Surviving Critical Times Hard To Deal With

Notes From The Front-Afghanistan and Iraq

2012-01-25T18:17:00.000-08:00

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

In 'Notes From the Front Lines,' Argument Unbecoming a Decent Human Being

Anyone who thinks the New York Times is a part of the "liberal media" would be served well by checking out the work of groups like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), and gadfly's like Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, David Peterson, and so on. The Times has shown time and time again to be a propaganda tool for the dominant economic and political powers. On matters of war, the Times routinely helps beat the drums, or provides a venue for jingoists to delusionally go on about the nobility and righteousness of America's wars.

In yesterday's "Notes From the Front Lines" the Times gives Ramsey Sulayman, a major in the Marine Corps Reserve and legislative associate with Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), space to write a piece titled "In Urination Video, Behavior Unbecoming a Marine."

We are constantly reassured that the Marines are about “Honor, Courage, Commitment," and that while "war is a dirty business," the soldiers who urinated on their victims was "unbecoming a Marine." Many of Sulayman's comments read as if a decent human being would be moved by them with awe and respect. Here are a selection:

The values I learned were that we fight ferociously but maintain our honor. Always. We kill as a necessity of our business — not for sport, pleasure, or because we can. That is what makes us professional warriors. We also don’t take trophies, souvenirs, body parts, or desecrate the dead. That’s what separates us and why we can claim the moral high ground and come to terms with the ugliness of war. Gen. James N. Mattis, the current commander of the United States Central Command, summed up the rules for combat in Iraq and Afghanistan perfectly: “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”

By turning war into a "business," and being "professional warriors" there is somehow a "moral high ground" to be had. Sulayman even uses the word "perfectly" to describe "the rules for combat in Iraq and Afghanistan": "Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." This is said with all seriousness and an intent to come off as righteous. It reminds me of the John Lennon song "Working Class Hero" where the late Beatle sung, "There's room at the top they're telling you still, but first you must learn how to smile as you kill." Being a polite robot ready to kill everyone is, we are told, of the highest virtues defenders of freedom and liberty can have. But for Sulayman, the urinating killers are "Marines acting unprofessionally and inappropriately. Not because they were conducting their business during a combat action, but because they crossed the line after the fighting stopped."

With the revelation that these men urinated on their victims came a quick response by U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta saying the incident was "utterly deplorable," and announced an investigation into the act.

What I want to ask is: What exactly is "deplorable," or "inappropriate"? Urinating on the dead bodies of people we killed in a criminal war, or the killing (i.e. war) itself? This is an important question to ask because if it's just the urination, as Sulayman wants to believe, and that there would be no scandal if "our troops" just stopped at killing people, then our disconnect from decency is a much bigger problem than what is being called "deplorable."

(As a sidenote, all of this reminds me of Mark Twain's short story The War Prayer, which I recommend everyone read at the end of this article.)

Can we imagine the response of outrage if we were the people of Afghanistan and Iraq reading this? What if the tables were turned and it was us who was invaded and occupied and routinely subjected to crimes "unbecoming a Marine"? Or what if the horrors we endured were at the hands of smiling young men who acted "professionally"? Would we end our grief and say to ourselves, "At least the killer of my family shook my hand"? How would we feel about the New York Times publishing a piece by the article who trivialized our hardships, and made the perpetrators out to be courageous young men?

This is hardly an isolated incident. In one of the first drone attacks in Afghanistan following the October 2001 invasion was the story of Daraz Khan, an Afghan man who was murdered by an American Hellfire missile because he was tall, had a beard and wore a turban. According to the New York Times, a Pentagon spokesperson, Victoria Clarke, said that “We’re convinced that it was an appropriate target,” yet Mr. Clarke acknowledges that “we do not know yet exactly who it was.” Even Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld weighed in with the incriminating comment that, “Someone has said that these people were not what the people managing the Predator believed them to be,'' he said. ''We'll just have to find out. There's not much more anyone could add, except there's one version and there's the other version.” It doesn’t take much critical thought to conclude that there is nothing “appropriate” about killing an unknown man because he is tall, bearded and wearing a turban. It is clear that U.S. forces racistly profiled the man, and as the saying goes, shot first and asked questions later.

Another example of an American massacre was in January of 2002 when Time Magazine reported on it the following month by noting that, “In what appeared to be a perfect sneak attack, U.S. special-operations soldiers on Jan. 24 stormed Sharzam High School in Uruzgan” and killed all the men present. A guard hid in a ditch and heard the men pleading for their lives, but none were spared.

According to eyewitnesses, U.S. commandos moved on Uruzgan shortly before 2 a.m. on Jan. 24, accompanied by eight helicopters and at least two armored humvees. Local Afghans said that when the Americans burst into the school, they found Afghan fighters sleeping and began spraying the beds with gunfire.

The Americans accused them of being Taliban fighters however they were what the men were trying to tell the U.S. forces, who likely didn’t understand their language: “The soldiers slaughtered at Sharzam, they say, were not enemy fighters but anti-Taliban troops loyal to U.S.-backed interim Afghan leader Hamid Karzai. They belonged to a military commission appointed by the new provincial government to oversee the collection of leftover Taliban weapons.”

The article ends with another gruesome account of the incident:

One witness of the aftermath said the Americans shot Afghans as they hid under beds and rushed out of doorways. The Pentagon maintains that the Afghans started shooting first, but villagers say they heard no gunfire from inside the school. Two dead Afghans were found with their wrists bound. One U.S. soldier left behind a note: "Have a nice day. From Damage Inc." Days after the attack, the classrooms at the school were still soaked in thick blood.

There are many other examples of such bloodbaths. Accounts of drone attacks killing entire wedding parties, or U.S. convoys opening fire as they speed through town, or even the notorious “kill team” where U.S. soldiers hunted civilians and took grisly pictures of them holding the dead bodies as if they were trophies, and much more are easily found thanks to the power of the internet. The mass media however, has not given these bloodbaths the coverage they deserve and are already going down the memory hole.

For example, while the New York Times covered the story of Daraz Khan in one article totaling 1,758 words, in a two month period following the incident and never covered the Uruzgan massacre, the same is not true for an incident where Canadian soldiers were killed in a case of “friendly fire” in what came know as the Tarnak farm incident. In April of 2002 an American F-16 reported seeing surface-to-air fire, asked to fire on the location and while on “stand by” the pilot bombed the place before being told to “hold fire . . .Friendlies, Kandahar.” In a two month period the incident received eight articles totaling almost 6,500 words.

Recently the U.N. reported that, in Afghanistan, torture is "systematic." As the U.S. follows the tradition of a long line of empires who seek to control Afghanistan, and they never do, there has been a reliance on local forces to ruthlessly go after the dominant Islamic movement, the Taliban. A particularly gruesome example was the Dasht-i-Leili massacre where thousands of suspected Taliban fighters were caught, stored in metal containers and suffocated to death—all of which occurred with U.S. knowledge, and possibly supervision.

As for Iraq, we can turn to a medical report, which was released in late 2010, and where we learn how the effects of our November 2004 U.S. attack on Fallujah was worse than what the U.S. did to Hiroshima, when just over 65 years ago the United States became the first and only country to use a nuclear weapon (“little boy”) on the battlefield. That was in Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later in Nagasaki another nuke (“fat boy”) was dropped.

Back to Fallujah, early on, in our illegal war of aggression, when we “liberated” the country, we set up a military base near a school in the town. Naturally the residents, who were no friends of Saddam, protested. And the protests grew. U.S. soldiers, realizing they weren't being greeted with candy, opened fire on them, killing 17 and wounding 70. Tensions increased and escalated when the locals got their hands on four Blackwater mercenaries, hung them from a bridge and set fire to their hanging bodies. The U.S. responded in a heavy-handed and disproportionately manner (i.e. a war crime). As expected, Fallujah became a symbol of resistance to U.S. troops. That was the spring of 2004.

After Presidential elections in November 2004, and as the resistance grew like wildfire, the U.S. carried out another massive assault that resulted in numerous war crimes. We literally destroyed the town but before we did we refused to let “men of fighting age” leave despite it being widely known that the resistance fighters had already left. What followed was an orgy of destruction involving conventional and chemical weapons (white phosphorus/Whiskey Pete/WP). Some say WP is not a chemical weapon. That’s simply not true because we relied on the chemical properties of WP as a weapon and used them against people, which legally constitutes it as a chemical weapon.

Fallujah may never recover from the physical damages of our aggression, and the health effects will probably go on for years and years to come. Like Japan, who still struggles with the atomic fallout and a U.S. military presence where the population is expected to foot much of the bill for our destructive presence (Okinawa’s residents are still trying to evict us), the people of Fallujah have a hard life ahead of them and there is no reason to believe the U.S. has any intentions on making it easier for them. In fact, about the only time President Obama has referred to Fallujah has been in the context of the suffering we endured, like he did while a U.S. Senator.

While a list of grievances were made against Saddam Hussein before and during the war, we seem to have managed to achieve every one of them within three years of our occupation: massive arbitrary arrests, torture, various violations of international law including war crimes and crimes against humanity, use of terrorism and chemical weapons against the people of Iraq.

According to Field Artillery Magazine, an Army publication:

WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes where we could not get effects on them with HE [High Explosive]. We fired "shake and bake" missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out.

White Phosphorus was used as a chemical weapon—the U.S. Army publication described it as "an effective and versatile munition"—where its chemical property is used “as a psychological weapon” in order to kill them easier. The "method of warfare" even has a name: "shake and bake." When Iraqi guerillas got into "trench lines and spider holes where we could not get effects on them with HE” the Marines would use Whiskey Pete to “shake” them out so they could “bake” them with HE.

To expose the fact that we have long known WP is used as a chemical weapon we can turn to a 1995 DIA document titled "POSSIBLE USE OF PHOSPHOROUS CHEMICAL" that was about Saddam Hussein's alleged use of Whiskey Pete against Kurds in 1991 (an uprising the U.S. called for and then allowed Saddam to put down). In this document we clearly acknowledge WP as a chemical weapon:

IRAQ'S POSSIBLE EMPLOYMENT OF PHOSPHOROUS CHEMICAL WEAPONS -- IN LATE FEBRUARY 1991, FOLLOWING THE COALITION FORCES' OVERWHELMING VICTORY OVER IRAQ, KURDISH REBELS STEPPED UP THEIR STRUGGLE AGAINST IRAQI FORCES IN NORTHERN IRAQ. DURING THE BRUTAL CRACKDOWN THAT FOLLOWED THE KURDISH UPRISING, IRAQI FORCES LOYAL TO PRESIDENT SADDAM (HUSSEIN) MAY HAVE POSSIBLY USED WHITE PHOSPHOROUS (WP) CHEMICAL WEAPONS AGAINST KURDISH REBELS AND THE POPULACE IN ERBIL (GEOCOORD:3412N/04401E) (VICINITY OF IRANIAN BORDER) AND DOHUK (GEOCOORD:3652N/04301E) (VICINITY OF IRAQI BORDER) PROVINCES, IRAQ. THE WP CHEMICAL WAS DELIVERED BY ARTILLERY ROUNDS AND HELICOPTER GUNSHIPS (NO FURTHER INFORMATION ATTHIS TIME). APPARENTLY, THIS TIME IRAQ DID NOT USE NERVE GAS AS THEY DID IN 1988, IN HALABJA (GEOCOORD:3511N/04559E), IRAQ, BECAUSE THEY WERE AFRAID OF POSSIBLE RETALIATION FROM THE UNITED STATES(U.S.) LED COALITION. THESE REPORTS OF POSSIBLE WP CHEMICAL WEAPON ATTACKS SPREAD QUICKLY AMONG THE KURDISH POPULACE IN ERBIL AND DOHUK. AS A RESULT, HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF KURDS FLED FROM THESE TWO AREAS AND CROSSED THE IRAQI BORDER INTO TURKEY. IN RESPONSE TO THIS, TURKISH AUTHORITIES ESTABLISHED SEVERAL REFUGEE CENTERS ALONG THE TURKISH-IRAQI BORDER. THE SITUATION OF KURDISH REFUGEES IN THESE CENTERS IS DESPERATE -- THEY HAVE NO SHELTERS, FOOD, WATER, AND MEDICAL FACILITIES (NO FURTHER INFORMATION AT THIS TIME).

This reads almost like the U.S. siege on Fallujah. In 1991 it was Kurdish insurgents, incited by President Bush but then allowed to be crushed, who received a brutal suppression by Saddam with WP and in which hundreds of thousands fled to live in horrid shelters. That was precisely what happened to Fallujah.

While Lt Col Venable admits that WP was used for its toxic properties as a "method of warfare" he incorrectly claimed that its usage was legal. It was not. Even according to a section from an instruction manual used by the U.S. Army Command and General Staff School (CGSC) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, it is clear that "it is against the law of land warfare to employ WP against personnel targets."

But no worries, America. This was done "politely" by "professional warriors" who have "honor."

Another interesting item revealed as Americans were leaving last month was a New York Times reporter who happened upon some four-hundred pages of U.S. military documents pertaining to the 2005 Haditha massacre where American soldiers killed nearly two dozen civilians, many of them women and children. In the article we read of a testimony where a soldier says the murders were not "remarkable" because, "It happened all the time, not necessarily in MNF-West all the time, but throughout the whole country."

This is just a sample of the horrors the people of Afghanistan and Iraq have endured. In Iraq alone, more than a million people have died, with millions more ethnically cleansed from their communities, or injured, or traumatized, or sick with cancer due to our use of depleted uranium. In Afghanistan, the war and occupation has proved so unpopular that support for the Taliban has increased considerably. In 2007 before President Obama's "surge," the Taliban controlled half of the country. Now they control more than 90%. The war and occupation has proved so unpopular that Vice President Biden has had to change tracks and say the Taliban are not the "enemy," as the Taliban opens an office in Qatar to begin negotiating a settlement to the war.

Sulayman says that Marines "do the right thing because it is the right thing regardless of what those around us would allow," but that is clearly not the case by the fact that the Iraq War went on for nearly nine years, and that the Afghanistan War is still raging on. Both of these wars were completely illegal (and immoral), and any soldier who participated violated their enlistment oath and are not doing the right thing. In fact, the reason hundreds of thousands of soldiers have not done the right thing is that they were obedient to those around them. Resistance was not "allowed," nor has it been tolerated. The soldiers who have refused to follow orders and "do the right thing because it is the right thing regardless of what those around us would allow" are the ones who were punished. Folks like Ehren Watada, Naser Abdo, Stephen Funk, Victor Agosto, and Bradley Manning are a tiny minority of resisters, and punishment was sought in every case. Even the case of Alexis Hutchinson—a soldier who refused to deploy so that she could care for her newborn child—endured the military trying to punish her for doing the right thing.

It is worth noting that Sulayman's piece is completely void of the political, economic, ecological and human realities surrounding the wars he is defending. He talks of noble values, but real honor, courage and commitment lies not in obeying orders to go and kill and occupy, but in disobedience. What makes someone brave or a hero is not being a polite and professional warrior—a mercenary—for a criminal empire, but in resisting it. If Sulayman wanted to see real quality of character he would be looking to Bradley Manning, who has endured nearly two years of detention, often in torturous conditions, for leaking documents that expose corruption and criminality in America's wars and foreign policies. That the Times provided Sulayman with the platform in which to spread his jingoistic nonsense says a lot about the "paper of record" and their service to the Masters of War.

Read Mark Twain's The War Prayer.

The Warning In Gary Webb's Death

2011-12-13T13:38:00.000-08:00

December 9, 2011
Special Report: Modern American history is more complete because journalist Gary Webb had the courage to revive the dark story of the Reagan administration’s protection of Nicaraguan Contra cocaine traffickers in the 1980s. However, Webb ultimately paid a terrible price, as Robert Parry reports.
By Robert Parry
Every year since investigative journalist Gary Webb took his own life in 2004, I have marked the anniversary of that sad event by recalling the debt that American history owes to Webb for his brave reporting, which revived the Contra-cocaine scandal in 1996 and forced important admissions out of the Central Intelligence Agency two years later.
But Webb’s suicide on the evening of Dec. 9, 2004, was also a tragic end for one man whose livelihood and reputation were destroyed by a phalanx of major newspapers – the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times– serving as protectors of a corrupt power structure rather than as sources of honest information.

Journalist Gary Webb
In reviewing the story again this year, I was struck by how Webb’s Contra-cocaine experience was, in many ways, a precursor to the subsequent tragedy of the Iraq War.
In the 1980s, the CIA’s analytical division was already showing signs of politicization, especially regarding President Ronald Reagan’s beloved Contras and their war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government – and the U.S. press corps was already bending to the propaganda pressures of a right-wing Republican administration.
Looking back at CIA cables from the early-to-mid-1980s, you can already see the bias dripping from the analytical reports. Any drug accusation against the leftist Sandinistas was accepted without skepticism and usually with strong exaggeration, while the opposite occurred with evidence of Contra cocaine smuggling; then there was endless quibbling and smearing of sources.
So, to put these reports in anything close to an accurate focus, you would need special lenses to correct for all the politicized distortions. Yet, the U.S. news media, which itself was under intense pressure not to appear “liberal,” worsened the Reagan administration’s fun-house reflection of reality and attacked any dissident journalist who wouldn’t go along.
Thus, Americans heard a lot about how the evil Sandinistas were trying to “poison” America’s youth with cocaine, although there was not a single interception of a drug shipment from Nicaragua during the Sandinista reign, except for one planeload of cocaine that the United States flew into and out of Nicaraguan in a clumsy “sting” operation.
On the other hand, substantial evidence of Contra-related cocaine shipments out of Costa Rica and Honduras was kept from the American people with Reagan’s Justice Department and CIA intervening to head off investigations and thus prevent embarrassing disclosures. The chief role of the big newspapers in this upside-down world was to heap ridicule on anyone who told the truth.
During that time frame of the early-to-mid-1980s, the patterns were set for CIA analysts to advance their careers (by giving the president what he wanted) and mainstream journalists to protect theirs (by accepting propaganda). By 2002-2003, these patterns had become deeply engrained, leaving almost no one to protect the American people from a new round of falsehoods – aimed at Iraq.
Though I was not in touch with Webb in the last months of his life in 2004, I have always wondered if he saw this connection between his own valiant efforts to correct the historical record about Contra-cocaine trafficking in 1996 and the victory of lies over truth regarding Iraq’s WMD in 2002-2003.
In the weeks before Webb’s suicide, there also was the intervening fact of George W. Bush’s reelection – and with it, the dashed expectation that the CIA analysts and the mainstream journalists who played along with the Iraq-WMD fabrications might face some serious accountability. At the moment when Webb picked up his father’s pistol and put it to his head, there must have appeared little hope that anything would change.
Indeed, we are now seeing yet another replay of this systematic distortion of information, this time regarding Iran and its alleged nuclear weapons program. Any tidbit of information against Iran is exaggerated, while exculpatory data is downplayed or ignored.
So, it may be timely again to recount what happened to Gary Webb and to reflect on the dangers of allowing this corrupt disinformation system to press ahead unchecked.
Dark Alliance
For me, the tragic story of Gary Webb began in 1996 when he was working on his “Dark Alliance” series for the San Jose Mercury News. He called me at my home in Arlington, Virginia, because, in 1985, I and my Associated Press colleague Brian Barger had been the first journalists to reveal the scandal of Reagan’s Nicaraguan Contras funding themselves in part by collaborating with drug traffickers.
Webb explained that he had come across evidence that one Contra-connected drug conduit had funneled cocaine into Los Angeles, where it helped fuel the early crack epidemic. Unlike our AP stories a decade earlier — which focused on the Contras helping to ship cocaine from Central America into the United States — Webb said his series would examine what happened to the Contra cocaine after it reached the streets of Los Angeles and other cities.
Besides asking about my recollections of the Contras and their cocaine smuggling, Webb wanted to know why the scandal never gained any real traction in the U.S. national news media. I explained that the ugly facts of the drug trafficking ran up against a determined U.S government campaign to protect the Contras’ image. In the face of that resistance, I said, the major publications — the likes of the New York Times and the Washington Post — had chosen to attack the revelations and those behind them rather than to dig up more evidence.
Webb sounded confused by my account, as if I were telling him something that was foreign to his personal experience, something that just didn’t compute. I had a sense of his unstated questions: Why would the prestige newspapers of American journalism behave that way? Why wouldn’t they jump all over a story that important and that sexy, about the CIA working with drug traffickers?
I took a deep breath, sensing that he had no idea of the personal danger he was about to confront. Well, he would have to learn that for himself, I thought. It surely wasn’t my place to warn a journalist away from a significant story just because it carried risks.
So, I simply asked Webb if he had the strong support of his editors. He assured me that he did. I said their backing would be crucial once his story was out. He sounded perplexed, again, as if he didn’t know what to make of my cautionary tone. I wished him the best of luck, thinking that he would need it.
The Safe Route
When I hung up, I wasn’t sure that the Mercury News would really press ahead with the story, considering how the big national news outlets had dismissed and ridiculed the notion that President Reagan’s beloved Contras had included a large number of drug traffickers.
It never seemed to matter how much evidence there was. It was much easier — and safer, career-wise — for Washington journalists to reject incriminating testimony against the Contras, especially when it came from other drug traffickers and from disgruntled Contras. Even U.S. law-enforcement officials who discovered evidence were disparaged as overzealous and congressional investigators were painted as partisan.
In 1985, as we were preparing our first AP story on this topic, Barger and I knew that the evidence of Contra-cocaine involvement was overwhelming. We had a broad range of sources both inside the Contra movement and within the U.S. government, people with no apparent ax to grind who had described the cocaine-smuggling problem.
One source was a field agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA); another was a senior official on Reagan’s National Security Council (NSC) who told me that he had read a CIA report about how a Contra unit based in Costa Rica had used cocaine profits to buy a helicopter.
However, after our AP story was published in December 1985, we came under attack from the right-wing Washington Times. That was followed by dismissive stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post. The notion that the Contras, whom President Reagan had likened to America’s Founding Fathers, could be implicated in the drug trade was simply unthinkable.
Yet, it was always odd to me that many of the same newspapers had no problem accepting the fact that the CIA-backed Afghan mujahedeen were involved in the heroin trade, but bristled at the thought that the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras might be cut from the same cloth.
A key difference, which I learned both from personal experience and from documents that surfaced during the Iran-Contra scandal, was that Reagan had assigned a young group of ambitious intellectuals such as Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan to oversee the Contra war.
These neoconservatives worked with old-line anticommunists from the Cuban-American community, such as Otto Reich, and CIA propagandists, such as Walter Raymond Jr., to aggressively protect the Contras’ image. And the Contras were always on the edge between getting congressional funding or having it cut off.
So, that combination — the propaganda skills of Reagan’s Contra-support team and the fragile consensus for continuing Reagan’s pet Contra war — meant that any negative publicity about the Contras would be met with a fierce counterattack.
Going to Editors
The neoconservatives were also bright, well-schooled, and skilled in their manipulation of language and information, a process they privately called “perception management.” They proved adept, too, at ingratiating themselves with senior editors at major news outlets.
By the mid-1980s, these patterns had become well-worn in Washington. If a journalist dug up a story that put the Contras in a negative light, he or she could expect the Reagan administration’s propaganda team to make contact with a senior editor or bureau chief and lodge a complaint, apply some pressure, and often offer up some dirt about the offending journalist.
Also, many news executives in that time frame were sympathetic toward Reagan’s hard-line foreign policy, especially after the humiliations of the Vietnam War and the Iranian revolution. Supporting U.S. initiatives abroad — or at least not allowing your reporters to undercut those policies — was seen as patriotic.
At the New York Times, executive editor Abe Rosenthal was one of the news media’s most influential neoconservatives, declaring that he was determined to steer the newspaper back to “the center,” by which he meant to the right.
At AP, general manager Keith Fuller was known to be a strong Reagan supporter and his preferences were sometimes expressed forcefully to AP’s Washington bureau where I worked. At the Washington Post and Newsweek (where I went to work in 1987), there was also a strong sense that Reagan-era scandals should not reach the president, that it would not be “good for the country.”
In other words, on the issue of Contra drug trafficking, there was a confluence of interests between the Reagan administration, which was determined to protect the Contras’ public image, and senior news executives, who wanted to adopt a “patriotic” posture after convincing themselves that the country shouldn’t endure another wrenching battle over wrongdoing by a Republican president.
The popular image of courageous editors standing up for their reporters in the face of government pressure was not the reality, especially not where the Contras were concerned.
Reverse Rewards
So, instead of a process that outsiders might imagine — where journalists who dug out tough stories got rewarded — the actual system worked in the opposite way. The careerists in the news business quickly grasped that the smart play when it came to the Contras was either to be a booster or at least to pooh-pooh evidence of the Contras’ brutality or drug traffickers.
The same rules applied to congressional investigators. Anyone who pried into the dark corners of the Nicaraguan Contra war faced ridicule, as happened to Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts when he followed up the early AP stories with a courageous investigation that discovered more ties between cocaine traffickers and the Contras.
When his Contra-cocaine report was released in 1989, its findings were greeted with yawns and smirks. News articles were buried deep inside the major newspapers and the stories focused more on alleged flaws in his investigation than on his revelations.
For his hard work, Newsweek summed up the prevailing “conventional wisdom” on Kerry by calling him a “randy conspiracy buff.” Being associated with breaking the Contra-cocaine story was also regarded as a black mark on my own career.
To function in this upside-down world, where reality and perception often clashed – and perception usually won – the big news outlets developed a kind of cognitive dissonance that could accept two contradictory positions.
On one level, the news outlets did accept the undeniable reality that some of the Contras and their backers, including the likes of Panamanian General Manuel Noriega, were implicated in the drug trade, but then simultaneously treated this reality as a conspiracy theory.
Squaring the Circle
Only occasionally did a major news outlet seek to square this circle, such as during Noriega’s drug-trafficking trial in 1991 when U.S. prosecutors called as a witness Colombian Medellín cartel kingpin Carlos Lehder, who — along with implicating Noriega — testified that the cartel had given $10 million to the Contras, an allegation first unearthed by Sen. Kerry.
“The Kerry hearings didn’t get the attention they deserved at the time,” a Washington Post editorial on Nov. 27, 1991, acknowledged. “The Noriega trial brings this sordid aspect of the Nicaraguan engagement to fresh public attention.”
However, the Post offered its readers no explanation for why Kerry’s hearings had been largely ignored, with the Post itself a leading culprit in this journalistic misfeasance. Nor did the Post and the other leading newspapers use the opening created by the Noriega trial to do anything to rectify their past neglect.
And, everything quickly returned to the status quo in which the desired perception of the noble Contras trumped the clear reality of their criminal activities.
So, from 1991 until 1996, the Contra-cocaine scandal remained a disturbing story not just about the skewed moral compass of the Reagan administration but also about how the U.S. news media had lost its way.
The scandal was a dirty secret that was best kept out of public view and away from a thorough discussion. After all, the journalistic careerists who had played along with the U.S. government’s Contra defenders had advanced inside their media corporations. As good team players, they had moved up to be bureau chiefs and other news executives. They had no interest in revisiting one of the big stories that they had downplayed as a prerequisite for their success.
Pariahs
Meanwhile, those journalists who had exposed these national security crimes mostly saw their careers sink or at best slide sideways. We were regarded as “pariahs” in our profession. We were “conspiracy theorists,” even though our journalism had proven to be correct again and again.
The Post’s admission that the Contra-cocaine scandal “didn’t get the attention it deserved” didn’t lead to any soul-searching inside the U.S. news media, nor did it result in any rehabilitation of the careers of the reporters who had tried to put a spotlight on this especially vile secret.
As for me, after losing battle after battle with my Newsweek editors (who despised the Iran-Contra scandal that I had worked so hard to expose), I departed the magazine in June 1990 to write a book (called Fooling America) about the decline of the Washington press corps and the parallel rise of the new generation of government propagandists.
I was also hired by PBS Frontline to investigate whether there had been a prequel to the Iran-Contra scandal — whether those arms-for-hostage deals in the mid-1980s had been preceded by contacts between Reagan’s 1980 campaign staff and Iran, which was then holding 52 Americans hostage and essentially destroying Jimmy Carter’s reelection hopes. [For more on that topic, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]
Then, in 1995, frustrated by the pervasive triviality that had come to define American journalism — and acting on the advice of and with the assistance of my oldest son Sam — I turned to a new medium and launched the Internet’s first investigative news magazine, known as Consortiumnews.com. The Web site became a way for me to put out well-reported stories that my former mainstream colleagues seemed determined to ignore or mock.
So, when Gary Webb called me that day in 1996, I knew that he was charging into some dangerous journalistic terrain, though he thought he was simply pursuing a great story. After his call, it struck me that perhaps the only way for the Contra-cocaine story to ever get the attention that it deserved was for someone outside the Washington media culture to do the work.
When Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series finally appeared in late August 1996, it initially drew little attention. The major national news outlets applied their usual studied indifference to a topic that they had already judged unworthy of serious attention.
It was also clear that the media careerists who had climbed up their corporate ladders by accepting the conventional wisdom that the Contra-cocaine story was a conspiracy theory weren’t about to look back down and admit that they had contributed to a major journalistic failure to inform and protect the American public.
Hard to Ignore
But Webb’s story proved hard to ignore. First, unlike the work that Barger and I did for AP in the mid-1980s, Webb’s series wasn’t just a story about drug traffickers in Central America and their protectors in Washington. It was about the on-the-ground consequences, inside the United States, of that drug trafficking, how the lives of Americans were blighted and destroyed as the collateral damage of a U.S. foreign policy initiative.
In other words, there were real-life American victims, and they were concentrated in African-American communities. That meant the ever-sensitive issue of race had been injected into the controversy. Anger from black communities spread quickly to the Congressional Black Caucus, which started demanding answers.
Secondly, the San Jose Mercury News, which was the local newspaper for Silicon Valley, had posted documents and audio on its state-of-the-art Internet site. That way, readers could examine much of the documentary support for the series.
It also meant that the traditional “gatekeeper” role of the major newspapers — the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times — was under assault. If a regional paper like the Mercury News could finance a major journalistic investigation like this one, and circumvent the judgments of the editorial boards at the Big Three, then there might be a tectonic shift in the power relations of the U.S. news media. There could be a breakdown of the established order.
This combination of factors led to the next phase of the Contra-cocaine battle: the “get-Gary-Webb” counterattack. The first major shot against Webb and his “Dark Alliance” series did not come from the Big Three but from the rapidly expanding right-wing news media, which was in no mood to accept the notion that some of President Reagan’s beloved Contras were drug traffickers. That would have cast a shadow over the Reagan Legacy, which the Right was elevating to mythic status.
It fell to Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s right-wing Washington Times to begin the anti-Webb vendetta. Moon, a South Korean theocrat who fancied himself the new Messiah, had founded his newspaper in 1982 partly to protect Ronald Reagan’s political flanks and partly to ensure that he had powerful friends in high places. In the mid-1980s, the Washington Times went so far as to raise money to assist Reagan’s Contra “freedom fighters.”
Self-Interested Testimony
To refute Webb’s three-part series, the Washington Times turned to some ex-CIA officials, who had participated in the Contra war, and quoted them denying the story. Soon, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times were lining up behind the Washington Times to trash Webb and his story.
On Oct. 4, 1996, the Washington Post published a front-page article knocking down Webb’s series, although acknowledging that some Contra operatives did help the cocaine cartels.
The Post’s approach was twofold, fitting with the national media’s cognitive dissonance on the topic of Contra cocaine: first, the Post presented the Contra-cocaine allegations as old news — “even CIA personnel testified to Congress they knew that those covert operations involved drug traffickers,” the Post sniffed — and second, the Post minimized the importance of the one Contra smuggling channel that Webb had highlighted in his series, saying that it had not “played a major role in the emergence of crack.”
A Post sidebar story dismissed African-Americans as prone to “conspiracy fears.”
Next, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times weighed in with lengthy articles castigating Webb and “Dark Alliance.” The big newspapers made much of the CIA’s internal reviews in 1987 and 1988 — almost a decade earlier — that supposedly had cleared the spy agency of any role in Contra-cocaine smuggling.
But the CIA’s cover-up began to weaken on Oct. 24, 1996, when CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz conceded before the Senate Intelligence Committee that the first CIA probe had lasted only12 days, and the second only three days. He promised a more thorough review.
Mocking Webb
Webb, however, had already crossed over from being a serious journalist to a target of ridicule. Influential Post media critic Howard Kurtz mocked Webb for saying in a book proposal that he would explore the possibility that the Contra war was primarily a business to its participants. “Oliver Stone, check your voice mail,” Kurtz chortled.
However, Webb’s suspicion was no conspiracy theory. Indeed, White House aide Oliver North’s chief Contra emissary, Robert Owen, had made the same point in a March 17, 1986, message about the Contras leadership. “Few of the so-called leaders of the movement . . . really care about the boys in the field,” Owen wrote. “THIS WAR HAS BECOME A BUSINESS TO MANY OF THEM.” [Emphasis in original.]
In other words, Webb was right and Kurtz was wrong, even Oliver North’s emissary had reported that many Contra leaders treated the conflict as “a business.” But accuracy had ceased to be relevant in the media’s hazing of Gary Webb.
In another double standard, while Webb was held to the strictest standards of journalism, it was entirely all right for Kurtz — the supposed arbiter of journalistic integrity who was also featured on CNN’s Reliable Sources — to make judgments based on ignorance. Kurtz would face no repercussions for mocking a fellow journalist who was factually correct.
The Big Three’s assault — combined with their disparaging tone — had a predictable effect on the executives of the Mercury News. As it turned out, Webb’s confidence in his editors had been misplaced. By early 1997, executive editor Jerry Ceppos, who had his own corporate career to worry about, was in retreat.
On May 11, 1997, Ceppos published a front-page column saying the series “fell short of my standards.” He criticized the stories because they “strongly implied CIA knowledge” of Contra connections to U.S. drug dealers who were manufacturing crack cocaine. “We did not have enough proof that top CIA officials knew of the relationship,” Ceppos wrote.
Ceppos was wrong about the proof, of course. At AP, before we published our first Contra-cocaine article in 1985, Barger and I had known that the CIA and Reagan’s White House were aware of the Contra-cocaine problem.
However, Ceppos had recognized that he and his newspaper were facing a credibility crisis brought on by the harsh consensus delivered by the Big Three, a judgment that had quickly solidified into conventional wisdom throughout the major news media and inside Knight-Ridder, Inc., which owned the Mercury News. The only career-saving move – career-saving for Ceppos even if career-destroying for Webb – was to jettison Webb and his journalism.
A ‘Vindication’
The big newspapers and the Contras’ defenders celebrated Ceppos’s retreat as vindication of their own dismissal of the Contra-cocaine stories. In particular, Kurtz seemed proud that his demeaning of Webb now had the endorsement of Webb’s editor.
Ceppos next pulled the plug on the Mercury News’ continuing Contra-cocaine investigation and reassigned Webb to a small office in Cupertino, California, far from his family. Webb resigned from the paper in disgrace.
For undercutting Webb and other Mercury News reporters working on the Contra-cocaine investigation, Ceppos was lauded by the American Journalism Review and was given the 1997 national Ethics in Journalism Award by the Society of Professional Journalists.
While Ceppos won raves, Webb watched his career collapse and his marriage break up. Still, Gary Webb had set in motion internal government investigations that would bring to the surface long-hidden facts about how the Reagan administration had conducted the Contra war.
The CIA published the first part of Inspector General Hitz’s findings on Jan. 29, 1998. Though the CIA’s press release for the report criticized Webb and defended the CIA, Hitz’s Volume One admitted that not only were many of Webb’s allegations true but that he actually understated the seriousness of the Contra-drug crimes and the CIA’s knowledge of them.
Hitz conceded that cocaine smugglers played a significant early role in the Contra movement and that the CIA intervened to block an image-threatening 1984 federal investigation into a San Francisco–based drug ring with suspected ties to the Contras, the so-called “Frogman Case.”
After Volume One was released, I called Webb (whom I had met personally since his series was published). I chided him for indeed getting the story “wrong.” He had understated how serious the problem of Contra-cocaine trafficking had been.
It was a form of gallows humor for the two of us, since nothing had changed in the way the major newspapers treated the Contra-cocaine issue. They focused only on the press release that continued to attack Webb, while ignoring the incriminating information that could be found in the body of the report. All I could do was highlight those admissions at Consortiumnews.com, which sadly had a much, much smaller readership than the Big Three.
Looking the Other Way
The major U.S. news media also looked the other way on other startling disclosures.
On May 7, 1998, for instance, Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, introduced into the Congressional Record a Feb. 11, 1982, letter of understanding between the CIA and the Justice Department. The letter, which had been requested by CIA Director William Casey, freed the CIA from legal requirements that it must report drug smuggling by CIA assets, a provision that covered both the Nicaraguan Contras and the Afghan mujahedeen.
In other words, early in those two covert wars, the CIA leadership wanted to make sure that its geopolitical objectives would not be complicated by a legal requirement to turn in its client forces for drug trafficking.
The next break in the long-running Contra-cocaine cover-up was a report by the Justice Department’s Inspector General Michael Bromwich.
Given the hostile climate surrounding Webb’s series, Bromwich’s report also opened with criticism of Webb. But, like the CIA’s Volume One, the contents revealed new details about government wrongdoing. According to evidence cited by Bromwich, the Reagan administration knew almost from the outset of the Contra war that cocaine traffickers permeated the paramilitary operation. The administration also did next to nothing to expose or stop the crimes.
Bromwich’s report revealed example after example of leads not followed, corroborated witnesses disparaged, official law-enforcement investigations sabotaged, and even the CIA facilitating the work of drug traffickers.
The report showed that the Contras and their supporters ran several parallel drug-smuggling operations, not just the one at the center of Webb’s series. The report also found that the CIA shared little of its information about Contra drugs with law-enforcement agencies and on three occasions disrupted cocaine-trafficking investigations that threatened the Contras.
As well as depicting a more widespread Contra-drug operation than Webb had understood, the Justice Department report provided some important corroboration about a Nicaraguan drug smuggler, Norwin Meneses, who was a key figure in Webb’s series.
Bromwich cited U.S. government informants who supplied detailed information about Meneses’s drug operation and his financial assistance to the Contras. For instance, Renato Pena, a money-and-drug courier for Meneses, said that in the early 1980s the CIA allowed the Contras to fly drugs into the United States, sell them, and keep the proceeds.
Pena, who was the northern California representative for the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN) Contra army, said the drug trafficking was forced on the Contras by the inadequate levels of U.S. government assistance.
DEA Troubles
The Justice Department report also disclosed repeated examples of the CIA and U.S. embassies in Central America discouraging DEA investigations, including one into Contra-cocaine shipments moving through the international airport in El Salvador.
Inspector General Bromwich said secrecy trumped all. “We have no doubt that the CIA and the U.S. Embassy were not anxious for the DEA to pursue its investigation at the airport,” he wrote.
Bromwich also described the curious case of how a DEA pilot helped a CIA asset escape from Costa Rican authorities in 1989 after the man, American farmer John Hull, had been charged in connection with Contra-cocaine trafficking.
Hull’s ranch in northern Costa Rica had been the site of Contra camps for attacking Nicaragua from the south. For years, Contra-connected witnesses also said Hull’s property was used for the transshipment of cocaine en route to the United States, but those accounts were brushed aside by the Reagan administration and disparaged in major U.S. newspapers.
Yet, according to Bromwich’s report, the DEA took the accounts seriously enough to prepare a research report on the evidence in November 1986. In it, one informant described Colombian cocaine off-loaded at an airstrip on Hull’s ranch. The drugs were then concealed in a shipment of frozen shrimp and transported to the United States.
The alleged Costa Rican shipper was Frigorificos de Puntarenas, a firm controlled by Cuban-American Luis Rodriguez. Like Hull, however, Frigorificos had friends in high places. In 1985-86, the State Department had selected the shrimp company to handle $261,937 in non-lethal assistance earmarked for the Contras.
Hull also remained a man with powerful protectors. Even after Costa Rican authorities brought drug charges against him, influential Americans, including Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, demanded that Hull be let out of jail pending trial. Then, in July 1989 with the help of a DEA pilot – and possibly a DEA agent – Hull managed to fly out of Costa Rica to Haiti and then to the United States. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “John Hull’s Great Escape.”]
Despite these new disclosures, the big newspapers still showed no inclination to read beyond the criticism of Webb in the press release and the executive summary.
Major Disclosures
By fall 1998, Washington was obsessed with President Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, which made it easier to ignore even more stunning Contra-cocaine disclosures in the CIA’s Volume Two, published on Oct. 8, 1998.
In the report, CIA Inspector General Hitz identified more than 50 Contras and Contra-related entities implicated in the drug trade. He also detailed how the Reagan administration had protected these drug operations and frustrated federal investigations throughout the 1980s.
According to Volume Two, the CIA knew the criminal nature of its Contra clients from the start of the war against Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government. The earliest Contra force, called the Nicaraguan Revolutionary Democratic Alliance (ADREN) or the 15th of September Legion, had chosen “to stoop to criminal activities in order to feed and clothe their cadre,” according to a June 1981 draft of a CIA field report.
According to a September 1981 cable to CIA headquarters, two ADREN members made the first delivery of drugs to Miami in July 1981. ADREN’s leaders included Enrique Bermúdez and other early Contras who would later direct the major Contra army, the CIA-organized FDN which was based in Honduras, along Nicaragua’s northern border.
Throughout the war, Bermúdez remained the top Contra military commander. The CIA later corroborated the allegations about ADREN’s cocaine trafficking, but insisted that Bermúdez had opposed the drug shipments to the United States that went ahead nonetheless.
The truth about Bermúdez’s supposed objections to drug trafficking, however, was less clear. According to Hitz’s Volume One, Bermúdez enlisted Norwin Meneses, a large-scale Nicaraguan cocaine smuggler and a key figure in Webb’s series, to raise money and buy supplies for the Contras.
Volume One had quoted a Meneses associate, another Nicaraguan trafficker named Danilo Blandón, who told Hitz’s investigators that he and Meneses flew to Honduras to meet with Bermúdez in 1982. At the time, Meneses’s criminal activities were well-known in the Nicaraguan exile community. But Bermúdez told the cocaine smugglers that “the ends justify the means” in raising money for the Contras.
After the Bermúdez meeting, Contra soldiers helped Meneses and Blandón get past Honduran police who briefly arrested them on drug-trafficking suspicions. After their release, Blandón and Meneses traveled on to Bolivia to complete a cocaine transaction.
There were other indications of Bermúdez’s drug-smuggling tolerance. In February 1988, another Nicaraguan exile linked to the drug trade accused Bermúdez of participation in narcotics trafficking, according to Hitz’s report. After the Contra war ended, Bermúdez returned to Managua, Nicaragua, where he was shot to death on Feb. 16, 1991. The murder has never been solved.
The Southern Front
Along the Southern Front, the Contras’ military operations in Costa Rica on Nicaragua’s southern border, the CIA’s drug evidence centered on the forces of Edén Pastora, another top Contra commander. But Hitz discovered that the U.S. government may have made the drug situation worse, not better.
Hitz revealed that the CIA put an admitted drug operative — known by his CIA pseudonym “Ivan Gomez” — in a supervisory position over Pastora. Hitz reported that the CIA discovered Gomez’s drug history in 1987 when Gomez failed a security review on drug-trafficking questions.
In internal CIA interviews, Gomez admitted that in March or April 1982, he helped family members who were engaged in drug trafficking and money laundering. In one case, Gomez said he assisted his brother and brother-in-law in transporting cash from New York City to Miami. He admitted that he “knew this act was illegal.”
Later, Gomez expanded on his admission, describing how his family members had fallen $2 million into debt and had gone to Miami to run a money-laundering center for drug traffickers. Gomez said “his brother had many visitors whom [Gomez] assumed to be in the drug trafficking business.” Gomez’s brother was arrested on drug charges in June 1982. Three months later, in September 1982, Gomez started his CIA assignment in Costa Rica.
Years later, convicted drug trafficker Carlos Cabezas alleged that in the early 1980s, Ivan Gomez was the CIA agent in Costa Rica who was overseeing drug-money donations to the Contras. Gomez “was to make sure the money was given to the right people [the Contras] and nobody was taking . . . profit they weren’t supposed to,” Cabezas stated publicly.
But the CIA sought to discredit Cabezas at the time because he had trouble identifying Gomez’s picture and put Gomez at one meeting in early 1982 before Gomez started his CIA assignment.
While the CIA was able to fend off Cabezas’s allegations by pointing to these discrepancies, Hitz’s report revealed that the CIA was nevertheless aware of Gomez’s direct role in drug-money laundering, a fact the agency hid from Sen. Kerry in his 1987 investigation.
Cocaine Coup
There was also more to know about Gomez. In November 1985, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) learned from an informant that Gomez’s two brothers had been large-scale cocaine importers, with one brother arranging shipments from Bolivia’s infamous drug kingpin Roberto Suarez.
Suarez already was known as a financier of right-wing causes. In 1980, with the support of Argentina’s hard-line anticommunist military regime, Suarez bankrolled a coup in Bolivia that ousted the elected left-of-center government. The violent putsch became known as the Cocaine Coup because it made Bolivia the region’s first narco-state.
By protecting cocaine shipments headed north, Bolivia’s government helped transform Colombia’s Medellín cartel from a struggling local operation into a giant corporate-style business for delivering cocaine to the U.S. market.
Flush with cash in the early 1980s, Suarez invested more than $30 million in various right-wing paramilitary operations, including the Contra forces in Central America, according to U.S. Senate testimony by an Argentine intelligence officer, Leonardo Sanchez-Reisse.
In 1987, Sanchez-Reisse said the Suarez drug money was laundered through front companies in Miami before going to Central America. There, other Argentine intelligence officers — veterans of the Bolivian coup — trained the Contras in the early 1980s, even before the CIA arrived to first assist with the training and later take over the Contra operation from the Argentines.
Inspector General Hitz added another piece to the mystery of the Bolivian-Contra connection. One Contra fund-raiser, Jose Orlando Bolanos, boasted that the Argentine government was supporting his Contra activities, according to a May 1982 cable to CIA headquarters. Bolanos made the statement during a meeting with undercover DEA agents in Florida. He even offered to introduce them to his Bolivian cocaine supplier.
Despite all this suspicious drug activity centered around Ivan Gomez and the Contras, the CIA insisted that it did not unmask Gomez until 1987, when he failed a security check and confessed his role in his family’s drug business. The CIA official who interviewed Gomez concluded that “Gomez directly participated in illegal drug transactions, concealed participation in illegal drug transactions, and concealed information about involvement in illegal drug activity,” Hitz wrote.
Protecting Gomez
But senior CIA officials still protected Gomez. They refused to refer the Gomez case to the Justice Department, citing the 1982 agreement that spared the CIA from a legal obligation to report narcotics crimes by people collaborating with the CIA who were not formal agency employees.
Gomez was an independent contractor who worked for the CIA but was not officially on staff. The CIA eased Gomez out of the agency in February 1988, without alerting law enforcement or the congressional oversight committees.
When questioned about the case nearly a decade later, one senior CIA official who had supported the gentle treatment of Gomez had second thoughts. “It is a striking commentary on me and everyone that this guy’s involvement in narcotics didn’t weigh more heavily on me or the system,” the official acknowledged to Hitz’s investigators.
A Medellín drug connection arose in another section of Hitz’s report, when he revealed evidence suggesting that some Contra trafficking may have been sanctioned by Reagan’s NSC. The protagonist for this part of the Contra-cocaine mystery was Moises Nunez, a Cuban-American who worked for Oliver North’s NSC Contra-support operation and for two drug-connected seafood importers, Ocean Hunter in Miami and Frigorificos De Puntarenas in Costa Rica.
Frigorificos De Puntarenas was created in the early 1980s as a cover for drug-money laundering, according to sworn testimony by two of the firm’s principals — Carlos Soto and Medellín cartel accountant Ramon Milian Rodriguez. (It was also the company implicated by a DEA informant in moving cocaine from John Hull’s ranch to the United States.)
Drug allegations were swirling around Moises Nunez by the mid-1980s. Indeed, his operation was one of the targets of my and Barger’s AP investigation in 1985. Finally reacting to these suspicions, the CIA questioned Nunez about his alleged cocaine trafficking on March 25, 1987. He responded by pointing the finger at his NSC superiors.
“Nunez revealed that since 1985, he had engaged in a clandestine relationship with the National Security Council,” Hitz reported, adding: “Nunez refused to elaborate on the nature of these actions, but indicated it was difficult to answer questions relating to his involvement in narcotics trafficking because of the specific tasks he had performed at the direction of the NSC. Nunez refused to identify the NSC officials with whom he had been involved.”
After this first round of questioning, CIA headquarters authorized an additional session, but then senior CIA officials reversed the decision. There would be no further efforts at “debriefing Nunez.”
Hitz noted that “the cable [from headquarters] offered no explanation for the decision” to stop the Nunez interrogation. But the CIA’s Central American Task Force chief Alan Fiers Jr. said the Nunez-NSC drug lead was not pursued “because of the NSC connection and the possibility that this could be somehow connected to the Private Benefactor program [the Contra money handled by North] a decision was made not to pursue this matter.”
Joseph Fernandez, who had been the CIA’s station chief in Costa Rica, confirmed to congressional Iran-Contra investigators that Nunez “was involved in a very sensitive operation” for North’s “Enterprise.” The exact nature of that NSC-authorized activity has never been divulged.
At the time of the Nunez-NSC drug admissions and his truncated interrogation, the CIA’s acting director was Robert Gates, who nearly two decades later became President George W. Bush’s second secretary of defense, a position he retained under President Barack Obama.
Drug Record
The CIA also worked directly with other drug-connected Cuban-Americans on the Contra project, Hitz found. One of Nunez’s Cuban-American associates, Felipe Vidal, had a criminal record as a narcotics trafficker in the 1970s. But the CIA still hired him to serve as a logistics coordinator for the Contras, Hitz reported.
The CIA also learned that Vidal’s drug connections were not only in the past. A December 1984 cable to CIA headquarters revealed Vidal’s ties to Rene Corvo, another Cuban-American suspected of drug trafficking. Corvo was working with Cuban anticommunist Frank Castro, who was viewed as a Medellín cartel representative within the Contra movement.
There were other narcotics links to Vidal. In January 1986, the DEA in Miami seized 414 pounds of cocaine concealed in a shipment of yucca that was going from a Contra operative in Costa Rica to Ocean Hunter, the company where Vidal (and Moises Nunez) worked. Despite the evidence, Vidal remained a CIA employee as he collaborated with Frank Castro’s assistant, Rene Corvo, in raising money for the Contras, according to a CIA memo in June 1986.
By fall 1986, Sen. Kerry had heard enough rumors about Vidal to demand information about him as part of his congressional inquiry into Contra drugs. But the CIA withheld the derogatory information in its files. On Oct. 15, 1986, Kerry received a briefing from the CIA’s Alan Fiers Jr., who didn’t mention Vidal’s drug arrests and conviction in the 1970s.
But Vidal was not yet in the clear. In 1987, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami began investigating Vidal, Ocean Hunter, and other Contra-connected entities. This prosecutorial attention worried the CIA. The CIA’s Latin American division felt it was time for a security review of Vidal. But on Aug. 5, 1987, the CIA’s security office blocked the review for fear that the Vidal drug information “could be exposed during any future litigation.”
As expected, the U.S. Attorney’s Office did request documents about “Contra-related activities” by Vidal, Ocean Hunter, and 16 other entities. The CIA advised the prosecutor that “no information had been found regarding Ocean Hunter,” a statement that was clearly false. The CIA continued Vidal’s employment as an adviser to the Contra movement until 1990, virtually the end of the Contra war.
FDN Connections
Hitz also revealed that drugs tainted the highest levels of the Honduran-based FDN, the largest Contra army. Hitz found that Juan Rivas, a Contra commander who rose to be chief of staff, admitted that he had been a cocaine trafficker in Colombia before the war.
The CIA asked Rivas, known as El Quiche, about his background after the DEA began suspecting that Rivas might be an escaped convict from a Colombian prison. In interviews with CIA officers, Rivas acknowledged that he had been arrested and convicted of packaging and transporting cocaine for the drug trade in Barranquilla, Colombia. After several months in prison, Rivas said, he escaped and moved to Central America, where he joined the Contras.
Defending Rivas, CIA officials insisted that there was no evidence that Rivas engaged in trafficking while with the Contras. But one CIA cable noted that he lived an expensive lifestyle, even keeping a $100,000 Thoroughbred horse at the Contra camp. Contra military commander Bermúdez later attributed Rivas’s wealth to his ex-girlfriend’s rich family. But a CIA cable in March 1989 added that “some in the FDN may have suspected at the time that the father-in-law was engaged in drug trafficking.”
Still, the CIA moved quickly to protect Rivas from exposure and possible extradition to Colombia. In February 1989, CIA headquarters asked that the DEA take no action “in view of the serious political damage to the U.S. Government that could occur should the information about Rivas become public.” Rivas was eased out of the Contra leadership with an explanation of poor health. With U.S. government help, he was allowed to resettle in Miami. Colombia was not informed about his fugitive status.
Another senior FDN official implicated in the drug trade was its chief spokesman in Honduras, Arnoldo Jose “Frank” Arana.
The drug allegations against Arana dated back to 1983 when a federal narcotics task force put him under criminal investigation because of plans “to smuggle 100 kilograms of cocaine into the United States from South America.” On Jan. 23, 1986, the FBI reported that Arana and his brothers were involved in a drug-smuggling enterprise, although Arana was not charged.
Arana sought to clear up another set of drug suspicions in 1989 by visiting the DEA in Honduras with a business associate, Jose Perez. Arana’s association with Perez, however, only raised new alarms. If “Arana is mixed up with the Perez brothers, he is probably dirty,” the DEA said.
Drug Airlines
Through their ownership of an air services company called SETCO, the Perez brothers were associated with Juan Matta-Ballesteros, a major cocaine kingpin connected to the murder of a DEA agent, according to reports by the DEA and U.S. Customs. Hitz reported that someone at the CIA scribbled a note on a DEA cable about Arana stating: “Arnold Arana . . . still active and working, we [CIA] may have a problem.”
Despite its drug ties to Matta-Ballesteros, SETCO emerged as the principal company for ferrying supplies to the Contras in Honduras. During congressional Iran-Contra hearings, FDN political leader Adolfo Calero testified that SETCO was paid from bank accounts controlled by Oliver North. SETCO also received $185,924 from the State Department for ferrying supplies to the Contras in 1986. Furthermore, Hitz found that other air transport companies used by the Contras were implicated in the cocaine trade as well.
Even FDN leaders suspected that they were shipping supplies to Central America aboard planes that might be returning with drugs. Mario Calero, the chief of Contra logistics, grew so uneasy about one air freight company that he notified U.S. law enforcement that the FDN only chartered the planes for the flights south, not the return flights north.
Hitz found that some drug pilots simply rotated from one sector of the Contra operation to another. Donaldo Frixone, who had a drug record in the Dominican Republic, was hired by the CIA to fly Contra missions from 1983 to 1985. In September 1986, however, Frixone was implicated in smuggling 19,000 pounds of marijuana into the United States. In late 1986 or early 1987, he went to work for Vortex, another U.S.-paid Contra supply company linked to the drug trade.
By the time that Hitz’s Volume Two was published in fall 1998, the CIA’s defense against Webb’s series had shrunk to a fig leaf: that the CIA did not conspire with the Contras to raise money through cocaine trafficking. But Hitz made clear that the Contra war took precedence over law enforcement and that the CIA withheld evidence of Contra crimes from the Justice Department, Congress, and even the CIA’s own analytical division.
Besides tracing the evidence of Contra-drug trafficking through the decade-long Contra war, the inspector general interviewed senior CIA officers who acknowledged that they were aware of the Contra-drug problem but didn’t want its exposure to undermine the struggle to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.
According to Hitz, the CIA had “one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista government. . . . [CIA officers] were determined that the various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to prevent effective implementation of the Contra program.” One CIA field officer explained, “The focus was to get the job done, get the support and win the war.”
Hitz also recounted complaints from CIA analysts that CIA operations officers handling the Contras hid evidence of Contra-drug trafficking even from the CIA’s analysts.
Because of the withheld evidence, the CIA analysts incorrectly concluded in the mid-1980s that “only a handful of Contras might have been involved in drug trafficking.” That false assessment was passed on to Congress and to major news organizations — serving as an important basis for denouncing Gary Webb and his “Dark Alliance” series in 1996.
CIA Admission
Although Hitz’s report was an extraordinary admission of institutional guilt by the CIA, it went almost unnoticed by the big American newspapers.
On Oct. 10, 1998, two days after Hitz’s Volume Two was posted on the CIA’s Web site, the New York Times published a brief article that continued to deride Webb but acknowledged the Contra-drug problem may have been worse than earlier understood. Several weeks later, the Washington Post weighed in with a similarly superficial article. The Los Angeles Times never published a story on the release of Hitz’s Volume Two.
In 2000, the House Intelligence Committee grudgingly acknowledged that the stories about Reagan’s CIA protecting Contra drug traffickers were true. The committee released a report citing classified testimony from CIA Inspector General Britt Snider (Hitz’s successor) admitting that the spy agency had turned a blind eye to evidence of Contra-drug smuggling and generally treated drug smuggling through Central America as a low priority.
“In the end the objective of unseating the Sandinistas appears to have taken precedence over dealing properly with potentially serious allegations against those with whom the agency was working,” Snider said, adding that the CIA did not treat the drug allegations in “a consistent, reasoned or justifiable manner.”
The House committee — then controlled by Republicans — still downplayed the significance of the Contra-cocaine scandal, but the panel acknowledged, deep inside its report, that in some cases, “CIA employees did nothing to verify or disprove drug trafficking information, even when they had the opportunity to do so. In some of these, receipt of a drug allegation appeared to provoke no specific response, and business went on as usual.”
Like the release of Hitz’s report in 1998, the admissions by Snider and the House committee drew virtually no media attention in 2000 — except for a few articles on the Internet, including one at Consortiumnews.com.
Unrepentant Press
Because of this misuse of power by the Big Three newspapers — choosing to conceal their own journalistic failings regarding the Contra-cocaine scandal and to protect the Reagan administration’s image — Webb’s reputation was never rehabilitated.
After his original “Dark Alliance” series was published in 1996, Webb had been inundated with attractive book offers from major publishing houses, but once the vilification began, the interest evaporated. Webb’s agent contacted an independent publishing house, Seven Stories Press, which had a reputation for publishing books that had been censored, and it took on the project.
After Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion was published in 1998, I joined Webb in a few speaking appearances on the West Coast, including one packed book talk at the Midnight Special bookstore in Santa Monica, California. For a time, Webb was treated as a celebrity on the American Left, but that gradually faded.
In our interactions during these joint appearances, I found Webb to be a regular guy who seemed to be holding up fairly well under the terrible pressure. He had landed an investigative job with a California state legislative committee. He also felt some measure of vindication when CIA Inspector General Hitz’s reports came out.
However, Webb never could overcome the pain caused by his betrayal at the hands of his journalistic colleagues, his peers. In the years that followed, Webb was unable to find decent-paying work in his profession — the conventional wisdom remained that he had somehow been exposed as a journalistic fraud. His state job ended; his marriage fell apart; he struggled to pay bills; and he was faced with a move out of a modest rental house near Sacramento, California.
On Dec. 9, 2004, the 49-year-old Webb typed out suicide notes to his ex-wife and his three children; laid out a certificate for his cremation; and taped a note on the door telling movers — who were coming the next morning — to instead call 911. Webb then took out his father’s pistol and shot himself in the head. The first shot was not lethal, so he fired once more.
Even with Webb’s death, the big newspapers that had played key roles in his destruction couldn’t bring themselves to show Webb any mercy. After Webb’s body was found, I received a call from a reporter for the Los Angeles Times who knew that I was one of Webb’s few journalistic colleagues who had defended him and his work.
I told the reporter that American history owed a great debt to Gary Webb because he had forced out important facts about Reagan-era crimes. But I added that the Los Angeles Times would be hard-pressed to write an honest obituary because the newspaper had not published a single word on the contents of Hitz’s final report, which had largely vindicated Webb.
To my disappointment but not my surprise, I was correct. The Los Angeles Times ran a mean-spirited obituary that made no mention of either my defense of Webb, nor the CIA’s admissions in 1998. The obituary was republished in other newspapers, including the Washington Post.
In effect, Webb’s suicide enabled senior editors at the Big Three newspapers to breathe a little easier — one of the few people who understood the ugly story of the Reagan administration’s cover-up of the Contra-cocaine scandal and the U.S. media’s complicity was now silenced.
To this day, none of the journalists or media critics who participated in the destruction of Gary Webb has paid a price for their actions. None has faced the sort of humiliation that Webb had to endure. None had to experience that special pain of standing up for what is best in the profession of journalism — taking on a difficult story that seeks to hold powerful people accountable for serious crimes — and then being vilified by your own colleagues, the people that you expected to understand and appreciate what you had done.
On the contrary, many were rewarded with professional advancement and lucrative careers. For instance, Howard Kurtz still hosts the CNN program, “Reliable Sources,” which lectures journalists on professional standards.
[For more on related topics, see Robert Parry’s Lost History, Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep, now available in a three-book set for the discount price of only $29. For details, click here.]
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there.

Libya

2011-03-01T18:24:00.000-08:00

Events in Libya are moving very fast, and their outcome is uncertain. "Leader" Muammar Gadaffi is hunkered down in Tripoli, defended by army units from his tribe and mercenaries from black Africa. Watching Col. Muammar Gadaffi deliver a bombastic, defiant speech last week from the ruins of Tripoli's Bab al-Azizia barracks brought me back to 1987 when Libya's leader led me by the hand through the wreckage of his former residence. On 14 April, 1986, US aircraft attacked Libya after a Berlin disco frequented by US soldiers was bombed. US President Ronald Reagan blamed Libya and denounced Gadaffi as the "mad dog of the Middle East." But a defector from Israel's Mossad later claimed the US had been duped by a false flag operation into believing Libya was behind the attack. A 2,000 lb US bomb crashed through the ceiling of Gadaffi's private quarters. He was outside in his trademark tent. But his 2-year old adopted daughter was killed. Some 87 other civilians and a few French diplomats were also killed. Americans thought this raid was dandy. "Why, Mr Eric," a clearly confused Gadaffi plaintively asked me, "why are the Americans trying to kill me?" "Because they think you are funding every kind of anti-western group," I replied. "And they will never forgive you for provoking the rise in Arab oil prices." In those long ago days, Gadaffi, who considered himself a passionate revolutionary, supported every militant group that asked for Libyan help, including Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, various Palestinian groups fighting Israeli occupation, Basque separatists battling Madrid, and the Irish Republican Army. To Washington, Gadaffi was the world's arch "terrorist." After we spent the evening in his colorful Bedouin tent, I had some fun with Gadaffi. "We may bomb you, Leader, but we also think you are the best-dressed Arab leader." Gadaffi, dressed in a custom made, silk Italian jump suit and zippered boots, beamed with pleasure. He asked me where he could get the Ralph Lauren safari jacket I was wearing, adding, "you look very militant, Mr Eric." I could never get a good fix on Muammar Gadaffi. When he seized power way back in 1969, he was young and very handsome, with movie-star good looks, and an ardent reformist. Gadaffi's hero and father figure was Egypt's charismatic Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Subprime Neoconservative Leadership

2008-11-04T08:28:00.000-08:00

Tomgram: The End of a Subprime Administration
Foreclosed: The George W. Bush Story By Tom Engelhardt
They may have been the most disastrous dreamers, the most reckless gamblers, and the most vigorous imperial hucksters and grifters in our history. Selling was their passion. And they were classic American salesmen -- if you're talking about underwater land in Florida, or the Brooklyn Bridge, or three-card monte, or bizarre visions of Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles armed with chemical and biological weaponry let loose over the U.S., or Saddam Hussein's mushroom clouds rising over American cities, or a full-scale reordering of the Middle East to our taste, or simply eternal global dominance. When historians look back, it will be far clearer that the "commander-in-chief" of a "wartime" country and his top officials were focused, first and foremost, not on the shifting "central theaters" of the Global War on Terror, but on the theater that mattered most to them -- the "home front" where they spent inordinate amounts of time selling the American people a bill of goods. Of his timing in ramping up a campaign to invade Iraq in September 2002, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card infamously explained: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."
Indeed. From a White House where "victory strategies" meant purely for domestic consumption poured out, to the Pentagon where bevies of generals, admirals, and other high officers were constantly being mustered, not to lead armies but to lead public opinion, their selling focus was total. They were always releasing "new product." And don't forget their own set of soaring inside-the-Beltway fantasies. After all, if a salesman is going to sell you some defective product, it always helps if he can sell himself on it first. And on this score, they were world champs. Because events made it look so foolish, the phrase "shock and awe" that went with the initial attack on Iraq in March 2003 has now passed out of official language and (together with "mission accomplished") into the annals of irony. Back then, though, as bombs and missiles blew up parts of Baghdad -- to fabulous visual effect in that other "theater" of war, television -- the phrase was constantly on official lips and in media reports everywhere. It went hand-in-glove with another curious political phrase: regime change. Given the supposed unique technological proficiency of the U.S. military and its array of "precision" weapons, the warriors of Bushworld convinced themselves that a new era in military affairs had truly dawned. An enemy "regime" could now be taken out -- quite literally and with surgical precision, in its bedrooms, conference rooms, and offices, thanks to those precision weapons delivered long-distance from ship or plane -- without taking out a country. Poof! You only had to say the word and an oppressive regime would be, as it was termed, "decapitated." Its people would then welcome with open arms relatively small numbers of American troops as liberators. It all sounded so good, and high tech, and relatively simple, and casualty averse, and clean as a whistle. Even better, once there had been such a demonstration, a guaranteed "cakewalk" -- as, say, in Iraq -- who would ever dare stand up to American power again? Not only would one hated enemy dictator be dispatched to the dustbin of history, but evildoers everywhere, fearing the Bush equivalent of the wrath of Khan, would be shock-and-awed into submission or quickly dispatched in their own right. In reality (ah, "reality" -- what a nasty word!), the shock-and-awe attacks used on Iraq got not a single leader of the Saddamist regime, not one of that pack of 52 cards (including of course the ace of spades, Saddam Hussein, found in his "spiderhole" so many months later). Iraqi civilians were the ones killed in that precise and shocking moment, while Iraqi society was set on the road to destruction, and the world was not awed. Strangely enough, though, the phrase, once reversed, proved applicable to the Bush administration's seven-year post-9/11 history. They were, in a sense, the awe-and-shock administration. Initially, they were awed by the supposedly singular power of the American military to dominate and transform the planet; then, they were continually shocked and disbelieving when that same military, despite its massive destructive power, turned out to be incapable of doing so, or even of handling two ragtag insurgencies in two weakened countries, one of which, Afghanistan, was among the poorest and least technologically advanced on the planet.

The Theater of War
remarkably short order, historically speaking, the administration's soaring imperial fantasies turned into planetary nightmares. After 9/11, of course, George W. and crew promised Americans the global equivalent -- and Republicans the domestic equivalent -- of a 36,000 stock market and we know just where the stock market is today: only about 27,000 points short of that irreality. Once upon a time, they really did think that, via the U.S. Armed Forces, or, as George W. Bush once so breathlessly put it, "the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known," they could dominate the planet without significant help from allies or international institutions of any sort. Who else had a shot at it? In the post-Soviet world, who but a leadership backed by the full force of the U.S. military could possibly be a contender for the leading role in this epic movie? Who else could even turn out for a casting call? Impoverished Russia? China, still rebuilding its military and back then considered to have a host of potential problems? A bunch of terrorists? I mean… come on! As they saw it, the situation was pretty basic. In fact, it gave the phrase "power politics" real meaning. After all, they had in their hands the reins attached to the sole superpower on this small orb. And wasn't everyone -- at least, everyone they cared to listen to, at least Charles Krauthammer and the editorial page of the Washington Post -- saying no less? I mean, what else would you do, if you suddenly, almost miraculously (after an election improbably settled by the Supreme Court), found yourself in sole command of the globe's only "hyperpower," the only sheriff on planet Earth, the New Rome. To make matters more delicious, in terms of getting just what you wanted, those hands were on those reins right after "the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century," when Americans were shocked and awed and terrified enough that anything-goes seemed a reasonable response? It might have gone to anyone's head in imperial Washington at that moment, but it went to their heads in such a striking way. After all, theirs was a plan -- labeled in 2002 the Bush Doctrine -- of global domination conceptually so un-American that, in my childhood, the only place you would have heard it was in the mouths of the most evil, snickering imperial Japanese, Nazi, or Soviet on-screen villains. And yet, in their moment of moments, it just rolled right out of their heads and off their tongues -- and they were proud of it. Here's a question for 2009 you don't have to answer: What should the former "new Rome" be called now? That will, of course, be someone else's problem.

The Cast of Characters
And what a debacle the Bush Doctrine proved to be. What a legacy the legacy President and his pals are leaving behind. A wrecked economy, deflated global stock markets, collapsing banks and financial institutions, soaring unemployment, a smashed Republican Party, a bloated Pentagon overseeing a strained, overstretched military, enmired in an incoherent set of still-expanding wars gone sour, a network of secret prisons, as well as Guantanamo, that "jewel in the crown" of Bush's Bermuda Triangle of injustice, and all the grim practices that went with those offshore prisons, including widespread torture and abuse, kidnapping, assassination, and the disappearing of prisoners (once associated only with South America dictatorships and military juntas). They headed a government that couldn't shoot straight or plan ahead or do anything halfway effectively, an administration that emphasized "defense" -- or "homeland security" as it came to be called in their years -- above all else; yet they were always readying themselves for the last battle, and so were caught utterly, embarrassingly unready for 19 terrorists with box cutters, a hurricane named Katrina, and an arcane set of Wall Street derivatives heading south. As the supposed party of small government, they succeeded mainly in strangling civilian services, privatizing government operations into the hands of crony corporations, and bulking up state power in a massive way -- making an already vast intelligence apparatus yet larger and more labyrinthine, expanding spying and surveillance of every kind, raising secrecy to a first principle, establishing a new U.S. military command for North America, endorsing a massive Pentagon build-up, establishing a second Defense Department labeled the Department of Homeland Security with its own mini-homeland-security-industrial complex, evading checks and powers in the Constitution whenever possible, and claiming new powers for a "unitary executive" commander-in-chief presidency. No summary can quite do justice to what the administration "accomplished" in these years. If there was, however, a single quote from the world of George W. Bush that caught the deepest nature of the president and his core followers, it was offered by an "unnamed administration official" -- often assumed to be Karl Rove -- to journalist Ron Suskind back in October 2004:
"He] said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors.... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

"We create our own reality… We're history's actors."
It must for years have seemed that way and everything about the lives they lived only reinforced that impression. After all, the President himself, as so many wrote, lived in a literal bubble world. Those who met him were carefully vetted; audiences were screened so that no one who didn't fawn over him got near him; and when he traveled through foreign cities, they were cleared of life, turned into the equivalent of Potemkin villages, while he and his many armored cars and Blackhawk helicopters, his huge contingent of Secret Service agents and White House aides, his sniffer dogs and military sharpshooters, his chefs and who knows what else passed through. Of course, the President had been in a close race with the reality principle (which, in his case, was the principle of failure) all his life -- and whenever reality nipped at his heels, his father's boys stepped in and whisked him off stage. He got by at his prep school, Andover, and then at Yale, a c-level legacy student and, appropriately enough when it came to sports, a cheerleader and, at Yale, a party animal as well as the president of the hardest drinking fraternity on campus. He was there in the first place only because of who he wasn't (or rather who his relations were). Faced with the crises of the Vietnam era, he joined the Texas Air National Guard and more or less went missing in action. Faced with life, he became a drunk. Faced with business, he failed repeatedly and yet, thanks to his dad's friends, became a multi-millionaire in the process. He was supported, cosseted, encouraged, and finally -- to use an omnipresent word of our moment -- bailed out. The first MBA president was a business bust. A certain well-honed, homey congeniality got him to the governorship and then to the presidency of the United States without real accomplishments. If there ever was a case for not voting for the guy you'd most like to "have a beer with," this was it. On that pile of rubble at Ground Zero on September 14, 2001, with a bullhorn in his hands and various rescuers shouting, "USA! USA!" he genuinely found his "calling" as the country's cheerleader-in-chief (as he had evidently found his religious calling earlier in life). He not only took the job seriously, he visibly loved it. He took a childlike pleasure in being in the "theater" of war. He was thrilled when some of the soldiers who captured Saddam Hussein in that "spiderhole" later presented him with the dictator's pistol. ("'He really liked showing it off,' says a... visitor to the White House who has seen the gun. 'He was really proud of it.'") He was similarly thrilled, on a trip to Baghdad in 2007, to meet the American pilot "whose plane's missiles killed Iraq's Al Qaeda leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi" and "returned to Washington in a buoyant mood." While transforming himself into the national cheerleader-in-chief, he even kept "his own personal scorecard for the war" in a desk drawer in the Oval Office -- photos with brief biographies and personality sketches of leading al-Qaeda figures, whose faces could be satisfyingly crossed out when killed or captured. He clearly adored it when he got to dress up, whether in a flight suit landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier in May 2003, or in front of hoo-aahing crowds of soldiers wearing a specially tailored military-style jacket with "George W. Bush, Commander In Chief" hand-stitched across the heart. As earlier in life, he was supported (Karl Rove), enabled (Condoleezza Rice), cosseted (various officials), and so became "the decider," a willing figurehead (as he had been, for instance, when he was an "owner" of the Texas Rangers), manipulated by his co-president Dick Cheney. In these surroundings, he was able to take war play to an imperial level. In the end, however, this act of his life, too, could lead nowhere but to failure. As it happened, reality possessed its own set of shock-and-awe weaponry. Above all, reality was unimpressed with history's self-proclaimed "actors," working so hard on the global stage to create their own reality. When it came to who really owned what, it turned out that reality owned the works and that possession was indeed nine-tenths of one law that even George Bush's handlers and his fervent neocon followers couldn't suspend.

Exit Stage Right
The results were sadly predictable. The bubble world of George W. Bush was bound to be burst. Based on fantasies, false promises, lies, and bait-and-switch tactics, it was destined for foreclosure. At home and abroad, after all, it had been created using the equivalent of subprime mortgages and the result, unsurprisingly, was a dismally subprime administration. Now, of course, the bill collector is at the door and the property -- the USA -- is worth a good deal less than on November 4, 2000. George W. Bush is a discredited president; his job approval ratings could hardly be lower; his bubble world gone bust. Nonetheless, let's remember one other theme of his previous life. Whatever his failures, Bush always walked away from disastrous dealings enriched, while others were left holding the bag. Don't imagine for a second that the equivalent isn't about to repeat itself. He will leave a country functionally under the gun of foreclosure, a world far more aflame and dangerous than the one he faced on entering the Oval Office. But he won't suffer. He will have his new house in Dallas (not to speak of the "ranch" in Crawford) and his more than $200 million presidential "library" and "freedom institute" at Southern Methodist University; and then there's always that 20% of America -- they know who they are -- who think his presidency was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Believe me, 20% of America is more than enough to pony up spectacular sums, once Bush takes to the talk circuit. As the president himself put it enthusiastically,"'I'll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol' coffers.' With assets that have been estimated as high as nearly $21 million, Mr. Bush added, 'I don't know what my dad gets -- it's more than 50-75' thousand dollars a speech, and 'Clinton's making a lot of money.'" This is how a legacy-student-turned-president fails upward. Every disaster leaves him better off. The same can't be said for the country or the world, saddled with his "legacy." Still, his administration has been foreclosed. Perhaps there's ignominy in that. Now, the rest of us need to get out the brooms and start sweeping the stables.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years, has recently been published. To listen to a podcast in which he discusses Bush's record abroad, click here.

Georgia: McCain's Lost War?

2008-08-15T13:28:00.001-07:00

Bank analyst forecast Georgian crisis 2 days early
Thu Aug 14, 2008 1:12pm EDT
By Guy Faulconbridge MOSCOW, Aug 14 (Reuters)

The outbreak of war between Georgia and Russia shocked most of the world last week, but an investment bank analyst predicted it two days in advance

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili sent troops into the breakaway, pro-Russian region of South Ossetia on Aug. 7, on the eve of the Beijing Olympic Games, and Russia responded with overwhelming military force.Geoff Smith, a Kiev-based analyst for Renaissance Capital investment bank, had anticipated the Georgian move with uncanny prescience in an e-mail two days earlier to a fellow strategist."So whaddaya think? I say Saakashvili is going to 'restore the territorial integrity of Georgia' five minutes before the opening ceremony starts in Beijing and dare the Russians to invade while the games are on?" the note said.Reuters has seen a copy of the e-mail and confirmed its validity with both the sender and recipient of the message.The Kremlin swiftly asserted its vastly superior military might and thousands of Russian troops pushed out Georgian troops from the rebel region. Russian units are still operating inside Georgia proper.Russian sovereign Eurobond spreads, a measure of investment risk, widened on the hostilities, and shares tumbled."It was just intuition," Smith said by telephone. "I said nothing about the possible Russian response, but if you had asked me I would say that Moscow could not have taken it lying down," Smith said. Explaining his reasoning, the former journalist said the upcoming presidential election in the United States could have played a role in Saakashvili's decision to send troops into South Ossetia."Certainly the next White House will not be as supportive of Saakashvili as this one and so if Saakashvili wanted to reunite Georgia he really had to do it this year and he was probably hoping the Olympic Games gave him the right cover," he said. He refused to forecast how the crisis would end.

http://www.reuters.com/article/asiaCrisis/idUSLE696364

McCain Talked With Georgia President On The Same Day McCain Aide Sealed Georgia Lobbying Contract
By Andrew Tilghman - August 13, 2008, 12:11PM
Randy Scheunemann earned about $70,000 serving as Sen. John McCain's top foreign policy adviser between the January 2007 and May 15, 2008. During the same period, the government of Georgia paid his firm $290,000 in lobbying fees. Today's Washington Post reports a stark illustration of the conflict of interest that Scheunemann faced while advising McCain on foreign policy matters related to the former Soviet Republic and also working for the Georgia embassy. On April 17, McCain got on the phone with Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili about Russian efforts to gain leverage over two of Georgia's troubled provinces. That same day, McCain issued a public statement condemning Russia and expressing strong support for the Georgian position. And also on that same day, Georgia signed a new, $200,000 lobbying contract with Scheunemann's firm, Orion Strategies, according to the Post. [McCain Campaign spokesman Brian] Rogers said Orion's representation of Georgia had no bearing on McCain's decision to speak with Saakashvili in April. "The Embassy of Georgia requested the call because of Georgian concerns over recent Russian actions dealing with South Ossetia and Abkhazia," he said.The McCain campaign said Scheunemann has not received any payments from his lobbying firm since May 15 -- a few weeks after the Georgia contract was signed -- when the campaign imposed strict new restrictions on lobbying by campaign staffers. And the campaign notes that Scheunemann de-registered as a lobbyist for Georgia in March. But Scheunemann remains owner of the firm, according to the Wall Street Journal. It's not a big firm -- essentially including only one other person, Scheunemann's partner, Mike Mitchell. The firm has lobbied McCain's senate office a lot over the past few years. Orion reports making at least 71 phone calls to McCain and his staffers since 2004 to lobby on behalf of foreign clients, including Georgia.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/08/mccain_talked_with_georgia_pres.php

The Military Murder of LaVena Johnson

2008-07-31T17:35:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Slc552ScRg

PFC LaVena Johnson Was Raped, Beaten, Set On Fire And Worse - Army Calls It Suicide

By: Logan Murphy @ 9:28 AM - PDT Nicole and I have both written posts about the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of PFC LaVena Johnson, and Democracy Now! had a heartbreaking interview with her family last week. LaVena’s family has worked hard to find the truth about her death and have finally had a breakthrough in the case. Unfortunately, the new details they uncovered are so disturbing that they could potentially make the Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch stories pale in comparison. The above video from Cenk of The Young Turks captures my exact feelings about this horrific case. What you’re about to read will sicken and enrage you. The Army claims the 5’1” African-American soldier from North County died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound with a rifle on July 19, 2005. Her father, John H. Johnson, Ph.D. of Florissant, said color photos and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from the military suggest otherwise. “Our worst fears were substantiated when we started going through information from the Army,” Johnson said. He said the pictures and documents from the incident proved that his daughter had been brutalized - raped, beaten, shot and set on fire.

“Someone poured lye in her vagina to destroy evidence,” her father said. “Her body was dumped in a dirty, filthy contractor’s tent. Read on…

This was not a suicide. Contact your representatives in the House and Senate to demand a full scale Congressional investigation begin immediately. This crime and obvious cover up cannot go unpunished.
BREAKING: The House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs is holding a hearing now on Sexual Assault in the Military. You can watch the live stream here.

Afghan Karma & Rambo III

2008-07-26T00:39:00.000-07:00

Seth Colter Walls
walls@huffingtonpost.com HuffPost Reporting From DC

Brzezinski: Surge In Afghanistan Risky, Some McCain Backers Want World War IV

All of a sudden, everyone seems to be in favor of sending more troops to Afghanistan. As Barack Obama encourages Europeans to dispatch more NATO forces and John McCain says that U.S. troops could be sent in greater numbers, the idea that a bigger military footprint is needed has become something of a consensus in the political mainstream.

But Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski is not on board -- though it's not the first time President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser has cast a skeptic's eye on the usefulness of dispatching great numbers of troops to the country. In an famous 1998 interview with France's Le Nouvel Observateur, Brzezinski admitted his own role in funding Afghanistan's Mujahadeen in 1979, thereby "increasing the probability" that the Soviets would invade a tough, demoralizing, mountainous theater for combat.

And it's with a similar perspective that Brzezinski now doubts the that the answer to what ails Afghanistan is more troops. "I think we're literally running the risk of unintentionally doing what the Russians did. And that, if it happens, would be a tragedy," Brzezinski told the Huffington Post on Friday. "When we first went into Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban, we were actually welcomed by an overwhelming majority of Afghans. They did not see us as invaders, as they saw the Soviets."

However, Brzezinski noted that just as the Soviets were able to delude themselves that they had a loyal army of communist-sympathizers who would transform the country, the U.S.-led forces may now be making similar mistakes. He said that the conduct of military operations "with little regard for civilian casualties" may accelerate the negative trend in local public opinion regarding the West's role. "It's just beginning, but it's significant," Brzezinski said.

His own program for improving the state of affairs in Afghanistan -- where U.S. casualties have surpassed those in Iraq for two months now -- revolves around pragmatism. He believes Europe should bribe Afghan farmers not to produce poppies used for heroin since "it all ends up in Europe." Moreover, he thinks the tribal warlords can be bought off with bribes, with the endgame being the isolation of Al-Qaeda from a Taliban that is "not a united force, not a world-oriented terrorist movement, but a real Afghan phenomenon."

Brzezinski, who has endorsed Obama, was far more critical of a few figures now surrounding McCain, who he suggested were pushing the presumptive GOP nominee towards a radical foreign policy on issues such as Iran.
"Well, if McCain is president and if his Secretary of State is Joe Lieberman and his Secretary of Defense is [Rudolph] Giuliani, we will be moving towards the World War IV that they have been both favoring and predicting," he said, calling that an "appalling concept" (and adding that by their lights, the Cold War counted as World War III). "So it depends on who are the principal officers. If it's [Richard] Armitage, or if it were to be Brent Scowcroft, I think it would be very different."

Asked who he would like to see in a potential Obama cabinet, Brzezinski said: "I think [Sen. Chuck] Hagel. I would like to see a bipartisan cabinet. I think we need one very badly -- and we did well in the Cold War when we had one. I would say Hagel and [Sen. Dick] Lugar would be very good Republicans [for Obama]." He also cited Sen. Joe Biden as a potential Secretary of State, in which case it would also be possible to "keep [Secretary of Defense Bob] Gates in the job for a few months."

Brzezinski said such a cabinet would be an important step in redressing the increased partisanship of foreign affairs in recent years, adding: "I think there is a tendency, because of the very complexity of the issues, for solutions to become polarized and more extreme. ... Republicans move toward neocon-ish formulas, and Democrats [follow] idealistically escapist formulas. In either case you don't end up with the necessary mix of idealism and realism."

2008 Global Recession-Depression

2008-07-08T10:49:00.000-07:00

BANK FOR INTERNATIONAL SETTLEMENTS

78th Annual Report78th Annual Report 2007/08: an overview
30 June 2008

Chapter I: Introduction: the unsustainable has run its course
After a number of years of strong global growth, low inflation and stable financial markets, the situation deteriorated rapidly in the period under review. Most notable was the onset of turmoil in the US market for subprime mortgages, which rapidly affected many other financial markets and eventually called into question the adequacy of capital at a number of large US and European banks. At the same time, US growth slowed markedly, reflecting setbacks in the housing market, while global inflation rose significantly under the particular influence of higher commodity prices. This sudden change in financial conditions was blamed by some on shortcomings in the extension of the long-standing originate-to-distribute model to new mortgage products in recent years. Others, however, noted that the sudden deterioration in both financial and macroeconomic conditions looked more like a typical “bust” after a credit “boom”. Indeed, several factors seem to support this second hypothesis: the previous rapid growth of global monetary and credit aggregates; an extended period of low real interest rates; the unusually high price of many assets (both financial and real); and the way in which spending patterns in different countries (the United States and China in particular) reflected their different stages of financial development (encouraging consumption and investment respectively). While central banks in all the major financial centres took action to reliquefy financial markets, the setting of policy rates diverged markedly in light of domestic macroeconomic circumstances. Some central banks were more concerned about actual inflation and raised policy rates, whereas others focused on the disinflationary pressures likely to emerge as growth slowed, and lowered policy rates instead.
Chapter II: The global economy
The global economy has slowed since the second half of 2007 against the backdrop of the financial turmoil and a deepening US downturn. At the same time, global inflation has risen, led by rapid increases in prices of energy and key food items. The current consensus view is still that the global economy will slow only modestly further in 2008. Developments up to the first quarter have been broadly consistent with this view as growth in the euro area, Japan and major emerging market economies continued to be strong. Unfolding developments at the core of the global financial system have, however, also created great uncertainty about future economic prospects. Banks in several advanced industrial economies have been tightening lending standards, and thus a generalised squeeze in the availability of credit remains a distinct possibility, with potentially more severe implications for demand than are reflected in consensus forecasts. These developments have been compounded by the recent rapid rise in oil prices and increased inflation expectations in a number of major economies. The extent to which households with overstretched balance sheets in the United States and some other advanced industrial economies will have to retrench in the face of these negative shocks is hard to predict. While a substantial rise in US household saving could bring about a further sizeable reduction in the US current account deficit, it would do so at the price of weakening demand in the rest of the world. At the same time, inflation risks are greater than they have been for many years.
Chapter III: Emerging market economies
Growth in emerging market economies (EMEs) last year once again significantly exceeded that in the rest of the world. Foreign currency inflows were large, reflecting continued growth in current account surpluses and capital inflows in 2007. Nevertheless, the potential knock on effects of financial market turmoil in the major centres increased the risk of a slowdown in EMEs. At the same time, recent increases in headline inflation have caused inflation targets to be breached in many EMEs, reflecting the impact of steep increases in oil and food prices. As in the advanced industrial economies, these conflicting forces have created a major dilemma for monetary policy. Efforts to resist currency appreciation have introduced additional complications, having been associated with a sharp increase in foreign reserves and in credit growth in a number of EMEs.
Developments in the advanced industrial economies could also pose major challenges. First, a pronounced slowdown in the United States would hurt the EMEs which, although remarkably resilient so far, still depend significantly on external demand. Second, tighter conditions in global financial markets could constrain EMEs with large current account deficits, particularly those relying on more volatile portfolio financing. Countries heavily dependent on cross-border bank borrowing could also be especially vulnerable.
Chapter IV: Monetary policy in the advanced industrial economies
Monetary policy in the advanced industrial economies faced two conflicting challenges during the period under review. On the one hand, tensions in financial markets threatened to spill over into the real economy by way of tighter credit conditions and a loss in confidence. On the other hand, inflationary pressures that stemmed from rising commodity prices, together with high capacity utilisation and tight labour markets in many economies, threatened to feed into longer-term inflation expectations. Differences in the manifestation of these challenges across countries and regions can explain, at least in part, why central banks dealt with them in different ways. For example, the Federal Reserve reacted forcefully by cutting its policy rate from 5.25% to 2%, whereas the ECB and the Bank of Japan kept their policy rates unchanged. Changes in interest rates were only one measure through which central banks responded to the dislocation in financial markets. Even before the turbulence led to any changes in policy targets, central banks in several countries had adjusted their operations in a number of extraordinary and unprecedented ways to keep reference rates near targets and to provide financing in markets where liquidity had evaporated. The various types of operations and the reasoning behind them are discussed in the final section of the chapter.
Chapter V: Foreign exchange markets
Foreign exchange market volatility picked up sharply in the latter half of 2007 and has remained at elevated levels since. This was associated with a faster rate of decline of the US dollar as well as a substantial appreciation of the euro, yen and Swiss franc. As carry trades became less attractive, expected growth differentials became more of a focal point for market sentiment than prevailing levels of interest rates. While exchange rate policies continued to shape the behaviour of some emerging market currencies, developments in commodity prices and specific trends in capital flows also exerted a considerable influence on exchange rates. Notwithstanding some significant exchange rate movements and tensions in certain foreign exchange swap and cross-currency swap markets, foreign exchange spot markets generally continued to function smoothly throughout the period of higher volatility. From a longer-term perspective, there have been a number of notable developments that could potentially have a bearing on the resilience of foreign exchange markets. These include higher turnover, greater diversity in foreign exchange market activity and improvements in the risk management infrastructure. While generally positive, it is possible that the full implications of these developments for market dynamics at times of stress have not yet become apparent. It is important, therefore, to sustain the impetus for better risk management practices in foreign exchange markets going forward.
Chapter VI: Financial markets
During the period from June 2007 to mid-May 2008, concerns over losses on US subprime mortgage loans escalated into widespread financial stress. What initially appeared to be a contained problem quickly spread across other credit segments and broader financial markets to the point where sizeable parts of the financial system became largely dysfunctional. Surging demand for liquidity, coupled with growing concerns about counterparty risk, led to unprecedented pressures in major interbank markets, while bond yields in advanced industrial economies tumbled as investors sought safe havens amid fears that economic growth would weaken. Equity markets in advanced industrial countries were also weak, with financial shares selling off particularly sharply. A brighter spot was emerging financial markets, which in contrast to previous episodes of broad-based asset market weakness proved to be more resilient than those in the advanced industrial economies. The financial market turmoil unfolded in six stages, starting in mid-June 2007: (i) a dramatic widening of spreads on subprime mortgage products following large-scale rating downgrades on mortgage-backed securities and the closure of a number of hedge funds with subprime exposure; (ii) the extension of the sell-off to a wide variety of credit and other markets from mid-July, including structured products more generally; (iii) the expansion of the turmoil into short-term credit and, particularly, interbank money markets from end-July; (iv) broader problems for the financial sector from mid-October, including for companies acting as financial guarantors; (v) increasingly dysfunctional markets, against the backdrop of a marked worsening of the US macroeconomic outlook from early 2008, accompanied by rising fears about systemic risks which caused spreads of even the highest-quality assets to move out to unusually wide levels; (vi) recovery, except in the interbank term market, in the wake of the Federal Reserve-facilitated takeover of a troubled US investment bank in March 2008.
Chapter VII: The financial sector in the advanced industrialised economies
Several years of growth and enhanced profitability for financial firms came to an abrupt halt during the period under review as strains stemming primarily from exposures to residential real estate spread throughout the financial system. What had started as a problem specific to the US subprime mortgage market became a source of outsize losses for financial firms worldwide on their holdings of related securities. Uncertainty about the size and distribution of losses was exacerbated by the complexity of the new structures used in the securitisation process. Retrenchment from risk-taking led to illiquidity, exposing weaknesses in the funding arrangements of many financial firms. Indeed, the situation was punctuated by the near failure of sizeable financial firms, prompting intervention by the public sector to avert potential systemic repercussions from a disorderly collapse. With many financial institutions nursing weakened balance sheets, even as the macroeconomic environment continues to worsen, a turn in the credit cycle seems likely to imply persistent headwinds for economic activity. How the situation will evolve depends critically on the dynamic interactions between the financial sector and the macroeconomy. Reduced credit availability, due to efforts by the financial sector to preserve its capital base, could prolong the period of weak profitability by affecting aggregate spending, economic activity and asset quality. These effects could also be transmitted across borders if weakened banking systems tend to cut back on their international exposures. Beyond the cyclical implications, this period of intense stress also heralds some structural shifts. Financial firms are revisiting assumptions that supported a move towards a business model focused on origination and distribution of loans through securitisation. At the same time, policymakers are reviewing aspects of the prudential framework that failed to perform as intended.
Chapter VIII: Conclusion: the difficult task of damage control
In the aftermath of a long credit-driven boom, it would not be surprising to see turmoil in financial markets, slowing real growth and temporarily rising inflation. The crucial questions at the present juncture have to do with the severity of these individual trends as they now appear and how they might interact. While difficult to predict, their interaction does appear to point to a deeper and more protracted global downturn than the consensus view seems to expect. At the same time, inflationary forces, particularly in emerging market economies, could also prove unexpectedly strong and persistent. A major factor in inflation prospects everywhere is likely to be the behaviour of wages, but in some countries the effect of a depreciating exchange rate on domestic prices could also play an unwelcome role. With inflation a clear and present threat, and with real policy rates in most countries very low by historical standards, a global bias towards monetary tightening would seem appropriate. That said, the circumstances of different countries, both actual and prospective, currently rule out a "one size fits all" response. Moreover, should the global economy slow sharply and inflationary pressures recede, the bias to tightening would evidently also be reduced. In the current and prospective environment, it should nonetheless be borne in mind that the effectiveness of a lowering of policy rates might be significantly reduced in the aftermath of a credit-induced spending boom. In view of the potential negative side effects of such a policy, not least the risk of encouraging further financial imbalances and misallocations of real resources, complementary policies might be envisaged to avoid overburdening monetary easing. Expansionary fiscal policy could have some merit, but in many countries current debt levels mean there is little room for manoeuvre. Steps to recognise and deal with losses and debt overhang problems, in a timely and orderly way, and subject to conditionality, must then be a high priority.
Perhaps the principal conclusion to be drawn from today's policy challenges is that it would have been better to avoid the build-up of credit excesses in the first place. In future, this could be done through the establishment of a new macrofinancial stability framework, which would call for both monetary and macroprudential policies to "lean against the wind" of the credit cycle. Recognising that cycles can be attenuated but not eliminated, a number of preparatory steps are also suggested that would allow periods of financial turmoil or crisis to be more effectively managed.
Organisation, governance and activities
This chapter provides an overview of the internal organisation and governance of the Bank for International Settlements. It also reviews the activities of the Bank, and of the international groups it hosts, over the past financial year. These activities focus on promoting cooperation among central banks and other financial authorities, and on providing financial services to central bank customers. Many of the Bank's activities were refocused in the second half of the year to deal with the financial market turmoil that emerged in August 2007. In addition to an acceleration and modification of committees' work plans, other notable responses to the turmoil were: a special meeting of central bank Governors to discuss the underlying causes and potential economic consequences of the turmoil; more frequent and detailed discussions among central bankers and financial market participants more broadly, facilitated by the BIS and the committees it hosts; increased research devoted to the causes and policy implications of the turmoil; publication of information on monetary policy frameworks to complement central banks' market operations, with a view to enhancing transparency and the understanding of central bank actions; initiatives by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision to help make the banking system more resilient to financial shocks; and close cooperation with other organisations following the turmoil, in particular support for the Financial Stability Forum's working groups on enhancing market and institutional resilience. Furthermore, the BIS took a number of measures in its banking and risk management activities to address the challenges that have emerged as a result of the financial turmoil. The Bank's balance sheet grew to SDR 311 billion (USD 511 billion) at end-March 2008, representing a year-on-year increase of 15%. Some SDR 236 billion (USD 388 billion) of official foreign exchange reserves are deposited with the BIS, around 6% of the world's total. Net profits for the Bank's 78th financial year amounted to SDR 545 million (USD 847 million), compared with SDR 619 million (USD 920 million) in the preceding year.

The Last Empire

2008-07-02T12:37:00.000-07:00

Very interesting look at the decline and fall of Pax Americana...

Both George Bush and Dick Cheney have emphatically proclaimed the American Way of Life as “non-negotiable.” As hard as it may be for the feeble-minded, deluded, conscienceless, or hopelessly addicted to grasp, Mother Nature and billions of human beings are going to force us to the bargaining table. We can kick, scream, stomp our feet, and hold our breath all we want, but our abhorrent mode of existence is going down. Aside from the fact that they are utterly unsustainable, why is it such a certainty that American Capitalism, consumerism, militarism, and the myriad associated ills that exist to maintain our obscene lifestyle are a house of cards on the verge of collapse?

Quite simple really. With our overwhelming wealth, power, and military firepower, the United States exercises virtual hegemony over the globe. Granted our influence is waning, but we still call most of the shots. As lord and master of the planet, we are doing a miserable job. Emotionally infantile, we have a sense of entitlement that dwarfs Mt. Everest, we are absolutely certain that we are center of the universe, and we throw incredibly destructive tantrums when we don’t get our way, the American Way that is. We are massive toddlers inflicting our version of the “terrible twos” on the world. Were we not wielding such a massive cudgel, our childishness would be laughable. Under our “good stewardship,” as our current unitary executive loves to call it, the world is careening down the highway at break-neck speed with an infant at the wheel. And if he crashes before an adult can wrest control from him, we’re looking at a major accident with multiple fatalities. We’ve already pushed the world to the verge of economic collapse, the brink of starvation, the initiation of perpetual war, and impending environmental disaster.

Collectively, we act without conscience or concern for the consequences of our actions. The American Way of Life is “all about me and to hell with everyone else.” We revere narcissism, hyper-individualism, greed, wealth, and status as virtues. Becoming a rich, acquisitive careerist by clawing one’s way to the top of the hierarchy through deceit, betrayal, sycophancy, and whoring oneself out in any way imaginable is enshrined as the penultimate achievement in our sewer of a society. Contrary to the common misconception, the psychological umbilical cord between our mothers and us is severed at a very young age. Nearly the instant we are able to intellectualize we drop mom like a hot potato and become psychically parasitic, our hosts being those ubiquitous devices known as televisions.

When we were in the womb, our mothers’ rich and nurturing blood flowed through our veins, quite literally providing the essence of our physical being. Fast forward a few years. Our psychic umbilical cord detaches from mom and is immediately seduced to fuse itself to that seemingly innocent yet deeply nefarious pusher of mind crack. In stark contrast to our mother’s wholesome blood that nourished us in a way that ensured healthy physical growth, the rancid filth we derive from television cripples and malforms our psyches in profound and perverse ways. Planned or not, television has become the power elite’s primary weapon in the daily propaganda war they wage to maintain the American Way of Life, furiously beating down any and all challengers. Calling the content of television “programming” is quite fitting. Through our addiction to pixilated images, the lords and masters of American Capitalism manipulate us into participating in the banality of evil without giving it a first thought, let alone a second one. Much like the Leatherman, TV is an incredibly multi-faceted tool that enables the ruling elites in the US to hone the masses into the infantilized little sociopaths they need to man the bulwarks of American Capitalism, spreading our “corporatocracy and freedom from the pangs of conscience and critical thought” the world over.

If you don’t know the stats, you’ve been somnambulating, but here are a few:
1. We are 5% of the population and siphon off 30% of the world’s goodies, while 35,000 people starve to death each day.2. We, the land of the free, exercise a higher degree of social control than even those “tyrants” in China and Russia. We have the world’s largest prison population, many of whom are non-violent drug offenders. And then there’s our clever way of imposing our agenda in Latin America via the “War on Drugs…..”3. We lost about 500,000 people in WWII while Russia lost over 20 million yet we arrogantly boast that WE “defeated fascism.” And that’s not to mention the fact that many of our beloved capitalists, including members of the Bush dynasty, supported Hitler until they faced potential criminal prosecution.4. We have staged coups and incursions the world over (our interventions are far too numerous to document in this dispatch, but visit this site to familiarize yourself with the reach of our malevolent imperialist tentacles: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Foreign_Policy/US_ForeignPolicy.html)5. Ironically, we justify our trillion dollar a year military budget by waging wars against nations with phantom weapons of mass destruction–while we are the only nation to have deployed such weapons. Ask Japan about the devastating impact.6. We pour billions of dollars into the support of those miserable Zionist squatters in Palestine because a very small percentage of our population (which has very deep pockets, a strangle-hold on mass media, and a juggernaut lobbying organization) has many of us brain-washed into believing “poor little Israel” is fighting for its very existence—when the reality is that it has a more formidable military than all of its alleged threats combined and has ruthlessly brutalized the Palestinians like the terrorist state that it is.7. We slaughtered over two million Vietnamese in an attempt to keep the world safe for capitalism and are poised to consider putting one of the perpetrators in the White House.8. We have murdered untold millions of Iraqis since the Gulf War via invasion, brutal economic sanctions, fomenting civil war and chaos, illegal occupation, and destruction of infrastructure. And neither of the performers in the theater of the absurd we call a “presidential election” has promised to bring an immediate end to this moral and legal abomination. If we enforced the Nuremberg Laws that WE crafted, all responsible would be hanged, including whoever replaces Bush and perpetuates this genocide.

And that is just a brief and very incomplete summary of the evil that we openly or tacitly support simply by being Americans, even if our role is very banal or pedestrian. As cogs in a murderous machine built on stolen land and primarily with the blood, sweat and tears of slaves and poor immigrants, we all bear a degree of responsibility for the atrocities we commit. Even those who choose to remain and fight the system from within are still buttressing the American Way to some extent. How do we sleep at night? Some of us don’t and some of us have pharmaceutical help. But by and large our television programming has given us the “gifts” of a pathologically muted conscience, heavy doses of blissful ignorance, and the attention span of anencephalic sheep.

Desensitized to violence, mentally malnourished by a steady diet of brain candy, conditioned to putting our brains in neutral and letting the “idiot box” do our thinking for us, psychologically beaten down by constant reminders that the subjects of our idolatry are “better than us,” and manipulated into believing that the spiritually vacuous American Dream is more than just a mirage that keeps the working class trudging through the desert of perpetual corporatism, many of us remain true believers, prefer wage slavery to sleeping under a bridge, or recognize that (despite the shop-worn and inane rhetoric about freedom and democracy) the system has harsh consequences for those who don’t at least ostensibly toe the line. Regardless of our individual level of consciousness or level of participation in this criminal enterprise known in some circles as the American Empire, we Americans as a collective are an intriguingly repulsive synthesis of excessively spoiled brats and sociopaths. We want what we want when we want it, consequences be damned. We have the means to get what we desire, virtually no capacity to delay gratification, and the ability to punish those who stand in our way. To top it off, we don’t let trivialities like conscience restrain us. We are a nation of sociobrats.

Individually, we can change. Many have transformed and many more will. But there are some pretty long odds against enough of us shedding our grotesquely malformed psyches and evolving beyond our state of infantilization before the American Way of Life collapses under the weight of its own excrement or is eradicated by its hordes of victims.

Jason Miller is the associate editor of Cyrano’s Journal Online.
About Author
Jason Miller is a wage slave of the American Empire who has freed himself intellectually and spiritually. He writes prolifically and his essays have appeared widely on the Internet. He welcomes constructive correspondence at willpowerful@hotmail.com or via his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.

The Fall of Capitalism

2008-06-27T11:19:00.000-07:00

The Cure for High Gas and Food Prices: Vital Businesses Need Nationalization

SAN ANTONIO--The gas station attendant came outside. Wow, I thought, full serve! Ignoring me, she flung a magnetic price decal on top of the price per gallon. Regular unleaded had gone up 20 cents in the time it took me to drive from the curb to the pump. "You're kidding me," I moaned. "It's 3 o'clock," she shrugged. "Just got the new price." There has to be a better way, I thought. And there is. It isn't drilling in the Alaskan wilderness. It sure isn't John McCain's plan to offer $300 million to the first person to come up with a longer-lasting car battery. Gas prices could hit $7 a gallon before long, Wall Street analysts say, but Americans--always optimists!--take a little comfort in the fact that Europeans have paid more than that for years. But a lot of foreigners are laughing at us even harder than we're laughing at the Euros. Did you know that Venezuelans pay a mere 19 cents per gallon? It's 38 cents in Nigeria. Turkmenistanis might not have electoral democracy, but they only shell out $4.50 to fill a 15-gallon tank. Before we replaced Saddam Hussein with...with whatever they have in Iraq now, Iraqis paid less than a dime for a gallon of gas. One of the things that these countries have in common, of course, is that they're oil-producing states. Countries that export oil and gas have trouble explaining to their citizens why they should pay for their own natural resources--and most are smart enough not to try. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Burma, Malaysia, Kuwait, China and South Korea are just a few of the countries that keep fuel prices low in order to stimulate economic growth. But they also share something else: common sense. Strange it might sound to Americans used to reading about big oil windfalls, they consider cheap gas more of an economic necessity than lining the pockets of energy company CEOs. So they don't consider energy a profit center. To the contrary; government subsidies (Venezuela spends $2 billion a year on fuel subsidies) and nationalized oil companies keep gas prices low. Unlike corporations, governments don't care about turning a profit. They care about remaining in power. Their reliance on political support (or, if you're cynical, pandering) allows them to do things our much-vaunted free market system can't, such as make sure that people can afford to eat and buy enough gas to get to work. Like the rest of the world, Venezuelan consumers have been squeezed by rising prices, and even shortages, of groceries. In 2007 Venezuela's socialist-leaning government decided to do something about it. First they imposed price controls on staple items. When suppliers began to hoard supplies to drive up prices, President Hugo Chavez threatened to nationalize them. "If they remain committed to violating the interests of the people, the constitution, the laws, I'm going to take the food storage units, corner stores, supermarkets and nationalize them," he said. Food profiteers grumbled. Then they straightened up. Not even international corporations are immune from Chavez's determination to put the needs of ordinary Venezuelans ahead of the for-profit food industry. Faced with severe shortages of milk earlier this year, Chavez threatened Nestle and Parmalat's Venezuelan operations with nationalization unless they opened the spigot. "This government needs to tighten the screws," he said in February 2008, promising to "intervene and nationalize the plants" belonging to the two transnational corporations. Miraculously, milk is turning up on the shelves. When it works, nothing is better at creating an endless variety of reality TV shows than free market capitalism. But when it doesn't, it isn't just that extra brand of clear dishwashing liquid that goes away. Businesses fold. Banks foreclose. People starve. And no one can stop it. The G8 nations met in Osaka last week to try to address soaring food and energy prices--a double threat that could plunge the global economy into a ruinous depression. But the summit ended in failure. "Any hope that the G8 meeting would result in coordinated monetary action--or concerted intervention in foreign exchange markets--to counter rises, principally in commodity prices, was dispelled by their failure to agree on the phenomenon's underlying causes," reported Forbes. So the G8 ministers punted. "Due to the lack of consensus, they have stated the need for further study," wrote the magazine. The problem isn't the weak dollar or the non-existent housing market. It's capitalism. A sane government doesn't leave essential goods and services--food, fuel, housing, healthcare, transportation, education--to the vicissitudes of "magic" markets. Non-discretionary economic sectors should be strictly controlled by--indeed, owned by--the government. Consider, on the one hand, snail mail and public education. The Postal Service and public schools both have their flaws. But what if they were privatized? It would cost a lot more than 42 cents to mail a letter from Tampa to Maui. And poor children wouldn't get an education. Privatization, particularly of essential services, has always proven disastrous. From California's Enron-driven rotating blackouts to for-profit healthcare that has left 47 million Americans uninsured to predatory lenders pimping the housing bubble to Blackwater's atrocities in Iraq, market-based corporations' fiduciary obligation to maximize profits that is inherently incompatible with a stable economy whose goal is to provide people with a decent quality of life.

P.S. If you're reading this in Caracas, please mail me some gas.

Super Power Arms Race Heats Up

2008-02-13T12:11:00.000-08:00

Whenever it is that they are saying: "Peace And Security!" then sudden destruction...

1st Thessalonians 5:3

Pangs of distress are intensifying in a deadly rivalry heats up...

Asian arms race gathers speed

By John Feffer

Diplomats remain upbeat about solving the nuclear stand-off with North Korea; optimists envision a peace treaty to replace the armistice that halted, but failed to formally end, the Korean War 55 years ago. Some leaders and scholars are even urging the transformation of the six-party talks over the Korean nuclear issue, involving the United States, Japan, China, Russia and the two Koreas, into a permanent peace structure in Northeast Asia. The countries in the region all seem determined to make nice right now. Yasuo Fukuda, the new Japanese prime minister, is considerably more pacific than his predecessor, the ultra-nationalist Shinzo Abe. The new South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, despite his conservative credentials, is committed to continuing the previous president's engagement policy with North Korea and plans to reach out to Japan via his first post-inaugural state visit. The party that won the recent Taiwanese parliamentary elections, the Kuomintang, wants to rebuild bridges to the mainland and, when it comes to the Chinese Communist Party there, mend fences the ruling Democratic Progressive Party tried to pull down. Beijing, for its part, is being super-conciliatory toward practically everyone in this Summer Olympic Games year. Despite all this talk of peace, something else, quite momentous and hardly noticed, is underway in the region. The real money in Northeast Asia is going elsewhere. While in the news sunshine prevails, in the shadows an already massive regional arms race is threatening to shift into overdrive. Since the dawn of the 21st century, five of the six countries involved in the six-party talks have increased their military spending by 50% or more. The sixth, Japan, has maintained a steady, if sizeable military budget while nonetheless aspiring to keep pace. Every country in the region is now eagerly investing staggering amounts of money in new weapons systems and new offensive capabilities. The arms race in Northeast Asia undercuts all talk of peace in the region. It also sustains a growing global military-industrial complex. Northeast Asia is where four of the world's largest militaries - those of the United States, China, Russia, and Japan - confront each other. Together, the countries participating in the six-party talks account for approximately 65% of world military expenditures, with the US responsible for roughly half the global total. Here is the real news that should hit the front pages of papers today: wars grip Iraq, Afghanistan and large swathes of Africa, but the heart of the global military-industrial complex lies in Northeast Asia. Any attempt to drive a stake through this potentially destabilizing monster must start with the militaries that face one another there. The Japanese reversal The Northeast Asian arms buildup - a three-tiered scramble to dominate the seas, beef up air forces and control the next frontier of space - runs counter to conventional wisdom. After all, isn't Japan still operating under a "peace constitution"? Hasn't South Korea committed to the peaceful reunification of the Korean Peninsula? Didn't China recently wake up to the virtues of soft power? And how could North Korea and Russia, both of which suffered disastrous economic reversals in the 1990s, have had the wherewithal to compete in an arms race? As it turns out, these obstacles have proved little more than speed bumps on the road to regional hyper-militarism. Perhaps the most paradoxical participant in this new arms race is Japan. Its famous peace constitution has traditionally been one of the few brakes on arms spending in the region. The country has long limited its military expenditure to an informal ceiling of 1% of its overall budget. As that budget grew, however, so did military spending. Japan's army is now larger than Britain's, and the country spends more on its military than all but four other nations. (China surpassed Japan in military spending for the first time in 2006.) Nonetheless, for decades, the provisions of its peace constitution at least put limits on the offensive capabilities of the Japanese military, which is still referred to as its Self-Defense Forces (SDF). These days, however, even the definition of "offensive" is changing. In 1999, the SDF first used offensive force when its naval vessels fired on suspected North Korean spy ships. Less than a decade later, Japan provides support far from its "defensive" zone for US wars, including providing fuel to coalition forces in Afghanistan and transport in Iraq. Japan was once incapable of bombing other countries, largely because its air force didn't have an in-air refueling capability. Thanks to Boeing, however, the first KC-767 tanker aircraft will arrive in Japan this year, providing government officials, who occasionally assert the country's right to launch preemptive strikes, with the means to do so. This is not happy news for Japan's neighbors, who retain vivid memories of the 1930s and 1940s, when its military went on an imperial rampage throughout the region. Tokyo already has among the best air forces and naval fighting forces in the world, trailing only the US. But leading Japanese officials have displayed an even larger appetite. Some Japanese politicians are lobbying to amend the peace constitution or even scrap it entirely, while sending military spending skyrocketing. To promote these ideas, they use the thin rationale that Japan should be participating regularly in "international peacekeeping missions". The Japanese Defense Agency - its Pentagon - which was upgraded to ministry level last year, wants more goodies like an aircraft carrier, nuclear-powered submarines and long-range missiles. A light aircraft carrier, which the government has coyly labeled a "destroyer", will be ready in 2009. The subs and missiles, however, will have to wait. So, too, will Tokyo's attempt to take a quantum leap forward in air-fighting capabilities by importing advanced US F-22 stealth planes. Concerned about releasing latest-generation technology to the outside world, Congress scotched this deal at the last moment in August 2007. Washington has been a good deal more accommodating when it comes to missile defense. Japan has been a far more enthusiastic supporter of missile defense than any of America's European allies. In fact, the United States and Japan are spending billions of dollars to set up an early-warning-and-response prototype of such an advanced missile system. Part of this missile shield is land-based. Last month, Japan installed its third Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) surface-to-air interceptor and plans on nine more by 2011. The more ambitious part of the program, however, is based at sea. In December, Japan conducted its first sea-based interceptor test. With Japan and the US in the lead, a space race is also on in Northeast Asia. Last year, China tested its own anti-ballistic missile system by shooting down one of its old weather satellites. While at present this is far from an actual missile-defense system, China effectively served notice that it is up to the technological challenge of hitting a bullet with a bullet in space. Meanwhile, thanks to US pressure, Russia, too, is upgrading its missile defense systems, while pouring money into the development of new missiles that can bypass any putative shield the US and its allies can develop. Give me peace, but not just yet The two most recent South Korean presidents, Nobel Peace Prize winner Kim Dae-jung and the left-leaning Roh Moo-hyun, have been well known for their efforts to foster reconciliation with North Korea. Less well known have been their programs to beef up South Korea's military. The dark side of their engagement policy has been its unstated quid pro quo of satisfying the security concerns of South Korean hawks by giving the military everything it wants - and then some. Between 1999 and 2006, South Korean military spending jumped more than 70%. In 2007, at the launching ceremony for a new Aegis-equipped destroyer, which brought South Korea into an elite club of just five countries with such technology, Roh declared, "At the present time, Northeast Asia is still in an arms race, and we cannot just sit back and watch." By 2020, the South Korean navy wants to build three more Aegis destroyers at a cost of US$1 billion each. South Korean hawks are not only responding to concerns about North Korea, the traditional threat around which the South has organized its military. They are concerned about a declining military commitment from the US, which has reduced the levels of American troops that traditionally garrison the country and pushed hard for greater military "burden-sharing". South Korea's leaders and military officials are anxious that the Pentagon may continue to focus on the Middle East and Central Asia to the exclusion of its Pacific commitments. To prepare for the contingency of going it alone, South Korea has embarked on an ambitious $665 billion Defense Reform 2020 initiative, which will increase the military budget by roughly 10% a year until 2020. In those years, while troop levels will actually fall, most of the extra money will go to a host of expensive, high-tech systems such as new F-15K fighters from Boeing, SM-6 ship-to-air missiles that can form a low-altitude missile shield, and Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicles. If South Korea's spending spree remains largely under the radar, China's military expenditures have received considerable media scrutiny. They officially rose to $45 billion for 2007. However, that public figure, according to US intelligence estimates, tells only half the story. Beijing's spending, claim these sources, is really in the $100 billion range. With this money, are the gaps in the country's offensive capabilities. It has only a couple of hundred nuclear weaponsChina is pushing forward with an ambitious naval program that will include the addition to its naval forces of five new nuclear-powered attack subs, a mid-sized aircraft carrier, and - clandestinely - the supposed construction of a huge 93,000-ton nuclear-powered carrier by 2020. Lost in the hype around China's apparent quest for a world-class military to match its world-class economy and fewer than two dozen intercontinental ballistic missiles pointed at the United States. Its navy doesn't have a "blue-water" capability, lacking (as yet) any aircraft carriers, a large force of nuclear-powered submarines, and the overseas basing infrastructure to support them. It relies heavily on imports and can't yet build the sort of aircraft that would allow it to project serious force over large distances. China, however, has been the only modestly credible threat on the horizon that the Pentagon has been able to wield to justify military spending at levels not seen since World War II. The Pentagon can't use its big naval destroyers against al-Qaeda; Virginia-class subs can't do much to fight the Taliban or insurgents in Iraq. Yet these systems figure prominently in the Pentagon's long-range plans to build a 313-ship navy. Democratic Congressman John Murtha, who made headlines in 2005 with his newfound opposition to the Iraq war, is typical of congressional hawks when he warns of the need to prepare for a coming conflict with China. "We've got to be able to have a military that can deploy to stop China or Russia or any other country that challenges us," he recently told Reuters. "I've felt we had to be concerned about the direction China was going." To counter China, the US has pursued a classic containment strategy of strengthening military ties with India, Australia, the Philippines and Japan. The George W Bush administration trumpets its accomplishment of increasing military spending 74% since 2001. In addition to the $12.7 billion for new warships, there's $17 billion for new aircraft and over $10 billion for missile defense. The administration wants to increase the army from 482,400 to 547,400 troops by 2012. A sizable portion of the administration's $607 billion Pentagon budget request for 2009, which doesn't even include massive supplemental funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will go to maintaining and expanding the US military presence in the Pacific. The Democratic frontrunners for the presidential nomination have also called for troop increases and have said nothing about slowing, freezing or even cutting the military budget. No matter who is elected, under the next administration, as under the last one, the US will surely continue to be the chief driver of global arms spending. The armies of austerity Increased military spending is not always just a function of affluence. As the Russian economy contracted in the 1990s, the arms export industry became an ever more critical way for the faltering country to earn hard currency. Today, flush with oil and natural gas revenues, Russia has regained its place as the world's second largest arms dealer by almost doubling its arms exports since 2000. Washington's moves to establish a global missile defense system and encroach on Russian interests in Central Asia have only encouraged Moscow to boost its military spending in an effort to recover its lost superpower status. With the renewed growth of the Russian economy on the strength of energy sales, Russian arms expenditures began to take off again in the new millennium, increasing nearly four-fold between 2000 and 2006. The Russian government, which projected a 29% increase in spending for 2007, plans to replace nearly half its arsenal with new weaponry by 2015. Compared to Russia, North Korea has had the full experience of economic collapse with very little subsequent recovery. Yet, despite its woefully limited means, it has tried to keep up with the great powers that surround it. By many estimates, Pyongyang devotes as much as a quarter of its budget to the military (even though prosperous South Korea still spends as much, or more, on its military than the North's entire gross domestic product). North Korea's failure to match the conventional military spending of South Korea, much less Japan or the US, was what made the building of a "nuclear deterrent" increasingly attractive to its leaders. In other words, the current nuclear crisis that sucks up so much diplomatic attention in Northeast Asia today is at least partly a result of the region's accelerating conventional arms race and North Korea's inability to keep pace. Critics of the North Korean regime often point out that its military spending is ultimately a human-rights violation, because the government essentially takes food out of the mouths of its people to spend on armaments. North Korea is, however, just a particularly gross example of an expanding global problem. Each of the six countries in the new Pacific arms race has devised a wealth of rationales for its military spending - and each has ignored significant domestic needs in the process. Given the sums that would be necessary to address the decommissioning of nuclear weapons, the looming crisis of climate change, and the destabilizing gap between rich and poor, such spending priorities are in themselves a threat to humanity. The world put 37% more into military spending in 2006 than in 1997. If the "peace dividend" that was to follow the end of the Cold War never quite appeared, a decade later the world finds itself burdened with quite the opposite: a genuine peace deficit.

John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. He is the author of North Korea, South Korea: US Policy at a Time of Crisis (Seven Stories, 2003) among other books.

Without Sanctuary-Jena Six

2007-09-24T09:56:00.000-07:00

THE JENA SIX

The symbolism behind the nooses hanging from the "White Tree". Terrorism.

A picture is worth a thousand words...

http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/main.html

Southern trees bear strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is the fruit for the crows to pluck,

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

For the sun to rot,

for the trees to drop,

Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Billie Holiday

Chart of Pompous Prognosticators

2007-08-03T11:23:00.000-07:00

BACK TO THE FUTURE 1929-2007

Check out the link above for quotes!

Iraq Proxy War: China Weighs In

2007-07-08T10:51:00.000-07:00

U.S. concerns over China weapons in Iraq

By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington

Published: July 6 2007 22:01 Last updated: July 6 2007 22:01

The US has raised concerns with the Chinese government about the discovery of Chinese-made weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan. Richard Lawless, departing senior Pentagon official for Asia, on Friday said Washington had flagged the issue with Beijing. In recent months, the US has become increasingly alarmed that Chinese armour-piercing ammunition has been used by the Taliban in Afghanistan and insurgents in Iraq. A senior US official recently told the FT that Iran appeared to be providing the Chinese-made weapons. He said Washington had no evidence that Beijing was complicit, but stressed that the US would like China to “do a better job of policing these sales”. Mr Lawless said the question of origin was less important than who was facilitating the transfer. The concerns about Chinese weapons follow months of allegations from US officials that Iran is helping attack US troops in Iraq, and more recently Afghanistan, by providing technology for bombs that can destroy Humvees and other heavily armoured US vehicles. Mr Lawless also expressed concern about North Korea’s missile programme. Last week, Pyongyang tested a new short-range missile that could target not only the US military base at Pyeongtaek but also Seoul. He said North Korea was close to being able to field the solid-fuel, highly mobile rocket.

Mr Lawless said the US military relationship with China was “overall, not bad”, but there was a need for more engagement between the militaries, particularly at the senior levels. “They have been more willing to engage,

but it is in millimetres and increments,” he said. He said the Pentagon was disappointed that China had not given Admiral Michael Mullen, chief of naval operations, the same kind of access that his Chinese counterpart received during a visit to the US. Adm Mullen, who has since been nominated as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ended up not visiting China. Mr Lawless also said it was important for China to hold talks with the US about its nuclear forces. A recent Pentagon report concluded Beijing was developing a more survivable nuclear force, including submarine-launched missiles, and mobile land-based missiles. Since Presidents Hu Jintao and George W. Bush last year discussed increasing military exchanges, China has not responded to an offer for the commander of its strategic nuclear forces to visit US Strategic Command. “There is a great shortfall in our understanding of China’s intentions,” said Mr Lawless, referring to the overall Chinese military build-up. “When you don’t know why they are doing it, it is pretty damn threatening . . . they leave us no choice but to assume the worst.”

Mr Lawless also suggested that the Pentagon had refused a request from Japan for extensive data on the F-22 fighter jet. Japan wants the data to consider whether the advanced fighter – which under current law cannot be exported – would meet its defence needs. Mr Lawless said the Pentagon had offered Japan only basic data, which would not require a change in US law.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/82ce0740-2c03-11dc-b498-000b5df10621.html

STRANGE FRUIT- Jena, Louisiana

2007-07-03T09:09:00.000-07:00

"Strange Fruit"
Lyrics by Lewis Allen, Originally sung by Billie Holiday in 1939

Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves, blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

July 3, 2007

INJUSTICE IN JENA
Nooses Hanging from the "White" Tree

By BILL QUIGLEY

In a small still mostly segregated section of rural Louisiana, an all white jury heard a series of white witnesses called by a white prosecutor testify in a courtroom overseen by a white judge in a trial of a fight at the local high school where a white student who had been making racial taunts was hit by black students. The fight was the culmination of a series of racial incidents starting when whites responded to black students sitting under the "white tree" at their school by hanging three nooses from the tree. The white jury and white prosecutor and all white supporters of the white victim were all on one side of the courtroom. The black defendant, 17 year old Mychal Bell, and his supporters were on the other. The jury quickly convicted Mychal Bell of two felonies - aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery. Bell, who was a 16 year old sophomore football star at the time he was arrested, faces up to 22 years in prison. Five other black youths await similar trials on attempted second degree murder and conspiracy charges. Yes, you read that correctly. The rest of the story, which is being reported across the world in papers in China, France and England, is just as chilling. The trouble started under "the white tree" in front of Jena High School. The "white tree" is where the white students, 80% of the student body, would always sit during school breaks.

In September 2006, a black student at Jena high school asked permission from school administrators to sit under the "white tree." School officials advised them to sit wherever they wanted. They did. The next day, three nooses, in the school colors, were hanging from the "white tree." The message was clear. "Those nooses meant the KKK, they meant 'Niggers, we're going to kill you, we're going to hang you till you die,'" Casteptla Bailey, mom of one of the students, told the London Observer. The Jena high school principal found that three white students were responsible and recommended expulsion. The white superintendent of schools over-ruled the principal and gave the students a three day suspension saying that the nooses were just a youthful stunt. "Adolescents play pranks," the superintendent told the Chicago Tribune, "I don't think it was a threat against anybody." The African-American community was hurt and upset. "Hanging those nooses was a hate crime, plain and simple," according to Tracy Bowens, mother of students at Jena High. But blacks in this area of Louisiana have little political power. The ten person all-male government of the parish has one African-American member. The nine member all-male school board has one African American member. (A phone caller to the local school board trying to find out the racial makeup of the school board was told there was one "colored" member of the board). There is one black police officer in Jena and two black public school teachers.

Jena, with a population of less than 3000, is the largest town in and parish (county) seat of LaSalle Parish, Louisiana. There are about 350 African Americans in the town. LaSalle has a population of just over 14,000 people - 12% African-American. This is solid Bush and David Duke Country - GWB won LaSalle Parish 4 to 1 in the last two elections; Duke carried a majority of the white vote when he ran for Governor of Louisiana. Families earn about 60% of the national average. The Census Bureau reports that less than 10% of the businesses in LaSalle Parish are black owned. Jena is the site of the infamous Juvenile Correctional Center for Youth that was forced to close its doors in 2000, only two years after opening, due to widespread brutality and racism including the choking of juveniles by guards after the youth met with a lawyer. The U.S. Department of Justice sued the private prison amid complaints that guards paid inmates to fight each other and laughed when teens tried to commit suicide. Black students decided to resist and organized a sit-in under the "white tree" at the school to protest the light suspensions given to the noose-hanging white students. The white District Attorney then came to Jena High with law enforcement officers to address a school assembly. According to testimony in a later motion in court, the DA reportedly threatened the black protesting students saying that if they didn't stop making a fuss about this "innocent prank I can be your best friend or your worst enemy. I can take away your lives with a stroke of my pen." The school was put on lockdown for the rest of the week.

Racial tensions remained high throughout the fall. On the night of Thursday November 30, 2006, a still unsolved fire burned down the main academic building of Jena High School. On Friday night, December 1, a black student who showed up at a white party was beaten by whites. On Saturday, December 2, a young white man pulled out a shotgun in a confrontation with young black men at the Gotta Go convenience store outside Jena before the men wrestled it away from him. The black men who took the shotgun away were later arrested, no charges were filed against the white man. On Monday, December 4, at Jena High, a white student--who allegedly had been making racial taunts, including calling African American students "niggers" while supporting the students who hung the nooses and who beat up the black student at the off-campus party--was knocked down, punched and kicked by black students. The white victim was taken to the hospital treated and released. He attended a social function that evening. Six black Jena students were arrested and charged with attempted second degree murder. All six were expelled from school. The six charged were: 17-year-old Robert Bailey Junior whose bail was set at $138,000; 17-year-old Theo Shaw - bail $130,000; 18-year-old Carwin Jones--bail $100,000; 17-year-old Bryant Purvis--bail $70,000; 16 year old Mychal Bell, a sophomore in high school who was charged as an adult and for whom bail was set at $90,000; and a still unidentified minor. Many of the young men, who came to be known as the Jena 6, stayed in jail for months. Few families could afford bond or private attorneys. Mychal Bell remained in jail from December 2006 until his trial because his family was unable to post the $90,000 bond. Theo Shaw has also remained in jail. Several of the other defendants remained in jail for months until their families could raise sufficient money to put up bonds. The Chicago Tribune wrote a powerful story headlined "Racial Demons Rear Heads." The London Observer wrote: "Jena is gaining national notoriety as an example of the new 'stealth' racism, showing how lightly sleep the demons of racial prejudice in America's Deep South, even in the year that a black man, Barak Obama, is a serious candidate for the White House." The British Broadcasting Company aired a TV special report "Race Hate in Louisiana 2007."

The Jena 6 and their families were put under substantial pressure to plead guilty. Mychal Bell was reported to have been leaning towards pleading guilty right up until his trial when he decided he would not plead guilty to a felony. When it finally came, the trial of Mychal Bell was swift. Bell was represented by an appointed public defender.On the morning of the trial, the DA reduced the charges from attempted second degree murder to second degree aggravated battery and conspiracy. Aggravated battery in Louisiana law demands the attack be with a dangerous weapon. The dangerous weapon? The prosecutor was allowed to argue to the jury that the tennis shoes worn by Bell could be considered a dangerous weapon used by "the gang of black boys" who beat the white victim.Most shocking of all, when the pool of potential jurors was summoned, fifty people appeared--every single one white. The LaSalle Parish clerk defended the all white group to the Alexandria Louisiana Town Talk newspaper saying that the jury pool was selected by computer. "The venire [panel of prospective jurors] is color blind. The idea is for the list to truly reflect the racial makeup of the community, but the system does not take race into factor." Officials said they had summoned 150 people, but these were the only people who showed up. The all-white jury which was finally chosen included two people friendly with the District Attorney, a relative of one of the witnesses and several others who were friends of prosecution witnesses. Bell's parents, Melissa Bell and Marcus Jones, were not even allowed to attend the trial despite their objections, because they were listed as potential witnesses. The white victim, though a witness, was allowed to stay in the courtroom. The parents, who had been widely quoted in the media as critics of the process, were also told they could no longer speak to the media as long as the trial was in session. Marcus Jones had told the media "It's all about those nooses" and declared the charges racially motivated. Other supporters who planned a demonstration in support of Bell were ordered by the court not to do so near the courthouse or anywhere the judge would see them. The prosecutor called 17 witnesses - eleven white students, three white teachers, and two white nurses. Some said they saw Bell kick the victim, others said they did not see him do anything. The white victim testified that he did not know if Bell hit him or not. The Chicago Tribune reported the public defender did not challenge the all-white jury pool, put on no evidence and called no witnesses. The public defender told the Alexandria Town talk after resting his case without calling any witnesses that he knew he would be second-guessed by many but was confident that the jury would return a verdict of not guilty. "I don't believe race is an issue in this trial I think I have a fair and impartial jury". The jury deliberated for less than three hours and found Mychal Bell guilty on the maximum possible charges of aggravated second degree battery and conspiracy. He faces up to a maximum of 22 years in prison. The public defender told the press afterwards, "I feel I put on the best defense that I could." Responding to criticism of not putting on any witnesses, the attorney said "why open the door for further accusations? I did the best I could for my client, Mychal Bell."

At a rally in front of the courthouse the next day, Alan Bean, a Texas minister and leader of the Friends of Justice, said "I have seen a lot of trials in my time. And I have never seen a more distressing miscarriage of justice than what happened in LaSalle Parish yesterday." Khadijah Rashad of Lafayette Louisiana described the trial as a "modern day lynching." Tory Pegram with the Louisiana ACLU has been working with the parents for months. "People know if they don't demand equal treatment now, they will never get it. People's jobs and livelihoods have been threatened for attending Jena 6 Defense meetings, but people are willing to risk that. One person told me: 'We have to convince more people to come rally with us.....What's the worst that could happen? They fire us from our jobs? We have the worst jobs in the town anyway. They burn a cross on our lawns or burn down my house? All of that has happened to us before. We have to keep speaking out to make sure it doesn't happen to us again, or our children will never be safe.'" Whites in the community were adamant that there is no racism. "We don't have a problem," according to one. Other locals told the media "We all get along," and "most blacks are happy with the way things are." One person even said "We don't have many problems with our blacks." Melvin Worthington, the lone African American school board member in LaSalle Parish said it all could have been avoided. "There's no doubt about it," he told the Chicago Tribune, "whites and blacks are treated differently here. The white kids should have gotten more punishment for hanging those nooses. If they had, all the stuff that followed could have been avoided." Hebert McCoy, a relative of one of the youths who has been trying to raise money for bail and lawyers, challenged people everywhere at the end of the rally when he said you better come out and defend your children because they are incarcerating them by the thousands. Jena's not the beginning, but Jena has crossed the line. Justice is not right when you put on the wrong charges and then convict. I believe in justice. I believe in the point of law. I believe in accepting the punishment if I'm guilty. If I'm guilty, convict me and punishment, but if I'm innocent, no justice" and the crowd joined with him and shouted "no peace!"

What happened to the white guys? The white victim of the beating was later arrested for bringing a hunting rifle loaded with 13 bullets onto the high school campus and released on $5000 bond. The white man who beat up the black youth at the off-campus party was arrested and charged with simple battery. The white students who hung up the nooses in the "white tree" were never charged. The people in Jena are fighting for justice and they need legal and financial help. Since the arrests, a group of family members have been holding well-attended meetings, and have created a defense fund--the Jena 6 Defense Committee. They have received support from the NAACP, the Louisiana ACLU and Friends of Justice. People interested in supporting can contact: the Jena 6 Defense Committee, PO Box 2798, Jena, LA 71342 jena6defense@gmail.com; Friends of Justice, 507 North Donley Avenue, Tulia, TX 79088 www.fojtulia.org; or the ACLU of Louisiana, PO Box 56157, New Orleans, LA 70156 www.laaclu.org or 417.350.0536.

What is next? The rest of the Jena 6 await similar trials. Theodore Shaw is due to go on trial shortly. Mychal Bell is scheduled to be sentenced July 31. If he gets the maximum sentence he will not be out of prison until he is nearly 40. Meanwhile, the "white tree" outside Jena High sits quietly in the hot sun.

Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. You can reach him at Quigley@loyno.edu

FAKE CORPORATE JOB ADS

2007-06-29T10:03:00.000-07:00

Law firms are helping corporations to keep their costs down by placing fake job ads that weed out U.S. applicants in order to hire cheaper foreign workers. Its legal. A very strange issue indeed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU&eurl=

The Vatican Role In The Holocaust

2007-04-13T10:37:00.000-07:00

This post is in response to the article below. Since the Vatican signed a Concordat with Nazi Germany, it would be in the public interest for the Vatican to open up its archives on all of its activities during WWII.

What would Jesus do?

Vatican ambassador to boycott Holocaust memorial in row over photo

Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem Friday April 13, 2007 Guardian Unlimited

Monsignor Antonio Franco has called on Israel's Holocaust museum to change a picture caption which criticises Pope Pius XII. The Vatican ambassador to Israel has sparked a public row after refusing to attend this Sunday's annual Holocaust memorial service in Jerusalem in protest at a description of the wartime role of Pope Pius XII. Monsignor Antonio Franco, who arrived in Jerusalem last year, has called on Israel's official Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, to change a picture caption which criticises the pope for failing to condemn the deportation and mass killing of Jews under the Nazi regime. Earlier this month he wrote to turn down a formal invitation to Sunday's torch-lighting remembrance ceremony. In turn, the Holocaust museum said it was "shocked" at Monsignor Franco's decision to stay away from the event and called on the Vatican to open up its archives for further examination of the troubled history of Pius XII.

The dispute revolves around a paragraph-long picture caption of Pius XII that was installed when the newly-designed Yad Vashem museum was opened in 2005. The previous Vatican ambassador sent a letter of complaint about the text a year ago and now Monsignor Franco has complained again. The text notes that Pius XII's reaction to the Holocaust is controversial and states: "When he was elected Pope in 1939, he shelved a letter against racism and anti-semitism that his predecessor had prepared. Even when reports about the murder of Jews reached the Vatican, the Pope did not protest either verbally or in writing." The description also says Pius XII chose not to sign a December 1942 Allied declaration condemning the extermination of Jews and did not intervene when Jews were being deported from Rome to Auschwitz.

It is not the first criticism of Pius XII, who has long been regarded as one of the Catholic church's most controversial leaders. In the past, critics have dismissed him as "Hitler's Pope" for failing to speak out against the Holocaust and suggested his silence was aimed at averting a Communist takeover in Europe. However, others have sought to exonerate him, arguing instead that he was trying to defend a Catholic minority in Germany from the Nazis and suggesting he should be fast-tracked for canonisation.

Monsignor Franco, an Italian who has been a Vatican diplomat for 35 years, accepted there was debate and disagreement about the part played by the Pope during the second world war, but said he opposed the wording of the text at Yad Vashem. "I consider this picture in that place and the caption that accompanies it unfair and something that disturbs my feelings and the feelings of Catholics all over the world. It does not correspond to the truth," he told the Guardian today. "My approach is not polemic," he said. "It is an approach of dialogue and research and discussion and to see if perhaps it could be presented in another way."
Monsignor Franco, 70, defended Pius XII's silence over the Holocaust. "It was not really silence, it was a policy taken to avoid worsening the situation," he said. "When there were public statements and declarations there would be a huge number of people who were simply eliminated. Repression was the response to any kind of public position taken."

Yad Vashem stood by its text, although it said it was "prepared to continue examining the issue". It also called on the Vatican to open up its archives of documents relating to Pius XII. "Yad Vashem is shocked by, and regrets, that the Vatican's delegate to Israel has chosen not to respect the memory of the Holocaust and not to participate in the official ceremony in which the state of Israel and the Jewish people join in memory of the victims," Iris Rosenberg, a spokeswoman for the museum, said in a statement. "The Holocaust history museum presents the historical truth on Pope Pius XII as it is known to scholars today," she said. "It is unacceptable to use diplomatic pressure when dealing with historical research." Relations between Israel and the Vatican have been fraught for years. Full diplomatic relations were only established in 1993 and there have been continuing disagreements over the taxing of church property in and around Jerusalem. Last month Israeli government officials postponed at the last minute a trip to the Vatican for what would have been the first fully attended meeting of a joint commission on church-state issues for five years.

Check out these links to ongoing Vatican issues below, or go directly to the website linked above from vaticanbankclaims.com

National Catholic Reporter, June 16, 2006, Vatican faces Continued Legal Challenges to Immmunity in US Courts

Religion, Rome, and the Reich: The Vatican's Other Dirty Secret, The Independent (UK), may 21, 2006

Ex-Vatican official dies in Sun City home, Arizona Republic, February 22, 2006

Arts Journal, Following the Ratlines, January 19, 2006

Calvi Murder Trial Reveals Profound Links With Vatican Bank, Bloomberg, November 23, 2005

God's Banker Murder Trial Begins, American Atheists, November 18, 2005

The Vatican Shelters a War Criminal, New Vatican Ratline, The Trumpet, September 23, 2005

United nations Criminal Tribunal Accuses Franciscan Order & Vatican of Hiding Croatian War Criminals! History Repeats Itself as Vatican Ratline Using Franciscan Monastaries is Exposed. Telegraph-UK, September 20, 2005.

London Times, Church entrusts its talents to top bankers, July 12, 2005

Pope John Paul II’s Legacy in the Balkans, Carl Savich, Serbianna

Vatican asks Rice for help in sex abuse lawsuit , National Catholic Reporter, March 11, 2005

Carlo Calvi Exposes Vatican Financial Corruption, Montreal Mirror

The Shady deals of God's Banker

Argentina defends Two Ustasha War Criminals, Uki Net, June 2, 2003

Franciscan Order and Croat Terrorists linked to Bosnian shrine of Medjugorje, International News Analysis, March 18, 2003

US State Department calls Medjugorje Godforsaken Place, Kronzer Foundation

London - A panel of judges in Rome is expected to announce shortly that the death of "God's banker" Roberto Calvi, found strung up under Blackfriars Bridge in London in June 1982, was murder, Cape Times, February 19, 2003

Allegations of Molestation, Suspended Medjugorje Priest Launcches Cross Country Tour, The Wanderer, November 7, 2002

Vatican Bank and Bishop Marcinkus, Phoenix New Times, February 13, 2003

Nazi Salutes Openly Used in Zagreb, BBC, February 6, 2003

Queen of Profits, Medjugorje Draws Thousands of Pilgrims and Dollars,Los Angeles Lay Catholic Mission Newspaper, December 2002

Leading Medjugorje Franciscan, Barred from Cathedral, Accused of Sex Crimes, Washington Post, November 20, 2002

Special Fund for former slave laborers fopm Serbia

Vatican's Banker was Murdered, BBC, October 25, 2002

Vatican to Face its Pedophilia Crimes before the UN, October 14, 2002

New Clue Truns up in God's Banker's Death,October 14, 2002, The Guardian

Milosevic Implicates Vatican Bank in Arms Deal, Radio Netherlands, September 27, 2002

VATICAN BANK IS SUED IN US OVER CHARITY SCANDAL , The Mail on Sunday Newspaper, August 11, 2002

John Loftus is the Plaintiffs' Expert Witness against the Vatican Bank defendants. It is possible that John Loftus may know more intelligence secrets than anyone alive.

Full Copy of Complaint filed by Five States Against Martin Frankel and the Holy See for Insurance Fraud and Racketeering

Missouri Insurance Regulators have sued the Vatican, alleging that Roman Catholic Church officials conspired to launder millions of dollars looted in one of the largest scandals to rock the U.S. insurance industry. Kansas City Star, May 11, 2002

Vatican Sexual Exploitation of Children Violates International Law, Inter Press Service, April 23, 2002

Lawsuit (Complete text) against the Holy See for Sexual Abuse Cover Up, Vatican accused of Protecting Pedophiles

Long-awaited forensic tests into the death of Vatican banker Roberto Calvi - found hanging from a bridge in London in 1982 - are reported to show he was murdered. BBC News, April 19, 2002

The Vatican's Worldly Assets, The Independent, April 19, 2002

Hundreds Sue Vatican Over Child Sex Abuse, April 6, 2002, Sydney Morning Herald

A JUDGE in Rome ordered that a controversial film about the mysterious death of a Vatican-linked banker be withdrawn from cinemas across Italy yesterday after a complaint by a businessman with alleged Mafia links that it damages his reputation and honour, London Times, March 28, 2002

BBC, March 8, 2002, Twenty years after he was found hanging from a London bridge, a film opens in Italy on Friday 8 March which reignites the controversy about what happened to Vatican banker Roberto Calvi.

New film portrays Vatican Bank at the centre of a conspiracy involving drug-running mafiosi, corrupt bankers and politicians, arms traders, Freemasons and spies. London Times, February 27, 2002.

Irish Times, February 2, 2002, The Real Odessa

BBC, Author Blames Vatican for Holocaust, January 15, 2002

German Press Agency, December 10, 2001, Croatian Nationalists Attack over Nazi Monument

Daily Telegraph, November 19, 2001, Vatican Named as Major Money Laundering Center

Vatican Fraud Ring Exposed, Two Senior Officials Charged, Nov. 7, 2001, The Guardian

Our Lady of Lies, the Franciscans and Medjugorje, Salon Magazine

Vatican Continues to Deny Access to World War II Archives, October 19, 2001, Daily Telegraph

Vatican Accused of Nazi Era Cover Up, July 25, 2001, The

Deep Black Lies by David Guyatt, one of plaintiffs' expert witnesses

Jews Protest Beatification of Ustashe Cardinal,JTA News

Franciscan Controlled Bank Raided by UN Forces - Ties to Croat Extremists and Medjugorje Alleged

Croatian War Criminals Linked to Franciscan Order and Marianist Cult

Pope to Pray at Nazi Gold Bank, Irish Independent, April 6, 2000

Xinhua News Agency, October 3, 2000, Vatican bank Involved in Mafia's Online Washing Money

The Role of the Catholic Church in Yugoslavia's Holocaust

Anti Semitism in Croatia Today

Official US State Department report on the "Fate of the Wartime Ustasha Treasury" is available on this page.

Croatian volunteers in the Nazi Army.

Ustashe atrocities documented Warning! This material is extremely disturbing.

The Vatican Pipeline, $170 million in Nazi Gold to the Vatican, Time Magazine

Ustashe movement documented.

Online book,The Vatican's Billions; by Avro Manhattan

The Vatican, Croatia, and Nazi Gold, Flame Magazine

Washing Money in the Holy See, Fortune magazine, August 1999

US World News Report, March 30, 1998, Did gold stolen by Croatian fascists reach the Vatican?

What is the Vatican Hiding? The Vatican's Complicity in Genocide in Fascist Croatia by Barry Lituchy

The Ghosts of Surmanci: Queen of Peace, Ethnic Cleansing, Ruined Lives

US World News Report 11/15/99: Did a Wartime Pope Anticipate Nazi Victory?

Ustasha Loot from Holocaust Victims Enriched Eva Peron

Nazi Nostalgia in Croatia

Gelli Arrest Focuses Attention on Vatican Bank, American Atheists, September 1998

CNN: Vatican Drawn Into Scandal Over Nazi Gold, July 22, 1997

Shopping The Planet To Death: Its A Hard Habit To Break

2007-04-08T20:18:00.000-07:00

Hey, been there, done that! Too much is never enough. So enough already...You know you have too much stuff when you start referring to it as "crap", as in I need to organize the crap in my closet, house, car ect...Let's all at least try to buy less crap! Then again, the coming economic recession/depression will take care of that...

Published on Sunday, April 8, 2007

Stop Shopping … or the Planet Will Go Pop
by David Smith

‘Many big ideas have struggled over the centuries to dominate the planet,’ begins the argument by Jonathon Porritt, government adviser and all-round environmental guru.’Fascism. Communism. Democracy. Religion. But only one has achieved total supremacy. Its compulsive attractions rob its followers of reason and good sense. It has created unsustainable inequalities and threatened to tear apart the very fabric of our society. More powerful than any cause or even religion, it has reached into every corner of the globe. It is consumerism.’ According to Porritt, the most senior adviser to the government on sustainability, we have become a generation of shopaholics. We are bombarded by advertising from every medium which persuades us that the more we consume, the better our lives will be. Shopping is equated with fun, fulfilment and self-identity. It is also, Porritt warns, killing the planet. He argues, in an interview with The Observer, that merely switching to ‘ethical’ shopping is not enough.

We must shop less.

From pictures of Coleen McLoughlin weighed down with designer bags to branding endorsements by the likes of David Beckham, the image of consumerism as a universal aspiration is ubiquitous. Last week 3,000 people stormed Primark’s new flagship store on London’s Oxford Street before the official opening time, putting two staff in hospital and earning the description by BBC2’s Newsnight of ‘a plague of locusts’. There are, however, a growing number of dissenting voices such as the so-called ‘Froogles’, individuals who use the internet to seek a simpler lifestyle, and organisations and websites which urge people to kick the retail habit. Porritt, chairman of the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, has concluded that consumerism is central to the threat facing the planet, cannibalising its natural resources and producing the carbon dioxide emissions which result in climate change. In a film for Channel Five, he points out that Britons throw away their own body weight in rubbish every seven weeks, with 100 million tonnes of waste pouring into the country’s 12,000 landfill sites every year. If all six billion people in the world were to consume at the same level, we would need two new Earths to supply all the energy, soil, water and raw materials required. ‘I think capitalism is patently unable to go on growing the size of the consumer economy for any more people in the world today because levels of consumption are already undermining life support systems on which we depend - so if we do it for any more people, the planet will go pop,’ Porritt told The Observer. ‘So in a way we don’t have a choice about this: we’ve got to rethink the basic premise behind capitalism to make it deliver the goods. In the long run, when you really look at what happens on a planet with nine billion people and really serious constraints on the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that we can emit, it’s almost inevitable we will learn to have more elegant, satisfying lives, consuming less. I can’t see any way out of that in the long run.’

Porritt, co-founder of Forum For The Future, Britain’s leading sustainable development charity, believes that consumerism has taken over our lives almost unnoticed. ‘Shopping has become a recreational activity,’ he continued. ‘There’s a lot of evidence that people really do see shopping now as an amenity pastime. We’re well beyond the time where shopping was just a way of transacting what you needed in life. It’s now all about identity and status and recreation and companionship, even about meaning in people’s lives. There’s always been a “keeping up with the Joneses” type thing, but it’s now almost universalised and there is a sense of buying to be more like something or to get the image of somebody, particularly with clothes or branded goods, where there’s very much that sense of, “If I buy something with this name on it, maybe a little bit of the magic of that name will rub off on me and I’ll be a better person”, whereas we all know you’re exactly the same person just waiting to go out and make your next branded purchase.’ Porritt’s film cites China as an example of how booming economic growth has produced an explosion of consumerism with mixed results: millions have risen out of poverty, but the consequences for the environment are severe. He added: ‘There’s always been a more privileged part of society which was into buying more than they needed in order to demonstrate how wealthy and influential they were, but the benefits of mass consumption have now been spread so wide that we’ve got anywhere between 1.5 and two billion people on the planet today who can use their purchasing power like that. The total spend on advertising is just so enormous now that it’s little wonder people are seduced into this idea that their personal happiness results from spending in the way they’re being encouraged to do.’ There are some pockets of resistance. ‘Froogles’ include New Yorker Judith Levine who, realising that she had spent $1,000 (£500) in the run-up to Christmas in 2004, decided to buy nothing but necessities for the next year, chronicling the experience in her book, Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping.

A group called The Compact, made up of 10 friends in San Francisco, gained members around the world: their mission, to take a ‘12-month flight from the consumer grid’ and boycott all non-essential products. Every year, in November, Buy Nothing Day encourages people to ’shop less - live more’, and last year there were multiple events in Manchester and Oxford and at least six other British cities. Meanwhile, websites such as Freecycle.org enable users to exchange unwanted goods and preventing them going to waste. February saw the launch of Buy (Less), whose website parodies RED, the global fundraising campaign led by U2 singer Bono which tells consumers that when they buy RED branded products -which include clothes, a credit card and mobile phone - a slice of the money will be used to fight Aids in Africa. Buy (Less) Crap challenges the concept, urging its visitors to ‘join us in rejecting the ti(red) notion that shopping is a reasonable response to human suffering’. It provides weblinks to several charities so that people can make direct donations instead. ‘I’ve always been very nervous about this implied assumption that the more you put on your credit card, the more your charities will benefit, which is a bit perverse, but is what happens when you’re using credit cards of that kind,’ Porritt said. ‘I think it clutters up the awareness we need to encourage in people now that there’s an awful lot of unnecessary consumption, conspicuous consumption, irresponsible consumption, and we’re just got to get used to cracking down on that in our own lives and really thinking through the implications of all that.’ Red officials argue that their campaign is not about buying more but about buying differently. They say that is about buying an ‘ethical’ version of a product rather than a ‘non-ethical’ one. But Porritt argues that there is not only a need to shop differently, but to shop less. ‘I don’t subscribe to this view that all we need to do is consume a little more thoughtfully, a little bit less damagingly. When I look at the amount of consumption that almost instantly turns into waste, with huge amounts bought for no particularly good purpose and then discarded or thrown away, I do find it inexcusable. When some people are buying food they’re not buying for a particular meal, they’re not thinking it through very carefully, they’re almost buying speculatively as if, “Well, we might eat that this week, if we don’t we’ll chuck it away.” I find that extraordinary. I’m not being a miserable, parsimonious, old tightwad, it’s just why would you buy stuff that’s not needed?’

He denies that he is advocating a return to the austerity and rationing last seen during and just after the Second World War, although he describes low air fares as ‘ludicrous’ and warns a sacrifice will have to be made to reduce carbon emissions. ‘I know for sure that if we ever had a golden age, as far as most people are concerned, it’s been over the last 50 years. That’s the period of the greatest prosperity for the greatest number of people, so I don’t have any nostalgia for past eras where life was simpler but more primitive. I don’t talk about going back to anything, I talk about using technology a great deal more intelligently and efficiently to continue to give us a very high quality of life with a fraction of the environmental cost. ‘We need “sustainability literacy”, enabling people to see what the costs of living in a certain way really look like. We’re blind to a lot of that. When people take holidays in far-flung places they very rarely think about the impact of hundreds of thousands of tourists descending on some destination somewhere in the world. We’ve just got to get wiser to what happens when we enjoy the perks of this life.’ His sentiments were echoed by the conservation group Friends of the Earth. Tony Juniper, its director, said: ‘Our consumer culture is completely out of the step with the capacity of the planet. If we’re going to have a world that is in a fit state to live in by the end of the century, we’re going to have to drastically reduce the amount of material demand. ‘We need a legal framework for economic activity, but in the end this is about culture, and culture shapes politics. At the moment the culture is being shaped in an unsustainable direction by the advertising industry. It’s perfectly possible to present an alternative, but no one has the budget: Friends of the Earth has a few thousand pounds, whereas millions are spent to promote a single car. ’Trevor Datson, a spokesman for Tesco, Britain’s biggest retailer, insisted it shares many of Porritt’s values. ‘There’s no question there’s too much waste in society, and we’d agree with Jonathon there. The thrust of Tesco’s moves on the environment is helping customers choose a greener lifestyle. Our carrier bag scheme is designed to incentivise rather than castigate: we’ve saved 350 million plastic bags since last July by offering club card points for people who re-use bags. It’s the power of making people feel good about green choices rather than having to live like a monk.’

Mountains of waste

· 3.3 million tonnes of food are binned every year in the UK

· People get a new mobile on average every 18 months

· Last Christmas, more than 6 million PCs were left on standby in empty offices

· 1.5 million computers are thrown away every year, of which 99 per cent work perfectly

Buying into a low-cost lifestyle

‘Froogles’ started life as a broad American movement of environmentally motivated types who wanted to reduce drastically their consumerism. They use the internet to exchange goods for free.
Buy (Less) is an organisation that encourages individuals to donate money to charities and inspire less consumption.

www.buylesscrap.org
Justin Rowlatt, a reporter on BBC TV’s Newsnight, became Ethical Man when he led a green lifestyle for a year. He installed energy-efficient lightbulbs, avoided animal product foods and gave up his car to switch to public transport.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/6413195.stm
Buy Nothing Day started in 1993 and became an international event celebrated in 55 countries. Its aim is to make consumers think about how buying goods impacts on the environment and poverty.

www.buynothingday.co.uk
In December 2005 a group of professional friends in San Francisco got together and called themselves The Compact, aiming to go ‘beyond recycling’ by reducing clutter and waste.

www.sfcompact.blogspot.com
A New York City couple, Colin Beavan and Michelle Conlin, are spending a year experimenting with a new lifestyle they call No Impact. They only eat organic food produced within 400km of Manhattan, producing no rubbish, and using no paper (including toilet paper) or carbon-emitting transport.

www.noimpactman.typepad.com/blog

1929 & 2007 Depression Not Recession

2007-03-30T15:54:00.000-07:00

An interesting review by M.A. Nystrom...

Social Cycles, Depression and Revolution (Part II) March 29, 2007 by Michael Nystrom

It's not dark yet, but it's getting there...-Bob Dylan

Last week I gave you the good news, that after we make our way through the current political and economic mess that we find ourselves in, we will emerge into a new golden age. This week, the bad news: Before we get there, we will likely have to first undergo at least a depression, and certainly a revolution before we arrive. The brighter world will not come of its own accord; it will wait patiently until we collectively decide to create it. Until then, Batra predicts that "real wages and family income will continue to fall, while poverty will rise. The rich will keep getting richer and the poor getting poorer; similarly, the middle class will continue to shrink." For many, the motivation for real, fundamental change will only come from the depths of depression. Before continuing with Dr. Batra's theory, let's take a look at two recent news articles that set the stage and concretely depict the points he makes: The first, from today's New York Times, informs us that the nation's income gap widened significantly in 2005 to levels unseen since 1928 - the year before the start of the great depression. According to the story, the top 300,000 Americans collectively own as much wealth as the bottom 150 million. While the top 1% of the population got an average raise of $139,000 in 2005, the bottom 90% of workers saw their incomes fall by $172. These are times that try men's souls. Since these are abstracted numbers, it can be difficult to fully appreciate their meaning. But this second article should make things perfectly clear: Circuit City is firing 3,400 of its hourly sales floor workers, and will rehire either them or new workers at a lower hourly rate. Just so you understand the context, this is a company that is headed by a CEO -- Phillip Schoonover -- who raked in $8.5 million dollars last year. The company itself made a profit of $162 million, though it lost money in the most recent quarter. Apparently this is how Schoonover can justify his brilliant fire/rehire-cheaper scheme. According to the article, the average sales worker now makes $10-11 per hour, or about $21,000 per year, while a new worker would only make about $8.00, or $16,000 per year. That is below the poverty level for a family of four, or even three, so forget about trying to raise a family on that kind of a salary. Schoonover, on the other hand, makes about 530 times the average grunt worker's pay, and in today's climate, he'll likely get a bonus for his great idea. But as Batra points out in this and other books, these are precisely the kinds of conditions -- extreme wealth concentration and inequality -- that lead to depressions, for they weaken the overall capitalist system. With such minimal incomes, the only way for workers such as those at the new and improved Circuit City to continue to consume (the great "engine of global economic growth") is by taking on increased levels of consumer debt. But there are limits to how much debt such poorly paid workers can take on. To make sense of these stories in a larger context, let's take a look at the global economy through Dr. Batra's eyes. Batra asserts that the entire world economy has been colonized by the American Global Business Empire. The acquisitors have taken the reigns of power in both business and government and, motivated by unbrided and unchecked greed, are taking increasingly aggressive action to consolidate their power. As a result, members of the other three classes - both in the US and abroad - are being pushed increasingly into the laborer class, simply trying to make a living in the acquisitor dominated world. The American Global Business EmpireUsing Rome and Britain as examples of previous empires, Batra has identified four traits of imperial rule, three of which he claims apply to the US: 1) Empires are created through military force2) The ruling nation can and does extract cheap labor from it colonies3) The empire's colonies run trade surpluses that raise the living standards of the rulers4) The language, culture and institutions of the victor spreads across the imperial territories Batra believes that only the last three apply to the US. He excludes the first, claiming that the US does not seek to colonize other nations militarily. This is something Chalmers Johnson, in his excellent book Nemeis, the Last Days of the American Republic, disagrees with completely, and in fact makes an excellent case for. I'll have a review of Nemesis in the coming weeks. America's cheap colonial labor comes from two sources: First, immigrant labor - both legal and illegal - which expands the US labor pool, and keeps a lid on domestic wages. Illegal immigration offers tremendous benefits to big business at the expense of the laboring class. Since today's government works for business and not for the people, we hear tough talk about illegal immigration from the government but see very little action to control it. The second source of America's cheap colonial labor comes from multinational corporations that employ and subcontract hundreds of thousands of workers around the globe at local wages which are a fraction of what they would be in the US. Products produced by this cheap labor are then imported to the US, further depressing domestic wages while generating exorbitant profits for the multinationals and exceptionally high incomes for their executives. Look again at the case of Circuit City: You would be hard pressed to find anything in the store made in the US, and yet the company made a profit of $162 million last year. However, when profits do falter, it is not the managers who take responsibility by lowering their own salaries; instead they squeeze the laborers further by cutting their wages. While such moves are routinely justified because they "benefit consumers," at some point they become more harmful to the overall economy than helpful. Like Britain and Rome before it, the US receives nearly free goods from its colonial empire. Rome and Britain did it through taxation and forced "tributes," while the US does it more cleverly by controlling and printing the world's senior fiat currency. This allows the US -- unlike any other nation -- to run persistent trade deficits (import surpluses) without suffering currency depreciations or raising interest rates. As Bernanke has reminded us, we have a technology called a printing press, and we put it to very good use. America's colony nations such as China, Japan and Taiwan pay huge "tributes" to the US in the form of massive treasury bond purchases. These tributes ensure market access to the Imperial center for the colony's manufactured goods, while also helping to stabilize the empire's fiat currency. Finally, US culture, values, food, entertainment -- but most importantly business ideologies -- have infiltrated the world. This is clear enough from the surface. It is hard not to notice that the western suit and tie have become the de facto standard uniform for conducting business everywhere from Shanghai to Mumbai. But the realities run deeper. The business world is dominated by ideas hatched from the minds of economists and professors at elite American business schools, then sanctioned by official US government policy. The policies can be summed up in a single word: "tricklism." Tricklism gained its foothold in the US in the early 1980's thanks to Reagan's budget director David Stockman, who was just recently indicted for fraud. Tricklism, Batra explains, is the notion "whereby prosperity is supposed to seep, drop by drop, from the top to the bottom." Thanks to Stockman, tricklism is now practiced worldwide by nations both rich and poor, and is portrayed as the quickest means to economic success. But the real objective of tricklism, Batra contends, is to keep wages as low as possible while maximizing CEO incomes. Unfortunately, tricklism results in full time salaries of only $16,000 per year -- as the Circuit City example shows -- for workers at even highly profitable companies. This causes consumer demand to fall short of supply, for how much can a worker on a $16,000 salary afford to consume? The only way s/he can is by going into debt. This is where the acquisitors really get busy -- offering the kind of help that people should run from rather than take. The same class of intellectual acquisitors that came up with tricklism are only more than happy to provide a solution the problem of depressed demand that they created. That solution is called consumer credit, and it further enriches the acquisitor class while slowly bleeding the life from the laborer class, one interest payment at a time. Because this ideology dominates not only American business, but international business as well, global poverty has skyrocketed over the past 25 years along with tricklism. In spite of the dazzlingly and overwhelmingly positive mainstream media (MSM) spin, that as Mish puts it, creates the "myth ... that jobs are plentiful, the economy is geared for growth, and capital spending will pick up where real estate left off," the facts tell a different and rather grim story. Poverty is not only a third world phenomenon. Because of decisions by people like Philip Schoonover, poverty is afflicting more and more people in the industrialized nations in Europe, Asia and of course here in the US. The 2.4 million families that will face foreclosure due to the policies of tricklism only further emphasize this point.

The Twin Bubbles of Oil and Housing

While the recent Circuit City story gives a clear example of the handiwork of the acquisitor class, in his book Batra cites the twin bubbles of oil and housing as evidence of tricklism. In the 1970's oil prices skyrocketed due to the collusion of OPEC. Today, he asserts, they have skyrocketed due to supply restrictions by the "five bullies" -- the five oil companies which he says control 60% of global refinery output: Exxon-Mobil, Chevron-Texaco, BP-Amoco-Arco, Royal Dutch-Shell, and Conoco-Phillips,. Just one look at the names of the five bullies should tell you most of what you need to know. Each of these mammoth corporations was formed by the merger of already powerful, highly profitable companies. This, combined with 2,600 mergers in the oil industry since the early 90's, has led to a concentrated industry that colludes to keep supplies tight and prices high. Meanwhile, the pro-oil/pro-business national administration has allowed the consolidations to take place, with the Justice Department declining to enforce anti-trust laws. Friends in the big-business-controlled MSM put the blame for high oil and gas prices on OPEC, China's growth, conflict in the middle east, peak oil, etc -- anywhere but on the lack of refining capacity that the exorbitantly profitable five bullies refuse to build. High oil prices mean a silent transfer of wealth from all of us to the few of them. In 2006, the combined profits of the "five bullies" came to $120 billion.

Company (Symbol) 2006 Profits

Exxon-Mobil (XOM)
$40,000,000,000

Chevron-Texaco (CVX)
$17,000,000,000

BP-Amoco-Arco(BP)
$22,000,000,000

Royal Dutch-Shell (RDS'A)
$25,000,000,000

Conoco-Phillips (COP)
$16,000,000,000

Total
$120,000,000,000

Note: Figures rounded to nearest billion; source:

MarketwatchThis is the essence of tricklism in action: A little bit from you, and a little bit from me, and a little bit from 300 million other Americans every week at the gas pump adds up to $120 billion dollars in the hands of five corporations. Take some time to think about this the next time you're filling up your tank. The second bubble Batra cites is the housing bubble, which was artificially created by the acquisitors at the Federal Reserve. Like the oil bubble, the housing bubble is another wealth transfer scheme -- a little bit at a time -- from the pockets of the many into the bank accounts of the few. As wages stagnated, housing prices rose, leading owners to use their home value appreciation as to make up for their stagnating wages. They just borrowed the difference, allowing bankers to pocket lucrative fees and capture a recurring income stream in the form of future interest payments. New Century Financial made $416 million dollars in 2005 on a rising market, and now it's all but bankrupt. As Batra sees it, the artificially created twin bubbles allow the elite acquisitors to surreptitiously transfer wealth from the masses to their own pockets via various, mostly invisible schemes. As a result, the acquisitors now have just about everything locked up, and have managed to hypnotize the majority of the people into thinking that the current system is just, good and the way things should be. Through their near total control of cultural institutions and the MSM, the message of supermaterialism is emphasized and magnified. The benefits of wealth are flaunted while the tragedies of poverty -- as well as its true causes -- are hidden and ignored. To this I say, thank God for the internet! Just because the acquisitors have things locked up at the moment does not mean that their reign will last forever. No class can retain its grip on power forever. All bubbles pop, including artificially induced supply-side bubbles like the oil bubble. The housing bubble is already running its course - see New Century. As a result of the popping, things will continue to get worse before they get better. However, the point Batra makes is that things "out there" will not change until we as individuals make personal decisions that things must change, and then take decisive action to overthrow the current reign of money-rule. When angry individuals coalesce into a mass movement that cannot be ignored, real changes can take place quickly and society can be reorganized. This is called a revolution. But it will likely take more pain for a critical mass of people to reach that conclusion. For now, most people still think there is a chance to "get ahead," not realizing the game is rigged against them (starting with the Federal Reserve itself). Official government corruption -- which Batra defines as the government enacting policies that enrich the powerful while impoverishing the poor and middle class -- will have to get worse before the people come to see things for what they truly are. Batra cites Katrina as one example of the extreme disconnect between powerful government legislators and the people they rule over: "The legislators, spoiled by copious corporate money and junkets, wallowing in luxury, couldn't imagine that the poor had no cars [with which to escape New Orleans]." But unless we decide collectively to change now, we will have to endure more Katrinas, more Circuit City-type events, and millions more foreclosures before people take action to change. It is one thing to read about such things online. It is another to hear about them directly from friends or relatives who are victims. But it takes on an entirely different meaning when you fall victim to such malfeasance yourself. It is only once affected personally that the long fuse of a patient people burns down and they are ready to take direct, explosive action, as our Founding Fathers did 231 years ago. A people can only be pushed so far. The seeds of destruction of the current system are being sown with the daily injustices of tricklism. But a depression, Batra contends, in not necessary for change: With growing poverty and a vanishing middle class, overwhelming CEO greed and ruthlessness, mounting official corruption and incompetence and above all the demoralizing war in Iraq, voters could become furious enough to bring an end to the rule of money in society. Thus a depression need not be a precondition to the coming revolution. Economic and political reforms can come about without such a catastrophe. It is important to note that in the 1970's, Batra wrote a book called The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism. One down, one to go. In this current book, he concludes: All of the symptoms that I expected to see before the start of an anti-acquisitive rebellion are now here. I anticipated many social and economic cancers, such as abysmal wages, growing poverty, rising homelessness, educational decline, family breakdown and loose morals. They are all here, so revolution cannot be very far away.But revolution he contends, need not be violent nor bloody: In a democracy, power and responsibility ultimately rest with the people...Don't think of yourself as a Republican or Democrat; think of yourself as a victim of the misrule of acquisitors, because whatever you dislike today in society stems from the excessive greed and materialism of the acquisitive class. "The book is excellent and provocative, one that I feel I have not done proper justice to with this review. So much material in the book I have left untouched, as Batra covers a lot of ground. I do not agree with all of his assertions nor all of his conclusions, but I do appreciate his unique and unconventional perspective which helped me to stretch my understanding and see the world from a new and different angle."

OPERATION BITE: IRAN WAR SCHEDULED FOR APRIL?

2007-03-26T11:54:00.000-07:00

Hopefully this is only a "rumor of war", but in these crazy times who knows what's possible and if cooler heads will prevail?

OPERATION BITE: APRIL 6 SNEAK ATTACK BY US FORCES AGAINST IRAN
author: Webster G. Tarpley

The US military attack on Iran is now on track for 4 AM on April6,writes the well-known Russian journalist Andrei Uglanov in the Moscow weekly "Argumenty Nedeli." Uglanov cites Russian military experts close to the Russian General Staff for his account. The long awaited US military attack on Iran is now on track for the first week of April, specifically for 4 AM on April 6, the Good Friday opening of Easter weekend, writes the well-known Russian journalist Andrei Uglanov in the Moscow weekly "Argumenty Nedeli." Uglanov cites Russian military experts close to the Russian General Staff for his account. The attack is slated to last for twelve hours, according to Uglanov, lasting from 4 AM until 4 PM local time. Friday is a holiday in Iran. In the course of the attack, code named Operation Bite, about 20 targets are marked for bombing; the list includes uranium enrichment facilities, research centers, and laboratories. The first reactor at the Bushehr nuclear plant, where Russian engineers are working, is supposed to be spared from destruction. The US attack plan reportedly calls for the Iranian air defense system to be degraded, for numerous Iranian warships to be sunk in the Persian Gulf, and the for the most important headquarters of the Iranian armed forces to be wiped out. The attacks will be mounted from a number of bases, including the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Diego Garcia is currently home to B-52 bombers equipped with standoff missiles. Also participating in the air strikes will be US naval aviation from aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, as well as from those of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. Additional cruise missiles will be fired from submarines in the Indian Ocean and off the coast of the Arabian peninsula. The goal is allegedly to set back Iran's nuclear program by several years, writes Uglanov, whose article was re-issued by RIA-Novosti in various languages, but apparently not English, several days ago. The story is the top item on numerous Italian and German blogs, but so far appears to have been ignored by US websites. Observers comment that this dispatch represents a high-level orchestrated leak from the Kremlin, in effect a war warning, which draws on the formidable resources of the Russian intelligence services, and which deserves to be taken with the utmost seriousness by pro-peace forces around the world. Asked by RIA-Novosti to comment on the Uglanov report, retired Colonel General Leonid Ivashov confirmed its essential features in a March 21 interview: "I have no doubt that there will be an operation, or more precisely a violent action against Iran." Ivashov, who has reportedly served at various times as an informal advisor to Putin, is currently the Vice President of the Moscow Academy for Geopolitical Sciences. Ivashov attributed decisive importance to the decision of the Democratic leadership of the US House of Representatives to remove language from the just-passed Iraq supplemental military appropriations bill which would have demanded that Bush come to Congress before launching an attack on Iran. Ivashov pointed out that the language was eliminated under pressure from AIPAC, the lobbing group representing the Israeli extreme right, and of Israeli Foreign Minister Tsipi Livni. "We have drawn the unmistakable conclusion that this operation will take place," said Ivashov. In his opinion, the US planning does not include a land operation: " Most probably there will be no ground attack, but rather massive air attacks with the goal of annihilating Iran's capacity for military resistance, the centers of administration, the key economic assets, and quite possibly the Iranian political leadership, or at least part of it," he continued. Ivashov noted that it was not to be excluded that the Pentagon would use smaller tactical nuclear weapons against targets of the Iranian nuclear industry. These attacks could paralyze everyday life, create panic in the population, and generally produce an atmosphere of chaos and uncertainty all over Iran, Ivashov told RIA-Novosti. "This will unleash a struggle for power inside Iran, and then there will be a peace delegation sent in to install a pro-American government in Teheran," Ivashov continued. One of the US goals was, in his estimation, to burnish the image of the current Republican administration, who would now be able to boast that they had wiped out the Iranian nuclear program. Among the other outcomes, General Ivashov pointed to a partition of Iran along the same lines as Iraq, and a subsequent carving up of the Near and Middle East into smaller regions. "This concept worked well for them in the Balkans and will now be applied to the greater Middle East," he commented. "Moscow must expert Russia's influence by demanding an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council to deal with the current preparations for an illegal use of force against Iran and the destruction of the basis of the United Nations Charter," said General Ivashov. "In this context Russia could cooperate with China, France and the non-permanent members of the Security Council. We need this kind of preventive action to ward off the use of force," he concluded.

http://fr.rian.ru/world/20070319/62260006.html

http://fr.rian.ru/world/20070321/62387717.html

Ugly Times In Paris

2007-03-12T08:54:00.000-07:00

To some in Paris, sinister past is back.

In Texas, a white teenager burns down her family's home and receives probation. A black one shoves a hall monitor and gets 7 years in prison. The state NAACP calls it `a signal to black folks.

By Howard Witt Tribune senior correspondent Published March 12, 2007

PARIS, Texas -- The public fairgrounds in this small east Texas town look ordinary enough, like so many other well-worn county fair sites across the nation. Unless you know the history of the place.There are no plaques or markers to denote it, but several of the most notorious public lynchings of black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries were staged at the Paris Fairgrounds, where thousands of white spectators would gather to watch and cheer as black men were dragged onto a scaffold, scalded with hot irons and finally burned to death or hanged. Brenda Cherry, a local civil rights activist, can see the fairgrounds from the front yard of her modest home, in the heart of the "black" side of this starkly segregated town of 26,000. And lately, Cherry says, she's begun to wonder whether the racist legacy of those lynchings is rebounding in a place that calls itself "the best small town in Texas.""Some of the things that happen here would not happen if we were in Dallas or Houston," Cherry said. "They happen because we are in this closed town. I compare it to 1930s. "There was the 19-year-old white man, convicted last July of criminally negligent homicide for killing a 54-year-old black woman and her 3-year-old grandson with his truck, who was sentenced in Paris to probation and required to send an annual Christmas card to the victims' family.There are the Paris public schools, which are under investigation by the U.S. Education Department after repeated complaints that administrators discipline black students more frequently, and more harshly, than white students. And then there is the case that most troubles Cherry and leaders of the Texas NAACP, involving a 14-year-old black freshman, Shaquanda Cotton, who shoved a hall monitor at Paris High School in a dispute over entering the building before the school day had officially begun.The youth had no prior arrest record, and the hall monitor--a 58-year-old teacher's aide--was not seriously injured. But Shaquanda was tried in March 2006 in the town's juvenile court, convicted of "assault on a public servant" and sentenced by Lamar County Judge Chuck Superville to prison for up to 7 years, until she turns 21. Just three months earlier, Superville sentenced a 14-year-old white girl, convicted of arson for burning down her family's house, to probation."All Shaquanda did was grab somebody and she will be in jail for 5 or 6 years?" said Gary Bledsoe, an Austin attorney who is president of the state NAACP branch. "It's like they are sending a signal to black folks in Paris that you stay in your place in this community, in the shadows, intimidated."The Tribune generally does not identify criminal suspects younger than age 17, but is doing so in this case because the girl and her family have chosen to go public with their story. None of the officials involved in Shaquanda's case, including the local prosecutor, the judge and Paris school district administrators, would agree to speak about their handling of it, citing a court appeal under way. But the teen's defenders assert that long before the September 2005 shoving incident, Paris school officials targeted Shaquanda for scrutiny because her mother had frequently accused school officials of racism. Retaliation alleged "Shaquanda started getting written up a lot after her mother became involved in a protest march in front of a school," said Sharon Reynerson, an attorney with Lone Star Legal Aid, who has represented Shaquanda during challenges to several of the disciplinary citations she received. "Some of the write-ups weren't fair to her or accurate, so we felt like we had to challenge each one to get the whole story. "Among the write-ups Shaquanda received, according to Reynerson, were citations for wearing a skirt that was an inch too short, pouring too much paint into a cup during an art class and defacing a desk that school officials later conceded bore no signs of damage. Shaquanda's mother, Creola Cotton, does not dispute that her daughter can behave impulsively and was sometimes guilty of tardiness or speaking out of turn at school--behaviors that she said were manifestations of Shaquanda's attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, for which the teen was taking prescription medication. Nor does Shaquanda herself deny that she pushed the hall monitor after the teacher's aide refused her permission to enter the school before the morning bell--although Shaquanda maintains that she was supposed to have been allowed to visit the school nurse to take her medication, and that the teacher's aide pushed her first. But Cherry alleges that Shaquanda's frequent disciplinary write-ups, and the insistence of school officials at her trial that she deserved prison rather than probation for the shoving incident, fits in a larger pattern of systemic discrimination against black students in the Paris Independent School District. In the past five years, black parents have filed at least a dozen discrimination complaints against the school district with the federal Education Department, asserting that their children, who constitute 40 percent of the district's nearly 4,000 students, were singled out for excessive discipline. An attorney for the school district, Dennis Eichelbaum, said the Education Department had determined all of the complaints to be unfounded. "The [department] has explained that the school district has not and does not discriminate, that the school district has been a leader and very progressive when it comes to race relations, and that there was no validity to the allegations made by the complainants," Eichelbaum said. But the federal investigations of the school district are not so clear-cut, and they are not finished. In one 2004 finding, Education Department officials determined that black students at a Paris middle school were being written up for disciplinary infractions more than twice as often as white students--and eight times as often in one category, "class disruption. "The Education Department asked the U.S. Justice Department to try to mediate disputes between black parents and the district, but school officials pulled out of the process last December before it was concluded. And in April 2006, the Education Department notified Paris school officials that it was opening a new, comprehensive review to determine "whether the district discriminated against African-American students on the basis of race" between 2004 and 2006. Federal officials say that investigation is still in progress. According to one veteran Paris teacher, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, such discrimination is widespread."There is a philosophy of giving white kids a break and coming down on black kids," said the teacher, who is white. Not everyone in Paris agrees, however, that blacks are treated unfairly by the city's institutions. "I've lived here all my life, and I don't see that," said Mary Ann Reed Fisher, one of two black members of the Paris City Council. "My kids went to Paris High School, and they never had one minute of a problem with the school system, the courts or the police. Meanwhile, Shaquanda, a first-time offender, remains something of an anomaly inside the Texas Youth Commission prison system, where officials say 95 percent of the 2,500 juveniles in their custody are chronic, serious offenders who already have exhausted county-level programs such as probation and local treatment or detention."The Texas Youth Commission is reserved for those youth who are most violent or most habitual," said commission spokesman Tim Savoy. "The whole concept of commitment until your 21st birthday should be recognized as a severe penalty, and that's why it's typically the last resort of the juvenile system in Texas. "Inside the youth prison in Brownwood where she has been incarcerated for the past 10 months--a prison currently at the center of a state scandal involving a guard who allegedly sexually abused teenage inmates--Shaquanda, who is now 15, says she has not been doing well. Three times she has tried to injure herself, first by scratching her face, then by cutting her arm. The last time, she said, she copied a method she saw another young inmate try, knotting a sweater around her neck and yanking it tight so she couldn't breathe. The guards noticed her sprawled inside her cell before it was too late. She tried to harm herself, Shaquanda said, out of depression, desperation and fear of the hardened young thieves, robbers, sex offenders and parole violators all around her whom she must try to avoid each day. "I get paranoid when I get around some of these girls," Shaquanda said. "Sometimes I feel like I just can't do this no more--that I can't survive this."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0703120170mar12,1,1921178.story?coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true hwitt@tribune.com

UPDATE:

Contrast Shaquanda's case with that of teenager Andrew Riley, who was reportedly charged with 128 FELONIES for a year long crime spree.

Andrew Riley faced 128 felony charges Tuesday that included theft, vandalism and intimidation, but he is no adult; he is a seventh grader. Riley, 13, is accused of burglary, theft, stolen property and vandalism. It stems from a crime spree that the Athens County assistant prosecutor said lasted a year. "He's so young, we need to try and get him rehabilitated through the system," said Assistant Prosecutor Keller Blackburn. Blackburn said the Full Brooks Cafe was one of his many targets. Owner Miki Brooks said the restaurant has been robbed twice. "It sort of took all the air out of me the first time," said Brooks. "The second time, I couldn't believe it."His family did not deny he has been in trouble, but they said he could not commit so many crimes. "Honestly, you know, we are baffled by all the charges," said stepfather James Blake. "We suspected a few could come out of this, but nothing like what's been going over. "The charges came after a fellow student went to police, then Riley allegedly beat up that student and now faces charges for intimidating a witness. His stepfather said Riley had a rough childhood. "He's our oldest, you know. He's our first born and he's beenthrough a lot," said Blake. Riley is in a juvenile detention center and his pretrial hearing is scheduled for later this month.

Reported by Laura Cole
http://www.ohionewsnow.com/?sec=news&story=sites/10tv/content/pool/200703/1583692309.html

When Cowboys Don't Shoot Straight Russia Gets Mad

2007-02-28T15:16:00.001-08:00

RUSSIA AND THE NEW COLD WAR
When cowboys don't shoot straight
By F William Engdahl

The frank words of Vladimir Putin to the assembled participants of the annual Munich security conference have unleashed a storm of self-righteous protest from Western media and politicians. A visitor from another planet might have the impression that the Russian president had abruptly decided to launch a provocative confrontation policy with the West reminiscent of the 1943-91 Cold War. However, the details of the developments in the military policies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United States since 1991 are anything but deja vu. This time around we are already deep in a new cold war whose stakes are literally the future of life on this planet. The debacle in Iraq or the prospect of a US tactical nuclear preemptive strike against Iran are ghastly enough. In comparison with what is at play in the US global military buildup against its most formidable remaining global rival, Russia, they loom relatively small. The US military policies since the end of the Soviet Union and emergence of the Russian Federation in 1991 are in need of close examination in this context. Only then do Putin's frank remarks on February 10 at the Munich Conference on Security make sense. There were many misleading accounts of most of Putin's remarks in Western media. Putin spoke in general terms of Washington's vision of a "unipolar" world, with "one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making", calling it a "world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself, because it destroys itself from within." Then the president got to the heart of the matter: "Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper-use of force - military force - in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts. As a result, we do not have sufficient strength to find a comprehensive solution to any one of these conflicts. Finding a political settlement also becomes impossible." Putin continued: "We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state's legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?" These direct words began to touch on what Putin was concerned about in US foreign and military policy since the end of the Cold War some 16 ago. But it was further in the text that he got explicit about what military policies he was reacting to. Here is where the speech is worth clarification. Putin warned of the destabilizing effect of space weapons: "It is impossible to sanction the appearance of new, destabilizing high-tech weapons ... a new area of confrontation, especially in outer space. Star wars is no longer a fantasy - it is a reality ... In Russia's opinion, the militarization of outer space could have unpredictable consequences for the international community, and provoke nothing less than the beginning of a nuclear [arms race] era." He then declared: "Plans to expand certain elements of the anti-missile defense system to Europe cannot help but disturb us. Who needs the next step of what would be, in this case, an inevitable arms race?" What does he refer to here? Few are aware that while claiming it is doing so to protect itself against the risk of a "rogue state" nuclear-missile attack from the likes of North Korea or perhaps one day Iran, the US recently announced it is building massive anti-missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic. Poland? Missile defense? What's this all about?

Missile defense and a US nuclear first strike

On January 29, US Army Brigadier-General Patrick J O'Reilly, deputy director of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, announced US plans to deploy anti-ballistic-missile defense elements in Europe by 2011, which the Pentagon claims is aimed at protecting US and NATO installations from enemy threats coming from the Middle East, not Russia. After Putin's Munich remarks, the US State Department issued a formal comment noting that the administration was "puzzled by the repeated caustic comments about the envisaged system from Moscow". Oops ... Better send that press release back to the Pentagon's Office of Deception Propaganda for a rewrite. The Iran missile threat to NATO installations in Poland somehow isn't quite convincing. Why not ask longtime NATO member Turkey if the US can place its missile shield there, far closer to Iran? Or maybe Kuwait? Or Israel? US policy since 1999 has called for building some form of active missile defense despite the end of the Cold War threat from Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles or other missile launch. The National Missile Defense Act of 1999 says: "It is the policy of the United States to deploy as soon as is technologically possible an effective national missile defense system capable of defending the territory of the United States against limited ballistic missile attack (whether accidental, unauthorized, or deliberate) with funding subject to the annual authorization of appropriations and the annual appropriation of funds for national missile defense." Missile defense was one of Donald Rumsfeld's obsessions as defense secretary. Why now? What is increasingly clear, at least in Moscow and Beijing, is that Washington has a far larger grand strategy behind its seemingly irrational and arbitrary unilateral military moves. For the Pentagon and the US policy establishment, regardless of political party, the Cold War with Russia never ended. It merely continued in disguised form. This has been the case with presidents George H W Bush, Bill Clinton, and now George W Bush. Missile defense sounds plausible if the United States is vulnerable to attack by a tiny band of dedicated Islamic terrorists able to commandeer a Boeing aircraft with box cutters. The only problem is that missile defense is not aimed at rogue terrorists like al-Qaeda, or states like North Korea or Iran. From them the threat of a devastating nuclear strike on the territory of the United States is non-existent. The US Navy and Air Force bomber fleet today stands in full preparation to bomb, even nuke, Iran back to the Stone Age only over suspicions it is trying to develop independent nuclear-weapon technology. States like Iran have no capability to render the US defenseless, without risking nuclear annihilation many times over. Missile defense came out of the 1980s when president Ronald Reagan proposed developing a system of satellites in space and radar bases around the globe, listening stations and interceptor missiles, to monitor and shoot down nuclear missiles before they hit their intended target. It was dubbed "Star Wars" by its critics, but the Pentagon officially has spent more than US$130 billion on such a system since 1983. President Bush increased that significantly beginning 2002, to $11 billion a year, double the level during the Clinton years. And another $53 billion for the following five years has been budgeted. Washington's obsession with nuclear primacyWhat Washington did not say, but Putin has now alluded to in Munich, is that the US missile defense is not at all defensive. It is offensive, and how. The possibility of providing a powerful state, one with the world's most awesome military machinery, a shield to protect it from limited attack is aimed directly at Russia, the only other nuclear power with anywhere near the capacity to launch a credible nuclear counterpunch. Were the United States able to shield itself effectively from a potential Russian response to a US nuclear first strike, the US would be able simply to dictate to the entire world on its terms, not only to Russia. That would be what military people term "nuclear primacy". That is the real meaning of Putin's unusual speech. He isn't paranoid. He was being starkly realistic. It's now clear that since the end of the Cold War in 1991, the US government has never for a moment stopped its pursuit of nuclear primacy. For Washington and the US elites, the Cold War never ended. They just forgot to tell us all. The quest for global control of oil and energy pipelines, the quest to establish its military bases across Eurasia, its attempt to modernize and upgrade its nuclear-submarine and B-52 fleets, all make sense only when seen through the perspective of the relentless pursuit of US nuclear primacy. The Bush administration unilaterally abrogated the US-Russian Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in December 2001. It's in a race to complete a global network of missile defense as the key to US nuclear primacy. With even a primitive missile-defense shield, the US could attack Russian missile silos and submarine fleets with no fear of effective retaliation, as the few remaining Russian nuclear missiles would be unable to launch a response convincing enough to deter a US first strike. The ability of both sides - the Warsaw Pact and NATO - during the Cold War mutually to annihilate one another led to a nuclear stalemate dubbed by military strategists "MAD" - mutual assured destruction. It was scary but, in a bizarre sense, was more stable that what we have today with a unilateral US pursuit of nuclear primacy. The prospect of mutual nuclear annihilation with no decisive advantage for either side led to a world in which nuclear war was "unthinkable". Now, the US pursues the possibility of nuclear war as "thinkable". That's really mad. The first nation with a nuclear missile shield would de facto have first-strike ability. Quite correctly, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Bowman, director of the US Air Force (USAF) missile-defense program, recently called missile defense "the missing link to a first strike". More alarming is the fact that no one outside a handful of Pentagon planners or senior intelligence officials in Washington discusses the implications of Washington's pursuit of missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic or its drive for nuclear primacy. It calls to mind "Rebuilding America's Defenses", the September 2000 report of the hawkish Project for the New American Century, of which Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were members. There they declared, "The United States must develop and deploy global missile defenses to defend the American homeland and American allies and to provide a secure basis for US power projection around the world." Before becoming Bush's defense secretary in January 2001, Rumsfeld headed a presidential commission advocating the development of a missile defense for the United States. The Bush-Cheney administration was so eager to advance its missile-defense plans that the president and defense secretary ordered the waiving of the usual operational testing requirements essential to determining whether the highly complex system of systems was effective. The Rumsfeld missile-defense program was strongly opposed within the US military. On March 26, 2004, no fewer than 49 generals and admirals signed an Open Letter to the President appealing for missile-defense postponement. They noted, "US technology, already deployed, can pinpoint the source of a ballistic-missile launch. It is therefore highly unlikely that any state would dare to attack the US or allow a terrorist to do so from its territory with a missile armed with a weapon of mass destruction, thereby risking annihilation from a devastating US retaliatory strike." The 49 generals and admirals, including Admiral William J Crowe, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went on to argue to Bush, "As you have said, Mr President, our highest priority is to prevent terrorists from acquiring and employing weapons of mass destruction. We agree. "We therefore recommend, as the militarily responsible course of action, that you postpone operational deployment of the expensive and untested GMD [ground-based missile defense] system and transfer the associated funding to accelerated programs to secure the multitude of facilities containing nuclear weapons and materials, and to protect our ports and borders against terrorists who may attempt to smuggle weapons of mass destruction into the United States." What the seasoned military veterans did not say was that Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney, Bush and company had quite another agenda than rogue terror threats. They were after full-spectrum dominance, the new world order, and the elimination, once and for all, of Russia as a potential rival. The rush to deploy a missile-defense shield is clearly not aimed at North Korea or terror attacks. It is aimed at Russia and, to a lesser extent, the far smaller nuclear capacities of China. As the generals and admirals noted in their letter to Bush in 2004, the US already has more than sufficient nuclear warheads to hit a thousand bunkers or caves of a potential rogue state. Kier Lieber and Daryl Press, two US military analysts, writing in the influential Foreign Affairs magazine last March, noted, "If the United States' nuclear modernization were really aimed at rogue states or terrorists, the country's nuclear force would not need the additional thousand ground-burst warheads it will gain from the W-76 modernization program. The current and future US nuclear force, in other words, seems designed to carry out a preemptive disarming strike against Russia or China." Referring to the aggressive new Pentagon deployment plans for missile defense, Lieber and Press wrote, "The sort of missile defenses that the United States might plausibly deploy would be valuable primarily in an offensive context, not a defensive one - as an adjunct to a US first-strike capability, not as a stand-alone shield. If the United States launched a nuclear attack against Russia (or China), the targeted country would be left with a tiny surviving arsenal - if any at all. At that point, even a relatively modest or inefficient missile-defense system might well be enough to protect against any retaliatory strikes." This is the real agenda in Washington's Eurasian Great Game. Naturally, to state so openly would risk tipping Washington's hand before the noose had been irreversibly tightened around Moscow's metaphorical neck. So the State Department and Defense Secretary Robert Gates try to make jokes about the recent Russian remarks, as though they were Putin's paranoid delusions. This entire US program of missile-defense and nuclear-first-strike modernization is hair-raising enough as an idea. Under the Bush administration, it has been made operational and airborne, harking back to the dangerous days of the Cold War with fleets of nuclear-armed B-52 bombers and Trident nuclear-missile submarines on ready alert around the clock.

Global strike: Pentagon Conplan 8022

The march toward possible nuclear catastrophe by intent or by miscalculation, as a consequence of the bold new Washington policy, took on significant new gravity in June 2004, only weeks after the 49 generals and admirals took the highly unusual step of writing to their president. That June, then-defense secretary Rumsfeld approved a top-secret order for the armed forces of the United States to implement something called Conplan 8022, "which provides the president a prompt, global strike capability". The term Conplan is Pentagon shorthand for Contingency Plan. What "contingencies" are Pentagon planners preparing for? A preemptive conventional strike against tiny North Korea or even Iran? Or a full-force preemptive nuclear assault on the last formidable nuclear power not under the thumb of the United States' full-spectrum dominance - Russia? The two words "global strike" are also notable. It's Pentagon-speak to describe a specific preemptive attack that, for the first time since the earliest Cold War days, includes a nuclear option, counter to the traditional US military notion of nuclear weapons being only used in defense to deter attack. Conplan 8022, as has been noted by some, is unlike traditional Pentagon war plans that have in essence been defensive responses to invasion or attack. In concert with the aggressive preemptive 2002 Bush Doctrine, Bush's new Conplan 8022 is offensive. It could be triggered by the mere "perception" of an imminent threat, and carried out by presidential order, without Congress. Given the details about false or faked "perceptions" in the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President about Iraq's threat of weapons of mass destruction in 2003, the new Conplan 8022 suggests a US president might order the missiles against any and every perceived threat or even a potential, unproved threat. In response to Rumsfeld's June 2004 order, General Richard Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, signed the order to make Conplan 8022 operational. Selected nuclear-capable bombers, land- and sea-based missiles, and "information warfare" units have been deployed against unnamed high-value targets in "adversary" countries. Was Iran an adversary country, even though it had never directly attacked the United States? Was North Korea, even though it had never in five decades launched a direct attack on South Korea, let alone on any one else? Is China an "adversary" because it's simply becoming economically too influential? Is Russia now an adversary because it refuses to lie back and accept being made what Zbigniew Brzezinski termed a "vassal state of the American Empire"? Because there has been zero open debate inside the United States about Conplan 8022, there has been virtually no discussion of any of these potentially nuclear-loaded questions. What makes the June 2004 Rumsfeld order even more unsettling to a world that truly had hoped nuclear mushroom clouds had become a threat of the past is that Conplan 8022 contains a significant nuclear-attack component. It's true that the overall number of nuclear weapons in the US military stockpile has been declining since the end of the Cold War. But this is not, it seems, because the US is moving the world back from the brink of nuclear war by miscalculation. The new missile-defense expansion to Poland and Czech Republic is better understood in the context of the remarkable expansion of NATO since 1991. As Putin noted, "NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders ... think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. "On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: Against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?" US bases encircle Russia As Russian strategist and military expert Yevgeny Primakov, a close adviser to Putin, recently noted, NATO was "founded during the Cold War era as a regional organization to ensure the security of US allies in Europe". He added, "NATO today is acting on the basis of an entirely different philosophy and doctrine, moving outside the European continent and conducting military operations far beyond its bounds. NATO ... is rapidly expanding in contravention to earlier accords. The admission of new members to NATO is leading to the expansion of bases that host the US military, air-defense systems, as well as ABM components. Today, NATO member states include not only the Cold War core in Western Europe, commanded by an American. NATO also includes the former Warsaw Pact or Soviet states of Poland, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia, formerly of Yugoslavia. Candidates to join include the Republic of Georgia, Croatia, Albania and Macedonia. Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko has tried aggressively to bring his country into NATO. This is a clear message to Moscow, not surprisingly one it doesn't seem to welcome with open arms. New NATO structures have also been formed while old ones were abolished: the NATO Response Force was launched at the 2002 Prague Summit. In 2003, just after the fall of Baghdad, a major restructuring of the NATO military commands began. The Headquarters of the Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic was abolished. A new command, Allied Command Transformation (ACT), was established in Norfolk, Virginia. ACT is responsible for driving the "transformation" of NATO. By 2007 Washington had signed an agreement with Japan to cooperate on missile-defense development. It was deeply engaged in testing a missile-defense system with Israel. It has now extended its European missile defense to Poland, where the minister of defense is a close friend and ally of Pentagon neo-conservative war-hawks, and to the Czech Republic. NATO has agreed to put the question of Ukraine's and Georgia's bids for membership on a fast track. The Middle East, despite the debacle in Iraq, is being militarized with a permanent network of US bases from Qatar to Iraq and beyond. On February 15, the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee approved a draft, the Orwellian-named NATO Freedom Consolidation Act of 2007, reaffirming US backing for the further enlargement of NATO, including support for Ukraine joining along with Georgia. From the Russian point of view, NATO's eastward expansion since the end of the Cold War has been in clear breach of an agreement between then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and then-US president George H W Bush that allowed for a peaceful unification of Germany. NATO's expansion policy is seen as a continuation of a Cold War attempt to surround and isolate Russia. New bases to guard 'democracy'?An almost unnoticed consequence of Washington's policy since the bombing of Serbia in 1999 has been establishment of an extraordinary network of new US military bases, bases in parts of the world where they seem little justified as a US defensive precaution, given the threat and huge taxpayer expense, let alone other global military commitments. In June 1999, after the bombing of Serbia, US forces began construction of Camp Bondsteel, at the border between Kosovo and Macedonia. It was the linchpin in what was to be a new global network of US bases. Bondsteel put US air power within easy striking distance of the oil-rich Middle East and Caspian Sea, as well as Russia. Camp Bondsteel was at the time the largest US military base built since the Vietnam War, garrisoned with nearly 7,000 troops. The base had been built by the largest US military construction company, Halliburton's KBR. Halliburton's chief executive officer at the time was Dick Cheney. Before the start of the NATO bombing in 1999, the Washington Post matter-of-factly noted, "With the Middle East increasingly fragile, we will need bases and fly-over rights in the Balkans to protect Caspian Sea oil." Camp Bondsteel was but the first of a vast chain of US bases that have been built during this decade. The US military went on to build military bases in Hungary, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania and Macedonia. One of the most important and least mentioned new US bases was in Bulgaria, a former Soviet satellite and now a new NATO member. In a conflict - and in Pentagon-speak there are only "conflicts", not wars, which involve issues of asking the US Congress to declare them officially, and provide just reason - the US military would use the Bezmer base to surge men and materiel toward the front lines. Where? In Russia? The US has been building bases in Afghanistan, too. It built three major US bases in the wake of its occupation of Afghanistan in winter of 2001, at Baghram north of Kabul, the United States' main military logistics center; Kandahar Air Base, in southern Afghanistan; and Shindand Air Base in the western province of Herat. Shindand, the largest US base in Afghanistan, was built some 100 kilometers from the border with Iran. Afghanistan was historically the heart of the British-Russia Great Game, the struggle for control of Central Asia during the 19th and early 20th centuries. British strategy was to prevent Russia at all costs from controlling Afghanistan and thereby threatening Britain's imperial crown jewel, India, and advancing toward a warm-water port for its navy. Afghanistan is also seen by Pentagon planners as highly strategic. It is a platform from which US military might could directly threaten Russia and China as well as Iran and other oil-rich Middle Eastern lands. Little has changed in that respect over more than a century of wars. Afghanistan is in a vital location, straddling South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. Afghanistan also lies along a proposed oil-pipeline route from the Caspian Sea oilfields to the Indian Ocean, where the US oil company Unocal had been in negotiations, together with Halliburton and the since-bankrupt Enron, for exclusive pipeline rights to bring natural gas from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the huge natural-gas power plant at Dabhol near Mumbai. At that same time, the Pentagon came to an agreement with the government of Kyrgyzstan to build a strategically important base there, Manas Air Base at Bishkek's international airport. Manas is not only near Afghanistan; it is also in easy striking distance to Caspian Sea oil and gas, as well as to the borders of both China and Russia. As part of the price of accepting him as an ally in the "war on terror" rather than a foe, Washington extracted an agreement from Pakistan's military dictator, President General Pervez Musharraf, to allow the airport at Jacobabad, about 400km north of Karachi, to be used by the USAF and NATO to support their campaign in Afghanistan. Two other US bases were built at Dalbandin and Pasni. This all is merely a small part of the vast web of US-controlled military bases Washington has been building globally since the "end" of the Cold War. It's becoming clear to much of the rest of the world that Washington might even itself be instigating or provoking wars or conflicts with nations across the world, not merely to control oil, though strategic control of global oil flows had been at the heart of the American Century since the 1920s. That's the real significance of what Vladimir Putin said in Munich. He told the world what it did not want to hear: the American emperor's new clothes did not exist. The emperor was clothed in the naked pursuit of global military control. During the early 1990s, at the end of the Cold War, the government of Russian president Boris Yeltsin had asked Washington for a series of mutual reductions in the size of each superpower's nuclear missile and weapons arsenal. Russian nuclear stockpiles were aging, and Moscow saw little further need to remain armed to its nuclear teeth once the Cold War had ended. Washington clearly saw in this a golden opportunity to go for nuclear primacy, for the first time since the 1950s, when Russia first developed an intercontinental-missile delivery capability for its growing nuclear-weapons arsenal. Nuclear primacy is an aggressive offensive policy. It means that one superpower, the US, would have the possibility to launch a full nuclear first strike at Russia's nuclear sites and destroy enough targets in the first blow that Russia would be crippled from making any effective retaliation. With no credible threat of retaliation, Russia would have no credible nuclear deterrent. It would be at the mercy of the supreme power. Never before in history had the prospect of such ultimate power in the hands of one single nation seemed so near at hand. This stealthy move by the Pentagon for nuclear primacy has, up until now, been carried out in utmost secrecy, disguised amid rhetoric of a USA-Russia "Partnership for Peace". Rather than take advantage of the opportunity to climb down from the brink of nuclear annihilation after the end of the Cold War, Washington turned instead to upgrading its nuclear arsenal, at the same time that it was reducing its numbers. While the rest of the world was still in shock over the events of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration unilaterally moved to rip up its earlier treaty obligations with Russia not to build an anti-missile defense. On December 13, 2001, President Bush announced that the US government was unilaterally abandoning the ABM Treaty with Russia, and committing $8 billion of the 2002 budget to build a national missile-defense system. It was pushed through Congress, promoted as a move to protect US territory from rogue terror attacks, from states including North Korea or Iraq. The "rogue" argument was a fraud, a plausible cover story designed to sneak the policy reversal through without debate in the wake of the September 11 shock. The repeal of the ABM Treaty was little understood outside qualified military circles. In fact, it represented the most dangerous step by the United States toward nuclear war since the 1950s. Washington is going at a fast pace to the goal of total nuclear superiority globally, nuclear primacy. Washington had dismantled its highly lethal MX missiles by 2005. But that's misleading. At the same time, it significantly improved its remaining intercontinental ballistic missiles by installing the MX's high-yield nuclear warheads and advanced re-entry vehicles on its Minuteman ICBMs. The guidance system of the Minuteman has been upgraded to match that of the dismantled MX. The Pentagon began replacing aging ballistic missiles on its submarines with far more accurate Trident II D-5 missiles with new larger-yield nuclear warheads. The US Navy shifted more of its nuclear-missile-launching SSBNs (ships, submersible, ballistic, nuclear) to the Pacific to patrol the blind spot of Russia's early-warning radar net as well as patrolling near China's coast. The USAF completed refitting its B-52 bombers with nuclear-armed cruise missiles believed invisible to Russian air-defense radar. New enhanced avionics on its B-2 stealth bombers gave them the ability to fly at extremely low altitudes avoiding radar detection as well. A vast number of stockpiled weapons is not necessary to the new global power projection. Little-publicized new technology has enabled the US to deploy a "leaner and meaner" nuclear strike force. A case in point is the navy's successful program to upgrade the fuse on the W-76 nuclear warheads sitting atop most US submarine-launched missiles, which makes them able to destroy very hard targets such as ICBM silos. No one has ever presented credible evidence that al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah or any other organization on the US State Department's Terrorist Organization Black List possesses nuclear missiles in hardened underground silos. Aside from the US and perhaps Israel, only Russia and, to a far smaller degree, China have these in any numbers. In 1991 at the presumed end of the Cold War, in a gesture to lower the danger of strategic nuclear miscalculation, the USAF was ordered to remove its fleet of nuclear bombers from Ready Alert status. After 2004 that too changed. Conplan 8022 again put USAF long-range B-52 and other bombers on "Alert" status. The commander of the 8th Air Force stated at the time that his nuclear bombers were in essence "on alert to plan and execute global strikes" on behalf of the US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), based in Omaha, Nebraska. Conplan 8022 included not only long-range nuclear and conventional weapons launched from the US, but also nuclear and other bombs deployed in Europe, Japan and other sites. It gave the US what the Pentagon termed global strike, the ability to hit any point on the Earth or in the sky with devastating force, nuclear as well as conventional. Since the Rumsfeld June 2004 readiness order, STRATCOM has boasted it is ready to execute an attack anywhere on Earth "in half a day or less" from the moment the president gives the order. In the January 24 Financial Times, the US ambassador to NATO, Victoria Nuland, former adviser to Vice President Cheney and wife of a leading Washington neo-conservative war-hawk, declared that the US wanted a "globally deployable military force" that would operate everywhere - from Africa to the Middle East and beyond. It would include Japan and Australia as well as the NATO nations. Nuland added, "It's a totally different animal whose ultimate role will be subject to US desires and adventures." Subject to US desires and adventures? Those were hardly calming words given the record of Nuland's former boss in faking intelligence to justify wars in Iraq and elsewhere. Now, with the deployment of even a crude missile defense, under Conplan 8022, the US would have what Pentagon planners call "escalation dominance" - the ability to win a war at any level of violence, including nuclear war. As some more sober minds have argued, were Russia and China to respond to these US moves with even minimal self-protection measures, the risks of a global nuclear conflagration by miscalculation would climb to levels far beyond any seen even during the Cuban missile crisis or the danger days of the Cold War. Mackinder's nightmare In a few brief years Washington has managed to create the nightmare of Britain's father of geopolitics, Sir Halford Mackinder (1861-1947), the horror scenario feared by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger and other Cold War veterans of US foreign policy who have studied and understood the power calculus of Mackinder. The states of the vast resources-rich and population-rich Eurasian heartland and landmass are building economic and military ties with one another for the first time in history, ties whose driving force is the increasingly aggressive Washington role in the world. The driver of the emerging Eurasian geopolitical cooperation is obvious. China, with the world's largest population and an economy expanding at double digits, urgently needs alliance partners that could protect its energy security. Russia, an energy Goliath, needs secure trade outlets independent of Washington's control to develop and rebuild its tattered economy. These complementary needs form the seed crystal of what Washington and US strategists define as a new Cold War, this one over energy, over oil and natural gas above all. Military might is the currency this time as in the earlier Cold War. By 2006 Moscow and Beijing had clearly decided to upgrade their cooperation with their Eurasian neighbors. They both agreed to turn to a moribund loose organization that they had co-founded in 2001, in the wake of the 1998 Asian financial crisis, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The SCO had highly significant members, geopolitically seen. The SCO includes oil-rich Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan as well as China and Russia. By 2006 Beijing and Moscow began to view the SCO as a nascent counterweight to increasingly arbitrary US power politics. The organization discussed projects of energy cooperation and even military mutual defense. The pressures of an increasingly desperate US foreign policy are forcing an unlikely "coalition of the unwilling" across Eurasia. The potentials of such Eurasian cooperation among China, Kazakhstan and Iran are real enough and obvious. The missing link, however, is the military security that could make it invulnerable, or nearly, to the saber-rattling from Washington and NATO. Only one power on the face of the Earth has the nuclear and military base and know-how able to provide that - Vladimir Putin's Russia.

The Russian Bear sharpens its nuclear teeth

With NATO troops creeping up to Russia's borders on all sides, US nuclear B-52s and ballistic-missile submarines being deployed to strategic sites on Russia's perimeter, and Washington extending its new missile shield from Greenland to the United Kingdom, to Australia, Japan and now even Poland and the Czech Republic, it should be no surprise that the Russian government is responding. Washington planners may have assumed that because the once-mighty Red Army was a shell of its former glory, the state of Russian military preparedness since the end of the Cold War was laughable. But Russia never let go of its one trump card - its strategic nuclear force. During the entire economic chaos of the Yeltsin years, Russia never stopped producing state-of-the art military technology. In May 2003, some months after George W Bush unilaterally ripped up the bilateral Anti-Missile Defense Treaty with Moscow, invaded Afghanistan and bombed Baghdad into subjugation, Russia's president delivered a new message in his annual State of the Union address to the Russian nation. Putin spoke for the first time publicly of the need to modernize Russia's nuclear deterrent by creating new types of weapons, "which will ensure the defense capability of Russia and its allies in the long term". In response to the abrogation of the ABM Treaty and with it START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) II, Russia predictably stopped withdrawing and destroying its SS-18 MIRVed missiles (MIRV stands for multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle). START II had called for a full phase-out of such multiple warheads by both sides by 2007. At that point Russia began to reconfigure its SS-18 MIRV missiles to extend their service life to 2016. Fully loaded SS-18 missiles had a range of 11,000 kilometers. In addition, it redeployed mobile rail-based SS-24 M1 nuclear missiles. In its 2003 budget, the Russian government made funding of its SS-27 or Topol-M single-warhead missiles a priority. And the Defense Ministry resumed test launches of both SS-27 and Topol-M. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov has announced that the military will deploy another 69 silo-based and mobile Topol-M missile systems over the following decade. Just after his Munich speech, Putin announced he had named his old KGB/FSB friend Ivanov to be his first deputy prime minister overseeing the entire military industry. The Russian Defense Ministry reported that as of January 2006, Russia possessed 927 nuclear-delivery vehicles and 4,279 nuclear warheads against 1,255 and 5,966 respectively for the United States. No two other powers on the face of the Earth even came close to these massive overkill capacities. This was the ultimate reason all US foreign policy, military and economic, since the end of the Cold War had covertly had as endgame the complete deconstruction of Russia as a functioning state. Last April, the Russian military tested the K65M-R, a new missile designed to penetrate US missile-defense systems. It was part of testing and deploying a uniform warhead for both land- and sea-based ballistic missiles. The new missile was hypersonic and capable of changing its flight path. Four months earlier, Russia successfully tested its Bulava ICBM, a naval version of the Topol-M. It was launched from one of its Typhoon-class ballistic-missile submarines in the White Sea, traveling 1,600km before hitting a dummy target successfully on the Kamchatka Peninsula. The Bulava missiles were to be installed on Borey-class nuclear submarines beginning next year. During a personal inspection of the first regiment of mobile Topol-M ICBMs in December, Putin told reporters, "This is a significant step forward in improving our defense capabilities. "Maintaining a strategic balance," he continued, "will mean that our strategic deterrent forces should be able to guarantee the neutralization of any potential aggressor, no matter what modern weapons systems he possesses." Putin clearly did not have France in mind when he referred to the unnamed "he". Putin had personally given French President Jacques Chirac a tour of one of Russia's missile facilities the previous January, where Putin explained the latest Russian missile advances. "He knows what I am talking about," Putin told reporters afterward, referring to Chirac's grasp of the weapon's significance. Putin also did not have North Korea, China, Pakistan or India in mind, nor Britain with its aging nuclear capacity, not even Israel. The only power surrounding Russia with weapons of mass destruction was its old Cold War foe - the United States. The commander of Russia's strategic rocket forces, General Nikolai Solovtsov, was more explicit. Commenting on the successful test of the K65M-R at Russia's Kapustin Yar missile test site last April, he declared that US plans for a missile-defense system "could upset strategic stability. The planned scale of the United States' deployment of a ... missile-defense system is so considerable that the fear that it could have a negative effect on the parameters of Russia's nuclear deterrence potential is quite justified." Put simply, he referred to the now-open US quest for full-spectrum dominance - nuclear primacy. A new Armageddon is in the making. The unilateral military agenda of Washington has predictably provoked a major effort by Russia to defend itself. The prospects of a global nuclear conflagration by miscalculation increase by the day. At what point might a US president, God forbid, decide to order a preemptive full-scale nuclear attack on Russia to prevent Russia from rebuilding a state of mutual deterrence? The new Armageddon is not exactly the one George W Bush's Christian fanatics pray for as they dream of their Rapture. It is an Armageddon in which Russia and the United States would irradiate the planet and, perhaps, end human civilization in the process. Ironically, oil, in the context of Washington's bungled Iraq war and soaring world oil prices after 2003, has enabled Russia to begin the arduous job of rebuilding its collapsed economy and its military capacities. Putin's Russia is no longer a beggar-thy-neighbor former superpower. It is using its oil weapon and rebuilding its nuclear ones. Bush's United States is a hollowed-out, debt-ridden economy engaged on using its last card, its vast military power, to prop up the dollar and its role as the world's sole superpower. Putin has obviously realized that his newfound "partner in prayer", George W, has a large black spot hiding the secrets of his heart. It reminded of a popular country-and-western ballad from the late Tammy Wynette, "Cowboys don't shoot straight like they used to. They look you in the eye and lie with their white hats on." That's certainly the case with the famous cowboy from Crawford, Texas, in his dealings with Vladimir Putin and the rest of the world.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/IC01Ag01.html

F William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order and the soon-to-be published Seeds of Destruction: The Dark Side of Gene Manipulation. This article was drawn from his new book, in preparation, on the history of the American Century. He may be reached through his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

United Nations Violence

2007-02-15T10:49:00.000-08:00

UN Peacekeeping Paramilitarism

by Stephen Lendman Feb 15 2007

The world community calls them "Blue Helmets" or "peacekeepers," and the UN defines their mission as "a way to help countries torn by conflict create conditions for sustainable peace" by implementing and monitoring post-conflict peace processes former combatants have agreed to under provisions of the UN Charter. The Charter empowers the Security Council to take collective action to maintain international peace and security that includes authorizing peacekeeping operations provided a host country agrees to have them under Rules of Engagement developed and approved by all parties. At that point, the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations enlists member nations to provide force contingents to be deployed once the Security Council gives final approval. Once in place, Blue Helmets are supposed to help in various ways including monitoring the withdrawal of combatants, building confidence, enforcing power-sharing agreements, providing electoral support, aiding reconstruction, upholding the rule of law, maintaining order, and helping efforts toward economic and social development. Above all, "peacekeeping" missions are supposed to be benevolent interventions. They're sent to conflict areas to restore order, maintain peace and security and provide for the needs of people during a transitional period until a local government takes over on its own. Far too often, however, things don't turn out that way, and Blue Helmets end up either creating more conflict than its resolution or being counterproductive or ineffective. In the first instance, peacekeepers become paramilitary enforcers for an outside authority. In the second, they do more harm than good because they've done nothing to ameliorate conditions or improve the situation on the ground and end up more a hindrance than a help. This article focuses mostly on the former using Haiti as the primary case study example after reviewing peacekeeping operations briefly in six other countries. In each case, the examples chosen show people on the ground as helpless victims of imperial exploitation (usually US-directed) with UN Blue Helmets used by outside powers for social control and domination, not keeping the peace. First, a brief account of other failed "peacekeeping" missions is reviewed after an overview of the UN, its founding purpose and how the US dominates and undermines the world body for its own interests.

The UN - Its Founding Purpose and Mission

The UN was established in 1945 after WW II when 50 original member countries signed its Charter in San Francisco. Today 192 nations are member states. Its founding Charter states its purpose and mandate is: "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war....reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights....(support) equal rights of men and women....of nations large and small....establish conditions under which justice....can be maintained....promote social progress....practice tolerance and live in peace (and promote) economic and social advancement of all peoples." From its founding date till now, the world body failed on all counts even though some of its agencies (like UNICEF, WFP, UNHCR and UNESCO) have a history of providing important services in areas of health, education, food assistance, aiding refugees, social development and more. Nonetheless, the UN is hamstrung by a serious obstacle. Its dominant member is the US that undermines the world body's authority and effectiveness for its own imperial interests. It does it through its Security Council veto power, by withholding dues, disengaging from UN activities or just muscling or bribing member states to get its way. It gets away with it by being the world's leading economic, political and military superpower beholden to no interests but its own. It takes full advantage, and for over half a century used the UN as its foreign policy instrument or rendered it ineffective by inaction or obstruction. If allowed to be a voice for all member states, the UN could be a powerful one for global democratic governance and promotion of social equity and equal justice. Instead one dominant nation's veto power trumped the will of all others causing a shameful history of UN failure and ineffectiveness. As long as a single nation's monkey wrench can jam its works, the UN will never fulfill its founding purpose. It's apparent in its Charter-mandated peacekeeping role. If the UN functioned as a neutral international body pursuing its founding mission, it would always act to establish and maintain peace in every conflict area. It doesn't because its dominant member won't let it. So it failed to act when Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975 slaughtering hundreds of thousands in a secretly US-authorized aggression including the arming and supporting of Indonesian military TNI forces. It stood by again after the East Timorese voted by referendum for independence in 1999 after which TNI forces attacked and slaughtered thousands more. The UN did nothing during South Africa's border wars and invasion of Namibia in the 1960s and 70s and allowed a 36 year civil war to go on in Guatemala following the CIA fomented coup in 1954 ousting the country's democratically elected leader Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. It ignored a succession of oppressive military and civilian governments still ruling the country. It allowed them to compile the hemisphere's worst human rights record even after the UN brokered a Peace Accord formally ending the civil conflict mainly against the country's indigenous Mayan majority slaughtering 200,000 of them. It still ignores the government's shameless human rights abuses in a country Amnesty International calls a "land of injustice." But it happens to be one the US considers a close ally, and that's all that counts as Washington has the final say on most everything at the UN. These are a few of the many examples of UN failures to address injustice throughout the world on every continent. It belies discredited former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's standing up for the Security Council claiming it has primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security. It can't even prevent human rights abuses because it's mostly a talking shop, and the world body overall is a wholly owned subsidiary of the nation where its headquartered. It uses it to pursue its imperial agenda knowing no nation will dare try stopping it most often. And when the threat arises, Washington ignores it to do what it pleases like attacking Iraq without required Security Council approval and threatening now to extend the conflict to Iran on blatantly false cooked up charges that smell as bad as the WMD ones about its occupied neighbor.

UN Peacekeeping Operations

UN peacekeeping operations began in 1948 with its first one ever UNTSO mission to monitor the Arab-Israeli first of two brief failed truces in Israel's "War of Independence" beginning in June, 1948. The operation is still ongoing, peace was never achieved, the UN plays no active role, and UNTSO wastes money and takes up space observing and reporting what it wishes selectively while Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have total control of everything on the ground. UNTSO ineffectiveness shows in the way the IDF continues repressing and assaulting defenseless Palestinians while the UN gets out of their way functioning as little more than worthless window dressing. In 2006 it had a meager staff of 371 military and civilian observers and a budget of $30 million, all of which could have been better spent elsewhere on a real mission for a real purpose if there are any. That inauspicious start was symbolic of what lay ahead in 61 total peacekeeping missions undertaken to date ignoring all the other conflicts it should have intervened in but didn't. Currently 16 missions are ongoing as of year end 2006 plus two other small special political and/or peacebuilding ones with 113 countries contributing 99,817 military troops, observers, police and civilians budgeted for the 12 months through June, 2007 at $4.75 billion under names like UNIFIL in Lebanon created in 1978 for the same purpose it's still there for and now enlarged following Israel's withdrawal from the country last summer after its horrific invasion and assault weeks earlier.

UNIFIL Blue Helmets in Lebanon

Israel attacked and invaded Lebanon last July 12 following Hezbollah's cross-border incursion that was used as a pretext to ignite pre-planned aggression against the country and its people. The result was mass killing, crippling destruction, and a huge refugee problem all without Israel achieving its planned aim - to destroy Hezbollah resistance in South Lebanon. It proved too much for the world's fifth most powerful military equipped with state-of-the-art weaponry courtesy of the most powerful Washington-based one. UNIFIL was established to restore and maintain peace in South Lebanon one week after Israel's invasion of the country in March, 1978. It's been there since including throughout the period from 1982 when Israel again invaded and remained until withdrawing its forces in May, 2000. Despite its mandate, UNIFIL never established peace and security and did little more than take up space allowing the IDF free reign to control everything on the ground along with its proxy Christian South Lebanon Army acting as paramilitary enforcer thugs of a largely Shia Muslim population. "Proxy" describes UNIFIL's current role in Lebanon that has little to do with keeping peace and everything to do with being NATO's Israel enforcer. In that role, it can engage Hezbollah in confrontation if it chooses and do Israel's fighting and dying for it. It also represents a continuation of nearly three decades of "peacekeeping" failure in South Lebanon. The current one won't work any better than all efforts preceding it because UNIFIL is beholden to Israel, the US and NATO and will follow their mandate having nothing to do with peace and stability and everything to do with imperial control and dominance. The people of South Lebanon know all about UNIFIL's "benefits," but you won't hear them say thank you.

UNAMIR in Rwanda

UNAMIR was set up to help implement the Arusha Accords in 1993 to ease tensions, secure the capital, and monitor a ceasefire and security agreement prior to the outbreak of ethnic slaughter that began after CIA surface-to-air missiles shot down the aircraft carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundi President Cyprien Ntaryamira in April, 1994. That "unfortunate" plane accident made way for US-trained Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) Major-General Paul Kagame to take power so Washington could use the country as a base to pursue its greater prize in resource-rich Congo (DRC). It didn't matter that hundreds of thousands died and millions in Congo where war subsided, but instability remains because warring sides and Western interests still contest for control of the country's immense resources. Canadian General Romeo Dallaire led a UN 400 troop contingent in Rwanda, got no additional force help, mostly stood aside as thousands were slaughtered, and was only authorized to act in self-defense meaning his orders were do nothing. He left the country in August, 1994 followed by the departure of his replacements when UNAMIR's mandate ended in 1996 long after the damage was done. The result - a dismal mission failure in UN peacekeeping with hundreds of thousands dead because Blue Helmets were told to ignore it.

UNIMIK in Kosovo

UNMIK was created in 1999 for war-torn Kosovo as an interim civilian administration to remain in place until the Serbian province's fate is decided. Its stated mission includes maintaining the rule of law, protecting human rights, coordinating humanitarian and disaster relief, supporting reconstruction efforts, and assuring refugees and displaced persons can return to their homes. As always, stated goals are noble, but results shameful - another mission failure staying longer will just exacerbate, not ameliorate. The mission language hides the grim history of the 1990s Balkan wars. They destroyed a nation making its new pieces easy pickings for US and Western imperial exploitation and control. It had nothing to do with removing a "bad guy" Serbian leader and everything to do with installing new leadership more responsive to Western interests - meaning unconditional surrender to imperial authority. The US-led 1999 NATO assault was called an humanitarian intervention. It's real aim was to finish breaking one nation into six more easily handled ones plus deciding the fate of Serbia's Kosovo province to be dealt with later. In Kosovo, Washington and NATO collaborated with Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) paramilitary thugs ignoring their connection to organized crime. They got free reign to commit terrorist attacks including ethnic cleansing of Serbs and other minorities in the province. The US-led war caused massive population displacement, not the other way around as news reports claimed. Nor did the war bring Kosovo peace and stability. Far from it. The province is part of Serbia, and Serbs want to keep it that way. But it looks like they won't as Albanians in the majority have other ideas with assurance their US ally will help them. After the war, the former Serbian province got semi-autonomy as a UN protectorate with its final status nearly decided by the world body intending to make Kosovo semi-independent because the US wants it that way. It doesn't matter what Serbs want for territory they're about to lose. The scheme was unveiled on January 26 to the six-member contact group of major powers including the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy and Russia all of whom approve except Russia that remains skeptical enough to try to scuttle the plan. It supports Serbia that rejects the deal but has little power to stop it unless Russia vetoes it in the Security Council with final say on the matter. That verdict isn't in yet, but some things are clear. Whatever Kosovo's nominal disposition, Serbs will be losers and US and Western imperial control will continue by virtue of a proxy repressive UNIMIK/NATO Blue Helmet contingent remaining in place for an indefinite time likely to be lengthy. It's how imperial management works. People lose out so hegemons can win, and when it involves the US the price paid is big and painful.

MONUC in the Democratic Republic of Congo

MONUC began its operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 1999 and is the largest peacekeeping force now in place but one hardly adequate (if it mattered) for a country the size of Western Europe. MONUC was authorized to monitor a ceasefire agreement between waring sides as well as be involved in the usual kinds of things peacekeeping entails. After years of unresolved conflict, few places anywhere need peace and stability more than DRC in the wake of the country's long-running war taking 4 million or more lives causing immeasurable human misery and harm. All along, the UN was inept, counterproductive and out of the loop. It was more part of the problem than its solution. It knew all about legal and illegal arms trading fueling conflict but didn't stop it because its controlling members did the selling like they always do in war zones everywhere. In addition, Blue Helmets weren't where most needed and didn't help when able because direct orders said not to. Kofi Annan was part of the problem as he was as UN head of peacekeeping in 1994 allowing Rwandans to be slaughtered when his efforts at least might have ameliorated conditions. Instead, he kept his mouth shut and head down, refusing to act as he later did as Secretary-General serving imperial interests he was beholden to. That meant ignoring desperate people in Congo and all other warring regions. The DRC is a major one even though things are mostly quieted down - for now. The country's cursed by being the likely most resource-rich piece of real estate in the world (except for not having large oil reserves). That makes it a key target for imperial exploitation and control with Congo's people suffering just by being there. Sending Blue Helmets to keep peace is just a fig leaf hiding the dark side of the conflict and who stands to gain with US interests always topping the list and acting as guarantor nothing interferes with what Washington has in mind. So all parties ignore the situation on the ground, and Blue Helmets just make it worse. The evidence shows UN forces engaged in sex trafficking, using children as prostitutes. They abused young girls and got away with it because MONUC officials took no preventive action in spite of pious claims decrying it. What's common in Congo happens everywhere with so-called "peacekeepers" acting as thuggish enforcers for imperial powers. Their mission is "keeping the rabble in line" with free reign to do it harshly as long as it's kept under wraps. What happens in Congo goes on in Kosovo, Liberia, Sudan (discussed below) and Haiti also discussed in detail shortly. It's an ugly story of crackdown, repression or indifference hidden under the cover of "peacekeeping."

UNMIS in Sudan

UNMIS was established in 2005 to implement the January, 2005 Comprehensive Peace Treaty between the Sudanese government and Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army. It ended the protracted North-South 22 year civil war killing and uprooting millions in one of the continent's most costly wars, but not freeing the nation from conflict still ongoing in Darfur. UNMIS has authority to administer there once hostilities subside, waring sides allow them entry and agree to cooperate, and Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir decides if he's willing to risk a regional occupying force hostile to his interests. Currently a 7,000 force African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) operates in Darfur that's pathetically slim for an area the size of France in a country the size of Western Europe. The Sudanese government is justifiably reluctant for Blue Helmets to come knowing how they behave elsewhere. It also knows what fuels the conflict and what interests the US and West in the area. Like most everywhere, it's about valuable resources, and in Darfur it's mainly oil as it is in Somalia where Washington is involved in another proxy war with US supportive air and ground involvement this time using an Ethiopian force to be supplemented or replaced by other regional country contingent "peacekeepers." The Darfur conflict is falsely portrayed in Western media reports as atrocities committed by Arab Jan jawid militias supported by the Khartoum government against black African people. The truth is all parties involved are indigenous Arabic-speaking black Sunni Muslims involved in intertribal fighting over increasingly scare water and grazing rights in an area hard hit by draught and famine. If Blue Helmets come in, they'll make things worse because they'll be sent for imperial control further harming the people enduring more than they can already handle.

MINUSTAH in Haiti - Our Main Focus

Since European settlers first arrived in Haiti 500 years ago, this nation experienced an almost unparalleled legacy of colonial violence and exploitation. Even when the country gained freedom from France on January 1, 1804, it lay in ruins. Its plantations and sugar works were burned and large parts of its cities were rubble from many years of conflict. It cost the nation half its population of former slaves on top of its indigenous population nearly exterminated by Spanish Conquistadors beginning with the arrival of Columbus. Things got no better when Spain kept the Eastern two-thirds of the island in what's now the Dominican Republic leaving the Western third for French colonization beginning in the early 1600s. France brought over black African slaves controlling it till after the 1789 French Revolution that inspired Haitians to wage theirs for the same freedoms French people got briefly. Led by Toussaint L'Overture, they prevailed establishing the first free independent black republic anywhere on their New Years liberation day in 1804. It was short-lived as France regained control holding it till America took over later solidifying its regional lock when Woodrow Wilson sent in Marines in 1915 to protect US investments, doing it in typical US fashion - at the barrel of a gun. Nineteen years of brutal exploitation followed with massacres like the kinds seen in Haiti today. The worst of them was in 1929 when US Marines slaughtered 264 protesting peasants in Les Cayes. There were also smaller incursions, forced labor, and aerial bombing years before the Nazis' infamous attack on Spain's Republican government at Guernica supporting opposition fascist dictator, Francisco Franco. Except for a decade of relief under Jean-Bertand Aristide and Rene Preval, nothing improved for Haitians after US occupiers left in 1934. Aristide and Preval brought hope in spite of great Western constraint imposed on them. It didn't last courtesy of US Marines again ending a brief grace period of relief and deliverance for people having precious little of it for 500 years. In its wake, MINUSTAH was established by UN Security Council vote on April 30, 2004 two months after the US-led coup ousted President Aristide now in forced exile in South Africa. From inception, it's mission was flawed as it had no right being there in the first place. Blue Helmets, in principle, are deployed for peace and stability even though they seldom bring it. In this case, peacekeepers have may been illegally sent for the first time ever supporting and enforcing a coup d'etat against a democratically elected president instead of staying out of it or coming to back his right to office. The US runs everything in Haiti, and MINUSTAH became its repressive arm against Haitian people wanting their President back and their freedoms under him restored. The result is no surprise. MINUSTAH's mission is disastrous, disgraceful and in violation of the rule of law including UN's own Charter as explained below. Before it began, the UN lied claiming Aristide was less than democratically reelected in 2000 with under 10% of Haitians participating. UN officials further implied his Fanmi Lavalas party manipulated results allowing him to win. The truth was otherwise showing Aristide won with a 92% majority and a turnout of around 62% of eligible voters or a figure exceeding that in most US elections. The International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES) suggested turnout was even higher, but mainstream reporting never lets facts conflict with official US government versions of truth that hide it when it isn't the kind it wants. The line on Haiti came from the US State Department's affiliated Agency for International Development (USAID) claiming the opposition boycotted the election and Aristide won by default with a low voter turnout. This got reported as anti-Aristide black propaganda contradicting mass-Haitian support for a beloved leader twice elected the country's President. Haitians demand his return but won't get it as long as the US remains in charge.
Washington will ignite a firestorm if he tries coming setting off the kind of ugliness leading to what happened in February, 2004 that repeated similar events in September, 1991 after Aristide's first election. The result for Haitians is nightmarish courtesy of the Bush administration with complicit Security Council support in the form of Blue Helmet "peacekeepers" enforcing their kind of peace. They're on the ground along with mobilized death squads, otherwise known as the hated Haitian National Police (PNH), acting as a main duel proxy force serving their masters in Washington. They've done it by destroying all democratic freedoms in a country subjugated for 500 years under outside authority or one imposed on them from within. In 1990, Haitians hoped it ended when they elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide President with 67% of the vote. He took office in February, 1991, but his tenure was short-lived. It ended in September by the first of two US-instigated coups removing him from office for a more compliant military ruler beholden to Washington and its capital interests. Aristide returned to Haiti in 1994 regaining nominal power through a deal Clinton officials arranged. It included a largely US-led UN peacekeeping force remaining until 1999 to assure political and economic continuity by IMF-imposed neoliberal structural adjustment policy diktats of privatizations, debt serving and cuts in vitally needed social services. Under these conditions and with little financial support when he tried going around them, Aristide governed like a social democrat compiling an impressive record given the constraints on him. Under Haitian law, he was unable to succeed himself in 1996, but his ally Rene Preval ran for President and won with an 88% majority. Aristide then ran again in 2000 winning big as explained above. From then until 2004, Aristide instituted a host of important programs in areas of health, education, justice and human rights. He did it by maneuvering around the kinds of harsh dictates imposed on him out of Washington. It led to his second ouster reinstituting a US-directed reign of terror with MINUSTAH Blue Helmet proxies in the lead implementing harsh repression still ongoing and unaddressed by a world community mindful of conditions but turning a blind eye or playing a supportive role. Blue Helmets do this everywhere, but it gets no worse than in Haiti. It's the poorest country in the hemisphere, conditions continue getting worse, people are suffering, and MINUSTAH is there to keep it that way, not bring peace, security, stability or freedom to people desperately needing it. It's all about the rules of imperial management Washington forces on all nations but especially ones with strategically important resources, markets or in the case of Haiti cheap labor. Haiti has lots of it, and it's some of the cheapest in the world. It's an offshore US manufacturer's paradise where many garment and other workers earn as little as 12 cents an hour or near-slave wages. It's far below the poverty level even in Haiti, and after transportation and other expenses an average Haitian worker earns around $6 a week for those able to get any work in a country plagued by high unemployment running as high as 50% and at times much higher. During his tenure, President Aristide alleviated this and much more in spite of great constraints on him. He did it with scant outside help in spite of overwhelming pressures from Washington not to do anything affecting capital interests. With him gone and reelected President Rene Preval hamstrung under foreign occupation masquerading as "peacekeepers," Haitians have lost everything. Conditions have never been worse, and it goes on daily in Haiti's bloodstained streets patrolled by MINUSTAH, PNH and militarized gangs of enforcers with license to kill and brutalize freely. The Western media ignore it in a country the US controls as a de facto colony using violence for social control just like in Iraq with its own and proxy Iraqi forces. Guatemalan UN Special Envoy Edmond Mulet calls it needing to "liberate" neighborhoods from "thugs, criminals, gangs (and) drug dealers." He characterizes indiscriminate killing of unarmed civilians as "collateral damage" with UN forces coming "under attack (from gangs in Cite Soleil)." What he won't address is MINUSTAH'S role as enforcer to make Haiti safe for predatory capitalism with harsh repression the method of choice to do it. It's aim is to destroy all vestiges of democratic Lavalas and Jean-Bertrand Aristide's influence, but it resulted in mass-people resistance on the streets protesting their plight and demanding restitution of their rights as free people. Their answer is armed attacks and regular assaults. It goes on daily with punishing effects against helpless people. They're led by Blue Helmet thugs attacking Haitians in impoverished areas like Cite Soleil, Bel Air, Solino and elsewhere indiscriminately killing men, women and children. They work with PNH enforcers incarcerating or murdering Aristide supporters and advocates for freedom and justice, forcing many others underground or to flee the country even after Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas party was effectively destroyed.
Before Preval's reelection last February, MINUSTAH helped reinstitute Haiti's brutal and hated former military that Aristide disbanded and put Haiti again at the mercy of predatory international lending agencies. It also worked with the so-called Interim Government of Haiti (IGH) under US-installed puppet prime minister Gerard Latortue ending Aristide's social programs and returning the country to capital interests with lots of infused cash ending up in the pockets of the interim government Transparency International (TI) called the most corrupt in the world, but not enough to bother its US boss looking the other way and ignoring it. The IGH even locked up dissenters and emptied prisons of real criminals for service in the PNH. It also reconstituted Haiti's military and allowed private paramilitary gangs to operate as brutish enforcers of their own defenseless people. It's gone on since the 2004 coup in splendid fashion through bloody street crackdowns including massacres against people protesting their plight in a country returned to serfdom under repressive overlords. Haiti is short on law, order, justice and freedom and long on paramilitary thuggishness keeping things that way including the private paramilitary ones like the Little Machete Army that was implicated in the July 6, 2006 Grand Ravine massacre of more than 20 people along with burning scores of houses in an act of pure savagery. It was after the August 21, 2005 slaughter in a Grand Ravine soccer field in front of 5000 fans when as many as 50 people were shot or hacked to death with machetes by PNH thugs and red-shirted killers. A recent horrific incident happened in the early morning hours of December 22, 2006 in Cite Soleil when UN Blue Helmets assaulted the community killing more than 30 people with some reports claiming much higher numbers. It happened in random mass shooting striking people everywhere including in their homes with bullets easily penetrating paper-thin walls. The UN claimed it was after a young man named Belony, supposedly the head of a kidnapping gang, but the story is pure "baloney" like all other MINUSTAH ones. It's UN's way to justify repression and killings saying it's targeting bandits that are really ordinary Haitians protesting their misery or who happen to be in the line of fire that's deliberately indiscriminate as an added form of terror. Disturbingly, President Rene Preval apparently approved the December 22 operation and now has blood on his hands to answer for. He likely knew it's purpose was to punish an impoverished community that put 10,000 people on the streets a few days earlier demonstrating for the return of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and condemning a US-directed militarized occupation of their country. Video footage and eye witnesses captured and verified the retaliatory response on the streets with unarmed civilians shot by random gunfire including from helicopter gunships. At first the UN denied it but finally admitted what video footage and digital photos showed conclusively. They also showed wounded and dying with no medical help on the scene and people left to bleed to death on the streets or in their homes.
This assault was like an earlier one against Cite Soleil on July 6, 2005 when UN forces attacked the city with hundreds of heavily armed troops using M-50s and 60s mounted on armored personnel vehicles. It also used high-powered telescopic rifles for accuracy in singling out targeted dissenters for assassination and a type of gattling gun firing armor-piercing bullets believed to be depleted uranium tipped to slice through metal like butter. This time about 70 people were shot indiscriminately from thousands of rounds of ammunition fired. Again those hit were left to bleed to death unattended on the streets or in their homes. A more recent documented incident happened in Cite Soleil on January 23, 2007 with MINUSTAH forces again randomly shooting for hours including from helicopters while people ran for their lives or were gunned down indiscriminately as they did. No accurate count of casualties is known so far, and the number killed may never be known as Blue Helmets often remove bodies to conceal the extent of their handiwork. Another attack followed on January 24 with MINUSTAH acknowledging it killed six people and wounded others in the same targeted community. Haitians won't ever be free of this until peacekeepers leave, Blue Helmet terrorism ends and people can choose their own leaders, free from outside control, or not live under ones imposed on them.
For now, that seems light years away, and all reports out of Haiti are grim including a January 23 one by the National Bishops' Justice and Peace Commission (JILAP), a human rights commission of Haiti's Roman Catholic church. It reported at least 539 people died violently in Port-au-Prince alone in the three month period ending December 31, 2006 with the true number likely higher as it only counted dead bodies on the streets. Most of the victims were in impoverished communities like Cite Soleil, Grand Ravine, Martissant and Bolosse, and the main cause of death was from gunshot wounds. JILAP also attributed most of the violence to MINUSTAH and PNH with most deaths just local residents in targeted areas. Other violence was blamed on street gangs like the one led by the Little Machete Army that may have murdered Haitian independent journalist Jean Remy Badiau in Martissant because he "dared practice journalism in a country where the press (today) is never free." Sadly, Haitians have no freedom because the extent of occupation-led terror is greater than Haiti's ever had in its 200 year history as a sovereign state. It amounts to collective punishment of an impoverished people living under US-imposed police state type daily killings, massacres, rapes, arbitrary arrests, mass incarcerations, beatings and horrific immiseration of millions of people defenseless against it. It also includes human trafficking of women and children for forced prostitution and men and women for forced labor amounting to chattel slavery. Additional thousands of men have been forcibly taken to the Dominican Republic and other regional countries to work for wages so low they're called "sugar slaves." Still more abuse came out in the September, 2006 Lancet reported study conducted by Wayne State University, School of Social Work researchers Athena Kolbe and Dr. Royce Hutson. They exposed and documented massive human rights violations in Haiti under the puppet Latortue government using random Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinate sampling of 1260 households and 5720 individuals. 90.7% of them were interviewed using a structured questionnaire by trained interviewers to learn about their experiences since Aristide's ouster.
The study findings estimated 8,000 people were murdered and about 35,000 women (over half under 18)sexually assaulted in the greater Port-au-Prince area between February, 2004 and December, 2005. 21% of killings were attributed to the PNH, 13% to the demobilized army and another 13% to anti-Aristide paramilitary gangs like the Little Machete Army. Known criminals were the worst sex offenders, but officers from the HNP accounted for 13.8% of assaults and armed anti-Lavalas groups another 10.6%. The report also documented kidnappings, extrajudicial detentions, physical assaults other than rape, death threats, physical threats and threats of sexual violence against helpless people. The report concluded that "crime and systematic abuse of human rights were common in Port-au-Prince" involving criminals but also "political actors and UN (Blue Helmet) soldiers." It also stressed an overwhelming need on the ground for attention to "legal, medical, psychological, and economic consequences of widespread human rights abuses and crime."
The study ended in December, 2005, but the same abuses go on daily in Haitian communities around Port-au-Prince and elsewhere in the country. It's a picture of UN failure and its top officials and Secretary-General corrupted and criminally complicit with its authorized missions' worst crimes and abuses going on everywhere. It also shows the world body as a servant of power, defiling its founding mandate and damning the poor and weak to pay for its failure to protect them. Nowhere are things worse than in Haiti, and nowhere are UN representatives more culpable starting at the top where the buck stops with its former Secretary-General Kofi Annan. His tenure ended in December as it began - in disgrace but whose record went unreported because he served power interests well who'll now reward him in his new endeavors. Haitians hoped things might not be this way last February 7 when they reelected Rene Preval their President in an electoral process orchestrated, controlled and rigged by the US-installed puppet government but not enough to override the will of the people. For the first time in two years, desperate Haitians had reason to celebrate with a leader again in charge who once served their needs as President. But nothing is ever simple in Haiti, and long knives in Washington were out to undermine and destabilize Preval's rule from its outset or simply work around him and ignore it. The result to date is capital rules the country, and Rene Preval has little to show for his first year in office. Haitians continue suffering, and 9,000 repressive Blue Helmets, PNH and other paramilitaries are on the ground keeping it that way. It affects the lives of helpless people in ways beyond brute force and economic depravation. Blue Helmet attacks in Cite Soleil severely damaged the community's public water system as random gunfire hit pipelines and a water tower. It forced area residents to walk long distances with heavy buckets for what's unavailable close by while private speculators truck in drinking water for sale at prices Cite Soleil's half million residents can't afford. It's one more part of marketplace rule leaving most Haitians out of it with no resources to participate. The UN peacekeeping mandate expires on February 15, but Haitians won't see the end of it. The Security Council is about to extend the mission with disagreement over its length that comes up for review every six months. Before leaving office, Kofi Annan recommended a year's extension, but unanimity hasn't yet been reached by Security Council members. When it is, it won't reflect the peoples' will demanding Blue Helmets leave that's loudly heard on the streets and ignored as it always is. Protests and demonstrations are on the capital's streets all the time, but a major one happened on February 7 as well as in six other Haitian cities and many around the world in solidarity. They dramatically dispelled the UN's false assertions that Lavalas is dead. It lives, it's vibrant, and it puts a lie to UN Envoy Edmond Mulet's claim that "the issue of former President Aristide is not present anymore....in Haiti....and his (Fanmi Lavalas) movement is very much divided, weakened." The date marked the 16th anniversary of Jean-Bertrand Aristide's first inauguration as Haiti's first elected President in 1991 and 21st anniversary of the end of the hated Duvalier father-son dictatorship in 1986. Tens of thousands of Fanmi Lavalas supporters took to the streets peacefully to protest their occupation and violence from it. They called for the release of all political prisoners and demanded return of those in forced exile starting with their former President deposed on February 29, 2004. Protestors joined with them in solidarity in 53 cities around the world on five continents against Blue Helmet massacres in an "International Day in Solidarity with the Haitian People." On the same day, protesters went to Haiti's UN heavily guarded Port-au-Prince military headquarters demanding Aristide's return and confronting soldiers with shouts of "Down with the UN." Hundreds were back the following day repeating their chants and risking the kind of retaliation they've come to expect before. They got their answer on February 9 when hundreds of UN peacekeepers again raided Cite Soleil before dawn continuing their ritualized crackdown and retaliation against courageous people resistance. It's made Blue Helmets a hated symbol of imperial repression and all the terror from it. For Haitian people, it's just the latest chapter in their 500 year struggle never losing hope one day they'll be free at last. No people deserve it more than do Haitians.

See Also:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/31/144231

http://www.haitiaction.net/News/JS/9_19_6/9_19_6.html

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/02/12/news/CB-GEN-Haiti-Lancet-Study.php

A New Cold War

2007-02-15T08:18:00.000-08:00

February 15, 2007

Giants meet to counter US power

Jeremy Page in Delhi

India, China and Russia account for 40 per cent of the world’s population, a fifth of its economy and more than half of its nuclear warheads. Now they appear to be forming a partnership to challenge the US-dominated world order that has prevailed since the end of the Cold War. Foreign ministers from the three emerging giants met in Delhi yesterday to discuss ways to build a more democratic “multipolar world”. It was the second such meeting in the past two years and came after an unprecedented meeting between their respective leaders, Manmohan Singh, Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin, during the G8 summit in St Petersburg in July. It also came only four days after Mr Putin stunned Western officials by railing against American foreign policy at a security conference in Munich.

The foreign ministers, Pranab Mukherjee, Li Zhao Xing and Sergei Lavrov, emphasised that theirs was not an alliance against the United States. It was, “on the contrary, intended to promote international harmony and understanding”, a joint communiqué stated. Their formal agenda covered issues ranging from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East and North Korea to energy security, nuclear non-proliferation and trade. The subtext, however, was clear: how to use their growing economic and political muscle to prevent Washington from tackling such issues alone. “In the long term, they feel that the whole structure of international relations has to shift in their direction,” said Vinod C. Khanna, of the Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi. “What has happened is that quite independently they’ve reacted very similarly to recent international events.” Mr Mukherjee said: “We agreed that cooperation rather than confrontation should govern approaches to regional and global affairs. We also agreed on the importance of the UN.” Diplomats say that it is premature to talk of a strategic axis between the world’s largest and two most populous nations because they still have more in common with the West than with each other. Delhi was close to Moscow in Soviet times, but has forged a new friendship with Washington. Chinese relations were soured by its border wars with India in 1962 and the Soviet Union in 1969, and by its arms sales to Pakistan. Russia appears keener than China or India to challenge American hegemony. But there has been a convergence of interests as each struggles to make the transition from a command economy to free markets. Since 2003 they have found further common ground in opposing the US-led invasion of Iraq.

One area of agreement is opposition to outside interference in separatist conflicts in Chechnya, the northeast of India and the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang. Another is energy. India and China are desperate for Russian oil and gas, and Moscow is worried about its dependence on Western markets. But their most significant common ground is opposition to US military intervention in Iran. The joint statement did not mention Iran, but the three countries have taken a common stance in calling for a negotiated solution through the International Atomic Energy Agency. None of them wants a nuclear-armed Iran, but Russia sells Tehran nuclear technology and India and China need Iranian gas.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article1386812.ece

Global Warming Fight-Earth vs. Sun?

2007-01-30T13:04:00.000-08:00

I wanna see it painted, painted black black as night, black as coal I wanna see the sun blotted out from the sky I wanna see it painted, painted, painted, painted black...
Yeah!

-Rolling Stones

The Sun Will Never Shine

In corridors of air the clouds were waiting there
They knew that never again the skies would be so blue
They took away the sun and with it took the fun
It's true, and now there is really nothing I can do
So I look outside my window at the sheets of pouring rain
And I wonder if the sun will come again
But the sun will never shine the way it used to do
The clouds won't let it through
Oh the sun will never shine its smile for me and you
The clouds won't let it through
It wasn't long ago the people that I knew were glad
And nothing they ever thought about was sad
But since the sun has gone their laughing times are none
That's bad, to make them forget the happy times they've had
So they look outside their window at the sheets of pouring rain
And they wonder if the sun will come again
But the sun will never shine the way it used to do
The clouds won't let it through
Oh the sun will never shine its smile for me and you
The clouds won't let it through

-Barclay James Harvest

David Adam, environment correspondent Saturday January 27, 2007

The US government wants the world's scientists to develop technology to block sunlight as a last-ditch way to halt global warming, the Guardian has learned. It says research into techniques such as giant mirrors in space or reflective dust pumped into the atmosphere would be "important insurance" against rising emissions, and has lobbied for such a strategy to be recommended by a major UN report on climate change, the first part of which will be published on Friday. The US has also attempted to steer the UN report, prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), away from conclusions that would support a new worldwide climate treaty based on binding targets to reduce emissions - as sought by Tony Blair. It has demanded a draft of the report be changed to emphasise the benefits of voluntary agreements and to include criticisms of the Kyoto Protocol, the existing treaty which the US administration opposes. The final IPCC report, written by experts from across the world, will underpin international negotiations to devise a new emissions treaty to succeed Kyoto, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft of the report last year and invited to comment. The US response, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, says the idea of interfering with sunlight should be included in the summary for policymakers, the prominent chapter at the front of each IPCC report. It says: "Modifying solar radiance may be an important strategy if mitigation of emissions fails. Doing the R&D to estimate the consequences of applying such a strategy is important insurance that should be taken out. This is a very important possibility that should be considered." Scientists have previously estimated that reflecting less than 1% of sunlight back into space could compensate for the warming generated by all greenhouse gases emitted since the industrial revolution. Possible techniques include putting a giant screen into orbit, thousands of tiny, shiny balloons, or microscopic sulphate droplets pumped into the high atmosphere to mimic the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption. The IPCC draft said such ideas were "speculative, uncosted and with potential unknown side-effects". The US submission is based on the views of dozens of government officials and is accompanied by a letter signed by Harlan Watson, senior climate negotiator at the US state department. It complains the IPCC draft report is "Kyoto-centric" and it wants to include the work of economists who have reported "the degree to which the Kyoto framework is found wanting". It takes issue with a statement that "one weakness of the [Kyoto] protocol, however, is its non-ratificiation by some significant greenhouse gas emitters" and asks: "Is this the only weakness worth mentioning? Are there others?" It also insists the wording on the ineffectiveness of voluntary agreements be altered to include "a number of them have had significant impacts" and complains that overall "the report tends to overstate or focus on the negative effects of climate change." It also wants more emphasis on responsibilities of the developing world. The IPCC report is made up of three sections. The first, on the science of climate change, will be launched on Friday. Sections on the impact and mitigation of climate change - in which the US wants to include references to the sun-blocking technology - will follow later this year. The likely contents of the report have been an open secret since the Bush administration posted its draft copy on the internet in April. Next week's science report will say there is a 90% chance that human activity is warming the planet, and that global average temperatures will rise another 1.5C to 5.8C this century depending on emissions. The US response shows it accepts these statements, but it disagrees with a more tentative conclusion that rising temperatures have made hurricanes more powerful.
http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1999968,00.html

Points of view from the pro-sun side:

"Here comes the sun, here comes the sun, And I say it’s all right
Little darling, it’s been a long cold lonely winter
Little darling, it feels like years since it’s been here
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun And I say it’s all right"

-Beatles

sun sun merciful one
sun sun sun sun won't you lay down your light on us
sun sun all we need is to come into the sun we've been out in the dark for so long
all I need, all we need, all I need, all we need! yeah!

-Live

Don’t let the sun go down on me
Although I search myself, it’s always someone else I that see,
yeah I’d just allow a fragment of your life to wander free baby,
oh Cause’ losing everything is like the sun going down on me

-Elton John

I CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW THE RAIN IS GONE
I CAN SEE ALL OBSTACLES IN MY WAY
GONE ARE THE DARK CLOUDS THAT HAD ME DOWN
IT'S GONNA BE A BRIGHT BRIGHT BRIGHT BRIGHT SUN SHINY DAY
IT'S GONNA BE A BRIGHT BRIGHT BRIGHT BRIGHT SUN SHINY DAY ...........

-Jimmy Cliff

Those sitting sitting on the fence:

Who loves the sun
Who cares that it makes plants grow
Who cares what it does
Since you broke my heart

-Velvet Underground

Finance Runs Away From New York

2007-01-24T10:20:00.000-08:00

“Who is like Tyre, like her that has been brought to silence in the midst of the sea? When your stores went forth from the open sea, you satisfied many peoples. With the abundance of your valuable things and your articles of exchange you made earth’s kings rich. Now you have been broken by the open sea, in the depths of the waters." Ezekiel 27:33-34

Are the reasons given for this threat are the only ones ???

New York is facing a threat to its position as the world's leading financial centre, according to a report commissioned by Michael Bloomberg, the city's mayor, and New York Senator Chuck Schumer. If current trends continue, New York could lose up to 7 per cent of its market share, equivalent to 60,000 jobs, over the next five years. But much of that loss would be prevented if the US implemented legal and regulatory reforms, says the report by McKinsey, the consultancy. Mr Bloomberg and Mr Schumer commissioned the study amid increasing concern over New York's declining share of global capital markets activity.
Concern has focused on the rise in the number of foreign companies choosing to list their shares in London and Hong Kong rather than in New York. The report, published on Monday, says New York has also been losing out in areas such as derivatives, where Wall Street chief executives say they have been shifting business to London because of its more attractive legal and regulatory environment. Financial services employment in London rose 4.3 per cent to 318,000 in the three years to 2005, while it fell by 0.7 per cent to 328,000 in New York, the report says. Mr Schumer said the study showed that New York could lose its leadership "not just for IPOs but for all financial services, all too easily and all too soon". McKinsey based the report partly on interviews with 50 financial services chief executives. There was a consensus that New York had become less attractive than London over the past three years, and many expected the trend to continue. A senior member of Mr Bloomberg's staff said that while New York would lose some share because of maturing capital markets in Europe and Asia, the decline could be "substantially" stemmed if the report's "very realistic" recommendations were put into effect. These include clearer guidance on the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance rules, securities litigation reform, promoting the convergence of accounting standards, and easing visa restrictions on foreign professionals. John Thain, chief executive of the New York Stock Exchange, warned last year that the competitiveness of New York was being undermined by the litigious US climate and Sarbanes-Oxley. The fears prompted the formation of a panel of Wall Street executives and academics, with the backing of Hank Paulson, US Treasury secretary. In November, the group called for similar reforms. Chuck Prince, chief executive of Citigroup, recently forecast continued "diffusion away from New York". In the fourth quarter of last year, Citigroup's corporate and investment bank earned more in both Europe and Asia than in the US for the first time.

About my reference to Tyre:

"The modern cities of Tyre and Sidon on the Lebanese coast were once the major launching points of the seafaring Phoenicians. They were to the ancient world what Venice, Shanghai, Liverpool and New York have been in later times: some of the greatest of the world's ports, and crucial conduits for trade and cultural exchange. From the harbours of the Phoenician cities, ships carried precious dyes and textiles, soda and glass throughout the Mediterranean and beyond." http://www.bioedonline.org/news/news.cfm?art=2253

UPDATE FROM DAVOS WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM EXECPTS:

How Bush Has Shot US Capital Markets In The Foot
By Jeremy Warner in Davos
Published: 26 January 2007

"Behind the scenes, on the other hand, the UK is winning a somewhat higher profile. Or more particularly, the growing success of the City as a financial centre, and the march it is stealing on New York, is a source of constant discussion among the sizeable contingent of financiers and investment bankers here."

"Even American companies, never mind the foreign ones Nasdaq would once routinely have attracted, are choosing to list in London because of the misery of Sarbanes Oxley, an onerous set of rules and regulations that America has imposed on its publicly listed companies. Yet these defeats are only the high-profile end of a much wider loss of competitiveness. Across the piste of the financial markets, New York is losing out to London. Few here will talk publicly about the phenomenon, yet off the record there is common agreement about the causes. The light touch, principles-based regulation pursued by the Financial Services Authority is plainly one reason. This is widely acknowledged as more conducive to the operation of the capital markets than the rules-driven approach of the Securities & Exchange Commission. Yet the bigger cause is that the fast-growing economies of the developing world, together with the old and new petrodollars of the Middle East and Russia, simply don't trust the US with their money. Never mind what else it has done, George Bush's foreign policy has succeeded in shooting American capital markets in the foot like nothing else. In the process, it has cemented London's position as the default centre of choice. Few stories here in Davos better illustrate the conference's theme of the shifting power equation. According to one participant here, US homeland security measures that require banks to monitor all transactions in dollars have encouraged a significant shift into euro-denominated assets in international markets."

China Checkmates US In Space War Technology

2007-01-19T07:56:00.000-08:00

China Signals Its Determination That No Nation Will Be Allowed Dominate Space. A new race to weaponize and dominate space heats up.

Wake up and smell the cordite – now China gives Bush another problem

Richard Beeston, Diplomatic Editor

Washington has been sent a blunt new year’s message from Beijing that America no longer has a monopoly on weapons in space, and must choose between negotiating a treaty with the rising Asian power and facing the prospect of a dangerous arms race against a new rival. For decades America has been dominant in every aspect of space technology, particularly in what President Reagan liked to call “Star Wars”, the development of weapons systems capable of destroying satellites and even intercepting and knocking out ballistic missiles before they reach their targets. The development of such weapons has been one of the most controversial aspects of President Bush’s military build-up, which envisages one day being able to protect America and its allies from the growing threat of missile attack from rogue nuclear states such as North Korea and possibly Iran. Last year the Bush Administration made clear with the publication of its National Space Policy that it reserved the right to continue developing this technology in the face of opposition, particularly from the Chinese. On January 11 the Chinese destroyed an object at roughly the same distance in space that many US spy satellites orbit. So far Beijing has not said what it hopes to achieve from its dramatic missile test in space. However, experts believe that it will now press home its demands that America sit down at the negotiating table and agree to limit the use of weapons in space and future tests. If not, the Chinese clearly have the resources to develop the technology, and it is likely that Russia and even Europe could feel compelled to join the race. The tests could have a very damaging impact on commercial satellites, since the destruction of just one orbiter can scatter damaging debris in space for decades. As President Bush ponders his next move in Iraq, the Gulf and the Middle East, the Chinese have presented him with an unexpected and unwelcome new problem.

Also From Time
SIMON ELEGANT/BEIJING AND MARK THOMPSON/WASHINGTON

"The brazenness of this is a bit frightening," says Mike Green, former senior Bush Administration Asia adviser. "It shows that the Peoples Liberation Army has considerable leeway — a great deal of influence if not autonomy — to increase their capacity even at considerable diplomatic cost."

"The reason for all the fuss is simple: the test potentially marks a major step forward in China's ability to nullify the huge technological advantage of the U.S. in any clash over Taiwan. While Western intelligence agencies have long been aware that the People's Liberation Army was attempting to develop an anti-satellite system, the successful targeting of a single satellite in high orbit marks a significant milestone. When the Pentagon issued its annual report to Congress on China's Military Power last summer it stated that "China can currently destroy or disable satellites only by launching a ballistic missile or space-launch vehicle armed with a nuclear weapon." All that has now changed. "

"Beijing has demonstrated a capability, however limited, of punching out Washington's technological eyes. Indeed, it was reported last September that China had "painted" a U.S. satellite using a ground-based laser. The Dr. Strangelovian angle on what the Pentagon calls ASAT — anti-satellite — weapons is that a foe could use them to blind key U.S. spy satellites as the first punch in a massive war. "

"China is taking aimed at leveling out the playing field in case of a clash with the U.S. Other examples include the training of units designed to hack into military computers, and the development of massive shore-to-ship missile batteries that would make it very difficult for U.S. carrier groups to approach China's coast. The U.S. dependence on its technological edge is considerable: Green explains that in recent joint exercises held with the Indian Air Force, less technologically advanced Russian Sukhoi jets defeated American F-15s when the latter were deprived of support from satellite and AWACs systems. "

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1580595,00.html

While this Time article points toward Taiwan, could it be that China is rattling it's saber over its interests in the Middle East and Africa as well?

A King Rises

2006-12-05T21:46:00.000-08:00

Russia tips the balance

By W Joseph Stroupe (For Part 1, see Russia attacks the West's Achilles' heel)

Russia has set the agenda for the global transition to an entirely new model of international energy security designed to address intensifying concerns, especially those of the rising East. Russia, possessing unequaled energy-based leverage, has taken the leadership among the world's producers and the rising powerhouse economies of the East to promote a vast worldwide web of alliances and ties prominently featuring rigid bilateral, private long-term supply contracts. This model runs counter to and increasingly circumvents the established liberal US-backed global oil market denominated in US dollars. The West relies on the current order for its energy security. It cannot function without it, and therefore the order is its single point of weakness. And Russia is acting as the "point man" to locate and exploit, with the help of its partners, this Achilles' heel of the West. A conspicuous feature of global developments over the past several years is Russia's distinctive leadership role in fueling global transition in three key spheres - energy, economic and geopolitical. Within six months of taking office as Russia's new president, Vladimir Putin was by the summer of 2000 already moving hard against the capitalist-inspired oligarchs who were fleecing Russia of its natural resources and industry with, at a bare minimum, the full complicity of the West. Western institutions operating within Russia and those exercising what the Kremlin saw as undue influence from without, most notably the West's oil majors and their closely related financial institutions, certain non-governmental organizations and the media, have eventually either been pushed out or brought to heel. Russia's strategic resources have been brought firmly under de facto Kremlin control in direct opposition to the West's loudly proclaimed liberal democratic principles of private ownership and control. Russia's example and success in such endeavors have instigated a global wave of nationalization and consolidation of state control over energy resources, with an accompanying loss of leverage and control by the West's oil majors. That wave is accelerating.

The rise of a powerful and wealthy resources-based corporate state in Russia ("sovereign democracy"), its rapidly expanding control over global strategic resources, and the resultant loss of leadership and control of the global oil market by the West's oil majors are developments that move directly against the very foundations of the US-led oil-market order and the wider US-centric global economic order. This is because Russia is quite literally fueling the rise of the powerhouse economies of the East and helping to achieve a new global center of economic power in the East. It was also Russia that fundamentally led, along with its key partner China, the opposition to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. It has been Russia first and foremost that has taken leadership among its strategic partners since then to continue to stand firm inside and outside the United Nations in a hugely successful strategy to force the full and mounting geopolitical, economic and military burdens of Iraq on to US and British shoulders alone. Thereby, Russia has taken the lead in proving that the US-dominated geopolitical order can be successfully opposed. Consequently, it has clearly been primarily under Russia's leadership that the US-dominated global oil-market, global economic and geopolitical orders are being transformed, circumvented and opposed by growing numbers of the world's nations. Against this backdrop, an impending, forcible shift of the US colossus out of its position of global dominance can be clearly seen, less as merely random and uncoordinated events, and more as a progressive coalescing of a coherent global strategy. The new model As indicated above, in a throwback to the 1970s, the comparatively more rigid bilateral long-term supply contract is making a significant comeback on oil markets. As Putin explained at the July Group of Eight summit: "We want to form a stable system of legal, political and economic relations that ensures a reliable demand and stable offer of energy resources on the international market." Putin later complained at the Valdai Club meeting outside Moscow on September 9 that consuming nations in the West too strongly focussed on their own energy interests and security while simultaneously slighting the interests and security of producers. He noted that consuming nations wanted suppliers to pledge continuity of supplies for the long term, "so customers should not be able to turn around and say, 'We don't need it now.' Security works both ways. We need assurances, too." Putin explicitly stated that Russia and other suppliers wanted bilateral long-term supply contracts with consuming nations so that suppliers would know there would be a stable demand for their exports. The underlying, impending risk to the liquidity of the current oil order posed by such a throwback to the rigid bilateral long-term supply contract was highlighted recently in the testimony of David Goldwyn before the US House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform's Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations and the Subcommittee on Energy and Resources on May 16. Goldwyn is senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a prestigious Washington, DC, think-tank, and president of Goldwyn International Strategies, a leading provider of political and business intelligence, energy-sector analysis and Washington strategy advice to Fortune 100 companies and investment advisers. Goldwyn stated: "The United States is more energy-insecure today than it has been in nearly 30 years. We are insecure because the global oil market is more fragile, more competitive and more volatile than it has been in decades." Goldwyn referred to the fact that "the growing [energy] dependence of rising powers such as China and India is rapidly eroding US global power and influence around the world" as those rising powers increasingly enter bilateral long-term contracts with suppliers, ever greater numbers of which do not allow free market access by the West's oil majors to production and exploration acreage and which are creating a strategically tight market for the rest of the world. Goldwyn observed: "This 'tight' market is undermining the fluidity and fairness of the market for available oil supplies and exploration acreage. New competitors like China and India are trying to negotiate long-term supply contracts (at market prices) to ensure that they have supplies in the event of a crisis or supply disruption ... the trend is counter to the market system that operates so efficiently ... the trend of long-term contracts runs counter to the modern liquid global market which operates efficiently in rapidly moving supplies to meet market demand ... China has not yet developed faith in these market mechanisms." While Goldwyn presented such concerns in the context of a rising but not yet imminent threat to the current order, in testimony before the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations nearly a year earlier, on July 26, 2005, Mikkal Herberg of the National Bureau of Asian Research in Seattle, Senator Richard Lugar, the committee chairman, heard the following facts:

For China and India both, as well as the other Asian powers, energy is becoming a matter of "high politics" of national security and no longer just the "low politics" of domestic energy policy. Governments in both countries have decided that energy security is too important to be left entirely to the [US-led liberal] markets as their economic prosperity increasingly is exposed to the risks of global supply disruptions, chronic instability in energy exporting regions, and the vagaries of global energy geopolitics. Both governments are responding to their growing sense of insecurity with a broad range of similar strategies regionally and globally to try to guarantee greater supply security and reduce their vulnerability to potential supply and price shocks. These efforts are growing in scale and scope and they range from largely cooperative and market oriented strategies to those that are deeply neo-mercantilist and competitive. Both China and India are accelerating their efforts to gain more secure national control of overseas oil and gas supplies by taking equity stakes in overseas oil and gas fields, promoting development of new oil and gas pipelines to feed their booming markets, developing broader trade and energy ties, and following up with diplomatic ties to cement relations with the major oil and gas exporting countries. And both governments sense they are excluded from the major institutions that govern global oil cooperation, such as the IEA [International Energy Agency], and feel largely excluded from the global oil industry they feel is dominated by the large oil companies from the industrial countries. Both feel they are playing "catch-up". For China's leaders, energy security clearly is too important to be left to the markets and so far its approach has been decidedly neo-mercantilist and competitive. The term "neo-mercantilist" refers to the economic strategy and ideology pursued by the European colonial powers, wherein the natural resources and other wealth of the colonies that had been established by each colonial empire were rigidly dedicated exclusively to the sustenance of the mother empire. In application to India, China and the other rising powers of the East, the term refers to the somewhat comparable strategy of concluding rigid, private bilateral long-term supply contracts between themselves individually and producers they each target around the globe. This has the net effect of securing oil and gas exclusively for the individual consumer state at the expense of the liquidity of the global oil market, and hence at the expense of oil's fungibility. Herberg went on to make the case that China's three main state-owned oil companies (National Petroleum Corp, China Petroleum and Chemical Corp and China National Offshore Oil Corp) alone, by the latest data and estimates available more than a year ago, "have managed to establish control over about 300 mb/d [million barrels a day] of crude production, which could reach up to 600 mb/d by 2008". Herberg went on to make the case that both China and India strengthen and solidify the exclusivity of such rigid long-term supply contracts with multiple layers of cross-investment and commercial ties between themselves and their producer partners, and with deepening diplomatic ties as well. The net effect is to shut out the free markets and Western oil majors and place rapidly growing portions of global supply under private lock and key. As Herberg noted:

China now [as of July 2005] has signed some form of "strategic energy partnership" with nine countries, including Russia, Sudan, Iran, Venezuela, Brazil, Angola and Kazakhstan. Beijing's leadership has followed up with a long list of high-level diplomatic visits to cement stronger diplomatic, energy and trade ties. China has also used state diplomacy to secure future LNG [liquefied natural gas] supplies in contracts with Australia, Indonesia and Iran. China's leadership sees the development of broader diplomatic and trade ties and alliances as a key element in securing its access to future oil and gas supplies. This also includes military sales and cooperation, sales of nuclear equipment and other potentially problematic trade ties. None of this includes the profoundly important strategic partnership agreement China signed with Saudi Arabia in January, nor its ever more wide-ranging energy-based agreements with the other Persian Gulf oil-and-gas-exporting states of Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and others around the globe. India also is pursuing a global strategy very similar to that of China. In July 2005, Herberg noted:

Currently, nearly two-thirds of the Gulf's oil exports go to Asia, and this will grow sharply in the future. The growing nexus of diplomatic, trade and military ties with China and India appeals to the Gulf producers who are looking to diversify their economic and geopolitical base beyond traditional dependence on the US and European markets and diplomatic relationships. Herberg concluded with this assessment of the negative effects on the dynamism and liquidity of the US-led oil market:

Another area of concern involves a range of impacts of China and India's booming oil demand as well as the impact of their implied strategy of "locking up" national control of certain oil supplies to fuel their own economies, in effect, "taking oil off the market". Both countries clearly aim to lock up their own national oil supplies with many of their investments in places like Sudan and this practice is likely to contribute to higher oil prices and price volatility by reducing global market flexibility to handle tight markets, shortages and supply disruptions. Exploiting the Achilles' heel The economic (and consequently also the geopolitical) single point of failure for the highly industrialized nations of the West irrefutably is its continued unwavering global adherence to the liberal oil market that created and sustains oil-market supply fairness, liquidity, and oil's currently high level of fungibility. The net effect of the (now former) global dominance and control of the West's oil majors over the lion's share of global energy resources was to ensure that those resources were irreversibly captured into the US-led market, thereby perpetuating the global dominance of that very order. As such, the hemorrhaging of the dominance of West's oil majors to the current pitiful state that only 9% or 10% of global reserves are controlled by them represents a sea change. Where, that is, into which model, the lion's share of global energy resources will now be captured is no longer up to the West. That determination has already been forfeited to the rising East and the increasingly East-friendly producing regimes around the world, led by Russia. And nowadays the US depends on the market for nearly 60% of its energy needs. In effect, the world is seeing the globe's energy resources increasingly divided between two rival, incompatible energy markets, one suffering loss of global support and becoming ever more slanted toward serving the energy needs only of the West, and the other enjoying mounting global support and fully serving the energy needs of all the rest.

Such producing regimes, which display an ever greater self-assertiveness and an ever deepening political affinity with Russia and the East, are deciding to place a growing amount of their production in the Russian-led energy-market model rather than unwaveringly adhering to the US-led one.

The lucrative economic, financial, political and diplomatic package of enticements being offered to producers around the globe by China, India and the other economies of the East far outweigh what the US can offer - the US simply cannot compete. It cannot prevent, nor turn back, the steadily advancing global trend of the locking up of oil and gas by virtue of private, bilateral long-term supply contracts, and the mounting strategic control of oil and gas by state-owned enterprises. Its global leverage (and that of its oil majors) in the energy-rich regions of the world is severely contracting as a result. The tentative decision announced recently by Putin to redirect from the US to Europe the gas production from the giant Shtokman project illustrates how such state-owned (or controlled) enterprises can turn n switch away from this order to a growing number of alternatives, including the security of rigid bilateral long-term supply contracts. Russia, China, India and the rest of the world outside the West have little fundamental attraction or loyalty to the US-supported global oil market or the governing institutions from which (such as the IEA and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) they have largely been excluded. They do not feel an integral part of the global system they see as greedily and inordinately dominated by the multinational oil companies of the West, with which their relations are growing ever more tense. As such, they certainly cannot be expected to bolster the US-led model, and they are not doing so. As the new Russian-led model locks up increasing amounts of oil and gas away from the global pool, that one virtual global pool of oil is increasingly being transformed from being a truly global one into a Western one. This revives the possibility of a targeted embargo because producers can decide to place less oil in the US-led system in favor of locking up more of their production into bilateral contracts with consumers in the East, and they can move rapidly to accelerate in that direction. Professor Peter Odell, quoted in Part 1 of this report, alluded to this danger when he warned that Russia's oil grab presented an impending threat to the energy supplies of the West. The issue here is control of the production of oil and gas fields, and therefore where and to whom that production will be offered - within the open, liberal US-led model or within the rival, more rigid and private Russian-led one. The global production and profits of the West's international oil majors are still very high. However, behind that facade of apparent market control and dominance lurks the specter of an impending, perhaps precipitous, collapse of the role and leverage of those oil majors the West relies on for its energy security. In The Observer of London on October 29, in an article titled "Big oil may have to get even bigger to survive", the author notes that the West's international oil majors are in real trouble as regards the collapsing of their control over global energy reserves and face a global wave of nationalization, forced renegotiation of existing agreements, inability to get access to new exploration and production acreage and rising taxes. It is a caustic mix that is dissolving the glue that holds together the US-backed oil order. As the oil majors produce oil for the market, they must replace their reserves. In 1997 they were able to replace 140% of their reserves, but in 2005 they were able to replace far less - only 75%. Consequently, they are rapidly shrinking while the state-owned companies around the globe are rapidly expanding as respects market dominance as measured by the crucial parameter of control of reserves. Furthermore, the mounting global wave of oil-sector nationalization that is pushing international oil majors on to the sidelines as respects control of reserves could easily and quickly take an even more ominous turn - cutting significantly into the current production capabilities of the oil majors and placing the energy security of the US in acute jeopardy. Assumptions that such a scenario deserves little worry and attention are not valid or safe in the environment of ever more nationalistic leanings on the part of the oil-producing regimes around the globe and the specter of forced renegotiations of PSAs (production sharing agreements) and cancellations of operating licenses. What applies to production acreage also applies to exploration acreage, and access to and control over both are being massively forfeited by the West and its oil majors. Foreign investment in energy-producing enterprises and acreage is being severely restricted as a result, and this ensures strategically tight global supply, further exacerbating the mounting energy security misfortunes of the West. This is because in the absence of abundant global supply the West has no viable means to counteract the locking up of increasing amounts of the global supply by Russia's new model. Attack on dollar dominanceAs if these developments were not bad enough for Western strategic energy security, another key development has arisen, one that gravely threatens not only to diminish further the energy security of the West, but also in effect to put an end to its global economic and geopolitical dominance by credibly threatening to crash the US dollar. This additional key development is the planned and actual proliferation of new oil/gas market exchanges denominated in currencies other than US dollars.

The new Russian-led concept of "international" energy security and its new model for the global market do not consist merely of long-term supply contracts alone. Planned oil- and gas-market exchanges are being set up not to bolster the current London and New York exchanges, but to stand separate and distinct from, to compete with, them to rival the US-led order. The new exchanges are either being originally set up to settle transactions in currencies other than the US dollar, or they are being created with the sophistication and autonomy to enable them to switch from US dollars to virtually any other desired currency (or to multiple currencies) when developments might warrant such a switch. That fact implies the draining of significant portions of the one global dollar-denominated pool of oil to fill the new pools denominated in other currencies, thereby fragmenting from the current global pool (and from the US-led order itself) significant portions of the global supply to fill the new pools. Such fragmentation will in effect put an end to the current order, which has dominated for barely two decades. The new Shanghai Petroleum Exchange settles transactions in the Chinese currency, the yuan. Russia's new St Petersburg exchange, slated to come online next year, will settle transactions in the ruble. According to Russian Economy Minister German Gref, Russian products will be offered on the New York exchange until the St Petersburg exchange is operational, at which time Russian products will be shifted out of the New York exchange to the Russian exchange. Qatar's new Energy City concept with its integrated IMEX (International Mercantile Exchange), which India has recently joined with the planned creation of a satellite Energy City/IMEX complex in Mumbai, will apparently settle transactions initially in the US dollar, with the capability to switch to other currencies. The IMEX is a fully autonomous system predominantly designed and intended to capture the rising energy markets in the East. Prudently, Arab oil and gas exporters are leveraging IMEX to work to achieve full autonomy as respects market and exchange operations and product pricing and delivery, foreseeing the day when having their operations constrained almost completely under the aegis of the Anglo-US market arrangement and the US dollar no longer serves their strategic interests. The logical question at this juncture is whether these new exchanges can successfully compete any time soon with those in New York and London. Assuming those creating the new exchanges do not lose their nerve and back down from establishing them as working, autonomous entities, as Iran apparently has backed down from its planned oil bourse denominated in the euro, the answer to that question is fundamentally the same as asking whether there exists enough global supply margin for importing nations to be able to ignore the new exchanges. In the very tight global supply situation we find ourselves locked into, importing nations will have little choice but to go wherever oil and gas are available to fill their needs. If the new exchanges rob significant portions of oil from the current one global pool as is planned, then the new exchanges will not need to be concerned about adequate consumer interest, support and devotion. And global producers are assuredly going to do all that is needed to keep the global supply tight and the price of oil elevated to avoid a global oil glut and a price collapse. Continued tight supply will help to ensure the success of the new exchanges. Furthermore, the fact that the West's oil majors have lost control of all but 9% or 10% of reserves means that state-controlled oil companies can reroute any amount of product they wish from the New York-London exchanges to any of the new exchanges. This will provide a more than sufficient supply to guarantee the success of the new exchanges, and the US can do nothing to stop it. As this happens, the prospect of a targeted embargo of the West is revived. Producers will be able to restrict the amount of oil they sell on the London-New York exchanges, or cease selling there altogether, because they will have viable, even preferred, alternative exchanges. That will seriously endanger the amount of supplies accessible to the West and will radically drive up the price of oil on the dollar-denominated exchanges. But because all of the new and planned exchanges will have their own non-dollar pricing mechanisms, the undesirable price volatility will tend to be confined to the dollar-denominated exchanges. What happens to the US dollar as the new exchanges become operational and begin to be successful? The exit from the dollar as the international currency will have begun in earnest. But that exit will not be to one currency, but simultaneously to the several currencies that are the denomination currencies of all the successful new oil and gas market exchanges. The dollar will begin to weaken as its international support and devotion wanes, or even sinks. As the dollar weakens, the price in dollars for everything the US imports will skyrocket, adding a powerful inflationary hit to the US economy. Along with the impending US recession, that will further weaken the dollar and likely its decline, or outright collapse, will feed on itself. As the dollar weakens and energy price volatility increases on the New York-London exchanges, producers will have further powerful incentive to switch their product offering to the non-dollar-denominated exchanges, where there will be greater stability and where they will not be forced to take payment for their products in the increasingly undesirable weakened dollar. The profound risks to the West as respects its ability then to secure access to sufficient energy resources should be self-evident. Left with a severely shrunken dollar-denominated pool of oil and gas, a pool that virtually only the West draws from, the viability of a potential targeted embargo will have increased exponentially. The globe's producers will be fully able to "throttle" the economies of the West by virtue of controlling how much of their oil and gas they sell into the dollar-denominated pool. This represents the nightmare scenario for the US. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this analysis is the fact that it is not based on any hypothetical conspiracy theory, but rather on solid economic and market principles and the increasingly ominous warnings of experts and informed leaders. Additionally, the key developments that are already pushing the world order to the eventuality described here, that of a full exploitation of the West's Achilles' heel by Russia and its global partners leading to a loss of the US global position of economic and geopolitical dominance, are already well established. Russia, in conceiving the new model of "international" energy security and a new global energy order, and in winning increasing numbers of key converts and adherents to its model, thereby defines and draws the circle of international energy security. Those inside the circle will achieve Russia's definition of "energy security", but those left outside will be left with little if any energy security by any definition.

This is the conclusion of a two-part report. W Joseph Stroupe is author of the new book Russian Rubicon: Impending Checkmate of the West and editor of Global Events Magazine, online at www.GeoStrategyMap.com. (Copyright 2006 W Joseph Stroupe.)