The Rag Blog

“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

This is the event that fifty years of U.S. policy was designed to stop.

19/02/08 “Huffington Post” – — Fidel Castro has announced his retirement. He will be replaced in a peaceful succession, without the violent upheaval that U.S. policy makers have been predicting since the 1960s.

Now that Fidel Castro has announced his retirement, it’s time to retire our Cold War era Cuba policy. It failed.

Every U.S. president since Eisenhower has tried to kill or topple Fidel Castro and replace Cuba’s government and economic system with something more to our liking. They never succeeded.

It was the express purpose of the U.S. embargo, with sanctions more comprehensive than any we impose on Iran, North Korea, Sudan, or Syria to stop this transition. But it couldn’t.

For years, the U.S. embargo has been rebuked in lop-sided votes in the U.N. General Assembly. On October 30, 2007, when we were last drubbed by a margin of 184 to 4 (and one abstention), not a single country in South America, Central America or the Caribbean supported our policy. Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, three countries praised by President Bush one week earlier for their support of U.S. policy against Cuba, joined the condemnation — so did Afghanistan, the United Kingdom, and South Africa, a nation whose democracy was born with the help of U.S. sanctions.

As the Cuba embargo sullies our image around the world, it undermines the national interest and our highest values here at home. The embargo sacrifices the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens to travel. It cruelly divides Cuban families on both sides of the Florida straits. Trade sanctions cost U.S. businesses about $1 billion annually, and deny U.S. citizens access to vaccines and other medical treatments. Enforcing the embargo drains resources from the war on terror. By isolating the American people from the Cuban people, we stop our citizens from doing what Americans do best; we can’t offer Cubans our support or our ideas, and we’re unable to benefit from what they could offer us.

I have been to Cuba close to thirty times in the last seven years and I have spoken to Cubans of every stripe — fans of the revolution and diehard opponents of President Castro.

Cubans by their nature have vastly divergent opinions, except on one fundamental point: it is Cubans living on the island — not politicians in Washington, not their kinsmen in Miami — who must decide for themselves what happens next in Cuba. They cherish their sovereignty, they reject violence and instability, and they want the United States to respect those values as much as they do, especially now that they can see a future past President Fidel Castro and beyond the 50th year of their revolution.

There is a debate happening in Cuba right now, triggered by Raúl Castro on economic reform that is remarkable in its sweep. Leaders have spoken to us with unusual candor about the inability of Cubans to keep pace with prices, but they are committed to raising living standards in ways that are consistent with the preservation of Cuba’s political system. We have to have clear minds about their intentions for this debate, its limits, and where it might lead.

Now would be a perfect time to send the long overdue signal that the United States is no threat to Cuba’s national security, that we honor the aspirations of average Cubans, and that we are capable of having a constructive relationship with their government.

If President Bush cannot answer the call to history that has been issued in Havana, perhaps his successor will respond with greater imagination when he or she takes office in Washington next year.

A controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents has been taken offline in the US.

Wikileaks.org, as it is known, was cut off from the internet following a California court ruling, the site says.

The case was brought by a Swiss bank after “several hundred” documents were posted about its offshore activities.

Other versions of the pages, hosted in countries such as Belgium and India, can still be accessed.

However, the main site was taken offline after the court ordered that Dynadot, which controls the site’s domain name, should remove all traces of wikileaks from its servers.

The court also ordered that Dynadot should “prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court.”

Other orders included that the domain name be locked “to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar” to prevent changes being made to the site.

Wikileaks claimed that the order was “unconstitutional” and said that the site had been “forcibly censored”.

Web names

The case was brought by lawyers working for the Swiss banking group Julius Baer. It concerned several documents posted on the site which allegedly reveal that the bank was involved with money laundering and tax evasion.

The documents were allegedly posted by Rudolf Elmer, former vice president of the bank’s Cayman Island’s operation.

A spokesperson for Julius Baer said he could not comment on the case because of “pending legal proceedings”.

The BBC understands that Julius Baer asked for the documents to be removed because they could have an impact on a separate legal case ongoing in Switzerland.

The court hearing took place last week and Dynadot blocked access from Friday evening.

Wikileaks says it was not represented at the hearing because it was “given only hours notice” via e-mail.

A document signed by Judge Jeffery White, who presided over the case, ordered Dynadot to follow six court orders.

As well as removing all records of the site form its servers, the hosting and domain name firm was ordered to produce “all prior or previous administrative and account records and data for the wikileaks.org domain name and account”.

The order also demanded that details of the site’s registrant, contacts, payment records and “IP addresses and associated data used by any person…who accessed the account for the domain name” to be handed over.

Wikileaks allows users to post documents anonymously.

Information bank

The site was founded in 2006 by dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and technologists from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.

It so far claims to have published more than 1.2 million documents.

It provoked controversy when it first appeared on the net with many commentators questioning the motives of the people behind the site.

It recently made available a confidential briefing document relating to the collapse of the UK’s Northern Rock bank.

Lawyers working on behalf of the bank attempted to have the documents removed from the site. They can still be accessed.

Dynadot was contacted for this article but have so far not responded to requests for comment.

How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! – Mark Twain

18/02/08 “CommonGround” — – On March 25, 2003, during the “shock and awe” bombardment of Iraq, then US Ambassador Paul Cellucci admitted that “… ironically, Canadian naval vessels, aircraft and personnel… will supply more support to this war in Iraq indirectly… than most of those 46 countries that are fully supporting our efforts there.”

Cellucci merely scratched the surface of Canada’s initial “support” for the Iraq War, but he had let the cat out of the bag. As then Secretary of State Colin Powell had explained a week earlier, “We now have a coalition of the willing… who have publicly said they could be included in such a listing…. And there are 15 other nations, who, for one reason or another, do not wish to be publicly named but will be supporting the coalition.”

Canada was, and still is, the leading member of this secret group, which we could perhaps call CW-HUSH, the “Coalition of the Willing to Help but Unwilling to be Seen Helping.” The plan worked. Most Canadians still proudly believe that their government refused to join the Iraq War. Nothing could be further from the truth. Here are some of the ways in which we joined the fray:

Escorting the US Navy: Thirteen hundred Canadian troops aboard Canada’s multibillion dollar warships escorted the US fleet through the Persian Gulf, putting them safely in place to bomb Iraq.

Leading the coalition Navy: Canadian Rear Admiral Roger Girouard was in charge of the war coalition’s fleet.

Providing war planners: At least two dozen Canadian war planners working at US Central Command in Florida were transferred to the Persian Gulf in early 2003 to help oversee the war’s complicated logistics.

Commanding the war: In 2004, Canadian Brigadier General Walt Natynczyk commanded 10 brigades totalling 35,000 troops. He was Second-in-Command of the entire Iraq War for that year. When Governor General Clarkson gave Natynczyk the Meritorious Service Cross, her office extolled his “pivotal role in the development of numerous plans and operations [which] resulted in a tremendous contribution… to Operation Iraqi Freedom, and… brought great credit to the Canadian Forces and to Canada.”

Helping coordinate the war: Canadian military personnel working aboard American E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System warplanes helped direct the electronic war by providing surveillance, command, control and communications services to US war fighters.

Providing airspace and refuelling: Countless US troop and equipment transport aircraft have flown over Canada, to and from the Iraq War, and many refuelled in Gander, Newfoundland.

Providing air transport: At least three Canadian CC-130 military transport planes were listed by US military to supply coalition forces during the Iraq War.

Freeing up US troops: Canada’s major role in Afghan war has freed up thousands of US troops for deployment to Iraq.

Providing ground troops: At least 35 Canadian soldiers were directly under US command, in an “exchange” capacity on the ground, participating in the invasion of Iraq.

Testing weapons and drones: Two types of cruise missiles (AGM-86 and -129) and the “Global Hawk” (RQ-4A) surveillance drone, used in Iraq, were tested over Canada.

Depleted uranium (DU) weapons: Canada is the world’s top exporter of uranium. Our government pretends that Canada’s uranium is sold for “peaceful” purposes only, but absolutely nothing is done to stop the US from using DU in their weapons. America’s A-10 Wart Hog warplanes have fired DU munitions in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, while each cruise missile contains three kgs of DU ballast. Providing RADARSAT data: Eagle Vision, a US Air Force mobile ground station, ­which controls Canada’s RADARSAT-1 satellite and downlinks its data­, was used from the start of the Iraq War.

Diplomatic support: Former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien supported the “right” of the US to invade Iraq, although Kofi Annan said it was an illegal occupation. Chrétien criticized Canadian citizens who questioned the war, saying they provided comfort to Saddam Hussein.

Training Iraqi police: Canada has spent millions sending RCMP officers to Jordan to train tens of thousands of cadets for Iraq’s paramilitary police force.

Training Iraqi troops: High-level Canadian military personnel joined the “NATO Training Mission in Iraq” to “train the trainers” of Iraqi Security Forces who are on the leading edge of the US occupation. A Canadian colonel, under NATO command, was chief of staff at the Baghdad-based training mission. Canada was the leading donor to this centre, providing an initial $810 thousand.

Funding Iraq’s interior ministry: Canada provides advisors and financial support to this ministry, which has been caught running torture centres. Thousands of its officers have been withdrawn for corruption, and it has been accused of working with death squads that executed a thousand people per month in Baghdad alone in the summer of 2006.

Military exports: At least 100 Canadian companies sold parts and/or services for major weapons systems used in the Iraq War. Quebec’s SNC-TEC sold millions of bullets to the US military forces occupying Iraq. General Dynamics Canada, in London Ontario, sold hundreds of armoured vehicles to the US and Australia. Between October 2003 and November 2005, these troop transport vehicles logged over six million miles in Iraq. Winnipeg’s Bristol Aerospace sells cluster-bomb dispensing warheads used by US aircraft in Iraq.

Canada Pension Plan investments: Canadians are forced to invest their pension money in hundreds of military industries, including most of the world’s top 20 weapons producers, which are the leading prime contractors for virtually all the major weapons systems used in Iraq.

So the next time a proud fellow citizen tells you that Canada didn’t join the Iraq War, remind them of Mark Twain’s famous quip: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

For more information on the myth of Canada’s role as a global peacemaker, read Press for Conversion, coat.ncf.ca or write to COAT, 541 McLeod St., Ottawa, ON, K1R 5R2. Richard Sanders is the coordinator for the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade.

Last time out on this limb, I ended by saying that the Obama campaign performs a political sensibility—an attitude toward history—that adjourns the culture wars by assuming the Left won the struggles conducted in, or inherited from, the 1960s. This campaign assumes, in other words, that the New Left has become the mainstream of American politics. It assumes accordingly that the New Right has always been a marginal, insurgent movement destined to fail with an electorate that has increasingly insisted on—or rather just acted out—equality across lines of race, gender, sexual preference, and national origin.

As the culture at large moved rapidly left after 1965, the New Right chose political means to slow or stop the process. And once in a while, for example in 1994, it succeeded, although its intellectual purchase on the culture kept slipping, and its political toehold was always insecure at best—as witness the elections of 1998 and 2000, when Democrats won decisively.

Yes, George W. Bush was named the president by a radical junta convened at the Supreme Court. But his domestic agenda was “No Child Left Behind,” which, regardless of its bureaucratic intricacies, was, and is, a measure fully consistent with the welfare state—his Senatorial comrade in arms, remember, was Teddy Kennedy.

It was only in late 2001, after 9/11, that the zealots of the New Right were able to seize the time, in a kind of coup d’etat that featured all the hysterical symptoms of 20th-century fascist movements (and I use the adjective advisedly, based on my reading of Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism). Their instant magnification of executive power was designed to destroy any balance between the branches of government, and to refit the White House as a bunker from which to launch two wars in two years, each in the name of “an end to evil.” As late as the summer of 2007, they were planning to bomb Iran and happily acknowledged their insane intentions. War was, in principle, the health of the state they imagined.

But they failed. The “war on terror” has become a joke, except when journalists or politicians equate Al Qaeda in Iraq with the real thing. The zealots of the New Right—Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Feith, Addington, Perle, Frum, et al.—and their idiot enablers in the executive branch—Bush, Yoo, Gonzalez, Libby, Rice, Powell, et al.—are now in jail or in exile or in disgrace or in denial. The American people would not legitimate their attempted coup.

The people have made it plain, by this refusal, that they want a return to the rule of law, not of men. They’ve also made it plain that they favor Democrats on issues, from health care to the economy to the Iraq war, but also on values, including a woman’s right to choose and gay rights. Don’t take my word for it, consult the National Opinion Research Center or USA Today or the Pew Center polls. Everywhere you look, the results are the same: the New Right can no longer use political means to contain the consequences of the 1960s.

In short, the American people, young and old, have made it plain that they’re increasingly liberal. That liberal trend stopped the New Right in its tracks, just when it thought it finally had a grip on power in Washington.

Now these people typically don’t call themselves liberals. They don’t call themselves feminists or socialists, either. Nonetheless, liberalism, feminism, and socialism are constituent elements of our culture, our politics, and our society. That is why, when polled, most so-called conservatives say they want more government spending on health and education. That is why, when asked, men and women who refuse the label of “feminist” always insist they favor equal opportunity for males and females, and, when pressed, usually acknowledge that gender differences are mostly matters of historically determined cultural conventions.

And that is why, when prompted, even the hapless Bush administration is pushing a fiscal stimulus package to address the subprime mortgage mess, as meanwhile the Federal Reserve frantically drives real interest rates toward zero: everyone, from Left to Right, assumes that market forces are economic means to social and political ends—they are supposed to be manipulated in the name of the general welfare—not anonymous externalities beyond the intellectual grasp and social control of human beings.

Look at it another way. The transformation of liberalism in the late-20th century made it an approximation of what we used to call social democracy. And that interesting transformation makes sense of the New Right’s fear of liberalism—that is, its ferocious, yet mostly inarticulate conflation of liberalism and socialism.

Irving Kristol, the founding father, by all accounts, of neo-conservatism, explained this political process in 1978: “To begin with, the institutions which conservatives wish to preserve are, and for two centuries were called, liberal institutions, i.e., institutions which maximize personal liberty vis a vis a state, a church, or an official ideology. On the other hand, the severest critics of these institutions—those who wish to enlarge the scope of government authority indefinitely, so as to achieve ever greater equality at the expense of liberty—are today commonly called ‘liberals.’ It would certainly help to clarify matters if they were called, with greater propriety and accuracy, ‘socialists’ or ‘neo-socialists.”

This was, once upon a time, a complaint. What if we read it as a prophecy? What if Henry Kaufman, the Wall Street guru of the 1970s, was right in 1980 when he announced that the majority of the American people was committed to “an unaffordable egalitarian sharing of production,” that is, to some kind of unspoken socialism?

One way to answer the question is to notice the dizzying range of regulatory agencies, federal statutes, and executive orders, which, then as now, limit the reach of market forces in the name of purposes that have no prices. A laundry list of such agencies, statutes, and orders would merely begin with . . . FRS, FDA, FTC, SEC, FDIC, FCC, FAA, OSHA, EPA, EEOC, NWS, FEMA, NIH, CDC, NSF, NEA, NEH. . . And so on, unto acronymical infinity.

To this incomplete laundry list we should add the post-Vietnam armed services—the “all-volunteer army” that now serves as a job-training program and a portal to higher education for working-class kids of every color. These armed services are a social program that still lives up to the egalitarian ideals of the 1960s, in part because it addresses the problem of race and the promise of diversity with the attitudes of affirmative action.

Another, more prosaic way to answer the question about an unspoken socialism passing for politics as usual is to measure the growth of transfer payments in the late-20th century, when the liberal/welfare state was supposedly collapsing.

Transfer payments represent income received by households and individuals for which no contribution to current output of goods and services has been required. By supply-side standards, they are immoral at best and criminal at worst because they represent reward without effort, income without work. But they were the fastest growing component of income in the late-20th century, amounting, by 1999, to 20% of all labor income.

From 1959 to 1999, transfer payments grew by 10% annually, more than any other source of labor income, including wages and salaries. By the end of the 20th century, one of every eight dollars earned by those who were contributing to the production of goods and service was transferred to others who were not making any such contribution.

The detachment of income from work—the essence of socialism—abides, then, just as unobtrusively, but just as steadfastly, as The Dude, who unwittingly foiled the venal designs of that outspoken neo-conservative, the Big Lebowski.

Why, then, does the academic left keep crying wolf? Why do lefties keep portraying themselves as losers in the culture wars and in the larger political battles we’re fighting today? Why do they keep bemoaning “the collapse of the liberal state” or keep defending a welfare state that shows no sign of impending expiration? Why can’t they see that we won?

Why, in sum, does the Left agree with right-wing blockheads like Ross Douthat? He’s the guy who concludes his Sunday New York Times (2/10/08) op-ed as follows: “Precisely because the right has won so many battles—on taxes, welfare, crime and the cold war—in the decades since it squared off against Gerald Ford and Jacob Javits, the greatest danger facing the contemporary Republican party is ideological sclerosis, rather than insufficient orthodoxy.”

Hello? The supply-siders themselves have admitted, over and over, that the Reagan Revolution was a bust—because he couldn’t cut federal spending, and indeed increased it significantly in the 1980s. He also raised taxes, fled Lebanon after a terrorist attack on US Marines, sold illegal arms to Iran, and negotiated with the leader of the “evil empire” then resident in the Soviet Union.

An avowed liberal ended welfare as we knew it, and in doing so he permitted greater labor force participation by women. Violent crime rates have plummeted because the proportion of young single males in the general population has fallen—not because we’ve jailed more drug users and dealers. And the Cold War was fought (and “won,” if that is the right word) by a cross-class, bipartisan coalition that included many avowed Marxists, socialists, and liberals.

But the consensus across the Left/Right intellectual divide says that Douthat is correct—that the conservatives have been winning all along, or at least since the sainted Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter. Both sides believe that the electorate bought into supply-side economics, the Contract for America, the values of the religious right, and the “war on terror.” Both sides are wrong.

The Left is more wrong, however, because its pose as a marginalized movement with no real voice in the political debates of our time reenacts and reinforces a passivity that is at the very least a mistake. This pose enables abstention, not action. It makes us mere spectators on the history of our time; it depicts us as beautiful souls who can’t bear the corrupting burdens of the world as it is rather than as we would like it to be. It promotes purity.

As a case in point that will draw us back to Obamarama, I offer in evidence the incendiary essay by the esteemed feminist Robin Morgan, who, like Paulie (“the Hitman”) Krugman, sees nothing but “celebrity,” “hero worship,” and a “cult of personality” in the unreasonable and quite possibly misogynistic attitudes of Barack’s deluded supporters (see Krugman’s column of 2/11/08 in the NYT).

Morgan is nothing if not reasonable, so she is a true believer in the false consciousness of those who disagree with her. Unqualified and uneducated voters here worship at the shrine of “celebrity-culture mania” erected by Obama supporters. Among them are “young women eager to win male approval by showing they’re not feminists”—presumably by favoring Obama. She quotes Harriet Tubman to equate such women with slaves who did not even know they were enslaved: “When asked how she managed to save hundreds of enslaved African-Americans during [sic] the Civil War, she replied bitterly, ‘I could have saved thousands –if only I’d been able to convince them they were slaves.’”

I get it. If only we were able to convince Obama’s female supporters that they’re, uh, slaves to male supremacy, we could save them from their false consciousness and deliver them unto Hillary. Because of course “She’s better qualified” than Obama. It is self-evident. You can tell because this dubious statement about the candidates’ qualifications is followed by Homeric diction: “(D’uh.)”

But the pivot of the piece is the rhetorical series of questions through which Morgan announces the return of the repressed 1960s: “How dare anyone unilaterally decide to turn the page on history [that would be the 1960s], papering over real inequities and suffering constituencies [these would be the insignia of our benighted present], in the promise of a feel-good campaign? How dare anyone claim to unify while dividing, or think that to rouse U.S. youth from torpor it’s useful to triage the single largest demographic in this country’s history: the boomer generation—the majority of which is female?”

So Morgan wants us to believe that us Obama supporters are practically misogynists because we assume that the boomers of the Left won the battles begun in the 1960s and don’t want to fight them all over again. Like the New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier, who also raises the rhetorical stakes by asking “How dare he?”, Morgan wants us to believe that in making this crucial assumption—by acting as if the culture wars are over—we blind themselves to the inequities and suffering that, now as then, and always already, disfigure our country. Like Voltaire’s Pangloss, we have begun to believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds. In our happy ignorance, we forget the atrocities of the past and begin to believe, stupidly, in a better future.

To which there can be only one response: we need a usable past if we are to shape a better future. We need to know that this is our country. If our ethical principles do not reside in and flow from the historical circumstances we study—if our most cherished values do not somehow intersect with the dreary facts of our everyday lives and the disheartening facts of our country’s past—we have no choice except to retreat from the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be, and then curse it as the obvious cause of our righteous anger.

Here is how John Dewey explained the dilemma of those who would act as if their principles can never be derived from, or embodied in, historical circumstances, including the political movements and institutions of the present: “An ‘ought’ which does not root in and flower from the ‘is,’ which is not the fuller realization of the actual state of social relationships, is a mere pious wish that things should be better.”

Yes, it is a mere pious wish, a waking dream that will keep you pure, and only pure—undefiled by compromise and engagement with the world as it exists, a world full of illiberal Democrats and surly Republicans, plus many other unruly political species at home and abroad. That wish, that dream, will let you believe that false consciousness is the affliction of all those others who have misinterpreted their own interests—you already know what is right for them, and you mean to do it, no matter what they might say. Or you know that they’ll never get it, so you congratulate yourself as you say “Goodbye.”

To shed our piety, to wake from our dream of purity, we must “turn the page” on the “boomer generation” of the 1960s without forgetting or repudiating it, just as Obama asks us to. That means we take its achievements for granted. We assume we won, and get on with the changes we can still believe in.

Americans traditionally thought of their country as a “city upon a hill,” a “light unto the world.” Today only the deluded think that. Polls show that the rest of the world regards the U.S. and Israel as the two greatest threats to peace.

This is not surprising. In the words of Arthur Silber:

“The Bush administration has announced to the world, and to all Americans, that this is what the United States now stands for: a vicious determination to dominate the world, criminal, genocidal wars of aggression, torture, and an increasingly brutal and brutalizing authoritarian state at home. That is what we stand for.”

Addressing his fellow Americans, Silber asks the paramount question: “why do you support” these horrors?

His question goes to the heart of the matter. Do we Americans have any honor, any humanity, any integrity, any awareness of the crimes our government is committing in our name? Do we have a moral conscience?

How can a moral conscience be reconciled with our continuing to tolerate our government which has invaded two countries on the basis of lies and deception, destroyed their civilian infrastructures and murdered hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children?

The killing and occupation continue even though we now know that the invasions were based on lies and fabricated “evidence.” The entire world knows this. Yet Americans continue to act as if the gratuitous invasions, the gratuitous killing, and the gratuitous destruction are justified. There is no end of it in sight.

If Americans have any honor, how can they betray their Founding Fathers, who gave them liberty, by tolerating a government that claims immunity to law and the Constitution and is erecting a police state in their midst?

Answers to these questions vary. Some reply that a fearful and deceived American public seeks safety from terrorists in government power.

Others answer that a majority of Americans finally understand the evil that Bush has set loose and tried to stop him by voting out the Republicans in November 2006 and putting the Democrats in control of Congress – all to no effect – and are now demoralized as neither party gives a hoot for public opinion or has a moral conscience.

The people ask over and over, “What can we do?”

Very little when the institutions put in place to protect the people from tyranny fail. In the U.S., the institutions have failed across the board.

The freedom and independence of the watchdog press was destroyed by the media concentration that was permitted by the Clinton administration and Congress. Americans who rely on traditional print and TV media simply have no idea what is afoot.

Political competition failed when the opposition party became a “me-too” party. The Democrats even confirmed as attorney general Michael Mukasey, an authoritarian who refuses to condemn torture and whose rulings as a federal judge undermined habeas corpus. Such a person is now the highest law enforcement officer in the United States.

The judicial system failed when federal judges ruled that “state secrets” and “national security” are more important than government accountability and the rule of law.

The separation of powers failed when Congress acquiesced to the executive branch’s claims of primary power and independence from statutory law and the Constitution.

It failed again when the Democrats refused to impeach Bush and Cheney, the two greatest criminals in American political history.

Without the impeachment of Bush and Cheney, America can never recover. The precedents for unaccountable government established by the Bush administration are too great, their damage too lasting. Without impeachment, America will continue to sink into dictatorship in which criticism of the government and appeals to the Constitution are criminalized. We are closer to executive rule than many people know.

Silber reminds us that America once had leaders, such as Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed and Sen. Robert M. LaFollette Sr., who valued the principles upon which America was based more than they valued their political careers. Perhaps Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are of this ilk, but America has fallen so low that people who stand on principle today are marginalized. They cannot become speaker of the House or a leader in the Senate.

Today Congress is almost as superfluous as the Roman Senate under the caesars. On Feb. 13 the U.S. Senate barely passed a bill banning torture, and the White House promptly announced that President Bush would veto it. Torture is now the American way. The U.S. Senate was only able to muster 51 votes against torture, an indication that almost a majority of U.S. senators support torture.

Bush says that his administration does not torture. So why veto a bill prohibiting torture? Bush seems proud to present America to the world as a torturer.

After years of lying to Americans and the rest of the world that Guantanamo prison contained 774 of “the world’s most dangerous terrorists,” the Bush regime is bringing six of its victims to trial. The vast majority of the 774 detainees have been quietly released. The U.S. government stole years of life from hundreds of ordinary people who had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and were captured by warlords and sold to the stupid Americans as “terrorists.” Needing terrorists to keep the farce going, the U.S. government dropped leaflets in Afghanistan offering $25,000 a head for “terrorists.” Kidnappings ensued until the U.S. government had purchased enough “terrorists” to validate the “terrorist threat.”

The six that the U.S. is bringing to “trial” include two child soldiers for the Taliban and a car-pool driver who allegedly drove bin Laden.

The Taliban did not attack the U.S. The child soldiers were fighting in an Afghan civil war. The U.S. attacked the Taliban. How does that make Taliban soldiers terrorists who should be locked up and abused in Gitmo and brought before a kangaroo military tribunal? If a terrorist hires a driver or a taxi, does that make the driver a terrorist? What about the pilots of the airliners who brought the alleged 9/11 terrorists to the U.S.? Are they guilty, too?

The Gitmo trials are show trials. Their only purpose is to create the precedent that the executive branch can ignore the U.S. court system and try people in the same manner that innocent people were tried in Stalinist Russia and Gestapo Germany. If the Bush regime had any real evidence against the Gitmo detainees, it would have no need for its kangaroo military tribunal.

If any more proof is needed that Bush has no case against any of the Gitmo detainees, the following AP report, Feb. 14, 2008, should suffice: “The Bush administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to limit judges’ authority to scrutinize evidence against detainees at Guantanamo Bay.”

The reason Bush doesn’t want judges to see the evidence is that there is no evidence except a few confessions obtained by torture. In the American system of justice, confession obtained by torture is self-incrimination and is impermissible evidence under the U.S. Constitution.

Andy Worthington’s book, The Guantanamo Files, and his online articles make it perfectly clear that the “dangerous terrorists” claim of the Bush administration is just another hoax perpetrated on the inattentive American public.

Recently the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity issued a report that documents the fact that Bush administration officials made 935 false statements about Iraq to the American people in order to deceive them into going along with Bush’s invasion. In recent testimony before Congress, Bush’s secretary of state and former national security adviser, Condi Rice, was asked by Rep. Robert Wexler about the 56 false statements she made.

Rice replied: “[I] take my integrity very seriously, and I did not at any time make a statement that I knew to be false.” Rice blamed “the intelligence assessments” which “were wrong.”

Another Rice lie, like those mushroom clouds that were going to go up over American cities if we didn’t invade Iraq. The weapon inspectors told the Bush administration that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, as Scott Ritter has reminded us over and over. Every knowledgeable person in the country knew there were no weapons. As the leaked Downing Street memo confirms, the head of British intelligence told the UK cabinet that the Bush administration had already decided to invade Iraq and was making up the intelligence to justify the invasion.

But let’s assume that Rice was fooled by faulty intelligence. If she had any integrity she would have resigned. In the days when American government officials had integrity, they would have resigned in shame from such a disastrous war and terrible destruction based on their mistake. But Condi Rice, like all the Bush (and Clinton) operatives, is too full of American self-righteousness and ambition to have any remorse about her mistake. Condi can still look herself in the mirror despite one million Iraqis dying from her mistake and several million more being homeless refugees, just as Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, can still look herself in the mirror despite sharing responsibility for 500,000 dead Iraqi children.