Sections on today's Signs Page:
Signs Editorials
Editorial: Alternatives To the Collapsed WTO Doha Round Talks
by Stephen Lendman
23 August 2006
On July 24, 2006, World Trade Organization (WTO) Director-General Pascal Lamy was forced to halt the five years of negotiating of the so-called Fourth WTO Ministerial Doha Round that began in Doha, Qatar in November, 2001 and ended (for now, at least) in Geneva, Switzerland. The talks had been ongoing to strike a trade deal but broke down because the US, as usual, demanded all take and little give in return expecting it could strong-arm developing nations to accept whatever it proposed as it's always been able to do in the past.
No longer, apparently, as nations with growing clout like Brazil, India and others justifiably refused to knuckle under. Even European (EU) Trade Commissioner and US ally, Peter Mandelson expressed his ire when he accused the US of trying to exact a "disproportionate" price from developing countries. He added: "Surely the richest and strongest nation in the world, with the highest standards of living, can afford to give as well as take." Mandelson is right, of course, but he also understands the US considers itself the de facto ruler of the world and claims the right in that status to make all the rules and expect all other nations to agree to and obey them. It wasn't to be this time in Geneva and may never be again as a growing number of nations are fed up with Washington's notion of trade that's "free" in words but never "fair" in fact. The tone of frustration was expressed by India's Commerce and Industry Minister in his concluding comment that Doha is "definitely between intensive care and the crematorium." He and others thought it would be months to years before further talks could be restarted and likely never again on same basis as the current round that broke down.
That basis is the same business as usual one when the US is involved - promise them (the developing nations) everything, or at least an equitable arrangement for rich and poor countries alike, but in the end deliver little or nothing. It's just another example of US duplicity and disingenuousness as the initial Doha declaration promised that the rich nations would make most of the concessions and the poorest ones would need make few or none. It never happened, and the biggest obstacle was over farm subsidies so important to developing world countries that need protection for the major part of their economy along with ease of access to the US and European Union (EU) to assure growth. The US and EU made no teeth proposals to end their agricultural subsidies by 2013, but less developed countries rejected the kind of vague forked-tongue language the US especially has used before which in the end always failed to deliver what it promised.
A clear example of the kind of trade agreement the US wants is reflected in its subsidies to cotton farmers the WTO ruled illegal last year. Despite the ruling, the US did nothing to bring the subsidies into compliance, and Brazil may now ask the WTO to allow it to impose $1 billion in punitive duties on US imports in compensation. Brazil and other countries may also have justifiable rice, soybean and other crop claims against the US. Uruguay has complained about unfair US rice subsidies depressing world prices, and Oxfam International charged that these illegal subsidies, valued at $1.2 billion a year, hurt rice farmers in a dozen countries.
Call it just more of the "same old US same old." A key provision of the Doha "development round" clearly shows it. With a backdrop of high-sounding language promising to help poor countries grow their way out of poverty by granting them greater access for their goods, the EU extended the "Everything but Arms" initiative (EBA) under which it would unilaterally open its markets to developing countries. That was before the US hypocritically muddied things up by purportedly agreeing to a 97% opening of its markets to the developing world. These countries were initially disappointed with the original EBA initiative, and the EU promised to address their concerns to reach a more equitable compromise. US intentions, however, were quite different. While using market-opening language, the US, in fact, proposed just the opposite by claiming the right to choose a different 3% exclusion for each country to rig the deal to end up allowing developing countries the right to freely export everything but what they produce. So while they can freely export aircraft, jet engines, supercomputers and computer chips, they can't have free access for their agricultural products, processed foods or textiles. Hardly a fair trade initiative, and one sensible trade ministers would never accept. They didn't.
The net result is that the 3% EBA initiative is just another disingenuous multilateral trade scheme corrupted by US undermining to unfairly give this dominant country free access to world developing markets without having to grant equivalent access here in return. Based on the outcome in Geneva, developing countries, led by those with the most clout, no longer are buying it and walked away. They did it before at Cancun in 2003 and no doubt will stand firm in any future WTO negotiations.
A Disturbing Cloud on A World Trade Silver Lining
At the same time developing nations are resisting sweeping trade deals like Doha, some of them are agreeing to bilateral ones with the US with terms just as unacceptable as the WTO ones they rejected. So far the following countries have agreed to such "free trade agreements" with the US or are in the process of negotiating them: Australia, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Panama, Bahrain, Israel, Jordan, Malaysia, Vietnam (seeking WTO admission), Morocco, Oman, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the Central American nations included under the Dominican Republic Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) of the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica (the only CAFTA country that hasn't so far approved the agreement).
In addition, and less publicized, there are other agreements in place and being negotiated under various names like the so-called US-India Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture that gives US giants like Monsanto free access to the Indian market for their GMO products ravaging Indian farmers since gaining entry and causing thousands of suicides among them because of onerous debts they were forced to assume that ended up killing them; Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland for wheat at unaffordable prices increasing hunger and malnutrition and destroying the lives of still more small farmers; and the king of giants - Walmart - that wants to dominate the Indian retail market, and if successful, will do to thousands of small retailers in the country what Monsanto alone did to its small farmers.
By using the tactic of one-on-one negotiations, the US is showing it's not standing pat in the face of overall trade defeat that first erupted on the streets of Seattle in 1999, began in earnest in direct talks in Cancun in 2003 and culminated with the collapse of those talks in Geneva in July. It's trying to overcome it by undermining the unity of the developing world one nation at a time and do it with selective agreements covering products and services it's able to get its negotiating partners to agree on. In the case of India that stood firm against a sweeping Doha agreement, it's clear that country so far has been willing to trade away its food and retail small business security for whatever benefits it hopes to gain in return that when dealing with the US may turn out to be meager at best.
It's too early to know how successful this US strategy will be over time, but so far it's had enough success to show developing nations determined to hold their ground that their battle to do it has just begun, and it won't be easy prevailing in the end. Nonetheless, the ones willing to resist US bullying tactics have decided, so far at least, that sweeping agreements on US one-way terms are unacceptable. At most, they'll go for a limited one hoping for some expected gain in return for what they have to give up. So the bottom line thus far is that while Doha is either dead or on life support, so-called US-style "free trade" is very much alive and thriving.
Alternatives to the WTO Doha Round
Despite US trade ingenuity and chicanery to turn defeat into partial victory, challenges to its dominance have emerged showing a spirit of resistance and unwillingness to continue the old corrupted one-way neoliberal way of doing things that's little more than a race to the bottom. That spirit wanting change is more alive in Latin America than anywhere else, even though so far it's more hope than reality. Still, for the first time, more people in the region are fed up having to live under the oppressive heel of US dominance and are inspired by what's happening in Venezuela to overcome it and beginning in Bolivia as well. Call it a start, but all great social movements have modest beginnings. There's never a guarantee how far they'll go, and many just fade away or are destroyed by those of privilege using their power to do what they know how to do best - remove all threats to the interests of capital by whatever means it takes to do it.
That battle is now being waged in Venezuela against its democratically elected President, Hugo Chavez and his Movement for the Fifth Republic Party (MVR). Chavez was first elected in December, 1998 and from the start created the beginnings of a new mass social and political Bolivarian revolution based on participatory democracy and social justice. Privileged "sifrinos" and the corporate ruling class in the country aren't happy with the way things are now and have engaged the Chavez government in confrontation relentlessly since he came into office. Those forces have a strong ally in the Bush administration that's done all it can to aid them and continues to relentlessly.
The reason is because of all Chavez has done to help his overwhelmingly poor people emerge from their desperate state and have the essential social services and other help they need. He's accomplished much in a short time despite everything done to subvert him by powerful and determined internal rogue elements and the far more hostile threat from the huge shadow cast on his government from Washington that's tried and failed three times to oust him and now is planning a fourth attempt that may include an armed assault and invasion and likely attempt to assassinate him as well.
Chavez began in 1999 by drafting a new constitution that was put to a nationwide referendum and overwhelmingly approved by the Venezuelan people. It established the principle of participatory democracy for all Venezuelans, mandated quality health care and education, housing, an improved social security pension system for seniors, free speech, rights for indigenous people and banned discrimination. Chavez is revered by the great majority of his people because of all he's done for them since taking office in 1999. He currently enjoys an approval rating of over 80% and likely will have no trouble remaining President when he runs again for reelection in December unless an attempt is made to remove him from office forcibly before then that succeeds. Chavez is well aware of the threat against him and is doing all he can to prevent it.
ALBA - The Bolivarian Alternative to the Fourth WTO Ministerial Doha Round
Hugo Chavez is pursuing his progressive agenda abroad as well as at home. Key to it is his alternative to the US dominated WTO neoliberal type trade agreements that are called "free" but aren't "fair." The ones now in force under mandated WTO trade rules along with IMF and World Bank imposed structural adjustments and privatizations of state industries have caused growing poverty and human misery throughout the developing world. The harmful one-way trade rules are in place for agriculture, services under GATS, intellectual property under TRIPS, and the mostly unpassed corporate wish list from hell covered under MAI that would establish a single global economy run by these corporate giants. Led by the US and its giant transnational companies, the goal of these agreements is to establish a supranational "economic constitution" based on WTO mandated rules of global trade that would override the sovereignty of member states - in other words, to establish a global constitution with a binding set of trade rules favoring rich countries and giant corporations allowing them the right to dominate world markets and exploit developing nations and ordinary people everywhere for their benefit.
Hugo Chavez has opted out of this corrupted system with his alternative plan called ALBA or the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas. It's impressive goal is to achieve a comprehensive integration among Latin American countries to develop "the social state" that will benefit ordinary people. It's far different than the WTO structured deals explained above that only benefit large corporations and wealthy nations at the expense of developing ones and all people everywhere. ALBA is bold and innovative and based on the principles of complementarity, not competition; solidarity, not domination; cooperation, not exploitation; and respect for each participating nation's sovereignty free from the control of other nations and giant corporations.
Chavez hopes ALBA will unite participating nations in solidarity to benefit the people in them by providing essential goods and services, achieve real economic growth at the grassroots and improve the lives of ordinary people by reducing and one day eliminating poverty. A key feature of the plan is the exchange of goods and services outside the usual international banking and corporate trading system. For example, Venezuela has exchanged Venezuelan oil and building materials with Cuba paid for in kind by Cuba, in turn, sending 20,000 doctors to work in medical clinics and hospitals in the barrios plus staffing literacy programs to teach Venezuelans to read and write.
Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba have also agreed on an ALBA and People's Trade Agreement that will operate on the same basis. The agreements contain many articles and provisions of complementarity and mutually beneficial exchanges that will benefit all three countries and their people and also work with other Latin American countries to help them eradicate illiteracy using the methods that have virtually eliminated it in Venezuela and Cuba. Compare what's been accomplished in those two countries with limited resources to the US where the Department of Education in the richest country in the world estimates over 20% of the population to be functionally illiterate. That startling and shameful fact is but one of many noteworthy testimonies to the failure of the so-called neoliberal "free market" race to the bottom model the US wants to export to all other nations and do it by force if necessary.
The Mercosur Alternative
Mercosur, or the Southern Common Market, is a much less impressive and radical alternative to the WTO model than is ALBA. It's a customs union comprising Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and most recently in July, 2006 Venezuela as a formal member. It was founded in 1991 by the Treaty of Asuncion and amended by the Treaty of Ouro Preto in 1994. Mercosur was formed to promote free trade in goods and services among its member Latin American states that also include Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru as associate members as well as Mexico in temporary observer status prior to becoming an associate member.
As a functioning trade body, Mercosur is far different than ALBA. It was never meant to be an alternative to the dominant WTO model but rather to be complimentary to it. It was formed by and represents the ruling class of its Latin American member states that have long been dominated by the Global North. They believed by unifying into a regional trade block, they would have more negotiating clout in combination than each one could have acting separately. Despite the standoff at Cancun in 2003 and the just failed Doha round in Geneva, its results have been mixed at best in its dealings with the US primarily. Even as a more powerful regional trading block, these nations haven't been able to get the US to soften its negotiating position in trade talks and thus be willing to offer fairer terms, especially on products most important to each Latin country.
The failed Doha round especially proved that, but it also proved that when developing nations stand firm together, they can hold their own, bring talks with the US to a standstill, and prove they mean business and no longer are willing to cut one-way deals hurting themselves. So maybe after three years of failing to get its way in spite of all the pressure the US can bring to bear, Washington may finally be getting the message. But with the hardline Bush administration still in charge moving ahead boldly with bilateral deals, that possibility may only be wishful thinking.
Enter Venezuela into Mercosur
On July 21, Venezuela formally became the fifth member of Mercosur making this body the world's third largest economic bloc and adding to the strength of Latin American unity that may better enable it to hold its own in future trade negotiations with the US and other dominant Global North nations. Hugo Chavez joined this alternative trade bloc just months after withdrawing from the Andean Community of Nations (CAN) pact in April, 2006 in response to CAN members Colombia and Peru signing Free Trade Agreements with the US. The benefits of Venezuela's addition are significant, and Hugo Chavez signaled it by saying: "We are entering a new stage of Mercosur." He went on to add: "Latin America has all it needs to become a great world power (he didn't mean a military one). Let's not put any limits on our dreams. Let's make them reality." Chavez's words were backed up by Brazil's President Lula da Silva when he added "no one is talking anymore (about the US-backed) FTAA." And Argentina's President Nestor Kirchner added emphasis with his comment that "Democracy, human rights, liberty and the fight against poverty (are the basis for) a new world order." In his comments, Hugo Chavez was expressing his hope that with the addition of his country and likely other nations to follow, Mercosur would take more steps to "prioritize social concerns" and begin a process of no longer being beholden solely to "the old elitist corporate models" that put profits ahead of people needs. Hopefully, to some degree at least, Lula and Kirchner were expressing the same sentiment. So far though in their own style of governance, these two leaders differ markedly from Hugo Chavez and mostly follow the neoliberal "free market" rules prescribed by the US that the corporate giants benefit from.
But those leaders as well as those from Uruguay and Paraguay got a hint of what their people want at the summit when social activists representing the interest of labor, the environment, women's issues, human rights, and campesinos marched on the streets in solidarity with demonstrators of left-wing parties to present their progressive alternative proposals for regional integration to the Mercosur leaders. The street event marked the close of the summit at which the Peoples' Summit for Sovereignty and Integration ran for the first time parallel to a Mercosur summit meeting. The Peoples' agenda addressed issues that included anti-poverty measures, indigenous peoples' rights and demands, the protection of natural resources, investment in education, trade liberalization and matters of concern to women.
Participating organizations prepared a final document that proclaimed "South America is entering a new era," and they intend to create and fight for an alternative plan to the failed neoliberal so-called "free market" ones they reject. They made their goals clear stating: "No to free trade agreements and yes to peoples' integration. No to foreign debt and to meddling by the international financial institutions. Yes to economic independence. No to militarization, yes to self-determination. No to hunger and poverty, yes to better distribution of wealth."
Those attending also rejected a US Senate initiative to create a counter-terrorism organization in the tri-border area connecting Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, demanded Latin American UN MINUSTAH "blue helmet" so-called "peacekeepers" (that, in fact, serve as thuggish enforcers) be withdrawn from Haiti, and protested against the illegal US war against Iraq and the joint US-Israeli equally illegal ones against Lebanon and Palestine. This is likely to be a taste of further protest activism to come with various NGO groups representing ordinary people demanding their political leaders address the vital issues of greatest concern to them. With Hugo Chavez as a formal Mercosur member and already governing that way in Venezuela, these groups have an important regional leader as an ally who'll back and help them by addressing their needs and advocating Mercosur nations adopt them.
Chavez and Mercosur have already had one notable achievement last November when Venezuela successfully led the opposition that thwarted the US's attempt to conclude its Free Trade of the Americas agreement (FTAA) with South American countries. It's very likely FTAA is now dead, and the US may only attempt to resurrect it in bilateral form to get the best deals it can, even ones less acceptable to its giant corporations that would rather have all they get bilaterally than nothing at all resulting from the demise of FTAA.
The US task, however, will be all the harder with the addition of Venezuela as a full Mercosur member. The country has clout and intends to use it. Besides its immense oil reserves Chavez is willing to share equitably on an ALBA-type arrangement with his trading partners, Venezuela is South America's third largest economy after Brazil and Argentina. It's addition to Mercosur means this trade bloc now has a combined market of 250 million people and a total output of $1,000,000,000,000 ($1 trillion) in goods and services annually - 75% of the continent's GDP. Further, with its associate members and possible addition of Mexico (especially if Lopez Obrador manages to assume the office of President he won but so far has been denied), Mercosur is poised to become even larger and more powerful. At the Mercosur summit on July 20 - 21 in Cordoba, Argentina, Chavez called for Bolivia and Cuba to be included in the trade bloc. Bolivia already is an associate member, and in a clear rejection of how the US treats Cuba with its 45 year-old embargo aimed at trying to topple Fidel Castro, Mercosur nations just concluded an Economic Complementation Accord with the island state designed to eliminate tariffs and boost complementary trade.
Mercosur's growing strength is more political than economic, and therein hopefully lies its clout. It can't compete in size with the Global North or any trade bloc with the US as a member. As impressive as its market size and combined GDP numbers are, they're quite small compared to the three nation NAFTA bloc dominated by the US that has 450 million people in it and a combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $14 trillion. But just as the Hezbollah resistance humbled the mighty Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) fourth most powerful military in the world by its resilience, so too might economically small Mercosur hold its own in its dealings with its powerful and dominant northern neighbor - especially with some help from other developing nations like India, China and Russia that are also unwilling to trade across the board on any basis they consider unfair and are getting away with it when determined to do it.
Recent Russian muscle-flexing is an example of how one nation is able to stand up to the US successfully. Relations between the two countries have been frosty for some time, and as a result the Bush administration blocked Russia's desired entry into the WTO. In return, Russian President Vladimir Putin retaliated by denying US oil giants Chevron and Conoco-Phillips the right to develop oil and gas fields in the Barents Sea. Putin also cemented a relationship with US nemesis Hugo Chavez by concluding an arms deal involving 24 advanced Russian fighter jets, 53 helicopters, and 100,000 Kalashnikov rifles in addition to discussing the possibility of Russia becoming involved in building an oil pipeline in Venezuela.
In addition, Russia earlier joined in an important energy alliance in 2001 with China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that reportedly will shortly include Iran as a full member because of the Persian state's vast energy reserves so important to the other members, especially China. The intent of this alliance appears to be an effort to counter US attempts to control the hydrocarbon-rich Eurasian/Caspian Basin region and establish its own foothold in this vital part of the world. The SCO may be looking to add still another new member to its alliance after the CIA instigated fake 2004-05 "orange revolution" installed Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko was forced to accept pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovich as his Prime Minister on August 3. The CIA election tactic "coup" robbed Yanukovich of the presidency he won, and he now may look to get even by moving Ukraine into the Russian orbit dealing the US another defeat as opposition alliances gain in strength at the expense of the ruler of the world wannabe that looks a little vulnerable.
The US may face still further obstacles as Russia, China and Iran have announced or signaled their intentions to shift a portion of their dollar reserves away from the US currency into others like the euro. Russia also plans to make its ruble convertible into the other major currencies, and Iran intends to open an oil bourse, (its scheduled opening now delayed several times) and sell at least part of its oil in euros. China, in fact, just did it by opening its Shanghai Petroleum Exchange on August 18, began trading in gasoline, announced bitumen, methanol and glycol will follow and soon thereafter will trade in other petroleum and chemical products including crude and refined oil and liquified gas. The announcement didn't mention what currency trading would be done in, but likely initially at least it will be in the Chinese yuan with possible euro trading to follow.
If China, Russia, and Iran ally to reduce their dollar holdings, trade oil in euros, rubles and/or other non-dollar currencies and can get other oil producing states to join with them and do the same like Venezuela, it will pose a serious threat to US dominance in the region as well as undermine it's position as the world's economic leader. It will also increase world instability, as the US won't stand pat in the face of actions it sees as a challenge to its preeminence or anything that may harm its economy. Nonetheless, it shows what's possible when enough nations join together to counter the hostile effects of US dominance in trade and all else. In alliance these nations have strength in numbers, may attract others to join with them and thus be able to hold their own against US hegemony, weaken it significantly in the process, and end up negating whatever steps the US may attempt to fight back.
The Lesson Learned May Be Resist and Ye Shall Succeed
To prevail, it's just a matter of enough nations joining in their common self-interest to find out how successful they may be if they try. It's like the old story of the schoolyard bully who's able to get away with beating up on weaker kids until one or more fight back, strike a telling blow, and get away with it. At that point, the game is up, and the bully knows his bullying days are over. Others picked on know they too can fight back, some will if picked on, and bullies only like picking on the ones who won't. It's the same story with nations as with schoolyard bullies. The developing world can put down the US bully if enough of them in it refuse to be pushed around any more, join together for added strength and fight back.
History is on their side as the US seems to be repeating the same fatal errors all other dominant empires in the past did that overreached and paid for it with their own demise. Grandiose imperial plans and dreams and super weapons to back them up are no insulation against the rest of the world determined to resist them. That's what Yale Senior Research Scholar Immanuel Wallerstein believes in his 2003 book The Decline of American Power. In it he said the US "has been a fading global power since the 1970s, and the US response to the (9/11) terrorist attacks has accelerated this decline......the economic, political and military factors that contributed to US hegemony are the same factors that will inexorably produce the coming US decline." Retired professor Chalmers Johnson also predicts the dissolution of the US empire if present trends continue. He outlines a disturbing scenario in his 2004 book Sorrows of Empire including a "state of perpetual war," a loss of democracy, and the US going bankrupt because of its inability to maintain its "grandiose military projects." The conclusion is the US is acting recklessly and imprudently like all other dominant empires before it and is increasingly vulnerable as a result. It just remains for enough other nations joining together in a common purpose for them likely to be able to achieve what they set out to do.
It's already happening with positive results that holds promise of resonating and inspiring others in the developing world to join the struggle for their own rights. It happens in schoolyards, and it's now beginning to happen in global trade. It may just be a matter of time before the fight is carried to the larger issues of war and peace, social equity and global justice. All that's needed to advance the ball are a few more dedicated leaders like Hugo Chavez and Bolivia's Evo Morales combined with enough good people acting with courage and determination on their own behalf throughout the developing world to spread their message of resistance, ignite it into a raging bonfire, and extend it to others willing to join the fight for the possible big reward of a better world. That may be happening now on the streets of Mexico as millions there are rallying behind their candidate Lopez Obrador so far denied by electoral fraud of the office of President he clearly won. Win or lose, their voices are being heard in Mexico and throughout the region. Their resonance may inspire others to battle as courageously for the social equity and justice they too deserve.
Hugo Chavez is on a mission to help them by trying to build unity among developing nations to "confront the great challenges of this imperialist neo-liberal era." As part of it, he just concluded a whirlwind tour of seven nations including Russia, Iran, Vietnam, Belarus, Mali and Benin, and beginning August 22 he'll spend a week in China (his fourth visit there) to strike energy and investment deals and try to build political support with this important Asian country in need of the oil Venezuela can supply it. Chavez and his allies know how important these alliances are, and if they can convince enough other nations to join with them their strength in combination may give them the power they need to challenge US dominance and end its bullying days forever. For now it's just a glorious dream. But isn't that the way all great social movements begin?
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
Comment on this Editorial
Editorial: The Lobby
Qumsiyeh: A Human Rights Web
On the Israel/Zionist lobby in America and its influence on US policy: Why strategically and tactically focusing on this lobby maybe important
Why did the British Empire and all colonial powers before it use "divide and conquer" while the US government seems intent on unifying diverse groups from Iraqi resistance to Sunni Hamas to Shi'i Hizballah to Arab Nationalists? This administration talks and acts based on a supposed common threat and in the process ofcourse unifying others and creating enemies. Perhaps the Zionist coined "Islamofascism" term should be a hint. Perhaps those who think tribally can only think of others as equally tribal: if there is a Jewish nation and not simply a religion then there must also be an Islamic nation and not simply a religion. If "goyim/gentiles" are inherenltly anti Jewish then it would make sense to lump Castro, Chavez, Nasrallah and Ahmedinujad (and hence help them find common ground)! Or does it? Looking carefully at these questions sometimes generates discomfort in both left and right circles. A lifelong pacifict once stated that they were put on this earth to comfort the afflicted and make the comfortable uncomfortable. It is IMHO important to engage in open discussion regardless of where one stands on these matters. The following four pages are not intended to be a comprehensive analysis but hopefully strings to begin this needed discussion. I would suggest actually that the Council for National Interest, ADC or other groups host a conference specifically to delve deeper into the questions raised.
Howard Friedman, President of AIPAC, titled his letter of July 30, 2006 to friends and supporters of AIPAC "Look what you've done". He explained: "Israel is fighting a pivotal war for its life...the expected chorus of international condemnation of Israel's actions. ..only ONE nation in the world came out and flatly declared: Let Israel finish the job.. That nation is the United States of America--and the reason it had such a clear, unambiguous view of the situation is YOU and the rest of America
Jewry....How do we do it? ... decades of long hard work which never ends." Ari Berman in The Nation stated that "The congressional reaction to Hezbollah's attack on Israel and Israel's retaliatory bombing of Lebanon provide the latest example of why AIPAC's lock on US foreign policy in the Middle East must be examined." (July 31, 2006 http://www.alternet.org/story/39679 ). So let us do a little research on this lobby and cite some resources. Here we divide this into two sections:
a) Articles that describe the lobby and its influence (perhaps not "lock") on US foreign policy, and
b) A list of situations where other elite interests (oil, weapons manufacturers) collided with the Israel lobby and the latter won. There are of course other situations where the lobby lost, especially early in its career (e.g. 1956 with Eisenhauer and the Suez crisis).
First a relevant quote from Nehemia Stessler writing in Haaretz, May 12, 1989: "Israel's dependence on the United States is far greater than suggested by the sum of $3 billion. Israel's physical existence depends on the Americans in both military and political terms. Without the US, we would not be equipped with the latest fighter planes and other advanced weapons. Without the American veto, we would have long since been expelled from every international organization, not to speak of the UN, which would have imposed sanctions on us that would have totally paralyzed Israel's international trade, since we cannot exist without importing raw material"
A) ARTICLES ON THE LOBBY AND ITS INFLUENCE
About the recent resolution in Congress to support Israel and condemn Hezbollah and Hamas (passed 410 to 8): "They the Congress were given a resolution by AIPAC, They didn't prepare one." former Carter Administration National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who addressed the House Democratic Caucus on July 19, 2006.
"The Bush Administration is bad enough in tolerating measures they would not accept anywhere else but Israel, But the Congress, if anything, is urging the Administration on and criticizing them even at their most accommodating. When it comes to the Israeli-Arab conflict, the terms of debate are so influenced by organized Jewish groups like AIPAC that to be critical of Israel is to deny oneself the ability to succeed in American politics." Henry Siegman, former head of the American Jewish Congress and a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.
"In 2002, two Democrats in Congress with records of voting against Israel's interests -- Reps. Earl Hilliard of Alabama and Cynthia McKinney of Georgia.. faced primary opponents who received substantial support from Jewish donors. A majority of AIPAC board members gave either to McKinney's challenger or Hilliard's or both. Hilliard and McKinney lost. Bill Banks, McKinney's campaign manger, charged that AIPAC had made her the "No. 1 candidate to try to remove from office." AIPAC denied the accusation." Washington Post, "Pro-Israel Lobby Has Strong Voice: AIPAC Is Embroiled in Investigation of Pentagon Leaks" 9/5/04
In 1997, Fortune magazine asked members of Congress and their staffs to list the most powerful lobbies in Washington. AIPAC was ranked second behind the American Association of Retired People, but ahead of the AFL-CIO and the National Rifle Association. A National Journal study in March 2005 reached a similar conclusion, placing AIPAC in second place (tied with AARP).
'My No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel.' Dick Armey, September 2002
"There are a lot of guys at the working level up here on Capitol Hill who happen to be Jewish, who are willing . . . to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness . . . These are all guys who are in a position to make the decisions in these areas for those senators . . . You can get an awful lot done just at the staff level." Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC.
Think tanks that shape US policy are decidedly with the Lobby or even established as offshoots of the lobby: Washington Institute on Near East Affairs, the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Center for Security Policy, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. "The incestuous nature of the proliferating boards and think tanks, whose membership lists are more or less identical and totally interchangeable, is frighteningly insidious. Several scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, including former Reagan UN ambassador and long-time supporter of the Israeli right wing, Jeane Kirkpatrick, make their pro-Israel views known vocally from the sidelines and occupy positions on other boards.
Probably the most important organization, in terms of its influence on Bush administration policy formulation, is the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). Formed after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, specifically to bring Israel's security concerns to the attention of U.S. policymakers and concentrating also on broad defense issues, the extremely hawkish, right-wing JINSA has always had a high-powered board able to place its members inside conservative U.S. administrations. Cheney, Bolton, and Feith were members until they entered the Bush administration. Several lower level JINSA functionaries are now working in the Defense Department. Perle is still a member, as are Kirkpatrick, former CIA director and leading Iraq-war hawk James Woolsey, and old-time rabid pro-Israel types like Eugene Rostow and Michael Ledeen. Both JINSA and Gaffney's Center for Security Policy are heavily underwritten by Irving Moskowitz, a right-wing American Zionist, California business magnate (his money comes from bingo parlors), and JINSA board member, who has lavishly financed the establishment of several religious settlements in Arab East Jerusalem."
Previous CIA analysts Kathleen and Bill Christison write on the Israeli lobby http://www.counterpunch.org/christison09062004.html
Total Taxpayer Cost per Israeli: $23,240 (no other country comes even close). "Other recipients get their money in quarterly installments, but Israel receives its entire appropriation at the beginning of each fiscal year and can thus earn interest on it. Most recipients of aid given for military purposes are required to spend all of it in the US, but Israel is allowed to use roughly 25 per cent of its allocation to subsidize its own defence industry. It is the only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent, which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the US opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. Moreover, the US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and has given it access to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Finally, the US gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its NATO allies and has turned a blind eye to Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons."
Mearsheimer and Walt, London Review of Books, 3/23/06 explain how the US policy in the Middle East is shaped by the lobby even against other elite interests http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html
Philip Zelikow, member of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and a counsellor to
Condoleezza Rice stated clearly at the University of Virginia in September 2002 that Iraq was not a threat to the US but the 'unstated threat' was a
'threat against Israel' adding that the government, "doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell."
"Chomsky cites Stephen Zunes approvingly to the effect that 'there are far more powerful interests that have a stake in what happens in the Persian Gulf region than does AIPAC.' The practical implication of this statement is that it is wrong for anti-imperialists activists to pay too much attention to the Israel lobby. It's a waste of resources and a diversion from the real target -- U.S. imperialism. The problem is that Zunes and Chomsky are again confusing their own leftist framework with the right wing framework they oppose. It is wrong to focus on identity as such, including the national/ethnic identity of Jews/Israelis who are key figures in the imperialist machinery. It is wrong to see the world as fundamentally a clash of tribal identities. But it is not wrong to strategically focus on the Israel Lobby. The "Israel Lobby" shouldn't be an alternative framework that competes with 'U.S. imperialism' as an explanation to world events. The Israel Lobby should rather be a shorthand designation for a segment of the elites that fully participates in making U.S. imperialism happen. To insist on ignoring the Lobby is to help it maintain a 'safe zone' for U.S. imperialism to hide behind. This is indeed one of the many useful services the Lobby provides for the larger Washington power system. The Israel Lobby is today a major purveyor of racist and pro-war propaganda, which is shielded from public criticism by its association with Israel and the sword of fighting anti-Semitism. To ignore it is to create a safe zone for racism and war at the heart of the U.S. public sphere." Gabriel Ash, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Apr06/Ash20.htm
"What happened to all those nice plans? Israel's governments mobilized the collective power of US Jewry - which dominates Congress and the media to a large degree - against them. Faced by this vigorous opposition, all the presidents; great and small, football players and movie stars - folded, one after another." Israeli journalist and peace activist Uri Avnery
B) EXAMPLES OF SKIRMISHES BETWEEN THE LOBBY AND OTHER ELITES IN WHICH THE FORMER WON
- 1930's: Career British diplomats issued a government backed white paper suggesting tying Jewish immigration to Palestine to Palestinian economic interests, not just the Yishuv capacity. Weissman and other British Zionists mobilized their forces en masse and the effort succeeded in reversing this policy quickly (well discussed in Tom Segev's excellent book on this period).
-1940-1945: When there was strong sentiment in the US to help European Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, the Zionist lobby both in Britain and the US lobbied to limit Jewish immigration to the west and keep the door open only for one destination: Palestine (see Naeim Giladi's book "Ben Gurion Scandals" and Lenni Brenner's "51 Documents: History of the Nazi-Zionist collaboration).
- 1948: When the State Department, the Pentagon, and all major career diplomats in the US stood against support for the establishment of Israel, President Truman explained his decision to his cabinet (privately) very clearly as relating to the lobby and voting adding that "I have no Arab constituency" (Truman papers and many history books). The US went on to twist the arms of other countries to support partition and the imposing of a Jewish state on Palestine.
- June 1967: Israeli forces attacked the USS Liberty in international waters. Naval demands of an investigation were immediately attacked by the lobby in Congress. Senior Navy officers (and all survivors of the attack) were angry, but could do nothing in the face of a concerted media silencing campaign. Even in 2003 when new evidence emerged, little was reported on it (see http://www.ussliberty.org/)
- 1980's: Israel uses US technology and financing to develop its own arms export industry competing with US arms exporters but also giving advanced
technologies to US competitors. Many US arms industry leaders are unhappy, and some even complain openly, and Israeli-made "Python II" missiles now arm Chinese warplanes and in one instance threatened US planes. (see http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/p-krane.html).
- May 1987: The Reagan administration notified Congress of its intention to sell 1600 Maverick anti-tank missiles to Saudi Arabia. According to the NY
Times: "Within half an hour, lobbyists from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the only group registered to lobby Congress on legislation affecting Israel, were on the telephone to lawmakers about the proposal. Over the next 13 days, the committee mobilized its nationwide network of supporters with a series of memorandums and telephone calls urging them to lobby Congress. Though it is unclear whether the committee, known as AIPAC, can take all the credit, more than 260 members of Congress co-sponsored resolutions to block the sale, prompting President Reagan to withdraw it." http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/pg-nyt2.html
- Early 1991: Israel asked the US for $10 billion in loan guarantees to settle Russian Jews. George HW Bush told Shamir that Israel could have the guarantees if it freezes settlement building and promises that no Russian Jews would be settled in the occupied areas. Shamir simply called the lobby leaders to help. Mobilization was so swift and powerful that Bush received a barrage of media questions in a Press conference in 1991.. Bush uttered his famous line "I am only this little guy in the white house .... there are these thousands on Capital Hill..." and then folded. Israel got its $10 billion and went on to increase the number of colonists/settlers in the
occupied Palestinian areas from less than 200,000 in 1991 to over 450,000 in 2000. This was the main reason for the collapse of the peace process and increased resentment and anger in the world.
- 1992-1998: President Clinton brought to high office people who were previously employed by the various Israeli lobby groups. Dennis Ross, who worked for WIMEP and was then appointed as US Envoy to the Middle East, and then returned to work for WINEP (see
http://www.activistsreader.com/articles%20folder/thinktankwatch-winep2.html).
- Martin Indyk worked for AIPAC and to my knowledge is the only lobbyist for a foreign country ever appointed ambassador to that same foreign country. These folks and many others made clear their interest in merging US policy and Israeli policy. Thus it was not surprising that Clinton issued assurances saying that if the Camp David meetings failed no one will be faulted. But even as negotiations continued in Taba, Ross, Clinton, and Indyk blamed Arafat. The Clinton administration, under the influence of these lobbyists, continued to support an aggressive policy in Iraq and tried valiantly to thwart the International community and many leaders of US businesses (including multinational companies) who pushed for ending the sanctions that were killing 6000 children every month.
- September 2001, Bush urged Israel to show restraint in its crackdown on the Palestinians, and pressed Sharon to allow Shimon Peres to meet with Arafat (he also said publicly that he supported the creation of a Palestinian state). Sharon accused Bush of trying 'to appease the Arabs at our expense' and stated 'we will not be Czechoslovakia'. Bush was reportedly furious at being compared to Chamberlain, and the White House press secretary called Sharon's remarks 'unacceptable'. The Lobby kicked into high gear. 89 Senators wrote a letter to Bush. Bush backed down. The New York Times stated that the letter 'stemmed' from a meeting two weeks before between 'leaders of the American Jewish community and key senators' with the involvement of AIPAC.
- April 2002. Israel's push into the West Bank embarrases Bush and he asked its government to halt the incursion and withdraw from Palestinian cities. He repeated this twice. Even Condaleeza Rice (then National Security Adviser) emphasized "Withdraw now means withdraw now". The Lobby swung into action. Tom DeLay, Dick Armey, and Trent Lott told Bush to back off. On April 11, White House press secretary said that Bush believed Sharon to be a "man of peace". No more was heard about withdrawals.
- March 2005: In a snub to the White House, AIPAC managed to get a bill severely restricting aid to the Palestinians and even denying the usual
clause for a presidential waiver for national security ttp://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/p-nir.html
- April 2005. After initially complaining about Israel's plans to increase settlement activities to surround Jerusalem (Maale Adumim area) in violation of the US drafted "road map", the Bush administration backed down in the face of the lobby; http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/p-softenbush.html
Shattering the myths as important both tactically and strategically:
There are many implications and ramifications of understanding the power and influence of the the lobby. What if Nehemia Stessler is correct as cited above that without US support Israel would not be able to continue its policies (which are now so clear in their impact on native Palestinians and Lebanes)? What if indeed there are many instances (as cited above) that Zionist special interests win against other special interests (oil and military)? What if fortune Magazine and CIA and other analysts are correct about the power of this lobby in America? What if this lobby can be defeated (as was shown in some cases)? What if it can't? How does this relate to the war on Iraq (pushed for by neocon Zionists)? How does one resolve the fact that Israel is now directly competing with US Weapons manufacturers in exporting high tech weapons even as most of this was made possible by US transfer of military technology and money to Israel? How does one reconcile the facts that Congress and the White House frequently interfere to protect Israel from repercussions of its violations of US and international laws regarding proliferation, arms export, use of arms against civilians etc?
There were rare times when the lobby was not as powerful in pushing the myth of equivalency of US and Israeli interests. In 1956 President Eisenhower listened to career diplomats and US elites, and pressed for Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza and Sinai despite rumblings from Congress (itself influenced by the lobby). But any such minor resistance vanished after 1967 when the lobby pushed the idea that US weapons in Israeli hands are keeping the Soviets/Communism out of the Middle East (a lie because communism could never get a foothold in Arab society). It is misleading to say that Israel rules US foreign policy. But it would be even more misleading (and especially self-defeating for anti-war activists) to ignore the central role of this lobby in shaping US foreign policy in the Middle East and in building support by various means. Nor would it be fair to ignore the PR aimed at exaggerating the "strategic use" argument to outright misinformation about threats and responses to promoting a particular and false view of Christianity ("Christian Zionism"). For those of us interested in freedom and equality (i.e. human rights), it is simply not correct to try to ignore history and facts and accept the language of our oppressor. It is playing into both Zionist and Imperial hands by accepting their claim that the reason for support of Israel (and for the war on Iraq) is a "strategic relationship" directed to serving only US elite interests (oil, military, and other corporate interests).
The hypocrisy in US foreign policy is now visible to most people around the world and even here in the US with a self-censoring media it is hard to avoid it. Take this simple fact that Israel has WMD, has violated 65 UN Security Council Resolutions and was shielded from 35 others by a US Veto (because of the strong lobby), discriminates against people based on religion and the US supports it. Iraq violated very few UN SC resolutions by invading Kuwait and the US bombed Iraq to a pre-industrial age (destroying water purification, sewage, electrical, transportation and other critical facilities), subjected it to sanctions (even after the withdrawal from Kuwait) that killed over 1 million civilians, and then bombed and occupied Iraq intending to build 14 permanent military basis in Iraq and installing a new regime!! Is it any wonder that people ask why we have such hypocrisy and question the given answers formulated in Tel Aviv. After all, Iraq will continue to be a magnet of resistance fighters pouring in from other Arab and Islamic countries as long as Israel is supported in its continued ethnic cleansing of Palestinians (i.e. As long as this hypocrisy is evident).
Some argue whether the Lobby is the tail that wags the dog or the dog that wags the tail (ignoring teh possibility that there is a pack of wild dogs atacking John Q Public and the conflict may not be between the tail and head of one dog!). Some believe the attack on Iraq was for corporate profits. Some believe it was WMD, defeating terrorism, and most lately bringing "democracy" and freedom. Few want to consider third possibilities. Many try desperately to ignore the big elephant in the room. Many US TV and newspapers consider a discussion outside this permissible duality as taboo (and in a way it becomes self-fulfilling prophecies). People are now getting facts about the Israeli lobby from international media, books, and most importantly the Internet. This explains why an increasing number of Democrats, Republicans, Greens, and Independents in the US are asking some serious questions that go beyond these well protected dualities. More people are realizing that without discussing the role of the Israeli lobby in pushing for endless wars, the story would be very incomplete at best and misleading at worse. This alone would be a good reason to tackle it. But it is also from a utilaterian and pragmatic angle that we must discuss this. If we can't even explain the instability and mayhem beyond the vague "US Capitalism" or the preposterous "Islamofascism", then how can we develp strategies to bring peace? Counteracting destructive policies cannot be done in isolation of understanding who shapes these policies and why. Pragmatically we can also learn nuances and differences between competing elitist powers so that we can use these divisions to effect positive policy changes (this is unfortunately how politics work). Pragmatically, we can also work to convince those who chose to be our enemies that they are doomed to failure and self destruction by continuing their policies (something we cannot do if we only have a vague notion of who they are let alone what motivates them). If someone is an alcoholic, isn't it best to directly confront them with their alcoholism rather than allow them to continue to perpetuate their own myths blaming others? Isn't that called enabling?
Many within the Israeli lobby, the military lobby, and the oil lobby (among others) are beginning to see the light and leaving that destructive work (because ultimately it is short term gains and their children will pay dearly for their arrogance, greed and errors). For example, thousands of ex-Zionists and hundreds of military and career diplomats are openly speaking about the destructive power of the Israeli lobby (not only destructive for Palestinians but for Americans and Israelis). The ground is shifting as Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others who believe in human rights and do not support political Zionism join hands not only to point out the elephant in the room but also to take the old elephant out of the room and to an overdue retirement. That political Zionism is failing is not in doubt. What is in doubt is whether enough US citizens will wake up in time and join us to prevent the US economy and the public welfare from being dragged down by and with this self-destructive ideology of political Zionism.
Other resources:
On why the war on Iraq
http://www.qumsiyeh.org/connectingthedotsiraqpalestine/
On think tanks, see
http://www.sovereignty.org.uk/siteinfo/newsround/iraq4.html
On Neocons (someone suggested we call them corporatists), see
http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/neocon/index.html
On elite interests collaborating and competing
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/
Excellent books by conscientious Jews:
"Out of the Ashes" by Marc Ellis
"The myths of Zionism" by John Rose
"51 Documents: History of the Nazi-Zionist Collaboration" and "Zionism in the age of dictators" by Lenni Brenner
"Beyond Chutzpah" and "Image and Reality of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict" by Norman Finkelstein
Original
Comment on this Editorial
Editorial: The Truth about the "Terror Plot".... and the new "pseudo-terrorism"
The Cutting Edge
Monday, August 21, 2006Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
I am disappointed to say that so far there has been very little serious critical discussion, grounded in factual analysis, of the alleged "Terror Plot" foiled on the morning of Wednesday, 10th August 2006. Except for a few noteworthy comment pieces, such as Craig Murray's critical speculations published by the Guardian last Friday, the mainstream media has largely subserviently parroted the official claims of the British and American governments. This is a shame, because inspection of the facts raises serious problems for the 10/8 official narrative.
No Imminent Plot
On the basis of the "Terror Plot", Prime Minister Tony Blair is planning "to push through 90-day detention without charge for terror suspects." Home Secretary Dr. John Reid has ordered the draft of new anti-terror legislation that would suspend key parts of the Human Rights Act 1998, to facilitate the indefinite detention of terrorism suspects in the UK without charge or trial. The law is planned to apply also to British citizens. And since 10th August, Britain was on its highest "critical" state of alert, which indicates the threat of an imminent terrorist attack on UK interests. Only in the last few days was it lowered back down to "severe".
The stark truth is that the "Terror Plot" narrative has been thoroughly, hopelessly, politicized. There was never any evidence of an imminent plot. A senior British official involved in the investigation told NBC News on 14th August that:
"In contrast to previous reports... an attack was not imminent, [and] the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports."
If British security officials knew that an attack was not imminent, the decision to raise the alert level to critical, indicating an imminent threat, was unjustified by the available intelligence -- this was, in other words, a political decision.
Other British officials told NBC News that many of the suspects had been under surveillance for more than a year, since before the 7th July 2005 terrorist attacks. "British police were planning to continue to run surveillance for at least another week to try to obtain more evidence" -- as it was clearly lacking. But: "American officials pressured them to arrest the suspects sooner." An American official also confirmed the disagreement over timing.
Brits Opposed Arrest and Torture of Key Informant
The NBC News report further reveals, citing British security sources, that British police did not want to yet arrest Rashid Rauf, the alleged mastermind, al-Qaeda facilitator and key informant on the details of the plot: "British security was concerned that Rauf be taken into custody 'in circumstances where there was due process,' according to the official, so that he could be tried in British courts. Ultimately, this official says, Rauf was arrested over the objections of the British."
However, the arrest of Rashid Rauf is at the crux of the case, as it purportedly triggered the ensuing wave of arrests, with Rauf providing in-depth details of the plot to his interrogators in Pakistan. Among the details attributed to Rauf is the idea that the plotters intended to mix a "sports drink" with a gel-like "peroxide-based paste" to create a chemical explosive that "could be ignited with an MP3 player or cell phone."
The problem is that several Pakistani newspapers reported on 13th August that "Rauf had 'broken' under interrogation." The reports were described by a Pakistani human rights group "as confirmation that he had been tortured." According to the Guardian, "Asma Jehangir, of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, said that it was obvious how the information had been obtained. 'I don't deduce, I know -- torture,' she said. 'There is simply no doubt about that, no doubt at all.'"
That most of the details about the plot came from Rauf, who has been tortured and "broken" while under interrogation in Pakistan, raises serious questions about the credibility of the story being promoted by the British and American governments.
Torture Precedents: the "Ricin Plot"
The revelation bears hallmarks of a familiar pattern. It is now well-known that the interrogation of terror suspects using torture was responsible for the production of the false "Ricin Plot" narrative. In much the same way as Pakistan has done now, Algerian security services alerted the British in January 2003 to the alleged plot after interrogating and torturing a former British resident Mohammed Meguerba. We now know there was no plot. Police officials repeatedly claimed they had found plastic tubs of ricin -- but these claims were false. Four of the defendants were acquitted of terrorism and four others had the cases against them abandoned. Only Kamal Bourgass was convicted, but not in connection with the "Ricin Plot", rather for murdering Special Branch Detective Constable Stephen Oake during a raid. Indeed, the "rendition" of terror suspects orchestrated by Britain, the United States, and other western states, attempts to institutionalize and legitimize torture as a means for the production of fundamentally compromised information used by western states to manipulate domestic public opinion.
It is perhaps not all that surprising then to learn that, according to a Daily Mail headline, the Pakistanis have found "no evidence against 'terror mastermind'", despite two weeks of interrogation under torture and forensic combing of Rauf's home and computer. The plot "may not have been as serious, or as far advanced, as the authorities initially claimed", observes the Mail somewhat sheepishly, and belatedly. "Analysts suspect Pakistani authorities exaggerated Rauf's role to appear 'tough on terrorism' and impress Britain and America." I wonder if the paucity of evidence has something to do with why, as the Independent on Sunday reported: "Both Britain and Pakistan say the question of Mr Rauf's possible extradition [to the UK] is some way off." Indeed. A spokesman for Pakistani's Interior Ministry gave some helpful elaboration, telling the Mail that extradition "is not under consideration."
The extradition to Britain of the alleged chief mastermind of a plot to kill thousands of Americans and British citizens by simultaneously blowing up multiple civilian airliners has, in other words, been ruled out indefinitely.
Er, Still No Evidence...
All the evidence now suggests that the Americans wanted immediate arrests without proper evidence. It seems, there was no imminent necessity of such immediate action, nor was there sufficient evidence of an imminent plot, other than the claims of an informant under torture. There are only two further possibilities. Either there was no real evidence of any plot at all; or these premature arrests could have seriously compromised a long-term surveillance operation against suspects who may have been involved in a wider network involved in terrorist-related activity, an operation that has now been scuppered -- meaning that we may never know for sure what they were actually planning.
Meanwhile, reports of material evidence in the UK have been unnervingly threadbare. Only eleven out of the 24 suspects arrested over the alleged airliner bomb plot have been charged, largely it seems on the basis of police findings of "bomb-making equipment and martyrdom videos". Out of the other thirteen, two have been released without charge. But the "bomb-making equipment" discovery of "chemicals" and "electrical components" is ambiguous at best, especially given that police descriptions of the alleged bomb construction plan is to mix a sports drink with a peroxide-based household gel (the chemicals), and detonate the mixture with an MP3 player or mobile phone (electrical components). If possession of such items makes you a terror suspect in possession of potential bomb-making equipment, then we are all terror suspects. As Craig Murray observes:
"Let me fess up here. I have just checked, and our flat contains nail polish remover, sports drinks, and a variety of household cleaning products. Also MP3 players and mobile phones. So the authorities could announce -- as they have whispered to the media in this case -- that potential ingredients of a liquid bomb, and potential timing devices, have been discovered. It rather lowers the bar doesn't it?"
Yes -- clearly, it lowers the bar to potentially include millions of perfectly normal British citizens. The police story is also, simply, scientifically absurd, as Murray further notes: "The idea that high explosive can be made quickly in a plane toilet by mixing at room temperature some nail polish remover, bleach, and Red Bull and giving it a quick stir, is nonsense." Citing US chemistry experts, Washington-based information security journalist Thomas C. Greene similarly concludes that
"... the fabled binary liquid explosive -- that is, the sudden mixing of hydrogen peroxide and acetone with sulfuric acid to create a plane-killing explosion, is out of the question... But the Hollywood myth of binary liquid explosives now moves governments and drives public policy. We have reacted to a movie plot."
CIA, MI6 and ISI
A report by Asia Times Pakistan Bureau Chief Syed Shahzad citing Pakistani intelligence sources confirms that the British-born Pakistanis arrested in Lahore and Karachi were active members of al-Muhajiroun, the banned UK-based extremist Islamist group currently directed by Omar Bakri Mohammed from Lebanon. Moreover, they had been penetrated by Pakistani intelligence services. "I can tell you with surety", said one Pakistani source, "that the boys [recently] arrested in Pakistan have long been identified by the Pakistani establishment." They had come to Pakistan and "interacted with a few officials of the Pakistani army" with a view to stage a coup against the Musharraf regime. Omar Bakri has repeatedly issued fatawas calling for the assassination of Musharraf. In fact:
"Pakistani intelligence -- coming from a strong military background -- penetrated deep into them... The closeness of the Pakistani intelligence with some boys with a Muhajiroun background was a known fact, but at what stage it turned out to be their 'London terror plot', we are completely in the dark. However, I safely make a conjecture that those highly motivated boys were exploited by agents provocateurs. A religious Muslim youth in his early 20s is undoubtedly full of hatred against the US, and if somebody would guide them to carry out any attack on US interests, there would be a strong chance that they would go for that. And I think this is exactly what happened... they were basically [en]trapped."
I have no doubt that these individuals could have been associated with extremist groups. But while it may be possible they were involved in terrorist-related activity, it is now indisputable that there was no evidence of an imminent plot, and the specific claims about the details were obtained from an informant under torture. We should therefore be very cautious in accepting the "Terror Plot" official narrative, as there is clearly a continuing danger of political interference compromising ongoing intelligence investigations for political expedience.
But the deep involvement of the Pakistani ISI in penetrating the very group that was subsequently arrested and tortured, raises serious questions about what was going on. Moreover, the Asia Times also notes that the Pakistani intelligence operation against these groups was coordinated on the initiative of the CIA and MI6. Indeed, MI6 had also ensured that a deep undercover British intelligence operative had "infiltrated the group, giving the authorities intelligence on the alleged plan", according to several US government sources.
The revelation that the arrestees were associated with al-Muhajiroun also raises serious intelligence issues. Omar Bakri Mohammed, the leader of the group, which recently operated under the names of the Saved Sect and al-Ghuraaba, was recruited by MI6 in the mid-1990s to recruit British Muslims to fight in Kosovo. Despite being implicated in the 7/7 London bombings, the British government exiled him to Lebanon where he resides safely outside of British jurisdiction, and thus effectively immune from investigation and prosecution. One inevitably wonders about the nature of Bakri's corrupt relationship with British intelligence services today.
P2OG: Stimulating Reactions
So what were the CIA, MI6 and ISI doing? Given the disturbing context here, in which the entire "Terror Plot" narrative has obviously been deeply politicized and to some extent even fabricated, a balanced analysis needs to account precisely for the stated new "counter-terror" strategies of western intelligence services. In August 2002, a report by the Pentagon's Defense Science Board revealed the latest strategic thinking about creating a new US secret counterintelligence organization -- the Proactive Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG) -- which would, among other things, conduct highly clandestine operations to "stimulate reactions" among terrorist groups, by infiltrating them or provoking them into action in order to facilitate targeting them. In January 2005, Seymour Hersh revealed in the New Yorker that the P2OG strategy had been activated:
"Under Rumsfeld's new approach, I was told, US military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists. This could potentially involve organizing and carrying out combat operations, or even terrorist activities."
Hersh refers to a series of articles by John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, and a RAND terrorism consultant, where he elaborates on this strategy of "countering terror" with Pseudo-Terror. "When conventional military operations and bombing failed to defeat the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya in the 1950s," muses professor Arquilla, "the British formed teams of friendly Kikuyu tribesmen who went about pretending to be terrorists. These 'pseudo gangs', as they were called, swiftly threw the Mau Mau on the defensive, either by befriending and then ambushing bands of fighters or by guiding bombers to the terrorists' camps." He goes on to advocate that western intelligence services should use the British case as a model for creating new "pseudo gang" terrorist groups, purportedly to undermine "real" terror networks. "What worked in Kenya a half-century ago has a wonderful chance of undermining trust and recruitment among today's terror networks. Forming new pseudo gangs should not be difficult." He then confidently observes about John Walker Lindh, the young American lad who joined the Taliban before 9/11: "If a confused young man from Marin County can join up with Al Qaeda, think what professional operatives might do."
Hmmm....
I'm thinking about it, and I'm looking at the deep intelligence penetration of al-Qaeda affiliated networks like al-Muhajiroun by the CIA, MI6 and ISI, and unfortunately I'm not experiencing the same sense of elation as Arquilla. Is the 10/8 "Terror Plot" connected to the post-9/11 P2OG strategy?
Whatever happened on 10/8, it is not the majestic "success story" painted by the British and American governments. It is symptomatic of something far worse, the mechanics of which will never be truly understood in the absence of a full-scale independent public inquiry focusing on the 7th July bombings, but including associated British and western "security" policies which see Pseudo-Terrorism as a legitimate tool of statecraft.
Comment on this Editorial
Editorial: Patriot Acts
Monday, August 21, 2006
by Sara Robinson
From the London Daily Mail:
British holidaymakers staged an unprecedented mutiny - refusing to allow their flight to take off until two men they feared were terrorists were forcibly removed.
The extraordinary scenes happened after some of the 150 passengers on a Malaga-Manchester flight overheard two men of Asian appearance apparently talking Arabic.
Passengers told cabin crew they feared for their safety and demanded police action. Some stormed off the Monarch Airlines Airbus A320 minutes before it was due to leave the Costa del Sol at 3am. Others waiting for Flight ZB 613 in the departure lounge refused to board it.
The incident fuels the row over airport security following the arrest of more than 20 people allegedly planning the suicide-bombing of transatlantic jets from the UK to America. It comes amid growing demands for passenger-profiling and selective security checks.
It also raised fears that more travellers will take the law into their own hands - effectively conducting their own 'passenger profiles'.
Let's see. A frightened mob selects a couple victims, accuses them of being would-be criminals without any evidence whatsoever, forcibly robs them of the cost of transcontinental airfare, and threatens anyone (pilots and airline personnel) that questions either their verdict or their right to exact "justice."
There's only one word for this. It's vigilantism, pure and simple. It's no different than any other kind of lynch mob. And it is beneath the dignity of a civilized society.
The reasons for and righteousness of the anger on display here are under furious discussion on both the left and right sides of the blogosphere. (See The Mahablog and Glenn Greenwald for two useful perspectives.)
But there's far more at stake here than meets the eye. If these vigilante mobs are allowed to get their way on airplanes, what's to stop them from taking their show on the road? Are we going to see subway mobs assaulting brown people on train platforms to "prevent" subway bombings? Are restarauters going to find themselves under pressure from upset diners not to hire -- or seat -- certain "frightening" classes of people? Will neighborhood groups press realtors to stop selling local homes to specific ethnic groups, for fear property values will drop? Or will they, perhaps, subject "undesirable" neighbors to harassment campaigns until they're forced to move on?
This all sounds far-fetched -- until you realize that we're hardly forty years past an era when most of this was standard operating procedure in much of America. Vigilante justice, racial segregation in public accommodations, real estate redlining, and sundown towns are part of a past that we've worked hard to leave behind. It will be a disgrace to all of us if we allow a few irrational bullies on airplanes put us on the road to bringing it all back.
Greater sanity is called for. The airlines need to start by stating, unequivocally, that they trust the decisions of their security staff on the ground. And even if they can't make that statement with a clear conscience, allowing vigilante mobs to intimidate their passengers and crews isn't the way to solve it. They are, after all, the ones paying for the Big Security Show down at the gates. Every time pilots allow the vigilantes to win, they undermine public confidence in that system.
But the buck really stops with the passengers. Which means those of us who fly frequently need to sit down and have a long chat with ourselves.
We know, without question, that bully squads bent on violence believe they're acting on the tacit values of the community. That motivation is certainly at work here -- and every time the mob succeeds, that belief is validated further. We also know that vigilantism stops when the larger community steps up and says, "No. You don't represent our values."
Today, I've been trying to imagine myself in this situation. Would I have the courage to speak up in support of the flight crew and the accused? What would I say? How much danger would I be in? Could I count on the better sense of my fellow passengers, and rely on them to support me? Or would I simply become a target myself? And, if that happened, could I handle the consequences?
You never know the answers to these kinds of questions until you're standing in that moment, of course. But a little role-playing now -- thinking through the most effective choices of word and action, deciding how much I'd be willing to risk -- might come in handy somewhere down the runway. At the very least, I could see myself saying: You put them off this plane, and I'll be staying, too. And I'd invite everyone who believes in equal justice -- and who refuses to live in fear of strangers -- to pack up their stuff and march down the jetway with me.
This much I know: There are some principles worth more than any plane ticket.
Comment on this Editorial
Editorial: Signs Economic Commentary
Donald Hunt
Signs of the Times
August 23, 2006
Gold closed at 612.00 dollars an ounce on Friday, down 5.0% from $642.40 at the close of the previous week. The dollar closed at 0.7797 euros Friday, down 0.7% from 0.7855 for the week. The euro closed at 1.2825 euros, up from 1.2732 at the close of the previous Friday. Gold in euros would be 477.19 euros an ounce, down 5.7% from 504.56 for the week. Oil closed at 71.14 dollars a barrel Friday, down 4.4% from $74.30 at the close of the Friday before. Oil in euros would be 55.47 euros a barrel, down 5.2% from 58.36 for the week. The gold/oil ratio closed at 8.60 Friday, down 0.5% from 8.64 at the close of the previous Friday. In the U.S. stock market, the Dow closed at 11,381.47 last week, up 2.6% from 11,088.03 for the week. The NASDAQ closed at 2163.95 Friday, up 5.2% from 2,057.71 at the close of the previous Friday. In U.S. interest rates, the yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note closed at 4.85%, down 12 basis points from 4.97 for the week.
With gold and oil down and U.S. stocks up, the mainstream media last week credited a mood of optimism. About all they could point to was the cease fire between Israel and Lebanon, which lowered oil prices and the lower than expected inflation numbers in the U.S.
Dow closes up 47 on investor optimism
By Joe Bel Bruno, AP Business Writer
Fri Aug 18, 4:53 PM ET
Investors eked out Wall Street's fifth-straight day of gains Friday, bucking concerns about lagging consumer sentiment and disappointing second-quarter results from Dell Inc.
Trading got off to a shaky start after the University of Michigan released its preliminary consumer sentiment index, which fell to 78.7 in August, down from 84.7 a month earlier. Wall Street had been looking for the index to slide to 83.8, and the greater-than-expected drop was viewed as a signal the economy may weaken too much.
The poor sentiment index threatened to stall the market's rally this week, which came on evidence of lower inflation risk and a gently slowing economy. Yet the market's recovery from its session lows - aided by a $36 billion stock buyback announced by Microsoft Corp. - shows investors remain optimistic that the Federal Reserve will keep the economy strong enough to withstand recession while keeping inflation contained.
"If this rally continues on bad economic news, that's saying that investors have already made a decision we're going to have a soft landing in this economy," said Alexander Paris, economist and market analyst for Chicago-based Barrington Research.
Technology stocks nevertheless saw pressure after Dell reported second-quarter profit fell 51 percent, with sales growth slowing to the lowest rate in three years. The world's largest computer maker - already reeling from a massive laptop battery recall earlier in the week - also disclosed the Securities and Exchange Commission has been investigating its accounting for the past year.
The Dow Jones industrial average rose 46.51, or 0.41 percent, to 11,381.47.
Broader stock indicators also made modest gains. The Standard & Poor's 500 index added 4.82, or 0.37 percent, to 1,302.30, and the Nasdaq composite index gained 6.34, or 0.29 percent, to 2,163.95.
For the week, the Dow jumped 2.65 percent, the S&P 500 gained 2.81 percent and the Nasdaq surged 5.16 percent.
Bonds pushed toward gains for a fourth straight session, with the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note falling to 4.84 percent from 4.86 percent late Thursday. The dollar was mixed against other major currencies, while gold prices fell.
Oil prices moved higher in trading after tumbling a day earlier on cooling of Middle East tensions. A barrel of light, sweet crude for September delivery settled at $71.14, up $1.08 from Thursday's close, in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. On Thursday, oil fell as low as $69.60 a barrel - a level not seen since June 21.
The optimistic story had to ignore the plainly temporary lull in the aggressive actions of the United States and Israel as well as both countries' recent abysmal failures in their wars. The media also had to downplay a bad housing market and low consumer confidence numbers in the United States.
Home sales decline in 28 states, D.C.
By Martin Crutsinger, AP Economics Writer
The slowdown in the once-sizzling housing market is spreading, with 28 states and the District of Columbia reporting spring sales declines, led by big drops in former boom areas of Arizona, Florida and California.
Nationally, sales were down 7 percent in the April-June quarter this year compared with the same period in 2005, the National Association of Realtors said Tuesday in its latest state-by-state look at housing conditions around the country.
The Realtors survey showed that the biggest declines occurred in states that had been enjoying red-hot sales during the five-year housing boom.
The five biggest declines this spring compared to the April-June period of 2005 were Arizona, down 26.9 percent; Florida, down 26.7 percent; California, down 25.3 percent; Virginia, down 23.9 percent, and Nevada, down 23.5 percent.
The Realtors report depicted a tale of two housing markets, with former boom areas experiencing declines and other areas of moderate sales gains during the boom years experiencing strong growth.
In all, 20 states had sales gains in the spring, led by Alaska, which enjoyed a 48.6 percent jump in sales; followed by Arkansas, up 17.9 percent; Texas, up 11.3 percent; North Carolina, up 11 percent, and Vermont, up 9.1 percent compared to the spring of 2005.
Now the optimists can say that 20 states had housing sales gains, and that the 28 states that had declines were those which saw the greatest gains in the bubble. The problem, as always, is that the process of decline will not be linear. Here is the Billmon blogger:
Home is Where the Sink Hole Is
...Here in paradise, the housing boom is over:
Southern California home sales fell to their lowest level in nine years last month as price appreciation continued to decelerate, data released Tuesday showed...
The figures could rev up the debate over whether the Southland's housing market will be able to navigate a "soft landing" that produces only moderate price declines, or face a brutal correction.
...[T]alk of a "soft landing" is one of the normal steps in a bubble addict's recovery program.
It goes something like this:
1.) We're not in a bubble. Prices are just recovering from years of underappreciation.
2.) It's a bubble, but it's a sustainable bubble because the fundamentals of the market have changed in the past decade. People need to recognize this. (Note: this stage is usually recognizable by an explosion in popularity of increasingly desperate and bizarre financing options.)
3.) Yes, growth is slowing, but we think we'll navigate a soft landing. It's absurd to think that housing in [fill in area where you live] will actually lose value.
4.) This is a disaster! Somebody better step in and do something! People are losing their life savings!
5.) Buyers have learned a permanent lesson this time. Homeowners need to accept the reality that the bubble of the past five years was a one-time fluke and we'll never see it happen again.
Rise and (eventually) repeat.
These are actually the residential real estate versions of the more generic speculative cycle described by economist (and wise old man of the academic hills) Charles Kindleberger in his classic text Manias, Panics and Crashes.
Working from a schematic first developed by the late financial economist Hyman Minsky, Kindleberger described the idealized bubble thusly:
- Displacement: Some sort of exogenous shock -- such as the huge drop in interest rates in the early '00s -- gets the speculative juices flowing.
- Credit expansion: Lenders hustle to get in on the action, feeding more liquidity into the market, creating a self-sustaining loop of price increases, which leads to:
- Euphoria: (Minsky, following Adam Smith, called it "overtrading.") Since expectations are adaptive, not rational, a prolonged period of rising prices creates a growing consensus that the boom will never end. Clever writers and hack economists like Jim Glassman and Kevin Hassett, hustle to develop new wave theories showing why this must be true.
- Distress: As price gains slow or plateau (there are only so many fools in the world with money to wager) it begins to dawn on the crowd -- always slowly, never at once -- that the boom will NOT last forever.
- Revulsion: (Minsky also used the term "discredit") The conviction sets in that the one thing you do not want to own, under any circumstances, is the asset in question -- the same one the Glassmans and Hassets of the world were recently predicting would grow to the sky.
It appears that Southern California (which originally was the product of an 1880s real estate bubble deliberately engineered by the Southern Pacific railroad) has arrived at the stage of "distress" and is quickly moving on to "revulsion."
In the stock market, the revulsion stage typically ends in massive panic-driven price declines, as everybody and their broker tries to crowd through the same small door. However, because real estate markets are less liquid and have higher transaction costs, and since houses are a consumption item as well as an asset, what traditionally happens when the bubble bursts is that sales just dry up. Nobody wants to buy at quoted prices (usually based on previous, overinflated appraisals) but sellers aren't willing -- and often aren't able -- to sell for less. So the market can't clear, as Southern California markets aren't clearing now.
This tends to make housing busts the economic equivalent of Chinese water torture: they generally begin slowly but last a long time, as home "owners" gradually capitulate to reality and lenders (or in the S&L industry's case, the federal government) slowly write off all that bad debt and dispose of all those foreclosed homes.
That's one reason why the collapse in real estate values that accompanied the Great Depression didn't bottom out until the late 1940s. It's also why it took almost ten years for the last home price boom/bust cycle in California to come around again. According to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, the reg agency that tracks these things, home prices in the greater Los Angeles metro area didn't return to their 1990 peak until the spring of 2000.
But what makes things different -- and potentially more exciting -- this time around are the gaudy new financing gimmicks Kevin mentions: no money down loans, interest-only mortgages, ARMs that reset to truly usurious rates, etc. If and when these loans blow up, and they will, it could leave many home "owners" with no alternative but to sell and sell quickly -- or simply mail the keys back to the bank.
Combine that with the fact that this housing bubble, far more than past bubbles, appears to have been driven by the speculative investment demand of people who have no intention of living in the houses they've bought, and the finale could be much more spectacular, and play out a lot faster, at least in some markets.
How fast and how spectacular depends in part on Chairman Ben and the boys and girls at the Fed. Although short-term interest rates have now jumped 425 basis points since the trough in the summer of 2004 (a whopper of a move by past standards, particularly in real, after-inflation terms) long-term mortgage rates have increased much more modestly, thanks in large part to our good friends at the People's Bank of China. This is the main reason anyone can still talk about a "soft landing" for Southern California home prices.
However, now that the downward wave of the cycle is well-entrenched, the Fed is going to have to move relatively fast to keep the "soft landing" scenario from smashing into the runway. But experience teaches that the Fed rarely shifts from tightening to easing fast enough to head these kind of things off -- the fall of 1990 and the summer and fall of 2000 being two case studies in point.
My guess is that the Southern California market (along with the New York metro market and the South Florida market and a few other places where the bubble got well out of hand) are going to "auger in," as the test pilots used to call it. They've soared too high, and the Fed isn't going to be able to move quickly enough to catch them because national growth and inflation conditions aren't going to let it.
But whether the bust is national, as opposed to just regional, may depend as much or more on our Chinese benefactors as on the Fed.
The chain of causation is somewhat perverse: The Fed's recent decision to at least pause in its tightening campaign has put downward pressure on the dollar, which is forcing the People's Bank to buy dollars to protect the "crawling peg" with the renminbi, said dollars then being reinvested in the Treasury market, which drives long-term yields down, which pulls mortgage yields down, too.
As long as that particular windfall lasts, the prospects for a soft landing to the national real estate bubble look reasonably good -- that is, as long as the regional real estate busts, plus the overextended state of the American consumer and the mysterious reluctance of U.S. firms to funnel their bloated profits into capital spending, don't tip the national economy over into a recession.
You'd need a Cray supercomputer hooked up to a crystal ball to figure out the odds on that latter scenario, and I have neither. What I do have is a conventional 30-year mortgage at 6.12%, and a house with lots of equity located in one of the country's more stable real estate markets. So I'm personally not sweating the housing bubble too much. Yet.
Last week we wrote about the longer-term issues of imperial competition for resources and cheap labor. We should not think that these competitions between different power centers are exclusively economic. In Political Ponerology, Andrzej Lobaczewski wrote in 1984:
Upbeat economists point out that humanity has gained a powerful slave in the form of electric energy and that war, conquest, and subjugation of other countries is becoming increasingly unprofitable in the long run. Unfortunately... nations can be pushed into economically irrational desires and actions by other motives whose character is meta-economic (Political Ponerology, p. 93)
In fact, reducing all motivations to economic ones is precisely the kind of oversimplification that plays right into the hands of the pathocrats. Lobaczewski argues that, to the extent that a society's working model of human nature is inadequate, that society's institutions are more vulnerable to ponerization, or takeover by psychopaths. What Lobaczewski writes about western European legal psychology in the Middle Ages can be applied to the homo oeconomicus of classical economics, the rational calculator of economic advantage:
A "Western civilization" thus arose hampered by a serious deficiency in an area which both can and does play a creative role, and which is supposed to protect societies from various kinds of evil. This civilization developed formulations in the area of law, whether national, civil, for finally canon, which were conceived for invented and simplified beings. These formulations gave short shrift to the total contents of the species Homo sapiens.For many centuries any understanding of certain psychological anomalies found among some individuals was out of the question, even though these anomalies repeatedly caused disasters.
This civilization was insufficiently resistant to evil, which originates beyond the easily accessible areas of human consciousness and takes advantage of the enormous gap between formal or legal thought and psychological reality. (Political Ponerology, p. 48)
Such models have just enough truth in them to seem plausible while concealing dangerous simplifications. The neoclassical economic model of human psychology, a model with deepest roots in the Anglo-American world, cannot adequately reflect the complexity of motivations in most humans. Its psychology is plainly inadequate to all but psychopaths. It should be no surprise, then, that our culture is wide open to ponerizing forces. Furthermore, late capitalism's preferred institution, the modern business corporation, provides an ideal vehicle for ponerization. The recent boom in the study of psychopathy has led many to see the corporation as a psychopath, that is, someone without a conscience. Given legal personhood under the Constitution by the U.S. Supreme Court, the psychopath that pretends to have empathy when it has absolutely none. It's rules are the same as an individual psychopath's.
Neoliberals have pushed the privatization of just about everything. Even roads are now beginning to be privatized in the United States. However, we clearly cannot depend on corporations to fund infrastructure investment - usually only government can do that - but in the United States, with a neoliberal economic policy and a neoconservative foreign policy, the government is only good for destroying other countries' infrastructure and for funneling money to cronies in the military-industrial complex.
Alice Friedemann compares multinational corporations to "out of control robots." The economic rationality of these psychopathic actors are placing the world in increasing danger. Friedemann, a proponent of peak oil, marshals some startling facts about the lesser-known aspects of our energy dependence. Supply chains, made more efficient with just-in-time supply, and the offshoring of jobs to low-wage, low regulation countries, have increased the vulnerability of developed economies to transportation interruptions due to natural disasters or high energy costs:
The fragility of global trade and infrastructure
By Alice Friedemann
Science fiction movies used to scare us with out-of-control robots bent on world destruction. If there's a runaway robot now, it's global corporations doing what's best for the shareholder rather than the citizens and nations of the world. Pensions have been looted, health care benefits taken away, taxes avoided, and regulations ignored.
Risks are being taken that could bring down the global financial system.
One of the risks to global trade is due large computer and electronic companies using the same outsourcers for similar components from the same region -- even the same place - such as an industrial park in Hsinchu, Taiwan. The risk is a single source of failure.
Microprocessors are essential to the modern world.
Billions of chips are created every year for a myriad of applications: in autos, airplanes, ATMs, air conditioners, calculators, cameras, cell phones, clocks, DVDs, machine tools, medical equipment, microwave ovens, office and industrial equipment, routers, security systems, thermostats, TVs, VCRs, washing machines - nearly all electrical devices.
So when an earthquake struck Taiwan in 1999, world markets were shaken. Willem Roelandts of Xilinx immediately knew this had the possibility of hurting the world economy. "There is not an electronic product in the world that does not contain a Taiwanese component", he said.
Even though the factories were fine, electrical and transportation systems weren't, so production and delivery of components stopped, which caused assembly lines in the United States to halt as well. Wall Street traders sold off electronic firms, especially Dell, HP, and Apple.
You wouldn't think the United States would build microchip factories offshore in industries that were essential to its national and economic security. But low wages are irresistible to corporations. Also, many foreign countries are closer to sources of natural gas, which is declining at an alarming rate in North America.
According to Jack Gerard, president and CEO of the American Chemistry Council, " "Natural gas is a raw material for compounds used in thousands of consumer products - from agriculture, telecommunications and automobiles to pharmaceuticals...and food packaging. More than 96 percent of all manufactured goods are directly touched by chemistry. The industries that rely on chemistry together represent more than a quarter of the nation's entire workforce. Unaffordable natural gas is driving away investment, crippling our manufacturing base, and reducing job opportunities. It is transferring to foreign countries the advanced research and technology desperately needed in order to compete on the world stage. In effect, our nation's energy policy has become its de facto manufacturing and national-security policies as well.26
Industries also like to locate factories where environmental regulations are less stringent.
The chemicals used to create computer parts have resulted in 29 superfund sites in Silicon Valley, the most concentrated number of superfund spots in America. At the Advanced Micro Devices superfund site in Sunnyvale, California, chemicals are in the groundwater and soil that can cause death, cancer, brain and central nervous system damage, leukemia, anemia, convulsions, nausea, unconsciousness. The zinc and copper at this site are toxic to plants, ruining what were once some of the best orchards in the world.
The need to go where costs are lowest is driven by the enormous amount of money it takes to build a mega-size wafer fabrication plants -- nearly ten billion dollars.27
Part of this amount is due to very high insurance costs. In 1997, an Hsinchu Taiwan fabrication plant had a fire that caused $421 million dollars in smoke and water damage.
Business interruptions can cost a fabrication plant 20-30 million dollars in lost revenue. For instance, a plant that had a four-hour long electricity outage had to spend the next four days recalibrating their equipment, resulting in a $5 million dollar loss. Insurance companies have responded with huge deductibles and capped the loss amounts.28
As unexpected energy shortages and outages grow more common in the future, this will wreak havoc on microprocessor production.
Outsourced products are delivered just-in-time to the factory assembly. According to Barry C. Lynn, "Our corporations have built a global production system that is so complex, geared so tightly, and leveraged so finely, that a breakdown anywhere increasingly means a breakdown everywhere, much in the way that a small perturbation in the electricity grid in Ohio tripped the great North American blackout of August 2003".29
Less major blows to assembly lines have come from strikes, SARS, fires, explosions, and manufacturing mistakes, such as the ones that resulted in Chiron's failure to deliver half of the American flu vaccine. Fortunately, the impacts so far have been temporary and regional. But it's not hard to imagine events that could result in worldwide disruptions leading to a global depression.
United States Infrastructure
While the EROI of oil was high, we built a vast infrastructure to deliver clean water, treat sewage, built roads, bridges, dams, and so on. Any non-fossil fuel type of energy will have a great deal of work just maintaining the existing infrastructure.
...Consider just the drinking water infrastructure, the main reason our life spans have increased so much.23 In this century, all of the 600,000 miles of pipes delivering clean water to homes will need to be replaced. Every component of the water system is aging. The energy required to replace or maintain thousands of treatment plants, pumping stations, reservoirs and dams over the next century is staggering.24
Useful Life Matrix
Clean Water
Years |
Component |
80 - 100 |
Collections |
50 |
Treatment Plants - Concrete Structures |
15- 25 |
Treatment Plants - Mechanical & Electrical |
25 |
Force Mains |
50 |
Pumping Stations - Concrete Structures |
15 |
Pumping Stations - Mechanical & Electrical |
90 - 100 |
Interceptors |
Drinking Water
Years |
Component |
50- 80 |
Reservoirs & Dams |
60- 70 |
Treatment Plants - Concrete Structures |
15 - 25 |
Treatment Plants - Mechanical & Electrical |
65 - 95 |
Trunk Mains |
60- 70 |
Pumping Stations - Concrete Structures |
25 |
Pumping Stations - Mechanical & Electrical |
65- 95 |
Distribution |
And consider the energy required to deliver the water. According to Allan Hoffman, "Energy is required to lift water from depth in aquifers, pump water through canals and pipes, control water flow and treat waste water, and desalinate brackish or sea water. Globally, commercial energy consumed for delivering water is more than 26 Quads, 7% of total world consumption".25
Energy shortages for instance. Already many businesses in the chemical, agricultural, steel, glass, and other industries have failed or are in pain from high natural gas prices in America.30 31 32 When enough key suppliers of infrastructure components fail, this will stop the downstream assembly line. Suppliers might also go out of business because of economic failure in the manufacturing country, civil or regional wars, and extreme weather.
Despite the risk, single-sourcing occurs because cutting costs is how you stay in business, so the cheapest supplier wins the race to the bottom. Corporations have gone cuckoo with outsourcing; letting suppliers located in potentially shaky political and economic countries hatch their nest eggs.
When the fledglings hatch they often fly on Fed Ex, which is so reliable it seems as if the supplier were on the other side of town instead of across the world. But the airline industry is reeling from higher energy prices, so it's possible that the intricate, just-in-time, high-speed aircraft delivery of electronic gear will shift to ships, a much slower, less predictable way to deliver cargo "just-in-time".
Most products traded globally travel by sea. Over 50,000 large ships carry 80 percent of the worlds' cargo. Shipping faces critical challenges in the future.
Oil and LNG tankers are increasingly failing from corrosion. Over 2400 tankers split up or nearly did so from 1995 to 2001 according to the International Association of Independent Tanker Owners.33
...Continued global trade at current levels cannot be sustained as energy declines. At some point global trade will lessen due to a combination of declining fossil fuels, piracy, terrorism, energy shocks, pandemics, natural disasters, political turmoil, global depression, and a shortage of large, non-oil based vessels.
Global trade will not disappear, since moving freight over water is very efficient, but there will be several discontinuities as declining energy forces us to roll backwards though history.
Most cargo is shipped on enormous container vessels that can be over 1100 feet long with ten thousand containers stacked many stories high.
The first discontinuity will come when we have to retrofit ships to run on coal, and set up coal stations and tenders all over the world.
The second discontinuity will occur when coal gets scarce and container ships are moved by wind power (if this is even possible), with liquid fossil fuel only used when entering and leaving ports. A further step down will happen when it's too energy-intensive to keep harbors dredged deep enough accommodate large container ships. It's already very tricky getting these large ships into port, a local pilot is brought in and complex computer systems are used to delicately park these gargantuan ships along the wharf.43
These huge ships would have to remain offshore and unloaded to smaller ships, if that is possible, since they weren't designed for this.
The third discontinuity will come when containerization can no longer be supported due to lack of fuel and/or electricity for cranes, trucks, and trains. Containerization revolutionized the amount of cargo and the swiftness with which it could be loaded and delivered from origin to destination by orders of magnitude over earlier forms of transportation.
The final discontinuity will come when ships need to be built from wood, because the remaining mineral ore is too low quality and energy-intensive to process, and when we can no longer recycle the rusted and dispersed iron and steel.
Whether "Peak Oil" reflects actual short-sighted over-exploitation of a limited resource or a deliberate strategy of elites without conscience creating shortages to establish control and increase the suffering of others, our society is frighteningly vulnerable to its effects.
Comment on this Editorial
The Fear Factor
Fear is the ultimate tool of this government - "The truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country.... People shouldn't be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people."
by David DeGraw
August 22, 2006
It all began when...
"America's war grew worse and worse, when unfamiliar words like 'collateral' and 'rendition' became frightening.... The truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country.... Fear became the ultimate tool of this government."
Is this fiction, or reality?
Is it, as one movie reviewer put it, "a vile, pro-terrorist piece of neo-Marxist, left-wing propaganda" or is it an inevitable reaction to Neocon world domination?
Click to see the video clip.
As Anthony Kaufman wrote:
"In perhaps the most glaring and controversial example of Hollywood's refusal to toe the Bush party line, 'Vendetta's' hero is a terrorist -- a violent rebel on a mission to destroy his corrupt government in a blaze of explosives. Is this irresponsible? Does it glamorize terrorism? Perhaps. But for many progressives, whose anti-war protests have fallen on deaf ears and whose activism has been squashed by the powers-that-be, 'V for Vendetta' should feel almost cathartic.
Cathartic indeed.
"People should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people."
Check out this Bush flavored trailer and then go get your revolution on - DVD just came out this month.
David DeGraw is AlterNet's video blogger.
Comment on this Article
Straining the country's psyche
By CLAUDE SALHANI
UPI International Editor
22 August 06
WASHINGTON -- President George W. Bush admitted that the war in Iraq is "straining the psyche of our country." Bush said that sometimes he was "frustrated," though "rarely surprised." That in itself, should be surprising, given that not much in Iraq is really going according to plan and the violence is escalating almost daily.
With the death toll among U.S. troops now counting 2,600 and tens of thousands more servicemen and women wounded, it is understandable that the president may be frustrated. Not to mention the fact that Iraqis are dying by the hundreds every day, and with no visible light at the end of the tunnel. And if there happens to be a light in the proverbial tunnel, it's that of an oncoming train, or rather a brewing civil war.
Bush disagrees: "I hear a lot of talk about civil war. I'm concerned about that, of course, and I've talked to a lot of people about it," he said. "And what I've found from my talks are that the Iraqis want a unified country. And that the Iraqi leadership is determined to thwart the efforts of the extremists and the radicals."
True, some of Iraq's leaders may well want to maintain a unified Iraq, but that is hardly preventing the country from heading into what at least appears to be the start of a sectarian war. Bush may want to avoid calling it a civil war, but at the end of the day what you call it is really irrelevant. It's what is happening that really counts. If what is happening in Iraq looks, smells and feels like a civil war, as the saying goes, it must be civil war.
When Shiites are killing Sunnis and vice-versa, and when more than 150 bodies turn up every morning at the city morgue, it is safe to call it a civil war. More than 3,500 Iraqis were killed in ethnic violence last month, making it the worst month for civilian casualties since the war began in 2003.
"If you think it's bad now, imagine what Iraq would look like if the United States leaves before this government can defend itself and sustain itself," the president said. "Chaos in Iraq would be very unsettling in the region."
But Iraq was fine before the U.S. arrived, save for its megalomaniac dictator.
"You know, I've heard this theory about everything was just fine until we arrived, and kind of 'we're going to stir up the hornet's nest' theory," the president said. "It just doesn't hold water, as far as I'm concerned. The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East."
President Bush was asked what Iraq had to do with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
"Nothing," the president said. "Nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Iraq was a... the lesson of Sept. 11 is, take threats before they fully materialize."
"Wars are not a time of joy," said Bush. Hmmm?
Speaking at a White House news conference, President Bush then shifted his concern to the other Middle East trouble spot -- Lebanon. He urged for a quick decision to allow the deployment of a multinational force to back-up the Lebanese army in south Lebanon.
"The need is urgent," said Bush, referring to then need for an additional 13,000 troops for a UNIFIL Version 2.0, that in principle will have greater authority.
"The international community must now designate the leadership of this new international force, give it robust rules of engagement and deploy it as quickly as possible to secure the peace," said Bush. The president continued that the international force would help keep the militant Hezbollah organization from acting as a "state within a state."
And herein lies the problem. Most European countries are reluctant to venture into what can become a potential mine field, in more than one way. It's one thing to call for troops and criticize countries that are reluctant to place their soldiers in harm's way. France, who lost 58 soldiers in a suicide bombing in 1983, wants guarantees that its troops will not be attacked. The United States, which lost 241 servicemen to suicide bombing in Beirut, are also not about to deploy troops to south Lebanon any time soon.
"The United States will do our part," Bush said. But of course, the United States does not plan to contribute troops. Instead, it has pledged $230 million to help the Lebanese rebuild their homes and return to their towns and communities. The United States will provide intelligence support and command and control.
"These are challenging times, and difficult times," added Bush.
Comment: Bush is such a liar. The conditions in Iraq are exactly what the Neocons planned. They are, after all, psychopaths looking for ways to decimate the population of normal people.
Pathocracy survives thanks to the feeling of being threatened by the society of normal people, as well as by other countries wherein various forms of the system of normal man persist. For the rulers, staying on the top is therefore the classic problem of "to be or not to be". ...
Thus, the biological, psychological, moral, and economic destruction of the majority of normal people becomes, for the pathocrats, a "biological" necessity. Many means serve this end, starting with concentration camps and including warfare with an obstinate, well-armed foe who will devastate and debilitate the human power thrown at him, namely the very power jeopardizing pathocrats rule: the sons of normal man sent out to fight for an illusionary "noble cause." Once safely dead, the soldiers will then be decreed heroes to be revered in paeans, useful for raising a new generation faithful to the pathocracy and ever willing to go to their deaths to protect it. ...
The ideology must, of course, furnish a corresponding justification for this alleged right to conquer the world and must therefore be properly elaborated. Expansionism is derived from the very nature of pathocracy, not from ideology, but this fact must be masked by ideology. Whenever this phenomenon has been witnessed in history, imperialism was always its most demonstrative quality. Andrew Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology
Comment on this Article
The land of the free - but free speech is a rare commodity
Henry Porter
Sunday August 13, 2006
The Observer
You can say what you like in the US, just as long as you don't ask awkward questions about America's role in the Middle East
It used to be said that academic rows were vicious because the stakes were so small. That's no longer true in America, where a battle is underway on campuses over what can be said about the Middle East and US foreign policy.
Douglas Giles is a recent casualty. He used to teach a class on world religions at Roosevelt University, Chicago, founded in memory of FDR and his liberal-inclined wife, Eleanor. Last year, Giles was ordered by his head of department, art historian Susan Weininger, not to allow students to ask questions about Palestine and Israel; in fact, nothing was to be mentioned in class, textbooks and examinations that could possibly open Judaism to criticism.
Students, being what they are, did not go along with the ban. A young woman, originally from Pakistan, asked a question about Palestinian rights. Someone complained and Professor Giles was promptly fired.
Leaving aside his boss's doubtful qualifications to set limits on a class of comparative religion - her speciality is early 20th-century Midwestern artists such as Tunis Ponsen (nor have I) - the point to grasp is that Professor Giles did not make inflammatory statements himself: he merely refused to limit debate among the young minds in front of him.
This might be seen as a troubling one-off like the story involving the president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, who suggested that innate differences between the minds of men and women could be one reason why fewer women succeed in science and maths careers and was then ousted. But Giles's sacking is far more important because it is part of the movement to suppress criticism of Israel on the grounds that it is anti-semitic. A mild man, Giles seems astonished to find the battle for free speech in his own lecture theatre.
'It may be sexy to get on a bus and go to DC and march against war,' he said to me last week. 'It is much less sexy to fight in your own university for the right of free speech. But that is where it begins. That is because they are taking away what you can talk about.' He feels there is a pattern of intolerance in his sacking that has been encouraged by websites such as FrontPageMag.com and Campus Watch.
Joel Beinin of Stanford University is regularly attacked by both. Beinin is a Jew who speaks both Hebrew and Arabic. He worked in Israel and on an assembly line in the US, where he helped Arab workers understand their rights. Now, he holds seminars at Stanford in which all views are expressed. For this reason, no doubt, his photograph recently appeared on the front of a booklet entitled 'Campus Support for Terrorism'.
It was published by David Horovitz, the founder of FrontPageMag.com who has both composed a bill of rights for universities, designed to take politics (for which read liberal influence and plurality) out of the curriculum and a list of the 100 most dangerous academics in America, which includes Noam Chomsky and many other distinguished thinkers and teachers.
The demented, bullying tone of the websites is another symptom of the descent of public discourse in America and, frankly, one can easily see the attractions of self-censorship on the question of Middle East and Israel. Read David Horovitz for longer than five minutes and you begin to hear Senator Joseph McCarthy accusing someone of un-American activities.
At Harvard, a few weeks after what was called Summers's 'mis-step', a much greater row ensued when John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard published a paper called 'The Israel Lobby'. Brave because the alleged distortion of US pro-Israel foreign policy is unmentionable in American public life.
Their paper was printed only in the UK, in the London Review of Books. In America, there then followed what has been described as the massive 'Shhhhhhhhh!' Apart from the mud-slinging from sites such as Campus Watch and FrontPageMag, it has had little mainstream circulation and there has been no real debate.
I have read it several times and cannot disagree with an early point made by the authors. 'There is a strong moral case for supporting Israel's existence, but that is not in jeopardy. Viewed objectively, its past and present conduct offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians.' That is the crux. All Americans, to say little of the British who have been reluctantly welded to US policy, surely deserve the chance to know about the influence that lobbies such as the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) exert at times like these.
'The bottom line,' say Mearsheimer and Walt, 'is that AIPAC is a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy is not debated there, even though the policy has important consequences for the entire world. In other words, one of the three main branches of the government is firmly committed to supporting Israel.'
Later they say: 'The lobby's influence causes trouble on several fronts. It increases the terrorist danger that all states face, including America's European allies. It has made it impossible to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a situation that gives extremists a powerful recruiting tool, increases the pool of potential terrorist and sympathisers and contributes to Islamic radicalism in Europe and Asia.'
You could add that the lobby's influence may, in the long run, be very much against Israel's interests.
That is my belief, but these things are rarely discussed in America. People look vaguely queasy when you raise the subject of the Israeli lobby, as though the only concern in American discourse is not to appear anti-semitic, a fear which, I suggest, is sometimes shamelessly played upon.
The right of people like Mearsheimer, Walt, Beinin, Giles and even Summers to say what they think must remain inviolate if we are not to lose the values the West insists its fighting for. A little boldness is called for on both sides of the Atlantic to question the pressure coming from both Jewish and Muslim quarters not to discuss issues openly because of various sensibilities.
In Britain, we should deplore with equal vehemence the temptation to give into special pleading from, for instance, the Muslim businessmen who do not want the film of Monica Ali's Brick Lane made in their area. They have no right to dictate to this ancient democracy of ours - now theirs - and so stifle free expression.
Last week, during Jon Snow's fascinating Channel 4 documentary about Muslim attitudes in this country, a woman said that British society was too decadent for her to allow her children to integrate completely. A moment's thought suggested that British democracy had much to offer over the appalling civic values found in most Muslim countries, the oppression of women in Islam, the untold domestic abuse and the tens of thousands of children sold into bonded labour in Pakistan - her husband's country of origin. Her prim separatism fails to grasp the value of our democratic institutions when set against societies run by Sharia law and so undermines them.
My view is that in America and Britain, we should think of free speech as an article of faith, as one of the ways that we define our civilisation against the forces that were to be unleashed on us this week, as well as the influences that stifle criticism of Israel and so enable the disgraceful actions in south Lebanon.
The interests of extreme proponents of Muslim and Jewish faiths combine in one way or another to assault our ancient democratic traditions and we must resist them.
Let the students like those in Douglas Giles's class ask whatever they like.
Comment on this Article
Propaganda! Former Mossad boss steels West for 'third world war'- Terrorist roundups prove only the need for tougher measures, ex-spymaster sez
COLIN FREEZE
GlobeandMail
22 August 06
TORONTO -- Five years after Sept. 11, 2001, many experts feel that the war on terror has reached its climax. Yet a former Israeli spymaster is urging the West to gird for the long haul and take ever-tougher steps to fight terrorism.
"This is a third world war," Efraim Halevy, Mossad director from 1998 to 2002, told The Globe and Mail in an interview yesterday. "International Islamic terror has made its objectives and aims very clear."
Although al-Qaeda-inspired plots have been thwarted this summer in Britain and Canada, Mr. Halevy takes scant comfort in the arrests. He said they simply prove that more vigilance is needed against a threat that is still growing.
"Imagine [the Toronto group] was not penetrated," was his advice to Canadian lawmakers. "Even if a plot has been uncovered, you must treat the threat as if the plot had succeeded."
Mr. Halevy conceded that such a mindset would necessarily lead politicians to consider racial profiling, short-term preventive detentions and other measures that would seem anathema to democratic civil liberties.
"The price is a high price," he conceded. "Socially, politically, internally, internationally, it's a high price to pay. But the alternative is even more horrendous."
His remarks stand in contrast to many of the prevailing opinions in the West. High-profile controversies -- examples include the Guantanamo Bay prison experiment, the U.S-led invasion of Iraq, the so-called extraordinary renditions of terrorism suspects to face imprisonment or torture in foreign states -- have prompted judges, politicians and citizens to call for anti-terrorism measures to be reined in, not expanded.
Even some of Mr. Halevy's contemporaries agree, to a point.
"We don't profile because it's fundamentally stupid," Canadian Security Intelligence Service chief Jim Judd said last week.
"The wartime approach made sense for a while, but as time passes and the situation changes, so must the strategy," Richard Dearlove, the head of Britain's MI6 from 1999 to 2004, told the Atlantic Monthly this month.
But Mr. Halevy lamented that not enough is being done to fight al-Qaeda-style terrorism. Sooner or later, he said, Western democracies will have to realize that.
"This is a third world war. I would disagree entirely with the premise of Dearlove," he said yesterday.
While Israeli civilians have been constantly targeted by attacks, Mr. Halevy observed, countries that have never been attacked refuse to accept the fact that they may be in danger. He finds that even countries that have been hit, such as Britain, tend to become complacent within months of attacks.
Mr. Halevy was in Toronto yesterday to promote his memoir, Man in the Shadows, published earlier this year. In the book, he argues that the threat of international terrorism is growing, leaving Western democracies no choice but to team up and aggressively root out terrorists wherever they can be found.
But he also pointed out that recent years have elevated the status of a group he calls "the professionals," security chiefs who advise politicians, as he did. Their roles are rightly growing ever more important, he said.
A pragmatist, Mr. Halevy met many Arab and Muslim leaders through his work, and said that he would not close the door to talks with Hamas, Hezbollah or even Iran. But he says the threat posed by al-Qaeda's ideology is by far the most sinister one that exists today.
Its goal, he said, "is to disrupt societies of the free world, to cripple the economies of the free world, to force the free world to get out of the hair of the Muslim states, to facilitate the advance of Islam so that ultimately Islam will reach the goal [where] the world as a whole will be the world of Islam."
Yet he fears that many Western democracies, including Canada, will fail to pay adequate attention until they are attacked. Even then, the window for new laws will be short, he said.
"But I can assure that if there were such an event in Canada, for two to three months, the government could get through certain measures it could never get through before," he said.
"The key is, in my opinion, to line up in advance all the measures you think are necessary. Realize you can't get them approved until there is an act. Hope for the better, that there will be no such act, but be ready."
Comment on this Article
PROPAGANDA! War on terror is a perpetual fight, says UK minister
Oliver King and agencies
Tuesday August 22, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
A government minister today gave a stark warning that the "war on terror" was a war without end, telling a community meeting that the fight against extremists was likely to be "perpetual".
As 11 people appeared in court over an alleged aircraft bomb plot, communities minister Phil Woolas said it would take "generations" to overcome extremists who want to destroy British society and establish a "mono-theocratic dictatorship".
Mr Woolas, MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth, was speaking at a follow-up meeting of community leaders from various faiths, to check on the progress of a raft of government measures to combat terrorism after the July 7 London bombings.
"We see this fight against terrorism as a perpetual fight," he said at the event in Bolton, Greater Manchester.
"This is a generational thing. We are determined to protect civil liberties. But we can't solve it on our own.
"The terrorists will use whatever argument they have got to pull the wool over susceptible people's eyes, but their goal, as [former US President] Bill Clinton said, is to destroy the idea of a pluralist society.
"Get across the understanding that what these people are about is destroying the idea of society and creating a mono-theocratic dictatorship."
Mr Woolas's comments came as a ICM poll for the Guardian today revealed that 72% of people questioned think government foreign policy has made Britain more of a target for terrorists and only 1% of voters believe it has made Britain safer.
Since the July 7 attacks, the government has set up a number of advisory bodies and forums to "engage" the Islamic community and steer young Muslims away from extremism.
But there has been criticism of the alleged slow progress on many of the 64 recommendations made to combat terrorism since the outrage.
The initiative has been given added impetus by the alleged plot uncovered last week to blow up passenger jets.
But Mr Woolas said the government was working hard.
"We have implemented or are implementing the vast majority, we have got a clear, mature process going on involving tens of thousands of particularly young people, to work together to attack this ideology of terrorism.
"The government is very clear that the vast majority of Muslims want to defeat this terrorism carried out in the name of religion.
"Don't fall into the trap, don't allow yourself to be used by the terrorists, don't believe that the government doesn't understand your fear -of course we do.
"But the solution is to defeat terrorism, and that's the main goal of the government."
The meeting in Bolton is the first of a number taking place across the UK over the next month, including events in London, Burnley, Manchester, Birmingham, Leicester and Bradford.
Later in the week, Mr Woolas's departmental boss, Ruth Kelly, will launch the new Commission on Integration and Cohesion, to help build greater understanding between communities in Britain.
The government is also expected to announce that imams should be officially accredited and trained to prevent "extremist preachers" from radicalising young people at mosques.
Comment on this Article
Terrorism: let's do the maths
Daniel Finkelstein
TimesOnline
23 August 06
Even including the September 11 attacks, the number of Americans killed by terrorists since records on this were kept is about the same as those killed by lightning, accident-causing deer or severe allergic reaction to peanuts
"In a powerful paper for the libertarian American think-tank the Cato Institute, Professor John Mueller provides strong support for the Parris argument. He points out that "in almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists anywhere in the world is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States". He adds that even including the September 11 attacks, the number of Americans killed by terrorists since records on this were kept is about the same as those killed by lightning, accident-causing deer or severe allergic reaction to peanuts."
I AM THE SON of a teacher of mathematics and a professor of measurement. When I was a boy it was quite normal to come down to breakfast to find an animated discussion taking place about the fact that a centimetre isn't a proper SI unit of measurement, or to eat my cornflakes while someone provided a top of the head estimate of the number of 330ml cans that ought, theoretically, to be able to fit into a refrigerator of a given volume.
Maybe I am worrying about nothing, but it has recently occurred to me that perhaps this sort of discussion wasn't quite as common around other people's family breakfast tables as I had always presumed.
Anyway, my siblings emerged from these morning discussions as impressive mathematicians. I was left merely with a tendency to believe that every social or political issue that I encounter has a mathematical dimension.
I tell you all this to explain my attitude to a recent newspaper debate, the one that began after the police uncovered an apparent terrorist plot to blow up aircraft on their way to the United States.
The Government's reaction to the arrests provoked two sorts of articles. The first kind advanced the view that the Government was overreacting to the threat from terrorists. This argument was, naturally, put most lucidly by Matthew Parris on these pages. He argued that, in the end, the terrorists "can never amount to more than a big, bloody nuisance" and that we should treat them as nothing more. The alternative view, set out in The Times by Mary Ann Sieghart among others, is that this attitude is complacent, as the necessity for arrests conclusively demonstrated.
My view? Let's do the maths.
In a powerful paper for the libertarian American think-tank the Cato Institute, Professor John Mueller provides strong support for the Parris argument. He points out that "in almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists anywhere in the world is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States". He adds that even including the September 11 attacks, the number of Americans killed by terrorists since records on this were kept is about the same as those killed by lightning, accident-causing deer or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.
To this evidence he adds the research carried out at the University of Michigan that suggests that an American's chance of being killed in one non-stop airline flight is about one in 13 million. Apparently there "would have to be one set of September 11 crashes a month for the risks to balance out" between travelling by plane and by car.
Mueller's conclusion is that "assessed in broad but reasonable context, terrorism generally does not do much damage" and "the costs of terrorism very often are the result of hasty, ill-considered and overwrought reactions". Both the expense of over-the-top anti-terror measures and the damaging impact of panic on liberal institutions are greater than the cost of the terrorism itself.
This argument is too strong simply to be ignored. Nor can it be refuted by pointing to the possible danger posed by a single alleged plot. Even if such a plot had been successful, Professor Mueller's argument would stand: the chances of a British or US citizen being killed by a terrorist are tiny and the risk of it happening is far smaller than other risks that we regard as reasonably tolerable - being killed on the road, for instance. He is, no doubt about it, quite right.
But while I think he makes an open and shut case against panic, when it comes to the need for a vigorous policy to combat terrorism Professor Mueller's maths is less convincing.
First, the probability of an event is not really the thing you should be worrying about. In his excellent book Fooled by Randomness, the mathematician and Wall Street trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb discusses what he calls the issue of asymmetry. He explains (rather impatiently since he regards the issue as obvious) that you may believe, say, that financial markets will probably go up, while you behave, sensibly, as if they will go down. The reason? Because you think it very likely that they will go up a little, but, in the unlikely event that they go down, you think they will go down a great deal.
"How could people miss such a point?" he complains. "Why do they confuse probability and expectation, that is probability and probability times the payoff?" The probability of, say, a nuclear terrorist attack might be tiny but the consequences, the "payoff" as it were, would be huge. It is expectation, not probability, that should determine policy towards terrorism.
The second problem with Mueller's paper is simple: the low incidence of terrorist outrages occurred when there was already a firm policy in place to prevent it. His argument, the "bloody nuisance" argument, depends on the idea that, without additional measures domestically and internationally, the number of terrorist incidents is unlikely to rise greatly.
There is, however, lots of evidence that crime doesn't work like that. Instead of falling gently or rising gently in response to policy measures, crime behaves like a contagious disease. Potential offenders catch the idea of offending from each other. And just like a disease that starts with only a few people and becomes an epidemic, once it reaches a tipping point the amount of criminal behaviour explodes.
If successful suicide bombings became even slightly more common, can we really be confident that other fundamentalists would not copy that behaviour? We already know that ordinary suicides increase when there are front-page stories about people killing themselves. And if there were such an increase, might it escalate as one group copies another?
So Matthew Parris is right but also wrong. Without minimising the horrendous suffering of individuals, terrorism might well be little more than a "big bloody nuisance". But should we treat it as if that was all it was? Absolutely not.
Comment on this Article
The London Terror Plot: Can the Bush-Blair Duet Be Trusted?
By Oumar Diagana
Tunis Hebdo, Tunisia
Translated By Sandrine Ageorges
August 14 August 20 Issue
So above us in the sky brooded an imminent catastrophe. That of a terrorist attack on a the scale of September 11, aimed at trying to explode aircraft leaving from Great Britain, bound for the United States. The immense plot, foiled by the British secret services, in direct collaboration with Pakistan and America, has been perceived by the majority of Western chancelleries as a success. And it confirms, as if this was needed, that the West is truly committed to its crusade against Islamist terrorism.
A number of the suspects, British-born citizens of foreign ancestry, who are married, are fathers and who had no criminal records, were arrested by the British police before the spectacular plot could be carried out. The investigation reveals that the suspected terrorists had planned to execute their dirty work by using highly-noxious liquid explosives hidden in their hand luggage.
But beyond the emotions provoked by the event, relayed continuously and in a way that didn't fail to resuscitate the obsession with terrorism and the destruction that goes with it, and along with all the unbearable images that one could not possibly support, there are nonetheless questions that with all necessary care, common mortals must not fail to ask.
At the very moment that Lebanon and Palestine were being subject to Zionist barbarity with the blessing of the indecent Bush-Blair tandem, we are told (could this be a coincidence?) that this "big catch" was made possible thanks to amazing detective work and an investigation that reaches back six months. All of which didn't fail to cause doubt and skepticism among a majority of British Muslims who see only a subtle attempt, yet another set-up, designed to distract global opinion from the methodical genocide taking place in the Middle East.
Even the reputable British press began to point out the lack of transparency, in a case where the proofs looks far too skimpy.
After all, can one grant credit to a "couple" which, in the past, had macabre "ingeniousness" to give birth to a plot of a width without precedent, After all, how can one grant the benefit of the doubt a "couple" who have had the macabre ingeniousness to give birth to a plot of unprecedented scale, plunging Iraq into the abyss of despair and decline ... and this under the very nose of the U.N., which too has been drained of all credibility? ...
How can one explain that at a time when Great Britain maintains its highest-possible terrorist alert, followed by a number of other capital cities, the White-House chief and the boss of 10 Downing Street have not even considered, as would normally occur, shortening their vacations? The last of the two, imperturbable, enjoying his time under the Caribbean sun in Barbados ... an indecent bit of leisure that apparently drove 150 members of parliament to sign a petition demanding an end to the parliamentary summer break and a meeting to discuss the Blair government's position on the Israeli-Lebanese conflict.
Let's suppose that the aborted plot was actually the handiwork of "Islamo Facists," according to the "measured" expression by President Bush, why then be astonished, after having sown the seeds of hatred among Arabic-Muslim youth, that one collects a harvest of human bombs prepared to give their lives as an offering to make up for the affronts that they are subjected to by Bush. He who, king of contradiction and incoherence, after having supplied the Hebrew State with precision bombs and fuel to destroy the Land of the Cedar, pretends to be shocked by the scale of the damage. And he even had the nerve to send Condi to shed a few crocodile tears in Beirut while in Israel, the U.S. Secretary of State stood like a piece of marble, when Olmert stated his intention to continue his fatal offensive.
Instead of calming emotions, the U.S. President and Blair's blind "follow-my-leader" attitude, are in fact building factories for terrorist and other jihadists. To regild their tarnished reputations, some politicians who, by virtue of long experience with semantic distortions, would not hesitate, to paraphrase Khrushchev, to ask the advice of a good gastroenterologist, to find out what else can be done to push even more down the throats of their citizens. And the metaphor is worth its weight in gold.
Comment on this Article
Terrorists Threaten World Peace, But So Do the 'Great Powers'
EDITORIAL
Diario Co Latino, El Salvador
Translated By Halszka Czarnocka
August 11, 2006
Unquestionably first among the news on the world media last Thursday and Friday [August 10-11] was the announcement of the supposed terrorist plan against the United States and Great Britain, discovered by British police and domestic security agencies.
If the plot proves true, the police would have certainly saved the innocent lives of those traveling from the Old Continent toward the United States. And even in the opposite case [if it proves untrue], the crisis managed to divert the world's attention from Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, which have been the targets of Israeli military aggression since July 12.
Undoubtedly, the news alarmed not only the authorities of the countries that were directly threatened, but also all persons that, for whatever reason, were to travel on the targeted airlines, as well as all countries having direct flights to the United States or Great Britain.
Even El Salvador has became involved in a series of actions and reactions that have affected travelers, and has issued its own alert, as we informed our readers in our edition yesterday.
This most recent terrorist threat has served to remind us that the peace all over the world is endangered. And that danger, obviously, is not exclusively due to threats associated with the forces of terrorism or what is considered by the great powers to be terrorism; it emanates from the great powers themselves.
For example, the fact that the great powers tolerate or encourage the indiscriminate bombing of Lebanon by Israel also endangers world peace; and not only because even at a distance one cannot ignore the suffering of civilian victims, but also because it provokes a reaction from nationalists, fanatics and terrorists, like the one announced yesterday [Aug. 10]. Let's recall that the fundamentalist group al-Qaeda called for attacks in retaliation for Israel's war on Arabs in the Palestinian territories and in Lebanon. Obviously, the victims on both sides are always the civilian population: it is civilians who die, massacred in Lebanon; it is civilians being killed in Israel by Hezbullah's rockets; it is civilians who die or suffer in terrorist attacks, as happened on September the 11th of 2001 or on March the 11th in Spain.
And, although the answers may be complex, we must again pronounce that the key questions are: Why do some people want to crush others? Why do some maintain a silence that makes them accomplices? Why do some of the great economic and military powers wish to impose the rules of game? Why there are no forces of equilibrium that would enforce peaceful coexistence? Why does intolerance dominate reason?
El Salvador serves to foment all of this by providing troops of occupation to Iraq.
Comment on this Article
Man arrested at jetport after grenade joke
by David Hench
Portland Press Herald Staff Writer
August 22, 2006
A 76-year-old New York man who joked about having hand grenades on his luggage at the Portland Jetport was arrested on charges of terrorizing.
Richard Frey was checking in at the Jet Blue counter at 5:40 p.m. Monday when he told the ticket agent that he had two hand grenades in his checked baggage, police said. The agent called police who searched the bag but found nothing. The man told police the comment was intended to be funny.
Police charged Frey with terrorizing and he was taken to the Cumberland County Jail, missing his flight. He was released at 10 p.m. after posting $1,000 bail, police said.
Comment on this Article
Police seek to extend terror-plot questioning
Staff and agencies
Wednesday August 23, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Police will today ask for more time to question most of the 11 suspects still in custody over the alleged biggest terrorism plot in British history.
A high court judge sitting at City of Westminster magistrates in Horseferry Road, central London, is expected to hear the applications this afternoon.
Sources said police would apply for more time to question a large proportion of those currently in custody in connection with the alleged airline terror plot.
Under new anti-terror laws, which only came into force earlier this year, terrorism suspects can now be questioned for up to 28 days. If extensions are granted today, it will be the first time any suspects have been held beyond the previous 14-day limit.
Police can apply for a maximum of another week today, and then a further week next Wednesday. However, it is possible that one or more of the suspects may be released. There was no official comment from Scotland Yard.
Yesterday, 11 other people being held in connection with the alleged plot to blow up a series of transatlantic flights made their first appearance in court after being charged with various terror offences.
Eight were accused of conspiracy to murder and preparing acts of terrorism, two of failing to tell police of terrorist plots they allegedly knew about, and a 17-year-old was accused of having "in his possession... a book on improvised explosive devices, some suicide notes and wills with the identities to persons prepared to commit acts of terrorism". All have been remanded in custody.
Comment on this Article
Destroying Lebanon
Restarting the 34 Day War
Mike Whitney
22 August 06
"I prefer the most unfair peace to the most righteous war"
Cicero
Israel is in a state of post-war trauma. Its 34 day pounding of Lebanon has achieved none of the stated goals and has left the public furious at the incompetence of the Olmert government. 118 soldiers were killed in the conflict and Israel's celebrated "power of deterrents" was smashed to smithereens. Nothing was gained. In the north, industry and commerce were brought to a complete standstill while the local people were shunted off to fallout shelters for weeks on end.
What for?
Hezbollah hasn't been "disarmed" and the 2 captured Israeli soldiers haven't been returned. The whole travesty was a dead loss. The war was abruptly called off when Olmert couldn't bear the rising death-toll, a fact that was not lost on Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Nasrallah said from the very beginning that the only way to beat Israel was by "killing soldiers and destroying weapons". Olmert's retreat just proves that that Nasrallah was right.
Kenneth Besig summarized the feelings of many Israelis in his comments in the Jerusalem Post:
"Fewer than 5,000 poorly-armed Hezbollah terrorists stood off the mighty IDF for over a month. An Islamic terrorist gang with no tanks, no artillery, no fighter jets, no attack helicopters, and just a few RPG's and rifles held to a standstill nearly 30,000 crack IDF troops with the finest tanks, the best artillery, the fastest and most advanced fighter-jets and attack helicopters in the world. And they can still empty our northern communities with their rockets whenever they want. If that is not a victory, then the word has no meaning."
Besig may be wrong when he calls Hezbollah "terrorists", but many Israelis agree with his overall analysis. Israel may have decimated Lebanon, but no one believes they won the war.
Since the ceasefire began, the recriminations and finger-pointing have only gotten worse. The daily gnashing-of-teeth in the media has reached a crescendo with every major newspaper calling for the resignations of Olmert, Defense Minister Peretz and "George Armstrong" Halutz. Disgruntled reservists are flocking to the streets in public protests calling for "heads-to-role" while hundreds of IDF regulars have signed petitions demanding an independent inquiry into the botched war plans.
"I'm telling Ehud Olmert and Emir Peretz to look me in the eye and tell me they are fit to hold their posts," said Sgt. Major Lior Vilnes one of the many protestors.
So what does this firestorm of public outrage auger for Lebanon and the prospects for peace in the region?
The probability of peace "breaking out" has never looked more dismal. Public opinion is compelling Olmert to restart the war to salvage his battered career. Already, government officials have begun talking about a "second round" of hostilities, a euphemism that is being reiterated with worrisome regularity in the press. The mood in Israel is ugly and many believe that it foreshadows greater violence ahead.
Olmert is surrounded by "hawks" from the Sharon era who brush aside any plan that doesn't involve force. That makes military action all the more likely even though the objectives are as ambiguous as they were before.
Eli Yishai, Vice Prime Minister, sums up the current thinking in the Olmert administration:
"No army in the world is more moral than the IDF....We cannot be bleeding hearts while our citizens are being hurt. If Lebanese citizens pay the price, they will rise up against Hezbollah. I have proposed that we damage infrastructure and flatten villages because Hezbollah personnel must know they are not immune. We should make it clear to them that all residents in villages from which firepower is launched at IDF soldiers will be warned and required to leave their homes in 48 hours. And later these villages will be bombed from the air. That policy would have assured that Lebanese citizens would not permit Hezbollah to live next to them." (Haaretz)
Isn't this the same flawed-logic that led to "shock and awe"? What gives people like Yishai and Olmert such confidence in violence when it hasn't worked in 40 years of occupation?
The penchant among the Israeli high-command for resolving political issues with brute force doesn't bode well for Lebanon. Israel wants to settle accounts with Nasrallah and reestablish its dominance in the region, but that can only be accomplished by dealing a knockout blow to Hezbollah.
Olmert has no chance of defeating Hezbollah. Guerilla groups disappear in one place and pop up in another; crushing them is nearly impossible. The clueless Prime Minister is probably more interested in "saving face" than in protecting Israel's national security. In truth, Olmert's bruised vanity won't allow him to be remembered as the "man who lost the war to Hezbollah". This will lead to a steady escalation of incitements (like yesterday's commando raid on Balbak) which will eventually trigger all-out war.
Restarting the conflict will only create greater threats to Israel's security. It will strengthen the Lebanese resistance, weaken the already-feeble Siniora government, rouse more hatred for the United States, destabilize friendly Arab regimes, and further erode the perception of Israeli invincibility.
Israel has little to gain and everything to lose.
Never the less, Olmert will probably disregard the consequences and blunder ahead in the futile hope of silencing his critics while indulging his right-wing allies. Anything less than a full-blown assault on his Lebanese arch-rival would be tantamount to political seppuku.
Former Shin Bet chief and current Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter, made a reasonable proposal that could deescalate tensions and extract Olmert from his current predicament. Dichter said, "We must not sit and wait for the next war. A peace agreement in exchange for giving back the Golan Heights would disconnect Syria from Iran and disarm Hezbollah."
Bingo.
Dichter's advice is dead-on. If Israel conceded the Golan to Syria, then Syria would cut-off supplies and weaponry to Hezbollah setting the stage for a comprehensive peace treaty between the 3 nations.
It's a long-shot, but it could work and it reduces the liklihood of more fighting.
Unfortunately, Olmert quickly dismissed Dichter's plan saying, "We are not going into any adventure when terror is on their side. When Syria stops support for terror, then we will be happy to negotiate with them."
Blah, blah, blah; terror, terror, terror; the same worn mantra we've heard from Bush for the last 5 years while the entire region is doused in gasoline and ready to light up like a Roman candle.
Olmert has erected another road-block to peace and set the stage for a "second round" of devastation and bloodshed. His choice is bound to create more enemies for Israel while condemning thousands of Lebanese civilians to death.
That's a strategy for failure, not success
Comment on this Article
It must be frightening to be an Israeli now
Xymphora
23 August o6
It must be frightening to be an Israeli now. The class bully comes back from summer vacation and finds that all the little kids he used to beat up are now bigger than he is. Although we'll never read it in the mainstream press, and in fact are seeing a small tsunami of articles on 'making Aliyah', I'm sure there is a big net emigration from Israel, as it suddenly has become apparent that he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword (the 'demographic problem' is about to become much worse). Instead of using the lessons learned in Lebanon to lead to an interest in negotiation, the Israeli right is using the defeat as a prod to push for more violence. Soon, Netanyahu will be back in power, and the almost hopeless situation will become completely hopeless.
By the way, the test of good faith in reading anything on this issue is whether an attempt is made to claim that the Israeli attack on Lebanese civilians was an act of self-defense. If you see even a hint of 'self-defense', the writer is incapable of understanding that it is not acceptable to slaughter civilians and destroy an entire country in retaliation for the capture of two soldiers, particularly when:
* The soldiers were almost certainly captured in Lebanon;
* There have recently been hundreds of incidents along the border, almost all instigated by Israel, and none of which led to military escalation;
* Hezbollah captured the soldiers in order to exchange them for Lebanese held illegally by Israel;
* the Israeli attack on Lebanon had been planned for at least a year before the Israeli soldiers were captured.
An inability to comprehend that the Israel-has-a-right-to-defend-itself defense has moral limits is the unique Israeli/Zionist form of psychopathy. It is based - and unfortunately this in now undeniable, and forms the basis for the right-left Israeli consensus that the problem with the attack was that not enough Lebanese were killed - in the unstated assumption that Jews are the only human beings that have moral worth. This also explains why prominent Jewish 'human rights' advocates seem to have no interest in the plight of the Palestinians. Only human beings have human rights, and the only full human beings are Jewish.
There is no obvious direct military threat to Israel's existence. Hezbollah's victory - and it was a clear victory, with the small number of Hezbollah military funerals leading to the conclusion that the death ratio was probably well over two-to-one in favor of Hezbollah - was completely defensive. Nevertheless, the entire equation of Israel's existence has always been based on the idea that no Arab could defeat an IDF operation. That delusion has been shattered. The problem was both at the level of the highest military and political planners, and at the level of the IDF, and at the level of the Israeli soldiers.
The planners seemed to think that extensive intentional bombing of civilians would cause the Lebanese to blame Hezbollah for their problems, thus removing the civilian support for Hezbollah, thus leading to an easy Israeli military victory. Instead, as any fool could tell you would happen, Lebanese civilian opinion went entirely against the people dropping the bombs, and entirely towards the only group in the country with the ability to defend the Lebanese people. The Israelis based their analysis on the NATO success at bombing Serbian civilians, missing the point that Serbia had a functioning government in charge of the whole country which cared about the status of its civilian population. NATO blackmailed the central Serbian government into capitulating on the basis that it would keep slaughtering civilians until the government gave up. Since the central Lebanese government had no control over Hezbollah, the bombing plan was flawed from the outset, and just served to strengthen Hezbollah. Once again, the dream of military planners, that a war can be won from the air, has been proven to be wrong.
The Israelis are noticing that the IDF has become sloppy and ineffective, largely based on the fact that it has been exclusively employed as a police unit in charge of brutalizing Palestinian civilians. Israeli soldiers, used to showing force to groups of cowering Palestinian grandmothers, arrogantly stood around in Lebanese mountain passes, allowing Hezbollah to take them out in groups using anti-tank weapons. Even worse, the entire fighting ability of the IDF, both tactics and military hardware, has been formed around battling Palestinian small arms fire in urban settings on relatively flat ground. In the hills of Lebanon, facing well trained soldiers with anti-tank weapons, the Israelis were sitting ducks. A fighting unit geared around an ability to fire tank shells into groups of Palestinian schoolchildren was no match for Hezbollah. There is some karma in this: a history of brutalizing Palestinian civilians has made the IDF ineffective as a fighting force against real soldiers.
The final problem - and mentioning this is the ultimate taboo - is with the soldiers themselves. Israelis have always fought valiantly on the theory that the Jewish people had their backs against the wall and that the fight to preserve the Jewish people from anti-Semitic annihilation was just. Sending conscripts - many of them born in the Soviet Union and dragged by their phony-Jew parents to Israel as part of the ongoing Israeli scam to increase its non-Arab population, and with no interest in Israel or Jewish history or culture - who correctly understand that there is no real 'existential threat' to Israel, to risk their lives so the settlers can have swimming pools full of stolen water, isn't quite the same thing. In fact, it was the Hezbollah soldiers who benefited from the fact that they knew their fight to defend their families and their country was just. We are now seeing the lies that form the basis of racist Israeli statehood finally coming home to roost.
Comment on this Article
Little sign of progress at UN on Lebanon force
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 21, 2006 (AFP)
Ten days after securing a ceasefire in Lebanon, the UN was still scrabbling Monday to find sufficient troops to maintain the peace amid warnings the fragile truce would not hold indefinitely.
With a looming deadline to get 3,500 peacekeepers on the ground by next Monday, the world body was anxiously trying to get firm troop commitments from European member states, but failed to find a breakthrough.
In New York, UN delegates were holding technical discussions with Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia and Nepal - the few countries to have already given a firm commitment to put troops on the ground, according to UN sources.
But a more formal "troop generating meeting" that the UN had hoped to convene early this week was awaiting the outcome of talks in Brussels on Wednesday between European Union countries mulling a role in the force.
The Brussels talks are aimed at clarifying the European contributions to the force, which is expected to swell to a troop strength of 15,000 in the weeks after the vanguard force of 3,500 has been deployed.
So far, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Portugal and Spain have expressed willingness to deploy troops, but have fallen short of the offers the United Nations had hoped for.
And although Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi was quoted as telling UN Secretary General Kofi Annan Monday that Italy was available to lead the mission, the offer appeared to be conditional on a new UN resolution.
Prodi said he wanted the Security Council to clarify the force's mandate - something the UN has repeatedly said should not be necessary, while French diplomats for their part said they had not been advised of any new resolution.
France had earlier been considered likely to lead the force but disappointed the UN with a pledge of only 200 extra troops, prompting US President George W. Bush to express hopes that a larger French commitment would be forthcoming.
And despite talks at the UN on Thursday aimed at clarifying the force's rules of engagement and mandate, France has continued to ask the UN for clarification and security guarantees.
The Europeans fear being drawn into renewed fighting between Shiite militia Hezbollah and Israeli forces currently withdrawing from southern Lebanon.
Disarmament of the Iranian- and Syrian-backed militant group is one of the key stumbling blocks, with the United States saying it is a priority, as outlined in a UN resolution passed in 2004.
Bush said Monday there would be a fresh UN resolution giving "further instructions to the international force," throwing up confusion over whether Washington wanted a further UN vote before the peacekeepers deploy.
He made the comments at a hastily-convened press conference, but White House officials quickly warned that he may have misspoken, and it was not immediately clear whether the US was planning to bring a new resolution.
US ambassador to the UN John Bolton later said that while the United States wanted to see Hezbollah disarmed, there was as yet no firm plan to present a new resolution to the Security Council.
He made clear that deploying peacekeepers was the priority. "I think the initial force can be deployed now but it's obviously closely linked and we want the disarming of Hezbollah to be accomplished rapidly," he said.
The fragility of the UN-brokered truce was underscored over the weekend when Israeli commandos launched a raid deep into Lebanon. Israel also reported killing at least two Hezbollah guerrillas late Monday in southern Lebanon.
Meanwhile, UN sources speaking on condition of anonymity said Annan could soon visit countries in the region, including Syria and Iran, as part of efforts to ensure the ceasefire is fully implemented.
Comment on this Article
Israeli FM to visit Paris for peacekeeping talks
JERUSALEM, Aug 22, 2006 (AFP)
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni leaves Tuesday on a two-day visit to Paris and Rome for talks on implementing a UN resolution ending the Jewish state's war with Hezbollah, her ministry said.
She will discuss resolution 1701 and press for the immediate release of two Israeli servicemen who were captured by the Shiite guerrillas on July 12 at the start of the 34-day war, a statement said.
On Wednesday in Paris, Livni is expected to meet French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, as well as her Belgian counterpart Karel De Gucht.
Israel has criticised France's decision to limit to 200 the number of troops it is willing to contribute to a UN force in Lebanon.
As the former colonial power in Lebanon, Paris had been expected to take the lead in putting together a robust international force of up to 15,000.
On Thursday, Livni will hold talks with Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi and Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema before returning to Israel.
Rome has declared itself ready and willing to assume command of the UN force if France fails to contribute significant numbers of troops.
Belgium is one of various European countries to have expressed willingness to deploy troops without pledging firm numbers as hoped by the United Nations.
Resolution 1701 sets the groundwork for an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, the deployment of 15,000 international peacekeepers and the need for the two missing soldiers to be freed.
Comment on this Article
French, German leaders to meet on Mideast
BERLIN, Aug 21, 2006 (AFP)
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Jacques Chirac will meet in Paris on Friday for talks on efforts to put a lasting end to the conflict in Lebanon, her spokesman said Monday.
Deputy government spokesman Thomas Steg told reporters that the foreign ministers of the two countries, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Philippe Douste-Blazy, would also take part.
The meeting comes as differences have surfaced over the expansion of the UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon to monitor a shaky ceasefire between Israel and the Muslim Shiite militia Hezbollah.
France, the former colonial power in Lebanon, has begun to deploy a contingent of 200 troops, a much smaller number than expected by Israel and the international community.
Meanwhile Germany has said it would limit its commitment to the force to a naval unit and ruled out sending combat troops or police.
In a call to Merkel on Friday, Chirac called for "a necessary balance in the distribution of the contingents which must reflect the engagement of all the international community, including the European countries".
The European Union's Finnish presidency said Sunday that member states would meet this week in Brussels, probably on Wednesday, to discuss their contributions to a UN force in Lebanon.
The meeting between Merkel and Chirac will be part of regular informal consultations between the German and French governments held every six to eight weeks.
Comment on this Article
UN troops on Lebanon-Syria border a 'hostile' act: Assad
Turkish Press
22 August 06
DUBAI - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad warns that a deployment of international troops along Lebanon's border with Syria as demanded by Israel would be a hostile act, Dubai Television said Tuesday.
According to written excerpts of an interview with Assad to be aired on Wednesday and provided to AFP, Assad said such a deployment would create hostility between the two neighbors.
It would be tantamount to "a withdrawal of Lebanese sovereignty and a hostile position," he was quoted as saying.
Assad was referring to the possibility of stationing international forces alongside Lebanese army troops on Lebanon's border with Syria under UN Security Council Resolution 1701 which halted a month-long Israeli offensive against Lebanon last week.
The joint force would enforce an embargo on arms shipments to the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, whose abduction of two Israeli soldiers on July 12 sparked the Israeli onslaught.
Washington has accused Syria of acting as a transit point for shipments of arms and other supplies from Iran to Hezbollah.
Iran and Syria have denied the claim.
Israeli public radio reported Tuesday that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has conditioned the lifting of Israel's ongoing air and sea blockade of Lebanon on the deployment of international troops at Beirut airport and on Lebanon's border with Syria.
According to the excerpts of Assad's remarks, the Syrian leader called on the Lebanese government to shoulder its responsibilities and not undertake any action that would mar relations between Beirut and Damascus.
Assad also ruled out the demarcation of borders in the disputed Shebaa Farms area as long as it was occupied by Israel.
"No demarcation of borders in the Shebaa Farms before Israeli forces pull out of the area," he was quoted as saying.
Syria agrees in principle to Lebanon's claim to the Shebaa Farms, which were seized from Damascus by Israel during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Israel disputes the claim, saying it withdrew from all Lebanese territory in May 2000.
Assad also told Dubai Television that Hezbollah's "victory" during the month-long fighting with Israel "was sufficient to teach Israel a lesson."
Assad denied that Syria, which along with Iran is accused by the United States and Israel of backing Hezbollah and fomenting the recent conflict, was isolated.
"Whoever isolates Syria gets himself sidelined from major issues (in the Middle East)," he said.
In a speech last week, Assad implicitly attacked Arab countries that were critical of Hezbollah's abduction of the two Israeli soldiers and accused anti-Syrian Lebanese politicians who hold a majority in parliament of doing Israel's bidding.
His outburst, which some analysts saw as a measure of Syria's isolation, drew sharp reactions in Lebanon as well as in the press of some of the Arab countries he targeted, and which included Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
On peace with Israel, Assad was quoted by Dubai Television as saying that there is still a chance for peace in the region, but that time was running out and that "the current generation is the last peace generation."
Comment on this Article
U.S. resolution would disarm Hezbollah
By EDITH M. LEDERER
Associated Press
21 August 06
UNITED NATIONS - The United States is planning to introduce a new U.N. resolution on disarming Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, but U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said Monday this should not hold up the quick deployment of U.N. peacekeepers.
Footsteps of Bin Laden
A new Security Council resolution could help break the impasse over getting an expanded U.N. force on the ground quickly.
Countries that are potential troop contributors have expressed concern about the rules of engagement - and exactly what troops would be required to do, especially regarding the disarming of Hezbollah.
"I think the initial force can be deployed now," Bolton told reporters. "We want the disarming of Hezbollah to be accomplished rapidly so that the democratically elected government of Lebanon can establish full control over its territory."
Comment on this Article
Putin Says Russia Considering Sending Troops to Lebanon
Created: 23.08.2006 14:28 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 17:33 MSK
MosNews
Russia is considering sending troops to the United Nations peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon to enforce the Israel-Hezbollah cease-fire, President Vladimir Putin told Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi.
"He said he is thinking about it," Prodi told reporters at his vacation villa in Tuscany, after a telephone conversation last night with Putin. Prodi's spokesman confirmed his comments. Putin "has started talking to his collaborators and he'll give us an answer in the coming days," he said.
Lebanon faces a "security vacuum" unless the peacekeepers and Lebanese soldiers are deployed to oversee the cease-fire, UN envoy Terje Roed-Larsen said after visits to Lebanon and Israel yesterday. There is "reason for pessimism" until peacekeepers are in place, he said.
The cease-fire that came into force Aug. 14 halted a 33-day conflict between Israel and the Shiite Muslim Hezbollah group. European Union ambassadors are meeting in Brussels today to prepare a UN foreign ministers' meeting on Aug. 25 to determine Europe's contributions to the force.
The conflict in Lebanon began after Hezbollah abducted two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border attack on July 12. Israeli air strikes were followed by a ground offensive. About 1,200 Lebanese were killed and 4,500 wounded. Reports say 159 Israelis were killed.
The Lebanese army has taken up positions in about 70 percent of the area between the border with Israel and the Litani River, Riszard Morszymski, deputy spokesman for the UN force in the area, said Tuesday. The Litani River is about 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the border.
The Lebanese army's line is about 8-10 kilometers from the border, while the Israeli military controls a strip about 4-5 kilometers inside Lebanon, Morszymski said. UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) soldiers are deployed in between.
Comment on this Article
Israelis: Lebanon situation 'explosive'
Associated Press
23 August 06
PARIS - Israel's foreign minister on Wednesday called the situation in Lebanon "explosive" and urged the international community to work quickly to deploy peacekeeping troops there. Meanwhile, Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora urged the United States to help end Israel's sea and air blockade, and said his country was making "every effort" to secure its borders.
Comment on this Article
Untold story of the massacre of Marjayoun leaves blame on both sides of the border
Robert Fisk
The Independent
23 August 06
There are few marks on the road where the missiles hit the innocents of Marjayoun. But there are the memories of what happened immediately after the Israeli airstrike on the convoy of 3,000 people after dark on 11 August: a 16-year old Christian girl screaming "I want my Daddy" as her father's mutilated body lay a few metres away from her; the town mukhtar discovering that his wife, Collette, had been decapitated by one of the Israeli missiles; the Lebanese Red Cross volunteer who went into the darkness of wartime Lebanon to give water and sandwiches to the refugees and was cut down by another missile, and whose friends could not reach him to save his life.
There are those who break down when they recall the massacre at Joub Jannine - and there are the Israelis who gave permission to the refugees to leave Marjayoun, who specified what roads they should use, and who then attacked them with pilotless, missile-firing drone aircraft. Five days after being asked to account for the tragedy, they had last night still not bothered to explain how they killed at least seven refugees and wounded 36 others just three days before a UN ceasefire came into effect.
It is one of the untold stories of the Israeli-Hizbollah war; there are others - infinitely more bloody - but the ultimate tragedy of these largely Christian refugees involved a raft of Lebanese officers and ministers, the Prime Minister of Lebanon, the US ambassador and the Israeli Defence Ministry.
It all began on 10 August when the Israelis staged a small ground offensive into Lebanon after a month of massive bombing of Lebanese villages in the south. Brig-Gen Adnan Daoud, commanding a mixed force of 350 Lebanese paramilitary police and soldiers at the barracks in the pretty Christian town of Marjayoun, found a man at the gate at 9am, an Israeli officer calling himself Col Ashaya. Brig-Gen Daoud, whose men were not fighting the Israelis, called the Lebanese Interior Minister, Ahmad Fatfat, who "endorsed" - Fatfat's word - Daoud's decision to let him in. "Ashaya" spent four hours looking round the barracks to assure himself that there were no Hizbollah members there. Then he left. Daoud put a white flag on the guardhouse.
But at 4pm that afternoon, an Israeli tank unit approached the barracks and started to shoot their way in. Daoud was again told by Fatfat to let in the Israelis who, according to Daoud, informed him that "we are the occupiers and we are in charge". An Israeli officer then locked Daoud into a room.
Thousands of Christians in Marjayoun now feared for their lives. According to several aid workers, Hizbollah were firing rockets from behind the town's hospital, which was immediately abandoned by the Lebanese Red Cross. The inhabitants believed, with good reason, that Hizbollah's missiles would be redirected from Israel on to Marjayoun itself now that the town had been taken over by Israeli troops and tanks.
Locked in his room, Daoud now called Fatfat again and Fatfat called the Lebanese Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, who, by chance, was talking to the US ambassador to Beirut, Jeffrey Feltman. Feltman - either via the State Department or directly to the US embassy in Tel Aviv - told his diplomats to call the Israeli Defence Ministry; and they swiftly replied that there should be no Israeli troops in Daoud's barracks. But the Israelis in Marjayoun refused to believe what Daoud told them.
Marjayoun's inhabitants, however, were now in a state of panic and Daoud called Fatfat at 7pm to start arranging for a refugee convoy north from Marjayoun to Beirut. The Lebanese government, according to Fatfat, called the United Nations command in southern Lebanon at 5am the next day, 11 August, to seek clearance from the Israelis to allow the thousands of refugees to be convoyed north. The UN, according to the government in Beirut, subsequently notified Gen Abdulrahman Shaiti, assistant to the head of Lebanese military intelligence, that the convoy had permission from the Israelis to travel.
Two UN armoured vehicles, crewed by Indian troops, subsequently turned up in Marjayoun to find at least 3,000 people, including Shia Muslim refugees from the surrounding, devastated villages, waiting to leave. "We had a total agreement that they would go out to the Bekaa [Valley] from [Alain] Pellegrini [the UN commander]," Fatfat says. "The road was also agreed." But there were delays. Part of the road ahead had been heavily bombed and had to be repaired. It was 4pm before the convoy crept slowly out of Marjayoun, Daoud's 350 soldiers in the lead. The UN vehicles then abandoned the convoy at Hasbaya, the northern limit of UN operations, leaving the refugees dangerously exposed. The UN had already warned the Lebanese authorities that it was late for the convoy to leave.
"They went so slowly, I was enraged," a relief worker recalls. "People at friendly villages would come out and give the refugees food and water and want to talk to them and people would stop to greet old friends as if this was tourism. The convoy was only going at five miles an hour. It was getting dark." The 3,000 refugees now trailed up the Bekaa after nightfall and were approaching the ancient Kifraya vineyards at Joub Jannine when disaster struck them at 8pm.
"The first bomb hit the second car," Karamallah Dagher, a reporter for Reuters, said. "I was half way back down the road and my friend Elie Salami was standing there, asking me if I had any spare gasoline. That's when the second missile struck and Elie's head and shoulders were blown away. His daughter Sally is 16 and she jumped from the car and cried out: 'I want my Daddy, I want my Daddy.' But he was gone." Speaking of the killings yesterday, Dagher breaks down and cries. He tried to carry his arthritic mother from his own car but she complained that he was hurting her so he put her back in the passenger seat and sat beside her, waiting for a violent death which mercifully never came. But it arrived for Collette Makdissi al-Rashed, wife of the mukhtar, who was beheaded in her Cherokee jeep, and for a member of the Tahta family from from Deir Mimas, and for two other refugees, and for a Lebanese soldier and for 35-year-old Mikhael Jbaili, the Red Cross volunteer from Zahle, who was blasted into the air when a rocket exploded behind him.
"There was panic," the Marjayoun mayor, Fouad Hamra, said. "Many people drove away. They had a clearance; everything should have been OK. If Hizbollah was supposed to be carrying weapons at night, they would have been travelling in the opposite direction!"
Who flew the drones? An Israeli soldier of the invasion force? A nameless officer in the Israel Defence Ministry in Tel Aviv? The Israelis knew a civilian convoy was on the road. Yet they sent their pilotless machines to attack it. Why? Last night, the Israeli Defence Ministry had not responded to inquiries from reporters who asked for the answer last Friday.
Comment on this Article
They Care About You, Really
Student Debt Crisis: Are There Any Solutions? - A look at what's behind the ever-increasing cost of college and potential solutions offered by activists and government
By Talia Berman
WireTap
August 23, 2006
Many would argue that higher education in this country is the best in the world. France has some of the best culinary schools, and Oxford and Cambridge have rivaling histories of literary renown, but only in the United States will you find comparable culinary and literary prowess as well as thousands of virtually every other topic one could imagine -- only to the United States do more than half a million students come every year to study.
But at what cost? Americans (and visiting students) have always paid more for education. And in the past 30 years, in the past 10 years, in the past two years, the cost of higher education, including tuition and loan repayment, has steadily increased. But 2006 will likely go down as the worst year in history for student borrowers, and as the mountains of debt grow, young peoples' lives are forever changing.
Holly MacGibbon graduated from NYU's theater program with $120,000 in debt, which has obviously prevented her from taking any entry-level theater jobs. "Without $600 a month in loan payments, I could take a lower-paying theater job instead of working outside my field. Summer theater jobs, where most young performers start out, pay $200 to $300 a week, which is just not enough when you have $600 in loan payments."
And Julia Stubben's post-graduate life has been entirely governed by her student debt. "Being in debt has greatly affected my financial decisions. I do not enjoy my job, and it is not the career I would have chosen for myself, and in order to take the job I had to move three hours away from my boyfriend, family, and friends. Pretty much, I live in seclusion in a relatively boring rural area and hate this stage of my life. The only reason I am in this situation is because of the job -- which is paying off my loans."
According to Toby Chaudhuri, communications director at the progressive research group Campaign for America's Future, continuing to charge exorbitantly for education will have grave results. "If you want to create an America that works for everybody, you have to give every child the right to education," he said. "Families are getting hit with interest rates and across the country they are pinching pennies to afford to send their kids to college."
What's behind the high cost of education
Student debt is climbing for three reasons: Interest rates have begun to rise, tuition is skyrocketing, and student aid programs are stuck in 2003.
2006 has been the worst in history for government action against student borrowers. In February, President Bush rolled out the Deficit Reduction Act, which cut $12 billion in federal student aid money. Part of the plan includes a hike in interest rates on federal student loans and loans taken out by parents. The interest rate on Stafford Loans to students rose from 5.3 percent to 7.14 percent on existing loans and to 6.8 percent on new loans. Interest rates for Parent Loans for Undergraduate Students (PLUS) loans increased even more dramatically, from 6.1 to 7.4 percent on existing loans and to a whopping 8.5 percent on new loans.
These interest rate hikes are designed to ease the federal deficit, but this very budget plan also includes tax breaks for Americans making more than $1 million a year -- a move that negates anything saved in the interest rate increase.
The Deficit Reduction Act is particularly egregious because low interest rates have historically been the way students paid for college. Just as low mortgage rates ease the ever-increasing value of real estate, low interest rates allow students to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees, and even have a little time to outrun their slowly collecting debt. Now, with those rates going up as tuition skyrockets, recent graduates will be caught and buried before they have time to throw their caps in the air.
Though it is not a new problem, student debt has quickly climbed in the last few years. Between 1993 and 2004, the percentage of students needing to borrow money jumped from 46 to 66 percent [PDF]. Debt for graduates averages around $19,000 across public and private schools. Ten years ago, public school borrowers needed about $8,000. Now they borrow about $17,250 -- a 65 percent increase, adjusted for inflation.
Parents and families are also increasingly debilitated by higher education costs. In 2004, 15.3 percent of parents of graduating high school seniors took out PLUS loans. Their average debt load was $17,709 -- $14,056 at public institutions and $21,984 at private schools.
In the past five years, tuition and fees at public universities have risen by 40 percent, adjusted for inflation. Over the same time period, consumer prices in general rose less than 9 percent. Comparisons to tuition costs over the last 30 years are even more dramatic: adjusted for inflation, college tuition is roughly triple what it was in the '70s.
In addition to swelling tuition costs and interest rate hikes, student debt has been crushed by flagging amounts of direct aid. Since 2003, Congress has flat-funded the Pell Grant, the most common form of direct aid for students. Currently, the maximum Pell Grant is $4,050 a year.
According to Luke Swarthout, who works for the State PIRGs' Higher Education Project, "The buying power of the Pell Grant has decreased. Today, it doesn't even keep up with inflation, let alone college costs." To wit: In 2004, more than 88 percent of Pell Grant recipients who graduated with a bachelor's degree also had student loans.
According to Richard Vedder, author of "Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much," tuition rates are exorbitant and increasing for a variety of reasons. One factor is that universities have shifted their spending toward expensive research, administration and student services like residences, and student centers to boost schools' reputations and attract more students -- a move that he believes has hurt student instruction considerably.
Interestingly, Vedder also suggests that the increase in student loans facilitates rising tuition costs. Vedder believes that because virtually no one can go to school without financial aid, no one expects to, which makes it easier for students to accept exorbitant tuition rates. The thinking goes, neither these students nor their peers are paying for school right now, so tacking on a few more thousand to their school loans barely makes a conceptual difference. Furthermore, as tuition increases, loans necessarily increase, but students continue to earn and spend as they did before -- their debt goes from unimaginably huge to more unimaginably huge -- a somewhat elusive differentiation for most students, making it difficult to protest or even feel as if there is anything they can do about it.
School loans can be a lifelong decision
As today's students and recent graduates age, they're going to find their lives very different than preceding generations. High monthly debt payments will reduce their opportunities, and without a major change, it will only get worse.
Toby Chaudhuri with Campaign for America's Future estimates, "In the next decade, over 4.4 million low- and moderate-income academically qualified students will opt not to enroll in four-year university degree programs, and another two million will opt not to enroll in higher education at all." As a result, Campaign for America's Future reports that in 2002, student loan debt caused 14 percent of graduates to delay marriage, 27 percent to delay a medical or dental procedure, 30 percent to delay buying a car, 21 percent to postpone having children, and 38 percent to put off buying a home.
For some, the burden of student debt negates the advantage of a college education at all. MacGibbon holds a bachelor's degree, but she wishes she never went to school. "I definitely regret going. I wish that I had just come to New York and done an intensive theater training program -- a good one for around $20,000. I guess it's great to have a degree, but I would definitely not make this decision again."
This is precisely the fear that haunts the progressive lobby in Washington: that tuition and the lack of adequate aid will make students feel that higher education is just "not worth it." Chaudhuri worries about the global consequences of the cost of American education. "We are faltering while other countries are making investments -- China graduated 500,000 engineers in 2004; the United States graduated 70,000. We have to do better for families if we want to stay on top," he adds.
Luke Swarthout notes that students are naïve about how their debt is going to affect their life after school. "What I find is that students don't realize their debt until after they graduate," he says.
When they do realize how much debt they have accumulated, student borrowers' choices immediately following graduation are often dictated directly and expressly by that burden. Many students go right back into school after graduation to get more skills, get qualified for higher-paying jobs and continue to defer their loans. Or, they join the workforce, where their options are limited by their debt burden.
Recent graduates are far less likely to pursue a career in public service where they won't make as much money as they would in the private sector. One attorney, who asked not to be named, graduated from NYU in 2005 with $185,000 in debt and currently works 10-12 hour days for a large law firm in New York City. He says that the public sector was not an option for him, and he maintains that he is not nearly the only one. "It is true for many of my colleagues: If we weren't in so much debt, we would quit tomorrow! We know we brought it upon ourselves when we chose to get educated at one of the best and most expensive schools in the country, but taking on this debt does really trap you: Salaries are just lower anywhere else in the country. I would not be living in New York if I didn't have this debt."
Solutions to the student-debt crisis
How are graduates able to get out from under their debt? For borrowers in financial dire straits, declaring bankruptcy is an often-attempted but rarely viable option. But the passage of the business-friendly and individual-hostile Bankruptcy Bill in April 2005 has all but closed that option as well.
Aside from declaring bankruptcy, several organizations are working to reform school loan policies. The state PIRGs, for instance, propose a three-pronged approach. As Luke Swarthout describes it, "We need to increase grant aid at the federal level and lower tuition rates at the state level. We need reforms in loan programs, especially for people that want to go into social and public service careers. The third piece is cutting out waste in the student loan programs and redirecting it to students."
There are also various plans circulating in Congress to cut interest rates. The state PIRGs' Higher Education project has proposed a bill that would cut interest rates in half for borrowers with the most need. Under this bill, the typical undergraduate borrower would save $5,600 over the life of his or her loans.
Lauren Asher, associate director at the nonprofit Project on Student Debt, emphasizes reshaping the current lending system to make it more accessible to borrowers. The group's aim is to create a lending system that adjusts repayment based on a number of factors: dependents, borrowers' current income and public service. "You have to pay back your loans, but you can pay them back in a way that has some relationship to what you can really afford," Asher said. "We want to create a system that encourages work and repayment, and can reduce default."
In addition to providing solid information up front to prospective borrowers, Asher believes lenders should make room for unpredictability in recent graduates' earning capacities. "There's a limit to certainty about the value of a degree in the marketplace -- we think people need some protection so they can afford to take the risk that going to college entails."
On august 9, a federal commission on the future of higher education published a report that called for, among other things, broad changes in tuition costs and the way we pay for school. The report suggested increasing the Pell Grant and professed that tuition should increase in proportion to income increases. Furthermore the panel called on policy makers to find new ways to make school affordable.
The PIRG program calls for more in the way of debt relief for borrowers who choose to enter public service. Currently in place are several loan-forgiveness programs on both the federal and state level that offer loan forgiveness to a small number of teachers, nurses, health-care professionals, social workers, military personnel, and federal employees like House and Senate staff. For example, the federal government relieves elementary and high school teachers who teach in high-poverty schools for five consecutive years a total of $5,000 in relief. Americorps and VISTA volunteers receive $4,735 a year for up to two years. Child-care providers in low-income communities are eligible for 100 percent relief from their Stafford student loans after five consecutive years of service.
For Swarthout, this is on the right track, but the government must do more. "We are calling for reforms in loan programs so that students with high debt to salary ratio are able to manage that debt, especially people who want to go into social and public service careers."
On federal, state and municipal levels, some programs have been introduced that aim to prevent debt accumulation in the first place. Using a work-study approach, these initiatives offer to pay for subsidize degree programs in exchange for commitments to public service.
The New York City Teaching Fellowship is one example: Fellows commit to teaching "high need" subjects (high school math and science, special education) to students in a "high need" school district for two years while getting a masters in education from a City University of New York (CUNY) school. They are paid a teacher's salary and receive all the benefits of state employees, and their education is subsidized by the municipal government. In the end, participants end up paying about $5,000 for their education. Response to this program has been highly positive from all sides, and advocates say increasing the availability of this kind of opportunity would encourage more students to enter public service.
Making education free may not solve the problem
As much as it seems like a promising solution, the problem with following a European model and aiming to make school free or extremely low in cost is the potentially adverse effect it could have on the quality of education. Taking away the vast majority of tuition revenues would limit what schools could offer, so for Swarthout, making education free is not the object. He says, "We have the best higher ed system in the world because we have an incredibly diverse range of opportunities that allow access to different types of students and programs. I don't look to other systems -- I tend to consider ways of improving our system."
For some students, there is something in between free and what we currently pay. "I think we could maintain the quality of our universities with a lower cost," says Christina Arnold, a recent University of Pennsylvania graduate. "We could do without such a nice gym."
Daniel Parcerisas Land, a UC Berkeley exchange student from Barcelona, Spain, who also spent a year at the Universite de Paris X-Nanterre, wonders if the vast discrepancy between tuition at European schools and here is justified by the quality of the education. He says, "even though Berkeley was better than my schools in Barcelona and Paris, I don't think it was 4,000 times better."
Talia Berman is a freelance writer living in New York City.
Comment on this Article
The High Cost of Being Poor
By Barbara Ehrenreich, AlterNet. Posted July 21, 2006.
There are people, concentrated in the Hamptons and Beverly Hills, who still confuse poverty with the simple life. No cable TV, no altercations with the maid, no summer home maintenance issues -- just the basics like family, sunsets and walks in the park. What they don't know is that it's expensive to be poor.
In fact, you, the reader of middling income, could probably not afford it.
A new study from the Brookings Institute documents the "ghetto tax," or higher cost of living in low-income urban neighborhoods. It comes at you from every direction, from food prices to auto insurance. A few examples from this study, by Matt Fellowes, that covered 12 American cities:
* Poor people are less likely to have bank accounts, which can be expensive for those with low balances, and so they tend to cash their pay checks at check-cashing businesses, which in the cities surveyed, charged $5 to $50 for a $500 check.
* Nationwide, low-income car buyers, defined as people earning less than $30,000 a year, pay two percentage points more for a car loan than more affluent buyers.
* Low-income drivers pay more for car insurance. In New York, Baltimore and Hartford, they pay an average $400 more a year to insure the exact same car and driver risk than wealthier drivers.
* Poorer people pay an average of one percentage point more in mortgage interest.
* They are more likely to buy their furniture and appliances through pricey rent-to-own businesses. In Wisconsin, the study reports, a $200 rent-to-own TV set can cost $700 with the interest included.
* They are less likely to have access to large supermarkets and hence to rely on the far more expensive, and lower quality offerings, of small grocery and convenience stores.
I didn't live in any ghettoes when I worked on Nickle and Dimed --a trailer park, yes, but no ghetto -- and on my average wage of $7 an hour, or about $14,400 a year, I wasn't in the market for furniture, a house or a car. But the high cost of poverty was brought home to me within a few days of my entry into the low-wage life, when, slipping into social-worker mode, I chastised a co-worker for living in a motel room when it would be so much cheaper to rent an apartment. Her response: Where would she get the first month's rent and security deposit it takes to pin down an apartment? The lack of that amount of capital -- probably well over $1,000 -- condemned her to paying $40 a night at the Day's Inn.
Then there was the problem of sustenance. I had gone into the project imagining myself preparing vast quantities of cheap, nutritious soups and stews, which I would freeze and heat for dinner each day. But surprise: I didn't have the proverbial pot to pee in, not to mention spices or Tupperware. A scouting trip to K-Mart established that it would take about a $40 capital investment to get my kitchenette up to speed for the low-wage way of life.
The food situation got only more challenging when I, too, found myself living in a motel. Lacking a fridge and microwave, all my food had to come from the nearest convenience store (hardboiled eggs and banana for breakfast) or, for the big meal of the day, Wendy's or KFC. I have no nutritional complaints; after all, there is a veggie, or flecks of one, in Wendy's broccoli and cheese baked potato. The problem was financial. A double cheeseburger and fries is lot more expensive than that hypothetical homemade lentil stew.
There are other tolls along the road well-traveled by the working poor. If your credit is lousy, which it is likely to be, you'll pay a higher deposit for a phone. If you don't have health insurance, you may end taking that feverish child to an emergency room, and please don't think of ER's as socialized medicine for the poor. The average cost of a visit is over $1,000, which is over ten times more than what a clinic pediatrician would charge. Or you neglect that hypertension, diabetes or mystery lump until you end up with a $100,000 problem on your hands.
So let's have a little less talk about how the poor should learn to manage their money, and a little more attention to all the ways that money is being systematically siphoned off. Yes, certain kinds of advice would be helpful: skip the pay-day loans and rent-to-pay furniture, for example. But we need laws in more states to stop predatory practices like $50 charges for check cashing. Also, think what some microcredit could do to move families from motels and shelters to apartments. And did I mention a living wage?
If you're rich, you might want to stay that way. It's a whole lot cheaper than being poor.
Comment on this Article
Katrina rhetoric fails to calm storm
By Andrew Ward
August 22 2006
According to the Washington Post, Mr Bush has mentioned the word "poverty" in public only six times since his post-Katrina speeches and the debate over racial inequality proved no more durable.
"Katrina created an opening for America to deal seriously with these issues," says David Dante Troutt, editor of After the Storm, a collection of essays by black intellectuals about the disaster. "But the opportunity was missed."
Visitors to the New Orleans Gift and Jewelry Show this week could have been forgiven for thinking that life in the Big Easy is back to normal.
Hundreds of people descended on the city's Ernest N. Morial convention centre to hunt for bargains among stalls selling everything from loose diamonds and Rolex watches to crystal glassware and designer perfume, with a Starbucks coffee kiosk on hand to stave off thirst.
Nowhere in the sprawling venue was there any sign of the horror and suffering that occurred under the same roof a year ago next week, when more than 20,000 people sought refuge in the building following Hurricane Katrina.
For three days, the overwhelmingly poor and black refugees were left to fester in sweltering, airless conditions without food or liquid as the relief effort stalled.
The harrowing scenes, reminiscent of a third world camp, exposed an urban, black underclass that appeared to have been abandoned - literally and metaphorically - by the wealthiest nation on earth. For a brief period, the US was shamed into a national debate about its racial and economic divisions.
President George W. Bush acknowledged the "deep, persistent poverty" experienced by many blacks and blamed it on "a history of racial discrimination that cut off generations from the opportunity of America".
"We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action," he said.
But 12 months later, the business-as-usual atmosphere at the refurbished convention centre demonstrates how quickly the issue of social justice has fallen off the national agenda.
According to the Washington Post, Mr Bush has mentioned the word "poverty" in public only six times since his post-Katrina speeches and the debate over racial inequality proved no more durable.
"Katrina created an opening for America to deal seriously with these issues," says David Dante Troutt, editor of After the Storm, a collection of essays by black intellectuals about the disaster. "But the opportunity was missed."
Despite growth in the economy, the proportion of African-Americans living below the poverty line has increased during the Bush presidency to nearly a quarter - double the national average.
Nowhere are African-Americans more disadvantaged than in New Orleans, where four out of 10 black families lived in poverty before Katrina and 60 per cent of poor blacks had no access to a car, leaving them stranded as the storm approached. A year later, most of the city's black population is still dispersed across the country, many without the resources to return and rebuild.
Standing outside her mother's damaged home in the Gentilly district, Joanne Johnson makes no attempt to hide her bitterness. "We had their attention for five minutes, then they moved on," she says. "They can afford to pay for a war in Iraq but they can't afford to look after their own people."
To Ms Johnson, 45, a supermarket worker, "they" seems to refer to the Bush administration and white America, as if the two are interchangeable.
Like many African-Americans, she believes the authorities intentionally broke the levees near black neighbourhoods to spare wealthier, white districts. "People heard the explosion," she says.
The allegation is a rehashed version of an urban myth dating back to Hurricane Betsy in 1965. But the widespread belief in the theory underlines the extent of mistrust among blacks towards the white-dominated state and federal governments. "Katrina has exacerbated racial divisions rather than healed them," says Douglas Brinkley, a New Orleans historian and author of The Great Deluge.
For many whites, the lasting impression of Katrina's aftermath was not images of poverty, but instead the pictures of black people looting stores and reports of rape and murder in the convention centre and Superdome. "Many whites saw the looting as a violation of a social contract," says Lance Hill, executive director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University in New Orleans. "It strengthened the association in their minds between poor blacks and criminality and made them feel less guilty about the poverty."
Subsequent investigations showed that the reports were wildly exaggerated. But the perception that New Orleans was descending into anarchy delayed the relief effort as officials shifted focus from aid to security.
Some in New Orleans resent the focus on black poverty, arguing that many middle-class people, white and black, also lost homes to Katrina. But, as the anniversary nears, even the briefest drive through the city reveals an obvious truth: wealthier neighbourhoods are recovering much quicker than poor black ones.
The only part of life that has returned to normal for poor black communities is gang-related crime. The city recorded 21 murders in July, most of them involving young black men.
This apparent return to the bad old days raises doubts about whether the billions of dollars of federal aid committed to New Orleans can solve the city's social ills. June Cross, a filmmaker researching a documentary on Katrina, doubts there is the will to even try. "America views urban poverty in the same bracket as famine in Africa," she says. "People think it's sad but there's nothing that can be done about it."
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Comment on this Article
Health Care: It's What Ails Us
by Doug Pibel and Sarah van Gelder
CommonDreams
18 August 06
For Joel Segal, it was the day he was kicked out of George Washington Hospital, still on an IV after knee surgery, without insurance, and with $100,000 in medical debt. For Kiki Peppard, it was having to postpone needed surgery until she could find a job with insurance - it took her two years. People all over the United States are waking up to the fact that our system of providing health care is a disaster.
An estimated 50 million Americans lack medical insurance, and a similar and rapidly growing number are underinsured. The uninsured are excluded from services, charged more for services, and die when medical care could save them-an estimated 18,000 die each year because they lack medical coverage.
But it's not only the uninsured who suffer. Of the more than 1.5 million bankruptcies filed in the U.S. each year, about half are a result of medical bills; of those, three-quarters of filers had health insurance.
Businesses are suffering too. Insurance premiums increased 73 percent between 2000 and 2005, and per capita costs are expected to keep rising. The National Coalition on Health Care (NCHC) estimates that, without reform, national health care spending will double over the next 10 years. The NCHC is not some fringe advocacy group-its co-chairs are Congressmen Robert D. Ray (R-IA) and Paul G. Rogers (D-FL), and it counts General Electric and Verizon among its members.
Employers who want to offer employee health care benefits can't compete with low-road employers who offer none. Nor can they compete with companies located in countries that offer national health insurance.
The shocking facts about health care in the United States are well known. There's little argument that the system is broken. What's not well known is that the dialogue about fixing the health care system is just as broken.
Among politicians and pundits, a universal, publicly funded system is off the table. But Americans in increasing numbers know what their leaders seem not to - that the United States is the only industrialized nation where such stories as Joel's and Kiki's can happen.
And most Americans know why: the United States leaves the health of its citizens at the mercy of an expensive, patchwork system where some get great care while others get none at all.
The overwhelming majority - 75 percent, according to an October 2005 Harris Poll - want what people in other wealthy countries have: the peace of mind of universal health insurance.
A wild experiment?
Which makes the discussion all the stranger. The public debate around universal health care proceeds as if it were a wild, untested experiment &ndash if the United States would be doing something never done before.
Yet universal health care is in place throughout the industrialized world. In most cases, doctors and hospitals operate as private businesses. But government pays the bills, which reduces paperwork costs to a fraction of the American level. It also cuts out expensive insurance corporations and HMO's, with their multimillion-dollar CEO compensation packages, and billions in profit. Small wonder "single payer" systems can cover their entire populations at half the per capita cost. In the United States, people without insurance may live with debilitating disease or pain, with conditions that prevent them from getting jobs or decent pay, putting many on a permanent poverty track. They have more difficulty managing chronic conditions - only two in five have a regular doctor &mdash leading to poorer health and greater cost.
The uninsured are far more likely to wait to seek treatment for acute problems until they become severe.
Even those who have insurance may not find out until it's too late that exclusions, deductibles, co-payments, and annual limits leave them bankrupt when a family member gets seriously ill.
In 2005, more than a quarter of insured Americans didn't fill prescriptions, skipped recommended treatment, or didn't see a doctor when sick, according to the Commonwealth Fund's 2005 Biennial Health Insurance Survey.
People stay in jobs they hate - for the insurance. Small business owners are unable to offer insurance coverage for employees or themselves. Large businesses avoid setting up shops in the United States - Toyota just chose to build a plant in Canada to escape the skyrocketing costs of U.S. health care.
All of this adds up to a less healthy society, more families suffering the double whammy of financial and health crises, and more people forced to go on disability.
But the public dialogue proceeds as if little can be done beyond a bit of tinkering around the edges. More involvement by government would create an unwieldy bureaucracy, they say, and surely bankrupt us all. The evidence points to the opposite conclusion.
The United States spends by far the most on health care per person - more than twice as much as Europe, Canada, and Japan which all have some version of national health insurance. Yet we are near the bottom in nearly every measure of our health.
The World Health Organization (WHO) ranks the U.S. health care system 37th of 190 countries, well below most of Europe, and trailing Chile and Costa Rica. The United States does even worse in the WHO rankings of performance on level of health &mdash a stunning 72nd. Life expectancy in the U.S. is shorter than in 27 other countries; the U.S. ties with Hungary, Malta, Poland, and Slovakia for infant mortality - ahead of only Latvia among industrialized nations.
The cost of corporate bureaucracy
Where is the money going? An estimated 15 cents of each private U.S. health care dollar goes simply to shuffling the paperwork. The administrative costs for our patched-together system of HMO's, insurance companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, hospitals, and government programs are nearly double those for single-payer Canada. It's not because Americans are inherently less efficient than Canadians - our publicly funded Medicare system spends under five cents per budget dollar on administrative overhead. And the Veterans Administration, which functions like Britain's socialized medical system, spends less per patient but consistently outranks private providers in patient satisfaction and quality of care.
But in the private sector, profits and excessive CEO pay are added to the paperwork and bureaucracy. The U.S. pharmaceutical industry averages a 17 percent profit margin, against three percent for all other businesses. In the health care industry, million-dollar CEO pay packages are the rule, with some executives pulling down more than $30 million a year in salary and amassing billion-dollar stock option packages.
Do those costs really make the difference?
Studies conducted by the General Accounting Office, the Congressional Budget Office, and various states have concluded that a universal, single-payer health care system would cover everyone &ndash including the millions currently without insurance &mdash and still save billions.
Enormous amounts of money are changing hands in the health-industrial complex, but little is going to the front line providers - nurses, nurse practitioners, and home health care workers who put in long shifts for low pay. Many even find they must fight to get access to the very health facilities they serve.
Doctors complain of burnout as patient loads increase. They spend less time with each patient as they spend more time doing insurance company mandated paperwork and arguing with insurance company bureaucrats over treatments and coverage.
Americans know what they want
In polls, surveys, town meetings, and letters, large majorities of Americans say they have had it with a system that is clearly broken and they are demanding universal health care. Many businesses &mdash despite a distaste for government involvement &mdash are coming to the same view. Doctors, nurses, not-for-profit hospitals, and clinics are joining the call, many specifically saying we need a single-payer system like the system in Canada. And while we hear complaints about Canada's system, a study of 10 years of Canadian opinion polling showed that Canadians are more satisfied with their health care than Americans. Holly Dressel's article shows why.
Although you'd never know it from the American media, the number of Canadians who would trade their system for a U.S.-style health care system is just eight percent.
Again, the public dialogue proceeds from a perplexing place. Dissatisfied Canadians or Britons are much talked about. But there's little mention of the satisfaction level of Americans. The Commonwealth Fund's survey, for instance, shows that, in 2005, 42 percent of Americans doubted whether they could get quality health care. At a series of town hall meetings in Maine, facilitators asked participants to discuss dozens of complex health care policies but excluded single-payer as an option. (See Tish Tanski's article. Only after repeated demands by participants was the approach that cuts out the corporate middle-men allowed on the list.
The same story played out across the country at town meetings convened by the congressionally mandated Citizens' Health Care Working Group. In Los Angeles, New York, and Hartford, participants simply refused to consider the questions they were given about tradeoffs between cost, quality, and accessibility. They insisted that there's already enough money being spent to pay for publicly funded universal health care.
But it's not only about the money. Comments from participants in the town meetings, from Fargo to Memphis, from Los Angeles to Providence, revealed an understanding that this is about a deeper question. It is an issue of the sort of society we want to be &ndash one in which we all are left to sink or swim on our own or one in which we recognize that the whole society benefits when we each can get access to the help we need.
Likewise, when we asked readers of the YES! email newsletter what would make you healthier, nearly all answered in terms of "we." Any one of us could get sick or be injured. Any one could lose a job and with it insurance. Our best security, they said, is coverage for all.
What form might this take?
As elections near and the issue of health care tops opinion polls as the most pressing domestic issue, various proposals for universal health care are circulating. The bipartisan NCHC looked at four options: employer mandates, extending existing federal programs like Medicaid to all those uninsured, creating a new federal program for the uninsured, and single-payer national health insurance. All the options saved billions of dollars compared to the current system, but single payer was by far the winner, saving more than $100 billion a year.
Meanwhile, the Citizens' Health Care Working Group, which held those town meetings around the country, has issued interim recommendations. They state the values participants expressed: All Americans should have affordable health care, and assuring that they do is a shared social responsibility. Sadly, that bold statement is followed by inconclusive recommendations: more study, no preference for public funding, and a strong commitment to get everybody covered by 2012-but with no means to do it. The commission will make final recommendations to the president and Congress, and is accepting public comment through the end of August.
What is the obstacle?
With all the support and all the good reasons to adopt universal health care, why don't we have it yet? Why do politicians refuse to talk about the solution people want?
It could be the fact that the health care industry, the top spender on Capitol Hill, spent $183.3 million on lobbying just in the second half of 2005, according to PoliticalMoneyLine. com. And in the 2003-2004 election cycle, they spent $123.7 million on election campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Politicians dread the propaganda barrage and political fallout that surrounded the failed Clinton health care plan. But in the years since, health care costs have outpaced growth in wages and inflation by huge margins, Americans have joined the ranks of the uninsured at the rate of 2 million each year, and businesses are taking a major competitiveness hit as they struggle to pay rising premiums.
Health Care for All is holding town hall meetings throughout the United States (they've held 93 so far), and people are pressing their representatives to take action. Over 150 unions have called for action on universal health care, and polls show overwhelming majorities of Americans feel the same way.
Some political leaders are pressing for universal health care. Remember Joel, who was kicked out of the hospital with $100,000 in medical debt? He started giving speeches about the catastrophe of our health care system, and eventually got hired by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) to head his universal single payer health care effort. Conyers' "Medicare for All" bill now has 72 co-sponsors. Rep. Jim McDermott's (D-WA) Health Security Act has 62.
Around the United States, state and local campaigns for universal health care are making progress. (See Rev. Linda Walling's update).
One of these days, the lobbyists and their clients in government may have to get out of the way and let Americans join the rest of the developed world in the security, efficiency, and quality that comes with health care for all.
Sarah van Gelder is Executive Editor of YES! Magazine. Doug Pibel is Managing Editor of YES!
© 2004-06 YES!
Comment on this Article
Home Mortgage Defaults rise in California
FAIR OAKS
August 21, 2006
Foreclosure activity in California in the second quarter jumped by 67 percent over the year-earlier period, according to figures released Monday by Foreclosures.com, a Central Valley-based real estate investment advisory firm and publisher of foreclosure property information.
"Year over year at the end of the second quarter of 2006, foreclosure activity in California has increased more than 67 percent," says Alexis McGee, president of Fair Oaks-based ForeclosureS.com.
The once hot housing markets in Las Vegas and Phoenix are cooling off rapidly and defaults there are on the rise as well, she says.
"Both Las Vegas and Phoenix were impacted by speculators," says Ms. McGee, and more than 25 percent of new home sales in both markets were going to out of state investors who had no intention of ever occupying the homes they purchased.
Now those who came late to the party find themselves squeezed by rising interest rates and resulting negative cash flows, she says.
"The speculators are definitely on the run, and walking away from properties they cannot afford to hold and cannot sell at a profit," says Ms. McGee.
In Colorado, foreclosure activity has put Denver well up in the top 10 of metro areas with the highest foreclosure rates, according to Foreclosures.com's figures.
"Almost 5,300 homes in Colorado have already been lost in foreclosure and, as of August 11, over 11,300 were in the pre-foreclosure process," says Ms. McGee. She cites recent reports by economists that showed that Colorado was lagging behind the rest of the nation in economic recovery from the 2001-2002 recession.
"A more severe situation, however, is in California," she says. "A primary reason is the overwhelming use of so-called creative mortgage products people were sold in order to buy ever more expensive homes."
More than $1 trillion of these exotic mortgages were due to reset in the next 18 months, she says, "and payment shock to such homeowners would be severe if not financially fatal."
Comment on this Article
Cuba exports health
By Hernando Calvo Ospina
Le Monde diplomatique"
21 August 06
Some 14,000 Cuban doctors now give free treatment to Venezuela's poor and 3,000 Cuban medical staff worked in the aftermath of last year's Kashmir earthquake. Cuba has plans to heal those poorer than itself.
When Hurricane Katrina ripped through the southern United States in August 2005, the authorities were overwhelmed and the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, appealed to the international community for emergency medical aid. The Cuban government immediately offered assistance to New Orleans and to the states of Mississippi and Alabama, also affected by the storm, and promised that within 48 hours 1,600 doctors, trained to deal with such catastrophes, would arrive with all the necessary equipment plus 36 tonnes of medical supplies. This offer, and another made directly to President George Bush, went unanswered. In the catastrophe at least 1,800 people, most of them poor, died for lack of aid and treatment.
In October 2005, the Kashmir region of Pakistan experienced one of the most violent earthquakes in its history, with terrible consequences in the poorest and most isolated areas to the north. On 15 October an advance party of 200 emergency doctors arrived from Cuba with several tonnes of equipment. A few days later, Havana sent the necessary materials to erect and equip 30 field hospitals in mountain areas, most of which had never been previously visited by a doctor. Local people learned of Cuba's existence for the first time.
To avoid causing offence in this predominantly Muslim country, the women on the Cuban team, who represented 44% of some 3,000 medical staff sent to Pakistan in the next six months, dressed appropriately and wore headscarves. Good will was quickly established; many Pakistanis even allowed their wives and daughters to be treated by male doctors.
By the end of April 2006, shortly before their departure, the Cubans had treated 1.5 million patients, mostly women, and performed 13,000 surgical operations. Only a few severely injured patients had to be flown to Havana. Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf, an important ally of the US and friend of Bush, officially thanked the Cuban authorities and acknowledged that this small nation in the Caribbean had sent more disaster aid than any other country.
First medical brigade
Cuba set up its first international medical brigade in 1963 and dispatched its 58 doctors and health workers to newly independent Algeria. In 1998 the Cuban government began to create the machinery to send large-scale medical assistance to poor populations affected by natural disasters. After hurricanes George and Mitch blew through Central America and the Caribbean, it offered its medical personnel as part of an integrated health programme. The Dominican Republic, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Haiti and Belize all accepted this aid.
Cuba offered massive medical assistance to Haiti, where healthcare was chronically inadequate. In 1998 Cuba even approached France, Haiti's former colonial power, with a proposal to establish a humanitarian association to help the people of Haiti. The French government did not respond (although, finally, in 2004, it sent troops). Since 1998 Cuba has sent 2,500 doctors and as much medicine as its fragile economy permits.
This free aid - the Cuban government funds the personnel - has been effective. The willingness of the new barefoot doctors (1) to intervene in areas where their local equivalents refuse to go, because of the poverty of the clientele or the danger or difficulty of access, has persuaded other countries, especially in Africa, to apply for assistance.
Between 1963 and 2005 more than 100,000 doctors and health workers intervened in 97 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America (2) By March 2006, 25,000 Cuban professionals were working in 68 nations. This is more than even the World Health Organisation can deploy, while Médecins Sans Frontières sent only 2,040 doctors and nurses abroad in 2003, and 2,290 in 2004 (3).
The most seriously ill patients are often brought to Cuba for treatment. Over the decades these have included Vietnamese Kim Phuc, the little girl shown in the famous war photograph running naked along a road, her skin burned by US napalm. Cuba also took in some 19,000 adults and children from the three Soviet republics most affected by the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986.
In June 2001 the United Nations General Assembly met in special session to discuss Aids. Cuba, with an HIV infection rate of 0.09% compared with 0.6% in the US, made an offer of "doctors, teachers, psychologists, and other specialists needed to assess and collaborate with the campaigns to prevent Aids and other illnesses; diagnostic equipment and kits necessary for the basic prevention programmes and retrovirus treatment for 30,000 patients".
If this offer had been accepted, "all it would take is for the international community to provide the raw materials for the medicines, the equipment and material resources for these products and services. Cuba will not charge and will pay the salaries in its national currency" (4).
The offer was rejected. But eight African and six Latin American countries did benefit from an educational HIV/Aids intervention project which broadcast radio and television programmes, treated more than 200,000 patients and trained more than half a million health workers.
There are currently some 14,000 Cuban doctors working in poor areas of Venezuela. The two governments have also set up Operation Milagro (miracle) which, during the first 10 months of 2005, gave free treatment to restore the eyesight of almost 80,000 Venezuelans, transferring those suffering from cataracts and glaucoma to Cuba for operations (5). More widely, the project offers help to anyone in Latin America or the Caribbean affected by blindness or other eye problems. Venezuela provides the funding; Cuba supplies the specialists, the surgical equipment and the infrastructure to care for patients during their treatment in Cuba.
So far no other government, private body or international organisation has managed to put together a global medical programme on such a scale or to offer such a level of assistance to those in need of care. Operation Milagro's goal is to operate on the eyes of a million people every year.
A few hours before he took up office as president of Bolivia in December 2005, Evo Morales signed his first international treaty, which was with Cuba, setting up a joint unit to offer free ophthalmological treatment. As well as the national institute of ophthalmology in La Paz, recently equipped by Cuba, there will be medical centres in the cities of Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. Young Bolivian graduates from the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) will take part in the programme.
ELAM was founded in 1998, just as Cuba began to send doctors to the Caribbean and Central America. It operates from a former naval base in a suburb of Havana and trains young people of poor families from throughout the Americas, including the US. There are also hundreds of African, Arab, Asian and European students. Cuba's 21 medical faculties all participate in training. In July 2005 the first 1,610 Latin American students graduated. Each year some 2,000 young people enroll at the school, where they receive free training, food, accommodation and equipment in return for a commitment to go back home and treat their compatriots (6).
Really doctors?
Ideological considerations have inspired the medical and ophthalmologic associations of some countries to launch a campaign against this initiative. The review of the Argentine council of ophthalmology, for example, questioned whether the Cuban ophthalmologists really were doctors and announced that it was taking steps, along with humanitarian NGOs, to fund a similar programme (7).
There was the same reaction in 1998 in Nicaragua, where, despite the severity of the catastrophe caused by hurricane Mitch, President Arnoldo Alemán refused to admit Cuban doctors. Similar reactions have been seen in Venezuela since 2002 and now in Bolivia. Conservative doctors, who prefer to specialise in diseases of the credit-worthy and refuse to enter shantytowns, accuse Cuba's barefoot doctors of incompetence, illegal medical practice and unfair competition.
In April 2005 the legal authorities in the Brazilian state of Tocantins ordered out 96 Cuban doctors who had been treating the poor. The state governor disagreed, but could do no more than "recognise the professional bravery of the doctors who were welcome here and whom we wish to thank".
The medical associations are afraid that if the Cuban medics bring down prices or even offer some services free, medical treatment will cease to be a profitable, elitist service. As each new doctor graduates in Cuba, they intensify their protests and political pressure.
There is also a threat that diplomas obtained in Cuba will not be recognised elsewhere. Excessive charges in Chile have prevented many Cuban-trained doctors from validating their medical qualifications there. But, as the BBC has pointed out, if Latin America's medical associations persist in their opposition they risk losing the support of populations deprived of access to health services, for whom the project is a glimmer of light in the darkness (8). In the US, where 45 million people have no health cover and medical studies cost about $300,000, a blockade forbids students to study in Cuba, threatening up to 10 years' imprisonment and fines of up to $200,000.
Sceptics see the humanitarian aid offered by Cuba as a publicity stunt, an investment to secure diplomatic support in the face of continuing US hostility. They point out that when the UN Human Rights Council was established in March 2006, Cuba was elected with the support of 96 of the 191 UN member states, whereas Nicaragua, Peru and Venezuela, where political opposition is legal, as it is not in Cuba, were rejected.
But a western diplomat was prepared to recognise that Cuba's policy of exporting doctors was an initiative which benefited so many people that it should be applauded even by its political enemies (9).
© 1997-2006 Le Monde diplomatique.
Comment on this Article
UK Government warns of another winter of gas shortages
Terry Macalister
Wednesday August 23, 2006
The Guardian
The government gave a warning yesterday that Britain was heading into another winter of potential power shortages as one household gas supplier announced a record 30% increase in prices.
The energy minister, Malcolm Wicks, said rising demand and plunging output from North Sea fields cancelled out the benefits of new gas pipelines from Norway and the Netherlands.
"It's not going to be the easiest of winters and we need to manage this with care and make sure we get it right," said Mr Wicks from the sidelines of an energy industry conference in Norway. "It's looking the same as the last two or three years."
Dwindling output from the North Sea has turned the UK into a net importer after decades as an exporter of surplus gas. New pipelines were meant to relieve the pressure this year.
Industry experts had previously argued that the last two winters would be the end of the energy squeeze as new outlets opened and more storage capacity was put in place. But though the pipelines have been built, the storage facilities have seen delays in obtaining planning consents, leaving the country vulnerable at a time when demand is growing and domestic production is falling faster than expected.
The government has met with leading gas suppliers to ensure that maintenance work on platforms and pipelines has been carried out before the winter. But the Health and Safety Executive warned two weeks ago that some companies were falling behind on repairs, increasing the likelihood of breakdowns and disruptions to output.
The consumer group energywatch agreed with the minister's downbeat assessment and said a vicious cold spell could lead to another round of price increases on top of unprecedented rises over the past 12 months.
Ebico, a supplier of power to 10,000 customers, has become the latest company to raise its prices, with the gas tariff going up by 30% and electricity prices by up to 25%.
"We have kept the prices stable for the last 12 months but we cannot resist the wholesale prices rises any more and have had to move," said its chief executive Phil Levermore.
Paul Green, chief executive at energyhelpline.com, a company that offers consumers help with switching providers, said the Ebico rise was a blow for those who had been enjoying some of the cheapest prices on the market. "Ebico has been forced to follow the big six suppliers and put up its prices to balance skyrocketing wholesale costs," he said.
"As Ebico buys its energy from Scottish and Southern Energy, we are likely to see a further price rise announcement from SSE later this year as it passes rising costs on to customers. This will affect a further 6.7m UK households."
Energywatch defended Ebico's rise and pointed out that it was still a relatively cheap supplier that ensured that pre-payment customers on low incomes were not discriminated against.
"This really needs to be put in context," said a spokeswoman for energywatch. "This is a small company that had stood aside while the big six providers increased their prices three times."
According to energywatch, SSE has already put its gas prices up by a cumulative 35% and electricity prices by 22.5% through a series of changes in 2006. The consumer group says British Gas has increased its gas tariff by 37% this year and Powergen by 47%.
Comment on this Article
Existing home sales drop in July
By JEANNINE AVERSA
AP Economics Writer
23 August 06
WASHINGTON - Sales of previously owned homes plunged in July to the lowest level in 2 1/2 years and the inventory of unsold homes climbed to a new record high, fresh signs that the housing market has lost steam.
The National Association of Realtors reported Wednesday that sales of existing homes and condominiums dropped by 4.1 percent in July from June to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 6.33 million. That was the lowest level since January 2004.
The latest snapshot of housing activity was weaker than analysts anticipated. Economists were forecasting the pace of sales to fall to 6.55 million.
"The housing sector is fragile," said David Lereah, the association's chief economist.
The median price of a home sold last month was $230,000. That was up just 0.9 percent from the same month last year and marked the smallest year-over-year increase since May 1995. The median price is the middle point, where half sell for more and half sell for less.
The inventory of unsold homes in July rose to a record high of 3.86 million. At the current sales pace, it would take 7.3 months to exhaust that overhang. That is the longest period to exhaust the supply of home since the spring of 1993.
On Wall Street, the weak housing report dragged stocks down. The Dow Jones were down 8 points in morning trading.
By region, sales dropped by 5.4 percent in the Northeast. They fell by 5.9 percent in the Midwest and 1.2 percent in the South. Sales declined by 6.4 percent in the West.
Wednesday's report shows that the bloom is off the rose.
For five years running, home sales had hit record highs as low mortgage rates lured buyers. But the housing sector has lost steam this year as mortgage rates have gone up and would-be buyers have grown cautious amid high energy prices and a slowing economy.
Against that backdrop, the
Federal Reserve earlier this month decided to halt a rate-raising campaign that had pushed interest rates steadily higher over the last two-plus years to fend off inflation.
The Fed's goal is to raise rates sufficiently to thwart inflation but not enough to hurt the economy.
One of the things that Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues are watching closely is the housing slowdown. If home prices and sales were to crash, that could spell big trouble for the overall economy. Thus far, Bernanke has said the market's slowdown has been fairly orderly and smooth.
Lereah said he still expects a "soft landing" for the once high-flying housing sector. But he urged the Fed to leave interest rates alone and refrain from bumping them up again - as some analysts have said is a possibility.
The housing sector's transition from a red-hot market to a cool one has important implications for the overall economy.
Consumers who watched their homes rise rapidly in value over the last several years felt wealthy and more inclined to spend. They also borrowed against their homes - treating them like ATMs - to support their spending ways.
But with home values not going up as much now as the double-digit gains seen in the past several years, consumers have tightened their belts. That has contributed to a slowing in overall economic activity.
Recent reports underscore the housing slowdown's impact.
Luxury home builder Toll Brothers on Tuesday reported a sharp drop in third-quarter profits. One day earlier Lowe's Cos., the nation's second-largest home-improvement chain, warned that a slowing housing market will hurt its earnings for the rest of the year.
Last week the National Association of Home Builders reported that confidence among builders sank to a 15-year low.
Comment on this Article
Free in our Time...
By Bill Noxid
ICH
22 August 06
The question of every generation of thinking people in every country is "Will there be Peace in our time?" The nature of "Global Community" requires that Man see past Peace as a goal, and recognize it as a symptom.
When a child is born on this planet, his first perception of the three-dimensional world is that he or she is the "center". All activities in his or her immediate perception revolve around them and their needs. This perception of the world ( particularly in this country ) doesn't evolve much over time beyond one's team, community, or country, and as a result severely hampers one's ability to understand events in the world. Any event that occurs outside of our perceived world that doesn't support our understanding is deemed "wrong" or a "threat" to our "way of life" and must be destroyed, denied, or converted into something that makes us "comfortable". This ego driven undeveloped mentality keeps us at odds with any other perception on the planet and by it's nature denies any possibility of the conditions necessary for Peace.
Perspective is one of the primary components of Evolution. The only limit to Human Understanding is the scope of one's vision and the willingness to continuously expand it. The locked state of Ignorance in which we currently exist is a self-imposed condition formed from an obsolete and self-destructive fear that being wrong, accepting it, and making the tremendous effort to change it somehow diminishes us. I can tell you in Truth ( having experienced numerous stages of Evolution ) that exactly the opposite is the case. The only thing "diminished" in the process of expanded understanding is the validity of Ego.
The problem we face on this planet is that the "wrong" we have to admit to is massive. It is all encompassing and it exists at the core of our society's foundation. It is a self perpetuating fabrication that motivates our national consciousness. That fabrication is that Freedom exists on this planet, and that we are the only ones who have it. Neither of those things is even remotely true.
Everyone on this planet is in slavery whether they are cognizant of it or not. In fact it is the very same underdeveloped ability to perceive that prevents Man from recognizing this reality, but it's a fundamentally simple equation. Individuals in this country ( and on this Planet ) have "jobs" which occupy most of their waking life to produce goods and services for the Institution of the Corporation for generally meager compensation, which they promptly give right back to the Institution of the Corporation for the same goods and services. At best you live in indentured servitude, but in reality you are still on the Plantation.
However, the Slave Owner has learned through millennia of trial and error the value having the slave not perceive himself as a slave. Hence this entire society and all of it's components are geared to preventing the slave from awakening. Every new meaningless product or coffee flavor creates the illusion of "progress" and keeps the slave occupied. Every "news" broadcast is designed to focus your attention to anything other than the reality of the world and your position in it. The endless series of recreational products and events ensure that any chance of free thinking that hasn't already been destroyed is lost in some feeble attempt at having "fun".
So while Americans stay isolated, ignorant, and enslaved, the world evolves without our knowledge. Such a perspective might lead you to think I am a pessimist, but again I would tell you exactly the opposite. My field of vision is much larger than that. For the first time in this incarnation I can see the reality of Freedom in Our Time. While we in this country are subjected to endless coverage of fake bomb plots and a ten year old dead white girl case, the 33 Day War has dramatically altered the Middle East and the World. The slaves of Lebanon took the full wrath of their master and did not blink. This is a powerful turning point in the balance of power and marks the beginning of the end of subjugation. The Lebanese people have demonstrated the power, will, and right to exist not in Peace, but Free. This to the Slave Owner is the most terrifying development imaginable.
What is happening in Lebanon will change ( by example ) a variety of things on this planet that people accept as fact. The fundamental reason for this is that when Hassan Nasrallah says he cares about the Lebanese people, he means it. Not that anyone in this country would know that of course, since mainstream media hasn't played more than thirty seconds of any of his statements followed by the "white man's overview", but if you had the opportunity to actually hear him you would surely know differently. This makes him unique as a leader since there are very few leaders ( certainly not ours ) that actually care for the people they are supposed to serve and protect. We should all be very well aware by now that leaders on this planet aren't elected, they are "installed" and are there to support the desires of the Global Corporation at the expense of the individual.
One glaring example of this was Hezbollah's immediate response to the cease fire. Engineers and doctors were immediately dispatched, and registry centers were set up all over the south for people in need of aid. The response was so swift that European aid agency that went in after the cease fire couldn't find people that had not already been visited by Hezbollah. The aid workers reported that "The people were happy to take the extra supplies but said Hezbollah had already taken care of all of their needs". Two days after registering, people were called back in and given $12,000 U.S. Dollars each ( the equivalent of two and a half times the average annual salary ), no questions asked. All of this occurred within three days of the end of the bombings. Nasrallah has additionally pledged to not only rebuild their houses, but to build them better ones.
Contrast this with the U.S. response to Katrina. Weeks after the event the most the U.S. was willing to offer these people was a $1,200 impossible to get debit card ( which isn't equivalent to anything ) for which they have now spent untold millions in tracking down supposed "fraudulent" use of those funds. A year after the event these people are still homeless, the city is still in rubble, and the only thing our government did for them was to stigmatize them for not being wealthy enough to get out of the way on their own.
Which of these responses seems like the act of a terrorist government to you? Unless you're a fool, you would have to choose the latter. Is that the kind of environment you expect the peoples of the world to warmly embrace? If they wholly reject it, does that mean they hate your "freedom"? If they say "No, you can't have our land, you can't have our resources, and you can't have the servitude of our people", will you call that terrorism?
I assure you, the awakening is coming. A year from now ( barring the incessant interference from Israel and the U.S. ) Lebanon will be a city like it never was before. A city truly built by the people and for the people. The lie of endless autocratic processes delaying reconstruction all over the world will be exposed as the farce it is and people will have to take a good hard look at who is actually lying to them. If you insist on believing that the United States propaganda is "right" and everyone else is wrong, you are in for a grave and psychologically brutal awakening to your own ignorance. It behooves you to reexamine your perspective while it is still a choice, as opposed to having to endure the utter and crushing defeat of your belief in the Face of Truth.
All is Well in the Kingdom of God...
Bill Noxid, is a 40 year old ex-corporate engineer who spent fifteen years in service, and realized the dark nature of the Corporation. I've spent the last decade studying the evolution and/or de-evolution of the species and society.
Comment on this Article
New Orleans a Year After Katrina
By Bill Quigley
ICH
22 August 06
Bernice Mosely is 82 and lives alone in New Orleans in a shotgun double. On August 29, 2005, as Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, the levees constructed by the U.S. Corps of Engineers failed in five places and New Orleans filled with water.
One year ago Ms. Mosely was on the second floor of her neighborhood church. Days later, she was helicoptered out. She was so dehydrated she spent eight days in a hospital. Her next door neighbor, 89 years old, stayed behind to care for his dog. He drowned in the eight feet of floodwaters that covered their neighborhood.
Ms. Mosely now lives in her half-gutted house. She has no stove, no refrigerator, and no air-conditioning. The bottom half of her walls have been stripped of sheetrock and are bare wooden slats from the floor halfway up the wall. Her food is stored in a styrofoam cooler. Two small fans push the hot air around.
Two plaster Madonnas are in her tiny well-kept front yard. On a blazing hot summer day, Ms. Mosely used her crutches to gingerly come down off her porch to open the padlock on her fence. She has had hip and knee replacement surgery. Ms. Mosely worked in a New Orleans factory for over thirty years sewing uniforms. When she retired she was making less than $4 an hour. "Retirement benefits?" she laughs. She lives off social security. Her house had never flooded before. Because of her tight budget tight, Ms. Mosely did not have flood insurance.
Thousands of people like Ms. Mosely are back in their houses on the Gulf Coast. They are living in houses that most people would consider, at best, still under construction, or, at worst, uninhabitable. Like Ms. Mosely, they are trying to make their damaged houses into homes.
New Orleans is still in intensive care. If you have seen recent television footage of New Orleans, you probably have a picture of how bad our housing situation is. What you cannot see is that the rest of our institutions, our water, our electricity, our healthcare, our jobs, our educational system, our criminal justice systems - are all just as broken as our housing. We remain in serious trouble. Like us, you probably wonder where has the promised money gone?
Ms. Mosely, who lives in the upper ninth ward, does not feel sorry for herself at all. "Lots of people have it worse," she says. "You should see those people in the Lower Ninth and in St. Bernard and in the East. I am one of the lucky ones."
Housing
Hard as it is to believe, Ms. Mosely is right. Lots of people do have it worse. Hundreds of thousands of people from the Gulf Coast remain displaced. In New Orleans alone over two hundred thousand people have not been able to make it home.
Homeowners in Louisiana, like Ms. Mosely, have not yet received a single dollar of federal housing rebuilding assistance to rebuild their severely damaged houses back into homes.
Over 100,000 homeowners in Louisiana are on a waiting list for billions in federal rebuilding assistance through the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program. So far, no money has been distributed.
Renters, who comprised most of the people of New Orleans before Katrina, are much worse off than homeowners. New Orleans lost more than 43,000 rental units to the storm. Rents have skyrocketed in the undamaged parts of the area, pricing regular working people out of the market. The official rate of increase in rents is 39%. In lower income neighborhoods, working people and the elderly report rents are up much higher than that. Amy Liu of the Brookings Institute said "Even people who are working temporarily for the rebuilding effort are having trouble finding housing."
Renters in Louisiana are not even scheduled to receive assistance through the Louisiana CDBG program. Some developers will receive assistance at some point, and when they do, some apartments will be made available, but that is years away.
In the face of the worst affordable housing shortage since the end of the Civil War, the federal government announced that it refused to allow thousands of families to return to their public housing units and was going to bulldoze 5000 apartments. Before Katrina, over 5000 families lived in public housing - 88 percent women-headed households, nearly all African American.
These policies end up with hundreds of thousands of people still displaced from their homes. Though all ages, incomes and races are displaced, some groups are impacted much more than others. The working poor, renters, moms with kids, African-Americans, the elderly and disabled - all are suffering disproportionately from displacement. Race, poverty, age and physical ability are great indicators of who has and who has made it home.
The statistics tell some of the story. The City of New Orleans says it is half its pre-Katrina size - around 225,000 people. But the U.S. Post Office estimates that only about 170,000 people have returned to the city and 400,000 people have not returned to the metropolitan area. The local electricity company reports only about 80,000 of its previous 190,000 customers have returned.
Texas also tells part of the story. It is difficult to understand the impact of Katrina without understanding the role of Texas - home to many of our displaced. Houston officials say their city is still home to about 150,000 storm evacuees - 90,000 in FEMA assisted housing. Texas recently surveyed the displaced and reported that over 250,000 displaced people live in the state and 41 percent of these households report income of less than $500 per month. Eighty-one percent are black, 59 percent are still jobless, most have at least one child at home, and many have serious health issues.
Another 100,000 people displaced by Katrina are in Georgia, more than 80,000 in metro Atlanta - most of whom also need long-term housing and mental health services.
In Louisiana, there are 73,000 families in FEMA trailers. Most of these trailers are 240 square feet of living space. More than 1600 families are still waiting for trailers in St. Bernard Parish. FEMA trailers did not arrive in the lower ninth ward until June - while the displaced waited for water and electricity to resume. Aloyd Edinburgh, 75, lives in the lower ninth ward and just moved into a FEMA trailer. His home flooded as did the homes of all five of his children. "Everybody lost their homes," he told the Times-Picayune, "They just got trailers. All are rebuilding. They all have mortgages. What else are they going to do?"
Until challenged, FEMA barred reporters from talking with people in FEMA trailer parks without prior permission - forcing a reporter out of a trailer in one park and residents back into their trailer in another in order to stop interviews.
One person displaced into a FEMA village in Baton Rouge has been organizing with her new neighbors. Air conditioners in two trailers for the elderly have been out for over two weeks, yet no one will fix them. The contractor who ran the village has been terminated and another one is coming - no one knows who. She tells me, "My neighbors are dismayed that no one in the city has stepped forward to speak for us. We are "gone." Who will speak for us? Does anyone care?"
Trailers are visible signs of the displaced. Tens of thousands of other displaced families are living in apartments across the country month to month under continuous threats of FEMA cutoffs.
Numbers say something. But please remember behind every number, there is a Ms. Mosely. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people each with a personal story like Ms. Mosely are struggling to return, trying to make it home.
Water and Electricity
New Orleans continues to lose more water than it uses. The Times-Picayune discovered that the local water system has to pump over 130 million gallons a day so that 50 million gallons will come out. The rest runs away in thousands of leaks in broken water lines, costing the water system $2000,000 a day. The lack of water pressure, half that of other cities, creates significant problems in consumption, sanitation, air-conditioning, and fire prevention. In the lower 9th ward, the water has still not been certified as safe to drink - one year later.
Only half the homes in New Orleans have electricity. Power outages are common as hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs have not been made because Entergy New Orleans is in bankruptcy. Entergy is asking for a 25 percent increase in rates to help it become solvent. Yet Entergy New Orleans' parent company, Entergy Corporation reported earnings of $282 million last year on revenue of $2.6 billion.
Health and Healthcare
Early this month, on August 1, 2006, another Katrina victim was found in her home in New Orleans, buried under debris. The woman was the 28th person found dead since March 2006. A total of 1577 died in Louisiana as a result of Katrina.
A friend of mine, a lawyer with health insurance and a family physician, went for an appointment recently at 11am. The office was so crowded he had to sit out in the hall on the floor to wait his turn for a seat in the waiting room. Three hours later he met his doctor. The doctor thought might have a gall stone. The doctor tried to set up an ultrasound. None were available. He ordered my friend to the emergency room for an ultrasound. At 4pm my friend went to the hospital emergency room, which was jammed with people: stroke victims, young kids with injuries, people brought in by the police. At 5am the next morning, my friend finished his ultrasound and went home. If it takes a lawyer with health insurance that long to get medical attention, consider what poor people without health insurance are up against.
Half the hospitals open before Katrina are still closed. The state's biggest public healthcare provider, Charity Hospital, remains closed and there are no current plans to reopen it anytime soon. Healthcare could actually get worse. Dr. Mark Peters, board chair of the Metropolitan Hospital Council of New Orleans said within the next two to three months, "all the hospitals" will be looking seriously at cutbacks. Why? Doctors and healthcare workers have left and there is surging demand from the uninsured who before Katrina went through now non-existent public healthcare. There is a shortage of nurses. Blue Cross Blue Shield officials reported "About three-quarters of the physicians who had been practicing in New Orleans are no longer submitting claims."
There is no hospital at all in the city for psychiatric patients. While the metropolitan area had about 450 psychiatric beds before the storm, 80 are now available. The police are the first to encounter those with mental illness. One recent Friday afternoon, police dealt with two mental patients - one was throwing bricks through a bar window, the other was found wandering naked on the interstate.
The elderly are particularly vulnerable. Over 70 percent of the deaths from Katrina were people over 60 years old. No one knows how many seniors have not made it back home. Esther Bass, 69, told the New York Times, after months of searching for a place to come home to New Orleans, "If there are apartments, I can't afford them. And they say there will be senior centers, but they're still being built. They can't even tell you what year they'll be finished." As of late July 2006, most nursing homes in the 12 parish Gulf Coast area of Louisiana are still not fully prepared to evacuate residents in the face of a hurricane.
The healthcare community has been rocked by the arrest of a doctor and two nurses after the Louisiana Attorney General accused them of intentionally ending the lives of four patients trapped in a now-closed local hospital. The accusations now go before a local grand jury which is not expected to make a decision on charges for several more months. The case is complicated for several reasons. Most important is that the doctor and nurses are regarded as some of the most patient-oriented and caring people of the entire hospital staff. It is undisputed that they worked day and night to save hundreds of patients from the hospital during the days it was without water, electricity or food. Others say that entire hospital and many others were abandoned by the government and that is what the attorney general should be investigating. The gravity of the charges, though, is giving everyone in the community pause. This, like so much else, will go on for years before there is any resolution.
Jobs
Before Katrina, there were over 630,000 workers in the metropolitan New Orleans area - now there are slightly over 400,000. Over 18,000 businesses suffered "catastrophic" damage in Louisiana. Nearly one in four of the displaced workers is still unemployed. Education and healthcare have lost the most employees. Most cannot return because there is little affordable housing, child care, public transportation and public health care.
Women workers, especially African American women workers, continue to bear the heaviest burden of harm from the storm. The Institute for Women's Policy Research reports that the percentage of women in the New Orleans workforce has dropped. The number of single mother families in New Orleans has dropped from 51,000 to 17,000. Low-income women remain displaced because of the lack of affordable housing and traditional discrimination against women in the construction industry.
Tens of thousands of migrant workers, roughly half undocumented, have come to the Gulf Coast to work in the recovery. Many were recruited. Most workers tell of being promised good wages and working conditions and plenty of work. Some paid money up front for the chance to come to the area to work. Most of these promises were broken. A tour of the area reveals many Latino workers live in houses without electricity, other live out of cars. At various places in the city whole families are living in tents. Two recently released human rights reports document the problems of these workers.
Immigrant workers are doing the dirtiest, most dangerous work, in the worst working conditions. Toxic mold, lead paint, fiberglass, and who knows what other chemicals are part of daily work. Safety equipment is not always provided. Day laborers, a new category of workers in New Orleans, are harassed by the police and periodic immigration raids. Wage theft is widespread as employers often do not pay living wages, and sometimes do not pay at all. Some of the powers try to pit local workers against new arrivals - despite the fact that our broken Gulf Coast clearly needs all the workers we can get.
Public transportation to and from low-wage jobs is more difficult. Over 200 more public transit employees have been terminated - cutting employment from over 1300 people pre-Katrina to about 700 now.
Single working parents seeking childcare are in trouble. Before Katrina, New Orleans had 266 licensed day care centers. Mississippi State University surveyed the city in July 2006 and found 80 percent of the day care centers and over 75 percent of the 1912 day care spots are gone. Only one-third of the Head Start centers that were open pre-Katrina survived.
Public Education
Before Katrina, 56,000 students were enrolled in over 100 public schools in New Orleans. At the end of the school year there were only 12,500. Right after the storm, the local school board gave many of the best public schools to charter groups. The State took over almost all the rest. By the end of the school year, four schools were operated by the pre-Katrina school board, three by the State, and eighteen were new charter schools.
After thirty-two years of collective bargaining, the union contract with the New Orleans public school teachers elapsed and was not renewed and 7500 employees were terminated.
For this academic year, no one knows for certain how many students will enroll in New Orleans public schools. Official estimates vary between a low of 22,000 and a high of 34,000.
There will be five traditional locally supervised public schools, eighteen schools operated by the State, and thirty-four charter schools. As of July 1, not a single teacher had been hired for fifteen of the state-run schools. As of August 9, 2006, the Times-Picayune reported there are no staff at all identified to educate students with discipline problems or other educational issues that require special attention.
Whatever the enrollment in the new public school system is in the fall, it will not give an accurate indication of how many children have returned. Why? Many students in the public charter schools were in private schools before the hurricane.
Criminal Legal System
Consider also our criminal legal system. Chaka Davis was arrested on misdemeanor charges in October 2005 and jailed at the Greyhound station in New Orleans in October of 2005.
Under Louisiana law, he was required to be formally charged within 30 days of arrest or released from custody. Because of a filing error he was lost in the system. He was never charged, never went to court, and never saw a lawyer in over 8 months - even though the maximum penalty for conviction for one of his misdemeanors was only 6 months. His mother found him in an out of town jail and brought his situation to the attention of the public defenders. He was released the next day.
Crime is increasingly a problem. In July, New Orleans lost almost as many people to murder as in July of 2005, with only 40 percent of the population back. There are many young people back in town while their parents have not returned. State and local officials called in the National Guard to patrol lightly populated areas so local police could concentrate on high-crime, low-income neighborhoods. Arrests have soared, but the number of murders remain high. Unfortunately, several of the National Guard have been arrested for criminal behavior as well - two for looting liquor from a home, two others for armed robbery at a traffic stop.
Criminal Court District Judge Arthur Hunter has declared the current criminal justice system shameful and unconstitutional and promises to start releasing inmates awaiting trial on recognizance bonds on the one year anniversary of Katrina. The system is nearly paralyzed by a backlog of over 6000 cases. There are serious evidence problems because of resigned police officers, displaced victims, displaced witnesses, and flooded evidence rooms. The public defender system, which was down to 4 trial attorneys for months, is starting to rebuild.
"After 11 months of waiting, 11 months of meetings, 11 months of idle talk, 11 months without a sensible recovery plan and 11 months tolerating those who have the authority to solve, correct and fix the problem but either refuse, fail or are just inept, then necessary action must be taken to protect the constitutional rights of people,' said Hunter.
In the suburbs across the lake, Sheriff Jack Strain told the media on TV that he was going to protect his jurisdiction from "thugs" and "trash" migrating from closed public housing projects in New Orleans. He went on to promise that every person who wore "dreadlocks or che-wee hairstyles" could expect to be stopped by law enforcement. The NAACP and the ACLU called in the U.S. Justice Department and held a revival-like rally at a small church just down the road from the jail. Though the area is over 80 percent white, the small group promised to continue to challenge injustice no matter how powerful the person committing the injustice. Recently, the same law enforcement people set up a roadblock and were stopping only Latino people to check IDs and insurance. I guess to prove they were not only harassing black people?
Finally, a grand jury has started looking into actions by other suburban police officers who blocked a group of people, mostly black, from escaping the floodwaters of New Orleans by walking across the Mississippi River bridge. The suburban police forced the crowd to flee back across the two mile bridge by firing weapons into the air.
This is the criminal legal system in the New Orleans area in 2006. None dare call it criminal justice.
International Human Rights
The Gulf Coast has gained new respect for international human rights because they provide a more appropriate way to look at what should be happening. The fact that there is an international human right of internally displaced people to return to their homes and a responsibility on government to help is heartening even though yet unfulfilled.
The United Nations has blasted the poor U.S. response to Katrina. The UN Human Rights Committee in Geneva accepted a report from Special Reporter Arjun Sengupta who visited New Orleans in fall of 2005 and concluded: "The Committee...remains concerned about information that poor people, and in particular African-Americans, were disadvantaged by the rescue and evacuation plans implemented when Hurricane Katrina hit the United States of America, and continue to be disadvantaged under the reconstruction plans."
Asian tsunami relief workers who visited New Orleans over the summer were shocked at the lack of recovery. Somsook Boonyabancha, director of the Community Organisations Development Institute in Thailand, told Reuters she was shocked at the lack of progress in New Orleans. "I'm surprised to see why the reconstruction work is so slow, because this is supposed to be one of the most rich and efficient countries in the world. It is starting at such a slow speed, incredibly slow speed."
Warnings to the Displaced
Local United Way officials see the lack of housing, healthcare and jobs and conclude that low-income people should seriously consider not returning to New Orleans anytime soon.
United Way wrote: "Most of these people want to come home, but if they do not have a recovery plan they need to stay where they are. Some of these evacuees think that they can come back and stay with families and in a few weeks have a place of their own. But the reality is that they may end up living with those relatives for years. Sending people back without a realistic plan may have serious consequences: the crowding of families into small apartments/homes/FEMA trailers is causing mental health problems - stress, abuse, violence, and even death - and this problem is going to get worse, not better. Also, when the elderly (and others) are those returning and living in these conditions, their health is impacted and then the lack of medical facilities and hospital beds is a problem. Again the result may be death....Basically if an evacuee says they have a place to stay - like with relatives - those communities will give them bus fare back or pay for U-hauls. If an evacuee was a renter here and they want to return they should be told to plan on returning in 3-7 years, and in the meantime stay there, get a job, and be much better off."
FEMA officials in Austin are also warning people about returning to New Orleans. They wrote: "Before you return....New Orleans is a changing place...you should consider the conditions you may be returning to. Many neighborhood schools will not be open by August. Your children may have to travel some distance to get to school...Grocery and supermarkets have been slow to return to many neighborhoods. Sometimes there aren't enough residents back in your neighborhood for a store to open and be profitable. You may have to travel a large distance to groceries. Walking to the store might not be an option...If you or your family members require regular medical attention, or if you are pregnant or nursing, the services you received before the storm may be scattered and in very different and distant locations. Depending on your medical needs, you may have to drive across the river or even as far away as Baton Rouge...If you or your family members have allergies, remember that there is lots of dust and mold still in the city. While you may have suffered from allergies before the storm, please consider that being in the city will only worsen your allergies. If you have asthma, other respiratory or cardiac conditions, or immune system problems, you would be safer staying out of flooded areas due to the mold, particles and dust in the air. If you must return to the city, wear an approved respirator when working in moldy or dusty areas. ...Additionally, police, fire and emergency personnel are stretched to their limits...If you own a car, gas and service stations are limited in many areas. You may need to purchase a gas can in the event you cannot get gas near your home...Public transportation (busses) are also limited and do not operate in all areas....Available and affordable housing is extremely rare. Waiting lists for apartments are as large as 300 on the list, depending on how many bedrooms you need. Living inside your home could be dangerous if mold has set in of if your utilities are not in top working condition...Living in New Orleans may be easier said than done until we have fully recovered from the storm."
This is New Orleans, one year after Katrina.
Where Did the Money Go?
Everyone who visits New Orleans asks the same question that locals ask - where is the money? Congress reportedly appropriated over $100 billion to rebuild the Gulf Coast. Over $50 billion was allocated to temporary and long-term housing. Just under $30 billion was for emergency response and Department of Defense spending. Over $18 billion was for State and local response and the rebuilding of infrastructure. $3.6 billion was for health, social services and job training and $3.2 for non-housing cash assistance. $1.9 billion was allocated for education and $1.2 billion for agriculture.
One hour in New Orleans shows the check must still be in the mail.
Not a single dollar in federal housing rehab money has made it into a hand in Louisiana. Though Congress has allocated nearly $10 billion in Community Development Block Grants, the State of Louisiana is still testing the program and has not yet distributed dollar number one.
A lot of media attention has gone to the prosecution of people who wrongfully claimed benefits of $2000 or more after the storm. Their fraud is despicable. It harms those who are still waiting for assistance from FEMA.
But, be clear - these little $2000 thieves are minnows swimming on the surface. There are many big savage sharks below. Congress and the national media have so far been frustrated in their quest to get real answers to where the millions and billions went. How much was actually spent on FEMA trailers? How much did the big contractors take off the top and then subcontract out the work? Who were the subcontractors for the multi-million dollar debris removal and reconstruction contracts?
As Corpwatch says in their recent report, "Many of the same 'disaster profiteers' and government agencies that mishandled the reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq are responsible for the failure of 'reconstruction' of the Gulf Coast region. The Army Corps, Bechtel and Halliburton are using the very same 'contract vehicles' in the Gulf Coast as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are 'indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity' open-ended 'contingency' contracts that are being abused by the contractors on the Gulf Coast to squeeze out local companies. These are also 'cost-plus' contracts that allow them to collect a profit on everything they spend, which is an incentive to overspend."
We do know billions of dollars in no-bid FEMA contracts went to Bechtel Corporation, the Shaw Group, CH2M Hill, and Fluor immediately after Katrina hit. Riley Bechtel, CEO of Bechtel Corporation, served on President Bush's Export Council during 2003-2004. A lobbyist for the Shaw Group, Joe Allbaugh, is a former FEMA Director and friend of President Bush. The President and Group Chief Executive of the International Group at CH2MHill is Robert Card, appointed by President Bush as undersecretary to the US Department of Energy until 2004. Card also worked at CH2M Hill before signing up with President Bush. Fluor, whose work in Iraq was slowing down, is one of the big winners of FEMA work and its stock is up 65 percent since it started Katrina work.
Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota has raised many protests and questions over inflated prices. "It is hard to overstate the incompetence involved in all of these contracts - we have repeatedly asked them for information and you get nothing." Republican U.S. Representative Charles Bustany, who represents an area heavily damaged by Hurricane Rita, asked FEMA for reasons why the decision was made to stop funding 100 percent of the cost of debris removal in his district. FEMA refused to tell him. He then filed a Freedom of Information request to get the information, and was again refused. When he asked to appeal their denial, he was told that there were many appeals ahead of his and he would have to wait.
If a US Senator and a local U.S. Republican Representative cannot get answers from FEMA, how much accountability can the people of the Gulf Coast expect? There are many other examples of fraud, waste and patronage.
How did a company that did not own a truck get a contract for debris removal worth hundreds of millions of dollars? The Miami Herald reported that the single biggest receiver of early Katrina federal contracts was Ashbritt, Inc. of Pompano Beach, FL, which received over $579 million in contracts for debris removal in Mississippi from Army Corps of Engineers.
The paper reported that the company does not own a single dumptruck! All they do is subcontract out the work. Ashbritt, however, had recently dumped $40,000 into the lobbying firm of Barbour, Griffith & Rogers, which had been run by Mississippi Governor and former National GOP Chair Haley Barbour. The owners of Ashbritt also trucked $50,000 over to the Republican National Committee in 2004.
How did a company that filed for bankruptcy the year before and was not licensed to build trailers get a $200 million contract for trailers? Circle B Enterprises of Georgia was awarded $287 million in contracts by FEMA for temporary housing. At the time, that was the seventh highest award of Katrina money in the country. According to the Washington Post, Circle B was not even being licensed to build homes in its own state of Georgia and filed for bankruptcy in 2003. The company does not even have a website.
FEMA spent $7 million to build a park for 198 trailers in Morgan City Louisiana - almost 2 hours away from New Orleans.
Construction was completed in April. Three months later only 20 of the trailers were occupied. One displaced New Orleans resident who lives there has to walk three miles to the nearest grocery.
Hurricanes are now a booming billion dollar business. No wonder there is a National Hurricane Conference for private companies to show off their wares - from RVs to portable cell phone towers to port-a-potties. One long time provider was quoted by the Miami Herald at the conference that there are all kinds of new people in the field - 'Some folks here said, 'Man, this is huge business; this is my new business. I'm not in the landscaping business anymore, I'm going to be a hurricane debris contractor.' "
On the local level, we are not any better.
One year after Katrina the City of New Orleans still does not have a comprehensive rebuilding plan. The first plan by advisors to the Mayor was shelved before the election. A city council plan was then started and the state and federal government mandated yet another process that may or may not include some of the recommendations of the prior two processes. One of the early advisors from the Urban Land Institute, John McIlwain, blasted the delays in late July. "It's virtually a city with a city administration and its worse than ever...You need a politician, a leader that is willing to make tough decisions and articulate to people why these decisions are made, which means everyone is not going to be happy." Without major changes at City Hall the City will have miles of neglected neighborhoods for decades. "We're talking Dresden after World War II."
Signs of Hope
Despite the tragedies that continue to plague our Gulf Coast, there is hope. Between the rocks of hardship, green life continues to sprout defiantly.
Fifteen feet of water washed through Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School for Science and Technology in the lower 9th Ward. When people were finally able to get into the building, the bodies of fish were found on the second floor. Parents and over 90% of the teachers organized a grass-roots effort to put their school back together. Their first attempts to gut and repair the school by locals and volunteers from Common Ground were temporarily stopped by local school officials and the police. Even after the gutting was allowed to resume, the community was told that the school could not reopen due to insufficient water pressure in the neighborhood.
But the teachers and parents are pressing ahead anyway in a temporary location until they can get back in their school. Assistant Principal Joseph Recasner told the Times-Picayune: "Rebuilding our school says this is a very special community, tied together by more than location, but by spirituality, by bloodlines, and by a desire to come back."
New Orleans is fortunate to have a working newspaper again. The Times-Picayune won a well-deserved Pulitzer for its Katrina coverage. Its staff continues to provide quality documentation of the Gulf Coast region's efforts to repair and rebuild.
The New Orleans Vietnamese people continue to inspire us. They were among the very first group back and they have joined forces to care for their elders, rebuild their community church, and work together in a most cooperative manner to resurrect their community. Recently they took legal and direct action to successfully stop the placement of a gigantic landfill right next to their community. Their determination and sense of community-building is a good model for us all.
The only Republican running for Congress in New Orleans is blasting President Bush over failed Katrina promises. Joe Lavigne is running radio ads saying, "Sadly, George Bush has forgotten us. He's spending too much time and money on Iraq and not enough living up to his promise to rebuild New Orleans. His priorities are wrong. I'm running for Congress to hold President Bush accountable." Maybe other Republicans will join in.
Tens of thousands of volunteers from every walk of life have joined with the people of the Gulf Coast to help repair and rebuild. Lawyers are giving free help to Katrina victims who need legal help to rebuild their homes. Medical personnel staff free clinics. Thousands of college, high school and even some grade school students have traveled to the area to help families gut their devastated homes. Churches, temples, and mosques from across the world have joined with sisters and brothers in New Orleans to repair and rebuild.
Despite open attempts to divide them, black and brown and white and yellow workers have started to talk to each other. Small groups have started to work together to fight for living wages and safe jobs for all workers. Thousands came together for a rally for respectful treatment for Latino and immigrant workers. Seasoned civil rights activists welcomed the new movement and pledged to work together.
Ultimately, the people of the Gulf Coast are the greatest sign of hope. Despite setbacks that people in the US rarely suffer, people continue to help each other and fight for their right to return home and the right to live in the city they love.
On Sunday morning, a 70 year old woman told a friend where her children are. "They are all scattered," she sighed. "One is in Connecticut, one in Rhode Island, one in Austin." When he asked about her, she said, "Me? I am in Texas right now. I am back here to visit my 93 year old mother and go to the second line of Black Men of Labor on Labor Day. But I'm coming back. Yes indeed. I will return. I'm coming back."
Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. You can reach him at Quigley@loyno.edu
For more information see www.justiceforneworleans.org
Comment on this Article
FLASHBACK! 1944: Is Germany able to realise its fate?
Wednesday August 23, 1944
The Guardian
To our generals victory in France is "complete" and "the end of the war is in sight". So no doubt it should be by the rules of the military game.
One often wonders how near are the German people to realising [their] fate. In the summer of 1940, by the continental rules of the game, we too were defeated. But the British people did not admit or even recognise it. How nearly are the Germans in the same state of mind? The only asset the Germans have now is faith; in 1940 we too had faith, but we had also great untapped resources, a hardly mobilised economy, and a world on which to draw freely.
Now the Germans have no untapped friends or resources, and only the slenderest and weakest of mobilisable reserves. To the military eye their case is hopeless.
If we look closely into German military comments, the reliance is always on unknown factors. It is a "race between Allied arms and the coming new German arms".
The object of German strategy is "to delay the enemy by all means," until the Germans "have caught up with the material superiority of the enemy".
This faith in the magic of V2 and V3 may buoy up the people but it can have no virtue with the German armies. Still, it serves as the carrot dangled before a people driven harder than ever before.
From the Baltic to Silesia, the call to the population is to "dig, dig, dig" against the Russian enemy. Schools and shops are closed, industries are cut down to half their size, and all available, from boys of 12 and girls of 14 to the aged, are toiling.
Behind the heroic rhetoric about the people's "rising" is the ruthless force of the party. Anyone who leaves his post at the digging will be treated as a deserter. The strings are tightened. The 60-hour week is ordered, shops, schools and universities, newspapers, theatres and cinemas are partially shut down, postal services are reduced.
The use of the labour so released is the unsolved problem. It must be months before the new reserves can be felt, and these are the decisive months. The desperate efforts of the home front must be wasted.
The amateur digging will keep back neither the Russians nor the western Allies; the new labour reserves will make up neither for the material losses by Allied bombing nor the shattering of the armies.
But one thing will have been done. The Germans will have been dragged down still farther into suffering and exhaustion. The German leaders know this; they are determined to make their own fate also that of their people.
Comment on this Article
Yahweh's Stormtroopers
Israel Must Win
By GILAD ATZMON
August 22 , 2006
One may wonder whether the Israelis are changing their spots, do they stop approving Olmert's policies just because peace is what they really prefer? The influential political commentator Ari Shavit provided an answer two weeks ago. Mr Olmert, so he says, had 'failed shamefully' and should resign. Shavit continues, "You cannot lead an entire nation to war promising victory, produce humiliating defeat and remain in power." As I mentioned more than once before, the Israeli politician has to cope with a demanding, bloodthirsty crowd.
"The ceasefire in Lebanon was holding by a thread last night after Israel sanctioned a commando raid in the east of the country. Kofi Annan, the United Nations Secretary General, said Israel had violated the truce, and he was 'deeply concerned' about it."
The Guardian
For those familiar with Israeli aggression, the IDF violation was no surprise at all. For a week or so, every Israeli cabinet member and military official promised publicly that it is just a question of time before there is a 'second round'. Indeed, they must come up with something. Since the end of the hostilities, all Israeli political analysts and polls suggest that Israel's political and military leadership failed completely. If elections were to be held soon, both Labor and Kadima would simply disappear. It is no secret that with each passing day, Olmert's and Peretz's popularity continually slumps to new lows. Jerusalem Post.
One may wonder whether the Israelis are changing their spots, do they stop approving Olmert's policies just because peace is what they really prefer? The influential political commentator Ari Shavit provided an answer two weeks ago. Mr Olmert, so he says, had 'failed shamefully' and should resign. Shavit continues, "You cannot lead an entire nation to war promising victory, produce humiliating defeat and remain in power." As I mentioned more than once before, the Israeli politician has to cope with a demanding, bloodthirsty crowd.
This realisation throws some light over the reasons behind the failed Israeli operation in Lebanon just three days ago. Israelis are simply desperate to win. But it may also explain why Israeli government decided to expand its military operation pretty much at the same time it accepted the UN ceasefire resolution. Olmert knew that he must serve his voters with what they interpret as a clear-cut victory. This would mean either some severe form of revenge with lots of Arab casualties or a significant land invasion. Olmert, his 'national unity' government and the army leadership have to do something that would cover up four weeks of disastrous military campaign that failed to serve the Israeli public with even a single second of glory.
Indeed, the IDF military offensive doctrine is grounded on one basic axiom that was defined by David Ben Gurion in the early fifties: whatever it takes, Israel must always win! This axiom is indeed very powerful, yet, in reality, the Israeli army can't provide the goods anymore. In the last three decades the Israeli army is constantly being beaten time after time by enemies that are getting smaller and smaller.
Yet, one may mention that the IDF isn't very original in being defeated. The IDF fails exactly where the American army has been failing since Vietnam. Shockingly, the IDF has managed to copy every possible American mistake. It religiously adopted the new American military philosophy of a 'compact highly sophisticated fighting force'. Undeniably, this very doctrine is very effective in producing some gigantic collateral damage i.e., war crimes. Yet, in the long run, it fails miserably in wining wars. The new American military doctrine may win a battle or two but no more than that. In the most recent years it has been totally beaten in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza and obviously in Lebanon.
Though the early stages of the Israeli campaign in Lebanon looked very much like the first few days of the second Gulf War (major air assault on civilian infrastructure and populated areas), there is at least one major noticeable difference. While America can stand and even ignore international criticism referring to its own war crimes, it isn't willing to suffer much international criticism for Israeli atrocities. While in the early stages of the war America was rushing to provide Israel with air convoys loaded with its most lethal conventional arsenal, we have learned towards the last week of the war that the American administration changed its mind, it suddenly refused to provide the IDF with a shipment of cluster bombs because it "would endanger the civilian population". Seemingly, there is a limit to what the Americans are willing to do for their 'closest friend' in the Middle East.
This is exactly where the Israeli limbo is. In order to maintain its status as a winning regional super power, Israel needs the blind support of America (politically, financially and logistically). Yet American blind support can be grunted to Israel only if the Jewish State is indeed a regional super power to start with. Olmert and his government are fully aware of this very complexity. They know that without being a regional super power in the first place, they have nothing to offer their almighty American brothers. Israel is crucial for the strategy of the Americans as long as it can wipe out all its enemies in six days at the most. The way things appear now, the Israeli Army is basically defeated by the two smallest nations in the Arab world, the Palestinian and the Lebanese ones.
As much as it clear to the Israelis, it is clear to the Americans that unlike the bold Hezbollah, the IDF soldier has lost his will to fight. The IDF is a spoiled, confused and tired army that is specializing solely in terrorizing civilian populations while being engaged in constant tactical withdraw. This Israeli Army is not trained to win wars anymore. Instead, its tank battalions are mainly engaged in daily shelling of schools and hospitals. Its Air Force uses the best American fighter planes to flatten neighborhoods and shoot deadly rockets at cars in the streets of Gaza. Its command units are expert in abducting democratically elected middle-aged Palestinian politicians. The IDF is basically a heavy army specializing in merciless regional bullying. Yet, it cannot win a war, and as such it has nothing to offer the American empire.
But the Israeli military defeat has some further implications. Israel without a victorious army, has nothing to offer to world Jewry either. It can never present itself as the ultimate cosmic Judeo bunker. It is pretty shocking to prospect the relative silence of the infamous Zionist media shield. While just six weeks ago the loud supporters of Anglo-American interventionism were still pushing for democracy in the Arab world and beyond, they were enthusiastic about killing in the name of human rights and about Israel being the only democracy in the Middle East. Somehow, since the war began, since Israel revealed once again its murderous tendencies and Hezbollah proved to be the new Robin Hood, these voices are caving in. Many among the global Zionists do already understand now that the Anglo-American assault on the Arab world just suffered a major blow. Some of them probably grasp that it is just a question of time before more and more Europeans and Americans join the sacred battle against the Americanized Global Zionism, i.e., neo-conservatism.
The recent victory of the Hezbollah therefore must be realized as a major event with some global implications. While the Hezbollah regards itself a paramilitary organization concerned mainly with some local issues having to do with Israeli expansionism, it has managed to cause a serious blow to neo-conservatism as a political praxis as well as a philosophy. It has beaten the Zionized Anglo-American worldview. Standing up to Zionism and Americanism, it is the Lebanese, the Palestinians, the Iraqis, the Afghanis and the Iranians who happen to be at the vanguard of the war for humanity and humanism. For those who are yet to be convinced that this indeed the case, I will mention that the fact that it is Iran who rushed to pay 3 billion dollars to rebuild Lebanon after the destruction made by 'American interventionism' leaves no room for interpretation. While America spreads destruction and death all over the world, it is Iran and the Hezbollah that offers a new beginning.
Olmert knows very well that if Israel doesn't win this war, it is global Zionism that is defeated, he knows as well that without the backing of global Zionism, Israel is basically a dead entity. Olmert knows that without America, it won't take long before Israel turns into an historic event. Israel will have to win its mighty regional power status whatever it takes. Israeli is indeed in the very eye of the neo-conservative storm. And the Hezbollah is threatening something far greater than just the Jewish State. As the Israelis keep telling us, the fight in Lebanon will resume soon and every European leader knows it.
Even now, they all know who is going to be the aggressor when violence spreads again in the region. They are all clever enough to hesitate about whether they want to send their soldiers to the region. They know that if Israel must win, it is better to stay out of its way.
Gilad Atzmon was born in Israel and served in the Israeli military. He is the author of two novels: A Guide to the Perplexed and the recently released My One and Only Love. Atzmon is also one of the most accomplished jazz saxophonists in Europe. His recent CD, Exile, was named the year's best jazz CD by the BBC. He now lives in London and can be reached at: atz@onetel.net.uk
Comment on this Article
Israel's Double Standard
by James J. David
MediaMonitors
August 21 2006
"If the United States wants to win this war on terrorism then getting tough with Israel would be the best step they could take. Politicallly, it is a hard choice, but ultimately a sensible and realistic one that would bring about true peace and justice in the Middle East."
* Why is Israel not held to the same standards as other nations?
* Why is it that those who resist an illegal occupation of their land are considered freedom fighters except for those who resist an illegal Israeli occpation? In that case they are considered terrorists.
* Why is it that when Israel abducts more than 9000 Palestinians this is called an arrest but when Hamas or Hezbollah abducts 2 Israeli soldiers it is called a kidnap?
* Why is it when Hamas or Hezbollah fires a rocket into Israel it is considered an act of provocation but when Israel deliberatelly shells a Palestinian beach and kills 7 members of one family it is considered an act of self-defense? Why does there exist such a double-standard? Why is that?
* Why is it okay for the United States to supply Israel with cluster bombs and precision guided missiles and billions more of military weapons but wrong for Iran or Syria to supply Hezbollah with Kytusha rockets?
* Why is it wrong for Iran to cultivate nuclear weapons when its neighbor, Israel, has hundreds of nuclear weapons aimed at it on land and on sea?
* Why is it that U.N. Security Resolutions against Hezbollah must be complied with but those against Israel are ignored? Why the double standard?
The answer to these questions, sadly to say, is that a great many Americans today have been so confused by the brainwashing propaganda of the past few decades that they no longer understand it. How long can we go on accepting this double standard?
If the United States wants to win this war on terrorism then getting tough with Israel would be the best step they could take. Politicallly, it is a hard choice, but ultimately a sensible and realistic one that would bring about true peace and justice in the Middle East.
Comment on this Article
We Are Untouchable. We are Israelis
Tanya Hsu
LiveJournal
22 August 06
We are Israelis. We are untouchable. No matter what we do, the international community will not act against us. Oh, there will be talks at the United Nations but we know that the United States will intervene on our behalf. There will be Arab League discussions but we know that no state will take action against us. There will be mass protests and demonstrations; there will be activists and advocates begging for peace; there will be rallies and fund-raisers to help the targets of our bombs. And we know that nothing will make a difference because we are Jews - we are victims of the holocaust. We have suffered such that we have the right to make the rest of the world pay (even though organized Zionism officially declared war on Germany in 1933, long before Hitler's Final Solution). Because we are victims.
Yes, we know that peoples all over the world have suffered worse crimes than ours, but they were not the Chosen People. We know that over 22 million Russians were killed under Stalin, 15 million Chinese were killed by the Japanese, millions elsewhere in the world suffered the same fate in the bloodiest 20th century.
We know that Zionism is an atheist Marxist creation using Judaism as its weapon; that we were founded upon terrorism and our leaders became Israel's prime ministers and Nobel Peace Prize winners; that less than 10 percent of Jews worldwide supported the Zionist cause for decades until World War II. We know that the crimes committed by Hitler equally affected Communists, gypsies, the handicapped, and political prisoners. That does not matter - we are special. The rest of the world will not touch us because they are terrified of the label "anti-Semite". World leaders are terrified of this ad hominem even though we are mostly not Semitic peoples. Jews of Israel, the Sephardim Jews, were almost nonexistent when we arrived from Russia, Poland, Austria-Hungary and elsewhere in the 20th century and demanded Arab land. They had spread out and moved on. We did not come from Yemen, Ethiopia or Iraq, but who cares? We are the victims and that is all that counts.
Time and again we wonder at how far American gullibility will take us. We push it to the limits on cable television and get away with it repeatedly. We know that the majority of the world is aware we blatantly lie when we express our "deepest regrets" because "terrorists" were hiding in the villages we destroyed. We even have the gall to pick the same targets as a decade ago, ignoring the cries of outrage from America and the West. We'll just repeat the mantra "a tragic mistake".
Honestly, we too are rather surprised to see that America patiently sits back and buys our words each time. We have trained our diplomats well, not only in the art of deception to the media, but by using powerful strong-arm, behind-the-scenes tactics to mold the views of US Congressmen and women in our favor.
We have worked on this for decades and it has been perfected for the one place it counts: Our bank America. We rely upon those weapons; we need to create constant conflict so as to receive a perpetual $13 billion annual aid package from the US, including unsecured loans that we have never been, nor ever will be, required to pay back. We are living a dream: What we want is given to us on a silver patter because we are Jews, and we have the holocaust.
The above is only daring in that it is never voiced publicly in the West. The world is watching as Israel incinerates the Lebanese, next the Syrians and Palestinians, then Iran. Diplomats call for peace, a cease-fire, and negotiations. They speak the language of noncommittance. It takes a few brave men and women in leadership positions to dare to speak the truth. Israel is in the position of dominating the US government to an extent never before seen in history, creating a regime who will fully fund a "new Middle East" which in reality means Eretz Israel consisting of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, northern Saudi Arabia and even Cyprus by some accounts.
There is nothing speculative about these plans for hegemony - everything has been laid out, written down, and presented for years. Academics who dare write the facts know that their tenured careers are over. This war will not end with a cease-fire next week. This war will not end with a security zone controlled by the UN. This war will not end if Hezbollah and Hamas disappeared tomorrow. This war will not end as long as leaders and diplomats continue to fear the trump card charge of anti-Semitism by Israel.
So when hundreds of children are torn apart by uranium-tipped missiles provided courtesy of the US government, look in the mirror. Have you dared to offend Israel? Have you risked? Ask yourself what role you may have played in contributing to this global disaster. Nothing will change until you do.
- Tanya Cariina Hsu is a British Saudi-US Political analyst. She lives in Riyadh.
Comment on this Article
The world avoids Israel like the plague
by qrswave
The TruthSeeker
August 22, 2006
Israel has established itself as the premier international leper state - no longer in Arab eyes only.
The recent Locarno Film Festival dropped Israel as the co-sponsor of one of the programs because of the retaliatory bombing against Hizbullah targets in Lebanon. Lebanese and other Arabs filmmakers protested Israel's participation in the Swiss event. Israel was listed as a co-sponsoring the Leopards of Tomorrow program.
Organizers of the Edinburgh International Film Festival have also cancelled Israeli Embassy sponsorship of their program and returned the Israeli check following a protest. The Edinburgh branches of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the Stop the War Coalition had planned to picket all major film festival events if the link with Israel had been maintained.
And earlier this month, in a perhaps less insulting, but more politically significant move, Costa Rica moved its embassy back to Tel-Aviv from Jerusalem.
Tisk, tisk. Their house of illegitimate cards built on Arab blood falls apart before their eyes.
When this whole thing started in Lebanon last month, I predicted it was the beginning of the end for Israel. Was I right, or what?
Now's the time, if you're an uncommitted Zionist, to bail out while you still can.
Comment on this Article
The war that keeps on killing
Eli Stephens
Left I on the News
August 21, 2006
Israel has broken the ceasefire once again, killing four Lebanese children and wounding 21 in the last few days. What, you haven't read about it? That's because these deaths were caused by weapons fired before the ceasefire went into effect: cluster bombs. According to the U.N., these weapons, not illegal per se but illegal when fired into urban areas as they were, were fired largely in the last few days of the war, as (and these are my words, not the U.N.'s) Israel lashed out in vengeance to kill as many Lebanese as possible before it was forced to stop its deadly assault, at least temporarily.
Now those unexploded cluster bombs litter the villages of southern Lebanon, just waiting for the small children to pick them up and die, or perhaps just be crippled for life, like Sukna, Hassan and Merwa Saleh.
And, please promise not to be shocked, but the origin of these weapons...is the United States.
"You see what America is sending us," [Aisa Hussain] said bitterly. "This is their idea of democracy."
Comment on this Article
Olmert, Minister in Clash Over Returning the Golan to Syria
By ELI LAKE
Staff Reporter of the Sun
August 22, 2006
TEL AVIV, Israel - Dissent within Israel's war Cabinet appeared to spill into the open yesterday with the country's minister for internal security defying an order from Prime Minister Olmert and publicly saying that if Syria was interested, he would endorse negotiating the return of the Golan Heights to the Baathist regime in Damascus in exchange for peace.
The statements from Avi Dichter - a former chief of Israel's FBI, known as the Shabak - seemed directly to contradict the prime minister, who said on Sunday before the weekly Cabinet meeting that members of the government should not discuss possible Golan negotiations.
Mr. Dichter's remarks prompted Mr. Olmert to state plainly again that no such talks would be in the offing so long as the Assad regime supports terrorists.
The incoherence from Jerusalem on the negotiations question got even knottier last night after Israel's Channel 10 news reported that a delegation of private businessmen last week approached a Labor Party leader and current defense minister, Amir Peretz, with an offer from President Assad himself to restart talks on the Golan Heights.
"I think that a process of discussions with Syria is legitimate. If it turns out that there is someone to talk to, I think that the idea is very suitable," Mr. Dichter said on Israel Army Radio. "Israel can initiate it. Ultimately, initiatives of this kind are of a third party and there is an abundance of third parties in the world. If a third party approaches us, we must reply in the positive."
Mr. Olmert, however, responded a few hours later during a tour of northern Israel. He warned against "false hopes" and said his country would not start an "adventure when terror is on their side."
"When Syria stops support for terror, when it stops giving missiles to terror organizations, then we will be happy to negotiate with them," he said, according to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz.
The latest twists and turns regarding the Golan suggest two possibilities.The remarks from Mr. Dichter, one of Mr. Olmert's closest confidants in the government, could be seen as a trial balloon to anticipate a response from Syria.
A year ago, when the country's army was beating a retreat from Lebanon, Syria's ambassadors were openly asking the U.S. State Department to broker talks on the Golan with Israel. Also, the prospect of prying Syria away from Hezbollah and Iran in exchange for the high ground of the Golan still appeals to many doves here.
"There is a long history of governments being elected to one thing and then doing something different," an authority on the Middle East, Martin Kramer, said, referring to Mr. Olmert's admission last week that any plans for a unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank were on hold.
"The Palestinians and Syrians are two tracks. When the train of state is derailed from one, they put it into the other. It is not something that is without precedent. The problem is that the Olmert government was not on a Palestinian or Syrian track. They were on a third rail, unilateral withdrawal," Mr. Kramer, a scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who is currently in Tel Aviv, said.
Another possibility, however, is that Mr. Olmert's government is rapidly imploding after the cease-fire last week with Lebanon. While Israeli Cabinets in the past have seen private spats spill out into the open, the disagreement between Messrs. Dichter and Olmert comes after an avalanche of scandals have engulfed the country's leaders.
In the last 10 days, the justice minister has resigned amid charges of sexual harassment; members of the Knesset have grilled the military's chief of staff over a stock trade he made the day of the launch of the air war on July 12, and Mr. Olmert has fended off questions about whether he bent planning laws in exchange for an apartment he rents in Jerusalem from a property developer for an inappropriately low rent.
All the while, the independent commission investigating the government's conduct in the war has yet to make a finding, and Israel's newspapers are filled with accounts of how soldiers here were not supplied with adequate rations and had to scavenge in south Lebanon's towns for food while in the field.
Meanwhile, Israel's enemies are crowing. Last week, Mr. Assad gave a speech bragging of the success of the resistance. Yesterday, the other main sponsor of Hezbollah, Iran, conducted its second day of war games and its supreme leader again rebuffed the United Nations' calls for his country to suspend the enrichment of uranium.
Last night Israelis awaited what was promised by Iran to be a "multi-faceted response" to the formal request from the U.N. Security Council last month regarding their nuclear program.
[During a tour of the north of Israel yesterday, Mr. Olmert appeared cool toward an inquiry into the war, saying second-guessing would undermine the army, the Associated Press reported.
"I won't play this game, the game of beating ourselves up," he said.
Mr. Olmert's tour stops included Kiryat Shemona, one of the hardest-hit border towns, and the Arab village of Maghar, which also came under Hezbollah rocket fire during the fighting.
Facing local officials, Mr. Olmert pledged speedy reconstruction and defended his government's performance. He also appeared to pin some of the blame on his predecessors, saying his government had been in power for just two months when the war broke out.
"We knew for years that there was a great danger, but for some reason, we didn't translate that understanding into action, like we just did," he said. "We knew what Iran was doing, what Syria was doing, arming Hezbollah. We acted as if we didn't know."
In other developments:
- Nearly all of the 180,000 Lebanese who took refuge in Syria during the war had returned by Sunday, leaving only 2,500 to 5,000 refugees there, a U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees spokesman, Jack Redden, said.
- Lebanon needs about $3.5 billion to repair buildings and infrastructure damaged during the war, and the rebuilding effort was being hampered by lack of government leadership, the Lebanese official in charge of reconstruction, Fadel al-Shalaq, told CNN.
- The deputy leader of Hezbollah, Sheik Naim Kassem, said in a television interview that one of his sons was badly wounded during fighting against Israeli troops.
- Israel handed over to U.N. peacekeepers five Lebanese men who were captured during an Israeli commando raid on August 1 in Baalbek.At least 16 Lebanese were killed in the raid on what authorities in the Bekaa Valley city said was in Iranian-built hospital. Israel said the building was a Hezbollah base.]
Comment on this Article
Uncomfortable Truths about Israel
By Larry C. Johnson
Alternet
22 August 06
What would we be saying if Hizbullah kidnapped the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister and launched a daring raid inside Israel to disrupt a U.S. effort to resupply the Israeli Defense Force? We would be up in arms over their provocation and would be convening the UN Security Council to recommend new sanctions. Hell, we'd probably have the National Security Council in session and be ready to dispatch U.S. military forces to help Israel.
Okay. Back to reality. Hizbullah is minding its own business (or at least fostering that public image) and has embarked on public relief operation to counteract the devastation visited on the people of Lebanon by Israel's recent invasion and bombing campaign. The Hizbullah aid and recovery effort is so successful that some wags suggest that Nasrallah be hired to take over from FEMA in the event the U.S. is hit with another storm like Katrina. How inept are you when Hizbullah is able to organize a better public relief effort? But I digress.
Having helped transform Hizbullah from a band of terrorists into the rock stars of the Muslim world, Israel persists with being stupid. Ehud Olmert either never learned or forgot the first rule of crisis management--i.e., when you're in a hole, stop digging. With the reputation of the Isreali Defense Force in tattters after the debacle in Lebanon, Israeli leaders apparently decided to go all out to secure their reputation as the supreme rogue state in the Middle East. How else to explain the following?
Israel kidnaps elected official: The Palestinian's Deputy Prime Minister, Nasser Al Shaer was kidnapped by the Israeli army on Saturday, after hiding since the start of Israel's Palestine offensive in June. He was seized in a raid at his home in the West Bank town on Ramallah.
Israel breaches ceasefire: UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called Israel's latest attack on Lebanon a violation of the UN backed truce that ended the 34-day war. "The secretary-general is deeply concerned about a violation by the Israeli side of the cessation of hostilities as laid out in Security Council resolution 1701," a spokesman for Annan said in a statement posted on the United Nations Web site.
I realize Israeli officials will justify the kidnapping as the capture of a wanted terrorist and the attack in Lebanon as an effort to prevent Hizbullah from rearming. Unfortunately for Jerusalem's sake, these acts feed the image of Israel as a renegade state that operates outside the normal boundaries of international law.
If you had a friend you cared deeply about engaging in self-destructive behavior you would do an intervention--sit them down and try to talk some sense into them. Apparently that is not an option with Israel. Witness what happens when a reporter tells the public that Israel was trying to manipulate public perceptions during the recent invasion of Lebanon:
Kurtz: One other note. On Reliable Sources two weeks ago, "Washington Post" Pentagon reporter Tom Ricks said he'd been told by U.S. military analysts that Israel was leaving some Hezbollah rocket launchers intact because the killing of Israeli civilians provided an image of moral equivalency in the war. "Post" editor Len Downie, responding to a letter from former New York mayor, Ed Koch, says he told Ricks he should not have made those statements.
Ricks told the New York Sun that he accurately reported the comments from analysts but that, quote, "I wish I hadn't said them, and I intend from now on to keep my mouth shut about it."
The last thing Israel needs now are a bunch of sycophants and fawning relatives telling it how great and good it is. They need to stop acting like adolescent fools and find the moral high ground they once occuppied. One key to Israel's longterm security is to solidify its reputation as a nation committed to law and the protection of human rights. When Israeli civilians were being blown up on buses and in market places during the Intifada, international public pressure forced Hamas and Hizbullah to shift away from suicide bombings.
When Israel acts with honor and restraint it has little difficulty portraying its enemies as crazy terrorists. But, when Israel lowers itself to the level of the terrorists, it is Israel, not the terrorists, who suffer. And let there be no doubt, Israel is suffering.
The time has come to look to the past for some answers. When Israel kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, the mastermind of the Final Solution, in the 1960s, the Israelis gave the Nazi a defense counsel, a public trial, and a chance to confront his accusers. That was a moment of greatness for Israel because it provided a graphic demonstration of the difference between a terrorist state and a civilized nation. Israel gave a mass murderer due process and, in the course of events, provided the ultimate condemnation of the Nazi regime.
Now we have the spectacle of Hizbullah acting with statesmanship and restraint while the Israelis destroy their credibility among the international community. That is a truth Israel's true friends need to communicate to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in the strongest terms possible. And they need to do it soon.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
Comment on this Article
Former Israeli justice minister indicted on sexual misconduct charge
Independent/AP
23 August 2006
Former Justice Minister Haim Ramon was indicted today on a charge of sexual misconduct in a case that dealt a blow to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and added yet another layer of scandal to Israel's tainted leadership.
An 18-year-old female soldier has accused Ramon, 56, of forcibly kissing her at a farewell party at the Defense Ministry. Ramon has said he is innocent. If convicted, he could be sentenced to up to three years in prison.
Ramon has been a key political ally of Olmert's, and a chief supporter of his since-shelved plan to unilaterally withdraw from much of the West Bank by 2010. His resignation on Sunday from the justice minister's job came as Olmert faced intense criticism over the government's handling of the recently ended war in Lebanon. Ramon, who has remained in parliament, has waived his parliamentary immunity in the case.
The indictment was issued the same day police began questioning President Moshe Katsav in a separate sexual misconduct case, and at a time when other leading officials are under suspicion.
Olmert himself is being investigated in connection with a Jerusalem property deal. Tzahi Hanegbi, another prominent member of Olmert's Kadima party, was informed earlier this week he would be charged with fraud, bribery and perjury. And Army chief Dan Halutz has come under fire for selling his stock portfolio in the hours preceding the war. All of the men have denied any wrongdoing.
Cabinet minister Meir Sheetrit, a former justice minister, was appointed on Wednesday to replace Ramon at the Justice Ministry.
Comment on this Article
The Iraq Lie
Truth-Telling Gone Wild - The Bushies are having the hardest time trying to un-lie
By Molly Ivins
AlterNet
August 22, 2006
Royal Masset, a Texas Republican political consultant who has been accused of being less than brilliant, recently had this to say about Karl Rove: "I think we actually like Karl a lot more now than we did when he was more active locally." He told the San Antonio Express-News he believed that Rove in Washington is remaining loyal to Bush while "fighting the good fight. He's fighting budgets. He's fighting wars. He's doing conservative kinds of things."
When Rove was in Texas, Masset continued, "there was a real sense of him being a total self-centered (person) who didn't care about anybody. He would literally destroy people who tried to oppose him." Plenty o' food for thought in that. But first we should maybe figure out how to smuggle Royal out of the country with a fake passport. The Bushies are having the hardest time trying to un-lie now. For example, at his Monday press conference, the president asserted, "Nobody's ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the (Sept. 11) attack."
How true: What Vice President Cheney in December 2001 said about links between 9-11 and Iraq was that it was "pretty well confirmed" that hijacking ringleader Mohammed Atta had met with Iraqi intelligence. On June 17, 2004, Cheney said: "We have never been able to confirm that, nor have we been able to knock it down, we just don't know. ... I can't refute the Czech claim, I can't prove the Czech claim, I just don't know."
In July 2004, the CIA's own report stated it does not have "any credible information" that the alleged meeting ever took place. The CIA said the whole concoction was based on a single source "whose veracity ... has been questioned" and that the Iraqi official allegedly involved was in U.S. custody and denied the meeting ever took place. The 9-11 commission had already concluded the meeting never occurred.
Cheney has a consistent pattern of exaggeration on intelligence related to Iraq. The tragedy is that at least half the American people believed Saddam Hussein was connected to the 9-11 plot -- and most soldiers serving in Iraq still believe this.
It's pretty embarrassing when the British intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, accuse the FBI of leaking like a sieve. British intelligence has a lengthy history in the leaking-like-a-sieve department -- so that's some pot calling our kettle black. Nevertheless, they are making the point that our leaks about the "liquid terror" plot have pretty well bollixed up the case. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott was so annoyed he referred to the entire Bush performance in the Middle East as "crap." This truth-telling has gone too far.
Or, come to think of it, maybe it's just begun -- and it's high damn time we got on with it. I'd suggest starting with the reality on the ground. Iraq is a disaster. The most credible estimate of how long it would take to fix it -- if it is fixable -- is another 10 to 25 years and a commensurate amount of dollars. Is it doable? Is it worth it? What are the consequences if we do or do not continue the effort? What are the consequences if the most likely result of our withdrawal -- partition into three parts -- takes place? (That's also a likely consequence of our staying.)
It seems to me that those who advocate withdrawal ASAP have just as much of a duty to make the arguments for doing so -- and to admit how much they don't know -- as those who got us into this mess five years ago with that titanic combination of misinformation and ignorance.
Let's start with what Donald Rumsfeld once described as "the known unknowns" and then see how far we get. Let's have what we should have had at the beginning -- as informed and unideological a debate as possible, with attention to the effects on our allies and the region. Onward.
Molly Ivins writes about politics, Texas and other bizarre happenings.
Comment on this Article
Daily Show: Why aren't the Iraqis more thankful?
Posted by David DeGraw
August 22, 2006.
In light of Bush's recent puzzlement over the fact that the Iraqi people are not appreciative of the US occupation of their country, Jon Stewart interviewed their Baghdad Senior Bureau Chief to get the inside scoop on why they are so damn ungrateful.
Click to see the Daily Show Clip.
The NY Times recently wrote an article reporting that President Bush "expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices that the United States has made in Iraq."
Jon Stewart interviewed Aassif Mandvi, their Baghdad Senior Bureau Chief, to get the inside scoop on why the Iraqis are so damn ungrateful. Especially, given the fact that "everyone knew before the war that the Iraqis had huge stockpiles of gratitude."
Aassif Mandvi, completely bewildered by the lack appreciation, starts off by saying:
"Well, it is very surprising. After all, the United States invaded Iraq to help the Iraqi people, no other reason. In fact, what you called Operation Iraqi Freedom, the people here called Operation Doin' Us a Solid. But, as three years have gone by, it has grown harder and harder to find the right way to say thank you."
As you watch this clip and ponder why it is that Bush is so frustrated, just remember, it's not like the president is retarded...
David DeGraw is AlterNet's video blogger.
Comment on this Article
Bush OKs involuntary Marine recall - Initial recall is for 2,500, but there is no cap
CNN
22 August 06
WASHINGTON -- President Bush has authorized the U.S. Marine Corps to recall 2,500 troops to active duty because there are not enough volunteers returning for duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, Marine commanders announced Tuesday.
The recall was authorized last month, and will begin in spring 2007 to fill positions for upcoming rotations, Marine officials said. The Marine Corps is currently picking volunteers from the Marine Individual Ready Reserve, the officials said.
Marine Col. Guy A. Stratton, head of the manpower mobilization section, told The Associated Press that there is a shortfall of about 1,200 Marines needed to fill positions in upcoming unit deployments.
"Since this is going to be a long war, we thought it was judicious and prudent at this time to be able to use a relatively small portion of those Marines to help us augment our units," Stratton said, according to the AP.
Tours for recalled Marines could last 12 to 18 months, according to Marine officials.
Marines are trying to fill combat, communications, intelligence, engineering and military police positions, according to the Marine Corps.
Though the initial recall is for 2,500 troops, there is no cap on how many could be called up in the future.
Marines in the Individual Ready Reserve already have fulfilled their four-year, active duty requirement, but are on call for another four years.
Marines in their second or third years of on-call service will be tapped, because those in their first years just finished active duty and those in their fourth years have almost completed their military obligations.
The total of Marines in the Individual Ready Reserve is about 59,000, according to Marine officials.
Recalled Marines will have five months before reporting for duty, and will receive refresher courses and training before being deployed.
This is not the first time the corps has called on the Individual Ready Reserve since fighting started in Iraq in 2003. The Marines recalled more than 2,600 troops in the early days of the Iraq war.
The Army has recalled about 10,000 soldiers since September 11, 2001, the majority of those coming in 2004 to help bolster needed positions for troops in Iraq.
Comment on this Article
Saddam dismisses 'laws of occupation'
By Kim Sengupta
22 August 2006
The second trial of Saddam Hussein, who is accused of killing thousands of Kurds with poison, began yesterday with the former Iraqi leader refusing to accept the "laws of occupation".
Saddam and seven fellow defendants, among them his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid - known as "Chemical Ali" - refused to enter a plea at the hearing to charges of genocide and war crimes.
The military operation, codenamed Anfal or "spoils of war", was launched in the late 1980s. The most notorious gassing episode, which led to the deaths of 5,000 people in Halabja, northern Iraq, will be the subject of a separate investigation by the Iraqi High Tribunal.
The verdict on Saddam's first trial, on charges of killing 148 members of the Shia community at the town of Dujail, is to be handed down in October.
Asked yesterday to identify himself to the court and show respect for the law, Saddam responded: "You know me ... This is the law of the occupation. I am the president of the republic and commander-in-chief of the armed forces."
The trial judge, Abdullah al-Amiri declared: "This trial is on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Are you innocent or guilty." The judge then ordered a plea of "not guilty" to be entered.
Ali Hassan al-Majid, who allegedly led operation Anfal, also refused to enter a plea. Entering the court, using a cane and wearing a red checkered headdress, he identified himself as: "Fighting comrade, first major-general, pilot, Ali Hassan al-Majid."
Opening the proceedings Munqith al-Faroon, the chief prosecutor, produced photographs of dead women and children. "It's time for humanity to know ... the magnitude and scale of the crimes committed against the people of Kurdistan.
"Entire villages were razed to the ground, as if killing the people wasn't enough ... Wives waited for their husbands, families waited for their children to return - but to no avail."
The order to launch the Anfal campaign, the prosecutor said, had been issued by Saddam Hussein. Mr Faroon, described the detention of hundreds of Kurds, saying women were raped by guards and that those who died in prison were buried in shallow graves "which were easy for animals to dig open".
Saddam became angry and agitated when the prosecutor spoke of the rapes. "I can never accept the claim that an Iraqi woman was raped while Saddam is president," he shouted, banging on a podium in front of him and pointing a finger at the lawyers for the prosecution. "How could I walk with my head up? An Iraqi woman raped while Saddam is the leader?"
The former president said that during the 1990 Iraqi entry into Kuwait he heard that a soldier raped an Arab woman. "I ordered him tried and then hanged for three days at the site of the crime," he shouted.
The Anfal offensive was part of the Ba'ath regime's war with the Kurds in the north of the country.
Also on trial are Sabir al-Douri, the former director of military intelligence; Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai, who was head of the Iraqi army's 1st Corps, which carried out the Anfal military operation; and Taher Tawfiq al-Ani, then the governor of Mosul.
The two other defendants are Hussein Rashid Mohammed, who was deputy director of operations for the Iraqi military, and Farhan Mutlaq Saleh, at that time the head of military intelligence's eastern regional office.
More than 1,000 survivors and relatives of victims of the Anfal campaign demonstrated in the northern Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah yesterday, demanding the death penalty for Saddam. Khadhija Salih, a housewife who lost five brothers and sisters in the crackdown and herself spent a period in prison, said: "Today I will have my justice as I will see Saddam in the court ... If I could, I would have killed him myself with great pleasure."
The brutal Anfal campaign against the Kurds
By Anne Penketh
The US and Britain did nothing to stop Saddam Hussein's Anfal campaign against the Kurds because the Iraqi president was then a bulwark against the Shia revolutionary regime in Iran.
Although human rights groups accused Saddam at the time of committing genocide, criticism from Western governments, including Britain, was muted towards the dictator, then viewed as a vital ally against the Islamic Republic. The lack of criticism from Washington may even have emboldened Saddam to invade Kuwait in 1990.
Saddam unleashed the Anfal campaign against the Kurds in 1988 at the end of Iraq's eight-year war with Iran. Amnesty International estimates that more than 100,000 Kurds in northern Iraq were killed or disappeared. The offensive was under the command of Saddam's cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, who earned the nickname "Chemical Ali" from the military's use of poison gas against the Kurds. It was the first time any government had used toxic gas against its own people. Anfal, during which hundreds of villages were cleared and local people expelled, comprised eight military offensives and ran from February to September 1988.
On 23 February, the Iraqi army launched its first assault, against Kurdish guerrilla headquarters in Sergalou, along a 40-mile front. Survivors say villagers were warned that if they did not flee, they might be killed or "become the victim of chemicals". During the campaign, the Iraqi troops were accused of a systematic eradication of all Kurdish settlements controlled by guerrillas allied to Iran.
Comment on this Article
Americans separate Iraq from war on terrorism: poll
Agence France Presse
23 August 06
WASHINGTON (AFP) - For the first time since it began, a majority of Americans believe the Iraq war is not part of the war on terrorism, as US President George W. Bush keeps insisting it is, according to a poll.
Fifty-one percent of the 1,206 adults surveyed in the August 17-21 New York Times/CBS News poll believed the two wars were separate, while 44 percent saw a link between them. In June, opinion was split evenly at 41 percent.
Going to war in the first place was considered a mistake by 53 percent of respondents, up from 48 percent in July; 62 percent said US efforts to stabilize Iraq were going badly; and 65 percent were disappointed in how their president was handling the situation.
Forty-six percent said Bush had focused too much on Iraq and not enough on terrorists elsewhere, while 42 percent said the balance was about right.
Despite the warning the apparent rejection of the administration's Iraq policy sends to Republican lawmakers up for election in November, Bush's job approval rating in the poll remained unchanged from last month, at 36 percent. Fifty-seven percent disapproved.
Just 29 percent of respondents believed things were going in the right direction in the United States, compared with 67 percent who felt the country was headed down the wrong path.
A USA Today/Gallup Poll on Tuesday found Bush's approval rating had jumped five points to 42 percent following the arrest in Britain of 24 suspects in an alleged bomb plot against US-bound jetliners.
Bush's handling of the war on terrorism met with the approval of 55 percent of respondents in the Times/CBS poll. On other key policy issues, such as the economy and foreign policy, Bush's disapproval rating neared the 60 percent mark.
On the Middle East, the poll found that despite the recent
Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire agreement, 70 percent of Americans believed that lasting peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors would never come, against 26 percent who said it would.
A majority of 56 percent said it was not the US government's business to broker peace between Israel and its neighbors, while 39 percent believed it was.
Comment on this Article
Bush is crap, says Prescott - UK Deputy PM criticises US handling of Middle East, condemning 'cowboy' President at private meeting
By Colin Brown, Deputy Political Editor
The Independent
17 August 2006
John Prescott has given vent to his private feelings about the Bush presidency, summing up George Bush's administration in a single word: crap.
The Deputy Prime Minister's condemnation of President Bush and his approach to the Middle East could cause a diplomatic row but it will please Labour MPs who are furious about Tony Blair's backing of the United States over the bombing of Lebanon.
The remark is said to have been made at a private meeting in Mr Prescott's Whitehall office on Tuesday with Muslim MPs and other Labour MPs with constituencies representing large Muslim communities. Muslim MPs wanted to press home their objections to British foreign policy and discuss ways of improving relations with the Muslim communities.
Some of the MPs present said yesterday they could not remember Mr Prescott making the remark. He has been at pains to avoid breaking ranks with Mr Blair in public although he is believed to have raised concern about the bombing of Lebanon at a private meeting of the Cabinet. But Harry Cohen, the MP whose constituency includes Walthamstow, scene of some of the police raids in the alleged "terror plot" investigation, said Mr Prescott had definitely used the word "crap" about the Bush administration.
"He was talking in the context of the 'road map' in the Middle East. He said he only gave support to the war on Iraq because they were promised the road map. But he said the Bush administration had been crap on that. We all laughed and he said to an official, 'Don't minute that'." Mr Cohen added: "We also had a laugh when he said old Bush is just a cowboy with his Stetson on. But then he said, 'I can hardly talk about that can I?'
Last night, an official from the Deputy Prime Minister's office said: " These discussions are intended to be private and remain within the four walls. They are private so that there may be frank discussions."
And today Mr Prescott issued a statement in which he said: "This is an inaccurate report of a private conversation and it is not my view. "
Told that others at the meeting could not recall the words, Mr Cohen said: " He did. I stand by that."
Many Labour MPs have been infuriated by the spectacle of Mr Bush and Mr Blair jointly supporting the Israeli action. The Labour MPs went to see Mr Prescott to lodge their criticism of the Government's foreign policy and some said last night that they would be delighted if he did break ranks over the Bush administration following the outcry at the bombing of the Lebanon.
In the private discussions with Mr Prescott, the Labour MPs representing large Muslim communities pulled no punches in their criticism of Mr Blair for giving his backing to Mr Bush. Another of those who was contacted about the conversations did not deny Mr Prescott's words, but laughed and said: " I can't discuss that." When asked whether he had heard Mr Prescott use the "C-word", he said: "I don't remember that."
The Deputy Prime Minister is said to have made it clear he strongly backed the efforts by Mr Blair to persuade the Bush administration to revive the road map for Palestine and Israel. Mr Blair has given a commitment that he will give the peace process his priority when he returns from his holiday in the Caribbean.
"There was a very robust exchange of views," said the MP. " We had a row about community relations. The Deputy Prime Minister was told in no uncertain terms that the Government was relying too much on the elders in the Muslim community who didn't have the credibility that was needed."
Muslim Labour MPs also told Mr Prescott that they needed to retain their own credibility in their communities, which was one of the reasons why they had signed a controversial letter calling for a change in British foreign policy. They said it was not helpful for the Government to have attacked their letter.
Mr Prescott has been accused in the past of making his feelings known about the Republican administration in the White House. He became friendly with Al Gore, the unsuccessful Democrat presidential candidate in 2000, during the negotiations on the Kyoto treaty and allegedly told Mr Gore after his defeat that he was sorry he lost the race to Mr Bush.
Mr Prescott is also known to have used the word "crap" in relation to political events before. Earlier this month, he angrily rejected claims that he could resign over the row about his links to the bid by the tycoon Philip Anschutz for a super-casino at the Millennium Dome as "a load of crap".
Mr Prescott was left in charge by Mr Blair when the Prime Minister went on his delayed holiday but has largely taken a back seat while John Reid, the Home Secretary, has led for the Government on security and the alleged terror plot to blow up planes across the Atlantic.
Behind the scenes, Mr Prescott had to contend with growing backbench demands for Parliament to be recalled to debate the crisis in the Middle East. It remains an option, in spite of the ceasefire in the Lebanon. Campaigners claimed they had the signatures of more than 150 MPs from all parties for a recall. Significantly, they included Ann Keen, the parliamentary private secretary to Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, who is on paternity leave following the birth of his second child. Jim Sheridan, the Labour MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire North, resigned as the parliamentary private secretary to the defence ministers over the bombing of Lebanon.
Mr Prescott has been keen to show Labour MPs that he is prepared to listen to their grievances but has insisted on party discipline to avoid splits. He will be furious at his alleged remarks being repeated, but the signs of dissent within the Cabinet are becoming greater.
Straight-talker's way with words
* Posing with a crab in a jar at the Millennium Dome, while Peter Mandelson was standing for election to Labour's ruling national executive committee, he said to cameramen: "You know what his name is? He's called Peter. Do you think you will get on the executive, Peter?"
* When asked why a car was transporting him and his wife 200 yards to the Labour Party Conference in 1999:
"Because of the security reasons for one thing and second, my wife doesn't like to have her hair blown about. Have you got another silly question?"
* On the Millennium Dome: "If we can't make this work, we're not much of a government."
* "The green belt is a Labour achievement, and we mean to build on it." (Radio interview, January 1998)
* On the Tories at the 1996 Labour conference: "They are up to their necks in sleaze. The best slogan for their conference next week is " Life's better under the Tories" - sounds like one of Steven Norris's chat-up lines."
* When asked by a journalist about Peter Law's decision to quit the Labour Party after 35 years: "Why are you asking me about this? I don't care, it's a Welsh situation, I'm a national politician."
Comment on this Article
Both Bush and His Democratic Opponents are Clueless on Iraq
By Francisco Sarsfield Cabral
Jornal Tribuna, Macau
Translated By Brandi Miller
August 16, 2006
President Bush said that the terrorist attack thwarted by British police is a reminder that the United States is "at war with Islamo-fascism." But it is difficult to include the invasion of Iraq in that "war," which rather than reducing it, has acted as bait to Islamic terrorism.
The majority of the detained suspects were born in Great Britain and have connections to Pakistan. And it was the police, not the military, who aborted the attempts.
With the tragedies under way in Lebanon and Palestine, along with the nuclear threat from Iran in the background, the Iraq situation has taken a back seat in recent news. But what is happening there deserves attention, if for no other reason than that the Israeli attacks have reinforced anti-American sentiment in Iraq. Even Prime Minister al-Maliki, while visiting Baghdad's Sadr City, criticized the American bombings.
The British ambassador in Baghdad, like the two American generals serving in Iraq (one of them the commander of U.S. forces stationed there), came to an unsettling conclusion just a few days ago: Iraq will most likely deteriorate to an all-out civil war. As of now, it is estimated that about one hundred people are assassinated in sectarian and religious violence every day.
On June 13th, Bush made a surprise visit to Baghdad in support of Iraq's first prime minister. At the time the American military started an operation with the Iraqi armed forces [called Forward Together] to put a stop to the violence in the Iraqi capital.
But things didn't improve. On the contrary, from that moment until now, they have only worsened, raising doubts about the ability of the military and, above all, the U.S.-trained Iraqi police to succeed without solid support from the Americans.
In fact, Bush has already decided to double the North American contingent in Baghdad, a revealing measure that the U.S. Army is not in Iraq to combat terrorism but to try to reduce religious violence.
With the economy in collapse, oil production below pre-war levels, and aggravation of ethnic and religious hatred, there is now talk of plans to divide Iraq. The problem is that there are no clear geographic boundaries separating Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.
And Turkey would not be quiet if a "Kurdish nation" emerged from this division. It is also likely that Iran would intervene to more openly defend Iraq's Shiites, while Saudi Arabia and Jordan would be tempted to do the same for Sunnis. The civil war would become even more likely.
Facing this monumental difficulty - which only surprises those who are blinded by the ideological fantasies of the neocons - Bush has resisted the temptation to pull American troops out from Iraq in time to avert a severe Republican defeat in the November Congressional elections. As honorable as this would be, on this occasion it would be irresponsible, added on top of the initial irresponsibility of invading Iraq without any credible plan for the post-war period.
On Tuesday Joe Lieberman, vice-presidential candidate in 2000 as the No. 2 to Al Gore, and one of the 29 Senate Democrats that in 2002 voted in favor of the invasion (a vote he continues to defend), failed to gain his party's nomination for reelection as Senator of Connecticut. He was defeated in the primaries by an obscure anti-invasion Democrat, Ned Lamont. It's one more sign of the growing American opposition to maintain troops in Iraq.
The Democrats are trying to ride this wave of American public opinion. It is mere political opportunism: a rapid American pullout of Iraq would solve nothing anything. The Democrats have not the slightest idea of how to honorably pull out of the Iraq situation. They only want to win elections.
Dramatically, Bush also doesn't know. He keeps the troops there, which is already quite a thing to do, given his resulting unpopularity. Bush's hope is that, with time, things in Iraq will start to get better.
The only problem is that this hope has been repeatedly contradicted by the facts over the past three years. As foreseen by The New York Times, the most probable outcome is that Bush will try to make it to the end of his term with as few shake-ups in Iraq situation as possible, leaving a resolution to the problem to his successor.
However, there are still two more years before Bush is gone. It is not a prospect that exalts.
Comment on this Article
Neocons and the Failure to Impose Democracy By Force -
By Ding Gang
People's Daily Editor
August 17, 2006
Is the flagging effort in Iraq the death knell of the Neocon creed? - the attempt to impose U.S.-style democracy by force of arms has revealed to the American people and the world the bankruptcy of those surrounding President Bush.
Iraq seems to have been forgotten. On August 10, the shocking scenes at London's Heathrow airport raised the fears of the British and Americans to the highest level and attracted media attention from around the world. People were frightened, imagining a dozen airplanes exploding in the sky over the Atlantic. Passengers waiting for flights couldn't shrug off the shadow of fear taunting their hearts.
But in Iraq, it takes no imagination to see that lives are being lost in bombing and explosions every day. While British police were busy arresting terrorists, a suicide bombing in Iraq killed 35 people and wounded 120. These Iraqi civilian are no different from the passengers in London's Heathrow airport; they too have relatives, friends and families.
With the help of the global media, the paranoia felt in London has spread around the whole world at lightning speed. Terror and war seem to have become the new normal in this world. After the war in Lebanon and Israel broke out, Western experts discussing a Third World War and wonder whether or not a global war in the nuclear era would be a fatal disaster for mankind.
But what meaning does this sort of discussion have for those who live in Iraq and whose relatives have already been killed during war? For every family who has a relative and every individual who has lost a friend, the fatal disaster of war has already come to pass.
When U.S. President George W. Bush spoke about the London plot, he claimed that the incident was a strong warning to America that "our country is at a war with Islamic fascists." In fact, shouldn't this be a warning to America about the wisdom of continuing the Iraq War? As more than 100,000 American soldiers fought for democracy in Iraq, British youths were plotting a large scale terrorist attack. Isn't this a great irony?
Three years ago, American neo-conservatives were confident that democracy could be transplanted by military force to Iraq. But more and more, reality in Iraq has revealed to the American people that the entire exercise was a trap, a ploy, and is now a nightmare that simply will not go away. The attempt to transplant democracy by force of arms has had quite the opposite effect than was intended; Iraq is on the verge of civil war.
The American people are using a range of methods to express their views on the Iraq War. In Connecticut's recent Democratic Primary, well-known U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman lost to Ned Lamont, a millionaire with virtually no political experience. Media have suggested that Lieberman was defeated because he remains a supporter of the Iraq War. His defeat sent a signal that there is a force rising against the war in Iraq.
Academics are also reflecting on what has transpired. In his recent bestseller America at the Crossroads RealVideo, American-Japanese scholar Francis Fukuyama argued that democracy will grow within a society that it originates, but that it cannot be transplanted by military force. He argued that America's frustration with the Iraq War has forced the Bush Administration to return to realism, derailing the White House's determination to promote and implement democracy (by arms if necessary).
Some American scholars believe that there is cultural tradition ingrained in the psyche of the American people "to pursue shortcuts for anything." Since a powerful America has been built within just 200 years, is there anything that America cannot do? From the neo-conservative point of view, democracy seems to be instant anti-cold medicine. "Take it today, and the effects will be seen tomorrow." They assumed that the "seed" of democracy, so carefully nurtured in American history, culture and society, would be good in any part of the world. America has gone to great lengths to plant this "seed" in Iraq, but what has come of it? This might just be the end of neo-conservatism.
Comment on this Article
Supporting Terrorism
Disinformation: US to Israel: No financial aid for war
By HERB KEINON
Jerusalem Post
22 August 06
Washington has let Jerusalem know that for now Israel should not expect any financial aid to help defray the cost of the war in Lebanon, The Jerusalem Post has learned.
According to sources in Jerusalem, the government was considering requesting US aid - one report estimated a request of $2 billion - to help pay the cost of the war. There was talk in Washington of a large-scale financial package to help rebuild southern Lebanon, and in the process keep the Iranians out of the process. Israel was apparently hoping to fold its aid request into this package.
However, according to the sources, Washington has made it clear to Jerusalem that such aid for Israel is unlikely, even as US President George Bush on Monday announced a $230 million aid package for southern Lebanon.
"Things could change," the source said, "but right now this type of request would be like spitting into the wind."
Suggestions that Israel was going to ask for $2b. come in the wake of reports last summer that Israel was going to ask for a similar amount of aid from the Bush administration to pay some of the cost of disengagement from Gaza and the resettlement of the evacuees. That number was later trimmed down to $1b., and then in July, just before the disengagement began, Finance Minister director-general Yossi Bachar went to Washington and put in a request for $500 million.
Israel, however, shelved the request indefinitely following Hurricane Katrina last August that devastated New Orleans, amid the realization that the disaster caused billions of dollars of damage and that it would not look good at that time for Israel to be asking for hundreds of millions of dollars to help house its displaced population, when the US had its own displaced population to worry about.
In a related development, Globes reported that Washington had extended the US loan guarantees by three years until 2011. Israel has still not yet used $4.6 billion of the $9 billion program, which began in 2003, and - according to the paper - extending the program will make it easier for Israel to raise financing for the war in Lebanon on international markets.
Comment on this Article
Flashback: US extends 9 Billion dollar "credit line" to Israel
By Ynet
20 August 06
Bush administration agrees to extend by three-year loan guarantees for Israel given to Israel in 2003; Israel has used USD 4.9 billion of a total USD 9 billion
The Bush administration has agreed to an Israel demand that a loan guarantee deal be extended by an additional three years, until 2011.
The Congress needs to approve the move.
Finance Minister Abraham Hirchson said the administration's conceding to Israel's request underscores Washington's faith in Israeli economy.
In 2003, the United States approved a USD 9 billion aid package to Israel in the form of loan guarantees which allow Israel to borrow money on the international market for low interest rates.
Israel has used less than half of the fund leaving USD 4.6 billion in available cash.
Finance Minister Director General Yossi Bachar discussed the extension of the loan period with US Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert M. Kimmit.
Hirchson praised the Administration for expressing faith in Israel's economy.
Bachar will leave for New York on Wednesday where he will present to officials and investors the Israeli government's fiscal plans after the war in the north.
Comment on this Article
What Does Israel Want? It isn't just Lebanon...
Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com
21 August 06
Is anyone really surprised that Israel violated the cease-fire? Here, after all, is a nation that has defied the United Nations on 321 different occasions, refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and proudly proclaims its own lawlessness. Only a fool, or a masochist, would count on Tel Aviv to keep its agreements. Apart from that, however, this latest raid underscores the real objective of what the American media insists on calling the Israeli "incursion" (never "invasion") into Lebanon: it's all about Syria and Iran.
The Israelis justified the raid on the grounds that:
"The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and the Lebanese army were not showing any intention to end the rearmament of Hezbollah, since the former was unwilling to confront the 'terrorist organization.' Thus, Israel had no choice but to act itself to stop the flow of weapons and missiles to the Shiite group, the official added."
This means the Israelis will continue striking at any targets, especially along the border with Syria, that they deem necessary to stop the "rearmament" of Hezbollah. But of course, Hezbollah is already very well armed, as the Israelis discovered to their sorrow and surprise, and their arms are hardly exhausted. This is yet another pretext, just like the kidnapping of the two Israeli soldiers, for continued aggression against Lebanon - and a means for the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to avoid or at least ameliorate the political consequences of its abortive military campaign. It has more to do with the political situation in Israel than the military situation on the ground in Lebanon. As the Los Angeles Times reported, the real objective of the Israeli raid may not have been interdicting arms at all:
"At least one independent analyst expressed skepticism of Israel's claim that the raid was intended to intercept arms supplies. Arthur Hughes, former director-general of the Egypt-Israel Multinational Force and Observers, said the operation was so risky - both for the Israeli soldiers and the country's international standing - that he found the government's official explanation implausible. 'I would guess there was something of high value they were trying to accomplish,' Hughes said, suggesting that a rescue mission for the captive Israeli soldiers was more likely."
If the two Israeli soldiers could be rescued, then so could Olmert's government - but it is more than just internal Israeli politics that is driving the IDF. As I pointed out last week, we were warned by Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who admitted "The war isn't over yet." Indeed, if the Israelis have their way, it has barely begun: they are now shifting their focus to a full-fledged effort to embroil Damascus in the conflict, and I wouldn't rule out air strikes on Syrian territory before all this is over.
Lebanon is just a pawn in the game: Israel's real objective is toppling Bashar al-Assad and militarily confronting the Iranian mullahs - using U.S. troops, of course. The resulting incredibly destructive regional war will see not a few of their old enemies tossed in history's dustbin.
Israel's partisans in the U.S. have, in some instances, been quite open about this objective: Michael Ledeen's infamous taste for "creative destruction" is vivid evidence of the neocons' nihilism. But this is nihilism with a purpose: out of all that death and destruction will come a new world, the vaunted "transformation" of the region that was supposed to lead to democratic societies in nations that had never known any such thing. But, as it turns out, democracy has nothing to do with it: it's all about destabilizing the region to pursue an Israeli agenda. That agenda is the breakup and atomization of the Arab-Muslim world, so that it is little more than a collection of splinters. Lebanon is only the first phase of this campaign, and the Israelis are pushing ahead no matter what Washington thinks.
That is really the big question: is the U.S. going to go along with this crazed Israeli campaign? So far, George W. Bush has gone along for the ride. However, the distance between American and Israeli interests - never as aligned as the two governments averred in public - is fast becoming apparent, and it is only a matter of time before there is a public split.
I would qualify that, however, by adding that the prospects of a coming split are based on the assumption that the White House is putting American interests first, or is even concerned in the least with pursuing them. In the case of this White House, however, that may be assuming far too much.
There is no doubt that the U.S. put pressure on Israel to bring the "incursion" to a swift conclusion, but that wasn't the White House talking. The direction and control of U.S. foreign policy is the object of much internal contention and is shaped by this internecine struggle rather than any central authority.
To be sure, a pro-American faction in U.S. policymaking circles exists but, so far, has been relatively powerless to exert any significant influence: only when U.S. policy seems to go off the rails does it reassert itself. This impulse resulted in the U.S./French effort to engineer a cease-fire, but, as we have seen, the Israelis can violate this and face no immediately discernible consequences.
Condoleezza Rice went to Israel to try to cobble together a cease-fire and was undercut by the IDF's murderous assault on Qana. Condi was reportedly furious, but hers was an impotent rage. The Israelis delight in giving the finger to foreigners who would limit the scope of their actions, and especially, one suspects, to the Americans, whose largess makes the Israeli state possible. Every form of dependency breeds resentment, and in this case it is bound to come to a head in a very public way - given a U.S. commitment to its own interests, that is. But don't expect that from this White House:
"In Washington, the White House declined to criticize the raid, noting that Israel said it had acted in reaction to arms smuggling into Lebanon and that the UN resolution called for the prevention of resupplying Hezbollah with weapons. 'The incident underscores the importance of quickly deploying the enhanced UNIFIL,' a White House spokeswoman, Jeanie Mamo, said, referring to a force of 15,000 UN peacekeeping troops called for by the cease-fire agreement to police the truce."
With 130,000 American troops in the midst of a Shi'ite sea in Iraq, with the entire Arab-Muslim world turning against the U.S. on account of our countenancing the rape of Lebanon, with our supply of vital oil and gas supplies endangered by the outbreak of a regional war and our military at the breaking point - in spite of all this, the president of the United States forges ahead with this mad plan to "transform" the Middle East. It's an outrage, an act of treachery, and, yes, treason on a scale never before seen.
For years, we've been telling our readers that American foreign policy has been hijacked, and here we have the confirmation. The invasion of Iraq, the campaign of threats and provocations directed at Iran, and the destruction of Lebanon have all served the interests of a single country, and that country is not the United States of America. In the most successful covert action in history, Israel's amen corner in the U.S. has essentially seized effective control of the American giant, and is now riding the dumb elephant for all he's worth through the rubble of the Middle East.
The Israeli raid has showed how powerless the UN and the U.S. are against not Hezbollah, but Tel Aviv. As Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, put it to the New York Times:
"We know what they're not going to do, but what will they do. They're not going to disarm Hezbollah. But are they going to stop Israel from re-attacking Hezbollah? If the Israeli government decides there is an imminent threat, and attacks with F-16s, what is the mandate for the UN? What does the UN do?"
There is only one power on earth that can restrain the Israelis, and that is Israel's American sponsors and financiers. But I wouldn't bet the ranch on that happening, as long as George W. Bush - or his Democratic equivalents - reside in the White House. What we have to look forward to, in short, is perpetual war in the Middle East, for as far as the eye can see - unless a miracle occurs and we can reclaim U.S. foreign policy for American interests.
Comment on this Article
Non-Jews defend Israel on campus
By David J. Silverman
WASHINGTON Aug. 21 (JTA)
A cadre of students hit the pro-Israel books early this summer, studying techniques ahead of what is promising to be one of Israel's toughest seasons on campus in the wake of the Lebanon war.
The difference for these activists is that they're not Jewish.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee says there are currently about 400 non-Jewish activists trained in its programs at schools as disparate as the Ivy Leagues, state schools, Christian institutions and traditionally black colleges.
Of those, about 70 joined 300 Jewish student activists in late July in a four-day leadership training seminar that focused on dealing with the aftermath of Israel's war against the Hezbollah terrorist group.
"The face of AIPAC on campus is the face of America," said Jonathan Kessler, AIPAC's leadership development director. "It's also the future of the American pro-Israel movement."
Kessler said AIPAC wants to expand pro-Israel activism to traditionally untapped groups of students, seeking out campuses with small or no Jewish populations.
In January, AIPAC underwrote a mission to Israel to educate 43 non-Jewish students, including the presidents of the National College Democrats and College Republican National Committee.
In interviews, participants in the programs reveal the same anxieties and ambitions their Jewish counterparts face: They want to blunt the effects of media images by providing context. Some hope to book pro-Israel politicians and former Israeli soldiers for campus talks.
"Yes, what people see on television will shape their opinions," said Amanda Wilkerson, a senior political science major at Florida A & M University, a historically black institution. But the conflict violence also "gives us a chance to show that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization that is hiding in homes."
Wilkerson said her past AIPAC training -- she was not at the July workshop -- and her on-campus experience was helping her steel for increased anti-Israel activism this year.
"Two years ago, I had people saying it couldn't be done on an historically black campus, that there was no interest in Israel," said Wilkerson, who in the past month has been peppered with dozens of phone calls from students interested in learning more about the Middle East violence. She says she sometimes spends hours
explaining the conflict.
Wilkerson's interest in Israel was piqued when she was assigned the nation for a project in a comparative politics course. She was soon smitten with the Jewish state, and last November, she organized an Israel festival that drew 600 students. Her modus operandi, she says, is connecting her fellow students to Israeli culture.
"We made significant gains over the past year and it's evident on campus," she said. "I am not anticipating that the campus has changed sides, but at the same time I'm prepared to face any challenges that may arise on campus, in Tallahassee and in the world at large. I'm going to stand up and talk."
Jamal Sowell, a black U.S. Marine and graduate student in higher education at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, attended AIPAC's mission to Israel with Wilkerson last year.
He said he is ready to counteract what he expects to be a number of anti-Israel and anti-war forums and protests.
"Pro-Israel activists have to step it up another notch," he said. "You have groups such as Hezbollah that are out to wipe Israel off the map, and they are not going to stop until their agenda is pushed forth. That means that as Americans we cannot sit back and watch; we need to be proactive because what happens over there affects the whole Middle East and our country."
Even students from traditionally Christian schools, where anti-Israel sentiment is comparatively low, are getting ready for a relatively busy season.
"We want to make sure people get the facts," said Brian Colas, a senior at Virginia's Liberty University who interned at AIPAC this summer. "We're going to focus on the nature of Hezbollah to make sure no one is confused that they are a humanitarian organization that was attacked by Israel. If we bring this to the front, right away, I have no doubt that Liberty students will understand and know the nature of this conflict."
Jewish students who have trained with non-Jewish activists at AIPAC events say they marvel at their level of commitment and enthusiasm.
Naomi Berlin, a sophomore at Tufts University in Boston who also interned at AIPAC this summer, said the efforts of her non-Jewish counterparts affirm that what she is doing is right.
"With Jewish students it's something inherent, instilled in us from the beginning," she said. "But for most of them, it's something they've realized on their own. That's why the level of commitment is so impressive.''
Comment on this Article
Unexploded cluster bombs prompt fear and fury in returning refugees
Declan Walsh in Yahmour
Monday August 21, 2006
The Guardian
When the guns went silent in Aitta Shaab, a war-ravaged village close to the Israeli border, three children skipped through the rubble looking for a little fun.
Hurdling over lumps of crushed concrete and dodging spikes of twisted metal, Sukna, Hassan and Merwa, aged 10 to 12, paused before a curious object. Sukna picked it up. The terrifying blast flung her to the ground, thrusting metal shards into her liver. Hassan's abdomen was cut open. Merwa was hit in the leg and arm.
"We thought it was just a little ball," said Hassan with a hoarse whisper in the intensive care ward at Tyre's Jabal Amel hospital. In the next bed Sukna, a ventilator cupped to her mouth and a tangle of tubes from her arms, said even less.
Her mother watched anxiously. "The Israelis wanted to defeat Hizbullah," said Najah Saleh, 40. "But what did these children ever do to them?"
Israel may be pulling out of Lebanon but its soldiers leave behind a lethal legacy of this summer's 34-day war. The south is carpeted with unexploded cluster bombs, innocuous looking black canisters, barely larger than a torch battery, which pose a deadly threat to villagers stumbling back to their homes.
Mine-clearing teams scrambling across the region have logged 89 cluster bomb sites so far, and expect to find about 110 more. Meanwhile, casualties are being taken into hospital - four dead and 21 injured so far. Officials fear the toll could eventually stretch into the thousands.
"We already had a major landmine problem from previous Israeli invasions, but this is far worse," said Chris Clark of the UN Mine Action Coordination Centre in Tyre, standing before a map filled with flags indicating bomb sites.
Cluster bombs are permitted under international law, but UN and human rights officials claim Israel violated provisions forbidding their use in urban areas. "We're finding them in orange plantations, on streets, in cars, near hospitals - pretty much everywhere," Mr Clark said.
The bombs are ejected from artillery shells in mid-flight, showering a wide area with explosions that can kill within 10 metres (33ft). But up to a quarter fail to explode, creating minefields that kill civilians once the war is over. A decades-old campaign to ban them has failed.
Israel turned to cluster bombs in the last week of the war, apparently frustrated at the failure of conventional weapons to rout Hizbullah fighters from their foxholes. Mine-clearance teams are finding evidence pointing to their provenance: the US, the world's largest cluster bomb manufacturer, which gave Israel $2.2bn (£1.2bn) in military aid last year.
In Nabatiye, 15 people were injured in just one day along a bomb-strewn road. In Tibnin, 210 bombs were found around the town hospital. "That's about as inappropriate [a use of cluster bombs] as you can get," Mr Clark said.
In Yahmour, a hilly frontline village that has become a complex urban minefield, minesweepers from the UK-based Mine Action Group have cleared the main roads and some house entrances. But danger lurks everywhere. One elderly woman lost her leg in an explosion last Monday as she swept her yard.
Now holes pock the road, yellow tape appears around fields and houses, and residents tip-toe around the "grape bombs". Ilham Tarhini, 45, stood at her front door appealing for help. After returning from refuge in Syria three days ago she found tiny bomblets poking from the soil of her garden of olive trees. From where she was standing she could count eight: "I'm afraid to step into the streets."
But the most volatile payload sat in Jamil Zuhoor's living room. During the war an unexploded rocket packed with bomblets punched through his front wall, skidding to a halt before a chest of drawers. "I can't see us moving back in here for another year at least," he said, shutting the door of his shattered house.
The UN is appealing for money and minesweepers. With such help it hopes the worst-hit areas can be cleared within six months, Mr Clarke said. But until then residents live in fear.
Many share the blame equally between Israel and the US. "It's like we are living in a prison," said Aisa Hussain, 38, a Yahmour resident who has ordered his children to remain inside his house.
Strolling through the village he pointed to yet another tiny black canister perched under a tree. "You see what America is sending us," he said bitterly. "This is their idea of democracy."
Backstory
Cluster bombs were first used by the Germans in the second world war but have become a standard weapon for many countries, including Britain, France and Italy.
The most popular delivery device, the American-made M26 rocket, scatters 644 bomblets over 20,000 square metres. Under test conditions up to 23% of bomblets from the M26 failed to explode on impact. The United States keeps 370,000 such rockets in stock.
The M26 inflicted hundreds of civilian casualties in Iraq in 2003, says Human Rights Watch, over populated areas. The British army used M26s in the 1991 Gulf war
The US halted cluster bomb exports to Israel in 1982 after indiscriminate use against civilians but rescinded the ban in 1988. Belgium is the only country in the world that has banned cluster bombs.
Comment on this Article
Israel/Lebanon: Evidence indicates deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure
Amnesty International
Press Release
23 August 06
Amnesty International today published findings that point to an Israeli policy of deliberate destruction of Lebanese civilian infrastructure, which included war crimes, during the recent conflict.
The organization's latest publication shows how Israel's destruction of thousands of homes, and strikes on numerous bridges and roads as well as water and fuel storage plants, was an integral part of Israel's military strategy in Lebanon, rather than "collateral damage" resulting from the lawful targeting of military objectives.
The report reinforces the case for an urgent, comprehensive and independent UN inquiry into grave violations of international humanitarian law committed by both Hizbullah and Israel during their month-long conflict.
"Israel's assertion that the attacks on the infrastructure were lawful is manifestly wrong. Many of the violations identified in our report are war crimes, including indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks. The evidence strongly suggests that the extensive destruction of power and water plants, as well as the transport infrastructure vital for food and other humanitarian relief, was deliberate and an integral part of a military strategy," said Kate Gilmore, Executive Deputy Secretary General of Amnesty International.
The Israeli government has argued that they were targeting Hizbullah positions and support facilities and that other damage done to civilian infrastructure was a result of Hizbullah using the civilian population as a "human shield".
"The pattern, scope and scale of the attacks makes Israel's claim that this was 'collateral damage', simply not credible," said Kate Gilmore, Executive Deputy Secretary General of Amnesty International.
"Civilian victims on both sides of this conflict deserve justice. The serious nature of violations committed makes an investigation into the conduct of both parties urgent. There must be accountability for the perpetrators of war crimes and reparation for the victims."
The report, Deliberate destruction or 'collateral damage'? Israeli attacks against civilian infrastructure, is based on first-hand information gathered by recent Amnesty International research missions to Lebanon and Israel, including interviews with dozens of victims, officials from the UN, Israeli Defence Force (IDF) and Lebanese government, as well as official statements and press reports.
The report includes evidence of the following:
* Massive destruction by Israeli forces of whole civilian neighbourhoods and villages;
* Attacks on bridges in areas of no apparent strategic importance;
* Attacks on water pumping stations, water treatment plants and supermarkets despite the prohibition against targeting objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population;
* Statements by Israeli military officials indicating that the destruction of civilian infrastructure was indeed a goal of Israel's military campaign designed to press the Lebanese government and the civilian population to turn against Hizbullah.
The report exposes a pattern of indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks, which resulted in the displacement of twenty-five percent of the civilian population. This pattern, taken together with official statements, indicates that the attacks on infrastucture were deliberate, and not simply incidental to lawful military objectives.
Amnesty International is calling for a comprehensive, independent and impartial inquiry to be urgently established by the UN into violations of international humanitarian law by both sides in the conflict. It should examine in particular the impact of this conflict on the civilian population, and should be undertaken with a view to holding individuals responsible for crimes under international law and ensuring that full reparation is provided to the victims.
Further information :
Web Feature: Lebanon: Destruction of civilian infrastructure
Image Gallery
Satellite Images
Examples of leaflets dropped by the Israeli Defense Forces
Take Action: Lebanon/Israel conflict: attacks on civilians need immediate investigation
Comment on this Article
War wipes out 15 years of Lebanese recovery: UNDP
www.chinaview.cn 2006-08-23 07:10:06
GENEVA, Aug. 22 (Xinhua) -- The recent Israel-Hezbollah conflict has wiped out Lebanon's 15 years of economic and social recovery, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) said on Tuesday.
The destruction had been so devastating that it had effectively wiped out the past 15 years of rehabilitation and reconstruction efforts, UNDP spokesman Jean Fabre told reporters.
He added that all the progress Lebanon had made toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals had been wiped out and the country now had to start from zero again.
According to the spokesman, the overall economic losses of Lebanon in the past month were in the neighborhood of 15 billion U.S. dollars, at the very least.
He said UNDP had outlined six quick impact projects to address recovery and reconstruction, which the Lebanese government had approved, at an estimated cost of 46.3 million U.S. dollars, and UNDP had already disbursed 3.1 million U.S. dollars of its own funds to jump-start the projects without waiting for donors.
Responding to questions, Fabre said that the situation in Lebanon was very grave, as there had been much destruction.
He added that it was impossible now for Lebanon to repay its debt, which was already very big before last month's conflict.
Comment on this Article
Amnesty report accuses Israel of war crimes
David Fickling
Wednesday August 23, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Israel deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure and committed war crimes during the month-long conflict in Lebanon, according to an Amnesty International report.
The report said strikes on civilian buildings and structures went beyond "collateral damage" and amounted to indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks under the Geneva conventions on the laws of war.
Kate Gilmore, the Amnesty executive deputy secretary general, said the bombardment of power and water plants and transport links was "deliberate and an integral part of a military strategy".
"Israel's assertion that the attacks on the infrastructure were lawful is manifestly wrong," she said.
"Many of the violations identified in our report are war crimes. The pattern, scope and scale of the attacks makes Israel's claim that this was collateral damage simply not credible."
Amnesty called for an official UN inquiry into human rights violations on both sides of the conflict.
The report's authors described the destruction of up to 90% of some towns and villages in southern Lebanon, releasing aerial photographs that showed Beirut's southern Dahiya district had been transformed from a bustling suburb into a grey wasteland.
"In village after village the pattern was similar - the streets, especially main streets, were scarred with artillery craters along their length," the report said.
"In some cases, cluster bomb impacts were identified. Houses were singled out for precision-guided missile attack and were destroyed, totally or partially, as a result.
"Business premises such as supermarkets or food stores and auto service stations and petrol stations were targeted, often with precision-guided munitions and artillery that started fires and destroyed their contents."
Israel launched more than 7,000 air strikes against Lebanon during the 34-day war, and naval vessels launched 2,500 shells, the report said.
Around one third of the 1,183 people killed in Lebanon were children, while 4,054 people were injured and 970,000 displaced.
Lebanese estimates suggest that 30,000 houses, along with up to 120 bridges, 94 roads, 25 fuel stations and 900 businesses, were destroyed.
Two hospitals were destroyed and three others severely damaged, while 31 "vital points" - such as airports, ports, water and sewage treatment plants, and electrical facilities - were also completely or partially destroyed.
The overall cost of the damage amounted to $3.5bn (£1.8bn), the report said.
Around 4,000 Hizbullah rockets were fired at northern Israel during the conflict, killing around 40 civilians. Up to 300,000 people in northern Israel were driven into bomb shelters by the fighting, and 117 soldiers died.
The Amnesty report said Israeli military policy seemed directed at destroying Lebanese popular support for Hizbullah, a tactic prohibited by the Geneva conventions.
"The widespread destruction ... in addition to several statements by Israeli officials, suggests a policy of punishing both the Lebanese government and the civilian population in an effort to get them to turn against Hizbullah," it said.
Red Cross officials were quoted as saying that people left behind in inaccessible villages in southern Lebanon had been unable to get hold of fresh water.
Refugees from the border village of Rmeish had told Red Cross delegates that locals had had to drinking foul water from an irrigation ditch.
The report's allegation of disproportionate action echoes comments made during the conflict by international observers including French, Russian and EU officials and the UN humanitarian chief, Jan Egeland.
However, the British government has avoided the term, which could be considered an accusation of war crimes, although former the foreign secretary Jack Straw and the Conservative foreign affairs spokesman William Hague both used it.
Comment on this Article
Targeting Iran
Iran's Navy Attacks and Boards Romanian Rig in Gulf
By Andy Critchlow and Marc Wolfensberger
Bloomberg
22 August 06
Iran attacked and seized control of a Romanian oil rig working in its Persian Gulf waters this morning one week after the Iranian government accused the European drilling company of "hijacking'' another rig.
An Iranian naval vessel fired on the rig owned by Romania's Grup Servicii Petroliere (GSP) in the Salman field and took control of its radio room at about 7:00 a.m. local time, Lulu Tabanesku, Grup's representative in the United Arab Emirates said in a phone interview from Dubai today.
"The Iranians fired at the rig's crane with machine guns,'' Tabanesku said. "They are in control now and we can't contact the rig.'' The Romanian company has 26 workers on the platform, he said.
Iran, which holds the world's second-largest oil and gas reserves, is due to respond today to a European Union-led offer of incentives aimed at persuading it to halt uranium enrichment activities that are crucial to its nuclear program.
Neither the press office of Iran's oil ministry nor the one of Iran's revolutionary guards could be reached for comment when called. Today is a national holiday in Iran.
Crude oil for September was at $72.56 a barrel, up 11 cents, on the New York Mercantile Exchange at 12:06 p.m. in London. The contract expires today. The more-active October contract was up 7 cents at $73.37 a barrel.
Straits of Hormuz
Iran urged the United Arab Emirates last week to help it return another oil rig owned and operated by the Romanian company in the same waters close to the Straits of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world's daily oil supply moves on tankers.
Grup said it recovered its rig last week because of a contractual dispute with its Iranian client, Oriental Oil Kish.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suspended Oriental Oil's activities in 2005 on alleged corruption activity and ties to Halliburton Co. of the U.S. The U.A.E.-registered drilling company had signed a preliminary contract with Halliburton after winning an estimated $310 million contract to develop phases 9 and 10 of Iran's offshore South Pars gas reservoir.
Mircea Geoana, the head of the Social Democratic Party, the main opposition party in Romania, called on the government to "undertake all diplomatic measures necessary'' to persuade the Iranians to release the rig.
He also called on President Traian Basescu in a news conference broadcast on Realitatea television to invite all political party heads to the presidential palace to "discuss what Romania's reaction will be to this provocation.''.
To contact the reporter on this story: Andy Critchlow in Dubai at at acritchlow1@bloomberg.net
Comment on this Article
Iran ready for talks over nuclear issue
www.chinaview.cn 2006-08-23 03:50:58
TEHRAN, Aug. 22 (Xinhua) -- Iran is ready to start "serious talks" over its nuclear program as of Wednesday, top Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani was quoted by the semi-official ISNA news agency as saying on Tuesday.
"Iran now is ready for serious talks with the six world powers from this Wednesday over the package," Larijani said.
"We handed the response with a positive view and even tried to open a way for fair talks by interpreting the ambiguous cases logically and positively," he added.
The official also urged the six world powers who authored the package to get back to negotiations, adding that "the Islamic Republic is ready to play its role as a responsible country."
The chief negotiator made the remarks to envoys from China, Britain, France, Russia, Germany and Switzerland which is representing the United States since Washington has no diplomatic relations with Iran.
Earlier, Larijani handed over to foreign ambassadors in Tehran Iran's formal response to a package of proposals agreed on by six nations to solve the nuclear standoff without disclosing any details of the reply.
However, officials close to the meeting disclosed that the response had offered a "new formula" to resolve the disputed nuclear issue.
"Iran has given an all-sided response to the package, but also raised some questions," one of the officials said.
Meanwhile, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told reporters in New York that "we are ready to study the Iranian response carefully, but we are also prepared, if it does not meet the terms set to proceed here in the Security Council...with economic sanctions."
"I believe we are going to be prepared to submit elements of are solution in the Council very quickly," he added.
Iran has promised to give an official response by Tuesday to the package of proposals, which was authored by the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany.
The package, designed to defuse the current tensions over Iran's nuclear program, includes both incentives aimed at persuading Iran to suspend uranium enrichment and possible sanctions if Iran does not comply.
The Security Council adopted a resolution late June urging Tehran to suspend by Aug. 31 all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development, or face the prospect of sanctions.
The U.S. has accused Iran of secretly developing nuclear weapons under a civilian front, a charge categorically denied by Tehran which says that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.
Comment on this Article
Iran must suspend uranium enrichment: French FM
www.chinaview.cn 2006-08-23 19:49:50
PARIS, Aug. 23 (Xinhua) -- World powers would not negotiate with Iran over its disputed nuclear program unless Tehran suspend uranium enrichment activities, French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said on Wednesday.
"I want to point out again that France is available to negotiate," Douste-Blazy said at a joint news conference with visiting Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.
"As we have always said ... a return to the negotiating table is tied to the suspension of uranium enrichment," he stressed.
Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani on Tuesday gave Tehran's official response to the six-nation package of proposals on resolving the international nuclear dispute. But details of Tehran's response remain unclear at present.
Comment on this Article
Iran 'benefiting from war on terror'
The Independent
23 August 06
Iran's influence in the Middle East has been bolstered by America's so-called war on terror, according to a new report.
The report, by researchers at think-tank the Royal Institute for International Studies in London - also known as Chatham House - says: "There is little doubt that Iran has been the chief beneficiary of the war on terror in the Middle East.
"The United States, with Coalition support, has eliminated two of Iran's regional rival governments - the Taliban in Afghanistan in November 2001 and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq in April 2003 - but has failed to replace either with coherent and stable political structures."
The report, called Iran, Its Neighbours And Regional Crises, adds that the recent conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza and between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon have added to that instability.
One of the report's authors, Dr Ali Ansari, reader in modern history at the University of St Andrews, told Radio Four: "The United States needs to take a step back and reassess its entire policy towards Iran and work out, first of all, what does it want and how is it going to achieve it because at the moment everything is rather like putting a sticking plaster on a fairly raw wound and it is not really actually doing much at all."
The report, in its executive summary, says Iran has now superseded America as the most influential power in the Middle East.
"Iran is simply too important - for political, economic, cultural, religions and military reasons - to be treated lightly by any state in the Middle East or indeed Asia," it says.
It says the wars and instability in Afghanistan and Iraq have "further strengthened Iran", adding that: "The US-driven agenda for confronting Iran is severely compromised by the confident ease with which Iran sits in its region."
Concerning Iran's apparent attempts to develop nuclear weapons, the report says the country's importance in the region "helps explain why Iran feels able to resist western pressure".
"While the US and Europeans slowly grind the nuclear issue through the mills of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Security Council, Iran continues to prevaricate, feeling confident of victory as conditions turn ever more in its favour," it says.
Comment on this Article
Russia to Continue Talks With Iran on Nuclear Problem
Created: 23.08.2006 11:42 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 11:42 MSK
MosNews
Russia will continue seeking a political solution to the Iranian nuclear problem, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying on Wednesday.
"Russia will continue with its course of searching for a political solution to the situation surrounding the Iranian nuclear program, and will continue to seek to preserve the role of the IAEA and prevent the erosion of the nonproliferation regimen," he said commenting on Iran's response to the proposals of the international sextet of the UN Security Council's five permanent members and Germany. "The Russian side has started studying the Iranian reply along with its partners in the sextet," Kamynin said.
"It is essential to understand the nuances and to find constructive elements, if any exist, and to decide whether it is possible to go on working with Tehran on the basis of the well-known proposals of the six states," he said.
"We are ready to continue using multilateral mechanisms and the potential of the UN Security Council as well as bilateral contacts with the Iranian side" to find a political solution, he said.
Iran said Tuesday it was ready for "serious negotiations" on its nuclear program, but a semi-official news agency reported the government was unwilling to abandon nuclear enrichment - the key U.S. demand.
Ali Larijani, the country's top nuclear negotiator, delivered a written response to ambassadors of Britain, China, Russia, France, Germany and Switzerland to a package of incentives aimed at persuading Iran to roll back on its nuclear program. Larijani told the diplomats Iran was prepared as of Aug. 23rd to enter serious negotiations.
Comment on this Article
Iran wants to talk but keep nuke program
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
Associated Press
22 August 06
TEHRAN, Iran - Iran said Tuesday it was ready for "serious negotiations" on its nuclear program, offering a new formula to resolve a crisis with the West. A semiofficial news agency said the government was unwilling to abandon uranium enrichment - the key U.S. demand.
Iran delivered its written response to a package of incentives offered by the United States and five other world powers to persuade Iran to roll back on its nuclear program - and punishments if it does not. The world powers, the five permanent U.N. Security Council members plus Germany, have given Iran until Aug. 31 to accept the package.
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, said Washington will "study the Iranian response carefully" but was prepared to move forward with sanctions against Tehran if it was not positive. The White House held off commenting until it had studied the text. The European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said the document was "extensive" and required "a detailed and careful analysis."
Iranian officials offered no details of the response, but it appeared geared at enticing those countries into further negotiations by offering a broad set of proposals vague enough to hold out hope of progress in resolving the standoff.
If the Iranians leave the door open to halting enrichment as talks progress, that would drive a wedge in the Security Council between the Americans, British and French on one side and the Russians and Chinese on the other. Last month, Russia said the Council was in no rush to pressure Iran, striking a more conciliatory tone than the United States.
Tuesday's announcement was the latest development in the yearlong standoff over Tehran's nuclear program. Iran says it wants to master the technology to generate nuclear power. But critics say Iran is interested in uranium enrichment because it can also be used to make the fissile core of nuclear weapons.
The current drama is playing out in the wake of fears that the ability of the pro-Iranian Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon to withstand 34 days of Israeli bombardment has emboldened hard-liners in Tehran to risk a showdown with the Americans, who are bogged down in neighboring Iraq. There has also been speculation in the West that Iran encouraged Hezbollah to provoke the Israelis to distract attention from its nuclear ambitions.
Iran has pursued a confrontational stance on the nuclear issue since the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last year. The hard-line president has used the nuclear issue to encourage a sense of national pride among Iranians by standing up to the United States and other Western countries.
On Tuesday, Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, hand-delivered his government's response to ambassadors of Britain, China, Russia, France, Germany and Switzerland - which represents U.S. interests - nine days before a Security Council deadline for Iran to halt uranium enrichment or face economic and political sanctions.
Larijani refused to disclose whether the response included an offer to suspend uranium enrichment. But the semiofficial Fars news agency reported that Iran rejected calls to suspend "nuclear activities" - or uranium enrichment - and "instead has offered a new formula to resolve the issues through dialogue."
The state-run television quoted Larijani as telling the diplomats Iran "is prepared as of Aug. 23rd (Wednesday) to enter serious negotiations" with the countries that proposed the incentives package.
The Irna official news agency reported that "Larijani said Iran's answer has logically, fairly and constructively addressed demands of the proposed package, recommending the P5+1 group to return to the negotiation table immediately despite the false atmosphere created against Iran that it was buying time."
Last month, the Security Council set an Aug. 31 deadline for Iran to halt uranium enrichment or face economic and political sanctions. Iran called the resolution "illegal" but had said it was willing to offer a "multifaceted response" to an incentives package that the six powers offered in June.
Iranian officials familiar with Larijani's response said Tehran offered a "new formula" to resolve the dispute. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.
"Iran has provided a comprehensive response to everything said in the Western package. In addition, Iran, in its formal response, has asked some questions to be answered," one official said without providing more details.
But the Iranians have been signaling they are not prepared to abandon uranium enrichment as a precondition to talks. Last month, a senior Iranian lawmaker said the country's parliament was preparing to debate withdrawal from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty if the U.N. Security Council adopts a resolution to force Tehran to suspend enrichment.
On Monday, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the Islamic Republic "has made its own decision and in the nuclear case, God willing, with patience and power, will continue its path." Khamenei accused the United States of putting pressure on Iran despite Tehran's assertions that its nuclear program was peaceful.
Iran's former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati, who is now a top adviser to Khamenei, said Iran's national interests, not the West's demands, should be the basis for Iran's decision.
"What we have achieved in nuclear technology is worth more than the pressures against us at the international stage," the semiofficial Iranian Students News Agency quoted Velayati as saying Tuesday.
In February, Iran for the first time produced its first batch of low-enriched uranium, using a cascade of 164 centrifuges.
In the last few weeks, Iran prevented U.N. nuclear agency inspectors from inspecting an underground site meant to shelter its uranium enrichment program from attack, diplomats said Monday.
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, is to report by Sept. 11 to the agency's board on Iran's compliance with the U.N. deadline to freeze enrichment and other aspects of Tehran's cooperation with U.N. inspectors.
The Western incentives package has not been made public but some details have leaked. They include an offer to lift a ban on sales of Boeing passenger aircraft, providing Iran with some nuclear technology to build reactors for civilian purposes and guaranteeing a supply of nuclear fuel.
Comment on this Article
Minister says Israel must be ready for any Iranian attack
Reuters/Ha'aretz
22 August 06
A week after the end of the war with Hezbollah, Minister Rafi Eitan warned Tuesday that Israel should prepare for the possibility of a missile attack from Iran.
"We are liable to face an Iranian missile attack. The Iranians have said very clearly that if they come under attack, their primary target would be Israel," Eitan, a member of the decision-making security cabinet, told Israel Radio.
Iran could fire missiles at Israel "therefore we must prepare for what could come, and prepare the entire country for a missile strike attack, to prepare all the civilian systems so they are ready for this," Eitan said.
The radio said Eitan, a former spymaster, meant that Israel should prepare its bomb shelters to protect against a possible Iranian attack.
It quoted Eitan as alluding to the current international standoff with Iran over its uranium enrichment, saying if the situation deteriorates, Israel would be the first to come under attack.
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map."
He has said Israel "should not assume" its cease-fire with Iranian-backed Hezbollah guerrillas last week means an end to the crisis.
Hezbollah fired 4,000 rockets on northern Israel during the war.
Iranian cleric Amad Khatami has said that Iran would hit Tel Aviv with medium-ranged missiles if it came under attack. Arms experts say Iran's Shahab-3 missiles are capable of striking Israel.
Eitan's remarks also came as tensions rose between Iran and six world powers led by the United States, who have sought to persuade Tehran to halt its uranium enrichment program, with an August 31 deadline for Tehran to face possible sanctions from the United Nations.
Comment on this Article
All War, All the Time
Juarez Killings Escalate As Investigation Stalls - The Mexican government drops its investigation, leaving unsolved the brutal murders of hundreds of young women
By Leslie Fishburn-Clark
Women's Media Center
August 22, 2006
Like the families of hundreds of murdered and missing women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, Cipriana Jurado is infuriated. More than 400 young women have been raped and murdered since 1993, their bodies left in the desert in the border region south of El Paso, Texas. This summer -- quietly, and shortly after national elections to usher in a new government -- Mexican federal authorities returned 14 cases it had been investigating to the state of Chihuahua saying there is no evidence federal crimes were committed.
Jurado's organization, Centro de Investigacion & Solidaridad Obrera a Juárez (CISO), works to review the investigations and to identify and return the bodies to their families. She said the 25 families she works with are angry and frustrated knowing the decision will further delay answers about the murder and disappearance of their loved ones. Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) issued a major report on the murders in 2003 and has been pressuring authorities to investigate. But spokesman Eric Olson agreed, "It's been a very discouraging process." Among 2003 findings by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an agency chartered by the Organization of American States, the investigation of the killings has been impeded by institutionalized discrimination against women.
While the investigation stalls, the killings escalate. In the first five months of this year, 23 murders have been reported -- approximately the same number of murders committed in all of 2004. The level of fear is such that the victim's families now avoid the media so as not to call attention to themselves. According to advocates at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), the "ages, identities and backgrounds of victims suggest that a broad curve of violence against women is expanding."
The federal government's position that resolving the femicides rests with the state of Chihuahua puts the onus back on State Attorney General Patricia González Rodríguez -- a situation that Olson calls "gloomy" because of the corruption and ineptitude of state and local authorities. CISO, while crediting the AG's office with making some advances in the murder cases, is demanding more serious investigations.
Many activists argue for a bi-national response, with the United States assisting in investigate the killings. This spring the House and Senate approved identical resolutions urging U.S. involvement in solving the Juárez murders. Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), author of the Senate resolution, said Congress wanted to make sure that the investigation and efforts to prevent further murders became part of the diplomatic agenda between the two nations.
Advocates for the murdered women and their families must now turn to the new administration, following recent national elections in Mexico. But AIUSA's Olson said that by backing away from the Juárez murders and offering a "clean slate to the incoming government," the government seemed to be "washing its hands of a very serious and tragic series of events."
Cipriana Jurado, though, is not counting on Mexican authorities to resolve the femicides. CISO is seeking justice through international organizations, including the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which stated, "resolution of these killings requires attention to the root causes of violence against women -- in all of its principal manifestations."
Ed. Note: While a new arrest was recently made in the case, the Mexican federal government has still not resumed its investigation.
Leslie Fishburn-Clark is an Albuquerque-based journalist.
Comment on this Article
Cancer-Causing Gas Used in Maze Riot: British Soldiers
23/08/2006
Several British soldiers serving at the former Maze Prison in the North have said they believe CR gas was used to quell a riot at the facility 22 years ago.
The soldiers were themselves affected when gas canisters were dropped on the prison from helicopters during the disturbances.
Their comments have reignited the controversy surrounding the incident in which the poisonous gas was allegedly used against republican prisoners involved in setting fire to the prison in 1974.
The British authorities have never admitted using CR gas, which is ten times stronger than CS gas and has been shown to cause cancer.
One-fifth of the 300 republicans who were in the Maze at the time of the 1974 riot have since died of cancer.
Comment on this Article
Russian airliner crash not terrorist attack: official
www.chinaview.cn 2006-08-23 12:49:52
MOSCOW/KIEV, Aug. 23 (Xinhua) -- All 169 people aboard a Russian airliner were killed on Tuesday, when the jet crashed near the city of Donetsk in east Ukraine after it ran into severe weather, said the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry.
Preliminary information showed that all 159 passengers and 10 crew members aboard the plane were killed, including a dozen young children and an unidentified number of foreigners, the ministry said.
Earlier reports said that 160 passengers and 10 crew members were on board.
"Nobody survived," spokeswoman for the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry Irina Andrianova said.
"At 3:37 p.m. Moscow time (1137 GMT), the plane sent an SOS signal and at 3:39 it disappeared from radar screens," Andrianova said.
The airliner, a Tu-154 jet owned by Russia's Pulkovo Airlines, was flying from the southern Russian Black Sea coastal city of Anapa to St. Petersburg when it crashed, 45 km north of Donetsk.
The cause of the crash was under investigation, but officials in both Russia and Ukraine indicated that bad weather conditions, not terrorism, was likely responsible for the tragedy.
The crash "was not a terrorist attack," said Leonid Belyayev, acting director of Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry, in St. Petersburg.
According to initial information, the airplane crashed after it entered a zone of severe turbulence, head of the Russian Federal Air Navigation Service, Alexander Neradko said.
"The catastrophe occurred as the result of a lightning strike as the plane flew into a storm front," Andrianova was cited by the Interfax news agency as saying.
Meanwhile, Interfax Ukraine, reported that a fire had broken out on board the plane, shortly before it crashed.
A fire flared up inside the aircraft as it was flying at an altitude of 10,000 meters, spokesman for the Ukrainian Emergency Situations Ministry, Igor Krol, was quoted by Interfax Ukraine as saying.
The crew tried to make an emergency landing but failed due to the malfunction of the plane's landing gear, and the jet crashed "on its belly," said Krol .
Ukrainian rescuers have reached the crash site.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko promised to cooperate fully with Russia in investigating the cause of the crash and repatriating the victims' bodies. He declared Wednesday a national day of mourning.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, on his part, has asked Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov to form an investigation team, to find out the cause of the tragedy and declared a day of mourning for the victims' to be held on Thursday in his country.
A Pulkovo Airlines executive said that a special flight would leave St. Petersburg on Wednesday morning to fly relatives to Donetsk, the nearest city to the crash site. Once there, they are expected to try and identify the bodies of the deceased.
The crash was the second major incident involving Russia's aviation industry in the last two months. On July 9, an Airbus A-310 of the Russian Airline S7, skidded off a runaway and burst into flames in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, killing more than 120 people.
Comment on this Article
Islamic militants backed by Pakistan's ISI trying to attack Indian nuclear plant in Kakrapar near Surat - Indian ellite forces ready to battle
Rohit Kulkarni
India Daily
Aug. 22, 2006
Kakrapar nuclear power station complex near Surat, India is under attck from Pakistani jihadists. Indian security forces are in hot pursuit of militants and ellite commandoes are in place to defend the nuke plant.
Two armed men were spotted by the local people. Helicopters gun ships, paramilitaryt forces, ellite commandoes are all rushing to flush out the militants.
According to Governmnet sources, things are under control and people in and around the nuke plant are safe.
The local people near the nuke power plant are nervous. The are surprised by the size and hurried nature of the Government's actions.
Comment on this Article
US plane turned back to Amsterdam
By Nicola Leske
Reuters
August 23, 2006
AMSTERDAM - A U.S. Northwest Airlines plane bound for Mumbai was turned back to Amsterdam's Schiphol airport on Wednesday accompanied by Dutch fighter planes due to worrying passenger behavior, officials said.
"Northwest flight number 42 from Amsterdam to Mumbai with 149 passengers returned to Amsterdam when a couple of passengers displayed behavior of concern," said Northwest spokeswoman Kristin Heinmets, speaking from Minneapolis.
A Dutch air traffic control spokeswoman said the plane was in German airspace when it turned back. A spokeswoman for Schiphol said the pilot had taken the decision.
"We are cross-examining witnesses, passengers and crew," a Dutch police spokesman said, adding no arrests had been made and the passengers were being questioned near the craft, a 273-seat DC10-30 plane.
Security has been increased at airports worldwide after British police said on August 10 they had foiled a plot to blow up planes in the mid-Atlantic using liquid explosives disguised as drinks.
British prosecutors announced on Monday they were charging 11 people after police found bomb-making equipment, suicide notes and "martyrdom videos." No decision has yet been taken on whether to charge another 11 people who are still being held.
As many as 17 more people, including at least two British nationals, are being held in Pakistan over the suspected plot.
Last month serial bomb blasts hit commuter trains in Mumbai, killing more than 180 people. Indian police said on Tuesday they had foiled another possible attack in the city after they shot dead a suspected Pakistani national.
A spokeswoman for Dutch counter-terrorism said the level of security alert had not been changed at Schiphol airport -- Europe's third largest cargo airport and fourth biggest passenger hub -- at midday on Wednesday.
The Netherlands' security alert level has been at "substantial" since bombings in London last year, the second highest in a four-stage warning system.
An Iberian Airlines flight bound for Madrid was turned back to the Netherlands in April after a woman raised the alarm about a passenger she thought was acting suspiciously. The passenger was later cleared of any wrongdoing.
The Dutch secret service AIVD warned in March that the war in Iraq and the presence of Dutch troops in Afghanistan acted as motivation for possible attacks and for recruitment of home grown Islamist militants.
The 2004 murder of a filmmaker critical of Islam by a Dutch Moroccan shook the country and highlighted the activities of home grown militants. Nine young Muslim men were sentenced to jail this year on the charge of belonging to a terrorist group.
Comment on this Article
Airstrikes kill 11 Taliban fighters
By NOOR KHAN
Associated Press
23 August 06
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - NATO warplanes killed at least 11 Taliban fighters in Afghanistan's violence-wracked south just hours after militant attacks left one NATO soldier dead and five others wounded, the alliance said Wednesday.
Two roadside bombs killed three Afghan civilians as renewed bloodshed in the south underscored the persistent threat posed by resurgent Taliban militants to efforts to extend the reach of the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai.
Tuesday's NATO airstrikes were in the Zhari district of Kandahar province, a former Taliban stronghold, said alliance spokesman Maj. Scott Lundy.
Fifteen militants were preparing an ambush on a main highway but fled into a compound after realizing they were being watched. A subsequent bombing raid killed 11 militants, Lundy said. It was unclear what happened to the other four.
NATO troops killed one Afghan youth and wounded another after a suicide bombing Tuesday in Kandahar city that targeted a Canadian convoy, killing one soldier and wounding three, the alliance said.
Troops fearing a follow-up attack after the blast fired a single bullet at the two youths as they approached the scene of the bombing on a motorbike, a NATO statement said. The bullet hit both youths, killing one and wounding the other.
A purported Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing, which also killed one child.
Two Canadian soldiers were also wounded Tuesday in a separate attack in the south.
On Wednesday, two roadside bombs struck a truck and a motorbike in the Kandahar district of Daman, killing three civilians and wounding one, said Dawood Ahmadi, the provincial governor's spokesman.
Ahmadi blamed Taliban militants for the bombs, which were planted on a road usually used by NATO and Afghan forces. It was unclear if any soldiers were in the area at the time of the blasts.
More than 1,000 people, mostly militants, have died amid in an increase in violence in the last three months. Thousands of NATO and Afghan forces are battling Taliban fighters, believed to be backed by armed opium dealers, in southern provinces to extend the reach of Karzai's government.
It's the country's worst violence since the Taliban regime was toppled in 2001 by U.S.-led forces for hosting
Osama bin Laden.
Karzai's office said Wednesday he will travel to Washington "in the near future" following an invitation from
President Bush.
Bush telephoned Karzai on Tuesday to extend the offer and pledge continued American support, Karzai's office said.
"Both presidents talked about the situation in Afghanistan and the region," the statement said. "They discussed the progress Afghanistan, with the help from the United States, is making in fighting terrorism and rebuilding Afghanistan."
Karzai last visited Bush in May 2005, when the two leaders signed a strategic partnership agreement that ensures long-term U.S. support for Afghanistan in economic, security and other sectors. Bush also made a surprise visit to Kabul in March.
Comment on this Article
Doubts about Karzai growing in Afghanistan
By Carlotta Gall
The New York Times
August 22, 2006
After months of widespread frustration in Afghanistan over corruption, the economy and a lack of justice and security, doubts about President Hamid Karzai have led to a crisis of confidence in the country.
Interviews with ordinary Afghans, foreign diplomats and Afghan officials make clear that the expanding Taliban insurgency in the south represents the most serious challenge yet to Karzai's presidency.
The insurgency has precipitated an eruption of doubts about Karzai, widely viewed as having failed to attend to a range of problems that have left Afghans asking what the government is doing.
Corruption is so widespread, the government apparently so lethargic, and the divide between rich and poor so great, that Karzai is losing public support, warn officials like Ahmad Fahim Hakim, vice chairman of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.
"Nothing that he promised has materialized," Hakim said, echoing the comments of diplomats and others in Kabul, the capital. "Beneath the surface it is boiling."
For the first time since Karzai took power four and half years ago, Afghans and diplomats are speculating about who might replace him. Most agree that the answer for now is no one, leaving the fate of the U.S.-led military involvement in Afghanistan intimately tied to Karzai's own success or failure.
On Tuesday, Karzai's office announced that he had spoken that day with President George W. Bush, who assured him of continued American support. Karzai had also accepted Bush's invitation to visit Washington.
Karzai, a consummate tribal politician, has been the cornerstone of the U.S.-led effort to create a centralized democratic government in Afghanistan to replace the Taliban government driven from power in 2001 after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
To his supporters, he has managed to keep the peace in a fractious society by giving regional warlords and armed leaders a stake in power, while managing to set the country on the road to a democratic future.
"The perception of growing insecurity has affected the psyche of the Afghan people," Jawed Ludin, the president's chief of staff, said in a telephone interview from Kabul. But he called it a reality check rather than a crisis.
He said that people "still trust" Karzai and "still think he can lead them."
But the costs of his compromises are becoming harder to stomach for average Afghans and some foreign donors. Critics say they have insulated many people from the benefits of democratic change and have hampered the running of the president's administration and local government.
Riots in Kabul on May 29, which killed 17 people in the worst violence in the capital since the Taliban were ousted, were a wake-up call, many there say.
The violence came after three Afghans were killed by a runaway American military truck, and four more killed when American soldiers fired into an angry crowd.
Protesters later rampaged through the streets, attacking foreign offices and chanting "Death to Karzai," an indication of how he is blamed for the growing disenchantment.
"He was shaken," said a Western diplomat, asking not to be named because of the political content of his remarks.
Recriminations against Karzai have continued, and his own missteps have not helped redeem his political standing.
In a reaction to the riots, Karzai appointed a powerful local commander with known links to organized crime as police chief of Kabul. He also appointed to senior police posts 13 former commanders who were to have been weeded out under long-awaited improvements in the police system.
Karzai's aides indicated that the steps were necessary to ensure security in the capital. But the appointments further alienated foreign diplomats and aid workers as well as ordinary Afghans.
"He is too accommodating," said Joanna Nathan, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, a policy research organization. "The police reform was incredibly disappointing."
Recent interviews with a range of Afghans illustrated a common theme of complaints against corrupt and self- serving government officials.
Earlier this month, 60 members of the Parliament, which has until now been largely supportive, signed a statement protesting the appointment of certain officials and the poor performance of his government.
A group of elders from Baghlan Province, in northern Afghanistan, said they had come to Kabul to seek the replacement of their governor, who they said was concerned only with his own power and did nothing for his people. But they had no success.
"We just want a neutral, impartial governor," Abdul Shukur Urfani, one of the representatives, said. "People will start demonstrating because they are dissatisfied with what the government is doing."
Karzai has dismissed many such problems as petty corruption, but the range of corruption in fact runs both large and small.
At one end of the scale is a housing scandal from three years ago, when cabinet ministers, in Karzai's absence, awarded themselves and friends prime real estate in Kabul, where land prices have shot up since the U.S. invasion.
An investigation was quietly dropped and the officials were allowed to build their ostentatious villas, which now tower above passers-by as a constant reminder of official excess. Elsewhere, though corruption is small in scale, it has an enormous impact on the poor, which is most of the population.
Comment on this Article
Mother Earth
Worst is yet to come, US hurricane chief says
By Jim Loney
Reuters
22 August 06
MIAMI - If you thought the sight of the great American jazz city New Orleans flooded to the eaves -- its people trapped in attics or cowering on rooftops -- was the nightmare hurricane scenario, think again.
Max Mayfield, director of the U.S. National Hurricane Center, says there's plenty of potential for a storm worse than Hurricane Katrina which killed 1,339 people along the U.S. Gulf coast and caused some $80 billion in damage last August.
"People think we have seen the worst. We haven't," Mayfield told Reuters in an interview at the fortress-like hurricane center in Florida.
"I think the day is coming. I think eventually we're going to have a very powerful hurricane in a major metropolitan area worse than what we saw in Katrina and it's going to be a mega-disaster. With lots of lost lives," Mayfield said.
"I don't know whether that's going to be this year or five years from now or a hundred years from now. But as long as we continue to develop the coastline like we are, we're setting up for disaster."
Looking back nearly a year to the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, and the third-worst hurricane in terms of American lives lost, Mayfield said Katrina itself could have been a greater disaster.
By Friday night, more than two days before the storm struck the Gulf coast on Aug. 29, the hurricane center had predicted its future track accurately and also warned it could become a powerful Category 4 storm on the five-step Saffir Simpson scale of hurricane intensity.
New Orleans was squarely in the danger zone, and emergency managers and residents had plenty of time to prepare.
"One of my greatest fears is having people go to bed at night prepared for a Category 1 and waking up to a Katrina or Andrew. One of these days, that's going to happen," Mayfield said.
Katrina went just to the east of New Orleans, sparing the city the worst of a massive storm surge and the strongest winds. But still the city's protective levees failed.
VULNERABLE CITIES
The worst-case hurricane scenario? Mayfield has many in mind. A stronger hurricane closer to New Orleans. A direct hit on the vulnerable Galveston-Houston area, the fragile Florida Keys or heavily populated Miami-Fort Lauderdale.
Or how about a major hurricane racing up the east coast to the New York-New Jersey area, with its millions of people and billions of dollars of pricey real estate?
"One of the highest storm surges possible anywhere in the country is where Long Island juts out at nearly right angles to the New Jersey coast. They could get 25 to 30 feet (7.6 to 9.1 metres) of storm surge ... even going up the Hudson River," Mayfield said.
"The subways are going to flood. Some people might think 'Hey, I'll go into the subways and I'll be safe.' No, they are going to flood."
Mayfield, a silver-haired, 34-year veteran of the hurricane center who became its public face in 2000, is a tireless campaigner for hurricane preparation, warning the 50 million people who live in U.S. coastal counties from Maine to Texas that they are all in the path of a future storm.
He is mystified by a study that found 60 percent of people in hurricane-prone U.S. coastal areas have no hurricane plan -- which to disaster managers means up to a week's worth of food and water squirreled away, a kit with flashlights and other gear and an established evacuation route to higher ground.
"After Katrina and after the last two hurricane seasons you can't understand why more people are not taking hurricanes seriously," Mayfield said.
Katrina, he says, killed people who stayed in their homes with confidence because they had lived through 1969's Hurricane Camille. Camille was a much stronger storm than Katrina when it crashed ashore in Louisiana and Mississippi as one of only three Category 5s to hit the United States in recorded history.
"There were a lot of people who lost their lives because they thought that they had already lived through the worst they could possibly live through," Mayfield said.
"Experience isn't always a good teacher."
Comment on this Article
Strong Earthquake Rattles El Salvador
Wednesday August 23, 2006 3:31 AM
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) - A strong earthquake rattled El Salvador on Tuesday, but no injuries or serious damages were immediately reported.
The 5.7-magnitude quake was centered about 20 miles off the country's Pacific coast, off Playa El Espino in Usulutan province, according to the country's seismological service.
Emergency services did not report any victims or damages.
The quake, however, was felt by residents of the capital and in the eastern part of the country.
Comment on this Article
Tropical Storm Debby forms in the eastern Atlantic
Last Updated Wed, 23 Aug 2006 05:09:51 EDT
The Associated Press
The fourth tropical storm of the 2006 hurricane season, Debby, formed off the coast of Cape Verde in the eastern Atlantic Tuesday, U.S. forecasters said in Miami.
The depression that formed Monday was centred 480 kilometres west of the southernmost Cape Verde islands and was moving toward the west-northwest at speeds of near 30 km/h, the National Hurricane Center said.
The storm had maximum sustained winds near 105 km/h, with some strengthening forecast for the next 24 hours.
Cape Verde is about 560 kilometres off the African coast.
Long-range forecasts show the storm nearing Bermuda in about a week. But it was still too early to tell if it would hit land, senior hurricane specialist James Franklin said.
It is the fourth named storm of the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season.
Comment on this Article
Drought, water worries cloud skies for US farmers
By Christine Stebbins
Reuters
Tue Aug 22, 2006
CHICAGO - As the United States bakes in one of the hottest summers since the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, drought from the Dakotas to Arizona through Alabama has sharpened the focus of farmers on their lifeline: water.
Eighty percent of all fresh water consumed in the United States is used to produce food. But years of drought, diversion of water to growing urban areas and, most lately, concerns about global warming are feeding worries.
Specifically, farmers fear the U.S. Plains is facing its limits as a world producer of wheat, beef, vegetable oils and other crops due to long-term water shortages.
"Farmers aren't going to be able to produce enough food to feed the world because there's a finite amount of water left in the world. There are many folks that will tell you the next war will not be over gold, silver or land, it will be over water," said Ed Burchfield, director of facilities for Valmont Industries, which makes irrigation equipment.
The U.S. National Weather Service's outlook through October saw persistent drought from eastern Montana to Minnesota and on down through Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas -- the main spring-wheat and winter-wheat growing areas of the United States as well as its main cattle and beef production region.
"Relief for water supplies will likely need to wait until next winter's snow season, at the earliest, since snow melt is the major source for water in the West," the National Weather Service's Drought Outlook said last month.
IRRIGATION
The region under the greatest stress is the Great Plains, an area from North Dakota to Texas dubbed the Great American Desert by early explorers but turned into a garden spot in the last century thanks to a single innovation: irrigation.
But farmers from Nebraska through northern Texas are now growing more water-thirsty crops, like corn, that offer them better cash returns due to changing trends such as the boom in ethanol and biodiesel fuels.
That is only accelerating the depletion of ground water faster than it can be replenished by rain. In some cases, farm land is already being idled to conserve water.
"My sense in looking at these issues for 20 years, we're going to need at least a doubling of water productivity in agriculture if we're going to have an opportunity to meet food demand in a way that is somewhat environmentally sustainable," said Sandra Postel with the Global Water Policy Project, a group in Amherst, Massachusetts that analyzes water policies.
NOT JUST A PROBLEM FOR U.S. FOOD PRODUCTION
Experts say water scarcity will be a growing dilemma for world farmers. Most projections put world population at about 8 billion people by 2025, or another 2 billion mouths to feed.
But those people and their industries will also need more water. A 2002 study by the International Food Policy Research Institute estimated that farmers' use of irrigation water worldwide will rise only 4 percent from 1995 to 2025, partially because the water won't be available.
Meanwhile, non-irrigation water use could rise 62 percent.
"In the face of water scarcity, farmers will find themselves unable to raise crop yields as quickly as in the past, and by 2025 their irrigated cereal production will be 300 million metric tons less than it would have been with adequate water -- a difference nearly as large as the U.S. cereal crop in 2000," the study said.
But U.S. water problems have the greatest implications for world food supplies. The United States for decades has been the planet's "food reserve," the top exporter of wheat, corn and soybeans and the largest single provider of food aid to other nations.
The squeeze on water for U.S. farms is pushing innovation, such as a trend away from flood irrigation to center pivot sprinklers or state-of-the art, localized drip irrigation.
"Just the changing of irrigation techniques can save a lot of water. That's the first place to start," said Thomas Kimmell, executive director with the Irrigation Association.
Such technology is what arid Texas is banking on to maintain crop production. But further north, water costs and conflicts over the vast but shrinking Ogallala aquifer have already prompted restrictions on irrigation.
The aquifer is an 800-mile-long (1,287-km-long) underground pool that stretches from Texas to South Dakota and feeds one-fifth of all the irrigated land in the United States. But Nebraska has put a moratorium on new wells and taken farmland out of production in the Platte River Valley to limit the draw on the Ogallala.
"Farmers who constructed an irrigation well here 20 years ago did that believing that they'd never have to experience regulation of their wells," said Michael Jess, former director of Nebraska's water resources department.
"Changing the rules will adversely affect their economic situation," he said.
Comment on this Article
After the drought, scientists warn of a looming flood crisis
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
23 August 2006
Britain faces a serious risk of floods in the coming months according to experts who yesterday criticised the Government for cutting national funding for flood defences.
A combination of exceptionally high tides and the risk of autumn storms and heavy downpours could bring serious floods to many parts of the country at a time when anti-flood funding is being cut.
Professor Edmund Penning-Rowsell, head of the Flood Hazard Research Centre at Middlesex University, warned that government cuts indicated official complacency over a risk that could only increase with time. "The maintenance of flood defences should not be subject to political machinations and the reversal in funding sends out a dangerous sign of uncertainty," Professor Penning-Rowsell said. "People enjoying the beach this summer are probably not aware that our coast is in crisis. It is where the risks and dangers of flooding are increasing."
Last month the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) told the Environment Agency to cut its £400m flood protection budget by £15m, which will affect future mapping for floods and improved warning systems. "I think it's to be regretted. It sends a signal that flood defence is an area that's liable for volatile budgets in the future," Professor Penning-Rowsell said at the Science Media Centre in London. "That's quite dangerous when you have to build and plan things for the next 50 years. Really what we need is certainty, long-term planning, and a secure financial framework," he said.
"We're playing catch-up to a certain extent and the trends to the distant future don't look at all promising. There is unease in the profession as to whether we are spending enough money to deal with the kind of problems climate change will create in 20 or 30 years."
The risk of flooding will be heightened by two exceptionally high tides, with the highest on 9 October. If they coincide with storm surges, severe coastal flooding is almost inevitable.
Jean Venables, vice-president of the Institution of Civil Engineers and former chairman of a regional flood defence committee, said that three years ago the Government indicated that it would increase its investment in flood defences. "It's extremely disappointing for the Government to be reducing the budget for flood-risk management," Dr Venables said. "We need to look very hard at doing proper maintenance of flood defences. I'm very concerned that Defra has gone in the wrong direction." Rising sea levels and the increasing risk of heavy downpours or storm surges have raised the probabilities of severe flooding. Building on floodplains, such as the Thames Gateway scheme, was exacerbating the situation, the scientists said.
Professor Penning-Rowsell said that there were three major flooding threats. The first was to low-lying areas of the east coast of England, which was affected by rising sea levels. The second was to the Thames Valley, which was largely unprotected from flooding, and the third was to London, which was vulnerable to exceptionally heavy summer downpours that can overwhelm the city's Victorian drains.
A Defra spokesman said cuts to the Environment Agency's spending on floods only affected resources such as training and maintenance. It did not erode the capital budget used to build new flood defences.
Comment on this Article
Seismic scan of Etna reveals an eruption in the making
New Scientist Print Edition
23 August 2006
Mount Etna just got a full-body scan. While nothing serious was diagnosed this time around, similar scans might give warning of a future volcanic eruption.
The Sicilian volcano is almost always bubbling with activity, but despite this thousands of people live safely on its slopes. In 2002, however, there was an unusually violent eruption that geophysicists believe was caused by gas-rich magma rising within the volcano.
Now a team led by Domenico Patanè at Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Catania, Sicily, has used seismic data to peek inside the volcano. From variations in the seismic waves from local earthquakes that passed through Mount Etna before and after the 2002 outburst they were able to build up a 3D picture showing magma rising within the volcano a few months before the eruption (Science, vol 313, p 821). "We used a technique similar to a medical CAT scan," Patanè says.
The monitoring exercise was helped by the existence of a dense grid of seismic stations around the volcano. Patanè hopes that such networks will be placed around other volcanoes too. "This could be a powerful tool for forecasting highly explosive eruptions," he says.
From issue 2565 of New Scientist magazine, 23 August 2006, page 16-17
Comment on this Article
Glaciers heading for point of no return
Jessica Marshall
New Scientist Print Edition
19 August 2006
ONE of our worst fears about global warming has been confirmed. Greenland's ice is melting faster than ever. The process could reach a point of no return before the end of the century, raising the sea to catastrophic levels. Hopes that increased snowfall on Antarctica would mitigate the problem have also been dashed.
Greenland hosts the second-largest icecap on Earth, holding 10 per cent of the global ice mass. If the whole thing melted, global sea level would rise by 6.5 metres. Earlier this year Eric Rignot of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and his team used satellite radar interferometry to determine that Greenland's glaciers were melting more and more each year, with about 220 cubic kilometres lost in 2005.
Now Jianli Chen and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin have confirmed the scale of the problem using independent data from the twin satellites that make up the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE). These satellites monitor shifts in water and ice over a particular spot on Earth every 30 days by measuring slight changes in the gravitational field. Chen's team devised ways to home in on areas the size of Greenland and found that the massive island is losing about 239 cubic kilometres of ice per year, mainly from the eastern parts (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1129007).
The ice loss corresponds to 0.6 millimetres of sea level rise per year. "That's a very big number," says Chen. It's about 20 per cent of the total sea level rise that is occurring each year. Large outflows from east Greenland could also disrupt the North Atlantic current that warms much of northern Europe, says team member Byron Tapley.
Though Chen's findings agree remarkably well with Rignot's, not everyone is convinced. "Based upon our analysis of satellite data, including ICESat and GRACE, we believe the melting rate is only one-third of what they have reported," says Jay Zwally of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
That doesn't mean Zwally isn't worried. His own previous work showed no significant loss of ice prior to 2002, so he agrees that melting is accelerating. "There's no question that Greenland has changed in the last five years from being close to balanced to being imbalanced," Zwally says.
While it would take millennia for all of Greenland's ice to melt at the rate calculated by Chen, positive feedback mechanisms could accelerate the process. For instance, melt water is lubricating the bases of the glaciers, speeding up their calving rate. So a threshold exists beyond which the melting of the whole sheet is irreversible. That could happen within the century, says Zwally.
John Church of the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre in Hobart, Australia, agrees. "It is possible that by the end of this century the Greenland ice will have melted to a sufficient extent to cross the threshold."
Worse still, one of the possible safety nets appears not to be working as expected. Climate models predicted that as the world warms, Antarctica might mitigate sea-level rise by accumulating 15 to 20 per cent more snow, since warmer air can hold more moisture. However, Andrew Monaghan of Ohio State University in Columbus and his team studied ice cores from Antarctica and found that no such increase has occurred over the last 50 years (Science, vol 313, p 827).
Rising seas from Greenland's melt alone would be catastrophic. Huge parts of the world would be inundated, especially low-lying areas such as Bangladesh and the Nile delta. Great tracts of Florida would go underwater, and London and Manhattan would be threatened, along with the world's coastal infrastructure of ports, power plants and refineries.
"The world can't afford it," says climate change scientist John Harte of the University of California, Berkeley. "Even the most outrageously high estimates of what it would cost to do something about this are way, way less than what it would cost if it happened. It's frightening."
From issue 2565 of New Scientist magazine, 19 August 2006, page 8-9
Comment on this Article
9/11 The Ultimate Lie
Where Bush's Arrogance Has Taken Us - An illegal war, a long list of eroded rights, and a country run by and for the benefit of corporate campaign donors -- all courtesy of the imperial presidency
By Jim Hightower
Hightower Lowdown
August 23, 2006
During his gubernatorial days in Texas, George W let slip a one-sentence thought that unintentionally gave us a peek into his political soul. In hindsight, it should've been loudly broadcast all across our land so people could've absorbed it, contemplated its portent?and roundly rejected the guy's bid for the presidency. On May 21, 1999, reacting to some satirical criticism of him, Bush snapped: "There ought to be limits to freedom."
Gosh, so many freedoms to limit, so little time! But in five short years, the BushCheneyRummy regime has made remarkable strides toward dismembering the genius of the Founders, going at our Constitution and Bill of Rights like famished alligators chasing a couple of poodles.
Forget about such niceties as separation of powers, checks and balances (crucial to the practice of democracy), the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, and open government-these guys are on an autocratic tear. Whenever they've been challenged (all too rarely), they simply shout "war on terror," "commander-in-chief," "support our troops," "executive privilege," "I'm the decider," or some other slam-the-door political phrase designed to silence any opposition. Indeed, opponents are branded "enemies" who must be demonized, personally attacked, and, if possible, destroyed. Bush's find-the-loopholes lawyers assert that a president has the right to lie (even about going to war), to imprison people indefinitely (without charges, lawyers, hearings, courts, or hope), to torture people, to spy on Americans without court or congressional review, to prosecute reporters who dare to report, to rewrite laws on executive whim?and on and on.
Here, we are pleased to give you a sense of the enormity of what Bush & Company are doing under the cloak of war and executive privilege in a handy-dandy poster format.
The War President
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
-George W., August 2004
* Number of Americans killed in Bush's Iraq war as of August 2006: 2577
* What Bush press flack Tony Snow said the day the total number of American dead reached 2,500: "It's a number"
* Number of Americans killed since Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" on May 1, 2003: 2,438
* Number of Americans wounded (a vague term that includes such horrors as brain damage, limb blasted off, eyes blown out, psyche shattered, etc.) in Bush's war:
o Official count: 18,777
o Independent count: up to 48,000
* Estimated number of Iraqi civilians (men, women, and children) killed in Bush's war since Saddam Hussein was ousted: 38,960
* For Iraqis, the bloodiest month of the war so far: June 2006
more than 100 civilians killed per day
* Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmit's advice to Iraqis who see TV reports of innocent civilians being killed by occupying troops: "Change the channel."
* Percent of Iraqis who want American troops to leave: 82
* Stockpiles of Weapons of Mass Destruction found in Iraq since Bush committed Americans to war in 2003 on the basis that Saddam had and was about to use WMDs: 0
* Number of nations in the world: 192
* Number that joined Bush's "Coalition of the Willing" (COW) to invade Iraq: 48
(The list includes such military powers as Angola, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Latvia, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Romania, Solomon Islands, and Uganda.)
* Number of COW nations that actually sent any troops to Iraq: 39
(Of these, 32 sent fewer than 1,000 troops. Many sent no fighting units, deploying only engineers, trainers, humanitarian units, and other noncombat personnel.)
* Number of the 39 COW nations contributing troops that have since withdrawn them: 17
(An additional 7 have announced plans to withdraw all or part of their contingents this year.)
* Number of COW troops in Iraq: 150,000
* Number of these that are U.S. troops: 139,000
* Number of White House officials and cabinet members who have any of their immediate family in Bush's war: 0
Follow the Money
We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."
-"Howling Paul" Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary, in testimony to Congress, March 2003
* The official White House claim before the invasion of what the war and occupation would cost U.S. taxpayers: $50 billion
* As of July 2006, the total amount appropriated by Congress for Bush's ongoing war and occupation: $295,634,921,248
* Current Pentagon spending per month in Iraq: $8 billion (or $185,185.19 per minute)
* Assuming all troops return home by 2010, the projected "real costs" for the war: More than $1 trillion
(includes veterans' pay and medical costs, interest on the billions Bush has borrowed to pay for his war, etc.)
Bonus Stat!
* Annual salary of Stuart Baker, hired by the Bushites to be the White House "Director for Lessons Learned": $106,641
* Number of lessons that Bush appears to have learned: 0
The Imperial Presidency
"I'm the commander -- see, I don't need to explain -- I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."
George W., August, 2002.
Signing Statements
When signing a particular congressional act into law, a few presidents have occasionally issued a "signing statement" to clarify their understanding of what Congress intended. These have not had the force of law and have been used discreetly in the past.
Very quietly, however, Bush has radically increased both the number and reach of these statements, essentially asserting that the president can arbitrarily decide which laws he will obey.
* Number of signing statements issued by Bush as of July 2006: more than 800
(This is more than the combined total of all 42 previous presidents.)
A few examples of congressionally passed laws he has effectively annulled through these extralegal signing statements:
o a ban against torture of prisoners by the U.S. military
o a requirement that the FBI periodically report to Congress on how it is using the Patriot Act to search our homes and secretly seize people's private papers
o a ban against storage in military databases of intelligence about Americans that was obtained illegally
o a directive for the executive branch to transmit scientific information to Congress "uncensored and without delay" when requested
* Provision of the Constitution clearly stating that Congress alone has the power "to make all laws": Article 1, Section 8
* Provision of the Constitution clearly stating that the president "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed": Article 2, Section 3
* Name of the young lawyer in the Reagan administration who wrote a 1986 strategy memo on how to pervert the use of signing statements in order to concentrate more power in the executive branch, as Bush is now doing: Samuel Alito, named to the U.S. Supreme Court by Bush this year
National Security Letters
These are secret executive writs that the infamous 2001 Patriot Act authorizes the FBI to issue to public libraries, internet firms, banks, and others. Upon receiving an NSL, the institution or firm is required to turn over any private records it holds on you, me, or whomever the agents have chosen to search.
Who authorizes the FBI to issue these secret writs? The FBI itself.
* Surely the agents have to get a search warrant, a grand jury subpoena, or a court's approval? No
* But to issue an NSL, an agent must show probable cause that the person being searched has committed some crime, right? No
* Well, don't officials have to inform citizens that their records are being seized so they can defend themselves or protest? No
* Number of NSLs issued by various FBI offices last year alone: 9,254
NSA Eavesdropping
In 2001, Bush issued a secret order for the National Security Agency to begin vacuuming up massive numbers of telephone and internet exchanges by U.S. citizens, illegally seizing this material without any judicial approval or informing Congress, as required by law.
* Number of Americans who have had their phone and internet communications taken by NSA: Just about everyone!
(NSA is tapping into the entire database of long-distance calls and internet messages run through AT&T and probably other companies as well.)
* In May of this year, the Justice Department abruptly halted an internal investigation that was trying to uncover the name of the top officials who had authorized NSA's warrantless, unconstitutional program. Who killed this probe, which was requested by Congress? George W himself! (He directed NSA simply to refuse security clearances for the department's legal investigators.)
* What happened to NSA Director Michael Hayden, who was the key architect of Bush's illegal eavesdropping program and the one who would've formally denied clearances to Justice Department investigators? In May, Bush promoted him to head the CIA.
* This past May, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales warned that journalists who report on NSA's spy program could be prosecuted under the antiquated Espionage Act of 1917.
* Times in U.S. history this act has been used to go after the press: 0
* Margin by which the U.S. House in 1917 voted down an amendment to make the Espionage Act apply to journalists: 184-144
Interesting Fact:
The New York Times reported this June that Bush was running another spy program. This one was snooping through international banking records, including millions of bank transactions done by innocent Americans. George reacted angrily to the exposure, branding the Times report "disgraceful" and declaring that revelation of his spy program "does great harm to the United States." The White House and its right-wing acolytes promptly launched a "Hate-the-Times" political campaign.
Name the guy who was the first to reveal that such a bank-spying program was in the works: George W. Bush! At a September 2001 press conference, he announced that he'd just signed an executive order to monitor all international bank transactions.
Watch Lists
From the Bushites' ill-fated Total Information Awareness program (meant to monitor all of our computerized transactions) to the robust efforts by Rumsfeld's Pentagon to barge into the domestic surveillance game, America under Bush has fast become "The Watched Society."
* Number of data-mining programs being run secretly on us by the federal government: Nearly 200 separate programs at 52 agencies
* Number of "local activity reports" submitted to the Pentagon in 2004 under the "Threat and Local Observation Notice" program (TALON), which directed military officers throughout our country to keep an eye on suspicious activities by civilians: More than 5,000
(They included such "threats" as peace demonstrators and 10 activists protesting outside Halliburton's headquarters.)
* Number of official "watch lists" maintained by the feds: More than a dozen run by 9 different agencies
* Number of Americans on the Transportation Security Administration's "No- Fly" list: That's a secret.
(TSA concedes that it's in the tens of thousands. In 2005 alone, some 30,000 people called TSA to complain that their names were mistakenly on the list.)
* Most famous citizen who is on the No-Fly list and has been repeatedly pulled aside by TSA for additional screenings at airports: Sen. Ted Kennedy
* How can you get your name removed from TSA list? That's a secret.
Name That Guy!
In 1966, a young Republican congressman stood against his party's elders to cosponsor the original Freedom of Information Act, valiantly declaring that public records "are public property." He said that FOIA "will make it considerably more difficult for secrecy-minded bureaucrats to decide arbitrarily that the people should be denied access to information on the conduct of government."
Who was that virtuous lawmaker? Donald Rumsfeld!
Only eight years later, Gerald Ford's chief of staff strongly urged him to veto the continuation of FOIA. Who was that dastardly staffer? Donald Rumsfeld!
Who is now one of the chief "secrecy-minded bureaucrats" who routinely violates OIA's principles? Right, him again!
Regime of Secrecy
"Democracies die behind closed doors."
-- Appeals court judge Damon Keith, ruling in a 2002 case that the Bushites cannot hold deportation hearings in secret
* Increase in the number of government documents marked "secret" between 2001 and 2004: 81 percent
* Number of government documents stamped "secret" in 2001: 8.6 million
* Number of government documents stamped "secret" in 2004: 15.6 million (a new record)
* Cost to taxpayers of classifying and securing documents in 2004: $7.2 billion ($460 per document)
* Number of previously declassified documents that the CIA tried to reclassify as "secret" under a 2001 secret agreement with the National Archives, even though many had already been published and some date back to the Korean War: 25,315
* Number of different "official designations" the government now has to classify nonsecret information so it still is kept out of the public's reach: Between 50 and 60
(They include such stamps as CBU: Controlled But Unclassified, SBU: Sensitive But Unclassified, and LOU: Limited Official Use Only.)
* The only vice-president in history who has claimed that he, like the president, has the inherent authority to mark "secret" on any document he chooses: "Buckshot" Cheney
* Number of documents Cheney has classified: That's a secret.
(He claims he does not have to report this to anyone -- not even the president.)
* Of the 7,045 advisory committee meetings held by the Bushites in 2004, percentage that were completely closed to the public, contrary to the clear intent of the Federal Advisory Committee Act: 64 percent (a new record)
* Number of times from 1953 to1975 (the peak of the Cold War) that presidents invoked the "state secrets" privilege, which grants them unilateral power in extraordinary instances literally to shut down court cases on the grounds they could reveal secrets that the president doesn't want disclosed: 4
* Number of times the same privilege was invoked between 2001 and 2006: At least 24
* Under Clinton, Attorney General Janet Reno issued an official memo instructing agencies to release as much information as possible to the public. In October 2001, AG John Ashcroft issued a memo canceling Reno's approach, expressly instructing agencies to look for reasons to deny the public access to information and pledging to support the denials if the agencies were sued.
* 2005 FOIA requests still awaiting a response at year's end: 31 percent
(a one-third increase over the 2004 backlog)
* Median waiting time to get an answer on FOIA request from Bush's justice department: 863 days
Halliburton
"Halliburton is a unique kind of company."
-- Dick Cheney, September 2003
* Total value of contracts given to Halliburton for work in the Bush-Cheney "War on Terror" since 2001: More than $15 billion
* Amount that Halliburton pays to the Third World laborers it imports into Iraq to do the work in its dining facilities, laundries, etc.: $6 per 12-hour day (50 cents an hour)
* Amount that Halliburton bills us taxpayers for each of these workers: $50 a day
* Amount that Halliburton bills U.S. taxpayers for:
o A case of sodas: $45
o Washing a bag of laundry: $100
* Halliburton's campaign contributions in Bush-Cheney election years:
o In 2000: $285,252 (96 percent to Republicans)
o In 2004: $145,500 (89 percent to Republicans)
Plus $365,065 from members of its board of directors (99 percent to Republicans)
* Increase in Halliburton's profits since Bush-Cheney took office in 2000: 379 percent
* Halliburton's 2005 profit: $1.1 billion
(highest in the corporation's 86-year history
"Since leaving Halliburton to become George Bush's vice-president, I've severed all of my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind."
Former CEO Dick Cheney, Meet the Press, September 2003
* Annual payments that Cheney has received from Halliburton since he's been vice-president:
o 2001: $205,298
o 2002: $162,392
o 2003: $178,437
o 2004: $194,852
o 2005: $211,465
* Cash bonus paid to Cheney by Halliburton just before he took office: $1.4 million
* Retirement package he was given in 2000 after only 5 years as CEO: $20 million
* Number of times in the past two years that Republicans have killed Sen. Byron Dorgan's amendment to set up a Truman-style committee on war profiteering to investigate Halliburton: 3
* Naughty word Cheney used during a Senate photo session in 2004 to assail Sen. Patrick Leahy, who had criticized Cheney's ongoing ties to Halliburton: "Go #@!% yourself.
Jim Hightower is the author of "Let's Stop Beating Around the Bush" (Viking Press). He publishes the monthly Hightower Lowdown.
[Editor's Note: The August issue of The Hightower Lowdown contains a poster-sized chart detailing the many grievances, lies and miscues of the Bush Administration. Below is the story in text form, you can also download the full poster from The Hightower Lowdown.]
Comment on this Article
Another 9/11 Coverup in the Making?
By Rory O'Connor
AlterNet
August 23, 2006
The author of a new book about the mistakes that led to 9/11 accuses the National Geographic Channel of diluting a documentary about the book in order to protect the government
Despite the best efforts of the Pentagon to keep the lid on, the story of Able Danger -- the controversial secret military intelligence program that purportedly identified five active al-Qaeda cells and four of the 9/11 hijackers more than a year before the worst terror attacks ever on American soil -- continues to make news.
The latest wrinkle is a nasty public spat between the National Geographic Channel, which plans to broadcast "Triple Cross: Bin Laden's Spy in America" on Aug. 28, and author Peter Lance, whose new book forms the basis of the documentary.
Lance is an Emmy-winning former reporter-producer for ABC News. His book, "Triple Cross," which will be released in September, accuses law enforcement officials of negligence in tracking down Ali Mohamed, an alleged al-Qaeda agent in the United States for years before Sept. 11. The book says Mohamed was hired by the CIA and worked for the FBI, all the while providing information to the terrorists. The book also contains, according to Lance, "a major new insight" into why the Pentagon killed the Able Danger operation in April 2000.
It involves the discovery by Able Danger operatives that Ali Mohamed was a member of Osama bin Laden's inner circle. Mohamed turned up in FBI surveillance photos as early as 1989, training radical Muslims who would go on to assassinate Jewish militant Meir Kahane and detonate a truck bomb at the World Trade Center. He not only avoided arrest, but managed to become an FBI informant while smuggling bin Laden in and out of Afghanistan, writing most of the al-Qaeda terrorist manual and helping plan attacks on American troops in Somalia and U.S. embassies in Africa. Finally arrested in 1998, Mohamed cut a deal with the Justice Department, and his whereabouts remain shrouded, unknown.
''The FBI allowed the chief spy for al-Qaeda to operate right under their noses,'' Lance said. ''They let him plan the bombings of the embassies in Africa right under their noses. Two hundred twenty-four people were killed and more than 4,000 wounded because of their negligence."
Lance contends that when Pentagon officials realized how embarrassing it would be if it were revealed that bin Laden's spy had stolen top-secret intelligence (including the positions of all Green Beret and SEAL units worldwide), they decided to bury the entire Able Danger program. Lance further states that his book also contains evidence that Patrick Fitzgerald (of later Scooter Libby/Valerie Plame fame) covered up key al-Qaeda intelligence in 1996, when he was then an assistant U.S. attorney in New York. To Lance, Fitzgerald was "one of the principal players in the government's negligence, who engaged in an affirmative coverup of key al-Qaeda-related intelligence in 1996."
Lance believes "Fitzgerald was hopelessly outgunned by Mohamed, a hardened al-Qaeda spy, who was bin Laden's personal security advisor." Despite two face-to-face meetings with Mohamed, whom Fitzgerald called "the most dangerous man I've ever met," he left him on the street, which allowed Mohamed -- who actually planned the surveillance for the African Embassy bombings -- to help pull off that simultaneous act of terror in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998, in which 224 died and more than 4,000 were injured.
There is also a chilling tie-in in the book to the airliner-bombing plot revealed last week by the British intelligence. Much of the key intelligence that Fitzgerald helped to bury in 1996 was directly related to the Bojinka plot, a scheme by original WTC bomber and 9/11 architect Ramzi Yousef to smuggle small improvised explosive devices aboard up to a dozen U.S. bound jumbo jets exiting Asia.
Fitzgerald went on become both U.S. attorney for the northern district of Illinois and special prosecutor in the CIA leak probe. After allowing Ali Mohamed to operate with virtual impunity for years, Fitzgerald finally arrested him post-bombing in 1998. But then he cut a deal with him that allowed Mohamed to enter witness protection and avoid the death penalty.
Lance contends that this was to spare the government from embarrassment, since Ali Mohamed had been an FBI informant since 1992. Yet despite three years in federal custody, Fitzgerald and his elite FBI squad members were unable to extract the 9/11 plot from Mohamed, who was so close to bin Laden that he lived in the Saudi billionaire's house after moving him and his family from Afghanistan to Khartoum in 1992.
The revelations, says Lance, proved "too hot to handle" for the National Geographic Channel, which is two-thirds owned by Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp (which also owns Lance's publisher, HarperCollins). "The Feds have gotten to them, there is no doubt," Lance told me in an interview. "National Geographic has abandoned the truth and acquiesced to pressure from the government."
Television critic Glenn Garvin first reported the flap in a Miami Herald piece that characterized Lance's reaction to the program as a "watered-down whitewash" that was "like doing 'Schindler's List' from Hitler's perspective.''
Able Danger insiders had figured the documentary to be controversial, but no one expected open warfare to break out between Lance and his broadcasters prior to its airing. Lance, who was originally slated to narrate the film, is so angry at what he sees as the program's shift in direction and emphasis that he now refuses to back it at all.
At least one source interviewed for the documentary -- House Armed Services Committee vice chairman Curt Weldon, who has spearheaded congressional efforts to get to the bottom of the Able Danger affair -- has asked to be removed from the program. "We didn't think National Geographic was doing a 100 percent job," says Weldon's chief of staff, Russ Caso. "We felt we weren't looking at an unbiased piece.'' And National Geographic's producers now won't even let Lance see the final cut unless he signs what they call a "nondisparagement agreement.''
The public pissing match between Lance and his putative broadcaster is virtually without precedent. ''It's probably happened before,'' John Ford, executive vice president of programming at National Geographic Channel, told the Herald. "But I can't tell you when. I certainly don't know of a case." Ford strongly denies the documentary is a whitewash and says the network still stands behind it despite Lance's attack. But Lance is having none of it: "They hijacked my work," he says, "The documentary is now skewed so much in favor of the feds that it actually distorts the facts of the story." National Geographic's executive vice president of programming, John Ford, said the film's producers never intended to base the documentary solely on the book -- something Lance hotly disputes.
"Let me set the record straight on the allegations made by John Ford," he says. "First, in the Miami Herald piece, Ford lied to Glenn Garvin when he said that 'Peter wanted us to include accusations and conclusions ... that we could not independently verify, and we weren't willing to do that.'"
"The film is also based on our own independent research," says Ford. He also told United Press International that Lance "wants this show to reflect his own personal conclusions," and that he is "using this controversy to promote his book."
"The second lie is that the documentary 'was never supposed to be based solely' on my book," says Lance. "The truth is that from the beginning Nat Geo hired me to do a documentary exclusively based on my work. This was my show from start to finish. But now we're at a point where a major cable network, reporting on an issue of national importance, is backtracking on proof of how the FBI folded on the road to 9/11. What's worse, in a few days this documentary will air with my name on it!" Lance concludes, "This is a ridiculous lie, since they've cut me out of the process and rolled over in favor of the feds."
Despite Lance's vehement protestations, National Geographic executives like Ford are undeterred and say that the show must and will go on -- especially given the upcoming fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. ''It exposes how different parts of the U.S. national security apparatus failed to connect the dots on Ali Mohamed over a decade and a half,'' Ford said. "It's like a Tom Clancy thriller, but true.''
What's also true is that many questions still remain unanswered about the actual Able Danger program, what it found, and what reaction higher-ups everywhere from Pentagon brass to FBI officials to the 9/11 Commission had when Able Danger operatives attempted to inform them of its findings.
Why, for example, were three planned meetings with the FBI canceled at the last minute, thus preventing the bureau from hearing evidence that may have helped them "connect the dots" before the terror attacks? Why was the guided missile destroyer USS Cole sent to refuel at the port of Aden, Yemen, in October 2000, despite the fact that Able Danger had identified Aden as the location of an active al-Qaeda cell? Why did Special Operation Command chief Peter Schoomaker (now Army chief of staff) apparently do nothing after Able Danger analysts personally briefed him about the danger in Yemen just two days before a suicide bomb attack blew a 40-by-40-foot hole in the side of the Cole, killing 17 crew members and injuring 39 others?
Further, why was veteran intelligence analyst-operative Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer's career derailed and reputation besmirched after he tried to alert an unwilling 9/11 Commission to Able Danger's findings? What has happened to the Department of Defense's own inspector general's investigation into the scapegoating of Shaffer -- originally slated to be completed and made public in May? Whatever happened to Arlen Specter's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Able Danger, originally scheduled for last September and then "postponed for the Jewish holidays?" And why were the entire 2.5 terabytes of Able Danger data destroyed, along with a pre-9/11 link chart that identified four eventual hijackers and even had a photograph of Mohammed Atta?
And what about reports that the Able Danger program was reconstituted after the data purge by a classified Raytheon "skunk works" program in Garland, Texas? Or that the entire data-mining effort was then taken "black," hidden deep inside the intelligence bureaucracy and expanded into what later morphed into Total Information Awareness, NSA warrantless surveillance, and in fact the government's ongoing illegal and unconstitutional spying on huge quantities of domestic telephone calls and emails? Conspiracy ... or something more? The plot ever thickens ...
Filmmaker and journalist Rory O'Connor writes the Media Is A Plural blog.
Comment on this Article
Bush Now Says What He Wouldn't Say Before: Iraq Had 'Nothing' To Do With 9/11
Faiz
21 August 06
President Bush was in the midst of explaining how the attacks of 9/11 inspired his "freedom agenda" and the attacks on Iraq until a reporter, Ken Herman of Cox News, interrupted to ask what Iraq had to do with 9/11. "Nothing," Bush defiantly answered. Watch it.
To justify the war, Bush informed Congress on March 19, 2003 that acting against Iraq was consistent with "continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."
As ThinkProgress has repeatedly documented, Vice President Cheney cited "evidence" cooked up by Douglas Feith and others to claim it was "pretty well confirmed" that Iraq had contacts with 9/11 hijackers.
More generally, in the lead-up to the war in Iraq, the administration encouraged the false impression that Saddam had a role in 9/11. Bush never stated then, as he does now, that Iraq had "nothing" to do with 9/11. Only after the Iraq war began did Bush candidly acknowledge that Iraq was not operationally linked to 9/11.
Full transcript:
BUSH: The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.
QUESTION: What did Iraq have to do with it?
BUSH: What did Iraq have to do with what?
QUESTION: The attack on the World Trade Center.
BUSH: Nothing. Except it's part of - and nobody has suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Iraq was a - Iraq - the lesson of September 11th is take threats before they fully materialize, Ken. Nobody's ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq.
Comment on this Article
Under Fire! U.S. Army Intelligence Analyst Targeted For Suggesting New Independent 9/11 Investigation - Army sez: Doubting Official 9/11 Story Is 'Disloyal To The United States' The subject? The Pentagon!
By Stephen Webster
The Lone Star Iconoclast
21 August 06
FT. SAM HOUSTON, Texas - Forty-one-year-old Sergeant First Class Donald Buswell is a hero. Having served over 19 years in the United States Army, Buswell has seen a lot of terrain. On April 15, 2004, he was injured in a rocket attack while serving a tour in Iraq. For this, SFC Buswell was given a Purple Heart. And until recently, Buswell was an Intelligence Analyst stationed at Ft. Sam Houston, Texas.
But if one were to ask Buswell's Commanding Officer what he thinks of the Sergeant, the response would likely sound a little bit more like, "No comment."
Such were the words given to The Iconoclast by Lieutenant Colonel Jane Crichton after inquiring why SFC Buswell is the focus of an investigation initiated by Colonel Luke S. Green, Chief of Staff at Fifth Army in Ft. Sam Houston.
According to unnamed military sources contacted by The Iconoclast, SFC Buswell "used his Government issued email account to send messages disloyal to the United States ..." Because of these statements, SFC Buswell could soon find himself dishonorably discharged, court marshaled, or worse.
It all started as a simple response to a common, unsolicited mass email, sent to 38 individuals at Ft. Sam Houston on Aug. 2, 2006. The message, as well as Buswell's response, is among documents obtained by The Iconoclast. The sender of the first message is identified as "Anderson, Larry Mr JMC". It reads:
This is being sent more as assurance for what happens when a plane hits a nuclear site more so than in response to that German website alleging a government conspiracy related to the 9/11 Pentagon plane crash (though the website does present an interesting perspective) - LarrySubject: F-4 vs. Concrete Wall
Take a look at this clip [not included] and you'll get a good feel for what happens to an airplane when it hits a concrete wall. Many of you have seen the produced (but not factual), Michael Moore-esque website that asks the question; "If it's true that a Boeing airliner hit the Pentagon, what happened to all the parts of it? Why do we not find more pieces of it?
Where did all that mass GO???" (Therefore, the paranoid loony liberal reasoning, 9-11 must have been a US gov't conspiracy!) Well, for those who question what happened to "all the mass of that airplane".......watch this clip.
It's the old Air Force engineering tests of the concrete barrier that surrounds nuclear reactor domes -tests to see if it will indeed survive an aerial attack. With the hi-speed cameras rolling, they accelerated an F-4 Phantom to 500mph and.........
Recall: "What happens when an 'Unstoppable Force' meets an 'Immovable Object'???" (Remember, as you watch in slow motion as the F-4 turns to vapor, the Phantom was one of the toughest airplanes ever built).
SFC Buswell responded later that day, saying:
Subject: F-4 vs. Concrete Wall Hello,
I receive many unsolicited e-mails daily, this one I chose to respond to. The below mentioned premise that an F4 Phantom fighter jet hitting that hardened concrete barrier is akin to the alleged 757 hitting the Pentagon is like oil and water; they don't mix, and they serve to muddy the issue. The issue is 911 was filled with errors in the 'official report' and 'official story' of that day, and, what happened that day. We all know and saw 2 planes hitting the WTC buildings, we didn't see the 757 hit the Pentagon, nor did we see the plane crash in Shanksville PA. Both the PA and Pentagon 'crashes' don't have clues and tell-tale signs of a jumbo-jet impacting those zones!
The Pentagon would have huge wing impacts in the side of the building; it didn't. Shanksville PA would have had debris, and a large debris field; it didn't.
Getting back to the F4...The Pentagon isn't a nuclear hardened structure, so I can't follow your weak logic that since an F4 vaporized itself in a test impact on a nuclear hardened structure that the alleged 757 hitting the Pentagon should have exhibited the same characteristics!
I say Occums razor is the best way to deduce this 'day of infamy'; if you weigh all options, do some simple studying you will see 911 was clearly not executed by some arabs in caves with cell phones and 3 day old newspapers! I mean how are Arabs benefiting from pulling off 911? They have more war, more death and dismal conditions, so, how did 911 benefit them? Answer: It didn't. So, who benefited from 9-11? The answer is sad, but simple; The Military Industial [sic] Complex.
It's not a paranoid conspiracy to think there are conspiracies out there...and, it's not Liberal Lunacy either, nor is it Conservative Kookiness! People, fellow citizens we've been had! We must demand a new independent investigation into 911 and look at all options of that day, and all plausabilities [sic], even the most incredulous theories must be examined.
Upon returning to his office the next day, Buswell discovered the locks had been changed, his security clearance was revoked, and an investigation had been launched. Buswell's commanding officer, Colonel Luke Green, drafted a letter assigning Major Edwin Escobar to the investigation. According to sources, Colonel Green has asserted that SFC Buswell failed to obey Army regulations when he used his government issued email account to send what have been termed as messages disloyal to the United States with the intent of stirring up disloyalty, in a manner that brings discredit upon the United States Army.
It has been reported that Colonel Green also wrote that SFC Buswell claims to have information proving a conspiracy on the part of the United States Military Industrial Complex to attack targets within the United States, e.g., The Pentagon. Officials have suggested that the email response sent by SFC Buswell may be in violation of CFR 2635.705(a ), DoD-R 5500.7, and Joint Ethics Regulation paragraph 2-301b. These rules SFC Buswell is said to have perhaps violated regulate how soldiers utilize government resources, how they use their off-duty time, and how they use their official time.
The Iconoclast attempted to establish a dialogue with Colonel Green and Major Escobar, but calls were not returned as of press time. SFC Buswell declined to comment on the investigation, but noted that he spoke with his parents about the matter for a period of two days before he was ordered to not disclose any further information.
"My son spoke with me about [the investigation]," said Winthrop Buswell, SFC Buswell's father. "There was an unsolicited email. My son, without divulging anything, without usurping anything, without doing anything to discredit anyone in any way, simply responded to that saying 'Yes, there are what if's. And maybe there is something that is being covered up.' That's all that I know. He responded to it, but it was unsolicited. I think - of course, I'm dad, being very much in love with his son and wanting to praise him - because he is a low man on the totem pole, of course he's of pretty high rank but not quite an officer, that maybe ... Maybe an investigation might be the scapegoat for whomever."
"That is so ridiculous," said Winthrop Buswell. "[To say he is disloyal to the United States] is totally ridiculous. And the discourtesy was, ah, very apparent at that particular time. ... I've always thought the American way is this: to disagree is important. To dissent is important. And my son simply said, without any fanfare, 'Look, let's take a look at the whole picture. If you want to take a look at that, maybe there are a few paragraphs that a Michael Moore might want to emphasize.' That is all that my son has said. Never, however, to at all disparage the country and the patriotism that is so necessary for all of us. But, patriotism, as suggested by FOX News' [Bill O'Reilly], is following the line of George W. Bush and cohorts completely! All my son is saying is, 'Hey, maybe there's a what if.' Never, though, did he get sidetracked from the fact that [he loves his] country."
"What disturbed him more than anything else, I think, was the fact that the Iraqi citizens suffered so much and are suffering so much now," said Winthrop Buswell. "The time that he was injured, there were several Iraqis burning to death in front of him. He tried to put out the fire. It was a traumatic experience for him. ... He spoke about that a number of times, and how terrible that was to see the citizenry being killed and suffering so much."
"One of his heroes is Abraham Lincoln," Winthrop Buswell continued. "And Abraham Lincoln said many things, but one of the things he said - and I'm paraphrasing - was, 'I may disagree with the fellow who's speaking, but I will stand and defend his right to speak.' That's my son's position. He does look at the what if's. But that doesn't take away from his dedication and his patriotism. I don't know a fellow who gets more chills running up and down his spine when he sees the flag flying."
"As a boy, [Donald was] always a very curious fellow," he added. "Very daring, but never risking anything or stepping over the line. He loved motorcycles, but was always very cautious about it, always wearing proper clothing, always wearing a helmet. Also, he was very active in little model racing cars. He was in Cub Scouts. I remember walking to the gymnasium with him and having wonderful conversations with him years ago. His mother and I went through a divorce, and that is never easy for anyone. My son was also very close to his grandfather on his mother's side, and also his grandfather and grandmother on my side. Donald loves railroading, and my father has the best job that anyone could ever have. He's a locomotive engineer, and my son related to that. My son also has a strong belief in a power greater than ourselves."
"But one of the things that stands out ... is his love and his caring," said Winthrop, choking back tears. "He loves children. He's just the greatest guy, as far as I am concerned. He walks into a room with a big smile on his face. ... He's like my dad - he makes you feel like, you know ... I ... I care for you. Ah, he's ... He's my son ..."
The Iconoclast will continue reporting on this story as new details become available.
Comment on this Article
Flight 93 'was shot down' claims new UK book
by ROWLAND MORGAN
Daily Mail
19th August 2006
The heart-thumping moment came when when passengers on board one of the hijacked 9/11 jets fought back against the ruthless fanatics hellbent on crashing the plane into the heart of America.
Jumping out of their seats to a rallying cry of 'Let's roll!', they charged towards the front of the Boeing 757 and began smashing down the cockpit door to reach the hijackers at the controls.
Amid the desperate commotion, the plane rolled violently from right to left and pitched up and down as the rogue pilots tried to throw the passengers beyond the door off balance. As the struggle continued, the cockpit voice recorder captured the hijackers urgently discussing whether to ditch the plane. 'Is that it? Shall we finish it off?' asked one of the fanatics.
'No, not yet. When they all come, we finish it off,' was the reply. Minutes later, at10.03am, with the same voices shouting in Arabic, 'Allah is the greatest, Allah is the greatest,' the plane headed down, banked hard right and rolled on to its back. It smashed into an empty field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at its top speed of 580mph and exploded into a massive fireball.
Evidence suggests a sinister twist
The flames set nearby woods on fire as the impact sprayed body parts and other debris into the trees and up into the sky, to float to earth as far as eight miles away.
This, then, is the legend of United Airways Flight 93, one that has been vigorously promoted in a stream of books and films, most recently in the £9.6 million Hollywood movie United 93. It is the story of how 33 innocent passengers and seven crew gave their lives to save countless others as their plane flew kamikaze-style towards the White House or the Capitol in Washington.
To a nation still reeling from the attacks on New York's World Trade Centre and the Pentagon that same September morning, these were men and women every bit as heroic as those who had fought at the Alamo.
Yet my own exhaustive investigations have led me to conclude that the story of Flight 93 is far from being the straightforward account of supreme courage that the authorities would have us believe.
Instead, the real story is mired in cynical manipulation and warmongering propaganda. I am convinced there is evidence to suggest a wholly sinister twist to the tale that already holds pride of place in American folklore. For I believe that Flight 93 may well have been deliberately shot down as a means of stopping it from reaching its ultimate target - even at the expense of the 40 blameless people on board. It is a suspicion that was held even by the FBI, but was swept aside as a shaken America clung on to the official version of selfless sacrifice and raw patriotism.
Today, with the approach of the fifth anniversary of 9/11, some will still say that such speculation only serves to lend comfort to terrorists and does a disservice to the dead.
Others, however, will feel there are too many disquieting circumstances and unanswered questions to simply ignore.
But let us examine the evidence - so that you can come to your own conclusion. The massive impact caused the entire plane to disappear 30ft deep into the earth, telescoping down on itself and crushing everyone and everything inside the fuselage beyond recognition.
Why did the engines go missing?
However, the absence of any significant debris - including tailplane and wings - bewildered witnesses, relatives and, more importantly, some crash experts.
They found it hard to believe that an airliner up to 155ft long, with two engines each weighing more than six tons, could have penetrated the ground so completely as to utterly disappear. Had it, in reality, been blown to pieces in mid-air?
Certainly it is unclear how a single piece of fuselage the size of a dining room table could have been recovered from a marina in Indian Lake, a couple of miles away from the crash site - unless it fell from the sky during an aerial break-up.
But a bigger mystery is why the engines went missing.
Considering their weight, they should have plunged deep into the earth along with the rest of the airliner.
Yet they weren't in the crater and only a one-ton segment of an engine was ever recovered, again more than a mile from the crash site. The FBI said, unconvincingly, that it had 'bounced' there.
The FBI also claimed metal fragments found up to eight miles away could have been carried there by the wind, even though the breeze was very light.
Witnesses said nothing was left at the crash site, yet the FBI belatedly claimed to have made two sensational discoveries - a red bandana and a passport allegedly belonging to the hijackers.
Very conveniently, these turned up as prosecution evidence earlier this year at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the socalled 20th hijacker and only terrorist to be convicted over the 9/11 atrocities.
If flight 93 was shot down, there must have been a fighter jet in the skies to unleash a guided missile.
The U.S. government has admitted that two F-15s were flying above New York City before 9am on September 11 and three F-16s were patrolling over Washington by 9.40am. They could have reached Shanksville in minutes.
According to investigative writer David Ray Griffin, several witnesses saw two F-16s tailing Flight 93 minutes before it went down.
Twelve eyewitnesses state seeing another jet nearby.
They claim they saw an F-16 move closer in and fire what were probably two Sidewinder missiles, one of them catching at least one of the Boeing's huge engines, after which the 'plane dropped like a stone'.
Someone else 'heard a loud bang' and saw the airliner plummet. A Vietnam War veteran said he 'heard a missile', a sound he knew well. It is debatable how seriously we should take these reports. But there are numerous and highly credible witness accounts of a mysterious white jet being seen after Flight 93 went down.
Jim Brant, owner of the Indian Lake marina where debris was found, said he heard the roar of jet engines overhead, then saw a fireball rise into the air. He looked up and noticed a white plane circling the wreckage. 'It reminded me of a fighter jet,' he said.
Another resident, Tom Spinelli, said: 'I saw the white plane. It was flying around all over the place like it was looking for something. I saw it before and after the crash.'
He said it had high tail wings and no markings on it. John Feegle, another witness, said: 'It didn't look like a commercial plane. It had a real goofy tail on it, like a high tail. It circled around, and it was gone.'
Dennis Decker and his friend Rick Chaney were also close to the impact site. 'As soon as we looked up we saw a mid-sized jet flying low and fast,' said Decker.
'It appeared to make a loop or part of a circle, and then it turned fast and headed out.' Decker and Chaney described the jet as white with no markings. Decker added: 'It was a jet plane, and it had to be flying real close when that 757 went down. If I was the FBI, I'd find out who was driving that plane.'
A total of 12 eyewitnesses are on record as having seen the white jet. One witness, Susan McElwain, complained that the FBI told her there was no plane and did not note down her account.
However, amid the growing furore over the sightings, the FBI was forced to offer an explanation, which again many found unconvincing.
It claimed the jet was a passing civilian Fairchild Falcon 20 that was asked to descend to 5,000ft some minutes after the crash to give co-ordinates for the site. The plane and pilot have never been produced or identified.
The military's role in 9/11 is a mystery.
One commentator pointed out: 'The reason why this seems so implausible is that, first, by 10.06am on September 11, all non-military aircraft in U.S. airspace had received orders more than half an hour earlier to land at the nearest airport.
'Second, such was the density of emergency phone calls from people on the ground in the Shanksville area as to the location of the crash site, that aerial co-ordinates would have been completely unnecessary.
'Third, with F-16s supposedly in the vicinity, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that, at a time when no one knew for sure whether there might be any more hijacked aircraft still in the sky, the military would ask a civilian aircraft that just happened to be in the area for help.'
The military's role in 9/11 is shrouded in confusion, ambiguity and inconsistency.
A news report on September 20, 2001, said: 'America's defence establishment has disclosed that it ordered its fighter jets to intercept all the passenger aircraft hijacked in last week's attacks on New York and Washington.'
The report also stated that military intelligence was aware of the hijackings before any of the aircraft had hit their targets.
Three years later, however, the military said it hadn't heard about Flight 93 until after the plane had crashed - a line accepted by the official 9/11 Commission, which published its findings in July 2004.
The official inquiry said the Federal Aviation Authority - responsible for the security and safety of U.S. civilian aviation - had been incompetent in failing to alert the U.S. Air Force.
But the FAA had already acted quickly in ordering more than 4,000 aircraft to land at the nearest airstrip to avoid any more hijacks. And the military would have learned of Flight 93's hijack via teleconferences set up by the FAA, the White House and the U.S. Defence Department as events began to unfold on September 11. Richard Clarke, who ran the White House video conference, stated that at 9.27am, the FAA informed both Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, Chief of Defence Staff, of a number of 'potential hijacks' including 'United 93 over Pennsylvania'. Therefore, more than 25 minutes before Flight 93 went down, both Rumsfeld and Myers knew all about it. No wonder the military's claim to have learned about Flight 93 only after it crashed is dismissed by many as a bare-faced lie.
The FBI was in charge of the investigation.
In other air crashes, information from the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder - the black box recorders - were dealt with in an open manner, with crash investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board discussing the progress of their inquiries with reporters. But in the case of Flight 93, the Transportation Safety Board was not in charge of the investigation - the FBI was.
The black box recorders were reportedly found buried 25ft deep inside the crater. But a threeminute discrepancy in the crash time led to suspicions of foul play.
Seismic records, consolidated from four seismology stations in the region, originally pegged the impact time at 10.06am. It was only later that the Pentagon and the 9/11 Commission decreed that the correct impact time to have been at 10.03am.
But Terry Wallace, who heads the Southern Arizona Seismic Observatory and is considered the leading expert on the seismology of man-made events, was puzzled.
He complained: 'The seismic signals are consistent with impact at 10.06am and five seconds plus or minus two seconds. I don't know where the 10.03 time comes from.' So there were two crash times.
Sceptics note that a lot could happen in three minutes - minutes that could be removed from the end of a flight-deck recording to delete evidence of an attack by U.S. jets.
The FBI kept the contents of the voice recorder secret until it was forced by bereaved relatives to play the tape under heavy security at a hotel in April 2002.
The family members later reported they heard sounds of an on-board struggle beginning at 9.58am, with a final 'rushing sound' at 10.03am, when the tape fell silent. Could the 'rushing sound' have been made by the plane being holed? And what of the moment when the plane hit the ground?
'There is no sound of the impact,' said Kenneth Nacke, whose brother Lou had been on Flight 93. There is a further twist. In 2006, when the judge at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui ordered a transcript of the cockpit voice recorder, it ended with the sound of the hijackers shouting praises to Allah.
Just where had those praises been in 2002 when the tape was first played to relatives? For many, their sudden appearance confirmed suspicions of tape tampering.
At first, the FBI was keen to show it was keeping an open mind over the fate of Flight 93.
Within days of the crash, Reuters reported from Shanksville: 'Federal investigators said they could not rule out the possibility that the United Airlines jetliner that crashed in rural western Pennsylvania during this week's attacks on New York and the Pentagon was shot down.' 'We have not ruled out that,' FBI agent Bill Crowley told a news conference when asked about reports that a U.S. fighter jet may have fired on the hijacked Boeing 757. 'We haven't ruled out anything yet.'
Why did Crowley later retract his statement - and on the same day as the U.S. Air Force issued its official denial of any involvement?
At the crux of the legend of Flight 93 are the phones calls passengers are said to have made to their loved ones after the hijackers took control.
These are said to have alerted the passengers to the fact that they were victims of no ordinary hijacking, but a co-ordinated mission by fanatics to strike at the heart of America in New York and Washington. At the same time, a number of passengers allegedly told relatives of their resolve to fight back. Interestingly, phone contact from passengers on the two hijacked planes that hit the Twin Towers and a third jet which crashed into the Pentagon that same morning was scarce to non-existent.
Yet officially there were 35 calls made among the 40 passengers and crew on Flight 93, with callers using either mobile phones or GTE Airfones fitted into the backs of the aircraft seats.
The use of mobile phones is suspect anyway because telecommunications experts say that - given the technology of 2001 - calls at an altitude of six miles could have only occurred by fluke at best. Just as baffling, the FBI insisted there were 13 mobile phone calls - of which there were no billing records - yet reduced this number to just two at the trial this year of Zacarias Moussaoui when the evidence risked being exposed to the harsh light of law.
Why had the FBI failed to put the record straight over the previous four-and-a-half years?
One answer is that it suited the heroism legend to keep silent as the Pentagon banged the drum for war in Iraq.
Mrs Beamer only learned of her husband's final call four days later.
The 9/11 Commission claimed that five of the calls described the intent of the passengers and crew to revolt against the hijackers. One caller, the Commission said, ended her message with the words: 'Everyone's running up to first class. I've got to go. Bye.' But all this begs the question: why did the hijackers allow such a free-for-all of phone calls as they attempted to terrify their hostages?
After all, the hijackers would have realised that experts would have been able to locate the lost aircraft if people were using their mobles.
The most intriguing of the calls is the one said to have been made by Flight 93's most famous passenger Todd Beamer, whose 'Let's roll!' phrase became a byword for the victims' heroism and patriotism.
Beamer's call was said to have been taken by a telephone supervisor working for the Verizon Corporation, owners of GTE Airfones, the gadgets on the airplane seats.
At the time, Verizon had a contract worth £750million for installing a high-security telecoms package across U.S. government departments, including the Pentagon.
One of its supervisors, Lisa Jefferson, an evangelical Christian like Beamer himself, retains a vivid recollection of her 15-minute conversation with him.
After discovering that she shared her first name with Beamer's wife, they apparently talked about his two little boys and the new baby on the way, Beamer's fear that he might not make it home, and his faith.
Faced with the awful prospect of dying on board Flight 93, Beamer supposedly recited the Lord's Prayer and Psalm 23 with Mrs Jefferson. He also asked her to promise to call his wife. Mrs Jefferson received a Verizon Excellence Award from her bosses for her handling of the call. To some this may have seemed inappropriate.
She had not taken a recording of it, contrary to convention. She had not gone through the routine questions in her distress-call manual. She had not connected this agitated man to his wife waiting anxiously at home. Nor had she informed his wife subsequently of the call as promised.
Mrs Beamer only learned of her husband's final call four days later, when a representative of United Airlines got in touch.
She says the United Airlines representative told her: 'The FBI had been keeping the information private until they've had the opportunity to review the material. But now they've released it, I have a written summary of the call.'
But later Mrs Beamer learned that the FBI had not kept the call so secret after all. Her husband's boss at his computer company had already spun the story of Beamer the hero aboard Flight 93 before anyone else knew of his phone call.
As for Lisa Jefferson's evidence, it was single-sourced, unsubstantiated hearsay of which there was no record. For spooks inside a sprawling empire of wires like Verizon, rigging up a phone call to Lisa Jefferson's headset would have been simple.
'Let's roll!' became the war on terror's recruitment slogan.
She had no idea what Beamer's voice sounded like, and she would never hear it again to judge whether he had actually been speaking to her. This year, Lisa Jefferson published a book entitled Called - the story of seeing 'her life transformed, simply by answering Todd Beamer's call'.
The blurb added: 'Jefferson sends a stirring challenge to all of us whether it comes during quiet obscurity or international adversity, we must be prepared to answer God's call.'
Evangelical Christians throughout America rallied to that call. But one puzzle remains: Todd Beamer's wife later said she had never before heard of his reciting the Lord's Prayer in pressure situations. Nor, she added, was Psalm 23 something he often recited.
Todd Beamer's 'Let's roll!' phrase became the war on terror's recruitment slogan.
President Bush had launched the legend in a speech on September 20, 2001 as he declared his unprecedented 'war on terror'. Beamer's story of selfless patriotism, according to the President, was a 'defining moment' in American history. Alongside President Bush on this occasion was Todd Beamer's wife Lisa.
Nobody, of course, would begrudge Mrs Beamer her celebrity, given her tragic circumstances. But her presence undoubtedly helped President Bush's cause.
The President again invoked her evangelical Christian husband's courage in another speech a month later.
'We will no doubt face new challenges,' said the man widely regarded as having taken office fully intending to attack Iraq. 'But we have our marching orders. My fellow Americans... let's roll!'
Such a phrase couldn't fail to chime with the President's gung-ho admirers - nor with the 40 million evangelical Christians in the so-called 'red' states where the Bush regime had its most fervent support.
Later U.S. Navy personnel would spell out the words 9/11 LET'S ROLL by forming themselves on the deck of a warship bound for Iraq.
Lisa Beamer, always a staunch ally of the White House and its war on terror, had herself photographed unveiling a 'Let's Roll' logo on the side of a U.S. Air Force F-16.
She even sought to have 'Let's Roll' trademarked and signed a six-figure book deal which, along with her seven-figure compensation cheque, made her a rich woman. And in August 2002, just in time for the first 9/11 anniversary, she published her memoir entitled - predictably - Let's Roll!
The front cover showed the author with the Stars and Stripes and the publisher issued a staggering one million copies in hardback.
Secrecy is the first instinct of any war.
Truly, the Let's Roll slogan had become a call to arms - just at a time the White House needed it most.
Bush administration not admit its guilt? It could surely have argued that the poor souls lost in the airliner were a tragic but necessary sacrifice in order to prevent horror and destruction on a larger scale in at the Capitol Washington.
Air Force scrambles had been frequent enough in the past. One report said there had been 129 within the U.S. during 2000.
But secrecy is the first instinct of any war department, especially amid reports flooding in of a passenger revolt on the plane.
Any admission of a shooting down must have been ruled out politically because those brave passengers just might have retrieved the controls from fanatical hijackers.
For the U.S. military to have snatched victory from their grasp was unthinkable.
There are countless theories and areas of evidence to examine. There is even a theory that the plane could have blown up because of a bomb on board.
Air traffic controllers on the ground reportedly heard an anonymous voice in the cockpit announce: 'Ladies and gentleman. Here is the captain. Please sit down and keep remaining sitting. We have a bomb on board. So sit.'
But if Flight 93 had been blown up by a bomb at cruising altitude, its debris area would have covered at least 20 miles, as in the Lockerbie crash.
The 9/11 Commission speculated that the rogue pilot jolted the plane violently in the minutes before the impact to disrupt a passenger revolt.
This in turn led to claims that he might have succeeded in tearing a wing off, or otherwise wrecking the aircraft in mid-air, causing it to crash.
Boeing has refused to discuss this possibility. Such movements, however, could easily have been caused by the pilot attempting to avoid an approaching heatseeking missile homing in on its engines.
EYEWITNESS reports differed from the official story. Along the plane's route, people confirmed that the Boeing came in from the north-west, but they said it was not nose-diving. Instead it was flying low.
Bob Blair and Linda Shepley saw the plane when it dropped to 2,500ft. Rodney Peterson and Brandon Leventry noticed it at 2,000ft. Terry Butler saw it at about 500ft. Eric Peterson saw the plane at 'maybe 300ft'.
Lee Purbaugh, a scrap metal worker, was the closest. He told reporters: 'I heard this real loud noise coming over my head. I looked up and it was Flight 93, barely 50ft above me.
'It was coming down at 45 degrees and rocking from side to side. Then the nose suddenly dipped and it just crashed into the ground. There was this big fireball and then a huge cloud of smoke.'
Purbaugh's account was perhaps the nearest of all the witness testimony to the official version of the story. Except for one important element.
Not once did Purbaugh mention the plane being upside down, as the 9/11 Commission, the FBI and the Pentagon all maintained it was.
With such a huge airplane roaring over his head, he could hardly have failed to notice which way up it was.
To some, this cast doubt on the credibility of his reported evidence. To others, it was merely another piece of the Flight 93 jigsaw that failed to fit.
- ADAPTED from Flight 93: What Really Happened On The Heroic 9/11 'Let's Roll' Flight by Rowland Morgan, published by Constable & Robinson on August 24 at £7.99. © Rowland Morgan 2006
Comment on this Article
If September 11 Never Happened ...
By Juli Zeh
Die Zeit, Germany
Translated By Bob Skinner
August 11, 2006
What would today be like if 11 September 2001 had never occurred? A thought experiment.
Let's imagine that in 2001 somehow sped up a day, so that the fateful day fell away unnoticed and rolled off to the side. In September the figures on digital clocks would have jumped from "10" to "12." Perhaps there would have been a moment of confusion, but life generally would have gone on as before. If so, imagine what we would have missed!
First of all, we never would have experienced how a really historic moment feels: That odd hardening in the belly, as though one had swallowed a cobblestone; then the blinking, a continuous twitching of the eyelids. On the cheeks the red mark of a portable radio pressed to the ear during your nightly, despairing walks. And the train of thoughts through your head: "I-can't-believe-that, This-changes-everything, I-can't-believe-that ... One could do without such an experience, you say? You're most likely right. But what about its huge instructional effect?
You see, I was born in a golden era [June 30, 1974]. Classmates from well-off families had fallout shelters at home where they kept the ping-pong table. On Sundays we played sirens during practice alerts. The fear of the Third World War was as close at hand and manageable as a well-sorted broom closet. There were good guys and evil guys, as is the case in every good story.
The good ones included all of those who thought of themselves as democrats. The evil ones were everyone else. Democrats, we learned in school, never conduct wars of aggression, but employ peaceful means of cooperation and diplomacy. Also, they don't distinguish between people of different ancestry. To the contrary: discrimination by race or religion is constitutionally forbidden. Never in his life would a democrat consider staring suspiciously at an Asian-looking person in the subway.
In democracies there is no propaganda, no incitement of hysteria against certain groups of citizens by the press or politicians. A democratic country protects innocent citizens. It doesn't take away his nail clippers, doesn't listen to his phone or read his e-mail. A democratic state controls its secret services, doesn't deploy the army in its own borders, takes fingerprints exclusively from criminals, and doesn't use cameras at tollbooths to film harmless vehicles on the highway.
Because a democracy trusts its citizens, it knows that it relies on the consent of its citizenry, because otherwise it doesn't deserve to be called a democracy. If a crime occurs, however dreadful, a democratic state turns all of its resources to fighting that crime without labeling it a "war." For "war" is a dreadful concept. War directs itself not against the individual criminal, but holds entire regions, entire countries, entire areas of the globe responsible for a few inhabitants.
That's not just what was explained to me: that's what I believed. Contrary to the concepts of God, family and native country, the democratic ideal had direct significance to me. No one would have dared insist that this was just a fair-weather opinion that darkened whenever a cloud crossed the sun. No one called democracy an ideology that showed its true face only when it was attacked from outside.
Do you suspect, from what I've said so far, that I over-dramatize? You believe it hysterically negative when people say that our democracies are endangered from within? Then you don't know that childhood disappointment can also happen to adults. Then you don't know that even in this country there are true patriots who, without fuss and flag-waving, are proud, not of their Germanness, but of their democratic convictions. Gentle, blind fools, who, trapped in their childish pipe dreams, stumbling but persistent, seek the good. Candy-asses, goofballs, those who sympathize with Islam, who don't hear the shooting and just don't want to know when it's time for the next culture war.
Without that historic day in September 2001, I would still believe that I was in possession of divided convictions. I would imagine that the government that I supported shared, in general, all the above-named concepts that it taught me during the 1980s. It would have seemed obvious that European countries would not be drawn into wars contrary to international law. I would not have thought that democracy was just as phony, ideologically covered up and hypocritical as all other ideals upon which governments are based. I would bask in the illusion of being part of a government-imparted value system. I could feel less alone, and would thus be further caught up in that self-inflicted immaturity that muddles the precise employment of reason. But that would be terrible.
No? What is that you say? It strikes you as tasteless to regard a terrorist attack as enlightening? You don't want to hear that time and again, it has been Lucifer, the "Lightbringer," who shines the harsh spotlight of recognition on the world? And doesn't it interest you that knowledge - in the biblical paradise - is synonymous with the onset of catastrophe? And you're annoyed by the bitter irony with which late bloomers like me dismiss the ideals of their youth and become cynical contemplatives? I'll tell you something: it bothers me too.
We do allow ourselves the notion that the world, in the sense of peace, love, and understanding, would have been much better without September 11. Let's just read the other articles on this subject and forget what's been said here. If that doesn't make you feel better, that suggests a connection as simple as it is fateful: there are many paths that lead to understanding, but none that can turn back the clock.
Comment on this Article
Palestine
Gaza swelters through summer without power
By Gideon Levy
www.haaretz.com
Last update - 01:54 22/08/2006
It's hot, very hot, in the Gaza Strip. But over the last two months, ever since Israel bombed the new power station in the center of the Strip, the heat has become unbearable. The bombing has disrupted the supply of electricity to some 1.5 million residents; food in refrigerators goes bad, the patients in the hospitals groan, industry and work are paralyzed, traffic is gridlocked and there is a severe water shortage.
On the night of June 28, the Israel Air Force bombed the power station as part of Operation Summer Rains, destroying its six transformers.
The assault was approved by the security cabinet, and was intended to pressure the Palestinians into releasing Gilad Shalit, the captured soldier.
The modern power station, financed by Enron in partnership with a Palestinian company, was completely paralyzed, and the Gaza Strip lost some 60 percent of its supply of electricity. Gaza buys the remaining 40 percent from the Israel Electricity Corporation.
On Sunday this week, the burned out and destroyed transformers were still lying near the power station's fence. Two were made by Israeli company Elco Industries, and four by the German ABB. The station, located between Gaza and Dir al Balah, was inaugurated at the end of 2001. It was to provide power not only to Gaza but to the West Bank too, after being linked in the future to the Israeli network.
Israel knew exactly what it was bombing, says station manager Dr. Drar Abu-Sisi. It's impossible to operate the station without the transformers. Replacing them would take at least a year - either by ordering new transformers or by hooking up to the Egyptian power network.
With a capacity of 140 megawatts, the power station was the most advanced in the Arab world. Israel could have paralyzed the station by simply stopping its fuel supply, without putting it out of action for months.
"Had they told us on the phone to cut the power off, we'd have done so right away," says Abu-Sisi, who is convinced that the bombing was politically motivated.
"It was a foolish attack, which only sows more and more hatred for Israel," he says.
Each transformer costs around $2 million, but the main damage is indirect - the loss of income to the power station, grave damage to all its systems that could rust, and the huge blow to the Gaza Strip's miserable economy.
The Israel Defense Forces Spokesman's Office told Haaretz yesterday that "the bombing was intended to disrupt the activity of the terror networks directly and indirectly associated with Gilad Shalit's kidnapping."
Meanwhile, the station's 160 workers are out of work and Gaza has electrical power for only a few hours a day. Those who can afford it buy generators, and everyone goes up on the rooftops at night to escape the burdensome heat inside.
Comment on this Article
Propaganda! Islamic radicals, Nazism linked
By JONAH GOLDBERG
Union Leader
Aug. 22, 2006
The Jews everywhere are the Muslims' bitter enemies, said a prominent Islamic leader. Throughout history, the irreconcilable enemy of Islam has conspired and schemed and oppressed and persecuted 40 million Muslims, he said. In Palestine, the Jews are establishing a base from which to extend their power over neighboring Islamic countries. And, he proclaimed, this war, which was unleashed by the world Jewry, provided Muslims the best opportunity to free themselves from these instances of persecution and oppression.
Sound like Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah? Or perhaps Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Nope. It was the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, in 1942. An ardent Nazi supporter, al-Husseini delivered his speech at the opening of the Islamic Institute in Berlin, one day after the Allies denounced the Nazis, for carrying into effect Hitlers oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe. Al-Husseini's address was approved by Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Joseph Goebbels was in attendance. The Reich press office widely distributed the comments.
President Bush undoubtedly didn't have any of this in mind last week when he dubbed our enemies in the War on Terror Islamic fascists. But his comments -- analytically flawed as they may be -- added some much-needed moral clarity to our current struggle. They also helped to illuminate a much-overlooked point: Islamic fundamentalism and Nazism are historically and intellectually linked. (When the Israelis caught Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Final Solution, a leading Saudi Arabian newspaper read: "Arrest of Eichmann, who had the honor of killing 6 million Jews.") Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bush's remarks seem to have struck a nerve.
The Saudi government warned against hurling charges of terrorism and fascism at Muslims without regard to the spotless history of Islamic civilization. Of course, no civilization is without sin, but it takes particular chutzpah for Saudis to preen, considering their civilization is as spotless as a leopard.
Still, the point isn't to dredge up ancient history about Muslims and Nazis. Many Swedes got along swimmingly with the Nazis, but who worries about the Swedes today? The Muslim world is another matter. And unlike the Swedes, the similarities between Nazism and Islamic fascism are not all in the past. In what may be the most important book on the Holocaust in a generation, historian Jeffrey Herf explains why.
According to the standard Holocaust narrative, the "Final Solution" was the product of hate or racism or, often, both. Anti-Semitism became popular in the 19th century; the Nazis expanded on it, constructing a pseudo-scientific biological racism that saw the Jews as a cancer on the body politic and the Holocaust as an attempt to excise the tumor. Herf does not so much debunk this version of history as cut through it.
In "The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust,'' he concedes that hatred and racism were important, but he argues that they don't explain Germany's unique efforts to destroy the Jews. It's not as if no one hated the Jews until the 1930s.
The real answer isn't hate, but fear. Poring through miles of speeches, private comments, journal entries, party memoranda and all 24,000 pages of Goebbels' diaries, Herf concludes that the Nazis really believed that the Jews ran the world and wanted to destroy Germany. They believed that Jews controlled not only the Bolsheviks to the east but the capitalists to the west. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a mere pawn of his Jewish friends and advisers. The British Parliament, Goebbels wrote in one diary entry, was in reality a kind of Jewish stock exchange. The Jewish-plutocratic enemy was everywhere, benefiting from, and responsible for, every piece of bad news for Germany. In fact, the Nazis were sure that the Jews had declared war on Germany first, giving them no choice but to respond to the Jewish campaign to exterminate the Germans. This paranoia led the Nazis to believe that rounding up millions of Jews and gassing them was an act of self-defense.
What is so frightening is how similar this is to the sounds from the Middle East today. Ahmadinejad -- dismissed by sophisticated academics as a blowhard -- calls the Holocaust a myth. Indeed, there is no Jewish conspiracy theory too outlandish in the Muslim world. Huge numbers of Muslims -- even 45 percent of British Muslims -- believe that the Jews were behind 9/11. Theories that the Mossad is behind every bad headline, from the Indonesian tsunami to bad soccer performances, are common on the Arab street. According to Herf, this is only the second time the world has seen this sort of radical anti-Semitic paranoia. And, again, too many in the unspotless West are saying, they can't be serious.
Jonah Goldberg's e-mail address is JonahsColumn@aol.com.
Comment: From Norman Finkelstein's book "Beyond Chutzpah":
"In the course of preparing the chapters of this book devoted to Israel's human rights record in the Occupied Territories, I went through literally thousands of pages of human rights reports, published by multiple, fiercely independent, and highly professional organizations - Amnesty International, Human Rights Watchs, B'Tselem (Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights - Israel - each fielding its own autonomous staff of monitors and investigators.
Except on one minor matter, I didn't come across a single point of law or fact on which these human rights organizations differed.
In the case of Israel's human rights record, one can speak today not just of a broad consensus - as on historical questions - but of an UNQUALIFIED consensus.
All these organizations agreed, for example, that Palestinian detainees have been sytematically ill treated and tortured, the total number now probably reaching the tens of thousands.
Yet if, as I've suggested, broad agreement has been reached on the FACTUAL record, an obvious anomaly arises: what accounts for the impassioned controversy that still swirls around the Israel-Palestine conflict?
To my mind, explaining this apparent paradox requires, first of all, that a fundamental distinction be made between those controversies that are real and those that are contrived.
To illustrate real differences of opinion, let us consider again the Palestinian refugee question.
It is possible for interested parties to agree on the facts yet come to diametrically opposed moral, legal, and political conclusions.
Thus, as already mentioned, the scholarly consensus is that Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948.
Israel's leading historian on the topic, Benny Morris, although having done more than anyone else to clarify exactly what happened, nonetheless concludes that, morally, it was a good thing - just as, in his view, the "annihilation" of Native Americans was a good thing - that, legally, Palesitnians have no right to return to their homes, and that, politically, Israel's big error in 1948 was that it hadn't "carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country - the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan" of Palestinians.
However repellant morally, these clearly can't be called FALSE conclusions.
Returning to the universe inhabited by normal human beings, it's possible for people to concur on the facts as well as on their moral and legal implications, yet still reach divergent POLITICAL conclusions.
Noam Chomsky agrees that, factually, Palestinians were expelled; that, morally, this was a major crime; and that, legally, Palestinians have a right of return. Yet, politically, he concludes that implementation of this right is infeasible and pressing it inexpedient, indeed, that dangling this (in his view) illusory hope before Palestianian refugees is deeply immoral.
There are those, contrariwise, who maintain that a moral and legal right is meaningless unless it can be exercised and that implementing the right of return is a practical possibility.
For our purposes, the point is not who's right and who's wrong but that, even among honest and decent people, there can be a real and legitimate differences of political judgment.
This having been said, however, it bears emphasis that - at any rate, among those sharing ordinary moral values - the range of political disagreement is quite narrow, while the range of agreement quite broad."
It is quite clear that those individuals running Israel - not to mention the Neocon Administration - are psychological deviants without consciences.
During WW I , most of the area of Palestine was still under the control of the Ottoman Empire, and the borders of what would become Palestine had been outlined as part of the May 16, 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France. This was a secret understanding between the governments of Britain and France defining their respective spheres of post-World War I influence and control in the Middle East. The boundaries of this agreement still remain in much of the common border between Syria and Iraq. The agreement was negotiated in November 1915 by the French diplomat François Georges-Picot and British Mark Sykes. Britain was allocated control of areas roughly comprising Jordan, Iraq and a small area around Haifa. France was allocated control of South-eastern Turkey, Northern Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. The controlling powers were left free to decide on state boundaries within these areas. The area which subsequently came to be called Palestine was for international administration pending consultations with Russia and other powers.
This agreement is viewed by many as conflicting with the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence of 1915-1916. The conflicting agreements are the result of changing progress during the war, switching in the earlier correspondence from needing Arab help to subsequently trying to enlist the help of Jews in the United States in getting the US to join the First World War, in conjunction with the Balfour Declaration, 1917. The agreement had been made in secret.
The agreement was later expanded to include Italy and Russia. Russia was to receive Armenia and parts of Kurdistan while the Italians would get certain Aegean islands and a sphere of influence around Izmir in southwest Anatolia. The Italian presence in Anatolia as well as the division of the Arab lands was later formalized in the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920.
How do we know about the Sykes-Picot agreement?
The Russian Revolution of 1917 led to Russia being denied its claims in the Ottoman Empire. At the same time Lenin released a copy of the confidential Sykes-Picot Agreement as well as other treaties causing great embarrassment among the allies and growing distrust among the Arabs.
The agreement is seen by many as a turning point in Western/Arab relations, as it negated the promises made to Arabs through T.E. Lawrence for a national homeland in the Syrian territory in exchange for their siding with British forces against the Ottoman Empire and gave the national homeland of the Arabs, the land where they had been living under the control of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years, to European and American and Russian Jews in exchange for dragging the United States into the war.
Now, let me give you some perspective here: The number of World War I casualties (military and civilian) was over 37 million - over 15 million deaths and 22 million wounded. This includes almost 9 million military deaths and about 6.6 million civilian deaths. The United States lost 126,000 military personnel and brought home over 234,000 wounded - many disabled for life. That was the consequence of the Balfour Agreement, the double-crossing deal the Brits made with the Jews.
In his November, 2002 interview with the New Statesman magazine, the UK Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, has blamed Britain's imperial past for many of the modern political problems, including the Arab-Israeli conflict.
"The Balfour declaration and the contradictory assurances which were being given to Palestinians in private at the same time as they were being given to the Israelis-again, an interesting history for us, but not an honourable one," he said.
British imperial designs were undoubtedly the primary political motivation in drawing influential British politicians to support the Zionist project. However, it is clear that the latter were predisposed to Zionism and to enthusiastically supporting the proposals of Herzl and leading Zionist officials such as Chaim Weizmann due to their Christian Zionist backgrounds. Balfour's famous speech of 1919 makes the point:
"For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country...The four great powers are committed to Zionism, and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land."
The phrases "rooted in age-long traditions" and "future hopes" were perhaps grounded in Balfour's British imperial vision, but they were also buttressed by his understanding of Bible prophecy, which undergirded his bias toward the Zionist project as well as his grand designs for Britain's colonialist policy.
Journalist Christopher Sykes (son of Mark Sykes, co-author of the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916), noted in his volume Two Studies in Virtue that Lloyd-George's political advisers were unable to train his mind on the map of Palestine during negotiations prior to the Treaty of Versailles, due to his training by fundamentalist Christian parents and churches on the geography of ancient Israel. Lloyd-George admitted that he was far more familiar with the cities and regions of Biblical Israel than with the geography of his native Wales - or of England itself.
So, let's get it straight: Even Balfour admitted that there were over 700,000 occupants of Palestine when the land was given to the European, American and other Jews who then moved in, and occupied the land belonging to people who had been living there for over a thousand years.
So what right does Israel have to claim that their self-defense takes precedence over the self-defense of the original population of Palestine?
The fact is, the Zionist controlled American media is deliberately creating the conditions for a bogus "Clash of Civilizations".
Comment on this Article
PROPAGANDA! Mideast Echoes Of 1938
By Richard Cohen, Jewish apologist for Israeli War Crimes
Washington Post, PR Firm acting on behalf of Israel
August 22, 2006
In his upcoming book about the horrors of the 20th century, "The War of the World," the British historian Niall Ferguson has a chapter called "The Pity of Peace." It is about 1938, when World War II loomed, and Britain -- especially and importantly Britain -- did precious little to stop it. The warnings of Churchill -- "believe me, it may be the last chance . . ." -- were ignored, and the government under Neville Chamberlain obstinately pursued a policy that forever after made the word appeasement one of the most odious in history. Somehow, though, it looks like 1938 all over again.
The events in the Middle East are often compared to 1914 and the start of World War I. That war -- the Great War, the war to end all wars -- is actually the all-purpose war. It not only began for what seemed like a trivial reason (the assassination of someone who wasn't a head of state) but it was fought with tenacity and brutality for what now seems no reason at all. In the end, millions died and the world was utterly changed. Why?
But when it comes to the Middle East, 1938 is also a pretty instructive year. At the moment, the United Nations has committed itself to maintaining peace in Lebanon. It has done so by saying it will interpose an armed force between Israel on the one hand and Hezbollah on the other. At the same time, the Lebanese army will -- as it has already started to do -- invade its own country (gasp!), securing the south for the first time in decades.
A critical part of that plan is the establishment of the international peacekeeping force. It is supposed to have 15,000 troops, who will join 15,000 Lebanese troops to ensure that Hezbollah is not rearmed with Iranian and Syrian missiles and that Israel not only pulls out of Lebanon but stays out. The backbone of the international force is supposed to come from Europe, particularly France. It was France, in fact, that was most insistent on the establishment of the force.
Now France is having second thoughts . . . or cold feet . . . or mere questions. If it is the last, that's understandable. The French military is said to worry about the command structure, since this was a problem with the U.N. force in Bosnia in the 1990s. Command structure, though, was not nearly the whole problem in the Balkans. After all, Dutch soldiers were on the spot when Bosnian troops massacred Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica. It is hard to this day to account for what happened.
If only questions about the command structure vexed the French, there would be little cause for worry. But there are ample signs that more is at work here than a table of organization. Maybe the French and other Europeans have just plain lost the political will. The upshot is that now there is no international force worth its name in Lebanon -- certainly not one willing and able to shoot.
This inability of Europe to get its act together is what suggests 1938. Back then, Winston Churchill was hardly the only one who thought Hitler was intent on war. After all, the German leader was an ideological zealot and a murderer to boot. Still, England did little. Similarly, you don't have to have Churchillian prescience to see that what happened once in Lebanon can happen again. Hezbollah's avowed aim is to eradicate Israel. Listen to what it says. Pay attention. It will renew its attacks the first chance it gets. This is why it exists.
When George Bush used the term "Islamic fascists," he had a point. But it's futile to use colorful language when, in reality, you're out of the conversation altogether. This is another baleful consequence of the Iraq war. The United States is not only preoccupied, it is loathed. The leadership it once was able to exert -- especially in the Middle East -- is a thing of the past. If its credibility is to be restored, another president will have to do so. In the meantime, as we always learn, Europe without American leadership is a mere tourist destination.
What's striking about Ferguson's account of 1938 is the almost total absence of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The American president is almost never mentioned -- sidelined by the Great Depression and, more important, American isolationism. That year, too, Europe was left on its own, and England, pathetically, was not up to the job. Now, by default, the leadership of Europe has slipped to France. We can all sense war coming and a kind of crazy chronology forming like storm clouds for all to see -- 1938 becoming 1914.
Oui ?
cohenr@washpost.com
Comment: This is the second piece of Propaganda we picked up in the recent news that suggests that Radical Islam is similar to the Fascist Nazis and that Hezbollah is out to eradicate Israel.
Hmmm... sounding quite familiar.
For anyone who has not yet watched it, do check out Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land; it will disabuse you of the notion that there is any semblance of honest and factual news reporting by the Zionist controlled media in the U.S.
While you are at it, check out a nice little video entitled: "US citizens who say "NO!" There you will hear Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law recount the following:
I spoke with the head of the IDF, and I said, "you know, it's clear that your people are inflicting Nuremberg Crimes on the Palestinians, exactly what the Nazis did to the Jews. What's your explanation?" He said, "Military necessity." Notice, he didn't disagree with me. I said, "That argument was rejected at Nuremberg when the lawyers for the Nazis made it." He said, "Well, we have Public Relations people in the United States and they handle these matters for us.
It seems that Mr. Richard Cohen, (gee, isn't that a Jewish name), the author of this piece, is a member of the PR firm that covers up War Crimes for the illegal state of Israel.
Comment on this Article
Israeli tanks enter Gaza - Israel, the Energizer Bunny of War Crimes
By Nidal al-Mughrabi
Reuters
22 August 06
GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli soldiers killed three militants and wounded several other Palestinians in clashes across the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, the army and Palestinian medics said.
A 14-year-old boy suffered head wounds during an Israeli tank raid, medics said. Several other civilians were also hurt.
Palestinian medics said three members of the Islamic Jihad militant group were killed as they approached the border fence with Israel near the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis.
An army spokesman said the men were seen carrying large bags and were "acting in a suspicious manner".
Israeli tanks moved into the eastern Gaza Strip overnight and troops seized five Palestinian militants after clashing with fighters there, the army said.
Witnesses said the tanks, supported by unmanned drones in the sky, entered eastern Gaza near the Karni crossing, the main terminal for goods entering and leaving the densely populated strip.
At least three Palestinian fighters in eastern Gaza were wounded when they were hit by a missile fired by one of the drones.
An army spokesman said the raid in eastern Gaza targeted five wanted Palestinians, including two members of the Islamic militant group Hamas, which controls the Palestinian government.
"Forces surrounded a house in which the five wanted Palestinians were located," the spokesman said. "Some exchanges of fire occurred during which one of the wanted men was injured. The five were arrested and taken for questioning."
The spokesman said weapons were found in the house.
Israeli tanks and bulldozers also entered a village east of Khan Younis on Tuesday morning. At least two Palestinian civilians were wounded in the clashes, including the 14-year-old, witnesses said.
Israel has frequently carried out brief incursions into the Gaza Strip since launching an air and ground offensive in late June to rescue a soldier captured by Palestinian militants and to stop rocket fire from the strip into Israel.
Overnight, Israel carried out air strikes at houses in Jabalya, a district of Gaza City, in the northern part of the strip, and the southern Gaza town of Rafah after telling residents to leave their homes, witnesses said.
They said the strikes were apparently aimed at the homes of members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Gaza, a narrow coastal piece of land that is home to 1.4 million Palestinians, was occupied by Israeli troops until August last year, when soldiers and about 8,000 Jewish settlers pulled out after nearly 40 years of occupation.
A week ago, armed men kidnapped two journalists from the Fox TV network, an American and a New Zealander, as they were working in Gaza City. There has been no word on their whereabouts and no claim of responsibility for their abduction.
While kidnappings have not been uncommon in Gaza in recent years, most abductions are resolved in a matter of hours without any harm being done.
Comment on this Article
American Comedian Strip Searched at Israeli Airport
By Emily
August 6, 2006
www.maysoon.com
I want to tell you the story of what happened to my friend Maysoon Zayid when she left Ben Gurion Airport a few days ago to fly back to NYC.
She called me when she landed in NYC and said "Emily you won't believe what happened to me at Ben Gurion Airport... I should note that Maysoon has cerebral palsy and went through this whole process in a wheelchair at Ben Gurion airport.
Maysoon began "Emily I was strip-searched. They took everything. They left me naked in the room and when they returned with my clothes they had taken my maxipad."
What?
"Yes and then I told them I need one and they said they didn't have any."
She proceeded to tell them she had more in her hand carry-on. They wouldn't let her touch her stuff for "security reasons".
Nor would they give her one maxi-pad from her bag. They would not let her travel with her carry-on luggage on the plane.
My friend Maysoon was made to bleed for hours in the airport all over herself in a wheelchair.
As if that wasn't enough. She was also not allowed to touch her medication(also in her hand carry-on). She has cerebral palsy and needs to take special medicine or else she will throw up on the flight.
Several hours later she finally boarded Continental Airlines. The stewardess looked at her in disgust when she entered the plane.
Maysoon looked up at her and said "They took my maxi-pad."
The stewardess' ramaged through their belongings and managed to produce a pair of shorts etc for her to wear.
She threw up 7 times on the flight as she was not allowed to take her medicine.
Are there words for such horror and brutality?
The policy of treating Palestinians in the most dispicable manner at border crossings has been in place for years in an effort to brutalize people to such an extreme that they will not return.
I remember it all.
Every crossing from Jordan when I was a kid in the 70's, and later through Ben Gurion in the 80's. I will not forget.
I will never forget what they did to Maysoon.
Maysoon who is a comedian, an actress and an activist.
She herself is writing down this story in greater detail when she is able to.
See her website: http://www.maysoon.com/
Comment on this Article
The Coverage--and Non-Coverage--of Israel-Palestine
by: Alison Weir
July - August 2005
The Link - Volume 38, Issue 3
In the fall of 2004, we visited the Palestinian Territories. Such a simple statement, and such a complicated reality. Let me try again...
In the fall of 2004, we visited a large, open-air prison. A prison whose guards keep people out, when they choose to, as well as in, humiliating and violating those they dislike; a prison into which the jailers periodically shoot and send regiments of destruction; a prison full of mini-prisons and convoluted rules that change with the wind. A complicated, teeming prison in which there are wedding festivals and dancing; where babies laugh and the tea is flavored with mint and sage; and where desperation silently waits.
In fall, 2004, my daughter and I traveled to Palestine-to the West Bank. And the Israeli guards let us in. But then we went to Nablus, a historic and ancient city in the northern sector of the West Bank. We stood in the crowded line full of women, men, and children waiting to pass through the double turn-style gate into this interior, mini-prison, until it was our turn, and as we walked, one at a time, through that lonely, eerie twenty feet, the soldiers' guns trained on us, the soldiers waved us back. "You are not allowed in," they pronounced, and ignored our protests and our American passports.
But later we found a back way in, over the hills, and then we saw a little of what they didn't want us to see, and heard about the rest. We visited Balata refugee camp, one of the dense communities around the West Bank and Gaza created by the 1948 Naqba, the "Catastrophe," when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced off their land with the creation of Israel. These refugee communities are often on the outskirts of town and bear the major brunt of Israeli invasions. Their residents are among the poorest and most desperate in Palestine, and they contain pockets of resistance to Israeli military occupation.
We talked to a man in his late twenties who had recently adopted nonviolent methods of resistance. He told us that he used to have a group of close friends-about eight other guys that he'd grown up with. They would always hang out together, joke around. When Israeli forces launched a major invasion into Balata and Nablus-100 tanks descended on the area in April 2002-many joined the Palestinian resistance. One by one all these friends have been killed, and now "Sami," as we'll call him, was the only one still alive.
We learned that Israeli forces in armored vehicles periodically invaded Balata, occupying homes and shooting residents without provocation. While sometimes there were small numbers of Palestinian men with guns trying to resist these invasions, often there was no armed resistance at all. In many cases there were only kids throwing stones at these invading vehicles. The Israeli soldiers would then shoot these kids. The main street down which these Israeli armored vehicles would drive was bullet riddled and teeming with children. We also interviewed two old ladies whose home had occasionally been taken over by Israeli soldiers, who would then shoot out the windows at the people below. We saw a cemetery where children played-it was one of the few open spaces in this dense community-and people described how Israeli soldiers would taunt the children. Several kids had recently been killed there.
We were told of an incident that had occurred approximately two weeks before. There had been another of these regular Israeli "incursions" down the main street. The vehicles had stayed there for twenty minutes, asserting their control, and there had been no resistance against them. At one point an Israeli soldier poked his gun out the porthole of his vehicle, aimed at a boy nearby, and pulled the trigger. The boy, who looked to be about 13, was shot in the lower abdomen with a metal bullet coated by rubber. A Reuters photographer had photographed this incident, and an Associated Press cameraman had filmed it. We were told that the video of the incident had been sent to the Associated Press bureau in Jerusalem, and that it had been erased.
We were shocked. On what possible basis could this footage not be considered newsworthy? We decided to look into this incident further. In Balata there was a handful of international peace activists, members of the International Solidarity Movement, who were there to act as witnesses, and who attempted to intercede nonviolently in instances of aggression in order to reduce the violence in the conflict. Several of these people, an American woman and a British woman, had witnessed this event and described it to us in detail. They had recorded the number of the Israeli armored vehicle, and had written down the names of the two photographers who had filmed the incident. We talked to both photographers, who confirmed the facts. We found the hospital where the boy was still being treated, interviewed the boy himself, his father, his older brothers, and the doctor who had treated him. All the facts confirmed what we had been told. The boy was named Ahmed, and it turned out that he was actually 14, though he looked considerably younger. He had been shot with a rubber-coated steel bullet, which had penetrated his bladder. He had undergone an operation, and was still recovering.
The boy told us he was afraid of Israeli soldiers. He showed us a scar on his leg, where he had been shot previously. While we were in the hospital, we came across several other kids who had been shot. One had a fractured femur. He said he hadn't even been throwing stones, but that next time he would. Another boy had been shot in the chest. The doctors had barely saved him. Another boy, a visitor, showed us a scar at the corner of his mouth and missing teeth from when he had been shot. We had a camera along and filmed all of this.
After a few days we returned to Jerusalem.
Again, this sounds so deceptively simple. We made our way through armed Israeli checkpoints, rode in crowded vehicles that were stopped by Israeli police, wondered when or if we would be harassed. When we arrived in Jerusalem, we went straight to the AP bureau. We discovered that it was in a large building in the Israeli section of Jerusalem that appeared to house most, maybe all, of the major U.S. news bureaus. We went up to the 8th floor, still carrying our packs, and entered the AP office.
We walked up to the bureau chief, Steve Gutkin, and asked him about this incident and why the tape was erased instead of broadcast. He became flustered and said he wasn't allowed to say anything, that AP requires its Corporate Communications office to respond to all requests for information. Later, when we returned to the U.S., we phoned AP Corporate Communications and asked Jack Stokes, director of media relations, about this incident. I told Stokes about what I had learned, and asked him whether AP had indeed erased this video, and, if so, why. He said he would look into this and get back to me with the information. When I phoned him a few days later, he said that he had looked into it, and that this was "an internal AP matter" that he could tell me nothing about.
In other words, AP had video footage of an Israeli soldier specifically and intentionally shooting a young Palestinian boy who was not attacking them, and they erased it. I don't know how often they do this.
But back to the West Bank, and Steve Gutkin. My daughter and I run a small organization that focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian issue and, in particular, studies how it is covered in the American media. We were there to present our research into this topic at a conference in Ramallah, as well as to gather more information. Extremely disturbed at what we were discovering about AP news coverage, we decided to investigate further. Months earlier I had heard that AP had a bureau in Ramallah in the West Bank, but when I had phoned AP in Washington, DC, and New York about this, no one seemed to have heard of it. AP receptionists kept trying to look it up, and then would give me the number for the Jerusalem bureau, saying that was the only one listed.
We traveled to Ramallah, phoned a Palestinian agency, and asked if there was indeed an AP bureau in the city. They said there was, and gave us the phone number. We called this and were readily given directions to the bureau. When we arrived, we found a fully-staffed, professional bureau. While the Jerusalem bureau had appeared to be largely, perhaps exclusively, staffed by Israelis and Jewish Americans, this office appeared to contain journalists of Palestinian ethnicity.
We spoke to the bureau chief at length, and to his associate, an on-camera female reporter. They described how their news process worked. They and other correspondents throughout the Palestinian territories would cover events that took place in the area, then send their reporting to writers in the Jerusalem bureau, who would write the actual article. For example, while we were there, they received a phone call from a correspondent in Nablus. This time a 12-year-old boy had been killed. The boy, Bashar Zabara, had been throwing stones toward Israeli forces approximately 300 meters away. He had been shot in the throat with live ammunition. The bureau chief immediately phoned the Jerusalem bureau with all the details. Journalists in the Jerusalem bureau would then write up the story and send it out to the many worldwide papers that subscribe to AP's services.
The fact that everything reported by the West Bank bureau was vetted by the Jerusalem bureau flagged our attention. AP Jerusalem was the bureau that had recently erased footage of a similar incident. We asked the Ramallah bureau journalists if they could send out wire stories themselves. They said no, that all reports went through the Jerusalem bureau.
I remembered the Ramallah bureau chief's name from having occasionally seen articles with his byline in the past. Confused, we asked him if he ever wrote news stories himself. He said no, that he always called the information into Jerusalem, and that they then wrote the stories there.
We were surprised-and concerned-to learn that the bylines and datelines of stories were being misrepresented in this way. Given the ethnic nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the fact that the ethnicities live and suffer in two different (if neighboring) locations, both the location and ethnicity of journalists writing about the conflict are particularly relevant. While it is certainly appropriate to give full credit to journalists who gather information for a story, we felt that it was highly misleading that stories with a Palestinian byline and West Bank dateline were being written by Israeli and Jewish correspondents living in Israel-that one ethnic group in the conflict actually wrote news stories purported to be by reporters from the other ethnic group in the dispute.
If such a situation is for some reason necessary, it would seem important to disclose this fact with more accurate attribution, perhaps in the form of a byline reading "Reporting by ..., Written by ..."
Instead, we have articles containing, at least occasionally, a spin that I suspect the authors cited in the byline would be displeased to see, much less to receive credit for writing.
Later, back in the U.S., I looked up AP coverage of the 12-year-old who was shot in the throat while we were in the Ramallah bureau-the report the bureau chief phoned in to Jerusalem while we watched.
I found no story. Apparently, the Jerusalem bureau had not sent out a story on the incident. I did find an AP photo on the internet [reproduced on this page], but could not find a single American publication that had printed it-perhaps because there was no connecting story.
Also, I saw that AP Jerusalem had sent out no reports about any of the children with shattered bodies that we had visited in the Nablus hospital, despite the on-the-scene presence of paid AP journalists.
WHY ISRAEL/PALESTINE MATTERS TO US
I had first begun looking into news coverage of Israel-Palestine four years before this visit to the Palestinian territories. I was the editor of a small newspaper in California. I had never studied this conflict before, and knew almost nothing about it. When the current uprising began in the fall of 2000, however, I became curious about it and decided to follow the news more carefully. As I did this, I noticed that news reports seemed to be largely written from an Israeli point of view. Israeli sources were quoted first and far more frequently than Palestinian ones, for example. I began going on the internet to find more information, and was astounded at what I discovered. For months I followed events closely, increasingly drawn in by the immense disparity between the information I was reading from the foreign press and international websites, and the narrow sliver I was receiving from American media.
Finally, I decided to travel to Gaza and the West Bank as a freelance journalist in February and March of 2001. I traveled independently and alone, and was shocked at the devastation I found, and at the depth of human tragedy. I returned with a sense of obligation to tell other Americans the facts I was discovering, and about our connection to them. I founded an organization called If Americans Knew to provide this information to the public, as well as to undertake a systematic study of U.S. media coverage of Israel/Palestine.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been one of the most significant sources of global instability for over fifty years. It is the core conflict in the Middle East and is intimately connected to the "war on terror;" to the situations in Iraq, Iran, and Syria; and to America's disastrously deteriorating relationship with the world's 1.2 billion Muslims. In the "Holy Land" itself, it is the cause of continuing tragedy and daily misery, and according to a number of historians, in 1973 it came close to plunging the region-and perhaps the world-into a nuclear exchange. Many analysts feel such a possibility continues.
While the majority of the American public is unaware of this fact, American taxpayers are primary funders of Israeli actions.
More American tax money goes to Israel than to any other nation on earth-over $10 million per day.
In addition to this, approximately $3 billion of American tax money goes to Egypt every year (per capita, about one-twentieth the amount Israel receives). This funding was appropriated as part of an arrangement whereby the Egyptian government would largely refrain from opposing Israeli actions, so this money, too, could be considered in the total amount paid out annually on behalf of Israel.
While the amount of money dispersed to Palestinian organizations is significantly smaller than the above two categories, amounting to approximately $0.23 million per day in 2004, this, too, should be included, bringing the yearly total to over $9.7 billion.
In sum, then, over half of all American tax money sent abroad is connected to Israel/Palestine. In fact, a report commissioned by the U.S. Army War College estimates that the total financial cost to Americans of support for Israel over the years has been about $1.6 trillion.
In addition to this massive financial connection, American citizens are also significant players in this conflict through our government's critical role in representing Israeli interests in the international arena. In the United Nations alone, for example, the U.S. has exercised its veto 39 times on behalf of Israel.
For all of these reasons, it is essential that Americans be fully and accurately informed on Israel/Palestine, without bias in either direction.
STATISTICAL STUDIES
To determine how well the American media are fulfilling this critical function, our organization has undertaken the laborious but essential task of conducting statistical studies of media coverage of this issue. Our methodology is to examine clear, significant categories that are as impervious as possible to subjective bias. It is our view that the media's job is to report as accurately as possible the facts on a topic. Indications about the extent to which the press is accomplishing this can be objectively measured.
Specifically, we look at the extent to which certain media outlets-e.g., The New York Times or ABC World News Tonight-cover the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians in the conflict. This approach allows meaningful statistical analysis that would be impossible in a qualitative study and provides a yardstick that allows us to determine whether media demonstrate even-handed respect for human life, regardless of ethnic or religious background.
We decided to count the number of reports of deaths for each side during a given period, and then compare these to the number of people actually killed. It is our view that deaths among both populations are equally tragic.
Fortunately, reliable data for both populations is available from the widely respected Israeli human rights organization, B'Tselem (go to www.btselem.org. for a full analysis of their findings).
In our studies we only include Israeli deaths directly caused by the actions of Palestinians, and vice versa. In addition to analyzing coverage of all deaths, we specifically examine reporting on children's deaths. These tragedies represent an especially human side of the uprising, and one that lies outside of most people's views of acceptable violence in armed conflict. The killing of children is especially repugnant to most people, and these deaths elicit extreme disfavor for those responsible for them. Therefore, we felt that studying how the media covered children's deaths would be particularly significant.
In spring 2005, we completed studies of The New York Times, the "newspaper of record," and three of the major television network evening news shows, ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News. Not only are these news media the major sources of information for millions of Americans around the country, they are also the windows through which editors and producers of smaller newspapers and broadcast news stations throughout the nation view the conflict and gauge the accuracy of their own coverage. Their significance in forming Americans' views on Israel-Palestine cannot be overemphasized.
For each of these media outlets we examined coverage of deaths over two separate year-long periods. First, we analyzed coverage for the first year of the current uprising, September 29, 2000 through September 28, 2001. This period was selected for study in order to evaluate viewers' and readers' first impressions, which are crucial as they continue to try to make sense of the conflict. Coverage of this year set the context within which all subsequent reporting on the conflict is viewed, forming viewers' and readers' opinions as to who was initiating the violence and who was retaliating.
Second, we studied the coverage for 2004 to discover whether the patterns we found for the first year had continued, diminished, or increased several years into the intifada.
We looked into two types of reporting on deaths. The first and major focus of our study was on timely/specific reports and mentions of deaths; e.g., "four Palestinians/Israelis were killed yesterday." It is this ongoing reporting of deaths that provides people with their impression of a conflict. We also counted follow-up stories, so that, in theory, numbers of death reports could surpass actual number of deaths, giving percentages that exceed 100 percent. We were surprised to find that this frequently occurred-but only for one population.
Secondarily, we examined cumulative reports, e.g., "The violence has left 200 Palestinians dead" or "200 Israelis have been killed in suicide bombings." While we believe that such summaries of deaths can provide useful information, especially when numbers for both populations are given in the same report (which, sadly, rarely occurred), it was our view that such mentions are not the equivalent of 200 individual reports on each of these deaths, and needed to be enumerated in their own, separate category.
For The New York Times we studied prominent reporting on deaths-i.e. deaths reported in headlines/lead paragraphs-and then conducted a month-long sub-study on deaths reported in the entire article. (Interestingly, we found that the patterns discovered in our study of prominent reporting essentially held true.)
For the television networks we studied transcripts of the full newscasts in addition to introductions by anchors.
Our findings are disturbingly decisive as they reveal a pervasive pattern of distortion. For every time period, for every news source, for every category except one, one population's deaths were covered at significantly higher rates than the other-in one case 13 times greater. The favored population was the Israeli one. We found that the only category in which Palestinian deaths were reported at similar rates to Israeli deaths was cumulative reports-"200 Palestinians/Israelis have been killed"-and this only during the first months of the first year. After that, even cumulative reports disproportionately covered Israeli deaths over Palestinian deaths.
In addition, we were startled to find that not only was daily reporting profoundly skewed, but that in 2004 not a single network even once reported the kind of full, two-sided cumulative report one would expect to be a regular feature of news coverage: the number of people killed among both populations since the intifada had begun.
Let us look at what was going on, and then at how this was reported.
In the first year of the current uprising, Sept. 29, 2000 to Sept. 28, 2001, 165 Israelis and 549 Palestinians were killed. In 2004-a period that the media reported as a period of decreased violence-107 Israelis were killed and 821 Palestinians. In other words, the media were using a highly Israeli-centric index for measuring calm/violence. As I will show later, this is common.
This pattern was found to be even greater for children killed in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. In the first year, 28 Israeli children and 131 Palestinian children were killed. In 2004, eight Israeli children and 176 Palestinian children were killed. In other words, during our second study period, over 22 times more Palestinian children were killed than Israeli children.
Many people have reverse impressions of these death rates and of their trends. Perhaps even more significant, many Americans believe the chronology of deaths in this conflict to be the opposite of its reality. A survey two years after the intifada had begun found that 90 percent of respondents either had no idea which children were killed first in the conflict or thought them to be Israeli children, despite the fact that at least 82 Palestinian children were killed before a single Israeli child-and that this killing of Palestinian children had gone on for three and a half months before a single loss of life occurred among Israeli children. The single largest cause of these Palestinian deaths was gunfire to the head.
Our studies show why so many Americans have such diametrically incorrect impressions.
In the first year of coverage, The New York Times headlines and first paragraphs reported on Israeli deaths at a rate almost three times greater than Palestinian deaths. This 2.8 to one ratio was the closest to parity that we found in all of our studies. Perhaps that is why some pro-Israeli groups allege that the Times is "pro-Palestinian."
ABC, CBS, and NBC covered Israeli deaths at rates 3.1, 3.8, and 4.0 times greater, respectively, than they covered Palestinian deaths.
What does this mean for people who relied on these sources for their understanding of the conflict? One of the most noteworthy aspects of this type of coverage is that it creates an illusion that roughly the same number of Israelis and Palestinians have died in the conflict: all of the media outlets reported similar numbers of deaths on both sides. ABC reported on 305 Israeli deaths and 327 Palestinian deaths. The Times reported on 197 Israeli deaths and 233 Palestinian deaths in headlines and first paragraphs. CBS and NBC both reported on more Israeli deaths than Palestinian deaths. Hence, they were all giving the impression of balanced coverage of a balanced violence during a time when 3.3 times more Palestinians were being killed.
For children, the disparity in coverage was even larger for all four outlets.
The New York Times reported prominently on Israeli children's deaths at a rate almost 7 times greater than Palestinian children's deaths.
Significantly, we found that while the number of New York Times prominent reports on Israeli children's deaths, through follow-up stories, exceeded 100%, prominent reports on Palestinian children's deaths represented a small fraction of the number actually killed.
As a result, Times's coverage gave the impression that more Israeli children were killed than Palestinian children during a time when 4.7 more Palestinian children were actually killed.
Most of the networks were even worse: ABC reported Israeli children's deaths at a rate 13.8 times greater than Palestinian children's deaths, CBS at a rate 6.4 times greater, and NBC at a rate 12.4 times greater.
Again, we saw a pattern among the networks in which there were numerous follow-up stories on Israeli deaths, while only a small fraction of Palestinian deaths were being similarly covered:
In 2004, these distortions were amplified.
The New York Times reported prominently on overall Israeli deaths at a rate 3.7 times greater than Palestinian deaths, and on Israeli children's deaths at a rate 7.5 times greater than Palestinian children's deaths.
ABC, CBS, and NBC reported Israeli children's deaths at rates 9.0, 12.8, and 9.9 times greater, respectively, than Palestinian children's deaths.
A chronological graph of actual and reported deaths can be found on our website www.ifamericansknew.org. In all four news outlets (The New York Times, ABC, CBS, NBC) for both years of study, Palestinian deaths were reported along a curve that closely resembled the Israeli death rate, when in reality the actual curve for Palestinian deaths is far higher and slopes upward far sooner. This provides a striking illustration of the difference between the reality, in which deaths are heavily concentrated on one side, and the impression created in the major American media of a balanced conflict.
In our one-month sub-study of deaths reported in full New York Times articles (as opposed to the headlines and lead paragraphs), we found that the disparity in reporting grew even greater. The number of Palestinian deaths that were reported increased when the entire articles were studied-ten Palestinian deaths were reported for the first and only time in the last two paragraphs of articles-but we found that reports of Israeli deaths increased also, and at an even greater rate, due to the repetition of reports on Israeli deaths that had occurred in previous days.
Regarding Times's coverage of cumulative totals, information that would have at least somewhat ameliorated the above misimpressions, we found that The Times had never reported numbers for both populations side by side within the first paragraphs or headlines of articles. (Cumulatives were defined as reports summarizing deaths over a period of time greater than one week.)
Once in 2004, the paper reported a partial (e.g., for a shorter period of time than the entire intifada) cumulative figure of Palestinian deaths. Such a cumulative, however, without corresponding statistics for both populations, does little to enlighten readers on the comparative deaths among all people in the region.
In our month-long sub-study of full articles, The Times did mention full cumulative counts of fatalities for both populations side by side twice: once in paragraph 14 and once in paragraph 20 of an article.
The networks, also, rarely provided full two-sided cumulative reports, and partial two-sided cumulatives were only rarely given. Instead, we found that it was far more common for the networks to report one-sided cumulatives. These, whether full or partial, make it more difficult for the viewer to make a comparison and draw conclusions on the relative levels of violence. In fact, such one-sided cumulatives may at times do more to obscure understanding of the conflict than to enhance it. For example, ABC's March 22 report was typical: "Hamas has killed hundreds of Israelis over the years." We're not told over how many years, or how many hundreds. We're also not told how many Palestinians have been killed during this period-probably at least three times more.
The networks' full one-sided cumulative reports display an interesting pattern. All three networks reported full cumulatives of Palestinian deaths without corresponding numbers for Israelis in the first few months of the uprising, but quickly discontinued this practice. As the conflict continued, we found that cumulative reports of Israeli fatalities often provided information on extensive periods of time-frequently back to the beginning of the uprising or even before, while cumulative reports of Palestinian deaths tended to cover far shorter periods of time-often only weeks. Thus, similar numbers of deaths were frequently reported in these cumulatives, despite the fact that throughout the conflict Palestinians have been killed in substantially larger numbers than Israelis.
"BALANCE"
This phenomenon of achieving a deceptive appearance of reportorial "balance," achieved through actual enormous imbalance, was documented first by analyst Seth Ackerman of the media monitoring organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).
Ackerman conducted a study of National Public Radio's coverage of Israeli and Palestinian deaths during the first six months of 2001, and entitled his report "The Illusion of Balance." Ackerman found that NPR, which was being accused by Israel partisans as being "pro-Palestinian," had in reality reported Israeli deaths at a rate almost two and a half times greater than Palestinian ones, and Israeli children's deaths at rates almost four and a half times greater than Palestinian deaths. (For his study, Ackerman considered each reported death only once. If follow-up reports had been included, it is possible that the disparity would have been even larger.)
Moreover, Ackerman's study included an additional and extremely interesting category: a comparison of reports on deaths of armed combatants among both populations. He found that while an Israeli civilian victim was more likely to have his or her death reported on NPR, Palestinians were far more likely to have their deaths reported if they were security personnel than if they were civilians. Such distortion, of course, gives the impression that the Israelis being killed are civilians, and that the Palestinians being killed are armed fighters. The reality is that large numbers of civilians are being killed on both sides, and that far more Palestinian civilians have been killed than Israeli civilians.
Such distortion on a national scale often grows even greater on a local level, as news stories are cut to fit smaller editorial holes and editors choose which to place on front pages.
For example, a six-month study of the San Francisco Chronicle's coverage of children's deaths during the first six months of the intifada found that they had reported Israeli children's deaths at a rate 30 times greater than Palestinian children's deaths.
A similar study by Stanford professor John McManus of media monitoring organization Grade the News found that San Jose Mercury News front-page headlines had reported on Israeli deaths at a rate 11 times greater than Palestinian deaths. McManus found that during this period AP headlines had featured Israeli deaths at twice the rate they reported Palestinian deaths.
We have not yet conducted a formal study of the Los Angeles Times's coverage. In several cases it has run important stories that were omitted from The New York Times, and overall its coverage appears less distorted. Yet, one evening in February 2005, a breaking news report on their website stated that a suicide bombing had "shattered a months-long period of relative calm...."
I phoned the foreign desk immediately-there was still time to correct this story before it was published in the following day's print version-and pointed out that this alleged "months-long period of relative calm" had in reality been a time of particularly high Palestinian casualties. The preceding months had included the killing of 170 Palestinian men, women, and children and the wounding of 379 more.
I was told that the story said the calm was "relative," and therefore would not be modified. Not only did the next day's paper contain this highly false statement, the LA Times refused to print a single op-ed or letter to the editor correcting it, despite receiving many. By the way, the story carried a double byline. I looked into the reporters and found that one was a neophyte to the Middle East, while the other was an Israeli whose son was about to join the Israeli military.
REACTIONS FROM THE MEDIA
How have these news organization responded to such studies?
In our reports we write: "Given that the media have a desire and a responsibility to cover this topic accurately, we provide these reports in the hope that our analyses can assist them in achieving this goal." In our conclusions, we use almost the identical words that we used in one of our very first studies: "We assume that the San Francisco Chronicle is as disturbed as we have been to find these shortfalls in its quest to provide excellent news reporting to its readers. Now that it has been alerted to these distortions in its Israel-Palestine coverage, we encourage the Chronicle to undertake whatever changes necessary to provide accurate news coverage of this vital issue."
Sadly, it appears that the Chronicle was indeed as disturbed as we were-but not at the distortion we had documented. Rather, indications have been that the paper was only disturbed that the profound flaws in their coverage were being exposed; there seems to be little interest in remedying the situation. Numerous phone calls to editor Phil Bronstein to present our findings in person remained unreturned. When we had the opportunity to ask Bronstein about it at a community forum, he publicly promised he would meet with us to discuss our findings. However, he has continued to refuse to meet with us.
It is interesting to note that Bronstein got his start at the San Francisco Jewish Bulletin, where one of his early journalistic exposés was on American corporations participating in the international boycott of Israel (Congress, following Israel's directions, had made such financial pressure on Israel illegal).
Despite the Chronicle's lack of interest in our findings, several local organizations and many individuals have found them important and have distributed thousands of summaries of our report throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. We have presented our findings to a variety of Bay Area Rotary Clubs, at libraries, schools, and college campuses, and have discussed them on a number of radio programs. In addition, thousands of people have read our report online.
Other editors around the country have been more open to meeting with us. The reception has been mixed. Some editors of smaller papers were extremely surprised at the number of Palestinians actually being killed, and clearly had no idea that their coverage was so distorted. Their frequent conclusion-that the wire services that they subscribe to for international news stories bore much of the blame for this distortion-no doubt holds some validity.
The New York Times, unable to use the same excuse, instead has tried to ignore our evidence. An April 24, 2005 column by Public Editor Daniel Okrent on the Times coverage of Israel/Palestine, published a week after we had presented our findings to him in detail during a lengthy face-to-face meeting, omitted all mention of our two-year study of The Times's coverage, the forty-plus pages of documentation we provided, and our significant findings. He did mention our organization, however, in a statement misrepresenting our views.
Interestingly, during the meeting in which we presented our findings, Okrent had asked us what we felt was the cause for the Times distortion, and how we would fix it.
We gave two answers: that figuring out where their system had broken down was up to them. They are the only ones who know the internal workings of the Times newsroom and thus are the best equipped to discover what is wrong.
At the same time, I told Okrent that I wondered how diverse their team of editors and reporters working on this issue is. Since Israel's purpose and avowed identity is as "the Jewish state," I commented that it seemed to me there should be approximately equal numbers of Jewish journalists and Palestinian/Arab/Muslim journalists, as well as journalists without ethnic connections to either side-perhaps African-American, Asian-American, or editors and reporters from other non-involved ethnicities .
He responded that there were insufficient numbers of Arab-American or Muslim-American journalists to balance out the many Jewish reporters in this country, and ignored the suggestion that people of other, neutral ethnicities be involved in covering this issue.
In his subsequent April 24, 2005 column, Okrent claimed that we had suggested that if insufficient Arab/Muslim reporters could be found to balance Jewish reporters, then Jewish reporters should "be taken off the beat." Okrent said that he found this "highly offensive." I was shocked to see this misrepresentation of our meeting. If Americans Knew is opposed to discrimination in all its forms; proposing exclusion of any person based on ethnic or religious background is the antithesis of our philosophy. Moreover, there are many journalists of Jewish descent (several mentioned in this article) writing honestly and accurately on this subject (as on others), who bring valuable expertise and ability to their reporting. The last thing I would want would be to exclude such people. Rather than suggesting that any group be excluded, we had actually suggested that the Times include more ethnicities.
Outraged at his misrepresentation, I phoned and wrote The Times several times asking that a correction be published. Finally, at the bottom of his next column he stated I felt he had misrepresented our meeting, and added, "... interested readers can find her critique at www.ifamericansknew.com."
Interestingly, analysis of the space allotted to the "two sides" in this follow-up column shows more lack of balance. While Okrent juxtaposes If Americans Knew with a pro-Israel organization, and exudes the manner of one taking neither "side," he gives the highly pro-Israel organization 206 words, most of them high up in the column, and If Americans Knew only 44, at the end, again without informing readers of our detailed study.
As I responded in a letter to the editor, not published, this is a differential of approximately five to one (not even including the additional factor of placement), and an excellent index of the Times "balance" on this subject.
In a conversation with Times Deputy Foreign Editor Ethan Bronner, I was surprised to find Bronner similarly stating that it was impossible for The Times to find Arab or Muslim-American journalists to report on Palestine: he said that "...there aren't hundreds of Arab or Muslim-Americans journalists in America." I have no idea how many Arab-American or Muslim-American journalists there are (or how many Jewish-American journalists). All the Times needs to balance its Jewish reporters in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, however, is two. I don't know how many editors serve on The Times's foreign desk, but I suspect that attaining some approximation of balance at this level as well would also entail low single digits. We're not talking armies of journalists here.
(A longer report on my communications with The Times is available on our website.)
WHAT IS CAUSING THE DISTORTION?
One of the most common responses to our studies is a question: what is causing this distortion? This is an extremely important question, since solutions require that the cause of a problem be correctly diagnosed. Answering it accurately and with precision will require further study, and, given sufficient resources, perhaps this is something we will undertake in the future. We encourage others to investigate it as well.
Following are some possible factors to be studied.
1. Do statistical or contextual patterns explain why Israeli deaths are covered more frequently? For example, do Israeli deaths occur in spurts, while Palestinians die more frequently but in smaller numbers, making the instances less newsworthy?
Analyses of the data on deaths suggest that there are no such patterns. There were cases where small numbers of deaths on the Israeli side resulted in headlines, and large numbers on the Palestinian side did not. Similarly, as we've stated above, civilians are being killed among both populations, children on both sides.
Still, more detailed work on this question would be valuable. Analyses along the lines of Seth Ackerman's work in examining which deaths among both populations are being reported would be useful in clarifying coverage patterns.
2. Is there a vicious cycle of reporting at work? If the type of distortion our studies revealed on the media is not new, then journalists may have developed a particular mindset on this issue based on years of flawed reporting, which then influences how they themselves cover it.
Many journalists follow the news avidly, media reports providing their contextual understanding of Israel-Palestine. Editors who have neither studied the issue nor visited the region feel they are experts on it, and may find it hard to believe that coverage which is in line with the news they view on television and read in The New York Times is distorted. Conversely, accurate facts and reports that don't fit this preconceived paradigm may be rejected.
3. How significant is the fact that American correspondents tend to live exclusively in Israel? In some cases (perhaps many or most cases), their partners and spouses are Israeli, as, at times, are their children. One of ABC's major correspondents in the region, Martin Fletcher, is an example.
As noted above, bureaus are in Israel, and are largely staffed by Israelis. It is probably not surprising that these journalists are filing articles from an Israeli-centric perspective. It is important to note, however, that this intimate knowledge of the region they're covering may bring valuable depth to their reporting. On the other hand, the lack of journalists with this kind of first-hand life experience reporting from the Palestinian Territories may account for the massive imbalance we have found in news coverage. While reports from Palestinian journalists could help to counter this lack, the fact that these reports are being screened and edited by journalists living in Israel can be expected to diminish the balance such reporting could otherwise have provided.
4. Along these lines, to what extent is personal bias involved in creating the distortion we've found?
Journalists, like other people, possess prejudices and preferences, loyalties and allegiances. Early conditioning, family pressure, and received narratives are difficult to put aside. Such biases may color, intentionally or unconsciously, one's writing or editing on a subject.
An article entitled "Jewish journalists grapple with 'doing the write thing,'" in the Nov. 23, 2001 Jewish Bulletin of Northern California looked into this question, interviewing journalism students about how they would cover Israel. Its findings were inconclusive. Some students felt they would cover Israel impartially, some didn't. The Bulletin described one of the latter, Uzi Safanov: "'I'm a Jew before being a journalist, before someone pays me to write,' he said. 'If I find a negative thing about Israel, I will not print it and I will sink into why did it happen and what can I do to change it.' Safanov said that even if he eventually wrote about negative incidents that happen in Israel, he would try to find the way 'to shift the blame.'"
Another also spoke of the need to protect Israel: "'On campus there is already so much anti-Israeli sentiment that we have to be careful about any additional criticism against Israel,' said Marita Gringaus, who used to write for Arizona State University's newspaper. 'This is our responsibility as Jews, which obviously contradicts our responsibilities as journalists.'"
Still another felt that her background would inescapably affect her reporting, the Bulletin reporting: "...Meyers feels a loyalty to Jewish values. 'It doesn't matter if you are a journalist or in another profession... Our Jewish values influence every aspect of our lives. Nobody can be totally objective because we all come with our own perspective, our own biases, and that is going to come through in the writing.'"
On the other hand, there are numerous excellent Israeli and Jewish journalists reporting on this issue accurately. Some Israeli reporters regularly file investigative stories on Israeli abuses in the occupied territories. Similarly, some of the student interviewees in the Jewish Bulletin article stressed the importance of reporting honestly and without prejudice. For example, one student said, "Journalists have to realize the importance of unbiased reporting, the fairness of portraying both sides. They are not supposed to be agencies."
5. How large a part do outside pressure and pro-active news dissemination play in shaping news coverage?
Partisan groups are known for organizing phone-calling and letter-writing campaigns; boycotts have been organized against NPR and the LA Times, alleging that their coverage was "anti-Israel." An off-the-record comment made by the editorial page editor of a large metropolitan daily is noteworthy: "We write our editorials for our Jewish readers." Has there been a view that Israel is a "Jewish" subject, and that articles should be tailored to a particular, expected readership that these editors think holds a monolithic view on this subject? While pro-Palestinian groups are also beginning to organize media campaigns, these are still far smaller-an editor quoted in an article in American Journalism Review estimated them at one-tenth the activity level of pro-Israel efforts.
Similarly, how significant is lobbying by the Israeli government and pro-Israel organizations?
Israel makes great efforts at influencing the American media. The Israeli government employs such high-powered public relations firms as Howard J. Rubenstein Associates and Morris, Carrick & Guma to promote its version of events, and there are numerous think-tanks such as the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), the Middle East Forum, and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy actively disseminating information beneficial to Israel. Again, Palestinian officials and partisans are making similar efforts, but their activities are currently far smaller, their financing a fraction of that being mobilized on behalf of Israel, and they entered the game late.
6. To what degree do financial considerations of the "corporate media" influence news coverage?
Advertising and consumer pressures of the type noted above, interlocking business arrangements, and the quest for profits all need to be examined. The dynamics of these and the degree to which they're operative on Israeli-Palestinian coverage are unclear, particularly since coverage of Israel-Palestine so often reveals patterns of reporting that seem to lie outside the expected ratings-driven paradigm.
For example, reporting on Israel's killing of Rachel Corrie, a beautiful young American whose actions are seen by many around the world as extraordinarily heroic, would likely have increased viewership and sold newspapers. Yet reports on this incident were minimal and follow-up stories virtually nonexistent. Similarly, footage of Israeli soldiers shooting at the cross on the Church of the Nativity and taking pot shots at a statue of the Virgin Mary would, no doubt, have generated considerable audience interest. These stories still went unreported.
7. Finally, to what extent do the views of owners/management set the agenda for coverage?
Mortimer Zuckerman, at various times the owner of U.S. News & World Report, The Atlantic, and The New York Daily News, is passionately pro-Israel and is known, in general, for imposing his views on news content. A plethora of other owners/publishers/executives express similarly strong views, sit on pro-Israel boards, exhibit patterns of giving to Israeli organizations, etc. How significant is this factor? Do such individuals set general or specific policies for their news staffs, and if so, how are they manifested?
Without further study it is impossible to know which of the above factors, possible additional factors, or combinations are creating the situation we find today. What is less complex, are the results.
SHAPING COVERAGE
Several San Francisco Chronicle reporters and writers who had occasionally written about Israel/Palestine have been let go, transferred or demoted.
The experience of veteran Chronicle journalist Henry Norr is a case in point. Norr was fired in 2003 after he took part in an anti-war demonstration. Norr, who reported on technology, not on the war, had participated in the demonstration on his own time. He contested his firing and ended up winning a substantial out-of-court settlement from the Chronicle. Norr had also been active on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He suspects that his activities regarding Palestine, rather than his participation in the demonstration, were the underlying cause of his firing.
In July 2002, Norr wrote about an Intel factory constructed illegally on Palestinian land from which Israel had ejected the Palestinian owners. In a radio interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now after his firing, Norr described the Chronicle's reaction to the story, which had received a great deal of criticism from the Israeli lobby: "...I was told this was an inappropriate topic and I wasn't supposed to write such things anymore."
Norr went on to discuss a vacation-time trip during which he and his wife participated in nonviolent protest activities in the West Bank. When he returned to work, he described his trip to colleagues: "I put together a little lunchtime presentation and slideshow, a little discussion of what I had seen and observed and heard. And apparently management didn't like that very much. Apparently there was somebody who attended that presentation ... [who] reported to management that I made anti-Semitic remarks and so on, which is really a big joke. I mean, I'm Jewish by background and I don't think I'm the least bit anti-Semitic. However, I'm deeply opposed to the policy of the Israeli government."
Less than a year later Henry Norr was out.
Such veiled but firm management policies don't appear unique.
John Wheat Gibson, a former journalist who worked as a reporter and journalism instructor for a number of years before finally leaving for a different career, found a similar pro-Israel climate at Cox Newspapers, one of the nation's top newspaper chains, with 17 daily newspapers, including the Atlanta Constitution and 30 non-daily papers around the country: "As a journalist in the 1970s," Gibson recalls, "I found that a rigid bias against objective reporting and in favor of Israel was a prerequisite for employment with a daily newspaper in the Cox chain. I never understood why, since I saw no evidence the major advertisers in the media market were Zionists."
My own personal experiences with newspaper chains have been illuminating.
A few years ago a reporter from the Gannett newspapers planned to do an article about me and If Americans Knew, which had just begun operating. Gannett is one of the largest news outlets in the nation, with 102 daily newspapers in the United States, including USA Today, the nation's largest-selling daily newspaper, for a combined daily paid circulation of 7.6 million readers. Gannett also owns a variety of non-daily publications and USA WEEKEND, a weekly newspaper magazine of 22.7 million circulation delivered in more than 600 Gannett and non-Gannett newspapers. As if this weren't enough, Gannett also owns and operates 21 television stations covering almost 20 percent of the country.
Needless to say, a Gannett article about our fledgling organization was quite exciting. He interviewed me at considerable length about my experiences in the West Bank and Gaza, sent out a photographer to take pictures of me at home, and directed her to Fed Ex them immediately.
Then we waited. After a few months, I e-mailed him to ask if I'd missed the piece. He e-mailed back, no I hadn't missed it. The article had been shelved: "... the top guy here feels like the story is 'missing' something." The article, apparently, is still on the shelf.
At the other end of the newspaper chain spectrum is a small company in Rhinebeck, New York. A reporter from this chain also wrote an article about us. To his surprise, his boss axed it. Despite his protests, the piece was never published.
Killing such stories carries significance beyond simply suppressing the specific information they contain. Perhaps of even greater importance, it sends a very clear message to journalists about what one may report, and what one may not, if one is to get ahead in American journalism.
This article has only scratched the surface of the distortion, omission, and suppression I have come across as I have looked into press coverage of Israel and the Palestinian territories over the past four and a half years. Some of the other recent stories that haven't made it into the American media consciousness include:
-A story about the 1967 Israeli attack on an American ship, the U.S.S. Liberty, has been in the works at Nightline for over a year; surviving crew members have been interviewed, the Naval officer who blew the whistle on the cover-up on this attack was filmed a year ago. It, too, is still on the shelf.
-A report describing the harsh treatment of over 300 Palestinian youths being held in Israeli prisons was distributed by AP only on its international wire. In other words, it went to the U.K., Europe, Asia, South America-all over the world. The only place it didn't go was the United States. I read it on an Israeli newspaper website. When I asked AP spokesman Jack Stokes why this report was considered newsworthy in Norway but not in New York, Stokes said that not all stories are sent out on all newswires; AP editors use their news judgment in making these decisions.
-A potentially explosive piece by investigative journalist and author Stephen Green exposing the fact that some of the nation's top officials have been repeatedly investigated for spying for Israel fizzled. No newspapers picked it up, no wire services sent it out, no television stations reported it.
-A letter to the national headquarters of the Presbyterian Church threatening to torch Presbyterian churches across the country-while worshipers were inside-unless church leaders changed their position opposing Israeli human rights violations was barely reported. There was nothing on CBS, nothing on CNN, nothing on PBS, nothing on NPR. Not a single major newspaper notified readers of this threat.
There are multitudes of such stories.
In 1904 Joseph Pulitzer warned: "Our republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public spirited press with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself." Over 100 years before Pulitzer's words, our forefathers similarly considered an informed population such a fundamental necessity for our democracy that they established freedom of the press in the very first sentence of the Bill of Rights.
Yet today, time after time in meeting with editors and publishers responsible for informing Americans fully and accurately on Israel-Palestine-one of the world's most destabilizing, tragic and longstanding conflicts-we have found people too partisan, too ambitious, too neglectful, too fearful, or too jaded to fulfill their profoundly important responsibilities.
It is critical that we repair our faltering press.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is central to grave events in the world-and in our nation-today. The United States is currently fighting a war against Middle East "terror" that contains neither temporal nor geographic limits. Our population is being whipped up to fear and oppose an entire religion and untold millions of people whose ethnicity make them "enemies." Our security is threatened, our children are in peril, and our national morality is up for grabs.
It is urgent that Americans become informed. It is urgent that we share our information with others, that we require honesty and accuracy from our media, and that we affirm the principles that make the world safe for all people.
We cannot wait for others to do this. â
Comment on this Article
It's Only Money
Elbit Systems in US border security tender
Amir Keidan 21 Aug 06 14:42
[Israeli] company's US unit is in a Boeing-led group bidding in a $2b. Homeland Security tender.
New Hampshire paper "UnionLeader" reports that Elbit Systems Ltd. (Nasdaq: ESLT; TASE: ESLT) subsidiary Kollsman Inc. is part of a consortium participating in a $2 billion US Department of Homeland Security tender to build a border security fence designed to reduce the influx of illegal immigrants. Boeing (NYSE:BA) is leading the consortium. The Secure Border Initiative (SBI) program, or SBInet, is a multiyear plan to secure the US borders with Canada and Mexico by integrating cameras and sensors with communications systems.
"UnionLeader" quotes Kollsman as saying that it and Elbit Systems have a solid track record in exactly the type of security system Homeland Security might want, and that Elbit Systems provided a border control and management system to the IDF Border Security Program known as the Long-Range Reconnaissance and Observation System (LORROS), which the company believes is the best in the world.
"Union Leader" quotes Elbit Systems VP government relations Donald Goff as saying, "Which country has the most secure border? It's Israel." He added that Boeing selected Kollsman to be part of its team to provide detection and surveillance systems because of its proven record of work as a worldwide provider to commercial and military markets of advanced electro-optical and avionics systems.
"UnionLeader" says other members of the Boeing-led consortium include DRS Surveillance and Reconnaissance Group, L-3 Government Services Inc., Perot Systems, and Unisys Global Public Sector.
Goff told "UnionLeader" that the contract would be for three years, with an option for three additional years and that the deadline to submit proposals for SBInet was May 30. He added that he expected the number of competitors to be cut to two by mid-September and the contract would be awarded before the end of September.
"UnionLeader" reports that, in addition to the Boeing consortium, Lockheed Martin Corp. Raytheon Co. (NYSE:RTN), Northrop Grumman Corp. (NYSE:NOC), and Ericsson Inc. (Nasdaq: ERICY; SAX: ERIC) are leading teams competing for the SBInet contract.
Comment on this Article
IPO delays reach five-year high
By Anuj Gangahar in New York
Financial Times
Tue Aug 22, 2006
The number of US initial public offerings that have been withdrawn or postponed so far this year has reached a five-year high, with companies being put off by uncertain market conditions and a difficult capital raising environment.
A total of 44 planned offerings worth a combined $10bn have been withdrawn or postponed, according to Dealogic. It is the highest level of withdrawals or postponements since 2001, when 127 deals worth a combined $12.8bn were pulled during the same period.
Uncertainty about the US Federal Reserve's interest rate policy alongside worries about inflation, rising oil prices and volatile equity markets have made investors wary about taking on new stock issues, especially in sectors perceived as more risky, such as technology, biotechnology and telecommunications, analysts say.
The technology sector has been particularly affected in terms of deals withdrawn or postponed, with 10 deals pulled this year to date.
This month alone, seven deals have been pulled across a range of sectors: the largest being the planned $1.9bn float of Telemar, the Brazilian telecommunications company.
Some companies have chosen to proceed with planned public stock offerings, despite the challenging conditions, with varying degrees of success.
Infineon, Europe's second-largest semiconductor maker, was recently forced to slash the size of the partial float of Qimonda, its memory chip unit, on the New York Stock Exchange. At $546m it was down from an expected figure of more than $1.1bn. The company cited challenging market conditions and uncertain investor sentiment. Even at the reduced size, it was the largest float by a non-US company on the NYSE this year.
Cowen Group, the investment banking unit being spun out of Société Générale, the French bank, saw its shares tumble by 5.25 per cent on its Nasdaq debut last month.
Some 47 deals came to the market during the second quarter this year, raising a combined $10.3bn, according to IPO research firm Renaissance Capital.
The best week for issuance this year was May 22-28 when MasterCard staged its $2.6bn float. MasterCard is the only company of the top 10 IPOs by size to have listed in the US this year. Many overseas companies have opted to float their shares in their home markets or in London because of concerns about the stiff regulatory regime in the US.
Comment on this Article
Putin hails the new economy as Russia wipes $22bn off its debts
By Gabriel Rozenberg
TimesOnline
22 August 06
RUSSIA has finally paid off its Soviet-era debts to the Paris Club of wealthy nations in a dramatic display of the country's new-found economic clout.
The repayment of $22.5 billion (£11.9 billion) that Russia's Vnesheconombank made yesterday was the largest-ever repayment to the Paris Club of 19 creditor countries.
Analysts said that ratings agencies would upgrade Russia's sovereign rating after the clearest sign yet of President Putin's determination to use the soaring value of Russian oil to clean up his country's reputation on the financial markets.
The move knocked about a third off the country's foreign debts, which previously stood at $70 billion.
Russia had been due to pay off the debts by 2020, but the sharp rise in the price of oil has engineered a dramatic improvement in the country's fortunes. That enabled it to bring the repayment forward, at an estimated saving of $12 billion.
Under the terms of a deal agreed in June, Russia also agreed to pay a premium of $1 billion to compensate the creditors for lost interest.
In its budget provisions, Germany, the biggest creditor, had allowed for the debt to be unpaid until 2015.
Mr Putin said: "We used to live with our hand held out for many years . . . but now the Russian economy cannot only repay debts but do so ahead of time."
The Finance Ministry said that the repayment would reduce Russia's foreign debts as a share of GDP to just 9 per cent. "The early repayment to creditor nations was made possible by growth in the economic and financial might of Russia," it said.
"Repaying the entire sum . . . will facilitate a strengthening of Russia's international authority as a state with significant financial reserves and stable borrowing."
Christopher Green, senior economist at the Moscow Narodny Bank in London, said that the move had political implications as well as making economic sense. "It reflects the emergence of Russia as an economy on to the global stage," he said.
Russia, the world's second- largest oil exporter, has enjoyed a marked turnaround in its fortunes since its $40 billion domestic debt default and rouble devaluation in 1998.
At that time the price of oil was below $13 a barrel, compared with nearly $72 a barrel yesterday.
Two years ago, Russia set up a budget stabilisation fund to insulate it against fluctuations in the price of oil.
Over the past year the country has redeemed more than $40 billion of debts.
In another sign of strength, the rouble was made fully convertible at the start of July, six months ahead of schedule.
Following the repayment, Standard & Poor's and Moody's, the ratings agencies, are widely expected to grant Russia an upgrade. Moody's rates Russia Baa2 while S&P rates it BBB. Fitch upgraded the country last month to BBB+.
Mr Green said: "To a large extent, the profile of economic activity in Russia will depend on oil prices. Going forward, you are probably likely to see further improvements. This is a very favourable time for Russia."
FALL AND RISE
August 1998: after months of pressure on the nation's currency, Russia announces devaluation of the rouble and suspension of the market in government bonds. Shares plunge and Russia announces default on its $40 billion foreign loans, which date back to the Soviet era
March 2000: Vladimir Putin elected President
2004: Russian Stabilisation Fund established
August 2005: Russia pays off $15 billion of Paris Club debts
July 2006: Rouble becomes convertible currency
August 2006: Russia pays off remaining $22.5 billion Paris Club debts
# Paris Club debts written off include Germany ($7.7bn), France ($1.8bn), Finland ($300m), Denmark ($120m), Switzerland ($65m) as well as debts to Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, UK and US
Comment on this Article
California to raise minimum wage to highest in US
By Jim Christie
Reuters
Tue Aug 22, 2006
SAN FRANCISCO - California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state lawmakers reached a deal late Monday to hike the minimum wage to the highest level in the nation, aides said on Tuesday.
The agreement between the Republican governor and the Democrat-led legislature's leaders would increase California's minimum wage by $1.25 over the next year and a half to $8 an hour. The deal calls for an increase of 75 cents an hour next January and a rise of 50 cents an hour the following January.
The new wage would be 25 cents more than initially offered by Schwarzenegger, who vetoed previous bills to hike the state's minimum wage. In exchange, Democrats dropped demands the wage automatically adjust upward with inflation changes.
Schwarzenegger, a fiscal conservative and ally of business groups concerned about the cost of doing business in California, said the state economy had recovered and companies could afford to pay minimum-wage workers more.
"I have always said that when the economy was ready, we should reward the efforts of California's hard-working families by raising our minimum wage," he said in statement.
The agreement would benefit low-paid workers, said Assembly Member Sally Lieber, a Democrat who had advanced a minimum wage bill earlier this year. "We have a moral obligation to ensure that the minimum wage keeps pace with federal poverty guidelines. This bill does that," she said.
Business groups and labor unions were not pleased by the agreement, which Democratic lawmakers can pass without votes from minority Republicans.
"We appreciate the governor's opposition to indexing the minimum wage and not walking into automatic increases, but we still oppose increasing the minimum wage," said Michael Shaw, an officer of the National Federation of Independent Business, a small-business advocacy group. "It takes away resources from business owners, who are in the best position to decide how to invest in their companies."
Art Pulaski, secretary-treasurer of the California Labor Federation, said the state's AFL-CIO could live without an inflation-adjusted minimum wage over the near term.
"We realize that from a Republican governor who is so close to big corporations ... that we would never get him there," Pulaski said. "Fortunately, it's an election year, so we leveraged that to push him to do something."
Schwarzenegger is running for re-election against Democratic challenger and state Treasurer Phil Angelides, who is favored by unions, and is moving to improve his standing with Democrats and independent voters who turned against him in a controversial special election he called last year.
The Hollywood icon signed a bill on Monday that aims to make California one of the world's biggest producers of solar energy and is in talks with lawmakers on a bill to cap industrial emissions of greenhouse gas, popular ideas in a Democrat-leaning state where environmental issues rank high with voters.
Angelides said in a statement he would back an inflation-adjusted minimum wage.
"After three years of denying Californians the minimum wage increase they deserve, Governor Schwarzenegger is now trying to save his own job by giving minimum support to the minimum wage," Angelides added.
Comment on this Article
Medicare drug benefit hits $50M glitch
By KEVIN FREKING
Associated Press
Wed Aug 23, 2006
WASHINGTON - Don't cash that check. The federal government has erroneously reimbursed about 230,000 Medicare recipients for monthly premiums they paid this year for prescription drug coverage. For many, the checks - totaling nearly $50 million - have already arrived.
The refund will undoubtedly cause confusion, particularly because it comes with a letter that mistakenly instructs seniors that their monthly premiums will no longer be deducted from their Social Security check.
Mark McClellan, who oversees the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said people who get the check need to know two things. One, the money has to be returned. Two, their prescription drug coverage will continue.
"It's very important for people to know their coverage is continuing," he said. "There's no disruption at all."
Medicare officials say they caught the glitch just after the checks were sent out last week. As a result, they sent a second letter Tuesday letting people know about the problem. The average overpayment comes to about $215.
About 5 million people pay their monthly premiums for Medicare drug coverage by having the government withhold the money from their Social Security check.
McClellan said his agency will make sure that insurers who administer the new drug benefit continue to get paid for the beneficiaries caught up in the error. He said that his agency was responsible for the error and that the subsequent letter contains an apology.
The error occurred as McClellan's agency updated the
Social Security Administration about various changes in coverage that beneficiaries had requested. For instance, beneficiaries contact CMS because they want to switch plans or change how they pay their monthly premiums. CMS contacts Social Security officials because the changes often require an adjustment in the amount deducted from a beneficiary's checks. In this instance, the wrong information was transmitted, McClellan said.
McClellan also said that beneficiaries need to know the government won't be able to start making monthly premium deductions again until October.
He said the agency will work with beneficiaries who face a money crunch in the fall because they had already cashed the check from the Social Security Administration or because they can't afford to have premiums from a few months deducted from one Social Security check.
"The amounts involved here are generally not large, but we want to make sure that as we account for these extra payments, we do it in a way that's not burdensome," McClellan said. "There are a number of approaches we can take, including doing (repayment) over time if necessary when it's not a trivial amount of money for the beneficiary."
Comment on this Article
That's Just Weird
Crop Circles Puzzle Geneseo Illinois Officials
by Christina Palladino
4 Eyewitness News
22 August 06
GENESEO, IL - A mystery has planted itself firmly in the middle of a 90 acre field of soybeans in Henry County.
The question now is, are the five crop circles a natural phenomenon or the work of pranksters?
Phenomena experts say the strange circles have killed farmers' crops for centuries and they still have no answers as to how they form, but other folks say they believe it's the work of higher powers.
Henry County Sheriff Gib Cady had no real explanation for the phone call Saturday morning to report mysterious damage to a soybean crop west of Geneseo. His department had a bit of fun with the situation, asking people to call CrimeStoppers if they saw any UFO's with soybeans trailing behind.
But all kidding aside, the bizarre scene near Jim Stahl's soybean field has a lot of people scratching their heads. And phenomena experts are taking samples of the flattened crop to see what could have caused the crop circles.
"No one has been able to determine really how they're made or who makes genuine ones," said JoAnne Scarpellini, an investigator. "Many, many total fakes...total frauds."
Scarpellini says crop circles are certainly no urban legend. In fact, they've been killing farmers' crops since the first ones appeared in the late 1700's in England. She says every so often crop circles are spotted in fields throughout the Midwest, but to this day researchers have not been able to find out how they're made.
And she says there's no basis to the UFO stories.
"No one has seen a UFO making a crop circle," she said. "Until that happens, I can't say who does it or how they do it."
The circles have attracted people from Geneseo and other parts of the area. Some think it's just teenagers playing a joke but others say it could be from extraterrestrial beings.
"I watch it all the time on the Discovery Channel," said Luke Rawlings of Galva, Illinois. "You see all kinds of stuff like this. I just couldn't believe it. I had to see it with my own eyes."
"It's nothing serious," said Dave Paxton of Geneseo. "I think it's pranksters who got in there, because you can get in and out of a cornfield and a bean field without leaving any type of tracks."
The three biggest crop circles are 50 feet in diameter.
The dead soybeans will be tested and then compared to the healthy ones to see if they can determine what caused them all to fall flat and die. Because of the large circles, the entire crop will have to be destroyed.
People in Geneseo are scratching their heads over an unusual sight in the middle of a soybean field.
You can see in the pictures what has them so confused. The field has been damaged by what's being described as several circles with no path in or out of the field.
Over the weekend, Henry County Sheriff's officials said jokingly, if you have happen to see a UFO with soybeans attached to it, to contact them.
Comment on this Article
UFO lit up northern skies in Norway - A top astronomer thinks it was another meteorite.
Nina Berglund
Aftenposten
22 August 06
"It was colored white, green and gold, and lights seemed to blow off it like it was a sparkler," said one observer, Andre Grønmo. "It looked like it was a comet, and it was around four- to five times larger than a plane, and it flew much faster."
Several police districts logged reports from members of the public who observed "something" flying at high speed.
"What they're talking about here is some sort of flying object, and we can't explain what it was," Oddgeir Slettli, operations leader for the Midtre Hålogaland Police District, told dagbladet.no.
Observations were reported from Finnsnes to Trondheim. The main search and rescue station in northern Norway (Hovedredningssentralen Nord-Norge) reported that calls also came from crews on board ships off the northern coast, according to Dagbladet.
"It was colored white, green and gold, and lights seemed to blow off it like it was a sparkler," said one observer, Andre Grønmo. "It looked like it was a comet, and it was around four- to five times larger than a plane, and it flew much faster."
Slettli said others described a "green, lighted ball with a tail" that flew low. He said neither the Defense Department's radar station or its rocket facility at Andøya, nor the tower at Evenes airport, which serves Harstad and Narvik, had picked up the object.Slettli said calls came from people in Narvik, Vesterålen and Lofoten among other places, just before midnight on Monday.
A flurry of reports also came over the Coast Guard radio, and from an SAS flight and a Hurtigruten (Coastal Voyage) passenger ship.
Knut Jørge Røed Ødegaard, one of Norway's most well-known astronomers, said he thinks the UFO was actually another meteorite, a large rock containing a lot of chemical elements. There have been confirmed reports of at least two meteorites hitting Norway since June.
"When they enter the earth's atmosphere and meet the air, they warm up and can light up in a second," he told dagbladet.no.
This one's contents, the astronomer said, could explain why it seemed to change color as it flew through the night sky, which only recently has started getting dark again after the summer's midnight sun.
Comment on this Article
Ferocious ants bite like a bullet
By Elli Leadbeater
BBC
21 August 06
Trap-jaw ants bite with a force of over 300 times their own bodyweight, new high-speed digital images have shown.
Their jaws spring shut at more than 100 km/h (66mph)- the fastest recorded speed at which an animal can move its body parts.
The pictures also reveal these tiny creatures, native to Central and South America, do more with their vicious jaws than simply giving a nasty nip.
By biting the ground, the ants hurl themselves upwards when danger looms.
A frosty reception
Uninvited visitors to a nest of trap-jaw ants can expect a vicious response.
The ants are named after their characteristically long jaws, which they use to hurl unfamiliar neighbours from their nests, cripple prey, or deliver a brutal bite to anything they consider a threat.
Employing the same high-speed imaging methods as those used to film flying bullets, an American research team now show that the jaws can move at exceptional speeds.
"This is really by far and away the fastest recorded animal limb movement" said lead researcher Sheila Patek, of the University of California, Berkeley, who worked with ants from Costa Rica.
"The ants' jaws are relatively short, but they deliver such a powerful bite because they can accelerate so quickly. It's simple physics."
Airborne antics
The new findings, reported this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also explain why the ants sometimes bounce into the air when they bite.
"If they bite something which is too hard to be crushed or thrown back by their jaws, the impact tosses them upwards" said Dr Andy Suarez of the University of Illinois, a co-author in the study.
This recoil effect propels the biter onto a brief, haphazard flight which ends in a crash landing several centimetres away.
Such a chaotic journey might seem uncomfortable, but the ants are simply too light to be injured by their misadventures. In fact, Dr Patek and her team have now shown that the ants sometimes perform the flights voluntarily.
A new way to move
By biting the hard ground, rather than another animal, the ants can propel themselves skyward whenever the need arises.
The impact throws their tiny bodies upwards. In effect, the ants are using their enormous bite force as a means to suddenly take off.
This novel way to move may help them to escape predators such as lizards, which attack very quickly and would not be discouraged by a simple bite.
The popcorn-effect of many ants jumping at once might also serve to confuse attackers.
"The results show us the surprising and interesting ways in which a single mechanical system can be co-opted for such different behaviours," says Dr Patek.
Comment on this Article
Why doesn't America believe in evolution?
Jeff Hecht
New Scientist Print Edition
19 August 2006
Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals: true or false? This simple question is splitting America apart, with a growing proportion thinking that we did not descend from an ancestral ape. A survey of 32 European countries, the US and Japan has revealed that only Turkey is less willing than the US to accept evolution as fact.
Religious fundamentalism, bitter partisan politics and poor science education have all contributed to this denial of evolution in the US, says Jon Miller of Michigan State University in East Lansing, who conducted the survey with his colleagues. "The US is the only country in which [the teaching of evolution] has been politicised," he says. "Republicans have clearly adopted this as one of their wedge issues. In most of the world, this is a non-issue."
Miller's report makes for grim reading for adherents of evolutionary theory. Even though the average American has more years of education than when Miller began his surveys 20 years ago, the percentage of people in the country who accept the idea of evolution has declined from 45 in 1985 to 40 in 2005 (Science, vol 313, p 765). That's despite a series of widely publicised advances in genetics, including genetic sequencing, which shows strong overlap of the human genome with those of chimpanzees and mice. "We don't seem to be going in the right direction," Miller says.
There is some cause for hope. Team member Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California, finds solace in the finding that the percentage of adults overtly rejecting evolution has dropped from 48 to 39 in the same time. Meanwhile the fraction of Americans unsure about evolution has soared, from 7 per cent in 1985 to 21 per cent last year. "That is a group of people that can be reached," says Scott.
The main opposition to evolution comes from fundamentalist Christians, who are much more abundant in the US than in Europe. While Catholics, European Protestants and so-called mainstream US Protestants consider the biblical account of creation as a metaphor, fundamentalists take the Bible literally, leading them to believe that the Earth and humans were created only 6000 years ago.
Ironically, the separation of church and state laid down in the US constitution contributes to the tension. In Catholic schools, both evolution and the strict biblical version of human beginnings can be taught. A court ban on teaching creationism in public schools, however, means pupils can only be taught evolution, which angers fundamentalists, and triggers local battles over evolution.
These battles can take place because the US lacks a national curriculum of the sort common in European countries. However, the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind act is instituting standards for science teaching, and the battles of what they should be has now spread to the state level.
Miller thinks more genetics should be on the syllabus to reinforce the idea of evolution. American adults may be harder to reach: nearly two-thirds don't agree that more than half of human genes are common to chimpanzees. How would these people respond when told that humans and chimps share 99 per cent of their genes?
From issue 2565 of New Scientist magazine, 19 August 2006, page 11
Comment on this Article
In Your Genes
Research shows first impressions really count
David Fickling
Wednesday August 23, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
It takes only one tenth of a second for us to make up our minds about people, according to research published today.
Only long experience can dislodge our initial preconceptions, psychologists at Princeton University, in the US, said.
They found that people made judgements about the attractiveness, likeability, trustworthiness, competence and aggressiveness of other people after looking at their faces for 100 milliseconds.
Rather than correcting initial judgements, longer glances at the same faces caused people to become more convinced of their initial opinions, the scientists found.
"The link between facial features and character may be tenuous at best, but that doesn't stop our minds from sizing other people up at a glance," Alex Todorov, an assistant professor of psychology, said.
"We decide very quickly whether a person possesses many of the traits we feel are important, such as likeability and competence, even though we have not exchanged a single word with them. It appears we are hard-wired to draw these inferences in a fast, unreflective way."
The researchers showed photographs of faces to 200 participants and asked them to rate the images according to how attractive, likeable, trustworthy, competent or aggressive the people seemed.
There was no significant change between the opinions people formed after one-tenth of a second and those they formed after half a second or a whole second.
"What we found was that, if given more time, people's fundamental judgment about faces did not change," Mr Todorov said. "Observers simply became more confident in their judgments as the duration lengthened."
He suggested the speed of judgement of trustworthiness could reflect activity in an area of the brain connected with feelings of fear.
Comment on this Article
Project to link genes, lifestyle and health gets go-ahead
Andy Coghlan
NewScientist.com news service
21 August 2006
The world's largest project to investigate how genes and lifestyle combine to cause common diseases has received the go-ahead to proceed in full.
Organisers of the UK's "Biobank" project will now begin recruiting the half a million citizens aged between 40 and 69 they need for the project - about 1% of the UK population.
Full approval for the project was given on 22 August by the UK Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust, which are funding the £61-million project. It follows the success of a three-month pilot project in Manchester involving 3800 participants, which received glowing reviews from an independent international panel.
Each volunteer participating will donate small samples of urine and blood, containing their DNA, for indefinite storage in the "bank", which will be based in Manchester. They will also respond to detailed questionnaires about their lifestyle, health and environment.
By following all participants until their death, researchers hope to identify the genetic and lifestyle factors which may have contributed to any illnesses they suffered. If genes linked to disease can be identified, it might be possible to prevent illness in carriers of the gene by altering their lifestyles, for example.
Vital insights
Information from the project may also lead to development of new drugs and treatments, the researchers hope.
"For decades to come, the UK Biobank resource should provide researchers around the world with vital insights into some of the most distressing diseases of middle and old age," says Rory Collins, Biobank's principal investigator.
Eligible citizens throughout the UK will receive invitations to participate from early 2007. The organisers plan to recruit the full 500,000 over the next three or four years at 35 temporary centres to be set up throughout the UK.
Sceptical outlook
But despite its grandeur, the project has its critics. "For the millions of people thinking about whether or not to give their DNA, many questions remain unanswered," says Helen Wallace at GeneWatch, an independent watchdog in Buxton, Derbyshire, monitoring potentially controversial developments in genetics.
Wallace also doubts whether the information on lifestyle will be detailed enough - such as on diet - to validate disease links drawn with people's genes. "We remain sceptical whether the Biobank can give meaningful results when many exposures will not be measured accurately and most genes will have small and variable effects," she says.
Collins says these criticisms are unfair. "It's the largeness and the richness of the data that will make Biobank unique," he told New Scientist.
Tough questions
"The questionnaire is the most difficult part," Collins explained, because unlike the stored DNA and fluid samples which can be revisited time and time again, the baseline information can only be collected once. "You have to ask all the questions that people might have wished had been asked in 10 years time and beyond," he says.
To address that, the questionnaire is very detailed, with hundreds of questions. In the pilot phase, Biobank researchers in Manchester successfully tested out a 30-minute to 40-minute touch-screen method to collect personal data.
Collins said that safeguards were in place to make sure that the sensitive personal information would be kept secret, and that the information would be made anonymous before release to researchers, making it impossible to trace the medical information back to an identifiable individual.
Gold standard
"Identities would be available only to a small number of senior staff at Biobank to enable baseline data to be linked to a patient's medical records held by the UK National Health Service," says Collins. "It will not be available outside, and information will not be fed back to volunteers, their family doctors or their families."
The review panel, led by Thorkild Sørensen at the Institute of Preventive Medicine in Copenhagen, Denmark, said the measures for ethical oversight and governance of the samples were "exemplary, and would be held up as a gold standard across the world".
A similar project is under development in the US backed by Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, but is some way behind the UK Biobank.
Comment on this Article
What makes you you? Ask your genome
Dan Jones
NewScientist.com news service
19 August 2006
If you are looking for deeper self-knowledge, forget introspection and put your faith in science. Not only will it tell you about your health, it can also reveal secrets about your ancestry, personality, sexuality, attitudes, perceptions and intelligence. In this special report, New Scientist gives you the latest developments in the study of individuality, starting with what promises to be the richest ever source of self-knowledge - your own genome. This should be available to you in a few years, but what will it tell you about yourself, wonders Dan Jones.
CRAIG VENTER can make a unique claim. "To my knowledge I am the only person on the planet to have their genome decoded," he says with a hint of satisfaction. He is the driving force behind the commercial effort to sequence the human genome, so it is perhaps not surprising he was the first to attain this level of self-knowledge.
He hopes he will not be alone for long. The J. Craig Venter Science Foundation is sponsoring a $10 million prize for anyone who can get the cost of sequencing an individual's genome down to $1000. Venter predicts it will be scooped within a decade. At this price, plenty of people will be able to unravel their personal genetic story. "That's when we're going to see a massive shift in the study of human genetic variation and our own personal genetic make-up," he says.
Venter believes that once geneticists can compare thousands or even millions of individual genomes, they will get a better handle on why, as individuals, we turn out the way we do. Already we can link certain genes with diseases, personality traits, cognitive styles, aptitudes and the like. And although Venter does not believe in genetic determinism - the view that our fundamental nature is written in our genes - he still champions the importance of genes. "We're clearly not born blank slates, but I think the genetic effects on these traits are a lot stronger than most people are willing to deal with." Venter thinks that the analysis of entire personal genomes, together with information about how people actually live their lives, will provide a whole new window onto the complex interplay between your nature and your nurture. This avalanche of genomic knowledge could render the Freudian revolution a footnote of intellectual history. And unlike psychoanalysis, it might even give you the information you need to ensure your kids reach their full potential.
Some readers will find this prospect tremendously exciting, others quite terrifying. The fact is, though, that if Venter's dream is ever to become reality, a lot of people need to get their DNA sequenced. To get the ball rolling, Venter plans to unveil his genomic portrait on GenBank, the US National Institutes of Health genetic sequence database, making it freely available to anyone. Perhaps you are tempted to join him. If so, before you shell out the cash, you will probably want to know what you will be getting for your money. Put plainly, will you attain a level of self-knowlege previously unknown to humankind, or will your genome tell you little you didn't already know?
Do you really want to know?
The most obvious benefit of genomic knowledge is in predicting if and when you are likely to succumb to illnesses such as heart disease, stroke, Parkinson's and diabetes. Armed with this information, you could decide to take preventive medicines, or make lifestyle changes to delay or stave off the development of a condition. In a decade, we will undoubtedly know far more about how certain versions of various genes are linked to particular conditions. Venter, unsurprisingly, is ahead of the game. A look through his genome has prompted him to start taking cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins to delay or prevent heart disease.
Such insight sounds attractive, but it also raises the thorny issue of how to deal with information about your chances of future health, particularly as medical professionals might not be on hand to provide their interpretive and counselling skills. In a few cases the implications of finding a certain mutation will be certain. People with a particular duplicated region of chromosome 4, for example, always develop Huntington's disease. More often, though, the link between a sequence of DNA and any disease it might contribute to is much less clear-cut, often depending on the combined effects of many genes and environmental factors.
This goes to the heart of the main problem with personal genomics. Gone are the days when people talked about "the gene for X". Rare cases like Huntington's aside, at best all we can say about most sequences of DNA is that they confer on carriers a certain likelihood of developing a particular condition or trait. For example, a genetic variant could have a harmful effect in 70 per cent of people, but no detectable effect in the remaining 30 per cent. "Understanding this whole field will come down to probability statistics, which are very hard to interpret," admits Venter. In essence, the vagaries of genetic prediction mean that some people might benefit greatly, and others not at all.
The problem of probabilities is even greater when trying to understand the genetic basis of aspects of personality, temperament and intelligence than for many health-related traits. The details of human behaviour are not spelled out in the genome; social and cultural factors profoundly influence how we think and act. That doesn't render genes irrelevant. Genes are crucial to the development of the mind, personality and behaviour, just as they are for building limbs, lungs and livers. "Genes help wire up brains and guide individual neurons to their destination," says Gary Marcus, a developmental psychologist at New York University. "So genes play a pretty big role in building some of our cognitive processes, like the kinds of memory and fundamental reasoning skills we have."
In the absence of any other clues about a person's aptitudes, genetic analysis, though imperfect, might be better than nothing. "Good teachers try to tailor their teaching to an individual's strengths and weaknesses," says Marcus. "The genome could be one more tool to guess what these are." Genetic forecasting about talents or deficits that are hard to assess early on in life could also prove useful. "Such predictions might be useful if they are made in childhood. Parents can make extra efforts, for example, to encourage the musical development of a child with 'musicality' genes," says Judith Rich Harris, an independent psychologist based in New Jersey.
This is already possible to some extent. "There are other ways of finding out that one has untapped talents," Harris points out. As a child she disliked and avoided maths, but in college she did surprisingly well on a maths aptitude test, and even enjoyed taking some maths classes. Later, when bedridden through illness, she worked out a mathematical theory of human information processing that has since been published. "Doing well on that test at the age of 20 made me realise that my earlier avoidance of math had been a mistake," Harris says.
Venter's biography offers a similar example. After enlisting in the US navy, he, like all new recruits, went through a series of examinations, including an IQ test. When the results came back, Venter found himself top out of 35,000 test scores. This served as a wake-up call, making him reconsider his academic potential, and setting him on the path to his present position.
Clearly, life offers us many chances to test our aptitudes, and information from a personal genome could be a useful complement. It might even provide a basis for making ball-park predictions about how children will turn out. As adults, though, we don't just want to know about our strengths and weaknesses, we also want to understand how we have become what we are. Where some people now look to psychotherapists for such answers, in the future others may be tempted to consult their DNA. Could the information packed into our genomes really change our view of ourselves as individuals?
The answer might seem to be a resounding "yes". After all, geneticists already compare the composite human and chimp genomes to get insights into the genetic basis of chimp and human natures. So shouldn't a comparison of genomic portraits from two individuals reveal the genetic basis of why they differ?
What genes won't tell you
This is tricky terrain. The first misstep is to unreasonably elevate the power of genes. "We measure the genetic effects because we can," Venter says. "We don't know how to measure all the environmental effects that impact on our lives, or we would. The danger lies in attributing too much significance to something just because you can measure it."
A second and bigger stumbling block is that when thinking about individuals, probability complicates matters enormously. "Probabilities are perfectly reasonable as summaries of tendencies of multiple events or individuals in a large sample," says Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University, "but they are puzzling, perhaps even meaningless, when applied to a single event or individual." The relevance of probabilities after the event is even more questionable. It is a moot point, for example, whether gene analysis could be used objectively to determine the likelihood that a given pianist would have become a pianist.
All this is an attempt to explain retrospectively why you are the way you are. Though you can assign probabilities to candidate causes - to this gene or that environmental effect - either, or both, could have played a part in shaping you, with plenty of other factors and some random noise thrown in for good measure.
Your long-lost twin
Nevertheless, there is a way of thinking about your genomic portrait that might go some way towards helping you come to terms with who you are. "Having one's genome decoded is like finding out that you have an identical twin who was reared somewhere else," says Harris. "It lets you see the possibilities your genes provided you with, the selves you might have become, but didn't."
The "genomic twin" idea gives a visceral edge to thinking about the cold, abstract strings of DNA code that spell out our genomes. Harris tells a true story of twins separated at birth and raised apart. One became a concert pianist, the other was offered music lessons in childhood but declined. "I wonder what that twin thought when she met her concert-pianist sister," she says. "Did she realise that she, too, might have been an excellent musician if she had only accepted the offer to take lessons?" These are ultimately unanswerable speculations, but that doesn't diminish their intrigue for such curious animals as humans.
Now imagine that you have had your genome decoded, and the sequence has been sent to you on a CD. You pop it in your computer, run a scan and find out that you have "musicality" genes (imagining for the moment they exist and have been identified). How would you react? Well, such a discovery should prompt the same kinds of reflections suggested by Harris, with the same caveat. In both cases, we cannot unravel the specific genetic, environmental and random effects that made us the way we are - the probabilities make the picture so fuzzy you can't make out details. In this case, the best you can do is to try your hand at piano and see how it goes. Maybe you'll pick it up, maybe you won't.
In many cases, knowing that you have gene variants associated with certain strengths or weaknesses, tastes or temperaments will probably add little to your self-knowledge. "If I know that I'm impulsive, that should affect how I evaluate an appealing temptation in front of me now. If I know I have genes that probabilistically predispose me to impulsiveness, that is far less relevant to my situation," Pinker argues. "It's the impulsiveness that matters - whether it was ultimately due to genes, environment, chance events in zigzagging neurons is far less important, indeed, perhaps irrelevant."
What this boils down to is that if you are looking for self-knowledge, genes are often not the best level of analysis. And that's not the worst of it. "One of the biggest dangers of the information in the genome is over-interpretation by society," says Venter. Genes at best provide possibilities, not certainties. A particular suite of genes might tend to be associated with high intelligence or a love of risks, but they are no guarantee of such traits. The fact that we can talk about such genes does not mean we should attribute too much power to them. Another is the spectre of self-fulfilling prophecies. If you know that you have genes typically associated with being bad at music, you might convince yourself that you are just born without musicality. "If people expect that they're not good at something, they tend to become not good at that thing," says Marcus.
Looking into your genome could also dredge up trouble. Imagine that a genome scan revealed that a law-abiding man had genes that gave him a 50 per cent chance of becoming a criminal. "Will he feel good that he isn't in fact a criminal, or will the information itself make it more likely that he will embark upon a new career as a law-breaker?" asks Harris. "And what about the person with a similar genome who has already committed a serious crime? Can we blame him and punish him for his crime, if it was his genes that made him do it?"
With all this in mind, what do the experts conclude about the wisdom of getting our genomes sequenced as soon as the technology makes it feasible? Venter is optimistic about the promise of greater knowledge. At the moment we face difficult questions about the underlying causes for our unique repertoire of character traits. "When we have millions of genomes in hand we'll begin to be able to answer these questions," says Venter. "Today we know almost nothing compared with what we'll know in a decade or so."
Get one for your kids
Others are more circumspect, though there is general agreement that a genomic portrait would provide useful medical forecasts and other practical insights. Whether it would help you redefine your self-image is more contentious. "For an adult, I don't think it would make much difference. Whatever the genome brings us has already been considerably shaped by the environment, enough so that you can learn a lot more about a person by studying her directly than by studying her genome," says Marcus. "But new parents might some day want to purchase them to get an early forecast of their children's likely aptitudes. After all, even before we start to talk we've got a genome."
As the physicist Niels Bohr famously quipped: "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." One thing is certain, though: the more we study human genetic variation, the more we will know about the genetic basis of our predispositions, predilections and potential, so boosting our ability to predict how genes will affect the way people turn out. Some of this progress will come through comparative studies of the composite human genome and the genomes of chimps and other primates. More will result from targeted studies into particular diseases and conditions. And, if enough people follow Venter into the realm of personal genomics and make their individual DNA available for study, this will undoubtedly provide an additional and powerful lens through which to look at nature and nurture, and how they modulate each other.
The genome will never tell you everything, however. Even with a better understanding of which genes are important and why, our genes will never define our destiny. Venter is living proof of this. By many measures he is a risk-taker - he is an avid sailor and has taken big scientific chances in his career - but an analysis of his genome for genes associated with risk-taking and thrill-seeking failed to turn up the expected variants. That doesn't make him any less of a risk-taker. It just means that his personality has developed that way regardless of what his genes say.
From issue 2565 of New Scientist magazine, 19 August 2006, page 28-36
Comment on this Article
Leaky Lobbyists Smoke Lawyer Data
Leak Investigation Ordered: How Media Learned About Probe of Pro-Israel Lobbyists Sought
By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 23, 2006; A04
A federal judge has ordered an investigation into how reporters learned that two pro-Israel lobbyists were under federal investigation before they were formally charged, creating even more scrutiny of the media in a case with broad First Amendment implications.
The order by U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III in Alexandria came in the case against Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, who are charged with receiving and disseminating national defense information. Legal experts say the case could lead to criminal prosecutions of reporters or newspapers that print information the government has classified.
In an entry on the docket in U.S. District Court, Ellis ordered the Justice Department to conduct a leak investigation into whether government employees disclosed details of the investigation to CBS News in 2004. The docket entry was dated last week, but Ellis further explained it in a previously classified order made public yesterday.
In that order, Ellis denied defense requests to throw out much of the evidence against Rosen and Weissman, partly because of leaks to the media, but said defense attorneys could renew their motion later if the leak investigation results "warrant doing so."
"A single unauthorized leak" is not "sufficient to warrant suppression of the entire investigation," Ellis wrote, citing reports about the case that ran in the New York Times and the Miami Herald.
Federal prosecutors declined to comment on whether the leak investigation has begun, and a spokesman for CBS News declined to comment. Ellis has instructed prosecutors to report to him on the status of the inquiry by Sept. 15.
Attorneys for Rosen and Weissman also declined to comment yesterday, but sources familiar with the case said they have been arguing in numerous sealed motions that the leaks violated their clients' rights and could prejudice potential jurors against them.
Rosen and Weissman were charged last year with violating the Espionage Act in what prosecutors call a conspiracy to obtain classified information and pass it to members of the media and the Israeli government. They are former employees of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.
The lobbyists are the first civilians who do not work for the government to be charged under the 1917 espionage statute with orally receiving and transmitting national defense information. Court documents say the information covered subjects including the activities of al-Qaeda and possible attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq.
The case has alarmed First Amendment advocates and some lawyers, who say it criminalizes the type of information exchange that happens every day among journalists, lobbyists and others in Washington. Prosecutors have argued that disclosing sensitive defense information could harm national security.
Federal authorities are conducting a number of investigations of leaks of classified information to journalists, and legal experts said Ellis's order is noteworthy because it is unusual for a judge to initiate such an inquiry.
"It's one of the first tangible signs that the view of the Bush administration, that journalists are not immune from prosecution for trafficking in classified information, might have currency with some federal judges," said Rodney A. Smolla, dean of the University of Richmond Law School and an expert on First Amendment law. He said it is an "open question" whether federal law allows for the prosecution of journalists for publishing classified information.
The possibility of such prosecutions has swirled around Washington since the New York Times broke a story in December about the National Security Agency's surveillance of terrorist-related calls between people in the United States and abroad.
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has suggested publicly that New York Times journalists could be prosecuted for the NSA articles, and federal authorities are investigating other possible leaks that led to reports in The Washington Post about secret CIA prisons, law enforcement and intelligence officials have said.
Ellis, meanwhile, may have further opened the door to criminal prosecutions of reporters with another recent ruling, legal experts have said. The judge rejected defense arguments to dismiss the indictments against Rosen and Weissman, saying that they -- and others -- can be prosecuted if the government thinks they disclosed information harmful to national security.
Comment: Once again, the focus is being shifted away from the real crime, and placed instead upon those "evil reporters" who leaked information important to "national security". It's easy to make sure that crimes by the Israeli lobby always go unpunished: you just get someone close to them to leak information on any investigations, thereby creating a "bias" among potential jurors that you can then use to get the case dismissed. Works every time.
Comment on this Article
Scottish smoking ban leaves landlords fuming
Mark Tran
Wednesday August 23, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Many regulars are turning away from pubs in Scotland following the introduction of a ban on smoking in enclosed public places, licensees said today.
The first survey of Scotland's pubs and clubs since the ban came into force at the end of March has confirmed the worst fears of pub operators in the area.
According to the survey from the Scottish Licensed Trade Association (SLTA), almost 10 times as many licensees (46%) reported a drop in visits by regular customers as reported an increase (5%) following the ban.
As a result, drink sales have dropped by more than 10% and even food sales are down 3%, the SLTA said.
Pubs with no outdoor area are suffering the most as their customers stay at home or go elsewhere. Four percent reported an increase in business with their regulars, while 64% saw a decrease.
By contrast, some outlets with good smoking facilities have done well - or at least held their own.
Lynn Adams of the George Bar in Hamilton said: "I think on the whole things could be a lot worse for me in my pub.
"My outdoor area has helped a lot and trade is ticking over but, as my smoking customers say, what happens when winter arrives? This is when we will really feel it."
Paul Waterson, the chief executive of the SLTA and the owner of the Flagship Hotel group, said: "Our members have done an excellent job enforcing the ban and many are now paying for it with their livelihoods.
"These results bear out what we have been hearing - many operations have been hit and some are suffering significant downturns in business."
The SLTA had been sceptical of claims that a smoking ban would help business by attracting non-smokers to pubs. Today's survey will only strengthen those preconceptions.
"Our members are paying for an ill-judged and hasty government policy," Mr Waterson said.
"If this measure is going to save millions in health costs, as we are told, it would be good to have some of this back in compensation for our members who may lose everything."
England plans to introduce its own smoking ban next summer.
The pub group JD Wetherspoon has already introduced some non-smoking pubs in England in anticipation of the government's smoking ban.
But the company delayed making all of its 650 pubs non-smoking after a sharp drop in sales at its 49 smoke-free outlets.
Wetherspoon, however, reported an initial rise in sales at its Scottish pubs after the smoking ban, thanks to a heavy marketing campaign.
Jim Clarke, the finance director at Wetherspoon, said it was premature to come to any conclusions about the smoking ban.
"Although the ban in Scotland has been in place for five months, we need to see the impact in winter," he said.
"In the summer people are quite happy to smoke outside, but we don't know whether that will be the case when it gets cold."
Comment on this Article
How to tell when your data takes the scenic route
Celeste Biever
New Scientist Print Edition
18 August 2006
If you support net neutrality - the principle that all data packets routed around the internet should receive equal priority - soon you could help the cause personally by donating your spare computing power.
Imitating the popular SETI@home project, which harnesses 150,000 home computers worldwide to help search for signs of alien life, a group of politically minded bloggers and techies is planning to enlist a similar army of PCs to monitor the net for non-neutral data routing. Each PC would use its idle power to test whether broadband providers are deliberately slowing data down.
US broadband providers, such as AT&T and Verizon, which ferry data packets along fibre-optic cables, have recently started selling services such as video and voice-over IP (VOIP), sparking fears that these companies could slow down data packets from competing providers such as YouTube and Skype. However, there is currently no way to monitor whether deprioritisation is actually occurring, and a US Senate committee recently rejected draft "net neutrality" legislation that would outlaw deliberate "packet deprioritisation", in which packets get bumped down the transmission queue (www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn9435.html).
Deliberate deprioritisation is hard to detect because there is always a chance packets can be shunted to the back of the queue non-maliciously when there is heavy traffic, says Tom Evslin, a technology consultant based in Stowe, Vermont. His solution is to use the distributed approach to single out deliberate deprioritisation.
Each volunteer would download software that triggers their computer to send out test packets called pings to various websites. Because pings automatically trigger a return packet, they can be used to measure the speed of a connection between two computers. Each probe PC reports its results to a central server that can then work out from all the ping times whether packets from certain websites are being deprioritised, and if so by which broadband providers, says Evslin. He outlined the idea at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 8 August.
From issue 2565 of New Scientist magazine, 18 August 2006, page 26
Comment on this Article
In thrall to the Bush lawyers
Geoffrey Robertson
The Age
August 17, 2006
Those who subject David Hicks to an unfair trial may breach international law, writes Geoffrey Robertson.
The term "Bush lawyer" is Australian slang for a hick counsellor, ignorant of the law. Thanks to recent decisions of the US Supreme Court and inquiries into torture at Abu Ghraib, it has been given a wider meaning, to denote the lawyers in US Government service who have misunderstood or misrepresented the fundamental rules of human rights in their advice to the President. Their mistakes have been so damaging that the British Attorney-General has taken to tendering his own advice to the White House about Guantanamo Bay - namely to close it. The case of David Hicks should provide his Australian counterpart with an opportunity to do likewise.
It is, let us remember, a war crime to commit a "grave breach" of the Geneva Convention. Article 8(2)(a)(vi) of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court, to which Australia (but not the US) is a party, defines such breaches to include "wilfully depriving a prisoner of war or other protected person of the right of fair and regular trial". The Supreme Court has now declared Hicks to be a person protected by the Geneva Convention, and there must come a point at which Australian law officers who wilfully authorise or approve an unfair and irregular trial of an Australian citizen become complicit in a grave breach of international law.
No doubt Australia's Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, like the US President, has merely accepted the advice of the US Government lawyers that Guantanamo proceedings were lawful. From now on, that excuse will be unavailing. All the President's lawmen at first advised that Guantanamo was not on American soil, so due process did not apply. That argument was rejected by the Supreme Court in 2004. Next, they advised that the Geneva Convention did not protect the detainees because Afghanistan was a failed state or because they were not wearing military uniforms when captured or because the convention was "quaint" and "obsolete" or because the President as commander-in-chief could override them. Last month, the Supreme Court in the Hamdan case shredded these arguments as well. Were the Bush lawyers abashed? Not at all. One of them, Professor John Yoo, complained: "The court is attempting to suppress creative thinking."
He was one of the "creative thinkers" who approved interrogation techniques such as "waterboarding" (the process that mimics drowning) and "using detainees' individual phobias, such as fear of dogs". Other Bush lawyers approved interrogation techniques ranging from prolonged subjection to cacophonous noise to sexual humiliation and "other scenarios designed to convince the detainee that death is imminent for him and/or so for his family". This was not "torture", they advised, which required pain comparable "to physical injury such as organ failure, impairment of bodily functions or even death".
These "creative" techniques were used at Guantanamo when the base was assumed to be a Geneva-free environment, but the Schlesinger inquiry found that, once taught to military interrogators, they "migrated" with them to Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq, where they were adapted by "sadists on the night shift". It is not clear whether David Hicks has been subjected to them but they have on any view produced an inhumane environment to which no one should be subjected, and certainly not for years on end.
Ruddock believes that Hicks should be tried - but for what, exactly? The US would be entitled to try him for a war crime but so far he has faced only a generalised charge of a conspiracy based on his presence in the ranks of those who fought for the Taliban, which was the de facto government of Afghanistan. It is not a crime to enlist in the army of a government - even a government as unpleasant as the Taliban - otherwise all soldiers on a losing side would be guilty and peace agreements would never be negotiated.
Since the Hamdan decision, Bush lawyers have been back at work drafting legislation for a new tribunal to replace the "special military commissions" - the sad little Star Chambers that were struck down by the Supreme Court. Their early drafts provide no reassurance that these replacement tribunals will secure "the rights of fair and regular trial". A trial cannot be regular if judges and jurors owe obedience to the detaining authority, and the draft legislation provides for trial by US army officers. They cannot be fair with procedures that still prevent the defence from challenging prosecution evidence and admit evidence obtained by torture. At common law, based on Magna Carta, a criminal process cannot be fair if it is delayed through no fault of the defendant for more than five years (the point at which, the Privy Council has held, any death sentence must be commuted). Inevitably, the new tribunal will be subject to Supreme Court challenge, which will take until 2008 to resolve. Hicks and other detainees cannot be faulted for challenging the fairness of the process.
The advent of new forms of terror and new forces to inflict it on the innocent challenges democratic societies to respond with legal processes that do not abandon our cherished values. In some respects, the American record is impressive: internal documents show how strenuously the attempts to evade Geneva protections were opposed internally by US military lawyers. They were denounced by bar associations and defeated - eventually - in the courts and (in the case of torture) by John McCain's work in Congress. But the process is lengthy and unpredictable.
The White House, on present indications, cannot bring itself to grant foreign detainees the "fair and regular trial" by juries in state courts, as afforded to US citizens, nor the court martials afforded to its own soldiers. Nor will it choose an acceptable alternative, such as trial by independent or by international judges.
Given Australia's obligations under the Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute, and the history of demonstrably erroneous advice that the White House has received on interrogation, due process and treatment of foreign prisoners in Guantanamo, it may be time for the Australian Attorney-General to stand up to the Bush lawyers. He could echo the advice of his British counterpart: not only is closure of Guantanamo right in principle, it is right because "the historic tradition of the US as a beacon of freedom, liberty and of justice deserves the removal of what has become a symbol of injustice".
Geoffrey Robertson, QC, is author of Crimes Against Humanity, published this month by Penguin. This is an edited extract from his Kenneth Myer lecture, delivered yesterday at the National Library of Australia.
Comment on this Article
Remember, we need your help to collect information on what is going on in your part of the world!
Send your article suggestions to: sott(at)signs-of-the-times.org