The Rag Blog

Academic Freedom is at Risk in America

“Academic colleagues, get used to it,” warned the pro-Israel activist Martin Kramer in March 2004. “Yes, you are being watched. Those obscure articles in campus newspapers are now available on the Internet, and they will be harvested. Your syllabi, which you’ve also posted, will be scrutinized. Your Web sites will be visited late at night.”

Kramer’s warning inaugurated an attack on intellectual freedom in the U.S. that has grown more aggressive in recent months.

This attack, intended to shield Israel from criticism, not only threatens academic privileges on college campuses, it jeopardizes our capacity to evaluate our foreign policy. With a potentially catastrophic clash with Iran on the horizon and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict spiraling out of control, Americans urgently need to be able to think clearly about our commitments and intentions in the Middle East. And yet we are being prevented from doing so by a longstanding campaign of intimidation that has terminated careers, stymied debate and shut down dialogue.

Over the past few years, Israel’s U.S. defenders have stepped up their campaign by establishing a network of institutions (such as Campus Watch, Stand With Us, the David Project, the Israel on Campus Coalition, and the disingenuously named Scholars for Peace in the Middle East) dedicated to the task of monitoring our campuses and bringing pressure to bear on those critical of Israeli policies. By orchestrating letter-writing and petitioning campaigns, falsely raising fears of anti-Semitism, mobilizing often grossly distorted media coverage and recruiting local and national politicians to their cause, they have severely disrupted academic processes, the free function of which once made American universities the envy of the world.

Outside interference by Israel’s supporters has plunged one U.S. campus after another into crisis. They have introduced crudely political — rather than strictly academic or scholarly — criteria into hiring, promotion and other decisions at a number of universities, including Columbia, Yale, Wayne State, Barnard and DePaul, which recently denied tenure to the Jewish American scholar Norman Finkelstein following an especially ugly campaign spearheaded by Alan Dershowitz, one of Israel’s most ardent American defenders.

Our campuses are being poisoned by an atmosphere of surveillance and harassment. However, the disruption of academic freedom has grave implications beyond campus walls.

When professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer drafted an essay critical of the effect of Israel’s lobbying organizations on U.S. foreign policy, they had to publish it in the London Review of Books because their original American publisher declined to take it on. With the original article expanded into a book that has now been released, their invitation to speak at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs was retracted because of outside pressure. “This one is so hot,” they were told. So although Michael Oren, an officer in the Israeli army, was recently allowed to lecture the council about U.S. policy in the Middle East, two distinguished American academics were denied the same privilege.

When President Carter published “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid” last year, he was attacked for having dared to use the word “apartheid” to describe Israel’s manifestly discriminatory policies in the West Bank.

As that case made especially clear, the point of most of these attacks is to personally discredit anyone who would criticize Israel — and to taint them with the smear of “controversy” — rather than to engage them in a genuine debate. None of Carter’s critics provided a convincing refutation of his main argument based on facts and evidence. Presumably that’s because, for all the venom directed against the former president, he was right. For example, Israel maintains two different road networks, and even two entirely different legal systems, in the West Bank, one for Jewish settlers and the other for indigenous Palestinians. Those basic facts were studiously ignored by those who denounced Carter and angrily accused him of a “blood libel” against the Jewish people.

That Israel’s American supporters so often resort to angry outbursts rather than principled arguments — and seem to find emotional blackmail more effective than genuine debate — is ultimately a sign of their weakness rather than their strength. For all the damage it can do in the short term, in the long run such a position is untenable, too dependent on emotion and cliché rather than hard facts. The phenomenal success of Carter’s book suggests that more and more Americans are learning to ignore the scare tactics that are the only tools available to Israel’s supporters.

But we need to be able to have an open debate about our Middle East policy now — before we needlessly shed more blood and further erode our reputation among people who used to regard us as the champions of freedom, and now worry that we have come to stand for its very opposite.

Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA and a frequent commentator on the Middle East.

Hugo Chávez’s Alo Presidente TV program, telecast live from Santa Clara (Cuba), October 14, is an historic turning point in the gathering showdown between the imperialist North and the popular upsurge unfolding across the lands and islands of Abya Yala (“Western” Hemisphere), the infamous U.S. Border Wall and south of the Rio Bravo.

As my 19 year-old granddaughter and I watched Hugo and Fidel, members of Che Guevara’s family, and a range of other leaders of Cuba and Venezuela, my sense of history and actual events told me that something was up. A deeper awareness began to form before me — we indeed were witnessing and participating in something new and vital to our future, and the future of our aggrieved planet.

The Alo Presidente event, coupled with Hugo Chávez’s meeting with Fidel Castro the day before, stands – in my view — as our 21st Century Zimmerwald, a Zimmerwald Plus.

In September 1915 two coach loads of outstanding socialist leaders from the antiwar left wing of Socialist (2nd) International affiliated parties, including two future leaders of the October Soviet Revolution – Lenin and Trotsky — met at Zimmerwald (in neutral Switzerland) to unite those revolutionary socialists prepared to carry out serious and consequent opposition to the imperialist world war. They issued a manifesto calling upon soldiers, workers and oppressed peoples and nationalities of Europe to lay down their arms andrefuse to continue to slaughter one another in the interests of capital; to struggle to defend their own class interests against those who had sent them to the trenches.

In today’s jargon we might say that the group was small enough to meet in a rented Tim Horton’s, but too big to meet in a telephone booth (as do quite a number of ultraleft groups today when they congregate to cross more t’s and dot more i’s on their manifestos denouncing Chávez and Morales as a mealy-mouthed “populists”).

The solid core of the Zimmerwald group, despite its small size, went on to lead the Russian October revolution. Under the impact of Soviet power in the former Tsarist Empire, the capacity of the German and other ruling classes in Europe to continue their carnage and slaughter dissipated. Kings, Kaisers, and Tsars were toppled as the “war to end all wars” collapsed amidst mutinies, rebellions, civil wars, and insurrectionary commotion across the “Old Continent.” The rebellious mood even spread to North America as the Winnipeg General strike of 1919 showed.

From Santa Clara — today’s 21st Century Zimmerwald — tested Cuban and Venezuelan leaderships wielding government power set forth a clear orientation to millions of anti-imperialist, anti colonialist, and anti-capitalist fighters across the continent.

Hugo Chávez made it clear that they and their allies will not back down in the face of imperialist threats. And they will not stand idly by – Chávez iterated this with utter clarity – and allow imperialist inspired forces to overthrow the Bolivian government and/or assassinate Bolivian President Evo Morales. The great moral authority of el Che accompanied that of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez to add force and depth to the message.

Chávez’s October 13 meeting with Fidel Castro lasted for over four hours. On Alo Presidente the next day he played a ten-minute segment of that meeting. The clip appeared to be an unedited part of their longer chat. It is available on the internet at http://www.aporrea.org/venezuelaexterior/n103013.html.

I am struck by how comfortable and at ease our two leaders are, how much they enjoy each other’s presence and being, and how much they want to learn from each other’s experiences and thinking. This was especially evident in videos of previous encounters during Fidel’s long convalescence, when emotions ran higher because of uncertainty about Fidel’s recovery during that period.

The next day Fidel called into Chávez’s show and remained on line for well over an hour. The back-and-forth with Chávez and his live audience ranged from serious political discussion, announcements about new economic agreements between Venezuela and Cuba, to historical questions about the roots of the Bolivarian movement in the 80-90s. There was enough banter and irony in their exchanges to keep everyone, including them, in suspense as to what might be coming next.

The outdoor audience consisted of a large representation of Cuba’s government and Cuban Communist Party leaderships, as well as local Santa Clara leaders and representatives of grassroots organizations.

The Cuban-Venezuelan commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Che’s capture and murder on October 8-9, 1967 was held on the grounds of the Che Guevara museum and memorial. The Santa Clara event came on the heels of an official Bolivian government commemoration October 8 near the site where Che had waged his last armed battle.

Evo Morales gave a keynote address at that event before a multi-generational crowd from many countries. Prensa Latina reported that our indigenous president affirmed that the Movement Towards Socialism agenda for change is moving forward along a “100% Guevarist and socialist” course. El Che will live on forever, he said. “This struggle will continue, as long as capitalism exists, as long as neoliberalism remains unchanged.”

Guevara’s entire family — his wife Aleida March and his surviving children, attended the Santa Clara commemoration [Hildita, Che’s first daughter with the Peruvian revolutionary Hilda Gadea, died of cancer in Havana, over a decade ago]. Dr. Aleida Guevara, Che’s daughter, spoke and exchanged views with the Venezuelan leader.

Chávez’s TV program is almost always dynamic and participatory. Throughout the five hours he often invited compas (brothers and sisters) in the audience to take the mike and offer their opinions on some matter, usually their appreciation of the significance of the Che anniversary and commemoration.

The latter part of the program took viewers to five or six locations in Venezuela for live interviews with groups of citizens gathered together to discuss proposed amendments to Venezuela’s Bolivarian constitution, and to express their views on the Alo Presidente show they themselves were taking part and watching at the same time.

The political significance of the encounter between Chávez and Fidel, and the Santa Clara Alo Presidente program can be qualified through discussion of a number of key points.

Fidel appears stronger and recovering well. He clearly still plays a big role in key strategic discussions facing Cuba, Venezuela, and the ALBA alliance.

Chávez spoke about a firm alliance of four countries – Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, and Ecuador. He called for a federation of nations, beginning with those four. He interjected fluid ideas about some kind of common, federative government. He distinguished that idea from the longstanding pancontinental dream of “one Latin American country.”

In a federation of nations or countries some common state and semi- autonomous institutions could handle questions delegated to them through agreements among and between member states and governments.

Many indigenous activists and leaders question existing borders and/or the authority of many states in the hemisphere. They will surely appreciate the open-ended nature of the ALBA leader’s tentative proposals on this theme. A genuine confederation along the lines of an expanded ALBA would have to incorporate the essence of indigenous views on this problem, one with deep roots in the history of European political and cultural colonization.

Chávez and Castro discussed what Hugo calls “the rise of two, three many Vietnams” in South and Central America, and the Caribbean Basin. Iraq’s people, they noted, have just inflicted a Vietnam-scale defeat of U.S. imperialism that threatens to revive the Vietnam syndrome with a vengeance.

Chávez explained, however, that his concept of “two, three many Vietnams” is not an armed struggle strategy. He sees the Vietnams erupting up and down the continent as insurrections of “conscience and ideas,” the forging a new morality based on human solidarity, and the escalation of political struggle to a level, scope, and scale capable of delivering major defeats to the empire builders; and above all, capable of scoring major victories for their victims.

We already have 21st Century Vietnams breaking out, or well on their way. That’s mainly because we – the grassroots toilers and workers of society, the dispossessed and damned, are simply but loudly saying “enough!” We are refusing to back down and carry out our role as oppressed and exploited pawns. We want the whole board, and we want it now, in our lifetimes. We want to save our Mother Earth so that our grandchildren and great grandchildren can know her bosom and drink from her springs.

Fidel shares Chávez’s ‘many Vietnams’ concept. When the younger revolutionist asked for his opinion on that, Fidel added something significant to the mix. New Vietnams are blossoming all over the world, not just in our hemisphere, he explained. Hugo was quick to nod agreement on that point.

Chávez repeatedly referred to the dangerous political situation in Bolivia — the threat of a pro-imperialist, right wing coup against the MAS government and “brother Evo Morales.”

“If the Bolivian oligarchy manages to overthrow Evo Morales or assassinate him, you Bolivian oligarchs should know that we Venezuelans will not stand by with our arms crossed,” Chávez warned.

In the same vein, the Bolivarian president pointedly cautioned those who are trying to squash the democratically elected Bolivian government and Constituent Assembly. He told them they were playing with fire, because if they carry out such plans the result “would hardly be a Vietnam of ideas or a Constituent Assembly process; rather, they would beget, God help us, a Vietnam of submachine guns.” He added, “no consensus is possible with any oligarchy,” because they are only concerned with “hegemony and imposition.”[i]

The ALBA leadership team acts upon its strategy of open discussion with supporters, with the grassroots of their countries and the rest of the globe. They are completely comfortable with that – unlike their imperialist enemies who prefer the basement White House, secret negotiation, hidden agendas, and a dumbed-down public for their “leadership formula.”

The distinction is simple. One approach is based on convincing millions of supporters to undertake a course of action through open discussion and shared information. The contrary method is to impose policy decisions through lies, deception, and fiat – the way the Bush and Blair administrations [Denmark and Australian governments and other First World governments as well. Editor’s Note] dragged their countries into the war against Iraq, imperial occupation, and ultimate catastrophe for victims and aggressors alike.

President Chávez, upon arriving at the Santa Clara airport, made an immediate tour of the town in an open jeep. Cheering crowds lined streets and parks to welcome him to their city where July 26 forces under Che’s command struck a mortal blow against the Batista dictatorship in the historic 1958 Battle of Santa Clara.

The presence of virtually the entire Cuban leadership — and the public and participatory nature of the tribune from which this united, clear defiance was proclaimed — leave no doubt among friend and foe alike that this is an affirmation of strong will and intent to unite in a life-and-death struggle against imperialist war and intervention.

The ALBA alliance is re-invigorating the struggle against imperialist domination, regime-change, and coup making. This is nothing less than subversive, wide-open peace advocacy based on the right to self-determination, on harmonious relations with Mother Nature, and on freedom from imperial oppression, exploitation, and plunder.

The just concluded For the Historic Victory of the Indigenous Peoples of the World Encounter, held in Chimoré, Cochabamba – Bolivia (October 12) also issued an urgent call for the defense of the MAS government and “brother Evo Morales – President of the Indigenous Peoples of Abya Yala.”

[See: http://boliviarising.blogspot.com/2007/10/formal-summons-to-world-states-by.html
Or, for the Spanish orginal go to: http://www.movimientos.org/12octubre/show_text.php3?key=11076 ]

“We commit ourselves to support the historic effort led by bother Evo Morales, President of the Indigenous Peoples of Abya Yala [the lands and islands of the Western hemisphere], in the construction of a new plurinational state. In the face of any internal or external threat, we remain vigilant over what is happening in Bolivia, and we call on the peoples of the planet to offer support and solidarity to this process that must serve to motivate the Peoples, Nations, and States of the world to take up the same course.”

The appeals from Hugo and Fidel in Havana, and from the continental Indigenous Encounter in Chimoré, Cochabamba, articulate and amplify the voices of a chorus of fighters from a new generation. Some are organized in ALBA; some in a growing and strengthened continental indigenous movement; and some in other networks and campaigns. Many find themselves tuned in to all these harmonious frameworks. An orchestra for our times has assembled to rehearse and then carry off “two, three, many festivals of the oppressed.”

Among them will be two, three, many Che’s.

That’s why Bolivia’s allies can and do affirm, fists raised, that “they will never bring Evo down. He is our president, too, and we will defend him.”

The world will be a better world because it will be a socialist world. Anything less would not be, and could not be a better world. This time the victory is ours, and everyone’s. The planet told me so.

10/20/07 “London Review Of Books” — — Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years. ‘The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,’ the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the draft law was leaked. ‘They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.’ As negotiations over the oil law stalled in September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close political ally of President Bush.

How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions. (It takes a brave reporter to leave the Green Zone without a military escort.) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and distinct neighbourhoods – among them, ‘KBR-land’, named after the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the construction work at the base. Although few of the 20,000 American troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the base is one of the world’s busiest. ‘We are behind only Heathrow right now,’ an air force commander told Ricks.

The Defense Department was initially coy about these bases. In 2003, Donald Rumsfeld said: ‘I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting.’ But this summer the Bush administration began to talk openly about stationing American troops in Iraq for years, even decades, to come. Several visitors to the White House have told the New York Times that the president himself has become fond of referring to the ‘Korea model’. When the House of Representatives voted to bar funding for ‘permanent bases’ in Iraq, the new term of choice became ‘enduring bases’, as if three or four decades wasn’t effectively an eternity.

But will the US be able to maintain an indefinite military presence in Iraq? It will plausibly claim a rationale to stay there for as long as civil conflict simmers, or until every groupuscule that conveniently brands itself as ‘al-Qaida’ is exterminated. The civil war may gradually lose intensity as Shias, Sunnis and Kurds withdraw into separate enclaves, reducing the surface area for sectarian friction, and as warlords consolidate local authority. De facto partition will be the result. But this partition can never become de jure. (An independent Kurdistan in the north might upset Turkey, an independent Shia region in the east might become a satellite of Iran, and an independent Sunni region in the west might harbour al-Qaida.) Presiding over this Balkanised Iraq will be a weak federal government in Baghdad, propped up and overseen by the Pentagon-scale US embassy that has just been constructed – a green zone within the Green Zone. As for the number of US troops permanently stationed in Iraq, the defence secretary, Robert Gates, told Congress at the end of September that ‘in his head’ he saw the long-term force as consisting of five combat brigades, a quarter of the current number, which, with support personnel, would mean 35,000 troops at the very minimum, probably accompanied by an equal number of mercenary contractors. (He may have been erring on the side of modesty, since the five super-bases can accommodate between ten and twenty thousand troops each.) These forces will occasionally leave their bases to tamp down civil skirmishes, at a declining cost in casualties. As a senior Bush administration official told the New York Times in June, the long-term bases ‘are all places we could fly in and out of without putting Americans on every street corner’. But their main day-to-day function will be to protect the oil infrastructure.

This is the ‘mess’ that Bush-Cheney is going to hand on to the next administration. What if that administration is a Democratic one? Will it dismantle the bases and withdraw US forces entirely? That seems unlikely, considering the many beneficiaries of the continued occupation of Iraq and the exploitation of its oil resources. The three principal Democratic candidates – Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards – have already hedged their bets, refusing to promise that, if elected, they would remove American forces from Iraq before 2013, the end of their first term.

Among the winners: oil-services companies like Halliburton; the oil companies themselves (the profits will be unimaginable, and even Democrats can be bought); US voters, who will be guaranteed price stability at the gas pump (which sometimes seems to be all they care about); Europe and Japan, which will both benefit from Western control of such a large part of the world’s oil reserves, and whose leaders will therefore wink at the permanent occupation; and, oddly enough, Osama bin Laden, who will never again have to worry about US troops profaning the holy places of Mecca and Medina, since the stability of the House of Saud will no longer be paramount among American concerns. Among the losers is Russia, which will no longer be able to lord its own energy resources over Europe. Another big loser is Opec, and especially Saudi Arabia, whose power to keep oil prices high by enforcing production quotas will be seriously compromised.

Then there is the case of Iran, which is more complicated. In the short term, Iran has done quite well out of the Iraq war. Iraq’s ruling Shia coalition is now dominated by a faction friendly to Tehran, and the US has willy-nilly armed and trained the most pro-Iranian elements in the Iraqi military. As for Iran’s nuclear programme, neither air strikes nor negotiations seem likely to derail it at the moment. But the Iranian regime is precarious. Unpopular mullahs hold onto power by financing internal security services and buying off elites with oil money, which accounts for 70 per cent of government revenues. If the price of oil were suddenly to drop to, say, $40 a barrel (from a current price just north of $80), the repressive regime in Tehran would lose its steady income. And that is an outcome the US could easily achieve by opening the Iraqi oil spigot for as long as necessary (perhaps taking down Venezuela’s oil-cocky Hugo Chávez into the bargain).

And think of the United States vis-à-vis China. As a consequence of our trade deficit, around a trillion dollars’ worth of US denominated debt (including $400 billion in US Treasury bonds) is held by China. This gives Beijing enormous leverage over Washington: by offloading big chunks of US debt, China could bring the American economy to its knees. China’s own economy is, according to official figures, expanding at something like 10 per cent a year. Even if the actual figure is closer to 4 or 5 per cent, as some believe, China’s increasing heft poses a threat to US interests. (One fact: China is acquiring new submarines five times faster than the US.) And the main constraint on China’s growth is its access to energy – which, with the US in control of the biggest share of world oil, would largely be at Washington’s sufferance. Thus is the Chinese threat neutralised.

Many people are still perplexed by exactly what moved Bush-Cheney to invade and occupy Iraq. In the 27 September issue of the New York Review of Books, Thomas Powers, one of the most astute watchers of the intelligence world, admitted to a degree of bafflement. ‘What’s particularly odd,’ he wrote, ‘is that there seems to be no sophisticated, professional, insiders’ version of the thinking that drove events.’ Alan Greenspan, in his just published memoir, is clearer on the matter. ‘I am saddened,’ he writes, ‘that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.’

Was the strategy of invading Iraq to take control of its oil resources actually hammered out by Cheney’s 2001 energy task force? One can’t know for sure, since the deliberations of that task force, made up largely of oil and energy company executives, have been kept secret by the administration on the grounds of ‘executive privilege’. One can’t say for certain that oil supplied the prime motive. But the hypothesis is quite powerful when it comes to explaining what has actually happened in Iraq. The occupation may seem horribly botched on the face of it, but the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude towards ‘nation-building’ has all but ensured that Iraq will end up as an American protectorate for the next few decades – a necessary condition for the extraction of its oil wealth. If the US had managed to create a strong, democratic government in an Iraq effectively secured by its own army and police force, and had then departed, what would have stopped that government from taking control of its own oil, like every other regime in the Middle East? On the assumption that the Bush-Cheney strategy is oil-centred, the tactics – dissolving the army, de-Baathification, a final ‘surge’ that has hastened internal migration – could scarcely have been more effective. The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success.

Still, there is reason to be sceptical of the picture I have drawn: it implies that a secret and highly ambitious plan turned out just the way its devisers foresaw, and that almost never happens.

Protests erupted this past week in Turkey and Iraq over Turkey’s decision to authorize an invasion of Iraq in order to fight Kurdish separatists.

In addition to the Kurdish Parties in Turkey, both the Labor Party of Turkey and the Communist Party of Turkey rejected a bill put forward by Prime Minister Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party to authorize an invasion of Iraq to pursue Kurdish separatists affiliated with the Kurdish Workers’ Party or PKK.

Evoking Bush-style demagoguery, Erdogan accused opponents of the bill of supporting terrorism.

In a statement released on Thursday (10-18), the Labor Party said an invasion of Iraq was no solution to the conflict over Kurdistan, and “a new operation into North Iraq will only antagonize the peoples of the same region.”

The statement went on: “Our country and our peoples – both Kurds and Turks – will suffer from the results of this war.”

The Communist Party saw the vote not as a break with the Bush administration’s policies in the Middle East but as a collaboration with US imperialism and Bush administration aims in the Middle East.

The Communists, who held protests on Wednesday of this week in Ankara over the invasion bill, said, “Our country faces security problems but this problem comes from dependency on the USA, the love of the European Union, the NATO membership, the secret agreements with Israel and from sending our troops to death in order to serve the US imperialism in Afghanistan. “

Weighing in on the the issue and describing the likely results of a Turkish invasion of Iraq, northern Iraq International Committee of the Red Crescent spokesperson Flamerz Mohammed said, “Any military conflict in the region will bring about a humanitarian crisis as civilians will be killed or displaced due to shelling and troop incursions.”

In an interview with Al-Jazeerah, Murat Karayilan, leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, accused the Turkish government of lying about Kurdish fighters crossing the border from Iraq into Turkey. There are enough Kurdish separatists in Turkey to conduct their operations there, he said. PKK members or supporters do not need to cross the border.

Accusing Turkey of using the threat to attack Iraq and subsequent destabilization as a tactic to pressure President Bush to speak out against a US congressional resolution condemning the Armenian genocide, Murat Karayilan added, “Turkey’s aim is to attack Iraqi Kurds” not PKK members.

Many Kurds in both turkey and Iraq seek the formation of an independent Kurdistan whose territory would include portions of present-day Turkey.

In a statement released earlier in the week, the Iraqi Communist Party denounced the Erdogan policy of invading Iraq and the ongoing shelling in mountainous regions in northern Iraq.

“While rejecting and denouncing this escalation,” read an Iraqi Communist Party statement, “we call for putting an immediate end to it, and to stop, fully and once and for all, the use of violent means and military force. The only means to achieve an effective and just resolution of emerging problems is through dialog between the two neighboring countries, and through peaceful negotiations that avoid solving the problems of one side at the expense of the other.”

Under pressure from the Bush administration, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki declared the PKK a terrorist organization and has offered to allow the Turkish invasion of Kurdistan, including northern Iraq and even to conduct joint operations there.

Hundreds of Iraqi Kurds in Arbil, Iraq, in the semiautonomous region of Kurdistan, took to the streets on Wednesday to protest Erdogan’s invasion policy.

Massoud Barzani, the president of Iraqi Kurdistan, called for talks between Turkey and his government in order to resolve the conflict peacefully, but also promised to fight any aggression by Turkey, according to the Associated Press.

Ali Larijani, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator and the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, has resigned. This is a big deal!

The fact that Larijani had threatened to resign several times was an open secret in Iran; a fact that was even acknowledged by the government spokesman, Gholam-hossein Elham, in his announcement of Larijani’s resignation (Al Jazeera has good round up of some of Larijani’s conflicts with Ahmadinejad).

What is surprising is Ayatollah Khamenei’s agreement to this resignation and the reported replacement of Larijani by Saeed Jalili, a deputy foreign minister for European affairs who actually has very little diplomatic experience (Jalili’s experience at the foreign Ministry prior to being assigned as deputy minister by Ahmadinejad was in personnel matters). What Jalili does have is a very close relationship with Ahmadinejad. As such, the move, if it is confirmed, reflects yet another enhancement of Ahmadinejad’s fortunes in Iranian politics.

So far the Iranian system seems to be in a state of shock. Larijani was considered a successful handler of the Iranian nuclear file and his agreement with the IAEA regarding a work plan to resolve the remaining outstanding issues over Iran’s nuclear program an important step forward.

His announced meeting with Europe’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, for next Tuesday makes the timing of the resignation even stranger and suggests the extent to which this move might have been impromptu and really the result of intense personal as well as policy conflicts between Larijani and Ahmadinejad. The straw that broke the camel’s back was probably Larijani’s assertion that Putin had a special message about Iran’s nuclear file and Ahmadinejad’s public rejection of that assertion.

Several important politicians in Iran, including Ahmad Tavkoli, the head of Majles’ Research Center, and Mohsen Rezaie, the Expediency Council’s secretary, have already expressed their concern and unease about Larijani’s resignation as well as his replacement by a novice. The deputy head of Majles’ Foreign Relations Committee has promised an investigation.

The most unsettling aspect of this move from the insiders point of view may be questions raised regarding Ayatollah Khamenei’s control over the nuclear file. Both of the possibilities – that he has either lost control or decided to throw his support for the most radical elements in the Iranian political system – are bound to unsettle the domestic political scene. For him, to be seen as being in one corner with Ahmadinejad against all the other heavyweights of Iranian politics, including Hashemi Rafsanjani, Khatami, Karrubi, Rezaie, Qalibaf, and now Larijani, is a predicament he has tried hard to avoid at least publicly.

LEESBURG, Va. (AP) – The United States and other nations will not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon, Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday.

“Our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions,” Cheney said in a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Studies.

He said Iran’s efforts to pursue technology that would allow them to build a nuclear weapon are obvious and that “the regime continues to practice delay and deceit in an obvious effort to buy time.”

If Iran continues on its current course, Cheney said the U.S. and other nations are “prepared to impose serious consequences.” The vice president made no specific reference to military action.

“We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” he said.

Cheney’s words seemed to only escalate the U.S. rhetoric against Iran over the past several days, including President Bush ‘s warning that a nuclear Iran could lead to “World War III.”

Cheney said the ultimate goal of the Iranian leadership is to establish itself as the hegemonic force in the Middle East and undermine a free Shiite-majority Iraq as a rival for influence in the Muslim world.

Iran’s government seeks “to keep Iraq in a state of weakness to ensure Baghdad does not pose a threat to Tehran,” Cheney said.

While he was critical of that government and President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, he offered praise and words of solidarity to the Iranian people. Iran “is a place of unlimited potential … and it has the right to be free of tyranny,” Cheney said.

Cheney accused of Iran of having a direct role in the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and said the government has “solidified its grip on the country” since coming to power in 1979.

The U.S. and some allies accuse Iran of secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons and have demanded it halt uranium enrichment, an important step in the production of atomic weapons. Oil-rich Iran says its program is for peaceful purposes including generating electricity.

At a news conference Wednesday, Bush suggested that if Iran obtained nuclear weapons, it could lead to a new world war.

“I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them (Iran) from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon,” Bush said.

Bush’s spokeswoman later said the president was making not making any war plans but rather “a rhetorical point.”

Also, on Thursday, the top officer in the U.S. military said the U.S. has the resources to attack Iran if needed despite the strains of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan .

Navy Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said striking Iran is a last resort, and the focus now on diplomacy to stem Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but “there is more than enough reserve to respond” militarily if need be.

The Bush administration’s intentions toward Iran have been the subject of debate in Congress .

Last month the Senate approved a resolution urging the State Department to label Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization.

Sen. Jim Webb , D-Va., said he feared the measure could be interpreted as authorizing a military strike in Iran, calling it Cheney’s “fondest pipe dream.”

Rome – Hundreds of thousands of supporters of Italy’s radical left and communist parties gathered in Rome on Saturday to demonstrate against reform of the country’s pension and social security systems.

Demonstrators also sought to pressure Romano Prodi’s centre-left government to ensure creation of more secure jobs.

Franco Giordana, head of the Communist Refoundation Party (PRC), said up to 700,000 people had taken part in the march. He stressed however that the demonstration was not against the government.

10/20/07 “ICH ” — — Is it really fair to blame one man for destroying the US economy?

Probably not. But Alan Greenspan is still tops on our list. After all, Greenspan “presided over the greatest expansion of speculative finance in history, including a trillion-dollar hedge fund industry, bloated Wall Street-firm balance sheets approaching $2 trillion, and a global derivatives market with notional values surpassing an unfathomable $220 trillion.” (Henry Liu, “Why the Subprime Bust will Spread” Asia Times) Greenspan’s also responsible for slashing the real Fed Funds Rate so that it was negative for 31 months from 2002 to 2005. That decision flooded the housing market with trillions of dollars in low interest credit creating the largest equity bubble in history. Now that that bubble is crashing; Greenspan has hit the road. He now spends his time leap-frogging from city to city hawking his revisionist memoirs of how he steered the ship of state through troubled waters while fending off protectionist liberals. Look for it in the Fiction section of your local bookstore.

Still, can we really blame “Maestro” for what appears to have been a spontaneous flurry of “free market” speculation in real estate?

To a large extent, yes. Apart from Greenspan’s tacit endorsement of all the dubious loans (subprime, ARMs etc) which flourished during his reign; and despite his brusque rejection of the Fed’s role as regulator; the Federal Reserve’s own documents (“House Prices and Monetary Policy: A Cross-Country Study”) indicate that housing was “specifically targeted” acknowledging that it would serve as “a key channel of monetary policy transmission”. This is not even particularly controversial any more. In fact, we can see that this same scam has been used in England, Spain and Ireland—all now suffering the effects of massive real estate inflation. Low interest rates continue to be the most efficient way of stealthily shifting wealth from one class to another while decimating the foundations of a healthy economy.

Bankers fully understand the effects of cheap credit on the economy. It is branded on their DNA.

CALIFORNIA HOUSING FALLS OFF A CLIFF

We are now beginning to see the first signs that the listless housing bubble has sprung a leak and is careening towards earth. This week’s news from Southern California confirms that home sales have plummeted a whopping 48.5% from the previous year. This represents the biggest decline in home sales since the industry began keeping records more than 20 years ago. Sales are at a standstill and builders and homeowners have begun slashing prices in desperation. (See you tube “Central California Housing Crash: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVFBojFJTZM.)

The news is only slightly better in the Bay Area where DataQuick reports that “Bay Area home sales plummet amid mortgage woes”:

“Bay Area home sales sank to their lowest level in more than two decades in September, the result of a continuing market slowdown and borrowers’ increased difficulties in obtaining “jumbo” mortgages…

A total of 5,014 new and resale houses and condos were sold in the nine-county Bay Area in September. That was down 31.3 percent from 7,299 in August, and down 40.1 percent from 8,374 for September a year ago.”

40.1% year over year. That is the definition of a market collapse.

“Foreclosure activity is at record levels.”

September sales figures for the rest of the country are not yet available, but what is taking place in California, is what we anticipated after the stock market “froze over” on August 16th. Most people don’t understand that the market nearly crashed on that day and that the tremors from that cataclysm changed the way the banks do business. Many of the loans which were available just months ago (subprime, piggyback, ARMs, “no doc”, Alt-A, reverse amortization etc) are either much harder to get or have been discontinued altogether. Additionally, the banks are no longer able to bundle loans into securities and sell them to investors. In fact, the future of “securitization” of mortgage-debt is very much in doubt now. An article in the Financial Times shows how this process has slowed to a trickle:

“Only $9.9 billion of home equity loan securitizations have come to market since July 1—A 95% DECLINE FROM THE $200.9 BILLION IN THE FIRST HALF OF THIS YEAR AND A ROUGHLY 92% DECREASE FROM THE SAME PERIOD LAST YEAR.”

Also—and perhaps most importantly—many potential buyers are now finding that they no longer meet the stricter standards the banks are using to determine credit worthiness. This is especially true for jumbo loans, that is, any home loan that exceeds $417,000. The banks are getting increasing skeptical (some believe they are hoarding capital to cover bad bets on mortgage-backed derivatives) in determining who is a qualified mortgage applicant. Understandably, this has thrown a wrench in sales figures and slashed the number of September closings in half.

In other words, the credit meltdown on Aug 16 changed the basic dynamics of home mortgage-lending. Decreasing demand and mushrooming inventory are only part of a much larger problem; the financing mechanism has completely changed. The banks don’t want to lend money. And, when banks don’t lend money—bad things happen. The economy goes into freefall. Despite the valiant efforts of the Plunge Protection Team in engineering a late-day turnaround to the August rout; the damage is done. Tighter lending will put additional downward pressure on a housing market that is already in distress speeding up an unavoidable recession. The economic storm clouds are already visible on the horizon.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has finally admitted that the slumping housing market is now the “most significant risk to the economy”. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke agrees and adds that he believes that housing would be a “significant drag” on GDP. The troubles at the banks and the news from California have put the “fear of God” in both men. But there’s little they can do. Millions of people are “in over their heads” living in homes they clearly can’t afford. They’ll be forced to move in the next year or so. Foreclosures will soar. That can’t be avoided. Also, the industry has a 10 month backlog of existing homes that must be reduced before new sales have any chance of rebounding. That takes time. Construction and construction-related industries will suffer substantial losses.

The problems facing the banks are much more serious than anyone cares to openly discuss. The banking system is over-extended and under-capitalized. The Fed has provided more than $400 billion in repos since the August meltdown, and yet, the troubles persist. The Treasury Dept has joined with Citigroup, Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase in an attempt to repackage bad debts and sell them to wary investors via “Super conduit” mega fund. The desperation is palpable and these latest shenanigans are only adding to rising stock market jitters.

There’s a myth that the Fed chief can wave a magic wand and make things better. But that is not the case. Bernanke’s decision to cut to the Fed’s Fund Rate last month did not affect long term rates and, therefore, did not make it cheaper to buy (or refinance) a home. The rate-cut was really just a gift to the banks that are currently buried under $500 billion in mortgage-backed debt and CDO sludge. The increase in liquidity hasn’t made these toxic securities any more sellable or solvent. Nor has it increased the banks willingness to provide new home financing to mortgage applicants. That process has slowed to a crawl. All the Fed’s repos have done is buy more time for the banks while they try to wriggle out of reporting their true losses.

The banks serve as a key conduit for the transferal of credit to consumers. That conduit has turned into a chokepoint due to defaults in the mortgage industry and the banks own humongous debt-load. The Fed cannot get money to the people who need it and who can keep the economy (which is 70% dependent on consumer spending) growing. This is a structural problem and it cannot be resolved by merely cutting rates.

We’ve already begun to see signs of a slowdown in consumer spending at Target, Lowes and Walmart. If that deceleration continues, the economy will slip quickly into recession.

American consumers have withdrawn over $9 trillion from their home equity in the last 7 years. That spending-spree has kept the economy whirring along at a healthy clip. Now that housing prices have stabilized—and in many cases, gone down—that easy money is no longer available setting the stage for shrinking economic growth, slower home sales, and declining demand. Deflation is the Fed’s worst nightmare and will be fought with every weapon in their arsenal.

Regrettably, Bernanke does not have the tools to fix this problem and he is likely to destroy the currency if he keeps cutting rates. The recent cuts have already sent oil and gold to new highs while the dollar continues to nosedive. (The euro stands at $1.42 per dollar—up 63% since Bush took office) The weak dollar and the persistent credit problems in the markets, has sent foreign investors scampering for the exits. August was the biggest month on record for the withdrawal of foreign capital from US securities and Treasuries—$163 billion in capital flight. (Japan and China led the way) Confidence in US markets, leadership and integrity has never been lower. Investors are voting with their feet. They’ve had enough.

With capital fleeing the country at the present pace, the US will not be able to maintain its $800 current account deficit, which means that prices will rise, the dollar will fall, and consumer spending will dry up. No amount of financial tinkering at the Federal Reserve will make a damn bit of difference. Barring a dramatic change in economic policy—which seems unlikely—we appear to be quick-stepping towards a system-wide market-busting break-down.

THE MESS THAT GREENSPAN MADE

The ruinous effects of Greenspan’s housing bubble can’t be fully appreciated unless one spends a bit of time studying some of the charts and graphs that are now available. These graphs are the best way to dispel any lingering suspicion that the housing bubble may be some a left-wing conspiracy theory. It’s not, and these links should provide ample evidence to the contrary.

http://www.bubbleinfo.com/statistics-2007/2007/3/15/arm-reset-schedule.html

http://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2007/9/7/amortization_1.jpg

http://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2007/9/7/amortization_2.jpg

The first graph is the ARM (adjustable rate mortgages) reset schedule—totaling hundreds of billions of dollars in the next 2 years. The next 2 are the interest only and negative amortization share of total purchase mortgage originations 2000-2006. Keep in mind, when studying the ARM reset graph that “A study commissioned by the AFL-CIO shows that nearly half of homeowners with ARMs don’t know how their loans will adjust, and three-quarters don’t know how much their payments will increase if the loan does reset. 73% of homeowners with ARM’s don’t even know how much their monthly payment will increase the next time the rate goes up.” (Calculated Risk)

The unwinding of the housing bubble is now beginning to show up in other areas of the economy. Credit card debt has skyrocketed to 17% annually now that homeowners are no longer able to tap into their vanishing home equity. Americans already owe over $500 billion on their credit cards. Now that debt is increasing faster than retail sales, which suggests that many people are so over-extended they are using their cards for basic necessities and medical expenses. Industry analysts now expect an unprecedented wave of credit card defaults in the next 6 to 12 months. Unfortunately, for the tapped-out consumer, the credit card represents his last access to an unsecured loan.

We can also expect the downturn in housing to swell the unemployment lines. Oddly enough, while home sales have declined 40% from their peak in 2005, construction-related employment has only slipped 5%.That is really astonishing. It could be that the BLS is fabricating the numbers using its Birth-Death model. (which magically produces millions of fictitious jobs) But we know that construction has accounted for 2 out of every 5 new jobs in the US for the last 6 years, so we are sure to see a significant rise in unemployment as the bubble deflates. The financial and mortgage industries have already experienced significant layoffs.

Similarly, we can expect to see substantial correction in home prices. Housing prices typically lag 6 months after sales peak and inventory rises. So far, prices have dropped a mere 3.5%, whereas inventory is at historic highs and sales have decreased 40%. It is impossible to know how low prices will go (some experts like Robert Schiller predict 50% cuts in the hotter markets) but the downward pressure on housing prices is bound to be enormous. Growing unemployment, o% personal savings, rising foreclosures, the weakening dollar, and the prevailing mood of gloominess (a recent poll showed that a majority of Americans believe we are ALREADY in a recession!) suggest that the impending fall in home prices will be precipitous.

DEFLATIONARY DOWNWARD SPIRAL

There is a debate raging on the econo-blogs about whether the country is headed towards hyperinflation or a deflationary cycle. The argument for hyperinflation is compelling since the Fed has already shown that it is prepared to savage the dollar in order to keep the economy running. As a result, we’ve seen inflation is heating up at a pace not seen in over a decade.(despite the government’s mendacious figures) In September gasoline costs rose 4%, heating oil soared 9%, food jumped 5%, and dairy products lurched ahead 7.5%. Everything is up except the greenback which appears to be in its death throes.

Still, there are signs that America’s debt-fueled consumer economy is on its last legs as shoppers and homeowners are increasingly forced to accept that they have maxed-out nearly all of their available lines of credit. They will have to curtail their spending and live within their means. That means less growth, a continuing decline in housing, and a sharp fall in equities prices. These are all the harbingers of deflation.

Treasury Secretary Paulson’s new “Master Liquidity Enhancement Conduit”, M-LEC—which allows the investment banks to delay reporting their losses—is particularly ominous in this regard, since it was the Japanese banks unwillingness to write-off their bad debts which extended their deflationary recession for 15 years. Can the same thing happen here?

Probably. An interesting exchange took place last month between the widely-respected economic blogger, Mike Shedlock (“Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis”) and economist Paul L. Kasriel. The interview provides details of the Japanese crisis which offer some striking similarities to our present predicament. I have transcribed an extended portion of that discussion:

Paul L. Kasriel: “Japan experienced a deflation in recent years because the bursting of its asset-price bubble in the early 1990s created huge losses in its banking system. The Japanese banks had financed the asset-price bubble. When it burst, the debtors could not keep current on their loans to the banks and therefore were forced to turn back the collateral to the banks. The market value of the collateral, of course, was less than the amount of the loans outstanding, thereby inflicting huge losses of capital to the Japanese banks. With the decline in bank capital, the Japanese banks could not extend new credit to the private sector even though the Bank of Japan was offering credit to the banks at very low nominal rates of interest.

Banks are an important transmission mechanism between the central bank and the private economy. If the banks are unable or unwilling to extend the cheap credit being offered to them by the central bank, then the economy grows very slowly, if at all. This happened in the U.S. during the early 1930s.

U.S. banks currently hold record amounts of mortgage-related assets on their books. If the housing market were to go into a deep recession resulting in massive mortgage defaults, the U.S. banking system could sustain huge losses similar to what the Japanese banks experienced in the 1990s. If this were to occur, the Fed could cut interest rates to zero but it would have little positive effect on economic activity or inflation.

Short of the Fed depositing newly-created money directly into private sector accounts, I suspect that a deflation would occur under these circumstances. Again, crippled banking systems tend to bring on deflations. And crippled banking systems seem to result from the bursting of asset bubbles because of the sharp decline in the value of the collateral backing bank loans.”

Mish: What if Bernanke cuts interest rates to 1 percent?

Kasriel: In a sustained housing bust that causes banks to take a big hit to their capital it simply will not matter. This is essentially what happened recently in Japan and also in the US during the great depression.

Mish: Can you elaborate?

Kasriel: Most people are not aware of actions the Fed took during the Great Depression. Bernanke claims that the Fed did not act strong enough during the Great Depression. This is simply not true. The Fed slashed interest rates and injected huge sums of base money but it did no good. More recently, Japan did the same thing. It also did no good. If default rates get high enough, banks will simply be unwilling to lend which will severely limit money and credit creation.

Mish: How does inflation start and end?

Kasriel: Inflation starts with expansion of money and credit.
Inflation ends when the central bank is no longer able or willing to extend credit and/or when consumers and businesses are no longer willing to borrow because further expansion and /or speculation no longer makes any economic sense.

Mish: So when does it all end?

Kasriel: That is extremely difficult to project. If the current housing recession were to turn into a housing depression, leading to massive mortgage defaults, it could end. Alternatively, if there were a run on the dollar in the foreign exchange market, price inflation could spike up and the Fed would have no choice but to raise interest rates aggressively. Given the record leverage in the U.S. economy, the rise in interest rates would prompt large scale bankruptcies. These are the two “checkmate” scenarios that come to mind.” (“Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis”)

I received a request recently from a university professor who teaches a course about media literacy. She was wondering if I could help her find videos of the “Shared Values” television ads that the U.S. Department of State produced to improve the image of the United States in Muslim countries shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, so she could show them to her students.

I was a bit surprised to realize that the ads are fairly hard to locate online, but after some searching, we were able to find copies. To ensure that they will remain available, I uploaded the videos to two popular internet repositories: YouTube, where people can easily find them and drop them into their own web pages; and the Internet Archive, which should ensure that they survive for posterity.

Twenty or fifty years from now, scholars wishing to understanding the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world will certainly be interested in studying the “Shared Values” campaign. As my professor friend wrote back after finding the videos, “The ads are a great teaching tool about propaganda.” Like most propaganda, they tell us a great deal about how the propagandists see themselves as well as how they want to be perceived by others.

“Shared Values” was part of a public relations campaign launched by Charlotte Beers, a former Madison Avenue advertising executive who was appointed by Colin Powell as U.S. Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and asked to help “rebrand” the United States to improve its image in Muslim countries.

In practice, the Shared Values campaign ran up against rising Muslim anger following the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq. As we have pointed out on this website on numerous occasions, the U.S. image has plummeted internationally – especially among Muslims. Here is how John Stauber and I analyzed Charlotte Beers and her rebranding effort in our 2003 book, Weapons of Mass Deception:

Dubbed a “Muslim-as-Apple-Pie” campaign by the New York Times, the “Shared Values” videos featured photogenic Muslim-Americans playing with their children and going about their jobs. One TV commercial showed Rawia Ismail, a Lebanese-born schoolteacher who now lives in Toledo, Ohio. Her head covered with an Islamic scarf, Ismail was shown with her smiling children in her all-American kitchen, at a school softball game, and extolling American values as she taught her class. “I didn’t see any prejudice anywhere in my neighborhood after September 11,” she said.

The problem with these messages is not that they were necessarily false. The problem is that, like the rest of Charlotte’s web, “Shared Values” avoided discussing the issues at the core of Muslim resentment of the United States-the Palestinian/Israel conflict and the history of U.S. intervention in the region. “We know that there’s religious freedom in America, and we like that. What we’re angry about is the arrogant behavior of the U.S. in the rest of the world,” said Ahmad Imron, an economics student in Indonesia after watching one of the “Shared Values” TV ads.

Viewed today, the Shared Values campaign, and even our critique of it, looks rather quaint and naive. Since John and I wrote those words, America’s reputation has been further eroded by the ongoing violence in Iraq and by photographs of America soldiers gleefully torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The idea that the United States is a tolerant nation has been undermined by the behavior of the war’s strongest supporters, as pro-war columnists like Michelle Malkin and blogs like Little Green Footballs regularly refer to Arabs and Muslims as “vermin” in need of “sterilization,” while campaigning for the “free speech” of U.S. soldiers who compose humorous songs about killing Iraqis, or rallying to the defense of a student after his arrest for stealing stealing copies of the Koran and flushing them down toilets.

Does Propaganda Work?

After reviewing opinion polls that found steep declines in America’s public image in every Muslim country surveyed, John and I concluded in Weapons of Mass Deception that the Shared Values campaign was an “abject failure.” Most observers at the time agreed. The TV ads were controversial in the countries where they aired, and government-run channels in Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan flatly refused to run them at all. Less than a month after the launch of “Shared Values,” the State Department abruptly suspended it. “Islamic opinion is influenced more by what the U.S. does than by anything it can say,” commented an advertising executive in the Wall Street Journal. Charlotte Beers resigned two weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and comments at O’Dwyer’s, a leading public relations industry trade publication, greeted her departure with cries of “good riddance” and dismissive comments about her competence.

More recently, a couple of communications professors, Jami Fullerton and Alice Kendrick, have argued that the Shared Values ads were more effective than people realized. Fullerton and Kendrick reached their conclusions by conducting a survey that involved showing the ads to a test audience of university students in London and surveying their reactions. They first announced their findings in 2004, prompting a blistering critique from journalism professor Lawrence Pintak, who pointed out that only six of the 105 students surveyed were even Muslims.

Since Pintak wrote his critique, Fullerton and Kendrick have attempted to bolster their research by conducting a second survey in London and additional surveys in Singapore and Cairo. They have published their findings in a book, titled Advertising’s War on Terrorism: The Story of the U.S. State Department’s Shared Values Initiative. However, much of the substance of Pintak’s criticism still applies. For one thing, all of their surveys involved small samples of students at international universities. (Can the reactions of English-speaking students at American University in Cairo really predict how the rest of the Muslim world will respond to the ads?) As one book review noted,

The two London samples included 5.8% and 17% Muslims respectively, and the Singapore sample 13% Muslims. Muslims were the largest group (82%) in the Egyptian sample but the total number of participants in that case was only 39, potentially compromising the validity of the findings.

Beyond these methodological concerns, moreover, Pintak correctly observed that “the whole issue of the effectiveness of the commercials is actually beside the point.” Whatever positive impression the ads might have generated in people who viewed them was countered by the generally negative public outcry throughout the Muslim world about the very fact that they were being broadcast, and the Fullerton/Kendrick survey had no way of measuring this factor. More importantly still, any positive effects of the ads have been vastly outweighed by the negative attitudes that the U.S. has created toward itself through its invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Monologue About Dialogue

Regardless of whether the Shared Values ads were effective, they were in any case dishonest. Each “Shared Values” video ended with a tag line that said, “Presented by the Council of American Muslims for Understanding … and the American people.” But although “the American people” supposedly co-sponsored the ads, few Americans had ever heard of the Council of American Muslims for Understanding (CAMU). This is because CAMU was actually a PR front group, created and funded by the U.S. State Department.

Front groups are an example of a PR tactic known as the “third party technique,” in which the sponsor of a message seeks to put their words in someone else’s mouth. Usually this is done because the sponsor thinks the message will seem more credible if someone else says it. Here is how John and I described CAMU in Weapons of Mass Deception:

In another effort to achieve “third party authenticity,” a group called the Council of American Muslims for Understanding (CAMU) launched its own web site, called OpenDialogue.com. “It will be government-funded, but it’s not government-founded. I’d like to say we founded it,” said the group’s chairman, Malik Hasan, who nonetheless admitted that the idea for CAMU began with the State Department. Visitors to the website, whose declared mission was “bringing people and cultures together through dialogue,” were invited to send away for a free copy of “Muslim Life in America,” view the stories of Rawia Ismail and the others profiled in the “Shared Values” TV commercials, or to “tell us your story” by sending an e-mail.

The striking thing about the CAMU web site, however, is how little real dialogue it enabled. This is, after all, the twenty-first century. Internet newsgroups, web forums, email listservs and even web cams have long ago perfected the technologies that enable real dialogue to occur in real time between people throughout the world. The absence of opportunities for genuine dialogue may explain why OpenDialogue.com has been irrelevant to most people seeking information about U.S.-Muslim relations. A Google search on April 8, 2003 found only 58 other web pages that link to OpenDialogue, most of which were sites run by U.S. embassies or other government agencies. For comparison’s sake, there were 2,200 links to IslamiCity.com, a site that discusses world affairs from a Muslim point of view.

After the Shared Values campaign ended, CAMU’s government funding dried up, and the group quietly disappeared, as did its website. When I visited OpenDialogue.com just now, I found a commercial spam site with popup ads that crashed my web browser. You can still find a copy of the original website, however, at the Internet Archive. On its “questions and answers” page, CAMU described itself as “a private, non-profit, non-partisan and non-political organization.”

This, of course, is deliberate deception. An organization created by the U.S. State Department is certainly not “private,” and it is only “non-political” if we interpret that term in the narrow sense of “not involved in electoral politics.” (Malik Hasan, its chairman, is a wealthy Republican activist who subsequently became a founding member of “Muslims for Bush.”)

One of the hallmarks of propaganda is that its practitioners are wholly preoccupied with the question of whether their message “works” and are indifferent to the question of whether their message is “true.” At the risk of sounding like a moralist and scold, I believe that honesty is important in communications, even if dishonest messages sometimes “produce the results we want.” This, however, is a point that Fullerton and Kendrick do not seem to have considered in their analysis.

Ultimately, though, I think propaganda fails even the “effectiveness” test. Propaganda is the language through which power expresses itself. By its very nature, it is incapable of sustaining the sort of dialogue that creates genuine understanding between different cultures. If Americans truly wish to be respected and appreciated by the rest of the world, we have to find other ways of communicating.

The history of relations between the Black liberation movement and law enforcement has always been adversarial, at its best. At its worst, it is a history of murder, beatings, lies and frame-ups. There are few groups in this history that experienced the latter more than the Black Panther Party. The history of FBI and police harassment and intimidation of Panther members during the Party’s heyday is well documented. It includes the murders of several members, the constant harassment and petty arrests of members by local police forces and the framing of many of its leaders. Most of these frame-ups resulted in long prison terms for the members accused and convicted falsely.

What may be surprising to many who know this history is that these frame-ups continue today. It was under the FBI/Justice Department program known as COINTELPRO that the first frame-ups took place and it is that program’s successors that have occurred under. Two false convictions that received much of the publicity in the 1990s were those of Geronimo Pratt and Dhoruba bin Wahad. Both of these men spent over fifteen years in prison for crimes they did not commit, thanks to frame-ups carried out under the auspices of the COINTELPRO program.

Two ongoing cases that appear to be frame-ups from this vantage point are those of Mumia abu Jamal and the San Francisco 8. The former is a case involving the murder of a Philadelphia police officer in 1981 and the latter involves the murder of a San Francisco policeman in 1971. In both situations, the prosecution’s case is based on evidence that is flimsy at best and just plain false at its worst. Neither prosecution has proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt despite several chances. In addition, the politics of the defendants has been used by the prosecution in an attempt to prejudice the jury.

Mumia’s case has always carried the stench of a frame-up. The conflicting testimony of witnesses, the failure of witnesses to appear and many other instances of questionable conduct by the prosecution and law enforcement have conspired to create this perception. A recent book by Michael Schiffmannn titled Race Against Death (currently available only in German) adds even more documentary fuel to this perception. The text, which does a good job placing Mumia’s case into a historical context of racism in the United States, provides a history of the case itself and the movement that has grown in support of Mumia following the 1995 signing of his death warrant by then Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge. The new material at the end of the book includes several never-before-published photographs of the 1981 crime scene that were also never produced in court. These photos raise more questions as to Mumia’s role in the events of that night the policeman was killed. The litany of miscues and missing evidence already familiar to those who have followed Mumia’s case around the world is repeated here, with a renewed emphasis. In addition to this evidence is the newly discovered fact that a fifth bullet fired by police at the scene for comparative purposes was “lost.”

The photos in Schiffmann’s text cast more doubt on the state’s case by proving that the prosecution’s statements that Mumia stood over Officer Faulkner and fired at him several times. The photos show no marks from the bullets that were supposedly fired in this fashion. In fact, the sidewalk was not damaged in any way. Schiffmann foes on to write: “it is thus no question anymore whether the scenario presented by the prosecution at Abu-Jamal’s trial is true. It is clearly not, because it is physically and ballistically impossible.” (p. 205) The remainder of the photos show a scenario that constantly contradicts the testimony of officers and witnesses (apparently coerced) and the nature of the scene they described in Mumia’s original trial.

It is the continued refusal of the court to allow a new trial for Mumia that would allow the new evidence to be introduced that has been pointed to by Mumia’s supporters as part of the proof that not only was Mumia framed because of his politics and outspokenness as a member of the media, but that the frame-up continues. Added to this refusal by the court is the somewhat understandable desire of the slain officer’s family to have a perpetrator locked up, even that someone isn’t really the killer.

Other lesser known cases involving the US government and former Black Panther members are those of Veronza Bowers, Jr. and Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown). Bowers has been in prison for more than thirty years despite the fact that he is a model prisoner and has served his complete sentence under the law, been approved for parole only to have it overturned by the Justice department and is still in prison sixteen months after his sentence has expired.

Besides this travesty, the facts of Bowers’ conviction are questionable, to say the least. He was convicted of the murder of a U.S. Park Ranger based on the word of two government informers. Both of the informers received reduced sentences for other crimes in exchange for their testimony. There were no eye-witnesses, nor was there any other evidence to link him to the crime. Bowers’ alibi testimony was not credited by the jury and the testimony of two relatives of the informants who insisted that they were lying was not allowed. The informants had all charges against them in this case dropped. In addition, according to the prosecutor’s post-sentencing report, one was given $10,000 by the government.

As for Al-Amin, he was recently removed from state custody in Georgia by federal authorities and sent to the federal control unit in Florence, Colorado. No reason was given for the transfer, despite repeated requests from family and friends. According to the website maintained by the family and friends of the prisoner Dr. Mutulu Shakur, the transfer seems to be part of a more general move by the Bureau of Prisons to prevent programs that have had an “impact on the transformation of dozens of men, from a criminal mentality to liberation consciousness.” The transfers and other intimidation by the bureau seem intended to make it difficult for these prisoners to build networks of support. Other aspects of this campaign include the suspension of cultural and educational programs within the federal prison systems and the increased harassment of politically active prisoners.

As mentioned above, another ongoing case involving former Black Panthers and the government is that of the San Francisco 8. This case against eight former Panthers and Panther supporters charged with the murder of a San Francisco policeman in 1971 was thrown out of court in 1975 because the evidence used by the prosecution was obtained by torture. It was revived in the early part of the twenty-first century by the California attorney general with help from the US Justice Department. There seems to be no new evidence in the case, although the prosecution hints that some does exist. DNA taken from all of the defendants in 2005 failed to match any previous evidence and the prosecution has hinted that it will reintroduce the same evidence thrown out back in 1975 because it was extracted by torture. Evidence obtained by torture is not considered to be verifiable beyond a reasonable doubt precisely because it was obtained by torture.

Anybody following the current debate around the U.S. rendition program for terror suspects is quite familiar with the proven argument that torture does not produce credible evidence. Of course, if the purpose of the torture is something other than the procurement of credible evidence or confessions, than it doesn’t really matter as to its effectiveness.

In the case of the San Francisco 8, it appears that the prosecution was not so much interested in finding the people responsible for the killing of the San Francisco policeman in 1971 as it was interested in helping to destroy the already splintered Black Panther Party. As any student studying the COINTELPRO program can tell you, one of its primary goals was the destruction of the Panthers. This goal was pursued by a variety of means. Among them was murder, the spreading of false rumors concerning the members’ personal lives, the placing of snitch jackets on members, and the intentional framing of its members on felony charges.

The case of the San Francisco 8 falls under the latter category but is also unique if only because the entire case was based on police speculation and torture. None of the accused was ever found guilty of the murder the first time they were tried. After the torture was exposed in 1975, the prosecution’s case was thrown out. The men who were not in prison on other charges (of a questionable nature as well) returned to their communities and lived active and law abiding lives until 2005. In 2005, the Department of Homeland security revived the same case that had been discarded in 1975. Together with the State of California they convened a grand jury and called many of the same defendants to testify. To their credit, the men refused and served time for their refusal. In 2006, DNA was extracted from the men by the prosecution in the hope that this evidence could be tied to evidence from the 1971 crime scene. After more than a year of silence, the defense was told that none of the DNA samples matched any of the evidence. Despite this, the prosecution refuses to drop the case and appears to be intent on resubmitting the evidence obtained under torture back in the early 1970s despite the earlier court’s refusal to allow that same evidence. Randy Montesano, the attorney of Harold Taylor–one of the defendants-told the media after a motion to deny admission of the torture-extracted evidence that despite the refusal of the court to approve the motion “there is no way to get a fair hearing today, especially given the delay of so many years and (because) the passage of time alone precludes any reliable adjudication ­ so we will ultimately prevail.”

One respects Mr. Montesano’s optimism, yet it can not be emphasized enough that this case may not go the way it should (and the defense hopes it will) unless the light of the world is shown upon it. It will take the concerted effort of a popular movement to insure that the men known as the San Francisco 8 are not framed for the murder of the policeman in 1971. The alternative for these men would be spending the rest of their lives in prison, much like the future faced by Mumia abu Jamal. In fact, it is the growing popular movement supporting the San Francisco 8 that helped convince the judge in the case to lower the bail of most of the men and allow them to go home to their loved ones. Likewise, in the case of Mumia abu Jamal, it is the popular movement around his case that has kept him alive.

(CNN) — The feds call industrial hemp a controlled substance — the same as pot, heroin, LSD — but advocates say a sober analysis reveals a harmless, renewable cash crop with thousands of applications that are good for the environment.

Two North Dakota farmers are taking that argument to federal court, where a November 14 hearing is scheduled in a lawsuit to determine if the Drug Enforcement Administration is stifling the farmers’ efforts to grow industrial hemp. The DEA says it’s merely enforcing the law.

Marijuana and industrial hemp are members of the Cannabis sativa L. species and have similar characteristics. One major difference: Hemp won’t get you high. Hemp contains only traces of delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the compound that gets pot smokers stoned. However, the Controlled Substances Act makes little distinction, banning the species almost outright.

Marijuana, which has only recreational and limited medical uses, is the shiftless counterpart to the go-getter hemp, which has a centuries-old history of handiness.

The February 1938 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine heralded hemp as the “new billion-dollar crop,” saying it had 25,000 uses. Today, it is a base element for textiles, paper, construction materials, car parts, food and body care products.

It’s not a panacea for health and environmental problems, advocates concede, but it’s not the menace the Controlled Substances Act makes it out to be. Watch why a North Dakota official thinks the U.S. should be in the hemp business »

“This is actually an anti-drug. It’s a healthy food,” explained Adam Eidinger of the Washington advocacy group Vote Hemp. “We’re not using this as a statement to end the drug war.”

Rather, Eidinger said, Vote Hemp wants to vindicate a plant that has been falsely accused because of its mischievous cousin.

John Lennon would have turned 67 years old last week had he not been murdered in 1980, at the age of 40, by a mentally disturbed fan. On his birthday, Oct. 9, his widow, peace activist and artist Yoko Ono, realized a dream they shared. In Iceland, she inaugurated the Imagine Peace Tower, a pillar of light emerging from a wishing well, surrounded on the ground by the phrase “Imagine Peace” in 24 languages.

The legacy of Lennon is relevant now more than ever. The Nixon administration spied on him and tried to deport him, all because he opposed the war in Vietnam. Parallel details of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretap program and the Pentagon’s participation in domestic spying, with mass roundups of immigrants, are chilling, and the lessons vital.

Ono conceived the peace tower 40 years ago, at the outset of her relationship with Lennon. She grew up in Japan, surviving the firebombing of Tokyo. She told me, “Because of that memory of what I went through in the Second World War, it is embedded in me how terrible it is to go through war.”

She continued: “I thought of building a light tower, and John loved that idea, this light tower that just emerges once in a while. And so, he actually invited me in 1967, the first time that he invited me to his house. I thought it was a party or something, but, no, it was a very quiet day. And he said, ‘Well, actually, I invited you because I wanted to know if you can build the lighthouse in my garden,’ and I said: ‘Oh, dear, no, no. It’s just a conceptual idea. I don’t know how to build anything,’ and I was just laughing. But that’s when he wanted this light tower, and that was 40 years ago.”

Forty years ago, the young couple became increasingly active in the anti-Vietnam War movement. The FBI, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, spent tremendous resources targeting critics, most engaged in perfectly lawful dissent. This was later exposed as COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence program, which for decades spied on, infiltrated and disrupted domestic groups.

Lennon was a pacifist in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. As the anti-war movement was growing in militancy, Lennon and Ono got married, and used their honeymoon as a public appeal for peace. They decided to spend a week in bed, as a “Bed In.” Knowing their action would attract the global news media, the newlyweds ensured that their call for peace was heard and that all photos included the word “Peace.” They launched a poster and billboard campaign, using the phrase “The War Is Over-If you want it.” The actions were creative and lighthearted-but clearly threatening to the Nixon administration.

They developed a closer connection to the U.S. anti-war movement and, by 1971, were planning a massive get-out-the-vote concert tour to help defeat Nixon. Nixon and Hoover stepped up their campaign to neutralize Lennon.

The FBI increased surveillance and harassment of Lennon, followed by an attempt to deport him. Lennon’s activities were also tracked by the CIA, as revealed in recently declassified documents. Arch-conservative Sen. Strom Thurmond wrote a secret memo pushing deportation to then U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell, and the effort moved into full gear. Lennon beat the deportation attempt, and by 1980, with the release of the “Double Fantasy” album, was back demonstrating his creative brilliance, only weeks later to be slain.

Today, revelations about current government wiretaps and surveillance continue. Verizon has just revealed to Congress that it supplied customer records to the government more than 94,000 times since 2005. The American Civil Liberties Union has uncovered collusion between the Pentagon and the FBI in circumventing the law to obtain financial and credit information on people in the U.S. I asked Yoko Ono to compare the Nixon and Bush administrations: “I’m not that concerned about professional politicians. I always believe that we can change the world by grass-roots movements. It is a very important thing to do. It is the first time that I realized that I respect America so much because there are so many Americans trying to shift the axis of the world to peace.”

With major anti-war demonstrations set for cities around the country on Sat., Oct. 27 (see oct27.org), John Lennon’s legacy lives on, from the illuminated sky above Iceland to the heavily surveilled streets here at home.