Published on Monday, February 20, 2006 by the Atlanta Journal Constitution (Georgia)
Eyewitnesses Peel Back Lies on War Debate
by Jay Bookman
A hundred years from now, historians will still be regaling readers with the all-too-true tales of ignorance, arrogance, dishonesty and outright incompetence that drove our nation to invade Iraq. As stories go, nothing in our country's previous 225 years of history quite matches it. And for our children's sake, we better hope that nothing in our future comes close to it, either.
A lot of the raw material for those historians is available already in the growing number of eyewitness, inside accounts of how we got into this mess. At almost every point, those accounts contradict the version of events peddled by the Bush administration and its dwindling core of supporters.
For example, take the claim that the administration decided to invade Iraq because "Sept. 11 changed everything."
Paul O'Neill, President Bush's first treasury secretary, long ago revealed that administration officials were intent on invading Iraq from the moment the president took office.
"It was all about finding a way to do it," O'Neill says of Cabinet meetings he attended before Sept. 11. "That was the tone of it. The president saying, 'Go find me a way to do this.' "
In his new book "State of War," James Risen confirms that account by reporting that in April 2002 — long before most Americans had even heard war was a possibility — CIA officers in Europe were summoned by agency leaders and told an invasion was coming.
"They said this was on Bush's agenda when he got elected, and that 9/11 only delayed it," one CIA officer recalled to Risen. "They implied that 9/11 was a distraction from Iraq."
Then there were those weapons of mass destruction. The administration now implies it was misled into war by bad U.S. intelligence, but that's not true. While the CIA was indeed wrong about Iraq possessing at least some WMD, those faulty reports played no role whatsoever in the administration's decision to invade. WMD was the administration's excuse for a war it had already decided upon for other reasons.
The head of the CIA's Middle East bureau from 2000 to 2005 makes that clear in a new article in Foreign Affairs magazine. Paul Pillar writes that under the Bush administration, "official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions." Instead, "intelligence was misused to justify decisions already made," citing Iraqi WMD as a prime example.
In his article, Pillar also confirms that Bush told a monumental whopper in claiming that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden had informally allied against us.
Pillar is not the first to expose that fact. The Sept. 11 commission concluded back in June 2004 that there had been no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and bin Laden. But Pillar, who saw every scrap of intelligence about the Middle East, takes it further, saying the claim by Bush and others "did not reflect any judgment by intelligence officials that there was or was likely to be anything like the 'alliance' the administration said existed."
In other words, they made it up.
It is yet another example of how we were deceived into war by Bush, a man in whom Americans of both parties had put enormous amounts of faith in the aftermath of Sept. 11.
Of course, accusing Bush of deliberately lying to the country still sets off a contentious counterattack. Historians, though, will have no qualms whatsoever about reaching that same conclusion; the evidence is that overwhelming.
And then there was the incompetence. The claims that Iraq would pay for its own reconstruction, that we would be welcomed as liberators, that there were no serious ethnic splits in Iraq, that we had enough troops . . . the list is lengthy. How could the administration have been so wrong?
Well, there are none so blind as those who will not see.
If you're contemplating invading and occupying another country — and risking much of your own country's future on the outcome — your first step would be to request an assessment of the situation from your experts, right?
"As the national intelligence officer for the Middle East, I was in charge of coordinating all of the intelligence community's assessments regarding Iraq," Pillar writes. "The first request I received from any administration policy-maker for any such assessment was not until a year into the war."
A century from now, people will look at such statements in wonder. Unfortunately, for those of us who actually have to deal with the consequences, our interest is more than merely historical. The people who got us into this mess through deception, arrogance and incompetence still hold positions of authority. They still demand unilateral power over how to proceed, and still question the patriotism of those who dare question them.
To those who will only read about this era, that may prove the most remarkable thing of all.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0220-21.htm
Full Version: Democracy's Battle Joined, Again
Farewell to Ground Zero
by JONATHAN SCHELL
[from the March 6, 2006 issue]
This column will be my last "Letter From Ground Zero." The series will be succeeded by another, "Crisis of the Republic." Until recently it seemed possible to trace the main developments in the Bush Administration's policies back to that horrible, fantastical day in September 2001, as if following an unbroken chain of causes and effects. Now it no longer does. The chain is too entangled with other chains, of newer and older origin.
The war against Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden had his headquarters and support from the ruling Taliban, was, for better or worse, a clear response to the attack on the United States. The Patriot Act and the reorganization of the national security apparatus likewise were responses to September 11. But with the launch of the Iraq War, the subject was already beginning to change. The political support for the war still flowed from 9/11, but the Administration was already veering toward other objectives. For one thing, we know that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others had wanted to attack Iraq since their first days in office, and, for that matter, even before. For another, the war proved to be a kind of test case of a far more sweeping revolution in American foreign policy, soon outlined in the White House document of 2002, the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, which set forth American ambitions for nothing less than global hegemony based on military superiority, absolute and perpetual, over all other nations. Many friends of this policy frankly and rightly called it imperial.
The Iraq test case has failed; in doing so it has tied down forces that otherwise might have been given further aggressive missions. The imperial plan stalled, as the nuclearization of North Korea without an effective American response, among other things, attests. Nevertheless, the Administration's international ambitions had a scarcely less sweeping domestic corollary, for which no master strategic document was supplied: a profound transformation of the American state, in which, in the name of the "war on terror," the President rises above the law and the Republican Party permanently dominates all three branches of government. That project had even less to do with 9/11 than did the Iraq War. Its roots can be traced at least as far back as the election of 2000, when the Supreme Court improperly interjected itself into the electoral dispute in Florida and a majority consisting of Republican-appointed Justices awarded the presidency to the man of their own party. Or perhaps we need to look back even further, to the attempt by the Republican-dominated Congress to knock a Democratic President out of office by impeaching him for personal misbehavior accompanied by a minor legal infraction. (If those standards were still in force, President Bush would have been impeached eleven times over by now.) Obviously, these events had nothing to do with 9/11 or the Iraq War. Their roots are older and deeper. To arrange all the new developments, domestic and international, under the heading "Letter From Ground Zero," as if it all began with Osama bin Laden, would therefore be misleading. It would be a kind of lie.
For the series' new title, I want to acknowledge a debt to Hannah Arendt, who in 1972 published a book of essays titled Crises of the Republic. My single-letter change in her title reflects a belief that today the many disparate crises of the past have combined into one general systemic crisis, placing the basic structure of the Republic at mortal risk. At the forefront of concern must be the question: Will the Constitution of the United States survive? Is the American state now in the midst of a transmutation in which the 217-year-old provisions for a balance of powers and popular freedoms are being overridden and canceled? Or will defenders of the Constitution step forward, as has happened in constitutional crises of the past, to save the system and restore its integrity?
The obvious precedent is Watergate. Then as now, the presidency became "imperial." Then as now, a misconceived and misbegotten war led to presidential law-breaking at home. Then as now, a quixotic crusade for freedom abroad really menaced freedom at home. Then as now, the law-breaking President was re-elected to a second term. Then as now, the systemic rot went so deep that only a drastic cure could be effectual. Then as now, opposition at the outset consisted not of any great public outrage but the lonely courage of a few bureaucrats, legislators and reporters. Then it was the war in Vietnam; now it is the war in Iraq and the wider and more lasting "war on terror." Then it was secret break-ins and illegal wiretapping; now it is arbitrary imprisonment, torture and, again, illegal wiretapping. Then it was presidential assertion of "executive privilege"; now it is a full-scale reinterpretation of the Constitution to give the "unitary executive" power to do anything it likes in "wartime."
Of course, there are obvious differences. In the early 1970s, the opposition party controlled both houses of the legislature, which launched vigorous investigations and, eventually, impeachment proceedings. Now of course the President's party controls the legislative branch and possibly (it's still too early to say, given the traditional independence of the judiciary and its consequent unpredictability) the judicial branch as well. Then, the movement against the war had forced a decision to withdraw; now the antiwar movement is much weaker. On the other hand, when the crisis began back then, the President's popularity was high; now it is low.
Yet what remains most striking and most surprising is the degree of continuity of the systemic disorder in the face of radical, galloping change in almost every other area of political life. After all, the cold war, which seemed at the time to be the seedbed of the Watergate crisis, ended sixteen years ago, in the greatest upheaval of the international system since the end of World War II. How is it, then, that the United States has returned to a systemic crisis so profoundly similar to the one in the early 1970s? By looking at external foes, are we looking in the wrong place for the origins of the illness? Is this transformation what a more "conservative" public now wants? Or is there instead something in the dominant institutions of American life that push the country in this direction? Those are some of the questions that will be taken up in "Crisis of the Republic."
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20060306&s=schell
by JONATHAN SCHELL
[from the March 6, 2006 issue]
This column will be my last "Letter From Ground Zero." The series will be succeeded by another, "Crisis of the Republic." Until recently it seemed possible to trace the main developments in the Bush Administration's policies back to that horrible, fantastical day in September 2001, as if following an unbroken chain of causes and effects. Now it no longer does. The chain is too entangled with other chains, of newer and older origin.
The war against Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden had his headquarters and support from the ruling Taliban, was, for better or worse, a clear response to the attack on the United States. The Patriot Act and the reorganization of the national security apparatus likewise were responses to September 11. But with the launch of the Iraq War, the subject was already beginning to change. The political support for the war still flowed from 9/11, but the Administration was already veering toward other objectives. For one thing, we know that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others had wanted to attack Iraq since their first days in office, and, for that matter, even before. For another, the war proved to be a kind of test case of a far more sweeping revolution in American foreign policy, soon outlined in the White House document of 2002, the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, which set forth American ambitions for nothing less than global hegemony based on military superiority, absolute and perpetual, over all other nations. Many friends of this policy frankly and rightly called it imperial.
The Iraq test case has failed; in doing so it has tied down forces that otherwise might have been given further aggressive missions. The imperial plan stalled, as the nuclearization of North Korea without an effective American response, among other things, attests. Nevertheless, the Administration's international ambitions had a scarcely less sweeping domestic corollary, for which no master strategic document was supplied: a profound transformation of the American state, in which, in the name of the "war on terror," the President rises above the law and the Republican Party permanently dominates all three branches of government. That project had even less to do with 9/11 than did the Iraq War. Its roots can be traced at least as far back as the election of 2000, when the Supreme Court improperly interjected itself into the electoral dispute in Florida and a majority consisting of Republican-appointed Justices awarded the presidency to the man of their own party. Or perhaps we need to look back even further, to the attempt by the Republican-dominated Congress to knock a Democratic President out of office by impeaching him for personal misbehavior accompanied by a minor legal infraction. (If those standards were still in force, President Bush would have been impeached eleven times over by now.) Obviously, these events had nothing to do with 9/11 or the Iraq War. Their roots are older and deeper. To arrange all the new developments, domestic and international, under the heading "Letter From Ground Zero," as if it all began with Osama bin Laden, would therefore be misleading. It would be a kind of lie.
For the series' new title, I want to acknowledge a debt to Hannah Arendt, who in 1972 published a book of essays titled Crises of the Republic. My single-letter change in her title reflects a belief that today the many disparate crises of the past have combined into one general systemic crisis, placing the basic structure of the Republic at mortal risk. At the forefront of concern must be the question: Will the Constitution of the United States survive? Is the American state now in the midst of a transmutation in which the 217-year-old provisions for a balance of powers and popular freedoms are being overridden and canceled? Or will defenders of the Constitution step forward, as has happened in constitutional crises of the past, to save the system and restore its integrity?
The obvious precedent is Watergate. Then as now, the presidency became "imperial." Then as now, a misconceived and misbegotten war led to presidential law-breaking at home. Then as now, a quixotic crusade for freedom abroad really menaced freedom at home. Then as now, the law-breaking President was re-elected to a second term. Then as now, the systemic rot went so deep that only a drastic cure could be effectual. Then as now, opposition at the outset consisted not of any great public outrage but the lonely courage of a few bureaucrats, legislators and reporters. Then it was the war in Vietnam; now it is the war in Iraq and the wider and more lasting "war on terror." Then it was secret break-ins and illegal wiretapping; now it is arbitrary imprisonment, torture and, again, illegal wiretapping. Then it was presidential assertion of "executive privilege"; now it is a full-scale reinterpretation of the Constitution to give the "unitary executive" power to do anything it likes in "wartime."
Of course, there are obvious differences. In the early 1970s, the opposition party controlled both houses of the legislature, which launched vigorous investigations and, eventually, impeachment proceedings. Now of course the President's party controls the legislative branch and possibly (it's still too early to say, given the traditional independence of the judiciary and its consequent unpredictability) the judicial branch as well. Then, the movement against the war had forced a decision to withdraw; now the antiwar movement is much weaker. On the other hand, when the crisis began back then, the President's popularity was high; now it is low.
Yet what remains most striking and most surprising is the degree of continuity of the systemic disorder in the face of radical, galloping change in almost every other area of political life. After all, the cold war, which seemed at the time to be the seedbed of the Watergate crisis, ended sixteen years ago, in the greatest upheaval of the international system since the end of World War II. How is it, then, that the United States has returned to a systemic crisis so profoundly similar to the one in the early 1970s? By looking at external foes, are we looking in the wrong place for the origins of the illness? Is this transformation what a more "conservative" public now wants? Or is there instead something in the dominant institutions of American life that push the country in this direction? Those are some of the questions that will be taken up in "Crisis of the Republic."
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20060306&s=schell
Published on Tuesday, February 21, 2006 by WorkingforChange.com
Corruption Goes Unchecked; Congress in Need of Real Reform
by Molly Ivins
AUSTIN, Texas — Cynics are fond of meditating on the evil done in the name of reform. I'm a great believer in perpetual reform myself, on the theory that political systems, like houses, are always in want of some fixing. However, I have seen some pluperfect doozies passed off as reform in recent years, starting with "Social Security reform."
Conservatives used to oppose reform on principle, correctly regarding it as a vile plot by goo-goo good government forces to snatch away their perks. This once led to a colorful scene in the Texas legislature in which the letters R*E*F*O*R*M appeared on the rear ends of six female members of a baton drill team, who turned and perched their derrieres pertly on the brass rail of the House gallery.
Reform follows scandal as night the day, except in these sorry times when it appears we may not get a nickel's worth of reform out of the entire Jack Abramoff saga. Sickening. A real waste of a splendid scandal. When else do politicians ever get around to fixing huge ethical holes in the roof except when they're caught red- handed? Do not let this mess go to waste! Call now, and demand reform!
Sheesh. Tom DeLay gets indicted, and all the Republicans can think of is a $20 gift ban. Forget the people talking about "lobby reform." The lobby does not need to be reformed, the Congress needs to be reformed. This is about congressional corruption, and it is not limited to the surface stuff like taking free meals, hotels and trips. This is about corruption that bites deep into the process of making laws in the public interest. The root of the rot is money (surprise!), and the only way to get control of the money is through public campaign financing.
As long as the special interests pay to elect the pols, we will have government of the special interests, by the special interests and for the special interests. Pols will always dance with them what brung them. We have to fix the system so that when they are elected, they got no one to dance with but us, the people — we don't want them owing anyone but the public. So the most useful reform bill is being offered by Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., and Rep. Barney Frank, D- Mass. — public campaign financing. We, the citizens, put up the money to elect the pols. This bill won't cost us money, the savings will be staggering.
We're also looking for a way to control the system of earmarks, which has gotten completely out of hand. "The rush to revise ethics laws in the wake of the Jack Abramoff political corruption scandal has turned into more of a saunter," reports The Washington Post. The Republicans keep dicking around with the gift ban idea (opposed by those stalwarts who claim "you couldn't accept a t-shirt from your local high school"). But the best anti-reformer is Rep. John Boehner, R- Ohio, the new House majority leader, elected as a "reformer" (puh- leeze), a man after Tom DeLay's heart. Boehner argues that gift and travel bans would amount to members of Congress being "treated like children." (Actually, children are seldom offered golfing vacations.)
The lobbyists, of course, have pulled together to work against efforts to control them. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly. Tom Susman, chair of the ethics committee of the American League of Lobbyists (it is a concept), is reported in Legal Times as saying a gift ban would lead to "unnecessarily awkward dividing lines between lobbyists and members." God forbid.
The House Democratic leadership has proposed reinforcing a gift and travel ban with an attempt to control earmarks by prohibiting "dead of night" provisions — inserting language into a law without a chance for review. Members would be given 24 hours to read bills (which they don't, but their staffs can).
The cosmetic fixes — gift ban, travel ban, disclosure and slowing the revolving door between staff, Congress and the lobby — cannot stop the effects of the K Street Project. That's the cozy arrangement whereby lobbyists are Republican activists and Republican activists are lobbyists, and they underwrite campaigns in return for special privileges under the law — tax exemptions, regulatory relief, tariff dispositions, etc.
One of the most dangerous things about this whole corrupt system is that people who are given special privileges inevitably come to regard them not as special but as natural and right, and will fight furiously if you try to take them away.
It is this endless series of earmarks — special little set-asides for one special interest, one home district after another — that is behind the hemorrhaging in the federal budget. Those who remember when conservatives called for fiscal restraint may get sour amusement from the situation. But what is truly not funny is the pathetic spectacle of the United States of America, a nation with the greatest political legacy the world has ever known, letting itself be gnawed to death by the greed in a corrupt system that can be so easily fixed.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0221-26.htm
Corruption Goes Unchecked; Congress in Need of Real Reform
by Molly Ivins
AUSTIN, Texas — Cynics are fond of meditating on the evil done in the name of reform. I'm a great believer in perpetual reform myself, on the theory that political systems, like houses, are always in want of some fixing. However, I have seen some pluperfect doozies passed off as reform in recent years, starting with "Social Security reform."
Conservatives used to oppose reform on principle, correctly regarding it as a vile plot by goo-goo good government forces to snatch away their perks. This once led to a colorful scene in the Texas legislature in which the letters R*E*F*O*R*M appeared on the rear ends of six female members of a baton drill team, who turned and perched their derrieres pertly on the brass rail of the House gallery.
Reform follows scandal as night the day, except in these sorry times when it appears we may not get a nickel's worth of reform out of the entire Jack Abramoff saga. Sickening. A real waste of a splendid scandal. When else do politicians ever get around to fixing huge ethical holes in the roof except when they're caught red- handed? Do not let this mess go to waste! Call now, and demand reform!
Sheesh. Tom DeLay gets indicted, and all the Republicans can think of is a $20 gift ban. Forget the people talking about "lobby reform." The lobby does not need to be reformed, the Congress needs to be reformed. This is about congressional corruption, and it is not limited to the surface stuff like taking free meals, hotels and trips. This is about corruption that bites deep into the process of making laws in the public interest. The root of the rot is money (surprise!), and the only way to get control of the money is through public campaign financing.
As long as the special interests pay to elect the pols, we will have government of the special interests, by the special interests and for the special interests. Pols will always dance with them what brung them. We have to fix the system so that when they are elected, they got no one to dance with but us, the people — we don't want them owing anyone but the public. So the most useful reform bill is being offered by Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., and Rep. Barney Frank, D- Mass. — public campaign financing. We, the citizens, put up the money to elect the pols. This bill won't cost us money, the savings will be staggering.
We're also looking for a way to control the system of earmarks, which has gotten completely out of hand. "The rush to revise ethics laws in the wake of the Jack Abramoff political corruption scandal has turned into more of a saunter," reports The Washington Post. The Republicans keep dicking around with the gift ban idea (opposed by those stalwarts who claim "you couldn't accept a t-shirt from your local high school"). But the best anti-reformer is Rep. John Boehner, R- Ohio, the new House majority leader, elected as a "reformer" (puh- leeze), a man after Tom DeLay's heart. Boehner argues that gift and travel bans would amount to members of Congress being "treated like children." (Actually, children are seldom offered golfing vacations.)
The lobbyists, of course, have pulled together to work against efforts to control them. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly. Tom Susman, chair of the ethics committee of the American League of Lobbyists (it is a concept), is reported in Legal Times as saying a gift ban would lead to "unnecessarily awkward dividing lines between lobbyists and members." God forbid.
The House Democratic leadership has proposed reinforcing a gift and travel ban with an attempt to control earmarks by prohibiting "dead of night" provisions — inserting language into a law without a chance for review. Members would be given 24 hours to read bills (which they don't, but their staffs can).
The cosmetic fixes — gift ban, travel ban, disclosure and slowing the revolving door between staff, Congress and the lobby — cannot stop the effects of the K Street Project. That's the cozy arrangement whereby lobbyists are Republican activists and Republican activists are lobbyists, and they underwrite campaigns in return for special privileges under the law — tax exemptions, regulatory relief, tariff dispositions, etc.
One of the most dangerous things about this whole corrupt system is that people who are given special privileges inevitably come to regard them not as special but as natural and right, and will fight furiously if you try to take them away.
It is this endless series of earmarks — special little set-asides for one special interest, one home district after another — that is behind the hemorrhaging in the federal budget. Those who remember when conservatives called for fiscal restraint may get sour amusement from the situation. But what is truly not funny is the pathetic spectacle of the United States of America, a nation with the greatest political legacy the world has ever known, letting itself be gnawed to death by the greed in a corrupt system that can be so easily fixed.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0221-26.htm
Paradise Lost-John Milton
A Political Cento Based on Milton's Paradise Lost
Morals, Ethics and Empire
By ALEVTINA REA
Once upon a time, there was a country founded on the principles of liberty, equality and justice for all. That same country was deemed a stronghold of democracy not only by its own citizens but by peoples around the world: a country where "the history of liberty" as Woodrow Wilson once said, was "a history of the limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it"; a country that protected not only its own freedom but the freedom of sovereign nations around the globe; a country that proudly waved its flag and led the world by example; a country that was the hope of the world. Behold a wonder!
That country was our nation, and the preceding paragraph is--alas!-- only a beautiful dream. Originally expressed by our founding fathers, this dream had invited into its phantasmagoric world mostly whites with either some sort of property or at least some perspective of ownership. As Federick Douglass, 19th century escaped slave and human rights leader eloquently said in 1852, "The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me."
Later on, the extended version of this dream was proclaimed by Martin Luther King Jr., who invited the government to share it with previously excluded blacks, poor and the rest of oppressed and marginalized. "Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy," he said. "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal."
No matter how beautiful this dream , it eventually transmogrified into a dismal antithesis, the Paradise of Fools, to few unknown. It is now time for hopeful but deluded souls to realize that Americans have been daydreaming about having a real democracy in the homeland and--even more so -- about our country's ability to spread democracy around the globe. For example, even as America flaunted its democratic credentials during the Cold War, our country mirrored the actions of its ideological enemy, the USSR, or the "evil Empire," as it was called by our ideologues. In his book, "A Normal Totalitarian Society: How the Soviet Union Functioned and How It Collapsed," Vladimor Shlapentokh emphasizes that "during the cold war, the Soviet Union and the United States vied for geopolitical dominance using almost identical strategies: to expand influence whenever possible, oust or murder undersirable leaders, invade foreign countries, recruit spies from the opposing political and cultural establishments, collect information, and fund hostile propaganda." Our supposedly democratic country, however, managed to conceal that its political wantonness and pride raise out of friendship hostile deeds in peace and led to either covert or widely known wars abroad, with thousands and thousands innocents lives sacrificed on the altar of U.S. interests.
While it took Odysseus only a year to wake up from Circe's spell, save his enswined companions, and finally sail toward his home, we were--including a whole world--under this dream's spell for a few decades at least. This unflattering analogy, nonetheless, suits us well. After all, for a long while our government's actions abroad were concealed under the thick veil of this dream. Ballads and songs should be made how have [we] troubled all mankind with shows instead, mere shows of seeming pure. Neither we, nor the global community could clearly see that under the pretence of building democracy and protecting freedom of peoples abroad, "our government is guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of sovereign states." Furthermore, as Harold Pinter pinned it down in his Noble Peace Prize acceptance speech, "The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."
A list of these crimes has long been available for those who could see, read and hear. For many years a few perspicacious authors such as Edward Said and Noam Chomsky exposed the illusion of the dream--or hypnosis, according to Pinter-- in their writings, but the majority of us were like those three monkeys, who hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil. Let us not slip the occasion at least now to admit that our freedoms and rights have degenerated mostly into the freedom to consume and to the right to consent to our government's fairy tales. Let us recognize that the resemblance of the highest dream--where faith and reality remain not--is not the dream itself, and that we rather lived under the influence of the illusion that the dream came true. To use John Milton's words, it may be said, Princes, Potentates, Warriors, the flower of Heaven, once yours, now lost. It's time to look around with sober eyes.
In the film, "The Adams Family Values" , one of its ghoulish personages admits: "So I maim people, so I kill." The analogy is clear. So our political decision-makers snoop, so they kill. To mention just a few recent facts, the surveillance over U.S. citizens followed the snooping provisos of the Patriot Act. Nevertheless, this egregious encroachment on civil rights did not squeeze even one embarrassed bleat out of its mastermind, who should better hold his place by wisdom. As Bush told at the White House news conference, "The program's legal, it's designed to protect civil liberties, and it's necessary." He added, "there's no doubt in my mind it is legal." The emphasis is on his mind, of course. Well, "the advantage of an Empire is that it is able to prosper with an idiot at its head," as Régis Debray so sarcastically said in his book, "Empire 2.0: A Modest Proposal for a United States of the West by Xavier de C***." In this case, what does this unquestioned loyalty to the dream--without critical reflection and perpetual questioning about our social institutions and the prerogatives of "authority"--makes us, the U.S. constituency? O sacred name of faithfulness profaned! If we allow this to happen, are we not consanguineous then with those who make decisions for us? Even oppressed and brutalized Palestinians say, "we shall not seek friendships at the expense of our rights." What about our stand of having civil rights for real, not only dreaming about them? What about preferring hard liberty before the easy yoke of servile pomp and protecting our own rights to be neither sold nor exchanged for illusory safety, nor subjected to our paranoid fears or to the paternalistic intrusion of our supposedly over-protective government?
As to killing, the gruesome reality is that during the last few decades hundred of thousands of civilians have been permanently trampled, their lives extinguished in Latin America, Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia, etc., while the United States is "protecting itself and spreading freedom." Indeed, justice divine mends not her slowest pace for prayers or cries. This fledging year of 2006 has already brought some news about innocent lives sacrificed for the sake of democracy. On January 13, the CIA airstrike in Damadola--a village in Pakistan near Afghan border--resulted in the deaths of 13 civilians, including women and children. According to the CIA officials, it was aimed at Islamic militants. Even if the latter were present and killed at the moment of the airstrike, this fact doesn't bring innocent children back to life. Destruction with destruction to destroy? The logic implied is potent and dreadful. You will be free, whether live or dead. We will stop the bloodshed by bombing civilians. That were to make strange contradiction. And this logic warns that our politicial gurus--no matter how much inadvertently--follow the footsteps of Stalin, who liked the Russian saying, "when you cut down the forest, chips will fly." Not to such an extreme yet, but still Right now, chips are flying in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, as well as they fly--on a much bigger scale--in Iraq.
O what are these, death's ministers, not men, who thus deal death inhumanly to men? One might wonder, who are among our political paragons, elite of elites, who are the prime in order and in might responsible for the wanton international politics that purports to protect freedom and democracy by bombing innocent civilians? Heartless bureaucrats who care not about innocent lives being sacrificed on the altar of U.S. interests? Artificer(s) of fraud who camouflage themselves in the attire of the people's representatives? Obscurantists "with high words, that bore semblance of worth, not substance? "Sweet-singing manipulators whose tongues drip "manna, and could make the worse appear the better reason, to perplex and dash maturest counsels"? Or half-educated poor souls whose only guilt is to know not about the distinction between ethical and moral choices? Perhaps, all the above? Are they first seen in acts of prowess eminent and great exploits, but of true virtue void; who having split much blood, and done much subduing nations, and achieved thereby fame in the world? However, even if we are gravely in doubt whether to hold them wise, we should not draw a boundary between our political decision makers and us; haughtily say, "God bless their enfeebled minds"; and blame only them for all deeds redounding to our country's discredit. Let us no more contend, nor blame each other, blamed enough elsewhere. We are one of them; nay, we are them, for we are responsible to open and educate our own minds in order to tear asunder the panoply of ignorance and deception surrounding the highest dream.
While we let ourselves be manipulated by the illusion of the dream, the reality is that the truth with superstitions and traditions taint, left only in those written records pure, such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. While we see our country and its politics through rose-tinted glasses, corrupt politicians seek to avail themselves of names, places and titles, and with these to join secular power, though feigning still to act by spiritual. Nevertheless, leaving the meditated fraud and malice of some of our political decision makers aside for a deeper analysis, let's in conclusion illuminate one of the aspects of our foreign politics that deals rather with its awkwardness in terms of our foreign policies, speciously meaning good but getting negative results abroad. Let's face it, in the eyes of the "ever wider community," in G.H. Mead's expression, our politics take an immoral path. Even if our political deeds are done with good intentions, we all know where these intentions can lead us, toward the gates of Hell. This said, let's impute this political clumsiness, which is based on "good" intentions, to the notorious lapses in American education, and, therefore, not let pass occasion which now smiles. Let us share the intellectual delight of either acquainting or re-acquainting ourselves with Habermas' distinction between ethics and morality and of understanding how this differentiation reflects on being either just or unjust in the international arena. For, undeniably, it's possible to believe that we behave ethically and justly toward the world community outside of U.S. borders while acting immorally and spreading seeds of injustice.
Judge not what is best by pleasure. To paraphrase it, we can say, judge not what is the best policy by what is good for your country only. In his book, "The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory," Jurgen Habermas analyzed the not-so-obvious difference between ethical and moral choices facing political societies and their governments. "We judge value-orientation and the evaluative self-understanding of persons or groups from the ethical point of view, whereas we judge duties, norms, and categorical imperatives from the moral point of view." Ethical questions pertain to either the first-person perspective or to a shared ethos of a particular community. Namely, what is best for our country and questions of what's being good or bad for our interests are looked at from the ethical point of view, whereas the aspect of being right or wrong either toward our own interests or other communities are dealt from the moral viewpoint. It is crucial to comprehend what is the ethical point of view because the latter is the foundation of the understanding of the national self-identity, of our "preferences and goals." At the same time, the ethical standpoint allows for the breaking of the manacles of the egocentric position because "from the ethical point of view, preferences and goals are no longer given but are themselves open to discussion, they can undergo reasoned change through reflection on what has intrinsic value for us within the horizon of our shared social world."
However, the limits of ethical reasoning--as Habermas explains it--"become manifest once questions of justice arise." We might reckon "right" as what is self-interestedly good for us, and, therefore, consider our hasty actions abroad as justifiable, but as long as our politics ignore "an absolute priority of the right over the good," (again, good in the sense of "good for us") we are doomed to plant seeds of destruction instead of democracy and perpetually fall into the same illusion of having a beautiful dream instead of living it for real. Or, we can destroy, or, worse, by some false guile pervert the dream but still take its transmogrified version at face value. Habermas asserts that "without the priority of the right over the good one cannot have an ethically neutral conception of justice," which is the sine qua non of "the equal treatment of different individuals and groups," as well as being necessary for "the just regulation of international relations between states, for cosmopolitan relations between world citizens, and for global relations between cultures." Having a righteous stand on the American way of life and its concomitant foreign politics is not the same as being right, or being moral on the international arena. After all, our notion of the good may considerably differ from other countries' conception of the good. Furthermore, the continuing imposition of our way of the good on others "entails an intolerable form of paternalism," if not worse. As a result of our lack of a proper education in this field, so little we know to value right the good before [us], but pervert best things to worst abuse, or to their meanest use.
The role of political liberalism in American politics is undeniable in its importance. According to Habermas, "Liberalism, which goes back to John Locke, has invoked the danger of tyrannical majorities and postulated the priority of human rights." However, Habermas emphasizes that "the selective vision of a liberalism reduces the role of morality--as though it were the sum of negative liberty rights--to the protection of the individual good and thereby erects morality on an ethical foundation", which leads to curbed justice toward other members of the global community. The universal responsibility of each for all - in a context of "ever wider community" - is a must of Habermasian understanding of "a morality, based on equal respect for everyone" and it is "not limited to those who are like us; it extends to the person of the other in his or her otherness." The inclusion of the Other and the subtle interplay of the good and the right, with the good extending its limits toward the right leads to "a more comprehensive, intersubjectively shared perspective, or, what amounts to the same thing, the moral point of view."
Pointing to the seemingly utopian idea of having equal respect for everyone, Habermas doesn't leave out the great dilemma of achieving "a balance between popular sovereignty and human rights, or between the 'freedom of the ancients' and the 'freedom of the moderns,'" for "either idea can be upheld only at the expense of the other." In this regard, the right position, or the moral point of view, is razor-thin and as hard to dance as on a tight rope. As Earth self-balanced on her center hung, the aspiration of wise politics ought to strike a right balance between ethical and moral, between popular sovereignty and human rights, between public and private autonomies. According to Habermas, "the desired internal relation between human rights and popular sovereignty consists in this: human rights themselves are what satisfy the requirement that a civic practice of the public use of communicative freedom be legally institutionalized." Therefore, the civic rights of our constituency should not be considered as external barriers by our officialdom, whose representatives--in cowardly fashion--shroud in secrecy their deceptive deals such as manipulative intelligence reports in regard to Iraq in order to justify an immoral war against the country whose people are obviously not respected in their "otherness."
The egregiously paternalistic treatment of its own constituency of citizens and the recurring pattern of immoral foreign politics reveal that our government is not capable yet of achieving a delicate political balance as well as the fact that we, "as citizens of a state," fail to make "use of [our] public autonomy." Let us descend now therefore from this top of speculation; for the hour precise exacts our parting hence. It should be noted that the analysis offered by Habermas is much deeper than the scope of this article permits. For curious minds, however, his book is broadly available for future intellectual engagements. Let us not then pursue our state of splendid vassalage. Taking responsibility for oneself and for another--even if that another is "a stranger who has formed his identity in completely different circumstances and who understands himself in terms of other traditions"--is the moral point of view that is missing in our country's politics, and it is up to us to bring it forward. As the Hopi elder wisdom saying suggests, "We are the ones we have been waiting for." Let's not forget Adorno's "appeal to an actually existent state of consciousness." If we allow domination--not so much representation--of political officials over us, let's do it at least on the conscious--rather than so obtusely unconscious--level and, therefore, have dignity at least and not allow ourselves to be led by the false presumption of the dream.
http://counterpunch.com/rea02212006.html
Cento: a literary composition formed by selections from different authors, disposed in a new order. This particular political cento is based on "Paradise Lost" by John Milton. All the italicized words are Milton's.
Morals, Ethics and Empire
By ALEVTINA REA
QUOTE
The sad truth is to do good for humanity is one of the best ways to do evil.
Régis Debray
Régis Debray
Once upon a time, there was a country founded on the principles of liberty, equality and justice for all. That same country was deemed a stronghold of democracy not only by its own citizens but by peoples around the world: a country where "the history of liberty" as Woodrow Wilson once said, was "a history of the limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it"; a country that protected not only its own freedom but the freedom of sovereign nations around the globe; a country that proudly waved its flag and led the world by example; a country that was the hope of the world. Behold a wonder!
That country was our nation, and the preceding paragraph is--alas!-- only a beautiful dream. Originally expressed by our founding fathers, this dream had invited into its phantasmagoric world mostly whites with either some sort of property or at least some perspective of ownership. As Federick Douglass, 19th century escaped slave and human rights leader eloquently said in 1852, "The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me."
Later on, the extended version of this dream was proclaimed by Martin Luther King Jr., who invited the government to share it with previously excluded blacks, poor and the rest of oppressed and marginalized. "Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy," he said. "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal."
No matter how beautiful this dream , it eventually transmogrified into a dismal antithesis, the Paradise of Fools, to few unknown. It is now time for hopeful but deluded souls to realize that Americans have been daydreaming about having a real democracy in the homeland and--even more so -- about our country's ability to spread democracy around the globe. For example, even as America flaunted its democratic credentials during the Cold War, our country mirrored the actions of its ideological enemy, the USSR, or the "evil Empire," as it was called by our ideologues. In his book, "A Normal Totalitarian Society: How the Soviet Union Functioned and How It Collapsed," Vladimor Shlapentokh emphasizes that "during the cold war, the Soviet Union and the United States vied for geopolitical dominance using almost identical strategies: to expand influence whenever possible, oust or murder undersirable leaders, invade foreign countries, recruit spies from the opposing political and cultural establishments, collect information, and fund hostile propaganda." Our supposedly democratic country, however, managed to conceal that its political wantonness and pride raise out of friendship hostile deeds in peace and led to either covert or widely known wars abroad, with thousands and thousands innocents lives sacrificed on the altar of U.S. interests.
While it took Odysseus only a year to wake up from Circe's spell, save his enswined companions, and finally sail toward his home, we were--including a whole world--under this dream's spell for a few decades at least. This unflattering analogy, nonetheless, suits us well. After all, for a long while our government's actions abroad were concealed under the thick veil of this dream. Ballads and songs should be made how have [we] troubled all mankind with shows instead, mere shows of seeming pure. Neither we, nor the global community could clearly see that under the pretence of building democracy and protecting freedom of peoples abroad, "our government is guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of sovereign states." Furthermore, as Harold Pinter pinned it down in his Noble Peace Prize acceptance speech, "The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."
A list of these crimes has long been available for those who could see, read and hear. For many years a few perspicacious authors such as Edward Said and Noam Chomsky exposed the illusion of the dream--or hypnosis, according to Pinter-- in their writings, but the majority of us were like those three monkeys, who hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil. Let us not slip the occasion at least now to admit that our freedoms and rights have degenerated mostly into the freedom to consume and to the right to consent to our government's fairy tales. Let us recognize that the resemblance of the highest dream--where faith and reality remain not--is not the dream itself, and that we rather lived under the influence of the illusion that the dream came true. To use John Milton's words, it may be said, Princes, Potentates, Warriors, the flower of Heaven, once yours, now lost. It's time to look around with sober eyes.
In the film, "The Adams Family Values" , one of its ghoulish personages admits: "So I maim people, so I kill." The analogy is clear. So our political decision-makers snoop, so they kill. To mention just a few recent facts, the surveillance over U.S. citizens followed the snooping provisos of the Patriot Act. Nevertheless, this egregious encroachment on civil rights did not squeeze even one embarrassed bleat out of its mastermind, who should better hold his place by wisdom. As Bush told at the White House news conference, "The program's legal, it's designed to protect civil liberties, and it's necessary." He added, "there's no doubt in my mind it is legal." The emphasis is on his mind, of course. Well, "the advantage of an Empire is that it is able to prosper with an idiot at its head," as Régis Debray so sarcastically said in his book, "Empire 2.0: A Modest Proposal for a United States of the West by Xavier de C***." In this case, what does this unquestioned loyalty to the dream--without critical reflection and perpetual questioning about our social institutions and the prerogatives of "authority"--makes us, the U.S. constituency? O sacred name of faithfulness profaned! If we allow this to happen, are we not consanguineous then with those who make decisions for us? Even oppressed and brutalized Palestinians say, "we shall not seek friendships at the expense of our rights." What about our stand of having civil rights for real, not only dreaming about them? What about preferring hard liberty before the easy yoke of servile pomp and protecting our own rights to be neither sold nor exchanged for illusory safety, nor subjected to our paranoid fears or to the paternalistic intrusion of our supposedly over-protective government?
As to killing, the gruesome reality is that during the last few decades hundred of thousands of civilians have been permanently trampled, their lives extinguished in Latin America, Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia, etc., while the United States is "protecting itself and spreading freedom." Indeed, justice divine mends not her slowest pace for prayers or cries. This fledging year of 2006 has already brought some news about innocent lives sacrificed for the sake of democracy. On January 13, the CIA airstrike in Damadola--a village in Pakistan near Afghan border--resulted in the deaths of 13 civilians, including women and children. According to the CIA officials, it was aimed at Islamic militants. Even if the latter were present and killed at the moment of the airstrike, this fact doesn't bring innocent children back to life. Destruction with destruction to destroy? The logic implied is potent and dreadful. You will be free, whether live or dead. We will stop the bloodshed by bombing civilians. That were to make strange contradiction. And this logic warns that our politicial gurus--no matter how much inadvertently--follow the footsteps of Stalin, who liked the Russian saying, "when you cut down the forest, chips will fly." Not to such an extreme yet, but still Right now, chips are flying in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, as well as they fly--on a much bigger scale--in Iraq.
O what are these, death's ministers, not men, who thus deal death inhumanly to men? One might wonder, who are among our political paragons, elite of elites, who are the prime in order and in might responsible for the wanton international politics that purports to protect freedom and democracy by bombing innocent civilians? Heartless bureaucrats who care not about innocent lives being sacrificed on the altar of U.S. interests? Artificer(s) of fraud who camouflage themselves in the attire of the people's representatives? Obscurantists "with high words, that bore semblance of worth, not substance? "Sweet-singing manipulators whose tongues drip "manna, and could make the worse appear the better reason, to perplex and dash maturest counsels"? Or half-educated poor souls whose only guilt is to know not about the distinction between ethical and moral choices? Perhaps, all the above? Are they first seen in acts of prowess eminent and great exploits, but of true virtue void; who having split much blood, and done much subduing nations, and achieved thereby fame in the world? However, even if we are gravely in doubt whether to hold them wise, we should not draw a boundary between our political decision makers and us; haughtily say, "God bless their enfeebled minds"; and blame only them for all deeds redounding to our country's discredit. Let us no more contend, nor blame each other, blamed enough elsewhere. We are one of them; nay, we are them, for we are responsible to open and educate our own minds in order to tear asunder the panoply of ignorance and deception surrounding the highest dream.
While we let ourselves be manipulated by the illusion of the dream, the reality is that the truth with superstitions and traditions taint, left only in those written records pure, such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. While we see our country and its politics through rose-tinted glasses, corrupt politicians seek to avail themselves of names, places and titles, and with these to join secular power, though feigning still to act by spiritual. Nevertheless, leaving the meditated fraud and malice of some of our political decision makers aside for a deeper analysis, let's in conclusion illuminate one of the aspects of our foreign politics that deals rather with its awkwardness in terms of our foreign policies, speciously meaning good but getting negative results abroad. Let's face it, in the eyes of the "ever wider community," in G.H. Mead's expression, our politics take an immoral path. Even if our political deeds are done with good intentions, we all know where these intentions can lead us, toward the gates of Hell. This said, let's impute this political clumsiness, which is based on "good" intentions, to the notorious lapses in American education, and, therefore, not let pass occasion which now smiles. Let us share the intellectual delight of either acquainting or re-acquainting ourselves with Habermas' distinction between ethics and morality and of understanding how this differentiation reflects on being either just or unjust in the international arena. For, undeniably, it's possible to believe that we behave ethically and justly toward the world community outside of U.S. borders while acting immorally and spreading seeds of injustice.
Judge not what is best by pleasure. To paraphrase it, we can say, judge not what is the best policy by what is good for your country only. In his book, "The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory," Jurgen Habermas analyzed the not-so-obvious difference between ethical and moral choices facing political societies and their governments. "We judge value-orientation and the evaluative self-understanding of persons or groups from the ethical point of view, whereas we judge duties, norms, and categorical imperatives from the moral point of view." Ethical questions pertain to either the first-person perspective or to a shared ethos of a particular community. Namely, what is best for our country and questions of what's being good or bad for our interests are looked at from the ethical point of view, whereas the aspect of being right or wrong either toward our own interests or other communities are dealt from the moral viewpoint. It is crucial to comprehend what is the ethical point of view because the latter is the foundation of the understanding of the national self-identity, of our "preferences and goals." At the same time, the ethical standpoint allows for the breaking of the manacles of the egocentric position because "from the ethical point of view, preferences and goals are no longer given but are themselves open to discussion, they can undergo reasoned change through reflection on what has intrinsic value for us within the horizon of our shared social world."
However, the limits of ethical reasoning--as Habermas explains it--"become manifest once questions of justice arise." We might reckon "right" as what is self-interestedly good for us, and, therefore, consider our hasty actions abroad as justifiable, but as long as our politics ignore "an absolute priority of the right over the good," (again, good in the sense of "good for us") we are doomed to plant seeds of destruction instead of democracy and perpetually fall into the same illusion of having a beautiful dream instead of living it for real. Or, we can destroy, or, worse, by some false guile pervert the dream but still take its transmogrified version at face value. Habermas asserts that "without the priority of the right over the good one cannot have an ethically neutral conception of justice," which is the sine qua non of "the equal treatment of different individuals and groups," as well as being necessary for "the just regulation of international relations between states, for cosmopolitan relations between world citizens, and for global relations between cultures." Having a righteous stand on the American way of life and its concomitant foreign politics is not the same as being right, or being moral on the international arena. After all, our notion of the good may considerably differ from other countries' conception of the good. Furthermore, the continuing imposition of our way of the good on others "entails an intolerable form of paternalism," if not worse. As a result of our lack of a proper education in this field, so little we know to value right the good before [us], but pervert best things to worst abuse, or to their meanest use.
The role of political liberalism in American politics is undeniable in its importance. According to Habermas, "Liberalism, which goes back to John Locke, has invoked the danger of tyrannical majorities and postulated the priority of human rights." However, Habermas emphasizes that "the selective vision of a liberalism reduces the role of morality--as though it were the sum of negative liberty rights--to the protection of the individual good and thereby erects morality on an ethical foundation", which leads to curbed justice toward other members of the global community. The universal responsibility of each for all - in a context of "ever wider community" - is a must of Habermasian understanding of "a morality, based on equal respect for everyone" and it is "not limited to those who are like us; it extends to the person of the other in his or her otherness." The inclusion of the Other and the subtle interplay of the good and the right, with the good extending its limits toward the right leads to "a more comprehensive, intersubjectively shared perspective, or, what amounts to the same thing, the moral point of view."
Pointing to the seemingly utopian idea of having equal respect for everyone, Habermas doesn't leave out the great dilemma of achieving "a balance between popular sovereignty and human rights, or between the 'freedom of the ancients' and the 'freedom of the moderns,'" for "either idea can be upheld only at the expense of the other." In this regard, the right position, or the moral point of view, is razor-thin and as hard to dance as on a tight rope. As Earth self-balanced on her center hung, the aspiration of wise politics ought to strike a right balance between ethical and moral, between popular sovereignty and human rights, between public and private autonomies. According to Habermas, "the desired internal relation between human rights and popular sovereignty consists in this: human rights themselves are what satisfy the requirement that a civic practice of the public use of communicative freedom be legally institutionalized." Therefore, the civic rights of our constituency should not be considered as external barriers by our officialdom, whose representatives--in cowardly fashion--shroud in secrecy their deceptive deals such as manipulative intelligence reports in regard to Iraq in order to justify an immoral war against the country whose people are obviously not respected in their "otherness."
The egregiously paternalistic treatment of its own constituency of citizens and the recurring pattern of immoral foreign politics reveal that our government is not capable yet of achieving a delicate political balance as well as the fact that we, "as citizens of a state," fail to make "use of [our] public autonomy." Let us descend now therefore from this top of speculation; for the hour precise exacts our parting hence. It should be noted that the analysis offered by Habermas is much deeper than the scope of this article permits. For curious minds, however, his book is broadly available for future intellectual engagements. Let us not then pursue our state of splendid vassalage. Taking responsibility for oneself and for another--even if that another is "a stranger who has formed his identity in completely different circumstances and who understands himself in terms of other traditions"--is the moral point of view that is missing in our country's politics, and it is up to us to bring it forward. As the Hopi elder wisdom saying suggests, "We are the ones we have been waiting for." Let's not forget Adorno's "appeal to an actually existent state of consciousness." If we allow domination--not so much representation--of political officials over us, let's do it at least on the conscious--rather than so obtusely unconscious--level and, therefore, have dignity at least and not allow ourselves to be led by the false presumption of the dream.
http://counterpunch.com/rea02212006.html
Cento: a literary composition formed by selections from different authors, disposed in a new order. This particular political cento is based on "Paradise Lost" by John Milton. All the italicized words are Milton's.
Superpower as Global Dependent
Would Someone Please Interfere in Our Elections?
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
President Bush's Middle East policy is without rhyme or reason.
According to Bush and his neoconservatives, the only way to make America safe from terrorists is to force democracy upon the Middle East. Only ideologues completely ignorant of the Middle East could come to that conclusion.
Bush's invasion of Iraq turned a country with a secular government that suppressed terrorism over to Shia Islamists allied with Iran.
Bush's invasion of Afghanistan turned the country back to warlordism from the unified polity that the Taliban were achieving and revitalized the drug trade that helps to finance terrorism. Bush's interference in the Palestinian election brought Hamas to office. Bush's interference in Egyptian elections achieved gains for the Muslim Brotherhood. Bush's interference in the Pakistani elections put half the country into Islamic hands.
Now secretary of state Condi Rice wants to spend $85 million interfering in the internal affairs of Iran and $5 million "to accelerate the work of reformers in Syria."
What better way to solidify the Iranian and Syrian governments? Both countries are under threat of attack by the Bush regime. Any Iranian or Syrian who accepted American money to work against their own government would be guilty of high treason. With her announcements, Condi Rice has destroyed any opposition that might have existed in either country.
If terrorism is the threat to America that Bush says, why is Bush working so hard to enlarge the power and influence of terrorists and of Islamic politicians hostile to US hegemony in the Middle East?
The terrorist problem arises from the US government's long-term interference in the internal affairs of Middle Eastern countries. In the past the US has overthrown elected leaders, who were considered too radical for Washington's tastes, and replaced them with authoritarian secular strongmen backed by American money.
To avoid answering to mullahs, the strongmen operate secular governments that are not many steps removed from American puppets.
Being secular, these governments lack the authority of Islam. They are further weakened by not being perceived as representative of the aspirations of Muslims. They have held on to power by suppressing Islamic-based political opposition. Fair elections in these countries would bring Islamic leaders to power.
Muslim terrorists are not secular. Their chosen base is Islam, which puts them closer to the people than are the secular rulers.
Terrorist influence has grown primarily because of US actions in the Middle East. The Bush regime hasn't even a pretext of even-handedness in its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The invasion and occupation of Iraq has been a human rights disaster, with tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed and maimed, the country's infrastructure in ruins, and graphic photographic evidence of Muslims tortured and humiliated by US troops broadcast throughout the world. Undeterred by its accumulated crimes, the Bush regime now threatens more Muslim countries with sanctions, invasion and destruction.
The Bush regime has shown the Muslim world that the US takes for granted that it possesses the right of hegemony over the Middle East. The Bush regime has reaffirmed Washington's right to remove governments, select new ones, interfere in elections, and bomb and invade every country whose rulers Washington can demonize.
By its words and deeds, the Bush regime has confirmed everything that Osama bin Laden has ever said about the "Great Satan." Consequently, the terrorists have grown in influence and organization.
The US invasion of Iraq was a boon for terrorism. The ignorant and incompetent Bush regime expected a "cakewalk" war and an American puppet to do Washington's bidding. The reality is a powerful Iraqi insurgency that has tied down a dozen US divisions and created a training ground and recruits for terrorism and insurgency. Muslims have learned how to violently resist the superior military technology of the invader.
Overthrowing Saddam Hussein, a secular Sunni, was disastrous for American hegemony. Hussein ruthlessly stamped out Islamic-based political opposition and terrorist activity, which he rightly recognized as a threat to himself. With Hussein in power, Iran was isolated as the only Islamic-based government in the Middle East.
Iran was further isolated as Iran is Persian and not Arab, Shia and not Sunni.
The American invasion of Iraq has changed the correlation of forces dramatically in Iran's favor. Thanks to Bush, Iraq is now in the hands of the Shia majority. The Iraqi Shia are allied with Iran, as is Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, giving rise to the Shia crescent from Iran to Israel.
Iran is the beneficiary of the thousands of American lives and the hundreds of billions of dollars that the Bush regime has squandered in Iraq. The White House Moron turned Iraq from an Iranian enemy into an Iranian ally. Iran could not overthrow Saddam Hussein, but the White House Moron, using American blood and treasure, did it for the Iranian clerics.
With Hizbullah as Lebanon's most powerful faction, nothing can happen in Lebanon without Iran's approval. Bush's invasion of Iraq has served two purposes--Iran's and bin Laden's--at the expense of his own.
Bush cannot learn from his mistakes. Bush lacks the intelligence and education to recognize a mistake. His government is filled with ignorant ideologues who believe their own propaganda. The fools are now proceeding to compound their strategic blunders with plans to attack Iran and Syria.
Washington is accustomed to buying what it wants. Whenever Washington wants a country to do its bidding it buys the country's leaders. This used to work in the Middle East, but no longer. Do you remember the much maligned Yasser Arafat and his Fatah movement?
Arafat was on the American payroll, which made him ineffectual in effectively opposing Israel's illegal dispossession of the West Bank Palestinians. With Arafat's death, Washington found an even more compliant Fatah leader to finance. But the Palestinians themselves had had enough. Israel had forced Palestinians into ghettos while the Bush regime cheered on the right-wing Likud Party. In the Palestinian elections, which the Bush regime thought it had bought, the Palestinians gave a resounding victory to Hamas.
The Bush regime's invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have made it impossible for anyone in the Muslim world to take Washington's side.
Our puppet governments in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the tiny oil emirates are shaking in their boots. In all of these lands the Shia are oppressed, and the Shia are now emboldened. All of these lands are vulnerable to Osama bin Laden's claim that the governments represent American interests, not the interests of Egyptians, Jordanians, Saudis, Pakistanis. And certainly the American puppets cannot appeal to the prophet Mohammed.
The ignorance and hubris of Americans is extraordinary. The US, a country with a hollowed out industrial and manufacturing base, a country that no longer can produce jobs for university graduates, a country that is dependent on foreigners to finance its consumption and its wars, a country that cannot recruit troops for its wars of aggression, this same weak, collapsing country is enraging the Muslim World, inspiring hatred of America and Israel throughout the Middle East, creating massive openings for China and Russia, against whom US military might is feeble.
Europe is dependent on Russia for energy. War in the MIddle East makes Europe more dependent on Russia.
The US "superpower" is dependent on China for the advanced technology products that the US is no longer able to produce. China is America's second most important banker after Japan. China can destroy the US in a few minutes just by dumping its holdings of US dollar-denominated assets.
China is presently concluding a $100 billion investment in the development of an Iranian oil field. In its insane determination to attack Iran and seize the Iranian oil fields, the Bush regime is going against the interests of China. China holds all the cards, not the Moron in the White House.
As the US has established the precedent for interfering in the internal affairs of other countries and uses organizations such as the International Republican Institute to buy electoral outcomes, how could Washington complain if some other country were to help the American people by financing an American political party that represents American values and civil liberties. It would be wonderful for America to have a party committed to diplomacy, peace, financial soundness, and the best interests of the American people, as opposed to a Jacobin ideology of death that represents the neoconservative agenda of the Bush regime.
To combat the Republican lock on electronic voting machines, the US is in desperate need of the UN to oversee our elections to prevent Republicans with low approval ratings from winning elections that exit polls show they lost.
The Bush regime is wasting huge borrowed sums at a time when job growth in America has collapsed, when tens of millions of Americans are losing their health care, their pensions, and their middle class status. America cannot afford such a moronic regime. Someone, somewhere please rescue us from the ignorant, tyrannical, and war criminal government that has seized America.
http://counterpunch.com/roberts02212006.html
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com
Would Someone Please Interfere in Our Elections?
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
President Bush's Middle East policy is without rhyme or reason.
According to Bush and his neoconservatives, the only way to make America safe from terrorists is to force democracy upon the Middle East. Only ideologues completely ignorant of the Middle East could come to that conclusion.
Bush's invasion of Iraq turned a country with a secular government that suppressed terrorism over to Shia Islamists allied with Iran.
Bush's invasion of Afghanistan turned the country back to warlordism from the unified polity that the Taliban were achieving and revitalized the drug trade that helps to finance terrorism. Bush's interference in the Palestinian election brought Hamas to office. Bush's interference in Egyptian elections achieved gains for the Muslim Brotherhood. Bush's interference in the Pakistani elections put half the country into Islamic hands.
Now secretary of state Condi Rice wants to spend $85 million interfering in the internal affairs of Iran and $5 million "to accelerate the work of reformers in Syria."
What better way to solidify the Iranian and Syrian governments? Both countries are under threat of attack by the Bush regime. Any Iranian or Syrian who accepted American money to work against their own government would be guilty of high treason. With her announcements, Condi Rice has destroyed any opposition that might have existed in either country.
If terrorism is the threat to America that Bush says, why is Bush working so hard to enlarge the power and influence of terrorists and of Islamic politicians hostile to US hegemony in the Middle East?
The terrorist problem arises from the US government's long-term interference in the internal affairs of Middle Eastern countries. In the past the US has overthrown elected leaders, who were considered too radical for Washington's tastes, and replaced them with authoritarian secular strongmen backed by American money.
To avoid answering to mullahs, the strongmen operate secular governments that are not many steps removed from American puppets.
Being secular, these governments lack the authority of Islam. They are further weakened by not being perceived as representative of the aspirations of Muslims. They have held on to power by suppressing Islamic-based political opposition. Fair elections in these countries would bring Islamic leaders to power.
Muslim terrorists are not secular. Their chosen base is Islam, which puts them closer to the people than are the secular rulers.
Terrorist influence has grown primarily because of US actions in the Middle East. The Bush regime hasn't even a pretext of even-handedness in its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The invasion and occupation of Iraq has been a human rights disaster, with tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed and maimed, the country's infrastructure in ruins, and graphic photographic evidence of Muslims tortured and humiliated by US troops broadcast throughout the world. Undeterred by its accumulated crimes, the Bush regime now threatens more Muslim countries with sanctions, invasion and destruction.
The Bush regime has shown the Muslim world that the US takes for granted that it possesses the right of hegemony over the Middle East. The Bush regime has reaffirmed Washington's right to remove governments, select new ones, interfere in elections, and bomb and invade every country whose rulers Washington can demonize.
By its words and deeds, the Bush regime has confirmed everything that Osama bin Laden has ever said about the "Great Satan." Consequently, the terrorists have grown in influence and organization.
The US invasion of Iraq was a boon for terrorism. The ignorant and incompetent Bush regime expected a "cakewalk" war and an American puppet to do Washington's bidding. The reality is a powerful Iraqi insurgency that has tied down a dozen US divisions and created a training ground and recruits for terrorism and insurgency. Muslims have learned how to violently resist the superior military technology of the invader.
Overthrowing Saddam Hussein, a secular Sunni, was disastrous for American hegemony. Hussein ruthlessly stamped out Islamic-based political opposition and terrorist activity, which he rightly recognized as a threat to himself. With Hussein in power, Iran was isolated as the only Islamic-based government in the Middle East.
Iran was further isolated as Iran is Persian and not Arab, Shia and not Sunni.
The American invasion of Iraq has changed the correlation of forces dramatically in Iran's favor. Thanks to Bush, Iraq is now in the hands of the Shia majority. The Iraqi Shia are allied with Iran, as is Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, giving rise to the Shia crescent from Iran to Israel.
Iran is the beneficiary of the thousands of American lives and the hundreds of billions of dollars that the Bush regime has squandered in Iraq. The White House Moron turned Iraq from an Iranian enemy into an Iranian ally. Iran could not overthrow Saddam Hussein, but the White House Moron, using American blood and treasure, did it for the Iranian clerics.
With Hizbullah as Lebanon's most powerful faction, nothing can happen in Lebanon without Iran's approval. Bush's invasion of Iraq has served two purposes--Iran's and bin Laden's--at the expense of his own.
Bush cannot learn from his mistakes. Bush lacks the intelligence and education to recognize a mistake. His government is filled with ignorant ideologues who believe their own propaganda. The fools are now proceeding to compound their strategic blunders with plans to attack Iran and Syria.
Washington is accustomed to buying what it wants. Whenever Washington wants a country to do its bidding it buys the country's leaders. This used to work in the Middle East, but no longer. Do you remember the much maligned Yasser Arafat and his Fatah movement?
Arafat was on the American payroll, which made him ineffectual in effectively opposing Israel's illegal dispossession of the West Bank Palestinians. With Arafat's death, Washington found an even more compliant Fatah leader to finance. But the Palestinians themselves had had enough. Israel had forced Palestinians into ghettos while the Bush regime cheered on the right-wing Likud Party. In the Palestinian elections, which the Bush regime thought it had bought, the Palestinians gave a resounding victory to Hamas.
The Bush regime's invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have made it impossible for anyone in the Muslim world to take Washington's side.
Our puppet governments in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the tiny oil emirates are shaking in their boots. In all of these lands the Shia are oppressed, and the Shia are now emboldened. All of these lands are vulnerable to Osama bin Laden's claim that the governments represent American interests, not the interests of Egyptians, Jordanians, Saudis, Pakistanis. And certainly the American puppets cannot appeal to the prophet Mohammed.
The ignorance and hubris of Americans is extraordinary. The US, a country with a hollowed out industrial and manufacturing base, a country that no longer can produce jobs for university graduates, a country that is dependent on foreigners to finance its consumption and its wars, a country that cannot recruit troops for its wars of aggression, this same weak, collapsing country is enraging the Muslim World, inspiring hatred of America and Israel throughout the Middle East, creating massive openings for China and Russia, against whom US military might is feeble.
Europe is dependent on Russia for energy. War in the MIddle East makes Europe more dependent on Russia.
The US "superpower" is dependent on China for the advanced technology products that the US is no longer able to produce. China is America's second most important banker after Japan. China can destroy the US in a few minutes just by dumping its holdings of US dollar-denominated assets.
China is presently concluding a $100 billion investment in the development of an Iranian oil field. In its insane determination to attack Iran and seize the Iranian oil fields, the Bush regime is going against the interests of China. China holds all the cards, not the Moron in the White House.
As the US has established the precedent for interfering in the internal affairs of other countries and uses organizations such as the International Republican Institute to buy electoral outcomes, how could Washington complain if some other country were to help the American people by financing an American political party that represents American values and civil liberties. It would be wonderful for America to have a party committed to diplomacy, peace, financial soundness, and the best interests of the American people, as opposed to a Jacobin ideology of death that represents the neoconservative agenda of the Bush regime.
To combat the Republican lock on electronic voting machines, the US is in desperate need of the UN to oversee our elections to prevent Republicans with low approval ratings from winning elections that exit polls show they lost.
The Bush regime is wasting huge borrowed sums at a time when job growth in America has collapsed, when tens of millions of Americans are losing their health care, their pensions, and their middle class status. America cannot afford such a moronic regime. Someone, somewhere please rescue us from the ignorant, tyrannical, and war criminal government that has seized America.
http://counterpunch.com/roberts02212006.html
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com
Courtesy of Wundermaus
Bush vs. Constitution
President Bush's conception of his own powers is even more dangerous than his specific abuses.
By Paul Starr
Issue Date: 03.10.06
Repeatedly through our history, the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution have been threatened in war by an overreacting government and then reaffirmed in peace by calmer leadership. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, the suppression of free speech during and after World War I, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, McCarthyism, and the wiretapping of Vietnam-era dissenters -- all of these came to be seen, once fears subsided, as violations of our freedoms and embarrassments to our heritage.
George W. Bush’s presidency is another era of overreaction at the expense of constitutional rights, but the prospects for a quick correction are not auspicious. Nothing has helped end earlier bouts of repression so much as the fact that the wars themselves came to a close, and nothing has so exposed our liberties to indefinite jeopardy as the conception of a “war on terrorism” with no end.
The president claims an inherent power to imprison American citizens whom he has determined to be this country’s enemies without obtaining a warrant, letting them hear the charges against them, or following other safeguards against wrongful punishment guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Under his administration, the government has engaged in inhumane treatment of prisoners that amounts to torture, and when Congress passed legislation to ban such treatment, he declared he would simply interpret the law his own way. Although the Constitution says treaties are the “supreme law of the land,” the president has abrogated them on his own. And, we now know, he ordered a secret program of electronic surveillance of Americans without court warrants.
But there is something more dangerous than any of these specific abuses and usurpations, and that is the theory of inherent powers that Bush invokes to justify most of these actions and the possibility of its being effectively institutionalized by a meek Congress and, worst of all, by a deferential Supreme Court.
My concern is analogous to the one that Justice Robert H. Jackson articulated when he dissented from the majority in Korematsu, the infamous Supreme Court decision in the midst of war (1944) upholding the constitutionality of the military order to intern Japanese Americans. A judicial construction sustaining the program, he wrote, “is a far more subtle blow to liberty than the promulgation of the order itself.” For by rationalizing the order, “the Court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination in criminal procedure and of transplanting American citizens. The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.”
The real danger today is the loaded weapon that Bush and his defenders are willing to put in the hands of all future presidents. Even members of his own party ought to be able to see that danger, and act to stop it.
Americans have been slow to react to Bush’s actions because the great majority of them no more identify with the Arabs who are the chief targets of the “war on terrorism” than the majority in the 1940s identified with their fellow citizens of Japanese descent. But the principles that Bush is undermining protect us all. Our Constitution divides the president’s authority with Congress and the courts so as to create a system of mandatory consultations. That requirement does not make injustice and misuse of power impossible, but it makes them less likely. To survive, the system chiefly requires that if those in power cannot remember our traditions, they can at least imagine themselves out of power in the future.
Not long ago, the Supreme Court could have been counted on to restore the checks that Bush has thrust aside. But the confirmation of the president’s two nominees to the Court may now tilt it in his direction. The common element in the background of the new justices is not merely their political conservatism, but their history of support for a broad construction of executive powers.
The combined effect of a changed court and a putative state of perpetual war could radically distort our whole constitutional framework. An increasing number of congressional Republicans have recently expressed doubts about the legality of Bush’s surveillance program. The real battle, however, is about general principles applied across a wide range of policies. Of course, if the voters elect a Democratic president in 2008, perhaps even the Court’s new justices may discover constitutional reasons to limit the president’s inherent powers. I am not saying this is the only hope. But in a democracy, those who cannot imagine being out of power deserve another experience of being without it.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?sectio...articleId=11188
Bush's Mysterious 'New Programs'
By Nat Parry
February 21, 2006
Not that George W. Bush needs much encouragement, but Sen. Lindsey Graham suggested to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales a new target for the administration’s domestic operations -- Fifth Columnists, supposedly disloyal Americans who sympathize and collaborate with the enemy.
“The administration has not only the right, but the duty, in my opinion, to pursue Fifth Column movements,” Graham, R-S.C., told Gonzales during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Feb. 6.
“I stand by this President’s ability, inherent to being Commander in Chief, to find out about Fifth Column movements, and I don’t think you need a warrant to do that,” Graham added, volunteering to work with the administration to draft guidelines for how best to neutralize this alleged threat.
“Senator,” a smiling Gonzales responded, “the President already said we’d be happy to listen to your ideas.”
In less paranoid times, Graham’s comments might be viewed by many Americans as a Republican trying to have it both ways – ingratiating himself to an administration of his own party while seeking some credit from Washington centrists for suggesting Congress should have at least a tiny say in how Bush runs the War on Terror.
But recent developments suggest that the Bush administration may already be contemplating what to do with Americans who are deemed insufficiently loyal or who disseminate information that may be considered helpful to the enemy.
Top U.S. officials have cited the need to challenge news that undercuts Bush’s actions as a key front in defeating the terrorists, who are aided by “news informers” in the words of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com “Upside-Down Media” or below.]
Detention Centers
Plus, there was that curious development in January when the Army Corps of Engineers awarded Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root a $385 million contract to construct detention centers somewhere in the United States, to deal with “an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs,” KBR said. [Market Watch, Jan. 26, 2006]
Later, the New York Times reported that “KBR would build the centers for the Homeland Security Department for an unexpected influx of immigrants, to house people in the event of a natural disaster or for new programs that require additional detention space.” [Feb. 4, 2006]
Like most news stories on the KBR contract, the Times focused on concerns about Halliburton’s reputation for bilking U.S. taxpayers by overcharging for sub-par services.
“It’s hard to believe that the administration has decided to entrust Halliburton with even more taxpayer dollars,” remarked Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California.
Less attention centered on the phrase “rapid development of new programs” and what kind of programs would require a major expansion of detention centers, each capable of holding 5,000 people. Jamie Zuieback, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, declined to elaborate on what these “new programs” might be.
Only a few independent journalists, such as Peter Dale Scott and Maureen Farrell, have pursued what the Bush administration might actually be thinking.
Scott speculated that the “detention centers could be used to detain American citizens if the Bush administration were to declare martial law.” He recalled that during the Reagan administration, National Security Council aide Oliver North organized Rex-84 “readiness exercise,” which contemplated the Federal Emergency Management Agency rounding up and detaining 400,000 “refugees,” in the event of “uncontrolled population movements” over the Mexican border into the United States.
Farrell pointed out that because “another terror attack is all but certain, it seems far more likely that the centers would be used for post-911-type detentions of immigrants rather than a sudden deluge” of immigrants flooding across the border.
Vietnam-era whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said, “Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters. They’ve already done this on a smaller scale, with the ‘special registration’ detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo.”
Labor Camps
There also was another little-noticed item posted at the U.S. Army Web site, about the Pentagon’s Civilian Inmate Labor Program. This program “provides Army policy and guidance for establishing civilian inmate labor programs and civilian prison camps on Army installations.”
The Army document, first drafted in 1997, underwent a “rapid action revision” on Jan. 14, 2005. The revision provides a “template for developing agreements” between the Army and corrections facilities for the use of civilian inmate labor on Army installations.
On its face, the Army’s labor program refers to inmates housed in federal, state and local jails. The Army also cites various federal laws that govern the use of civilian labor and provide for the establishment of prison camps in the United States, including a federal statute that authorizes the Attorney General to “establish, equip, and maintain camps upon sites selected by him” and “make available … the services of United States prisoners” to various government departments, including the Department of Defense.
Though the timing of the document’s posting – within the past few weeks –may just be a coincidence, the reference to a “rapid action revision” and the KBR contract’s contemplation of “rapid development of new programs” has raised eyebrows about why this sudden need for urgency.
These developments also are drawing more attention now because of earlier Bush administration policies to involve the Pentagon in “counter-terrorism” operations inside the United States.
Pentagon Surveillance
Despite the Posse Comitatus Act’s prohibitions against U.S. military personnel engaging in domestic law enforcement, the Pentagon has expanded its operations beyond previous boundaries, such as its role in domestic surveillance activities.
The Washington Post has reported that since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the Defense Department has been creating new agencies that gather and analyze intelligence within the United States. [Washington Post, Nov. 27, 2005]
The White House also is moving to expand the power of the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), created three years ago to consolidate counterintelligence operations. The White House proposal would transform CIFA into an office that has authority to investigate crimes such as treason, terrorist sabotage or economic espionage.
The Pentagon also has pushed legislation in Congress that would create an intelligence exception to the Privacy Act, allowing the FBI and others to share information about U.S. citizens with the Pentagon, CIA and other intelligence agencies. But some in the Pentagon don’t seem to think that new laws are even necessary.
In a 2001 Defense Department memo that surfaced in January 2006, the U.S. Army’s top intelligence officer wrote, “Contrary to popular belief, there is no absolute ban on [military] intelligence components collecting U.S. person information.”
Drawing a distinction between “collecting” information and “receiving” information on U.S. citizens, the memo argued that “MI [military intelligence] may receive information from anyone, anytime.” [See CQ.com, Jan. 31, 2005]
This receipt of information presumably would include data from the National Security Agency, which has been engaging in surveillance of U.S. citizens without court-approved warrants in apparent violation of the Foreign Intelligence Security Act. Bush approved the program of warrantless wiretaps shortly after 9/11.
There also may be an even more extensive surveillance program. Former NSA employee Russell D. Tice told a congressional committee on Feb. 14 that such a top-secret surveillance program existed, but he said he couldn’t discuss the details without breaking classification laws.
Tice added that the “special access” surveillance program may be violating the constitutional rights of millions of Americans. [UPI, Feb. 14, 2006]
With this expanded surveillance, the government’s list of terrorist suspects is rapidly swelling.
The Washington Post reported on Feb. 15 that the National Counterterrorism Center’s central repository now holds the names of 325,000 terrorist suspects, a four-fold increase since the fall of 2003.
Asked whether the names in the repository were collected through the NSA’s domestic surveillance program, an NCTC official told the Post, “Our database includes names of known and suspected international terrorists provided by all intelligence community organizations, including NSA.”
Homeland Defense
As the administration scoops up more and more names, members of Congress also have questioned the elasticity of Bush’s definitions for words like terrorist “affiliates,” used to justify wiretapping Americans allegedly in contact with such people or entities.
During the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the wiretap program, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, complained that the House and Senate Intelligence Committees “have not been briefed on the scope and nature of the program.”
Feinstein added that, therefore, the committees “have not been able to explore what is a link or an affiliate to al-Qaeda or what minimization procedures (for purging the names of innocent people) are in place.”
The combination of the Bush administration’s expansive reading of its own power and its insistence on extraordinary secrecy has raised the alarm of civil libertarians when contemplating how far the Pentagon might go in involving itself in domestic matters.
A Defense Department document, entitled the “Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support,” has set out a military strategy against terrorism that envisions an “active, layered defense” both inside and outside U.S. territory. In the document, the Pentagon pledges to “transform U.S. military forces to execute homeland defense missions in the … U.S. homeland.”
The Pentagon strategy paper calls for increased military reconnaissance and surveillance to “defeat potential challengers before they threaten the United States.” The plan “maximizes threat awareness and seizes the initiative from those who would harm us.”
But there are concerns over how the Pentagon judges “threats” and who falls under the category “those who would harm us.” A Pentagon official said the Counterintelligence Field Activity’s TALON program has amassed files on antiwar protesters.
In December 2005, NBC News revealed the existence of a secret 400-page Pentagon document listing 1,500 “suspicious incidents” over a 10-month period, including dozens of small antiwar demonstrations that were classified as a “threat.”
The Defense Department also might be moving toward legitimizing the use of propaganda domestically, as part of its overall war strategy.
A secret Pentagon “Information Operations Roadmap,” approved by Rumsfeld in October 2003, calls for “full spectrum” information operations and notes that “information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP, increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice-versa.”
“PSYOPS messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public,” the document states. The Pentagon argues, however, that “the distinction between foreign and domestic audiences becomes more a question of USG [U.S. government] intent rather than information dissemination practices.”
It calls for “boundaries” between information operations abroad and the news media at home, but does not outline any corresponding limits on PSYOP campaigns.
Similar to the distinction the Pentagon draws between “collecting” and “receiving” intelligence on U.S. citizens, the Information Operations Roadmap argues that as long as the American public is not intentionally “targeted,” any PSYOP propaganda consumed by the American public is acceptable.
The Pentagon plan also includes a strategy for taking over the Internet and controlling the flow of information, viewing the Web as a potential military adversary. The “roadmap” speaks of “fighting the net,” and implies that the Internet is the equivalent of “an enemy weapons system.”
In a speech on Feb. 17 to the Council on Foreign Relations, Rumsfeld elaborated on the administration’s perception that the battle over information would be a crucial front in the War on Terror, or as Rumsfeld calls it, the Long War.
“Let there be no doubt, the longer it takes to put a strategic communication framework into place, the more we can be certain that the vacuum will be filled by the enemy and by news informers that most assuredly will not paint an accurate picture of what is actually taking place,” Rumsfeld said.
The Department of Homeland Security also has demonstrated a tendency to deploy military operatives to deal with domestic crises.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the department dispatched “heavily armed paramilitary mercenaries from the Blackwater private security firm, infamous for their work in Iraq, (and had them) openly patrolling the streets of New Orleans,” reported journalists Jeremy Scahill and Daniela Crespo on Sept. 10, 2005.
Noting the reputation of the Blackwater mercenaries as “some of the most feared professional killers in the world,” Scahill and Crespo said Blackwater’s presence in New Orleans “raises alarming questions about why the government would allow men trained to kill with impunity in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to operate here.”
U.S. Battlefield
In the view of some civil libertarians, a form of martial law already exists in the United States and has been in place since shortly after the 9/11 attacks when Bush issued Military Order No. 1 which empowered him to detain any non-citizen as an international terrorist or enemy combatant.
“The President decided that he was no longer running the country as a civilian President,” wrote civil rights attorney Michael Ratner in the book Guantanamo: What the World Should Know. “He issued a military order giving himself the power to run the country as a general.”
For any American citizen suspected of collaborating with terrorists, Bush also revealed what’s in store. In May 2002, the FBI arrested U.S. citizen Jose Padilla in Chicago on suspicion that he might be an al-Qaeda operative planning an attack.
Rather than bring criminal charges, Bush designated Padilla an “enemy combatant” and had him imprisoned indefinitely without benefit of due process. After three years, the administration finally brought charges against Padilla, in order to avoid a Supreme Court showdown the White House might have lost.
But since the Court was not able to rule on the Padilla case, the administration’s arguments have not been formally repudiated. Indeed, despite filing charges against Padilla, the White House still asserts the right to detain U.S. citizens without charges as enemy combatants.
This claimed authority is based on the assertion that the United States is at war and the American homeland is part of the battlefield.
“In the war against terrorists of global reach, as the Nation learned all too well on Sept. 11, 2001, the territory of the United States is part of the battlefield,” Bush's lawyers argued in briefs to the federal courts. [Washington Post, July 19, 2005]
Given Bush’s now open assertions that he is using his “plenary” – or unlimited – powers as Commander in Chief for the duration of the indefinite War on Terror, Americans can no longer trust that their constitutional rights protect them from government actions.
As former Vice President Al Gore asked after recounting a litany of sweeping powers that Bush has asserted to fight the War on Terror, “Can it be true that any President really has such powers under our Constitution? If the answer is ‘yes,’ then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited?”
In such extraordinary circumstances, the American people might legitimately ask exactly what the Bush administration means by the “rapid development of new programs,” which might require the construction of a new network of detention camps.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/022106a.html
By Nat Parry
February 21, 2006
Not that George W. Bush needs much encouragement, but Sen. Lindsey Graham suggested to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales a new target for the administration’s domestic operations -- Fifth Columnists, supposedly disloyal Americans who sympathize and collaborate with the enemy.
“The administration has not only the right, but the duty, in my opinion, to pursue Fifth Column movements,” Graham, R-S.C., told Gonzales during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Feb. 6.
“I stand by this President’s ability, inherent to being Commander in Chief, to find out about Fifth Column movements, and I don’t think you need a warrant to do that,” Graham added, volunteering to work with the administration to draft guidelines for how best to neutralize this alleged threat.
“Senator,” a smiling Gonzales responded, “the President already said we’d be happy to listen to your ideas.”
In less paranoid times, Graham’s comments might be viewed by many Americans as a Republican trying to have it both ways – ingratiating himself to an administration of his own party while seeking some credit from Washington centrists for suggesting Congress should have at least a tiny say in how Bush runs the War on Terror.
But recent developments suggest that the Bush administration may already be contemplating what to do with Americans who are deemed insufficiently loyal or who disseminate information that may be considered helpful to the enemy.
Top U.S. officials have cited the need to challenge news that undercuts Bush’s actions as a key front in defeating the terrorists, who are aided by “news informers” in the words of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com “Upside-Down Media” or below.]
Detention Centers
Plus, there was that curious development in January when the Army Corps of Engineers awarded Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root a $385 million contract to construct detention centers somewhere in the United States, to deal with “an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs,” KBR said. [Market Watch, Jan. 26, 2006]
Later, the New York Times reported that “KBR would build the centers for the Homeland Security Department for an unexpected influx of immigrants, to house people in the event of a natural disaster or for new programs that require additional detention space.” [Feb. 4, 2006]
Like most news stories on the KBR contract, the Times focused on concerns about Halliburton’s reputation for bilking U.S. taxpayers by overcharging for sub-par services.
“It’s hard to believe that the administration has decided to entrust Halliburton with even more taxpayer dollars,” remarked Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California.
Less attention centered on the phrase “rapid development of new programs” and what kind of programs would require a major expansion of detention centers, each capable of holding 5,000 people. Jamie Zuieback, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, declined to elaborate on what these “new programs” might be.
Only a few independent journalists, such as Peter Dale Scott and Maureen Farrell, have pursued what the Bush administration might actually be thinking.
Scott speculated that the “detention centers could be used to detain American citizens if the Bush administration were to declare martial law.” He recalled that during the Reagan administration, National Security Council aide Oliver North organized Rex-84 “readiness exercise,” which contemplated the Federal Emergency Management Agency rounding up and detaining 400,000 “refugees,” in the event of “uncontrolled population movements” over the Mexican border into the United States.
Farrell pointed out that because “another terror attack is all but certain, it seems far more likely that the centers would be used for post-911-type detentions of immigrants rather than a sudden deluge” of immigrants flooding across the border.
Vietnam-era whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said, “Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters. They’ve already done this on a smaller scale, with the ‘special registration’ detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo.”
Labor Camps
There also was another little-noticed item posted at the U.S. Army Web site, about the Pentagon’s Civilian Inmate Labor Program. This program “provides Army policy and guidance for establishing civilian inmate labor programs and civilian prison camps on Army installations.”
The Army document, first drafted in 1997, underwent a “rapid action revision” on Jan. 14, 2005. The revision provides a “template for developing agreements” between the Army and corrections facilities for the use of civilian inmate labor on Army installations.
On its face, the Army’s labor program refers to inmates housed in federal, state and local jails. The Army also cites various federal laws that govern the use of civilian labor and provide for the establishment of prison camps in the United States, including a federal statute that authorizes the Attorney General to “establish, equip, and maintain camps upon sites selected by him” and “make available … the services of United States prisoners” to various government departments, including the Department of Defense.
Though the timing of the document’s posting – within the past few weeks –may just be a coincidence, the reference to a “rapid action revision” and the KBR contract’s contemplation of “rapid development of new programs” has raised eyebrows about why this sudden need for urgency.
These developments also are drawing more attention now because of earlier Bush administration policies to involve the Pentagon in “counter-terrorism” operations inside the United States.
Pentagon Surveillance
Despite the Posse Comitatus Act’s prohibitions against U.S. military personnel engaging in domestic law enforcement, the Pentagon has expanded its operations beyond previous boundaries, such as its role in domestic surveillance activities.
The Washington Post has reported that since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the Defense Department has been creating new agencies that gather and analyze intelligence within the United States. [Washington Post, Nov. 27, 2005]
The White House also is moving to expand the power of the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), created three years ago to consolidate counterintelligence operations. The White House proposal would transform CIFA into an office that has authority to investigate crimes such as treason, terrorist sabotage or economic espionage.
The Pentagon also has pushed legislation in Congress that would create an intelligence exception to the Privacy Act, allowing the FBI and others to share information about U.S. citizens with the Pentagon, CIA and other intelligence agencies. But some in the Pentagon don’t seem to think that new laws are even necessary.
In a 2001 Defense Department memo that surfaced in January 2006, the U.S. Army’s top intelligence officer wrote, “Contrary to popular belief, there is no absolute ban on [military] intelligence components collecting U.S. person information.”
Drawing a distinction between “collecting” information and “receiving” information on U.S. citizens, the memo argued that “MI [military intelligence] may receive information from anyone, anytime.” [See CQ.com, Jan. 31, 2005]
This receipt of information presumably would include data from the National Security Agency, which has been engaging in surveillance of U.S. citizens without court-approved warrants in apparent violation of the Foreign Intelligence Security Act. Bush approved the program of warrantless wiretaps shortly after 9/11.
There also may be an even more extensive surveillance program. Former NSA employee Russell D. Tice told a congressional committee on Feb. 14 that such a top-secret surveillance program existed, but he said he couldn’t discuss the details without breaking classification laws.
Tice added that the “special access” surveillance program may be violating the constitutional rights of millions of Americans. [UPI, Feb. 14, 2006]
With this expanded surveillance, the government’s list of terrorist suspects is rapidly swelling.
The Washington Post reported on Feb. 15 that the National Counterterrorism Center’s central repository now holds the names of 325,000 terrorist suspects, a four-fold increase since the fall of 2003.
Asked whether the names in the repository were collected through the NSA’s domestic surveillance program, an NCTC official told the Post, “Our database includes names of known and suspected international terrorists provided by all intelligence community organizations, including NSA.”
Homeland Defense
As the administration scoops up more and more names, members of Congress also have questioned the elasticity of Bush’s definitions for words like terrorist “affiliates,” used to justify wiretapping Americans allegedly in contact with such people or entities.
During the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the wiretap program, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, complained that the House and Senate Intelligence Committees “have not been briefed on the scope and nature of the program.”
Feinstein added that, therefore, the committees “have not been able to explore what is a link or an affiliate to al-Qaeda or what minimization procedures (for purging the names of innocent people) are in place.”
The combination of the Bush administration’s expansive reading of its own power and its insistence on extraordinary secrecy has raised the alarm of civil libertarians when contemplating how far the Pentagon might go in involving itself in domestic matters.
A Defense Department document, entitled the “Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support,” has set out a military strategy against terrorism that envisions an “active, layered defense” both inside and outside U.S. territory. In the document, the Pentagon pledges to “transform U.S. military forces to execute homeland defense missions in the … U.S. homeland.”
The Pentagon strategy paper calls for increased military reconnaissance and surveillance to “defeat potential challengers before they threaten the United States.” The plan “maximizes threat awareness and seizes the initiative from those who would harm us.”
But there are concerns over how the Pentagon judges “threats” and who falls under the category “those who would harm us.” A Pentagon official said the Counterintelligence Field Activity’s TALON program has amassed files on antiwar protesters.
In December 2005, NBC News revealed the existence of a secret 400-page Pentagon document listing 1,500 “suspicious incidents” over a 10-month period, including dozens of small antiwar demonstrations that were classified as a “threat.”
The Defense Department also might be moving toward legitimizing the use of propaganda domestically, as part of its overall war strategy.
A secret Pentagon “Information Operations Roadmap,” approved by Rumsfeld in October 2003, calls for “full spectrum” information operations and notes that “information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP, increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice-versa.”
“PSYOPS messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public,” the document states. The Pentagon argues, however, that “the distinction between foreign and domestic audiences becomes more a question of USG [U.S. government] intent rather than information dissemination practices.”
It calls for “boundaries” between information operations abroad and the news media at home, but does not outline any corresponding limits on PSYOP campaigns.
Similar to the distinction the Pentagon draws between “collecting” and “receiving” intelligence on U.S. citizens, the Information Operations Roadmap argues that as long as the American public is not intentionally “targeted,” any PSYOP propaganda consumed by the American public is acceptable.
The Pentagon plan also includes a strategy for taking over the Internet and controlling the flow of information, viewing the Web as a potential military adversary. The “roadmap” speaks of “fighting the net,” and implies that the Internet is the equivalent of “an enemy weapons system.”
In a speech on Feb. 17 to the Council on Foreign Relations, Rumsfeld elaborated on the administration’s perception that the battle over information would be a crucial front in the War on Terror, or as Rumsfeld calls it, the Long War.
“Let there be no doubt, the longer it takes to put a strategic communication framework into place, the more we can be certain that the vacuum will be filled by the enemy and by news informers that most assuredly will not paint an accurate picture of what is actually taking place,” Rumsfeld said.
The Department of Homeland Security also has demonstrated a tendency to deploy military operatives to deal with domestic crises.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the department dispatched “heavily armed paramilitary mercenaries from the Blackwater private security firm, infamous for their work in Iraq, (and had them) openly patrolling the streets of New Orleans,” reported journalists Jeremy Scahill and Daniela Crespo on Sept. 10, 2005.
Noting the reputation of the Blackwater mercenaries as “some of the most feared professional killers in the world,” Scahill and Crespo said Blackwater’s presence in New Orleans “raises alarming questions about why the government would allow men trained to kill with impunity in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to operate here.”
U.S. Battlefield
In the view of some civil libertarians, a form of martial law already exists in the United States and has been in place since shortly after the 9/11 attacks when Bush issued Military Order No. 1 which empowered him to detain any non-citizen as an international terrorist or enemy combatant.
“The President decided that he was no longer running the country as a civilian President,” wrote civil rights attorney Michael Ratner in the book Guantanamo: What the World Should Know. “He issued a military order giving himself the power to run the country as a general.”
For any American citizen suspected of collaborating with terrorists, Bush also revealed what’s in store. In May 2002, the FBI arrested U.S. citizen Jose Padilla in Chicago on suspicion that he might be an al-Qaeda operative planning an attack.
Rather than bring criminal charges, Bush designated Padilla an “enemy combatant” and had him imprisoned indefinitely without benefit of due process. After three years, the administration finally brought charges against Padilla, in order to avoid a Supreme Court showdown the White House might have lost.
But since the Court was not able to rule on the Padilla case, the administration’s arguments have not been formally repudiated. Indeed, despite filing charges against Padilla, the White House still asserts the right to detain U.S. citizens without charges as enemy combatants.
This claimed authority is based on the assertion that the United States is at war and the American homeland is part of the battlefield.
“In the war against terrorists of global reach, as the Nation learned all too well on Sept. 11, 2001, the territory of the United States is part of the battlefield,” Bush's lawyers argued in briefs to the federal courts. [Washington Post, July 19, 2005]
Given Bush’s now open assertions that he is using his “plenary” – or unlimited – powers as Commander in Chief for the duration of the indefinite War on Terror, Americans can no longer trust that their constitutional rights protect them from government actions.
As former Vice President Al Gore asked after recounting a litany of sweeping powers that Bush has asserted to fight the War on Terror, “Can it be true that any President really has such powers under our Constitution? If the answer is ‘yes,’ then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited?”
In such extraordinary circumstances, the American people might legitimately ask exactly what the Bush administration means by the “rapid development of new programs,” which might require the construction of a new network of detention camps.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/022106a.html
Those concentration camps for terrorists and illegal aliens are nothing of the kind... they are for you and me...
Published on Thursday, February 23, 2006 by WorkingforChange.com
George Bush, Protector of Arab Rights?
Suddenly, Dubya's 'War on Terra' takes back seat in Dubai Ports deal
by Molly Ivins
AUSTIN, Texas -- So, aside from the fact that it's politically idiotic and at least theoretically presents a national security risk, just what is wrong with the Dubai Ports deal?
As President George W. Bush actually said, "I want those who are questioning it to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company. I'm trying to conduct foreign policy now by saying to the people of the world, we'll treat you fairly."
So, what's wrong with that? There's our only president standing up against discrimination and against tarring all Arabs with the same brush and all that good stuff. (The fact that it was Mr. Racial Profiling speaking -- the man who has single-handedly created more Arab enemies for this country than anyone else ever dreamed of doing -- is just one of those ironies we regularly get whacked over the head with.)
OK, here's for starters. We have already been warned that, should we back out of the DP deal, the United Arab Emirates may well take offense and not be so nice about helping us in the War on Terra -- maybe even cut back its money, as well as its cooperation. This is a problem specific to the fact that we are dealing with a corporation owned by a country: A corporation only wants to make money, a corporation owned by a country has lots of motives.
Second, this is a corporation, consequently its only interest is in making money. A corporation is like a shark, designed to do two things: kill and eat. Thousands of years of evolution lie behind the shark, where as the corporation has only a few hundred. But it is still perfectly evolved for its purpose. That means a corporation that makes money running port facilities does not have a stake in national security. It's not the corporation's fault any more than it's the shark's.
The president is quite correct that a "Great British" corporation has no more or less interest in helping terrorists than an Arab corporation. It is not the corporation that is supposed to have other interests -- it is government. But as Michael Chertoff, secretary of homeland security, said, "We have to balance the paramount urgency of security against the fact that we still want to have a robust global trading system."
"Balance" is the arresting word here -- keep your eye on "balance." We have an administration that is absolutely wedded to corporate interests, both American and global. It honestly believes that "free trade" is more important than the environment and more important than the people. It has repeatedly demonstrated it is willing to let both go in order to foster free trade. There is no "balance" in its consideration on these issues, and now it turns out not much in "balancing" national security, either.
The people running this country -- and that includes most of the leaders of both parties -- have proven again and again they are perfectly willing to outsource American jobs, American wage standards, and American health and safety standards all for the sacred, holy grail of free trade. Why would it surprise us that national security is ditto?
I am amused by Chertoff's use of the word "balance." Since the administration has done zip, nada, zilch about port security, it's unclear what he's trying to "balance." In 2002, the Coast Guard estimated it would take $5.4 billion over 10 years to improve port security to the point mandated by the Maritime Transportation Security Act. Last year, Congress appropriated $175 million. The administration had requested $46 million, below 9-11 levels.
As David Sirota points out, the administration has been negotiating a free trade deal with the United Arab Emirates at the same time the port deal was being negotiated. This whole thing is about free trade and the lock big corporations have on our government to further free trade. Sirota also points out you will see and hear almost no discussion of this fact in the corporate news media.
I have no idea whether DP World represents a security threat, but U.S. News & World Report said in December that Dubai was notorious for smuggling, money laundering and drug trafficking in support of terrorists. I suppose the same could be said of New York, but it doesn't sound pleasant.
Dubai is believed to be the transfer port for the spread of nuclear technology by the Abdul Qadeer Khan network. David Sanborn, an executive who ran DP World's European and Latin American operations, was chosen last month by Bush to head the U.S. Maritime Administration, according to the New York Daily News.
It'll be interesting to see just how much power the free trade lobby has over the political establishment. Right now, both Democrats and Republicans are yelling about what appears to be a dippy idea. Let's see what hearing from their contributors brings about.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0223-28.htm
George Bush, Protector of Arab Rights?
Suddenly, Dubya's 'War on Terra' takes back seat in Dubai Ports deal
by Molly Ivins
AUSTIN, Texas -- So, aside from the fact that it's politically idiotic and at least theoretically presents a national security risk, just what is wrong with the Dubai Ports deal?
As President George W. Bush actually said, "I want those who are questioning it to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company. I'm trying to conduct foreign policy now by saying to the people of the world, we'll treat you fairly."
So, what's wrong with that? There's our only president standing up against discrimination and against tarring all Arabs with the same brush and all that good stuff. (The fact that it was Mr. Racial Profiling speaking -- the man who has single-handedly created more Arab enemies for this country than anyone else ever dreamed of doing -- is just one of those ironies we regularly get whacked over the head with.)
OK, here's for starters. We have already been warned that, should we back out of the DP deal, the United Arab Emirates may well take offense and not be so nice about helping us in the War on Terra -- maybe even cut back its money, as well as its cooperation. This is a problem specific to the fact that we are dealing with a corporation owned by a country: A corporation only wants to make money, a corporation owned by a country has lots of motives.
Second, this is a corporation, consequently its only interest is in making money. A corporation is like a shark, designed to do two things: kill and eat. Thousands of years of evolution lie behind the shark, where as the corporation has only a few hundred. But it is still perfectly evolved for its purpose. That means a corporation that makes money running port facilities does not have a stake in national security. It's not the corporation's fault any more than it's the shark's.
The president is quite correct that a "Great British" corporation has no more or less interest in helping terrorists than an Arab corporation. It is not the corporation that is supposed to have other interests -- it is government. But as Michael Chertoff, secretary of homeland security, said, "We have to balance the paramount urgency of security against the fact that we still want to have a robust global trading system."
"Balance" is the arresting word here -- keep your eye on "balance." We have an administration that is absolutely wedded to corporate interests, both American and global. It honestly believes that "free trade" is more important than the environment and more important than the people. It has repeatedly demonstrated it is willing to let both go in order to foster free trade. There is no "balance" in its consideration on these issues, and now it turns out not much in "balancing" national security, either.
The people running this country -- and that includes most of the leaders of both parties -- have proven again and again they are perfectly willing to outsource American jobs, American wage standards, and American health and safety standards all for the sacred, holy grail of free trade. Why would it surprise us that national security is ditto?
I am amused by Chertoff's use of the word "balance." Since the administration has done zip, nada, zilch about port security, it's unclear what he's trying to "balance." In 2002, the Coast Guard estimated it would take $5.4 billion over 10 years to improve port security to the point mandated by the Maritime Transportation Security Act. Last year, Congress appropriated $175 million. The administration had requested $46 million, below 9-11 levels.
As David Sirota points out, the administration has been negotiating a free trade deal with the United Arab Emirates at the same time the port deal was being negotiated. This whole thing is about free trade and the lock big corporations have on our government to further free trade. Sirota also points out you will see and hear almost no discussion of this fact in the corporate news media.
I have no idea whether DP World represents a security threat, but U.S. News & World Report said in December that Dubai was notorious for smuggling, money laundering and drug trafficking in support of terrorists. I suppose the same could be said of New York, but it doesn't sound pleasant.
Dubai is believed to be the transfer port for the spread of nuclear technology by the Abdul Qadeer Khan network. David Sanborn, an executive who ran DP World's European and Latin American operations, was chosen last month by Bush to head the U.S. Maritime Administration, according to the New York Daily News.
It'll be interesting to see just how much power the free trade lobby has over the political establishment. Right now, both Democrats and Republicans are yelling about what appears to be a dippy idea. Let's see what hearing from their contributors brings about.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0223-28.htm
The Bush White House as a "Fifth Column"
Dubaigate Deconstructed
By JONATHAN M. FELDMAN
The Bush Administration's championing of a disastrous war, its grievous neglect of homeland security in New Orleans, and its promotion of a Dubai company to manage key strategic ports all point in one direction. The Bush White House represents a fifth column, an insidious Trojan Horse aimed against not only the American people but also American democracy itself. The state is no longer a tool for rational governance, but a tool of corporate plunder. The ruling corporate elite that has taken over the White House is loyal to a transnational economy and the short term cash nexus. It is in fact the direct extension of that economy into the very workings of government itself. Despite their protestations to the contrary, this parasitic elite is not patriotic. They only use the rhetoric of "patriotism" as a cover for junking civil liberties, wrecking the economy, and enriching their cronies.
The Wikipedia Encyclopedia explains the origins of the term "fifth column." Its first use was in a 1936 radio address by Emilio Mola, a Nationalist general during the Spanish Civil War: "As four of his army columns moved on Madrid, the general referred to his militant supporters within the capital as his 'fifth column,' intent on undermining the Republican government from within."
The term has taken on other meanings. It is also used to refer "to a population who are assumed to have loyalties to countries other than the one in which they reside or who supported some other nation in war efforts against the country they lived in."
Parasitical Economy as Political Exchange Value
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, among the top corporate contributors to George W. Bush's 2004 presidential campaign were leading transnational interests. Calculating donors based on organizational PACs, coporate members, employees, owners and those in immediate families, the Center identified various corporate sponsors. While these were not direct transfers by the company to each candidate, the transfers do suggest the kind of cultural support system which the company provides that leads to a given donation (for example, John Kerry got far more such large scale donations from university affiliated donors).
In 2004, the lead such donor to Bush's Presidential campaign was Morgan Stanley interests that gave $600,480. This highly global operation has over 600 offices in twenty-eight countries.
The next largest corporate group was Merrill Lynch. Their collected contributions were $580,004 in 2004. While 71% of this company's revenue originated in the U.S., its orientation was similarly global, with operations in China, Russia, India, Israel and elsewhere. The global markets segment of its operations have grown steadily over the last few years, from $6.185 billion in 2002 to $8.211 billion in 2004.
The third ranked corporate group donor to Bush was PricewaterhouseCoopers. They gave $512,004 to Bush in 2004. In Fiscal Year 2004, the share of aggregated revenues coming from North America and the Caribbean were only 35.0%, declining to 34.8% in Fiscal Year 2005. The company's homepage profiles a report, "Global Integration through Knowledge Process Offshoring," which opens, "The success of offshoring as a delivery model has been clearly established. The journey commenced with organizations relocating business processes, characterized by high-volumes, labor-intensity and support functionality, to low-cost destinations."
The report continues by discussing India as "known to export world-class manpower that has become an integral part of the business fabric in global markets." While downplaying the "costs in India for highly qualified knowledge professionals" which are "far lower than their counterparts in the US and in Europe," the report instead highlights an aging Western World and professional shortages. Yet, these shortages are at least partly driven by dilapidated school systems and an underinvestment in infrastructure as well as the writing off of immigrants and ethnic minority groups as part of the underclass. The neoliberal priorities that have robbed the state also make the global market that much more appealing.
Corporate Hegemony over Governance
One could argue that increasingly any company today must go global or go broke. Large scale markets exist overseas. The problem occurs when the pursuit of such markets begins to erode the division between public and private, the workings of government and the workings of a bank or private investment operation. The roots of the problem can be seen at the highest levels of the nation state. The American cabinet resembles and has been reduced to a corporate board of directors. It should be little surprise then that governmental decisions are made based on market logic. Richard Cheney's ties to Halliburton are well known. From 1977 to 1985. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld served as Chief Executive Officer, President, and then Chairman of G.D. Searle & Co., a worldwide pharmaceutical company. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has sat on the boards of the Chevron Corporation, the Charles Schwab Corporation, Transamerica Corporation, and Hewlett Packard. Secretary of Commerce Don Evans was the head of the Tom Brown, Inc, energy company. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao was Vice President of Syndications at BankAmerica Capital Markets Group and a banker with Citicorp. Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman was Chairman, CEO, and a Director of the Cabot Corporation. Alphonso Jackson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development was President of American Electric Power-TEXAS, a $13 billion utility company.
The Bush cabinet's ties to corporate American can be compared to those who served for President Roosevelt. Roosevelt's Vice President, Henry A. Wallace was a journalist and farmer. Secretary of War Henry Lewis Stimsom was a lawyer. Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr. was a Vice President of General Motors, although his rise to this position was based on support for labor benefits. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins worked with settlement houses and in various government posts.
While Bush's cabinet has included lawyers and governors, as the Roosevelt administration included corporate leaders, the dominance of the Bush cabinet by corporate types is striking. This tendency, accelerated by postwar trends, is certainly not unique to Bush. Rather, the problem is that a short-term corporate mindset has increasingly taken over the way all decisions are framed and policies conceived.
Hollowing Out the Economy and American Defense
The United States economy has been sold out to transnational and corporate interests. A report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in December of 2005, notes that "by the end of 2004, foreign net claims on the United States amounted to $2.5 trillion, equivalent to 22 percent of U.S. GDP." Continuing, the report says that "normally, such a large net liability position would require substantial investment income payments to the rest of the world. Yet, the reverse is true for the United States." Why? In 2004, the U.S. "earned $36 billion more on its foreign assets than it paid out to service its foreign liabilities." A key explanation was that "U.S. firms operating abroad are reportedly far more profitable than foreign firms operating in the U.S." Large terms deficits continue to challenge the U.S., however, "which now imports vastly more than it exports."
Patriotic rhetoric and military campaigns conceal corporate and military industrial cronyism. A report in the Christian Science Monitor on January 10th of this year described a new study by Columbia University professor Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes. They concluded that the total costs for the Iraq war could exceed $2 trillion dollars. This report includes such expenses as the long term healthcare costs for some 16,000 U.S. injured soldiers. Many funds go to defense corporations (included in the other military budget not tied to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). While defense contractors benefit from crony capitalism, ports and chemical plants are insecure. All these expenses represents represent opportunity costs against reindustrialization and infrastructure investments.
As noted by Paul Craig Roberts, transnational parasitism and military hegemony are at odds. The military depletionist school, led by economists Seymour Melman, Lloyd J. Dumas, and John Ullmann argued that military expenditures diverted important research and development resources away from civilian developments. Other economists argue that the computer and other strategic industries were nurtured by military procurement, which represents a subsidy to high technology businesses. Nevertheless, U.S. consumer imports and outsourcing provide key capital and spillovers to Chinese manufacturers and military production capacity.
A report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in November 2005, noted that the Pentagon was dependent on a growing globalized private sector for key military technologies. As quoted in the December 12th, 2005 New York Times, the report notes that: "This is taking place as China's position at the center for the global technology supply chain grows, raising the prospect of future U.S. dependency on China for certain items critical to the U.S. defense industry as well as vital to continued economic leadership." Companies who have driven such strategic Chinese investments included Intel, Motorola, Cisco Systems and Microsoft. In sum, it will be increasingly difficult for Bush's transnational corporate allies to hide behind "national defense" arguments.
Reclaim America through a "Shadow State"
Leaders of both parties argue that in the Dubai deal Bush has taken things too far. Yet, the Democratic Party which has largely endorsed transnational economics and Bush's war program have offered little to stop the parasitical drain.
The such alternative to the status quo is obvious, requiring a pull out from Iraq, reinvestment in infrastructure, education and alternative energy, and a program to rebuild basic manufacturing capacity on a sustainable basis. Yet, if we are honest that the White House, Congress and the leading parties, have been largely taken over by corporate elites, we need to think big to come up with an alternative.
One alternative is to build on the fragmentation caused by fiscal shortages and decline that have created panic among cities and some state governments that can not cover mounting deficits. The devastation caused by the war and outsourcing create other allies. The growing pressure on the regional state and those alienated by the Bush program calls for the development of a new, "networked" state that brings these fragments together. This alternative state could not only be equipped with a "shadow government" (with alternatives to corporate spokespersons as Ralph Nader has advocated), but would itself constitute a "shadow state." The "shadow state" should organize its own public forums that would follow candidates from both parties and challenge their continuing arbitrage game, selling out the government to parasitic corporate interests. A series of Congressional hearings could be held from coast to coast to document the costs of militarism and the parasitic decline in basic infrastructure and social needs. Pieces of an alternative state can be seen in various local government initiatives, chronicled for example by Gar Alperovitz in his latest book, America Beyond Capitalism.
Such an alternative state should be developed based on cooperation with friendly European governments, allies among progressive forces in Latin America and elsewhere. The demonization of Germany and France for opposition to the Iraq War and threats to Venezuela's leadership all are related to this potential. Yet, there is a logic to this alternative. The network state could, for example, enter into R&D alliances with the European Union, create bilateral procurement initiatives to support alternative energy systems and transportation vehicles, and use such economic and technical exchanges to open up a new political front against the elites that have taken over the national state apparatus. Ultimately, strategic alliances can be built through exchanges among local governments, socially responsible corporations, trade unions, universities, and other actors alienated by the increasingly dangerous status quo.
http://counterpunch.com/feldman02232006.html
Dubaigate Deconstructed
By JONATHAN M. FELDMAN
The Bush Administration's championing of a disastrous war, its grievous neglect of homeland security in New Orleans, and its promotion of a Dubai company to manage key strategic ports all point in one direction. The Bush White House represents a fifth column, an insidious Trojan Horse aimed against not only the American people but also American democracy itself. The state is no longer a tool for rational governance, but a tool of corporate plunder. The ruling corporate elite that has taken over the White House is loyal to a transnational economy and the short term cash nexus. It is in fact the direct extension of that economy into the very workings of government itself. Despite their protestations to the contrary, this parasitic elite is not patriotic. They only use the rhetoric of "patriotism" as a cover for junking civil liberties, wrecking the economy, and enriching their cronies.
The Wikipedia Encyclopedia explains the origins of the term "fifth column." Its first use was in a 1936 radio address by Emilio Mola, a Nationalist general during the Spanish Civil War: "As four of his army columns moved on Madrid, the general referred to his militant supporters within the capital as his 'fifth column,' intent on undermining the Republican government from within."
The term has taken on other meanings. It is also used to refer "to a population who are assumed to have loyalties to countries other than the one in which they reside or who supported some other nation in war efforts against the country they lived in."
Parasitical Economy as Political Exchange Value
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, among the top corporate contributors to George W. Bush's 2004 presidential campaign were leading transnational interests. Calculating donors based on organizational PACs, coporate members, employees, owners and those in immediate families, the Center identified various corporate sponsors. While these were not direct transfers by the company to each candidate, the transfers do suggest the kind of cultural support system which the company provides that leads to a given donation (for example, John Kerry got far more such large scale donations from university affiliated donors).
In 2004, the lead such donor to Bush's Presidential campaign was Morgan Stanley interests that gave $600,480. This highly global operation has over 600 offices in twenty-eight countries.
The next largest corporate group was Merrill Lynch. Their collected contributions were $580,004 in 2004. While 71% of this company's revenue originated in the U.S., its orientation was similarly global, with operations in China, Russia, India, Israel and elsewhere. The global markets segment of its operations have grown steadily over the last few years, from $6.185 billion in 2002 to $8.211 billion in 2004.
The third ranked corporate group donor to Bush was PricewaterhouseCoopers. They gave $512,004 to Bush in 2004. In Fiscal Year 2004, the share of aggregated revenues coming from North America and the Caribbean were only 35.0%, declining to 34.8% in Fiscal Year 2005. The company's homepage profiles a report, "Global Integration through Knowledge Process Offshoring," which opens, "The success of offshoring as a delivery model has been clearly established. The journey commenced with organizations relocating business processes, characterized by high-volumes, labor-intensity and support functionality, to low-cost destinations."
The report continues by discussing India as "known to export world-class manpower that has become an integral part of the business fabric in global markets." While downplaying the "costs in India for highly qualified knowledge professionals" which are "far lower than their counterparts in the US and in Europe," the report instead highlights an aging Western World and professional shortages. Yet, these shortages are at least partly driven by dilapidated school systems and an underinvestment in infrastructure as well as the writing off of immigrants and ethnic minority groups as part of the underclass. The neoliberal priorities that have robbed the state also make the global market that much more appealing.
Corporate Hegemony over Governance
One could argue that increasingly any company today must go global or go broke. Large scale markets exist overseas. The problem occurs when the pursuit of such markets begins to erode the division between public and private, the workings of government and the workings of a bank or private investment operation. The roots of the problem can be seen at the highest levels of the nation state. The American cabinet resembles and has been reduced to a corporate board of directors. It should be little surprise then that governmental decisions are made based on market logic. Richard Cheney's ties to Halliburton are well known. From 1977 to 1985. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld served as Chief Executive Officer, President, and then Chairman of G.D. Searle & Co., a worldwide pharmaceutical company. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has sat on the boards of the Chevron Corporation, the Charles Schwab Corporation, Transamerica Corporation, and Hewlett Packard. Secretary of Commerce Don Evans was the head of the Tom Brown, Inc, energy company. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao was Vice President of Syndications at BankAmerica Capital Markets Group and a banker with Citicorp. Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman was Chairman, CEO, and a Director of the Cabot Corporation. Alphonso Jackson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development was President of American Electric Power-TEXAS, a $13 billion utility company.
The Bush cabinet's ties to corporate American can be compared to those who served for President Roosevelt. Roosevelt's Vice President, Henry A. Wallace was a journalist and farmer. Secretary of War Henry Lewis Stimsom was a lawyer. Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr. was a Vice President of General Motors, although his rise to this position was based on support for labor benefits. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins worked with settlement houses and in various government posts.
While Bush's cabinet has included lawyers and governors, as the Roosevelt administration included corporate leaders, the dominance of the Bush cabinet by corporate types is striking. This tendency, accelerated by postwar trends, is certainly not unique to Bush. Rather, the problem is that a short-term corporate mindset has increasingly taken over the way all decisions are framed and policies conceived.
Hollowing Out the Economy and American Defense
The United States economy has been sold out to transnational and corporate interests. A report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in December of 2005, notes that "by the end of 2004, foreign net claims on the United States amounted to $2.5 trillion, equivalent to 22 percent of U.S. GDP." Continuing, the report says that "normally, such a large net liability position would require substantial investment income payments to the rest of the world. Yet, the reverse is true for the United States." Why? In 2004, the U.S. "earned $36 billion more on its foreign assets than it paid out to service its foreign liabilities." A key explanation was that "U.S. firms operating abroad are reportedly far more profitable than foreign firms operating in the U.S." Large terms deficits continue to challenge the U.S., however, "which now imports vastly more than it exports."
Patriotic rhetoric and military campaigns conceal corporate and military industrial cronyism. A report in the Christian Science Monitor on January 10th of this year described a new study by Columbia University professor Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes. They concluded that the total costs for the Iraq war could exceed $2 trillion dollars. This report includes such expenses as the long term healthcare costs for some 16,000 U.S. injured soldiers. Many funds go to defense corporations (included in the other military budget not tied to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). While defense contractors benefit from crony capitalism, ports and chemical plants are insecure. All these expenses represents represent opportunity costs against reindustrialization and infrastructure investments.
As noted by Paul Craig Roberts, transnational parasitism and military hegemony are at odds. The military depletionist school, led by economists Seymour Melman, Lloyd J. Dumas, and John Ullmann argued that military expenditures diverted important research and development resources away from civilian developments. Other economists argue that the computer and other strategic industries were nurtured by military procurement, which represents a subsidy to high technology businesses. Nevertheless, U.S. consumer imports and outsourcing provide key capital and spillovers to Chinese manufacturers and military production capacity.
A report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in November 2005, noted that the Pentagon was dependent on a growing globalized private sector for key military technologies. As quoted in the December 12th, 2005 New York Times, the report notes that: "This is taking place as China's position at the center for the global technology supply chain grows, raising the prospect of future U.S. dependency on China for certain items critical to the U.S. defense industry as well as vital to continued economic leadership." Companies who have driven such strategic Chinese investments included Intel, Motorola, Cisco Systems and Microsoft. In sum, it will be increasingly difficult for Bush's transnational corporate allies to hide behind "national defense" arguments.
Reclaim America through a "Shadow State"
Leaders of both parties argue that in the Dubai deal Bush has taken things too far. Yet, the Democratic Party which has largely endorsed transnational economics and Bush's war program have offered little to stop the parasitical drain.
The such alternative to the status quo is obvious, requiring a pull out from Iraq, reinvestment in infrastructure, education and alternative energy, and a program to rebuild basic manufacturing capacity on a sustainable basis. Yet, if we are honest that the White House, Congress and the leading parties, have been largely taken over by corporate elites, we need to think big to come up with an alternative.
One alternative is to build on the fragmentation caused by fiscal shortages and decline that have created panic among cities and some state governments that can not cover mounting deficits. The devastation caused by the war and outsourcing create other allies. The growing pressure on the regional state and those alienated by the Bush program calls for the development of a new, "networked" state that brings these fragments together. This alternative state could not only be equipped with a "shadow government" (with alternatives to corporate spokespersons as Ralph Nader has advocated), but would itself constitute a "shadow state." The "shadow state" should organize its own public forums that would follow candidates from both parties and challenge their continuing arbitrage game, selling out the government to parasitic corporate interests. A series of Congressional hearings could be held from coast to coast to document the costs of militarism and the parasitic decline in basic infrastructure and social needs. Pieces of an alternative state can be seen in various local government initiatives, chronicled for example by Gar Alperovitz in his latest book, America Beyond Capitalism.
Such an alternative state should be developed based on cooperation with friendly European governments, allies among progressive forces in Latin America and elsewhere. The demonization of Germany and France for opposition to the Iraq War and threats to Venezuela's leadership all are related to this potential. Yet, there is a logic to this alternative. The network state could, for example, enter into R&D alliances with the European Union, create bilateral procurement initiatives to support alternative energy systems and transportation vehicles, and use such economic and technical exchanges to open up a new political front against the elites that have taken over the national state apparatus. Ultimately, strategic alliances can be built through exchanges among local governments, socially responsible corporations, trade unions, universities, and other actors alienated by the increasingly dangerous status quo.
http://counterpunch.com/feldman02232006.html
W: "My Government"
by Marty Kaplan
02.23.2006
Here's how W is defending the Dubai decision: "The more people learn about the transaction that has been scrutinized and approved by my government, the more they'll be comforted..."
For a moment, set aside the "trust-me" part of this, and focus instead on the "my government" bit.
If he'd said "my administration," I wouldn't have blinked.
"My cabinet" would also have raised no hackles. If he really wanted to use the word "government," then how about these pronouns as antecedents for "people": "their government" or "our government."
But no, he said "my government." I don't think that's just a garden variety Bushism, a trivial malapropism. I think it goes right to his understanding of who he is, and who we are. It's not a Freudian slip; it's an Orwellian siren, an anti-democratic red alert.
The founding documents of our nation talk about the government, our government, a government, any government. If my is used, it's said on behalf of the citizens, not their rulers.
But W really believes that it's his government. He doesn't see himself as a steward, a trustee, a caretaker, someone who temporarily gets to steer the ship of state because of the momentary consent of the governed and an enduring set of rules. No, he believes it's his ship, his state, his rules -- his and his ideological fellow-travelers.
The heads of some countries with parliamentary systems, like India, sometimes say "my government"; when they do, it means 'my Cabinet," "my temporary ruling colition," "my majority" -- which could fall in an instant, if there were a no-confidence vote.
But in the US, we don't have governments that get made and dissolved year-round; we have Administrations, that get formed every four years.
In the American context, unless it's an ordinary citizen like you or me speaking, let's recognize the expression "my government" as what it really is: a deeply troubling oxymoron, the inappropriate yoking together of a democratic institution and -- well, a moron.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan...nt_b_16224.html
by Marty Kaplan
02.23.2006
Here's how W is defending the Dubai decision: "The more people learn about the transaction that has been scrutinized and approved by my government, the more they'll be comforted..."
For a moment, set aside the "trust-me" part of this, and focus instead on the "my government" bit.
If he'd said "my administration," I wouldn't have blinked.
"My cabinet" would also have raised no hackles. If he really wanted to use the word "government," then how about these pronouns as antecedents for "people": "their government" or "our government."
But no, he said "my government." I don't think that's just a garden variety Bushism, a trivial malapropism. I think it goes right to his understanding of who he is, and who we are. It's not a Freudian slip; it's an Orwellian siren, an anti-democratic red alert.
The founding documents of our nation talk about the government, our government, a government, any government. If my is used, it's said on behalf of the citizens, not their rulers.
But W really believes that it's his government. He doesn't see himself as a steward, a trustee, a caretaker, someone who temporarily gets to steer the ship of state because of the momentary consent of the governed and an enduring set of rules. No, he believes it's his ship, his state, his rules -- his and his ideological fellow-travelers.
The heads of some countries with parliamentary systems, like India, sometimes say "my government"; when they do, it means 'my Cabinet," "my temporary ruling colition," "my majority" -- which could fall in an instant, if there were a no-confidence vote.
But in the US, we don't have governments that get made and dissolved year-round; we have Administrations, that get formed every four years.
In the American context, unless it's an ordinary citizen like you or me speaking, let's recognize the expression "my government" as what it really is: a deeply troubling oxymoron, the inappropriate yoking together of a democratic institution and -- well, a moron.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan...nt_b_16224.html
"The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him."
~Niccolo Machiavelli
Published on Thursday, February 23, 2006 by The Nation
The Rule of Law versus The Rule of Cheney
by John Nichols
In the moment of executive excess, when abuses of the powers of the presidency and -- thanks to Dick Cheney's contributions to the crisis -- the vice presidency are so threatening to the Republic, it is important to remember that this is not a new fight. Cheney was the prime defender of the "right" of the executive branch to disregard Congress and the Constitution during the Iran-Contra scandal of the late 1980s, contributing a chilling dissent to the bipartisan Congressional report that accused the Reagan administration of "secrecy, deception and disdain for the law."
In that dissent, the man who then represented Wyoming in the House chastised Congress for "abusing its power" by seeking to limit the ability of the president and his aides to spend money as they chose in support of the Nicaraguan Contras. "Congress must recognize that effective foreign policy requires, and the Constitution mandates, the President to be the country's foreign policy leader," argued Cheney, it what remains one of history's most dramatic misreads of the Constitutional mandates with regard to the Constitutional system of checks and balances.
This messianic faith that the executive branch is above the law, which Cheney first spelled out as a member of Congress, has only hardened during his tenure as the most powerful vice president in history. Now, with the war in Iraq fully degenerated into quagmire and with the "war on terror" being used as an excuse for everything from warrantless wiretapping to extension of the Patriot Act, the Cheney doctrine infects the body politic as a cancer so widespread that is raises honest concern about the health and future of the American experiment.
It is important to recall, however, that the dangers inherent in Cheney's views were diagnosed almost two decades ago, in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra debacle.
Historian Theodore Draper, who has died at age 93, penned a brilliant assessment of the specific scandal and the broader concern, A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs (Hill & Wang: 1991) which used congressional testimony and private depositions to explain the controversy that erupted after it was revealed that the Reagan administration had set up an entirely illegal scheme to sell arms to Iranian fundmentalists in order to raise money that funded Contra terrorism against the Nicaraguan government and people. The title of the book refers to what Draper saw as "a very thin line (separating) the legitimate from the illegitimate exercise of power in our government."
To Draper's view, the Iran-Contra scandal was "symptomatic of a far deeper disorder in the American body politic" -- a malady characterized by the misguided view that the United States can or should disregard the system of checks and balances in order to create "a president almighty in foreign policy."
Draper warned us well about that "deeper disorder. Unfortunately, his was a warning unheeded. Now, as we struggle with its deadly ramifications, we would do well to return to Draper's text -- not merely to honor a visionary historian who saw both the past and the future, but to arm ourselves for the fight over whether this country will be governed by the rule of law or the rule of Cheney.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0223-30.htm
The Rule of Law versus The Rule of Cheney
by John Nichols
In the moment of executive excess, when abuses of the powers of the presidency and -- thanks to Dick Cheney's contributions to the crisis -- the vice presidency are so threatening to the Republic, it is important to remember that this is not a new fight. Cheney was the prime defender of the "right" of the executive branch to disregard Congress and the Constitution during the Iran-Contra scandal of the late 1980s, contributing a chilling dissent to the bipartisan Congressional report that accused the Reagan administration of "secrecy, deception and disdain for the law."
In that dissent, the man who then represented Wyoming in the House chastised Congress for "abusing its power" by seeking to limit the ability of the president and his aides to spend money as they chose in support of the Nicaraguan Contras. "Congress must recognize that effective foreign policy requires, and the Constitution mandates, the President to be the country's foreign policy leader," argued Cheney, it what remains one of history's most dramatic misreads of the Constitutional mandates with regard to the Constitutional system of checks and balances.
This messianic faith that the executive branch is above the law, which Cheney first spelled out as a member of Congress, has only hardened during his tenure as the most powerful vice president in history. Now, with the war in Iraq fully degenerated into quagmire and with the "war on terror" being used as an excuse for everything from warrantless wiretapping to extension of the Patriot Act, the Cheney doctrine infects the body politic as a cancer so widespread that is raises honest concern about the health and future of the American experiment.
It is important to recall, however, that the dangers inherent in Cheney's views were diagnosed almost two decades ago, in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra debacle.
Historian Theodore Draper, who has died at age 93, penned a brilliant assessment of the specific scandal and the broader concern, A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs (Hill & Wang: 1991) which used congressional testimony and private depositions to explain the controversy that erupted after it was revealed that the Reagan administration had set up an entirely illegal scheme to sell arms to Iranian fundmentalists in order to raise money that funded Contra terrorism against the Nicaraguan government and people. The title of the book refers to what Draper saw as "a very thin line (separating) the legitimate from the illegitimate exercise of power in our government."
To Draper's view, the Iran-Contra scandal was "symptomatic of a far deeper disorder in the American body politic" -- a malady characterized by the misguided view that the United States can or should disregard the system of checks and balances in order to create "a president almighty in foreign policy."
Draper warned us well about that "deeper disorder. Unfortunately, his was a warning unheeded. Now, as we struggle with its deadly ramifications, we would do well to return to Draper's text -- not merely to honor a visionary historian who saw both the past and the future, but to arm ourselves for the fight over whether this country will be governed by the rule of law or the rule of Cheney.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0223-30.htm
Cheney's coup
A 3-year-old executive order that vastly expanded his powers illuminates how the vice president and his minions led us into war.
By Sidney Blumenthal
Feb. 23, 2006 | After shooting Austin lawyer Harry Whittington, Dick Cheney's immediate impulse was to control the intelligence. Rather than call the president directly, he ordered an aide to inform White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card that there had been an accident but not that Cheney was its cause. Then a host of surrogates attacked the victim for not steering clear of Cheney when he was firing. Cheney attempted to defuse the subsequent furor by giving an interview to friendly Fox News. His most revealing answer came in response to a question about something other than the hunting accident.
Cheney was asked about court papers filed by his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice in the investigation of the leaking of the identity of an undercover CIA operative, Valerie Plame. (She is the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, a critic of disinformation used to justify the invasion of Iraq.) In those papers, Libby laid out a line of defense that he had leaked classified material at the behest of "his superiors" (to wit, Cheney). Libby detailed that he was authorized to disclose to members of the press classified sections of the prewar National Intelligence Estimate on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. (The NIE was exposed as wrongly asserting that Saddam possessed WMD and was constructing nuclear weapons.) Indeed, Cheney explained, he has the power to declassify intelligence. "There is an executive order to that effect," he said. Had he ever done that "unilaterally"? "I don't want to get into that."
On March 25, 2003, President Bush signed Executive Order 13292, a hitherto little known document that grants the greatest expansion of the power of the vice president in American history. The order gives the vice president the same ability to classify intelligence as the president. By controlling classification, the vice president can in effect control intelligence and, through that, foreign policy.
Bush operates on the radical notion of the "unitary executive," that the president has inherent and limitless powers in his role as commander in chief, above the system of checks and balances. By his extraordinary order, he elevated Cheney to his level, an acknowledgment that the vice president was already the de facto executive in national security. Never before has any president diminished and divided his power in this manner. Now the unitary executive inherently includes the unitary vice president.
The unprecedented executive order bears the earmarks of Cheney's former counsel and current chief of staff, David Addington. Addington has been the closest assistant to Cheney through three decades, since Cheney served in the House of Representatives in the 1980s. Inside the executive branch, far and wide, Addington acts as Cheney's vicar, bullying and sarcastic, inspiring fear and obedience. Few documents of concern to the vice president, even executive orders, reach the eyes of the president without passing first through Addington's agile hands.
To advance their scenario for the Iraq war, Cheney & Co. either pressured or dismissed the intelligence community when it presented contrary analysis. Paul Pillar, the former CIA national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, writes in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, "The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made."
On domestic spying conducted without legal approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Addington and his minions isolated and crushed internal dissent from James Comey, then deputy attorney general, and Jack Goldsmith, then head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.
On torture policy, as reported by the New Yorker this week, Alberto Mora, recently retired as general counsel to the U.S. Navy, opposed the Bush administration's abrogation of the Geneva Conventions -- by holding thousands of detainees in secret camps without due process and using abusive interrogation techniques -- based on legal doctrines Mora called "unlawful" and "dangerous." Addington et al. told him the policies were being ended while continuing to pursue them on a separate track. "To preserve flexibility, they were willing to throw away our values," Mora said.
The first vice president, John Adams, called his position "the most insignificant office ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." John Nance Garner, Franklin D. Roosevelt's first vice president, said it was not worth "a warm bucket of spit." When Dick Cheney was secretary of defense under the first President Bush, he reprimanded Vice President Dan Quayle for asserting power he did not possess by calling a meeting of the National Security Council when the elder Bush was abroad. Cheney well knew the vice president had no authority in the chain of command.
Since the coup d'état of Executive Order 13292, however, the vice presidency has been transformed. Perhaps, for a blinding moment, Cheney imagined he might classify his shooting party top secret.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/20...ower/print.html
A 3-year-old executive order that vastly expanded his powers illuminates how the vice president and his minions led us into war.
By Sidney Blumenthal
Feb. 23, 2006 | After shooting Austin lawyer Harry Whittington, Dick Cheney's immediate impulse was to control the intelligence. Rather than call the president directly, he ordered an aide to inform White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card that there had been an accident but not that Cheney was its cause. Then a host of surrogates attacked the victim for not steering clear of Cheney when he was firing. Cheney attempted to defuse the subsequent furor by giving an interview to friendly Fox News. His most revealing answer came in response to a question about something other than the hunting accident.
Cheney was asked about court papers filed by his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice in the investigation of the leaking of the identity of an undercover CIA operative, Valerie Plame. (She is the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, a critic of disinformation used to justify the invasion of Iraq.) In those papers, Libby laid out a line of defense that he had leaked classified material at the behest of "his superiors" (to wit, Cheney). Libby detailed that he was authorized to disclose to members of the press classified sections of the prewar National Intelligence Estimate on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. (The NIE was exposed as wrongly asserting that Saddam possessed WMD and was constructing nuclear weapons.) Indeed, Cheney explained, he has the power to declassify intelligence. "There is an executive order to that effect," he said. Had he ever done that "unilaterally"? "I don't want to get into that."
On March 25, 2003, President Bush signed Executive Order 13292, a hitherto little known document that grants the greatest expansion of the power of the vice president in American history. The order gives the vice president the same ability to classify intelligence as the president. By controlling classification, the vice president can in effect control intelligence and, through that, foreign policy.
Bush operates on the radical notion of the "unitary executive," that the president has inherent and limitless powers in his role as commander in chief, above the system of checks and balances. By his extraordinary order, he elevated Cheney to his level, an acknowledgment that the vice president was already the de facto executive in national security. Never before has any president diminished and divided his power in this manner. Now the unitary executive inherently includes the unitary vice president.
The unprecedented executive order bears the earmarks of Cheney's former counsel and current chief of staff, David Addington. Addington has been the closest assistant to Cheney through three decades, since Cheney served in the House of Representatives in the 1980s. Inside the executive branch, far and wide, Addington acts as Cheney's vicar, bullying and sarcastic, inspiring fear and obedience. Few documents of concern to the vice president, even executive orders, reach the eyes of the president without passing first through Addington's agile hands.
To advance their scenario for the Iraq war, Cheney & Co. either pressured or dismissed the intelligence community when it presented contrary analysis. Paul Pillar, the former CIA national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, writes in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, "The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made."
On domestic spying conducted without legal approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Addington and his minions isolated and crushed internal dissent from James Comey, then deputy attorney general, and Jack Goldsmith, then head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.
On torture policy, as reported by the New Yorker this week, Alberto Mora, recently retired as general counsel to the U.S. Navy, opposed the Bush administration's abrogation of the Geneva Conventions -- by holding thousands of detainees in secret camps without due process and using abusive interrogation techniques -- based on legal doctrines Mora called "unlawful" and "dangerous." Addington et al. told him the policies were being ended while continuing to pursue them on a separate track. "To preserve flexibility, they were willing to throw away our values," Mora said.
The first vice president, John Adams, called his position "the most insignificant office ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." John Nance Garner, Franklin D. Roosevelt's first vice president, said it was not worth "a warm bucket of spit." When Dick Cheney was secretary of defense under the first President Bush, he reprimanded Vice President Dan Quayle for asserting power he did not possess by calling a meeting of the National Security Council when the elder Bush was abroad. Cheney well knew the vice president had no authority in the chain of command.
Since the coup d'état of Executive Order 13292, however, the vice presidency has been transformed. Perhaps, for a blinding moment, Cheney imagined he might classify his shooting party top secret.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/20...ower/print.html
Victims of War Are Not To Be Seen Or Heard Or Mentioned
by Robert Weitzel
QUOTE
"The greatest dignity and respect you can give [victims of war] is to show the horror they suffered, the absolute gruesome horror."
-War Photographer David Lesson
-War Photographer David Lesson
Joseph Bonham was an American soldier. He lost both of his arms and legs and all of his face to an artillery shell. He could not see or hear or speak. Other than that he was healthy and lucid. That was Joe's nightmare. He could be kept alive a long time.
Joe remained an anonymous torso until his head tapping was recognized as Morse code. When his message was finally understood, it was assumed he'd gone insane. Joe asked to be put on exhibit so that children and parents and teachers and politicians and preachers and patriots of every stripe could have a close-up look at war's leavings. It was the only way he could give his nightmare meaning.
Joseph Bonham's request was denied. It was not in the best interest of the country to foist him on an unsuspecting public. He died an "unknown soldier."
On March 18, 2003, two days before her son launched the invasion of Iraq, Barbara Bush appeared on Good Morning America. Our nation's "First Mother" asked Diane Sawyer, "Why should we hear about body bags and death and how many? . . . Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that."
First Mother Bush knows her children well. When it comes to war's gallery of death and grotesqueries the big difference between Joseph Bonham and ourselves is that we choose not to see or hear or speak.
We resist and resent any reminder of the human cost of war with epithets and accusations. It is a breech of good taste. It undermines morale on the home front. It is aiding and abetting the enemy. It is unpatriotic and irrelevant. It is a waste of our beautiful minds.
In November 2004 Travis Babbitt was mortally wounded while on patrol in Baghdad. An Associated Press photographer captured his last moments on film. When the Star Ledger of Newark, N. J. and several other papers published the picture their editors were excoriated by readers who called them "cruel, insensitive, even unpatriotic."
Defending the decision to print the photograph, Star Ledger's assistant managing editor, Pim Van Hemmen wrote, "Writing a headline that 1,500 Americans have died doesn't give you nearly the impact of showing one serviceman who died."
Six months after the publication of the picture Babbitt's mother told a Los Angles Times reporter, "That is not an image you want to see like that. Your kid is lying like that and there is no way you can get there to help them. I do think it's an important thing, for people to see what goes on over there. It throws reality more in your face. And sometimes we can't help reality"
In war soldiers and civilians die gruesome deaths and suffer horrific wounds. This is reality. Pictures that capture this miserable fact are not meant to be gratuitously violent. They are merely the unvarnished truth.
Veteran war photographer, Chris Hondros, admits that many of his imagines of war are indeed horrible, but says, " . . . war is horrible and we need to understand that. I think if we are going to start a war, we ought to be willing to show the consequences of that war."
But it is not only the dying that remains invisible and unheard and never mentioned. The armless and the legless and the blind and the burned, the destroyed minds and the disfigured bodies "recovering" at Walter Reed Army Hospital remain as unknown as Joseph Bonham. The national myths and political lies that sent these casualties marching to war cannot abide their wounds.
Joseph Bonham lived in the fictional world of Dalton Trumbo's antiwar novel, "johnny got his gun." But the victims of war are flesh and blood. They have weight. Their lives are counted in years. We cannot turn them into a work of fiction and then refuse to even look at what we have written.
March 20 is the third anniversary of the start of the "The Long War" (formerly the War on Terror) in Iraq. It has cost America more than 340,650 pounds of flesh and bone and viscera, 2,838 gallons of blood, 6,813 pounds of brain matter, and 113,550 unlived years. It has cost Iraq over 18 million pounds of flesh and bone and viscera, 125,000 gallons of blood, 300,000 pounds of brain matter, and 5 million unlived years.
Imagine if we could see this . . . one picture at a time.
On January 31, 2006, Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq, appeared in the gallery of the House of Representatives to hear President Bush's State of the Union address. She was manhandled, shunted from view, and arrested for wearing a t-shirt that displayed the number of American war dead and that asked, "How many more?"
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0222-22.htm
February 24, 2006
Corpses in the Garden
the past as doctrine for the future
By Charles Sullivan
Knowing what I know about the history of my country, it is often difficult for me to fathom how my fellow countrymen have shaped their views. I have come to believe that they have created a mythical America that is not a real place. The perceived necessity of substituting a fantasy world for the real world suggests there is something terribly wrong with the American psyche. If there are corpses buried in our gardens, surely they must gnaw at our conscience and produce pathological behavior, even if we did not put them there. Subconsciously, we know they are turning in their graves trying to be free. We fear that they will awaken and climb out of their graves, forcing their way into our conscience, and revealing our complicity in the crimes committed in our name.
Pretending that these corpses do not exist leads to a recklessness of language and perversion of truth that is both deplorable and manipulative. Denial of this magnitude requires deliberate and wanton ignorance that can only be based upon fear. It makes a mockery of our sacred institutions—the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Self respect demands that we know truth and that we always convey truth to the best of our ability. Living in denial does not serve our cause; it serves the interest of wealth and power—the plutocracy. A fabricated life of denial allows the atrocities to continue without anyone being held accountable.
Imagine what an enigma we are to those people in other parts of the world who have experienced first hand Pax Americana. Throughout the world our government is engaged in acts of terror that inflict misery and suffering upon untold millions of innocent people. These acts of terror easily dwarf the infamous events of 9-11 that occurred on our own soil. We are told that these amoral actions are necessary to protect American interests. The widely held assumption is that American interests are noble and high minded; that they have much to do with democracy and liberation; the florid language of presidents. In truth, however, American interests are construed to mean corporate interests. The corporate interest and the welfare of American citizens must never be confused—they are mutually exclusive.
To believe that corporate greed is a noble cause intimately related to human rights requires a leap of faith that is beyond fantastic. It requires wanton and willful ignorance—the creation of a fantasy world that can make a miserable existence at least minimally palatable. Burying our heads in the sand can never bring us closer to solving the problems exacerbated by denial, nor can it provide a means of attaining social justice or ecological health. Denial is the most dangerous and delusional form of ignorance.
Eventually we will have to exhume the corpses that refuse to stay buried in our gardens. Truth always finds the cracks in the walls of denial we have built in our minds. Little by little it oozes out and destroys our most cherished delusions about who we are. The fruit it bears are a poison to the soul. Truth is self-exhuming, self extracting.
The corpses of millions of American Indians lie restive in the dark recesses of the earth; a story told but as yet unheard. Among the living dead are political prisoners who were executed by the state, whose roll call includes the names of Joe Hill, Albert Parsons and Vincent St. John, and a litany of others. Like the corymbs of splendid Orchid buried deep in the nurturing soil, lie the tormented corpses of the strange fruit that hung from southern poplar trees, with bulging eyes and twisted mouths, the scent of magnolia clean and fresh; the sudden smell of burning flesh. Their angst-ridden souls still haunt the sultry summer nights of the Deep South, impatient in their quest for justice. Divested of their humanity, these nameless men, women and children were recorded in their master’s ledgers as mere property, and accorded a dollar value on a par with inanimate objects such as plows and hammers.
America’s enormous wealth was built upon the labor of millions of slaves at a human cost that is beyond calculation. Some of the most highly esteemed names in the country accumulated their fortunes in this damnable manner. Many of them still hold important seats of power in government to this day, and play key roles in shaping current domestic and foreign policy. The descendants of slave owners in Alabama and Mississippi may be driving the enslavement of people of Middle Eastern descent. Surely, this is no accident. It is the continuation of an abominable racist policy called Manifest Destiny carried forward.
These heinous events are but a small sampling of America’s obscured history. As a people we must summon the courage of reconciliation with our past. A cultural reckoning is imperative if we are to comprehend what America really is, as well how and why we came to this place in the present. Burying the mutilated corpses and desecrating their unmarked graves under tons of asphalt and concrete, just as our ancestors abused them in life, assures that our national conscience will be haunted by the specters our ancestors created and unleashed upon the world. Asphalt and concrete will not keep them in their graves. They know how to rise and they will do it.
Only the full acknowledgement of these monstrous events can emancipate us from our past. Pretending they didn’t happen will not make them go away. America was built upon an unbroken chain of events like these which continue to this day. The torture and abuse of prisoners in Abu Graiab are connected to the lynchings of the Deep South a century ago. The abuse will not stop until there is a reckoning followed by reparations. As a people we must take ownership of the things our ancestors did because they are a cleared path that leads to the crimes against humanity that are occurring today in our names. Understanding current events in the context of history allows us to see without obstruction what is happening and why it is happening. Seeing history in this manner may thus help us to avoid the pitfalls that have troubled us in the past.
Fortunately, while our history has been one of brutality and unspeakable cruelty, it is also a history of resistance—a history of movements and hope. It is the kind of history that has been deliberately suppressed by those who write history precisely because it inspires the kind of hope that motivates and moves people from the realm of rhetoric into the theater of action. Action occurs at the interface of convention and social change; and it is all that has ever changed the world.
Those who record written history do so from the perspective of the conquerors, rather than the vanquished. It terrifies them whenever the other side of the story is told because it intrudes upon their delusion. When this happens a truth is revealed that conflicts with everything we have been told about America—a truth the historians of conquest and empire desperately want to keep hidden. Their dilemma is that the truth will not stay buried. It constantly threatens to awake, to expose their omissions and lies.
Awakening of this kind poses a threat to the established order, even as it promises a new order based upon social justice rather than exploitation and gluttony. It is a truth that menaces the myths surrounding war and conquest by bringing the ugliness of their real motives to the light of day and public ridicule. Truth is all powerful and all revelatory. Those who do not have it on their side may prevail for a while longer; but in the long run they will succumb to reality. The counterfeit cannot long endure the scrutiny and judgment of truth.
Reality, truth, exists apart from the human imagination as well as within it. They are a spirit that is imprinted indelibly upon the bedrock of time, as if etched in stone. They are a story that not only must be told—they are a story that will be told. Burying them under volumes of myth and bravado will not make them lie still and quiet in their graves. They will awaken and tell their story whether we want to know them or not. No force on earth can make them lie still until their lessons have been learned.
Viewed in the context of history, current events lose their ability to deceive. We see them exactly as they are, vulnerable and naked, and indefensible as doctrines of a civilized culture; always in stark contrast to what we are told. Truth, and only truth, will set us free.
So let the corpses in our gardens rise. They are trying to tell us something that may make our survival possible.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_ch...n_the_garde.htm
Corpses in the Garden
the past as doctrine for the future
By Charles Sullivan
Knowing what I know about the history of my country, it is often difficult for me to fathom how my fellow countrymen have shaped their views. I have come to believe that they have created a mythical America that is not a real place. The perceived necessity of substituting a fantasy world for the real world suggests there is something terribly wrong with the American psyche. If there are corpses buried in our gardens, surely they must gnaw at our conscience and produce pathological behavior, even if we did not put them there. Subconsciously, we know they are turning in their graves trying to be free. We fear that they will awaken and climb out of their graves, forcing their way into our conscience, and revealing our complicity in the crimes committed in our name.
Pretending that these corpses do not exist leads to a recklessness of language and perversion of truth that is both deplorable and manipulative. Denial of this magnitude requires deliberate and wanton ignorance that can only be based upon fear. It makes a mockery of our sacred institutions—the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Self respect demands that we know truth and that we always convey truth to the best of our ability. Living in denial does not serve our cause; it serves the interest of wealth and power—the plutocracy. A fabricated life of denial allows the atrocities to continue without anyone being held accountable.
Imagine what an enigma we are to those people in other parts of the world who have experienced first hand Pax Americana. Throughout the world our government is engaged in acts of terror that inflict misery and suffering upon untold millions of innocent people. These acts of terror easily dwarf the infamous events of 9-11 that occurred on our own soil. We are told that these amoral actions are necessary to protect American interests. The widely held assumption is that American interests are noble and high minded; that they have much to do with democracy and liberation; the florid language of presidents. In truth, however, American interests are construed to mean corporate interests. The corporate interest and the welfare of American citizens must never be confused—they are mutually exclusive.
To believe that corporate greed is a noble cause intimately related to human rights requires a leap of faith that is beyond fantastic. It requires wanton and willful ignorance—the creation of a fantasy world that can make a miserable existence at least minimally palatable. Burying our heads in the sand can never bring us closer to solving the problems exacerbated by denial, nor can it provide a means of attaining social justice or ecological health. Denial is the most dangerous and delusional form of ignorance.
Eventually we will have to exhume the corpses that refuse to stay buried in our gardens. Truth always finds the cracks in the walls of denial we have built in our minds. Little by little it oozes out and destroys our most cherished delusions about who we are. The fruit it bears are a poison to the soul. Truth is self-exhuming, self extracting.
The corpses of millions of American Indians lie restive in the dark recesses of the earth; a story told but as yet unheard. Among the living dead are political prisoners who were executed by the state, whose roll call includes the names of Joe Hill, Albert Parsons and Vincent St. John, and a litany of others. Like the corymbs of splendid Orchid buried deep in the nurturing soil, lie the tormented corpses of the strange fruit that hung from southern poplar trees, with bulging eyes and twisted mouths, the scent of magnolia clean and fresh; the sudden smell of burning flesh. Their angst-ridden souls still haunt the sultry summer nights of the Deep South, impatient in their quest for justice. Divested of their humanity, these nameless men, women and children were recorded in their master’s ledgers as mere property, and accorded a dollar value on a par with inanimate objects such as plows and hammers.
America’s enormous wealth was built upon the labor of millions of slaves at a human cost that is beyond calculation. Some of the most highly esteemed names in the country accumulated their fortunes in this damnable manner. Many of them still hold important seats of power in government to this day, and play key roles in shaping current domestic and foreign policy. The descendants of slave owners in Alabama and Mississippi may be driving the enslavement of people of Middle Eastern descent. Surely, this is no accident. It is the continuation of an abominable racist policy called Manifest Destiny carried forward.
These heinous events are but a small sampling of America’s obscured history. As a people we must summon the courage of reconciliation with our past. A cultural reckoning is imperative if we are to comprehend what America really is, as well how and why we came to this place in the present. Burying the mutilated corpses and desecrating their unmarked graves under tons of asphalt and concrete, just as our ancestors abused them in life, assures that our national conscience will be haunted by the specters our ancestors created and unleashed upon the world. Asphalt and concrete will not keep them in their graves. They know how to rise and they will do it.
Only the full acknowledgement of these monstrous events can emancipate us from our past. Pretending they didn’t happen will not make them go away. America was built upon an unbroken chain of events like these which continue to this day. The torture and abuse of prisoners in Abu Graiab are connected to the lynchings of the Deep South a century ago. The abuse will not stop until there is a reckoning followed by reparations. As a people we must take ownership of the things our ancestors did because they are a cleared path that leads to the crimes against humanity that are occurring today in our names. Understanding current events in the context of history allows us to see without obstruction what is happening and why it is happening. Seeing history in this manner may thus help us to avoid the pitfalls that have troubled us in the past.
Fortunately, while our history has been one of brutality and unspeakable cruelty, it is also a history of resistance—a history of movements and hope. It is the kind of history that has been deliberately suppressed by those who write history precisely because it inspires the kind of hope that motivates and moves people from the realm of rhetoric into the theater of action. Action occurs at the interface of convention and social change; and it is all that has ever changed the world.
Those who record written history do so from the perspective of the conquerors, rather than the vanquished. It terrifies them whenever the other side of the story is told because it intrudes upon their delusion. When this happens a truth is revealed that conflicts with everything we have been told about America—a truth the historians of conquest and empire desperately want to keep hidden. Their dilemma is that the truth will not stay buried. It constantly threatens to awake, to expose their omissions and lies.
Awakening of this kind poses a threat to the established order, even as it promises a new order based upon social justice rather than exploitation and gluttony. It is a truth that menaces the myths surrounding war and conquest by bringing the ugliness of their real motives to the light of day and public ridicule. Truth is all powerful and all revelatory. Those who do not have it on their side may prevail for a while longer; but in the long run they will succumb to reality. The counterfeit cannot long endure the scrutiny and judgment of truth.
Reality, truth, exists apart from the human imagination as well as within it. They are a spirit that is imprinted indelibly upon the bedrock of time, as if etched in stone. They are a story that not only must be told—they are a story that will be told. Burying them under volumes of myth and bravado will not make them lie still and quiet in their graves. They will awaken and tell their story whether we want to know them or not. No force on earth can make them lie still until their lessons have been learned.
Viewed in the context of history, current events lose their ability to deceive. We see them exactly as they are, vulnerable and naked, and indefensible as doctrines of a civilized culture; always in stark contrast to what we are told. Truth, and only truth, will set us free.
So let the corpses in our gardens rise. They are trying to tell us something that may make our survival possible.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_ch...n_the_garde.htm
February 24, 2006
Perception is Reality
By Ernest Partridge, Co-Editor, The Crisis Papers
Yogi Berra said it best: “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”
Predictions in politics rest upon two assumptions: [a] that present trends will continue into the future, and [b] that there will be no totally unexpected “surprises.”
Both assumptions are rarely true and both are refuted both by common sense and by the lessons of history.
Case in point: last week’s “Texas shootout.” Until last week, the White House routine was in motion and functioning smoothly: Bush was the public face of the Administration, and Cheney the hand in the sock-puppet, self-selected in 2000 to give stability, maturity and “gravitas” to the Bush regime. Last week Cheney was exposed to the public at large as the reckless, self-absorbed, super-annuated adolescent that his perceptive critics knew him to be. Today the right-wing propaganda mills are up to full speed, telling us “move along, folks, nothing to see here.” But try as they might, the public perception of Dick Cheney will not revert to status-quo-ante. The “present trend” of the Bush/Cheney team has been turned in an altered direction.
But Dick Cheney’s bad aim was a minor disruption, of interest to us only because of its immediacy. Other “surprises” are well known to all of us.
* In the fall of 1958, Fidel Castro seemed to be insignificant irritant to the regime of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. On New Years Day in 1959, Batista fled Cuba, and two days later Castro and his “brigands,” marched into Havana.
* In the summer of 1963, John Kennedy’s election to a second term appeared to be a near-certainty.
* So too, his brother Robert’s nomination at the Chicago Democratic convention in August, 1968.
* On election day in 1964, Lyndon Johnson seemed assured of a second term four years hence. And on election day, 1972, there was no reason whatever to doubt that Richard Nixon would serve out a full term.
* In the early eighties, Reagan’s UN Ambassador, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, warned us all that where communism had established its rule, it had never retreated one square inch. And Mikhail Gorbachev, the Right told us, was just another Communist apparatchik, like all the others – “Khruschev with a tailored suit and a thin wife,” as George Will put it.
* In 1990 Nelson Mandela was a prisoner of the South African apartheid regime. In 1994 he was elected President of the Republic of South Africa.
Political upheavals are like earthquakes. Beneath a placid landscape, stresses quietly build up until the fault ruptures, suddenly and without warning, forever transforming the landscape.
So, is an upheaval looming ahead for the United States? Not necessarily. For history also teaches us that democracies can descend slowly, by small increments, into despotism. As William O. Douglas put it: “As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged.”
Which is our future? A bang, or a whimper? Or perhaps a renaissance? We don’t know. But the answer, to no small degree, is in the hands of us, of "we the people."
This much seems likely: given the increasing unrest among the American people, the accumulating evidence of GOP corruption and Administration crimes, and the likelihood of a devastating economic setback, come September and October this year, the political landscape will be radically different than it is today. It could be far worse, with an intervening catastrophic terrorist attack followed immediately by martial law and full-fledged fascism. On the other hand, we the people just might achieve our deliverance from this reign of error, lies, greed, and cruelty.
The latter, hopeful, outcome may appear impossible today. But we must never forget that every successful peoples’ liberation movement begins as an impossible dream. (And, be sure, many such movements remain so). They then proceed to possibility, then probability, and finally to inevitability and success.
The resistance to Bushism is now at the “impossible” stage; today, the Busheviks control the ballot box and the mainstream media. Their continuing control of the Congress and soon the Courts seems assured, and the alleged “opposition party” is enfeebled, disorganized and compliant. To be sure, if conditions and trends remain as they are today, and there are no “surprises,” continued control by the GOP of all branches of government is a certainty.
However, it is very unlikely that conditions and trends will remain as they are, or that there will be no disrupting “surprises.” Below this controlled and placid political and economic landscape, the stresses are accumulating.
Among them:
* More and more moderate republicans and authentic conservatives are finally coming to realize that they share little more with the Bush Administration and the GOP Congress than a name, “Republican,” and an adjective, “conservative.” With the rightward shift in US politics, traditional Republican values and policies – fiscal responsibility, small government, local control, individual self-reliance -- are approaching congruence with those of the Democratic party. And genuine conservatives share with the Democrats, and in opposition to the Bush regime, a respect for our Constitution, the balance of governmental powers, and the rule of law.
* Similarly, many libertarians are becoming disenchanted with the Bushevik assault on civil liberties and its flirtation with theocracy. In fact, a recent analysis of congressional voting records has determined that with the exception of the estimable libertarian-republican, Ron Paul, virtually all the top voting scores in the libertarian index belong to House Democrats.
* Bush has lost the confidence and support of a majority of Americans. His approval ratings have once again dropped below 40%. A November AP-Ipsos poll found that 57% of those polled do not believe that the Bush Administration has "high ethical standards," and the same number
say that Bush is not honest.
* Last month, a Gallup poll found that 58% consider Bush's second term a failure, and 53% believe that Bush's administration deliberately misled the public about Saddam's alleged WMD programs. Finally, an October Ipsos poll found that
exactly half of the population
would want Congress to consider impeachment if Bush lied about his reasons for going to war with Iraq.
* The Religious Right is fracturing, and the moderate Christians are becoming politically active, reminding us that Jesus blessed the peacemakers and condemned the wealthy and the hypocrites.
* Some evangelical Christian ministers are openly criticizing Bush’s environmental policies and expressing concern about global warming.
* The patience of the international community with the neo-con’s imperial ambitions is wearing thin. And as knowledgeable observers of international politics and economics are fully aware, the community of nations is quite capable of exerting considerable economic pressure on the US government.
* Bushism is based upon and sustained by a scaffolding of lies and deception. At long last, the public is beginning to “wise up,” and as the Busheviks respond to public skepticism with still more lies, their credibility crumbles, and with it their legitimacy and political clout.
* Doubts about the validity of the election process will not go away, despite the disparagement of the issue by the mainstream media and the persistent indifference of the Democratic Party. More and more jurisdictions are decertifying electronic voting devices as legal challenges proliferate.
* The US economy is approaching a breaking point, as the housing bubble is about to burst followed by the bankruptcy of millions of double-mortgaged speculating home owners. With ever-more Americans “maxing-out” their credit cards and credit qualifications, and with the continuing decline in median middle-class income, consumer spending is certain to stall. Nothing provokes the American public to political action more than economic distress.
* It is finally beginning to dawn on a few “movers and shakers” of finance and industry that where Bush, Inc. is leading, they should not want to follow. There are few winners in an economic depression, least of all investors. And a country that fails to invest in infrastructure, in scientific research, in technological development, and in education, and which “outsources” its technical jobs, is committing economic suicide. Savvy investors and corporate financial officers recall that they flourished during the Clinton administration, not to mention most Democratic administrations.
* After five years of slavishly spewing out Bushite/GOP propaganda, the mainstream media is losing its credibility and its audience. The public is beginning to look to alternative sources for its news: the foreign media, the independent press, and of course, the internet.
* The would-be despots, Bush, Cheney and the rest, are not very good at despotism. There is a widening charisma-gap, as these leaders appear ever-less “commanding” and ever-more puerile, incompetent, and even pathetic. In addition, Bush and his minions are not “deep thinkers.” They prefer faith to science, and gut-feeling to expertise. The public is beginning to appreciate that this administration can not bend reality to its will, and that eventually “reality bites.”
All these factors are working to the disadvantage of the Bush regime, thus, the sub-surface stresses are accumulating. Given the manifest skills of the Bush propaganda machine, and the blackmail and intimidation issuing from Karl Rove’s office, the political fault beneath could hold fast throughout the next decade, into the Jeb Bush Administration. Or it could rupture next month. My guess is sooner, rather than later.
Meanwhile, the resistance is gaining in strength.
The catalytic moment for liberation movements arrives when [a] the movement achieves self-awareness – when the dissenters look about and find that they are not alone, and recognize that they are participants in a concerted political force, [b] when the movement acquires effective leadership that focuses goals and coordinates action, and [c] when leaders and followers of the movement achieve results, albeit minor, and thus perceive that success is achievable. This perception that success is possible is, in itself, a formidable political force. “Perception is reality.” Si, se puede!
I opened with a warning about the unreliability of political predictions. So I will not now hazard predictions about the State of the Union in the fall, as the mid-term election approaches. However, I can point out some factors that might emerge in the meantime to re-shuffle the political deck.
Election fraud: As Bush’s approval ratings continue to fall, the economy sours, the Iraq casualty toll increases with no end in sight, the Abramov and Plame scandals yield indictments, the defensive lies from the White House become more transparent and desperate, opinion polls point to a Democratic blowout in the November elections. As more and more voices are heard to ask, “why on earth did we elect these guys?,” the public becomes ever more receptive to the reply, “we didn’t! Those damned machines elected them!” Then the Busheviks face a daunting dilemma: can they allow a Democratic takeover of the Congress, and with it the power of congressional investigation including the levers of subpoena and the threats of perjury and contempt of Congress? Or dare they once again "jigger" the computer programs, in the secret and unauditable ballot and compilation codes, to assure a GOP “victory,” thus inviting a Ukrainian-style public rebellion?
The Mainstream Media: As the MSM continues to lose its audience, it faces another dilemma: propaganda vs. profits. When the Soviet media, state-owned and thus in no need of profits, persisted in spewing out state propaganda, it gave rise to an underground media, samizdat, and an enthusiastic public audience for foreign broadcasts and publications. In the United States today, profits are a factor, as here and there elements of the MSM, facing competition from foreign and independent sources and the internet, are exhibiting increasing critical independence from the GOP party line. The opponents to Bush, Inc., need no counter-propaganda. A healthy dose of the truth will suffice as an invaluable resource in the struggle to bring an end to the reigning oligarchy.
Leadership: The resistance to Bushism is essentially leaderless, and thus unfocused and disorganized. When the leaders emerge, reflecting the values and aspirations of the resistance movement, that movement may become a formidable force.
I am not proposing another despot to replace the ones we have. If prospective leaders step forward with agendas alien to the followers, they will be discarded. Successful leaders must embody the values and aspirations of the movement. In an authentic popular movement, communication and coordination between leaders and followers flows in both directions. Though rebels by nature resist authority, leadership in a resistance movement is essential, for if the movement is to be effective, its goals must be defined and focused, and its activism coordinated. Let’s be realistic: where would the sixties civil rights movement be without Martin Luther King, Jr. – or, of not King himself, a King-like leader? Where India, without a Gandhi, South Africa without a Mandela, Russia without a Sakharov? For that matter, where would the United States be without a Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and the rest? All of these succeeded as leaders because those in their movements chose to follow. Other individuals, lost to history, claimed leadership and were rejected.
Message Discipline is behind much of the success of the GOP. Memos with “talking points” issue forth from the offices of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, with clear and simple messages that are heard, incessantly, in the echo chambers of right-wing talk radio and right-wing punditry. In contrast, the left speaks with a thousand tongues, with worthy causes spread all over the political landscape, and with factions, that should be allies, fighting amongst themselves for a place at the podium. Witness the Washington Mall peace rallies, where we hear messages of gay pride, reproductive freedom, animal liberation, save the rain forests, abolish the death penalty, and, oh yes, end the war. All these are commendable causes, and all these are also wedge issues that fracture the coalition, to the delight of the right, which therein gains an opportunity to divide and conquer.
To the public at large, a thousand messages equate with no message, and a validation of the tiresome right-wing criticism that “the left has no new ideas.”
The essential message of the resistance movement must be simple, clear, with few elements, and comprehensive enough to encompass a broad coalition of citizens, who may differ on particular issues: liberals, progressives, the religious, the secular, moderate Republicans, conservatives, libertarians. To the religious, ask “What would Jesus Do?” (I.e., promote peace and charity, and condemn wealth and hypocrisy). To “establishment” Republicans and their followers, “What is the supreme object of your loyalty? A party? A man who happens to be President” or your country and its laws and Constitution?" And to citizens in general: “What have they done to our country?”
If these few and simple messages are repeated, over and over, the public might at last pay attention, and the resistance movement might achieve self-identity and grow into an irresistible force for reform and renewal.
In conclusion, we must pay no attention to the pundits’ proclamations that Democratic control of Congress is “out of reach,” that impeachment is impossible, or that claims of election fraud are groundless paranoia.. There are live bombs in the basement of The House of Bush – scandals, crimes, betrayals, treachery, even treason. Any one of these potentially explosive issues might, at any time, go off and bring down the entire wretched structure. Or they might all be defused, as a long night of despotism falls upon our republic. We can be confident only of this much: the present trends will not continue, and we must expect and be prepared to deal intelligently with the unexpected.
We Americans are not an evil people. Woefully ignorant at times, and short on political sales-resistance. But when we sense that we’ve been swindled and lied to, watch out! Our country was born in rebellion against tyranny. We have a Constitution and we have a tradition of liberty and the rule of law. We have vivid memories of a short time ago when we lived in a country that was both prosperous and free.
But neither were the Germans or the Russians fundamentally evil people. Yet they succumbed to evil regimes. The Germans had to be liberated at horrendous cost. After seventy long years, the various nationalities of the Soviet Union threw out their oppressors. We may suffer the fate of the Germans – there are no guarantees. Or perhaps “the Old World” will come to the rescue of the New,” just as we came to their rescue in the century just past.
Far better that we accomplish our own liberation and renewal. For only the American people can restore the honor of the United States of America.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_er...n_is_realit.htm
Perception is Reality
By Ernest Partridge, Co-Editor, The Crisis Papers
QUOTE
Today the many disparate crises of the past have combined into one general systemic crisis, placing the basic structure of the Republic at mortal risk. At the forefront of concern must be the question: Will the Constitution of the United States survive? Is the American state now in the midst of a transmutation in which the 217-year-old provisions for a balance of powers and popular freedoms are being overridden and canceled? Or will defenders of the Constitution step forward, as has happened in constitutional crises of the past, to save the system and restore its integrity?
Jonathan Schell
Jonathan Schell
Yogi Berra said it best: “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”
Predictions in politics rest upon two assumptions: [a] that present trends will continue into the future, and [b] that there will be no totally unexpected “surprises.”
Both assumptions are rarely true and both are refuted both by common sense and by the lessons of history.
Case in point: last week’s “Texas shootout.” Until last week, the White House routine was in motion and functioning smoothly: Bush was the public face of the Administration, and Cheney the hand in the sock-puppet, self-selected in 2000 to give stability, maturity and “gravitas” to the Bush regime. Last week Cheney was exposed to the public at large as the reckless, self-absorbed, super-annuated adolescent that his perceptive critics knew him to be. Today the right-wing propaganda mills are up to full speed, telling us “move along, folks, nothing to see here.” But try as they might, the public perception of Dick Cheney will not revert to status-quo-ante. The “present trend” of the Bush/Cheney team has been turned in an altered direction.
But Dick Cheney’s bad aim was a minor disruption, of interest to us only because of its immediacy. Other “surprises” are well known to all of us.
* In the fall of 1958, Fidel Castro seemed to be insignificant irritant to the regime of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. On New Years Day in 1959, Batista fled Cuba, and two days later Castro and his “brigands,” marched into Havana.
* In the summer of 1963, John Kennedy’s election to a second term appeared to be a near-certainty.
* So too, his brother Robert’s nomination at the Chicago Democratic convention in August, 1968.
* On election day in 1964, Lyndon Johnson seemed assured of a second term four years hence. And on election day, 1972, there was no reason whatever to doubt that Richard Nixon would serve out a full term.
* In the early eighties, Reagan’s UN Ambassador, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, warned us all that where communism had established its rule, it had never retreated one square inch. And Mikhail Gorbachev, the Right told us, was just another Communist apparatchik, like all the others – “Khruschev with a tailored suit and a thin wife,” as George Will put it.
* In 1990 Nelson Mandela was a prisoner of the South African apartheid regime. In 1994 he was elected President of the Republic of South Africa.
Political upheavals are like earthquakes. Beneath a placid landscape, stresses quietly build up until the fault ruptures, suddenly and without warning, forever transforming the landscape.
So, is an upheaval looming ahead for the United States? Not necessarily. For history also teaches us that democracies can descend slowly, by small increments, into despotism. As William O. Douglas put it: “As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged.”
Which is our future? A bang, or a whimper? Or perhaps a renaissance? We don’t know. But the answer, to no small degree, is in the hands of us, of "we the people."
This much seems likely: given the increasing unrest among the American people, the accumulating evidence of GOP corruption and Administration crimes, and the likelihood of a devastating economic setback, come September and October this year, the political landscape will be radically different than it is today. It could be far worse, with an intervening catastrophic terrorist attack followed immediately by martial law and full-fledged fascism. On the other hand, we the people just might achieve our deliverance from this reign of error, lies, greed, and cruelty.
The latter, hopeful, outcome may appear impossible today. But we must never forget that every successful peoples’ liberation movement begins as an impossible dream. (And, be sure, many such movements remain so). They then proceed to possibility, then probability, and finally to inevitability and success.
The resistance to Bushism is now at the “impossible” stage; today, the Busheviks control the ballot box and the mainstream media. Their continuing control of the Congress and soon the Courts seems assured, and the alleged “opposition party” is enfeebled, disorganized and compliant. To be sure, if conditions and trends remain as they are today, and there are no “surprises,” continued control by the GOP of all branches of government is a certainty.
However, it is very unlikely that conditions and trends will remain as they are, or that there will be no disrupting “surprises.” Below this controlled and placid political and economic landscape, the stresses are accumulating.
Among them:
* More and more moderate republicans and authentic conservatives are finally coming to realize that they share little more with the Bush Administration and the GOP Congress than a name, “Republican,” and an adjective, “conservative.” With the rightward shift in US politics, traditional Republican values and policies – fiscal responsibility, small government, local control, individual self-reliance -- are approaching congruence with those of the Democratic party. And genuine conservatives share with the Democrats, and in opposition to the Bush regime, a respect for our Constitution, the balance of governmental powers, and the rule of law.
* Similarly, many libertarians are becoming disenchanted with the Bushevik assault on civil liberties and its flirtation with theocracy. In fact, a recent analysis of congressional voting records has determined that with the exception of the estimable libertarian-republican, Ron Paul, virtually all the top voting scores in the libertarian index belong to House Democrats.
* Bush has lost the confidence and support of a majority of Americans. His approval ratings have once again dropped below 40%. A November AP-Ipsos poll found that 57% of those polled do not believe that the Bush Administration has "high ethical standards," and the same number
say that Bush is not honest.
* Last month, a Gallup poll found that 58% consider Bush's second term a failure, and 53% believe that Bush's administration deliberately misled the public about Saddam's alleged WMD programs. Finally, an October Ipsos poll found that
exactly half of the population
would want Congress to consider impeachment if Bush lied about his reasons for going to war with Iraq.
* The Religious Right is fracturing, and the moderate Christians are becoming politically active, reminding us that Jesus blessed the peacemakers and condemned the wealthy and the hypocrites.
* Some evangelical Christian ministers are openly criticizing Bush’s environmental policies and expressing concern about global warming.
* The patience of the international community with the neo-con’s imperial ambitions is wearing thin. And as knowledgeable observers of international politics and economics are fully aware, the community of nations is quite capable of exerting considerable economic pressure on the US government.
* Bushism is based upon and sustained by a scaffolding of lies and deception. At long last, the public is beginning to “wise up,” and as the Busheviks respond to public skepticism with still more lies, their credibility crumbles, and with it their legitimacy and political clout.
* Doubts about the validity of the election process will not go away, despite the disparagement of the issue by the mainstream media and the persistent indifference of the Democratic Party. More and more jurisdictions are decertifying electronic voting devices as legal challenges proliferate.
* The US economy is approaching a breaking point, as the housing bubble is about to burst followed by the bankruptcy of millions of double-mortgaged speculating home owners. With ever-more Americans “maxing-out” their credit cards and credit qualifications, and with the continuing decline in median middle-class income, consumer spending is certain to stall. Nothing provokes the American public to political action more than economic distress.
* It is finally beginning to dawn on a few “movers and shakers” of finance and industry that where Bush, Inc. is leading, they should not want to follow. There are few winners in an economic depression, least of all investors. And a country that fails to invest in infrastructure, in scientific research, in technological development, and in education, and which “outsources” its technical jobs, is committing economic suicide. Savvy investors and corporate financial officers recall that they flourished during the Clinton administration, not to mention most Democratic administrations.
* After five years of slavishly spewing out Bushite/GOP propaganda, the mainstream media is losing its credibility and its audience. The public is beginning to look to alternative sources for its news: the foreign media, the independent press, and of course, the internet.
* The would-be despots, Bush, Cheney and the rest, are not very good at despotism. There is a widening charisma-gap, as these leaders appear ever-less “commanding” and ever-more puerile, incompetent, and even pathetic. In addition, Bush and his minions are not “deep thinkers.” They prefer faith to science, and gut-feeling to expertise. The public is beginning to appreciate that this administration can not bend reality to its will, and that eventually “reality bites.”
All these factors are working to the disadvantage of the Bush regime, thus, the sub-surface stresses are accumulating. Given the manifest skills of the Bush propaganda machine, and the blackmail and intimidation issuing from Karl Rove’s office, the political fault beneath could hold fast throughout the next decade, into the Jeb Bush Administration. Or it could rupture next month. My guess is sooner, rather than later.
Meanwhile, the resistance is gaining in strength.
The catalytic moment for liberation movements arrives when [a] the movement achieves self-awareness – when the dissenters look about and find that they are not alone, and recognize that they are participants in a concerted political force, [b] when the movement acquires effective leadership that focuses goals and coordinates action, and [c] when leaders and followers of the movement achieve results, albeit minor, and thus perceive that success is achievable. This perception that success is possible is, in itself, a formidable political force. “Perception is reality.” Si, se puede!
I opened with a warning about the unreliability of political predictions. So I will not now hazard predictions about the State of the Union in the fall, as the mid-term election approaches. However, I can point out some factors that might emerge in the meantime to re-shuffle the political deck.
Election fraud: As Bush’s approval ratings continue to fall, the economy sours, the Iraq casualty toll increases with no end in sight, the Abramov and Plame scandals yield indictments, the defensive lies from the White House become more transparent and desperate, opinion polls point to a Democratic blowout in the November elections. As more and more voices are heard to ask, “why on earth did we elect these guys?,” the public becomes ever more receptive to the reply, “we didn’t! Those damned machines elected them!” Then the Busheviks face a daunting dilemma: can they allow a Democratic takeover of the Congress, and with it the power of congressional investigation including the levers of subpoena and the threats of perjury and contempt of Congress? Or dare they once again "jigger" the computer programs, in the secret and unauditable ballot and compilation codes, to assure a GOP “victory,” thus inviting a Ukrainian-style public rebellion?
The Mainstream Media: As the MSM continues to lose its audience, it faces another dilemma: propaganda vs. profits. When the Soviet media, state-owned and thus in no need of profits, persisted in spewing out state propaganda, it gave rise to an underground media, samizdat, and an enthusiastic public audience for foreign broadcasts and publications. In the United States today, profits are a factor, as here and there elements of the MSM, facing competition from foreign and independent sources and the internet, are exhibiting increasing critical independence from the GOP party line. The opponents to Bush, Inc., need no counter-propaganda. A healthy dose of the truth will suffice as an invaluable resource in the struggle to bring an end to the reigning oligarchy.
Leadership: The resistance to Bushism is essentially leaderless, and thus unfocused and disorganized. When the leaders emerge, reflecting the values and aspirations of the resistance movement, that movement may become a formidable force.
I am not proposing another despot to replace the ones we have. If prospective leaders step forward with agendas alien to the followers, they will be discarded. Successful leaders must embody the values and aspirations of the movement. In an authentic popular movement, communication and coordination between leaders and followers flows in both directions. Though rebels by nature resist authority, leadership in a resistance movement is essential, for if the movement is to be effective, its goals must be defined and focused, and its activism coordinated. Let’s be realistic: where would the sixties civil rights movement be without Martin Luther King, Jr. – or, of not King himself, a King-like leader? Where India, without a Gandhi, South Africa without a Mandela, Russia without a Sakharov? For that matter, where would the United States be without a Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and the rest? All of these succeeded as leaders because those in their movements chose to follow. Other individuals, lost to history, claimed leadership and were rejected.
Message Discipline is behind much of the success of the GOP. Memos with “talking points” issue forth from the offices of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, with clear and simple messages that are heard, incessantly, in the echo chambers of right-wing talk radio and right-wing punditry. In contrast, the left speaks with a thousand tongues, with worthy causes spread all over the political landscape, and with factions, that should be allies, fighting amongst themselves for a place at the podium. Witness the Washington Mall peace rallies, where we hear messages of gay pride, reproductive freedom, animal liberation, save the rain forests, abolish the death penalty, and, oh yes, end the war. All these are commendable causes, and all these are also wedge issues that fracture the coalition, to the delight of the right, which therein gains an opportunity to divide and conquer.
To the public at large, a thousand messages equate with no message, and a validation of the tiresome right-wing criticism that “the left has no new ideas.”
The essential message of the resistance movement must be simple, clear, with few elements, and comprehensive enough to encompass a broad coalition of citizens, who may differ on particular issues: liberals, progressives, the religious, the secular, moderate Republicans, conservatives, libertarians. To the religious, ask “What would Jesus Do?” (I.e., promote peace and charity, and condemn wealth and hypocrisy). To “establishment” Republicans and their followers, “What is the supreme object of your loyalty? A party? A man who happens to be President” or your country and its laws and Constitution?" And to citizens in general: “What have they done to our country?”
If these few and simple messages are repeated, over and over, the public might at last pay attention, and the resistance movement might achieve self-identity and grow into an irresistible force for reform and renewal.
In conclusion, we must pay no attention to the pundits’ proclamations that Democratic control of Congress is “out of reach,” that impeachment is impossible, or that claims of election fraud are groundless paranoia.. There are live bombs in the basement of The House of Bush – scandals, crimes, betrayals, treachery, even treason. Any one of these potentially explosive issues might, at any time, go off and bring down the entire wretched structure. Or they might all be defused, as a long night of despotism falls upon our republic. We can be confident only of this much: the present trends will not continue, and we must expect and be prepared to deal intelligently with the unexpected.
We Americans are not an evil people. Woefully ignorant at times, and short on political sales-resistance. But when we sense that we’ve been swindled and lied to, watch out! Our country was born in rebellion against tyranny. We have a Constitution and we have a tradition of liberty and the rule of law. We have vivid memories of a short time ago when we lived in a country that was both prosperous and free.
But neither were the Germans or the Russians fundamentally evil people. Yet they succumbed to evil regimes. The Germans had to be liberated at horrendous cost. After seventy long years, the various nationalities of the Soviet Union threw out their oppressors. We may suffer the fate of the Germans – there are no guarantees. Or perhaps “the Old World” will come to the rescue of the New,” just as we came to their rescue in the century just past.
Far better that we accomplish our own liberation and renewal. For only the American people can restore the honor of the United States of America.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_er...n_is_realit.htm
Published on Friday, February 24, 2006 by Candide's Notebooks
Iraq’s Cambodian Jungle: How American ‘Nation-Building’ Fueled Civil War
by Pierre Tristam
The standard line about Iraq right now is that the country is on the verge of civil war. That “simmering hatreds” are boiling to the surface. That “sectarianism” is to blame. All those regurgitated clichés of the Orientalist canon may well be true. But what convenient detractions from a three-year-old certainty rendered by the American invasion. What ideal way to shift the blame, indemnify the invader, and make this third anniversary of Iraq’s “liberation,” approaching at the speed of a panicked Bradley Fighting Vehicle, look like a job gone awry only because Iraqis couldn’t get along. Sure, the destruction of a revered Shiite mosque in Samarra, allegedly by Sunni militants, was not going to get a kinder reception than the destruction of the 16 th century Babri mosque in Ayodhya, in India, by Hindus, in December 1992. That barbaric eruption led to riots across India and Pakistan that left more than 1,000 people dead and renewed fears of a sectarian breakdown on the subcontinent, possibly even another reason for India and Pakistan to go at it a fourth time in six decades. The fears were exaggerated. The discovery that religion is south Asia’s radioactive variant was not. It’s that very variant the neo-cons ignored when they celebrated the invasion of Iraq as a turning point in Mideastern destiny.
It has been a turning point, with the wrong assumptions at gunpoint. The problem wasn’t Iraq’s WMDs or Iran’s nukes. It’s the region’s religious warheads. There’s no easier way to arm them than with Western-fueled resentment, no quicker way to set them off than with the permanent reminder of an alien army of provocateurs, the same Anglo provocateurs whose boots not so long ago, in every grandfather’s memory, flattened the culture with colonialism and called it progress. Conversely, there are more credible, more Wilsonian ways to diffuse the warheads, beginning with Woodrow Wilson’s aversion to assuming mandates and protectorates over regions better left to sort out their issues on their own, but with available help when requested.
That’s the approach Francis Fukuyama, the ex-neocon, is now advocating in his belated berating of the neocon catastrophe in Iraq: “[T]he United States does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about. By definition, outsiders can’t ‘impose’ democracy on a country that doesn’t want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective.” In other words, the so-called “liberal” approach advocated all along by those who don’t see bombs as quite compatiblke with democratic nation-building..
The strength of the West in relation to the East has never been in its impositions and colonialisms. That’s when it’s been at its weakest, at its most repugnant, morally and politically. Western strength has been derived, paradoxically, from restraint: by valuing example above force, persuasion above imposition. (World War I and II were not battles between East and West but primarily within the West.) That strength, at the moment, has been made null and void by the American occupation of Iraq—by Abu Ghraib, by Guantanamo, by the parody of democracy in Afghanistan and the emerging tragedy of democracy in Iraq, Iran and Palestine, where extremism is not only ascendant, but triumphant and virtually unrivaled.
Iraq is not “on the verge” of civil war. It has been at war the moment Americans replaced one tyranny with a pluralism of tyrannies three years ago. Iran blamed the explosion in Samarra on Israel and the United States. Israel, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with Iraq. But American responsibility for Samarra is as evident as American responsibility for the looting and chaos that followed the early days of the occupation—and of course the chaos and low-grade civil war that hasn’t stopped since. The powder keg was always there. It was to be a sign of American wiles and strategy—of foresight or ignorance—either to diffuse the keg or light the match. With Bush at the helm, the American occupation had no choice but to suck fire. That fuse is what the Anglo-American occupation force represents in Iraq. The Orientalist narrative of Muslim-on-Muslim violence happening as if in a vacuum all its own is the expedient way for Western conservatives to translate the latest events to their convenience. It’s also an opportunity. Here’s the Bush administration’s chance to claim that it’s done all it could. Sectarian battles aren’t its game ( South Carolina’s Republican primary fatwa against John McCain notwithstanding). Time to go. Time to let them sort it out. The going won’t be literal, to be sure: The administration isn’t oiling those permanent military bases for nothing, nor does it want to have an Arab Yalta tattooed on its retreating rear. No, this would be a stealth retreat from the turbulence of the Iraqi street to the safety of U.S. garrisons on the barbarians’ rims, something even John Murtha could applaud. No retreat, no surrender, but redeployment. At least for now.
But it’s the Cambodian get-away scheme all over again: Nixon bombs Cambodia back to the Neolithic from 1970 to 1973, killing somewhere in the six figures, destabilizing the country with Lon Nol’s complicity and setting the stage for the Khmer take-over and ensuing genocide. Nixon shrugs, acts blameless. It was a civil war, after all, and he had his own civil war on his hands, compliments of a couple of reporters from the Washington Post. With Kissinger as his Oz, Nixon spun Cambodia into just another American attempt at battling Communism in the name of freedom. The Khmers mucked it up. And by 1973, Kissinger was throwing in the towel, Nixon was facing impeachment, and the Khmers were biding their time until their final, if brief, victory in 1975 (until the Vietnamese finally ended their killing spree in 1978). A similar scenario is unfolding in Iraq. The United States has done nothing if not destabilize the country under the guise of building up democracy for the last three years. Bombings and night raids tend not to do democracy’s bidding. Insurgents have picked up strength. On both sides. A Khmer-like genocide might not be in the offing, although with Lebanon and the Balkans in recent memory, and with Saddam’s tradition of facile massacres still humidifying the Mesopotamian air with the scent of unavenged blood, you never know: a genocide may well result still, giving the region’s Vietnam—Iran—an opportunity to intervene. The moment the United States invaded the way it did and occupied the nation as boorishly as it did, the outcome couldn’t have been any different than it is now. It isn’t the Arabs who are repeating history. It is the United States repeating its own, a few time zones to the east. Same continent. Same errors, same Nixonian hubris.
Naturally, Arabs — those “barbaric” Sunnis and Shiites — will get all the blame. But the vilest fanatics are in the White House, comfortably enabling destruction from their “situation room.” The only difference between them and the barbarians who blow up mosques is a matter of dress and language, and, of course, method. The results are the
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0224-23.htm
Iraq’s Cambodian Jungle: How American ‘Nation-Building’ Fueled Civil War
by Pierre Tristam
The standard line about Iraq right now is that the country is on the verge of civil war. That “simmering hatreds” are boiling to the surface. That “sectarianism” is to blame. All those regurgitated clichés of the Orientalist canon may well be true. But what convenient detractions from a three-year-old certainty rendered by the American invasion. What ideal way to shift the blame, indemnify the invader, and make this third anniversary of Iraq’s “liberation,” approaching at the speed of a panicked Bradley Fighting Vehicle, look like a job gone awry only because Iraqis couldn’t get along. Sure, the destruction of a revered Shiite mosque in Samarra, allegedly by Sunni militants, was not going to get a kinder reception than the destruction of the 16 th century Babri mosque in Ayodhya, in India, by Hindus, in December 1992. That barbaric eruption led to riots across India and Pakistan that left more than 1,000 people dead and renewed fears of a sectarian breakdown on the subcontinent, possibly even another reason for India and Pakistan to go at it a fourth time in six decades. The fears were exaggerated. The discovery that religion is south Asia’s radioactive variant was not. It’s that very variant the neo-cons ignored when they celebrated the invasion of Iraq as a turning point in Mideastern destiny.
It has been a turning point, with the wrong assumptions at gunpoint. The problem wasn’t Iraq’s WMDs or Iran’s nukes. It’s the region’s religious warheads. There’s no easier way to arm them than with Western-fueled resentment, no quicker way to set them off than with the permanent reminder of an alien army of provocateurs, the same Anglo provocateurs whose boots not so long ago, in every grandfather’s memory, flattened the culture with colonialism and called it progress. Conversely, there are more credible, more Wilsonian ways to diffuse the warheads, beginning with Woodrow Wilson’s aversion to assuming mandates and protectorates over regions better left to sort out their issues on their own, but with available help when requested.
That’s the approach Francis Fukuyama, the ex-neocon, is now advocating in his belated berating of the neocon catastrophe in Iraq: “[T]he United States does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about. By definition, outsiders can’t ‘impose’ democracy on a country that doesn’t want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective.” In other words, the so-called “liberal” approach advocated all along by those who don’t see bombs as quite compatiblke with democratic nation-building..
The strength of the West in relation to the East has never been in its impositions and colonialisms. That’s when it’s been at its weakest, at its most repugnant, morally and politically. Western strength has been derived, paradoxically, from restraint: by valuing example above force, persuasion above imposition. (World War I and II were not battles between East and West but primarily within the West.) That strength, at the moment, has been made null and void by the American occupation of Iraq—by Abu Ghraib, by Guantanamo, by the parody of democracy in Afghanistan and the emerging tragedy of democracy in Iraq, Iran and Palestine, where extremism is not only ascendant, but triumphant and virtually unrivaled.
Iraq is not “on the verge” of civil war. It has been at war the moment Americans replaced one tyranny with a pluralism of tyrannies three years ago. Iran blamed the explosion in Samarra on Israel and the United States. Israel, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with Iraq. But American responsibility for Samarra is as evident as American responsibility for the looting and chaos that followed the early days of the occupation—and of course the chaos and low-grade civil war that hasn’t stopped since. The powder keg was always there. It was to be a sign of American wiles and strategy—of foresight or ignorance—either to diffuse the keg or light the match. With Bush at the helm, the American occupation had no choice but to suck fire. That fuse is what the Anglo-American occupation force represents in Iraq. The Orientalist narrative of Muslim-on-Muslim violence happening as if in a vacuum all its own is the expedient way for Western conservatives to translate the latest events to their convenience. It’s also an opportunity. Here’s the Bush administration’s chance to claim that it’s done all it could. Sectarian battles aren’t its game ( South Carolina’s Republican primary fatwa against John McCain notwithstanding). Time to go. Time to let them sort it out. The going won’t be literal, to be sure: The administration isn’t oiling those permanent military bases for nothing, nor does it want to have an Arab Yalta tattooed on its retreating rear. No, this would be a stealth retreat from the turbulence of the Iraqi street to the safety of U.S. garrisons on the barbarians’ rims, something even John Murtha could applaud. No retreat, no surrender, but redeployment. At least for now.
But it’s the Cambodian get-away scheme all over again: Nixon bombs Cambodia back to the Neolithic from 1970 to 1973, killing somewhere in the six figures, destabilizing the country with Lon Nol’s complicity and setting the stage for the Khmer take-over and ensuing genocide. Nixon shrugs, acts blameless. It was a civil war, after all, and he had his own civil war on his hands, compliments of a couple of reporters from the Washington Post. With Kissinger as his Oz, Nixon spun Cambodia into just another American attempt at battling Communism in the name of freedom. The Khmers mucked it up. And by 1973, Kissinger was throwing in the towel, Nixon was facing impeachment, and the Khmers were biding their time until their final, if brief, victory in 1975 (until the Vietnamese finally ended their killing spree in 1978). A similar scenario is unfolding in Iraq. The United States has done nothing if not destabilize the country under the guise of building up democracy for the last three years. Bombings and night raids tend not to do democracy’s bidding. Insurgents have picked up strength. On both sides. A Khmer-like genocide might not be in the offing, although with Lebanon and the Balkans in recent memory, and with Saddam’s tradition of facile massacres still humidifying the Mesopotamian air with the scent of unavenged blood, you never know: a genocide may well result still, giving the region’s Vietnam—Iran—an opportunity to intervene. The moment the United States invaded the way it did and occupied the nation as boorishly as it did, the outcome couldn’t have been any different than it is now. It isn’t the Arabs who are repeating history. It is the United States repeating its own, a few time zones to the east. Same continent. Same errors, same Nixonian hubris.
Naturally, Arabs — those “barbaric” Sunnis and Shiites — will get all the blame. But the vilest fanatics are in the White House, comfortably enabling destruction from their “situation room.” The only difference between them and the barbarians who blow up mosques is a matter of dress and language, and, of course, method. The results are the
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0224-23.htm
Bush is to Blame for Destroying Iraq
By Robert Dreyfuss, TomPaine.com
Posted on February 24, 2006, Printed on February 25, 2006
With Iraq perched at the very precipice of an ethnic and sectarian holocaust, the utter failure of the Bush administration's policy is revealed with starkest clarity. Iraq may or may not fall into the abyss in the next few days and weeks, but what is no longer in doubt is who is to blame: If Iraq is engulfed in civil war then Americans, Iraqis and the international community must hold President Bush and Vice President Cheney responsible for the destruction of Iraq.
The CIA, the State Department, members of Congress and countless Middle East experts warned Bush and Cheney -- to no avail -- that toppling Saddam could unleash the demons of civil war. They said so before, during and in the aftermath of the war, and each time the warnings were dismissed. Those warnings came from people like Paul Pillar, the CIA veteran who served as the U.S. intelligence community's chief Middle East analyst; from Wayne White, the State Department's chief intelligence analyst on Iraq; and from two CIA Baghdad station chiefs who were purged for their analysis. Pillar, who wrote this month in Foreign Affairs that prewar intelligence on Iraq was distorted by the Bush-Cheney team, is being excoriated by the right.
For the most radical-right neoconservative Jacobins amongst the Bush-Cheney team, the possibility that Iraq might fall apart wasn't even alarming: They just didn't care, and in their obsessive zeal to overthrow Saddam Hussein they were more than willing to take the risk. David Wurmser, who migrated from the Israeli-connected Washington Institute on Near East Policy to the American Enterprise Institute to the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans to John Bolton's arms control shop at the State Department to Dick Cheney's shadow National Security Council in the office of the vice president from 2001 to 2006, wrote during the 1990s that Iraq after Saddam was likely to descend into violent tribal, ethnic and sectarian war.
In a paper for an Israeli think tank, the same think tank for which Wurmser, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith prepared the famous "Clean Break" paper in 1996, Wurmser wrote in 1997: "The residual unity of the nation is an illusion projected by the extreme repression of the state." After Saddam, Iraq would "be ripped apart by the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects and key families," he wrote. "Underneath facades of unity enforced by state repression, [Iraq's] politics is defined primarily by tribalism, sectarianism and gang/clan-like competition." Yet Wurmser explicitly urged the United States and Israel to "expedite" such a collapse. "The issue here is whether the West and Israel can construct a strategy for limiting and expediting the chaotic collapse that will ensue in order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance."
Such black neoconservative fantasies -- which view the Middle East as a chessboard on which they can move the pieces at will -- have now come home to roost. For the many hundreds of thousands who might die in an Iraqi civil war, the consequences are all too real.
The bankruptcy of the Bush-Cheney Iraq policy is revealed in the fact that the United States has succeeded in pitting itself now against two major "resistance" groups in Iraq. The first is the Sunni-led, mostly Baathist and military resistance, which has battled U.S. forces in Baghdad and the so-called Sunni triangle to the north and west. The second, which is growing in the ferocity of its anti-Americanism, is the Shiite religious force led by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Moqtada Al Sadr's Mahdi Army and their allies, who have begun routinely to denounce the United States for its opposition to their plans to create a Shiite-dominated, Iranian-allied Islamic Republic of Iraq. Abdel Aziz Al Hakim, SCIRI's chieftain and former commander of its Badr Brigade paramilitary force, has all but declared war on the United States, blaming Ambassador Khalilzad for giving a "green light" to the bombers by insisting that Shiite militias be disarmed. Proclaimed Hakim:
For sure, the statements made by the ambassador were not made in a responsible way. and he did not behave like an ambassador. These statements were the reason for more pressure and gave green lights to terrorist groups. And, therefore, he shares in part of the responsibility.
And even the oracle-like Ayatollah Ali Sistani, whose supposedly nonpolitical stance looks more and more like a cover for shrewd and calculating political ambition, overtly threatened this week to order the unleashing of Shiite militias in a civil war mode.
But the escalating political rhetoric is built on a foundation of escalating inter-communal violence. Ethnic cleansing is proceeding apace. The bombing of the Golden Dome in Samarra ought not to be seen as a conspiratorial effort to provoke civil war, but merely as a symptom of that incipient war. Ethnic cleansers likely planned the attack on Samarra, a Sunni city north of Baghdad, as a means of terrifying Shiites in that part of Iraq to flee southward to the Shiite enclaves. Scores of Iraqi cities, towns and neighborhoods are undergoing a similar pattern of terrorism and death squads aimed at ethnic cleansing.
What is especially scary to Shiites is that the destruction of the Golden Dome follows a historic pattern first laid down by the Wahhabi conquerors of the Arabian Peninsula in the 19th and early 20th century, when the Wahhabi Arab army made demolition of Shiite mosque domes its signature and launched a crusade against alleged idolatry by Shiites, who were disparaged by the Wahhabis as heretics. The Kurds, too, standing back from the Sunni-Shiite battles, are engaging in their own anti-Arab ethnic cleansing in and around the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which President Jalal Talabani of Iraq, a Kurd, has called "the Jerusalem of Kurdistan."
It is all ugly and likely to get much uglier. So far, hundreds of Iraqis on all sides have died since Tuesday, scores and perhaps hundreds of mosques attacked, execution-style slayings proliferated and ordinary Iraqis driven into hiding or into exile. A weekend curfew has Iraq on the knife's edge.
Like the Sarajevo assassination that precipitated World War I, the attack on the mosque may trigger a war, but it won't be the cause. The cause is far more deep-rooted, embedded in the chaos and bitterness that followed the U.S. invasion of Iraq and America's deliberate efforts to stress sectarian differences in creating the Iraqi Governing Council and subsequent government institutions. If the current crisis doesn't spark a civil war, be patient. The next one will.
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/32747/
By Robert Dreyfuss, TomPaine.com
Posted on February 24, 2006, Printed on February 25, 2006
With Iraq perched at the very precipice of an ethnic and sectarian holocaust, the utter failure of the Bush administration's policy is revealed with starkest clarity. Iraq may or may not fall into the abyss in the next few days and weeks, but what is no longer in doubt is who is to blame: If Iraq is engulfed in civil war then Americans, Iraqis and the international community must hold President Bush and Vice President Cheney responsible for the destruction of Iraq.
The CIA, the State Department, members of Congress and countless Middle East experts warned Bush and Cheney -- to no avail -- that toppling Saddam could unleash the demons of civil war. They said so before, during and in the aftermath of the war, and each time the warnings were dismissed. Those warnings came from people like Paul Pillar, the CIA veteran who served as the U.S. intelligence community's chief Middle East analyst; from Wayne White, the State Department's chief intelligence analyst on Iraq; and from two CIA Baghdad station chiefs who were purged for their analysis. Pillar, who wrote this month in Foreign Affairs that prewar intelligence on Iraq was distorted by the Bush-Cheney team, is being excoriated by the right.
For the most radical-right neoconservative Jacobins amongst the Bush-Cheney team, the possibility that Iraq might fall apart wasn't even alarming: They just didn't care, and in their obsessive zeal to overthrow Saddam Hussein they were more than willing to take the risk. David Wurmser, who migrated from the Israeli-connected Washington Institute on Near East Policy to the American Enterprise Institute to the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans to John Bolton's arms control shop at the State Department to Dick Cheney's shadow National Security Council in the office of the vice president from 2001 to 2006, wrote during the 1990s that Iraq after Saddam was likely to descend into violent tribal, ethnic and sectarian war.
In a paper for an Israeli think tank, the same think tank for which Wurmser, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith prepared the famous "Clean Break" paper in 1996, Wurmser wrote in 1997: "The residual unity of the nation is an illusion projected by the extreme repression of the state." After Saddam, Iraq would "be ripped apart by the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects and key families," he wrote. "Underneath facades of unity enforced by state repression, [Iraq's] politics is defined primarily by tribalism, sectarianism and gang/clan-like competition." Yet Wurmser explicitly urged the United States and Israel to "expedite" such a collapse. "The issue here is whether the West and Israel can construct a strategy for limiting and expediting the chaotic collapse that will ensue in order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance."
Such black neoconservative fantasies -- which view the Middle East as a chessboard on which they can move the pieces at will -- have now come home to roost. For the many hundreds of thousands who might die in an Iraqi civil war, the consequences are all too real.
The bankruptcy of the Bush-Cheney Iraq policy is revealed in the fact that the United States has succeeded in pitting itself now against two major "resistance" groups in Iraq. The first is the Sunni-led, mostly Baathist and military resistance, which has battled U.S. forces in Baghdad and the so-called Sunni triangle to the north and west. The second, which is growing in the ferocity of its anti-Americanism, is the Shiite religious force led by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Moqtada Al Sadr's Mahdi Army and their allies, who have begun routinely to denounce the United States for its opposition to their plans to create a Shiite-dominated, Iranian-allied Islamic Republic of Iraq. Abdel Aziz Al Hakim, SCIRI's chieftain and former commander of its Badr Brigade paramilitary force, has all but declared war on the United States, blaming Ambassador Khalilzad for giving a "green light" to the bombers by insisting that Shiite militias be disarmed. Proclaimed Hakim:
For sure, the statements made by the ambassador were not made in a responsible way. and he did not behave like an ambassador. These statements were the reason for more pressure and gave green lights to terrorist groups. And, therefore, he shares in part of the responsibility.
And even the oracle-like Ayatollah Ali Sistani, whose supposedly nonpolitical stance looks more and more like a cover for shrewd and calculating political ambition, overtly threatened this week to order the unleashing of Shiite militias in a civil war mode.
But the escalating political rhetoric is built on a foundation of escalating inter-communal violence. Ethnic cleansing is proceeding apace. The bombing of the Golden Dome in Samarra ought not to be seen as a conspiratorial effort to provoke civil war, but merely as a symptom of that incipient war. Ethnic cleansers likely planned the attack on Samarra, a Sunni city north of Baghdad, as a means of terrifying Shiites in that part of Iraq to flee southward to the Shiite enclaves. Scores of Iraqi cities, towns and neighborhoods are undergoing a similar pattern of terrorism and death squads aimed at ethnic cleansing.
What is especially scary to Shiites is that the destruction of the Golden Dome follows a historic pattern first laid down by the Wahhabi conquerors of the Arabian Peninsula in the 19th and early 20th century, when the Wahhabi Arab army made demolition of Shiite mosque domes its signature and launched a crusade against alleged idolatry by Shiites, who were disparaged by the Wahhabis as heretics. The Kurds, too, standing back from the Sunni-Shiite battles, are engaging in their own anti-Arab ethnic cleansing in and around the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which President Jalal Talabani of Iraq, a Kurd, has called "the Jerusalem of Kurdistan."
It is all ugly and likely to get much uglier. So far, hundreds of Iraqis on all sides have died since Tuesday, scores and perhaps hundreds of mosques attacked, execution-style slayings proliferated and ordinary Iraqis driven into hiding or into exile. A weekend curfew has Iraq on the knife's edge.
Like the Sarajevo assassination that precipitated World War I, the attack on the mosque may trigger a war, but it won't be the cause. The cause is far more deep-rooted, embedded in the chaos and bitterness that followed the U.S. invasion of Iraq and America's deliberate efforts to stress sectarian differences in creating the Iraqi Governing Council and subsequent government institutions. If the current crisis doesn't spark a civil war, be patient. The next one will.
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/32747/
Bush, Rats & a Sinking Ship
By Robert Parry
February 25, 2006
In just this past week, conservative legend William F. Buckley Jr. and neoconservative icon Francis Fukuyama have joined the swelling ranks of Americans judging George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq a disaster.
“One can’t doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed,” Buckley wrote at National Review Online on Feb. 24, adding that the challenge now facing Bush and his top advisers is how to cope with the reality of that failure.
“Within their own counsels, different plans have to be made,” Buckley wrote after a week of bloody sectarian violence in Iraq. “And the kernel here is the acknowledgement of defeat.”
Fukuyama, a leading neoconservative theorist, went further citing not just the disaster in Iraq but the catastrophe enveloping Bush’s broader strategy of preemptive military American interventions, waged unilaterally when necessary.
“The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration’s first term is now in shambles,” Fukuyama wrote Feb. 19 in The New York Times Magazine.
“Successful preemption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America’s perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before,” Fukuyama wrote.
While those Americans who always opposed the Iraq War may see this unseemly scramble of Bush’s former allies as a classic case of rats deserting a sinking ship, the loss of these two prominent thinkers of the Right mark a turning point in the political battle over the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
If Bush can’t hold William F. Buckley Jr. – and if even the ranks of the neocons are starting to crack – Bush may soon be confronted with a hard choice of either acknowledging his errors or tightening his authoritarian control of the United States.
Bush’s foundering Iraq policy also raises the stakes in the November elections. Prospects have brightened for those who want Bush held accountable for his reckless deeds and his violation of laws, both domestic and international.
Fortune Reversal
This reversal of fortune is stunning when compared to Bush’s seeming omnipotence in 2002, when he unveiled the Bush Doctrine, and even a year ago when leading U.S. pundits were hailing the President as a visionary leader.
Bush picked his belligerent course in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York and Washington. Though the world had rallied to America’s side – offering both sympathy and cooperation in fighting terrorism – Bush chose to issue ultimatums.
Bush famously told other nations that they were either “with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Vowing to “rid the world of evil,” he made clear he would brush aside any restrictions on his actions, including the United Nations Charters and the Geneva Conventions.
Europeans were soon protesting Bush’s treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and Muslims were voicing growing hatred for the United States. Though Bush's tough actions were popular with his base, they played poorly abroad.
“It annoys your allies in the war against terrorism, and it creates problems for our Muslim allies, too,” one West European ambassador said in 2002. “It puts at stake the moral credibility of the war against terrorism.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Return to Unilateralism.”]
Bush spelled out his broader strategy in a speech at West Point on June 1, 2002. He asserted a unilateral U.S. right to overthrow any government in the world that is deemed a threat to American security, a position so sweeping it lacked historical precedent.
“If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long,” Bush said in describing what soon became known as the “Bush Doctrine.”
Shortly after Bush’s West Point speech, an article at Consortiumnews.com observed that “Bush’s grim vision is of a modern ‘crusade,’ as he once put it, with American military forces striking preemptively at ‘evil-doers’ wherever they live, while U.S. citizens live under a redefined Constitution with rights that can be suspended selectively by one man.
“Beyond the enormous sacrifices of blood, money and freedom that this plan entails, there is another problem: the strategy offers no guarantee of greater security for Americans and runs the risk of deepening the pool of hatred against the United States.
”With his cavalier tough talk, Bush continues to show no sign that he grasps how treacherous his course is, nor how much more difficult it will be if the U.S. alienates large segments of the world's population.” [See “Bush’s Grim Vision”]
Iraq War
On March 19, 2003, Bush took another fateful step, ordering the invasion of Iraq despite being denied authority from the U.N. Security Council.
After ousting Saddam Hussein’s regime three weeks later, Bush basked in popular acclaim from many Americans. He even donned a flight suit for a “Mission Accomplished” aircraft-carrier celebration on May 1, 2003.
During those heady days, Bush and his neoconservative advisers dreamed of remaking the entire Middle East with pro-U.S. leaders chosen through elections and Arab nations ending their hostility toward Israel.
But Bush’s wishful thinking began to run into trouble. A fierce resistance emerged in Iraq, claiming the lives of hundreds – and then thousands – of U.S. soldiers who couldn’t quell the violence. Instead of contributing to peace, the Iraqi elections deepened the country’s sectarian divisions – empowering the Shiite majority while alienating the Sunni minority.
Surging anti-Americanism caused other Middle East elections to have the opposite results from what Bush’s neoconservatives predicted. Instead of breeding moderation, elections in Pakistan, Egypt, Iran and the Palestinian Authority saw gains by Islamic extremists, including a surprise victory by the militant group Hamas in Palestine.
The United States also has seen its international reputation devastated by reports of abuse and torture in U.S.-run detention centers. Rather than the all-powerful nation that the neocons wanted to project, the United States revealed the limitations of its military might and the incompetence of its administrative follow-through.
This string of catastrophes has now led even prominent conservatives to conclude that Bush’s “stay the course” strategy must be rethought. They see Iraq spiraling toward a civil war with 138,000 U.S. troops caught in the middle
The latest defectors – Buckley and Fukuyama – threaten to pull away even members of Bush’s political base. Buckley is the godfather of conservative punditry, while Fukuyama has been a bright light among neocon theorists.
Now, Bush must decide what to do – admit mistakes and heed the advice of critics – or circle the wagons even tighter and lash out at the growing majority of Americans who think the war in Iraq was a deadly mistake.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/022506.html
By Robert Parry
February 25, 2006
In just this past week, conservative legend William F. Buckley Jr. and neoconservative icon Francis Fukuyama have joined the swelling ranks of Americans judging George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq a disaster.
“One can’t doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed,” Buckley wrote at National Review Online on Feb. 24, adding that the challenge now facing Bush and his top advisers is how to cope with the reality of that failure.
“Within their own counsels, different plans have to be made,” Buckley wrote after a week of bloody sectarian violence in Iraq. “And the kernel here is the acknowledgement of defeat.”
Fukuyama, a leading neoconservative theorist, went further citing not just the disaster in Iraq but the catastrophe enveloping Bush’s broader strategy of preemptive military American interventions, waged unilaterally when necessary.
“The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration’s first term is now in shambles,” Fukuyama wrote Feb. 19 in The New York Times Magazine.
“Successful preemption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America’s perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before,” Fukuyama wrote.
While those Americans who always opposed the Iraq War may see this unseemly scramble of Bush’s former allies as a classic case of rats deserting a sinking ship, the loss of these two prominent thinkers of the Right mark a turning point in the political battle over the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
If Bush can’t hold William F. Buckley Jr. – and if even the ranks of the neocons are starting to crack – Bush may soon be confronted with a hard choice of either acknowledging his errors or tightening his authoritarian control of the United States.
Bush’s foundering Iraq policy also raises the stakes in the November elections. Prospects have brightened for those who want Bush held accountable for his reckless deeds and his violation of laws, both domestic and international.
Fortune Reversal
This reversal of fortune is stunning when compared to Bush’s seeming omnipotence in 2002, when he unveiled the Bush Doctrine, and even a year ago when leading U.S. pundits were hailing the President as a visionary leader.
Bush picked his belligerent course in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York and Washington. Though the world had rallied to America’s side – offering both sympathy and cooperation in fighting terrorism – Bush chose to issue ultimatums.
Bush famously told other nations that they were either “with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Vowing to “rid the world of evil,” he made clear he would brush aside any restrictions on his actions, including the United Nations Charters and the Geneva Conventions.
Europeans were soon protesting Bush’s treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and Muslims were voicing growing hatred for the United States. Though Bush's tough actions were popular with his base, they played poorly abroad.
“It annoys your allies in the war against terrorism, and it creates problems for our Muslim allies, too,” one West European ambassador said in 2002. “It puts at stake the moral credibility of the war against terrorism.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Return to Unilateralism.”]
Bush spelled out his broader strategy in a speech at West Point on June 1, 2002. He asserted a unilateral U.S. right to overthrow any government in the world that is deemed a threat to American security, a position so sweeping it lacked historical precedent.
“If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long,” Bush said in describing what soon became known as the “Bush Doctrine.”
Shortly after Bush’s West Point speech, an article at Consortiumnews.com observed that “Bush’s grim vision is of a modern ‘crusade,’ as he once put it, with American military forces striking preemptively at ‘evil-doers’ wherever they live, while U.S. citizens live under a redefined Constitution with rights that can be suspended selectively by one man.
“Beyond the enormous sacrifices of blood, money and freedom that this plan entails, there is another problem: the strategy offers no guarantee of greater security for Americans and runs the risk of deepening the pool of hatred against the United States.
”With his cavalier tough talk, Bush continues to show no sign that he grasps how treacherous his course is, nor how much more difficult it will be if the U.S. alienates large segments of the world's population.” [See “Bush’s Grim Vision”]
Iraq War
On March 19, 2003, Bush took another fateful step, ordering the invasion of Iraq despite being denied authority from the U.N. Security Council.
After ousting Saddam Hussein’s regime three weeks later, Bush basked in popular acclaim from many Americans. He even donned a flight suit for a “Mission Accomplished” aircraft-carrier celebration on May 1, 2003.
During those heady days, Bush and his neoconservative advisers dreamed of remaking the entire Middle East with pro-U.S. leaders chosen through elections and Arab nations ending their hostility toward Israel.
But Bush’s wishful thinking began to run into trouble. A fierce resistance emerged in Iraq, claiming the lives of hundreds – and then thousands – of U.S. soldiers who couldn’t quell the violence. Instead of contributing to peace, the Iraqi elections deepened the country’s sectarian divisions – empowering the Shiite majority while alienating the Sunni minority.
Surging anti-Americanism caused other Middle East elections to have the opposite results from what Bush’s neoconservatives predicted. Instead of breeding moderation, elections in Pakistan, Egypt, Iran and the Palestinian Authority saw gains by Islamic extremists, including a surprise victory by the militant group Hamas in Palestine.
The United States also has seen its international reputation devastated by reports of abuse and torture in U.S.-run detention centers. Rather than the all-powerful nation that the neocons wanted to project, the United States revealed the limitations of its military might and the incompetence of its administrative follow-through.
This string of catastrophes has now led even prominent conservatives to conclude that Bush’s “stay the course” strategy must be rethought. They see Iraq spiraling toward a civil war with 138,000 U.S. troops caught in the middle
The latest defectors – Buckley and Fukuyama – threaten to pull away even members of Bush’s political base. Buckley is the godfather of conservative punditry, while Fukuyama has been a bright light among neocon theorists.
Now, Bush must decide what to do – admit mistakes and heed the advice of critics – or circle the wagons even tighter and lash out at the growing majority of Americans who think the war in Iraq was a deadly mistake.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/022506.html
Losing on Every Front
"By Their Fruits..."
By JOHN BOMAR
Can anyone doubt that the war in Iraq has proved to be Osama bin Laden's sweetest dream come true? In his book on the run up to war, Richard Clarke, the counter-terrorism czar at the White House, immediately recognized this potential risk of an Iraq invasion. He recounts envisioning bin Laden sitting somewhere in a cave actually "willing George Bush to invade Iraq." Clarke knew that such a jingoist misadventure would play right into the hands of the extremists: It would allow them portray the US as an out of control Great Satan with a personal vendetta against the Islamic world and thirst for their oil. Bush's verbal faux paux in using the word "crusade" to describe the effort only heightened the propaganda bonanza for the extremists.
Mr. Clark and other knowledgeable war critics correctly foresaw our present dilemma: the US treasury spent and bleeding red ink, our credibility and respect lost to the world, our military stretched and overextended while fighting on two fronts, near civil war in Iraq, an unfinished job in Afghanistan, deep and serious divisions in our body politic, and immense international distrust of the intentions and motives of our nation. And worst of all, a great strengthening of the forces of international terrorism.
In his recent dialogue in The Nation, former head of the Middle Eastern Division of the CIA, Paul Pillar, reveals in substantial ways the abusive and deceptive tactics used by the Bush administration in their manipulation of intelligence to sell the war on Iraq. He also describes Mr. Bush's complete disregard of cautionary warnings about the post war conditions in Iraq, conditions now proven so sadly true. Pillar's confessions only confirm what many had already begun to accept: we were lied to in justifying the war in Iraq, the intelligence was indeed "cherry-picked," and the administration was ignorant of or did not care about the potential post war civil strife inside Iraq. So obsessed was Mr. Bush to make war on Saddam Hussein that he willingly played us for fools, and went in half-cocked with insufficient troops to manage the post war environment. The myth of a cakewalk followed by rose pedals in the streets and happy-ever-after demonstrates just how disconnected were the war planners from the reality of Iraq.
And the larger war on international terrorism? We are losing by leaps and bounds. Who in their right mind can argue that invading Iraq has made us safer at home? Despite Mr. Bush's vain attempt to portray Iraq as the forefront in the struggle against international terrorism -- which only compounds the core dishonesty that characterized his preemptive invasion -- most now concede that the war has indeed strengthened the Islamofascist movement in unprecedented ways. Sure, Iraq has become a magnet for those in the Middle East who would actively make war against us, but the opportunity we handed them was of our own making. By almost universal agreement it is now accepted that we have actually strengthened international terrorism and the aura of Osama bin Laden by creating a "breeding and training ground for terrorists" in Iraq.
World opinion does matter. In many ways it provides a mirror by which we may see ourselves. Right now we hold the lowest position ever, even worse than the terrible days of Vietnam. We have been disgraced and humiliated in the eyes of the world under Mr. Bush's blundering helmsmanship.
All military commanders are held to the high standard of outcome and effect, it is the price they pay for the power given them. By this measure Mr. Bush has been a miserable failure bordering on incompetence. We are weaker now than at any time in recent history. We have squandered the good will afforded us after the events of 9/ll and thrown away our punch on a tin pot dictator who posed absolutely no threat to us whatsoever. We are bogged down in a foreign land half a world away that is perhaps quickly approaching a state of civil war. We have handed the terrorists a propaganda bonanza on a silver platter and multiplied the hatred and resentment toward us in the Islamic world to immense proportion. Many argue that the recent success of extremists in Palestine and Iran have been a direct result of our Iraqi invasion; sweeping the floor from underneath the moderate/progressive voices in the region.
If "by their fruit ye shall know them," then the present realities for the United States speak of leadership that has utterly failed in its duty to lead with wisdom, prudence and forethought. From the missed opportunities to identify and thwart the airborne attacks of 9/11, to the missed opportunities to capture Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora, to the lies that preceded the trumped up war in Iraq, to the unwitting strengthening of our real enemies, to the bankrupt treasury and deep divisions within the US, this administration's legacy will be one of missed opportunities, fatal misjudgments, arrogant and short sighted priorities, reactionary jingoism, and delusional incompetence: Bitter fruits indeed.
http://counterpunch.com/bomar02252006.html
"By Their Fruits..."
By JOHN BOMAR
Can anyone doubt that the war in Iraq has proved to be Osama bin Laden's sweetest dream come true? In his book on the run up to war, Richard Clarke, the counter-terrorism czar at the White House, immediately recognized this potential risk of an Iraq invasion. He recounts envisioning bin Laden sitting somewhere in a cave actually "willing George Bush to invade Iraq." Clarke knew that such a jingoist misadventure would play right into the hands of the extremists: It would allow them portray the US as an out of control Great Satan with a personal vendetta against the Islamic world and thirst for their oil. Bush's verbal faux paux in using the word "crusade" to describe the effort only heightened the propaganda bonanza for the extremists.
Mr. Clark and other knowledgeable war critics correctly foresaw our present dilemma: the US treasury spent and bleeding red ink, our credibility and respect lost to the world, our military stretched and overextended while fighting on two fronts, near civil war in Iraq, an unfinished job in Afghanistan, deep and serious divisions in our body politic, and immense international distrust of the intentions and motives of our nation. And worst of all, a great strengthening of the forces of international terrorism.
In his recent dialogue in The Nation, former head of the Middle Eastern Division of the CIA, Paul Pillar, reveals in substantial ways the abusive and deceptive tactics used by the Bush administration in their manipulation of intelligence to sell the war on Iraq. He also describes Mr. Bush's complete disregard of cautionary warnings about the post war conditions in Iraq, conditions now proven so sadly true. Pillar's confessions only confirm what many had already begun to accept: we were lied to in justifying the war in Iraq, the intelligence was indeed "cherry-picked," and the administration was ignorant of or did not care about the potential post war civil strife inside Iraq. So obsessed was Mr. Bush to make war on Saddam Hussein that he willingly played us for fools, and went in half-cocked with insufficient troops to manage the post war environment. The myth of a cakewalk followed by rose pedals in the streets and happy-ever-after demonstrates just how disconnected were the war planners from the reality of Iraq.
And the larger war on international terrorism? We are losing by leaps and bounds. Who in their right mind can argue that invading Iraq has made us safer at home? Despite Mr. Bush's vain attempt to portray Iraq as the forefront in the struggle against international terrorism -- which only compounds the core dishonesty that characterized his preemptive invasion -- most now concede that the war has indeed strengthened the Islamofascist movement in unprecedented ways. Sure, Iraq has become a magnet for those in the Middle East who would actively make war against us, but the opportunity we handed them was of our own making. By almost universal agreement it is now accepted that we have actually strengthened international terrorism and the aura of Osama bin Laden by creating a "breeding and training ground for terrorists" in Iraq.
World opinion does matter. In many ways it provides a mirror by which we may see ourselves. Right now we hold the lowest position ever, even worse than the terrible days of Vietnam. We have been disgraced and humiliated in the eyes of the world under Mr. Bush's blundering helmsmanship.
All military commanders are held to the high standard of outcome and effect, it is the price they pay for the power given them. By this measure Mr. Bush has been a miserable failure bordering on incompetence. We are weaker now than at any time in recent history. We have squandered the good will afforded us after the events of 9/ll and thrown away our punch on a tin pot dictator who posed absolutely no threat to us whatsoever. We are bogged down in a foreign land half a world away that is perhaps quickly approaching a state of civil war. We have handed the terrorists a propaganda bonanza on a silver platter and multiplied the hatred and resentment toward us in the Islamic world to immense proportion. Many argue that the recent success of extremists in Palestine and Iran have been a direct result of our Iraqi invasion; sweeping the floor from underneath the moderate/progressive voices in the region.
If "by their fruit ye shall know them," then the present realities for the United States speak of leadership that has utterly failed in its duty to lead with wisdom, prudence and forethought. From the missed opportunities to identify and thwart the airborne attacks of 9/11, to the missed opportunities to capture Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora, to the lies that preceded the trumped up war in Iraq, to the unwitting strengthening of our real enemies, to the bankrupt treasury and deep divisions within the US, this administration's legacy will be one of missed opportunities, fatal misjudgments, arrogant and short sighted priorities, reactionary jingoism, and delusional incompetence: Bitter fruits indeed.
http://counterpunch.com/bomar02252006.html
Published on Saturday, February 25, 2006 by the Los Angeles Times
America: Utopia Lost
Fifty years ago, America's future was limitless. So what happened to optimism?
by Andrew L. Yarrow
America has never been richer, but it once was much more optimistic — even utopian — about its future.
In 1956, Fortune magazine published "The Fabulous Future," a book of essays by luminaries forecasting a nation of technological and economic wonders by 1980. Adlai Stevenson spoke of "the most extraordinary growth any nation or civilization has ever experienced." George Meany predicted "ever-rising" living standards. And David Sarnoff gushed, "There is no element of material progress we know today that will not seem from the vantage point of 1980 a fumbling prelude."
That same year, that wild utopian, Richard Nixon, then vice president in the Eisenhower administration, heralded a 30-hour, four-day workweek "in the not too distant future." Gallup polls found that only 3% of the population questioned whether the nation was enjoying "good times," and just 8% doubted that the good times would keep getting better indefinitely.
From the end of the Korean War to the peak of the Vietnam War, American media trumpeted a utopian future. A 1953 issue of Time predicted that a newborn would be twice as wealthy by her high school graduation and that a worker 100 years in the future would produce in seven hours what he now produced in 40. In 1954, Life magazine predicted a technotopia of jets, computers, color TVs, superhighways and doubled living standards by 1976. In 1959, Newsweek predicted that the 1960s would bring short workweeks, automatic highways and self-operating lawnmowers.
Most Americans and their leaders, from the Eisenhower administration to John Kennedy's top advisors to the chattering classes, which wrote such books as "The Challenge of Abundance," believed in a land of milk and honey from New York to L.A. JFK, who challenged us to land on the moon, also declared in his inaugural address that "man holds in his hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty."
According to the National Opinion Research Center, American happiness peaked between the mid-1960s and 1973. Today, nary a politician nor a public intellectual — not even the cybergeeks — dares predict soaring incomes, limitless leisure or technologies to make our lives pure bliss.
Studies show that happiness rises with incomes — up to the point at which basic needs are met, after which it stagnates as aspirations also rise with income. The recent Nobel Prize-winning economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls this a "hedonic treadmill." Like the proverbial rats, we run faster and faster — and so do our aspirations — but the bottom line is the old cliche: Money can't buy happiness.
Of course, Western Europeans and Japanese are gloomier than we are. But some of that starry-eyed optimism of late 1950s America can be seen today — on the streets of Shanghai. Meanwhile, Americans find more happiness in marriages, relationships and children. But that fails to explain why we, as a nation, have lost the capacity to dream big. Why does no one talk about doubling living standards, 20-hour workweeks or silly but delightful gadgetry like the personal helicopters envisioned in the 1950s? Why have the Jetsons been succeeded by Homer Simpson?
Of course, one reason is that utopia has not come to pass. Many Americans have a harder time making ends meet; working hours are longer, reversing a 50-year decline; the cool new gadgets come with neuralgic 300-page manuals. But the other reason is the lack of what George Bush pere so eloquently referred to as "the vision thing" in politicians who are busy with political catfights, tinkering at the policy margins or raising money.
"Utopianism" is often used as a pejorative, but our nation was built on — and flourished on — utopian dreams. We need them now more than ever.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0225-28.htm
America: Utopia Lost
Fifty years ago, America's future was limitless. So what happened to optimism?
by Andrew L. Yarrow
America has never been richer, but it once was much more optimistic — even utopian — about its future.
In 1956, Fortune magazine published "The Fabulous Future," a book of essays by luminaries forecasting a nation of technological and economic wonders by 1980. Adlai Stevenson spoke of "the most extraordinary growth any nation or civilization has ever experienced." George Meany predicted "ever-rising" living standards. And David Sarnoff gushed, "There is no element of material progress we know today that will not seem from the vantage point of 1980 a fumbling prelude."
That same year, that wild utopian, Richard Nixon, then vice president in the Eisenhower administration, heralded a 30-hour, four-day workweek "in the not too distant future." Gallup polls found that only 3% of the population questioned whether the nation was enjoying "good times," and just 8% doubted that the good times would keep getting better indefinitely.
From the end of the Korean War to the peak of the Vietnam War, American media trumpeted a utopian future. A 1953 issue of Time predicted that a newborn would be twice as wealthy by her high school graduation and that a worker 100 years in the future would produce in seven hours what he now produced in 40. In 1954, Life magazine predicted a technotopia of jets, computers, color TVs, superhighways and doubled living standards by 1976. In 1959, Newsweek predicted that the 1960s would bring short workweeks, automatic highways and self-operating lawnmowers.
Most Americans and their leaders, from the Eisenhower administration to John Kennedy's top advisors to the chattering classes, which wrote such books as "The Challenge of Abundance," believed in a land of milk and honey from New York to L.A. JFK, who challenged us to land on the moon, also declared in his inaugural address that "man holds in his hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty."
According to the National Opinion Research Center, American happiness peaked between the mid-1960s and 1973. Today, nary a politician nor a public intellectual — not even the cybergeeks — dares predict soaring incomes, limitless leisure or technologies to make our lives pure bliss.
Studies show that happiness rises with incomes — up to the point at which basic needs are met, after which it stagnates as aspirations also rise with income. The recent Nobel Prize-winning economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls this a "hedonic treadmill." Like the proverbial rats, we run faster and faster — and so do our aspirations — but the bottom line is the old cliche: Money can't buy happiness.
Of course, Western Europeans and Japanese are gloomier than we are. But some of that starry-eyed optimism of late 1950s America can be seen today — on the streets of Shanghai. Meanwhile, Americans find more happiness in marriages, relationships and children. But that fails to explain why we, as a nation, have lost the capacity to dream big. Why does no one talk about doubling living standards, 20-hour workweeks or silly but delightful gadgetry like the personal helicopters envisioned in the 1950s? Why have the Jetsons been succeeded by Homer Simpson?
Of course, one reason is that utopia has not come to pass. Many Americans have a harder time making ends meet; working hours are longer, reversing a 50-year decline; the cool new gadgets come with neuralgic 300-page manuals. But the other reason is the lack of what George Bush pere so eloquently referred to as "the vision thing" in politicians who are busy with political catfights, tinkering at the policy margins or raising money.
"Utopianism" is often used as a pejorative, but our nation was built on — and flourished on — utopian dreams. We need them now more than ever.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0225-28.htm
February 25, 2006
Time to Disband Homeland Security and Renew Democracy
By Stephen Crockett
In the aftermath of 9-11, American politics and government went slightly insane. America turned its collective back on 200 plus years of successful democratic government and turned toward its dark side. The national security state began to be seen as needed and desirable. This insane model of government always puts the State over the Individual and becomes both corrupt and dictatorial. Examples in history are numerous.
The United States of America began as a reaction to corrupt, dictatorial rule from the English monarchy. In modern times, the world has seen “national security” states arise in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Soviet Union, Pinochet Chile, and Franco Spain. Other examples can be found all over the globe. Dictatorial powers were seized by corrupt political figures with ardent followers blinded by ideology following “national security” crises in every example. After 9-11, we started speeding down that slippery slope. It is not too late for us as a nation to come to a screeching halt and return to our American political traditions should we make that choice as a nation.
Current events are forcing us to examine our course based on results instead of ideology. We have seen a great American city almost destroyed because we put national disaster relief under the control of incompetents at the Homeland Security Department. New Orleans started opening the eyes of American citizens everywhere.
Our government is ignoring federal law whenever it so desires in the name of national security. We have government run secret prisons. We lock people away without filing criminal charges and never set trial dates. We conduct torture and ignore the documented facts about that torture. We launch aggressive wars based on false information and propaganda aimed at our citizens along with the rest of the world.
We trample individual rights and civil liberties won at great expense for millions of American soldiers over generations in the name of “national security.” We conduct government in secret to hide corruption at the highest levels claiming security concerns. We spy on political dissenters who are seeking to return our nation to traditional American political values. We use Homeland Security and the American military to spy on average American citizens doing their civic duty.
The Bush Republicans controlling our government encourage the abuse of public office to advance strictly partisan political goals. They are trying falsely to redefine American patriotism as blindly following the most extreme of Republican Right policies and ideology.
They are assaulting the Bill of Rights and attacking the Constitutional principles of our nation. Our Constitutional system of checks and balances between competing branches of government, which was designed to prevent dictatorial government and guarantee individual liberty, has almost been overthrown under Bush Republican rule. Separation of Church and State has been severely undermined by deliberate policy thereby threatening both with the corruption. Government has no business interfering in the religious aspects of our lives.
Homeland Security can act as a cover for all kinds of corruption and political abuse. Secrecy in government has always fostered corruption and abuse. Traditionally, America divided our intelligence and law enforcement agencies up into many different competing units. The competition held each unit act more aggressively and efficiently. The different units helped prevent abuses by other units using our traditional checks and balances system. The system worked very well as long as it was overseen by a competent chief executive in the White House, effectively monitored by Congress and followed federal court guidelines.
9-11 did not demonstrate a failure of our system based on design. It instead demonstrated that the individuals involved failed the nation. The White House dropped the ball on national security in the months immediately before 9-11. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield and Ashcroft were largely responsible along with their aides and other individuals in various federal agencies. They were not coordinating the activities of the various federal agencies involved in law enforcement or intelligence effectively.
The hysteria and fear fostered and used by Bush, Cheney and the rest of the Bush Republicans was used to cover their failures and to achieve unchecked political power. Bush and Cheney should have been impeached for incompetence for allowing the 9-11 attacks to happen!
We now have a Homeland Security Department interfering with normal domestic political activity and threatening our democratic form of government. We need to return to our previous separation of the various units system concerning the law enforcement and intelligence agencies. We will get better unbiased intelligence information and more efficient law enforcement without as much politicization.
Homeland Security officials were somehow involved in the permitting unsupervised voting counting in Ohio during the 2004 Presidential election. The media was blocked from observing the vote count in at least one County as a result of interference from Homeland Security according to numerous media reports.
In Idaho, Homeland Security was used to harass and intimidate a federal employee over an anti-War bumper sticker on his personal automobile Red State, Meet Police State http://www.boiseweekly.com/gyrobase/content?oid=oid:158729 . Homeland Security seems to be engaged in forcing American citizens to support the unpopular, unjust and unwise Iraq War policy of the Bush-Cheney Administration.
The national security state has really gotten totally out of control in Alaska, as evidenced in this recent example by Brad Friedman at Brad Blog.
“A bizarre story concerning Alaska's 2004 Election has taken yet another even more bizarre turn this week, The BRAD BLOG has learned.
A long-standing public records request for the release of Election 2004 database files created by Diebold's voting system had been long delayed after several odd twists and turns, including the revelation of a contract with the state claiming the information to be a "company secret."
But while it finally appeared as though the state had agreed to release the information (after reserving the right to "manipulate the data" in consultation with Diebold before releasing it), the state's top Security Official has now -- at the last minute -- stepped in to deny the request. The grounds for the denial: the release of the information poses a "security risk" to the state of Alaska.
We couldn't make this stuff up...
Full Story, including the Letters from Election & Security Officials and Much More:
http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002467.htm “
It is now clear that we need to turn our back on the national security state model and return to the kind of wise, traditional American government founded by the leaders of the American Revolution and strengthened by generations of American heroes.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_st...isband_home.htm
Time to Disband Homeland Security and Renew Democracy
By Stephen Crockett
In the aftermath of 9-11, American politics and government went slightly insane. America turned its collective back on 200 plus years of successful democratic government and turned toward its dark side. The national security state began to be seen as needed and desirable. This insane model of government always puts the State over the Individual and becomes both corrupt and dictatorial. Examples in history are numerous.
The United States of America began as a reaction to corrupt, dictatorial rule from the English monarchy. In modern times, the world has seen “national security” states arise in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Soviet Union, Pinochet Chile, and Franco Spain. Other examples can be found all over the globe. Dictatorial powers were seized by corrupt political figures with ardent followers blinded by ideology following “national security” crises in every example. After 9-11, we started speeding down that slippery slope. It is not too late for us as a nation to come to a screeching halt and return to our American political traditions should we make that choice as a nation.
Current events are forcing us to examine our course based on results instead of ideology. We have seen a great American city almost destroyed because we put national disaster relief under the control of incompetents at the Homeland Security Department. New Orleans started opening the eyes of American citizens everywhere.
Our government is ignoring federal law whenever it so desires in the name of national security. We have government run secret prisons. We lock people away without filing criminal charges and never set trial dates. We conduct torture and ignore the documented facts about that torture. We launch aggressive wars based on false information and propaganda aimed at our citizens along with the rest of the world.
We trample individual rights and civil liberties won at great expense for millions of American soldiers over generations in the name of “national security.” We conduct government in secret to hide corruption at the highest levels claiming security concerns. We spy on political dissenters who are seeking to return our nation to traditional American political values. We use Homeland Security and the American military to spy on average American citizens doing their civic duty.
The Bush Republicans controlling our government encourage the abuse of public office to advance strictly partisan political goals. They are trying falsely to redefine American patriotism as blindly following the most extreme of Republican Right policies and ideology.
They are assaulting the Bill of Rights and attacking the Constitutional principles of our nation. Our Constitutional system of checks and balances between competing branches of government, which was designed to prevent dictatorial government and guarantee individual liberty, has almost been overthrown under Bush Republican rule. Separation of Church and State has been severely undermined by deliberate policy thereby threatening both with the corruption. Government has no business interfering in the religious aspects of our lives.
Homeland Security can act as a cover for all kinds of corruption and political abuse. Secrecy in government has always fostered corruption and abuse. Traditionally, America divided our intelligence and law enforcement agencies up into many different competing units. The competition held each unit act more aggressively and efficiently. The different units helped prevent abuses by other units using our traditional checks and balances system. The system worked very well as long as it was overseen by a competent chief executive in the White House, effectively monitored by Congress and followed federal court guidelines.
9-11 did not demonstrate a failure of our system based on design. It instead demonstrated that the individuals involved failed the nation. The White House dropped the ball on national security in the months immediately before 9-11. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield and Ashcroft were largely responsible along with their aides and other individuals in various federal agencies. They were not coordinating the activities of the various federal agencies involved in law enforcement or intelligence effectively.
The hysteria and fear fostered and used by Bush, Cheney and the rest of the Bush Republicans was used to cover their failures and to achieve unchecked political power. Bush and Cheney should have been impeached for incompetence for allowing the 9-11 attacks to happen!
We now have a Homeland Security Department interfering with normal domestic political activity and threatening our democratic form of government. We need to return to our previous separation of the various units system concerning the law enforcement and intelligence agencies. We will get better unbiased intelligence information and more efficient law enforcement without as much politicization.
Homeland Security officials were somehow involved in the permitting unsupervised voting counting in Ohio during the 2004 Presidential election. The media was blocked from observing the vote count in at least one County as a result of interference from Homeland Security according to numerous media reports.
In Idaho, Homeland Security was used to harass and intimidate a federal employee over an anti-War bumper sticker on his personal automobile Red State, Meet Police State http://www.boiseweekly.com/gyrobase/content?oid=oid:158729 . Homeland Security seems to be engaged in forcing American citizens to support the unpopular, unjust and unwise Iraq War policy of the Bush-Cheney Administration.
The national security state has really gotten totally out of control in Alaska, as evidenced in this recent example by Brad Friedman at Brad Blog.
“A bizarre story concerning Alaska's 2004 Election has taken yet another even more bizarre turn this week, The BRAD BLOG has learned.
A long-standing public records request for the release of Election 2004 database files created by Diebold's voting system had been long delayed after several odd twists and turns, including the revelation of a contract with the state claiming the information to be a "company secret."
But while it finally appeared as though the state had agreed to release the information (after reserving the right to "manipulate the data" in consultation with Diebold before releasing it), the state's top Security Official has now -- at the last minute -- stepped in to deny the request. The grounds for the denial: the release of the information poses a "security risk" to the state of Alaska.
We couldn't make this stuff up...
Full Story, including the Letters from Election & Security Officials and Much More:
http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002467.htm “
It is now clear that we need to turn our back on the national security state model and return to the kind of wise, traditional American government founded by the leaders of the American Revolution and strengthened by generations of American heroes.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_st...isband_home.htm
A Judicial Green Light for Torture
The New York Times | Editorial
Sunday 26 February 2006
The administration's tendency to dodge accountability for lawless actions by resorting to secrecy and claims of national security is on sharp display in the case of a Syrian-born Canadian, Maher Arar, who spent months under torture because of United States action. A federal trial judge in Brooklyn has refused to stand up to the executive branch, in a decision that is both chilling and ripe for prompt overturning.
Mr. Arar, a 35-year-old software engineer whose case has been detailed in a pair of columns by Bob Herbert, was detained at Kennedy Airport in 2002 while on his way home from a family vacation. He was held in solitary confinement in a Brooklyn detention center and interrogated without proper access to legal counsel. Finally, he was shipped off to a Syrian prison. There, he was held for 10 months in an underground rat-infested dungeon and brutally tortured because officials suspected that he was a member of Al Qaeda. All this was part of a morally and legally unsupportable United States practice known as "extraordinary rendition," in which the federal government outsources interrogations to regimes known to use torture and lacking fundamental human rights protections.
The maltreatment of Mr. Arar would be reprehensible - and illegal under the United States Constitution and applicable treaties - even had the suspicions of terrorist involvement proven true. But no link to any terrorist organization or activity emerged, which is why the Syrians eventually released him. Mr. Arar then sued for damages.
The judge in the case, David Trager of Federal District Court in Brooklyn, did not dispute that United States officials had reason to know that Mr. Arar faced a likelihood of torture in Syria. But he took the rare step of blocking the lawsuit entirely, saying that the use of torture in rendition cases is a foreign policy question not appropriate for court review, and that going forward would mean disclosing state secrets.
It is hard to see why resolving Mr. Arar's case would necessitate the revelation of privileged material. Moreover, as the Supreme Court made clear in a pair of 2004 decisions rebuking the government for its policies of holding foreign terrorism suspects in an indefinite legal limbo in Guant'namo and elsewhere, even during the war on terror, the government's actions are subject to court review and must adhere to the rule of law.
With the Bush administration claiming imperial powers to detain, spy on and even torture people, and the Republican Congress stuck largely in enabling mode, the role of judges in checking executive branch excesses becomes all the more crucial. If the courts collapse when confronted with spurious government claims about the needs of national security, so will basic American liberties.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/022606C.shtml
The New York Times | Editorial
Sunday 26 February 2006
The administration's tendency to dodge accountability for lawless actions by resorting to secrecy and claims of national security is on sharp display in the case of a Syrian-born Canadian, Maher Arar, who spent months under torture because of United States action. A federal trial judge in Brooklyn has refused to stand up to the executive branch, in a decision that is both chilling and ripe for prompt overturning.
Mr. Arar, a 35-year-old software engineer whose case has been detailed in a pair of columns by Bob Herbert, was detained at Kennedy Airport in 2002 while on his way home from a family vacation. He was held in solitary confinement in a Brooklyn detention center and interrogated without proper access to legal counsel. Finally, he was shipped off to a Syrian prison. There, he was held for 10 months in an underground rat-infested dungeon and brutally tortured because officials suspected that he was a member of Al Qaeda. All this was part of a morally and legally unsupportable United States practice known as "extraordinary rendition," in which the federal government outsources interrogations to regimes known to use torture and lacking fundamental human rights protections.
The maltreatment of Mr. Arar would be reprehensible - and illegal under the United States Constitution and applicable treaties - even had the suspicions of terrorist involvement proven true. But no link to any terrorist organization or activity emerged, which is why the Syrians eventually released him. Mr. Arar then sued for damages.
The judge in the case, David Trager of Federal District Court in Brooklyn, did not dispute that United States officials had reason to know that Mr. Arar faced a likelihood of torture in Syria. But he took the rare step of blocking the lawsuit entirely, saying that the use of torture in rendition cases is a foreign policy question not appropriate for court review, and that going forward would mean disclosing state secrets.
It is hard to see why resolving Mr. Arar's case would necessitate the revelation of privileged material. Moreover, as the Supreme Court made clear in a pair of 2004 decisions rebuking the government for its policies of holding foreign terrorism suspects in an indefinite legal limbo in Guant'namo and elsewhere, even during the war on terror, the government's actions are subject to court review and must adhere to the rule of law.
With the Bush administration claiming imperial powers to detain, spy on and even torture people, and the Republican Congress stuck largely in enabling mode, the role of judges in checking executive branch excesses becomes all the more crucial. If the courts collapse when confronted with spurious government claims about the needs of national security, so will basic American liberties.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/022606C.shtml
Published on Monday, February 27, 2006 by the Independent/UK
Defeat is Victory, Death is Life
Everyone in the Middle East rewrites history, but never before have we had a US administration so wilfully, dishonestly and ruthlessly reinterpreting tragedy as success, defeat as victory, death as life - helped, I have to add, by the compliant American press
by Robert Fisk
I'm reminded not so much of Vietnam as of the British and French commanders of the First World War who repeatedly lied about military victory over the Kaiser as they pushed hundreds of thousands of their men through the butchers' shops of the Somme, Verdun and Gallipoli. The only difference now is that we are pushing hundreds of thousands of Arabs though the butchers' shops - and don't even care.
Last week's visit to Beirut by one of the blindest of George Bush's bats - his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice - was indicative of the cruelty that now pervades Washington. She brazenly talked about the burgeoning "democracies" of the Middle East while utterly ignoring the bloodbaths in Iraq and the growing sectarian tensions of Lebanon, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Perhaps the key to her indifference can be found in her evidence to the Senate Committee on International Affairs where she denounced Iran as "the greatest strategic challenge" facing the US in the region, because Iran uses policies that "contradict the nature of the kind of Middle East sought by the United States".
As Bouthaina Shaaban, one of the brightest of Syria's not always very bright team of government ministers, noted: "What is the nature of the kind of Middle East sought by the United States? Should Middle East states adapt themselves to that nature, designed oceans away?" As Maureen Dowd, the best and only really worthwhile columnist on the boring New York Times, observed this month, Bush "believes in self-determination only if he's doing the determining ... The Bushies are more obsessed with snooping on Americans than fathoming how other cultures think and react." And conniving with rogue regimes, too, Dowd might have added.
Take Donald Rumsfeld, the reprehensible man who helped to kick off the "shock and awe" mess that has now trapped more than 100,000 Americans in the wastes of Iraq. He's been taking a leisurely trip around North Africa to consult some of America's nastiest dictators, among them President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, the man with the largest secret service in the Arab world and whose policemen have perfected the best method of gleaning information from suspected "terrorists": to hold them down and stuff bleach-soaked rags into their mouths until they have almost drowned.
The Tunisians learned this from the somewhat cruder methods of the Algerians next door whose government death squads slaughtered quite a few of the 150,000 victims of the recent war against the Islamists. The Algerian lads - and I've interviewed a few of them after their nightmares persuaded them to seek asylum in London - would strap their naked victims to a ladder and, if the "chiffon" torture didn't work, they'd push a tube down the victim's throat and turn on a water tap until the prisoner swelled up like a balloon. There was a special department (at the Chateauneuf police station, in case Donald Rumsfeld wants to know) for torturing women, who were inevitably raped before being dispatched by an execution squad.
All this I mention because Rumsfeld's also been cosying up to the Algerians. On a visit to Algiers this month, he announced that "the United States and Algeria have a multifaceted relationship. It involves political and economic as well as military-to-military co-operation. And we very much value the co-operation we are receiving in counter-terrorism..." Yes, I imagine the "chiffon" technique is easy to learn, the abuse of prisoners, too - just like Abu Ghraib, for example, which now seems to have been the fault of journalists rather than America's thugs.
Rumsfeld's latest pronouncements have included a defence of the Pentagon's system of buying favourable news stories in Iraq with bribes - "non-traditional means to provide accurate information" was his fantasy description of this latest attempt to obscure the collapse of the American regime in Baghdad - and an attack on our reporting of the Abu Ghraib tortures. "Consider for a moment the vast quantity of column inches and hours of television devoted to the detainee abuse [sic] at Abu Ghraib. Compare that to the volume of coverage and condemnation associated with, say, the discovery of Saddam Hussein's mass graves, which were filled with hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis."
Let's expose this whopping lie. We were exposing Saddam's vile regime, especially his use of gas, as long ago as 1983. I was refused a visa to Iraq by Saddam's satraps for exposing their vile tortures at - Abu Ghraib. And what was Donald Rumsfeld doing? Visiting Baghdad, grovelling before Saddam, to whom he did not mention the murders and mass graves, which he knew about, and pleading with the Beast of Baghdad to reopen the US embassy in Iraq.
With the usual press courtiers in tow, Rumsfeld has no problems, witness George Melloan's recent interview with the Beast of Washington in his Boeing 737: "He generously spares me time for a chat about defence strategy. Bright sunlight streams in and lights his face ... Sitting across from him at a desk high above the clouds, one wonders if the ability of this modern Jove to call down lightning on transgressors will be equal to the tasks ahead."
And so myth-making and tragedy go hand in hand. Iraq's monumental catastrophe has become routine, shapeless, an incipient "civil war". Note how the American framework of disaster is now being portrayed as an Iraqi vs Iraqi war, as if the huge and brutal US occupation has nothing to do with the appalling violence in Iraq. They blow up each other's mosques? They just don't want to get on. We told them to have a non-sectarian government and they refused. That, I suspect, will be the get-out line when the next deluge overwhelms the Americans in Iraq.
Winston Churchill, when the Iraqis staged their insurgency against British rule in 1920, called Iraq "an ungrateful volcano". But let's just sit back and enjoy the view. Democracy is coming to the Middle East. People are enjoying more liberties. History doesn't matter, only the future. And the future for the people of the Middle East is becoming darker and bloodier by the day. I guess it just depends whether "Jove" is up to his job when all that bright sunlight streams in and lights his face.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0227-21.htm
Defeat is Victory, Death is Life
Everyone in the Middle East rewrites history, but never before have we had a US administration so wilfully, dishonestly and ruthlessly reinterpreting tragedy as success, defeat as victory, death as life - helped, I have to add, by the compliant American press
by Robert Fisk
I'm reminded not so much of Vietnam as of the British and French commanders of the First World War who repeatedly lied about military victory over the Kaiser as they pushed hundreds of thousands of their men through the butchers' shops of the Somme, Verdun and Gallipoli. The only difference now is that we are pushing hundreds of thousands of Arabs though the butchers' shops - and don't even care.
Last week's visit to Beirut by one of the blindest of George Bush's bats - his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice - was indicative of the cruelty that now pervades Washington. She brazenly talked about the burgeoning "democracies" of the Middle East while utterly ignoring the bloodbaths in Iraq and the growing sectarian tensions of Lebanon, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Perhaps the key to her indifference can be found in her evidence to the Senate Committee on International Affairs where she denounced Iran as "the greatest strategic challenge" facing the US in the region, because Iran uses policies that "contradict the nature of the kind of Middle East sought by the United States".
As Bouthaina Shaaban, one of the brightest of Syria's not always very bright team of government ministers, noted: "What is the nature of the kind of Middle East sought by the United States? Should Middle East states adapt themselves to that nature, designed oceans away?" As Maureen Dowd, the best and only really worthwhile columnist on the boring New York Times, observed this month, Bush "believes in self-determination only if he's doing the determining ... The Bushies are more obsessed with snooping on Americans than fathoming how other cultures think and react." And conniving with rogue regimes, too, Dowd might have added.
Take Donald Rumsfeld, the reprehensible man who helped to kick off the "shock and awe" mess that has now trapped more than 100,000 Americans in the wastes of Iraq. He's been taking a leisurely trip around North Africa to consult some of America's nastiest dictators, among them President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, the man with the largest secret service in the Arab world and whose policemen have perfected the best method of gleaning information from suspected "terrorists": to hold them down and stuff bleach-soaked rags into their mouths until they have almost drowned.
The Tunisians learned this from the somewhat cruder methods of the Algerians next door whose government death squads slaughtered quite a few of the 150,000 victims of the recent war against the Islamists. The Algerian lads - and I've interviewed a few of them after their nightmares persuaded them to seek asylum in London - would strap their naked victims to a ladder and, if the "chiffon" torture didn't work, they'd push a tube down the victim's throat and turn on a water tap until the prisoner swelled up like a balloon. There was a special department (at the Chateauneuf police station, in case Donald Rumsfeld wants to know) for torturing women, who were inevitably raped before being dispatched by an execution squad.
All this I mention because Rumsfeld's also been cosying up to the Algerians. On a visit to Algiers this month, he announced that "the United States and Algeria have a multifaceted relationship. It involves political and economic as well as military-to-military co-operation. And we very much value the co-operation we are receiving in counter-terrorism..." Yes, I imagine the "chiffon" technique is easy to learn, the abuse of prisoners, too - just like Abu Ghraib, for example, which now seems to have been the fault of journalists rather than America's thugs.
Rumsfeld's latest pronouncements have included a defence of the Pentagon's system of buying favourable news stories in Iraq with bribes - "non-traditional means to provide accurate information" was his fantasy description of this latest attempt to obscure the collapse of the American regime in Baghdad - and an attack on our reporting of the Abu Ghraib tortures. "Consider for a moment the vast quantity of column inches and hours of television devoted to the detainee abuse [sic] at Abu Ghraib. Compare that to the volume of coverage and condemnation associated with, say, the discovery of Saddam Hussein's mass graves, which were filled with hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis."
Let's expose this whopping lie. We were exposing Saddam's vile regime, especially his use of gas, as long ago as 1983. I was refused a visa to Iraq by Saddam's satraps for exposing their vile tortures at - Abu Ghraib. And what was Donald Rumsfeld doing? Visiting Baghdad, grovelling before Saddam, to whom he did not mention the murders and mass graves, which he knew about, and pleading with the Beast of Baghdad to reopen the US embassy in Iraq.
With the usual press courtiers in tow, Rumsfeld has no problems, witness George Melloan's recent interview with the Beast of Washington in his Boeing 737: "He generously spares me time for a chat about defence strategy. Bright sunlight streams in and lights his face ... Sitting across from him at a desk high above the clouds, one wonders if the ability of this modern Jove to call down lightning on transgressors will be equal to the tasks ahead."
And so myth-making and tragedy go hand in hand. Iraq's monumental catastrophe has become routine, shapeless, an incipient "civil war". Note how the American framework of disaster is now being portrayed as an Iraqi vs Iraqi war, as if the huge and brutal US occupation has nothing to do with the appalling violence in Iraq. They blow up each other's mosques? They just don't want to get on. We told them to have a non-sectarian government and they refused. That, I suspect, will be the get-out line when the next deluge overwhelms the Americans in Iraq.
Winston Churchill, when the Iraqis staged their insurgency against British rule in 1920, called Iraq "an ungrateful volcano". But let's just sit back and enjoy the view. Democracy is coming to the Middle East. People are enjoying more liberties. History doesn't matter, only the future. And the future for the people of the Middle East is becoming darker and bloodier by the day. I guess it just depends whether "Jove" is up to his job when all that bright sunlight streams in and lights his face.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0227-21.htm
The Case for Impeachment
By Lewis H. Lapham
Harper's Magazine
Monday 27 February 2006
Why we can no longer afford George W. Bush.
On December 18 of last year, Congressman John Conyers Jr. (D., Mich.) introduced into the House of Representatives a resolution inviting it to form "a select committee to investigate the Administration's intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment." Although buttressed two days previously by the news of the National Security Agency's illegal surveillance of the American citizenry, the request attracted little or no attention in the press-nothing on television or in the major papers, some scattered applause from the left-wing blogs, heavy sarcasm on the websites flying the flags of the militant right. The nearly complete silence raised the question as to what it was the congressman had in mind, and to whom did he think he was speaking? In time of war few propositions would seem as futile as the attempt to impeach a president whose political party controls the Congress; as the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee stationed on Capitol Hill for the last forty years, Representative Conyers presumably knew that to expect the Republican caucus in the House to take note of his invitation, much less arm it with the power of subpoena, was to expect a miracle of democratic transformation and rebirth not unlike the one looked for by President Bush under the prayer rugs in Baghdad. Unless the congressman intended some sort of symbolic gesture, self-serving and harmless, what did he hope to prove or to gain? He answered the question in early January, on the phone from Detroit during the congressional winter recess.
"To take away the excuse," he said, "that we didn't know." So that two or four or ten years from now, if somebody should ask, "Where were you, Conyers, and where was the United States Congress?" when the Bush Administration declared the Constitution inoperative and revoked the license of parliamentary government, none of the company now present can plead ignorance or temporary insanity, can say that "somehow it escaped our notice" that the President was setting himself up as a supreme leader exempt from the rule of law.
A reason with which it was hard to argue but one that didn't account for the congressman's impatience. Why not wait for a showing of supportive public opinion, delay the motion to impeach until after next November's elections? Assuming that further investigation of the President's addiction to the uses of domestic espionage finds him nullifying the Fourth Amendment rights of a large number of his fellow Americans, the Democrats possibly could come up with enough votes, their own and a quorum of disenchanted Republicans, to send the man home to Texas. Conyers said:
"I don't think enough people know how much damage this administration can do to their civil liberties in a very short time. What would you have me do? Grumble and complain? Make cynical jokes? Throw up my hands and say that under the circumstances nothing can be done? At least I can muster the facts, establish a record, tell the story that ought to be front-page news."
Which turned out to be the purpose of his House Resolution 635-not a high-minded tilting at windmills but the production of a report, 182 pages, 1,022 footnotes, assembled by Conyers's staff during the six months prior to its presentation to Congress, that describes the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq as the perpetration of a crime against the American people. It is a fair description. Drawing on evidence furnished over the last four years by a sizable crowd of credible witnesses-government officials both extant and former, journalists, military officers, politicians, diplomats domestic and foreign-the authors of the report find a conspiracy to commit fraud, the administration talking out of all sides of its lying mouth, secretly planning a frivolous and unnecessary war while at the same time pretending in its public statements that nothing was further from the truth.[1] The result has proved tragic, but on reading through the report's corroborating testimony I sometimes could counter its inducements to mute rage with the thought that if the would-be lords of the flies weren't in the business of killing people, they would be seen as a troupe of off-Broadway comedians in a third-rate theater of the absurd. Entitled "The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War," the Conyers report examines the administration's chronic abuse of power from more angles than can be explored within the compass of a single essay. The nature of the administration's criminal DNA and modus operandi, however, shows up in a usefully robust specimen of its characteristic dishonesty.
That President George W. Bush comes to power with the intention of invading Iraq is a fact not open to dispute. Pleased with the image of himself as a military hero, and having spoken, more than once, about seeking revenge on Saddam Hussein for the tyrant's alleged attempt to "kill my Dad," he appoints to high office in his administration a cadre of warrior intellectuals, chief among them Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, known to be eager for the glories of imperial conquest.[2] At the first meeting of the new National Security Council on January 30, 2001, most of the people in the room discuss the possibility of preemptive blitzkrieg against Baghdad.[3] In March the Pentagon circulates a document entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oil Field Contracts"; the supporting maps indicate the properties of interest to various European governments and American corporations. Six months later, early in the afternoon of September 11, the smoke still rising from the Pentagon's western facade, Secretary Rumsfeld tells his staff to fetch intelligence briefings (the "best info fast...go massive; sweep it all up; things related and not") that will justify an attack on Iraq. By chance the next day in the White House basement, Richard A. Clarke, national coordinator for security and counterterrorism, encounters President Bush, who tells him to "see if Saddam did this." Nine days later, at a private dinner upstairs in the White House, the President informs his guest, the British prime minister, Tony Blair, that "when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq."
By November 13, 2001, the Taliban have been rousted out of Kabul in Afghanistan, but our intelligence agencies have yet to discover proofs of Saddam Hussein's acquaintance with Al Qaeda.[4] President Bush isn't convinced. On November 21, at the end of a National Security Council meeting, he says to Secretary Rumsfeld, "What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq?...I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret."
The Conyers report doesn't return to the President's focus on Iraq until March 2002, when it finds him peering into the office of Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, to say, ""expletive deleted" Saddam. We're taking him out." At a Senate Republican Policy lunch that same month on Capitol Hill, Vice President Dick Cheney informs the assembled company that it is no longer a question of if the United States will attack Iraq, it's only a question of when. The vice president doesn't bring up the question of why, the answer to which is a work in progress. By now the administration knows, or at least has reason to know, that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, that Iraq doesn't possess weapons of mass destruction sufficiently ominous to warrant concern, that the regime destined to be changed poses no imminent threat, certainly not to the United States, probably not to any country defended by more than four batteries of light artillery. Such at least is the conclusion of the British intelligence agencies that can find no credible evidence to support the theory of Saddam's connection to Al Qaeda or international terrorism; "even the best survey of WMD programs will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile and CW/BW weapons fronts..." A series of notes and memoranda passing back and forth between the British Cabinet Office in London and its correspondents in Washington during the spring and summer of 2002 address the problem of inventing a pretext for a war so fondly desired by the Bush Administration that Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's MI-6, finds the interested parties in Washington fixing "the intelligence and the facts...around the policy." The American enthusiasm for regime change, "undimmed" in the mind of Condoleezza Rice, presents complications.
Although Blair has told Bush, probably in the autumn of 2001, that Britain will join the American military putsch in Iraq, he needs "legal justification" for the maneuver-something noble and inspiring to say to Parliament and the British public. No justification "currently exists." Neither Britain nor the United States is being attacked by Iraq, which eliminates the excuse of self-defense; nor is the Iraqi government currently sponsoring a program of genocide. Which leaves as the only option the "wrong-footing" of Saddam. If under the auspices of the United Nations he can be presented with an ultimatum requiring him to show that Iraq possesses weapons that don't exist, his refusal to comply can be taken as proof that he does, in fact, possess such weapons.[5]
Over the next few months, while the British government continues to look for ways to "wrong-foot" Saddam and suborn the U.N., various operatives loyal to Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld bend to the task of fixing the facts, distributing alms to dubious Iraqi informants in return for map coordinates of Saddam's monstrous weapons, proofs of stored poisons, of mobile chemical laboratories, of unmanned vehicles capable of bringing missiles to Jerusalem.[6]
By early August the Bush Administration has sufficient confidence in its doomsday story to sell it to the American public. Instructed to come up with awesome text and shocking images, the White House Iraq Group hits upon the phrase "mushroom cloud" and prepares a White Paper describing the "grave and gathering danger" posed by Iraq's nuclear arsenal.[7] The objective is three-fold-to magnify the fear of Saddam Hussein, to present President Bush as the Christian savior of the American people, a man of conscience who never in life would lead the country into an unjust war, and to provide a platform of star-spangled patriotism for Republican candidates in the November congressional elections.[8]
The Conyers report doesn't lack for further instances of the administration's misconduct, all of them noted in the press over the last three years-misuse of government funds, violation of the Geneva Conventions, holding without trial and subjecting to torture individuals arbitrarily designated as "enemy combatants," etc.-but conspiracy to commit fraud would seem reason enough to warrant the President's impeachment. Before reading the report, I wouldn't have expected to find myself thinking that such a course of action was either likely or possible; after reading the report, I don't know why we would run the risk of not impeaching the man. We have before us in the White House a thief who steals the country's good name and reputation for his private interest and personal use; a liar who seeks to instill in the American people a state of fear; a televangelist who engages the United States in a never-ending crusade against all the world's evil, a wastrel who squanders a vast sum of the nation's wealth on what turns out to be a recruiting drive certain to multiply the host of our enemies. In a word, a criminal-known to be armed and shown to be dangerous. Under the three-strike rule available to the courts in California, judges sentence people to life in jail for having stolen from Wal-Mart a set of golf clubs or a child's tricycle. Who then calls strikes on President Bush, and how many more does he get before being sent down on waivers to one of the Texas Prison Leagues?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The above is a brief excerpt from the complete essay, available in the March 2006 issue of Harper's Magazine.
Notes
1. The report borrows from hundreds of open sources that have become a matter of public record-newspaper accounts, television broadcasts (Frontline, Meet the Press, Larry King Live, 60 Minutes, etc.), magazine articles (in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Review of Books), sworn testimony in both the Senate and House of Representatives, books written by, among others, Bob Woodward, George Packer, Richard A. Clarke, James Mann, Mark Danner, Seymour Hersh, David Corn, James Bamford, Hans Blix, James Risen, Ron Suskind, Joseph Wilson. As the congressman had said, "Everything in plain sight; it isn't as if we don't know." [Back]
2. In January of 1998 the neoconservative Washington think tank The Project for the New American Century (which counts among its founding members Dick Cheney) sent a letter to Bill Clinton demanding "the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power" with a strong-minded "willingness to undertake military action." Together with Rumsfeld, six of the other seventeen signatories became members of the Bush's first administration-Elliott Abrams (now George W. Bush's deputy national security advisor), Richard Armitage (deputy secretary of state from 2001 to 2005), John Bolton (now U.S. ambassador to the U.N.), Richard Perle (chairman of the Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2003), Paul Wolfowitz (deputy secretary of defense from 2001 to 2005), Robert Zoellick (now deputy secretary of state). President Clinton responded to the request by signing the Iraq Liberation Act, for which Congress appropriated $97 million for various clandestine operations inside the borders of Iraq. Two years later, in September 2000, The Project for the New American Century issued a document noting that the "unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification" for the presence of the substantial American force in the Persian Gulf. [Back]
3. In a subsequent interview on 60 Minutes, Paul O'Neill, present in the meeting as the newly appointed secretary of the treasury, remembered being surprised by the degree of certainty: "From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go.... It was all about finding a way to do it." [Back]
4. As early as September 20, Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, drafted a memo suggesting that in retaliation for the September 11 attacks the United States should consider hitting terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, or perhaps deliberately selecting a non-Al Qaeda target like Iraq. [Back]
5. Abstracts of the notes and memoranda, known collectively as "The Downing Street Minutes," were published in the Sunday Times (London) in May 2005; their authenticity was undisputed by the British government. [Back]
6. The work didn't go unnoticed by people in the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department accustomed to making distinctions between a well-dressed rumor and a naked lie. In the spring of 2004, talking to a reporter from Vanity Fair, Greg Thielmann, the State Department officer responsible for assessing the threats of nuclear proliferation, said, "The American public was seriously misled. The Administration twisted, distorted and simplified intelligence in a way that led Americans to seriously misunderstand the nature of the Iraq threat. I'm not sure I can think of a worse act against the people in a democracy than a President distorting critical classified information." [Back]
7. The Group counted among its copywriters Karl Rove, senior political strategist, Andrew Card, White House chief of staff, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff. [Back]
8. Card later told the New York Times that "from a marketing point of view...you don't introduce new products in August." [Back]
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/022706C.shtml
By Lewis H. Lapham
Harper's Magazine
Monday 27 February 2006
Why we can no longer afford George W. Bush.
QUOTE
A country is not only what it does - it is also what it puts up with, what it tolerates.
-Kurt Tucholsky
-Kurt Tucholsky
On December 18 of last year, Congressman John Conyers Jr. (D., Mich.) introduced into the House of Representatives a resolution inviting it to form "a select committee to investigate the Administration's intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment." Although buttressed two days previously by the news of the National Security Agency's illegal surveillance of the American citizenry, the request attracted little or no attention in the press-nothing on television or in the major papers, some scattered applause from the left-wing blogs, heavy sarcasm on the websites flying the flags of the militant right. The nearly complete silence raised the question as to what it was the congressman had in mind, and to whom did he think he was speaking? In time of war few propositions would seem as futile as the attempt to impeach a president whose political party controls the Congress; as the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee stationed on Capitol Hill for the last forty years, Representative Conyers presumably knew that to expect the Republican caucus in the House to take note of his invitation, much less arm it with the power of subpoena, was to expect a miracle of democratic transformation and rebirth not unlike the one looked for by President Bush under the prayer rugs in Baghdad. Unless the congressman intended some sort of symbolic gesture, self-serving and harmless, what did he hope to prove or to gain? He answered the question in early January, on the phone from Detroit during the congressional winter recess.
"To take away the excuse," he said, "that we didn't know." So that two or four or ten years from now, if somebody should ask, "Where were you, Conyers, and where was the United States Congress?" when the Bush Administration declared the Constitution inoperative and revoked the license of parliamentary government, none of the company now present can plead ignorance or temporary insanity, can say that "somehow it escaped our notice" that the President was setting himself up as a supreme leader exempt from the rule of law.
A reason with which it was hard to argue but one that didn't account for the congressman's impatience. Why not wait for a showing of supportive public opinion, delay the motion to impeach until after next November's elections? Assuming that further investigation of the President's addiction to the uses of domestic espionage finds him nullifying the Fourth Amendment rights of a large number of his fellow Americans, the Democrats possibly could come up with enough votes, their own and a quorum of disenchanted Republicans, to send the man home to Texas. Conyers said:
"I don't think enough people know how much damage this administration can do to their civil liberties in a very short time. What would you have me do? Grumble and complain? Make cynical jokes? Throw up my hands and say that under the circumstances nothing can be done? At least I can muster the facts, establish a record, tell the story that ought to be front-page news."
Which turned out to be the purpose of his House Resolution 635-not a high-minded tilting at windmills but the production of a report, 182 pages, 1,022 footnotes, assembled by Conyers's staff during the six months prior to its presentation to Congress, that describes the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq as the perpetration of a crime against the American people. It is a fair description. Drawing on evidence furnished over the last four years by a sizable crowd of credible witnesses-government officials both extant and former, journalists, military officers, politicians, diplomats domestic and foreign-the authors of the report find a conspiracy to commit fraud, the administration talking out of all sides of its lying mouth, secretly planning a frivolous and unnecessary war while at the same time pretending in its public statements that nothing was further from the truth.[1] The result has proved tragic, but on reading through the report's corroborating testimony I sometimes could counter its inducements to mute rage with the thought that if the would-be lords of the flies weren't in the business of killing people, they would be seen as a troupe of off-Broadway comedians in a third-rate theater of the absurd. Entitled "The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War," the Conyers report examines the administration's chronic abuse of power from more angles than can be explored within the compass of a single essay. The nature of the administration's criminal DNA and modus operandi, however, shows up in a usefully robust specimen of its characteristic dishonesty.
That President George W. Bush comes to power with the intention of invading Iraq is a fact not open to dispute. Pleased with the image of himself as a military hero, and having spoken, more than once, about seeking revenge on Saddam Hussein for the tyrant's alleged attempt to "kill my Dad," he appoints to high office in his administration a cadre of warrior intellectuals, chief among them Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, known to be eager for the glories of imperial conquest.[2] At the first meeting of the new National Security Council on January 30, 2001, most of the people in the room discuss the possibility of preemptive blitzkrieg against Baghdad.[3] In March the Pentagon circulates a document entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oil Field Contracts"; the supporting maps indicate the properties of interest to various European governments and American corporations. Six months later, early in the afternoon of September 11, the smoke still rising from the Pentagon's western facade, Secretary Rumsfeld tells his staff to fetch intelligence briefings (the "best info fast...go massive; sweep it all up; things related and not") that will justify an attack on Iraq. By chance the next day in the White House basement, Richard A. Clarke, national coordinator for security and counterterrorism, encounters President Bush, who tells him to "see if Saddam did this." Nine days later, at a private dinner upstairs in the White House, the President informs his guest, the British prime minister, Tony Blair, that "when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq."
By November 13, 2001, the Taliban have been rousted out of Kabul in Afghanistan, but our intelligence agencies have yet to discover proofs of Saddam Hussein's acquaintance with Al Qaeda.[4] President Bush isn't convinced. On November 21, at the end of a National Security Council meeting, he says to Secretary Rumsfeld, "What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq?...I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret."
The Conyers report doesn't return to the President's focus on Iraq until March 2002, when it finds him peering into the office of Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, to say, ""expletive deleted" Saddam. We're taking him out." At a Senate Republican Policy lunch that same month on Capitol Hill, Vice President Dick Cheney informs the assembled company that it is no longer a question of if the United States will attack Iraq, it's only a question of when. The vice president doesn't bring up the question of why, the answer to which is a work in progress. By now the administration knows, or at least has reason to know, that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, that Iraq doesn't possess weapons of mass destruction sufficiently ominous to warrant concern, that the regime destined to be changed poses no imminent threat, certainly not to the United States, probably not to any country defended by more than four batteries of light artillery. Such at least is the conclusion of the British intelligence agencies that can find no credible evidence to support the theory of Saddam's connection to Al Qaeda or international terrorism; "even the best survey of WMD programs will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile and CW/BW weapons fronts..." A series of notes and memoranda passing back and forth between the British Cabinet Office in London and its correspondents in Washington during the spring and summer of 2002 address the problem of inventing a pretext for a war so fondly desired by the Bush Administration that Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's MI-6, finds the interested parties in Washington fixing "the intelligence and the facts...around the policy." The American enthusiasm for regime change, "undimmed" in the mind of Condoleezza Rice, presents complications.
Although Blair has told Bush, probably in the autumn of 2001, that Britain will join the American military putsch in Iraq, he needs "legal justification" for the maneuver-something noble and inspiring to say to Parliament and the British public. No justification "currently exists." Neither Britain nor the United States is being attacked by Iraq, which eliminates the excuse of self-defense; nor is the Iraqi government currently sponsoring a program of genocide. Which leaves as the only option the "wrong-footing" of Saddam. If under the auspices of the United Nations he can be presented with an ultimatum requiring him to show that Iraq possesses weapons that don't exist, his refusal to comply can be taken as proof that he does, in fact, possess such weapons.[5]
Over the next few months, while the British government continues to look for ways to "wrong-foot" Saddam and suborn the U.N., various operatives loyal to Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld bend to the task of fixing the facts, distributing alms to dubious Iraqi informants in return for map coordinates of Saddam's monstrous weapons, proofs of stored poisons, of mobile chemical laboratories, of unmanned vehicles capable of bringing missiles to Jerusalem.[6]
By early August the Bush Administration has sufficient confidence in its doomsday story to sell it to the American public. Instructed to come up with awesome text and shocking images, the White House Iraq Group hits upon the phrase "mushroom cloud" and prepares a White Paper describing the "grave and gathering danger" posed by Iraq's nuclear arsenal.[7] The objective is three-fold-to magnify the fear of Saddam Hussein, to present President Bush as the Christian savior of the American people, a man of conscience who never in life would lead the country into an unjust war, and to provide a platform of star-spangled patriotism for Republican candidates in the November congressional elections.[8]
The Conyers report doesn't lack for further instances of the administration's misconduct, all of them noted in the press over the last three years-misuse of government funds, violation of the Geneva Conventions, holding without trial and subjecting to torture individuals arbitrarily designated as "enemy combatants," etc.-but conspiracy to commit fraud would seem reason enough to warrant the President's impeachment. Before reading the report, I wouldn't have expected to find myself thinking that such a course of action was either likely or possible; after reading the report, I don't know why we would run the risk of not impeaching the man. We have before us in the White House a thief who steals the country's good name and reputation for his private interest and personal use; a liar who seeks to instill in the American people a state of fear; a televangelist who engages the United States in a never-ending crusade against all the world's evil, a wastrel who squanders a vast sum of the nation's wealth on what turns out to be a recruiting drive certain to multiply the host of our enemies. In a word, a criminal-known to be armed and shown to be dangerous. Under the three-strike rule available to the courts in California, judges sentence people to life in jail for having stolen from Wal-Mart a set of golf clubs or a child's tricycle. Who then calls strikes on President Bush, and how many more does he get before being sent down on waivers to one of the Texas Prison Leagues?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The above is a brief excerpt from the complete essay, available in the March 2006 issue of Harper's Magazine.
Notes
1. The report borrows from hundreds of open sources that have become a matter of public record-newspaper accounts, television broadcasts (Frontline, Meet the Press, Larry King Live, 60 Minutes, etc.), magazine articles (in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Review of Books), sworn testimony in both the Senate and House of Representatives, books written by, among others, Bob Woodward, George Packer, Richard A. Clarke, James Mann, Mark Danner, Seymour Hersh, David Corn, James Bamford, Hans Blix, James Risen, Ron Suskind, Joseph Wilson. As the congressman had said, "Everything in plain sight; it isn't as if we don't know." [Back]
2. In January of 1998 the neoconservative Washington think tank The Project for the New American Century (which counts among its founding members Dick Cheney) sent a letter to Bill Clinton demanding "the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power" with a strong-minded "willingness to undertake military action." Together with Rumsfeld, six of the other seventeen signatories became members of the Bush's first administration-Elliott Abrams (now George W. Bush's deputy national security advisor), Richard Armitage (deputy secretary of state from 2001 to 2005), John Bolton (now U.S. ambassador to the U.N.), Richard Perle (chairman of the Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2003), Paul Wolfowitz (deputy secretary of defense from 2001 to 2005), Robert Zoellick (now deputy secretary of state). President Clinton responded to the request by signing the Iraq Liberation Act, for which Congress appropriated $97 million for various clandestine operations inside the borders of Iraq. Two years later, in September 2000, The Project for the New American Century issued a document noting that the "unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification" for the presence of the substantial American force in the Persian Gulf. [Back]
3. In a subsequent interview on 60 Minutes, Paul O'Neill, present in the meeting as the newly appointed secretary of the treasury, remembered being surprised by the degree of certainty: "From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go.... It was all about finding a way to do it." [Back]
4. As early as September 20, Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, drafted a memo suggesting that in retaliation for the September 11 attacks the United States should consider hitting terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, or perhaps deliberately selecting a non-Al Qaeda target like Iraq. [Back]
5. Abstracts of the notes and memoranda, known collectively as "The Downing Street Minutes," were published in the Sunday Times (London) in May 2005; their authenticity was undisputed by the British government. [Back]
6. The work didn't go unnoticed by people in the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department accustomed to making distinctions between a well-dressed rumor and a naked lie. In the spring of 2004, talking to a reporter from Vanity Fair, Greg Thielmann, the State Department officer responsible for assessing the threats of nuclear proliferation, said, "The American public was seriously misled. The Administration twisted, distorted and simplified intelligence in a way that led Americans to seriously misunderstand the nature of the Iraq threat. I'm not sure I can think of a worse act against the people in a democracy than a President distorting critical classified information." [Back]
7. The Group counted among its copywriters Karl Rove, senior political strategist, Andrew Card, White House chief of staff, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff. [Back]
8. Card later told the New York Times that "from a marketing point of view...you don't introduce new products in August." [Back]
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/022706C.shtml
From Superpower to Tinhorn Dictatorship?
Twilight of the Hegemony
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
America is headed for a soft dictatorship by the end of Bush's second term. Whether any American has civil rights will be decided by the discretionary power of federal officials. The public in general will tolerate the soft dictatorship as its discretionary powers will mainly be felt by those few who challenge it.
The congressional elections this coming November is the last chance for for Americans to reaffirm the separation of powers that is the basis of their civil liberties. Unless the voters correct their mistake of putting both the executive and legislative branches in the hands of the same party and deliver the House or the Senate to the Democrats, there is nothing on the domestic scene to stand in the way of more power, and less accountability, being accumulated in the executive.
The Democrats have been a totally ineffective opposition and might not inspire any voter response other than apathy. Rather than vote for a cowardly party that is afraid to defend the Constitution, voters might simply not vote at all.
In this unfortunate event, the only check on the Bush regime is its own hubris.
Bush's ill-fated invasion of Iraq has set in motion forces beyond his control. On February 23 the Asia Times reported that America's Pakistani puppet, Musharraf, is "losing his grip." Some Pakistani provinces are already beyond Musharraf's control, and the remainder are rioting against "Busharraf" as Musharraf is now known. The infantile American press misrepresents the riots as responses to the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed, but in fact the target of the riots is the American puppet.
By invading Afghanistan and Iraq and by threatening Syria and Iran, Bush has taught Muslims everywhere that they owe their humiliation to the Western controlled secular governments that suppress their aspirations. They are realizing that their power resides in Islam and that this power is suppressed by secular governments. Busharraf is probably dead meat, and when he goes so does the US military adventure in Afghanistan.
When Bush attacks Iran, the US army will be caught between the Iraqi Shia and the Iranian Shia and will be decimated in fourth generation conflict, so aptly described in CounterPunch a few days ago by William S. Lind. If a few thousand Sunni insurgents can tie down 10 US divisions, imagine the fate of US forces trapped in a Shia crescent.
The collapsing power of the US hegemon is everywhere evident. It is evident in the inability to successfully occupy Iraq or even Baghdad. It is evident in the growing military cooperation between North and South Korea, and it is evident it the revolt in the Indian government against Prime Minister Singh's nuclear agreement with the US. Indians say this agreement subjects India to US hegemony and represents America's attempt to block India's pioneering research on thorium as a nuclear fuel. Opposition parties have told Singh that if he signs the agreement, they will bring down his government.
The entire world now recognizes that America has lost its economic power and is dependent on the rest of the world to finance its budget and trade deficits. The US no longer holds the cards. American real incomes are falling, except for the rich. Jobs for university graduates are scarce, and advanced technology products must be imported from China. The US is a rapidly declining power and may soon end up as nothing but a tinhorn dictatorship.
http://counterpunch.com/roberts02272006.html
Twilight of the Hegemony
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
America is headed for a soft dictatorship by the end of Bush's second term. Whether any American has civil rights will be decided by the discretionary power of federal officials. The public in general will tolerate the soft dictatorship as its discretionary powers will mainly be felt by those few who challenge it.
The congressional elections this coming November is the last chance for for Americans to reaffirm the separation of powers that is the basis of their civil liberties. Unless the voters correct their mistake of putting both the executive and legislative branches in the hands of the same party and deliver the House or the Senate to the Democrats, there is nothing on the domestic scene to stand in the way of more power, and less accountability, being accumulated in the executive.
The Democrats have been a totally ineffective opposition and might not inspire any voter response other than apathy. Rather than vote for a cowardly party that is afraid to defend the Constitution, voters might simply not vote at all.
In this unfortunate event, the only check on the Bush regime is its own hubris.
Bush's ill-fated invasion of Iraq has set in motion forces beyond his control. On February 23 the Asia Times reported that America's Pakistani puppet, Musharraf, is "losing his grip." Some Pakistani provinces are already beyond Musharraf's control, and the remainder are rioting against "Busharraf" as Musharraf is now known. The infantile American press misrepresents the riots as responses to the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed, but in fact the target of the riots is the American puppet.
By invading Afghanistan and Iraq and by threatening Syria and Iran, Bush has taught Muslims everywhere that they owe their humiliation to the Western controlled secular governments that suppress their aspirations. They are realizing that their power resides in Islam and that this power is suppressed by secular governments. Busharraf is probably dead meat, and when he goes so does the US military adventure in Afghanistan.
When Bush attacks Iran, the US army will be caught between the Iraqi Shia and the Iranian Shia and will be decimated in fourth generation conflict, so aptly described in CounterPunch a few days ago by William S. Lind. If a few thousand Sunni insurgents can tie down 10 US divisions, imagine the fate of US forces trapped in a Shia crescent.
The collapsing power of the US hegemon is everywhere evident. It is evident in the inability to successfully occupy Iraq or even Baghdad. It is evident in the growing military cooperation between North and South Korea, and it is evident it the revolt in the Indian government against Prime Minister Singh's nuclear agreement with the US. Indians say this agreement subjects India to US hegemony and represents America's attempt to block India's pioneering research on thorium as a nuclear fuel. Opposition parties have told Singh that if he signs the agreement, they will bring down his government.
The entire world now recognizes that America has lost its economic power and is dependent on the rest of the world to finance its budget and trade deficits. The US no longer holds the cards. American real incomes are falling, except for the rich. Jobs for university graduates are scarce, and advanced technology products must be imported from China. The US is a rapidly declining power and may soon end up as nothing but a tinhorn dictatorship.
http://counterpunch.com/roberts02272006.html
On Force And Fear Alone
Tom Porteous
February 27, 2006
Tom Porteous is a freelance writer and analyst on the Middle East who was formerly with the BBC and the British Foreign Office.
In September 2002 Secretary General of the Arab League Amr Moussa warned that the invasion of Iraq would "open the gates of hell."
Here's a vision of that hell as reported this month by journalist Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder Newspapers, embedded with the U.S. Army in Samarra:
This stark image is as good a metaphor as any for the current military and political posture of the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East.
Across the region—and beyond— Arabs and Muslims are now glaring at U.S. power in the same way as those Iraqi families glared at the soldiers of the 101st Airborne.
With its war on terror, the U.S. is frittering away the last vestiges of its moral authority in the Middle East. Its influence increasingly rests on military might alone—and that is not enough to ensure a peaceful end to all this, as the deteriorating situation in Iraq demonstrates.
After the events of the past week it should be clearer than ever that Washington and London's fanciful political strategies in Iraq and the region are as full of vitality and potential as the limbs of those dead insurgents flapping in the air atop a U.S. Army Humvee.
Iraq's real power brokers— the clerical and militia leaders, more than the weak politicians who make up the government— may yet prevent an all out sectarian conflict between Shi'a and Sunni from being triggered by the bombing of one of Shi'a Islam's holiest shrines on February 22.
But if they do it will be no thanks to the U.S., whose military presence in Iraq is providing nationalist legitimacy to the most extreme Iraqi political tendencies and a magnet for the most militant and dangerous groups in the region.
Blaming terrorists for the attack on the Askariya mosque in Samarra, President Bush said on February 24 that the sectarian violence it had sparked was "a test for the Iraqi security forces"— as though the U.S. government had no role in Iraq's affairs and bore no responsibility for the current situation.
But the increase in Sunni-Shi'a violence (and Kurd-Arab violence in the north) has exposed the flaw in Bush's mantra "as the Iraqi security forces stand up, we stand down," on which the U.S. exit strategy is based.
Equally prone to ethnic, sectarian and tribal divisions as the rest of Iraqi society, the Iraqi police and army, so far from being able to stop this kind of civil conflict, are drawn into it, bringing with them their equipment and guns paid for by the U.S. taxpayer.
If the civil war in Iraq escalates, the chances of regional contagion are high: Middle East powers, including not only Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, but also Turkey and Israel, would get drawn even further into the Iraqi mess in what would become a new regional power struggle. Al Qaeda would fan the flames and use Iraq as a base from which to launch operations in the neighbourhood. It claimed the February 24 suicide bombing at the huge and tightly guarded Abqaiq oil in facility in Saudi Arabia, which did no serious damage to the plant, but pushed the price of oil up by more than two dollars a barrel. Sectarian violence in Iraq is also straining relations between Sunni and Shi'a communities elsewhere in Middle East.
Meanwhile, last week's tour of the Arab nations by Bush's transformational diplomat-in-chief, Condoleezza Rice, demonstrated the extent to which another pillar of the U.S. strategy in the Middle East— the push for democracy— is collapsing under the unbearable lightness of the strategic thinking on which it rests.
Yes, a push for political pluralism may well be a good way to lance the angry boil of extremism in the region, as Bush says. But only if it curtails the power of the "tyrannies" (Bush's word) which have served Western interests so well for so long; only if it brings to power representative governments which will certainly— in the current circumstances— want to renegotiate the terms of U.S. and Israeli influence in the region.
Since the victory of the Islamist Hamas in the Palestinian elections, the U.S. and Israel have indicated clearly that they are ready for no such renegotiation. Indeed The New York Times has reported they are now colluding to suffocate the Arab world's first democratically elected government.
Rice's Middle East tour was aimed at convincing Arab leaders that they should not fund a Hamas-run Palestinian Authority (a "terrorist authority" according to acting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert). But Arab leaders are understandably reluctant to concur.
This is not because these Arab leaders love either democracy or Hamas, whose Islamist colleagues are threatening their regimes by winning similar victories wherever elections are held in the Middle East. But Arab rulers are all too aware that a U.S. diplomacy which calls for sanctions on the victims of Israeli military occupation is not only hypocritical but a gift to opposition forces across the region.
Washington's new-found coolness towards Arab democracy was on display during Rice's stopover in Egypt. Her last visit in June was all about pushing for greater democracy. Since then the Muslim Brotherhood has won a stunning 88 out of 454 seats in parliamentary elections that were heavily weighted against them.
Last week in Cairo, Rice publicly made little of the fact that local council elections had just been postponed for two years. Nor did she seem keen to bring up the fate of the jailed secular opposition leader Ayman Nour, whose cause she had taken up in June, let alone the estimated 15,000 political prisoners (mostly Islamists) in prolonged detention without trial under draconian colonial-era emergency laws.
The impression given is that the U.S. only wants political freedom in the Middle East on its own and Israel's terms— "designer democracy," as Egyptian broadcaster Mervat Mohsen described it bluntly in an interview with Rice. No acceptance of Islamist victories at the polls, as this would amount to appeasement of terrorists. No compromise with any political development, however democratic, that might challenge absolute U.S. dominance of the region.
If Washington continues in this direction, U.S. influence in the region will cease to depend on any kind of political accommodation, and come to hang on military force and fear alone. That, coupled with a civil war in Iraq, would make a military confrontation with the Holocaust deniers in Tehran over Iran's alleged nuclear ambitions a slam-dunk. The gates of hell are already ajar. All the U.S. needs do now is kick them wide open and blame it on the terrorists.
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/02/2..._fear_alone.php
Tom Porteous
February 27, 2006
Tom Porteous is a freelance writer and analyst on the Middle East who was formerly with the BBC and the British Foreign Office.
In September 2002 Secretary General of the Arab League Amr Moussa warned that the invasion of Iraq would "open the gates of hell."
Here's a vision of that hell as reported this month by journalist Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder Newspapers, embedded with the U.S. Army in Samarra:
QUOTE
Five soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division scrambled down, pulled two of the insurgents' bodies from the reeds and dragged them through the mud. "Strap those motherf-----s to the hood like a deer," said Staff Sgt. James Robinson. The soldiers heaved the two bodies onto the hood of a Humvee and tied them down with a cord. The dead insurgents' legs and arms flapped in the air as the Humvee rumbled along. Iraqi families stood in front of the surrounding houses. They watched the corpses ride by and glared at the American soldiers.
This stark image is as good a metaphor as any for the current military and political posture of the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East.
Across the region—and beyond— Arabs and Muslims are now glaring at U.S. power in the same way as those Iraqi families glared at the soldiers of the 101st Airborne.
With its war on terror, the U.S. is frittering away the last vestiges of its moral authority in the Middle East. Its influence increasingly rests on military might alone—and that is not enough to ensure a peaceful end to all this, as the deteriorating situation in Iraq demonstrates.
After the events of the past week it should be clearer than ever that Washington and London's fanciful political strategies in Iraq and the region are as full of vitality and potential as the limbs of those dead insurgents flapping in the air atop a U.S. Army Humvee.
Iraq's real power brokers— the clerical and militia leaders, more than the weak politicians who make up the government— may yet prevent an all out sectarian conflict between Shi'a and Sunni from being triggered by the bombing of one of Shi'a Islam's holiest shrines on February 22.
But if they do it will be no thanks to the U.S., whose military presence in Iraq is providing nationalist legitimacy to the most extreme Iraqi political tendencies and a magnet for the most militant and dangerous groups in the region.
Blaming terrorists for the attack on the Askariya mosque in Samarra, President Bush said on February 24 that the sectarian violence it had sparked was "a test for the Iraqi security forces"— as though the U.S. government had no role in Iraq's affairs and bore no responsibility for the current situation.
But the increase in Sunni-Shi'a violence (and Kurd-Arab violence in the north) has exposed the flaw in Bush's mantra "as the Iraqi security forces stand up, we stand down," on which the U.S. exit strategy is based.
Equally prone to ethnic, sectarian and tribal divisions as the rest of Iraqi society, the Iraqi police and army, so far from being able to stop this kind of civil conflict, are drawn into it, bringing with them their equipment and guns paid for by the U.S. taxpayer.
If the civil war in Iraq escalates, the chances of regional contagion are high: Middle East powers, including not only Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, but also Turkey and Israel, would get drawn even further into the Iraqi mess in what would become a new regional power struggle. Al Qaeda would fan the flames and use Iraq as a base from which to launch operations in the neighbourhood. It claimed the February 24 suicide bombing at the huge and tightly guarded Abqaiq oil in facility in Saudi Arabia, which did no serious damage to the plant, but pushed the price of oil up by more than two dollars a barrel. Sectarian violence in Iraq is also straining relations between Sunni and Shi'a communities elsewhere in Middle East.
Meanwhile, last week's tour of the Arab nations by Bush's transformational diplomat-in-chief, Condoleezza Rice, demonstrated the extent to which another pillar of the U.S. strategy in the Middle East— the push for democracy— is collapsing under the unbearable lightness of the strategic thinking on which it rests.
Yes, a push for political pluralism may well be a good way to lance the angry boil of extremism in the region, as Bush says. But only if it curtails the power of the "tyrannies" (Bush's word) which have served Western interests so well for so long; only if it brings to power representative governments which will certainly— in the current circumstances— want to renegotiate the terms of U.S. and Israeli influence in the region.
Since the victory of the Islamist Hamas in the Palestinian elections, the U.S. and Israel have indicated clearly that they are ready for no such renegotiation. Indeed The New York Times has reported they are now colluding to suffocate the Arab world's first democratically elected government.
Rice's Middle East tour was aimed at convincing Arab leaders that they should not fund a Hamas-run Palestinian Authority (a "terrorist authority" according to acting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert). But Arab leaders are understandably reluctant to concur.
This is not because these Arab leaders love either democracy or Hamas, whose Islamist colleagues are threatening their regimes by winning similar victories wherever elections are held in the Middle East. But Arab rulers are all too aware that a U.S. diplomacy which calls for sanctions on the victims of Israeli military occupation is not only hypocritical but a gift to opposition forces across the region.
Washington's new-found coolness towards Arab democracy was on display during Rice's stopover in Egypt. Her last visit in June was all about pushing for greater democracy. Since then the Muslim Brotherhood has won a stunning 88 out of 454 seats in parliamentary elections that were heavily weighted against them.
Last week in Cairo, Rice publicly made little of the fact that local council elections had just been postponed for two years. Nor did she seem keen to bring up the fate of the jailed secular opposition leader Ayman Nour, whose cause she had taken up in June, let alone the estimated 15,000 political prisoners (mostly Islamists) in prolonged detention without trial under draconian colonial-era emergency laws.
The impression given is that the U.S. only wants political freedom in the Middle East on its own and Israel's terms— "designer democracy," as Egyptian broadcaster Mervat Mohsen described it bluntly in an interview with Rice. No acceptance of Islamist victories at the polls, as this would amount to appeasement of terrorists. No compromise with any political development, however democratic, that might challenge absolute U.S. dominance of the region.
If Washington continues in this direction, U.S. influence in the region will cease to depend on any kind of political accommodation, and come to hang on military force and fear alone. That, coupled with a civil war in Iraq, would make a military confrontation with the Holocaust deniers in Tehran over Iran's alleged nuclear ambitions a slam-dunk. The gates of hell are already ajar. All the U.S. needs do now is kick them wide open and blame it on the terrorists.
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/02/2..._fear_alone.php
Where Are the Good Americans?
by JEREMY BRECHER & BRENDAN SMITH
[posted online on February 27, 2006]
Anyone who sees the photographs of the victims of the Nazi concentration camps must wonder how human beings could ever have allowed such things to happen. They must wonder how people of good will could have stood by while their government committed atrocities in their name. In the wake of that nightmarish era, people often asked, "Where were the good Germans?"
After the publication of the long-suppressed pictures of Abu Ghraib victims and the United Nations finding that torture and abuse are still taking place at the US prison in Guantánamo Bay, America has fashioned its own nightmare. We now must ask ourselves, "Where are the good Americans?"
After an eighteen-month study, five independent experts appointed by the UN Commission on Human Rights have just concluded that practices currently conducted at the US prison in Guantánamo amount to torture: excessive violence, force-feeding of hunger-striking detainees and arbitrary detention of prisoners that violates their right under international law to challenge the legality of their captivity before an independent judicial body.
The Bush Administration has condemned the publication of the Abu Ghraib photos and has rejected the UN report as "fundamentally flawed." But Americans should be grateful that people in the rest of the world are helping us discover what the Administration is trying to conceal from its own citizens: It is conducting war crimes in our name.
The UN report makes recommendations that are simple and obvious:
§ Immediately allow international inspection and supervision to insure an end to force-feeding and special interrogation techniques approved by the Defense Department but condemned under international law.
§ Bring the detainees to trial or release them without delay.
§ Conduct an investigation by an independent authority of all allegations of abuse to insure that all perpetrators of torture and other crimes are brought to justice--even high-level military and political officials.
§ Close the Guantánamo prison.
The demand to close Guantánamo was quickly seconded by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. And the European Union Parliament voted 80 to 1 to ask the United States to close Guantánamo and give every prisoner "a fair and public hearing by a competent, independent, impartial tribunal" without delay.
The Bush Administration has placed the responsibility for prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere on a few "bad apples" in the lowest ranks. But since the Nuremberg Tribunal of Nazi war criminals, international law has maintained the principle of "command responsibility," which makes top officials who ordered the crimes or failed to prevent them accountable.
It's not just a question of international law. Administration officials are well aware that the US War Crimes Act makes it a serious crime for any American--including top government officials--to commit any "grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions, including "willful killing, torture, or inhuman treatment" of detainees. Perhaps that has something to do with the Administration's eagerness to discredit the UN report.
If President Bush won't halt the abuse of US captives, Congress stands next in line for responsibility. Last December, it passed the so-called McCain amendment, which supposedly abolished all torture by US forces anywhere in the world. But the UN report makes clear that torture is continuing at Guantánamo.
The law's sponsor, Senator John McCain, promised that Congress would establish oversight over Guantánamo and other US prisons abroad to assure enforcement. But where's Senator McCain now? If he really wants to stop torture, why doesn't he fly to Guantánamo immediately and make sure no one is being abused? Isn't that what McCain would have wanted US senators to do when he was being tortured in a prison cell in Vietnam?
If Congress won't act, then it is up to the people. We must make every family dining table, every house of worship and every town meeting a place to stand up and speak out.
Only then will those who come after us know where the "good Americans" were.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060313/brecher
by JEREMY BRECHER & BRENDAN SMITH
[posted online on February 27, 2006]
Anyone who sees the photographs of the victims of the Nazi concentration camps must wonder how human beings could ever have allowed such things to happen. They must wonder how people of good will could have stood by while their government committed atrocities in their name. In the wake of that nightmarish era, people often asked, "Where were the good Germans?"
After the publication of the long-suppressed pictures of Abu Ghraib victims and the United Nations finding that torture and abuse are still taking place at the US prison in Guantánamo Bay, America has fashioned its own nightmare. We now must ask ourselves, "Where are the good Americans?"
After an eighteen-month study, five independent experts appointed by the UN Commission on Human Rights have just concluded that practices currently conducted at the US prison in Guantánamo amount to torture: excessive violence, force-feeding of hunger-striking detainees and arbitrary detention of prisoners that violates their right under international law to challenge the legality of their captivity before an independent judicial body.
The Bush Administration has condemned the publication of the Abu Ghraib photos and has rejected the UN report as "fundamentally flawed." But Americans should be grateful that people in the rest of the world are helping us discover what the Administration is trying to conceal from its own citizens: It is conducting war crimes in our name.
The UN report makes recommendations that are simple and obvious:
§ Immediately allow international inspection and supervision to insure an end to force-feeding and special interrogation techniques approved by the Defense Department but condemned under international law.
§ Bring the detainees to trial or release them without delay.
§ Conduct an investigation by an independent authority of all allegations of abuse to insure that all perpetrators of torture and other crimes are brought to justice--even high-level military and political officials.
§ Close the Guantánamo prison.
The demand to close Guantánamo was quickly seconded by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. And the European Union Parliament voted 80 to 1 to ask the United States to close Guantánamo and give every prisoner "a fair and public hearing by a competent, independent, impartial tribunal" without delay.
The Bush Administration has placed the responsibility for prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere on a few "bad apples" in the lowest ranks. But since the Nuremberg Tribunal of Nazi war criminals, international law has maintained the principle of "command responsibility," which makes top officials who ordered the crimes or failed to prevent them accountable.
It's not just a question of international law. Administration officials are well aware that the US War Crimes Act makes it a serious crime for any American--including top government officials--to commit any "grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions, including "willful killing, torture, or inhuman treatment" of detainees. Perhaps that has something to do with the Administration's eagerness to discredit the UN report.
If President Bush won't halt the abuse of US captives, Congress stands next in line for responsibility. Last December, it passed the so-called McCain amendment, which supposedly abolished all torture by US forces anywhere in the world. But the UN report makes clear that torture is continuing at Guantánamo.
The law's sponsor, Senator John McCain, promised that Congress would establish oversight over Guantánamo and other US prisons abroad to assure enforcement. But where's Senator McCain now? If he really wants to stop torture, why doesn't he fly to Guantánamo immediately and make sure no one is being abused? Isn't that what McCain would have wanted US senators to do when he was being tortured in a prison cell in Vietnam?
If Congress won't act, then it is up to the people. We must make every family dining table, every house of worship and every town meeting a place to stand up and speak out.
Only then will those who come after us know where the "good Americans" were.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060313/brecher
A Sham Process and a Rotten Deal
Renewing the Patriot Act
By Sen. RUSSELL FEINGOLD
Later today we will have a cloture vote on S. 2271. We should not end debate on this bill, and we should not pass this bill. Doing so will only help implement the deeply flawed deal that was struck with the White House to reauthorize the Patriot Act without enacting the core civil liberties protections for which so many of us have fought. I urge my colleagues to vote No on cloture.
Everyone in this body wants to reauthorize the Patriot Act. Many of the expiring provisions are entirely non-controversial. But we also need to fix the provisions that went too far, that do not contain the checks and balances necessary to protect our rights and freedoms. This reauthorization process is our chance to get it right, and moving forward with this bill takes us one step closer to wasting that chance.
Back in December, 46 Senators voted against cloture on the Patriot Act conference report. I think it's clear by now that the deal makes only minor changes to that conference report, which remains as flawed today as it was two months ago. The Senator from Pennsylvania, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee and primary proponent of the conference report in this body, was quoted as saying that the changes that the White House agreed to were "cosmetic." And then he said, according to the AP, "But sometimes cosmetics will make a beauty out of a beast and provide enough cover for senators to change their vote."
Since this deal was announced, editorial pages of newspapers also have pointed out how minimal these changes are, and have urged Senators not to change their votes. Let me read a few examples.
The editorial board of the Roanoke Times in Virginia had this to say on February 11: "A compromise that is expected to clear the way for the law's reauthorization is a victory of fear over strength. The 'compromise' the White House and congressional leaders reached this week on reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act is a compromise of the basic freedoms that define this nation. The Bush administration has made a few minor concessions, enough to give the handful of defiant Senate Republicans and some of their Democratic allies cover to extend the broad anti-terrorism bill and claim they have done what they could to protect the civil liberties of innocent Americans. They have not."
That same day, from the New York Times, we heard this: "The Patriot Act has been one of the few issues on which Congress has shown backbone lately. Last year, it refused to renew expiring parts of the act until greater civil liberties protections were added. But key members of the Senate have now caved, agreeing to renew these provisions in exchange for only minimal improvements. At a time when the public is growing increasingly concerned about the lawlessness of the Bush administration's domestic spying, the Senate should insist that any reauthorization agreement do more to protect Americans against improper secret searches."
And from my own home state, this is from the Wisconsin State Journal on February 18: "In recent weeks senators have worked with the White House to produce a compromise. However, the compromise remains far short of what is required to protect Americans' civil liberties. Regrettably, the Senate has backed down from its earlier stand and is poised to pass the inadequate bill."
These editorial boards and millions of Americans across the country recognize what everyone in this body already knows: that this deal makes only minor, yes cosmetic, changes to the conference report that was blocked in December. The deal is woefully inadequate. Let me explain why.
I want to start by reminding my colleagues of the context for this deal. Back in November and December when so many of us were fighting for improvements to the conference report, we made very clear what we were asking for. We laid out five issues that needed to be addressed to get our support. I'm going to read excerpts from a letter that we sent explaining our concerns, because I think it will help demonstrate why this deal is so bad. Here are the problems we identified and the changes we asked for several months ago.
On Section 215 we said:
The draft conference report would allow the government to obtain sensitive personal information on a mere showing of relevance. This would allow government fishing expeditions. As business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have argued, the government should be required to convince a judge that the records they are seeking have some connection to a suspected terrorist or spy.
Next we discussed gag orders, both for Section 215 orders and National Security Letters:
The draft conference report does not permit the recipient of a Section 215 order to challenge its automatic, permanent gag order. Courts have held that similar restrictions violate the First Amendment. The recipient of a Section 215 order is entitled to meaningful judicial review of the gag order.
The draft conference report does not provide meaningful judicial review of an NSL's gag order. It requires the court to accept as conclusive the government's assertion that a gag order should not be lifted, unless the court determines the government is acting in bad faith. The recipients of NSLs are entitled to meaningful judicial review of a gag order.
We then moved on to National Security Letters more generally:
The draft conference report does not sunset the NSL authority. In light of recent revelations about possible abuses of NSLs, the NSL provision should sunset in no more than four years so that Congress will have an opportunity to review the use of this power.
And finally we addressed sneak and peek search warrants:
The draft conference report requires the government to notify the target of a "sneak and peek" search no earlier than 30 days after the search, rather than within seven days, as the Senate bill provides and as pre-Patriot Act judicial decisions required. The conference report should include a presumption that notice will be provided within a significantly shorter period in order to better protect Fourth Amendment rights. The availability of additional 90-day extensions means that a shorter initial time frame should not be a hardship on the government.
Again, those quotes are from a letter that we sent late last year. Now, you might ask, in this newly announced deal on the Patriot Act, have any of these five problems been solved?
The answer is "No." Not a single one. Only one of these issues has been even partially addressed by this deal, but it has not been fixed.
This deal only makes a few small changes. First, it would permit judicial review of Section 215 gag orders, but under conditions that would make it very difficult for anyone to obtain meaningful judicial review. Under the deal, judicial review can only take place after a year has passed and can only be successful if the recipient of the Section 215 order proves that that government has acted in bad faith. As many of us have argued in the context of the National Security Letters, that is a virtually impossible standard to meet. We need meaningful judicial review of these gag orders, not just the illusion of it.
Second, the deal would specifically allow the government to serve National Security Letters on libraries if the library comes within the current requirements of the NSL statute. This is a provision that appears to just restate current law. Even the American Library Association has called it a "fig leaf."
And third, the deal would clarify that people who receive a National Security Letter or a Section 215 order would not have to tell the FBI if they consult with an attorney. This last change is a positive step, but it is only one relatively minor change.
So that is what we are left with: one relatively minor improvement. That is nowhere near enough.
Ordinarily, when we debate a flawed bill like this one, we have the chance to improve it by offering amendments. I've been trying to do just that to make sure that we don't miss this opportunity to address the core problems with the Patriot Act that so many of us have been fighting to fix. Before the recess I filed four amendments to S. 2271, but I was prevented from calling them up because the Majority Leader used the procedural tactic of filling the amendment tree in order to prevent Senators from offering and getting votes on amendments. Using procedural maneuvers like this to prevent the Senate from debating and voting on amendments is an insult to this institution and to every one of my colleagues. We are being told we have no choice but to accept a deal that a few members cut with the White House, without changing a word.
We do have a choice -- to oppose cloture on this bill and insist that any deal include meaningful civil liberties protections. I don't know if the Majority Leader fears that my amendments would actually pass, or if he just wants to protect Senators from having to explain why they oppose basic protections for law-abiding Americans. But that should not be how the Senate does its business. Offering, debating and voting on amendments is what the Senate is supposed to be all about that's how we craft legislation. Trying to ram this deal through without a real amending process is a cynical maneuver that we should all reject, regardless of how we may feel about the merits of the bill. If my colleagues wish to vote against my amendments, that is their right. But no one has the right to turn this body into a rubber stamp.
Let's take a step back and consider the process that got us here today. As we all know, conference reports are not amendable. They come to this body as a take it or leave it proposition. Those are the rules and we all understand them and play by them. In December, we said no to the Patriot Act conference report.
Now we have a new bill, the product of a side-deal with the White House, that is essentially an amendment to the conference report. It is even drafted that way. Each section of the bill amends the underlying law, as amended by the conference report. That's right. The bill we are considering today amends a law that hasn't even been passed by the Senate, much less signed into law. As I understand it, this bill, should both Houses of Congress pass it, will have to sit on the President's desk unsigned until the President signs the conference report into law.
So proponents of this deal want to effectively amend the conference report which couldn't pass the Senate in December, even though conference reports are unamendable. And they want to do it by circumventing the regular legislative process with a bill that no one is being allowed to amend even though the bill did not even go through committee, let alone a conference. How is that fair? Why should a handful of members of this body be able to amend an unamendable conference report with a deal struck with the White House, and then prevent the Senate from working its will on that deal? How can one group of Senators amend the conference report but prevent other Senators from trying to do the same thing? How is that possible?
The answer is that it's not possible, unless the Senate lets it happen. And the vote we will have later today is the vote where we will find out if the Senate will let it happen.
I hope that even colleagues who may support the deal will oppose such a sham process. It makes no sense to agree to end debate without a guarantee that we will be allowed to actually try to improve the bill. And it is a discourtesy to all Senators, not just me, to try to ram through controversial legislation without the chance to improve it.
My amendments are limited and reasonable. I spoke at length about them before the recess, but let me just take a few minutes to explain again what they would do.
First, Amendment No. 2892 would implement the standard for obtaining Section 215 orders that was in the Senate bill that the Judiciary Committee approved by a vote of 18 to 0, and that was agreed to in the Senate without objection. This is a reasonable amendment that every Senator in one way or another has basically supported.
It took hard work, but the Judiciary Committee came up with language on Section 215 that protects innocent Americans while also allowing the government to do what is needs to do to investigate and prevent terrorism. The Senate standard would require the government to convince a judge that a person has some connection to terrorism or espionage before obtaining their sensitive records. The Senate standard is the following: (1) that the records pertain to a terrorist or spy; (2) that the records pertain to an individual in contact with or known to a suspected terrorist or spy; or (3) that the records are relevant to the activities of a suspected terrorist or spy. And that is the standard that my amendment would impose. This would not limit the types of records that the government could obtain, and it does not go as far to protect law-abiding Americans as I might prefer, but it would make sure the government cannot go on fishing expeditions into the records of innocent people.
The conference report did away with this delicate compromise, replacing the three-prong test with a simple, and quite broad, relevance standard, which could arguably justify the collection of all kinds of information about law-abiding Americans.
Of all the concerns that have been raised about the Patriot Act since it was passed in 2001, Section 215 is the one that has received the most public attention, and rightly so. A reauthorization bill that doesn't fix this provision, in my view, has no credibility.
My second amendment is Amendment No. 2893, which would ensure that recipients of business records orders under section 215 of the Patriot Act and recipients of National Security Letters can get meaningful judicial review of the gag orders that they are subject to.
Under the conference report, as modified by the Sununu bill, recipients of these documents would theoretically have the ability to challenge the gag orders in court, but the standard for getting the gag orders overturned would be virtually impossible to meet. In order to prevail in challenging the NSL or Section 215 gag order, the recipient would have to prove that any certification by the government that disclosure would harm national security or impair diplomatic relations was made in bad faith. There would be what many have called a "conclusive presumption" that the gag order stands, unless the recipient can prove that the government acted in bad faith. That is not meaningful judicial review.
My amendment would eliminate the "bad faith" showing currently required for overturning both section 215 and NSL gag orders. And it would no longer require recipients of section 215 orders to wait a year before they can challenge the accompanying gag orders, which is a new requirement included in the Sununu bill.
My third amendment, Amendment No. 2891, would add to the conference report one additional 4-year sunset provision. It would sunset the National Security Letter authorities that were expanded by the Patriot Act. It would simply add that sunset to the already existing 4-year sunsets that are in the conference report with respect to section 206, section 215, and the lone wolf provision.
National Security Letters, or NSLs, are finally starting to get the attention they deserve. This authority was expanded by sections 358 and 505 of the Patriot Act. The issue of NSLs has flown under the radar for years, even though many of us have been trying to bring more public attention to it.
National Security Letters are issued by the FBI to businesses to obtain certain types of records, without any court approval whatsoever. NSLs can be used to obtain three types of business records: subscriber and transactional information related to Internet and phone usage; credit reports; and financial records, a category that has been expanded to include records from all kinds of everyday businesses like jewelers, car dealers, travel agents and even casinos. This is a very broad power, and I can think of no reason why Congress would not want to place a sunset on these authorities to ensure we have the opportunity to take a close look at them.
Finally, my fourth amendment, Amendment No. 2894, concerns so-called "sneak and peek" searches, whereby the Government can secretly search people's houses in everyday criminal investigations and not provide notice of the search until afterward. The key issue here is how long the government should be allowed to wait, at least in most cases, before it notifies individuals that their homes have been searched. The Senate bill said seven days should be the presumption, with the ability to get extensions if necessary. But the conference report does away with that and instead allows a delay of 30 days in most cases.
My amendment would restore the key component of the Senate compromise by requiring that subjects of sneak and peek searches be notified of the search within 7 days, unless a judge grants an extension of that time because there is a good reason to still keep the search secret. It makes no other change to the conference report other than changing 30 days to 7 days.
Those are my amendments. They are eminently reasonable. They are consistent with provisions that we approved in the Senate last year, or they were central to the concerns raised by so many Senators late last year. So these are obviously not extreme ideas. And the Senate should be allowed to vote on these four amendments. All of us have as much right as the Senators who struck a deal with the White House do, to try to amend the conference report.
I'm happy to report that the Senator from Pennsylvania thinks these are reasonable amendments too. In fact, he thinks they are so reasonable that late yesterday he announced that he is going to combine them into a single bill and introduce it today, and try to move it in the Judiciary Committee. That's right, the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, the chief proponent in this body of the Patriot Act reauthorization conference report and of the White House deal the Senate is being asked to ratify, has taken the four amendments I just described and, with a few minor tweaks, introduced them as a bill.
I must say, I am flattered. And of course I will support that bill. But there is an alternative to the lengthy and uncertain legislative process that awaits the Chairman's new bill. And that is to allow the Senate to vote on my amendments. The Chairman could offer them with me. We would make a powerful team I'm sure. And we have the perfect and logical vehicle for these amendments to the Patriot Act before us right now. All we need to do is add the Chairman's reasonable proposals to this bill and send it to the House where it would almost certainly pass if the leadership would allow it to be voted on. These provisions, most of which come right out of the bill that passed the Senate without objection last July, could become law in a matter of weeks, rather than a year or more from now, if ever.
My amendments, and Senator Specter's bill, are simply what the bipartisan group asked for back in December when we blocked the Patriot Act reauthorization conference report. Our requests were reasonable then, and they are reasonable now. The only reason we are considering a package that doesn't include them is that the White House played hardball, and some Senators decided they had to capitulate.
I oppose the flawed deal we are being asked to ratify. And I oppose the sham process that the Senate is facing here. We still have not fixed some of the most significant problems with the Patriot Act, and if we allow the conference report to go through, the Chairman's sincere hopes notwithstanding, I fear we will lose that chance for another four years. So I must oppose cloture on this bill, which will allow the deal to go forward.
http://counterpunch.com/feingold02282006.html
Renewing the Patriot Act
By Sen. RUSSELL FEINGOLD
Later today we will have a cloture vote on S. 2271. We should not end debate on this bill, and we should not pass this bill. Doing so will only help implement the deeply flawed deal that was struck with the White House to reauthorize the Patriot Act without enacting the core civil liberties protections for which so many of us have fought. I urge my colleagues to vote No on cloture.
Everyone in this body wants to reauthorize the Patriot Act. Many of the expiring provisions are entirely non-controversial. But we also need to fix the provisions that went too far, that do not contain the checks and balances necessary to protect our rights and freedoms. This reauthorization process is our chance to get it right, and moving forward with this bill takes us one step closer to wasting that chance.
Back in December, 46 Senators voted against cloture on the Patriot Act conference report. I think it's clear by now that the deal makes only minor changes to that conference report, which remains as flawed today as it was two months ago. The Senator from Pennsylvania, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee and primary proponent of the conference report in this body, was quoted as saying that the changes that the White House agreed to were "cosmetic." And then he said, according to the AP, "But sometimes cosmetics will make a beauty out of a beast and provide enough cover for senators to change their vote."
Since this deal was announced, editorial pages of newspapers also have pointed out how minimal these changes are, and have urged Senators not to change their votes. Let me read a few examples.
The editorial board of the Roanoke Times in Virginia had this to say on February 11: "A compromise that is expected to clear the way for the law's reauthorization is a victory of fear over strength. The 'compromise' the White House and congressional leaders reached this week on reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act is a compromise of the basic freedoms that define this nation. The Bush administration has made a few minor concessions, enough to give the handful of defiant Senate Republicans and some of their Democratic allies cover to extend the broad anti-terrorism bill and claim they have done what they could to protect the civil liberties of innocent Americans. They have not."
That same day, from the New York Times, we heard this: "The Patriot Act has been one of the few issues on which Congress has shown backbone lately. Last year, it refused to renew expiring parts of the act until greater civil liberties protections were added. But key members of the Senate have now caved, agreeing to renew these provisions in exchange for only minimal improvements. At a time when the public is growing increasingly concerned about the lawlessness of the Bush administration's domestic spying, the Senate should insist that any reauthorization agreement do more to protect Americans against improper secret searches."
And from my own home state, this is from the Wisconsin State Journal on February 18: "In recent weeks senators have worked with the White House to produce a compromise. However, the compromise remains far short of what is required to protect Americans' civil liberties. Regrettably, the Senate has backed down from its earlier stand and is poised to pass the inadequate bill."
These editorial boards and millions of Americans across the country recognize what everyone in this body already knows: that this deal makes only minor, yes cosmetic, changes to the conference report that was blocked in December. The deal is woefully inadequate. Let me explain why.
I want to start by reminding my colleagues of the context for this deal. Back in November and December when so many of us were fighting for improvements to the conference report, we made very clear what we were asking for. We laid out five issues that needed to be addressed to get our support. I'm going to read excerpts from a letter that we sent explaining our concerns, because I think it will help demonstrate why this deal is so bad. Here are the problems we identified and the changes we asked for several months ago.
On Section 215 we said:
The draft conference report would allow the government to obtain sensitive personal information on a mere showing of relevance. This would allow government fishing expeditions. As business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have argued, the government should be required to convince a judge that the records they are seeking have some connection to a suspected terrorist or spy.
Next we discussed gag orders, both for Section 215 orders and National Security Letters:
The draft conference report does not permit the recipient of a Section 215 order to challenge its automatic, permanent gag order. Courts have held that similar restrictions violate the First Amendment. The recipient of a Section 215 order is entitled to meaningful judicial review of the gag order.
The draft conference report does not provide meaningful judicial review of an NSL's gag order. It requires the court to accept as conclusive the government's assertion that a gag order should not be lifted, unless the court determines the government is acting in bad faith. The recipients of NSLs are entitled to meaningful judicial review of a gag order.
We then moved on to National Security Letters more generally:
The draft conference report does not sunset the NSL authority. In light of recent revelations about possible abuses of NSLs, the NSL provision should sunset in no more than four years so that Congress will have an opportunity to review the use of this power.
And finally we addressed sneak and peek search warrants:
The draft conference report requires the government to notify the target of a "sneak and peek" search no earlier than 30 days after the search, rather than within seven days, as the Senate bill provides and as pre-Patriot Act judicial decisions required. The conference report should include a presumption that notice will be provided within a significantly shorter period in order to better protect Fourth Amendment rights. The availability of additional 90-day extensions means that a shorter initial time frame should not be a hardship on the government.
Again, those quotes are from a letter that we sent late last year. Now, you might ask, in this newly announced deal on the Patriot Act, have any of these five problems been solved?
The answer is "No." Not a single one. Only one of these issues has been even partially addressed by this deal, but it has not been fixed.
This deal only makes a few small changes. First, it would permit judicial review of Section 215 gag orders, but under conditions that would make it very difficult for anyone to obtain meaningful judicial review. Under the deal, judicial review can only take place after a year has passed and can only be successful if the recipient of the Section 215 order proves that that government has acted in bad faith. As many of us have argued in the context of the National Security Letters, that is a virtually impossible standard to meet. We need meaningful judicial review of these gag orders, not just the illusion of it.
Second, the deal would specifically allow the government to serve National Security Letters on libraries if the library comes within the current requirements of the NSL statute. This is a provision that appears to just restate current law. Even the American Library Association has called it a "fig leaf."
And third, the deal would clarify that people who receive a National Security Letter or a Section 215 order would not have to tell the FBI if they consult with an attorney. This last change is a positive step, but it is only one relatively minor change.
So that is what we are left with: one relatively minor improvement. That is nowhere near enough.
Ordinarily, when we debate a flawed bill like this one, we have the chance to improve it by offering amendments. I've been trying to do just that to make sure that we don't miss this opportunity to address the core problems with the Patriot Act that so many of us have been fighting to fix. Before the recess I filed four amendments to S. 2271, but I was prevented from calling them up because the Majority Leader used the procedural tactic of filling the amendment tree in order to prevent Senators from offering and getting votes on amendments. Using procedural maneuvers like this to prevent the Senate from debating and voting on amendments is an insult to this institution and to every one of my colleagues. We are being told we have no choice but to accept a deal that a few members cut with the White House, without changing a word.
We do have a choice -- to oppose cloture on this bill and insist that any deal include meaningful civil liberties protections. I don't know if the Majority Leader fears that my amendments would actually pass, or if he just wants to protect Senators from having to explain why they oppose basic protections for law-abiding Americans. But that should not be how the Senate does its business. Offering, debating and voting on amendments is what the Senate is supposed to be all about that's how we craft legislation. Trying to ram this deal through without a real amending process is a cynical maneuver that we should all reject, regardless of how we may feel about the merits of the bill. If my colleagues wish to vote against my amendments, that is their right. But no one has the right to turn this body into a rubber stamp.
Let's take a step back and consider the process that got us here today. As we all know, conference reports are not amendable. They come to this body as a take it or leave it proposition. Those are the rules and we all understand them and play by them. In December, we said no to the Patriot Act conference report.
Now we have a new bill, the product of a side-deal with the White House, that is essentially an amendment to the conference report. It is even drafted that way. Each section of the bill amends the underlying law, as amended by the conference report. That's right. The bill we are considering today amends a law that hasn't even been passed by the Senate, much less signed into law. As I understand it, this bill, should both Houses of Congress pass it, will have to sit on the President's desk unsigned until the President signs the conference report into law.
So proponents of this deal want to effectively amend the conference report which couldn't pass the Senate in December, even though conference reports are unamendable. And they want to do it by circumventing the regular legislative process with a bill that no one is being allowed to amend even though the bill did not even go through committee, let alone a conference. How is that fair? Why should a handful of members of this body be able to amend an unamendable conference report with a deal struck with the White House, and then prevent the Senate from working its will on that deal? How can one group of Senators amend the conference report but prevent other Senators from trying to do the same thing? How is that possible?
The answer is that it's not possible, unless the Senate lets it happen. And the vote we will have later today is the vote where we will find out if the Senate will let it happen.
I hope that even colleagues who may support the deal will oppose such a sham process. It makes no sense to agree to end debate without a guarantee that we will be allowed to actually try to improve the bill. And it is a discourtesy to all Senators, not just me, to try to ram through controversial legislation without the chance to improve it.
My amendments are limited and reasonable. I spoke at length about them before the recess, but let me just take a few minutes to explain again what they would do.
First, Amendment No. 2892 would implement the standard for obtaining Section 215 orders that was in the Senate bill that the Judiciary Committee approved by a vote of 18 to 0, and that was agreed to in the Senate without objection. This is a reasonable amendment that every Senator in one way or another has basically supported.
It took hard work, but the Judiciary Committee came up with language on Section 215 that protects innocent Americans while also allowing the government to do what is needs to do to investigate and prevent terrorism. The Senate standard would require the government to convince a judge that a person has some connection to terrorism or espionage before obtaining their sensitive records. The Senate standard is the following: (1) that the records pertain to a terrorist or spy; (2) that the records pertain to an individual in contact with or known to a suspected terrorist or spy; or (3) that the records are relevant to the activities of a suspected terrorist or spy. And that is the standard that my amendment would impose. This would not limit the types of records that the government could obtain, and it does not go as far to protect law-abiding Americans as I might prefer, but it would make sure the government cannot go on fishing expeditions into the records of innocent people.
The conference report did away with this delicate compromise, replacing the three-prong test with a simple, and quite broad, relevance standard, which could arguably justify the collection of all kinds of information about law-abiding Americans.
Of all the concerns that have been raised about the Patriot Act since it was passed in 2001, Section 215 is the one that has received the most public attention, and rightly so. A reauthorization bill that doesn't fix this provision, in my view, has no credibility.
My second amendment is Amendment No. 2893, which would ensure that recipients of business records orders under section 215 of the Patriot Act and recipients of National Security Letters can get meaningful judicial review of the gag orders that they are subject to.
Under the conference report, as modified by the Sununu bill, recipients of these documents would theoretically have the ability to challenge the gag orders in court, but the standard for getting the gag orders overturned would be virtually impossible to meet. In order to prevail in challenging the NSL or Section 215 gag order, the recipient would have to prove that any certification by the government that disclosure would harm national security or impair diplomatic relations was made in bad faith. There would be what many have called a "conclusive presumption" that the gag order stands, unless the recipient can prove that the government acted in bad faith. That is not meaningful judicial review.
My amendment would eliminate the "bad faith" showing currently required for overturning both section 215 and NSL gag orders. And it would no longer require recipients of section 215 orders to wait a year before they can challenge the accompanying gag orders, which is a new requirement included in the Sununu bill.
My third amendment, Amendment No. 2891, would add to the conference report one additional 4-year sunset provision. It would sunset the National Security Letter authorities that were expanded by the Patriot Act. It would simply add that sunset to the already existing 4-year sunsets that are in the conference report with respect to section 206, section 215, and the lone wolf provision.
National Security Letters, or NSLs, are finally starting to get the attention they deserve. This authority was expanded by sections 358 and 505 of the Patriot Act. The issue of NSLs has flown under the radar for years, even though many of us have been trying to bring more public attention to it.
National Security Letters are issued by the FBI to businesses to obtain certain types of records, without any court approval whatsoever. NSLs can be used to obtain three types of business records: subscriber and transactional information related to Internet and phone usage; credit reports; and financial records, a category that has been expanded to include records from all kinds of everyday businesses like jewelers, car dealers, travel agents and even casinos. This is a very broad power, and I can think of no reason why Congress would not want to place a sunset on these authorities to ensure we have the opportunity to take a close look at them.
Finally, my fourth amendment, Amendment No. 2894, concerns so-called "sneak and peek" searches, whereby the Government can secretly search people's houses in everyday criminal investigations and not provide notice of the search until afterward. The key issue here is how long the government should be allowed to wait, at least in most cases, before it notifies individuals that their homes have been searched. The Senate bill said seven days should be the presumption, with the ability to get extensions if necessary. But the conference report does away with that and instead allows a delay of 30 days in most cases.
My amendment would restore the key component of the Senate compromise by requiring that subjects of sneak and peek searches be notified of the search within 7 days, unless a judge grants an extension of that time because there is a good reason to still keep the search secret. It makes no other change to the conference report other than changing 30 days to 7 days.
Those are my amendments. They are eminently reasonable. They are consistent with provisions that we approved in the Senate last year, or they were central to the concerns raised by so many Senators late last year. So these are obviously not extreme ideas. And the Senate should be allowed to vote on these four amendments. All of us have as much right as the Senators who struck a deal with the White House do, to try to amend the conference report.
I'm happy to report that the Senator from Pennsylvania thinks these are reasonable amendments too. In fact, he thinks they are so reasonable that late yesterday he announced that he is going to combine them into a single bill and introduce it today, and try to move it in the Judiciary Committee. That's right, the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, the chief proponent in this body of the Patriot Act reauthorization conference report and of the White House deal the Senate is being asked to ratify, has taken the four amendments I just described and, with a few minor tweaks, introduced them as a bill.
I must say, I am flattered. And of course I will support that bill. But there is an alternative to the lengthy and uncertain legislative process that awaits the Chairman's new bill. And that is to allow the Senate to vote on my amendments. The Chairman could offer them with me. We would make a powerful team I'm sure. And we have the perfect and logical vehicle for these amendments to the Patriot Act before us right now. All we need to do is add the Chairman's reasonable proposals to this bill and send it to the House where it would almost certainly pass if the leadership would allow it to be voted on. These provisions, most of which come right out of the bill that passed the Senate without objection last July, could become law in a matter of weeks, rather than a year or more from now, if ever.
My amendments, and Senator Specter's bill, are simply what the bipartisan group asked for back in December when we blocked the Patriot Act reauthorization conference report. Our requests were reasonable then, and they are reasonable now. The only reason we are considering a package that doesn't include them is that the White House played hardball, and some Senators decided they had to capitulate.
I oppose the flawed deal we are being asked to ratify. And I oppose the sham process that the Senate is facing here. We still have not fixed some of the most significant problems with the Patriot Act, and if we allow the conference report to go through, the Chairman's sincere hopes notwithstanding, I fear we will lose that chance for another four years. So I must oppose cloture on this bill, which will allow the deal to go forward.
http://counterpunch.com/feingold02282006.html
Published on Tuesday, February 28, 2006 by the Fort Collins Coloradoan (Colorado)
Civil Disobedience a Just, Responsible Approach
by Joe Kissell
If there is an unjust, immoral or illegal situation, particularly if that situation has been brought about by people chosen to make and uphold law, then is it not only the right but the moral responsibility of even but one citizen to speak out? In a free society, part of that vocalization must always include the option of action in the form of peaceful civil disobedience.
Peaceful civil disobedience does not threaten the safety of anyone. Pounding on a 12-ton, concrete cover of a missile silo with a hammer as three Roman Catholic nuns did in 2002, couldn’t possibly have the slightest chance of disaster or, for that matter, even an acutely minor detrimental effect. It is a statement, pure and simple.
And, should people in a free society feel the necessity to make such a statement, it is one that needs attention paid to it. If ordinary citizens take such actions, something may indeed be seriously wrong.
If you look at any major issue where peaceful civil disobedience has occurred, most of the time a sound percentage of the population has been swayed to sympathy, and with good reason; consider these examples - the free slave movement, the suffragette movement, the several nonviolent labor actions in the 1930s, the civil rights movement, the protest against the wars in Vietnam and more recently Iraq and the disastrous free-trade policies of NAFTA.
Let’s be clear on this point. Those who perform civil disobedience are responsible people. They are mostly hard-working, law-abiding citizens who have come to the realization where the only way they can make a point is to peacefully break a simple law, usually one of trespassing or blocking public access. These people go through great inconvenience trying to bring to light desperate issues.
At times it may even be standing atop a silo that restrains a missile carrying multiple, illegal nuclear war-heads holding a hammer in hand. Or it could be not paying one’s taxes in proportion to the federal budget one believes is truly unjust such as expenditures for unwarranted military actions in another country and redirecting those funds to charitable and/or life sustaining organizations. There should be laws allowing such redirection. As it is now in any tax-redirection-civil-disobedience, the opposite is the case. You get to help out charitable organizations and you get to pay the penalty and interest. No refund.
The point is that everyday people such as you and me risk arrest, fines and incarceration for some very good reasons. It is not an easy choice or a glamorous thing to do. It’s not like you go out on a bender on Friday night and get pulled over for a driving while under the influence violation.
These people have chosen to peacefully yet manifestly bring attention to injustice. The fact that civil disobedience is done peacefully and without threat to anyone’s safety yet at great possible disadvantage to the one performing it should be a clue that something is going on that is in need of scrutiny. In other words, in a free and democratic society such as ours is supposed to be, people performing civil disobedience should be looked upon with a good degree of respect. Remember the Boston Tea Party.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0228-22.htm
Civil Disobedience a Just, Responsible Approach
by Joe Kissell
If there is an unjust, immoral or illegal situation, particularly if that situation has been brought about by people chosen to make and uphold law, then is it not only the right but the moral responsibility of even but one citizen to speak out? In a free society, part of that vocalization must always include the option of action in the form of peaceful civil disobedience.
Peaceful civil disobedience does not threaten the safety of anyone. Pounding on a 12-ton, concrete cover of a missile silo with a hammer as three Roman Catholic nuns did in 2002, couldn’t possibly have the slightest chance of disaster or, for that matter, even an acutely minor detrimental effect. It is a statement, pure and simple.
And, should people in a free society feel the necessity to make such a statement, it is one that needs attention paid to it. If ordinary citizens take such actions, something may indeed be seriously wrong.
If you look at any major issue where peaceful civil disobedience has occurred, most of the time a sound percentage of the population has been swayed to sympathy, and with good reason; consider these examples - the free slave movement, the suffragette movement, the several nonviolent labor actions in the 1930s, the civil rights movement, the protest against the wars in Vietnam and more recently Iraq and the disastrous free-trade policies of NAFTA.
Let’s be clear on this point. Those who perform civil disobedience are responsible people. They are mostly hard-working, law-abiding citizens who have come to the realization where the only way they can make a point is to peacefully break a simple law, usually one of trespassing or blocking public access. These people go through great inconvenience trying to bring to light desperate issues.
At times it may even be standing atop a silo that restrains a missile carrying multiple, illegal nuclear war-heads holding a hammer in hand. Or it could be not paying one’s taxes in proportion to the federal budget one believes is truly unjust such as expenditures for unwarranted military actions in another country and redirecting those funds to charitable and/or life sustaining organizations. There should be laws allowing such redirection. As it is now in any tax-redirection-civil-disobedience, the opposite is the case. You get to help out charitable organizations and you get to pay the penalty and interest. No refund.
The point is that everyday people such as you and me risk arrest, fines and incarceration for some very good reasons. It is not an easy choice or a glamorous thing to do. It’s not like you go out on a bender on Friday night and get pulled over for a driving while under the influence violation.
These people have chosen to peacefully yet manifestly bring attention to injustice. The fact that civil disobedience is done peacefully and without threat to anyone’s safety yet at great possible disadvantage to the one performing it should be a clue that something is going on that is in need of scrutiny. In other words, in a free and democratic society such as ours is supposed to be, people performing civil disobedience should be looked upon with a good degree of respect. Remember the Boston Tea Party.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0228-22.htm
The U.S. Disconnect on Bush Abuses
By Robert Parry
February 28, 2006
The U.S. news media is experiencing a cognitive meltdown as it tries to hold onto the traditional view of the United States as a beacon for human rights while facing the new reality in which George W. Bush has plunged the nation into the dark arts of torture, assassination and “disappearances” more common in “death-squad” states.
Rarely has that disconnect been more clearly on display than on the Feb. 28 editorial page of the Washington Post.
The lead editorial, entitled “Homicide Unpunished,” criticizes the Bush administration for letting off U.S. interrogators implicated in murder and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the page’s final editorial hails the Bush administration for demanding that the United Nations purge its human rights organization of human rights violators.
That final editorial, entitled “Prodding the U.N.,” reads like something written from the not-so-distant past when the United States could credibly point fingers at nations with poor records for respecting civil liberties and human rights.
“The administration refused to accept a proposed structure for this new (U.N. human rights) body, reasonably fearing that it would protect human rights abusers rather than put pressure on them,” the Post said, listing those offending nations as Zimbabwe, Sudan, China and Cuba.
The Post added that Washington should confront allies, such as Pakistan and Egypt, and tell them “that relations with the United States will be affected if they resist a serious U.N. human rights body.”
The Big Elephant
Leaving aside the question of whether some of these U.S. allies have appreciably better human rights records than the countries on the Post’s list, the editorial also ignores the bigger elephant in the room, whether Washington retains the moral standing to lecture anybody about respect for human rights and international law.
After all, just six inches above the editorial praising Bush’s human rights position at the U.N. is the other editorial describing how the Bush administration gave only slaps on the wrist to interrogators implicated in torturing detainees to death since 2002.
Indeed, the hypocrisy within this hypocrisy is that the only serious jail time has been meted out to the Abu Ghraib guards who were photographed posing Iraqi prisoners naked in humiliating postures but didn’t kill anyone.
The lead Post editorial notes that Corporal Charles A. Graner Jr., who supervised Private Lynndie England and other guards on the Abu Ghraib night shift, did appear in one photo with a dead Iraqi prisoner, but Graner wasn’t responsible for the man’s murder.
Nevertheless, the sexually-oriented photos of naked Iraqis had infuriated President Bush and many Americans in his Christian Right base, so Graner got 10 years in jail and seven other low-level guards, including England, also were sentenced to prison.
By contrast, the Navy SEAL and CIA interrogators who tortured to death Iraqi Manadel al-Jamadi (the victim in the Graner photo) were spared any serious punishment. On Nov. 4, 2003, the interrogators had taken turns punching and kicking Jamadi before shackling him and hanging him five feet off the floor, where he died of asphyxiation.
“Nine members of the Navy team were given ‘nonjudicial punishment’ by their commanding officer; the 10th, a lieutenant, was acquitted on charges of assault and dereliction of duty,” the Post wrote. “None of the CIA personnel has been prosecuted. The lead interrogator, Mark Swanner, reportedly continues to work for the agency.”
The Rule
The Jamadi case also wasn’t an exception; it was the rule. A new report by Human Rights First documented that only 12 of 98 deaths of detainees in U.S. custody have resulted in any punishment for implicated U.S. officials. Even in the eight cases when the deaths have resulted from torture, the stiffest penalty was five months in jail.
“The report documents many of these cases in devastating detail,” the Post noted. “There is, for example, the case of former Iraqi Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush, who in November 2003 was beaten for days by Army and CIA interrogators, then stuffed into a sleeping bag, wrapped with electrical cord and smothered.
“The case was classified as a murder, but only one person was court-martialed, a low-level warrant officer. After arguing, plausibly, that his actions were approved by more senior officers under a policy issued by the then-commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, his punishment was to be restricted for 60 days to his home, workplace and church.”
Human Rights First reported that in dozens of prisoner deaths, “grossly inadequate reporting, investigation and follow-through have left no one at all responsible for homicides and other unexplained deaths.”
The Post editorial traced this pattern of brutality and neglect all the way to the top. “Commanders, starting with President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and extending through the ranks, have repeatedly declined to hold Americans accountable for documented war crimes,” the Post wrote.
“The defacto principles governing the punishment of U.S. personnel guilty of prisoner abuse since 2002 now are clear: Torturing a foreign prisoner to death is excusable. Authoring and implementing policies of torture may lead to promotion. But being pictured in an Abu Ghraib photograph that leaks to the press is grounds for a heavy prison sentence.”
While this disparity between punishments given the Abu Ghraib night shift and the more lethal work of CIA and military interrogators can’t be disputed, the other disconnect – demonstrated by the two Post editorials both appearing on Feb. 28 – may be harder to explain.
Even as the world looks on in horror – as the United States eviscerates its reputation for promoting human rights – the Post and other U.S. news outlets cling to the now-outdated notion of America as the undisputed human rights champion when it lectures the U.N. on how to isolate human rights abusers.
What the Post editorial board can’t seem to get its brain around is that the United States might now fit better in the category of abusive states, the ones that Bush wants excluded from the new U.N. human rights commission. Otherwise, that new body – like its predecessor – might lose all credibility.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/022806.html
By Robert Parry
February 28, 2006
The U.S. news media is experiencing a cognitive meltdown as it tries to hold onto the traditional view of the United States as a beacon for human rights while facing the new reality in which George W. Bush has plunged the nation into the dark arts of torture, assassination and “disappearances” more common in “death-squad” states.
Rarely has that disconnect been more clearly on display than on the Feb. 28 editorial page of the Washington Post.
The lead editorial, entitled “Homicide Unpunished,” criticizes the Bush administration for letting off U.S. interrogators implicated in murder and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the page’s final editorial hails the Bush administration for demanding that the United Nations purge its human rights organization of human rights violators.
That final editorial, entitled “Prodding the U.N.,” reads like something written from the not-so-distant past when the United States could credibly point fingers at nations with poor records for respecting civil liberties and human rights.
“The administration refused to accept a proposed structure for this new (U.N. human rights) body, reasonably fearing that it would protect human rights abusers rather than put pressure on them,” the Post said, listing those offending nations as Zimbabwe, Sudan, China and Cuba.
The Post added that Washington should confront allies, such as Pakistan and Egypt, and tell them “that relations with the United States will be affected if they resist a serious U.N. human rights body.”
The Big Elephant
Leaving aside the question of whether some of these U.S. allies have appreciably better human rights records than the countries on the Post’s list, the editorial also ignores the bigger elephant in the room, whether Washington retains the moral standing to lecture anybody about respect for human rights and international law.
After all, just six inches above the editorial praising Bush’s human rights position at the U.N. is the other editorial describing how the Bush administration gave only slaps on the wrist to interrogators implicated in torturing detainees to death since 2002.
Indeed, the hypocrisy within this hypocrisy is that the only serious jail time has been meted out to the Abu Ghraib guards who were photographed posing Iraqi prisoners naked in humiliating postures but didn’t kill anyone.
The lead Post editorial notes that Corporal Charles A. Graner Jr., who supervised Private Lynndie England and other guards on the Abu Ghraib night shift, did appear in one photo with a dead Iraqi prisoner, but Graner wasn’t responsible for the man’s murder.
Nevertheless, the sexually-oriented photos of naked Iraqis had infuriated President Bush and many Americans in his Christian Right base, so Graner got 10 years in jail and seven other low-level guards, including England, also were sentenced to prison.
By contrast, the Navy SEAL and CIA interrogators who tortured to death Iraqi Manadel al-Jamadi (the victim in the Graner photo) were spared any serious punishment. On Nov. 4, 2003, the interrogators had taken turns punching and kicking Jamadi before shackling him and hanging him five feet off the floor, where he died of asphyxiation.
“Nine members of the Navy team were given ‘nonjudicial punishment’ by their commanding officer; the 10th, a lieutenant, was acquitted on charges of assault and dereliction of duty,” the Post wrote. “None of the CIA personnel has been prosecuted. The lead interrogator, Mark Swanner, reportedly continues to work for the agency.”
The Rule
The Jamadi case also wasn’t an exception; it was the rule. A new report by Human Rights First documented that only 12 of 98 deaths of detainees in U.S. custody have resulted in any punishment for implicated U.S. officials. Even in the eight cases when the deaths have resulted from torture, the stiffest penalty was five months in jail.
“The report documents many of these cases in devastating detail,” the Post noted. “There is, for example, the case of former Iraqi Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush, who in November 2003 was beaten for days by Army and CIA interrogators, then stuffed into a sleeping bag, wrapped with electrical cord and smothered.
“The case was classified as a murder, but only one person was court-martialed, a low-level warrant officer. After arguing, plausibly, that his actions were approved by more senior officers under a policy issued by the then-commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, his punishment was to be restricted for 60 days to his home, workplace and church.”
Human Rights First reported that in dozens of prisoner deaths, “grossly inadequate reporting, investigation and follow-through have left no one at all responsible for homicides and other unexplained deaths.”
The Post editorial traced this pattern of brutality and neglect all the way to the top. “Commanders, starting with President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and extending through the ranks, have repeatedly declined to hold Americans accountable for documented war crimes,” the Post wrote.
“The defacto principles governing the punishment of U.S. personnel guilty of prisoner abuse since 2002 now are clear: Torturing a foreign prisoner to death is excusable. Authoring and implementing policies of torture may lead to promotion. But being pictured in an Abu Ghraib photograph that leaks to the press is grounds for a heavy prison sentence.”
While this disparity between punishments given the Abu Ghraib night shift and the more lethal work of CIA and military interrogators can’t be disputed, the other disconnect – demonstrated by the two Post editorials both appearing on Feb. 28 – may be harder to explain.
Even as the world looks on in horror – as the United States eviscerates its reputation for promoting human rights – the Post and other U.S. news outlets cling to the now-outdated notion of America as the undisputed human rights champion when it lectures the U.N. on how to isolate human rights abusers.
What the Post editorial board can’t seem to get its brain around is that the United States might now fit better in the category of abusive states, the ones that Bush wants excluded from the new U.N. human rights commission. Otherwise, that new body – like its predecessor – might lose all credibility.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/022806.html
February 28, 2006
Miscreants, Murderers, and Malefactors:
Imperial Conquest, Torture, and a Little Matter of Genocide
By Jason Miller
Acting with impunity and wielding the moral authority of pedophiles, Bush and his fellow Neocons have decimated what was left of America's good name while severely crippling our nation’s capacity for advancing and protecting human rights. Setting a sanguineous course in their reckless pursuit of wealth and power, they have afflicted humankind with their perverse agenda. With alarming consistency, these sociopaths have demonstrated their utter disregard for humanity and the well-being of our planet.
While the US has a history of imperialism, deep cruelty, and mass murder, including slaughtering one million civilians in the conquest of the Philippines, legalizing the institution of slavery, and committing the Native American genocide, by World War II America had arguably begun to demonstrate a reasonable level of commitment to humanitarian ideals. While it was a long, painful process, Abolitionists, Women Suffragists, Populists, Labor Activists, Civil Rights Protestors, and the like forced the United States to strive for truly noble causes. From the end of World War II up until the 1960's, one could reasonably conclude that the nation primarily responsible for the defeat of militaristic fascism in both Europe and Asia had earned a degree of moral authority, in spite of its remaining flaws.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here…
Vietnam marked the beginning of America's descent into a fetid moral sewer, high-lighted (or more appropriately low-lighted) by the deaths of 3,000,000 Vietnamese civilians and the devastating after effects of Agent Orange (compliments of Monsanto). America's light as a beacon of hope for humanity was rapidly extinguished. Ignoring Eisenhower's prescient warning, his successors chose the sword over the plowshare repeatedly. Funneling outrageous percentages of our precious resources into the coffers of the bloated and malevolent military industrial complex, they carried out murderous agendas through direct military intervention, covert CIA operations, and proxies like the Shah of Iran. Sadly, under the last 7-8 presidencies, Democrat and Republican alike, the United States government has evolved into the most powerful terrorist organization on the planet.
Bush and his criminal cohorts have assured US victory in its race to the bottom. Dropping the cloak of altruism, they have come out of the closet and revealed their wicked proclivities. In openly murdering innocent civilians and torturing suspected terrorists under the pretenses of "pre-emptive" military action and the nebulous “War on Terror”, Israel’s Neocon operatives have secured America's place in the pantheon of egregious violators of human rights. Despite having stolen the last two elections, these depraved war criminals continue to act in the name of the American people as they repeatedly urinate and defecate on virtually everything that was truly virtuous in our nation.
Perhaps torture and murder are the values of this “Christian nation”…
Human Rights First recently released a particularly damning and extremely well-researched report entitled Command's Responsibility. I spent several hours perusing this disturbing analysis of homicides committed by our own government (to further the cause of “spreading freedom and democracy”). A shocking number of alleged enemy combatants have been murdered by the US military and the CIA. Apparently justice vanishes without a trace if one is of Middle Eastern descent and suspected of terrorism.
According to the report, 100 such individuals have died since August of 2002. By the US military’s own admission, 34 of those cases were "suspected or confirmed homicides". Human Rights First determined that the "facts suggest death as a result of physical abuse or harsh conditions of detention" in 11 additional cases. The report also reveals that 8 US detainees "were tortured to death".
How is the "bastion of human rights" policing itself? "Only 12 detainee deaths have resulted in punishment of any kind for a US official." Human Rights First also uncovered the facts that "while the CIA has been implicated in several deaths, not one CIA agent has faced a criminal charge". The harshest sentence issued for those responsible for torture-related deaths? An unbelievable slap on the wrist: five months in jail for homicide! Meanwhile, America's "justice system" eagerly metes out the death penalty for murder, mostly to our poor and/or black citizens. Just ask California’s “Terminator”.
Israeli peace of mind and oil are worth the annihilation of millions of human beings, aren’t they?
Still high enough on hubris to believe the Bush Regime is righteous in passing judgment and proclaiming that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea form an "Axis of Evil"? While you are grabbing stones to cast at this trio for their deplorable records on human rights, consider the acts of barbarism, terrorism, and deceit the United States has committed against the first member of the so-called "Axis" over the last two decades. Since Reagan swaggered into office, America has been committing genocide against the Iraqi people in multiple ways. Bear in mind that these "evil" Iraqis never attacked the United States or its citizens. Their crime? Ostensibly it was that their tyrannical leader, Saddam Hussein, needed to be deposed, they possessed weapons of mass destruction, they were a threat to the United States, and eventually were complicit in 9/11. But for those who live in reality, the Iraqis’ true "sins" were possessing vast quantities of oil, daring to sell their oil for Euros instead of the almighty Dollar, and posing a "threat" to poor little Israel, a nation bristling with military firepower and enjoying the unflinching support of the most powerful military in the history of humanity.
As an aside, if the “infinitely benevolent” United States bore the responsibility of removing Hussein to “liberate the Iraqis”, a question naturally arises. Which nation will liberate the world from Bush and his team of despicable Neocons?
A Little Duplicity, a little hypocrisy…whatever it takes, right?
In 1982, the Reagan Regime removed Iraq from the State Department's list of nations sponsoring terrorism. This enabled US corporations, including members of the military industrial complex, to capitalize on the abundant profits to be had in the Iraqi marketplace. In 1983, Ronald Reagan sent special envoy Donald Rumsfeld to meet with US ally Saddam Hussein to "normalize relations" which had been terminated during the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. Despite full knowledge that Hussein used chemical weapons against Iran and on the Kurds of his own nation, the United States continued its cozy relationship with Saddam. The United States and its allies in Western Europe provided Hussein with military helicopters and the precursor agents necessary to manufacture the very weapons of mass destruction which later became one of the pretexts for the Neocon invasion of Iraq.
Former US Assistant Secretary of Defense Noel Koch said this about American support of Hussein:
"No one had any doubts about the Iraqis' continued involvement in terrorism....The real reason was to help them succeed in the war against Iran."
Confirming the initial US acts of genocide against the Iraqi people through its support of Hussein are some quick facts provided by the US State Department. Bear in mind that Hussein was an American ally when these atrocities occurred:
-- Documented chemical attacks by the regime, from 1983 to 1988, resulted in some 30,000 Iraqi and Iranian deaths.
-- Human Rights Watch estimates that Saddam's 1987-1988 campaign of terror against the Kurds killed at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 Kurds.
-- The Iraqi regime used chemical agents to include mustard gas and nerve agents in attacks against at least 40 Kurdish villages between 1987-1988. The largest was the attack on Halabja which resulted in approximately 5,000 deaths.
-- 2,000 Kurdish villages were destroyed during the campaign of terror.
Leave it to American ingenuity to find a better way…
Ongoing US support of Hussein became virtually impossible when he invaded Kuwait, a US ally which had slant-drilled $14 billion worth of oil from Iraq (using equipment supplied by a United States corporation). Despite United States Ambassador April Glaspie's assurances to Hussein that the US "takes no position" in the conflict (just days before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait), Bush the elder unleashed the US military beast on Hussein. The US war machine defeated Iraq by burying thousands of Iraqi troops alive, employing depleted uranium, and murdering thousands of retreating Iraqis during the Basra Road Massacre.
Research by Beth Osborne Daponte, who ran afoul of "straight shooter" and then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney for "inflating" body counts related to the Gulf War, and who has since been exonerated, published by two scholarly journals, and awarded a teaching position at Carnegie Mellon University, demonstrates that 205,500 Iraqis died as a result of the Gulf War. Perhaps the rulers of the American Empire tired of committing genocide through their proxy, Hussein. Recasting him as an enemy certainly increased their capacity to eliminate the Iraqi people.
Keeping our hands clean while “killing them softly”
Shortly after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (on August 6, 1990), the United Nations, under intense pressure from the US, imposed severe economic sanctions on Iraq. A year later, with Iraq defeated, the sanctions continued. From the initial implementation of these draconian measures, the United States utilized its powerful influence within the UN to ensure that the sanctions remained in place. The alleged targets of the sanctions were Saddam Hussein and his government. However, the people of Iraq were the ones brutally victimized by this twelve year campaign of economic terror.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, by late 1995, over a million Iraqis (including 567,000 children) had died as a direct result of the economic sanctions. Based on UNICEF's research, 4,500 children were dying each month and 825,000 Iraqi children were at risk of suffering acute malnutrition.
Demonstrating the Clinton Regime’s complicity in the Iraqi genocide, Secretary of State Madeline Albright appeared on 60 Minutes in May of 1996. When asked about reports of the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to the sanctions, she stated:
"We think the price is worth it."
Even the Oil for Food Program implemented in 1996 (to enable Iraq to exchange its oil on the world market for food and humanitarian supplies) failed to stem the tide of suffering and death. Supporters of the American Empire claim that corruption, inefficiency and abuse caused the failure of this "noble rescue effort". However, despite the fact that the program did not end the misery for Iraqi civilians (regardless of the reasons), the US saw to it that the sanctions remained in place until Bush II launched his illegal invasion. To protest the ongoing sanctions, United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator Dennis Halliday ended his 34 year career with the UN in 1998.
Noam Chomsky has postulated that the ultimate goal of US foreign policy in Iraq is to reduce it to a sparsely populated nation, providing the American Empire with a readily attainable, strategically located piece of real estate sitting atop one of the largest oil reserves in the world.
Evidence does exist to support Chomsky's speculations. Slow Motion Holocaust by Stephanie Reich and The Secret Behind the Sanctions by Thomas Nagy both reference DIA documents which expose US intent with respect to the economic sanctions:
Reich: A series of recently revealed Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) reports show that the US attack on Iraq's civilian population was deliberate and calculated. A DIA report of January 1991 stated that sanctions would prevent the import of chemicals and equipment required for the provision of safe drinking water, resulting in epidemics. A second DIA report listed as likely causes of epidemics in urban areas the fact that US bombing had destroyed water, electrical and waste disposal systems, and had largely ended distribution of preventive medicines. The report itemized the predicted disease outbreaks, highlighting those that strike children. A third DIA report dated March 1991 explicitly connected outbreaks of gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases to the war, stated that children in particular were affected, and noted that potable water had been reduced to 5% of prewar supplies.
Nagy: Over the last two years, I've discovered documents of the Defense Intelligence Agency proving beyond a doubt that, contrary to the Geneva Convention, the U.S. government intentionally used sanctions against Iraq to degrade the country's water supply after the Gulf War. The United States knew the cost that civilian Iraqis, mostly children, would pay, and it went ahead anyway.
Patience is not a Neocon virtue
Once the Bush Regime seized power, the "slow motion holocaust" was no longer satisfactory. In enabling or causing 9/11, they had the Pearl Harbor they needed to launch ”full speed genocide". Spinning incredibly absurd yarns linking Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden while "proving" that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (and the means to unleash them), the nefarious ones whipped the American public into a "patriotic" fervor. Driven by fear of the "terrorists" and the lies of the mainstream media, the American public zealously supported the "Shock and Awe" campaign.
Conveniently, the Neocons and their media handmaidens neglected to inform the American public that as a former ally, the US had a degree of complicity in Saddam's crimes against humanity. They also failed to mention that our government had committed similar offenses during the Gulf War and had engaged in the passive mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis by strong-arming the UN into maintaining the economic sanctions for 12 years. Or perhaps by Neocon moral reckoning, two wrongs do make a right and they decided it would be frivolous to rehash America's "heroic efforts" to end Hussein's tyranny.
In December 2005, George Bush himself publicly admitted that his Regime bears responsibility for at least 30,000 Iraqi civilian deaths since the start of the illegal Occupation in 2003. The Lancet Journal released a study in October 2004 which concluded that the number was close to 100,000 at that time. A more recent study referenced in an article in The Canadian places the number at 250,000. The Neocons certainly have accelerated the pace of the Iraqi genocide.
“Collateral Damage” in the Homeland
Iraqis are not the only victims of the Empire's most recent efforts to exterminate them. Americans are reaping the wages of Bush's sins against the Iraqi people. Over 2300 Americans have died carrying out the twisted bidding of Rumsfeld and company. Hundreds of billions of wasted US taxpayer dollars, virtually certain federal bankruptcy, and the steady asphyxiation of domestic programs which benefit the poor, the sick, the elderly, the working people, and most importantly, our children, closely parallel the passive mass murder perpetrated through the US-driven UN economic sanctions against Iraq. Want evidence? Look to New Orleans.
In light of the Downing Street Memo, which clearly demonstrates that Bush constructed a false case to justify the invasion of a country that posed no real threat to the United States, based on the accompanying needless deaths of American soldiers, and considering the resulting economic sanctions placed upon the American people, Congress has a sacred obligation to truly represent the interests of its constituents and remove Bush and his fellow criminals from office. It is time to impeach Bush and Cheney. Once removed from office, these two and the rest of the cabal need to face trial at the International Criminal Court for war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.
We the People and the Iraqis deserve better
"Congressman John Conyers has introduced three new pieces of legislation aimed at censuring President Bush and Vice President Cheney, and at creating a fact-finding committee that could be a first step toward impeachment."
Americans are not an evil lot, but we are culpable for having allowed a string of truly despicable human beings to perpetrate the Iraqi genocide that has been taking place since the Reagan Regime. The monstrous psychopaths now infesting the White House have taken malevolence to a whole new level. Let us remind ourselves that The White House belongs to us and that Bush serves us.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_ja...2c_murderer.htm
Miscreants, Murderers, and Malefactors:
Imperial Conquest, Torture, and a Little Matter of Genocide
By Jason Miller
Acting with impunity and wielding the moral authority of pedophiles, Bush and his fellow Neocons have decimated what was left of America's good name while severely crippling our nation’s capacity for advancing and protecting human rights. Setting a sanguineous course in their reckless pursuit of wealth and power, they have afflicted humankind with their perverse agenda. With alarming consistency, these sociopaths have demonstrated their utter disregard for humanity and the well-being of our planet.
While the US has a history of imperialism, deep cruelty, and mass murder, including slaughtering one million civilians in the conquest of the Philippines, legalizing the institution of slavery, and committing the Native American genocide, by World War II America had arguably begun to demonstrate a reasonable level of commitment to humanitarian ideals. While it was a long, painful process, Abolitionists, Women Suffragists, Populists, Labor Activists, Civil Rights Protestors, and the like forced the United States to strive for truly noble causes. From the end of World War II up until the 1960's, one could reasonably conclude that the nation primarily responsible for the defeat of militaristic fascism in both Europe and Asia had earned a degree of moral authority, in spite of its remaining flaws.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here…
Vietnam marked the beginning of America's descent into a fetid moral sewer, high-lighted (or more appropriately low-lighted) by the deaths of 3,000,000 Vietnamese civilians and the devastating after effects of Agent Orange (compliments of Monsanto). America's light as a beacon of hope for humanity was rapidly extinguished. Ignoring Eisenhower's prescient warning, his successors chose the sword over the plowshare repeatedly. Funneling outrageous percentages of our precious resources into the coffers of the bloated and malevolent military industrial complex, they carried out murderous agendas through direct military intervention, covert CIA operations, and proxies like the Shah of Iran. Sadly, under the last 7-8 presidencies, Democrat and Republican alike, the United States government has evolved into the most powerful terrorist organization on the planet.
Bush and his criminal cohorts have assured US victory in its race to the bottom. Dropping the cloak of altruism, they have come out of the closet and revealed their wicked proclivities. In openly murdering innocent civilians and torturing suspected terrorists under the pretenses of "pre-emptive" military action and the nebulous “War on Terror”, Israel’s Neocon operatives have secured America's place in the pantheon of egregious violators of human rights. Despite having stolen the last two elections, these depraved war criminals continue to act in the name of the American people as they repeatedly urinate and defecate on virtually everything that was truly virtuous in our nation.
Perhaps torture and murder are the values of this “Christian nation”…
Human Rights First recently released a particularly damning and extremely well-researched report entitled Command's Responsibility. I spent several hours perusing this disturbing analysis of homicides committed by our own government (to further the cause of “spreading freedom and democracy”). A shocking number of alleged enemy combatants have been murdered by the US military and the CIA. Apparently justice vanishes without a trace if one is of Middle Eastern descent and suspected of terrorism.
According to the report, 100 such individuals have died since August of 2002. By the US military’s own admission, 34 of those cases were "suspected or confirmed homicides". Human Rights First determined that the "facts suggest death as a result of physical abuse or harsh conditions of detention" in 11 additional cases. The report also reveals that 8 US detainees "were tortured to death".
How is the "bastion of human rights" policing itself? "Only 12 detainee deaths have resulted in punishment of any kind for a US official." Human Rights First also uncovered the facts that "while the CIA has been implicated in several deaths, not one CIA agent has faced a criminal charge". The harshest sentence issued for those responsible for torture-related deaths? An unbelievable slap on the wrist: five months in jail for homicide! Meanwhile, America's "justice system" eagerly metes out the death penalty for murder, mostly to our poor and/or black citizens. Just ask California’s “Terminator”.
Israeli peace of mind and oil are worth the annihilation of millions of human beings, aren’t they?
Still high enough on hubris to believe the Bush Regime is righteous in passing judgment and proclaiming that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea form an "Axis of Evil"? While you are grabbing stones to cast at this trio for their deplorable records on human rights, consider the acts of barbarism, terrorism, and deceit the United States has committed against the first member of the so-called "Axis" over the last two decades. Since Reagan swaggered into office, America has been committing genocide against the Iraqi people in multiple ways. Bear in mind that these "evil" Iraqis never attacked the United States or its citizens. Their crime? Ostensibly it was that their tyrannical leader, Saddam Hussein, needed to be deposed, they possessed weapons of mass destruction, they were a threat to the United States, and eventually were complicit in 9/11. But for those who live in reality, the Iraqis’ true "sins" were possessing vast quantities of oil, daring to sell their oil for Euros instead of the almighty Dollar, and posing a "threat" to poor little Israel, a nation bristling with military firepower and enjoying the unflinching support of the most powerful military in the history of humanity.
As an aside, if the “infinitely benevolent” United States bore the responsibility of removing Hussein to “liberate the Iraqis”, a question naturally arises. Which nation will liberate the world from Bush and his team of despicable Neocons?
A Little Duplicity, a little hypocrisy…whatever it takes, right?
In 1982, the Reagan Regime removed Iraq from the State Department's list of nations sponsoring terrorism. This enabled US corporations, including members of the military industrial complex, to capitalize on the abundant profits to be had in the Iraqi marketplace. In 1983, Ronald Reagan sent special envoy Donald Rumsfeld to meet with US ally Saddam Hussein to "normalize relations" which had been terminated during the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. Despite full knowledge that Hussein used chemical weapons against Iran and on the Kurds of his own nation, the United States continued its cozy relationship with Saddam. The United States and its allies in Western Europe provided Hussein with military helicopters and the precursor agents necessary to manufacture the very weapons of mass destruction which later became one of the pretexts for the Neocon invasion of Iraq.
Former US Assistant Secretary of Defense Noel Koch said this about American support of Hussein:
"No one had any doubts about the Iraqis' continued involvement in terrorism....The real reason was to help them succeed in the war against Iran."
Confirming the initial US acts of genocide against the Iraqi people through its support of Hussein are some quick facts provided by the US State Department. Bear in mind that Hussein was an American ally when these atrocities occurred:
-- Documented chemical attacks by the regime, from 1983 to 1988, resulted in some 30,000 Iraqi and Iranian deaths.
-- Human Rights Watch estimates that Saddam's 1987-1988 campaign of terror against the Kurds killed at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 Kurds.
-- The Iraqi regime used chemical agents to include mustard gas and nerve agents in attacks against at least 40 Kurdish villages between 1987-1988. The largest was the attack on Halabja which resulted in approximately 5,000 deaths.
-- 2,000 Kurdish villages were destroyed during the campaign of terror.
Leave it to American ingenuity to find a better way…
Ongoing US support of Hussein became virtually impossible when he invaded Kuwait, a US ally which had slant-drilled $14 billion worth of oil from Iraq (using equipment supplied by a United States corporation). Despite United States Ambassador April Glaspie's assurances to Hussein that the US "takes no position" in the conflict (just days before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait), Bush the elder unleashed the US military beast on Hussein. The US war machine defeated Iraq by burying thousands of Iraqi troops alive, employing depleted uranium, and murdering thousands of retreating Iraqis during the Basra Road Massacre.
Research by Beth Osborne Daponte, who ran afoul of "straight shooter" and then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney for "inflating" body counts related to the Gulf War, and who has since been exonerated, published by two scholarly journals, and awarded a teaching position at Carnegie Mellon University, demonstrates that 205,500 Iraqis died as a result of the Gulf War. Perhaps the rulers of the American Empire tired of committing genocide through their proxy, Hussein. Recasting him as an enemy certainly increased their capacity to eliminate the Iraqi people.
Keeping our hands clean while “killing them softly”
Shortly after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (on August 6, 1990), the United Nations, under intense pressure from the US, imposed severe economic sanctions on Iraq. A year later, with Iraq defeated, the sanctions continued. From the initial implementation of these draconian measures, the United States utilized its powerful influence within the UN to ensure that the sanctions remained in place. The alleged targets of the sanctions were Saddam Hussein and his government. However, the people of Iraq were the ones brutally victimized by this twelve year campaign of economic terror.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, by late 1995, over a million Iraqis (including 567,000 children) had died as a direct result of the economic sanctions. Based on UNICEF's research, 4,500 children were dying each month and 825,000 Iraqi children were at risk of suffering acute malnutrition.
Demonstrating the Clinton Regime’s complicity in the Iraqi genocide, Secretary of State Madeline Albright appeared on 60 Minutes in May of 1996. When asked about reports of the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to the sanctions, she stated:
"We think the price is worth it."
Even the Oil for Food Program implemented in 1996 (to enable Iraq to exchange its oil on the world market for food and humanitarian supplies) failed to stem the tide of suffering and death. Supporters of the American Empire claim that corruption, inefficiency and abuse caused the failure of this "noble rescue effort". However, despite the fact that the program did not end the misery for Iraqi civilians (regardless of the reasons), the US saw to it that the sanctions remained in place until Bush II launched his illegal invasion. To protest the ongoing sanctions, United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator Dennis Halliday ended his 34 year career with the UN in 1998.
Noam Chomsky has postulated that the ultimate goal of US foreign policy in Iraq is to reduce it to a sparsely populated nation, providing the American Empire with a readily attainable, strategically located piece of real estate sitting atop one of the largest oil reserves in the world.
Evidence does exist to support Chomsky's speculations. Slow Motion Holocaust by Stephanie Reich and The Secret Behind the Sanctions by Thomas Nagy both reference DIA documents which expose US intent with respect to the economic sanctions:
Reich: A series of recently revealed Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) reports show that the US attack on Iraq's civilian population was deliberate and calculated. A DIA report of January 1991 stated that sanctions would prevent the import of chemicals and equipment required for the provision of safe drinking water, resulting in epidemics. A second DIA report listed as likely causes of epidemics in urban areas the fact that US bombing had destroyed water, electrical and waste disposal systems, and had largely ended distribution of preventive medicines. The report itemized the predicted disease outbreaks, highlighting those that strike children. A third DIA report dated March 1991 explicitly connected outbreaks of gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases to the war, stated that children in particular were affected, and noted that potable water had been reduced to 5% of prewar supplies.
Nagy: Over the last two years, I've discovered documents of the Defense Intelligence Agency proving beyond a doubt that, contrary to the Geneva Convention, the U.S. government intentionally used sanctions against Iraq to degrade the country's water supply after the Gulf War. The United States knew the cost that civilian Iraqis, mostly children, would pay, and it went ahead anyway.
Patience is not a Neocon virtue
Once the Bush Regime seized power, the "slow motion holocaust" was no longer satisfactory. In enabling or causing 9/11, they had the Pearl Harbor they needed to launch ”full speed genocide". Spinning incredibly absurd yarns linking Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden while "proving" that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (and the means to unleash them), the nefarious ones whipped the American public into a "patriotic" fervor. Driven by fear of the "terrorists" and the lies of the mainstream media, the American public zealously supported the "Shock and Awe" campaign.
Conveniently, the Neocons and their media handmaidens neglected to inform the American public that as a former ally, the US had a degree of complicity in Saddam's crimes against humanity. They also failed to mention that our government had committed similar offenses during the Gulf War and had engaged in the passive mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis by strong-arming the UN into maintaining the economic sanctions for 12 years. Or perhaps by Neocon moral reckoning, two wrongs do make a right and they decided it would be frivolous to rehash America's "heroic efforts" to end Hussein's tyranny.
In December 2005, George Bush himself publicly admitted that his Regime bears responsibility for at least 30,000 Iraqi civilian deaths since the start of the illegal Occupation in 2003. The Lancet Journal released a study in October 2004 which concluded that the number was close to 100,000 at that time. A more recent study referenced in an article in The Canadian places the number at 250,000. The Neocons certainly have accelerated the pace of the Iraqi genocide.
“Collateral Damage” in the Homeland
Iraqis are not the only victims of the Empire's most recent efforts to exterminate them. Americans are reaping the wages of Bush's sins against the Iraqi people. Over 2300 Americans have died carrying out the twisted bidding of Rumsfeld and company. Hundreds of billions of wasted US taxpayer dollars, virtually certain federal bankruptcy, and the steady asphyxiation of domestic programs which benefit the poor, the sick, the elderly, the working people, and most importantly, our children, closely parallel the passive mass murder perpetrated through the US-driven UN economic sanctions against Iraq. Want evidence? Look to New Orleans.
In light of the Downing Street Memo, which clearly demonstrates that Bush constructed a false case to justify the invasion of a country that posed no real threat to the United States, based on the accompanying needless deaths of American soldiers, and considering the resulting economic sanctions placed upon the American people, Congress has a sacred obligation to truly represent the interests of its constituents and remove Bush and his fellow criminals from office. It is time to impeach Bush and Cheney. Once removed from office, these two and the rest of the cabal need to face trial at the International Criminal Court for war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.
We the People and the Iraqis deserve better
"Congressman John Conyers has introduced three new pieces of legislation aimed at censuring President Bush and Vice President Cheney, and at creating a fact-finding committee that could be a first step toward impeachment."
Americans are not an evil lot, but we are culpable for having allowed a string of truly despicable human beings to perpetrate the Iraqi genocide that has been taking place since the Reagan Regime. The monstrous psychopaths now infesting the White House have taken malevolence to a whole new level. Let us remind ourselves that The White House belongs to us and that Bush serves us.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_ja...2c_murderer.htm
Feingold reads constitution on Senate floor
03/01/2006 @ 2:42 pm
Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) has read the text of the U.S. constitution to the U.S. Senate after the body voted 95-4 approving 3 amendments to 16 controversial provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, set for renewal.
Feingold spent 34 minutes sharing the document with his fellow Senators, stopping to repeat the Fourth Amendment, which he feels the law violates.
The Fourth Amendment reads:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The Senate has yet to decide the fate of the overall extension of the Act, and is set to consider more Amendments designed to protect civil liberties.
http://rawstory.com/news/2006/Feingold_rea...floor_0301.html
Published on Wednesday, March 1, 2006 by the Chicago Tribune
What to Do When the Emperor Has No Clothes
by Garrison Keillor
These are troubling times for all of us who love this country, as surely we all do, even the satirists. You may poke fun at your mother, but if she is belittled by others it burns your bacon. A blowhard French journalist writes a book about America that is full of arrogant stupidity, and you want to let the air out of him and mail him home flat. And then you read the paper and realize the country is led by a man who isn't paying attention, and you hope that somebody will poke him. Or put a sign on his desk that says, "Try much harder."
Do we need to impeach him to bring some focus to this man's life? The Feb. 27 issue of The New Yorker carries an article by Jane Mayer about a loyal conservative Republican and U.S. Navy lawyer, Albert Mora, and his resistance to the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. From within the Pentagon bureaucracy, he did battle against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and John Yoo, who then was at the Justice Department, and shadowy figures taking orders from Vice President Dick "Gunner" Cheney, arguing America had ratified the Geneva Convention that forbids cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners, and so it has the force of law. They seemed to be arguing that President Bush has the right to order prisoners to be tortured.
One such prisoner, Mohamed al-Qahtani, was held naked in isolation under bright lights for months, threatened by dogs, subjected to unbearable noise volumes and otherwise abused, so that he begged to be allowed to kill himself. When the Senate approved the Torture Convention in 1994, it defined torture as an act "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering."
Is the law a law or is it a piece of toast?
Wiretap surveillance of Americans without a warrant? Great. Go for it. How about turning over American ports to a country more closely tied to Sept. 11, 2001, than Saddam Hussein was? Fine by me. No problem. And what about the war in Iraq? Hey, you're doing a heck of a job. No need to tweak a thing. And your blue button-down shirt--it's you.
But torture is something else. Most people agree with this, and in a democracy that puts the torturers in a delicate position. They must make sure to destroy their e-mails and have subordinates who will take the fall. Because it is impossible to keep torture secret. It goes against the American grain and it eats at the conscience of even the most disciplined, and in the end the truth will come out. It is coming out now.
Our adventure in Iraq, at a cost of billions, has brought that country to the verge of civil war while earning us more enemies than ever before. And tax money earmarked for security is being dumped into pork-barrel projects anywhere somebody wants their own SWAT team. Detonation of a nuclear bomb within our borders--pick any big city--is a real possibility, as much so now as five years ago. Meanwhile, many Democrats have conceded the very subject of security and positioned themselves as Guardians of Our Forests and Benefactors of Waifs and Owls, neglecting the most basic job of government, which is to defend this country. The peaceful lagoon that is the White House is designed for the comfort of a vulnerable man. Perfectly understandable, but not what is needed now. The U.S. Constitution provides a simple, ultimate way to hold him to account for war crimes and the failure to attend to the country's defense. Impeach him and let the Senate hear the evidence.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0301-34.htm
What to Do When the Emperor Has No Clothes
by Garrison Keillor
These are troubling times for all of us who love this country, as surely we all do, even the satirists. You may poke fun at your mother, but if she is belittled by others it burns your bacon. A blowhard French journalist writes a book about America that is full of arrogant stupidity, and you want to let the air out of him and mail him home flat. And then you read the paper and realize the country is led by a man who isn't paying attention, and you hope that somebody will poke him. Or put a sign on his desk that says, "Try much harder."
Do we need to impeach him to bring some focus to this man's life? The Feb. 27 issue of The New Yorker carries an article by Jane Mayer about a loyal conservative Republican and U.S. Navy lawyer, Albert Mora, and his resistance to the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. From within the Pentagon bureaucracy, he did battle against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and John Yoo, who then was at the Justice Department, and shadowy figures taking orders from Vice President Dick "Gunner" Cheney, arguing America had ratified the Geneva Convention that forbids cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners, and so it has the force of law. They seemed to be arguing that President Bush has the right to order prisoners to be tortured.
One such prisoner, Mohamed al-Qahtani, was held naked in isolation under bright lights for months, threatened by dogs, subjected to unbearable noise volumes and otherwise abused, so that he begged to be allowed to kill himself. When the Senate approved the Torture Convention in 1994, it defined torture as an act "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering."
Is the law a law or is it a piece of toast?
Wiretap surveillance of Americans without a warrant? Great. Go for it. How about turning over American ports to a country more closely tied to Sept. 11, 2001, than Saddam Hussein was? Fine by me. No problem. And what about the war in Iraq? Hey, you're doing a heck of a job. No need to tweak a thing. And your blue button-down shirt--it's you.
But torture is something else. Most people agree with this, and in a democracy that puts the torturers in a delicate position. They must make sure to destroy their e-mails and have subordinates who will take the fall. Because it is impossible to keep torture secret. It goes against the American grain and it eats at the conscience of even the most disciplined, and in the end the truth will come out. It is coming out now.
Our adventure in Iraq, at a cost of billions, has brought that country to the verge of civil war while earning us more enemies than ever before. And tax money earmarked for security is being dumped into pork-barrel projects anywhere somebody wants their own SWAT team. Detonation of a nuclear bomb within our borders--pick any big city--is a real possibility, as much so now as five years ago. Meanwhile, many Democrats have conceded the very subject of security and positioned themselves as Guardians of Our Forests and Benefactors of Waifs and Owls, neglecting the most basic job of government, which is to defend this country. The peaceful lagoon that is the White House is designed for the comfort of a vulnerable man. Perfectly understandable, but not what is needed now. The U.S. Constitution provides a simple, ultimate way to hold him to account for war crimes and the failure to attend to the country's defense. Impeach him and let the Senate hear the evidence.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0301-34.htm
The Most Dangerous Days
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 01 March 2006
Vice President Dick Cheney spoke at the 46th Annual American Legion Washington Conference on Tuesday to let everyone know that all is well in Iraq. "This nation has made a decision," said Cheney. "We will stand by our friends and engage our enemies with the goal of a victory. And as the president said in the State of the Union, 'We are in this fight to win, and we are winning.'"
Cheney's optimistic assessment echoed the words of television pundit Terry Jeffery, editor of the conservative weekly Human Events, who appeared with Wolf Blitzer on CNN several days ago after a wave of sectarian violence threatened to hurl Iraq into civil war. Blitzer asked Jeffery if Iraq was falling apart, and Jeffery replied, "I think actually these attacks on Shia shrines can be attributed to the potential success of the Bush strategy." The Neil Cavuto show on FOX, of course, was able to locate a bright silver lining in the carnage. The show carried an onscreen caption that read, "All-Out Civil War in Iraq: Could It Be a Good Thing?"
Hmm.
Wednesday opened with a string of bombings in Baghdad that killed at least 26 people and wounded 65 others. Tuesday saw 75 more people killed in another series of bombings, the worst being five explosions in Baghdad. Since the bombing last Wednesday of the gold-domed Askariya shrine, sacred to Shi'ite Muslims, more than 1,400 people have been killed in Iraq. Bush officials in Iraq and here in America have been scrambling to slap a smiley-face on these horrors, but the threat of all-out religious civil war looms larger by the hour. The so-called "elected" government in Iraq is powerless to stem the tide.
A press release documenting Cheney's speech before the American Legion stated that our impending victory in Iraq "will demand patience and perseverance on the part of the American people. It will also require continued sacrifice by the country's men and women in uniform."
Let's take these one at a time.
Patience and perseverance on the part of the American people? It seems as though this ship, after 1,077 days of utterly useless warfare, has sailed. New polling data has Mr. Bush's overall approval rating stuck at a fantastically anemic 34%. Only 30% of those polled approve of Bush's handling of Iraq. The American people took this ride with Mr. Bush, based in no small part upon the scare tactics he used to frighten everyone into the belief that the Iraqi threat was imminent and the need for war was immediate, but it appears today that the American people feel this ride has gone on long enough.
There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, no connections to al Qaeda or 9/11. The deep sense of betrayal felt within the populace is very real, and very dangerous to congressional Republicans staring down the barrel of the midterm elections that are nine months away. Patience and perseverance? Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
Continued sacrifice by the country's men and women in uniform, now, is truly the sticky wicket. A new Zogby International poll of US troops in Iraq has a full 72% stating flatly that America should be out of Iraq within a year. 29% of those troops polled believe America should pull out of Iraq immediately. A whopping 93% of troops polled believe the occupation of Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with finding and destroying weapons of mass destruction. So much for all of Mr. Bush's canned, choreographed, fake-turkey photo-ops with the soldiers. The soldiers he lionizes and hides behind, even while he slashes their benefits, have run out of patience with him.
This is not a surprise. 2,298 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and tens of thousands more have been horribly and permanently wounded. Those who remain unscathed see, every day, the horrors of war that have ripped through the Iraqi populace. They have seen the bodies, the blood, and have themselves participated under orders in the killings. They have seen their friends die. They have been deployed, and redeployed, and redeployed again. One in ten of them suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome, a number sure to rise as time passes. More than any other Americans, these soldiers have been lied to about this war. The numbers speak volumes. They have had enough.
We have entered, perhaps, the most dangerous time period thus far in this wretched engagement. Matters in Iraq threaten to collapse into chaotic civil war, with the government in place unable to do anything substantive to stop it. This White House remains adamantly and stubbornly unable and unwilling to see the situation for what it is. The lies they put forth to promote this thing - handwritten notes by Lewis Libby demonstrate he knew the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame a month before he claimed to have received it, thus bursting his defense that he got her name from reporters - are collapsing into the hands of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Frightened GOP congresspeople, desperate to keep their jobs under the blotched shadow of an unpopular president in an election year, are liable to do anything to protect themselves and their leader.
And the dying continues.
Where will we as a nation be nine months from now? It seems almost completely certain that we will still be engaged in Iraq. The last nine months saw 631 American soldiers die, so we will likely be staring at nearly 3,000 dead by the time November rolls around. The new rules of military engagement in Iraq, which emphasize air strikes by warplanes and helicopters, will bring about a massive rise in civilian casualties. The sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni in Iraq could easily spread throughout the entire Middle East, destabilizing almost a dozen other nations.
How can this be? The answer is simple. We as a nation are being led by a man - and an administration - that perceive reality through a prism of triumphalism, that refuses to see the truth of things, that avoids hard facts the way a cat avoids water. If any further proof of this is needed, look no further than the Tuesday interview of Mr. Bush on CNN. "I know the American people want somebody to stand on principle," said Bush, "make decisions and stand by them and lead this world toward a more peaceful tomorrow, and I strongly believe we're doing that. And I enjoy it. It's a fantastic opportunity."
He is enjoying this fantastic opportunity. 'Nuff said.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030106A.shtml
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 01 March 2006
Vice President Dick Cheney spoke at the 46th Annual American Legion Washington Conference on Tuesday to let everyone know that all is well in Iraq. "This nation has made a decision," said Cheney. "We will stand by our friends and engage our enemies with the goal of a victory. And as the president said in the State of the Union, 'We are in this fight to win, and we are winning.'"
Cheney's optimistic assessment echoed the words of television pundit Terry Jeffery, editor of the conservative weekly Human Events, who appeared with Wolf Blitzer on CNN several days ago after a wave of sectarian violence threatened to hurl Iraq into civil war. Blitzer asked Jeffery if Iraq was falling apart, and Jeffery replied, "I think actually these attacks on Shia shrines can be attributed to the potential success of the Bush strategy." The Neil Cavuto show on FOX, of course, was able to locate a bright silver lining in the carnage. The show carried an onscreen caption that read, "All-Out Civil War in Iraq: Could It Be a Good Thing?"
Hmm.
Wednesday opened with a string of bombings in Baghdad that killed at least 26 people and wounded 65 others. Tuesday saw 75 more people killed in another series of bombings, the worst being five explosions in Baghdad. Since the bombing last Wednesday of the gold-domed Askariya shrine, sacred to Shi'ite Muslims, more than 1,400 people have been killed in Iraq. Bush officials in Iraq and here in America have been scrambling to slap a smiley-face on these horrors, but the threat of all-out religious civil war looms larger by the hour. The so-called "elected" government in Iraq is powerless to stem the tide.
A press release documenting Cheney's speech before the American Legion stated that our impending victory in Iraq "will demand patience and perseverance on the part of the American people. It will also require continued sacrifice by the country's men and women in uniform."
Let's take these one at a time.
Patience and perseverance on the part of the American people? It seems as though this ship, after 1,077 days of utterly useless warfare, has sailed. New polling data has Mr. Bush's overall approval rating stuck at a fantastically anemic 34%. Only 30% of those polled approve of Bush's handling of Iraq. The American people took this ride with Mr. Bush, based in no small part upon the scare tactics he used to frighten everyone into the belief that the Iraqi threat was imminent and the need for war was immediate, but it appears today that the American people feel this ride has gone on long enough.
There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, no connections to al Qaeda or 9/11. The deep sense of betrayal felt within the populace is very real, and very dangerous to congressional Republicans staring down the barrel of the midterm elections that are nine months away. Patience and perseverance? Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
Continued sacrifice by the country's men and women in uniform, now, is truly the sticky wicket. A new Zogby International poll of US troops in Iraq has a full 72% stating flatly that America should be out of Iraq within a year. 29% of those troops polled believe America should pull out of Iraq immediately. A whopping 93% of troops polled believe the occupation of Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with finding and destroying weapons of mass destruction. So much for all of Mr. Bush's canned, choreographed, fake-turkey photo-ops with the soldiers. The soldiers he lionizes and hides behind, even while he slashes their benefits, have run out of patience with him.
This is not a surprise. 2,298 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and tens of thousands more have been horribly and permanently wounded. Those who remain unscathed see, every day, the horrors of war that have ripped through the Iraqi populace. They have seen the bodies, the blood, and have themselves participated under orders in the killings. They have seen their friends die. They have been deployed, and redeployed, and redeployed again. One in ten of them suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome, a number sure to rise as time passes. More than any other Americans, these soldiers have been lied to about this war. The numbers speak volumes. They have had enough.
We have entered, perhaps, the most dangerous time period thus far in this wretched engagement. Matters in Iraq threaten to collapse into chaotic civil war, with the government in place unable to do anything substantive to stop it. This White House remains adamantly and stubbornly unable and unwilling to see the situation for what it is. The lies they put forth to promote this thing - handwritten notes by Lewis Libby demonstrate he knew the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame a month before he claimed to have received it, thus bursting his defense that he got her name from reporters - are collapsing into the hands of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Frightened GOP congresspeople, desperate to keep their jobs under the blotched shadow of an unpopular president in an election year, are liable to do anything to protect themselves and their leader.
And the dying continues.
Where will we as a nation be nine months from now? It seems almost completely certain that we will still be engaged in Iraq. The last nine months saw 631 American soldiers die, so we will likely be staring at nearly 3,000 dead by the time November rolls around. The new rules of military engagement in Iraq, which emphasize air strikes by warplanes and helicopters, will bring about a massive rise in civilian casualties. The sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni in Iraq could easily spread throughout the entire Middle East, destabilizing almost a dozen other nations.
How can this be? The answer is simple. We as a nation are being led by a man - and an administration - that perceive reality through a prism of triumphalism, that refuses to see the truth of things, that avoids hard facts the way a cat avoids water. If any further proof of this is needed, look no further than the Tuesday interview of Mr. Bush on CNN. "I know the American people want somebody to stand on principle," said Bush, "make decisions and stand by them and lead this world toward a more peaceful tomorrow, and I strongly believe we're doing that. And I enjoy it. It's a fantastic opportunity."
He is enjoying this fantastic opportunity. 'Nuff said.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030106A.shtml
Why We Act
By Congressman John Conyers
t r u t h o u t | Statement
Thursday 02 March 2006
Before sharing some thoughts with you, I wanted to make sure all of you know about an important event in New York City at 8pm tonight. Harper's Magazine is hosting a public forum entitled "Is There a Case for Impeachment?" It will be moderated by Sam Seder of Air America Radio's the Majority Report. I will be on the panel with Lewis H. Lapham, the editor of Harper's and recent author of an article I highly recommend "The Case for Impeachment" (the web article is an excerpt, get the magazine for the whole thing).
We will be joined by Michael Ratner, the President of the Center for Constitutional Rights; my former House Judiciary colleague who served with me during the impeachment of President Nixon, Liz Holtzman; and John Dean, a renowned legal scholar and former White House counselor to President Nixon.
More information can be found at the Harper's website. For those who cannot attend (and my understanding is that the event is at or near capacity) I am told that the Majority Report will be airing it live and C-span will be taping it for a later date.
For some time, I have opened some of my speeches with a fairly standard line about how great democracy is because hardly anyone votes but everyone complains. There is a new variation on this problem among some in the progressive community and it goes like this: nothing we do matters, nothing we do changes anything so why bother doing anything. Here are a few thoughts I will touch upon tonight that I offer in response:
Why We Act
There are few roles in our constitutional government that are more frustrating than being a member of the minority party during a period of one party control of the government. However, at a time when the majority party in general - and the president in particular - appears to be acting in open violation of the laws and the constitution, there are few jobs which are more important to the future of our democratic form of government.
People think of Watergate, or Iran Contra as constituting crises. They were in the sense that an executive branch was acting in violation of the law, and in tension with the majority party in the congress. But in the end, the system worked, the abuses were investigated, and actions were taken - even if presidential pardons ultimately prevented a full measure of justice.
Today, the crisis is substantively and systemically far worse. The alleged acts of wrongdoing - lying about the decision to go to war; manipulation of intelligence; facilitating and countenancing torture; using confidential information to out a CIA agent; open and flagrant violations of federal wiretap laws - are far more egregious than any I have witnessed in my 41 years in Congress. The majority party has shown no ability to engage in simple oversight, let alone challenge the Administration directly. The courts, while operating as an occasional and partial check, are institutionally incapable of delving into most of the controversies we are presented with as a result of limitations on standing, ripeness, and other doctrines. The media, which is increasingly concentrated, was shell-shocked and in some respects cowered by 9/11, and for the most part unwilling to alienate the party in charge.
Faced with that dilemma, we had a choice. We could simply ignore the myriad of transgressions being committed, and continue to reacting to the legislative agenda put before us by the Republican Party on a day-to-day basis, or we could do everything in our power to call attention to and document these very grave abuses of power. I opted for the latter course.
I could not live with myself or my children, if when faced with an Administration that went to war under false pretenses, used classified information to smear political opponents; and wiretapped innocent Americans without warrants, I did not formally respond to it. If the Ranking Member of the Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over the constitution, is silent on these matters, who else can we expect to speak out?
So for the last several years I have:
Forwarded scores of letters to the Administration requesting information about these abuses, including most notably a letter inquiring about the accuracy of the Downing Street Minutes signed by 122 Members and more than 500,000 Americans.
Forwarded numerous letters to the Republican Chairs asking them to conduct hearings on these abuses, including a letter signed by 52 Members formally requesting that the Committees on Judiciary, Armed Services, International Relations and Intelligence convene hearings on the Downing Street Minutes.
Filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the Administration, asked for investigations by GAO, various Inspectors General, and the Justice Department.
Held our own Democratic hearings, for which we were forced by the Majority to retreat to the basement of the Capitol.
Completed a comprehensive report on the Downing Street Minutes and the Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War, which was more than 270 pages and 1000 footnotes in length.
Filed legislation resulting from our investigation not only censoring the President and the Vice President, but creating a select committee to more fully investigate whether impeachable offenses had occurred.
When the NSA scandal broke, we again responded - with letters, requests for independent investigations, holding our own hearing, and are now in the process of completing a comprehensive report of these and related civil rights and civil liberties abuses by the Administration since 9/11.
All of this constitutes a public record of the constitutional abuses we have seen, and is designed to stand the test of time. It comes on top of the hearings and Report I prepared on the electoral abuses in Ohio which led to an unprecedented electoral college challenge in the House and the Senate.
Now let me add, in many respects, this is just the tip of the iceberg of the policy failures of this Administration. Over the last six years we have seen a record budget surplus turn into a record deficit; we face trade deficits as far as they eye can see and the near evisceration of our manufacturing base; we have a record number of individuals and families who do not have health insurance; we passed a disastrous Medicare sell out bill; we went through the debacle of Congress and the President politicizing the tragic Terry Schiavo case; Port Security is abysmal, the Homeland Security Department is a joke, and yesterday we learned that Bush knew very well that the levees in New Orleans could be breached even though he later said no one anticipated it. These are all weighty, serious issues. They present significant problems for our nation as well, however, they are not of the same constitutional magnitude as the other issues we're talking about today.
There can be no doubt that today we are in a constitutional crisis that threatens the system of checks and balances that has preserved our fundamental freedoms for more than 200 years. Just because the president's approval ratings is down to 34% and the vice president's approval is down to 18%, does not mean they cannot do severe, long term harm to our nation. Our actions and tonight's forum are an important clarion call to anyone who is listening - that there is a constitutional line that even a president cannot cross without our people standing up and fighting for their democracy.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030206S.shtml
By Congressman John Conyers
t r u t h o u t | Statement
Thursday 02 March 2006
Before sharing some thoughts with you, I wanted to make sure all of you know about an important event in New York City at 8pm tonight. Harper's Magazine is hosting a public forum entitled "Is There a Case for Impeachment?" It will be moderated by Sam Seder of Air America Radio's the Majority Report. I will be on the panel with Lewis H. Lapham, the editor of Harper's and recent author of an article I highly recommend "The Case for Impeachment" (the web article is an excerpt, get the magazine for the whole thing).
We will be joined by Michael Ratner, the President of the Center for Constitutional Rights; my former House Judiciary colleague who served with me during the impeachment of President Nixon, Liz Holtzman; and John Dean, a renowned legal scholar and former White House counselor to President Nixon.
More information can be found at the Harper's website. For those who cannot attend (and my understanding is that the event is at or near capacity) I am told that the Majority Report will be airing it live and C-span will be taping it for a later date.
For some time, I have opened some of my speeches with a fairly standard line about how great democracy is because hardly anyone votes but everyone complains. There is a new variation on this problem among some in the progressive community and it goes like this: nothing we do matters, nothing we do changes anything so why bother doing anything. Here are a few thoughts I will touch upon tonight that I offer in response:
Why We Act
There are few roles in our constitutional government that are more frustrating than being a member of the minority party during a period of one party control of the government. However, at a time when the majority party in general - and the president in particular - appears to be acting in open violation of the laws and the constitution, there are few jobs which are more important to the future of our democratic form of government.
People think of Watergate, or Iran Contra as constituting crises. They were in the sense that an executive branch was acting in violation of the law, and in tension with the majority party in the congress. But in the end, the system worked, the abuses were investigated, and actions were taken - even if presidential pardons ultimately prevented a full measure of justice.
Today, the crisis is substantively and systemically far worse. The alleged acts of wrongdoing - lying about the decision to go to war; manipulation of intelligence; facilitating and countenancing torture; using confidential information to out a CIA agent; open and flagrant violations of federal wiretap laws - are far more egregious than any I have witnessed in my 41 years in Congress. The majority party has shown no ability to engage in simple oversight, let alone challenge the Administration directly. The courts, while operating as an occasional and partial check, are institutionally incapable of delving into most of the controversies we are presented with as a result of limitations on standing, ripeness, and other doctrines. The media, which is increasingly concentrated, was shell-shocked and in some respects cowered by 9/11, and for the most part unwilling to alienate the party in charge.
Faced with that dilemma, we had a choice. We could simply ignore the myriad of transgressions being committed, and continue to reacting to the legislative agenda put before us by the Republican Party on a day-to-day basis, or we could do everything in our power to call attention to and document these very grave abuses of power. I opted for the latter course.
I could not live with myself or my children, if when faced with an Administration that went to war under false pretenses, used classified information to smear political opponents; and wiretapped innocent Americans without warrants, I did not formally respond to it. If the Ranking Member of the Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over the constitution, is silent on these matters, who else can we expect to speak out?
So for the last several years I have:
Forwarded scores of letters to the Administration requesting information about these abuses, including most notably a letter inquiring about the accuracy of the Downing Street Minutes signed by 122 Members and more than 500,000 Americans.
Forwarded numerous letters to the Republican Chairs asking them to conduct hearings on these abuses, including a letter signed by 52 Members formally requesting that the Committees on Judiciary, Armed Services, International Relations and Intelligence convene hearings on the Downing Street Minutes.
Filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the Administration, asked for investigations by GAO, various Inspectors General, and the Justice Department.
Held our own Democratic hearings, for which we were forced by the Majority to retreat to the basement of the Capitol.
Completed a comprehensive report on the Downing Street Minutes and the Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War, which was more than 270 pages and 1000 footnotes in length.
Filed legislation resulting from our investigation not only censoring the President and the Vice President, but creating a select committee to more fully investigate whether impeachable offenses had occurred.
When the NSA scandal broke, we again responded - with letters, requests for independent investigations, holding our own hearing, and are now in the process of completing a comprehensive report of these and related civil rights and civil liberties abuses by the Administration since 9/11.
All of this constitutes a public record of the constitutional abuses we have seen, and is designed to stand the test of time. It comes on top of the hearings and Report I prepared on the electoral abuses in Ohio which led to an unprecedented electoral college challenge in the House and the Senate.
Now let me add, in many respects, this is just the tip of the iceberg of the policy failures of this Administration. Over the last six years we have seen a record budget surplus turn into a record deficit; we face trade deficits as far as they eye can see and the near evisceration of our manufacturing base; we have a record number of individuals and families who do not have health insurance; we passed a disastrous Medicare sell out bill; we went through the debacle of Congress and the President politicizing the tragic Terry Schiavo case; Port Security is abysmal, the Homeland Security Department is a joke, and yesterday we learned that Bush knew very well that the levees in New Orleans could be breached even though he later said no one anticipated it. These are all weighty, serious issues. They present significant problems for our nation as well, however, they are not of the same constitutional magnitude as the other issues we're talking about today.
There can be no doubt that today we are in a constitutional crisis that threatens the system of checks and balances that has preserved our fundamental freedoms for more than 200 years. Just because the president's approval ratings is down to 34% and the vice president's approval is down to 18%, does not mean they cannot do severe, long term harm to our nation. Our actions and tonight's forum are an important clarion call to anyone who is listening - that there is a constitutional line that even a president cannot cross without our people standing up and fighting for their democracy.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030206S.shtml
QUOTE(DWB04 @ Mar 3 2006, 02:13 PM)
On Torture and Being 'Good Americans'
By Fred Branfman
YubaNet
Friday 03 March 2006
"Gestapo interrogation methods included: repeated near drownings of a prisoner in a bathtub."
-- The History Place
"The CIA officers say 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed lasted the longest under water boarding, two and a half minutes, before beginning to talk, with debatable results."
-- Brian Ross, ABC World News Tonight, November 18, 2005
"When President Bush last week signed the bill outlawing the torture of detainees, he quietly reserved the right to bypass the law under his powers as commander in chief...Bush believes he can waive the restrictions, the White House and legal specialists said."
-- "Bush Could Bypass Torture Ban," Boston Globe
As a teenager, I could not understand how the German people could claim to be "good Germans," unaware of what the Nazis had done in their names. I could understand if these ordinary German people had said they had known and been horrified, but were afraid to speak up. But they would then be "weak or fearful or indifferent Germans," not "good Germans." The idea that only the Nazis were responsible for the Holocaust made no sense. Whatever the Germans as a whole know about the concentration camps, they certainly knew about the systematic mistreatment of Jews that had occurred before their very eyes, and from which so many had profited. And if they were not really "good Germans," what should or could they have done, given the reality of Nazi tyranny?
The issue became personal for me in the summer of 1961, when I hitchhiked through Europe with a lovely German woman named Inge. Still in love after an idyllic summer, we visited Hyde Park the day before I was to return home. A bearded, middle-aged concentration-camp survivor was angrily attacking the German people for standing by and letting the Jews be slaughtered. I was moved beyond words. Suddenly the woman I loved began yelling angrily at him, screaming that the Germans did not know, that her father had just been a soldier and was not responsible for the Holocaust.
Our relationship essentially ended then and there. I understood intellectually that she was just defending her father and was neither an anti-Semite nor an evil person. But there it was. She on one side. The survivor on the other. A gulf between them. Whatever my head said, my heart knew that the world is divided into evil-doers, their victims, and those like Inge who do not want to know. And that I had no choice but to stand with the victims.
I never dreamed at that moment that I, as an American, would a few years later face this same question as my government committed mass murder of civilians in Indochina in violation of the Nuremberg Principles. Or that more than four decades later I would still be struggling with what it means to be a "good American" after learning that a group of US leaders has unilaterally seized the right to torture anyone it chooses without evidence and in violation of international law, human decency, and the sacrifice of the many Americans who have died fighting autocracy and totalitarianism.
Bush Embraces Torture
To ask what it means to be a "good American" is not to compare Bush to Hitler or Republicans to Nazis. The question does not arise only when leaders engage in mass murder on the scale of a Hitler or Stalin, which Bush has not. It requires only that they engage in actions that are clearly evil, which Bush has.
Every generation or so an evil arises which is so monstrous, so degrading to the human spirit, so morally bankrupt that even to debate it is a sign of moral corruption. Native American genocide, slavery, totalitarianism, and Jim Crow laws are evils so unspeakable that we cannot understand today how anyone with a shred of decency could have once supported them. Today, torture, a practice far more degrading to us than to our victims, represents such an evil.
The issue has become urgent because Bush has chosen to demand the legal right to torture anyone he wishes. When torture was revealed at Abu Ghraib, the administration - falsely and shamelessly - attempted to shift its own responsibility onto foot-soldiers like Lynndie England. Since then, however, leaks have revealed that the CIA has tortured terrorist suspects all around the world, using techniques like "water boarding." In response, Senator John McCain proposed an amendment, attached to the 2006 Defense bill, that would ban torture.
Bush's first response to McCain's amendment was to threaten to veto the Defense Bill if it passed. When it became clear that McCain's amendment would pass by an overwhelming majority (it passed in by a 90-9 margin in the end), Bush reversed course and said he would support the amendment. Yet when he actually signed the bill, Bush added something called a "signing statement" in which he reserved the right to do whatever he chooses as Commander-in-Chief to "protect the American people from further terrorist attacks." In short, even as he signed McCain's amendment, Bush let it be known that he intends to ignore it as he sees fit.
Bush's demand is unprecedented. No leader in all human history, not even Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, has publicly demanded the right to torture. All others have behaved as Bush did before the amendment when he secretly tortured on a scale unseen in American history even while saying he wasn't. Forced into the open by the McCain amendment, however, Bush chose to openly demand the legal right to torture. Most experts assume he will continue to torture.
It is important to understand what this means. Bush justifies his right to torture on the grounds of saving American lives in a global "war on terrorism." Unlike previous wars, however, this war will never end. On the contrary, Bush's bungling of the war on terror - including the increased Muslim hatred of the United States that the practice of torture has caused - makes it more likely that there will be another domestic 9/11, leading in turn to more demands to torture. Bush's assertion of his right to torture, therefore, would make torture a permanent and growing instrument of US state policy.
Also, by opposing the McCain amendment, Bush took direct responsibility for the torture he and his administration have inflicted on countless suspects. As you read these words, people are screaming in agony from Gestapo techniques used in CIA and "allied" torture chambers around the world. Many or even most of the victims are innocent. The New Republic has noted that "Pentagon reports have acknowledged that up to 90 percent of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, many of whom were abused and tortured, were not guilty of anything.... And Abu Ghraib produced a tiny fraction of the number of abuse, torture, and murder cases that have been subsequently revealed."
Mr. Bush's statement that "we do not torture," even as he was threatening to veto the entire Defense bill because it limited his right to torture, is a dramatic example of how torture degrades the torturer even more than it does his victims. And it is a disgraceful commentary on our nation that no major church, business, or political leader, nor the fawning media personalities who interview him and his officials, has expressed outrage at this bald-faced lie. And one can barely mention an unspeakable Congress, which ignored his lying about torture after spending two years impeaching his predecessor for lying about sex.
The real question for us, however, is what this says not about President Bush and our other leaders, but about ourselves. What are we, as citizens, as human beings, willing to live with? Are we willing to live with a President, Vice-President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, and Attorney-General who either engage in or rationalize torture in our names, even as they shamelessly deny they are doing so?
If we are willing to live with this evil, the torture will continue. If not, it can be brought to an end. Who are we?
Becoming "Good Americans"
We are in some ways more morally compromised than the "good Germans" of the 1930s. To begin with, we are far less able to claim we do not know. Our daily newspapers regularly report new revelations of Bush administration torture.
Second, by opposing torture, we face far less severe threats than did Germans who tried to help Jews. Even the strong possibility that we could become targets of illegal spying by this administration for protesting its torture is far less frightening than the death or imprisonment faced by Germans who helped Jews.
And, third, unlike the Germans, we cannot reasonably claim that it is futile to oppose our leaders. Creating or joining an organized effort to prevent torture can succeed because we possess one great advantage that human rights advocates in Germany did not have: the public is with us. Most Americans abhor torture and can understand the argument that it does not protect American lives. This is why the McCain amendment enjoyed 90 percent majorities in the Republican-controlled House and Senate, and why it is possible to bring to power leaders who are not committed to torture.
If we can build a movement to limit and ultimately remove from power those who torture, and thus endanger our lives, we will be achieving other important goals as well.
We will be building support for international law, which is one of humanity's few frail protections against far greater violence. If we can implement international law against torture, perhaps we can extend it to preventing the murder of civilians or aggressive war. We will be reaffirming America's once-strong commitment to building the kind of new international order that is required to reduce international terrorism, and fostering a world in which US leaders would once again be respected as fighters for human decency rather than despised as threats to it.
We will bring the once-powerful but forgotten force of morality and nonviolent action - for civil rights, for peace, for women's rights - back into our politics. A false morality that claims to love Jesus while torturing and killing in his name will be replaced by an authentic morality that seeks to address the root-causes of terrorism and violence.
We will thus also join this renewed moral force with a practical strategy that can actually protect us from terrorism. Torture is only the most dramatic example of how Bush has endangered our lives by bungling the war on terrorism. He has also dangerously neglected homeland security, alienated world opinion, helped Al Qaeda grow in numbers and fervor, wasted vast resources in Iraq in ways that increase terrorist ranks, failed to build an effective democracy in Afghanistan, failed to bring peace to the Middle East, and failed to address the poverty that fuels anti-American terrorism. Ending torture is a necessary precondition to developing an effective strategy that will actually protect rather than endanger Americans.
And we will strengthen democracy at home. Nothing is more un-American and undemocratic than the idea that a small group of executive branch leaders should be free to torture, kill, and spy at will. This idea is in fact precisely what generations of Americans have died fighting against. Ending Bush's use of torture will be the beginning of restoring an accountable and democratic government to this nation.
Conservative Totalitarianism
Ending torture will have a major impact beyond torture itself for a simple reason: as slavery was the linchpin to the entire pre-bellum Southern social order, torture has become integral to today's conservative ideology. Conservative ideology was once a coherent set of ideas built around limiting state power over the individual. It has today degenerated into a rationale for expanding executive power over the individual, including not only the right to torture but the right to spy on citizens, wage aggressive war while lying about it, prevent gay people from marrying, deny a woman the right to an abortion, publish disguised government propaganda in the media, and even deny us the right to die in peace if conservatives decree that we must live as vegetables or in unendurable pain.
It is no coincidence that the executive's right to torture was defended not only by Bush and Cheney, but also by conservative ideologues at The Weekly Standard, financed by media mogul Rupert Murdoch and edited by William Kristol, who published a cover story by Charles Krauthammer - widely admired in conservative circles - which declared that "we must all be prepared to torture" to save American lives. Or that the National Review opined that "if McCain's amendment becomes law ... we will then be able to apply only methods formulated to deal with conventional soldiers in a different sort of conflict than the one that faces us now. This is folly."
Today's conservative movement has been reduced to a set of impulses, above all a totalitarian impulse to support the expansion of autocratic power it was founded to restrain. Since its ideological blinders prevent it from developing sensible measures to reduce terrorism, it has turned to justifying only those policies that expand executive power and seek to rule through coercion, threats, and violence.
Whatever a movement to abolish torture will achieve for society, it is clear what participating in it means for each of us as individuals. It means above all that our children and grandchildren will not remember us with shame, that they will not one day have to try to justify to our victims our failure to oppose the torture being conducted in our names, and that the term "good Americans" will mean just that, and not become an excuse for fear or indifference.
When we fight to end torture we are not only fighting for human decency, international law, democracy, and freedom. We are fighting for ourselves.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030306C.shtml
By Fred Branfman
YubaNet
Friday 03 March 2006
"Gestapo interrogation methods included: repeated near drownings of a prisoner in a bathtub."
-- The History Place
"The CIA officers say 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed lasted the longest under water boarding, two and a half minutes, before beginning to talk, with debatable results."
-- Brian Ross, ABC World News Tonight, November 18, 2005
"When President Bush last week signed the bill outlawing the torture of detainees, he quietly reserved the right to bypass the law under his powers as commander in chief...Bush believes he can waive the restrictions, the White House and legal specialists said."
-- "Bush Could Bypass Torture Ban," Boston Globe
As a teenager, I could not understand how the German people could claim to be "good Germans," unaware of what the Nazis had done in their names. I could understand if these ordinary German people had said they had known and been horrified, but were afraid to speak up. But they would then be "weak or fearful or indifferent Germans," not "good Germans." The idea that only the Nazis were responsible for the Holocaust made no sense. Whatever the Germans as a whole know about the concentration camps, they certainly knew about the systematic mistreatment of Jews that had occurred before their very eyes, and from which so many had profited. And if they were not really "good Germans," what should or could they have done, given the reality of Nazi tyranny?
The issue became personal for me in the summer of 1961, when I hitchhiked through Europe with a lovely German woman named Inge. Still in love after an idyllic summer, we visited Hyde Park the day before I was to return home. A bearded, middle-aged concentration-camp survivor was angrily attacking the German people for standing by and letting the Jews be slaughtered. I was moved beyond words. Suddenly the woman I loved began yelling angrily at him, screaming that the Germans did not know, that her father had just been a soldier and was not responsible for the Holocaust.
Our relationship essentially ended then and there. I understood intellectually that she was just defending her father and was neither an anti-Semite nor an evil person. But there it was. She on one side. The survivor on the other. A gulf between them. Whatever my head said, my heart knew that the world is divided into evil-doers, their victims, and those like Inge who do not want to know. And that I had no choice but to stand with the victims.
I never dreamed at that moment that I, as an American, would a few years later face this same question as my government committed mass murder of civilians in Indochina in violation of the Nuremberg Principles. Or that more than four decades later I would still be struggling with what it means to be a "good American" after learning that a group of US leaders has unilaterally seized the right to torture anyone it chooses without evidence and in violation of international law, human decency, and the sacrifice of the many Americans who have died fighting autocracy and totalitarianism.
Bush Embraces Torture
To ask what it means to be a "good American" is not to compare Bush to Hitler or Republicans to Nazis. The question does not arise only when leaders engage in mass murder on the scale of a Hitler or Stalin, which Bush has not. It requires only that they engage in actions that are clearly evil, which Bush has.
Every generation or so an evil arises which is so monstrous, so degrading to the human spirit, so morally bankrupt that even to debate it is a sign of moral corruption. Native American genocide, slavery, totalitarianism, and Jim Crow laws are evils so unspeakable that we cannot understand today how anyone with a shred of decency could have once supported them. Today, torture, a practice far more degrading to us than to our victims, represents such an evil.
The issue has become urgent because Bush has chosen to demand the legal right to torture anyone he wishes. When torture was revealed at Abu Ghraib, the administration - falsely and shamelessly - attempted to shift its own responsibility onto foot-soldiers like Lynndie England. Since then, however, leaks have revealed that the CIA has tortured terrorist suspects all around the world, using techniques like "water boarding." In response, Senator John McCain proposed an amendment, attached to the 2006 Defense bill, that would ban torture.
Bush's first response to McCain's amendment was to threaten to veto the Defense Bill if it passed. When it became clear that McCain's amendment would pass by an overwhelming majority (it passed in by a 90-9 margin in the end), Bush reversed course and said he would support the amendment. Yet when he actually signed the bill, Bush added something called a "signing statement" in which he reserved the right to do whatever he chooses as Commander-in-Chief to "protect the American people from further terrorist attacks." In short, even as he signed McCain's amendment, Bush let it be known that he intends to ignore it as he sees fit.
Bush's demand is unprecedented. No leader in all human history, not even Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, has publicly demanded the right to torture. All others have behaved as Bush did before the amendment when he secretly tortured on a scale unseen in American history even while saying he wasn't. Forced into the open by the McCain amendment, however, Bush chose to openly demand the legal right to torture. Most experts assume he will continue to torture.
It is important to understand what this means. Bush justifies his right to torture on the grounds of saving American lives in a global "war on terrorism." Unlike previous wars, however, this war will never end. On the contrary, Bush's bungling of the war on terror - including the increased Muslim hatred of the United States that the practice of torture has caused - makes it more likely that there will be another domestic 9/11, leading in turn to more demands to torture. Bush's assertion of his right to torture, therefore, would make torture a permanent and growing instrument of US state policy.
Also, by opposing the McCain amendment, Bush took direct responsibility for the torture he and his administration have inflicted on countless suspects. As you read these words, people are screaming in agony from Gestapo techniques used in CIA and "allied" torture chambers around the world. Many or even most of the victims are innocent. The New Republic has noted that "Pentagon reports have acknowledged that up to 90 percent of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, many of whom were abused and tortured, were not guilty of anything.... And Abu Ghraib produced a tiny fraction of the number of abuse, torture, and murder cases that have been subsequently revealed."
Mr. Bush's statement that "we do not torture," even as he was threatening to veto the entire Defense bill because it limited his right to torture, is a dramatic example of how torture degrades the torturer even more than it does his victims. And it is a disgraceful commentary on our nation that no major church, business, or political leader, nor the fawning media personalities who interview him and his officials, has expressed outrage at this bald-faced lie. And one can barely mention an unspeakable Congress, which ignored his lying about torture after spending two years impeaching his predecessor for lying about sex.
The real question for us, however, is what this says not about President Bush and our other leaders, but about ourselves. What are we, as citizens, as human beings, willing to live with? Are we willing to live with a President, Vice-President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, and Attorney-General who either engage in or rationalize torture in our names, even as they shamelessly deny they are doing so?
If we are willing to live with this evil, the torture will continue. If not, it can be brought to an end. Who are we?
Becoming "Good Americans"
We are in some ways more morally compromised than the "good Germans" of the 1930s. To begin with, we are far less able to claim we do not know. Our daily newspapers regularly report new revelations of Bush administration torture.
Second, by opposing torture, we face far less severe threats than did Germans who tried to help Jews. Even the strong possibility that we could become targets of illegal spying by this administration for protesting its torture is far less frightening than the death or imprisonment faced by Germans who helped Jews.
And, third, unlike the Germans, we cannot reasonably claim that it is futile to oppose our leaders. Creating or joining an organized effort to prevent torture can succeed because we possess one great advantage that human rights advocates in Germany did not have: the public is with us. Most Americans abhor torture and can understand the argument that it does not protect American lives. This is why the McCain amendment enjoyed 90 percent majorities in the Republican-controlled House and Senate, and why it is possible to bring to power leaders who are not committed to torture.
If we can build a movement to limit and ultimately remove from power those who torture, and thus endanger our lives, we will be achieving other important goals as well.
We will be building support for international law, which is one of humanity's few frail protections against far greater violence. If we can implement international law against torture, perhaps we can extend it to preventing the murder of civilians or aggressive war. We will be reaffirming America's once-strong commitment to building the kind of new international order that is required to reduce international terrorism, and fostering a world in which US leaders would once again be respected as fighters for human decency rather than despised as threats to it.
We will bring the once-powerful but forgotten force of morality and nonviolent action - for civil rights, for peace, for women's rights - back into our politics. A false morality that claims to love Jesus while torturing and killing in his name will be replaced by an authentic morality that seeks to address the root-causes of terrorism and violence.
We will thus also join this renewed moral force with a practical strategy that can actually protect us from terrorism. Torture is only the most dramatic example of how Bush has endangered our lives by bungling the war on terrorism. He has also dangerously neglected homeland security, alienated world opinion, helped Al Qaeda grow in numbers and fervor, wasted vast resources in Iraq in ways that increase terrorist ranks, failed to build an effective democracy in Afghanistan, failed to bring peace to the Middle East, and failed to address the poverty that fuels anti-American terrorism. Ending torture is a necessary precondition to developing an effective strategy that will actually protect rather than endanger Americans.
And we will strengthen democracy at home. Nothing is more un-American and undemocratic than the idea that a small group of executive branch leaders should be free to torture, kill, and spy at will. This idea is in fact precisely what generations of Americans have died fighting against. Ending Bush's use of torture will be the beginning of restoring an accountable and democratic government to this nation.
Conservative Totalitarianism
Ending torture will have a major impact beyond torture itself for a simple reason: as slavery was the linchpin to the entire pre-bellum Southern social order, torture has become integral to today's conservative ideology. Conservative ideology was once a coherent set of ideas built around limiting state power over the individual. It has today degenerated into a rationale for expanding executive power over the individual, including not only the right to torture but the right to spy on citizens, wage aggressive war while lying about it, prevent gay people from marrying, deny a woman the right to an abortion, publish disguised government propaganda in the media, and even deny us the right to die in peace if conservatives decree that we must live as vegetables or in unendurable pain.
It is no coincidence that the executive's right to torture was defended not only by Bush and Cheney, but also by conservative ideologues at The Weekly Standard, financed by media mogul Rupert Murdoch and edited by William Kristol, who published a cover story by Charles Krauthammer - widely admired in conservative circles - which declared that "we must all be prepared to torture" to save American lives. Or that the National Review opined that "if McCain's amendment becomes law ... we will then be able to apply only methods formulated to deal with conventional soldiers in a different sort of conflict than the one that faces us now. This is folly."
Today's conservative movement has been reduced to a set of impulses, above all a totalitarian impulse to support the expansion of autocratic power it was founded to restrain. Since its ideological blinders prevent it from developing sensible measures to reduce terrorism, it has turned to justifying only those policies that expand executive power and seek to rule through coercion, threats, and violence.
Whatever a movement to abolish torture will achieve for society, it is clear what participating in it means for each of us as individuals. It means above all that our children and grandchildren will not remember us with shame, that they will not one day have to try to justify to our victims our failure to oppose the torture being conducted in our names, and that the term "good Americans" will mean just that, and not become an excuse for fear or indifference.
When we fight to end torture we are not only fighting for human decency, international law, democracy, and freedom. We are fighting for ourselves.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030306C.shtml
"It's just a goddamned piece of paper"
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publ...icle_7779.shtml
By Doug Thompson
Republished from Capitol Hill Blue
Bush curses inconvenient Constitution during a GOP meeting on extending the Patriot Act.
Last month, Republican Congressional leaders filed into the Oval Office to meet with President George W. Bush and talk about renewing the controversial USA Patriot Act.
Several provisions of the act, passed in the shell shocked period immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, caused enough anger that liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union had joined forces with prominent conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and Bob Barr to oppose renewal.
GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.
“I don’t give a goddamn,” Bush retorted. “I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.”
“Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.”
“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”
I’ve talked to three people present for the meeting that day and they all confirm that the President of the United States called the Constitution “a goddamned piece of paper.”
And, to the Bush Administration, the Constitution of the United States is little more than toilet paper stained from all the "expletive deleted" that this group of power-mad despots have dumped on the freedoms that “goddamned piece of paper” used to guarantee.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, while still White House counsel, wrote that the “Constitution is an outdated document.”
Put aside, for a moment, political affiliation or personal beliefs. It doesn’t matter if you are a Democrat, Republican or Independent. It doesn’t matter if you support the invasion or Iraq or not. Despite our differences, the Constitution has stood for two centuries as the defining document of our government, the final source to determine – in the end – if something is legal or right.
Every federal official – including the President – who takes an oath of office swears to “uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says he cringes when someone calls the Constitution a “living document.”
“”Oh, how I hate the phrase we have—a ‘living document,’” Scalia says. “We now have a Constitution that means whatever we want it to mean. The Constitution is not a living organism, for Pete’s sake.”
As a judge, Scalia says, “I don’t have to prove that the Constitution is perfect; I just have to prove that it’s better than anything else.”
President Bush has proposed seven amendments to the Constitution over the last five years, including a controversial amendment to define marriage as a “union between a man and woman.” Members of Congress have proposed some 11,000 amendments over the last decade, ranging from repeal of the right to bear arms to a Constitutional ban on abortion.
Scalia says the danger of tinkering with the Constitution comes from a loss of rights.
“We can take away rights just as we can grant new ones,” Scalia warns. “Don’t think that it’s a one-way street.”
And don’t buy the White House hype that the USA Patriot Act is a necessary tool to fight terrorism. It is a dangerous law that infringes on the rights of every American citizen and, as one brave aide told President Bush, something that undermines the Constitution of the United States.
But why should Bush care? After all, the Constitution is just “a goddamned piece of paper.”
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