The Rag Blog

Acorn: Fighting the Banks to Counter Foreclosures

Posted on February 18, 2009 by RagBlog

Jonathan Westin, an Acorn organizer, comforted Denise Parker, whose house was being foreclosed on, after she spoke at an Acorn training session in Brooklyn. Photo: James Estrin/The New York Times.
A Bid to Link Arms Against Eviction
By Fernanda Santos / February 17, 2009

As resistance to foreclosure evictions grows among homeowners, community leaders and some law enforcement officials, a broad civil disobedience campaign is starting in New York and other cities to support families who refuse orders to vacate their homes.

The community organizing group Acorn unveiled the campaign with a spirited rally on Friday at a Brooklyn church and will roll it out in at least 22 other cities in the coming weeks. Through phone trees, Web pages and text-messaging networks, the effort will connect families facing eviction with volunteers who will stand at their side as officers arrive, even if it means risking arrest.

“You want to haul us out to jail? Fine. Let the world see how government has been ineffective,” Bertha Lewis, Acorn’s chief organizer, said in an interview. “Politicians have helped banks, but they haven’t helped families in the way that it’s needed, and these families are now saying, enough is enough.”

At the onset of the foreclosure crisis, the problem was regarded by some as one of a homeowner’s own making, the result of irresponsible decisions made by families who chose to live beyond their means. But as foreclosures spread across the country, devastating even solidly middle-class communities, the blame has slowly shifted to the financial companies that made questionable loans and have received billions of dollars in federal aid to stave off collapse.

In recent months, a budding resistance movement has grown among Americans who believe they have been left to face their predicament on their own — and the Acorn campaign is an organized expression of that frustration, Ms. Lewis said. Instead of quietly packing up and turning their homes over to banks, homeowners are now fighting back.

On Feb. 9, a man scrawled a message on the roof of his house in a suburb of Los Angeles: “I Want 2 Be Heard.” Then he barricaded himself inside when deputies showed up to evict him, surrendering after a few hours. In October, a woman in San Diego chained herself to her front porch after the bank that held her mortgage refused to renegotiate the terms. She remains in her home, but has received a second eviction notice.

And last year in Boston, neighbors and activists locked arms outside eight buildings that had been foreclosed upon to prevent the authorities from forcing residents onto the streets.

Sheriffs in some places have also taken a stand. In Wayne County in Michigan, Sheriff Warren C. Evans, suspended all evictions starting Feb. 2 until the federal government implements a plan to help homeowners facing foreclosures.

In Cook County in Illinois, which includes Chicago, Sheriff Thomas J. Dart directed a lawyer to review all eviction orders to protect people who kept on paying rent after the buildings where they lived had been seized by banks. In Butler County in Ohio, Sheriff Richard K. Jones ordered his deputies not to evict people who had no place else to go.

“This is a cold place in the winter and I will not give people a death sentence for not paying their debts,” Sheriff Jones said in an interview. “These are human beings, responsible middle-class people who fell on hard times, and I just can’t toss them out onto the streets.”

Acorn’s strategy is modeled on a movement the group led in the 1980s, when squatters occupied and set out to renovate thousands of abandoned city-owned buildings in New York, Philadelphia and Detroit, among other cities. The motivation was to solve what Ms. Lewis has called “the working family’s housing crisis.”

In cities like Orlando, Fla., which has one of the nation’s highest foreclosure rates — and Boston, Houston, Baltimore, Oakland, Calif., and Tucson, Ariz. — Acorn organizers have been creating networks to alert a homeowner’s neighbors when an eviction has been scheduled or deputies are on the way. Some volunteers will summon friends and relatives to converge at the home, while others will be in charge of notifying the news media. Organizers are also recruiting lawyers willing to defend for no fee those who are arrested.

The campaign, called Home Defenders, enlisted about 500 participants during meetings held Friday and Saturday in New York and five other cities. Ms. Lewis and other organizers said that they believed the number will reach into the tens of thousands within weeks.

“This is a desperate, last-ditch effort by folks who are working two or three jobs, single mothers, elderly people who don’t know what else to do to save their homes,” said Ginny Goldman, Acorn’s lead organizer in Texas, where the campaign began in Houston on Saturday.

The rally in Brooklyn, at Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Fort Greene, drew about 150 people. There were homeowners, Acorn members, community advocates and candidates for the City Council. One councilman, Mathieu Eugene, was carrying a slab of papers as thick as a large dictionary, each sheet representing, he said, a family facing foreclosure in his district, which includes parts of Crown Heights, Flatbush and Kensington.

The church’s pastor, the Rev. Clinton M. Miller, opened the gathering with this prayer: “If anybody here is facing foreclosure, God, we ask that a miracle be made and a home be saved.”

Then, between homeowners’ sharing their plight, the crowd chanted, “Enough is enough.”

One homeowner, Myrna Millington, 73, who lives in Laurelton, Queens, said that she had to take a second mortgage on her home of 38 years to pay for repairs that turned out to be more extensive than originally planned. What Ms. Millington did not know was that she had signed for a subprime loan, which carried interest rates so high she could not keep up with the payments. Her house was foreclosed on in September.

“I may lose my home, but I’m only leaving in handcuffs,” Ms. Millington said.

Another homeowner, Denise Parker, a mother of three who works as a housekeeper at two Midtown Manhattan hotels, bought a home in Springfield Gardens, Queens, in 2005 with an adjustable interest rate that, after two years, went up every six months. Her payments started at $3,500 and now are $5,050 a month, she said. She fell behind last year and her house is scheduled to be auctioned off on Friday.

“I refuse to leave the home that I’ve worked so hard to keep,” Ms. Parker, 42, told the audience. “I will not let the bank take my home and I will not leave.”

Eviction resistance actions are scheduled for Thursday in cities including New York, Oakland and Houston. Organizers will try to recruit enough volunteers to form a human wall on the sidewalk to avoid being arrested for trespassing. But occupying a house or having people attach themselves to a home could also be a tactic.

The campaign has earned praise and raised concern. Sheriff Dart, in Illinois, said it was a “slippery slope when you have individuals deciding whether they can lawfully remain in their homes.”

Sheriff Jones, in Ohio, equated the planned resistance to “chaining yourself to a tree that’s about to be cut down” and said that though he may not agree with it, he sympathizes.

In Washington, Acorn has found a staunch supporter in Representative Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, who, during a discussion last month about the $700 billion bailout package for financial companies, took to the floor of the House and instructed people to “stay in your homes — if the American people, anybody out there, is being foreclosed, don’t leave.”

In an interview, Ms. Kaptur said, “I’m thrilled that the American people are rising up and exercising the power that Wall Street has taken away from them.”

Source / New York Times

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Banking, Bankruptcy, Foreclosures, Housing Crisis | Leave a comment

Paul Krassner on The Virtues of Irreverence, Indecency and Illegal Drugs

Posted on February 17, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

The Right Irreverent Paul Krassner.

‘In the wishful-thinking corner of my mind, pushing the limits and fostering social change are inextricably connected, but I don’t have any delusions that I’ve inspired an epidemic of epiphanies.’ — Paul Krassner.

By David Kupfer

[David Kupfer’s interview with Paul Krassner appears in Issue 398, February, 2009, of The Sun magazine.]

Paul Krassner has been spreading his witty, sometimes snide, and often political brand of humor since the late 1950s. His publication the Realist was the underground journal of the counterculture during the sixties and seventies, breaking political stories and covering topics that were taboo for the mainstream press. Krassner became known for interweaving current events, social criticism, and satire in a manner not previously seen in print.

Born and raised in New York City, Krassner was a violin prodigy, and in 1939, at the age of six, he became the youngest person ever to perform at Carnegie Hall. In the 1950s he worked as a writer for comedian Steve Allen and for Mad magazine, and he became friends with stand-up comic Lenny Bruce. Krassner edited Bruce’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, and at Bruce’s encouragement began performing stand-up comedy himself at the Village Gate nightclub in New York City.

As editor of the Realist, Krassner approached journalism not as an objective observer but as a participant in many of the stories he covered. After he interviewed a doctor who performed illegal abortions, Krassner ran an underground abortion referral service. He wrote about the antiwar movement while he was an active member of it. And in addition to publishing articles on the psychedelic revolution, he took lsd with the revolution’s unofficial leader, Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary, and the spiritual teacher Ram Dass, a former associate of Leary’s at Harvard. Later Krassner joined novelist Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, who traveled the country spreading the gospel of psychedelics.

In 1967 Krassner cofounded (with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin) the Yippies, a countercultural political party that led theatrical demonstrations outside the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. At the height of the Vietnam War, Krassner was on an fbi list of radicals to be rounded up in the event of a national emergency. His friends John Lennon and Yoko Ono financed a 1972 issue of the Realist that exposed the Watergate break-in before journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did so in the mainstream press. In 1978 publisher Larry Flynt hired Krassner to take over the pornographic men’s magazine Hustler. The job lasted only six months, during which time Krassner appeared as a centerfold in the magazine.

In 2004 Krassner received an American Civil Liberties Union Upton Sinclair Award for his dedication to freedom of expression, and at the fourteenth annual Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, Krassner was inducted into the Counterculture Hall of Fame by the publication High Times. His articles have been published in Rolling Stone, Playboy, Penthouse, Mother Jones, the Nation, the New York Press, National Lampoon, the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times, and Funny Times. The Realist printed its last issue in 2001, but Krassner is still active as a writer, contributing a monthly column to High Times and a bimonthly column to Adult Video News Online. He is a regular columnist for the Huffington Post website and has been actively involved in movements to end the Iraq War and to legalize marijuana. (“Cigarettes are legal, and smoking them causes the death of twelve hundred people a day,” he says. “Marijuana is illegal, and the worst side effect is maybe you’ll raid your neighbor’s refrigerator.”)

Krassner has released six comedy albums and authored numerous books, including his autobiography, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counter-Culture (Touchstone) — which he is currently updating and expanding for a possible new edition — and One Hand Jerking: Reports from an Investigative Satirist (Seven Stories Press). His most recent collection, Who’s to Say What’s Obscene? Politics, Culture, and Comedy in America Today, will be published by City Lights Books in July of this year.

Krassner lives in southern California’s Desert Hot Springs with his wife, Nancy Cain, whom he married on April Fool’s Day twenty years ago. When I arrived at their home, just prior to last year’s presidential election, he answered the door wearing jeans and a black t-shirt that said, “Stop Bitching — Start a Revolution.” He walks with a cane because of a beating he suffered at the hands of two San Francisco cops during the riot following the voluntary-manslaughter verdict in the trial of Dan White, who had assassinated Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk. Krassner’s dark, curly hair and youthful demeanor make him appear younger than seventy-six.

On the walls of Krassner’s home office hang a portrait of Albert Einstein with the maxim “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” a photo of the Great Pyramid of Giza (from when Krassner traveled to Egypt for the Grateful Dead concerts there in 1978), and a trickster icon from a healers-and-shamans expedition in Ecuador. Outside the window, in a part of the yard he calls “Birdland,” doves, finches, and starlings were bathing, and hummingbirds hovered by huge blossoms. We were serenaded by a mockingbird Krassner had nicknamed “Plagiarist.” True to form, halfway through our conversation, Krassner lit up a fat joint.

Kupfer: Who are your influences?

Krassner: I come out of a tradition of American humorists that includes Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, and Will Rogers. My first modern influence was Lyle Stuart, who published the Independent, where I did my apprenticeship in journalism and wrote a column titled “Freedom of Wit.” Another of my mentors was Jean Shepherd, the radio humorist. In the middle of the night he’d talk about how you might explain an amusement park to a Venusian, or about a man who could taste an ice cube and tell you the make and model of the refrigerator it came from. Comedian Lenny Bruce was my role model as a stand-up performer, and novelist Joseph Heller was my biggest influence as a satirical writer. Heller explained to me how, in his book Catch-22, he used exaggeration so gradually that unreality became more credible than reality.

Kupfer: You have done stand-up comedy for nearly fifty years. How have your audiences changed?

Krassner: I think they’re more aware now of the contradictions in society: the phony piety, the hypocrisy. And I’ve evolved right along with them. Performing, for me, is a two-way street. English is my second language. Laughter is my first.

Kupfer: Do you aspire to foster social change with your satire, or do you just want to see how far you can push the limits?

Krassner: In the wishful-thinking corner of my mind, pushing the limits and fostering social change are inextricably connected, but I don’t have any delusions that I’ve inspired an epidemic of epiphanies. People don’t like to be lectured to, but if you can make them laugh, their defenses come down, and for the time being they’ve accepted whatever truth is embedded in your humor. When a large audience of people are all laughing together, no matter how disparate their backgrounds are, it’s a unifying moment. But who’s to say how long that moment of truth or unity lasts and whether it leads to any action? It’s one more positive input, but rarely a tipping point.

Kupfer: What pushed you into the role of provocateur?

Krassner: I couldn’t help but notice the difference between what I experienced in the streets and the way it was reported in the mainstream media, which acted as cheerleaders for the suppression of dissent.

Kupfer: Was there some early life event that led you to this calling?

Krassner: I was a child-prodigy violinist and at the age of six played the Vivaldi Concerto in A Minor at Carnegie Hall. A year later I saw my first movie, Intermezzo, which was also Ingrid Bergman’s first major movie, and I fell in love with the theme song. I couldn’t fathom why it felt so good to hear a certain combination of notes in a certain order with a particular rhythm, but it gave me enormous pleasure to hum that melody over and over to myself. It was like having a secret companion. When I told my violin teacher that I wanted to learn how to play the movie theme, he sneered and said, “That’s not right for you.” His words reverberated in my head. That’s not right for you. How could he know? For me, this was not merely a refusal of my request; it was a declaration of war upon the individual. In self-defense I drove him crazy during lessons, and after he died, I bought the sheet music to “Intermezzo” and taught myself to play it. That was the end of my musical career. I had a talent for playing the violin, but I had a passion for making people laugh.

A couple of decades later I heard different metaphors for that kind of experience. Timothy Leary talked about the way “people try to get you onto their game board.” And Ken Kesey warned, “Always stay in your own movie.”

Kupfer: How did you maintain your integrity as the editor and publisher of the Realist?

Krassner: I didn’t have to answer to anyone. There was no board of directors and no advertisers, and the readers trusted me not to be afraid to offend them — though sometimes they said, “Well, now you’ve gone too far.” Money was always tight, and I had to subsidize the magazine by doing interviews for Playboy and speaking at college campuses. I was forced to stop publishing in 1974 when I ran out of money, but in 1985 I got a five-thousand-dollar grant to start it up again as a newsletter, which lasted until 2001.

Kupfer: What was it like in the early days of the underground press?

Krassner: When People magazine labeled me “father of the underground press,” I demanded a paternity test. “Underground” is a misnomer, because it wasn’t a secret who published those weeklies or where you could get copies. A truly underground paper was the Outlaw, which was clandestinely published by inmates and staffers at San Quentin State Prison.

Kupfer: It seems as if “underground” publications are even more accessible today. You can get Earth First! Journal at Borders and Barnes & Noble now.

Krassner: That’s good news in terms of infiltrating the mainstream. Of course, with the possibility of Barnes & Noble buying out Borders, there may soon be one book giant: Barnes & Noble without Borders.

Kupfer: When you relaunched the Realist as a newsletter, you said in your editorial statement, “Irreverence is still our only sacred cow.”

Krassner: I’ve had second thoughts about that since then. There seems to be too much irreverence for its own sake these days. In some cases victims, rather than oppressors, have become the target.

Read the rest of this interview here/ The Sun.

Thanks to Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Alternative Media, Authors, Drug Legalization, Journalists, Paul Krassner, Political Activists, Political Satire, Sixties | 1 Comment

Israeli Jew : Bring the Suffering Gazans Home

Posted on February 17, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Israelis, led by Peace Now, demonstrate for peace in Gaza.

The following article by an Israeli Jew may at first blush seem a bit idealistic. But there are times when idealism may be the only practical answer. Thanks to Rag Blog resident poet Larry Piltz for passing along this inspirational call to (open) arms by Deb Reich.

— Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / February 17, 2009

‘Speaking as an Israeli Jew, I say that we (Israeli Jews and our friends abroad) ought to embrace EVERYONE who wants to live here among us, so long as they truly love the land and have some reasonable claim to it.’

By Deb Reich / February 17, 2009

Most people will say I’m delusional; that’s okay. I will say what I have to say anyway. When your opinion is way out on the periphery, it may mean you are delusional – or it may just mean that the so-called center has gradually drifted closer and closer to a very high cliff, and finally fallen off the edge, while the majority of the population follows along like a horde of doomed lemmings. In that scenario, someone needs to stake out a position at the other extreme and drag the locus of the center back from oblivion. So here goes.

After this futile, criminal, pornographic war in Gaza (Shmuel Amir rightly termed it a “hunt” rather than a war) and yet another national election in Israel ending basically in impasse, but this time with a distinctly fascist motif, we are no closer to sustainable peace in the Middle East. We need a drastic revisioning of what we are doing here.

So we start with this: Speaking as an Israeli Jew, I say that we (Israeli Jews and our friends abroad) ought to embrace EVERYONE who wants to live here among us, so long as they truly love the land and have some reasonable claim to it. This would not include, say, tourists from Zanzibar or Antarctica – but would naturally include the Palestinians, whose claim to the land is (or ought to be) beyond dispute and whose deep and enduring love for the land is richly evident to any observer not in a vegetative state.

I say we bring all the long-suffering, besieged, shell-shocked Gazans home to Israel now! They miss their homes. They want to come home. Let us welcome them! We can all move over a little bit and make room. Believe me, there is still plenty of room.

Dayenu! (Enough!). Enough suffering inflicted on the surviving families in Gaza who are hungry, thirsty, cold, frightened, wounded, traumatized for life, and bereaved. Enough. And enough suffering on the other side of the fence in Sderot and environs, too. (Their fates are inextricably intertwined; all our fates are inextricably intertwined.)

The generals and the militants have had their day, for the nth time – and at the end of it, as usual, all that we (any of us) have now, as a result, is war crimes and grief. War crimes and grief and fear. War crimes, grief, fear, hatred, and despair… with thousands of injured and disabled people bearing the burden most directly, forever.

Enough! Israelis are more afraid now than before, and more at risk, too. Time to ABANDON this insane strategy that we (any of us) can force people to love us, or anyhow accept us, by killing them!

Let us in Israel who have so much, open our homes and our communities to the victims of this insane war who have so little – exactly as we once opened our homes to refugees from northern Israel when the Katyushas were falling. Our traditional ethos is full of charity and generosity; we know all about providing refuge and succour; we have taken in wave after wave of refugees over the decades, most recently more than a million Russian émigrés deemed essential to our future, for whom we moved over and made room.

So let’s get going. Let every family in Israel who wants to live in peace in this region, open their home to a Gaza family until new housing can be built. Let the participating families declare a hudna between themselves. Now. Today.

You start by not picturing these neighbors as “the enemy”; picture them instead as families who have suffered a tsunami like the one that flattened coastal Indonesia a few years ago – and in fact, the order of magnitude of what they have been through is about the same. Presto! Reaching out to help suddenly makes perfect sense. Moreover, professional planners have already minutely addressed the question of exactly where Palestinians coming home to Israel could reside, eager to make their best contribution to a shared future. What is missing in Israel is not sufficient space, but sufficient imagination to envision how much there is to be gained by all concerned. Now is a good time to change that.

The Gaza disaster can become the turning point. Let the Gazan expatriates whose families came from Ashdod (Issdod) be matched with Ashdod-area families. Let the expatriates from Lod (Lydd) be matched with Lod/Lydd-area families – Jewish or Palestinian. And so forth. And let no time be lost! They have lost everything and their situation is dire. We in Israel have lost our moral compass and we want to reclaim it. Bingo!

Let the governments of the world, led by the USA, immediately stop sending Israel aid for military ordnance, and earmark it instead for a massive rehabilitation and reconciliation program.

Let all the tens of thousands of Palestinian professionals who are citizens of Israel, born and raised here – doctors, social workers, nurses, dentists, psychiatrists, lawyers, engineers, teachers, designers, journalists – join gladly and wholeheartedly in this effort, finally and at long last, to bring their fellow Palestinians home from exile in Gaza. Let us bind up the wounds and become whole, together. All of us. Let us build a really wonderful society together, for the sake of ALL OUR CHILDREN. Rewrite the national anthem! Why not? It’s a SONG, folks. No song is holier than the life of even one child (anyone’s child).

The Gaza families who actually lived in Gaza before 1948 will want to stay and rebuild their homes and communities. Volunteers would doubtless throng to Gaza from all over the world to help them. Imagine them turning what was the world’s largest open-air prison into the world’s largest open-air Reconciliation Park – with facilities for tourism, education, environmental studies, cultural attractions, and museums (including a Palestinian Nakba Museum). Imagine Gaza as the reconciliation capital of the world – people in Israel could commute to work in Gaza for a change, instead of the other way around. Very refreshing.

This is a blueprint for a SHARED LIFE. If it sounds crazy, just ask yourself: Which is crazier — rampant slaughter, or rampant cooperation? Rivers of blood, or the free flow of joint prosperity? Rampant mass cooperation could break out here tomorrow – and in a week or two, or maybe a month or two, we would feel like we have always believed in it.

A political accommodation would follow the humanitarian one – probably some creative form of federation, with complete, reciprocal, national-cultural autonomy based on each group’s granting the other group the same perks it wants for itself. The technical restructuring follows the vision, not the other way around. There are several good plans, already fully elaborated, for political power-sharing here. Anyone can read them; they’re on the web. Once we dare to envision a shared future, we can make it happen. And if not now, when?

We Jews consider it rational and wonderful to rejoice in our emergence as a modern nation in the ancient homeland, after… not twenty years, not two hundred years, but two thousand years of exile!! Yet the idea of repatriating all those homesick Palestinian families, exiled from their homes a mere 60 years ago, is considered delusional. Something there does not compute.

So think it over and let’s put the guns away for good. Let the tribunals meet to apportion blame and responsibility, by all means, but as for the rest of us: we have other tasks. Treat the wounded, yes, of course, and heal the traumatized… And beat the swords into ploughshares and recycle the tank parts into computer equipment. Retool the death factories to make swimsuits instead of parachutes, irrigation pipes for farmers instead of M16 rifles. No time for missiles; we’ll all be too busy getting a life. The only phosphorous I ever want to see around here again is in a spelling contest for the kids (ALL our kids). Haul out the welcome mat for the long-lost cousins and let’s get busy – there’s a lot of work to do here. It’s not too late, even now, but you have to take the first step: Choose life!!!

[Deb Reich is a writer and translator in Israel/Palestine – debmail@alum.barnard.edu.]

Source / AMIN Media

Thanks to Larry Piltz / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Gaza, Israel, Palestinian Occupation, Peace Movement | 1 Comment

Afghanistan : Hello? Obama Actually Wants Plan Before Sending Troops?

Posted on February 17, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

War scene at the time of then Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s July 28, 2008, visit to Afghanistan.

President Barack Obama is refusing to be rushed into his first decision to send troops into combat, an early sign he may be more independent-minded than U.S. military leaders expected.
[…]
Rather than sign off quickly on all or part of a long-standing Pentagon request for three Army combat brigades and Marine units, totaling over 10,000 troops, Obama and his aides are questioning the timetable, the mission and even the composition of the new forces, officials familiar with the deliberations said.

David S. Cloud / Politico / February 17, 2009

See complete Politico story, Below

‘If the mission is containment of the hive of villainy in the borderlands to its caves, that’s fine in the short term but, as Colin Powell would say, we need an exit strategy. That strategy needs more focus on nuclear Pakistan than Stone Age Afghanistan.’

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / February 17, 2009

What a novel concept!

Mission first; sending troops second.

I’m not opposed to sending troops and barring a complete pullout — which would be really dumb at this moment in time — we need to send SOME troops.

The question is the mission and de debil is in dose details.

If the mission is “a democractic and peaceful Afghanistan” or some such crap, we are well and truly fucked.

If the mission is containment of the hive of villainy in the borderlands to its caves, that’s fine in the short term but, as Colin Powell would say, we need an exit strategy. That strategy needs more focus on nuclear Pakistan than Stone Age Afghanistan. The internal politics of Pakistan really drive what is going to happen.

We are overdue in resolving the Kissinger “tilt” in favor of Pakistan in the Pakistan-India disagreements dating from the Nixon years. The only way I can explain no major hoo-hah in the US when we took the side of a military dictatorship against a democracy because that democracy was not on board with our Cold War moves was that Nixon was into so much bad stuff elsewhere nobody noticed. Well, now let’s see where that “tilt” got us.

Is India a problem? Well, they want to compete for our tech jobs. But it’s Pakistan that is willing to sell nukes to North Korea.

Haven’t we been clever? Thanks again, Dr. K!

Obama slows troop boost decision
By David S. Cloud / February 17, 2009

President Barack Obama is refusing to be rushed into his first decision to send troops into combat, an early sign he may be more independent-minded than U.S. military leaders expected.

The new president’s methodical decision-making offers an early insight into how the new commander in chief will approach the war in Afghanistan and has surprised some Pentagon officials, who had predicted repeatedly in the past two weeks that Obama would decide within days on additional forces, only to find the White House taking more time.

Rather than sign off quickly on all or part of a long-standing Pentagon request for three Army combat brigades and Marine units, totaling over 10,000 troops, Obama and his aides are questioning the timetable, the mission and even the composition of the new forces, officials familiar with the deliberations said.

The latest sign of crossed signals occurred Friday, when White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters Obama “hasn’t made a decision on augmenting our force structure in Afghanistan,” three days after Pentagon officials said he would likely do so that week. Defense Secretary Robert Gates called Obama’s deliberate approach on his first troop decision “entirely appropriate.”
Gibbs said Monday he expects Obama to decide “shortly” on sending more troops to Afghanistan but declined to be pinned down on exactly when.

Obama’s deliberate pace represents yet another break with the usual style of his predecessor. Former President George W. Bush usually signed off quickly on requests for additional troops from his commanders, and, especially early in his presidency, he rarely engaged in lengthy discussions about what the troops would be used for. Those decisions were generally worked out ahead of time between field commanders and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who favored holding down troop levels in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The major exception to this approach was when Bush got directly involved in pressing his reluctant commanders for the “surge” — the decision to send nearly 30,000 additional troops to Iraq in late 2006 and early 2007.

At least in the early weeks of his presidency, Obama in some ways resembles the Bush of late 2006 as he considers his own mini-surge to reverse the worsening situation in Afghanistan and appears to be immersing himself in the details of the policy shift.

“I’m personally hopeful that President Obama will do something that President Bush didn’t do particularly well,” said John Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security and a retired Army officer. “I think he’s thinking through the implications of committing troops, not just the first order but the second and third order effects.”

The request for additional forces from Gen. David McKiernan, the senior commander in Afghanistan, came before the administration has completed a review of Afghanistan strategy that is likely to make far-reaching changes in how U.S. and NATO forces are being deployed.

As a result, officials said, though the troop decision was once seen as an almost routine matter, Obama’s discussions with Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has evolved into a broader discussion about goals and methods in Afghanistan, even before the conclusion of the review.

The delay in deciding reflects at least in part Obama’s determination not to be rushed by the Pentagon brass into a decision before he fully understands the implications, several officials said.

The slow pace also is an indication of the influence being exerted by Gates, who has warned repeatedly in recent weeks about rushing into a greater U.S. commitment in Afghanistan without carefully weighing the risks. The Pentagon has asked McKiernan for a study that would examine the risks of sending additional troops to a part of the world that has a long history of resisting the presence of foreign forces.

McKiernan has sought at least some of the additional forces in time for them to be on the ground ahead of expected spring fighting. But the White House appears more concerned with getting troops in place ahead of the Afghan presidential elections, now scheduled for August, an official said.

The White House’s longer timetable is likely an indication of its intention to shift the military strategy over the coming year.
Instead of using U.S. forces primarily to kill and capture insurgents, the strategy review is likely to recommend placing more emphasis on protecting the Afghan population, several officials said. In that case, getting McKiernan the troops by spring is not the primary concern, an official said.

Obama also faces a decision on whether to shift forces equipped with Stryker vehicles, an armored troop carrier, from Iraq to Afghanistan. Commanders in Iraq particularly value the Stryker units, which can move quickly and with greater protection from roadside bombs than conventional convoys using Humvees.

But with the security situation worsening in Afghanistan, commanders there are also seeking vehicles with greater protection that can also move forces around the vast country more quickly.

The Stryker decision illustrates the real tradeoffs that Obama is facing early in his presidency as he juggles his campaign vow to shift resources to Afghanistan with the need to protect the security gains achieved in Iraq.

The White House is also exploring whether at least one of the three requested brigades should be designated to train the Afghan Army, rather than used primarily in combat operations, the official added. Shifting the unit’s mission would require additional training that could delay the date when the unit could arrive in Afghanistan, an official said.

The U.S. Army is currently supplying only around 1,000 advisers to the Afghan National Army, around 2,000 short of the necessary number, according to Anthony Cordesman, military analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. The administration is hopeful that NATO allies will contribute more personnel to assist in training Afghan security forces, especially the police.

There are currently 33,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, including 15,000 under NATO command and another 18,000 under exclusive U.S. command involved in fighting insurgents and training Afghan forces. Another roughly 30,000 troops are in the country from NATO allies.

Obama appears likely to approve one or two additional brigades, totaling between 3,500 and 9,000 soldiers and put off a decision on the third brigade until later. But he has been given multiple options, officials said, including sending no additional forces now or approving all three of the requested brigades and Marine units, the last of which would not arrive in Afghanistan until next year. The Pentagon is also shifting additional helicopters and other assets to Afghanistan as part of the ramping-up of capabilities there.

Even if all three brigades are sent now, that would still only total less than half of the 30,000 additional troops that U.S. commanders once said they needed in the country. Gates said last week that he would be reluctant to recommend sending more forces beyond those now under consideration.

© 2009 Capitol News Company, LLC

Source / Politico

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Afghanistan, Obama Foreign Policy, Pakistan | 3 Comments

No Wealth Creation Since the Turn of the Millennium

Posted on February 17, 2009 by RagBlog

Decade at Bernie’s
By Paul Krugman / February 15, 2009

By now everyone knows the sad tale of Bernard Madoff’s duped investors. They looked at their statements and thought they were rich. But then, one day, they discovered to their horror that their supposed wealth was a figment of someone else’s imagination.

Unfortunately, that’s a pretty good metaphor for what happened to America as a whole in the first decade of the 21st century.

Last week the Federal Reserve released the results of the latest Survey of Consumer Finances, a triennial report on the assets and liabilities of American households. The bottom line is that there has been basically no wealth creation at all since the turn of the millennium: the net worth of the average American household, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than it was in 2001.

At one level this should come as no surprise. For most of the last decade America was a nation of borrowers and spenders, not savers. The personal savings rate dropped from 9 percent in the 1980s to 5 percent in the 1990s, to just 0.6 percent from 2005 to 2007, and household debt grew much faster than personal income. Why should we have expected our net worth to go up?

Yet until very recently Americans believed they were getting richer, because they received statements saying that their houses and stock portfolios were appreciating in value faster than their debts were increasing. And if the belief of many Americans that they could count on capital gains forever sounds naïve, it’s worth remembering just how many influential voices — notably in right-leaning publications like The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and National Review — promoted that belief, and ridiculed those who worried about low savings and high levels of debt.

Then reality struck, and it turned out that the worriers had been right all along. The surge in asset values had been an illusion — but the surge in debt had been all too real.

So now we’re in trouble — deeper trouble, I think, than most people realize even now. And I’m not just talking about the dwindling band of forecasters who still insist that the economy will snap back any day now.

For this is a broad-based mess. Everyone talks about the problems of the banks, which are indeed in even worse shape than the rest of the system. But the banks aren’t the only players with too much debt and too few assets; the same description applies to the private sector as a whole.

And as the great American economist Irving Fisher pointed out in the 1930s, the things people and companies do when they realize they have too much debt tend to be self-defeating when everyone tries to do them at the same time. Attempts to sell assets and pay off debt deepen the plunge in asset prices, further reducing net worth. Attempts to save more translate into a collapse of consumer demand, deepening the economic slump.

Are policy makers ready to do what it takes to break this vicious circle? In principle, yes. Government officials understand the issue: we need to “contain what is a very damaging and potentially deflationary spiral,” says Lawrence Summers, a top Obama economic adviser.

In practice, however, the policies currently on offer don’t look adequate to the challenge. The fiscal stimulus plan, while it will certainly help, probably won’t do more than mitigate the economic side effects of debt deflation. And the much-awaited announcement of the bank rescue plan left everyone confused rather than reassured.

There’s hope that the bank rescue will eventually turn into something stronger. It has been interesting to watch the idea of temporary bank nationalization move from the fringe to mainstream acceptance, with even Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham conceding that it may be necessary. But even if we eventually do what’s needed on the bank front, that will solve only part of the problem.

If you want to see what it really takes to boot the economy out of a debt trap, look at the large public works program, otherwise known as World War II, that ended the Great Depression. The war didn’t just lead to full employment. It also led to rapidly rising incomes and substantial inflation, all with virtually no borrowing by the private sector. By 1945 the government’s debt had soared, but the ratio of private-sector debt to G.D.P. was only half what it had been in 1940. And this low level of private debt helped set the stage for the great postwar boom.

Since nothing like that is on the table, or seems likely to get on the table any time soon, it will take years for families and firms to work off the debt they ran up so blithely. The odds are that the legacy of our time of illusion — our decade at Bernie’s — will be a long, painful slump.

Source / New York Times

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Finance, Financial Crisis | 1 Comment

The Missing Billions from Iraq Reconstruction: A Story That Won’t Go Away

Posted on February 17, 2009 by RagBlog

The missing billions – the story that no one ever really cared to follow to its conclusion. Why? I could probably make a pretty fair case that it’s a function of racism – most of the money wasn’t American taxpayer cash; it was Iraqi money that was held in the Federal Reserve after the US decided that Saddam was a despot and garnisheed everything possible from the Iraqi government. When it is only money from the Iraqi people, who fuckin’ cares, eh?

Blood Money, Christian Miller’s book about this was published in August 2006, and everyone ignored it. The Vanity Fair article below made the airwaves in October 2007. And everyone ignored it. And it is clear that the rudiments of the blatant theft were already known as early as 2004 (if not earlier). What conceivable reason would anyone have for believing that this new investigation will somehow make a difference? Fools errands.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Dale C. Stoffel, an American contractor in Iraq, described cash delivered in pizza boxes and payoffs dropped in paper sacks. Photo: courtesy David Stoffel.
Inquiry on Graft in Iraq Focuses on U.S. Officers
By James Glanz, C.J. Chivers and William K. Rashbaum / February 14, 2009

Federal authorities examining the early, chaotic days of the $125 billion American-led effort to rebuild Iraq have significantly broadened their inquiry to include senior American military officers who oversaw the program, according to interviews with senior government officials and court documents.

Court records show that last month investigators subpoenaed the personal bank records of Col. Anthony B. Bell, who is now retired from the Army but who was in charge of reconstruction contracting in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 when the small operation grew into a frenzied attempt to remake the country’s broken infrastructure. In addition, investigators are examining the activities of Lt. Col. Ronald W. Hirtle of the Air Force, who was a senior contracting officer in Baghdad in 2004, according to two federal officials involved in the inquiry.

It is not clear what specific evidence exists against the two men, and both said they had nothing to hide from investigators. Yet officials say that several criminal cases over the past few years point to widespread corruption in the operation the men helped to run. As part of the inquiry, the authorities are taking a fresh look at information given to them by Dale C. Stoffel, an American arms dealer and contractor who was killed in Iraq in late 2004.

Before he was shot on a road north of Baghdad, Mr. Stoffel drew a portrait worthy of a pulp crime novel: tens of thousands of dollars stuffed into pizza boxes and delivered surreptitiously to the American contracting offices in Baghdad, and payoffs made in paper sacks that were scattered in “dead drops” around the Green Zone, the nerve center of the United States government’s presence in Iraq, two senior federal officials said.

Mr. Stoffel, who gave investigators information about the office where Colonel Bell and Colonel Hirtle worked, was deemed credible enough that he was granted limited immunity from prosecution in exchange for his information, according to government documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with officials and Mr. Stoffel’s lawyer, John H. Quinn Jr. There is no evidence that his death was related to his allegations of corruption.

Prosecutors have won 35 convictions on cases related to reconstruction in Iraq, yet most of them involved private contractors or midlevel officials. The current inquiry is aiming at higher-level officials, according to investigators involved in the case, and is also trying to determine if there are connections between those officials and figures in the other cases. Although Colonel Bell and Colonel Hirtle were military officers, they worked in a civilian contracting office.

“These long-running investigations continue to mature and expand, embracing a wider array of potential suspects,” a federal investigator said.

The reconstruction effort, intended to improve services and convince Iraqis of American good will, largely managed to do neither. The wider investigation raises the question of whether American corruption was a primary factor in damaging an effort whose failures have been ascribed to poor planning and unforeseen violence.

The investigations, which are being conducted by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, the Justice Department, the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command and other federal agencies, cover a period when millions of dollars in cash, often in stacks of shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills, were dispensed from a loosely guarded safe in the basement of one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces.

Former American officials describe payments to local contractors from huge sums of cash dumped onto tables and stuffed into sacks as if it were Halloween candy.

“You had no oversight, chaos and breathtaking sums of money,” said Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat who helped create the Wartime Contracting Commission, an oversight board. “And over all of that was the notion that failure was O.K. It doesn’t get any better for criminals than that set of circumstances.”

In one case of graft from that period, Maj. John L. Cockerham of the Army pleaded guilty to accepting nearly $10 million in bribes as a contracting officer for the Iraq war and other military efforts from 2004 to 2007, when he was arrested. Major Cockerham’s wife has also pleaded guilty, as have several other contracting officers.

In Major Cockerham’s private notebooks, Colonel Bell is identified as a possible recipient of an enormous bribe as recently as 2006, the two senior federal officials said. It is unclear whether the bribe was actually offered or paid.

When asked if Major Cockerham had ever offered him a bribe, Colonel Bell said in a telephone interview, “I think we’ll end the discussion,” but stayed on the line. Colonel Bell’s response was equally terse when asked if he thought that Colonel Hirtle had carried out his duties properly: “No discussion on that at this time.”

The current focus on Colonel Bell is revealed in federal court papers filed in Georgia, where he has a residence and is trying to quash a subpoena of his bank records by the Special Inspector General. The papers, dated Jan. 27, indicate that Colonel Bell’s records were sought in connection with an investigation of bribery, kickbacks and fraud.

Colonel Bell said that he sought to quash the subpoena not because he had anything to hide, but because the document contained inaccuracies. “If they clean it up, I won’t have a problem,” he said, suggesting that he would cooperate. He declined to detail the inaccuracies, although his handwritten notations on the court papers indicated that the home address and the bank account number on the subpoena were incorrect.

Asked whether he knew why the records had been subpoenaed, he said, “That is not for me to direct what they’re going to do.”

Another case that has raised investigators’ suspicions about top contracting officials involves a company, variously known as American Logistics Services and Lee Dynamics International, that repeatedly won construction contracts for millions of dollars despite a dismal track record.

One contracting official committed suicide in 2006 a day after admitting to investigators that she had taken $225,000 in bribes to rig bids in favor of the company. At least two other former contracting officials in Iraq have admitted to taking bribes in the case and are cooperating with investigators. It is unknown what information they may have provided on Colonel Hirtle, a high-ranking contracting official in Baghdad. But Colonel Hirtle signed the company’s first major contract in Iraq in May 2004, a roughly $10 million deal to build arms warehouses for the fledgling Iraqi security forces, according to a copy of the contract and federal officials. The warehouses went largely unbuilt. Investigators said the inquiry into the Lee case was continuing.

“I can’t talk to any media right now, because I don’t know anything about this and I’ve got to do some research on it,” Colonel Hirtle said when reached by phone in California, before abruptly hanging up.

The next day, Colonel Hirtle said he had been “taken aback” by questions about an investigation involving himself. “I try to keep things as transparent and aboveboard as I can,” he said, referring questions to an Air Force public affairs office.

The Air Force referred questions to the United States Army Criminal Investigation Command, where a spokesman, Christopher Grey, said the command “does not discuss or confirm the names of persons who may or may not be under investigation.”

An extraordinary element of the current investigation is a voice from beyond the grave: that of Mr. Stoffel, who died with a British associate, Joseph J. Wemple, in a burst of automatic gunfire on a dangerous highway north of Baghdad in December 2004 as he returned from a business meeting at a nearby military base.

A previously unknown Iraqi group claimed responsibility for the killings, which remain unsolved. The men may simply have been unlucky enough to be engulfed in the violence that was then just beginning to grip the country.

On May 20, 2004, a little more than a week after Colonel Hirtle signed the Lee company’s warehouse contract, Mr. Stoffel was granted limited immunity by the Special Inspector General for what amounted to a whistle-blower’s complaint. Copies of the immunity document were obtained from two former business associates of Mr. Stoffel.

The picture of corruption Mr. Stoffel painted, including the clandestine delivery of bribes, was “like a classic New York scenario,” said a former business associate.

“Fifty thousand dollars delivered in pizza boxes to secure contracts,” said the former associate, a consultant in the arms business with whom Mr. Stoffel sometimes worked in the former Eastern bloc. “Of course, it just looked like a pizza delivery.”

It was Mr. Stoffel’s experience with Eastern bloc weaponry that helped him win a contract to refurbish Iraq’s Soviet-era tanks as part of a program to rebuild Iraq’s armed forces. Mr. Stoffel’s company remains locked in a dispute over payments it says are owed by the Iraqi government.

His problems with American officials were what led him to make the accusations of corruption. Mr. Stoffel, the associate said, “was trying to do this as quietly as possible, to blow the whistle.”

“He knew enough about what was going on, and he was getting pretty frustrated.”

Source / New York Times

And lest we forget, this article from Vanity Fair, October 2007:

Illustration by John Blackford. By Peter van Agtmael/Polaris (desert), Konstantin Inozemtsev/Alamy (money).
Billions over Baghdad
By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele / October 2007

Between April 2003 and June 2004, $12 billion in U.S. currency — much of it belonging to the Iraqi people — was shipped from the Federal Reserve to Baghdad, where it was dispensed by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Some of the cash went to pay for projects and keep ministries afloat, but, incredibly, at least $9 billion has gone missing, unaccounted for, in a frenzy of mismanagement and greed. Following a trail that leads from a safe in one of Saddam’s palaces to a house near San Diego, to a P.O. box in the Bahamas, the authors discover just how little anyone cared about how the money was handled.

Hidden in plain sight, 10 miles west of Manhattan, amid a suburban community of middle-class homes and small businesses, stands a fortress-like building shielded by big trees and lush plantings behind an iron fence. The steel-gray structure, in East Rutherford, New Jersey, is all but invisible to the thousands of commuters who whiz by every day on Route 17. Even if they noticed it, they would scarcely guess that it is the largest repository of American currency in the world.

Officially, 100 Orchard Street is referred to by the acronym eroc, for the East Rutherford Operations Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The brains of the New York Fed may lie in Manhattan, but xeroc is the beating heart of its operations—a secretive, heavily guarded compound where the bank processes checks, makes wire transfers, and receives and ships out its most precious commodity: new and used paper money.

Pallets of American currency arriving in Baghdad.

On Tuesday, June 22, 2004, a tractor-trailer truck turned off Route 17 onto Orchard Street, stopped at a guard station for clearance, and then entered the eroc compound. What happened next would have been the stuff of routine—procedures followed countless times. Inside an immense three-story cavern known as the currency vault, the truck’s next cargo was made ready for shipment. With storage space to rival a Wal-Mart’s, the currency vault can reportedly hold upwards of $60 billion in cash. Human beings don’t perform many functions inside the vault, and few are allowed in; a robotic system, immune to human temptation, handles everything. On that Tuesday in June the machines were especially busy. Though accustomed to receiving and shipping large quantities of cash, the vault had never before processed a single order of this magnitude: $2.4 billion in $100 bills.

Under the watchful eye of bank employees in a glass-enclosed control room, and under the even steadier gaze of a video surveillance system, pallets of shrink-wrapped bills were lifted out of currency bays by unmanned “storage and retrieval vehicles” and loaded onto conveyors that transported the 24 million bills, sorted into “bricks,” to the waiting trailer. No human being would have touched this cargo, which is how the Fed wants it: the bank aims to “minimize the handling of currency by eroc employees and create an audit trail of all currency movement from initial receipt through final disposition.”

Forty pallets of cash, weighing 30 tons, were loaded that day. The tractor-trailer turned back onto Route 17 and after three miles merged onto a southbound lane of the New Jersey Turnpike, looking like any other big rig on a busy highway. Hours later the truck arrived at Andrews Air Force Base, near Washington, D.C. There the seals on the truck were broken, and the cash was off-loaded and counted by Treasury Department personnel. The money was transferred to a C-130 transport plane. The next day, it arrived in Baghdad.

That transfer of cash to Iraq was the largest one-day shipment of currency in the history of the New York Fed. It was not, however, the first such shipment of cash to Iraq. Beginning soon after the invasion and continuing for more than a year, $12 billion in U.S. currency was airlifted to Baghdad, ostensibly as a stopgap measure to help run the Iraqi government and pay for basic services until a new Iraqi currency could be put into people’s hands. In effect, the entire nation of Iraq needed walking-around money, and Washington mobilized to provide it.

What Washington did not do was mobilize to keep track of it. By all accounts, the New York Fed and the Treasury Department exercised strict surveillance and control over all of this money while it was on American soil. But after the money was delivered to Iraq, oversight and control evaporated. Of the $12 billion in U.S. banknotes delivered to Iraq in 2003 and 2004, at least $9 billion cannot be accounted for. A portion of that money may have been spent wisely and honestly; much of it probably wasn’t. Some of it was stolen.

Once the money arrived in Iraq it entered a free-for-all environment where virtually anyone with fingers could take some of it. Moreover, the company that was hired to keep tabs on the outflow of money existed mainly on paper. Based in a private home in San Diego, it was a shell corporation with no certified public accountants. Its address of record is a post-office box in the Bahamas, where it is legally incorporated. That post-office box has been associated with shadowy offshore activities.

Coalition of the Billing

The first shipment of cash to Iraq took place on April 11, 2003—it consisted of $20 million in $1, $5, and $10 bills. It was arranged in small bills on the theory that these could quickly be circulated into the Iraqi economy “to prevent a monetary and financial collapse,” as one former Treasury official put it. Those were the days when American officials worried that the gravest threat facing Iraq might be low-grade civilian unrest in Baghdad. They didn’t have a clue as to the power of the insurgency that was to come. The initial $20 million came exclusively from Iraqi assets that had been frozen in U.S. banks as long ago as the Gulf War, in 1990. Subsequent airlifts of cash also included billions from Iraqi oil revenues controlled by the United Nations. After the creation of the Development Fund for Iraq (D.F.I.)—a kind of holding pit of money to be spent for “purposes benefitting the people of Iraq”—the U.N. turned over control of Iraq’s oil billions to the United States.

When the U.S. military delivered the cash to Baghdad, the money passed into the hands of an entirely new set of players—the staff of the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority. To many Americans, the initials C.P.A. would soon be as familiar as those of long-established government agencies such as D.O.D. or hud. But the C.P.A. was anything but a conventional agency. And, as events would show, its initials would have nothing in common with “certified public accountant.” The C.P.A. had been hastily created to serve as the interim government of Iraq, but its legality and paternity were murky from the start. The Authority was in effect established by edict outside the traditional framework of American government. Not subject to the usual restrictions and oversight of most agencies, the C.P.A. during the 14 months of its existence would become a sump for American and Iraqi money as it disappeared into the hands of Iraqi ministries and American contractors. The Coalition of the Willing, as one commentator observed, had turned into the Coalition of the Billing.

The first mention of the C.P.A. came on April 16, 2003, in a so-called freedom message to the Iraqi people by General Tommy R. Franks, commander of the coalition forces. A week after mobs ransacked Iraq’s National Museum of its treasures, unchallenged by American troops, General Franks arrived in Baghdad for a six-hour whirlwind tour. He met with his commanders in one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces, held a video conference with President Bush, and then quickly flew off. “Our stay in Iraq will be temporary,” General Franks wrote, “no longer than it takes to eliminate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, and to establish stability and help Iraqis form a functioning government that respects the rule of law.” With that in mind, General Franks wrote that he created the Coalition Provisional Authority “to exercise powers of government temporarily, and as necessary, especially to provide security, to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid and to eliminate weapons of mass destruction.” Three weeks later, on May 8, 2003, the U.S. and British ambassadors to the United Nations sent a letter to the U.N. Security Council, effectively delivering the C.P.A. to the United Nations as a fait accompli.

Read the rest of this remarkably informative article here. / Vanity Fair

See also, A ‘fraud’ bigger than Madoff, Patrick Cockburn’s expose dated today of this issue of the missing billions.

Thanks to Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Corporate Corruption, Iraq, Iraq Occupation, Political Corruption | 1 Comment

The Pentagon : Attack of the Killer Robots

Posted on February 16, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

The Pentagon’s dream of a techno army is doomed to fail.

‘They don’t get hungry,’ Gordon Johnson, who headed a program on unmanned systems at the Joint Forces Command at the Pentagon told the New York Times in 2005. ‘They’re not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has just been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.’

By Eric Stoner / February 15, 2009

‘You don’t want your defenses to bankrupt you. If it costs $100,000 to defeat a $500 roadside bomb, that doesn’t sound like such a good strategy—as pretty as it may look on YouTube.’ Share Digg del.icio.us Reddit Newsvine One of the most captivating storylines in science fiction involves a nightmarish vision of the future in which autonomous killer robots turn on their creators and threaten the extinction of the human race. Hollywood blockbusters such as Terminator and The Matrix are versions of this cautionary tale, as was R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the 1920 Czech play by Karel Capek that marked the first use of the word “robot.”

In May 2007, the U.S. military reached an ominous milestone in the history of warfare—one that took an eerie step toward making this fiction a reality. After more than three years of development, the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division based south of Baghdad, deployed armed ground robots.

Although only three of these weaponized “unmanned systems” have hit Iraq’s streets, to date, National Defense magazine reported in September 2007 that the Army has placed an order for another 80.

A month after the robots arrived in Iraq, they received “urgent material release approval” to allow their use by soldiers in the field. The military, however, appears to be proceeding with caution.

According to a statement by Duane Gotvald, deputy project manager of the Defense Department’s Robotic Systems Joint Project Office, soldiers are using the robots “for surveillance and peacekeeping/guard operations” in Iraq. By all accounts, robots have not fired their weapons in combat since their deployment more than a year and a half ago.

But it is only a matter of time before that line is crossed.

Future fighting force?

For many in the military-industrial complex, this technological revolution could not come soon enough.

Robots’ strategic impact on the battlefield, however—along with the moral and ethical implications of their use in war—have yet to be debated.

Designed by Massachusetts-based defense contractor Foster-Miller, the Special Weapons Observation Remote Direct-Action System, or SWORDS, stands three feet tall and rolls on two tank treads.

It is similar to the company’s popular TALON bomb disposal robot—which the U.S. military has used on more than 20,000 missions since 2000—except, unlike TALON, SWORDS has a weapons platform fixed to its chassis.

Currently fitted with an M249 machine gun that fires 750 rounds per minute, the robot can accommodate other powerful weapons, including a 40 mm grenade launcher or an M202 rocket launcher.

Five cameras enable an operator to control SWORDS from up to 800 meters away with a modified laptop and two joysticks. The control unit also has a special “kill button” that turns the robot off should it malfunction. (During testing, it had the nasty habit of spinning out of control.)

Developed on a shoestring budget of about $4.5 million, SWORDS is a primitive robot that gives us but a glimpse of things to come. Future models—including several prototypes being tested by the military—promise to be more sophisticated.

Congress has been a steady backer of this budding industry, which has a long-term vision for technological transformation of the armed forces.

In 2001, the Defense Authorization Act directed the Pentagon to “aggressively develop and field” robotic systems in an effort to reach the ambitious goal of having one-third of the deep strike aircraft unmanned within 10 years, and one-third of the ground combat vehicles unmanned within 15 years.

To make this a reality, federal funding for military robotics has skyrocketed. From fiscal year 2006 through 2012, the government will spend an estimated $1.7 billion on research for ground-based robots, according to the congressionally funded National Center for Defense Robotics. This triples what was allocated annually for such projects as recently as 2004.

The centerpiece of this roboticized fighting force of the future will be the 14 networked, manned and unmanned systems that will make up the Army’s Future Combat System—should it ever get off the ground. The creation of the weapons systems is also one of the most controversial and expensive the Pentagon has ever undertaken.

In July 2006, the Defense Department’s Cost Analysis Improvement Group estimated that its price tag had risen to more than $300 billion—an increase of 225 percent over the Army’s original $92 billion estimate in 2003, and nearly half of President Obama’s proposed stimulus package.

‘War in a can’

Despite the defense world’s excitement and the dramatic effect robots have on how war is fought, U.S. mainstream media coverage of SWORDS has been virtually nonexistent.

Worse, the scant attention these robots have received has often been little more than free publicity. Time magazine, for example, named SWORDS one of the “coolest inventions” of 2004. “Insurgents, be afraid,” is how its brief puff piece began. And while most articles are not that one-sided, any skepticism is usually mentioned as a side note.

On the other hand, prior to the deployment of SWORDS, numerous arguments in their defense could regularly be found in the press. According to their proponents—generally the robot’s designers or defense officials—robots will not have any of the pesky weaknesses of flesh-and-blood soldiers.

“They don’t get hungry,” Gordon Johnson, who headed a program on unmanned systems at the Joint Forces Command at the Pentagon told the New York Times in 2005. “They’re not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has just been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.”

Ronald Arkin, a leading roboticist at Georgia Tech, whose research the Defense Department funds, argues without a sense of irony that autonomous robots will be more humane than humans. Atrocities like the massacre by U.S. troops in Haditha, Iraq, would be less likely with robots, he told The Atlanta in November 2007, because they won’t have emotions that “cloud their judgment and cause them to get angry.”

Robots are also promoted as being cost-effective. On top of the annual salary and extra pay for combat duty, the government invests a great deal in recruiting, training, housing and feeding each soldier. Not to mention the costs of healthcare and death benefits, should a soldier be injured or killed.

By comparison, the current $245,000 price tag on SWORDS—which could drop to $115,000 per unit if they are mass-produced—is a steal.

After attending a conference on military robotics in Baltimore, journalist Steve Featherstone summed up their function in Harper’s in February 2007: “Robots are, quite literally, an off-the-shelf war-fighting capability—war in a can.”

And the most popular talking point in favor of armed robots is that they will save U.S. soldiers’ lives. To drive the point home, proponents pose this rhetorical question: Would you rather have a machine get blown up in Iraq, or your son or daughter?

Remove from reality

At first glance, these benefits of military robots sound sensible. But they fall apart upon examination.

Armed robots will be far from cost effective. Until these machines are given greater autonomy—which is currently a distant goal—the human soldier will not be taken out of the loop. And because each operator can now handle only one robot, the number of soldiers on the Pentagon’s payroll will not be slashed anytime soon. More realistically, SWORDS should best be viewed as an additional, expensive remote-controlled weapons system at the military’s disposal.

A different perspective is gained when the price of the robot is compared with the low-tech, low-cost weaponry that U.S. forces face on a daily basis in Iraq.

“You don’t want your defenses to be so expensive that they’ll bankrupt you,” says Sharon Weinberger, a reporter for Wired’s Danger Room blog. “If it costs us $100,000 to defeat a $500 roadside bomb, that doesn’t sound like such a good strategy—as pretty as it may look on YouTube and in press releases.”

The claim that robots would be more ethical than humans similarly runs contrary to both evidence and basic common sense.

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman writes in his 1996 book On Killing that despite the portrayal in our popular culture of violence being easy, “There is within most men an intense resistance to killing their fellow man. A resistance so strong that, in many circumstances, soldiers on the battlefield will die before they can overcome it.”

One of the most effective solutions to this quandary, the military has discovered, is to introduce distance into the equation. Studies show that the farther the would-be killer is from the victim, the easier it is to pull the trigger. Death and suffering become more sanitized—the humanity of the enemy can be more easily denied. By giving the Army and Marines the capability to kill from greater distances, armed robots will make it easier for soldiers to take life without troubling their consciences.

The Rev. G. Simon Harak, an ethicist and the director of the Marquette University Center for Peacemaking, says, “Effectively, what these remote control robots are doing is removing people farther and farther from the consequences of their actions.”

Moreover, the similarity that the robots have to the life-like video games that young people grow up playing will blur reality further.

“If guys in the field already have difficulties distinguishing between civilians and combatants,” Harak asks, “what about when they are looking through a video screen?”

Rather than being a cause for concern, however, Maj. Michael Pottratz at the Army’s Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center in Picatinny Arsenal, N.J., says in an e-mail that developers are in the process of making the control unit for the SWORDS more like a “Game Boy type controller.”

It is not only possible but likely that a surge of armed robots would lead to an increase in the number of civilian casualties, not a decrease.

The supposed conversation-ender that armed robots will save U.S. lives isn’t nearly as clear as it is often presented, either. “If you take a narrow view, fewer soldiers would die,” Harak says, “but that would be only on the battlefield.”

As happens in every war, however, those facing new technology will adapt to them.

“If those people being attacked feel helpless to strike at the robots themselves, they will try to strike at their command centers,” Harak says, “which might well be back in the United States or among civilian centers. That would then displace the battlefield to manufacturing plants and research facilities at universities where such things are being invented or assembled… The whole notion that we can be invulnerable is just a delusion.”

The new mercenaries

Even if gun-totting robots could reduce U.S. casualties, other dangerous consequences of their use are overlooked.

Frida Berrigan, a senior program associate at the New America Foundation’s Arms and Security Initiative and In These Times contributing editor, argues that similar to the tens of thousands of unaccountable private security contractors in Iraq, robots will help those in power “get around having a draft, higher casualty figures and a real political debate about how we want to be using our military force.”

In effect, by reducing the political capital at stake, robots will make it far easier for governments to start wars in the first place.

Since the rising U.S. death toll appears to be the primary factor that has turned Americans against the war—rather than its devastating economic costs or the far greater suffering of the Iraqi people—armed robots could also slow the speed with which future wars are brought to an end.

When Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) infamously remarked that he would be fine with staying in Iraq for 100 years, few noted that he qualified that statement by saying, “as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.”

Robot soldiers will be similar to mercenaries in at least one more respect. They both serve to further erode the state’s longstanding monopoly on the use of force.

“If war no longer requires people, and robots are able to conduct war or acts of war on a large scale, then governments will no longer be needed to conduct war,” Col. Thomas Cowan Jr. wrote in a March 2007 paper for the U.S. Army War College. “Non-state actors with plenty of money, access to the technology and a few controllers will be able to take on an entire nation, particularly one which is not as technologically advanced.”

This may not be farfetched.

In December 2007, Fortune magazine told the story of Adam Gettings, “a 25-year-old self-taught engineer,” who started a company in Silicon Valley called Robotex. Within six months, the company built an armed robot similar to the SWORDS—except that it costs a mere $30,000 to $50,000. And these costs will drop.

As this happens, and as the lethal technology involved becomes more accessible, Noel Sharkey, a professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, warns that it will be only a matter of time before extremist groups or terrorists develop and use robots.

Evidence now suggests that using armed robots to combat insurgencies would be counterproductive from a military perspective.

One study, published in the journal International Organization in June 2008, by Jason Lyall, an associate professor of international relations at Princeton, and Lt. Col. Isaiah Wilson III, who was the chief war planner for the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq and who currently teaches at West Point, looks at 285 insurgencies dating back to 1800.

After analyzing the cases, Lyall and Wilson conclude that the more mechanized a military is, the lower its probability of success.

“All counterinsurgent forces must solve a basic problem: How do you identify the insurgents hiding among noncombatant populations and deal with them in a selective, discriminate fashion?” Lyall writes in an e-mail.

To gain such knowledge, troops must cultivate relationships with the local population. This requires cultural awareness, language skills and, importantly, a willingness to share at least some of the same risks as the local population.

The Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which was released in December 2006 and co-authored by Gen. David Petraeus, would seem to agree.

“Ultimate success in COIN [counterinsurgency] is gained by protecting the populace, not the COIN force,” the manual states. “If military forces remain in their compounds, they lose touch with the people, appear to be running scared, and cede the initiative to the insurgents.”

Mechanized militaries, however, put greater emphasis on protecting their own soldiers. Consequently, Lyall and Wilson argue in their study that such forces lack the information necessary to use force discriminately, and therefore, “often inadvertently fuel, rather than suppress, insurgencies.”

Given such findings, deploying armed robots in greater numbers in Iraq or Afghanistan would likely only enflame resistance to the occupation, and, in turn, lead to greater carnage.

To understand this point, put yourself in the shoes of an Iraqi or Afghani. How could seeing a robot with a machine gun rumble down your street or point its weapon at your child elicit any reaction other than one of terror or extreme anger? What would you do under such circumstances? Who would not resist? And how would you know that someone is controlling the robot?

For all the Iraqis know, SWORDS is the autonomous killer of science fiction—American-made, of course.

The hope that killer robots will lower U.S. casualties may excite military officials and a war-weary public, but the grave moral and ethical implications—not to mention the dubious strategic impact—associated with their use should give pause to those in search of a quick technological fix to our woes.

By distancing soldiers from the horrors of war and making it easier for politicians to resort to military force, armed robots will likely give birth to a far more dangerous world.

[Eric Stoner is a New York-based contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus. His articles have appeared in The Nation, NACLA, The Indypendent and The Huffington Post.]

Source / In These Times

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Pentagon, Robots, U.S. Military, Weaponry | Leave a comment

Big Oil Led the Fight Against the Stimulus Plan

Posted on February 16, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

North Carolina millionaire businessman and former state legislator Art Pope is a director of Americans for Prosperity.

Why would an organization funded by oil and gas interests be hostile to the economic stimulus plan? Could it be the $50 billion the bill offers for more sustainable energy alternatives?

By Sue Sturgis / February 16, 2009

The compromise version of the $787 billion economic stimulus plan passed the House and Senate Friday and is expected to be signed by President Obama tomorrow in Denver. Despite Democratic leaders’ efforts to reach out for Republican support by dropping various controversial provisions and beefing up tax cuts, the measure passed with no Republican votes in the House and only three Republican votes in the Senate.

Public opposition to the plan was led by a group called Americans for Prosperity, which delivered 400,000 signatures on a petition to the Senate opposing the measure. As the group says in a statement at its nostimulus.com/:

We lost. But we put up a heckuva fight!

We turned what was supposed to sail through with 80 votes and no controversy into a bloody knock-down, drag-out fight.

We showed that Americans won’t passively sit by while our future is plundered. Just the fact that the bill shrank in conference committee — they almost always grow — showed that we had an impact.

Who is Americans for Prosperity? According to SourceWatch.org, the group was founded in 2003 with money from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, which is run by the billionaires behind Kansas-based Koch Industries — the national’s largest privately held oil and gas company. Media Transparency reports that the group gets substantial financial support from the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, another one of the Koch family foundations.

Why would an organization funded by oil and gas interests be hostile to the economic stimulus plan?

Could it be the $50 billion the bill offers for more sustainable energy alternatives?

Among other things, the stimulus bill allocates $5 billion to weatherize more than a million modest-income homes and another $6.3 billion to install energy-saving insulation, windows and furnaces in federally funded housing projects, USA Today reports. It also offers a tax credit of up to $7,500 for families that buy plug-in hybrid cars, and includes $500 million for green jobs training.

Americans for Prosperity has long worked against any government efforts to tackle climate disruption by promoting more sustainable energy. Last year Facing South reported on the group’s “Hot Air Tour,” which featured a hot-air balloon that traveled around the country with a message challenging what AFP dismisses as “global warming alarmism.”

The organization is currently running TV ads in Virginia criticizing state efforts to address climate change. Last week, Gov. Tim Kaine signed a pact with the U.K., agreeing to work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, research renewable energy and raise public awareness about climate change. Kaine has also championed legislation creating renewable energy tax credits and promoting the use of alternative fuels.

Here’s the text for one of the Virginia ads titled “Tell Congress Not to Waste Our Money,” which makes clear Americans for Prosperity’s hostility to government support for more sustainable forms of energy:

MAN: OK, we’re in a recession.

Times are tough and jobs are scarce.

Congress talks about economic recovery, but what are they doing?

Spending billions of taxpayer dollars in the name of global warming and green energy.

Who is going to bail us out and pay our bills? Instead, they will:

… Make energy more expensive

… cost us more to heat our homes

… and regulate our local businesses and our jobs out of existence

No thanks. Congress should stop wasting their time and focus on real problems.

ANNOUNCER (VO): Isn’t it time Congress listened to the rest of us and got its science and priorities straight.

Paid for by Americans for Prosperity

One of the directors of Americans for Prosperity is North Carolina millionaire businessman and former state legislator Art Pope. He funds a network of pro-business think tanks that was behind an effort to scuttle efforts to address global warming in North Carolina, as was reported in a 2007 Facing South investigation titled “Hostile Climate.”

Americans for Prosperity has also been active on labor issues in North Carolina, where it’s fighting the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers unionize. Today the N.C. NAACP is holding a press conference to highlight the fact that the group is a front for big business.

Interestingly, Obama Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the president chose Colorado as the place to sign the stimulus legislation into law “to highlight some of the investments to put people back to work — particularly clean-energy jobs.”

Source / Facing South / The Institute for Southern Studies

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Congress, Conservatives, Economic Recovery, Oil Companies, Stimulus Bill | 1 Comment

‘America’s Toughest Sheriff’ : Arizona’s Joe Arpaio Finally Called to Account

Posted on February 16, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Maricopa County Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio: such a lovely fellow. Dennis Gilman /Adolfo Maldonado / Phoenix New Times.
‘It is high time that somebody on the national scene notice, and the Federal government take action on, the egregious and violative conduct of [Arizona Sheriff] Joe Arpaio.’

By Emptywheel / February 14, 2009.

The House Judiciary Committee made a critical and public step to rein in a terrible Arizona “lawman.”

You have probably heard of the shamelessly self professed “Toughest Sheriff in America”, Maricopa County Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. For years he has been making a PR spectacle of himself, all the while running an unconstitutionally deplorable jail system, letting inmates die under tortuous conditions, and violating the civil rights and liberties of everybody in sight, especially minorities. Last week, the House Judiciary Committee made public a critical and public step to rein in the Most Abusive Sheriff In America.

From the HJC statement:

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.), and Immigration Subcommittee Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Constitution Subcommittee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), and Crime Subcommittee Chairman Bobby Scott (D-Va.) called on Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to investigate allegations of misconduct by Maricopa County (Arizona) Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Sheriff Arpaio has repeatedly demonstrated disregard for the rights of Hispanics in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Under the guise of immigration enforcement, his staff has conducted raids in residential neighborhoods in a manner condemned by the community as racial profiling. On February 4, 2009, Arpaio invited the media to view the transfer of immigrant detainees to a segregated area of his “tent city” jail, subjecting the detainees to public display and “ritual humiliation.” Persistent actions such as these have resulted in numerous lawsuits; while Arpaio spends time and energy on publicity and his reality television show, “Smile… You’re Under Arrest!”, Maricopa County has paid millions of dollars in settlements involving dead or injured inmates.
[…]
It is time for the federal government to step in and uphold the rule of law in this country, even in Maricopa County.”

“Law enforcement is not a game or a reality show, it is a public trust,” said Scott. “There is no excuse for callous indifference to the rights of the residents of Arizona, whether in their neighborhoods or as pretrial detainees.”

The full official text of the letter to Napolitano and Holder is here.

It is high time that somebody on the national scene notice, and the Federal government take action on, the egregious and violative conduct of Joe Arpaio.

Joe Arpaio is a two bit carnival barker and huckster, not a dedicated law enforcement official. The opportunistic man came into office running against a fellow Republican and incumbent Maricopa County Sheriff, Tom Agnos, by bad mouthing Agnos and arguing that the entire Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department needed to be cleaned up. In fact, Arpaio’s winning campaign was predicated upon his willingness to mock the very department he was running to lead and promise to expose the dirty laundry of Agnos and the Sheriff’s Department for its involvement in the infamous Buddhist Temple Murder case (link is a fascinating three part story), a seminal case in textbooks on coerced confessions (from the fact that four separate coerced false confessions were obtained to a single crime). Arpaio promised to restore honor to the department, and also swore he would serve only one term in office. Five terms and seventeen years later, Arpaio has failed miserably on both promises.

The upshot of the House Judiciary Committee’s missive to Attorney General Holder and DHS Secretary Napolitano is that Arpaio’s:

…repeated course of conduct, which values publicity opportunities over the civil rights of residents of Arizona, is too disturbing to leave enforcement of the civil rights laws to private litigants. There are several tools at the federal government’s disposal to address these allegations, and we urge their prompt consideration and application.

In short, the HJC is demanding that a full panoply of federal civil and criminal laws and remedies be brought to bear by the arms of federal law enforcement. One of the grounds for the HJC demand is Arpaio’s acts earlier this month, described in the letter as follows:

Most recently, on February 4, after making sure to alert the media, Arpaio reportedly paraded approximately 200 suspected illegal immigrants in shackles to a segregated area of his “tent city” county facility, where they will supposedly remain until they are adjudicated and have served any sentences they face for local violations. The New York Times described this conduct as “ritual humiliation.” The men who Arpaio is displaying like trophies are reportedly in pretrial detention, not having been convicted of any crime.

If you want to understand the true extent of Sheriff Joe’s war on brown people, the Phoenix New Times’ expose “Guadalupe Made It Clear That Joe Arpaio’s Attacking Anyone With Brown Skin” is an absolute must read. Seriously, it is a long piece, but to call it chilling and important would be an understatement, and it is superb start to finish. Here is a taste:

With spirited protesters and helmeted deputies on horseback, the night of April 3 in Guadalupe was like some historical reenactment, albeit in miniature, of a late-’60s anti-war melee. You know, the kind chronicled by Norman Mailer in one of his seminal “non-fiction novels” of the era, such as Miami and the Siege of Chicago or The Armies of the Night.
[…]
Following up on his criticism of Arpaio during a César Chávez luncheon in March, Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon addressed a letter to the U.S. Justice Department asking for an investigation of the sheriff. The letter was dated April 4, the second day of the MCSO’s Guadalupe sweep, and the MCSO’s actions in Guadalupe figured prominently in the missive.

Egregious to be sure, but hardly the only such acts by Arpaio, and certainly not the worst. Let’s go through some of the others alluded to in the letter, although not described in detail.

Arpaio was little more than halfway through his first term in office when his policies and jail conditions first came under investigation for abuse by the US Department of Justice. Shortly after that, and still during his first term in office, young Scott Norberg died in Arpaio’s jail as a result of said policies:

[Norberg] was in Arpaio’s jail just 15 hours before he was handcuffed by guards, kicked, stomped on, and then strapped into a restraint chair. There, guards held a towel over his head, literally suffocating him. Medical records later revealed that he had been shot with a stun gun at least 14 times and beaten so badly that his larynx cracked.

That one cost the taxpayers of Maricopa County $8.25 million, but did not deter the Most Abusive Sheriff in America; instead, he seemed to get off on the notoriety. There were more unnatural deaths in Arpaio’s jails, from a variety of causes, after Norberg. The belligerent Arpaio finally stopped the deplorable use of the restraint chair in 2006 after fighting demands by citizens and federal overseers on the issue for nearly a decade.

What caused Arpaio to finally give up his demonic obsession with the restraint chair that killed Scott Norberg? Ah, glad you asked:

On March 29, 2006, a $9 million court judgment was leveled against Arpaio and the county in the beating and restraint-chair death of inmate Charles Agster III.

Agster, 33 and mentally retarded, was arrested for trespassing on August 6, 2001. Detention officers at the Madison Street Jail pulled a hood over his head and slammed him into a medieval-looking restraint chair. The hood around Agster’s throat smothered him to the point that he became brain dead. He was pronounced legally dead three days later on August 9, 2001.

Agster’s death should have been prevented. Two years before he was killed, the county had paid $8.25 million to settle the Norberg suffocation suit.

There was at least one more death at the restraints of Arpaio’s cherished chair, Clint Yarborough in 2005. It should be noted that neither Norberg, Agster, nor Yarbrough were ever tried or convicted for the charges they were arrested on; none of them lived to see their first court date and died innocent men under the law. Those are just the deaths associated with the medieval restraint chair, there have been numerous deaths from improper or complete lack of medical care, neglect and other perils.

One of the other examples of the decrepit conditions Arpaio presided over is that of Kathleen Carey:

Like most attorneys, Kathleen Carey leads a busy life. So she didn’t take much time to examine what looked like a pimple on her arm. Twelve days later, Carey’s arm had ballooned to nearly twice its normal size, and pus was oozing from a boil where the zit had been.

After $180,000 in medical bills, four doctors, and two hospitals, Carey learned that the supposed pimple was actually the flesh-eating “superbug” bacteria commonly known as MRSA staph infection. You may recognize MRSA from recent news reports, following a study concluding that more Americans die each year from antibiotic-resistant MRSA infections than from HIV/AIDS.

MRSA commonly spreads through hospitals, but Carey hadn’t been to a hospital or doctor for months before her infection. So where did she get the potentially fatal infection?

Carey says she knows exactly where she got it — the Maricopa County Jail. She wasn’t there as an inmate, but as an attorney visiting her client.
[…]
Carey is one of many Maricopa County residents who’ve never been booked into Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s jails but who are paying dearly for conditions inside his lockups.

Vermin, filth, medical care suggestive of POW camps, chronic mismanagement, the wanton destruction of records, and a steady parade of corpses in Maricopa County jails have cost taxpayers an astonishing — and until now, undisclosed — 41.4 million dollars.

Don’t know if you caught that or not, but that is nearly $42 million dollars (and that was as of over a year ago, the figure is now higher) that Maricopa County has paid out due to the Most Abusive Sheriff in America’s detention policies and procedures. Want to know how that compares to other big municipalities? Get a load of this:

There simply isn’t another jail system in America with this history of taxpayer-financed litigation.

New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston, for example, collectively housed more than 61,000 inmates per day last year. From 2004 through November of this year, these same county jails had a combined 43 prison-conditions lawsuits filed against them in federal courts.

In the very same three-year time frame, despite housing a mere 9,200 prisoners per day, Sheriff Arpaio was the target of a staggering 2,150 lawsuits in U.S. District Court and hundreds more in Maricopa County courts.

With a fraction of the inmate population, Arpaio has had 50 times as many lawsuits as the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston jail systems combined.

But Sheriff Joe’s reign of terror does not end with the immigrant bashing and inhuman detention policies and facilities. When the Most Abusive Sheriff in America disagrees with colleagues, even fellow police officers, he attacks them with not only rhetoric, but the heavy dark hand of his department:

The sheriff raided municipal buildings in Mesa in what appeared to be nothing more than a blatant political maneuver against Arpaio’s perceived enemy, Mesa Police Chief George Gascón.

As a public safety effort, the pre-dawn October 16 incursion into Mesa City Hall and its library was laughable — it netted just three undocumented workers. A couple of former county Superior Court judges criticized Arpaio’s action in the East Valley Tribune, with former chief judge of the court Colin Campbell calling the raid “bizarre” and “extraordinary.”

Last, but far from least, Sheriff Joe has waged a jihad against the local investigative weekly newspaper in Phoenix/Maricopa County, the Phoenix New Times. Arpaio long felt the New Times coverage of him was too strident; not content to address his concerns in the media and public sphere, Arpaio arrested the publishers, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, on trumped up asinine charges (that were almost immediately dismissed without ever seeing the light of a courtroom). However, if you cherish the First Amendment and the freedom of the press, Larkin and Lacey’s arrests by Arpaio were not even the worst part.

In a breathtaking abuse of the United States Constitution, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, and their increasingly unhinged cat’s paw, special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik, used the grand jury to subpoena “all documents related to articles and other content published by Phoenix New Times newspaper in print and on the Phoenix New Times website, regarding Sheriff Joe Arpaio from January 1, 2004 to the present.”

Every note, tape, and record from every story written about Sheriff Arpaio by every reporter over a period of years.

In addition to the omnibus subpoena, which referred to our writer Stephen Lemons directly, reporters John Dougherty and Paul Rubin were targeted with individual subpoenas.

More alarming still, Arpaio, Thomas, and Wilenchik subpoenaed detailed information on anyone who has looked at the New Times Web site since 2004.

Every individual who looked at any story, review, listing, classified, or retail ad over a period of years.

The article the passage immediately above was quoted from, “Breathtaking Abuse of the Constitution”, was written personally by the two publishers, Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin, and is as chilling as was Arpaio’s attempt to silence them. Again, it is a feature length article, but a serious must read.

This post could easily be three or four times the already tedious length and still not have room to touch on the bill of craven particulars against the Most Abusive Sheriff in America, Joe Arpaio. But it is a start, and renders an idea as to why Chairman Conyers, Representative Nadler and the others on the House Judiciary Committee have requested the civil and criminal powers of the United States Government be brought to bear on Joe Arpaio. He isn’t the toughest, he’s the most abusive. It is imperative that Attorney General Holder and DHS Secretary Napolitano heed the call and address the long overdue matter. Secretary Napolitano, of all people, ought to understand the menace to society as a whole, and the citizenry of Maricopa County in particular, that Arpaio poses. It is time for it to be stopped.

Source / Firedoglake / AlterNet

Thanks to cloudy / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Arizona, Criminal Justice, Law Enforcement, Police Brutality, Prisoner Abuse | 6 Comments

American Crimes Against Humanity Slowly See the Light of Day

Posted on February 15, 2009 by RagBlog

Former Guantánamo prison guard Brandon Neely has come forward to air his feelings of guilt about how he and some soldiers treated the prisoners shortly after 9/11.
Photo: Pat Sullivan/AP.
Ex-Gitmo guard describes abuse
By Mike Melia / February 15, 2009

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Army Pvt. Brandon Neely was scared when he took the first shackled detainees off a bus at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Told to expect vicious terrorists, he grabbed a trembling, elderly detainee and ground his face into the cement, the first of a range of humiliations he said he participated in and witnessed as the prison was opening for business.

Neely has come forward in this final year of the detention center’s existence, saying he wants to air his feelings of guilt and shame about how some soldiers behaved as the military scrambled to handle the first suspected al-Qaida and Taliban members arriving at the U.S. Navy base.

Basic comforts denied

His account, one of the first by a former guard describing abuses at Guantánamo, describes a chaotic time that soldiers lacked clear rules for dealing with detainees who were denied many basic comforts. He said the circumstances changed quickly once monitors from the International Committee of the Red Cross arrived.

The military said it has gone to great lengths in the seven years since then to ensure the prisoners’ safe treatment. “Our policy is to treat detainees humanely,” said Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman.

After the Sept. 11 attacks and the swift U.S. military response in Afghanistan, the Bush administration had little time to prepare for the hundreds of prisoners being swept up on the battlefield.

The U.S. Southern Command was given only a few weeks’ notice before detainees began arriving at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, a locale thought to be beyond the reach of U.S. and Cuban law. The first arrivals were housed in cages.

President Obama is committed to closing the prison and finding new ways of handling the remaining 245 detainees and any future terrorism suspects. Human-rights group officials said his pledge to adhere to long established laws and treaties governing prisoner treatment is essential if the United States hopes to prevent abuses in the future.

“If Guantánamo has taught us anything, it’s the importance of abiding by the rule of law,” said Jennifer Daskal, senior counterterrorism counsel for Human Rights Watch.

Or as Neely put it in an interview last week, “The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong.”

Honorably discharged

Neely, who served for a year in Iraq after his six months at Guantánamo, received an honorable discharge last year, with the rank of specialist, and works as a law-enforcement officer in the Houston area. He is also president of the local chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Neely, 28, described a litany of cruel treatment by his fellow soldiers, including beatings and humiliations he said were intended only to deliver physical or psychological pain.

A spokeswoman for the detention center, Navy Cmdr. Pauline Storum, said she could not comment on “what one individual may recall” from seven years ago. “Thousands of service members have honorably carried out their duties here in what is an arduous and scrutinized environment,” she said.

Neely’s account sheds new light on the early days of Guantánamo, where guards were hastily deployed in January 2002 and were soon confronted by men stumbling out of planes, shackled and wearing blackout goggles. They were held in chain-link cages and moved to more permanent structures three months later.

The soldiers, many still in their teens, had no detailed standard operating procedures and were taught hardly anything about the Geneva Conventions, which provide guidelines for humane treatment of prisoners of war, Neely said, though some learned about them on their own initiative.

“Most of us who had everyday contact with the detainees were really young.”

Army Col. Bill Costello acknowledged that Guantánamo-specific procedures developed over time, but insisted that the guards had strict direction from the start.

“This was a professional guard force,” said Costello, who served as a Guantánamo spokesman during its first months and now speaks for the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, which oversees the base.

Seeking revenge

Only months had passed since the Sept. 11 attacks, and Neely said many of the guards wanted revenge. Especially before the first Red Cross visit, he said guards were seizing on any apparent infractions to “get some” by hurting the detainees.

The soldiers’ behavior seemed justified at the time, he said, because they were told “these are the worst terrorists in the world.”

He said one medic punched a handcuffed prisoner in the face for refusing to swallow a liquid nutritional supplement, and another bragged about cruelly stretching a prisoner’s torn muscles during what were supposed to be physical-therapy treatments.

He said detainees were forced to submit to take showers and defecate into buckets in full view of female soldiers, against Islamic customs. When a detainee yelled an expletive at a female guard, he said a crew of soldiers beat the man up and held him down so the woman could repeatedly strike him in the face.

Neely said he is ashamed for how he treated that elderly detainee the first day. As he recalled it, the man made a movement to resist on his way to his cage, and Neely responded by shoving the shackled man headfirst to the ground, bruising and scraping his face. Other soldiers hog-tied him and left him in the sun for hours.

Only later did Neely learn — from another detainee — that the man had jerked away thinking he was about to be executed.

“I just felt horrible,” Neely recalled.

Neely grew up in a military family in Huntsville, Texas, and said he initially saw the Army as a career. He said his experiences led him to see the treatment of detainees and the Iraq invasion as “morally wrong.”

He refused to return to active duty when called up from the Inactive Ready Reserves in 2007 and ignored letters threatening penalties.

Interviews with former guards are rare. The military allows journalists visiting Guantánamo to interview active-duty guards at the base, but they are hand-picked by the military and speak in the presence of public-affairs officers.

Source / Seattle Times

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Criminal Justice, Guantanamo, Torture, War Crimes | 3 Comments

Student Protests in Solidarity with Palestine Cross the Atlantic

Posted on February 15, 2009 by RagBlog

At a Campus Sit-In Against Israeli Occupation: An Interview with Three Participants
By Ron Jacobs / February 13, 2009

On Friday, February 6, the University of Rochester-SDS (UR-SDS) organized an occupation of Goergen Hall at the University of Rochester for peace and solidarity with the Palestinians. The action was partially inspired by the wave of occupations across the UK in support of Palestine the past few weeks. UR-SDS made a list of demands of the administration (including divestment from weapons manufacturers, educational and humanitarian aid to Gaza, and scholarships for Palestinian students). In a related event, on Thursday, February 12, 2008 Hampshire College of Amherst, MA. became the first US school to divest from corporations profiting from the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Back at the University of Rochester representatives of the occupying students and the university administration signed a Joint Statement of Understanding.

The approximate wording of the statement is:

1. University of Rochester will commit to provide any surplus goods or supplies that could assist the devastated University of Gaza.

2. University of Rochester will commit resources and information to assist fundraising for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

3. University of Rochester will commit to reach out to Palestinian students in order to provide them scholarships to the University of Rochester

4. University of Rochester will commit to organize open forum to discuss why the University invests in weapons manufactures and discuss the process of the University moving toward a more socially responsible, transparent, and democratically controlled investment policy.

* * * * *
I got in touch with three of the organizers/participants via email and recorded the following online exchange.

Ron: Please introduce yourself? Are you a student? Do you have a major?

Adriano: My name is Adriano Contreras. I’m a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), where I study both Sociology and Video Production.

Kyle: My name’s Kyle Brown. I graduated in 2004 with a BA in Sociology. For the past four years I’ve been working as a residential mental health and drug addiction counselor.

Ryan:My name is Ryan Acuff, a member of University of Rochester Students for a Democratic Society (UR-SDS). I’m a graduate student in psychology and a part-time instructor at the university.

Can you tell us what happened at UR on February 6th?

Adriano: Well, Students for a Democratic Society at UR (SDS-UR) handed their administration four demands the day before they planned to occupy the Goergen Building. The sit-in, inspired by 20 other universities in the UK, took a stand against the Israeli siege on Gaza. SDS invited other activists groups, community members and allies to participate in the sit-in.

I don’t think anyone would have thought that 9 hours later everything would be over. There was a whole schedule planned for the first evening of the occupation. There was a discussion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, SDS’s demands, and we were to have guest speakers. The administration however, realized the seriousness of the occupiers and sent the Dean of Student Affairs to be their negotiator multiple times that day.

Ryan and Kyle can better explain more of what happened that day, I spent most of that time blogging from inside the occupation.

Ryan: On February 6th, we took direct action for peace and in solidarity with the Palestinians by peacefully occupying a building at the University of Rochester. Beginning at 3:00pm, UR-SDS claimed and occupied the adjacent atrium and auditorium of Goergen Hall (the Biomedical Engineering Building) and declared them a liberated community space—an autonomous zone democratically run by the occupiers until our demands were met. The action was organized by University Rochester Students for a Democratic Society (UR-SDS) but U of R post-docs, faculty members, and staff also occupied along with numerous community members. We came to raise awareness about the dire situation in Palestine and the United States role in the conflict. In addition, we were there to occupy this space until our demands of the administration for divestment, humanitarian aid, educational aid, and scholarships for Palestinian students were met. Also, (let me clarify) despite what the administration said, we did not “reserve” the auditorium and the online calendar still says that it remains unreserved at that time.

Kyle: (LIke Ryan and Adriano said) SDS at UR organized an occupation of Goergen Atrium and Auditorium on campus in solidarity with Gaza. Beforehand, they had presented the administration with an official letter demanding that UR divest from corporations that profit from Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and to provide direct aid to the people of Gaza. This wasn’t an occupation like the illegal sit-down strikes of 1930’s because the campus administration allowed SDS to reserve the building in the interest of “peaceful dialogue”. They also provided the Dean of Student Affairs for negotiation of the demands.

As the day went on, the Dean informed the organizers that UR students would be punished if not out of the building by midnight. So we decided to call for as many campus and community members to mobilize around that time as possible to put as much pressure on the Dean as possible to deliver on our demands.

The Dean agreed to negotiate at 10pm and we had maybe 75 people in the building for support. Through the negotiations, the Dean agreed to the following plan of action: that the administration organize a public forum with UR investors, SDS and the community on the university’s investment policy and its investment in Israel; that UR commit resources and provide any needed information for a campus-wide fund drive for Palestine; that UR work to assess needs in Gaza and donate surplus supplies to universities, such as computers and books; and that UR commit to reaching out to Palestinians with international student scholarships.

Feb 6th was a day of education, debate and mobilization. It was a concrete show of solidarity with the people of Gaza and protest against Israel’s occupation. It was a concrete demonstration of real democratic decision-making and flexibility.

What particular event spurred you to get personally involved in this issue and the occupation?

Ryan: (For me) the unspeakable events of the recent US-Israeli war on Gaza were very difficult for me witness. Especially knowing how complicit the United States was in the massacres. On January 23rd a message about a series of student occupations of English universities in solidarity with Palestine was floated on the northeast SDS listerv. On Saturday January 24th UR-SDS called an emergency meeting to discuss bringing the occupation movement across the Atlantic. Our discussions bore out a resolve to do the same in the United States.

Kyle: After September 11th, I was already organizing against the US invasion of Afghanistan and Israel began using Bush’s “war on terror” rhetoric to extend its occupation of Palestine. I became dedicated to ending the occupation of Palestine when I attended a national demonstration in DC in solidarity with the Al Aqsa Intifada. It was amazing to be marching in the streets with Arabs and Muslims chanting “Free Free Palestine!” Through and after that demonstration, I started exploring US funding for Israel and came to the understanding that Israel plays a crucial role as watch dog in the Middle East for US imperialism. I’ve been an anti-imperialist ever since, so when I heard that UR was organizing an occupation on campus I dove into organizing head first.

Adriano: I’ve been involved with the Campus Antiwar Network, a national democratic student anti-war organization, for over 2 years now. When I began my activism it was really all about figuring out the political reasons for why being in Iraq and Afghanistan was wrong, aside from the moral gut feelings I had. The answers I found were imperialism, geopolitics, and profit. With that understanding I became firmly anti-war.

The chapter of CAN at my school had done an educational meeting around the issue of Palestine a week or so prior to Israel’s assault. While home in New York City, I participated in two demonstrations that were overwhelmingly Arab. Unlike anti-war demonstrations which have remained largely free of an Arab presence, the demonstrations around Gaza filled the streets with people whom after 9/11 feared to speak out against the wave of anti-Arab sentiment.

When we returned from Christmas break the political landscape of the anti-war movement had begun to shift. Israel’s true colors were shown clearly to the entire world. Despite its claims to the right of self-defense, the slaughter of over 1300 Palestinians was unjustifiable and people took notice. I took part in the national demonstration on January 10 and it was an amazing experience. CAN and the Muslim Students Association marched together for the first time ever. The people most directly affected by the so-called “War on Terror” were out in big numbers.

Organizing at school had taken on a different character. People wanted to talk and organize around Palestine, even though we had things organized already around the occupation of Afghanistan. When I spoke with Ryan Acuff about SDS’s plans at UR, he mentioned the sit-in. The CAN chapter at RIT got on board with it.

Is this part of a larger movement? Would you call it a coordinated movement or spontaneous?

Ryan: Our occupation is part of the larger occupation that began on January 13th in London when students from the School of Oriental and Asians Studies occupied a building on campus. This exploded into an occupation movement that has swept over 20 schools in England and Scotland and has now begun in the United States. Oh yeah, and all the occupations have been spontaneous in that each one ha has inspired the others, but none coordinated by a higher body.

Adriano:What is happening in the UK is spreading like wildfire. There have been 23 university occupations so far and some of them are still occupied. Certain demands have been won and its really a testament to the power of organized struggle and protest. The UR occupation was inspired by the UK. Globally, I think it’s something that’ll catch on. Like I said, the world has now seen Israel’s true colors. The siege, the blockade, and the history of oppression have exposed the ideology of the Israeli state.

In the United States, we’re going to begin to see more occupations of this nature. We’ll see similar campaigns to the ones that ended South African apartheid. Presently, South African dockworkers are refusing to import Israeli goods. Already a national call has been put out by the Campus Antiwar Network to figure out and propose a plan of action that includes the help of SDS UR members and students from the UK.

Kyle: There are a number of events that set the stage for the UR action. First, the election of Obama has given ordinary people across the country hope that things can change after eight long years living under the Bush regime. The urgency for change has never been felt more strongly as we are spiraling into the worst recession/depression since the 1930’s. After Obama was elected, the Republic Windows and Doors workers in Chicago won severance pay and health insurance owed to them by occupying their factory when their bosses announced the plant was closing. Not too long after, students at the New School of Social Research in NYC occupied a building to prevent it from closing and directly noted inspiration from the Republic workers. Israel invaded Gaza over the holiday and sparked a series of campus occupations in Britain. The demands of the UR students almost exactly mirror the demands of the Britain students. So I think there is a real context to what we did. I see the UR action as the next stage in the anti-war movement–a new movement of occupations in this country and internationally.

I think this also needs to be viewed in the context of the broader antiwar movement. This has the potential to breath new life into the antiwar movement and set the stage for the national antiwar demonstration called in DC for March 21st which is the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

What is the intention of the movement?

Kyle: Simply put, we want justice for the people of Palestine. The US funds Israel’s occupation of Palestine with billions of dollars in addition to direct military aid. This means that the US government is directly responsible for bombs dropped on schools, bulldozers razing communities, and F16s terrorizing Gaza. It’s amazing to learn that so many institutions of higher learning–both UR and RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) invest and research for corporations that directly profit from the occupation of Palestine. Our intention is to end the occupation of Palestine by standing in solidarity with the people of Gaza and building a movement capable of forcing the US government from divesting from Israel.

Ryan: Although many of the schools have slightly different demands, the movement seeks to take direct action to express our solidarity with the people of Gaza, highlight our countries’ and universities’ complicity in the atrocities in the Gaza strip, and make our universities’ relationship to Gaza one of supporting people and peace, not war. Members of UR-SDS also hope our action will help inspire other occupations or sit-ins in the United States, given that our culpability as Americans is dramatically larger than even the British in blocking peace and supporting oppression of the Palestinians.

Adriano: The movement has taken on boycott, divestment, and sanctions. The demands of the UK and UR occupations represent that. The effectiveness however of the movement will largely depend on how well coordinated it is on a national level. Locally we can act, make demands, and win but if we remain isolated it’ll be harder for these actions to catch on. The movement needs to be a player on the national scene in order to tackle organizations like AIPAC but also get to the root of the problem, which is United State tax dollars invested in imperialism in the Middle East. The movement has to bring to light the fact that Israel is the US’s proxy in that region. Why else would it have the second largest fleet of F16s, the highest amount of our foreign aid, and nuclear weaponry?

What has been the response of other members of the campus community? What about alumni?

Kyle: Adriano and Ryan are on the campuses (I’ll take the next question though!)

Adriano: At RIT, we’ve had a significantly larger attendance at our meetings around Palestine. It hasn’t completely translated into activism, but people are searching for answers and perspectives from the Palestinian side. So there is a potential to mobilize people around this.

Ryan: The response from other members of the campus community has been mostly positive. People seem excited to have these kinds of actions at the University of Rochester. Although the U of R has a history of activism its been a few years since students have taken direct action for a cause. Given that we have a large Jewish population on campus, there are some members of the community that see any support of the Palestinians or condemnation of Israeli state policy as a direct threat to their identity as a Jew. The best we can do in these cases is continue the dialogue to clear up misunderstandings. All alumni I’ve communicated with have been extremely excited about our actions. We’ve even had graduates from 1970s send us e-mails of support.

In the broader sense, what kind of impact do you see (or hope to see) the movement against the Israeli occupation of the Territories on university and college campuses having on the US and British public?

Kyle: Consciousness is shifting around the question of Palestine. I was amazed to learn that over 40% of people in the US were against Israel’s latest attack on Gaza. This is amazing given how pro-Israel the US mainstream media has been. There is never a voice for Palestinians. The only question US reporters would ask Palestinians during Israel’s latest invasion was, “Do you blame Hamas for this?”

That being said, it seems like people are aching to take up this issue but up until this point have been under-confident that anything can be done. The amazing thing about our action is that we won in just 9 hours an agreement for a plan of action from the Dean that provides concrete organizing for the movement in weeks ahead. This is giving confidence to community members and fellow activists across the country that we can fight and win.

I think people are also nervous about being labeled an anti-Semite when organizing and taking a stand against Zionism. We have to education people on the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. It is helpful just to point out that there are anti-Zionist Jews organizing in Israel today. We can and should fight against racism, anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism all at the same time.

Adriano:If the movement grows, if it is coordinated, we could expose university investments and fight for socially responsible endowments. The struggle to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine could potentially expose the “war on terror” on a big scale. The possibilities are numerous especially in this period of economic crises and endless war. On the flip-side Obama has brought hope to many and promises of change. If we educate ourselves, take action, and push Obama for more than what he’s promised than we can expect some serious victories.

Similar actions at campuses around other issues like sweatshops have received a certain amount of positive press when they were undertaken, only to have the administration and trustees negate the agreements that were made. How does a group prevent this, while simultaneously keeping interest in the issue alive on campus and in the surrounding community?

Adriano: This was brought up during the occupation by some people and the answer was unanimous… we’d occupy again. For UR, the biggest employer in Rochester, NY, it’s crucial for them to maintain a favorable reputation. They won’t completely brush off our demands because they know what we’re willing to do now to have our voices heard. During the occupation there was a huge effort made to contact local press and media outlets.

Maintaining interest in the issue has much to do with winning something along the way. The victory at UR was just a first step to get the administration to comply with our demands. If people invest time and energy into organizing and never win anything it becomes demoralizing. If we win, people build confidence and it give activism a whole new meaning.

Kyle: We won the agreement/plan of action through mobilization of students and community members. The agreement was signed in person and in front of all the participants of the occupation because we demanded that the negotiations happen in the auditorium in front of everyone. The agreement should continue to be publicized as far and wide as possible, not only on UR campus but throughout the community and onto every campus across the country. This will play a key role in holding the administration accountable.

We need to continue galvanizing new students and community members with educational panel discussions and teach-ins where we can learn the history of Zionism, the history of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, campus complicity, the politics of the Palestinian resistance and the role of US imperialism in it all. And we need groups like SDS, CAN, and all activists organizing to hold the Dean accountable to what he agreed but also to push it further. If the administration negates the agreement in anyway, we occupy with more numbers and we stay until they meet our demands.

Ryan: We hope these actions on college campuses help open the discussions on the US-Palestinian-Israeli conflict and help the voices of the Palestinians be heard. One of the only ways the horrific polices of the U.S. in Israel-Palestine can continue is if people don’t know the extend the U.S. suppressing peace and democracy. (Specifically) our big follow up event we have planned is an open forum on the universities investment policies and a discussion of the process of moving towards more socially responsible, transparent, and Democratic investment policy. The more people we can bring into the process the more authoritarian institutions will begin to break down. The more we work to empower and inform people on these issues and the more they will start demanding more power and reform of the institution. We are also planning an editorial in investment for the next issue of the Campus Times along with an open forum to discuss the US-Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In addition, if the university breaks the agreements or simply refuses to move forward we are prepared to take direct action again, this time will more people and in a more dramatic fashion. Justice will be served.

Since it appears that one of the goals of these actions is to make connections between college investments and the occupation of Palestine (and to make people consider their own complicity, let’s take that a step further: do you think people make the connection between US tax dollars and Israel’s occupation?

Adriano: Right now especially, people are making these connections! Bailout for the banks, none for the working class. $3 billion per year for Israel and no money for universal healthcare coverage. Unemployment is rising and wages have less buying power. If people haven’t made the connection between tax dollars and Israel, they will. It is only a matter of time before people realize the hypocrisy of the system. However not everyone will come to these conclusions alone. We need to be there alongside those people to get them organized to fight back and win the divestment campaigns and reforms we need.

Kyle: I don’t think people make the connection yet. This is a connection the movement will have to make clear. Over three billion dollars in government money goes to fund Israel every year. What could $3 billion a year do for the 47 million people without health insurance in this country? What could $3 billion a year do for our schools that are crumbling under the weight of budget deficits from state to state across this country? What about the workers at Kodak that have lost their jobs as Kodak has laid off more than 50% of their Rochester workforce in the past 30 years (UR has now become the largest employer in Rochester)? It should be our job to make the connections and reach beyond our campuses to win solidarity in the community and labor movement.

Ryan: I think people are beginning to see this connection. UR-SDS pointed this out in our editorial in the campus paper last week. The more people can see we individually our complicit in these atrocities, the more willing people are going to be to take action.

I know there is a national conference going on around this issue. What do you see as the goals of that conference?

Ryan: Currently there is national conference call organized by the Campus Anti-war Network planned for next Monday to discuss spreading the occupation movement across the U.S. I believe the goals are for other schools to learn about our actions and possibly enact something similar at their school. People are feeling that the time has come to escalate our actions.

Kyle: (Like Ryan said) There is a national conference call this Monday. We will be giving a report on the UR action. Also, someone will be giving a report from the New School occupation. Hopefully, we can get someone on from the occupations in Britain. We want students to organize on every campus across the US. But there must also be coordination between these campuses because it’s going to take a coordinated, democratic, nationwide movement to win divestment from Israel. Hopefully the call will inspire students. Students should “think big” and organize to win concrete gains. (If you are talking about another conference, let me know! I should be there!) (I was referring to the conference call-Ron)

Anything else?

Adriano: I run a website called The Sitch. It’s a site for activist news, political commentary and analysis. On there you’ll find coverage of the UR occupation, as it happened, including videos and images.
Visit: www.thesitch.com/occupation

Kyle: Yes. The immigrant rights movement in 2006 took up the slogan “Yes we can!”. Obama adopted this for his presidential campaign in 2008. Coming out of the UR action, I was thinking to myself “Yes we did”. It feels great to finally win something. I want people across the country to feel the same way so we can raise our hopes even higher and fight for more!

Ryan: Thanks for your interest in our action. We hope to spread the word far and wide to help inspire similar actions for peace and Palestine and fight oppression in all forms.

[Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs’ essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch’s collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. He can be reached at: rjacobs3625@charter.net.]

Source / CounterPunch

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Political Protest, SDS, Student Movement | Leave a comment

US Policy in Afghanistan: Destined for Failure?

Posted on February 15, 2009 by RagBlog

An Afghan boy walks by a destroyed Soviet made helicopter in Kabul in this picture taken February 5, 2009. February 15th marks 20 years since the last Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan. Moscow’s forces pulled out of the country in 1989 after a decade of war in which thousands of Soviet soldiers and many more Afghans died.
Photo: REUTERS/Ahmad Masood.
West risks repeating Soviet mistakes in Afghanistan
By Abdul Saboor / February 15, 2009

ALI MARDAN, Afghanistan — The foreign warplanes swooped in just as the Afghan village of Ali Mardan was celebrating a wedding.

Bombs slammed into the crowded village square, killing 30 men, women and children. After the smoke cleared and the dead were buried, all the able-bodied men left alive took up arms against the invaders.

That was 1982 and the warplanes belonged to the Soviet Union, but 20 years after the last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan on Sunday, U.S. and NATO troops are all too often making the same mistakes and could run the same risk of being driven out.

A string of bungled U.S. and NATO air strikes killed 455 Afghan civilians last year, according to the United Nations. Wedding parties seem to be particularly at risk, perhaps due to the crowds of people, some of them firing weapons in the air.

U.S. planes bombed two Afghan weddings last year alone.

Memories are long in Afghanistan and revenge is a duty.

In the mud-brick homes of Ali Mardan, close to the Afghan capital Kabul, villagers still visit the graves of those killed in the Soviet bombardment and keep photographs of the dead to remind the living of the cruelty of war.

“I was nine years-old. It was early in the morning during my sister’s wedding when the jets bombed us,” said Abdul Bashir.

“You can see I lost one of my eyes, and my teeth. My brother was wounded. My sister, father and my aunt were martyred,” he said. “I can never forget.”

QUAGMIRE

Soviet leaders were at first reluctant to respond to repeated requests from Kabul’s Marxist government to send troops to help quash resistance from rural Islamic fighters, fearing getting bogged down in Afghanistan, just as the British had in the 19th Century.

But on December 25, 1979, hundreds of Soviet tanks rumbled across the border into northern Afghanistan and large numbers of airborne troops landed at Kabul airport.

Despite deploying up to 120,000 soldiers, supported by 300,000 Afghan government forces, the Soviets failed to crush the insurgency by Afghan mujahideen fighters who were backed by U.S. guns and money and had bases inside neighboring Pakistan.

Some 15,000 Soviet troops were killed before Moscow decided the war could not be won and pulled out its forces in 1989. By that time, 1 million Afghans had lost their lives and another 5 million become refugees in neighboring Pakistan and Iran.

The tables are now turned and the United States is considering whether to send another 25,000 troops to add to the nearly 70,000 Western forces locked in a bitter stalemate with Taliban-led insurgents in south and eastern Afghanistan.

“I tell you this for sure, that if NATO and America put all their attention on fighting, and invest only in the military, they will not win,” former mujahideen leader and ex-President Burhanuddin Rabbani told Reuters.

PEACE THOUGH PROGRESS?

President Barack Obama’s new administration is also planning a large increase in spending on development assistance to Afghanistan, more than seven years after the 2001 U.S.-led invasion of one of the poorest countries in the world.

But the Soviets also tried to bring progress to deeply conservative and traditional Afghanistan and in many ways their record was more impressive than that of the West so far.

Most of Afghanistan’s roads, ministries, major schools and hospitals were Soviet-built. Even now, many of the upper echelons of the civil service, army and police are Soviet trained.

The rows of apartment blocks around Kabul were all built by the Soviets. Though many are now shabby and pock-marked with bullet holes from the civil war, they are still highly prized as no public housing has been built since.

“These residential buildings are the achievement of the Russians,” said Abdul Ghani Rahpore, who lives in one of the blocks. “Now there are 40 countries stationed in this country but they haven’t made any achievements that benefit the people.”

But any gains the Soviets made through development and building the Afghan government’s capacity were scuppered by the resentment and anger their devastating bombing raids caused.

That is a lesson U.S. and NATO forces should learn from the experience of their former Cold War adversary.

“I don’t think NATO has fully understood just how serious this issue is,” said a Kabul-based Western analyst. “They certainly have done what they can to try to avoid civilian casualties from air strikes, but I just don’t think they have grasped how central it is to informing the views of the nation.”

Added Rabbani: “There have already been some mistakes during military operations and the mistakes are continually being repeated. This is the same mistake the Soviets made.”

[Writing by Jon Hemming; editing by Dean Yates.]

Source / Reuters

And there’s this, quite similar analysis:

Lieutenant General Boris Gromov, with his son, Maxin, leaves Afghanistan over the Amy Darya River at Termez, Uzbekistan on Feb. 15, 1989. Photo: AP.
Is the U.S. repeating Soviet mistakes in Afghanistan?
By Jonathan S. Landay / February 14, 2009

KABUL, Afghanistan — Twenty years to the day after the last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan, Dastagir Arizad ticked off grievances against President Hamid Karzai and the United States that are disturbingly reminiscent of Moscow’s humiliating defeat.

“Day by day, we see the Karzai government failing. The Americans are also failing,” said Arizad, 40, as he huddled against the cold in the stall where he sells ropes and plastic hoses. “People are not feeling safe. Their lives are not secure. Their daughters are not safe. Their land is not secure. The Karzai government is corrupt.”

“The problems we are having are made by the Americans. The Americans should review their policies,” he said Saturday. “They should not support the people who are in power.”

As Arizad spoke, Pres. Barack Obama’s special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, was holding his first talks with Karzai in the presidential palace nearby amid mounting U.S.-Afghan tensions fueled by mutual recriminations over the growing Taliban insurgency.

Some Afghan experts are worried that the United States and its NATO allies are making some of the same mistakes that helped the Taliban’s forerunners defeat the Soviet Union after a decade-long occupation that bled the Kremlin treasury, demoralized Moscow’s military and contributed to the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Among the mistakes, these experts said, are relying too heavily on military force, inflicting too many civilian casualties, concentrating too much power in Kabul and tolerating pervasive government corruption.

Violence and ethnic tensions will worsen, they warned, absent a rapid correction in U.S.-led strategy that improves coordination between military operations and stepped up reconstruction, job-training and local good governance programs.

“We have not justified democracy. We have not justified human rights. We have not justified liberalism,” said Azziz Royesh, a political activist, educator and former anti- Soviet guerrilla. “Afghans don’t like the Taliban. But we haven’t shown them a better option.”

“I see a time when again there could be thousands of unorganized insurgencies around the country,” he cautioned. “The foreigners are the ones who will be targeted. If we don’t bring change here, these kinds of incidents will add to the Taliban insurgency.”

A public opinion survey released earlier this month underscored the concerns.

The poll, commissioned by ABC News and the BBC, found that while 90 percent of Afghans oppose the Taliban, less than half view the U.S. favorably, down from 67 percent last year. Twenty-five percent also said they believed that attacks on foreign troops can be justified, up from 17 percent in 2007.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, conceded in a Washington Post opinion article Saturday that the U.S., which is planning to almost double the 32,000-strong U.S. force in Afghanistan over the next 18 months, will lose the war if it can’t win Afghans’ trust.

“We can send more troops. We can kill or capture all the Taliban and al Qaida leaders we can find — and we should. We can clear out havens and shut down the narcotics trade. But until we prove capable, with the help of our allies and Afghan partners, of safeguarding the population, we will never know a peaceful, prosperous Afghanistan,” Mullen wrote. “Lose the people’s trust, and we lose the war.”

A senior official of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, who requested anonymity in order to speak more candidly, said that many allied governments would find it harder to keep troops in Afghanistan “if we don’t see some sort of rise in (Afghans’) perception of how things are going . . . within the next 12 months.”

Some Western officials and many Afghans appear to be hoping that Obama, who last week criticized Karzai for being “very detached,” will abandon the Bush administration’s unqualified support for the Afghan leader in hopes that he won’t run for re-election or is defeated in an Aug. 20 vote.

Soviet leaders, however, believed in 1986 that a change in Afghan leadership would stem that decade’s Islamist insurgency. They were wrong.

Of course, there are major differences between the brutal 10-year Soviet occupation that ended on Feb. 14, 1989 — the date it’s marked on the Afghan calendar — and the U.S.-led effort to prevent Afghanistan from reverting to a Taliban-ruled sanctuary for al Qaida.

Moscow invaded to save a dictatorial regime that ignited a rebellion when it tried to force communism on a tribal society that remains rooted in conservative Islam and centuries-old tribal law. Some 1 million Afghans died and more than 5 million fled the country as Soviet and Afghan troops fought U.S.-backed guerrillas based in Pakistan.

The 2001 U.S.-led intervention came after the former Taliban regime refused to surrender Osama bin Laden following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. More than 40 nations have deployed a total of 70,000 troops and are spending billions on schools, clinics and roads, while the United Nations is helping to prepare for Afghanistan’s second-ever presidential election.

The effort, however, faces grave uncertainties because the Bush administration, fixated on Iraq, never committed enough troops or developed a comprehensive counter-insurgency strategy for Afghanistan.

Previously secret Soviet documents made public in English for the first time on Saturday reveal that Obama is facing some of the same problems that compelled former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to order a withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The documents, posted on the George Washington University’s National Security Archive Web site, show that Gorbachev decided in 1985 to end the Soviet occupation after realizing that Moscow couldn’t win a military victory, a point that Obama and senior U.S. commanders repeatedly stress.

Soviet leaders also saw that Afghanistan’s ruling communists had failed to earn legitimacy, become self-reliant or improve most Afghans’ lives, problems that also afflict Karzai’s U.S.-backed government.

“After seven years in Afghanistan, there is not one square kilometer left untouched by a boot of a Soviet soldier. But as soon as they leave a place, the enemy returns and restores it all back the way it used to be,” the late Soviet Army chief Sergei Akhromeyev is quoted as saying in notes from a Nov. 13, 1986, Politburo meeting.

Moreover, the documents indicate, Soviet troops were unable to stop U.S.-backed guerrillas infiltrating from sanctuaries in Pakistan, and they fueled support for the insurgents by killing civilians, factors that are aiding the Taliban today.

“Very little is left of the friendly feelings toward the Soviet people, which existed for decades. Very many people have died, and not all of them were bandits (guerrillas). Not a single problem was solved in favor of the peasants,” then-Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze reported to the Politburo on Jan. 21, 1987, according to minutes of the meeting. “In essence, (we) waged war against the peasants.”

Source / McClatchy

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Afghanistan, U.S. Foreign Policy, War | Leave a comment

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ROXANN WEDEGARTNER / BOOK REVIEW / From the Octagon: People, Places, News, Views by Allen Young.

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