The Rag Blog

We’re in big trouble if even half of what Sibel Edmonds says is true…

“The next president may have to deal with a nuclear attack,” averred ABC’s Charles Gibson at Saturday night’s Democratic presidential debate. “The day after a nuclear weapon goes off in an American city, what would we wish we had done to prevent it and what will we actually do on the day after?”

It’s a question that frightens everyone, and one to which there is no easy answer: none of the candidates really rose to the occasion, and most seemed baffled. Hillary Clinton made sure she used the word “retaliation” with unusual emphasis, and when pressed on the question of how she would retaliate against “stateless” terrorists nevertheless insisted that she would indeed retaliate against someone, because the perpetrators had to have a “haven” somewhere within a state.

Yes, well, that’s not necessarily true, but what if that “haven” is… right here in the U.S.? Or, perhaps, in a NATO country, say, Turkey?

Say what?

Impossible, you say? Not if you believe Sibel Edmonds, a former translator for the FBI who listened in on hundreds of telephone intercepts and has now told the London Times that several top U.S. government officials conspired with foreign agents to steal U.S. nuclear secrets and sell them on the black market. The Times reports:

“Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of U.S. officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.

“Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the U.S. State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan. The name of the official – who has held a series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims. However, Edmonds said: ‘He was aiding foreign operatives against U.S. interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.’

“She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names – who were aiding foreign agents. ‘If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials,’ she said.”

Edmonds brought all this to the attention of lawmakers, as well as the American media, and several news organizations filed reports – until a federal judge issued an unprecedented gag order. Edmonds’ story was deemed too hot to handle: if the public were allowed to know what she knows, according to our government, America’s national security would be severely impaired. Yet now she is speaking out, and what she has to say is unsettling, to say the least.

Edmonds has named at least one of the officials: he is Marc Grossman, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, assistant secretary of state for European affairs under the Clinton administration and undersecretary of state for political affairs from 2001-2005. Grossman is now vice chairman of The Cohen Group, a consulting firm founded by Bill Clinton’s defense secretary, William S. Cohen.

Edmonds contends that an international nuclear smuggling ring, associated with the intelligence agencies of Pakistan, Turkey, and Israel, has been permitted to operate in the U.S. with impunity. Our government, she claims, knew all about it yet, in order to placate the foreign governments involved, allowed a vast criminal enterprise to carry out its activities, including money laundering, narcotics trafficking, and espionage involving efforts to steal U.S. nuclear technology.

As a translator for the FBI, Edmonds had the task of translating many hours of intercepted phone conversations between Turkish officials and Pakistanis, Israelis, and Americans who were targets of the FBI’s counterintelligence unit. Thousands of hours of intercepted calls revealed a network of moles placed in various military installations and academic venues dealing with nuclear technology. Edmonds gives us the details, via the Times:

“Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. ‘The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,’ she said.

“They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department official [Marc Grossman] who provided some of their moles – mainly Ph.D. students – with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the U.S. nuclear deterrent.”

And “while the FBI was investigating,” says Edmonds, “several arms of the government were shielding what was going on.” An entire wing of the national security bureaucracy, associated with the neoconservatives, has long profited from representing Turkish interests in Washington: this group includes not only Grossman, but also Paul Wolfowitz, chief intellectual architect of the Iraq war and ex-World Bank president; former deputy defense secretary for policy Douglas J. Feith; Feith’s successor, Eric Edelman; and Richard Perle, the notorious uber-neocon whose unique ability to mix profiteering and warmongering forced him to resign his official capacity as a key administration adviser.

Edmonds draws a picture of a three-sided alliance consisting of Turkish, Pakistani, and Israeli agents who coordinated efforts to milk U.S. nuclear secrets and technology, funneling the intelligence stream to the black market nuclear network set up by the Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan. The multi-millionaire Pakistani nuclear scientist then turned around and sold his nuclear assets to North Korea, Libya, and Iran.

This was no “rogue” operation, but a covert action executed by Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad, the chief of Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, at the time. The Turks were used as intermediaries because direct ISI intervention would have roused immediate suspicion. Large amounts of cash were dropped off at the offices of Turkish-American lobbying groups, such as the American Turkish Council in Washington, which was reportedly picked up by at least one top U.S. official.

This Pakistani-Turkish-Israeli Axis of Espionage, operating through their respective embassies, systematically combed Washington officialdom for potential moles, compiling lists that, according to Edmonds and the Times, “contained all their ‘hooking points,’ which could be financial or sexual pressure points, their exact job in the Pentagon and what stuff they had access to.” Nice work, there.

This sounds a lot like the setup the handlers of convicted spy Larry Franklin worked with to glean information from the rabidly pro-Israel Franklin and pass it off to Israeli embassy officials, including former Israeli ambassador Danny Ayalon; Naor Gilon, the former political officer at the embassy; and Rafi Barak, the former deputy chief of mission. And there is indeed a connection to the Franklin case, according to the Times,

“One of the Pentagon figures under investigation was Lawrence Franklin, a former Pentagon analyst, who was jailed in 2006 for passing U.S. defense information to lobbyists and sharing classified information with an Israeli diplomat. ‘He was one of the top people providing information and packages during 2000 and 2001,’ [Edmonds] said.”

Franklin delivered his “packages” to AIPAC officials Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman and their Israeli handlers for ideological reasons, but others, such as Grossman – according to Edmonds – did it for money. Grossman angrily denies the charge. In any case, apparently large cash transactions were recorded on the tapes Edmonds translated, in which U.S. officials were heard selling the nation’s nuclear secrets. As the Times relates:

“Well-known U.S. officials were then bribed by foreign agents to steal U.S. nuclear secrets. One such incident from 2000 involves an agent overheard on a wiretap discussing ‘nuclear information that had been stolen from an air force base in Alabama,’ in which the agent allegedly is heard saying: ‘We have a package and we’re going to sell it for $250,000.'”

A vast criminal enterprise supported by at least three foreign intelligence agencies acting in concert with top U.S. officials, including some “household names” – if true, it’s the story of the decade. Yet that isn’t all. The really scary aspect of this labyrinthine network of foreign agents, and their American dupes and collaborators, is its connections to terrorist organizations, specifically al-Qaeda.

To begin with, Gen. Ahmad is suspected of having wired a large amount of money into Mohammed Atta’s Dubai bank account shortly before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. More ominously, the Times reports: “Following 9/11, a number of the foreign operatives were taken in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or somehow aided the attacks.”

Pakistani and/or Turkish operatives arrested or held for questioning in the wake of the 9/11 attacks? Well, that’s the first I’ve heard of it. However, the U.S. authorities did round up a large number of Israelis, including these guys, and held them for several months before extraditing them back to their home country.

Even more alarming is the reason Edmonds approached the Times with the story, “after reading about an al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.” That’s a reference to this Nov. 2 story in the Times, which details the career of a top al-Qaeda kingpin, one Louai al-Sakka, who claims to have trained several of the 9/11 hijackers at a camp situated outside Istanbul in the resort area of the Yalova mountains.

Now that’s curious: a Muslim fundamentalist training camp in a country run by a fanatically secular military that would normally not tolerate such activities. As the Times puts it: “Turkish intelligence were aware of unusual militant Islamic activity in the Yalova mountains, where Sakka had set up his camps. But they posed no threat to Turkey at the time.”

Not a threat to Turkey, eh? All too true: the terrorists’ target was the U.S. The al-Qaeda recruits trained by Sakka were specifically chosen by the top leadership of al-Qaeda – i.e., bin Laden – to carry out the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. That they were nurtured and steeled for their mission under the noses of our NATO allies in Ankara seems bizarre – until one begins to take Sibel Edmonds seriously. Then the whole horrifying picture starts to fall into place.

The darkest secrets of 9/11 are buried at the end of the trail laid out in Edmonds’ testimony. As Luke Ryland, the world’s foremost expert on the Edmonds case, writes:

“The Times article then notes something that I reported 18 months ago. Immediately after 911, the FBI arrested a bunch of people suspected of being involved with the attacks – including four associates of key targets of FBI’s counterintelligence operations. Sibel heard the targets tell Marc Grossman: ‘We need to get them out of the U.S. because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans.’ Grossman duly facilitated their release from jail and the suspects immediately left the country without further investigation or interrogation.

“Let me repeat that for emphasis: The #3 guy at the State Dept. facilitated the immediate release of 911 suspects at the request of targets of the FBI’s investigation.”

Corruption and a massive cover-up organized at the highest levels of government – America’s nuclear secrets and technology looted on a massive scale, and sold to our enemies via a network set up by our alleged foreign “friends,” while the threat of nuclear terrorism hangs over our country like a thick fog of fear, and warmongering politicians scare us into going along with the program – if even half of what Edmonds alleges turns out to be true, then we are all in some very big trouble.

In light of the Edmonds revelations, we have to reconsider the implications of the question Charles Gibson opened with during the ABC Democratic debate:

“The day after a nuclear weapon goes off in an American city, what would we wish we had done to prevent it and what will we actually do on the day after?”

Perhaps congressman Henry Waxman, who solemnly pledged to launch a public investigation into the allegations made by Edmonds, will wish he had kept his promise. Maybe even the national news media, which has been offered this story repeatedly, by Ms. Edmonds and her supporters, will wish they had covered it.

Fortunately, we don’t need the “mainstream” media to get the truth out to the American people. With the new technology of the computer age, we can do an end run around the media. This YouTube video is shocking:

As Edmonds says, “we have the facts, we have the documents, we have the witnesses. Put out the tapes, put out the documents, put out the intercepts – put out the truth.”

MANCHESTER, N.H. — When Hillary Clinton, seriously set back by the Iowa caucuses, landed in New Hampshire to resuscitate her presidential campaign, the first question from the audience was unsparingly blunt: “When will the troops come home?”

She replied, as she has done before, that she hopes to begin bringing them home a brigade or two a month, but will leave enough troops in Iraq to protect themselves, American civilians and Iraqis who have helped the United States. That’s not too much different from what has been proposed by Barack Obama and John Edwards.

In other words, no matter who wins, Democrat or Republican, get ready for an extended war, a nagging pain that won’t go away. That simple, infuriating thought has been lost in the deluge of analysis, vote figures, handicapping and moments of drama that accompanied the Iowa caucuses and are carrying over into the frantic few days before New Hampshire’s primary.

Neither the weekend’s debates nor Clinton’s furious effort to reduce Obama’s lead in the polls gave comfort to Americans who want to end the war. For those of us who do, the most significant article of the weekend appeared on the back page of The New York Times Week In Review, saying “numbers don’t lie: for those in uniform, 2007 was the deadliest year since the invasion.” The centerpiece was a powerful chart, in color, breaking down the 2,592 recorded deaths suffered last year by American and other coalition troops, Iraqi security forces and Kurdish-controlled militias.

And as the candidates invoked the vague phase change, also lost in the process was the important point that a decent health insurance plan and the war are intertwined. In other words, the war is so expensive that it will be impossible for a Democratic president to keep campaign promises regarding federal health insurance while the conflict continues.

The man who asked Clinton about the war opened a question-and-answer session that lasted considerably longer than her speech. She clearly was determined to reintroduce herself in a state where she once had a strong lead in the polls.

She spoke in a large hangar at the Nashua airport, north of Manchester, after finishing third to Obama and Edwards in Iowa. It was a damaging finish, made worse for her by the size of Obama’s win and by his powerful, moving victory speech afterward.

Her New Hampshire staff had labored to give the hangar the ambiance of victory. A big American flag hung on the closed doors of the chilly building. A bus was to the right of the flag, painted in blue, red, gray and white, with a slogan on the sides: “Big Challenges, Real Solutions.” It was there to take the Clintons—Hillary, Bill and Chelsea—off on a New Hampshire tour that the senator hopes will save her campaign. “We got in at 4:30 [a.m.],” the former president told the crowd, which occupied almost half the large hangar. “I think my girls look good, don’t you?”

I was happy that the first question was about the war, and that it was asked in such a direct way. When the campaign began, the war was a critical issue. But it has come up less and less frequently in past weeks as Democratic candidates concentrated more on health care and other domestic issues.

There are reasons for this. Casualties are down. TV news directors and their counterparts in the print media and online have a short attention span and suffer from war fatigue. The economy is troubled, home foreclosures are growing, and health care horror stories abound. The polls show increased public concern about the domestic issues.

Yet, as the University of Michigan’s Juan Cole pointed out in his blog Informed Comment, the fact that the war “is tied with health care does not mean it isn’t important to voters. It means it is as important to them as the health of themselves and their loved ones, which is to say it is very important.”

The war’s cost is tremendous. Economist Scott Wallstein estimates it so far at close to $1 trillion. Economists Linda Bilnes and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and former Clinton administration adviser, said the figure is twice that much. A 2006 study by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service put the cost at $2 billion a week.

Universal health care would also be very expensive. Various studies by advocates estimate the cost over several years at between $34 billion and $69 billion. Even so, it would be cheaper than the war.

The issue is tremendously important here in New Hampshire. The state is recovering from an industrial decline, with high-tech business coming in. “It started in the ’90s,” Mike Vlacich, director of the New Hampshire Division of Economic Development, told me.

But I got a gloomier view from Jay Ward, political director for the Service Employees International Union, which is supporting Edwards in the state.

It’s true, Ward said, that high-tech jobs have increased, but not enough to take up the slack from the loss of manufacturing, particular the paper mills in the northern part of the state. “These jobs allowed people to work 40 hours a week and send their kids to college,” he said. The unemployment rate remains comparatively low, he said, but the jobs are in retail and service—low paying and with minimal benefits. “There’s underemployment, which means you have three jobs,” he added.

These people need a system of Medicare for all—a form of which is advocated by Obama, Clinton and Edwards, the three real post-Iowa survivors among the Democrats.

There are differences in their plans, but they are all good.

The candidates also say they are against the war and want our troops out. But Clinton wants withdrawal in phases and wouldn’t have most troops out until 2013. After that, she would keep a residual force in Iraq. Edwards would withdraw 40,000 to 50,000 immediately and all within nine or 10 months, another phased pullout. Obama, who—unlike Clinton and Edwards—opposed the invasion, would withdraw all troops before 2010, again in phases.

All these plans would leave troops there for a substantial time. And that’s assuming that the winner can keep a withdrawal promise. It’s easy to imagine what will happen when the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the so-called wise men and women of the Washington foreign policy establishment start “talking sense” to the new president, urging him or her to keep a strong force in Iraq to guard strategic interests and oil supplies in the Middle East and to protect Israel. Only Bill Richardson and Dennis Kucinich favor an immediate pullout.

Republicans John McCain, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney all support the war and oppose even setting a timetable for withdrawal. And none of them favor a decent federal health insurance plan.

The headline in last Friday’s Washington Post says it all: “No Murder Charges Filed in Haditha Case.”

Two years ago, a group of Marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians — including women and children cowering in their own homes — in a revenge rampage in Haditha. Once the story emerged from the usual layers of lies and cover-up, the atrocity flared briefly on the public stage, and eight of the Marines and their officers were charged “with murder or failing to investigate an apparent war crime,” as the Post reports. But public attention moved swiftly on, and over the past few months, the Pentagon’s “military justice” system has quietly reduced or dropped charges against most of the men. Yesterday’s announcement signaled the final climb-down in the case, leaving only a single Marine, Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, facing a charge of voluntary manslaughter, and lesser charges against one other enlisted man and two officers.

Two dozen civilians slaughtered, as confirmed by the Pentagon itself — and yet there was no murder. Indeed, Brian Rooney, the lawyer for one of the officer charged with failing to investigate the killings, now says “it’s clear now that no massacre occurred, yet this legal fiction is moving forward.” Twenty-four actual, physical dead bodies in the ground — yet the incident was a “legal fiction” — “no massacre occurred.”

The Pentagon has decided that the beserkers who killed two dozen innocent civilians were essentially following the accepted rules of engagement for U.S. forces in Iraq — a revealing fact in itself. As the Post notes:

Investigating officers in the cases have recommended lesser charges because they have found that the Marines determined the houses were hostile and believed they could kill everyone inside, more likely a case of recklessness than intent to commit a crime.

Even the indictment of Wuterich contains mitigating circumstances in the charge itself, which, the Post notes, alleges “that he had an intent to kill and that his actions inside a residential home and on a residential street in November 2005 amounted to unlawful killing ‘in the heat of sudden passion caused by adequate provocation.'”

“Adequate provocation” to kill twenty-four unarmed civilians in cold blood — or rather, as the indictment terms it, in hot blood, “the heat of sudden passion.”

There is little I can say about this case beyond what I first wrote about it in 2006 in a piece called “The Line of Atrocity: From the White House to Haditha.”

“Many observers have compared the methodical murder of 24 innocent civilians by U.S. Marines in the Iraqi town of Haditha ­ now confirmed by Pentagon and Congressional sources ­ to the infamous My Lai massacre in Vietnam, when American troops slaughtered hundreds of civilians in a bloody rampage. But this is a false equation, one that gravely distorts the overall reality of the Coalition effort in Iraq.

“For it is not the small-scale Haditha atrocity that should be compared to My Lai: it is the entire Iraq War itself. The whole operation ­ from its inception in high-level mendacity to its execution in blood-soaked arrogance, folly, greed and incompetence ­ is a war crime of almost unfathomable proportions: a My Lai writ large, a My Lai every single day, year after year after year.

“….Photos taken afterwards by U.S. military intelligence document the carnage [at Haditha]. ‘One portrays an Iraqi mother and young child, kneeling on the floor, as if in prayer,’ the Sunday Times reports. ‘They have been shot dead at close range. The pictures show other victims, shot execution-style in the head and chest in their homes.’ The victims ‘included a 76-year-old amputee and a four-year-old boy,’ the Observer reports. “In one house an entire family, including seven children, were attacked with guns and grenades. Only a 13-year-old girl survived.’ A U.S. government official told the Sunday Times that the attackers had ‘suffered a total breakdown in morality and leadership.’

“Take special note of that last statement: it may be the first time that a Bush Administration spokesman has ever told the truth about the war. There has indeed been a “total breakdown in morality and leadership” in Iraq; but it’s not confined to the Haditha killers. They are just the inevitable end product of the culture of lawlessness, brutality, and aggression deliberately manufactured by the White House to serve its predatory geopolitical ambitions and its dirty war-profiteering schemes.

“This fish has rotted from the head, and the corruption has eaten through the entire body politic. It was bound to find its most extreme manifestations in those whom Bush has armed with lies ­ a majority of U.S. soldiers believe that Iraq was involved in 9/11, polls show ­ and sent off to kill and be killed in an illegal war of aggression based on knowingly false and tricked-up evidence. If atrocity is the foundation of your enterprise, if atrocity is the atmosphere you breathe, why then, you are bound to produce atrocities, over and over, despite the many individual soldiers and honorable officers who struggle against the infected tide.

“These massacres aren’t just momentary outbursts of revenging anger; they’re learned behavior. The Marines who killed at Haditha were veterans of the much larger atrocity at Fallujah the year before. There they took part in one of the most savage demolitions of a city since World War II. Eight weeks of relentless bombing was followed by a cut-off of the city’s water, electricity and food supplies. a clear war crime under the Geneva Conventions. More than two-thirds of the city’s residents, some 200,000 people, fled the coming inferno, refugees in their own land. Those who remained were considered fair game in the house-by-house ravaging that followed. Among the Americans’ first targets were the city’s hospitals and clinics, as U.S. officers freely admitted to the New York Times: another blatant war crime. They were destroyed or shut down, with medical staff killed or imprisoned, to prevent bad publicity about civilian casualties from reaching the outside world, the officers said. Later, an investigation by the U.S.-backed Iraqi government found credible evidence of the use of chemical weapons against the city; yet another war crime. Up to 6,000 people were killed in the attack, most of them civilians.

“The few hundred Fallujah-based insurgents who had been the ostensible target of the assault had escaped long before the onslaught began. Thus there was no real military purpose to the city’s destruction, which had been ordered by the White House; it was instead an act of reprisal, a collective punishment against the Iraqi people as a whole, non-combatants included, for the armed resistance to the Coalition conquest. The Marines of Kilo Company simply took what they were taught by their eminently respectable superiors in Fallujah and applied it in Haditha.

“…Like Abu Ghraib, Haditha is not an aberration by a few ‘bad apples’ but the emblem of a wider, systemic crime, the natural fruit of an outlaw regime that has made aggressive war, torture, indefinite detention, ‘extrajudicial killing,’ rendition and concentration camps official national policy. This moral rot is Bush’s true historical legacy.”

It is also the historical legacy of every single public figure and presidential candidate who fails to stand up — right now, today, and every single day– and demand that this abomination come to an immediate end, and that its perpetrators face the full measure of justice for what they have done. Who gives a damn about Obama’s “elevating rhetoric” or Hillary’s “tough fight-back” in New Hampshire — or any of the other soul-rotting bullshit of the presidential campaign — when this innocent blood drenches us all, day after day after day? Moral insanity has gripped this nation — and we are all of us, every single one, tainted and corrupted by it…and are passing it on to our children. Who will break this chain of madness? And where will we find mercy for these crimes?

Already, the “surge” of US troops into Baghdad is beginning to recede, leaving behind a country where, by most accounts, levels of political violence are much reduced.

But the surge has not accomplished the goal that the administration of US President George W. Bush set when it announced the policy at the beginning of last year – to buy time for Iraqi politicians to reach compromises on the country’s future that would reconcile its feuding ethnic and sectarian factions.

US officers say that such a grand compromise may not be so important. They have achieved “bottom-up” reconciliation by cementing local alliances and arranging for the amnesty of prisoners, the pensioning off of former regime officials and other measures to win Sunni acceptance for the Shia-led government.

Over the next year, as neighbourhoods, towns and districts lose the US garrisons that helped suppress sectarian militias and insurgent groups and maintain the balance of power, the ability of these improvised measures to withstand the centrifugal forces of Iraqi sectarian politics will be put to the test.

US forces numbered approximately 160,000 at the end of December, down from a high of over 170,000 in October. Robert Gates, US defence secretary, said last month that the military should be able to withdraw five brigades, or around 20,000 soldiers, by mid-2008, and hoped to take out another five by the end of this year.

British troops will also be winding down their deployment in Iraq, with numbers expected to fall from 5,000 to 2,500 in the middle of next year.

In terms of reducing violence, the strategy orchestrated by General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, appears to have succeeded beyond its planners’ expectations. Both US military casualties and Iraqi civilian casualties have fallen dramatically since the summer.

But many Iraqi politicians and Iraq analysts fear that unless the government can reach agreement with its political opponents, the lull in violence may not last. “If this improvement in security is not matched by improvements in political life, economy, unemployment and the services for the standard of living, [or] if there is no reconciliation, nobody can guarantee that this security would not deteriorate again,” says Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish politician.

“What Petraeus has accomplished is a lull that is sustainable through the American elections [in November 2008],” says Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think-tank. “It’s not indefinitely sustainable without political accommodation at the top . . . This is conventional wisdom and it makes sense.”

Gen Petraeus himself said last month that, although the violence that had brought Iraq to the “brink of civil war” had receded, the progress had been “tenuous in many areas and could be reversed”.

According to American officers, the surge worked by allowing the US and Iraqi governments to blanket strategic districts, in some cases placing troops in positions where they could overlook virtually every main road junction.

This allowed US forces to intercept guerrillas moving in and out – and, more importantly, to break the hold that insurgents had gained on neighbourhoods via intimidation. Fatalities suffered by the US-led coalition fell to 40 a month in October and November, and 23 in December, from well over 100 a month in each of April, May and June. Figures for civilian dead also suggest a drop of more than 50 per cent since the summer.

In addition, both Sunni and Shia armed groups appear to have suffered a significant loss of legitimacy among their support bases. Members of both sects say that the gunmen alienated the civilian population by imposing a puritan version of Islamic law or by killing locals suspected of being informants.

Iraq’s al-Qaeda network, in particular, sparked a massive backlash. Over 70,000 paramilitaries, or “concerned local citizens”, enlisted in neighbourhood patrols targeted mainly at the radical Sunni movement.

Shia militants also appear to have lost legitimacy. Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical cleric, continues to enforce a ban on all armed activity in areas controlled by his movement, and his deputies say that that they have formed a special “Golden Unit” to purge members suspected of criminal violence or sectarian killing.

However, the retreat of the armed movements does not appear to have been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the authority and legitimacy of the Iraqi state. Gen Petraeus has said that as al-Qaeda activity lessens in Sunni areas, “mafia-like” criminal organisations practising kidnapping and extortion expand to fill the gap. Meanwhile, the British military’s recent withdrawal from Basra city stems from the realisation that it could do little to stop feuding among Islamist militia groups.

Some analysts have suggested Basra is a glimpse into Iraq’s medium-term future. The violence there, which probably results in several dozen dead a month, is hardly a serious threat to the Iraqi state. But the climate of lawlessness ensures that investors steer clear of an oil-rich port city that could be Iraq’s economic and commercial capital – and that the middle class, which fled en masse to neighbouring countries, does not return.

Meanwhile, Iraqi politicians have failed to deliver the hoped-for “national reconciliation” package of legislation. Parliament adjourned at the end of the year without having approved important legislation on the distribution of oil revenues and the fate of members of the former ruling Ba’ath party. Given the heated rhetoric that continues to fly between Kurds and Arabs, Sunni and Shia, it appears that the much-vaunted “consensus” may not in fact exist.

It could be the US troop presence, rather than low-profile trust-building measures, that is the crucial factor in keeping the feuding factions apart. “The Americans can [prevent local conflicts] now because they have leverage through the military,” says Mr Hiltermann.

The US surge does appear to have interrupted the cycle of violence that a year ago seemed to be pushing Iraq inexorably into all-out sectarian war. But it has not bought Iraqis enough time to resolve their differences and it is unclear whether local ceasefires can last without US troops to help resolve disagreements and prevent groups from settling their disputes by force.

Strikes have been described as everything from organized labor’s version of a declaration of war to a collective attempt at economic exorcism. Viewed by corporations as acts of defiance and aggression directed toward munificent, guiltless benefactors, strikes are nonetheless necessary, even if the arithmetic favors management (which it does, overwhelmingly).

In truth, a strike is often the only thing standing between a union membership and total capitulation. Even when painful, pulling the trigger is not only the honorable thing to do, it can provide long-term strategic benefits if played properly. Strikes can be cathartic. As George Meany (president of the AFL-CIO, 1955-79) liked to say, “You don’t own it until you pay for it.”

In regard to strikes, there’s a phenomenon that’s well known to union aficionados but more or less unheard of and, therefore, unappreciated by outsiders. This phenomenon involves women union members, and can be expressed by this general observation: Women members tend to show more resilience, intelligence and courage during a strike than the men do.

Whether it’s walking the picket line, attending informational meetings, or just sitting quietly at home contemplating the strike’s potential effects, women routinely behave more calmly and bravely than the men. Somehow, women handle the stress better. In the face of a strike, women tend to be more resilient than men, more able to accept bad news and stick to the game plan, less apt to go ape-shit.

I’ve seen dozens of instances of this phenomenon firsthand-instances of men overreacting, barking, panicking, breaking down, spinning out of control-all in response to a protracted strike (in some cases, even in response to the threat of a strike). In my experience I’ve never seen a woman do any of that stuff.

While men do things like punch holes in the walls of the union hall, and circulate hysterical petitions demanding recall of the bargaining board, women show up and perform their duties, whether it’s walking picket, stuffing envelopes, making telephone calls, or passing out blocks of government cheese. Although the term “team player” is overused and misused, women are, indeed, the preeminent team players during a strike.

I realize this sounds like a wild generalization (not to mention “sexist”), but it happens to be true. Ask any union honcho who’s ever been involved in a strike and is willing to speak honestly. They’ll tell you the same thing. Women union members exhibit more steely resolve and grace under fire than their male counterparts. Simple as that.

Three reasons are given to explain or account for this.

First, it’s suggested that because there are, typically, fewer women members than men in union locals, particularly ones affiliated with the manufacturing sector, and more particularly, ones affiliated with what are called “smokestack” industries (steel, paper, automobiles, heavy equipment), women are going to play a less prominent role than men.

Accordingly, women will be judged slightly differently. It’s possible that their low profile will be misinterpreted, that it will be mistaken as evidence of self-discipline or “poise.” Put simply, women members will be given credit where credit isn’t due. That’s one explanation.

Second, it is noted that because men are recognized by society as being the “providers,” a man’s response to a work stoppage is going to be more dramatic, more extreme, than a woman’s. Losing a job, even temporarily, will represent more of a crisis to a man, hence, his severe reaction (or overreaction). That’s the second explanation.

The third explanation is more revealing. It suggests that women are simply better equipped than men to handle adversity of this type. Granted, this is a glib and derivative assertion, a gender-based account of women’s behavior which, besides being blatantly sexist, is purely conjectural, incapable of being verified. So be it. But it also sounds suspiciously close to the truth.

In discussions with women union members, I’ve been told that the reason women bring a more “grown up” (their term) perspective to the table is because of their comparative life experiences. Women union members have already been forced to deal with all sorts of adversity, and, as a consequence, have gained confidence in their ability to survive and persevere.

Many have been single moms, left to raise kids after the fathers abandoned them; they’ve had to work for less money than men (except in union jobs), have had to “prove” themselves capable of doing men’s work, have had to routinely overcome obstacles most of their adult lives. Thus, to a woman, a work stoppage isn’t the shattering, cataclysmic event it is to a man. That’s the theory.

Ask any union honcho who’s been involved with a strike, and they’ll tell you that this gender distinction exists. Moreover, they’ll tell you that the exemplary behavior of women can have a salutary effect on the membership. It’s the “Norma Rae” syndrome (referring to the 1979 Sally Field movie) in action. A gutsy woman can become a de facto union leader on the basis of her actions; she can lead the membership, inspire them, mobilize them.

And a resolute, unbending woman, one willing to stand up to the company, is exactly what it will take to get someone like Wal-Mart to unionize. It will take a woman worker to inspire her male fellow-workers, to shame them into action. What the union movement needs are more women willing to step up and serve as examples.

Nothing against men, mind you; it’s just that men haven’t been the answer to what ails us, at least not lately. The labor movement needs another Norma Rae. It needs a thousand of them.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City Sunday with David L.
Boren, left, his host for a conference in Norman, Oklahoma.

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
Published: January 7, 2008

NORMAN, Okla. — Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and a dozen current and former elected officials from both parties arrived in this college town Sunday evening with little fanfare but grand ambitions.

Over a Sunday dinner, Mr. Bloomberg and other participants in the conference were to begin discussing ways to end “partisan polarization” in Washington, according to the invitation sent last month.

The conference was organized by two former Democratic senators, David L. Boren of Oklahoma, now president of the University of Oklahoma here, and Sam Nunn of Georgia.

Last month, the former senators suggested that they would consider urging Mr. Bloomberg to mount an independent presidential campaign if the major-party nominees do not formally embrace bipartisanship to address the nation’s problems.

“Today, we are a house divided,” the two men explained in their invitation. “We believe that the next president must be able to call for a unity of effort by choosing the best talent available — without regard to political party — to help lead the nation.”

Mr. Bloomberg and his aides have toyed for months with the idea of such a campaign, though officially he says he plans to complete his second term as New York City’s mayor, which ends next year.

He is a repeat guest of Mr. Boren’s, having delivered the commencement address at the university last year.

Other participants in the conference include Christie Whitman, a Republican and the former governor of New Jersey; Senator Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator from Nebraska; and the former senators Charles S. Robb of Virginia and Gary Hart of Colorado.

The private meetings on Sunday will be followed by a private breakfast on Monday and a public panel discussion, after which the participants may issue a brief statement of shared principles.

Arriving for dinner at Mr. Boren’s residence, Mr. Bloomberg brought gifts: three cheesecakes — one plain, one chocolate swirl, one raspberry swirl — from Junior’s, the famed Brooklyn outpost of pickles, pastrami and pastries.

SIXTEEN students sat around a table in the Manhattan cafeteria of the New School discussing where commas should go. They were rewriting, for the third time, a mission statement for their chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, the activist group that had been dormant for nearly 40 years. They wanted the document to be collectively produced, but after more than three weeks of communal drafting, no one seemed particularly content with the results.

One student thought the phrase “we accept all persons” should be broadened to cover animals. Another worried that the word “delineation” was alienating because “it means drawing lines, and don’t we object to lines?” The only sentence everyone seemed to support wholeheartedly was the final one: “Power to the People!”

The subject was a sensitive one, because the revived group has yet to produce a document as compelling as the S.D.S. manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, written in 1962, long before any of them were born. Although members of the original movement serve as mentors, the young S.D.S. is eager to prove that its interest in social change extends beyond nostalgia.

“One of our strengths is having a clear understanding of what went wrong in the ’60s,” says Pat Korte, a 19-year-old sophomore at the New School, in Greenwich Village. Mr. Korte was a co-founder of the born-again organization in 2006, as a senior at Stonington High School, in Connecticut. S.D.S. now has around 120 active chapters and 3,000 registered members.

“We know the drive for revolutionary change is correct,” Mr. Korte says, “but blowing up buildings is not going to get us anywhere. Nor is joining the Democratic Party.”

According to a provisional statement, drafted at the national convention last summer at Wayne State University in Detroit, the group aims to combat “racism and white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, heterosexism and transphobia, authoritarianism and imperialism.” Chapters focus on any issue that falls under the rubric of “oppression.” In the past year, members have occupied military recruiting centers, participated in hunger strikes to raise wages for university workers and demonstrated in front of companies that invest in nuclear power plants.

The group’s growth has surprised everyone involved, particularly former members who wondered why students would want to model themselves on an organization that ultimately self-destructed. The original S.D.S. became a major force in the opposition to the Vietnam War and grew to nearly 100,000 members before collapsing in 1969 into radicalized factions. It never quite overcame the perceived homogeneity of its leaders. Most were white, male and upper middle class.

The new S.D.S. is painstakingly self-conscious about its image and inherited failures. Men refrain from speaking for the group; if one interrupts a woman or finishes her sentence, he may be politely reminded of what he has done. There is no national hierarchy, and members coordinate through conference calls — up to 30 people on the line. (There’s a roll call at the start of each conversation.)

A significant number of chapters are not at prestigious universities, which already have a glut of political groups, but at commuter schools, community colleges and high schools, many of which had existed in a political vacuum. Members cite three events — 9/11, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina — in describing what brought them to S.D.S.

The chapter at Queens College has 140 people on its mailing list, a quarter of them Latino. “At a working-class school, we have jobs to go home to at night, so the problems in the government more directly affect the quality of our lives,” says Rachel Haut, a 19-year-old junior. And while most young people view the war in Iraq via remote, on commuter campuses like Queens the military recruits heavily. Ms. Haut’s chapter sets up a table every other week to distribute literature aiming to discourage students from enlisting.

Although the student movements of the ’60s have often been viewed through a veil of mythical romance, their legacy has become particularly relevant in the midst of another unpopular war. Forty years after the events of 1968 — the Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations, the Tet offensive in Vietnam and the Democratic convention in Chicago — the decade is back on the cover of news magazines.

Three books written or edited by former S.D.S. members are coming out this month and next: “Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Anti-War Movement,” by Carl Oglesby; “A Hard Rain Fell: S.D.S. and Why It Failed,” by David Barber; and “Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History,” edited by Paul Buhle.

“I think the sense of powerlessness is so profound right now that to know there was a movement of young people that changed history offers leverage, a sense of confidence,” says Dr. Buhle, a lecturer in American civilization at Brown.

The graphic history, which comes out this week, is written by the comic book author Harvey Pekar. It traces the rise and fall of the first S.D.S. and includes a six-page epilogue, “S.D.S. Revived.”

“While few seemed to be watching,” it begins, “the demography of American youth had shifted dramatically and a new generation of students, more insecure, much more often the children of immigrants, had arrived.” The first panel features a couple kissing on a grassy hill. The second panel, representing the new S.D.S., shows an airplane flying into the World Trade Center while New York City is engulfed in flames.

The epilogue also includes a drawing of Pat Korte, with shaggy hair and big, alarmed eyes. Jessica Rapchik, 19, was the S.D.S. co-founder with Mr. Korte. She says she was surprised that her role goes unmentioned in the book. The omission, she says, points to “larger problems in our society — men being sought out as voices of authority.”

MR. KORTE and Ms. Rapchik, of Chapel Hill, N.C., met on a conference call. Both were active members of an antiwar group in high school. They wanted to be part of an organization that would tackle more enduring issues.

“These problems won’t go away unless you change the entire power structure,” says Ms. Rapchik, now a sophomore at Antioch College. She blames the “dominant hegemonic system.”

Ms. Rapchik’s parents were so opposed to her involvement in a radical organization that they threatened not to help pay for college if she attended the first convention, so she stayed home. Mr. Korte says his father voted for Nixon. “My parents didn’t even know the ’60s happened,” he says.

In search of mentors, the students reached out to the first president of S.D.S., Alan Haber, who is now a woodworker. He and other original members met with the students and offered their old pamphlets and letters. The “old folks,” a k a the “veterans,” attend meetings and marches, help coordinate conferences and provide moral support. When students are arrested, veterans sometimes wait outside the jail with sandwiches.

But some chapters have distanced themselves from the ’60s generation. To Ms. Haut, at Queens College, it is not “productive” to work with “a lot of old white guys arguing about what they should have done.” As it is, the new group devotes a good deal of intellectual energy to self-analysis.

At the second national convention, attended by about 200 members, the students spent a day discussing how not to oppress one another. They split into caucuses based on gender, class, race and sexual orientation.

Nick Kreitman, a junior at Elmhurst College in suburban Chicago, participated in meetings about “Class Privilege,” “White Privilege” and “Hetero-Privilege,” in which, he says, members talked about the danger of coming off as the “liberal savior who is going to instantly solve all their problems.”

Because the ultimate goal is to become a mass movement, S.D.S. members make an effort to appeal to students who wouldn’t necessarily cast themselves as left-wing political activists. One proposal at the convention that was later adopted advocated using “the language of the mainstream” and avoiding “intimidating word choice” — an unintimidating euphemism for leftist buzzwords like “anti-authoritarianism” and “syndicalism.”

Aaron Petcoff, a founding member of the Wayne State chapter, worries about the group becoming a clique. “We can’t just go to the punk places and tell people it’s cool to join S.D.S.,” he says. He consciously recruits for diversity, and his chapter has one Hispanic, two African-American, two Iraqi-American and six white members.

Nationally, membership is predominantly white, and Mr. Petcoff describes himself as fitting “the stereotype of the white, left, activist guy.” He first learned about the group two years ago, when, he recalls, a roommate’s friend told him, “You look like you got drop-kicked out of S.D.S.” He was dressed in “these bell-bottom kind of pants and an olive green army jacket with a big peace sign.” He didn’t know what S.D.S. was, he says. “So I went to the computer and did an image search, which was how I found out the group was being revived.” Soon after, he joined.

AFTER shelving the syntactical problems of the mission statement, the huddle at the New School cafeteria moved on to planning action at the Manhattan office of a New School trustee whose company has military contracts. The students debated whether to demonstrate on the company’s property with a marching band, but the conversation soon digressed into the risk of using e-mail. Some worried that the authorities would read what they wrote. When one student offered that “the federal agencies probably don’t care,” the group ignored him.

Mr. Korte, who lives with three other members on Malcolm X Boulevard in Brooklyn, frequently reminds the group that it is trying to start a movement that will “last for decades,” not just a semester. He asked if anyone felt it was worth it to be arrested at a coming antiwar demonstration. Almost everyone raised a hand.

In the past two years, well over 100 S.D.S. members have been arrested for civil disobedience, including blocking ports in Washington from which military equipment was being shipped to Iraq and demonstrating in front of car dealerships in favor of higher fuel efficiency standards. This fall, the group began participating in the Iraq Moratorium, a series of monthly national antiwar demonstrations modeled after the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium.

Today’s organization has yet to depart significantly from the protest models of the past. Many members say they resent being overshadowed by the S.D.S. of 1968 and argue that their opposition will manifest itself in a way unique to their own generation. Beyond having a new organizing tool in the Internet, it’s unclear what this will look like. Students elegantly critique what’s wrong with the country but struggle to find new ways to channel their disgust.

“They’re blogging against the war, they’re not burning draft cards,” says Tom Hayden, the primary author of the Port Huron Statement, who went on to serve in the California State Senate. A former president of S.D.S., he has met many new members but held back from giving guidance. “The war in Iraq vividly demonstrates that the issues of the ’60s have not gone away,” he says. “But this generation has an identity crisis that it will have to resolve on its own.”

George Bush is coming to Israel this week. He will take pleasure in his visit. One can assume that there are few prime ministers with a giant photo of themselves with the U.S. president hanging on the wall in their home, as our Ehud Olmert boasted last week that he does, to his exalted guest, the comic Eli Yatzpan. There are also few other countries where the lame duck from Washington would not be greeted with mass demonstrations; instead, Israel is making great efforts to welcome him graciously. The man who has wreaked such ruin upon the world, upon his country, and upon us is such a welcome guest only in Israel.

A man is coming to Israel this week who has left a trail of killing, destruction and global hatred. Never has the U.S. been so despised as during Bush’s seven years in office, which abruptly brought his county back to the not-so-merry days of Vietnam.

He led the U.S., and the free world in its wake, into two brutal and completely futile wars of conquest, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. He sowed mass killing in these two wretched countries under the false pretext of a battle against global terror.

But the world after these two wars is not a better world or a safer one. And these two wounded countries feel no gratitude toward the superpower that ostensibly came to emancipate them from their regimes of terror.

There was no connection between the attack on the Twin Towers and Iraq. Saudi Arabia, where most of the terrorists came from, could have been a more appropriate target but it remained an ally of the U.S. despite its despotic regime. The war in Iraq, the rationale for which – the presence of weapons of mass destruction – was revealed to be false, was an atrocious, futile war that is far from being over, even if its daily toll of killing has declined from 100 to 50.

In Western Europe, in South America, in Asia, in all parts of the Arab and Muslim world and in parts of Africa, the sole global superpower has come to be viewed as a hostile, arrogant and ostracized entity. This is not good for America and it is not good for the world.

Closer to home, it is worth remembering the damage Bush has caused to the Middle East. His seven years in power have been wasted years, barren and dangerous. Never has there been a president who gave Israel such an automatic carte blanche and even encouraged it to take violent action, to deepen and entrench the occupation.

This is not friendship with Israel. This is not concern for its future. A president who did not even try to pressure Israel to end the occupation is a president who is hostile to it, indifferent to its future and fate.

A president who endorsed every abomination – from the expansion of settlements to the failure to honor commitments and signed agreements, including those with U.S. such as the passages agreement and the freeze on settlement construction – is not a president who seeks the best for Israel or aspires to peace.

What happened to the days when Israel hesitated before planting another trailer home in the territories or before every liquidation operation out of fear for America’s reaction? What happened to the days when there was a president in Washington who sowed trepidation in Jerusalem before each human rights violation or war crime?

This is all we got from Bush: a more entrenched and brutal occupation with the open, or tacit, encouragement of the U.S.; a green light for another superfluous war in Lebanon; a Hamas government in Gaza, which the U.S., and consequently the rest of the world, is boycotting – a measure that has only led to the starvation of Gaza, while failing to weaken Hamas; and U.S. authorization for “the settlement blocs.”

The Middle East has only moved further away from peace during Bush’s tenure.

His belated and feeble attempts to change this fact have not produced anything. Until a determined president is inaugurated in Washington who will engage in a serious effort to bring an end to the occupation, no peace will prevail here. Bush could have done this, but he abused his office.

A decade ago, the eyes of the world were on Venezuela, as one-time coup leader Hugo Chavez, calling for a Bolivarian revolution, surged ahead in the polls on a platform of social inclusion. And it didn’t take long for an unlikely courter to come a-calling: US tobacco giant Philip Morris was knocking on Chavez’s door, even before his inauguration.

A giant US corporation wooing arguably the Western Hemisphere’s most anti-corporate-America president perhaps seems like an exercise in futility today, but this was back during Chavez’s honeymoon period with the West: Before the International Monetary Fund supported the ephemeral 2002 coup against Chavez, announcing it stood “ready to assist the new administration in whatever manner they find suitable.” Before US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice proclaimed that Chavez was “really, really destroying his own country.” Before Chavez stood in front of the UN General Assembly, crossed himself for protection against George Bush and claimed the US president smelled of sulfur.

Back in 1999, the new Venezuelan administration wasn’t viewed as unfriendly, only unknown. And the US tobacco industry had plenty to gain from friendly relations: the country, along with a bevy of others, was suing the industry for tobacco-related healthcare expenses, and stood to lose should Venezuela ramp up its cigarette taxes, heighten its anti-smuggling efforts or spearhead public health campaigns.

And so the tobacco industry suggested three talking points, according to documents recently uncovered in the Philip Morris Tobacco archive. They would argue that the lawsuit was not winnable; that dropping the lawsuit would separate the Chavez administration from the corrupt governments of the past; and that it would encourage foreign investment in the country.

Lawyers of Philip Morris first approached the Chavez administration soon after the election. At the time, they had been lead to believe that the lame-duck Caldera administration would allow the incoming administration to decide whether or not to file a health care cost recovery suit on behalf of the country. Instead, the Caldera administration filed the suit three days before leaving office, but apparently left the new government no documents related to the case, or at least not any government officials would acknowledge. “We were informed that the outgoing Attorney General, Mr. Nepomuceno Garrido, had left absolutely no files or information regarding his relationship with the [tobacco company’s lawyers] or the filing of the lawsuit,” said a 2000 Philip Morris backgrounder on Venezuela. “Similar inquiries were made with respect to the President’s Office and the Ministry of Health yet no files on the tobacco industry lawsuit could be found.”

Philip Morris stepped up its efforts to convince Venezuela to drop the suit. The company maintained a “steady dialogue” with the Chavez’s Attorney General’s Office and kept it “apprised of significant developments in the foreign sovereign health care cost litigation filed by other Latin American governments.” It also seems to have been working behind the scenes with Congressional offices: an unsigned letter released during discovery in another trial appears to be from a Congressional delegate to Venezuela. The letter focuses on two of the three talking points in Philip Morris’s backgrounder: the suit, the letter said, has no legal basis, and would only serve to discourage foreign investment. “Singling out the US industry in this lawsuit reveals a number of contradictions that will not go unnoticed by US public opinion,” the letter adds, noting that Venezuela receives excise taxes from the tobacco company and that the lawsuit, filed in a US court, ignores the impact of the local tobacco industry.

It’s not clear which Congressional office was responsible for the letter, or if it was ultimately sent. But the letter mentions that the signatory had been part of a December 1999 US Congressional delegation. Nexis contains no news reports for a December delegation, but a January delegation consisted of only four members: Bill Delahunt (D-MA), Mark Souder (R-IN), Sam Farr (D-CA) and former Representative Cass Ballenger (R-NC).

“It would make sense for it to come from the office from North Carolina,” said Ballenger, reached at his home. “But I’m 81 years old, I don’t remember.”

Representative Delahunt and Souder’s offices did not return calls for comment. Tom Mentzer, spokesperson for Farr, said the letter did not originate in the Congressman’s office.

In any case, the Chavez administration was apparently unimpressed by the threats of losing foreign investment or US public esteem. The suit moved forward.

At the time, the suit was only one of a number brought by foreign countries, following on the heals of state-level litigation. Venezuela, like various US states, alleged that “Big Tobacco” had conspired to deceive the government about tobacco’s health risks, and altered cigarettes to make them more dangerous than they would otherwise be. “While Venezuela and its various agencies and institutions are struggling to pay for the health care costs of tobacco, BIG TOBACCO continues to reap millions of dollars in profits from the sale of cigarettes and other products in Venezuela,” says the 1999 complaint. “Venezuela has expended hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in caring for its residents.” The complaint, brought against Philip Morris, RJR, and British American Tobacco, among others, requested “compensatory damages, costs, and other such relief as the court deems appropriate” but did not specify an amount. The compensatory damages included both health care expenses and lost productivity due to tobacco related diseases.

There is some evidence that Venezuelan cigarettes were even more dangerous than their US counterparts. Between October 1960 and January 1961 Philip Morris’s Research and Development Department carried out a series of five tests comparing Venezuelan and US cigarettes. Participants found the Venezuelan cigarettes to be “more irritating” than domestic cigarettes, according to an internal report. Philip Morris subsequently halted the tests, saying in a report that, although “all panel smoking was carried out under extremely low illumination so panelists would not be able to see the printed ‘Venezuela’ on the Venezuela cigarettes,” the company could not be sure that the participants were unable to see the markings in the dark.

The suit jumped between state and federal court before finally landing in Florida’s Third District Court of Appeals. The court curtly dismissed the suit-ultimately no foreign country successfully sued the US tobacco companies-on the grounds that Venezuela didn’t have a right to sue on behalf of its citizens. “Simply, the government of Venezuela does not have a direct independent cause of action against the tobacco companies to recover for smoking-related medical expenses incurred by its citizens,” decided the court. “We add parenthetically, that is inappropriate for Venezuela to attempt to turn Miami-Dade County into the ‘courthouse for the world.'”

Reached for comment, Joel S. Perwin, Venezuela’s appellate lawyer called the court’s “courthouse for the world” comment “gratuitous,” since the case was dismissed for other reasons.

But losing a lawsuit in US courts wasn’t enough to convince the Chavez administration to steer clear of the US tobacco industry. For the tobacco industry, the worst was yet to come: in recent years, Venezuela has raised cigarette taxes, cracked down on tax evasion and broadened public health campaigns.

Venezuela’s government has long had an interest in regulating tobacco. Though the lawsuit alleges that the government would have done more to prevent tobacco usage had it known of the dangers of tobacco, the country was far from passive in its regulation of cigarettes. Taxes were 43 percent of a cigarette’s retail price in Venezuela in 1999, according to the World Bank. In 1990, the country prohibited sales of cigarettes to minors. And cigarette advertising has been banned from radio and television since the early 1980s. The country’s policies appear to have been effective: in 1999 Venezuela was home to 5 percent of Latin America’s population, but only consumed 2 percent of its cigarettes, according to the World Bank.

In 2003 and 2004, the Chavez administration took the previous administration’s already relatively stringent anti-smoking efforts a step further, announcing policies to ramp up Venezuela’s tax collection efforts. Among other moves Seniat, the country’s tax collection agency, declared a “zero evasion” policy. Though the broad based tax collection crackdown did not exclusively target the cigarette industry-among other groups IBM and Coca-Cola’s Venezuela branches and were temporarily closed-tobacco companies didn’t escape Venezuela’s new adherence to tax law. Eudomar Tovar, Venezuela’s Vice Minister of Finance, singled the tobacco industry out for criticism, saying that tax evasion robbed government coffers of almost $72 million annually. And last September, Alí Padrón, president of the sub-commission against customs fraud’s cigarette and tobacco sector, announced that it had snuffed out a significant portion of the tax evasion, cutting the number of smuggled cigarettes by more than half.

More recently, Venezuela took a direct swipe at the tobacco industry’s pocket book. In October, the country raised the excise tax on cigarettes from 50 to 70 percent, and mandated that all cigarettes sold in Venezuela-eventually including those in free-trade zones-be subject to the tax. The government estimates that the new tax will result in additional revenues of about $180 million. In 1999, the World Bank estimated Venezuela collected about $300 million annual cigarette tax.

In addition to increased taxes, the Chavez administration has also pursued a three-pronged strategy to decrease smoking in the country, providing more public education, increasing public access to smoking cessation programs, and limiting the areas in which Venezuelans can smoke.

In March 2005, cigarette packages in Venezuela became more graphic. Though cigarette packages had had warnings since 1978, the entire front of a package now consists of a picture representing the effects of smoking, such as rotting teeth or a foot with a toe tag and one of ten warnings, including “smoking causes impotence in men” and “smoking causes bad breath, loss of molars, and mouth cancer.” One of the sides of the box also contains health warnings.

Venezuela has also begun providing free medical care for people trying to quit smoking. Last August, the Health Ministry announced it had started 43 clinics to help people stop smoking and had trained more than 420 doctors who specialize in smoking cessation techniques. Venezuelans can participate in these programs free of charge. Earlier this year, the Ministry announced that the government paid almost $2800 per participant. “We’re providing treatment, completely free, to people who have voluntarily decided to quit their addiction, including giving out patches, gum, and other things that allow them to get better,” announced then-Health Minister Erick Rodríguez.

And the country has made it harder to light up. Earlier this year, the Health Ministry announced a ban on smoking in restaurants.

But despite the Chavez administration’s interest in tobacco industry, the industry has won at least one recent battle. Last May, Health Minister Rodríguez was widely quoted as saying Venezuela was preparing to ban domestic production of tobacco, leaving smokers to consume the more expensive, foreign cigarettes. The next day he appeared on state television, saying his words had been taken out of context and that the government was planning no such ban. Three days later Chavez announced Rodríguez resigned, citing personal reasons.

Margo Tamez recently sent out the following urgent call for support, explaining that since July, her Mother and Elders of el Calaboz, Texas, have been the targets of numerous threats and harassments by the Border Patrol, Army Corps of Engineers, NSA, and the U.S. related to the proposed building of a fence on their levee.

The NSA, for one, has been specifically demanding that Elders give up their lands for the levee–telling them that they will have to travel a distance of 3 miles to go through checkpoints, to walk, recreate, and to farm and herd goats and cattle ON THEIR OWN LANDS.

Margo’s mother just informed her that since last Monday the Army Corps of Engineers, Border Patrol and National Security Agency teams have been tracking down and enclosing upon the people; telling them that they have no choice: “the wall is going on these lands whether you like it or not, and you have to sell your land to the U.S.”

Margo asks that you Please help the elders and indigenous women land title holders resist forced occupation in their own lands! As a start, you can do so by sharing this information to your friends and networks. (more to follow.)

If you would like to contact Margo for more information, you can email her at mtamez@wsu.edu