The Rag Blog

VERSE / Bobby Nelson : The Wall

Posted on August 11, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Photo by Veruschka (1971) / Playboy / Flatrock.

THE WALL

We are all masons
highly skilled
without apprenticeship
a birthright of our culture

We lay the bricks
unintentionally – without design
as we sit in silence
and long for god-driven bulldozers
to crush our life’s work

Our dreams slowly suffocate
while our fear
places the mortar
expertly on the growing wall

We wait expectantly
for just one brick to crumble
by lightning, thunder and the
storms of heaven
but divine sources don’t intervene in
this human-made catastrophe

Instead
we move into smaller confines
as the wall spreads over the open spaces
our dreams intensify
as the space we allot ourselves shrinks

We imagine actions
which would crumble the red brick
praying our silent screams will shatter the wall
and uncover the hidden rainbows

The wall only continues to expand

How have we built such a sturdy wall
what did we do to shape its architecture

Did it begin with my silence
on that Sunday morning
when you rolled on and off of me quickly
apologized for your insensitivity
but received no satisfactory reply

or the last time we left the mortar
in the other room
threw the bricks out the window
stripped off the offending rococo

you slid into me easily
embarrassed that the entry was not biblical
my pleasure didn’t reassure you
and the wall went up a foot at least

Is it too late to tell you
how I loved your hard dick in those days
that you could want such pleasure with it
without the all restrictive fear
that I would not approve of your love of your own body

Have we learned enough not to build other walls
but not enough to tear down the existing structure

The great wall, the maginot line, the Berlin wall
county lines, racist incorporation, patriotic borders
separating cultures
dividing people
reinforcing the night silence into the day
walls built by human hands and weak hearts
by fear of loss, ignorance of gain

walls over the earth
providing privacy, preventing union
built brick by brick
as our minds lose the zest for openness
our hearts the belief in others

cynical walls too long to allow
holding-hand circles
too high to allow
embraces and kisses

We can’t even nestle in each other’s eyes
as the wall shades the sunlight

silence
the most effective and compleat mason of all time

We build a brick each time we keep our
fantasies to ourselves
each time we bury our smiles and tears
our stoic selves are building a dead world

the wall is high
shouts of love barely chip the mortar
my eyes can’t say enough to you

and how I miss your low slung balls in my hands

barbed wire fence parallels the brick in my country
supposedly to separate the cows from the sheep
but instead separating people
establishing territory
privacy
loneliness

people sweat as they stretch the wire
    and lay the bricks
the same builders wonder at the destruction
    of their dreams
about the purpose of their life at the time of their death
fleeting last thoughts of sweat, misunderstanding,
    and eternal nothingness

a double wall of protection in my land

a crazy friend – who is sane –
smashes bricks and clips barbed wire
at the most unexpected time
exasperating her community with her lonely success

observers remain in their brick prison
silently cheering the effort she makes
on behalf of us all
but unwilling to enter the unknown territory
beyond the wall

this crazy bricksmasher is scratched by the wire
choked on the dust of the crumbling brick
she despairs at the bricklayers found on the
other side of the wall
replacing the red blocks faster than she can
knock them down
but she keeps looking for bricksmashers in her life

where are the bricksmashers
the bulldozers, the wire clippers

where are the crafty people
ones with strength in their hearts –
wall-smashing strength
determination in the eyes –
wire-cutting determination

show me the hands that can masturbate
in the middle of the morning
surrounded by red brick
and I will show you a natural born brick-smasher

show me the eyes that can shine
in the middle of the night
surrounded by barbed wire
and I will show you an experienced wire-cutter

eyes of light; hands of purpose
these are the illegals
those who cross borders, boundaries and walls

so tell me your fantasies
what you think as you fall into sleep
what you dream as the sun goes high
    and the hours pass on the glossy lake
    as the nibbling crappies mesmerize us
    into a dead silence

help me rip open a small place in the wall
a hole through which we can pull ourselves
and make space for others

I know you’re there

I’ll look for you
you look for me
we can add on as we go
tearing down those red oblong blocks
which imprison our most worthwhile dreams

find the active hands and hold on tight
locate the gleaming eyes
and keep a steady gaze

do something
do it now
while we sit in our separate corners
the wall keeps getting higher

Bobby Nelson
© 1980

“Camouflage.” Image from The Sun, U.K. / Flatrock.
Posted August 10, 2010 / The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Bobby Nelson, Poetry | 3 Comments

Steve Russell : In Memory of Jay Spotted Elk

Posted on August 9, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

In memory of Jay Spotted Elk

It became possible to prove that Jay Spotted Elk’s last night on earth was not unusual in the history of Sheridan County, Nebraska.

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / August 9, 2010

In my time as a trial judge, I’ve learned that often when a litigant says it’s not about the money it is in fact about the money. You can’t tell at the beginning of a case but you can tell at the end. In this case, it was not about the money.

An Indian hanging himself in the drunk tank is seldom big news in Indian country except to his relatives. When Jay Spotted Elk hung himself while facing misdemeanor charges in Sheridan County, Nebraska, his mother decided not to stand for it. Arlyn Eastman/Broken Nose sued the county and several individuals who might have been able to prevent the suicide if they had been properly trained and motivated.

Any lawsuit is difficult, and this one much more so. In the wake of the civil rights movement, there was a time when the courts seemed generally sympathetic to claims by the powerless against the powerful. As a result, the Republican Party took on the reorientation of the federal courts as a project that continues to this day.

This year saw the racial attacks on Sonia Sotomayor and the recent hearing on the appointment of Elena Kagan that left the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee praising Kagan’s qualifications and personality while still resolved to vote against her (excepting Lindsey Graham, who seems to find good government more important than party discipline).

In all GOP administrations since Nixon, most nominees have been very young and very conservative. Young because federal judgeships are lifetime appointments and conservative to get the law back into what they choose to call the mainstream, where you can tell the winners largely by race and by class.

At this time, as at the beginning of the Clinton administration, there are no American Indians serving on federal courts, which is where Indian interests are normally adjudicated. As bad, the influx of judges with a political agenda has had approximately 40 years to work its magic, since the Democrats in power during that time have been centrists who would correctly claim that stacking courts is bad government and refrain from fighting fire with fire.

I was educated in the legal landscape peopled by Thurgood Marshall (demonized in the first day of the Kagan hearings), William O. Douglas, William Brennan, and judges like Hugo Black, who wrote the words that Indian lawyers call the all-purpose Indian law dissent: “Great nations, like great men, should keep their word.” I doubt that I would have become a lawyer had Thurgood Marshall not existed and I was reluctant to wash my hand again after William O. Douglas shook it.

In modern times, the “liberals” are conservative appointees who were enlightened by their experiences on the court like Harry Blackmun or David Souter. The “center” has been moved by political calculation. As a result, people without power have a set of problems that go far beyond the fact that they often don’t know lawyers and that lawsuits cost a lot of money.

Should she find a lawyer to work on a “contingent fee” (no pay unless you win), Spotted Elk’s mother would have to contend with the social fact of suing a local government (the law enforcement part, no less) and with the legal fact that if there is one class of litigants that has less success than American Indians it would have to be prisoners.

The courts, since the heyday of civil rights lawsuits, have made it harder to sue local governments for damages. It’s not enough that law enforcement officers violate your rights and they work for the city or the county you want to sue. To hold the local government responsible, you must prove that they did or failed to do something in particular. Most common is a failure to properly train or supervise the officers, but this has to be a pattern. One bad outcome is not enough, even if somebody is killed.

The lawyer who took on this case, Maren Chaloupka, hit a mother lode of evidence that was good for the lawsuit but bad for the Indian community in Nebraska:

Twelve inmates had attempted suicide in the same jail, all but one Indian.
The inmates had attempted suicide repeatedly.
One inmate literally killed himself the day after he told corrections officers that he no longer wanted to live.

When nothing was done in the face of all this, it was bad for the Indians who might be in the jail from time to time but it made proving that the county had failed to take suicide precautions the proverbial slam dunk.

It became possible to prove that Jay Spotted Elk’s last night on earth was not unusual in the history of Sheridan County, Nebraska. According to a report in the Scottsbluff Star-Herald, Spotted Elk threatened suicide before he even got to the jail. Yet his belt was not removed and he was not closely watched.

In these rare cases when there’s a good chance of prevailing in a trial, there comes a time when you know why the lawsuit was filed. Everybody knows that going to trial is a crapshoot, but there is something to negotiate about if the lawyer on the other side is sane. If the case settles, that’s when you learn why the case was brought.

Chaloupka, of Scottsbluff and her co-counsel, Robin Zephier of the Abourezk Law Firm in Rapid City, got $100,000 paid to Jay Spotted Elk’s estate, managed by his mother. If that was all, it would be better than not placing any cost on Indian lives, but it is unlikely that I would be writing about it. The rest of the settlement requires the county to:

Have all employees of the sheriff and jail trained in suicide prevention.
Make efforts to contact the tribal suicide prevention program for any Indian who expresses ideas of suicide.
Post the contact information for suicide prevention at Pine Ridge and Rosebud at the booking desk and keep a log of calls made to those programs.
Notify the closest tribal suicide prevention program in cases where no program can be reached for the inmate’s tribe.
Allow a representative of the tribal suicide prevention program to speak to the inmate by telephone or in person and document the reason why any recommendation by the tribal suicide prevention program is not followed.
Provide a written report on compliance with the agreement every year until 2015, after which Spotted Elk’s mother retains the right to inspect the records.

This is what civil rights lawyers can do now and then even when the courts are so stacked against them, and local officials would plainly not care to spend money protecting Indians if they had a choice. In this case, we won’t know exactly whose life was saved but it is safe to say that saving lives will be the result. It’s for that result we should remember the life of Jay Spotted Elk.

[Steve Russell, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin. He is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. Steve was an activist in Austin in the Sixties and Seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. Steve is also a columnist for Indian Country Today, where this article first appeared. He can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged American Indians, Civil Rights, Justice, Law, Native Americans, Prisoner Abuse, Steve Russell, Suicide | 3 Comments

Harry Targ : Ethics Charges and the Natural Order of Things

Posted on August 9, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Congresswoman Maxine Waters. Photo from Getty Images.
The natural order of things:
Ethics and Congresswomen Waters and Harman

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / August 9, 2010

The stories about ethics violations by Congressman Charles Rangel (NY) have been making the rounds of the media and wire service reports have indicated that the House Ethics Committee will be charging Congresswoman Maxine Waters (California’s 35th Congressional District) with financial and influence improprieties as well. Of course, the leaked information in both cases is complicated and presumes guilt while the targets’ denials seem like desperate gestures to save themselves.

These stories have been contextualized in two ways. First, the charges against Rangel and Waters have been framed as part of concern about the seeming rise in corruption in public life and reminders that candidate Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have promised greater political transparency. So the upcoming Rangel/Waters hearings seem a natural byproduct of a changing political atmosphere in Washington and the country.

Second, virtually all the analyses of the announcement of the charges, the responses from those charged, and estimates of when panel hearings will take place, highlight the impacts of these cases on the November 2010 elections. Pundits speculate on what effect these political troubles will have for Democrats and reinforce media conclusions that the Democrats will be even more hurt from these revelations than everyone already expects.

What are these charges really about?

I have not read all the stories on Rangel or Waters but none I have seen have mentioned three other variables that just might relate to the attacks on the Congresspersons in question. First, both, but particularly Maxine Waters, have been visible progressives on war/peace and economic issues. Second, both Congresspersons are African-American and have been articulate spokespersons for the Congressional Black Caucus. Third, and not unconnected to the other two, these charges follow a two-year trajectory of assaults on progressive African-Americans, including the grassroots organization ACORN, green jobs activist Van Jones, and most recently, agricultural specialist, Shirley Sherrod.

Congresswoman Jane Harman.
On Waters and Harman

On Tuesday August 3, 2010, The New York Times published a front-page story titled “A Capital Abuzz With Ethics,” reflecting the standard frame suggested above. “The charges reflect, in part, a heightened sensitivity in Washington to indiscretions by members of Congress.”

On page one of the business section in the same issue of the paper a story appears with the title “An Audio Pioneer Buys Beleaguered Newsweek.” It describes Sidney Harman’s purchase of the faltering but still visible news magazine, Newsweek. Curiously, paragraph 17, on page two of the section, opens with the following: “He is married to Jane Harman, a Democratic Congresswoman who represents Southern California. Asked whether being married to a Congresswoman might represent a conflict of interest, he replied: ‘We’ve been married for over 30 years. I’ve never told her how to run the government and she’s never told me how to run the business. That’s absolutely fundamental to us.’”

(Last fall, in the midst of the health care debate it was disclosed in Indiana that the wife of retiring Senator Evan Bayh was a board member of the health insurance giant Wellpoint and that she made over $200,000 in fees and stock options for her work. Bayh’s legislative aide said that the Senator and Susan Bayh never spoke about the health care issue at home.)

Just a superficial comparison of the political agendas of the two Southern California legislators, Maxine Waters and Jane Harman, indicate that the former has been a leader in opposition to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Harman has been more tied to homeland security advocacy and support for Israel.

On economic issues, Waters has been an advocate for expanding economic stimulus policies, increasing housing and community development support, empowering women and youth, and promoting green jobs and other policies of relevance to the poor and minorities. Harman has identified with the “Blue Dog Blueprint for Fiscal Reform” a plan that prioritizes budget balancing and deficit reduction over human needs. She also identifies with the New Democrats call for “a robust market-based approach to address our nation’s energy needs.”

We must respond

The right wing and their allies in both political parties are engaging in a campaign at all levels of society to destroy the prospects of building a progressive agenda. Most of the media — print, electronic, and internet — for whatever reasons, are co-conspirators. AND this campaign clearly is targeting the interests of workers, African-Americans, people of color in general, and women. Progressives must join the struggle to save the progressive agenda wherever political activity takes place.

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Congress, Congressional Black Caucus, Ethics, Harry Targ, Maxine Waters, Progressives, Right Wing | Leave a comment

Bob Feldman : Brent Snowcroft and the Roots of the Iraq War

Posted on August 9, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Bush I’s national security advisor Brent Scowcroft. Photo from The Washington Times.
‘Liberating Kuwait’ and targeting Saddam:
Twenty years of war against Iraq

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / August 9, 2010

This August marks the twentieth anniversary of the Republican Bush I White House’s August 1990 decision to send U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia and covertly start working for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Baath regime in Iraq, under the pretext of “liberating Kuwait.” Yet, according to the 2010 World Almanac, as recently as late 2009, Kuwait was still “ruled by the Sabah dynasty” and “nearly half the population is non-Kuwaiti… and cannot vote.”

Coincidentally, when the Iraqi troops of the now-executed Saddam Hussein marched into Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, a former member of the corporate board of the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation’s Santa Fe International U.S. subsidiary — Brent Scowcroft — just happened to be the Bush I White House’s National Security Affairs advisor.

And, according to a Feb. 2, 1991 New York Times article, it was the presentation of Scowcroft — who was also the vice-chairman of Nixon Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s Kissinger Associates influence-peddling firm — at a National Security Council meeting on Aug. 3, 1990, “that made clear what the stakes were, crystallized people’s thinking and galvanized support for a strong response” to the Iraqi military occupation of Kuwait.

After learning that Iraq troops had entered Kuwait, Scowcroft “returned to the White House and informed Bush,” according to the 1991 book The Commanders by Bob Woodward. Scowcroft then “called an emergency meeting of the deputies committee by securing video links and chaired it himself from the Situation Room.”

At the emergency meeting, according to The Commanders, Scowcroft “pressed for more action,” proposed that a squadron of 24 Air Force F-15 fighters be offered to Saudi Arabia immediately and “called a National Security Council [NSC] meeting for first thing in the morning.”

The former board member of the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation’s Santa Fe International subsidiary then went to sleep in his White House office at 4 a.m., awoke 45 minutes later and “by 5 a.m. was at Bush [I]’s bedroom door” with an executive order to be signed that froze all of Kuwait’s foreign assets — except for the overseas special interests of the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation [KPC].

This executive order insured that little of the Al-Sabah Dynasty’s foreign wealth would end up in the hands of the Iraqi government while Kuwait was occupied, and that the Al-Sabah Dynasty’s KPC would be able to continue its normal commercial operations outside of Kuwait.

After the initial White House National Security Council meeting of Thursday, Aug. 2, 1990, was held, according to The Commanders, “Scowcroft was alarmed” because no immediate military response was agreed upon. A second NSC meeting was therefore held in the White House the following morning, on Friday, Aug. 3. And at this second NSC meeting, according to The Commanders, the following happened:

Scowcroft stated that there had to be two tracks. First, he believed the United States had to be willing to use force. Second, he said that Saddam had to be toppled. That had to be done covertly through the CIA, and be unclear to the world.

Responding immediately to this policy recommendation of the former Kissinger Associates vice-chairman,“Bush ordered the CIA to begin planning for a covert operation that would destabilize the regime and, he hoped, remove Saddam from power,” according to The Commanders.

After Scowcroft’s proposal to respond to the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait by sending a few hundred thousand Pentagon troops to Saudi Arabia had been implemented in August and September of 1990, the Emir of Kuwait then visited Bush I in the Oval Office on Friday, Sept. 28, 1990. And, according to Bob Woodward, “Scowcroft joined them for the hour long meeting” and “though the Emir did not directly ask for military intervention to liberate his country, Scowcroft could see that that was his subliminal message.”

Perhaps one reason why Scowcroft was able to detect the Emir of Kuwait’s “subliminal message” that the U.S. military should be used to put the Al-Sabah royal dynasty back in power in Kuwait, was that Scowcroft had apparently received payments from Santa Fe International in 1984, 1985, and 1986 for sitting on its corporate board — after the Al-Sabah Dynasty’s KPC had purchased Santa Fe International in 1981 for $2.5 billion.

According to The Commanders, by Fall 1990 “Scowcroft had become the First Companion and all-purpose playmate to the President on golf, fishing and weekend outings,” and by early October 1990 “Scowcroft told [then-Secretary of Defense] Cheney that Bush wanted a briefing right away on what an offensive against Saddam’s forces in Kuwait might look like.”

On Oct. 11, 1990, the Pentagon plans to launch a military offensive against Iraq were given to Bush [I]. And, at a 3:30 afternoon meeting on Oct. 29, 1990, Bush met with [then-Secretary of State James] Baker, Cheney, Scowcroft, and [then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin] Powell in the White House Situation Room where, according to The Commanders, “Bush and Scowcroft seemed primed to go ahead with the development of the offensive option.”

The Commanders also indicated that by Dec. 17, 1990, Scowcroft was eager to begin the bombing blitz of Iraq, despite all the subsequent pre-Jan. 16, 1991 Bush [I] Administration talk of how eager it was to have its then-Secretary of State Baker talk face-to-face with the Iraqi foreign minister, in order to avert a war:

It was obvious to [then-Congressional Representative] Aspin that Scowcroft had lost his patience with diplomacy… Saddam was jerking everyone around. There was no reason to deal with him, Scowcroft said. War would take less time… Scowcroft said. He was now convinced that war would be a two-to-three week solution…

That same week in December 1990, Scowcroft told Saudi Arabia’s then-Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, that “Basically the President had made up his mind” and that the diplomatic efforts to avoid war undertaken by the Bush Administration were “all exercises.”

Nearly a month later, on Jan. 16, 1991, the bombing of Iraq was begun by the U.S. government and, according to The Commanders, about 20 Tomahawk missiles “were preprogrammed to hit Saddam’s presidential palace, the main telephone exchange and Baghdad’s electrical power-generating station” — in the name of “liberating Kuwait.”

And around 100,000 people in Iraq were apparently killed by the U.S. War Machine during the first few months of its 20-year war against Iraq in early 1991. In addition, at least 849 U.S. troops were either killed or wounded during the first few months of Gulf War I.

During the next 10 years more than 9,600 of the U.S. soldiers involved in the first Gulf War, who “were often required to enter radioactive battlefields unprotected and were never warned of the dangers of Depleted Uranium” weapons, reportedly also died, according to Project Censored’s Censored 2004 book. Another 1.5 million people in Iraq, more than half of them children under the age of five, also died during the next 10 years as a result of the economic sanctions that the U.S. government imposed on people in Iraq, as part of its continuing economic warfare against Iraq.

Meanwhile, in “liberated” Kuwait, after the Al-Sabah Dynasty was restored to power there, its government executed or tortured hundreds of its political opponents and began to violate the human rights of Palestinians living in Kuwait in the early 1990s. And in 1997, the Al-Sabah Dynasty’s KPC earned an additional $997.5 million by selling 35 million shares of the common stock of its Santa Fe International subsidiary on the global stock markets, while still keeping a controlling 69 percent of all Santa Fe International common stock in KPC hands.

Then, in 2000, the KPC’s wholly-owned SFIC Holdings (Cayman) Inc. sold another 30 million shares of its Santa Fe International common stock for big money, reducing KPC’s holdings of Santa Fe International’s stock to 39 percent. Yet that same year KPC was still given $15.9 billion by the United Nations for alleged “damages” related to the 1990 Iraq’s military occupation of Kuwait.

And in September 2001 , KPC’s Santa Fe International subsidiary agreed to merge, in a $3 billion stock swap, with Global Marine, to create the world’s second-largest offshore drilling contractor, GlobalSantaFe — with the KPC owning 18 percent of GlobalSantaFe’s stock in early 2002.

But after GlobalSantaFe repurchased 43.5 million shares of the GlobalSantaFe stock owned by KPC’s SFIC Holdings subsidiary for $799.5 million in 2005, the percentage of GlobalSantaFe stock owned by the Al-Sabah Dynasty’s KPC was reduced to around 8 percent. And two years later, KPC’s GlobalSantaFe (through another merger) became part of the Transocean offshore drilling contractor that owned the Deepwater Horizon oil-drilling rig that BP leased — which has recently created a lot of environmental destruction after it exploded, killed some oil industry workers, and began spilling a lot of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Meanwhile, in March 2003, the neo-con Republican Bush II Administration (with the support of AIPAC and other pro-Israeli government lobbying organizations in the United States) escalated the U.S. government’s war against people in Iraq.

And since the U.S. War Machine began bombing and occupying Iraq again in a big way in March 2003, about 1 million more Iraqis have been killed, along with at least 4,732 more U.S. troops — including at least 413 more U.S. soldiers from Texas killed in Iraq since March 2003. In addition, at least 31,882 more U.S. troops have been wounded in Iraq since March 2003 — including at least 3,059 more U.S. soldiers from Texas wounded in Iraq since March 2003.

Yet 20 years after Scowcroft apparently recommended that the CIA be authorized to begin planning for a covert operation, “which would be unclear to the world,” that would destabilize the Baath regime in Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power — in violation of international law and the United Nations Charter — as part of the U.S. government’s effort to “liberate Kuwait,” most people in Kuwait still do not have full democratic rights.

Amnesty USA’s 2010 Annual Report For Kuwait, observed that “formal political parties remained banned” and “critics of the government and ruling family were harassed” in Kuwait in 2009. And as Priyanka Motaparthy of Human Rights Watch noted in a recent July 21, 2010 Foreign Policy Focus article:

Last month, prosecutors began the trial of Mohammad al-Jasim, a journalist accused of endangering national security. Jasim, trained as a lawyer, is one of the government’s most vocal critics and has faced more than 20 separate charges for libel and slander of government officials based on his writings and public statements…

Based on the government’s most recent charges, which elevate charges to national security offenses, Jasim spent 49 days in pretrial detention, including a brief stay in a military hospital following a weeklong hunger strike, before he was released on bail. At his trial, which resumes in September, he will be forced to defend himself from charges that he was “instigating to overthrow the regime” and attempting to “dismantle the foundations of Kuwaiti society.”

These accusations initially stemmed from 32 entries on his well-known Arabic-language blog Mizan, where Jasim has lambasted the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of the government and called for Kuwaiti Emir Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah to follow through on his promises of democratic reform… Following calls for his release in the local media and demonstrations by activists, the government issued a gag order prohibiting the press from covering his trial. Although Jasim has since been released from detention on bail, the ban on media coverage continues.

…While members of parliament and civil society groups are pushing for further change, Kuwait’s emir and key members of his family still hold the power to block any reforms.

Jasim’s prosecution is part of a steady encroachment over the past year on Kuwaitis’ freedom of expression, the right to assemble peacefully, and the right to criticize public officials’ performance. In October 2009, prosecutors charged two members of parliament with slander — the first for criticizing the prime minister, a member of the ruling family, and the second for accusing the health minister of corruption. Each was convicted and fined more than $10,000…

In March, the government arrested and deported virtually overnight more than 30 Egyptian nationals who supported former International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed El-Baradei, an advocate of political reform in Egypt and possible presidential candidate. The Egyptians, many of whom were longtime residents in Kuwait, had simply organized a meeting to discuss his campaign…

Khalid al-Fadhala, the head of Kuwait’s National Democratic Alliance… was also recently prosecuted for criminal libel and slander of the country’s prime minister based on comments he made during a public rally accusing the prime minister of money laundering…

“…Kuwait’s activists and media remain under threat. When it comes to freedom of the press, and its approach to human rights more broadly, too many Kuwaiti decision-makers focus on superficial attempts to polish their country’s reputation abroad, while ignoring vital legal protections. When challenged, the government falls back on arguments of state sovereignty, essentially ordering international actors to mind their own business…

But the government remains skittish and highly sensitive to criticism, whether from foreign governments, international actors, or local activists and writers. As Jasim’s case demonstrates, these individuals have borne the brunt of its response, including aggressive criminal prosecutions for slander and defamation directed at those who comment on the work of government officials, crackdowns on public gatherings, and gag orders on the local media…

Scowcroft, meanwhile, has, in recent years, been a “principal member”/president of The Scowcroft Group influence-peddling firm, “whose principals and network of consultants reach into government and businesses worldwide” and whose clients include “industry leaders in the telecommunications, insurance, aeronautics, energy, and financial products sectors; foreign direct investors in the electronics, utilities, energy and food industries; and investors in the fixed income, equities, and commodities markets around world,” according to The Scowcroft Group’s website.

And, coincidentally, another “principal member” in Scowcroft’s firm is former CIA Deputy Director for Operations James L. Pavitt, who “managed more than one-third of the CIA’s globally deployed personnel and nearly half of the CIA’s multi-billion-dollar budget,” “spent many years abroad as a member of the Clandestine Service,” “served as Senior Intelligence Advisor to President George H.W. Bush as a member of the National Security Council team from 1990 to 1993,” and “as head of America’s Clandestine Services… led the CIA’s operational response to… September 11, 2001,” according to The Scowcroft Group’s website.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Bob Feldman, Brent Snowcroft, George H. W. Bush, Iraq War, Kuwait, Saddam Hussein | Leave a comment

Greg Moses : Deporting Texas Student Was Big Mistake

Posted on August 9, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Saad Nabeel. Photo by Shehab Uddin / Der Spiegel.
What the Times forgot to mention:
Story of deported Texas student
Awaits President in Dallas

By Greg Moses / The Rag Blog / August 9, 2010

While the New York Times Monday morning proclaims that the Obama administration is not deporting college students whose parents brought them to America at a young age, the President is headed toward a fundraiser in Dallas Monday night where one such case is well known.

Dallas real estate developer and immigrant rights advocate Ralph Isenberg bought tickets to the fundraiser with President Barack Obama so that he can plead for the speedy return of a young deportee from Texas. Isenberg has been working for several months to secure the return of 19-year-old who was deported to Bangladesh with his parents in early 2010.

If the New York Times is correct about what the Obama administration is trying to do, then the deportation of Saad Nabeel was a big mistake. He had lived in the USA since age three, completing grades six through twelve in Texas. When he was deported at age 18, Nabeel was studying electrical engineering on full scholarship at the University of Texas at Arlington

“I plan to tell the President that if he is looking for a poster child for someone who has been unfairly treated and who we need to do right by, then Saad Nabeel is perfect,” said Isenberg Saturday in a telephone interview with the Texas Civil Rights Review.

“There are multiple legal issues that we can pursue to try to get Saad back in the country,” said Isenberg. “But the quickest solution by far would be to pass a DREAM Act that includes an amendment for young persons who have been recently deported. Other legal issues would require lengthy legal actions — and the wait would do no good to Saad.”

If adopted by Congress and signed by the President, the DREAM Act would offer citizenship options to youth who were brought to the USA by migrant parents. When Isenberg approaches the President in Nabeel’s behalf, he will also be representing the opinions of Saad’s young friends who are this week preparing their returns to college life.

“I feel like everything that has happened in the past year was unnecessary,” explains Chris Anderson, one of Nabeel’s high school friends contacted by the Texas Civil Rights Review.

Saad was brought to America by his family when he was a young child. He lived like every other American by going to school, getting a job, and spending time with his friends and family. Everything that he knew and loved was in the United States, and one day he was just uprooted from college, thrown in jail for over a month, and shipped to a foreign third world country that he has no memory of.

Nabeel’s case has attracted media attention in Dallas and the German magazine Der Spiegel. Other international media have shown interest in the case. Isenberg agrees with Der Spiegel that Nabeel’s campaign to return to the USA has been helped by the young man’s fluency with computer skills.

Keeping tabs on news via computer in Bangladesh, Nabeel saw Monday’s New York Times report as soon as it hit his inbox as the morning’s top story. When asked via email what he would like to say to the President during Monday’s visit to Texas, Nabeel replied within two minutes:

I love America and would die for my country in a heartbeat. It is the only home that I know.

“Saad’s case is really rather compelling,” said Isenberg over the weekend. “Given the discretion that is available to immigration authorities, this thing could have so easily gone the other way. My hope is that the most powerful man in the world will at least take a brief interest.”

[Rag Blog contributor Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence. He can be reached at gmosesx@gmail.com .]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Bangladesh, Dallas, Greg Moses, Immigration, Obama, Texas | 1 Comment

Kate Braun : (Crescent) Moon Musings

Posted on August 9, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Waxing crescent moon over Austin, Feb. 15, 2010. Photo from KXAN.com.
Moon Musings:
Waxing Crescent Moon,
(August 12-August 15, 2010)

By Kate Braun / The Rag Blog / August 8, 2010

This phase of the moon is for promoting things that require growth. Health, money, and relationships fall into this category as does planting above-ground crops in your garden. You may find it helpful to use this moon-phase for clarifying foci and continuing to set goals to accomplish between now and the next new moon.

Sunset is the prime time to begin your celebration; daytime high temperatures begin to drop as sunset drifts into darkness, making the outdoors more comfortable. It is usually better to honor Lady Moon under the open sky.

You have several days in which this moon phase is active. If you choose to activate moon-energy on Thursday, focus your energies on promoting growth where money and legal matters are concerned as Jupiter is the ruling planet. Use the color blue, the number four, and plenty of water in your activities.

Ouspensky considered four the perfect number. It refers to the seasons, the major points on a compass, the suits of Tarot, and the fixed signs of the Zodiac; and adding 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 gives 10, which is composed of the numerals one and zero, which in binary terms are the only numerals needed to create any number. Ergo, four represents “all and everything.” Repeat your invocations four times, turning sunwise and facing each of the cardinal points on the compass in turn (north, east, south, and west).

If you prefer to celebrate on Friday, Venus rules and the focus is more concentrated on promoting love and attraction. Use the color green, go barefoot so that your feet make direct contact with the earth, include water and the number seven in your activities. Seven is a number of Great Magick and may be invoked by drawing a seven-pointed star in the earth. Repeat your invocations seven times, drawing moon energy from above, below, and within yourself as well as the cardinal compass-points.

If Saturday is a better day for you to work with waxing crescent moon energy, the ruling planet is Saturn, it would be good to dress in black, to stay in close contact with the earth and incorporate the number three into your activities. Three is also a number of Great Magick, representing the balance of Mind, Body, and Spirit in the world. Use a triangle to represent this number if celebrating on Saturday and repeat your invocations three times.

There are no hard-and-fast rules as to what you say when you open yourself to moon-energy. You may take some time in advance to write out what you feel to be a good statement or you may speak extemporaneously.

The more important thing is to be centered. One way to do this is to take seven slow and easy yoga-breaths (inhale through the nose, gently and smoothly, feeling the intake of air filling all the empty spaces in your body; exhale gently and smoothly with no huffing and puffing, letting all the empty spaces in your body become completely empty) before you begin, concentrating on making a connection between you and Lady Moon. If you like, visualize this connection as a shining cord of braided silver growing brighter and stronger with each inhalation and exhalation.

Don’t let yourself become too heavy with food before completing your activities. You need energy to focus yourself spiritually, not to run a marathon, but an empty stomach is not good, either. An array of cheeses, crackers, fruits, water, and herb tea, or fruit punch will give you sufficient strength with overloading your digestive system.

Stay focused on laying the foundation for what you choose to accomplish, both short-term and long-term. Remember: you are still at a beginning stage of creating the successful outcome that is your goal. Immediate response to your invocations is possible, but it would be unwise to expect immediate results.

[Kate Braun’s website is www.tarotbykatebraun.com. If you know any Moon Lore that you would like to share with her, send it to kate_braun2000@yahoo.com. Kate will be participating in a Metaphysical Fair on Saturday and Sunday, August 14-15, 2010, at the Holiday Inn (formerly the Radisson) at 6000 Middle Fiskville Rd. in Austin (between Highland Mall and Lincoln Village).]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Astrology, Kate Braun, Metaphysics, Moon, Ritual | Leave a comment

John Ross : Epic Hunger Strike in the Land of the Hungry

Posted on August 9, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Cayetano Cabrera of the Mexican Electricity Workers’ Union (SME). His hunger strike was the longest in Mexican history — but it ended in futility. Photo from Musicios y Politicos y Locos.
Where Hunger is palpable:
Mexican hunger strike sets record
But electrical workers win nothing

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / August 8, 2010

MEXICO CITY — Hunger is palpable in Mexico. Beggars line the streets of the cities with their bowls and their children, pleading for coins: “Para comer, Senor, para comer?” (“To eat, Mister?”) Whole families rifle through the trash bins in front of the fast food franchises hunting for discarded scraps. At La Merced market, women like Juana Cortez glean the rotting produce thrown out on the patio. “Para comer, Senor…”

According to National Nutrition Institute (INN) studies, 42% of all Mexicans have experienced some degree of malnutrition in their lives. Millions of children living in extreme poverty go to bed hungry every night. Although tortillas are universally utilized to wrap food or scoop up what’s on your plate, for 13 million kids affirms the INN, the tortilla is the whole meal.

With hunger so rooted in Mexican demographics, it seems a jarring anomaly that deliberately starving oneself should be so popular a tactic of achieving redress for social grievances but activists here seem to reflexively go into hunger strike mode when they have exhausted all other remedies to reverse perceived injustices.

Indigenous Zapatista prisoners in Chiapas jails stop eating to protest inequities. So does their emeritus bishop Samuel Ruiz who once hunkered down in a freezing cathedral and refused food for weeks until the government made room for his peace group at the negotiating table. 91 year-old Luis H. Alvarez, once a right-wing PAN party presidential candidate, sat on the steps of the Chihuahua legislature and refused to eat for 41 days to protest electoral flimflam as did his successor as PAN presidential hopeful Manuel Clouthier after the 1988 election was stolen.

Rodolfo Macias, a self-proclaimed president of Mexico, went 50 days in the Zocalo to protest the government’s refusal to recognize his exalted stature.

Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, whose activist son disappeared in police custody and is the force behind the Mothers of the Disappeared, has staged seven hunger strikes demanding the reappearance of those who have been taken. This reporter went 26 days without eating in front of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to protest a Latin American debt that takes food off the table from those at the very bottom of the food chain.

This past April 25th, over 100 members of the Mexican Electricity Workers Union (SME) lay down under a tent pitched in the great Zocalo plaza here, the heart of the Mexican body politic, and declared themselves to be on hunger strike. When medical emergencies forced many of the original strikers to abandon the strike, others stepped up to take their place on the cots under the tent. But after three months, their numbers had been winnowed down to 14. Two of the survivors, Cayatano Cabrera and Miguel Angel Ibarra, vowed to fast to the death to get their jobs back.

Both Miguel Angel and Cayatano had worked for years for “Luz y Fuerza del Centro” (“Light and Power of the Center”), a state-run enterprise that distributed electricity throughout Mexico City and five central states. On October 11, 2009, President Felipe Calderon declared “Luz y Fuerza” to be a debilitating drain on Mexico’s floundering economy and shut down the company. Thousands of federal police and army troops swarmed over 103 generating stations, pushing 44,000 SME members out of their work places at bayonet point.

Shuttering Luz y Fuerza and the subsequent displacement of union workers was one further step in the creeping privatization of the electricity generation sector here that the Constitution mandates to be the domain of the state. Despite constitutional restrictions, over 30% of Mexican electricity generation is now in private — and often transnational — hands.

Calderon’s takeover of Luz y Fuerza appeared to be predicated on his fascination with the company’s 24,000 kilometers of transmission lines upon which he hopes to lay fiber optic cable and sell off the technology to the highest bidder.

From the get-go, it was evident that the Calderon government was equally as dead set on dismembering the Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas (SME), the second oldest union in Mexico, born 96 years ago at the zenith of the Mexican revolution during a strike against the transnational Canadian Light and Power that then monopolized Mexico City electricity generation.

The SME, which remained largely independent of the long-ruling PRI during that party’s 71 year rule, has a tradition of solidarity with social organizations in struggle — SME volunteers hooked up turbines deep in the Lacandon jungle to bring light to Zapatista villages and, in the aftermath of the horrific 8.1 1985 earthquake here, quickly repaired fallen lines in working class colonias and got Mexico City humming again.

In a not so subtle maneuver to break union solidarity, Calderon and his hard-nosed labor secretary Javier Lozano, who political wags suggest is being groomed to succeed his boss, offered the displaced workers indemnization based on seniority if they would give up their SME affiliation.

Bonuses were promised to those who cashed out quickly and the ex-workers were told they would soon be re-contracted by the Federal Electricity Commission. The CFE is charged with distributing energy outside of Mexico City but has temporarily taken over Luz y Fuerza’s operations here — but only 100 ex-SME members were ever hired.

To sweeten the offer, government financial advisors were made available to counsel the former workers on how best to invest their payouts. Fast food franchises were offered but proved to be prohibitively expensive — former electricity workers were soon selling old clothes in the streets. Under the Calderon-Lozano putsch that involved prime time TV spots and even Twitter messages to prompt cash-outs, 60% of the SME membership was snookered out of fighting for their jobs.

Of 44,000 workers, only 16,400 remained on the SME books and Lozano went after the holdouts with a vengeance, refusing to accept election results that had returned the union’s secretary-general Martin Esparza to office for a second term and freezing 100,000,000 pesos in union funds.

Popular resentment to the Calderon-Lozano assault on the SME flourished briefly. Five days after the takeover, a quarter of a million citizens marched through Mexico City to demand the workers’ reinstatement. Over the next months, according to city transit officials, the SME initiated nearly 900 marches and rallies (nearly three a day), further snarling Mexico City traffic that at best moves at a snail’s pace, to gridlock.

Two attempts at a national strike fizzled. Esparza flew off to Geneva to plead the SME’s case before the OIT or World Labor Organization, a wing of the United Nations. Despite the OIT’s condemnation, Calderon and Lozano would not budge. Finally, on April 25th, Cayatano and Miguel Angel and their comrades lay down in the Zocalo and declared they were not going to eat again until they got their jobs back.

Massive protests occurred after 44,000 members of the Mexican Electricity Workers’ Union were pushed out of their work places at bayonet point. Photo from Think Mexico.
The weeks and months mounted up. By June, Cayatano had clocked 53 days on hunger strike, one more than Provisional Irish Republican Army leader Bobby Sands who expired in the Maze prison in 1981 under British custody — 10 more Provos would starve themselves to death before they won recognition for their struggle. In Ireland, hunger strikers honor the martyrs of the Easter Rebellion who back in 1916 resorted to starvation to win freedom from the British yoke.

By the beginning of July, Cayatano was trespassing into Gandhi’s territory — the Mahatma went on multiple prolonged hunger strikes to win India’s independence. Hunger striking is an Indian tradition in which the aggrieved lay themselves down on the doorstep of those who have wronged them and seek to shame them into just compensation by starving themselves to death.

Now, as he entered his 75th day, Cayatano’s numbers were running neck and neck with Turkish political prisoners, nearly 80 of whom have died in the last decade to protest repression in their country. Turkish activists proudly wear the clothes of those who starved themselves to death in pursuit of justice.

Day after day, Cayatano and Miguel Angel, the others, lay on their cots in the Zocalo. The World Cup, broadcast on giant screens to multitudes in the great plaza, came and went. A tropical music festival followed. Demonstrators for diverse causes tramped into the square. The summer rains inundated the SME camp.

By mid-July, Cayatano Cabrera was fading fast, down to skin and bones, his body eating itself to provide desperately needed nourishment. He had lost 60 pounds, a third of his body weight, suffered two pre-heart attacks, and needed oxygen to breath. The physician who attended the strikers, Alfredo Verdeleguel, pronounced him near death. The government threatened to suspend the doctor’s license if Cayatano died. Verdeleguel began receiving anonymous death threats.

Cayatano and Miguel Angel insisted upon an audience with Felipe Calderon: “…if he fails to give us this right, then he will be responsible for our deaths,” Cabrera gasped, reading a letter to the press that both workers had signed, demanding their jobs back. But Felipe Calderon was preoccupied with praising other hunger strikers, Cuban political prisoners that the Castro government had just released.

When corporate media charged that Cayatano was faking it, that he was sipping atole (corn gruel) and munching on pan dulce in the mornings, his SME comrades ripped off their shirts, plunged syringes into their veins to draw blood, and painted banners with it denouncing the calumnies.

But as Cayatano neared the Guinness Book of Records mark of 94 days set by an IRA prisoner decades ago, the Calderon brain trust was getting jumpy. A government ambulance was stationed in the Zocalo to whisk Cayatano off to hospital if he fell into a coma but the workers drove it off.

Mexico is a mess these days with the economy in free fall and 25,000 citizens sacrificed in Calderon’s foolhardy drug war and the death of a hunger striker or two would only pour gasoline on the blaze. Moreover, many world dignitaries would be showing up in the very plaza where the hunger strikers were starving themselves to death in just six weeks for Mexico’s bicentennial celebrations. Something had to give.

On July 15th, the President fired his Interior Secretary Fernando Gomez Mont, the second most powerful politico in the nation and a staunch proponent of labor secretary Lozano’s hard hand. The new Interior minister was an unknown from Baja California, Francisco Blake Mora, a school chum of Calderon’s that he could control.

Blake’s appointment undercut Lozano who by now was sending out 5,000 Tweets a day threatening to jail Esparza for murder if Cayatano croaked. Blake summoned the SME secretary general to his offices to negotiate an end to Cayatano’s hunger strike.

After months of rejection and frustration, the union had distilled its demands down to three. Sensing that the SME would never get back the Luz y Fuerza jobs, Esparza focused on the figure of a “substitute patron,” i.e. finding a new boss for the workers, a practice embedded in Mexican labor law — indeed, Luz y Fuerza had been founded on the same principle in the 1960s when Canadian Light and Power gave up the ghost.

Esparza and his team urged that the Federal Electricity Commission contract the remaining SME workers but Lozano considered this an impossible solution because the CFE already has contracts with its own compliant company union. The creation of a new corporate entity to oversee Mexico City electricity generation was also nixed by Lozano — the Calderon government has budgeted billions for the bicentennial celebrations and the cupboard was bare.

The second demand was that the labor secretary accept the election results or “toma de nota” (a new vote had been held) ratifying Martin Esparza as the SME’s top official and unfreezing 100,000,000 pesos in union funds. The third demand was amnesty from prosecution for SME strikers — as blackouts spread throughout Mexico City and environs, Lozano and the deposed Gomez Mont accused the electricistas of “sabotage.”

Following a six hour July 22nd negotiating session behind closed doors at the Interior Secretariat, the protagonists emerged from the inner sanctum to announce the end of Cayatano Cabrera’s hunger strike. No jobs or contracts or new companies or even amnesty for the workers were promised although Lozano indicated that union recognition was under renewed consideration. Blake Mora, Javier Lozano, and Martin Esparza shook hands and posed for the official photo. That was it. No agreement had been signed. The details would be worked out later. Trust me.

Past 2 a.m., Martin Esparza sped back to the encampment in the Zocalo in his silver Gran Marquis and disappeared into the tent where the hunger strikers were laid out. For two hours, the SME boss cajoled and browbeat 13 of the starving men into eating again. By acquiescing to the Calderon government’s demands, the men gave up the only power card they still held, the threat of their death.

The one holdout was Cayatano Cabrera. All he wanted was his job back. When his companeros were taken to hospital for treatment, he refused to go along and his family carried him to the car and took the emaciated man home. The longest hunger strike in Mexican history was now history and Cayatano had not gotten his job back.

[John Ross, author of El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City (“gritty and pulsating” — New York Post), is at home in Mexico City. He is available for dinnertime tete-a-tetes at the Café La Blanca in the Centro Historico. Write johnross@igc.org.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Direct Action, Hunger, John Ross, Labor Unions, Mexico, Strikes | 2 Comments

Marc Estrin : Awesome Days of Awe

Posted on August 7, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

The space between the pillars:
Awesome days of awe

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / August 7, 2010

August 6th: Hiroshima. August 9th: Nagasaki. Three days in between.

The days between close-set giant pillars take on special significance. Whatever the current behavior of the state of Israel, most Jews know such spaces well.

The 10 days between Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the year, and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, are not actually holidays, but mark a special period of time — what are called the Days of Awe. They are a kind of spring cleaning in fall, a purification of one’s world and soul so that on Yom Kippur the Jew can faced the Eternal with all worldly issues in place. And what is the main strategy for this cleaning? It may surprise you. Asking and giving forgiveness.

The tradition of the shtetels — those small eastern European Jewish communities depicted in Fiddler on the Roof — was that in the 10 days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur people would ask forgiveness of everyone they had wronged that year. All the little, and sometimes the big, wrongs that had been done in the community were brought out into the open, confessed, made good if possible, and forgiven. The entire community felt cleansed and pure.

Perhaps not everyone was that honest. Like folks everywhere, not all Jews had the courage to beg someone’s pardon or, when they themselves were asked, to give pardon with a full heart. But they found it a lot easier to do than we would today. While we have much more information now than they did, we don’t know as well how to say “I’m sorry.”

But in those simple villages, to avoid a world full of hate, people often took the 10 days and went knocking on the doors of any estranged friends, and cleared their personal paths, and those of the community. The world was cleansed for Yom Kippur — the “Day of Atonement.”

And on that day the naked human being was scheduled to go mano a mano, godwrestling with the Eternal. Tradition has it that on Rosh Hashanah, God inscribed your name in either the Book of Life or the Book of Death. That’s why the concern for measuring up. But the verdict on Rosh Hashanah was not final. You had the 10 days in between, and especially Yom Kippur, to change the Judgment. But at the end of Yom Kippur, the Books were closed.

And so it is understandable that Yom Kippur be a full day of prayer without food. Five separate services take place during 25 hours — like Muslim practice — but with little or no pause between them. The idea of the fast is this: when the human body has paused from its natural acts of life, and history has suspended its normal ups and downs, the spirit can be utterly reborn. We don’t really do fasts in America. We’re better at pig-outs.

And sin — or evil, for that matter — is not a very popular concept in the contemporary American heartmind. Yet some concept of estrangement from the Truth has been common to most religious world views. The acknowledgment of sin is a crucial part of the Yom Kippur service.

“The Cloud Over The Culture” is the punning title of an extraordinary article by Paul Boyer (1985) which appeared on the fortieth anniversary of dropping the bombs. In it, he asserts, as do I, that although “Hiroshima” and “Nagasaki” are such familiar words — banal even — the United States “has yet to assimilate fully what those words represent in its political, cultural or moral history.”

He quotes the American Catholic Bishops’ 1983 Statement on Nuclear War:

After the passage of nearly four decades and a concomitant growth in our understanding of the ever-growing horror of nuclear war, we must shape the climate of opinion which will make it possible for our country to express profound sorrow over the atomic bombing in 1945. Without that sorrow, there is no possibility of finding a way to repudiate future use of nuclear weapons. [My emphasis.]

Sorrow. Remorse. It sounds Days of Awe-like. How very, very strange it is that we — as a nation — have never done that. Not once, in now 65 years. Not even the teensiest bit. Un-Amerkin.

We have consistently refused — and still, even now, refuse — an absolute and explicit “no first use” nuclear weapons policy. One of the physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project observed that

If the memory of things is to deter, where is that memory? Hiroshima has been taken out of the American conscience, eviscerated, extirpated.

1945 seems so long ago. We were a nation in genuine and legitimate relief from a dreadful war. But what tenacity there is in the myth of American innocence, the belief that we are somehow set apart from the world, our motives higher, our methods purer.

It is this constant myth that prevents us from having any national Days of Awe, that keeps us from expressing sorrow over the event. And, as the Catholic Bishops so insightfully express, without that sorrow, we cannot go on, we cannot build a world safe — from ourselves.

New national holydays

Let me therefore beat the drum for some pre-Labor Day labor. Down with innocence! Up with memory, confession, sorrow, apology, healing!

I hereby propose a new national holiday, modeled on the Days of Awe, but occurring in August, between Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like the Days of Awe, they would be bounded by two momentous events, would celebrate those events with appropriate ritual, and would feature redemptive tasks to be done in between.

“It could never happen,” you say, “too serious. It runs against the American grain to do that kind of self-criticism.”

Maybe, maybe not. We have our solemn holidays, in places still solemnly kept. And besides, we may be growing up as a nation. Engaged in five current wars, with Iran coming up, the peach fuzz is off our cheeks. Obama’s fairytales notwithstanding, we know we’re not in Kansas anymore.

The vast majority of people realize we can’t go on as we are — exporting jobs, exploiting foreign workers, making wars, eviscerating and polluting the planet. “Change” has become the buzzword to win elections.

The Christians have taught the world to acknowledge a December season of Peace. Is it too much to imagine that churches and synagogues, national organizations and neighborhood groups, schools and universities, could slowly grow a late summer holiday to express the profound sorrow the Catholic Bishops recommend — a mindful holiday to witness and grieve, to assimilate a painful part of the past, to dissipate the cloud over the culture, to ask and give forgiveness, to sing in chorus “Hiroshima, Nakasaki. Never Again,” and to be able to go on, safer from ourselves?

The religious historian Mircea Eliade has made a distinction between sacred and profane time. In sacred time, historical events gradually come to partake of the permanence of myth, while in profane time they gradually lose their grip on people and become merely material for historians and the technicians at Disney World.

I am calling for a holiday that would change Hiroshima and Nagasaki into universal myths, deeply grounded in sacred time, permanent stop signs on the road to destruction. Four new holydays, making things whole, healing.

Here’s how it might go. On August 5th, supper is a Japanese meal, which Americans would learn to make as beautifully as we do a turkey dinner. The event would have a ritual component like a Seder, in which symbolic foods are eaten, and history is thoughtfully reviewed. Each family, each congregation, each school would develop its own texts until some key themes and treatments became solidified.

The morning and afternoon of the 6th — Hiroshima Day — would be a time for fasting, or some special breakfast, with a ritual observance at 8:15 AM. During the 6th, 7th and 8th — our three days of awe and repentance — individuals would consciously perform expiatory tasks, personal and interpersonal, as in the Jewish Days of Awe, but also social, holding teach-ins, attending peace events. If a weekend fell between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there would be special services at churches, synagogues, mosques. Morning and afternoon of the 9th is again a special time of fasting. 11:02 is observed, and everyone gears up for a big celebration in the evening, at which international foods of all kinds would be prepared — a huge community festival.

What I’m describing is a full-blown, big holiday. Things don’t begin that way, of course. We might just start by thinking about it for a few years, by recognizing that in fact something important did occur on these days. Then, who knows what would grow — in individual hearts, in individual families, in individual congregations and institutions. Were something like this to get underway, in 10 years we’d have Good Housekeeping printing August peace recipes.

We postmoderns like to play with history. Now we can play in its real mudbath, and actually get dirty — a death-defying vital alternative to psychic numbing.

Would the New Days of Awe change anything? I can’t imagine otherwise. The power of confession has been known to the Catholic Church for centuries. If anything has sustained the even older Jewish community, it has been the inspiration of the High Holy Days. The Muslims make pilgrimage to Mecca.

This stuff has both a track record and the power of newness-at-large. Like an exotic virus spreading in a vulnerable population, the power of guilt could quite transform postmodern American culture. Revelation through genuine memory, then Teshuvah, turning and Tikkun, healing.

Or shall we just go on making wars?

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Atomic Bomb, Hiroshima, Marc Estrin, Nagasaki, Nuclear Weapons | 2 Comments

Ted McLaughlin : Access to Water Is a Human Right

Posted on August 5, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Clean water should be a human right,
Not a capitalist commodity

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / August 5, 2010

A vote took place in the United Nations a few days ago that could eventually have far-reaching effects on everyone on this planet. The vote was on a resolution, introduced by the Bolivian representative to the U.N., that extended basic human rights. The resolution officially made access to clean water and sanitation a basic fundamental human right.

This just makes sense. After all, water is not a luxury but an absolute necessity for human life. Humans cannot live with water. This puts water in a special category with food and shelter. These items are more important than any other resources because they are a must for sustaining human life. So how could anyone oppose this resolution?

Actually there were no votes against the resolution. It was approved 122 to 0. One might think that was a unanimous victory for human rights, but that would not be completely true. Although no nation voted against the resolution, about 40 nations abstained from voting on the resolution. And, interestingly enough, most of those nations abstaining are the very countries that preach the loudest about human rights.

Among the nations refusing to vote for access to clean water and sanitation as a basic human right were the United States, Canada, Australia, and many European countries — the so-called industrialized and “civilized” first-world nations. Why would they not vote for the right of every human to have access to clean water?

That’s simple. Voting for access to clean water as a fundamental human right would expose their own hypocrisy. You see, these countries don’t see water as something everyone should have a right to. They see water as simply another commodity to be bought and sold, and those who cannot afford to buy it have no right to it. This may sound harsh, but it is true.

The United States has never recognized the right of humans to have access to water. In this country, we give lip service to providing access to clean water for everyone, but the fact is that access is granted only to those who are willing and able to pay for that access. If you don’t think this is true, just try not paying your water bill for a while. You will find your water cut off. Your access to water will be denied by the very government that proudly claims to provide that access.

I have always thought this was wrong. No one should be denied access to clean water just because they cannot afford to buy it. No one should be reduced to having to steal this basic resource just to sustain their lives. Clean water should be provided by the government (as it is in most places in the United States), but it should not be sold — it should be paid for through taxes and provided free of charge to all citizens.

Now I know that some of you are thinking that if water is provided for free then some people will waste this precious resource. That is true — some people will waste the water, and there should be a punishment (probably monetary) for that. Anyone who uses more than a reasonable amount of this precious resource should be fined severely, but no one should be completely denied access to a reasonable amount of water (and that reasonable amount can be determined by the community-at-large).

Frankly, much water is already being wasted. Here in Texas we know that our water resources will not meet our future and growing demand. And yet we continue to waste water. In fact, many communities actually encourage that waste. As example, does it really make sense to keep planting and watering lawns (a requirement in many communities and subdivisions) in a state where water becomes more scarce every year?

And the waste is even more egregious in the richer communities, where one family lives on a large estate and to water many acres of lawns will use more water than that necessary to sustain hundreds of families with clean water. But Americans are in love with their lawns and, even in a state with scarce water resources, are currently unwilling to give them up and stop wasting that valuable resource — and the future be damned.

But such wasteful use of water may not be possible in the future. Especially in light of global climate change (and that change is happening whether you believe it is caused by humans or not), water is becoming scarcer all over the world. There are those who believe (including myself) that future wars will be fought over water rather than oil or other capitalist commodities.

The resolution introduced by Bolivia and passed by 122 nations was nothing less than a gauntlet being thrown down. The developing nations and their allies are telling the industrialized world that water is not a commodity to be sold only to those who can afford it. It is a scarce resource that must be shared by all of humanity.

Like it or not, the industrialized world must reconsider and change it’s wasteful use of this scarce resource, and they must no longer view it as a commodity to make the rich even richer — a commodity that can be denied to the poor. The industrialized world, especially the United States, loves to preach equality and human rights. It is now time for them to start practicing what they preach. The future of humanity demands it.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Human Rights, Ted McLaughlin, United Nations, Water, Water Conservation | 2 Comments

Thomas McKelvey Cleaver : ‘Crossing the Rubicon’ at the Gulf of Tonkin

Posted on August 4, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

E. J. Fitzgerald’s painting (1980) illustrates the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. U.S. Navy Historical Center / Wikimedia Commons.
Crossing the Rubicon:
The Tonkin Gulf Incident

It’s an event I can never forget, because I was there, a young sailor working in the operations office of the Admiral in charge of the two destroyers.

By Thomas McKelvey Cleaver / The Rag Blog / August 4, 2010

Today, August 4, is the 46th anniversary of the attacks on four North Vietnamese ports by the U.S. Navy, ordered by President Lyndon Johnson in response to reported attacks during the two days previous by “North Vietnamese torpedo boats” against two American destroyers cruising in “international waters,” the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy.

It became the causus belli for direct American military involvement in the Vietnam War, known forever after as the “Tonkin Gulf Incident.”

It’s an event I can never forget, because I was there, a young sailor working in the operations office of the Admiral in charge of the two destroyers. The Seventh Fleet Patrol Force operated extensive reconnaissance networks, from off Vladivostok and the Soviet Far East in the Sea of Japan, down the coast of China to Taiwan and on down to the South China Sea. The initial story, that the two destroyers had been patrolling in the Gulf of Tonkin, in international waters, immediately set off alarm bells to me.

That was because I knew, having worked to set up the briefing for the Admiral the week before, that these two destroyers were operating in support of something known as a “34-Alpha” operation, and that they were very close to Hon Me Island, a piece of real estate in the middle of the Gulf of Tonkin internationally recognized as being part of North Vietnam. My doubts grew more when I got mail from home the following week, with newspaper clippings on the event. Not one of the maps published in the newspapers showed Hon Me Island as even existing.

A month later, we were in Subic Bay, the Philippines, and I was on liberty in Olongapo. I walked into a bar and there sitting at the bar was a sailor I had met a year previously, when he and I went through fire fighting training in San Diego while awaiting transportation to Japan to join our units.

The last time I had seen him, he was a Fire Control Technician 3rd Class, a petty officer. Now he wore Seaman’s stripes on his sleeve. We talked, and things finally got around to how he’d “lost his crow.” He told me he’d been court-martialed. That didn’t surprise me, it happened all the time, if a Captain was upset about some kid coming back off liberty late and wanted to make an example of him. “What for?” I asked. “Disobedience of a direct order,” he replied. That wasn’t some late-liberty offense.

“What was the order?”

“Open fire.”

And then he told me the story.

He was crew aboard the USS Maddox. During the second night, when the two destroyers were reported under attack by several torpedo boats, he was in charge of the fire control tower, responsible for operating the main armament of six five-inch cannons. When ordered to “open fire,” he refused and told his captain that the only target out there was the other destroyer, the Turner Joy. The order was repeated and he refused again. It was repeated a third time and he refused again.

A Chief Petty Officer was sent to arrest him. By the time he was brought to the bridge, the event was over, with the captain of the Turner Joy having established by radio that the torpedo boats had “disappeared.” Still, my friend had refused the order, and was given a general court-martial, where he lost his rank. I’ll never forget the last thing he said: “That whole story is bullshit. Nothing happened out there.”

A year later I was out of the Navy and people would ask me why I was opposed to the war, and I would tell them that story. They’d say “where’s your proof?” and I would have to admit it was somewhere in some sub-basement of the Pentagon, wrapped in a Top Secret clearance. And so not many believed me, it was just too much to take in, that the war was started on such a lie.

Yet, over the years, the story did come out in bits and pieces.

In 1966, an officer I knew who had been part of the Admiral’s staff gave an interview to a newspaper in New York, where he told of how he had interviewed the Chief Sonarman on the Maddox, and that he’d been told there were never any sounds of torpedo boats in the water — a distinctive sound that is unmistakable for anything else.

In 1968, Professor Peter Dale Scott of UC Berkeley interviewed the former Assistant Gunnery Officer of the USS Turner Joy, who related how he had convinced his captain not to open fire that night, because the only target out there was the USS Maddox.

One can only imagine how history would read, had one of those two men been less conscientious in doing his job and had opened fire as ordered. As my friend had told me, “We were so close I’d have blown them out of the water with the first salvo.”

I remember in 1970, when Sixty Minutes ran the first story that told the truth about Tonkin Gulf, revealing that “34-Alpha” operations were code for South Vietnamese commando raids on targets in North Vietnam. The report went on to say that the available evidence looked like the two ships had been where they were to support the raid.

I sat down at my typewriter that night, and wrote the program, telling them what I knew. A week later, Joe Werschba, one of the legendary “Murrow’s Boys” at CBS, called me and told me they had proof my letter was accurate, because he had shown it to a senator in Washington on the Armed Services Committee who confirmed the main points.

And then in 1971 — 39 years ago last month — came the publication of the Pentagon Papers, and the true story of Tonkin Gulf was out there in all its detail. Several people I knew apologized to me for having doubted me over the years. I didn’t have any trouble with their doubt. I had wanted to doubt what I knew myself, because the implications were enormous:

My government lied and millions of people died.

I date my personal political “revolution” to this day, 46 years ago. The day I found that the country I had grown up believing in, that 10 generations of my ancestors had fought and died for at times and in places that made us who we were, that that country didn’t exist.

America has a long history of being lied into wars.

The War of 1812 was far less about “freedom of the seas” and far more about an attempt to grab Canada.

In 1846, Abraham Lincoln stood up in the House of Representatives and demanded that President Polk “point on a map” to the spot where American blood was shed on American soil — Polk couldn’t do it because Taylor’s cavalrymen weren’t in Texas — which wasn’t part of American territory to begin with — they were in territory recognized as part of Mexico, and America was off on its first grand imperial adventure, “liberating” half the territory of Mexico.

In 1876, President Grant decided it was easier to declare war on the Sioux under the pretext they were “killing whites” than to enforce a treaty and expel the thieving miners from the Black Hills of South Dakota.

In 1898, an accidental explosion on a poorly-maintained American ship was taken by William Randolph Hearst and turned into “a splendid little war” that expanded the empire by taking the Philippines and eventually involving us in our first genocidal Asian war, the Philippine Insurrection, which resulted in the deaths of 20 percent of the population of the country over five years, including the near-total annihilation of the population of Panay Island, an event celebrated by the commander of the troops responsible for killing 40,000 Filipinos as “leaving the island a howling wilderness,” which prompted Mark Twain to write the famous “War Prayer” in response to the news.

It took a lot for me to finally understand there is a difference between loving one’s country and supporting the government. It’s not surprising at all that most of my fellow citizens can’t bring themselves to see the lies and do something about them.

[Thomas McKelvey Cleaver is an accidental native Texan, produced screenwriter, and journalist who is frequently accused by his fellow lefties of not being left enough. Being shallow enough to have written successful horror movies and articles about Second World War aviation, he won’t argue the point. But he does take pride that he personally raised $350,000 for Obama in 2008 and has been an activist on anti-war, political reform, and environmental issues for almost 50 years. It should count for something.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Gulf of Tonkin, Imperialism, Military, Thomas Cleaver, Vietnam | 2 Comments

Jay D. Jurie : The ‘New Zeal’ of Right Wing Propagandist Trevor Loudon

Posted on August 4, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Trevor Loudon. Image from USA Survival News.
New Zealand’s Trevor Loudon and the
Right-wing propaganda machine

By Jay D. Jurie / The Rag Blog / August 4, 2010

Until I came across the KeyWiki site I didn’t know I had my very own “Wiki” page. When I went to “my” page I discovered it focused exclusively on the political side of my life.

KeyWiki describes itself as

…a bipartisan knowledge base focusing primarily on corruption and the covert side of politics in the United States and globally. While particular interest is taken in the left, KeyWiki serves to expose covert politics on both the left and right of the political spectrum.

Accompanying this description was a photo of the Statue of Liberty.

Wondering who might be responsible for all this, the KeyWiki “team” identified only one individual, named Trevor Loudon, while “members of the KeyWiki team will be added below shortly.”

As it turns out, Trevor Loudon is a resident of Christchurch, New Zealand. Since New Zealand has a multiparty parliament it is a little odd that he describes his site as “bipartisan.” His description makes it clear he is focusing on the U.S., so perhaps he means “bipartisan” in the U.S. context. If that’s the case, then his “knowledge base” is virtually nonexistent when it comes to exposing “covert politics” on the right.

For example, a search on his site for David Horowitz — one of the few members of the New Left who became an outspoken conservative — produced information only about his incarnation on the left several decades ago. There were no pages or listings for well-known figures on the right such as Bay Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Nikki Haley, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, or Bill O’Reilly, though there are links on the companion KeyWiki.org site to blogs operated by Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin.

Statue of Liberty photo by David Prior / KeyWiki.
Thinking maybe these were insufficiently “covert,” I tried several others, including Bo Gritz, Eric Rudolph, and Randall Terry, turning up nothing. I thought he might have entries for well-known white supremacists David Duke or Tom Metzger, or for well known anti-Semites or Holocaust deniers such as Don Black or Willis Carto, but again, nothing. There wasn’t even a listing for the Ku Klux Klan.

There is no information on right-wing elected officials such as Michelle Bachmann, John Cornyn, Ron Paul, or Joe “You lie!” Wilson. Loudon maintains a separate blog called New Zeal (“promoting liberty in New Zealand and beyond”) on which he re-posted a Washington Times op-ed piece by former Representative and nativist Tom Tancredo (R-CO), in which Tancredo wrote: “Mr. Obama is a more serious threat to America than al-Qaeda,” to which Loudon approvingly appended “well said.”

There are a lot of items about individuals and groups on the left, including denunciatory articles about legislators Neil Abercrombie and Dennis Kucinich, and negatively-framed information about Alan Grayson and Bernie Sanders, among others.

There’s a list of “key organizations” that includes the Apollo Alliance, the Center for American Progress, Committees of Correspondence, Democratic Socialists of America, Institute for Policy Studies, and the New Party. Several other organizations and publications also rate considerable attention, including the Communist Party USA, In These Times, the Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS), the New American Movement (NAM), and The Rag Blog.

A September 2008 blog article (“therealbarackobama”) by Brenda J. Elliott was entitled “Has Trevor Loudon found the Ayers-Dohrn-Obama ‘smoking gun’?” According to Elliott, MDS was behind the creation of Progressives for Obama. Carl Davidson of Progressives for Obama responded that MDS “had nothing to do” with it, “nor did any one of the other alphabet soup of left groups you list.” Elliott further asserted “MDS is the brains behind the SDS brawn.”

America’s Survival Inc. president and Accuracy in Media blogger Cliff Kincaid and Loudon co-authored a 32-page article entitled “From Arms to Education to Political Power: Return of the SDS and the Weather Underground” to further smoke out MDS. Loudon and Kincaid found that under the auspices of MDS, the new SDS, the Center for American Progress and pro-Barack Obama elements were ominously coalescing:

Key to this overall effort is the MDS, which unites Rudd, Ayers, Dohrn and other members of the SDS and Weather Underground from many different socialist and communist organizations.

These assertions are certain to generate some laughter among those actually familiar with the organizations in question.

Former Obama administration “green jobs” director Van Jones was among those singled out by Loudon for special attention. Kincaid has used a Loudon link about Jones on his blog. Glenn Beck has given Loudon a shout-out for “exposing” Jones and Joel Rogers of the New Party. Another shout-out comes from Andrew Breitbart, who conjured up the recent brouhaha over Shirley Sherrod.

Loudon has expended considerable energy making a case that Obama boyhood mentor Frank Marshall Davis was a secret Communist. According to Loudon, U.S. Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan “doesn’t lean left. She leans socialist-communitistic (sic) first.”

In fact, Loudon’s preoccupation with individuals with links, no matter how obscure, to (real or perceived) socialist or communist organizations puts him at the center of a revival of the redbaiting tactics of former Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Among the reasons I apparently rate my own KeyWiki page is I once signed a petition in support of academic freedom for, in Loudon’s word, “terrorist” Bill Ayers. Loudon’s definition of terrorism seems highly selective, or he must look across the Pacific to find it.

Nowhere does he mention the deadly French intelligence services bombing of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in the Auckland harbor, or refer to that as a terrorist act. Nor does Loudon have anything to say about an incident in which New Zealand police pointed automatic weapons at the passengers of a Maori-operated school bus.

The Rag Blog‘s Jay D. Jurie: Sufficiently ‘covert’? Image from Jay’s KeyWiki page, in a photo lifted from Next Left Notes.
My page shows me as a signer of a statement several decades ago that advocated closer working relations between NAM and the Socialist Party USA. I owe Loudon a debt of gratitude for this, as I had forgotten all about it. After being reminded of this, my regret is that those closer working relations never materialized.

Virtually all “Rag Bloggers,” including Marion Delgado, have some listing on KeyWiki. Thorne Dreyer and David Hamilton are among those who have interested Loudon most. In fact, simply writing for The Rag Blog or signing the Progressives for Obama petition appears to be enough to rate your own KeyWiki page. And Loudon seems to consider The Rag Blog a virtual mouthpiece for his theoretical MDS/Progressives for Obama nexus.

[It should be pointed out that The Rag Blog is an independent progressive newsweekly, published by the non-profit New Journalism Project, and has no affiliation with any political group or party.]

Still left unanswered is the question about why Loudon hasn’t exposed covert politics on the right?

Since KeyWiki has only been in existence since April, perhaps he’s just been preoccupied with filling in the left-wing side.

A larger question is why has a New Zealander like Loudon created a Wiki site primarily concerned with the U.S.? Answers to these two questions seem to overlap. In several of his writings Loudon makes it clear he is a committed “Americanphile.” He apparently sees New Zealand as a satellite for what he believes, but the U.S. is the mother ship.

What are those beliefs? Several on-line sources identify Loudon as a member of the “Zenith Applied Philosophy” or ZAP cult, based upon an admixture of Scientology, Eastern mysticism, and John Birch-style laissez-faire capitalism. Loudon’s admiration for the U.S. and its traditions is apparently limited to that which conforms to his laissez-faire outlook. He has taken it upon himself to help chart the rightful course for the U.S.

Whereas its site claims “KeyWiki isn’t a part of any political party and we don’t support candidates,” Loudon is a former vice-president of New Zealand’s ACT (Association of Consumers and Taxpayers) Party. ACT appears to be more or less the equivalent of the U.S. Libertarian Party. According to its website, ACT espouses “free market classical liberalism” and “…seek[s] to rebuild diplomatic and political relationships with Australia and the United States.” ACT also seeks to negotiate a free trade agreement with the United States.

All of the above makes it patently obvious that Loudon is engaged in the “covert politics on the right of the political spectrum.” Rather than engage in honest pursuit of knowledge or debate, his modus operandi is duplicity. While KeyWiki masquerades as objective or balanced its real purpose is to conceal the advancement of a right-wing agenda.

In the deceitful pursuit of this purpose Loudon is not alone, as the shameful Breitbart attack on Shirley Sherrod makes evident. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson recently wrote of “a cynical right-wing propaganda machine.”

Trevor Loudon has not only helped fuel this machine with half-truths, distortions, and fabrications, but is one of its drivers.

[Jay D. Jurie is a proud Rag Blogger who teaches public administration and urban planning and lives near Orlando, Florida.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Andrew Breitbart, Carl Davidson, David P. Hamilton, Jay D. Jurie, KeyWiki, McCarthyism, New Zeal, Propaganda, Rag Blog, Right Wing Media, Thorne Dreyer, Trevor Loudon | 3 Comments

Jim Turpin : Cutting Through the ‘Fog of War’

Posted on August 4, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Fog of war. Image from Thomas Paine’s Corner.
Rules of engagement:
U.S. brutality in the combat zones

The chain of command gave orders to fire indiscriminately at civilians even when soldiers made efforts to refuse such orders.

By Jim Turpin / The Rag Blog / August 4, 2010

The “fog of war” is defined as the ambiguity of situational awareness by participants in military operations. This term is attributed to Prussian military analyst Carl von Clauswitz who stated:

The great uncertainty of all data in war is a peculiar difficulty, because all action must, to a certain extent, be planned in a mere twilight, which in addition not infrequently — like the effect of a fog or moonshine — gives to things exaggerated dimensions and unnatural appearance. (Clauswitz, On War, Book 2, Chapter 2, Paragraph 24)

U.S. combat operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan are approaching the 10-year mark and recent release of classified documents through WikiLeaks has used a floodlight to cut through the “fog of war” and expose the brutality imposed on civilian populations in both of these conflicts.

A recent article in The Nation discusses three soldiers from Bravo Company 2-16 and their deployment in Baghdad in July 2007 and their statements regarding putting up a “wall of steel” or responding to threats with a barrage of fire — even if it put civilians at risk

Three soldiers from this company (McCord, Stieber and Corcoles) report such incidents as:

Corcoles describes the first IED death his unit suffered. “We did a mission that night till like midnight, and we were actually just sitting down… I hadn’t even got three or four drags off my cigarette and an IED went off… We watched the Humvee burn, but we didn’t realize [someone] was still in it.”

The IED attacks left the soldiers angry and scared. McCord recalls one mission to impose curfews. Earlier that day, a popular soldier had died in an IED attack, and the troops took it out on the Iraqis. “There were a lot of people who got beat up that night,” he says bluntly.

This anger was turned into policy by the chain of command. “We had just lost three guys to an IED when the battalion commander came out to the COP (Combat Outpost),” says McCord. He went on to explain that the commander gave orders to shoot indiscriminately after IED attacks. “He said, ‘Fuck it, this is what I want… anytime someone in your line gets hit by an IED.. .you kill every motherfucker in the street,” McCord testifies.

“When one [IED] went off, you were supposed to open fire on anybody,” says Stieber. “At first I would just fire into a field. Then I wouldn’t fire at all.” He describes an IED that went off near a crowd of teenagers. “I said I wouldn’t fire,” even though “other people were firing,” he recalls.

Like Stieber, Corcoles describes incidents in which he purposely aimed his gun away from people. “You don’t even know if somebody’s shooting at you,” he says. “It’s just insanity to just start shooting people.” Stieber pointed out that in incidents like these, it was very rare for U.S. military vehicles to stop to help the wounded or assess how many people had been injured or killed.

Stieber was intimidated and reprimanded by his command for refusing orders to shoot. “One time when I didn’t fire, people in my truck were yelling at me for the rest of the mission. When we got back, one or two leaders got up in my face and kept yelling at me and stuff,” he says. The command eventually stopped sending him on missions as a gunner, and Stieber says he “faced a lot of criticism for it.”

Corcoles saw this too. “One night our truck got hit by an IED and Josh didn’t fire, and another soldier didn’t fire,” he says. “And they were getting yelled at: ‘Why aren’t you firing?’ And they said, ‘There’s nobody to fire at.'”

Clearly, there is no ambiguity in this scenario. The chain of command gave orders to fire indiscriminately at civilians even when soldiers made efforts to refuse such orders. This is most likely a very commonly occurring situation in both theaters of conflict for our soldiers.

Anger and frustration remain for soldiers in the field with June 2010 being the highest casualty rate since the beginning of the Afghanistan conflict for coalition forces with July being on track to possibly exceed this number when count is completed.

This begs the question of why do we continue to put our soldiers in impossible scenarios with large civilian populations that result in deaths and injuries to the very people we are “liberating”?

The “rules of engagement” or basically when to pull the trigger is a delicate balance for any soldier in any combat situation. The present U.S. counterinsurgency (known as “COIN”) presents great difficulties for soldiers in the field. COIN is predicated on “winning hearts and minds” of the civilian population and this is not typically achieved through indiscriminate weapons fire or drone missile strikes on unarmed civilians.

General Petraeus was recently discussed in a Salon article as reviewing the “rules of engagement”:

Petraeus also has to appear to stay the course in terms of counterinsurgency (COIN) fundamentals, such as making extensive efforts not to kill innocent people. The tricky part is that the main argument against McChrystal’s rules of engagement is not that they are too bureaucratic; it’s that they are overreaching and potentially dangerous.

So, the maddening choice by soldiers of firing or not firing on civilian populations always remains. It seems the easy choice is simply not to have combat operations in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

The recent Wikileaks release of over 90,000 classified documents details Afghan corruption, the use of Stinger surface-to-air missiles by the Taliban, U.S. assassination teams, and large numbers of civilian deaths.

But a more chilling Wikileaks release in April 2010 is of an Apache helicopter video clip from July 2007 of 30mm cannon fire cutting down two Reuters reporters and killing 10 civilians. For those that have seen this video, its’ horror and nonchalance are breathtaking. It is impossible to describe and requires that you grit your teeth to watch. It is worth noting that the same company (Bravo 2-16) that was described earlier was also involved in this operation. So death occurred from above and below simultaneously for the civilian populations in this area.

Other than “rules of engagement” and other military protocols, what environmental factors drive this brutal behavior towards civilians in war zones? Which is the “chicken” and which is the “egg”?

Why is indiscriminate fire on civilians so prevalent in Iraq and Afghanistan?

The answer lies in the repeated deployment of U.S. military personnel to both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The continuous exposure to combat trauma has led to dramatic increases in the number of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) cases. Since October 2001, with almost 1.8 million U.S. service personnel serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, the VA has predicted 10-18% have PTSD, or 324,000 individuals.

Even this number may be considered low, with a recent American Journal of Public Health article showing a tripled risk of PTSD for New Jersey based National Guardsmen with repeat deployments.

In past U. S. wars, PTSD was called “soldiers heart” during the Civil War, in WW I it was named “shell shock” and by WW II, “combat fatigue” or “exhaustion.” It is only on recent years that PTSD in combat zones has been fully understood and recognized by both the military and psychiatric experts.

Diagnostic symptoms of PTSD include the following: re-experiencing the original trauma(s) through flashbacks or nightmares, avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma (certain thoughts or feelings associated with an event), and increased arousal such as difficulty falling or staying asleep, or problems with anger, concentration, or hypervigilance. (American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV [DSM- IV] 1994).

The symptoms of avoidance, anger, and hypervigilance are all a psychological witches’ brew in combat situations and ensure brutality towards civilian populations.

Another outcome has been suicides which are tracking at the highest point in the U.S. Army since the 1970’s. Thirty-two soldiers took their own lives In June 2010, the most Army suicides in a single month since the Vietnam era. Eleven of the soldiers were not on active duty. Of the 21 who were, seven were serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

In my recent volunteer work at Under the Hood Café and Outreach Center at Ft. Hood in Killeen, Texas, I have had the opportunity to speak to many active duty soldiers and veterans of both the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. Under the Hood is a non-military environment for active duty and veterans to speak out on the effects of war and offers referral to legal and psychological services for all who come through the door, including those active duty soldiers who are war resisters and have refused to re-deploy to Afghanistan.

Their stories are similar to the ones above and detail heart rending experiences of personal trauma, loss, and pain in their own way much like the testimonies at Winter Soldier.

The original Winter Soldier was testimony organized in 1971 by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) as a challenge to the morality and conduct of the Vietnam War, with the goal of publicly exposing war crimes and atrocities by the United States Armed Forces.

On the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion in March 2008, the Iraq Vets Against the War resurrected Winter Soldier as a forum where more than 200 U.S. military veterans and active duty soldiers as well as Iraqi and Afghani citizens gave testimony on the conflicts in both countries.

“I remember one woman walking by,” said Jason Washburn, a corporal in the U.S. Marines who served three tours in Iraq. “She was carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading toward us, so we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher, and when the dust settled, we realized that the bag was full of groceries. She had been trying to bring us food and we blew her to pieces.”

Washburn testified on a panel that discussed the rules of engagement in Iraq, and how lax they were, even to the point of being virtually non-existent.

“During the course of my three tours, the rules of engagement changed a lot,” Washburn’s testimony continues. “The higher the threat the more viciously we were permitted and expected to respond.” (9/20/2008 — Asian Times, Book Review (Dahr Jamail): Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan by Aaron Glantz)

Whether U.S. brutality against civilians in war zones occurred in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, the common themes remain the same: soldiers repeatedly deployed to war zones with heavy civilian populations with no enforced “rules of engagement” resulting in war crimes.

A quote attributed to Joan Baez seems most appropriate:

If it’s natural to kill, why do men have to go into training to learn to do it?

[Jim Turpin is a native Austinite and member of CodePink Austin. He also volunteers for the GI coffeehouse Under the Hood Cafe at Ft. Hood in Killeen, Texas.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Anti-War GIs, Jim Turpin, Military, PTSD, War Crimes, War Resisters, WikiLeaks | 1 Comment

VERSE / Bobby Nelson : The Wall

Steve Russell : In Memory of Jay Spotted Elk

Harry Targ : Ethics Charges and the Natural Order of Things

Bob Feldman : Brent Snowcroft and the Roots of the Iraq War

Greg Moses : Deporting Texas Student Was Big Mistake

Kate Braun : (Crescent) Moon Musings

John Ross : Epic Hunger Strike in the Land of the Hungry

Marc Estrin : Awesome Days of Awe

Ted McLaughlin : Access to Water Is a Human Right

Thomas McKelvey Cleaver : ‘Crossing the Rubicon’ at the Gulf of Tonkin

Jay D. Jurie : The ‘New Zeal’ of Right Wing Propagandist Trevor Loudon

Jim Turpin : Cutting Through the ‘Fog of War’

SEARCH

TAGS

RECENT POSTS

MICHAEL MEEROPOL / ECONOMICS / Inflation, unemployment, and President Trump's speech

BRUCE MELTON / CLIMATE CHANGE / Climate Change Review 2025

JONAH RASKIN / BOOK REVIEW / Levitating the Pentagon

DANIEL ACOSTA, JR. / HIGHER EDUCATION / Ideological Warfare at the University of Texas

LARRY PILTZ / VERSE / Save The Futures

MARTIN J. MURRAY / REMEMBRANCE / Larry Caroline disarmed critics without demeaning them

ALLEN YOUNG / BOOK REVIEW / The Trees are Speaking

THORNE DREYER / JOURNALISM / Central to the new Rag's voice is to retain the levity of the original

MICHAEL MEEROPOL / COMMENTARY / Sleeping Giant: Thoughts on the results of the November 4 elections

LAMAR HANKINS / COMMENTARY / Norman Finkelstein explains the Israel-Gaza conflict

ALICE EMBREE / MEDIA / A new Rag for a new generation

JOSHUA BROWN / LIFE DURING WARTIME SPECIAL / Remembering Dick Cheney

ALICE EMBREE / BOOK REVIEW / Insurgent Politics in the Lone Star State: Remembering the Antiwar Movement in Austin, Texas, 1967-1973

ALICE EMBREE / REMEMBRANCE / Sam Jones: antiwar activist, lover of music, builder of guitars

HENRY MECREDY / REMEMBRANCE / Gavan Duffy was a scholar with a sense of humor

ARCHIVES