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P
I C T U R E O F T H E D
A Y
Freedom
of Speech in America
Today's
Picture of the Day is a photograph that appeared on
Reuters
News web site last week, the accompanying text
stated:
"Police
detain a demonstrator after disrupting a speech
by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the San
Francisco Commonwealth Club, in San Francisco, Friday,
May 27, 2005. Shortly after Rice started speaking,
at least two protesters stood wearing black robes
and black hoods, an apparent reference to U.S. abuse
of detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. The
crowd applauded as the protesters were taken from
the hall."
Just for the record; there is no freedom of speech
or expression in the US, that much is clear. It has
effectively been abolished by the Bush administration.
The protestors at Rice's speech were simply making
a statement, and one that many attendees, and indeed
many Americans in general, seem to agree with - that
the war in Iraq was waged on a lie, and thousands
of innocent people have suffered needlessly as a result.
Such simple, peaceful and conscientious dissent however,
is not tolerated by the Bush administration (or should
we say regime?). As George so infamously said
in November 2001: "You're either with us or against
us," or in other words, support our murderous
policies against the innocent, or you'll be next.
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Know what real
men do? They admit their mistakes. Know what real
people do in times of great stress and strife and
economic downturn? They seek help, understand they
don't know all the answers, realize they might not've
been asking the right questions in the first place.
Know what great leaders, great nations do at times
of war and fracture and massive bludgeoning debt?
All of the above, all the time, with great intelligence
and humility and grace and awareness and shared
humanity. Or they die.
But not BushCo. This is the hilarious thing. This
is the appalling thing, still. How can this man
remain so blindly, staggeringly resolute? How can
he be so appallingly ignorant of fact, of truth,
of evidence, of deep thought? In short, what the
hell is wrong with George W. Bush?
Here it is, another bumbling,
barely articulate press
conference by Dubya, one of few he ever gives
because he clearly hates the things and is deeply
troubled by them, hates reporters who ask complicated
questions and hates people who dare doubt his simple
mindset, his effectiveness, his policies, his lopsided
myopic one-way black/white good/evil worldview.
Bush hates press conferences because he can't speak
extemporaneously and can't form a complete sentence
without mashing up the language like a five-year-old
and can't express a complex idea to save his life
and somewhere deep down, he knows it, and he knows
we know it, and it makes him mumble and stutter
and wish he could be somewhere else, anywhere else,
like sittin' on the back porch in Texas eatin' ribs
and dreamin' 'bout baseball. Ahhh, there now. That's
better.
But here he is, instead, stuck like a pinned bug
in the Rose Garden, struggling to answer tricky,
multisyllabic questions from the godforsaken press.
Go ahead, read the Q&A, linked above. It's sort
of staggering. It's also very impressive, in a soul-stabbing,
nauseating way.
Bush is, to be sure and in a word, unyielding.
Determined. Immovable. Also, deeply confused. Myopic
as hell. Frighteningly narrow minded. Weirdly
random. Childish in a way that would make any
good parent seriously question whether it might
be time to get their child some Ritalin and an emetic.
Unlike you or me or any human anywhere who happens
to be in possession of humility or subtlety of mind,
Bush, to this day, admits zero mistakes. He refuses
help, rejects suggestions that everything is not
dandy and swell. He is confounded by questions that
dare suggest he might be somewhat inept, or failing.
And he absolutely insists that America exists in
some sort of bizarre utopian vacuum, isolated and
virtuous and towering like a mad hobbled king over
our enemies and allies alike.
He is, in other words, our downfall.
Iraq? Going smoothly, Bush says, happy with the
progress there, despite huge surges in insurgent
violence and endless uptick of the U.S. death toll
and the utter wasteland we've made of that poor,
shredded nation.
Iran, North Korea and Egypt? Just dandy. No serious
problems at all. Gotta talk more with that "North
Korean" guy though, sort out the "nukuler"
problem. Sneering thug John Bolton for U.N. ambassador?
You betcha, still on track, a good man, despite
what everybody -- and I do mean everybody -- says.
Overhaul Social Security, despite an enormous lack
of support from Dems and Repubs and the vast majority
of the American people? "Just a matter of time,"
Bush mutters, completely blinded to the fact that
it's an enormous mistake. His deeply
hypocritical stance on stem-cell research that
kow-tows to the deeply ignorant Christian Right?
No real answer there. Doesn't compute. Just shrug
that sucker right off.
Notice, when you read: There is no eloquent, deeply
felt defense of ideas. There is no intellectual
breakdown of opinion, no multifaceted explanation,
no passionate clarification. And there is certainly
no reference to outside ideas, a confession that
we might need help, input, wisdom from our neighbors,
from science, from the wise and the experienced.
It's a fact we've known all along but which keeps
hammering at us like a drunk gorilla hammers at
a dead mouse: Bush is able
to speak only at one level, to one level. The level
of a child. The level of a simpleton. The
level of a sweet, bumbling, small-town mayor, addressing
a PTA meeting, everyone in soft plaids and everyone
drinking light beer and everyone wondering about
just what the heck to do about the rusty swing sets
and the busted stoplight.
Bush is, of course, not talking
to you or me or anyone with a remotely active imagination
when he speaks at press conferences, or at his staged,
pre-screened, sycophant-rich "town hall"
meetings, so full of plain, everyday folk hand-selected
for their blind love of Shrub and lack of ability
to ask hard questions (read this
transcript of a recent town hall on Social Security,
and come away stupefied at the man's shocking ability
to appear just exactly as gullible and uneducated
as his questioners).
He is not even speaking to conservative Democrats
or moderate Republicans. He's certainly not speaking
to highly educated people who harbor a sincere curiousity
for and tenuous understanding of the complexities
of the world.
Bush is, of course, speaking to children. He is
speaking to babies. It is a decidedly shallow and
hollow and oddly deflated type of language that
offers not a single nutritious or substantive thought
to the political or cultural dialogue, other than
to expand his staggering collection of embarrassing
Bushisms.
It's all merely a crayon drawing, an intellectual
wading pool, a big messy cartoon world populated
by manly white good guys and fanged dark evil guys
and we are good and They are evil and that's all
there is to it so please stop asking weird tricky
polysyllabic questions.
Maybe this is appropriate. Maybe this is as it
should be. After all, we are, by and large, a nation
that refuses to grow up, refuses to take responsibility
for our gluttony and its global effects, refuses
to see the world as it is now, a mad tangle of interconnected
humanity, a global marketplace, a hodgepodge of
variegated religions all stemming from the same
source and which therefore all require a nimble
and nuanced and deeply intelligent leadership, to
navigate. Qualities which our current leadership
has, well, not at all.
The U.S. still behaves, when all is said and done,
like one of those scared wild monkeys, clinging
desperately to a shiny object despite
the trap closing in all around us, unable to
let go of this old, silly, faux-cowboy mentality
of boom boom kill kill God is your daddy now sit
down and shut up.
What causes the downfall of empires? What causes
the implosion of leadership, the slide of great
nations into the deep muck of recession and war
and mediocrity and numb irrelevance? That's easy.
Stagnation. Refusal to change. Refusal to adapt,
to progress. Refusal to grow the hell up, to take
responsibility for our shortcomings and failures,
as well as our successes.
Indeed, George W. Bush would make a great small-town
mayor, somewhere deep in a dusty, forgotten part
of Texas. His still-appalling inability to speak
with any depth or resonance, coupled with his brand
of personable, aww-shucks, none-too-bright simpleton
worldview is perfect for some cute, redneck, tiny
burg. It really is.
But for a major world power
caught in the throes of a desperate need to change
and grow and evolve, he is, of course, imminent
death, leading us deeper into a regressive ideological
tar pit from which we may never emerge.
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Code
Red |
By Chris Floyd
Published: June 3, 2005 |
Last month, we
reported here about Jeb Bush's courtroom efforts
to crush the life of an abused, poverty-stricken
6-year-old girl in his gubernatorial satrapy of
Florida. Later, against all odds, a jury of ordinary
citizens thwarted the dynast's brutal will. But
as befits a scion of the ruling family, Bush is
now brushing aside this interference from the rabble
and pressing ahead with his plans to strip the little
girl of all public assistance.
Bush's minions went to court earlier this year
in a bid to cut off medical aid to Marissa Amora,
who, at the age of 2, had been abandoned by Jeb's
"Department of Children and Families"
despite overwhelming evidence of horrific past abuse
-- and the imminent danger of more to come. More
came. Within weeks, she was beaten almost to death;
then Jeb's agents tried to stop her medical treatment
and let her die. She survived their malign intervention
and is now thriving with a new family -- but still
suffers from permanent, catastrophic damage caused
by the entirely predictable beating she received
after the DCF cast her aside.
But late last month, the jury in the case issued
a stern rebuke to these perverted Bush Family values:
They awarded Marissa $35 million in damages for
institutional neglect and for her future medical
care, with the DCF ordered to pay the bulk of the
costs. So, a happy ending, right?
Don't be silly -- we're dealing with the Bush-Walker
gang here. And for almost 100 years, from their
ammo-dealing days in World War I to their heavy
investments in Nazi Germany to their profitable
hook-ups with Arab oil tyrants to their back-door
buttressing of Saddam Hussein to their present-day
bonanza of blood money gushing from the slaughter
in Iraq, this clan of wingtipped thugs has always
built its fortune on the backs -- and the bones
-- of the poor. And no self-respecting Bush clansman
would ever let some uppity little black girl and
her foster mother make him look bad, no matter how
egregious his failures.
Jeb had three choices after the verdict. He could
have simply accepted responsibility for his agency's
horrible neglect and paid the full amount. Or he
could have accepted responsibility but asked that
the large award be reduced, as often happens in
such cases, which would still leave Marissa with
enough money to afford the extensive and costly
health care she will need for the rest of her life.
The first course would have been just and honorable;
the second, pragmatic yet not inherently cruel.
But honor, justice and responsibility have no place
in the Bush clan's ruthless operations. So Jeb picked
the third choice, the "nuclear option."
He asked an appeals court to throw out the entire
award -- even the damages levied against other,
non-state parties in the case -- leaving Marissa
with absolutely nothing, The Palm Beach Post reports.
Filing for dismissal, Bush's lawyers blasted the
jury for being too stupid to process the complex
documentation of the case and acting instead on
"prejudice and sympathy." While any "prejudice"
in the case would seem to lie with the lily-white
governor's attempt to grind a black child under
his heel, it's true that the jury probably did have
some measure of sympathy for a 6-year-old girl who
will have to be kept alive through a feeding tube
for the rest of her days because Bush's bureaucrats
failed to protect her from well-documented abuse.
But sympathy is for "girlie-men" in the
demented moral universe of the Bushist faction.
Or as one of the Bush Family's old business partners
once said, just before he launched an unprovoked
war of aggression against Poland based on lies,
propaganda and manipulated intelligence about a
bogus threat to the nation: "Close your hearts
to pity. The stronger man is right. Be steeled against
all signs of compassion." Power is everything,
people are nothing, and the weakest go to the wall
-- that's the Kennebunkport Code.
But of course you have to dress up your blood-and-iron
philosophy with the prevailing pieties of the day
if you want to snow the hoi polloi and weasel your
way into power. And Jeb is one of the great whited
sepulchres of our time, a master of the hypocritical
arts, ever eager to hog the nearest camera and blubber
teary platitudes about the "culture of life"
-- even as he feverishly signs death warrants in
an apparent bid to surpass his older brother's record
as the most bloodthirsty executioner in modern U.S.
history. If Marissa were, say, a nice white woman
in a vegetative state whose case had been taken
up by powerful interest groups and ballyhooed into
a national media carnival, then doubtless Jeb would
even now be dabbing his eyes as he knelt for a photo-op
at her bedside.
But because Marissa is "nobody" -- one
of the poor, the powerless, the "insulted and
injured," in Dostoevsky's phrase -- she can
be flushed down the toilet and no one will notice.
For the aim of Bush's legal maneuvering is clear:
He wants to "run out the clock" on Marissa,
litigating the case quite literally to death, until
her family sinks beneath the overwhelming financial
and physical burden of keeping her alive and her
makeshift, overstrained support system eventually
suffers the inevitable breakdown.
It's a despicable strategy, a wicked strategy,
but entirely in keeping with the Ruling Family's
ethos, which has given the world a terror-spawning
quagmire of murder and atrocity in Iraq -- 10,000
Marissa Amoras, dead, mangled, orphaned, abandoned,
abused, forgotten. And for what? For power. For
money. For the Code.
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A plan to reorganize military
bases at home is just one piece of a larger puzzle
that involves the projection of American power into
the distant lands that most concern us.
The last few weeks have been base-heavy ones in
the news. The Pentagon's provisional Base Realignment
and Closure (BRAC) list, the first in a decade,
was published to domestic screams of pain. It represents,
according to the Washington Post, "a sweeping
plan to close or reduce forces at 62 major bases
and nearly 800 minor facilities" in the United
States. The military is to be reorganized at home
around huge, multi-force "hub bases" from
which the Pentagon, in the fashion of a corporate
conglomerate, hopes to "reap economies of scale."
This was front page news for days as politicians
and communities from Connecticut (the U.S. Naval
Submarine Base in Groton) and New Jersey (Fort Monmouth)
to South Dakota (Ellsworth Air Force Base) cried
bloody murder over the potential loss of jobs and
threatened to fight to the death to prevent their
specific base or set of bases (but not anyone else's)
from closing -- after all, those workers had been
the most productive and patriotic around.
These closings -- and their potentially devastating
after-effects on communities -- were a reminder
(though seldom dealt with that way in the media)
of just how deeply the Pentagon has dug itself into
the infrastructure of our nation. With over 6,000
military bases in the U.S., we are in some ways
a vast military camp.
But while politicians screamed locally, Donald
Rumsfeld's Pentagon never thinks less than globally;
and, if you throw in the militarization of space,
sometimes even the global has proven too small a
framework for its presiding officials. For
them, the BRAC plans are just one piece of a larger
puzzle that involves the projection of American
power into the distant lands that most concern us.
After all, as Chalmers Johnson has calculated in
his book, "The Sorrows of Empire," our
global Baseworld already consists of at least 700
military and intelligence bases; possibly -- depending
on how you count them up -- many more. Under Rumsfeld's
organizational eye, such bases have been pushed
ever further into the previously off-limits "near
abroad" of the former Soviet Union (where we
now probably have more bases than the Russians do)
and ever deeper into the Middle Eastern and Caspian
oil heartlands of the planet.
The Bush administration's fierce focus on and interest
in reconfigured, stripped down, ever more forward
systems of bases and an ever more powerfully poised
military "footprint" stands in inverse
proportion to press coverage of it. To the present
occupants of the Pentagon, bases are the equivalent
of imperial America's lifeblood and yet basing policy
abroad has, in recent years, been of next to no
interest to the mainstream media.
Strategic Ally
Just in recent weeks, however, starting with the
uproar over the economic pain BRAC will impose (along
with the economic gain for those "hubs"),
bases have returned to public consciousness in at
least a modest way. This month, for instance, the
Overseas Basing Commission released a report to
the President and Congress on the "reconfiguration
of the American military overseas basing structure
in the post-Cold War and post-September 11 era."
The report created a minor flap by criticizing the
Pentagon for its overly ambitious global redeployment
plans at a time when "[s]ervice budgets are
not robust enough to execute the repositioning of
forces, build the facilities necessary to accommodate
the forces, [and] build the expanding facilities
at new locations..."
In other words, the global ambitions of the Pentagon
-- and the soaring budgets that go with those ambitions
-- are beyond our means (not that that means much
to the Bush administration). The
report's criticism evidently irritated Secretary
of Defense Rumsfeld and so the report, already posted
at a government website, was promptly taken down
after the Defense Department claimed it contained
classified information, especially "a reference
to ongoing negotiations over U.S. bases in Bulgaria
and Romania." (As it happened, the Federation
of American Scientists had posted the report at
its own site, where it remains available to all,
according to Secrecy News.)
Perhaps in part because of BRAC and the Commission
report, numerous bits and pieces of Pentagon basing
plans -- even for normally invisible Romania and
Bulgaria -- could be spied in (or at the edge of)
the news. For instance, last week our man in Kabul,
President Hamid Karzai, came calling on Washington,
amid some grim disputes between "friends."
On the eve of his departure, reacting to a New
York Times' article about a U.S. Army report on
the torture, abuse and murder of Afghan prisoners
in American hands, he essentially demanded that
the Bush administration turn over Afghan prisoners,
both in-country and in Guantánamo, to his
government, and give it greater say in U.S. military
operations in his country. For
anyone who has followed the Bush administration,
these are not just policy no-no's but matters verging
on faith-based obsession. Having with dogged determination
bucked the International Criminal Court, an institution
backed by powerful allies, Bush officials were not
about to stand for such demands from a near non-nation
we had "liberated" and then stocked with
military bases, holding areas, detention camps,
and prisons of every sort.
Not long after Karzai made this demand, "an
American official alarmed at the slow pace of poppy
eradication" leaked to the New York Times a
cable written from our Kabul embassy to Secretary
of State Rice on May 13 indicating that his weak
leadership -- previously he had only been lauded
by administration officials -- was responsible for
Afghanistan's rise to preeminence as the model drug-lord-state
of the planet. ("Although President Karzai
has been well aware of the difficulty in trying
to implement an effective ground [poppy] eradication
program, he has been unwilling to assert strong
leadership, even in his own province of Kandahar.")
And then, of course, State Department officials
publicly came to his defense. On
arrival in the U.S., he found himself refuting this
charge rather than on the offensive demanding the
rectification of American wrongs in his country.
At a White House welcoming ceremony, our President
promptly publicly denied Karzai the Afghan prisoners
and any further control over American military actions
in his country. As in Iraq, the Bush administration's
working definition of "sovereignty" for
others is: Stay out of our way. ("As I explained
to [President Karzai], that our policy is one where
we want the people to be sent home [from Guantánamo],
but, two, we've got to make sure the facilities
are there -- facilities where these people can be
housed and fed and guarded.")
But the Afghan president was granted something
so much more valuable -- this was, after all, the
essence of his trek to the U.S. -- a "strategic
partnership" with the United States which he
"requested." (The actual language: "Afghanistan
proposed that the United States join in a strategic
partnership and establish close cooperation.")
Great idea, Hamid! And quite an original one.
Of course, the term is ours, not Karzai's, and
we already have such "partnerships" with
numerous nations including Japan, Germany, and Greece.
But Afghanistan is none of the above. The "partners"
in this relationship are the country that likes
to think of itself as the planet's "sole superpower"
-- its global "sheriff," the "new
Rome," the new imperial "Britain"
(Britain itself now being a distinctly junior partner
providing a few of the "native" troops
so necessary for our Iraqi adventure) -- and the
country that, in the UN's Human Development Report
2004, was ranked the sixth worst off on Earth, perched
just above five absolute basket-case nations in
sub-Saharan Africa. This is the equivalent of declaring
a business partnership between a Rockefeller and
the local beggar.
In the somewhat vague, four-page Joint Declaration
of the United States-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership
issued by the two partners while Karzai was in Washington,
along with the usual verbiage about spreading democracy
and promoting human -- perhaps a typo for "inhuman"
-- rights in Afghanistan and throughout the Central
Asian region, there were these brief lines:
"It is understood that in order to achieve
the objectives contained herein, U.S. military forces
operating in Afghanistan will continue to have access
to Bagram Air Base and its facilities, and facilities
at other locations as may be mutually determined
and that the U.S. and Coalition forces are to continue
to have the freedom of action required to conduct
appropriate military operations based on consultations
and pre-agreed procedures."
The Afghans may get no prisoners and not an extra
inch of control over U.S. military movements --
note that "continue to have the freedom of
action required... based on... pre-agreed procedures"
-- but they do get to give, which is such an ennobling
feeling. What they are offering up is that "access"
to Bagram Air Base "and facilities at other
locations." (The language
is charming. You would think that the Americans
were at the gates of the old Soviet air base waiting
to be let in, not that it was already fully occupied
and a major American military facility.)
Nothing "permanent," of course, especially
since Afghan students in recent protests over mistreated
Korans at Guantánamo were also complaining
about American bases in their country; and no future
treaties, since Karzai might have a tough time with
parliament over that one. Afghans tend to be irrationally
touchy, not to say mean-spirited, on national sovereignty
issues. (Think of the Soviet occupation.) Just a
simple, honestly offered "request" and
a "joint declaration" -- somebody must
have been smoking one -- that quietly extends our
rights to base troops in Afghanistan until some
undefined moment beyond the end of time.
Spanning the World
Base news has been trickling in from the 'stans
of Central Asia -- formerly SSRs of the old Soviet
Union -- as well. After the Tulip Revolution in
Kyrgyzstan, for instance, we rushed an official
into the country -- no, not the Secretary of State
to celebrate the spread of democracy, but our globe-trotting
Secretary of Defense, who hustled into that otherwise
obscure land just to make sure that Ganci Air Base
(named not for some Kyrgyzstani hero, but for Peter
Ganci, the New York City fire chief killed in the
Sept. 11, 2001 attacks) in the capital of Bishkek
was still ours to use (as it is).
In the Uzbekistan of grim, authoritarian Islam
Karimov, our ally in the war on terror (who received
his third visit from Rumsfeld in 2004), the Bush
administration, we're told, is wrestling with a
most difficult problem in the wake of a government
massacre of demonstrators: bases versus values (John
Hall, "U.S. wrestles with bases vs. values
in Uzbekistan," Richmond Times-dispatch, May
29).
After all, while the White House values the spread
of democracy, the Pentagon considers Camp Stronghold
Freedom, the former Soviet base we now occupy there
-- "The air-conditioned tents at the base...
are laid out on a grid, along streets named for
the thoroughfares of New York: Fifth Avenue, Long
Island Expressway, Wall Street." -- to be valuable
indeed. And then there's that handy matter of stowing
away prisoners. Uzbekistan
is one of the places where the U.S. has reportedly
been practicing "extraordinary rendition"
-- the kidnapping of terrorist subjects and the
dispatching of them to countries happy to torture
them for us. Here's a guess: whether Karimov
(to whom the Chinese leadership gave a giant smooch
last week) remains in office or not, in the modern
"Great Game" in Central Asia expect us
to remain in the aptly named Camp Stronghold Freedom.
(I'd like to see someone try to pry us out.)
In Africa this last week, there was news too. The
Bush administration was promising to pour ever more
"soldiers and money into its anti-terrorism
campaign [there], including in Algeria and chaotic
Nigeria, both oil-rich nations where radical Islam
has a following." ("Oil-rich"
is the key phrase in that sentence, in case you
missed it.) "The new campaign,"
writes Edward Harris of AP, "will target nine
north and west African nations and seek to bolster
regional cooperation."
American officials, calling for a "budgetary
increase" for anti-terror military aid to the
area, are now evidently comparing the vast "ungoverned"
desert expanses of the Sahara "to Afghanistan
during Taliban rule, when Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida
terror group thrived." Talk about ambition.
Quick, someone report them to the Overseas Basing
Commission before anything else happens!
While the Pentagon is planning to shut-down bases
all over the U.S., it's like a shopaholic. It just
can't help itself abroad. Rumors of future base
openings are multiplying fast -- base workers from
Connecticut, New Jersey, and South Dakota take note
for future travel planning -- in the impoverished
former Warsaw Pact lands of Southeastern Europe,
which are also conveniently nearer to the oil heartlands
of the planet than our old Cold War bases in places
like Germany.
UPI, for instance, reported last week that the
Pentagon was eyeing bases on Romania's scenic Black
Sea coast and that the Romanians (whose plans for
a world class, Disney-style Dracula theme park seem
to have fallen through) were eager to be of well-paid
service in the war on terror. Then
a Romanian general confirmed that base negotiations
were indeed well along: "General Valeriu Nicut,
head of the strategic planning division for the
Romanian general staff, said on Wednesday after
an international military conference on security
issues that the U.S. would set up two military bases
in Romania within one year." He
was promptly demoted for his efforts. (Perhaps it
was as a result of Rumsfeld's pique.) No one on
either side is denying, however, that base negotiations
are underway.
Meanwhile in neighboring Bulgaria, the Defense
minister was claiming that the U.S. would soon occupy
three bases in that land and the Deputy Defense
Minister, chairing the talks none of us knew were
going on between the two countries, "told journalists
that Washington is also interested in placing storehouses,"
assumedly to be filled with pre-positioned military
supplies, there too. Earlier in the year, the U.S.
head of NATO forces had spoken of the possibility
of our occupying five bases in Bulgaria -- and all
of them (so far) are hanging onto their jobs.
To the Southeast, there were yet more basing rumors
in a volatile area where, last week, a massive 1,700
kilometer-long pipeline bringing Caspian oil from
Baku in the former SSR of Azerbaijan to Ceyhan in
Turkey via the former SSR of Georgia, was officially
opened for business. The pipeline, as Pepe Escobar
of Asia Times pointed out, is little short of a
"sovereign state"; its route, carefully
constructed to cut both Russia and Iran out of the
Caspian oil loop, ends "right next door to
the massive American airbase at Incirlik" in
Turkey. The presidents of all three countries attended
the opening ceremonies in Baku, while an Azerbaijan
newspaper reported that the "U.S. and Azerbaijani
governments on April 12 agreed on the deployment
of U.S. military bases... Under the agreement, the
U.S. forces will be deployed in Kurdamir, Nasosnaya
and Guyullah. Various types of aircraft will be
deployed at all the three bases, which have runways
modernized for U.S. military needs." The report
was promptly denied by the Azerbaijani defense ministry,
which under the circumstances probably means little.
In neighboring Georgia, our goals have been somewhat
more modest. With U.S. military trainers already
in and out of the country to help bring Georgian
forces up to speed in the war in terror, and --
thanks to the Rose Revolution -- a friendly government
in place (the salaries of whose top officials are
now "supplemented" by a fund set up by
George Soros), a push had been on to rid the country
of its last two Russian military bases. This week
an agreement to vacate them by 2008 was announced.
Bases in Iraq: 2003-2005
And mind you, all of the above was just the minor
basing news of the week. The biggest news had to
do with Iraq. Bradley Graham of the Washington Post
published a rare piece in our press on American
bases in that country (Commanders Plan Eventual
Consolidation of U.S. Bases in Iraq). As a start,
he revealed that, at the moment,
the "coalition" has a staggering 106 bases
in the country, none with less than 500 troops on
hand, and that figure doesn't even include
"four detention facilities and several convoy
support centers for servicing the long daily truck
runs from Kuwait into Iraq."
With just over 160,000 coalition troops on hand
in Iraq that would mean an average of about 1,600
to a base. Of course, some of these bases also house
Iraqi troops, various Iraqis needed by U.S. forces
-- translators, for instance, who, when living outside
such bases, are being killed off by insurgents at
what seems to be a ferocious rate -- and some of
the hordes of contractors "reconstructing"
the country, including the thousands and thousands
of hired guns who have flooded in and are constantly
at risk. Some American bases like Camp Anaconda,
spread over 15 square miles near Balad (with two
swimming pools, a first-run movie theater, and a
fitness gym) or Camp Victory at the Baghdad International
Airport, are vast Vietnam-style encampments, elaborate
enough to be "permanent" indeed.
It is, by the way, a mystery of compelling proportions
that American journalists, more or less trapped
in their hotels when it comes to reporting on Iraqi
Iraq (given the dangers of the situation), have
seemed no less trapped when it comes to reporting
on important aspects of American Iraq. We know,
for instance, that even a year and a half ago the
American base construction program was already in
"the several billion dollar range," and
such bases had long been at the heart of Bush administration
dreams for the region; yet since April 2003 there
have been only a few very partial descriptions of
American bases in Iraq in the press -- and those
are largely to be found in non-mainstream places
or on-line.
Given what's generally available
to be read (or seen on the TV news), there is simply
no way most Americans could grasp just how deeply
we have been digging into Iraq. Take, for
instance, this description of Camp Victory offered
by Joshua Hammer in a Mother Jones magazine piece:
"Over the past year, KBR contractors have
built a small American city where about 14,000 troops
are living, many hunkered down inside sturdy, wooden,
air-conditioned bungalows called SEA (for Southeast
Asia) huts, replicas of those used by troops in
Vietnam. There's a Burger King, a gym, the country's
biggest PX -- and, of course, a separate compound
for KBR workers, who handle both construction and
logistical support. Although
Camp Victory North remains a work in progress today,
when complete, the complex will be twice the size
of Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo -- currently one of
the largest overseas posts built since the Vietnam
War."
There has not, to my knowledge, been a single descriptive
article in a major American paper during our two-year
occupation of Iraq that has focused on any one of
the American bases in that country and I don't believe
that the American public has any idea -- I certainly
didn't -- that there were at least 106 of them;
or, for that matter, that some of them already have
such a permanent feel to them; that they are, in
essence, facts-on-the-ground long before any negotiations
about them might begin with a "sovereign"
Iraqi government.
In any case, Graham reports that, according to
the latest Pentagon plans, we would focus our Iraqi
bases -- once called "enduring camps,"
now referred to as "contingency operating bases"
(but never, never use the word "permanent")
-- into four "hubs" ("BRAC for Iraq"),
none too close to major population centers -- "the
four are Tallil in the south, Al Asad in the west,
Balad in the center and either Irbil or Qayyarah
in the north."
"Several officers involved in drafting the
consolidation plan said it entailed the construction
of longer-lasting facilities at the sites, including
barracks and office structures made of concrete
block instead of the metal trailers and tin-sheathed
buildings that have become the norm at bigger U.S.
bases in Iraq.
"The new, sturdier buildings
will give the bases a more permanent character,
the officers acknowledged. But they said the consolidation
plan was not meant to establish a permanent U.S.
military presence in Iraq... The new buildings are
being designed to withstand direct mortar strikes,
according to a senior military engineer."
This plan is being presented
-- hilariously enough -- as part of a "withdrawal"
strategy. It seems we are (over what will
have to be interminable years) planning to turn
the other 100 or so bases over to the Iraqi military
(itself a bit of a problematic concept). For this,
of course, "no timetable exists." Once
the massive bulk of bases are let go, only those
4 (or -- see below -- possibly 5) bases will remain
to be dealt with; and, in that distant future, while
maintaining "access" to our former Iraqi
strongholds, we will withdraw to our bases in Kuwait
from which we will practice what one colonel interviewed
by Graham termed "strategic overwatch."
(Given the intensifying insurgency in Iraq, this
seems like nothing short of a Pentagon pipe dream.)
The future of a fifth base, the Camp Victory complex,
headquarters of the U.S. military in Iraq, remains
"unresolved." After all, who wouldn't
want to keep a massive complex on the edge of the
Iraqi capital, though the military has proven incapable
thus far of securing even the road that runs from
Camp Victory (and Baghdad International Airport)
into downtown Baghdad and the Green Zone. Today,
it is the "deadliest road in Iraq," perhaps
the most dangerous stretch of highway on the planet,
which of course says something symbolic about the
limits of the Pentagon's plans to garrison the globe.
Naturally, these four (or five) bases aren't "permanent,"
even if they are about to be built up to withstand
anything short of an atomic blast and have the distinct
look of permanency. The problem is, as Maj. Noelle
Briand, who heads a basing working group on the
U.S. command staff, commented to Graham, "Four
is as far as we've gone down in our planning."
The word "permanent" cannot be spoken
in part because all of the above decisions have
undoubtedly been taken without significant consultation
with the supposedly sovereign government of Iraq
with whom the Pentagon is undoubtedly just dying
to have one of those strategic partnerships as well
as a "status of forces agreement" or SOFA.
The SOFA is considered a future necessity since
it would essentially give American troops extraterritoriality
in Iraq, protecting them from prosecution for crimes
committed and offering them impunity in terms of
actions taken. No Iraqi government, however, could
at present negotiate such an agreement without losing
its last shred of popularity.
Still, congratulations to Graham for giving us
an important, if somewhat encoded, version of the
Bush administration's latest basing plans for Iraq.
But here's the catch, these "latest" Pentagon
plans look suspiciously like some rather well-worn
plans, now over two years old. Unfortunately, our
media has just about no institutional memory.
As it happens, though, I remember -- and what I
remember specifically is a New York Times front-page
piece, Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access to Four
Key Bases in Iraq, by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt
that was published on April 19, 2003, just as the
Bush administration's Iraq War seemed to be successfully
winding down. Since next to nothing else of significance
on the subject was written until Graham's piece
came out last week, it remains a remarkable document
as well as a fine piece of reporting. It began:
"The United States is planning a long-term
military relationship with the emerging government
of Iraq, one that would grant the Pentagon access
to military bases and project American influence
into the heart of the unsettled region, senior Bush
administration officials say.
"American military officials, in interviews
this week, spoke of maintaining perhaps four bases
in Iraq that could be used in the future: one at
the international airport just outside Baghdad;
another at Tallil, near Nasiriya in the south; the
third at an isolated airstrip called H-1 in the
western desert, along the old oil pipeline that
runs to Jordan; and the last at the Bashur air field
in the Kurdish north."
Let's just stop there and consider
for a moment. In April 2003, the Pentagon was looking
for long-term "access" to four bases;
at the end of May 2005, it's revealed that the Pentagon
is looking for long-term "access" to...
four bases. After two years and billions of dollars
worth of base construction, the general distribution
of these bases remains relatively unchanged. In
fact, the base chosen for the Shiite South at Tallil
remains the same.
One of the four bases mentioned in the Times' account
of 2003, at Baghdad International Airport, now Camp
Victory, is the "unresolved" fifth base
in the Post's 2005 account; in the West, H-1 has
been replaced by Al Asad in the same general area;
in the Kurdish North, Bashur (2003) has been replaced
by either Qayyarah or Irbil, approximately 50 kilometers
to the south; and Balad, north of Baghdad, is assumedly
the non-urban version of the 2003 Airport choice.
In other words, between 2003 and 2005, the numbers
and the general placement of these planned bases
seems to have remained more or less the same.
"In Afghanistan, and in Iraq," Shanker
and Schmitt wrote, "the American military will
do all it can to minimize the size of its deployed
forces, and there will probably never be an announcement
of permanent stationing of troops. Not permanent
basing, but permanent access is all that is required,
officials say." This was, of course, at a moment
when Bush administration neocons expected to draw
down American forces rapidly in a grateful, liberated
land.
Shanker and Schmitt then put the prospective Iraqi
bases into a larger global context, mentioning in
particular access to bases in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan,
Romania, and Bulgaria, and adding:
"[T]here has been a concerted diplomatic and
military effort to win permission for United States
forces to operate from the formerly Communist nations
of Eastern Europe, across the Mediterranean, throughout
the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, and across
Central Asia, from the periphery of Russia to Pakistan's
ports on the Indian Ocean. It is a swath of Western
influence not seen for generations."
Three days after the Shanker/Schmitt report was
front-paged, Donald Rumsfeld strongly denied it
was so at a Pentagon news conference reported in
the Washington Post (U.S. Won't Seek Bases in Iraq,
Rumsfeld Says) by Bradley Graham. His piece began:
"Defense Secretary Donald
H. Rumsfeld said yesterday the United States is
unlikely to seek any permanent or 'long-term' bases
in Iraq because U.S. basing arrangements with other
countries in the region are sufficient... 'I have
never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a
permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting,'
Rumsfeld said... 'The likelihood of it seems to
me to be so low that it does not surprise me that
it's never been discussed in my presence -- to my
knowledge.'"
And, for the next two years, that was largely that.
The Times hasn't seriously revisited the story since,
despite the fact that their original front-page
piece was groundbreaking. You would think it a subject
worth returning to. After all, despite everything
that's happened between May 2003 ("Mission
Accomplished!") and the present disastrous
moment in Iraq, the Pentagon is still planning on
those four bases. Coincidence? Who knows, but might
it not be worth at least a blip on the inside pages
somewhere?
An Empire of Bases
As the Overseas Basing Commission indicated in
their recent report, such global basing plans are
nothing if not wildly ambitious and sure to be wildly
expensive (especially for a military bogged down
in fighting a fierce but not exactly superpower-sized
enemy in one part of a single Middle Eastern country).
When we take the bits and pieces of the global-base
puzzle that have sprung up like weeds between the
cracks in recent weeks and try to put them together
into a map of the Pentagon's globe, it looks rather
like the one described by Shanker and Schmitt in
2003.
Begin with those prospective bases in Romania and
Bulgaria (and while you're at it, toss in the ones
already in existence in the former Yugoslavia);
make your way southeastwards past "Pipelineistan,"
keeping your eye out for our Turkish bases and those
possible future ones in Azerbaijan; take in the
4 or 5 bases we'd like to hang onto in the embattled
Iraqi heartland of the Middle East (not to speak
of the ones we already control in Kuwait, Qatar,
Bahrain and elsewhere in the region); take a quick
glance at "oil-rich" North Africa for
a second, imagining what might someday be nailed
down there; then hop over base-less Axis of Evil
power Iran and land at Bagram Air Base (don't worry,
you have "access") or any of the other
unnamed ones in Afghanistan where we now have a
long-term foothold; don't forget the nearby Pakistani
air bases that Gen. Pervez Musharraf has given us
access to (or Diego Garcia, that British "aircraft
carrier" island in the Indian Ocean that's
all ours); add in our new Central Asian facilities;
plot it all out on a map and what you have is a
great infertile crescent of American military garrisons
extending from the old Soviet-controlled lands of
Eastern Europe to the old Soviet SSRs of Central
Asia, reaching from Russia's eastern border right
up to the border of China. This
is, of course, a map that more or less coincides
with the Middle Eastern and Caspian oil heartlands
of the planet.
Put in historical terms,
in the last decade-plus, as the pace of our foreign
wars has picked up, we've left behind, after each
of them, a new set of bases like the droppings of
some giant beast marking the scene with its scent.
Bases were dropped into Saudi Arabia and the small
Gulf emirates after our first Gulf War in 1991;
into the former Yugoslavia after the Kosovo air
war of 1999; into Pakistan, Afghanistan, and those
former Central Asian SSRs after the Afghan war of
2001; and into Iraq after the invasion of 2003.
War in Iraq, in turn, has spawned at least 106 bases
of various sizes and shapes; while a low-level but
ongoing guerilla conflict in Afghanistan has produced
a plethora of fire bases, outposts, air bases, and
detention centers of every sort. It's a matter of
bases and prisons where there is opposition. Just
bases where there isn't. This, it seems, is now
the American way in the world.
Most Americans, knowing next
to nothing about our global bases or the Pentagon's
basing policies, would undoubtedly be surprised
to learn that ours is an empire of bases. In fact,
our particular version of military empire is perhaps
unique: all "gunboats," no colonies. Nothing
has been of more concern to the Pentagon-centered
Bush administration abroad than bases, or of less
concern to our media at home. Despite two
years of catastrophic setbacks, the ambitions of
the Bush White House and the Pentagon evidently
remain remarkably unchanged and wildly ambitious
-- and, I suspect, the rule of inverse media interest
still holds.
Special research thanks go to Nick Turse.
Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com,
is co-founder of the American Empire Project and
author of "The End of Victory Culture." |
SINGAPORE - Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld accused China on Saturday of enhancing
its ability to project power at a time when it faced
no threat and said Beijing will have to expand
political freedoms to maintain economic growth and
influence.
The Pentagon has been raising alarms over China's
military modernization for several years. Rumsfeld's
rhetorical assault, in a speech to a conference
of regional defense ministers, underscores a growing
concern in the United States over China's rising
military, economic and diplomatic power.
But facing an audience anxious about a possible
U.S.-China confrontation in Asia, Rumsfeld toned
down parts of his prepared speech and insisted Washington
sought neither to destabilize China nor fan a competition
for regional influence.
"China appears to be expanding its missile
forces, allowing them to reach targets in many areas
of the world, not just the Pacific region, while
also expanding its missile capabilities within this
region," he told an annual conference hosted
by the International Institute of Strategic Studies.
"China also is improving
its ability to project power, and developing advanced
systems of military technology," he said.
"Since no nation threatens
China, one must wonder: Why this growing investment?
Why these continuing large and expanding arms purchases?
Why these continuing robust deployments?"
One line dropped from the prepared text said: "One
might be concerned that this buildup is putting
the delicate military balance in the region at risk
-- especially, but not only, with respect to Taiwan."
The United States itself has vastly
boosted defense spending since the Sept.11 attacks.
Some experts say China's military increases can
be expected of a growing power.
During a question and answer session, a Chinese
foreign ministry official asked if Rumsfeld really
believed China faced no threat and if the United
States felt threatened by China.
"I don't know of nations
that threaten China," Rumsfeld said, adding:
"No, we don't feel threatened by the emergence
of China. It strikes me that the emergence of China
is perfectly understandable."
OPENNESS REQUIRED
But he said China's continued economic growth "will
require an openness that will put a pressure on
a political system that is less free and there will
be a tension over time."
When asked whether his comments meant China's rise
was replacing the war on terrorism as the top U.S.
concern, Rumsfeld said "the
struggle against extremism is not over" and
that China's rise was an inevitable and largely
positive development.
He also said that it was "flat
wrong" that America wanted to destabilize China
because this would not be good for the Chinese people
or the region.
Analysts attending the conference told Reuters
the speech was less critical of China than they
expected.
"We're still left with
a sense that he's clearly worried about China.
But he's not saying what the United States is prepared
to do about it," said Jonathan Pollack, a professor
at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.
Rumsfeld spoke as the Pentagon prepared to release
its annual assessment of China's military expenditures.
Last year, it reported China expanded its military
buildup with more sophisticated missiles, satellite-disrupting
lasers and underground facilities, all aimed at
winning a possible conflict with Taiwan and exerting
power.
It said Beijing had more than 500 short-range ballistic
missiles opposite Taiwan and its defense spending
of $50 billion to $70 billion is third behind the
United States and Russia.
While new Pentagon figures are
not yet public, the RAND Corp., a research group
that often works for the military, reported that
the Defense Department may have overestimated China's
total military spending by more than two-thirds.
But CIA Director Porter Goss said recently China's
military buildup was tilting the balance of power
in the Taiwan Strait.
After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the Bush administration
often extolled improving Sino-American relations,
triggered in part by anti-terror cooperation.
But increasingly, disputes over China's currency
rates, its refusal to lean harder on North Korea
to return to six-party nuclear talks and trade issues
have come to the fore. |
The Bush administration is
expected to soon announce a new national space policy
that will give the Pentagon the green light to move
toward deployment of offensive weapons in space.
The new directive could allow deployment of lasers
in space; attack vehicles that descend on targets
from space; killer satellites, which would disrupt
or destroy other nation's satellites; and tungsten
rods fired from space platforms that would gather
speeds of over 7,000 mph and be able to penetrate
underground targets.
In the Air Force Space Command's Strategic Master
Plan, FY06 and Beyond, the military said, "Our
vision calls for prompt global strike space systems
with the capability to apply force from or through
space against terrestrial targets. International
treaties and laws do not prohibit the use or presence
of conventional weapons in space."
There was once a treaty
that limited the research, development, testing
and deployment of such offensive space systems.
It was called the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM)
Treaty with Russia. Once
in office, George W. Bush withdrew the U.S. from
the treaty and moved forward with expanded research
and development on offensive space weapons.
The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq was largely coordinated
from space. Over 70% of the
weapons used in the war were guided to their targets
by military satellites. Thus the Pentagon
maintains that the U.S. must "deny" other
nations the use of space in order to maintain "full
spectrum dominance."
In order to sell this space warfare program to
the American people, the Pentagon has labeled it
"missile defense." But in reality the
program is all about offensive engagement and was
first spelled out in the 1997 Space Command plan,
Vision for 2020, that called for U.S. "control
and domination" of space.
The Pentagon and its aerospace corporation allies
understand that they cannot come to the American
people and ask for hundreds of billions of dollars
for offensive weapons in space. Thus the claim of
"missile defense." The U.S. has to date
spent well over $130 billion on Star Wars research
and development. The budget for military-related
space activity in 2003 was $18 billion and is expected
to top $25 billion a year by 2010.
With growing budget deficits in
the U.S., Congress will have to drastically cut
needed programs like Medicare, Medicaid, education,
and environmental clean-up in order to pay the growing
cost of space weapons technology.
The world has become reliant on satellites for
cell phones, cable TV, ATM bank machines and the
like. Space debris is already a problem as space
shuttles have had windshields cracked by bits of
paint orbiting the Earth at enormous speeds. Imagine
what would happen if the U.S. began destroying satellites
in space, creating massive amounts of orbiting space
junk, that made access to space virtually impossible
for everyone.
For the last several years the Space Command, headquartered
in Colorado Springs, held a computer simulation
space war game set in the year 2017. The
game pitted the "Blues" (U.S.) against
the "Reds" (China). In the war
game the U.S. launched a preemptive first strike
attack against China using the military space plane
(called Global Strike). Armed with a half-ton of
precision-guided munitions the space plane would
fly down from orbit and strike anywhere in the world
in 45 minutes.
It is easy to see why Canada, Russia, and China
have repeatedly gone to the United Nations asking
the U.S. to join them in negotiating a new global
ban on weapons in space. Why not close the door
to the barn before the horse gets out? So far the
U.S., during both the Clinton and Bush administrations,
refuses to even discuss the idea of a new space
treaty.
Gen. Lance Lord, head of
the Air Force Space Command, recently told Congress,
"Space superiority is not our birthright, but
it is our destiny."
The idea that the U.S. is
destined to rule the Earth and space militarily
needs to be debated by the citizens of our nation.
Not only is this a provocative notion, it is also
one that will lead to a massive waste of our hard-earned
tax dollars and create a dangerous new arms race.
Do we really want war in the heavens?
Bruce K. Gagnon is Coordinator of the Global
Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.
He can be reached at: globalnet@mindspring.com |
SINGAPORE (Reuters)
- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Saturday
that Arab news channel Al Jazeera was encouraging
Islamic militant groups by broadcasting beheadings
of foreign hostages in Iraq.
Al Jazeera broadcasts footage from militant groups,
often showing hostages being brutally killed by
their captors or foreign captives pleading at gunpoint
for their governments to withdraw troops from Iraq.
"If anyone lived in the Middle
East and watched a network like the Al Jazeera day
after day after day, even if he was an American,
he would start waking up and asking what's wrong.
But America is not wrong. It's the people who are
going on television chopping off people's heads,
that is wrong," he said.
"And television networks that carry it and
promote it and jump on the spark every time there
is a terrorist act are promoting the acts,"
he told a security conference in Singapore.
Al Jazeera's offices in Baghdad and in the Afghan
capital, Kabul, have been hit by U.S. fire but Washington
said the bombings had been accidental and had not
targeted the network. [...]
|
DUBAI (Reuters)
- The Arab TV channel Al Jazeera rejected on Saturday
as unfounded Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's
accusations that it was encouraging Islamic militant
groups by airing beheadings of foreign hostages
in Iraq.
"Al Jazeera ... has never at any time transmitted
pictures of killings or beheadings and ... any talk
about this is absolutely unfounded," the television
said in a statement.
Al Jazeera, repeatedly accused by Washington of
biased reporting on Iraq, has often shown video
of hostages pleading at gunpoint for their government
to withdraw its troops. But it does not broadcast
footage of killings, posted on the Internet by militants.
The channel voiced "deep regret and surprise"
over Rumsfeld's remarks.
The channel has angered some Arab governments as
well as Washington with its coverage of the war
in Iraq, Islamic militancy and interviews with Arab
dissidents.
Al Jazeera is forbidden to report from Saudi Arabia,
and Iraq's U.S.-backed authorities closed its office
there, accusing it of supporting insurgents.
The station, which has interviewed Iraqi government
and U.S. officials on Iraq, denies it is helping
the militants' cause.
|
WASHINGTON (Reuters)
- The United States criticized four Gulf Arab allies
as some of the world's worst offenders in permitting
human trafficking on Friday in a rebuke Washington
hopes will promote improved human rights in the
Middle East.
The State Department downgraded Saudi Arabia, Kuwait,
Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to the lowest
level of compliance in the report, which evaluates
countries' efforts in fighting the trafficking of
thousands of people forced into servitude or the
sex trade every year.
Victims in the region were mainly domestic servants
and laborers but also included boy camel jockeys,
according to the report.
It cited the case of a 17-year-old orphan, Lusa,
kidnapped from Uzbekistan and was sold into a slavery
ring in UAE. She was eventually "no longer
usable" as a prostitute and the emirates' immigration
service said she should serve a two-year prison
sentence for entering the country illegally.
Officials from the Gulf countries were not immediately
available to comment on the one-step downgrade,
which ranks them with such countries as Burma, North
Korea and Sudan.
"This report shows that
in this administration we will not pull our punches
even with our friends. We appreciate their
cooperation in other areas but they just don't have
a good track record fighting this," a State
Department official said on condition of anonymity.
Each of the four nations has oil resources vital
to Washington and also gave logistical support for
the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The lowest category in the congressionally mandated
annual report is called Tier 3, which lists countries
that "do not fully comply with the minimum
standards (laid down by U.S. law) and are not making
significant efforts to do so."
WOMEN AND CHILDREN
While victims generally come from Asia to work
as domestic servants and laborers, the main concern
over the UAE is the sexual exploitation of women,
according to the report.
In the cases of Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE, the
State Department also said boys were trafficked
and forced to work as camel jockeys.
In Qatar, the government banned the use of child
jockeys in May. Rights groups say several thousand
boys, some as young as three, work as jockeys in
the Gulf Arab region's lucrative races.
Bolivia, Jamaica, Cambodia and Togo also were downgraded
to Tier 3 this year. Cuba, Ecuador and Venezuela
were already there.
Nations in the lowest category may be subject to
sanctions, including the withholding of U.S. aid
that is not for humanitarian or trade purposes,
if they do not improve their records in three months.
President Bush has the right to waive sanctions,
which, even if applied, would not likely have much
practical effect on the wealthy Gulf oil exporters.
Bush urged Saudi Arabia this year to be a leader
of reform in the Middle East and said he would make
rights and democracy a central plank of U.S. relations
with countries in the region.
While State Department reports have criticized
Arab allies before over rights issues, the trafficking
critique is unusual because it put so much focus
on the region. In no other region were there as
many downgrades to the lowest category.
Many governments, particularly those rebuked in
the State Department's annual rights reports, complain
the United States has little credibility in criticizing
other nations because of scandals in recent years
involving U.S. abuse of prisoners.
|
Debating
Guantanamo
Amnesty's chief goes head-to-head with a White House
lawyer about Guantanamo, war crimes, and the word
'gulag.' |
By Amy Goodman
Democracy Now!
June 3, 2005 |
Editor's
Note: A week ago Amnesty International
accused the Bush administration of being a "leading
purveyor and practitioner" of human rights
violations. Since then, debate has intensified over
the U.S. war on terror. On Tuesday, Bush described
the Amnesty report as "absurd." What follows
is a debate between Amnesty's William Schulz and
attorney David Rivkin, who served in the Reagan
and George H.W. Bush administrations.
AMY GOODMAN: At a news conference yesterday, President
Bush dismissed the report [she plays excerpt from
the news conference].
REPORTER: Mr. President, recently Amnesty International
said you have established "a new gulag of
prisons around the world beyond the reach of the
law and decency." I'd like your reaction
to that, and also your assessment of how it came
to this, that that is a view not just held by
extremists and anti-Americans, but by groups that
have allied themselves with the United States
government in the past. And what the strategic
impact is that in many places of the world, the
United States these days under your leadership
is no longer seen as the good guy?
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I'm aware of the Amnesty
International report, and it's absurd. It's absurd
allegation. The United States is a country that
is -- promotes freedom around the world. When
there's accusations made about certain actions
by our people, they're fully investigated in a
transparent way. It's just an absurd allegation.
In terms of, you know, the detainees, we have
had thousands of people detained. We have investigated
every single complaint against the detainees.
Seemed like to me, they base some of their decisions
on the word of -- on the allegations by people
who were held in detention, people who hate America,
people that have been trained in some instances
to disassemble. That means not tell the truth.
So, it's an absurd report. Just is. And you know
-- yes, sir.
AMY GOODMAN: That was President Bush speaking at
a news conference yesterday. Joining us on the phone
from New York is the Executive Director of Amnesty
International U.S.A, William Schultz. Also in our
D.C. Studio, David Rivkin, partner in the Washington
office of Baker and Hostetler, also served in a
variety of legal and policy positions in the Reagan
and George H.W. Bush administrations, including
stints at the White House counsel's office, office
of the Vice President and the Departments of Justice
and Energy, was also a visiting fellow at the Nixon
Center and a contributing editor of the National
Review magazine. Let's begin with William Schultz
responding to what President Bush had to say about
your report.
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: Well, it's quite interesting that
the Vice President doesn't take Amnesty seriously.
The President calls us absurd. But,
you know, when Amnesty International took on Saddam
Hussein 20 years ago, when Donald Rumsfeld was courting
him, and even in the run-up to the Iraq war; when
Amnesty International was regularly quoted by Mr.
Rumsfeld and other officials about Saddam Hussein's
brutality - under those circumstances, this administration
didn't think we were absurd at all. When we criticize
Cuba, when we criticize North Korea, when we criticize
China, as we have repeatedly, this administration
applauds Amnesty International. But
when we criticize the United States, we are suddenly
absurd. I think the administration doth protest
too much.
Let me clarify one point of your introduction,
though, Amy. Amnesty International has urged that
the United States undertake these investigations
with a high-level commission and the appointment
of a special prosecutor. And we have only said that
if the United States fails to do its job, then other
countries who are party to the Convention Against
Torture and other international instrumentalities,
have a legal obligation to investigate and, if appropriate,
if they find evidence, then, of course, to prosecute.
AMY GOODMAN: David Rivkin, your response.
DAVID RIVKIN: First of all, Amnesty International
indeed has a long and illustrious legacy. Amnesty
International in the past has been an equal opportunity
critic, if you will, bringing spotlight on abuses
by many dictatorial and authoritarian regimes, including
Cuba, Vietnam, China, North Korea, Iraq, etc., etc.
Having said that, I think Amnesty International
has unfortunately gone astray. It is not just the
position of this administration. It's interesting
that The Washington Post, that's been quite critical
of many aspects of the administration's policies,
the day after the report, issued a pretty scathing
editorial pointing out a couple of things.
First of all, rhetorically -- and it's very important
to look at the rhetoric, because we're inundated
with news, in a way...the way you cast your observations.
In fact, your observations are very important. The
Washington Post said that the word "gulag"
is offensive. The gulags are outfits where political
prisoners, dissidents are holed in, worked to death,
starved to death.
The gulags today are in places like North Korea,
China, Cuba; in the past, of course, in the Soviet
Union. Whenever you think about the administration's
policy relative to Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, gulag
is the wrong word, number one. Now, in terms
of the facts - and by the way, Amnesty International
report that goes for hundreds of --
AMY GOODMAN: Let me just let William Schultz respond
to that, then we'll take it step by step. William
Schultz.
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: Well, I'm
simply unwilling to get into an argument about semantics.
I can certainly understand why some people feel
that the secretary general's metaphor there was
over the top. But, I think
that it is important to say that whether or not
this is a gulag in the Soviet sense, there certainly
are some similarities. After all, we have an archipelago
of prisons around the world, many of them secret,
in which people are being held in incommunicado
detention and which they are being severely mistreated
in some cases. And that --
DAVID RIVKIN: Forgive me, terms --
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: -- that is the fundamental point.
DAVID RIVKIN: Forgive me, terms -- we're both adults.
When you use words like "gulag" and one
uses words like "holocaust," they have
special responsibility not to cheapen those terms
by promiscuous usage. You
could have said "brutal prison." I wouldn't
disagree with you there. You could have said "horrible
prison conditions." To use the word
"gulag," you have special responsibility
because everybody knows what it means. It's not
even close. It's not even in the same universe.
And that is utterly irresponsible of Amnesty International.
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: Well, it's
very fine, Mr. Rivkin, if you want to focus on that
one issue at the expense of the substance of the
concerns, which is --
DAVID RIVKIN: I did not choose this moniker, you
did, sir.
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: You are welcome to do that, but
I'd like to discuss the substance of the concerns
here.
DAVID RIVKIN: Okay, but the --
Conditions were extremely harsh.
Prisoners received inadequate food rations and
insufficient clothing, which made it difficult
to endure the severe weather and the long working
hours; sometimes the inmates were physically abused
by camp guards.
The Red Cross also says that
inmates at the Abu Ghraib jail suffer "prolonged
exposure while hooded to the sun over several
hours, including during the hottest time of the
day when temperatures could reach 50 degrees Celsius
(122 degrees Fahrenheit) or higher
At Abu Ghraib, according to
the investigation Major General Antonio M. Taguba
carried out on behalf of the U.S. Army, there
was "credible" evidence that one inmate
suffered forced sodomy "with a chemical light
and perhaps a broom handle."
AMY GOODMAN: Why don't we talk about the substance
of the concerns, William Schultz. A term like that
was based on reports that Amnesty International
has done. Can you talk about what you see as the
most egregious violations at Guantanamo?
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: Well, I think what is important
to say here is that Amnesty has been pointing out
the systematic nature of what has been going on
here, both in terms of denial of certain internationally
recognized rights, but also in terms of mistreatment.
Now, in a recent National Review online article,
Mr. Rivkin claimed that the President had said,
"clearly and unequivocally that prisoners should
be treated humanely."
But that's not what the President said. The President
said in his February 7, 2002, Executive Order that
they should be treated in accordance with the conventions,
"to the extent appropriate and consistent with
military necessity."
That opened the green light to a whole series of
mistreatments, of misbehaviors that were ratified
by 27 rules issued by Secretary Rumsfeld. Those
included such things as the use of dogs. They allowed
up to four hours of stress positions. These were
implemented for a period of time, but at the advice
of military lawyers, Rumsfeld then withdrew the
authority for commanders at Guantanamo to do this
kind of thing.
And we know from reports that have been unearthed
by the ACLU and others that it was not just groups
like Amnesty or the ACLU that was concerned about
this. We know that F.B.I. agents raised concern
about this. We know that some people in the military
community itself raised concerns about the treatment
of these prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere.
Let me make the final point and then, of course,
Mr. Rivkin can respond. If indeed all of the prisoners
at Guantanamo Bay, some 670 originally, were enemy
combatants and not prisoners of war, as Mr. Rivkin
and his hard-right allies claim, then what about
the more than 100 of them that have been released
since they were taken into custody?
If they were released, then
one presumes that they were either wrongly detained
in the first place or that the war against terror
is over and that all should be released. Of course,
that is not the administration's position.
And that is the fundamental problem with holding
people in incommunicado detention and failing to
give them an opportunity to answer the charges against
them. Because we simply don't know how many of those
670 now remaining -- a little more than 500 -- are
in fact in the same category as the more than 100
that have been released.
DAVID RIVKIN: Let me take the last point first.
It's ironic, to put it mildly, that the administration's
policy of releasing people not because they are
innocent, but the vast majority of people who have
been released, indeed, are individuals who are enemy
combatants, but have basically been released because
of the sense that they no longer pose danger, which
[is an] inherently difficult and subjective determination.
I wonder if Mr. Schultz would like to remind our
listeners that at least two-and-a-half dozen individuals
who have been released have gone back to combat,
including a senior Taliban commander in Afghanistan.
How would you like to be a person to tell a family
of an American soldier who has been killed by an
individual who was released, or civilians whom they
have killed because of this revolving door policy?
So, bottom line is we are releasing people because
we're humanitarian, we're compassionate, and, frankly,
we have been pushed to do so for the rest of the
world -- by the rest of the world. I wouldn't deduce
anything from it.
But let me give you the bottom line: I would not
deny, and I don't think any reasonable person would
deny, that some problems have occurred. But the
facts, the statistics are very simple. We have close
to 70,000 detainees. 70,000 detainees in Iraq and
Afghanistan. No more than 320 or 330 have alleged
problems ranging from serious ones -- there have
been some murders, there have been some beatings--
to more minor ones. About 120 have been investigated
and found to have merits, and people are being prosecuted.
These are better stats than the situation in any
civilian penitentiary, Federal or State, anywhere
in human history.
The problem is that any time you detain people,
any time you put them in captivity, there are going
to be some mistakes. There are going to be some
problems. There are going to be abuses. It's human
nature. But the facts simply do not support the
proposition that the wide-scale abuses attributed
to government policy.
AMY GOODMAN: William Schultz.
DAVID RIVKIN: The final point. No, no. Let me --
AMY GOODMAN: Ok, go ahead.
DAVID RIVKIN: Okay, just one sec -- Amnesty International
and others have said many times, "Charges being
brought." There's a fundamental problem here.
Amnesty International and others did not understand,
but this is war. These people are not criminal suspects
who are entitled to speedy trial and adjudication.
Even if they were P.O.W.s,
which they are not, they would be entitled to be
held for a duration of hostilities. They're
not entitled to get charges brought against them.
They are using the criminal law paradigm, which
is the paradigm which came on September 11.
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: Of course, Mr. Rivkin is completely
wrong about Amnesty's position on that. But
let me just say that there's no way in the world
that Mr. Rivkin or anyone else can know whether
there are only 300 complaints, because, in fact,
many of the thousands of people who are being detained
are being detained in secret facilities. They are
being detained incommunicado.
There is simply no way for any of us to know exactly
how much abuse is going on, because, I assure you,
that unlike in the U.S. prison system where there
is usually at least some kind of an appeal process
or independent authority to whom a prisoner can
appeal, including the court system, if they feel
that they have been abused in prison, there is no
such authority within this archipelago of prisons.
So, there's no way that he can make his claim.
Now, with regard to the Guantanamo prisoners who
have been released, Amnesty International's position
is not that they should just be treated as criminals,
though, of course, if they are guilty of crimes,
they should be prosecuted. Our
position is that we don't know whether they are
prisoners of war or whether they are enemy combatants,
but under the Geneva Conventions, a competent tribunal
is supposed to determine that. And at that tribunal,
those who are charged with being enemy combatants
are to be given the opportunity to answer their
charges. That is what the U.S. government has denied
them.
And if, in fact, Mr. Rivkin's
position on why those 100 or so have been released
is correct, then the U.S. is acting irresponsibly.
If, in fact, those are people who are liable to
go back and commit crimes against the United States,
then either they should be charged or they can be
considered prisoners of war and held until a judgment
is made by an independent authority as to whether
the "war" is resolved or not. That is
Amnesty's position. It is a subtle position.
It is not as black and white as Mr. Rivkin is making
it. I'm not surprised that Bush and Cheney don't
see these subtleties, but Mr. Rivkin is a lawyer,
and he ought to understand.
AMY GOODMAN: William Schultz, when you released
the report, you said that Washington has become
a leading purveyor and practitioner of torture and
ill treatment, and that senior officials should
face prosecution. Among the officials you named:
Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Undersecretary
of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales, Former C.I.A Director George Tenet,
and other senior officials at U.S. detention facilities
at Guantanamo. Are you saying
that President Bush should be tried for war crimes?
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: No. And
let me make it clear, Amy. Amnesty never assumes
the guilt of anyone.
And we did not call for their prosecution. We
called for the appointment of a special prosecutor
by the Attorney General to investigate whether President
Bush or any of these other officials, including
Attorney General Gonzales, should be prosecuted.
That is Amnesty's position, again, perhaps a subtle
position, but a very important one.
We are saying that there is reason to believe that
the President gave a green light here, and that
a high-level, truly independent commission, not
just a military commission, a commission like the
9/11 Commission, independent, blue-ribbon commission,
should be appointed by the Congress to investigate
all of these questions. But we have not called for
the prosecution until that investigation takes place.
That's an elementary principle of due process.
AMY GOODMAN: David Rivkin, why not have this special
prosecutor, and then if your arguments prove to
be correct, it'll show that there's no reason to
move forward with prosecutions?
DAVID RIVKIN: Amy, we have to be careful about
terminology. A commission is one thing, a special
prosecutor is another thing.
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: We are calling for both.
DAVID RIVKIN: I understand that, but let me say
this, there have been more investigations --
AMY GOODMAN: We have ten seconds.
DAVID RIVKIN: --and prosecutions then, again, in
any war in human history. We are going to go forward.
A number of people have already been indicted. To
the extent senior officers are involved, they will
be prosecuted. The facts simply do not support the
proposition. There's been
a wide-scale failure to comply with the laws of
war.
AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there. David Rivkin,
William Schultz, head of Amnesty International U.S.A.,
I want to thank you both for being with us. |
"I'm aware of the Amnesty International
report, and it's absurd. The United States is
a country that promotes freedom around the world
[We have] investigated every single complaint
against [sic] the detainees It seemed like [Amnesty
International] based some of their decisions on
the word and allegations by people who were held
in detention, people who hate America, people
had been trained in some instances to disassemble
[sic] that means not tell the truth. And
so it was an absurd report. It just is."
President George W. Bush, press conference,
May 31
"For Amnesty International to suggest that
somehow the United States is a violator of human
rights, I frankly just don't take them seriously.
Frankly, I was offended by it. I think the fact
of the matter is, the United States has done more
to advance the cause of freedom, has liberated
more people from tyranny over the course of the
20th century and up to the present day than any
other nation in the history of the world [I]f
you trace [abuse allegations] back, in nearly
every case, it turns out to come from somebody
who has been inside and been released to their
home country and now are peddling lies about how
they were treated."
Vice President Dick Cheney, May 30 CNN interview
with Larry King
Those of us in the reality-based
community are not inclined to dismiss an Amnesty
International report out of hand. I myself am sometimes
disappointed with AI, especially when they accuse
certain organizations I respect of human rights
violations on a par with those of the governments
they seek to topple. I think it necessary to distinguish
between the violence of the oppressed and the violence
of the oppressor. One is "political" whether
one so distinguishes or not, and AI's politics tends
towards the legitimatization of state power over
the right to rebel. In any case, the organization
does a lot of good work, and I support for example
the programs they maintain in our high schools.
Only fools would call their reports "absurd,"
not to be taken seriously.
But here you have the president and vice president
of the United States dissing AI big time, arguing
in effect that
(a) the U.S. is the biggest liberator of human
beings ever, and that therefore ipso facto
(b) it can't possibly have tortured abused and
humiliated prisoners from Guantanamo to Afghanistan.
Isn't it simple and obvious? And
(c): those making charges are freed detainees,
who hate America, and
(d) they have been trained to "disassemble,"
which preacher man Bush tells us means to lie.
Actually, those in the reality-based community
know that "disassemble" means to take
something apart, which I am doing now as we speak.
The president meant "dissemble," as in
Edgar Allan Poe's "Tell-tale
Heart.":
"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble
no more! I admit the deed! -- tear up the planks!
-- here, here! -- it is the beating of his hideous
heart!"
"Dissemble" means to put on a false appearance.
In Poe's story, the madman thinks the police officers
visiting his apartment know that he's murdered his
landlord and deposited the body under the floor
planks. He sees their quiet chitchat as a provocation.
Actually the cops in the story seem perfectly honest
and straightforward, but the murderer haunted by
guilt imagines that they must be out to get him.
Bush and Cheney see the released detainees as men
out to attack America and themselves and to dissemble
in order to achieve that purpose. It's madness,
of course. The International Red Cross concluded
many months ago that most detainees in Iraq were
innocent people mistakenly imprisoned. ("Absurd!"
some will say. The U.S. is a country that promotes
freedom, so that can't be right, right? Just can't
be. America! Good people.) People who report after
their release that they were beat up, tortured,
mocked for their religion and sexually humiliated
while in U.S. custody are probably not dissembling.
But those whose very release presumably confirms
their innocence, even if the government justifies
their earlier confinement on the grounds they might
have produced some information servicing U.S. goals,
in the madmen's tortured minds have to be lying
about their confinement. But these people should
ask themselves: "Haven't any released detainees
spoken well of the fairness and humanity of their
captors?"
No? No happy campers? Nobody saying, "Well,
I was picked up by mistake, because my name sounds
like this other guy's name, but I was well-treated
and freed expeditiously after the matter was cleared
up"? Nobody? They're all hostile and bummed
out about what happened to them in detention? Well,
there's a whole lot of anti-Americanism out there
in this unfriendly world of Muslims and French and
German and Chinese and other foreign people. Lots
of reasons for them to make stuff up just to make
us look bad---because we're trying to bring freedom
and democracy to their people.
Gollum, gollum.
And for Amnesty to peddle these people's lies well,
"What villains!" shriek the world's maddest
murderers, tearing up and disassembling the planks
of international order and revealing exactly who
they are. Deconstructing their dissembling is fairly
easy, for those of us on this side of reality. For
those on the other side, such dissembling is God's
truth. "And so it was an absurd report,"
their president assures them, closing discussion
with the smugly pontifical, "It just is."
It all depends on what is is. The madman's is is
a product of his imagination, ours an ontology of
discernible reality in which U.S. imperialism seeks
to conquer and dominate Southwest Asia using bald-faced
lies, fascistic brainless nationalism, religious
intolerance and racism at every step. The madman's
dismissal of Amnesty's report is an appeal to the
Bush base to more thoroughly fortress its bovine
mind against questions and criticisms. America---Freedom.
America-haters---Liars, Disassemblers.
William Schultz, head of Amnesty's U.S. section
responds that it is "worth noting that this
administration never finds it 'absurd' when we criticize
Cuba or China, or when we condemned the violations
in Iraq under Saddam Hussein." Indeed U.S.
administrations routinely reference AI reports when
they want to attack some foreign foe. But the fascistic
epistemology current in ruling circles dictates
that truth cannot negatively affect the USA. Facts
and intelligence must be fixed around U.S. interests.
So the Cheney-friendly Wall Street Journal lashes
out at the "moral degradation" of Amnesty
International, debased so low as to compare the
U.S.'s global network of detention centers including
those in allied countries that routinely employ
torture, with a "gulag." Neocons David
Rivkin and Lee Casey condemn AI's "extravagant
and unfounded claims" in the National
Review without attempting to refute any particular
claim. "Groups like Amnesty persistently state
that American policy at Guantanamo Bay is illegal,"
they declare, "even though this is simply not
true." It just is, in the disassembler's words,
not true.
But from the reality-based camp a muezzin cries,
"Yes! what AI says is true." The battle
to determine what is slowly takes shape, as the
implications of the lies so plainly spelled out
in the Downing
Street Memo and so many other documents impact
those still awake among us. The Bush administration
knowingly and willfully attacked a sovereign country,
illegally, unprovoked, on the basis of deliberately
manufactured lies, using the emotions produced by
9-11, general ignorance, and a compliant press to
promote the cause. Seizing control of a country
whose population responded to occupation with sullen
caution or natural, predictable resistance, the
occupiers rounded up thousands of people doing what
people typically do under such circumstances. Of
course kids with Kalashnikovs are going to shoot
at the invaders. (What would kids in Texas do if
confronted with analogous events?) Hated, opposed,
ill-prepared by their own brainwashing process as
to why any decent person would dislike them, the
fine American troops treat these kids as "terrorists,"
cousins of the 9-11 attackers. Why not make them
excrete on themselves, and smear them with menstrual
blood, and force them to masturbate and simulate
homosexual acts on camera so their neighbors can
see, since they hate America so much?
These are the questions raised implicitly by Bush
and Cheney and their defenders in the press. How
can anyone dispute the reason and justice of the
heroic plan to conquer the Greater Middle East,
through a combination of military and psy-war tactics,
noble lies and if possible a fascistic crackdown
on dissent at home? Only people who hate America,
people trained in some instances to disassemble,
would wish that. So say the fascists. But they are
in trouble as thinking people lock horns with their
brain-dead supporters, who can only endlessly echo
"United We Stand" as they stand against
anybody Bush wants to smite in his ongoing imperialist
Crusade.
Thank you, Amnesty International, for your epistemological
integrity in these troubled crusading neo-medieval
proto-fascist times.
Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts
University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative
Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands
and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan;
Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in
Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan:
Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is
also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle
of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia,
Imperial Crusades.
|
WASHINGTON (Reuters)
- The U.S. military for the first time on Friday
detailed how jailers at Guantanamo mishandled the
Koran, including a case in which a guard's urine
splashed through a vent onto the Islamic holy book
and others in which it was kicked, stepped on and
soaked in water.
U.S. Southern Command, responsible for the prison
for foreign terrorism suspects at the U.S. naval
base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, described five cases
of "mishandling" of a Koran by U.S. personnel
confirmed by a newly completed military inquiry,
officials said in a statement.
In the incident involving urine, which took place
this past March, Southern Command said a guard left
his observation post, went outside and urinated
near an air vent, and "the
wind blew his urine through the vent" and into
a cell block.
It said a detainee told guards the urine "splashed
on him and his Koran." The statement said the
detainee was given a new prison uniform and Koran,
and that the guard was reprimanded and given duty
in which he had no contact with prisoners. Army
Capt. John Adams, a spokesman at Guantanamo, said
the inquiry deemed the incident "accidental."
Southern Command said a civilian contractor interrogator
apologized in July 2003 to a detainee for stepping
on his Koran. The interrogator "was later terminated
for a pattern of unacceptable behavior, an inability
to follow direct guidance and poor leadership,"
the statement said.
In August 2003, prisoners' Korans became wet when
night-shift guards threw water balloons in a cell
block, the statement said. In February 2002, guards
kicked a prisoner's Koran, it added.
In the fifth confirmed incident of mishandling
a Koran, Southern Command said a prisoner in August
2003 complained that "a two-word obscenity"
had been written in English in his Koran. Southern
Command said it was "possible" a guard
had written the words but "equally possible"
the prisoner himself had done it. It did not offer
an explanation of the detainee's possible motive.
'NEVER CONDONED'
"Mishandling a Koran at Guantanamo Bay is
a rare occurrence. Mishandling of a Koran here is
never condoned," Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, commander
of the Guantanamo prison who headed the inquiry,
said in the statement released after business hours
on Friday night. [...]
The United States holds about 520 detainees at
Guantanamo, most caught in Afghanistan, and has
classified them "enemy combatants" not
entitled to rights given to prisoners of war under
the Geneva Conventions. The high-security prison
opened in January 2002 for non-U.S. citizens caught
in the U.S. war on terrorism, and many prisoners
have been held more than three years without charges.
President Bush and Rumsfeld this week defended
Guantanamo from criticism by Amnesty International,
which called the jail the "gulag of our times." |
WASHINGTON (Reuters)
- A surge in suicide attacks
in Iraq and elsewhere around the world is a response
to territorial occupation and has no direct link
with Islamic fundamentalism, according
to the author of a new book who has created a database
of such bombings over the past 25 years.
Robert Pape, associate professor of political science
at the University of Chicago, said most suicide
terrorists were well-integrated and productive members
of their communities from working-class or middle-class
backgrounds.
"Technicians, waitresses, security guards,
ambulance drivers, paramedics ... few are criminals.
Most are volunteers whose first act of violence
is their very own suicide attack," Pape told
Reuters in an interview.
A broad misunderstanding of the
issue, he said, is taking the U.S.-led war on terrorism
in the wrong direction and could in fact be fueling
an increase in suicide terrorism.
Pape has created what he calls the first comprehensive
database on every suicide terrorist attack in the
world since 1980, using Arabic, Hebrew, Tamil and
Russian-language sources.
The U.S. Departments of Defense and Homeland Security,
as well as the U.N. Secretary General's office were
looking at the information, he said.
Some insurgent leaders in Iraq have cast suicide
attacks in holy-war terms. President Bush has called
such attacks a tactic of "enemies of freedom"
driven by a "thirst for absolute power."
HOMELANDS
"Islamic fundamentalism is
not the primary driver of suicide terrorism,"
Pape said. "Nearly all suicide terrorist attacks
are committed for a secular strategic goal -- to
compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces
from territory the terrorists view as their homeland."
"Yes, it's true we're killing terrorists day
by day, but the real measure of suicide terrorism
is simply the number of attacks," said Pape.
"The problem with suicide terrorism is that
it's not supply limited, it's demand-driven."
Pape cited suicide terrorism campaigns from Lebanon
to Israel, Chechnya and Sri Lanka, where he said
major democracies -- the United States, Israel,
France, India, Russia -- had been the principal
targets.
In "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide
Terrorism," Pape writes that the world's most
prolific suicide terrorist organization is the Tamil
Tigers -- a secular, Hindu group in Sri Lanka which
he said invented the "suicide belt."
Iraq, he said, was a prime example of strategic
terrorism. Prior to the U.S.-led invasion in March
2003 there was "never in Iraq's history a suicide
terrorist attack" but since then they had doubled
every year.
There has been a sharp escalation in violence,
especially suicide attacks, since Iraq's new Shi'ite
Islamist-led cabinet was announced in late April.
More than 700 Iraqis and 78 U.S. soldiers were killed
in bombings and other attacks in May, making it
the deadliest month in Iraq since January.
Pape collected demographic information on 462 suicide
attackers who completed their missions and said
he found that the common wisdom was wrong.
"The standard stereotype of a suicide attacker
as a lonely individual on the margins of society
with a miserable existence is actually quite far
from the truth," he said.
Pape, who has been invited to discuss his analysis
with a bipartisan group of U.S. congressmen, said
he hoped his book would demonstrate to policymakers
that a presumed connection between suicide attacks
and Islamic fundamentalism is misleading and could
contribute to policies that worsen the situation.
The U.S. government had only "a partial understanding"
of what has been driving suicide terrorism because
it did not begin collecting data until 2000, Pape
said.
"Once you have a more
complete picture you can see that the main cause
of suicide terrorism is a response to foreign occupation,
not Islamic fundamentalism, and the use of
heavy combat forces to transform a Muslim society
is only likely to increase the number of suicide
terrorists as is now happening." |
Once again it has taken grieving
relatives to point out that the Bush administration
will exploit even a heroic death for its own partisan
purposes.
As with the widows of Sept. 11 who demanded that
our obfuscating leaders investigate what went wrong
on that terrible day, or wounded Army Pvt. Jessica
Lynch who resisted efforts to make her into some
kind of Rambo figure, so relatives of late NFL star
Pat Tillman are demanding to know why their celebrated
war hero son's death in 2004 was exploited for public
relations purposes by the U.S. military and the
administration.
"They blew up their poster
boy," Tillman's father, Patrick, a San Jose
lawyer, told the Washington Post last week. He joined
his former wife to demand accountability for the
latest military cover-up to happen on Commander
in Chief Bush's watch. High-ranking Army officials,
he said, told "outright lies."
"After it happened, all the people in positions
of authority went out of their way to script this,"
Tillman said. "They purposely interfered with
the investigation .... I think they thought they
could control it, and they realized that their recruiting
efforts were going to go to hell in a handbasket
if the truth about his death got out."
A devastating series of investigations
and Post stories has shown that the Army's command
structure was eager to cover up the embarrassing
truth: that Pat Tillman, who turned down a $3.6-million
contract with the Arizona Cardinals to join the
Army Rangers after 9/11, was accidentally killed
by his fellow Rangers while on patrol in Afghanistan
a year ago.
Last spring, after months of increasingly damaging
reports exposing the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and
cover-up, the administration found some public relations
relief in the sad, patriotic tale of a man who spurned
fame and fortune to make "the ultimate sacrifice
in the war on terror," in the words of a White
House spokesman at the time. A nationally televised
memorial service and a Silver Star commendation
cemented Tillman's place as the nation's first war
hero since the story of Lynch's capture and phony
details of her rescue were foisted on an unaware
public in 2003.
Now, thanks to the reporting of the Post and the
fury of Tillman's parents, we know that the military's
top commanders were covering up the truth to protect
their image, and that of the Bush administration's
costly and deadly "nation-building" exercises
in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Although "soldiers on the scene said they
were immediately sure Tillman was killed by a barrage
of American bullets," according to the Post,
and "a new Army report on the death shows that
top Army officials, including the theater commander,
Gen. John P. Abizaid, were told that Tillman's death
was fratricide days before the service," Army
officials decided not to inform Tillman's family
or the public until weeks after the memorial. And
even then, they provided no details or answered
questions, saying only that friendly fire "probably"
killed Tillman.
"The fact that he was the ultimate team player
and he watched his own men kill him is absolutely
heartbreaking and tragic," Tillman's mother,
Mary, told the Post. "The
fact that they lied about it afterward is disgusting."
The soldiers on the ground said they burned Tillman's
bullet-riddled uniform and body armor, the Post
reported, because they considered it a "biohazard,"
and because "we knew at the time, based on
taking the pictures and walking around it, it was
a fratricide.... so we weren't thinking about proof
or anything."
So, given all this, why has nobody
higher in the Army chain of command, such as Abizaid,
been held accountable for this cover-up?
Did President Bush know about it? If not, why not?
After all, this was the most prominent soldier to
die since Bush took office four years earlier, a
prize recruit for his controversial spate of foreign
invasions.
In any case, the White House has refrained from
making any public apologies for the cover-up. Indeed,
Mary Tillman said she was particularly offended
that even after the facts were known, Bush exploited
her son's death with a message played before an
Arizona Cardinal game last fall before the election.
"Maybe lying's not
a big deal anymore," Patrick Tillman
said. "Pat's dead, and this isn't going to
bring him back. But these guys should have been
held up to scrutiny, right up the chain of command,
and no one has."
For the Tillmans, as with Pvt.
Lynch and the 9/11 widows, the path to true patriotism
means confronting your government when it lies.
Robert Scheer is the co-author of The Five
Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq. |
UNITED NATIONS - U.N. satellite
imagery experts have determined that material that
could be used to make biological or chemical weapons
and banned long-range missiles has been removed
from 109 sites in Iraq, U.N. weapons inspectors
said in a report obtained Thursday.
U.N. inspectors have been blocked from returning
to Iraq since the U.S.-led war in 2003 so they have
been using satellite photos to see what happened
to the sites that were subject to U.N. monitoring
because their equipment had both civilian and military
uses.
In the report to the U.N. Security Council, acting
chief weapons inspector Demetrius Perricos said
he's reached no conclusions about who removed the
items or where they went. He said it could have
been moved elsewhere in Iraq, sold as scrap, melted
down or purchased.
He said the missing material can be used for legitimate
purposes. "However, they can also be utilized
for prohibited purposes if in a good state of repair."
He said imagery analysts have identified 109 sites
that have been emptied of equipment to varying degrees,
up from 90 reported in March.
The report also provided much more detail about
the percentage of items no longer at the places
where U.N. inspectors monitored them.
From the imagery analysis, Perricos said analysts
at the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection
Commission which he heads have concluded that biological
sites were less damaged than chemical and missile
sites.
The commission, known as UNMOVIC, previously reported
the discovery of some equipment and material from
the sites in scrapyards in Jordan and the Dutch
port of Rotterdam.
Perricos said analysts found, for example, that
53 of the 98 vessels that could be used for a wide
range of chemical reactions had disappeared. "Due
to its characteristics, this equipment can be used
for the production of both commercial chemicals
and chemical warfare agents," he said.
The report said 3,380 valves, 107 pumps, and more
than 7.8 miles of pipes were known to have been
located at the 39 chemical sites.
A third of the chemical items removed came from
the Qaa Qaa industrial complex south of Baghdad
which the report said "was among the sites
possessing the highest number of dual-use production
equipment," whose fate is now unknown."
Significant quantities of
missing material were also located at the Fallujah
II and Fallujah III facilities north of the city,
which was besieged last year.
Before the first Gulf War in 1991, those facilities
played a major part in the production of precursors
for Iraq's chemical warfare program.
The percentages of missing biological equipment
from 12 sites were much smaller - no higher than
10 percent.
The report said 37 of 405 fermenters ranging in
size from 2 gallons to 1,250 gallons had been removed.
Those could be used to produce pharmaceuticals and
vaccines as well as biological warfare agents such
as anthrax.
The largest percentages of missing items were at
the 58 missile facilities, which include some of
the key production sites for both solid and liquid
propellant missiles, the report said.
For example, 289 of the 340 pieces of equipment
to produce missiles - about 85 percent - had been
removed, it said.
At the Kadhimiyah and Al Samoud factory sites in
suburban Baghdad, where the report said airframes
and engines for liquid propellant missiles were
manufactured and final assembly was carried out,
"all equipment and missile components have
been removed."
UNMOVIC is the outgrowth of a U.N. inspections
process created after the 1991 Gulf War in which
invading Iraqi forces were ousted from Kuwait. Its
staff are considered the only multinational weapons
experts specifically trained in biological weapons
and missile disarmament.
The report noted that the commissioners who advise
UNMOVIC again raised questions about its future.
Iraq has called for its Security Council mandate
to be terminated because UNMOVIC is funded from
past Iraqi oil sales and it wants to be treated
like other countries, but the council has not taken
up the issue.
France's U.N. Ambassador Jean-Marc de La Sabliere
said Thursday the commission's expertise "should
not be lost for the international community." |
Washington, DC,
Jun. 2 (UPI) -- Two years after the invasion of
Iraq, the United States has spent $990 million on
U.S. "embassy" operations there, but none
of that has been put toward building a permanent
home for the U.S. diplomatic presence, according
to a report for Congress.
That project will cost taxpayers another $1.3 billion,
only $20 million of which has been put toward the
project so far, according to an April report from
the Congressional Research Service.
However, two weeks ago Congress approved nearly
half that amount to begin construction of the site.
With a staff of about 1,000 Americans and 400 Iraqis,
the mission is one of the United States' largest.
It is dramatically larger than what came before
it in Baghdad: When the United States pulled out
of the country after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait
in 1990, the embassy staff numbered around 50 and
had an annual operating budget of $3.5 million.
By comparison, the new U.S. Embassy in Beijing
cost $434 million, according to Congress.
The embassy in Iraq will be three times that expensive
because it includes not just offices and living
spaces but also a power plant. Iraqi electricity
remains unreliable, far below demand and vulnerable
to sabotage.
President Bush requested $1.3 billion for the embassy
not in the State Department's annual budget but
in the 2005 "emergency supplemental,"
the bill intended to cover costs associated with
the war.
The request included $690 million for logistical
and security costs and $658 million for the construction
of an embassy compound to be built on an expedited
schedule within two years.
The U.S. Embassy is currently contained within
the "international zone," Saddam's sprawling
former headquarters on the Tigris River in Baghdad.
U.S. personnel occupy three buildings: the Chancery,
a former Baathist residence once occupied by the
U.S. Army; the Republican Palace, also known as
the Four-Head Palace until the Coalition Provisional
Authority paid about $35,000 to have the four massive
busts of Saddam removed from its roof; and the ambassador's
residence.
The new embassy compound will be built within the
"international zone" on a site along the
river. The Iraqi government wants the Saddam-era
buildings back for its own use.
Congress in May approved $748.5 million for "diplomatic
and consular programs" and $592 million for
embassy security, construction and maintenance in
the supplemental appropriation. During a joint conference
on the bill, the Senate was able to reverse a bipartisan
provision in the House of Representatives' version
of the bill, which had zeroed out that request.
"We knew years ago that we were going to need
a new embassy, and yet last summer when plans were
laid for construction of this particular site it
was not included in the omnibus appropriation bill
taken up in November. The 2006 budget request which
came up in February, no moneys were included in
the president's budget request for that as well,"
complained Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., when he spoke
on the House floor in March to restrict construction
funding.
The inclusion of the embassy costs in the emergency
supplemental allows the Bush administration to fund
the compound out of deficit spending, rather than
having to identify cuts within the State Department
or Pentagon budgets to pay for it. It also allows
the project to be built swiftly, without the sometimes-cumbersome
oversight of the appropriate congressional committees.
The practice of larding the supplemental with expenses
that are not strictly "emergencies" allows
the White House and Congress to offload billions
from the regular budget and pad it instead with
pet projects, said Winslow Wheeler, a budget analyst
with the Center for Defense Information, at a conference
last month. In the meantime, the deficit just keeps
getting bigger.
Moreover, by allowing undisciplined supplementals
-- which are passed swiftly and without extensive
hearings -- Congress is forswearing one of its only
ways of influencing U.S. policy and the executive
branch. And with billions being spent with little
congressional oversight, it sets the stage for contracting
abuses. |
KUWAIT (Reuters)
- Kuwait's Public Warehousing Co. (PWC) won its
second giant contract this year by securing a U.S.
Defense Logistics Agency deal worth as much as $14
billion over up to 5 years, the bourse said on Saturday.
The Kuwait Stock Exchange said in a statement the
deal has a minimum value of $1.4 billion and a maximum
value of $4.2 billion during an initial 18-month
period.
The news of the deal helped the Kuwaiti bourse,
the second largest in the Arab world, log a gain
of some or 3.5 percent by late morning.
Under the contract, Public Warehousing will supply
and provide logistical services to U.S. and allied
armed forces in Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan and Turkey,
the bourse added.
Public Warehousing will also provide support to
a UK-based logistics firm which has won the U.S.
defense tender to supply the Afghanistan region.
|
Iraq War June
2, 2005 - US occupation forces
announced on their propaganda radio beamed at local
residents of ar-Ramadi that the US military would
stop raiding houses and mosques, would open roads
to local people and turn the electricity and drinking
water supply in the city back on if local residents
would cooperate by informing the American occupation
troops of the locations and bases of Iraqi Resistance
fighters operating in the city against the Americans.
The statement on the US radio said that the US
would launch a program for employing unemployed
youths and offer financial help for those wanting
to get married on condition that the men and women
of ar-Ramadi cooperate and inform the Americans
on the Resistance fighters.
The correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported
that the Americans made the announcement more than
six times by the time he filed his report (posted
at 10:22am Mecca time Wednesday morning). The US
propaganda station also jammed other local and international
radio stations to force listeners in their cars
or homes to hear their announcement.
The statement told residents that they could dial
the special local telephone number 104 to contact
the occupation troops – whom they called "the
coalition forces" – to
inform them of the whereabouts of Resistance fighters,
whom it called "terrorists."
At the same time, however, the
American propaganda radio warned that the people
of ar-Ramadi would meet a fate similar to that of
the residents of al-Fallujah together with all the
destruction inflicted on their city during the US
offensives there, if they failed to cooperate with
the Americans.
Note: Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, collective
punishments are a war crime. Article 33 of the Fourth
Convention states: "No protected person may
be punished for an offense he or she has not personally
committed," and "collective penalties
and likewise all measures of intimidation or of
terrorism are prohibited."
|
History will
acknowledge that the criminal policy of the U.S-Britain
and the illegal invasion of Iraq led to the current
tragedy of the Iraqi people. In addition, history
will have to acknowledge that the Iraqi people,
alone, have resisted the genocidal sanctions and
the U.S-British Occupation of their country.
A detailed study by the U.N. and Iraqi officials
found that life in Iraq has decayed significantly
since U.S-led foreign forces invaded and occupied
the country, following a general trend seen in most
sectors since the imposition of the genocidal sanctions
in 1990. Iraqi civilians, mostly children, have
suffered the consequences of this criminal tragedy.
The United Nations Development Program (UNDP)
conducted the survey (study), titled "Iraq
Living Conditions Survey 2004," (ILCS)
in cooperation with Iraq's Ministry of Planning
under Occupation. It should be noted that the study
is not independent. The survey was conducted by
Iraqi officials, who are serving the Occupation,
with officials from the U.N.
Iraq had one of the best national health-care
systems in the Middle East. For example, Saudi Arabia
with all her petrodollar earnings had just a fraction
of that of Iraq's.
Iraq boasted a modern social infrastructure with
a first-class range of health-care facilities, and
the Iraqi people enjoyed one of the highest standards
of living in the Middle East. In 1991, there were
1,800 health-care centres in Iraq. More than a decade
later, that number is almost half, and almost a
third of them require major rehabilitation. Iraq
had used its oil revenues, which accounted for 60%
of its gross domestic product (GDP), to build a
modern health-care system with large Western-style
hospitals and modern technology. Iraqi medical and
nursing schools attracted students from throughout
the Middle East, and many Iraqi doctors were trained
in Europe or the U.S.A. Primary health-care services
reached about 97% of the urban population and 78%
of the rural population in 1990. But the Gulf war
of 1991 and more than 13 years of U.S-Britain sponsored
genocidal sanctions have left the country's economy
and infrastructure in ruins.
UNICEF reported on March 28, 2003 that, "The
Education system in Iraq, prior to 1991, was one
of the best in the region, with over 100% Gross
Enrolment Rate for primary schooling and high levels
of literacy, both of men and women. The Higher Education,
especially the scientific and technological institutions,
was of an international standard, staffed by high
quality personnel". In the 1980s, a successful
government program to eradicate illiteracy among
Iraqi men and women was implemented.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO),
"Iraq had a modern sanitary infrastructure
with an extensive network of water-purification
and sewage-treatment systems. Water networks distributed
clean, safe water to 95% of the urban population
and to 75% of those in rural areas. In 1990, Iraq
was ranked 50th out of 130 countries on the UNDP
Human Development Index, which measures national
achievements in health, education, and per capita
GDP".
It has fallen to 127, one of the most dramatic
declines in human welfare in recent history, as
a result of the U.S-Britain-sponsored sanctions
and wars, which needlessly killed civilians en mass.
The UN
ILCS study, which took less than five months
to complete and covered all of Iraq's provinces,
reveals that some 24,000 Iraqis, 12 per cent of
them children under the age of 18 years old, died
as a result of the U.S-British invasion and the
first year of Occupation. The three volumes report,
which was based on interviews conducted with some
22,000 Iraqi households in 2004. The report estimates
that the total number of Iraqi deaths is between
18,000 and 29,000. However, this estimate is misleading
and does not take into account households where
all members were lost, crimes that occurred very
often in the indiscriminate bombings of population
centres.
The most credible study so far was published in
November 2004 in the Lancet, the highly reputable
British medical journal. It shows that U.S. occupation
forces in Iraq have killed more than 100,000 civilians
between March 2003 and October 2004, the great majority
of them are women and children. The estimate is
considered "conservative" because it excludes
the high death toll in areas such as Fallujah, where
the U.S. committed crimes against humanity by obliterating
the entire city of 300,000 people. Further, the
Lancet study also shows that 14 per cent of U.S.
soldiers and 28 per cent of U.S. marines had killed
a civilian: U.S-authorised war crimes ignored in
the ILCS Report.
Consistent with other studies, the ILCS study
reveals that Iraqi civilians, mostly children, have
suffered from lack of health care and adequate nutrition.
The Data shows that 23 per cent of children under
the age of 5 suffer from chronic malnutrition, and
12 percent suffer from general malnutrition, 8 per
cent suffer acute malnutrition.
In a study published in November, the Norwegian-based
Fafo Institute for Applied Social Science found
that acute malnutrition among Iraqi children between
the ages of six months and 5 years has increased
from 4% before the invasion to 7.7% since the US
invasion of Iraq. In other words, despite the 13-years
sanctions, Iraqi children were living much better
(by 3.7%) under the regime of Saddam Hussein than
under the Occupation. Officials from the Institute
revealed that the Iraqi malnutrition rate is similar
to the level in some hard-hit African countries.
A generation ago, obesity was the main nutrition-related
public health concern, today at 7.7 per cent, Iraq's
child malnutrition rate is roughly equal to that
of Burundi, an African nation ravaged by more than
a decade of war. The study was substantiated by
new study prepared for the U.N. Human Rights Commission
by the reputed Swiss professor of Sociology and
expert on the right to food, Dr. Jean Ziegler.
Infant mortality and malnutrition findings show
clearly that, ''the suffering of children due to
war and conflict in Iraq is not limited to those
directly wounded or killed by military activities",'
says the study. With children under the age of 15
make up 39 per cent of the country's total
population of 27 million, the ILCS study notes that,
"Most Iraqi children today have lived their
whole lives under sanctions and war". In other
words, most Iraqi children today have lived their
lives in constant fear of U.S-British sponsored
terrorism. "We find record of not a single
significant demonstration protesting the wholesale
destruction of Iraqi children," wrote Professor
Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado.
A detailed study by the British-based charity
organisation (Medact) that examines the impact of
war on health, revealed cases of vaccine-preventable
diseases were rising and relief and reconstruction
work had been mismanaged. Gill Reeve, deputy director
of Medact, said, "[t]he health of the Iraqi
people has deteriorated since the 2003 invasion.
The 2003 war not only created the conditions for
further health decline, but also damaged the ability
of Iraqi society to reverse it".
And as a consequence of the war, "Hundreds
of thousands of children born since the beginning
of the present war [March 2003] have had none of
their required vaccinations, and routine immunization
services in major areas of the country are all but
disrupted. Destruction of refrigeration systems
needed to store vaccines have rendered the vaccine
supply virtually useless", writes Dr. César
Chelala, an international public health consultant.
"Even antibiotics of minimal cost are in short
supply, increasing the population's risk of dying
from common infections. Hospitals are overcrowded,
and many hospitals go dark at night for lack of
lighting fixtures. The Iraqi minister of health
claims that 100 percent of the hospitals in Iraq
need rehabilitation", added César Chelala.
The "current major problems" includes
"lack of health personnel, lack of medicines,
non-functioning medical equipments and destroyed
hospitals and health centres", the study reveals.
It is a U.S-made and a U.S-accelerated tragedy.
After health, Iraq's education system has
also deteriorated. Again, Iraqis youngsters are
hard hit under Occupation. The literacy rate among
Iraqis between the ages of 15 and 24 is just 74
per cent, which is according to the study is only
"slightly higher than the literacy rate for
the population at large". The figure is lower
than that for those 25-34, "indicating that
the younger generation lags behind its predecessors
on educational performance", said the study.
As a result of high unemployment (over 70 per cent),
males have neglected their education and are in
search of work to support their families. Contrary
to the ILCS study, like males, women literacy has
declined markedly.
In reference to the past, the study acknowledge
that while the previous regime (of Saddam Hussein)
built up many of the country's service networks,
like electricity grids, sewage systems and water,
the systems are widely in disrepair, the study reveals.
However, in scathing over the sanctions and war,
the ILCS study fails to condemn and attribute the
causes of Iraq's current conditions to the
deliberate and systematic U.S-British bombings campaign
(since 1991) to destroy the entire of Iraq's
civilian infrastructure, including water purification
plants, sewage treatment plants, electricity grids,
and communications.
The deliberate destruction of Iraq's water
and sewage systems by U.S. bombings has been the
major cause (for a decade) of an outbreak of diarrhoea
and hepatitis, particularly lethal to pregnant women
and young children. Diarrhoea killed two out of
every 10 children before the 1991 Gulf War and four
in 10 after the war. The study indicates that only
54 per cent of households nationwide have access
to a "safe and stable" supply of drinking
water. An estimated 722,000 Iraqis, the report also
notes, rely on sources that are both unreliable
and unsafe.
Conditions are worse in rural areas, with 80 per
cent of families drinking unsafe water, the report
says. According to researchers, "the situation
is alarming" in the southern governorates of
Basra, Dhiqar, Qadisiyah, Wasit, and Babel, located
near the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. A large percentage
of the population in this region relies on water
from polluted rivers and local streams.
Although 98 per cent of Iraqi households are connected
to the electrical grid, 78 per cent of them experience
"severe instability" and low quality in
the service, according to the survey. One in three
Iraqi families now relies on electricity generators,
most of which are shared between households. In
all, daily living conditions under the Occupation
have deteriorated markedly.
According to Barham Salih, Iraq's minister of
planning, "This survey shows a rather tragic
situation of the quality of life in Iraq".
Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. secretary general's
deputy special representative in Iraq, said the
study "not only provides a better understanding
of socio-economic conditions in Iraq, but it will
certainly benefit the development and reconstruction
processes". The study will help address the
grave disparities between urban and rural [areas]
and between governorates in a more targeted fashion",
Mistura added.
Despite its reluctant to blame this criminal tragedy
on U.S-Britain genocidal policy toward Iraq and
the violent Occupation, the ILCS study is a strong
indicator of a failed colonial policy and an illegal
war of aggression against the Iraqi people. The
‘world community' should use the study
as a benchmark to demand the full withdrawal of
U.S-British forces from Iraq and prevent the acceleration
of this criminal tragedy.
|
Mounting evidence
gathered over several years has convinced US and
foreign intelligence agencies that leading terror
suspects have been living inside Iran.
Their existence in the Islamic republic poses a
continuing problem for top Bush administration officials,
who have warned Middle Eastern countries against
providing shelter or other aid to suspected terrorists.
The evidence includes communications by a fugitive
mastermind of the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in
Saudi Arabia and the capture of a Saudi militant
who appeared in a video in which Osama bin Laden
confirmed he ordered the September 11, 2001, attacks,
according to US and foreign officials.
They spoke anonymously because much of the evidence
remains classified. [...]
|
In the heady days of the Second Iraq
War, when the West seemed to be winning Bush's
"war on terror," Westerners laughed
at Baghdad Bob, more formally known as Mohammed
"no tanks" Saeed Al-Sahhaf, Saddam's
minister of information. Al-Sahhaf's cocksure
pronouncements of Iraqi military victory against
US "coalition" forces - always
made with an air of studied casualness - had
then a hilarity about them that spawned endless
jokes.
But that was then. This is now.
And now, Al-Sahhaf seems almost prescient in his
predictions about how the war would progress. He
was incredulous when asked about Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz's
predicitions, made by way of their unimpeachable
source, Ahmad Chalabi, that Iraqis would welcome
US troops with flowers, kisses, and candy: "We
will welcome them with bullets and shoes,"
he assured reporters. And the West laughed. But
that was then. This is now.
When asked how Iraqi officials would handle the
coalition invaders, Baghdad Bob cordially replied,
"They are most welcome" to enter Iraq.
"We will butcher them." The West sneered.
But that was then. This is now. And after two years
of suicide bombings and car bombings and the occasional,
horrific kidnappings and beheadings, one has to
wonder who's living less in reality -
Baghdad Bob, or Chevy Chase Cheney, also known as
Dick Cheney, America's vice president? "I
think they're in the last throes, if you will,
of the insurgency," Cheney averred this week
about Iraq. With 140 car bombings and 60 suicide
bombings in May alone, one wonders whether President
George Bush isn't the only top US political
executive who never reads the newspapers.
The Bush administration hoped to reduce these figures
by Operation Lighting, geared to shatter the insurgency
through setting up checkpoints, instigating massive
arrests, and then catching insurgents as they fled
through the checkpoints. A good plan, in theory,
as Pentagon plans always are. But Operation Lightning
didn't take into account the many insurgents
who'd rather stand and die than flee. And
so it surprised Americans when the insurgents turned
and, as the Los Angeles Times observed, "target(ed)
the very checkpoints set up to ensnare them"
with no fewer than five suicide bombings in six
hours.
If US casualties are down in Iraq, it's largely
because few Americans dare venture outside highly
protected areas. The problem's the same as
Al-Sahhaf observed when the West had not yet stopped
laughing at him: "How can you lay siege to
a whole country? Who is really under siege now?
Baghdad cannot be besieged." Is Al-Sahhaf
having the last laugh? "Washington,"
driven by "the insane little dwarf, Bush,"
Al-Sahhaf warned back then, "has thrown their
soldiers on the fire."
American voters were so sensitive to this issue
in the last presidential election that Bush vigorously
sought to pull together Iraqi police and somewhat
diverse groupings of Iraqi "defense forces"
supposedly only "backed" by Americans
and coalition soldiers. "I think we may well
have some kind of presence over there for a period
of time," Chevy Chase Cheney reportedly mused,
implying that Iraqis would now run their own show.
But insurgents merely shifted targeting Americans
to targeting those Iraqis considered Quislings.
One raises an eyebrow remembering Al-Sahhaf's
remark that invading Americans rarely left their
tanks and "refused to do battle with us. They
are just going places." Indeed, Iraqis now
see Americans bunker down behind the thick, guarded
walls of their Green Zone. Meanwhile, Iraqis just
seeking jobs or, even better, paychecks, often lose
their lives.
And when Americans do leave their safety zone,
such as in Operation Lightning, the results are
curious indeed. "At 4 a.m. today, American
soldiers attacked my house from all directions,"
Sunni Iraqi Mohsen Abdul-Hamid, head of the Iraqi
Islamic Party, declared. "They blew up doors
and took me and my three sons. They blindfolded
me and put me in a helicopter and took me someplace.
They interrogated me all day. Then they let me go."
America's response? "Coalition forces
regret any inconvenience," the Pentagon remarked.
If Baghdad Bob were speaking, we'd all be
laughing. But that would have been then. This is
now. Now - almost a year after the Abu Ghraib
scandal first broke; weeks after the supposedly
false news reports about flushing the Qur'an
down the toilet at Guantanamo sparked deadly riots
in Afghanistan; and days after the tabloid press
published demeaning photographs of Saddam Hussein
shirtless in his underwear - all clear violations
of the Geneva Conventions. So it is with a certain
chill that one remembers Al-Sahhaf's remarks
on the coalition forces and those who lead them:
"These are not ordinary human beings. They
are criminals....both by nature and training. Big
institutions in this imperial state, in this evil
US empire, prepare their politicians to become criminals."
Americans and those who support them need to see
that these things are no laughing matter.
Not then, and not now.
|
Beginning June 21, the Orlando
airport will let travelers pay $80 a year for a
card that guarantees an exclusive security line
and the promise of no random secondary
pat-down. To get this new "Clear" card,
travelers would have to be vetted by the Department
of Homeland Security and submit to fingerprint and
iris scans.
Since the federal government began letting select
frequent fliers with new high-tech passes speed
through airport security checkpoints, one of the
biggest complaints has been that the year-old program
is too limited to be of much use.
Now, a privately run version coming online in Florida
could spur efforts to broaden the program - and
boost media entrepreneur Steven Brill's vision of
installing such a system across the nation at airports
and other security-sensitive locations.
Similar systems exist at some European airports,
and in five U.S. airports as part of a test by the
Transportation Security Administration.
But the TSA's "Registered Traveler" program,
which is free for now while in its test phase, has
been capped at 10,000 participants, and cards obtained
at one airport don't work at others.
The company behind Clear is Verified Identity Pass
Inc., which Brill founded in 2003 in hopes of creating
a nationwide, voluntary system that would give pre-screened
people a dedicated fast lane for entering secure
areas - not only at airports but also office buildings,
power plants and stadiums.
Brill, the founder of Court TV and American Lawyer
magazine, argues that while more rigorous security
checks are needed in post-Sept. 11 America, it doesn't
make sense for everyone to have to go through them.
New York-based Verified ID has attracted such investors
as Lehman Bros. and Lockheed Martin Corp., which
is providing the technology for Clear. But until
the Orlando deal, Verified Identity Pass had not
snared a customer.
Brill says he has had talks with about 20 other
airports.
He's giving them good reason to listen: In its
proposal to Orlando officials - which beat a rival
bid from technology integrator Unisys Corp. - Verified
ID promised to share 29 percent of Clear's first-year
revenue with the airport authority and as much as
22.5 percent in succeeding years. The airport also
would get 2.5 percent of Clear's future nationwide
revenue.
The proposal says Verified ID expects to have 3.3
million members across the nation within six years,
with annual memberships likely costing $100.
That kind of participation is well beyond the scope
of the TSA's Registered Traveler tests, which have
been limited to certain airlines' passengers in
Boston, Los Angeles, Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul
and Washington-Reagan. A separate, older program,
known as INSPASS, lets frequent international travelers
whisk through some U.S. Customs checkpoints with
the use of hand-shape biometrics.
The TSA is open to broadening Registered Traveler
through public-private partnerships, and several
airports have expressed interest, said Steve Van
Beek, executive vice president of policy for Airports
Council International, a trade association. But
he is concerned that the concept could run aground
unless the TSA enforces technology standards that
enable cards to work at more than one airport.
Not everyone, however, is ready for trusted-traveler
programs to take off.
Chris Bidwell, who oversees security
for the Air Transport Association, which represents
airlines, says it remains to be seen whether Registered
Traveler does much to enhance security, especially
because many airports' lines aren't that long anyway.
Privacy watchdogs have questioned how flyers' personal
data will be handled, although Brill pledges that
Clear will obtain minimal information on its members
and store almost none. For example, the system will
not record its users' comings and goings the way
automated toll-collection devices do.
"We have much less information about you,
at our best, than any credit card company has,"
Brill said.
(Brill also has distanced himself from Choicepoint
Inc., the data aggregator originally cited as one
of Verified ID's partners. Brill said he wouldn't
work with the company until it fixes the problems
that led to a massive leak of personal information
to identity thieves that came to light in February.
A private data-mining company
like Choicepoint isn't necessary for Clear in airports
anyway, since the government is doing the vetting.)
Other observers worry that fast lanes will be tempting
to terrorists whose records are clean enough to
earn them a "trusted" label.
"As soon as you make an easy path and a hard
path through a security system, you invite the bad
guys to try to take the easy path," said Bruce
Schneier, author of "Beyond Fear: Thinking
Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World."
"It's counterintuitive,"
Schneier said. "Everyone complains: 'Why are
you frisking grandmas?' But if you don't frisk grandmas,
that's who (terrorists) are going to pick to carry
bombs." |
WASHINGTON - A New York-bound
passenger jet was diverted to Canada on Friday after
sending out a false hijacking alarm. It landed safely
in Nova Scotia and resumed its flight to John F.
Kennedy International Airport.
Canadian fighter jets escorted Virgin Atlantic
Airways' Flight 45 to the Halifax International
Airport because of the false alarm.
Canadian law enforcement officials met the plane
and inspected it to determine what caused the problem.
Airline spokeswoman Brooke Lawer said the transponder
sent out a false alert.
SWAT team members were seen entering the Airbus
A340-600 as it sat on the tarmac with its 273 passengers
and 16 crew members still on board. The plane had
left London Heathrow Airport.
The airline issued a statement saying the technical
issues involved in the false alarm were resolved
and it apologized for any upset or inconvenience
to passengers.
Federal Aviation Administration
spokesman Greg Martin said transponders rarely malfunction.
"It does happen," Martin said.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan said
the president was briefed about the plane incident
while clearing brush on his Texas ranch and was
being kept apprised of the situation. |
The Texas Legislature gives
itself a huge retirement pension and, the next day,
cuts retirement benefits for teachers. Welcome to
a Republican-ruled state.
So, the Texas Legislature decided it's OK for gay
couples to be foster parents, but only if they're
not married. I would explain what message that sends,
if only I understood it.
Look at it this way: At least we can hunt inside
city limits now. My personal
fave was the day they voted themselves a huge retirement
pension and the next day cut retirement benefits
for the teachers. Classy move, boys. Retiring solons
will now get $36,000 a year after 12 years in the
Lege. The job pays $7,200 a year and requires 140
days of work once every other year. Welcome to a
Republican-dominated state.
As all hands know by now, the Lege got nowhere
on the Big One -- the interrelated issues of property
tax relief and school financing. The whole state
is screaming for property tax relief because of
the rise in real estate values.
In order to lower property taxes, you have to raise
them on something else. So
of course the House decided to tax ordinary people,
instead of taxing big corporations. Not for
nothing is the House gallery, where the business
lobbyists sit, known as "the Owner's Box."
The House was prepared to saddle us all with the
highest sales tax in the country. By lowering property
taxes and raising sales taxes, the House lowered
the tax burden on the richest Texans and dumped
it on the poorest Texans, in a state that already
has a staggeringly regressive tax structure.
The Senate passed a fairer bill, all things being
relative, but House Speaker Tom Craddick refused
to compromise. [...]
"The Speaker said no," was the story
of the whole session. If the state Supreme Court,
which consists of nine conservative Republicans,
backs the lower court decision that our current
school financing system is unconstitutional, we'll
have to close the public schools in October. That's
how irresponsible these people are.
You know, it's one thing for Republicans to run
year after year railing against government. But
once you win, you got to run it, people.
One good thing: The state added 2,500 child protection
workers. This was after a study showing that 509
Texas children died from abuse or neglect over a
two-and-a-half-year period between 2001 and 2004.
More than a quarter of those children had previously
been investigated by Child Protective Services.
CPS workers are so overburdened,
they're handling up to 70 cases each, when the recommended
load is somewhere in the 20s. Gov.
Goodhair Perry ordered the statewide study after
the beating death of a 2-year-old in San Antonio
just a few weeks after she was returned home from
state custody. God bless the child -- at least she
didn't die in vain. [...] |
In May the Bush economy eked
out a paltry 73,000 private sector jobs: 20,000
jobs in construction (primarily for Mexican immigrants),
21,000 jobs in wholesale and retail trade, and 32,500
jobs in health care and social assistance. Local
government added 5,000 for a grand total of 78,000.
Not a single one of these jobs produces an exportable
good or service. With Americans increasingly divorced
from the production of the goods and services that
they consume, Americans have no way to pay for their
consumption except by handing over to foreigners
more of their accumulated stock of wealth. The country
continues to eat its seed corn.
Only 10 million Americans are classified
as "production workers" in the Bureau
of Labor Statistics nonfarm payroll tables. Think
about that.
The US with a population approaching
300 million has only 10 million production workers.
That means Americans are consuming the products
of other countries labor.
In the 21st century the US economy has been unable
to create jobs in export and import-competitive
industries. US job growth is confined to nontradable
domestic services.
This movement of the American labor force toward
third world occupations in domestic services has
dire implications both for US living standards and
for America's status as a superpower.
Economists and policymakers
are in denial while the US economy implodes in front
of their noses. The US-China Commission is
making a great effort to bring reality to policymakers
by holding a series of hearings to explore the depths
of American decline.
The commissioners got an earful at the May 19 hearings
in New York at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Ralph Gomory explained that America's naïve
belief that offshore outsourcing and globalism are
working for America is based on a 200 year old trade
theory, the premises of which do not reflect the
modern world.
Clyde Prestowitz, author of the just published
Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of
Wealth and Power to the East, explained that America's
prosperity is an illusion. Americans
feel prosperous because they are consuming $700
billion annually more than they are producing. Foreigners,
principally Asians, are financing US over-consumption,
because we are paying them by handing over our markets,
our jobs, and our wealth.
My former Business Week colleague, Bill Wolman,
explained the consequences for US workers of suddenly
facing direct labor market competition from hundreds
of millions of Chinese and Indian workers.
Toward the end of the 20th century three developments
came together that are rapidly moving high productivity,
high value-added jobs that pay well away from the
US to Asia: the collapse of world socialism which
vastly increased the supply of labor available to
US capital; the rise of the high speed Internet;
the extraordinary international mobility of US capital
and technology.
First world capital is rapidly deserting first
world labor in favor of third world labor, which
is much cheaper because of its abundance and low
cost of living. Formerly, America's high real incomes
were protected from cheap foreign labor, because
US labor worked with more capital and better technology,
which made it more productive. Today, however, US
capital and technology move to cheap labor, or cheap
labor moves via the Internet to US employment.
The reason economic development in China and some
Indian cities is so rapid is because it is fueled
by the offshore location of first world corporations.
Prestowitz is correct that the form that globalism
has taken is shifting income and wealth from the
first world to the third world. The rise of Asia
is coming at the expense of the American worker.
Global competition could have developed differently.
US capital and technology could have remained at
home, protecting US incomes with high productivity.
Asia would have had to raise itself up without the
inside track of first world offshore producers.
Asia's economic development would have been slow
and laborious and would have been characterized
by a gradual rise of Asian incomes toward US incomes,
not by a jarring loss of American jobs and incomes
to Asians.
Instead, US corporations, driven
by the short-sighted and ultimately destructive
focus on quarterly profits, chose to drive earnings
and managerial bonuses by substituting cheap Asian
labor for American labor.
American businesses' short-run profit maximization
plays directly into the hands of thoughtful Asian
governments with long-run strategies. As Prestowitz
informed the commissioners, China now has more semiconductor
plants than the US. Short-run goals are reducing
US corporations to brand names with sales forces
marketing foreign made goods and services.
By substituting foreign for American workers, US
corporations are destroying their American markets.
As American jobs in the higher paying manufacturing
and professional services are given to Asians, and
as American schoolteachers and nurses lose their
occupations to foreigners imported under work visa
programs, American purchasing power dries up, especially
once all the home equity is spent, credit cards
are maxed out and the dollar loses value to the
Asian currencies.
The dollar is receiving a short-term respite as
a result of the rejection of the European Union
by France and Holland. The fate of the Euro, which
rose so rapidly in value against the dollar in recent
years, is uncertain, thus possibly cutting off one
avenue of escape from the over-produced US dollar.
However, nothing is in the works to halt America's
decline and to put the economy on a path of true
prosperity. In January 2004, I told a televised
conference of the Brookings Institution in Washington,
DC, that the US would be a third world economy in
20 years. I was projecting the economic outcome
of the US labor force being denied first world employment
and forced into the low productivity occupations
of domestic services.
Considering the vast excess supplies of labor in
India and China, Asian wages are unlikely to rapidly
approach existing US levels. Therefore, the substitution
of Asian for US labor in tradable goods and services
is likely to continue.
As US students seek employments immune from outsourcing,
engineering enrollments are declining.
The exit of so much manufacturing is destroying
the supply chains that make manufacturing possible.
The Asians will not give us back
our economy once we have lost it. They will not
play the "free trade" game and let their
labor force be displaced by cheap American labor.
Offshore outsourcing is dismantling the ladders
of America's fabled upward mobility. The US labor
force already has one foot in the third world. By
2024 the US will be a has-been country.
Paul Craig Roberts has held a number of academic
appointments and has contributed to numerous scholarly
publications. He served as Assistant Secretary of
the Treasury in the Reagan administration. His graduate
economics education was at the University of Virginia,
the University of California at Berkeley, and Oxford
University. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good
Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com |
If I didn't know better, I'd
think Hillary planted the Vanity Fair story.
The outing of W. Mark Felt as Deep Throat has set
off a predictable frenzy of Republican bashing and
obligatory Dubya/Tricky Dick comparisons. With visions
of John Kerry fading in our ever-shortening attention
spans, it's open season on the GOP and you know
what that means: Yet another opportunity to directly
or indirectly prop up the Democrats as a viable
alternative.
Although he does offer a tangential mention to
LBJ, Bob Herbert of the New York Times melodramatically
reminds us, "with George W. Bush in charge,
the nation is mired in yet another tragic period
marked by incompetence, duplicity, bad faith, and
outright lies coming once again from the very top
of the government."
I wonder: When was the nation NOT mired in incompetence,
duplicity, bad faith, and outright lies from the
very top of the government? To not ask this question
is to grant tacit, undeserved credit to the Democrats.
Before the hair-splitters bombard me with e-mails
attempting to defend the Dems, let's not lose sight
of the fact that arguing over who lies less further
masks the real crimes. Remember, Nixon was brought
down for his role in the Watergate cover-up...not
for, say, war crimes in Southeast Asia or Vietnam.
The adversarial (sic) press is ever at the ready
to topple leaders over misdemeanors but the felony
offenses remain taboo. In fact, that same lapdog
press willingly plays its part in resurrecting disgraced
leaders like Nixon (and turning "I am not a
crook" into an enduring punch line). If Nixon
had resigned after being charged with mass murder,
well, perhaps his public rehabilitation might not
have gone as smoothly.
Watergate, Deep Throat, Woodward,
Bernstein, etc ... these are all smokescreens effectively
obscuring the catalog of crime we call American
History. Until more Americans recognize both
the corporate media and two-party (sic) system for
what they truly are, we're left with sideshows like
W. Mark Felt.
|
WASHINGTON - There's a new
face at the podium for the State Department's daily
press briefings.
Sean McCormack will be answering questions in the
sessions, which are broadcast worldwide and made
previous spokesman Richard Boucher one of the best-known
figures in the government.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice introduced
McCormack on Friday.
"Don't get excited.
I didn't come to answer questions,"
she said. "I came to make a handoff here."
McCormack was Rice's spokesman in her previous
job as White House national security adviser. Like
Boucher, he is a career foreign service officer
with a specialty in economics.
Boucher plans to remain in government but his new
job has not been announced. He served two stints
as spokesman, most recently from 2000 to this week.
He also was spokesman from 1989 to 1993. He served
six secretaries of state under both Democratic and
Republican White Houses.
"Richard, obviously, has been the consummate
professional," Rice said. "He is somebody
on whom I've relied, not just for advice on communications
and press matters, but on all kinds of matters of
foreign policy."
McCormack took questions on North Korea, Lebanon,
Israel and numerous other subjects in his first
session at the microphone.
"I think it's an example for the entire world
in that the spokesman of the State Department (is)
standing up here and taking questions from a free
and responsible press," McCormack said. |
European
Consitution Analysis:
Last Sunday the
French voted down the proposed referendum. On Wednesday,
the Dutch followed suit. "It's the gravest crisis
in the history of the union!" shout the headlines.
Is it really?
Today we present a variety of responses to the No
vote as we look at the spin doctoring going on to
influence how we see the results. |
The public rejection
of the EU treaty may have been a debacle for French
President Jacques Chirac but, despite his conflict
with US President George W. Bush, his detractors in
Washington are none too pleased with the result. Jerome
Bernard reports.
The United States will now have to deal with a European
Union that has been weakened by the French rejection
of a European draft constitution when
Washington needs it as a strong partner in resolving
a number of international issues, according
to US experts.
"I think the dominant view will be that the
United States now faces a host of weak European leaders,"
said Charles Kupchan, director of European studies
at the Council on Foreign Relations.
"Blair is weak, Chirac
is now weak, Schroeder is headed toward what looks
like defeat, Berlusconi just had to change his cabinet
and that spells trouble for the United States that
needs help in the world and my sense is that perspective
will dominate any other," Kupchan said.
"Finally, at a time when the Bush administration
had demonstrated a renewed willingness to deal with
Europe as a union, the EU may be missing in action,"
said Siman Serfaty, an expert on European issues at
the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"What can now be expected from the EU and its
members - in Iran, but also Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon,
and elsewhere in the Middle East; in Ukraine but also
in Southeast Europe and toward Russia; in North Korea
and in China; in the Sudan?" he asked.
"The question is daunting: if not with the EU
and its members, with whom; if not now, when?"
Serfaty said.
"We were seeing since January the start of the
process of revitalization of a new transatlantic agenda,"
pointed out Samuel Wells, an expert on European issues
at the Woodrow Wilson Institute. "I think that
will slow down" in the wake of the French vote,
he said.
According to Wells, "the US government and analysts
generally will probably take the EU less seriously
as a player in international politics." However,
Kupchan does not believe the French referendum "will
have any immediate impact on US-European relations."
The State Department said that Washington expected
the European Union to remain an effective partner
"however the EU evolves."
According to Kupchan, the administration of US President
George W. Bush is somewhat divided on how to deal
with Europe.
"There will be those
who prefer a weaker, a more decentralized Europe,
the so-called hardliners, and others, primarily in
the State Department who see this as a setback and
will prefer a stronger and more unified Europe that
could ultimately be a partner of the United States,"
he said.
Wells shares that view. "The neoconservatives
and a very large group in Congress, who prefer to
deal with Europe bilaterally and not to work through
the European Union, will feel inclined to do it,"
he said.
"There is a significant group of policy and
political elites who feel the major foreign policy
issue is China and I think they will now have arguments
that more attention should be paid to China and less
to the European Union," Wells pointed out.
US newspapers described the resounding French "no"
to the EU constitution as damaging for Europe and
devastating for French President Jacques Chirac.
Unhappy French voters who rejected the proposed European
constitution were "thumbing their noses at the
country's governing elite," a Washington Post
article said.
French President Jacques Chirac "smiled stiffly
as he struggled to mask his disappointment" in
televised remarks immediately after the vote, The
New York Times said.
"The vote, which made France the first country
to reject the treaty, has deeply wounded the French
president," The Times said. "The vote stalls
the forward momentum of Europe and makes it more vulnerable
to economic and political uncertainty.
"It could paralyze decision-making in the European
Union for months, complicate the process of admitting
new members, and make it even more difficult to impose
discipline on members' spending and inflation levels,"
The Times pointed out.
But, added Kupchan, "there may be certain members
of the US government that are not unhappy to see Chirac's
political fortunes take a downturn because of the
legacy of the rift over Iraq." |
Voters in the
Netherlands rejected the European Union constitutional
treaty 61.6% to 38.4% on June 1. The overwhelming
"no" vote by the citizens of a traditionally
pro-European founding member of the EU raises questions
about Dutch attitudes toward the European integration
process. It also throws into doubt the survival of
the treaty itself. [...]
All the mainstream political parties supported the
"yes" campaign, both in the governing coalition
and opposition. The "no" campaign was led
by a heterogeneous group of extreme right- and left-wing
parties. It triumphed, despite the overwhelming support
among the electorate that the mainstream parties commanded
in the last national elections, and the 75% approval
rate for the EU in the most recent Eurobarometer poll.
The desire to register a protest vote against the
government played an important role in boosting the
"no" vote. Discontent among the Dutch electorate
is directed at the political establishment as a whole
and particularly its stance on a number of key EU
policy issues.
Many voters blame price increases in the Netherlands
on the introduction of the euro, or link immigration
concerns to EU enlargement.
The perceived loss of influence of the Dutch government
as the process of European integration unfolds also
played a part in the large "no" vote.
Concern over this perceived bias was exacerbated
by recent developments concerning the euro-area's
Stability and Growth Pact. While
the Dutch obeyed the pact's fiscal strictures, Germany
and France ignored them and went unpunished, and in
March, the Pact was loosened to suit the needs of
large states with excessive budget deficits.
The treaty's opponents also connected concerns over
loss of influence in social issues.
While there is no direct connection between the approval
of the constitution and the accession of Turkey, the
possibility of increased Muslim immigration, which
Turkish accession could usher in, is likely to have
increased the appeal of the "no" front.
The Netherlands has long been a supporter of deepening
integration and strengthening EU institutions. Therefore,
to the extent that the reforms proposed in the constitution
supported the process of European integration, Wednesday's
"no" vote will undermine Dutch interests
at the EU level.
However, the Dutch position in the EU may be strengthened
by the referendum result.
Since the French rejection of the constitutional
treaty preceded the Dutch "no" vote, the
Dutch will not be singled out for blame for scuttling
the treaty. The Dutch political
establishment, which overwhelmingly supported the
constitution, also proved its credentials to its EU
partners.
The Dutch "no" will strengthen the government's
position in future EU negotiations. This leverage
is likely to manifest itself in this month's budget
negotiations.
The result of the referendum is
not formally binding, and parliament has the task
of ratifying the treaty. Given Wednesday's result,
it will not be able, politically, to do so.
The option of a second referendum before November
2006 remains open, and has been mentioned as a possibility
by several key politicians. This may be preceded by
a treaty renegotiation on specific areas of concern
such as social policy or immigration. However, "opt-outs"
from the constitutional treaty are hard to envisage,
and such hopeful statements about the survival of
the treaty may not last beyond a further rejection
of the treaty by popular vote in another member state.
The electorate's convincing
rejection of the constitutional treaty has challenged
the long-standing Dutch commitment to deeper European
integration. However, the "no" vote,
and the prospect that the EU will continue to operate
under the current institutional framework will bolster
the Dutch position. Its negotiating position on policy
issues, notably the budget, will harden as a result
of the voters' strong expression of discontent about
the integration process. |
BEIJING, June 4
(Xinhuanet) -- The latest polls showed the French
and Dutch "no" votes on the European Union's
constitutional treaty decreased the support for the
treaty in European countries and triggered debates
on EU enlargement on Friday.
According to a survey conducted by Greens for business
daily Boersen in Denmark, where a referendum on the
treaty is scheduled for Sept. 27, 39.5 percent of
Danes would vote "no" for the treaty, compared
with 30.8 percent who would vote "yes."
Just last month, Greens found that naysayers represented
only 26 percent of the voters, while 34.3 percent
of the population expected to vote "yes"
on the treaty.
Morten Messerschmidt, a spokesman for the Danish
People's Party that opposes the treaty, said Friday
that "I think the government should follow the
Danish People's Party proposal about not holding a
referendum. It seems pointless, since there isn't
anything to vote on, now that France and Holland have
said no."
In the Czech Republic, according to a poll conducted
by the Factum Invenio public opinion institute, more
than two-fifths (almost 44 percent) of respondents
who said they would take part in the referendum would
support the document, fewer compared to the findings
of other polls which were carried in the country before
the referendums in France and the Netherlands.
The result showed that 33.7 percent of the Czechs
are against the ratification of the EU constitution,
31.5 percent support and 34.8 percent have no clear
view on the question.
Portuguese Foreign Minister Diogo Freitas do Amaral
said Thursday that his country will cancel October's
referendum on the EU constitution if EU leaders decide
to stop the ratification process.
The Irish government said in a statement after the
Dutch referendum that it was continuing to prepare
to ratify the EU constitution by November 2006.
However, a spokesman for the foreign ministry told
the press Friday that Ireland was closely watching
the situation and would take into account any decision
made at the upcoming EU summit in mid-June.
Meanwhile, Jean-Claude Junker, current rotating
EU president and prime minister of Luxembourg, said
Friday that he will resign if the EU constitution
is rejected in a referendum on July 10 in his country.
The latest surveys show 46 percent of voters in
Luxembourg support the constitution and 32 percent
plan to vote "no," with 22 percent undecided.
The setbacks of the EU constitution ratification
process also triggered debates on the enlargement
of the bloc, as quite a lot of Europeans are worried
that the enlargement might result in massive influx
of cheap labor.
As a response, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder
on Friday said that it was "totally wrong"
to suggest that EU enlargement should stop after the
EU constitution was rejected by French and Dutch voters.
The EU must fulfill its commitment of admitting
Romania and Bulgaria on Jan. 1, 2007, provided both
countries meet accession criteria, Schroeder told
reporters after meeting with visiting Romanian Prime
Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu.
Romania and Bulgaria singed accession treaties on
EU membershipin April.
In Turkey, Sermet Atacanli, chief advisor of foreign
affairs to Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, said
at a press briefing on Friday that "Turkey is
determined to maintain its progress in integration
with the EU. There is not any deviation from Turkey's
integration with the EU."
"We rightfully expect the EU and the EU member
countries not to assume prejudiced attitudes against
Turkey with respect to their commitments," he
added.
The failure of the EU constitution in France and
the Netherlands also led to a higher opposition to
Norwegian membership of the EU.
An opinion poll conducted right after the Dutch
rejected the constitution showed that the opposition
to Norway's entry to the EU has increased from 42
percent to 59 percent.
Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik said
Friday that it would take longer time for Norway to
join the EU after the constitutional crisis.
"First the EU constitution must be in place,
in order that we will know what kind of a union we
will be debating," he said.
The Norwegians have rejected twice the EU membership
so far. |
Just
Say 'Non' to Progressive Values
In voting against the EU constitution, the French
left allowed its hatred of Jacques Chirac to trump good
sense. |
By Ian Williams, AlterNet.
Posted June 1, 2005. |
The French predictably
voted "non!" to the proposed EU constitution
this weekend. While the outcome of the referendum
was hardly surprising, the reactions of some U.S.
commentators to the vote were as collectively incoherent
as the motives of the voters themselves.
Diehard conservatives in the United States cheered
on French Communists and leftists for their success
in frustrating a multinational challenger to U.S.
global dominance, while many on the American left
expressed solidarity with their French comrades who
joined with fascists to vote down a "capitalist"
constitution. The irony of
this blinkered endorsement is redoubled by the rejected
constitution itself, which guarantees rights undreamt
of by any liberal in the United States. This
is a constitution derided by the conservative Weekly
Standard for guaranteeing "entitlement to social
security benefits and social services providing protection
in cases such as maternity, illness, industrial accidents,
dependency or old age, and in the case of loss of
employment." How can so-called liberals in a
country that has 45 million uninsured citizens dismiss
a document that ensures the right of access to preventive
health care and the right to benefit from medical
treatment?
The draft constitution even has a clause on animal
rights -- whither Brigitte Bardot? -- and recognizes
equal rights for religions and "philosophical"
associations for all those born-again atheists.
Who needs that kind of Anglo-Saxon capitalism?
The weakness of the constitution is not so much its
alleged corporate agenda, but its dense and prolix
prose, which reflects the attempt to accommodate everyone
from British conservatives to East European emulators
of American excess that has led to far too much ambiguity.
In the end, those ambiguities
gave a wide spectrum of the French public the excuses
they needed to vote against the real issue on the
ballot: Jacques Chirac. This includes the French
Socialists and Communists who, albeit with deep anguish,
voted for Chirac at the last election to keep Le Pen's
rightwing and ultra-nationalist party from winning.
This time around, the same folks voted "no"
alongside Le Pen's racists and fascists -- a
sight that should at least give U.S. progressives
some pause for thought.
French workers have every reason to want to defend
their social benefits against the encroaching Anglo-Saxon
free market capitalism. But perhaps they should first
have looked across the English Channel, where British
conservatives oppose the constitution because of all
the benefits it guarantees ordinary people. Indeed,
most British labor unions that once opposed joining
Europe as a capitalist plot now recognize the superior
protections offered by Brussels. And while much has
been made of the threat of immigration, if that mythical
Polish plumber turns up in Paris with his wrench in
hand, the constitution entitles him to the same, considerable
statutory benefits of his French colleagues.
So what will the ultimate effect
be of this French cupidity? It is true that by indulging
themselves in giving le doigt to Chirac, the French
were as reckless of the consequences to them and the
rest of the world as American voters who voted for
George Bush out of fear and paranoia. However, despite
the "sky falling down" rhetoric that the
"Oui" campaigners deployed to scare voters,
the French referendum is unlikely to have such dire
effects as Bush's new term of office.
For a start, it will not dissolve the European Union,
which, at worst, will remain in its present Rube Goldberg,
ad hoc state – and that may in it self be a
political blessing in disguise. It may delay the supplanting
the dollar by the Euro, but it is unlikely to break
up the currency union.
It may also push back the creation of an official
European foreign policy, but the formulation of such
a policy -- acceptable to all the disparate members
-- would in any case be a long, drawn-out process.
The reality is that the Europeans have been increasingly
acting in concert, and would indeed be doing so much
more frequently if it were not for Tony Blair, who
seems determined to confirm Charles de Gaulle's
suspicion that Britain is no better than an American
Trojan horse in Europe.
After an abysmal failure to develop a common position
on the Balkans, the European Union has incrementally
developed a number of shared policies, whose coherence
becomes more impressive given that these often put
the EU at loggerheads with the United States. The
EU continues to support multilateralism and the United
Nations, has stayed firm in its support of the International
Criminal Court, and has been a collective voice of
reason in the face of neoconservative hysteria over
Iran and North Korea. Moreover, the EU has consistently
called for more aid and debt relief to the developing
world.
Much of this consensus has developed without an official
charter while muddling along with a bewildering variety
of different institutions and treaties. Ironically,
the EU constitution is an attempt to harmonize and
rationalize these policies, and to do so within the
context of an agreed decision-making process that
gives more direct and transparent input to citizens
and states alike. And in rejecting the constitution,
the French left also said "non" to more
democratic and rational alternative to rightwing visions
of empire in the global arena.
In the end, the European Union is a good idea, both
for its own citizens and for the rest of the world.
Imagine, 450 million people with near-universal health
care! Eventually, in some form or other, the Europeans
will adopt a constitution to reflect what they have
already achieved. Perhaps the next time around, Chirac
-- if he is still around -- will campaign for a "No"
vote and provoke the French into supporting it! |
There
is one tiny problem with most of the analysis of last
Sunday's vote in France. Those who probe the motivations
of the large majority who voted no (54.87%) forget
to remind us that they, overwhelmingly, voted yes.
For more than six months, all the leading commentators
in the media heaped praise on the constitutional project.
France's two biggest media owners (and weapons manufacturers)
endorsed the yes side: Serge Dassault, a conservative
senator, did so in an editorial in one of his many
magazines; Arnaud Lagardère spoke to a pro-yes
rally, cheered by Nicolas Sarkozy and most of the
cabinet.
Most commentators have observed that Jacques Chirac
has been stung by this defeat, but
the rout of France's mainstream media is even more
impressive. From the rightwing television channel
TF1 to the "leftwing" weekly le Nouvel Observateur,
and including le Monde, Libération, the business
press, the major radio stations, even women's and
sports publications - they all warned and railed,
they all censored and twisted. Yet,
their propaganda was blunted by an unexpected surge
of democracy. Thousands of well-attended meetings
discussed the constitutional treaty. And, bit by bit,
the sense of inevitability that it would be easily
ratified by a mildly interested electorate was torn
apart.
Indeed the outrage about media bias became a leading
issue of the campaign - not least because it encapsulated
so many of the things that this referendum came to
be about: representation, the elite and class.
The problem is obvious on the political
side. Last February more than 90% of French deputies
had backed the constitution; it garnered the support
of only 45% of the voters. The gap is no less obvious
when it comes to informing the people: the leading
journalists, who often live in Paris, an increasingly
bourgeois city, seem to write and speak for the affluent.
And the rich did vote yes by a healthy margin, just
like 66% of the Parisians.
But elsewhere it was quite
another story: whereas 74% of the voters earning more
than €4,500 a month backed the constitutional
project, 66% of the voters earning less than €1,500
a month voted against. In ultra-wealthy Neuilly
(a Paris suburb where many industrial and media tycoons
reside, and whose mayor is the presidential hopeful
Sarkozy) 82.5% voted yes. Mining cities of northern
France and the poorest districts of Marseille were
equally lopsided: 84% of Avion (Nord-Pas-de Calais)
and 78% of Marseille's 15th district voted no.
Granted, Chirac has lost. Yet it should not take
long for the Socialists to wonder how well a party
of the left is doing when 80% of the workers and the
unemployed, 60% of the young and a large proportion
of its own voters desert its official position on
such an important issue.
Four years ago Pierre Moscovici, then the French
minister for European affairs, wrote in the Financial
Times that Tony Blair's triumph was "excellent
news for the left and for Europe. For the left, it
shows that a good leader, good results and a good
programme can win elections. From that point of view,
Mr Blair is an admirable example to other social democrats."
Yet a few months after Lionel Jospin had been inspired
by this "admirable example" he was humiliated
in France's presidential election and sidelined by
Jean-Marie Le Pen. The cause? A gulf between the Socialist
party and its working-class constituency, who rarely
read the English business press.
The party did not learn its lesson. By backing a
constitution enshrining free-market liberalism, it
again made the wrong choice and lost.
Business leaders and the wealthy
journalists who write for them may bewail this: the
French regularly reject Anglo-Saxon-style capitalism,
and the left electorate does not want the "third
way". Every new election makes this clear. Yet
nothing seems to change. Chirac was first elected
president 10 years ago because he had denounced a
"social divide". Today it is greater than
ever. In the meantime, a series of free-market reforms
has hit pensions, education and industry. Unemployment
has kept on rising and poverty has spread.
Some politicians - and the employers' federation
- had hoped to use the constitution's obsession with
markets (the word appears 88 times) and competition
(29 times) as a legal wedge against France's "social
model".
"Why am I pro-European?"
said Sarkozy a few weeks ago. "Because I think
it is a powerful lever to force France to modernise
and reform. If France has twice as much unemployment
as other countries it is not because we are too liberal,
it is because we have the 35-hour week."
But France is not yet safe for liberalism. Sarkozy's
line of argument triggered such a backlash that the
Socialists - but also Chirac - swore that he had misunderstood
it all. "The constitution is a child of 1789,"
Chirac argued.
But by voting no, many French people
have understood that their choice was the truly European
one - that, contrary to what they were told, the constitutional
treaty was not the tool that could end Europe's free-market
drift. In the last 20 years, the project dreamed up
by the European commission and most governing coalitions
of the member states has appeared obsessed only with
economic reform, an ever-expanding free-market zone,
the dismantling of the welfare state, lower corporate
taxes and business-friendly legislation - such as
a proposal to liberalise Europe's market for service
industries.
France's landslide rejection of the treaty is likely
to embolden many of the progressive forces of the
EU, bringing about the rethinking of a once-worthy
ideal that gradually became distorted into a single
market and a military junior partner for the US. Such
a reappraisal bears no resemblance to the "federation
of fear" that European commission president José
Manuel Barroso saw unfolding after Sunday's vote.
All along, "Europe" has
been an elite process with shallow roots. In France,
a large turnout (70%) has tackled the constitutional
project with seriousness and passion. Many politicians
in Paris and Brussels probably regret this surge of
democracy and will look for ways to pressure the French
to hold another vote. But it is unlikely that an informed
electorate will change its mind now that it has understood
the links between the social devastation at home and
the neoliberal policies that spread under the cover
of European unification.
· Serge Halimi writes for le
Monde diplomatique and is the author of Le
Grand Bond en Arrière: Comment l'ordre libéral
s'est imposé au monde (The Great Leap
Backward: How the liberal order was imposed on the
world) |
The Sunday May
29 victory of the NON campaign against the EU Constitutional
Treaty has already taken its first toll. On Tuesday,
President Jacques Chirac replaced a controversial,
unpopular prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, with
the debonair, Dominique de Villepin. In a morose but
defiant speech on Sunday evening, Chirac provoked
international tension over Europe. The French and
British mainstream press heaped on the hysteria with
worn out Kissingerisms of falling dominoes.
A long time associate of Chirac and a former foreign
minister, Villepin was of course the man to have given
France the tepidly willed role of peace harbinger
faced with the US plan to invade Iraq. His oppositional
stance stood upon being rational. His words evoked
US responsibility under international law. But his
appointment is little more than a make-up job. A handsome
profile for Chirac to keep face.
The French political elite has long played off on
drama to rally its forces. One need only recall another
May event, this time back in '68. Faced with a mounting
insurrection, then President Charles de Gaulle fled
France to Baden Baden where he consulted with his
chiefs of staff behind closed doors. The plunge into
darkness worked. Shortly after returning to Paris,
he launched a referendum on his political future.
A mass of 800,000 Gaullist forces marched along the
Champs Elysees to Place de la Concorde calling for
an end to the student-workers' revolt, prior to de
Gaulle's overwhelming referendum victory. Little has
changed since.
At bottom, the NON result is not more significant
for internal French politics than were the regional
and cantonal elections a year ago when the Socialist
Party swept the board with their candidates. In any
democratic system, this would have surely been enough
to remind a leader of his outstanding debts and pledges.
Yet in 2004 not only did the
president fail to speak henceforth in the name of
all the French, he also ignored the opposition victory.
Even now, the elite might be pissed off, but what
it expresses is anything but shame.
This is why it must be said that the French voted
on the Constitutional Treaty less out of interest
in the European past and future, than on the national
present. In the build-up to the French poll on Sunday,
the media usurped objectivity and turned an act of
responsible citizenry into a battleground lined with
self-deception and guilt.
What stood explicitly to observe
was the spiritual pact between the media and the French
political elite. Together they tried to hound the
NON vote into the irrational. The mainstream
media overwhelmingly rejected any new voices from
being heard. They bid to force the opposition into
the clutches of former prime ministers whose "leftist
chic" is a stain on the ontological complaints
issued in the only major question asked of the population
about the entire European governance issue, aside
from the initial Maastricht Treaty referendum of 1992.
Those new voices, however, are the ones to have framed
the opposition's standpoint. It was the ATTAC group,
knit from sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's 1995 involvement
in the general public sector strike with Le Monde
diplomatique (the monthly political journal with
no relation to the establishment daily Le Monde).
ATTAC's members are also some of the people who helped
bring you the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre and
Mumbai. Their publications, website (www.attac.fr)
and public gatherings proved to be the laboratory
fostering the arguments on why a NON was necessary.
ATTAC operates as a national NGO
projecting internationally. It is at the forefront
of progressive political groups in France and throughout
Europe who reject the association of the current capitalist
oligarchy running the G7 zone with the name "democracy".
And it lies at the tense fault line of debate regarding
the most effective way to grind down the power elite,
whether through self-transformation into a political
party or by establishing the issues from without.
As the late French philosopher Michel Foucault argued,
it is pointless to battle against power wholesale
until understanding how to reform the terms of governance.
Yet it is senseless to begin to govern until striving
to establish new terms for creating oneself as an
individual and group member. The whole question is
how does the other side, the 24 other member states,
fare in all of this.
This is what the French are seeking to work out from
behind the scenes, in the shadows where the media
glare does not beam and where meaning is shaped to
strike. From the media's angle, the NON vote is merely
a vote of protectionism, national cocooning and cowardly
diversion from the necessities of today.
As usual, the British establishment press, from the
eurosceptics of the Financial Times to the Blairites
of the Guardian lambasted the French sense of the
situational and surreal. After all, wasn't the European
Union a great deal of a French insistence? Weren't
the French benefiting most from the treaty? Hasn't
everything been done to comply with France's stubborn
insistence on agricultural subsidies and its broad
public sector?
As a progression from the European Economic Community,
a financial deal that was built upon the persuasive
rhetoric of the need to prevent further wars between
France and Germany, the European Union long ago left
the shores of memory for most of the population. Contemporary
pragmatism forces it to be considered an economic
powerhouse in a brutal competitive market. Therefore,
it is argued, "Planet France" can only better
grow under the new "neo-liberal" terms set
out in the Constitution. As Jon Henley wrote in the
Guardian (May 14), "the liberal Anglo-Saxon model
(in Britain at any rate) boasts an unemployment rate
half that of France's, a minimum wage raised by 40%
in five years, health spending doubled over the same
period, steadily increasing purchasing power, years
of sustained growth, low interest rates and 2 million
children lifted from below the poverty line."
Why then would "Planet France"
resist an economic philosophy bound for success? The
only thing Henley failed to point out were the terms
of the initial conditions motivating that British
growth. Over a decade of Thatcherism had gone as far
as wiping away minimum wage requirements. Purportedly
hands-off government led to the "poll tax".
Under Blair, continued short-term planning has marked
the job creation front and the nature of British services
being offered. In this makeshift mood of post-crisis,
Britain perpetuates its imperialism. Like France,
it stands within the top five GDPs worldwide
oil, weapons and financial products are its only "productive"
sectors.
Beyond contemporary economic platforms, the European
Union is also the child of history. Yet if the French
voted "NON" on the referendum, they did
not do so in the name of WWII and imperial glory.
Put to the ballot was their betrayed past. As international
awe shrouds this expression of the population's will,
the truism of the media's ability to send the near-past
into oblivion has been further confirmed. The date
of reckoning is neither 1945, nor 58 and de Gaulle,
nor even 68 or 89, the latter being revolutions in
their own right. It was 2002.
The victory of the "NON" is an attack on
the results of the 2002 presidential elections-and
everything that has come in its wake. (See Norman
Madarasz, "The Luck of the Draw", April
22, 2002; "Pandora's Box: Media Obsessions and
Muting the Progressive Voice," May 7, 2002, www.counterpunch.com).
As a collective expression, it is absurd to speak
of revenge. But as a judgment
on the type of governance Jacques Chirac has offered
the 83 percent of the French population who voted
against him in the first round back in 2002, only
to be compelled to elect him against the freak result
of a face-off against a far-right contender in the
second, the majority of the population was indeed
stirred for action.
Some will object that the NON vote was replete with
a right-wing xenophobic sentiment. The NON forces
consist also of the extreme right, the Front National
and MPF, headed by Jean-Marie LePen and Philippe de
Villiers, respectively. Together, they may account
for some 15 percent of the entire voting population.
Despite their leaders' rhetoric, all of the voters'
claims cannot be dismissed outright as mere lunacy.
But what the entire vote surely falls short of is
muffled fear, as Timothy Garton Ash would have it
(The Guardian, May 30).
Instead, the vote was largely cast upon issues related
to accountable and emancipatory governance. The turnout
in France was high for a non-national level election,
standing at some 70 percent. Democracy is only a pale
ideological lie when the fudged results of the vote-count
are used to force through programs for which the majority
has little patience. The referendum had everything
to do with breaking the gridlock of an elite that
has insisted ever since the latter-day decay of the
French socialist party on telling the people want
they want.
Distance is often a theoretical vantage point held
high in esteem in the sciences, whereas modulating
the question of speed of thought is often ignored
as a methodological approach. Whether a project for
a socialist Europe will be achieved or not depends
on many factors of transnational building which require,
over and above the population's consent, time. Hasty
results can now be deferred by disagreement. The lessons
learnt recently over the elitist protectionism involved
in drafting the United States Constitution must be
borne in mind here. Out of its slanted terms, the
US Senate has defended its oligarchic legitimacy for
over 200 years. So as opposed
to what the French media claim about the impressive
level of debate marking the referendum campaign, the
actual negotiation begins now with the power
elite on the retreat.
In the current militaristic and corrupt-corporate
environment, it plays into the hands of conservative
manipulators to encourage the formation of a centralized
European executive, whose ultimate intension is to
build a European army. As it also does into the pockets
of the transnational military-industrial complex,
which arm-in-arm with the increasingly monopolized
stock exchanges, are the main fabricators of what
is known today as the "economy". Slowing
down inevitable thought associations is a stick thrown
into the spokes of competitive hysteria. With China
fever going round, such hysteria has only built since
the terms of its forced-fed argument were first introduced
in the early nineties.
From a balanced vantage point, the Chinese threat
looks more integrated from this side of the Atlantic.
While American financiers have been thrilled to receive
Chinese T-Bond investment, it is a deception to claim
that what the North American population must fear
is China's competitive force. The American public's
own unquenchable thirst for product buying is what
ought to be blamed as a starting point. Financial
crises have less to do with the productive sector
of the economy than with the banking and stock market
industries. It's through the big buck mergers in which
mega corporations brutalize each other that the population
is left sclerotic and the productive sector disabled.
This situation is no less the case in France. The
elite is certainly conservative, but it has also taken
advantage of a push within French culture of a moral
philosophy and ethical insistence whose purported
aim is to get beyond the differences. Although derided
for its lack of uniformity, the French NON is crafted
from what that difference involves on the field. Still,
rhetoric blooms with the spring air. Upon examining
a recent article by one of the French elite's foremost
sociologists, Edgar Morin ("Les lendemains du
non," Le Monde, May 26), the path to achieving
that peace beyond difference stretches by way of defacing
the adversary as "Communists-Trotskyites"
in words, to better smash it as object later. Only
afterward can peace be drawn on a bed of lilies deprived
of song and dreams.
In the end, President Jacques Chirac's
defeat allocution remains striking by its deafness.
Chirac embarrassingly skirted the results as the French
elite has done throughout the campaign. His wife went
out on a last minute socialite tour trying to portray
the population as her children with whom she pleaded
to keep the family honor intact.
As usual, the only ears on
the right to hear the message clearly were those of
the maverick Nicolas Sarkozy. No current French politician
is more Machiavellian, more devious than the fox-snake
hybrid and Downing Street-admired Sarkozy.
As head of the governing UMP party, his Sunday speech
was a scroll down a list of every piece of litigation
the French NON voters voiced. Atypically, he pledged
to honor them all. The only glitch was that Sarkozy's
party and government are behind them all: from destroying
the 35-hour anti-unemployment policy, to harassing
the French public sector, to privatizing and accumulating
joblessness, to subjecting the psychoanalytic establishment
to political law, reforming education on Taylorist
assembly-line principles, and destroying the only
job security program for the creative arts in the
world (the "intermittents du spectacle")
The list goes on.
His shrewd smirk has obviously never tasted the stench
of the tear gas and pepper spray of social and political
insurrection-which are decidedly the only means by
which the French economic machine will honor opposition
claims.
The main item of litigation is anything
but fear. It is the adamant, stubborn erosion of France's
welfare state, akin to the Amazon forest, due to "market
forces". The population yearns only for its reinforcement.
But the elite do not speak these social terms: "unemployment"
is the only shrunk down issue, after apart from public
safety, its smokescreen jargon names.
France is the world's fifth economic power. If lack
of job security is the handmaiden of economic growth,
then what is it all worth? This is the question to
which the larger part of the French electorate responded:
"not much".
Like in the US, its elite clinch to stock options
while the population rots. Corruption, white collar
crime, massive in level, is well protected by the
law, and thus shades in spectacular comparison to
the ever so visible petty crime stemming from "immigrants".
The population has little choice but to use "referenda"
as its only tool of opposition, when the nation's
youth are not corralled like cattle on Museum-lined
streets when asking for a brighter day.
With the retreat and dissolution of France's revolutionary
left through the 1980s in the name of social-democratic
reform, the French political terrain was groomed for
"la pensée unique". Its principles
are that democracy has proved itself historically
the best political system for the largest amount of
people, and that capitalist economic planning with
decreased state involvement over the specific economy
is its motor though democracy and capitalism
are claimed to be two irreducible entities. Back in
the 1990s, and in the name of solidarity, French big
business pleaded with the population to release its
hold on the welfare state due to the ferocious competition
coming from the "authoritarian" Asian tigers.
Then the construction bubble burst in the Far East.
The French and German stock exchanges bulged in convulsion
from the hot money flooding their respective pits.
Yet the elation of split stocks never translated into
shared stripes.
These were some of the issues at
stake. The population took advantage of a serious
vote, acting on its future and the terms of international
collaboration. In a "not-in-my-name" act,
the majority has attempted to paralyze the political
class from moving forward in a program that has made
life in France more expensive, less secure in terms
of jobs, and all the more attractive to international
finance. Production is at the basis of a democratic
economy, not investment. Sunday's poll was a NON against
the Constitutional Treaty as well as against Chirac.
No ambivalent disjunction and therefore no mystery:
were only one listening to its terms.
As the May 29 communiqué from ATTAC declared
("La victoire d'un peuple debout et informé")
:
'The French have just said no to the constitutional
treaty. An overwhelmingly democratic and European
no. As such, citizens female and male alike first
and foremost said no to neoliberalism, of which the
text subjected to referendum is an eloquent defense
and illustration. This no is also a yes to an independent,
internationalist, social, ecological and feminist
Europe; a yes to a Europe standing together in solidarity
with the rest of the world: first with the South and
then with future generations.
But it is also a yes to democracy,
shamefully derided by the State propaganda acting
in combination with a media system whose actors all
but entirely bore an unprecedented partialness and
offensive haughtiness toward the 'black sheep' who
were audacious enough not to literally accept the
'yes' parties' arguments from authority. With their
ballots, female and male citizens proved allergic
to being brainwashed. This is why this event, whose
value ought to stand as an example, has a historical
dimension with important repercussions for the rest
of Europe and the world.
ATTAC pays homage to the tens and tens of thousands
of citizens who thoroughly committed themselves to
the battle of the referendum." |
A French appeal
court has found the editor-in-chief of Le Monde and
the authors of an opinion piece in the paper guilty
of "racial defamation" against Israel and
the Jewish people.
In a ruling greeted with applause by Jewish groups
and some alarm by media lawyers, the court ordered
Jean-Marie Colombani and the three writers to pay
a symbolic one euro in damages to the France-Israel
Association and to Lawyers Without Borders.
The two groups had alleged that the June 2002 article,
headed Israel-Palestine: the Cancer, contained comments
that "targeted a whole nation, or a religious
group in its quasi-globality", and constituted
racial defamation.
The offence was exacerbated, the groups said, by
a "semantic slip" from the phrase "the
Jews of Israel" to "Jews in general";
in other words, it referred to "the Jews"
when it meant "certain Israelis".
France, which has the largest Jewish and Muslim communities
in western Europe, has seen tensions rise in recent
years in parallel with the increase in violence in
the Middle East. The French media are routinely accused
of pro-Palestinian bias.
Mr Colombani and the authors of the article - Edgar
Morin, a sociologist; Daniele Sallenave, a writer
and lecturer; and a French MEP, Sami Nair - argued
that the extracts had been taken out of context from
"a lengthy and more balanced piece" that
"did not undermine or attack the fundamental
values of democratic societies".
But the appeals court overturned a lower court ruling,
deciding last week that two passages did constitute
a breach of France's strict defamation law.
The first passage read: "It is hard to imagine
that a nation of fugitives born of a people who have
been subjected to the longest persecution in the history
of humanity, who have suffered the worst humiliation
and the worst contempt, should be capable, in the
space of two generations, of transforming themselves
into a people sure of themselves and dominating (of
others) and, with the exception of an admirable minority,
a scornful people that takes satisfaction in humiliating
others."
The second continued: "The Jews of Israel, descendants
of an apartheid named the ghetto, ghettoise the Palestinians.
The Jews who were humiliated, scorned and persecuted
humiliate, scorn and persecute the Palestinians. The
Jews who were the victims of a pitiless order impose
their pitiless order on the Palestinians. The Jews,
scapegoats for every wrong, make scapegoats of Arafat
and the Palestinian Authority."
The French umbrella group for Jewish associations,
CRIF, said it "noted with satisfaction"
the appeal court ruling, adding that the verdict "clearly
set limits on a deviation that consists of incriminating
'the Jews' in the name of a criticism of Israel".
The group added: "We have always considered
that criticism of Israeli policy falls under the category
of the free and democratic exchange of ideas, but
that debate cannot express itself as a demonisation
of Israel nor of the Jews."
Lawyers were divided over the significance of the
decision. Catherine Cohen, who acted for Le Monde
and Mr Nair, said she was taking the ruling to France's
highest court because "we cannot allow jurisprudence
like this to stand. The article was a critique of
a policy, of [Israeli prime minister Ariel] Sharon's
policy, it wasn't a racial criticism. The remarks
were taken out of context; the plaintiffs argued that
they were against Jews, but a few paragraphs later,
the piece says that all occupiers behave the same
way.
"This is a very serious matter for intellectuals,
for commen tators who express their point of view
on a very complex issue. Of course these authors are
not anti-Jewish, nobody believes that. In reality,
this kind of case does not belong in a court of law
- the groups should have written their own rebuttal
in the paper."
But Georges Kiejman, who defended Mr Morin (who is
Jewish), said he did not think the decision would
prevent free and frank debate on the Middle East question
in France.
"The court made plain that it found the text
as a whole constituted a very potent critique, but
a perfectly tolerable one given the complexity of
the situation," he said. "It was just those
two passages that were picked out. All
it means is people are going to have to re-read their
copy a bit more carefully; be very careful not to
talk about 'the Jews', for example, but about 'some
Israelis'." |
NEW ZEALAND -- Two earthquakes
shook the lower North Island within half an hour
late of each other last night.
The first quake at 11.54pm, which rated 3.9 on
the Richter scale, was centred 30km west of Bulls,
at a depth of 25km, and was felt in Marton.
The second, which measured 3.5, occurred at 12.22am,
10km northwest of Hunterville and was around 30km
deep.
It was felt as far away as Marton and Wanganui.
|
A moderate earthquake occurred
at 19:24:48 (UTC) on Friday, June 3, 2005. The magnitude
5.1 event has been located in SOUTHERN PERU. (This
event has been reviewed by a seismologist.) |
A moderate earthquake occurred
at 00:53:41 (UTC) on Friday, June 3, 2005. The magnitude
5.5 event has been located in TONGA. (This event
has been reviewed by a seismologist.) |
A moderate earthquake occurred
at 00:42:02 (UTC) on Friday, June 3, 2005. The magnitude
5.8 event has been located in the NIAS REGION, INDONESIA.
(This event has been reviewed by a seismologist.)
|
The Barren Island
volcano, active since May 28 after lying dormant for
11 years, is emitting a greater quantity of smoke
after heavy rain led to decrease in the flames, though
lava was still flowing out of the crater, Coast Guard
sources said today.
Andamans Governor Ram Kapse, who made an aerial survey
of the uninhabitated Barren Island, 140 km north-west
of here, this morning, told PTI that he had seen smoke
and lava emerging from the crater.
The island's administration as well as the Coast
Guard were keeping a watch on the situation, he said.
Coast Guard PRO Commandant Sanjay Anchalwar said
that due to the heavy rain the flames had subsided
a little, but the volume of smoke had increased and
lava was still flowing out.
The last eruption of the volcano took place in 1994
on the island, which is less than two kilometre across.
It is completely uninhabited save some feral goats,
which stayed on the other side where there was some
vegetation and natural sources of water.
However, there was no report about these goats as
of now.
The island is out of bounds with defence personnel
solely allowed access. |
Satellite images
reveal how the environment has changed dramatically
in recent decades.
An atlas of environmental change compiled by the
United Nations reveals some of the dramatic transformations
that are occurring to our planet.
It compares and contrasts satellite images taken
over the past few decades with contemporary ones.
These highlight in vivid detail the striking make-over
wrought in some corners of the Earth by deforestation,
urbanisation and climate change.
The atlas has been released to mark World Environment
Day.
The United Nations Environmental Programme (Unep)
produced One Planet Many People: Atlas of our Changing
Environment in collaboration with other agencies such
as the US Geological Survey and the US space agency
(Nasa).
Transformed world
Among the transformations highlighted in the atlas
are the huge growth of greenhouses in southern Spain,
the rapid rise of shrimp farming in Asia and Latin
America and the emergence of a giant, shadow puppet-shaped
peninsula at the mouth of the Yellow River that has
built up through transportation of sediment in the
waters.
The effects of retreating glaciers on mountains and
in polar regions, deforestation in South America and
forest fires across sub-Saharan Africa are also shown
in the atlas.
This year's World Environment Day, which will be
hosted by San Francisco in California, will focus
on ways of making cities more environmentally friendly
and resource-efficient.
"The battle for sustainable development, for
delivering a more environmentally stable, just and
healthier world, is going to be largely won and lost
in our cities," said Klaus Toepfer, Unep's executive
director.
"Cities pull in huge amounts of resources including
water, food, timber, metals and people. They export
large amounts of wastes including household and industrial
wastes, waste water and the gases linked with global
warming.
"Thus their impacts stretch beyond their physical
borders affecting countries, regions and the planet
as a whole."
World Environment Day was established by the United
Nations General Assembly in 1972 to mark the opening
of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment.
It is celebrated each year on 5 June. |
Three people have
been convicted over the abuse of a girl, eight
Hundreds of central African children living in the
UK may have suffered abuse or even been killed after
being accused of witchcraft, charities say.
The warning follows the conviction of three people
over the torture of an eight-year-old girl.
Four London charities, working with people from central
Africa, told BBC News this was not an isolated case.
The children may have been returned to their home
countries for "deliverance services" or
other punishments.
'Breakaway churches'
In one case it was claimed an Angolan child had been
sent home two years ago, and had since been killed.
BBC correspondent Angus Crawford said community workers
believed the growth of "breakaway churches"
could be one possible cause of the abuse.
A minority of these preach a powerful blend of traditional
African beliefs and evangelical Christianity.
Community workers also complain of ignorance on the
part of the UK authorities, and a lack of resources
to tackle the problem.
On Friday three adults were found guilty at the Old
Bailey over the torture of an eight-year-old girl
in Hackney, east London, after she was accused of
witchcraft.
The orphan was beaten, cut and had chilli peppers
rubbed in her eyes to "beat the devil out of
her".
The child's aunt, who cannot be named for legal reasons,
was found guilty of child cruelty, while Sita Kisanga
and her brother Sebastian Pinto were convicted of
aiding and abetting.
The trio, all from London, were found not guilty
of conspiracy to murder. They were remanded in custody
and the women were warned they faced lengthy jail
sentences.
Speaking exclusively to the BBC, Kisanga said the
girl was possessed by an evil spirit, known as kindoki.
"In our community, kindoki happens. It is killing
people. It is doing bad things," she said.
The orphan was brought to Britain from Angola in
2002 by her 38-year-old aunt after the girl's parents
died.
The cruelty started at the beginning of 2003 when
a boy told his mother that the girl had been practising
witchcraft.
'Today you die'
The child was cut with a knife and beaten with a
belt and shoe.
During police interviews, the girl said Kisanga had
cornered her in the kitchen and told her "today
you die".
Abuse masquerading as religion
The court also heard the girl, now 10, was put into
a laundry bag and believed she would be "thrown
away" into a river.
Detective Superintendent Chris Bourlet, head of the
Metropolitan Child Abuse Command, said such cases
were difficult to police: "These are very small
churches. Sometimes they meet in very small halls,
sometimes in people's houses.
"It's not really the role of the police to go
and watch churches."
Mary Marsh, director of the NSPCC, called the case
"horrific", saying it had "exposed
beliefs held by some in the African community that
can lead to child abuse".
Penny Thompson, Hackney Council's Chief Executive,
said the case was "very serious".
The City and Hackney Safeguarding Board, which monitors
child protection agencies, would be making an independent
inquiry.
A new unit called Project Violet had been set up
to protect children from abuse as the result of religious
or cultural beliefs, police said. |
Police in Austria
said yesterday that they had found the bodies of four
newborn babies at a block of flats. Two were in a
freezer and one was in a cement-filled paint bucket.
Investigators said the babies' 32-year-old mother
had admitted killing them out of despair over her
inability to pay household bills, and fear that having
a child might drive away her long-term male partner.
Three bodies were found earlier this week and a fourth
yesterday afternoon. It was not immediately clear
where the last body was found.
Police said that the woman and her 38-year-old partner,
from Graz, about 120 miles south of the capital, Vienna,
were both under investigation for murder.
The killings may have begun three years ago.
Graz's Kleine Zeitung newspaper reported that the
first of the bodies had been found on Monday by a
resident of the flats when he opened a basement freezer
shared by the building's occupants. |
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