The Rag Blog

It has been 21 months since John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt published their article “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” in The London Review of Books and four months since their publication of a book by the same name. Their main arguments are that unconditional U.S. support for the Israeli government has harmed U.S. interests in the Middle East and that American organizations allied with the Israeli government have been the primary influence regarding the orientation of U.S. Middle East policy. As a political scientist and international relations scholar specializing in the United States role in the Middle East, I certainly had no disagreements with their first contention. I took strong exception to their second, however.

There is no denying that the Israel Lobby can be quite influential, particularly on Capitol Hill and in its role in limiting the broader public debate. However, I found it incredibly naïve to assume that U.S. policy in the Middle East would be significantly different without AIPAC and like-minded pro-Zionist organizations. In response to what I saw as a rather simplistic and reductionist understanding of U.S. foreign policy by these prominent center-right international relations scholars, I wrote the article The Israel Lobby: How Powerful is It Really?

While most the criticisms of Mearsheimer and Walt’s article came from right-wing apologists of the Israeli government, many long-time critics of U.S. support for Israeli occupation, repression, colonization and related policies against their neighbors raised concerns as well. My article became one of the more widely-circulated and detailed critiques from the left.

My analysis drew profoundly negative reaction from those who insisted that it was not oil interests, military contractors, ideological imperialists, and related powerful sectors of America’s ruling class who were responsible for the U.S. invasion of Iraq and other tragic manifestations of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, but was instead the responsibility of a rich cabal of Jews who manipulated the Bush administration to engage in policies it would not have otherwise supported. I was denounced for propagating left-wing “lies” and “myths” by examining some of the broader structural, ideological, economic and institutional inherencies in U.S. foreign policy instead of acknowledging that it was all the fault of the Jews.

Just as the hysterical reaction from right-wing Zionist circles seemed to some to vindicate Mearsheimer and Walt’s arguments that an all-powerful Israel Lobby stifles legitimate debate about U.S. policy toward Israel and the broader Middle East, the reaction to my critique seemed to some to vindicate the notion that those who put the blame on the Israel Lobby are prone to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Mearsheimer and Walt’s book certainly does not fall into the anti-Semitic rants of many of their supporters. Like their original article, however, the book is still fundamentally flawed.

Simplistic Understanding

The Israel Lobby is seemingly powerful because it converges with more powerful interests driving U.S. policy, particularly the drive for hegemonic domination of the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Even when the Lobby was significantly weaker than it is now, U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East was the largely the same.

Mearsheimer and Walt, along with their defenders, fail to make the distinction between the undeniable impact the Lobby has had on limiting debate regarding U.S. policy toward Israel and the assertion that it is the major defining force behind U.S. policy in the Middle East. As Professor Joseph Massad at Columbia University – who has been subjected to vicious attacks from right-wing Zionist groups – puts it, the Israel Lobby is responsible for “the details and intensity but not the direction, content, or impact of such policies.” Indeed, as I pointed out in my original article, U.S. policy toward both Israel/Palestine and the region as a whole is quite consistent with U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America, Southern Africa, Southeast Asia and elsewhere. The consequences are more serious for Americans at home (for example, no Vietnamese or Nicaraguans ever flew airplanes into buildings), but they are not fundamentally different.

Any serious review of U.S. foreign policy in virtually every corner of the globe demonstrates how the United States props up dictatorships, imposes blatant double-standards regarding human rights and international law, supports foreign military occupations (witness East Timor and Western Sahara), undermines the authority of the UN, pushes for military solutions to political problems, transfers massive quantities of armaments, imposes draconian austerity programs on debt-ridden countries through international financial institutions, and periodically bombs, imposes sanctions, stages coups, and invades countries that don’t accept U.S. hegemony. If U.S. policy toward the Middle East was fundamentally different than it has been toward the rest of the world, Mearsheimer and Walt would have every right to look for some other sinister force leading the United States astray from its otherwise benign foreign policy agenda.

In many respects, their argument is nothing new. A small group of former State Department officials and former Republican congressmen at such publications as the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and organizations like the Center for the National Interest shares Mearsheimer and Walt’s critique of U.S. Middle East policy and their failure to acknowledge the nature of America’s hegemonic designs in the region and beyond. As political scientist Asad AbuKhalil – the self-described “angry Arab” currently serving as a visiting professor at the University of California in Berkeley – describes it, such analysis “absolves the Bush administration, any administration, from any responsibility because they become portrayed as helpless victims of an all-powerful lobby.”

I have been familiar with the work of Mearsheimer and Walt for many years. Professor Mearsheimer and I both received our doctorates from Cornell University’s Department of Government (which, incidentally, did not offer a single course dealing with the Middle East.) They are considered two of the countries leading scholars in the field of international relations from the “realist” tradition. While I do not believe they are motivated by a conscious anti-Semitism or any innate hostility toward Israel, their perspective has nevertheless been compromised by another kind of ideological bias.

As political scientists, Mearsheimer and Walt should recognize that American foreign policy is a result of a complex mix of ideological prejudices, bureaucratic processes, domestic politics, group-think, and more. The interplay of these different factors has been the subject of some of the most acclaimed studies of the discipline, including Graham Allison’s Essence of Decision, regarding the decision-making within the Kennedy administration during the Cuban missile crisis (which, ironically, is the first book Stephen Walt reportedly read as a graduate student at Berkeley.)

Putting most of the blame on the Israel Lobby is reductionism at its worst, taking just one vector of power and influence and turning into a monocausal theory. It is overly simplistic in that it embraces a naively pluralistic understanding of political power, denying the deeper power structures that drive U.S. policy in the Middle East. Indeed, I wish their analysis were correct, since a single, powerful lobby would be a much simpler problem to overcome.

Both authors blindly accept a number of naíve and demonstrably false assumptions regarding America’s role in the world. For example, they assert that the foreign policy of the United States — the world’s number one arms supplier for dictatorial regimes — “…is designed to promote democracy abroad” and the U.S. effort to spread democracy throughout the Middle East “has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion.” The reality, of course, is just the opposite: it has been U.S. support for the majority of the dictatorships in that part of the world that has primarily contributed to anti-American sentiment.

According to the disturbing nativism implied in Mearsheimer and Walt’s thesis, foreigners and those allied to their interest by ethnic or ideological connections undermine the benign instincts of America’s leaders. In doing so, the two analysts create an artificial duality with the Israel lobby on one side and U.S. national interest on the other. As such, if the pursuit of certain policies ends up being bad for the United States, it must have been the result of those with ulterior motives forcing American leaders to do so, not the well-documented hubris of the current administration. In defense of Bush, whom they insist has “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” they ignore his stubborn resistance to any facts that contradict his rigid ideological convictions, his choice to ignore public opinion calling for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and other changes in policies, and his dismissal of the opinions of allies whose support is so crucially needed in these dangerous times.

Iraq

In an article published four weeks prior to the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the monthly magazine Tikkun, I predicted that sooner or later, the American public would realize that a U.S. invasion of Iraq had been a disaster. I also argued that there might be some in the foreign policy establishment who would revert to the time-honored tradition of blaming the Jews as a means of deflecting attention away from those who really have power in order to avoid a critical re-evaluation of America’s role in the world.

Sure enough, as public opinion polls show more and more Americans are recognizing that the Iraq War was essentially about oil, Mearsheimer and Walt – in defense of the foreign policy establishment they have served so well – are eager to shift attention toward nefarious foreign-influenced forces as being responsible for the Bush administration’s disastrous decision to invade and occupy Iraq. In reality, however, while guilty of advocating many immoral, illegal and dangerous policies over the years, the Israel Lobby was not a major factor in the decision to go to war.

Not only have there been a plethora of books and articles on the decision-making in the lead-up to the war in which it appears that Israel was not a major factor, it has since been revealed that then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon specifically warned Bush against occupying Iraq or invading Iraq without an exit strategy. The Israeli prime minister also feared that an insurgency could radicalize the region and spill over Iraq’s borders. Israeli Ambassador to the United States Danny Ayalon was even instructed by Sharon to tell visiting Israelis not to encourage a U.S. invasion of Iraq for fear that its likely failure would be blamed on Israel. Israeli officials also warned the Bush administration that invading Iraq could destabilize the region, in large part due to concern that it would strengthen Iran, which the Israelis considered the primary threat. For example, in a visit to Washington in February 2002, both Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his Defense Minister Fouad Ben-Eliezer emphasized their concern that “Iran is more dangerous than Iraq.”

Indeed, as far back as the aftermath of the 1991 war, the head of the Israeli military intelligence revealed in an interview that Iraq was no longer a threat to Israel.

Interestingly, Mearsheimer and Walt acknowledge that the Israelis were initially skeptical about the administration’s obsession with “regime change” in Iraq, and they present very little evidence of active support by the Lobby for the war. At most, they point out that mainstream U.S. Zionist leaders “refused to speak out.” Indeed, a careful reading of their book reveals that they present no real evidence that Israel was the principal backer of long-planned invasion. Israeli officials came on board only after the decision had been made, apparently with the promise that Iran would become the next target. In other words, the Israeli government and the Israel Lobby were willing to use their clout to help their friends in the White House garner support from the public and Congress for a decision which the Bush administration had already made on its own. Given Bush’s strong support for Israel’s acts of aggression, they were willing to return the favor. This is very different, however, than somehow being responsible for the decision itself.

The Role of Neoconservatives

Mearsheimer and Walt highlight what they claim to be the affinity for Israel by influential neo-conservatives as a major factor in the U.S. decision to invade Iraq. In particular, they cite the efforts of the neo-cons behind the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). In reality, however, those who made up PNAC and other neo-conservatives opposed Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq because they feared it would challenge U.S. hegemony in the region, which was always their priority. For example, in the introduction to the influential 2000 PNAC report Rebuilding America’s Defenses, they explicitly spelled out the neo-conservative agenda: “At present the United States faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and expand this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.” The strong support by PNAC members and other neo-cons of Israel only goes as far as they see American and Israeli interests converging. They have not been major supporters of Israel, for example, when the right-wing has not been in power there. And even under the rightist prime minister Ariel Sharon, most Israeli government officials – with a few notable exceptions – saw Israel’s political and strategic interests at odds with the grandiose American neo-conservative designs on Iraq.

Indeed, the Defense Guidance Plan of 1992, rejected by the senior Bush administration as being too extreme but adopted in large part by his son’s administration, also makes clear that the primary concerns of the neo-conservatives was advancing U.S. hegemony, not supporting Israel. The role for Israel, at least under its right-wing governments, was as an important ally in that struggle for American primacy in the Middle East and beyond, but not the main focus, which they spelled out quite clearly: “In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the preeminent outside power in the region and preserve US and Western access to the region’s oil.”

The evolution of PNAC is based on – in the words of their initial statement of principles – “A Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.” Throughout the group’s published statements, American primacy, not Israeli primacy, is their focus. Mearsheimer and Walt cite the 1996 paper written for a right-wing Israeli think tank by two leading American Jewish neo-cons – Douglas Feith and David Wurmser – which encouraged Israel to make a “clean break” with the Oslo Peace Process and rely more on force to advance its objectives, including the removal of Saddam Hussein. However, if one actually reads the paper, it is a clear call for Israel to break from the U.S.-led peace process and the perceived restraints on Israeli actions by the U.S. government, then under the leadership of the more moderate Clinton administration. It was not a call for the United States to take risky initiatives at the behest of Israel. Similarly, the paper demonstrates how, rather than being a case of the Israelis getting the neo-cons to pressure the United States to change its policies to a more hard-line position, it was American neo-cons pressuring Israel to change its policies to a more hard-line position.

The people behind PNAC and other neo-conservatives were indeed allied with more traditional conservatives like former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney to push the United States to take a more assertive position in the region. This was not in support of Israel, but to establish “full spectrum dominance” by the United States over any international or regional rival, in the Middle East or anywhere else. For example, Feith, frequently cited as someone supposedly willing to put Israel’s interests ahead of America’s, used his post as under-secretary of defense for policy during the first term of the Bush administration to sanction and eventually order the purge of top Israeli Defense officials, over the protests of the Israeli government, for their decision to upgrade Harpy drones for China, which the Bush administration deemed a threat to U.S. strategic dominance in East Asia.

In any case, the neo-conservatives were not nearly as “profoundly important” as Mearsheimer and Walt pretend they are in shaping U.S. Middle East policy under the current Bush administration. Their primary role has been to provide the intellectual framework and rationalizations for policies – motivated by a number of strategic, economic and ideological factors – that would likely have been pursued in any case.
Indeed, one of the major fallacies of Walt and Mearsheimer’s book is the assumption that access and connections equal control over policy. For example, they describe in detail the activities of pro-Israel think tanks like the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), emphasizing how WINEP has employed a number of former government officials. They are unclear as to how these activities translate into influence on policy, however, or how this translates into influence on the president or secretary of state, or any other key decision-maker. An influential group may convince a president to appoint one of their people to an assistant secretary position in the Defense Department or State Department, but that doesn’t mean they control policy, which is ultimately determined by the president and others at the top, who make their decisions based on what they – rightly or wrongly – believe to be in the best interest of the United States.

Other Middle East Policies

There are also serious questions regarding Mearsheimer and Walt’s argument that, were the Lobby not so powerful, U.S. policy toward the region would somehow be “more temperate,” as if the United States has pursued temperate policies in Central America, Southeast Asia, and other regions where perceived strategic, geopolitical and economic interests were at stake. For example, they insist that without the Lobby, “the United States would almost certainly have a different and more effective Iran Policy,” ignoring the Bush administration’s propensity to take similarly rigid and uncompromising posture toward Cuba and other so-called “rogue states.”

Mearsheimer and Walt blame U.S. support for Israel’s war on Lebanon during the summer of 2006 as another example of the Lobby’s power, ignoring that it was the United States that pushed Israel to attack Lebanon in the first place as a proxy war against Iran and Syria. Indeed, the desperate effort by the Bush administration to blame the Iranian and Syrian governments for the conflict illustrates that U.S. support for the Israeli offensive – which ended up being a major strategic setback for the Israelis – was motivated primarily by perceived U.S. regional interests than by concern for Israel’s right to self-defense.

Similarly, a strong case can be made that the United States’ unremitting hostility toward Hamas playing any role in Palestinian self-governance is less a reflection of the power of the Lobby than, as with the case of Hezbollah in Lebanon, it is of the U.S. obsession with preventing any anti-American Islamist group in the Middle East from exercising effective governance.

There is no question that the Israel Lobby has worked hard and largely successfully to garner congressional support, even from otherwise liberal Democrats, to support the Bush administration in its policies towards Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. However, Mearsheimer and Walt have yet to make a convincing case that the Bush administration’s policies towards these and other Middle Eastern countries would be very different without it.

The Lobby and Israel Policy

As I acknowledged in my original article, the Israel Lobby is far more influential regarding U.S. policy toward Israel than in the broader Middle East, but Mearsheimer and Walt grossly exaggerate their role regarding U.S.-Israeli relations as well.

The authors are particularly inaccurate in their assessment regarding the influence of the Lobby on the executive branch, which is primarily responsible for foreign policy, where lobbyists of all kinds tend to have less influence than they do in Congress. For example, the two presidents who most dramatically shifted U.S. policy in a more “pro-Israel” direction were Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, who were less dependent on Jewish voters and campaign contributions from pro-Israel Political Action Committees (PACs) and individuals than any modern presidents. Nixon’s tilt toward Israel was a result of his belief that that country, having proven itself more powerful than any combination of Arab armies in the 1967 war, would be an important Cold War asset. In a similar vein, Bush has seen Israel’s right-wing government as a natural ally in his “war on terror.”

The U.S.-Israeli alliance is based primarily on strategic considerations rather than a powerful lobby. In my original critique, I cited a number of examples illustrating that whenever the president has deemed U.S. interests to be at variance with Israeli interests, U.S. national interest has prevailed. More recent examples include President Bush successfully blocking Israel’s lucrative plan to upgrade Venezuela’s F-16 fighters and his refusal to provide massive financial “compensation” for Israel’s disengagement from the occupied Gaza Strip and possible further disengagements from the West Bank.

Of course, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and related groups have been primarily responsible for Congress passing a number of resolutions by overwhelming bipartisan majorities every session declaring its support for particular Israeli policies, including defending and covering up for blatant Israeli violations of international humanitarian law. However, virtually all of these are non-binding resolutions. When AIPAC has tried to get Congress to force the president’s hand through binding legislation – such as the periodic attempts mandating that the United States move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – they almost always fail.

One of the major arguments regarding the supposed power of the Lobby is through the contributions of its allied political action committees (PAC). In 2006, “pro-Israel” PACs and individuals are estimated to have contributed more than $9 million to party coffers and Congressional campaigns. While that is certainly a significant amount, it ranks significantly below that of PACs and individuals supporting the interests of lawyers ($58 million), retirees ($36 million), the real estate industry ($33 million), health professionals ($32 million), securities and investment firms ($29 million), the insurance industry ($21 million), commercial banks ($16 million), the pharmaceutical industry ($14 million), electrical utilities ($12 million), the oil and gas industry ($11 million), and the computer industry ($10 million), among others. Even contributions given in support of unions representing public sector workers, the building trades, and transportation workers each were significantly higher than the total contributions given in support of the Israeli government. Indeed, if political contributions made that big a difference, one would assume that – given that nine of the top 20 PACs are affiliated with labor unions – U.S. government policy would be solidly behind working people and far more hostile to the interests of powerful corporations. In any case, with rare exceptions, PACs allied with the Israel Lobby generally do not contribute more than 10% of the total amount raised by a given campaign.

True, there are cases when members of Congress critical of unconditional U.S. support for Israeli policies lost re-election bids – such as Rep. Paul Findley and Rep. Cynthia McKinney. But, as I illustrated in my original article there were other far more significant sources of support for opponents and reasons for their defeat than the “pro-Israel” PACs. Furthermore, it is important to note that the vast majority of House members who refuse to follow AIPAC’s line are easily re-elected. For example, every Democratic member of Congress who refused to support the July 2006 House resolution supporting Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, subjected to vigorous lobbying by AIPAC, was re-elected by a larger margin than they were two years earlier.

It is also important to recognize the broad array of interests that find it advantageous to exaggerate the Lobby’s power. Some members of Congress and their aides want to deflect criticism from progressive constituents opposed to their support for the occupation and other Israeli policies. Some foreign service officers want to do the same to foreign leaders by making the U.S. government appear to be a hostage to special interests beyond the administration’s control. There are also the constituent components of the Lobby itself, which find it useful for fundraising purposes and as a means of intimidating members of Congress. There are Jews who find the idea of having such power and influence a liberating antidote to centuries of oppression. And, of course, there are bigots who find the exaggeration of Jewish power and influence a highly-effective means of spreading their anti-Semitic ideology.

As a result, while it is important to acknowledge where the Israel Lobby does indeed have clout, it is also important to be wary of the multiplicity of reasons why so many people would, consciously or unconsciously, tend to overstate its influence.

Consistency in Policy

A number of examples given by Mearsheimer and Walt regarding the unique influence of the Israel Lobby when, examined more closely, do not appear to be unique at all.

One example they give of the Lobby’s supposed power was the failure of the Bush administration to more harshly criticize the Israeli government for ordering a missile strike on the home of a Hamas leader in June 2003. Yet, U.S. support for the assassinations of alleged terrorist leaders is not a policy that comes about as a result of Israeli influence. For example, earlier that year, the U.S. government itself ordered a missile attack on an automobile in Yemen that killed an alleged al-Qaeda leader and five others.

Mearsheimer and Walt also claim that the failure of the United States to follow through on previous U.S. commitments to enforce a promised Israeli freeze on its illegal settlements in the West Bank was a response to pressure by the Lobby, ignoring the fact that the United States has never pressured Turkey, Morocco, or Indonesia to freeze their settlements in their occupied territories, which are also illegal.

The authors try to make the case that more moderate elements within the administration, such as Secretary of State Powell, lost out to hardliners like Cheney and Rumsfeld on policy decisions involving Israel as a result of pressure from the Israel Lobby. Rather than being proof of the power of the Lobby, however, it is more accurately just one of many examples in which Powell came out on the losing end of power struggles within the administration, most of which involved issues unrelated to Israel. In addition, the authors fail to consider that Cheney and Rumsfeld might have been motivated by their own ideological preconceptions.

This underscores another major fallacy of Mearsheimer and Walt: their claim that, “For past several decades, the centerpiece of U.S. Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel.” Any serious look at U.S. diplomatic history in the region, however, underscores the primacy of access to Persian Gulf oil as well as support for strategic allies – of which Israel is perceived to be the most important, but not the only one – to counter Communist and left-wing nationalist forces in earlier decades and, more recently, anti-American Islamic extremism. Instead of recognizing that the United States uses Israel to strengthen its domination of the region, however, Mearsheimer and Walt insist that it is the other way around. In one sense, it is not an either/or proposition. As the leftist Israeli journalist Uri Avnery put is, “The U.S. uses Israel to dominate the Middle East, Israel uses the U.S. to dominate Palestine.” It is a quid pro quo the United States is quite willing to accept. Mearsheimer and Walt are essentially correct in observing that the United States doesn’t gain much by Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. But history shows it hasn’t actually significantly hurt U.S. relations with its Arab allies, who are quite willing to give lip service to the Palestinian cause but see maintaining a close strategic relationship with the United States as more important. While Mearsheimer and Walt are certainly correct that U.S. support for the Israeli government has greatly harmed popular perceptions of the United States within the Arab and Islamic world and has contributed to the rise of anti-American extremism, the failure of the U.S. government to be more sensitive to this fact is more a reflection of the longstanding historic tendency to downplay the importance of the masses relative to their governments than an example of the Israel Lobby somehow forcing the United States to pursue policies against its own interests.

Corporate Influences in Israel Policy

In their lengthy book, Mearsheimer and Walt largely ignore the influence of the military-industrial complex in the close U.S.-Israeli relationship. For example, the authors note that “The US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such to-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets…,” with the assumption that this is the result of the Israel Lobby. They fail to mention, however, that Sikorsky, manufacturers of Black Hawk helicopters, lobbied vigorously for these arms transfers and that Lockheed Martin, manufacturer of the F-16s and the nation’s largest defense contractor, donated more than $1 million to the campaigns of members of relevant Congressional committees alone. Both companies have a “revolving door” relationship with Pentagon, as former top procurement officers are immediately offered lucrative jobs upon their retirement to lobby their former colleagues.

Mearsheimer and Walt downplay this role of American arms manufacturers by noting that Israel is allowed to spend up to one-quarter of its military aid domestically. However, even that 75% is far more than any other country receives. Even “domestic” Israeli arms production involves the purchase of American parts and includes lucrative partnerships with American firms. Furthermore, this U.S. military assistance to Israel makes it possible for the United States to then sell arms to Arab countries concerned about countering perceived strategic vulnerabilities as a result of Israeli procurement of American armaments.

The combined U.S. foreign aid currently provided to the governments of Egypt and Colombia, which – like the Israeli government – engage in serious human rights abuses, is close to the amount of aid received by the Israeli government. Yet neither of these two countries has a massive lobby working on its behalf or an influential ethnic community that identifies with those states.

It is also important to note that the United States spends far more money to fund its far-flung bases in the Arab world than it does to support Israel and that Americans spend 50 times as much annually on the war in Iraq than on aid to Israel.
Similarly, while the authors are quick to note how a number of think tanks supportive of a militaristic U.S. policy have a disproportionate number of Jews in influential positions, they fail to mention that their boards of directors also include non-Jewish representatives from major arms manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Cypress International, which presumably have other motivations for supporting a militaristic U.S. policy in the Middle East.

The Role of Ideology

Another factor overlooked by Mearsheimer and Walt is the role of ideology and prejudice. Most detailed studies of the Bush White House, for example, reveal that the president has a genuine ideological affinity with Israel, which he has spoken of publicly on a number of occasions. And such a bias is not just among right-wing fundamentalist Christians like Bush.

The sentimental attachment many Americans – particularly liberals of the post-World War II generation – have for Israel should not be underestimated and goes a long way in explaining why so many otherwise liberal members of Congress and other influential left-of-center voices take positions that even within Israel itself would be considered to be on the right-wing of the political spectrum. There is a great appreciation for Israel’s internal democracy, progressive social institutions (such as the kibbutzim), the relatively high level of social equality, and Israel’s important role as a sanctuary for an oppressed minority group that spent centuries in the Diaspora. Through a mixture of guilt regarding Western anti-Semitism, personal friendships with Jewish Americans who identify strongly with Israel, and fear of inadvertently encouraging anti-Semitism by criticizing Israel, American liberals show an enormous reluctance to acknowledge the seriousness of Israeli violations of human rights and international law. Many American liberals of this generation have an idealist view of Israel that is both as sincere and inaccurate as the idealized view of Stalin’s Russia embraced by an earlier generation of American leftists or that of various Third World revolutionary regimes by many in my generation. To many Americans who are middle aged and older, Israel is still seen as it was portrayed in the idealized and romanticized 1960 movie Exodus, starring a young Paul Newman.

Contributing to this view is the widespread racism in American society against Arabs and Muslims, often encouraged in the media. Such racist attitudes toward Arab and Muslim peoples (i.e., the only language they understand is force), particularly since 9/11, is a phenomenon that – while certainly encouraged by elements of the Israel Lobby – has unfortunately been deeply rooted in American society, and Western culture in general, for centuries. This is compounded by the identification many Americans have with Zionism in the Middle East as a reflection of their own historical experience in North America as immigrants and pioneers. In both cases, European migrants – many of whom were escaping religious persecution – built a new a nation based upon noble, idealistic values while simultaneously suppressing and expelling the indigenous population seen as violent and “primitive.” The strong identification Americans have with Israel, then, is less the fact that it is a Jewish state as it is perceived as a Western state.

The exaggerated view of the power of the Lobby also becomes self-fulfilling. Peace and human rights activists and their organizations tend to be far more forgiving of Democratic candidates who take right-wing positions regarding Israel than they do of any other issue because they have come to believe these candidates are supposedly powerless to stand up to the Lobby and therefore should be absolved of any responsibility. As a result, since these politicians do not have to worry about pressure from the other direction, giving in to the demands of the Lobby becomes the path of least resistance. This is why quotes by leaders of the Lobby used by Mearsheimer and Walt to illustrate their supposed influence, rather than providing proof of their power, are more likely deliberate hyperbole to scare off challenges.

Before the Lobby even bothers to mobilize around a particular issue, pre-emptive censorship takes place. For example, host organizations have canceled scheduled events on the excuse that they might result in protests from the Jewish community, even in cases where no organized opposition had yet emerged. Recent examples include the postponement of the play “My Name is Rachel Corrie” by the New York Theater Workshop; the cancellation of an appearance at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs by Mearsheimer and Walt; the cancellation of a speech by former South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu at St. Thomas University in Minneapolis; and the denial of venue of a scheduled concert by Lebanese folk musician Marcel Khalife by the Joan Kroc Theater in San Diego. In each case, the sponsoring or hosting organization did not buckle to protests, but made their decision based simply on private concerns expressed by certain members of the Jewish community about the possibility that there would be protests.

The Default Explanation

In Mearsheimer and Walt’s world view, the Israel Lobby becomes the default explanation for every wrong turn the United States has made in the Middle East. They have a hard time accepting the possibility that those who have led the United States into these tragic misadventures could be acting out of sincere, however seriously misguided, conviction.

Given that their flawed arguments have already gotten far more support and attention than they deserve – with their book on bestseller lists and their being granted major forums in towns and cities across the country – it is ironic that they insist they have been “stifled.” Nor do they acknowledge that forums that have denied them a podium may have chosen to do so because they recognize that their work is fundamentally flawed and not because of pressure from the Lobby.

The fact that so many people have so easily bought into Mearsheimer and Walt’s transparently superficial arguments may be indicative of a subtle but pervasive anti-Semitism in American society, even among supposed progressives. Or perhaps it’s just a kind of naive liberalism that finds it psychologically more comfortable to blame immoral, irrational, and dangerous policies on a small group of bad guys rather than take a more systemic, radical critique of the nature of U.S. imperialism. Of course, the same kind of simple-minded, superficial arguments have been leveled against Mearsheimer and Walt. Abraham Foxman’s reply, The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control is an even worse piece of analysis.

There is no question that the Israel Lobby is one important factor influencing U.S. policy in the Middle East, particularly regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is not, however, the only factor or the most important factor.

There is also no question that the Israel Lobby has made informed debate on U.S. support for Israeli policy far more difficult than it would be otherwise and, as a result, has made it much harder for peace and human rights activists to make as much headway in challenging U.S. policy as we would otherwise be able to do. However, while this is certainly not insignificant, this is very different than the assertion of Mearsheimer and Walt that U.S. policy would be considerably more enlightened without the Lobby’s influence.

Their book and article and the debate surrounding them has been a distraction from the serious re-evaluation of U.S. Middle East policy so desperately needed.

Stephen Zunes is Middle East editor for Foreign Policy in Focus. He is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and chair of its Middle East Studies program.

Three quarters of the world’s countries have signed an international agreement to ban antipersonnel landmines. The Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty – to never again use, produce, acquire, or export these so-called “hidden killers” of civilians – reached its 10th anniversary this month. But the United States is still not a signatory.

Unfortunately this “just say no” approach to international treaties has become a pattern for the US, especially under the Bush administration. This trend must change. The president’s successor should make it a high priority for the US to rejoin the world and reassume the country’s role as a globally respected leader.

In some cases the rationale for US opposition is tied to security, economic, or legal considerations. But in all cases the unifying principle behind the Bush administration’s refusal to join these treaties seems to be ideological – not wanting to encumber the US with further international obligations or to constrain America’s freedom of action.

This “America unbound” approach is making the US the odd man out on critical global issues. In March of this year, a new human rights treaty was opened for signature at the United Nations, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The convention would ensure that people around the world with disabilities enjoy the same rights as everyone else to equal protection before the law, and in work and education opportunities.

Entry into force of the new treaty would give those disabled by land mines – an estimated 473,000 people worldwide – as well as others injured by weapons of war an important boost in their efforts to rebuild shattered lives.

The treaty had the largest number of first-day signatories in the history of the UN – 81. Today that number is 119. The US is not one of them.

Nor was the US a participant at a conference concluded this month in Vienna. Some 130 nations attended to consider an international treaty banning cluster bombs, which “cause unacceptable harm to civilians.” Once dropped, these munitions scatter hundreds of bomblets over a wide area. Many don’t explode (the failure rate is up to 30 percent) and instead linger on as de facto land mines.

The use of these weapons is rising, as is the civilian toll. In the 2006 “summer war” in Lebanon, UN officials estimate, the Israeli military dropped at least 1.2 million cluster bomblets on southern Lebanon, most of them manufactured in the US. Human Rights Watch says the munitions have killed or injured more than 250 people in Lebanon since then.

Instead of sending delegates to the Vienna meeting, the Bush administration says it will seek to regulate the use of cluster munitions in another forum known as the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). Described by The Economist as “a ponderous process, going on since 1980,” the CCW normally takes years to produce results, if then.

Ironies abound in this record of the US standing aside from international attempts to establish legally binding norms and obligations to safeguard civilians from the effects of war and its aftermath. Although not a signatory to the land-mine ban, the US is the largest financial contributor for land-mine clearing and victim assistance around the world. The UN convention to protect the rights of the disabled is patterned after landmark legislation first passed by the US in 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act.

But perhaps the greatest irony is that the US is missing the opportunity to take credit for much of the good that it does around the world. Instead of garnering appreciation, the US engenders resentment for its continued practice of “American exceptionalism.”

That resentment spilled over at the recent Bali conference on global warming, where obstructionist tactics by the US delegation were met by boos from other delegates and a threatened European boycott of the Bush administration’s climate conference in Hawaii next month. With the diplomatic equivalent of a gun to its head, the US showed a bit more flexibility. But it remained adamant in its refusal to join a global pact to cut greenhouse-gas pollution. Instead, the US said these goals should be “aspirational.”

“Just saying no” is not the kind of leadership that many expect of the US, either at home or abroad. By joining other countries to establish mutually binding agreements, the US could seize the opportunity to demonstrate that it is truly committed to working with the international community to solve global problems.

War tax resistance is far from a new idea. But there is a bold initiative brewing that has an elegantly simple new angle: There is safety in numbers. The idea is to get people to sign a pledge that they will engage in civil disobedience by withholding a percentage of their taxes, but only if a critical mass of 100,000 signers is reached by April 15, 2008.

Activists have spent long hours pushing for election reform, marching in the streets, and engaging in other forms of civil disobedience against the Iraq war with seemingly no effect, so clearly a different tack is needed. The “I’ll jump if you will” approach to war tax resistance just might work.

My friend Jodie Evans, cofounder of Code Pink, is one of those people who live on the barricades, sleep little, and dedicate most every waking moment to social change. Her material desires take a backseat to her convictions, and the ragged pink mules she has worn for years as part of her Code Pink identity are the laughingstock of her friends. She has been arrested more times than she can count and has been at the epicenter of many of the most effective and mediagenic progressive campaigns of the past several decades.

But Jodie is also at home in the most rarefied strata of power. Thanks in no small part to her, the pledge list will be seeded with participants from business, Hollywood, and other influential enclaves, and the initiative will be backed by a strong communications strategy.

War tax resistance dates back to the early 13th century, when King John of England raised taxes to pay for a war against France and offended many barons who objected to the war. Their fury led to the birth, in 1215, of the Magna Carta, which underpins U.S. constitutional law. Henry David Thoreau was the most famous U.S. war tax resister, and his essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” influenced Mahatma Gandhi, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and many others. During the Vietnam War, tens of thousands of citizens withheld payment of the 10 percent phone service excise tax that was instituted to pay for that war. Organizations like the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee have ongoing campaigns and considerable expertise in the how-tos of withholding taxes.

I know a man who has a passion for slashing taxes but a political agenda very different from mine, and I wanted to know what he thought of withholding income tax as an act of civil disobedience. He initially said that he was opposed to breaking even unjust laws and that his approach is to work the system. In his view, the income tax is unconstitutional and therefore an unjust law because it should have been ratified state by state, rather than introduced as the 16th Amendment to the Constitution. When I explained the critical mass approach to tax withholding, he cautioned me to beware of the law of unintended consequences. If this war tax resistance initiative is successful, he said, people like him could take the same approach to withholding taxes for social spending. I told him that it seems to me that spending on human needs and environmental protection is already eviscerated. “Well, then you have nothing to be afraid of,” he said.

Salt Lake City mayor Ross “Rocky” Anderson recently made an impassioned speech in which he said, “I implore you: Draw a line. Figure out exactly where your own moral breaking point is. How much will you put up with before you say ‘No more’ and mean it?”

What do you say, Rocky? I’ll sign on if you will.

Meanwhile, tonight Jodie Evans has, Cinderella-like, put on a gown and jewels for a gala gathering of high-tech titans. I have no doubt that when her glass slippers revert to pink mules, she will be clutching some high-octane names for the war tax resisters pledge list.

Stay tuned and sign on at www.dontbuybushswar.org.

SAN FRANCISCO (Dec. 23) – Americans are falling behind on their credit card payments at an alarming rate, sending delinquencies and defaults surging by double-digit percentages in the last year and prompting warnings of worse to come.

An Associated Press analysis of financial data from the country’s largest card issuers also found that the greatest rise was among accounts more than 90 days in arrears.

Experts say these signs of the deterioration of finances of many households are partly a byproduct of the subprime mortgage crisis and could spell more trouble ahead for an already sputtering economy.

“Debt eventually leaks into other areas, whether it starts with the mortgage and goes to the credit card or vice versa,” said Cliff Tan, a visiting scholar at Stanford University and an expert on credit risk. “We’re starting to see leaks now.”

The value of credit card accounts at least 30 days late jumped 26 percent to $17.3 billion in October from a year earlier at 17 large credit card trusts examined by the AP. That represented more than 4 percent of the total outstanding principal balances owed to the trusts on credit cards that were issued by banks such as Bank of America and Capital One and for retailers like Home Depot and Wal-Mart .

At the same time, defaults – when lenders essentially give up hope of ever being repaid and write off the debt – rose 18 percent to almost $961 million in October, according to filings made by the trusts with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Serious delinquencies also are up sharply: Some of the nation’s biggest lenders – including Advanta, GE Money Bank and HSBC – reported increases of 50 percent or more in the value of accounts that were at least 90 days delinquent when compared with the same period a year ago.

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the White House
Not a creature was stirring, not even my spouse,
The stockings were hung up by the chimney with care,
And the shredders were humming in the chilly night air

Our spinners and fixers all snug in their beds
While visions of water boarding danced in their heads.
Now Laura in ‘kerchief, and me in a nightcap,
Had settled our brains for a long winter’s nap.

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
Agents sprang from their bunks to see what was the matter.
Away to the windows they flew with guns pointed,
Tore open the shutters and were not disappointed.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to a bloodbath below.
When, what to our wondering eyes did unfold,
A nativity play of events rarely told.

First the old torturer, so lively and quick,
Vice President Cheney dressed up as St Nick.
More rapid than eagles his helpers they came,
Carrying gags, hot pokers, sundry handtools of pain.

A replica dungeon sprang up on the grass,
Writhing with suspects, sticks up their ass.
Twas a moving rendition of the CIA’s Mission
A sacred tableau: The American Inquisition!

Habeas corpus we burned at the stake,
Air strikes on Arabs are ducks on a plate.
Five million orphans adrift in Iraq
But the oil still flows, the plan is on track.

And then, in a twinkling, it was heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof,
As three men on camels leapt into the garden;
One was none other than Osama bin Laden.

“Welcome my brother” came Dick’s merry greeting,
“I know we are soul mates and your visit is fleeting”.
The pair danced a jig and bowed to the crowd
Sweet Laura asked, “Should this be allowed”?

Now Cheney is sweating from his head to his foot,
And his fat face is tarnished with ashes and soot.
Electrodes and thumb screws he’s flung on his back,
And he looks like a psychopath, poised to attack.

But a wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Assured all those present they had nothing to dread.
We’ve erased all evidence, he said with delight,
While our tortures continue, late into the night.

The stump of an infant he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
And I heard him exclaim, ‘ere he drove out of sight,
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!”

It comes as no surprise when a major U.S. newspaper backs real estate developers over the rights and interests of the poor they have a long track record of doing so, while the poor are lectured in patronizing language to emulate the people the papers celebrate. This week the New Orleans Times-Picayune has an article on their website titled “Protests ignore realities.” This article is a response to the struggle local residents have been waging against the planned demolition of their homes–protests which made national headlines this week. The “realities” these people supposedly ignore is that the government and wealthy real estate developers know what’s best for them.

But the poor just don’t seem to be getting it. Over the past week, as residents of New Orleans public housing complexes and activist allies have been resisting the demolition of four public housing complexes, comprising of 4,500 units, the city council–now racially skewed to the white end of the spectrum–voted to bulldoze those complexes to make way for new “mixed income” developments that purportedly would provide homes to some of those being displaced. The reality of similar programs around the country is that they seldom provide even a fraction of the affordable units promised by officials when older housing complexes were demolished.

Housing activists are not against programs that create more and better affordable housing, but they correctly point out that people should have a say in what happens to their current homes. In the case of New Orleans, it is outrageous that the city should demolish so much public housing when there are tens of thousands of displaced residents still looking for a place to live.

The Washington Post, too, weighs in on the side of real estate developers with an unsigned editorial (“A Better Life in New Orleans” December 20, 2007) calling for the demolition of public housing in New Orleans. The Post dismisses the fight by local residents for their homes as being mistakenly based on a “conspiracy.” The Post repeats standard myths about the housing complexes being havens for crime and poverty. These myths ignore the fact that these complexes have been closed since Katrina, that residents worked hard to keep crime out, and that crime is high all across New Orleans. Residents of these complexes are working people and this housing was affordable. History suggests this will not be the case with the developments proposed to replace them.

The Post also recycles the claim that most of these complexes were seriously damaged by the hurricanes. This is simply untrue.

What the Post doesn’t get is that New Orleans residents should first and foremost have the power to decide what is best for their interests. The Post would never editorialize that a group of white residents living in, say, Arlington, Virginia shouldn’t have input on the future of their homes if they were being threatened by a government-backed redevelopment project. When housing in New Orleans is so scarce and rents so high, the right of people to have access to their existing housing should take priority over any project to demolish housing–and certainly over any project so clearly aimed at fattening the wallets of developers and construction companies.

The Post tries to cast the New Orleans housing struggle as being fomented by a few people who just don’t want to get rid of poverty: “What makes no sense is perpetuating a housing policy that trapped people in poverty.” What makes no sense is a policy that would tear down thousands of habitable units when tens of thousands of people are looking for homes. The current policy only replicates failed national programs such as Hope VI, which purports to turn housing complexes into mixed-income developments with affordable units, but which are really just a form of ethnic cleansing, gentrification, and welfare for the rich. It’s hard to believe that the New Orleans government is well-intentioned when it is replicating housing policies that elsewhere have turned out so unfavorably for the urban working poor. It’s also clear that the New Orleans ruling class is using the dislocation caused by the hurricanes to enact policies that haven’t gone through a democratic process. To cite just one rather important detail, the current plan lacks any details about where people are supposed to live during the years that these new projects are under construction.

It’s ironic that the Washington Post should dismiss the New Orleans housing struggle as some kind of “romantic” lost cause, a day after the New York Times’ architectural critic wrote that the demolitions are “one of the greatest crimes in American urban planning.” One of the reasons why so many people enjoy visiting New Orleans is because it is one of the few American cities left with a truly unique gumbo of architecture, culture, environment, and diversity of people. If the Post feels that the interests of New Orleans should be swept aside in the name of modernization, why stop with the demolition of these four housing complexes? Why doesn’t the city bulldoze the French Quarter and replace it with an upscale mixed-use development? Such a project would create new jobs and more income for the city. Tourists wouldn’t miss a beat if the new and modernized French Quarter had a Panera that sells beignets, a Hard Rock Cafe and all of our favorite sports bar chains lining Bourbon Street.

Why, the tourists would feel right at home!

The chances are slim that you saw much news coverage of Human Rights Day when it blew past the media radar — as usual — on Dec. 10. Human rights may be touted as a treasured principle in the United States, but the assessed value in medialand is apt to fluctuate widely on the basis of double standards and narrow definitions.

Every political system, no matter how repressive or democratic, is able to amp up public outrage over real or imagined violations of human rights. News media can easily fixate on stories of faraway injustice and cruelty. But the lofty stances end up as posturing to the extent that a single standard is not applied.

When U.S.-allied governments torture political prisoners, the likelihood of U.S. media scrutiny is much lower than the probability of media righteousness against governments reviled by official Washington.

But what are “human rights” anyway? In the USA, we mostly think of them as freedom to speak, assemble, worship and express opinions. Of course those are crucial rights. Yet they hardly span the broad scope that’s spelled out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

That document — adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on Dec. 10, 1948 — affirms “human rights” in the ways that U.S. media outlets commonly illuminate the meaning of the term. But the Declaration of Human Rights also defines the rights of all human beings to include “freedom from fear and want” — and not only as generalities.

For instance, the first clause of Article 23 states: “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.”

And: “Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work”; the right “to form and to join trade unions”; and, overall, “an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.”

Perhaps the farthest afield from the customary U.S. media parameters is Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which insists: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”

Measured with such yardsticks for human rights, the United States falls far short of many countries. If American news media did a better job of reporting on human rights in all their dimensions, we’d be less self-satisfied as a nation — and more outraged about the widespread violations of human rights that persist in our midst every day.

The human consequences of those violations are incalculable, but they’re largely removed from the center stage of dramas that fill news pages and newscasts. This downplaying of economic human rights is not mere happenstance. The violations are systemic — within a system that thrives on extreme inequities, creating enormous profits for corporations and enriching some individuals along the way.

Within the boundaries of dominant news media and mainline political discourse, the “issue” of human rights is in a narrow box. It severely limits the humanity of our social order.

Worldwide food prices have risen sharply and supplies have dropped this year, according to the latest food outlook of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. The agency warned December 17 that the changes represent an “unforeseen and unprecedented” shift in the global food system, threatening billions with hunger and decreased access to food.

The FAO’s food price index rose by 40 percent this year, on top of the already high 9 percent increase the year before, and the poorest countries spent 25 percent more this year on imported food. The prices for staple crops, including wheat, rice, corn and soybeans, all rose drastically in 2007, pushing up prices for grain-fed meat, eggs and dairy products and spurring inflation throughout the consumer food market.

Driving these increases are a complex range of developments, including rapid urbanization of populations and growing demand for food stuffs in key developing countries such as China and India, speculation in the commodities markets, increased diversion of feedstock crops into the production of biofuels, and extreme weather conditions and other natural disasters associated with climate change.

Because of the long-term and compounding nature of all of these factors, the problems of rising prices and decreasing supplies in the food system are not temporary or one-time occurrences, and cannot be understood as cyclical fluctuations in supply and demand.

The world reserves of cereals are dwindling. In the past year, wheat stores declined 11 percent. The FAO notes that this is the lowest level since the UN began keeping records in 1980, while the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has reported that world wheat stocks may have fallen to 47-year lows. By FAO figures, the falloff in wheat stores equals about 12 weeks worth of global consumption.

The USDA has cautioned that wheat exporters in the US have already sold more than 90 percent of what the department had expected to be exported during the fiscal year ending June 2008. This has dire consequences for the world’s poor, whose diets consist largely of cereal grains imported from the United States and other major producers.

More than 850 million people around the world suffer from chronic hunger and other associated miseries of extreme poverty. According to the FAO, 37 countries—20 in Africa, 9 in Asia, 6 in Latin America, and 2 in Eastern Europe—currently face exceptional shortfalls in food production and supplies.

Those most affected live in countries dependent on imports. The poorest people, whose diets consist heavily of cereal grains, are most vulnerable. Already the poor spend the majority of their income on staple foods—up to 80 percent in some regions, according to the FAO. Ever-rising prices will lead to a distinct deterioration in the diets of these sections of the population.

The food crisis is intensifying social discontent and raising the likelihood of social upheavals. The FAO notes that political unrest “directly linked to food markets” has developed in Morocco, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Guinea, Mauritania and Senegal. In the past year, cereal prices have triggered riots in several other countries, including Mexico, where tortilla prices were pushed up 60 percent. In Italy, the rising cost of pasta prompted nationwide protests. Unrest in China has also been linked to cooking oil shortages.

In addition to the cost of imports, war and civil strife, multiple years of drought and other disasters, and the impact of HIV/AIDS have crippled countries’ food supply mechanisms.

Iraq and Afghanistan both suffer severe shortfalls because of the US invasion and ongoing occupation. North African countries are hard hit by the soaring wheat prices because many staple foods require imported wheat.

Countries of the former Soviet Union are facing wheat shortages. People there spend upwards of 70 percent of their incomes on food; the price of bread in Kyrgyzstan has risen by 50 percent this year and the government released emergency reserves of wheat in the poorest areas to temporarily ease the crisis.

In Bangladesh, food prices have spiraled up 11 percent every month since July; rice prices have risen by nearly 50 percent in the past year.

Central American countries saw a 50 percent increase in the price of that region’s staple grain, corn. Several countries in South America have also been impacted by the high international wheat prices, compelling national governments to dispense with import taxes. The government in Bolivia, for example, has dispatched the military to operate industrial-scale bread bakeries.

All national governments are keenly aware of the possibility of civil unrest in the event of severe food shortages or famine, and many have taken minimal steps to ease the crisis in the short term, such as reducing import tariffs and erecting export restrictions. On December 20, China did away with food export rebates in an effort to stave off domestic shortfalls. Russia, Kazakhstan, and Argentina have also implemented export controls.

But such policies cannot adequately cope with the crisis in the food system because they do not address the causes, only the immediate symptoms. Behind the inflation are the complex inter-linkages of global markets and the fundamental incompatibility of the capitalist system with the needs of billions of poor and working people.

The volatility of the financial markets, driven by speculation and trading in equity and debt, intersects with the futures and options markets that have a direct bearing on agricultural commodity markets. As the housing market in the United States collapsed, compounding problems in the credit market and threatening recession, speculation shifted to the commodities markets, exacerbating inflation in basic goods and materials. The international food market is particularly prone to volatility because current prices are greatly influenced by speculation over future commodity prices. This speculation can then trigger more volatility, encouraging more speculation.

Future grain prices are a striking example of this disastrous cycle. On December 17, speculation on wheat and rice for delivery in March 2008 forced prices to historic highs on the Chicago Board of Trade. Wheat jumped to more than $10 a bushel on projections of worsening shortages and inflation. This level is double the $5-a-bushel price of wheat at the beginning of 2007.

Japan, the largest wheat importer in Asia, announced December 19 that it may raise wheat prices by 30 percent. The same day, Indian government officials warned of impending food security problems. These were due, according to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, to “clouds on global financial markets following the sub-prime lending crisis.”

Soybean and corn prices have also been pushed up to 34-year and 11-year highs, respectively, on the projected shortages and demand for biofuel. These new trading levels become the agricultural benchmarks for subsequent trading, and, as the Financial Times put it December 17, have the consequence of “raising inflationary pressure and constraining the ability of central banks to mitigate economic slowdown.”

Higher fuel costs ultimately lead to higher food prices, via higher shipping charges, particularly for nations that import a large proportion of their staple foods. Shipping costs for bulk commodities have increased by more than 80 percent in the past year and 57 percent since June, according to the Baltic Exchange Dry Index.

The FAO report noted that the enormous increase in freight costs has had the effect of dis-integrating the world market in certain regions because many import-heavy countries have opted to purchase from closer suppliers, resulting in “prices at regional or localized levels falling out of line with world levels.”

The rising oil price not only affects the costs of transportation and importation. It also has a direct impact on the costs of farm operation in the working of agricultural and industrial processing machinery. Moreover, fertilizer, which takes its key component, nitrogen, from natural gas, is also spiking in price because of the impact of rising oil prices on the demand and costs of other fuels. By the same token, as oil prices rise, the demand for biofuel sources such as corn, sugarcane, and soybeans also rises, resulting in more and more feedstock crops being devoted to fuel and additives production.

In the US, the use of corn for ethanol production has doubled since 2003, and is projected by the FAO to increase from 55 million metric tons to 110 million metric tons by 2016. The US government is more ambitious. On December 19, President Bush signed a new energy bill into law which contains a mandate for expanding domestic biofuel production five-fold over the next 15 years, to more than 36 billion gallons a year. Already a third of the US corn harvest is devoted to ethanol production, surpassing the amount of corn bound for the world food markets.

As more US cropland is devoted to ethanol-bound corn, other major agricultural regions are struggling with weather disasters associated with climate change. Australia and the Ukraine, both significant exporters of wheat, have suffered extreme weather that damaged crops. A prolonged drought in southern Australia has curtailed farming to such a degree that many farmers have sold their land.

Current research suggests that as temperatures rise over the next fifty years by 1 to 2 degrees Celsius, poor countries may lose 135 million hectares (334 million acres) of arable land because of lost rainfall. In new studies published earlier this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers have cautioned that this estimate may be conservative, and that the impact of climate change on food production has been over-simplified.

According to NASA/Goddard Institute of Space Studies researcher Francesco Tubiello, complications of climate change on the world food supply may be far worse than previously predicted: “The projections show a smooth curve, but a smooth curve has never happened in history. Things happen suddenly, and then you can’t respond to them.”

Tubiello’s research focuses on extreme weather events that have devastated entire crops when they coincided with germination and blossoming periods, as was the case with Italy’s corn crop in 2003. Tubiello noted that corn yield in the Po valley growing region fell to 36 percent following a heat wave that raised Italy’s temperatures 6 degrees over the long-term average.

In addition to the survival thresholds of plants, researchers have begun studying the effects of higher temperatures on the physiology and diseases of livestock, as well as the spread of pests, molds and viruses native to tropical zones. Goddard Institute research has suggested that bluetongue, a viral disease of cattle and sheep, will move outward from the tropics into regions including southern Australia. According to the Earth Institute at Columbia University, higher temperatures will lead to higher infertility in livestock and lower dairy yields.

Peace campaigners expressed shock yesterday at revelations of a massive escalation in US air attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A report by Anthony H Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies found a massive increase in the number of air attacks on the two countries from 2006 to 2007.

The centre was founded by veteran US warmonger Zbigniew Brzezinski, the mastermind of the US-funded 1979-1989 Afghan war.

Mr Cordesman’s report found 1,119 “close air support/precision” (CAS) bombing raids in Iraq in 2007, an incredible fivefold increase on 2006.

In Afghanistan, the number of CAS raids rose from an already massive 1,770 in 2006 to 2,926 this year, a 65 per cent increase over the year and 34 times as many as in 2004.

Mr Cordesman attributed the rising use of air power in Iraq and Afghanistan to the “surge” or escalation in Iraq and to an increase in “Taliban activity,” coupled with a lack of NATO and Afghan army forces, in Afghanistan.

He pointed out that most aircraft sorties do not result in the dropping of bombs but he admitted: “This does not mean that there were not civilian casualties or collateral damage to civil facilities.”

A Stop the War Coalition spokesman said that the increasing reliance of NATO on air strikes demonstrates “the poverty of its military strategy and only results in large numbers of civilian deaths.”

More than 6,000 Afghan civilians have been killed in the fighting this year alone, almost twice as many as died during the US-led invasion in 2001.

However, the figures in the report do not paint the whole picture, as they exclude attacks where only machine guns, 20mm and 30mm cannon or rockets were used.

This would exclude most attacks by helicopter gunships and the A-10 close air support aircraft.

It is unclear whether high-level raids by heavy bombers are included and no mention is made of ground-based artillery bombardments.

In addition, the figures for Afghanistan only include air forces attached to the US so-called Operation Enduring Freedom mission and not the NATO International Security Assistance Force.

The figures also show that the quantity of supplies air-dropped to troops has almost doubled, as it has become too dangerous to deliver by road in Afghanistan.

Media Workers Against the War spokesman David Crouch said: “Andrew Gilligan was right when he said that Iraq is underreported.

“As a result, we have a very limited understanding of the surge and what it means for Iraqis on the ground.

“Afghanistan really is Britain’s forgotten war,” said Mr Crouch.

“Almost all we read about it in the newspapers are Ministry of Defence press releases.

“It’s hardly surprising, then, that shocking figures like these come seemingly out of the blue.”

Labour MP John McDonnell added: “These figures give the lie to the image portrayed by the government that Iraq is being pacified and demonstrate the intensity of the conflict in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The reality is that the coalition forces have been defeated.

“They’re using air strikes rather than risk troops on the ground,” said the MP.

A Ministry of Defence spokesman refused to discuss US tactics.

THE CIA chief who ordered the destruction of secret videotapes recording the harsh interrogation of two top Al-Qaeda suspects has indicated he may seek immunity from prosecution in exchange for testifying before the House intelligence committee.

Jose Rodriguez, former head of the CIA’s clandestine service, is determined not to become the fall guy in the controversy over the CIA’s use of torture, according to intelligence sources.

It has emerged that at least four White House staff were approached for advice about the tapes, including David Addington, a senior aide to Dick Cheney, the vice-president, but none has admitted to recommending their destruction.

Vincent Cannistraro, former head of counterterrorism at the CIA, said it was impossible for Rodriguez to have acted on his own: “If everybody was against the decision, why in the world would Jose Rodriguez – one of the most cautious men I have ever met – have gone ahead and destroyed them?”

The tapes recorded the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, two suspected Al-Qaeda leaders, over hundreds of hours while they were held in secret “ghost” prisons. According to testimony from a former CIA officer, Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding, a form of torture that simulates drowning, and “broke” after 35 seconds. He is believed to have been interrogated in Thailand. The tapes were destroyed in 2005. Both men are now held in Guantanamo Bay.

The House intelligence committee has subpoenaed Rodriguez to appear for a hearing on January 16. Last week the CIA began opening its files to congressional investigators. Silvestre Reyes, a Democrat who is chairing the committee, has said he was “not looking for scapegoats” – a hint to Rodriguez that he would like him to talk.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer, believes the scandal could reach deep into the White House. “The CIA and Jose Rodriguez look bad, but he’s probably the least culpable person in the process. He didn’t wake up one day and decide, ‘I’m going to destroy these tapes.’ He checked with a lot of people and eventually he is going to get his say.”

Johnson says Rodriguez got his fingers burnt during the Iran-contra scandal while working for the CIA in Latin America in the 1980s. Even then he sought authorisation from senior officials. But when summoned to the FBI for questioning, he was told Iran-contra was “political – get your own lawyer”.

He learnt his lesson and recently appointed Robert Bennett, one of Washington’s most skilled lawyers, to handle the case of the destroyed interrogation tapes. “He has been starting to get his story out and was smart to get Bennett,” said Johnson.

The Justice Department has launched its own inquiry into the destruction of the tapes. It emerged yesterday that the CIA had misled members of the 9-11 Commission by not disclosing the existence of the tapes, in potential violation of the law. President George W Bush said last week he could not recall learning about the tapes before being briefed about them on December 6 by Michael Hayden, the CIA director.

“It looks increasingly as though the decision was made by the White House,” said Johnson. He believes it is “highly likely” that Bush saw one of the videos, as he was interested in Zubaydah’s case and received frequent updates on his interrogation from George Tenet, the CIA director at the time.

It has emerged that the CIA did preserve two videotapes and an audiotape of detainee interrogations conducted by a foreign government, which may have been relevant to the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the Al-Qaeda conspirator.

Neo-con supporters of the U.S. government’s war of aggression against Iraq are undoubtedly holding their collective breath in the hope that U.S. military forces have finally smashed any further violent opposition to their conquest of Iraq. The attitude would then be, “You see, this shows that we were right after all to invade and occupy Iraq and kill and maim hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people.”

Meanwhile, the Associated Press is reporting that U.S. soldiers have found mass graves next to a torture center north of Baghdad. In the torture center, chains were attached to blood-spattered walls while a metal bed was attached to an electrical shock system.

Hey, who knows? Maybe the torture center prevented a ticking time bomb from going off? And who’s to say that chains, blood-spattered walls, metal beds, and an electrical shock system really constitute torture? Doesn’t torture depend on each person’s subjective determination of the term?

By the way, wasn’t there torture in Iraq under Saddam Hussein? I wonder if his justifications for torture were different from those employed by those torturing in Iraq today. I wonder if they were different than those employed by current U.S. torturers.

As Rosa Brooks writes in the Los Angeles Times today, Baghdad has now been divided into “cleansed” neighborhoods, in which Sunnis occupy some areas and Shiites occupy others. The U.S. military is helping to keep the neighborhoods free of violence by constructing walls that separate the respective neighborhoods. What an interesting way for the Pentagon to rebuild a peaceful society that it has destroyed with its invasion.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have fled the country, mostly to neighboring countries given that the U.S. government refuses to let them emigrate to the United States, despite one of the U.S. government’s claims (in addition to the WMD one) that it invaded Iraq out of love for the Iraqi people. Hey, what better way to reduce the death toll than by reducing the country’s population?

And if things weren’t crazy enough, we now learn that the U.S. government is helping Turkey to attack Iraqi Kurds in the northern part of the country. Can’t you just hear U.S. officials exclaim when some Iraqi survivor of those attacks retaliates with a terrorist attack against the U.S.: “We’re innocent! We’re innocent! We haven’t done anything to provoke this! They hate us for our freedom and values! God bless America!”

No rational person can deny that Iraq never had any connection whatsoever to the 9/11 attacks, especially given that none of the 9/11 attackers were even from Iraq. Yet, countless Iraqi people are now dead or maimed and their entire country is destroyed. One might easily say that Iraq is the federal massacre of Waco magnified a million-fold. The whole situation in Iraq brings to mind the famous dictum of Tacitus: “They made a desert and called it peace.”

Nothing, not even “peace” in Iraq, will ever be able to morally justify a war of aggression against a nation whose people were totally innocent of the 9/11 attacks. Nothing, not even some warped definition of “terrorist,” will ever be able to morally justify killing Iraqis who were doing nothing more than trying to oust their country of an illegal invader who had invaded with a thirst for vengeance and regime change relying on fake and false rationales for its invasion. Nothing will ever be able to morally justify the killing of even one single Iraqi, much less hundreds of thousands of them, given that neither the Iraqi people nor their government ever attacked the United States.

Celebrations by the families, friends and supporters of the three British men who returned from Guantánamo on Wednesday – Omar Deghayes, Jamil El-Banna and Abdulnour Sameur – were abruptly cut short when the Spanish government immediately requested the extradition of El-Banna and Deghayes for alleged ties with terrorists, even though the supposed evidence in Deghayes’ case was comprehensively demolished nearly three years ago, and, in El-Banna’s case, is strenuously denied by his lawyers. In March 2005, image recognition experts, commissioned by the BBC’s Newsnight, concluded that the figure in a grainy video of a Chechen training camp, which was supposed to be Deghayes, was in fact a militant named Abu Walid, who had later been killed.

As the men landed on British soil, there was no reason to suspect that their return would involve anything more than a cursory police investigation. El-Banna had been cleared for release from Guantánamo by a military review board in May this year – as close to an admission of innocence as the notoriously unapologetic US administration ever gets – and the US authorities had also agreed to the return of Deghayes and Sameur, as requested by the British government in August, while refusing to release another British resident, Binyam Mohamed.

Lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, who represented the men and met with them at Guantánamo during their long imprisonment without charge or trial, pointed out that they had all agreed to unspecified voluntary security arrangements required by the UK authorities, and, on arrival, as Sean O’Neill described it in the Times, El-Banna “was detained under port and border controls – a signal that Britain does not regard him as posing any serious security threat.” Deghayes and Sameur, meanwhile, were arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 and were held for questioning at Paddington Green police station in west London, a move that served only to indicate that Scotland Yard’s Counter-Terrorist commanders wanted to be certain that they posed no threat to Britain before releasing them. O’Neill added, “Most of the previous returnees from Camp Delta have been through the same process and none have been involved in any trouble since they came back.”

Even more significant were comments made by William Nye, director of counter-terrorism and intelligence at the Home Office, following discussions with the US government about the return of the British residents, which had first taken place in June 2006, and which were revealed in the Guardian last October. At the time, the British government, which, until that point, had refused to press for the release of any of the British residents, was reluctantly discussing the return of just one of the British residents, Bisher al-Rawi (who was released in March this year). Both al-Rawi and El-Banna had been kidnapped by CIA agents in the Gambia, where they had travelled to set up a mobile peanut-processing plant, after an inexplicable tip-off from MI5, and had been transferred to Guantánamo via a secret CIA-run prison. Scandalously, the discussions about the repatriation of al-Rawi – but not of El-Banna – were based solely on the fact that al-Rawi’s lawyers had embarrassed the government by pointing out that he had actually been working for MI5, keeping tabs on the radical cleric Abu Qatada.

Describing what had happened during the meeting with Americans, William Nye explained that the Americans had requested that the British take back all the residents – not just al-Rawi – but that the British representatives had balked at the conditions that the US government had attempted to impose, which included an insistence that they “cannot legally leave the UK, engage with known extremists or engage in, support, promote, plan or advocate extremist or violent activity,” and that the British government would put surveillance in place “to know immediately of any attempt to engage in any such activity.” Nye declared, “I am not satisfied it would be proportionate to impose … the kind of obligations which might be necessary to satisfy the US administration,” explaining that the measures demanded by the Americans would have to be enforced by MI5 and would divert vital resources away from countering more dangerous terrorist suspects. “The use of such resources … could not be justified and would damage the protection of the UK’s national security,” he wrote, adding, in the most crucial passage, that the detainees “do not pose a sufficient threat to justify the devotion of the high level of resources” the US would require.

It was genuinely shocking, therefore, when the Spanish government lodged its extradition request on the men’s return. As Sean O’Neill described it, the Spanish alleged that El-Banna had links with a Madrid al-Qaeda cell, which was purportedly responsible for recruiting young men and sending them for jihad training, and which was also “said to have had ties to the German-based al-Qaeda unit that plotted the September 11 atrocities.” He added, “What has motivated Spain to act now is something of a mystery. America has had Mr. El-Banna in custody for five years and interrogated him repeatedly in brutal conditions. It laid no charges against him and deemed him fit to be freed. Spain made no attempt to extradite him from or question him while he was in US custody.” He concluded that the Spanish government’s action “seems inhumane and its evidence rather thin.”

Clive Stafford Smith added more detail, explaining that he had tried to encourage a Spanish extradition request as a means of getting the men out of Guantánamo, but that the authorities in Madrid had never showed any interest. “It is very dismaying,” he told the BBC’s Newsnight. “For quite a long time, we tried to get the Spanish to demand their release because we thought it was an elegant way to get them out of Guantánamo. The Spanish weren’t interested … The idea now that they want to use this evidence we have proved to be false to take them for further detention is very worrying.”

Under the terms of the European Arrest Warrant, an EU-wide agreement introduced in 2004 and intended to simplify extradition procedures between member states by removing potential political interference and ensuring “faster and simpler surrender procedures,” the British government had no choice but to comply with the Spanish request, even though William Nye had made it clear that none of the men were regarded as a “sufficient threat” to warrant 24/7 surveillance, and, as Sean O’Neill pointed out, the British “had no intention of putting [El-Banna] on trial as a terrorist when he returned here.”

On the morning of December 20, while the Metropolitan Police were preparing to release Abdulnour Sameur without charge, Jamil El-Banna and Omar Deghayes were duly transported to Westminster Magistrates’ Court – just a few hundred yards from Parliament – where Melanie Cumberland, representing the Spanish government, resurrected the claims against the men, first formulated by the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón in December 2003, when he also requested the extradition of two other Guantánamo detainees, a Moroccan and a Spaniard – that El-Banna had been a member of a Madrid-based organization known as the Islamic Alliance, and that he was an associate of Imad Yarkas, who is serving 12 years in a Spanish prison for terrorism offences. Cumberland relayed the Spanish authorities’ claim that both El-Banna and Deghayes belonged to a cell that provided recruits for military training in Afghanistan and Indonesia, which was also alleged to have raised funds for terrorism and to have spread al-Qaeda propaganda.

In response, Ed Fitzgerald QC, who represented both men, cited the discredited video as “the centrepiece” of the Spanish allegations, and accused the prosecutor of making wild accusations “for which there was no evidence,” adding that there was, instead, solid evidence that neither the US nor UK authorities considered the men to pose a significant danger.

Granting bail to both men – set at £50,000 (much of which was paid by actress and human rights campaigner Vanessa Redgrave) – the judge, Timothy Workman, dismissed prosecution claims that they would flee abroad or engage in terrorist acts, and declared, in El-Banna’s case, “The prosecution concerns about offences being committed are outweighed by the detailed review being carried out in the US.” He did, however, insist on tough bail conditions, including the imposition of a curfew, the use of electronic tagging and a prohibition on travelling abroad.

Outside the court, El-Banna, who appeared to have aged considerably during the five years of his imprisonment, made only a brief statement. “Thank you very much everybody, my solicitor, the British people, the British government for your help,” he said, adding, “I am tired, I want to go home and see my children,” before leaving in a car to be reunited with his wife and his five children. He has never seen his youngest child, who was born after his capture. His MP, Sarah Teather, who has campaigned assiduously for his release, said that “immense cruelty” had been inflicted on the family, who were only told at 8.30pm on Wednesday that he had been arrested and would not be coming home. “The children could not understand why he was not back and Sabah [his wife] was devastated,” she added. After meeting Mrs. El-Banna briefly outside the courtroom on Thursday morning, I can confirm that this was indeed the case.

Several hours later, Omar Deghayes also emerged from the court to be reunited with his family. Speaking later from his home in Brighton, he said, “I am very, very happy to be home. I am very grateful to everybody who has helped me. I would have been happier if everybody in Guantánamo were released and that ugly, bad place was closed down if not demolished.” He added, “I need some rest but I will be very happy to speak to everybody in the media to help other people to be released.”

Missing from the extradition discussions – in the media, if not amongst the lawyers – was the demonstrable weakness of the intelligence relating to the two other Guantánamo detainees whose extradition was requested by Judge Garzón in December 2003. Garzón’s motives were not in doubt. In an interview for Mother Jones in 2004, he explained to Tim Golden why he was opposed to the Americans’ approach to the “War on Terror,” and why he favoured “a multinational, legal approach over what he describe[d] as a ‘militaristic’ strategy of intelligence gathering, extrajudicial arrests, and military detention.” “What frightens me is when people start going beyond the limits of the law,” he said. “Taking the right to a defense away from those who are detained at Guantánamo. Establishing a license to kill terrorists. In this country, we know what it means to use this heavy hand. We know that when the fight against terrorism moves outside the law, it becomes very dangerous.”

As an example of Garzón’s legal approach to the post-9/11 world, Tim Golden observed that an indictment of Osama bin Laden that was issued by Garzón in autumn 2003, which was the first such document to charge bin Laden in connection with the 9/11 attack, “echoed his insistence that even the most terrible criminals on earth should be dealt with in courts of law.” Garzón also defended his extradition request for the four Guantánamo detainees – Jamil El-Banna, Omar Deghayes, Moroccan-born Lahcen Ikassrien, and Hamed Abderrahman Ahmed, from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, in north Africa – “arguing pointedly that the only standing charges against them were those he had filed in Spain.”

Despite Garzón’s enthusiasm for the law, however, when Lahcen Ikassrien and Hamed Ahmed were extradited from Guantánamo to Spain, at his request, the cases against them collapsed.

Ahmed, transferred in February 2004, had the dubious distinction of being the first Guantánamo detainee to be handed over to a foreign country for prosecution. Released on bail in July 2004, he was later put on trial and was sentenced to six years in prison in October 2005, although Garzón’s claims did not even figure in his trial. Instead, he was convicted based on allegations by the prosecution that he had travelled to Afghanistan in August 2001 to fight for the Taliban government, and had received religious and military training. However, in a momentous decision by the Spanish Supreme Court in July 2006, his sentence was dismissed. The Supreme Court ordered his immediate release, and said that the High Court had not considered him “innocent until proven guilty,” and had used evidence collected at Guantánamo that “should be declared totally void and, as such, non-existent,” adding that the High Court was “entirely remiss in its role of providing evidence.”

Ikassrien, transferred in July 2005, was released on his return, but was ordered to report daily to the police, and was prohibited from leaving the country without permission. When his trial came around, he, like Hamed Ahmed, had his case dismissed by the Supreme Court, which concluded, in October 2006, that there was no evidence to back up charges he was a member of al-Qaeda, stating, “It has not been proved that the accused Lahcen Ikassrien was part of a terrorist organization of Islamic fundamentalist nature, and more specifically, the al-Qaeda network created by [Osama] bin Laden.” Significantly, the Supreme Court’s judgment followed another momentous decision, four months before, to quash the conviction of Imad Yarkas, the lynchpin of the whole case against Hamed Ahmed, Lahcen Ikassrien, Jamil El-Banna and Omar Deghayes, for conspiracy to commit murder in the 9/11 attacks, although his conviction for belonging to a terrorist organization was upheld.

With only these examples of failed prosecutions to draw upon, the position taken by the Spanish government is, frankly, incomprehensible. As Jamil El-Banna and Omar Deghayes attempt to rebuild their shattered lives in the bosom of their families, it is to be hoped that their lawyers can draw compelling arguments from these cases – and from other examples of Spanish intelligence failures – before the extradition hearings begin on January 9, 2008.