The Rag Blog

DETROIT — The stunned reaction of so many to the intelligence report that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003 frankly stuns me. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their legions of neoconservative warmongers use lies and deceptions so routinely, I’ve learned to anticipate them.

The mainstream media trumpeted the assessment in a National Intelligence Estimate as a “bombshell,” a “major reversal” and a “shocking development.” Where have these people been? Don’t they remember the serial lies used to sell the war in Iraq? “Mushroom cloud” Condi Rice told us we had to invade Iraq to avoid nuclear annihilation. Cheney declared with sober certainty that Saddam Hussein had “reconstituted nuclear weapons.”

The script is predictable. Describe a doomsday scenario, scare the hell out of people and get the compliant media to serve as the echo chamber for the inflamed, lie-laced rhetoric. CNN, determined to challenge the Fox News Channel as the “We Love War” network, already had produced a piece aimed at ramping up the propaganda for war with Iran. Originally slated to air this Wednesday on “CNN Presents,” the program dubbed “We Were Warned — Iran Goes Nuclear” was billed as a “speculative documentary” (read: fiction).

The shameless shills at CNN had actors and former government officials playing the roles of government leaders discussing how to cope with the Iranian nuclear threat. The special has been postponed because, as CNN Vice President Mark Nelson told Variety, it was “based on a different set of rules and a different set of conditions,” noting the NIE report “changed everything.”

What’s changed? Bush still insists Iran remains “dangerous,” especially “if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon,” which Iranian scientists certainly have. The executives at CNN are still hucksters and whores. So let’s go on with the show.

In October — long after learning Iran had no nuclear weapons program — Bush was warning us that we needed to confront Iran “if you’re interested in avoiding World War III.” Norman Podhoretz, the neocon nut and Rudy Giuliani’s foreign policy adviser, had been urging Bush to launch an attack on Iran as soon as possible — an event Podhoretz says he and his ilk “pray every day” for.

The “bad news” of the NIE had the neocons rattled for a few minutes, but they quickly spun a new set of lies to try to twist the truth, threatening their march to yet another disastrous war.

Remember, all the manly men — including Podhoretz — who signed the Project for a New American Century’s manifesto in 1999 wanted to confront Iraq and Iran with or without those nations possessing nuclear weapons.

The neocon goal, which Bush dutifully pursues, is to position the United States and Israel as the only significant military powers in the Middle East, and thus control the petroleum reserves and dominate the region economically. The “war on terror” and fabricated “threats” from Iraq and Iran are ruses to justify permanent U.S. military bases in the neighborhood.

Podhoretz sees a plot and another intelligence community move to undermine Bush. “This time, the purpose is to head off the possibility that the president may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installation,” Podhoretz writes.

Think Progress reports a Podhoretz rant in which he argued the “intelligence community, having been excoriated for supporting the then universal belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, is now bending over backward to counter what has up to now been a similarly universal view … that Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons.”

The godfather of the neocons declared that, “having been excoriated as well for minimizing the time it would take Saddam to add nuclear weapons to his arsenal, the intelligence community is now bending over backward to maximize the time it will take Iran to reach the same goal.”

Podhoretz, upon whom Bush conferred a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004, sees a conspiracy: “The intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again.” Mercy me! Call in the National Guard! It’s another “intelligence failure.” The bastards are out to get Bush and are shaping the facts to thwart the next neocon-planned war.

Cheney is a master leaker. Just ask Scooter Libby and Valerie Plame Wilson. Big Dick told Politico.com that the NIE on Iran was released because the administration wanted to be “upfront with what we know.” Pure crap. Cheney would have deep-sixed the report if he’d thought he could get away with it.

Later, in a lapse into honesty, Cheney admitted one reason the report was made public was because “everything leaks.” Cheney and Bush kept the NIE under wraps for as long as they could, releasing it only when they feared the anticipated leak would show they are even bigger lying sons of bitches than is recognized.

Juan Cole of the University of Michigan offers a penetrating analysis on how the NIE became public. Cole is a scholar and seeker of the truth. I have interviewed him several times at his Ann Arbor home. His living room is lined with the kind of books you know Cheney and Bush would never read.

Cole is a realist and he has been right on the keys issues in the Middle East as often as Podhoretz has been wrong. On his blog, Informed Comment, Cole presented this view on the release of the NIE: “My guess is that Admiral William J. Fallon, the CENTCOM commander, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, may well have cooperated with figures in the intelligence world to get the report written and some of it released, especially since Congress had mandated that it be completed and its findings conveyed by a date certain.”

Fallon has reportedly said privately an attack on Iran “will not happen on my watch.” Cole writes Mullen “has worried that the way the U.S. is bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq will prevent Washington from replying decisively to any other foe or crisis.”

Cole sees the Irish sailors skillfully outmaneuvering the vice president in alerting the world about Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons program: “Cheney clearly was making a push for war on Iran his fall. The real puzzle is how the NIE got past his team of plumbers, which still includes convicted perjurer Scooter Libby. That’s why I say there was more moxie behind the NIE, of the sort an admiral has, or better two admirals.”

Two years after Iran abandoned its nuclear program, Cheney proclaimed just the opposite with his typical certitude and ominous tones. Tehran was a threat to world peace, sponsoring terrorism and building a “fairly robust nuclear program,” Cheney said on the “Imus in the Morning” show on Jan. 21, 2005, a few hours before Bush’s second inaugural address. In the same interview, Cheney suggested a surrogate for violence: “Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards.”

Cheney was doing more than thinking out loud. In September, “Newsweek” magazine reported Cheney was pressing the Israelis to launch missile strikes on Iran. According to the report, Cheney’s former Middle East adviser David Wurmser told a small group that Cheney wanted to ask Israel to do the dirty work.

Two-thirds of Israelis oppose an attack on Iran, a new poll shows. The Israelis, like the American people, are far more restrained than their political leaders. I would suggest that if Israel bombs Iran, special arrangements should be made for Cheney and Podhoretz to participate. They can take on the role of Major T.J. “King” Kong, the Slim Pickens character in the film “Dr. Strangelove.” They can put on their cowboys hats and mount the bombs they love, riding them to glory and oblivion.

But, silly me, I should know desiccated chickenhawks like Cheney and Podhoretz never get their own vile feathers ruffled.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraq will never allow the United States to have permanent military bases on its soil, the government’s national security adviser said, calling the issue a “red line” that cannot be crossed.

“We need the United States in our war against terrorism, we need them to guard our border sometimes, we need them for economic support and we need them for diplomatic and political support,” Mowaffaq al-Rubaie said.

“But I say one thing, permanent forces or bases in Iraq for any foreign forces is a red line that cannot be accepted by any nationalist Iraqi,” he told Dubai-based al Arabiya television.

Rubaie’s comments, in an interview first broadcast late on Monday night, were the clearest sign yet that Iraq’s leaders are looking ahead to the days when they have full responsibility for the country’s defence.

The United States has around 160,000 troops in Iraq, officially under a United Nations mandate enacted after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

Iraq formally asked the United Nations on Monday to renew that mandate for a year until the end of 2008. It made clear it would not extend the mandate beyond next year and the mandate could be revoked sooner at Iraq’s request.

U.S. President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki signed a declaration of principles last month agreeing to friendly long-term ties. Arrangements for U.S. troops to stay beyond next year will be negotiated in early 2008.

8-year-old girl was separated from her mother for four days in detention facility meant to keep families together

DALLAS — Immigrant advocates have filed complaints over an 8-year-old girl who was separated from her pregnant mother by immigration authorities and left without her for four days at a detention center established to hold families together.

Attorneys with the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law sent a complaint on Monday to the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees detention of immigrants. They also made a complaint to the Texas Department of Protective Services on Nov. 29, said Barbara Hines, a law professor who helps oversee the clinic.

After being caught in South Texas in August, the child and her mother were sent to the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility, a former Central Texas prison where noncriminal immigrant families are held while their cases are processed. They were awaiting a decision on a bid for asylum, which they eventually lost.

When agents attempted to deport the woman in October, she wouldn’t comply. As a result, she was considered a high risk for disruptive behavior and moved to a South Texas detention center in Pearsall on Oct. 18., according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Guards and ICE staff watched over the child for four days and the pair were reunited when they were deported, ICE spokesman Carl Rusnok said.

ICE officials have previously said detaining families at the facility is meant to help “children remain with parents, their best caregivers” while they are processed for deportation. They also told the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services that parents would be at the facility with their children and would be responsible for their care, so state regulation wasn’t needed.

But if the state’s child care licensing division receives a complaint indicating child care is being provided, it could investigate, said Patrick Crimmins, a spokesman for the Department of Family and Protective Services.

As of Monday afternoon, the child care licensing division had received no complaints about the facility. Complaints made to Child Protective Services about a child being abused or neglected are confidential by state law, so officials could not say if one was received or not, Crimmins said.

Forget homo-, bi- or even metro-: the latest prefix in sexuality is vegan-, as in “vegansexual.” In a study released in May, Annie Potts, a researcher at the University of Canterbury and a director of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies, surveyed 157 vegans and vegetarians (120 of them women) on the topic of cruelty-free living. The questions ranged from attitudes about eating meat to keeping pets to wearing possum fur to, yes, “cruelty-free sex” — that is, “rejecting meat eaters as intimate partners.”

Some of the survey respondents volunteered their reluctance to kiss meat eaters. “I couldn’t think of kissing lips that allow dead animal pieces to pass between them,” a 49-year-old vegan woman from Auckland said. For some, the resistance is the squeamishness factor.

“Nonvegetarian bodies smell different to me,” a 41-year-old Christchurch vegan woman said. “They are, after all, literally sustained through carcasses — the murdered flesh of others.”

For some, it is a question of finding a like-minded life partner. An Auckland ovo-vegetarian had tried a relationship with a carnivore, but reported that despite the sexual attraction, the gulf in “shared values and moral codes” was just too wide.

Potts, who coined the term vegansexuality, says the “negative response of omnivores” to her study has surprised her. Even some fellow animal lovers question the wisdom of vegansexuality. A blog for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals noted that sleeping with only fellow vegans means forgoing the opportunity to turn carnivores into vegans by the most powerful recruiting tool available — sex.

PETA’s founder and president, Ingrid Newkirk, agrees that vegans smell fresher. (“There’s science to prove it,” she says.) But Newkirk is all about the recruiting, even if it means one convert at a time. “When my staff members come to me and say: ‘Guess what? My boyfriend, now he’s a vegan,’ I say, half-jokingly: ‘Well, it is time to ditch him and get another. You’ve done your work; move on.’ “

A NATO air attack on Nov. 28 dropped two bombs on tents where workers were sleeping in Nuristan, a rugged province in eastern Afghanistan. The bombs killed 14 workers, with no survivors. These workers had been building a road for the NATO occupation forces.

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) admitted it conducted air strikes against Taliban fighters in the area but denied any workers were killed. ISAF spokesman Brig. Gen. Carlos Branco claimed at a news conference a few days later that a “Taliban leader” was targeted and that “there were no civilian casualties.”

While it may be no surprise that Gen. Branco denied the bombing, it wouldn’t be the first time NATO forces in Afghanistan have caused heavy civilian casualties. According to United Nations reports, NATO and Afghan government forces killed 314 civilians in the first six months of this year. The same source says 279 civilians were killed by the Afghan resistance.

Mark Herold, a well-respected economist at the University of New Hampshire, estimates that U.S. forces killed 3,767 civilians in Afghanistan—and that’s only between October and December of 2001, during the initial bombing. Many more have been killed in the six years since. The U.S. Department of Defense admits to 401 military fatalities as of July 2007. Another 278 from other NATO countries have also been killed. Many more Afghan civilians than NATO troops have been killed, and most have been killed by NATO troops.

Past examples indicate that even if it were clearly established that the ISAF air and helicopter attack was aimed the road workers, it is highly unlikely that any serious charges would be brought against the forces involved, especially if they are from the U.S. or other big imperialist powers.

U.S. Marines’ impunity

During a routine patrol last March 4, U.S. Marines were attacked by a suicide bomber. They responded by killing at least 50 civilians and seriously injuring an unspecified number more. Three weeks later, after large, angry protests, Marine commanders agreed to open an investigation and announced that they would keep the platoon implicated in the massacre in Afghanistan even though they were sending the company involved out of the country.

On May 9, Col. John Nicholson, who commanded the brigade to which the Marine Special Forces were attached, apologized to the families of the 69 civilians who were killed or wounded. Nicholson said he was “deeply, deeply ashamed” about this “terrible, terrible mistake.” On behalf of the U.S. government, he turned over $2,000 as compensation for the deaths and injuries.

A few weeks later, the Marine Corp’s top general said that Nicholson was wrong to apologize because investigators had yet to determine whether any wrongdoing occurred. As of the middle of November, the Defense Department was saying that a formal investigation would be opened sometime in December.

Polish troops jailed

The Polish military reacted differently. When the military prosecutors in Poznan, Poland, became aware that Polish soldiers, who were operating together with U.S. troops, mortared the Afghan town of Nangar Khel on Aug. 16, killing six civilians including women and children, they jailed the troops on Nov. 15. The authorities are holding the Polish troops in separate cells, to avoid collusion. The investigating judge has held that it is established that the killings took place.

Poland currently has about 1,200 troops in Afghanistan and 900 in Iraq. The new prime minister, Donald Tusk, appointed at the end of October after his Civic Platform party won the parliamentary elections, had run on a platform of withdrawing from Iraq by the summer of 2008. His platform also included trying to strengthen Poland’s ties to the U.S. Tusk says he will continue to keep a significant Polish force in Afghanistan.

According to a recent public opinion poll, 72 percent of Poles want Poland out of Afghanistan.

The Polish edition of Newsweek ran a front-page headline, “Blood on the uniform,” the week the news broke of the Aug. 16 massacre. The Polish Business News Agency raised the charge that Polish army commanders knew about the massacre and the cover up.

Tusk announced that if the charges were proven, he would apologize to the Afghani people. The Polish military prosecutor intends to try the soldiers early in the spring of 2008.

Washington, the imperialist capital with the most powerful military, has insisted its soldiers be exempt from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, and that the actions of its occupation troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are virtually unpunished. Poland is a poor neo-colony of U.S. and Western European imperialism.

More than two million of Poland’s young workers have left for Western Europe in the past three years. Though Poland’s youths are also acceptable as cannon fodder for imperialist wars and occupations, they don’t get the same arrogant protection as the imperialist troops when they commit war crimes.

Amid the idyllic Americana setting in a small Texas town is a place where young children lived surrounded by razor wire fence with the threat of separation from their parents. They and their families—none of whom were charged with crimes—had been kept in prison cells with limited access to medical care, education and even food. You likely wouldn’t have found the typical colorful drawings found in most homes with children, because they weren’t allowed to have even paper and crayons in their cells.

While Taylor, Texas, advertises itself as a “a vibrant, growing community of…friendly people living the good life,” something it doesn’t promote is the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility, a former medium security prison that now is a detention center for immigrant families, including children, awaiting decisions about asylum in the U.S. or other immigration-related issues.

When Barbara Hines, director of the School of Law’s Immigration Clinic, first visited the facility in fall 2006, she discovered life has been anything but idyllic for the children detained there. The facility was surrounded by fences topped with razor wire. No direct sunlight entered the building. During detentions that lasted as long as a year, the children were kept in cells at least 12 hours a day, required to wear prison uniforms, given 20 minutes to eat their meals (with no additional nutrition available beyond what was served at mealtimes), and provided about one hour a day of education.

Hines, who has worked on immigration law issues for three decades, said she was stunned by the conditions she encountered at Hutto, run by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), a for-profit company. CCA is the fifth-largest operator of corrections facilities in the nation—behind only the federal government’s prison system and those of three states.

“I have seen a lot in many years of doing immigration law that disturbed me,” she said, “but this is the most disturbed I’ve been about any immigration policy in a really long time. I just couldn’t believe that there were children in prison uniforms behind barbed wire. Imprisoning families who have fled their home countries under fear of persecution from their own governments, and detaining them in jail-like conditions, was an indescribable trauma for many of the children.”

Elise Harriger, a third-year law student in the Immigration Clinic who also visited Hutto to work on cases there, was similarly distressed by what she saw.

“It was a prison, plain and simple. Children wore prison uniforms and lived in cells with narrow slits for windows. I had to keep reminding myself that I really was in the United States. It seemed so terribly wrong,” Harriger recalled.

According to advocates, there was little or no privacy in bathrooms or showers at Hutto. Many of the children said that they were threatened with being separated from their parents if they did not respond immediately to the orders of their uniformed guards. There was no pediatrician onsite, and many children’s medical conditions worsened while they were in custody. Advocates say the children had almost no toys or age-appropriate books and were not allowed to keep writing implements and paper in their cells. In many cases, the children’s mental health deteriorated substantially.
None of the detainees was charged with crimes, and none had violent histories. Among them were families from Lithuania, Romania, Iraq, Somalia and several Latin American countries.

Calls for assistance

The Hutto facility opened in May 2006. Frances Valdez, a 2005 Law School graduate, who was then the clinic’s Clinical Fellow, began receiving calls for assistance in August. Because the detainees have no right to a publicly funded lawyer, the clinic fields many such requests—it is one of very few organizations with expertise in this area that provides free legal services.

“The first call I got was from a frantic Nicaraguan woman in the Valley saying her daughter and her daughter’s baby were being held at a prison in Taylor,” Valdez recalled. “That was when we first learned families were being detained at Hutto.”

As clinic students began meeting with Hutto detainees to help them with their asylum claims and other cases, Valdez also worked to raise public awareness of those detainees’ circumstances. At an Austin meeting convened by the national organization Detention Watch Network to discuss general detention issues, she asked those in attendance to focus on Hutto, and the group Texans United for Families was formed as a result. In December 2006, Valdez and others organized a vigil at Hutto, and that event ignited media attention.

“Suddenly we were receiving calls from everywhere,” Valdez said, “not just Texas media but national media, too.”

With 12 students, the Immigration Clinic could handle only a relatively small number of cases for individual Hutto detainees.

“We were overwhelmed,” Hines said. “We realized that we were going to need more help.”

Other organizations providing individual services, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, were also finding their resources barely sufficient to meet the needs of individuals there.

The litigation

In March of this year, the Immigration Clinic, along with the American Civil Liberties Union and the international law firm LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae, filed lawsuits on behalf of 26 children detained at Hutto against Michael Chertoff, secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and six officials from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The lawsuits charged that the children were being imprisoned under inhumane conditions, and in contravention of a 1997 federal settlement agreement, Flores v. Meese, that requires immigration authorities to house children in the least restrictive conditions possible and to meet certain basic standards in their care and treatment. All 12 students from the Immigration Clinic participated in developing the case.

In an April ruling consolidating the 26 cases into one trial, the District Court Judge hearing the case—1963 Law School graduate Sam Sparks—warned the defendants that they faced an uphill struggle to justify their actions, writing: “The Court finds it inexplicable that defendants have spent untold amounts of time, effort, and taxpayer dollars to establish the Hutto family detention program, knowing all the while that Flores is still in effect.”

In an apparent response to the suit, ICE accelerated the process of issuing bonds for asylum seekers who passed interviews regarding their credible fear of harm or repression if they returned to their native countries. Those bonds freed some of the detainees and their children from the facility.

Other changes also began taking place at Hutto after the suit was filed, changes that former clinic student Elizabeth Wagoner, a 2007 Law School graduate, described as nearly farcical.

“It would have been funny if it weren’t so tragic,” Wagoner recounted. “For example, they painted a big mural on one wall, with castles and happy dragons and blue skies and puffy clouds, and it said Bienvenidos a Hutto—Welcome to Hutto—as though this would bring some sort of pleasure to children who were, in my view, being cruelly mistreated and many of whose parents were experiencing serious distress as a result of their penal confinement and the confinement of their children.”

The settlement

As the trial was about to begin in August, a settlement was reached. All 26 of the plaintiff children had been released before the trial date—six of them just days earlier. They are still in the U.S., now living with family members who are U.S. citizens and/or legal permanent residents while their asylum claims are being pursued.

The defendants agreed to ensure that living conditions at Hutto—where, as of the writing of this article, about 200 people are still detained—met appropriate standards. U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew Austin, a 1985 Law School graduate, was assigned to monitor those conditions, pursuant to a 127-item checklist included in the settlement.

“In my opinion, Hutto should be shut down,” Valdez said. “But at least now the children can wear regular clothes instead of prison uniforms, they can go outside, and there are no more clanging iron cellblock gates.”

Hines and her students still provide legal services to individuals detained at Hutto. Even with the settlement in place and changes beginning to occur, Hines said that it is still very difficult to go there and see families held in such confinement.
“The conditions at Hutto are not just distressing,” she said. “They are fundamentally in conflict with what Congress intended as a proper way to deal with detained families.”

The policy

Before 2001, apprehended immigrant families (a category that includes asylum seekers, who are placed under arrest and considered to be in the U.S. illegally until their status is determined) typically were released with an assigned date to appear in court. After 2001, in an environment that placed heightened emphasis on security, government policy called for the detention of more apprehended immigrants, including those accompanied by children, to provide a greater likelihood that they would appear for their court dates.

The first facility to house detained immigrant families was established in a former nursing home in Berks County, Pa., in 2001. With about 84 beds, it is run by the county. The much larger Hutto is the only other facility used to detain families.

In a joint report published earlier this year, the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, while declaring “the system of family detention is overwhelmingly inappropriate for families,” observed that children at the Berks County institution were generally treated more humanely than those held at Hutto.

The House committee overseeing the budget for the Department of Homeland Security has regularly described detention of families as a last resort. In 2005 it wrote: “The Committee expects DHS to release families or use alternatives to detention such as the Intensive Supervised [sic] Appearance Program whenever possible. When detention of family units is necessary, the committee directs DHS to use appropriate detention space to house them together.” In the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, under way in nine American cities, immigrants are generally equipped with electronic bracelets and supervised by caseworkers to ensure compliance with the terms of their release.

In 2006 the committee reiterated its expectation that “if detention is necessary,” DHS should “house these families together in non-penal, homelike environments until the conclusion of their immigration proceedings.”

Hines and her students take pride in the services they provide to individual Hutto detainees, and in their substantial part in obtaining the settlement that is changing the conditions of detention there. But many feel strongly that detention of families is an inappropriate policy and that even if detention must be used, the Hutto facility is the wrong place to do it.

When the U.S. Air Force Southern Command’s 10-year usage rights for Ecuador’s Manta air base expire in 2009, they can expect to be evicted in favor of China.

President Jamil Mahuad signed a 10-year lease agreement with the US Military’s Forward Operating Location (FOL) in 1999. The Manta base is not geopolitically important for US national security, but Southern Command (South Com) currently uses it to combat illegal cocaine trade in the “source zone” of Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. The Air Base shares a common runway with Manta’s Eloy Alfaro International Airport terminal, but the airbase has a separate office for cargo, while the airport handles passengers. About 475 US military personnel are stationed at the air base under a under a 10-year agreement signed with Quito in November 1999 and due to expire in 24 months.

Acording to Latin Americanist Marc Becker, the agreement with the US military “has proved to be unpopular and some argue unconstitutional. The purported purpose of the FOL was to help interdict drug shipments from neighboring Colombia, but opponents contend that the U.S. government has . . . move[d] well beyond that mandate into counter-insurgency and anti-immigrant activities.” There are also complaints that the base was consolidated by expropriating land from indigenous groups and small farmers, and that is being used by Colombian pilots and as a center of anti-guerilla intelligence as a part of Plan Colombia, and for the targeting of alleged terrorist groups. From March 5 to 9 of 2007, more than 400 activists gathered in Manta for the first International Conference for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases. They chose Manta due to the new government’s stance against continued US presence.

When Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa was campaigning in 2006, he promised to make the contract renewal with the US contingent on a reciprocal agreement allowing Ecuador to build or station military on an airbase in Miami, Florida. The US rejected this idea, and Correa offered the base to the Terminales del Ecuador, a subsidiary of Hong Kong-based Hutchison Port Holdings [HPH] during to Beijing on Nov. 21. China would be most likely to use the base for cargo transit in trade, rather than security purposes. Strategic Forecasting [STRATFOR] predicts that Correa’s offer is “aimed partly at maintaining domestic support, partly at extracting preferential trade access to U.S. markets (something Washington probably will cave in and deliver), and partly at securing Chinese capital for fulfilling Manta’s future role as the largest Sino-Latin American trade transshipment hub on the South American west coast.”

Correa’s presidential campaign also focused on the need to improve regional transport and trade in order to compete with ports in Peru, Colombia and Chile and to link to industry in Brazil. Some of the roads planned between the Andean countries would also connect waterways linking Ecuador and Brazil. The agreement will create profits for Brazil as well as Ecuador, as the two countries recently signed an agreement to link Manta to the city of Manaus by railway or highway corridor. According to the government, the details of this project have already been discussed with other interested Chinese investment firms. This corridor project is a key part of IIRSA, the South American regional infrastructure integration initiative.

Since before his election, Correa has also emphasized the necessity of attracting Asian investment in order to upgrade infrastructure and therefore expand regional and international trade. In offering the Manta base to HPH, he said that he was offering Chinese investors a “geopolitical window,” which would make Ecuador a bridge for accessing markets in South America.

Chinese Investment and US Relations

Chinese investment in Manta began when Chinese, Chilean, Singaporean, Japanese, and US port companies expressed interest in the Manta port (not the air force base). In October, HPH gave a $1 million bond to the MPA . In November, 2006, HPH was the only final bidder and the Manta Port Authority (MPA) gave HPH operating concessions in exchange for $486 million (added to $55 million promised by the MPA) to upgrade facilities over the next 30 years.

According to Business News Americas, Hutchinson Port Holdings [HPH] is the port-operating subsidiary of Hong Kong’s Hutchison-Whampoa. The company focuses “on trans-Pacific/Atlantic corridor cargo trade” and has a portfolio of ports in Latin America. “In 2001 it bought out Philippines-based port operator ICTSI, which had various Latin American interests in Argentina, Mexico and the Bahamas. In Panama, HPH’s Panama Port Company operates the ports of Cristobal and Balboa. Manta is the closest port to Asia on South America’s west coast.” Manta is a desirable port for HPH as it is the closest port to Asia on Latin America’s west coast. The Manta deal could also help smooth out a disagreement between Ecuador and China’s major state energy players over the October increase of Ecuador’s oil taxes from 50 percent to 99 percent.

The next steps would involve HPH accepting the post 2009 concession for Manta’s air force base (it already controls the sea port), and another Chinese investment firm’s participation in financing the road/rail network between Manta and Manaus, Brazil.

According to STRATFOR, “while this is not the first time China has been made such an offer by a Latin American nation, it is the first time U.S. geopolitical interests in the region have been so closely brushed up against.” They forecast that “from a security perspective, a Chinese military presence in the Western Hemisphere would be viewed by the United States as a hostile move, and would almost inevitably invite the Pentagon’s ire.” They predict that Beijing and especially the People’s Liberation Army will try to maintain good relations with the US to prevent remunerative trade policies such as tariffs.

“It’s ironic that it is China, not a European power, that would challenge the Monroe Doctrine. The irony is doubled as China turns the original US Open Door Policy of 1900 (designed to allow US access to Chinese markets) back on the US to get better access to Latin American markets,” comments Sanho Tree of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Why the former chief prosecutor for the Office of Military Commissions resigned his post.

I was the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, until Oct. 4, the day I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system. I resigned on that day because I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively or responsibly.

In my view — and I think most lawyers would agree — it is absolutely critical to the legitimacy of the military commissions that they be conducted in an atmosphere of honesty and impartiality. Yet the political appointee known as the “convening authority” — a title with no counterpart in civilian courts — was not living up to that obligation.

In a nutshell, the convening authority is supposed to be objective — not predisposed for the prosecution or defense — and gets to make important decisions at various stages in the process. The convening authority decides which charges filed by the prosecution go to trial and which are dismissed, chooses who serves on the jury, decides whether to approve requests for experts and reassesses findings of guilt and sentences, among other things.

Earlier this year, Susan Crawford was appointed by the secretary of Defense to replace Maj. Gen. John Altenburg as the convening authority. Altenburg’s staff had kept its distance from the prosecution to preserve its impartiality. Crawford, on the other hand, had her staff assessing evidence before the filing of charges, directing the prosecution’s pretrial preparation of cases (which began while I was on medical leave), drafting charges against those who were accused and assigning prosecutors to cases, among other things.

How can you direct someone to do something — use specific evidence to bring specific charges against a specific person at a specific time, for instance — and later make an impartial assessment of whether they behaved properly? Intermingling convening authority and prosecutor roles perpetuates the perception of a rigged process stacked against the accused.

The second reason I resigned is that I believe even the most perfect trial in history will be viewed with skepticism if it is conducted behind closed doors. Telling the world, “Trust me, you would have been impressed if only you could have seen what we did in the courtroom” will not bolster our standing as defenders of justice. Getting evidence through the classification review process to allow its use in open hearings is time-consuming, but it is time well spent.

Crawford, however, thought it unnecessary to wait because the rules permit closed proceedings. There is no doubt that some portions of some trials have to be closed to protect classified information, but that should be the last option after exhausting all reasonable alternatives. Transparency is critical.

Finally, I resigned because of two memos signed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England that placed the chief prosecutor — that was me — in a chain of command under Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes. Haynes was a controversial nominee for a lifetime appointment to the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, but his nomination died in January 2007, in part because of his role in authorizing the use of the aggressive interrogation techniques some call torture.

I had instructed the prosecutors in September 2005 that we would not offer any evidence derived by waterboarding, one of the aggressive interrogation techniques the administration has sanctioned. Haynes and I have different perspectives and support different agendas, and the decision to give him command over the chief prosecutor’s office, in my view, cast a shadow over the integrity of military commissions. I resigned a few hours after I was informed of Haynes’ place in my chain of command.

The Military Commissions Act provides a foundation for fair trials, but some changes are clearly necessary. I was confident in full, fair and open trials when Gen. Altenburg was the convening authority and Brig. Gen. Tom Hemingway was his legal advisor. Collectively, they spent nearly 65 years in active duty, and they were committed to ensuring the integrity of military law. They acted on principle rather than politics.

The first step, if these truly are military commissions and not merely a political smoke screen, is to take control out of the hands of political appointees like Haynes and Crawford and give it back to the military.

The president first authorized military commissions in November 2001, more than six years ago, and the lack of progress is obvious. Only one war-crime case has been completed. It is time for the political appointees who created this quagmire to let go.

Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham have said that how we treat the enemy says more about us than it does about him. If we want these military commissions to say anything good about us, it’s time to take the politics out of military commissions, give the military control over the process and make the proceedings open and transparent.

Will the presidential election of 2008 mark a turning point in American political history? Will it terminate with extreme prejudice the conservative ascendancy that has dominated the country for the last generation? No matter the haplessness of the Democratic opposition, the answer is yes.

With Richard Nixon’s victory in the 1968 presidential election, a new political order first triumphed over New Deal liberalism. It was an historic victory that one-time Republican strategist and now political critic Kevin Phillips memorably anointed the “emerging Republican majority.” Now, that Republican “majority” finds itself in a systemic crisis from which there is no escape.

Only at moments of profound shock to the old order of things — the Great Depression of the 1930s or the coming together of imperial war, racial confrontation, and de-industrialization in the late 1960s and 1970s — does this kind of upheaval become possible in a political universe renowned for its stability, banality, and extraordinary capacity to duck things that matter. The trauma must be real and it must be perceived by people as traumatic. Both conditions now apply.

War, economic collapse, and the political implosion of the Republican Party will make 2008 a year to remember.

The Politics of Fear in Reverse

Iraq is an albatross that, all by itself, could sink the ship of state. At this point, there’s no need to rehearse the polling numbers that register the no-looking-back abandonment of this colossal misadventure by most Americans. No cosmetic fix, like the “surge,” can, in the end, make a difference — because large majorities decided long ago that the invasion was a fiasco, and because the geopolitical and geo-economic objectives of the Bush administration leave no room for a genuine Iraqi nationalism which would be the only way out of this mess.

The fatal impact of the President’s adventure in Iraq, however, runs far deeper than that. It has undermined the politics of fear which, above all else, had sustained the Bush administration. According to the latest polls, the Democrats who rate national security a key concern has shrunk to a percentage bordering on the statistically irrelevant. Independents display a similar “been there, done that” attitude. Republicans do express significantly greater levels of alarm, but far lower than a year or two ago.

In fact, the politics of fear may now be operating in reverse. The chronic belligerence of the Bush administration, especially in the last year with respect to Iran, and the cartoonish saber-rattling of Republican presidential candidates (whether genuine or because they believe themselves captives of the Bush legacy) is scary. Its only promise seems to be endless war for purposes few understand or are ready to salute. To paraphrase Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for many people now, the only thing to fear is the politics of fear itself.

And then there is the war on the Constitution. Randolph Bourne, a public intellectual writing around the time of World War I, is remembered today for one trenchant observation: that war is the health of the state. Mobilizing for war invites the cancerous growth of the bureaucratic state apparatus and its power over everyday life. Like some over-ripe fruit this kind of war-borne “healthiness” is today visibly morphing into its opposite — what we might call the “sickness of the state.”

The constitutional transgressions of the executive branch and its abrogation of the powers reserved to the other two branches of government are, by now, reasonably well known. Most of this aggressive over-reaching has been encouraged by the imperial hubris exemplified by the invasion of Iraq. It would be short-sighted to think that this only disturbs the equanimity of a small circle of civil libertarians. There is a long-lived and robust tradition in American political life always resentful of this kind of statism. In part, this helps account for wholesale defections from the Republican Party by those who believe it has been kidnapped by political elites masquerading as down-home, “live free or die” conservatives.

Now, add potential economic collapse to this witches brew. Even the soberest economy watchers, pundits with PhDs — whose dismal record in predicting anything tempts me not to mention this — are prophesying dark times ahead. Depression — or a slump so deep it’s not worth quibbling about the difference — is evidently on the way; indeed is already underway. The economics of militarism have been a mainstay of business stability for more than half century; but now, as in the Vietnam era, deficits incurred to finance invasion only exacerbate a much more embracing dilemma.

Start with the confidence game being run out of Wall Street; after all, the subprime mortgage debacle now occupies newspaper front pages day after outrageous day. Certainly, these tales of greed and financial malfeasance are numbingly familiar. Yet, precisely that sense of déjà vu all over again, of Enron revisited, of an endless cascade of scandalous, irrational behavior affecting the central financial institutions of our world suggests just how dire things have become.

Enronization as Normal Life

Once upon a time, all through the nineteenth century, financial panics — often precipitating more widespread economic slumps — were a commonly accepted, if dreaded, part of “normal” economic life. Then the Crash of 1929, followed by the New Deal Keynesian regulatory state called into being to prevent its recurrence, made these cyclical extremes rare.

Beginning with the stock market crash of 1987, however, they have become ever more common again, most notoriously — until now, that is — with the dot.com implosion of 2000 and the Enronization that followed. Enron seems like only yesterday because, in fact, it was only yesterday, which strongly suggests that the financial sector is now increasingly out of control. At least three factors lurk behind this new reality.

Thanks to the Reagan counterrevolution, there is precious little left of the regulatory state — and what remains is effectively run by those who most need to be regulated. (Despite bitter complaints in the business community, the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, passed after the dot.com bubble burst, has proven weak tea indeed when it comes to preventing financial high jinks, as the current financial meltdown indicates.)

More significantly, for at least the last quarter-century, the whole U.S. economic system has lived off the speculations generated by the financial sector — sometimes given the acronym FIRE for finance, insurance, and real estate). It has grown exponentially while, in the country’s industrial heartland in particular, much of the rest of the economy has withered away. FIRE carries enormous weight and the capacity to do great harm. Its growth, moreover, has fed a proliferation of financial activities and assets so complex and arcane that even their designers don’t fully understand how they operate.

One might call this the sorcerer’s apprentice effect. In such an environment, the likelihood and frequency of financial panics grows, so much so that they become “normal accidents” — an oxymoron first applied to highly sophisticated technological systems like nuclear power plants by the sociologist Charles Perrow. Such systems are inherently subject to breakdowns for reasons those operating them can’t fully anticipate, or correctly respond to, once they’re underway. This is so precisely because they never fully understood the labyrinthine intricacies and ramifying effects of the way they worked in the first place.

Likening the current subprime implosion to such a “normal accident” is more than metaphorical. Today’s Wall Street fabricators of avant-garde financial instruments are actually called “financial engineers.” They got their training in “labs,” much like Dr. Frankenstein’s, located at Wharton, Princeton, Harvard, and Berkeley. Each time one of their confections goes south, they scratch their heads in bewilderment — always making sure, of course, that they have financial life-rafts handy, while investors, employees, suppliers, and whole communities go down with the ship.

What makes Wall Street’s latest “normal accident” so portentous, however, is the way it is interacting with, and infecting, healthier parts of the economy. When the dot.com bubble burst many innocents were hurt, not just denizens of the Street. Still, its impact turned out to be limited. Now, via the subprime mortgage meltdown, Main Street is under the gun.

It is not only a matter of mass foreclosures. It is not merely a question of collapsing home prices. It is not simply the shutting down of large portions of the construction industry (inspiring some of those doom-and-gloom prognostications). It is not just the born-again skittishness of financial institutions which have, all of sudden, gotten religion, rediscovered the word “prudence,” and won’t lend to anybody. It is all of this, taken together, which points ominously to a general collapse of the credit structure that has shored up consumer capitalism for decades.

Campaigning Through a Perfect Storm of Economic Disaster

The equity built up during the long housing boom has been the main resource for ordinary people financing their big-ticket-item expenses — from college educations to consumer durables, from trading-up on the housing market to vacationing abroad. Much of that equity, that consumer wherewithal, has suddenly vanished, and more of it soon will. So, too, the life-lines of credit that allow all sorts of small and medium-sized businesses to function and hire people are drying up fast. Whole communities, industries, and regional economies are in jeopardy.

All of that might be considered enough, but there’s more. Oil, of course. Here, the connection to Iraq is clear; but, arguably, the wild escalation of petroleum prices might have happened anyway. Certainly, the energy price explosion exacerbates the general economic crisis, in part by raising the costs of production all across the economy, and so abetting the forces of economic contraction. In the same way, each increase in the price of oil further contributes to what most now agree is a nearly insupportable level in the U.S. balance of payments deficit. That, in turn, is contributing to the steady withering away of the value of the dollar, a devaluation which then further ratchets up the price of oil (partially to compensate holders of those petrodollars who find themselves in possession of an increasingly worthless currency). As strategic countries in the Middle East and Asia grow increasingly more comfortable converting their holdings into euros or other more reliable — which is to say, more profitable — currencies, a speculative run on the dollar becomes a real, if scary, possibility for everyone.

Finally, it is vital to recall that this tsunami of bad business is about to wash over an already very sick economy. While the old regime, the Reagan-Bush counterrevolution, has lived off the heady vapors of the FIRE sector, it has left in its wake a de-industrialized nation, full of super-exploited immigrants and millions of families whose earnings have suffered steady erosion. Two wage-earners, working longer hours, are now needed to (barely) sustain a standard of living once earned by one. And that doesn’t count the melting away of health insurance, pensions, and other forms of protection against the vicissitudes of the free market or natural calamities. This, too, is the enduring hallmark of a political economy about to go belly-up.

This perfect storm will be upon us just as the election season heats up. It will inevitably hasten the already well-advanced implosion of the Republican Party, which is the definitive reason 2008 will indeed qualify as a turning-point election. Reports of defections from the conservative ascendancy have been emerging from all points on the political compass. The Congressional elections of 2006 registered the first seismic shock of this change. Since then, independents and moderate Republicans continue to indicate, in growing numbers in the polls, that they are leaving the Grand Old Party. The Wall Street Journal reports on a growing loss of faith among important circles of business and finance. Hard core religious right-wingers are airing their doubts in public. Libertarians delight in the apostate candidacy of Ron Paul. Conservative populist resentment of immigration runs head on into corporate elite determination to enlarge a sizeable pool of cheap labor, while Hispanics head back to the Democratic Party in droves. Even the Republican Party’s own elected officials are engaged in a mass movement to retire.

All signs are ominous. The credibility and legitimacy of the old order operate now at a steep discount. Most telling and fatal perhaps is the paralysis spreading into the inner councils at the top. Faced with dire predicaments both at home and abroad, they essentially do nothing except rattle those sabers, captives of their own now-bankrupt ideology. Anything, many will decide, is better than this.

Or will they? What if the opposition is vacillating, incoherent, and weak-willed — labels critics have reasonably pinned on the Democrats? Bad as that undoubtedly is, I don’t think it will matter, not in the short run at least.

Take the presidential campaign of 1932 as an instructive example. The crisis of the Great Depression was systemic, but the response of the Democratic Party and its candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt — though few remember this now — was hardly daring. In many ways, it was not very different from that of Republican President Herbert Hoover; nor was there a great deal of militant opposition in the streets, not in 1932 anyway, hardly more than the woeful degree of organized mass resistance we see today despite all the Bush administration’s provocations.

Yet the New Deal followed. And not only the New Deal, but an era of social protest, including labor, racial, and farmer insurgencies, without which there would have been no New Deal or Great Society. May something analogous happen in the years ahead? No one can know. But a door is about to open.

Steve Fraser is a writer and editor, as well as the co-founder of the American Empire Project. He is the author of Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life. His latest book, Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace, will be published by Yale University Press in March 2008.

The Gate, Tonoho O’Odham Nation (Arizona)

While Homeland Security announced the forced occupation and takeover of Lipan Apache lands in Texas for the border wall, I was at the Arizona border once again being bullied by the US Border Patrol.

All along the border, Homeland Security’s Border Patrol is intimidating and harassing the people who have lived here all their lives.

The Tohono O’odham have lived here since time immemorial. Now their land has been seized and taken over by the Border Patrol, the contractor Boeing and the invading National Guardsmen, for construction of the border wall. The graves of O’odham ancestors have been dug up, according to the traditional O’odham now speaking out against the militarization and abuse.

All along the border, young people are intimidated and harassed constantly. Tailgating police, excessive force by police and Nazi-style prosecutors push young people into rage and jails.

At the same time in Tucson, a judge has declared peace activities opposing US torture in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo, as a “danger to the community” and jailed them.

The United States government has become the terrorist it claims to oppose.

In Texas, Margo Tamez, Lipan Apache/Jumano Apache, called for immediate support, when Homeland Security announced the occupation of lands where Apache land title holders are refusing to sign NSA waivers for the border wall.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the United States will seize private lands in south Texas for the border wall, using the law of eminent domain.

Tamez said, “We need your help on our continuing efforts to protect and keep safe the elders of our struggle against U.S. tyranny.”

Chertoff announced plans to force occupation of South Texas families who refuse to allow the government access to their lands.

Tamez said, “‘Refusers’ such as the Lipan Apache Land Grant Women Defense, led by my mother, Dr. Eloisa Garcia Tamez (Lipan Apache, Basque-Apache), in the rancheria of El Calaboz, have frustrated the NSA, Border Patrol and Army Corps of Engineers officials for over two years, and increasingly in the last two months.

“Using tactics such as public announcements over the news service, used as intimidation and as psychological warfare — NSA/Chertoff exploits the press to prepare the nation to invade South Texas — and indigenous peoples–who are being ‘architected as the perpetual enemies of the United States.’ This is an old story of genocidal tactics and militarization.

“This scenario played out before, in 19th century, in 20th century. And now the 21st, my mother, the ‘child of lightning ceremony’, is fighting for the vestiges of our traditional lands.

“My mother, and the ancestors of ‘the place where the Lipan pray’, have been critical to our land-based struggle, and they are leaders in an Apache struggle in the Mexico-US International Boundary region. Our elder voices direct us in a huge role that Apache people will play in standing up against tyranny of the settler society. We cannot do this without the support and the solidarity of our indigenous sisters and brothers who are also at the forefront of the 21st century battles for our rights as indigenous people with ancient footprints on this land.

“My mother, at this stage of our community-based struggle, indicates that she is prepared to receive national and international support for our small community on the peripheries of U.S. empire. She wrote a comment on the page of this news story out of Houston, Texas.

“Today we are submitting our comments to the Environmental Impact Statement authorities, and parallel to that we are submitting an in depth case study of our histories under U.S., Mexican, Spanish, Vatican and corporate domination to the International Indian Treaty Council shadow report to be submitted to the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of Racism and Racial Discrimination in December,” Tamez said.

Meanwhile in Tucson, peace activists opposing US torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo were declared a “danger to the community” and jailed. They are the latest prisoners of conscience taking action against the torture training at Fort Huachuca in southern Arizona. Earlier, Fort Huachuca was also the site of the originator of the torture manuals used by the Schools of the Americas, leading to the murder, rape, torture and disappearance of masses of Indigenous Peoples in Central and South America in the 1980s and 1990s.

At a detention hearing in federal court in Tucson, Betsy Lamb, a retired Catholic lay leader, and Franciscan Fr. Jerry Zawada were jailed without bail until their trial, according to the support group “Torture on Trial.”

Lamb, Zawada and Mary Burton Riseley were arrested on November 18 at Fort Huachuca, home of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School, during a protest of military use of torture against war detainees.

Magistrate Hector Estrada was concerned by evidence that both Lamb and Zawada had failed to heed an order of the court in cases pending in other jurisdictions. Betsy Lamb is awaiting trial for a September anti-war protest outside the office of Rep. Greg Walden, in Bend, Oregon.

As a standard condition of release on her own recognizance, Lamb had promised not to commit any other crime while awaiting trial. Fr. Zawada has an outstanding bench warrant for failure to appear for a court date in Washington, D.C., where he has been arrested several times in recent years for anti-war protest.

Army Prosecutor Capt. Evan Seamone came to court with three witnesses in dress uniform, several poster-sized photo enlargements and a videotape of the arrests. But the magistrate said he already knew the defendants’ intent, and would only listen to Seamone’s summation.

Seamone described the defendants’ peaceful passage through police barricades at the gate of Fort Huachuca as a violent act because it had to be met by police, who were forced to go face to face with the unarmed protesters and lift them from a kneeling position. In the eyes of the law and legal precedent, Seamone argued that such violent trespass warranted pretrial detention for the safety of the community.

Were the court to release Zawada and Lamb, “their blatant defiance is likely to happen again” Seamone warned, gravely predicting that “all kinds of chaos” would ensue at the gate to Fort Huachuca.

Attorney Rachel Wilson, representing the defendants, objected repeatedly without success to Seamone’s arguments. Wilson told the court that Ms. Lamb had “learned her lesson” and was willing to post bond along with her promise to return to court for trial. Estrada was unmoved.

He told the defendants he didn’t trust them and that he believed they were right where they wanted to be – before him in chains. Protest is brinkmanship, and the point is to not be arrested; better to organize a conference or seminar, he chided.

Estrada then ordered that Lamb and Zawada be kept in custody until their February 4 trial because they “remain a flight risk, and are a danger to the community.” Not even Capt. Seamone had suggested that the defendants were a “flight risk”.

Responding to the court’s conclusion, Felice Cohen-Joppa said of her friends, “Betsy Lamb and Jerry Zawada are not a danger to the community – they, along with Mary Burton Riseley, are the conscience of the community. They are shining a light on the involvement of military intelligence in torture around the world. Their nonviolent acts are no more a danger to the community than were the nonviolent acts of Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King, Jr.” Lamb and Zawada are not the only people now in prison for peaceful protest of U.S. torture practices.

On October 17, Magistrate Estrada sent Frs. Steve Kelly and Louie Vitale to prison for five months in prison for a similar protest at Fort Huachuca in November, 2006. They are scheduled to be released in mid-March.

Brenda Norrell can be reached at: brendanorrell@gmail.com

More: www.tortureontrial.org

Please see photo of construction of the border fence on Tohono O’odham land: www.bsnorrell.blogspot.com

What has changed in the way we see the world? For as long as I can remember, the relationship of journalists with power has been hidden behind a bogus objectivity and notions of an “apathetic public” that justify a mantra of “giving the public what they want”. What has changed is the public’s perception and knowledge. No longer trusting what they read and see and hear, people in western democracies are questioning as never before, particularly via the internet. Why, they ask, is the great majority of news sourced to authority and its vested interests? Why are many journalists the agents of power, not people?

Much of this bracing new thinking can be traced to a remarkable UK website, www.medialens.org. The creators of Media Lens, David Edwards and David Cromwell, assisted by their webmaster, Olly Maw, have had such an extraordinary influence since they set up the site in 2001 that, without their meticulous and humane analysis, the full gravity of the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan might have been consigned to bad journalism’s first draft of bad history. Peter Wilby put it well in his review of Guardians of Power: the Myth of the Liberal Media, a drawing-together of Media Lens essays published by Pluto Press, which he described as “mercifully free of academic or political jargon and awesomely well researched. All journalists should read it, because the Davids make a case that demands to be answered.”

That appeared in the New Statesman. Not a single major newspaper reviewed the most important book about journalism I can remember. Take the latest Media Lens essay, “Invasion – a Comparison of Soviet and Western Media Performance”. Written with Nikolai Lanine, who served in the Soviet army during its 1979-89 occupation of Afghanistan, it draws on Soviet-era newspaper archives, comparing the propaganda of that time with current western media performance. They are revealed as almost identical.

Like the reported “success” of the US “surge” in Iraq, the Soviet equivalent allowed “poor peasants [to work] the land peacefully”. Like the Americans and British in Iraq and Afghanistan, Soviet troops were liberators who became peacekeepers and always acted in “self-defence”. The BBC’s Mark Urban’s revelation of the “first real evidence that President Bush’s grand design of toppling a dictator and forcing a democracy into the heart of the Middle East could work” (Newsnight, 12 April 2005) is almost word for word that of Soviet commentators claiming benign and noble intent behind Moscow’s actions in Afghanistan. The BBC’s Paul Wood, in thrall to the 101st Airborne, reported that the Americans “must win here if they are to leave Iraq . . . There is much still to do.” That precisely was the Soviet line.

The tone of Media Lens’s questions to journalists is so respectful that personal honesty is never questioned. Perhaps that explains a reaction that can be both outraged and comic. The BBC presenter Gavin Esler, champion of Princess Diana and Ronald Reagan, ranted at Media Lens emailers as “fascistic” and “beyond redemption”. Roger Alton, editor of the London Observer and champion of the invasion of Iraq, replied to one ultra-polite member of the public: “Have you been told to write in by those cunts at Media Lens?” When questioned about her environmental reporting, Fiona Harvey, of the Financial Times, replied: “You’re pathetic . . . Who are you?”

The message is: how dare you challenge us in such a way that might expose us? How dare you do the job of true journalism and keep the record straight? Peter Barron, the editor of the BBC’s Newsnight, took a different approach. “I rather like them. David Edwards and David Cromwell are unfailingly polite, their points are well argued and sometimes they’re plain right.”

For a decade, Australians have been living under a right-wing, semi-fascist and racist Liberal government, led by an egomaniac John Winston Howard. In order to win elections, the Howard’s gang manipulated the public, instilled fear and incited hatred against marginalised communities, including the small community of Arab and Muslim Australians. Racism has been the way that elections have been won in Australia since 1996.

In the past four elections, John Howard skilfully employed deception and scapegoating. With insatiable appetite for racism and bigotry, Australians were largely receptive to an agenda of racism and division, though deluged with propaganda and deceit. In the 2007 elections, Howard’s gang tried to use the same recipe of scaremongering and fear tactics, but failed because most Australians found John Howard to be a dishonest and deceptive politician.

First, it was the Indian-born Doctor, Mohamed Haneef who was employed at the Gold Coast Hospital. Dr Haneef was unfairly and viciously accused of supporting “terrorism”. Although, he was found to be innocent and all charges against him were dropped, he was illegally deported from Australia. The aim was to demonise the Muslim community and use Dr Haneef as a pawn to create fear in the community and garner support for the Liberal Party.

Secondly, the Howard’s government thought to use the conflict in Darfur in its elections’ campaign. With Sudan demonised by inherently racist mainstream media, there could be no better scapegoat to manipulate Australians than the Sudanese refugees in Australia. Despite the violent crimes against the Sudanese community, Howard’s Minister of Immigration Kevin Andrews deliberately accused Sudanese youth of crimes and inability to adapt to “Australian values”. Having had enough of Howard’s and his gang of attack dogs, the Queensland Premier, Anna Bligh, protested this form of racism. Premier Bligh rightly called Andrews a “racist” and compared his comments with the Deep South in the U.S. in the 1950s. She provided police statistics that show the opposite of what Andrews alleged. The Queensland Premier said: “It has been a long time since I have heard such a pure form of racism out of the mouth of any Australian politician”, let alone the immigration minister of a country made entirely of immigrants and old stock of convicts.

Finally, just few days before the 2007 elections’ day, the Liberal Party desperately used racism against Muslim Australians to tap into the anti-Muslims sentiment which has become a daily diet, particularly in Sydney’s western and southern suburbs, where the “Howard’s battlers” and many of the State hardcore racists congregated. Pamphlets, allegedly from a fictitious ‘Islamic Australia Organisation’, were printed and distributed in the electorate of Lindsay from the home of the New Zealand-born Liberal MP Jackie Kelly by her husband Gary Clark and two other high profiles senior officials of the Liberal Party, Jeff Egan (New South Wales Liberal executive), and Tony Craig. The aim was not only to discredit the Labor Party, but to spread fear and incite hatred against Muslim and Arab Australians. It is part of the wider fascist-Zionist campaign that plagued the minds of most Western societies today.

On the economy, the Howard’s government often bragged about its legacy of ‘managing’ Australian economy. But, a glance into the Howard’s government ‘achievements’ shows it is a myth. In 1996, the Howard’s government inherited a well-managed economy at an average inflation rate of 2.5 per cent. During the Howard government, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The top 20 per cent of Australian household have an average annual income of $225,000 while the bottom 20 per cent average just $22, 000, with over a million “working poor” with some work but not enough to live a decent way of life. A report by the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS) reveals that, “the number of Australian living in poverty rose from 7.6 per cent to 9.9 percent between 1994 and 2004”. The report compared Australia with the rest of the developed world on issues, including education, health and housing [1].

Howard legacy is also marked by the following: 1) the introduction of the GST (Howard pledged that he would “never, ever” introduce); 2) the anti-Muslims “terrorism Law” legalising discrimination and police harassment against Muslim and Arab Australians; 3) the anti-workers law (WorkChoices) and; 4) the introduction of the racially and ideologically motivated National Emergency Response Bill to take-over Aboriginal land in Northern Territory. (See: Axis of Logic, Sep 1, 2007).

During his term of prime minister, Howard developed a hatred for democracy. As media commentator David Marr noted: “Since 1996, Howard has cowed his critics, muffled the press, intimidated the ABC, gagged scientists, silenced non-government organisations, neutered Canberra’s mandarins, curtailed parliamentary scrutiny, censored the arts, banned books, criminalised protest and prosecuted whistleblowers” , is evident of an authoritarian government fuelled by social exclusion and division.

That is said; the 2007 elections were as usual, an all Anglo-Celtic elections affair. The elections ritual and the results provided a glimpse into a shallow “multicultural” Australia. The newly-elected Labor (Right) government is just another group of white Anglo-Celtic elites. They won government because they were able to neutralise Howard’s agenda by identifying the Labor Party agenda with the Liberal Party agenda. The “Me Too” campaign was crucial factor. In addition, Labor capitalised on pledges to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and to abolish the draconian laws known as WorkChoices. Further, the Australian Green Party preferences to Labor were also key factor in Labor’s win.

To suggest the new government of Kevin Rudd will be different from any Liberal government post John Howard is grossly misleading. The Labor Party is a lite Liberal party dominated by the Right faction. Take a look at some of the states Labor governments. For example, the NSW State Government is Labor, but ‘Labor’ is always a misnomer. It is a Liberal right-wing government, with an agenda not dissimilar from that of the Howard’s agenda. The same goes for Western Australia – the country’s cesspool of racism and political corruption. The State Labor government there is an extreme right-wing government. It is also the only state where Liberals outvoted Labor in the 2007 elections. In sum, the Rudd’s Labor Government is void of what a truly Labor government stands for. It remains to be seen whether Prime Minister-elect Kevin Rudd is a Tony Blair or a John Howard or cross between the two in sheep’s clothing.

Kevin Rudd’s pledge to start “stage withdrawal” of some 500 Australian soldiers has nothing to do with Labor’s concern for the mass slaughter of Iraqi civilians. It is political opportunism designed for public consumption. Australia’s complicity in the Iraq’s massacre is opposed by the majority of Australians. Some 1000 soldiers, including navy and air force units will continue supporting the U.S. murderous Occupation. Rudd’s aim is ‘to implement an exit strategy’ for troops who are ‘needed much closer to home’, enforcing Australia’s role as imperialism’s “Deputy Sheriff” in East Timor and the Pacific.

If Rudd is serious, the Labor Government should bring John Howard before an Australian court or the International Court of Justice to face war crimes charges for knowingly misleading the Australian public about Iraq and sending Australian troops to take part in the mass slaughter of innocent Iraqi civilians.

The Howard’s legacy will be remembered as a decade of right-wing, semi-fascist and racist government characterised by one egomaniac leader whose first priority has been his re-election, rather than doing anything for Australia. Under Howard, Australia has become a meaner and more divided country. Howard will be remembered (if ever) by most Australians as a divisive and deceptive prime minister. Good riddance.

Ghali Hassan is an independent writer living in Australia.

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