The Rag Blog

A MILITARY prosecutor called it “a simple case” of murder. But the conviction of a US army sniper in Baghdad for the killing of an unarmed man has provided a glimpse of the shadowy tactics employed by American forces in Iraq and the sleep-deprived conditions under which they are forced to operate.

Jurors at the court-martial of Sergeant Evan Vela yesterday took three hours to find him guilty of murder without premeditation and making false statements for his role in the execution of the Iraqi civilian in May last year.

Vela, who had faced life in jail, was sentenced to ten years, after which he will receive a dishonourable discharge. His case is automatically referred to a military appeal court.

The court heard the Iraqi man, Genei Nesir Khudair al-Janabi, stumbled across a hideout occupied by Vela and his sniper team 30 miles south of Baghdad: he was shot once in the head to prevent him alerting a gang of suspected Iraqi insurgents nearby.

Defence lawyers claimed Vela, a married father of two, had slept for less than five of the previous 72 hours and that his judgment was impaired by exhaustion when he followed the orders of a superior to pull the trigger.

“This was an accident waiting to happen,” his lawyer, James Culp, said. “These men were extremely sleep-deprived and nobody was thinking clearly.”

Vela wept on the witness stand as he recalled the events of the night of 11 May, 2007, but said his memory of events was hazy.

“I heard the word ‘shoot’. My next memory is the man was dead. It took me a minute for me to realise the shot came from the pistol in my hand. I don’t remember pulling the trigger,” he said.

However, according to prosecutors, the group was thinking clearly enough to try to cover up the murder by planting an AK-47 rifle on the dead man’s body.

Details of the secret policy of taking weapons on operations to plant on victims emerged during evidence given by the group’s leader, Sgt Mark Hensley, who admitted ordering Vela to fire the fatal shot, but who was acquitted of murder last year.

The court also heard it was an accepted policy for US snipers’ units to carry fake explosives and other weapons as bait, leave them out in the open, then to shoot any suspected insurgents who tried to take them.

Twenty-five protesters, most of them Baltimore high school students, were detained yesterday after they charged up the steps of the State House demanding that Gov. Martin O’Malley be arrested for not addressing what they called a “historic underfunding” of Maryland public schools.

The demonstrators were handcuffed as they lay still, as if dead, before the bronze doors of the building. They had pressed past more than a dozen police officers, strung crime-scene tape along the stair railings of the State House and called O’Malley’s budget proposal to slow the rate of education funding increases “a crime.”

The detained protesters, including a Baltimore public school teacher and two dozen students from high schools and colleges in Baltimore and Washington, were held for about an hour by Department of General Services Police before they were released.

The demonstration, organized by the Baltimore Algebra Project, a student-run tutoring and advocacy group, involved about 150 high school and college students who said inadequate education funding has led to juvenile crime and the killing last month of one of the Algebra Project’s members, Zachariah Hallback, who was shot in Northeast Baltimore during a robbery.

They lay a coffin symbolizing Hallback’s death before the State House while loudly reciting, “No education, no life.”

“We are identifying this place as a crime scene,” organizer Christopher Goodman said to the protesters, who gathered before a bronze statue of Thurgood Marshall. “Every year, they underfund our schools, they kill us.”

O’Malley spokesman Rick Abbruzzese said in an e-mail, “The governor has met with representatives from the Algebra Project in the past, and he shares their commitment to improving public education in our state.”

O’Malley’s proposed budget provides “a record $5.3 billion for K-12 education – an increase of $184 million over last year,” Abbruzzese said.

O’Malley’s proposal would change the way education funding is calculated in the landmark Thornton law, a move that, coupled with other formula adjustments, means Maryland public school districts would receive about $133 million less than they had expected.

Baltimore school officials have estimated that the city school system would receive about $45 million less over the next two years in state aid than it would have had the Thornton formula stayed in effect.

O’Malley’s plan has sparked concern among teachers unions and superintendents, but the backlash had remained fairly muted until the demonstration yesterday.

Demonstrators – some as young as 11 – said they considered a provocative protest necessary to draw attention to their cause.

Charles Waters, a 16-year-old junior at City College, smiled as he sat in handcuffs on the sidewalk.

CARACAS, Venezuela (Feb. 10) – President Hugo Chavez on Sunday threatened to cut off oil sales to the United States in an “economic war” if Exxon Mobil Corp. wins court judgments to seize billions of dollars in Venezuelan assets.

Exxon Mobil has gone after the assets of state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA in U.S., British and Dutch courts as it challenges the nationalization of a multibillion dollar oil project by Chavez’s government.

A British court has issued an injunction “freezing” as much as $12 billion in assets.

“If you end up freezing (Venezuelan assets) and it harms us, we’re going to harm you,” Chavez said during his weekly radio and television program, “Hello, President.” “Do you know how? We aren’t going to send oil to the United States. Take note, Mr. Bush, Mr. Danger.”

Chavez has repeatedly threatened to cut off oil shipments to the United States, which is Venezuela’s No. 1 client, if Washington tries to oust him. Chavez’s warnings on Sunday appeared to extend that threat to attempts by oil companies to challenge his government’s nationalization drive through lawsuits.

“I speak to the U.S. empire, because that’s the master: continue and you will see that we won’t sent one drop of oil to the empire of the United States,” Chavez said Sunday.

“The outlaws of Exxon Mobil will never again rob us,” Chavez said, accusing the Irving, Texas-based oil company of acting in concert with Washington.

A U.S. Embassy spokeswoman did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Venezuelan Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez has argued that court orders won by Exxon Mobil have “no effect” on the state oil company PDVSA and are merely “transitory measures” while Venezuela presents its case in courts in New York and London.

Exxon Mobil is also taking its claims to international arbitration, disputing the terms it was granted under Chavez’s nationalization last year of four heavy oil projects in the Orinoco River basin, one of the world’s richest oil deposits.

Other major oil companies including U.S.-based Chevron Corp., France’s Total, Britain’s BP PLC, and Norway’s StatoilHydro ASA have negotiated deals with Venezuela to continue on as minority partners in the Orinoco oil project.

ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil, however, balked at the tougher terms and have been in compensation talks with PDVSA.

The din of squealing, laughing children is the background white noise of the Third World. In Belize, as in most of the Third World, 45% of all people are under the age of 16. About a dozen of that 45% swarm around me as I cut my toenails under the mango tree. A few are picking on the mangy, quarreling dogs but the majority are drawn in close, giving advice about how to cut gnarly, old man type toenails: “Saw dem off wid a file” seems to be the consensus.

What I see are children I help with homework and feed, and admonish about grades unanxious and reasonably happy little members of the human race. They do not look much like a global migration or crushing planetary population pressure. Yet they are among the most incredible wave of both ever in human history.

Most families here have five or six kids and their kids will have a similar number. I’ve yet to meet a native of the village who does not think half a dozen is not a nice round number of offspring. My adopted family has six kids and four adults living on a 100×300-foot lot. This does not include the Guatemalan family of five living in a rented cabana at one corner of the lot. Assuming all the children reach adulthood and procreate, the tally in ten years will be about 50 people of all ages trying to exist on this square of sewerage soaked sand.

But oh, were it that bright a future. As adults with families, these kids won’t even have this spot on which to live at all, much less live as well as they live now. The resorts and condo rackets out of Canada, South Africa and the U.S. are buying up these small plots. Unschooled in western financial concepts and janked by the developers’ offers of more money than they have ever seen in their lives, locals sell. Usually they are broke within a year. In any case their semi-literate children will join the next generation’s issuance of dispossessed poverty stricken young adults headed for elsewhere. Just what the world does not need, not here in Central America, not in the Middle East, not in Latin America or the U.S. But that’s what we’ve got and that’s what we are going to get a lot more of.

Population growth is the rhino in the playpen, the root cause of our approaching eco-disaster that no one honestly talks about. On the left we get an onslaught of information about what we must and must not do to prevent climate change. Good Democrats get Al Gore’s advice, which somehow never mentions the corporations doing the damage. And all of America gets feel-good electric car ads — buy your way out of the problem, or at least your guilt if you happen to have any. But nowhere do we get an honest discussion about population growth. If you care to, argue that climate change may or may not destroy us. But uncontrolled population growth is guaranteed to do the job. As an old Idaho rancher told me, “You can’t run a hundred head of cattle on half an acre.”

Most of the developed world remains clueless as to how all this will affect their own lives. But Americans in particular cannot get their head around the impact these billions will have on the lifestyles they are driven like rats in hell to sustain. About half of Americans

SCREAMING MAN: LOOKY HERE BAGEANT, YOU PICKLED OLD GAS BAG. HALF OF AMERICANS LIVE UNDER THE GOOFBALL HALLUCINATION THEY CAN SEAL THE BORDERS WITH SILLY PUTTY, DRONE AIRCRAFT AND MACHINE GUNS. THE OTHER HALF, LIBERALS OVERDOSED ON PROZAC AND WHITE WINE, IS LINED UP LIKE DOCKSIDE WHORES WAVING AT THE INCOMING FLEET. “LET’S WELCOME THEM ALL! AMERICA IS THE LAND OF IMMIGRANTS SO HELL FUCKING YES, LET’EM ALL IN!” YEA, RIGHT. LET EVERYBODY LIVE LIKE A FUCKING HATIAN WHARF RAT IN THE NEW THIRD WORLD AMERICA. HELL, IT’S ALREADY STARTED. THEY’RE CROAKING 49 MILION AMERICANS BECAUSE THEY CAN’T COME UP WITH THE BLACKMAIL DOUGH FOR HEALTHCARE. THEY’RE KICKIN HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OUT OF THEIR PLYWOOD NESTING BOXES BECAUSE THEY CAN’T MAKE THE MONTHLY NUT. AMERICA IS ALREADY A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY WITH DRIVE THROUGH FEEDING BOXES.

Meanwhile, both camps of a nation with no sense of history beyond its own state sponsored founding fathers mythology hasn’t the slightest notion of how population migrations from areas of scarcity to areas of plenty have shaped human history perhaps more than any other force, including war (war is just more dramatic when it happens and more entertaining to read about when it’s over.) The Vikings were a population shift from the limited arable land resources of the north around the British coast to Normandy (and then back to England by way of William the Conqueror, a Viking descendant.) The Huns, the Goths, the Vandals, the Irish in America, Chinese into Tibet

SCREAMING MAN: WELL BUBBA, LET ME SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU IN CRAYONS. IT’S GETTING RIGHT BROWN OUT THERE IN HEARTLAND AMERICA. ALL THOSE SAWED-OFF LITTLE DARK HAIRED FUCKERS HAVEN’T COME UP HERE TO BE LAWN ORNAMENTS. AND SINCE THEY EAT AND SHIT ABOUT THE SAME AMOUNT AS YOU DO, THERE’S GONNA BE SOME REDISTRIBUTION OF THE GOODIES. YOU’RE GONNA SEE A LOT OF AMERICAN BLUBBER PARKED IN LINE ALONGSIDE SALVADORANS WITH THEIR WHEELBARROWS FULL OF WORTHLESS GREENBACKS WAITING TO BUY BLACK BEANS AND MASA HARINA IN BULK ­ THEN HITCHING A RIDE HOME ON A FLATBED TRUCK LIKE THE REST OF THE WORLD SOUTH OF LOREDO DOES. OR MAYBE TAKING THE CHICKEN COOP FIREWOOD EXPRESS SURPLUS SCHOOL BUS BACK TO THE SAVAGE ARMED SUBURBS. A LITTLE TIP FROM THE OLE SCREAMING MAN: IF THERE IS A BILLY GOAT IN THE BACK OF THE BUS, RIDE UP FRONT. IF THE DAMNED GOAT IS UP FRONT, RIDE ON THE ROOF. THERE IS USUALLY SOMEBODY OR SOMETHING UP THERE TO HANG ONTO.

Hungry but still humpin’

Meanwhile, the truth stays buried in the crapola. According to the UN’s newest report on the planetary condition, crop production has improved but has not kept up with population. World cereal production per person peaked in the 1980s, and has since been decreasing. We have over six billion people now — there were far less than half that when I was born — and there will be roughly nine billion people by 2050. But the UN, being a world organization that has to please a couple hundred governments, each beating its own national drum to its people, pretending there is a long term solution other that to eliminate two thirds of the world population within the above mentioned kids’ lifetimes. Thus, the UN issues “millennium development goals.” This neatly sidesteps the fact that if the present six billion mouths and assholes running the world’s resources through their gullets like shit through a goose is unsustainable, then nine billion of the same are waaaaaay beyond sustainable in any way worth calling human life.

For starters it would take a doubling of world food production to (A-) feed the current victims of hunger, and (B-) to feed the additional three billion. Theoretically, we’re going to cut back. We’ll feed the nine billion by some unarguably admirable means, like cutting waste, not overeating, biofuels, and ending meat consumption. Small problem here Jackson: We’re pretty much out of the phosphate fertilizer that is the foundation of world agriculture. The soil itself collapsing in terms of human nutrition, as we use up its finite reserves of vital elements ­ iodine, chromium salts and other complex materials our six billion collective bodies need to function. And farming has already sucked down the world’s water supply to the danger level. Yet somehow, we are going to come up with TWICE the water we now use by 2050, global warming and drying be damned. The whole time we are fixing global warming the population climbs.

Old Tom Malthus said something like this was gonna happen, although he got some of the details wrong, which a person just might conceivably do in predicting the fate of human civilization a couple hundred years in advance. Call me a softie here, but I tend to give the guy a break for getting it 90% right.

But then I’m no scientist. Supposedly sophisticated American scientists have been pissing on the grave of poor Tom at least since I was a kid in school. All my life American capitalist economists have proclaimed they’ve licked the population problem by using the world up faster. “A failed prophet of doom,” I believe my high school teacher called Malthus. Even commies kicked Tom’s dog around. Engles called him a barbarian. Marx couldn’t handle Tom’s action, either. Nor practically anyone else, from John Stuart Mill to Allen Greenspan. And we still get the stale argument that “This planet isn’t crowded; it is just mismanaged.” Even the greens seem to believe that we can manage our way out of this fatal mess, if we just recycle, wear hemp and vote for the candidate on the bicycle with the Celtic tattoo. The alternative geeks swear nanotech is gonna pull us through. But last I heard pandemic viruses were still smarter than carbon nanotubes. Something about rapid adaptability. Those little fuckers seem to be fast on their feet, so in a title match between nano tech (or any tech for that matter) managed in the ring by nerds, and natural evolutionary biology — which not only has mother nature holding the towels in its corner, but also calling the fight — I’m damned sure betting on the biology.

At any rate, when it comes to the planet, now under the new global corporate management, it looks to be managed to death, dirt, people and all. The new management, kings and feudal lords of corporate finance to a man, peer down happily from the forty-fourth floor at six billion potential slave wage employees and wonder if you can feed’em on dirt and kudzoo.

Malthus must be thrashing inside his lead lined English coffin right now, cackling, “Do the math, you fuckers!” But they won’t. With the world’s geet presently being loaded into their yachts bound for the Caymans, they don’t have to. Not just yet, anyway. As for they guy on the bike with the Celtic tattoo, if he peddles long enough he’s bound to run into some of those 49,671 human beings born while I was writing this.

SCREAMING MAN: AND WHILE HE’SPEEDING HE CAN CLOSE HIS EYES AND MAKE A FUCKING WISH WITH TINKERBELL! THAT NINE BILLION WILL BE HUMPING AWAY TRYING TO CRACK THE TWELVE BILLION MARK. WHEN WE ARE ALL LIVING IN RENTALSTORAGE LOCKERS AND EATING PURINA PEOPLE CHOW, FUCKING WILL BE ONE OF THE LAST FREE PASSTIMES LEFT, OTHER THAN LISTENING TO THE 24/7 ADVERTIZING PIPED IN THROUGH OUR NECK CHIPS SELLING TEENSY STRAP ON YOUR ASS RUBBER BAND POWERED CARS. SO WE’RE GONNA HAVE EITHER HOMELAND SECURITY FUCK POLICE, OR FORCED STERILIZATION BY ICE PICK.

Actually, THE SCREAMING MAN is not so far off the mark. Human sterilizing crops are being researched, and I’m not entirely sure I’m agin it, partner, so long as they make the white people eat the stuff first.

In the meantime, the air is getting rather balmy in places it shouldn’t. Such as the North Pole. So the corporate and financial lizards at the top of the world rock, in a last ditch effort to milk out a few bloody trillion dollars more, has come up with a plan: carbon emissions trading.

Just as in a Mafia handshake and kiss on the neck “business agreement,” there are no escape clauses in the laws of physics. In either case the rules cannot be bent, though you ass may well end up worse than bent if you try to escape the debt you have racked up, be it in greenbacks or the green life supporting stuff of our planet. Both are finite and vital. Which means you get killed if you try to scam the game, and you certainly don’t get to write yourself an escape clause after the fact. But that doesn’t keep the high rolling carnie hucksters we call legislators from trying.

Naturally they like carbon trading. To my mind at least, making a profit off the fact that you did not piss into the community drinking gourd is the kind of logic only obsessive, property based western world governments and corporations could come up with. It assumes that (A) poisoning everyone else in the human fishbowl is a right to start with, and (B) that right is a property which can be bought and sold between corporate poisoners.

Traded or not, there will be plenty of carbon around, so don’t worry about not getting your fair share. In fact, we could park every car on the planet and be assured of a nice steady supply of carbon pollution for our great-great-great grandchildren. Turns out that, decades ahead of an already grim global warming schedule, biological repositories of carbon are beginning to release enough of the stuff to tide us over so our progeny can gasp for breath as they skateboard piggyback to and from their barracks at the Manpower gulag. Anyway, we can monetize pollution, and trade our commonly shared hemlock back and forth, and we can call it a “partial solution and a progressive step forward.” But it’s still hemlock. Yet, economists assure us that it makes good sense propertize, then buy and sell catastrophe in the market of calamity.

SCREAMING MAN: LOOK HERE SPORT. THEY’RE POLISHING A TURD SO THEY CAN SHAKE DOWN THE YOKELS. AND THE DUMB MAMMY JAMMING PUBLIC BUYS IT! HELL, AN ECONOMIST SAID IT AND AN ECOLOGIST AGREED, SO IT MUST BE A GOOD IDEA, RIGHT? BUT WHEN ALL THOSE MOOKS WITHOUT ECONOMICS DEGREES FIGURE OUT THAT TURD IS NEVER GONNA SHINE, THE GAME WILL BE UP. ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY BEGIN TO ASSOCIATE POLLUTION WITH THE FACT THAT THEIR KIDS ARE BEING BORN WITH 177 TEETH AND AN I.Q. OF 33.

The Great Commons Shell Game

Civilization’s most fatal folly was monetization and propertizing of the natural world that is humanity’s great common. In fact those two things ­ monetization and propertization — have come to mean civilization from the perspective of most ordinary people over the increasingly brutal centuries they have enabled. If modern cumulative civilization is not perceived as being very brutal by, say, the average hedge fund manager or Russian oligarch with a cell phone jacked into one ear and hurtling through the earth’s commons in a new BMW toward either the Outback Steakhouse or an appointment with is mistress, well, theirs is certainly a minority perspective. Ask any indigenous person.

“Commons” may be the current precious little term embraced by environmentally concerned American writers and activists ­ including me ­ but it rests on old European “ours together and my own private” concepts of the earth. That green foliage stuff whizzing by our windshields is more than commonly shared space. It is our commonly shared oxygenic and chlorophylic blood. And the “dirt” scraped and hammered into sterility and smothered under the asphalt is the armature, the bones of our existence. It was never possible for anyone to “own” any part of this so-called common, a word that only exists so someone else –usually a less than nice fellow surrounded by thugs in armor and whatnot — could call a piece of it his private property. You dared kill and eat one of my grouse! Die peasant motherfucker!

But once the delusion set in, and the peasants were allowed to scratch out a living on “their own” miserable designated little square, there was no turning back. Especially if you were European or derivative thereof, and ultimately ended up on the winning side of the delusion, otherwise called empire. But there never was a “mine and theirs,” when it comes to breathing clean air or drinking clean water. It only appeared so to propertized minds and cultures busy conquering and killing and pillaging other people’s natural world. And thanks to feudalism’s greatest shape shifting trick of all, capitalism, there ain’t much left to pillage.

For Americans this is particularly ironic, especially in terms of politics. Just as we started ballyhooing the triumph of America consumer capitalism over communism, the world’s ecology started backing up like a redneck septic tank. And Castro’s Cuba, of all places, emerged as a beacon of relatively petroleum free eco-enlightenment, organic farming and clean air, thanks to our 45-year embargo and the Ruskies turning off cigarland’s oil spigot in 1990. And now, despite it toxic track record, we find China, the same goddamned anthill people who flat out starved 30 million people (there’s population control for ya) to make weight for a great leap forward, are running the two largest eco-reclamation projects on earth — the Natural Forest Protection and the Sloping Land Conversion Programs. These are admirable efforts in the world’s eyes, even if the air over the cities is still so foul buzzards fly into it and drop dead. It certainly beats the U.S. refusing to stop in at the Kyoto Conference, not even for the hors d’oeuvres. Or going to the Bali Eco Summit just to pick fights with the French. George Bush might claim to be from Texas, but he plays global poker like a drunk. Meanwhile, the Chinese are still reaping the benefits of offing those 30 million because, voila! They never reproduced. Are those guys inscrutable or what?

So we what’s an all-American guy to do but drive around the suburbs looking for fried chicken, watching the weeds grown up on the foreclosed lawns, and slobber into our cell phones regarding our geographic location, having lost all sense of historical and moral location. “I’m going down Shirley Drive. Where are you?” “Me? I’m eating a pizza and watching some hot blonde on Animal Planet smootch upon bonobo chimps. It’s educational. Kinda sexy too, in a weird way.” Now this folks, is called our “socio-economic environment.” It may be social, and it may be economic, but it sure as hell ain’t much of an environment. Unless you happen to be a chimp. Of course like the chimps, we are “prime apes.” And as such, we’re supposed to have big brains that account for our “success as a species.” We’re gonna have to rethink that one. I’m not seeing much success here, hoss. Are you?

Let somebody else fix it while I grab a salad

Sad lot that we are as a species, not everyone is a moral pig. Millions of individuals, some governments even, are unnerved by what is happening. In America the best among us are outraged, and protest that officialdom has failed us. Unfortunately, we are officialdom, indirectly as that may be. Because we are mankind and mankind is all inclusive, organically and forever ­ forever having turned out to be rather shorter than we thought. If officialdom has failed us, it is because we have failed ourselves, and in many respects, our official governments provide us with a collective excuse not to act personally.

Mainly though, aware Americans are watching and waiting for someone else to make an important move. Guts are nonexistent in Americans these days, programmed out of us during the posh captivity of the “cheap oil fiesta” that drove our grotesque and brief civilization. Still, if ever there were a time to show some guts, it’s now. Not by protesting ­ which has become a security state supervised liberal pussy sport — but by giving up the material life, the consumer life. Damned near all of it. Including all those leftie and alternative books from Amazon — sitting on our asses reading and drinking green tea just because we can afford to is just another type of inaction and consumerism. It’s the only real act of protest possible by the prisoners of our consumption driven monolith. True, you’ll be just one iPodless, and carless little guy throwing a single stone at the United States of Jabba the Hutt. But assuming you’re still capable of any kind of life after the stellazine mind conditioning we’ve all been administered for past 40 years, I’ve got folding cash that says you will own your life in a way that seemed previously impossible. Hanging onto or chasing the bling is over with anyway, as dead as the economy. The Olive Garden and Circuit City are still open, true, but only because the hair and nails still grow on Jabba’s corpse. Would somebody please quit pretending he’s alive and yank the feeding tube?

Scoffers abound, those lurching, undead cud chewers whose best lick is: “Aw, if things were really that bad somebody would be doing something about it.” Asked who that somebody might be, they usually come up with “the government.” Or science or the stupidest of all, the Free Market Solution. In other words, they haven’t the slightest fucking notion other than that there is some great governmental or commercial force that governs their destiny ­ one so vast that, like god, they don’t have to understand it, just swear by it and trust it, even if they don’t know exactly what the hell it is. What it is of course is good old fashioned pillage. But Even Alaric the Goth limited pillage to three days ­ with an extra day of rape thrown in if it had been a particularly good siege.

The gun and cheeseburger ethic

In Hopkins Village, one can find examples of everything that is both destroying the world (scarcely a villager here would not live the America lifestyle given half a chance) and good about the world (this morning I took a bath in the sea at dawn, then ate fresh papaya with one of the kids now supervising my pedicure.) Americans constitute 5% of the world’s population but consume at least 28% of the world’s resources. This is a primary contributor to the fact that the kids around me, Kirky, Lian, Ebony, Dennis and the rest have no future. Is that out fault? You and I are but two of 280 million Americans. Yet just because one’s contribution to global misery seems small, it does not mean exemption from responsibility. If I took part in the mass stoning of a child, would you be less guilty because the stone I threw was a smaller than the rest?

Compassion figures somewhere into all this. Or is supposed to anyway. Without it, we are lost. Being born America, I have as little as anyone else. Last week a young Garifuna woman in our village, a neighbor and friend, lost her baby son in a terrible truck crash. That night, with neighbors gathered round her in the dim light of her shack, her grief was beyond grief. Unable even walk, she lay on the bed issuing a low feral gurgling howl. And as I stood there packed in among the black faces I felt nothing, except a strong sense of looking at a National Geographic documentary. Exotic dark people mourning in a strange setting. That’s what American media does to human consciousness. Provides inhuman reference points in the brain/mind to replace experience and feeling. As a people who demonstrably show no guts and even less compassion about the rest of the world, we are in real trouble.

Comfortable as we have been in our plentitude, and confident as we have been in our providence—or perhaps because of these things—we Americans are now at the most critical and terrible moral and ethical juncture in our history. Do we care at all about anybody but ourselves? Is the reader, who has never met Ebony, Lian, Kirky or Dennis, responsible for accommodating any kind of future for them? Are we responsible that they be fed adequately full well knowing that the world has far too many babies anyway?

Not many Americans would eat a cheeseburger in front of a starving African child. But is it OK to eat the cheeseburger behind the child’s back, out of sight of the child? How far must we get from the starving child to make it OK? What if we worked very hard to buy that cheeseburger? Does hard work justify everything? What is our responsibility? Or are we just helpless in the face of such things?

That we look to other people, politicians, police, and supposed experts to solve our problems demonstrates that we have learned to be helpless — learned helplessness. None of us is helpless. The fact is that at any given moment in any given day, we can do something to help eliminate world misery and disparity. As any Third World priest can tell you, this is done mostly face to face, people helping people one at a time. But America’s strictly enforced and fearful class lines prevent us from even associating with those we can actively help. The single mother, the felon just released from prison, the Mexican with four kids who empties your office waste basket at night

Americans and people of the developed world are in an unusual position. We can help by doing nothing. Simply by sitting on our asses and not buying stuff, not driving to the Gap or the organic market, not turning on our televisions, which is the ultimate act of protest, since it both denies access to our minds by corporate interests, and denies media monoliths that all important sea of eyeballs. We can refuse to consume. By not consuming we can create our own economic cutbacks. Otherwise, economic cutbacks are not going to happen and endless war is the inevitable outcome. People will be killed so others survive, advanced nations with sophisticated weaponry will kill off the people from weaker nations so as to grab their land and resources. It happens. And if we let it get that far (well, much farther, since we’re already doing it) Americans will be in favor because we live here and not in a poor country. Evil as it sounds, we will have no choice because it is human to prefer to see others die and our own families survive. Morals never get in the way of ultimate survival. In the end, there is no other way, except universal legislation to push our bloated material standard of living back three generations. Clearly democracy cannot make this happen. Unless it is the democracy of the human heart, that internal thing that seeks justice.

Overcoming our worst instincts is hard enough. But we also have an array of genuine enemies lined up before us, many but not all of our own making. Being the toughest kid on the global block, we long ago chose a geo-strategic struggle for dwindling energy resources rather than conservation. Simply because we could. The richest, strongest among us, the global schoolyard bullies, the ones with the power and holding all our national wealth (they hold the wealth, we hold the debt) are seeing the same thing coming down the pike that we see, and are building their forts around the planetary neighborhood, consolidating as much wealth and power among as few people as possible.

Yet no one is much alarmed by this because they are incapable of being alarmed by anything except what the state message tells them to be alarmed about, mainly terrorism, which is a form of chickens coming home to roost. America is moreover a nation of state supervised zombies. This used to scare the piss out of me, but now they have so long been the national furniture, they are merely depressing. Especially considering that, despite the Republican historical rewrite of the era, we, meaning my generation, had a real crack at turning this thing around during the Sixties. And we failed. We failed ourselves, failed our children. And as if that were not enough, we failed the planet and humanity itself. Fucking up doesn’t come bigger than that. I spent at least a decade nailing the bling. The only excuse I can offer is that I didn’t know any better. And I didn’t. But somehow that seems so lame.

I’m trying to atone. Yes, that is the right word here ­ atone — for my part in this unholy mess. I try to live on about $4,000 — $5,000 a year and come close to pulling it off. I share the rest with the world’s needy, almost never drive, refuse to own a cell phone or anything else that requires earth killing batteries other than the laptop that now provides my livelihood, yada yada you know the drill. Lest I sound holier than thou, let me confess to my continuing part in fucking up the earth’s food chain due to a love of pork. But on the whole, I’m not too ashamed these days of my role in the ongoing disaster called America, though there is more I could do. Almost weekly I seriously consider refusing to pay income taxes as an act of personal resistance. But I ain’t Joan Baez and this ain’t the Sixties, and I’m scared shitless of going it alone. (Work with me here people!) Besides that, my wife is unenthusiastic about the idea of her geezer playing dressups in the Big House. The relatives would talk.

Thus, I am moreover just waiting it out. Either I’ll watch my sorry assed species will walk right off that cliff, or I will croak first. Crappy set of choices. Meanwhile, on a good day I realize that I’ve still got horses to break, ball games to fix and beer to drink.

Stay strong.

Dear Hillary,

By polling logic, I should be your supporter — Democrat, woman, white, liberal. But this past summer I saw a News Hour show on farmers committing suicide in Maharastra, India, which affected me deeply. I started learning what was happening to farmers and to food and how the Clintons are connected.

The News Hour piece said Monsanto, a US agricultural corporation, hired Bollywood actors to sell illiterate farmers Bt (genetically engineered) cotton seeds, promising they’d get rich from big yields. The expensive seeds needed expensive fertilizer and pesticides (Monsanto’s) and irrigation. There is no irrigation there. Crops failed. Farmers had immense debt and couldn’t collect seeds to try again because Monsanto seeds are “patented” as “intellectual property”).

Genetic Engineering is often justified as a human technology, one that feeds more people with better food. Nothing could be further from the truth. With very few exceptions, the whole point of genetic engineering is to increase sales of chemicals and bio-engineered products to dependent farmers.” David Ehrenfield: Professor of Biology, Rutgers University.

Monsanto has a $10 million budget and 75 person staff to prosecute farmers.

Since the late 1990s (as industrial agriculture took hold in India),166,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide and 8 million have left the land (P. Sainath, The Hindu). Farmers in Europe, Asia, Africa, Indonesia, South America, Central America and here, have all protested Monsanto and genetic engineering.

What does this have to do with you?

Your Orwellian-named “Rural Americans for Hillary” were Monsanto’s lobbyists. My greater concern, though, is you former-employer, Rose Law Firm, representing Monsanto, world’s largest GE (GE – genetic engineering) corporation; Tyson, world’s largest meat producer; Walmart, the world’s largest retailer. Rose is home to Industrial FOOD.

Rose’s cozy connections: Jon Jacoby, senior at the Stephens Group – one of the largest shareholders of Tyson, Walmart, DP&L – is C.O.B. of DP&L, arranged the Wal-Mart deal. Jackson Stephens’ Stephens Group staked Walton, financed Tyson. Monsanto bought DP&L. Walmart’s board invited you on, Tyson executive helped you do $100,000 trade just before Bill’ governorship, Jackson Stephens backed Bill for Governor, then President (donating $100,000).

Monsanto made Agent Orange, PCBs, nuclear weapons components, pesticides, and with that diverse background in death, are now “doing” food.

Bill in office:

USDA immediately significantly weakened chicken waste/contamination standards, easing Tyson’s poultry-factory expansion.

1. Monsanto people were put in charge of food, …

2. FDA okayed Monsanto’s rBGH (bovine growth hormone), first GE-product ever approved.

3. Despite bovine illness/death, FDA didn’t recall or warn.

4. When dairymen labeled milk “rBGH-free,” USDA threatened confiscation.

5. Organic food was the last way around unknown danger. FDA tried to close that escape with new “organic” standards, to include: genetic engineering of plants/animals, food irradiation , sewage sludge fertilizer.
USDA backed down from public response 20 times greater than to anything before American food:

Oils: Indian sheep died eating from Bt cotton fields. Our children eat Bt cottonseed oil in peanut butter, cookies.

Grains: 49 per cent of corn acreage planted in Bt corn in 2007. A French study indicates it causes kidney and liver toxicity. . Monsanto controls US’s two main crops, soy (90% GMO, 90% of traits “belong” to Monsanto) and corn, the largest crop (60% GMO, nearly 100% Monsanto “owned” traits).

Meat: Steroids bulk athletes, Monsanto steroids fatten animals, our fattening children eat steroid-laced meats. FDA allowed “known TSE-positive (Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy Mad Cow Disease) material to be used in pet food, pig, chicken and fish feed.” Monsanto’s GE-hormone increases risk sick cows are entering US food chain

Poultry: USDA weakened waste/contamination standards. Waste from transnational poultry industry is now implicated as the source of bird flu. The poultry industry is using the crisis to push out small farmers.

Milk: Scientific studies indicate Monsanto’s rBGH increases risks of breast cancer by up to seven-fold, increases colon, prostate cancers risks. Canada, 29 European nations, Norway, Switzerland, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa ban U.S. rBGH dairy products. Bill’s USFDA put no restrictions, warning labels, or any labels.

Control out of control.

Monsanto’s Terminator genes make plants sterile after one season, posing apocalyptic risk of breaking out into nature. GE breakouts have contaminated maize and weeds, already.

Monsanto, meat-packers, and the USDA are pushing NAIS (National Animal Identification System), a corporate database tracking small farmers’ livestock. Monsanto pushing state laws taking control from farmers, communities, over GE planting.

Cattle living in filth, 12,000-year-old seed loss, poultry industry implicated in bird flu, Mad Cow disease, bee colony collapse, poisoned soil, depleted water, Superweed), lawsuits against farmers, loss of family farms throughout the world, … farmers committing suicide. Industrial agriculture.

Bees and farmers, dead canaries in that mine.

Your proposed “Department of Food Safety” centralizes control over food into whose hands? Tough talk on labeling “foreign” food but Bill degraded US food and prevented minimally sane labeling. You never objected.

Monsanto uses child labor in India.

You take Monsanto donations. Blacks, our poorest group, have to eat Monsanto’s steroid/hormone/antibiotic-filled GE food. You take Monsanto donations.

Who are you protecting? National Black Farmers Association, boycotting Monsanto? Babies drinking rBGH milk? Women fearing breast cancer? Despairing farmers? Suffering animals? Children fed kidney-and-liver-toxic Bt-corn?

Or Monsanto?

I am a person before I am a woman. Your gender is irrelevant. Given deadly threats to my grandchildren’s future by your corporate connections (Edwards was right), I don’t believe your talk of “caring” about Blacks/women/children/health/farmers/food.

I will vote for someone committed to small farmers – our ONLY real food safety. Your friends, though, are the heart of an international industrial agricultural nightmare.

Linn Cohen-Cole
Atlanta

Whoever wins the presidency will most likely fail to take on the unholy trinity of arms manufacturers, the Pentagon, and Congress

10/02/08 “The Independent” — -“Lockheed Martin,” intones the fruity male voice, drenched in patriotism. “We begin with the things that matter… [pregnant pause]… Freedom.” Such are the joys of listening to radio commercials as you drive to work in Washington DC. Lockheed, of course, is a giant defence contractor. Hearing this ad, and similar inspirational stuff from Boeing and the like, you might think you were on the front lines of a war that reached into your living room.

That, of course, is precisely what George W Bush would like you to think of his “war on terror”, even though the closest the average citizen here ever gets to it is a security line at an airport. But those commercials are part of another struggle, less violent but no less relentless. It is being fought out by companies like Lockheed over the lucrative and effectively captive US government arms market.

Obscured by the great Obama-Hillary battle and the drama of Super Tuesday, the final budget of the Bush era was published last week. It covers the 2009 financial year, and contains one startling fact. If this President has his way, the US will next year be spending more on its military (adjusted for inflation) than at any time since the Second World War.

The raw figures are mind-boggling. The official Pentagon budget for 2009 runs to $515bn (£265bn), or around 4 per cent of America’s total economy (the equivalent figure for Britain is 2.5 per cent), and about the same size as the entire output of the Netherlands. Throw in an expected $150bn of supplementary outlays and you’ve got defence spending larger than Australia’s entire gross domestic product.

Even that may be an understatement. Add in various “black items”, such as military spending tucked away in other parts of government, and some claim that America’s total annual spending on the military now exceeds a trillion dollars – roughly half the entire British economy.

Students of these matters claim that the wind-down of the surge in Iraq, and the likelihood that the Democrats will recapture the White House in December, mean that the latest growth cycle in Pentagon spending, that began at the end of the Clinton era, has probably peaked. But don’t bet on it.

A faltering economy may be the biggest worry for voters this election year, but national security runs it close. On Thursday, Mitt Romney justified his decision to drop out of the Republican race for the White House by his party’s need to set aside divisive internal squabbling “at this time of war”. As for John McCain, the man now set to carry the Republican standard in November, maintaining the strength of the US military is his top priority. The economy, he freely admits, is not his strong suit. National security, however, is. If McCain wins, it will be because Americans deem him the candidate to keep them safe.

Appearing “soft” on national security can be fatal, as Democrats know only too well after their stinging defeats in the 2002 mid-terms and the presidential election of 2004. Hillary Clinton has been trying to establish herself as a hawk ever since, while Barack Obama knows full well he also has to convince in the role of commander-in-chief. In short, even a liberal Democratic President will hesitate before taking an axe to the Pentagon budget. But he should.

The US simply does not get value for its defence dollars. The Pentagon is still fighting the Cold War, not the terrorists who rely on infiltration and ambush rather than submarines and strategic bombers. Yet for all the money Bush has lavished on the military since 9/11, Iraq has stretched America’s armed forces to breaking point.

The US defence budget may reach a 60-year high next year, but the number of combat troops is smaller than ever. Politicians – Democrats as well as Republicans – all now agree the armed forces need more boots on the ground. That, however, means more, not less, Pentagon spending – unless, of course, some of those blue-chip weapons programmes are cut back.

But again, don’t bet on it. Vast spending on defence is locked into the contemporary American system as firmly as it was into the former Soviet one. Paradoxically, it took a general-turned-president to warn against such excesses. Indeed, Dwight Eisenhower had hardly taken office in 1953 when he spoke of the danger of amassing military strength at the expense of all else, a policy that amounted “to defending ourselves against one disaster by inviting another”.

Eisenhower famously referred to a “military-industrial complex”. A better term, however, is perhaps an “Iron Triangle” whose three corners are the Pentagon, arms manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and – most important – Congress. All three are locked together by a common vested interest. The Pentagon chiefs want the best weaponry possible. The companies want to keep the orders flowing ever more munificently. But the ultimate enablers are the elected representatives of the people.

10/02/08 “ICH”– -After one spends 45 years in Washington, high farce does not normally throw one off balance. I found the past few days, however, an acid test of my equilibrium.

I missed the National Prayer Breakfast—for the 45th time in a row. But, as I drove to work I listened with rapt attention as President George W. Bush gave his insights on prayer:

“When we lift our hearts to God, we’re all equal in his sight. We’re all equally precious…In prayer we grow in mercy and compassion…. When we answer God’s call to love a neighbor as ourselves, we enter into a deeper friendship with our fellow man — and a deeper relationship with our eternal Father.”

Vice President Dick Cheney skipped Thursday’s prayer breakfast in order to put the final touches on the speech he gave later that morning to the Conservative Political Action Conference. Perhaps he felt he needed some extra time to devise careful words to extol “the interrogation program run by the CIA…a tougher program for tougher customers, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11,” without conceding that the program has involved torture.

But there was a touch of defensiveness in Cheney’s remarks, as he saw fit repeatedly to reassure his audience yesterday that America is a “decent” country.

After all, CIA Director Michael Hayden had confirmed publicly on Tuesday that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other “high-value” detainees had been waterboarded in 2002-2003, though Hayden added that the technique has since been discontinued.

An extreme form of interrogation going back at least as far as the Spanish Inquisition, waterboarding has been condemned as torture by just about everyone—except the hired legal hands of the Bush administration.

On Wednesday President Bush’s spokesman Tony Fratto revealed that the White House reserves the right to approve waterboarding again, “depending on the circumstances.” Fratto matter-of-factly described the process still followed by the Bush administration to approve torture—er; I mean, “enhanced interrogation techniques” like waterboarding:

“The process includes the director of the Central Intelligence Agency bringing the proposal to the attorney general, where the review would be conducted to determine if the plan would be legal and effective. At that point, the proposal would go to the president. The president would listen to the determination of his advisers and make a decision.”

Dissing Congress

Cheney’s task of reassuring us about our “decency” was made no easier Thursday, when Attorney General Michael Mukasey stonewalled questions from the hapless John Conyers, titular chair of the House Judiciary Committee. Conyers tried, and failed, to get straight answers from Mukasey on torture.

Conyers referred to Hayden’s admission about waterboarding and branded the practice “odious.” But Mukasey seemed to take perverse delight in “dissing” Conyers, as the expression goes in inner city Washington. Sadly, the tired chairman took the disrespect stoically.

He did summon the courage to ask Attorney General Mukasey directly, “Are you ready to start a criminal investigation into whether this confirmed use of waterboarding by U.S. agents was illegal?”

“No, I am not,” Mukasey answered.

Mukasey claimed “waterboarding was found to be permissible under the law as it existed” in the years immediately after 9/11; thus, the Justice Department could not investigate someone for doing something the department had declared legal. Got that?

Mukasey explained:

“That would mean the same department that authorized the program would now consider prosecuting somebody who followed that advice.”

Oddly, Mukasey himself is on record saying waterboarding would be torture if applied to him. And Michael McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, was even more explicit in taking the same line in an interview with Lawrence Wright of New Yorker magazine. McConnell told Wright that, for him:

“Waterboarding would be excruciating. If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can’t imagine how painful! Whether it’s torture by anybody else’s definition, for me it would be torture.”

Okay, it would be torture if done to you, Mike; how about if done to others? Sadly, McConnell, too, missed the prayer breakfast and the president’s moving reminder that we are called “to love a neighbor as ourselves.” Is there an exception, perhaps, for detainees?

Cat Out of Bag

When torture first came up during his interview with the New Yorker, McConnell was more circumspect, repeating the obligatory bromide “We don’t torture,” as former CIA Director George Tenet did in five consecutive sentences while hawking his memoir on 60 Minutes on April 29, 2007. As McConnell grew more relaxed, however, he let slip the rationale for Mukasey’s effrontery and the administration’s refusal to admit that waterboarding is torture. For anyone paying attention, that rationale has long been a no-brainer. But here is McConnell inadvertently articulating it:

“If it is ever determined to be torture, there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it.”

Like death. Even Alberto Gonzales could grasp this at the outset. That explains the overly clever, lawyerly wording in the Jan. 25, 2002 memorandum for the president drafted by the vice president’s lawyer, David Addington, but signed by Gonzales. Addington/Gonzales argued that the president’s determination that the Geneva agreements on prisoners of war do not apply to al-Qaeda and the Taliban:

“Substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441)…enacted in 1996…

“Punishments for violations of Section 2441 include the death penalty…

“[I]t is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441. Your determination would create a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution.”
MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT, January 25, 2002, p. 2

Mike McConnell needs to get his own lawyers to bring him up to date on all this. For that memorandum was quickly followed by an action memorandum signed by George W. Bush on Feb. 7, 2002. The president’s memo incorporated the exact wording of Addington/Gonzales’ bottom line; to wit, the U.S. would “treat the detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of [Geneva]. (emphasis added)

That provided the loophole through which then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and then-CIA director George Tenet and their subordinates drove the Mack truck of torture. Even the Bush-administration-friendly editorial page of the Washington Post saw fit on Friday to declare torture “illegal in all instances,” adding that “waterboarding is, and always has been, torture.”

Waterboarding has been condemned as torture for a very long time. After WW-II Japanese soldiers were hanged for the “war crime” of waterboarding American soldiers.

Patriots and Prophets

Patriots and prophets have made it clear from our earliest days that such abuse has no place in America.

Virginia’s Patrick Henry insisted passionately that “the rack and the screw,” as he put it, were barbaric practices that had to be left behind in the Old World, or we are “lost and undone.” Attorney General Mukasey, for his part, recently refused to say whether he considers the rack and the screw forms of torture, dismissing the question as hypothetical.

As for prophets, George Hunzinger of Princeton Theological Seminary has awakened enough religious folks to form the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, a coalition of 130 religious organizations from left to right on the political spectrum. Hunzinger puts it succinctly: “To acknowledge that waterboarding is torture is like conceding that the sun rises in the east,” adding:

“All the dissembling in high places that makes these shocking abuses possible must be brought to an end. But they will undoubtedly continue unless those responsible for them are held accountable…. A special counsel is an essential first step.”

Sadly, Hunzinger and his associates have been unable to overcome the pious complacency of the vast majority of institutional churches, synagogues, and mosques in this country and their reluctance to exercise moral leadership.

How It Looks From Outside

Sometimes it takes a truth-telling outsider to throw light on our moral failures.

South African Methodist Bishop Peter Storey, erstwhile chaplain to Nelson Madela in prison and longtime outspoken opponent of apartheid, has this to say to those clergy who might be moved to preach more than platitudes:

“We had obvious evils to engage; you have to unwrap your culture from years of red, white, and blue myth. You have to expose and confront the great disconnect between the kindness, compassion, and caring of most American people and the ruthless way American power is experienced, directly or indirectly, by the poor of the earth. You have to help good people see how they have let their institutions do their sinning for them.

“All around the world there are those who long to see your human goodness translated into a different, more compassionate way of relating with the rest of this bleeding planet.”

Mukasey’s thumbing his nose at Conyers’ committee yesterday was simply the most recent display of contempt for Congress on the part of the Bush administration. The Founders expected our representatives in Congress to be taken seriously by the executive branch, and expected that Members of Congress would hold senior executives accountable—to the point of impeaching them, when necessary, for high crimes and misdemeanors.

That used to worry those officials and put a brake on more outlandish behavior. Not any more.

No Worries, George

One reads George Tenet’s memoirs with some nostalgia for the days of a modicum of congressional oversight, and with a strong sense of irony—as he confesses concern that Congress might one day hold him and others accountable for taking liberties with national and international law.

It seems likely that then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington counseled Tenet that his concerns were quaint and obsolete and, alas, they may have been right, the way things have been going. But Tenet apparently entertained lingering misgivings—perhaps even qualms of conscience.

In the immediate post-9/11 period, Tenet says he told the president “our only real ally” on the Afghan border was Uzbekistan, “where we had established important intelligence-collection capabilities.” We now know from UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray that those “collection capabilities” included the most primitive methods of torture, including boiling alleged “terrorists” alive.

Tenet adds that he stressed the importance of being able to detain unilaterally al-Qaeda operatives around the world. His worries shine through the rather telling sentences that follow:

“We were asking for and we would be given as many authorities as CIA ever had. Things could blow up. People, me among them, could end up spending some of the worst days of our lives justifying before congressional overseers our new freedom to act.” At the Center of the Storm, p. 177-178

Tenet need not have worried. He would be shielded from accountability by a timid Congress as well as an arrogant White House able to arrogate unprecedented power to itself and to shield those it wished to protect.

Setting the Tone

It was President George W. Bush who set the tone from the outset. After his address to the nation on the evening of 9/11, he assembled his top national security aides in the White House bunker—the easier, perhaps, to foster a bunker mentality. Among them was counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, who quoted the president in his memoir:

“I want you to understand that we are at war and we will stay at war until this is done. Nothing else matters. Everything is available for the pursuit of this war. Any barriers in your way, they’re gone. Any money you need, you have it. This is our only agenda…

“I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.” Against All Enemies, Free Press, 2004

Clarke, of course, took his book’s title from the oath of office we all swore as military officers and/or senior government officials: “To defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

John Ashcroft, head of the Department of Justice at the time, fell in lockstep with the thrust of the president’s comment dismissing any concern with international law—or, as would quickly be seen, domestic law, as well. With the enthusiastic assistance of David Addington, the affable Ashcroft assembled a cabal of Mafia-like lawyers whose imaginative legal opinions on torture, warrantless eavesdropping, and other abuses mark them forever as “domestic enemies” of the Constitution.

Add Mukasey to this distinguished roster.

Torture: the Hallmark

What is not widely known is that Justice Department-approved torture was first applied on an American citizen, John Walker Lindh, who was captured in Afghanistan in late November 2001. The White House and corporate press immediately sensationalized Lindh as “the American Taliban.”

Jesselyn Radack, a conscientious legal advisor in the Justice Department’s Professional Responsibility Advisory Office, which gives ethics advice to Department attorneys, insisted that Lindh be advised of his rights before any interrogation. Instead, he was tortured mercilessly during the first few days of his internment and denied medical care.

Lindh had had the foolishness and bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time; i. e., in a large group of prisoners rounded up by CIA and Army paramilitary forces—too large a group, it turned out.

A spontaneous uprising took place, and CIA paramilitary officer Johnny “Mike” Spann, who had questioned Lindh just minutes before, was shot dead. Outraged, Spann’s colleagues applied “frontier justice,” totally ignoring the Constitutional cautions of Ms. Radack.

The Department of Justice moved quickly to fire Radack for her principled stand. But she had the presence of mind to save emails providing chapter and verse of the difficult exchanges in which she had insisted on respect for Lindh’s rights as an American citizen. Newsweek carried the story briefly, but neither Congress nor anyone else in the media showed much interest.

Radack’s book recounting this experience, The Canary in the Coalmine: Blowing the Whistle in the Case of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, is available on line at: www.patriotictruthteller.net.

Against this backdrop, together with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, Patrick Henry’s warning remains a challenge for our time: Are we “lost and undone?” I think not; but we had better get it together soon, for, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., cautioned, “There is such a thing as too late.”

ISLAMABAD, Feb 9 (Reuters) – Pakistan rejected on Saturday a U.S. official’s assertion that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar are operating from Pakistani territory.

A senior U.S. administration official told reporters in Washington Bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri and others were operating out of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas bordering Afghanistan.

Mullah Omar and other Taliban leaders were directing insurgency operations in Afghanistan from the Pakistani city of Quetta, said the U.S. official who declined to be identified.

Pakistan has consistently denied that the militant leaders were on its territory since they disappeared when U.S.-led troops overthrew the Taliban in Afghanistan for refusing to hand over bin Laden after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Bin Laden and Omar are believed to have fled from Afghanistan at that time.

Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Sadiqsaid if a U.S. official had information on the whereabouts of the wanted militants he should tell Pakistan.

“If there is any actionable intelligence it should be shared with the government of Pakistan so that they can be neutralised,” Sadiq said. “You don’t talk to the media if you have information like this.”

He said the U.S. official’s assertion was not correct.

“If he was right, he would claim the bounty money, not speak to the media,” he said, referring to U.S. reward money for information leading to arrest of the militants.

Pakistan did not know where the militant leaders were, Sadiq said. “If we knew, we would take action.”

“PRESSURE AND INSTABILITY”

Pakistan supported the Taliban in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11 attacks but President Pervez Musharraf threw his support behind the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism after the attacks on U.S. cities.

But with the Taliban gaining strength in Afghanistan despite the efforts of U.S and NATO troops, frustration has been growing in the United States with what critics see as Pakistan’s less than whole-hearted efforts to tackle the militants on the border.

The U.S. official said despite the presence of al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, the U.S. administration still saw Musharraf as a worthy ally.

The former chief United Nations weapons inspector and a retired Middle East diplomat recently warned that America was heading straight toward imminent war with Iran.

And while both talked about wrong-headed U.S. policy in Iraq and Iran, they also criticized Israel for its role.

Scott Ritter, UN weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, and Edward Peck, onetime chief of mission in Baghdad and former ambassador to Mauritania, spoke recently at a forum sponsored by Cleveland Peace Action Now and Trinity Cathedral. Before the event, this reporter and a journalist from The Plain Dealer talked to Ritter and Peck.

The White House is using outright fabrications and exaggerations to persuade the American public that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program, Ritter and Peck claimed. The ultimate goal, they said, is overthrow of Iran’s Islamic theocracy.

Just as he did with Iraq, President Bush is falsely positioning Iran as a threat to U.S. national security and a leading sponsor of terrorism, contended Ritter, a 12-year Marine veteran who spent four years in Israel as lead liaison between the UN and the Jewish state on the issues of Iraq and nuclear weapons.

By demonizing Iran and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bush is repeating the failed policy used against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, said Ritter, 46, who resigned under pressure from his UN post in 1998. Ritter claimed he was punished for criticizing the White House’s handling of Saddam Hussein. Allegations that he spied for Israel were ultimately dropped following an FBI investigation.

There is an 80% chance of war with Iran, probably in March or April, insisted the impassioned Ritter, who was last in Iran in September 2005. A second window of opportunity for an air assault opens in October or November, he added.

Ritter has been making this prediction of war with Iran for at least three years. Internet research turned up a similar forecast he made in April 2005, insisting an aerial attack on Iran was likely that June.

Israel, according to his 2006 book, is largely responsible for the coming military action. The Jewish Daily Forward reported that in Ritter’s Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plan for Regime Change, the antiwar activist writes: “Let there be no doubt. If there is an American war with Iran, it is a war that was made in Israel and nowhere else.”

The Bush Administration, with the help of the Israeli government and the pro-Israel “Lobby,” has exploited the American public’s fear of a nuclear-armed Iran, Ritter writes in his book, according to the Forward.

The current U.S. military buildup will peak this spring, and Ritter told the CJN that America would begin a 30-day limited, but massive, air strike against Iran. Neither Congress nor the corporate-controlled media will check the president’s power, Ritter maintained.

Iran will retaliate with missiles launched at Israel, Ritter predicted. The Islamist state will also shut down oil production by blocking the route out of the Persian Gulf through the Straits of Hormuz. And Iran will unleash Shia Muslims in southern Iraq to target American forces there, Ritter asserted.

“Now we have a major conflict. We’re caught in a spiral of events out of our control. After 30 days, the military will be putting Marines in Hormuz, soldiers in Iran. Israel, especially, stands to lose.”

In 2002, Ritter similarly talked about the likelihood of America launching a war against Iraq, despite the fact that UN inspectors repeatedly said Saddam Hussein no longer had weapons of mass destruction.

At the Cleveland Peace Action event, Peck and Ritter talked about the quagmire in Iraq and the lessons we failed to learn there and apply to Iran. Much of what Ahmadenijad is accused of saying he has never said, Ritter insisted. Furthermore, Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wields the only power to wage war and build nuclear weapons, not Ahmadenijad.

Sanctions against Iran are “a holding pattern, while revving up for war,” claimed Peck. “They are a guarantee of armed conflict.” He advocated diplomatic negotiation instead.

When Congress appropriates $77 million to finance dissident groups to overthrow the Iranian regime, “that’s an act of war,” Peck continued. People in the Middle East “are afraid of us. They do not see us as bringers of truth, justice and harmony.”

Forcing democracy on Middle Eastern countries is not possible, Peck warned. “Democracy is experiential. Iraqis know nothing about it. It’s something you grow up with.” The West pushes democracy and then hypocritically punishes the Palestinians for choosing Hamas in democratic elections, added Peck, who observed the balloting in the West Bank.

He criticized Israel for occupying the West Bank and for “doing terrible things” there. “One person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter,” he said, alluding to suicide bombings targeting Israeli civilians.

Most of those audience members who took the microphone to ask questions bashed Israel for its occupation and brutalization of the Palestinian people. Several blamed Israel for all conflict in the Middle East.

Pursuing its inhumane policy toward the Palestinian people will not bring Israel peace, Peck said. “Israel’s security will be derived from good relations with its neighbors. The future of Israel is at stake.”

Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have indicated that US troops are not going to be withdrawn in any significant manner in the first term of a presidency. What do you think would happen if the US did withdraw immediately from Iraq?

We have a specific example of what would likely happen throughout Iraq if the US were to withdraw completely. When the Brits recently pulled out of their last base in Basra City late last year, The Independent reported that according to the British military, violent attacks dropped 90 percent. I think that goes to show that the Brits down in Basra, like the Americans in central and northern Iraq, have been the primary cause of the violence and the instability.

And I think it’s easy to see that when the US does pull out completely, we would have a dramatic de-escalation in violence. We would have increased stability and it would be the first logical step for Iraqis to form their own government. This time, it would actually have popular support, unlike the current government, where less than 1
percent of Iraqis polled even support it or even find it legitimate at all…

…I know your expertise is not necessarily US domestic politics, but like all of us, you’re following the presidential campaign. Do you see any marked difference for Iraqis in the event of a Hillary Clinton presidency or a Barack Obama presidency?

I don’t. They’ve both already officially taken the idea of total unconditional withdrawal of all occupation forces out of Iraq off the table, until after their first term, if one of them is elected. So it’s off the table already until 2013, even before one of them would come into power, if that is going to happen. In reality, they in no way are reflecting the will of the troops on the ground in Iraq, or the majority of Americans now who are opposed to the occupation. And certainly not respecting the will of the Iraqi people, where the most conservative polls I’ve found have shown that 85 percent, at a minimum now, of the total population of Iraq are completely opposed to the occupation and want it to end, right now.

Iraqis are willing to take the risk of what might happen if that much-discussed “power vacuum” is created. And the reality is that the only real first step to a solution in Iraq is full, immediate, unconditional withdrawal, while simultaneously re-funding all the reconstruction projects and turning them over to Iraqi concerns. So this idea of, “You break it, you buy it.” Well, there’s no buying happening. There’s nothing being done by Western contractors on the ground to improve the basic life necessities of any Iraqi in that country right now.