The Rag Blog

Mexico City.

The single, spindly seven foot-tall cornstalk spiring up from the planter box outside a prominent downtown hotel here was filling out with new “elotes” (sweet corn) to the admiration of passer-bys, some of whom even paused to pat the swelling ears with affection. Down the centuries most of the population of this megalopolis migrated here from the countryside at one time or another over the course of the past 500 years and inside every “Chilango” (Mexico City resident) lurks an inner campesino.

But the solitary stalk, sewn by an urban coalition of farmers and ecologists under the banner of “No Hay Pais Sin Maiz” (“There Is No Country Without Corn”) in planter boxes outside the downtown hotels, museums, government palaces and other historical monuments can just as easily be seen as a signifier for the fragile state of survival of Mexican corn.

As the year ripens into deep autumn, the corn harvest is pouring in all over Mexico. Out in Santa Cruz Tanaco in the Purepecha Indian Sierra of Michoacan state, the men mow their way down the rows much as their fathers and their fathers before did, snapping off the ears and tossing them into the “tshundi” basket on their backs.

In the evenings, the families will gather around the fire and shuck the “granos” from the cobs into buckets and carry them down to the store to trade for other necessities of life. It is the way in Tanaco in this season of plenitude just as it is in the tens of thousands of tiny farming communities all over Mexico where 29 per cent of the population still lives. But it is a way of life that is fading precipitously. Some say that these indeed may be the last days of Mexican corn.

In fact, this January 1 may prove to be a doomsday date for Mexican maiz when at the stroke of midnight, all tariffs on corn (and beans) will be abolished after more than a decade of incremental NAFTA-driven decreases. Although U.S. corn growers are already dumping 10 million tons of the heavily subsidized grain in Mexico each year, zero tariffs are expected to trigger a tsunami of corn imports, much of it genetically modified, that will drive millions of Mexican farmers off their land – in NAFTA’s first 13 years, 6,000,000 have already abandoned their plots – and could well spell the end of the line for 59 distinct “razas” or races of native corn.

Corn was first domesticated eight millennia ago in the Mexican states of Puebla and Oaxaca and Mexico remains the fourth largest corn producer on the planet but its 22,000,000 ton annual yield pales in comparison to U.S. growers who are expected to harvest near 300,000,000 tons this year, accounting for 70 per cent of the world’s maize supply. A third of U.S. corn acreage is now under genetically modified seed.

Big Biotec has had its guns trained on Mexican corn for a long time but under the national biosecurity law, Monsanto and its ilk have been barred from selling their GMO seed here. Now the transnationals are putting a full court press on the CIBOGEN, the inter-secretarial committee on bio-security, to vacate the prohibition on GMO sales – the measure was originally enacted in the late ’90s in an effort to protect native seed from contamination and homogenization by genetically modified materials.

This September, the CIBOGEN was on track to designate experimental GMO farms in the north of Mexico (Sonora’s Yaqui Valley and the Valley of Culiacan) where there are no native corns that could be corrupted by the engineered seeds but the designation was abruptly postponed around issues of potential contamination to the great frustration of a powerhouse pro-GMO coalition motored by the Biotec giants and including the Mexican National Farming Council (big growers), the National Association of Self-Service Stores (Wal-mart – now the biggest tortilla retailer in the country), and the National Farmers Central (CNC) which groups together rank and file farmers attached to the once-ruling (71 years) PRI party.

A dubious milestone in the history of corn was reached in July when scientists at the National Genetics & Biodiversity Laboratories announced that they had successfully mapped the genome of Mexican maiz. That was the good news. The bad news is that the genome will be available to anyone who can pay the Institute’s asking price.

Who owns the genome is crucial to the survival of Mexican corn. There is little doubt that the Monsanto Corporation of St. Louis Missouri would love to get its hands on this breakthrough information so that for-profit scientists could design seeds modeled upon the DNA of native corns for commercial sales.

Mexican corn is a rich source of genetic history. Millions of adaptations to specific conditions have created a seed stock with extremely variegated properties. For millennia, native seed savers have set aside corn seed that is resistant to drought whose DNA structure Monsanto will now be able to simulate in its laboratories and market under its brand.

Monsanto took a giant step in locking up the genetic wealth of Mexico this past April 18 when it signed an agreement with the National Association of Corn Producers (CNPMM), a section of the CNC that groups together big corn farmers, to establish regional seed banks in the center and south of the country. CNC members were designated “guardians of the seed” and charged with assembling collections of native corn to be housed in Monsanto-financed repositories. (Big bucks from Cargill and Maseca-ADM have also funded the seed banks.) “Allowing Monsanto to get so close to the secrets of Mexican corn is like asking Herod to baby-sit,” writes Adelita San Vicente, an activist with the “No Hay Pais” coalition in a recent agrarian supplement of the left daily La Jornada.

55 per cent of the crops needed to feed the human race are now grown by just ten corporations. The biggest players in this monopoly game are Bayer, Dow, Dupont, Syngenta (once Novartis), and Monsanto. None of these conglomerates is a seed company. They all began their corporate life selling chemicals for war and farming.

Monsanto, which dominates 71 per cent of the GMO seed market, has operated in Mexico since the post-World War II so-called “green revolution” that featured hybrid seeds (“semillas mejoradas”) that only worked when associated with pesticides and fertilizers manufactured by the transnational chemical companies. Selling hybrid seeds and chemical poisons in Mexico continues to be profitable for Monsanto whose total 2006 sales here topped 3,000,000,000 pesos ($300 million USD.) It doesn’t hurt that Monsanto Mexico sells hybrid seed for $2 Americano for a packet of a thousand when its states-side price is $1.34.

22,000,000 Mexicans, 13,000,000 of them children, suffer some degree of malnutrition according to doctors at the National Nutrition Institute and Monsanto insists that it can feed them all if only the CIBOGEN will allow it to foist its GMO seed on unwitting corn farmers. But the way Monsanto sells its GMO seed is severely questioned.

Farmers are forced to sign contracts, agreeing to buy GMO seed at a company-fixed price. Monsanto’s super-duper “Terminator” seed, named after California’s action hero governor, goes sterile after one growing cycle and the campesinos are obligated to buy more. By getting hooked on Monsanto, Mexican farmers, once seed savers and repositories themselves of the knowledge of their inner workings, become consumers of seed, an arrangement that augurs poorly for the survival of Mexico’s many native corns.

Moreover, as farmers from other climes who have resisted Monsanto and refused to buy into the GMO blitz, have learned only too traumatically, pollen blowing off contaminated fields will spread to non-GMO crops. Even more egregiously, Monsanto will then send “inspectors” (often off-duty cops) to your farm and detect their patented strains in your fields and charge you with stealing the corporation’s property.

When Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser came to Mexico several years back to explain how Monsanto had taken his farm from him for precisely these reasons, local legislators laughed that it was a science fiction scenario. “It is going to happen to you,” the old farmer warned with all the prescience of an Aztec seer.

Mexican corn is, of course, not the only native crop that is being disappeared by global capitalism. Native seeds are under siege from pole to pole. In Iraq, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers come together to form the birthplace of agriculture, one of the very first acts of George Bush’s neo-colonial satrap L. Paul Brenner was to issue the notorious Order 81 criminalizing the possession of native seeds. The U.S. military spread out throughout the land distributing little packets of GMO seeds, the euphemistically dubbed Operation “Amber Waves.” To make sure that Iraq would no longer have a native agriculture, the national seed bank, located at Abu Ghraib, was looted and set afire.

The threat to native seed has become so acute that the United Nations Food & Agricultural Organization is funding the construction of a doomsday vault on remote Svalbard Island in northern Norway 800 miles from the North Pole. It was thought that seeds cryogenically frozen and stored in deep underground bunkers would be insured of survival. But as the polar bears of that gelid bioregion now know only too well, nothing is safe from the globalizers’ hunger to destroy the planet and what it grows.

As thousands of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan return to the US, the dimensions of the social burden of war are beginning to take shape. A number of recent reports highlight the toll colonial occupation has taken on the physical and mental health of military personnel, as well as the lack of US government medical and financial assistance awaiting them on their return.

Incidence of veteran suicide, homelessness, drug addiction, incarceration, severe poverty, unmanaged mental illness, and the redeployment of mentally unstable troops all point to a growing social crisis faced by returning soldiers and a military on the verge of collapse.

More than 3,860 US troops have been killed in Iraq, and well over 60,000 soldiers have been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. Because of medical and technological advances, the ratio of survivors to fatalities in the current war operations is greater than in any other war in modern history. Thousands of wounded soldiers are surviving with extremely serious injuries, and many more suffer untreated psychological and brain trauma on the battlefield.

When these soldiers return to the United States, they face long waits for medical care in overcrowded, mismanaged, and underfunded Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) facilities—or drop out of the system entirely, into all manner of social misery.

The volume of cases is overwhelming an already ill-prepared system. On November 14, Veterans for Common Sense reported that the VA admitted in court filings related to a lawsuit against it by the group that nearly 264,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans were treated in VA hospitals and clinics through October 2007. In 2008, the VA expects to treat 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, according to House Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Bob Filer. The government estimates healthcare will cost upwards of $650 billion for veterans of the two wars.

Even conservative estimates from the military suggest an epidemic of mental trauma among new veterans. The Pentagon reported earlier this year that of the 1.6 million military personnel deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, 38 percent of Army and fully half of National Guard service members have been diagnosed with mental illness.

Incidence of traumatic brain injury, PTSD

One of the most common injuries is among the most difficult to diagnose and treat: traumatic brain injury, or TBI. Symptoms, which can range from irritability and dizziness to forgetting how to walk and talk, often take weeks to surface and worsen over time.

According to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, more than 4,200 returned troops have been seen for TBI at military hospitals this year. Doctors believe that thousands more troops suffer TBI but have not reported it. Post-deployment screenings of returning troops suggest that one in five have sustained TBI, most from proximity to roadside bomb detonations.

Reflecting the brutal nature of the occupation, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, has also been diagnosed in a large percentage of returned combat troops. A recent survey conducted by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research found that, of nearly 22,000 returned personnel diagnosed with PTSD, four in five had either fired weapons in order to kill or witnessed someone being killed or wounded.

A new study by the institute of 88,235 soldiers, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association November 14, revealed that while only 4 to 5 percent of soldiers were referred for mental health care in their initial Post-Deployment Health Assessment, the percentage leaped up in follow-up exams.

After three to six months, more than 20 percent of active-duty soldiers and more than 42 percent of reserve soldiers who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan were recommended for mental healthcare for post-combat stress and PTSD. Severe depression rates doubled, from 5 percent to 1 in 10 soldiers; reports of conflict with family and friends rose from 3.5 to 14 percent for active-duty personnel and from 4 to 21 percent for returned reservists.

The institute concluded that earlier estimates were inaccurate assessments of the prevalence of trauma because of the early timing of mental health screenings. “The study shows that the rates that we previously reported based on surveys taken immediately on return from deployment substantially underestimate the mental health burden,” the authors wrote.

The result of underestimation is lack of care for traumatized veterans. A September report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) suggested that half of the military’s so-called Warrior Transition Units had “significant shortfalls” of caregiving staff. The GAO stated that “46 percent of the Army’s returning service members who were eligible to be assigned to a [Warrior Transition] unit had not been assigned due in part to staffing shortages,” and that over half of the units had staffing shortfalls of more than 50 percent.

Large numbers of new veterans are abandoned by the military both financially and medically, and the burden of medical care falls overwhelmingly onto the shoulders of those least prepared to cope, family members or the soldiers themselves.

Homelessness and incarceration

Soldiers recruited from economically distressed areas are thrust back into them with enormous medical and psychological challenges. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH), thousands of returned Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have already been identified among the millions of homeless in America.

Based on 2005 figures from the VA and the Census Bureau, the NAEH estimated that in 2006, on any given night, 194,254 homeless people were veterans. Just under half a million combat veterans—one in four homeless persons—lived on the street for at least part of the year.

The government actually puts the proportion higher. As of August 2007, the VA estimates that one in three homeless people are veterans. While there are nearly 200,000 homeless veterans, the government provides only 15,000 shelter beds nationwide to supplement the 8,000 supplied by local non-profit organizations. The VA web site notes, “Many other veterans are considered near homeless or at risk because of their poverty, lack of support from family and friends, and dismal living conditions in cheap hotels or in overcrowded or substandard housing.”

Ricky Singh of Black Veterans for Social Justice told OneWorld news service, “What typically happens to young adults who go into the military at 17 or 18, when they return home, the same kind of economic conditions that forced them towards the military still exist or have gotten worse.”

The vast majority of homeless veterans are single males from poor economic backgrounds. About 45 percent suffer mental illness, and 70 percent suffer alcoholism or other drug dependency; 56 percent are ethnic minorities.

Unsurprisingly, a large number of veterans are also incarcerated. Justice Department statistics suggest roughly 12 percent of the 7 million people within the corrections system—in prison, jail, or on parole—have served in the military. Four in five incarcerated veterans reported drug dependency, and nearly a quarter held in jails were homeless in the year before arrest. A quarter were also identified as mentally ill.

Lack of affordable housing is the primary driver of homelessness in general, the NAEH states, and while veterans as a subset of the population in general have high rates of home ownership, a significant segment of the Vietnam and post-Vietnam veteran population face severe housing burdens. Rather than returning to an economic boom, veterans from wars of the past four decades have come home to an economic vacuum, particularly in the manufacturing sector where veterans of previous generations were able to enter the workforce.

Besides the half a million homeless veterans, the NAEH estimates 467,877 veterans were “severely rent burdened and paying more than 50 percent of their income for rent.” This group is considered at risk for homelessness. “More than half (55 percent) of veterans with severe housing cost burden fell below the poverty level and 43 percent were receiving food stamps,” the report states.

Redeployment and relaxed enlistment standards

The plight of mentally ill veterans does not end with adjustment problems in the United States. Many are sent back into war, dangerously compounding psychiatric trauma.

Reflecting the unpopularity of both the war and the prospect of a draft, enlistment standards have been substantially relaxed over the past few years to allow recruitment of people with mental illness and criminal records. At the same time, the Pentagon has extended tours and made it much more difficult to leave the military and still qualify for disability benefits.

Even so, the military is experiencing a significant troop shortage in the two wars, creating a numbers problem for the Bush administration’s plans for a war against Iran.

Current military policy allows soldiers diagnosed with serious mental problems to be redeployed to combat zones if they are assessed as stable for three months. According to a November 11 investigation by Boston’s ABC affiliate station, WCVB TV/DT Channel 5, the National Guard and Army were redeploying soldiers diagnosed with PTSD in direct violation of already lax standards.

The report cited the redeployment of a 25-year-old soldier, Damian Fernandez, who had been classified as 70 percent disabled from PTSD. “Everyday, for 365 days, they were under attack there,” his mother told WCVB. “Bombings and land mines were in the street and he saw his fellow soldiers killed.” After Fernandez got his order to redeploy, his mother said, “All day long he was just getting more and more agitated until he said he was going to kill himself rather than go back.”

An Army soldier, Michael DeVlieger, got the order to redeploy just one day after being released from a Kentucky military hospital for acute stress disorder, the station reported. “The closer that it got, he kept saying, ‘Mom, I’m going to die, I’m not coming back this time. I’m feeling it, I’m dreaming it. I’m not coming back,’ ” his mother said.

Suicide among active-duty troops and veterans

Extreme psychological distress among active-duty troops is reflected in the occasional official figures released concerning suicide and self-harm. The Department of Defense recognizes 130 self-inflicted fatalities among US personnel since 2003 in Iraq.

This is a substantial understatement of suicide rates in the military. An Army Suicide Event Report made public in August 2007 revealed 97 cases of suicide among US Army personnel last year alone—the highest rate of suicide in 26 years. The report documented at least 948 suicide attempts by Army personnel in 2006.

Yet an investigation by CBS News suggests these suicide figures are barely the tip of the iceberg. As reported by Armen Kieteyian on CBS Evening News November 13, suicides are not systematically tracked by the military. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, the network obtained Defense Department documents enumerating nearly 2,200 suicides among active-duty personnel between 1995 and 2007, including 188 in the past year.

When CBS related the figures to Ira Katz, head of the VA’s mental health division, asking why the military has not conducted a national study, Katz told the network, “There is no epidemic in suicide in the VA, but suicide is a major problem.”

CBS requested information from state vital statistics agencies on suicide data for veterans and non-veterans dating back to 1995. The figures for 45 states that returned data were staggering: CBS reported that in 2005 alone, there were at least 6,256 suicides among veterans. That averages out to 120 each week, or 17 each day. By comparison, the daily average for total US military deaths in Iraq since 2003 is about 2.4 per day, or 17 per week.

An analysis of the raw data by University of Georgia Epidemiology and Biostatistics Department head Steve Rathbun found that veterans were more than twice as likely to commit suicide as non-veterans in 2005. The 20-to-24-year-old age group had the highest suicide rate among all veterans, and rates two to four times higher (22.9-31.9 per 100,000) than civilians the same age (8.3 per 100,000).

“Let’s put this into perspective,” Paul Sullivan of Veterans for Common Sense told reporter Keteyian in an interview. “Of the one and a half million service members put into the two wars, we’re estimating about a third will come home with some kind of mental health problem.” Sullivan, who was a data analyst for the VA from 2000 to 2006, said the government operated on a “ ‘don’t look, don’t find’ policy.”

The media — both mainstream outlets and the blogosphere — have spent the last week consumed by the story of a leaked operating manual from Guantánamo. This is understandable in some ways. The prison’s Standard Operating Procedures have never been revealed to the public before, and, while it takes some dedication to stay awake through the numbing and pedantic attention to detail that drags on through 238 pages, there is something genuinely shocking about the stark admission that all incoming detainees are to be held in isolation for the first 30 days “to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process,” which “concentrates on isolating the detainee and fostering dependence of the detainee on the interrogator.” At least as worrying is the additional directive that, during this period, the detainees are to be prevented from having contact with representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). What makes these admissions particularly disturbing, of course, is that they were brazenly committed to paper in an official document, even though the conduct that they endorse — the establishment of an offshore interrogation camp, and denying access to ICRC representatives — is illegal.

These are not, however, facts that were previously unknown. A copious amount of evidence (discussed in the majority of the books published about Guantánamo, including my own, The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison) attests to the fact that the prison’s major focus was the illegal interrogation of detainees, and the denial of access to ICRC representatives has also been reported in detail, particularly in the cases of Abdallah Tabarak, a supposed bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, who was mysteriously released in 2004, and Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian accused of aiding the 9/11 hijackers in Germany, who is still held in Guantánamo.

More noticeably, the manual, published in March 2003, is nearly five years old, and, although there are good reasons to be wary of the administration’s claims that it is completely out of date, it is, to a large degree, ancient news, whose domination of the media has overshadowed other, more contemporary issues of considerable importance.

A case in point is a new statement by Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, an Army reservist who worked at Guantánamo in 2004-05, which was submitted to the Washington DC Circuit Court as part of a brief in the continuing, and long-running struggle to secure justice for Sudanese detainee Adel Hamad. A hospital administrator for a large Saudi charity, Hamad had lived in Pakistan for 17 years, working on various humanitarian aid projects, when he was captured by Pakistani and American intelligence operatives in July 2002, based on spurious or non-existent “intelligence,” and sent to Guantánamo.

Lt. Col. Abraham, an Army reservist with 20 years experience in military intelligence, first came to prominence in June this year, when his criticisms of the tribunal process at Guantánamo — the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs), convened to assess whether, on capture, the detainees had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants” — were widely credited with persuading the justices of the Supreme Court to reverse themselves for the first time in 60 years, agreeing to review the detainees’ right to challenge the basis of their detention in a case that is scheduled to start on December 5.

In an affidavit filed in the case of Fawzi al-Odah, a Kuwaiti detainee, Lt. Col. Abraham delivered a damning verdict on the tribunal process, which he described as severely flawed, relying on intelligence “of a generalized nature — often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status.” In addition, he insisted that the process was designed to rubber-stamp the detainees’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.”

His latest statement is no less explosive. After giving a little more of his background, pointing out that his last assignment before Guantánamo, from November 2001 to November 2002, was as “the Lead Counterterrorism Analyst for the Joint Intelligence Center, Pacific Command,” for which he received the Defense Meritorious Service Medal, Abraham explains that he has been asked by Adel Hamad’s lawyer, the Federal Public Defender for the District of Oregon, to provide “additional information about the manner in which OARDEC [the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants] operated during my assignment there, from September 11, 2004 until March 9, 2005,” and also “to comment upon certain declarations provided by the directors of the national intelligence organizations,” which were filed in an attempt to prevent the courts, and, in some cases, the detainees’ lawyers, from having access to supposedly sensitive government information about the detainees.

After revisiting previously aired complaints about OARDEC — specifically that most of the staff “were volunteer reserves forces with little or no experience with intelligence or legal matters,” who were ill-equipped to deal with OARDEC’s “extraordinary and historic mission” — Lt. Col. Abraham launches a blistering attack on the woeful, and deliberately narrow parameters of OARDEC’s capabilities, which, by extension, refutes the national intelligence directors’ claims that there was any information worth concealing.

Noting that the mission, as established in the Combatant Status Review Tribunal Procedures, in July 2004, mandated OARDEC to request “reasonably available information in the possession of the US government bearing on the issue of whether the detainee meets the criteria to be designated as an enemy combatant,” he points out that, in reality, “the facilities and systems utilized by OARDEC precluded access to or use of information that OARDEC needed in order to perform its primary mission effectively,” and that the mission was additionally hampered because there was “no systematic method for requesting the government information relating to specific detainees,” and because the largely unskilled staff “rarely selected the most promising sources of information and failed effectively to identify and pursue leads if any developed.”

The specific problems relating to the collection of evidence centered on the fact that OARDEC was only permitted access to material that was “classified SECRET and below”; in other words, that access to “TOP SECRET information,” which might have been particularly useful, was denied across the board. This lack of access was compounded by the administration’s insistence that all 558 CSRTs were completed within 120 days, and, even more critically, by the fact that OARDEC was “entirely dependent on indulgences from external organizations,” having “no organic intelligence assets, no collection capabilities, no dissemination authority, and no direct tasking authority” of its own.

“As a result,” he adds, requests for information were “very rarely” sent to the CIA, were never sent to the NSA (National Security Agency) or the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), and were only sent to the US Army Intelligence and Security Command when Abraham himself “mentioned this fairly obvious and fertile source of information.” Compounding these failures, OARDEC’s lack of any “tasking authority” meant that any responses to the limited number of requests that were actually made were “largely dependant on whether anyone at the agency was inclined to do so.” In most instances, he concludes, “OARDEC received either a negative response (no information available) or no response at all.”

Abraham also notes that, even on the databases available to OARDEC, “access to much information was confined to particular individuals or groups, called communities of interest (COIs),” and adds that, “In order to access COI-restricted information, individuals either had to be members of the COI or obtain special access.” However, “Even if an OARDEC member had the appropriate clearance and access to the overall system, without a password and authorization, he or she would be denied access to COI information.” As a result, he explains that most of the OARDEC staff lacked access to COI-restricted information to such an extent that, “If there were information about a detainee in those other systems, the OARDEC researchers could not find it.” His conclusion is bleak. Given these obstacles, and the fact that most of the staff “had little if any understanding of the nature of, or even the existence of the myriad of intelligence components They literally did not know what they were missing.”

Shorn of almost all genuine sources of intelligence, Abraham writes that OARDEC “relied primarily upon information provided by Joint Task Force Guantánamo” — the organization running the prison itself — “which consisted primarily of post-detention custodial and interrogation reports”; or, in rather clearer language, “Most of the information OARDEC collected consisted of information obtained during interrogations of other detainees.”

Describing a typical scenario, he notes that the compilation of material for the tribunals effectively began and ended with the file received from Guantánamo, which contained little more than post-detention summaries of interrogations, and incident reports relating to the detainee’s behavior. On some occasions, documentation relating to the detainee’s initial detention, “including notes on the contents of items in the detainee’s possession” might also be in the file, “but this was not so in every case.” He then explains that, even with this evidence, the researchers failed to investigate it rigorously, preferring, instead, to search their “limited databases” and “cast broad nets for any information, no matter how marginal, no matter how tenuous, no matter how dated, no matter how generic, no matter how dubious the source, so long as it could be connected to the detainee.”

The result of this slap-dash approach was obvious, and, looked at in conjunction with the lack of access to genuine classified information (if, indeed, any existed) explains some of the more egregious and well-documented failures of the tribunal process. “Where no information was obtained about an individual,” Abraham explains — adding, crucially, that this “was the case for nearly all detainees except individuals of prominence” — the search “would shift to more broadly based themes, such as the region from where the individual came, his ethnic group or nation of origin, or any organization denominated as being associated with terrorist activities, with which the individual was alleged to have been associated.” For the last of these allegations, Abraham notes, pointedly, that OARDEC personnel “presumed that having an alleged association with an organization was a sufficient basis for attributing all research relating to that organization to the individual. As Mark and Josh Denbeaux of Seton Hall Law School realized through their analysis of the CSRT documents, and as I write about in depth in The Guantánamo Files, what this meant in practice was not only that a significant number of detainees were tarred as terrorists through the most tangential associations with organizations proscribed by the US government, but also that organizations that were not included on the government’s blacklists — like the World Association of Muslim Youth, for which Adel Hamad worked as a hospital administrator — were labeled as entities associated with terrorism.

Furthermore, Abraham notes that “information relating to the credibility of a source was omitted, making sources appear authoritative even when they were suspect,” and he uses, as an example, an allegation against a particular group that “would be repeated without disclosing that it originated with one of the groups’ political opponents or some government overtly hostile to it” (as happened, in particular, with detainees from China, Libya and Tunisia). He also points out that, using the time restraints as a deliberate cover, “independent evidence from the detainee’s life before his arrest” was never investigated, even though the detainees’ “claims of innocence often could have been corroborated or disproved by a few simple inquiries,” and in this instance he uses, as an example, that, “if a detainee told interrogators that he had worked at a hospital in Afghanistan, OARDEC could have requested that an agency with regional or functional purview locate and obtain records from the hospital and interview personnel there.” In addition, he notes that “Beyond impractical discussions about bringing villagers to the nearest video conference facility,” he was “not aware of any realistic attempts” to “identify or even attempt to bring before the Tribunal [outside] witnesses [requested by the detainee] or their statements,” and concludes that OARDEC “was designed to conduct Tribunals without witnesses other than the accused detainee.” This, too, is a topic that I discuss at length in The Guantánamo Files, particular in relation to many of the Afghan detainees, who begged their tribunals to make a few phone calls to confirm their innocence, and in June 2006 the journalist Declan Walsh proved how easy it was to contact witnesses that the US government claimed to be unable to find, locating, in just 72 hours, three witnesses, in Washington, Kabul and Gardez, who were able to verify the story told by a wrongly imprisoned pro-US Afghan commander, Abdullah Mujahid (who is still in Guantánamo, even though he has now been cleared for release).

After this comprehensive demolition of the tribunals’ claims to competency, Abraham turns his attention to the claims made by the directors of the national intelligence organizations that granting the courts access to government information about the detainees “might risk disclosure of highly sensitive national intelligence information, such as source or method information.” He notes in the first instance that OARDEC’s systems were so primitive that the staff were unable to communicate electronically with major organizations including the CIA and the NSA, and also had no way of retaining or utilizing highly classified information. “This limitation,” he writes, “precluded any possibly that such sensitive information could be incorporated into materials presented to the Tribunals.”

Moreover, Abraham points out that “the kinds of sensitive national intelligence information discussed by the intelligence directors is not normally shared between intelligence agencies except in the rarest of circumstances,” and specifically rebuts a statement made by General Michael Hayden, the current director of the CIA, and the director of the NSA from 1999 to 2005 — that disclosure of government information would reveal details of “clandestine intelligence operations, including counterterrorism operations, foreign intelligence information and assistance, information provided by sensitive sources, and technical collection activities” — by insisting that this kind of information would not have been disclosed to OARDEC, or to the tribunal members, “under any circumstances.” He adds that, “in the few cases where the concerns might apply, there are adequate mechanisms in place to provide for in camera review of any critical information, the nature of which precludes disclosure beyond the court.”

In a damning aside (which he cannot prove, though I too infer that it is correct, based on my extensive research into the detainees’ stories), Abraham explains that, even assuming OARDEC had been able to conduct an exhaustive search for information, “what it would have likely discerned from the exercise is that there is little information to be obtained on people that have never before been considered let alone determined to be persons of interest.” As long ago as February 2002, this was effectively admitted by Brigadier General Mike Lehnert of the Marines, who was in charge of Guantánamo in the early days, when he stated, “A large number [of the detainees] claim to be Taliban, a smaller number we have been able to confirm as al-Qaeda, and a rather large number in the middle we have not been able to determine their status. Many of the detainees are not forthcoming. Many have been interviewed as many as four times, each time providing a different name and different information.”

As someone who has been writing about this crazed administration’s plans to launch an attack on Iran now for over a year, I have always noted that the real sign that it might happen would be when oil industry analysts started to worry about it.

That’s because the oil industry is probably more plugged into the inner sanctum of the Bush administration than any other entity. If the analysts, who have their fingers on the pulse of the oil industry, start worrying that an attack could happen–with the resulting shutdown of oil shipments through the Persian Gulf, from which the world gets roughly a third of its oil–then we need to take the threat very seriously.

While we haven’t seen the kind of spike in oil futures prices that we would expect should that mad war begin–which would see oil soaring well above $200 a barrel–we are seeing oil rise to a record high of around $100 a barrel.

Now comes word from the respected newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor, that analysts are starting to factor a US attack on Iran into their thinking. As the newspaper put it in an article published today reporting on the recently concluded meeting of the leaders of OPEC nations:

The 13-nation cartel once controlled prices often by just talking about pumping more or less oil. But now its leaders say booming world demand–largely from India and China–and concern over a possible US attack on Iran are driving prices.

The article also quotes an oil industry analyst, Mustafa Alani, of the Gulf Research Center in Dubai, UAE, who says, ” … there’s very little they [the OPEC leaders] can do if there’s an attack on Iran or something of that nature. In that case, prices will double, perhaps go to $300 a barrel.”

It may be that Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his generals, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, and the leaders of many of America’s Fortune 500 companies are opposed to an attack on Iran, knowing that it will be a military disaster and that it would cause a global economic collapse, but the US today is being led by two insane and desperate men, who may not care what any of those people think. With their domestic and international policies in ruins and their legacy a disaster, they may have decided to double up on their bet and just throw everything in with an air assault on Iran.

Keep watching those oil prices. If they start really bumping up from their current level, hold on to your Constitution–and get the hell out of dollars–because they’re both going down.

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His n book of CounterPunch columns titled “This Can’t be Happening!” is published by Common Courage Press. Lindorff’s newest book is “The Case for Impeachment”, co-authored by Barbara Olshansky.

The phrase honest politician has become an oxymoron. We should not be impressed by the prospect of having the first woman, first black or first Latino president. What would be far more radical would be to have the first honest president, if not ever, certainly in a very long time.

Presidents in recent memory have been excellent liars, contributing mightily to our culture of dishonesty. Bill Clinton had the audacity to look right into the TV camera and blatantly lie to the American public. George W. Bush has probably set a record for official lying, though it might take many decades to fully document them. Carl M. Cannon saw the bigger truth: “posterity will judge [George W. Bush] not so much by whether he told the truth but whether he recognized what the truth actually was.”

Things have gotten so bad that hardly anyone can even imagine an honest president. But if we don’t expect an honest president, how can we expect to trust government?

Don Nash made these insightful observations, “If America was ever faced with a politician who spoke truth to the people, no-one would know what to make of the oddity. This politician could probably not get elected to office. Sadly, Americans can’t handle the truth. …Lies, then, are the consequential destruction of American democracy. Little by very little, the lies and lying politicians have chipped away at America’s Constitution and the American form of government.”

Rampant lying by politicians is a major reason why so many Americans have stopped paying attention to politics, stopped hoping for political reforms, and stopped voting

Lying politicians probably tell themselves that the public cannot take the truth. Many convince themselves (lie to themselves) that lies of omission are not really serious like lies of commission.

Just how bad things have become is shown by the recent decision by the Supreme Court of the state of Washington that lying politicians are protected by the 1st Amendment. They are free to lie as much as they can get away with. Free speech apparently is a green light for lying, even though it leads to rotten, dishonest government.

During this primary season it is worthwhile to look at Republican and Democratic candidates from this honest-president perspective. A truly honest president would have the greatest loyalty to honoring the rule of law, the Constitution and the needs of the public, rather than what we have grown used to: greatest loyalty to their party and the moneyed interests funding it. If the nation really wants a change president, honesty should be a requirement.

On the Republican side, Ron Paul looks like the most honest candidate. Straight-talk John McCain still seems to have better than average honesty, and Mike Huckabee seems relatively honest, except when he talks about his record on taxes as governor. On the Democratic side, Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel look the most honest, with Bill Richardson running close. Among third party presidential candidates in recent history, Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan stand out for their honesty, which clearly was not sufficient to prevail against liars.

Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney are pretty comparable big-time, gold-medal Republican liars. And with Romney we might get the first Mormon president, but not an honest one. If Hillary Clinton wins the nomination, then the most dishonest Democratic candidate will have prevailed. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that only 34 percent of Americans view Senator Clinton as honest. As to Barack Obama, viewed as 50 percent more honest than Clinton in some polls, his statements about his upbringing, universal health care, and campaign funding cast doubt on his honesty. Still, he seems successful in selling himself as honest. Liars are bad, but liars claiming to be honest are worse. Odds are that there will be no honest Republican or Democratic presidential candidate to vote for in 2008.

As I write, on a cloudy Washington afternoon, my “Bush’s Last Day Countdown Keychain” tells me there are 433 days, 11 hrs, 50 minutes and 41.3 seconds left before our 43rd president leaves office. Like other citizens concerned about the fate of the Republic, I wonder what the Bush legacy will be.

Many commentators have written about how the domestic politics of this administration have left the United States more divided than ever; or perhaps the unsettled illegal immigration issue is what Bush will be most remembered for — with an unfinished barrier across the U.S.-Mexican border as the main monument to his eight years in office.

To some concerned with foreign affairs, the Bush era will be remembered most for the acceleration of America’s putative march to empire. Advocates of such a view highlight the exorbitant sums the U.S. has sunk into its land bases in the Middle East and Afghanistan, its massive sea power, and its all-volunteer professional army; the inordinately expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (the latter being evidence that the U.S. is engaged in a ruthless effort to control the world’s oil resources); the threats of possible military action against Iran (interpreted as a desire to control the Middle East in collaboration with Israel); the growing tensions with Russia, as well as the urge to maintain and expand its foothold in former Soviet areas in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (seen as a reflection of America’s determination to remain the global hegemon); the increasing frictions with China (proof that the U.S. will not tolerate a competitor in Asia); the constant disagreements with the Europeans (a reminder on our part that we — not they — are the boss).

Indeed, there is little doubt that the military, economic, and cultural impact of the United States continues to be enormous. Calling this global footprint “imperial” is certainly tempting. But for a nation to be an empire, its leaders must have a plan or vision for how to deal with the rest of the world — as, arguably, Theodore Roosevelt and his entourage did with their “large policy” for American overseas dominance. Some historians cite these schemes as the beginning of an American-style empire that led to “the American century,” a period that now seems so long ago and so far away. (Are we not now, in fact, living in the Anti-American Century?)

Bush and Visions of Empire

The immense (but declining) global power of the United States notwithstanding, the conceptual baggage required to engage in truly imperial ambitions has simply not been a part of the Bush administration’s mindset. This remains so despite its assembly-line-style production of countless “national security” reports on a vast range of global security matters — committee-written, unreadable documents marked by a total lack of intellectual coherence or clear direction. These can, if anything, be seen as a collective “cover-up” for the administration’s obvious lack of thought beyond the here-and-now.

To be sure, no imperial plan is ever perfectly framed or implemented (as Theodore Roosevelt himself realized), but the Bush administration’s version of such now appears to have been remarkably without rhyme or reason — on, in fact, an automatic pilot, driven by a self-aggrandizing Pentagon budgetary process and “priorities” strikingly determined by shifting domestic politics (what Congressional district or crony corporation had put in the best, or most influential, bid for a base, military-style activity, or war-production plant). True, our generals remain engaged in the fearsome-sounding “Global War on Terror” by order of the White House — but this has proven a helter-skelter example of global confusion, regularly renamed by an administration clueless about what its “war” really is.

Put another way, the Bush administration was never able to define, shape, or direct in an “imperial” fashion the powerful forces, negative and positive, stemming from various segments of American society that do so much to determine the destiny of our planet. (This may have been inevitable, given the contentious nature of American democracy.) As for the once-dynamic duo who characterized much of this administration — Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (and those clustered around their “offices”) — the only “empire” that really counted for them was the parochial world of Washington, DC, with its lobbyists, bureaucrats, politicians, and assorted supporting think-tankers, all absorbed in their petty turf-wars about who among them would get government money for their minions and projects, overseas or at home. This was the narcissistic province that the Vice President and Secretary of Defense had the urge to dominate with their “unitary executive,” “wartime,” commander-in-chief presidency and the foreign wars that made it all possible. Developments outside the U.S., however, mattered largely to the extent that they helped in the aggrandizement of their own power, their fiefdoms, and those of their cronies, on the banks of the Potomac.

The President and His Diplomats

To make some sense of all this, let’s start at the top. With his utter lack of experience in foreign affairs and complete lack of curiosity about the outside world (with the possible exception of Mexico), George W. Bush was incapable of having a global vision himself, imperial or otherwise. In the words of commentator William Pfaff, “Bush is happy deciding, even though he knows nothing.” The President’s major foreign-policy decision — to invade Iraq — was certainly not based on any understanding of the global implications of what he was doing (including, conceivably, expanding an empire). It was taken for reasons that still remain unclear, but may have ranged from his tortuous relationship with his father to his desire to portray himself as a decisive commander in chief to the American electorate. Perhaps, to use his words, the former cheerleader frat boy just wanted to “kick ass” overseas to show the media, voters, and possibly even himself, that he was doing something other than sitting in the Oval Office preaching the virtues of compassionate conservatism.

Kicking ass — playing cowboys and Indians with the world, as little boys once did on playroom floors or in backyards — has remarkably little to do, however, with anything that might once have been defined as imperial planning or the knowledge necessary to implement such plans. For example, a year after his “axis of evil” State of the Union Address, when informed by Iraqi exiles that there were both Sunnis and Shiites in their country, “emperor” Bush allegedly responded that he thought “the Iraqis were Muslims.” (No way, after all, that you can tell those Indian tribes apart!) And what better summarizes George W. Bush’s preparation for putative empire building than the following nugget from the 2000 presidential campaign season, as related by Elaine Sciolino of the New York Times:

“When a writer for Glamour Magazine recently uttered the word ‘Taliban’ — the regime in Afghanistan that follows an extreme and repressive version of Islamic law — during a verbal Rorschach test, Mr. Bush could only shake his head in silence. It was only after the writer gave him a hint (‘repression of women in Afghanistan’) that Mr. Bush replied, ‘Oh. I thought you said some band. The Taliban in Afghanistan! Absolutely. Repressive.'”

Given the tabula rasa in Bush’s mind regarding the world outside “the homeland” (a word his administration has regrettably contributed to the American language), it is hardly surprising that he selected as his main foreign policy advisers two people with very limited global visions of their own: Condoleezza Rice as National Security Advisor and, as Secretary of State, Colin Powell. (Rice herself admitted in 2000 that, as a “Europeanist,” “I’ve been pressed to understand parts of the world that have not been part of my scope”; and Powell’s qualifications were based on his military savvy — and loyalty — not his geopolitical perspectives. The general, as Bill Keller of the New York Times reported in 2001, was “a problem solver, not a visionary.”

As became clear after the horror of 9/11 — a foreign policy failure of the first order, if ever there was one, that no “empire” in its right mind would have allowed — Rice and Powell essentially became talking-point briefers on day-to-day events they had not foreseen and did not control. Compare them to Henry Kissinger, who held each of their positions at some point in his White House career. A cynical maneuverer who may not have been to everyone’s liking, he nonetheless worked in the realm of global strategy. In the way he attempted to play off the Soviet Union against China in relation to the Vietnam War, he was an imperial planner of the first order (if not always with the greatest success). Contrast his meaty books on Metternich and on nuclear weapons to the sole tome that Rice authored by herself — a bland monograph on the relationship between the Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army, 1948-1983, excoriated by the scholarly American Historical Review in 1985. What her sad little historical “study” demonstrated, if anything at all, was that Rice was, from scratch, anything but a geopolitician of Soviet — or any other — affairs.

Had Rice and Powell been capable of a global imperial vision — or even of grasping essential global cause and effect — they doubtless would have advised their president that his much-desired Mesopotamian (mis)adventure was bound to be a bloody, costly imperial mess. With certain down-to-earth military smarts, Powell may have sensed this, but evidently he lacked the nerve (or was it intellectual inclination?) to ask the simple questions at White House meetings that would have been the key to any imperial decision-making process: “Why exactly are we doing this?” “Is it really in our interests to invade a third-world country thousands of miles from our shores?” Or, put another way: “How does this invasion preserve or expand the American empire”?

All the President’s Men: Cheney and Rumsfeld

According to some commentators, when it came to the American ascendancy abroad, the real powers behind (or in) the White House were Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who had been collaborators ever since the distant Ford administration. Some argue that they — and their neocon poodle and second-in-command at the Defense Department, Paul Wolfowitz, as well assorted neocons once linked to the Likud party in Israel and the Christian right in the U.S. — were the true framers of a Bush empire.

To be sure, Rumsfeld was an early member of the Project for the New American Century and no doubt had ideas — or perhaps simply fantasies masquerading as ideas — about a more aggressive use of American military strength throughout the world. Cheney’s former position as CEO of Halliburton and his connections with large corporations certainly made him the prime imperial candidate for considering global energy flows and eyeing Iraq as one vast oil field just waiting to be seized, one more country with must-have natural resources for the American imperium.

Even if the duo were eager indeed to expand U.S. influence and resources overseas, as veterans of countless Washington partisan and personal battles, what really got their aged blood flowing was the sleazy, vindictive inside-the-Beltway world of Washington, DC. Rumsfeld’s utter inability to focus on post-invasion planning in Iraq was in itself strong evidence that what happened there (“events” which he so often simply made up) was of secondary concern. Iraq — or success in that country — was indeed important but mainly to the extent that it heightened his profile as a monster player in Washington.

For both Cheney and Rumsfeld, it was the imperial capital, not the empire itself that really mattered. There, “war” would mean the loosing of a commander-in-chief presidency unchecked by Congress, courts, anything — which meant power in the only world that mattered to them. War in the provinces was their ticket to renewed prominence within DC’s self-absorbed biosphere, a kind of lost space station far removed from Mother Earth, and a place where they had longstanding, unfinished accounts — both personal and political — to settle. “Foreign policy,” in other words, was an excuse for war in a far-off country that 63% of American youth between the ages of 18 and 24 could not, according to a National Geographic survey, find on a map of the Middle East. That, in turn, would make both the Vice President and Secretary of Defense (for a while) little Caesars in the only place that mattered, Washington, DC.

If Saddam and assorted terrorists were enemies, they weren’t the ones who really mattered. In the realest war of all, the one on the banks of the Potomac, Cheney and Rumsfeld were, above all, targeting those symbols of American internationalism that they had grown to despise in their previous Washington stays — the State Department and the CIA — perhaps because those organizations, at their best, aspired to see how the world looked at the United States, and not just how the United States could dismiss the world. Just as Bush “kicked ass” in Iraq, so Cheney and Rumsfeld used Iraq to “kick ass” among the striped-pants weenies at Foggy Bottom and the eggheads in the Intelligence Community. (Consider Cheney’s treatment of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who questioned the validity of the administration’s claim about Saddam Hussein’s search for uranium yellowcake in Niger in the late 1990s.) In toppling Iraq, the “imperial” aim of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, their foreign policy “experts” and their acolytes was to raise the flag of their own power high above Washington, DC, while discrediting and humiliating those in the foreign-policy profession interested in the outside world for itself, those willing to consider how it related to actual U.S. national interests, not fantasy ones, and who therefore dared to question the goals and intentions of the dynamic duo.

To see how Washington-centered this cast of characters actually was, just recall the Secretary of Defense’s self-glorifying press conferences in his post-invasion heyday, when he played the strutting comedian. In that period, Rumsfeld, venerated by, among others, aging neocon Midge Decter in a swooning biography, was the king of the heap and visibly loving every second of it. Front-page headlines in the imperial capital were what counted, never the reality of Iraq — any more than it did when George W. Bush strutted that aircraft-carrier deck in his military get-up for his “mission accomplished” moment, launching (against a picturesque backdrop of sailors and war) Campaign 2004 at home. Poor Iraq. It was the butt of the imperial joke, as was — for a while — the rest of the outside world.

Political theorist Benjamin Barber caught the Bush foreign-policy moment perfectly. The U.S., he wrote, made “foreign policy to indulge a host of domestic concerns and self-celebratory varieties of hide-bound insularity. The United States remains a hegemonic global superpower sporting the narrow outlook of mini-states like Monaco and Lichtenstein.”

In the end, the Bush administration is likely to be remembered not for a failed imperialism, but a failed parochialism, an inability to perceive a world beyond the Washington of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, beyond George W. Bush’s national security “homeland.” That may be the President’s ultimate legacy.

John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer who resigned from the State Department over the planned war in Iraq, compiles a near-daily Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review, available free by requesting it at johnhbrown30@hotmail.com.

WASHINGTON (Nov. 19) – Hate crime incidents in the United States rose last year by nearly 8 percent, the FBI reported Monday, as racial prejudice continued to account for more than half the reported instances.

Police across the nation reported 7,722 criminal incidents in 2006 targeting victims or property as a result of bias against a particular race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnic or national origin or physical or mental disability. That was up 7.8 percent from the 7,163 incidents reported in 2005.

Although the noose incidents and beatings among students at Jena, La., high school occurred in the last half of 2006, they were not included in the report. Only 12,600 of the nation’s more than 17,000 local, county, state and federal police agencies participated in the hate crime reporting program in 2006 and neither Jena nor LaSalle Parish, in which the town is located, were among the agencies reporting. justice protest

Nevertheless, the Jena incidents, and a rash of subsequent noose incidents around the country, have spawned civil rights protests in Louisiana and last week at Justice Department headquarters here. The department said it investigated the incident but decided not to prosecute because the federal government does not typically bring hate crime charges against juveniles.

The Jena case began in August 2006 after a black student sat under a tree known as a gathering spot for white students. Three white students later hung nooses from the tree. They were suspended by the school but not prosecuted. Six black teenagers, however, were charged by LaSalle Parish prosecutor Reed Walters with attempted second-degree murder of a white student who was beaten unconscious in December 2006. The charges have since been reduced to aggravated second-degree assault, but civil rights protesters have complained that no charges were filed against the white students who hung the nooses.

“The FBI report confirms what we have been saying for many months about the severe increase in hate crimes,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, who organized Friday’s march. “What is not reported, however, is the lack of prosecution and serious investigation by the Justice Department to counter this increase in hate crimes.” Sharpton called for Attorney General Michael Mukasey to meet with members of the Congressional Black Caucus and civil rights leaders to discuss this matter.

I first heard “Alice’s Restaurant” in 1968 on Washington DC’s underground radio station WHFS. The most memorable time I heard it was in May 1970 on the day after the military murders at Kent State when a friend read it in homeroom at the junior high I attended in Frankfurt, Germany. The song’s innocence and hope echo today in the empty chambers of our empty culture where the current antiwar movement has yet to find an anthem. For those who don’t know this song by Arlo Guthrie, it is the story of a littering arrest that becomes a humorous yet pointed diatribe against the culture of war and conformity. The littering arrest itself took place on Thanksgiving Day in 1965 and the draft was in full swing-filling the growing demands of the war machine and its war of the day.

Guthrie’s song was part of a general distrust of authority making its way back into white America after a post World War Two hiatus. It was more than distrust actually. In fact, it was turning quickly into a refusal to go along with said authority. For the most part, this sentiment was most profoundly felt and expressed by the young via their music, culture and politics. In a story told several times over and with an equal number of twists, the youth counterculture of the time was a culture of opposition. Sometimes that opposition took the form of protests and direct action against authority and sometimes it wore the costume of color and danced to music enhanced by sex and drugs. As naïve as its audience and as jaded as its target, Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” combined all of the counterculture’s aspects into a tale of disgust with the corporate status quo, opposition to its desire to classify us all and throw us into war, and some good ol’ fun.

What can be more traditional than Thanksgiving, after all? Despite its negative historical connotations in that it celebrates the beginning of the Europeans’ ethnic cleansing of the American continent’s indigenous peoples, most folks in the United States celebrate it. It’s not that they are celebrating their ancestors’ massacre of the native peoples; it’s that they see it as a time to gather with friends and family and have a good time. Even the homeless shelters take on a bit of a festive air this Thursday in November as merchants and individuals contribute time and money to preparing a traditional Thanksgiving meal for the residents of those often quite dismal places of refuge. Of course, the next day there is no more turkey and stuffing on the table and those without permanent shelter are still without a home. The wealthy, meanwhile, scrape several days worth of poor folks’ Thanksgiving dinners into their garbage disposals.

The second part of Arlo’s song takes place at the draft induction center formerly located on Whitehall Street in Manhattan, New York. He has received his draft notice and is reporting for the physical and mental exam that was given every inductee before he had his locks shorn and went off to boot camp and a life of military. After going through a number of tests, which are related quite hilariously by Guthrie, he is finally at the last station on his induction, where he is asked, “Have you ever been arrested?” This question naturally brings up Guthrie’s entire tale of his Thanksgiving arrest for littering in Massachusetts and the entire trial following the arrest. Because of his arrest, he is sent to the Group W bench with all the other “criminals.” There he is given another form that ends with the question: “Have you rehabilitated yourself?” I’ll let Arlo tell the rest of the story …

I went over to the sargeant, and I said, “Sargeant, you got a lot a damn gall to ask me if I’ve rehabilitated myself, I mean, (with added emphasis and a sneer)

I mean, I mean that just, I’m sittin’ here on the bench,

I mean I’m sittin here on the Group W bench ’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough to join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug.”

Guthrie is not drafted because of his record. And his Thanksgivings will never be the same. Neither should ours, even if George Bush shows up for a photo op in Baghdad with a plastic turkey and a couple dozen unarmed handpicked-for-their-loyalty troops. There are thousands of other troops who have deserted because they don’t want to go back to Iraq. Protesters have been arrested in Olympia and Tacoma, WA. For blocking military shipments. It’s time that those who oppose these dirty little wars join their fellow antiwarriors in the Pacific Northwest on today’s Group W bench. Who knows, we might start a movement.

Watch it here.

Having endured the Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham saga up close and personal for the last two years, most recently in the form of Mr. Brent Wilkes’ conviction on all 13 counts for the corrupt acts that he and Cunningham performed, San Diego has had a ring-side seat on modern sleaze in Congress.

Since the Dukester’s resignation from the U.S. House of Representatives in November 2005, there has been a lot of congressional activity to change how members of Congress do business with lobbyists like Mr. Wilkes and how Congress enacts those “earmarks” that Cunningham chased so assiduously to earn his bribes. Voters in San Diego County have a right to think that there is potentially a positive side to the mess; the scandal could produce reforms to retard at least some of the more painfully obvious abuses.

Sorry. It hasn’t happened, and it’s not going to.

I worked on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., for 31 years as a staffer for Republican and Democratic senators, helping them chase down pork and stay cozy with the network of lobbyists that pay huge sums to members of Congress to keep federal tax dollars flowing through the congressional pork process. Despite dozens of pages of new rules and “reforms,” and thousands of sanctimonious speeches, nothing has changed. In some ways, legislative ethics are now even worse than when felon Cunningham was selling himself in return for used cars, old furniture, prostitutes and other goodies.

Just after the November 2006 elections that brought the Democrats into the majority in Congress, the new Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, promised “the most ethical Congress ever.” Her delivery on part of that promise was a new set of rules for the pork process on Capitol Hill. They permit any spending bill to be ruled “out of order” (and therefore dead) unless it is accompanied by a list of earmarks in the bill. The identity of each earmark’s congressional sponsor must be displayed along with “the name and address of the intended recipient” or “the intended location” of the earmark and a certification that no member of Congress has any financial interest in the earmark. In other words, the reform sheds “sunshine” on earmarks.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

The new sunlight is more deceptive than illuminating; each earmark’s description is authored not by an objective entity, but by the earmark’s congressional sponsor. In other words, Duke Cunningham, for example, would have been allowed to explain without fear of contradiction why Brent Wilkes’ earmarks should stay in the defense budget as essential national security spending. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., can today freely articulate every reason the Boeing Company feeds her as to why a few billion more should be spent on C-17 transport aircraft the secretary of defense doesn’t want. She will not be required to explain what other defense spending will be axed to make her superfluous C-17s available, nor that they will never arrive in time to play a useful role in the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Sen. Boxer and all other congressional porkers would be crazy not to comply with the new “anti-pork” reforms. They are nothing less than free advertising. None of the pork in this new “reformed” system will be objectively evaluated by or honestly described to anyone. We won’t know if it is actually needed, how much it will really cost, or whether spending on something else would be a better idea.

But it gets worse. The so-called “sunshine” that the Pelosi reforms have shed on earmarks is highly selective. The new definition of earmarks excludes huge amounts of pork. The Washington, D.C.-based watchdog organization Taxpayers for Common Sense found 70 earmarks that the House Appropriations Committee failed to identify in its new fiscal year 2008 Department of Defense Appropriations bill, adding to the 1,339 earmarks the committee did disclose. These unlisted 70 earmarks were fat ones: They more than doubled the legislation’s pork bill from $3 billion to $6.5 billion. When the Senate got to its version of the bill in September, it put in 936 earmarks amounting to $5.2 billion. Earlier this month, the House and Senate reconciled the differences between their two versions of the legislation and sent it to the president. It’s now law. Analysts are still sorting out the complete pork bill, but it already looks to be an amount higher than what either the House or Senate separately passed; after all, porking is an additive process.

Further, the pork process for defense spending will not be over if and when this new defense bill is enacted. There is still the supplemental spending Congress must pass to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the congressional porkers have big plans there too. They include almost $3 billion for those additional C-17s the Pentagon says it doesn’t want, but which Sen. Boxer, and many others, will jam into the bill.

In toto, there is an excellent chance that Congress will top last year’s pork bill for defense spending. For fiscal year 2007, the Republican Congress enacted 2,646 defense earmarks for $10.5 billion. Given the course the Democratic “reform” Congress is on, that will be an easy mark to beat. Should this occur, it will be done in spite of the promise from both the House and Senate Democratic leadership to cut pork spending in half.

And what about bribes? That system is alive and well also. They will surely come from the appreciative corporations for the ever-compliant porkers. Payments in the form of used cars, furniture and women will be rare —- as has always been the case; payment in the form of campaign contributions will be routine. The only difference between the Cunningham form of payment and the latter is that Congress has deemed thank you payments in the form of cash to campaigns to be perfectly legal. After all, they write the laws.

There is a simple reason why Congress has not changed any fundamentals: Senators and representatives still see their political survival dependant on their ability to “bring home the bacon.” Any reduction in spending for a congressional district will be immediate grounds for a political attack in an election. Less pork will prompt an allegation that the member of Congress either “doesn’t care” or “can’t produce.” Sitting members are deathly afraid of any such attack and behave accordingly.

Those attacks will not just come from political opponents; they will also come from local media who keep track of such things. They will also come from the voters, who think that “bringing home the bacon” is a measure of a good representative.

In the final analysis, it is not the members of Congress we should attack for their phony reforms. They are only doing what they know we want them to do. When we change, they will.

Mr. President:

I am sure that you will agree that in the aftermath of the start of the Iraq war it was a total embarrassment for this nation to have to expose to the world that your office was supplied with at best ‘flawed’ intelligence: hardly the way for this nation to stand confidently on the world’s stage and direct international affairs. Sadly I have to report to you that the same circumstance is arising in relation to what is commonly called ‘Global Warming’. There is no other issue that is so non-partisan because what is about to happen will impact every life in this country, irrespective of political affiliation or individual wealth, and also around the world. Further, there is no other issue that threatens the national security of this nation more, including Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan.

The IPCC has just released its fourth report and I note that Jim Connoughton states that there is, ‘no clear definition of the dangers of climate change’: let me help to clarify this on your behalf for Mr. Connoughton. Have someone check with NSIDC (after all this is a taxpayer-funded entity), regarding the scheduled disappearance of the Arctic Sea Ice: their current estimate is 2013-15 and quite frankly it could be anytime before these dates. This is not scientific theory but actual physical measurements in tandem with a trend line that points to the obvious and unequivocal conclusion. The IPCC report can in fact be largely ignored because it is based on dated data and inadequate science: matters in fact are much worse than portrayed, but then I digress.

Having established this simple fact Mr. Connoughton should then check the equally simple fact that when the sea ice disintegrates, even for a part of the year, civilization as we know it ends rather abruptly. The reason is again quite simple: the climate of the earth is dictated by this ice mass and once it is gone the climate will not be stable enough for mass agriculture. The consequence will be progressive mass starvation around the world. This fact can be confirmed throughout the entire breadth of peer-reviewed science: any dissention will only emanate from individual and extremely dubious sources.

Your good friend Prime Minister Howard should be able to confirm to you that Australia is currently being ravaged by drought as a mere precursor to the main event because the consequence of the accelerated disappearance of the sea ice is already being seen in crop failures all over the world: particularly in Australia. But then again the Governors of several southern states in the US can report to you directly that contrary to the headlines the droughts in their states are neither ‘one of the worst’, nor ‘hundred year’ events, but actually the worst since record keeping started in this country.

It is unfortunate, but for whatever reasons and there any several, the majority of the world has gradually developed a deep hatred for this country. In the aftermath of the disappearance of the sea ice, with the attendant consequences, that hatred will undoubtedly both multiply and intensify due entirely to the proportionate use of fossil fuels by the US, and its failure to respond to physical evidence of this looming catastrophe for literally billions of people around the world. The consequence to national security is patently obvious.

I fully realize that you are extremely occupied with what are considered more pressing matters on nation security and thus this letter may not reach your desk due entirely to some misguided person in the chain between you and me. I have therefore taken the liberty of copying this letter to: my Senators, Congressional Representative, the Speaker of the House, several leading media outlets, and I am sure it will travel far and wide on the Internet. A failure to elicit any structured and definitive response should be compensated by an Executive Order changing the expression ‘God Bless America’ to ‘God Help America’ as we await the revenge of literally billions around the world.

Yours sincerely as an extremely concerned citizen,

World opinion is still on the side of the people of the occupied territories. But as long as they are divided, talks are futile

11/16/07 “The Guardian” — — As the United States-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian meeting in Annapolis, Maryland, approaches, the key question is what follows when it fails. Fiasco is looming, so what do the Palestinians do next? In their decades-long bid for justice, they have already tried everything.

The “armed struggle” of the 1970s, with its publicity-seeking aircraft hijackings, won global attention but no major concessions. The suicide bombings of the 1990s hardened Israeli attitudes and lost the Palestinian struggle much of its legitimacy. The Qassam rockets which continue to be fired from Gaza inflict damage and occasional death, but bring disproportionate retribution from the Israeli airforce.

Taking the political path has been only marginally more productive. When the Palestinian leadership in the 1980s made the historic compromise of accepting Israel’s implantation on 78% of pre-1948 “mandate Palestine”, they were rewarded with no equivalent Israeli recognition that Palestinians should control the remaining land.

There was a flicker of optimism in the dying months of the Clinton administration, when a peace deal was almost brokered between Yasser Arafat and the Ehud Barak government. Although it failed, the mood among most Israelis and Palestinians favoured a two-state solution. The line was: “Everyone knows what the outlines of a peace deal are. It just needs political decisions at the top.” But Ariel Sharon’s government put paid to that, and the Israeli definition of what constitutes a viable Palestinian state has continued to diminish.

Today no major party is willing to contemplate a reasonable concept of Palestinian independence. Instead, the ancient settlement project of Zionist dreams moves forward unabated, with the outrage of the ever-expanding wall and the annexation of east Jerusalem and its hinterland. According to the latest figures, Palestinians only control 54% of the West Bank. The rest has been taken by Israeli settlements. Meanwhile 570 closures – concrete blocks, mounds of earth and checkpoints – divide the remaining Palestinian land into mini-enclaves of anger and indignity.

Attempting to convince successive US administrations that pressure needs to be put on Israel has also not worked for the Palestinians. Even Bill Clinton confined himself to sweet-talking. He never wielded any muscle, let alone hinted at sanctions for Israel’s serial non-compliance with UN resolutions.

To expect anything tougher from George Bush is futile. Indeed, it is hard to fathom what his people are up to by proposing the Annapolis meeting. The president shows no real energy or engagement on the issue, compared with Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, or even his father. Does he seriously think he can get an agreement, and have one foreign policy success after the disaster of Iraq? Even if Mahmoud Abbas were to sign a meaningful piece of paper at Annapolis, the Palestinian president lacks the moral or political authority of Arafat. He is more likely to be denounced than praised by most Palestinians.

Efforts to send a message to Washington and Israel through the ballot box have also yielded the Palestinians no benefits. When voters elected Hamas two years ago in the hope of showing the world their frustration, the Israeli and US response was first to punish them and then to try to split them by pampering the defeated Fatah movement diplomatically and giving it arms. Had Fatah been rewarded with substantial Israeli concessions on lifting roadblocks and releasing prisoners, undermining Hamas might have worked. The opposite has happened. If Abbas thinks he can win new elections on the basis of an Annapolis deal, he will be disappointed. Everything suggests Palestinian voters would give Hamas more support in the West Bank than they have already.

So what options do the Palestinians have? Could non-violent resistance on a mass scale make a difference, as it did in the intifada, which started 20 years ago next month? Mary King’s new study, A Quiet Revolution, provides a timely reminder of what they achieved through courageous and disciplined mobilisation. A former activist of the US civil rights movement and now a professor of peace and conflict studies, she explains how Palestinians shook off the Israeli military occupation through a sustained campaign of boycotts and defiance. The template was South Africans’ mass democratic movement against apartheid. Of course, like Pretoria, the Israeli government highlighted the occasional Molotov cocktails and sporadic stone-throwing to demonise the entire movement as violent, but the core of the protests was unarmed civil disobedience.

The first intifada was more impressive than the much-touted “colour revolutions” of recent years, or even of the east European uprisings of 1989, with the exception of Solidarity in Poland. It did not receive US or other foreign government funding. It was not an affair of a few days against a weak and divided regime. It required months of brave activity and the endurance of mass arrests and heavy repression from opponents like defence minister Yitzhak “break their bones” Rabin who, unlike the crumbling Communist elites of 1989 or the administrations of Milosevic, Shevardnadze, and Kuchma, had no compunction in repeatedly using force.

Palestinian success in getting the Israelis to abandon their military administration of the land seized in 1967 and accept the Oslo arrangements for Palestinian self-rule did not, alas, lead to peace or a final settlement. Most Palestinians now deride Oslo. But it was a victory, and a key stage in their struggle.

Should non-violent resistance be revived on a large scale? What would the focus be? Mass sit-ins at the major roadblocks with crowds pushing through? Marches to the sites where the wall is going up? Or should the target of popular protest first be the Palestinians’ own elites? In recent months nothing has been more damaging to the Palestinian cause than the violence between Fatah and Hamas, egged on by the Israeli government, the Bush administration and a supine European Union.

The central requirement for any new Palestinian initiative is Palestinian unity. Don’t let opponents divide you. Resist international flattery. Ignore the instinct for revenge. The jury of international public opinion is still on the side of the Palestinians’ demand for justice. It may not have achieved as much as it could have, but it matters, and needs to be preserved.

Christian conservative leader Pat Robertson recently endorsed Rudy Giuliani’s presidential candidacy. The announcement gained media attention and provoked considerable commentary, but quickly dissipated as Giuliani’s protégé in strong-arm deception, Bernie Kerik, faced a 16-count federal indictment. Today, Robertson’s endorsement has all but evaporated from public discourse, reflecting its inherent meaninglessness.

Robertson’s endorsement of Giuliani drew much attention due to the odd-couple nature of their alignment. It was a political marriage few anticipated and exposes the deeper crisis faced by the Republican Party in the wake of the ongoing debacle of both the Bush administration and the Christian right. Robertson’s endorsement represents a pragmatist’s bet on “who can beat Hillary,” thus dropping any pretense to the higher moral calling that, for more than a quarter-century, fueled his opportunistic career.

Most remarkable, the two old-time artful dodgers skillfully sidestepped any mention of abortion and gay rights, issues that for Robertson and the Christian right, let alone the other Republican presidential candidates, have been cornerstone concerns during the last two presidential cycles. Equally surprising, no mention of Giuliani’s adulterous past found its way into their orgy of backslapping political revelry.

The Seventh Commandment states: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” [Exodus 20:14] Nathaniel Hawthorne published “The Scarlet Letter” in 1850. In this classic American gothic tale, the central character, Hester Prynee, gives birth to Pearl, her out-of-wedlock daughter, and refuses to name the father. Set against a grim background of the later-17th century New England witchcraft trials, Hester is found guilty of adultery and forced to wear the scarlet letter “A” on her chest.

One can only wonder why, as the electoral season gets underway, Giuliani and other Republican worthies are not being forced by their devout Christian supporters to wear Hester Prynee’s scarlet “A”?