The Rag Blog

“When once a republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil.”~~- Thomas Jefferson

29/01/08 “ICH” – — Each new year ushers in a myriad of “Top Ten” lists — 10 best things, 10 worst things, things we need to do, things we did but shouldn’t have — and this year, even a hilarious list of WTF? things popped up. I’ll admit I’m not as well organized as those who progress in 10-step increments. My problem is narrowing the atrocities down to 10 — and then narrowing those 10 down to a single year. I’m confident I could compile a really neat list if I could decide which in the tangle of loathsome assaults should be Number One.

It can’t be done. Everything that happened in 2007 is a direct result of events in 2006, a continuation of 2005 crimes, the bloody mess of 2004, the shock and awe of 2003 and the vicious, ruthless lies of 2001 that led us to where we are today. It’s impossible to appraise the malignant nature of this administration in any intelligible way. From the outset, it came at us — at the world — on all fours with fangs bared. Whether ripping the humanity from our Constitution or drowning the innocent in a sea of blood, its appetite is insatiable. It rises from each feast hungrier than before.

I used to think Americans had been whipped by 9-11 terror confusion into some sort of national stupor. That’s not so. We’re trapped in a massive spiritual paralysis. Normal people are simply not equipped to deal with remorseless psychopaths. We were not prepared to come face to face with evil, nor to be manipulated by lies and controlled through stark fear. Our refusal to address the mounting list of Bush-Cheney war crimes could be because we cannot force ourselves to admit our “one nation under God” spies upon its citizens, imprisons them without due process, engages in grotesque acts of torture and delights in mass murder. And so we stand here on the precipice of our own destruction, waiting for evil to run its course.

No Mercy

Evil never runs its course. With each success, it grows stronger, more ghastly and, like Dick Cheney, emerges a bit more from the shadows. Never doubt for a minute that these unfeeling creatures are not evil. They are incapable of compassion, of empathy, of mercy. Their eyes are on the prize of One World rule, and they will have it in spite of — or as a result of — all the chaos and carnage it takes to achieve it. There are no “Imps of the Perverse” among them who will be so overcome with guilt they will break from the pack and run through the populace shrieking, “We’re guilty! We did it! We are murderers!”

Cheney and his destructive little sidekick, George Bush, have brazenly committed treasonous acts — left piles of corpses in their wake since the 2000 election coup. If there is a God, they are bound straight for Hell. But they are not alone. They’re protected by a merciless axis of courts, congressional conspirators and corporate media who cover up their crimes by issuing a steady barrage of terror threats and a relentless fog of twisted disinformation.

Our government is nothing but a Good Ol’ Boys and Girls club, with judges, journalists, legislators and administration jesters whooping it up while pillaging the Treasury, ignoring the cries of their victims, turning a blind eye to millions of slaughtered and displaced innocents, and sending thousands of their own citizens to their deaths. They have mauled, raped and obstructed Justice until that once noble Lady is no longer recognizable.

Author Kurt Vonnegut, who died last April after a fall in his home, warned that corruption in this government must be removed and the perpetrators must pay for their crimes or our Republic is dead. In an October 2005 PBS interview, as his last book, “A Man Without a Country,” soared to the top of best-seller lists, Vonnegut said, “…we have only a one-party government. It’s the winners. And then everybody else is the losers. And the winners are divided into two parties. The Republicans and the Democrats…that’s what a charade the combat between the Republicans and the Democrats is. It’s rich kids. Winners on both sides. So the winners can’t lose. And, of course, the losers have no representation in Congress…” Vonnegut said members of Congress, regardless of party, represent only those who bankroll their political campaigns; those making tons of money from Bush and Cheney’s illegal war.

Enough is Enough

The 2006 elections, which gave the Democrats control of both houses of Congress, was a clear imperative to govern according to the will of the people. No Congress in history has ever been elected who knew better what that will was — primarily to stop an immoral war, but also to hold accountable those responsible for the lies, torture, loss of freedoms, spying on their own citizens, and the relentless slaughter of US military as well as innocent Iraqi and Afghanistani citizens.

Nancy Pelosi, quivering at the thought of becoming the nation’s first female Speaker of the House, said on Nov 9, 2006, “This new Democratic majority has heard the voices of the American people.” She added, while apparently attempting to stifle a burst of wild, maniacal laughter, “Americans placed their trust in Democrats. We will honor that trust. We will not disappoint.”

Pelosi’s counterpart in the Senate, Harry Reid, bowed his head and mumbled that “The days of the do-nothing Congress are over.” He looked around furtively before whispering that Americans spoke “clearly and decisively in favor of Democrats leading this country in a new direction.” Reid then scurried off to crouch behind Bush, who smirked good naturedly while giving him a “good thumpin..”

They knew they were elected to stop the madness, to stem the onslaught of tyranny and to protect and defend the Constitution, but chose instead to fall on their knees before those who scorned them, threatened them, or perhaps offered them a “piece of the action.” By choosing to suspend, rather than defend, the Constitution, they are guilty of high crimes.

We can no longer stand on the sidelines waiting for the evil to subside. They must go — all of them — starting at the top with the impeachment of the mad Cheney and Bush and continuing through both houses of Congress where all 435 House seats and 35 Senate seats are up for election this year.

The majority of Americans are demanding that both Bush and Cheney be impeached and removed from office, and those like David Swanson, Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, and now Fla Rep. Robert Wexler, are working tirelessly to make that happen.

We’ve had enough. We not only agree with Vonnegut, but with Lee Iacocca, who pulls no punches in his April 2007 book, “Where Have All the Leaders Gone?” Iacocca asks, “Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, ‘Stay the course.’ Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!”

Yes. Throw the bums out and watch them scatter. And when they do, there will be a traffic jam on the highway to Hell.

Our shared spaces have become a bear pit. This ever-crumbling civility risks our wellbeing and points to a bleak future.

A grey weekday morning at 7.40am in Edmonton bus station in north London, and it’s teeming with schoolchildren. As the bus arrives, a crowd surge forward to squeeze their way on. People get knocked over. The children, screaming and pushing, panic. Small ones, horrified by the melee, hold back. The ones with the sharpest elbows make it. The rest have to go through the ordeal again with the next bus and the next – and get bad marks for being late when, battle-scarred, they finally make it into school.

When I recounted this incident to my 12-year-old, hardened by 18 months of secondary school travel, she smiled at my naivety. Being pushed, sworn at and squeezed on to overcrowded trains and buses is already routine to her.

Trivial personal anecdotes, you might say, with some justification. But what I saw at Edmonton bus station left me enraged. How can we complain about children’s antisocial behaviour when we show such dereliction in developing in them any understanding of social behaviour? Where are the buses, the stewards or bus conductors they need? Why are transport services in poorer areas so under-resourced? Treat people like animals and, chances are, they will end up behaving like them. Every morning, these kids are getting a crash-course in how aggressive self-assertion is your passport in life.

Edmonton is the latest in a series of nasty experiences in different parts of Britain – this is not just an urban or London phenomenon – that I’ve witnessed (or of which I’ve been the object) that have left me shaken. It’s the sheer gratuitousness of the aggression over minor driving misdemeanours or the fuck-you indifference of those whose behaviour is affecting others. Every time, children were present, sometimes aping their parents’ gesticulations – learning how to abuse.

It’s not just a run of my bad luck. One-third of respondents told the British Crime Survey, published last week, that they were worried about antisocial behaviour. Crime may be falling, but something more intangible and just as important is moving centre stage: a pervasive anxiety about a deterioration in the everyday interactions between strangers. Typically, the aggression erupts when someone gets in someone else’s way. It’s a pathology of individual entitlement. What’s crumbling is the civility that is so essential to wellbeing, to trust and to the conviviality of our lives. We have failed to invest the resources, both material and cultural, in the places where we interact with strangers. Antisocial teenagers are simply playing out their own version of the aggression and indifference that has been meted out to them.

Take a big jump and switch from the shared physical spaces of streets to a very different shared public space – the internet – and a related phenomenon is being played out. Aggression, abuse and contempt are now the normal currency of debate among strangers on blogs. Last week two prominent columnists, David Aaronovitch and Linda Grant, added their bewilderment to the growing chorus of those arguing that public debate on the internet is being strangled at birth by the quantity of personal abuse and bullying. The response from bloggers was fascinating. One argued that “the internet is good therapy. People can use it to voice their opinions, anger, fears and worries in anonymity, instead of penting it up [sic] leading to violence or suicides”, while another argued that blogging is an “internal monologue … spilling over into the public domain”. Several contributors to the voluminous debate Grant’s column spawned on Comment is free online admitted revulsion and shock. One asked: “Is human nature as awful as this?”

The thinker who predicted all of this with remarkable prescience was Richard Sennett in his book The Fall of Public Man, published 34 years ago. He argued that the distinction between the public and private realms was being eroded as we elevated the self-absorption and narcissism of “knowing oneself” into an end rather than a means by which to know the world. The public sphere – where we encounter strangers – becomes a canvas on which we play out our own emotional preoccupations and neuroses. Sennett sharply warned us that “because every self is, in some measure, a cabinet of horrors, civilised relations between selves can only proceed to the extent that nasty little secrets of desire, greed or envy are kept locked up”.

What makes Sennett so pertinent is that this concept of privacy, of concealing thoughts, is exactly what is under assault. In some vain search for authenticity and honesty, all those horrors in the cabinet are now hawked around the blogging sites. Debate has become so gladiatorial that it generates its own mechanisms of exclusion; anyone who doesn’t want verbal fisticuffs withdraws. Some participants, intoxicated by absurd interpretations of freedom of speech and individual entitlement, suggest people should be able to say whatever happens to pop into their heads, that there should be no space for reflection before speech. Martin Amis gave some intellectual credibility to this notion last autumn in the controversy over his remarks about Muslims, saying that he couldn’t edit his thoughts. Yet deciding which thought to give voice to is precisely what all of us do all the time – and so it should be. What relationship, either public or private, could ever be sustained on any other principle?

A century of psychoanalysis and its derivatives and misapplications has legitimised parading our cabinets of horrors. Sennett describes this as having been a “trap rather than a liberation”. The self-referential frame by which all is measured is “what does this person, that event mean to me?”, he argues.

Amid such cacophony of attention-seeking “me, me, me”, two things are in danger of being lost: first, the ability really to listen – rather than just wait with varying degrees of patience for your chance to spout off; and second, that grand old etiquette of liberal debate, the option to agree to differ. Both are vital ingredients of public debate as a process of learning and negotiation, both are much needed if the unprecedented diversity of our public spaces now is to produce civility or even conviviality.

Sennett’s concern was that narcissism projected on to the public realm would strip us of our dignity. Reality television illustrates his point perfectly, and it’s true of other media that scrutinise the painful private lives of the likes of Amy Winehouse. It’s also evident on many blog sites, as some bloggers themselves lament. Dignity is as essential to human wellbeing as food and shelter, but in the public spaces of our lives it is in increasingly short supply.

That prompts frustration and disillusionment and a retreat into our private worlds as we disengage even further from the brutal bear pit that so many aspects of our public life have become. The danger is that we withdraw into bunkers of the like-minded, vacating the territory of solidarity and common purpose. That’s a brutally bleak picture, and that is exactly what the children in Edmonton bus station were being taught last week.

m.bunting@guardian.co.uk

When Bush first came in, the comedian Will Ferrell did a skit on the television show “Saturday Night Live” that depicted the president cowering under his desk as bombs went off in Washington and the country went down the tubes. Coming after the prosperity and relative peace of the Clinton years, it seemed a fantastic parody. Little did we know that if anything SNL did not begin to capture the full extent of the catastrophe.

Nobody cares any more, unlike in 2003 when shills for the war were always on my case to “report the good news” and lay off Bush. Some of my “arguments with Bush” during the past 7 years were internet bestsellers. Now, the man has discredited himself so badly, he can’t even get people to so much as yawn at him. But in honor of all those arguments of the past, I’m doing it one last time.

As usual, most of what he said in the State of the Union address was transparent lies. He praised private groups for doing charity work in Louisiana because he hasn’t followed through on his own promises after Katrina. He did that phony thing of reporting the average tax “increase” if his “tax cuts” were allowed to expire. If I’m in the room with someone who made a billion dollars last year and Bush doesn’t cut my taxes at all but he cuts those of the billionaire such that he saves 5% of his income, then the two of us in the room have an average tax cut of $25 million apiece. But in the real world, I get bupkus and the billionaire gets $50 million. That shell game sums up the Republican “tax cut” scam they keep running on the American middle class, which always falls for it.

So here are some last arguments with the man’s bald faced lies, for old times sake.

Bush assertion: “We believe that the most reliable guide for our country is the collective wisdom of ordinary citizens.”

Sad Fact: Indiana GOP tries to keep ordinary citizens from voting with restrictive photo identification law.

Bush assertion: “And so, in all we do, we must trust in the ability of free peoples to make wise decisions and empower them to improve their lives for their futures.”

Sad fact: Amit Paley writes, “A strong majority of Iraqis want U.S.-led military forces to immediately withdraw from the country, saying their swift departure would make Iraq more secure and decrease sectarian violence, according to new polls by the State Department and independent researchers.

In Baghdad, for example, nearly three-quarters of residents polled said they would feel safer if U.S. and other foreign forces left Iraq, with 65 percent of those asked favoring an immediate pullout . . .”

Bush assertion: “We’ve seen Afghans emerge from the tyranny of the Taliban and choose a new president and a new parliament.”

Sad fact: “Afghanistan Journalist sentenced to Death for Blasphemy” and I don’t think women would agree with Bush’s rosy picture of progressive democracy in Kabul. Not to mention that half the country’s gross domestic product is generated by the heroin trade. Bush goes on to say that his democratic projects are only being interrupted by terrorists; but all the problems above are problems with the establishment, not with terror groups.

Bush assertion: “From expanding opportunity to protecting our country, we’ve made good progress.”

Sad fact: Bush’s Iraq is a major generator of terrorism, which it was not before 2003. “Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the prime training ground for foreign terrorists who could travel elsewhere across the globe and wreak havoc, according to U.S. counterterrorism officials and classified studies” by the CIA and the Department of State, Warren P. Strobel reported July 4, 2005. “Iraq’s emergence as a terrorist training ground appears to challenge President Bush’s rationale for invading and overthrowing leader Saddam Hussein in March 2003,” Strobel wrote.” So we are safer how again?

Bush assertion: “We launched a surge of American forces into Iraq. We gave our troops a new mission: Work with the Iraqi forces to protect the Iraqi people, pursue the enemy in his strongholds, and deny the terrorists sanctuary anywhere in the country.”

Sad fact: “The Iraqi Red Crescent Organization and the U.N. reported last month that the “number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has soared since the American troop increase began in February. . . The chart reports some decreases in the intensity of “ethno-sectarian violence” in certain Baghdad districts (Note: This is based on military data). But where there have been decreases, they are due largely to the fact that “mixed Muslim” areas are being overrun by either Shia or Sunni enclaves.The map above demonstrates that Shias have been gradually taking over all of Baghdad (noted by the green mass that now covers much of the city), wiping out Sunni communities that stood in their path. Center for American Progress analyst Brian Katulis estimated that Baghdad, which once used to be a 65 percent Sunni majority city, is now 75 percent Shia.”

A large proportion of the 1.5 million Iraqi refugees in Damascus was displaced to Syria during 2007, apparently as a side effect of Bush’s troop surge.

So all this involves “protecting the Iraqi people” how, exactly? Does Bush think Iraqis are safer when they are refugees in a foreign country?

28/01/08 “ICH” — – In my film Death of a Nation, there is a sequence filmed on board an Australian aircraft flying over the island of Timor. A party is in progress, and two men in suits are toasting each other in champagne. “This is an historically unique moment,” says one of them, “that is truly uniquely historical.” This is Gareth Evans, Australia’s foreign minister. The other man is Ali Alatas, principal mouthpiece of the Indonesian dictator, Gen. Suharto. It is 1989, and the two are making a grotesquely symbolic flight to celebrate the signing of a treaty that allowed Australia and the international oil and gas companies to exploit the seabed off East Timor, then illegally and viciously occupied by Suharto. The prize, according to Evans, was “zillions of dollars.”

Beneath them lay a land of crosses: great black crosses etched against the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the hillsides. Filming clandestinely in East Timor, I would walk into the scrub and there were the crosses. They littered the earth and crowded the eye. In 1993, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Australian Parliament reported that “at least 200,000” had died under Indonesia’s occupation: almost a third of the population. And yet East Timor’s horror, which was foretold and nurtured by the U.S., Britain, and Australia, was actually a sequel. “No single American action in the period after 1945,” wrote the historian Gabriel Kolko, “was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried to initiate the massacre.” He was referring to Suharto’s seizure of power in 1965-1966, which caused the violent deaths of up to a million people.

To understand the significance of Suharto, who died on Sunday, is to look beneath the surface of the current world order: the so-called global economy and the ruthless cynicism of those who run it. Suharto was our model mass murderer – “our” is used here advisedly. “One of our very best and most valuable friends,” Thatcher called him, speaking for the West. For three decades, the Australian, U.S., and British governments worked tirelessly to minimize the crimes of Suharto’s Gestapo, known as Kopassus, who were trained by the Australian SAS and the British army and who gunned down people with British-supplied Heckler and Koch machine guns from British-supplied Tactica “riot control” vehicles. Prevented by Congress from supplying arms directly, U.S. administrations from Gerald Ford to Bill Clinton provided logistic support through the back door and commercial preferences. In one year, the British Department of Trade provided almost a billion pounds worth of so-called soft loans, which allowed Suharto to buy Hawk fighter-bombers. The British taxpayer paid the bill for aircraft that dive-bombed East Timorese villages, and the arms industry reaped the profits. However, the Australians distinguished themselves as the most obsequious. In an infamous cable to Canberra, Richard Woolcott, Australia’s ambassador to Jakarta, who had been forewarned about Suharto’s invasion of East Timor, wrote: “What Indonesia now looks to from Australia … is some understanding of their attitude and possible action to assist public understanding in Australia….” Covering up Suharto’s crimes became a career for those like Woolcott, while “understanding” the mass murderer came in buckets. This left an indelible stain on the reformist government of Gough Whitlam following the cold-blooded killing of two Australian TV crews by Suharto’s troops during the invasion of East Timor. “We know your people love you,” Bob Hawke told the dictator. His successor, Paul Keating, famously regarded the tyrant as a father figure. When Indonesian troops slaughtered at least 200 people in the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, East Timor, and Australian mourners planted crosses outside the Indonesian embassy in Canberra, foreign minister Gareth Evans ordered them destroyed. To Evans, ever-effusive in his support for the regime, the massacre was merely an “aberration.” This was the view of much of the Australian press, especially that controlled by Rupert Murdoch, whose local retainer, Paul Kelly, led a group of leading newspaper editors to Jakarta, fawn before the dictator.

Here lies a clue as to why Suharto, unlike Saddam Hussein, died not on the gallows but surrounded by the finest medical team his secret billions could buy. Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations officer in the 1960s, describes the terror of Suharto’s takeover of Indonesia as “the model operation” for the American-backed coup that got rid of Salvador Allende in Chile seven years later. “The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders,” he wrote, “[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965.” The U.S. embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a “zap list” of Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured. Roland Challis, the BBC’s south east Asia correspondent at the time, told me how the British government was secretly involved in this slaughter. “British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so they could take part in the terrible holocaust,” he said. “I and other correspondents were unaware of this at the time…. There was a deal, you see.”

The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard Nixon had called “the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in southeast Asia.” In November 1967, the greatest prize was handed out at a remarkable three-day conference sponsored by the Time-Life Corporation in Geneva. Led by David Rockefeller, all the corporate giants were represented: the major oil companies and banks, General Motors, Imperial Chemical Industries, British American Tobacco, Siemens, U.S. Steel, and many others. Across the table sat Suharto’s U.S.-trained economists who agreed to the corporate takeover of their country, sector by sector. The Freeport company got a mountain of copper in West Papua. A U.S./ European consortium got the nickel. The giant Alcoa company got the biggest slice of Indonesia’s bauxite. America, Japanese, and French companies got the tropical forests of Sumatra. When the plunder was complete, President Lyndon Johnson sent his congratulations on “a magnificent story of opportunity seen and promise awakened.” Thirty years later, with the genocide in East Timor also complete, the World Bank described the Suharto dictatorship as a “model pupil.”

Shortly before he died, I interviewed Alan Clark, who under Thatcher was Britain’s minister responsible for supplying Suharto with most of his weapons. I asked him, “Did it bother you personally that you were causing such mayhem and human suffering?”

“No, not in the slightest,” he replied. “It never entered my head.”

“I ask the question because I read you are a vegetarian and are seriously concerned with the way animals are killed.”

“Yeah?”

“Doesn’t that concern extend to humans?”

28/01/08 “ICH” — – -“Your papers please” has long been a phrase associated with Hitler’s Gestapo. People without the Third Reich’s stamp of approval were hauled off to Nazi Germany’s version of Halliburton detention centers.

Today Americans are on the verge of being asked for their papers, although probably without the “please.”

Thanks to a government that has turned its back on the US Constitution, Americans now have an unaccountable Department of Homeland Security that is already asserting tyrannical powers over US citizens and state governments. Headed by the neocon fanatic Michael Chertoff, the Orwellian-sounding Department of Homeland Security has mandated a national identity card for Americans, without which Americans may not enter airports or courthouses.

There is no more need for this card than there is for a Department of Homeland Security. Neither are compatible with a free society.

However, Bush, the neocons, Republicans and Democrats do not want America to any longer be a free society, and they are taking freedom away from us just as they took away the independence of the media.

Free and informed people get in the way of power-mad zealots with agendas.

It is the agendas that are supreme, not the American people, who have less and less say about less and less.

George W. Bush, an elected president, has behaved like a dictator since September 11, 2001. If “our” representatives in Congress care, they haven’t done anything about it. Bush has pretty much cut Congress out of the action.

In truth, Congress gave up its law making powers to the executive branch during the New Deal. For three-quarters of a century, the bills passed by Congress have been authorizations for executive branch agencies to make laws in the form of regulations. The executive branch has come to the realization that it doesn’t really need Congress. President Bush appends his own “signing statements” to the authorizations from Congress in which the President says what the legislation means. So what is the point of Congress?

As for laws already on the books, the US Department of Justice (sic) has ruled that the President doesn’t have to abide by US statutes, such as FISA or the law forbidding torture. Neither does the President have to abide by the Geneva Conventions.

Other obstacles are removed by edicts known as presidential directives or executive orders. There are more and more of these edicts, and they accumulate more and more power and less and less accountability in the executive.

The disdain in which the executive branch holds the “separate and equal” legislative branch is everywhere apparent. For example, President Bush is concluding a long-term security agreement with the puppet government he has set up in Iraq. Prior to September 11, 2001, when the President became The Decider, a defense pact was a treaty requiring the approval of Congress.

All that is now behind us. General Douglas Lute, President Bush’s national security adviser for Iraq says that the White House will not be submitting the deal to Congress for approval. Lute says Bush will not be seeking any “formal inputs from the Congress.”

“There is no question that this is unprecedented,” said Yale Law School Professor O. Hathaway.

Bush can do whatever he wants, because Congress has taken its only remaining power–impeachment–off the table.

The Democratic Party leadership thinks that the only problem is Bush, who will be gone in one year. Besides, the Israel Lobby doesn’t want Israel’s champion impeached, and neither do the corporate owners of the US media.

The Democrats are not adverse to inheriting the powers in Bush’s precedents. The Democrats, of course, will use the elevated powers for good rather than for evil.

Instead of having a bad dictator, we’ll have a good one.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (Jan. 28) – Mitt Romney and John McCain accused each other Monday of harboring liberal tendencies, a charge bordering on blasphemy in the increasingly caustic campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

Romney struck first on the day before the winner-take-all Florida primary, criticizing the Arizona senator for his legislation reducing the role of money in politics, for his position on immigration and for his support of an energy bill that he said would have driven up consumer costs.

“If you ask people, ‘Look at the three things Senator McCain has done as a senator,’ if you want that kind of a liberal Democrat course as president, then you can vote for him,” Romney told campaign workers. “But those three pieces of legislation, those aren’t conservative, those aren’t Republican, those are not the kind of leadership that we need as we go forward.”

McCain answered swiftly, accusing the former Massachusetts governor of “wholesale deception of voters. On every one of the issues he has attacked us on, Mitt Romney was for it before he was against it.”

He added, “The truth is, Mitt Romney was a liberal governor of Massachusetts who raised taxes, imposed with Ted Kennedy a big government mandate health care plan that is now a quarter of a billion dollars in the red, and managed his state’s economy incompetently, leaving Massachusetts with less job growth than 46 other states.”

McCain later told a Jacksonville audience that Romney has been “entirely consistent. He’s consistently taken at least two sides of every issue, sometimes more than two.”

The exchange reflected the stakes in Tuesday’s contest, a prelude to a virtual nationwide primary on Feb. 5.

Attacking other countries to stop them acquiring nuclear weapons repudiates a key principle of international law

27/01/08 “The Guardian” — — Five former Nato generals, including the former chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Shalikashvili, have written a “radical manifesto” which states that “the West must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the ‘imminent’ spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.”

In other words, the generals argue that “the west” – meaning the nuclear powers including the United States, France and Britain – should prepare to use nuclear weapons, not to deter a nuclear attack, not to retaliate following such an attack, and not even to pre-empt an imminent nuclear attack. Rather, they should use them to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a non-nuclear state. And not only that, they should use them to prevent the acquisition of biological or chemical weapons by such a state.

Under this doctrine, the US could have used nuclear weapons in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, to destroy that country’s presumed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons – stockpiles that did not in fact exist. Under it, the US could have used nuclear weapons against North Korea in 2006. The doctrine would also have justified a nuclear attack on Pakistan at any time prior to that country’s nuclear tests in 1998. Or on India, at any time prior to 1974.

The Nuremberg principles are the bedrock of international law on war crimes. Principle VI criminalises the “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression …” and states that the following are war crimes:

“Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation of slave labor or for any other purpose of the civilian population of or in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.”

To state the obvious: the use of a nuclear weapon on the military production facilities of a non-nuclear state will mean dropping big bombs on populated areas. Nuclear test sites are kept remote for obvious reasons; research labs, reactors and enrichment facilities need not be. Nuclear bombs inflict total devastation on the “cities, towns or villages” that they hit. They are the ultimate in “wanton destruction”. Their use against a state with whom we are not actually at war cannot, by definition, be “justified by military necessity”.

“The west” has lived from 1946 to the present day with a nuclear-armed Russia; no necessity of using nuclear weapons against that country ever arose. Similarly with China, since 1964. To attack some new nuclear pretender now would certainly constitute the “waging of a war of aggression …” That’s a crime. And the planning and preparation for such a war is no less a crime than the war itself.

Next, consider what it means to determine that a country is about to acquire nuclear weapons. How does one know? The facilities that Iran possesses to enrich uranium are legal under the non-proliferation treaty. Yes, they might be used, at some point, to provide fuel for bombs. But maybe they won’t be. How could we tell? And suppose we were wrong? Ambiguity is the nature of this situation, and of the world in which we live. During the cold war, ambiguity helped keep both sides safe: it was a stabilising force. We would not use nuclear weapons, under the systems then devised, unless ambiguity disappeared. But the generals’ doctrine has no tolerance for ambiguity; it would make ambiguity itself a cause for war. Thus, causes for war could be made to arise, wherever anyone in power wanted them to.

The generals’ doctrine would not only violate international law, it repudiates the principle of international law. For a law to be a law, it must apply equally to all. But the doctrine holds that “the west” is fundamentally a different entity from all other countries. As the former Reagan official Paul Craig Roberts has pointed out, it holds that our use of weapons of mass destruction to prevent the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction is not, itself, an illegal use of weapons of mass destruction. Thus “the west” can stand as judge, jury and executioner over all other countries. By what right? No law works that way. And no country claiming such a right can also claim to respect the law, or ask any other country to respect it.

Conversely, suppose we stated the generals’ doctrine as a principle: that any nuclear state which suspects another state of being about to acquire nuclear weapons has the right to attack that state – and with nuclear weapons if it has them. Now suppose North Korea suspects South Korea of that intention. Does North Korea acquire a right to strike the South? Under any principle of law, the generals’ answer must be, that it does. Thus their doctrine does not protect against nuclear war. It leads, rather, directly to nuclear war.

Is this proposed doctrine unprecedented? No, in fact it is not. For as Heather Purcell and I documented in 1994, US nuclear war-fighting plans in 1961 called for an unprovoked attack on the Soviet Union, as soon as sufficient nuclear forces were expected to be ready, in late 1963. President Kennedy quashed the plan. As JFK’s adviser Ted Sorensen put it in a letter to the New York Times on July 1, 2002:

“A pre-emptive strike is usually sold to the president as a ‘surgical’ air strike; there is no such thing. So many bombings are required that widespread devastation, chaos and war unavoidably follow … Yes, Kennedy ‘thought about’ a pre-emptive strike; but he forcefully rejected it, as would any thoughtful American president or citizen.”

It’s not just citizens and presidents who are obliged to think carefully about what General Shalikashvili and his British, French, German and Dutch colleagues now suggest. Military officers – as they know well – also have that obligation. Nuremberg Principle IV states:

“The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

For starters, I have become a single-issue voter. The two-front war in Iraq-Afghanistan continues to drag on; and I am thoroughly convinced that no viable Democratic nominee will stop these occupations.

The recent analysis by Allan Nairn shows that even the putative anti-war Edwards (who the press is smothering because of his anti-corporate declarations) has a backroom full of defense contractors. Clinton is a ruthless war-monger, period. Obama is employing on the sorriest, pro-Zionist, neoliberal trash on the market, i.e., Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Clarke, and Dennis Ross, on his core advisory staff.

No one listens to me much, but in some fantasy world where they might, I would suggest that others follow suit with me here. In open primary states, cross over to vote in the Republican primaries for Ron Paul. In closed primary states, switch fast to Republican (like in the next few days).

Vote in the Republican primary; and vote for Ron Paul. Turnout will be dismally low for Republicans this year, because they have been demoralized by the Bush loons’ performances. Independents will vote Paul. The other Republicans are engaged in a fratricidal melee.

I already know what I am going to hear from all over the program-intoxicated, “I won’t endorse this-n-that position” liberal-left. Ron Paul is backward on abortion, passively racist, anti-immigrant, and on and on. Sorry, but I said I’d vote a dead cat that was anti-war before I’d vote a resurrected Eugene Debs if he showed up and supported the war. I meant that from my heart.

Cynthia McKinney is running Green, though she hasn’t got the nomination yet. Remember Cynthia McKinney? When she broke with the DLC diktat, her own party fronted another Black woman (Denise Majette) to run against her in an open primary, and Republicans crossed over massively to vote in the Democratic primary to unseat her in a foregone Democratic Congressional district.

Two can play that game. If Cynthia McKinney runs in 2008 for President, I’ll write her in if I have to just to burn a vote for Clinton or Obama. But meanwhile, Ron Paul is on our primary ballot (North Carolina), because he is running as a Republican (we have draconian ballot access conditions here for thrid-parties, thanks to — of course — Democrats).

Ron Paul is running for President. Just what are the capabilities of a President, and what are his likely courses of action… in the unlikely event he wins?

Well, he is the Commander-in-Chief, so he can bring the troops home immediately, as well as order the military-industrial complex to radically scale back. In case anyone on the left has missed the implications of this, this would be a profoundly anti-imperial development that would take the US boot off the necks of hundreds of millions of people around the world.

He is a libertarian who dislikes corporate subsidies, so he would veto the mega-billion dollar subisidies for Big Agra, Big Pharma, nuclear power company insurance policies, Weapons-R-Us, the ADM/Cargill Great Ethanol Scam,et al. He could veto the federal highway spending that is promoting sprawl. He has also stated that he opposed so-called free trade agreements.

Hello?

Don’t argue with libertarians when they are right. Many of them say that the leviathan-capitalists that dominate the world’s economy could not get as big as they are in an unfettered and unsubsidized market. Newsflash: that is actually true.

Ron Paul is a Gold Bug. For the uninitiated, that means he believes dollar-value should be pegged to a gold-standard. The implications of a return to the gold standard by the Fed are grim… for Wall Street and the military, both of which depend on massive foreign loans convered by runaway printing presses. Putting a stop to this is a Good Thing. What is the net effect?

Ron Paul may have the most outrageous personal account of race you might imagine; but what is the most horrific social catastrophe in the United States for Black and Brown folk? You guessed it: the criminal (in)justice system. The malignant growth of the American Gulag has been fueled — more than by any other cause — by the ever-more-punative criminalization of drug use and drug addiction, and the ability fo the criminal justice system to apply this criminalization with special force against African America and Hispano-Latinas. Here’s the thing. Paul opposes the criminalization of drugs. What is the net effect?

When we are at the point in history where we cannot change the electoral system, then we need to think tactically about what we can do right now. What will a Paul victory in the primaries do? Not whether a vote for Paul in the Republican primaries endorses his decentralizing philosophy on reproductive choice. President Paul will not be writing legislation. The Executive Branch decides how strongly to enforce legislation… like domestic spying fer-instance.

President Paul would close Guantanamo, halt CIA kidnappings, and gut the enforcement capacity for the PATRIOT Act.

Nominee Paul would give 2008 voters a choice between a real anti-war candidate and a phony Democratic equivocator. The intensity of anti-war sentiment in the country already forced ex-war-hawk Edwards to adopt an out-in-nine-months position to left flank his Democratic opponents.

Don’t ask yourself “what are the ideas?” If your toilet backs up, you can come up with a thousand ideas while shit-water cascades onto the floor. The question is not about ideas; it is, “What will be the net effect?”

Wanna throw a monkey wrench into a fixed electoral system? Here’s a chance.

Stan Goff is the author of “Hideous Dream: A Soldier’s Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti” (Soft Skull Press, 2000), “Full Spectrum Disorder” (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and “Sex & War” which will be released approximately December, 2005. He is retired from the United States Army. His blog is at www.stangoff.com.

Is Barack Obama the new JFK? A Washington press corps that is forever on the lookout for its next cue wants to know. (There are links below, but I don’t suggest you actually read them; they’re strictly for illustration purposes.) This doesn’t really sound like a question that wants to be taken seriously, and it isn’t. It’s an honorific–the sort of hero worship that Hugh Sidey came to be venerated for writing about every president in Time–and a cheerleader’s cry.

But it’s not entirely fatuous. JFK was the first born-for-TV president and thus the first political celebrity of the modern age. His charisma, his storybook life and family, and his gift for sounding high-minded without ultimately saying much or committing himself to anything are all mirrored in the rise of Obama. And I suspect that Obama, like Kennedy, has no very vivid sense of the hopes he conjures in his listeners or what he’s going to do about them if elected.

To the civil rights movement, Kennedy gave a little encouragement and a lot of stonewalling; to the emerging generation that would define itself around the anti-war movement, he gave escalation in Vietnam. What would Obama do with the hopes of those supporters who oppose the war, those who want affordable, accessible health care once and for all, those who want to start seeing more economic fairness in the tax code and in laws governing corporations?

Kennedy disappointed sorely, a fact that was forgiven and forgotten after he became America’s first prime-time celebrity martyr, and Obama would surely disappoint as well. But there are disappointments and there are disappointments, and I am relieved to say I don’t believe Barack Obama is any Jack Kennedy.

Take JFK’s foreign policy. No one seems to remember what an avid hawk and Cold Warrior Kennedy was. He adored toughness in all things and believed wholeheartedly in brinksmanship and political subversion in the name of combatting global communism. Vietnam was only the most consequential piece of it. JFK blustered his way from one crisis to another, starting with the Bay of Pigs and proceeding through the Cuban Missile Crisis (where he bet the farm over Soviet missiles in Cuba that would have been no closer to our borders than our missiles in Turkey already were to Soviet borders) and a few misbegotten passes at assassinating Fidel Castro with the help of the CIA. Among his less-remembered achievements was to begin arming the Central American militias that became the next decade’s death squads–again, in the name of battling communist insurgency in the region.

Enough is enough.

Like many of us, after having watched helplessly as the Bush administration trampled the Constitution and made a mockery of checks and balances over the course of five bitter years, I was hopeful when the American people elected a Democratic Congress in November of 2006. Finally, I imagined, we would have a whiff of legality and the hint of a restoration of the rule of law in the land. Perhaps we would even have congressional committees to oversee the administration’s subversions of the rule of law and investigate the wide range of abuses that it had perpetrated since 2001.

There has been a bit of movement — which is why the thousands of Americans I have met who are appalled at these abuses but feel powerless to raise their voices effectively should take heart, but not stop their fight. To some extent, these raised voices have yielded some action: Congress has in fact held numerous hearings on issues — ranging from torture to warrantless wiretapping — that had been taboo to contend with when the administration was heedlessly, and unopposed, using a hyped narrative of `the global war on terror’ to subdue American liberties. Most prominently, we got some of the bad guys out of town. Citizen-driven congressional investigations into the politicization of the Department of Justice, for example, spurred the resignations of many key Bush administration officials, including the mild-mannered gatekeeper of the first bolgia of Hell, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

And yet, where it counts most, Democratic leaders in Congress have completely abdicated their constitutional oversight role. What they are doing now reprises the worst failures of other self-paralyzed Parliaments in societies that were facing crackdowns on civil liberties and the rule of law, and their voluntary self-emasculation may go down in history as one of those turning points at which leaders cave shamefully to transformative pressure that leaves a country far less than its founded ideal. Through their actions, they are potentially causing irreparable harm to the institution of Congress itself.

At issue is the failure of White House chief of staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers to comply with congressional subpoenas to testify about the 2006 firings of a handful of U.S. Attorneys. We now have an America in which Congress says, “We subpoena you.” And potential criminals say, “Yeah? F— off.”

As most people know, the Bush administration asserted executive privilege on behalf of Bolten and Miers and refused to allow them to comply with the subpoenas to testify before the House Judiciary Committee last July. It is widely understood that executive privilege only protects certain conversations and correspondences with the president and is not intended to be a blanket privilege — protecting possible wrongdoers against having to appear before Congress AT ALL.

By going far beyond specific exchanges between the president and other officials, the White House essentially asserted that Congress has no power over the executive branch and could not question executive branch officials about their activities. This is an affront to our Constitution. In the shootout of this executive power grab, it effectively leaves one branch of government fatally wounded on Main Street.

Guess what? In America, Congress is not supposed to be tied up and left for dead as potential criminals walk away with impunity. Within weeks, the few brave members of the House Judiciary Committee who were apparently still sentient and still aware of their role as Americans appropriately passed a criminal contempt resolution against both Bolten and Miers.

It was then in the hands of Democratic leaders in the House to bring the resolution to the floor for a vote.

Since then, the citizens of this High Noon scenario have been hiding under the bar stools as the black hats swagger through the nation’s abandoned thoroughfare, and chaparral rolls through the streets. Democratic leaders are hiding from the call of destiny and offering nothing but delays and excuses to avoid producing any semblance of cojones.

In July, they said there would be a vote in September. In September, they said there would be a vote in October. In October, they said a vote would be “more likely” in November. In December, it appeared as if there would be a vote in December – which was then changed to January. If this was my twelve-year-old justifying an unfinished school project, she would be grounded. If it is your congressional representatives justifying an advanced case of cowardice, they should be fired.

Then, less than two weeks ago, on January 14, the Washington Post reported, under a headline, “House Democrats Target Bolten, Miers,” that the House would likely take up the resolutions in the next “couple of weeks.” With this information coming from “Democratic leadership aides,” it appeared as if — Hallelujah! — the long wait for some semblance of justice and a faint breeze of courage might be over.

But two days ago, Politico reported that the votes on criminal contempt citations had been — Say it ain’t so! — “postponed” by House Democrats. Now they were not expected “for weeks.” Moreover, after “Democratic leadership aides” asserted in October that Congress “would be able to round up the 218 votes needed to push through the resolution from Democrats alone,” a Democratic “insider” was now saying, “When we have the votes, we’ll go ahead with this. Right now, the votes are just not there.”

So let me get this straight. The Democrats in Congress cannot even get their own members together to defend the Constitution against a supremely unpopular executive who has essentially spit in their faces, eaten their lunch and the nation’s, and publicly called them out as powerless. Not to mention the fact that they are setting a precedent for the future that any executive can emasculate any Congress and defy any subpoena after having committed possibly any crime. Still they are trembling under the barstools — summoning up, perhaps, the courage to crawl out fully prone and toss their untouched guns humbly at the feet of the posse.

Remember this: each and every member of Congress took an oath — and the oath was not to some abstract government, it was an oath TO YOU — to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Unlike many good people across the political spectrum who are appalled at this dismantling of the three-part system the founders put in place and the besmirching of the rule of law, Congressional Republicans have clearly decided to place their allegiance to the president and their party over their allegiance to the Constitution. This is bad enough; this is, in fact, treason. But the Democrats do not even have that party allegiance as an excuse for their treachery. They would be standing up for their party, the institution of Congress, and the Constitution by passing the contempt resolutions. What more will it take to get them to act?

Those who think — as Pelosi apparently does — that they may rock the boat through a contempt citation in a way that endangers a possible Democratic victory in September are badly misreading the public mood — as well as severely misreading the historical record. If you don’t punish those who break the law at this stage of a crackdown on liberty — through contempt citations, through the use of Congress’s jail cell for those who are found guilty of contempt, and/or through the investigations of a truly independent prosecutor — you are not going to have a transparent, accountable election in November. You will have set a benchmark for impunity and you will get greater and greater crimes committed in the certainty of impunity.

If you doubt the dangers of this, think of the Gulf of Hormuz threat a few weeks ago — oops, hoax. Because the press is actually asking questions, the Pentagon’s narrative of a vicious Iranian provocation was sidelined. But it is purely naive to believe that a White House that would ignore subpoenas and impose yet another false threat scenario on the American people will conduct a transparent election in the fall, especially if it can get away with murder — the murder of the rule of law — today.

Tell your representative to move forward with contempt. And if your representatives fail to act, the punishment should not just be removal from office in the next election; they should also be subject to investigations themselves — for abetting crimes against the Constitution.

Contempt is at issue, indeed.

Naomi Wolf is the author of The New York Times bestseller “The End of America” (Chelsea Green) and is the co-founder of the American Freedom Campaign.