Englehardt: The Expanding Afghanistan-Pakistan Conflict

Posted on May 24, 2009 by RagBlog

Bodies of some of 25-30 Afghan civilians killed in NATO air strike, October 16, 2008. Obama has escalated the Afghanistan war. Photo: Abdul Khaleq/Associated Press.

Going for Broke: Six Ways the Af-Pak War Is Expanding
By Tom Engelhardt / May 21, 2009

Yes, Stanley McChrystal is the general from the dark side (and proud of it). So the recent sacking of Afghan commander General David McKiernan after less than a year in the field and McChrystal’s appointment as the man to run the Afghan War seems to signal that the Obama administration is going for broke. It’s heading straight into what, in the Vietnam era, was known as “the big muddy.”

General McChrystal comes from a world where killing by any means is the norm and a blanket of secrecy provides the necessary protection. For five years he commanded the Pentagon’s super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which, among other things, ran what Seymour Hersh has described as an “executive assassination wing” out of Vice President Cheney’s office. (Cheney just returned the favor by giving the newly appointed general a ringing endorsement: “I think you’d be hard put to find anyone better than Stan McChrystal.”)

McChrystal gained a certain renown when President Bush outed him as the man responsible for tracking down and eliminating al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The secret force of “manhunters” he commanded had its own secret detention and interrogation center near Baghdad, Camp Nama, where bad things happened regularly, and the unit there, Task Force 6-26, had its own slogan: “If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it.” Since some of the task force’s men were, in the end, prosecuted, the bleeding evidently wasn’t avoided.

In the Bush years, McChrystal was reputedly extremely close to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The super-secret force he commanded was, in fact, part of Rumsfeld’s effort to seize control of, and Pentagonize, the covert, on-the-ground activities that were once the purview of the CIA.

Behind McChrystal lies a string of targeted executions that may run into the hundreds, as well as accusations of torture and abuse by troops under his command (and a role in the cover-up of the circumstances surrounding the death of Army Ranger and former National Football League player Pat Tillman). The general has reportedly long thought of Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single battlefield, which means that he was a premature adherent to the idea of an Af-Pak — that is, expanded — war. While in Afghanistan in 2008, the New York Times reported, he was a “key advocate… of a plan, ultimately approved by President George W. Bush, to use American commandos to strike at Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan.” This end-of-term Bush program provoked such anger and blowback in Pakistan that it was reportedly halted after two cross-border raids, one of which killed civilians.

All of this offers more than a hint of the sort of “new thinking and new approaches” — to use Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s words — that the Obama administration expects General McChrystal to bring to the devolving Af-Pak battlefield. He is, in a sense, both a legacy figure from the worst days of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era and the first-born child of Obama-era Washington’s growing desperation and hysteria over the wars it inherited.

Hagiography

And here’s the good news: We luv the guy. Just luv him to death.

We loved him back in 2006, when Bush first outed him and Newsweek reporters Michael Hirsh and John Barry dubbed him “a rising star” in the Army and one of the “Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls ‘the shadows.'”

It’s no different today in what’s left of the mainstream news analysis business. In that mix of sports lingo, Hollywood-ese, and just plain hyperbole that makes armchair war strategizing just so darn much fun, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, for instance, claimed that Centcom commander General David Petraeus, who picked McChrystal as his man in Afghanistan, is “assembling an all-star team” and that McChrystal himself is “a rising superstar who, like Petraeus, has helped reinvent the U.S. Army.” Is that all?

When it came to pure, instant hagiography, however, the prize went to Elisabeth Bumiller and Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times, who wrote a front-pager, “A General Steps from the Shadows,” that painted a picture of McChrystal as a mutant cross between Superman and a saint.

Among other things, it described the general as “an ascetic who… usually eats just one meal a day, in the evening, to avoid sluggishness. He is known for operating on a few hours’ sleep and for running to and from work while listening to audio books on an iPod… [He has] an encyclopedic, even obsessive, knowledge about the lives of terrorists… [He is] a warrior-scholar, comfortable with diplomats, politicians…” and so on. The quotes Bumiller and Mazzetti dug up from others were no less spectacular: “He’s got all the Special Ops attributes, plus an intellect.” “If you asked me the first thing that comes to mind about General McChrystal… I think of no body fat.”

From the gush of good cheer about his appointment, you might almost conclude that the general was not human at all, but an advanced android (a good one, of course!) and the “elite” world (of murder and abuse) he emerged from an unbearably sexy one.

Above all, as we’re told here and elsewhere, what’s so good about the new appointment is that General McChrystal is “more aggressive” than his stick-in-the-mud predecessor. He will, as Bumiller and Thom Shanker report in another piece, bring “a more aggressive and innovative approach to a worsening seven-year war.” The general, we’re assured, likes operations without body fat, but with plenty of punch. And though no one quite says this, given his closeness to Rumsfeld and possibly Cheney, both desperately eager to “take the gloves off” on a planetary scale, his mentality is undoubtedly a global-war-on-terror one, which translates into no respect for boundaries, restraints, or the sovereignty of others. After all, as journalist Gareth Porter pointed out recently in a thoughtful Asia Times portrait of the new Afghan War commander, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld granted the parent of JSOC, the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), “the authority to carry out actions unilaterally anywhere on the globe.”

Think of McChrystal’s appointment, then, as a decision in Washington to dispatch the bull directly to the China shop with the most meager of hopes that the results won’t be smashed Afghans and Pakistanis. The Post‘s Ignatius even compares McChrystal’s boss Petraeus and Obama’s special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, to “two headstrong bulls in a small paddock.” He then concludes his paean to all of them with this passage — far more ominous than he means it to be:

“Obama knows the immense difficulty of trying to fix a broken Afghanistan and make it a functioning, modern country. But with his two bulls, Petraeus and Holbrooke, he’s marching his presidency into the ‘graveyard of empires’ anyway.”

McChrystal is evidently the third bull, the one slated to start knocking over the tombstones.

An Expanding Af-Pak War

Of course, there are now so many bulls in this particular China shop that smashing is increasingly the name of the game. At this point, the early moves of the Obama administration, when combined with the momentum of the situation it inherited, have resulted in the expansion of the Af-Pak War in at least six areas, which only presage further expansion in the months to come:

1. Expanding Troop Commitment: In February, President Obama ordered a “surge” of 17,000 extra troops into Afghanistan, increasing U.S. forces there by 50%. (Then-commander McKiernan had called for 30,000 new troops.) In March, another 4,000 American military advisors and trainers were promised. The first of the surge troops, reportedly ill-equipped, are already arriving. In March, it was announced that this troop surge would be accompanied by a “civilian surge” of diplomats, advisors, and the like; in April, it was reported that, because the requisite diplomats and advisors couldn’t be found, the civilian surge would actually be made up largely of military personnel.

In preparation for this influx, there has been massive base and outpost building in the southern parts of that country, including the construction of 443-acre Camp Leatherneck in that region’s “desert of death.” When finished, it will support up to 8,000 U.S. troops, and a raft of helicopters and planes. Its airfield, which is under construction, has been described as the “largest such project in the world in a combat setting.”

2. Expanding CIA Drone War: The CIA is running an escalating secret drone war in the skies over the Pakistani borderlands with Afghanistan, a “targeted” assassination program of the sort that McChrystal specialized in while in Iraq. Since last September, more than three dozen drone attacks — the Los Angeles Times put the number at 55 — have been launched, as opposed to 10 in 2006-2007. The program has reportedly taken out a number of mid-level al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but also caused significant civilian casualties, destabilized the Pashtun border areas of Pakistan, and fostered support for the Islamic guerrillas in those regions. As Noah Shachtman wrote recently at his Danger Room website:

“According to the American press, a pair of missiles from the unmanned aircraft killed ‘at least 25 militants.’ In the local media, the dead were simply described as ’29 tribesmen present there.’ That simple difference in description underlies a serious problem in the campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. To Americans, the drones over Pakistan are terrorist-killers. In Pakistan, the robotic planes are wiping out neighbors.”

David Kilcullen, a key advisor to Petraeus during the Iraq “surge” months, and counterinsurgency expert Andrew McDonald Exum recently called for a moratorium on these attacks on the New York Times op-ed page. (“Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent — hardly ‘precision.'”) As it happens, however, the Obama administration is deeply committed to its drone war. As CIA Director Leon Panetta put the matter, “Very frankly, it’s the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership.”

3. Expanding Air Force Drone War: The U.S. Air Force now seems to be getting into the act as well. There are conflicting reports about just what it is trying to do, but it has evidently brought its own set of Predator and Reaper drones into play in Pakistani skies, in conjunction, it seems, with a somewhat reluctant Pakistani military. Though the outlines of this program are foggy at best, this nonetheless represents an expansion of the war.

4. Expanding Political Interference: Quite a different kind of escalation is also underway. Washington is evidently attempting to insert yet another figure from the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era into the Afghan mix. Not so long ago, Zalmay Khalilzad, the neocon former American viceroy in Kabul and then Baghdad, was considering making a run for the Afghan presidency against Hamid Karzai, the leader the Obama administration is desperate to ditch. In March, reports — hotly denied by Holbrooke and others — broke in the British press of a U.S./British plan to “undermine President Karzai of Afghanistan by forcing him to install a powerful chief of staff to run the Government.” Karzai, so the rumors went, would be reduced to “figurehead” status, while a “chief executive with prime ministerial-style powers” not provided for in the Afghan Constitution would essentially take over the running of the weak and corrupt government.

This week, Helene Cooper reported on the front page of the New York Times that Khalilzad would be that man. He “could assume a powerful, unelected position inside the Afghan government under a plan he is discussing with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, according to senior American and Afghan officials.” He would then be “the chief executive officer of Afghanistan.”

Cooper’s report is filled with official denials that these negotiations involve Washington in any way. Yet if they succeed, an American citizen, a former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. as well as to Kabul, would end up functionally atop the Karzai government just as the Obama administration is eagerly pursuing a stepped-up war against the Taliban.

Why officials in Washington imagine that Afghans might actually accept such a figure is the mystery of the moment. It’s best to think of this plan as the kinder, gentler, soft-power version of the Kennedy administration’s 1963 decision to sign off on the coup that led to the assassination of South Vietnamese autocrat Ngo Dinh Diem. Then, too, top Washington officials were distressed that a puppet who seemed to be losing support was, like Karzai, also acting in an increasingly independent manner when it came to playing his appointed role in an American drama. That assassination, by the way, only increased instability in South Vietnam, leading to a succession of weak military regimes and paving the way for a further unraveling there. This American expansion of the war would likely have similar consequences.

5. Expanding War in Pakistan: Meanwhile, in Pakistan itself, mayhem has ensued, again in significant part thanks to Washington, whose disastrous Afghan war and escalating drone attacks have helped to destabilize the Pashtun regions of the country. Now, the Pakistani military — pushed and threatened by Washington (with the loss of military aid, among other things) — has smashed full force into the districts of Buner and Swat, which had, in recent months, been largely taken over by the Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas we call “the Pakistani Taliban.”

It’s been a massive show of force by a military configured for smash-mouth war with India, not urban or village warfare with lightly armed guerrillas. The Pakistani military has loosed its jets, helicopter gunships, and artillery on the region (even as the CIA drone strikes continue), killing unknown numbers of civilians and, far more significantly, causing a massive exodus of the local population. In some areas, well more than half the population has fled Taliban depredations and indiscriminate fire from the military. Those that remain in besieged towns and cities, often without electricity, with the dead in the streets, and fast disappearing supplies of food, are clearly in trouble.

With nearly 1.5 million Pakistanis turned into refugees just since the latest offensive began, U.N. officials are suggesting that this could be the worst refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Talk about the destabilization of a country.

In the long run, this may only increase the anger of Pashtuns in the tribal areas of Pakistan at both the Americans and the Pakistani military and government. The rise of Pashtun nationalism and a fight for an “Islamic Pashtunistan” would prove a dangerous development indeed. This latest offensive is what Washington thought it wanted, but undoubtedly the old saw, “Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true,” applies. Already a panicky Washington is planning to rush $110 million in refugee assistance to the country.

6. Expanding Civilian Death Toll and Blowback: As Taliban attacks in Afghanistan rise and that loose guerrilla force (more like a coalition of various Islamist, tribal, warlord, and criminal groups) spreads into new areas, the American air war in Afghanistan continues to take a heavy toll on Afghan civilians, while manufacturing ever more enemies as well as deep resentment and protest in that country. The latest such incident, possibly the worst since the Taliban was defeated in 2001, involves the deaths of up to 147 Afghans in the Bala Baluk district of Farah Province, according to accounts that have come out of the villages attacked. Up to 95 of the dead were under 18, one Afghan lawmaker involved in investigating the incident claims, and up to 65 of them women or girls. These deaths came after Americans were called into an escalating fight between the Taliban and Afghan police and military units, and in turn, called in devastating air strikes by two U.S. jets and a B-1 bomber (which, villagers claim, hit them after the Taliban fighters had left).

Despite American pledges to own up to and apologize more quickly for civilian deaths, the post-carnage events followed a predictable stonewalling pattern, including a begrudging step-by-step retreat in the face of independent claims and reports. The Americans first denied that anything much had happened; then claimed that they had killed mainly Taliban “militants”; then that the Taliban had themselves used grenades to kill most of the civilians (a charge later partially withdrawn as “thinly sourced”); and finally, that the numbers of Afghan dead were “extremely over-exaggerated,” and that the urge for payment from the Afghan government might be partially responsible.

An investigation, as always, was launched that never seems to end, while the Americans wait for the story to fade from view. As of this moment, while still awaiting the results of a “very exhaustive” investigation, American spokesmen nonetheless claim that only 20-30 civilians died along with up to 65 Taliban insurgents. In these years, however, the record tells us that, when weighing the stories offered by surviving villagers and those of American officials, believe the villagers. Put more bluntly, in such situations, we lie, they die.

Two things make this “incident” at Bala Baluk more striking. First of all, according to Jerome Starkey of the British Independent, another Rumsfeld creation, the U.S. Marines Corps Special Operations Command (MarSOC), the Marines’ version of JSOC, was centrally involved, as it had been in two other major civilian slaughters, one near Jalalabad in 2007 (committed by a MarSOC unit that dubbed itself “Taskforce Violence”), the second in 2008 at the village of Azizabad in Herat Province. McChrystal’s appointment, reports Starkey, has “prompted speculation that [similar] commando counterinsurgency missions will increase in the battle to beat the Taliban.”

Second, back in Washington, National Security Advisor James Jones and head of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen, fretting about civilian casualties in Afghanistan and faced with President Karzai’s repeated pleas to cease air attacks on Afghan villages, nonetheless refused to consider the possibility. Both, in fact, used the same image. As Jones told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos: “Well, I think he understands that… we have to have the full complement of… our offensive military power when we need it… We can’t fight with one hand tied behind our back…”

In a world in which the U.S. is the military equivalent of the multi-armed Hindu god Shiva, this is one of the truly strange, if long-lasting, American images. It was, for instance, used by President George H. W. Bush on the eve of the first Gulf War. “No hands,” he said, “are going to be tied behind backs. This is not a Vietnam.”

Forgetting the levels of firepower loosed in Vietnam, the image itself is abidingly odd. After all, in everyday speech, the challenge “I could beat you with one hand tied behind my back” is a bravado offer of voluntary restraint and an implicit admission that fighting any other way would make one a bully. So hidden in the image, both when the elder Bush used it and today, is a most un-American acceptance of the United States as a bully nation, about to be restrained by no one, least of all itself.

Apologize or stonewall, one thing remains certain: the air war will continue and so civilians will continue to die. The idea that the U.S. might actually be better off with one “hand” tied behind its back is now so alien to us as to be beyond serious consideration.

The Pressure of an Expanding War

President Obama has opted for a down-and-dirty war strategy in search of some at least minimalist form of success. For this, McChrystal is the poster boy. Former Afghan commander General McKiernan believed that, “as a NATO commander, my mandate stops at the [Afghan] border. So unless there is a clear case of self-protection to fire across the border, we don’t consider any operations across the border in the tribal areas.”

That the “responsibilities” of U.S. generals fighting the Afghan War “ended at the border with Pakistan,” Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt of the Times report, is now considered part of an “old mind-set.” McChrystal represents those “fresh eyes” that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates talked about in the press conference announcing the general’s appointment. As Mazzetti and Schmitt point out, “Among [McChrystal’s] last projects as the head of the Joint Special Operations Command was to better coordinate Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency efforts on both sides of the porous border.”

For those old enough to remember, we’ve been here before. Administrations that start down a path of expansion in such a war find themselves strangely locked in — psychically, if nothing else — if things don’t work out as expected and the situation continues to deteriorate. In Vietnam, the result was escalation without end. President Obama and his foreign policy team now seem locked into an expanding war. Despite the fact that the application of force has not only failed for years, but actually fed that expansion, they also seem to be locked into a policy of applying ever greater force, with the goal of, as the Post‘s Ignatius puts it, cracking the “Taliban coalition” and bringing elements of it to the bargaining table.

So keep an eye out for whatever goes wrong, as it most certainly will, and then for the pressures on Washington to respond with further expansions of what is already “Obama’s war.” With McChrystal in charge in Afghanistan, for instance, it seems reasonable to assume that the urge to sanction new special forces raids into Pakistan will grow. After all, frustration in Washington is already building, for however much the Pakistani military may be taking on the Taliban in Swat or Buner, don’t expect its military or civilian leaders to be terribly interested in what happens near the Afghan border.

As Tony Karon of the Rootless Cosmopolitan blog puts the matter: “The current military campaign is designed to enforce a limit on the Taliban’s reach within Pakistan, confining it to the movement’s heartland.” And that heartland is the Afghan border region. For one thing, the Pakistani military (and the country’s intelligence services, which essentially brought the Taliban into being long ago) are focused on India. They want a Pashtun ally across the border, Taliban or otherwise, where they fear the Indians are making inroads.

So the frustration of a war in which the enemy has no borders and we do is bound to rise along with the fighting, long predicted to intensify this year. We now have a more aggressive “team” in place. Soon enough, if the fighting in the Afghan south and along the Pakistani border doesn’t go as planned, pressure for the president to send in those other 10,000 troops General McKiernan asked for may rise as well, as could pressure to apply more air power, more drone power, more of almost anything. And yet, as former CIA station chief in Kabul, Graham Fuller, wrote recently, in the region “crises have only grown worse under the U.S. military footprint.”

And what if, as the war continues its slow arc of expansion, the “Washington coalition” is the one that cracks first? What then?

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.]

Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt

Source / TomDispatch

Thanks to Juan Cole / The Rag Blog

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Disaster in the Making: Mexico City Short of Water

Posted on May 23, 2009 by RagBlog

Dawn breaks over the sprawling metropolis of Mexico City. Officials are struggling to provide water for all 20 million residents. Photo: Brennan Linsley/Associated Press.

Water shortages plague Mexico City
May 21, 2009

It’s been three weeks since the taps in Carlos Sandana’s Mexico City home ran dry.

In that time, the swine flu fears that gripped his country have peaked and subsided, though the government has urged residents to continue their vigilance with extra cleaning and hand washing.

“We need to clean more often than before because, like they say, you needed to maintain your house clean and wash with Clorox and everything,” Sandana told CBC’s The Current. “You can’t do that ’cause you don’t have enough water to do it.”

Sandana, his wife, Elizabeth, and his 8-year-old son, Samuel, are lucky enough to have a storage tank under their house, unlike others in their poor neighbourhood in Iztapalapa, a federal district in the city’s east end. But that too is running dry and he must sometimes purchase water.

Even when water flows from his faucet, Sandana says it’s brown and “terrible” quality, despite pipes being replaced several months ago.

Jorge Villalón Efrén Figaredo, a general director with Mexico’s National Water Commission, known by the Spanish acronym CONAGUA, says the neighbourhood where Sandana lives is at the end of the water pipeline, about 100 kilometres from the source. As a result, the water pressure and volume is insufficient to reach the highest parts of the neighbourhood.

But the problem is larger than one neighbourhood. The sprawling metropolis of 20 million people is struggling with a crumbling water infrastructure and serious shortage of the precious resource.

Sinking city

Three times this spring, water has been cut off for hundreds of thousands of people due to dangerously low reservoir levels.

The city relies on the Cutzamala system, which pipes in surface water from the Cutzamala River basin, for about 20 per cent of its water, while 70 per cent is pumped up from underground wells.

“That’s a problem because the city is sinking 10 centimetres per year due to the amount of water we are extracting from the wells, which is equivalent to 60,000 litres per second,” says Villalón.

Mexico City was founded by the Aztecs on what was once a great lake, but Spanish conquerors later drained most of the water to allow for expansion.

As the city sinks into the old lake bed, pressure is building on water pipes, causing them to leak about 40 per cent of the liquid before it even reaches its destination.

Though the city holds out hope that the coming rainy season will replenish its reservoirs, Villalón says the government is investing “a lot of money” in water projects, including finding new sources and raising awareness about water conservation.

Mexico City residents use about 300 litres of water per person each day, twice what Europeans in some cities are using.

“We are using 50 per cent more than in other parts of the world and we need to change that,” said Villalon.

But Villalón notes the government is facing a tough task. Even if the city can find additional sources of water and reduce consumption, demand for water is expected to rise by 20 per cent over the next three to four years as the population grows by about four per cent each year.

David Stahle, a geoscience professor at the University of Arkansas, says since 1994 Mexico has been in the midst of one of the country’s worst droughts.

“It’s been very persistent and it’s been very severe,” says Stahle, who was the lead researcher of an article titled Early 21st Century Drought in Mexico. “And in those metrics it’s nearly equal to the very severe drought of the 1950s, and the epic drought of the 16th century, about 1560 to 1580.”

Wake-up call

For Piet Klop, a senior fellow with the environmental think tank World Resources Institute, it all combines to suggest Mexico City, like many other metropolises around the world, has reached a tipping point.

“I think in many cases — and Mexico City may be a case in point — we’ve actually gotten to the point where politicians may not have any other choice than to fix the system,” said Klop. “We got used to the idea that water would be free … That’s one philosophy that can no longer be maintained.”

As dozens of mega cities such as Mexico City, Jakarta and Bangkok face water shortages and growing populations, Klop expects many will begin to start pricing water according to its actual cost and scarcity value.

“We’ve got to price water as though it was oil,” he adds.

By providing low-priced, subsidized water, he says, the city robs itself of having enough revenue in its coffers to maintain the system, plus eliminates an incentive for people to use water more efficiently.

To ensure the poor do not suffer due to a drastic rise in prices, Klop suggests subsidizing the price they pay.

“In many places around the world … the poor indeed suffer from service and scarcity problems like the one of Mexico City. Per litre they pay 10, 20, 50 times as much as others fortunate enough to be connected to the network,” he said.

As a result, water conservation for the poor, like Sandana, is already part of daily life.

His family scrimps on water use, foregoing showers in order to have enough water to cook with.

“You can’t just really throw it around. So we’d rather save it because you don’t know if you spend that bucket of water, when are you gonna get water again.”

Source / CBC

Thanks to Deva Wood / The Rag Blog

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Barack Obama : So Soon the Assassin

Posted on May 23, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Obama’s choice: Gen. Stanley MacChrystal, America’s new army chief in Afghanistan. His expertise is in assassination and “decapitation.” Photo by Getty Images.

How Long Does It Take?

As far back as President Woodrow Wilson in the early twentieth century, American liberalism has been swift to flex imperial muscle, to whistle up the Marines.

By Alexander Cockburn / May 23, 2009

How long does it take a mild-mannered, antiwar, black professor of constitutional law, trained as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, to become an enthusiastic sponsor of targeted assassinations, “decapitation” strategies and remote-control bombing of mud houses the far end of the globe?

There’s nothing surprising here. As far back as President Woodrow Wilson in the early twentieth century, American liberalism has been swift to flex imperial muscle, to whistle up the Marines. High explosive has always been in the hormone shot.

The nearest parallel to Obama in eager deference to the bloodthirsty counsels of his counter-insurgency advisors is John F. Kennedy. It is not surprising that bright young presidents relish quick-fix, “outside the box” scenarios for victory.

Whether in Vietnam or Afghanistan the counsels of regular Army generals tends to be drear and unappetizing: vast, costly deployments of troops by the hundreds of thousand, mounting casualties, uncertain prospects for any long-term success — all adding up to dismaying political costs on the home front.

Amid Camelot’s dawn in 1961, Kennedy swiftly bent an ear to the counsels of men like Ed Lansdale, a special ops man who wore rakishly the halo of victory over the Communist guerillas in the Philippines and who promised results in Vietnam.

By the time he himself had become the victim of Lee Harvey Oswald’s “decapitation” strategy, brought to successful conclusion in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, on Nov. 22, 1963, Kennedy had set in motion the counter-insurgency operations, complete with programs of assassination and torture, that turned South-East Asia and Latin America into charnel houses, some of them, like Colombia, to this day.

Another Democrat who strode into the White House with the word “peace” springing from his lips was Jimmy Carter. It was he who first decreed that “freedom” and the war of terror required a $3.5 billion investment in a secret CIA-led war in Afghanistan, plus the deployment of Argentinian torturers to advise US military teams in counter-insurgency ops in El Salvador and Nicaragua.

(Though no US president can spend more than a few moments in the Oval Office scanning his in-tray the morning after the inaugural ceremonies without okaying the spilling of blood somewhere on the planet, it has to be said that Bill Clinton did display some momentary distaste before settling comfortably into the killer’s role. “Do we have to do this?” he muttered, as his national security team said that imperial dignity required cruise missile bombardment of Baghdad in 1993 in retaliation for a foiled attack on former President G.H.W. Bush, during a visit to Kuwait. The misisiles landed in a suburb, one of them killing the artist Laila al-Attar.)

Obama campaigned on a pledge to “decapitate” al-Qaida, meaning the assassination of its leaders. It was his short-hand way of advertising that he had the right stuff. And, like Kennedy, he’s summoning the exponents of unconventional, short-cut paths to success in that mission. Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal now replaces General David McKiernan as Commander of US Forces in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s expertise is precisely in assassination and “decapitation.” As commander of the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) for nearly five years starting in 2003, McChrystal was in charge of death squad ops, with its best advertised success being the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of al-Qaida in Iraq.

The phrase “sophisticated networks” tends to crop up in assessments of McChrystal’s Iraq years. Actually there’s nothing fresh or sophisticated in what he did. Programs of targeted assassination aren’t new in counter-insurgency. The most infamous and best known was the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, designed to identify and eliminate cadres of Vietnam’s “National Liberation Front”, informally known as the Viet Cong of whom, on some estimates, at least 40,000 were duly assassinated.

In such enterprises two outcomes are inevitable. Identification of the human targets requires either voluntary informants or captives. In the latter instance kidnapping (ie extrajudicial seizure of “enemy combatants”) and then torture are certain, whatever rhetorical pledges are proclaimed back home. There may be intelligence officers who will rely on patient, non-violent interrogation, as the US officer, Major Matthew Alexander, who elicited the whereabouts of al-Zarquawi told Patrick Cockburn that he did. There will be others, US personnel who will either personally reach for the garden hose and the face towel, or delegate the task to the local talent.

It has been thus, without remit, through the entire course of Empire. Not so long ago CounterPuncher Prof. Bruce Jackson of SUNY, Buffalo, sent us an illustration from the May 22, 1902 issue of the original (pre-Luce) Life. The only military action the US had going at the time was in the Philippines, where Pershing was fighting the Moros — Muslims who wanted independence from US rule. A pipe-smoking GI pours water into a funnel held in the mouth of a barefoot prisoner by another GI, who sits on the prisoner’s genitals and points a pistol at his throat.

McChrystal, not coincidentally, was involved in the prisoner abuse scandal at Baghdad’s Camp Nama. (He also played a sordid role in the cover-up in the friendly-fire death of ex-NFL star and Army Ranger Pat Tillman.)

Whatever the technique, a second certainty is the killing of large numbers of civilians in the final “targeted assassination.” At one point in the first war on Saddam in the early 1990s, a huge component of US air sorties was devoted each day to bombing places where US intelligence had concluded Saddam might be hiding. Time after time, after the mangled bodies of men, women and children had been scrutinized, came the crestfallen tidings that Saddam was not among them.

Already in Afghanistan public opinion has been inflamed by the weekly bulletins of deadly bombardments either by drones or manned bombers. Still in the headlines is the US bombardment of Bola Boluk in Farah province, which yielded 140 dead villagers torn apart by high explosive including 93 children. Only 22 were male and over 18. Perhaps “sophisticated intelligence” had identified one of these as an al-Qaida man, or a Taliban captain, or maybe someone an Afghan informant to the US military just didn’t care for. Maybe electronic eavesdropping simply screwed up the coordinates. If we ever know, it won’t be for a very long time. Obama has managed a terse apology, even as he installs McChrystal, thus ensuring more of the same.

The logic of targeted assassinations was on display in Gaza even as Obama worked on the uplifting phrases of his Inaugural Address. The Israelis claimed they were targeting only Hamas even as the body counts of women and children methodically refuted these claims and finally extorted from Obama a terse phrase of regret.

He may soon weary of uttering them. His course is set and his presidency already permanently stained the ever-familiar blood-red tint. There’s no short-cut, no “nicer path” in counter-insurgency and the policing of Empire. A targeted bombing yields up Bola Boluk, and the incandescent enmity of most Afghans. The war on al Qaida mutates into war on the Taliban, and 850,000 refugees in the Swat Valley in Pakistan.

The mild-mannered professor is bidding to be as sure-footed as Bush and Cheney in trampling on constitutional rights. He’s now backing into pledges to shut down the kangaroo courts (“military commissions”) by which means the US have held prisoners at Guantanamo who’ve never even been formally charged with a crime! He’s threatening to hold some prisoners indefinitely in the U.S. without trial. He’s been awarded a hearty editorial clap on the back from the Wall Street Journal:

“Mr. Obama deserves credit for accepting that civilians courts are largely unsuited for the realities of the war on terror. He has now decided to preserve a tribunal process that will be identical in every material way to the one favored by Dick Cheney.”

It didn’t take long. But it’s what we’ve got –- for the rest of Obama-time.

Source / CounterPunch

Thanks to David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

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Marilyn Buck from the Greybar : Reflections on Liberation and Poetry

Posted on May 23, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Portrait of Marilyn Buck by Tom Manning from Can’t Jail the Spirit: Art by Political Prisoner Tom Manning and others, 2006.

The following is from former Austinite and Ragamuffin (contributor to our Sixties underground paper), long-time political prisoner and poet Marilyn Buck, the latest of her continuing letters to a legion of friends and supporters hopefully awaiting her release, perhaps in 2010.

Her informal reflections on current events provide an important perspective too often missing from our debates. Far removed, as yet, from the world of blogs and tweets, Buck is forced to observe events unfold on their terms, and to objectively weigh their relative importance.

You can see Marilyn’s work on The Rag Authors’ Page.

Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / May 23, 2009

‘Already it’s May! National Poetry Month in April, celebrated poetry in… more public quarters. I think of prisoners buried in dark cells (maybe not so dark, but bleak without signs of spring and nature).’

By Marilyn Buck / The Rag Blog / May 23, 2009

My legs are tied with a rope
and my arms are bound by my side,
but I smell the sweet perfume of woodland flowers
and hear the birds. Impossible
to keep these from me.
Anyhow, now the road is not so long,
and I am not alone.

Ho Chi Minh

I didn’t quite get to an International Women’s day/month letter, but as always my spirit is renewed through the evidences of our ongoing struggle for equality as human beings.

My spirits were not renewed at all on learning Uncle Sam’s lackey in Afghanistan signed a law legalizing men’s right — at least in the Shia communities — to forcibly have sex with their wives, turning anti-women culture tradition into modern law. A few giant steps backward for women, everywhere. And then there’s Nicaragua’s and Uruguay’s presidents, D. Ortega and Tabaré, ostensibly “progressive, former leftists,” signed laws further criminalizing abortion and women’s right to choose.

Let us see how the other progressing nations of Latin America develop programs that do or do not benefit more than half of their populations, the women. If a politic or struggle does not work to liberate the women of the country, the country will not be able to advance very far. Not a good sign for anyone, woman or man, especially among those who advocate for justice and liberation.

Nor is it a good sign that our brother Mumia Abu Jamal’s Supreme Court petition was denied. I hope more strategies will emerge to free our comrade. It continues to be dangerous to give voice to the voiceless, especially when the voice and militancy is African.

Already it’s May! National Poetry Month in April, celebrated poetry in [….] more public quarters. I think of prisoners buried in dark cells (maybe not so dark, but bleak without signs of spring and nature). Even though at times it may seem frivolous, excessive, not serious enough for these times in which we live, poetry… is important for the famished spirit. Spring, with its bursting of flowers, greenery and new life gladdens our hearts, despite the dying, torture and brutality that generates poetry of war, incredible loss and anguish.

Many of us like to think of poets as artists-advocates of progress or justice. I am reminded of the Fascist poets, and, recently I read a short essay by Slavoj Žižek , “The Military Poetic Complex” which reminds us of the role of Randovan Karadzic, a poet/psychiatrist/leader in ethnic cleansing and the torturous dismemberment of Yugoslavia. Žižek reminds us that poetry can advocate for the worst of human behaviors.

As for my own poetry, I’ve not been writing much. Nevertheless, recently a graduate music student (now university teacher) in Texas, Lauren Morgan, used three of my poems as the lyrics for a post-modern musical suite, performed in early April in San Marcos, Texas and sung by an operatic-level soprano. She won a competition for her composition! Finally, [my] translation of [exiled Uruguayan poet Cristina Peri Rossi’s] State of Exile was a finalist in the Northern California Book Awards. It was quite a surprise!

May you be well. Spring calls us to renew our energies and to generate collective work towards possibilities of liberation, justice and peace.

Marilyn Buck
FCI Dublin, California

[Marilyn J. Buck was an activist in Austin, Texas in the late Sixties. She was a staffer on The Rag, the underground newspaper that was The Rag Blog’s inspiration. She is also a former editor of the original SDS’ New Left Notes, former member of San Francisco’s movement film project Newsreel, an accomplished poet, and a literacy and AIDS prevention educator. She is one of the longest-held woman political prisoners in the US today. To learn more about Marilyn’s history, her incarceration and her creative work, go to her entry on The Rag Authors’ Page.]

Also see Marilyn Buck from the Greybar: Thoughts on the Recent Election, by Marilyn Buck / The Rag Blog / Dec. 28, 2008

The Rag Blog

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Ralph Solonitz : Memorial Day

Posted on May 23, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Political cartoon by Ralph Solonitz / The Rag Blog / May 23, 2009.
[Ralph Solonitz’ cartoons also appear at MadasHellClub.net.]

The Rag Blog

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True Fiction, Dept. : San Angelo Mayor Quits to be With Gay Alien Lover

Posted on May 23, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

(Former) San Angelo Mayor J.W. Lown, in a photo with (and autographed by) U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson. Photo from jwloan.com

San Angelo Mayor springs a Hell of a surprise on his town
By Richard Connelly / May 21, 2009

See ‘Texas Mayor Resigns To Be With Gay Lover,’ by Mona Elyafi, Below.

Out there in West Texas, they know how to do things right. Like spring surprise mayoral resignations.

The mayor of San Angelo, J.W. Lown, abruptly announced his resignation just days before he was to be sworn in for his fourth term as mayor, the San Angelo Standard Times reports.

Surprise Number One: He made the announcement from Mexico, where he had suddenly bolted to.

Surprise Number Two: He was resigning because he is in a relationship with an illegal alien and they’re trying to fix the alien’s status.

Surprise Number Three: Both Lown and the Mexican citizen are guys. As in HE’S GAY. In San Angelo.

Lown is obviously a well-respected public servant: He won the most recent re-election with 89 percent of the vote, and stunned city council members were effusive in their praise for his work.

But it’s also obvious they didn’t know he was in the closet.

Lown told the paper he would come back to the city “if the people of San Angelo will welcome me back.”

Let’s hope they do. It could be fascinating.

Some would be troubled by the illegal-alien thing, of course. Some because he was helping someone he knew was illegal, and was mayor of the town while doing so. Others might just hate the Messkins.

But the whole gay thing, in West Texas? Hard to say. You would hope people would be open-minded, but then again we’ve been to West Texas.

Boy, there’s a TV movie here for someone: Popular, young attractive mayor of a prairie town, torn by love, decides to go back to Mexico to help his partner get legal. He has to give up a job he also loves…and he has to come out.

J.W. Lown, get yourself an agent.

Source / Hair Balls / Houston Press

Mayor J.W. Lown and Ret. NY CRMS Chief Rosey Valez at 9/11 Memorial Ceremony. Photo from jwloan.com.

Texas Mayor Resigns To Be With Gay Lover
By Mona Elyafi / April 22, 2009

San Angelo, Texas Mayor J.W. Lown abruptly resigned from office effective immediately to be with his illegal alien gay lover, according to Perez.

Lown had just been elected to his fourth term in a landslide only a few weeks ago garnering about 89 percent of the votes.

Lown broke the news of his stepping down from Mexico where he flew to be with his partner. He tendered his resignation through a letter to City Manager Harold Dominguez.

Scheduled to take the oath of office last Tuesday for his fourth term as mayor, Lown did not appear at the event. In a telephone call late Wednesday afternoon from Mexico the Mayor explained that because he was in personal relationship with a man who does not have legal residency in the United States, he didn’t see fit to take the oath of office knowing he was “aiding and assisting” someone who was not a legal citizen.

“I made the final decision when I knew it was the right decision to make for me and my partner and our future – and for the community,” said Lown.

While Lown declined to provide the name of the person, he did confirm that his lover entered the United States five years ago to attend Angelo State University. Lown also said that their relationship didn’t start until after March. He and his partner are currently in Mexico in a hotel awaiting a visa to legally re-enter the US territory.

“I did the best I could,” Lown said. “I had to get down here and get everything in order to make a life for myself.”

The 32-year-old real estate owner who has dual citizenship in both the U.S. and Mexico, said that while he wasn’t sure how long it would take for his partner’s visa to be granted, the couple would only come back if “the people of San Angelo will welcome (them) back.”

Source / She Wired

Thanks to Jeff Jones and Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog

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Canada Convicts Rwandan War Criminal

Posted on May 23, 2009 by RagBlog

If this can happen, then surely we can also bring people such as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to justice. Genocide in Rwanda or genocide in Iraq are of equal weight – both are heinous crimes under international law and should be dealt with accordingly.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Retired general Romeo Dallaire is seen in a court sketch before judge Andre Denis and crown attorney Alexis Gauthier, standing, during his testimony at the war crimes trial of Desire Munyaneza, Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2007 in Montreal. Munyaneza, a former Toronto resident, was accused and is now convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes for leading a militia gang that allegedly killed and raped civilians during the Rwanda genocide in 1994. Graphic: Source.

Canadian Judge Convicts Rwandan in Genocide
By Ian Austen / May 22, 2009

OTTAWA — A Rwandan who entered Canada more than a decade ago claiming to be a refugee was convicted Friday in a Montreal court on seven charges related to the 1994 genocide.

The conviction was the first under a Canadian war crimes law introduced nine years ago and followed an unusually complex two-year trial that involved hearings in Africa and in Europe.

The Rwandan, Désiré Munyaneza, 42, a Hutu and a son of a prominent businessman, was accused of mass murders, rape and pillaging in the Butare region of the small central African nation.

Justice André Denis of Quebec Superior Court found him guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in a nonjury trial.

“The accused’s criminal intent was demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt, as was his culpable violence,” he wrote in his decision, which ran more than 200 pages and was published in English and French.

“The educated son of an important bourgeois family in Butare, Désiré Munyaneza was at the forefront of the genocidal movement.”

The judge added that while he found prosecution witnesses, many testifying anonymously and in private for their security, to be generally credible, he had a hard time believing most of the defense witnesses.

Lawyers for Mr. Munyaneza said outside the courthouse that they would appeal the verdict.

The bloodshed in Rwanda began in April 1994 when extremists among the majority Hutu population organized mass killings of Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The passage of time as well as the extent of the massacres — which took an estimated 800,000 lives — has made prosecutions difficult.

Many witnesses offered harrowing accounts of Mr. Munyaneza’s role in the genocide. One witness passed out after testifying that she and several other women had been raped repeatedly over several days by a group led by Mr. Munyaneza.

Another witness, identified only as RCW-11, described his participation in a daylong killing tour led by Mr. Munyaneza. It began at a mosque where Tutsis were removed from their hiding place in a ceiling and killed.

From there, the killers moved to a Roman Catholic church where, according to other witnesses, about 500 Tutsis had sought shelter. After initially assuring the Tutsis that they would be taken to a safer place, the killers spent the next five hours removing them in small numbers and killing them. The day concluded with the killing of Tutsis hiding in an Adventist church.

RCW-11 himself was convicted in Rwanda of taking part in the genocide.

News of the conviction was received positively by many in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital.

“Maybe it’s a beginning that many of them will be brought to justice,” said Raphael Mipali, a musician. “The priority first for me is to bring these people to Rwanda, because this is where genocide was committed. But if there is no way for them to come to Rwanda, they should be brought to the book somewhere else.”

An international tribunal in Tanzania, established to supplement Rwanda’s justice system, has convicted about 30 people and acquitted 6.

The Montreal case was aided by a continuing tribunal case, in which six other people were being tried for massacres in Butare. Mr. Munyaneza was described in his trial as a militia leader who had worked with them.

Mr. Munyaneza arrived in Toronto in 1997 and sought refugee status, which was ultimately denied. Late that year a complaint to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police from a Rwandan in Canada prompted an inquiry. After investigators traveled to Rwanda six times to gather evidence, Mr. Munyaneza was arrested in 2005.

Under the war crimes law, which allows Canada to prosecute residents for acts they committed in other countries, Mr. Munyaneza, who has two children, faces life in prison when he is sentenced Sept. 9.

Switzerland and Belgium have also convicted Rwandans for crimes related to the genocide.

[Josh Kron contributed reporting from Kigali, Rwanda.]

Source / New York Times

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Talk Show Host Waterboarded : ‘It Was Instantaneous… Absolutely Torture’

Posted on May 23, 2009 by RagBlog

Right-Wing Radio Host Gets Waterboarded, and Lasts Six Seconds Before Saying It’s Torture
By John Byrne / May 22, 2009.

Host Erich Muller says “It was instantaneous…and I don’t want to say this: absolutely torture.”

Chicago radio host Erich “Mancow” Muller decided he’d get himself waterboarded to prove the technique wasn’t torture.

It didn’t turn out that way. “Mancow,” in fact, lasted just six or seven seconds before crying foul. Apparently, the experience went pretty badly — “Witnesses said Muller thrashed on the table, and even instantly threw the toy cow he was holding as his emergency tool to signify when he wanted the experiment to stop,” according to NBC Chicago.

“The average person can take this for 14 seconds,” Marine Sergeant Clay South told his audience before he was waterboarded on air. “He’s going to wiggle, he’s going to scream, he’s going to wish he never did this.”

Mancow was set on a 7-foot long table with his legs elevated and his feet tied.

“I wanted to prove it wasn’t torture,” Mancow said. “They cut off our heads, we put water on their face…I got voted to do this but I really thought ‘I’m going to laugh this off.’ “

The upshot? “It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that’s no joke,” Mancow told listeners. “It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back…It was instantaneous…and I don’t want to say this: absolutely torture.”

“Absolutely. I mean that’s drowning,” he added later. “It is the feeling of drowning.”

“If I knew it was gonna be this bad, I would not have done it,” he said.

The 42-year-old radio host is no stranger to controversy. In 2005, he was maligned for saying that then-Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean was “vile,” “bloodthirsty,” “evil” and “should be kicked out of America.”

Source / AlterNet

Thanks to Jeffrey Segal / The Rag Blog

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Card Check is Dead : Did Obama Betray Labor?

Posted on May 23, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Sen. Arlen Specter, “Democrat” of Pennsylvania, with President Obama, says he will accept a compromise on the Employee Free Choice Act. Photo by AP.

Last Thursday President Obama pronounced “card check” dead, saying that the current Employee Free Choice Act didn’t have the votes to pass but that a “compromise” could work. By compromise, the president meant a version of the bill without card check, the provision obliging employers to recognize unions after a majority of workers have signed cards, rather than after an election. On the same day, Sen. Arlen Specter, newly “D”-Pa., a key swing vote, said that he, too, would support a “compromise” on EFCA: card-check-free, of course.

Liza Featherstone / Reuters / May 21, 2009

Democrats Betray Labor
Card Check is Pronouced Dead

By David Macaray / May 22, 2009

Earlier this week it was acknowledged by labor officials and Democratic insiders that the EFCA (Employee Free Choice Act), as presently written, wasn’t going to pass. While the bill may be reintroduced in a different form, the crucial “card check” component has been pronounced dead. Although labor wonks across the country were disappointed by the news, most weren’t surprised by it.

Despite all the hoopla and anticipation, skeptics had predicted long ago that this ambitious bill, which would have provided working people with far greater access to labor unions, had virtually no chance of passing. Why? Because it was too explicitly “pro-labor.”

Big Business and the Democratic Party (despite its lip service) simply couldn’t allow legislation this progressive to become law. Not for nothing has Taft-Hartley remained on the books for 62 years.

Let’s clarify what the EFCA was and wasn’t. First, it wasn’t the draconian, anti-democratic measure it was portrayed to be by its Republican opponents and back-pedaling Democrats (e.g., Senator Diane Feinstein of California) who, while schmoozing with organized labor, were looking to bail.

There was nothing “anti-democratic” about it. Clearly, it was “public,” rather than “secret,” but how is that anti-democratic? Legislators use nay and yea votes on the floor of Congress hundreds of times a year, and a show of hands is used everywhere—from city councils to school boards to company boards of directors. How is card check “anti-democratic”?

If you want an example of “anti-democratic,” just consider the system that exists today—a system that allows a group of workers who actually want to join a union to be nonetheless prevented from doing so by a combination of stalling tactics and company propaganda.

You say you want to join a labor union? Fine, you have that legal right. What that means, precisely, is that you have the legal right to “want” to join. But the company can make you wait months and months before you vote, and has the authority to force you to attend hours of mandatory “fright seminars.”

Management has the right to barrage you with anti-union propaganda. They have the de facto right to threaten you, intimidate you, offer you bribes and promises, and spread false or slanderous information. And while those tactics are more or less legal (if you think they’re not, try fighting them in court), what isn’t legal is allowing you to simply sign a card saying you want to join. Now how topsy-turvy is that?

Second, instead of depicting the EFCA as some sort of wildly “radical” measure, let’s put it in perspective. What the EFCA would have given American workers is what they already have in Europe and Canada. Yes, they have this arrangement in Canada—our calm, stolid, unimaginative, boring neighbor to the north. We’re speaking here of Canada, people, not Albania.

Accordingly, as anti-labor as some members of Canada’s conservative party are, they would, frankly, be taken aback, if not staggered, by the suggestion that Canadian workers not be allowed to freely choose whether or not to belong to a union. While Canadian conservatives may regard unions as detrimental (and harbor the conceit that they themselves wouldn’t join one if given the opportunity), they don’t interfere with workers who choose to join. If only our country were as egalitarian.

How ironic is it—given our fetish for personal liberty—that it’s harder for an American to become a union member than for a foreigner to become a U.S. citizen?

And third, let’s not pretend that this debate had anything to do with the freedom of choice, or adherence to the Bill of Rights, or any other noble-sounding issue. Opposition to the EFCA was no more about a worker’s constitutional “right to choose” than it was about George Washington’s powdered wig.

Let’s be clear: This whole anti-EFCA drive was designed to keep the unions out. Everything else is smoke. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce didn’t spend tens of millions of dollars to promote some abstract principle involving a citizen’s right to choose; they did it to pierce the heart of organized labor.

So who do we blame for the defeat? Obviously, when something as big and expensive and widely publicized as the EFCA falls on its face, somebody has to be held accountable. In truth, organized labor seems the likeliest candidate.

Not only was labor unable to speak with one voice (e.g., UNITE HERE’s battle, SEIU’s leadership scandals, Change to Win’s breakaway from the AFL-CIO, et al), but they once again allowed themselves to be sweet-talked and misled by the Democrats. Yes, labor had on board its Russ Feingolds (D-WI) and Carl Levins (D-MI), but there were too many other DINOs (Democrats In Name Only) eager to jump ship.

In hindsight, organized labor should have relied more heavily on the support of America’s four “most popular” unions—police, firefighters, nurses and airline pilots. This would have helped clear the public relations hurdle raised by teachers, autoworkers and longshoremen, unions that have been receiving bad press.

As much as we like to think we’re an “issue-driven” electorate, it’s often a handsome face, a nice smile, or a famous family name that wins elections. After all, isn’t it the cute weather girl who gets hired for TV, and not the nerdy meteorologist?

Unbelievable as this sounds, it was reported that one of Governor Rod Blagojevich’s staffers once told him “he had the hair” to become U.S. president. And polls showed that 25% of Republican males approved of Sarah Palin because they found her “hot.” (That whirring sound in the background is James Madison spinning in his grave.)

Still, organized labor may not have invented the game, but they’re compelled to play it. Therefore, “pretty” unions (police, firemen, pilots) are going to be more popular than the conspicuously “ugly” ones—like teachers, who are being blamed for the nation’s low test scores, and the UAW, which, as urban myth has it, was responsible for killing the American auto industry and Detroit along with it.

At the EFCA’s coming-out party, the American Labor Movement should have dolled itself up before entering the room. It should have made the grand, sweeping entrance worthy of a prized debutante. Instead, it chose to conduct business in its usual, plodding fashion. Granted, it’s easy to second-guess, but organized labor clearly needs a makeover.

Of course, we’re already hearing people say, “Wait til 2010,” suggesting the Democrats will pick up enough senate seats to have those 60 votes necessary for cloture. The problem with that logic is it assumes the Democrats want card check to pass. Alas, there’s little evidence to support that assumption.

[David Macaray, a Los Angeles playwright (“Americana,” “Larva Boy”) and writer, was a former labor union rep. He can be reached at dmacaray@earthlink.net.]

Source / CounterPunch

President Obama now says that card check is dead…

He says he regrets that it may be necessary to find a compromise on labor reform that does not include card check, “as the votes aren’t there.” The fact is that the interview Obama granted to the Washington Post on Jan. 16, six days before he was sworn into office, was aimed consciously at trying to bury EFCA and card check.

By urging the political establishment to consider “an alternative” that would be more palatable to Big Business than EFCA, as he did in this interview with the Washington Post, Obama sent a signal to Arlen Specter, Dianne Feinstein and all the other politicians that he would not uphold his promise to labor and use the power of his presidency and his massive support among working people to fight for EFCA. His about-face began six days before he took his oath of office. It shows how hard the Chamber of Commerce and Wall Street must have leaned on Obama on this burning question for the entire labor movement — and for working people as a whole…

Alan Benjamin
Unity & Independence / UnionBook

Thanks to Jeffrey Segal / The Rag Blog

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‘Be Safe’ : A Poem by Mariann G. Wizard

Posted on May 23, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

“A Fox in the Hen House,” woodcut by Chet Philips / The Painter Factory.

In response to former Vice President Cheney’s ongoing fear-mongering and divisiveness.

Be Safe

“Be safe,” we say, when taking leave of friend and family member –
“Be safe,” more nuanced than it was before that one September.
Where once the phrase was meant to ward against life’s daily mishaps
(the slip on icy pavement, or in the bathtub, perhaps),
now it invokes the shadowed threat of alien freedom fighters
blowing up the local market with their bombs, the blighters!

“Be safe,” we plead, not just at home, but in a public fiction,
as if the words were something more than private benediction.
A dubious concept has been formed that we may be protected
from threats at home, threats abroad, and threats yet undetected;
if only we’ll agree to live cocooned inside a fence,
and only venture out in groups, and frightened beyond sense.

This fear gives power to the goals of certain social forces
whose wealth and influence derive from their “fence-selling” sources.
Think of the legendary fox, who seals the henhouse door,
warning the hens of darker fates; they trust their jailer more
   and more!
They fret that the sky will fall, and Fox predicts bad weather;
our own fears swirl, suspended, in a haze of shit and feathers.

Life is not safe, my dearest dears, nor can more fences save us;
thus, guard your liberty; that’s all that our Creator gave us!

Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog
Austin, Texas
May 22, 2009

The Rag Blog

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Climate Change Legislation : Landmark Energy Bill Faces Major Challenge

Posted on May 22, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Illustration by KAL / The Economist.

The Energy Bill… sets us on two important courses: major support for development of alternative energy, and establishment of a cap-and-trade system to reduce emissions 80 percent by 2050.

By Thomas Cleaver / The Rag Blog / May 22, 2009

See ‘Cap-and-trade showdown,’ by Jared Allen, Below.

The Energy Bill currently before Congress is probably the most important environmental legislation since the original Environmental Quality Act 37 years ago. It sets us on two important courses: major support for development of alternative energy, and establishment of a cap-and-trade system to reduce emissions 80 percent by 2050.

This is incredibly important. When Obama announced last November that he would commit the US to this, and to working on the new climate treaty that is to be signed this December, it resulted in the Chinese announcing they would do the same if the US did (and since they’re the #2 polluter on the planet, we can’t do a thing without them). And Brazil announced that if the international cap-and-trade system was established in the treaty, that Brazil would commit to an 80 percent reduction of Amazonian deforestation in 10 years — right now, tropical deforestation emits more carbon dioxide than all the cars, trucks and airplanes in use.

If the U.S. goes to the treaty signing with this bill signed into law, it establishes our leadership, and will likely bring in the Indians and the Indonesians, the other crucial new ones. If we do this, we might have a chance of meeting what the IPCC said last year — that we have (or had then) a 3-4 year window of opportunity left to establish the policies that will allow us to mitigate climate change.

In the Congress, the Republicans are unanimously opposed, and plan to bring up 100 plus amendments, one at a time, to be voted on in an effort to run the clock out on passing the bill altogether. It is crucial to maintain Democratic support. My congressman, Henry Waxman, is doing this and he is great at getting things done. Tireless. But the big problem is the centrist Democrats who face competitive races in the face of the Republican disinformation campaign now being run in their districts.

That’s why this report from “The Hill” blog is so important.

Cap-and-trade showdown

By Jared Allen / May 20, 2009

A committee chairman is threatening House leaders to either give him a role in shaping climate change legislation or risk losing every Democratic vote on his panel when the bill hits the floor.

Rep. Collin Peterson (Minn.), the outspoken Democratic chairman of the Agriculture panel, has been making it well-known that he wants his committee to have full jurisdictional authority over whatever climate change bill emerges from Chairman Henry Waxman’s (D-Calif.) Energy and Commerce Committee.

But Peterson is no longer making idle threats.

Peterson earlier this week met with the 26 Democrats on his panel and emerged with a “virtually unanimous” agreement that his committee members would stand with him in opposition to a climate change bill that didn’t adequately address the concerns of the agriculture industry, according to one of those Democrats.

“We’ve thrown a pitchfork in the sand,” the Democrat said.

Peterson wants a full markup to alter what he and other committee Democrats think are inadequate provisions on everything from fuel standards to renewable energy definitions to regulations governing the trading of carbon derivatives created through a cap-and-trade system, all of which have been written into the Energy and Commerce bill.

“We expect the bill to be re-referred to us by the [House] parliamentarian,” Peterson said in a brief interview Wednesday. “At this point my intention is to make it prohibit derivatives from being traded on this.”

That point alone would put Peterson and Waxman worlds apart.

Waxman has said that his staff is in early discussions with Peterson’s staff about the jurisdictional question — and noted he has not talked to Peterson directly. But he has also said that he believes his bill has fully addressed the concerns of the agriculture community.

Energy and Commerce Committee spokeswoman Karen Lightfoot said Waxman is continuing to work with Peterson and other committee chairmen on the bill.

Agriculture Committee Democrats, though, see it differently.

“There’s been some things relating to agriculture that have been put together rather sloppily by the Energy Committee,” a Democrat on the Agriculture panel said. “If they don’t address those concerns, they’re not going to have the votes to pass this.”

Waxman and House Democratic leaders, who have been trying to patch together enough votes to clear the Energy and Commerce Committee, have been delicately tiptoeing around the issue of whether to send the bill to Peterson’s committee.

But they won’t be able to dance around that question too much longer, especially because Waxman appears to have the votes to move the bill out of his panel. And anything resembling a gentlemanly meeting of the minds between Energy and Agriculture Democrats is evaporating as an option, sources said.

There is not a single Democrat who sits on both panels. Further complicating the equation for party leaders is the fact that the Agriculture Committee is loaded with vulnerable and freshman Democrats — those members who most fear Republican attacks on what the GOP has labeled a “cap-and-tax” bill.

Eleven freshmen sit on the Agriculture Committee, and seven of them are in competitive reelection races, according to The Cook Political Report, which handicaps House and Senate contests.

All of Cook’s three Democratic “toss-ups” — Reps. Bobby Bright (Ala.), Walt Minnick (Idaho) and Frank Kratovil (Md.) — sit on the Agriculture Committee.

Minnick said Wednesday that he was undecided on climate change.

Asked if his decision on how to vote will be influenced by Peterson, he responded; “Certainly, how the leadership reacts to Chairman Peterson’s concerns will have an impact on how all of us on the committee feel about this legislation.”

Leadership sources said that no final decisions have been made about how to deal with Peterson’s demands.

“The focus up until now has been getting through the Energy and Commerce Committee,” a senior aide said.

Peterson’s hostage-like situation presents a major problem for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who has called climate change her flagship issue. Getting a bill through the House will be incredibly difficult, with an overwhelmingly majority of Republicans expected to vote no.

Turning a blind eye to Peterson would allow vulnerable members — many of them already queasy about climate change — plenty of cover to buck their leaders and vote against the bill on the House floor.

But acquiescing to the chairman has its own potential risks.

A number of Energy and Commerce Democrats have told Waxman he has their votes this week, but have hedged in indicating their support for anything other than what emerges from the Energy panel.

Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), the key architect of an agreement with Waxman and Energy and Environment subcommittee Chairman Edward Markey (D-Mass.) allowing the markup to begin, on Wednesday said his support is conditional once the bill clears the Energy markup stage.

“Well, I am a yes vote in the committee,” Boucher said on C-SPAN Wednesday morning. “Then I will simply weigh the improvements that are made in the House and in the Senate.”

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) on Tuesday said that he anticipates climate change legislation will hit the House floor “probably in June or the first part of July.” Some aides said they interpreted that timeline to mean that leaders need time to work out jurisdictional issues even if Waxman manages to complete his markup this week.

House leaders, including Pelosi, will eventually determine the timeline of referrals to other committees.

There is a total of eight committees that can claim jurisdiction over the climate change bill — outside of Energy and Commerce and Agriculture, those panels include: Appropriations; Education and Labor; Financial Services; Natural Resources; Science; and Transportation and Infrastructure. But the only real saber-rattling has come from Peterson, a centrist lawmaker who voted against President Obama’s stimulus bill and has been highly critical of his agriculture-related proposals.

Waxman has acknowledged having direct talks about jurisdiction with only one gavel-wielding lawmaker: Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.).

But Ways and Means member Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who is also the assistant to the Speaker, indicated that Ways and Means is not looking either for a jurisdictional fight or even to change the bill substantially.

“I wouldn’t expect to see any major surgery by the Ways and Means Committee,” Van Hollen told reporters on Tuesday.

Source / The Hill

Source

The Rag Blog

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2010 : ‘Year of the Bible?’

Posted on May 22, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

President Barack Obama swears in on the Lincoln Bible. Photo from Getty Images.

The Bible bill?

Rep. Broun’s simple congressional resolution aimed at honoring the Good Book has produced a push-back of biblical proportion in the blogosphere, with critics dismissing it as either unconstitutional or a waste of time.

By Victoria McGrane / May 22, 2009

When the clock strikes midnight on Dec. 31, 2009, Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.) hopes you’ll be ringing in “the Year of the Bible.”

It’s probably just wishful thinking.

Broun’s simple congressional resolution aimed at honoring the Good Book has produced a push-back of biblical proportion in the blogosphere, with critics dismissing it as either unconstitutional or a waste of time. Jews in Congress and atheist activists are dismissing the resolution, while none of the many Democrats in Congress who are Christian have bothered to sign on as co-sponsors.

According to GovTrak.us, the resolution is among the most-blogged-about pieces of legislation, with most posts less than complimentary in nature.

“Does that mean 2009 is not the year of the Bible?” mocked Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who is Jewish. “What is 2012 the year of? The Quran?”

“That’s an endorsement of religion by the federal government, and we shouldn’t be doing that,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), even though he has introduced his own legislation dealing with religion.

“Republican lawmakers with apparently too much time on their hands and no solutions to offer the country are pushing a resolution that will not address the nation’s problems or advance prosperity or even untangle their previous governing mistakes,” blogged the Progressive Puppy.

Broun rejects the critiques leveled at this effort.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with Christianity,” he said in an interview with POLITICO. Rather, he says, it seeks to recognize that the Bible played an integral role in the building of the United States, including providing the basis for our freedom of religion that allows Muslims, Hindus and even atheists to vocalize their own beliefs.

And even as Nadler criticized Broun, he has done his own share of mixing religion and legislation.

Last year, he introduced a bill that would overturn a federal appeals court ruling — an “idiot” decision, he says — that a condominium board in Chicago had the right to ban Jews from installing mezuzahs, which consist of a piece of parchment inscribed with a specific religious text put inside a case and hung on a door frame.

Condo boards shouldn’t be able to interfere in an individual’s right to practice his or her religion, Nadler said.

But he himself declined to install a mezuzah on his congressional office door when asked by a rabbi, even though he does so at home.

“That’s my religious symbol, and the office does not belong to me; it belongs to the people of the congressional district, and no one should feel uncomfortable walking into the office if it’s not their religion,” Nadler said, describing his feelings on religion and Congress.

“Same thing with the Bible. … It’s not everybody’s religion. And the federal government should not be imposing religious viewpoints.”

Atheists, who might feel themselves a particular target with the declaration of a biblical year, aren’t even worried about Broun’s effort.

“Right now, we’re seeing atheism on such a rise,” said David Silverman, vice president and national spokesman of American Atheists, a group dedicated to fighting for the civil rights of atheists.

“We are seeing Christianity on such a dramatic decline that we’re not particularly worried about it. We’re thinking that this kind of old-style George W. Bush Republicanism is about to go away,” Silverman said, referring to the latest Pew Forum survey of American religious life, which showed nonreligious Americans as the fastest-growing group.

And it may be the best-selling book of all time, as Broun’s resolution points out, but the Bible isn’t such a popular legislative topic.

A search of Thomas, the online congressional database, for “Bible” yields just one other bill: a resolution to have the “Lincoln-Obama Bible” on permanent display in the Capitol Visitor Center.

The resolution specifically asks the president “to issue a proclamation calling upon citizens of all faiths to rediscover and apply the priceless, timeless message of the Holy Scripture which has profoundly influenced and shaped the United States and its great democratic form of government.”

As for the economy, health care, global warming and all the other issues on Congress’ plate?

“While we must focus on fiscal policies that provide relief to families during these tough economic times, an endeavor I have been working tirelessly towards in this Congress, we must also not forget to protect and celebrate our fundamental freedoms that the Bible has influenced,” Broun said.

Broun has gathered 15 co-sponsors, all Republicans, but says he’s looking for more and hopes Democrats will sign on, as well.

“This is not a partisan issue,” he said. “I want it to be bipartisan.”

Whether he’s successful or not — the same measure didn’t go anywhere last year — at least Broun and his fellow supporters can take heart in one fact: They already had a “year of the Bible.”

Source / Politico

Thanks to Kathy Tomlinson / The Rag Blog

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