The Rag Blog

Tuesday’s Democratic primaries saw Barack Obama racking up over 60 percent of the white male vote in Wisconsin, riding an unprecedented historical demographic anomaly that will likely send him to the White House – barring a third consecutive general election theft by the Republicans. It appears Hillary Clinton’s goose is cooked.

Once whites demonstrated their willingness to vote for a “certain type” of Black man, in Iowa back in January, it was a foregone conclusion that African Americans would line up in overwhelming numbers behind the Illinois Senator. Before then, all that had held back the tides of Black mass commitment to Obama’s candidacy were lingering doubts that whites would support any “type” of Black person’s elevation to the nation’s highest office. When that dam broke, the African American celebration began. After 400 years in slave hell and Jim Crow purgatory, we’ve finally got a chance! Or so the crowd believes.

Obama wasn’t taking any chances. His strategy from the very beginning has been to flip the historical script by appealing directly to the most backward demographic in electoral politics: white males. This “white male strategy” – smelling eerily of a previous Republican “southern strategy” – required constant assurances to white men that Obama’s run would signal the end of race as a point of political contention in the United States. No longer would whites, especially males, be compelled to answer for their privileged status. A 40-plus year annoyance was nearly over, since Blacks had “already come 90 percent of the way” to equality. Obama told them so.

Reagan-loving whites – especially the white men who have always led the “backlash” against real and perceived African American gains – found themselves wooed by a Black man who understood their sense of revulsion at “the excesses of the Sixties and Seventies.” Wow! That’s the kind of change we’ve been waiting for, exclaimed increasing numbers of white males. A new day beckoned, free at last of psychological harassment from the likes of Reverends Jesse and Al.

Obama is a world-class wooer. His white male wooing is made much easier by the fact that those who consider themselves his “sisters” and “brothers” demand nothing whatsoever from him. Just come home when you get ready, brother. Obama is free to concentrate his attentions on the hard-to-get demographics, especially white men with their peculiar notions of “change.” No need for Obama to promise the hood a damn thing, except that he’ll cut a dashing figure in the Oval Office and make the homefolks proud that he’s there, symbolically representing them.

Republicans and GOP-leaning “independents” (meaning, deep-dyed whites) are crossing over in herds to vote for Obama. They’ve gotten the message: happy days are here again, when the darkies smiled and were careful not to hurt our feelings by telling the truth. That’s the kind of “change” we’ve always “hoped” for, by golly!

The white liberal/left, ineffectual and geographically scattered, are drawn irresistibly to the Black man who regales them with sweet nothings – literally, nothing in the way of the concrete policies for peace and social justice they claim to champion. His presence in their midst is enough. Besides, Obama is someone who is “capable of forging a progressive majority,” they say.

That’s a strange concept, since Obama doesn’t act like a progressive, or claim to be one. But he has no problem with folks gathering around him. He’s a real party guy.

The no-nonsense white men that rule society and cling to ownership of the world were harder nuts to crack; you’ve got to sign a prenuptial to get skin-tight with them. No problem. Before Obama even began to strut on the national runway, he’d won the approval of the Wall Street and military/industrial (and nuclear power) branches of the Money Family. Run-of-the-mill citizens will be barred from state court relief, so as not to jam up big corporations with their silly lawsuits. Energy companies can count on their usual subsidies. The “sanctity of contracts” will not be violated to save homeowners from foreclosure, no matter how deep the credit crisis becomes. The voracious military will be fed an additional 92,000 soldiers and Marines, regardless of what happens in Iraq, to be available for more wars. Most importantly – and this is the really smooth part of Obama’s game – the ever-increasing military budget will make moot all of Barack’s and Hillary’s (near identical) promises about health care, affordable housing, the whole public agenda that has been dangled in front of those fans and groupies in the cheap seats.

Once he gets in office, many of the swooners will find out that he’s already married to the Power Mob.

But that’s OK. Obama knows his most enthusiastic supporters – the ones that claim him as their own as a matter of blood – will stick by him without complaint. Hell, their “leaders” show every sign of allowing him to wine and dine and make promises to everybody else BUT them, at least until he is comfortably in office – maybe for the entirety of his first term. For the time being, though, Black folks aren’t even hearing what he’s saying to the white men or anybody else – they’re just enjoying the music: “It’s been a long, a long time coming, but I know, a change gonna come.”

Oh no it ain’t.

I would not have thought that the coverage of the US presidential campaign could get more shallow and meaningless, and then, along comes the plagiarism story.

OMG! Barack Obama, the silver-tongued front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, lifted a couple of lines and an idea from the black governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick. Patrick, himself something of a wordsmith, had been hit with the same attack by a wooden opponent, and responded by saying that words matter, and citing Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” line and the Declaration of Independence’s ringing “all men are created equal.”

Obama, whose oratorical skills have left the robotic and monotonous Hillary Clinton sounding like a pull-string Barbie on the stump (remember “Math is hard!”?), has had the Clinton campaign frantically casting around for a rejoinder, and the best they could come up with to date was a charge that he’s “all hat and no cattle” (itself a line lifted, uncredited, from Texas populist Jim Hightower, if I recall, though I think it has an older lineage among Texans, and has been appropriately applied to President Bush on numerous occasions). Obama decided to respond using some of Patrick’s lines.

Now, one could argue that Obama would have been better advised to give fair attribution to Gov. Patrick, but since when have politicians gone around putting footnotes on their public speeches? Most political speeches are exercises in cut and paste, full of regurgitated pablum and lifted quotes. If plagiarism were a political crime, 90 percent of members of Congress would be out on their ears. (For that matter, if plagiarism were a crime, Hillary Clinton herself would be behind bars. Her book, “It Takes a Village,” was largely written by Barbara Feinman, a Georgetown University journalism prof who was reportedly offered $120,000 for the job, but her name appeared nowhere in the volume, which Clinton still claims as her own work.)

Besides, come on now! We’re not nominating an English professor, god knows. If we were, how the hell would we have had Bush for president for the last what seems like eternity, with his maddening use of the word “nukular,” his drunken “sh” slurs all over the place, his grammatical atrocities, and his mangled quotes (remember “if you fool me once…”?)?

Excuse me, but we have a criminal $1-trillion war raging in Iraq that is sucking the lifeblood out of the American economy, killing American troops by the day and slaughtering innocent Iraqis by the hundred thousands, we have an economy that’s racing for the toilet like a party-goer who ate too many bad shrimps, we have bridges collapsing, we have the North Pole ice vanishing faster than Bush’s credibility, and the media are focussed laser-like on what? The momentious question of whether Obama lifted a quote from Gov. Patrick without acknowledgement?

We have Democrats trying to decide whether to select a woman senator who used insider information to make a killing in cattle futures, who has accepted massive donations from the healthcare industry and military contractors, who voted enthusiastically if cynically for George Bush’s Iraq War, and whose husband wants nothing more than a new shot at some eager White House interns, or a black senator who spoke out against that war before it happened, when to do so was to risk being called a traitor by the Commander in Chief and his minions, and the best our vaunted “independent” media pundits can do is what? Accuse Obama of plagiarism?

We could use some reporting on Clinton’s and Obama’s corporate backing, on the key people advising them on foreign affairs and domestic economic policy, some serious challenges on how each candidate will actually address climate change issues, and on how they can do anything without attacking the out-of-control military budget. Instead, we get this “big” plagiarism story as the main event of the Wisconsin primary.

Thank you, Fourth Estate, for making us a well-informed citizenry.

In his victory speech in Texas Tuesday, Barack Obama promised to end the Iraq war in 2009, a new commitment that parallels recent opinion pieces in The Nation.

Prior to his Houston remarks, Obama’s previous position favored an American combat troop withdrawal over a sixteen-to-eighteen-month timeframe. He has been less specific on the number and mission of any advisers he would leave behind.

Ending the war in the first year of his potential presidency, therefore, is the strongest stand Obama has taken thus far, and one he will be questioned on sharply by the Republicans and the media. As Juan Cole noted last year, the Bush-Cheney team is preparing a “poison pill” of disorder and blame for any future President contemplating an Iraq troop withdrawal.

Did Obama mean it? Was it only rhetoric? Perhaps, but as Obama has said over and over lately, words make a difference. He may be asked to square his 2009 goal with his previous eighteen-month timetable. To avoid inconsistencies or missteps, he might claim that he will publicly declare in 2009 that he is ending the occupation but bringing the troops home on his longer timetable. Who knows? But these were words worth holding the candidate to. The astonishing thing is that antiwar sentiment among Obama’s base is running strongly enough to push the candidate forward to a stronger commitment. By comparison, in The Audacity of Hope (2006), Obama wrote that “how quickly a complete withdrawal can be accomplished is a matter of imperfect judgment based on a series of best guesses.”

The Iraq war, and the so-called war on terrorism, are now guaranteed to loom large in the likely battle between Obama and John McCain. The American experience, first with Vietnam and now with Iraq, provides a strong reservoir of support for Obama’s skeptical position from 2002 until the present time. But McCain’s personal experience as a tough Navy pilot and prisoner of war makes him much more formidable than Hillary Clinton as a “national security” advocate against Obama. McCain’s remarks last night were focused entirely on Obama’s lack of experience in foreign affairs, and should be a wake-up call to the peace movement to become more engaged in the presidential election.

Obama faces two immediate tests aside from the primary contests ahead. First, sometime in April, General David Petraeus will be testifying in Washington that the conditions are improving in Iraq and that the United States must “stay the course.” Petraeus will be acting as a de facto surrogate for McCain in domestic politics. Obama will have to respond to the general’s serious claims without retreating from the commitment he has given to early withdrawal.

Second, the questions of Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan could intensify as a symbol of America’s current policies towards terrorism. McCain has already absorbed both neoconservative doctrines and the neoconservatives themselves in his campaign against “Islamo-fascism” as the greatest threat in American history.

First, the neoconservatives will push for Obama’s (and the Democrats’) acceptance of their terminology to control the debate, or berate their opponents as weak for not recognizing “Islamo-fascism” as the new equivalent of the Communist threat during the cold war.

Next, they will attack Obama for proposing to pull the plug on Iraq just when the tide is turning.

Finally, they will question Obama’s experience in pushing for diplomacy towards Iran, and draw him out on why he favors more troops in Afghanistan and a pre-emptive strike against Pakistan if there is “actionable intelligence.” They will probe, too, into Obama’s commitment to Israel.

It will be messy and ugly, with right-wingnuts calling Obama by his middle name as often as possible.

Weeks before Obama became the front-runner, the New York Times hired William Kristol as another in-house neoconservative, as Kristol was blasting the Democratic Party for becoming “the puppet of the antiwar groups.” The Times’s own “objective” news commentary adopted the right-wing frame that the Democrats would “seem unpatriotic” by cutting funds for American troops while “under intense pressure from the antiwar faction [read: majority] of their party.” Wedge politics virtually dictates that splintering the Obama campaign, the Democrats and the antiwar movement, while uniting the right and center around “experience,” will be the strategic agenda for Republicans through November. If he is not the vice-presidential candidate, Joe Lieberman will be employed as the primary ally of the Republicans in trying to make inroads into the American Jewish community as well.

But there are Republican weaknesses to expose too, beginning with their attempt to perpetuate an endless trillion-dollar war in Iraq. MoveOn and others will strike hard at that Republican vulnerability. According to counterinsurgency doctrine, the current Iraq war is expected to last throughout the next presidential term, longer than most Americans can imagine supporting it. On Iran, the recent National Intelligence Estimate has dampened any White House plans for an American strike, though the Israelis may act as a dangerous surrogate before December.

Then there is the quagmire of Afghanistan, where no military solution is in sight. And finally, in Pakistan, $11 billion invested in the Musharraf regime was swept away by the voters yesterday. The Pakistanis do not want to be pawns in the American war on terrorism. They know that a military fight with the Taliban or Al Qaeda is also a bottomless battle against Pashtun nationalism with implications for Pakistan’s stability as a whole.

The danger for Obama lies in being challenged by McCain, the neoconservatives and the right-wing conservatives to prove his credentials as a militarist or face being painted as another Democrat too weak to be Commander-in-Chief.

The opportunity for the peace movement is to engage in open political and intellectual battle, from precincts to public forums, against the neoconservative agenda for a permanent war against Muslim radicals and on behalf of American access to oil with dire consequences at home.

From prostitutes to Super bowl tickets, a federal probe reveals how contractors in Iraq cheated the U.S.

21/02/08 ” Chicago Tribune” — — ROCK ISLAND, Ill.—Inside the stout federal courthouse of this Mississippi River town, the dirty secrets of Iraq war profiteering keep pouring out.

Hundreds of pages of recently unsealed court records detail how kickbacks shaped the war’s largest troop support contract months before the first wave of U.S. soldiers plunged their boots into Iraqi sand.

The graft continued well beyond the 2004 congressional hearings that first called attention to it. And the massive fraud endangered the health of American soldiers even as it lined contractors’ pockets, records show.

Federal prosecutors in Rock Island have indicted four former supervisors from KBR, the giant defense firm that holds the contract, along with a decorated Army officer and five executives from KBR subcontractors based in the U.S. or the Middle East. Those defendants, along with two other KBR employees who have pleaded guilty in Virginia, account for a third of the 36 people indicted to date on Iraq war-contract crimes, Justice Department records show.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Rock Island sentenced the Army official, Chief Warrant Officer Peleti “Pete” Peleti Jr., to 28 months in prison for taking bribes. One Middle Eastern subcontractor treated him to a trip to the 2006 Super Bowl, a defense investigator said.

Prosecutors would not confirm or deny ongoing grand jury activity. But court records identify a dozen FBI, IRS and military investigative agents who have been assigned to the case. Interviews as well as testimony at the sentencing for Peleti, who has cooperated with authorities, suggest an active probe.

Rock Island serves as a center for the probe of war profiteering because Army brass at the arsenal here administer KBR’s so-called LOGCAP III contract to feed, shelter and support U.S. soldiers, and to help restore Iraq’s oil infrastructure.

In one case, a freight-shipping subcontractor confessed to giving $25,000 in illegal gratuities to five unnamed KBR employees “to build relationships to get additional business,” according to the man’s December 2007 statement to a federal judge in the Rock Island court. Separately, Peleti named five military colleagues who allegedly accepted bribes. Prosecutors also have identified three senior KBR executives who allegedly approved inflated bids. None of those 13 people has been charged.

A common thread runs through these cases and other KBR scandals in Iraq, from allegations the firm failed to protect employees sexually assaulted by co-workers to findings that it charged $45 per can of soda: The Pentagon has outsourced crucial troop support jobs while slashing the number of government contract watchdogs.

The dollar value of Army contracts quadrupled from $23.3 billion in 1992 to $100.6 billion in 2006, according to a recent report by a Pentagon panel. But the number of Army contract supervisors was cut from 10,000 in 1990 to 5,500 currently.

Last week, the Army pledged to add 1,400 positions to its contracting command. But even those embroiled in the frauds acknowledge the impact of so much war privatization.

“I think we downsized past the point of general competency,” said subcontractor Christopher Cahill, who for a decade prepared military supply depots under LOGCAP. Now serving 30 months in federal prison for fraud, Cahill added: “The point of a standing army is to have them equipped.”

KBR, a former subsidiary of Halliburton Co., says it has been paid $28 billion under LOGCAP III. The firm says it quickly reports all instances of suspected fraud and has repaid the Defense Department more than $1 million for questionable invoices.

In a statement, KBR said its roughly 20,000 employees and 40,000 subcontractors have performed laudably in a war zone where Army demands shift rapidly and local suppliers don’t always maintain ledger books. Spokeswoman Heather Browne wrote: “Ethics and integrity are core values for KBR.”

But a wiretapped transcript recently released in Rock Island underscores the brazen nature of the exceptions.

In October 2005, with federal agents tailing them, three war contractors slipped through London’s posh Cumberland hotel before meeting in a quiet lounge. For the rest of that afternoon, the men sipped cognac and whiskey and discussed the bribes that had greased contracts to supply U.S. troops in Iraq.

Former KBR procurement manager Stephen Seamans, who was wearing a wire strapped on by a Rock Island agent, wondered aloud whether to return $65,000 in kickbacks he got from his two companions, executives from the Saudi conglomerate Tamimi Global Co.

One of the men, Tamimi operations director Shabbir Khan, urged him to hide the money by concocting phony business records.

“Just do the paperwork,” Khan said.

Party houses, prostitutes

In October 2002, five months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Khan threw a birthday party for Seamans at a Tamimi “party house” near the Kuwait base known as Camp Arifjan. Khan “provided Seamans with a prostitute as a present,” Rock Island prosecutors wrote in court papers. Driving Seamans back to his quarters, Khan offered kickbacks that would total $130,000.

Five days later, with Seamans and Khan hammering out the fine print, KBR awarded Tamimi the war’s first $14.4 million mess hall subcontract, court records show.

In April 2003, as American troops poured into Iraq, Seamans gave Khan inside information that enabled Tamimi to secure a $2 million KBR subcontract to establish a mess hall at a Baghdad palace. Seamans submitted change orders that inflated that subcontract to $7.4 million.

By June, Seamans and fellow KBR procurement manager Jeff Mazon, a Country Club Hills resident, had executed subcontracts worth $321 million. At least one deal put U.S. soldiers at risk.

The Army LOGCAP contract required KBR to medically screen the thousands of kitchen workers that subcontractors like Tamimi imported from impoverished villages in Nepal, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.

But when Pentagon officials asked for medical records in March 2004, Khan presented “bogus” files for 550 Tamimi workers, Assistant U.S. Atty. Jeffrey Lang said in a court hearing last year.

KBR retested those 550 workers at a Kuwait City clinic and found 172 positive for exposure to hepatitis A, Lang told the judge. Khan tried to suppress those findings, warning the clinic director that Tamimi would do no more business with his medical office if he “told KBR about these results,” Lang said in court. The infectious virus can cause fatigue and other symptoms that arise weeks after contact.

Retesting of the 172 found that none had contagious hepatitis A, Lang said, and Khan’s attorneys said in court that no soldiers caught diseases from the workers or from meals they prepared. It remains unclear if that is because the workers were treated or because they did not remain infectious after the onset of symptoms.

Still, the incident shows how even mundane meal contracts can put troops at risk. Similar disease-testing breaches cropped up at cafeterias outsourced to firms besides Tamimi, former KBR Area Supervisor Rene Robinson said in a Tribune interview.

“That was an ongoing problem,” Robinson said. “When the military asked for paperwork, it was spotty.” KBR was forced to begin vaccinating the employees at their work sites, he added.

Tamimi and its U.S. lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. The company has said it is cooperating with federal authorities.

By July 2005, Tamimi had secured some 30 KBR troop feeding subcontracts worth $793.5 million, records show. Khan continued to negotiate Iraq war subcontracts for Tamimi until shortly before he was arrested in Rock Island in March 2006.

He is now serving a 51-month prison sentence for lying to federal agents about the kickbacks he wired to Seamans, who pleaded guilty and served a year and a day in prison. Both declined to comment.

Seamans, a 46-year-old Air Force veteran, once taught ethics to junior KBR employees. At his December 2006 sentencing hearing, he expressed remorse for taking the kickbacks, telling the judge: “It is not the way that Americans do business.”

It was another repentant LOGCAP veteran standing before a Rock Island judge on Wednesday. Peleti, formerly the military’s top food service adviser for the Middle East, wept as he admitted taking bribes from Tamimi and three other subcontractors between 2003 and early 2006.

Ribbons and badges glittered across Peleti’s pressed green Army shirt. “I stand here before you today to convey my remorse and sincere regret,” he said, then broke down.

One subcontractor, Public Warehousing Co., took Peleti and another top Army official to the Super Bowl, a defense investigator said in court Wednesday. The firm has denied wrongdoing. Khan also bribed Peleti to influence LOGCAP contracts with cash. Peleti was arrested in 2006 while re-entering the U.S. at Dover Air Force Base with a duffel bag stuffed with watches and jewelry as well as about $40,000 concealed in his clothing.

While prosecutors documented kickbacks in only the first two of Tamimi’s mess hall subcontracts, they contend that the tone was set to corrupt the system.

“Tamimi and Mr. Khan have their hooks into Mr. Seamans, they have their hooks into KBR,” Lang said in court last year. “It is difficult to assess the kind of damage that did to the integrity of the subcontracting process when the first two subcontracts are corrupted.”

Auditors in the basement

Military auditors say they closely monitor the layers of KBR subcontractors who actually perform most of the LOGCAP work, stationing teams in Iraq. But one Rock Island search warrant said auditors working back in the U.S. could manage only limited reviews of the cascade of deals.

In the basement of one of KBR’s Houston office buildings, a 25-member team from the Defense Contract Audit Agency had “no communications” with “personnel on the ground,” so they could not confirm whether goods and services actually were delivered, the search warrant application said.

In the absence of oversight, some Middle Eastern businessmen would offer “Rolex watches, leather jackets, prostitutes, and the KBR guys weren’t shy about bragging about the fact that they were being treated to all that stuff,” said Paul Morrell, whose firm The Event Source ran several mess halls as a KBR subcontractor.

Such questionable relationships continued long after early procurement managers like Seamans had been rooted out. Early subcontractors such as Tamimi became almost indispensable in part by outfitting Army cafeterias with expensive power generators and refrigeration systems, records and interviews show.

“If you ever gave Tamimi a hard time, you’d get a call,” former KBR subcontract manager Harry DeWolf told the Tribune.

When subcontracts came up for renegotiation, DeWolf said, companies like Tamimi “would say, ‘Fine, we’re going to pull out all of our people and equipment.’ They really had KBR and the government over the barrel.”

Complicating the investigation of war-contract crimes, the government of Kuwait has denied a U.S. request to extradite two Middle Eastern businessmen accused of LOGCAP fraud. The country’s ambassador last year sent letters to the Justice Department asking the U.S. to drop its case against one of them, arguing that international agreements forbid U.S. prosecution of Kuwaiti residents for crimes allegedly committed on Kuwaiti soil. Prosecutors disagree, but a judge is considering Kuwait’s assertion.

Investigators also have faced challenges in dealing with KBR. The company has withheld some internal company documents relating to Mazon, Seaman’s fellow KBR procurement manager, the firm’s attorneys wrote in court filings.

In response to one subpoena, the firm gave agents about 2,760 of Mazon’s computer files but withheld 398 others, saying they were covered by attorney-client privilege or other protections.

Federal prosecutors say they have given KBR no special treatment and that the company has legal rights afforded to all firms whose employees have been charged with wrongdoing. “We did withhold some documents as being privileged,” a KBR spokeswoman wrote, but added that the company has provided statements and grand jury testimony.

Mazon has pleaded not guilty to charges that he inflated a fuel contract. His attorneys say the fuel subcontract was accidentally inflated when figures were converted from U.S. dollars to Kuwaiti dinars then back again. At least 22 KBR troop support subcontracts were inflated through similar errors, Mazon’s attorney J. Scott Arthur wrote in papers filed in Rock Island.

KBR attorneys said the company informed federal officials of three similar “double conversions” on other subcontracts. But KBR said it “has not undertaken an exhaustive search of its millions of pages of procurement documents” to determine whether other such errors exist.

dyjackson@tribune.com – jgrotto@tribune.com

21/02/08 “Seattle Times” — — Iraq should have cured President George W. Bush of any further itch for starting a war. And yet there comes a rumble for an attack on Iran. Opposing this, the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation sends out emissaries, several of whom visited The Seattle Times.

Among them was Brig. Gen. John H. Johns (ret.), who was assistant commander of the 1st Infantry Division and a lecturer at the Army War College. Like other generals, Johns opposed the invasion of Iraq, and he now opposes an attack on Iran.

Is such an attack possible? It is Bush’s last year in office. There is no time for a land war, and anyway, says Johns, “We don’t have the ground troops to do it.” But an air war is possible. Johns says it might destroy 1,200 to 1,600 targets.

Johns is not a spokesman for the government. Whether that makes him less credible will depend on your point of view. He lives near Washington, D.C., and socializes with retired generals and CIA officers and others from the security world. He speaks on behalf of a peace group. Take that for what it is worth.

Here is what he says: Last year, there was a push in the administration for an air war against Iran. The given reason was Iran’s plan to build an A-bomb. Then came the National Intelligence Estimate that said Iran had given up on it five years ago.

Says Johns, “The intelligence community intended that to be public to lessen the president’s chance of going to war. They wanted to avoid being complicit in another war. That’s the story I get.”

Johns says a struggle is under way in Washington, D.C. Those opposed to an attack include Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff. Those wanting an attack, he says, are the deputy national-security adviser for global democracy strategy, Elliott Abrams; Vice President Dick Cheney, “and the hard-line Israel lobby.”

Bombing Iraq is how Israel scotched Saddam Hussein’s A-bomb, in 1981. Israel is much admired for that, but preventive air attack is a high-risk strategy. It stirs hatred, and it has a large downside if it fails.

Diplomacy is lower-risk, especially if there is time for it. Johns goes further, arguing against an attack even if diplomacy fails. “Even if Iran got nuclear weapons,” he says, “they’re not going to commit suicide by using them.”

There may be other pretexts for war. On Jan. 6 came an incident of Iranian speedboats zipping around U.S. Navy ships in a provocative way. It could have been another Gulf of Tonkin incident.

What would it take to have a war with Iran? Stephen Kinzer, a former New York Times correspondent and author of “All the Shah’s Men” (2003), was also part of the peace delegation here. He says it might just take a decision. “The possibility of an attack is real,” he says, and notes that President Bush would not need a vote of Congress.

Air attack is an act of war. At least, Americans thought so in 1941. But despite the Constitution granting the war power to Congress, in Vietnam (1964), Kuwait (1990) and Iraq (2002) our presidents have asked Congress for permission to make war only when they expected major fighting on the ground. Even to invade Iraq, George W. Bush said he did not need permission and asked for it only after Congress, and the public, raised an outcry.

In 1999, President Clinton conducted a 78-day air war against Serbia even though the House deadlocked 213-213 on a resolution supporting it, and the Senate never voted at all. Clinton didn’t care; his position was that he didn’t need permission for an air war.

What matters is not only the Constitution; it is the outcry. Government does what it can get away with – and in the last year of the Bush presidency, it is still an open question how much that is.

Bruce Ramsey’s column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is bramsey@seattletimes.com.

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored”. Aldous Huxley

21/02/08 “ICH” — — The credit storm which began in July when two Bear Stearns hedge funds were forced to liquidate, has continued to intensify and roil the markets. Last week the noose tightened around auction-rate securities,a little-known part of the market that requires short-term funding to set rates for long-term municipal bonds. The $330 billion ARS market has dried up overnight pushing up rates as high as 20% on some bonds—a new benchmark for short term debt. Auction-rate securities are now headed for extinction just like the other previously-vital parts of the structured finance paradigm. The $2 trillion market for collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), the multi-trillion dollar mortgage-backed securities market (MBSs) and the $1.3 asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) market have all shut down draining a small ocean of capital from the financial system and pushing many of the banks and hedge funds closer to default.

The price of insuring corporate bonds has skyrocketed in the last few weeks making it more difficult for businesses to get the funding they need to expand or continue present operations. Much of this has to do with the growing uncertainty about the reliability of credit default swaps, a $45 trillion dollar market which remains virtually unregulated. Credit-default swaps are a type of financial instrument that are used to speculate on a company’s ability to repay debt. They pay the buyer face value in exchange for the underlying securities or the cash equivalent if a borrower fails to adhere to its debt agreements. When the price of CDSs increases, it means that there is greater doubt about the quality of the bond. Prices are presently soaring because the entire structured finance market—and anything connected to it—is under withering attack from the meltdown in subprime mortgages. As foreclosures continue to rise, the securities that were fashioned from subprime loans will continue to unwind destroying trillions of dollars of virtual-capital in the secondary market.

It all sounds more complicated than it really is. Imagine a 200 ft. conveyor belt with two burly workers and a mountain-sized pile of money on one end, and a towering bonfire on the other. Every time a home goes into foreclosure; the two workers stack the money that was lost on the transaction—plus all of the cash that was leveraged on the home via “securitization” and derivatives—-onto the conveyor-belt where it is fed into the fire. That is precisely what is happening right now and the amount of capital that is being consumed by the flames far exceeds the Fed’s paltry increases to the money supply or Bush’s projected $168 billion “surplus package”. Capital is being sucked out of the system faster than it can be replaced which is apparent by the sudden cramping in the financial system and a more generalized slowdown in consumer spending.

According to a recent Bloomberg article:

“A year ago $20 million would have gotten Luminent Mortgage Capital Inc. access to $640 million in loans to buy top-rated mortgage-backed securities. Now that much cash gets the firm no more than $80 million. …(Only) 6 lenders are offering 5 times leverage, while a year ago, 20 banks extended 33 times.”

The banks are not providing anywhere near as much money for leveraged investments as they did just last year. And, when credit shrinks on a national scale–as it is—so does the economy. It’ a simple formula; less money means less economic activity, less growth, fewer jobs, tighter budgets, more pain.

Bloomberg continues:

“Wall Street firms, reeling from $146 billion in losses on their debt holdings, are fueling a credit crisis by clamping down on lending to investors and hedge funds that use borrowed money to buy securities. By pulling back, (the banks) are contributing to reduced demand and lower prices throughout the fixed-income world.”

The banks are in no position to be extravagant because they’re already saddled with $400 billion in MBSs and CDOs—as well as another $170 billion in private equity deals—for which there is currently no market. They’ve had to dramatically cut back on their lending because they either don’t have the resources or are facing bankruptcy in the near future.

An article which appeared on the front page of the Financial Times last week, illustrates how hard-pressed the banks really are:

“US banks have been quietly borrowing massive amounts of money from the Federal Reserve…$50 billion in one month”.

The Fed’s new Term Auction Facility “allows the banks to borrow money against all sort of dodgy collateral,” says Christopher Wood, analyst at CLSA. “The banks are increasingly giving the Fed the garbage collateral nobody else wants to take … [this] suggests a perilous condition for America’s banking system.”

The move has sparked unease among some analysts about the stress developing in opaque corners of the US banking system and the banks’ growing reliance on indirect forms of government support.” (“US Banks borrow $50 billion via New Fed Facility”, Financial Times)

(The story appeared no where in the US media)

At the same time the banks are getting backdoor injections of liquidity from the Fed; banking giant Citigroup has been trying to off-load some of its branches so it can cover its structured investment losses. It all looks rather desperate, but scouring the planet for capital to shore up flagging balance sheets is turning out to be a full-time job for many of America’s largest investment banks. It is the only way they can stay one step ahead of the hangman.

In the last few days, gold has spiked to $950, a new high, while oil futures passed the $100 per barrel mark. The battered greenback has already taken a beating, and yet, Fed chairman Bernanke is signaling that there are more rate cuts to come. The prospect of a global run on the dollar has never been greater. Still, Bernanke will do whatever he can to resuscitate the faltering banking system, even if he destroys the currency in the process. Unfortunately, interest rates alone won’t cut it. The banks need capital; and fast. Meanwhile, the waning dollar has sent food and energy prices soaring which is leaving consumers without the discretionary income they need for anything beyond the basic necessities. As a result, retail sales are down and employers are forced to lay off workers to reduce their spending. This is all part of the self-reinforcing negative-feedback loop that begins with falling home prices and then rumbles through the broader economy. There is no chance that the economy will rebound until housing prices stabilize and the rate of foreclosures returns to normal. But that could be a long way off. With housing inventory at historic highs and mortgage applications at new lows, the economy could keep somersaulting down the stairwell for a full two years or more. Only then, will we hit rock-bottom.

The country is now headed into a deep and protracted recession. Low interest credit and financial innovation have paralyzed the credit markets while inflating a monstrous equity bubble that is wreaking havoc with the world’s financial system. The new market architecture, “structured finance” has collapsed from the stress of falling asset-values and rising defaults. Many of the banks are technically insolvent already, hopelessly mired in their own red ink. Public confidence in the nations’ financial institutions has never been lower. Monetary policy and deregulation have failed. The system is self-destructing.

Now that the credit crunch has rendered the markets dysfunctional, spokesmen for the investor class are speaking out and confirming what many have suspected from the very beginning; that the present troubles originated at the Federal Reserve and, ultimately, they are the ones who are responsible for the meltdown. In an article in the Wall Street Journal this week, Harvard economics professor and former Council of Economic Advisers under President Reagan, Martin Feldstein, made this revealing admission:

“There is plenty of blame to go around for the current situation. The Federal Reserve bears much of the responsibility, because of its failure to provide the appropriate supervisory oversight for the major money center banks. The Fed’s banking examiners have complete access to all of the financial transactions of the banks that they supervise, and should have the technical expertise to evaluate the risks that those banks are taking. Because these banks provide credit to the nonbank financial institutions, the Fed can also indirectly examine what those other institutions are doing.

The Fed’s bank examinations are supposed to assess the adequacy of each bank’s capital and the quality of its assets. The Fed declared that the banks had adequate capital because it gave far too little weight to their massive off balance-sheet positions—the structured investment vehicles (SIVs), conduits and credit line obligations—that the banks have now been forced to bring onto their balance sheets. Examiners also overstated the quality of the banks’ assets, failing to allow for the potential bursting of the house price bubble. The implication of this for Fed supervision policy is clear. The way out of the current crisis is not.”

How odd? So, when all else fails; tell the truth?

But Feldstein is right; the Fed refused to perform its oversight duties because its friends in the banking industry were raking in obscene profits selling sketchy, subprime junk to gullible investors around the world. They knew about the “massive off balance-sheet positions” which allowed the banks’ to create mortgage-backed securities and CDOs without sufficient capital reserves. They knew it all; every last bit of it, which simply proves that the Federal Reserve is an organization which serves the exclusive interests of the banking establishment and their corporate brethren in the financial industry.

Surprised?

Never have so many hoped for so much because of rollicking rhetoric and pulsating platitudes. A tsunami of hope has plunged America into electoral euphoria. In its path is the wreckage of critical thinking about what ails the US and what bold, revolutionary actions are needed. Barry Obama has accomplished semantic alchemy, turning justified but grim distrust and outrage with government and politics into hallelujah hope. But most hope never materializes and is a terrible predictor of reality.

In my peacemaking class I challenged my 20-year-old college students to approach global issues by studying the conflicts they engender and then to seek the ways of peace and nonviolence by starting with themselves to “be the change they wish to see in the world.”

Over the past six weeks we have looked at global warming, overpopulation, the “clash of civilizations”, and resource depletion (i.e., oil). I feared depressing them and even apologized for presenting them with such a glum picture of the future!

And then they surprised me.

As I read their journals, which reflect on the past week’s work, I consistently discovered that my students were far from being paralyzed by all these troubles. Instead they were facing the world with hope and courage and actively seeking practical solutions. Look at some of the remarks from their papers.

“I am depressed by the current situation, horrified by the possible future, and at the same time, completely inspired. As our conversation began to shift from how frightening the circumstances are at this point to what can still be done, I became very motivated to DO something.”

“Yes, it is true that our generation will be facing some of the most challenging decades to come….Yet, humanity is at the mercy of its own doings, and this is a beautiful concept in my eyes, because it means that there is a budding potential for change. If we look upon the history and disposition of civilization that produces such circumstances as human-made, they become influence-able. We have full responsibility.”

“One person at a time will change the world little by little, even if our good actions aren’t seen instantly.”

“I don’t know why I didn’t feel depressed or upset about our current and future state of affairs. Rather, it inspired a curiosity within myself to really think about how things are currently around the world and to learn more about what’s going on, to see what I can do and how minor ’sustainable’ or ‘green’ changes in my life will affect it and the way I see myself living it in the future.”

“Through all the dust and piles of dry wall, I could still see the progress we had made [in our Habitat for Humanity project]. It might be a slow process, but every shovel and every bucket full of dry wall is another step closer to the final product: a house for someone who could not afford one otherwise. And knowing that I am contributing to this product makes everything worth it. That is why I am willing to devote 3-4 hours every other Saturday morning.”

“We have to understand and make changes within ourselves before we can make changes in our community. I think that is vital for everyone, without exception. I never would have thought that I could make changes without first realizing that I had the potential and the passion [to so do].”

“I feel that I have reached that point in my life where I have become aware that something I love [the earth] is currently being destroyed. I cannot simply ignore it, because if I truly love it then I have to do something to save it. I cannot simply give up hope and be depressed about our situation because that is what enough people are doing already.”

“I think that my biggest downfall in my pursuit of the peacemaker lifestyle is my tendency to be overwhelmed by the feeling that I want to fix every problem of the world. This sensation of drowning in the problems of the world can often inspire feelings of apathy, and the notion that nothing you do will be enough to change the world. However, I have recently decided that what is important for me right now is taking the steps to enact change at home.”

“I believe that seeing the immediate effects on my college and community will not only make me a more engaged citizen, but will also remind me why it is important to remain positive and start at the local level.”

“How tired I am of having all the anger of seeing how others are more privileged, are better-off than I am and then to pretend that everything is all right….I now understand that anger is good only when it is taken in a positive direction. This is what creates passion, passion for change.”

And then here are some things they say they will do:

* Begin an urban organic garden this summer in my community
* Join Building Blocks, a College project where students paint houses in poor neighborhoods
* Reduce my carbon footprint
* Slow down my pace of life
* Double my efforts in conserving resources that I use and encourage those around me to do the same
* Change the way I view production, the economy, and our consumerist culture
* Make a conscious decision to walk when I can instead of driving and encourage others to do the same.
* Protest against the energy crisis by becoming a vegetarian “as an alternative to the gluttonous carnivorous [American] lifestyle”
* Take cold showers twice a week during Lent to be in solidarity with the poor
* Do more research on New Urbanism to reduce urban sprawl
* Observe more closely the violence that is inherent by our inaction (i.e., Hurricane Katrina, Kyoto Protocol, allowing the Iraq War to continue)
* Apply for a job with Greenpeace in order to fight global warming
* Apply for Teach for America
* Organize College events for Women’s History Month, volunteer for the Amigos Tutoring Program, work with College Democrats
* Continue to work on alternative forms of energy. (Last summer the student built a solar oven and planted a first-time organic garden.)

Truly, the best part about teaching is being inspired by the students!

We have screamed at the heavens and cried bitter tears. We’ve marched and picketed and gone to jail. And we are sick. Sick of the corruption–sick of the liars–sick of this war!

On March 19, the day the U.S. invaded Iraq five years ago, we’ll be sick of it yet again. But on that revolting day we can do something nonviolently revolutionary. We can withdraw our consent from this sick system — by calling in sick.

People are signing up to do just that at the “Sick Of It Day” website. With passion and eloquence they’re saying why they are “sick of it.”

Listen:

“Because over a million innocents have died. Because the Democrats, who promised to end the war, have been in control of the budget now for almost a year and a half, and they have continued to fund the war. Because I’m disgusted with Bush, Cheney and the Democrats.”

David Lindorff, Ambler PA

“The lies, the deaths, the brutality, the sheer hubris and arrogance, and the obscene profits from it all.”

Ron Jacobs, Asheville NC

“Because Lavena Johnson is dead and she should not be and her parents are broken-hearted. Because Ken Ballard is dead and he should not be and his parents are broken-hearted. Because James Curtis Coons is dead and he should not be and his parents are broken-hearted. Because there are “officially” 3,960 young men and women who are dead and they should not be and their parents, wives, husbands, children, grandparents, siblings, friends, lovers, and communities are broken-hearted. Because the wounded will live with their own broken hearts, hopes and dreams. And so will their families. Because the collective heart of Iraq…that is beyond words.”

Peggy Daly-Masternak, Toledo OH

“Like hamsters we run the wheel, never getting ahead. While our leaders kill, bomb & torture for fun and big profits. These soldiers are our sons & daughters and our government turns them into monsters–War is not glory it’s horror–This is not life!
It’s death described as life.”

Michael McKinney, Bay Village OH

“My daughter is an Iraq Vet and on Inactive Ready Reserve…and risks another Iraq deployment. Our congresswoman is on the OUT OF IRAQ Caucus, but continues to fund this occupation every other time it is presented to her. My x son-in-law is a disabled, Purple Heart Iraq Veteran. We have to stop drinking the kool-aid, wake up America!”

Dinah Mason, Santa Barbara CA

“I am sick of hearing people lose hope and say there’s nothing that can be done–we can start change now. Being sick of it is only the first step. We must–believe again that we really do have the power to make an impact, and put our conscience into action.”

Susan Burky, Reading PA

“I am sick of seeing another generation of young men and women get betrayed and destroyed by their country. I am sick of feeling again each blow a mother gave me when I told her that her only son was killed in Vietnam–I am sick of having the visions of little knee high kids maimed by bombs in another never should have happened war–I am sick that we never learned the lessons of Vietnam and are repeating them again in Iraq.”

Paul Appell, Altona IL

“I am sick of all the killing. I am sick of the lies. I am sick of the apathy–I am sick of feeling ashamed of my country.”

Peggy Love, Rock Island WA

“I am sick of seeing America in denial about how much we have been lied to.”

Adam Kokesh, Washington DC

“I’m sick of seeing The American People fall for scum bag propaganda and disempowering their own ears, eyes, brains, and hearts.”

Susan Galleymore, Alameda CA

Sick enough? Then sign up here: www.sickofitday.org. And when you call in sick on March 19, before going back to bed or out to protest, check out this link to the document that started a revolution against another King George. Note where it says “Governments are instituted among Men (sic), deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed–“

We no longer consent. We are sick of it.

20/02/08 “The Nation” — — Secret evidence. Denial of habeas corpus. Evidence obtained by waterboarding. Indefinite detention. The litany of complaints about the legal treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay is long, disturbing and by now familiar. Nonetheless, a new wave of shock and criticism greeted the Pentagon’s announcement on February 11 that it was charging six Guantánamo detainees, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, with war crimes–and seeking the death penalty for all of them.

Now, as the murky, quasi-legal staging of the Bush Administration’s military commissions unfolds, a key official has told The Nation that the trials are rigged from the start. According to Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo’s military commissions, the process has been manipulated by Administration appointees in an attempt to foreclose the possibility of acquittal.

Colonel Davis’s criticism of the commissions has been escalating since he resigned this past October, telling the Washington Post that he had been pressured by politically appointed senior defense officials to pursue cases deemed “sexy” and of “high-interest” (such as the 9/11 cases now being pursued) in the run-up to the 2008 elections. Davis, once a staunch defender of the commissions process, elaborated on his reasons in a December 10, 2007, Los Angeles Times op-ed. “I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system,” he wrote. “I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively.”

Then, in an interview with The Nation in February after the six Guantánamo detainees were charged, Davis offered the most damning evidence of the military commissions’ bias–a revelation that speaks to fundamental flaws in the Bush Administration’s conduct of statecraft: its contempt for the rule of law and its pursuit of political objectives above all else.

When asked if he thought the men at Guantánamo could receive a fair trial, Davis provided the following account of an August 2005 meeting he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes–the man who now oversees the tribunal process for the Defense Department. “[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time,” recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions.'”

Davis submitted his resignation on October 4, 2007, just hours after he was informed that Haynes had been put above him in the commissions’ chain of command. “Everyone has opinions,” Davis says. “But when he was put above me, his opinions became orders.”

Reached for comment, Defense Department spokesperson Cynthia Smith said, “The Department of Defense disputes the assertions made by Colonel Davis in this statement regarding acquittals.”

“That he [Haynes] said there can be no acquittals will stain the entire [tribunal] process,” says Scott Horton, who teaches law at Columbia University Law School and who has written extensively about Haynes’s conflicts with the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) corps, the judicial arm of the Armed Forces, which is charged with implementing the military commissions. According to Horton, Haynes tried to cut the JAG corps out of internal debates over the detention and prosecution of detainees, knowing it was critical of the Administration’s views. In private memos and in public Senate testimony, high-ranking officers of the corps have repeatedly expressed concerns about the Administration’s advocacy of “extreme interrogation techniques.”

“The JAG corps consists of a group of rigorous professionals, but Haynes never trusted them to do their job,” says Horton. “His clashes have always had the same subtext–they want to be independent, he wants them to do political dirty-work.”

Haynes, a political appointee and chief legal adviser to Defense secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, was nominated in 2006 by the Bush Administration for a lifetime seat as a judge in the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. But his nomination never got out of committee, primarily because of the opposition of Republican Senator (and former military lawyer) Lindsey Graham and other members alarmed over Haynes’s role in writing or supervising the writing of Pentagon memos advocating the use of harsh interrogation techniques the Geneva Conventions classify as torture.

Currently, in his capacity as Pentagon general counsel, Haynes oversees both the prosecution and the defense for the commissions. “You would think a person in that position wouldn’t be favoring one side,” says Colonel Davis.

Told of Davis’s story about Haynes, Clive Stafford Smith, a defense attorney who has represented more than seventy Guantánamo clients, said, “Hearing it makes me think I’m back in Mississippi representing a black man in front of an all-white jury.”

He adds, “It confirms what people close to the system have always said,” noting that when three prosecutors–Maj. Robert Preston, Capt. John Carr and Capt. Carrie Wolf–requested to be transferred out of the Office of Military Commissions in 2004, they claimed they’d been told the process was rigged. In an e-mail to his supervisors, Preston had said that there was thin evidence against the accused. “But they were told by the chief prosecutor at the time that they didn’t need evidence to get convictions,” says Stafford Smith.

At the time, the military wrote it off as “miscommunication” and “personality conflicts.” And then there were changes in personnel. “They told us that the system had been cleaned up…but I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same,” says Stafford Smith.

The terrible irony is that even if acquittals were possible, the government has declared that it can continue to detain anyone deemed an “enemy combatant” for the duration of hostilities–no matter the outcome of a trial. And most of the 275 men held at Guantánamo are classified as “enemy combatants” while the hostilities in the “war on terror” could be never-ending.

Says ACLU staff attorney Ben Wizner, “The trial doesn’t make a difference. They can hold you there forever until they decide to let you out.” The one person to be released from Guantánamo through the judicial process, Australian David Hicks, pleaded guilty. As Wizner wrote in the Los Angeles Times in April 2007, “In an ordinary justice system, the accused must be acquitted to be released. In Guantánamo, the accused must plead guilty to be released.”

Still, the trials serve a purpose for the government, in providing the semblance of a legitimate judicial process. According to defense attorneys involved–and many of the former prosecutors, like Davis–the process is political, not legal.

“If someone was acquitted, then it would suggest we did the wrong thing in the first place. That can’t happen,” says Horton sardonically. “When the government decides to clear someone, it calls the person ‘no-longer an enemy combatant’ instead of just saying they made a mistake.”

He adds, “For people like Haynes, justice is meant to serve the party.”

20/02/08 “Asia Times” — — – A new report on Iran by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is about to be released and US “pre-emptive” diplomacy, aimed at preventing an IAEA “clean bill of health” that could derail Washington’s effort for a new round of UN sanctions on Iran, is at full throttle – with the timely help of disinformation.

Setting the bar unusually high, the US envoy at the IAEA, Gregory Schulte, has warned that unless Iran “confesses” about its “past work on weapons designs and weaponization and the role of the Iranian military”, international efforts to resolve the nuclear standoff will be “doomed”.

Washington’s brand new benchmark comes in the wake of a spate of US media reports that the US has “shared new intelligence” with the IAEA that corroborates American allegations of past Iranian nuclear proliferation activities. According to the New York Times, the US decided to “turn over intelligence data” and allow the IAEA privileged access for “divulging confidential information” by reversing “longstanding refusal to show the data, citing the need to protect intelligence sources”. [1]

A widely published report by Associated Press cites diplomats as saying that the material forwarded to the IAEA over the past two weeks expands on previous information from the Americans. [2]

But, we learn, the new information pertains to data from the same “stolen laptop” that was the source of the previous information, which was termed unreliable at the time by, among others, David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) in Washington. (For more on the laptop story see the author’s The IAEA and the new world order, Asia Times Online, February 3, 2006.)

Meanwhile, in response to this author’s request for clarification regarding this matter, a source close to the IAEA has called the US media reports “misleading”. The source said: “Without going into the intelligence we may or may not have received, I can say that in my view, these news reports were misleading. The [IAEA] report [on Iran] is due to come out Friday or Monday and then things will become clearer for everyone.”

Standing firm

The IAEA must insulate itself from the disinformation campaign against Iran that has by all indications gone into a higher gear as we draw closer to the upcoming meeting of the IAEA’s board of governors, and it must ignore the intensifying American lobbying efforts and those of its junior partners such as France (at a recent meeting of France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy and the IAEA chief, Mohammad ElBaradei, the IAEA was urged to “stay firm” on Iran).

More important, the IAEA must stay firm on the rules of game and consider the fact that any overstepping of its bounds – eg, by pressuring Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment program in spite of Iran’s legal rights and its nuclear transparency – will definitely backfire against the agency and, indeed, the entire non-proliferation regime.

After all, Iran has the solid backing of a bulk of international community, namely the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which covers some 118 member states. Recently, Iran’s ambassador to the UN, Mohammad Khazaee, met NAM representatives and urged them to continue with their crucial support for Iran’s right to nuclear technology. Ambassador Khazaee has also written a letter to the UN Secretary General about the recent US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, reiterating Iran’s peaceful nuclear intentions and urging the UN not to yield to US pressure that could harm the UN’s legitimacy.

South Africa, a key NAM member, has already played a pivotal role in making sure that the UN Security Council does not take any action against Iran before the new IAEA report on Iran.

From Iran’s vantage point, the resolution of so-called “outstanding questions” as a result of a “work plan” with the IAEA, which has full scope to monitor Iran’s nuclear facilities and which has stressed on numerous occasions the absence of any evidence of military diversion, means that there is no justification for any UN sanctions or continued UN Security Council involvement with Iran’s nuclear dossier.

This week, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, the head of Iran’s nuclear energy organization, traveled to Vienna to provide further explanation about Iran’s nuclear activities and to dispel the new suspicions about past activities raised by the US.

Undoubtedly, Washington’s new intransigent strategy has its own limitations. There is only so much emphasis that can be placed on alleged past activities, when the real concern is and should be Iran’s present and future nuclear activities.

By placing the bar artificially high, on the other hand, the US may spoil the steady progress in Iran-IAEA cooperation and, indeed, set the process back if the IAEA heeds the present US pressure tactics and refuses to issue a clean bill of health (or something approximating it) for Iran.

The existence of merely minor or technical questions cannot possibly be the basis for declaring Iran in breach of its Non-Proliferation Treaty obligations, which is what the UN Security Council has done, going well beyond the IAEA’s own findings.

What lies ahead then? Iran has categorically stated that it will reject any UN pressure to stop the enrichment program and given Iran’s rapid technological progress with its P-1 and P-2 centrifuges, a fait accompli according to the IAEA chief, the US’s rigid insistence on “zero centrifuges” is unrealistic and in dire need of a revised, new approach that would conceivably place the focus on nuclear transparency and the full implementation of the IAEA safeguard measures. [3]

But with Schulte sending the wrong signal, the Iran nuclear crisis will likely become more aggravated in the coming months if (1) the US and its allies succeed in forcing a more circumspect IAEA report that does injustice to Iran, and (2) Iran fulfills its threat to scale back its work with the IAEA if the agency permits the powers that be to manipulate its findings on Iran. Such a negative leap backward is not in anyone’s interest.

Notes

[1] David Sanger and Elaine Sciolino, U.S. to Produce Data on Iran’s Nuclear Program, New York Times.

[2] George Jahn, US Intel Links Iran With Nuclear Bomb Bid, Associated Press.

[3] For more on this, see the author’s Realism, not idealism: Keeping Iran’s nuclear potential latent, Harvard International Review