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Editorial: The Bogeyman Industry
Butler Shaffer
Lew Rockwell
September 12th 2006
"For as children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror and imagine will come true." ~ Lucretius
When I was a small child, I delighted in scaring my two younger sisters with specters dreamed up by me with the help of radio broadcasts. My mind was a bottomless well of monsters, hobgoblins, and - scariest of all - those amorphous demons whose lack of clarity in shape made them all the more terrifying. I was a Ziegfeld of theatrical production, with sound effects produced by my ghostly vocalizing, the pounding on walls, or the scratching of my fingernails on a door; while my special effects took the form of crawling beneath their beds at night and kicking the bedsprings. The script was nothing special, it being sufficient that the acting would generate the desired screams.
I have been out of the fear-mongering business for many decades now, the field having been taken over by well-financed professionals with whom I am unable and unwilling to compete. The stage props and special effects have become so massive and expensive as to leave little room for a small-time operator to succeed with nothing more than voice-over screeches. For the enterprise to be worthwhile today, economies-of-scale demand that the intended audience be expanded beyond one's immediate family. The bogeyman has become a multinational operation, leaving a budding young entrepreneur to content himself with annoying the neighbors with a garage band.
Fear-peddling is very much in danger of becoming monopolized by the state, which long ago realized that keeping people perennially frightened was the most effective method of maintaining them in a huddled and obedient mass. From the primitive tribal chief who was able to convince his neighbors of the threats posed by the "Nine Bows" across the river, to today's political shakedown artists with their terrorist phantoms, fear has been the essential organizing principle of politics.
As my sisters and I learned at an early age, fear objects are most terrifying when their identities are vague and formless. Lions and tigers and bears are dangerous, but never as frightening as shadowy creatures who haunt darkened streets or hallways. I recall the stark terror I experienced in listening to Lionel Barrymore's radio presentation of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," and imagining the ghost of Jacob Marley clanking his way up a lonely staircase. I also recall the disappointment I felt in seeing my first movie version of the story: I had, after all, dreamed up a far scarier specter than Hollywood was able to accomplish with special effects photography.
Like small children, we are now living in a society that the institutional order - particularly the state - tries vainly to hold together through fear. While pointing to "others" as threats to our well-being - one of the clearest symptoms of psychological projection - the state unwittingly acknowledges its terrorist foundations. We must be kept in constant terror of faceless and formless men - or women - who might attack us in some unexpected manner; we must learn to fear unattended packages, or breast-feeding mothers on airliners, or dark-skinned people who speak in languages we do not understand. We have even been warned to feel unsafe at petting zoos and roller-skating rinks, as government officials warn us to be constantly alert to dangers from "suspicious" others.
Lest we not accord world events their "proper" potential for threats to our lives, we have been provided with one of the most idiotic of political gimmicks: a color-coded chart identifying the level of fear we should feel. Like Pavlovian dogs, our operant conditioning is apparently deigned to elicit from each of us an expected rush of adrenalin as the colors move upwards from yellow to orange to red.
It is rational for men and women to have an awareness of potential dangers in their environments, and to make an appropriate response when needed. Some very dangerous and ill-motivated people did murder nearly three thousand people on 9/11. It is important that the identities and purposes of those involved be revealed, even if doing so requires us to look in directions we are uncomfortable considering. On the other hand, it is quite irrational - to the point of being pathological - to embrace the doctrine of a malevolent universe; to live in constant fear of everything and everybody at all times. I was in college, in the early 1950s, when the shadowy hobgoblin of the "communist infiltrator" became a useful tool to mobilize fear on behalf of expanded governmental power. I recall one study in which people were asked whether they suspected any of their neighbors of being communists. Many did, offering such "evidence" as a man having National Geographic maps pinned to his walls, or a couple who were accustomed to entertaining people at their home late at night. I also recall a legislator in our state who was convinced of the presence of a communist "conspiracy" within the faculty of the state university. When informed that there was no evidence to support such a charge, the solon responded that the lack of evidence only confirmed the effectiveness of the conspiracy! Again, fear-objects are rendered more terrifying when we imagine them operating in shadows, where our imaginations must be employed to fill in the details.
Today's "terrorist" or "jihadist" would doubtless be defined in the same murky fashion. Of course, "jihad" is a word very few people understand, it only being sufficient that everyone fear it. Our fears of such persons are hastened because we do not understand the causal explanations for their actions. Nor are most of us desirous of learning such causes because, to do so, would give rise to an even greater fear: that of discovering the nature of the political games being played at our expense. It is far better that we simply accept the bogeyman du jour as our fear object, and recite all the appropriate mantras on behalf of our attachment to patriotic causes that only lead to our destruction.
We are told, on a daily basis, that our lives are under constant threat of attack from terrorists. But if this is so, where are these supposed terrorists? President Bush and his defenders have been bleating that their expanded police and surveillance powers are keeping terrorists out of the country, a proposition that is rendered laughable by the daily influx of immigrants from Central America! If it has been so easy for millions of people to enter this country in spite of determined government efforts to prevent it, what efficacious mechanisms has the Bush administration put in place to keep out terrorists? Nor does the government's performance in New Orleans suggest to any thoughtful person that it is capable of making an effective response to any alleged danger.
The so-called "war on terror" is just another of the many state-run rackets designed to benefit governmental, media, and various business interests, all of whom profit from state-induced fears of others. Greater power and more tax dollars flow to political systems; the media enjoys an increase in viewers and readers; while untold numbers of government contractors, along with suppliers of goods and services for a market of frightened people, profit from this protection racket. In threatening to expand the war to other countries, the state increases hostilities from its targeted enemies, thus engendering more fears from Americans who demand "protection."
If physicians could figure out ways to inject people with deadly viruses that they could then treat with expensive tests, drugs, and medical advice, their profession would precisely correlate with the methods of the state!
President Bush and other politicians - along with the agents of disinformation in the media - spent many hours exploiting the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Mr. Bush went to the World Trade Center site ostensibly to honor the victims of that atrocity, but in fact his purpose was to take advantage of that event in order to reinforce the mindset of fear upon which the state depends for the continuing expansion of its power over our lives. Fear is a condition the state cannot allow to enervate; it must be constantly revitalized. Like a morsel of food to Pavlov's dogs, Mr. Bush's memorial wreath served - like Memorial Day ceremonies - to reinforce the conditioning that is the state's power source.
On the same day that Mr. Bush gave his performance in New York City, Faux News had a feature asking: "Is Iraq war a 'sideshow' in the war on terror?" Intelligent minds would do better to ask: is the war on terror a sideshow in the war on the American people?
Butler Shaffer [send
him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University
School of Law. He is the author of Calculated
Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival
Original
Comment on this Editorial
Editorial: "Palestinians will never surrender"
Dr Sattar Kassem interviewed by Silvia Cattori in Nablus.
Silvia Cattori: You are a strong voice in Palestine, but a voice we don't hear much in French speaking countries. Why?
Sattar Kassem: For 26 years, I am not authorized by the Israeli authorities to go out of Palestine. I spent two years in the Israeli jails and eight months in a Palestinian prison under Arafat's regime. I was injured by four bullets shot by men recruited by the Palestinian authorities. But I am always here, with my pen, to help my people to recover their rights and try to get a change in the Arab world. I firmly believe that present Arab regimes must disappear, because they defend foreign interests and not the interests of their citizens. Most of these dictatorial regimes are collaborating with Israel, so against the rights of the Palestinians and the Lebanese. These regimes are the puppets of certain powers, more particularly of the United States.
Silvia Cattori: Were you arrested and the victim of an assassination attempt under Mr Yasser Arafat's regime because you criticized his policy? Does that mean that you had no democracy, no freedom under his government?
Sattar Kassem: Under Arafat's regime there was no democracy, no freedom of opinion at all. So many people where arrested! In 1999, with nineteen other persons, I signed a statement saying that there was so much corruption in the country and that Arafat was leading that corruption.(1) So he put us in jail. After that, I wrote an article entitled "Democracy under the prisons" where I criticized Arafat for his undemocratic behaviour. For that reason, they sent some people to shoot me. Arafat never wanted to implement any kind of democracy.
Silvia Cattori: Do you mean that the 1996 elections was not a fair election?
Sattar Kassem: Yes. It was not fair because there was so much fraud in that election. But there was no opposition, so nobody cared.
Silvia Cattori: So now, for the first time in the region, you had fair elections, Hamas won and, for the first time in history, we have seen the European Union punishing, by way of sanctions, a people under occupation?!
Sattar Kassem: That is true, that is a paradox. That question should be directed to the Europeans. We had fair and honest elections but we did not have the general atmosphere of democracy, and that was a problem. Probably you noticed outside too, that after Hamas won the election, it appeared clearly that a certain number of personalities -particularly in Fatah party- did not accept the result of this election.
Silvia Cattori: In such a difficult context, do you think that the Hamas movement will succeed to implement that atmosphere of democracy you call for?
Sattar Kassem: I do not think so, not because they are not able to do it, but because they are facing terrible problems from so many sides. The Israelis do not want to let this government function. Actually, the Israelis have arrested most of the ministers and many legislative members.
Silvia Cattori: When you complain about "Arab regimes" do you include the Palestinian authority?
Sattar Kassem: I include the former Palestinian authority and Abou Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), the present President of the Palestinians.
Silvia Cattori: But, when you make such a statement, is it based upon facts you can prove on the basis of your personal experience?
Sattar Kassem: I have been an opponent to the leadership of the PLO in the parliament for more than 30 years. From my knowledge and research on Arafat, I learned that he had abdicated his revolutionary task and that he was not working for the interests of the Palestinians: that he worked as a filter for the Israelis and, finally, that he had damaged the image of the Palestinians in the different Arab countries he used to live in; and also that he had damaged the ethical and the social fabric of the Palestinian people.
Silvia Cattori: Have you an example?
Sattar Kassem: For instance, he used to send the young, loyal and faithful Palestinians who proved to be real fighters to southern Lebanon where they used to get killed. Why? Because one of Arafat aides used to contact the Israelis to inform them about the mission of those fighters; so that they would not be surprised. By that way, the Israelis killed those young people.
Silvia Cattori: Do you mean that Mr Arafat never imposed any security policy to his fellows?
Sattar Kassem: What I can tell you is that information used to flow into the hands of the Israelis. Arafat never made any kind of investigation within the PLO to know who was leaking information to them. So, if you insist on such behaviour, this means that the leaking of information is receiving your consent. It is for that reason that I am saying I knew that he was not revolutionary but that he was filtering. The faithful Palestinians used to be put aside by different means, and Arafat generally kept around him those Palestinians who cared about their personal interest.
Silvia Cattori: So, in your opinion the leaders around Mr Arafat where compromising from the start?
Sattar Kassem: Yes. From the early seventies, Arafat always depended on suspect people who, I think, have security ties with the Israelis. They were corrupt when they were in Lebanon, in Tunisia, in Jordan. When Arafat was in these Arab countries he intended misbehaviour. He never prevented his aids to misbehave and do many wrong things in the Arab streets. For instance, when he would let one of his fellows humiliate a tribal Jordanian leader; this would lead the whole tribe to start hating the Palestinians. When the PLO was fired and kicked out of Beirut by the Israeli army, they went to Tunisia. The Tunisians tell us that when the Palestinians came to Tunisia, they brought with them brothels, whore-houses. All whore-houses flourished because there were so many clients - Palestinian clients. The Palestinians made bars and dirty places in Tunisia flourish. For the Tunisians, the Lebanese, the Jordanians and the Kuwaitis, these are the true Palestinians. That's what they think. From that time we have been hated in Tunisia, Kuwait and Lebanon. I wrote several articles against this scandalous corruption warning that these leaders where guiding their people towards a very terrible end. Except for people who had direct experience with these leaders, very few believed me. From 1994, after Arafat's arrival in the West Bank and Gaza, the people started to realize that what I was telling them was the truth. It is unfortunate that they discovered the truth too late. True he is dead now, but we are still suffering from all his policies. Therefore, I can say that he was no different from any other Arab leader.
Silvia Cattori: Did these people of Arafat's circle belong to the staff that came back to Palestine in 1994?
Sattar Kassem: Yes, alas.
Silvia Cattori: But did Mr Arafat know that his aides were misbehaving? Was he aware of what was happening around him?
Sattar Kassem: Yes, he was aware and he was very clever. If you are challenged several times and you don't correct your behaviour then you intend such behaviour. Arafat was warned hundreds of times by so many people that his aides were misbehaving, but he did nothing to stop that. He was supported by the money he got from Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Emirates. So, because Arafat was the man of Israel and America, these countries were asked to finance him. He had a lot of money; he was the richest so called "revolutionary man" in the world. How can that be when revolutionaries are generally under siege? Without the consent of Israel and America, these countries wouldn't give him money. These aren't independent countries. Now it is on orders from Israel and America that they aren't giving money to Hamas.
Silvia Cattori: Did you work with the people in Mr Arafat's entourage?
Sattar Kassem: Yes. I worked with them for some time and I saw what I am telling you about. This is the truth.
Silvia Cattori: Did you write about that?
Sattar Kassem: Yes. I wrote a book in Arabic called "The Road to Defeat" about what Arafat and his aides used to do.
Silvia Cattori: If I understand you well, this means that Mr Arafat was far from the reality and from the real expectations of his people?
Sattar Kassem: I think that the Israelis consumed him. That's what the Israelis do to their agents. Once they are consumed they throw them away and I think that is what the Israelis did to Arafat: after spoiling him, they threw him away because he was of no more use to them.
Silvia Cattori: When I met Mr. Arafat in April 2002, I got the feeling that he was surrounded by a number of opportunistic people. Was he not the victim of bad advisers?
Sattar Kassem: Yes, but he was the leader, the centre. He never tried to have honest advisers; he always lived with dirty people. And dirty people always give dirty advice. I even have a definition for "Arafatism" and I spread it internationally. "Arafatism" means that Arafat was the one who used corruption to bring the Palestinians to their knees.
Silvia Cattori: But in the opinion of the leaders of the solidarity movement, for instance, or of a writer like Uri Avnery who considered him as his personal friend, Mr. Arafat was a great man living in a very simple way, "a partner to build a new hope"!
Sattar Kassem: That is true; he used to live a very simple life. However, I believe that Arafat's mission served the Israelis, but not the Palestinians. His life was very simple, but his aides were very rich. Some of them lived in 5 star hotels and used to go to Monte Carlo and Las Vegas. You know how difficult life is in Palestine. I invite those people who supported Arafat and believed that he was honest with the Palestinians to come and talk openly about his policies. I am ready.
Silvia Cattori: But how can we believe that Mr. Arafat's mission was to accomplish what the Israelis wanted?
Sattar Kassem: At least for me, all my expectations about Arafat turned out to be true. I am convinced of what I am saying. For instance, in 1979, I wrote that the PLO was going to recognize Israel. At that time, the people didn't believe me and started saying that I was a spy, because I raised doubts about Arafat. In 1994, when Arafat came to stay in Palestine, I wrote that he would do the same thing he used to do in Lebanon; that he would open whore-houses, he would damage the Palestinian ethical and social structure and he would co-operate security-wise with the Israelis. Unfortunately, all that I wrote turned out to be true. I told all this frankly to the authorities. That is why they shot me.
Silvia Cattori: When you speak of the "Palestinian ethical and social structure", what did you mean exactly?
Sattar Kassem: Any people should live with an ethical code, so as to be able to respect others and to live with them. If the ethical code is absent, then everybody will be against everybody else. If there are no ethics how can we live together? This is what happened during Arafat's time. All the bad people, the gangsters, became strong and all the good people stayed at home. Arafat time established a system of terrible values, which caused respect among people to disappear.
Silvia Cattori: Despite all of that, it appears that PLO leaders succeeded in winning the sympathy of the left all over the world. Until today, most of the leftist parties consider Arafat and PLO representatives as revolutionary leaders and they still support them, and distrust Hamas authorities?
Sattar Kassem: Generally speaking, Arafat was entrusted with giving that image. But he was not honest at all. Of course, Arafat was not the only leader in Palestine. There were leftist leaders too, like George Habache, for instance, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. There was Nayef Hawathme also, who is the leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Arafat and his aides - although they knew beforehand that the international community was not going to liberate Palestine - gave that false image that they were really working for Palestine with the help of the international community. The Palestinian leaders and the Arab leaders in general, used to show to the international community that they care about their people. In fact they are the true allies of Israel.
Silvia Cattori: If the PLO representatives are, like you say, detrimental to the interests of the Palestinians, why doesn't the Hamas government remove them?
Sattar Kassem: From the time Hamas won the elections, Fatah leaders, with the support of their representatives outside, started working very hard against the new government. They have been co-operating with the United States, with Arab countries and with Israel to topple the Hamas government. Of course, that is part of Arafat's heritage. They have been working very hard to rob Hamas of its authority and topple the government. That is why they have been concentrating on the PLO since Hamas won the elections. The PLO was so disregarded by Arafat and his aides - they did not care about the PLO. They did not even care about the Palestinian National Charter. When they signed the Oslo Accords, despite the fact this agreement was contradictory to the Palestinian National Charter, none of them cared. Now they care, because they want to strip Hamas of its authority. So, that is part of a conspiracy. It is an international conspiracy.
Silvia Cattori: Do you mean that the PLO representatives are part of a conspiracy against Hamas?
Sattar Kassem: Yes.
Silvia Cattori: Do you consider Mrs. Leila Shahid, the PLO representative in France for more than twenty years, and who was appointed recently by Mr Abou Mazen to the European Union, as part of what you call a "conspiracy"?
Sattar Kassem: All of them are cooperating with the Europeans States, the United States and the Israelis against our real national interests. I personally believe that Leila Shahid is part of Arafat's court. For me, as a Palestinian, Leila Shahid is not a reliable person. I do not trust her. If I was in the Authority, I would remove her, because what she has been talking outside of Palestine all about for so many years is a kind of surrender. This will not bring any just peace to the Palestinians. We want peace, but the peace we believe in is the peace that will bring the Palestinian refugees back to Palestine. Other than that, on the contrary of what she says, we have not to talk about. So, all the Palestinians who are part of the Oslo Accords, for us, are not accepted. They are part of Arafat's policies, part of the corruption, and part of the collaboration with the Israelis. Now, if some people say that they won us some friends, we too can win friends. We can explain our situation; everybody can explain the difficulties and the miseries the Palestinians have been facing over the years. And, as for the leftists and for the rightists, we can also talk to them and try to convince them of our real aspirations. So, to gain supporters in Europe is not enough. What Leila Shahid, and all the others who follow her participated in is the liquidation the Palestinian cause. And that is why today most of the Palestinian people support Hamas.
Silvia Cattori: Did you vote for Hamas?
Sattar Kassem: Yes. I voted for Hamas. Why? Because we want to regain the Palestinian cause, because we should keep our just cause alive. And the Palestinian cause is not the establishment of a so called "Palestinian authority"; that is not what we care about. We care about the return of five million of refugees who have been suffering for around sixty years and living under very difficult and dire conditions in refugee camps. That is what we care about. And besides, Arafat and Fatah and all of these PLO people who pretend to represent us have also been conspiring against other Arab countries, such as Syria and Lebanon. They have been contributing to the Israeli and United State propaganda. They have also been standing against Iran, although Iran has been extending so much help to the Palestinians. Again, if we talk about financial aid that these people insist we should get from Europe that is an adventure. How can I depend, and my live, on the Europeans? At any time if they feel displeased with me, they will say, "OK, I am turning off the tap." That is what happened. Although the European states insist on democracy, it appears that they do not defend democracy, they do not want democracy, and they want a democracy that is tailored to their own interests. So, if we want to live, we have to depend on ourselves. And under occupation, it is the responsibility of Israel to provide enough food and to provide salaries for the people under occupation. That is international law. Besides, if I need some help and some financial assistance, I should get it from friends, not from those who are supporting Israel.
Silvia Cattori: Who are these friends?
Sattar Kassem: At least I can get it from Malaysia for instance; I can get it from Iran. I was a presidential candidate in 2005 and I told the people: if I am elected, I am not going to take a penny from those who are not our friends, because at any time they may threaten us. I want my live secure.
Silvia Cattori: Are the people who succeeded Mr. Arafat better?
Sattar Kassem: Abou Mazen is a very weak person and he doesn't have a vision. All Palestinians know him. I have known Abou Mazen personally for more than thirty years and I know that he has been against resistance all the time. So, Arafat was just putting him there until the time comes.
Silvia Cattori: In your opinion is he an honest man?
Sattar Kassem: I think he is better than Arafat in that sense, but he is very weak. He is like a tool. Fatah people supported him to keep him in power, especially as they knew he was weak.
Silvia Cattori: Was he not the man that Israel and United States promoted, as from 2003?
Sattar Kassem: He was Israel's choice, but all the influential people in Fatah are the men of Israel and the United States. So, these three parties made that choice, but the person chosen is very weak and incapable.
Silvia Cattori: Are the authorities of the Hamas government more capable?
Sattar Kassem: The government of Hamas has nothing to do with the former Fatah governments. It hasn't taken the chance yet. Since Hamas won the legislative elections, all sort of troubles started to obstruct that government from carrying out its duties. Hamas hasn't taken the chance so we can't judge, we must wait. Generally speaking, Hamas didn't take the offensive. They are scared. What I mean by taking the offensive is not, of course, to carry guns and kill everybody.
Silvia Cattori: Are you thinking of the offensive against corruption? Did you expect that the Hamas government would open the files as soon as it took office and arrest the corrupt politicians?
Sattar Kassem: Yes. The new authorities should, at least, open the files of corruption. But they didn't do so. They didn't even talk about it. They are scared. The new government was even supposed to collect the thousands of cars that Arafat distributed to his own people, sell them and use that money to pay salaries to the employees who have been without income for months.
Silvia Cattori: So why didn't the Hamas government collect these cars? Do they fear causing a civil war?
Sattar Kassem: As I told you, they are scared. When they are asked to correct the situation they will tell you that confrontation will lead to civil war. This is not an excuse, since, if they open the files of corruption, they would be able to make all Fatah people leave the country.
Silvia Cattori: How could the Hamas government take the risk of a confrontation, since the real power, like the Security Service, is still under Mr Abou Mazen's orders?
Sattar Kassem: I think that our authorities have good intentions, but they can do nothing, because whatever they say or do, they will be considered internationally as "terrorists". However, if they had opened the corruption files, then most of corrupt Fatah leaders would have left the country. That isn't "terrorism"; that has to do with an internal problem.
Silvia Cattori: Are you in contact with members of the Hamas government?
Sattar Kassem: I see them, I meet them, and I phone them in Gaza and here in the West Bank.
Silvia Cattori: The Israeli officials used to portray them as mad people? How are they in fact?
Sattar Kassem: They are nice people. They are honest and they would like to serve the Palestinians. Unfortunately they are facing many obstacles and they are accused of being "terrorists", that is the problem.
Silvia Cattori: Do you think that the European Union supports the United States' boycott against the Hamas government with the intention of helping the Israelis to win and to constrain the Palestinians to give up their rights? Further, has France been pushing in 2004 for the 1559 resolution in order to suppress the only force of resistance able to constrain Israel to draw back?
Sattar Kassem: Yes. Look at the Europeans: they want Hamas disarmed; they want Jihad Islamic disarmed, they want Hezbollah disarmed, they want Syria and Iran disarmed. So, who is going to defend the Arabs? Why should Israel not be disarmed? This is completely unfair and that is completely unreasonable. It is unacceptable. I want to defend myself. Who could be so mad as to accept to be crushed without fighting back? How on earth can they ask Hezbollah to be disarmed, while Israel is armed to the teeth? The Europeans States are actually adopting the Israeli point of view; they are not adopting a fair and balanced point of view - they are completely biased. If they want us disarmed, they should ask Israel to disarm as well. Then there will be a kind of justice.
Silvia Cattori: The Swiss diplomacy the promotion of the "Geneva Accord", relying on Mr. Abbed Rabbo; an "accord" that the majority of the Palestinian factions have strongly refused.(2) Is this denial of your aspirations not upsetting the Palestinians?
Sattar Kassem: I think this Swiss initiative does not represent the Palestinians, but rather the parties who have compromised with Israel and the United States. The western powers believe that there is a kind of democracy that is tailored to their own interests and to the interests of the neo-liberal capitalism. If it deviates, then it is not democracy. That is unreasonable. You know, they think that they are dealing with an immature and adolescent people. No, we are mature, we have our own thinkers, we have our own intellectuals, we can analyse things and we can read them in the right way. These Palestinians, who are cooperating with Israel, with the Europeans countries and the Americans to halt Hamas, are actually committing treason. How could these people, like Rabbo, incite against Hamas saying that, "If you do not support the Geneva Accord, if you don't support those who promoted it, the Hamas extremists will ascend to power"?
Silvia Cattori: But now, the Hamas government is in power. Again, why didn't Hamas condemn the attitude of all those people who go on participating in masquerades, in contempt of democracy?
Sattar Kassem: Hamas does not have the power. Until now Hamas has not had the power. The security services are all under the leadership of Abu Mazen, and from the time of the elections, Fatah has been making so many problems for Hamas, that they did not leave them any time to plan, or to think about what to do. Fatah has been busying Hamas in daily problems. Besides, Abu Mazen has monopolized all the security services; so upon whom can they depend? Fatah has created a real problem, not only for Hamas, but for the people. For example, you can go now into town and you will see armed people. Who are they? They are Fatah people. They are armed and they harm the people, they steal from private properties, they can threaten, they blackmail the people, and sometimes they kill. I was shot by these people in 1995.
Silvia Cattori: Are they still doing the same?
Sattar Kassem: Yes, they are still doing the same. They were brought up by Yasser Arafat and financed by Yasser Arafat, so many of them now belong to the security service. The security service is supposed to preserve and to observe the security of the people. Instead they are threatening the people's security.
Silvia Cattori: That means that, as yesterday, under Mr. Arafat's power, people are scared because Fatah people are still powerful?
Sattar Kassem: Yes. We are scared of the Israelis and of Fatah people. Both are making threats to our security.
Silvia Cattori: So, you have two camps: the camp of Fatah, which is struggling to not lose its power and the camp of Hamas, who would like to defend the interests of the people, but which is impotent?
Sattar Kassem: That is true. And the camp of those who are against our own people is strong, because they are supported by Israel, by the United States, and by the European countries. Mr. Bush said openly, "We are supporting Abu Mazen financially and militarily." They are supplying him with guns. Guns to use against whom? Against Israelis? No, against Hamas, of course!
Silvia Cattori: Does this mean that, when Mr. Abu Mazen and the PLO representatives call the new Hamas government to respect the results of the agreements negotiated with Israel, it is just because they want to preserve the privileges they got?
Sattar Kassem: Yes. They want Hamas to adopt the Oslo Accords so that they will preserve their personal interests and privileges. The Europeans and the Israelis needed supporters for the Oslo Accords. This is why they encouraged the corruption that Arafat established in the West Bank and Gaza. For the United States, Israel and European countries, corruption was an instrument to get supporters. So, much of the European money was wasted for the corrupt people. Palestinians do not believe that the negotiation has been productive for them; on the contrary. So they don't want it anymore.
Silvia Cattori: Do you think the European Union will change its strategy and recognise the legitimacy of the Hamas authorities?
Sattar Kassem: No. The European countries will never recognize Hamas, never. The European states are a tool in the hands of the Israelis and the Americans. There are not independent. They are not united. If Hezbollah wins the war, the movement within the Arab countries will accelerate.
Silvia Cattori: What are the differences between Hamas and Hezbollah?
Sattar Kassem: Hamas does not have a strong organisation, weapons or training. Hamas is under occupation. Palestinians suffer, but regardless, they will continue their fight. They will never surrender.
As for the Hezbollah, Israel will not be able to disarm or cripple them. Hezbollah will remain strong. What is now important about Lebanon is that the people should know what terrible things Israel is doing against this country, as well as against Palestine. In fact, Israel is not destroying Hezbollah. Israel is harming the entire Lebanese civil population. The attack on Lebanon was huge, but Israel hit the civilians and hasn't been hitting Hezbollah. Thousands of civilians have been killed and injured. Tens of thousands of houses have been destroyed, as well as bridges, factories and electrical generators. So the people need to learn about the mentality of the Israelis and their destructive behaviour. That is why I think we have to make the Palestinian cause an Arab and an Islamic one. Hezbollah has an excellent organization, a good administration, a good conflict management. Israel has tried several times to launch attacks against Hezbollah. This is not the first attack, but Hezbollah always turns out to be the winner. The problem for us is that recognition by the Europeans and the Americans of our right to resist is something impossible, because we aren't powerful. Unless we are strong enough, we can't convince anyone.
Silvia Cattori: You arrive at the same conclusion as the Lebanese political analyst, Youssef Aschkar,(3) who thinks that the so-called "war against terrorism" is a war against societies and against communities, a war cynically designed to destroy entire countries and peoples. He also concludes that the latter are no longer protected by their authorities.
Sattar Kassem: Yes, that is alas true. This is not, as Bush and Blair say, a war against "terrorism". This is a war against all of us.
(1) This refers to the «Appeal of the 20 » drafted by the members of the Legislative Counsel, among whom was Hussam Khader. Israel abducted him in 2003 and since, he remains imprisoned. This appeal denounced Mr. Arafat's compromises with the occupying Israelis, corruption, and the difficulties generated by the Oslo-Accord.
(2) The Geneva-Accord, signed in Geneva in December 2003, is the result of two years of negotiations. This agreement is consider unjust and unfavourable to the Palestinians. The Israeli, Yossi Beilin, and the Palestinian, Abed Rabbo, were the chief negotiators, along with the pro-Israeli, Alexis Keller, mandated by Switzerland to pilot this initiative.
(3) http://www.voltairenet.org/article136760.html
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Editorial: War Stories
By Elias Khoury
09/10/06 "Al-Ahram"
Hundreds of men and women walk over the rubble, carrying the coffins of 19 martyrs. Black clothes, tears and ululations. I stood to the side of the road observing the scene. I'm saying, 'to the side of the road', when it wasn't a road. I'm saying 'the scene' when it wasn't a scene. How to narrate feelings that have no name? When I went into the village of Aita Ashaab I couldn't believe my eyes. There was the name but no village. Nothing but a great ruin blocking the horizon. All the houses demolished, walls leaning on emptiness, emptiness leaning on dust.
I went to the village last week as if returning among the returnees. I wasn't carrying a house key. But I carried my heart and went along, only to be shocked at the demolished village filling up with returnees embracing the void. Everything but the sun was clothed in black. The sun was grey and stinging. I was walking in the rubble when a young man stood next to me and started narrating stories of heroism and death. But I didn't need stories that I already knew. I'm saying 'already knew' when I didn't know them. But I felt that the scene was coming at me from within an aged memory. Not my memory, rather a mixture of things some of which I lived in the past. But why am I seeing the ghost of 1948? Why am I seeing Barwa and Ghabsiya and Ein Zaitoun?
There they went into the villages, evicted their inhabitants, lined the houses with dynamite and blew them up. Here they didn't go in. Well, they had barely reached the village square when death showered them; they retreated, went on retreating till they reached the Blue Line, leaving behind the remains of a Merkava tank, part of a jeep, abandoned containers. But they had destroyed the village before going in. And, as in the year of the Nakba, they ordered the residents to leave with the help of amplifiers. I saw the memory of the year of the Nakba, and I saw the peasants carrying the keys to houses without doors or walls. This time the peasants returned in black, carrying the keys. And I saw those years when we shed our young in the villages of the south, watering the olives of Lebanese Galilee with the blood of the young of Palestinian Galilee.
That was in 1968. We were in our twenties. Kafar Shouba, Kafar Hamam and Habbariya were the start of the journey that taught us the way to Bent Jbeil, Aita Ashaab and Aytaroun. I saw as if I was remembering. But memory deceives, and so does the eye.
I stood before the ruins, and the tears flowed. No, it was before that scene that I stood, when the people carried the coffins walking over the rubble with the dust of death blanketing them. I couldn't feel the tears collecting at the edges of my eyes, burning them, before they fell on my cheeks. The dust covered us under the burning sun, the sweat trickling out of our pores and spreading over our bodies. I didn't realise I was crying when I did. I had never experienced weeping that came out of the whole body, mixing tears and sweat.
No, it was neither sadness nor memory. It was rather that storming feeling of belonging to this land, of those people, the dead and the living, being family.
How to tell a martyr who does not know me that we have become family, and that it should be disallowed to have to part the day we met? How to tell demolished houses that they have become un-visited homes, that the tobacco shoots hanging in gorged rooms are the sweat of my brow, that they are the undone work that has become my name and address? How to speak without that water that has given me a thirst for love? How to carve in my heart words that emerge from the depths of pain, which speak a language only the victim knows?
I listened to the stories of heroism, walked along the demolished alleyways with a group of young men, before we reached the outskirts of the village, where the marks of the Merkava's chains stood side by side with the demolition truck that razed the houses. I listened to the details of the battle, in which a battalion of the invincible army was forced to retreat.
They came upon them from underground, from the dumps, from where they could not expect them, turning Khillat Warda, where the two Israeli soldiers were taken prisoner, into a field of the resistance and a confrontation arena.
I stood and there was the procession. Coffins carried on the shoulders. A woman throwing rice at the procession, men hitting their own cheeks, women mixing weeping with ululation. And I saw the ruins as if I were in an infinity of dust without beginning or end. As if that same procession would cut through all the destroyed villages and towns. Everywhere is destroyed, without ceilings -- except for the coffins covered with black cloth and the flags of the resistance. Nowhere but the coffin, no story but death, no water but tears.
I saw as if I was, rather, remembering, and listened to the story of a succession of generations. Abu Shawqi, an octogenarian from Hawla, said he walked off, fleeing the Hawla massacre in 1948, and has not stopped walking for 58 years. 'But this time we did not flee,' the white-haired man said, sitting on the mastaba of his house in the southern village. 'This time we learned that we do not flee, we force them to flee.'
At the entrance to Bent Jbeil, which witnessed the most violent battles of endurance, I stood before a pond with geese swimming in it. Everything in the town is demolished, but the geese swim on, caring for neither dust nor the smell of corpses being dragged out from under the rubble.
A horizon of water, and stories of heroism and death.
Peasants carrying coffins on their shoulders. Coffins turned into ships, tears turned into water, stories of resisting the Israeli monster, and a south that stretches from the Blue Line to the blue of the sky.
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Editorial: 9-11; the "unifying myth" for the war on terror
By Mike Whitney
09/11/06 "Information Clearing House"
To a large extent, the war on terror is a shabby promotional scheme designed to mobilize the nation for a permanent state of war while curtailing civil liberties. There's nothing original in this analysis, but it does explain the importance of media as a vehicle for Bush's public relations campaign. It also explains why high-ranking officials in the administration are still provided unlimited air-time to reiterate the same bland bromides over and over again without being challenged.
To commemorate the 5th year anniversary of 9-11, the political talk-shows have again given Cheney, Rice and Bush an open forum to make their claim that "America is safer" and that "we are winning the war on terror". Cheney even went so far as to say, "We've done a helluva job here at home on homeland security....I don't know how you can explain 5 years of no attacks, 5 years of successful disruption of attacks, 5 years of defeating the efforts of Al Qaida to come back and kill more Americans."
In Cheney's mind, the government is performing its task satisfactorily if he can say, "What are you complaining about, you're still alive aren't you?"
This is a fair indication of how far the "bar has been lowered" for government accountability since Bush took office.
Condoleezza Rice's performance on CNN was grimmer than Cheney's. Rice repeated the absurd claim that the US might yet uncover evidence of links between Saddam and Al Qaida. She said, "There were ties between Iraq and Al Qaida."
The fact that government officials lie is hardly shocking or newsworthy. What is surprising, however, is the complicity of the media in propagating those deceptions without argument. As Robert Fisk noted some time ago, the news should actually be called, "High-ranking government official said;" since the news exclusively reflects the war-mongering, business-friendly perspective of government.
This phenomenon has gotten steadily worse since the attacks of 9-11. In fact, the war on terror is the greatest public relations campaign of all time, involving all the major media which continue to promote the same, tired themes ad nauseum. There is virtually no refuge in the corporate media for the nearly 40% of the public who don't accept the official version of 9-11, or for the 63% of American who "no longer believe the Iraq war was worth it", or for the vast number of people who "don't believe we are safer". Their views are simply dismissed as irrelevant since they do not advance the objectives of ownership and the state.
This "open-conspiracy" of controlled media seems much more interesting to me than the many anomalies surrounding the attacks of 9-11. At the very least, there is a concerted effort by corporate big-wigs and western elites to manage public perceptions through an increasingly sophisticated disinformation campaign. (Rumsfeld appears to be way out front of his colleagues in this regard by targeting the internet, chat rooms, blogs, liberal journalists, and Arab media)
The central part of the present campaign is now, and will continue to be, the war on terror, that threadbare PR scam which justifies America's global resource war. 9-11 is the unifying myth that animates the war on terror and without that point of reference the whole project would quickly unravel.
Today's anniversary of 9-11 promises to be another futile attempt to reengage the public and try to shore-up support. Bush can be expected to invoke the same stale imagery of dusty fireman and smoldering buildings while the bag-pipes wail in the distance. The nation will again be dumped into a bottomless pool of grief in the vain hope that their feelings will reinvigorate the war effort.
It won't work.
The American people are tired of Iraq, tired of Bush, and tired of the war on terror. It will take more than Bush's feigned patriotism or David Horowitz's revisionist-rehash in "The Path to 9-11" to energize the war on terror. Even the best propaganda campaign has its limits.
The only way to get the public back "on board" is with a "massive casualty-producing event" in the United States. And, don't think they haven't thought about that in Washington.
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Editorial: When assumption trumps objectivity
By Habib Battah
Sunday 03 September 2006, 12:23 Makka Time, 9:23 GMT
After four weeks of devastating Israeli air raids across Lebanon, American news network NBC began its Nightly News bulletin with its anchorman, Brian Williams, asking: "Does the US really have any influence in this war?"
Hours earlier on sister network MSNBC, anchorwoman Chris Jansing seemed to be at a similar loss. "Can anything be done to stop the violence?" she asked.
But to an American audience, the thought of a Syrian or Iranian news anchor posing the same questions would be fit for a comedy skit.
After all, the Syrians and Iranians wield an obvious "influence" over the course of the conflict according to the NBC channels, which like CNN, Sky and many other Western new organisations reported relentlessly on claims that Hezbollah's rocket imports were made possible through the help of its two "rogue" allies.
But where was the parallel analysis of multi-billion dollar weapons shipments bound for Israel from the United States? Most Western broadcasters reported religiously on the number of rockets fired at Israel each day of the month-long conflict, often comparing fresh figures with those of previous days and weeks, even peppering the audit with analysis and commentary.
Absent however was almost any accounting of the daily tonnage of US-manufactured munitions dropped from an unknown fleet of US-manufactured jets levelling an untold number of Lebanese homes and villages.
Sanitised
On American television screens, the US role in this conflict was a relatively sanitised one, pictured as diplomatic rather than military; seen across negotiating tables and in visits to foreign capitals - a far less sinister role than that repeatedly attributed to the Iranians and Syrians over allegations of their financial and logistical support.
In fact, so penetrating was the alleged connection that some channels, such as Bloomberg Television, began referring to Hezbollah on second reference as merely "the Syrian- and Iranian-backed group". But why did Bloomberg not choose to identify Israel, the largest official recipient of US foreign military assistance for decades, as "the US-backed state"?
Whether the decision was deliberate or unconscious, the prevailing notion of non-military US involvement is just one of many underlying assumptions communicated by the US media about the conflict between Israel and Lebanon, assumptions that were continually reinforced in comments made by anchors and by hired analysts.
Viewed as part of an overall package, the assumptions appear to reflect US foreign policy, particularly the relationship with Israel, much more than the pursuit of journalistic objectivity.
Of course it would be unfair to generalise by suggesting that the Western media did a poor job of covering this war. On the ground in the midst of air strikes, ground fire and naval attacks, American and European journalists, particularly those reporting from south Lebanon, genuinely risked their lives to tell the story.
Contradictory
The efforts of many Western reporters operating out of towns such as Tyre at a time when the Israeli military vowed to fire on any vehicle that moved were no less valiant than those displayed by their colleagues from the Arab media. However, a clear difference emerged between battlefield reporting and the animated conversations that went on thousands of miles away in air-conditioned studios. At some points it even appeared as if the two were completely contradictory.
Beginning with the war in Iraq, American media outlets developed an obsession with hosting former military personnel as analysts, so much so that it now appears as if large American networks have become a sort of retirement programme for the US military's top brass. An inherent problem with this formula is a tendency to reflect the views and strategic interests of the US government rather than offer critical analyses that shed light on the complex realities of the battlefield.
Take coverage of the Israeli commando raid on Baalbeck during the third week of the conflict on August 2. The Israeli military had reported that it kidnapped five Hezbollah members, but MSNBC's reporter on the scene quoted local villagers who said those apprehended were "just nobodies".
Hezbollah also claimed that ordinary civilians, not fighters, had been kidnapped. Meanwhile Israeli newspaper Haaertz quoted Lebanese sources as saying that more than a dozen civilians were killed in the attack.
Details may still have been sketchy on the ground in the Bekaa valley but in MSNBC's East Coast studio, the view from its military analyst, Rick Francona, was starkly clear. Francona, a former lieutenant-colonel in the US Air Force, swiftly praised the attack as an "excellent raid" and "well done" on Israel's part. He then began to postulate confidently about the motives behind the operation, saying "Israel obviously had intelligence of high-profile targets" and naming Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, as a possibility.
Optimism
But even Israel's chief of staff, Dan Halutz, appeared to be playing down the operation, with an article in Haaretz quoting him as saying "the soldiers had not aimed to take any individuals in particular, but rather to demonstrate that the IDF [Israeli military] could reach any part of Lebanon".
Not only does Francona manage to analyse the situation solely from Israel's point of view, but his optimism even appears to exceed that of the Israelis themselves.
Weeks later, on August 23, the Lebanese press would post pictures of the Baalbeck captives returning home, indicating that all five men had been returned to Lebanon through the International Committee of the Red Cross, which served as a liaison with the Israeli military.
The chief suspect had been Hassan Nasrallah; not the leader of Hezbollah but an elderly village farmer that shared the same first and last name. "They wanted to use us for propaganda about the arrest of Hassan Nasrallah," the former detainee told Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper in a reference to the Hezbollah leader.
Among the other returned captives were relatives and friends of Nasrallah, the farmer that is.
Looking back at the initial coverage, one would wonder why MSNBC and countless others chose to report the claims of the Israeli military machine over those of witnesses on the scene.
Malicious
The Baalbeck incident was by no means isolated. Time and again, the TV generals seemed so confident in Israel's stance that any talk of malicious activity was dismissed regardless of pending investigations.
Another case in point was Israel's attack on a UN post, killing four observer troops, on July 26. Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, quickly condemned the strike as "apparently deliberate", noting "a co-ordinated artillery and aerial attack on a long-established and clearly marked UN post".
The Irish foreign ministry said one of its officers at the post had made at least six warning calls to the Israelis during their bombardment. Reports also emerged of email correspondence from a Canadian soldier giving warning that the Israelis had been striking near the UN position for "weeks upon weeks", according to the soldier's wife who was quoted by Canadian TV as calling the Israeli attack "intentional".
Meanwhile UN officials quoted by Reuters said "the firing continued even as rescue operations were under way", while Annan called for a "full investigation" into the "disturbing incident".
But these multiple claims seemed to be of little consequence to the CNN military analysts back home. A retired US Air Force general employed by the station dismissed the controversy outright, saying the Israeli strike was simply "a screw-up, a major screw-up".
Assumptions over Israel's intentions were not limited to analysts but also to senior journalists, such as Tim Marshall, Sky's foreign editor, who confidently labelled the attack as "inadvertent" and "an accident waiting to happen" on the same evening as it had occurred. It was almost as if Marshall were pre-empting the Israeli government's apology and denial of wrongdoing, which would not come until the next day.
'No evidence'
Instead of adopting a cautious approach to a developing story - as any good journalist would - the authoritative voices from CNN and Sky seemed merely to reflect the views of Israel and its allies. Listening to a press statement from the US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, it almost seemed as though the press outlets had become a conduit for official statements. "We take them at their word," Bolton said of the Israeli reaction. "There is no evidence to the contrary."
Less than a week after the killing of the UN observers, the headlines shifted to another attack by Israel, this time in Qana where at least 28 civilians, including 16 children, were killed as a result of air attacks. Qana also happens to be the site of an attack by Israel in 1996 that killed more than 100 people - Israel denied responsibility at the time but subsequent UN investigations were inconclusive.
Israeli officials also denied responsibility for the more recent bloodbath, accusing Hezbollah of somehow staging the attack by firing from the area, using the civilians as human shields. Israel's UN ambassador, during a speech at the Security Council, even went so far as to entertain the possibility that Hezbollah "wanted and wished" for the mass killing.
American news outlets began to pick up the claim, despite the absence of ground reporting or any other kind of supporting evidence. As bodies were being carried out of the rubble, a CNN anchorwoman in Atlanta turned to an Arab media analyst and asked if Arab TV channels acknowledged Hezbollah's use of civilians as human shields. The analyst did not refute the claim but merely indicated that Hezbollah criticism was a taboo subject for regional news networks.
Human shields
Later CNN military analysts would describe Hezbollah as a "terrorist organization" that breached Geneva Conventions by using human shields. Despite the lack of physical evidence in either direction, it seemed just as easy for the in-studio analysts to assume Israel's innocence as it was for them to assume guilt on the part of Hezbollah, even when the Israeli military did the actual shooting.
Israel's third "accident" came on August 11 when six innocents were killed as its missiles struck a civilian convoy fleeing the bombardment in South Lebanon.
Three days later, when the smoke began to clear and a shaky ceasefire took hold, the Lebanese death toll had reached 1,100, the vast majority being civilians. On the Israeli side, the majority of deaths were military, 117 soldiers and 40 civilians, according to Reuters. (Hezbollah casualties were quoted as a separate figure with the group claiming no more than 80 and Israel claiming more than 500.)
The vast disparity between Lebanese civilian deaths and those of Israeli civilians remained formulaic throughout the war, but the TV generals seemed to tell a different story, constantly using the adjective "indiscriminate" to describe Hezbollah's rocket attacks and "very accurate" in describing Israel's tactics and weaponry.
In fact, on several occasions, Israeli officials interviewed by American broadcasters touted Israel's policy of restraint and gave warning of the country's ability to pursue a "scorched earth policy" in Lebanon.
Interviewers often accepted such a response either by ending the interview at that point or moving on to different questions. One can hardly imagine an American interviewer remaining silent if an Arab official spoke of flattening the Jewish state in such genocidal terms.
Unrealistic
Few phrases were repeated more often during this war than that of "Israel's war against Hezbollah" and "Israeli strikes on Hezbollah targets" mainly in South Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut.
The examples of this usage on NBC, CNN, Sky and many, many other channels were simply ubiquitous throughout the month of war coverage - the two phrases used many times a day as an introduction to the whole package of reporting, all framed as a war solely on Hezbollah. However, on the ground, there could not have been a more unrealistic assessment of reality.
According to a report released by Oxfam on August 14, the destruction across Lebanon included "7,000 homes, 160 factories, markets, farms and other commercial buildings, 29 water and sewage-treatment plants, electrical plants, dams, ports and airports, 23 petrol stations, 145 bridges and overpasses; 600 kilometres of roads".
The figures do not include damage to television towers, which were attacked in at least four different places across the country, disrupting signals and causing millions of dollars in damage to the Lebanese broadcasting industry.
Where were the TV generals to explain the threat of media coverage to Israel's war on Hezbollah? Lebanon's entire transnational road system was incapacitated by Israeli missiles, but when anchors rationalised this by speaking of "Hezbollah supply lines", where were the military men to explain that weapons could easily be smuggled through back roads and mountain passages?
Was it clear that Hezbollah did not have its own discreet transportations routes to begin with?
And when the Lebanese international airport was struck repeatedly, where were the generals to explain that rockets had traditionally been carried into Lebanese territory on flat beds and not commercial airliners?
The battlefield analysts seemed so transfixed on analysing Israel's invasion tactics that they rarely looked at the conflict from the opposite end of the map. So much airtime was devoted to Israeli commanders and military spokesman claiming victory, but Hezbollah representatives seemed to have been boycotted by the American press much as they had been boycotted by the American government.
Basic
In reality, Hezbollah was claiming victories of its own, but at times it seemed as if the American media were too busy reflecting their government's viewpoint to have noticed.
The TV generals dutifully relayed Israel's daily claims of destroying rocket launchers and medium-range missiles by shading overhead maps with digital pens. But rarely did they discuss Hezbollah's attacks on scores of Israeli Merkava tanks in what was seen as valiant effort at resisting one of the world's most powerful military machines.
If the shading of military maps proved too complicated for the American public to comprehend, broadcasters and commentators often broke down their assumptions in more basic terms. When Israel, for example, decided to launch a land invasion to claim all Lebanese territory south of the Litani river, CNN's Wolf Blitzer simply referred to the attack as "what some are calling a new Normandy," and "Israel's D-Day"; a reference to the Allied powers' invasion of Nazi territory in World War II.
When Blitzer began to discuss that day's events on the battlefield, he, like dozens of other American broadcasters, spoke of Hezbollah rockets landing in "Israeli neighbourhoods". Israel on the other hand, retaliated by bombing "Hezbollah strongholds".
But in reality, these strongholds were also neighbourhoods and support among their residents for Hezbollah could not have been any less than Israeli citizens' support for their own military. If Hezbollah areas cannot be considered neighbourhoods, then why not refer to Israeli neighbourhoods as "Israeli military strongholds"?
After all, a recent report in the Guardian newspaper in Britain by Jonathan Cook alleged that Israel also built military installations and mortar batteries near residential areas. In any case, the lack of balance is problematic: it conveys humanity on the one side and vague militarism on the other.
Omitted
As another example, Blitzer conducted one of two CNN interviews with the grieving wife of an Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hezbollah. But where were the parallel interviews with the families of Lebanese held by the Israelis? How could audiences really identify with the other side if all of its emotive, humanising details were repeatedly omitted?
In a show that aired on MSNBC during the first week of the conflict, Chris Matthews illustrated daily life in Haifa by comparing it with a city in California; "very modern", he explained. Cosmopolitan Beirut, on the other hand, where the nightlife rivals any capital in Western Europe, did not get a mention in the entire show.
Detail from Israel also entered the religious realm during a separate broadcast with Rita Cosby, an anchorwoman who qualified a report of rocket attacks on the city of Nazareth as an attack on the "home town of Jesus".
But where was the mention of Jesus's wine-making miracle in the Lebanese town of Qana during the mass killings that took place there? And what of the many other biblical references across Lebanon, in Tyre and Sidon when the two cities were subjected to continuous Israeli shelling?
In the end, some broadcasters ditched the metaphors altogether. Tucker Carlson, an MSNBC talk-show host, actually criticised Israel's tactics in fighting Hezbollah while interviewing an Israeli spokesperson. But he made no qualms with objectivity during his concluding statement. "I hope you succeed," he told the Israeli official. "And I hope you do it quickly."
Can one imagine an American broadcaster ever conveying such enthusiastic support to a Hezbollah official?
Habib Battah is a Lebanese writer
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9/11 - Whodunnit? The Answer Is Clear
Poll: 45% of Americans blame Bush for 9/11
September 11, 2006
CNN
WASHINGTON - The percentage of Americans who blame the Bush administration for the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington has risen from almost a third to almost half over the past four years, a CNN poll released Monday found.
Asked whether they blame the Bush administration for the attacks, 45 percent said either a "great deal" or a "moderate amount," up from 32 percent in a June 2002 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.
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Bush unbowed in 9/11 address
Last Updated Mon, 11 Sep 2006 22:44:27 EDT
CBC News
The war on terror is no less than the "struggle for civilization," U.S. President George W. Bush said Monday night on the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Bush made his nationally televised address from the Oval Office, after a day spent honouring the nearly 3,000 dead at all three sites of the attacks - New York City, Shanksville, Pa., and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.
"America did not ask for this war, and every American wishes it were over, and so do I," Bush said. "But the war is not over - and it will not be over until either we or the extremists emerge victorious."
Bush said that most of those behind the 9/11 attacks have been killed or captured, and promised that the search for Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda members would continue.
"Our message to them is clear: No matter how long it takes, America will find you, and we will bring you to justice," he said.
Bush characterized the Middle East as the key to the world's peace, highlighting a vision where its citizens would be free from the "deserts of despotism."
"If we do not defeat these enemies now, we will leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons," Bush said.
No attacks since 9/11
While mentioning the fact there have been no further terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, the president pointed to bombings around the world and charges brought in apparent foiled plots as as evidence that extremism remained a threat.
Bush praised the efforts of law enforcement and the intelligence community, and promised to continue to supply them with "every response and legal authority to do their jobs."
Last week, Bush publicly acknowledged for the first time that suspects accused of terrorism have been detained abroad in secret CIA prisons, indicating that all of them were now at at the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the military tribunals ordered by the Bush administration at Guantanamo were illegal.
Global threat
After addressing the global threat, Bush attempted to make the case for the war in Iraq, though he admitted that Saddam Hussein's regime was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
Three days ago, the U.S. Senate intelligence committee concluded that there was no evidence of a link between the former Iraqi president and al-Qaeda, based on an analysis of CIA intelligence.
While Bush said the world was safer without Hussein in power, he did not go into the type of specific reasoning that Vice President Dick Cheney did while appearing on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday.
Cheney asserted that Hussein would have prospered from the global spike in oil prices, would have ignored United Nations sanctions and would have resumed his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
Bush said the notion that a pullout in Iraq would lead to an end to terrorist attacks was mistaken, adding he "cherishes the memory" of the nearly 3,000 Americans who have been killed in the Iraqi war.
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Bush confesses to war crimes
Nicolas J S Davies
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Sep 11, 2006
George W. Bush's speech on September 6 amounted to a public confession to criminal violations of the 1996 War Crimes Act. He implicitly admitted authorizing disappearances, extrajudicial imprisonment, torture, transporting prisoners between countries and denying the International Committee of the Red Cross access to prisoners.
These are all serious violations of the Geneva Conventions. The War Crimes Act makes grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and all violations of Common Article 3 punishable by fines, imprisonment or, if death results to the victim, the death penalty.
At the same time, Bush asked Congress to amend the War Crimes Act in order to retroactively protect him and other U.S. officials from prosecution for these crimes, and from civil lawsuits arising from them. He justified this on the basis that "our military and intelligence personnel involved in capturing and questioning terrorists could now be at risk of prosecution under the War Crimes Act . . . ," and insisted that "passing this legislation ought to be the top priority" for Congress between now and the election in November.
His profession of concern for military and intelligence personnel was utterly misleading. Military personnel charged with war crimes have always been, and continue to be, prosecuted under the Universal Code of Military Justice rather than the War Crimes Act; and the likelihood of CIA interrogators being identified and prosecuted under the act is remote -- they are protected by the secrecy that surrounds all CIA operations.
The only real beneficiaries of such amendments to the War Crimes Act would be Bush himself and other civilian officials who have assisted him in these crimes -- Rumsfeld, Cheney, Gonzales, Rice, Cambone, Tenet, Goss, Negroponte and an unfortunately long list of their deputies and advisors.
Bush asked Congress to do three things in these amendments. "First, I am asking Congress to list the specific recognizable offenses that would be considered crimes under the War Crimes Act so our personnel can know clearly what is prohibited in the handling of terrorist enemies."
One prong of the U.S. government's attack on the Geneva Conventions has been the assertion that they do not provide a laundry list of what techniques of treatment and interrogation are permitted or prohibited. This is, of course, because the Geneva Conventions instead contain blanket prohibitions on torture, cruelty and humiliation. It has only been the efforts of U.S. officials to encroach on these prohibitions that may have raised doubt among U.S. personnel as to what is and is not permitted.
Captain Ian Fishback, the military interrogator who blew the whistle on Camp Nama (Nasty Assed Military Area) in Iraq, has contrasted his orders in Iraq with the rules he had been taught, "My feelings were that it clearly violated what I had learned as the appropriate way to treat detainees at West Point. . . . You don't force them to give you any information other than name, rank, and serial number. That's the gist of the Geneva Conventions." Captain Fishback's account of the war crimes he was involved in at Camp Nama is in the latest edition of Esquire magazine.
Bush continued, "Second, I'm asking that Congress make explicit that by following the standards of the Detainee Treatment Act, our personnel are fulfilling America's obligations under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions."
This is the crucial change that Bush wants in the law. The War Crimes Act currently criminalizes murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, torture, humiliating and degrading treatment, and arbitrary punishment of prisoners, based on the prohibitions in Common Article 3 of the Geneva conventions. Bush is asking Congress to replace the straightforward prohibitions in Common Article 3 with the provisions of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, which includes extraordinary protections for U.S. officials.
These protections are clearly designed to undermine the Geneva Conventions, the War Crimes Act and even the Nuremberg Principles. Section 1004(a) of the Detainee Treatment Act states that, in the case of "operational practices . . . that were officially authorized and determined to be lawful at the time they were conducted, it shall be a defense that such officer, employee, member of the Armed Forces or other agent did not know that the practices were unlawful and a person of ordinary good sense and understanding would not know the practices were unlawful."
This would shift the legal standard from the clear one defined by the Geneva Conventions and the War Crimes Act as it is presently written to one of who knew what when, requiring courts to conclude beyond reasonable doubt that the perpetrator knew his actions were unlawful. Even if opinions written by Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Jack Goldsmith and David Addington were found to have no legal basis at all, they could suffice to cast doubt on Bush and his colleagues' knowledge of their crimes, which would be crucial under the amended law.
"Third," Bush said, "I'm asking that Congress make it clear that captured terrorists cannot use the Geneva Conventions as a basis to sue our personnel in courts, in U.S. courts. The men and the women who protect us should not have to fear lawsuits filed by terrorists because they're doing their jobs."
This would protect U.S. officials from civil liability for human rights violations. Prisoners released from Guantanamo have already filed such lawsuits against the U.S. government, Bush, Rumsfeld and other officials, which might help to explain why these amendments are Bush's "top priority."
The central myth of the War on Terror is that the world faces an unprecedented threat from terrorism that renders obsolete the existing laws of war and international behavior.
Bush framed his justification of torture in a classic use of this mistaken logic: "And in this new war, the most important source of information on where the terrorists are hiding and what they are planning is the terrorists themselves. Captured terrorists have unique knowledge about how terrorist networks operate. They have knowledge of where their operatives are deployed and knowledge about what plots are under way. This is intelligence that cannot be found any other place. And our security depends on getting this kind of information. To win the war on terror, we must be able to detain, question and, when appropriate, prosecute terrorists captured here in America and on the battlefields around the world."
The context Bush did not provide is that this applies equally to all prisoners of war. Captured soldiers usually do possess information that would be valuable to their captors, and the Geneva Conventions do constrain the ability to extract this information from them, but this is by design. Based on bitter experience, the people and governments of the world have decided that torture is so abhorrent that it must be completely outlawed, even though this results in the loss of information that might save lives or even alert captors to an existential threat to their country.
The purpose of the Hague and Geneva Conventions is to provide all people with certain protections in times of war, to place some limits on the otherwise limitless human suffering that war inflicts. Arguably, governments have agreed to rules of war precisely so that they can continue to wage limited war without plunging their societies into the total chaos that would result from unrestricted use of increasingly destructive modern weapons against entire populations. The Geneva Conventions afford different status to different classes of people, giving rise to different protections for combatants, prisoners of war and civilians. However the notion that certain classes of people fall entirely beyond the protection of these Conventions is not a serious interpretation, unless one is talking of something other than human beings.
For five years, U.S. government officials have justified unlawful actions with political arguments that have no legal merit. Now that the political tide is turning, Bush and his associates are behaving like other war criminals throughout history, marshalling what power they have left to shield themselves from the legitimate consequences of their actions.
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Bush Aims to Kill War Crimes Act
By Jeremy Brecher & Brendan Smith
09/05/06 "The Nation"
The US War Crimes Act of 1996 makes it a felony to commit grave violations of the Geneva Conventions. The Washington Post recently reported that the Bush administration is quietly circulating draft legislation to eliminate crucial parts of the War Crimes Act. Observers on The Hill say the Administration plans to slip it through Congress this fall while there still is a guaranteed Republican majority--perhaps as part of the military appropriations bill, the proposals for Guantánamo tribunals or a new catch-all "anti-terrorism" package. Why are they doing it, and how can they be stopped?
American prohibitions on abuse of prisoners go back to the Lieber Code promulgated by Abraham Lincoln in 1863. The first international Geneva Convention dates from the following year.
After World War II, international law protecting prisoners of war and all noncombatants was codified in the Geneva Conventions. They were ratified by the US Senate and, under Article II of the Constitution, they thereby became the law of the land.
Wishing to rebuke the unpunished war crimes of dictators like Saddam Hussein, in 1996 a Republican-dominated Congress passed the War Crimes Act without a dissenting vote. It defined a "war crime" as any "grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions. It thereby advanced a global trend of mutual reinforcement between national and international law.
The War Crimes Act was little noticed until the disclosure of Alberto Gonzales's infamous 2002 "torture memo." Gonzales, then serving as presidential counsel, advised President Bush to declare that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to people the United States captured in Afghanistan. That, Gonzales wrote, "substantially reduced the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act."
Noting that the statute "prohibits the commission of a 'war crime' by or against a US person, including US officials," he warned that "it is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges." The President's determination that the Geneva Conventions did not apply "would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution."
Unfortunately for top Bush officials, that "solid defense" was demolished this summer when the Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ruled that the Geneva Conventions were indeed the law of the land.
The Court singled out Geneva's Common Article 3, which provides a minimum standard for the treatment of all noncombatants under all circumstances. They must be "treated humanely" and must not be subjected to "cruel treatment," "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment," or "the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."
As David Cole of the Georgetown University Law Center pointed out in the August 10 issue of The New York Review of Books, the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rusmfeld "suggests that President Bush has already committed a war crime, simply by establishing the [Guantánamo] military tribunals and subjecting detainees to them" because "the Court found that the tribunals violate Common Article 3--and under the War Crimes Act, any violation of Common Article 3 is a war crime." A similar argument would indicate that top US officials have also committed war crimes by justifying interrogation methods that, according to the testimony of US military lawyers, also violate Common Article 3.
Lo and behold, the legislation the Administration has circulated on Capitol Hill would decriminalize such acts retroactively. Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, told the Associated Press on August 10, "I think what this bill can do is in effect immunize past crimes. That's why it's so dangerous." Human rights attorney Scott Horton told Democracy Now! on August 16 that one of the purposes of the proposed legislation is "to grant immunity or impunity to certain individuals. And these are mostly decision-makers within the government."
The Coming Debate
Bush officials have not acknowledged that one of their real motives for gutting the War Crimes Act is to protect themselves from being prosecuted for their own crimes. But so far they have apparently offered only one other reason for tampering with the law: The existing law, especially the Geneva language prohibiting "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment," is too vague to enforce. (Perhaps the Bush Administration should declare the US Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" as too vague to enforce as well.)
Fidell noted in an August 9 Washington Post article that military law includes many terms like "dereliction of duty," "maltreatment" and "conduct unbecoming an officer" that may appear vague but that are nonetheless enforceable. The Army Field Manual bars cruel and degrading treatment. When Attorney General Gonzales recently testified at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that "outrages upon personal dignity" was too ambiguous, Senator John McCain stated that top military lawyers see no problem in complying with Common Article 3.
The arguments for preserving the War Crimes Act and rejecting the Bush amendments, in contrast, are multiple and overwhelming:
1. Commitment to the Geneva Conventions protects US service people from future retaliation.
As former Secretary of State Colin Powell has argued, abandoning the Geneva Conventions would put US soldiers at greater risk, would "reverse over a century of US policy and practice in supporting the Geneva Conventions" and would "undermine the protections of the law of war for our troops, both in this specific conflict [Afghanistan] and in general."
2. The War Crimes Act will prohibit "torture-lite" in the future.
According to Scott Horton, the proposed legislation is "designed to provide an OK to certain techniques which fall just short of torture that are being used by the CIA," including "waterboarding, longtime standing and hypothermia," techniques that have been "linked to severe injuries and fatalities."
3. The War Crimes Act will prohibit future Abu Ghraib-type outrages.
The Bush Administration's legislation would remove the prohibition on "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." Repealing the War Crimes Act, the Washington Post's R. Jeffrey Smith reported, is decriminalizing the forced nakedness, use of dog leashes and wearing of women's underwear that shocked the world at Abu Ghraib prison.
Derek P. Jinks an assistant law professor at the University of Texas, author of a forthcoming book on the Geneva Conventions, said in an August 9 Washington Post article that the "entire family of techniques" used to degrade, humiliate and coerce prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo "is not addressed in any way, shape or form" in the Bush Administration's proposal. Retired Army Lieut. Col. Geoffrey Corn, until recently chief of the war law branch of the Army's Office of the Judge Advocate General, said in the same article, "This removal of [any] reference to humiliating and degrading treatment will be perceived by experts and probably allies as 'rewriting'" the Geneva Conventions.
This "rewriting" could have very concrete ramifications in practice. The international tribunal prosecuting war crimes in the former Yugoslavia deemed acts like placing prisoners in "inappropriate conditions of confinement," forcing them to urinate or defecate in their clothes, and threatening them with "physical, mental, or sexual violence" to be humiliations, degrading treatment and outrages. The proposed changes to the War Crimes Act would indicate that it is not a crime for Americans to conduct such acts.
4. Gutting the War Crimes Act will promote the perception of the United States as an outlaw country.
As a letter signed by sixteen members of Congress recently said, such legislation "would harm the reputation of the United States as a leader promoting and protecting human rights." What would be more deserving of scorn than a country that lets potential war-crime defendants repeal the very law under which they might be prosecuted?
5. The Bush legislation unfairly exempts high government officials from the very war crimes charges they are leveling against lowly "grunts."
Since the start of the Iraq War there have been more than thirty prosecutions under the military law that prohibits war crimes, with many more pending. But they have all prosecuted low-level military personnel. Gutting the War Crimes Act would leave the military "bad apples" at the bottom subject to prosecution but would let the civilian "bad apples" at the top evade all responsibility.
As Horton points out, the Uniform Code of Military Justice already incorporates the Geneva Convention rules, but it does not apply "to Donald Rumsfeld or Stephen Cambone or to people in the White House." The point of the War Crimes Act is that it "spreads the application of the Geneva Conventions the next level up to civilians, and particularly to civilian policymakers." From the beginning, the "prosecutorial focus" of the War Crimes Act "was intended to provide deterrence at that level." Repealing it undermines the fundamental principle of equal justice under law.
6. Preserving the War Crimes Act is part of reasserting the rule of law in America.
The War Crimes Act has been a central focus of the Bush Administration's scorn for all Constitutional limits on the power of the President and the executive branch. It was the idea that the President could by fiat declare US and international law null and void that animated the Gonzales torture memo. It was this denial of constitutional limits that the Supreme Court resoundingly rebuked in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. A rebuff to the Bush Administration's attack on the War Crimes Act is a reassertion of those constitutional limits.
The War Crimes Act can be a bridge to a more just and peaceful world. The incorporation of the Geneva Conventions' prohibitions on war crimes into national law affirms America's commitment to international law. It embodies an implementation of the global heritage of the Nuremberg trials, the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions. It embeds that tradition within our own national law.
In the wake of World War II, Justice Robert Jackson, chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal, observed that "the ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, which are inevitable in a system of international lawlessness, is to make statesmen responsible to law." Making statesmen responsible to law is what the War Crimes Act is all about.
Defending the Law
The arguments for preserving the War Crimes Act are conclusive (except perhaps to those who might face criminal prosecution under them). Indeed, the Administration's decision to gut the War Crimes Act is a gift to those who want to see American statesmen held accountable to national and international law. It suggests that the Bush Administration itself recognizes the criminality of many of its actions. And it shows in the sharpest relief why the War Crimes Act is needed.
But, at least for the moment, Bush's Republican allies still control both houses of Congress; they are in a position to slip a repeal of the War Crimes Act into any piece of legislation they choose. Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey, senior member of the House Committee for Homeland Security, told The Nation, "The Bush Administration and the GOP leadership in Congress is trying to quietly excuse and even codify cruel and inhuman treatment of prisoners in US custody, at secret CIA prisons abroad and even the abhorrent practice of extraordinary rendition [the outsourcing of torture and other cruel treatment to other countries]."
While the Administration has been lining up its ducks, the campaign to save the War Crimes Act has just begun. The advocacy group Just Foreign Policy has started an online campaign to save the War Crimes Act. "This is not an obscure point in the law. What's at stake here is whether, for example, the abuses of prisoners by sexual humiliation that shocked us at Abu Ghraib are clearly illegal under US law," national coordinator Robert Naiman observes. "If we found these actions outrageous, we are obligated to tell our members of Congress to protect the law that bans them."
Markey adds, "Every American citizen should call the White House and their members of Congress because these changes being made in the dead of night could be the green light for other countries that capture American troops to treat them cruelly or torture them."
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CIA interrogators 'sign up for liability cover'
News.com.au
September 11, 2006
MANY CIA officers involved in questioning war-on-terror detainees have signed up for a government-reimbursed insurance plan that would pay their legal expenses if they are sued or charged with criminal wrongdoing, The Washington Post reported today.
Citing unnamed current and former intelligence officials, the newspaper said the trend reflected heightened anxiety at the Central Intelligence Agency that officers may be vulnerable to accusations they were involved in abuse, torture, human rights violations and other misconduct.
They worry that they will not have Justice Department representation in court or congressional inquiries, the report said.
The Post said the anxieties stem partly from public controversy about a system of secret CIA prisons, in which detainees were subjected to harsh interrogation methods, including temperature extremes and simulated drowning.
The White House contends the methods were legal, but some CIA officers have worried privately that they may have violated international law or domestic criminal statutes, the paper said.
President George W. Bush announced last week that he had transferred the last 14 detainees from secret CIA prisons abroad to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and expressed his determination to try them.
But defence attorneys for the suspects are expected to argue that admissions made by their clients were illegally coerced as the result of policies set in Washington, The Post said.
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Passengers' chat will be recorded to foil hijackers
11/09/2006
Telegraph
Air passengers could have their conversations and movements monitored as work intensifies to design the terrorist-proof aeroplane.
Researchers in Britain and Europe are looking at technology that would see a comprehensive network of microphones and cameras installed throughout the aircraft, including the lavatory, which would be linked to a computer.
This computer would be "trained" to pick up suspicious behaviour, said Catherine Neary, of Bae Systems, one of the British participants in a £24 million European Union project Safety of Aircraft in Future European Environment.
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"It would pick passengers who are behaving oddly or in an unruly manner," she said. "They may appear nervous, or could be getting up while the plane is taxiing. If someone looks as if they are praying, the microphones would be able to tell if they were by picking up key words."
Eventually, the computer would be programmed to understand a variety of languages.
"Passengers are not being snooped on by humans, but by machines which will process the data, which would not be stored after the flight unless there is an incident," she said.
"There are likely to be cameras and microphones in the toilet, because that is where terrorists go to assemble bombs." The camera could also be trained to detect seemingly harmless items being left in aircraft lavatories that could later be assembled to make a lethal device.
"If people know they will be safer, they will be happy to accept the sensors, but we are considering the legal implications of this."
Bae Systems is co-operating with Reading University on the project designed to make the aircraft as secure as possible. "We are concentrating on onboard threat protection," said James Ferryman, a lecturer in computer science.
"We would be looking at ways in which people behave which would give rise to suspicion. It is a challenge to distinguish between situations - such as two children play fighting or someone being attacked."
The aviation industry is monitoring the project closely. ''We are always looking at new initiatives that would enhance security," a British Airways spokesman said. "BA already has CCTV which monitors activity outside the reinforced cockpit door. But we believe it is robust ground security which is the key to safety in the air."
Even before the aircraft takes off, passengers could be swept with an "electric nose" a hand-held device which could tell if they had had any contact with explosives.
Other initiatives include sophisticated biometric cameras at the check-in desk and departure gate. By comparing the iris, it could check that the passenger presenting him or herself at the airport was the one boarding the aircraft.
Work is already in hand to examine putting electronic chips on luggage that would match ones embedded in the boarding pass. They would make it easier to link passengers to their bags or, more importantly, find them when they are separated.
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Agents scrutinize all in the US in the name of surveillance
LA Times
11/09/2006
As Americans consider whether they are more safe or less five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, one thing is certain: They are being monitored by their own government in ways unforeseen before 19 terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Within minutes of the strikes, U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence-gathering authorities mobilized to find the culprits and prevent another attack. They ramped up the tapping of Americans' phone calls and voicemails. They watched Internet traffic and e-mails as never before. They tailed greater numbers of people and into places previously deemed off-limits, such as mosques.
They clandestinely accessed bank and credit card transactions and school records. They monitored travel. And they broke into homes without notice, looking for signs of terrorist activity and copying entire file cabinets and computer hard drives.
Authorities even tried to get inside peoples' heads, using supercomputers and "predictive" software to analyze enormous amounts of personal data about them and their friends and associates in an effort to foretell who might become a terrorist, and when.
In the five years since the attacks, the scope and breadth of domestic surveillance has steadily increased, according to interviews with dozens of current and former U.S. officials and privacy experts.
Some of these programs have been debated and approved by the courts and Congress - the traditional checks against unjustified intrusions on Americans' right to privacy under the Fourth Amendment.
But others have not, and some of them are operating without the knowledge or approval of judicial and legislative overseers, officials and experts say.
Two such classified programs have been disclosed by the media, over the objections of the Bush administration. One involves the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping of suspicious phone calls and e-mails into and out of the United States. The other is an effort by the Treasury Department and the CIA to monitor international bank transfers.
Beyond top secret
Privacy experts believe that some of the activity is so secret that none but a small circle of top Bush administration officials and operational support personnel know about it - even though Congressional leaders are legally required to be notified.
"The White House simply refuses to be straight with us about what they're up to," said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who says he has pressed unsuccessfully for answers as a member of the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence, which entitles him to classified briefings on the subject.
In response, administration officials say that they have the authority to conduct whatever surveillance is under way, in part due to the special war powers granted to President Bush by the Congress a week after the Sept. 11 attacks.
In a speech Thursday, Bush lobbied Congress for updated and expanded surveillance powers, saying they are needed to keep pace with a stealthy and technologically savvy enemy.
Meanwhile, the domestic surveillance effort continues within virtually every U.S. counter-terrorism, law-enforcement and intelligence agency.
The programs comprise actual surveillance of Americans' activities and communications, and "dataveillance," the practice of mining the vast amounts of personal data compiled on Americans.
On both fronts, the NSA is leading the effort from its headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., just outside Washington, D.C.
Robert Deitz, general counsel for the NSA, told Congress last week that the NSA's primary mission since Sept. 11 has been to develop ways of eavesdropping on al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations that have used cutting-edge technologies to stay one step ahead of their pursuers.
The NSA has improved its ability to monitor the entire spectrum of communications, including fiber-optic and wireless transmissions, instant messages, BlackBerry e-mails and voice conversations sent over the Internet, say officials and experts.
They add that the intelligence community may not be breaking any laws because these kinds of communication might not be covered under loosely worded federal laws that don't account for advances in technology.
Several congressional officials and privacy experts said they believe the NSA also tracks the movement of "persons of interest" by the electronic signals emitted by their cell phones and the global positioning navigation system in the vehicles they drive.
Letter to search
On the ground, the FBI has led the way on the low-tech surveillance front, using little-known powers given to it under the USA Patriot Act and other post-Sept. 11 policies.
Before Sept. 11, virtually all FBI surveillance was authorized by court-approved warrants and subpoenas issued through federal grand juries, which have some measure of oversight by citizen jurors and judges.
Since then, however, the FBI has dramatically increased the use of "National Security Letters," which allow agents to obtain information on people they deem suspicious with little probable cause and without judicial approval. Unlike traditional search warrants, the "target" does not have to be notified.
FBI agents are also using what are known as "sneak-and-peek" warrants on a wider scale, entering hundreds of homes clandestinely to gather intelligence and copy computers and files, again without notification.
And they have conducted surveillance on antiwar, religious, civil rights and environmental groups, including Greenpeace and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
Treasury Department agents have directed searches of bank records and other financial information in more than 4,000 cases, usually without notifying the U.S.-based individuals, companies, charities and nonprofit organizations, interviews and documents show.
The U.S. military has a program known as "Threat and Local Observation Notice," or TALON, which compiles reports of suspicious activity in and around military installations.
Under TALON, military intelligence squads have monitored Americans at scores of events, including religious and antiwar protests, and filed suspicious action reports, according to records obtained by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.
High-tech surveillance
Many government officials and privacy experts say the most alarming expansion in domestic surveillance involves the use of computers and the Internet.
Because gadget-happy consumers are snapping up the latest high-technology devices and online services to make life easier, authorities and private data brokers now have easy access to a digitized footprint of their activities and interests. Phone records, political preferences and purchasing habits are now only mouse clicks away from government agents.
After Sept. 11, government agencies began combining information collected by private companies with their own storehouses of intelligence. Authorities then used "social networking" software to map relationships among large groups of people in America and overseas. And they used "predictive" software to determine terrorism risks associated with individuals based on their activities, purchases, personal quirks and habits.
In 2004, an investigation by the Government Accountability Office found 199 U.S. government uses of data mining, 54 of which used private-sector data, including credit-card records, Internet logs and other information, some of which was of questionable accuracy.
"This has to be largest intrusion on privacy that we have ever seen in the history of this country, undoubtedly," said James Dempsey, policy director for the nonpartisan Center for Democracy and Technology and a former Congressional staffer.
One former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with even the most secret surveillance and data-mining programs defended them, saying that when combined, they form a nearly all-encompassing web that is critically important to the overall counter-terrorism effort.
He said the programs have been hugely successful in catching individual terrorists and in allowing authorities to home in on geographic "hot spots" and ways that terrorist cells communicate and operate.
"If you lose programs like these, you rip a huge hole out of the hide of protection we have put in place around the United States," the former official said. "They are tremendously important, in ways people cannot even imagine."
Angry lawmakers
But even some supporters of such programs believe the administration's failure to disclose them to Congress and the courts could lead to a Constitutional showdown, and soon.
Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote recently to President Bush that he had learned of "some alleged intelligence community activities about which our committee has not been briefed.
"If these allegations are true, they may represent a breach of responsibility by the administration, a violation of the law, and, just as importantly, a direct affront to me and the members of this committee who have so ardently supported efforts to collect information on our enemies," wrote Hoekstra, a staunch Bush ally.
"The U.S. Congress," Hoekstra added, "simply should not have to play Twenty Questions to get the information that it deserves under our Constitution."
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War's Critics Abetting Terrorists, Cheney Says
Washington Post
September 11, 2006
Vice President Cheney offered a veiled attack yesterday on critics of the administration's Iraq policy, saying the domestic debate over the war is emboldening adversaries who believe they can undermine the resolve of the American people.
"They can't beat us in a stand-up fight -- they never have -- but they're absolutely convinced they can break our will, [that] the American people don't have the stomach for the fight," Cheney said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
The vice president said U.S. allies in Afghanistan and Iraq "have doubts" the United States will finish the job there. "And those doubts are encouraged, obviously, when they see the kind of debate that we've had in the United States," he said. "Suggestions, for example, that we should withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq simply feed into that whole notion, validates the strategy of the terrorists."
Cheney unapologetically defended the 2003 invasion that toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, saying the administration would have done "exactly the same thing" even if it knew before the war what he acknowledged knowing now -- that Iraq did not have stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Yet he also gave a bit of ground, as he was pressed repeatedly by interviewer Tim Russert about statements that turned out to be wrong or damaging to his credibility.
The vice president acknowledged he had been overly optimistic in predicting a quick demise to the Iraqi insurgency that continues to bedevil U.S. forces. More than a year ago, in May 2005, Cheney proclaimed the insurgency was in its "last throes." Since then, more than 1,000 U.S. troops have died and sectarian violence has intensified.
"I think there's no question . . . that the insurgency's gone on longer and been more difficult [than] I had anticipated," Cheney said. But he added that 2005 will be seen as a "turning point" in Iraq's history because of elections that have led to a democratic government.
He did not mention warnings from the intelligence community and others that the post-invasion Iraq could be consumed by religious violence, and that pacifying the country would require many thousands more troops than those committed by the White House.
Cheney's appearance came on the eve of the five-year anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and as the Bush administration ratchets up efforts to convince Americans that the war in Iraq is part of a global struggle against Islamic terrorism and extremism. As it tries to keep GOP majorities in Congress, the White House is hoping to make the elections more about battling terrorism in general than about the unpopular war in Iraq.
In sending out Cheney to do a nearly hour-long interview with Russert, the administration chose one of the principal authors of its national security strategy -- but one whose stature has been eroded, in part, by assertions that Democrats and even some administration allies consider as lacking credibility.
Democrats reacted with scorn to Cheney's latest comments.
"Vice President Cheney's influence over our nation's foreign policy and defense has made America less safe," said Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.). "The vice president was a chief architect of the effort to manipulate intelligence to build a case for invading Iraq; he ignored the threat of insurgencies, he took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan, and today he made clear that he would do nothing different."
Cheney appeared unruffled as Russert asked him again and again about his past remarks or about policies that have lost popularity with Americans.
When Russert presented polling data suggesting that most Americans do not view Iraq as part of a war against terrorists, Cheney replied, "I beg to differ. . . . The fact is, the world is much better off today with Saddam Hussein out of power."
Russert pushed Cheney on his repeated assertions that Sept. 11 plotter Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague, which the vice president has used to raise the possibility of a connection between Hussein and the Sept. 11 attacks.
Cheney said yesterday the CIA had presented a Czech intelligence report to him of the meeting but later "backed off" it; U.S. intelligence reports, however, repeatedly cast doubt on that meeting, even in the months before Cheney discussed it publicly in September 2002, according to a declassified report released Friday by the Senate intelligence committee.
Separate from the issue of Sept. 11, the vice president maintained, prewar Iraq was a state sponsor of terrorism. He quoted former CIA chief George Tenet in saying there was a relationship between Hussein and al-Qaeda going "back at least a decade" before the U.S. invasion.
Cheney asserted that the slain al-Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had fled Afghanistan and "set up operations in Baghdad in the spring of '02 and was there from then, basically, until basically the time we launched into Iraq." The Senate intelligence committee reported that, by October 2005, the CIA had debunked the idea of any prewar relationship between Zarqawi and Hussein's government.
Cheney told Russert that he had not read the Senate report.
Cheney said it is "hard to say" whether there are more terrorists now than five years ago. But the fact that al-Qaeda has launched no successful attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001, shows that the administration's policies are working, he added.
"I don't know how you can explain five years of no attacks, five years of successful disruption of attacks, five years of, of defeating the efforts of al-Qaeda to come back and kill more Americans," Cheney said. "You've got to give some credence to the notion that maybe somebody did something right."
Cheney said he sees "part of my job is to think about the unthinkable, to focus upon what, in fact, the terrorists may have in store for us." He said the threat that drives administration thinking is "the possibility of a cell of al-Qaeda in the midst of one of our own cities with a nuclear weapon, or a biological agent. In that case, you'd be dealing -- for example, if on 9/11 they'd had a nuke instead of an airplane, you'd have been looking at a casualty toll that would rival all the deaths in all the wars fought by Americans in 230 years."
Comment: Make no mistake, 'ol Dick is trying to label "peaceniks" as "terrorists". Sounds strange? Well heck! Haven't you noticed that black is white and up is down in the world of the terrible terror trio of Israel the US and the UK?
Here's a novel idea for big brave Dick. Why doesn't he get his sorry ass over to the Middle East and engage in a "stand-up fight" with ordinary Iraqis or Palestinians. There would be no shortage of offers from people eager to give Dick some of his own medicine.
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Cheney reasserts Iraq/al-Qaeda links
By Demetri Sevastopulo
Published: September 10 2006 21:01 | Last updated: September 10 2006 21:01
US Vice-President Dick Cheney repeated assertions on Sunday on links between the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda despite a recent Senate intelligence committee report that concluded otherwise.
In defending the decision to invade Iraq despite its lack of weapons of mass destruction, Mr Cheney said the fact that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former head of al-Qaeda in Iraq who was killed in a US air strike this year, was in Baghdad before the war was evidence that Iraq had links to al-Qaeda.
But a Senate intelligence committee report on prewar Iraq intelligence released on Friday concluded that there was no evidence that Mr Hussein's Ba'athist regime had either harboured or turned a blind eye to Mr Zarqawi.
In an hour-long interview on NBC television, Mr Cheney argued that the invasion of Iraq had improved the country. While recognising the increase in sectarian violence, he said Iraq was better off without Mr Hussein. "If we weren't there . . . the situation would be far worse than it is today," Mr Cheney said.
He acknowledged that the US intelligence on Iraq had been poor but he appeared to put the blame on the Central Intelligence Agency, saying George Tenet, the former director of the spy agency, had told President George W. Bush that the case that Mr Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was a "slam dunk".
But he said the lack of weapons of mass destruction would not have changed the decision to invade Iraq.
"If we had to do [it] over again, we would do exactly the same thing," Mr Cheney said. He also defended the use of controversial methods - including the domestic spying programme and US detention policies - in the "war on terror", saying they had helped stop further attacks on the US. "There has not been another attack on the US," he said. "That is not an accident."
Congress is considering legislation to authorise the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping programme. In the wake of a June Supreme Court ruling that the military commissions created to try prisoners at Guantánamo Bay were illegal, the White House and Congress are working towards approving a revamped military tribunal.
Republicans are becoming concerned that Democrats could gain control of one, or both, houses of Congress in November elections. With decreasing support for the Iraq war, which has resulted in the deaths of 2,662 US soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis, the administration is trying to argue that success in Iraq is key to winning the "war on terror".
Mr Cheney, who said last year the insurgency was in its "last throes", acknowledged on Sunday that "we did not anticipate an insurgency that would last this long". But he said the US was "well on the way" to success, meaning viable government, a country that was not a safe haven for terrorists, and the elimination of al-Qaeda.
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Poll: Half Britons think Britain "losing terror war"
www.chinaview.cn 2006-09-12 17:35:22
LONDON, Sept. 12 (Xinhua) -- More than half of British people think the "war on terror" is being lost, the BBC reported on Tuesday.
According to a latest survey, carried out for the BBC five years after 9/11 attacks, 53 percent of respondents believed the British government was losing the "war on terror," and 56 percent thought it was being lost by other western governments.
Four out of 10 people questioned said they felt less safe now than when the so-called war on terror began after the 9/11 attacks, while 11 percent felt safer.
In the survey, some 52 percent thought British troops should be withdrawn from Afghanistan now, and half believed they should leave Iraq. And about 52 percent believed western governments should not negotiate with al-Qaida, and almost a third thought they should.
Some 55 percent people said British government is too closely aligned with U.S. foreign policy, and 19 percent thought it was about right.
According to the report, GfK NOP surveyed almost 1,000 people nationally on Sept. 8-10 for the BBC's Ten O'Clock News.
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Terrorism - Standard Strategy Of The 'Democratic' State
UK agents 'had role in IRA bomb atrocities'
Henry McDonald, Ireland editor
Sunday September 10, 2006
The Observer
The controversy over claims that Britain allowed two IRA informers to organise 'human bomb' attacks intensified this weekend.
A human rights watchdog has handed a report to the Police Service of Northern Ireland, which concludes that two British agents were central to the bombings of three army border installations in 1990.
Meanwhile the Police Ombudsman's Office in Belfast confirmed it is investigating allegations by the family of one victim that the bomb in Newry on 24 October 1990 could have been prevented.
The British Irish Rights Watch report will also put the focus back on the alleged MI6 agent 'J118'. Army intelligence officer turned whistleblower Martin Ingram has alleged 'J118' was Sinn Fein's chief negotiator Martin McGuinnesss.
The Mid Ulster MP strenuously denies Ingram's allegations and has claimed the speculation is fuelled by the Democratic Unionist Party.
The 'human bomb' tactic involved forcing civilians to drive vehicles laden with explosives into army checkpoints and included deadly sorties near Newry and Coshquin outside Derry. Six British soldiers and a civilian worker at an army base died in the simultaneous blasts on either side of Northern Ireland.
British Irish Rights Watch said: 'This month BIRW sent a confidential report to the Historical Enquiries Team on the three incidents that occurred on 24th October 1990... at least two security force agents were involved in these bombings, and allegations have been made that the "human bomb" strategy was the brainchild of British intelligence.
'Questions arise as to whether the RUC, Garda Síochána and the army's Force Researc