The Rag Blog

24/01/08 “ICH” — — The former president of Tanzania Julius Nyerere once asked, “Why haven’t we all got a vote in the US election? Surely everyone with a TV set has earned that right just for enduring the merciless bombardment every four years.” Having reported four presidential election campaigns, from the Kennedys to Nixon, Carter to Reagan, with their Zeppelins of platitudes, robotic followers and rictal wives, I can sympathize. But what difference would the vote make? Of the presidential candidates I have interviewed, only George C. Wallace, governor of Alabama, spoke the truth. “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrats and Republicans,” he said. And he was shot.

What struck me, living and working in the United States, was that presidential campaigns were a parody, entertaining and often grotesque. They are a ritual danse macabre of flags, balloons and bullsh*t, designed to camouflage a venal system based on money power, human division and a culture of permanent war.

Traveling with Robert Kennedy in 1968 was eye-opening for me. To audiences of the poor, Kennedy would present himself as a savior. The words “change” and “hope” were used relentlessly and cynically. For audiences of fearful whites, he would use racist codes, such as “law and order.” With those opposed to the invasion of Vietnam, he would attack “putting American boys in the line of fire,” but never say when he would withdraw them. That year (after Kennedy was assassinated), Richard Nixon used a version of the same, malleable speech to win the presidency. Thereafter, it was used successfully by Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and the two Bushes. Carter promised a foreign policy based on “human rights” – and practiced the very opposite. Reagan’s “freedom agenda” was a bloodbath in Central America. Clinton “solemnly pledged” universal health care and tore down the last safety net of the Depression.

Nothing has changed. Barack Obama is a glossy Uncle Tom who would bomb Pakistan. Hillary Clinton, another bomber, is anti-feminist. John McCain’s one distinction is that he has personally bombed a country. They all believe the US is not subject to the rules of human behavior, because it is “a city upon a hill,” regardless that most of humanity sees it as a monumental bully which, since 1945, has overthrown 50 governments, many of them democracies, and bombed 30 nations, destroying millions of lives.

If you wonder why this holocaust is not an “issue” in the current campaign, you might ask the BBC, which is responsible for reporting the campaign to much of the world, or better still Justin Webb, the BBC’s North America editor. In a Radio 4 series last year, Webb displayed the kind of sycophancy that evokes the 1930s appeaser Geoffrey Dawson, then editor of the London Times. Condoleezza Rice cannot be too mendacious for Webb. According to Rice, the US is “supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.” For Webb, who believes American patriotism “creates a feeling of happiness and solidity,” the crimes committed in the name of this patriotism, such as support for war and injustice in the Middle East for the past 25 years, and in Latin America, are irrelevant. Indeed, those who resist such an epic assault on democracy are guilty of “anti-Americanism,” says Webb, apparently unaware of the totalitarian origins of this term of abuse. Journalists in Nazi Berlin would damn critics of the Reich as “anti-German.”

Moreover, his treacle about the “ideals” and “core values” that make up America’s sanctified “set of ideas about human conduct” denies us a true sense of the destruction of American democracy: the dismantling of the Bill of Rights, habeas corpus and separation of powers. Here is Webb on the campaign trail: “[This] is not about mass politics. It is a celebration of the one-to-one relationship between an individual American and his or her putative commander-in-chief.” He calls this “dizzying.” And Webb on Bush: “Let us not forget that while the candidates win, lose, win again . . . there is a world to be run and President Bush is still running it.” The emphasis in the BBC text actually links to the White House website.

None of this drivel is journalism. It is anti-journalism, worthy of a minor courtier of a great power. Webb is not exceptional. His boss Helen Boaden, director of BBC News, sent this reply to a viewer who had protested the prevalence of propaganda as the basis of news: “It is simply a fact that Bush has tried to export democracy [to Iraq] and that this has been troublesome.”

Defence request denied as France is latest to say child soldiers are victims, not war criminals

The Pentagon has denied a request to send a United Nations observer to a hearing for Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr, a month after a UN representative raised concerns about the Canadian’s trial.

Khadr’s military lawyers had asked that a representative for Radhika Coomaraswamy, the United Nations special representative for children in armed conflict, be given access to the U.S. base in Cuba for Khadr’s hearing, to start Feb. 4.

Coomaraswamy has told the U.S. State Department she’s concerned a precedent would be set by a war crimes trial for “alleged acts committed when (Khadr) was a child,” said her spokesperson Laurence Gerard.

“The denial smacks of retaliation,” said Khadr’s military lawyer, Lt.-Cmdr. Bill Kuebler. “It’s difficult to see how Prime Minister Harper can defend the military commission as an appropriate judicial process when the U.S. refuses to let the leading international experts even watch.”

A Pentagon official was not available for comment.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said the government will not intervene in the trial of Khadr, who was 15 when captured in Afghanistan and accused of throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier.

Now 21, he faces charges of murder in violation of the laws of war, attempted murder, spying, conspiracy and providing material support to terrorism. His lawyers will argue his trial is in violation of international treaties that protect “child soldiers.” The Pentagon says international law allows for the prosecution of defendants over age 15.

Perhaps no campaign tactic is more effective than fearmongering, and in the current presidential race the sum of all fears, once again, is radical Islamic terrorists-or “jihadists,” to use the now-ubiquitous term. On the Republican side, it’s a pissing match over who can look toughest against this shadowy enemy, with John McCain running ads showing masked Islamic gunmen, while Mitt Romney spouts the old neocon warning about forces that want to “unite the world under a single jihadist caliphate.” Although the Democrats’ rhetoric is more restrained, Hillary Clinton didn’t hesitate to suggest that the new president might quickly face another terrorist attack on American soil, as part of her quest to convince voters they need her cool-headed experience.

Largely ignored by the mainstream candidates-as well as the mainstream media-are the latest efforts to bring the fear home by targeting “homegrown terrorism”-another new catchphrase. Only liberal Democrat Dennis Kucinich and libertarian Republican Ron Paul have warned that in the name of stopping domestic terrorist plots before they happen, Congress is in the midst of passing legislation aimed not at actual hate crimes or even terrorist conspiracies, but at talking, Web surfing, or even thinking about jihadism or other “extremist belief systems.” Last October, a piece of legislation called the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 sailed through the House with near-universal bipartisan support; it is likely to reach the floor of the Senate early this year and appears certain to be signed into law.

Meanwhile, a report released by the New York City Police Department’s intelligence division has been warmly received in Washington and widely distributed to law enforcement officials and seems sure to influence national policy. “Radicalization in the West and the Homegrown Threat” details how not only committed terrorists but potential jihadists think, what they talk about, and where they meet. The report’s apparent goal is to increase surveillance on constitutionally protected activities. Already, members of the New York City Fire Department have been enlisted by Homeland Security to be on the lookout for signs of possible terrorist activity whenever they enter people’s homes and to share this “intelligence” with other agencies.

Both the legislation and the report are presented as reasonable, rational responses to the threat of terrorism from domestic “extremist” groups and are framed not as plans for action but as efforts to “study” and “understand” the roots of homegrown terrorism. Both promote precisely the kind of broad approach-targeting beliefs rather than actions, assuming that “radicalization” leads to violence, defining terms loosely and casting a wide net-that has been used in the past by government authorities to monitor and disrupt legitimate dissent as well as illegal plots.

The primary sponsor of the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act is Jane Harman, chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security’s Subcommittee on Intelligence. Harman made a point of introducing the legislation on April 19, the 12th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, saying it was “aimed at ensuring such an attack never happens again.” But it was clear from the start that the bill was not aimed at white supremacists or anti-government militias. In announcing the bill, Harman also cited a 2005 plot in her Southern California district, targeting “military bases and recruiting stations, the Israeli Consulate, synagogues filled with worshipers on Jewish holy days, and the El Al ticket counter at LAX”-a plot that was foiled when a local police detective spotted “jihadist extremist material” in the apartment of a robbery suspect.

The danger posed by American jihadists remains relatively small-both in comparison to domestic threats in Europe and to the threat of attacks on the United States from abroad. The latest National Intelligence Estimate on “The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland,” released in July 2007, clearly stated that Al Qaeda “is and will remain the most serious terrorist threat” to the United States. In fact, the report found that “the group has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability” from its safe haven in Pakistan, and that the rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq has helped it raise resources and “recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attacks.” Far down in its threat assessment, the NIE notes that “the radical and violent segment of the West’s Muslim population is expanding, including in the United States,” but also finds that “this internal Muslim terrorist threat is not likely to be as severe as it is in Europe.”

Nonetheless, a few thwarted conspiracies are more than enough to float a bill like this. After a couple of hearings-described by OMB Watch as “primarily one-sided, with the bulk of the witnesses representing law enforcement or federal agencies”-the bill went to the House floor, where it was it passed with only six members voting against it-three Democrats and three Republicans. (Twenty-two others were absent.) Currently, a nearly identical version of the bill awaits a vote in the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security, where it has a supporter in chair Joseph Lieberman. Committee member Barack Obama has gone on record as being undecided on the bill (after an earlier email to constituents that seemed to indicate support)-but no presidential candidate is likely to cast a vote that could be seen as soft on terrorism.

The legislation would create a National Commission on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism composed of 10 members whose vaguely defined job would be to “examine and report upon the facts and causes of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence,” and to “build upon and bring together the work of other entities” including various federal, state, and local agencies, academics, and foreign governments. The commission is charged with issuing a report after 18 months. It also directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to set up a center to study “violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism” at a U.S. university, and to “conduct a survey” of what other countries are doing to prevent homegrown terrorism.

On the surface it looks harmless enough, except perhaps as a source of potential pork. California’s Dana Rohrabacher, one of three Republicans to oppose the bill, told Congressional Quarterly that he saw the creation of the commission as “the [worst] type of posturing. Is spending $20 million so people can talk more and pay for their hotel rooms and expenses really going to solve anything? I don’t think so.”

On the Democratic side, however, the legislation’s three nay votes included Kucinich, who refers to it as the “thought-crimes bill.” At campaign stops in New Hampshire, Kucinich cited the bill as yet another sign of government intervention in civil liberties. Earlier in his campaign, he said it “sets the stage for further criminalization of protest.”

The bill raises the potential for government encroachments on civil rights in part through the way it defines some basic terms. The text of the bill says that “the term ‘violent radicalization’ means the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change.” It gives no clue as to what would qualify, under this law, as an “extremist belief system,” leaving this open to broad interpretation according to the prevailing political winds.

In addition, simply by designating the “process of adopting or promoting” belief systems as a target for government concern or control, the bill moves into dangerous territory. The director of the ACLU’s Washington legislative office, Caroline Fredrickson, said in a statement on the bill, “Law enforcement should focus on action, not thought. We need to worry about the people who are committing crimes rather than those who harbor beliefs that the government may consider to be extreme.”

The United States already has ample federal and state laws against violence of all kinds, and against conspiracy to commit violence. Participants in the handful of “homegrown terrorist” plots that have hatched since 9/11 are being prosecuted under these existing statutes. Certain kinds of direct incitement to violence are already illegal, as well, but within strict limits.

Robert Peck of the Center for Constitutional Litigation points out that some of the most significant First Amendment battles have been fought over precisely when “speech transgresses the line from mere advocacy, which is protected by the First Amendment, to incitement, which is not.” Through the early twentieth century, when “incitement” was defined broadly as speech that had a “tendency” to cause illegal acts, it was used to prosecute nonviolent abolitionists, anarchists, socialists, and draft resisters. Gradually, the Supreme Court narrowed the definition, so that speech is protected unless it will “intentionally produce a high likelihood of real imminent harm.”

What the Homegrown Terrorism bill does is bring back into the equation not just violent actions, and not just violent plots, but the words and ideas that may (or may not) inspire or encourage them somewhere down the road. It moves toward designating people as terrorists based not on what they do, but on what they say and what they think.

Other red flags appear in the bill’s initial “findings”-among them, the charge that “the Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.” “If Congress finds the Internet is dangerous, then the ACLU will have to worry about censorship and limitations on First Amendment activities,” says the ACLU’s Fredrickson. “Why go down that road?”

It’s the “road” the bill lays out that worries civil libertarians. “This measure looks benign enough, but we should be concerned about where it will lead,” Kamau Franklin of New York’s Center for Constitutional Rights said when the bill passed the House. The National Commission it creates will have broad power to conduct investigations; one commentator dubbed it the “Son of HUAC”-the House Un-American Activities Committee-because it is supposed to travel around the country, holding hearings and questioning people under oath about their ideological beliefs. Wherever it may ultimately lead, the bill seems clearly part of a growing push toward expanding domestic intelligence operations-spying that is aimed not at any Al Qaeda members who may have slipped across the border, but at U.S. citizens and legal residents. The great civil libertarian Frank J. Donner, in his book The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System, argued that the true goal of domestic intelligence was not to prevent or punish criminal activity, but to protect existing power structures and suppress dissent. Unlike law enforcement, which deals with illegal actions that have already been committed, domestic intelligence is by nature “future-oriented”: It is not looking for criminals, but potential criminals, and it does so by relying on “ideology, not behavior, theory not practice.” Anyone who thinks the wrong way could at some point act the wrong way-so they have to be watched.

Donner was writing in the late 1970s, following congressional investigations that exposed the abuses of the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program), which for more than a decade had conducted surveillance and planted informants to spy on and disrupt what J. Edgar Hoover had decided were “enemies of the American way of life”-including civil rights, anti-war, student, and women’s liberation groups, as well as the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan. During this period, the bureau tapped phones, opened mail, planted bugs, and burglarized homes and offices. At least 26,000 individuals were at one point catalogued on an FBI list of persons to be rounded up in the event of a “national emergency.” In the end, the Bureau conducted more than half a million investigations of so-called subversives and maintained files on well over a million Americans-all of this without a single conviction for a criminal act.

Plenty of people will argue that the “subversive” groups targeted during the McCarthy era or the COINTELPRO period were nothing like today’s Islamic radicals-and there are, of course, differences, not least in terms of new tactics like suicide attacks and dirty bombs. But the Weather Underground set off at least a dozen bombs, which is a dozen more than the homegrown jihadists have managed so far. And just as the FBI spied on Weathermen and anti-war activists alike, it will be unlikely to distinguish between active jihadists and Muslims who are simply ardent or angry. What’s more, anything that can be applied to one “extremist” group-laws, policies, law enforcement strategies, domestic intelligence operations-can be applied to others. A case in point is offered by Brian Michael Jenkins, a Rand Corporation terrorism expert who served as a consultant on the NYPD’s report. In his book on terrorism, Unconquerable Nation: Knowing Our Enemy, Strengthening Ourselves, Jenkins wrote, “In their international campaign, the jihadists will seek common grounds with leftist, anti-American, and anti-globalization forces, who will in turn see, in radical Islam, comrades against a mutual foe.” Once a terrorist is defined by thought and word rather than deed, there will be room for all of us in the big tent.

The bill does include a provision that all activities “should not violate the constitutional rights, civil rights, or civil liberties of United States citizens or lawful permanent residents,” and must observe “racial neutrality” policies. They are also to be audited by Homeland Security’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Officer. But as Mike German of the ACLU told In These Times, an internal review does not constitute real independent oversight. “Nobody should be fooled that such an office would have authority to address policies that are approved at a high level of the administration.”

Outside of civil liberties groups, most criticism of the bill seems to be coming from the libertarian right-including presidential candidate Ron Paul, who gave a shout-out to his diverse base of supporters when he warned that “otherwise non-violent anti-tax, antiwar, or anti-abortion groups [could] fall under the watchful eye of this new government commission.”

For an indication as to where the initiatives outlined in the bill could lead, we can look to the NYPD report on the “homegrown threat” that was released in August 2007. Prepared by two senior analysts in the department’s intelligence division, it compiles information from case studies of successful attacks and thwarted plots by domestic terrorists in the United States and other Western nations, and uses them to create what the authors call “a conceptual framework for understanding the process of radicalization in the West.”

The NYPD report, like the House bill, starts out with a definition of terms. But unlike the bill, it is frank about which “extremist belief system” poses what it calls “the homegrown threat” (although it often avoids referring to Islam and instead uses the term “jihadi-Salafi ideology”): “What motivates young men and women, born or living in the West, to carry out ‘autonomous jihad’ via acts of terrorism against their host countries? The answer is ideology. Ideology is the bedrock and catalyst for radicalization. It defines the conflict, guides movements, identifies the issues, drives recruitment, and is the basis for action. In many cases, ideology also determines target selection and informs what will be done and how it will be carried out.”

The lines between thought and action are blurred. And the report states explicitly that both are dangerous and need to be policed: “Where once we would have defined the initial indicator of the threat at the point where a terrorist or group of terrorists would actually plan an attack, we have now shifted our focus to a much earlier point-a point where we believe the potential terrorist or group of terrorists begin and progress through a process of radicalization. The culmination of this process is a terrorist attack.”

Central to the report is an analysis of the four phases of this “radicalization process”: pre-radicalization; self-identification with the jihadist cause; indoctrination following exposure to jihadist literature or arguments; and finally, “jihadization.” None of these phases involves any violent acts, although the last, in the report’s definition, will “ultimately” lead to “operational planning for the jihad or a terrorist attack.” The way that one phase leads into another suggests a kind of seamless continuity between thought and action, a sense of inevitability-as if once an individual admits the ideology into his mind, he will eventually end up with a bomb strapped to his body.

The report acknowledges that individuals destined to follow this trajectory do not fit any particular profile. They can be citizens or resident aliens (legal or illegal); immigrants or second- and third-generation Americans; Muslim-born or converts. The “radicalization incubators” where they gather, the report says, “can be mosques,” but also “cafes, cab driver hangouts, flophouses, prisons, student associations, nongovernmental organizations, hookah (water pipe) bars, butcher shops and book stores.” Or they may meet on the Web, which the report calls “a virtual incubator of its own” and New York police commissioner called “the de facto training ground” for terrorists.

Future jihadists, the report says, “look, act, talk and walk like everyone around them,” and “in the early stages of their radicalization, these individuals rarely travel, are not participating in any kind of militant activity, yet they are slowly building the mind-set, intention and commitment to conduct jihad.” In other words, as Spencer Ackerman writes on TPMMuckraker, “most of what we learn about potential homegrown jihadists is that their pre-radical behavior is…a lot like that of non-jihadists.” How, then, can we identify these people? Only by keeping an eye on everyone who might remotely fit the bill.

“The NYPD must have the tools it needs to investigate and combat terrorism, but this report lays the foundation for blanket surveillance of the entire Muslim community,” said Christopher Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

The NYPD report outlines no concrete strategies for combating “jihadization,” but these would presumably involve the same kinds of tactics that have been used to track “dangerous” and “subversive” groups in the past, the basic tactics of domestic intelligence work: electronic surveillance, recruiting informants, placing agents-and sometimes agents provocateur-inside suspect communities, and taking up other opportunities to watch, look, and listen.

The report also seems to have inspired renewed calls for ordinary citizens to join in the task of rooting out potential jihadists by spying on their neighbors. “They can live next door,” warned the New York Post, which also declared that the report “underscores the relentless efforts by civil libertarians and leftist groups-with the New York Times at the head of the line-to thwart counterterrorist efforts” by the NYPD.

Interestingly, the NYPD’s “counterterrorist efforts” to which the Post refers had nothing to do with crushing jihadist plots; instead, they involve one of the most blatant crackdowns on legitimate dissent in recent memory, and show why the police force honed by Rudy Giuliani needs no more weapons against constitutional liberties added to its arsenal. Before and during the 2004 Republican National Convention, with no credible threat of violence, the NYPD conducted not only mass arrests of peaceful protesters (almost three times as many as Chicago 1968), but widespread preconvention surveillance of activists with “anti-Bush sentiment,” from anti-war organizations to church groups to street-theater companies. “The police action helped to all but eliminate dissent from New York City during the Republican delegates’ visit,” said the New York Times editorial that aroused the Post’s wrath. “If that was the goal, then mission accomplished. And civil rights denied.”

James Ridgeway is the Washington Correspondent for Mother Jones. Jean Casella has worked in independent book publishing for more than 20 years, most recently as publisher of the Feminist Press, and is coeditor of two anthologies.

As the Senate takes up “debate” today over granting the President new warrantless eavesdropping powers and granting immunity to lawbreaking telecoms, the individual who joined forces with Dick Cheney to get this ball rolling, AT&T’s personal Senator Jay Rockefeller, made some comments yesterday to The Politico that illustrate just how twisted and dishonest is the thinking of telecom immunity advocates. First, there is this:

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) is predicting the Senate will grant retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies as Congress takes up reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). . . “I think we will prevail,” Rockefeller said on Wednesday, adding that he hoped the Senate will finish the bill by next week. The FISA legislation expires in February, and both President Bush and GOP congressional leaders have demanded new legislation be in place by that time.

“It’s a pretty bad idea to appear cocky,” Rockefeller noted. “I am not pessimistic.”

For an entire year, Congressional Democrats have won absolutely nothing. They’ve given in to the White House on every one of its demands. Yet here is Jay Rockefeller strutting around declaring Victory and having to battle against feelings of cockiness because, finally, he is about to win something. But ponder the “win” that is giving him these feelings of immense self-satisfaction. Is he finally accomplishing what Democrats were given control of Congress to do: namely, impose some checks and limits on the administration? No. The opposite is true. Rockefeller is doing the bidding of Dick Cheney. The bill that he is working for is the bill the White House demanded. Rockefeller is supported by the entire Bush administration, urged on and funded by the nation’s most powerful telecoms, and is backed by the entire GOP caucus in the Senate.

When Rockefeller smugly announces that he “thinks we will prevail,” the “we” on whose behalf he is so proudly speaking is Bush and Cheney, lawbreaking telecoms, and all Republican Senators. The only parties whom Rockefeller is so happily “defeating” are civil liberties groups and members of his own party. That is what is making him feel pulsating sensations of excitement and “smugness.”

He is being allowed to win only because he is advancing the Bush agenda and those of his largest corporate donors, and waging war against members of his own party, acting to destroy the allegedly defining values of that party. Yet he’s so desperate to feel like he’s won something that this is enough to cause him to strut around giddily battling feelings of cockiness over his impending “win.” At least he’s being honest here about whom he represents.

Next we have this:

Rockefeller also rejected a potential compromise being floated by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) that would let a secret FISA court decide whether the telecom companies, who are being sued for going along with official requests from the Bush administration to cooperate with warrantless surveillance programs, acted properly.

Telecoms already have immunity under existing FISA law where they acted pursuant to written government certification or where they prove they acted in good faith (see 18 USC 2520 (d)). There is no reason that the federal courts presiding over these cases can’t simply make that determiniation, as they do in countless other cases involving classified information. Even Feinstein’s “compromise” is a completely unnecessary gift to telecoms: to transfer the cases away from the federal judges who have ruled against them to the secret FISA court. But even that pro-telecom proposal is unacceptable to Rockefeller (and the administration), because that would still leave telecoms subject to the rule of law. Rockefeller’s only goal is to bestow on his telecom supporters full and unconditional protection from having their conduct — and, by effect, the administration’s conduct — subject to a court of law. Manifestly, that’s the real agenda. That’s why he’s feeling “cocky.”

It gets worse:

Rockefeller defended the actions of the telecom companies, arguing that the companies received explicit orders from the National Security Agency to cooperate with the super-secret surveillance effort. The West Virginia Democrat said the telecom companies were being “pushed by the government, compelled by the government, required by the government to do this. And I think in the end, we’ll prevail.”

Can someone please tell Jay Rockefeller that we don’t actually live in a country where the President has the definitively dictatorial power to “compel” and “require” private actors to break the law by “ordering” them to do so? Like all other lawbreakers, telecoms broke the law because they chose to, and profited greatly as a result. That telecoms had an option is too obvious to require proof, but conclusive proof can be found in the fact that some telecoms did refuse to comply on the grounds that doing so was against the law. There is a branch of Government that does have the power to compel and require behavior by private actors. It’s called “the American people,” acting through their Congress, who democratically enact laws regulating that behavior. And the American people enacted multiple laws making it illegal (.pdf) for telecoms, in the absence of a warrant, to enable Government spying on their customers and to turn over private data. Rockefeller’s claimed belief that we live in a country where private companies are “compelled” to obey orders to break the law is either indescribably authoritarian or disgustingly dishonest — probably both.

Finally, we have this bit of pure mendacity:

Rockefeller added: “If people want to be mad, don’t be mad at the telecommunications companies, who are restrained from saying anything at all under the State Secrets Act. And they really are. They can’t say whether they were involved, they can’t go to court, they can’t do anything. They’re just helpless. And the president was just having his way.”

Rockefeller’s claim that telecoms can’t submit exculpatory evidence to the court is flat-out false, an absolute lie. There is no other accurate way to describe his statement. Under FISA (50 USC 1806(f)), telecoms are explicitly permitted to present any evidence in support of their defenses in secret (in camera, ex parte) to the judge and let the judge decide the case based on it. That section of long-standing law could not be clearer, and leaves no doubt that Rockefeller is simply lying when he says that telecoms are unable to submit secret evidence to the court to defend themselves:

[W]henever any motion or request is made by an aggrieved person pursuant to any other statute or rule of the United States or any State before any court or other authority of the United States or any State to discover or obtain applications or orders or other materials relating to electronic surveillance or to discover, obtain, or suppress evidence or information obtained or derived from electronic surveillance under this chapter, the United States district court or, where the motion is made before another authority, the United States district court in the same district as the authority, shall, notwithstanding any other law, if the Attorney General files an affidavit under oath that disclosure or an adversary hearing would harm the national security of the United States, review in camera and ex parte the application, order, and such other materials relating to the surveillance as may be necessary to determine whether the surveillance of the aggrieved person was lawfully authorized and conducted.

How much clearer could that be? Directly contrary to Rockefeller’s claims, federal courts are not only able, but required (”shall”), to review in secret any classified information — including evidence over which a “states secrets privilege” has been asserted — in order “to determine whether the surveillance of the aggrieved person was lawfully authorized and conducted.” Federal courts already have exactly the power that Rockefeller dishonestly claims they lack. Moreover, even if that provision didn’t exist (and it does), and even if Rockefeller were telling the truth when claiming that telecoms were unable to submit exculpatory evidence to the court (and he isn’t), then Congress could just easily fix that problem in one day. All they have to do is amend FISA to make clear that telecoms do have the right to submit such evidence to defend themselves notwithstanding the President’s utterance of the all-powerful magic phrase “State Secrets.” And then this oh-so-unfair problem would be instantly fixed.

If telecoms were really these poor, “helpless” victims unable to defend themselves, the solution isn’t to bar anyone from suing them even when they break the law. The solution, if that were really the concern, is simply to add a provision to FISA enabling them to submit that evidence in secret, the way classified evidence is submitted to federal courts all the time. The reality is that 50 USC 1806(f) already says exactly that, but even if it didn’t, Congress could just amend it to do so.

Rockefeller’s claims also entail the core dishonesty among amnesty advocates. He implies that the real party that engaged in wrongdoing was the President, not telecoms, yet his bill does nothing to enable plaintiffs to overcome the numerous obstacles the administration has used to block themselves from being held accountable. If Rockefeller were being truthful about his belief that it’s the administration that should be held accountable here, then his bill would at least provide mechanisms for ensuring that can happen. It doesn’t, and thus results in nothing other than total protection for all lawbreakers — including administration officials — who committed felonies by spying on Americans for years without warrants.

Democrats have failed repeatedly to end or even limit one of the most unpopular wars in American history. They have failed to restore habeas corpus. They have failed to fulfill their promise of “fixing” the hastily-passed Protect America Act. They even failed to provide children’s health insurance even though their entire party and much of the GOP favored it. They don’t feel the slightest bit ashamed or remorseful about any of that.

Yet here is Jay Rockefeller, feeling proud and cocky and triumphant, because he is about to vanquish members of his own party and civil liberties groups on behalf of a radical agenda of amnesty for lawbreaking corporations and warrantless eavesdropping powers demanded by Dick Cheney, AT&T and Mitch McConnell. I suppose he needs to find his self-esteem somewhere. But there shouldn’t be any doubts regarding on whose behalf Senate Democratic leaders are working. When Rockefeller says “we will prevail,” he’s telling you as clearly as he can whom they represent.

UPDATE: California’s Courage Campaign has an excellent critique of the “compromise” amendment which Diane Feinstein plans to introduce to transfer the cases against telecoms to the secret FISA court and allow them to be shielded from immunity if they can prove they acted in “good faith.” That site also has a fairly thorough summary of the procedural events likely to occur today. Feintsein’s press release on her amendment — which seems to have some chance of passing — “>is here.

Feinstein’s amendment indirectly provides immunity to telecoms while pretending not to. As demonstrated, telecoms already have immunity under the law if they can prove they acted in good faith, and there is absolutely no reason whatosever to transfer these cases away from a real federal court (that operates largely in the open, with both sides present, though with the ability to review evidence in secret), to a compeltely secret, one-sided court (only telecoms and the Government would be present) that is renown for deciding blindly in favor of the Government.

In any event, Feinstein’s amendment would almost certainly be vetoed by the White House, which (like Rockefeller) is demanding unconditutional immuninty. I actually prefer the much more honest and open approach of Bush/Cheney full-scale immunity to Feinstein’s deceitful approach. If they’re going to do this, it’s preferable to have it happen all out in the daylight, clear as can be what they’re actually giving to telecoms and how they’re protecting both governmental and corporate lawbreakers. A loss here can at least have the beneficial effect of serving as a potentially mobilizing event, unmistakably demonstrating just how lawless and corrupt our Beltway culture has become.

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book “How Would a Patriot Act?,” a critique of the Bush administration’s use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, “A Tragic Legacy“, examines the Bush legacy.

Dick Cheney was at his best shilling for immunity for telecom companies today before the Heritage Foundation. His speech came one day before the Republican rubber stamp machine in the Senate attempts another push to give blanket immunity to the telecommunication companies suspected of engaging in illegal eavesdropping and surveillance of Americans. Although wiretapping is usually justified as a necessary tool in the “War on Terror”, there is good reason to doubt the official story and question the legality of the Bush administration’s practices.

Already a series of Bush administration lies on the subject has collapsed. First, there was President Bush’s repeated public statements back in 2004 that wiretapping occurs in the United States only pursuant to court order. NY Times writers who had found out otherwise were threatened and cajoled into silence for an entire year. When the government’s massive warrantless surveillance program was finally exposed in 2005, we were told the “terrorist surveillance program” had been instituted in response to the 9-11 attacks and the threat of terrorism. But a number of credible sources have since reported that the NSA’s domestic phone record program began 7 months before 9/11.

The Administration argues that the telecom companies deserve immunity because their managers were loyal Americans acting in the public interest and they could not have been expected to determine the legality of their actions. Hefty financial incentives in the form of government contracts may have been dangled in front of the telecoms to get them to overlook the legalities. This argument fails, nonetheless, because of evidence in the form of heavily redacted court documents describing Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio’s refusal in February 2001 to turn over call records to the NSA without a proper legal order. (Nacchio contends that he was targeted by the Administration for a criminal investigation precisely because he refused to play ball without a court order.)

Obtaining the truth about the NSA’s surveillance program is of the utmost importance. Congress is in the process of fashioning a legislative fix that is supposed to accomplish the dual goals of detecting terrorists without unduly invading privacy interests and without clogging up the NSA’s databases with non-relevant data about innocent Americans.

Without the facts about the scope of monitoring, what actual prior limitations or technological challenges existed and exactly what kinds of surveillance services or customer records the telecoms were providing the NSA, it’s hard to know what, if any, legislative remedy is needed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). It is quite obvious, however, from various congresspersons’ public statements after the midnight vote in August 2007 (before their summer recess) that few understood what they had voted for. So there’s strong reason to believe that Congress itself has still not been told the truth. What Congress and the public have been told is that dramatic changes to FISA are necessary to expand warrantless monitoring of all international calls including of Americans’ calls abroad.

Immunizing the telecoms’ prior illegal actions in a blanket way not only sets a terrible precedent that the Constitution and the courts don’t matter on the mere say-so of the executive branch, but the continued murkiness potentially covers up all kinds of other problems. Remember the FBI’s rush to collect banking, credit, telephone, travel and all manner of other information about you with their hundreds of thousands of “national security letters” after 9-11? More is not necessarily better if mistakes and non-relevance are pervasive in such collection, as the Department of Justice’s own Inspector General later found.

There are similar utilitarian concerns with the NSA’s massive data collection and data-sorting system as those regarding the effectiveness of “no fly lists” that have quickly grown to contain tens of thousands of ordinary persons’ names like “Gary Smith”. Sources have reported the NSA’s surveillance system, enabled by secret contracts between private telecommunication companies and the government, collecting various communications of Americans without individualized probable cause, has already produced a database clogged with corrupted and useless information. The same sources say that privacy protection would have helped inject some judiciousness into analysis and investigations to better separate the innocent from the guilty.

Moreover, there is reportedly no way to even monitor for abuses under the current system. While privacy regulations normally protect all sensitive information about American citizens, such as an IRS return or an FBI file, the program that Bush seeks to immunize apparently provides no way to track abuse by someone in the NSA or Executive Branch. This concern is no small matter considering the history of a rogue FBI agent like Russian spy Robert Hanssen or a criminal staffer like Scooter Libby.

The last time the country was scared into such civil rights abuses, in the 1960s, a high level FBI official ended up testifying to the Church Committee that no one in the FBI had questioned if the COINTELPRO domestic surveillance program was legal, moral or ethical. Fear has a history of inducing such mistakes. The Church Committee eventually unraveled many of the abuses of that era in an open process that stands as a model in ferreting out truth and fixing the problems. That’s how we got the FISA law to begin with–it was a compromise to enable monitoring in individual cases for purposes of national security while simultaneously preventing abuse of Americans’ privacy rights.

It appears the Bush Administration’s push to provide blanket immunity for telecoms is on a par with the C.I.A.’s destruction of videotaped harsh interrogations in the midst of ongoing legal inquiries, the millions of White House e-mail records missing in violation of the Presidential Records Act and Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence. In the Bush administration, protection of the guilty from accountability under the Constitution requires suppressing the truth. But if Congress allows it to happen, the suppression of the truth will come at a high cost to the integrity of the Constitution, to Americans’ civil liberties and potentially also to the national security of the United States.

Co-authored by Tom Maertens, former Deputy Coordinator for Counter-terrorism, Department of State and National Security Council Director for Non-Proliferation.

Coleen Rowley is a columnist/blogger for Huffington Post.

CAPULÁLPAM DE MENDEZ, OAXACA — It is an open secret that throughout the Americas and the world, people are struggling against the intrusion of Canadian mining companies and their short term “get the gold and get out” strategies. The backlash against Canadian mining companies has, in some cases (particularly in Guatemala and Peru), strengthened broader social and political movements re-vindicating local control over land. In Oaxaca, Mexico, the struggle against a Vancouver based mining company is unifying an isolated Zapotec community, and bringing their struggles to state and nation-wide attention.

* * *

“Welcome to Ixlán: Our land is communal land, not to be bought or sold,” pronounces a rusting billboard just outside regional centre of Ixlán, 60km north of the Southern Mexican state of Oaxaca’s capital city, Oaxaca de Juarez.

A couple of bumpy, graveled kilometers from Ixlán lies Capulálpam, a remote mountain village flanked by locally owned riverside eco-tourism getaways. The town center is but a square block, as the majority of community members are rural indigenous Zapotec farmers, who farm to support their families.

“The whole territory of Capulálpam is communally owned,” explains Francisco Garcia López, a member of Capulálpam’s Commission of Communal Goods, standing on a rock above a river valley and indicating with a sweep of his arm the forests, rivers and mountains that comprise the municipality.

He then points down to a series of white buildings, with mining carts on tracks leading to openings into the earth.

“For 230 years, gold and silver mining companies have been exploiting tunnels in the mountains,” he explains.

Thousands of people from Calpulálpam worked in the mine, until the union was broken in 1993. Only a few hundred people, mostly from the nearby town of Natividad, stayed on. In the last few years, there has been little activity at the mine.

Today, residents of Calpulálpam as well as former miners from the town have agreed that reopening the mine will not benefit the community. “The quantity and quality of our water supplies have been negatively affected by mining activity, that’s the main reason we’re demanding the cancellation of all mining concessions in our communal land,” says López.

Skyrocketing gold prices, favorable mining laws and a recent flood of speculation-linked financing for junior mining companies have opened up the way for Vancouver-based Continuum Resources to buy up the majority of the mining concessions in the state of Oaxaca. The reactivation of the historic “Natividad” site, reportedly Oaxaca’s richest gold and silver mine, has been spearheaded by Continuum, majority owners in a joint venture which started up in 2004 with a Mexican firm. At the Natividad project alone, Continuum holds more than 54,000 hectares of concessions.

Underneath the entrance to the mine, an area where waste rock, chemicals and tailings have been thrown directly into the river below for centuries looks like a sagging black stain on the hillside. But it gets worse. Out of service electrical transformers, once used to power the mining operation, are now generating toxic Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which community members fear could be entering the water system.

According to López, over the last few years, 13 streams have disappeared completely because of Continuum’s exploration activities. The National Water Commission (Conagua) has confirmed that during the course of their activities, Continuum Resources captured underground water, which resulted in the disappearance of springs. The company maintains that “the mine and the mining activity are not responsible for the disappearance of the springs.”

“People in Capulálpam know that mining isn’t sustainable” says Aldo Gonzales Rojas, a member of the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juarez (UNOSJO), an organization devoted to popular education and farmer-to-farmer outreach. In addition to dried up springs and contaminated water, “people can’t use sand from the rivers anymore because it’s contaminated, nor can we capture the frogs that are part of our diet without leaving our traditional territory,” says Rojas.

Roadblock for Negotiation

“All of our complaints to the government were falling on deaf ears,” says López, referring to the dozens of attempts by the municipal council and community organizations to have the federal or state government intervene in environmental conflicts with the company.

In October of 2007, the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (Profepa) ordered Continuum to halt all exploitation activities at Natividad due to environmental complaints. Locals were glad that the government stepped in, but remained concerned that the company would continue exploration work.

“We decided to take collective action,” says López, referring to the decision by members of the community, including the mayor, to block the main highway out of Oaxaca City.

“On October 16th, we blocked the highway with fifty pickup trucks for five hours, demanding the permanent closure of the Natividad mine.” They withdrew the roadblock once a working dialogue with the Secretary of Economy, the sub-Secretary of Government and Profepa was agreed upon.

Profepa issued another document in November of 2007, noting that among other infractions, Continuum had not carried out hydro-geological studies required of it, because “[the company] lacks permission from the authorities of Capulálpam to enter in their jurisdiction or territory.”

Continuum acknowledges in official documents that it has received environmental complaints and that Natividad has been subject to temporary closure. The company does not appear to have adopted a protocol on corporate social responsibility.

Mexico has ratified the International Labour Organization’s Convention 169, on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, Article 16 of which reads “In cases in which the State retains the ownership of mineral or sub-surface resources or rights to other resources pertaining to lands, governments shall establish or maintain procedures through which they shall consult these peoples, with a view to ascertaining whether and to what degree their interests would be prejudiced, before undertaking or permitting any programmes for the exploration or exploitation of such resources pertaining to their lands.”

López, a lifetime resident of Capulálpam, says that neither the government of Mexico nor the company has consulted with the people of the village. The main prospects for Continuum’s expansion of the Natividad mine lay under communally owned property in Capulálpam.

“Protest and Violence” in Context

“Investors may be aware that political and social tension has lead to incidences of protest and violence in Oaxaca over the past six months,” warns a promotional piece for Continuum Resources prepared by Fundamental Research Corporation in April of 2007.

In her new book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein summarizes recent events in Oaxaca in the context of popular resistance to the current economic model in Mexico. Klein writes, “…the right wing government sent in riot police to break a strike by teachers who were demanding an annual pay raise. It provoked a statewide rebellion against the corruption of the corporatist state that raged for months.”

The scale of repression is captured in part by Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, which reports that stemming from the repression of the teachers’ strike in Oaxaca, between June and December 2006 20 people were killed, 25 people were disappeared, 349 people were detained and 370 people were wounded. The report notes that “the sections of the Federal Preventative Police (PFP) that intervened to restore public order have used repetitive and excessive violence.”

The International Civilian Commission for Human Rights Observation describes the state repression of the uprising as “a juridical, police, and military strategy… whose final objective is to intimidate and gain control over the civilian population.”

Stripped of its context, the “protest and violence” referred to in Continuum’s promotional material is rendered innocuous, and the company unabashedly capitalizes on it: “While other companies have shied away from exploration due to the violence in Oaxaca, Continuum has been able to acquire highly prospective properties with very large land areas due to a lack of interest there.”

Continuum has made good off of “protest and violence,” doing deals with Oaxaca’s corporatist governments, and joining a host of other mining companies, like Vancouver’s Eurasian Minerals in Haiti and others in Colombia, aiming to make a profit in parts of the Americas where repression and violence are often directed against popular movements.

Oaxaca, 2008

In the city of Oaxaca today, there is little more than graffiti as physical evidence of the 2006 rebellion. The full-scale repression intended to decimate the popular movements seems to have worked, at least temporarily.

On my first evening in Ixlán, I went to a gathering place behind the church to watch a fireworks display in honor of the city’s patron saint. Less than a block away was a military jeep with six heavily armed soldiers, monitoring the crowd.

A man approached me, and noticed I was looking at what seemed like too many soldiers for a small town festival. “They’re not here to protect us,” he said quietly, “they’re scared of us. We supported the resistance in Oaxaca City, they know we’re strong.”

For his work advocating for the rights of the 70,000 Zapotec people in the Sierra Juarez, as well as his stand in solidarity with the popular uprising in Oaxaca in 2006, Aldo Rojas from UNOSJO has received email death threats from unidentified individuals, and has reportedly appeared on military black lists, accused of being a guerilla.

Rojas continues his work for justice in the area, as do the citizens of Capulálpam, regardless of intimidation from a government that has proven it is willing to kill, torture and imprison its citizens in the name of control.

It is in this climate of “protest and violence” that Continuum Resources is determined to carry its project forward, and the likelihood is that the mainstream media and the Canadian Government rallies behind them in promoting the extractive industry’s “development” model in Southern/Indigenous territory.

“The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction.” Five Western military leaders.

23/01/08 “ICH” — — I read the statement three times trying to figure out the typo. Then it hit me, the West has now out-Orwelled Orwell: The West must nuke other countries in order to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction! In Westernspeak, the West nuking other countries does not qualify as the use of weapons of mass destruction.

The astounding statement comes from a paper prepared for a Nato summit in April by five top military leaders–an American, a German, a Dutchman, a Frenchman, and a Brit. It can be found here.

The paper, prepared by men regarded as distinguished leaders and not as escapees from insane asylums, argues that “the West’s values and way of life are under threat, but the West is struggling to summon the will to defend them.” The leaders find that the UN is in the way of the West’s will, as is the European Union which is obstructing NATO and “NATO’s credibility is at stake in Afghanistan.”

And that’s a serious matter. If NATO loses its credibility in Afghanistan, Western civilization will collapse just like the Soviet Union. The West just doesn’t realize how weak it is. To strengthen itself, it needs to drop more and larger bombs.

The German military leader blames the Merkel government for contributing to the West’s inability to defend its values by standing in the way of a revival of German militarism. How can Germany be “a reliable partner” for America, he asks, if the German government insists on “special rules” limiting the combat use of its forces in Afghanistan?

Ron Asmus, head of the German Marshall Fund and a former US State Department official, welcomed the paper as “a wake-up call.” Asmus means a call to wake-up to the threats from the brutal world, not to the lunacy of Western leaders.

Who, what is threatening the West’s values and way of life? Political fanaticism, religious fundamentalism, and the imminent spread of nuclear weapons, answer the five asylum escapees.

By political fanaticism, do they mean the neoconservatives who believe that the future of humanity depends on the US establishing its hegemony over the world? By religious fundamentalism, do they mean “rapture evangelicals” agitating for armageddon or Christian and Israeli Zionists demanding a nuclear attack on Iran? By spread of nuclear weapons, do they mean Israel’s undeclared and illegal possession of several hundred nuclear weapons?

No. The paranoid military leaders see all the fanaticism, religious and otherwise, and all the threats to humanity as residing outside Western civilization (Israel is inside). The “increasingly brutal world,” of which the leaders warn, is “over there.” Only Muslims are fanatics. All us white guys are rational and sane.

There is nothing brutal about the US/Nato bombing of Serbia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, or the Israeli bombing of Lebanon, or the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, or the genocide Israel hopes to commit against Palestinians in Gaza.

All of this, as well as America’s bombing of Somalia, America’s torture dungeons, show trials of “detainees,” and overthrow of elected governments and installation of puppet rulers, is the West’s necessary response to keep the brutal world at bay.

Brutal things happen in the “brutal world” and are entirely the fault of those in the brutal world. None of this would happen if the inhabitants of the brutal world would just do as they are told. How can the civilized world with its monopoly on morality allow people in the brutal world to behave independently? I mean, really! God forbid, they might attack some innocent country.

The “brutal world” consists of those immoral fanatics who object to being marginalized by the West and who reply to mass bombings from the air and to the death and destruction inflicted on them through myriad ways by strapping on a suicide bomb.

Unable to impose its will on countries it has invaded with conventional arms, the West’s military leaders are now prepared to force compliance with the moral world’s will by threatening to nuke those who resist. You see, since the West has the monopoly on morality, truth, and justice, those in the outside world are obviously evil, wicked and brutal. Therefore, as President Bush tells us, it is a simple choice between good and evil, and there’s no better candidate than evil for being nuked. The sooner we can get rid of the brutal world, the sooner we will have “freedom and democracy” everywhere that’s left.

Meanwhile, the United States, the great moral light unto the world, has just prevented the United Nations from censuring Israel, the world’s other great moral light, for cutting off food supplies, medical supplies, and electric power to Gaza. You see, Gaza is in the outside world and is a home of the bad guys. Moreover, the wicked Palestinians there tricked the US when the US allowed them to hold a free election. Instead of electing the US candidate, the wicked voters elected a government that would represent them. The US and Israel overturned the Palestinian election in the West Bank, but those in Gaza clung to the government that they had elected. Now they are going to suffer and die until they elect the government that the US and Israel wants. I mean, how can we expect people in the brutal world to know what’s best for them?

The fact that the UN tried to stop Israel’s just punishment of the Gazans shows how right the five leaders’ report is about the UN being a threat to Western values and way of life. The UN is really against us. This puts the UN in the outside world and makes it a candidate for being nuked if not an outright terrorist organization. As our president said, “you are with us or against us.”

The US and Israel need a puppet government in Palestine so that a ghettoized remnant of Palestine can be turned into a “two state solution.” The two states will be Israel incorporating the stolen West Bank and a Palestinian ghetto without an economy, water, or contiguous borders.

This is necessary in order to protect Israel from the brutal outside world.

Inhabitants of the brutal world are confused about the “self-determination” advocated by Western leaders. It doesn’t mean that those outside Western civilization and Israel should decide for themselves. “Self” means American. The term, so familiar to us, means “American-determination.” The US determines and others obey.

It is the brutal world that causes all the trouble by not obeying.

The national sales tax would apply to all transactions, including groceries, rent, new homes, medical care and gasoline. A new bureaucracy would be formed to administer it, with the authority to audit any person or business. They would give a rebate at the end of the year to those below the poverty line. The poverty line is way below the actual level of poverty. How many purchases would people have to forego because they could not afford them? What would that do to our economy?

Most people don’t know about this because the candidates refer to the national sales tax as a “consumption” tax or as the “Fair” Tax. People don’t know what this means, and the pundits don’t ask them about it.

21/01/08 ” Haaretz.” — – -The United Nations Security Council will not approve a resolution condemning Israel over the closure of the Gaza Strip, due to pressure applied by the United States.

The council will instead issue a Presidential Statement on the matter when it meets to discuss the situation in Gaza.

According to a draft of the statement obtained by Haaretz, the Security Council will express “its deep concern about the deterioration of the situation in the occupied Palestinian territory.”

“The Security Council also expresses concern in particular about the steep deterioration of the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, due to the continued closure of all of the Gaza Strip border crossings and the recent decision by the Israeli government to reduce fuel supplies, to cut off electric power, and to prevent the delivery of food and medical supplies to the Gaza Strip,” the draft says.

“The Security Council calls upon Israel to abide by its obligations under international law including humanitarian and human rights law and immediately cease all its illegal measures and practices against the Palestinian civilian population in the Gaza Strip,” continued the draft statement.

Israel was deeply concerned by Arab states’ effort to win UN Security Council condemnation of the sanctions imposed by Jerusalem on the Gaza Strip, in response to the massive Qassam rocket fire southern Israeli communities have sustained in the past week.

Foreign Ministry Director-General Aaron Abramovich had instructed Israel’s delegation at the UN headquarters in New York to oppose any Security Council on Gaza, while “emphasizing the damage and suffering caused by the incessant firing of Qassam rockets.”

“A situation in which the Security Council debates the plight of the residents of Gaza, while completely ignoring the situation of Israelis living under the constant threat of Qassam rockets, is totally unacceptable,” Abramovich said.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday she had spoken to the Israeli officials and urged them to avert a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

“Nobody wants innocent Gazans to suffer and so we have spoken to the Israelis about the importance of not allowing a humanitarian crisis to unfold there,” Rice told reporters traveling with her to Berlin for a meeting on Iran.

Rice said ultimately Hamas was to blame for the situation in Gaza. She said the Israelis were dealing with an “intolerable” situation, with the firing of rockets and the anxiety and terror that came with that.

She said there needed to be creative solutions to the problem and referred to the Quartet’s suggestion to allow the Palestinian Authority to play a greater role at the crossings.

Ahmadinejad calls Mubarak for first time over Gaza situation

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad telephoned his Egyptian counterpart for the first time and discussed the situation in the Gaza strip in the latest sign of warming ties between the two long time Middle East rivals, the official Iranian News Agency reported Tuesday.

Ahmadinejad and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak discussed the crisis in Gaza and called for the lifting of the siege on Gaza and the dispatch of fuel and medicine to the Palestinians, the Egyptian state news agency confirmed.

This was the first time Iranian president had ever spoken by phone to his Egyptian counterpart and the call comes as Iran has been pushing for improving ties between the two countries which were severed in 1979.

Tehran cut diplomatic ties after Cairo signed a peace agreement with Israel and provided asylum for the deposed Iranian Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Egypt has always maintained that normal ties with Iran would come only after Iran stopped meddling in internal affairs of Arab countries.

Iran’s support for Iraqi Shiites, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestinian radical Hamas group has further deteriorated relations, resulting in very limited diplomatic contacts between the two countries.

Early this month, however, top level Iranian envoy Ali Larijani came to Cairo and met with Egyptian officials. His trip followed an exchange of visits by the countries’ deputy foreign ministers in September and October.

Ahmadinejad has repeatedly offered to restore ties, something Egypt says it is considering, while noting that full diplomatic relations could only be restored if Iran takes down a large mural of former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s assassin, Khaled el-Islambouli, and change the name of a street honoring him.

The U.S. has repeatedly warned Arab countries of Iran’s designs on the region.

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, according to a radical manifesto for a new Nato by five of the west’s most senior military officers and strategists.

Calling for root-and-branch reform of Nato and a new pact drawing the US, Nato and the European Union together in a “grand strategy” to tackle the challenges of an increasingly brutal world, the former armed forces chiefs from the US, Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands insist that a “first strike” nuclear option remains an “indispensable instrument” since there is “simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world”.

The manifesto has been written following discussions with active commanders and policymakers, many of whom are unable or unwilling to publicly air their views. It has been presented to the Pentagon in Washington and to Nato’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, over the past 10 days. The proposals are likely to be discussed at a Nato summit in Bucharest in April.

“The risk of further [nuclear] proliferation is imminent and, with it, the danger that nuclear war fighting, albeit limited in scope, might become possible,” the authors argued in the 150-page blueprint for urgent reform of western military strategy and structures. “The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction.”

The authors – General John Shalikashvili, the former chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff and Nato’s ex-supreme commander in Europe, General Klaus Naumann, Germany’s former top soldier and ex-chairman of Nato’s military committee, General Henk van den Breemen, a former Dutch chief of staff, Admiral Jacques Lanxade, a former French chief of staff, and Lord Inge, field marshal and ex-chief of the general staff and the defence staff in the UK – paint an alarming picture of the threats and challenges confronting the west in the post-9/11 world and deliver a withering verdict on the ability to cope.

The five commanders argue that the west’s values and way of life are under threat, but the west is struggling to summon the will to defend them. The key threats are:

· Political fanaticism and religious fundamentalism.

· The “dark side” of globalisation, meaning international terrorism, organised crime and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

· Climate change and energy security, entailing a contest for resources and potential “environmental” migration on a mass scale.

· The weakening of the nation state as well as of organisations such as the UN, Nato and the EU.

To prevail, the generals call for an overhaul of Nato decision-taking methods, a new “directorate” of US, European and Nato leaders to respond rapidly to crises, and an end to EU “obstruction” of and rivalry with Nato. Among the most radical changes demanded are:

· A shift from consensus decision-taking in Nato bodies to majority voting, meaning faster action through an end to national vetoes.

· The abolition of national caveats in Nato operations of the kind that plague the Afghan campaign.

· No role in decision-taking on Nato operations for alliance members who are not taking part in the operations.

· The use of force without UN security council authorisation when “immediate action is needed to protect large numbers of human beings”.

In the wake of the latest row over military performance in Afghanistan, touched off when the US defence secretary, Robert Gates, said some allies could not conduct counter-insurgency, the five senior figures at the heart of the western military establishment also declare that Nato’s future is on the line in Helmand province.

“Nato’s credibility is at stake in Afghanistan,” said Van den Breemen.

“Nato is at a juncture and runs the risk of failure,” according to the blueprint.

Naumann delivered a blistering attack on his own country’s performance in Afghanistan. “The time has come for Germany to decide if it wants to be a reliable partner.” By insisting on “special rules” for its forces in Afghanistan, the Merkel government in Berlin was contributing to “the dissolution of Nato”.

Ron Asmus, head of the German Marshall Fund thinktank in Brussels and a former senior US state department official, described the manifesto as “a wake-up call”. “This report means that the core of the Nato establishment is saying we’re in trouble, that the west is adrift and not facing up to the challenges.”

Naumann conceded that the plan’s retention of the nuclear first strike option was “controversial” even among the five authors. Inge argued that “to tie our hands on first use or no first use removes a huge plank of deterrence”.

Reserving the right to initiate nuclear attack was a central element of the west’s cold war strategy in defeating the Soviet Union. Critics argue that what was a productive instrument to face down a nuclear superpower is no longer appropriate.

Robert Cooper, an influential shaper of European foreign and security policy in Brussels, said he was “puzzled”.

“Maybe we are going to use nuclear weapons before anyone else, but I’d be wary of saying it out loud.”

Another senior EU official said Nato needed to “rethink its nuclear posture because the nuclear non-proliferation regime is under enormous pressure”.

Naumann suggested the threat of nuclear attack was a counsel of desperation. “Proliferation is spreading and we have not too many options to stop it. We don’t know how to deal with this.”

Nato needed to show “there is a big stick that we might have to use if there is no other option”, he said.

The Authors:

John Shalikashvili

The US’s top soldier under Bill Clinton and former Nato commander in Europe, Shalikashvili was born in Warsaw of Georgian parents and emigrated to the US at the height of Stalinism in 1952. He became the first immigrant to the US to rise to become a four-star general. He commanded Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq at the end of the first Gulf war, then became Saceur, Nato’s supreme allied commander in Europe, before Clinton appointed him chairman of the joint chiefs in 1993, a position he held until his retirement in 1997.

Klaus Naumann

Viewed as one of Germany’s and Nato’s top military strategists in the 90s, Naumann served as his country’s armed forces commander from 1991 to 1996 when he became chairman of Nato’s military committee. On his watch, Germany overcame its post-WWII taboo about combat operations, with the Luftwaffe taking to the skies for the first time since 1945 in the Nato air campaign against Serbia.

Lord Inge

Field Marshal Peter Inge is one of Britain’s top officers, serving as chief of the general staff in 1992-94, then chief of the defence staff in 1994-97. He also served on the Butler inquiry into Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and British intelligence.

Henk van den Breemen

An accomplished organist who has played at Westminster Abbey, Van den Breemen is the former Dutch chief of staff.

Jacques Lanxade