The Rag Blog

12/13/07 “ICH” — — The US department of veteran affairs has issued an official report (See report in full) that confirms 73,000 U.S. troops killed and 1.6 million “disabled” by Persian Gulf wars. 73,846 U.S. Troops Dead (Page 6) and 1,620,906 permanently disabled ( Page 7)

George Walker Bush has presided over the worst defeat of the United States Military since Vietnam and has deliberately skewed reporting of the deaths and injuries to conceal the facts.

The Department of Veteran’s Affairs, in conjunction with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has released the truth because they need the American People to know our military is literally, destroyed.

They cannot release these horrific numbers via the chain of command because they are under orders to conceal the truth at all costs, so they let slip a report which now cannot be “un-slipped.”

Here are the facts and a link to the government source to prove these facts:

More Gulf War Veterans Have Died Than Vietnam Veterans.

The Department of Veterans Affairs, May 2007, Gulf War Veterans Information System reports the following:

Total U.S. Military Gulf War 1 and Gulf War 3 Deaths: 73,846

* Deaths amongst Deployed: 17,847
* Deaths amongst Non-Deployed: 55,999

Total “Undiagnosed Illness” (UDX) claims: 14,874

Total number of disability claims filed: 1,620,906
* Disability Claims amongst Deployed: 407,911
* Disability Claims amongst Non-Deployed: 1,212,995

Percentage of combat troops who filed Disability Claims 36%

Soldiers, by nature, typically don’t complain. They don’t want to be perceived as being weak, or complainers, or looking to get out of work/danger. In other words, the real impact of those who are disabled from the US invasions in Iraq, Afghanistan and other Nations, is not fully reflected in the official Veterans Affairs numbers.

Why are the government numbers of 3,777 as of 9-7-7 are so low? The answer is simple, the government does not want the 73,846 dead U.S. soldiers killed in the Gulf to date to be compared to the 55,000 U.S. soldiers killed in Vietnam, lest we all conclude Iraq = Vietnam.

What the government is doing is only counting the soldiers that die in action before they can get them into a helicopter or ambulance. Any soldier who is shot but they get into a helicopter before he dies is not counted.

73,846 dead U.S. soldiers for this scale operation using weapons of mass destruction is not high – we expect the great majority of U.S. soldiers who took part in the invasion of Iraq to die of uranium poisoning, which can take decades to kill.

More than 1,820 tons (3-million, 640 thousand pounds) of radio-active nuclear waste uranium were exploded into Iraq alone in the form of armor piercing rounds and bunker busters, representing the worlds worst man made ecological disaster ever. 64 kg of uranium were used in the Hiroshima bomb. The U.S. Iraq Nuclear Holocaust represents far more than fourteen thousand Hiroshima atomic bombs.

That’s 14,000.

The nuclear waste the U.S. has exploded into the Middle East will continue killing for BILLIONS of years and can wipe out more than a third of life on earth. Gulf War Veterans who have ingested the uranium will continue to die off over a number of years.

From a victors perspective, above any major war in history, The Gulf War has taken the severest toll on soldiers.

So far, more than one million people have been slaughtered in the illegal invasion of Iraqi by the U.S.. This is genocide of the highest order.

Iraqi birth defects are up 600% – the same will apply to U.S. Veterans.

Statistics and evidence published by the government and mainstream media in no way reflect the extreme gravity of the situation.

Those working for the government and media must wake up and take responsibility for immediately reversing this U.S. Holocaust. Understanding who is manipulating all of us is critical for all of us.

For those of you who doubt the veracity of this story, who naively believe it can’t be true because if it were true, you would have heard it from the government or from the main stream media, can see the proof yourselves directly from the United States Department of Veteran’s Affairs web site -Source: www1.va.gov/rac-gwvi/docs/GWVIS_May2007.pdf

This story is 100% accurate. 100% true. 100% verifiable.

From the bottom of page 9:

1. The total number of service members ever identified by DoD with possible low-level chemical warfare agent exposure serving in units in the hazard areas at or near Khamisiyah, Iraq is 145,472 as of June 30, 2006.

In this report, VBA displayed compensation and pension statistics on 145,456 service members. VA and DoD have completed their fourth quarter 2006 review of service member records. However, there is a possibility of future changes, if needed, based on further review by DoD.

Peter Marshall E. Boomhower – eboomhower@juno.com

(Dec. 13) – A record number of soldiers – 109 – have killed themselves this year, according to Army statistics showing confirmed or suspected suicides.

The deaths occur as soldiers serve longer combat deployments and the Army spends $100 million on support programs.

“Soldiers, families and equipment are stretched and stressed,” Gen. George Casey, Army chief of staff, told Congress last month.

The Army provided suicide statistics to Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. Her staff shared them with USA TODAY.

Those numbers show 77 confirmed suicides Army-wide this year through Nov. 27 and 32 other deaths pending final determination as suicides.

The Army updated those statistics Wednesday, confirming 85 suicides, including 27 in Iraq and four in Afghanistan.

The highest number of Army suicides recorded since 1990 was 102 in 1992 – a period when the service was 20% larger than today.

A total of 109 suicides this year would equal a rate of 18.4 per 100,000, the highest since the Army started counting in 1980. The civilian suicide rate was 11 per 100,000 in 2004, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded this week, in Oslo, Norway. Al Gore shared the prize with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which represents more than 2,500 scientists from 130 countries. The solemn ceremony took place as the United States is blocking meaningful progress at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia, and the Republicans in the U.S. Senate have derailed the energy bill passed by the House of Representatives, which would have accelerated the adoption of renewable energy sources at the expense of big-oil and coal corporations.

Gore set the stage: “So, today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.

“As a result, the Earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a passing affliction that will heal by itself. We asked for a second opinion. And a third. And a fourth. And the consistent conclusion, restated with increasing alarm, is that something basic is wrong. We are what is wrong, and we must make it right.”

He went on: “Last Sept. 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the north polar ice cap is ‘falling off a cliff.’ One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as seven years. Seven years from now.”

How will climate-change skeptics explain that one? (Already, big business is celebrating the break up of the polar ice cap, as a northern sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific is opening, creating a cheaper route for more needless shipping.) It is hard to imagine the north pole, the storied, frozen expanse of ice and snow, completely gone in just a few years. Lost as well will be the vast store of archeological data trapped in the ice: thousands of years of the Earth’s climate history are told in the layers of ice that descend for miles there. Scientists are just now learning how to read and interpret the history. The great meltdown will surely have catastrophic effects on the ecosystem in the north, with species like the polar bear already edging toward extinction.

Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian scientist, accepted for the IPCC. He is a careful scientist with the political finesse to chair the work of the IPCC despite the enduring antagonism of the United States. He pointed to the disproportionate effect of climate change on the world’s poor:

“[T]he impacts of climate change on some of the poorest and the most vulnerable communities in the world could prove extremely unsettling … in terms of: access to clean water, access to sufficient food, stable health conditions, ecosystem resources, security of settlements.”

Pachauri predicts water wars and mass migrations. “Migration, usually temporary and often from rural to urban areas, is a common response to calamities such as floods and famines.”

Gore invoked the memory of Mohandas Gandhi, saying he “awakened the largest democracy on earth and forged a shared resolve with what he called ‘Satyagraha’—or ‘truth force.’ In every land, the truth—once known—has the power to set us free.” Satyagraha, as Gandhi practiced it, is the disciplined application of nonviolent resistance, which is exactly what Ted Glick is doing back in Washington, D.C.

Glick heads up the Climate Emergency Council. On his 99th day of a liquids-only fast, the day after the Nobel ceremony, he joined with 20 people in the office of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for a sit-in. The Senate Republicans are now blocking a federal energy bill that would create funding for the development of renewable energy sources in the U.S., while stripping away billions of dollars worth of tax breaks for big oil and coal.

Glick told me: “We have to be willing to go to jail. Al Gore, himself, a couple of months ago talked about how young people need to be sitting in in front of the coal plants to prevent coal plants from being built. That’s true. Young people need to be doing that. Middle-age people need to be doing that. Older people need to be doing that. And Al Gore needs to be doing that. Let’s get serious about this crisis.”

While Glick was sitting in, news reports began to circulate about Republican presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani’s law firm’s lobbying activities against the energy bill. According to Bloomberg news, Bracewell & Giuliani LLP was hired by energy giant Southern Co. to defeat the bill. At a $1,000-a-plate fundraiser last August, addressing members of the coal industry, Giuliani said, “We have to increase our reliance on coal.”

As Giuliani’s coffers get fat with money from big oil, gas and coal, Glick has lost more than 40 pounds, and the Earth’s temperature continues to rise.

Finally, some good news for drug policy.

In the history of the civil rights movement there are probably only a handful of moments in which the decision of a few policymakers propelled significant change forward. Think of President Truman’s decision to integrate the military or the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Our nation recently witnessed another such moment when the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted unanimously to apply recent sentencing reductions for crack cocaine offenses retroactively. Although the decision is only a partial step towards racial equality, it reunites thousands of families and sets the stage for Congress to enact major reform.

Predictably, Chicken Littles in the Bush administration have insinuated that 20,000 people will be released from prison tomorrow. That’s just shock and awe. Retroactivity would actually be staggered over several decades, and the largest one-year release (possibly 2,500 people in the first year) is a drop in the bucket compared to the 650,000 people released from state and federal prisons last year because they had served their time. Federal courts will also have the power to deny a sentencing reduction to people who pose a risk to society.

The Sentencing Commission’s decision came only a day after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal judges can sentence individuals below the guideline recommendation in crack cocaine cases. The combination of both rulings puts enormous pressure on Congress to change the statutory mandatory minimums that punish crack cocaine offenses 100 times more severely than powder cocaine offenses. That sentencing disparity is responsible for appalling racial inequities in the criminal justice system. Although the majority of crack users and sellers are white, more than 80 percent of people incarcerated in federal prison for crack are black.

Ironically, the biggest obstacle to eliminating the crack/powder disparity is probably not the Bush administration or law enforcement but House Democratic leadership. While the Senate Judiciary Committee is set to debate three reforms bills early next year, no hearings have been scheduled yet in the House. Many rank-and-file Democrats support reform, but leadership is reportedly reluctant to even debate the issue. Their silence gives the impression they don’t care about reducing racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

The struggle to bring some justice to federal cocaine laws is just one part of a bigger struggle to undo the damage being done by the war on drugs. In a recent op-ed in New Orleans’ Times-Picayune, former ACLU Executive Director and current Drug Policy Alliance President Ira Glasser makes the case that drug prohibition is one of the major civil rights issues of our day.

“[T]he racially discriminatory origin of most [drug] laws is reinforced by the disparate impact they have on racially targeted drug felons. In the states of the Deep South, 30 percent of black men are barred from voting because of felony convictions. But all of them are nonetheless counted as citizens for the purpose of determining congressional representation and electoral college votes. The last time something like this happened was during slavery, when three-fifths of slaves were counted in determining congressional representation.

“Just as Jim Crow laws were a successor system to slavery in the attempt to keep blacks subjugated, so drug prohibition has become a successor system to Jim Crow laws in targeting black citizens, removing them from civil society and then barring them from the right to vote while using their bodies to enhance white political power in Congress and the electoral college.”

“POLITICS, LIKE nature, abhors a vacuum,” goes the revamped aphorism. Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul’s surprising stature among a small but vocal layer of antiwar activists and leftist bloggers appears to bear this out.

At the October 27, 2007, antiwar protests in dozens of cities noticeable contingents of supporters carried his campaign placards and circulated sign-up sheets. The Web site antiwar.com features a weekly Ron Paul column. Some even dream of a Left-Right gadfly alliance for the 2008 ticket. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, liberal maverick and Democratic presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich told supporters in late November he was thinking of making Ron Paul his running mate if he were to get the nomination.

No doubt, the hawkish and calculating Hillary Rodham Clinton and flaccid murmurings of Barack Obama, in addition to the uninspiring state of the antiwar movement that backed a prowar candidate in 2004, help fuel the desperation many activists feel. But leftists must unequivocally reject the reactionary libertarianism of this longtime Texas congressman and 1988 Libertarian Party presidential candidate.

Ron Paul’s own campaign Web site reads like the objectivist rantings of Ayn Rand, one of his theoretical mentors. As with the Atlas Shrugged author’s other acolytes, neocon guru Milton Friedman and former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, Paul argues, “Liberty means free-market capitalism.” He opposes “big government” and in the isolationist fashion of the nation’s Pat Buchanans, he decries intervention in foreign nation’s affairs and believes membership in the United Nations undermines U.S. sovereignty.

Naturally, it is not Ron Paul’s paeans to the free market that some progressives find so appealing, but his unwavering opposition to the war in Iraq and consistent voting record against all funding for the war. His straightforward speaking style, refusal to accept the financial perks of office, and his repeated calls for repealing the Patriot Act distinguish him from the snakeoil salesmen who populate Congress.

Paul is no power-hungry, poll-tested shyster. Even the liberalish chat show hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar on “The View” gave a friendly reception to Paul’s folksy presentation, despite his paleoconservative views on abortion, which he-a practicing obstetrician-argues is murder.

Though Paul is unlikely to triumph in the primaries, it is worth taking stock not only of his actual positions, but more importantly the libertarian underpinnings that have wooed so many self-described leftists and progressives. Because at its core, the fetishism of individualism that underlies libertarianism leads to the denial of rights to the very people most radicals aim to champion-workers, immigrants, Blacks, women, gays, and any group that lacks the economic power to impose their individual rights on others.

Ron Paul’s positions

A cursory look at Paul’s positions, beyond his opposition to the war and the Patriot Act, would make any leftist cringe.

Put simply, he is a racist. Not the cross-burning, hood-wearing kind to be sure, but the flat Earth society brand that imagines a colorblind world where 500 years of colonial history and slavery are dismissed out of hand and institutional racism and policies under capitalism are imagined away. As his campaign Web site reads:

“The true antidote to racism is liberty. Liberty means having a limited, constitutional government devoted to the protection of individual rights rather than group claims. Liberty means free-market capitalism, which rewards individual achievement and competence-not skin color, gender, or ethnicity.”

Paul was more blunt writing in his independent political newsletter distributed to thousands of supporters in 1992. Citing statistics from a study that year produced by the National Center on Incarceration and Alternatives, Paul concluded: “Given the inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.” Reporting on gang crime in Los Angeles, Paul commented: “If you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be.”

His six-point immigration plan appears to have been cribbed from the gun-toting vigilante Minutemen at the border. “A nation without secure borders is no nation at all. It makes no sense to fight terrorists abroad when our own front door is left unlocked,” reads his site. And he advocates cutting off all social services to undocumented immigrants, including hospitals, schools, clinics, and even roads (how would that work?).

“The public correctly perceives that neither political party has the courage to do what is necessary to prevent further erosion of both our border security and our national identity,” he wrote in a 2005 article. “Unfortunately, the federal government seems more intent upon guarding the borders of other nations than our own.” The article argues that, “Our current welfare system also encourages illegal immigration by discouraging American citizens from taking low-wage jobs.” The solution: end welfare so that everyone will be forced to work at slave wages. In order that immigrants not culturally dilute the nation, he proposes that “All federal government business should be conducted in English.”

Though he rants about his commitment to the Constitution, he introduced an amendment altering the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing citizenship to anyone born in the United States, saying in a 2006 article: “Birthright citizenship, originating in the 14th amendment, has become a serious cultural and economic dilemma for our nation. We must end the perverse incentives that encourage immigrants to come here illegally, including the anchor baby incentive.”

Here we come up against the limits of libertarianism-Paul wants a strong state to secure the borders, but he wants all social welfare expenditures eliminated for those within them.

Paul is quite vocal these days about his rank opposition to abortion-“life begins at conception,” he argues. He promotes a “states’ rights” position on abortion-that decades old hobgoblin of civil rights opponents. And he has long opposed sexual harassment legislation, writing in his 1988 book Freedom Under Siege (available online), “Why don’t they quit once the so-called harassment starts?” In keeping with his small government worldview, he goes on to argue against the government’s right “to tell an airline it must hire unattractive women if it does not want to.”

In that same book, written as the AIDS crisis was laying waste to the American gay male population prompting the rise of activist groups demanding research and drugs, Paul attacked AIDS sufferers as “victims of their own lifestyle.” And in a statement that gives a glimpse of the ruling-class tyranny of individualism he asserts that AIDS victims demanding rushed drug trials were impinging on “the rights of insurance company owners.”

Paul wants to abolish the Department of Education and, in his words, “end the federal education monopoly” by eliminating all taxes that go toward public education and “giving educational control back to parents.” Which parents would those be? Only those with the leisure time, educational training, and temperament commensurate with home schooling! Whatever real problems the U.S. education system suffers from-and there are many-eliminating 99 percent literacy rates that generations of public education has achieved and tossing the children of working parents out of the schools is not an appealing or viable option.

Paul also opposes equal pay for equal work, a minimum wage, and, naturally, trade unions. In 2007, he voted against restricting employers’ rights to interfere in union drives and against raising the federal minimum wage to $7.25. In 2001, he voted for zero-funding for OSHA’s Ergonomics Rules, instead of the $4.5 billion. At least he’s consistent.

Libertarians like Paul are for removing any legislative barriers that may restrict business owners’ profits, but are openly hostile to alleviating economic restrictions that oppress most workers. Only a boss could embrace this perverse concept of “freedom.”

Individualism versus collectivism

There is a scene in Monty Python’s satire Life of Brian where Brian, not wanting to be the messiah, calls out to the crowd: “You are all individuals.” The crowd responds in unison: “We are all individuals.”

Libertarians, using pseudo-iconoclastic logic, transform this comical send-up of religious conformity into their own secular dogma in which we are all just atomized beings. “Only an individual has rights,” not groups such as workers, Blacks, gays, women, and minorities, Ron Paul argues. True, we are all individuals, but we didn’t just bump into one another. Human beings by nature are social beings who live in a collective, a society. Under capitalism, society is broken down into classes in which some individuals-bosses, for example-wield considerably more power than others-workers.

To advocate for society to be organized on the basis of strict individualism, as libertarians do, is to argue that everyone has the right to do whatever he or she wants. Sounds nice in the abstract, perhaps. But what happens when the desires of one individual infringe on the desires of another? Libertarians like Paul don’t shy away from the logical ramifications of their argument. “The dictatorial power of a majority” he argues ought to be replaced by the unencumbered power of individuals-in other words, the dictatorial power of a minority.

So if the chairman of Dow Chemical wants to flush his company’s toxic effluence into rivers and streams, so be it. If General Motors wants to pay its employees starvation wages, that’s their right too. Right-wing libertarians often appear to not want to grapple with meddlesome things like economic and social power. As the bourgeois radical Abraham Lincoln observed of secessionist slaveowners, “The perfect liberty they seek is the liberty of making slaves of other people.”

Too much government?

Unwavering hostility to government and its collection of taxes is another hallmark of libertarianism. Given the odious practices of governments under capitalism, their repugnant financial priorities, and bilking of the lower classes through taxation it’s hardly surprising that libertarians get a hearing.

But the conclusion that the problem is “big government” strips the content from the form. Can any working-class perspective seriously assert that we have too much government involvement in providing health care? Too much oversight of the environment, food production, and workplace safety? Would anyone seriously consider hopping a flight without the certainty of national, in fact international, air traffic control? Of course not. The problem doesn’t lie with some abstract construct, “government,” the problem is that the actual class dynamics of governments under capitalism amount to taxing workers and the poor in lieu of the rich and powerful corporations and spending those resources on wars, environmental devastation, and the enrichment of a tiny swath of society at the expense of the rest of us.

Ron Paul argues, “Government by majority rule has replaced strict protection of the individual from government abuse. Right of property ownership has been replaced with the forced redistribution of wealth and property” Few folks likely to be reading this publication will agree that we actually live in a society where wealth and property are expropriated from the rich and given to workers and the poor. Even the corporate media admit that there has been a wholesale redistribution of wealth in the opposite direction. But Paul exposes here the class nature of libertarianism-it is the provincial political outlook of the middle-class business owner obsessed with guarding his lot. As online anti-libertarian writer Ernest Partridge puts it in “Liberty for some”:

“Complaints against “big government” and “over-regulation,” though often justified, also issue from the privileged who are frustrated at finding that their quest for still greater privileges at the expense of their community are curtailed by a government which, ideally, represents that community. Pure food and drug laws curtail profits and mandate tests as they protect the general public.”

In fact, the libertarians’ opposition to the government, or the state if you will, is less out of hostility to what the state actually does than who is running it. Perhaps this explains Paul’s own clear contradiction when it comes to abortion, since his opposition to government intervention stops at a woman’s uterus. But freedom for socialists has always been about more than the right to choose masters. Likewise, Paul appears to be for “small government” except when it comes to using its power to restrict immigration. His personal right to not have any undocumented immigrants in the U.S. seems to trump the right of free movement of individuals, but not capital, across borders.

Right-wing libertarians, quite simply, oppose the state only insofar as it infringes the right of property owners.

Left-Right alliance?

Some antiwar activists and leftists desperate to revitalize a flagging antiwar movement make appeals to the Left to form a Left-Right bloc with Ron Paul supporters. Even environmental activist and left-wing author Joshua Frank, who writes insightful and often scathing attacks on liberal Democrats’ capitulations to reactionary policies, recently penned an article citing-though not endorsing-Paul’s campaign in calling for leftist antiwar activists to reach out to form a sort of Left-Right antiwar alliance. He argues, “Whether we’re beer swilling rednecks from Knoxville or mushroom eatin’ hippies from Eugene, we need to come together,” (“Embracing a new antiwar movement”).

Supporters of Ron Paul who show up to protests should have their reactionary conclusions challenged, not embraced. Those of his supporters who are wholly ignorant of his broader politics beyond the war, should be educated about them. And those who advocate his noxious politics, should be attacked for their racism, immigrant bashing, and hostility to the values a genuine Left champions. The sort of Left-Right alliance Frank advocates is not only opportunistic, but is also a repellent to creating the multiracial working-class movement that is sorely needed of we are to end this war. What Arabs, Blacks, Latinos-and antiracist whites, for that matter-would ever join a movement that accommodates to this know-nothing brand of politics?

Discontent with the status quo and the drumbeat of electoralism is driving many activists and progressives to seek out political alternatives. But libertarianism is no radical political solution to inequality, violence, and misery. When the likes of Paul shout: “We need freedom to choose!” we need to ask, “Yes, but freedom for whom?” Because the freedom to starve to death is the most dubious freedom of all.

Here comes another inconvenient truth. Despite all the attention to Oprah for Obama and the pundit blabbering about the Democratic primary horse race the outcome has been predetermined. What people do not want to know is that power elites control what the Democratic ticket will be. When the primaries end the winner will be the reigning plutocracy.

Rich and powerful elites want Hillary Clinton in the White House if the Democrats get their turn in the rigged two-party system. Just one big problem: The establishment plutocracy wants her more than most Americans trust or like her. No matter how much she spends and no matter how many big name endorsements she gets, her phoniness and arrogance prevail. She would be America’s irritating Panderer-in-Chief. What to do?

For power elites the answer is crystal clear. Obama is too young and inexperienced and less trustworthy for the elites, meaning he is less corrupted by big money than Hillary. But he is perfect to offset Hillary’s negatives. A majority of voters can succumb to months of slick advertising promoting the first woman president and first black vice-president and future president. And eight years as vice president will train Obama to be an obedient Washington insider.

Though Republicans will still mount a vicious attack on Clinton, Obama will moderate those efforts. Hillary can be the annoying bad cop that people fear and hate, while he is the good guy that people like and believe. And make no mistake: what friction exists between the two will be quickly replaced by their ambition. Obama will tell his supporters (and Oprah hers) to back the compromise ticket and he will negotiate a sweet deal to gain big influence as vice president like Cheney has had. Then we can all prey (delude ourselves) that he might curb Clinton’s tendencies to use military force rather than diplomacy, and create more terrible trade agreements and wasteful federal programs. Obama might even fight the assault on the middle class and rising economic inequality. Might.

U.S. News & World Report’s Paul Bedard made these points in 2006 about a Clinton-Obama ticket: “Some Republican advisers to the White House and leading 2008 hopefuls Sen. John McCain and Rudy Giuliani see the ticket as an easy winner built on the enthusiasm it would generate in Democratic circles. Their theory is that Clinton would stand a good chance to pick up the states that Sen. John Kerry won in 2004. While not enough to win the election on her own, the addition of Obama would help push closely divided states like Ohio over into the Democratic column, thereby giving the Clinton-Obama ticket the White House. …Obama could help soften Clinton’s image and bring more African-American voters to the ticket as well as independents seeking real and symbolic change.” Exactly.

In April 2007 The New York Times political blog raised the same possibility and there were hundreds of wide-ranging comments. Though many expressed negativity about Clinton, many others showed enthusiasm for a Clinton-Obama ticket, as shown by the following five comments:

Clinton/Obama would be an unbeatable ticket. She has the experience as both a senator and she knows the foreign nations as her work as First Lady, remember Bill’s campaign slogan “Two for the price of one.” with Bill back in the White House, her as Pres, could surely let Obama earn his stripes and after 8 years will become what could be America’s first black president.

I too would love to see a Hillary-Obama ticket. I believe Obama would settle for a VP position because he is young, has served only 2 years as a US senator, and has a long career ahead of him.

If the Dems are smart, and I hope they are, the ticket will be Clinton-Obama and it will be unbeatable in 2008 and again in 2012. Then in 2016 and 20020 Obama will be top dog on the ticket thus providing sixteen years of a Democratic presidency.

Hey, Clinton/Obama is pretty powerful sounding! I’m all for it! You folks who have been programmed to hate Hillary need to get over it already. She is one smart woman who has more than enough experience in the white house and she will make one hell of a prez! Obama will learn a lot from president Clinton and will be ready to lead our great nation in 2016 or 17!

Obama and Hillary on the same ticket would be terrific. With these 2 candidates the country could become a democratic society for 16 years!

In sum, whenever you hear more chatter about the tight Democratic primary race take a breath. Get back in touch with your cynicism. Talk about change is for campaigns; protecting the status quo is for winners. Plutocrats know who they want and what voters can be conned into voting for. Despite primaries the ultimate outcome has already been determined by the faceless fat-cat plutocrats running and ruining our nation. Think Big Oil, Big Insurance, Big Pharma, Big Business, Big Law and Lobbying Firms, and Big Wall Street Money. They can pump in the money and endorsements to make Clinton the winner and the corporate mainstream media will assist.

The Americans will discover, as the British learned to their cost in Basra, that they have few permanent allies

12/12/07 “”The Independent”” — — As British forces come to the end of their role in Iraq, what sort of country do they leave behind? Has the United States turned the tide in Baghdad? Does the fall in violence mean that the country is stabilising after more than four years of war? Or are we seeing only a temporary pause in the fighting?

American commentators are generally making the same mistake that they have made since the invasion of Iraq was first contemplated five years ago. They look at Iraq in over-simple terms and exaggerate the extent to which the US is making the political weather and is in control of events there.

The US is the most powerful single force in Iraq but by no means the only one. The shape of Iraqi politics has changed over the past year, though for reasons that have little to do with “the surge” – the 30,000 US troop reinforcements – and much to do with the battle for supremacy between the Sunni and Shia Muslim communities.

The Sunni Arabs of Iraq turned against al Qa’ida partly because it tried to monopolise power but primarily because it brought their community close to catastrophe. The Sunni war against US occupation had gone surprisingly well for them since it began in 2003. It was a second war, the one against the Shia majority led by al-Qa’ida, which the Sunni were losing, with disastrous results for themselves. “The Sunni people now think they cannot fight two wars – against the occupation and the government – at the same time,” a Sunni friend in Baghdad told me last week. “We must be more realistic and accept the occupation for the moment.”

This is why much of the non-al-Qa’ida Sunni insurgency has effectively changed sides. An important reason why al-Qa’ida has lost ground so swiftly is a split within its own ranks. The US military – the State Department has been very much marginalised in decision-making in Baghdad – does not want to emphasise that many of the Sunni fighters now on the US payroll, who are misleadingly called “concerned citizens”, until recently belonged to al Qa’ida and have the blood of a great many Iraqi civilians and American soldiers on their hands.

The Sunni Arabs, five million out of an Iraqi population of 27 million and the mainstay of Saddam Hussein’s government, were the core of the resistance to the US occupation. But they have also been fighting a sectarian war to prevent the 16 million Shia and the five million Kurds holding power.

At first, the Shia were very patient in the face of atrocities. Vehicles, packed with explosives and driven by suicide bombers, were regularly detonated in the middle of crowded Shia market places or religious processions, killing and maiming hundreds of people. The bombers came from al-Qa’ida but the attacks were never wholeheartedly condemned by Sunni political leaders or other guerrilla groups. The bombings were also very short-sighted since the Iraqi Shia outnumber the Sunni three to one. Retaliation was restrained until a bomb destroyed the revered Shia al-Askari shrine in Samarra on 22 February, 2006.

The bombing led to a savage Shia onslaught on the Sunni, which became known in Iraq as “the battle for Baghdad”. This struggle was won by the Shia. They were always the majority in the capital but, by the end of 2006, they controlled 75 per cent of the city. The Sunni fled or were pressed back into a few enclaves, mostly in west Baghdad.

In the wake of this defeat, there was less and less point in the Sunni trying expel the Americans when the Sunni community was itself being evicted by the Shia from large parts of Iraq. The Iraqi Sunni leaders had also miscalculated that an assault on their community by the Shia would provoke Arab Sunni states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt into giving them more support but this never materialised.

It was al-Qa’ida’s slaughter of Shia civilians, whom it sees as heretics worthy of death, which brought disaster to the Sunni community. Al-Qa’ida also grossly overplayed its hand at the end of last year by setting up the Islamic State of Iraq, which tried to fasten its control on other insurgent groups and the Sunni community as a whole. Sunni garbage collectors were killed because they worked for the government and Sunni families in Baghdad were ordered to send one of their members to join al Qai’da. Bizarrely, even Osama bin Laden, who never had much influence over al Qa’ida in Iraq, was reduced to advising his acolytes against extremism.

Defeat in Baghdad and the extreme unpopularity of al Qa’ida gave the impulse for the formation of the 77,000-strong anti-al-Qa’ida Sunni militia, often under tribal leadership, which is armed and paid for by the US. But the creation of this force is a new stage in the war in Iraq rather than an end to the conflict.

Sunni enclaves in Baghdad are safer, but not districts where Sunni and Shia face each other. There are few mixed areas left. Many of the Sunni fighters say openly that they see the elimination of al Qai’ida as a preliminary to an attack on the Shia militias, notably the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, which triumphed last year.

The creation of a US-backed Sunni militia both strengthens and weakens the Iraqi government. It is strengthened in so far as the Sunni insurrection is less effective and weakened because it does not control this new force.

If the Sunni guerrillas were one source of violence in 2006 the other was the Mehdi Army, led by Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia nationalist cleric. This has been stood down because he wants to purge it of elements he does not control, and wishes to avoid a military confrontation with his rivals within the Shia community if they are backed by the US army. But the Mehdi Army would certainly fight if the Shia community came under attack or the Americans pressured it too hard.

American politicians continually throw up their hands in disgust that Iraqis cannot reconcile or agree on how to share power. But equally destabilising is the presence of a large US army in Iraq and the uncertainty about what role the US will play in future. However much Iraqis may fight among themselves, a central political fact in Iraq remains the unpopularity of the US-led occupation outside Kurdistan. This has grown year by year since the fall of Saddam Hussein. A detailed opinion poll carried out by ABC News, BBC and NTV of Japan in August found that 57 per cent of Iraqis believe that attacks on US forces are acceptable.

Nothing is resolved in Iraq. Power is wholly fragmented. The Americans will discover, as the British learned to their cost in Basra, that they have few permanent allies in Iraq. It has become a land of warlords in which fragile ceasefires might last for months and might equally collapse tomorrow.

Soldiers in 2nd Platoon, Charlie 1-26 stage a ‘mutiny’ that pulls the unit apart

Spc. Gerry DeNardi stood at the on-base Burger King, just a few miles from downtown Baghdad, hoping for a quick taste of home.

Camp Taji encompasses miles of scrapped Iraqi tanks, a busy U.S. airstrip and thousands of soldiers living in row upon row of identical trailers. Several fast-food stands, a PX and a dining facility the size of a football field compose Taji’s social hub. The base had been struck by an occasional mortar round, and a rocket had hit the airfield two weeks before and killed an American helicopter pilot. But the quiet base brought on a sense of being far from roadside bombs, far from rocket-propelled grenades and far from the daily gunfire that rained down on the soldiers of Charlie 1-26 as they patrolled Adhamiya, a violent Sunni neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad.

Just two weeks earlier, the 20-year-old DeNardi had lost five good friends, killed together as they rode in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle that rolled over a powerful roadside bomb.

As DeNardi walked up the three wood steps to the outdoor stand to pick up his burger, the siren wailed.

Wah! Wah! Wah! “Incoming! Incoming! Incoming!”

The alarms went off all the time — often after the mortar round or rocket had struck nothing but sand, miles from anything important. Many soldiers and others at Taji had taken to ignoring the warnings. DeNardi glanced around at the picnic tables to make sure everyone was still eating. They were. The foreign nationals who worked the fast-food stands hadn’t left; so he went back to get the burger he had paid for.

The mortar round hit before he could pick up his order.

“I turned around and all of Burger King and me went flying,” DeNardi said.

He’d lived through daily explosions in 11 months with Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, at nearby Combat Outpost Apache, a no-frills fortress smack in the middle of Adhamiya’s hostile streets. He had rushed through flames to try to save friends and carried others to the aide station only to watch them die.

“I’m not getting killed at Burger King,” he thought, and he dived for a concrete bunker. People were screaming. DeNardi saw a worker from Cinnabon hobbling around, so he climbed out of the bunker, pulled shrapnel out of the man’s leg and bandaged him. The Pizza Hut manager was crying and said two more foreign workers were injured behind her stand — near the Burger King.

“Lightning doesn’t strike twice,” DeNardi said, “so I went back. But there were body parts everywhere.” The first man’s leg had been blown off, his other leg was barely attached and he had a chest wound. “He was going to die,” DeNardi said.

The other wounded man had shrapnel to his neck. DeNardi peeled off his own shirt and fashioned a bandage out of it as other soldiers started streaming in to help.

Then, “all clear” sounded over the loudspeakers as medics arrived and took over.

“I’m covered in blood, but I still have my hamburger receipt,” DeNardi said. “I went back to Burger King the next day, but they wouldn’t give me my burger.”

For all his dark humor, the “Hero of Burger King,” as fellow soldiers teasingly called him, was deeply rattled by the carnage of the explosion at the fast-food court. At Apache, he expected trouble. But not at Burger King.

“That affected me,” he said. For the next few days, he said, he slept in the open-ended concrete bunkers positioned between the housing units.

It was just another bad day to add to many — and DeNardi’s platoon had already faced misery that seemed unbearable. When five soldiers with 2nd Platoon were trapped June 21 after a deep-buried roadside bomb flipped their Bradley upside-down, several men rushed to save the gunner, Spc. Daniel Agami, pinned beneath the 30-ton vehicle. But they could only watch — and listen to him scream — as he burned alive. The Bradley was far too heavy to lift, and the flames were too high to even get close. The four others died inside the vehicle. Second Platoon already had lost four of its 45 men since deploying to Adhamiya 11 months before. June 21 shattered them.

Though their commanders moved them from the combat outpost to safer quarters, members of 2nd Platoon would stage a revolt they viewed as a life-or-death act of defiance. With all they had done and all they had seen, they now were consumed with an anger that ate at the memory of the good men they were when they arrived in Iraq.

Primed for revenge

After June 21, most of Charlie Company moved out of COP Apache, their makeshift home on the grounds of one of Saddam Hussein’s son’s palaces. At Taji, the company would try to recover for a new mission.

Sgt. 1st Class Tim Ybay, 38, served as 2nd Platoon’s platoon sergeant, but also its father figure. The former drill sergeant teased constantly and tried to treat his men like family. At memorial services for lost soldiers, he cried the loudest. He’d been on patrol June 21 when the five 2nd Platoon soldiers died in the Bradley. When he came back, his grieving platoon circled him as the weight of the loss forced him to his knees in the sand. He’d promised to bring all his boys home.

Now he would concentrate on the ones that remained.

“I knew after losing those five guys, my platoon had to get out of there,” he said. “These were the guys they slept with, joked with, worked out with. I don’t think they’d be able to accomplish the mission.”

the tears came again as he spoke, and he looked away.

“And I was having a hard time losing my guys.”

At Taji, the company had a week off. DeNardi looked more surfer than soldier after a couple of days at the pool. Ybay and his sergeants sat at the picnic tables drinking frozen coffee concoctions. The guys bought Persian carpets and brass lamps to send home as souvenirs — as if Taji were a vacation spot. But the anger over Adhamiya emerged even poolside, and erupted at the mental health clinic, which they visited in groups.

“You never really get over the anger,” said Staff Sgt. Robin Johnson, a member of Charlie’s scout platoon who had been especially close to Agami. “It just kind of becomes everything you are. You become pissed off at everything. We wanted to destroy everything in our paths, but they wanted us to keep building sewer systems and handing out teddy bears.”

Some of the younger members of the platoon were particularly disillusioned.

Spc. Armando Cardenas, 21, had taken honors classes in high school but feared college would bore him. He wanted something challenging and found it in the Army, in Iraq. As a soldier, he was the guy who leaped out of a truck to chase an insurgent, or instantly returned fire with an uncanny ability to tell where the rounds came from. When a friend, Pfc. Ryan Hill, was killed in battle, Cardenas helped carry him back.

But Cardenas’ anger was just as quick as his heroics.

He said the platoon had been waiting for June 21 — that they had known they would eventually hit a big IED and have a catastrophic loss.

Cardenas wanted revenge. “But they don’t let us take care of the people responsible,” he said. “It was a slap in the face.”

Adhamiya remained under the control of 1-26, but the brass moved Charlie 1-26 to another combat outpost, Old Mod — so called because it used to house Iraq’s Ministry of Defense — in a calmer area on the outskirts of Adhamiya. From there, they patrolled Kadhamiya.

“If my guys had stayed at Adhamiya, they would have taken the gloves off,” said Capt. Cecil Strickland, Charlie’s company commander. “We were afraid somebody was going to get in trouble.”

There had been close calls before. DeNardi had to fight back a strong desire to kill an Iraqi — accused of triggering an IED that killed two Charlie Company soldiers — as he held a 9mm Glock handgun to the man’s eye socket.

And Cardenas and Staff Sgt. John Gregory had been ordered to the Green Zone to talk to an investigator after they roughed up two insurgents. A week after Pfc. Ross McGinnis fatally threw himself on a grenade to save four friends, Cardenas and Gregory had chased a couple of guys on a scooter and managed to stop them. Cardenas kicked over a wooden box the two Iraqis stood next to.

“There was a grenade full of nails,” Cardenas said. “We had to go see a major about detainee abuse. We told him [the Iraqis] didn’t want to get in the Bradley.”

Nothing came of the investigation.

Such incidents belied the squared-away record Charlie 1-26 posted during its deployment to Iraq. In 15 months, they had one incident when two soldiers were caught with alcohol, Strickland said, but that was all.

“I think the performance comes from the level of discipline,” Strickland said. “And the discipline comes from the hardship. They’re a little bit more mature than a lot of other units.”

In Shiite Kadhamiya, Charlie Company found paved, clean streets. In Sunni Adhamiya, so many garbage collectors had been killed that the Shiite government workers refused to go there. “It was one road and one river away from Adhamiya,” DeNardi said. “But there was civilization on one side and chaos on the other.”

Suicide and a twist of fate

Lt. Col. John Reynolds replaced Lt. Col. Eric Schacht as battalion commander July 8. Schacht left after his son died of a heart condition in Germany, the same day Charlie Company lost five men in the Bradley. Even with the high operations tempo and the loss of so many men, Reynolds called the changeover “easy.”

“It was the best transition you could get,” he said.

But within days, he would lose five men, including a respected senior non-commissioned officer. Master Sgt. Jeffrey McKinney, Alpha Company’s first sergeant, was known as a family man and as a good leader because he was intelligent and could explain things well. But Staff Sgt. Jeremy Rausch of Charlie Company’s 1st Platoon, a good friend of McKinney’s, said McKinney told him he felt he was letting his men down in Adhamiya.

“First Sergeant McKinney was kind of a perfectionist and this was bothering him very much,” Rausch said. On July 11, McKinney was ordered to lead his men on a foot patrol to clear the roads of IEDs. Everyone at Apache heard the call come in from Adhamiya, where Alpha Company had picked up the same streets Charlie had left. Charlie’s 1st Platoon had also remained behind, and Rausch said he would never forget the fear he heard in McKinney’s driver’s voice:

“This is Apache seven delta,” McKinney’s driver said in a panicked voice over the radio. “Apache seven just shot himself. He just shot himself. Apache seven shot himself.”

Rausch said there was no misunderstanding what had happened.

According to Charlie Company soldiers, McKinney said, “I can’t take it anymore,” and fired a round. Then he pointed his M4 under his chin and killed himself in front of three of his men.

At Old Mod, Charlie Company was called back in for weapons training, DeNardi said. They were told it was an accident. Then they were told it was under investigation. And then they were told it was a suicide. Reynolds confirmed that McKinney took his own life.

A week later, without their beloved first sergeant, Alpha Company would experience its first catastrophic loss on a mission that, but for a change in weather, was supposed to go to Charlie Company.

On July 17, Charlie’s 2nd Platoon was refitting at Taji when they got a call to go back to Adhamiya. They were to patrol Route Southern Comfort, which had been black — off-limits — for months. Charlie Company knew a 500-pound bomb lay on that route, and they’d been ordered not to travel it. “Will there be route clearance?” 2nd Platoon asked. “Yes,” they were told. “Then we’ll go.”

But the mission was canceled. The medevac crews couldn’t fly because of a dust storm, and the Iraqi Army wasn’t ready for the mission. Second Platoon went to bed.

They woke to the news that Alpha Company had gone on the mission instead and one of their Bradleys rolled over the 500-pound IED. The Bradley flipped. The explosion and flames killed everybody inside. Alpha Company lost four soldiers: Spc. Zachary Clouser, Spc. Richard Gilmore, Spc. Daniel Gomez and Sgt. 1st Class Luis Gutierrez-Rosales.

“There was no chance,” said Johnson, whose scouts remained at Apache and served as the quick-reaction force that day. “It was eerily the same as June 21. You roll up on that, and it looked the same.”

The guys from Charlie Company couldn’t help but think about the similarities — and that it could have been them.

“Just the fact that there was another Bradley incident mentally screwed up 2nd Platoon,” Strickland said. “It was almost like it had happened to them.”

The battalion gave 2nd Platoon the day to recover. then they were scheduled to go back out on patrol in Adhamiya on July 18.

But when Strickland returned from a mission, he learned 2nd Platoon had failed to roll.

“A scheduled patrol is a direct order from me,” Strickland said.

“‘They’re not coming,’” Strickland said he was told. “So I called the platoon sergeant and talked to him. ‘Remind your guys: These are some of the things that could happen if they refuse to go out.’ I was irritated they were thumbing their noses. I was determined to get them down there.”

But, he said, he didn’t know the whole platoon, except for Ybay, had taken sleeping medications prescribed by mental health that day, according to Ybay.

Strickland didn’t know mental health leaders had talked to 2nd Platoon about “doing the right thing.”

He didn’t know 2nd Platoon had gathered for a meeting and determined they could no longer function professionally in Adhamiya — that several platoon members were afraid their anger could set loose a massacre.

“We said, ‘No.’ If you make us go there, we’re going to light up everything,” DeNardi said. “There’s a thousand platoons. Not us. We’re not going.”

They decided as a platoon that they were done, DeNardi and Cardenas said, as did several other members of 2nd Platoon. At mental health, guys had told the therapist, “I’m going to murder someone.” And the therapist said, “There comes a time when you have to stand up,” 2nd Platoon members remembered. For the sake of not going to jail, the platoon decided they had to be “unplugged.”

Ybay had gone to battalion to speak up for his guys and ask for more time. But when he came back, it was with orders to report to Old Mod.

Ybay said he tried to persuade his men to go out, but he could see they were not ready.

“It was like a scab that wouldn’t heal up,” Ybay said. “I couldn’t force them to go out. Listening to them in the mental health session, I could hear they’re not ready.”

At 2 a.m, Ybay said, he’d found his men sitting outside smoking cigarettes. They could not sleep. Some of them were taking as many as 10 sleeping pills and still could not rest. The images of their dead friends haunted them. The need for revenge ravaged them.

But Ybay was still disappointed in his men. “I had a mission,” he said. “The company had a mission. We still had to execute. But I understood their side, too.”

Somehow, the full course of events didn’t make it to Strickland. All he knew, the commander said, was his men had refused an order, and he was determined to get them to Apache.

“When you’re given an order, you’ve got to execute,” Strickland said. “Being told, ‘They’re not coming,’ versus, ‘They’re taking meds and went to mental health,’ are different things. It was just this weird situation where almost nothing connected.”

A revolt in the ranks

“They called it an act of mutiny,” Cardenas said, still enraged that the men he considered heroes were, in his mind, slandered. “The sergeant major and the battalion commander said we were unprofessional. They said they were disappointed in us and would never forget our actions for the rest of their lives.”

But no judicial action ever came of it.

“Captain Strickland read us our rights,” DeNardi said. “We had 15 yes-or-no questions, and no matter how you answered them, it looked like you disobeyed an order. No one asked what happened. And there’s no record — no article 15. Nothing to show it happened.”

After the members of 2nd Platoon had spent a year fighting for each other and watching their buddies die, battalion leaders began breaking up the platoon. Seven noncommissioned officers were told they were being relieved for cause and moved out of the unit. Three noncommissioned officers stayed at Old Mod. Two, including Sgt. Derrick Jorcke, would remain in Iraq for one month after 2nd Platoon went home in October because they had been moved to different battalions in different areas of Iraq.

“In a way, they were put someplace where they wouldn’t have to go out again,” Johnson said. “But as an NCO, they took these guys’ leaders away and put them with people they didn’t know and trust. You knew 2nd Platoon would die for you without a second’s hesitation. That’s what made them so great. These guys need each other.”

Then, they were all flagged: No promotions. No awards. No favorable actions.

“We had PFCs miss [promotion to] specialist for two months,” DeNardi said. “Bronze Stars and [Army Commendation Medals] were put on hold. You’re talking about heroes like Cardenas. These are guys who save lives and they can’t get awards.”

“I didn’t want to punish them,” Strickland said. “I understood what was going on. But they had to understand you couldn’t do something like that and have nothing happen.”

And things could not continue as they had. Strickland could not operate for three more months with a platoon that refused to go out.

“Within the company, we made some adjustments,” Strickland said. “They needed a fresh start. After looking into it, I didn’t feel the need to punish anybody.” However, he left the flags in place.

“If anything was going to be punishment, that was it,” he said. For at least one soldier, that meant going through a promotion board again. Jorcke lost his promotion table status, but Strickland signed a memo re-establishing it. “I’ve tried to fix those issues. Almost everybody else has been promoted except one guy.” Jorcke made his E-6 on Nov. 1.

Even after the “mutiny,” Strickland said, he had a great deal of admiration for his soldiers.

“I understood why they did what they did,” he said. “Some of the NCOs, I was disappointed in them because they failed to lead their soldiers through difficult times. They let their soldiers influence their decisions. But on a personal level, I applauded their decision because they stood behind their soldiers. I was disappointed, but I thought they had great courage. It was truly a Jekyll/Hyde moment for me.”

And though they were horrified at being torn away from each other, the soldiers themselves were conflicted about the outcome.

“For us being disbanded, now we definitely had unfinished business,” Jorcke said. “If we’d cleared Adhamiya, we could have said, ‘I left Iraq and my buddies didn’t die in vain.

The following is an excerpt from Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed edited by Vandana Shiva (South End, 2007).

I am not a scientist, journalist, or other specialist. I sell food. I help run a family-owned and operated neighborhood market and cafe that buys and sells predominantly local, clean, and sustainable food. I cannot speak about the reality of our food supply around most of the world. I can only can speak of what is happening in the first world, where, unfortunately, only the privileged elite can choose to put real food on their dinner tables.

Lately it seems every mass media newspaper or magazine, from the New York Times to Rolling Stone, has an article digging into the true filth that most food in the U.S. really is. Some people are actually questioning mass produced and monoculture organic food. Even Time magazine proclaimed “Local Is the New Organic” on its cover. Everywhere I turn people tell me that there is a new wind in the U.S.; that people are now concerned about eating local, clean, and sustainable food. From my vantage point in the market, behind the counter, I just don’t see it. Yes, in Massachusetts there are more farms today than in the last 20 or so years, but fewer total acres than ever recorded. Farmers markets are becoming popular or perhaps trendy. Chain supermarkets are “listening to their customers” and capitalizing on cheap “organic” food. But the chain-supermarket owners are some of the same people who screwed up our food supply in the first place. How can we trust them?

Outdoor food markets are a mainstay in most cultures in the world and were once a given in our culture. Now most people go there to shop for the luxury food treats (locally grown food) and get their staples at the supermarket. I think that because of the Depression (when there was no money to spend on food) and World War II (when there was rationing and everyone was focused on the war effort) Americans lost their taste-buds. Along came the mass-produced foods of the 1950s at cheap prices. Supermarkets were a “progressive” thing, as suburban living was progressive. Rural culture and production was frowned upon as old-fashioned and primitive. Food from all over the world suddenly became available and at prices lower than local food. Protecting America’s foreign interest, the beginning of what we now call globalization, became a new form of colonialism. Foreign resources, raw materials as well as labor, were now easily exploitable by the nation’s new superpower status. As the economy grew, money filtered down to the managerial and to some of the working class and was coupled with an influx of cheap products made cheaply and available to most classes of the U.S. Consumerism took off. Our food changed as well, especially with faster transport and technologies trickery to extend the shelf life of food. Seasonal produce became available year round; exotic food (such as bananas and oranges in Boston) became readily available and affordable. Everything was cheaper, the shopping was more convenient, and exotic foods became staples in our diet. Small and local farms shut down or were forced into monoculture farming. A disconnect sprouted between our diets and our food sources. An orange, once a special and rare treat, became an everyday commodity.

Supermarkets are part of mainstream America’s identity. Working-class people have little choice but to shop at conventional supermarkets. Middle-class people can shop at places like Whole Foods and appease their consciences with the notion that that food is safer and tastier than conventional supermarket food. And those of the flat earth society — middle- and upper-class people who do not believe that their climate is changing, that a global market is a bad thing, or that our food systems are in trouble — favor the conventional supermarket. However, both conventional and progressive supermarkets operate on the same model: mass-produced foods, made cheaply, and sold at cheap prices.

Supermarkets sell commodities. They buy mass-produced food from big business. This model of efficiency, which mirrored the production of things like automobiles and VCRs, is what created the mess our food supply is in. Efficient ordering and deliveries, no seasonal variety of stock, little to no blemishes (whether natural or from human error), significant quantities — enough to keep all those shelves constantly filled with whatever the customer might want. I describe this model as “I want what I want when I want it,” and it goes against everything about food that is local, clean, and sustainable. It cannot be done at a mass level. […]

BP, the British oil giant that pledged to move “Beyond Petroleum” by finding cleaner ways to produce fossil fuels, is being accused of abandoning its “green sheen” by investing nearly £1.5bn to extract oil from the Canadian wilderness using methods which environmentalists say are part of the “biggest global warming crime” in history.

The multinational oil and gas producer, which last year made a profit of £11bn, is facing a head-on confrontation with the green lobby in the pristine forests of North America after Greenpeace pledged a direct action campaign against BP following its decision to reverse a long-standing policy and invest heavily in extracting so-called “oil sands” that lie beneath the Canadian province of Alberta and form the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.

Producing crude oil from the tar sands – a heavy mixture of bitumen, water, sand and clay – found beneath more than 54,000 square miles of prime forest in northern Alberta – an area the size of England and Wales combined – generates up to four times more carbon dioxide, the principal global warming gas, than conventional drilling. The booming oil sands industry will produce 100 million tonnes of CO2 (equivalent to a fifth of the UK’s entire annual emissions) a year by 2012, ensuring that Canada will miss its emission targets under the Kyoto treaty, according to environmentalist activists.

The oil rush is also scarring a wilderness landscape: millions of tonnes of plant life and top soil is scooped away in vast open-pit mines and millions of litres of water are diverted from rivers – up to five barrels of water are needed to produce a single barrel of crude and the process requires huge amounts of natural gas. The industry, which now includes all the major oil multinationals, including the Anglo-Dutch Shell and American combine Exxon-Mobil, boasts that it takes two tonnes of the raw sands to produce a single barrel of oil. BP insists it will use a less damaging extraction method, but it accepts that its investment will increase its carbon footprint.

Mike Hudema, the climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace in Canada, told The Independent: “BP has done a very good job in recent years of promoting its green objectives. By jumping into tar sands extraction it is taking part in the biggest global warming crime ever seen and BP’s green sheen is gone.

“It takes about 29kg of CO2 to produce a barrel of oil conventionally. That figure can be as much 125kg for tar sands oil. It also has the potential to kill off or damage the vast forest wilderness, greater than the size of England and Wales, which forms part of the world’s biggest carbon sinks. For BP to be involved in this trade not only flies in the face of their rhetoric but in the era of climate change it should not be being developed at all. You cannot call yourself ‘Beyond Petroleum’ and involve yourself in tar sands extraction.” Mr Hudema said Greenpeace was planning a direct action campaign against BP, which could disrupt its activities as its starts construction work in Alberta next year.

The company had shied away from involvement oil sands, until recently regarded as economically unviable and environmentally unpleasant. Lord Browne of Madingley, who was BP’s chief executive until May, sold its remaining Canadian tar sands interests in 1999 and declared as recently as 2004 that there were “tons of opportunities” beyond the sector. But as oil prices hover around the $100-per-barrel mark, Lord Browne’s successor, Tony Hayward, announced that BP has entered a joint venture with Husky Energy, owned by the Hong Kong based billionaire Li Ka-Shing, to develop a tar sands facility which will be capable of producing 200,000 barrels of crude a day by 2020. In return for a half share of Husky’s Sunrise field in the Athabasca region of Alberta, the epicentre of the tar sands industry, BP has sold its partner a 50 per cent stake in its Toledo oil refinery in Ohio. The companies will invest $5.5bn (£2.7) in the project, making BP one of the biggest players in tar sands extraction.

Mr Hayward made it clear that BP considered its investment was the start of a long-term presence in Alberta. He said: “BP’s move into oil sands is an opportunity to build a strategic, material position and the huge potential of Sunrise is the ideal entry point for BP into Canadian oil sands.”

Canada claims that it has 175 billion barrels of recoverable oil in Alberta, making the province second only to Saudi Arabia in proved oil riches and sparking a £50bn “oil rush” as American, Chinese and European investors rush to profit from high oil prices. Despite production costs per barrel of up to £15, compared to £1 per barrel in Saudi Arabia, the Canadian province expects to be pumping five million barrels of crude a day by 2030.

BP said it will be using a technology that pumps steam heated by natural gas into vertical wells to liquefy the solidified oil sands and pump it to the surface in a way that is less damaging than open cast mining. But campaigners said this method requires 1,000 cubic feet of gas to produce one barrel of unrefined bitumen – the same required to heat an average British home for 5.5 days.

A spokesman for BP added: “These are resources that would have been developed anyway.”

Licenses have been issued by the Albertan government to extract 350 million cubic metres of water from the Athabasca River every year. But the water used in the extraction process, say campaigners, is so contaminated that it cannot be returned to the eco-system and must instead be stored in vast “tailings ponds” that cover up to 20 square miles and there is evidence of increased rates of cancer and multiple sclerosis in down-river communities.

WASHINGTON (Dec. 12) – The Bush administration was under court order not to discard evidence of detainee torture and abuse months before the CIA destroyed videotapes that revealed some of its harshest interrogation tactics.

Normally, that would force the government to defend itself against obstruction allegations. But the CIA may have an out: its clandestine network of overseas prisons.

While judges focused on the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and tried to guarantee that any evidence of detainee abuse would be preserved, the CIA was performing its toughest questioning half a world away. And by the time President Bush publicly acknowledged the secret prison system, interrogation videotapes of two terrorism suspects had been destroyed.

The CIA destroyed the tapes in November 2005. That June, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. had ordered the Bush administration to safeguard “all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay.”

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler issued a nearly identical order that July.

At the time, that seemed to cover all detainees in U.S. custody. But Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the terrorism suspects whose interrogations were videotaped and then destroyed, weren’t at Guantanamo Bay. They were prisoners that existed off the books – and apparently beyond the scope of the court’s order.

Attorneys say that might not matter. David H. Remes, a lawyer for Yemeni citizen Mahmoad Abdah and others, asked Kennedy this week to schedule a hearing on the issue.

Though Remes acknowledged the tapes might not be covered by Kennedy’s order, he said, “It is still unlawful for the government to destroy evidence, and it had every reason to believe that these interrogation records would be relevant to pending litigation concerning our client.”

In legal documents filed in January 2005, Assistant Attorney General Peter D. Keisler assured Kennedy that government officials were “well aware of their obligation not to destroy evidence that may be relevant in pending litigation.”

For just that reason, officials inside and outside of the CIA advised against destroying the interrogation tapes, according to a former senior intelligence official involved in the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because it is under investigation.

Exactly who signed off on the decision is unclear, but CIA director Michael Hayden told the agency in an e-mail this week that internal reviewers found the tapes were not relevant to any court case.

Remes said that decision raises questions about whether other evidence was destroyed. Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation helped lead investigators to alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Remes said Abu Zubaydah may also have been questioned about other detainees. Such evidence might have been relevant in their court cases.

“It’s logical to infer that the documents were destroyed in order to obstruct any inquiry into the means by which statements were obtained,” Remes said.

He stopped short, however, of accusing the government of obstruction. That’s just one of the legal issues that could come up in court. A judge could also raise questions about contempt of court or spoliation, a legal term for the destruction of evidence in “pending or reasonably foreseeable litigation.”