The Rag Blog

11/22/07 “New York Times” — — LAST WEEK, superinvestor Warren Buffett, America’s second richest man, testified before the Senate Finance Committee on the subject of why people like him can well afford to pay taxes. In fact, Buffett is ceasing to be among the very wealthiest because he is giving most of his fortune away to philanthropies while he is still alive.

“Dynastic wealth, the enemy of a meritocracy, is on the rise,” Buffett told the senators. “Equality of opportunity has been on the decline. A progressive and meaningful estate tax is needed to curb the movement of a democracy toward a plutocracy.”

Buffett also proposed higher taxes on the wealthy in order to give working people a break on their payroll taxes, which now cost three Americans in four more than they pay in income taxes. And he supports taxing hedge fund bonuses at the same rate as ordinary income, so that billionaire hedge fund managers don’t pay taxes at a lower rate than the people who clean their offices.

The conservatives on the committee were somewhat nonplussed, since Buffett is a poster boy for capitalist entrepreneurship. He isn’t supposed to hold such views. And indeed, few Americans of great wealth do.

Another one who does is William Gates Sr., who writes in the current issue of the magazine Politico with coauthor Chuck Collins that “Without our society’s substantial investments in taxpayer-funded research, technology, education, and infrastructure, the wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans would not be so robust.”

The source of great wealth is not just private entrepreneurs, but the society they inhabit and the public resources on which they build.

Collins, a Bostonian who gave away an inherited fortune while still in his 20s, has organized a new group called Business for Shared Prosperity.

One of the leaders of that group is Jim Sinegal, chief executive of Costco, which offers a business model that radically contrasts with rival Wal-Mart.

Sinegal not only provides decent wages and health insurance for his employees, but was part of a small group of business leaders who actually lobbied for an increase in the minimum wage.

One has to admire citizens like Buffett, Gates, Collins, and Sinegal, patricians who look beyond their own personal fortunes to the fortunes of the Republic and who lay constructive civic roles beyond their business interests.

The problem is that there are not nearly enough of them. And their attitudes run contrary to the gospel of our era that the prime duty of a corporate executive is to make as much money as possible for shareholders, no matter what the cost to employees, communities, or the environment. I recently attended a conference called the Summit on the Future of the Corporation, which brought together enlightened corporate executives and their critics. Half the people attending were corporate leaders convinced that socially responsible businesses could solve everything from environmental degradation to uplift of the poor. As engaged consumers and informed investors reward benign corporations with their pocketbooks, they contended, more corporations will be socially virtuous.

The other half of the room responded that most corporations, even those that want to do the right thing, are largely undermined by the cutthroat competitive environment in which they operate.

Pay decent wages, try to keep good jobs at home, provide good health and retirement benefits, swear off dubious products like junk food for kids – and some competitor who takes the low road is likely to out-compete or underprice you.

Further, much of what passes for socially responsible behavior by large corporations is so much marketing and “green-washing.”

It’s nice that Wal-Mart promotes long-life light bulbs, but when is Wal-Mart going to pay a good wage?

Some businesses like Costco can perhaps do it all (and God bless them). But for the most part, standards need to be set and financed socially.

That project calls not just for discerning consumers and investors but for engaged citizens crusading for public laws and public funds.

Leaders like Warren Buffett should be prized, both as executives whose civic values shame their peers, and as advocates for better tax-and-spend policies generally. If society is to get the resources so that healthcare and secure retirement (not to mention child care and job training) are not left to the whims and public relations of corporations, Congress had better follow Buffett’s lead on tax equity, and restore our ability to finance these benefits as citizens.

Robert Kuttner’s new book is “The Squandering of America: How the Failure of our Politics Undermines our Prosperity.”

11/22/07 “ICH” — — Deep in the bowels of a Washington DC Think Tank, a recent college graduate—selected for her unquestioning and eager embrace of their cynical ideology—labors under the watchful eye of a well-connected political strategist, creating “talking points” for the evening news. The large corporations that so generously fund the Think Tank will pleased with this latest fiction, the strategist muses as he inserts her virulent words into his email and clicks “send”. He is confident that corporate contributions will flow as long as the propaganda flows.

Squeezed in a featureless cubicle in the middle of a sprawling over-lit newsroom, a young reporter is struggling to ensure his article conforms with the worldview of his boss’s bosses, leaders of a large corporation with billions in government defense contracts. His computer chimes. He retrieves the Think Tank’s “talking points” from his inbox and begins to read. If you want to get along, you gotta go along, he whispers to himself. He presses Command-Shift-C on his keyboard and proceeds to infect his own work with the diseased words.

Seated behind a desk on a cheap plastic office chair in a crowded suburban high school, an American history teacher bites her lip as she recites to her class from the authorized textbook. She must restrain herself from commenting on the narrow interpretations and overt omissions. No Child Left Behind dictates that her students must learn these fictions or her school will lose its federal funding. A bell rings and the students escape to the next class, where they will be infected with more fictions.

A 30-something copywriter in a major advertising agency rubs his eyes as he stares at his flickering computer screen. It is late and he wants to go home, but he must find some compelling reason for consumers to buy another drug, another game, another heavily processed food for which there is no true need. The packaging warns it may be harmful to the buyer’s health. He wonders if they mean a physical or psychological health, but dismisses the concern; there is no room for moral misgivings in the world of business. He touches his keyboard and continues to spread fiction.

Collapsing onto the sofa after a long commute home and an even longer day at the office, an exhausted middle-age couple turns on the TV and the husband begins to surf through the endless stream of violence, murder, and angry talking heads barking half-truths and Think Tank talking points. Numbed, the man reaches his favorite “reality” show and the couple settles in for an evening of fiction. Real reality is far too messy and complicated; they trust their Congressman to discern fact from fiction and vote in their best interest. That’s why they elected him.

Covering a phlegm-choked cough, a Congressman picks up his phone and dials the CEO of a large corporation to reassure him that their generous campaign contribution had paid off handsomely. A bill, written by the corporation’s lobbyists and submitted by the Congressman, had passed without question or comment. Its diseased language had been buried deep in an omnibus defense appropriations bill submitted for a vote late the previous night. The opposition was given a single hour to review the legislation before a vote was called. Not having time to read the bill and not wanting to appear weak on defense, the opposition party rubber-stamped the legislation, much to the pleasure of the Congressman. He was very good at transforming these fictions into cash, very good. He coughed again.

It is 8 pm and a poll worker closes the door of the polling place and turns the lock. Until a few minutes ago there had been a long line of people wanting to vote, but they had been turned away. Once again, peculiar problems with the voting machines had caused delays. Someone thought it might be a computer virus. These problems were compounded by an fraudulent mailing announcing a change in the polling place. Voters who traveled to the address discovered it belonged to an empty lot. And then there had been a large number of felons trying to vote again this year. Most denied any crime more serious than a parking ticket and demanded the right to vote, but the list of authorized voters supplied by the state clearly indicated they were felons. Although the head of the state’s elections board is a politician with ties to the private company that created the list, the state is certainly not in the business of tampering with elections, she assures herself.

A military band marches by at the Flag Day parade, snapping out crisp salutes to the procession of American flags waving bravely ahead of them in the early summer breeze. Young fathers instruct their children to place their right hand over their breast in a sign of solemn respect. Elderly veterans in VFW hats wipe tearing eyes as the band begins to play another rousing march on gleaming instruments. This is the best country in the world, we are reminded. We are the most blessed by God and the most free. We have such an abundance of freedom that we proudly export it to other countries, along with arms and cash to help compliant regimes put down insurrection and squash dissent among its citizens. So they can be free like us.

A mother cries as the body of her son is lowered into the grave. He was only nineteen and full of promise when he heard his nation calling and enlisted in the National Guard. He was quickly trained and armed with a rifle, a Vietnam-era flak jacket, and desert boots. His first letter home bore his pride and the conviction that he was bringing democracy and freedom to an oppressed and backward nation. He claimed the battle for hearts and minds would soon be won and he would return to a grateful nation a hero. His next letter confessed the indiscriminate killing, the fear, and the hatred of an entire culture. The conquered, he said, must accept freedom and democracy, even if it is at the point of a gun. There was no third letter. Only a knock on the door and a painfully short visit by two Marines who brought with them the few miserable effects of their son. Nothing of him was found after the car bombing. The father comforted his wife in her misery as he thought back to Vietnam, when a fiction had spread and killed 52,000 other sons.

An old and inconceivably wealthy man produces a weak cough without covering his mouth. He smiles in false apology then generously waves a carefully manicured hand over the captains of industry assembled in the rich, mahogany-lined boardroom. This has been a very good year, he reminds them. Corporate profits are up, labor costs continue their downward slide thanks to foreign workers flooding into the country. New opportunities are opening up in the cheap labor markets of China and India. In an era of dwindling resources we are quietly conquering countries that possess the cheap fuel and raw materials our voracious economic engine demands. Globalization is inevitable, irrefutable, irrepressible: it is like a virulent disease for which there is no cure. We have removed the few remaining obstacles to unimaginable wealth; gone are the regulations on the products we sell, the restrictions on which lands and workers we may exploit, and the inconvenient laws that stand in the way of our progress. At last, he proclaims, the markets are in command—and we are in command of the markets. We, who were destined to rule, will use our power to create an even an richer life. For ourselves. And those below us will be grateful as surplus droplets of our success trickle from our fingers and down into their bleating mouths.

The elderly waiter clearing the soiled gold-rimmed dinner plates of the well-satisfied men seated around the boardroom table dares not make eye contact with his betters, for he fears his thoughts will betray him. This must be a fiction, he thinks, for it is too terrible to be true. These men—these self-ordained rulers—would condemn us to feudalism. They will succeed if we do not act; history has proven this too many times. But when he shares his fears with the other waiters, they laugh and dismiss his concerns as the mutterings of a silly old man.

The old man, who has lived a very long time and seen much, is far from silly. He is one of many people who see the evil that is happening but judge themselves powerless to stop it. The old man knows that until Americans reject the fiction and discover a courage for the truth this nation shall be condemned to live as sheep in a society run by a pack of diseased wolves.

As his bare hand scrapes the slop from the rich men’s dirty dishes, he remembers something his mother once told him: You are what you eat: Swallow the fiction you are fed and your life will be yours no longer.

11/22/07 “ICH’ — — Institutionally unwilling to consider America’s responsibility for the bloodbath, the traditional media have refused to acknowledge the massive number of Iraqis killed since the invasion.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s flirtation with those who deny the reality of the Nazi genocide has rightly been met with disgust. But another holocaust denial is taking place with little notice: the holocaust in Iraq. The average American believes that 10,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the US invasion in March 2003. The most commonly cited figure in the media is 70,000. But the actual number of people who have been killed is most likely more than one million.

This is five times more than the estimates of killings in Darfur and even more than the genocide in Rwanda 13 years ago.

The estimate of more than one million violent deaths in Iraq was confirmed again two months ago in a poll by the British polling firm Opinion Research Business, which estimated 1,220,580 violent deaths since the US invasion. This is consistent with the study conducted by doctors and scientists from the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health more than a year ago. Their study was published in the Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal. It estimated 601,000 people killed due to violence as of July 2006; but if updated on the basis of deaths since the study, this estimate would also be more than a million. These estimates do not include those who have died because of public health problems created by the war, including breakdowns in sewerage systems and electricity, shortages of medicines, etc.

Amazingly, some journalists and editors – and of course some politicians – dismiss such measurements because they are based on random sampling of the population rather than a complete count of the dead. While it would be wrong to blame anyone for their lack of education, this disregard for scientific methods and results is inexcusable. As one observer succinctly put it: if you don’t believe in random sampling, the next time your doctor orders a blood test, tell him that he needs to take all of it.

The methods used in the estimates of Iraqi deaths are the same as those used to estimate the deaths in Darfur, which are widely accepted in the media. They are also consistent with the large numbers of refugees from the violence (estimated at more than four million). There is no reason to disbelieve them, or to accept tallies such as that the Iraq Body Count (73,305 – 84,222), which include only a small proportion of those killed, as an estimate of the overall death toll.

Of course, acknowledging the holocaust in Iraq might change the debate over the war. While Iraqi lives do not count for much in US politics, recognizing that a mass slaughter of this magnitude is taking place could lead to more questions about how this horrible situation came to be. Right now a convenient myth dominates the discussion: the fall of Saddam Hussein simply unleashed a civil war that was waiting to happen, and the violence is all due to Iraqis’ inherent hatred of each other.

In fact, there is considerable evidence that the occupation itself – including the strategy of the occupying forces – has played a large role in escalating the violence to holocaust proportions. It is in the nature of such an occupation, where the vast majority of the people are opposed to the occupation and according to polls believe it is right to try and kill the occupiers, to pit one ethnic group against another. This was clear when Shiite troops were sent into Sunni Fallujah in 2004; it is obvious in the nature of the death-squad government, where officials from the highest levels of the Interior Ministry to the lowest ranking police officers – all trained and supported by the US military – have carried out a violent, sectarian mission of “ethnic cleansing.” (The largest proportion of the killings in Iraq are from gunfire and executions, not from car bombs). It has become even more obvious in recent months as the United States is now arming both sides of the civil war, including Sunni militias in Anbar province as well as the Shiite government militias.

New Rule: The president can’t pardon just one or two turkeys this Thanksgiving. He’s got to let them all go.

It’s probably too much to expect from the man who wanted “no child left behind,” then vetoed health care for kids. But think of the upside. Freeing the turkeys might help the president’s credibility when he says things like, “We don’t torture.”

Take a look at this video, shot just last month at a typical American turkey slaughterhouse, and this one, shot undercover last year at a Butterball slaughterhouse by investigators from PETA, and you’ll see that my use of the word is no exaggeration. Butterball employees, taking a page out of the Abu Ghraib handbook, laughed while they kicked, punched, stomped, and even sexually assaulted turkeys.

These people should be arrested. They would be if the turkeys were dogs or cats. Too bad our animal protection laws make about as much sense as fighting a war against a country that doesn’t have an army. Even though 98 percent of the land animals Americans eat are turkeys and chickens, the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act specifically excludes birds from protection. I’m not kidding.

The Butterball plant in the video slaughters about 50,000 turkeys every day. Fifty million turkey corpses will go into American ovens this Thanksgiving. More than 9 billion turkeys and chickens are killed in the U.S. each year. But not one of them is guaranteed a painless death, as documented in this video that was narrated by my fellow animal-lover and HuffPo Blogger, Alec Baldwin. The Senate can find time to vote to condemn an advertisement, but not to add birds to humane slaughter laws.

So in the face of this surreal situation, in which, once again we can’t put our faith in the president, I ask you to do what I’m going to do and pardon a turkey this Thanksgiving. It’s not hard. Just eat something else (ideas here and here). Not someone else, because it doesn’t seem fair to spare a turkey and roast a hunk of pig or cow instead. If we can bow our heads in gratitude for our families, our friends and our big screen TVs, and then carve into a creature who lived a miserable life and died a horrible death, then our ethics are about as sensible as Britney’s parenting skills.

Former Vice President Al Gore should be the first to take the meat-free Thanksgiving pledge. Since raising animals for food generates more greenhouse gases than all the cars and trucks in the world combined, is it too much ask Mr. Gore to stop gazing at his Oscar and his Nobel Prize long enough to read the United Nations report that calls the meat industry “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global”?

For those of you who believe that the war is just and that global warming is a figment of the elite liberal media’s imagination, here’s the straight poop:

* Turkeys and other animals raised for food produce 130 times as much excrement as the entire U.S. human population — all without the benefit of waste treatment systems. Sewage spills, waste-filled waterways and underground aquifer contaminated with e coli are the meat industry’s gift to Americans this holiday season.

* Turkey meat has just as much cholesterol as the pieces of cow and pig called “red meat.” Eating meat is linked to heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, some cancers, and diabetes.

So do the right thing. Instead of stuffing a turkey this year, stuff the tradition of turkey for Thanksgiving right where it belongs — in history’s trash can.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a column that resonated with a lot of people.

Since 2001, I noted, “We’ve lost our right to see an attorney, to confront our accusers, even to get a fair trial. Government agents have kidnapped thousands of people, most of whom have never been heard from again. Bush even signed an edict claiming the right to assassinate anyone, including you and me, based solely on his whims. Torture, the ultimate sign that civilized society has been replaced by a police state,” has been legalized.

None of the major presidential candidates are currently promising to do what it would take to restore democracy: close Gitmo and the CIA torture chambers, get out of Afghanistan and Iraq, revoke the protofascist USA-Patriot and Military Commissions Acts, obey the Geneva Conventions and turn over Bush, his torturers, his Congressional allies and his top civilian and military officials to an international war crimes tribunal for their role in the murders of more than one million Afghans and Iraqis.

The politicians are too timid to do what’s right. But we can bully them into it. Let’s begin America’s long slog toward moral and political redemption by demanding that our next president’s first act be to declare the Bush Administration null and void. Every law and act carried out between 12 noon on January 20, 2001 and January 20, 2009 should just…go…poof.

My readers are cranky, distrustful and smart. (You can read their comments at tedrall.com.) Rallblog readers are all over the place politically: old-school Democrats, Goldwater Republicans, libertarians, socialists, anarchists, even neoconservatives. But they’re speaking out as one about my call to expunge the legacy of the Bush Administration: Yes. Yes. Hell, yes!

Let’s make it happen!

Now is the time. Write (an actual letter, not email) to your favorite presidential candidate and declare that you are a single-issue voter. Swear that, if he or she agrees to sign the following Pledge, your vote is assured. If not, promise to stay home or vote for someone else.

“I, ______________, hereby solemnly pledge that my first act upon assuming the office of President shall be to sign an American Renewal Act of 2009, which shall declare all laws, regulations, executive orders, treaties and actions undertaken by the federal government during the illegitimate and unlawful administration of George W. Bush to be null, void and without effect.”

Sound crazy? So did Thomas Paine in 1775. As a practical and legal matter, however, consigning Bush to the dung heap of history makes more sense than revolting against the British.

First, the law.

George W. Bush’s January 20, 2001 inauguration was unconstitutional. This isn’t because Bush lost the popular vote. Nor is it because he lost Florida and thus the electoral vote. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to hear the Florida recount lawsuit, Bush v. Gore, violated the U.S. Constitution. It’s a states’ rights issue. Elections fall under state law; the highest court that may resolve a legal challenge about an election is a state supreme court. The U.S. Supreme Court–a federal body–didn’t have jurisdiction in the case.

An American Renewal Act is merely a confirmation of two centuries of standard practice.

There are precedents. After France was liberated in 1944, incoming president Charles de Gaulle declared the collaborationist government of Marshall Henri-Philippe Pétain null and void. (It was a stretch. Unlike Bush, who carried out a judicial coup, Pétain came to power legally.) In any case, Pétain vanished from textbooks. Numerous laws passed between 1940 and 1944, dealing with matters like taxes and construction projects, had to be debated and passed all over again.

The Southern secession of 1860 was perfectly legal, yet laws and currency issued by the Confederate government in the South were invalidated by the victorious Union in 1865.

The main argument for erasing Bush and his nefarious deeds is a legal one: official acknowledgement that the 2000 election was stolen gets the U.S. back on the path to democracy. (Should Al Gore should be allowed to serve the term he won in 2000? I don’t know.)

There’s also an ethical principle at stake. As de Gaulle said about Pétain’s partnership with the Nazis, the Bush Administration so disgraced itself and our nation that we have to renounce it in order to restore our moral authority, to be able to face citizens of other, less despicable, countries in the eye.

Another argument is based on power. Imagine that Gore had seized power in 2000 instead. Now imagine that he had turned as rabid as Bush, that he had ruled as far to the left as Bush has to the right. Businesses would have been nationalized. Healthcare would have been socialized; doctors would be federal employees. Taxes on the rich would have soared while the poor got off scot-free. Republican protesters at the Democratic National Convention would have gotten beaten up and thrown into filthy internment facilities for days on end. Crazy Gore would have apologized for foreign policies that provoked the 9/11 attacks. To prove he meant it, he would have sent troops to overthrow the world’s most heinous dictators, all U.S. allies, in Uzbekistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.

Now imagine that, over the years, Gore’s policies had ruined the economy and mired the military in endless, losing wars. That people had turned again him to the same degree that they’ve rejected Bush. As Frank Rich writes in The New York Times, only 24 percent of Americans approve of the Bush Administration–almost as bad as the image of the U.S. in Pakistan.

You can bet that the Republicans, after they took back power, would carry out the mother of all rollbacks. Gore, the rogue president, would probably wind up in prison. There’s no reason to treat Bush and his policies any more gently.

“We are a people in clinical depression,” writes Rich. “Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon.” Anyone who reads Tim Weiner’s “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA” knows the U.S. was damned far from perfect before Bush came along. But Rich’s broader point is correct. Falling short of lofty ideals is better than forgetting about them.

Demand that the major presidential candidates sign the Pledge for American Renewal. We know the woman and half-dozen men who are leading in the polls want to rule us. But will they lead?

Ted Rall is the author of the new book “Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?,” an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America’s next big foreign policy challenge.

I received an email last week. Almost two pages long and with only enough sentence breaks to count on one hand, it was coming from a place I knew all too well and recognized instantly ­ the heart of a military wife who wanted to lose control but knew she was all that stood between her husband and heartbreak.

She told of a nightmare reminiscent of one I had lived through just a short time ago ­ with added trauma I have come to understand. I have learned there are many forms of combat, not all on the frontlines of a battlefield, but all can manifest themselves in ways only those who have lived through them will ever fully comprehend.

Serving with the 4th Infantry Division, her husband had deployed to Iraq in 2005 and spent a year in combat before returning as someone she was no longer sure she recognized. As he struggled to find his way back to her, he continued to work on post, and to ask for the help he knew he needed in dealing with the nightmares, the anger, the uncontrollable rages, mood swings, and the suicidal feelings. His commander said there was nothing wrong with him another combat tour wouldn’t fix, and didn’t do much more than tell the couple they needed marriage counseling. On R and R from Iraq for the birth of his child, he attempted suicide with the anti-depressants he had been prescribed while he was in Iraq. A judge ordered him to a military behavioral hospital and when he was released the mood swings, rages, nightmares and anger only grew worse.

He was again told he would be sent to a military hospital for treatment, and his wife was told she would be able to follow him shortly thereafter. He was sent to Ft. Stewart, Georgia, where he was immediately placed in the behavioral unit of the Army hospital on post. The doctor there, rather than recognize the problem, saw the soldier as the problem, accused him of “malingering” (a common military command practice) and told the soldier he could not get out of deploying to Iraq. The soldier’s request for conscientious objector status was not even considered, and he called his wife to let her know he would rather die in the states confined to his barracks room than return to die in Iraq; he was holding the rest of his pills and refused to tell her which barracks he was in.

She could have broken down, and after enduring months of nightmares, abusive behaviors and rage by her husband, she could have walked away ­ her heart was stronger than all of that and she began making phone calls, getting no answer at the number listed for the ambulance service or the staff duty desk. Finally she reached the MP station and they were able to find him. He was placed in the hospital and the ridicule continued. Seeking guidance from many organizations who offered to help, she soon learned she was on her own. An attorney managed to have the soldier released. At first he was ordered to stay on a cot in the battalion headquarters, unable to remove his uniform or even shower. The day before she contacted me, he faced a summary court martial and was given 30 days confinement and a less than honorable discharge. He managed a quick call to her to let her know it was almost over, and wasn’t able to say anymore. She was left on her own to find out where he was incarcerated and how he was doing. He eventually contacted her. He’s safe and being cared for, and with time off for good behavior this soldier is almost home.

For this couple, the worst is over, or is it just beginning??

I know the nightmares, I know the anger and I know the mood swings. I also know how it tears your heart when you realize how little most people understand. Watching the changes that come to a soldier who has waged a war for peace that is far more difficult sometimes than the battles fought on the ground in Iraq, it sometimes feels as if all sides are working against that peace ever taking hold.

We watched our love ones go to war, knowing the apprehension, but loving them for doing what they believed they must to keep us safe, to give to their country and to honor the service of those who came before.

We ached for them while they were gone; never sure when a phone call might come and when they did return alive we ached again, wondering when the rest of the person they had left behind in the war zone would finally catch up and come home too.

The price they paid for their freedom was greater than most will understand and theirs is a freedom many others will fight to dampen, afraid of what that freedom represents.

It’s not about who is to blame for an immoral, unjust war. It’s not about who is responsible for ending the war, or who should receive credit for the work that eventually brings us peace. It is about recognizing our personal responsibility in the madness and about accepting our role in bringing about the changes needed to repair the damage.

It’s not about why a soldier enlisted to serve, not when their conscience is torn apart by the abuse of that service; abuse from all sides until all sides begin to work together to end the war and put into place programs for reconciliation and recovery for all those affected by what we have faced in the name of freedom and human rights.

It is about reconciliation. It is about recovery. It is about doing what is right within ourselves to see that the changes we implement have a lasting impact for peace, and for healing.

It’s about understanding what has been given, setting aside what can be taken, working together to make things right.

It’s about the need for peace.

Monica Benderman is the wife of Sgt. Kevin Benderman, a ten-year Army veteran who served a combat tour in Iraq and a year in prison for his public protest of war and the destruction it causes to civilians and to American military personnel. Please visit their website, www.BendermanDefense.org to learn more.

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.