The Rag Blog

10/23/04 “TruthDig” — – Don’t worry, the White House is telling us. The world’s most powerful leader was simply making a rhetorical point. At a White House press conference last week, just in case you haven’t heard, President Bush informed the American people that he had told world leaders “if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” World War III. That is certainly some rhetorical point, especially coming from the man singularly most capable of making such an event reality.

Pundits have raised their eyebrows and comics are busy writing jokes, but the president’s reference to Armageddon, no matter how cavalierly uttered and subsequently brushed away, suggests an alarming context. Some might note that the comment was simply an offhand response to a reporter’s question, the kind of free-thinking scenario that baffles Bush so. In a way, this makes what the president said even more disturbing, since we now have an insight into the vision, and related terminology, which hovers just below the horizon in the brain of George W. Bush.

When I was a weapons inspector with the United Nations, there was a jostling that took place at the end of each day, when decisions needed to be made and authorization documents needed to be signed. In an environment of competing agendas, each of us who championed a position sought to be the “last man in,” namely the person who got to imprint the executive chairman (our decision maker) with the final point of view for the day. Failure to do so could find an inspection or point of investigation sidetracked for days or weeks after the executive chairman became distracted by a competing vision. I understand the concept of “imprinting,” and have seen it in action. What is clear from the president’s remarks is that, far from an innocent rhetorical fumble, his words, and the context in which he employed them, are a clear indication of the imprinting which is taking place behind the scenes at the White House. If the president mentions World War III in the context of Iran’s nuclear program, one can be certain that this is the very sort of discussion that is taking place in the Oval Office.

A critical question, therefore, is who was the last person to “imprint” the president prior to his public allusion to World War III? During his press conference, Bush noted that he awaited the opportunity to confer with his defense secretary, Robert Gates, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice following their recent meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. So clearly the president hadn’t been imprinted recently by either of the principle players in the formulation of defense and foreign policy. The suspects, then, are quickly whittled down to three: National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Vice President Dick Cheney, and God.

Hadley is a long-established neoconservative thinker who has for the most part operated “in the shadows” when it comes to the formulation of Iran policy in the Bush administration. In 2001, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, Hadley (then the deputy national security adviser) instituted what has been referred to as the “Hadley Rules,” a corollary of which is that no move will be made which alters the ideological positioning of Iran as a mortal enemy of the United States. These “rules” shut down every effort undertaken by Iran to seek a moderation of relations between it and the United States, and prohibited American policymakers from responding favorably to Iranian offers to assist with the fight against al-Qaida; they also blocked the grand offer of May 2003 in which Iran outlined a dramatic diplomatic initiative, including a normalization of relations with Israel. The Hadley Rules are at play today, in an even more nefarious manner, with the National Security Council becoming involved in the muzzling of former Bush administration officials who are speaking out on the issue of Iran. Hadley is blocking Flynt Leverett, formerly of the National Security Council, from publishing an Op-Ed piece critical of the Bush administration on the grounds that any insight into the machinations of policymaking (or lack thereof) somehow strengthens Iran’s hand. Leverett’s article would simply underscore the fact that the Bush administration has spurned every opportunity to improve relations with Iran while deliberately exaggerating the threat to U.S. interests posed by the Iranian theocracy.

The silencing of informed critics is in keeping with Hadley’s deliberate policy obfuscation. There is still no official policy in place within the administration concerning Iran. While a more sober-minded national security bureaucracy works to marginalize the hawkish posturing of the neocons, the administration has decided that the best policy is in fact no policy, which is a policy decision in its own right. Hadley has forgone the normal procedures of governance, in which decisions impacting the nation are written down, using official channels, and made subject to review and oversight by those legally and constitutionally mandated and obligated to do so. A policy of no policy results in secret policy, which means, according to Hadley himself, the Bush administration simply does whatever it wants to, regardless. In the case of Iran, this means pushing for regime change in Tehran at any cost, even if it means World War III.

But Hadley is simply a facilitator, bureaucratic “grease” to ease policy formulated elsewhere down the gullet of a national security infrastructure increasingly kept in the dark about the true intent of the Bush administration when it comes to Iran. With the Department of State and the Pentagon now considered unfriendly ground by the remaining hard-core neoconservative thinkers still in power, policy formulation is more and more concentrated in the person of Vice President Cheney and the constitutionally nebulous “Office of the Vice President.”

Cheney and his cohorts have constructed a never-never land of oversight deniability, claiming immunity from both executive and legislative checks and balances. With an unchallenged ability to classify anything and everything as secret, and then claim that there is no authority inherent in government to oversee that which has been thus classified, the Office of the Vice President has transformed itself into a free republic’s worst nightmare, assuming Caesar-like dictatorial authority over almost every aspect of American national security policy at home and abroad. From torture to illegal wiretapping, to arms control (or lack of it) to Iran, Dick Cheney is the undisputed center of policy power in America today. While there are some who will claim that in this time of post-9/11 crisis such a process of bureaucratic streamlining is essential for the common good, the reality is far different.

It is said that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and this has never been truer than in the case of Cheney. What Cheney is doing behind his shield of secrecy can be simply defined: planning and implementing a preemptive war of aggression. During the Nuremberg tribunal in the aftermath of World War II, the chief American prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, stated, “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Today, we have a vice president who articulates publicly about global conflict, and who speaks in not-so-veiled language about a looming Armageddon. If there is such a future for America and the world, let one thing be certain; World War III, as postulated by Dick Cheney, would be an elective war, and not a conflict of tragic necessity. This makes the crime even greater.

Sadly, Judge Jackson’s words are but an empty shell. The global community lacks a legally binding definition of what constitutes a war of aggression, or even an act of aggression. But that isn’t the point. America should never find itself in a position where it is being judged by the global community regarding the legality of its actions. Judge Jackson established a precedent of jurisprudence concerning aggression based upon American principles and values, something the international community endorsed. The fact that current American indifference to the rule of law prevents the international community from certifying a definition of criminality when it comes to aggression, whether it be parsed as “war” or simply an “act,” does not change the fact that the Bush administration, in the person of Dick Cheney, is actively engaged in the committing of the “supreme [war] crime,” which makes Cheney the supreme war criminal. If the world is not empowered to judge him as such, then let the mantle of judgment fall to the American people. Through their elected representatives in Congress, they should not only bring this reign of unrestrained abuse of power to an end, but ensure that such abuse never again is attempted by an American official by holding to account, to the full extent of the law, those who have trampled on the Constitution of the United States and the ideals and principles it enshrines.

But what use is the rule of law, even if fairly and properly implemented, if in the end he who is entrusted with executive power takes his instructions from an even higher authority? President Bush’s relationship with “God” (or that which he refers to as God) is a matter of public record. The president himself has stated that “God speaks through me” (he acknowledged this before a group of Amish in Pennsylvania in the summer of 2004). Exactly how God speaks through him, and what precisely God says, is not a matter of speculation. According to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, President Bush told him and others that “God told me to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.” As such, at least in the president’s mind, God has ordered Bush to transform himself into a modern incarnation of St. Michael, smiting all that is evil before him. “We are in a conflict between good and evil. And America will call evil by its name,” the president told West Point cadets in a speech in 2002.

The matter of how and when an individual chooses to practice his faith, or lack thereof, is a deeply personal matter, one which should be kept from public discourse. For a president to so openly impose his personal religious beliefs, as Bush has done, on American policy formulation and implementation represents a fundamental departure from not only constitutional intent concerning the separation of church and state but also constitutional mandate concerning the imposition of checks and balances required by the American system of governance. The increasing embrace by this president of the notion of a unitary executive takes on an even more sinister aspect when one realizes that not only does the Bush administration seek to nullify the will of the people through the shackling of the people’s representatives in Congress, but that the president has forgone even the appearance of constitutional constraint by evoking the word of his personal deity, as expressed through his person, as the highest form of consultation on a matter as serious as war. As such, the president has made his faith, and how he practices it, a subject not only of public curiosity but of national survival.

That George W. Bush is a born-again Christian is not a national secret. Neither is the fact that his brand of Christianity, evangelicalism, embraces the notion of the “end of days,” the coming of the Apocalypse as foretold (so they say) in the Book of Revelations and elsewhere in the Bible. President Bush’s frequent reference to “the evil one” suggests that he not only believes in the Antichrist but actively proselytizes on the Antichrist’s physical presence on Earth at this time. If one takes in the writing and speeches of those in the evangelical community today concerning the “rapture,” the numerous references to the current situation in the Middle East, especially on the events unfolding around Iran and its nuclear program, make it very clear that, at least in the minds of these evangelicals, there is a clear link between the “end of days” prophesy and U.S.-Iran policy. That James Dobson, one of the most powerful and influential evangelical voices in America today, would be invited to the White House with like-minded clergy to discuss President Bush’s Iran policy is absurd unless one makes the link between Bush’s personal faith, the extreme religious beliefs of Dobson and the potential of Armageddon-like conflict (World War III). At this point, the absurd becomes unthinkable, except it is all too real.

Thomas Jefferson, one of our nation’s greatest founders, made the separation of church and state an underlying principle upon which the United States was built. This separation was all-inclusive, meaning that not only should government stay out of religion, but likewise religion should be excluded from government. “I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself,” Jefferson wrote in a letter to Francis Hopkinson in 1789. “Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent.” If only President Bush would abide by such wisdom, avoiding the addictive narcotic of religious fervor when carrying out the people’s business. Instead, he chooses as his drug one which threatens to destroy us all in a conflagration derived not from celestial intervention but individual ignorance and arrogance. Again Jefferson, in a letter written in 1825: “It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it [the Apocalypse], and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams.”

Nightmares, more aptly, unless something can be done to change the direction Bush and Dobson are taking us. The problem is that far too many Americans openly espouse not only the faith of George W. Bush but also the underlying philosophy which permits this faith to be intertwined with the governance of the land. “God bless America” has become a rallying cry for this crowd, and those too ignorant and/or afraid to speak out in opposition. If this statement has merit, what does it say for the 6.8 billion others in the world today who are not Americans? That God condemns them? The American embrace of divine destiny is not unique in history (one only has to recall that the belt buckles of the German army during World War II read “God is with us”). But for a nation born of the age of reason to collectively fall victim to the most base of fear-induced theology is a clear indication that America currently fails to live up to its founding principles. Rather than turning to Dobson and his ilk for guidance in these troubled times, Americans would be well served to reflect on President Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, delivered in the middle of a horrific civil war which makes all of the conflict America finds itself in today pale in comparison:

“Both [North and South] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. … The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. … [T]hat He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?”

God is not on our side, or the side of any single nation or people. To believe such is the ultimate expression of national hubris. To invoke such, if one is a true believer, is to embrace sacrilege and heresy. This, of course, is an individual right, granted as an extension of religious freedom. But it is not a collective right, nor is it a right born of governance, especially in a land protected by the separation of church and state.

The issue of Iran is a national problem which requires a collective debate, discussion and dialogue inclusive of all the facts, and stripped of all ideology and theocracy which would seek to deny reasoned thought conducted within a framework of accepted laws and ideals. It is grossly irresponsible of an American president to invoke the imagery of World War III without first sharing with the American people the framework of thought that produced such a comparison. Such openness will not be forthcoming from this administration or president. Not in the form of Stephen Hadley’s policy of no policy, designed with intent to avoid and subvert both bureaucratic and legislative process and oversight, or Dick Cheney’s secret government within a government, operating above and beyond the law and in a manner which violates both legal and moral norms and values, and certainly not in the president’s own private conversations with “God,” either directly or through the medium of lunatic evangelicals who embrace the termination of all we stand for, and especially the future of our next generation, in a fiery holocaust born from the fraudulent writings of centuries past. The processes which compelled George W. Bush to speak of a World War III are intentionally not transparent to the American people. The president has much to explain, and it would be incumbent upon every venue of civic and public pressure to demand that such an explanation be forthcoming in the near future. The stakes regarding Iran have always been high, but never more so than when a nation’s leader invokes the end of days as a solution.

“No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” ­The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 5 (1948)

It’s clear to everyone paying attention these days that the U.S. Government sanctions the use of torture, despite continued denials made by President Bush, like, “We do not torture.”

The evidence is overwhelming both here in U.S. prisons and rendition abroad at so-called Black Sites (secret prisons) that captured individuals are severely tortured. Of course the word torture is never used. Instead, tortures such as waterboarding, stress positions, and other brutalities, humiliations are said to be “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

In fact, the Department of Justice authorized the use of extreme interrogation techniques not only in 2002 and 2003, but twice more in 2005. And the infamous “torture memo” written by White House legal counsel, John Yoo, stated that no interrogation tactics were illegal unless they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or “even death.” Another memo produced at the same time detailed how such practices would be applied, how often and how long.

I’m quite sure, however, that it doesn’t take DOJ authorization for the CIA, FBI, and local police to feel confident that they’ll suffer no consequences for their torture of prisoners deemed terrorists or enemy combatants, labels applied to freedom fighters.

The exception, of course, was the court martial of low-ranking U.S. military guards for the most egregious, abhorrent tortures at Abu-Graib prison in Iraq – once there was an international outcry following widespread dissemination of explicit photographs. Yet no one in position of authority was prosecuted.

Who raised any hell about the brutal torture and interrogation of three Black Panthers in New Orleans in 1973, namely: John Bowman, Harold Taylor, and Ruben Scott? Scott is a broken man; JB suffered pain and injury until his premature death in 2006; and Harold Taylor continues to suffer from physical pain, PTSD, and nightmares to this day. Has anyone been held accountable or suffered any consequences for their torture and injuries?

Hell no! In fact, the two San Francisco detectives, McCoy and Erdelatz, who conducted the interrogations and subjected these brothers to the vicious brutal tortures in New Orleans have since become Federal agents authorized to arrest and charge these elders all over again. In 1973,they tortured them into signing confessions of guilt (which they all later recanted) in the now 36-year-old case of the shooting of police officer, Sgt. John Young at the Ingleside Station in San Francisco, August 28, 1971.

On October 10, before a packed courtroom, Judge Philip Moscone denied Harold Taylor’s motion for collateral estoppel presented by his attorney, Randy Montesano. That’s a legal term that asks the court to honor prior decisions by judges on the same issue. In this case, two courts had refused to admit confessions rendered under torture. In fact, a San Francisco judge threw these same charges out in 1975. Att. Montesano noted what a waste of resources it is to do it all over again, forcing Taylor, still suffering the ill effects of the torture, to “relive those moments.”

Judge Moscone’s decision was based on the prosecution’s assertion that the 1974 Los Angeles proceedings (involving Harold Taylor) were pre-trial hearings and not final adjudication. However, the judge did leave the door open for the defense attorneys to enter a motion to suppress (the coerced statements) at future hearings.

In an interview with Richard Brown, one of the six defendants out on bail, he said, “Based upon three rulings that we’ve had already, including the Supreme Court, those forced confessions will be suppressed…and I’m very, very happy to say that he [Moscone] seems to be a judge. He doesn’t seem to be politically motivated or intimidated by anything or anyone…it appears as though he’s going to judge the case based on the merit of the case, the evidence; and that’s what we’re all hoping for.”

The next hearing is scheduled for Monday, December 3, when issues of discovery and the sealing of prejudicial documents will be litigated.

Be sure to encourage all your friends to help us pack the courtroom, as we’re quite sure that your continued presence and support are what made it possible for Richard Brown, Richard O’Neal, Ray Boudreaux, Hank Jones, Harold Taylor, and Francisco Torres to be released on bail, and return home to their families.

Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim (Bottom) remain in solitary confinement with no-contact visits at the San Francisco County Jail. Please write to them and learn more about the frameup that has kept them incarcerated in New York State prisons for 34 and 36 years respectively. http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/profiles/ny3.html
For past articles and updates on this case, go to www.freethesf8.org or www.sfbayview.com.

Syria is a beautiful country- at least I think it is. I say “I think” because while I perceive it to be beautiful, I sometimes wonder if I mistake safety, security and normalcy for ‘beauty’. In so many ways, Damascus is like Baghdad before the war- bustling streets, occasional traffic jams, markets seemingly always full of shoppers… And in so many ways it’s different. The buildings are higher, the streets are generally narrower and there’s a mountain, Qasiyoun, that looms in the distance.

The mountain distracts me, as it does many Iraqis- especially those from Baghdad. Northern Iraq is full of mountains, but the rest of Iraq is quite flat. At night, Qasiyoun blends into the black sky and the only indication of its presence is a multitude of little, glimmering spots of light- houses and restaurants built right up there on the mountain. Every time I take a picture, I try to work Qasiyoun into it- I try to position the person so that Qasiyoun is in the background.

The first weeks here were something of a cultural shock. It has taken me these last three months to work away certain habits I’d acquired in Iraq after the war. It’s funny how you learn to act a certain way and don’t even know you’re doing strange things- like avoiding people’s eyes in the street or crazily murmuring prayers to yourself when stuck in traffic. It took me at least three weeks to teach myself to walk properly again- with head lifted, not constantly looking behind me.

It is estimated that there are at least 1.5 million Iraqis in Syria today. I believe it. Walking down the streets of Damascus, you can hear the Iraqi accent everywhere. There are areas like Geramana and Qudsiya that are packed full of Iraqi refugees. Syrians are few and far between in these areas. Even the public schools in the areas are full of Iraqi children. A cousin of mine is now attending a school in Qudsiya and his class is composed of 26 Iraqi children, and 5 Syrian children. It’s beyond belief sometimes. Most of the families have nothing to live on beyond their savings which are quickly being depleted with rent and the costs of living.

Within a month of our being here, we began hearing talk about Syria requiring visas from Iraqis, like most other countries. Apparently, our esteemed puppets in power met with Syrian and Jordanian authorities and decided they wanted to take away the last two safe havens remaining for Iraqis- Damascus and Amman. The talk began in late August and was only talk until recently- early October. Iraqis entering Syria now need a visa from the Syrian consulate or embassy in the country they are currently in. In the case of Iraqis still in Iraq, it is said that an approval from the Ministry of Interior is also required (which kind of makes it difficult for people running away from militias OF the Ministry of Interior…). Today, there’s talk of a possible fifty dollar visa at the border.

Iraqis who entered Syria before the visa was implemented were getting a one month visitation visa at the border. As soon as that month was over, you could take your passport and visit the local immigration bureau. If you were lucky, they would give you an additional month or two. When talk about visas from the Syrian embassy began, they stopped giving an extension on the initial border visa. We, as a family, had a brilliant idea. Before the commotion of visas began, and before we started needing a renewal, we decided to go to one of the border crossings, cross into Iraq, and come back into Syria- everyone was doing it. It would buy us some time- at least 2 months.

We chose a hot day in early September and drove the six hours to Kameshli, a border town in northern Syria. My aunt and her son came with us- they also needed an extension on their visa. There is a border crossing in Kameshli called Yaarubiya. It’s one of the simpler crossings because the Iraqi and Syrian borders are only a matter of several meters. You walk out of Syrian territory and then walk into Iraqi territory- simple and safe.

When we got to the Yaarubiya border patrol, it hit us that thousands of Iraqis had had our brilliant idea simultaneously- the lines to the border patrol office were endless. Hundreds of Iraqis stood in a long line waiting to have their passports stamped with an exit visa. We joined the line of people and waited. And waited. And waited…

It took four hours to leave the Syrian border after which came the lines of the Iraqi border post. Those were even longer. We joined one of the lines of weary, impatient Iraqis. “It’s looking like a gasoline line…” My younger cousin joked. That was the beginning of another four hours of waiting under the sun, taking baby steps, moving forward ever so slowly. The line kept getting longer. At one point, we could see neither the beginning of the line, where passports were being stamped to enter Iraq, nor the end. Running up and down the line were little boys selling glasses of water, chewing gum and cigarettes. My aunt caught one of them by the arm as he zipped past us, “How many people are in front of us?” He whistled and took a few steps back to assess the situation, “A hundred! A thousand!”. He was almost gleeful as he ran off to make business.

I had such mixed feelings standing in that line. I was caught between a feeling of yearning, a certain homesickness that sometimes catches me at the oddest moments, and a heavy feeling of dread. What if they didn’t agree to let us out again? It wasn’t really possible, but what if it happened? What if this was the last time I’d see the Iraqi border? What if we were no longer allowed to enter Iraq for some reason? What if we were never allowed to leave?

We spent the four hours standing, crouching, sitting and leaning in the line. The sun beat down on everyone equally- Sunnis, Shia and Kurds alike. E. tried to convince the aunt to faint so it would speed the process up for the family, but she just gave us a withering look and stood straighter. People just stood there, chatting, cursing or silent. It was yet another gathering of Iraqis – the perfect opportunity to swap sad stories and ask about distant relations or acquaintances.

We met two families we knew while waiting for our turn. We greeted each other like long lost friends and exchanged phone numbers and addresses in Damascus, promising to visit. I noticed the 23-year-old son, K., from one of the families was missing. I beat down my curiosity and refused to ask where he was. The mother was looking older than I remembered and the father looked constantly lost in thought, or maybe it was grief. I didn’t want to know if K. was dead or alive. I’d just have to believe he was alive and thriving somewhere, not worrying about borders or visas. Ignorance really is bliss sometimes…

Back at the Syrian border, we waited in a large group, tired and hungry, having handed over our passports for a stamp. The Syrian immigration man sifting through dozens of passports called out names and looked at faces as he handed over the passports patiently, “Stand back please- stand back”. There was a general cry towards the back of the crowded hall where we were standing as someone collapsed- as they lifted him I recognized an old man who was there with his family being chaperoned by his sons, leaning on a walking stick.

By the time we had reentered the Syrian border and were headed back to the cab ready to take us into Kameshli, I had resigned myself to the fact that we were refugees. I read about refugees on the Internet daily… in the newspapers… hear about them on TV. I hear about the estimated 1.5 million plus Iraqi refugees in Syria and shake my head, never really considering myself or my family as one of them. After all, refugees are people who sleep in tents and have no potable water or plumbing, right? Refugees carry their belongings in bags instead of suitcases and they don’t have cell phones or Internet access, right? Grasping my passport in my hand like my life depended on it, with two extra months in Syria stamped inside, it hit me how wrong I was. We were all refugees. I was suddenly a number. No matter how wealthy or educated or comfortable, a refugee is a refugee. A refugee is someone who isn’t really welcome in any country- including their own… especially their own.

We live in an apartment building where two other Iraqis are renting. The people in the floor above us are a Christian family from northern Iraq who got chased out of their village by Peshmerga and the family on our floor is a Kurdish family who lost their home in Baghdad to militias and were waiting for immigration to Sweden or Switzerland or some such European refugee haven.

The first evening we arrived, exhausted, dragging suitcases behind us, morale a little bit bruised, the Kurdish family sent over their representative – a 9 year old boy missing two front teeth, holding a lopsided cake, “We’re Abu Mohammed’s house- across from you- mama says if you need anything, just ask- this is our number. Abu Dalia’s family live upstairs, this is their number. We’re all Iraqi too… Welcome to the building.”

BAGHDAD, 21 October 2007 (IRIN) – Iraqis are breathing a sigh of relief as violence in their war-torn country is ebbing and the number of violence-related victims has dropped sharply since the beginning of this year, according to statistics compiled by the country’s interior, defence and health ministries.

“Violence-related deaths in September dropped remarkably to levels not seen in more than a year as the number [of violence-related deaths] stood at 290 while in September 2006 the number was about 1,400,” Adel Muhsin, the health ministry’s inspector-general, told IRIN in a phone interview.

According to the ministry’s statistics, between January and the end of September 2007, the number of violent deaths involving civilian, police and military in all of Iraq was about 7,100, against 27,000 in the same period of 2006.

According to Muhsin, the average number of dead bodies sent to Baghdad’s main morgue just over a year ago was between 100 and 150 a day. Now, it is no more than 10 bodies a day, and about 50 percent of them are dying in normal circumstances.

“There have been days this year when no dead bodies were sent to the morgue and this gave the morgue employees a chance to refurbish it, something they couldn’t do in the past,” Muhsin added.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon recently said that September witnessed the lowest number of Iraqi casualties in any month this year. He added that there had been a decease in violence in general due to a cessation of attacks by the Mahdi Army, led by Shia religious leader Muqtada al-Sadr, who in August ordered a temporary freeze of his followers’ activities, including attacks on US troops.

As a result, Ban said he had strengthened the UN team in Iraq by increasing staff in Baghdad and Erbil from 65 to 85 and was considering the establishment of a small UN presence in Basra.

Some time after Operation Imposing Law was launched by US and Iraqi forces on 14 February this year, the number of those thought to be victims of Shia death squads began dropping dramatically in Baghdad, and there has also been a lull in violent attacks by Sunni insurgents.

“But that doesn’t mean that their attacks have ended, but they have been reduced and have become less effective as we have managed to arrest their senior leaders and disband many vital cells,” a senior police officer said on condition of anonymity as he fears reprisals.

“And as a result of that, the number of car bomb attacks has been reduced from between eight and 15 a day to one and three and sometimes none. The same is true of roadside bomb attacks and assassinations,” he added.

Some return to normalcy

Naji Mohammed Adel (not his real name), 22, has reopened his music store in eastern Baghdad nearly two years after al-Sadr followers went to his shop and left a threatening letter asking him to shut it down because it contravened their perception of Islamic law.

”Now I can open my store for about six to eight hours a day and clients are showing up every day to buy the latest music.”
“Now I can open my store for about six to eight hours a day and clients are showing up every day to buy the latest music,” said Adel from Mashtal, which, like other parts of eastern Baghdad, was controlled by the Mahdi Army.

W.N., a 33-year-old female hairdresser who has a salon in a western neighbourhood of the capital, is now serving clients again after extremists had previously threatened to “have her head chopped off” if she stayed in this “sinful” business.

“Clients are trickling in but not like before,” she said.” We are open for about three to five hours during the day as there is a nearby Iraqi army check point.”

Deadly business

Taxi driver Ahmed Khalil Baqir used to station himself outside Baghdad’s main morgue, waiting for grieving families who went there to claim their relatives’ dead bodies.

World oil production has already peaked and will fall by half as soon as 2030, according to a report which also warns that extreme shortages of fossil fuels will lead to wars and social breakdown.

The German-based Energy Watch Group will release its study in London today saying that global oil production peaked in 2006 – much earlier than most experts had expected. The report, which predicts that production will now fall by 7% a year, comes after oil prices set new records almost every day last week, on Friday hitting more than $90 (£44) a barrel.

“The world soon will not be able to produce all the oil it needs as demand is rising while supply is falling. This is a huge problem for the world economy,” said Hans-Josef Fell, EWG’s founder and the German MP behind the country’s successful support system for renewable energy.

The report’s author, Joerg Schindler, said its most alarming finding was the steep decline in oil production after its peak, which he says is now behind us.

The results are in contrast to projections from the International Energy Agency, which says there is little reason to worry about oil supplies at the moment.

However, the EWG study relies more on actual oil production data which, it says, are more reliable than estimates of reserves still in the ground. The group says official industry estimates put global reserves at about 1.255 gigabarrels – equivalent to 42 years’ supply at current consumption rates. But it thinks the figure is only about two thirds of that.

Global oil production is currently about 81m barrels a day – EWG expects that to fall to 39m by 2030. It also predicts significant falls in gas, coal and uranium production as those energy sources are used up.

Britain’s oil production peaked in 1999 and has already dropped by half to about 1.6 million barrels a day.

The report presents a bleak view of the future unless a radically different approach is adopted. It quotes the British energy economist David Fleming as saying: “Anticipated supply shortages could lead easily to disturbing scenes of mass unrest as witnessed in Burma this month. For government, industry and the wider public, just muddling through is not an option any more as this situation could spin out of control and turn into a complete meltdown of society.”

Mr Schindler comes to a similar conclusion. “The world is at the beginning of a structural change of its economic system. This change will be triggered by declining fossil fuel supplies and will influence almost all aspects of our daily life.”

Jeremy Leggett, one of Britain’s leading environmentalists and the author of Half Gone, a book about “peak oil” – defined as the moment when maximum production is reached, said that both the UK government and the energy industry were in “institutionalised denial” and that action should have been taken sooner.

“When I was an adviser to government, I proposed that we set up a taskforce to look at how fast the UK could mobilise alternative energy technologies in extremis, come the peak,” he said. “Other industry advisers supported that. But the government prefers to sleep on without even doing a contingency study. For those of us who know that premature peak oil is a clear and present danger, it is impossible to understand such complacency.”

Mr Fell said that the world had to move quickly towards the massive deployment of renewable energy and to a dramatic increase in energy efficiency, both as a way to combat climate change and to ensure that the lights stayed on. “If we did all this we may not have an energy crisis.”

He accused the British government of hypocrisy. “Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have talked a lot about climate change but have not brought in proper policies to drive up the use of renewables,” he said. “This is why they are left talking about nuclear and carbon capture and storage. “

Yesterday, a spokesman for the Department of Business and Enterprise said: “Over the next few years global oil production and refining capacity is expected to increase faster than demand. The world’s oil resources are sufficient to sustain economic growth for the foreseeable future. The challenge will be to bring these resources to market in a way that ensures sustainable, timely, reliable and affordable supplies of energy.”

Transcribed by Matt Espinoza Watson

Sherman Austin first gained national attention in 2002 when the FBI ransacked his home and eventually held him in 24 hour lockdown in connection with internet activity. After a maze of interrogations and court proceedings from LA to New York, Sherman served one year in Federal Detention, mostly in Arizona. He completed a three year probation this year, and recently released a new record titled “Silence is Defeat: The Album the FBI Doesn’t Want You to Hear.” I spoke with Sherman Austin about his music, his resistance, and the initial FBI raid on his home:

Sherman: I was 18 years old, and I was asleep, it was about four in the afternoon, I was taking a nap. My sister came in my room, woke me up, said that FBI-looking cars were all parked up and down the street, all around the block, and everyone was focused on the house. So I got up, went to the door, I was basically pulled outside. At that time they already had the whole house surrounded with guns; submachine guns, shotguns, bullet-proof vests. They came into the house, and went straight to my room, where I had a computer network that was running the website raisethefist.com, which was an anarchist independent media type site where people could publish their own articles to a newswire automatically, and it featured information that covered everything from police brutality, environmental racism, corporate globalization, [to] a variety of political issues. And so they came straight to the room, they dismantled the entire computer network, all the servers, downloaded everything to their own remote equipment, and then loaded everything onto a white truck. During that whole time, I was also being interrogated by the two special agents who were conducting the raid, [and] a secret service agent. And I was asked questions, like if I’d like to see the president killed, and I asked them [if it] was even legal for them to come in my house; come in and take all this computer equipment, and have a whole search warrant; how [was] all of this even legal, just because I had a website. And the head agent responded “Well it’s now legal under the USA PATRIOT Act.” This happened three months after that act was passed, only four months after 9/11. So, this is one of their first attempts to exercise the new act against someone who was an activist/anarchist/organizer or whatever, in the community. And so they basically spent about four or five hours at the house, boxed everything up, they also seized political literature, books, protest signs, they took everything and put it into a big white truck that was waiting outside. And then before they left, they said that I had crossed over a line and [that] as long as I got back on the other side of that line, everything would be all right. Basically what he was saying was that as long as I stayed quiet and shut up, everything would be cool, everything would be fine. So after that happened, I did the opposite. I wrote up an article about what had happened, and I went to New York about a week and half later to participate in the World Economic Forum protest in New York. I was waiting in Columbus Circle in New York when about 10, 15 different New York police officers blitzed the crowd and scooped up 26 demonstrators, one of which was me. [I found out later] that the Secret Service notified the New York Police Chief of my presence at the rally, so the New York Police Chief gave orders to just start sweeping up random demonstrators, and to basically see if they could find me somewhere in the crowd. So I was taken to a Brooklyn Navy yard jail, where everyone was processed and booked. Then, everyone was starting to get released, and I was taken into a back room in handcuffs, where I met an FBI agent and a Secret Service agent, and I was interrogated again, for about three hours. And they asked me questions such as: if I was a terrorist, if I was involved in any terrorist organizations, if I knew of any plans of violence that were going to happen at the demonstration, how I got to New York, where my car was parked, what train I took to get into Manhattan. And they basically said I wasn’t going to be able to leave New York until my car was searched. At this point I was tired, I basically wanted to go home, and said, “I’ve got nothing to hide, there’s nothing in my car that could possibly incriminate me; nothing that you’re looking for”, and so I signed over the keys. And then they left. And there were about six or seven different FBI agents coming into the room, in and out of the room this whole time I was being interrogated, messing with files, getting information, and they kept asking me questions over and over about the raid that happened in California; questions about raisethefist.com; what it was about. I refused to talk about any of that, because during that time, I still didn’t have any sort of legal representation, I still didn’t have any type of lawyer.

Aura: Did you ask for [a lawyer]?

Sherman: Yeah, I asked for a lawyer, and they just kept asking me the same questions over and over again. They were really persistent. And so, I just got fed up and I signed over the keys to my car, and I said, “I want to go home”. And then they left and five minutes later I was taken to a courthouse, and basically released. I just waited there for a half-hour, for someone to come and pick me up. And then, about three or four FBI agents came into the building, and then two New York Police officers came over to me and said “These guys want to talk to you.”, walked me over, and they said I was under arrest for putting information on the internet about explosives. And they basically cuffed me, grabbed me by my neck and hurried me out of the courtroom into a black SUV waiting outside, and took me to a Federal Building, processed me, and then took me to Manhattan Metropolitan Correctional Center. [They] put me into a 24 hour lockdown, maximum security federal prison cell. I was actually in the same cell block as the people who were convicted of the USS Cole bombing, and [the] people who were convicted for bombing the US Embassy in Kenya. I was 18 years old, put into an orange jumpsuit, put into a cold dark cell, and I wasn’t allowed out at any time except for legal visits. And so I spent, I believe it was 12 or 13 days in custody before Federal prosecutors said they didn’t want to file an indictment just yet, so just like that I was released, after 13 days. There were articles in mainstream newspapers, like the New York Post, that read, “Teen Terrorist”; headlines reading “Baby Bomb Bust”, I was made out to look like this terrorist person. U.S. Marshals were calling me names like “terror boy”; I was [thinking]: this new teenage terrorist that was caught, [and was] then all of a sudden just let go. And I was able to fly back to California by myself, without being extradited back by the U.S. Marshals, which was the original plan, because I was denied bail, and I was deemed a threat to the community. And if I was to be let back out on my own recognizance, I was going to blow up the Olympics, according to them. But now, all of a sudden, since the prosecutors decided not to file any charges, I was able to just go back by myself.

Aura: I want to go back to this 24 hour lockdown. Because I think a lot of people have been to demonstrations, I think a lot of people, especially people of color, have had negative interactions, with authority, particularly police. You’re 18 years old in 2002, you’ve been arrested and/or interrogated for the third time in a week, and all of a sudden you’re placed in a 24 hour lockdown facility. I don’t think most of us have been inside a 24 hour lockdown facility. Can you describe physically what that place was like?

Sherman: Basically, it’s almost like being in the hole, but it’s a little more extreme. [For example], you can’t be escorted just by one guard. I was escorted by at least three or four U.S. Marshals, one in front of you, one in back of you, and one on each side of you. Your ankles are handcuffed to each other, and your wrists are in handcuffs. And from there, your wrists are then handcuffed to your waist. And you wear an orange jumpsuit so they can know exactly who you are, so in case you try to run or escape or anything like that. Where I was at, in the cellblock, there’s one main big cage gate that opens up the cellblock and then from there you have the other cells. Each cell usually holds two inmates, but I was put in by myself; a single cell that actually held two inmates, but they kept me alone for some reason. It was just a dark, dark, small cell, maybe about the size of your bathroom. And you don’t do anything but stay in there 24 hours a day and just try to make use of your time; try to work out, read, write, whatever you can. There’s a small, long, slit in the wall which is sort of a window. It’s maybe about a foot long, ¾ of a foot wide, actually, and maybe about four feet tall. It was kind of dark inside most of the time. There’s a window on the cell door where the Marshals or the [correction officers] can pass by and see you inside. Any time you’re fed, they stick the food through a little slot in the door, and you come and pick it up and they close up the slot again. Anytime you come out of the cell you have to walk backwards. If you walk forwards, it’s considered an assault and they can put you down physically, any way they want to. If you have to take a shower, you actually have to take a shower in handcuffs. You walk backwards out of your cell, they cuff you, put you into another cell-like room which is [the actual] shower, and then they cuff you again, with your hands in front of you, and you have to take a shower in handcuffs. So, it’s pretty secure. There are cameras everywhere; there are cameras in the cell block; there are cameras in the general room, where the [correction officers] sit, where the Marshals sit, with all the video monitoring screens and [so forth]. I mean, I was the youngest person there. Everyone looked at me like “What the hell are you doing here? You’re a kid.”

Aura: You were a kid. You were 18.

Sherman: Exactly. And I was like, “I just had a website…”

Aura: So you spent almost two weeks in complete isolation, having to take showers with handcuffs on, having to walk backwards, doing completely humiliating things; what did it mean to you to have to spend that much time in there?

Sherman: I don’t know, it was pretty crazy, because I didn’t know exactly how much time I was even going to be spending in there, because I had seen what was being said in the newspapers about this crazy terrorist being caught.

Aura: So you were able to see the newspapers?

Sherman: Yeah, because fortunately, I did have a lawyer when I was actually locked up, and I was able to get legal visits, and she would give me clippings of the newspaper articles in my legal file. I was able to read through some of the articles and see what was being said, and it looked like it was pretty crazy. It looked like I wasn’t going to get out anytime soon. When I was inside the cell, I kind of had to make myself used to the fact that I might be here for a while, maybe a year, two years, five years, ten years, I don’t know if I’ll be here even twenty years. I mean, it was just crazy. Words can’t really describe it. I don’t know, I don’t know what to think. I just thought about how I was going get out, if I was going get out, when I was going get out, and if I was even going to go to court, because I was denied bail. They didn’t even give me a chance to have bail, so I thought that I might even be there for at least, five years, before maybe getting some type of fair court hearing or something like that. Because, I was so young, and I had never been through something that extreme before; I just didn’t know what to think, except for the fact that I would probably be spending a lot of time there.

Aura: How did it make you feel every time you were let out of your cell, knowing that you had to go back into that cell?

Sherman: It’s a bad feeling, it’s just like when you get out, it’s almost like a moment of relief; it’s a moment that breaks the daily routine of just being inside the cell. When you get let out it’s like a new feeling, it’s almost refreshing, even though you might just go down the cell block to take a shower or just upstairs, escorted by Marshals, to get a legal visit. It’s such a refreshing moment even to just get a legal visit, because you can just sit in a different room, with different lights over you, and sit and talk to an actual person, face to face, and maybe fumble with some papers, and I mean, it’s a good feeling compared to just like being back in the cell. And then when you’re escorted back into the cell, it’s like “All right, here I go again. I’ve got to get back into this other mindset of being in the cell 24 hours a day.” I don’t know how to describe it, it’s pretty bad. You imagine people who spend years and years in there; what kind of people they come to be when they’re actually let out. It’s a bad feeling. I think I had moments of hope because I was trying to remain optimistic; I knew that a lot of people did know about the case, and they knew about the website too, so I knew that people had to have been talking about it while I was inside, and my lawyer told me that people were talking about it on the outside, so I felt that as long as people knew on the outside there could at least be some hope that I might get out, some hope that people were trying to get me out, and some hope that people weren’t giving up on the outside for my release. I couldn’t really communicate with people on the outside; I don’t think I ever got a phone call. Any type of message that was passed on was usually just passed on through my lawyer. And so, I just tried to remain optimistic. As long as I thought I might be getting out, as long as I though that there was like a slim, slim, even one percent chance that I might get out, that was enough hope for me.

Aura: Let’s move on and focus on what happened after you spent so much time in this lockdown facility. You came back to LA; what happened here?

Sherman: I came back to LA, and I got all the back-ups that were for the site, raisethefist.com, and I got [it] back together, and at that point the site was getting even more hits, like four or five thousand hits a day, from all the publicity it was getting from the newspaper articles and [press], and the FBI raid and everything. And so I just got the website back online and continued what I was doing, I continued my work in the community; tried to get Copwatch started up in Long Beach, started up different programs; free clothing programs, free food programs, just basically continued the political work I was doing in the community, and with that came a lot of harassment, not just by the FBI, but also by the local police. I mean, I couldn’t ride my bike down the street without being stopped and police all knowing my name, three cop cars showing up, asking me what I was doing, where I was going, questioning me about raisethefist.com. I couldn’t go to other people’s court hearings without literally being followed and swarmed on by four or five different police cars when I came within a couple of blocks of the courthouse, asking me what was going on that day, why I was there, what was happening; basic harassment and intimidation. My phones were tapped, my internet lines were tapped, I’d be receiving countless death threats from white supremacist organizations: the Aryan Brotherhood, [and] Neo-Nazis would constantly email me, post racist comments on the website. My instant messenger accounts were being hacked into; I received threats such as “You’re going to jail.” Friends would receive threats such as “You’re next.” All this continued for about six months. During that period of six months, we heard nothing back from the FBI or from prosecutors until the prosecutors called my lawyer and said they didn’t find anything on the computers they could prosecute me for; nothing was illegal that I had even done – but they didn’t want to let me off the hook. They wanted me to admit guilt to distributing information related to explosives or weapons of mass destruction with the intent that it be used in a Federal crime of violence, namely arson. They wanted me to admit guilt to writing information that was actually on a different website, which I had no part in authoring or implementing in any way.

Aura: This is something that I want to address specifically, because I think there’s a lot of confusion about what it is that you were charged with. So I’d like you to explain exactly what it was that they went after you for.

Sherman: It was basically another kid’s website. This kid had a website called The Reclaim Guide. And a page on his website contained information on how to make homemade explosives, which he had copied I guess from The Anarchist Cookbook, and he put it all on his website and put it online. And so, I had links on my website to a bunch of different websites, and one of the links was to his website. They basically accused me of writing this other website. They knew I was the author of raisethefist.com, [and] they knew I didn’t author this other website that this other kid created, but they still accused me of writing it. Two weeks before the federal prosecutors called my lawyer, they actually visited this kid in Orange County, and basically confirmed he was the one who authored, implemented, and created this entire website with the information about how to create explosives and manufacture these homemade bombs. And he had put it online so that people could use it in upcoming protests against the International Monetary Fund in Washington D.C. And they basically confirmed he wrote it, and all that information is there in the FBI case discovery, where they went to his house, questioned him, and he admitted to writing all the information. [Then] the FBI left. Then they put documents together, fabricating statements, saying that I admitted to writing the information, saying that I admitted to implementing, creating, and authoring all the websites that this other kid had written; specifically the page with the information about how to build bombs and explosives. And then, all those documents were then submitted to the prosecutors, which were then submitted to the judge, which were then submitted to the probation officer assigned to the case for pre-sentencing. These documents with all these lies and all fabricated statements were basically used to create this false case against me and basically used to convict me for something that I had never even done in the first place.

Aura: What happened to the kid in Orange County who was actually the one who posted this information on his website?

Sherman: Nothing ever happened to him. I don’t even know what happened to him – if he even left town after that, but the FBI never came after him ever. This kid was a white kid from Orange County, he had wealthy Republican parents, and they obviously would have no trouble coming up with the right amount of money to find the right lawyer to defend him if indeed the FBI had decided to go after him. It would have been a lot easier, obviously, for the FBI to come after me, a black anarchist who didn’t have the financial resources to afford private legal defense; enough legal defense to actually go to trial and fight the case. It was just them [figuring out] who the easier target was. And, this type of railroading goes on all the time in the legal system. If you look at the prison population, the majority of the population is black; the least of the population is white. People get railroaded in this system all the time, and I think this case is just another example of how people continuously get railroaded in this injustice system, where they can’t afford a lawyer, therefore they can’t afford a fair trial, therefore there’s no justice whatsoever. With this case, with them not going after that white kid, obviously just reinforces that fact. It’s just another example of what type of system we’re living under.

Aura: We’re talking about railroading, and one of the ways in which people often have to respond to this type of railroading is by taking plea agreements. I want to talk to you about why you felt compelled to have to take one, and under what conditions that happened.

Sherman: I wanted to go to trial when my lawyer first told me about what the prosecutors wanted to do and wanted to have me sign. And I was like, “There’s no way, I didn’t do any of this, they know I didn’t do any of this, so I want to go to trial.” And we had gone back and forth to court, the prosecutors kept trying to get me to take the plea deal, they kept leaving it on the table even though they said they were going to withdraw it if I rejected it. And my lawyer said “Well, you’re looking at three to four years in prison, and most likely, you’ll be convicted, considering the current political climate in this country right now.” Because it wasn’t even that long after 9/11, and a lot of people were still gung-ho about looking for the terrorists. And so I said, “That’s fine, let’s go to trial; three or four years, whatever, I can appeal it later on.” So, as I kept resisting, the FBI made a phone call to somebody, and the probation officer assigned to the case for pre-sentencing decided to re-assess the case, and find out if indeed a “Terrorism enhancement” was applicable to my case. And the second time she decided to re-assess the case, all of a sudden, this ‘terrorism enhancement’ was applicable to my case, which meant that I was no longer looking at three or four years in federal prison, I was now looking at 23 or 24 years in federal prison. At that point, my lawyer was almost begging me to not go to trial because it wasn’t the type of case that he could even take on at that point. And I had to make a choice: if I have to get a new lawyer, I have to have about $50,000 to afford the right type of legal team that I would need to take this thing to trial. And so I had no other choice but to sign a plea agreement for something that I didn’t even do, or go to trial with an inadequate defense and most likely get 20 years in federal prison.

Aura: Let’s talk about this enhancement; explain what an enhancement is and who created this enhancement because of course, this is happening in the post 9/11 climate, yet this enhancement was created under Clinton, so tell us a little more about it.

Sherman: Yeah, this “terrorism enhancement” was actually created under Clinton’s [1996] Anti-Terrorism Act. Basically, say you go to trial and you’re convicted by the jury, and you’re sentenced to three or four years of prison. If the judge doesn’t like you, if he decides you’re lying, if he just has a bad feeling about you; say the enhancement is up to twenty years in prison, the judge can then say, “Okay, you’re sentenced to three or four years… I’m going to add on an additional ten years, or an additional twenty years onto your sentence, because that’s my decision. That’s my decision under this enhancement.” That decision doesn’t come from the jury. But actually, the law was recently changed. When I was doing the time in Tucson [Federal Correction Institute], the law had recently changed, where now that enhancement has to be decided by the actual jury. So, now if you’re convicted and sentenced to three to four years, now it’s up to the jury’s discretion to decide whether or not you then face that enhancement, rather than it just being the judge.

Aura: So you’re looking at an enhancement, you take a plea deal. What’s next? Where do they send you?

Sherman: I take a plea deal, I go to court, and I’m sentenced to a year in federal prison, with three years supervised release, [during which time] I can’t touch a computer or knowingly associate with anyone who espouses violence for political change. I’m given thirty days to self-surrender to the U.S. Marshals in downtown L.A. A month later I go and surrender, and I’m taken into a holding tank, to the Downtown [Metropolitan Correction Center]. And since that place is overpopulated, I’m then taken to San Bernardino Detention Center, put into the general population. I do about a week and a half there, and I was put into protective custody, because I later learned that there were a lot of death threats against me from a lot of the white supremacist organizations.

Aura: And that San Bernardino prison is known as the headquarters of the Aryan [Brotherhood] within prisons in California…

Sherman: Yeah.

Aura: And so they put a black anarchist in San Bernardino?

Sherman: Yeah, they put a black anarchist in San Bernardino, knowing that he had death threats against him from these white supremacist organizations, knowing he had these threats being posted against him on his website for the past two years. They then go ahead and purposefully put him in this San Bernardino detention center, which has the largest population of Aryan Brotherhood and white supremacist organizations. That was questioned a lot by people, especially my mom. And so, when people found out [I was placed there], they just flooded the prison with phone calls, every single day. And they told them to get me out of there right away.

Aura: And you ended up in Arizona?

Sherman: Yeah, that’s where I did the majority of my time at Tucson, Arizona; it’s a federal correctional institution, a medium security federal prison. And when I got there, I was put in the hole again. The lieutenant told me it was because of the threats I was receiving. Interestingly enough, they didn’t put me in the hole right away when I was in San Bernardino, until people told them to get me out of there, but when I got to Tucson, the lieutenant immediately put me in the hole because he told me nothing was going to jeopardize my safety out on the yard, and that I could be let out in general population without them having to be worried about anything. I was put in the hole for about another week, and then I was finally let out into general population, where I did the majority of my time. On the yard, I talked to people, and just got into a daily routine; working out, reading, writing, and just did my time.

Aura: You were released three years ago, and I remember a very joyous day at the airport on the day you came home; I was actually invited to go with your family. As a journalist, it was really one of the highlights of anything I’ve ever done. I felt really honored to be there and to be able to speak with you as you were literally coming into a new freedom. And I remember being in the car with you on the way to the halfway house, and somebody gets a phone call, and they’re about to hand you the phone, and everyone stops and says “No! Sherman you can’t touch that cell phone!” You had some very interesting probation terms, including not being able to use a cell phone, [and] not being able to use the computer – I remember that very recently, I just got my first email from you. Talk about the terms of your probation and how you were able to navigate through that for the last three years.

Sherman: It was crazy. It was really hard, because they wouldn’t even let me use a computer for work. I called the probation office maybe ten, fifteen different times asking them “Can I use the computer for work? When can I use the computer for work?” And they would just give me the run-around, and eventually, it was just like “No, you can’t use the computer at all, for three years.” And so, that was hard, because using the computer was what I had always done for work. So, not only did I have to find a job where I wasn’t doing computer work, but I had to find a job that didn’t even require a computer. And that was really hard, because I had found a few jobs, but they required me to use a computer, so I immediately had to leave them. And then if I had found a job where I didn’t have to use a computer, then they saw my record, and saw this thing that said “weapons of mass destruction” on it, and I was a convicted felon, and I was fired [because of it]. I had these two big things against me, and I was like, “What do I do?” That’s just how crazy it was, and I would tell people, “Yeah, I can’t even use a computer”, and people wouldn’t even believe me, they’d be like “What? Are you serious? You can’t use a computer?” People were just amazed by it, they had never heard anything like it.

Aura: So let’s talk a little bit about your record, “Silence is Defeat: The album that the FBI doesn’t want you to hear”. Tell us a little more about this record, and the ways in which you’ve found to express yourself, particularly after your release [from prison].

Sherman: It was actually something that I started working on when I was locked up in Tucson. I actually just started writing different lyrics down, coming up with different ideas for songs, and I decided that if I couldn’t use a computer when I got out, that I would just use the next best thing to try and get a message out, which was music. So when I got out, I started doing whatever I could to start recording the CD. I had first recorded [a] mixtape with the limited resources I had, because I couldn’t use a computer. And so I just pieced together different pieces of equipment, and I finally started to record the actual album. The whole album took about three years to record, mainly because I couldn’t use a computer, and I had to figure out ways to record and mix without having to use a laptop or computer workstation. The idea of the album was mainly to try and articulate the whole experience with the FBI, articulate the whole experience being locked up in maximum security federal prison, in a 24-hour lockdown federal prison cell. To try and articulate what it was like being railroaded, what it was like to have almost no hope, knowing that you’re probably going to be in there for a long, long time. Knowing that you were set up, you were put into prison for something you didn’t even actually do. A lot of times we can talk about these things, we can talk about these things in articles, when we’re being interviewed, but still, it’s almost as if there are no words that can describe the actual experience, there’s no words that can describe the feeling; I think another step up from that is music. The best way I can articulate it is through music, specifically hip hop, because I feel that it’s not just the lyrics that you hear, it’s not just the vocals that you hear, but it’s the tone of the music that can also articulate what it’s like going through all that. That’s mainly why I even put the album together, is because it’s talking about something that’s real. I wasn’t just talking about “Silence is Defeat” because it sounds cool. I wasn’t just talking about police brutality or police repression or the FBI or COINTELPRO or the PATRIOT Act because it’s a catchy phrase; I was talking about it because it was something I lived through. It was something that was in the flesh and blood that was real to me and I just had to put it out there and had to articulate it because that type of rage is just too hard to articulate through words, it has to be articulated through something more than that.

Aura: Sherman Austin, you were 18 when the FBI raided your house and changed your life forever, and they sat you down and they told you, “Either you shape up, or we’re going to go after you.” I want to ask you what it is, what it was inside of you, [that made you] say “I’m going to continue being who I am”, especially in this that world we live in, in this world that seems to get crazier by the minute, under this administration, the same administration under which you were originally railroaded. What was that?

Sherman: I don’t know. I think it was the fact that when they came to my house with guns, loaded guns and bullet-proof vests, had me surrounded, when I didn’t even know they had me surrounded because I was asleep, and I just thought “Wow, if my sister wasn’t home, they would have just broken down the door and who knows what would have happened…” And the fact that all of this had happened because of a website made me want to resist even more because it was that crazy, it was that ridiculous. I mean, they come to your house with loaded weapons and surround you because you have a website. I didn’t hurt anybody; I was no physical threat to anybody. I hadn’t broken any laws. If there was any threat I posed, it was because of the information I had put out there. If there was any threat I posed, it was because I was trying to exercise my so-called First Amendment right to freedom of speech, and to see them react in that way just made me want to continue doing what I was doing, to not give in and not be silent, because that’s exactly what they wanted.

Sherman Austin works with CopWatch LA, and recently released a new Album the FBI Doesn’t Want You to Hear.” For more information, go to www.copwatchla.org or www.raisethefirst.com.

A psychologist blames assaults on civilians in the 1990s on soldiers’ bad training, boredom and poor supervision

A study by an Israeli psychologist into the violent behaviour of the country’s soldiers is provoking bitter controversy and has awakened urgent questions about the way the army conducts itself in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

Nufar Yishai-Karin, a clinical psychologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, interviewed 21 Israeli soldiers and heard confessions of frequent brutal assaults against Palestinians, aggravated by poor training and discipline. In her recently published report, co-authored by Professor Yoel Elizur, Yishai-Karin details a series of violent incidents, including the beating of a four-year-old boy by an officer.

The report, although dealing with the experience of soldiers in the 1990s, has triggered an impassioned debate in Israel, where it was published in an abbreviated form in the newspaper Haaretz last month. According to Yishai Karin: ‘At one point or another of their service, the majority of the interviewees enjoyed violence. They enjoyed the violence because it broke the routine and they liked the destruction and the chaos. They also enjoyed the feeling of power in the violence and the sense of danger.’

In the words of one soldier: ‘The truth? When there is chaos, I like it. That’s when I enjoy it. It’s like a drug. If I don’t go into Rafah, and if there isn’t some kind of riot once in some weeks, I go nuts.’

Another explained: ‘The most important thing is that it removes the burden of the law from you. You feel that you are the law. You are the law. You are the one who decides… As though from the moment you leave the place that is called Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] and go through the Erez checkpoint into the Gaza Strip, you are the law. You are God.’

The soldiers described dozens of incidents of extreme violence. One recalled an incident when a Palestinian was shot for no reason and left on the street. ‘We were in a weapons carrier when this guy, around 25, passed by in the street and, just like that, for no reason – he didn’t throw a stone, did nothing – bang, a bullet in the stomach, he shot him in the stomach and the guy is dying on the pavement and we keep going, apathetic. No one gave him a second look,’ he said.

The soldiers developed a mentality in which they would use physical violence to deter Palestinians from abusing them. One described beating women. ‘With women I have no problem. With women, one threw a clog at me and I kicked her here [pointing to the crotch], I broke everything there. She can’t have children. Next time she won’t throw clogs at me. When one of them [a woman] spat at me, I gave her the rifle butt in the face. She doesn’t have what to spit with any more.’

Yishai-Karin found that the soldiers were exposed to violence against Palestinians from as early as their first weeks of basic training. On one occasion, the soldiers were escorting some arrested Palestinians. The arrested men were made to sit on the floor of the bus. They had been taken from their beds and were barely clothed, even though the temperature was below zero. The new recruits trampled on the Palestinians and then proceeded to beat them for the whole of the journey. They opened the bus windows and poured water on the arrested men.

The disclosure of the report in the Israeli media has occasioned a remarkable response. In letters responding to the recollections, writers have focused on both the present and past experience of Israeli soldiers to ask troubling questions that have probed the legitimacy of the actions of the Israeli Defence Forces.

The study and the reactions to it have marked a sharp change in the way Israelis regard their period of military service – particularly in the occupied territories – which has been reflected in the increasing levels of conscientious objection and draft-dodging.

The debate has contrasted sharply with an Israeli army where new recruits are taught that they are joining ‘the most ethical army in the world’ – a refrain that is echoed throughout Israeli society. In its doctrine, published on its website, the Israeli army emphasises human dignity. ‘The Israeli army and its soldiers are obligated to protect human dignity. Every human being is of value regardless of his or her origin, religion, nationality, gender, status or position.’

However, the Israeli army, like other armies, has found it difficult to maintain these values beyond the classroom. The first intifada, which began in 1987, before the wave of suicide bombings, was markedly different to the violence of the second intifada, and its main events were popular demonstrations with stone-throwing.

Yishai-Karin, in an interview with Haaretz, described how her research came out of her own experience as a soldier at an army base in Rafah in the Gaza Strip. She interviewed 18 ordinary soldiers and three officers whom she had served with in Gaza. The soldiers described how the violence was encouraged by some commanders. One soldier recalled: ‘After two months in Rafah, a [new] commanding officer arrived… So we do a first patrol with him. It’s 6am, Rafah is under curfew, there isn’t so much as a dog in the streets. Only a little boy of four playing in the sand. He is building a castle in his yard. He [the officer] suddenly starts running and we all run with him. He was from the combat engineers.

‘He grabbed the boy. I am a degenerate if I am not telling you the truth. He broke his hand here at the wrist, broke his leg here. And started to stomp on his stomach, three times, and left. We are all there, jaws dropping, looking at him in shock…

‘The next day I go out with him on another patrol, and the soldiers are already starting to do the same thing.”

Yishai-Karin concluded that the main reason for the soldiers’ violence was a lack of training. She found that the soldiers did not know what was expected of them and therefore were free to develop their own way of behaviour. The longer a unit was left in the field, the more violent it became. The Israeli soldiers, she concluded, had a level of violence which is universal across all nations and cultures. If they are allowed to operate in difficult circumstances, such as in Gaza and the West Bank, without training and proper supervision, the violence is bound to come out.

A spokeswoman for the Israeli army said that, if a soldier deviates from the army’s norms, they could be investigated by the military police or face criminal investigation.

The case against expanding surveillance powers for a White House that’s already out of control.

“I’ve got nothing to hide, so electronic surveillance doesn’t bother me. To the contrary, I’m delighted that the Bush Administration is monitoring calls and electronic traffic on a massive scale, because catching terrorists is far more important that worrying about the government’s listening to my phone calls, or reading my emails.” So the argument goes. It is a powerful one that has seduced too many people.

Millions of Americans buy this logic, and in accepting it, believe they are doing the right thing for themselves, their family, and their friends, neighbors, community and country. They are sadly wrong. If you accept this argument, you have been badly fooled.

This contention is being bantered about once again, so there is no better time than the present to set thinking people straight. Bush and Cheney want to make permanent unchecked Executive powers to electronically eavesdrop on anyone whom any president feels to be of interest. In August, before the summer recess, Congress enacted the Protect America Act, which provided only temporary approval for the expanding Executive powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). These temporary powers expire in February 2008, so Congress is once again addressing the subject.

The FISA amendments: the administration is seeking immunity for miscreants

Because of the way electronic traffic is directed from foreign countries through the United States, the FISA Court had previously rejected requests to intercept certain foreign-person- to-foreign-person communications in the United States. It was a technical problem, arising from the fact that FISA was written before modern data routing had been designed, and FISA thus needed fixing. On this, everyone agreed.

However, when the Bush Administration asked for the necessary fix to FISA, it also requested much more, including immunity under the existing laws for all the telecommunications companies that have been assisting the government in its illegal warrantless surveillance. Significantly, this practice — justified by reference to the “war on terror” — apparently started well before 9/11 under the Bush Administration.

Ironically, in requesting this immunity, the Bush White House has refused to disclose exactly what type of activities Congress would be retroactively immunizing. Preliminary congressional inquiry has revealed that a massive amount of electronic surveillance of Americans has gone on under the Bush/Cheney Administration. For example, one of the telecom giants, Verizon, reported that between January 2005 and September 2007 they provided information on 94,000 occasions. These numbers suggest that Verizon was operating as merely another (and a secret) extension of the federal intelligence establishment.

Many of the companies appear to be violating a number of federal criminal statutes — such as 18 U.S.C. 2511, which requires a warrant for such surveillance and 18 U.S.C. 2702, which prohibits any “entity providing an electronic communication service to the public” from knowingly divulging “to any person or entity the contents of a communication” without a court order.

Currently, the telecoms are not likely to be particularly worried about being prosecuted by the very same government that instructed them to violate the law, and is leading the way in doing so itself.

But what about under the next Administration? The five-year statute of limitations will make them potentially criminally liable after Bush is gone — at least, unless the Bush Administration gains for them retroactive and future immunity. In a new Administration, the telecoms may be viewed not as cooperative patriots, but rather as criminal co-conspirators.

Civil liability appears to be driving the immunity request

Meanwhile, civil liability for these companies is also a realistic prospect. For example, in a San Francisco federal court, AT&T customers are seeking to protect their privacy with actions under laws like 18 U.S.C. 2520, which provides a civil remedy and hefty damages — ranging up to $10,000 per day per violation. Since it is possible that, over five-plus years, there have been tens upon tens of thousands of such violations, the, if liable telecoms could be looking at hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars of damages.

The Bush Administration clearly wants to help its partners in crime; it also wants to avoid accountability for what it has done and is still doing. If the civil litigation proceeds — and one judge already ruled that the “state secrets” privilege does not prevent the plaintiffs from going forward — the Bush Administration faces the risk of a federal court’s forcing it to disclose its unsavory surveillance activities.

Privacy advocates are horrified at the prospect of Congress’s potentially protecting this activity through immunity legislation. Yet, in sharp contrast, most people could care less. Indeed few people seem to care about their loss of privacy, notwithstanding the fact that, like an invisible pollutant to our air or water, it is increasingly eroding our freedom. Unfortunately, it seems that the invasion of our privacy, like the destruction of our atmosphere, may be tolerated until it is too late to fix it.

One of the leading causes of both problems is ignorance. Privacy is a highly complex issue, so people easily accept the claims of those who assert that, if you are not doing anything illegal, you have nothing to be concerned about government surveillance, and if you are, you have no right to privacy to break the law.

Understanding the misunderstanding about privacy

For several years I have been reading the work of George Washington University Law School Professor Daniel J. Solove, who writes extensively about privacy in the context of contemporary digital technology. The current apathy about government surveillance brought to mind his essay “‘I’ve Got Nothing To Hide’ And Other Misunderstandings of Privacy.”

Professor Solove’s deconstruction of the “I’ve got nothing to hide” position, and related justifications for government surveillance, is the best brief analysis of this issue I have found. These arguments are not easy to zap because, once they are on the table, they can set the terms of the argument. As Solove explains, “the problem with the nothing to hide argument is with its underlying assumption that privacy is about hiding bad things.” He warns, “Agreeing with this assumption concedes far too much ground and leads to an unproductive discussion of information people would likely want or not want to hide.” Solove’s bottom line is that this argument “myopically views privacy as a form of concealment or secrecy.”

In his work, Solove addresses the reality that privacy problems differ: Not all are equal; some are more harmful than others. Most importantly, he writes, “to understand privacy, we must conceptualize it and its value more pluralistically.” Through several years of work, Solove has developed a more nuanced concept of privacy that rebuts the idea that there is a “one-size-fits-all conception of privacy.”

The concept of “privacy” encompasses many ideas relating to the proper and improper use and abuse of information about people within society. Privacy protects information not only because it would cause others to think less of the person at issue, but also simply to give us all breathing room: “Society involves a great deal of friction,” Solove writes, “and we are constantly clashing with each other. Part of what makes a society a good place in which to live is the extent to which it allows people freedom from the intrusiveness of others. A society without privacy protection would be suffocation, and it might not be a place in which most would want to live.”

Never knowing when–or if–you will be released is a cruel form of torture. It allows you to keep hope while filling you with fear.

Now that the U.S. military has “cleared” my notes, I can tell you about my July meeting at Guantánamo with my client Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi.

Al-Ghizzawi was visibly shaken when I entered the meeting room and he immediately told me of his despair over the May death of a fellow inmate, a young Saudi man named Abdel Rahman Al Amri. Al-Ghizzawi knew that Amri had been suffering from Hepatitis B and tuberculosis, the same two conditions from which he himself suffers. Like al-Ghizzawi, Amri had not been treated for his illnesses. Al-Ghizzawi, now so sick he can barely walk, told me that Amri, too, had been ill and then, suddenly, he was dead.

Al-Ghizzawi also mentioned that Amri had engaged in hunger strikes in the past but had stopped a long time ago because of his health. I knew about Amri’s death. I also know our military has called it an “apparent suicide.”

As I sat with al-Ghizzawi I found myself thinking about South African anti-apartheid activist Steven Biko. In his book I Write What I Like, Biko declares that “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” There are many ways for the oppressor to force himself into the mind of the oppressed, but one surefire way is through indefinite detention. Never knowing when—or if—you will be released is a cruel form of psychological torture. It allows you to keep hope while simultaneously filling you with fear. South Africa’s apartheid government sharpened this tactic when it passed the Terrorism Act of 1967, which allowed the police to pick up Biko as a “suspect” involved in terrorism (“involvement” under that law was defined as “anything that might endanger the maintenance of law and order”) and detain him for an indefinite period without trial. Biko’s indefinite detention ended after only a month, when he suffered a brutal death at the hands of the South African police. The government claimed that Biko died as the result of a hunger strike. (In U.S. military parlance, that would be an “apparent suicide.”) Autopsy results later showed that Biko died of a head trauma and that his body was badly beaten. Our government officials, clever devils that they are, apparently learned from the “mistake” of South Africa and refuse to release Amri’s autopsy records.

Back in 2005, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld explained in a speech that Guantánamo is a great training ground for our interrogators because they learn what works and what doesn’t. The Pentagon’s little laboratory gathered speed last December when the military moved several hundred men into Camp 6. Included in the randomly selected group was al-Ghizzawi.

Camp 6 is worse than any of America’s supermax prisons because inmates are given little to occupy their minds as they sit in tiny cells with no natural light or air for at least 22 hours every day. The men are allowed one book per week, but it’s the same old books that have been around year after year. Guards also allow the men two hours of “recreation time” in four-foot-by-four-foot cages. As part of the experiment, the military plays with the “rec” times: Sometimes the guards show up at 3 a.m. for al-Ghizzawi’s recreation time. He is too polite to tell the guards what I would feel compelled to say. Instead he shows his dignity by refusing to stand in the dark. Other times, when the Cuban sun is at its hottest, al-Ghizzawi is offered the opportunity to stand in the metal cage under the blistering sun where there is no shade.

Al-Ghizzawi told me in July that he now finds himself talking out loud even though no one is there to talk to. We both know he is in dangerous territory. We talked about ways to help fight the mental deterioration, such as trying to read, exercising his body or focusing on his wife and daughter. Even though his body is already shot to hell with almost six years of physical and psychological abuse and medical neglect, at least he had been maintaining his mind. He was able to put his life in perspective. He had hope, though mingled with fear for the future. But now he can no longer read the books because his eyes too are shot, so he spends his days in tedious boredom. (In September, I requested that military officials provide him reading glasses, but what is the likelihood that they will give him glasses when they will not give him medical treatment?) So al-Ghizzawi spends his days pacing in his cell, washing and rewashing his clothes and preparing for the death he knows is looming.

When I left our September meeting a few days ago, al-Ghizzawi was doubled over in pain and gagging on his own phlegm. Again, I thought about Steven Biko and the young Saudi, Amri. I feared al-Ghizzawi may suffer a cruel, solitary death. I promised him the only things I could: that his death will not go unnoticed and that I will not let him be listed as an apparent suicide. Then I asked al-Ghizzawi to please not let them take his mind.

Until they clear my notes, his response is classified.

When we arrived in Ciudad del Este, we were petrified. After all, we were in the Paraguayan city known in the American press as a “Jungle Hub for World’s Outlaws” (L.A. Times, 8/24/98), and a “hotbed” “teeming with Islamic extremists and their sympathizers” (New York Times, 12/15/02).

The U.S. media’s portrayal of this city, the center of a zone on the frontiers of Argentina and Brazil known as the Tri-Border Area, left us expecting to see cars bombs exploding, terrorists training and American flags burning. We soon realized that picture painted by U.S. media was inaccurate. In the Cold War, Washington and the media used the word “communism” to rally public opinion against political opponents. Now, in the post– September 11 world, there is a new verbal weapon — “terrorism.” Despite a lack of evidence, Washington and the media are asserting links to terrorism in the Tri-Border Area to advance their agenda in a region that is increasingly shifting to the left.

The rumors date back to two anti-Semitic bombings in Buenos Aires in the 1990s—a 1992 attack on the Israeli embassy and a 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center. Ciudad del Este, with its large Arab population, made an easy scape-goat. Though the attacks were never proven to be connected to Ciudad del Este, journalists since the bombings have had Washing-ton’s go-ahead to promote the unverified hypothesis that Hez-bollah (or any other Middle Eastern group designated as a terrorist organization) is finding refuge in the Tri-Border Area.

Ciudad del Este has been described (New York Times, 8/24/98) as “a capital of institutionalized smuggling that today flows back and forth to other Latin nations, Europe, the United States, Asia and the Middle East.” That’s not necessarily inaccurate, as far as it goes—there is a lot of smuggling and organized crime in the Tri-Border Area—but U.S. coverage of Ciudad del Este is marked by a combination of sensationalism and xenophobia.

Mixing orientalism with fears of illegal immigrants, the L.A. Times (8/24/98) called the city a seething “Latin American casbah” with “tens of thousands of small-time smugglers, as brazen and numerous as illegal crossers at the U.S. border.” In “alleys dense with tables of pornographic videos,” New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg (10/21/02) found an “alarming enclave of lawlessness,” a “filthy and disgusting” place where “everything is illegal.” The New York Times (8/24/98) described the “jungle hamlet” as a “slow-motion riot” of “urban mayhem,” with “predatory street kids” and a “trash-strewn downtown.”

Of late, another theme has been creeping into reports on Ciudad del Este: the spectre of terrorism. In the words of the New York Times (8/24/98), the area is not just a “magnet for organized crime” but “a danger to the entire continent.” The Tri-Border, the paper reported, is “a free zone for significant criminal activity, including people who are organized to commit acts of terrorism.” The L.A. Times (8/24/98) put it simply: It is “a prototypical laboratory for developing a base for bad guys.”

Missing evidence

What’s missing from the pieces painting the Tri-Border Area as a hotbed of terrorism is evidence. Paraguayan officials protested accusations that Ciudad del Este was funding Hezbollah. “There’s no proof, only suspicions,” Washington Times journalist Mike Caesar (10/26/01) quoted officials as saying.

Nearly every article reporting on Islamic terrorism in the Tri-Border Area is honeycombed with qualifying language indicating that, despite a lack of clear evidence, U.S. officials say that there are probably links to terrorist organizations in the Tri-Border Area. The New Yorker’s Goldberg perhaps went the farthest in his claims that the Tri-Border region hosts a hard core of terrorists, a community under the influence of extreme Islamic beliefs; Hezbollah runs weekend training camps on farms cut out of the rain forest of the Triple Frontier. In at least one of these camps, in the remote jungle terrain near Foz do Iguaçu, young adults get weapons training and children are indoctrinated in Hezbollah ideology—a mixture of anti-American and anti-Jewish views inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini.

Goldberg’s certainty about these claims—for which he supplied scant evidence—is reminiscent of a later article he wrote as the U.S. government was gearing up for a war in Iraq (New Yorker, 2/2/03), confidently linking Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. The article was gratefully cited by the Bush administration to further their argument for war. Veteran muckraker Alexander Cockburn (CounterPunch, 3/28/03), pointing out various inaccuracies in that article, described it as “a servile rendition of Donald Rumsfeld’s theory of intelligence: ‘Build a hypothesis, and then see if the data supported the hypothesis, rather than the reverse.’”

Though the press reports might not have had much evidence, they ensured that further unverified reports of terrorism in the Tri-Border Area could point to those news accounts as proof of a sort, however hollow. The Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress released an official report (7/03) titled Terrorist and Organized Crime Groups in the Tri-Border Area (TBA) of South America. Using thinly sourced media accounts to gloss over the lack of proof linking the early ’90s bombings to the Tri-Border Area, the report glibly summarized the next 10 years: “Since the1994 attack, Islamic terrorists in the TBA have largely confined their activities to criminal fundraising and other activities in support of their terrorist organizations, including plotting terrorist actions to be carried out in other countries.”

Using media reports (among them the New Yorker, New York Times and L.A. Times articles cited above) as its conclusive evidence of terrorist groups in the region, the report concluded with a section titled “The TBA as a Haven and Base for Islamic Terrorist Groups.” The bulleted finale stated that “various Islamic terrorist groups, including the Egyptian Al-Jihad (Islamic Jihad) and Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group), Hamas, Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda, probably have a presence in the TBA; Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda are probably cooperating in the region, but definitive proof of this collaboration, in the form of a specific document, did not surface in this review.” Indeed, proof that the Shiite Hezbollah was working with the ferociously anti-Shiite Al-Qaeda would be remarkable news.

A new generation of rumors

The Library of Congress report’s release prompted a flurry of new coverage, citing the report as solid evidence of terrorism links in the TBA. The most confident officials declared their conviction that Paraguay’s “illicit activities help finance global terror”: “That is fact, not speculation,” insisted U.S. Southern Command chief Gen. James Hill, without offering any substantiation (Miami Herald, 8/15/03). In the same report, an anonymous Bush administration official was more cautious. “There’s no solid evidence that Al-Qaeda is still present in the region, but ‘we want to do the work of prevention and reduce the flows of money to Hezbollah and Hamas. . . . As terrorists flee the hot spots in the world, we don’t want them to see places like the Tri-Border Area as potential safe havens.’”

The master of hypothesis verification himself, Donald Rumsfeld, took another approach: ignore the topic altogether. When Rumsfeld visited Asunción in August 2005, he talked about using the Paraguayan military to save bordering Bolivia from the leftist influence of Venezuela, but never mentioned terrorism in the Tri-Border Area. At the time, the Washington Post (8/17/05) reported that “Defense officials said [the TBA] might also harbor groups that finance international terrorism. One Defense official . . . said Hezbollah and Hamas, radical Islamic groups in the Middle East, ‘get a lot of funding’ from the Tri-Border Area.”

The issue received steady coverage in 2006. In a June 3, 2006 Associated Press report, Western intelligence officials, speaking anonymously, claimed that if Iran were cornered by the United States, it could use a Hezbollah network based in the TBA to direct terrorist attacks. Again, no evidence was offered, and the Paraguayan government protested the unverified report. On August 3, 2006, Daniel Glaser, deputy assistant treasury secretary for terrorist financing and financial crimes, practiced his verbal gymnastics when talking about “a broad series of new measures aimed at uncovering money-laundering rings that [U.S. officials] believe are funding Hezbollah and other radical groups.” “I am highly confident that’s the case,” Glaser said (Washington Post, 8/2/06). “We believe there is evidence.”

By the end of the year, the U.S. government was ready to take action in an environment saturated with media coverage, if light on evidence. On December 6, 2006, “The U.S. Department of the Treasury . . . designated nine individuals and two entities [in the Tri-Border Area] that have provided financial and logistical support to the Hezbollah terrorist organization” (paraguay.usembassy.gov, 12/6/06). These claims were rejected by Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. As of August 7, 2007, an article describing the designation was still the top article of the “Latest Headlines from the Americas” section of the U.S. embassy site. The article, titled “Hezbollah Fundraising Network in the Triple Frontier” and dated December 6, 2006, appeared on the front page of the site without a date, misleading readers to believe that it was a current article. Next on the list of news stories was an article dated July 10, 2007.

Seeing for ourselves

To see what was really happening in Ciudad del Este today, we set out into the sunny heat of the city to hear what Paraguayans had to say. The press attaché for the governor of Alto Paraná, the state where the city is located, was shocked to see us: In spite of all the media coverage this city had received in the international media, we were the first two foreign journalists to speak with him. He denied any terrorist activity in the area.

Others were similarly dismissive about claims about terrorist groups. Local vendors and farmers calmly described the mafia activities, drug trafficking and arms smuggling going on in the area, but were quick to point out that there were no links with foreign terrorist groups. A Syrian businessman we spoke with ridiculed the claims, saying Middle Easterners in the area left their home countries to escape violence and war. In a country that ran rampant with rumors, no one seemed to believe the claims of terrorist links for a second.

There are a number of plausible reasons the region has been portrayed as a terrorist stronghold. One is that the current Paraguayan government is one of the Bush administration’s last allies in a region that is increasingly shifting to the left. It is strategically located in the heart of South America, between the politically and economically more powerful countries of Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia. An alliance with the Paraguayan military, justified by an internal threat, can only help expand the Pentagon’s reach in the area.

The Mideastern community in Ciudad del Este makes it potentially easier for Washington to claim a threat of terrorism if the need for a military intervention arises. The area is also rich in natural resources: Bolivia’s vast natural gas reserves are right next door, and the largest fresh water aquifer is under Paraguay’s soil.

Misinformation to militarization

The media misinformation campaign transformed into a military campaign when hundreds of U.S. troops arrived in Paraguay in July 2005. After Washington threatened to cut off millions in aid to Paraguay if its Senate refused the military’s entry, the legislature voted to allow U.S. troops to train Paraguayan military. When the U.S. troops arrived in the country, U.S. funding for counter-terrorism to Paraguay soon doubled, and repression against rural farmer movements subsequently increased.

The media portrayal of Paraguay has facilitated the repression of some of the most powerful protest movements in the country. Small farmers in rural Paraguay are being forced off their land—and in some cases tortured and killed—to make way for the booming soy industry (Upside Down World, 7/17/06). Analysts in Paraguay believe the increased violence against farmers is linked to the presence of U.S. military.

“The U.S. military is advising the Paraguayan police and military about how to deal with these farmer groups,” Orlando Castillo of Service Peace and Justice, a Latin American human rights organization, explained: They are teaching theory as well as technical skills to Paraguayan police and military. These new forms of combat have been used internally. . . . U.S. troops form part of a security plan to repress the social movement in Paraguay. A lot of repression has happened in the name of security and against “terrorism.”

University of Brasília historian Luiz Moniz Bandeira told the Washington Times (10/25/05), “I wouldn’t dismiss the hypothesis that U.S. agents plant stories in the media about Arab terrorists in the Triple Frontier to provoke terrorism and justify their military presence.”

The U.S. Embassy in Asunción denied that the U.S. military is linked to the increased repression against farmers. In December 2006, the Paraguayan Senate voted against renewing the legislation granting the U.S. troops freedom to operate in the country.

Upon leaving Ciudad del Este, we saw children playing baseball in a park, couples walking hand in hand, people fishing in a nearby river and Brazilians on vacation snapping photos. It looked like any other sleepy Latin American city on a Sunday. Given the history of U.S. intervention in the region, we have no reason to trust what is being said in most foreign media about this city. For the last hundred years, the U.S. has been accusing Latin Americans of lawlessness and terrorism. It is easy to make those accusations about places that most North Americans are unlikely to go. Our job, as conscientious news readers, is to ask for evidence and be skeptical of the hype.