The Rag Blog

When the Tonkin Gulf incident took place in early August 1964, I was a journeyman CIA analyst in what Condoleezza Rice refers to as “the bowels of the agency.” As current intelligence referent for Russian policy toward Southeast Asia and China, I worked very closely with those responsible for analysis of Vietnam and China.

Out of that experience I must say that, as much as one might be tempted to laugh at the bizarre antics of Sunday’s incident involving small Iranian boats and US naval ships in the Strait of Hormuz, this is – as my old Russian professor used to say – nothing to laugh.

The situation is so reminiscent of what happened-and didn’t happen-from Aug 2-4, 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin and in Washington, it is in no way funny. At the time, the US had about 16,000 troops in South Vietnam. The war that was “justified” by the Tonkin Gulf resolution of Aug. 7, 1964 led to a buildup to 535,000 US troops in the late Sixties, 58,000 of whom were killed-not to mention the estimated two million Vietnamese who lost their lives by then and in the ensuing ten years.

Ten years. How can our president speak so glibly about ten more years of a U.S. armed presence in Iraq? Wonder why he doesn’t know anything about Vietnam.

Intelligence Lessons From Vietnam and Iraq

What follows is written primarily for honest intelligence analysts and managers still on “active duty.” The issuance of the recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran was particularly welcome to those of us who had been hoping there were enough of you left who had not been thoroughly corrupted by former CIA Director George Tenet and his flock of malleable managers.

We are not so much surprised at the integrity of Tom Fingar, who is in charge of national intelligence analysis. He showed his mettle in manfully resisting forgeries and fairy tales about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction.” What is, frankly, a happy surprise is the fact that he and other non-ideologues and non-careerist professionals have been able to prevail and speak truth to power on such dicey issues as Iran-nuclear, the upsurge in terrorism caused by the US invasion of Iraq, and the year-old NIE saying Iraq is headed for hell in a hand basket (with no hint that a “surge” could make a difference).

But those are the NIEs. They share the status of “supreme genre” of analytic product with the President’s Daily Brief and other vehicles for current intelligence, the field in which I labored, first in the analytic trenches and then as a briefer at the White House, for most of my 27-year career. True, the NIE “Iraq’s Continuing Program for Weapons of Mass Destruction” of Oct. 1, 2002 (wrong on every major count) greased the skids for the attack on Iraq on March 19, 2003. But it is more often current intelligence that is fixed upon to get the country into war.

The Tonkin Gulf events are perhaps the best case in point. We retired professionals are hopeful that Fingar can ensure integrity in the current intelligence process as well as in intelligence estimates.

Salivating for Wider War: Tonkin Gulf

Given the confusion last Sunday in the Persian Gulf, you need to remember that a “known known” in the form of a non-event has already been used to sell a major war-Vietnam. It is not only in retrospect that we know that no attack occurred that night.

Those of us in intelligence, not to mention President Lyndon Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy all knew full well that the evidence of any armed attack on the evening of Aug. 4, 1964, the so-called “second” Tonkin Gulf incident, was highly dubious. But it fit the president’s purposes, so they lent a hand to facilitate escalation of the war.

During the summer of 1964 President Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were eager to widen the war in Vietnam. They stepped up sabotage and hit-and-run attacks on the coast of North Vietnam. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara later admitted that he and other senior leaders had concluded that the seaborne attacks “amounted to little more than pinpricks” and “were essentially worthless,” but they continued.

Concurrently, the National Security Agency was ordered to collect signals intelligence from the North Vietnamese coast on the Gulf of Tonkin, and the surprise coastal attacks were seen as a helpful way to get the North Vietnamese to turn on their coastal radars. The destroyer USS Maddox, carrying electronic spying gear, was authorized to approach as close as eight miles from the coast and four miles from offshore islands, some of which had been subjected to intense shelling by clandestine attack boats.

As James Bamford describes it in “Body of Secrets:”

“The twin missions of the Maddox were in a sense symbiotic. The vessel’s primary purpose was to act as a seagoing provocateur-to poke its sharp gray bow and the American flag as close to the belly of North Vietnam as possible, in effect shoving its 5-inch cannons up the nose of the Communist navy. In turn, this provocation would give the shore batteries an excuse to turn on as many coastal defense radars, fire control systems, and communications channels as possible, which could then be captured by the men…at the radar screens. The more provocation, the more signals…

“The Maddox’ mission was made even more provocative by being timed to coincide with commando raids, creating the impression that the Maddox was directing those missions and possibly even lobbing firepower in their support….

“North Vietnam also claimed at least a twelve-mile limit and viewed the Maddox as a trespassing ship deep within its territorial waters.” (pp 295-296)

On Aug. 2, 1964 an intercepted message ordered North Vietnamese torpedo boats to attack the Maddox. The destroyer was alerted and raced out to sea beyond reach of the torpedoes, three of which were fired in vain at the destroyer’s stern. The Maddox’ captain suggested that the rest of his mission be called off, but the Pentagon refused. And still more commando raids were launched on Aug. 3, shelling for the first time targets on the mainland, not just the offshore islands.

Early on Aug. 4, the Maddox captain cabled his superiors that the North Vietnamese believed his patrol was directly involved with the commando raids and shelling. That evening at 7:15 (Vietnam time) the Pentagon alerted the Maddox to intercepted messages indicating that another attack by patrol boats was imminent.

What followed was panic and confusion. There was a score of reports of torpedo and other hostile attacks, but no damage and growing uncertainty as to whether any attack actually took place. McNamara was told that “freak radar echoes” were misinterpreted by “young fellows” manning the sonar, who were “apt to say any noise is a torpedo.”

This did not prevent McNamara from testifying to Congress two days later that there was “unequivocal proof” of a new attack. And based largely on that, on the following day (Aug. 7) Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf resolution bringing ten more years of war.

Meanwhile, in the Trenches

By the afternoon of Aug. 4 (Washington time), the CIA’s expert analyst on North Vietnam (let’s call him “Tom”) had concluded that probably no one had fired on US ships in the Tonkin Gulf over the past 24 hours. He included a paragraph to that effect in the item he wrote for the Current Intelligence Bulletin, which would be wired to the White House and other key agencies and appear in print the next morning.

And then something unique happened. The Director of the Office of Current Intelligence, a very senior officer whom Tom had never before seen, descended into the bowels of the agency to order the paragraph deleted. He explained:

“We’re not going to tell LBJ that now. He has already decided to bomb North Vietnam. We have to keep our lines open to the White House.”

“Tom” later bemoaned-quite rightly: “What do we need lines open for, if we’re not going to use them, and use them to tell the truth?”

A year or two ago, in the wake of the policy/intelligence fiasco on Iraq, I would have been inclined to comment sarcastically, “How quaint; how obsolete.” But the good news is that the analysts writing the National Intelligence Estimates have now reverted to the ethos in which “Tom” and I were proud to work.

Today’s analysts/reporters of current intelligence need to follow their good example. And we trust that Tom Fingar will hold their feet to the fire. For if they don’t rise to the challenge, the consequences are sure to be disastrous. This should be obvious in the wake of the Tonkin Gulf experience, not to mention the more recent performance of senior officials before the attack on Iraq in 2003.

The late Ray S. Cline, who at the time was the boss of the Director of Current Intelligence, said he was “very sure” that no attack took place on Aug. 4. He suggested that McNamara had shown the president unevaluated signals intelligence which referred to the (real) earlier attack on Aug. 2 rather than the non-event on the 4th. There was no sign of remorse on Cline’s part that he didn’t step in and make sure the president was told the truth.

We in the trenches knew there was no attack; and so did the Director of Current Intelligence as well as Cline, who was Deputy Director for Intelligence. But all knew, as did McNamara, that President Johnson was lusting for a pretext to strike the North and escalate the war. And so, like B’rer Rabbit, they didn’t say nothin’.

Commenting on the interface of intelligence and policy on Vietnam, a well respected, retired senior CIA officer addressed:

“… the dilemma CIA directors and senior intelligence professionals face in cases when they know that unvarnished intelligence judgments will not be welcomed by the President, his policy managers, and his political advisers…[They] must decide whether to tell it like it is (and so risk losing their place at the President’s advisory table), or to go with the flow of existing policy by accentuating the positive (thus preserving their access and potential influence). In these episodes from the Vietnam era, we have seen that senior CIA officers more often than not tended toward the latter approach.” “CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes, 1962-1968″ Harold P. Ford

Bummer. I wish there were more of a sense of anger at that.

Back to Iran. This time, we all know that the president and vice president are seeking an excuse to attack Iran. There is a big difference from the situation in the summer of 1964, when President Johnson had intimidated all his senior subordinates into using deceit to escalate the war. Bamford comments on the disingenuousness of Robert McNamara when he testified in 1968 that it was “inconceivable” that senior officials, including the president, deliberately used the Tonkin Gulf events to generate Congressional support for a wider Vietnam war.

In Bamford’s words, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had become “a sewer of deceit,” with Operation Northwoods and other unconscionable escapades to its credit. Then-Under Secretary of State George Ball commented, “There was a feeling that if the destroyer got into some trouble, that this would provide the provocation we needed.”

Good News: It’s Different Now

As indicated above, we now have more integrity at the top of the intelligence community. But, in my view, the main thing that has prevented Bush and Cheney from attacking Iran so far has been the strong opposition of the uniformed military, including the Joint Chiefs. The circumstances attending the misadventure last Sunday in the Strait of Hormuz are far from clear. But the incident certainly shows that our senior military need all the help they can get from intelligence officers more concerned with the truth than with “keeping lines open to the White House” and doing its bidding.

In addition, today the intelligence oversight committees in Congress seem to be waking from their Rip Van Winkle-like slumber. It was Congress, after all, that ordered the controversial NIE on Iran/nuclear (and was among those pushing strongly that it be publicized). And the flow of substantive intelligence to Congress is much larger than it was in 1964 when, remember, there were no intelligence committees as such.

So listen, you inheritors of the honorable profession of current intelligence, don’t let them grind you down. If you’re working in the bowels of the agency and you find that your leaders are cooking intelligence to a recipe for casus belli, think long and hard about the oath you took to protect the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Should not that oath transcend in importance any secrecy promise you had to agree to as a condition of employment?

By sticking your neck out, you might be able to prevent ten years of unnecessary war.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer, then a current intelligence analyst at CIA, and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

“It’s not who votes that counts. It’s who counts the votes.” Joseph Stalin

11/01/08 “ICH” — — Something doesn’t ring true about Hillary’s “upset” victory in the New Hampshire primary. It just doesn’t pass the smell test. All the exit polls showed Clinton trailing Obama by significant margins. In fact, in the Gallup Poll taken just days before the election, “Crocodile tears” Hillary was down by a whopping 13 points. Her “turnaround” was not only unexpected, but downright shocking. The results for the rest of the candidates–excluding Clinton and Obama—were all within the margin of error. Clinton was the only anomaly. Surprise, surprise.

If this election had been conducted in any other country in the world, the Bush administration would have immediately dispatched an independent team of election observers and demanded a recount. But not in the good old USA, where stealing elections is replacing baseball as the national pastime. Would it surprise you to know that (according to Black Box Voting) the Marketing and Sales Director of the company that tallies the votes (LHS) “was arrested, indicted, and pleaded guilty to “sale / CND” and sentenced to 12 months in the Rockingham County Correctional facility, and fined $2000.” That would be LHS Sales Director Mr. Ken Hajjar. Here’s an excerpt from Bev Harris’s Black Box Voting web site:

“The Diebold ballot printing plant at the time we got records on the overages (that is, more ballots than needed for election; MW) was being run by a convicted felon who had spent four years in prison on a narcotics trafficking charge. No, not New Hampshire’s voting machine programming exec Ken Hajjar, who cut a plea deal in 1990 for his role in cocaine distribution. This was another convicted felon, John Elder, who ran the Diebold ballot printing plant; he’s now an elections consultant.” (Source)

Still feel confident about the election results?

Then why not spend 5 minutes perusing this you-tube demonstration that shows how anyone with a screwdriver and a brain the size of a walnut can transform a ‘humiliating defeat’ into a miraculous Clintonesque “comeback”. YouTube video

The you-tube video also shows LHS’s owner defending the dubious record of his optical scanning hardware in court. The reader can decide for himself whether we’re dealing with a man of impeccable integrity or another flannel-mouth opportunist who has enriched himself at the expense of our basic democratic institutions.

Bradblog’s Dori Smith reports that Sales Director “Hajjar totes memory cards around in the trunk of his car and defends the practice of swapping out memory cards during the middle of elections.” (http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5320) Nice touch, eh?

Smith also adds this revealing tidbit:

“Other LHS staff members we spoke with, including Mike Carlson and Tom Burge, provided similar comments. They said they would open machines up during an election and swap memory cards as needed. This is illegal under Connecticut law and Deputy Secretary Mara told us she has since informed LHS that such actions were in violation of Connecticut election laws.” Source

“So what’s all the fuss? I’ll just slip this little card in the slot and—Lookee here—Hillary’s a winner; just like I figured.”

Activist Nancy Tobi provides a great summary of the back-room machinations in her article “Democracy for New Hampshire” which came out the day after the primary:

“81% of New Hampshire ballots are counted in secret by a private corporation named Diebold Election Systems (now known as “Premier”). The elections run on these machines are programmed by one company, LHS Associates, based in Methuen, MA. We know nothing about the people programming these machines, and we know even less about LHS Associates. We know even less about the secret vote counting software used to tabulate 81% of our ballots. People like to say “but we use paper ballots! They can always be counted by hand!”

But they’re not. They’re counted by Diebold. Only a candidate can request a hand recount, and most never do so. And a rigged election can easily become a rigged recount, as we learned in Ohio 2004, where two election officials were convicted of rigging their recount. (Is it just a funny coincidence that Diebold spokesman is named Mr. Riggall?)

We need to get the count right on election night. Right now, nobody in New Hampshire, except the programmers at LHS Associates and Diebold Election Systems, knows if we are getting it right or wrong.”

Good job, Nancy.

Does it seem to you, dear reader, that we could save the taxpayer a lot of money and trouble by just returning to the “old system” of letting 9 judges on the Supreme Court chose our leaders? Why do we continue with this pointless sham?

Look, our elections are being run by corporations that have an obvious stake in the outcome. There’s a heap of money involved and nothing is left to chance. The media’s job is to make us feel like we have a choice. We don’t.

The only reason the farce continues is because the ruling elite believe that perception management is the cheapest way to control the bewildered herd. And, of course, they’re right. Pulling a lever every 4 years is a type of political empowerment. It makes us feel like we’re part of the decision-making process, which makes it easier to accept the “shittier and shittier paying jobs”, the curtailed civil liberties and the endless wars. (Thanks George Carlin)

This year we can choose from a slate of 8 candidates; all of whom are members of the secretive Council on Foreign Relations; and all of whom are wholly committed to the off-shoring of businesses, the outsourcing of jobs, the expansion of police-state powers, and the obscene enlargement the already over-bloated War Machine. The only exceptions are Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich who are treated like pariahs by the establishment media.

As for Hillary; she won nothing. The results are completely bogus. Her weepy performance before the balloting was orchestrated to create a credible narrative to explain the fraudulent shifting of votes away from Obama. It was exactly the same trick that Karl Rove played in 2004, when he had the entire corporate media standing behind his cockamamie story that 3 or 4 million fundamentalists—who had never voted before in a general election—suddenly poured down from the mountains to cast their ballot for their champion, George Bush. This absurd narrative was spouted from every media-soapbox in the nation until it was generally accepted as fact. The media then proceeded to quash any investigation of the massive voter fraud which took place across the country (particularly in Ohio) while discrediting critics as conspiracy theorists.

“Conspiracy theorists?”

Is it a conspiracy to think that the same guys who abduct foreign nationals off the streets of cities around the world and take them to black sites—where their eyes are gouged out and their finger nails ripped off—would get squeamish over something as trivial as ballot stuffing?

Get real!

Clinton’s tearful antics were right out of Karl Rove’s “Dirty Tricks Playbook”. Chapter one: Invent a believable storyline, run it through the Propaganda Ministry (the media) and stick with it no matter how ridiculous it sounds.

I carry no brief for Obama or Clinton and I don’t see any substantial difference between either of them. They are both water carriers for their far-right constituents. It is the system that’s important. And the system is broken.

11/01/08 “ICH” — — In the many, (too many) gang interviews that are currently called debates by the mainstream media, the question is asked at each gathering, “What will you do on your first day in office?’ The candidates of both parties will harrangue and equivocate, one after another, but not one will reply with the answer that would gladden the heart of a real progressive, Constitution-loving citizen of the United States. Can’t you just imagine the roar of approval if any one of the prospective Presidents would give the following answer?

“On my first day in office, I will sign an Executive Order which will cancel every Executive Order instituted by any former President. I will open the records of every official department to the Freedom of Information Act so that the press and, thereby, the people can learn what has really happened to the liberties which every one of us once took for granted. In addition, I will send a letter to Congress stating that, despite the “exception statements” that may have been signed by any former President, every law that has been passed by them and signed into law will be followed in both letter and intent by this administration. Further, the powers claimed by the Executive Branch will be those outlined in the Constitution; no more and no less.”

Why is it so impossible for anyone to run for the highest office in the land without acknowledging their recognition of the true problems of our democracy and the necessity to restore its once-proud state of affairs? They touch upon the Iraq War and debate how and when to disengage American troops but refuse to touch the question of the lies that put them there. They will turn over and discuss briefly the milliions of illegal aliens but never bring up the Mexican military incursions into our sovereign territory as protection for their drug runners. They lament the state of our economy but not one, of either party, has any plans or even suggestions as to how to deal with it. True, some on the far right will offer that taxation must be ended, the Internal Revenue Service eliminated, and Social Security “drowned in the bathtub”, but none are able to project what would happen next.

As a vastly important “planning meeting” is being conducted in Oklahoma to try to build compromise and pull the political scene back to “the middle” with “compromise and coalition”, all we see from any candidate is precisely “compromise and coalition” as every one of them claims to be in the “middle-of-the-road”. Meanhwile, the few who might speak for the disenchanted, like Dennis Kucinich on one side and Ron Paul on the other, are discredited and ignored by most of the media so that there is really no chance for their views to be considered by the “slobbering masses”. Only one candidate, former Senator John Edwards, even comes close to expressing our hopes and fears.

Born without the proverbial “silver foot in his mouth”. he worked his way through college and has made his fortune by his own legalistic abilities. He knows the worries of working-class families and, though winning no primaries, has made a respectable showing in all, not only this year, but sufficiently in 2004 to become the candidate for vice.President. Hwoever, lacking the glamor and charisma of Obama and Clinton, he is evidently not going to be the “people’s choice”, and that is to our detriment. Our choices have been made by the media.

The progressive movement turned out in force in 2006, defeated many of the hard-core Bushites and installed “liberal” Democrats in their stead. It didn’t help. They were stymied at every turn by their business-as-usual senior colleagues of both parties who really understood “how the game is played”. Congressman Robert Wexler has accumulated over 200,000 signatures on a petition to impeach vice-President Dick Cheney but don’t bet on it ever getting to the floor of Congress or, for that matter, the presence of the good Congressman there after the next election. The people in Congress say that it would do no good for them to begin anything that would not go through the Senate and the Senators will not approve or even propose anything at all unless they have the backing of a veto-proof majority. Both sides are desperately afraid of provoking a filibuster so, if they can’t work out a compromise, they will do nothing. Never mind the hordes of hurting folks out here who are screaming, “You can’t do anything unless you try!”

As the politicking season began, we were faced with choosing between several of these Senators, all of whom are charter members of a “do-nothing” Congress and all scrambling for the “middle of the road”. The two exceptions on the Democratic side are Congressman Kucinich and former Senator John Edwards but, instead, the media spotlight shines only for the glamour and charisma of the inexperienced Senator Obama and the all-too-experienced Senator Clinton who must have callouses on her behind from “straddling the fence”.

Must we wait until the nation is in another Great Depression before the huddled masses realize what their negligence and nonchalance has cost before we can anticipate a “savior” arising who can put our democracy back together on the pattern set out by our Founding Fathers and we can again walk in the sunshine of freedom and equality? I shall not be here to see it but I have the utmost confidence that the blood of our forebears will arise, even if belatedly, but I believe that it can and will be done once the people awake and arise. Otherwise, we will all go down in history alongside ancient Greece and the mighty Roman Empire as an example of the folly of caring only too late to preserve our own honor.

I was a kid in 1968. It was the year I turned 13 and it was the year my dad began to prepare to go to Vietnam. The Tet offensive was on the television in January. The picture of the South Vietnamese police chief killing a suspected NLF fighter shook up our dinner table the night it was in the news. After that, my father didn’t watch television news when his younger kids were around. I won grand prize in the science fair at my junior high for an investigation into whether or not my pet guppies talked. Then I won first place in my division at the statewide fair held the last weekend in March of that year at the University of Maryland’s Cole Field House.

My dad picked me up after the fair closed down. After we had packed the exhibit in the trunk of his station wagon, we got in the front seat. On the way from College Park, MD to our house in Laurel, MD-about ten miles away-we listened to the speech by President Johnson where he told the nation that he would not “seek or accept the nomination” for his party’s candidacy for the presidency. After a brief discussion with my dad about what this meant and why it happened, we turned to a conversation about the differences between FM and AM radio. Then he told me that he had been given orders to go to Vietnam. I didn’t say anything while he told me when he thought he would be leaving and what it meant for the family. He never mentioned whether he thought what he would be doing there was right or wrong. When we got home, I talked with my parents for a few minutes and went to bed.

The next day in Social Studies class the teacher talked about how remarkable it was that Lyndon Johnson had decided not to run for reelection. From there, he segued into a conversation about the elections. After a quick show of hands regarding who we supported, he asked me why I supported Gene McCarthy. I told him it was because he wanted to end the war in Vietnam. In fact, McCarthy was calling for a negotiated settlement with the northern Vietnamese and the NLF while everyone else (except for maybe Bobby Kennedy) was still talking about some kind of victory. There was only one other person in the class who supported McCarthy. Two or three others supported Bobby Kennedy, who had entered the race only days before. Most supported either Humphrey (who was LBJ’s replacement) or Nixon. On the playground at lunch that day, one of the Nixon supporters called me a faggot because I supported McCarthy.

Three days later, April 4, 1968, I was watching TV with my older sister when the graphic before a breaking news bulletin flashed across the screen. I walked over to the TV and turned up the volume. (There were no remotes back then.) A talking head came on the screen and announced that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot in Memphis. My sister and I looked at each other. We knew this was something big. I sat down to watch the incoming news while my sister put our younger siblings to bed. I knew that King had been in Memphis supporting a strike of sanitation workers and that there had been trouble at one of the marches. When our parents got home, I told my father what had happened. He sat down for a few minutes and watched as news reports filtered in about angry blacks gathering in different parts of Washington, DC. That night, I listened to WTOP–the all news station in DC– relay reports on the growing insurrection in that city and around the nation. When I got up to deliver my newspaper route the next morning, the front page was covered with banner headlines and full color pictures of the assassination and the angry response.

The following week, our family attended a cookout at a neighbor’s house down the block in our lily-white middle class suburban development. Most of Maryland was under curfew, gun sales were forbidden and liquor sales had been stopped in DC, Baltimore and several counties. While I ate beans, salad and burgers from the paper plate I had loaded up, some of the adults conversed about the murder and the insurrection. The remarks I heard from some of the neighbors changed my impression of them forever. I had never heard such racist remarks before except from some of the working class toughs who wore their hair greased back like early Elvis and smoked cigarettes while hanging out in front of the Peoples Drug Store at the local shopping center. If I learned one thing that night, it was that the ignorance of racism knew no class boundaries. The names they called Martin Luther King and the suggestions they had for the local police to “keep order” in the black section of town were reminiscent of the Klan literature one of my newspaper customers gave me almost every time I collected his month’s payment from him. Literature that I threw away after reading it the first time and being repulsed by the hatred therein.

After the King assassination I began to read the newspaper much more carefully. Not just the sports section like before, but all of the news sections as well. Prior to that, I had skimmed the front page and the local section, but had never really read anything too carefully. As the presidential campaign heated up, I switched my allegiance to Bobby Kennedy. His ability to gather huge crowds no matter where he showed up-West Virginia one day and Washington, DC the next-was impressive. He had somehow figured out how to speak to people on a different level than all of the other candidates and he said he was against the war. Meanwhile, I had discovered another newspaper that told a completely different story. That paper was Washington DC’s first underground paper, The Washington Free Press. A friend’s older brother who went to the University of Maryland used to give me his old copies when he was done with them. Somewhere not very far from the boring suburban redneck town that I lived in there was something going on that was both new and connected to the revolution I was certain had to be happening somewhere. It had to be happening because the Beatles were singing about it, the Rolling Stones seemed to have joined it, and the Free Press reported it. I didn’t understand why they didn’t like Kennedy or thought the elections were bullshit but I wanted to find out why.

When Bobby Kennedy was killed I was watching TV with my sister once again. I remember feeling angry, sad and bitter all at the same time. After he was killed I gave up on the elections for a while. No more passing out campaign literature at the shopping center or door to door. There was nothing left to do but wait until the convention and hope some kind of miracle happened that would stop the war. A war my dad was heading off to in a few short months. In late July we took a family vacation at a beach near Norfolk, VA. My father was getting ready to go to some kind of school there that was required before he went away to Vietnam. The name of that school? Air War College. You don’t have to guess what the general course of studies was. After a week, my older sister and I returned to Laurel. I delivered my newspapers, mowed lawns for the neighbors and hung out with my friends listening to music, reading, and watching TV. It was one of those nights of TV watching when another news bulletin flashed across the screen. Soviet troops had invaded Czechoslovakia. This was a year for news bulletins. I followed this event with interest because I was secretly hoping that the Czechs truly could find some kind of humane alternative to both Stalinism and monopoly capitalism, even if that terminology was unknown to me at the time.

Not long after that night, I began watching the coverage of the Democratic Convention in Chicago. I recall a sign shown on television that said “Welcome to Czechago.” Those few nights of watching cops beat the shit out of people and politicians showing their true colors-be they fascist in nature or on the side of the protesters-did more to educate and radicalize me than pretty much anything I had ever read or would ever read in my life. The angry repartee between William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal on one of the networks gelled in my mind along with pictures of tear gas, bloodied reporters, people chanting “The whole world’s watching,” and my mom crying because her country was falling to pieces. When my dad came home for a weekend, he tried to convince me that the protesters were wrong and that voting was the way to solve the country’s problems. I was not convinced.

By this time, Detroit Tigers pitcher Denny McLain was getting closer and closer to a mark not reached by a major league pitcher in many seasons. He was approaching thirty wins. Although I had given my heart to the Red Sox the year before, I tried to watch or listen to every game McLain pitched. If it wasn’t on TV and I couldn’t get the game over my AM radio via the nighttime skip phenomenon that somehow brought the games to my transistor, then I reconstructed the box scores the next morning before I delivered my papers. When the World Series came around, I was pulling for Bob Gibson and the St. Louis Cardinals. I loved to watch Gibson pitch even though he had beat the Red Sox the year before.

Meanwhile, in school we were composing a scrapbook for the elections. Each of us had to choose either Nixon or Humphrey for our scrapbook and fill it with materials related to the campaign. I chose Humphrey, even though he was for the war, he wasn’t Nixon. When it came time to turn in the scrapbook, I covered the front of the binder with “Dick Gregory for President” stickers. My teacher was not happy. She yelled at me and asked how I could support someone who opposed the war when my dad was on his way over there. I snidely suggested that the answer was obvious and ended up being sent to the counselor. He yelled at me and told me to get my head out of my ass. I left there thinking that he should do the same.

On election day we watched the final returns come in over the television in our social studies class. There weren’t any exit poll projections back then. The news people actually let the election run its course. When Walter Cronkite said that Nixon had won I had a feeling that the world as I knew it was over. In fact, it was only getting worse. The difference was now I was aware of it. I didn’t hit the streets in protest for another year but I was already there in my heart and soul.

“At the edge of the Rubicon, men don’t go fishing.” “Richard Nixon” in the 1987 Opera, “Nixon in China”

“I can predict that the historians will say that George W. Bush recognized the threats of the 21st century, clearly defined them, and had great faith in the capacity of liberty to transform hopelessness to hope, and laid the foundation for peace by making some awfully difficult decisions.” George W. Bush, January 4th, 2008 Interview for Israel’s Channel 2

Those familiar with the Tarot know that the figure depicted on the first card in the deck is the Magician. The Magician is a very powerful figure, for seemingly he creates realities where before there was nothing. A clear indication of this creative power is the presence on the card of the mathematical sign for infinity — — representing the possessor of all knowledge (magi), all space, all time going forward.

But those who would ask the Magician to “perform” need be wary of what the response is. In some cultures, the magician is a trickster whose real objective is to deceive–sometime with devastating consequences for the interlocutor. And when that interlocutor is the President of the United States, the consequences of deception can be earth-shattering.

Think back to June 16th, 2001, when George Bush and Vladimir Putin met for the first time in Slovenia. In answer to a reporter’s question about whether the U.S. could trust Russia (and by implication, Putin), Bush replied: “I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul. I appreciated so very much the frank dialogue that’s the beginning of a very constructive relationship.” At this time, before Russia regained economic strength from rising oil prices, before September 11th, 2001, before Iraq, Bush saw himself as the man who would make things happen. After all, as the new millennium opened, the United States was indisputably the most powerful nation in the history of the world.

In short, even then Bush saw himself as the Magician, as the “decider.” In reality, those who see themselves in that role are sure to be deceived, for they are focused on that which is intended to distract attention from what is really happening. The power of any good Magician, after all, is to be able to conjure an illusion that holds the attention of his audience long enough to reveal the reality that has always existed but was hidden.

Fast forward to late 2007-early 2008. With one year left in his presidency, George Bush has no significant positive foreign policy achievements. At the beginning of 2007, he sent 40,000 additional U.S. troops into Iraq to stave off increased sectarian and ethnic depredations. In January 2008, he is sending 3,200 more troops into Afghanistan to try to stabilize conditions there. The attempt to push forward the “roadmap” for Mid-East peace–starting with the November 22nd Annapolis summit, had bogged down and, unless re-invigorated, would likely stall as had all previous efforts.

We may never know who the “Magician” behind the curtain was who kept the props in place while the actors played their parts on history’s center stage. But assume he or she finally succeeded in pushing forward one other long-standing issue whose resolution in 2008 would guarantee George Bush’s coveted positive mark on world history. It would, if successful, rival the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China in 1972 in its impact.

But like Nixon-Kissinger in 1972, powerful centers in the U.S. would oppose the opening–and the same could be expected in the country to which the opening would be made. The whole project would have to be concealed; the attention of the media, the American public, and most of those in the U.S. administration, had to be diverted. The presidential campaigns in the U.S. would help, but the background rhetoric would have to be steady and highly critical.

What the Magician intended–and Bush finally agreed to do–was to go to Tehran to end 30 years of estrangement with Iran.

The grand distraction would be a trip ostensibly to reenergize the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. But while everyone was focused on that process, the “exploratory” talks about talks in Baghdad between the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker and his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Kasemi Qumi, really would be working out details of the visit to Iran.

Among all the warnings of the dangers a nuclear Iran represented to the other Gulf states, despite the charges that Iran was supplying Iraqi insurgents with weapons used to kill U.S. troops in Iraq, the hidden exchanges never faltered–unlike in 2003 when the U.S. abruptly cut contact with Tehran.

It was in his December 4th, 2007 press conference, after release of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear weapons programs, that Bush signaled he was prepared to make the leap: “On the one hand, we should exert pressure, and on the other hand, we should provide the Iranians a way forward. And our hope is that the Iranians will get diplomacy back on track.”

Thirty days passed. Just as Nixon had worried that something would derail his opening to China, Bush could see his legacy disappearing. Then on January 3rd, 2008, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, speaking to a small group of Iranian students, signaled back: “I would be the first one to support these relations. Of course we never said the severed relations were forever. But for the time being, it (restoring ties) (would) provide an opportunity for security agents to come and go, as well as for espionage.”

But was this reply a yes or a no? Were the Iranians about to pull the rug from under the secret negotiations for the visit? Three days passed. Suddenly the whole project seemed lost because of what appeared to be a serious incident-at-sea between three U.S. warships and five Iranian fast patrol boats. Someone in a senior position in Tehran, opposed to any rapprochement and having control of military sea craft, must have suspected something was about to happen.

And although the U.S. press played up the encounter’s hazards–and began to probe deeper into other incidents that might lead them toward the Magician and his illusion of countries-at-odds–the official Iranian version (after denying that the encounter ever occurred) stressed that the meeting was a routine exchange of ship identities, course and intent and that no hostile actions took place.

Nonetheless, some in the U.S. press immediately equated this modern-day encounter to the August 1964 “Gulf of Tonkin” incident which led to a major escalation of U.S. troop units in South Vietnam. Interestingly, word of the encounter leaked first from the White House, but reporters had to go to the Pentagon for the details–most of which were still murky.

Departure day for the Mid-East trip arrived. As Air Force One became airborne, Bush found himself in a quandary similar to Richard Nixon in 1972: then, when the American president landed in Beijing, he still had no assurance he would be able to meet directly with Chairman Mao.

He did, and changed U.S. relations in Asia and the globe. Then the issues were 55,000 dead in South Vietnam, a looming recession, the price of oil soon to (for then) skyrocket, and the abandonment of the gold standard.

Today the issues for Bush are 4,400 U.S. dead in Afghanistan and Iraq, a looming recession, the price of oil on the verge of skyrocketing, the precipitous decline of the dollar against other currencies, the troubled housing market, global warming, and U.S. Iranian relations. Of these, only on the latter is Bush still “the decider”–or rather co-decider.

* If he didn’t go to Tehran, obviously nothing in U.S.-Iranian relations would change, and Bush would miss the last opportunity for a legacy.

* If he went but Khamenei refused to see him, his “grand opening” would be incomplete and thus his historical stature would be forever diminished.

* But should he go, and should he and Khamenei meet, even though nothing substantive occurred, the illusion would dominate.

Is there still a Magician in the house?

The following speech was given by Russell Means in July 1980, before several thousand people who had assembled from all over the world for the Black Hills International Survival Gathering, in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It is Russell Means’ most famous speech.

11/01/08 “ICH” — — The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of “legitimate” thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world’s ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.

So what you read here is not what I’ve written. It’s what I’ve said and someone else has written down. I will allow this because it seems that the only way to communicate with the white world is through the dead, dry leaves of a book. I don’t really care whether my words reach whites or not. They have already demonstrated through their history that they cannot hear, cannot see; they can only read (of course, there are exceptions, but the exceptions only prove the rule). I’m more concerned with American Indian people, students and others, who have begun to be absorbed into the white world through universities and other institutions. But even then it’s a marginal sort of concern. It’s very possible to grow into a red face with a white mind; and if that’s a person’s individual choice, so be it, but I have no use for them. This is part of the process of cultural genocide being waged by Europeans against American Indian peoples’ today. My concern is with those American Indians who choose to resist this genocide, but who may be confused as to how to proceed.

(You notice I use the term American Indian rather than Native American or Native indigenous people or Amerindian when referring to my people. There has been some controversy about such terms, and frankly, at this point. I find it absurd. Primarily it seems that American Indian is being rejected as European in origin-which is true. But all the above terms are European in origin; the only non-European way is to speak of Lakota-or, more precisely, of Oglala, Brule, etc.-and of the Dineh, the Miccousukee, and all the rest of the several hundred correct tribal names.

(There is also some confusion about the word Indian, a mistaken belief that it refers somehow to the country, India. When Columbus washed up on the beach in the Caribbean, he was not looking for a country called India. Europeans were calling that country Hindustan in 1492. Look it up on the old maps. Columbus called the tribal people he met “Indio,” from the Italian in dio, meaning “in God.”)

It takes a strong effort on the part of each American Indian not to become Europeanized. The strength for this effort can only come from the traditional ways, the traditional values that our elders retain. It must come from the hoop, the four directions, the relations: it cannot come from the pages of a book or a thousand books. No European can ever teach a Lakota to be Lakota, a Hopi to be Hopi. A master’s degree in “Indian Studies” or in “education” or in anything else cannot make a person into a human being or provide knowledge into traditional ways. It can only make you into a mental European, an outsider.

I should be clear about something here, because there seems to be some confusion about it. When I speak of Europeans or mental Europeans, I’m not allowing for false distinctions. I’m not saying that on the one hand there are the by-products of a few thousand years of genocidal, reactionary. European intellectual development which is bad; and on the other hand there is some new revolutionary intellectual development which is good. I’m referring here to the so-called theories of Marxism and anarchism and “leftism” in general. I don’t believe these theories can be separated from the rest of the of the European intellectual tradition. It’s really just the same old song.

The process began much earlier. Newton, for example, “revolutionized” physics and the so-called natural sciences by reducing the physical universe to a linear mathematical equation. Descartes did the same thing with culture. John Locke did it with politics, and Adam Smith did it with economics. Each one of these “thinkers” took a piece of the spirituality of human existence and converted it into code, an abstraction. They picked up where Christianity ended: they “secularized” Christian religion, as the “scholars” like to say- and in doing so they made Europe more able and ready to act as an expansionist culture. Each of these intellectual revolutions served to abstract the European mentality even further, to remove the wonderful complexity and spirituality from the universe and replace it with a logical sequence: one, two, three. Answer!

This is what has come to be termed “efficiency” in the European mind. Whatever is mechanical is perfect; whatever seems to work at the moment- that is, proves the mechanical model to be the right one- is considered correct, even when it is clearly untrue. This is why “truth” changes so fast in the European mind; the answers which result from such a process are only stopgaps, only temporary, and must be continuously discarded in favor of new stopgaps which support the mechanical models and keep them (the models) alive.

Hegel and Marx were heirs to the thinking of Newton, Descartes, Locke and Smith. Hegel finished the process of secularizing theology- and that is put in his own terms- he secularized the religious thinking through which Europe understood the universe. Then Marx put Hegel’s philosophy in terms of “materialism,” which is to say that Marx despiritualized Hegel’s work altogether. Again, this is in Marx’ own terms. And this is now seen as the future revolutionary potential of Europe. Europeans may see this as revolutionary, but American Indians see it simply as still more of that same old European conflict between being and gaining. The intellectual roots of a new Marxist form of European imperialism lie in Marx’- and his followers’- links to the tradition of Newton, Hegel and the others.

Being is a spiritual proposition. Gaining is a material act. Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted to be the best people they could. Part of that spiritual process was and is to give away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain. Material gain is an indicator of false status among traditional people, while it is “proof that the system works” to Europeans. Clearly, there are two completely opposing views at issue here, and Marxism is very far over to the other side from the American Indian view. But let’s look at a major implication of this; it is not merely an intellectual debate.

The European materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person. And who seems most expert at dehumanizing other people? And why? Soldiers who have seen a lot of combat learn to do this to the enemy before going back into combat. Murderers do it before going out to commit murder. Nazi SS guards did it to concentration camp inmates. Cops do it. Corporation leaders do it to the workers they send into uranium mines and steel mills. Politicians do it to everyone in sight. And what the process has in common for each group doing the dehumanizing is that it makes it all right to kill and otherwise destroy other people. One of the Christian commandments says, “Thou shalt not kill,” at least not humans, so the trick is to mentally convert the victims into nonhumans. Then you can proclaim violation of your own commandment as a virtue.

In terms of the despiritualization of the universe, the mental process works so that it becomes virtuous to destroy the planet. Terms like progress and development are used as cover words here, the way victory and freedom are to justify butchery in the dehumanization process. For example, a real-estate speculator may refer to “developing” a parcel of ground by opening a gravel quarry; development here means total, permanent destruction, with the earth itself removed. But European logic has gained a few tons of gravel with which more land can be “developed” through the construction of road beds. Ultimately, the whole universe is open- in the European view- to this sort of insanity.

Most important here, perhaps, is the fact that Europeans feel no sense of loss in all this. After all, their philosophers have despiritualized reality, so there is no satisfaction (for them) to be gained in simply observing the wonder of a mountain or a lake or a people in being. No, satisfaction is measured in terms of gaining material. So the mountain becomes gravel, and the lake becomes coolant for a factory, and the people are rounded up for processing through the indoctrination mills Europeans like to call schools.

But each new piece of that “progress” ups the ante out in the real world. Take fuel for the industrial machine as an example. Little more than two centuries ago, nearly everyone used wood- a replenishable, natural item- as fuel for the very human needs of cooking and staying warm. Along came the Industrial Revolution and coal became the dominant fuel, as production became the social imperative for Europe. Pollution began to become a problem in the cities, and the earth was ripped open to provide coal whereas wood had always simply been gathered or harvested at no great expense to the environment. Later, oil became the major fuel, as the technology of production was perfected through a series of scientific “revolutions.” Pollution increased dramatically, and nobody yet knows what the environmental costs of pumping all that oil out of the ground will really be in the long run. Now there’s an “energy crisis,” and uranium is becoming the dominant fuel.

Capitalists, at least, can be relied upon to develop uranium as fuel only at the rate which they can show a good profit. That’s there ethic, and maybe they will buy some time. Marxists, on the other hand, can be relied upon to develop uranium fuel as rapidly as possible simply because it’s the most “efficient” production fuel available. That’s their ethic, and I fail to see where it’s preferable. Like I said, Marxism is right smack in the middle of European tradition. It’s the same old song.

There’s a rule of thumb which can be applied here. You cannot judge the real nature of a European revolutionary doctrine on the basis of the changes it proposes to make within the European power structure and society. You can only judge it by the effects it will have on non-European peoples. This is because every revolution in European history has served to reinforce Europe’s tendencies and abilities to export destruction to other peoples, other cultures and the environment itself. I defy anyone to point out an example where this is not true.

So now we, as American Indian people, are asked to believe that a “new” European revolutionary doctrine such as Marxism will reverse the negative effects of European history on us. European power relations are to be adjusted once again, and that’s supposed to make things better for all of us. But what does this really mean?

Right now, today, we who live on the Pine Ridge Reservation are living in what white society has designated a ” National Sacrifice Area.” What this means is that we have a lot of uranium deposits here, and white culture (not us) needs this uranium as energy production material. The cheapest, most efficient way for industry to extract and deal with the processing of this uranium is to dump the waste by-products right here at the digging sites. Right here where we live. This waste is radioactive and will make the entire region uninhabitable forever. This is considered by the industry, and by the white society that created this industry, to be an “acceptable” price to pay for energy resource development. Along the way they also plan to drain the water table under this part of South Dakota as part of the industrial process, so the region becomes doubly uninhabitable. The same sort of thing is happening down in the land of the Navajo and Hopi, up in the land of the Northern Cheyenne and Crow, and elsewhere. Thirty percent of the coal in the West and half of the uranium deposits in the United States have been found to lie under reservation land, so there is no way this can be called a minor issue.

We are resisting being turned into National Sacrifice Area. We are resisting being turned into a national sacrifice people. The costs of this industrial process are not acceptable to us. It is genocide to dig uranium here and drain the water table- no more, no less.

Now let’s suppose that in our resistance to extermination we begin to seek allies (we have). Let’s suppose further that we were to take revolutionary Marxism at it’s word: that it intends nothing less than the complete overthrow of the European capitalists order which has presented this threat to our very existence. This would seem to be a natural alliance for American Indian people to enter into. After all, as the Marxists say, it is the capitalists who set us up to be a national sacrifice. This is true as far as it goes.

But, as I’ve tried to point out, this “truth” is very deceptive. Revolutionary Marxism is committed to even further perpetuation and perfection of the very industrial process which is destroying us all. It offers only to ” redistribute” the results- the money, maybe- of this industrialization to a wider section of the population. It offers to take wealth from the capitalists and pass it around; but in order to do so, Marxism must maintain the industrial system. Once again, the power relations within European society will have to be altered, but once again the effects upon American Indian peoples here and non-Europeans elsewhere will remain the same. This is much the same as when power was redistributed from the church to private business during the so-called bourgeois revolution. European society changed a bit, at least superficially, but its conduct toward non-Europeans continued as before. You can see what the American Revolution of 1776 did for American Indians. It’s the same old song.

Revolutionary Marxism, like industrial society in other forms, seeks to “rationalize” all people in relation to industry- maximum industry, maximum production. It is a doctrine that despises the American Indian spiritual tradition, our cultures, our lifeways. Marx himself called us “precapitalists” and “primitive.” Precapitalist simply means that, in his view, we would eventually discover capitalism and become capitalists; we have always been economically retarded in Marxist term. The only manner in which American Indian people could participate in a Marxist revolution would be to join the industrial system, to become factory workers, or “proletarians,” as Marx called them. The man was very clear about the fact that his revolution could only occur through the struggle of the proletariat, that the existence of a massive industrial system is a precondition of a successful Marxist society.

I think there’s a problem with language here. Christians, capitalists, Marxists. All of them have been revolutionary in their own minds, but none of them really means revolution. What they really mean is continuation. They do what they do in order that European culture can continue to exist and develop according to its needs.

So, in order for us to really join forces with Marxism, we American Indians would have to accept the national sacrifice of our homeland; we would have to commit cultural suicide and become industrialized and Europeanized.

At this point, I’ve got to stop and ask myself whether I’m being too harsh. Marxism has something of a history. Does this history bear out my observations? I look to the process of industrialization in the Soviet Union since 1920 and I see that these Marxists have done what it took the English Industrial Revolution 300 years to do; and the Marxists did it in 60 years. I see that the territory of the USSR used to contain a number of tribal peoples and that they have been crushed to make way for the factories. The Soviets refer to this as ” the National Question.” The question of whether the tribal peoples had the right to exist as peoples; and they decided the tribal peoples were an acceptable sacrifice to the industrial needs. I look to China and I see the same thing. I look to Vietnam and I see Marxists imposing an industrial order and rooting out the indigenous tribal mountain people.

I hear the leading Soviet scientist saying that when uranium is exhausted, then alternatives will be found. I see the Vietnamese taking over a nuclear power plant abandoned by the U.S. military. Have they dismantled and destroyed it? No, they are using it. I see China exploding nuclear bombs, developing uranium reactors, and preparing a space program in order to colonize and exploit the planets the same as the Europeans colonized and exploited this hemisphere. It’s the same old song, but maybe with a faster tempo this time.

The statement of the Soviet scientist is very interesting. Does he know what this alternative energy source will be? No, he simply has faith. Science will find a way. I hear revolutionary Marxists saying that the destruction of the environment, pollution, and radiation will all be controlled. And I see them act upon their words. Do they know how these things will be controlled? No, they simply have faith. Science will find a way. Industrialization is fine and necessary. How do they know this? Faith. Science will find a way. Faith of this sort has always been known in Europe as religion. Science has become the new European religion for both capitalists and Marxists; they are truly inseparable; they are part and parcel of the same culture. So, in both theory and practice, Marxism demands that non-European peoples give up their values, their traditions, their cultural existence altogether. We will all be industrialized science addicts in a Marxist society.

I do not believe that capitalism itself is really responsible for the situation in which American Indians have been declared a national sacrifice. No, it is the European tradition ; European culture itself is responsible. Marxism is just the latest continuation of this tradition, not a solution to it. To ally with Marxism is to ally with the very same forces that declare us an acceptable cost.

There is another way. There is the traditional Lakota way and the ways of the American Indian peoples. It is the way that knows that humans do not have the right to degrade Mother Earth, that there are forces beyond anything the European mind has conceived, that humans must be in harmony with all relations or the relations will eventually eliminate the disharmony. A lopsided emphasis on humans by humans-the Europeans’ arrogance of acting as though they were beyond the nature of all related things-can only result in a total disharmony and a readjustment which cuts arrogant humans down to size, gives them a taste of that reality beyond their grasp or control and restores the harmony. There is a need for a revolutionary theory to bring this about; it’s beyond human control. The nature peoples of this planet know this and so they do not theorize about it. Theory is an abstract; our knowledge is real.

Distilled to its basic terms, European faith-including the new faith in science-equals a belief that man is God. Europe has always sought a Messiah, whether that be the man Jesus Christ or the man Karl Marx or the man Albert Einstein. American Indians know this to be totally absurd. Humans are the weakest of all creatures, so weak that other creatures are willing to give up their flesh that we may live. Humans are able to survive only through the exercise of rationality since they lack the abilities of other creatures to gain food through the use of fang and claw.

But rationality is a curse since it can cause humans to forget the natural order of things in ways other creatures do not. A wolf never forgets his or her place in the natural order. American Indians can. Europeans almost always do. We pray our thanks to the deer, our relations, for allowing us their flesh to eat; Europeans simply take the flesh for granted and consider the deer inferior. After all, Europeans consider themselves godlike in their rationalism and science. God is the Supreme Being; all else must be inferior.

All European tradition, Marxism included, has conspired to defy the natural order of all things. Mother Earth has been abused, the powers have been abused, and this cannot go on forever. No theory can alter that simple fact. Mother Earth will retaliate, the whole environment will retaliate, and the abusers will be eliminated. Things come full circle, back to where they started. That’s revolution. And that’s a prophecy of my people, of the Hopi people and of other correct peoples.

American Indians have been trying to explain this to Europeans for centuries. But, as I said earlier, Europeans have proven themselves unable to hear. The natural order will win out, and the offenders will die out, the way deer die when they offend the harmony by over-populating a given region. It’s only a matter of time until what Europeans call “a major catastrophe of global proportions” will occur. It is the role of American Indian peoples, the role of all natural beings, to survive. A part of our survival is to resist. We resist not to overthrow a government or to take political power, but because it is natural to resist extermination, to survive. We don’t want power over white institutions; we want white institutions to disappear. That’s revolution.

American Indians are still in touch with these realities-the prophecies, the traditions of our ancestors. We learn from the elders, from nature, from the powers. And when the catastrophe is over, we American Indian peoples will still be here to inhabit the hemisphere. I don’t care if it’s only a handful living high in the Andes. American Indian people will survive; harmony will be reestablished. That’s revolution.

At this point, perhaps I should be very clear about another matter, one which should already be clear as a result of what I’ve said. But confusion breeds easily these days, so I want to hammer home this point. When I use the term European, I’m not referring to a skin color or a particular genetic structure. What I’m referring to is a mind-set, a worldview that is a product of the development of European culture. People are not genetically encoded to hold this outlook; they are acculturated to hold it. The same is true for American Indians or for the members of any culture.

It is possible for an American Indian to share European values, a European worldview. We have a term for these people; we call them “apples”-red on the outside (genetics) and white on the inside (their values). Other groups have similar terms: Blacks have their “oreos”; Hispanos have “Coconuts” and so on. And, as I said before, there are exceptions to the white norm: people who are white on the outside, but not white inside. I’m not sure what term should be applied to them other than “human beings.”

What I’m putting out here is not a racial proposition but a cultural proposition. Those who ultimately advocate and defend the realities of European culture and its industrialism are my enemies. Those who resist it, who struggle against it, are my allies, the allies of American Indian people. And I don’t give a damn what their skin color happens to be. Caucasian is the white term for the white race: European is an outlook I oppose.

The Vietnamese Communists are not exactly what you might consider genetic Caucasians, but they are now functioning as mental Europeans. The same holds true for Chinese Communists, for Japanese capitalists or Bantu Catholics or Peter “MacDollar” down at the Navajo Reservation or Dickie Wilson up here at Pine Ridge. There is no racism involved in this, just an acknowledgment of the mind and spirit that make up culture.

In Marxist terms I suppose I’m a “cultural nationalist.” I work first with my people, the traditional Lakota people, because we hold a common worldview and share an immediate struggle. Beyond this, I work with other traditional American Indian peoples, again because of a certain commonality in worldview and form of struggle. Beyond that, I work with anyone who has experienced the colonial oppression of Europe and who resists its cultural and industrial totality. Obviously, this includes genetic Caucasians who struggle to resist the dominant norms of European culture. The Irish and the Basques come immediately to mind, but there are many others.

I work primarily with my own people, with my own community. Other people who hold non-European perspectives should do the same. I believe in the slogan, “Trust your brother’s vision,” although I’d like to add sisters into the bargain. I trust the community and the culturally based vision of all the races that naturally resist industrialization and human extinction. Clearly, individual whites can share in this, given only that they have reached the awareness that continuation of the industrial imperatives of Europe is not a vision, but species suicide. White is one of the sacred colors of the Lakota people-red, yellow, white and black. The four directions. The four seasons. The four periods of life and aging. The four races of humanity. Mix red, yellow, white and black together and you get brown, the color of the fifth race. This is a natural ordering of things. It therefore seems natural to me to work with all races, each with its own special meaning, identity and message.

But there is a peculiar behavior among most Caucasians. As soon as I become critical of Europe and its impact on other cultures, they become defensive. They begin to defend themselves. But I’m not attacking them personally; I’m attacking Europe. In personalizing my observations on Europe they are personalizing European culture, identifying themselves with it. By defending themselves in this context, they are ultimately defending the death culture. This is a confusion which must be overcome, and it must be overcome in a hurry. None of us has energy to waste in such false struggles.

Caucasians have a more positive vision to offer humanity than European culture. I believe this. But in order to attain this vision it is necessary for Caucasians to step outside European culture-alongside the rest of humanity-to see Europe for what it is and what it does.

To cling to capitalism and Marxism and all other “isms” is simply to remain within European culture. There is no avoiding this basic fact. As a fact, this constitutes a choice. Understand that the choice is based on culture, not race. Understand that to choose European culture and industrialism is to choose to be my enemy. And understand that the choice is yours, not mine.

This leads me back to address those American Indians who are drifting through the universities, the city slums, and other European institutions. If you are there to resist the oppressor in accordance with your traditional ways, so be it. I don’t know how you manage to combine the two, but perhaps you will succeed. But retain your sense of reality. Beware of coming to believe the white world now offers solutions to the problems it confronts us with. Beware, too, of allowing the words of native people to be twisted to the advantages of our enemies. Europe invented the practice of turning words around on themselves. You need only look to the treaties between American Indian peoples and various European governments to know that this is true. Draw your strength from who you are.

A culture which regularly confuses revolt with resistance, has nothing helpful to teach you and nothing to offer you as a way of life. Europeans have long since lost all touch with reality, if ever they were in touch with who you are as American Indians.

So, I suppose to conclude this, I should state clearly that leading anyone toward Marxism is the last thing on my mind. Marxism is as alien to my culture as capitalism and Christianity are. In fact, I can say I don’t think I’m trying to lead anyone toward anything. To some extent I tried to be a “leader,” in the sense that the white media like to use that term, when the American Indian Movement was a young organization. This was a result of a confusion I no longer have. You cannot be everything to everyone. I do not propose to be used in such a fashion by my enemies. I am not a leader. I am an Oglala Lakota patriot. That is all I want and all I need to be. And I am very comfortable with who I am.

In eight years Palestinians have seen the bald eagle of enlightened US power degenerate into a phoney, biased, cynical lame duck

11/01/08 “The Guardian”” — — It is a well-deserved irony for George Bush that his first presidential visit to Israel coincided this week with the storm of excitement produced by the unexpected outcome of the two New Hampshire primaries. Nothing could better highlight the irrelevance of the final year of the Bush presidency.

The moment at which an incumbent becomes a lame duck fluctuates in every US administration, depending on circumstances. The day on which the first votes are cast is traditionally the symbolic date, even though the race has been under way in the media for months. This year’s riveting contests in New Hampshire certainly proved that true, overshadowing whatever interest there was in Bush’s plans for influencing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Even before the president left Washington, expectations for his visit were low. His much-trumpeted meeting of Middle Eastern leaders in Annapolis in November produced a predictably tinny follow-up. Little happened in the subsequent six weeks, and it was only courtesy to Bush that impelled Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas to meet again in advance of the president’s touchdown in Tel Aviv on Wednesday and produce the blandest pretence of progress. According to Olmert’s spokesman, they agreed to “authorise their negotiating teams to conduct direct and ongoing negotiations on all the core issues”. Isn’t this tautological statement merely a repeat of what they had already launched in Annapolis?

Bush’s engagement in the world’s most intractable dispute is late, piecemeal and phoney. Above all, it is one-sided. As Ghassan Khatib, a former Palestinian minister, remarked this week: “Palestinians agree that in the history of the United States, Bush is more biased toward Israel than any other American president.” In any conflict, responsibility for making the largest concessions always rests on the stronger party, especially when most of the wrong is on its side. But, despite his rhetoric yesterday, Bush has not used Washington’s enormous leverage over Israel to end the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

He has not even applied pressure for an end to the expansion of Israeli settlements or the dismantling of the spider’s web of roadblocks that make normal life for Palestinians impossible. A US plan for benchmarks by which to judge Israeli progress was quickly abandoned last spring at the first whiff of concern by Olmert’s government. Occasional state department pronouncements disapproving of settlement expansion are not followed by measures to reflect US anger when – as happened in Jerusalem again on Wednesday – Olmert makes it clear he will continue the illegal construction of Israeli homes.

Any talk of dealing with “core issues” is meaningless without measures to reduce the daily hardships of Palestinians and end the kidnapping of hundreds of Palestinian leaders. About 40 Palestinian MPs who were seized after Hamas’s election victory two years ago remain in Israeli prisons, uncharged and seemingly forgotten by Bush and other western governments. US and European policies towards Hamas remain hopelessly unjust and counterproductive.

In the first phase of the so-called roadmap that Bush boasts of having revived, Palestinians are supposed to build the institutions of a responsible state. Yet Israel and the US continue to do all they can to undermine this laudable goal by blatantly taking sides in the rivalry between Fatah and Hamas. Bush’s comment yesterday in Ramallah about the situation in Gaza was one of history’s most extraordinary examples of tunnel vision. “Hamas has delivered nothing but misery for Palestinians,” he declared. Had he said, “My reaction and that of my Israeli and European Union colleagues to the mandate given Hamas by Palestinian voters has delivered nothing but misery for Palestinians”, he would have been closer to the truth.

The human catastrophe deliberately inflicted on Gaza by western policies over the past two years is one of the great crimes of this century so far. It is especially unjustified since Hamas had been observing a truce in its attacks on Israelis for several months prior to winning the “free, fair and open elections” that the roadmap asked for. Hamas was, and continues to be, punished not for its occasional use of violence but simply for being popular. And, as often happens with sanctions, it is not the leaders who suffer, but the whole civilian population of the territory – deprived of medicine, adequate food, public services and jobs. Rather than pursuing the chimera of a final settlement that would mean nothing without Hamas’s endorsement, western policy should focus on more manageable humanitarian and political goals: lifting the boycott of Hamas, promoting Palestinian unity, and forcing Israel to end its brutal siege of Gaza.

Bush is not the first US president to take an interest in the Middle East in the last year of an eight-year period of office. Bill Clinton also applied his mind to it in the dying months of his second term. Yet his performance was very different: Clinton had endorsed the Oslo process early in his first term, and showed considerable energy in pushing it forward and supporting the new Palestinian Authority.

Later, in spite of being a lame duck by the year 2000, he tried hard to get agreement between Arafat and Barak at Camp David, on a final settlement that was not loaded overwhelmingly in Israel’s favour. It was a model of how American presidents can act more firmly when released from the pressures of seeking election. It only needs an effort of will for a lame duck to become the bald eagle of enlightened US power.

In contrast, Bush’s current visit to the region is nothing more than a display of partisan cynicism, coupled with the hope that if some sort of interim deal is signed this year between Olmert and Abbas, it would erase Washington’s failures in Iraq.

I make the rules around here which is hard work so I have to play hard too. If you don’t like that then you can vote for somebody else next time.

Sorry about TxDOT giving me a bum steer on the toll road funding thing. The buck stops over there with them. Who else could have ever known how bad things had gotten???

If you ever get a little ahead of the game, you should come join me out here on the slopes. I know all the best places to go.

Yours truly,
The Man

New information reveals that the alleged Iranian threat to American naval vessels may have been blown out of proportion. We speak to investigative historian Gareth Porter.

Transcript

JUAN GONZALEZ: The United States has lodged a formal diplomatic protest against Iran for its “provocation” in the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday morning. But new information reveals that the alleged Iranian threat to American naval vessels in the Strait might have been blown out of proportion.

On Tuesday, the Pentagon released video of Iranian patrol boats approaching American warships and an audio recording of a direct threat in English. The accented voice says, “I am coming to you,” and then adds, “You will explode after a few minutes.”

IRANIAN VOICE: I am coming to you.

US NAVAL OFFICER: Inbound small craft, you’re approaching a coalition warship operating in international waters. Your identity is not know. Your intentions are unclear. You’re sailing into danger and may be subject to defensive measures. Request you establish communications now or alter your course immediately to remain clear. Request you alter course immediately to remain clear.

IRANIAN VOICE: You will explode after a few minutes.

US NAVAL OFFICER: “You will explode after a few minutes.”

JUAN GONZALEZ: That was an audio recording released by the Pentagon along with the video of the encounter between American warships and Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz.

But a Navy spokesperson told ABC News Thursday that the threat might not have come from the Iranian patrol boats, but from the shore or another ship passing by. The spokesperson added, “I guess we’re not saying that it absolutely came from the boats, but we’re not saying it absolutely didn’t.”

Iran has denied all allegations of a confrontation and released its own video of the encounter. This is an excerpt of the Iranian video broadcast on Thursday showing what seems to be a routine exchange between an Iranian Navy patrol boat and the American ship.

IRANIAN NAVAL PATROLMAN: Coalition warship 73, this is Iranian Navy patrol boat. Request side number [inaudible] operating in the area this time. Over.

US NAVAL OFFICER: This is coalition warship 73. I’m operating in international waters.

AMY GOODMAN: Gareth Porter is a historian and national security policy analyst. His latest article for IPS News analyzes how the official US version of the naval incident has begun to unravel. He joins us now from Washington, D.C. Gareth Porter, welcome.

GARETH PORTER: Good morning, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about everything that happened from Sunday, what President Bush said, what the Pentagon was alleging, and now what we understand?

GARETH PORTER: Well, this alleged crisis or confrontation on the high seas is really much less than what met the eyes of the American public as it was reported by news media. And the story really began from leaks from the Pentagon. I mean, there were Pentagon officials apparently calling reporters and telling them that something had happened in the Strait of Hormuz, which represented a threat to American ships and that there was a near battle on the high seas. The way it was described to reporters, it was made to appear to be a major threat to the ships and a major threat of war. And that’s the way it was covered by CNN, by CBS and other networks, as well as by print media.

Then I think the next major thing that happened was a briefing by the commander of the 5th fleet in Bahrain, the Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, which is very interesting. If you look carefully at the transcript, which was not reported accurately by the media, or not reported at all practically, the commander—or rather, Vice Admiral Cosgriff actually makes it clear that the ships were never in danger, that they never believed they were in danger, and that they were never close to firing on the Iranian boats. And this is the heart of what actually happened, which was never reported by the US media.

So I think that the major thing to really keep in mind about this is that it was blown up into a semi-crisis by the Pentagon and that the media followed along very supinely. And I must say this is perhaps the worst—the most egregious case of sensationalist journalism in the service of the interests of the Pentagon, the Bush administration, that I have seen so far.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Gareth Porter, there have been some reports about the apparent splicing of audio onto the actual video that appear to be from two different sources. Could you talk about that?

GARETH PORTER: Well, that’s right. I mean, we don’t yet know exactly what the sequence of events was in this incident. We don’t know exactly when the voices that we hear making what appear to be a threat to the American ships, where—when that occurred in the sequence of events in this incident. And it seems very possible that indeed the Pentagon did splice into the recording, the audio recording of the incident, the two bits of messages from a mysterious voice in a way that made it appear to occur in response to the initial communication from the US ship to the Iranian boats. And it seems very possible that, in fact, those voices came at some other point during this twenty-minute incident.

So this is something that really deserves to be scrutinized and, in fact, investigated by Congress, because of the significance, in the larger sense, of a potential major fabrication of evidence in order to make a political point by the Bush administration.

AMY GOODMAN: Gareth Porter, what about the timing of this, on the eve of President Bush’s visit to the Middle East?

GARETH PORTER: Well, of course, there’s no doubt that the motivation for the Pentagon to blow this incident up was precisely the timing of President Bush leaving on a trip to the Middle East, in which one of his major purposes was to try to keep together a coalition of Arab states, which—a very, very loose and shaky coalition to oppose Iran and to support, hopefully, according to the administration’s policy, the US pressure on Iran through diplomatic and financial means, through the Security Council and through its allies in Europe. So this is definitely part of the reason, very clearly, that what was a very minor incident which did not threaten US ships, as far as we can tell from all the evidence so far, was turned into what was presented as a confrontation and a threat of war.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Gareth Porter, I’d like to ask you, I was watching the Republican debate last night on Fox News and was astonished to see one of the moderators spend quite a bit of time on this topic, questioning every one of the candidates as to whether they believe the Navy commander on the scene did the right thing by not blowing the Iranian boats out of the water. Surprisingly, only Ron Paul, the maverick, even questioned some of the facts of the incident as reported. Your response to this suddenly becoming a topic for the presidential debates?

GARETH PORTER: Well, I think it’s astonishing that you have this incident being regarded as a test of whether the United States is being belligerent enough, when the commanders of the ships themselves clearly did not regard this as a threat to the safety of their ships. This is the point, again, that the commander of the 5th fleet made very clearly. He was asked by reporters whether the commanders were close to firing on the Iranian ships, and he said, “No, that was not the case,” that at no point were they about to fire on the ships and that they did not feel threatened by the Iranian boats. Bear in mind, what has not been reported by the media, that these are essentially small speedboats that are at most armed with machine guns, not with any weapons that were capable of harming those ships.

AMY GOODMAN: Gareth Porter, this also comes right at the time that new documents have—newly declassified documents have revealed that the Johnson administration faked the Gulf of Tonkin incident to escalate the war in Vietnam, to provide a pretext for increased bombing and increased troops there.

GARETH PORTER: Well, you know, this is an incident—the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the policy shenanigans surrounding it are something that I wrote about in my book, Perils of Dominance, about the US involvement in the Vietnam conflict. And what actually happened regarding the Gulf of Tonkin was that the ships, because of anxiety on the part of the crew of these ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, they thought they were under fire originally. They sent back messages saying that.

But within a matter of a couple of hours, the commander of the flotilla had decided that they had been mistaken, and he passed that message on to the Pentagon, and the Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara was informed by early afternoon on the same day. And it is my interpretation, based on the evidence, that he failed—he refused to inform President Johnson of that fact, and that’s why Johnson went ahead with a decision to bomb North Vietnam, which had already been made at noontime.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you, going back to the incident also, one of the key contradictions now that have surfaced between the initial reports and certainly after the Iranian release of their own video is that initially the public was told that these were Revolutionary Guard boats, and now the Iranian government has said no, that they were actually boats of the Iranian Navy, and they clearly identified themselves as such.

GARETH PORTER: I do not know what the provenance of these Iranian boats was, whether it was IRGC or Iranian Navy. We do have pictures, photographs of the IRGC small speedboats that clearly resemble the boats that are depicted—at least one of them—depicted in the video. But from the evidence that we have right now, it’s really impossible to say what—whether these boats belonged to be on IRGC or not. It is the case, however, that the IRGC does have, apparently, the primary responsibility to patrol in this area of the gulf. I heard yesterday a former commander of the IRGC state very clearly that they do in fact have the primary responsibility to patrol in that area. So it’s certainly the—it’s a possibility, a good possibility, that these were IRGC boats.

Congress could do a good job, theoretically, but it can’t. Why? Its owned lock, stock, and barrel by corporate America. So you think you’re going to become president and you’re going to turn to the Congress and say, “Let’s really straighten out corporate America.” This is foolishness. It’s fantasy.

Transcript:

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR: Do you distinguish between the three leading candidates coming out of Iowa and going into New Hampshire, in terms of the polling? You know, Obama and Edwards and Clinton. Do you distinguish between them in any way?

MIKE GRAVEL: No. I think that they’re the product of the celebrity nature of American communication. And that’s the sadness of it all. You know. They have the same level of celebrity attention as Britney Spears has.

JAY: When you get down to the policy level, there are some differences between them. Are they significant differences?

GRAVEL: No, not at all. They’re not significant. All three of them want the health care paid for through business enterprise, which cripples business enterprise. What’s the difference? And as far as education, they’re all three endorsed by the NEA [National Education Association]. You’re not going to see any changes in our educational system. What else? Education, health care. Two vital ones. The rest is just rinky-dinking around.

JAY: Edwards has certainly been talking more aggressively about taking on corporate America.

GRAVEL: Oh, yeah. Tell me how you’re going to do that. No. I mean, how do you do that? I don’t know how to do that. I know, if I can empower the American people, that they can sustain some policies, that I would do that.

JAY: Certainly there are laws Congress could pass. I mean, a president working with Congress—.

GRAVEL: Oh, Congress could do a good job, theoretically, but it can’t. Why? Its owned lock, stock, and barrel by corporate America. So you think you’re going to become president and you’re going to turn to the Congress and say, “Let’s really straighten out corporate America.” This is foolishness. It’s fantasy. But it sounds good on the stump. I could make that kind of speech. Oh, man. Just listen to me. What am I going to do to corporate America? You can’t believe. And I know a lot about corporate personhood and POCLAD and all of that. But so what?

JAY: But in a campaign like this, if someone has the potential of winning and makes some kind of promises, in theory they can mean something.

GRAVEL: In theory what it means is you’re a hypocrite. That’s what it means in theory, because if you’re smart enough to know you can’t deliver, and you tell them you can deliver, what are you doing? You’re raising expectations and you’re lying to the people. Or you’re too dumb to know you’re lying to the people.

JAY: Do you distinguish between the leading Democrats and the leading Republicans?

GRAVEL: Oh, the leading Republicans, in my point of view, are nutty as loons. They really are. I mean, they’re warmongers. I mean, the Democrats at least—here, I’ll give you this example. The Republicans and Bush. Lump them together. You’ve got boiling water. You take a frog, you throw him in the water, and the frog jumps out. You get the Democrats. You get tepid water. You put the frog in the water, and you turn the heat up slowly, and you cook the frog, and nobody knows the difference.

JAY: Okay, but that’s an argument for saying there isn’t significant differences between the Republicans and the Democrats.

GRAVEL: Where are the Democrats raising all their money right now? Wall Street.

JAY: No, wait. Hold on. When I asked you first, you said they’re nutty as loons. That kind of implies the others aren’t nutty as loons.

GRAVEL: Well, they’re not as bad, no, they’re not as bad. Well, no, they’re not as bad. Far from it. They’re not as bad. But they’re pretty bad. Here. The Democrats are raising more money from Wall Street than the Republicans are right now, from the same people who own the Republican Party.

JAY: So, then, what do you make of Obama’s promise of change and all the rhetoric that’s been going along with his campaign?

GRAVEL: It’s foolish. Foolish. Dangerous. Dangerous, because he doesn’t even recognize that he can’t deliver. That’s dangerous. I would rather – Hillary. At least she knows what she’s talking about. He doesn’t.

JAY: Edwards?

GRAVEL: Edwards? He probably knows better, what he’s talking about, than Obama. Obama of the three is the most dangerous, because he raises greater expectations of the youth and can’t deliver. And the worst thing a leader can do is raise expectations, and they don’t happen. You create a whole new generation of cynics. And that’s what he’s doing. And he’s used the line [inaudible] reason out what he’s saying. You know, the statement I like that I’ve heard from young people: there’s no ‘there’ there. And listen to the words. Make a speech and use the word change ten times—what specifically are you going to change? You’re going to change the health care system? Not really. You’re going to change the military-industrial complex? Not really. He wants another hundred thousand more troops. Are you going to change anything about your relationship with Iran? Not really. Nukes are on the table. Are you going to change anything with respect to Israel? Not really. He’s supported by AIPAC. Are you going to change anything for education? He’s on the education committee. He’s supported by the NEA. Where’s change? I don’t see any change. But he doesn’t say any of those things. He lets you figure out what the change is. So it’s like an actor. What does an actor do? He gives you a scene, and you read into it what the scene means to you. And that’s what he’s doing. It’s terrible, because what you read into it isn’t what’s going to happen, ’cause he’s going to have the reality. The simplest one of all is we have a $50 to $70 trillion fiscal gap. There’s no money to do anything, never mind this imperialism, which is why there’s no money to do anything. Here. You recall that Hillary, Edwards, and Obama all said, when asked by Tim Russert, would you have the troops out of Iraq by the end of 2013? And all three of them equivocated, weren’t sure that they could do it. And then you heard just last night, oh, yeah; I’m going to start withdrawing them immediately. What are they talking about? Say one thing; say another thing. You know, withdrawing immediately, what does that mean? We’ll withdraw ten this month, and then I’m going to change my mind next month? It’s gross hypocrisy – is really what it is. It’s politics as usual, and that’s sad, because we’re at a turning point in ’08. If we continue with American imperialism, we’re done as a nation. Truly are. And two things coming at us. We’re going to be irrelevant in the world. You see this in foreign affairs when you see all these other countries making arrangements by themselves; don’t even invite us to the meeting. Why? We come to a meeting; we think we know it all. We’re the superpower—you’ve got to listen to us.

JAY: Which meeting do you have in mind?

GRAVEL: Oh, they have meetings between China and India, between India and Malaysia, between Pakistan and India. You name it. There’s meetings going on all over the world, and we’re not invited.

DISCLAIMER:

WASHINGTON (AP) – Telephone companies cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau’s repeated failures to pay phone bills on time, according to a Justice Department audit released Thursday.

The faulty bookkeeping is part of what the audit, by the Justice Department’s inspector general, described as the FBI’s lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. Poor supervision of the program also allowed one agent to steal $25,000, the audit said.

More than half of 990 bills to pay for telecommunication surveillance in five unidentified FBI field offices were not paid on time, the report shows. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000.

And at least once, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation – the highly secretive and sensitive cases that allow eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or spies – “was halted due to untimely payment.”

The surge has only bought time for the US in Iraq. There will be no reconciliation without complete withdrawal

Who would have believed it? When George Bush arrives in Jerusalem today to salvage something from the wreckage of his attempt to impose a new pax Americana on the Middle East, there will at least be one ray of sunshine in an otherwise grim presidential vista. Iran may be resurgent, Hizbullah unbroken, the prospect of an Israel-Palestine peace settlement more remote than ever. But, as far as the US administration is concerned, things are at last coming good in Iraq. Its people are “reclaiming a normal society”, Bush has declared, a theme echoed enthusiastically across the US and wider western media. American casualties are down, economic growth is up, refugees are returning home, and people can once again walk the streets of Baghdad in safety, the story goes.

“We are out of the woods,” Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, the Iraqi government’s national security adviser, insisted last month. And however such claims are regarded in Iraq, they are certainly having an impact on the US presidential elections. The Iraq war is still top of American voters’ concerns, but it now jostles with the economy, immigration and healthcare and, while a clear majority want troops withdrawn, a record 40% believe the past year’s troop surge is making things better. The result is that the leading Democratic candidates are hedging their bets on troop withdrawal – Barack Obama would keep trainers and special forces, Hillary Clinton is only committed to pulling most troops out by 2013. Meanwhile, the glad tidings from Iraq means pro-war Republicans are once again in with a fighting chance.

The one part of this tale that is true is that the level of violence has dropped sharply in the past three months, both involving Iraqis, and US and British occupation troops. The monthly average of US soldiers killed between October and December was 33, compared with 110 in April to June, and the number of Iraqi civilians reported killed in December was 902, according to Iraq Body Count, compared with 2,731 in May. Any reduction in the suffering of Iraqis in particular, who have certainly endured hundreds of thousands of deaths as a result of the invasion of their country, must obviously be welcome. But if that dip in violence is misinterpreted as reflecting the beginning of a successful stabilisation and reduces the pressure to end the occupation, it will only prolong that agony into the future.

The fact is that 2007 was the deadliest year for US troops, with 901 killed; and the second bloodiest for Iraq as a whole, with at least 22,586 civilian deaths. The level of resistance attacks on US forces is still running at 2,000 a month, and the level of violence is back to roughly where it was in 2004-05 – seen as disastrous at the time. The reasons for that drop are mostly not disputed. The first is the creation of “awakening councils”, in effect US-backed Sunni militias, to police areas that have been at the heart of the resistance campaign.

Then there is the six-month ceasefire called by Moqtada al-Sadr’s anti-occupation Mahdi army, the most powerful Shia militia in the country. And lastly, there has been the impact of the surge in US troop numbers and the change of tactics orchestrated by its architect, General Petraeus, including the carving up of cities such as Baghdad into ethnically cleansed security zones behind Israeli-style walls, barriers and checkpoints. Iraqis also report that US troops have sharply reduced their patrols and operations in the last couple of months in Baghdad and elsewhere, with fewer clashes as a result.

But already, the upsurge in bombings, assassinations and attacks on US forces in the last couple of weeks – including the first killing of American troops by an Iraqi soldier – should be a warning to those now talking up the success of the surge. Here are four reasons why the lull in violence is highly unlikely to hold. First, the occupation-funded awakening councils, which are now getting on for 80,000-strong, are an unstable mishmash of groups with different agendas, created in the teeth of opposition from the supposedly sovereign Iraqi government, which have already been drawn into sectarian clashes with Shia militias. To solve one problem, the US has created another.

Second, the surge was only ever a temporary fix, and US troop numbers are already being reduced. Third, violence has been increasing in Shia areas and is likely to continue to do so, both as militias vie for power and as they come into conflict with US forces now tilting towards Sunni interests – or as a result of the clash between the US and Iran. But perhaps most important, there hasn’t been the slightest move to a political settlement for which the surge was meant to buy time. The government barely exists, parliament rarely manages a quorum, and there has been no change in the fundamental issue which drives armed resistance: the foreign occupation of the country against the will of its people.

The reality of the surge is this: the number of people displaced from their homes has quadrupled to over 2 million, and detention without trial has risen dramatically (the US alone holds 25,000 prisoners). Another 2 million have fled the country since the occupation began – and about 30,000 have returned, mostly because of lack of cash and visa restrictions. In oil-rich Iraq, electricity is now available in Baghdad for only eight hours a day, half the level before the invasion; unemployment is over 60%; food rations are being cut; corruption is rampant; and 43% of the population now lives on less than a dollar a day.