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Editorial: al-Zarqawi Dies Again
Joe Quinn
Signs of the Times
08/06/2006
I really never knew that one's lower jaw could drop to the level of the midrift, but here I sit, dribbling on my toes, a living testimony to the capacity of the marvellous machine that is the human body to adapt to new data. Of course, it would be remiss of me not to thank the members of the Bush government for providing me with this experience and who have also provided me with a new appreciation for and understanding of the words 'lie' and 'blatant'.
Of course, I really should have seen it coming. With the recent reports of fine American soldiers summarily executing Iraqi children with a bullet (or several) to the head and what such acts suggest about the reality of 'operation Iraqi freedom', the US government was always going to have to pull something out of the bag. And we didn't have to wait long. Today, in an inspiring act of self-sacrifice, the Pentagon offered up one of its most valued assets - the phantom Islamic terrorist known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Through this act, the US government clearly hopes to convince the American people and the world that it really is fighting a 'war on terror' in Iraq against real 'terrorists', despite the fact that American troops have shown a proclivity for 'offing' Iraqi children and pregnant women rather than 'terrorists', (maybe they can't find any) and someone seems determined to embroil Iraqi civilians in an ethnic bloodbath.
As if this blatant and obvious manipulation were not enough, we now have to face ourelves into the nauseous backslapping and rhetoric as Bush and Co play up this "victory" in the war on terror. For example, CNN reports:
Bush: U.S. forces 'delivered justice'
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most recognizable face of Iraq's violent insurgency, died in a coalition airstrike near Baquba, authorities said today. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad called al-Zarqawi "the godfather of sectarian killing and terror in Iraq." President Bush said, "Zarqawi has met his end and this violent man will never murder again."
Notice also that Bush, in true moron style, patronizingly informs us that when someone is dead, they can't murder anyone. What would we do without him. The real question here however is not whether or not Bush has a functioning brain, but whether "al-Zarqawi" has been doing anything other than decomposing for the past 2+ years, given that Iraqi militants claimed that he died in a US bombing raid sometime before March 2004.
In the above CNN report, the US ambassador to Iraq (is it possible to be an ambassador to a country that you own?) ascribes much of the sectarian killing in Iraq over the past two years to 'al Zarqawi'. But before we rush to reasonable and logical conclusions and assume that most car bombings and executions will now stop, Tony Blair wants us to know that "Zarqawi's death will not end the killing in Iraq" and that, "insurgents in Iraq will seek revenge for the killing of 'al Zarqawi' and will "fight back hard". Not much to celebrate then, which, I suppose, is only to be expected when you 'kill' a 'master terrorist' who has been dead for 2+ years.
That 'al Zarqawi' existed more or less in the lurid dreams of Donald Rumsfeld wasbacked up by American military intelligence agents in Iraq who reported in October 2004 that 'al-Zarqawi' was "more man than myth" and that his position as arch al-Qaeda terrorist in Iraq was essentially a creation of the Bush administration who wanted to "find a villain for the post-invasion mayhem."
The was also the very obviously fabricated February 2004 'letter' that was alleged, by the U.S. government, to be a communiqué from al-Zarqawi to Bin laden. Who can forget the stoicism of the Pentagon when it refused to reveal from whom it had obtained the 'letter' and the patriotism of Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt when he said: "the important thing is that we have this document in our hands, how it was found is not as important as the fact that we have it and that we can use it."
No doubt.
In the letter, Zarqawi conveniently took pre-emptive responsibility for the wave of sectarian attacks and shrine bombings in Iraq over the last 2 years. In the letter 'Zarqawi' 'wrote':
"We are striving urgently and racing against time to create companies of mujahidin that will repair to secure places and strive to reconnoiter the country, hunting the enemy -- Americans, police, and soldiers -- on the roads and lanes. We are continuing to train and multiply them. As for the Shi'a, we will hurt them, God willing, through martyrdom operations and car bombs."
In a tape released in April 2004 'al-Zarqawi' called on Iraqis to "burn the earth under the occupiers' feet." As yet no one has been able to explain the logic behind 'al Zarqawi's' plan to encourage Iraqis to join him in fighting American troops while at the same time attacking and killing Iraqis. It is also a mystery why 'al-Zarqawi' believes that attacking and killing Iraqi civilians is the best way to 'destroy the infidels'.
If we were in any way conspiratorially minded, we might suggest that 'al-Zarqawi' was simply a ficticious point man in a U.S. military psychological operation designed to hide the U.S. government's military and political policy in Iraq - but everyone knows 'conspriacies' do not exist. Long-standing American and British counter-insurgency tactics that amount to the same thing on the other hand...
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Editorial: The War They Wanted, The Lies They Needed - A MUST READ!
By CRAIG UNGER
Vanity Fair
The Bush administration invaded Iraq claiming Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger. As much of Washington knew, and the world soon learned, the charge was false. Worse, it appears to have been the cornerstone of a highly successful "black propaganda" campaign with links to the White House
It's a crisp, clear winter morning in Rome. In the neighborhood between the Vatican and the Olympic Stadium, a phalanx of motor scooters is parked outside a graffiti-scarred 10-story apartment building. No. 10 Via Antonio Baiamonte is home to scores of middle-class families, and to the embassy for the Republic of Niger, the impoverished West African nation that was once a French colony.
Though it may be unprepossessing, the Niger Embassy is the site of one of the great mysteries of our times. On January 2, 2001, an embassy official returned there after New Year's Day and discovered that the offices had been robbed. Little of value was missing - a wristwatch, perfume, worthless documents, embassy stationery, and some official stamps bearing the seal of the Republic of Niger. Nevertheless, the consequences of the robbery were so great that the Watergate break-in pales by comparison.
A few months after the robbery, Western intelligence analysts began hearing that Saddam Hussein had sought yellowcake - a concentrated form of uranium which, if enriched, can be used in nuclear weapons - from Niger. Next came a dossier purporting to document the attempted purchase of hundreds of tons of uranium by Iraq. Information from the dossier and, later, the papers themselves made their way from Italian intelligence to, at various times, the C.I.A., other Western intelligence agencies, the U.S. Embassy in Rome, the State Department, and the White House, as well as several media outlets.
Finally, in his January 2003 State of the Union address, George W. Bush told the world, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Two months later, the United States invaded Iraq, starting a conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and has irrevocably de-stabilized the strategically vital Middle East. Since then, the world has learned not just that Bush's 16-word casus belli was apparently based on the Niger documents but also that the documents were forged.
In Italy, a source with intimate knowledge of the Niger affair has warned me that powerful people are watching. Phones may be tapped. Jobs are in jeopardy, and people are scared.
On the sixth floor at Via Baiamonte, a receptionist finally comes to the door of the nondescript embassy office. She is of medium height, has dark-brown hair, wears a handsome blue suit, and appears to be in her 50s. She declines to give her full name. A look of concern and fear crosses her face. "Don't believe what you read in the papers," she cautions in French. "Ce n'est pas la rit." It is not the truth.
But who was behind the forgeries? Italian intelligence? American operatives? The woman tilts her head toward one of the closed doors to indicate that there are people there who can hear. She can't talk. "C'est interdit," she says. It is forbidden.
"A Classic Psy-Ops Campaign"
For more than two years it has been widely reported that the U.S. invaded Iraq because of intelligence failures. But in fact it is far more likely that the Iraq war started because of an extraordinary intelligence success - specifically, an astoundingly effective campaign of disinformation, or black propaganda, which led the White House, the Pentagon, Britain's M.I.6 intelligence service, and thousands of outlets in the American media to promote the falsehood that Saddam Hussein's nuclear-weapons program posed a grave risk to the United States.
The Bush administration made other false charges about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.) - that Iraq had acquired aluminum tubes suitable for centrifuges, that Saddam was in league with al-Qaeda, that he had mobile weapons labs, and so forth. But the Niger claim, unlike other allegations, can't be dismissed as an innocent error or blamed on ambiguous data. "This wasn't an accident," says Milt Bearden, a 30-year C.I.A. veteran who was a station chief in Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, and Germany, and the head of the Soviet- East European division. "This wasn't 15 monkeys in a room with typewriters."
In recent months, it has emerged that the forged Niger documents went through the hands of the Italian military intelligence service, SISMI (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare), or operatives close to it, and that neoconservative policymakers helped bring them to the attention of the White House. Even after information in the Niger documents was repeatedly rejected by the C.I.A. and the State Department, hawkish neocons managed to circumvent seasoned intelligence analysts and insert the Niger claims into Bush's State of the Union address.
By the time the U.S. invaded Iraq, in March 2003, this apparent black-propaganda operation had helped convince more than 90 percent of the American people that a brutal dictator was developing W.M.D.- and had led us into war.
To trace the path of the documents from their fabrication to their inclusion in Bush's infamous speech, Vanity Fair has interviewed a number of former intelligence and military analysts who have served in the C.I.A., the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.), and the Pentagon. Some of them refer to the Niger documents as "a disinformation operation," others as "black propaganda," "black ops," or "a classic psy-ops [psychological-operations] campaign." But whatever term they use, at least nine of these officials believe that the Niger documents were part of a covert operation to deliberately mislead the American public.
The officials are Bearden; Colonel W. Patrick Lang, who served as the D.I.A.'s defense intelligence officer for the Middle East, South Asia, and terrorism; Colonel Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell; Melvin Goodman, a former division chief and senior analyst at the C.I.A. and the State Department; Ray McGovern, a C.I.A. analyst for 27 years; Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia division in 2002 and 2003; Larry C. Johnson, a former C.I.A. officer who was deputy director of the State Department Office of Counterterrorism from 1989 to 1993; former C.I.A. official Philip Giraldi; and Vincent Cannistraro, the former chief of operations of the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center.
In addition, Vanity Fair has found at least 14 instances prior to the 2003 State of the Union in which analysts at the C.I.A., the State Department, or other government agencies who had examined the Niger documents or reports about them raised serious doubts about their legitimacy - only to be rebuffed by Bush-administration officials who wanted to use the material. "They were just relentless," says Wilkerson, who later prepared Colin Powell's presentation before the United Nations General Assembly. "You would take it out and they would stick it back in. That was their favorite bureaucratic technique - ruthless relentlessness."
All of which flies in the face of a campaign by senior Republicans including Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to blame the C.I.A. for the faulty pre-war intelligence on W.M.D.
Indeed, the accounts put forth by Wilkerson and his colleagues strongly suggest that the C.I.A. is under siege not because it was wrong but because it was right. Agency analysts were not serving the White House's agenda.
What followed was not just the catastrophic foreign-policy blunder in Iraq but also an ongoing battle for the future of U.S. intelligence. Top officials have been leaving the C.I.A. in droves - including Porter Goss, who mysteriously resigned in May, just 18 months after he had been handpicked by Bush to be the director of Central Intelligence. Whatever the reason for his sudden departure, anyone at the top of the C.I.A., Goss's replacement included, ultimately must worry about serving two masters: a White House that desperately wants intelligence it can use to remake the Middle East and a spy agency that is acutely sensitive to having its intelligence politicized.
Cui Bono?
Unraveling a disinformation campaign is no easy task. It means entering a kingdom of shadows peopled by would-be Machiavellis who are practiced in the art of deception.
"In the world of fabrication, you don't just drop something and let someone pick it up," says Bearden. "Your first goal is to make sure it doesn't find its way back to you, so you do several things. You may start out with a document that is a forgery, that is a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, which makes it hard to track down. You go through cutouts so that the person who puts it out doesn't know where it came from. And you build in subtle, nuanced errors so you can say, 'We would never misspell that.' If it's very cleverly done, it's a chess game, not checkers."
Reporters who have entered this labyrinth often emerge so perplexed that they choose not to write about it. "The chances of being manipulated are very high," says Claudio Gatti, a New York-based investigative reporter at Il Sole, the Italian business daily. "That's why I decided to stay out of it."
Despite such obstacles, a handful of independent journalists and bloggers on both sides of the Atlantic have been pursuing the story. "Most of the people you are dealing with are professional liars, which really leaves you with your work cut out for you as a reporter," says Joshua Micah Marshall, who has written about the documents on his blog, Talking Points Memo.
So far, no one has figured out all the answers. There is even disagreement about why the documents were fabricated. In a story by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, a source suggested that retired and embittered C.I.A. operatives had intentionally put together a lousy forgery in hopes of embarrassing Cheney's hawkish followers. But no evidence has emerged to support this theory, and many intelligence officers embrace a simpler explanation. "They needed this for the case to go to war," says Melvin Goodman, who is now a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. "It serves no other purpose."
By and large, knowledgeable government officials in the U.S., Italy, France, and Great Britain are mum. Official government investigations in Italy, the U.K., and the U.S. - including a two-year probe into pre-war intelligence failures by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence - have been so highly politicized as to be completely unsatisfying.
Only the ongoing investigation by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into the Plamegate scandal bears promise. However, it is focused not on the forgeries but on the leaks that were apparently designed to discredit former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson and that outed his wife, former C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame, after Wilson revealed that the Niger story was false. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, has already been charged in the case, and President Bush's senior adviser, Karl Rove, has been Fitzgerald's other principal target.
But, with the dubious exception of an ongoing F.B.I. inquiry, there is no official probe into who forged the Niger documents, who disseminated them, and why, after they had been repeatedly discredited, they kept resurfacing.
Meanwhile, from Rome to Washington, and countless points in between, journalists, bloggers, politicians, and intelligence agents are pondering the same question: Cui bono? Who benefits? Who wanted to start the war?
The Stuff of Conspiracy Fantasies
If Italy seems like an unlikely setting for a black-propaganda plot to start the Iraq war, it is worth remembering that Et tu, Brute is part of the local idiom, and Machiavelli was a native son. Accordingly, one can't probe Nigergate without examining the rich tapestry of intrigue that is Italian intelligence.
Because Italy emerged from World War II with a strong Communist Party, domestic politics had elements of a civil war, explains Guido Moltedo, editor of Europa, a center-left daily in Italy. That meant ultra-conservative Cold Warriors battled the Communists not just electorally but through undercover operations in the intelligence world.
"In addition to the secret service, SISMI, there was another, informal, parallel secret service," Moltedo says. "It was known as Propaganda Due."
Led by a neo-Fascist named Licio Gelli, Propaganda Due, with its penchant for exotic covert operations, was the stuff of conspiracy fantasies - except that it was real. According to The Sunday Times of London, until 1986 members agreed to have their throats slit and tongues cut out if they broke their oaths.
Subversive, authoritarian, and right-wing, the group was sometimes referred to as the P-2 Masonic Lodge because of its ties to the secret society of Masons, and it served as the covert intelligence agency for militant anti-Communists. It was also linked to Operation Gladio, a secret paramilitary wing in NATO that supported far-right military coups in Greece and Turkey during the Cold War.
In 1981 the Italian Parliament banned Propaganda Due, and all secret organizations in Italy, after an investigation concluded that it had infiltrated the highest levels of Italy's judiciary, parliament, military, and press, and was tied to assassinations, kidnappings, and arms deals around the world. But before it was banned, P-2 members and their allies participated in two ideologically driven international black-propaganda schemes that foreshadowed the Niger Embassy job 20 years later.
The first took place in 1980, when Francesco Pazienza, a charming and sophisticated Propaganda Due operative at the highest levels of SISMI, allegedly teamed up with an American named Michael Ledeen, a Rome correspondent for The New Republic.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Pazienza said he first met Ledeen that summer, through a SISMI agent in New York who was working under the cover of a U.N. job.
The end result of their collaboration was a widely publicized story that helped Ronald Reagan unseat President Jimmy Carter, whom they considered too timid in his approach to winning the Cold War. The target was Carter's younger brother, Billy, a hard-drinking "good ol' boy" from Georgia who repeatedly embarrassed his sibling in the White House.
It began after Billy mortified the president in 1979 by going to Tripoli at a time when Libya's leader, Muammar Qaddafi, was reviled as a radical Arab dictator who supported terrorism. Coupled with Billy's later admission that he had received a $220,000 loan from Qaddafi's regime, the ensuing "Billygate" scandal made headlines across America and led to a Senate investigation. But it had died down as the November 1980 elections approached.
Then, in the last week of October 1980, just two weeks before the election, The New Republic in Washington and Now magazine in Great Britain published a story co-authored by Michael Ledeen and Arnaud de Borchgrave, now an editor-at-large at The Washington Times and United Press International. According to the story, headlined "Qaddafi, Arafat and Billy Carter," the president's brother had been given an additional $50,000 by Qaddafi, on top of the loan, and had met secretly with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat. The story had come dramatically back to life. The new charges were disputed by Billy Carter and many others, and were never corroborated.
A 1985 investigation by Jonathan Kwitny in The Wall Street Journal reported that the New Republic article was part of a larger disinformation scam run by Ledeen and SISMI to tilt the election, and that "Billy Carter wasn't the only one allegedly getting money from a foreign government." According to Pazienza, Kwitny reported, Michael Ledeen had received at least $120,000 from SISMI in 1980 or 1981 for his work on Billygate and other projects. Ledeen even had a coded identity, Z-3, and had money sent to him in a Bermuda bank account, Pazienza said.
Ledeen told the Journal that a consulting firm he owned, I.S.I., worked for SISMI and may have received the money. He said he did not recall whether he had a coded identity.
Pazienza was subsequently convicted in absentia on multiple charges, including having used extortion and fraud to obtain embarrassing facts about Billy Carter. Ledeen was never charged with any crime, but he was cited in Pazienza's indictment, which read, "With the illicit support of the SISMI and in collaboration with the well-known American 'Italianist' Michael Ledeen, Pazienza succeeded in extorting, also using fraudulent means, information ... on the Libyan business of Billy Carter, the brother of the then President of the United States."
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Ledeen denied having worked with Pazienza or Propaganda Due as part of a disinformation scheme. "I knew Pazienza," he explained. "I didn't think P-2 existed. I thought it was all nonsense - typical Italian fantasy."
He added, "I'm not aware that anything in [the Billygate] story turned out to be false."
Asked if he had worked with SISMI, Ledeen told Vanity Fair, "No," then added, "I had a project with SISMI - one project." He described it as a simple "desktop" exercise in 1979 or 1980, in which he taught Italian intelligence how to deal with U.S. officials on extradition matters. His fee, he said, was about $10,000.
The Bulgarian Connection
In 1981, Ledeen played a role in what has been widely characterized as another disinformation operation. Once again his alleged ties to SISMI were front and center. The episode began after Mehmet Ali Agca, the right-wing terrorist who shot Pope John Paul II that May, told authorities that he had been taking orders from the Soviet Union's K.G.B. and Bulgaria's secret service. With Ronald Reagan newly installed in the White House, the so-called Bulgarian Connection made perfect Cold War propaganda.
Michael Ledeen was one of its most vocal proponents, promoting it on TV and in newspapers all over the world. In light of the ascendancy of the Solidarity Movement in Poland, the Pope's homeland, the Bulgarian Connection played a role in the demise of Communism in 1989.
There was just one problem - it probably wasn't true.
"It just doesn't pass the giggle test," says Frank Brodhead, co-author of The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection. "Agca, the shooter, had been deeply embedded in a Turkish youth group of the Fascist National Action Party known as the Gray Wolves. It seemed illogical that a Turkish Fascist would work with Bulgarian Communists."
The only real source for the Bulgarian Connection theory was Agca himself, a pathological liar given to delusional proclamations such as his insistence that he was Jesus Christ.
When eight men were later tried in Italian courts as part of the Bulgarian Connection case, all were acquitted for lack of evidence. One reason was that Agca had changed his story repeatedly. On the witness stand, he said he had put forth the Bulgarian Connection theory after Francesco Pazienza offered him freedom in exchange for the testimony. He subsequently changed that story as well.
Years later, Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs, who had initially believed the theory, wrote that "I became convinced that the Bulgarian connection was invented by Agca with the hope of winning his release from prison. He was aided and abetted in this scheme by right-wing conspiracy theorists in the United States and William Casey's Central Intelligence Agency, which became a victim of its own disinformation campaign."
Exactly which Americans might have been behind such a campaign? According to a 1987 article in The Nation, Francesco Pazienza said Ledeen "was the person responsible for dreaming up the 'Bulgarian connection' behind the plot to kill the Pope." Similarly, according to The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection, Pazienza claimed that Ledeen had worked closely with the SISMI team that coached Agca on his testimony.
But Ledeen angrily denies the charges. "It's all a lie," he says. He adds that he protested to The Wall Street Journal when it first reported on his alleged relationship with Pazienza: "If one-tenth of it were true, I would not have security clearances, but I do."
Not long before his death, in 2005, Pope John Paul II announced that he did not believe the Bulgarian Connection theory. But that wasn't the end of it. In March 2006 an Italian commission run by Paolo Guzzanti, a senator in the right-wing Forza Italia Party, reopened the case and concluded that the Bulgarian Connection was real. According to Frank Brodhead, however, the new conclusions are based on the same old information, which is "bogus at best and at worst deliberately misleading."
In the wake of Billygate and the Bulgarian Connection, Ledeen allegedly began to play a role as a behind-the-scenes operative with the ascendant Reagan-Bush team. According to Mission Italy, by former ambassador to Italy Richard Gardner, after Reagan's victory, but while Jimmy Carter was still president, "Ledeen and Pazienza set themselves up as the preferred channel between Italian political leaders and members of the new administration." Ledeen responds, "Gardner was wrong. And, by the way, he had every opportunity to raise it with me and never did."
When Reagan took office, Ledeen was made special assistant to Alexander Haig, Reagan's secretary of state. Ledeen later took a staff position on Reagan's National Security Council and played a key role in initiating the illegal arms-for-hostages deal with Iran that became known as the Iran-contra scandal.
The Italian Job
In 1981, P-2 was outlawed and police raided the home of its leader, Licio Gelli. Authorities found a list of nearly a thousand prominent public figures in Italy who were believed to be members. Among them was a billionaire media mogul who had not yet entered politics - Silvio Berlusconi.
In 1994, Berlusconi was elected prime minister. Rather than distancing himself from the criminal organization, he told a reporter that "P-2 had brought together the best men in the country," and he began to execute policies very much aligned with it.
Among those Berlusconi appointed to powerful national-security positions were two men known to Ledeen. A founding member of Forza Italia, Minister of Defense Antonio Martino was a well-known figure in Washington neocon circles and had been close friends with Michael Ledeen since the 1970s. Ledeen also occasionally played bridge with the head of SISMI under Berlusconi, Nicolog Pollari. "Michael Ledeen is connected to all the players," says Philip Giraldi, who was stationed in Italy with the C.I.A. in the 1980s and has been a keen observer of Ledeen over the years.
Enter Rocco Martino. An elegantly attired man in his 60s with white hair and a neatly trimmed mustache, Martino (no relation to Antonio Martino) had served in SISMI until 1999 and had a long history of peddling information to other intelligence services in Europe, including France's Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure (D.G.S.E.).
By 2000, however, Martino had fallen on hard times financially. It was then that a longtime colleague named Antonio Nucera offered him a lucrative proposition. A SISMI colonel specializing in counter-proliferation and W.M.D., Nucera told Martino that Italian intelligence had long had an "asset" in the Niger Embassy in Rome: a woman who was about 60 years old, had a low-level job, and occasionally sold off embassy documents to SISMI. But now SISMI had no more use for the woman - who is known in the Italian press as "La Signora" and has recently been identified as the ambassador's assistant, Laura Montini. Perhaps, Nucera suggested, Martino could use La Signora as Italian intelligence had, paying her to pass on documents she copied or stole from the embassy.
Shortly after New Year's 2001, the break-in took place at the Niger Embassy. Martino denies any participation. There are many conflicting accounts of the episode. According to La Repubblica, a left-of-center daily which has published an investigative series on Nigergate, documents stolen from the embassy ultimately were combined with other papers that were already in SISMI archives. In addition, the embassy stationery was apparently used to forge records about a phony uranium deal between Niger and Iraq.
The Sunday Times of London recently reported that the papers had been forged for profit by two embassy employees: Adam Maiga Zakariaou, the consul, and Montini. But many believe that they, wittingly or not, were merely pawns in a larger game.
According to Martino, the documents were not given to him all at once. First, he explained, SISMI had La Signora give him documents that had come from the robbery: "I was told that a woman in the Niger Embassy in Rome had a gift for me. I met her and she gave me documents." Later, he said, SISMI dug into its archives and added new papers. There was a codebook, then a dossier with a mixture of fake and genuine documents. Among them was an authentic telex dated February 1, 1999, in which Adamou Chekou, the ambassador from Niger, wrote another official about a forthcoming visit from Wissam al-Zahawie, Iraq's ambassador to the Vatican.
The last one Martino says he received, and the most important one, was not genuine, however. Dated July 27, 2000, it was a two-page memo purportedly sent to the president of Niger concerning the sale of 500 tons of pure uranium per year by Niger to Iraq.
The forged documents were full of errors. A letter dated October 10, 2000, was signed by Minister of Foreign Affairs Allele Elhadj Habibou - even though he had been out of office for more than a decade. Its September 28 postmark indicated that somehow the letter had been received nearly two weeks before it was sent.
In another letter, President Tandja Mamadou's signature appeared to be phony. The accord signed by him referred to the Niger constitution of May 12, 1965, when a new constitution had been enacted in 1999. One of the letters was dated July 30, 1999, but referred to agreements that were not made until a year later. Finally, the agreement called for the 500 tons of uranium to be transferred from one ship to another in international waters - a spectacularly difficult feat.
Martino, however, says he was unaware that they were forgeries. He was merely interested in a payday. "He was not looking for great amounts of money - $10,000, $20,000, maybe $40,000," says Carlo Bonini, who co-authored the Nigergate stories for La Repubblica.
SISMI director Nicolo Pollari acknowledges that Martino has worked for Italian intelligence. But, beyond that, he claims that Italian intelligence played no role in the Niger operation. "[Nucera] offered [Martino] the use of an intelligence asset [La Signora] - no big deal, you understand& - one who was still on the books but inactive - to give a hand to Martino," Pollari told a reporter.
Rocco Martino, however, said SISMI had another agenda: "SISMI wanted me to pass on the documents, but they didn't want anyone to know they had been involved."
The Cutout
Whom should we believe? Characterized by La Repubblica as "a failed carabiniere and dishonest spy," a "double-dealer" who "plays every side of the fence," Martino has reportedly been arrested for extortion and for possession of stolen checks, and was fired by SISMI in 1999 for "conduct unbecoming." Elsewhere he has been described as "a trickster" and "a rogue." He is a man who traffics in deception.
On the other hand, operatives like Martino are highly valued precisely because they can be discredited so easily. "If there were a deep-cover unit of SISMI, it would make sense to use someone like Rocco," says Patrick Lang. "His flakiness gives SISMI plausible deniability. It's their cover story. That's standard tradecraft with the agencies."
In other words, Rocco Martino may well have been the cutout for SISMI, a postman who, if he dared to go public, could be disavowed.
Martino, who is the subject of a recently reopened investigation by the public prosecutor in Rome, has declined to talk to the press in recent months. But before going silent, he gave interviews to Italian, British, and American journalists characterizing himself as a pawn who distributed the documents on behalf of SISMI and believed that they were authentic. "I sell information, I admit," Martino told The Sunday Times of London, using his pseudonym, Giacomo. "But I sell only good information."
Over the next two years, the Niger documents and reports based on them made at least three journeys to the C.I.A. They also found their way to the U.S. Embassy in Rome, to the White House, to British intelligence, to French intelligence, and to Elisabetta Burba, a journalist at Panorama, the Milan-based newsmagazine. Each of these recipients in turn shared the documents or their contents with others, in effect creating an echo chamber that gave the illusion that several independent sources had corroborated an Iraq-Niger uranium deal.
"It was the Italians and Americans together who were behind it. It was all a disinformation operation," Martino told a reporter at England's Guardian newspaper. He called himself "a tool used by someone for games much bigger than me."
What exactly might those games have been? Berlusconi defined his role on the world stage largely in terms of his relationship with the U.S., and he jumped at the chance to forge closer ties with the White House when Bush took office, in 2001. In its three-part series on Nigergate, La Repubblica charges that Berlusconi was so eager to win Bush's favor that he "instructed Italian Military Intelligence to plant the evidence implicating Saddam in a bogus uranium deal with Niger." (The Berlusconi government, which lost power in April, denied the charge.)
Because the Niger break-in happened before Bush took office, La Repubblica and many others assume that the robbery was initiated as a small-time job. "When the story began, they were not thinking about Iraq," says La Repubblica's Bonini. "They were just trying to gather something that could be sold on the black market to the intelligence community."
But it is also possible that from its very inception the Niger operation was aimed at starting an invasion of Iraq.
As early as 1992, neoconservative hawks in the administration of George H. W. Bush, under the aegis of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, unsuccessfully lobbied for regime change in Iraq as part of a grandiose vision for American supremacy in the next century.
During the Clinton era, the neocons persisted with their policy goals, and in early 1998 they twice lobbied President Clinton to bring down Saddam. The second attempt came in the form of "An Open Letter to the President" by leading neoconservatives, many of whom later played key roles in the Bush administration, where they became known as the Vulcans. Among those who signed were Michael Ledeen, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and David Wurmser.
According to Patrick Lang, the initial Niger Embassy robbery could have been aimed at starting the war even though Bush had yet to be inaugurated. The scenario, he cautions, is merely speculation on his part. But he says that the neocons wouldn't have hesitated to reach out to SISMI even before Bush took office.
"There's no doubt in my mind that the neocons had their eye on Iraq," he says. "This is something they intended to do, and they would have communicated that to SISMI or anybody else to get the help they wanted."
In Lang's view, SISMI would also have wanted to ingratiate itself with the incoming administration. "These foreign intelligence agencies are so dependent on us that the urge to acquire I.O.U.'s is a powerful incentive by itself," he says. "It would have been very easy to have someone go to Rome and talk to them, or have one of the SISMI guys here [in Washington], perhaps the SISMI officer in the Italian Embassy, talk to them."
Lang's scenario rings true to Frank Brodhead. "When I read that the Niger break-in took place before Bush took office, I immediately thought back to the Bulgarian Connection," he says. "That job was done during the transition as well. [Michael] Ledeen saw himself as making a serious contribution to the Cold War through the Bulgarian Connection. Now, it was possible, 20 years later, that he was doing the same to start the war in Iraq."
Brodhead is not alone. Several press outlets, including the San Francisco Chronicle, United Press International, and The American Conservative, as well as a chorus of bloggers - Daily Kos, the Left Coaster, and Raw Story among them - have raised the question of whether Ledeen was involved with the Niger documents. But none have found any hard evidence.
An Absurd Idea
Early in the summer of 2001, about six months after the break-in, information from the forged documents was given to U.S. intelligence for the first time. Details about the transfer are extremely sketchy, but it is highly probable that the reports were summaries of the documents. It is standard practice for intelligence services, in the interests of protecting sources, to share reports, rather than original documents, with allies.
To many W.M.D. analysts in the C.I.A. and the military, the initial reports sounded ridiculous. "The idea that you could get that much yellowcake out of Niger without the French knowing, that you could have a train big enough to carry it, much less a ship, is absurd," says Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff.
"The reports made no sense on the face of it," says Ray McGovern, the former C.I.A. analyst, who challenged Rumsfeld about the war at a public event this spring. "Most of us knew the Iraqis already had yellowcake. It is a sophisticated process to change it into a very refined state and they didn't have the technology."
"Yellowcake is unprocessed bulk ore," explains Karen Kwiatkowski, who has written extensively about the intelligence fiasco that led to the war. "If Saddam wanted to make nuclear bombs, why would he want unprocessed ore when the best thing to do would be to get processed stuff in the Congo?"
"When it comes to raw reports, all manner of crap comes out of the field," McGovern adds. "The C.I.A. traditionally has had experienced officers. They are qualified to see if these reports make sense. For some reason, perhaps out of cowardice, these reports were judged to be of such potential significance that no one wanted to sit on it."
Since Niger was a former French colony, French intelligence was the logical choice to vet the allegations. "The French were managing partners of the international consortium in Niger," explains Joseph Wilson, who eventually traveled to Niger to investigate the uranium claim. "The French did the actual mining and shipping of it."
So Alain Chouet, then head of security intelligence for France's D.G.S.E., was tasked with checking out the first Niger report for the C.I.A. He recalls that much of the information he received from Langley was vague, with the exception of one striking detail. The agency had heard that in 1999 the Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican, Wissam al-Zahawie, had made an unusual visit to four African countries, including Niger. Analysts feared that the trip may have been a prelude to a uranium deal.
Chouet soon found that the al-Zahawie visit was no secret. It had been covered by the local press in Niger at the time, and reports had surfaced in French, British, and American intelligence. Chouet had a 700-man unit at his command, and he ordered an extensive on-the-ground investigation in Niger.
"In France, we've always been very careful about both problems of uranium production in Niger and Iraqi attempts to get uranium," Chouet told the Los Angeles Times last December. Having concluded that nothing had come of al-Zahawie's visit and that there was no evidence of a uranium deal, French intelligence forwarded its assessment to the C.I.A. But the Niger affair had just begun.
Into Overdrive
A few weeks later, on September 11, 2001, terrorists struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The neocons had long said that they needed another Pearl Harbor in order to realize their dreams of regime change in Iraq. Now it had taken place. According to Bob Woodward's Bush at War, C.I.A. director George Tenet reported to the White House within hours that Osama bin Laden was behind the attack. But by midday Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had already raised the question of attacking Saddam.
Likewise, four days later, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz advised President Bush not to bother going after Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan but to train American guns on Iraq instead.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Bush's approval ratings soared to 90 percent, the all-time high for any U.S. president. This was the perfect opportunity to go after Saddam, except for one thing: the available intelligence did not support the action. Ten days after the attacks, Bush was told in a classified briefing that there was no credible evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.
How the Niger operation went into overdrive
The details of how this happened are murky. Accounts from usually reputable newspapers, the United States Senate Intelligence Committee, and other sources are wildly at variance with one another.
In October 2001, SISMI, which had already sent reports about the alleged Niger deal to French intelligence, finally had them forwarded to British and U.S. intelligence. The exact dates of the distribution are unclear, but, according to the British daily The Independent, SISMI sent the dossier to the Vauxhall Cross headquarters of M.I.6, in South London. The delivery might have been made, Italian reports say, by Rocco Martino. At roughly the same time, in early October, according to La Repubblica, SISMI also gave a report about the Niger deal to Jeff Castelli, the C.I.A. station chief in Rome. According to a recent broadcast by CBS's 60 Minutes, C.I.A. analysts who saw the material were skeptical.
In addition, on October 15, 2001, Nicolo Pollari, the newly appointed chief of SISMI, made his first visit to his counterparts at the C.I.A. Under pressure from Berlusconi to turn over information that would be useful for America's Iraq-war policy, Pollari met "with top C.I.A. officials to provide a SISMI dossier indicating that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Niger," according to an article by Philip Giraldi in The American Conservative.
According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the analysts saw Pollari's report as "very limited and lacking needed detail." Nevertheless, the State Department had the U.S. Embassy in Niger check out the alleged uranium deal. On November 20, 2001, the U.S. Embassy in Niamey, the capital of Niger, sent a cable reporting that the director general of Niger's French-led consortium had told the American ambassador that "there was no possibility" that the African nation had diverted any yellowcake to Iraq.
In December 2001, Greg Thielmann, director for strategic proliferation and military affairs at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), reviewed Iraq's W.M.D. program for Colin Powell. As for the Niger report, Thielmann said, "A whole lot of things told us that the report was bogus. This wasn't highly contested. There weren't strong advocates on the other side. It was done, shot down."
"Faster, Please"
Michael Ledeen waves an unlit cigar as he welcomes me into his 11th-floor office at the American Enterprise Institute, in Washington. Home to Irving Kristol, Lynne Cheney, Richard Perle, and countless other stars in the neocon firmament, the A.E.I. is one of the most powerful think tanks in the country. It has sent more than two dozen of its alumni to the Bush administration.
After 17 years at the A.E.I., Ledeen is the institute's Freedom Scholar and rates a corner office decorated with prints of the Colosseum in Rome, the Duomo in Florence, and other mementos of his days in Italy. Having served as a consultant at the Pentagon and the State Department and on the National Security Council, Ledeen relishes playing the role of the intriguer. In the Iran-contra scandal, Ledeen won notoriety for introducing Oliver North to his friend the Iranian arms dealer and con man Manucher Ghorbanifar, who was labeled "an intelligence fabricator" by the C.I.A.
Ledeen has made his share of enemies along the way, especially at the C.I.A. According to Larry Johnson, "The C.I.A. viewed Ledeen as a meddlesome troublemaker who usually got it wrong and was allied with people who were dangerous to the U.S., such as Ghorbanifar."
Apprised of such views, Ledeen, no fan of the C.I.A., responds, "Oh, that's a shock. Ghorbanifar over the years has been one of the most accurate sources of understanding what is going on in Iran. I have always thought the C.I.A. made a big mistake."
Bearded and balding, the 65-year-old Ledeen makes for an unlikely 007. On the one hand, he can be self-deprecating, describing himself as "powerless and, well, schlumpy." On the other, one of his bios grandiosely proclaims that he has executed "the most sensitive and dangerous missions in recent American history."
Ledeen props his feet up on his desk next to an icon of villainy - a mask of Darth Vader. "I'm tired of being described as someone who likes Fascism and is a warmonger," he says. "I've said it over and over again. I'm not the person you think you are looking for. I think it's obvious I have no clout in the administration. I haven't had a role. I don't have a role." He barely knows Karl Rove, he says. He has "very occasionally" had discussions with Cheney's office. And he denies reports that he was a consultant for Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans, the division of the Pentagon that was famous for cherry-picking and "stovepiping" intelligence that suited its policy of invading Iraq. "I have had no professional relationship with any agency of the federal government during the Bush Administration," Ledeen later clarifies via e-mail. "That includes the Pentagon."
However, there is considerable evidence that Ledeen has had far more access than he lets on to the highest levels of the Bush administration. Even before Bush took office, Rove asked Ledeen to funnel ideas to the White House. According to The Washington Post, some of Ledeen's ideas became "official policy or rhetoric."
As for Ledeen's role in the Office of Special Plans, Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the Pentagon during the run-up to the Iraq war, has described Ledeen as Feith's collaborator and said in an e-mail that he "was in and out of there (OSP) all the time."
Through his ties to Rove and Deputy National-Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Michael Ledeen was also wired into the White House Iraq Group, which was charged with marketing an invasion of Iraq.
Ledeen claims, as he told the Web site Raw Story, that he had strongly advised against the plan, saying that the invasion of Iraq was the "wrong war, wrong time, wrong way, wrong place." But the truth is somewhat more complicated. Ledeen had urged regime change in Iraq since 1998, and just four hours after the 9/11 attacks he posted an article on the National Review Web site urging Bush to take "the fight directly to Saddam on his own territory."
But to Ledeen, Iraq was just one part of a larger war. As he later told a seminar, "All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq that is entirely the wrong way to go about it." He urged Americans not to try to "piece together clever diplomatic solutions to this thing, but just wage a total war against these tyrants."
In January 2003, two months before the war started, he wrote, "If we were serious about waging this war, we would, at an absolute minimum, support the Iranian people's brave campaign against their tyrants and recognize an Iraqi government in exile in the 'no fly' zones we control. If we don't, we may well find ourselves facing a far bigger problem than Saddam alone."
Ledeen repeatedly urged war or destabilization not just in Iraq but also in Iran, Syria, Lebanon, even Saudi Arabia. "One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please," he wrote. "Faster, please" became his mantra, repeated incessantly in his National Review columns.
Rhapsodizing about war week after week, Ledeen became chief rhetorician for neoconservative visionaries who wanted to remake the Middle East. "Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad," he wrote after the attacks. "We must destroy [our enemies] to advance our historic mission."
The U.S. must be "imperious, ruthless, and relentless," he argued, until there has been "total surrender" by the Muslim world. "We must keep our fangs bared," he wrote, "we must remind them daily that we Americans are in a rage, and we will not rest until we have avenged our dead, we will not be sated until we have had the blood of every miserable little tyrant in the Middle East, until every leader of every cell of the terror network is dead or locked securely away, and every last drooling anti-Semitic and anti-American mullah, imam, sheikh, and ayatollah is either singing the praises of the United States of America, or pumping gasoline, for a dime a gallon, on an American military base near the Arctic Circle."
"An Old Friend of Italy"
As 2001 drew to a close, such positions seemed decidedly outside the mainstream. Career military and intelligence professionals saw the relatively moderate Colin Powell and George Tenet, a Clinton appointee, reassuringly ensconced as secretary of state and director of central intelligence, respectively. "George Tenet had been there for a number of years," says Larry Wilkerson. "He knew what he was doing. He was a professional. What did he have to do with Douglas Feith? It didn't seem possible that someone like Douglas Feith could exercise such influence." But a schism was growing between the cautious realism of analysts in the C.I.A. and the State Department, on one side, and the hawkish ambitions of Dick Cheney and the Pentagon, on the other.
As for Ledeen, how much clout he carried with the administration is a matter of debate. But one measure of his influence may be a series of secret meetings he set up - with Hadley's approval, he claims - in Rome in the second week of December 2001. During these meetings, Ghorbanifar introduced American officials to other Iranians who passed on information about their government's plans to target U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. Among those in attendance were Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin of the Office of Special Plans. (In a separate matter, Franklin has since pleaded guilty to passing secrets to Israel and been sentenced to 12 years in prison.) "That information saved American lives in Afghanistan," Ledeen asserts.
But other accounts suggest that Ledeen may have used his time in Italy to reactivate old friendships that played a role in the Niger affair.
According to La Repubblica, Nicolo Pollari had become frustrated by the C.I.A.'s refusal to let SISMI deliver a smoking gun that would justify an invasion of Iraq. At an unspecified date, he discussed the issue with Ledeen's longtime friend Minister of Defense Antonio Martino. Martino, the paper reported, told Pollari to expect a visit from "an old friend of Italy," namely Ledeen. Soon afterward, according to La Repubblica, Pollari allegedly took up the Niger matter with Ledeen when he was in Rome. Ledeen denies having had any such conversations. Pollari declined to be interviewed by Vanity Fair, and has denied playing any role in the Niger affair. Martino has declined to comment.
By early 2002, career military and intelligence professionals had seen the Niger reports repeatedly discredited, and assumed that the issue was dead. But that was not the case.
"These guys in the Office of Special Plans delighted in telling people, 'You don't understand your own data,'" says Patrick Lang. "'We know that Saddam is evil and deceptive, and if you see this piece of data, to say just because it is not well supported it's not true is to be politically naive.'"
Not everybody in the C.I.A. was of one mind with regard to the alleged Niger deal. As the Senate Intelligence Committee report points out, some analysts at the C.I.A. and other agencies considered the Niger deal to be "possible." In the fall of 2002, the C.I.A. approved language referring to the Niger deal in one speech by the president but vetoed it in another. And in December 2002, analysts at WINPAC, the C.I.A.'s center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control, produced a paper that chided Iraq for not acknowledging its "efforts to procure uranium from Niger."
Nevertheless, the C.I.A. had enough doubts about the Niger claims to initially leave them out of the President's Daily Brief (P.D.B.), the intelligence updates given each morning to President Bush.
On February 5, 2002, however, for reasons that remain unclear, the C.I.A. issued a new report on the alleged Niger deal, one that provided significantly more detail, including what was said to be "verbatim text" of the accord between Niger and Iraq. In the State Department, analysts were still suspicious of the reports. But in the Pentagon, the Vulcans pounced on the new material. On February 12, the D.I.A. issued "a finished intelligence product," titled "Niamey Signed an Agreement to Sell 500 Tons of Uranium a Year to Baghdad," and passed it to the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.
Cheney gave the Niger claims new life. "The [C.I.A.] briefer came in. Cheney said, 'What about this?,' and the briefer hadn't heard one word, because no one in the agency thought it was of any significance," says Ray McGovern, whose job at the C.I.A. included preparing and delivering the P.D.B. in the Reagan era. "But when a briefer gets a request from the vice president of the United States, he goes back and leaves no stone unturned."
The C.I.A.'s Directorate of Operations, the branch responsible for the clandestine collection of foreign intelligence, immediately tasked its Counterproliferation Division (CPD) with getting more information. According to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report, just hours after Dick Cheney had gotten the Niger report, Valerie Plame, who worked in the CPD, wrote a memo to the division's deputy chief that read, "My husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity."
Her husband, as the world now knows, was Joseph Wilson, who had served as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and as ambassador to Gabon under George H. W. Bush. Wilson approached the task with a healthy skepticism. "The office of the vice president had asked me to check this out," Wilson told Vanity Fair. "My skepticism was the same as it would have been with any unverified intelligence report, because there is a lot of stuff that comes over the transom every day."
He arrived in Niger on February 26, 2002. "Niger has a simplistic government structure," he says. "Both the minister of mines and the prime minister had gone through the mines. The French were managing partners of the international consortium. The French mining company actually had its hands on the product. Nobody else in the consortium had operators on the ground."
In addition, Wilson personally knew Wissam al-Zahawie, the Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican, whose visit to Niger had raised suspicions. "Wissam al-Zahawie was a world-class opera singer, and he went to the Vatican as his last post so he could be near the great European opera houses in Rome," says Wilson. "He was not in the Ba'thist inner circle. He was not in Saddam's tribe. The idea that he would be entrusted with this super-secret mission to buy 500 tons of uranium from Niger is out of the question."
On March 1, the State Department weighed in with another cable, headed "Sale of Niger Uranium to Iraq Unlikely." Citing "unequivocal" control of the mines, the cable asserted that President Tandja of Niger would not want to risk good relations with the U.S. by trading with Iraq, and cited the prohibitive logistical problems in such a transaction.
A few days later, Wilson returned from Niger and told C.I.A. officials that he had found no evidence to support the uranium charges. By now the Niger reports had been discredited more than half a dozen times - by the French in 2001, by the C.I.A. in Rome and in Langley, by the State Department's INR, by some analysts in the Pentagon, by the ambassador to Niger, by Wilson, and yet again by State.
But the top brass at the C.I.A. knew what Cheney wanted.
They went back to French intelligence again - twice.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the second request that year, in mid-2002, "was more urgent and more specific." The C.I.A. sought confirmation of the alleged agreement by Niger to sell 500 tons of yellowcake to Iraq. Alain Chouet reportedly sent five or six men to Niger and again found the charges to be false. Then his staff noticed that the allegations matched those brought to him by Rocco Martino. "We told the Americans, 'Bullshit. It doesn't make any sense.'"
The Marketing Campaign
Until this point, the American people had been largely oblivious to the Bush administration's emerging policy toward Iraq. But in August 2002, just as Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans formally set up shop in the Pentagon, White House chief of staff Andrew Card launched the White House Iraq Group to sell the war through the media. The plan was to open a full-fledged marketing campaign after Labor Day, featuring images of nuclear devastation and threats of biological and chemical weapons. A key piece of the evidence was the Niger dossier.
Test-marketing began in August, with Cheney and his surrogates asserting repeatedly that "many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon." Making Cheney seem moderate by comparison, a piece by Ledeen appeared in The Wall Street Journal on September 4, suggesting that, in addition to Iraq, the governments of Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia should be overthrown.
But the real push was delayed until the second week of September. As Card famously put it, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." The first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was perfect.
The opening salvo was fired on Sunday, September 8, 2002, when National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told CNN, "There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
The smoking-gun-mushroom-cloud catchphrase was such a hit that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld all picked it up in one form or another, sending it out repeatedly to the entire country.
Meanwhile, the C.I.A. had finally penetrated Saddam's inner sanctum by "turning" Foreign Minister Naji Sabri. Tenet delivered the news personally to Bush, Cheney, and other top officials in September 2002. Initially, the White House was ecstatic about this coup.
But, according to Tyler Drumheller, the C.I.A.'s chief of operations in Europe until he retired last year, that reaction changed dramatically when they heard what Sabri had to say. "He told us that they had no active weapons-of-mass-destruction program," Drumheller told 60 Minutes. "The [White House] group that was dealing with the preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer interested. And we said, 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said, 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change.'"
At roughly the same time, highly placed White House sources such as Scooter Libby leaked exclusive "scoops" to credulous reporters as part of the campaign to make Saddam's nuclear threat seem real. On the same day the "mushroom cloud" slogan made its debut, The New York Times printed a front-page story by Michael Gordon and Judith Miller citing administration officials who said that Saddam had "embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb." Specifically, the article contended that Iraq "has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium."
The next day, September 9, the White House received a visitor who should have known exactly what the tubes were for - Nicolo Pollari. As it happens, the Italians used the same tubes Iraq was seeking in their Medusa air-to-ground missile systems, so Pollari presumably knew that Iraq was not trying to enrich uranium but merely attempting to reproduce weaponry dating back to an era of military trade between Rome and Baghdad. As La Repubblica pointed out, however, he did not set the record straight.
Pollari met with Stephen Hadley, an understated but resolute hawk who has since replaced Condoleezza Rice as national-security adviser. Hadley has confirmed that he met Pollari, but declined to say what was discussed. "It was a courtesy call," Hadley told reporters. "Nobody participating in that meeting or asked about that meeting has any recollection of a discussion of natural uranium, or any recollection of any documents being passed."
But there was no need to pass documents. It was significant enough for Pollari to have met with Hadley, a White House official allied with Cheney's hard-liners, rather than with Pollari's American counterpart, George Tenet.
"It is completely out of protocol for the head of a foreign intelligence service to circumvent the C.I.A.," says former C.I.A. officer Philip Giraldi. "It is uniquely unusual. In spite of lots of people having seen these documents, and having said they were not right, they went around them."
"To me there is no benign interpretation of this," says Melvin Goodman, the former C.I.A. and State Department analyst. "At the highest level it was known the documents were forgeries. Stephen Hadley knew it. Condi Rice knew it. Everyone at the highest level knew." Both Rice and Hadley have declined to comment.
Michael Ledeen, who had access to both Pollari and Hadley, categorically denies setting up the meeting: "I had nothing to do with it." A former senior intelligence official close to Tenet says that the former C.I.A. chief had no information suggesting that Pollari or elements of SISMI may have been trying to circumvent the C.I.A. and go directly to the White House.
But the Niger documents had been resurrected once again. Two days later, on September 11, 2002, the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks, Hadley's office asked the C.I.A. to clear language so that President Bush could issue a statement saying, "Within the past few years, Iraq has resumed efforts to purchase large quantities of a type of uranium oxide known as yellowcake. The regime was caught trying to purchase 500 metric tons of this material. It takes about 10 tons to produce enough enriched uranium for a single nuclear weapon."
In addition, in a new paper that month, the D.I.A. issued an assessment claiming that "Iraq has been vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake."
Later that month, the British published a 50-page, 14-point report on Iraq's pursuit of weapons that said, "There is intelligence that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
"When you are playing a disinformation operation," says Milt Bearden, "you're like a conductor who can single out one note in the symphony and say, 'Let the Brits have that.'"
On September 24, Prime Minister Tony Blair cited that "dossier of death" and asserted again that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from Africa. "The reports in [the Niger file] were going around the world, and Bush and Blair were talking about the documents without actually mentioning them," Rocco Martino told Milan's Il Giornale. "I turned the television on and I did not believe my ears."
Now it was time for the international media to chime in with independent corroboration. In early October 2002, Martino approached Elisabetta Burba, a journalist at Panorama, the Milan-based newsmagazine. Burba and Martino had worked together in the past, but there may have been other reasons he went to her again. Owned by Silvio Berlusconi, Panorama was edited by Carlo Rossella, a close ally of the prime minister's. It also counted among its contributors Michael Ledeen.
Martino told Burba he had something truly explosive-documents that proved Saddam was buying yellowcake from Niger. Burba was intrigued, but skeptical. She agreed to pay just over 10,000 euros-about $12,500-on one condition: Martino would get paid only after his dossier had been corroborated by independent authorities. Martino gave her the documents.
When Burba told Rossella of her concerns about the authenticity of the Niger documents, he sent her to Africa to investigate. But he also insisted that she give copies to the U.S. Embassy. "I think the Americans are very interested in this problem of unconventional weapons," Rossella told her.
On October 17, Burba flew to Niger. Once there, she discovered for herself how difficult it would be to ship 500 tons of uranium out of Africa. By the time she returned, she believed the real story was not about Saddam's secret nuclear-weapons program at all, but about whether someone had forged the documents to fabricate a rationale for invading Iraq. But when she reported her findings to Rossella, he called her off. "I told her to forget the documents," he told Vanity Fair. "From my point of view, the story was over."
Now, however, thanks to Panorama, the U.S. had received copies of the Niger documents. They were quickly disseminated to the C.I.A. station chief in Rome, who recognized them as the same old story the Italians had been pushing months before, and to nuclear experts at the D.I.A., the Energy Department, and the N.S.A.
The State Department had already twice cast doubt on the reports of the sale of uranium to Iraq. In the fall, Wayne White, who served as the deputy director of the State Department's intelligence unit and was the principal Iraq analyst, reviewed the papers themselves. According to The Boston Globe, he said that after a 15-minute review he doubted their authenticity.
"Stick That Baby in There"
In early October, Bush was scheduled to give a major address on Iraq in Cincinnati. A few days earlier, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, the N.S.C. sent the C.I.A. a draft which asserted that Saddam "has been caught attempting to purchase up to 500 metric tons of uranium oxide from Africa-an essential ingredient in the enrichment process."
The C.I.A. faxed a memo to Hadley and the speechwriters telling them to delete the sentence on uranium, "because the amount is in dispute and it is debatable whether it can be acquired from the source. We told Congress that the Brits have exaggerated this issue. Finally, the Iraqis already have 550 metric tons of uranium oxide in their inventory." Iraq's supply of yellowcake dated back to the 1980s, when it had imported hundreds of tons of uranium ore from Niger and mined the rest itself. The C.I.A. felt that if Saddam was trying to revive his nuclear program he would be more likely to use his own stockpile than risk exposure in an illegal international deal.
But the White House refused to let go. Later that day, Hadley's staff sent over another draft of the Cincinnati speech, which stated, "The regime has been caught attempting to purchase substantial amounts of uranium oxide from sources in Africa."
This time, George Tenet himself interceded to keep the president from making false statements. According to his Senate testimony, he told Hadley that the "president should not be a fact witness on this issue," because the "reporting was weak." The C.I.A. even put it in writing and faxed it to the N.S.C.
he neocons were not done yet, however. "That was their favorite technique," says Larry Wilkerson, "stick that baby in there 47 times and on the 47th time it will stay. At every level of the decision-making process you had to have your ax out, ready to chop their fingers off. Sooner or later you would miss one and it would get in there."
For the next two months, December 2002 and January 2003, references to the uranium deal resurfaced again and again in "fact sheets," talking-point memos, and speeches. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice all declared publicly that Iraq had been caught trying to buy uranium from Niger. On December 19, the claim reappeared on a fact sheet published by the State Department. The bureaucratic battle was unending. In light of the many differing viewpoints, the Pentagon asked the National Intelligence Council, the body that oversees the 15 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community, to resolve the matter. According to The Washington Post, in a January 2003 memo the council replied unequivocally that "the Niger story was baseless and should be laid to rest." The memo went immediately to Bush and his advisers.
Nevertheless, on January 20, with war imminent, President Bush submitted a report to Congress citing Iraq's attempts "to acquire uranium and the means to enrich it."
At an N.S.C. meeting on January 27, 2003, George Tenet was given a hard-copy draft of the State of the Union address. Bush was to deliver it the next day. Acutely aware of the ongoing intelligence wars, Tenet was caught between the hard-liners in the White House, to whom he reported, and the C.I.A., whose integrity he was duty-bound to uphold. That day, he returned to C.I.A. headquarters and, without even reading the speech, gave a copy to an assistant who was told to deliver it to the deputy director for intelligence. But, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, no one in the D.D.I.'s office recalls receiving the speech.
A State of the Union address that was a call for war, that desperately needed to be vetted, had been misplaced and gone unread. "It is inconceivable to me that George Tenet didn't read that speech," says Milt Bearden. "At that point, he was effectively no longer D.C.I. [director of central intelligence]. He was part of that cabal, and no longer able to carry an honest message."
In an e-mail, a former intelligence official close to Tenet said the charge that Tenet was "part of a 'cabal' is absurd." The official added, "Mr. Tenet was unaware of attempts to put the Niger information in the State of the Union speech. Had he been aware, he would have vigorously tried to have it removed."
The next day, despite countless objections from the C.I.A. and other agencies, Bush cited the charges from the fraudulent Niger documents in his speech. Later that year, Stephen Hadley accepted responsibility for allowing the sentence to remain in the speech. He said he had failed to remember the warnings he'd received about the allegations.
Blaming the C.I.A.
In last-minute negotiations between the White House and the C.I.A., a decision was made to attribute the alleged Niger uranium deal to British intelligence. The official reason was that it was preferable to cite British intelligence, which Blair had championed in his 50-page report, rather than classified American intelligence. But the C.I.A. had told the White House again and again that it didn't trust the British reports.
The British, meanwhile, have repeatedly claimed to have other sources, but they have refused to identify them. According to Joseph Wilson, that refusal is a violation of the U.N. resolution stipulating that member states must share with the International Atomic Energy Agency all information they have on prohibited nuclear programs in Iraq. "The British say they cannot share the information, because it comes from a third-country intelligence source," says Wilson. "But that third country is presumably a member of the United Nations, and it too should comply with Article 10 of United Nations Resolution 1441." So far, Wilson says, no evidence of a third country has come to light.
A week after Bush's speech, on February 4, the Bush administration finally forwarded electronic copies of the Niger documents to the I.A.E.A. Astonishingly, a note was attached to the documents which said, "We cannot confirm these reports and have questions regarding some specific claims."
On March 7, the I.A.E.A. publicly exposed the Niger documents as forgeries. Not long afterward, Cheney was asked about it on Meet the Press. He said that the I.A.E.A. was wrong, that it had "consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing." He added, "We know [Saddam] has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."
On March 14, Senator Jay Rockefeller IV, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote a letter to F.B.I. chief Robert Mueller asking for an investigation because "the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq." But Senator Pat Roberts, of Kansas, the Republican chair of the committee, declined to co-sign the letter.
Then, on March 19, 2003, the war in Iraq began.
On July 11, 2003, faced with public pressure to investigate the forgeries, Roberts issued a statement blaming the C.I.A. and defending the White House. "So far, I am very disturbed by what appears to be extremely sloppy handling of the issue from the outset by the C.I.A.," he said.
Under Roberts's aegis, the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the Niger affair and came to some extraordinary conclusions. "At the time the President delivered the State of the Union address, no one in the IC [intelligence community] had asked anyone in the White House to remove the sentence from the speech," read the report. It added that "CIA Iraq nuclear analysts ... told Committee staff that at the time of the State of the Union, they still believed that Iraq was probably seeking uranium from Africa."
In November 2005, Rockefeller and Democratic senator Harry Reid staged a dramatic shutdown of the Senate and challenged Roberts to get to the bottom of the forgeries. "The fact is that at any time the Senate Intelligence Committee pursued a line of questioning that brought us close to the White House, our efforts were thwarted," Rockefeller said.
So far, the Republican-controlled Senate committee has failed to produce a more extensive report.
An Even Bigger Mistake
For his part, Michael Ledeen thinks all the interest in the Niger documents and Bush's famous 16 words is overblown. "I don't want my government's decisions based on falsehoods," he says. "But the president referred to British intelligence. So far as I've read about it, that statement is true."
Ledeen categorically asserts that he couldn't have orchestrated the Niger operation, because he disagreed so strongly with the administration's policy. "I thought it was wrong to do Iraq militarily," he says. "Before we went into Iraq, I said that anyone who thinks we can march into Iraq, overthrow Saddam, and then have peace is crazy. I thought it was a mistake at the time, and the way they did it." He adds, "Let's get real. This is politics. People in office do not like people who criticize them."
It is unclear how these assertions square with the widespread reports that Ledeen was tightly wired into the neocons in the administration; with his long history of ties to SISMI, as reported by The Wall Street Journal and the court records from the trial of Francesco Pazienza; and with Ledeen's own pro-war writings.
Despite all the speculation, there are no fingerprints connecting Ledeen to the Niger documents. Even his fiercest adversaries will concede this. "In talking to hundreds of people, no one has given us a hint linking Ledeen to the Niger documents," says Carlo Bonini of La Repubblica, which is facing a defamation suit by Ledeen in Italy.
It is also unclear what, if anything, the Italians may have received for their alleged participation in Nigergate. In 2005, a consortium led by Finmeccanica, the Italian arms company, and Lockheed Martin unexpectedly beat out U.S.-owned Sikorsky to win a contract to build presidential helicopters. Some saw the contract, worth as much as $6.1 billion, as a reward to Berlusconi for helping Bush on Iraq.
Regardless of who fabricated the Niger documents, it is difficult to overstate the impact of the war they helped ignite. By May 18, 2006, the number of American fatalities was 2,448, while various methods of tracking American casualties put the number of wounded at between 18,000 and 48,000. At least 35,000 Iraqis have been killed. A new study by Columbia University economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001, and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes concludes that the total costs of the Iraq war could top $2 trillion. That figure includes the long-term health-care costs for injured soldiers, the cost of higher oil prices, and a bigger U.S. budget deficit.
But the most important consequence of the Iraq war is its destabilization of the Middle East. If neoconservatives such as Ledeen and their critics agree on anything, it is that so far there has been only one real winner in the Iraq conflict: the fundamentalist mullahs in Iran. For decades, the two big threats in the Middle East-Iran and Iraq-had counterbalanced each other in a standoff that neutralized both. Yet the Bush administration, despite having declared Iran a member of the Axis of Evil, proceeded to attack its two biggest enemies, Afghanistan and Iraq. "Iran is unquestionably the biggest beneficiary of the war in Iraq," says Milt Bearden.
Perhaps it is not surprising that the Bush administration is now rattling its sabers against Iran, which has been flexing its muscles with a new nuclear program. As a result, according to a Zogby poll in May, 66 percent of Americans now see Iran as a threat to the U.S. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national-security adviser to President Carter, has argued that starting the Iraq war was a catastrophic strategic blunder, and that taking military action against Iran may be an even bigger mistake. "I think of war with Iran as the ending of America's present role in the world," he told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. "Iraq may have been a preview of that, but it's still redeemable if we get out fast. In a war with Iran, we'll get dragged down for 20 or 30 years. The world will condemn us. We will lose our position in the world."
To Michael Ledeen, however, Iran's ascendancy is just one more reason to expand the Iraq war to the "terror masters" of the Middle East. "I keep saying it over and over again to the point where I myself am bored," he says. "I have been screaming 'Iran, Iran, Iran, Iran' for five years. [Those in the Bush administration] don't have an Iran policy. Still don't have one. They haven't done fuck-all."
This is Craig Unger's third article for Vanity Fair. He is currently working on a book based on his article "American Rapture," which appeared in the December 2005 issue.
[ Original ]
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Editorial: Recipe for War: Israeli Hysteria and Imperial Logic
by James Brooks
www.dissidentvoice.org
June 6, 2006
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
-- Voltaire
The Bush administration's agreement to join international talks with Iran has been hailed as a bright hope for a peaceful resolution of the engineered crisis in the Persian Gulf.
But the agreement carries a poison pill; Iran must subject its legal rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to negotiation, something it has sworn never to do again. Washington is telling Tehran to surrender its main point before it sits down to the negotiating table.
It's simply another move in the effort to establish a great power consensus against uranium enrichment in Iran, which the Bush administration hopes to use as an excuse for war, much as it used UN Security Council Resolution 1441 as a fig-leaf for its illegal invasion of Iraq.
The poison pill should protect the US from the threat of serious talks by forcing Tehran to reject a "generous package" of international incentives, which should make it more difficult for Moscow and Beijing to exit the "international consensus" that Washington has already declared.
More evidence that the US change of heart is nothing of the sort emerged with the news that it was all pre-approved by the Israeli government. Bush and Rice had consulted separately with Israeli PM Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. Both Israelis said they were in "complete agreement" with US plans for Iran.
A few days earlier, Olmert had told Congress that Iran threatens Israel's very existence and an Iranian nuclear weapon "cannot be permitted to materialize."
In response to mistranslations of the Iranian president's comments about Israel, Israeli Vice Premier Shimon Peres recently said that Ahmadinejad "should bear in mind that his own country could also be destroyed." In an interview last month Peres confidently stated that, "In the end there will be no choice but war with Iran." The newspaper reassured its Israeli readers that he was "referring to the international military option against Iran's nuclear program, not a war between Israel and Iran."
The Israeli lobby sees the development of Iran's nuclear program as a convenient timetable for war, a golden opportunity to weaken or destroy Israel's enemies in Tehran and settle Israel's strategic horizon for a generation, preferably by goading others (the US) to do the job.
Unlike its relatively coy public position in pushing the US war on Iraq, Israel's warmongering against Iran has been unabashed and relentless. Bush has also been explicit in linking Iran's nuclear development to Israel's security. He has pledged on more than one occasion to protect Israel from Iranian attack.
The co-dependence of this bi-national hysteria has become so obvious that several American Jewish groups recently sent quiet requests to the White House to cool it. The linkage was becoming embarrassing. Abraham Foxman, the head of the ADL, explained that, "because there is this debate on Iraq, where people are trying to put the blame on us, maybe you shouldn't say it that often or that loud."
Those of us who work for an end to Israel's war on the Palestinians would not mind seeing Israel's government take the blame for the disasters that would follow a US attack on Iran. If Israel's American political machine is hitched to Bush's star, may they both go down together.
But we should know by now that the issues imperialists emphasize in public almost never reflect the dimensions of the struggle at hand. The public scenario usually serves to inflame passions and divert public attention from crimes in progress.
In the US, Israel is useful as a propaganda cutout, to portray the innocent potential victim of an Islamic terrorist "Hitler." This gambit electrifies Bush's political base and breathes new life into the old Zionist lies about "poor defenseless Israel."
Internationally, Israeli leaders understand that the disaster in Iraq has reduced the diplomatic pressure to end their relentless destruction of Palestine. They might conclude that creating a new crisis over the "Iranian threat" would buy them the elimination of another enemy, plus a few more years of international diversion, during which they might complete their theft of Palestine.
Yet despite all the political muscle that Israel brings to the game and all the advantages it stands to win, it appears to be but one of several subtexts to the impending US war on Iran.
Nuclear non-proliferation is the other public issue bandied about by Washington and the EU, but it, too, is nothing but smoke and mirrors. There is no legal basis for halting Iran's nuclear program at this time. Its current enrichment work is necessary to develop nuclear power generation and is allowed under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Iran is a party to the treaty and has submitted to IAEA inspections, unlike US favorites India and Israel, which rejected the NPT in order to secretly build their own nuclear arsenals.
As David Peterson points out in Iran's Manufactured Crisis, the current US-EU demands are so absurd that they would actually force Iran to violate the NPT, and if this tactic is sustained it could fatally undermine the battered treaty.
We assume that Iran wants to "build a bomb", but it is never made clear why this would be an intolerable event. By conventional geostrategic standards, it is logical for Iran to seek nuclear deterrence. For starters, the US has demonstrated a brutal will to invade and destroy nations on the terrorism pretext, provided they do not have nukes. And Iran now stands encircled by nations "hosting" the nuclear-tipped US military.
Iran has reasonably good relations with its balanced nuclear neighbors to the east, Pakistan and India and Russia and China, but on its western front it has long been vulnerable to attack by the fifth strongest military force in the world -- nuclear Israel.
Tehran must be further concerned that, since Baghdad fell three years ago, Israel's diplomats, spooks, and politicians have been steadily selling Iran as an "existential threat" to the survival of the "Jewish State."
The issue of nuclear weapons demands a modicum of sobriety and respect for the truth. We must ask the Israelis, Why did you build those 200 to 400 nuclear warheads and place them in submarines and atop intercontinental missiles? Was it not to establish a credible deterrent that would protect you in exactly this kind of scenario? How can you claim to be defenseless?
John Negroponte, the newly-minted US intelligence czar, recently said that Iran is probably ten years away from acquiring a usable nuclear weapon. Does this rehash of previously released CIA estimates signal a change of policy? Probably not, but it confirms that there is no logical basis for the current madness.
Iran's nuclear potential is a symbol, not a tangible threat. In one sense it's merely a targeting device, a way of marking out Iran for intervention. Yet the symbolism itself is a deadly serious matter to the geostrategists who presume to plan the presumed future of our empire. The US power elite has more than one problem with the idea of Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons. And it has other problems with the country's resources, geography, economy, and religion.
Iran is a major oil producer and may have the world's largest reserves of natural gas, the projected carbon fuel of the future. According to the unspoken rules of the new world order, major petroleum sources are not allowed to acquire nukes. That would be "destabilizing." We must always have "access" to vital petroleum resources. Iran's presumed interest in acquiring nuclear weapons is considered a threat to our strategic assets.
Next door, Iraq continues to disintegrate under the watchful guidance of Proconsul Khalilzad. The prospect of a Shia state emerging in the southern half of the country is increasingly plausible. Dividing Iraq into three parts should make it easier for Washington to exploit the whole, but there's concern that a Shia state bordering Iran would be influenced by Tehran, and might even opt to join Iran. If Iraq should manage to stay together, Iran will be considered a threat to its fragile unity.
In the logic of imperialism, when you weaken or destroy a nation for advantage and control, you must also weaken or destroy any neighboring states that might take advantage of the chaos you're sowing for your own benefit. So this is another casus belli fueling up our long-range bombers.
And of course Iran is supposed to be our enemy, because it supports Hizbullah and Palestinian militants, which makes it a terrorist state, which by definition can't be allowed to have nukes. Following this line of "reasoning" we join and even trump the Israelis by denying the obscenely larger power of our own deterrent force.
The wonderful thing about a brazenly absurd foreign policy is that when the public accepts it, it is prone to draw predictably logical yet equally absurd conclusions about the policy's assumptions.
If our overkill deterrence can't protect us from Iran's putative nuclear "threat," it must be because the Iranians would not handle a nuclear weapon the way you or I would. Probably they would use it just as soon as they could get their hands on it, despite the consequences, sort of like a national suicide bomber.
Just the sort of Islamophobic mush the war-on-terrorists would have us believe.
As nearly everyone knows by now, Iran has been identified as a prime target for war, before or after Iraq, in several documents produced by neoconservatives later prominent in the Bush administration.
And there's the matter of the Iranian Oil Bourse, which was scheduled to open in March but was postponed indefinitely and without comment by the government. It is planned as a global oil exchange to challenge the two in London and New York that now dominate world oil trade. To add potential injury to this insult to Anglo domination of world oil trades, the IOB plans to buck the US-OPEC "petrodollar" by offering oil for sale in euros.
Everyone expects the deflating dollar's domination of world oil markets to end soon, perhaps by gradually phasing in a mix of currencies. But some analysts believe that if the choice to trade oil in euros or dollars is left up to market forces (per neoliberalism and the IOB), it could dramatically reverse dollar flows and evaporate the value of an already weak greenback, throwing the US economy into a depression.
Most of the elites of Europe and Asia would not relish this prospect; they would rather acquire our crumbling mantle of power and wealth by gradual and predictable means. No one is talking about it, including officials in Tehran, but for now the "threat" of the IOB is on ice.
Whether the IOB ever sees the light of day, powerful people in Washington and elsewhere have already tossed it onto the scales with the nuclear issue and the terrorism charge. And they have passed a dreadful judgment: Iran is not a "reliable" player in global energy markets. This by itself may be deemed sufficient cause to ignore the niceties of national sovereignty and international law.
Meanwhile, the "Great Game" of global empire is quietly coming to a head, and Iran finds itself in the middle of the struggle.
One of the key objectives in the US quest for global supremacy (a goal asserted openly in recent National Security and Defense policy statements) is to acquire control of a broad arc of territory stretching from Southwest Asia through Central Asia to the border of China.
In his exploitation of 9/11, Bush lost no time in destroying and radioactively poisoning Afghanistan and planting US military bases across Central Asia. But we've been kicked out of Uzbekistan and things aren't going well in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, or Tajikistan, either. It seems Central Asia would rather deal with China and Russia than the United States, a very sensible decision under the geographic, economic, cultural, and political circumstances.
When imperial dreams start going up in smoke on contact with reality, imperialists get desperate. Iran may be looming as the last stand for the US campaign to establish a beachhead in the belly of Asia. If the neocons lose this self-manufactured opportunity to take down Iran and cement their "gains" in the Middle East, they will have to admit failure, even to themselves.
When will they admit that war is the greatest failure of all?
James Brooks serves as webmaster for Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel (www.vtjp.org). He can be contacted at: jamiedb@wildblue.net.
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Night of the Living Dead
AIRSTRIKE KILLS AL-ZARQAWI - Is that 5 or 6 of his 9 Lives?
CNN
8 June 06
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most recognizable face of Iraq's violent insurgency, died in a coalition airstrike near Baquba, jubilant U.S. and Iraqi authorities said today. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad called al-Zarqawi "the godfather of sectarian killing and terror in Iraq" and said his death "marks a great success for Iraq and the global war on terror."
Comment: No doubt a new phantom is waiting in the wings - judging by the New York Times today he will probably be a close cousin of an Iranian Ayatollah with a degree in nuclear physics, can dodge bullets, walk through walls and evade capture for months if not years......oh, and he'll be immortal until CNN tell us he isn't.
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Al-Qaida's chief Zarqawi killed
www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-08 15:24:43
BAGHDAD, June 8 (Xinhua) -- Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced on Thursday that the most wanted insurgent in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been killed.
Maliki made the announcement at a press conference in Baghdad with top U.S. commander in Iraq General George Casey and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.
"Today Zarqawi has been killed," Maliki told reporters.
He said that Zarqawi and seven of his top aides were killed in a joined U.S.-Iraqi raid on an area called Hibhib, near Baquba, some 65 km northeast of Baghdad, on Wednesday evening. Hibhib is about 40 km northeast of Baghdad.
The announcement came six days after Zarqawi showed up in a video tape, calling on followers to launch a war against Shiite sin Iraq.
The killing of the most wanted insurgent in Iraq "constituted a message to all those involved in the insurgency against the state," said Maliki, vowing to "face all kinds of challenges."
"The sole road for the prosperity of the Iraqi people is by means of unity and national conciliation," he added.
"I thank all my citizens for their services and coordination and I also thank the armed forces and the army and the Multi-national Forces for their leading role," Maliki said.
The prime minister, a prominent Shiite leader, also vowed to further efforts in the fight against insurgents in order to restore safety and order in Iraq, while pledging to strengthen national unity.
Meanwhile, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad described the killing of Zarqawi as "a good omen" to the new Iraqi government and the overall efforts in the war against terror.
Zarqawi's death "did not end violence in Iraq but is a step in the right direction and is a good omen for Iraq, the prime minister and efforts in the global war against terrorism," he said.
Al-Qaida's leader in Iraq Abu Musabal-Zarqawi appeared in a video on an Islamic website April 25.
Congratulating Maliki on the death of the most wanted man in Iraq, Khalilzad, meanwhile, also warned of "difficult days a head" in the fight against terrorists, but he stressed that the Iraqi authorities would "continue to fight terrorism and those who want Iraq to fail."
In addition, Khalilzad also called upon Iraqi leaders from all the ethnic groups to stick to national unity and put an end to sectarian violence.
General Casey, on his part, said that the U.S. military would give detailed information on Zarqawi's death at another news conference scheduled for 3:00 p.m. (1100 GMT).
He said that the U.S. air strike came after an intelligence tip-off and that Zarqawi and his aides were believed to be holding a meeting when the raid occurred.
The top U.S. military commander in Iraq also revealed that Zarqawi's whereabouts was pinpointed about two weeks ago and that his identity was confirmed by fingerprints and facial recognition.
"Tips and intelligence from senior leaders of the al-Qaida network in Iraq led the forces to Zarqawi and some of his associates, who were conducting a meeting when the air strike was launched," Casey said.
Zarqawi and his aides "have conducted terrorist activities against the Iraqi people for years", he said, lauding Zarqawi's death as "a significant blow to al-Qaida and another step toward defeating terrorism in Iraq."
Zarqawi, with a 25 million U.S. bounty on his head, is believed to be the top leader of the al-Qaida terror group in Iraq. He is accused of being behind some of the most gruesome kidnappings and killings including beheadings in Iraq.
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Al-CIA-da in Iraq confirms death of Zarqawi: Internet
www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-08 19:26:54
CAIRO, June 8 (Xinhua) -- Al-Qaida terror group in Iraq on Thursday confirmed the death of its leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to a statement posted on the Internet.
"We announce the joyous news of the martyrdom of our warrior Sheikh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq," said the statement posted on an Islamic Web site.
"This is an honor to our nation," said the statement signed by Zarqawi's deputy Abu Abdulrahman al-Iraqi.
"Our leader's death will only boost our persistence in continuing the holy war," it added.
The authenticity of the statement cannot be immediately verified.
Earlier in the day, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced at a Baghdad news conference that Zarqawi, the most wanted man in Iraq, had been killed in a joint U.S. and Iraqi operation north of Baghdad on Wednesday evening.
The Jordanian-born Zarqawi, with a 25 million U.S. bounty on his head, is believed to be the top leader of the al-Qaida terror group in Iraq. He is accused of being behind some of the most gruesome kidnappings and killings including beheadings in Iraq.
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Zarqawi: don't celebrate too soon - Rather than being a blow against al-Qaida, the death of its leader in Iraq could relieve the terror group of a problem and give it a martyr.
Brian Whitaker
June 8, 2006
The price of oil dipped below $70 a barrel for the first time in a fortnight and in London Tony Blair told his cabinet that the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is "a very important moment in Iraq".
"Today's announcement was very good news because a blow against al-Qaida in Iraq was a blow against al-Qaida everywhere," the prime minister's office said in a statement.
Comments posted on the BBC website early this morning were mainly along the lines of "good riddance", though many also doubted that Zarqawi's death would make much difference.
One said:
"Another significant moment in Iraq" - How many times have we heard this already and how many times has it been shown to be wrong? Whilst this might make some difference it will not make much of one since most of the killing in Iraq is between Sunni and Shia, Zarqawi, for all his killing has been to some effect marginalised by other events. People shouldn't hold their breaths.
The jubilations when Saddam Hussein was captured, and the hopes that Iraqi would quieten down as a result, also turned out to be misplaced.
Zarqawi has been built up by the US and sections of the media into the main bogeyman but the war, or civil war as it is increasingly regarded, has a momentum of its own. Dozens of ordinary people are being killed daily for all sorts of reasons, or no reason at all.
The latest to be targeted, an Iraqi friend told me yesterday, are people who sell ice. Ice, apparently was not something the Prophet used or approved of, so it shouldn't be allowed.
Having been proclaimed the root of all evil in Iraqi, Zarqawi presumably made some contingency plans, and it would be foolish to imagine that his organisation will simply wither away after his death.
It's true that the Saudis seem to have got on top of their local al-Qaida problem by steadily working through a "most-wanted" list, killing one leader after another as they shuffled up to the top of the organisation. Saudi Arabia is a different matter, though, because it does have a nationwide government and security forces that can assert control. Iraq does not.
There is some evidence that the original al-Qaida leaders were not entirely happy with the direction Zarqawi's activities were taking. Last October, a letter attributed to Ayman al-Zawahiri (though its authenticity is disputed) appeared to give him a telling-off.
It was highly critical of attacks on ordinary Shia Muslims in Iraq and urged Zarqawi to establish a political movement capable of attracting not only Islamic fighters but tribal elders, scientists, merchants and "all the distinguished ones who are not sullied by appeasing the occupation".
"We don't want to repeat the mistake of the Taliban, who restricted participation in governance," the letter said.
If it is true that Zawahiri was disenchanted with Zarqawi, then his death could mean that al-Qaida has gained a martyr and been relieved of a problem.
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UK police apologises for Forest Gate "anti-terror" raid disruption in the shadow of Al-Zarqawi news
BBC
Thursday, 8 June 2006
Scotland Yard has apologised for the inconvenience and disruption caused by the anti-terror raid in Forest Gate last Friday.
Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman said he regretted the disruption caused to the community but they had to act on intelligence received.
Mr Hayman said they would continue "to try and bottom it out".
He also indicated police would meet the local community to reflect on their tactics.
However, the head of Specialist Operations insisted the raid in Lansdown Road, which involved close to 250 officers and led to a suspect being shot in the shoulder, was "necessary and proportionate".
'Time of reflection'
Police have yet to find what specific intelligence suggested they would in the house - reportedly a chemical-based explosive device.
But Mr Hayman said the investigation was continuing and if police did not find it there, the search could go on elsewhere to prove or disprove the intelligence.
The assistant commissioner said there had been "a time of reflection" since the raid.
"I am aware that in mounting this operation we have caused disruption and inconvenience to many residents in Newham and for that I apologise," he said.
Mr Hayman said he understood that some communities "may be feeling confused or indeed, angry".
But he insisted anti-terror operations were not targeted against any particular community or section of a community.
"We are working tirelessly to target criminals who are intent on spreading fear and terror amongst us all."
Community concerns
Mr Hayman said police had to act on the intelligence as it appeared to suggest "a threat to public safety".
"We had no choice but to take the action that we did in trying to prove or disprove the intelligence," he said.
"To do otherwise we would have been failing in our duty to make London safer and protect all Londoners."
He said the decision had not been taken lightly.
However, Mr Hayman appeared to suggest that community concerns would be taken into account in the planning of future operations.
"The concern that has been expressed to me has been the visual impact of the operation as it was played out last week."
'Balancing act'
Officers involved in the raid were wearing chemical protection suits.
Mr Hayman said: "That has led us to reflect as to whether or not we can do it differently.
"But having said that, there was a difficult balancing act between officers' safety and public safety and those we would come into contact with in the house.
"It would be difficult to see how we could reduce the level of officer attendance and equipment.
"What we are planning in the next couple of weeks is joint meetings with the community to share with them our planning options and considerations and to ask them to tell us whether they see anything differently."
With regard to Friday's planned demonstration outside Forest Gate police station, Mr Hayman said: "We must all pull together. This is not the time for conflict and anger."
Detectives have been given more time to question the two men arrested in the east London raid.
Brothers Mohammed Abdul Kahar, 23, and Abul Koyair, 20, have been held over an alleged terror plot since the raid at Paddington Green police station.
They can now be detained until Saturday afternoon.
Comment: With regard to Friday's planned demonstration outside Forest Gate police station, Mr Hayman said: "We must all pull together. This is not the time for conflict and anger."
Right. This is not the time for conflict and anger, unless the conflict and anger is coming from the government. And don't you forget it!
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Middle East Madness
Why the Boycott of Israel is Justified
by Gabriel Ash
www.dissidentvoice.org
June 6, 2006
The recent boycott resolutions of CUPE and NATFHE against Israel's Apartheid predictably awakened Israel's willing apologists, initiating a high pitched chorus of condemnation and self pity across the Western media, not to mention the blogosphere.
Their arguments, however, are flimsy, not to say rotten. I'll review them one at a time.
But first a clarification. The boycott/divestment/sanctions (BDS) campaign is a very diverse campaign. Each organization has its own specific criticism of what it condemns. Israel's offensive policies of colonization in the West Bank and Gaza are the common denominator, but some organizations go beyond that. Likewise, each organization has a different take on what action its members should undertake. But all agree on the need for and appropriateness of some kind of collective action that puts pressure on Israel. I have my own take on both these questions -- what to condemn and how to respond -- but my following remarks address only the broad consensus.
1. Boycotting Israel is hypocritical. There are many other and worse human rights violators. Why aren't these organizations boycotting the UK for occupying Iraq or Russia for its massive slaughter of Chechens?
If a group were to participate in the BDS campaign against Israel while supporting the invasion of Iraq and the massacres in Chechnya, such a group would probably be hypocritical, or at least seriously confused. Are there such groups? I am not aware of any. But if they do exist, they should indeed rethink their stance.
However, there is no direct line from condemnation to choice of action. When considering what action to endorse, a group must take into account other considerations beyond the moral wrongness of what is being condemned.
Responsibility. Are Russian academics involved in the Russian occupation of Chechnya the way Israeli academics are involved in legitimizing Apartheid? Obviously not. If some Israeli apologists believe the opposite, they are welcome to make the case. The case for the complicity of Israeli academia has been persuasively made.
Practicality. Is it practical to try to influence US policy in Iraq through a boycott of US academics? Clearly not. Israel's small academic world is vulnerable and therefore susceptible to pressure. The British boycott resolution already succeeded in scuttling a proposed cooperation between Hebrew University and the Israeli Security apparatus. There is no point in trying to use the same tactics against the U.S. That is unfortunate. But taking an all or nothing attitude to human rights -- which is what some of Israel's apologists demand -- is silly. Not to mention the real hypocrisy of those who call attention to human right violations in Sudan or Russia without having any demonstrable interest in human rights at all, but rather out of the desire to defend human rights violations.
Saliency: Most of the organizations that call to boycott Israel have their own different missions that are not focused on the Middle East. Each has to consider the role solidarity with Palestinians and pressure on Israel plays in its overall position and the way it reflects its identity and specific goals. Those groups committed to defending human right are completely within their rights, for example, to consider that Israel damages the framework of humanitarian law more than China does, even though China has jailed more people than Israel has. Israel's democratic rhetoric and its claim to be a beacon of civilization and morality mean that the occupation in Palestine doesn't merely violates human rights, it relaxes and degrades the principles of human rights in a way no other rogue state does.
Local leadership: Like most strategies of collective action, the boycott/divestment/sanctions campaign depends on broad consensus. The first requirement for such a consensus to form successfully is that the campaign be actively supported and demanded by the victims, in this case Palestinians. At least for now, there is neither an Iraqi nor a Chechnyan boycott campaign or even demand. Palestinians, on the other hands, are leading the boycott/divestment/sanctions campaign against Israel. Also important is the vocal support from a minority of Israeli groups that support Palestinian rights. This is similar to the way the South African campaign was led by the ANC and was supported by an activist minority of White South Africans. Without local leadership, a campaign lacks legitimacy and is less likely to take hold. Groups are therefore fully justified in taking that in consideration when deciding their priorities.
Tailoring different responses to different transgressions based on complex considerations is not necessarily hypocritical, although it can be. The more appropriate adjective in this particular case is "thoughtful."
2. The comparison between Israel and South Africa is misguided. Israel is very different and not as bad as South Africa.
"Apartheid" means "separation" and so does "Hafrada," the Hebrew term for the current policy of Israel vis-à-vis Palestinians. But nobody claims that Israel is "the same" as South Africa. A glance to the globe is enough to ascertain that the two are indeed different countries, and therefore have different, unique and specific histories and institutions. What we claim, however, is that the Apartheid regime in South Africa and the current regime in Israel have a number of significant common traits, and that these common traits are repugnant.
This is not the place to engage in that substantive debate. For those who wish to deepen their knowledge of the issue, Chris McGreal provides an excellent introduction in The Guardian. But one does remark that Israel's defenders are not in a very good position to argue now that the regime in Israel is not as repugnant as South Africa was. In fact, Israel's apologists today are often the same groups that used to defend the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Zionist organizations feted the similarities between Afrikaners and Jews, the Anti-Defamation League, for example, even spied on anti-Apartheid activists in the U.S. Israel, for its part, supported South Africa's nuclear program and later helped it evade sanctions. On the other hand, South African Black and Jewish anti-Apartheid activists who visited the West Bank said that the conditions of Palestinians were similar or even worse than what Blacks endured under Apartheid.
Who has more credibility on the subject of how repugnant the Israeli brand of "Hafrada" is, Abe Foxman, head of an organization that supported Apartheid in South Africa, or the victim of Apartheid, Archbishop Desmond Tutu?
3. Putting pressure on Israel is one-sided and therefore unfair. It would be better to encourage both sides to engage each other in dialogue.
Israel's apologists have a simple narrative about the history of the relations between Jews and Palestinians. In that narrative, Jews came to Palestine with open palms, and have tried ever since to achieve peaceful co-existence with Palestinians, only to be repeatedly rebuffed by hostile and belligerent Palestinians. Base on that narrative, Israel's apologists demand more "dialogue," and excuse all Israel's actions as self-defense.
Unfortunately for them, nobody else accepts that fairy tale today. Actual history is very different. Since the very beginning, the Zionist leadership was clear about its intention to displace and dispossess Palestinians to make way for a Jewish state. That goal had been largely accomplished in 1948. Thereafter, Israel found the status quo comfortable, and saw no urgency in resolving its conflict with the Palestinians. At every occasion, Israeli leaders expressed disinterest in peace. Ben Gurion said the solution for the Palestinian problem would be that Palestinians would become "human dust." Moshe Dayan told them after the 1967 occupation, "we have no solution, you will continue to live like dogs." Golda Meir said there was no need for dialogue because "there is no Palestinian people." Begin and Shamir refused to negotiate on Palestinian rights in the face of serious U.S. pressure. Begin even invaded Lebanon to avoid having to talk with Arafat (who had already agreed to a "two state solution" in 1974.) After Oslo, despite their lip service to advancing a "two state solution," Rabin, Netanyahu and Barak have all refused to evacuate a single settlement. All three built new settlements, Barak being the most industrious. At no point has any Israeli leader agree to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza in full, not to mention to recognize the rights of Palestinian refugees.
The evacuation of Gaza, contrary to the fairy tale, is not a withdrawal at all. Israel is still the occupying force in Gaza. The situation of Gaza today is in fact the closest Israel comes to the full South African Apartheid model; Gaza is an effective separate Bantustan under full Israeli military control. Finally, Olmert's latest plans for "unilateral separation" in the West Bank point in the same intensified Apartheid direction.
Those who might fear that this historical excursus is threading stale water should consider how Sharon's advisor Dov Weissglass recently described the purpose of evacuating the settlements from Gaza:
"...we succeeded in removing the issue of the political process from the agenda. And we educated the world to understand that there is no one to talk to....As long as there is no one to talk to, the geographic status quo remains intact..... [until] Palestine becomes Finland."
There you have it succinctly. Israel's consistent policy is to avoid dialogue in order to maintain its domination. Based on this analysis, peace can only be advanced by putting pressure on Israel. This is exactly the purpose of the divestment, boycott and sanctions campaign.
4. The boycott advocates are anti-Semitic.
Puhleeeeze!
Writing in the Boston Globe, Reason magazine's Cathy Young insinuates that Mona Baker is guilty of anti-Semitism.
Young's evidence: Baker says that in the U.S., "Zionist lobbies are extremely powerful with both Congress and the media." Apparently, according to Young, you're either an anti-Semite or an idiot. Because only an idiot would argue with what Baker said.
Young's smear, to put it mildly, is despicable, but very much de rigeur in almost every standard apology for Israel. Dear Ms. Young, please read the first half of Norman Finkelstein's book, Beyond Chutzpah, and copy the following sentence 500 times in your notebook: "I will not use accusations of anti-Semitism to smear critics of Israel and Zionism."
Now, there are certainly a few lost souls out there whose motive for supporting Palestinian rights is anti-Semitism. It's a pity. They are the mirror image of the Zionists who support human rights in Sudan for the sole purpose of deflecting attention from Israel. We wish both kinds of bigots full recovery. But we won't stop eating Broccoli if we discovered that it was Hitler's own favorite food. Nor should we stop supporting Palestinian rights because David Duke support them too.
Besides, outside the fervid imagination of Israel's willing apologists, the problem of real anti-Semitism is negligible. To gauge how negligible it is, consider that in 2003, the ADL, which is supposed to lead the struggle against anti-Semitism, honored former Italian PM Berlusconi, weeks after the latter made sympathetic remarks about Mussolini -- Hitler's sidekick in World War II -- a dictator who enacted race laws and sent Jews to the death camps. Furthermore, taking into consideration the Christian Zionist right in the U.S. and the anti-Muslim right in Europe, I think it is safe to say that there are more anti-Semites among Israel's friends than among those who express solidarity with Palestinians.
Gabriel Ash is an activist and writer who writes because the pen is sometimes mightier than the sword and sometimes not. He welcomes comments at: g.a.evildoer@gmail.com.
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Pro-Israel group pushes tough U.S. policy on Iran
Wed Jun 7, 2006 4:15 AM IST164
By Carol Giacomo, Diplomatic Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As the Bush administration pursues sensitive diplomacy, the influential U.S. pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC has sent out a fundraising letter seeking support for a tough U.S. line against Iran's nuclear program.
In a letter to supporters this week, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee requested contributions to build support for a proposed law tightening U.S. sanctions on Iran.
Meanwhile, President George W. Bush is backing a new diplomatic initiative offering incentives to Iran, including the prospect of direct talks and economic benefits, as an inducement to end its nuclear program.
The package, agreed by Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany as well as the United States, also outlines penalties if Iran rejects the deal.
It was formally presented to Iranian officials in Tehran on Tuesday. Many American and European officials are doubtful that Tehran will accept any deal but see the overture as diplomacy's best chance.
AIPAC, with about 100,000 members, has for years considered Iran and its nuclear program the most serious threat to U.S. ally Israel and sought to ensure a tough American policy.
"Iran's apocalyptic president (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) has openly and repeatedly called for Israel's destruction. But long before he began making headlines ... AIPAC was working behind-the-scenes to educate leaders throughout the U.S. government about the growing Iranian threat," the fundraising letter states.
"While many organizations now realize the threat that Iran poses, AIPAC is the only organization uniquely positioned to work with (the U.S.) Congress and the administration to take meaningful action against this terrorist regime," it said.
The letter added, "we need your help to stop Iran" and to pass the Iran Freedom Support Act.
The act, which was overwhelmingly approved by the U.S. House of Representatives and has considerable support in the Senate, would tighten sanctions on Iran, urge disinvestment from companies investing in its oil sector and support assistance for democratic forces inside Iran.
An AIPAC official said the letter's timing was not connected to the major powers' offer and its message essentially mirrored long-standing AIPAC policy.
AIPAC has not formally endorsed the U.S. decision to back the major powers' offer to Iran.
AIPAC spokesman Josh Block said: "If Iran fulfills the demands of the international community ... by immediately stopping all of its work on the nuclear fuel cycle and allowing inspectors unfettered access, that would be a positive development."
But he added: "We must remain cautious and aware of Iran's two decade history of deception and delay, and not allow the offer of dialogue to devolve into a time-wasting exercise."
The United States and its partners believe Iran is trying to produce nuclear weapons but Tehran insists its activities are only aimed at generating civilian energy.
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Why Israel's capture of Eichmann caused panic at the CIA - Information that could have led to Nazi war criminal was kept under wraps
Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday June 8, 2006
The Guardian
On May 23 1960, when Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion announced to the Knesset that "Adolf Eichmann, one of the greatest Nazi war criminals, is in Israeli custody", US and West German intelligence services reacted to the stunning news not with joy but alarm.
Newly declassified CIA documents show the Americans and the German BND knew Eichmann was hiding in Argentina at least two years before Israeli agents snatched him from the streets of Buenos Aires on his way back from work. They knew how long he had been in the country and had a rough idea of the alias the Nazi fugitive was using there, Klement.
Even though German intelligence had misspelled it as Clemens, it was a crucial clue. The Mossad effort to track Eichmann had been suspended at the time because it had failed to discover his pseudonym. They were ultimately tipped off by a German official disgusted at his government's failure to bring the war criminal to justice.
Embarrassment
Washington and Bonn failed to act on the information or hand it to the Israelis because they believed it did not serve their interests in the cold war struggle. In fact, the unexpected reappearance of the architect of the "final solution" in a glass box in a Jerusalem court threatened to be an embarrassment, turning global attention to all the former Nazis the Americans and Germans had recruited in the name of anti-communism.
Historians say Britain and other western powers probably did the same, but they have not published the evidence. The CIA has. Under heavy congressional pressure, the agency has been persuaded to declassify 27,000 unedited pages about American dealings with former Nazis in postwar Europe.
One of the most startling of those documents is a CIA memo dated March 19 1958, from the station chief in Munich to headquarters, noting that German intelligence (codenamed Upswing) had that month passed on a list of high-ranking former Nazis and their whereabouts. Eichmann was third on the list. The memo passed on a rumour that he was in Jerusalem "despite the fact that he was responsible for mass extermination of Jews", but also states, matter-of-factly: "He is reported to have lived in Argentina under the alias Clemens since 1952."
There is no record of a follow-up in the CIA to this tip-off. The reason was, according to Timothy Naftali, a US historian who has reviewed the freshly-declassified archive, it was no longer the CIA's job to hunt down Nazis. "It just wasn't US policy to go looking for war criminals. It wasn't British policy either for that matter. It was left to the West Germans ... and this is further evidence of the low priority the Germans gave to hunting down war criminals."
It was not just a question of bureaucratic inertia. There were good reasons not to go hunting for Eichmann. In Bonn, the immediate fear was what Eichmann would say about Hans Globke, who had also worked in the Nazis' Jewish affairs department, drafting the Nuremberg laws, designed to isolate Jews from the rest of society in the Third Reich. While Eichmann had gone on the run, Globke stayed behind and prospered. By 1960 he was Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's national security adviser.
"The West Germans were extremely concerned apparently about how the East Germans and Soviet bloc in general might make use of what Eichmann would say about Hans Globke," Mr Naftali said.
It was not just a West German concern. Globke was the main point of contact between the Bonn government, the CIA and Nato. "Globke was a timebomb for Nato," Mr Naftali said. At the request of the West Germans, the CIA even managed to persuade Life magazine to delete any reference to Globke from Eichmann's memoirs, which it had bought from the family.
But it was not just Globke. When Eichmann was captured the CIA combed files it had captured from the Nazis to find information that might be useful to the Israeli prosecution. The results caused near panic among the CIA's leadership because, unknown to the junior staff who had looked through the files, a few of Eichmann's accomplices being investigated had been CIA "assets".
An urgent memo was sent to CIA investigators urging caution and pointing out that if Moscow discovered these ex-Nazis had been working for the Americans that would make those agents "very vulnerable".
Meanwhile, some of the CIA's German agents were beginning to panic. One of them, Otto Albrecht von Bolschwing - who also had worked with Eichmann in the Jewish affairs department and was later Heinrich Himmler's representative in Romania - frantically asked his old CIA case officer for help.
After the war Bolschwing had been recruited by the Gehlen Organisation, the prototype German intelligence agency set up by the Americans under Reinhard Gehlen, who had run military intelligence on the eastern front under the Nazis. "US army intelligence accepted Reinhard Gehlen's offer to furnish alleged expertise on the Red army - and was bilked by the many mass murderers he hired," said Robert Wolfe, a historian at the US national archives.
'Unreconstructed'
Alongside the Gehlen Organisation, US intelligence had set up "stay-behind networks" in West Germany, who were supposed to stay put in the event of a Soviet invasion and transmit intelligence from behind enemy lines. Those networks were also riddled with ex-Nazis who had horrendous records.
One of the networks, codenamed Kibitz-15, was run by a former German army officer, Lieutenant Colonel Walter Kopp, who was described by his own American handlers as an "unreconstructed Nazi".
Most of the networks were dismantled in the early 1950s when it was realised what an embarrassment they might prove.
"The present furore in western Germany over the resurgence of the Nazi or neo-Nazi groups is a fair example - in miniature - of what we would be faced with," CIA headquarters wrote in an April 1953 memo.The new documents make clear the great irony behind the US recruitment of ex-Nazis: for all the moral compromises involved, it was a complete failure in intelligence terms. The Nazis were terrible spies.
"Subject is immature and has a personality not suited to clandestine activities," the CIA file on one of the stay-behind agents said sniffily. "His main faults are his lack of regard for money and his attraction to members of the opposite sex."
Those were the least of their flaws as would-be anti-communist agents. They had not risen in the Nazi ranks because of their respect for facts. They were ideologues with a keen sense of self-preservation.
"The files show time and again that these people were more trouble than they were worth," Mr Naftali said. "The unreconstructed Nazis were always out for themselves, and they were using the west's lack of information about the Soviet Union to exploit it."
The lesson would be well learned by young CIA case officers today.
"Threats change rapidly, and it's always exiles and former government elements who are the first to come running to us saying - we understand this threat. We have seen it with Iraqi exiles. No doubt we're seeing it now with Iranian exiles. We have to be smart and we have to know who we are really dealing with."
Protected Nazis
Adolf Eichmann The SS colonel who organised the final solution was so enthusiastic about his work that he carried on even after Heinrich Himmler had called a halt. He was captured by US troops but escaped to Argentina. Israeli agents tracked him down in 1960 and he was hanged in 1962.
Hans Globke A Nazi functionary working with Eichmann in the Jewish Affairs department who helped draft the laws stripping Jews of rights. After the war he rose to become one of the most powerful figures in the government. As national security advisor to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, he was the main liaison with the CIA and Nato.
Reinhard Gehlen A major general in the Wehrmacht who was head of intelligence-gathering on the eastern front. He sold his supposed inside knowledge of the Soviet Union to the Americans who made him head of West German intelligence, an organisation he led until 1968.
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Attacking Iran: Bad Policy is a Bipartisan Affair
by Robert Jensen
www.dissidentvoice.org
June 6, 2006
Will the United States attack Iran?
That was the question on everyone's mind at a recent political talk I gave in a small college town in Texas. I ran through some of the many reasons such an attack would be ill-advised, bordering on insane:
* U.S. forces are bogged down in a failed war in Iraq and have limited capacity to fight anywhere;
* Iran is militarily a much more formidable opponent than Iraq, and its people are even less likely than Iraqis to welcome the U.S. military;
* Iranian nuclear sites are dispersed around the country, making it difficult for U.S. (or U.S.-backed Israeli) air strikes to achieve the stated goal; and
* Any aggression in a region already enraged about U.S. bullying, prison torture, and war crimes would risk setting off an uncontrollable conflict that would be potentially catastrophic, leaving U.S. troops in Iraq and American citizens everywhere exposed to heightened dangers.
"Given all that," I asked the audience, "can you imagine any sane politician or policymaker deciding to invade or bomb Iran?"
"No, of course not," they responded.
"Even though all this is obvious," I asked, "are you still worried that the Bush administration is going to bomb Iran?"
"YES!" they shouted back.
The Bush administration's ongoing propaganda campaign to paint Iran as a grave threat to U.S. security -- which just happens to look a lot like the propaganda campaign that targeted Iraq -- suggests that whether or not policymakers have definitive plans to invade and/or bomb, they are creating the context for attack if they deem it necessary to their project of total domination of the Middle East and Central Asia.
So, many in the United States -- and even more people around the world -- are scared that among top U.S. policymakers, rational arguments can easily be trumped by ideology, willed ignorance, and self-delusion. While U.S. military commanders likely view an attack on Iran as dangerous folly -- and are the likely source of leaks to journalists about the planning process, perhaps in an attempt to derail such plans -- civilian leaders seem to be insulated from reality and responsibility.
Indeed, the fanatics in the Bush administration pose a serious threat to peace and are an impediment to the pursuit of justice in the world. But that should not obscure the other lesson of the current "crisis" around Iran's nuclear program: We are dealing with the consequences of 60 years of dangerous U.S. policies around the world.
Let's remember the basics of post-World War II U.S. policy in Iran: A CIA-supported coup in 1953 overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq's government after his nationalization of the oil industry, leading to more than two decades of harsh rule by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi enforced by a brutal secret police, SAVAK. Support for the shah, who played a key role as a mostly obedient U.S. surrogate in the region, continued through Republican and Democratic administrations alike -- including that of Jimmy Carter, the so-called "human-rights president." All that is well documented, but the public memory of U.S.-Iranian relations and the 1979 Islamic revolution typically is reduced to the "hostage crisis," in which the United States casts itself as a victim of crazed Muslims gripped by irrational hatreds.
But we forget history at our own peril. Today many of our problems around the world are a result of what has been called "blowback" -- support of reactionary forces for short-term advantage has often created unforeseen problems. A bit more attention to those decades of immoral and shortsighted U.S. policy around the world would suggest a new course, one that requires the U.S. public to do what doesn't come naturally in this ahistorical, propaganda-driven society: Study honest accounts of our history, evaluate the facts, and apply basic legal and moral principles. That's not only the right thing, it's the sensible thing to do out of self-interest.
We can start with a simple question: If Iranian leaders do indeed want to acquire nuclear weapons, why might that be? Other major players in that part of the world (Pakistan, India, China) have nukes, as does Iran's primary regional enemy (Israel). And let's not forget that the occupying army in Iran's next-door neighbor belongs to the United States, whose president has designated Iran as a member of the "axis of evil." Iranians no doubt have observed that of the two other original members of that exclusive club, one is thought to have nuclear weapons (North Korea) and one quite clearly didn't (Iraq). Which one got invaded?
What does Iran want? As would any nation in its position, Iran seeks security guarantees -- exactly what the United States refuses to give. As U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton put it this spring, the Iranians "must know everything is on the table and they must understand what that means."
Got it, Mr. Ambassador, we understand: The United States, once again, is ignoring a fundamental principle of international law. The U.N. charter states that nations "shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state."
So, everything is on the table, including bombing, which has many people nervous. But we should remember this is not a new U.S. policy. Go back to President Carter's 1980 State of the Union address, in which he outlined the "Carter Doctrine": "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."
Throughout the post-WWII period, U.S. policymakers have interpreted "outside force" to include inside forces -- that is, any force that doesn't bow to U.S. demands, no matter where it lives. The Bush administration, while more brazen in its threats and use of force than some past administrations, is not straying too far from a time-honored U.S. principle, articulated most clearly by his father, the first President Bush, in 1991: "What we say goes."
Two simple, but haunting, questions were on the minds of the folks at my talk in Denton, Texas, that night: What if "what we say" is crazy? And, do those in power actually have the power to make sure a crazy idea "goes" forward?
With the attack on Iraq, the Bush administration -- along with fellow-travelers in both the Republican and Democratic parties -- ignored international law, a global mass movement against the war, and the opinions of the vast majority of the world's governments in pursuit of a policy of domination-through-violence.
The same forces are lined up for and against an attack on Iran. The difference may be that this time even the most fanatical in the administration will have a hard time convincing themselves such an attack can succeed.
We hope.
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books). He can be reached at: rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
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When Kabul Capsizes ... "I dread the moment my countrymen come to the conclusion that the Americans are no better than the Russians."
By Britta Petersen
Financial Times Deutschland, Germany
Translated by Bob Skinner
May 31, 2006
Civil war looms in Afghanistan because U.S. troops act like occupiers and the Taliban are powerful again. Now Europe must act so that its soldiers don't return home in coffins.
A rampaging mob, burning buildings, a number of dead, and for the first time since the end of the war, curfews. That is the result of an auto accident on Monday, May 29, in Kabul. Is Afghanistan becoming a second Iraq?
Not yet, but it's time that the international community wake up. If it doesn't immediately take the wheel politically, Afghanistan threatens to once again slip into civil war.
But especially the Americans are called on. No one who knows Kabul is surprised by the traffic accident nor the furious reaction to it. Since the Americans entered Kabul, they have conducted themselves like an occupying power. Anywhere a U.S. agency opens an office, the entire street is closed to traffic. And woe to anyone who comes to close to an American vehicle. Green, nervous soldiers with fingers on the trigger spread more fear and anxiety than the mujahedeen ever could.
COMPLAINTS GO UNHEARD
German military and aid workers have complained to Washington many times, without success.
"We are surprised at how unfriendly they are, and that gets to be annoying. Just look at the number of traffic accidents the Americans are involved in. They drive like crazy," said Brigadier General Ernst Otto Berk, former commander of the German contingent to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), in 2005.
But European annoyance should not be the decisive factor. How much longer does the U.S. want to show that it hasn't the slightest respect for the culture or citizens of a country whose dogged resistance has expelled every foreign occupier? Another thing that burned down on May 29 was one of the many brothels which are operated by Americans for the own mercenaries and security forces, and whose existence in Kabul is an open secret.
One who so regularly demonstrates the law of might makes right shouldn't be surprised when Islamists are able to mobilize a violent mob in a short period of time.
"I dread the moment my countrymen come to the conclusion that the Americans are no better than the Russians, and once again call for jihad," says an Afghani resident of Germany. Thus the rebuilding process is being threatened by the arrogance of the American superpower.
For Europeans there's much more at stake than just diplomatic relations. If the situation in Afghanistan deteriorates further, all foreigners will be affected. That's also true for Germany's soldiers, who according to the Bundeswehr's plans [German armed forces] are to remain there for some time. The Germans and other Europeans must put the goodwill they have earned to good use, heir careful work and put it in the balance, and urge a different approach by U.S. troops. Otherwise there's a great danger that more German soldiers will return in coffins.
At the same time the strategy for the political reconstruction of Afghanistan needs to be rethought. The idea of including Islamists in the government to keep the provinces quiet has failed. For one thing, the Taliban and other armed groups don't care who rules in Kabul. For another, radical ideologues like the warlord Rassul Sayyaf or his ally Fazel Hadi Shinwari - who was rejected for the post of chief justice by Parliament - formally support the Karzai government, but in fact advocate re-Talibanization.
CRIMINAL GOVERNMENT ADVISOR
President Hamid Karzai has thus lost most of his credibility. The recasting of his cabinet with a few supposed democrats won't slow the erosion of his authority. That can only be re-established if the proper conclusions are drawn. Not all Taliban collaborators can be punished, but it's important to put the worst human rights violators on trial, because as long as they occupy government positions, no peace will come to Afghanistan.
Who in the past 25 years has been a freedom fighter, and who a criminal? This question must be answered satisfactorily before Afghan society can establish rational political procedures. That is why the speedy establishment of a judicial system is essential. The Italians, who are responsible for this, have not accomplished very much. Perhaps it's asking too much for a single nation to do something so central to this success of the enterprise.
The construction of a constitutional state and a healthy judiciary must become a priority of the international community. To keep the country slipping back into chaos, we must send a clear message to Afghanis that the outside world takes their desire for justice and democracy seriously.
*Britta Petersen is a chairman of the NGO, The Free Press Initiative, has trained journalists in Afghanistan for the past three years.
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U.S. offers to command NATO in Afghanistan
By PAUL AMES
Associated Press
June 6, 2006
BRUSSELS, Belgium - The United States has offered to take command of the NATO force in Afghanistan next year following the current British stint in charge of the expanding peacekeeping mission, diplomats said Tuesday.
The handover to a U.S. general is expected to take place in February as part of an overhaul of the NATO mission. The changes will include introducing a more flexible, multinational headquarters to replace the system of rotating national commands which has been in place since the start of the operation in August 2003.
One senior NATO diplomat said the offer reflects the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan even as the expansion of the NATO mission into the volatile south and east of Afghanistan means more European and Canadian troops can free up U.S. troops currently based there.
The diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of a meeting of NATO defense ministers Thursday, said the U.S. would likely remain in command for a year, as the alliance drops the current system of six-month command rotations.
Other diplomats also confirmed the U.S. offer. They spoke on condition of anonymity in line with their delegations' usual practice ahead of NATO ministerial meetings.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said his country would like to take command in 2008.
NATO is scheduled to expand its peacekeeping mission from 9,000 to 16,000 by late July when it is scheduled to take on security in the dangerous southern region. Later this year, it hopes to complete its expansion by moving into the eastern sector, which will likely take its total numbers to 21,000.
The U.S. is hoping to reduce its troops numbers this year from 19,000 to 16,000. Many of the remaining U.S. troops will be incorporated into the NATO force, notably in the eastern region, where Americans will be the lead nation under the NATO command. Britain is taking command in the south, Germany commands the north, and Italy the west.
However, the U.S. will also maintain a smaller combat force independent of NATO with the aim of hunting down Taliban and al-Qaida remnants.
The NATO diplomat said the likely appointment of a U.S. general to head the NATO force would not prevent the planned reduction in the overall level of U.S. troops, although some additional headquarters units may be needed to support the commander.
Britain's Lt. Gen. David Richards took command of NATO's International Security Assistance Force last month, replacing an Italian general.
Afghanistan will be a key topic at Thursday's NATO meeting, where defense ministers are expected to stress their commitment to the mission despite a surge in attacks on international forces and their Afghan allies. NATO's move into the south will double the number of foreign troops there and alliance officials expressed confidence the beefed up force will be able to confront the insurgent threat.
"We are not planning to review a plan, at the moment, which we believe has been designed to meet the kinds of challenges that we are now seeing," John P. Colston, NATO's assistant secretary general for defense policy and planning, told reporters.
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For Your Health
Plastics chemical alters female brains - Research renews debate over the toxicity of bisphenol A, a plastics chemical found in humans.
PAUL D. THACKER
Environmental Science and Technology
7 June 06
A chemical that leaches out of plastics has been discovered to modify the developing brains of female mice, who later behave much more like their brethren. This latest study builds on a growing body of literature about the toxicity of bisphenol A (BPA) and raises questions about its effects in humans.
Low doses of bisphenol A make female mice behave more like males.
In 1936, researchers found that BPA acts much like the hormone estrogen. Scientists now estimate that more than 6 billion pounds of the chemical are manufactured for use in products such as polycarbonate plastic-the resin lining food cans-and dental sealants. Citing the precautionary principle, city supervisors for San Francisco recently banned the chemical for use in products, such as baby bottles, that are intended for use by children under 3 years of age.
In the latest study, published in the journal Endocrinology, Beverly Rubin, an associate professor of cellular biology at Tufts University, and colleagues placed tiny pumps into female mice. From the 8th day of pregnancy until the 16th day of nursing, these pumps released doses of BPA into the mothers. This time period is critical because on the eighth day of development, embryonic mice begin growing neurons in a region of the brain that is critical for sexual behavior.
Most importantly, says Rubin, the concentrations administered were very tiny. One set of mothers was exposed to doses of 250 nanograms per kilogram per day (ng/kg/d) of BPA, while the other set was dosed at only 25 ng/kg/d.
"The levels of bisphenol A that were used are within the range that is estimated to be found in humans," she says. Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 95% of Americans excrete at least 100 parts per trillion (ppt) of BPA in their urine.
The scientists then examined the brains and behavior of the new generation of mice. In a section of the brain that controls the sexual cycle, female mice have 2-3 times as many neurons as males. But female mice who had been exposed to BPA while still in the womb were found to have fewer neurons than usual in this area of the brain. Female mice are typically more energetic than males, but the activity level of females who had been exposed to BPA dropped and mirrored that of their brothers.
"We found that the differences between males and females, at least for these two markers, were obliterated," adds Rubin.
But Steve Hentges, executive director of the American Plastics Council, says he finds little that is compelling in the research. "This study is of limited relevance to human health. A more robust study should be done," he says.
"We are within the human exposure range," counters Ana Soto, a Tufts professor of cellular biology and coauthor of the paper. She points out that other studies have found that BPA can lead to problems of the reproductive tract in both male and female rodents. "There is plenty of evidence now that low-dose levels lead to problems," she adds.
Few studies have reported on how BPA might harm humans. One study found that exposure to BPA is associated with recurrent miscarriage.
For almost two decades, Fred vom Saal, a professor of biology at the University of Missouri, has been investigating chemicals that alter the hormone system. "The findings reported in this study show permanent changes to the brain at doses that are 2000-20,000 times lower than what is estimated to be safe," he says. In January, vom Saal published an article that examined 120 papers on BPA. Of these studies, 109 found effects on experimental animals from low doses-40 of them at concentrations below the U.S. EPA's recommended safe level of 50 micrograms/kg/d.
However, he reported that 11 studies funded by industry found no effect from BPA.
And in a paper published in Cancer Research, scientists discovered that BPA can permanently alter DNA in rats. Like in the Rubin study, researchers exposed fetal rats to BPA at similar levels to those found in humans. When later tested, the male rats had DNA with an altered methylation pattern. Methyl groups act like switches and when attached to DNA can shut down gene expression. In this case, the excess methylation occurred on genes that regulate the function of the prostate, a gland that is influenced by hormones. Rats with this disrupted methylation pattern showed an increased incidence of precancerous prostate lesions.
Commenting on Rubin's research, Scott Belcher, an associate professor of pharmacology at the University of Cincinnati, says that the work does an excellent job of measuring low-dose responses in classic behavior and neuroanatomical studies.
Last December, Belcher published an article in Endocrinology reporting that rat brains were affected by BPA at doses below 1 ppt. "It was very surprising to see how the effects correlate with levels that have been found in humans," he says.
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Halt Is Urged for Trials of Antibiotic in Children
By GARDINER HARRIS
The New York Times
June 8, 2006
A Food and Drug Administration official called in May for a drug company to halt clinical trials of an antibiotic in children because the drug could be deadly, according to internal memorandums sent to other F.D.A. officials.
The drug, Ketek, made by Sanofi-Aventis, is being tested as a treatment for ear infections and tonsillitis in nearly 4,000 infants and children in more than a dozen countries, including the United States, according to postings on a government Web site. But Ketek, which is currently approved for use only in adults, has been reported to cause liver failure, blurred vision and loss of consciousness in adults.
"How does one justify balancing the risk of fatal liver failure against one day less of ear pain?" Dr. Rosemary Johann-Liang, an official in the Office of Drug Safety at the agency, wrote in one of the memorandums, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.
Sanofi-Aventis is sponsoring four clinical trials in children ages 6 months to 13 years, according the Web site posting. The drug agency approved plans for the trials.
There is growing evidence that Ketek is unusually toxic, according to a recent review by F.D.A. safety officials. Twelve adult patients in the United States have suffered liver failure, including four who died; 23 others suffered serious liver injury.
The safety officials wrote in their review that the agency should consider forcing Sanofi-Aventis to withdraw Ketek from the market, severely restrict its uses, even in adults, or add a prominent warning to its label about potentially fatal side effects.
More than five million prescriptions for Ketek have been written in the United States since its approval two years ago.
Asked about the memorandum written by Dr. Johann-Liang, an F.D.A. spokeswoman, Susan Bro, said that it was "a preliminary, raw assessment" and that "the final decision will be made by experts who have the full benefit of a large section of opinion and scientific fact."
Melissa Feltmann, a spokeswoman for Sanofi-Aventis, said in an e-mail message, "We are engaged in ongoing discussions with the F.D.A. regarding Ketek."
Other antibiotics cause liver failure, but Ketek seems to do so almost four times as often, the safety officials concluded in the review.
Ketek can also cause blurred vision and loss of consciousness, problems that are unique to it. In her memorandum, Dr. Johann-Liang asked how Sanofi-Aventis's investigators were going to assess whether infants were suffering blurred vision.
"If we cannot monitor for this event in infants/young children appropriately in the clinical trial setting, what can we conclude from the safety results of the trial?" she asked.
Dr. Danny Benjamin, an infectious-disease specialist at Duke University who was consulted separately by the drug agency, concluded that the pediatric trials with Ketek were a cause for concern and "hard to support," according to the memorandums obtained by The New York Times.
Dr. Benjamin did not respond to voice-mail or e-mail messages left for him yesterday.
In his memorandum, Dr. Benjamin said that in up to 87 percent of cases, pediatric ear infections resolved within a few days without treatment. Tests of an unusually risky antibiotic in infants with ear infections might be justified if the infants had already been treated unsuccessfully with safer antibiotics first, he wrote.
Sanofi-Aventis planned to give Ketek as a first-line therapy, according to the company's trial descriptions.
The drug agency's actions in regard to Ketek are being investigated by Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, as well as by Representatives Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Henry A. Waxman of California, both Democrats.
Sanofi-Aventis first asked the agency to approve the drug in February 2000. But officials demurred, citing reports of side effects. So the company undertook a study of Ketek in 24,000 patients to prove its safety. The trial was marred by fraud. One of the investigators on the study is now in federal prison; another lost his medical license.
The F.D.A. said it dismissed the study's results and instead asked the company to report its experience with Ketek in Europe, where it was approved in 2001. Although it is unusual for the agency to approve a drug based upon its use elsewhere, in April 2004, it . did just that, approving Ketek to treat sinusitis, bronchitis and pneumonia.
Since then, problems with the drug have continued to mount. By April, the agency had reports of 110 cases of liver problems associated with Ketek, most of which occurred in otherwise healthy people, according to the safety review. In one, a 49-year-old woman took no more than two doses of the drug before becoming nauseous and vomiting. She was hospitalized five days later and died.
Since they are submitted voluntarily, these kinds of case reports usually represent only a small fraction - estimates range from 1 percent to 10 percent - of actual drug problems. The reports that the F.D.A. has received so far are unusual because of their "rapid tempo and severity," the agency's internal safety report said.
The agency officials estimated that Ketek caused acute liver failure in 23 people for every 10 million prescriptions, about four times the rate of such events seen in other antibiotics.
In 1999, sales of the antibiotic Trovan were severely restricted after it was shown to cause liver failure in 58 people for every 10 million prescriptions.
In her memorandum, Dr. Johann-Liang suggested that Ketek's risks outweighed its benefits.
She noted that powerful antibiotics known as fluoroquinolones can also damage the liver. But she said that those drugs were available in intravenous forms and "are also used for more serious infectious diseases rather than solely for minor upper respiratory indications," as Ketek is.
Dr. Johann-Liang wrote in her memorandum that the parents of patients in Sanofi-Aventis's pediatric trials must be better informed about Ketek's risks "in order for any of these trials to continue to proceed."
She added that the parents "need to know that the 'close monitoring' for visual events is not possible in very young children, and the long-term consequences of such adverse reactions are unknown for the developing system."
Dr. Benjamin agreed that the brochure about the trials and informed-consent material given to parents "must address in plain language the risks, and severity of risks, of adverse events."
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Disciplinarian parents have fat kids-US study
Reuters
5 June 06
CHICAGO - Parents who are strict disciplinarians are far more likely to wind up with children who are fat by age six, perhaps because the youngsters over-eat as a reaction to stress, a study said on Monday.
The report from Boston University School of Medicine also found that the fewest weight problems occur among children whose parents are "authoritative" -- having high expectations for self control but respectful of a child's opinions and who set clear boundaries.
The study also found that children of parents who are permissive, defined as indulgent and without discipline, also have weight problems but not to the degree of the offspring of strict disciplinarians with low levels of sensitivity, the study said.
Researchers also found that children of neglectful mothers and fathers, those who are emotionally uninvolved with no set rules, fared about the same as kids raised by permissive parents.
The study covered 872 children who were part of a group enrolled at birth in 1991 in a U.S. government study and followed for a number of years.
"Among the four parenting styles, authoritarian parenting was associated with the highest risk of overweight among young children," concluded the study published in the June issue of "Pediatrics," the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
"These results provide evidence that a strict environment lacking in emotional responsiveness is associated with an increased risk of childhood overweight," the study said.
It may be that strict parents have defined limits on when and what their children eat that could have a negative impact if not accompanied by warmth and sensitivity, it added.
"A parent who is relatively insensitive to the child's emotional needs and development may impose a structure, such as requiring that a child clean his or her plate, that results in learning to eat on the basis of external cues rather than internal cues," the report said.
In addition, if a parent demands that a child exercise, it may result in an aversion to exercise, it said.
And living in a home with high expectations for self control but little sensitivity can be stressful, it added, and overeating can become "a stress response."
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Astronomers link human evolution, cosmic radiation
By Scott LaFee
UNION-TRIBUNE
June 7, 2006
Among working astronomers, Aden and Marjorie Meinel are synonymous with the science. For almost three-quarters of a century, the married couple have helped not only to better see the universe - Aden has designed, built and operated telescopes and observatories around the world - but also to explain it: Certain bands of light seen in auroras are called Meinel bands.
But after decades of focusing their attentions skyward, the Meinels - now in their 80s - are grappling with a question that seems, at first light, to be far, far away from astronomy. Namely: Why did modern humans and other species emerge some 40,000 years ago?
Their answer: Cosmic radiation, which the Meinels will elaborate on June 20 in a noon public lecture at the University of San Diego, part of the annual meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
"Paleoanthropologists kind of gasp at the idea," said Aden. "The idea of cosmic rays significantly affecting early hominids and other species is pretty dramatic, but there's some really compelling evidence to support the idea. It's a totally new factor to be considered."
Distinguished careers
Coming from almost anyone else, the suggestion that a burst of cosmic radiation profoundly mutated life on Earth and altered the course of human evolution would probably be dismissed as outrageous science fiction.
But Aden and Marjorie Meinel have been both serious and significant players in astronomy for a good chunk of the last century. Natives of Pasadena, they met in a special 11th grade class for gifted students at Pasadena Junior College. Both were interested in space science. Marjorie's interest was inherited: Her father, Edison Pettit, was one of the founding astronomers of the 102-year-old Mount Wilson Observatory, east of Los Angeles. Aden's interest evolved over time. It began as an apprentice in Mount Wilson's optics shop, through a stint in the Navy as a rocket engineer and at the California Institute of Technology, where his doctoral dissertation eventually resulted in the world's first solid Schmidt spectrograph - a device for measuring and charting wavelengths of light in space.
With Marjorie serving as adviser, editor and muse (and mother to their seven children), Aden launched a career designing, developing and directing observatories around the world. He helped establish the first national observatory at Kitt Peak, southwest of Tucson, Ariz., in the 1960s, then moved to Steward Observatory and taught at the University of Arizona. At various times, he helped build telescopes in India and China. In the 1980s, he and Marjorie moved to the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena where they helped launch space-based telescopes like the Hubble. Aden retired in 1993, Marjorie in 2000.
So how does a distinguished astronomer become interested in human evolution?
"Frankly, when you retire, you finally have time to read and think a lot, said Aden. "When that happens, questions pop up, sometimes right out of the blue."
As a high school student, Aden had participated in some balloon experiments at Cal Tech to study cosmic radiation, which were utterly mysterious at the time but are now known to consist of high energy particles (including protons) emanating from sources in outer space and bombarding the planet from every direction.
While reading a story about ice-core research, Aden wondered whether the core samples also contained information about cosmic radiation levels over the Earth's history. To his and Marjorie's surprise, an examination of existing ice core data showed a significant surge in radiation roughly 40,000 years ago - about the same time, they noted, that modern humans emerged in Eurasia, and numerous other species in the northern hemisphere were either undergoing significant change or disappearing altogether.
"That's when we first became tempted to put two and two together," said Aden. "If there was a large surge of cosmic rays, and there's good evidence that these rays can (cause mutations), the question becomes, did they help create new species of life?
"Our findings indicate that two very rare occurrences happened at roughly the same time, which suggests that how we've evolved might not be just slow, random mutation and natural selection. Maybe we are partly the product of cosmic radiation."
The Meinels even have a likely source for the radiation: the gaseous remains of a dying star called the Cat's Eye nebula discovered by William Herschel in 1786.
According to their hypothesis, the nebula began emitting a burst of radiation roughly 200,000 years ago. "Around the time that Neanderthals began to appear," said Aden.
Approximately 40,000 years ago, the frequency and intensity of the radiation surged, spawning in the Meinels' view, a host of evolutionary changes. "Then, about 10,000 years ago, the Earth passed out of the nebula's jet of cosmic rays, ending the accelerated mutations," said Aden.
Insufficient data
But is the nebula's radiation truly the cause or simply an intriguing correlation? Aden and Marjorie don't know. They expect their ideas to be questioned and scrutinized. Indeed, they demand it.
"During World War II, I edited articles on rocketry," said Marjorie. "I had to be absolutely accurate in my descriptions and details or things could blow up. I've always believed that you have to get the science exactly right, with nothing misunderstood."
Both say that much more research needs to be done, that the ice cores are just a clue. But Aden is optimistic that he and his wife have noticed something overlooked by others, something significant.
He recalls attending a conference at UC Berkeley in 1980 when Luis Alvarez, the Nobel physicist, and his geologist son, Walter, first proposed the theory that a massive asteroid impact 65 million years ago spurred the extinction of dinosaurs.
Though widely accepted now, the Alvarez' asteroid-impact theory was initially dismissed by many scientists as folly. Aden thinks his cosmic ray idea will also require time (and more proof) to become accepted.
"We're describing a creation event, the impetus behind new species emerging," said Aden. "People who are well-established don't like to change their minds, and this requires a big change in thinking. That's why Marjorie and I like giving public lectures, especially to young people who are more likely to have open minds.
"I doubt either of us will be around to see how all of this works out. We just hope others will find what we've discovered exciting enough to pursue."
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Book Review: Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives
Reviewed by Michael Levin
Forsyth Institute, Harvard School of Dental Medicine
Journal of Scientific Exploration, Volume 19, Number 4
Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives
by Jim Tucker
St. Martin's Press, 2005. 256 pp. $23.95 (hardcover). ISBN 0-312-32137-6
Life Before Life is a highly readable account of the ongoing research at the University of Virginia division of Personality Studies into the fascinating phenomena surrounding past-life recall by children.
The basic phenomenon usually involves a young child who talks about the memories of another (adult) person in first-person perspective. In some cases there are predictions or announcing dreams made, respectively by the older person before death and the mother of the child, predicting the transfer of personal identity.
Also involved may be unusual play, behavior patterns, specific phobias, and birthmarks/birth defects specifically related to the life and death of the previous personality. Such cases have been found in many parts of the world; the most striking cases involve memories that can be (and in many cases were) checked against independent sources and shown to correspond to an actual deceased person. The far majority of these cases describe ordinary lives (not famous individuals, as often occurs through "past life recall therapy"), as well as violent deaths resulting from accidents or various crimes.
The investigation of such cases, as described in this book, is carried out in a methodical and impartial manner. The only view that the book assumes is that there is a phenomenon here worthy of study, and that seems amply proven. The text is fairly neutral about the interpretation of the data and indeed goes into considerable detail about the methodology (interviews and fact-checking) as well as possible pitfalls of individual cases. The author is very good about suggesting possible conclusions that might be drawn and discussing their relative merits. Clearly the most immediate thing that comes to mind is a classical notion of reincarnation, but the book discusses a number of possible alternatives that must also be considered. Accepting that, one is left with a variety of further questions, such as why only some people seem to have such recall, why the recall generally ceases at 5-6 years of age, why the birthmark cases almost always involve the skin, why the deaths almost always involve violence, etc.
Chapter 3 focuses on "explanations to consider", including super-PSI, possession, etc., which while hardly being more palatable explanations for conventional scientists, need to be evaluated. Interestingly, while these alternatives are discussed in detail, along with both scientific and religious objections to reincarnation, the book does not spend time unpacking the notion of reincarnation, or exactly what it means for a "person" to be identified with another person. The philosophical (ontological as well as epistemological) issues surrounding personal identity are complex (see the works of Anthony Flew), and quite germane to this discussion [Glover, 1976; Morick, 1970; Perry, 1975; Perry, 1978]. While the data will be convincing to many readers, it would be a mistake to think that accepting reincarnation as the most likely explanation for these observations gets us past many of the difficulties with personal identity and the meaning of "memory" which have plagued philosophy of mind for millennia.
As an example, consider the fact that the concept of "person" has undergone a radical deconstruction by recent advances in cognitive science. Evidence from a number of areas of psychology, biology, and artificial intelligence suggests that there is no unified "I" even in living individuals! The author asks (p. 215), "what is it that reincarnates?". A first question might be, "what is it that is incarnated now?". The currently most-popular notion of human cognition treats the self as a fiction, or a "center of narrative gravity", while the behavior and perceptions of a human being are the result of a number of information processing modules that vie for control [Braude, 1995; Dennett, 1980; Dennett, 1991; Marks, 1981; Marks, 1978; White, 1991]. These modules are made up nested hierarchies of increasingly "dumb" information-processing systems, ultimately merging with specific neuronal pathways in the brain. It is clear that we are moving away from the notion of a centralized Ghost in the Machine who supervises the whole operation; if this view is even partially correct, it challenges us to develop more sophisticated notions of what might reincarnate and how, assuming we believe that something related to human cognition might survive the death of the body.
The author proposes the analogy of TV signal to TV set, to explicate the relationship between mind and body. As the television apparatus is needed for the signal to be expressed, the mind is not originated by the brain but rather is "transmitted" through it. This offers dualists a way to explain why the brain is necessary but not sufficient. Pull out the right wires, and there's no TV program on, but not because the program has disappeared. On this view, the information content of the show is not in the wires of the TV set. The analogy is appealing, but dangerous. The main problem is that it only explains the simplest cases-a bullet through the brain 5 no human behavior. However, neuroscience now has a huge amount of data showing how very subtle and primary aspects of our personality do indeed depend upon the structure and function of the brain. Through work with psychotropic compounds, accidents or disease which causes specific kinds of damage, and genetic mutation in animal systems, it seems that this simple analogy must be fleshed out much more before it can do useful work. Many wonderful examples have now been reported [Sacks, 1998]. A particular kind of damage can cause a man not to be able to name red vegetables, or to cause him to believe and claim vehemently that his left arm does not belong to him. Does that really jibe with the brain being just a transmitter? Not in any simple fashion. If, when one pulls out a certain transistor, the TV show does not stop but rather shows the protagonist start to walk on his hands for the rest of the program, one starts to suspect that some important aspect of the fundamental information content was indeed directly related to the hardware that was removed.
These issues directly point to the reason why this work is so important. While many people are personally excited at the prospect of reincarnation, it is unclear that this possesses that kind of general import for most of us. First, the data do not show that everyone reincarnates; at face value, it suggests that perhaps only those with particular kinds of deaths may do so. Even if all of us do, the far majority will have no recollection of it, dampening the excitement about the prospect (shades of Philosophy-101 again: is the situation where you are reborn but do not know about it, really any different from one where you simply die and another person is born, and does it matter to "you" now?). In any case, it would seem that one's focus ought to be in the current life, and not on the past lives (as suggested in the book section dealing with how to ease the psychological issues confronting children with these kinds of memories). If we don't remember our past lives, there's probably a good reason for it. Nor do there appear to be any societal benefits stemming from an acceptance of rebirth and even karma; as pointed out in the book, there are just as many villains in countries where this is commonly-accepted fact as there are in the Western world.
The biggest import of this work is for basic science and the understanding of the universe as a whole. More profoundly than most of the work on psychokinesis, telepathy, and so on, which at least can be approached with physicalist theories [White and Krippner, 1977], the prospect of personal survival of bodily death speaks against the doctrine of materialism [Beloff, 1985; Beloff, 1990]. The author discusses a couple of related phenomena that do the same (veridical out-of-body experiences) and touches on relevant aspects of parapsychology, such as the mind-machine interaction work [Jahn and Dunne, 1987]. It is clear that if the human personality is not simply a by-product of the biology of the body, a drastic revision in our basic sciences will be required. A brief discussion of the issues (problems with conservation of mass/energy, quantum approaches by people like Stapp, etc.) is appropriately included. Interested readers can learn more about these issues from [Popper and Eccles, 1983].
Indeed, the intersection of this body of work with mainstream science provides some important puzzles. The author rightly points out that it is entirely unclear how (in the case of birthmarks, if they were caused by the beliefs and wishes of the mother instead of by reincarnation) information acquired by the mother might affect the genetics of embryonic development. This is true, although it is of course equally unclear how the information content of a discarnate spirit can affect the embryogenesis of a human fetus. A couple of the most interesting cases revealed information from the children about how they "chose" their prospective parents. This immediately presents a thought experiment. Suppose one takes a human egg, fertilizes it in vitro, and waits until it makes its first division into a 2-celled embryo. This is done today routinely in IVF clinics around the world. One then tosses a coin (or if you prefer, uses a quantum random number generator). If it comes up heads, one implants the embryo as is, and one child results. If it comes up tails, one separates the 2 cells and implants them individually, which will result in the birth of twins - two different individuals. The procedure from coin toss to splitting can be done on the time-scale of a minute. Assuming the "decisions" about picking one's parents are performed in a world where time is relevant (and it would seem that a "decision" process assumes a linear flow of time), when in such a case does a spirit get assigned to the twin which would not exist if the coin comes up heads?
As long as we're talking about biology (and certainly this work, and the works of Stevenson, contribute to biology in an important way), I am tempted to add to the "Future Research" section (p. 231) and describe a potential area of experimental research that at least begins to address these questions in a rigorous manner. It turns out that there is a type of worm that can regenerate (re-grow) its head (including brain etc.) if it is cut off. These worms can also be trained to perform simple tasks - they have memories and remember. Some truly astounding work in the 1970s (which is now being pursued in our lab) has shown that if trained worms are cut up, and the tails are allowed to form a new worm (with a new brain), the resulting worm remembers the original training [McConnell, 1965]. This work demonstrates that (assuming the memory is in the body at all) knowledge and information can be stored outside of the brain. While this example doesn't take us all the way to a discarnate entity, and may or may not apply to higher vertebrates, it provides a foot-hold to begin, giving biologists an experimentally tractable entry-point into the process of how information could be imposed on a forming brain from outside the brain.
The book does not describe any cases not supportive of 1:1 relationships between deceased personalities and children (for example, cases where the original personality was still alive while the child was born, or two children who remember the same previous life). Such were (as a minority) described in the larger Stevenson books, and represent interesting cases which might also teach us much. Clearly, lots of work remains to be done. Besides continued collection of cases, one wishes for more experimental approaches, such as the described marks purposefully made at the time of death that can help identify possible rebirths if they occur in the same family. A number of children apparently also made statements about their conditions between lives, and it is hoped that continued questioning of such children might reveal interesting details about the process.
The author has not only produced a first-rate piece of research, but also has shown the necessary very wide-ranging knowledge to help the reader make sense of it. This work is incredibly important, and the author is clearly doing it the right way. The coding of all cases into a searchable computer database is an important advance, as it will allow a significant amount of data-mining-a technique which allows, given large data sets, to automatically find and derive relationships and hypotheses which were not specifically anticipated. For example the author describes the test for a correlation between "saintliness" in the previous life and the societal position of the next personality. For those who have never heard of this fascinating work, this is a good introduction and describes a number of informative cases. For those who have, the book includes plenty of discussions of related topics and will surely cause the reader to ponder important issues. I recommend this book. Interested readers will also want to read a number of the works of Ian Stevenson, the originator of this field [Stevenson, 1997a; Stevenson, 1997b].
References
1. Beloff, J. (1985). Parapsychology and radical dualism. Journal of Religious & Psychical Research 8, 3-10.
2. Beloff, J. (1990). Could there be a physical explanation for PSI? In: The Relentless Question: Reflections on the Paranormal. McFarland, Jefferson, NC.
3. Braude, S. (1995). First Person Plural: Multiple Personality and the Philosophy of Mind. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
4. Dennett, D. (1980). Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind & Psychology. MIT Press.
5. Dennett, D. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown and Co.
6. Glover, J. (1976). The Philosophy of Mind. Oxford University Press.
7. Jahn, R. G., and Dunne, B. J. (1987). Margins of Reality: the Role of Consciousness in the Physical World. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
8. Marks, C. E. (1981). Commissurotomy, Consciousness, and Unity of Mind. MIT Press.
9. Marks, L. E. (1978). The Unity of the Senses: Interrelations among the Modalities. New York: Academic Press.
10. McConnell, J. V. (1965). The Worm Re-turns: The Best from the Worm Runner's Digest. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
11. Morick, H. (1970). Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind: Readings from Descartes to Strawson. Glenview, Ill: Scott Foresman.
12. Perry, J. (1975). Personal Identity. University of California Press.
13. Perry, J. (1978). A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality. Hackett Pub. Co.
14. Popper, K. R., and Eccles, J. C. (1983). The Self and Its Brain. Routledge & K. Paul, London; Boston.
15. Sacks, O. (1998). The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. Simon & Schuster.
16. Stevenson, I. (1997a). Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects. Praeger.
17. Stevenson, I. (1997b). Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. Praeger.
18. White, J., and Krippner, S. (1977). Future Science: Life Energies & the Physics of Paranormal Phenomena. Doubleday.
19. White, S. L. (1991). The Unity of the Self. MIT Press.
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Road deaths a global epidemic, says report
Reuters
8 June 06
LONDON - Road deaths are a global epidemic on the scale of malaria and tuberculosis and world leaders must do more to address the issue, a report said on Thursday.
The Commission for Global Road Safety, headed by former NATO chief George Robertson, said 1.2 million people were killed and 50 million injured every year worldwide in traffic accidents.
More than 85 percent of the casualties were in low and middle income countries, with road deaths second only to AIDS as a global killer of young men.
The Commission said the Group of Eight, made up of the world's richest countries, must back a $300 million, 10-year action plan to address the issue in developing countries.
Robertson said it needed the same attention from the G8 as was given to the "Make Poverty History" campaign, which lobbied political leaders to write off billions of dollars of debt owed by the world's poorest nations.
"In 2005 millions of people, and the leaders of the G8, responded to the call to Make Poverty History," Robertson said in a statement.
"Yet the gains for development won in 2005 will be at risk if action is not taken to reverse the growing epidemic of road traffic death and injury, with its terrible human and economic cost."
The report said that despite causing death on a similar scale to malaria and TB, road safety was not included in the Millennium Development Goals and so received far less in overseas funding.
It estimated that the economic cost to low and middle income countries was $65-100 billion.
Robertson called for "political leadership" from the G8 along with a significant increase in resources.
The commission's findings will be presented to world leaders before the G8 summit in St Petersburg in July in an effort to have road safety put on the agenda of future summits.
The report also called for a United Nations Road Safety Summit to be called to coordinate an international policy for preventing road injuries.
"Five hundred children are dying every say and thousands more are being disabled or injured," said Formula One driver Michael Schumacher, a member of the commission set up by the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) Foundation.
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BlackBerry addict? - Hotel offers detox
Reuters
7 June 06
CHICAGO - BlackBerry addicts have a crack at freedom when they check into one Chicago hotel: the manager will put the communications devices and others like them under lock and key for guests who want a break.
Rick Ueno, general manager of the Sheraton Chicago Hotel, said the program which began on Wednesday grew out of his own personal BlackBerry addiction. His one-step recovery was switching to a regular cell phone.
"I was really addicted to my BlackBerry. I had an obsession with e-mail," he told Reuters. "Morning and night. There came a time when I didn't think it was healthy ... I quit cold turkey."
He believes guests might want to try the same thing for a day or two anyway, so they can concentrate on meetings, business and socializing while at the hotel.
Ueno said he would take personal charge of any BlackBerrys or related devices guests want to surrender and place them in his office locked up until their return is requested. There is no charge.
"I run a hotel with over 900 employees and thousands of guests. I think I'm more effective. I feel better. I sleep better. My family likes it," he said of his post-BlackBerry life.
The popular hand-held devices, sometimes called "CrackBerries" because users become so reliant on them, are made by Canadian-based Research In Motion Ltd..
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Bushland
FBI says, "No hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11"
Muckraker Report
June 6, 2006
On June 5, 2006, the Muckraker Report contacted the FBI Headquarters, (202) 324-3000, to learn why Bin Laden's Most Wanted poster did not indicate that Usama was also wanted in connection with 9/11. The Muckraker Report spoke with Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI. When asked why there is no mention of 9/11 on Bin Laden's Most Wanted web page, Tomb said, "The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden's Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11."
This past weekend, a thought provoking e-mail circulated through Internet news groups, bringing attention to the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist web page for Usama Bin Laden.[1] (See bottom of this web page for Most Wanted page) In the e-mail, the question is asked, "Why doesn't Usama Bin Laden's Most Wanted poster make any direct connection with the events of September 11, 2001?" The FBI says on its Bin Laden web page that Usama Bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 7, 1998 bombings of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. According to the FBI, these attacks killed over 200 people. The FBI concludes its reason for "wanting" Bin Laden by saying, "In addition, Bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorists attacks throughout the world."
On June 5, 2006, the Muckraker Report contacted the FBI Headquarters, (202) 324-3000, to learn why Bin Laden's Most Wanted poster did not indicate that Usama was also wanted in connection with 9/11. The Muckraker Report spoke with Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI. When asked why there is no mention of 9/11 on Bin Laden's Most Wanted web page, Tomb said, "The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden's Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11."
Surprised by the ease in which this FBI spokesman made such an astonishing statement, I asked, "How this was possible?" Tomb continued, "Bin Laden has not been formally charged in connection to 9/11." I asked, "How does that work?" Tomb continued, "The FBI gathers evidence. Once evidence is gathered, it is turned over to the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice than decides whether it has enough evidence to present to a federal grand jury. In the case of the 1998 United States Embassies being bombed, Bin Laden has been formally indicted and charged by a grand jury. He has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connected Bin Laden to 9/11."
It shouldn't take long before the full meaning of these FBI statements start to prick your brain and raise your blood pressure. If you think the way I think, in quick order you will be wrestling with a barrage of very powerful questions that must be answered. First and foremost, if the U.S. government does not have enough hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11, how is it possible that it had enough evidence to invade Afghanistan to "smoke him out of his cave?" The federal government claims to have invaded Afghanistan to "root out" Bin Laden and the Taliban. Through the talking heads in the mainstream media, the Bush Administration told the American people that Usama Bin Laden was Public Enemy Number One and responsible for the deaths of nearly 3000 people on September 11, 2001. Yet nearly five years later, the FBI says that it has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.
Next is the Bin Laden "confession" video that was released by the U.S. government on December 13, 2001. Most Americans remember this video. It was the video showing Bin Laden with a few of his comrades recounting with delight the September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States. The Department of Defense issued a press release to accompany this video in which Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said, "There was no doubt of bin Laden's responsibility for the September 11 attacks before the tape was discovered."[2] What Rumsfeld implied by his statement was that Bin Laden was the known mastermind behind 9/11 even before the "confession video" and that the video simply served to confirm what the U.S. government already knew; that Bin Laden was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
In a BBC News article[3] reporting on the "9/11 confession video" release, President Bush is said to have been hesitant to release the tape because he knew it would be a vivid reminder to many people of their loss. But, he also knew it would be "a devastating declaration" of Bin Laden's guilt. "Were going to get him," said President Bush. "Dead or alive, it doesn't matter to me."
In a CNN article[4] regarding the Bin Laden tape, then New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said that "the tape removes any doubt that the U.S. military campaign targeting bin Laden and his associates is more than justified." Senator Richard Shelby, R-Alabama, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said, "The tape's release is central to informing people in the outside world who don't believe bin Laden was involved in the September 11 attacks." Shelby went on to say "I don't know how they can be in denial after they see this tape." Well Senator Shelby, apparently the Federal Bureau of Investigation isn't convinced by the taped confession, so why are you?
The Muckraker Report attempted to secure a reference to the U.S. government authenticating the Bin Laden "confession video", to no avail. However, it is conclusive that the Bush Administration and U.S. Congress, along with the dead stream media, played the video as if it was authentic. So why doesn't the FBI view the "confession video" as hard evidence? After all, if the FBI is investigating a crime such as drug trafficking, and it discovers a video of members of a drug cartel opening talking about a successful distribution operation in the United States, that video would be presented to a federal grand jury. The identified participants of the video would be indicted, and if captured, the video alone would serve as sufficient evidence to net a conviction in a federal court. So why is the Bin Laden "confession video" not carrying the same weight with the FBI?
Remember, on June 5, 2006, FBI spokesman, Chief of Investigative Publicity Rex Tomb said, "The FBI has no hard evidence connecting Usama Bin Laden to 9/11." This should be headline news worldwide. The challenge to the reader is to find out why it is not. Why has the U.S. media blindly read the government-provided 9/11 scripts, rather than investigate without passion, prejudice, or bias, the events of September 11, 2001? Why has the U.S. media blacklisted any guest that might speak of a government sponsored 9/11 cover-up, rather than seeking out those people who have something to say about 9/11 that is contrary to the government's account? And on those few rare occasions when a 9/11 dissenter has made it upon the airways, why has the mainstream media ridiculed the guest as a conspiracy nut, rather than listen to the evidence that clearly raises valid questions about the government's 9/11 account? Why is the Big Media Conglomeration blindly content with the government's 9/11 story when so much verifiable information to the contrary is available with a few clicks of a computer mouse?
Who is it that is controlling the media message, and how is it that the U.S. media has indicted Usama Bin Laden for the events of September 11, 2001, but the U.S. government has not? How is it that the FBI has no "hard evidence" connecting Usama Bin Laden to the events of September 11, 2001, while the U.S. media has played the Bin Laden - 9/11 connection story for five years now as if it has conclusive evidence that Bin Laden is responsible for the collapse of the twin towers, the Pentagon attack, and the demise of United Flight 93?
...No hard evidence connecting Usama Bin Laden to 9/11... Think about it.
[1] Federal Bureau of Investigation, Most Wanted Terrorists, Usama Bin Laden, http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/terrorists/terbinladen.htm, [Accessed May 31, 2006]
[2] United States Department of Defense, News Release, U.S. Releases Videotape of Osama bin Laden, December 13, 2001, http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/2001/b12132001_bt630-01.html, [Accessed June 5, 2006]
[3] BBC News, Bin Laden video angers New Yorkers, December 14, 2001, Peter Gould, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1711874.stm, [Accessed June 5, 2006]
[4] CNN, Bin Laden on tape: Attacks 'benefited Islam greatly", December 14, 2001, http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/12/13/ret.bin.laden.videotape, [Accessed June 5, 2006]
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Is the U.S. becoming a police state? Here are the top 10 signs that it may well be the case
by Allan Uthman
Globalresearch.ca
4 June 06
1. The Internet Clampdown
One saving grace of alternative media in this age of unfettered corporate conglomeration has been the internet. While the masses are spoon-fed predigested news on TV and in mainstream print publications, the truth-seeking individual still has access to a broad array of investigative reporting and political opinion via the world-wide web. Of course, it was only a matter of time before the government moved to patch up this crack in the sky.
Attempts to regulate and filter internet content are intensifying lately, coming both from telecommunications corporations (who are gearing up to pass legislation transferring ownership and regulation of the internet to themselves), and the Pentagon (which issued an "Information Operations Roadmap" in 2003, signed by Donald Rumsfeld, which outlines tactics such as network attacks and acknowledges, without suggesting a remedy, that US propaganda planted in other countries has easily found its way to Americans via the internet). One obvious tactic clearing the way for stifling regulation of internet content is the growing media frenzy over child pornography and "internet predators," which will surely lead to legislation that by far exceeds in its purview what is needed to fight such threats.
2. "The Long War"
This little piece of clumsy marketing died off quickly, but it gave away what many already suspected: the War on Terror will never end, nor is it meant to end. It is designed to be perpetual. As with the War on Drugs, it outlines a goal that can never be fully attained -- as long as there are pissed off people and explosives. The Long War will eternally justify what are ostensibly temporary measures: suspension of civil liberties, military expansion, domestic spying, massive deficit spending and the like. This short-lived moniker told us all, "get used to it. Things aren't going to change any time soon."
3. The USA PATRIOT Act
Did anyone really think this was going to be temporary? Yes, this disgusting power grab gives the government the right to sneak into your house, look through all your stuff and not tell you about it for weeks on a rubber stamp warrant. Yes, they can look at your medical records and library selections. Yes, they can pass along any information they find without probable cause for purposes of prosecution. No, they're not going to take it back, ever.
4. Prison Camps
This last January the Army Corps of Engineers gave Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root nearly $400 million to build detention centers in the United States, for the purpose of unspecified "new programs." Of course, the obvious first guess would be that these new programs might involve rounding up Muslims or political dissenters -- I mean, obviously detention facilities are there to hold somebody. I wish I had more to tell you about this, but it's, you know... secret.
5. Touchscreen Voting Machines
Despite clear, copious evidence that these nefarious contraptions are built to be tampered with, they continue to spread and dominate the voting landscape, thanks to Bush's "Help America Vote Act," the exploitation of corrupt elections officials, and the general public's enduring cluelessness.
In Utah, Emery County Elections Director Bruce Funk witnessed security testing by an outside firm on Diebold voting machines which showed them to be a security risk. But his warnings fell on deaf ears. Instead Diebold attorneys were flown to Emery County on the governor's airplane to squelch the story. Funk was fired. In Florida, Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho discovered an alarming security flaw in their Diebold system at the end of last year. Rather than fix the flaw, Diebold refused to fulfill its contract. Both of the other two touchscreen voting machine vendors, Sequoia and ES&S, now refuse to do business with Sancho, who is required by HAVA to implement a touchscreen system and will be sued by his own state if he doesn't. Diebold is said to be pressuring for Sancho's ouster before it will resume servicing the county.
Stories like these and much worse abound, and yet TV news outlets have done less coverage of the new era of elections fraud than even 9/11 conspiracy theories. This is possibly the most important story of this century, but nobody seems to give a damn. As long as this issue is ignored, real American democracy will remain an illusion. The midterm elections will be an interesting test of the public's continuing gullibility about voting integrity, especially if the Democrats don't win substantial gains, as they almost surely will if everything is kosher.
Bush just suggested that his brother Jeb would make a good president. We really need to fix this problem soon.
6. Signing Statements
Bush has famously never vetoed a bill. This is because he prefers to simply nullify laws he doesn't like with "signing statements." Bush has issued over 700 such statements, twice as many as all previous presidents combined. A few examples of recently passed laws and their corresponding dismissals, courtesy of the Boston Globe:
--Dec. 30, 2005: US interrogators cannot torture prisoners or otherwise subject them to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.
Bush's signing statement: The president, as commander in chief, can waive the torture ban if he decides that harsh interrogation techniques will assist in preventing terrorist attacks.
--Dec. 30, 2005: When requested, scientific information ''prepared by government researchers and scientists shall be transmitted [to Congress] uncensored and without delay."
Bush's signing statement: The president can tell researchers to withhold any information from Congress if he decides its disclosure could impair foreign relations, national security, or the workings of the executive branch.
--Dec. 23, 2004: Forbids US troops in Colombia from participating in any combat against rebels, except in cases of self-defense. Caps the number of US troops allowed in Colombia at 800.
Bush's signing statement: Only the president, as commander in chief, can place restrictions on the use of US armed forces, so the executive branch will construe the law ''as advisory in nature."
Essentially, this administration is bypassing the judiciary and deciding for itself whether laws are constitutional or not. Somehow, I don't see the new Supreme Court lineup having much of a problem with that, though. So no matter what laws congress passes, Bush will simply choose to ignore the ones he doesn't care for. It's much quieter than a veto, and can't be overridden by a two-thirds majority. It's also totally absurd.
7. Warrantless Wiretapping
Amazingly, the GOP sees this issue as a plus for them. How can this be? What are you, stupid? You find out the government is listening to the phone calls of US citizens, without even the weakest of judicial oversight and you think that's okay? Come on -- if you know anything about history, you know that no government can be trusted to handle something like this responsibly. One day they're listening for Osama, and the next they're listening in on Howard Dean.
Think about it: this administration hates unauthorized leaks. With no judicial oversight, why on earth wouldn't they eavesdrop on, say, Seymour Hersh, to figure out who's spilling the beans? It's a no-brainer. Speaking of which, it bears repeating: terrorists already knew we would try to spy on them. They don't care if we have a warrant or not. But you should.
8. Free Speech Zones
I know it's old news, but... come on, are they fucking serious?
9. High-ranking Whistleblowers
Army Generals. Top-level CIA officials. NSA operatives. White House cabinet members. These are the kind of people that Republicans fantasize about being, and whose judgment they usually respect. But for some reason, when these people resign in protest and criticize the Bush administration en masse, they are cast as traitorous, anti-American publicity hounds. Ridiculous. The fact is, when people who kill, spy and deceive for a living tell you that the White House has gone too far, you had damn well better pay attention. We all know most of these people are staunch Republicans. If the entire military except for the two guys the Pentagon put in front of the press wants Rumsfeld out, why on earth wouldn't you listen?
10. The CIA Shakeup
Was Porter Goss fired because he was resisting the efforts of Rumsfeld or Negroponte? No. These appointments all come from the same guys, and they wouldn't be nominated if they weren't on board all the way. Goss was probably canned so abruptly due to a scandal involving a crooked defense contractor, his hand-picked third-in-command, the Watergate hotel and some hookers.
If Bush's nominee for CIA chief, Air Force General Michael Hayden, is confirmed, that will put every spy program in Washington under military control. Hayden, who oversaw the NSA warrantless wiretapping program and is clearly down with the program. That program? To weaken and dismantle or at least neuter the CIA. Despite its best efforts to blame the CIA for "intelligence errors" leading to the Iraq war, the picture has clearly emerged -- through extensive CIA leaks -- that the White House's analysis of Saddam's destructive capacity was not shared by the Agency. This has proved to be a real pain in the ass for Bush and the gang.
Who'd have thought that career spooks would have moral qualms about deceiving the American people? And what is a president to do about it? Simple: make the critical agents leave, and fill their slots with Bush/Cheney loyalists. Then again, why not simply replace the entire organization? That is essentially what both Rumsfeld at the DoD and newly minted Director of National Intelligence John are doing -- they want to move intelligence analysis into the hands of people that they can control, so the next time they lie about an "imminent threat" nobody's going to tell. And the press is applauding the move as a "necessary reform."
Remember the good old days, when the CIA were the bad guys?
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
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A Florida Woman Reported To The FBI For Criticizing Arlen Specter - She used a quote from Thomas Jefferson!
Peggy Decker
From this extremely useful website here I was able to get e-mail addresses for every House and Senate staffer including Senator Arlen Specter's Chief of Staff and Director of Communications, William Reynolds.
Then I sent the following quote from Thomas Jefferson to every Republican who voted for S.2611:
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
Reynolds (e-mail him) replied:
"If you were meaning to convey a threat, then you have effectively done so. I am forwarding this to the FBI and U.S. Capitol Police. I will not tolerate threats against my people."
I responded to Reynolds:
"How DARE YOU threaten ME. You work for ME, not the other way around. I have every right to express my displeasure at Senator Specter's traitorous vote, and if I choose to quote Thomas Jefferson, that is my right.
"You and your boss are elites who feel that you can do anything and say anything without repercussions. Your threatening e-mail was read over the air on a popular radio show and this reply to you was read as well.
"I, unlike many elected officials, have nothing to hide. You do not frighten me. I have never been in trouble of any sort in my life.
"And also unlike Specter and many of his colleagues, I love my country and revere our Founding Fathers.
"If you and Specter would devote the same effort to catching and deporting illegal aliens as you do in harassing the law abiding citizens for whom you work, this country would not be in the dire straits that it is in."
VDARE.COM note: Decker, a retired schoolteacher, advised the Tampa branch of the FBI about her e-mail exchange with Reynolds, noting that she felt threatened by him.
The FBI replied to Decker: "The Senate message is not considered threatening," but "the message you sent, because the quote was altered (i.e. by color of text) can be construed as threatening."
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In Battle Over U.S. Intelligence, 'Equality Under Law' Falls Victim
By Gennady Yevstafyev
Novosti, Russia
May 26, 2006
MOSCOW: Porter J. Goss has retired as Director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a post which he held for about 18 months. Or rather, we should say, he was prodded into retirement.
There are many reasons for this surprise move, and those who suggest one or two superficial explanations don't fully understand the essence of the problem.
Goss as CIA Director also held the post of Director of Central Intelligence, or DCI, and was in charge of all 16 security services of the United States. He used to proudly say that he wore five hats, referring to the number of functions he was responsible for carrying out.
[Editor's Note: In a comment that raised a few eyebrows last year, Goss was quoted as saying: The jobs I'm being asked to do, the five hats that I wear, are too much for this mortal. I'm a little amazed at the workload].
There is a special conference room for the heads of the CIA intelligence divisions, where the DCI sat at the head of the table, and each intelligence spokesman had a definite chair, with the emblem of his organization hanging on the wall above him.
So it was. Until colossal failures (the 9/11 tragedy and Iraq) and other pitfalls and scandals (the CIA's secret prisons and a stream of leaks from the security services, for example, the extrajudicial system of telephone tapping and a secret Pentagon program to collect information on U.S. nationals codenamed Operation TALON, which was officially designed to hunt down and apprehend fugitive felons, many of them violent offenders, by matching them against government records of current and former food stamp recipients).
As a result of this, the ruling circle of the Republican Party began an overhaul of the U.S. secret services, and Goss was deprived of the post of DCI, and even the functions of the job were changed.
Goss was said to have been Vice President Dick Cheney's nominee, the gray eminence of the Republican Administration, with whom he had worked in Congress. In 1997, Goss rose to be chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee.
As soon as Goss was appointed CIA director, he got down to business. At the prodding of ultra-conservatives who demanded the removal of Clinton nests from the agency, especially those who were allegedly appointed at Hilary Clinton's instigation or thought to support the Democratic Party, Goss set out to cleanse the agency.
Goss did his best, but that apparently was not enough. Although it is George W. Bush's declared priority, the fight against terror has not brought the desired results. The CIA's Counterterrorism Center failed, and Iraq had turned into a base for terrorists. But as well-known American political scientist Ashton B. Carter said, in testimony before the September 11 Commission, There is no such thing as an 'intelligence failure.' All intelligence failures are coupled to policy failures. [RealVideoCarter's Washington Post op-ed].
Surprisingly and precisely at that moment, it became clear that Porter Goss was not at all Cheney's main protégé, but rather it is the favorite son of American conservatives, John D. Negroponte. Negroponte was charged with the most ambitious reform of the American intelligence community in 50 years. He was appointed to a new post, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and was instructed to implement the recommendations of the Robb-Silberman Commission [RealVideo] on weapons of mass destruction.
It was the beginning of the end for the CIA, and apparently, the other community members were glad of this.
Next came the corruption scandal around Kyle Dusty Foggo, the number three official at the CIA. Foggo was in charge of agency contracts, is an old pal of Porter Goss and enjoyed his absolute confidence. The Foggo Affair now threatens to become a super-scandal, smearing prominent politicians and businessmen.
Negroponte, who was charged with depriving the CIA of its dominant role, began delivering the President's morning intelligence briefing. Goss had lost the President's ear, which is the heaviest price one could pay in the U.S. bureaucracy.
When Robert Grenier resigned as chairman of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center and accepted a job with Negroponte's National Counterterrorism Center, dozens of analysts followed him, and it is competently said that there is enough room for several hundred more.
When Goss was CIA director, he appointed so-called WMD managers for North Korea and Iran. Now, information indicates that the nexus of WMD intelligence gathering is gradually shifting to Negroponte operation as well.
In early February, most likely due to his inability to stop the leaks, Porter Goss declared a battle to protect our classified information. He made his intentions known in an article titled Loose Lips Sink Spies published by the International Herald Tribune [RealVideo]. His timing was extremely bad, though he probably did this to aggravate the White House.
One of the underpinnings of the accusation that Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons was a widely circulated Bush Administration charge that the Iraqis had purchased uranium ore [yellow cake] from Niger. At first, the Americans obtained this information from SISMI, Italy's military intelligence agency, and were not convinced [RealVideo]. They decided to check the information confidentially and dispatched former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger. Subsequent events show that the CIA chose Wilson because his wife was a deep-cover CIA agent.
But Wilson didn't do what the White House expected, and reporting that the information [on Saddam's purchase of yellow cake from Niger] was untrue. But by that time, the anti-Saddam propaganda campaign had been launched, with Dick Cheney as lead singer and Tony Blair as backup.
Ambassador Wilson continued to insist that he was right, although no one would listen. So the White House decided to punish him by leaking information that his wife, Valerie Plame, was a deep-cover CIA operative.
This was scandalous. Under U.S. law, the disclosure of the names of secret CIA operatives is a criminal offence. Ironically, the law was made even harsher in 1998 at the instigation of Congressman Porter Goss. A prosecutor was appointed and the investigation soon tracked down the source of the leak: Lewis Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff.
His interrogation promised to become another Watergate, but the unsinkable grey eminence Cheney survived this storm too. Saving the honor - and possibly preventing the collapse of his administration - George Bush said that it was he who had ordered Libby to disclose Plame's name. Lawyers were found to say that in the supreme interests of national security, the U.S. President was the only person permitted to do this. The case was back under control and quietly closed.
This is how honest investigation and the equality of all U.S. citizens under the law have been brought to an end. American democracy is so interlaced with lies, one often wonders whether truth or falsehood outweighs the other.
This also brought to an end the career of Porter J. Goss, although not the struggle within the American intelligence community. The one thing that is clear is that the next U.S. President will not leave things as they are.
*Gennady Yevstafyev is a retired Lieutenant General with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service and a senior adviser with Russia's Center for Policy Studies.
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Was the 2004 Election Stolen?
by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Rolling Stone
Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted...
Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)
But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)
The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)
Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ''We didn't have one election for president in 2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.''
But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)
''It was terrible,'' says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ''People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct -- it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I'm terribly disheartened.''
Indeed, the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. ''Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,'' Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. ''You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.''
I. The Exit Polls
The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states weren't just off the mark -- they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error. In all but four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush.(16)
Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.''(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine -- paid for by the Bush administration -- exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.(20)
But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the U.S. election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the survey treated its very existence as an embarrassment. Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with ''corrected'' numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote count. Rather than finding fault with the election results, the mainstream media preferred to dismiss the polls as flawed.(21)
''The people who ran the exit polling, and all those of us who were their clients, recognized that it was deeply flawed,'' says Tom Brokaw, who served as anchor for NBC News during the 2004 election. ''They were really screwed up -- the old models just don't work anymore. I would not go on the air with them again.''
In fact, the exit poll created for the 2004 election was designed to be the most reliable voter survey in history. The six news organizations -- running the ideological gamut from CBS to Fox News -- retained Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International,(22) whose principal, Warren Mitofsky, pioneered the exit poll for CBS in 1967(23) and is widely credited with assuring the credibility of Mexico's elections in 1994.(24) For its nationwide poll, Edison/Mitofsky selected a random subsample of 12,219 voters(25) -- approximately six times larger than those normally used in national polls(26) -- driving the margin of error down to approximately plus or minus one percent.(27)
On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush's 174, with fifty-five too close to call.(28) In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.(29)
As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states -- including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida -- and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush's neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina.(30) Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.(31) ''Either the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong,'' a Fox News analyst declared, ''or George Bush loses.''(32)
But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities -- as much as 9.5 percent -- with the exit polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33)
According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. ''As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible,'' he says, ''it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.'' (See The Tale of the Exit Polls)
Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. ''I'm not even political -- I despise the Democrats,'' he says. ''I'm a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong.'' In his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling.
In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election, Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology -- so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd(34) -- displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that skewed the polls in Kerry's favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.(35)
Industry peers didn't buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation's leading pollsters, told me that Mitofsky's ''reluctant responder'' hypothesis is ''preposterous.''(36) Even Mitofsky, in his official report, underscored the hollowness of his theory: ''It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the reasons that, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters.''(37)
Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky's own data by Freeman and a team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that the theory is dead wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were more disinclined to answer pollsters' questions on Election Day. In Bush strongholds, Freeman and the other researchers found that fifty-six percent of voters completed the exit survey -- compared to only fifty-three percent in Kerry strongholds.(38) ''The data presented to support the claim not only fails to substantiate it,'' observes Freeman, ''but actually contradicts it.''
What's more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent -- a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.(39)
''When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the supposition of election fraud,'' concludes Freeman. ''The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud -- and yet this supposition has been utterly ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.''
The evidence is especially strong in Ohio. In January, a team of mathematicians from the National Election Data Archive, a nonpartisan watchdog group, compared the state's exit polls against the certified vote count in each of the forty-nine precincts polled by Edison/Mitofsky. In twenty-two of those precincts -- nearly half of those polled -- they discovered results that differed widely from the official tally. Once again -- against all odds -- the widespread discrepancies were stacked massively in Bush's favor: In only two of the suspect twenty-two precincts did the disparity benefit Kerry. The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered ''27,'' in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)
Such results, according to the archive, provide ''virtually irrefutable evidence of vote miscount.'' The discrepancies, the experts add, ''are consistent with the hypothesis that Kerry would have won Ohio's electoral votes if Ohio's official vote counts had accurately reflected voter intent.''(41) According to Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, ''No rigorous statistical explanation'' can explain the ''completely nonrandom'' disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are ''completely consistent with election fraud -- specifically vote shifting.''
II. The Partisan Official
No state was more important in the 2004 election than Ohio. The state has been key to every Republican presidential victory since Abraham Lincoln's, and both parties overwhelmed the state with television ads, field organizers and volunteers in an effort to register new voters and energize old ones. Bush and Kerry traveled to Ohio a total of forty-nine times during the campaign -- more than to any other state.(42)
But in the battle for Ohio, Republicans had a distinct advantage: The man in charge of the counting was Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of President Bush's re-election committee.(43) As Ohio's secretary of state, Blackwell had broad powers to interpret and implement state and federal election laws -- setting standards for everything from the processing of voter registration to the conduct of official recounts.(44) And as Bush's re-election chair in Ohio, he had a powerful motivation to rig the rules for his candidate. Blackwell, in fact, served as the ''principal electoral system adviser'' for Bush during the 2000 recount in Florida,(45) where he witnessed firsthand the success of his counterpart Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state who co-chaired Bush's campaign there.(46)
Blackwell -- now the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio(47) -- is well-known in the state as a fierce partisan eager to rise in the GOP. An outspoken leader of Ohio's right-wing fundamentalists, he opposes abortion even in cases of rape(48) and was the chief cheerleader for the anti-gay-marriage amendment that Republicans employed to spark turnout in rural counties(49). He has openly denounced Kerry as ''an unapologetic liberal Democrat,''(50) and during the 2004 election he used his official powers to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens in Democratic strongholds. In a ruling issued two weeks before the election, a federal judge rebuked Blackwell for seeking to ''accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000.''(51)
''The secretary of state is supposed to administer elections -- not throw them,'' says Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Cleveland who has dealt with Blackwell for years. ''The election in Ohio in 2004 stands out as an example of how, under color of law, a state election official can frustrate the exercise of the right to vote.''
The most extensive investigation of what happened in Ohio was conducted by Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.(52) Frustrated by his party's failure to follow up on the widespread evidence of voter intimidation and fraud, Conyers and the committee's minority staff held public hearings in Ohio, where they looked into more than 50,000 complaints from voters.(53) In January 2005, Conyers issued a detailed report that outlined ''massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio.'' The problems, the report concludes, were ''caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.''(54)
''Blackwell made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake,'' Conyers told me. ''He saw his role as limiting the participation of Democratic voters. We had hearings in Columbus for two days. We could have stayed two weeks, the level of fury was so high. Thousands of people wanted to testify. Nothing like this had ever happened to them before.''
When ROLLING STONE confronted Blackwell about his overtly partisan attempts to subvert the election, he dismissed any such claim as ''silly on its face.'' Ohio, he insisted in a telephone interview, set a ''gold standard'' for electoral fairness. In fact, his campaign to subvert the will of the voters had begun long before Election Day. Instead of welcoming the avalanche of citizen involvement sparked by the campaign, Blackwell permitted election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national elections.(55) In Cleveland, which went five-to-one for Kerry, nearly one in four voters were wiped from the rolls between 2000 and 2004.(56)
There were legitimate reasons to clean up voting lists: Many of the names undoubtedly belonged to people who had moved or died. But thousands more were duly registered voters who were deprived of their constitutional right to vote -- often without any notification -- simply because they had decided not to go to the polls in prior elections.(57) In Cleveland's precinct 6C, where more than half the voters on the rolls were deleted,(58) turnout was only 7.1 percent(59) -- the lowest in the state.
According to the Conyers report, improper purging ''likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters statewide.''(60) If only one in ten of the 300,000 purged voters showed up on Election Day -- a conservative estimate, according to election scholars -- that is 30,000 citizens who were unfairly denied the opportunity to cast ballots.
III. The Strike Force
In the months leading up to the election, Ohio was in the midst of the biggest registration drive in its history. Tens of thousands of volunteers and paid political operatives from both parties canvassed the state, racing to register new voters in advance of the October 4th deadline. To those on the ground, it was clear that Democrats were outpacing their Republican counterparts: A New York Times analysis before the election found that new registrations in traditional Democratic strongholds were up 250 percent, compared to only twenty-five percent in Republican-leaning counties.(61) ''The Democrats have been beating the pants off us in the air and on the ground,'' a GOP county official in Columbus confessed to The Washington Times.(62)
To stem the tide of new registrations, the Republican National Committee and the Ohio Republican Party attempted to knock tens of thousands of predominantly minority and urban voters off the rolls through illegal mailings known in electioneering jargon as ''caging.'' During the Eighties, after the GOP used such mailings to disenfranchise nearly 76,000 black voters in New Jersey and Louisiana, it was forced to sign two separate court orders agreeing to abstain from caging.(63) But during the summer of 2004, the GOP targeted minority voters in Ohio by zip code, sending registered letters to more than 200,000 newly registered voters(64) in sixty-five counties.(65) On October 22nd, a mere eleven days before the election, Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett -- who also chairs the board of elections in Cuyahoga County -- sought to invalidate the registrations of 35,427 voters who had refused to sign for the letters or whose mail came back as undeliverable.(66) Almost half of the challenged voters were from Democratic strongholds in and around Cleveland.(67)
There were plenty of valid reasons that voters had failed to respond to the mailings: The list included people who couldn't sign for the letters because they were serving in the U.S. military, college students whose school and home addresses differed,(68) and more than 1,000 homeless people who had no permanent mailing address.(69) But the undeliverable mail, Bennett claimed, proved the new registrations were fraudulent.
By law, each voter was supposed to receive a hearing before being stricken from the rolls.(70) Instead, in the week before the election, kangaroo courts were rapidly set up across the state at Blackwell's direction that would inevitably disenfranchise thousands of voters at a time(71) -- a process that one Democratic election official in Toledo likened to an ''inquisition.''(72) Not that anyone was given a chance to actually show up and defend their right to vote: Notices to challenged voters were not only sent out impossibly late in the process, they were mailed to the very addresses that the Republicans contended were faulty.(73) Adding to the atmosphere of intimidation, sheriff's detectives in Sandusky County were dispatched to the homes of challenged voters to investigate the GOP's claims of fraud.(74)
''I'm afraid this is going to scare these people half to death, and they are never going to show up on Election Day,'' Barb Tuckerman, director of the Sandusky Board of Elections, told local reporters. ''Many of them are young people who have registered for the first time. I've called some of these people, and they are perfectly legitimate.''(75)
On October 27th, ruling that the effort likely violated both the ''constitutional right to due process and constitutional right to vote,'' U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott put a halt to the GOP challenge(76) -- but not before tens of thousands of new voters received notices claiming they were improperly registered. Some election officials in the state illegally ignored Dlott's ruling, stripping hundreds of voters from the rolls.(77) In Columbus and elsewhere, challenged registrants were never notified that the court had cleared them to vote.
On October 29th, a federal judge found that the Republican Party had violated the court orders from the Eighties that barred it from caging. ''The return of mail does not implicate fraud,'' the court affirmed,(78) and the disenfranchisement effort illegally targeted ''precincts where minority voters predominate, interfering with and discouraging voters from voting in those districts.''(79) Nor were such caging efforts limited to Ohio: The GOP also targeted hundreds of thousands of urban voters in the battleground states of Florida,(80) Pennsylvania(81) and Wisconsin.(82)
Republicans in Ohio also worked to deny the vote to citizens who had served jail time for felonies. Although rehabilitated prisoners are entitled to vote in Ohio, election officials in Cincinnati demanded that former convicts get a judge to sign off before they could register to vote.(83) In case they didn't get the message, Republican operatives turned to intimidation. According to the Conyers report, a team of twenty-five GOP volunteers calling themselves the Mighty Texas Strike Force holed up at the Holiday Inn in Columbus a day before the election, around the corner from the headquarters of the Ohio Republican Party -- which paid for their hotel rooms. The men were overheard by a hotel worker ''using pay phones to make intimidating calls to likely voters'' and threatening former convicts with jail time if they tried to cast ballots.(84)
This was no freelance operation. The Strike Force -- an offshoot of the Republican National Committee(85) -- was part of a team of more than 1,500 volunteers from Texas who were deployed to battleground states, usually in teams of ten. Their leader was Pat Oxford, (86) a Houston lawyer who managed Bush's legal defense team in 2000 in Florida,(87) where he warmly praised the efforts of a mob that stormed the Miami-Dade County election offices and halted the recount. It was later revealed that those involved in the ''Brooks Brothers Riot'' were not angry Floridians but paid GOP staffers, many of them flown in from out of state.(88) Photos of the protest show that one of the ''rioters'' was Joel Kaplan, who has just taken the place of Karl Rove at the White House, where he now directs the president's policy operations.(89)
IV. Barriers to Registration
To further monkey-wrench the process he was bound by law to safeguard, Blackwell cited an arcane elections regulation to make it harder to register new voters. In a now-infamous decree, Blackwell announced on September 7th -- less than a month before the filing deadline -- that election officials would process registration forms only if they were printed on eighty-pound unwaxed white paper stock, similar to a typical postcard. Justifying his decision to ROLLING STONE, Blackwell portrayed it as an attempt to protect voters: ''The postal service had recommended to us that we establish a heavy enough paper-weight standard that we not disenfranchise voters by having their registration form damaged by postal equipment.'' Yet Blackwell's order also applied to registrations delivered in person to election offices. He further specified that any valid registration cards printed on lesser paper stock that miraculously survived the shredding gauntlet at the post office were not to be processed; instead, they were to be treated as applications for a registration form, requiring election boards to send out a brand-new card.(90)
Blackwell's directive clearly violated the Voting Rights Act, which stipulates that no one may be denied the right to vote because of a registration error that ''is not material in determining whether such individual is qualified under state law to vote.''(91) The decision immediately threw registration efforts into chaos. Local newspapers that had printed registration forms in their pages saw their efforts invalidated.(92) Delaware County posted a notice online saying it could no longer accept its own registration forms.(93) Even Blackwell couldn't follow the protocol: The Columbus Dispatch reported that his own staff distributed registration forms on lighter-weight paper that was illegal under his rule. Under the threat of court action, Blackwell ultimately revoked his order on September 28th -- six days before the registration deadline.(94)
But by then, the damage was done. Election boards across the state, already understaffed and backlogged with registration forms, were unable to process them all in time. According to a statistical analysis conducted in May by the nonpartisan Greater Cleveland Voter Coalition, 16,000 voters in and around the city were disenfranchised because of data-entry errors by election officials,(95) and another 15,000 lost the right to vote due to largely inconsequential omissions on their registration cards.(96) Statewide, the study concludes, a total of 72,000 voters were disenfranchised through avoidable registration errors -- one percent of all voters in an election decided by barely two percent.(97)
Despite the widespread problems, Blackwell authorized only one investigation of registration errors after the election -- in Toledo -- but the report by his own inspectors offers a disturbing snapshot of the malfeasance and incompetence that plagued the entire state.(98) The top elections official in Toledo was a partisan in the Blackwell mold: Bernadette Noe, who chaired both the county board of elections and the county Republican Party.(99) The GOP post was previously held by her husband, Tom Noe,(100) who currently faces felony charges for embezzling state funds and illegally laundering $45,400 of his own money through intermediaries to the Bush campaign.(101)
State inspectors who investigated the elections operation in Toledo discovered ''areas of grave concern.''(102) With less than a month to go before the election, Bernadette Noe and her board had yet to process 20,000 voter registration cards.(103) Board officials arbitrarily decided that mail-in cards (mostly from the Republican suburbs) would be processed first, while registrations dropped off at the board's office (the fruit of intensive Democratic registration drives in the city) would be processed last.(104) When a grass-roots group called Project Vote delivered a batch of nearly 10,000 cards just before the October 4th deadline, an elections official casually remarked, ''We may not get to them.''(105) The same official then instructed employees to date-stamp an entire box containing thousands of forms, rather than marking each individual card, as required by law.(106) When the box was opened, officials had no way of confirming that the forms were filed prior to the deadline -- an error, state inspectors concluded, that could have disenfranchised ''several thousand'' voters from Democratic strongholds.(107)
The most troubling incident uncovered by the investigation was Noe's decision to allow Republican partisans behind the counter in the board of elections office to make photocopies of postcards sent to confirm voter registrations(108) -- records that could have been used in the GOP's caging efforts. On their second day in the office, the operatives were caught by an elections official tampering with the documents.(109) Investigators slammed the elections board for ''a series of egregious blunders'' that caused ''the destruction, mutilation and damage of public records.''(110)
On Election Day, Noe sent a team of Republican volunteers to the county warehouse where blank ballots were kept out in the open, ''with no security measures in place.''(111) The state's assistant director of elections, who just happened to be observing the ballot distribution, demanded they leave. The GOP operatives refused and ultimately had to be turned away by police.(112)
In April 2005, Noe and the entire Board of Elections were forced to resign. But once again, the damage was done. At a ''Victory 2004'' rally held in Toledo four days before the election, President Bush himself singled out a pair of ''grass-roots'' activists for special praise: ''I want to thank my friends Bernadette Noe and Tom Noe for their leadership in Lucas County.''(113)
V. ''The Wrong Pew''
In one of his most effective maneuvers, Blackwell prevented thousands of voters from receiving provisional ballots on Election Day. The fail-safe ballots were mandated in 2002, when Congress passed a package of reforms called the Help America Vote Act. This would prevent a repeat of the most egregious injustice in the 2000 election, when officials in Florida barred thousands of lawfully registered minority voters from the polls because their names didn't appear on flawed precinct rolls. Under the law, would-be voters whose registration is questioned at the polls must be allowed to cast provisional ballots that can be counted after the election if the voter's registration proves valid.(114)
''Provisional ballots were supposed to be this great movement forward,'' says Tova Andrea Wang, an elections expert who served with ex-presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford on the commission that laid the groundwork for the Help America Vote Act. ''But then different states erected barriers, and this new right became totally eviscerated.''
In Ohio, Blackwell worked from the beginning to curtail the availability of provisional ballots. (The ballots are most often used to protect voters in heavily Democratic urban areas who move often, creating more opportunities for data-entry errors by election boards.) Six weeks before the vote, Blackwell illegally decreed that poll workers should make on-the-spot judgments as to whether or not a voter lived in the precinct, and provide provisional ballots only to those deemed eligible.(115) When the ruling was challenged in federal court, Judge James Carr could barely contain his anger. The very purpose of the Help America Vote Act, he ruled, was to make provisional ballots available to voters told by precinct workers that they were ineligible: ''By not even mentioning this group -- the primary beneficiaries of HAVA's provisional-voting provisions -- Blackwell apparently seeks to accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000.''(116)
But instead of complying with the judge's order to expand provisional balloting, Blackwell insisted that Carr was usurping his power as secretary of state and made a speech in which he compared himself to Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and the apostle Paul -- saying that he'd rather go to jail than follow federal law.(117) The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Carr's ruling on October 23rd -- but the confusion over the issue still caused untold numbers of voters across the state to be illegally turned away at the polls on Election Day without being offered provisional ballots.(118) A federal judge also invalidated a decree by Blackwell that denied provisional ballots to absentee voters who were never sent their ballots in the mail. But that ruling did not come down until after 3 p.m. on the day of the election, and likely failed to filter down to the precinct level at all -- denying the franchise to even more eligible voters.(119)
We will never know for certain how many voters in Ohio were denied ballots by Blackwell's two illegal orders. But it is possible to put a fairly precise number on those turned away by his most disastrous directive. Traditionally, anyone in Ohio who reported to a polling station in their county could obtain a provisional ballot. But Blackwell decided to toss out the ballots of anyone who showed up at the wrong precinct -- a move guaranteed to disenfranchise Democrats who live in urban areas crowded with multiple polling places. On October 14th, Judge Carr overruled the order, but Blackwell appealed.(120) In court, he was supported by his friend and campaign contributor Tom Noe, who joined the case as an intervenor on behalf of the secretary of state.(121) He also enjoyed the backing of Attorney General John Ashcroft, who filed an amicus brief in support of Blackwell's position -- marking the first time in American history that the Justice Department had gone to court to block the right of voters to vote.(122) The Sixth Circuit, stacked with four judges appointed by George W. Bush, sided with Blackwell.(123)
Blackwell insists that his decision kept the election clean. ''If we had allowed this notion of ?voters without borders' to exist,'' he says, ''it would have opened the door to massive fraud.'' But even Republicans were shocked by the move. DeForest Soaries, the GOP chairman of the Election Assistance Commission -- the federal agency set up to implement the Help America Vote Act -- upbraided Blackwell, saying that the commission disagreed with his decision to deny ballots to voters who showed up at the wrong precinct. ''The purpose of provisional ballots is to not turn anyone away from the polls,'' Soaries explained. ''We want as many votes to count as possible.''(124)
The decision left hundreds of thousands of voters in predominantly Democratic counties to navigate the state's bewildering array of 11,366 precincts, whose boundaries had been redrawn just prior to the election.(125) To further compound their confusion, the new precinct lines were misidentified on the secretary of state's own Web site, which was months out of date on Election Day. Many voters, out of habit, reported to polling locations that were no longer theirs. Some were mistakenly assured by poll workers on the grounds that they were entitled to cast a provisional ballot at that precinct. Instead, thanks to Blackwell's ruling, at least 10,000 provisional votes were tossed out after Election Day simply because citizens wound up in the wrong line.(126)
In Toledo, Brandi and Brittany Stenson each got in a different line to vote in the gym at St. Elizabeth Seton School. Both of the sisters were registered to vote at the polling place on the city's north side, in the shadow of the giant DaimlerChrysler plant. Both cast ballots. But when the tallies were added up later, the family resemblance came to an abrupt end. Brittany's vote was counted -- but Brandi's wasn't. It wasn't enough that she had voted in the right building. If she wanted her vote to count, according to Blackwell's ruling, she had to choose the line that led to her assigned table. Her ballot -- along with those of her mother, her brother and thirty-seven other voters in the same precinct -- were thrown out(127) simply because they were, in the words of Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio), ''in the right church but the wrong pew.''(128)
All told, the deliberate chaos that resulted from Blackwell's registration barriers did the trick. Black voters in the state -- who went overwhelmingly for Kerry -- were twenty percent more likely than whites to be forced to cast a provisional ballot.(129) In the end, nearly three percent of all voters in Ohio were forced to vote provisionally(130) -- and more than 35,000 of their ballots were ultimately rejected.(131)
VI. Long Lines
When Election Day dawned on November 2nd, tens of thousands of Ohio voters who had managed to overcome all the obstacles to registration erected by Blackwell discovered that it didn't matter whether they were properly listed on the voting rolls -- because long lines at their precincts prevented them from ever making it to the ballot box. Would-be voters in Dayton and Cincinnati routinely faced waits as long as three hours. Those in inner-city precincts in Columbus, Cleveland and Toledo -- which were voting for Kerry by margins of ninety percent or more -- often waited up to seven hours. At Kenyon College, students were forced to stand in line for eleven hours before being allowed to vote, with the last voters casting their ballots after three in the morning.(132)
A five-month analysis of the Ohio vote conducted by the Democratic National Committee concluded in June 2005 that three percent of all Ohio voters who showed up to vote on Election Day were forced to leave without casting a ballot.(133) That's more than 174,000 voters. ''The vast majority of this lost vote,'' concluded the Conyers report, ''was concentrated in urban, minority and Democratic-leaning areas.''(134) Statewide, African-Americans waited an average of fifty-two minutes to vote, compared to only eighteen minutes for whites.(135)
The long lines were not only foreseeable -- they were actually created by GOP efforts. Republicans in the state legislature, citing new electronic voting machines that were supposed to speed voting, authorized local election boards to reduce the number of precincts across Ohio. In most cases, the new machines never materialized -- but that didn't stop officials in twenty of the state's eighty-eight counties, all of them favorable to Democrats, from slashing the number of precincts by at least twenty percent.(136)
Republican officials also created long lines by failing to distribute enough voting machines to inner-city precincts. After the Florida disaster in 2000, such problems with machines were supposed to be a thing of the past. Under the Help America Vote Act, Ohio received more than $30 million in federal funds to replace its faulty punch-card machines with more reliable systems.(137) But on Election Day, that money was sitting in the bank. Why? Because Ken Blackwell had applied for an extension until 2006, insisting that there was no point in buying electronic machines that would later have to be retrofitted under Ohio law to generate paper ballots.(138)
''No one has ever accused our secretary of state of lacking in ability,'' says Rep. Kucinich. ''He's a rather bright fellow, and he's involved in the most minute details of his office. There's no doubt that he knew the effect of not having enough voting machines in some areas.''
At liberal Kenyon College, where students had registered in record numbers, local election officials provided only two voting machines to handle the anticipated surge of up to 1,300 voters. Meanwhile, fundamentalist students at nearby Mount Vernon Nazarene University had one machine for 100 voters and faced no lines at all.(139) Citing the lines at Kenyon, the Conyers report concluded that the ''misallocation of machines went beyond urban/suburban discrepancies to specifically target Democratic areas.''(140)
In Columbus, which had registered 125,000 new voters(141) -- more than half of them black(142) -- the board of elections estimated that it would need 5,000 machines to handle the huge surge.(143) ''On Election Day, the county experienced an unprecedented turnout that could only be compared to a 500-year flood,'' says Matt Damschroder,(144) chairman of the Franklin County Board of Elections and the former head of the Republican Party in Columbus.(145) But instead of buying more equipment, the Conyers investigation found, Damschroder decided to ''make do'' with 2,741 machines.(146) And to make matters worse, he favored his own party in distributing the equipment. According to The Columbus Dispatch, precincts that had gone seventy percent or more for Al Gore in 2000 were allocated seventeen fewer machines in 2004, while strong GOP precincts received eight additional machines.(147) An analysis by voter advocates found that all but three of the thirty wards with the best voter-to-machine ratios were in Bush strongholds; all but one of the seven with the worst ratios were in Kerry country.(148)
The result was utterly predictable. According to an investigation by the Columbus Free Press, white Republican suburbanites, blessed with a surplus of machines, averaged waits of only twenty-two minutes; black urban Democrats averaged three hours and fifteen minutes.(149) ''The allocation of voting machines in Franklin County was clearly biased against voters in precincts with high proportions of African-Americans,'' concluded Walter Mebane Jr., a government professor at Cornell University who conducted a statistical analysis of the vote in and around Columbus.(150)
By midmorning, when it became clear that voters were dropping out of line rather than braving the wait, precincts appealed for the right to distribute paper ballots to speed the process. Blackwell denied the request, saying it was an invitation to fraud.(151) A lawsuit ensued, and the handwritten affidavits submitted by voters and election officials offer a heart-rending snapshot of an electoral catastrophe in the offing:(152)
From Columbus Precinct 44D:
''There are three voting machines at this precinct. I have been informed that in prior elections there were normally four voting machines. At 1:45 p.m. there are approximately eighty-five voters in line. At this time, the line to vote is approximately three hours long. This precinct is largely African-American. I have personally witnessed voters leaving the polling place without voting due to the length of the line.''
From Precinct 40:
''I am serving as a presiding judge, a position I have held for some 15+ years in precinct 40. In all my years of service, the lines are by far the longest I have seen, with some waiting as long as four to five hours. I expect the situation to only worsen as the early evening heavy turnout approaches. I have requested additional machines since 6:40 a.m. and no assistance has been offered.''
Precinct 65H:
''I observed a broken voting machine that was not in use for approximately two hours. The precinct judge was very diligent but could not get through to the BOE.''
Precinct 18A:
''At 4 p.m. the average wait time is about 4.5 hours and continuing to increase?. Voters are continuing to leave without voting.''
As day stretched into evening, U.S. District Judge Algernon Marbley issued a temporary restraining order requiring that voters be offered paper ballots.(153) But it was too late: According to bipartisan estimates published in The Washington Post, as many as 15,000 voters in Columbus had already given up and gone home.(154) When closing time came at the polls, according to the Conyers report, some precinct workers illegally dismissed citizens who had waited for hours in the rain -- in direct violation of Ohio law, which stipulates that those in line at closing time are allowed to remain and vote.(155)
The voters disenfranchised by long lines were overwhelmingly Democrats. Because of the unequal distribution of voting equipment, the median turnout in Franklin County precincts won by Kerry was fifty-one percent, compared to sixty-one percent in those won by Bush. Assuming sixty percent turnout under more equitable conditions, Kerry would have gained an additional 17,000 votes in the county.(156)
In another move certain to add to the traffic jam at the polls, the GOP deployed 3,600 operatives on Election Day to challenge voters in thirty-one counties -- most of them in predominantly black and urban areas.(157) Although it was billed as a means to ''ensure that voters are not disenfranchised by fraud,''(158) Republicans knew that the challengers would inevitably create delays for eligible voters. Even Mark Weaver, the GOP's attorney in Ohio, predicted in late October that the move would ''create chaos, longer lines and frustration.''(159)
The day before the election, Judge Dlott attempted to halt the challengers, ruling that ''there exists an enormous risk of chaos, delay, intimidation and pandemonium inside the polls and in the lines out the doors.'' Dlott was also troubled by the placement of Republican challengers: In Hamilton County, fourteen percent of new voters in white areas would be confronted at the polls, compared to ninety-seven percent of new voters in black areas.(160) But when the case was appealed to the Supreme Court on Election Day, Justice John Paul Stevens allowed the challenges to go forward. ''I have faith,'' he ruled, ''that the elected officials and numerous election volunteers on the ground will carry out their responsibilities in a way that will enable qualified voters to cast their ballots.''(161)
In fact, Blackwell gave Republican challengers unprecedented access to polling stations, where they intimidated voters, worsening delays in Democratic precincts. By the end of the day, thanks to a whirlwind of legal wrangling, the GOP had even gotten permission to use the discredited list of 35,000 names from its illegal caging effort to challenge would-be voters.(162) According to the survey by the DNC, nearly 5,000 voters across the state were turned away at the polls because of registration challenges -- even though federal law required that they be provided with provisional ballots.(163)
VII. Faulty Machines
Voters who managed to make it past the array of hurdles erected by Republican officials found themselves confronted by voting machines that didn't work. Only 800,000 out of the 5.6 million votes in Ohio were cast on electronic voting machines, but they were plagued with errors.(164) In heavily Democratic areas around Youngstown, where nearly 100 voters reported entering ''Kerry'' on the touch screen and watching ''Bush'' light up, at least twenty machines had to be recalibrated in the middle of the voting process for chronically flipping Kerry votes to Bush.(165) (Similar ''vote hopping'' from Kerry to Bush was reported by voters and election officials in other states.)(166) Elsewhere, voters complained in sworn affidavits that they touched Kerry's name on the screen and it lit up, but that the light had gone out by the time they finished their ballot; the Kerry vote faded away.(167) In the state's most notorious incident, an electronic machine at a fundamentalist church in the town of Gahanna recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry.(168) In that precinct, however, there were only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed up.(169) (The error, which was later blamed on a glitchy memory card, was corrected before the certified vote count.)
In addition to problems with electronic machines, Ohio's vote was skewed by old-fashioned punch-card equipment that posed what even Blackwell acknowledged was the risk of a ''Florida-like calamity.''(170) All but twenty of the state's counties relied on antiquated machines that were virtually guaranteed to destroy votes(171) -- many of which were counted by automatic tabulators manufactured by Triad Governmental Systems,(172) the same company that supplied Florida's notorious butterfly ballot in 2000. In fact, some 95,000 ballots in Ohio recorded no vote for president at all -- most of them on punch-card machines. Even accounting for the tiny fraction of voters in each election who decide not to cast votes for president -- generally in the range of half a percent, according to Ohio State law professor and respected elections scholar Dan Tokaji -- that would mean that at least 66,000 votes were invalidated by faulty voting equipment.(173) If counted by hand instead of by automated tabulator, the vast majority of these votes would have been discernable. But thanks to a corrupt recount process, only one county hand-counted its ballots.(174)
Most of the uncounted ballots occurred in Ohio's big cities. In Cleveland, where nearly 13,000 votes were ruined, a New York Times analysis found that black precincts suffered more than twice the rate of spoiled ballots than white districts.(175) In Dayton, Kerry-leaning precincts had nearly twice the number of spoiled ballots as Bush-leaning precincts.(176) Last April, a federal court ruled that Ohio's use of punch-card balloting violated the equal-protection rights of the citizens who voted on them.(177)
In addition to spoiling ballots, the punch-card machines also created bizarre miscounts known as ''ballot crawl.'' In Cleveland Precinct 4F, a heavily African-American precinct, Constitution Party candidate Michael Peroutka was credited with an impressive forty-one percent of the vote. In Precinct 4N, where Al Gore won ninety-eight percent of the vote in 2000, Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik was credited with thirty-three percent of the vote. Badnarik and Peroutka also picked up a sizable portion of the vote in precincts across Cleveland -- 11M, 3B, 8G, 8I, 3I.(178) ''It appears that hundreds, if not thousands, of votes intended to be cast for Senator Kerry were recorded as being for a third-party candidate,'' the Conyers report concludes.(179)
But it's not just third-party candidates: Ballot crawl in Cleveland also shifted votes from Kerry to Bush. In Precinct 13B, where Bush received only six votes in 2000, he was credited with twenty percent of the total in 2004. Same story in 9P, where Bush recorded eighty-seven votes in 2004, compared to his grand total of one in 2000.(180)
VIII. Rural Counties
Despite the well-documented effort that prevented hundreds of thousands of voters in urban and minority precincts from casting ballots, the worst theft in Ohio may have quietly taken place in rural counties. An examination of election data suggests widespread fraud -- and even good old-fashioned stuffing of ballot boxes -- in twelve sparsely populated counties scattered across southern and western Ohio: Auglaize, Brown, Butler, Clermont, Darke, Highland, Mercer, Miami, Putnam, Shelby, Van Wert and Warren. (See The Twelve Suspect Counties) One key indicator of fraud is to look at counties where the presidential vote departs radically from other races on the ballot. By this measure, John Kerry's numbers were suspiciously low in each of the twelve counties -- and George Bush's were unusually high.
Take the case of Ellen Connally, a Democrat who lost her race for chief justice of the state Supreme Court. When the ballots were counted, Kerry should have drawn far more votes than Connally -- a liberal black judge who supports gay rights and campaigned on a shoestring budget. And that's exactly what happened statewide: Kerry tallied 667,000 more votes for president than Connally did for chief justice, outpolling her by a margin of thirty-two percent. Yet in these twelve off-the-radar counties, Connally somehow managed to outperform the best-funded Democrat in history, thumping Kerry by a grand total of 19,621 votes -- a margin of ten percent.(181) The Conyers report -- recognizing that thousands of rural Bush voters were unlikely to have backed a gay-friendly black judge roundly rejected in Democratic precincts -- suggests that ''thousands of votes for Senator Kerry were lost.''(182)
Kucinich, a veteran of elections in the state, puts it even more bluntly. ''Down-ticket candidates shouldn't outperform presidential candidates like that,'' he says. ''That just doesn't happen. The question is: Where did the votes for Kerry go?''
They certainly weren't invalidated by faulty voting equipment: a trifling one percent of presidential ballots in the twelve suspect counties were spoiled. The more likely explanation is that they were fraudulently shifted to Bush. Statewide, the president outpolled Thomas Moyer, the Republican judge who defeated Connally, by twenty-one percent. Yet in the twelve questionable counties, Bush's margin over Moyer was fifty percent -- a strong indication that the president's certified vote total was inflated. If Kerry had maintained his statewide margin over Connally in the twelve suspect counties, as he almost assuredly would have done in a clean election, he would have bested her by 81,260 ballots. That's a swing of 162,520 votes from Kerry to Bush -- more than enough to alter the outcome. (183)
''This is very strong evidence that the count is off in those counties,'' says Freeman, the poll analyst. ''By itself, without anything else, what happened in these twelve counties turns Ohio into a Kerry state. To me, this provides every indication of fraud.''
How might this fraud have been carried out? One way to steal votes is to tamper with individual ballots -- and there is evidence that Republicans did just that. In Clermont County, where optical scanners were used to tabulate votes, sworn affidavits by election observers given to the House Judiciary Committee describe ballots on which marks for Kerry were covered up with white stickers, while marks for Bush were filled in to replace them. Rep. Conyers, in a letter to the FBI, described the testimony as ''strong evidence of vote tampering if not outright fraud.'' (184) In Miami County, where Connally outpaced Kerry, one precinct registered a turnout of 98.55 percent (185) -- meaning that all but ten eligible voters went to the polls on Election Day. An investigation by the Columbus Free Press, however, collected affidavits from twenty-five people who swear they didn't vote. (186)
In addition to altering individual ballots, evidence suggests that Republicans tampered with the software used to tabulate votes. In Auglaize County, where Kerry lost not only to Connally but to two other defeated Democratic judicial candidates, voters cast their ballots on touch-screen machines. (187) Two weeks before the election, an employee of ES&S, the company that manufactures the machines, was observed by a local election official making an unauthorized log-in to the central computer used to compile election results. (188) In Miami County, after 100 percent of precincts had already reported their official results, an additional 18,615 votes were inexplicably added to the final tally. The last-minute alteration awarded 12,000 of the votes to Bush, boosting his margin of victory in the county by nearly 6,000. (189)
The most transparently crooked incident took place in Warren County. In the leadup to the election, Blackwell had illegally sought to keep reporters and election observers at least 100 feet away from the polls. (190) The Sixth Circuit, ruling that the decree represented an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, noted ominously that ''democracies die behind closed doors.'' But the decision didn't stop officials in Warren County from devising a way to count the vote in secret. Immediately after the polls closed on Election Day, GOP officials -- citing the FBI -- declared that the county was facing a terrorist threat that ranked ten on a scale of one to ten. The county administration building was hastily locked down, allowing election officials to tabulate the results without any reporters present.
In fact, there was no terrorist threat. The FBI declared that it had issued no such warning, and an investigation by The Cincinnati Enquirer unearthed e-mails showing that the Republican plan to declare a terrorist alert had been in the works for eight days prior to the election. Officials had even refined the plot down to the language they used on signs notifying the public of a lockdown. (When ROLLING STONE requested copies of the same e-mails from the county, officials responded that the documents have been destroyed.) (191)
The late-night secrecy in Warren County recalls a classic trick: Results are held back until it's determined how many votes the favored candidate needs to win, and the totals are then adjusted accordingly. When Warren County finally announced its official results -- one of the last counties in the state to do so (192) -- the results departed wildly from statewide patterns. John Kerry received 2,426 fewer votes for president than Ellen Connally, the poorly funded black judge, did for chief justice. (193) As the Conyers report concluded, ''It is impossible to rule out the possibility that some sort of manipulation of the tallies occurred on election night in the locked-down facility.'' (194)
Nor does the electoral tampering appear to have been isolated to these dozen counties. Ohio, like several other states, had an initiative on the ballot in 2004 to outlaw gay marriage. Statewide, the measure proved far more popular than Bush, besting the president by 470,000 votes. But in six of the twelve suspect counties -- as well as in six other small counties in central Ohio -- Bush outpolled the ban on same-sex unions by 16,132 votes. To trust the official tally, in other words, you must believe that thousands of rural Ohioans voted for both President Bush and gay marriage. (195)
IX. Rigging the Recount
After Kerry conceded the election, his campaign helped the Libertarian and Green parties pay for a recount of all eighty-eight counties in Ohio. Under state law, county boards of election were required to randomly select three percent of their precincts and recount the ballots both by hand and by machine. If the two totals reconciled exactly, a costly hand recount of the remaining votes could be avoided; machines could be used to tally the rest.
But election officials in Ohio worked outside the law to avoid hand recounts. According to charges brought by a special prosecutor in April, election officials in Cleveland fraudulently and secretly pre-counted precincts by hand to identify ones that would match the machine count. They then used these pre-screened precincts to select the ''random'' sample of three percent used for the recount.
''If it didn't balance, they excluded those precincts,'' said the prosecutor, Kevin Baxter, who has filed felony indictments against three election workers in Cleveland. ''They screwed with the process and increased the probability, if not the certainty, that there would not be a full, countywide hand count.'' (196)
Voting machines were also tinkered with prior to the recount. In Hocking County, deputy elections director Sherole Eaton caught an employee of Triad -- which provided the software used to count punch-card ballots in nearly half of Ohio's counties (197) -- making unauthorized modifications to the tabulating computer before the recount. Eaton told the Conyers committee that the same employee also provided county officials with a ''cheat sheet'' so that ''the count would come out perfect and we wouldn't have to do a full hand-recount of the county.'' (198) After Eaton blew the whistle on the illegal tampering, she was fired.
(199) The same Triad employee was dispatched to do the same work in at least five other counties. (200) Company president Tod Rapp -- who contributed to Bush's campaign (201) -- has confirmed that Triad routinely makes such tabulator adjustments to help election officials avoid hand recounts. In the end, every county serviced by Triad failed to conduct full recounts by hand. (202)
Even more troubling, in at least two counties, Fulton and Henry, Triad was able to connect to tabulating computers remotely via a dial-up connection, and reprogram them to recount only the presidential ballots. (203) If that kind of remote tabulator modification is possible for the purposes of the recount, it's no great leap to wonder if such modifications might have helped skew the original vote count. But the window for settling such questions is closing rapidly: On November 2nd of this year, on the second anniversary of the election, state officials will be permitted under Ohio law to shred all ballots from the 2004 election. (204)
X. What's At Stake
The mounting evidence that Republicans employed broad, methodical and illegal tactics in the 2004 election should raise serious alarms among news organizations. But instead of investigating allegations of wrongdoing, the press has simply accepted the result as valid. ''We're in a terrible fix,'' Rep. Conyers told me. ''We've got a media that uses its bullhorn in reverse -- to turn down the volume on this outrage rather than turning it up. That's why our citizens are not up in arms.''
The lone news anchor who seriously questioned the integrity of the 2004 election was Keith Olbermann of MSNBC. I asked him why he stood against the tide. ''I was a sports reporter, so I was used to dealing with numbers,'' he said. ''And the numbers made no sense. Kerry had an insurmountable lead in the exit polls on Election Night -- and then everything flipped.'' Olbermann believes that his journalistic colleagues fell down on the job. ''I was stunned by the lack of interest by investigative reporters,'' he said. ''The Republicans shut down Warren County, allegedly for national security purposes -- and no one covered it. Shouldn't someone have sent a camera and a few reporters out there?''
Olbermann attributes the lack of coverage to self-censorship by journalists. ''You can rock the boat, but you can never say that the entire ocean is in trouble,'' he said. ''You cannot say: By the way, there's something wrong with our electoral system.''
Federal officials charged with safeguarding the vote have a
Comment on this Article
RFK Jr: Taking the Stolen Election Seriously
By Thom Hartmann
AlterNet
June 7, 2006.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has written a brilliant new article about the biggest political story in the history of the United States: An American politician illegitimately took the office of president by outright theft and fraud. Although such high crimes and misdemeanors have been rumored in previous elections, none in the history of the republic have been so thoroughly documented. George W. Bush is not the legitimate president of the United States.
Schoolchildren read (in the few remaining civics classes in America) about the multiple pollings and tense standoff that led to Thomas Jefferson's election as president in "the Revolution of 1800," because newspapers of the day looked into and reported on such things. But -- unless we speak out -- odds are that few will read about what happened in Ohio in 2004 in future history books, because modern newspaper editors are increasingly corporate appendages, and many of today's "reporters" worry more about currying favor with institutional power than investigating stories that may inconvenience or upset their "sources."
Kennedy's story -- "Was The 2004 Election Stolen?" -- broke on Thursday, June 1, 2006, when Rolling Stone magazine put it on their website and it was reprinted on other websites. It hit the newsstands soon thereafter. In the article, Kennedy lays out the details of exactly how the Republican Party, in several states but particularly in Ohio, engaged in a criminal conspiracy to both steal the 2004 election and to cover up the evidence of that theft.
The subtitle of the article lays out Kennedy's foundational premise: "Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House." And that's just the beginning of the story, which includes ballot-box stuffing, electronic voting machine manipulation, "caging" in defiance of a court order banning Republicans from the notorious practice, threats and intimidation of Democratic voters by imported Republican goon squads, and multiple illegal uses of the office of the Secretary of State to disenfranchise Democratic voters.
The Republican rebuttals/attacks have already begun, starting with a particularly tragic hit-piece in one of the higher-profile "online magazines" that claims to authoritatively quote so-called but unnamed "experts" who doubt Kennedy's sources, and takes a clip of Ohio law so out of context as to essentially reverse its meaning in support of the Republican talking points.
The day Kennedy's article came out, Republican callers began dialing into talk radio shows complaining about "massive Democrat (sic) voter fraud by registering illegal immigrants" (to quote a caller to my Air America Radio program on 6/2/06). Clearly the meme Republicans will put out if Kennedy's story gets traction in the mainstream media is that "election fraud is something both parties do," and they'll use that meme to push even harder for more Republican-helpful restrictions on voters who are old, urban, or poor enough not to have or easily acquire two forms of government-issued ID. We can't let them -- this is about real crimes, and the destruction of democracy in our republic.
Kennedy's article is an in-depth, on-the-ground report from Ohio about the 2004 election. In it, he acknowledges that he is building on the work of many who preceded him - this was a story not particularly difficult to uncover, even though the mainstream media has chosen to ignore it. Seminal investigations were done by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman of the Columbus, Ohio Free Press, and by Michigan Congressman John Conyers, who held hearings in Ohio that resulted in a summary report now available in book form titled What Went Wrong In Ohio (all referenced by Kennedy).
Just after the 2002 elections, I wrote an article for Common Dreams outing Senator Chuck Hagel's odd journey from voting machine peddler to the US Senate (being elected on his own machines). Six months later, in the summer of 2003, MoveOn.org commissioned me to write a round-up article about voting machine problems which they emailed to over 2 million members, and was published on AlterNet. In both articles (and others since), I was building on the work of Bev Harris of blackboxvoting.org, Lynn Landes, and many others, just as Kennedy has done.
It's not like the theft of the 2004 election is a secret to anybody who is looking. Mark Crispin Miller devoted an entire (brilliant) book to the topic, "Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them)", and BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast lays it out in a chapter of his new book "Armed Madhouse" and articles at gregpalast.com.
Kennedy, however, has a name and reputation that demands instant recognition in the mainstream American media. And he didn't just recycle the work of those who preceded him - he went to Ohio, talked with elections officials, looked over records, investigated the investigators, and only included in his story those facts he felt were sufficiently solid that they could, as he told me, "convince a jury." In fact, he is calling for criminal investigations into his evidence, for indictments of culpable Republican officials, and jury trials.
Even with such a credible and high-profile figure involved, however, the response so far of America's corporate-owned mainstream media to Kennedy's article evokes echoes of the media's handling of similar Republican Party crimes in Florida in the 2000 election.
Although it was reported -- in The New York Times, no less -- that Al Gore got more votes than George W. Bush in a statewide recount of Florida "no matter what standard was chosen to judge voter intent," most Americans don't know to this day that Gore actually won the 2000 election. The reason is a small percentage of Republican spin and a large percentage of journalistic cowardice in the mainstream media following 9/11. (This cowardice is limited to the USA, by the way -- the story was extensively covered in most of the rest of the world.)
In the 2000 case, The New York Times, on November 12, 2001, published a story summarizing the work of the newspaper consortium that spent nearly a year counting all the ballots in the 2000 Florida election. They found that a statewide recount -- the process the Florida Supreme Court had mandated and which had begun when George W. Bush sued before the US Supreme Court to stop the recount -- "could have produced enough votes to tilt the election his [Gore's] way, no matter what standard was chosen to judge voter intent."
The Times analysis further showed that had "spoiled" ballots -- ballots normally punched but "spoiled" because the voter also wrote onto the ballot the name of the candidate -- been counted, the results were even more spectacular. While 35,176 voters wrote in Bush's name after punching the hole for him, 80,775 wrote in Gore's name while punching the hole for Gore. Katherine Harris decided that these were "spoiled" ballots, and ordered that none of them should be counted. Many were from African American districts, where older and often broken machines were distributed, causing voters to write onto their ballots so their intent would be unambiguous. As the Times added in a sidebar article with a self-explanatory title by Ford Fessenden, in the 2000 election in Florida: "Ballots Cast by Blacks and Older Voters Were Tossed in Far Greater Numbers."
The November, 2001, New York Times article went on to document how, in a statewide recount, there was no possible doubt that Al Gore won Florida in 2000:
If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards [all the ones that were used by either party], and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won, by a very narrow margin. For example, using the most permissive ''dimpled chad'' standard, nearly 25,000 additional votes would have been reaped, yielding 644 net new votes for Mr. Gore and giving him a 107-vote victory margin. ...
Using the most restrictive standard -- the fully punched ballot card -- 5,252 new votes would have been added to the Florida total, producing a net gain of 652 votes for Mr. Gore, and a 115-vote victory margin.
All the other combinations likewise produced additional votes for Mr. Gore, giving him a slight margin over Mr. Bush, when at least two of the three coders agreed.
And yet all of this information was buried well after the 17th paragraph of the story, which carried the baffling headline "Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote."
As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pointed out to me in an interview on my radio program on June 2, the reason the Times chose to bury the lede of their story and instead imply in the headline and first few paragraphs that Bush had legitimately won the 2000 election was because just a month earlier the US had been struck on 9/11 and the Times' publisher didn't want to undermine the president's legitimacy in a time of national crisis.
In a case eerily prescient of the Times' 2004 decision to delay reporting on Bush's illegal wiretapping of Americans until after the election, the Times' publisher and editors decided in November of 2001 that that wasn't a good time to reveal that Bush was an illegitimate president and that Al Gore actually had won the election, both by the majority vote and the electoral vote. (Although, to their credit, at least they reported that Gore got the most votes in Florida, as did The Washington Post, which also ran the story but buried it deep within an article that similarly seemed to imply Bush won legitimately. USA Today passed over it altogether, simply saying that Bush won.)
The big question for today is whether media history will repeat itself. Will the mainstream media do any first-source on-the-ground investigative reporting into the theft of the 2004 election, or simply treat it as a political "difference of opinion"? And if they do engage in the hard work of first-source reporting as the Times and their consortium did in 2001, and the results again come back that Bush is an illegitimate president, will they again bury that fact seventeen paragraphs into a story with a misleading headline and opening as they did when, in 2001, they counted the ballots and found that Al Gore got more votes than George W. Bush did in Florida?
So far, it seems that the mainstream media is going to pass on doing any of their own first-source reporting, while Kenneth Blackwell begins the process of destroying evidence, which he'll be legally authorized to do in the next few months.
For example, on Friday, June 3, 2006, CNN briefly interviewed Kennedy, but treated the story as a political one rather than an example of investigative reporting. Instead of interviewing Kennedy about the details and substance of the story, Wolf Blitzer had on with Kennedy the infamous Terry Holt, spokesman for the Bush/Cheney campaign and a likely co-conspirator in the crime, instead of an investigative reporter who had examined Kennedy's evidence. Just as when Holt was confronted by Anderson Cooper in August of 2004 about the administration's manipulation of terror alerts during the campaign, Holt similarly ridiculed the idea of Republican election crimes, and Blitzer didn't challenge him -- or let Kennedy finish most of his sentences.
Three days after Kennedy's story broke in Rolling Stone, a Google news search shows no national "mainstream" media having picked up the story as a serious news report, or having done any follow-up reporting into the issues he raises whatsoever. An email reply from an editor at The Seattle Times, asking why they're not covering the story, is characteristic of the response from many other national newspapers: "We subscribe to many news services for our national and foreign coverage. However, Rolling Stone is not one of them."
The question should not be, "Is this a story we can quote or should investigate because it was first reported in a major newspaper?" Instead, it should be, "Is there credible evidence that the election of 2004 was stolen by Republicans engaged in openly criminal activity?" And, of course, "Are they preparing to do the same in 2006 and 2008?"
Our national mega-corporate-owned media -- now so driven by ad dollars that sensationalized "missing white girls" trump real news -- will only respond if enough of us raise enough questions with their editors and writers. Or if more of our members of congress (you can call your congressperson or senator at 202 225-3121) -- particularly the "media darlings" like Joe Biden and (gulp) Chuck Hagel, who are ubiquitous on the Sunday talking-head shows -- begin to speak out with the rare courage Congressman John Conyers showed when he pursued his investigation despite a virtual news blackout from the mainstream media.
Thom Hartmann is an author and nationally syndicated daily talk show host. His newest book is 'We The People: A Call To Take Back America.'
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Republicans dodge disaster with House win
By John Whitesides
Reuters
June 7, 2006
WASHINGTON - Republicans celebrated a crucial U.S. House of Representatives win in a conservative California district on Wednesday, but Democrats said the narrow margin of victory showed their message of change could be effective in November's midterm elections.
Republican Brian Bilbray narrowly won a tough battle with Democrat Francine Busby in a special election north of San Diego to replace Randy Cunningham, a former Republican congressman imprisoned for taking bribes.
The race in the solidly Republican district was closely watched for signs that President George W. Bush's dismal approval ratings and issues like corruption and immigration were taking a toll on the party five months before elections to decide control of Congress.
A Democratic win would have sent shock waves through Washington. But the narrow Bilbray victory -- he received just under 50 percent of the vote -- gave Republicans at least short-term bragging rights and reinforced their argument November's elections would be a series of local contests, not a referendum on Bush or the national party.
"The Republicans dodged not a bullet, but a bazooka. Things look brighter for them today," said University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato.
"It's going to be a Democratic year, but will it be the kind of year that produces a victory big enough for them to take control of the House?" Sabato asked. "That's much less sure today than it appeared to be on Monday."
Democrats must pick up 15 House seats and six Senate seats in November's election to claim majorities in each chamber. A sour national electorate and plunging approval ratings for Bush and the Republican-led Congress have fueled Democratic hopes for big gains.
"I think a lot of critics were hoping this would be a kind of a bellwether so they could say the Republican Party and the president are in peril and their hopes were clearly frustrated," White House spokesman Tony Snow said.
ROUGH CAMPAIGN
Busby and Bilbray battered each other on immigration in what became a rough campaign. Busby tried to tie Bilbray, a former congressman, to the national party's troubles and corruption scandals.
"It goes back to local politics being a choice between two people," said Carl Forti, spokesman for the House Republican campaign committee. "Busby was wrong for this district on immigration and she was wrong on taxes, and that's what made the difference."
But Democrats said the improved showing by the school board official Busby -- she won 38 percent of the vote against Cunningham in 2004 but 45 percent on Tuesday -- showed their message of change was gaining strength even in Republican strongholds.
"In an election cycle that is shaping up to be a change versus the status quo contest, Francine Busby has shown a strong change message can make even former members of Congress vulnerable in deeply red Republican districts," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (news, bio, voting record) of Illinois, chairman of the House Democratic campaign committee.
Democrats said Republicans spent almost $5 million on the race, nearly double the Democrats', to pull out the narrow win in a district where they have rarely been challenged.
"I don't know how they can sustain that effort throughout the country," House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said. "While this did not produce a victory for us, it was good news in terms of the closeness of the race."
But Republicans said moral victories would not give Democrats a majority in November.
"There are no moral victories in American politics -- either you win or you don't," said Rep. Tom Reynolds of New York, chairman of the House Republican campaign committee.
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Rumsfeld proposes pullout on drug effort
By CURT ANDERSON
Associated Press
June 7, 2006
MIAMI - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wants to end Army helicopter support for a joint U.S.-Bahamas drug-interdiction program that over the past two decades has resulted in hundreds of arrests and the seizure of tons of cocaine and marijuana.
The Army's seven Blackhawk helicopters and their crews form the backbone of Operation Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, which the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration credits with helping drive cocaine and marijuana smugglers away from the Bahamas and its easy access to Florida.
But in a May 15 letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Rumsfeld said it was time after more than 20 years to shift the equipment elsewhere. The military is being stretched thin by the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and other commitments around the globe.
The Bahamas anti-drug program, Rumsfeld wrote, "now competes with resources necessary for the war on terrorism and other activities in support of our nation's defense, with potential adverse effects on the military preparedness of the United States."
The letter asks Gonzales to help identify "a more appropriate agency" to provide the air support. Rumsfeld said he wants to complete the military pullout from the program by Oct. 1, 2007.
The DEA is the other major player in the program, but it has only one helicopter in the Bahamas. The Coast Guard has three Jayhawk helicopters assigned to the program, but DEA officials said the equipment would be insufficient to provide quick response along the vast, 700-island Bahamas chain.
"We would need some resources to be able to do that," Mark R. Trouville, chief of DEA's Miami field office, said in an interview. The Miami DEA office oversees U.S. anti-drug efforts in the Caribbean and Latin America.
The Justice Department, of which DEA is a part, declined comment Wednesday on Rumsfeld's letter. Trouville said discussions were under way regarding which agency might assume the military's role in the Bahamas.
Officials at the
Pentagon and the U.S. Southern Command in Miami did not immediately return calls Wednesday.
When the program began in 1982, up to 90 percent of the cocaine smuggled into the U.S. from Latin America came into Florida through the Bahamas and Caribbean. Now, most of the cocaine moves across the U.S. southwestern border, in part because of the pressure on traffickers operating off Florida's coasts.
"If we start letting our guard down here now, and we reduce our presence here, it will be more economical (for smugglers) to come back this way. And certainly the state of Florida is ground zero for that," Trouville said.
Since 2000, the program has resulted in seizure of more than 25 tons of cocaine, 82 tons of marijuana and the arrests of 786 people, according to DEA statistics from April.
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Specter Won't Subpoena Telecom Executives
By KATHERINE SHRADER
Associated Press
6 June 06
"Why don't we just recess for the rest of the year?" the committee's top Democrat, Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont, asked sarcastically. "Vice President Cheney will just tell the nation what laws we'll have."
WASHINGTON - Phone company executives won't be grilled by a Senate panel anytime soon about their roles in the Bush administration's eavesdropping program.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said Tuesday he will hold off subpoenaing the telecommunications chiefs while he works with the White House on his legislation that would ask a secretive federal court to review the constitutionality of Bush's surveillance operations.
Democrats accused Specter of abdicating Congress' oversight responsibilities.
"Why don't we just recess for the rest of the year?" the committee's top Democrat, Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont, asked sarcastically. "Vice President Cheney will just tell the nation what laws we'll have."
Bush has acknowledged that the National Security Agency monitored _ without court approval _ the communications of terror suspects when one person was in the United States and another was overseas. Until Bush ordered the operations shortly after 9/11, a judge had to sign off on such monitoring.
Following a report last month in USA Today, lawmakers have said the government is also using general information on Americans' telephone calls _ such as the number called, and the number dialed from _ to analyze calling patterns to detect and track suspected terrorist activity.
Specter had threatened to subpoena executives of the major phone companies to get them to testify about their cooperation with the NSA. But in an informal conversation, one company lawyer told Specter the executives wouldn't be able to testify about any classified information. Specter said Cheney told the committee the restriction would apply to everyone the senators want to question.
"I cannot make them talk," said Specter, who later acknowledged that the executives have access to more information than senators.
In exchange for deferring action on the phone companies, Specter said Cheney has specifically agreed to work with him on his legislation.
Specter rejected suggestions that he was letting the White House dictate the committee's agenda, and he said he plans to have Attorney General Alberto Gonzales before the committee later this month.
"I yield to no man or woman on pressing this administration on these issues," he said.
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Specter tells Cheney to stop interfering
Eyewitnsess News
7 June 06
CAPITOL HILL A fellow Republican is calling on Vice President Cheney to butt out of a congressional investigation.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter is firing off a three-page letter to Cheney. At issue is the committee's review of the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program. The letter asks Cheney to stop lobbying other committee Republicans to oppose subpoenas for phone company executives.
Specter is the most vocal member of the G-O-P to be against monitoring the calls and e-mails of Americans without a judge's warrant. The White House says the program requires that terrorism be suspected, and that one of the parties be overseas.
Copyright 2006 Associated Press.
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Warm Water
Field commanders tell Pentagon Iraq war 'is lost'
By DOUG THOMPSON
Jun 5, 2006
Military commanders in the field in Iraq admit in private reports to the Pentagon the war "is lost" and that the U.S. military is unable to stem the mounting violence killing 1,000 Iraqi civilians a month.
Even worse, they report the massacre of Iraqi civilians at Haditha is "just the tip of the iceberg" with overstressed, out-of-control Americans soldiers pushed beyond the breaking point both physically and mentally.
"We are in trouble in Iraq," says retired army general Barry McCaffrey. "Our forces can't sustain this pace, and I'm afraid the American people are walking away from this war."
Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has clamped a tight security lid on the increasingly pessimistic reports coming out of field commanders in Iraq, threatening swift action against any military personnel who leak details to the press or public.
The wife of a staff sergeant with Kilo Company, the Marine Unit charged with killing civilians at Haditha, tells Newsweek magazine that the unit was a hotbed of drug abuse, alcoholism and violence.
"There were problems in Kilo company with drugs, alcohol, hazing [violent initiation games], you name it," she said. "I think it's more than possible that these guys were totally tweaked out on speed or something when they shot those civilians in Haditha."
Journalists stationed with the unit described Kilo Company and the Third Batallion of Marines as a "unit out of control," where morale had plummeted and rules went out the window.
Similar reports emerge from military units throughout Iraq and even the Iraqi prime minister describes American soldiers as trigger happy goons with little regard for the lives of civilians.
Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki says the murder of Iraqi civilians has become a "daily phenomenon" by American troops who "do not respect the Iraqi people."
"They crush them with their vehicles and kill them just on suspicion. This is completely unacceptable," Maliki said. The White House tried to play down Maliki's comments, saying the prime minister was "misquoted" although Maliki himself has yet to made such a public claim.
''Can anyone blame Iraqis for joining the resistance now?'' Mustafa al-Ani, an Iraqi analyst living in Dubai, told The Chicago Tribune. ''The resistance and the terrorists alike are feeding off the misbehavior of the American soldiers.''
As the resistance mounts and daily violence escalates, the overstressed U.S. units are unable to control the mounting violence and conclusions escalate that the war is lost.
"Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood," says Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa.
The former commander of American forces in Northern Iraq admits incidents like Haditha add to the impression that the U.S. cannot win the war.
"Allegations such as this, regardless of how they are borne out by the facts, can have an effect on the ability of U.S. forces to continue to operate," says Army Brig. Gen. Carter Ham.
Others say the incident just shows the U.S. has lost he "hearts and minds" of the Iraqi people.
"When something like Haditha happens, it gives the impression that Americans can't be trusted to provide security, which is the most important thing to Iraqis on a day-to-day level," says Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "It tends to confirm all of the worst interpretations of the United States, and not simply in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan and in the region."
© Copyright 2005 Capitol Hill Blue
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Bush Flunks the Art of War - Master Sun-Tzu, President Hu and Bush
By JOHN WALSH
Counterpunch
7 June 06
At the very least China's President Hu displayed a sense of humor in presenting a book, of all things, to George W. Bush on his recent visit to the United States. And the choice of Sun-Tzu's fifth century B.C. classic, "The Art of War" was tantalizing. Since Dubya certainly will not penetrate too far into it, I decided to have a look, so that at least one American would honor the Chinese gift by actually reading it. This provided me a rare patriotic surge, much like the rush when I put my tax return in the mailbox.
Sun-Tzu did not disappoint. At almost the very beginning of the second chapter I found a near perfect description of Dubya's ill-fated war on Iraq. To quote:
"Master Sun said: The art of warfare is this:
"In joining battle, seek the quick victory. If battle is protracted, your weapons will be blunted and your troops demoralized. If you lay siege to a walled city, you exhaust your strength. If your armies are kept in the field for a long time, your national reserves will not suffice. Where you have blunted your weapons, demoralized your troops, exhausted your strength and depleted all available resources, the neighboring rulers will take advantage of your adversity to strike. And even with the wisest of counsel, you will not be able to turn the ensuing consequences to the good. There never has been a state that has benefited from an extended war."
What a simple and concise description of the quagmire in Iraq! Here Sun-Tzu is providing counsel for an invading army. For the invaded, or in our era for the colonized or occupied, protracted struggle and the inevitable atrocities committed by the invader are both keys to victory. It is certain that the military and the neocon architects of the war know these classical principles of warfare even if Dubya is clueless. One is led to suspect that the neocons knew that a quagmire would ensue in Iraq, and in fact there is evidence for this, but they did not care. They had other goals. (Think Mearscheimer and Walt.*)
In the third chapter, Sun-Tzu makes some further pertinent observations.
"Master Sun said: The art of warfare is this:
"It is best to keep one's own state intact; to crush the enemy's state is only a second best. The highest excellence is to attack strategies; the next to attack alliances; the next to attack soldiers; and the worst to attack walled cities. . Therefore the expert in using the military subdues the enemies forces without going to battle."
In other words going to battle is a sign of weakness, a sign that other means were not available. The very fact that the U.S. wages war on Iraq is a sign either of weakness or lack of wisdom, the latter a failure to perceive one's own interests. (Think Mearscheimer and Walt again.*)
In Chapter 13,
"Master Sun said:
"Intelligence is of the essence in warfare it is what the armies depend upon in their every move."
And this has a dual application. In Iraq the Americans are surrounded by the Resistance; it seeps into their every pore like water even though they inhabit the desert. And so the Americans have no intelligence, and all the Abu Ghraib's in the world will not extort the information they want. One does not readily betray one's family and friends.
Finally, in the very first words of Chapter 1, Sun-Tzu offers perhaps his most important observation which we have left for last:
"Master Sun said:
"War is a vital matter of state. It is the field on which life or death is determined and the road which leads to either survival or ruin, and must be examined with greatest care.
"Therefore to gauge the outcome of war we must appraise the situation on the basis of the following five criteria, and compare the two sides by assessing their relative strengths. The first of the five criteria is the way (tao). The way (tao) is what brings the thinking of the people in line with their superiors."
(Think the polls that show the overwhelming majority of Americans feel that the war in Iraq is a mistake and not worth fighting, certainly not worth dying for. This amounts to bad tao for Bush and his accomplices in both War Parties.)
John Walsh can be reached at john.endwar@gmail.com or late on Friday afternoons in Boston picketing against AIPAC or the Dem establishment, the "left" wing of the bird of prey.
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Washington fury over UN attack on Bush 'hypocrites' - Annan's British deputy criticises administration - Bolton calls comments 'a very, very grave mistake'
Oliver Burkeman in New York
Thursday June 8, 2006
The Guardian
The deputy secretary-general of the United Nations was last night accused of making "a very, very grave mistake" after calling the Bush administration hypocrites who were feeding a right-wing anti-UN frenzy in middle America.
Washington's ambassador to the UN responded with undisguised fury to a speech by Mark Malloch Brown, the deputy secretary-general, in which he accused Washington of using the international body "almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool" while failing to defend it at home.
"Much of the public discourse that reaches the US heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors, such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News," Mr Malloch Brown said in a speech in New York on Tuesday. Depending on the UN while tolerating "too much unchecked UN-bashing and stereotyping" was "simply not sustainable", he said. "You will lose the UN one way or another."
John Bolton, the US envoy and an outspoken critic of the UN, called the comments "a very, very grave mistake". He said he told the secretary-general, Kofi Annan, yesterday morning: "I've known you since 1989, and I'm telling you, this is the worst mistake by a senior UN official that I have seen in that entire time." He called on the secretary-general to repudiate the speech.
Tensions between the UN and George Bush's White House have been simmering since the war in Iraq, but they also encompass deep splits over the international criminal court and the new human rights council, whose formation the US was one of only four states to oppose. But the diplomatic tradition according to which UN officials do not publicly attack specific member states has a longer history still.
Washington was angered by Mr Malloch Brown's references to middle America, and the influence upon it of conservative commentators such as Mr Limbaugh. Mr Bolton said the speech demonstrated a "condescending, patronising tone about the American people. Fundamentally and very sadly, this was a criticism of the American people, not the American government, by an international civil servant. It's just illegitimate."
The deputy secretary-general, a Briton who was previously head of the UN development programme, called his speech "a sincere and constructive critique of US policy toward the UN by a friend and admirer". But he may have felt liberated to speak his mind: his term of office ends in December, at the same time as Mr Annan's, and he is understood not to be planning to stay at the UN.
As speculation over Mr Annan's successor mounts, some reports have suggested Tony Blair is angling for the job - and that a speech he gave at Georgetown University two weeks ago, in which he outlined his ideas on UN reform, constituted a job application of sorts.
Mr Malloch Brown also used his speech to defend 18 peacekeeping missions around the world and to criticise continuing efforts by the US to use its leverage - as by far the UN's largest funding source - to press for more rapid reforms.
The UN needed to be overhauled, he acknowledged, but "in recent years the enormously divisive issue of Iraq and the big stick of financial withholding have come to define an unhappy marriage", he said. Other nations had the perception that the US adopted "maximalist positions" in diplomatic negotiations, he added, rather than seeking compromise.
A UN official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Guardian the speech was intended to be "a warning call" about a broader crisis. On many issues, including UN reform, "what the US is doing is absolutely right from our point of view", the official said. "It's just that almost nobody else, in the current environment, believes them." The state of public discourse about the UN in America meant that "the rest of the world thinks that the US has a hidden agenda, or is trying to use the process to manipulate the UN".
A senior UN official, Shashi Tharoor, said on Tuesday that the UN risked having to shut down if the US and Japan carried out a threat to withhold funding because management reforms had not been sufficiently implemented.
Comment: The deputy secretary general of the UN told the truth. But, in this day and time, telling the truth is a crime in the good ole U.S. of A.
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Bush envoy's fury over 'insult' to US by British UN chief
From James Bone in New York
The Times
8 June 06
LONG-SIMMERING tensions between the Bush Administration and the United Nations leadership erupted into open warfare yesterday when Washington's ambassador voiced outrage at criticism of the United States by the UN's British second-in-command.
John Bolton, the US Ambassador to the UN, called on Kofi Annan, its Secretary- General, to "personally and publicly repudiate" criticisms of the US and its people by Mark Malloch Brown, his British deputy.
But Mr Annan, an old friend of Mr Malloch Brown who has promoted him to a series of top jobs in the UN system, retires on December 31 after a decade in office and was in no mood to back down.
"The Secretary-General stands by the Deputy Secretary-General and agrees with the thrust of his speech," Mr Annan's spokesman said last night. "The speech was not a mistake."
In his speech on Tuesday, Mr Malloch Brown attacked the US for "too much unchecked UN-bashing and stereotyping over too many years. From Lebanon and Afghanistan to Syria, Iran and the Palestinian issue, the US is constructively engaged with the UN," he said.
"But that is not well known or understood, in part because much of the public discourse that reaches the US heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors, such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News," he added.
"That is what I mean by 'stealth' diplomacy: The UN's role is in effect a secret in Middle America even as it is highlighted in the Middle East and other parts of the world."
Mr Bolton told Mr Annan that Mr Malloch Brown's comments were "the worst mistake by a senior UN official" that he had seen in many years and would damage the world body.
Analysts say that the clash could imperil congressional funding for the UN. The US, which pays 22 per cent of the UN's administrative budget, is already threatening to block its budget for the second half of this year unless it adopts a set of management reforms.
Mr Malloch Brown's speech was delivered to a think-tank seminar attended by prominent Democrat foreign policy experts and supporters. The audience included Madeleine Albright, the Clinton Administration's Secretary of State, Anthony Lake, National Security Adviser to President Clinton, and Richard Holbrooke, the former UN Ambassador.
Mr Bolton, a longtime UN critic, denounced Mr Malloch Brown's "condescending, patronising tone about the American people".
He said: "Fundamentally and very sadly, this was a criticism of the American people, not the American Government, by an international civil servant . . . It's just illegitimate." He said he feared that the fallout would hurt the UN far more than the US and warned Mr Annan of the "potential adverse effects these remarks would have on the organisation". Mr Bolton is expected to comment further on the controversy in a speech at the Centre for Policy Studies in London today.
Mr Malloch Brown last night defended his remarks, saying the crisis facing the UN demanded that he speak out. "For the life of me, I cannot understand how that can be construed as an anti-American speech," he said.
The row comes after months of tension between the blunt-speaking US envoy and Mr Malloch Brown, a former journalist and political consultant who was drafted in to do damage control during the Oil-for-Food scandal.
IN THE US CORNER . . .
JOHN BOLTON
Age 57
Trademark Walrus moustache
Background Yale-educated lawyer. Served Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior. US chief arms control negotiator and ambassador to UN since 2005
Best known for Helping George W Bush to clinch victory in disputed 2000 election in Florida. Denounced North Korea as "hellish nightmare". Accused of bullying subordinates in State Department
Quote "There is no such thing as the United Nations. The United States makes the UN work, when it wants to work. If the UN building in New York lost ten stories, it would not make a bit of difference"
IN THE UN CORNER . . .
MARK MALLOCH BROWN
Age 52
Trademark Transatlantic twang
Background Marlborough College and Cambridge University. Worked as a journalist on the Economist before joining the World Bank and heading the UN's Development Programme
Best known for Accepting job as UN deputy secretary-general to reform it after allegations of corruption, bribery and sexual harassment. Lives in home owned by the financier George Soros
Quote "If you look at the past 60 years of the UN, things rarely go well when there are strains in the relationship with the US. We must learn to trust the US without being seen as a poodle of America"
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Ann Coulter, "Bitch" Is Too Kind a Word For You
Russell Shaw
Huffingtonpost.com
6 June 06
Earlier today, the Today Show's Matt Lauer challenged fright-wing pundit Ann Coulter on this charming statement of hers:
"These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9-11 was an attack on our nation and acted like as if the terrorist attack only happened to them. They believe the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony.
Apparently, denouncing bush was part of the closure process."
Then Matt said "and this part is the part I really need to talk to you about: 'These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband's death so much.'
"Because they dare to speak out?," Matt then asked.
Ann Coulter then said something to the effect that the left loves the fact that by being widows, these women exude a certain gravitas of quotability.
Well, Ann, if you believe these are "reveling," "millionaire" "broads," then I invite you to be a fly on the wall tonight.
A fly on the wall as one of these widows looks at her dead husband's picture on her desk and remembers the finer times.
A fly on the wall as one of these widows looks at the other side of what was her marriage bed and sees no one there.
A fly on the wall as one of these widows introduces a new male friend to her children, and they instantaneously - yet only to themselves, wonder if he will be as kind and as loving to their mother as their slain father was.
A fly on the wall as one of these widows listens to a new audio tape by Osama Bin Laden, and wonders why the man who was the ultimate mastermind of her husband's murder has not been caught.
A fly on the wall as one of these widows kneels in prayer, looks up to heaven at the projected presence of her slain husband's spirit, and with tears in your eyes, says, "I am doing this (speaking out) for you - because you can't, sweetheart."
A fly on the wall as one of these widows reads or hears Ann Coulter's hurtful, spiteful words and damns Ann Coulter to hell.
I am no authority on the next life, Ann Coulter, but I know something about this life.
And in this life, consigning you to "bitch-dom" is too kind an assignation.
I've got a better word for you, Ann Coulter.
The word that rhymes with what football teams often do on fourth down.
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9/11 Widows, New York Papers, Respond to Coulter's 'Slander'
By E&P Staff
June 07, 2006
NEW YORK Syndicated columnist and author Ann Coulter appeared on the Today show on Tuesday, promoting a new book. Host Matt Lauer asked her to explain certain remarks in the book aimed at activist 9/11 widows, including her charge that they were nothing but "self obsessed" and celebrity-seeking "broads" who are "enjoying" their husbands' deaths "so much."
After she defended these statements, Lauer inexplicably closed by saying, "always fun to have you here."
Elsewhere in the book, Coulter refers to the widows as "witches" and asks, "how do we know their husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies"?
In response, a group of five 9/11 widows, who may have been the prime targets of Coulter's remarks, issued a statement denouncing Coulter's views. The New York Daily News on Wednesday featured a smiling Coulter and this headline on its front page: COULTER THE CRUEL. One story inside was topped with "Massive Chip on Her Coulter " and another called her a "a model of meanness."
The Star-Ledger in Newark, meanwhile, carried a story today with the headline "For 9/11 widows, book adds insult to injury." It featured interviews with some of the widows. The New York Post headlined a story: "RIGHTY WRITER COULTER HURLS NASTY GIBES AT 9/11 GALS."
The Post interviewed one of the widows, Mindy Kleinberg of East Brunswick, N.J. -- part of a group Coulter dubbed "The Witches of East Brunswick." Kleinberg said, "We are trying to make sure that nobody else walks in our footsteps. And if she [Coulter] thinks that's wrong, so be it." Newsday (Melville, N.Y.) carried an Associated Press story.
On a separate matter -- charges that she knowingly voted in the wrong precinct in Florida last year -- Coulter said on Fox News Tuesday night that reporters who wrote about the case are "all retarded" and accused Palm Beach officials of having a sexually transmitted disease. "I think the syphilis has gone to their brains," she said. "This is all false, I'm telling you."
Universal syndicates Coulter's column. A spokesman there told E&P it had no response to the latest firestorm.
The five widows' statement is reprinted below (it first appeared at crooksandliars.com).
***
We did not choose to become widowed on September 11, 2001. The attack, which tore our families apart and destroyed our former lives, caused us to ask some serious questions regarding the systems that our country has in place to protect its citizens.
Through our constant research, we came to learn how the protocols were supposed to have worked. Thus, we asked for an independent commission to investigate the loopholes which obviously existed and allowed us to be so utterly vulnerable to terrorists. Our only motivation ever was to make our Nation safer. Could we learn from this tragedy so that it would not be repeated?
We are forced to respond to Ms. Coulter's accusations to set the record straight because we have been slandered.
Contrary to Ms. Coulter's statements, there was no joy in watching men that we loved burn alive. There was no happiness in telling our children that their fathers were never coming home again. We adored these men and miss them every day.
It is in their honor and memory, that we will once again refocus the Nation's attention to the real issues at hand: our lack of security, leadership and progress in the five years since 9/11.
We are continuously reminded that we are still a nation at risk. Therefore, the following is a partial list of areas still desperately in need of attention and public outcry. We should continuously be holding the feet of our elected officials to the fire to fix these shortcomings.
1. Homeland Security Funding based on risk. Inattention to this area causes police officers, firefighters and other emergency/first responder personnel to be ill equipped in emergencies. Fixing this will save lives on the day of the next attack.
2. Intelligence Community Oversight. Without proper oversight, there exists no one joint, bicameral intelligence panel with power to both authorize and appropriate funding for intelligence activities. Without such funding we are unable to capitalize on all intelligence community resources and abilities to thwart potential terrorist attacks. Fixing this will save lives on the day of the next attack.
3. Transportation Security. There has been no concerted effort to harden mass transportation security. Our planes, buses, subways, and railways remain under-protected and highly vulnerable. These are all identifiable soft targets of potential terrorist attack. The terror attacks in Spain and London attest to this fact. Fixing our transportation systems may save lives on the day of the next attack.
4. Information Sharing among Intelligence Agencies. Information sharing among intelligence agencies has not improved since 9/11. The attacks on 9/11 could have been prevented had information been shared among intelligence agencies. On the day of the next attack, more lives may be saved if our intelligence agencies work together.
5. Loose Nukes. A concerted effort has not been made to secure the thousands of loose nukes scattered around the world - particularly in the former Soviet Union. Securing these loose nukes could make it less likely for a terrorist group to use this method in an attack, thereby saving lives.
6. Security at Chemical Plants, Nuclear Plants, Ports. We must, as a nation, secure these known and identifiable soft targets of Terrorism. Doing so will save many lives.
7. Border Security. We continue to have porous borders and INS and Customs systems in shambles. We need a concerted effort to integrate our border security into the larger national security apparatus.
8. Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Given the President's NSA Surveillance Program and the re-instatement of the Patriot Act, this Nation is in dire need of a Civil Liberties Oversight Board to insure that a proper balance is found between national security versus the protection of our constitutional rights.
-- September 11th Advocates
Kristen Breitweiser
Patty Casazza
Monica Gabrielle
Mindy Kleinberg
Lorie Van Auken
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The Religious Right Is Un-American - The idea of America as a Christian nation was anathema to the Founding Fathers, as it should be to all Americans.
By Joseph Smigelski
2 June 06
Many people associated with the Religious Right in America would have us believe that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. They foster this lie because they want to force their narrow-minded religious beliefs down our throats. They would like us to envision that Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison are standing with them shoulder to shoulder when they spout their distorted views on abortion, contraception, gay marriage, school prayer, evolution, etc. But to assert that the U.S. is a Christian nation is clearly un-American, if we define "American" as holding dear the precepts and values handed down to us in the Constitution by the Founding Fathers. The framers of the Constitution had no intention of defining our country as Christian. On the contrary, they were deeply concerned about preventing any kind of religious tyranny.
On the Christian Coalition of America's website banner, the group proclaims that it is "America's leading grassroots organization defending our godly heritage." This statement begs the question, "Is our heritage a godly one?" The answer is a resounding "No." The United States of America was founded as a secular nation with a firm "wall of separation" between church and state. The Founding Fathers were against establishing a national religion because they were keenly aware of the results of such tyranny throughout history. This caution did not prevent them, however, from giving all American citizens the right to privately practice freedom of religion, even the freedom to have no religion at all. Everyone had the right to go to church, but the pew and the pulpit were not fit places for partisan politics, and vice versa.
James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, once wrote, "Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and all of which facilitates the execution of mischievous projects. Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded project." Those are strong words that could justifiably be leveled at the Religious Right today.
Have you read the Constitution lately? The words "God," "Christ," "Christian," and "Jesus" do not appear even once. The word "religious" appears but a single time, in Article VI:
No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.
The word "religion" can be found only in the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
When we see the words "religious" and "religion" in the Constitution, it is in the context of a warning against the use of religious pressure as a weapon of tyranny.
Thomas Jefferson, a leading voice behind including the Bill of Rights as an addendum to the Constitution, was adamant about building a "wall of separation" between church and state. In an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, Jefferson wrote:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.
When Jefferson wrote the following words that are carved on his memorial in Washington, D.C., he was specifically referring to the tyranny of state-sponsored religion:
No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship or ministry or shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion.
In their book The Godless Constitution, Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore robustly point out Jefferson's attitudes toward religious tyranny. I think it will be clear that what Jefferson said about priests is applicable today to those of the Religious Right who proselytize that the only real American is a "Christian" American.
How shocking Jefferson's vitriolic attacks on ministers of God, especially those who meddled in politics, seem to late-twentieth-century sensibility. Christ saw no need for priests, Jefferson wrote. They were not necessary "for the salvation of souls." He suggested to John Adams, his friend after they had left politics, that "we should all, then, like the Quakers, live without an order of priests," and "moralize for ourselves, following the oracle of conscience." The ... irritable tribe of priests had subverted the pure morality of primitive Christianity to serve their own selfish interests, according to Jefferson. They "perverted" Christianity "into an engine for enslaving mankind, a mere contrivance to filtch wealth and power to themselves." On another occasion he labeled this as the priestly quest for "pence and power," which "revolts those who think for themselves." The clergy stood condemned, along with monarchy and the nobility, as the people's enemies. Like kings and aristocrats "in every country and in every age," Jefferson wrote, "the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own."
One can argue, of course, and use hundreds of quotations for support, that the Founding Fathers often thought and wrote about God and religion. But whether or not Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison believed in a Christian God is not the issue. The important thing is that these Founders wanted to keep religion out of politics for the good of religion. They saw religion as a moral and ethical guide for the individual, not the state. Moral men should establish the state; the state should not dictate morality to men. That's why the Founders were so adamant about personal freedom of religion, no matter what that religion was. They indeed went even further and defended everyone's right to full freedom of thought, even atheistic thought. Jefferson wrote:
Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important part of every person's life, freedom of religion affects every individual. State churches that use government power to support themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths undermine all our civil rights.
The Founders also believed that if religion were a part of politics, religion would lose its value as a moral force. After all, politics is a rat's nest of deceit, backstabbing, and manipulation. Why soil religious thought by embroiling it in politics? Religious principles, the Founders held, were an antidote of sorts to the detrimental chimeras and that try to crawl their way into the political mind. This is Jefferson again:
State support of the church tends to make the clergy unresponsive to the people and leads to corruption within religion. Erecting the "wall of separation between church and state," therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.
The idea of establishing a Christian nation was anathema to the Founding Fathers, as it should be to all thinking people. Jefferson wrote, "I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another." So do not believe those proselytizers on the Religious Right who claim that they are true Americans, and that they uphold the true ideals of our Founding Fathers, when they make the specious claim that America is a Christian nation. They are spouting un-American nonsense.
Joseph Smigelski teaches English at two Northern California community colleges.
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The Mystery of the 'Two Cheneys'
By Xue-Jiang Li
Translated By Mark Klingman
May 15, 2006
Are U.S. politicians stuck in the Cold War, treating Russia as an adversary when to do so is self-defeating? According to this op-ed article from China's Communist Party-controlled People's Daily, the hypocrisy and short-sightedness of American policy was recently exposed by Vice President Cheney, who criticized Russia, and days later embraced dictator and human rights abuser Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan.
American Vice President Cheney attended a European Democratic Congress on May 4, held in Lithuania [the Common Vision of Common Neighborhood conference]. Such conferences are not usually very interesting, nor do they attract many viewers. However, because Cheney created an incident in his speech by criticizing Russia [RealVideo], this conference garnered quite a bit of attention.
Cheney stated at the meeting that in many areas, from freedom of religious belief to freedom of the press, the Russian government has unfairly and improperly restricted the rights of her people. He further accused Russia of backtracking in their democratic development; and of using oil and gas as tools of intimidation or blackmail. This language, which had the Russian public opinion in an uproar, led some commentators to believe that Cheney's rhetoric just might provoke a second Cold War between America and Russia [RealVideo].
Comparisons with the Cold War are perhaps exaggerated, but Cheney's speech did serve to illustrate the level of White House suspicion of, and dissatisfaction with, the Putin government. Recent American opinion has been that Russia is backsliding on democracy. This position's loudest proponent has been Republican Senator John McCain. On the campaign trail for upcoming American presidential elections [in 2008], he not only has praised Cheney's criticism as spot on, but has appealed to President Bush to continue the criticism at the G8 Summit, to be held in [St. Petersburg] Russia in July. They all support Cheney's promotion of American democratic values and ideas.
However, what they didn't expect was that a day later, Cheney would be in Kazakhstan, actually praising that central Asian nation. There he was, grasping President Nazarbayev's hand, calling him as my friend, and saying, the United States is proud to be your strategic partner [RealVideo]. This left the American media particularly puzzled, since according to so-called American democratic standards, Nazarbayev (a former Communist cadre) is an even a bigger dictator than Putin, having held sole power for 15 years.
This [American discomfort] was seen in particular after Nazarbayev was re-elected last December, with support as high as 91%. Western observers, including in the United States, recognized that the election failed to conform to many international standards. Also, the U.S. State Department this March issued its International Report on Human Rights, in which it accused Kazakhstan of a poor human rights record [RealVideo].
But there was Vice President Cheney again clearly expressing, my admiration for what has transpired here in Kazakhstan over the last 15 years. Both in terms of economic development, as well as political development. That comment was a real eye-popper for the American media: The New York Times and Washington Post, the two most influential mainstream newspapers, together sounded the alarm: These are two completely different Cheneys!
Actually, it's not that there are two different Cheneys, but rather that people are judging him according to two standards.
A Washington Post editorial RealVideo stated that this strange event in U.S. diplomacy has occurred because Kazakhstan is rich in the petroleum and natural gas that the U.S. needs. Therefore they say, our flawed energy policies are forcing us to pursue a contorted foreign policy. But isn't this a case of failing to see the forest for the trees? Does anyone dispute that Russia is rich in the petroleum and natural gas resources that the West so desperately needs?!
After all, American prejudice against Russia is not just due to the failure of Russia's democratic system to conform to American democratic standards; it is even more the case because the United States remains anxious and guarded over Russia's policy to maintain contact but obstruct.
For two years, the U.S. has been executing color revolutions in countries around Russia's periphery: not only has it allocated a special fund to help opposition groups in various countries seize power, but it has encouraged and subsidized American civil groups, for them to go to the scene and add their support in person. And in the end, it's the U.S. that accuses Russia of repeatedly attempting to interfere in the internal affairs of neighboring countries! If the U.S. really regards Russia, like itself, as a member of Western society, then why this great effort to undermine it?
From another perspective: in the present world, China remains far from being able to contend with the United States. Only Russia controls the kind of military force that could seriously challenge American might, and this is why the American superpower cannot lower its guard.
Thus it can be seen that when it comes to Russia's development, America has a tendency toward unwarranted criticism. On the one hand, this is because of different historical and cultural traditions that have led to clear disagreements over values; on the other, the conservative politicians holding power in the U.S. stick stubbornly to Cold War ideology. Whether they [the Americans] realize it or not, they always see Russia's development through a Cold War lens, and will always regard Russia as a military competitor. That is why, to a greater or lesser extent, they have no alternative but to be vigilant toward Russia, and by no means treat it as a trusted friend. In the future, we may look back on this period as the time that the cancer first began to grow.
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U.S.-Conspiracy 'Dashed to Pieces' By Bolivian Military
Translated By Paula van de Werken
May 29, 2006
Did George W. Bush give the green light for a conspiracy to topple the rightfully elected government of Bolivia? According to this article from the Venezuelan state news service, a coup plot with the American ambassador to Bolivia at its heart, has been foiled by the Bolivian armed forces.
La Paz: Already condemned by Bolivian President Evo Morales, a desperate conspiracy to undertake a coup d'etat confronted the Commander of the Army, General Freddy Bersatti, who publicly proclaimed his loyalty.
Yesterday, the military leader took this stance during Alo, Presidente, the televised program of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, which was transmitted near the border with Peru from the pre-Colombian ruins of Tiahuanaco, Prensa Latina reported.
After greeting President Chavez, Bersatti revealed that in 2005, while in command of the Army Officer's School, he had opposed an uprising against then-President Carlos Mesa, which may or may not have handed the government to the military high command, but in either case, would have shut down the Congress.
He said he rejected the plan (at the time) because he was a simple soldier, as he remains today. By making this statement, he showed his respect toward and support for President Evo Morales, as well as the unity of Latin America.
Minutes earlier, Chavez warned that Washington had begun giving an earful [inciting] to the Bolivian military, to persuade it to pit itself against Morales, and he declared the hope that Bolivia would not suffer a bloody coup attempt, as Venezuela did in 2002.
He accused the U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, David Greenlee, of being behind the plan to seize power, and he called on uniformed Bolivians to remain on alert.
The Bolivian leader pointed out that among the agreements of cooperation signed last Friday between Bolivia and Venezuela, one pertains to defense and security.
Yesterday, Morales himself confirmed a desperate conspiracy against his government, during a speech in the southern mining region of Uncia. He made the comments while inaugurating the sixth ophthalmologic center of Operation Miracle, a Cuban program that provides care for poor patients.
What my partner Chavez has said is in no way untrue, Morales said, in reference to accusations first made by the Venezuelan government on Friday.
According to Chavez, North American President George W. Bush, gave the green light to the conspiracy to overthrow Morales, by declaring that there is a supposed deterioration of democracy here.
The indigenous leader added that since the nationalization of the petroleum, transnational corporations and some people who escaped after murdering the nation [a reference to associates of former President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, currently residing in the United States], want to organize the overthrow of Bolivian democracy.
He then asked the crowd of Bolivian miners if they would defend the nationalization of the oil industry, which was achieved by virtue of the unity of the Bolivian people? He was answered in the affirmative with cheers.
He also stressed the importance of the election of delegates to the Constituent Assembly, which will be held on July 2, and warned that allowing the enemies of the nation to regain seats and foment unrest is not an option.
Morales underlined that he has absolutely no fear of the conspirators and that he is determined to confront them to make possible the recovery of Bolivia's natural resources, through the help of the citizenry.
Morales announced the withdrawal of troops that, as a precaution, have been guarding petroleum installations since they were nationalized on May 1, and he reiterated his gratitude to the Armed Forces for having participated in that operation.
He promised never to use the Armed Forces against the people of this land, and he said that uniformed personnel must defend national sovereignty and territory, including the country's national resources.
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What Geneva Conventions?
Haditha, Bush & Nuremberg's Law
Peter Dyer
Consortiumnews.com
June 6, 2006
George W. Bush -- in his first public comment on the alleged massacre of 24 civilians by U.S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq, last November -- said: "If, in fact, these allegations are true, the Marine Corps will work hard to make sure that ... those who violated the law -- if indeed they did -- will be punished."
Now that President Bush has resolved publicly that those who committed war crimes will be punished, the subject of U.S. war crimes may begin to move closer to its deserved prominent place in the American public discourse. If this happens, more Americans are likely to realize that the man who spoke of punishing war criminals has himself violated the law and should be accordingly punished.
In fact, according to the Nuremberg Charter, a document which the U.S. had a major role in drafting, those who initiate a war of aggression quite literally bear individual criminal responsibility, not only for waging unprovoked war, but for the war crimes which inevitably flow from aggression.
In 1946, the chief American prosecutor of the first Nuremberg trial, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, took this principle seriously enough to help secure the conviction of 17 of the most prominent surviving German leaders for initiating a war of aggression. Eleven were sentenced to death. Three received life sentences and three received lesser sentences.
Reading the transcript of the first Nuremberg trial, we see that all who committed war crimes, from the foot soldiers to the highest leaders, were to be held responsible for their crimes. We also see, however, that the leaders who initiated the aggression were assigned primary criminal responsibility by the prosecutors and by the Tribunal, since none of the subsequent crimes would have been committed had the aggression not occurred. This principle was absolutely central to the Nuremberg Charter and Trials.
Moreover, we see that the intent of the authors of the Charter was not to limit the principles involved in this body of law to prosecution of Germans in 1946 but rather to set a precedent for all times and for all countries, including the United States.
Article 6 of the Charter states: "The following acts, or any of them, are crimes coming within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal for which there shall be individual responsibility: (a) CRIMES AGAINST PEACE: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing; ...Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan."
And from Article 7: "The official position of defendants, whether as Heads of State or responsible officials in Government Departments, shall not be considered as freeing them from responsibility or mitigating punishment."
On Aug. 12, 1945, three months before the trial began, Justice Jackson made the intent of the American prosecution and of the law clear in a statement on the War Trials Agreement:
"If we can cultivate in the world the idea that aggressive war-making is the way to the prisoner's dock rather than the way to honors, we will have accomplished something toward making the peace more secure. ...We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it."
Bearing in mind the relationship of the Marines now awaiting trial for the Haditha massacre to their Commander-in-Chief and his subordinates, Justice Jackson's words in his Nov. 21, 1945, opening statement concerning the German leaders then on trial go to the heart of the matter:
"These defendants were men of a station and rank which does not soil its own hands with blood. They were men who knew how to use lesser folk as tools. We want to reach the planners and designers, the inciters and leaders without whose evil architecture the world would not have been for so long scourged with the violence and lawlessness, and wracked with the agonies and convulsions, of this terrible war. ...We have here the surviving top politicians, militarists, financiers, diplomats, administrators, and propagandists, of the Nazi movement. Who was responsible for these crimes if they were not?"
If we bear in mind that the U.S. aggression in Iraq was a violation not only of the Nuremberg Charter but of the U.N. Charter (Article 2, Sec. 4 and Articles 39 and 51) and if we remember the several shifting justifications for the aggression presented by the Bush administration, Justice Jackson's later words that day resonate today for us and for President Bush:
"The very minimum legal consequence of the treaties making aggressive wars illegal is to strip those who incite or wage them of every defense the law ever gave, and to leave war-makers subject to judgment by the usually accepted principles of the law of crimes. ... Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions."
And speaking to the concept of individual responsibility for war criminals at the highest levels, then and in the future, Justice Jackson said:
"The ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, which are inevitable in a system of international lawlessness, is to make statesmen responsible to law. And let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment. We are able to do away with domestic tyranny and violence and aggression by those in power against the rights of their own people only when we make all men answerable to the law. This trial represents mankind's desperate effort to apply the discipline of the law to statesmen who have used their powers of state to attack the foundations of the world's peace and to commit aggressions against the rights of their neighbors."
In his closing statement for the American prosecution, July 26, 1946, Justice Jackson hammered again at the relationship between the criminals at the bottom and the criminals at the top:
"The gist of the offense is participation in the formulation or execution of the plan. These are rules which every society has found necessary in order to reach men, like these defendants, who never get blood on their own hands but who lay plans that result in the shedding of blood. All over Germany today, in every zone of occupation, little men who carried out these criminal policies under orders are being convicted and punished. It would present a vast and unforgivable caricature of justice if the men who planned these policies and directed these little men should escape all penalty."
On Oct. 1, 1946, judgment was delivered by the Nuremberg Tribunal. From the judgment:
"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole. ...Crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced."
The simple truth is that had President Bush not ordered an illegal war of aggression, the 24 civilians in Haditha, along with countless thousands of other Iraqis and Americans, would be alive today.
Justice Jackson's last sentence in his closing statement, July 26, 1946, concerns the German leaders on trial at the time, but speaks to contemporary American leaders as well: "If you were to say of these men that they are not guilty, it would be as true to say that there has been no war, there are no slain, there has been no crime."
Peter Dyer is a machinist who moved with his wife from California to
New Zealand in 2004.
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The media's bloody footprints
Mike Whitney
6-5-06
"It was premeditated slaughter in every sense of the word. The marines came In and they killed everyone inside." - Khalid Ahmed Rasayef, eyewitness at Massacre in Haditha.[1]
The western media functions as the bullhorn for the political establishment. Its message is crafted to reflect the objectives of the government elites, and To defend the interests of its corporate ownership. The media's recent Coverage of the haditha massacre hasn't changed its essential purpose. It's still a Fully-vested partner in the corporate-state power structure. It's still the Government-corporate-media complex.
And yet the reporting on haditha has been surprisingly thorough. The major American newspapers have run several articles that cover the incident in great Detail. And the mainstream media still attracts some of the brightest, most Talented writers in the country. What a pity that their talent is being wasted on The promotion of an illegal, immoral, and tragic war which has led us to the Brink of disaster.
We really don't know why the media giants have veered away from their Traditional cheerleading role to focus on the u.s. military's atrocities at haditha. After all, they have ignored scores of similar incidents that have been Reported on the internet over the past three years.
What makes the haditha massacre so special when many more have gone Unreported? [2]
It's doubtful that the media executives are suddenly bothered by "pangs of Remorse" about the extensive mayhem and suffering they've helped to create in Iraq. It's more likely that their unexpected attention to haditha indicates Growing divisions among the american elites about bush's alarming mismanagement of The war. If his "post-war" military occupation had gone smoothly, there'd be No recriminations against - or even recognition of - the haditha massacre. Americans like a winner, and they're prepared to overlook the heinous criminal Indiscretions of their leaders if they're victorious.
Right now, the government-corporate-media complex is characterizing haditha As an "anomaly" that diverges from the norm of military conduct. But that is Not what the iraqis say. Even the newly-appointed iraqi prime minister, nouri Al-maliki, admits that such killings are a "daily occurrence," and that american Soldiers routinely "crush iraqis with their vehicles and kill them on Suspicion." in fact, it is impossible that the u.s. military has exterminated 100,000 Civilians without leaving behind a conspicuous trail of war crimes. Haditha Is the inevitable upshot of the illegal invasion and military occupation; it Fits into the familiar pattern of serial-killing that the media mischaracterizes Under the rubric of "pacification."
We know that stories, like haditha, rarely find their way into the evening News. They would interrupt the optimistic flow of jingoism and cheerful Predictions that dominate the broadcast media's storyline. None of its presstitutes Would be brazen enough to suggest that this petro-war was entirely motivated by Crass self-interest, or that the bush administration's calls for the "democratization" and "liberation" of the middle east are merely rationalizations Intended to divert the public's attention from the daily record of slaughter. They Know that such honesty would surely be a career-ending move.
The basic function of the media never changes.
The mainstream media is a top-down corporate institution that's designed to Provide a business-friendly worldview and to enhance the profits of its Investors. Its embedded presstitutes are paid handsomely to transform a vicious Colonial war into a "noble cause," and to defend the military's indiscriminate Killing of civilians as if it were the highest expression of "patriotism." thus, Haditha is the logical extension of that system.
Voltaire said, "those who can make you believe absurdities can make you Commit atrocities." the haditha massacre proves that voltaire was right. He wisely Anticipated the role of media in the modern era: it is the pitch-man for Atrocities which are thinly disguised as acts of "self-sacrifice" and "humanitarianism." voltaire never imagined that the cynical manipulation of public Perceptions could evolve into an entire industry. In fact, the corporate-controlled Media is more like an army than an industry: it is a band of mercenaries who are Used to carry out information-warfare against their own people.
The media's propaganda campaign has been the most successful part of the iraq War. News programs have faithfully delivered the same storyline from every Soapbox in america, crowding out opposing points of view. The synchronization And uniformity of the message has left no doubt that the corporate-controlled Media's propaganda system is vastly superior to any other. Its "profit-motive" Creates the best possible incentive for manipulating the public mind and Corrupting democracy. Indeed, the media has become a more valuable asset to the Department of defense than an abrams tank, or a laser-guided missile. It is the One truly indispensable weapon in the pentagon's arsenal.
The reporting on haditha hasn't damaged the pentagon-media alliance. Iraq has Produced thousands of hadithas all of which will remain ignored or concealed By the media.
Where are the photos of falluja?
Two years have passed since rumsfeld ordered the city of falluja flattened in An act of vindictive rage, and the media still hasn't provided even one Picture of the devastation. How is it that the clueless american people fail to Grasp this obvious sign of collaboration between the media and the pentagon Warlords?
The media knew about haditha months before it appeared in time magazine. They
Chose to ignore it rather than expose bush's blood-sport to the world.
Eventually, either the american people or an international war-crimes Tribunal will have to seriously address the media's culpability in the deaths of Hundreds of thousands of innocent iraqi non-combatants. Their conspiracy to Facilitate mass murder is not protected under the first amendment any more than Shouting "fire" in a crowded building. Moreover, the media has played crucial Roles in deliberately misleading the country into an illegal war of aggression, And in subsequently aiding and abetting numerous war crimes. Roles for which They will have to be held accountable.
The persistent slaughter in iraq is the work not only of the fanatical Right-wing neocons but also of the media's information-managers, who pumped their Lies through the public airwaves and made the war a fait accompli. They've Played a central role in decimating iraqi society and putting america on the Fast-track to ruin.
The bloody footprints from haditha lead straight to the corporate Headquarters at time warner, viacom, and fox news.
They are every bit as guilty as any marine who served in kilo company.
1] Here are the basic facts. In addition to the U.S. Marines' alleged massacre of 24 innocent civilians in Haditha on 11-19-05, they also allegedly massacred 11 innocent civilians in Ishaqi on 3-15-06. Evidence exists to buttress this second major charge that revenge murders were committed against civilians: a BBC videotape shows that U.S. troops first bound and then shot 11 Iraqis execution style, including 5 children and 4 women. And last week, a third questionable killing by U.S. troops took place in Samarra, where they shot 2 women to death in their car. Soldiers claimed their car failed to stop at a checkpoint. However, one of the slain women was pregnant and about to give birth, and it appears likely that they were merely rushing to the hospital. [See Tim Harper's 6-2-06 CD/Toronto Star article, "U.S. Accused Of New Iraq Massacre: Military Probes Death Of 5 Kids, 4 Women"
[2] Two essays contend the U.S. military is responsible for more massacres in Iraq:
A. Mike Ferner's 6-2-06 Counterpunch essay, "Haditha Is Not An Aberration: More, Lots More" [The author, who served as a Navy Corpsman during the Vietnam War, contends that the U.S. military has committed numerous war crimes in Iraq. "Would somebody please tell me that the corporate media is talking about U.S. war crimes in Iraq besides just Haditha?"]:
Dahr Jamail's 5-31-06 AntiWar.com essay, "Countless My Lais In Iraq" ["Just like Abu Ghraib, while the media spotlight shines squarely on the Haditha massacre, countless atrocities continue daily, conveniently outside the awareness of the general public."]
ENDNOTES [3]-[34] ARE RECENT OP-EDS, EDITORIALS AND ARTICLES ABOUT HADITHA.
[3] Tom Englehart's 6-6-06 TomDispatch.com essay, "The Real Meaning Of Haditha" ["Other than revealing just how overstretched the American military is in Iraq, such an 'incident'... is also a kind of confession -- of failure. If, as a soldier, you feel you are protecting anyone in an area, you simply do not slaughter random civilians, no matter how you 'snap'." The American media has a sordid history of knowing complicity in the cover-up and damage-control phases of the U.S. military's massacrest: (a) it treats them as if they were merely "a big public relations problem"; and (b) it hides the mass murderers' prosecutable war crimes behind technical euphemisms, like "collateral damage."]:
[4] Diane Christian's 6-6-06 Counterpunch essay, "Negatives: Torturers, Massacres And Denial" [Psychoanalyzes the U.S. government's attempts to fool us by either flatly denying, or cleverly rationalizing away, the torture they condone and the massacres their policies produce.]:
[5] Bruce Jackson's 6-5-06 Counterpunch essay, "Why Haditha Happened" [The White House and Pentagon are saying the Marines who committed the Haditha massacre were "inadequately trained." But the author is an ex-Marine who explains why that excuse is pure bovine excrement.]:
[6] Cindy Sheehan's 6-5-06 CD essay, "The Abominations Of War: From My Lai To Haditha" [A refreshingly sane analysis of the insane abominations of war. The Pentagon routinely dehumanizes once-wholesome kids, drops them into hellish occupations where some become frenzied berserkers, and then speciously claims it's an "aberration" when they commit mass murder.]:
[7] Ellen Knickmeyer's 6-5-06 Washington Post article, "Iraqis Accuse U.S. Marines Of Killing Innocent Civilian In April: Disabled Man's Family Disputes Troops' Story"
[8] Michael Duffy's 6-5-06 Time Magazine article, "The Shame Of Kilo Company" ["Sparked by a Time report published in March, a U.S. military investigation is probing the killing of as many as 24 civilians by a group of Marines in the town of Haditha last November. Several Marines may face criminal charges, including murder. And new revelations suggest that superiors might have helped in the cover-up."]
[9] Mariam Karouny and Fredrik Dahl's 6-4-06 CD/Reuters article, "Iraq Rejects U.S. Probe Clearing Troops Of Killings" [The Iraqi government has announced that it rejects the Pentagon's exoneration of the U.S. troops who stand accused of having massacred 11 innocent civilians in Ishaqi, and that it will be conducting its own investigation into these alleged war crimes.]:
[10] Marie Cocco's 6-4-06 CD/Daily Camera essay, "Yet Another Cover-Up, Why Be Surprised?" ["The Marines, and those who shielded them, may well have suffered a 'total breakdown of morality and leadership' at Haditha. But that is because our country's leadership is suffering the very same breakdown."]
[11] Michael Portillo's 6-5-06 London Times Online essay, "Iraq Looks A Little More Like Vietnam Every Day" ["Vietnam ended with American helicopters plucking marines from the roof of the embassy in Saigon as the Vietcong overran the city. It is not impossible that one day the scene will be re-enacted in the green zone of Baghdad."]
[12] Chris Floyd's 6-5-06 Counterpunch essay, "Return To Ishaqi: The Pentagon's Shaky Self-Exoneration" ["It seems the Pentagon, that veritable fount of veracity, has probed itself for the alleged execution-style slaying of civilians in Ishaqi (reported here in March) and found that the operation -- which left 11 civilians dead, including five children under the age of five -- was in fact an exemplary feat of arms, strictly by the book." Explains why it would be foolish to accept the result of the Pentagon's self-investigation without independent corroboration. "(P)ut it this way: if you're ever charged with murder or bank fraud or dope-dealing or tax dodging, ask the cops if you can investigate yourself, and see what they say."]
[13] Robert Fisk's 6-3-06 CD/Seattle Post-Intelligencer essay, "The Way The Americans Like Their War" ["The corpses we have glimpsed, the grainy footage of the cadavers and the dead children, could these be just a few of the many? Does the handiwork of the United States' army of the slums go further? ... Who is dumping so many bodies on garbage heaps? After Haditha, we are going to reshape our suspicions. ... We mentally dress ourselves up as Galahads, yes as crusaders, and we tell those whose countries we invade that we are going to bring them democracy. I can't help but wonder today how many of the innocents slaughtered at Haditha took the opportunity to vote in the Iraqi elections -- before their 'liberators' murdered them?"]:
[14] Tom Regan's 6-2-06 Christian Science Monitor article, "Pentagon Investigates New Allegation Of Iraqi Civilian Massacre" [A BBC videotape of the US military's March raid in Ishaqi reportedly shows the bodies of 11 people - all of whom were innocent civilian noncombatants.]
[15] Richard Oppel's 6-2-06 CD/New York Times article, "Iraqi Accuses U.S. Of 'Daily' Attacks On Civilians": [Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri Kamal Al-Maliki accused US troops of committing acts of violence against civilians every day, and added that many troops in the American-led coalition obviously "do not respect the Iraqi people." He said with understandable outrage: "They crush them with their vehicles and kill them just on suspicion. This is completely unacceptable!"]
[16] The Nation's 6-2-06 CD/TN editorial, "Why Haditha Matters" [Briefly summarizes the shameful moral implications of the Haditha Massacre. Among other things, it implicates our criminal leadership for having creating a sense of license, and a climate of impunity, among the troops. Concludes that the U.S. military's murderous atrocities in Haditha could turn out to be the war's low point, or a foreshadowing of things to come. In either case, the Iraq War is a moral catastrophe.]:
[17] Richard Gwyer's 6-2-06 CD/Toronto Star essay, "Haditha Signals Beginning Of End Of Iraq War" [Just like the My Lai Massacre in 1968 proved to be the tipping point in public opposition to the Vietnam War, so too will the Haditha Massacre prove to be the tipping point that turns public opinion irrevocably against the Iraq War.]:
[18] Eleanor Clift's 6-2-06 Newsweek article, "Out Of Control: How The Haditha Killings Could Haunt The GOP In The Midterm Elections" [Karen Hughes, the head the State Department's public-diplomacy effort, is bracing for another public-relations disaster -- reports that U.S. Marines allegedly shot 24 Iraqi unarmed civilian men, women and children in the town of Haditha.]
[19] Justin Raimondo's 6-2-06 AntiWar.com essay, "The Menaing Of Haditha: Murderous Depravity And Empire-Building Go Hand-In-Hand"
[20] Mickey Z's 6-2-06 Counterpunch essay, "Mass Murder As A PR Problem: The Haditha Massacre Was Inevitable": http://www.counterpunch.org/mickey06022006.html [21] Daniel Schorr's 6-2-06 Christian Science Monitor essay, "Haditha: A New Coud In The Fog Of War [A proven Iraqi massacre by U.S. Marines would add pressure to remove the troops.]:
[22] Molly Ivins' 6-1-06 CNN essay, "No Excuses This Time" ["So Haditha becomes another name at which we wince, along with Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and My Lai. Tell you what - let's not use the 'stress of combat' excuse this time. According to the neighbors, the girls in the slain family of Younis Khafif - the ones who kept pleading in English: 'I am a friend. I am good." - were ages 14, 10, 5, 3 and 1. What are they going to say - 'Under the stress of combat we thought the baby was 2?'"]
[23] Ruth Conniff's 6-1-06 CD/Progressive essay, "Haditha Means Time to End Iraq War" [Morally speaking, the US Marines' Haditha massacre and attempted cover-up is an even bigger scandal than the criminal acts of torture at Abu Ghraib. It's time to admit that this war was a terrible mistake. And it's time to put an end to this awful war. The entire exercise was morally bankrupt from the very outset.]
[24] Brian Cloughley's 6-1-06 Counterpunch essay, "War Crimes Start At The Top: Haditha And The Farrago Of Lies" [The Bush administration's policy of covering up of its own war crimes was summed up by former Marine and Congressman John Murtha (D-PA), who said: "It goes right up the chain of command. Who said 'We're not going to publicize this thing; we're not even going to investigate it'?"]
[25] Ted Rall's 6-1-06 CD/TR essay, "For The Iraqis, American Atrocities Are Old News" [The USA is a twilight zone in which morals-come-lately Bushite Americans are professing to be shocked that the US Marines would commit a massacre in Haditha, while the mainstream media is expressing much anguish about the Marines' anguish, but no anguish about the 24 murdered Iraqis and their families. Middle Easterners have been paying much closer attention, so they already knew that the American military shows no respect for the lives of Iraqi civilians, and that it has perpetrated innumerable atrocities in places like Fallujah.]
[26] Linda Heard's 6-1-06 Online Journal essay, "Shameful Reactions To Haditha 'Atrocity'" [In last week's column, I highlighted the massacre of innocent men, women and children, carried out by up to a dozen Marines in the Iraqi town of Haditha. In it, I quoted Representative John Murtha, a highly decorated ex-Marine, who is distressed at the unprovoked attack.]
[27] Kim Gamel's 5-31-06 AP/Chicago Tribune article, "U.S. Troops Kill Pregnant Woman in Iraq" [Reports on the US military's unjustified shooting of two civilian women at a checkpoint in Samara]
[28] Derrick Z. Jackson's 5-31-06 CD/Boston Globe essay, "From Hubris To Humility" [It should not surprise us that a few of these soldiers may have turned their hatred of being in Iraq into a door-to-door killing spree of the innocent.]:
[29] Chicago Tribune's 5-31-06 CT editorial, "Investigating Haditha" [It is critical, whatever the fallout for U.S. interests, that the U.S. military give a full accounting. ]:
[30] Boston Globe's 5-31-06 BG editorial, "Death in Haditha" ["The Pentagon needs to probe deeply to determine whether a cover-up of the Haditha killings extended beyond the battalion."]:
[31] Washington Post's 5-31-06 WP editorial, "What Happened in Haditha: The Response To A Reported Massacre By U.S. Troops Must Be Full Accountability" ["Though we don't yet know the details of the Marine investigation, there is no way to mitigate or excuse such despicable acts if they occurred, and hardly any way to alleviate the tremendous damage that will be done to U.S. honor in Iraq and around the world."]:
[32] Edward M. Gomez' 5-30-06 SF Gate essay, "Haditha Massacre: America's Allies Shocked, But No Longer Surprised" [Provides world media reactions to the U.S. military's Haditha Massacre, with helpful links to the German, French, Canadian and Scottish press.]:
[33] Ben Tanosborn's 5-29-06 Online Journal essay, "My Lai, Haditha And America's Whitewashers" ["It was 38 years ago that a platoon from Charlie Company's 11th Brigade, Americal Division, commanded by a young Army lieutenant, murdered hundreds of old men, women, and children in a small Vietnam village -- presumably with the tacit approval of military higher-ups. A memorial later erected there by the Vietnamese lists 504 names as victims of the massacre, ranging in ages from 1 to 82." Compares America's whitewashing responses to the My Lai and Haditha massacres.]:
[34] Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski's (USAF-Ret.) 5-27-06 Lew Rockwell essay, "What May Come Of The Haditha Massacre?" [Now that the Bush administration's cover-up has failed, they will only be blaming the soldiers on the ground for the Haditha Massacre of 24 innocent civilian noncombatants on 11-19-05. However, this heinous war crime was bound to happen when our war-addicted politicians and commanders irresponsibly committed these soldiers to a military occupation with no clear goal, no clear enemy, and no end in sight.]:
THE MORAL OF THIS STORY: In a very real sense, every illegal war of aggression is state-sponsored terrorism on a massive scale. Most of the victims of the Iraq War's reign of terror are women, children, the elderly, and other innocent civilian noncombatants. We've already learned that the U.S. military has been committing the slow massacre of civilians, poisoning our own troops, and contaminating future generations, through its global dispersal of radioactive dust from Depleted Uranium Munitions ("DUM"). When will we learn: (1) that even the best of intentions does not guarantee a good outcome, and frequently leads to a bad outcome, when we unleash the evil means and uncontrollable chaos of war; and (2) that violence only begets more violence, and warfare more wars?
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Marines Killed Iraqi Then Fix Scene
June 6 2006
UPI
WASHINGTON -- Evidence has emerged U.S. Marines deliberately killed an unarmed Iraqi civilian in April in the town of Hamdaniya, CNN reported Tuesday.
A military source with knowledge of a U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigation told the network the victim, identified by Knight Ridder as Hashim Ibrahim Awad, was dragged from his home and shot by Marines, who placed a shovel and AK-47 next to him to make it appear he was an insurgent.
"They went after someone, not necessarily this person, but they set out to get someone," the officer said of the findings.
Seven Marines and a Navy medical corpsman are being held in the brig at California's Camp Pendleton, and four other Marines have been confined to base in connection with the probe.
The source said murder charges are likely to be filed in the next few days.
The investigation is separate from two others involving an alleged massacre of 24 civilians at Haditha last November.
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Pentagon Limits Medical Role in Questioning
By Julian E. Barnes, Times Staff Writer
June 7, 2006
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon on Tuesday placed new restrictions on how doctors can be involved in interrogations of detainees, but critics deplored any policy that gives medical professionals a role, saying it can lead questioners to use harsher tactics than they would without medical advice.
The military's use of medical professionals in interrogations has drawn fire from human rights groups and medical ethicists. They have charged that doctors have been used unethically at the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to force-feed detainees on hunger strikes and provide medical advice to help interrogators.
William Winkenwerder Jr., the assistant secretary of Defense for health affairs who approved the new policy, said it was written to ensure that healthcare professionals play an appropriate role. The policy attempts to draw a clear distinction between medical personnel who care for the health of detainees and mental health professionals, called "behavioral science consultants," who assist interrogators.
Winkenwerder, in a conference call with reporters, said the "consultants" did not take part in interrogations. They make psychological assessments of prisoners, he said, but are not allowed to shape interrogations with their knowledge of a subject's phobias or medical vulnerabilities.
Leonard S. Rubenstein, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights, said the military should prohibit psychologists or doctors from aiding in the questioning of detainees. "They are using their professional knowledge to hurt people," he said. "The bottom line is health professionals should not be involved in interrogations."
The guidelines are part of a policy directive for medical personnel that was originally due to be released with the Army Field Manual and another directive on the treatment of detainees.
But the Field Manual has been held up by objections from members of Congress, who are worried that it might not go far enough to ensure prisoners are treated humanely. The Times reported Monday that the Pentagon has decided to leave out a key part of the Geneva Convention that bans "humiliating and degrading treatment."
Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) on Tuesday sent a letter to President Bush, saying such an omission would "make our troops and our country less safe."
"Given the current situation in Afghanistan and Iraq," he wrote, "it is an especially bad time to send a signal to the world that we no longer abide by internationally accepted norms for the treatment of prisoners."
The medical directive released Tuesday also makes no mention of international law or treaties.
"It is outrageous that there is no reference to Geneva," said M. Gregg Bloche, a Georgetown University law professor and one of the first to disclose the work of the behavioral consultants in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The most controversial of the new rules for medical personnel are likely to be those governing the "behavioral science consultants," psychologists or other experts who advise interrogators.
The American Psychiatric Assn.'s guidelines prohibit its members from taking part in interrogations. Professional guidelines for psychologists are less clear.
The new policy notes that physicians, such as psychiatrists, are not ordinarily used as behavioral consultants, "but may be so assigned" when qualified psychologists are unavailable.
Critics have said the consultants give interrogators information that helps them to increase the discomfort, stress or ill-treatment of detainees, giving tacit approval that allows harsher treatment.
Under the guidelines, the consultants are permitted to "make psychological assessments of the character, personality, social interactions, and other behavioral characteristics of detainees." They can also train military personnel on "safe and effective interrogation methods" and advise them on the "potential effects of cultural and ethnic characteristics of subjects."
The rules, however, bar them from "the use of physical or mental health information regarding any detainee in a manner that would result in inhumane treatment or not be in accordance with applicable law."
"These words speak to humane behavior," Winkenwerder said. "And if you have observed our personnel in action ... I can tell you they act humanely and they act with humane principle and they are ethical people."
He said the new rules consolidated existing policies and added new details. "They reaffirm what has been a tradition that goes back decades and decades and decades," he said.
Rubenstein, with Physicians for Human Rights, said anything short of a complete ban on the use of psychologists or physicians in interrogations would result in medical personnel helping interrogators use ever-tougher tactics.
"They have adopted the same policy and dressed it up in what purports to be safeguards," he said. "Once you get sucked into interrogations, the likelihood of violating ethical obligations and hurting people is high."
Many doctors and psychologists argue it is ethical to give classes on human behavior or other general instruction to interrogators. But giving advice on how to break an individual subject and make him or her talk crosses an ethical line, they say. The new rules allow such individualized advice, if the interrogators use lawful techniques.
Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist and former Army brigadier general in the medical corps, has criticized the use of doctors and psychologists in interrogations. He said he once supported the kind of wall the Pentagon is trying to create between caring for detainees and aiding in their interrogation.
But he now says such a distinction will be impossible. "You are always a healthcare provider," Xenakis said. "You can't be an interrogator in one job and a doctor in another."
The new guidelines may also tighten the use of medical records. At Guantanamo Bay, there was for a time no restriction on interrogators looking at medical records. The new directive does not restrict access to records but mandates that such disclosures are recorded.
The new rules also offer guidance on force-feeding. They say that medical personnel may assist in force-feeding detainees on a hunger strike "without the consent of the detainee to prevent death or serious harm." The directive says the treatment must be medically necessary.
The International Committee on the Red Cross prohibits force-feeding.
Xenakis argues that doctors should take steps, short of force-feeding, to try to keep patients alive, or persuade them to stop hunger strikes. But he said if patients were mentally competent, and rationally decide to starve themselves, medical personnel must let them do it.
"Patients have the right to exercise autonomy and starve themselves," he said.
Winkenwerder said the new directive adhered to the policy of the Federal Bureau of Prisons: to keep anyone under detention alive.
He said healthcare was provided "with the consent of the detainees," with the exception of those who are refusing nourishment. "We have a policy that is to preserve life," he said. "That policy is an ethical policy," he said.
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Secret US 'web' of prisons alleged
By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff | June 8, 2006
BERLIN -- The head of an investigation into alleged CIA secret prisons charged yesterday that 14 European nations collaborated with the United States to create a "spider's web" of clandestine flights and detention centers across the continent and beyond.
Dick Marty, a Swiss senator who led the Council of Europe's investigation, offered little in the way of hard evidence for what he called serious violations of the human rights of at least 17 terrorist suspects allegedly shunted around the globe by CIA interrogators. But the long-awaited report issued by the council -- which monitors human rights issues -- signaled the outrage felt by many Europeans over America's alleged use of the continent's air space and landing ports in prosecuting its war against Islamic terrorism.
"It is now clear -- although we are still far from having established the whole truth -- that authorities in several European countries actively participated with the CIA in these unlawful activities," Marty said at a news conference in Paris.
The 67-page report specifically accused Poland and Romania of allowing the CIA to use their territory to transfer secret prisoners from plane to plane. At least 12 other European nations allowed refuel ing stops, "pickup points," or "staging centers" for controversial CIA undertakings, the report stated.
Using often colorful language, the report described CIA operatives "dressed in black like ninjas" hustling suspects on and off airplanes on missions spanning four continents: Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America.
Pop-up GLOBE GRAPHIC: Secret CIA flights
Bangor, Maine, which is frequently used for US military flights, may have served as a refueling point for CIA planes headed out on rendition operations, according to the report. Other landing spots ranged from the Spanish resort island of Mallorca -- where American intelligence agents may have enjoyed R&R breaks as well as transferred captives -- to Kabul, Afghanistan, according to the report.
The Maine airport was listed as a CIA "stopover" point along with airports in Britain, Ireland, Italy, and Greece.
Germany, Spain, Cyprus, and Turkey were identified as "staging" grounds for clandestine operations.
The report focused on alleged Europe collusion with the CIA but also cites Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan as apparently colluding in extensive operations starting after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The United States has tacitly acknowledged transferring suspected terrorist suspects through "third countries" but has insisted it has always procured permission from governments. The Bush administration yesterday had no direct response to the report.
"There seem to be a lot of allegations [in the report] but no real facts behind it," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters in Washington, adding that cooperation between countries has saved lives in the war against terrorism.
The Council of Europe is a toothless entitity that, in Marty's words, can only "name and shame" nations it suspects of rights abuses.
The report specifically accused Poland and Romania of allowing US intelligence agencies to operate secret jails on their territory to question suspected terrorists spirited out of other countries. The aim of the clandestine operations was to avoid allowing detainees to set foot on American soil, which would would entitle them to all constitutional protections afforded any suspect.
Poland denied that CIA planes transporting terror suspects ever landed or dropped off prisoners in that country. In the past it has denied hosting secret detention or interrogation facilities.
"This is slander, and it's not based on facts," Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz told reporters in Warsaw, according to the Associated Press.
Marty conceded that he had little hard evidence of clandestine detention facilities and secret flights, accusing European governments of refusing to help human rights investigators establish facts.
"Even if proof, in the classical meaning of the term, is not yet available, a number of coherent and converging elements indicate that such secret detention centers did exist in Europe," Marty said in the report, which is based on a seven-month probe that relied heavily on accounts in The Washington Post and other news media about so-called "extraordinary renditions" and "dark prisons."
Pop-up GLOBE GRAPHIC: Secret CIA flights
Marty also used airport traffic-control records showing some 1,000 CIA flights crisscrossing Europe and statements by 17 individuals who say they were abducted by US intelligence operatives. The report said that such abductions occurred with cooperation or at least tacit permission by European spy agencies.
The European report slammed Britain's MI5 intelligence agency for helping the CIA in "abducting persons against which there is no evidence." It cited the case of two British residents, Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil al-Banna, who human rights groups have claimed were snatched in the African nation of Gambia, transported to Afghanistan, then flown to the US facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with at least one refueling stop in Europe, apparently Bucharest, the Romanian capital.
Britain's prime minister, Tony Blair, told Parliament the report contained "absolutely nothing new."
The Council of Europe report listed the following countries as having colluded with the United States in "unlawful [international] transfers" of people: Britain, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Bosnia, Macedonia, Turkey, Spain, Cyprus, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Poland, and Romania.
A map released by the Council of Europe identified airports in Timisoara, Romania, and Szymany, Poland, as "detainee transfer/drop-off" points -- the site of alleged secret detention centers.
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Probe of CIA Prisons Implicates EU Nations - Friends and "Foes" of U.S.
By JAN SLIVA
Associated Press
PARIS - Fourteen European nations colluded with U.S. intelligence in a "spider's web" of human rights abuses to help the CIA spirit terror suspects to illegal detention facilities, a European investigator said Wednesday.
Swiss senator Dick Marty's report to Europe's top human rights body was thin on evidence but raises the possibility of a cover-up involving both friends and critics of Washington's war on terror. It says European governments "did not seem particularly eager to establish" the facts.
The 67-page report, addressed to the 46 Council of Europe member states, will likely be used by the rights watchdog to pressure countries to investigate their suspected role in U.S. rendition flights carrying terror suspects.
Marty's claims triggered a wave of angry denials but also accusations that governments are stonewalling attempts to confront Europe's role in the flights.
"This report exposes the myth that European governments had no knowledge of, or involvement in, rendition and secret detentions," said lawmaker Michael Moore, foreign affairs spokesman for Britain's second opposition party, the Liberal Democrats.
In the strongest allegations so far, Marty said evidence suggests planes linked to the CIA carrying terror suspects stopped in Romania and Poland and likely dropped off detainees there, backing up earlier news reports that identified the two countries as possible sites of clandestine detention centers.
Officials in Romania and Poland vigorously denied the accusations.
"This is slander and it's not based on any facts," Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, Poland's prime minister, told reporters in Warsaw.
But Filip Ilkowski, leader of Poland's "Stop War" movement protesting the Iraq war, said the Polish government was trying to thwart European Union investigators.
"It is hard to say whether prisoners were dropped off here, but from what we know, U.S. planes landed in Poland outside the official channels. The government has done nothing to clarify the matter, it is doing everything to cover it up," Ilkowski said.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair also denied the collusion allegations and said Marty's report contained no new evidence.
"I have to say, the Council of Europe report has absolutely nothing new in it," he told lawmakers.
There was no immediate U.S. reaction.
Marty, investigating the flights since November, said the 14 European nations _ along with some other countries including Iraq, Morocco and Afghanistan _ aided the movement of at least 17 detainees who said they had been abducted by U.S. agents and secretly transferred to detention centers around the world.
Some former detainees said they were transferred to the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and others to alleged secret facilities in countries including Egypt and Jordan. Some said they were mistreated or tortured.
"I have chosen to adopt the metaphor of a global spider's web, a web that has been spun out incrementally over several years using tactics and techniques that had to be developed in response to new threats of war," Marty said.
In his investigation, Marty _ a former prosecutor _ relied mostly on flight logs provided by the European Union's air traffic agency, Eurocontrol, witness statements gathered from people who said they had been abducted by U.S. intelligence agents, and judicial and parliamentary inquiries in various countries.
He concluded that several countries let the CIA abduct their residents, while others allowed the agency to use their airspace or turned a blind eye to questionable foreign intelligence activities on their territory.
"European governments simply agreed not to want to see," Marty told journalists.
He listed 14 European countries _ Britain, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Bosnia, Macedonia, Turkey, Spain, Cyprus, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Romania and Poland _ as being complicit in "unlawful interstate transfers" of people.
Some, including Sweden and Bosnia, already have acknowledged some involvement.
Marty put airports in Timisoara, Romania, and Szymany, Poland, in a "detainee transfer/drop-off point" category, together with eight airports outside Europe.
He said one plane arrived in Timisoara from Kabul, Afghanistan, on the night of Jan. 25, 2004, after picking up Khaled El-Masri, a German who said he had been abducted by foreign intelligence agents in Skopje, Macedonia, and taken to the Afghan capital.
The investigator said the plane stayed in Timisoara for 72 minutes before leaving for Spain.
"The most likely hypothesis of the purpose of this flight was to transport one or several detainees from Kabul to Romania," Marty said in the report, without elaborating.
But Dan Andrei, the head of Romania's Civil Aeronautic Agency, denied that the CIA operated the plane.
"The plane did not drop off or pick up any passengers and declared five passengers on board. We don't have any evidence that it was a CIA plane," he said.
Marty said he believed the Szymany airport in northeastern Poland was also used for a rendition flight in September 2003.
A parallel investigation by the European Parliament has said data show there have been more than 1,000 clandestine CIA flights stopping on European territory since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Officials said it was not clear if or how many detainees were on board.
"We're definitely not talking about hundreds of detainees, it likely is a much smaller number," Marty said.
Allegations that CIA agents shipped prisoners through European airports to secret detention centers, including compounds in eastern Europe, were first reported in November by The Washington Post.
Clandestine prisons and secret flights via or from Europe to countries where suspects could face torture would breach the continent's human rights treaties, including the European Convention on Human Rights.
The Council of Europe has no power to punish countries for breaching the treaty other than terminating their membership in the organization. Based on irrefutable evidence, the European Union might be able to suspend the voting rights of a country found to have breached the convention.
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Europeans, US dismiss CIA rendition accusations as baseless, libel
AFP
8 June 06
Poland and Romania led European countries in dismissing a Council of Europe report accusing them of working with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to covertly transfer terror suspects.
The United States also criticized the report calling it a list of unproven allegations.
"We're certainly disappointed in the tone and the content of it," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told a press briefing.
"This would appear to be a rehash of the previous efforts by this group. I don't see any new solid facts in it. There seem to be a lot of allegations but no real facts behind it."
McCormack said that renditions "are an internationally recognized legal practice. (Venezuelan terrorist) Carlos the Jackal wouldn't be in jail today without the practice of rendition."
McCormack also decried the "tone in the report and some of the discussion that there's something inherently bad or illegal about intelligence activities."
Intelligence cooperation "between the United States and Europe and between the United States and other countries around the world saves lives in the war on terror," he said.
The report, drawn up by Swiss parliamentarian Dick Marty for the pan-European rights body, said European countries had colluded in or tolerated the transfer of prisoners for the CIA.
"It is now clear -- although we are still far from establishing the whole truth -- that authorities in several European countries actively participated with the CIA in these unlawful activities. Other countries ignored them knowingly, or did not want to know," the report said.
"The United States ... actually created this reprehensible network. But we also believe to have established that it is only through the intentional or grossly negligent collusion of the European partners that this 'web' was able to spread also over Europe," it said.
Although it did not openly accuse Poland and Romania of housing CIA prisons, it said there was "a preponderance of indications" that secret detention centres were operated near aircraft landing points.
In Warsaw, Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz dismissed the allegations as "libel" with "no basis in fact," Poland's PAP news agency reported.
Poland has denied housing secret CIA prisons since allegations first surfaced in November that the US intelligence agency operated several detention centres around the world, including in new democracies in eastern Europe.
Poland's ex-president Aleksander Kwasniewski said shortly before he left office in December that CIA aircraft could have made stopovers in the country but strongly denied the US ran secret prisons there.
Romania said the accusations were "pure speculation" and slammed as unacceptable the "accusations based on 'indications'."
"Mr. Marty's report does not provide any proof of the presence of detention centres in Romania," Norica Nicolai, president of the parliamentary commission investigating alleged CIA flights to Romania, told AFP.
"There is no proof that the planes that landed in Romania belong to the CIA, or of any CIA prisons in this country," she added.
Belgium, meanwhile, urged Poland and Romania to lay their cards on the table and clear up the murky situation.
"There are serious indications which show that strange things have happened. Romania and Poland must clear this up -- that is the priority now," Belgian Foreign Minister Karel De Gucht was quoted by the Belga press agency as saying.
European Union foreign ministers would discuss the issue on Monday in Luxembourg, de Gucht said.
The Council of Europe report accused 14 European countries of collaborating with the CIA to transfer suspected terrorists to third countries or to US-run detention centres, a practice known as "extraordinary rendition".
Bosnia-Hercegovina, Britain, Italy, Macedonia, Germany, Sweden and Turkey were said to have been "responsible, at varying degrees... for violations of the rights of specific persons".
Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Spain "could be held responsible for collusion, active or passive", said the report, which blamed the United States for creating "this reprehensible network".
Greece did not deny that CIA flights transited via the country, but said it had not breached international aviation laws.
"Greece strictly abides by the laws, rules and international treaties on civil aviation for every aircraft arriving in or leaving the country," government spokesman Evangelos Antonaros told reporters.
A spokesman for the German government, Thomas Steg, said Berlin would withold comment on the report so as not to impede the work of the judiciary, which was hearing several cases cited in the report.
Spain "categorically" rejected the accusations, with a government spokesman in Madrid saying: "Spain has in no way, either actively or passively, taken part in operations to transfer prisoners".
British Prime Minister Tony Blair dismissed the report as containing "absolutely nothing new", echoing a comment by the Foreign Office.
But rights watchdog Amnesty International welcomed the report and repeated demands for the United States and Europe to halt "extraordinary renditions".
The London-based organisation said the report showed that so-called renditions were outside the law and "contrary to basic legal principles -- involving... 'disappearances', arbitrary detention, illegal transfers and torture or other ill-treatment".
The Strasbourg-based Council of Europe, which is a separate body from the European Union, was set up after World War II to promote democracy and human rights across the continent. All 25 EU countries are part of the 46-member organisation.
Comment: Typical Pathocratic response: "Old news, rehash," etc. Marie Antoinette once said "Let them eat cake," too.
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US dismisses EU report on secret prisons as "rehash"
www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-08 12:50:29
WASHINGTON, June 7 (Xinhua) -- The United States on Wednesday refuted a European Union (EU) report on alleged CIA secret prisons in Europe as a "rehash."
State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters that though U.S. officials have not had the opportunity to thoroughly read the report, they "don't see any new solid facts in it."
"I think that we're certainly disappointed at the tone and the content of it," he said.
Though the EU report criticized the CIA for detaining and transferring terror suspects through European countries, McCormack said that renditions and transfers of terror suspects to third countries are legal.
The report suggested that intelligence activities were inherently bad, but international intelligence cooperation is important and saves lives, he said.
White House press secretary Tony Snow did not comment on the report, but said that nations have practiced renditions for a very long time.
The EU report by Swiss investigator Dick Marty revealed that more than a dozen European countries colluded in a "global spider's web" of secret CIA prisons and transfers of terrorism suspects.
The report offered no direct proof, but said that many evidence shows that the CIA set up detention centers in Europe.
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Show Me the Money!
US surge in unsold homes may herald cooling market
By Christopher Swann in Washington
Financial Times
June 7 2006
The number of unsold homes on the American market has risen by more than 1m over the past year, a gain of a third, increasing the prospect of a rapid cooling of the US property market.
The inventory of new and existing homes waiting for buyers is now approaching 4m.
The surge in unsold homes has been largely due to a release of new properties on the market rather than a sharp slowdown in sales. This suggests that many sellers are eager for one last payout before the halcyon days of the market draw to a close. Speculative buyers may also be trying to exit the market before conditions deteriorate.
"We should start to see a stand-off as buyers offer lower prices and homeowners refuse," said Paul Ashworth, US analyst at consultants Capital Economics."After a period of frustration, sellers should become more realistic about what their homes are worth."
The pace of home sales has slowed over the past year, but not dramatically. Existing home sales have fallen by just under 6 per cent over the past year to an annualised 6.75m units in April. New home sales are down from an annualised 1.27m last April to 1.198m units this year.
Despite continued robust sales, the inventory of unsold homes has continued to rise. With sales at their current pace, it would now take six months to sell the existing homes on the market - the largest oversupply since the National Association of Realtors started collecting figures in 1999.
So far evidence of a slowdown in the housing market has remained tentative. Prices continued to rise at an impressive 12.5 per cent in the first three months of the year, according to comprehensive figures produced by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise and Oversight. Overall US house prices have climbed by almost 60 per cent over the past five years, with prices more than doubling in a host of property hot-spots such as Washington DC, California, Nevada and Florida.
The total value of US residential property is now around $19,000bn (€15,000bn, $10,000bn), according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. The US Census Bureau calculates that there are around 123.9m housing units in the US.
"We are at a turning point in the housing market," said Nicolas Retsinas, director of the JCHS at Harvard. "But this does not mean that we are going to take a nose dive, except in selected areas of overbuilding and highly inflated valuations."
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Rising gas prices drag on deliveries
By JOYCE M. ROSENBERG
AP Business Writer
June 7, 2006
NEW YORK - Fast delivery and same-day service, two favorite ways for small businesses to build relationships with customers, are becoming casualties of higher gas prices.
Some small companies that until recently sent their vans or trucks on several runs a day have been forced to cut back, sometimes to just one. Their customers, meanwhile, have to wait longer, or if they're in a rush, take their business elsewhere.
It's a painful turn, especially when deliveries, a component of customer service, are also a fundamental part of a business itself.
Karen Ross, who owns Montgomery's Florist in Raleigh, N.C., has had to limit deliveries to customers in several nearby cities, among them Carey, 15 miles away.
"We used to go in the morning and afternoon. People were just used to that, being able to call and have morning delivery," Ross said. Now, however, her vans deliver to those cities only in the afternoon.
"We lost some business there," Ross said. While customers generally understand the situation, those who need flowers delivered by 1 p.m. end up calling another florist.
But that's just part of the sting that Ross and her customers are feeling because of gasoline that's hovering around $3 a gallon. With her two Ford vans now costing $75 to fill up, Ross has had to raise her delivery charge to $12 from $8.50, a more than 40 percent increase.
"Sometimes they'll say, 'Wow, that's a lot,'" Ross said. But when we explain ... they always understand."
Businesses across the country have been forced to cope for more than a year with higher fuel prices, not just for their own deliveries, but for shipments of supplies and raw materials they receive. And higher energy costs are driving up the prices of the goods themselves.
But the impact isn't just on profits - owners are aware that fewer or later deliveries along with higher delivery charges are chipping away at the customer service they have long prided themselves on.
Cynthia McKay is struggling with that issue in her Castle Rock, Colo.-based business, Le Gourmet Gift Basket Inc.
"We are known for last-minute deliveries," McKay said, explaining, "that's been a lot to do with dropping everything and getting the basket out when we need it for corporate clients."
But with gas prices climbing, "our delivery people can't afford to do it anymore," she said.
McKay's situation is complicated by the fact that she hires independent contractors for her deliveries. These are people who make their money doing deliveries for other people, using their own vehicles and paying for gas themselves. As business owners themselves, they have to cut their costs by consolidating the number of deliveries they make; they're not willing to handle McKay's eleventh-hour orders if they don't have other deliveries to make at the same time or in the same area.
McKay's contractors are also charging her more for all the deliveries they make, and last month, she passed along a 15 percent increase to her customers. "We waited as long as we could" before imposing the increase, she said.
Many business owners try to offset the decline in service by giving some kind of discount or adding some value for customers. McKay said she's upgraded the quality of merchandise that goes into the gift baskets.
"Since I'm buying wholesale, they get more for their money," she said. And sometimes, depending on the customer, she might get a rush job delivered, even if it means absorbing the higher charges.
But, like Ross, sometimes she'll just lose a sale.
"It can't compete with time," McKay said of the extras. "There's only so much we can do."
Hal Smith, who owns the Tacoma, Wash., franchise for 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, said his customer service has also been affected. He can't afford to have both of his big trucks on the road at one time if business isn't brisk enough, so customers may not always be able to get pickups at the exact times they want.
"It limits the customer more than I'd like," said Smith, whose business collects all sorts of unwanted items from homeowners and businesses. Still, Smith said, if a customer desperately needs a pickup, "I will accommodate them."
Smith said higher fuel prices are actually having a bigger impact on his ability to market himself. When gas was cheaper, he would send his trucks out in a caravan; they were very eye-catching.
"Our biggest compliment was, 'We saw your trucks everywhere,'" Smith said. He said he's now using more traditional direct marketing to try to make his company's name more visible.
He's also had to cut back on a community service that was very important to him: taking recycled materials to thrift shops. The higher cost of fuel makes it too expensive to make the trip.
"The thrift store's way out of our way, not on the way to the dump," Smith said. "We're not being able to kick back to the community the way we have in the past."
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Big fines aim to clean up the airwaves
By Stephanie Kirchgaessner in New York
Financial Times
8 June 06
Broadcasters such as Rupert Murdoch's Fox and Sumner Redstone's CBS will be forced to dig much deeper into their pockets if they are found guilty of violating indecency rules following the passage of legislation on Wednesday in the House of Representatives.
The Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act will increase the top fine the Federal Communications Commission, the media and telecommunications regulator, can impose on a broadcaster for each indecency violation from $32,500 (€25,380, £17,490) to $325,000. The FCC cannot fine a broadcaster in excess of $3m for any single act.
Republican leader John Boehner said the bill would hold broadcasters accountable when they "poison the public airwaves". Passage of the bill was celebrated by FCC chairman Kevin Martin, who said the 379-35 vote sent a clear signal that Congress shared the commission's concern for "more meaningful enforcement" of the decency standard.
Mr Martin used the occasion to reiterate his support for an overhaul of the cable industry's pricing model in favour of an à la carte model, which allows customers to buy individual channels instead of cable bundles and empower parents to choose the programming that enters their homes. À la carte is also favoured by Senator John McCain, who introduced legislation on the issue on Wednesday.
The FCC has recently proposed record fines on broadcasters for indecency violations, with CBS's Without a Trace commanding a record $3.3m in fines against the network and affiliates for a scene that suggested a teenage orgy.
The four big networks have filed suits against the FCC in response to the influx of complaints, charging that the commission has overstepped its authority.
The passage of the bill marks a victory for the ultra-conservative Parents Television Council and its president, Brent Bozell, who has used his base of 1m members to flood the FCC with electronically generated indecency complaints as part of a campaign to clean up America's airwaves. Mr Bozell is credited with helping keep the issue alive years after the 2004 Super Bowl "wardrobe malfunction" that exposed Janet Jackson's nipple to America's viewers.
Democratic congressman Gary Ackerman warned that the bill would have a chilling effect on free speech, which was at risk of being "nibbled to death by election-minded politicians and self-righteous pietists".
In the past few years, he said, the budding "culture of censorship" led many PBS stations to refuse to air an episode of one children's show, Postcards with Bunny, because an eight-year-old bunny learned how to make maple syrup from a Vermont family with two mothers. He also pointed out a decision by CBS and NBC to refuse to air a commercial from the United Church of Christ because it suggested homosexual couples were welcome in the church.
Copyright The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Facing Iran's Challenge: Safeguarding Oil Exports from the Persian Gulf
By Simon Henderson June 7, 2006
In a June 4 speech marking the anniversary of the death of his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a warning to the United States in the crisis of over Iran's nuclear program. "If the Americans make a wrong move toward Iran, the shipment of energy will definitely face danger, and the Americans would not be able to protect energy supply in the region," Khamenei said. This raises questions about the strength of the Iranian military and how the United States could counter it, using military power, alternative export routes, or a combination of both.
In a June 4 speech marking the anniversary of the death of his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a warning to the United States in the crisis of over Iran's nuclear program. "If the Americans make a wrong move toward Iran, the shipment of energy will definitely face danger, and the Americans would not be able to protect energy supply in the region," Khamenei said. This raises questions about the strength of the Iranian military and how the United States could counter it, using military power, alternative export routes, or a combination of both.
Iran and Gulf Oil
The Persian Gulf is the greatest source of oil in the world. The countries surrounding it-Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman-account for 60 percent of the world's oil reserves and 40 percent of the world's reserves of natural gas. Each day these countries produce about 24 million barrels; total world production is about 84 million barrels per day. Crucially, about 18 million barrels per day of Gulf oil, representing about 40 percent of all internationally traded oil, is exported-almost all through the narrow Strait of Hormuz. The Strait at its narrowest is thirty-four miles across, forcing shipping to divide into two sea lanes just two miles wide when entering and exiting the Gulf.
Khamenei did not specify how Iran would endanger "the shipment of energy." Some commentators and politicians in the West speculate that Iran would merely stop its own oil exports in the hope that energy demand and supply are so finely balanced that this would tip the world economy into crisis. This would be risky for Iran. Despite an OPEC production quota of 4.11 million barrels per day, Iran exports only around 2.6 million barrels per day. Even this might be an overstatement. The Wall Street Journal reported on June 5 that for the last six weeks Iran has been storing on tankers the equivalent of 475,000 barrels per day, suggesting that Iran can threaten only about 2.1 million barrels per day in supply to world markets. This is a figure almost bridgeable by Saudi Arabia's existing spare capacity, especially in light of a Journal report that Saudi production is currently down by 400,000 barrels per day.
The Military Threat
If Khamenei instead meant that Tehran might use its armed forces to disrupt all Gulf oil exports, then in simple military terms, the threat is real enough. Iran has both a conventional navy and the separate Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with an even larger naval component, specially trained and equipped with fast patrol boats intended to project an asymmetric challenge to U.S. naval forces and the navies of the conservative Arab states on the Gulf's southern shore.
In the past, the main military threat to shipping has been from mines. During the last year of the Iran-Iraq War, when Kuwaiti tankers were reflagged for protection by the United States, the threat of mines led to a surge in insurance premiums. Indeed, Iranian mines damaged one tanker and the U.S. Navy frigate Samuel B. Roberts. Iran also has Chinese-supplied surface-to-surface missiles that could have a devastating effect on a tanker or a large fighting ship caught unawares. In February 2005 Senate testimony, Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby of the Defense Intelligence Agency said, "We judge Iran can briefly close the Strait of Hormuz, relying on a layered strategy using predominantly naval, air, and some ground forces. [In 2004] it purchased North Korean torpedo and missile-armed fast attack craft and midget submarines, making marginal improvements to this capacity."
The U.S. Navy has long prepared for the mission of keeping open the Strait of Hormuz, recently with active cooperation from several NATO members and other allies. In 1987 and 1988, the U.S. Navy clashed with Iranian forces. The Iranian navy was neutralized as a fighting force and Revolutionary Guard units suffered heavy losses; Guard bases on small islands and offshore rigs were destroyed. An attempt to attack tankers or close the Strait of Hormuz would be regarded by Washington, and indeed much of the rest of the world, as unacceptable. In the event of renewed fighting, Iran would suffer punishing losses-and fail.
But even a successful conflict to keep open the Strait of Hormuz would come at a cost. In the 1980s, damage sustained by U.S. forces was insignificant. The next time could be different. According to Iranians close to the Tehran regime, Iran is prepared to incite local rebellions among its coreligionist Shiite Muslim communities in countries across the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, where Shiites form a local majority in the oil-rich Eastern Province, could be one target. The island of Bahrain, where the Shiites form a majority and the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet is headquartered, could be another. Tactical mistakes by the U.S. military could adversely affect world opinion, as happened in 1988, 290 people on an Iranian airliner perished when the U.S. guided missile cruiser Vincennes mistook it for an attacking fighter. And were Iran to develop deliverable nuclear weapons, during times of tension the entire Persian Gulf would effectively become a no-go zone for U.S. aircraft carriers and other large navy ships.
Reducing Vulnerability
There are few alternative export routes for Persian Gulf oil. In the event of a conflict, it would be necessary to keep the world market supplied with 18 million barrels each day. Saudi Arabia has an underutilized 5.5 million barrels per day capacity pipeline stretching across the kingdom to the Red Sea. An export line with a capacity of 1.6 million barrels per day from Iraq across Saudi Arabia has not been used since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. Iraq also has an export line of 1.2 million barrels per day northwards through Turkey to the Mediterranean coast, currently closed by the insurgency. Taken together, these alternate routes do not even get close to 18 million barrels.
Were Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE to recognize that the vulnerability of the Strait of Hormuz requires alternative routes to market, new pipelines could be built across the Musandam peninsula to the Gulf of Oman and across Oman to the Arabian Sea. But such recognition of long-term interests seems unlikely; the instinct of the Gulf Arab states is to seek compromise with Iran and to resist any American use of force. So if Iran were to attack Gulf shipping, the rest of the world would face rationing by (high) price, with some-but not enough-amelioration by the accelerated introduction of alternative fuels such as ethanol.
Khamenei's remarks were not welcomed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who said, "We are going to give diplomacy a little time here, and we are not going to react to everything the Iranian leadership says." (The oil markets did react though, jumping by more than $1 per barrel as soon as trading opened June 5.)
The diplomatic initiative for talks with Iran shows the awareness that any military option should be a last resort. The continuing experience in Iraq has created a lack of political enthusiasm for any use of force elsewhere even though, as the lessons of the 1988 clashes show, countering any Iranian blockade might involve only a few days of fighting, with major disruption to shipping lasting only slightly longer. If Iran's public diplomacy is going to continue in the style of Khamenei, Washington needs to pursue a third option-persuading energy-importing countries, particularly in Asia, to prepare emergency energy policies. These would include strategic petroleum reserves, speed limits, carpooling, and shorter working weeks. Energy exporters, such as Saudi Arabia, should be persuaded to use some of their record revenues to build spare pipelines to bypass such bottlenecks as the Strait of Hormuz.
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French state fined for WW2 Jewish rail deportations
TOULOUSE, France, May 16, 2006 (AFP)
In the first case of its kind, the French state and the country's national rail operator, the SNCF, were fined 62,000 euros (80,000 dollars) on Tuesday for their role in the deportation of two Jewish men in World War II.
An administrative court in the southern city of Toulouse upheld a lawsuit brought by the family of Green party deputy Alain Lipietz, whose father and uncle were taken by train to an internment camp in Paris in May 1944. Both survived the war.
Previous attempts to condemn the SNCF in criminal and civil courts have failed and the current case rested on claims that the French state authorities, the police and the SNCF failed in their duty to provide services to citizens.
Lipietz said it was a "historic victory".
"It is the first time in history that the state and the SNCF as such have been condemned. The court recognised that these were not the actions of individuals or of some collaborator or another but the responsibility of the state," he said.
In the past judges have ruled that the SNCF was commandeered during the war by the occupying German army, while the Vichy government was an aberration for which the post-war French state was not responsible.
But at last month's hearing Lipietz said the jurisprudence had changed since 1995, when President Jacques Chirac recognised France's role in the oppression of Jews, and 1997, when the trial of Vichy official Maurice Papon proved the participation of the government in the deportations.
Lipietz's lawyer Remi Rouquette said that "in the round-ups, it was not the Gestapo but the French authorities who took action".
The SNCF will appeal against the court's decision, according to the rail carrier's lawyer Yves Baudelot said late on Tuesday.
"The SNCF is going to appeal. We do not understand this conviction," Baudelot said. He added that the ruling contradicted studies done by the French national research centre, the CNRS, to which the SNCF provided open access to its archives.
The railway "acted under orders from the regime without any room to manoeuvre", he said.
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More Housecleaning
Fireball: Object in sky nets 100 calls
By ADAM CLAYTON
Winnipeg Sun
The Manitoba Museum has been flooded with phone calls from people who spotted a strange object in the sky.
Resident astronomer Scott Young said the museum has received at least 100 calls about an eerie green light that appeared in the sky on Friday night. Young believes the object was either a small asteroid or a chunk of comet that shattered into several pieces after burning up in the Earth's atmosphere.
"The receptionist is doing nothing but answering calls and taking numbers right now and I think I'm up to 180 e-mails," he said. "Lots of people saw it."
Eyewitnesses from Dryden to Brandon and as far south as Duluth, Minn., have reported seeing the object.
EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS SOUGHT
Ufology Research of Manitoba, a Winnipeg-based independent centre that collects data on Canadian UFO reports, is assisting the museum in gathering eyewitness accounts to determine the object's flight path. Spokesman Chris Rutkowski said he's received more than a dozen calls so far.
"They all report seeing a brilliant blue or green light moving through the sky with a long tail," he said. "There may have been somebody who captured it on a cellphone camera."
Young said the end point of the object's flight path is somewhere in northwestern Ontario. It's not known whether any pieces reached the ground.
"The first step is to figure out the trajectory and where pieces might come down," he said. "If it's a reasonable place to go looking, then we'll look for pieces," he said.
People can send an e-mail to skyinfo@manitobamuseum.ca or call 956-2830.
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Volcano erupts in southern Japan, spews 1000m smoke plume
CNN
7 June 08
TOKYO, Japan -- A volcano erupted in southern Japan on Wednesday, spewing a plume of smoke about 1,000 meters (3,300 feet) into the air, the Weather Agency said. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.
Mount Sakurajima erupted at 5:30 p.m. (0830 GMT) and registered as moderate on the agency's scale for both the sound and the strength of the tremors it caused, according to a volcano bulletin.
There was no other significant change in volcanic activity, the bulletin said. "We do not believe that a large-scale eruption is imminent," said agency official Akira Otani.
Authorities in the area have received no immediate reports of damage or injuries, according police official Shoichi Araki in Kagoshima city, across the bay from the volcano. There has been ash falling in the city for several days, he added.
The 1,117-meter (3,686-foot) high Sakurajima is one of Japan's most active volcanoes. Clouds of ash constantly drift from its crater. It sits in Kagoshima Bay, about 950 kilometers (590 miles) southwest of Tokyo.
Sakurajima's last major eruption was in October 2000, when smoke rose about 5,000 meters (16,400 feet) into the air and blanketed Kagoshima city in dust. That eruption did not cause any injuries.
With 108 active volcanoes, Japan is among the most seismically active countries in the world. The nation lies in the "Ring of Fire" -- a series of volcanoes and fault lines that outline the Pacific Ocean.
In 2000, an eruption at a volcano on Miyake Island, about 180 kilometers (110 miles) east of Tokyo, forced all 4,000 islanders to evacuate the island. About half of them returned last year after the evacuation order was lifted.
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press.
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Villagers flee biggest eruption yet from Mt Merapi
Staff and agencies
Thursday June 8, 2006
The Indonesian volcano Mount Merapi spewed a spectacular rolling cloud of hot gas and ash down its southern slope today, in what a government expert said was its biggest eruption yet.
More than 15,000 villagers ran to safety or piled into cars and trucks, officials said, as dark grey clouds poured three miles down the mountainside.
Mt Merapi has been venting steam and ash for weeks, but this morning's burst was the largest yet, according to Sugiono, an Indonesian government vulcanologist.
It was one of a series of powerful explosions, but hundreds of villagers living on the volcano's fertile slopes refused to leave, saying they wanted to tend livestock or crops. "Of course we're worried," one resident, Supriatun, said by mobile phone, adding that her small dairy farming community was so far untouched. "But as long as the hot clouds do not reach us, we won't go."
The governor of Yogyakarta province, Sultan Hamengkubuwono X, said there was no reason for alarm. "There's nothing to worry about," he told Reuters. "There have been eruptions, but so far from the report I received this morning the conditions remain as of yesterday."
Another vulcanologist, Triyani, from the state-run centre for vulcanological research and technology development, said the increased emissions were not the huge eruption they were expecting.
"This is not the major slide we are waiting for. We could not ascertain yet when the biggest hot cloud will appear. We cannot project the time," he said.
Some scientists say a powerful earthquake on May 27 that killed more than 5,700 people in an area 25 miles south of Mount Merapi may have contributed to the volcano's volatility in recent weeks.
The rumbling mountain's lava dome has swelled, raising concerns that it could suddenly collapse and send scalding clouds of fast-moving gas, lava and rocks into areas yet to be evacuated.
Sutomo, a government official at the scene, told Associated Press that 3,500 people had fled Sleman district on Merapi's southern side, some clutching children as they ran and others heading to towns at the base in trucks or cars.
Another 12,000 people fled their villages in Magelang district on the west side. Farmers carrying piles of grass on their head ran down the mountain, as others clambered on to motorcycles.
"We saw the hot cloud spilling down the mountain and ran as fast as we could," said Judi Sutrisono, a father of five, adding that ash had covered rooftops in Jrakah, a village four miles from the crater. Sutrisono was among hundreds of people seeking refuge in a makeshift camp set up in a field dotted with Red Cross tents. As he spoke, a truck carrying 30 men, women and children arrived. Roads leading to the mountain peak had been closed, said Sunarto, another government official.
Authorities had earlier urged residents to evacuate the danger zone on the mountain's fertile slopes. Some 20,000 people left, but thousands more stayed behind, some complaining of boredom at shelters set up in schools, mosques and at government offices.
Merapi's last deadly eruption was in 1994, when it sent out a searing gas cloud that burned 60 people to death. About 1,300 people were killed when it erupted in 1930.
Authorities said that another big, deadly eruption would severely strain ongoing earthquake relief operations in nearby Bantul and Klaten districts. More than half a million people were displaced in last month's tremor, many living in makeshift shelters with no toilets or running water.
Hundreds of local and international relief workers poured into the region to help, providing food, tents and medical supplies to survivors.
"If there's a large blast at Merapi that causes deaths and injuries, we'll need help from paramedics now deployed in the quake-zone - especially with severe burns," said Imam Purwadi, a government official who is overseeing relief efforts at both sites. People displaced by the quake and volcano would also need nutritional supplements, he said, adding that local authorities had not yet come up with a plan to deal with simultaneous crises.
Indonesia is located in the so-called Pacific "ring of fire", an arc of volcanoes and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.
The Bulusan volcano in the central Philippines was spewing ash and hot steam into the air late yesterday, prompting scientists to raise the alert level in fear of a bigger eruption.
In southern Japan, Mt Sakurajima was also volatile, spitting a plume of smoke about 1,000 metres into the air. There were no reports of damage or injuries in those other volcanic eruptions.
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Quake jolts Indonesia's Sumatra
Reuters
8 June 06
JAKARTA (Reuters) - A 5.1 magnitude undersea earthquake struck off the western Indonesian island of Sumatra on Thursday, but the state meteorology and geophysics agency said it would not generate a tsunami nor cause damage.
The quake's Indian Ocean epicenter was in the same area where a massive earthquake triggered a tsunami that left 170,000 people killed and missing in Aceh province in December 2004.
A quake with a 6.2 magnitude shook Indonesia's main island of Java late last month, killing more than 5,700 people and rendering thousands homeless in and around Yogyakarta.
Earthquakes are frequent in Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous country. Its 17,000 islands sprawl along a belt of intense volcanic and seismic activity, part of what is called the "Pacific Ring of Fire".
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EuroNews
Despair turns to fury, but it's not too late to end France's war with itself
Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday June 8, 2006
The Guardian
Last Sunday I watched France playing football. This was a match more important than the World Cup for the future of France. It took place at a tatty stadium in Clichy-sous-Bois, the small town in the north-eastern outskirts of Paris where last autumn's nationwide explosion of anger began after two teenagers, Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna, were electrocuted when they hid from the police in an electricity substation. Now I leaned against the railings with Bouna's elder brother, who, like so many others, wore a T-shirt saying "Bouna and Zyed ... dead for nothing". As we watched two teams from communities of immigrant origin play a rather desultory game on a bumpy pitch, he told me a story I would hear again and again over three days spent visiting the now notorious high-rise housing estates of Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil.
Nothing had changed, he said, in the more than six months since that nationwide bonfire of the motorcars - a conflagration that the distant inhabitants of the smart quarters of inner Paris call les émeutes (the riots), but the spokespeople of the outskirts call les événements, recalling "the events" of May 1968, or simply la révolte. Last week, when protest flared up again in Montfermeil, the police were back in force, circulating overhead in helicopters and lurking in their Black Marias. But otherwise they leave the people of the outskirts to stew: packed into overcrowded, decaying high-rise blocks covered in graffiti; up to half of them unemployed and living on state handouts; nothing to do all day except watch television, or kick a football around in the yard, or do drugs; cut off by poor public transport and poverty. And then insulted by the interior minister and presidential hopeful of the right, Nicolas Sarkozy. Challenged by a resident of Montfermeil on his recent visit to a nearby town, Sarkozy used the familiar "tu" as he berated him.
"Respect above all," said a woman of Algerian origin when I asked what they most needed to improve their situation. "Above all, respect." "We live in France," explained Zoulikka Jerroudi, a community activist who came to France from Morocco when he was nine months old, "but they don't treat us as truly French". "Zidane is French," said Mehdi, a social worker, referring to the French football hero of Algerian origin, "but if he was burning cars then suddenly he wouldn't be." "Moi, je suis la France!" cried Abdelaziz Eljaouhari, an activist from another community, decrying Sarkozy's habit of treating him as if he were not.
All they ask of the French republic is that it should practise what it preaches: the equality of all French citizens, blind to race and religion. In the wake of les événements, a group of local activists in Clichy-sous-Bois set up an association with the acronym ACLEFEU, which, pronounced in French, sounds like "enough of fire". The LEF stands for liberté, égalité, fraternité. But the reality is that, even if someone from these communities can get a reasonable education - and here the French state is visibly trying to do something; the schools in Clichy-sous-Bois are well funded and apparently not so bad - their job application is likely to be turned down simply on the basis of their address and "foreign" name. If by some miracle they get to an interview, the job opening mysteriously disappears as soon as the interviewer sees the colour of their skin. I heard this story so many times and from so many different sources, including independent analysts, that there is clearly truth in it. If what has happened over the last 20 years in the French labour market is not racism, I don't know what is. The lofty ideals of republican egalitarianism that they imbibe at school only add insult to injury. "It's a country of hypocrisy," said Oussine, who trained as a book-keeper but could not find a position.
Meanwhile, they are almost entirely unrepresented in French public life. The appointment of a black man as a prime-time TV anchor was recently hailed as a breakthrough, but over several days of relentless channel-flicking here I have seen nothing but white faces presenting to camera. In politics the faces are almost all white too. Only on the football pitch is the real France of multiple ethnicities, cultures and colours represented - even over-represented. When France won the World Cup in 1998, with a mixed-colour team and the genius of Zinedine "Zizou" Zidane, there was a flurry of enthusiasm for the new French national colours: not bleu-blanc-rouge, as in the tricoleur, but black-blanc-beur - roughly speaking "black, white, brown" (beur being the French word for people of north African origin and black the new French for noir). Yet look at the rest of French public life and you have to conclude that there ain't no beur in the tricoleur
"It's too late," several people told me in the battered housing estates. A generation has been lost. Despair has turned to fury. Every little spark will produce another explosion. A community activist who has worked on one of the worst estates for 14 years told me that, if something radical is not done to improve the life-chances of the young, "C'est la guerre ... c'est la guerre avec madame la France."
To my own surprise, I came away thinking that it's not too late. The people I met had not abandoned hope and were clear and articulate in explaining what is needed. Of course they are, so to speak, the elite of the ghettoes: I did not meet the despairing homebound, the criminal elements, the drug dealers or the extremist Islamists. But these were people born and living there, and they were quite different from anything you would expect from television and newspaper reports. Some of their demands will be hard to meet: the over-rigid French economy is unlikely to create that many new jobs any time soon; nor is the French state likely to be able to redirect the large resources needed to turn their stinking high-rise blocks (Le Corbusier's dream become a nightmare) into decent, human-scale housing. But some can be realised.
I asked a group of women on the worst estate in Montfermeil what they thought of the socialist presidential hopeful Ségolène Royal's controversial suggestion that delinquent youths should have to do national service under military supervision. "Absolutely right!" they responded in unison. More suprising still, a group of 15- to 17-year-old volunteers from the local school agreed. And they'd like a local community police, on foot, to replace the remote bullies who descend from armoured lorries to insult and beat them.
Above all, they want what one might call the three Rs: respect, recognition, representation. To achieve this, policies of positive discrimination will be needed to compensate for the negative discrimination seemingly widespread in French society. Role models will be needed to change the attitudes of that society. One man more than any other could lead that change, when he retires from the football field: Zinedine "Zizou" Zidane, the hero alike of the richest, whitest and the poorest, brownest suburbs of Paris. The politicians have failed France; the hour of the footballers has come. Farewell, the old regime of Dominique de Villepin. Hail the new France of Zizou Zidane.
www.timothygartonash.com
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Swedish men about the house leave Portuguese standing
Giles Tremlett in Madrid
Thursday June 8, 2006
The Guardian
Europe's southern fringe is still the home of machismo, with Portuguese men being the least likely to do any housework, according to a study released yesterday.
At the top of the household layabouts' ranking, 61% of Portuguese men, 57% of Greek men and 47% of Spanish men told researchers they rarely, or never, used an iron or wielded a dustpan and brush.
Italian results were not included in the study analysis as researchers there had not delivered their findings in time, but their Spanish counterparts said they assumed Italians would fare just as badly. The findings were drawn from the latest European Social Survey, according to La Vanguardia newspaper.
British men came towards the middle of the Europe-wide list, with 22% admitting they rarely lifted a finger at home. They were shamed by their Swedish counterparts, with only 8% saying they did nothing, or nearly nothing, at home.
The study also found a huge discrepancy between the number of men who thought they should be sharing housework equally and the number who actually did so, across all the countries.
More than three-quarters of Spanish and Portuguese men, for example, thought they ought to be doing half the housework, but at least a quarter of those men admitted doing nothing. Only 10% of British men thought there was no need to share housework equally, but 20% said they hardly did anything at home.
Spain's socialist government is aware of the problem. Last year it passed a law that obliges men who marry in civil ceremonies to pledge to "share domestic responsibilities and the care and attention" of children and elderly family members.
"The idea of equality within marriage always stumbles over the problem of work in the house and caring for dependent people," Margarita Uría, a senator who backed the law, said.
Spanish women spend, on average, five times longer on housework than their husbands. Even where both have jobs outside the home, Spanish women still do three times as much work in the house.
A study published last year showed that, if you combined their hours at the office with the work they did at home, Spanish women worked an average of an hour a day more than their men.
The sociologist who presented the study, María Angeles Durán, said young Spanish women had opted for the easiest "solution" to the problem of squeezing children into their busy timetable.
"Given that they take up so much time, we have decided not to have them," she said, explaining the country's low birth-rate.
The survey also revealed that southern Europeans and people from former communist countries were the least interested in politics.
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Dutch Ambassador quits Estonia over gay abuse
Nick Paton Walsh
Thursday June 8, 2006
The Guardian
The Dutch ambassador to Estonia has asked to be assigned to another country after his male partner suffered repeated racist and homophobic abuse on the streets of the Baltic state. Hans Glaubitz asked to be transferred to the Dutch consulate in Montreal after the insults against his partner, a black Cuban, in the capital, Tallinn. The incidents highlight the poor human rights record of one of the EU's newest members, which Moscow has accused of treating its ethnic Russian population as second-class citizens.
Mr Glaubitz said: "It is not very nice to be regularly abused by drunken skinheads as a 'nigger' and to be continuously gawped at as if you have just stepped out of a UFO."
His partner has been named in the media as Raúl García Lao, a Cuban dancer. In 1997 the couple were based in post-apartheid South Africa and did not have problems there, said Tessa Martens, a spokeswoman for the Dutch foreign ministry. She said there were "some severe incidents" of racist and homophobic abuse in Tallinn that had gone on "long enough". She declined to give details, but said the incidents were the sole reason for Mr Glaubitz's transfer request.
He has been ambassador since September and he will leave for Montreal in the coming months.
She said the Estonian authorities said they "regretted the incidents very much".
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AsiaNews
Russia tells Ukraine to stay out of Nato - Protests force US troops in Crimea to stay in barracks
Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
Thursday June 8, 2006
The Guardian
Russia yesterday warned Ukraine the two countries' relations would be significantly damaged if Ukraine joined Nato, as protests against planned exercises in the Crimea kept hundreds of US troops confined to barracks.
The Russian parliament, often a mouthpiece for the Kremlin, passed a resolution yesterday which said: "Ukraine's accession to the military bloc will lead to very negative consequences for relations between our fraternal peoples."
The message, part of a continuing campaign by Moscow to retain its influence on its more western-orientated neighbours Ukraine and Georgia, was later bolstered by the foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. He said former Soviet Union countries could decide their own fate, but he warned of "a colossal geopolitical shift" if Georgia and Ukraine joined Nato.
The statements came as 200 US troops, who are in the predominantly Russian-speaking southern Ukrainian region of Crimea to prepare for Nato exercises due to start next Wednesday, remained trapped in their barracks. Protesters greeted their arrival last week with barricades and slogans reading "occupiers go home!", and reportedly harass them if they step outside the military base.
The marine reservists are in the region to prepare for the Sea Breeze 2006 Nato manoeuvres on the Black Sea, intended as a key sign of the west's slow embrace of Ukraine. On Tuesday the Crimean parliament declared the region a "Nato-free zone", a move it said was intended to support the anti-Nato protesters.
Brent Byers, a spokesman for the US embassy in Kiev, said the unarmed troops, who are working on the Feodosiya military base's plumbing and other infrastructure, could not leave the barracks. "They are safe and sound and anxious to get on with their work," he said, adding they were keeping a low profile to avoid inciting tensions. "We really don't understand what is going on down there," he said. "They would like to get out to enjoy the restaurants and buy some souvenirs."
Ukraine's Nato ambitions are long-standing and were entertained by President Viktor Yushchenko's predecessor, Leonid Kuchma, unseated in the so-called orange revolution in November 2004. But pro-western protests that ushered Mr Yushchenko into power have heightened Kremlin sensitivities about losing influence over former Soviet satellites.
Yesterday Mr Yushchenko met the Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende in the Hague to discuss joining Nato by 2008. He has promoted membership of the military bloc to Ukraine's 47 million people as a key step towards the economic benefits of joining the European Union.
The row over Nato exercises has come at a sensitive time for Mr Yushchenko, who is struggling to form a government coalition two months after his party's dismal performance in March's elections. Recent signals have suggested a coalition is almost ready, with his main adversary and former partner in the orange revolution, Yulia Tymoshenko, set to return as prime minister. But yesterday talks hit another snag, causing MPs to postpone a parliamentary vote that had been intended to approve the Nato exercises. The vote will now be held on June 14, the day the exercises were due to start.
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Google signals U-turn over Chinese site
Oliver Burkeman in New York and Bobbie Johnson
Thursday June 8, 2006
The Guardian
Internet giant Google may reverse its decision to launch a censored version of its search engine in China, one of the company's founders has said.
Sergey Brin said the Californian company had "felt that perhaps we could compromise on our principles, but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese" with Google.cn, which does not link to results for politically incendiary terms such as "Tiananmen Square" or "Falun Gong", the religious movement banned by the Chinese government.
But Mr Brin said he could consider reversing that decision. "Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense," he told reporters in Washington.
Google was widely accused of ignoring its informal motto, "Don't be evil", in favour of commercial gain when the Chinese service began in January. Campaigners have voiced strong concerns about the conflict between the repressive regime in Beijing and Google's commitment to freedom of information, but representatives for the company have argued that a policy of engagement is more valuable to Chinese internet users than refusing to deal with the authorities. Mr Brin intimated that Google could now be considering another approach.
"It's perfectly reasonable to do something different, to say, 'Look, we're going to stand by the principle against censorship, and we won't actually operate there'. That's an alternate path," said the Russian-born entrepreneur, 31, who founded Google with Larry Page in 1996, when they were at Stanford University.
Google has claimed that Chinese surfers can use its main portal, Google.com, to read material that does not appear on the censored site. But it is thought that Mr Brin's comments may have been precipitated by reports that the international site has been inaccessible throughout much of China for long periods of time - apparently blocked by the so-called Great Firewall, which prevents access to websites the government deems unsavoury.
"I don't think they were that comfortable with the decision in the first place," said Danny Sullivan, editor of the Search Engine Watch website. "But Google.com has never worked perfectly within China - that, after all, is the reason why Google caved in to create an approved Chinese edition."
Two months ago Google's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said that entering the Chinese market was the right thing to do and that the company had no intention of confronting the government.
"I'm wondering if Google are really hypocritical or just naive," said Julian Pain of media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, which campaigns against online censorship. "They never made a clear statement about what they would accept from the Chinese and what they wouldn't - now they're not sure about how far they can go. I hope they start realising that the internet is a global network and that doing something in one part of the world has an effect in another."
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China Theaters to Pull 'Da Vinci Code'
By MIN LEE
Associated Press
HONG KONG - The Chinese government, in an unprecedented move, has ordered movie theaters to stop showing "The Da Vinci Code," movie industry officials said Thursday.
Chinese authorities said the withdrawal of the movie from theaters Friday was to make way for locally produced films, one industry executive said, declining to be named because she wasn't authorized to speak to the media on the matter.
But another Hollywood blockbuster, "Ice Age: The Meltdown" was to be released in China on Friday, said the executive, who added that "The Da Vinci Code" was the first foreign film to be pulled from theaters in China after being approved for release.
"The Da Vinci Code," which has been opposed by Christian groups because it suggests Jesus fathered children who continued his lineage, has made $13 million since its release on May 19. It was on its way to becoming one of the highest-earning foreign films in China, the executive said.
A man who answered the phone at the press office of China's Film Bureau in Beijing said he was "unclear" about whether the film was pulled from cinemas. He declined to give his name.
Wu Hehu, a spokesman for Shanghai's United Cinema Line Corporation, said he received a notice to cease showing the film, but he didn't know why the order was made.
"This is such a short notice from the film's distributor. They will stop showing it from tomorrow," Wu said.
"I don't know the reason either. We just do what we are told to do," he said.
"Pearl Harbor," which made $13 million, has been the No. 2 foreign film in Chinese box office history, the industry executive said.
"Titanic" was first, fetching $45 million.
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History's Mysteries
Cathedral studies reveal earthquake date
07 June 2006 13:15
It has been an established and hallowed focal point of the East Anglian landscape for nearly a millennium.
But specialist studies have now brought a greater understanding of a violent episode in the history of Ely Cathedral - and a new dating for the oldest parts of the building.
The study of timber tree rings, known as dendrochronology, has revealed that repairs were carried out in the south transept in 1425/26, with the cause of damage likely to have been a documented, yet previously undated, earthquake which destroyed part of the cathedral.
The research by experts from Nottingham University also revealed that the oldest known timbers in the "Ship of the Fens", in the west tower turrets, date back almost 1000 years to 1043-1068.
The team has been collecting samples of oak timbers from the cathedral and monastic buildings on the site for nearly two decades.
An initial programme of sampling was undertaken between 1989 and 1996, funded jointly by the cathedral and English Heritage.
In 2001, English Heritage financed a further study with a viewing to dating structures which had previously not been assessed.
Derek Hamilton, scientific dating specialist at English Heritage, said: "During the 1980s and 1990s, when recording work started, we realised that Ely Cathedral was one of the best-preserved monastic complexes in the country.
"We then commissioned this more comprehensive study, which has not only enhanced our overall understanding of these buildings, but has ultimately provided important evidence for the likely timing of the 15th century earthquake."
It has also been discovered that timbers from the cathedral, Prior's Complex and Infirmary Complex range in date from the 11th century through to the late 18th century, with the research also providing evidence of where the wood originated.
Jane Kennedy, surveyor of the fabric for the cathedral, said: "From the smallest details discovered, we can start to build up a picture of the development of this vast and well-preserved site.
"The reports on the cathedral and monastic buildings have also enhanced our understanding of the timber trade, showing that the requirements for boards were such that timbers were procured from increasingly distant sources during the 14th and 15th centuries.
"For example, the very thin timbers, used for boarding, were imported mostly likely from the Baltic states, which provides information about the timber trade and the role of King's Lynn as an important port.
"Huge amounts of timber were needed in the construction of these magnificent buildings, and with very little available in the surrounding fens which were still flood plains, it all had to be sourced from outside the local area."
The original monastery at Ely was founded by St Etheldreda in 673.
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New species of dinosaur unearthed in Germany
Reuters
June 7, 2006
Fossils from a hitherto unknown species of a 150 million-year-old dwarf dinosaur have been found in northern Germany, scientists said Wednesday.
Initially they suspected that the remains from more than 11 sauropods were from young dinosaurs. But an analysis of their bones showed they were small adults that probably lived on an island during the late Jurassic period.
"It is the first case of island dwarfing proven for sauropod dinosaurs," said Professor Martin Sander of the University of Bonn in Germany.
Sauropods were the largest animals that lived on Earth. With their long necks, massive tails, small heads and stout legs they weighed on average about 20 tons and measured 20 yards in length. The biggest grew to 80 tons and were as long as 40 meters.
By contrast, the new dwarf species, called Europasaurus, was a mere 1 ton and about 6 yards long--about the size of a small rhinoceros or a big buffalo.
"This one is minute but it is still a big animal," said Sander, who reported the finding in the journal Nature.
The bones were discovered in marine beds in northern Germany. During the Jurassic period, sea levels were much higher than today, so much of central Europe was underwater.
Dwarfism is a common phenomenon on islands. The scientists believe the animals' size decreased because they lived in an area where sea levels rose and land masses shrunk.
Another possibility is that they moved as large animals to islands and shrank within a few generations because of limited resources.
Their small leg bones had led scientists to believe they were young dinosaurs, until a technique called bone microstructure revealed they were adults.
Sander and his team, who are one of only four groups worldwide who use the technique to study dinosaurs, took cores from the leg bones to determine the age of the dinosaurs.
"The microstructure of the bone is really well preserved. You can see where the cells were and the blood vessels," he said.
By comparing the size of the bones of the dwarf dinosaurs with their closest ancestors and descendants, the scientists determined how old they were.
The smallest upper leg bone they analyzed was 6.3 inches in length and the biggest 20 inches. Dwarf dinosaurs with 20-inch leg bones were fully grown, but in other species that would have represented a young animal.
Their closest relatives had femurs measuring 1.5 to 2 yards, according to the scientists.
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Odds n Ends
Migrants number 191 million across globe, UN says
By Nick Olivari
Reuters
Tue Jun 6, 2006
UNITED NATIONS - Some 191 million people now live outside their country of birth and migration is a major feature of international life, U.N. Secretary-General
Kofi Annan reported on Tuesday.
While most migrants move to wealthy nations, 75 million people have moved between developing countries, Annan said in a report to the 191-nation U.N. General Assembly.
Calling the report "an early road map for this new era of mobility," he proposed a standing forum on migration at the
United Nations to help governments pursue an integrated approach to migration and development at both the national and international levels.
The report recognizes the right of governments to decide who may enter their territory but encourages them to work together to upgrade economic and social benefits at both ends of the migrant chain.
"It is for governments to decide whether more or less migration is desirable," Annan said. "Our focus in the international community should be on the quality and safety of the migration experience and on what can be done to maximize its development benefits."
Migration has several positive benefits for both the host nation and the country of origin, according to the report.
Migrants undertake less desirable jobs in the host country while stimulating demand and improved economic performance. They also help to shore up pension systems in countries with aging populations.
Poor countries benefit by receiving an estimated $167 billion a year in remittances, up from $58 billion in 1995.
Worldwide, money sent home by migrants totaled $232 billion in 2005, up from $102 billion in 1995. One third of global remittances went to just four countries, India, China, Mexico and France.
The report found that one third of all immigrants in the world have moved from one developing country to another.
But migration to high income countries -- including some still regarded as developing such as South Korea, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates -- has grown much faster than to the rest of the world, it said.
Six out of 10 international immigrants reside in countries considered "high income," according to the report.
Europe hosted 34 percent of all migrants in 2005, North America 23 percent and Asia 28 percent. Only 9 percent were living in Africa, 3 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, and another 3 percent in Oceania.
Nearly half of all immigrants are women, and in developed countries they outnumber men, the report said.
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The Power of Coincidence
By: Jill Neimark
Psychology Today
The life of psychiatrist Elisabeth Targ was haunted by coincidences. In 1972 her father, physicist Russell Targ, cofounded the Stanford Research Institute to investigate psychic phenomena. Elisabeth participated in his ESP experiments, and he encouraged her to "remotely view" and predict her birthday presents before she opened them (and claims she was correct most of the time). Elisabeth Targ was an academic superstar. She graduated from high school at age 15, was fluent in Russian, German and French, and eventually graduated from Stanford Medical School.
In July of 1998, Targ and colleagues at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco published a double-blind study in the Western Journal of Medicine that rocketed her to fame in the field of complementary and alternative medicine: Forty healers around the U.S. were recruited to pray for the health of patients with advanced AIDS. The prayed-for group had significantly fewer opportunistic illnesses than the control group, and Targ instantly became the poster child for a fledgling new field exploring prayer and healing. "Elisabeth is our hero," wrote Mitchell Krucoff, a Duke University Medical Center cardiologist who has pioneered complementary therapies in patients with heart disease.
Targ's research was impressive enough that in January of 2002 the National Institutes of Health gave her $1.5 million to carry out two more distant-prayer studies, one on AIDS and another on glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive and almost inevitably fatal brain tumor. In Europe and the U.S. there are approximately two to three new cases per 100,000 people annually. "It is a particularly gnarly disease from which people rarely recover," says her father, "and that's why she wanted to study it."
Two months later, in March of 2002, Targ, who was 40, began fertility treatments: she and her fiancé, physicist Mark Comings, wanted a family. That spring, however, she began finding it difficult to pronounce words with the letter "b," and one morning the left side of her face sagged. A high-resolution MRI revealed that she was suffering from a rapidly growing grade 4 glioblastoma multiforme brain tumor. Word of the horrific diagnosis spread, and healers began calling, visiting and praying from a distance-in a truly eerie echo of her newly funded study. But they could not save her. Targ died on July 18, 2002, at 11:11 p.m., 111 days after her diagnosis.
The coincidences, if we may call them that, did not end with Targ's death. Kate MacPherson, a healer and registered nurse in Salinas, California, had participated in Targ's first study on AIDS and prayer. "About a month after Elisabeth died," says MacPherson, "I had a dream."
In the dream, Comings (who married Targ shortly before her death was sitting on a weathered wooden box in an old European town with cobbled streets and stone buildings. "He was devastated," recalls MacPherson, "and Elisabeth kept repeating something to him. I couldn't understand it. I thought maybe it was Hebrew. The sounds were ya vas liu bliu. I wrote down the dream and phonetics and sent it to Mark, whom I knew in passing."
Russell Targ recalls the Sunday morning when Comings came over to his home and read MacPherson's letter out loud. Targ instantly recognized the syllables as the Russian words for "I love you." Elisabeth was not only fluent in the language but had traveled there with her dad.
Yet another coincidence? "So many mystical things have happened to me in the aftermath of Elisabeth's death," says Comings, who to this day wears not only his wedding ring, but Elisabeth's as well. "The stories are mind-blowing, even to the parapsychologists who study these things for a living."
Lucky Accidents
One thing is certain about coincidence. The phenomenon fascinates believers and skeptics alike. It's a porthole into one of the most interesting philosophical questions we can ask: Are the events of our lives ultimately objective or subjective? Is there a deeper order, an overarching purpose to the universe? Or are we the lucky accidents of evolution, living our precious but brief lives in a fundamentally random world that has only the meaning we choose to give it?
For those with a highly empirical bent, a coincidence is happenstance, a simultaneous collision of two events that has no special significance and obeys the laws of probability. "In reality, the most astonishingly incredible coincidence imaginable would be the complete absence of all coincidence," says John Allen Paulos, professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia, and best-selling author of Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences. "Believing in the significance of oddities is self-aggrandizing," he adds. "It says, 'Look how important I am.' People find it dispiriting to hear, 'It just happened, and it doesn't mean anything.'"
To the mystically inclined, however, coincidence is a synchronicity, the purposeful occurrence of two seemingly unrelated events. The argument is not likely to be resolved anytime soon. Of late, though, the phenomenon of coincidence has begun to yield new scientific insights. It turns out that we may actually be hardwired to connect anomalies in a meaningful way. Many of the remarkable feats our brains regularly perform-including our ability to learn the meaning of words or decode the unspoken laws of social decorum depend on our penchant for noticing coincidences. In fact, mathematicians, cognitive scientists and paranormal researchers are applying the tools of statistics and probability to tease out just where coincidences lie on the bell curve of everyday experience. Are they easily explained, or so improbable they must signify something?
Comets, Dogs and Dalmatians
In A.D. 66 a comet was seen across the sky in Jerusalem just as the Jewish people were revolting against the Romans. In 1066, another comet appeared, just before the fateful Battle of Hastings was fought over the throne of England. Were these merely strange coincidences-or are comets portents of divine intent?
In 1705 English astronomer Edmund Halley was looking through old records of comets when he noticed a coincidence: The bright comets of 1531, 1607 and 1682 had almost the same orbits and appeared approximately every 75 years. Halley concluded they were one comet and predicted it would reappear in 1758. On Christmas night of 1758, Halley's comet appeared, forever changing our understanding of comets.
Indeed, coincidences help prod science along. "They are a true paradox," says MIT cognitive scientist Josh Tenenbaum. "On the one hand they seem to be the source of our greatest irrationalities-seeing causal connections when science tells us they aren't there. On the other hand, some of our greatest feats of scientific discovery depend on coincidences."
According to Tenenbaum, we could not learn language and syntax without the ability to notice strange coincidences. "Consider the challenge in learning just a single word," says Tenenbaum. "Every word is in a sense an infinite object. It's not just a name for an individual thing, it refers to an infinite set of things." Take the word "dog"-to understand that simple word you have to understand the name (Rover), the type (say, a black Labrador), all dogs, all mammals, all animals, all Labradors, all black Labradors (or black poodles, or black Great Danes), all running things, all furry things. "Yet even children under 5 can be given just a few relevant examples of dog and learn to use it," marvels Tenenbaum. Even more remarkable is that between the ages of 1 and 5, children are learning at least five new words a day.
Children make these cognitive leaps by noticing coincidences-Labradors and poodles and other dogs bark, pant with their tongues on hot days and, in cities at least, appear on leashes led by humans. Tenenbaum has demonstrated that we can generalize meaningfully from just a few examples of a novel word. In one study, 25 adults were shown sets of photographs (animals, vegetables, vehicles), and presented with a "novel" non-English word (such as "blick") as the name for the object. They were asked to point out instances of "blick" in additional photographs. Tenenbaum found that after seeing an object (such as a Dalmatian) with the name "blick" only once, adults were able to infer that the word either referred to all Dalmatians or all dogs. If they were shown three Dalmatians as three examples of "blick," they were much more likely to infer that "blick" referred only to Dalmatians. A pilot study found that even 4-year-old children could generalize properly if presented "blick" three times.
"Coincidences drive so many of the inferences our minds make," says Tenenbaum. "Our neural circuitry is set up to notice these anomalies and use them to drive new learning. There is an old saying that neurons that fire together wire together. So you could say that coincidence operates at the level of the synapse, whenever neurons fire at the same time." If our minds are primed to find coincidences, it's not surprising that we sometimes see connections where they don't exist. But do we fall into that trap too often?
It's Just a Coincidence!
"What are the odds of that?" asks SQuire Rushnell [sic] again and again in his best-selling book, When God Winks, an entertaining collection of confounding coincidences, from star-crossed lovers to holocaust survivors who were reunited years later. When Rushnell began writing the book, he was pondering the famous fact that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, two men who shaped the Declaration of Independence, both died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of that historic document.
"I sat in my small study wondering whether there were more coincidences connecting the two men," recalls Rushnell. He pulled a reference book off his shelf, but it had no useful information. "Then I noticed a thin, homely, old volume right next to the reference book. I'd brought it back in a box of books after my grandfather's funeral and never noticed it before. It was a collection of Daniel Webster's speeches, and the first one was a eulogy for Adams and Jefferson." The speech described many coincidences linking the two men. In later research, Rushnell discovered that the book was available in only one public library in the Eastern U.S., the rare book section of the Library of Congress. "Yet here was a copy from my grandfather, sitting right there on my shelf, just when I needed it," exclaims Rushnell. "What are the odds of that?"
Not as small as you'd think, answer mathematicians who study the laws of probability. "In 10 years there are 5 million minutes," says Irving Jack Good, a professor in the department of statistics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg. "That means each person has plenty of opportunity to have some remarkable coincidences in his life." Good recalls his own remarkable coincidence: He was at a conference listening to a speaker who described a mathematical proof, and later that day opened a mathematics textbook at random in the library. On the open page was a shorter proof of the same theorem. "I estimated that coincidence had a probability of 10^11."
Improbable occurrences are to be expected, say statisticians, especially considering there are 5 billion people on the planet. "We're awash in a torrent of names, numbers, dates, addresses, acronyms, telephone calls, e-mails, calendars, birth dates," says John Paulos. "The information-rich environment of modern life itself is a source of many coincidences." Even "prophetic" dreams can be explained by probability, says Paulos. This country dreams a half billion hours each night (250 million people dreaming two hours a night). Some of those dreams are bound to coincide with real events.
Mathematicians point out that people are notoriously inaccurate in predicting probability. We are, in a sense, mathematically naive. Perhaps one of the most famous experiments to demonstrate this is known as the "birthday problem." There are 365 days a year, and 366 in a leap year. To absolutely guarantee that two people in the same room share a birthday, you need 367 people. But how many people are needed to ensure a 50 percent chance of a shared birthday (such as July 4)? Most people guess about half of 366-or 183. The actual answer is surprisingly low: you need only 23 people. However, if you specify an exact birth date (July 4, 1976), you need 613 people to reach a 50 percent probability. The upshot: improbable events are quite likely to occur but specific, predicted improbable events are far less likely.
If we understood probability theory better, would we be less bewitched by coincidences? Perhaps not. Josh Tenenbaum says we're actually very good at inferring probabilities-as long as the data are presented in a way that reflects real-world thinking. "Asking people for an arbitrary number in terms of probability-such as 'What are the odds that three people share the same birthday?'-is asking them to perform a strange calculation," explains Tenenbaum. "But we are extremely good at noticing data that might have an underlying common cause." Tenenbaum and doctoral candidate Thomas Griffiths showed Stanford University undergraduates 14 sets of birth dates reflecting either randomness (such as 2, 4, 6 and 8 unrelated birthdays) or coincidence (such as 4 birthdays on the same day). The students were asked to rate how big a coincidence each set of birth dates was on a scale of 1 to 10. "There was a very high correlation between people's intuition about coincidence and the correct probability," says Tenenbaum, who suggests that if we change the way we model questions about probability we'll conclude that humans actually excel at detecting the singularity of an event.
The Other Side of Probability
We may be highly skilled at detecting and connecting anomalous events, but that doesn't help us understand events so spectacular that they are readily noticed-but not easily explained. "I have no argument with people who suggest that very unusual events happen every so often and have no intrinsic significance," says Dean Radin, author of The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena,and senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California, which studies psychic phenomena. "I just don't accept that this explanation is correct 100 percent of the time." For instance, in laboratory studies he's found that people seem to know when they're going to view upsetting photos. A measurement of electrical activity on their skin rises before viewing disturbing photos randomly selected by a computer. The same changes do not occur before neutral or calming photos appear. "Science makes assumptions about the way things work, and yet we still understand so little. I'm willing to dance with the mystery without requiring the whole answer ahead of time," says Radin.
Since 1998 Radin, who has studied everything from precognition to remote viewing, has been testing coincidence on a global scale specifically, whether events with a worldwide impact focus consciousness and influence the functioning of machines. To study this, a volunteer collaboration of 75 researchers around the world joined in the Global Consciousness Project, headed up by Radin and psychologist Roger Nelson of Princeton University. The researchers are monitoring 75 devices called random number generators. These machines generate numbers based on electronic noise like the static you hear between radio stations. The goal is to measure whether events that focus mass consciousness tip the random number generators toward significantly greater randomness or significantly greater coherence.
"We've studied 168 events from August 1998 to November 2003," says Radin. On September 11, 2001, a few hours before the World Trade Center was attacked, there was a large, anomalous spike in the 37 generators being monitored at that time-a uniform rise in what statisticians call variance. In a sense the generators were extremely "noisy," says Radin. "Over the course of the rest of the day," the opposite happened. There was a drop in magnitude that was uncharacteristically quiet, and unique for that entire year." On March 11, 2004, after the terror attacks in Madrid, it was also unusually "noisy," but the next day, during the demonstrations in Spain, there was once again uncharacteristic coherence, or "quiet." Disasters disrupt global consciousness (and the machines), hypothesizes Radin, while mass demonstrations and celebrations lead to a coherent mind field, which shifts these supposedly random machines toward more coherence and "quiet."
What does this have to do with coincidence-besides that the data itself might be a mere coincidence? Computer scientist Richard Shoup, president of the Boundary Institute in Saratoga, California, which studies psychic phenomena, thinks this kind of data may challenge the assumption of fundamental randomness that is at the core of theories like quantum mechanics-and thereby challenge the worldview of those who chalk up coincidences to happenstance. Shoup wonders if other sources of random data on September 11, such as devices that were scanning the radio spectrum for signals, also showed a shift. "The data seem to show that observation can change things, that maybe thoughts affect the world," says Shoup. "We need more people to think about this." One person who is thinking deeply about this is Mark Comings. A week after Elisabeth Targ died, he happened to be at a bank around the corner from the place in Palo Alto, California, where they'd had their first dinner in 1981. The site is now a Border's Books store, but the courtyard and tables where they ate are still there. "I was filled with emotion remembering our meeting so long ago and thinking what a profound impact she'd had on my life," recalls Comings. "Then all of a sudden I heard her voice in my head, saying, 'Get that book.' I turned around and at that moment a person was pushing a cart of books by me, and on the cart was a cardboard sign with a hand pointing down that read, 'This one is for you.' I walked over to the book it was pointing at. It was called The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe. I picked it up and opened to a footnote about Elisabeth and a famous remote viewing experiment she'd done." It turned out there was an entire chapter about Elisabeth Targ, so Comings bought the book, and brought it to Russell Targ. "He hadn't seen it. It was a new book that had just been published."
Comings finds solace in his view of the universe, which embraces the import of coincidences. "I have a sense of real and dynamic interaction between [me and Elisabeth]. But I have a unique view of the world," he says.
He also finds comfort in Targ's enduring legacy. One hundred fifty patients with glioblastomas are enrolled in the study she devised before succumbing to the cancer. Preliminary results are expected this fall.
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