And You Will Be Brought to Justice, No Matter How Long It Takes

Posted on July 27, 2008 by RagBlog


New Zealand Students Offer New Bounty For Arrest of Condoleezza Rice For War Crimes
by Ray Lilley / July 26, 2008

WELLINGTON, New Zealand – A group of New Zealand students offered a higher reward Saturday for the citizen’s arrest of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for war crimes after another group withdrew their own bounty, accusing police of threatening them.

Students at Victoria University in the capital, Wellington, doubled the original reward offer to US$7,400, according to Joel Cosgrove, the student president.

Cosgrove said Rice should be arrested because she is responsible for the deaths of at least 600,000 Iraqis killed since the 2003 invasion by U.S.-led coalition troops.

“Condoleezza Rice needs to be tried before the international war crimes tribunal,” Cosgrove told New Zealand’s National Radio.

The new bounty came a day after the Auckland University Students’ Association made a formal complaint to local police seeking Rice’s arrest for “overseeing the illegal invasion and continued occupation” of Iraq in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

The Auckland students offered a reward of 5,000 New Zealand dollars (US$3,700), but late Friday withdrew the bounty. Student President David Do said authorities had threatened criminal charges for anyone trying to make a citizen’s arrest.

“It is unfortunate the police have threatened students for essentially a form of peaceful protest and civil disobedience,” Do said.

Superintendent Brett England, the district police commander in Auckland, New Zealand’s biggest city, warned anyone attempting to penetrate the security around Rice would be punished.

“The consequences of such a security threat could be very serious indeed,” England said.

Rice, asked about the demonstration at a news conference Friday, said “student protests are particularly a long-honored tradition in democratic society.”

“I can only say that the United States has done everything that it can to end this war on terror, to live up to our international and national laws and obligations,” Rice said.

About 70 people protested Saturday outside Government House, where Rice was meeting with Prime Minister Helen Clark.

Source / Common Dreams

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The Surge Has Worked? Right.

Posted on July 27, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


In Vietnam they called it ‘escalation’
By James Abourezk / July 27, 2008

Back in the good old days of the Vietnam War General Westmoreland, Lyndon Johnson and Bob McNamara kept sending more troops into battle, calling it “escalation.” It was a term fraught with negative meaning, but capitalizing on the horrible public relations experience of that war, George Bush has since hired PR experts who have given it a new name, i.e., “surge.” It sounds much better, and despite the horrors of what’s happening in Iraq, Bush and his political clone, John McCain, are chanting the mantra, “the surge is working,” meaning the escalation is working. Sen. McCain has come out for victory and against surrender in Iraq.

What Sen. McCain means by “the surge is working,” is that he sees America as winning the war in Iraq and that we shouldn’t stop what we are doing in order to finalize the victory there. Aside from never explaining what he means by “winning the war” he also hints that American casualties are way down because of the escalation. That chorus is intended to help him win the Presidency this fall.

In January of 2007, when Bush first announced his escalation, U.S. troop levels were at 132,000. By then the government had counted 3044 dead Americans. Iraqi civilian deaths continued to mount.

By March, 2007, U.S. troop strength reached 152,000. On March 27, 2008, Sen. John McCain told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that “General Petraeus goes out there every day in an unarmed humvee . . .” But he later acknowledged that there is no such thing as an unarmored humvee.

In April, 2007, U.S. troop levels reached 150,000 soldiers, and in June, 2008, the American command acknowledged that they were arming and passing money to Sunni Tribes formerly allied with Al-Qaeda, who, after the money was passed, have promised to fight their former allies alongside their former enemies— the U.S.

In September, 2007, U.S. troop strength reached 168,000, a time when Gen. Petraeus told Congress that the escalation had largely met its military goals. By October of 2007, U.S. military casualties had dropped to levels that were lower than any before it. For example, in October, 37 U.S. soldiers died from combat; in November, 35 died, and in December, 2007, 23 died. From January, 2008, through July, 2008, the U.S. lost 215 American soldiers to combat. That, obviously, is relatively a good thing, compared to the earlier much heavier losses.

No Americans lost would be my preference, which would have been the case had Bush not lied in 2003, and had not invaded Iraq that year.

But what neither McCain nor Bush are adding to the “surge is working” mantra is a series of factors that more accurately explain the drop in casualties, a drop that has little or nothing to do with the escalation. The drop in casualty rates in fact coincided with the near completion of the ethnic cleansing of Sunnis that the Shiite militias had undertaken in Baghdad. In effect, the Sunni minority already had either been killed, or they had fled to other parts of Iraq, or had fled to Syria and to Jordan to save themselves and their families. Syria now has about 1.5 million Iraqis who are refugees from the killing fields in Iraq, and Jordan has about 750,000 of such refugees. (As opposed to less than a thousand Iraqi refugees who have been admitted to the United States).

To simplify the equation, there were very few Sunnis remaining to be killed who were within reach of the Shiite militias.

Adding to this milestone was the outright U.S. bribery of Sunni tribesmen in western Iraq, many of whom once had been allied with Al-Qaeda, and who made up the bulk of the insurgency, but who are now fighting alongside the Americans. The bribing of Sunnis started in 2006 by a fellow named Col. McFarland, and not in 2007 under Petraeus. It continued under Petraeus.

The result of this positive change in strategy has been to drive Al-Qaeda sympathizers into remote corners of Iraq, and away from where U.S. troop strength is concentrated.

While it has fortunately brought down American casualties, bribing these former enemies is itself a danger. No one knows what will happen should someone else come along and offer them more money. The danger is that they may not stay bribed and they may turn on Americans again with the weapons General Petraeus has given them. But hopefully they will stay bribed, and that would also be a good thing. One wishes that General Westmoreland would have thought of that military strategy in Vietnam, provided, that is, only if the Communists were capable of being bribed.

The third factor accounting for the drop in U.S. deaths is the cease-fire called by Moktada Al-Sadr, which has been of great help in saving American lives. One must suppose that the cease fire came about because of the departure of Sunnis from Baghdad—people who were the targets of Al-Sadr’s militia.

Far be it for me to accuse politicians of using wars and casualties to advance themselves politically, but in short, Mr. Bush and Sen. McCain have manufactured the modern myth that escalating troop strength was the correct formula for Iraq, thus giving McCain the words to his song of “Obama was wrong.” In fact, Obama is wrong on a lot of issues, but he was right when he opposed the Iraq War [though he has continued to vote the money to pay for it] and he was not wrong on the escalation.

McCain, however, has tried to turn his deadly mistake of supporting the Iraq War to his advantage by trumpeting that his policy decision has brought down American casualties. But what neither Obama nor McCain are talking about is the 32,000 wounded and maimed Americans, nor do they mention the several hundred thousand Iraqis who have died as a result of Bush’s invasion and who would be alive today had Bush not invaded. It’s as though those dead Iraqis never existed. Supporters of the Iraq war are unable so see the wreckage of Iraqi lives caused by George W. Bush, the former fraternity boy, who has left to someone else the cleaning up of the terrible mess he’s made.

The suffering of the tens of thousands of Iraqis and the killing of hundreds of thousands more is an invisible thing, invisible because of the silence of the mainstream American press as well as the silence of the politicians. That silence, that arrogance, and that refusal to see what has been done to Iraq and to the Middle East allows those people to argue for continuing a debilitating war until we reach some vague “victory,” where someone else suffers, but not them.

James G. Abourezk is a lawyer practicing in South Dakota. He is a former United States senator and the author of two books, Advise and Dissent, and a co-author of Through Different Eyes. Abourezk can be reached at georgepatton@alyajames.net.

Source / counterpunch

Thanks to David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

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Presidential Campaign : "Liberal Media Bias" Debunked

Posted on July 27, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


Cable talking heads accuse broadcast networks of liberal bias — but a think tank finds that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Barack Obama than on John McCain in recent weeks.
By James Rainey / July 27, 2008

Haters of the mainstream media reheated a bit of conventional wisdom last week.

Barack Obama, they said, was getting a free ride from those insufferable liberals.

Such pronouncements, sorry to say, tend to be wrong since they describe a monolithic media that no longer exists. Information today cascades from countless outlets and channels, from the Huffington Post to Politico.com to CBS News and beyond.

But now there’s additional evidence that casts doubt on the bias claims aimed — with particular venom — at three broadcast networks.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign.

You read it right: tougher on the Democrat.

During the evening news, the majority of statements from reporters and anchors on all three networks are neutral, the center found. And when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative.

Network reporting also tilted against McCain, but far less dramatically, with 43% of the statements positive and 57% negative, according to the Washington-based media center.

Conservatives have been snarling about the grotesque disparity revealed by another study, the online Tyndall Report, which showed Obama receiving more than twice as much network air time as McCain in the last month and a half. Obama got 166 minutes of coverage in the seven weeks after the end of the primary season, compared with 67 minutes for McCain, according to longtime network-news observer Andrew Tyndall.

I wrote last week that the networks should do more to better balance the air time. But I also suggested that much of the attention to Obama was far from glowing.

That earned a spasm of e-mails that described me as irrational, unpatriotic and . . . somehow . . . French.

But the center’s director, RobertLichter, who has won conservative hearts with several of his previous studies, told me the facts were the facts.

“This information should blow away this silly assumption that more coverage is always better coverage,” he said.

Here’s a bit more on the research, so you’ll understand how the communications professor and his researchers arrived at their conclusions.

The center reviews and “codes” statements on the evening news as positive or negative toward the candidates. For example, when NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell said in June that Obama “has problems” with white men and suburban women, the media center deemed that a negative.

The positive and negative remarks about each candidate are then totaled to calculate the percentages that cut for and against them.

Visual images and other more subjective cues are not assessed. But the tracking applies a measure of analytical rigor to a field rife with seat-of-the-pants fulminations.

The media center’s most recent batch of data covers nightly newscasts beginning June 8, the day after Hillary Rodham Clinton conceded the Democratic nomination, ushering in the start of the general-election campaign. The data ran through Monday, as Obama began his overseas trip.

Most on-air statements during that time could not be classified as positive or negative, Lichter said. The study found, on average, less than two opinion statements per night on the candidates on all three networks combined — not exactly embracing or pummeling Obama or McCain. But when a point of view did emerge, it tended to tilt against Obama.

That was a reversal of the trend during the primaries, when the same researchers found that 64% of statements about Obama — new to the political spotlight — were positive, but just 43% of statements about McCain were positive.

Such reversals are nothing new in national politics, as reporters tend to warm up to newcomers, then turn increasingly critical when such candidates emerge as front-runners.

It might be tempting to discount the latest findings by Lichter’s researchers. But this guy is anything but a liberal toady.

In 2006, conservative cable showmen Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly had Lichter, a onetime Fox News contributor, on their programs. They heralded his findings in the congressional midterm election: that the networks were giving far more positive coverage to the Democrats.

More proof of the liberal domination of the media, Beck and O’Reilly declared.

Now the same researchers have found something less palatable to those conspiracy theorists.

But don’t expect cable talking heads to end their trashing of the networks.

Repeated assertions that the networks are in the tank for Democrats represent not only an article of faith on Fox, but a crucial piece of branding. On Thursday night, O’Reilly and his trusty lieutenant Bernard Goldberg worked themselves into righteous indignation — again — about the liberal bias they knew was lurking.

Goldberg seemed gleeful beyond measure in saying that “they’re fiddling while their ratings are burning.”

O’Reilly assured viewers that “the folks” — whom he claims to treasure far more than effete network executives do — “understand what’s happening.”

By the way, Lichter’s group also surveys the first half-hour of “Special Report With Brit Hume,” Fox News’ answer to the network evening news shows.

The review found that, since the start of the general-election campaign, “Special Report” offered more opinions on the two candidates than all three networks combined.

No surprise there. Previous research has shown Fox News to be opinion-heavy.

“Special Report” was tougher than the networks on Obama — with 79% of the statements about the Democrat negative, compared with 61% negative on McCain.

There’s plenty of room for questioning the networks’ performance and watching closely for symptoms of Obamamania.

But could we at least remain focused on what ABC, NBC and CBS actually put on the air, rather than illusions that their critics create to puff themselves up?

Source / Los Angeles Times

Thanks to Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog

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Will Survivalists Get the Last Laugh?

Posted on July 27, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

With multiple crises on the horizon, survivalist views don’t seem as marginal as they did before.
By Scott Thill / July 26, 2008.

They used to be paranoid preparation nuts who built bomb shelters for a place to duck and cover during nuclear dustups with communist heathens, but their tangled roots go back to the Great Depression for a reason. If you want to get sociological about it, survivalism started out as a response to economic catastrophe. And now, with a cratering stock market, a housing meltdown that has devalued everything in sight, and skyrocketing prices for food, gas and pretty much everything else, survivalists are preparing for — and are prepared for — the rerun. In fact, they may be the only people in America feeling good about the prospects of a major crash.

And the interesting thing about the once-fringe movement at this moment in history is that survivalism has now gone green — at least in theory.

From peak oil and food crises all the way to catastrophic payback from that bitch Mother Earth, there are more reasons to hide than ever. Conventional society as we know it is already undergoing some disastrous transformations. Ask anyone ducking fires in California, floods in the Midwest or bullets in Baghdad. Maybe it didn’t make sense to run for the hills, stockpile water and food, grow your own vegetables and drugs, or unplug from consumerism back when America’s budget surplus still existed, its armies weren’t burning up all the nation’s revenue and its infrastructure wasn’t being outsourced to a globalized work force.

But those days are gone, daddy, gone.

What’s coming up is weirder. Author, social critic and overall hilarious dude James Kunstler tackled that weirdness, otherwise known as an incoming post-oil dystopia, in his recent novel, World Made by Hand, which has since become one of a handful of survivalist classics. And as Kunstler sees it, whether you are talking about gun nuts or green pioneers, at least you are talking.

“At least they’re aware that we’ve entered the early innings of what could easily become a very disruptive period of our history,” the Clusterfuck Nation columnist explains. “Most of them are responding constructively rather than just defensively. They’re much more interested in gardening and animal husbandry than firearms.”

Not that the gun nuts have gone away. Their ranks have just diversified.

“The gun nuts have been on the scene longer than the peak oil argument has been in play,” he adds. “They were initially preoccupied with Big Government and its accompanying narrative fantasy of fascist oppression, which is why they adopted a fascist tone themselves. But peak-oil survivalists are different from the Ruby Ridge generation. They don’t think that a bolt-hole in the woods is a very promising strategy. We have no idea at this point what the level of social cohesion or disorder may be, but if the rural areas, especially the agricultural centers, become too lawless for farming, then we’ll be in pretty severe trouble because there will be nothing for us to eat.”

That’s not on the to-do list of author and SurvivalBlog owner James Rawles, who has been getting asked more and more questions by a mainstream press finally waking to the consequences of disaster capitalism, climate crisis and the hyperreal dream of bottomless consumption. He has fielded questions from the New York Times, and he has taken an online beating from conscientious pubs like Grist, but he hasn’t gone Hollywood. The times, which are a-changin’, have caught up to him.

“There is greater interest in preparedness these days because the fragility of our economy, lengthening chains of supply and the complexity of the technological infrastructure have become apparent to a broader cross section of the populace,” Rawles wrote to me via e-mail (but only after asking how many unique monthly visitors AlterNet commanded). “All parties concerned may not realize it, but the left-of-center greens calling for local economies and encouraging farmers markets have a tremendous amount in common with John Birchers decrying globalist bankers and gun owners complaining about their constitutional rights. At the core, for all of them, is the recognition that big, entrenched, centralized power structures are not the answer. They are, in fact, the problem.”

Fair enough. But that broad brush fails to recognize the complexities of the very community it is purporting to try to establish. Indeed, difference is what survivalists seem to be running from, whether it is historically the difference between blacks and whites, secularists and true believers, or simply the haves and have-nots. It is that latter crowd that the survivalists seem most worried about. Their separation from society at large is arguably a retreat from community rather than a striving toward it.

“I’d say that survivalism is indeed a celebration of community,” Rawles asserts. “It is the embodiment of America’s traditional can-do spirit of self-reliance that settled the frontier.”

But that’s also a generalization, especially when one considers that the word “settled” is a coded reduction for a “near-genocidal wipeout of the frontier’s native populations,” most if not all of whom were perfecting a survivalist ethic by maximizing their skill sets and living in symbiosis with the land that provided them what they needed in food, tools and medicine. In fact, those settlements would have been hard-pressed to exist without what Rawles earlier described as a “centralized power structure,” known as the expansionist United States government and its military, paving the road forward. Each self-reliant mythology carries within it grains of complicity in the community at large, which is a fancy way of saying there’s nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide.

This is especially true today in our hyperreal, hyperconsuming 21st century, where survivalism has become more of a gadget fantasy than an earnest grasp for community.

“It seems a natural human impulse that we are hard-wired to follow as circumstances require,” Kunstler says, “although it is constrained by social and cultural conditioning. To some degree, in our consumer culture, survivalism is related to the gear fetishism you see in popular magazines that purport to be about sporting adventures, but are really about acquiring snazzy equipment. America in 2008 has become a cartoon culture of Hollywood violence that promotes grandiose power fantasies of hyper-individualism and vigilante justice. Add guns and economic hardship, and spice it up with ethnic grievances, and the recipe is not very appetizing.”

This future cultural, environmental and geopolitical miasma is where the survivalist and the mainstream converge in agreement. Both camps, pardon the pun, are convinced that we’re screwed down the road.

“The next Great Depression will be a tremendous leveler,” Rawles prophesies. “If anything, life in the 22nd century will more closely resemble the 19th century than the 20th century. Sadly, the 21st century will probably be remembered as the time of the Great Die-Off.”

“I don’t consider it a total wipeout,” Kunstler counters. “It’s a very big change, but people are resilient and resourceful. Look, imagine if you were a person who had survived the Second World War in Europe, and you were walking around Berlin in the spring of 1946, a year after the end of the war. A once-magnificent city has been reduced to rubble. Your culture is lying in ashes. Yet, people pick up and rebuild.”

That is, if they’re sticking together. If they’re scattered and fending for themselves, and taking armed retreat defense tips from SurvivalBlog, that makes rebuilding a bit more complicated. Which, in the end, is where survivalism is most ambiguous. Is it a growing population of forward-looking realists who are smartly preparing for the die-off brought on by climate crisis and economic collapse, so they can pick up themselves and their people, and rebuild with that “can-do” spirit, as Rawles calls it? Or are they simply gadget-fascinated fundamentalists afraid of change and challenge, so afraid that they’d rather hide and hoard than join the fight?

The jury is still out. But, according to Rawles, it will soon have its diversity mirrored by survivalism’s changing demographic.

“I think that in the next couple of decades,” he explains, “we will witness the formation of some remarkable intentional communities that will feature some unlikely bedfellows: anarchists and Ayn Rand readers, Mennonites and gun enthusiasts, Luddites and techno-geeks, fundamentalist Christians and Gaia worshippers, tree huggers and horse wranglers. We welcome them all. Because the threats are clearly manifold: peak oil, derivatives meltdowns, pandemics, food shortages, market collapses, terrorism, state-sponsored global war and more. In a situation this precarious, I believe that it is remarkably naive to think that mere geographical isolation will be sufficient to shelter communities from the predation of evildoers.”

[Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.]

Source / AlterNet

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Worth a Thousand Words, Dept…

Posted on July 27, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


Thanks to Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog / Posted July 27, 2008

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The Big Green Bus: Ex-Diesel Goes Veggie

Posted on July 27, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


‘Spreading the green gospel’
By Patrick Pfeiffer / July 27, 2008

“Either you’re on the bus or you’re off the bus,” was the hackneyed statement proposed to me by three members of Dartmouth College’s Big Green Bus; an ex-diesel goes veggie 37′ foot school bus. My hometown San Francisco weekend was just beginning as I emphatically accepted the invitation to climb aboard and clock some miles with the 12 Dartmouth students on a mission to educate Americans about climate change through the use of this high profile ‘green’ machine.

A tour by resident Andrew Zabel (Dartmouth Class of 2009 and the bus’ leader) begins at the flap doors, in which the crossing of this threshold transports you into a funky retrofitted living space complete with bunk-beds, a library, multiple couches, a flat screen TV, a refrigerator, and a plethora of everyday comforts and necessities. A stroll along the central walkway brings you to the rear of the bus, to an oblong machine, complete with PVC piping, tubes, and everything else needed to take veggie oil and turn it into primo fuel. The ability of the Big Green Bus to run, relies on the ability of its team to track down ample amounts of spent deep-fryer oil from locations all across the country. The 70 gallons of McChicken grease that I witnessed came from a restaurant close to Shoreline Ampitheatre, the Saturday night Big Green Bus destination. The careful navigation of the bus down the restaurant’s narrow back ally and the subsequent assembly of the veggie oil pump to the gas tanks, serves to note the difficulty and time taken to refill the bus. At 7 miles per veggie-gallon, this fill would be enough to take the bus and its crew north to Oregon; stop number 27 of 43.

In ascertaining what the hardest part of the journey has been, Bennet Meyers (Dartmouth Class of 2009) complains of “California”. He then goes on to explain that because of “California’s environmental progressivism and forward-thinking population; it is extremely difficult to find any spent veggie oil in the state, for it has all been accounted for”. Whereas in the past burger joints and restaurants would have to pay a third party to remove this waste, they are now selling it to aggregators.

Within the past year, there is no doubt that the use of alternative fuels, especially biodiesel (made from veggie oil and other grades of diesel fuel) and ethanol have been on the front burner as a way to both help reduce our climatic impact and curb our dependence on foreign oil. However, the recent ramping up in production of biodiesel and ethanol has brought forth some bad rap to the alternative fuels world.

The negative side to increased biodiesel and ethanol production includes: an increase in food prices, an increase in land degradation (to grow the fuel stock) , and some experts even report that biodiesel and ethanol use leads to a net positive increase in carbon dioxide emissions (the most common of the greenhouse gasses).

Veggie oil is different however; the carbon impacts are net negative from a business-as-usual baseline. The oil used to power the Big Green Bus, would have been created anyways, and no additional cropland was used to create the stock. Furthermore, the use of veggie oil has been approved by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as an approved avenue to generate carbon credits (UNFCCC). Such credits, known as CERs (Certified Emission Reductions), are being traded at around $30 per metric ton. Even though the Big Green Bus is not eligible (the U.S. is not a signatory to the Kyoto protocol) to generate carbon credits, their carbon reductions and further, ability to affect change is priceless.

My weekend on the bus is one to remember. The ability to combine an environmental message with the fun of the bus is sure to inspire those who read about, saw, and/or toured the Big Green Bus. Whether it be Newman’s Own, Timberland, or Waste Management (3 of the bus’ biggest sponsors), corporations and individuals alike are hoping on this big green machine, helping to spread this green gospel.

Source / The Huffington Post

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Standing on Strong Legal Ground

Posted on July 27, 2008 by RagBlog

Hearing on Limits of Executive Power:
Vincent Bugliosi

Vincent Bugliosi’s opening statements during the House Judiciary Committee hearing on the constitutional limits of executive power.

The Rag Blog / Posted July 27, 2008

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Greed … Has Marked the Upward Surge of Mankind

Posted on July 26, 2008 by RagBlog


Evil as the Absence of Empathy
by Ernest Partridge / July 26, 2008

We live in a world … hardened and distorted by hate. We communicate in the language of fear and violence. Human beings are no longer viewed as human beings. They are no longer endowed in our eyes, or the eyes of those who oppose us, with human qualities. They do not love, grieve, suffer, laugh or weep. They represent cold abstractions of evil. The death-for-death means we communicate by producing corpses. – Chris Hedges

In 1946, Dr. Gustav M. Gilbert, a psychologist fluent in German, was assigned by the U.S. Army to study the minds and motivations of the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg tribunals. The following year, his Nuremberg Diary was published, containing transcripts of his conversations with the prisoners. (Excerpts here).

In words consistent with what I have read of, and about, Gustav Gilbert, he is portrayed in the 2000 TV film Nuremberg, as telling the Head Prosecutor Robert Jackson (Alex Baldwin): “I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants: a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

“Absence of empathy” is likewise, I submit, “the one characteristic that connects” most of the immoral and misbegotten tenets of Bushism: that dogmatic mix of market absolutism, libertarianism, corporatism and simple greed that falsely describes itself as “conservatism,” and which I choose to call “regressivism.” “Absence of empathy” is the essence of evil which, if unchecked and unreversed, is certain to bring about the demise of the American republic as we know it, just as it led to the fall of the Third Reich.

In contrast, empathy, the capacity to recognize and cherish in other persons, the experience, emotions and aspirations that one is aware of in oneself, is the moral cornerstone of progressive politics. It is a principle recognized and taught in all the great world religions, reiterated by numerous moral philosophers, and validated by the scientific study of human personality.

Empathy is the foundation of the moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. In that most-quoted New Testament verse, the golden rule, Jesus said: “as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.” (Luke 6:31, also Matthew 7:2). Also, “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” (Matthew 22:39, also Leviticus 19;18). Both commandments imply recognition in others of the human dignity and worth that one recognizes in oneself. In a word, empathy.

The golden rule is echoed in the moral teachings of Islam: “None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.” And as Mohamed taught in his last sermon, “Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you.” (Mohamed, last sermon). And Rabbi Hillel, a contemporary of Jesus, taught “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole Torah; the rest is just commentary.”

And yet, how much empathy is to be found among self-proclaimed “Christian” end-times preachers, such as James Hagee and Tim LeHaye, who eagerly anticipate “the rapture” and the eternal torment and damnation that awaits virtually all of humanity, as punishment for the sin of failing to agree with the preachers’ theology? How much empathy is evident in the late Jerry Falwell’s on-air remark to Wolf Blitzer, about Islamic militants, “If it takes 10 years, blow them all away in the name of the Lord,” and Ann Coulter’s infamous outburst, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.” Because they explicitly renounce Jesus’ injunction to “love thy enemies” these hate-mongers are, in a literal and moral sense, “anti-Christs.”

Regressivism and the Absence of Empathy

Empathy is conspicuously absent in the off-hand remarks of George Bush, his family, and his political allies. For example,

* Bush himself, to an ordinary citizen after a campaign event: “Who cares what you think?” And to Bob Woodward: “History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”

* The President’s mother, Barbara Bush, on Good Morning America: “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths. Oh, I mean, it’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?” (March 18, 2003).

* Dick Cheney, in an exchange with ABC reporter, Martha Raddatz:

Raddatz: Two-third of Americans say [the Iraq War] is not worth fighting.

Cheney: So?

Raddatz: So? You don’t care what the American people think?

Cheney: No….

* John McCain: “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” And in response to the news that cigarettes are a major US export to Iran, McCain remarked that it might be “a way of killing ‘em.”

* Former Senator Phil Gramm, economic advisor to John McCain, in an interview with the Washington Times, remarked that the American economy is in “a mental recession.: “We’ve sort of become a nation of whiners,” he added.


The foundational doctrines of regressivism are equally devoid of empathy. For example, Ayn Rand: “Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.. the process of setting man free from men.” (The Fountainhead) And “Man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself.” (The Virtue of Selfishness)

Furthermore, “economic Man” (Homo economicus), a central concept of neo-classical economic theory favored by regressives, is an uncompromising egoist, whose sole motivation is to “maximize personal utility” or “preference satisfaction.” A “perfect market” of fully informed, non-colluding, uncoerced “economic men,” free of government interference, the theory tells us, will invariably produce better results for all than any governmental system yet devised. Never mind that “economic man” and “the perfect market” are fictions, that never have been and never can be realized in any human society. (For a defense of this claim, see my “Beautiful Theory vs. Baffling Reality”).

The unfounded yet undiminished right-wing faith in the “wisdom” of the free-market and in the superiority of the pursuit of individual “utility maximization” as the engine of social progress, was starkly summed up by “Gordon Gekko” (Michael Douglas) in the 1987 movie, Wall Street: “Greed … is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind.”

In fact, history teaches us that greed is not good, and greed does not work. Homo economicus is, in fact, a moral monster, for he is a being devoid of empathy and even of conscience. A mere bundle of “consumer preferences” can not add up to personhood, much less moral agency. When greed (call it “the profit motive”) reigns supreme, “others,” be they employees or fellow citizens, are reduced to impersonal objects. If these “others” are employees, they are regarded as units of “human capital” to be replaced by less costly “units” (e.g. “outsourced”) whenever possible. And if they are fellow citizens, they are prospective customers, to be relieved through “creative marketing” of their disposable wealth. Human, social, environmental “external costs” be damned. Witness the tobacco industry.

A “society” of private, egoistic, “utility maximizers,” devoid of empathy and unregulated by law and popular government, without shared values, loyalties and aspirations, is no society at all. It is a Hobbesian state of nature – a “war of all against all,” wherein life becomes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”1

As we are now discovering, to our great regret and sorrow.

Progressivism and Empathy

In stark contrast, empathy — awareness of the needs, sufferings, aspirations, rights, and dignity of others — is the unifying theme of the progressive agenda, and of the history of political/economic liberalism (in the traditional sense of the word). The elite and wealthy delegates to the Continental Congress, when they demanded recognition of their rights, did not fail at that time to acknowledge the rights of all persons:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

True, at the outset the full “rights” of citizenship were restricted to white, male, landowners. But through time and constant struggle, those rights were extended to include all adult citizens, regardless of gender, race or creed. These struggles, which continue today, were led by “liberals,” and resisted by self-described “conservatives.”

Joe Conason eloquently describes these struggles and achievements:

If your workplace is safe; if your children go to school rather than being forced into labor; if you are paid a living wage, including overtime; if you enjoy a forty-hour week and you are allowed to join a union to protect your rights — you can thank liberals. If your food is not poisoned and your water is drinkable — you can thank liberals. If your parents are eligible for Medicare and Social Security, so they can grow old in dignity without bankrupting your family — you can thank liberals. If our rivers are getting cleaner and our air isn’t black with pollution; if our wilderness is protected and our countryside is still green — you can thank liberals. If people of all races can share the same pubic facilities; if everyone has the right to vote; if couples fall in love and marry regardless of race; if we have finally begun to transcend a segregated society — you can thank liberals. Progressive innovations like those and so many others were achieved by long, difficult struggles against entrenched power. What defined conservatism, and conservatives, was their opposition to every one of those advances. The country we know and love today was built by those victories for liberalism — with the support of the American people.2

That public support and the consequent liberal reforms issued from empathy: from the awareness throughout the general public that oppressed minorities and economically and educationally disadvantaged individuals, possess the same sentiments, needs, aspirations and rights that more fortunate citizens recognized in themselves.

Regressivism as Psychopathology

Empathy is never totally absent in any functioning human being. A recognition that other persons with whom one deals have functioning minds with ideas, emotions, and aspirations is implicit in game playing, in negotiations, and even ordinary conversation. Self awareness, even that of a thoroughly egoistic, narcissistic and sociopathic self, can only arise out of childhood interaction with others. The self is a social construct.

Thus even such sociopaths as George Bush and Dick Cheney will acknowledge that the bombs dropped on Iraq cause “collateral damage” and thus profound suffering to innocent civilians. They likewise are aware of the suffering in New Orleans caused by the mismanagement of the Katrina disaster. They are, after all, at least minimally sane. Such an awareness of others that is also devoid of feeling we might call “abstract empathy.” The misery to innocent others that they cause simply does not matter to the Busheviks. They do not care, unless these moral atrocities exact political costs to themselves.

This “abstract empathy” is not the sort of “empathy” that Dr. Gustav Gilbert found absent among the Nuremberg defendants. The empathy that he had in mind combines awareness with feelings of concern and with respect for the rights and integrity of the other.

In contrast, the regressivism of the Bush-Cheney administration would have us ignore the economic, social and environmental consequences of unregulated commerce, and also have us dismantle Social Security, impoverish public education, tolerate inadequate health care for millions of our fellow citizens, abolish fundamental constitutional rights, and engage in aggressive wars against unthreatening countries, all of this with minimal regard for the human misery caused by these policies. To do all this, requires a deliberate stifling of feelings of empathy, and what David Hume called the “natural moral sentiment” of benevolence: a genuine concern for the well-being of others.

Regressives who support such policies are, at worst, simply amoral: without moral restraint, “rotten to the core.” At best, they are profoundly mistaken: possibly fundamentally decent individuals, trustworthy, law-abiding, charming friends, devoted spouses and parents, but bewitched by false dogmas. The former are, by and large, beyond redemption and are best isolated from political influence and from positions of public responsibility. The latter might be amenable to evidence and rational persuasion.

How can such an ideology captivate and take political control of a nation once renowned and admired for its generosity and compassion and for its devotion to democracy and human rights?

In part, the rise and dominance of regressivism is the result of a deliberate and opulently funded public relations campaign, supported for the past forty years by wealthy individuals and corporations. This campaign included the establishment of ideological “think tanks” such as The American Enterprise Institute, The Heritage Foundation, and The Competitive Enterprise Institute, the abolition of The Fairness Doctrine and the consolidation of most of the mass media into six “conservative” mega-conglomerates, enormous expansion of corporate lobbying of Congress, and a vastly increased corporate involvement in campaign financing, of both major parties. With conservative Republicans in control of the White House for all but eight of the past twenty-eight years, the federal courts have become dominated by right-wing judges.

With these formidable propaganda resources, the resurgent Right has exploited “natural sentiments” equally fundamental to human nature as empathy; namely, ethnocentrism (identification with and loyalty to “our group”) and its negative complement, xenophobia (fear, distrust, and hatred of “outsiders”). The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 intensified these prejudices, objectifying and depersonalizing the new enemy (so-called “Islamo-Fascists”) while, at the same time, neutralizing empathetic sentiments toward the residents of these “alien” nations.

With the captive media exploiting and intensifying public fear of “terrorism,” the Bush regime formulated, and the intimidated Congress readily assented to, assaults upon our traditional civil liberties such as the PATRIOT Act, the Military Commissions Act, and now the revised FISA Act.

Finally, regressivism feeds upon greed: the relentless corporate drive for still more profits and political control, and the perpetual cultivation of consumer demand by the multi-billion dollar advertising and public relations industries.

But greed is pitiless and blind to the side effects (“externalities”) of the unconstrained appetite for the consumption of consumer goods and for profit: effects such as poverty, pollution, disease, and the “collateral damage” of war upon innocent civilians.

A political economy based upon unregulated greed has been tried numerous times in the past, and has failed in each and every occasion: the French and Russian Revolutions, the era of the robber barons in the late Nineteenth Century, the Great Depression of the Thirties. They failed because when greed rules, the nation’s wealth inevitably flows from those who produce the wealth to those who own and control the wealth until, eventually, the toleration of the increasingly miserable masses for this economic injustice collapses, and the oligarchic regime is overthrown.

Once again, regressivism is on the brink of collapse.

* Time magazine and the Rockefeller Foundation reported last week that 85% of US population is unhappy with the US economy.

* In April, 80% of Americans believed that the “country is moving in the wrong direction.”

* “During the first six months of 2008, 343,159 Americans lost their homes, up 136% from 145,696 recorded during the same period in 2007.” (CNNMoney.com).

* An alarming and under-reported increase in unemployment and inflation is underway. (US government cost of living statistics do not include food and fuel prices).

* The latest Gallup Poll reports that Democratic party affiliation leads Republican by ten points (47% to 37%).

* George Bush’s approval ratings are at an all-time low at 28% (disapproval from 61%-69%).

This public sentiment should suffice to overthrow any regime that maintains power “with the consent of the governed” and subject to recall by election. Under normal circumstances, these statistics would indicate a landslide repudiation of the regime in the coming national election.

But these are not normal circumstances, for this regime is supported by a formidable array of resources: virtually unlimited financial support, a captive media including a cadre of right-wing pundits, a proven ability to rig elections along with a refusal of the media to investigate and report election fraud, oppressive laws, a ruthless GOP campaign organization unconstrained by facts, fair-play, or even on occasion, by the law. All these resource might once again overwhelm the “consent of the governed,” and prolong the regressive regime for another four or even eight years. But eventually, it must fall. The longer it holds on, the greater the misery and repression that will ensue, and the more violent the eventual overthrow.

Best to end it now.

But it will take an extraordinary effort by an overwhelming number of ordinary citizens to bring it off. There are no guarantees.

Notes

1. Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan.
2. Big Lies, p. 3.

Ernest Partridge is the co-editor of The Crisis Papers.

Source / Dissident Voice

The Rag Blog

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BushCo Is Desperate for Results, Even in Failure

Posted on July 26, 2008 by RagBlog

The M.E.K. [the Mujahideen-e-Khalqhas, Iranian dissident group] has been on the State Department’s terrorist list for more than a decade, yet in recent years the group has received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the United States. Some of the newly authorized covert funds, the Pentagon consultant told me, may well end up in M.E.K. coffers. “The new task force will work with the M.E.K. The Administration is desperate for results.”

Sy Hersh in the New Yorker

Source / Jesus’ General

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The Brewing Storm in Northern Iraq

Posted on July 26, 2008 by RagBlog

Vetoing the law came after protests by Kurdish and some Shiite MPs, who boycotted the vote over a secret ballot on Kirkuk’s provincial council seats. (Reuters photo)

Election Law Polarizes Kirkuk
By Afif Sarhan / July 24, 2008

KIRKUK — The controversial provincial election legislation is leaving the northern oil-rich city of Kirkuk polarized between Arabs who believe it would restore justice and Kurds who see it a threat to their influence.

“We had only one day of hope and happiness when the new election law was approved,” Firas Bakar, an Arab resident of Kirkuk, told IslamOnline.net.

“Kurds, again, took away the dream.”

The law would have given equal distribution of seats among Kurds, Turkmen and Arabs in the disputed city, which means Kurds would lose their current control over Kirkuk’s provincial council seats.

The Presidential Council, headed by President Jalal Talabani, has rejected the law, passed by the parliament to pave the way for provincial elections later this year.

“The president does not accept a law like this,” read a statement issued by the office of Talabani, himself a Kurd.

“We were beginning to trust the government with the approval of the law but Kurds could not let it happen,” fumed Bakar, a 43-year-old teacher.

“The decision taken by the parliament was about to achieve justice,” insists Fadhel Mustafa, an Arab MP.

“Giving power to just one group is unfair and without logic.”

He warns that the city has been on shaky grounds for years.

“Kurdish politicians have been encouraging Kurds to settle in Kirkuk and change the normal structure of the city.”

Kirkuk, a historically and ethnically mixed city, has seen successive political policies altering its demographics.

Thousands of Kurds were reportedly forced out in the 1970s by the Saddam Hussein regime.

Over the past five years, the city has seen thousands of Kurds returning and other thousands of Arabs forced out from their homes.

Sunni Arabs, who make up nearly 30 percent of Kirkuk population, accuse the local government of siding with the returning Kurds.

Tension

For Kurds, rejecting the provincial election legislation and having total control over Kirkuk’s council is fair.

“We have the right to control Kirkuk and make it our own,” Heyas Rebiwar, a resident of Sulaimaniyah, told IOL.

“We don’t want division of power.”

Kurds believe the oil-rich city is rightfully theirs.

“It is clear that this land is part of Kurdistan and we are the majority,” insists Rebiwar.

“We should have control over Kirkuk. If it doesn’t happen, we will fight for out rights, whatever the consequences are.”

Tensions are already running high in the city.

“We have raised security over Kirkuk’s streets because we believe this recent announcement would drop more fuel over the fire,” a local police officer told IOL requesting anonymity for the sensitivity of the issue.

According to the police, five cases of sectarian violence were registered in only one day, and all of them resulted from heated political discussions over the law.

Uncertainty

Iraqi officials say vetoing the provincial election legislation over the Kirkuk dispute has left the entire political process in tatters.

“We expected that any decision that would involve Kirkuk’s control would create uncontrolled disputes,” a member from the electoral commission told IOL on condition of anonymity.

The commission had already said that provincial elections, scheduled for October 1, needed to be delayed until December 22.

The commission official believes that the delay would most likely be further extended now.

The presidential veto means the bill would be sent back to parliament to be redrafted.

“The situation is getting critical,” said the official.

“We hope a soon solution can be achieved so we can have a fair and democratic election.”

A delay of the elections would be a blow to the Bush administration, which considers them a key step toward national reconciliation.

The provincial elections are aimed at redistributing power in Iraq’s 18 provinces.

Most Sunni Arabs boycotted provincial balloting in 2005, enabling Shiites and Kurds to win a disproportionate share of power.

Source / Islam OnLine.Net

The Rag Blog

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Military Women Ready to Rock the Boat

Posted on July 26, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Sgt. Jennifer Hogg speaks out against sexual harassment and assault in the military. She calls attention to the importance of the upcoming election for military women. Photo by Jackie Scalone.

‘For the military this election has heavy stakes’
By Jennifer Hogg

For women in the military, this election season has the potential either to focus a spotlight on long-neglected needs or to continue rendering us invisible. Due to our military training, we often struggle to exercise our right to speak out, but now we need systemic and systematic change both to do justice to service members and to create healthier communities for everyone.

I was still in high school in 2000 when I joined up, looking for a fuller life than I saw available to me in blue-collar Buffalo, New York. But would I have ever joined the military if higher education was not so hard to fund? Would the young, the poor, the single mothers feel their only option was to enlist if adequate housing, jobs and healthcare were available?

These are fundamental social inequalities that funnel people into the military. We hope to escape the injustice of racism, sexism and homophobia by proving ourselves—being able to say, “I served. I earned my place here.” And service does earn us praise, but only as long as we don’t rock that boat.

For the military, this election has heavy stakes, with two occupations taking place simultaneously, Iraq and Afghanistan, and a third waiting in the wings. Such high stakes tend to push aside other issues, and we risk being forced into silence for fear that the boat may capsize. But if it’s that close to going under, isn’t it time for a better boat?

Female veterans know this feeling all too well. All service members are taught to never question your own or your mission. For women service members this silence can have particularly dangerous consequences. When I began basic training, I never expected the culture of fear that service women take pride in living through. From a young woman ready to stand for what was right, I was being turned into a person who shrugged off injustice. When I helped another female recruit report a physical assault, I saw her become the target of widespread verbal harassment. The lesson? Bearing indignity silently in private is far better than risking public ridicule from those who choose to make you a target.

Imagine if those flashy recruiting commercials showed the real dangers a woman can face while serving in the military, living her formative years in a hazardous work environment where racism and homophobia are tolerated for the sake of “getting by” and sexual harassment goes unreported so you don’t “ruin his career.” All this while women work twice as hard to prove themselves as soldiers—more than just a “bitch,” “dyke,” “whore.”

I recently read a news story that highlighted service women who spoke of working twice as hard as the men in order to be seen as equal. That only made them appreciate the military, they said. These stories make me cringe because I remember very keenly boasting about unnecessary hardship—we thought it made us tough. But now such pride seems more like a coping method, one that allows negligent and sometimes criminal behavior to go unpunished. It pits women against one another, with those who are sexually assaulted seen as weak—as if strength alone and not luck allows one to avoid rape or assault.

Buried within this news story was an unfortunate example, a soldier named Spc. Kamisha Block reported dead in Iraq of a “non-combat related injury.” This injury turned out to be gunshot wounds inflicted by a male soldier who had a record of three previous assaults against her. It is obvious Spc. Block was not silent, yet her reports only resulted in her harasser being moved five minutes away from her in Iraq, allowing him the access to murder her before turning the gun on himself. When political candidates this season talk of foreign aggressors, they miss the largest threat military women face. By May of 2004 there were already 112 reports of sexual assault and rape in Iraq and Afghanistan. New Department of Defense policies make reporting easier, but what does it matter if complaints fall on deaf ears?

Sadly these are only secondary concerns in politics, at the VA and the Pentagon, or even in the antiwar movement—if they are issues at all. The current occupation of Iraq has left 97 women dead, the most so far of any American military intervention. Forty percent (39) of those are attributed to non-combat related injuries. Still uncounted in these numbers are suicides and murders that happen in the United States or on military bases post deployment. Spc. Block was reported to have died of friendly fire, so it is hard to extrapolate how many such deaths were actually murders. We need to know more about Pfc. Tina Priest, whose apparent suicide followed a rape allegation that was dropped after her death, and about Pfc. Lavena Johnson, who was brutally beaten, set on fire, doused with acid and somehow ruled a suicide. Their families are still trying to find answers.

One begins to understand why some women in Iraq—marked as targets by both their uniform and their womanhood—carry weapons for protection against fellow service members. We need to make these stories public, so that female service members find communities to amplify their voices when they speak out against these injustices. The Pentagon must be convinced that cover-ups will be uncovered with due haste. We need to ask other women, those who may feel like just one unworthy case, if they have stories to tell.

And we must look at the way post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) affects men if we really want to address the role of women in the military both as service members and partners of male soldiers. It’s easy to vilify men who turn on women with violence to escape their own powerlessness. Yet once again we don’t have a flashy military recruitment video that shows the real effects of war, seeing your friends blown up, being forced to kill. A whole generation of young service men is becoming emotionally shut off—for fear of seeming “weak” if they show signs of cracking under the enormous pressure of bloody combat.

The PTSD women experience in association with military sexual assault (MSA) must also be treated seriously. The title itself, post-traumatic stress disorder, suggests an abnormal reaction to combat or sexual assault. We continue to reinforce the idea that one is a broken person when experiencing PTSD—something wrong with the individual rather than with what happened to them. Women also lose out because current combat PTSD care is often geared towards men since women are officially barred from the combat zone, as though the military could sustain the occupation without women playing combat roles. If a woman is experiencing both combat and MST-related PTSD, she may be directed to male-filled PTSD groups or MST groups with no combat support. She has nowhere within the VA to find the care she needs.

If we are going to create any meaningful change for service women, it will require that as a country we begin to truthfully recognize our military. As it stands, the occupation of Iraq has become more of a far away sound bite than a tangible situation that real people face every day. Our media must do its job. Senator Barack Obama’s upcoming trip to Iraq, rather than becoming a media circus, could afford a valuable glimpse into the reality of the occupation for our female service members. Listen to their first hand accounts. It’s a real opportunity to highlight the dangers they face.

This is no time to relegate these concerns to the status of “women’s issues” in election campaigns. When any candidate is questioned on the gaps in VA health care, they cannot be allowed a free pass to render MST and female service members invisible. The candidates vying for commander in chief must be held accountable by the media for a full understanding of that job in the 21st Century when women in the military are a reality.

Women veterans and service members are bravely bringing these issues to light, breaking the codes of silence. Their acts of courage mean there is no longer an excuse for inaction at any level of our media or government. I have found a voice in SWAN, the Service Women’s Action Network, which allows me to share my story and help other women share theirs. The healing and subsequent strength gained from this regained visibility needs to happen for our country as well. Too often I am asked if my military battle dress is a boyfriend’s, as if it were not possible that the uniform was once my work clothing. Instead of asking such questions, it’s time to listen.

[With this commentary by SWAN activist Jennifer Hogg, WMC Media Track 2008 continues a series of dispatches on perspectives of issues that the press and the candidates must address in order to win women voters this November. The series began with economist Heidi Hartmann’s commentary, “Shaky Economic Times are Shakier for Women]

Source / Women’s Media Center / Posted July 18, 2008

Thanks to Alice Embree / The Rag Blog

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4,000 U.S. Deaths, and Just a Handful of Public Images

Posted on July 26, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Zoriah Miller, the freelance photographer who took this image and others of marines killed in a June 26 suicide attack and posted them on his Web site, was subsequently forbidden to work in Marine Corps-controlled areas of Iraq. Maj. Gen. John Kelly, the Marine Corps commander in Iraq, is now seeking to have Mr. Miller barred from all United States military facilities throughout the world. Mr. Miller has since left Iraq.
Photo by Zoriah Miller.

‘Public portrayal of the war is being sanitized’
By Michael Kamber and Tim Arrango / July 26, 2008

BAGHDAD — The case of a freelance photographer in Iraq who was barred from covering the Marines after he posted photos on the Internet of several of them dead has underscored what some journalists say is a growing effort by the American military to control graphic images from the war.

Zoriah Miller, the photographer who took images of marines killed in a June 26 suicide attack and posted them on his Web site, was subsequently forbidden to work in Marine Corps-controlled areas of the country. Maj. Gen. John Kelly, the Marine commander in Iraq, is now seeking to have Mr. Miller barred from all United States military facilities throughout the world. Mr. Miller has since left Iraq.

If the conflict in Vietnam was notable for open access given to journalists — too much, many critics said, as the war played out nightly in bloody newscasts — the Iraq war may mark an opposite extreme: after five years and more than 4,000 American combat deaths, searches and interviews turned up fewer than a half-dozen graphic photographs of dead American soldiers.

It is a complex issue, with competing claims often difficult to weigh in an age of instant communication around the globe via the Internet, in which such images can add to the immediate grief of families and the anger of comrades still in the field.

While the Bush administration faced criticism for overt political manipulation in not permitting photos of flag-draped coffins, the issue is more emotional on the battlefield: local military commanders worry about security in publishing images of the American dead as well as an affront to the dignity of fallen comrades. Most newspapers refuse to publish such pictures as a matter of policy.

But opponents of the war, civil liberties advocates and journalists argue that the public portrayal of the war is being sanitized and that Americans who choose to do so have the right to see — in whatever medium — the human cost of a war that polls consistently show is unpopular with Americans.

Journalists say it is now harder, or harder than in the earlier years, to accompany troops in Iraq on combat missions. Even memorial services for killed soldiers, once routinely open, are increasingly off limits. Detainees were widely photographed in the early years of the war, but the Department of Defense, citing prisoners’ rights, has recently stopped that practice as well.

And while publishing photos of American dead is not barred under the “embed” rules in which journalists travel with military units, the Miller case underscores what is apparently one reality of the Iraq war: that doing so, even under the rules, can result in expulsion from covering the war with the military.

“It is absolutely censorship,” Mr. Miller said. “I took pictures of something they didn’t like, and they removed me. Deciding what I can and cannot document, I don’t see a clearer definition of censorship.”

The Marine Corps denied it was trying to place limits on the news media and said Mr. Miller broke embed regulations. Security is the issue, officials said.

“Specifically, Mr. Miller provided our enemy with an after-action report on the effectiveness of their attack and on the response procedures of U.S. and Iraqi forces,” said Lt. Col. Chris Hughes, a Marine spokesman.

After heavy censorship of images of American casualties during World War I and the beginning of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt lifted the restrictions. Soon after, in September 1943, LIFE magazine published this image of three dead American soldiers and their landing craft on Buna Beach, New Guinea after a Japanese ambush. Photo by George Strock/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

News organizations say that such restrictions are one factor in declining coverage of the war, along with the danger, the high cost to financially ailing media outlets and diminished interest among Americans in following the war. By a recent count, only half a dozen Western photographers were covering a war in which 150,000 American troops are engaged.

In Mr. Miller’s case, a senior military official in Baghdad said that while his photographs were still under review, a preliminary assessment showed he had not violated ground rules established by the multinational force command. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing, emphasized that Mr. Miller was still credentialed to work in Iraq, though several military officials acknowledged that no military unit would accept him.

Robert H. Reid, the Baghdad bureau chief for The Associated Press, said one major problem was a disconnection between the officials in Washington who created the embed program before the war and the soldiers who must accommodate journalists — and be responsible for their reports afterward.

“I don’t think the uniformed military has really bought into the whole embed program,” Mr. Reid said.

“During the invasion it got a lot of ‘Whoopee, we’re kicking their butts’-type of TV coverage,” he said.

Now, he said the situation is nuanced and unpredictable. Generally, he said, the access reporters get “very much depends on the local commander.” More specifically, he said, “They’ve always been freaky about bodies.”

The facts of the Miller case are not in dispute, only their interpretation.

On the morning of June 26, Mr. Miller, 32, was embedded with Company E of the Second Battalion, Third Marine Regiment in Garma, in Anbar Province. The photographer declined a Marine request to attend a city council meeting, and instead accompanied a unit on foot patrol nearby.

When a suicide bomber detonated his vest inside the council meeting, killing 20 people, including 3 marines, Mr. Miller was one of the first to arrive. His photos show a scene of horror, with body parts littering the ground and heaps of eviscerated corpses. Mr. Miller was able to photograph for less than 10 minutes, he said, before being escorted from the scene.

Mr. Miller said he spent three days on a remote Marine base editing his photos, which he then showed to the Company E marines. When they said they could not identify the dead marines, he believed he was within embed rules, which forbid showing identifiable soldiers killed in action before their families have been notified. According to records Mr. Miller provided, he posted his photos on his Web site the night of June 30, three days after the families had been notified.

The next morning, high-ranking Marine public affairs officers demanded that Mr. Miller remove the photos. When he refused, his embed was terminated. Worry that marines might hurt him was high enough that guards were posted to protect him.

On July 3, Mr. Miller was given a letter signed by General Kelly barring him from Marine installations. The letter said that the journalist violated sections 14 (h) and (o) of the embed rules, which state that no information can be published without approval, including material about “any tactics, techniques and procedures witnessed during operations,” or that “provides information on the effectiveness of enemy techniques.”

“In disembedding Mr. Miller, the Marines are using a catch-all phrase which could be applied to just about anything a journalist does,” said Joel Campagna, Middle East program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

New embed rules were adopted in the spring of 2007 that required written permission from wounded soldiers before their image could be used, a near impossibility in the case of badly wounded soldiers, journalists say. While embed restrictions do permit photographs of dead soldiers to be published once family members have been notified, in practice, photographers say, the military has exacted retribution on the rare occasions that such images have appeared. In four out of five cases that The New York Times was able to document, the photographer was immediately kicked out of his or her embed following publication of such photos.

In the first of such incidents, Stefan Zaklin, formerly of the European Pressphoto Agency, was barred from working with an Army unit after he published a photo of a dead Army captain lying in a pool of blood in Falluja in 2004.

Two New York Times journalists were disembedded in January 2007 after the paper published a photo of a mortally wounded soldier. Though the soldier was shot through the head and died hours after the photo was taken, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno argued that The Times had broken embed rules by not getting written permission from the soldier.

Chris Hondros, of Getty Images, was with an army unit in Tal Afar on Jan. 18, 2005, when soldiers killed the parents of an unarmed Iraqi family. After his photos of their screaming blood-spattered daughter were published around the world, Mr. Hondros was kicked out of his embed (though Mr. Hondros points out that he soon found an embed with a unit in another city).

Increasingly, photographers say the military allows them to embed but keeps them away from combat. Franco Pagetti of the VII Photo Agency said he had been repeatedly thwarted by the military when he tried to get to the front lines.

In April 2008, Mr. Pagetti tried to cover heavy fighting in Baghdad’s Sadr City. “The commander there refused to let me in,” Mr. Pagetti said. “He said it was unsafe. I know it’s unsafe, there’s a war going on. It was unsafe when I got to Iraq in 2003, but the military did not stop us from working. Now, they are stopping us from working.”

James Lee, a former marine who returned to Iraq as a photographer, was embedded with marines in the spring of 2008 as they headed into battle in the southern port city of Basra in support of Iraqi forces.

“We were within hours of Basra when they told me I had to go back. I was told that General Kelly did not want any Western eyes down there,” he said, referring to the same Marine general who barred Mr. Miller.

Military officials stressed that the embed regulations provided only a framework. “There is leeway for commanders to make judgment calls, which is part of what commanders do,” said Col. Steve Boylan, the public affairs officer for Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq. For many in the military, a legal or philosophical debate over press freedom misses the point. Capt. Esteban T. Vickers of the First Regimental Combat Team, who knew two of the marines killed at Garma, said photos of his dead comrades, displayed on the Internet for all to see, desecrated their memory and their sacrifice.

“Mr. Miller’s complete lack of respect to these marines, their friends, and families is shameful,” Captain Vickers said. “How do we explain to their children or families these disturbing pictures just days after it happened?”

Mr. Miller, who returned to the United States on July 9, expressed surprise that his images had ignited such an uproar.

“The fact that the images I took of the suicide bombing — which are just photographs of something that happens every day all across the country — the fact that these photos have been so incredibly shocking to people, says that whatever they are doing to limit this type of photo getting out, it is working,” he said.

[Michael Kamber reported from Baghdad, and Tim Arango from New York.]

Source / New York Times

Also see Photographer Dismissed for Showing GI Remains / The Rag Blog / July 5, 2008

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