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Editorial: Morality is in the Eye of the Oppressor
Jason Miller
5/15/06
We of the privileged *Caucasian race have been dancing without paying for centuries. And the piper is seriously pissed.
Rudyard Kipling encouraged America's fledgling empire when he wrote The White Man's Burden. However, by that time the Unites States had already committed genocide against the Native Americans, engulfed half of Mexico and turned Hawaii over to a handful of wealthy White plantation owners. White Americans were already "bearing the burden" of ruling those who were "half-devil and half-child".
In the early 20th Century, confidence in their moral superiority and Manifest Destiny spurred Americans to slaughter tens of thousands of civilians in the Philippines, prevent a sovereign nation from emerging in Cuba, and negate Puerto Rico the autonomy it had negotiated with Spain.
As one of the most brutal European imperialists, Spain played a significant role in the ongoing oppression of the Filipinos, Cubans and Puerto Ricans. When the United States defeated them in the Spanish-American War, they essentially sold the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico to their new masters in Washington.
Taking off the rose-colored glasses
Casting aside the history books written by the "superior" White race and viewing history through the lens of reality, one readily sees that European nations like Spain, Great Britain, France, and Portugal committed unspeakable atrocities against millions whose only "crime" was that they were born on the continents of Africa, North America, or South America.
"Brave and noble" pioneers and explorers like Columbus and Cortez came to the "New World" bearing gifts. Their hosts were "blessed" with "gifts" like Small Pox, servitude, and genocide. As they convinced themselves they were "civilizing the savages", the European invaders dehumanized their "converts". Human beings became tools for empire building, or if they impeded imperial expansion, little more than insects to be exterminated.
In the area of North America which eventually became the United States, one of the ultimate ironies occurred. Refugees from oppression in Western Europe became ruthless oppressors themselves. Victims became abusers as our ancestors nearly drove Native Americans to extinction.
Similar patterns emerged in Africa as various European nations carved up the Dark Continent like a juicy Thanksgiving Day bird. Humans and resources alike became subject to the will and whims of their colonial rulers.
Encountering a shortage of labor and an over-abundance of economic opportunities in the "New World", the "intrepid" imperialists were undaunted. They simply started capturing indigenous people from various tribes in Africa, selling them into slavery, and shipping them to the Americas. Valuable new commodity emerges. Labor shortage problem solved. One can't help but admire their ingenuity; that is if one suffers from anti-social personality disorder.
To summarize, our European and American ancestors raped, pillaged, plundered, enslaved, and nearly annihilated the "lesser beings" they encountered on several continents in their "glorious" bids to expand their empires.
Barren desert never looked so good....
After the invention of the internal combustion engine led to wide-spread use of automobiles, the Middle East became an area of particular interest to Europe and the United States. With the revelation that vast quantities of black gold oozed from their sand, the heretofore unappealing arid lands of the Arab and Persian "savages" suddenly became indispensable commodities.
Once again the "onus of domesticating the barbarians" was thrust upon the West. In the process of sharing their "enlightened values", the United States and their fellow imperialists in Europe have derived the "ancillary benefit" of exerting a great deal of control over the precious Middle Eastern oil. Assuaging their guilt for the Holocaust, they also "found" a homeland for the Jewish people. To this day we "noble" Americans are enabling genocide against the Palestinians to make this homeland possible.
The illusion of freedom and autonomy
While virtually all of the former colonies are now "autonomous" nations, Europe and the United States possess many means to continue exploiting the people and resources of the "developing world". Imperialism is alive and well in Africa, South America, Central America, and the Middle East.
So called free trade agreements perpetuate US and European multi-national corporations' virtually unfettered access to cheap labor and valuable raw materials. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund ensure powerful Western influence by deeply indebting impoverished nations. The debtors are then obliged to tailor their economic policies to benefit their Neoliberal masters, leaving a majority of their citizens miserably poor.
Utilizing direct and indirect military intervention, the Neocolonialists have long guaranteed the loyalty of their "subjects" by ousting leaders elected by the people and installing dictators friendly to Western interests.
Close call for the wealthy ruling elite
Consider one of many examples. With a long-standing tradition of constitutional rule and leaders elected by the vote of the people, Chileans made the "grave error" of electing Salvador Allende as their president in the early 1970's.
Allende suffered from the delusion that it would be just to nationalize industries and end years of multi-national corporate exploitation. In 1973, the zealous efforts of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, the CIA, and telecommunications giant ITT bore fruit. Their three year campaign to destabilize the social, political, and economic conditions of Chile softened the beach-head for a bloody coup, which included the assasination of Allende. General Augusto Pinochet, America's man, took the helm.
Pinochet "rescued" the people of Chile by abolishing the minimum wage, crushing labor unions, lowering taxes and privatizing the pension system. It came as no great surprise that American multi-nationals like ITT were able to continue their plunder.
2100 murders, 1100 disappearances, and 28,000 torture victims later, Pinochet resigned in 1990. Since his arrest and detention in 1998, Pinochet has been stripped of his immunity as former head of state and indicted for crimes against humanity. There is hope for justice.
One of the better articulations of the indirect yet powerful Neocolonial rule imposed by the United States and Western Europe comes from a speech Salvador Allende made before the United Nations (as the Nixon Regime was covertly wreaking social, political, and economic havoc under his very nose):
Our economy could no longer tolerate the subordination implied by having more than eighty percent of its exports in the hands of a small group of large foreign companies that have always put their interests ahead of those of the countries where they make their profits...
These same firms exploited Chilean copper for many years, made more than four billion dollars in profit in the last forty-two years alone, while their initial investments were less than thirty million...My country, Chile would have been totally transformed by that four billion dollars...
We find ourselves opposed by forces that operate in the shadows, without a flag, with powerful weapons, from positions of great influence....We are potentially rich countries, yet we live in poverty. We go here and there, begging for credits and aid, yet we are great exporters of capital. It is a classic paradox of the capitalist economic system.
The coffee is brewing, can't you smell it?
Live in denial if you will, but we Caucasian descendents of Western imperialists living in Neocolonial nations owe a tremendous moral and fiscal debt to those whom our ancestors and governments have egregiously wronged. Our wealth and power insulates us to an extent, but those we have oppressed are beginning to extract their pound of flesh.
Significant numbers of "illegal" immigrants are evading detection and entering the United States. They are passing through the grossly immoral border our ancestors created after stealing the land comprising our nation from the Native Americans and from Mexico. Xenophobia, paranoia, and racism are again rearing their ugly heads as some White Americans clamor for the arrest and deportation of 11 million immigrants and the creation of an American version of the Iron Curtain.
Despite his assurances that he does not intend to militarize the Mexican border, George Bush's latest agenda for our southern boundary includes deploying 6,000 National Guard troops and adding prison beds for "illegal" immigrants. Not a whiff of militarization there.
Bush's discourse made it quite clear that despite the fact that he did not support mass deportation, the "illegals" who had established themselves in the United States would only be eligible for citizenship if they wrapped themselves in the American flag, steeped themselves in the lore of the Empire, and became fluent in English, the global language which is the key to self-actualizing and getting into heaven. Once the "illegals" reaching for the brass ring of American citizenship have sold their cultural souls, Bush wants to grace them with the opportunity to "get in line" behind those who won the lottery in their country of origin and obtained documents to enter the United States legally.
While Congress struggles to create an immigration bill to pacify the Decider, business interests hungry for cheap labor, and racist forces eager to expel non-Anglo individuals, the deportation sweep is already taking place. On 4/21, the federal government announced that it would treat employers hiring "illegals" like criminal organizations. They promptly arrested 1,000 undocumented immigrants at IFCO, a German container manufacturer with locations around the United States.
Here in the Kansas City area, immigration officials are tenaciously pursuing the deportation of a 31 year old Mexican named Myrna Dick. Myrna is married to an American and has a child with him.
Also in Kansas City, a law abiding 38 year old father of two has been victimized by anti-immigrant laws. Adam Hernandez lived in the United States for 26 years and is married to an American citizen. Last week our federal government deported him to his native Honduras because he stole a car when he was a teenager. Human compassion in action.
On 4/24 Missouri state senators voted to empower state troopers to enforce federal immigration laws. If you have brown skin and are in Missouri, you better be able to prove you are a "real American" or you may find yourself "south of the border".
Unabashed imperialists that they were, the Romans at least granted limited citizenship, and ultimately full citizenship, to those they conquered. America is content to simply exploit its foreign subjects as it bleeds its colonies dry of wealth and resources.
Interestingly, our fellow imperialists across the Atlantic are coping with their own influx of people they have abused for centuries.
Each year, tens of thousands of desperately poor Africans make a perilous journey of 2,000 miles or more to seek better lives in Western Europe. However, Europe is also in the throes of xenophobia. 4,000 victims of the fallout from the colonization of Africa have been detained by Spain so far in 2006. With increasingly zealous enforcement of immigration laws, Africans are forced to take more dangerous routes to enter Europe. At least 1300 have died at sea so far this year.
Many of the African migrants attempt to gain entrance to Europe through Morocco in North Africa. To counter what it claims to be a tide of millions of African immigrants, Morocco has militarized its border, built high fences and dug deep trenches. Despite these measures, tens of thousands of African migrants make it into Morocco. Many of them are unable to make it to Spain, their ultimate goal. They remain stranded in Morocco where most live in abject poverty.
Like their counterpart in the United States, the French National Assembly is now debating immigration legislation. They are considering severe restrictions on the entry of unskilled laborers from African nations. Several French human rights groups and churches have denounced this measure. They recognize that such laws would lead to a flood of educated African professionals immigrating to France. Those left behind in Africa would find their situations even more dire as their doctors and engineers left for greener pastures in France.
In South America, two indigenous leaders have risen to power through legitimate popular election. Following the lead of Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales are boldly defying their Neocolonial masters. Much to the chagrin of Western imperialists in Washington and in the European Union, Chavez is committing such heinous acts as utilizing Venezuelan oil revenues to provide education, housing, medical care, and food to the poor. Morales recently nationalized Bolivia's vast fields of natural gas. Perhaps Allende has been given a second chance through a double reincarnation.
In a Homeric tragedy, the Middle East has been the epicenter of a maelstrom of venomous hatred, brutality, subjugation and war dating back to the Crusades. While instability and conflict have plagued the region for many years, the demand for oil has taken the unrest to new heights. Western support for brutal, tyrannical regimes, like that of the Shah, Saddam Hussein and a continuous parade of Israeli leaders, has fueled an intense and understandable hatred amongst many of the indigenous people in various Middle Eastern nations.
Committing egregious acts of terrorism and murder "justified" by the warped notion that military personnel simply cause "collateral damage" when they kill innocent civilians, the United States, Israel, and their European allies have triggered a violent backlash from the denizens of the Middle East. While the violence committed by both sides is abhorrent, the violent reprisals of the Iraqi Resistance and groups like Hamas represent a rational response to invasion, terrorism, murder of civilians, and acts of genocide committed by avaricious and powerful invaders.
Aside from the obvious moral imperatives, we have several pragmatic impetuses to change our malevolent ways and redeem ourselves. Our victims out-number us. They possess both the will and the means to do us grievous harm, both militarily and economically. The days of their meek submission are long past. Iraq, Iran, nuclear proliferation, oil addiction, a notable increase in the percentage of minorities in American and European populations, and fears of "homeland" attacks are painful reminders of the increasing inability of the Caucasian-dominated West to dominate the world as it once did.
How do we in the United States finally shoulder the real White man's burden?
If we implemented the following social and political policies/strategies, much of our debt would be repaid to those we have abused and exploited, our creditors whom we victimized would leave us alone, and humanity would no longer be on a path to self-destruction:
1. Slashing insanely bloated military budgets by at least 2/3 and using the savings to balance the budget, fund domestic social programs and to increase foreign aid. (It is delusional to believe that the US needs to account for over 50% of world military expenditures per year to protect 5% of the world's population).
2. Forgiving World Bank debt and closing the doors to both the World Bank and the IMF
3. Withdrawing US forces from the Middle East and closing many of the US military bases around the globe
4. Ceasing US military and financial aid to Israel
5. Ending the Cuban Embargo
6. Adhering to the Geneva Conventions by ending torture, rendition, and wars of aggression.
7. Adhering to decisions rendered by the UN
8. Banning the use of depleted uranium
9. Allowing the millions of "illegal" immigrants who have established stable residence the opportunity to earn citizenship
10. Putting a stop to our support of murderous tyrants like Pinochet, Marcos, Suharto, and Saddam Hussein
11. Placing severe restriction on the powers and rights of corporations
12. Summarily removing the members of the Bush Regime from office, arresting them, and extraditing them to the Hague for war crimes trials
13. Implementing tax increases on the wealthy and on corporate giants while eliminating the loopholes which often enable them to shift the tax burden onto the poor and middle class
14. Amending the US Constitution with a Separation of Business and State clause to stop the revolving door between corporate America and the government and to stop corporations from buying our leaders
15. Holding internationally-monitored elections to replace the current criminal regime. The elections would need to be publicly funded, include a Populist party to represent the middle class and poor (since Democrats and Republicans are de facto representatives of the rich), and ban the use of electronic voting machines.
16. Repealing the Patriot Act and restoring the Bill of Rights
17. Closing Guantanamo Bay, the torture facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the CIA's network of secret prisons
18. Ending the "separate and unequal" public education system by infusing more public money into predominately Black and Hispanic school districts
19. Creating a system of national health care which charges premiums based on financial capacity
20. Ending the "War on Drugs" which has failed miserably, has filled our prisons with non-violent offenders who committed the "crime" of self-destructive hedonism, and has been used as a tool of military intervention in Central and South America
21. Focusing more law enforcement resources on rehabilitation and education and less on punitive measures
22. Facilitating an equitable distribution of resources, land, and power between Jews and Palestinians in Israel
After enduring years of Caucasian hubris, arrogance, abuse, invasion, exploitation, state terrorism, and genocide, it is small wonder that some non-Anglos are enraged enough to commit acts of terror and many others are desperate enough to risk death by attempting entry into the US or Europe.
Odds are the de facto ruling class of the United States will not rush to implement my suggestions to satisfy our moral debt and inject more humanity into the world. Property, power and money move their worlds. Surrender of their precious imperial, racist, and plutocratic system is out of the question until they feel some serious pain. Given prevailing conditions in the world, that time may be closer than these Masters of the Earth believe.
I recently wrote that some Whites believe that we Caucasians represent the pinnacle of human evolution. A reader emailed me to ask what proof I had that we do not represent the pinnacle of human evolution. The answer is intuitively obvious to the casual observer. Highly evolved human beings registering at the top of humanity's scale would have willingly forged a sociopolitical system based on peace, economic justice, social justice, and universal human rights long ago.
I rest my case.
Now let's get to work on repaying our seriously past due balance.
*including the Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean sub-categories of the Caucasian race, loosely referred to as Whites
Jason Miller is a 39 year old sociopolitical essayist with a degree in liberal arts and an extensive self-education (derived from an insatiable appetite for reading). He is a member of Amnesty International and an avid supporter of Oxfam International and Human Rights Watch. He welcomes responses at willpowerful@hotmail.com or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.
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Editorial: Solidarity Street Demonstrations To Demand US Keep Hands Off Venezuela and Cuba
by Stephen Lendman
Maybe it's just a coincidence that just days before an international expression of solidarity demanding the US keep its hands off Venezuela and Cuba, Rep. Dan Burton (a right wing Republican in good standing) introduced an anti-Venezuelan resolution in the US House of Representatives. His resolution on May 11 was just another step along the way in the Bush administration's fourth attempt to oust President Hugo Chavez as the democratically elected leader of the Venezuelan people. The resolution shows at least two things: that the US government's stated commitment to democracy is farcical and empty on its face and that any resemblance in it between the truth about the Chavez government's achievements in combatting drug trafficking and money laundering (and all else for that matter) and the malicious inaccuracies and misstatements of facts in the Burton resolution is in writing for all to see.
Of course, the whole notion of the US making a determined effort to eliminate so-called ellicit drugs is even more absurd as I've explained several times before in other writing. Dan Burton and his Republican cohorts know quite well that doing that would be counter to the real US policy of protecting the ellicit trade to guarantee the huge profits from it flow unobstructed into the US economy. The so-called "war on drugs" is really a war to keep the stuff flowing freely.
On May 20 the People Will Have Their Say
So in glorious and committed counterpoint to the shameless Burton resolution, large demonstrations will take place on the streets of Washington, DC and Los Angeles on May 20 demanding "US Hands Off Venezuela and Cuba." A broad coalition of progressive organizations and noted individuals have organized them including: Venezuela, Cuba and Latin America - oriented solidarity groups and other groups supporting and fighting for the rights of blacks, Latinos, women, immigrants and the civil rights of all people. In addition, prominent activist figures will also participate including Noam Chomsky, Cindy Sheehan and Danny Glover.
And on the same day, there will be similar international solidarity actions in Venezuela, Cuba, Columbia, Australia, Canada and other countries. These demonstrations around the world are historic as they reflect a growing movement to combat US imperial aims in Latin America, Central America and the Caribbean. It was in those regions that offshore US imperialism first took flight once it left the incubator of the lands it stole from its original native inhabitants whose only offense was having lived on them for the past 20 - 30,000 years. Poor Mexico paid the price first for its geographical sin (in the words of its former dictator Porfirio Diaz) of being "so far from God (and) so close to the US." That poor choice of its country's borders resulted in their ending up enclosing half their former territory. I guess the Mexicans never really wanted California and the rest it lost anyway.
On May 20, the voices of people yearning to be free from the yoke of a global criminal enterprise otherwise known as the United States of America will take to the streets in an expression of their commitment. These voices will resonate in solidarity against clear US aggressive and hostile intentions against Venezuela and Cuba aiming to crush their revolutions and the burgeoning one in Bolivia to keep them from spreading throughout the region. The stakes are very high on both sides. Call it a war between the rights of free people determined to remain so against a powerful and predatory neighbor that has other ideas and will ruthlessly pursue all means to achieve them. On May 20, the voices in the streets will have their say, . and the sound heard will be: no mas - no more, and they're willing to fight for it. It also happens to be the day the Bush administration intends to release its so-called "Commission for Assistance for a Free Cuba" report.
A little translation is in order. By assistance, Washington means new policy sanctions against the Castro government (the longest standing thorn in its side) and its commitment to be the sole authority to decide what economic, social and political priorities are best for that country. It doesn't matter what the Cuban people want. After all, they only live there, which in Washington - think means nothing.
It doesn't matter what the Venezuelan people want either, unless they're willing to forego all the benefits they now have and allow them to be replaced by the poverty and human misery they had before Hugo Chavez came into office and changed everything. Don't bank any time soon on that happening as the overwhelming majority of the Venezuelan people twice democratically elected Hugo Chavez as their president and want to keep him as their leader. And why wouldn't they. Before him, they were repressed and desperate, and now they're the beneficiary of his wonderful economic, political and social policies that have transformed their lives for the better. They're not about to give that up without a fight. But Washington policy makers may not understand that, and even if they do, are likely to take that fight to the people and try to prevail by any means possible, regardless of the consequences.
The One Threat Above All Others Washington Fears
Washington also fears another threat: the one it fears most above all others - a good example that may spread and become unstoppable, so it must be crushed and not allowed to advance further. It follows that it now views any collaboration between Venezuela and Cuba (and now a likely tripartite alliance with Bolivia) as unacceptable as the benefits from it to their people will only encourage a further spread of them to other nations that may want the same things. Any why not? When governments improve the lives of their people, why would they ever want or be willing to give up what they gained.
So the battle lines are now drawn, and the importance of what's at stake will play out in the streets around the world on May 20. Those demonstrations mark a significant first step beginning and hopefully a turning point that will lead to a mass movement of millions of working people inside the US and around the world unwilling any longer to accept being subjugated by US imperial rule. Hopefully they will follow on and build from the historic US nationwide street demonstrations fighting for the rights of immigrant workers demanding equity and justice and being willing to accept nothing less. It may be one new civil rights movement growing from another and mushrooming into a giant national and worldwide expression of the people here, throughout the region, and spreading everywhere fighting for the rights they deserve. An epochal struggle may have begun, and the path ahead for it is fraught with danger. It's the people against a powerful giant predator willing to accept nothing less than total global domination with no "outliers" going their own way allowed. Stay tuned. The people may have other ideas.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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Editorial: Greg Palast on His New Book "Armed Madhouse"
Democracy Now
15/05/06
AMY GOODMAN: Investigative reporter Greg Palast joins us in the studio right
now. He has a brand new book. It's called Armed Madhouse, and the subtitle
is Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats, Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal
'08, No Child's Behind Left and Other Dispatches from the Frontlines of the
Class War. Welcome to Democracy Now!
GREG PALAST: Thanks, Amy, for getting the entire subtitle without choking.
There's a lot of ground to cover in the book.
AMY GOODMAN: There certainly is. And right now, Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan
president, who you recently met with and interviewed and we broadcast on Democracy
Now!, was in Vienna, offering to the poor of Europe cheap oil. Of course, the
deaths continue in Iraq, both U.S. soldiers and Iraqis. We have the spy scandal
that is unfolding here in the United States. Link them.
GREG PALAST: Yeah, that's why I wrote a book, because it does link the whole
thing together. I mean, I just got back from meeting with Chavez, as you know,
and you showed our interview a few weeks ago. He's offered the U.S. $50-a-barrel
oil. That's a third off of what we're paying right now. Now, you would think
our president would be down in Caracas kissing Hugo Chavez's behind and saying, "Thank
you, thank you for dropping the price of oil by a third, and let's make a deal," because
Chavez wants a deal.
But he's not doing that, our president, even though the high prices are costing
about a million jobs right now. And the reason he's not is that what Chavez
will not do is that Chavez will not return the money. It's not about petroleum,
it's about petrodollars, as I explain in the book. In other words, when George
Bush rides around King Abdullah in his little golf cart on the Crawford ranch,
he's not trying to get Abdullah's oil. Abdullah can't drink the stuff. He's
got to sell it to us and Japan. But Abdullah takes the money back from the
-- when you fill up your SUV, you give your money to Saudi Arabia, the big
oil companies, Saudi Arabia. But then he returns it the form of petrodollars,
and that is what is funding George Bush's mad spending spree.
We have a president who has racked up $2 trillion in extra debt, you know,
stone sober, apparently. And someone's got to pay for that. And basically we're
paying for it by effectively an oil tax, which is returned to us, because the
Gulf states and our other trading partners are now buying up $2 trillion in
U.S. Treasury bonds and debt. So, in other words, they're recycling the money
back and paying for George Bush's spending spree on ending inheritance taxes,
you know, several wars, etc.
Now, Hugo Chavez says, "I'll give you cheap oil, not only to the poor,
but to everyone. But I'm not giving you back the money. That money is going
to stay in Latin America to build our nations." And he just withdrew $20
billion out of the U.S. Federal Reserve. You have to understand, this is a
punch in the face of the U.S. administration, far more than withholding oil,
withholding and withdrawing petrodollars, as I explain in the book, and that's
why you have that little nice floater from -- balloon thrown out by Reverend
Robertson, Pat Robertson, saying "Hugo Chavez thinks we're trying to assassinate
him, and I think we ought to just go and do it," because they have got
to get that -- it's not that they need that oil, they need that oil money.
And if they can't get it, they have to eliminate Hugo Chavez.
AMY GOODMAN: Is the war in Iraq a war for oil?
GREG PALAST: Is the war in Iraq for oil? Yes, it's about the oil, but not
for the oil. In my investigations for Armed Madhouse, I ended up with a story
far more fascinating and difficult than I imagined. We didn't go in to grab
the oil. Just the opposite. We went in to control the oil and make sure we
didn't get it. It goes back to 1920, when the oil companies sat in a room in
Brussels in a hotel room, drew a red line around Iraq and said, "There'll
be no oil coming out of that nation." They have to suppress oil coming
out of Iraq. Otherwise, the price of oil will collapse, and OPEC and Saudi
Arabia will collapse.
And so, what I found, what I discovered that they're very unhappy about is
a 323-page plan, which was written by big oil, which is the secret but official
plan of the United States for Iraq's oil, written by the big oil companies
out of the James Baker Institute in coordination with a secret committee of
the Council on Foreign Relations. I know it sounds very conspiratorial, but
this is exactly how they do it. It's quite wild. And it's all about a plan
to control Iraq's oil and make sure that Iraq has a system, which, quote, "enhances
its relationship with OPEC." In other words, the whole idea is to maintain
the power of OPEC, which means maintain the power of Saudi Arabia.
And this is one of the reasons they absolutely hate Hugo Chavez. As you'll
see in next week's Harper's coming out, which is basically an excerpt from
the book, Hugo Chavez on June 1st is going to ask OPEC to officially recognize
that he has more oil than Saudi Arabia. This is a geopolitical earthquake.
And the inside documents from the U.S. Department of Energy, which we have
in the book and in Harper's, say, yeah, he's got more oil than Saudi Arabia.
AMY GOODMAN: And is it accessible?
GREG PALAST: That's the trick. It's accessible, but the price of oil -- it's
heavy oil, which means it costs about -- you need oil to be about $30 a barrel,
less than half of what it is now. Chavez says, "Cut a deal with me. Oil
will never drop below a minimum price, but we'll get off this insane world-destroying
$75 a barrel. I'll give you cheap oil, but you just put a floor under it." He
shook hands with Bill Clinton on the deal. And Bush came in and spit on his
hand, to say the least. He had the guy kidnapped back in 2002. Bush does not
-- you have to remember, he doesn't like cheap oil. When we talk about paying
$3-a-gallon gasoline, Bush's benefactors, donors and his own family collects
the $3 a gallon.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?
GREG PALAST: Well, we're paying three bucks a gallon. ExxonMobil is collecting
$3 a gallon. There's a chapter called "Trillion-Dollar Babies." When
Bush came in, we had oil as low as $18 a barrel. It was like water. Bush has
successfully built up the price of oil from 18 bucks a barrel to over $70 a
barrel. That's the "mission accomplished." He didn't make a mistake
here. That's the "mission accomplished."
ExxonMobil, which after Enron is the biggest lifetime donor to the Bush campaigns,
its value of its reserves, of its oil reserves, because of the Bush wars and
Bush actions, has gone up by almost exactly $1 trillion in value. Just one
company. A trillion-dollar windfall to a single company. That's the Bush benefactors.
And you have to look at where's Bush make his money.
So, the problem that they have now is that Chavez is trying to supplant the
Saudis running OPEC, and we've got a president who basically is caught up in,
you know, these guys in bathrobes and crowns, these dictators of Saudi Arabia
in the Gulf. And that's what the Bush family is linked up to, and they are
not going to let them be supplanted by Chavez.
AMY GOODMAN: Greg Palast, when you open your book, Armed Madhouse -- most
people have a white space there, but you use every inch, and you have a secret
history of the war over oil in Iraq.
GREG PALAST: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: You have a chronology.
GREG PALAST: Yes. I had a big fight with my capitalist pig publisher to put
in this very fancy colorful front page to give you a chronology, the complexity
of these secret deals between the administration and big oil. We actually got
our hands on two different plans for Iraq's oil, a 101-page plan and a 323-page
plan, which is all about, in great detail, what we are going do with Iraq's
oil, and the number of Iraqis involved in writing this thing is exactly zero.
You know, and of course, the number of Americans who know that that's why we're
in Iraq, and we even know from -- in my research for Armed Madhouse, going
through this and getting this document, I now know what was in the discussions
between the oil companies, Ken Lay and Dick Cheney, in his bunker.
AMY GOODMAN: All right, what?
GREG PALAST: Well, and you'll see there, they were going over the oil maps
of Iraq, and the question was why was Ken Lay, you know, the kind of Al Capone
of electricity --
AMY GOODMAN: He's on trial right now, of course, in Houston.
GREG PALAST: -- who's on trial right now. The verdict is about to come down.
Why was he in the meeting with oil companies, looking over the maps of Iraq?
The answer is he was on this committee, drafting up the program for what to
do about Iraq. And they had to get rid of Saddam, because he was jerking the
oil markets up and down. I was very interested in why did we go into Iraq suddenly,
and the answer was he was destabilizing the oil markets. He was making it jump
up, making it jump down. And he had to go. And that's right in the documentation.
AMY GOODMAN: Plan B?
GREG PALAST: Plan B -- there are two plans. There was a neo-con plan, which
was 101 pages long. Now, they actually did want to break up OPEC and destroy
Saudi Arabia, but the Bush family wasn't going to let that happen, nor was
big oil. And you will see behind this all: James Baker and, of course, Dick
Cheney. You know, actually the interesting thing -- I was just realizing this
morning -- four years of investigation, Amy, you'll find in the book. You'll
see all the stuff about the hugger muggers between Cheney, big oil, Rumsfeld,
Jim Baker. Nowhere is there any discussion of George Bush. He was not in the
picture. He was not in the frame. Basically, there was no decision made or
even discussed with George Bush. He's the president who's not there.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Greg Palast. He has written a new book. It is
called Armed Madhouse, short title, extremely long subtitle, Who's Afraid of
Osama Wolf?, China Floats, Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's
Behind Left, and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War. Why "Armed
Madhouse"?
GREG PALAST: That's back to the Allen Ginsberg's Howl, my old teacher. He
said, "The soul should not die ungodly in an armed madhouse." It's
like we have a circus of -- it's like we have the asylum taken over by the
inmates, and they're quite dangerous. And so, we have to get out of it. So,
in a way, the idea is to kind of arm you with the information.
AMY GOODMAN: The scheme to steal '08?
GREG PALAST: Yeah. Well, for those who, you know, know my background, I came
to the U.S. attention when I broke a story that before the 2000 election, Jeb
Bush and Katherine Harris knocked off tens of thousands of black voters off
the voter rolls of Florida, and this is what gave the election to George Bush
in 2000. It was fixed by knocking off of these black voters. There's a chapter
in the new book --
AMY GOODMAN: You broke this on BBC.
GREG PALAST: Yeah, I broke this on BBC, and to get in the United States, we
got Michael Moore to put on a chicken suit and report it here as a joke. And
then, thank you very much, Amy, for bringing it across the water and breaking
through the electronic Berlin Wall. By the way, all of these stories are stories
developed out of BBC and Guardian that basically are blacked out, except for
here on Democracy Now! That's very important, because these are the stories
that they don't want you to have for good reason. And they don't want you to
have it, because -- I then followed up with 2004. Now, it's accepted 2000 pretty
much was fixed. Well, there's a chapter, "Kerry won." 2004 was fixed.
And the way it was done is that 3.6 million votes were cast and never counted
in the United States. That's very important to know. This isn't Greg Palast
conspiracy nut stuff.
AMY GOODMAN: Say the number again.
GREG PALAST: 3.6 million ballots cast, never counted. And that's because they
call these spoiled votes or rejected provisional ballots, 1.9 million so-called
provisional ballots, and then, most of those don't get counted. And so, whose
votes don't get counted? If it was random, it wouldn't matter. In other words,
if these were votes where the machine doesn't record it properly, hanging chads,
extra marks on a paper ballot, you had the wrong address on your absentee ballot,
etc.
Three million ballots. Whose ballots? If you're a black person, the chance
your ballot will be technically invalidated is 900% higher than if you're a
white voter. Hispanic voter, 500% higher than if you're a white voter. Native
Americans, it's like 2,000% higher than if you're a white voter. The overwhelming
majority -- and I went to the state of New Mexico, which supposedly Bush won
by 5,000 votes, 89% of the ballots were cast out of minority precincts that
were thrown away. Kerry won New Mexico. You go into the dumpster, and it's
black votes, 155,000 black votes that were chucked away in Ohio. Kerry won
those votes. He won Ohio.
AMY GOODMAN: '08?
GREG PALAST: And '08, so what's happening is there is no fix of the system.
In other words, just like black folk get bad schools and bad hospitals, they
get the bad voting machines, which are going to kill those votes. But they're
not satisfied with just letting the ballots be thrown away. They're going to
move it along. And one of the things I discovered is the Republican Party has
something called "caging lists," which came to our -- you know, just
like you had Friday, the way the Yes Men capture material by using false websites,
so through a false website we were able to capture Republican Party internal
missives, through georgebush.org.
And so, what happened was is that they sent us a bunch of lists of literally
tens of thousands of names of voters and addresses. We were wondering what
the heck this was. It turns out these were almost all African American voters,
who they were prepared to challenge in 2004, and they did, to say that these
people shouldn't vote, because their addresses are suspect. And you'll see
in the book that in the lists of thousands of black voters that they were challenging
over their address were thousands of black soldiers who were sent to Iraq;
go to Baghdad, and the Republican Party challenges your vote.
And that's the beginning, and because there's been really no action taken,
they're accelerating the system now. And the next thing that they're going
after is the Hispanic vote. So when we saw two million votes cast/not counted
in 2000, nearly four million votes cast/not counted in 2004, you're going see
that number massively increase in challenges to voters in 2008. And that's
what's going back to this database story with the National Security Agency.
AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds.
GREG PALAST: So, you have to say, "Why are they collecting this data?" The
answer is 2008. It's ultimately all about the elections.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, this is part one. Greg Palast, I want to thank you for
being with us. You'll be traveling around the country, and you can go to our
website at democracynow.org. We will link to Greg's website, gregpalast.com.
Greg Palast's book is called Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China
Floats, Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left, and Other
Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War.
Comment on this Editorial
Homeland Security
US 'releases 9/11 Pentagon tape'
Tuesday, 16 May 2006, 17:42 GMT 18:42 UK
The US defence department is to release a video of the plane crashing into the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, legal rights group Judicial Watch has said.
The US was to release the previously unseen footage at 1300 (1700 GMT).
American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the US military headquarters, killing 184 people, after it was hijacked as part of an al-Qaeda plot.
The release of the video, taken from a Pentagon security camera, comes after a Freedom of Information Act request.
Judicial Watch said it would release the footage as soon as it could, but it was not clear when that would be.
'Conspiracy theories'
Stills released in 2002 showed the moment the hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon, killing 125 people in the building and 59 passengers and crew.
WHAT IS JUDICIAL WATCH?
Describes itself as a conservative, non-partisan educational foundation
Has repeatedly sued US government agencies to obtain information
Forced release of documents on subjects ranging from RU-486 "abortion pill" to lobbyist visits to White House
Special focus on monitoring illegal immigration and Hillary Clinton fundraising
Source: www.judicialwatch.org |
The crash came shortly after two other hijacked airlines were flown into the twin towers at the World Trade Center in New York.
Judicial Watch filed the freedom of information request in 2004, but the Pentagon refused to release the video because it was part of the investigation involving al-Qaeda plotter Zacarias Moussaoui, the group said.
Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit this February, arguing that there was "no legal basis" for the refusal.
Earlier this month Moussaoui was jailed for life for his role in the 2001 attacks.
Judicial Watch said it wanted to obtain the video because "it was very important to complete the public record" on the attacks.
"Finally, we hope that this video will put to rest the conspiracy theories involving American Airlines Flight 77," President Tom Fitton said.
Some theorists have questioned the official account of the Pentagon attack.
French author Thierry Meyssan alleged that Flight 77 did not crash into the Pentagon and suggested a truck bomb or missile caused the damage.
Such views are challenged by eye-witness testimony at the scene of an aircraft fitting the description of Flight 77 crashing into the site.
Comment: No surprises here. The Pentagon is releasing the same "video" that they released in 2002 to counter Thierry Meyssan's book, only then it was several frames. Now they have kindly added a small section before and after the explosion.
Do they really think this is going to fly? Well, it probably will for the wing nuts. They'll tell us that the visual proof has been established! But anyone with two neurons left firing can tell that this video doesn't provide any more "proof" than the still frames provided...and that was no proof at all!
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Pentagon Releases Gitmo Detainees' Names
By ANDREW SELSKY
Associated Press
May 16, 2006
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - The Pentagon gave The Associated Press on Monday the first list of everyone who has been held at Guantanamo Bay, more than four years after it opened the detention center in Cuba. But none of the most notorious terrorist suspects were included, raising questions about where America's most dangerous prisoners are being held.
The handover marks the first time that everyone who has been held at Guantanamo Bay in the Bush administration's war on terror has been identified, according to Navy Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler. A total 201 of the names have never been disclosed by the Defense Department before.
"This list takes us one step closer to our goal of fully reporting who has been swept into U.S military custody in Guantanamo, and how they and their cases are being handled," said David Tomlin, the AP's assistant general counsel, adding that the Pentagon did not give all the information the AP sought in a Freedom of Information Act request.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the names of all detainees held at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base were previously kept classified because of "the security operation as well as the intelligence operation that takes place down there."
In a briefing in Washington, he did not explain why the Pentagon did not contest the AP's request for the release of the names, as it did with previous Freedom of Information Act requests for prisoner information. Just last month, the Pentagon released 558 names of current and former detainees to AP.
The release will help lawyers and other advocates track who has been held at the base and find former detainees to help investigate allegations of abuse, said Priti Patel, an attorney for New York-based Human Rights First.
While the release of Guantanamo names is welcome, human rights groups also want to learn the identities of all those held in
Iraq,
Afghanistan and secret locations, Patel said.
"There's still much more in darkness," she said.
For example, the United States has not disclosed where it is holding Khalid Shaikh Mohammed or Ramzi Binalshibh, who allegedly plotted the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and other captured top al-Qaida figures. The list released Monday also does not specify what has happened to former Guantanamo Bay detainees.
The fate of some is documented. All British nationals held at Guantanamo Bay, for example, were transferred back to Britain. But what has become of dozens of other detainees was not known.
Some could be free. Others could be in secret U.S. detention centers, or in torture cells of prisons in other countries.
Jumana Musa, an official with Amnesty International's Washington office, said there have long been rumors that the
CIA has a secret prison at Guantanamo Bay, an isolated base along the Caribbean which Cuba granted to Washington by treaty a century ago.
But Peppler, in an e-mail to the AP, emphatically ruled that out.
"Absolutely not," Peppler said. "There are no other detention facilities other than those under DoD control in Guantanamo Bay.
The AP sought the names, photos and other details of current and former Guantanamo Bay detainees through a Freedom of Information Act request on Jan. 18. After the Pentagon didn't respond, the AP filed a lawsuit in March seeking compliance.
The Pentagon later agreed to turn over much of the information. Motions are pending in court for additional information, including the height and weight of the roughly 480 detainees still at Guantanamo Bay to assist with news coverage of a hunger strike.
The Pentagon refused to release that information, arguing that medical records are private. The military said the hunger strike began in August and has involved a maximum of 131 detainees.
The Pentagon also argued that releasing photos of current detainees would damage U.S. intelligence gathering. Releasing pictures would make it easier for al-Qaida to retaliate against detainees suspected of cooperating with interrogators, said Paul B. Rester, the director of the Joint Intelligence Group at Guantanamo. That would make it harder for the U.S. to collect intelligence, Rester said in a May 10 affidavit filed in response to the AP's Freedom of Information Act suit.
"No human intelligence sources interested in cooperating with the United States officials under any hope of anonymity will be willing to do so if their photographs and names are publicly released," he said.
The U.S. military says 759 detainees have been held at Guantanamo Bay since the detention center began taking prisoners in the U.S. war on terror in January 2002. About 275 have been released or transferred.
The U.S. has filed charges against 10 detainees.
The Pentagon says another 136 detainees at Guantanamo have been approved for release or transfer, but their departure in some cases has been delayed as Washington tries to persuade their home countries to accept them and receive assurances they won't be treated inhumanely.
In April, the Department of Defense released to the AP the names of 558 detainees who had a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, which determines whether they are "enemy combatants" who should be held.
That list, however, did not include about 200 detainees who were released or transferred before the Combatant Status Review Tribunals began in July 2004. Those names were among those listed Monday.
Comment: Gosh, where could these "notorious terrorist suspects" be? Secret prisons, perhaps? Or maybe the Bush administration really doesn't know where the big fish are since they never existed in the first place... Think about it: The Bush administration throws out some Arab name and claims that he is a bigwig in al-Qaeda, and that they have captured him. How do you know they are telling the truth? The image they show on the boob tube could be anyone, and we'd never know any better. They lied about WMD's in Iraq, so why wouldn't they also be perfectly willing to invent terrorists to boost their ratings??
Having said that, the secret prisons do seem to exist, and the torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was very real. They were just torturing average joes instead of Osama's alleged 3 million lieutenants.
Comment on this Article
10,000 US troops to be sent to Mexican border
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Tuesday May 16, 2006
The Guardian
George Bush, scrambling to hold on to an increasingly disaffected conservative Republican base, said last night that he was deploying thousands of troops on America's border with Mexico to crack down on illegal immigration.
With opinion polls charting a steep decline in support from the conservatives who have been the president's bedrock, Mr Bush promised to deploy as many as 6,000 national guard troops along the 2,000-mile frontier as part of a $1.9bn (£1.01bn) programme to seal off America's border. He also plans to increase the border patrol force.
"We do not yet have full control of the border and I am determined to change that," Mr Bush said in prepared remarks. "I am calling on Congress to provide funding for dramatic improvements in manpower and technology on the border."
Last night's address was intended to disarm conservative opposition to legislation coming before the Senate this week for a guest worker programme that would allow many of the 11 million illegal immigrants already in the US a chance at becoming citizens.
Mr Bush plans to follow up his address with a visit on Thursday to the border in Arizona to further press his case. He is also expected to call on immigrants to learn English if they want to gain US passports.
In addition to the national guard, which will play a supporting role to the border patrol forces, the plan unveiled by Mr Bush last night calls for an increase in detention centres for illegal immigrants.
The tough talk on border security was intended to reassure conservatives who have agitated for harsher treatment of illegal immigrants. But Mr Bush faced a delicate balancing act, reeling in his conservative base while not alienating the increasingly important Hispanic voting bloc. "We will fix the problems created by illegal immigration and we will deliver a system that is secure, orderly and fair," Mr Bush said.
Earlier yesterday Karl Rove, the White House adviser, reached out to both constituencies. In a speech to a conservative thinktank, he said: "We have got a border that is so porous, who knows whether that is simply an illegal immigrant looking to get a job in a landscaping company, or somebody who wants to do something worse?" But he went on to say a guest worker programme was a necessity.
Last night's speech marked the first phase of a concerted effort by the White House to shore up a conservative base whose support for Mr Bush has declined from 80% to 50%. But Democratic as well as Republican leaders lined up to express their doubts. "The national guard already is stretched to the limit by repeated tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as from providing disaster assistance in their own states," said Edward Kennedy, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts.
Although Mr Rove was upbeat yesterday about the Republicans' prospects in next November's elections, he admitted that Mr Bush's popularity had declined.
Asked about the Republican party's prospects in the midterm elections, Mr Rove said: "Look, we're in a sour time. Being in the middle of a war where people turn on their TV sets and see brave men and women dying is not something that makes people happy and optimistic and upbeat."
In an attempt to turn things around, Mr Bush will hold a signing ceremony at the White House for an extension of his tax cuts later this week. Next month Congress is expected to return to the controversial issue of gay rights, with a vote on a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriages.
Comment on this Article
Troops on the Canadian border? Well, maybe
Last Updated Tue, 16 May 2006 08:53:38 EDT
CBC News
U.S. President George Bush didn't mention Canada in his speech about new border security measures and immigration, but officials in his administration indicated sending National Guard troops to the Canadian border is a possibility.
Tightening security at the Mexican border will take "dramatic improvements in manpower and technology," Bush told a national television audience on Monday night. He called for 6,000 troops, new fences, cameras and unmanned aerial vehicles to stem the flood of illegal immigrants.
The National Guard would be deployed while thousands of border guards are trained.
"We do not yet have full control of the border and I am determined to change that," Bush said.
"The border should be open to trade and lawful immigration and shut to illegal immigrants as well as criminals, drug dealers and terrorists."
The plan would also create thousands of beds so more illegal immigrants can be detained at the border
And while Bush confined his televised comments to the Mexican border, the Canadian Press reported that administration officials said state governors on the northern frontier might ask for similar security measures.
Canada and the United States set out their security arrangements shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the "smart border agreement." It aims to co-ordinate security at the border while facilitating trade.
Concern has been raised in Ottawa about a U.S. plan to require a passport or special ID card at land crossings by Jan. 1, 2008. There are worries that it would hurt the tourism and commerce industries.
In his speech Monday, Bush also proposed a plan to give some of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States a chance at citizenship, without offering them blanket amnesty.
Reaction to the speech in Mexico was muted.
Late night newscasts buried the story, reporting on the latest drug-trafficking murders, worker protests and the upcoming hurricane season before mentioning Bush's speech.
Mexican President Vicente Fox phoned Bush on the weekend when he heard of the plan, and went public with his concerns about militarizing the border - something Bush explicitly said he didn't plan to do.
Tuesday morning, a Fox spokesman said Mexico might not like Bush's plan, but can do little more than protest.
On Monday night, the Mexican Foreign Ministry issued a statement declaring its concern about the quick troop deployment on the border, considering the slow pace of immigration legislation in Washington.
The ministry also promised that its consulates in the United States would increase their efforts to protect the rights of Mexican workers, whether they are in the country legally or not.
Hundreds of thousands of immigrants have taken to the streets across the United States in recent weeks to demand better treatment.
Angelica Salas of the Coalition for Immigrants' Rights said she is appalled by what she heard Monday night.
"We have gone in the millions out in the streets in a peaceful manner. And to have our president respond in a military manner is disgraceful," she said.
But others believe Bush should have sent more troops.
"The intention of the president is to give us the illusion of security by throwing a handful of national guardsmen on the border," said Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minutemen, a southern California-based group that organizes volunteer border patrols.
Comment on this Article
Passport plan may drive 'invisible wedge' between Canada and U.S.: Wilson
19:44:37 EDT May 15, 2006
NATHANIAL GRONWALD
NEW YORK (CP) - The United States must move carefully and consider the full range of possible economic consequences before tightening security at the U.S.-Canada border, Canadian Ambassador Michael Wilson said Monday.
In an address to the Canadian Association of New York, Wilson warned that the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, a law passed by the U.S. Congress requiring formal identification documents such as passports for travellers entering the United States, "threatens to drive an invisible wedge between our two peoples."
"The concern that has been expressed by a number of people to us a is whether we can meet the timelines that are set out in the legislation," said Wilson, Canada's ambassador to the United States.
The legislation will require everyone crossing U.S. borders, including U.S. citizens returning from Canada or Mexico, to carry either a passport or a special border crossing identification card beginning Jan. 1, 2008.
Wilson stressed Canada and the United States must work together in introducing new border identity cards to ensure "that they can be distributed in a way that people will be ready to take advantage of them when the time comes for implementation."
On his first visit to New York since being named ambassador, Wilson called upon the United States to undertake a careful analysis of the potential economic consequences of the passport initiative, warning of a possible "cooling effect" on cross-border travel and commerce.
Wilson's comments came ahead of a major speech to be delivered Monday night by U.S. President George W. Bush, who was announcing plans to beef up security at the U.S.-Mexico border, including the deployment National Guard troops.
Border security has become a major topic of discussion as the U.S. Congress debates ways to normalize the status of millions of illegal immigrants in the United States.
Despite anxiety in Mexico over the U.S. debate, Wilson told reporters he was not concerned about any new action from Bush.
Asked what he thought the implications for Canada would be in Bush's speech, Wilson said he didn't expect to hear anything that would be specifically directed at Canada. He cautioned reporters not to misinterpret any new initiatives announced by Bush as applying to both borders.
With oil and energy prices at record highs, Wilson talked up the potential that the oil sands in Alberta held in enhancing U.S. energy security.
The oil sands have the potential of achieving output levels of two billion barrels per day, he noted. "This supply is safe, secure and right next door, and subject to normal market conditions and not from some cartel or unstable regime."
Wilson assured the U.S. business community Prime Minister Stephen Harper would continue economic policies that contributed to Canada's strong economic performance. He urged the Canadians in the audience to pass this message on to their American colleagues.
"I think that it's an important message for you to take to people in the United States that there's a continuity here, there's a continuity that started from the '80s into the '90s now into this century, that speaks to the significance of good economic policies in Canada."
Comment on this Article
Bush and Blair: Two of a Kind
A dangerous shift of norms - 'There is no responsible use of torture'
By Brita Sydhoff
Le Monde diplomatique
May 2006
If the entertainment industry, not least Hollywood, reflects a prevailing state of mind in the United States and the West in general, torture may be steadily gaining acceptance as a means of extracting information from suspects.
Or is it just a coincidence that the entertainment industry increasingly appeals to its audience through scenes of torture and violence at just this time when politicians and intellectuals are arguing in favour of interrogation methods that amount to torture, as a countermeasure in the so-called war on terror? In an earlier season of the popular Fox television series 24, Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) agent Jack Bauer fought a radical Islamist plot to cause meltdown at US nuclear power plants.
The series is highly entertaining, but it is also a test of its audience's views on the ticking-bomb scenario: are they prepared to condone torture if thousands of innocent lives are at stake? Is it acceptable, for example, when a CTU agent tortures his colleague's husband with electric cables in an attempt to extract the information that could possibly prevent the meltdown?
The fact that 24 presents the enemies of the US as dehumanised beings who are willing to kill even their own children in their terrorist fight against a democratic society suggests that the upholders of law and life are left with no alternatives, so that torture becomes acceptable in extreme situations.
The series also gives the impression that torture is not always as bad as its reputation. In one scene a CTU director used a stun gun repeatedly against a female staff member who was assumed to have knowledge that could prevent the meltdown. What was her reaction when the director realised she was not involved in the plot? She was disappointed with her superior for mistrusting her, but then demanded a pay rise and went back to her desk. Just another bad day at work.
This presentation of what we can call the torture dilemma, combined with the minimisation of the effects of torture, make it necessary to reiterate two facts that are increasingly questioned in anti-terrorism provisions:
- The prohibition against torture in international law is absolute: nothing can justify torture. This principle is reflected in the United Nations Convention Against Torture amongst other international law instruments. The logic is that allowing torture in exceptional circumstances would open a Pandora's box and would lead to a situation in which states would be at liberty to respond to perceived extraordinary crises by diluting existing definitions of torture.
In the words of the British law lord, Lord Hope of Craigshead: "A single instance, if approved to meet the threat of international terrorism, would establish a principle with the power to grow and expand so that everything that falls within it would be regarded as acceptable."
The US detention camp at Guantánamo aptly illustrates the problem. The UN has recently criticised the US for using interrogation methods amounting to torture against detainees at the camp. The US government denies the charges, relying instead on its own interpretation of what constitutes torture, an interpretation that is far narrower than that of the UN convention, to which the US is a signatory.
- In the real world torture is even worse than its reputation. Torture is not only about the immediate pain; it is also about the all-encompassing fear associated with being completely at the mercy of one's torturers.
In most cases the actual physical and/or psychological abuse coupled with complete helplessness makes the victim's subsequent life a hell of depression, rage, anxiety, nightmares and feelings of guilt, which are a few of the common consequences of torture. The victim's family is heavily affected too. And all of this happens whether the victim is in fact "guilty" or not.
These two crucial factors - the slippery slope associated with questioning the absoluteness of the prohibition against torture, and the effects of torture in the real world - must be at the forefront of the debate at a time when leading democratic countries have implicitly and explicitly expressed reservations as to that absoluteness.
Any attempt to open a Pandora's box, in entertainment or the real world, should raise deep concern. Torture is not something you walk away from with a disappointed shrug, whether at the hands of your boss at the office, hooded thugs in a soundproof room at the back of the local police station, or foreign soldiers in the dungeons of Abu Ghraib. And it is no less torture when secret agents working for democratic governments use stun guns and electric cables to interrogate another human being than when the henchmen of dictatorships extract their victims' fingernails or burn them with irons.
Those who claim otherwise are playing a dangerous game, and contributing to a treacherous discourse that has developed in the context of the war on terror, a discourse that has caused a slow but unmistakable shift of norms and values to the point that it has become plausible to suggest that torture can be used in a responsible and morally sound fashion. It cannot.
In empirical terms, history does not give us one single example to support the claim that there can be such a thing as responsible use of torture. No torturing governments in the history of humanity, whether dictatorships or democracies, have limited their use of torture to indisputable ticking-bomb scenarios. If anything, the present US government's unclear policies on torture and the resulting abuses at detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan have confirmed the lesson that any opening, however small, that allows the use of torture will turn instantly into a festering gap, even when the perpetrator is a leading democracy.
The claim that there can be responsible use of torture ignores the fact that, even in theoretical terms, foolproof safeguards against mistakes (such as that of the stun gun incident in 24) are not possible. Nothing can establish beyond doubt that the guy in custody is the right guy. That the information leading to his arrest is 100% reliable. That he does not just look convincingly like the real guy. That he has not been set up.
The logical next step is to allow torture on the grounds of justified suspicion. And so it goes. Accept a shift of norms, however small and well argued, and you blow the lid off Pandora's box. Allow a little torture and no one will be entirely safe.
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Bush Government Attempted To Cover Up Its Lies About Iraqi WMDs
The Associated Press
Sunday, May 14, 2006
A year after Bush administration claims about Iraqi ''bioweapons trailers'' were discredited by American experts, U.S. officials were still suppressing the findings, according to a senior member of the CIA-led inspection team.
At one point, former U.N. arms inspector Rod Barton says, a CIA officer told him it was ''politically not possible" to report that the White House claims were untrue. In the end, Barton says, he felt ''complicit in deceit."
Barton, an Australian biological weapons specialist, discusses the 2004 events in ''The Weapons Detective,'' a memoir of his years as an arms inspector, being published Monday in Australia.
Much sought after for his expertise, Barton served on the U.N. Iraq arms inspection teams of 1991-98 and 2002-03. After the U.S. invasion, he was an aide to chief U.S. inspector Charles Duelfer.
The Washington Post reported last month that a U.S. fact-finding mission confidentially advised Washington on May 27, 2003, that two trailers found in Iraq were not mobile units for making bioweapons, as had been suspected.
Two days later, President Bush still asserted the trailers were bioweapons labs, and other officials repeated that line for months afterward.
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Italian Pay-off From Niger Forgery?
By Jeffrey Klein and Paolo Pontoniere
New America Media
05/15/06
Italian journalists and parliamentary investigators are hot on the trail of how pre-Iraq War Italian forged documents were delivered to the White House alleging that Saddam Hussein had obtained yellowcake uranium ore from Niger.
New links implicating Italian companies and individuals with then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi now raise the question of whether Berlusconi received a payback as part of the deal -- namely, a Pentagon contract to build the U.S. president's special fleet of helicopters.
The yellowcake story in the United States has long been linked to the ongoing investigation into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. Plame's diplomat husband Joe Wilson had probed the Niger connection and concluded that the Bush administration was twisting intelligence reports to fit its case for war.
Two people -- Carlo Rossella and Giovanni Castellaneta -- are at the center of Italian inquiries into the transfer of the yellowcake dossier from the SISMI, the Italian intelligence agency, to the White House.
According to the influential Rome-based La Repubblica, Carlo Rossella -- at the time editor-in-chief of Berlusconi's Panorama, one of Italy's largest weeklies -- delivered the dossier in the autumn of 2002 to the U.S. Embassy in Rome. Rossella's actions were puzzling because its top investigative reporter, Elisabetta Burba, was in the midst of discounting the file as a gross falsification.
Besides directing Panorama, Rossella -- once a foreign policy advisor to Berlusconi -- had been considered a candidate to direct RAI, Italy's state broadcasting system.
A more direct connection to Berlusconi is Giovanni Castellaneta, current Italian ambassador to the United States and Berlusconi's former national security adviser.
According to La Repubblica, Nicola Pollari, the head of SISMI, tried to dispel the CIA's misgivings about the authenticity of the yellowcake papers and failed. Castellaneta then arranged for Pollari to bypass the CIA and meet directly with then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley, Rice's chief deputy and currently national security advisor. The meeting took place on Sept. 9, 2002, in the White House, and has been confirmed by White House officials.
It was after this meeting that the story of the yellowcake uranium ore from Niger took off. In late September, CIA director George Tenet and Secretary of State Colin Powell cited the attempted yellowcake purchase from Niger in separate classified hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In advance of President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address, Hadley asked for the CIA's approval to include the Niger claim in the president's speech. Even though the CIA had explicitly excised the claim from a prior address given by the president and now repeated its misgivings to Hadley, Bush ended up saying in his speech that, "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Bush attributed this intelligence to the British government. No mention was made of any connections between the Italian and American governments.
What did the Berlusconi government get in return for providing the Bush administration with a convenient "smoking gun" to attack Iraq? At the end of the yellowcake trail may be the prestigious contract an Italian firm won to manufacture Marine One -- the fleet of presidential helicopters. In January 2005, the U.S. Navy awarded the contract for the construction of 23 new Marine One helicopters to AgustaWestland. Marketing itself as an Anglo-Italian firm, AgustaWestland is wholly owned by Finmeccanica, Italy's largest defense conglomerate.
The choice of AgustaWestland for Marine One surprised most industry observers because U.S.-based Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. was the heavy favorite. Sikorsky patented the first helicopter design in 1939 and built virtually every president's helicopter since 1957. President Eisenhower regularly flew in a Sikorsky to his Gettysburg farm, and the Sikorsky that Nixon boarded when he resigned from the White House is now being restored for permanent display at the Nixon Library.
Not only did Sikorsky lose, but it lost to a foreign firm that has no problems selling its helicopters to the United States' adversaries. (See side bar, "Choppers for Sale, to Everyone")
As with the yellowcake dossier, the key figure in the Marine One contract is Gianni Castellaneta. When the Pentagon put the Marine One contract out for bid, Castellaneta was deputy chair of Finmeccanica and national security advisor to Prime Minister Berlusconi. By the time the contract was awarded, Castellaneta had been appointed Italy's ambassador to the United States.
Castellaneta proudly told U.S. Italia Weekly, "At noon President Bush received me for the official delivery of credentials. He didn't make me wait a single day. An exceptional courtesy."
Castellaneta's role in obtaining the Marine One contract has never been examined before, but according to Affari Italiani, Italy's first online daily, and disarmo.org, an Italian arms control advocacy group, Castellaneta has long managed the most sensitive dossiers in U.S.-Italian bilateral relations.
When Ambassador Castellaneta was asked about his role, the embassy press officer, Luca Ferrari said, "In his capacity as ambassador, representing all of Italy in the United States, the ambassador does not care to speak any more about Finmeccanica."
"Castellaneta's double role as ambassador and corporate businessman has come under scrutiny at various junctures," says Carlo Bonini, an Italian journalist who has extensively investigated the yellowcake affair. "His duality has inspired animated debate in the Italian Parliament, but due to the absolute majority of seats held by Berlusconi, the matter could never be fully discussed."
With center-left opposition leader Romano Prodi taking the helm of Italy's new government, the newly reconfigured Parliament is expected to open a probe into the "Yellowcake One" affair. For Italians, the main question is whether Berlusconi personally profited from the helicopter deal. For Americans, the question is whether the Bush administration paid the Italians back for providing the false intelligence that helped justify launching the war in Iraq.
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They did it their way - so they have no one to blame but themselves
Gary Younge
Monday May 15, 2006
The Guardian
"Only when we are all dead will the genius of this war finally become clear."
Bush and Blair are trying to offset the unpopularity of their chosen war by appealing to a verdict of history we will never hear
If democracy is supposed to represent the will of the people, then there is either something wrong with the democracies or something wrong with the people on both sides of the Atlantic. Less than two years ago George Bush was re-elected president of the United States. His pitch: "Stick with me, I have not done a thing wrong." His promise: "I will do more of the same." Six months later Tony Blair went to the polls with a similar message.
Both were elected. Both have since been as good their word. With the exception of Dick Cheney's poor marksmanship and John Prescott's priapism there have been no real surprises since then.
Yet both now find themselves wallowing at dismal levels of public support. Blair has the lowest approval rating of any Labour premier on record - dipping below Harold Wilson in 1968 during the post-devaluation crisis. Bush similarly keeps plumbing new depths - currently standing at just over half the level Clinton enjoyed in the midst of the Lewinsky scandal. If there were an election tomorrow, both would struggle.
On the domestic front, the route by which they got to this point and the time they have to recover differ. Blair has strayed too far from the core interests of the party he represents. Bush has stuck too closely to his. Bush must stay and face the music until January 2009, and no one knows who will replace him; Blair could go at any moment, and his heir apparent lives next door and is champing at the bit.
But both move into the twilight of their political careers with colleagues and commentators looking over their shoulders at potential successors, like social climbers at a cocktail party. From now on they are not fighting for their political lives - their days on that score are literally numbered, even if in Blair's case we are not sure quite what the number is - but for their political obituaries. In the time that remains, they are focused not on legislation but legacy.
The trouble is that the issue on which those legacies will be judged is the one where they have given themselves the least room for political manoeuvre and over which they now have the least day-to-day control: Iraq.
According to a morgue report, last month sectarian fighting claimed 1,100 Iraqi lives in Baghdad alone. Meanwhile, the death toll of US soldiers has risen to roughly three a day - back to the higher levels of last year. According to a Pew poll in March, half of Americans favour immediate troop withdrawal and less than a third approve of the way Bush is handling the war. In the UK, a Newsnight poll showed 60% believed that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake.
Both Bush and Blair staked their reputations on this war. They made their pledges to tough it out the hallmark of their leadership style. Yet the premises on which they entered it were false and the conduct of it remains flawed. Militarily, they are unable to move forward; politically, they are incapable of turning back. They are desperate for everyone to change the subject and yet are stuck with the subject they themselves chose.
"The diplomatic historian traces foreign affairs as if domestic affairs were offstage disturbances," writes Walter Karp in The Politics of War. "The historian of domestic politics treats the explosions of war as if they were offstage disturbances. Were that true, we would have to believe that presidents who faced a mounting sea of troubles at home have none the less conducted their foreign policy without the slightest regard for those troubles - that individual presidents were divided into watertight compartments, one labelled 'domestic' and the other 'foreign'."
The relationship between this foreign misadventure and these domestic mishaps is contextual rather than causal. Iraq has become a signifier for leaders who do not listen, politicians who mislead, and political priorities that are out of kilter with the public need. These are sentiments that transfer easily to gas prices and Hurricane Katrina in the US as much as to school reform and ID cards in Britain. The war "is like a fog that just envelops the entire political atmosphere", Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report told the Los Angeles Times. According to a CBS poll in April, almost two-thirds of Americans think Bush describes things in Iraq as better than they are. In the Newsnight poll, 52% of Britons said their opinion of Blair has gone down as a result of the war. More Americans rank the war as the most important issue facing the country than those who prioritise the economy, immigration and terrorism put together. But that is still only 27%.
These statistics are not coming from the same place. These two leaders sold different wars to different electorates. The Bush administration used the terrorist attacks in New York as the pretext for this war; terrorists used this war as the pretext for attacking London. The Bush administration responded to the attacks with a policy of pre-emptive strikes and regime change in which WMD were central but not crucial. In his post-9/11 speech, Blair promised to "reorder this world around us" but evoked Congo and Kyoto, not Iraq or Iran. Finally, most Americans supported the war until last year; bar a brief period at the outset, most Britons never did.
But, for all these differences, what the war exposed both in the UK and the US were democratic deficits that failed to check or balance the bellicose machismo of either man. In Britain the dislocation between public will and foreign policy was blatant. Somehow an issue of war and peace that raged through the country was marginalised in parliament and erased from the cabinet. In the US the public barely got a look in. A supine press and spineless Democrats ensured that no alternative arguments or strategies would emerge until it was too late. The people are not fickle but their democracies are dysfunctional.
As a result, both leaders got precisely what they wanted. Unchecked by political opposition at home, unfettered by international law abroad, unpersuaded by argument at home and abroad, like Sinatra they did it their way. And so, since they have no one else to blame and find themselves out of credit at the goodwill bank of public opinion, they reach for the arbiter of last resort: history.
Not the history that has passed. Not the history of Kenya or Vietnam which taught us that the suppression of a colonised people can only be sustained through barbarism. Certainly not the history in which Winston Churchill advocated gassing the Kurds and the US continued to support Saddam Hussein as an ally after the Halabja massacres.
In their desire for legacy, they seek not the history that records the past but a history of the future: an abstract verdict that we cannot argue with for the simple reason that it hasn't been made yet.
"History will prove the decision we made to be the right decision," said Bush in 2003.
"If we are wrong," argued Blair, "we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least, is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive."
Rebutted by the past and rejected in the present, their only hope is the future imperfect. Only when we are all dead will the genius of this war finally become clear.
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Spies 'hid' bomber tape from MPs
05/15/06
The Times
Bugging revealed earlier plot
MI5 is being accused of a cover-up for failing to disclose to a parliamentary watchdog that it bugged the leader of the July 7 suicide bombers discussing the building of a bomb months before the London attacks.
MI5 had secret tape recordings of Mohammad Sidique Khan, the gang leader, talking about how to build the device and then leave the country because there would be a lot of police activity.
However, despite the recordings, MI5 allowed him to escape the net. Transcripts of the tapes were never shown to the parliamentary intelligence and security committee (ISC), which investigated the attacks.
The disclosures prompted allegations of a "whitewash" from politicians and victims of the attacks this weekend.
Last week the committee, whose members are appointed by Tony Blair and report to him, cleared MI5 of blame after it failed to thwart the attacks, which killed 52 innocent people and injured more than 700. It concluded that MI5 had no reason to suspect Khan of plotting attacks in Britain. He was regarded as "peripheral" to higher priorities.
The new evidence shows MI5 monitored Khan when he met suspects allegedly planning another, separate attack; that he had knowledge of the "late-stage discussions" of this plot; and that he was recorded having discussions with them about making a bomb and leaving the country. He was also recorded talking about his plans to wage jihad - holy war - and go to Al-Qaeda terrorist camps abroad.
Yesterday David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: "If this is true, it completely undermines the basis on which the ISC did its report."
Patrick Mercer, the Tory spokesman on homeland security, said: "Unless there is a proper independent inquiry, there is a danger of the committee's report being interpreted as a whitewash."
A committee member, who asked not to be named, admitted that it had not seen transcripts of MI5's recordings of Khan. Instead, it had taken evidence from senior security officials and accepted their judgment that there was no reason to regard Khan as a serious threat.
The MP said that if the transcripts showed Khan had been involved in discussions about bomb-making and another possible attack, the committee had been seriously misled. "If that is the case, it amounts to a scandal," said the source. "I would be outraged."
Rachel North, a survivor of the bomb at King's Cross, was shocked by the disclosure: "I am shaking with anger.
In the absence of an independent inquiry answering the public's questions, I had hoped that those who heard the evidence behind closed doors on our behalf would find out the answers for us.
"They did not find out nor tell us the whole truth, and I feel badly, desperately let down."
The disclosures will increase pressure for a public inquiry into the atrocity, with greater powers to demand evidence and interrogate witnesses.
The government also failed to address concerns about what MI5 knew when they were raised in unreported exchanges in the Commons last week. Davis referred to the existence of the tape recordings when he addressed John Reid, the home secretary.
"It seems that MI5 taped Mohammad Sidique Khan talking about his wish to fight in the jihad and saying his goodbyes to his family - a clear indication that he was intending a suicide mission . . . he was known to have attended late-stage discussions on planning another major terror attack. Again, I ask the home secretary whether that is true."
Reid said the questions were "legitimate" but failed to answer them.
Comment: Just last friday we had a parliamentary inquiry into the London bombings concluding that MI5 lacked the manpower to keep tabs on the bombers, today, that claim is shown to be a lie. A whitewash indeed. See here for friday's stories and our suggestion that the parliamentary committee's conclusion was completely unbelieveable.
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Dixie Chicks, Valerie Plame & Bush
By Robert Parry
May 16, 2006
A politician's reaction to dissent is often the true test of a commitment to democracy. Great leaders not only tolerate criticism, but welcome disagreement as part of a fair competition of ideas leading to the best result for society.
Certainly, no one who truly cares about democracy favors punishing critics and demonizing dissenters. But just such hostility has been the calling card of George W. Bush and his backers over the past five years as they have subjected public critics to vilification, ridicule and retaliation.
While Bush doesn't always join personally in the attack-dog operations, he has a remarkable record of never calling off the dogs, letting his surrogates inflict the damage while he winks his approval. In some cases, however, such as the punishment of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, CIA officer Valerie Plame, Bush has actually gotten his hands dirty. [See below.]
The Bush-on-the-sidelines cases are illustrated by what happened to the Dixie Chicks, a three-woman country-western band that has faced three years of boycotts because lead singer, Natalie Maines, criticized Bush as he was stampeding the nation toward war with Iraq.
During a March 10, 2003, concert in London, Maines, a Texan, remarked, "we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas." Two days later - just a week before Bush launched the Iraq invasion - she added, "I feel the President is ignoring the opinions of many in the U.S. and alienating the rest of the world."
With war hysteria then sweeping America, the right-wing attack machine switched into high gear, organizing rallies to drive trucks over Dixie Chicks CDs and threatening country-western stations that played Dixie Chicks music. Maines later apologized, but it was too late to stop the group's songs from falling down the country music charts.
On April 24, 2003, with the Iraq War barely a month old, NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw asked Bush about the boycott of the Dixie Chicks. The President responded that the singers "can say what they want to say," but he added that his supporters then had an equal right to punish the singers for their comments.
"They shouldn't have their feelings hurt just because some people don't want to buy their records when they speak out," Bush said. "Freedom is a two-way street."
So, instead of encouraging a full-and-free debate, Bush made clear that he saw nothing wrong with his followers hurting Americans who disagree with him.
Pattern of Attack
Other celebrities who opposed the Iraq War, such as Sean Penn, got a similar treatment. Bush's supporters even gloated when Penn lost acting work because he had criticized the rush to war.
"Sean Penn is fired from an acting job and finds out that actions bring about consequences. Whoa, dude!" chortled pro-Bush MSNBC commentator Joe Scarborough.
Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, cited as justification for Penn's punishment the actor's comment during a pre-war trip to Iraq that "I cannot conceive of any reason why the American people and the world would not have shared with them the evidence that they [Bush administration officials] claim to have of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." [MSNBC transcript, May 18, 2003]
In other words, no matter how reasonable or accurate the concerns expressed by Bush's Iraq War critics, they could expect retaliation.
With Bush's quiet encouragement, his supporters also denigrated skeptical U.S. allies, such as France by pouring French wine into gutters and renaming "French fries" as "freedom fries."
Bush's backers even mocked U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix for not finding WMD in Iraq in the weeks before the U.S. invasion. CNBC's right-wing comic Dennis Miller likened Blix's U.N. inspectors to the cartoon character Scooby Doo, racing fruitlessly around Iraq in vans.
As it turned out, of course, the Iraq War critics were right. The problem wasn't the incompetence of Blix but the fact that Bush's claims about Iraq's WMD were false, as Bush's arms inspectors David Kay and Charles Duelfer concluded after the invasion.
But the critics never got any apologies or repair to the careers. As CBS's "60 Minutes" reported in a segment on May 14, 2006, the Dixie Chicks were still haunted by the pro-Bush boycott three years later.
"They have already paid a huge price for their outspokenness, and not just monetarily," said correspondent Steve Kroft. Sometimes, Iraq War supporters even turned to threats of violence.
During one tour, lead singer Maines was warned, "You will be shot dead at your show in Dallas," forcing her to perform there under tight police protection, said the group's banjo player, Emily Robison. In another incident, a shotgun was pointed at a radio station's van because it had the group's picture on the side, Robison said.
Though the Dixie Chicks are still shunned by many country-western stations, they have refused to back down. Indeed, one of their new songs - entitled "Not Ready to Make Nice" - takes on the hatred and intolerance they faced for voicing an opinion about Bush and the Iraq War.
As Kroft noted, "Not Ready to Make Nice" received favorable reviews and became one of the most downloaded country songs on the Internet, but it still "fizzled on the charts" as Bush supporters called up stations and demanded that it never be played.
Asked to explain why these tactics work, Maines said, "when you're in the corporate world, and when that's your livelihood, and when 100 people e-mail you that they'll never listen to your station again, you get scared of losing your job. And why did they need to stand up for us? They're not our friends. They're not our family. And they cave." [CBS's "60 Minutes," May 14, 2006]
The Plame Case
But what's most troubling is that this intolerance toward dissent is not simply overzealous Bush supporters acting out, but rather loyal followers who are getting their signals from the top levels of the Bush administration.
For instance, a new federal court filing by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney apparently instigated the campaign to punish former Ambassador Wilson for his criticism of the administration's claims that Iraq had sought enriched uranium from Africa.
After reading Wilson's July 6, 2003, opinion article in the New York Times, Cheney scrawled questions in the space above the article, according to the court filing. Cheney's questions would soon shape the hostile talking points that White House officials and their right-wing supporters would spread against Wilson and his CIA officer wife, Valerie Plame.
"Those annotations support the proposition that publication of the Wilson Op-Ed acutely focused the attention of the Vice President and the defendant - his chief of staff [I. Lewis Libby] - on Mr. Wilson, on the assertions made in his article, and on responding to these assertions," according to a May 12, 2006, filing by Fitzgerald.
Cheney's questions addressed the reasons why the CIA sent Wilson to Niger in 2002 to check out - and ultimately discredit - suspicions about Iraq allegedly seeking "yellowcake" uranium from Africa.
"Have they [CIA officials] done this sort of thing before?" Cheney wrote. "Send an Amb[assador] to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?"
Though Cheney did not write down Plame's name, his questions indicate that he was aware that she worked for the CIA and was in a position (dealing with WMD issues) to have a hand in her husband's assignment to check out the Niger reports.
Over the next several days, White House officials, including Libby and Bush's political adviser Karl Rove, allegedly disseminated information about Plame's CIA identity to journalists in the context of knocking down Wilson's critical article. In effect, the White House tried to cast Wilson's trip as a case of nepotism arranged by his wife.
On July 14, 2003, Plame was publicly identified as a CIA operative in a column by right-wing commentator Robert Novak, destroying her career at the CIA and forcing the spy agency to terminate the undercover operation that she had headed. A CIA complaint to the Justice Department prompted an investigation into the illegal exposure of a CIA officer.
Initially, when the investigation was still under the direct control of Attorney General John Ashcroft, Bush and other White House officials denied any knowledge about the leak. Bush pretended that he wanted to get to the bottom of the matter.
"If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is," Bush said on Sept. 30, 2003. "I want to know the truth. If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true."
Yet, even as Bush was professing his curiosity and calling for anyone with information to step forward, he was withholding the fact that he had authorized the declassification of some secrets about the Niger uranium issue and had ordered Cheney to arrange for those secrets to be given to reporters.
In other words, though Bush knew a great deal about how the anti-Wilson scheme got started - since he was involved in starting it - he uttered misleading public statements to conceal the White House role and possibly to signal to others that they should follow suit in denying knowledge.
Failed Cover-up
The cover-up might have worked, except in late 2003, Ashcroft recused himself because of a conflict of interest, and Fitzgerald - the U.S. Attorney in Chicago - was named as the special prosecutor. Fitzgerald pursued the investigation far more aggressively, even demanding that journalists testify about the White House leaks.
In October 2005, Fitzgerald indicted Libby on five counts of perjury, lying to investigators and obstruction of justice. In a court filing on April 5, 2006, Fitzgerald added that his investigation had uncovered government documents that "could be characterized as reflecting a plan to discredit, punish, or seek revenge against Mr. Wilson" because of his criticism of the administration's handling of the Niger evidence.
Beyond the actual Plame leak, the White House oversaw a public-relations strategy to denigrate Wilson. The Republican National Committee put out talking points ridiculing Wilson, and the Republican-run Senate Intelligence Committee made misleading claims about his honesty in a WMD report.
Rather than thank Wilson for undertaking a difficult fact-finding trip to Niger for no pay - and for reporting accurately about the dubious Iraq-Niger claims - the Bush administration sought to smear the former ambassador and, in so doing, destroyed his wife's career and the effectiveness of her undercover work on WMDs. Plame has since quit the CIA.
The common thread linking the Plame case to the attacks on the Dixie Chicks and other anti-war celebrities is Bush's all-consuming intolerance of dissent.
Rather than welcome contrary opinions and use them to refine his own thinking, Bush operates from the premise that his "gut" judgments are right and all they require is that the American people get in line behind him.
Bush then views any continued criticism as evidence of disloyalty. While Bush will tolerate people voicing disagreement, he feels they should pay a steep price, exacted by Bush's loyalists inside and outside the government.
So, when Bush's supporters malign his critics as "traitors" and spit out other hate-filled expressions bordering on exhortations to violence, Bush sees no obligation to rein in the intimidating rhetoric.
Instead, Bush almost seems to relish the punishments meted out to Americans who dissent.
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Bush Spying on Americans
Federal official says US tracking calls made by ABC News, New York Times, Washington Post
RAW STORY
Monday May 15, 2006
ABC News' press office just sent out this release to news organizations, RAW STORY has learned. The story has been posted at the ABC NEWS blog (Read here).
ABC's Brian Ross and Richard Esposito Report:
A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.
"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.
indication our phones were being tapped so the content of the conversation could be recorded.
A pattern of phone calls from a reporter, however, could provide valuable clues for leak investigators.
We do not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.
Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.
One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen.
Our reports on the CIA's secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known to have upset CIA officials.
People questioned by the FBI about leaks of intelligence information say the CIA was also disturbed by ABC News reports that revealed the use of CIA predator missiles inside Pakistan.
Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for the government to keep track of numbers dialed by phone customers.
The official who warned ABC News said there was no
Comment: So the Bush government is listening in on newspaper reporters phone calls to make sure they are not planning on publishing stories about the Bush government listening in on American citizen's phone calls. There should be irony in there somewhere, but we can't find it.
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Majority of Americans against phone record collection
AFP
Mon May 15, 2006
WASHINGTON - A majority of Americans disapprove of the government's attempt to collect millions of telephone records from ordinary citizens, an opinion poll showed.
The survey by USA Today newspaper and Gallup also showed around two-thirds of respondents were concerned that the program conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA) may signal other, undisclosed efforts to gather information on the general public.
By a margin of 51 percent to 43 percent, those polled disapproved of the program.
The existence of the program was first disclosed last Thursday by USA Today, which said the database compiled by the NSA following the September 11, 2001 attacks contained phone records of tens of millions of Americans provided by AT and T, Verizon and BellSouth.
Officials would not provide any details on how the records were used. But former government security experts and media reports indicated that its origin lay in US phone numbers found on Al-Qaeda suspects captured overseas.
Two-thirds of those surveyed were concerned that the database would identify innocent Americans as possible terrorism suspects.
Among Republicans and those who generally vote Republican, 71 percent approved of the NSA program, while among Democrats and Democratic "leaners," 73 percent disapproved.
Americans were split on whether the news media should report information about the government's secret methods to fight terrorism: 47 percent said "yes" and 49 percent said "no".
By a margin of 62 percent to 34 percent, those surveyed supported immediate congressional hearings to investigate the practice.
The poll of 809 adults conducted Friday and Saturday had a margin of error of plus or minus four percent.
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Republican skepticism over NSA program widens
By Anne Broache
CNET News.com
May 15, 2006
WASHINGTON--A Republican senator on Monday questioned whether the federal government should be using its resources for large-scale data-mining efforts such as those associated with the National Security Agency's wiretapping program.
Speaking at a privacy seminar here at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, John Sununu of New Hampshire said the latest revelations that the nation's three biggest phone companies have delivered call records on potentially millions of Americans to the NSA raise concerns about the government's encroachment into private citizens' lives, even if the actions were legal.
"The important question is whether or not this is activity that we think will yield a good result and whether we think it's activity in which the federal government should be engaged," Sununu said.
Voicing similar concerns about the FBI data-mining system once known as Carnivore, Sununu deemed the value of such databases "certainly untested" and said they were potentially ripe for "misuse."
"That's the history of the federal government, is that once you create a tool, create a database, create a program, oftentimes it then begins to seek out new uses, new opportunities, new activities that weren't part of its original charter," he said.
When speaking about the NSA program, Sununu chose his words carefully, saying he didn't doubt the accuracy of the Bush administration's descriptions of the closely guarded program and even going so far as to say he believed the appropriate congressional leadership had been adequately briefed on the matter.
In that sense he seemed to take a more moderate stance than his colleague, Sen. Arlen Specter, who has been perhaps the most vocal Republican to question the Bush administration's actions. Public criticism of the program has been limited largely to Democrats.
Asked whether he expected Congress to take action against AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon Communications for reportedly turning over records to the feds, Sununu said he didn't think the companies themselves deserved the blame. (Specter, meanwhile, has vowed to call in the company executives for questioning.)
"Again, that's not because I think that the program is one that should receive support without question," Sununu said, "but because I understand that the federal government has a great deal of power, is viewed as being responsible in this area, and for a person in a position of responsibility to comply with that is understandable."
Sununu said he saw no reason to believe that the information had even been obtained illegally by the government, noting that they could have "easily" used National Security Letters under the Patriot Act to obtain phone records. The controversial NSLs compel communication service providers to provide records about individuals but do not require the use of a court warrant.
The real question, Sununu said, is, "Do you want (the government) to be creating these large, broad databases? Do you see a very specific value to doing so? That's where I begin to get queasy."
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FBI checking reporters' phone records
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com
May 16, 2006 at 11:20 a.m.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation may be using National Security Letters, which where introduced in the USA Patriot Act, to gain access to phone records of reporters for ABC News, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
ABC News reports that the FBI has acknowledged that it was seeking reporters' phone records to investigate leaks about secret prisons in Europe and warrantless wiretapping.
"It used to be very hard and complicated to do this, but it no longer is in the Bush administration," a senior federal official told ABC News "The Blotter" news blog.
ABC News explained that a National Security Letter (NSL) is "a version of an administrative subpoena and are not signed by a judge. Under the law, a phone company receiving a NSL for phone records must provide them and may not divulge to the customer that the records have been given to the government."
On Monday, ABC News reporters Brian Ross and Richard Esposito, who write "The Blotter," reported that a senior federal law enforcement official told ABC News that the FBI is tracking the phone numbers the two reporters call to reach confidential sources. The source told them in person that it was "time for you to get some new cell phones, quick."
Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for the government to keep track of numbers dialed by phone customers. The official who warned ABC News said there was no indication our phones were being tapped so the content of the conversation could be recorded. A pattern of phone calls from a reporter, however, could provide valuable clues for leak investigators.
On Monday night, another federal source told Mr. Ross and Mr. Esposito that it was not that the FBI was "tracking" their calls. but that they were "backtracking." The Associated Press reported early Monday that the FBI said it does not "routinely" track calls made by and to reporters, but that it does check phone records of government employees as part of leak investigations.
The New York Sun reports that under "long standing" Justice Department provisions, a reporter must be notified within 90 days that his or her records have been obtained, and that subpoenas for the records must not be issued until after the department attempts to negotiate access with the reporter (subscription required).
Spokeswomen for ABC and the Times said their organizations had received no official notification of the effort to seek their phone records. The Washington Post did not respond to a call seeking comment for this article.
The executive director of the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press, Lucy Dalglish, said the government's reported acquisition of journalists' calling records was part of a pattern of intrusions on First Amendment rights by the Bush administration. "I'm ready to throw my arms up in the air," she said. "If there was a subpoena, they are supposed to be notified."
The Sun reports that by using NSLs, the Justice Department can "head off" court challenges that have been initiated by media organizations under the existing provisions.
In his Early Warning blog on national and homeland security for The Washington Post, William Arkin writes that it is "urban legend" that only the news media are making an issue of increased NSA surveillance, and that the majority of Americans "approve" because it protects them from terrorist attacks. He cites a new USA Today-CNN poll shows that a majority of Americans disapprove of the huge database of phone numbers being collected by the NSA, and that two-thirds of Americans also believe that the disclosure of this program shows that there are other, yet-undisclosed programs that are monitoring the general public.
Arkin says that all these activities revolve around two key questions: are these just "ingestion and digestion" designed to catch more terrorists, or are they the "the building blocks of a new seamless surveillance culture?"
The government's position is that if you are "innocent," you have nothing to hide. It is a new version of 'you are either with us or against us.' Massive monitoring is of course meant to find terrorists; I completely believe that this is not some 1960's enemies list politically motivated effort. But these post 9/11 programs signal a new and different problem.
People of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent and Muslims are potential terrorists, machine selected as "of interest." Throw in there callers and travelers to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, recipients of wire transfers, purchasers of fertilizer, flight school attendees. These are the new guilty until proven innocent. Innocent means of course mostly white, mostly Christian Americans who accept that the government knows best and that the national security state is only after the bad guys and would never apply its new found capacities in any illegitimate way.
In an interview with news site Salon.com, NSA historian Matthew Aid said he believes it is only a matter of time before we discover that cellphone and Internet companies also helped the government spy on Americans.
We should be terrified that Congress has not been doing its job and because all of the checks and balances put in place to prevent this have been deliberately obviated. In order to get this done, the NSA and White House went around all of the checks and balances. I'm convinced that 20 years from now we, as historians, will be looking back at this as one of the darkest eras in American history. And we're just beginning to sort of peel back the first layers of the onion. We're hoping against hope that it's not as bad as I suspect it will be, but reality sets in every time a new article is published and the first thing the Bush administration tries to do is quash the story. It's like the lawsuit brought by [the Electronic Frontier Foundation] against AT&T - the government's first reaction was to try to quash the lawsuit. That ought to be a warning sign that they're on to something.
Mr. Aid said he feels certain that when the complete story of the warrantless wiretapping and the collection of phone records becomes public, it will show that "key oversight functions - those functions that were put in place to protect the rights of Americans - were deliberately circumvented."
Meanwhile, National Journal's CongressDaily reported last week that Russell Tice, a former NSA employee who was also one of the sources who revealed the warrantless wiretapping story to The New York Times, is going to give Senate Armed Services Committee staffers more information Wednesday about the activities of the NSA during the tenure of Gen. Michael Hayden. He says some of the things he will tell the committee include the news that "not only do employees at the agency believe the activities they are being asked to perform are unlawful, but that what has been disclosed so far is only the tip of the iceberg."
[Tice] said he plans to tell the committee staffers the NSA conducted illegal and unconstitutional surveillance of US citizens while he was there with the knowledge of Hayden. ... "I think the people I talk to next week are going to be shocked when I tell them what I have to tell them. It's pretty hard to believe," Tice said. "I hope that they'll clean up the abuses and have some oversight into these programs, which doesn't exist right now." ...
Tice said his information is different from the Terrorist Surveillance Program that Bush acknowledged in December and from news accounts [last] week that the NSA has been secretly collecting phone call records of millions of Americans. "It's an angle that you haven't heard about yet," he said. ... He would not discuss with a reporter the details of his allegations, saying doing so would compromise classified information and put him at risk of going to jail. He said he "will not confirm or deny" if his allegations involve the illegal use of space systems and satellites.
The Associated Press reported Monday that a chief of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said that his agency needs to investigate if phone companies are violating federal communications law by giving phone records of customers to the NSA.
There is no doubt that protecting the security of the American people is our government's No. 1 responsibility," Commissioner Michael J. Copps, a Democrat, said in a statement. "But in a digital age where collecting, distributing and manipulating consumers' personal information is as easy as a click of a button, the privacy of our citizens must still matter."
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Worst Day In History
Where is the global outcry at this continuing cruelty?
Ghada Karmi
Monday May 15, 2006
The Guardian
Nearly 60 years after most Palestinians were first forced from our homes, the killings and blockades carry on with impunity
Israel is 58 years old today. Israelis have already celebrated with barbecues and parties. And so they should, for they've pulled off an amazing stunt: the creation of a state for one people on the land of another - and at their massive expense - without incurring effect