The Rag Blog

STREET FIGHTING MAN FIGHTS ONCE

“America, with its ears turned to its transistors, has been following what it imagines to be an ideological debate between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones,” observed a British radical. Although both bands were culturally influential in ways that are hard to quantify, the supposed ideological differences between them were superficial and hard to discern. Their albums were not—to borrow Greil Marcus’s slick phrase—“wax manifestos.” They were more like Rorschach inkblot tests, upon which youths projected their own interpretations. Although Jagger allegedly developed a leftwing critique of capitalism when he was a student at the London School of Economics (LSE), a friend observed that later, “he grew rather fond of capitalism as first one million, then the next poured into his bank account.” Jagger’s supposed “radicalization” by his drug arrest seems equally specious; after all, he apparently attended only part of one demonstration in his life. In 1968, the Stones agreed to be filmed for Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil—a confusing documentary that blended shots of the band working in the studio with clips of Black Panthers spouting nationalist rhetoric—but on their 1969 tour they refused to allow the Panthers to appeal for funds from their stage. In hindsight it is hard to regard the Rolling Stones’ radicalism as anything but faddish; after all, the band had already been mod during the mid-’60s, and psychedelic during the Summer of Love; in the late ’70s, the Stones would enter a brief disco phase.

Meanwhile, Lennon’s political thinking in the late 1960s and early 1970s can only be described as muddled. Not long after “Revolution” came out, Lennon launched a series of avant-garde, peacepromoting protests with Yoko Ono—beginning with their March 1969 “Bed-In” in Amsterdam—that seemed to endorse pacifism and flower power. But the following year, after the Beatles broke up, he told Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner that he resented “the implication that the Stones are like revolutionaries and the Beatles weren’t.” In the same interview he disavowed his previous belief that “love [will] save us all” and professed (whether literally or metaphorically) to be wearing a Chairman Mao badge. “I’m just beginning to think he’s doing a good job,” Lennon said.5 For a short time thereafter, Lennon seemed to look more favorably upon the New Left, and in 1971 he went so far as to place yet another phone call to the Black Dwarf ’s Tariq Ali, this time to play for him a new song called “Power to the People” that seemed to directly refute “Revolution.” (“We say we want a revolution / Better get on it right away.”) Later he changed course again. “The lyrics [in ‘Revolution’] stand today. They’re still my feeling about politics.… Don’t expect me on the barricades unless it’s with flowers.”

Despite the evident confusion and half-heartedness with which the Beatles and the Stones regarded the exigencies of their day, both bands held such clout over young music fans that their songs, lyrics, behavior, and mannerisms continued to provoke robust debate. Even those who turned against the Beatles after “Revolution” never doubted their influence. This stirred another complaint: why didn’t they do more? “They could own television stations,” remarked John Sinclair, the notorious Detroit radical. “They could do anything they want to. They are in a position to propose and carry out a total cultural program, the effects of which would be incredible,” and instead they frittered away their energy on things like Apple Boutique, a trendy retail store in downtown London. “I think it may be safely said that they have more power and influence over the ‘revolutionary’ generation… than anyone else alive,” said another young writer. If they “really wanted to change the world, the world would feel it.”

Instead, the Beatles’ politics lagged. “For a long time the Beatles were oracles for our generation,”said one wistful youth. “Whatever the state of the world was, they seemed to be able to make their music expressive of it; when we began to look analytically at our society they began to tell us what we saw.” In fact, there was very little social criticism to be found in mid-’60s Beatles lyrics, but by late 1968 one could plausibly argue that the group had fallen out of step with radical youths. “Revolution” was “probably an honest statement,” rock critic Richard Goldstein remarked. “They probably don’t really understand what we mean by ‘revolution.’” Recalling that the Beatles had received MBE (Members of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) awards from Queen Elizabeth in 1965, another writer called them “confirmed institutionalists” and quipped, “[they] may yet become the Walt Disneys of the day.”

By contrast, the Stones were briefly thought by radicals to be more authentic than the Beatles. “I don’t dig hero cults,” sniffed Dave Doggett, editor of Jackson, Mississippi’s, Kudzu, “and the Beatles are beginning to smell of that sort of thing.” Jon Landau maintained that the Stones “strive for realism in contrast to the Beatles’ fantasies.” Another writer observed that Beatles songs were frequently elliptical—one had to search for meaning—whereas, “When you hear a Stones song, there is no question in your mind as to what they are trying to accomplish.” “The Stones sing to and for the ‘Salt of the Earth,’ reflecting their backgrounds,” added a clueless Fifth Estate writer. Meanwhile, “the Beatles live in their beautiful, self enclosed Pepperland.”6

But the Stones’ bloom was brief; soon radicals charged them with elitism and aloofness, especially during their 1969 U.S. tour, when they played in gargantuan arenas, and gouged fans with exorbitant ticket prices.7 This was a new thing; until then, the world’s most popular bands often played halls that held less than a thousand people, in part because the equipment and expertise necessary to put on large stadium shows did not yet exist.8 Oftentimes the Stones kept fans waiting until late in the night before they started their show, and the best seats for their concerts weren’t even available for fans; they were “reserved for music industry bigwigs.” Youths who believed they shared some commonality of outlook and purpose with the Stones were quick to register their frustration.

After the Stones played in Philadelphia, they were denounced in a lengthy, humorous front-page Free Press article.“A small band of daring fast-moving bandits… pulled off
one of the cleanest and biggest hauls in recent history at the Spectrum.… Operating before almost 15,000 eyeball witnesses, the bizarrely dressed gang… made a clean getaway with cash and negotiable paper believed to be worth in the neighborhood of $75,000.” The paper revealed embarrassing details of the Rolling Stones’ contract (remarkable for its “sheer audacity”) and complained that little of the economic activity around the Stones’ show redounded to the community’s benefit. What’s worse, the Stones acted like prima donnas, refusing interviews and traveling with a rough security team (“goons”) who made sure fans kept their distance. According to biographer Philip Norman, “Promoters in almost every city attacked them for the huge percentage [of the gate] they had taken, [and] their egomaniacal Rock Star arrogance.… To amass their two million gross, it was suggested, the Stones had systematically and callously ripped off teenagers all across America.”

In 1970, editors at Chicago’s Rising Up Angry completely revised their opinion about the Stones. The previous year they had written, “Unlike the Beatles and their passive resistance with ‘All You Need is Love’ and [‘Revolution’], the Stones take a different look at things. They know you can’t love a pig to death with flowers while he kicks the shit out of you.” Though “only a rock group,” the Stones address “real life and how to deal with it, not meditation and copout escape.” But fallout from the 1969 tour convinced them that the Stones deserved more critical scrutiny. “They should no longer be able to sing about revolution and give clenched fist salutes, making money hand over fist unless they actively support what they sing about.”

Having recorded songs like “Under My Thumb,” “Yesterday’s Papers,” and “Stupid Girl,” the Stones were overdue for condemnation on the sexism charge. But for many Movement politicos, it was the Altamont disaster that precipitated their final break. Nettled by criticisms about all the money they were making, the Stones boasted that they would express their gratitude to American fans by headlining a hastily organized “free” outdoor concert at Altamont Speedway, some sixty miles east of San Francisco. (In fact, they hoped to cash in indirectly since they knew their performance would be featured in the forthcoming concert film Gimme Shelter, directed by Albert and David Maysles.)

Altamont was a dirty, bleak space for a rock festival, almost completely lacking in amenities for the three hundred thousand concertgoers. Asked to guard the stage, the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang went on a drug-and-booze-soaked rampage, assaulting countless hippies with weighted pool cues and kicks to the head. “Their violence united the crowd in fear,” one journalist remarked. When the band played “Under My Thumb,” the Angels set upon an African American teenager, Meredith Hunter. While trying to escape a brutal beating (possibly a stabbing), Hunter whipped out a pistol and held it high over his head; in an instant, the Angels stabbed and beat him to death.When the Stones next toured the U.S., in 1972, they no longer seemed to be preaching revolution; Jagger enmeshed himself in the apolitical, high-society jet set, and bandmembers made a special point of flaunting their licentious behavior before gaping journalists.9

THE ADULT DIAPERS WORLD TOUR

What happened next happened gradually, then suddenly. Of course, rock had always been a popular and a performative art— based in part on the commercial exploitation of blues music—and even the most ostentatiously “radical” rock acts of the 1960s understood this. But the controversies and discussions generated by bands like the Beatles and Stones remind us that there was a time when rock’s artifice was frowned upon, and its commercial logic was muted. To 1960s rock fans, the idea that the Rolling Stones would go on to gross hundreds of millions of dollars playing giant stadiums under corporate sponsorship, as senior citizens, would have seemed unfathomable. Nor could they have easily imagined that someone like Michael Jackson would purchase a considerable chunk of the Lennon-McCartney songbook and authorize “Revolution” to be used for a Nike commercial. As music writer Fred Goodman observed, “Just a few decades ago rock was tied to a counterculture professing to be so firmly against commercial and social conventions that the notion of a ‘rock and roll business’ seemed an oxymoron.”

As the rock constituency that fueled the New Left and the counterculture faded into a memory, so too did the radical newspapers that once printed such clamorous rhetoric. In their place arose the “alternative press,” today’s network of weekly newspapers that are normally distributed for free in metropolitan vending boxes. Unlike the underground papers, these new metropolitan weeklies were always meant to be commercially successful; the “alternative” label they embraced was in fact a transparent bid for respectability, meant to underscore their distance from political radicalism that supposedly sullied the underground press. In return for advertisements in these papers, record companies regularly receive flattering articles, record reviews, and concert listings promoting their bands. Meanwhile, market-savvy researchers and niche advertisers have helped to shape a rock audience that is not only older but increasingly heterogeneous and sheeplike. As a global phenomenon and a multibilliondollar industry, rock and roll holds considerable capitalist clout, but today no one thinks of it as a generation’s lingua franca.

Of course, youths will always turn to rock and roll as an outlet for their energies, frustrations, rebellions, and desires, and as a way of making sense of their lives. But the rainbow-splashed pages of the underground press remind us just how much the audience for rock music has changed. Perhaps, though, we ought not be so cynical. No matter how fractious the New Left may have seemed in the late 1960s, many radicals and hippies continued to regard rock and roll as their one common denominator, the single force around which they could unify and extend their communal culture. In this context, even the era’s most tepidly political rock heroes could present themselves as avatars.✯

NOTES

5 Lennon was famously cranky in this interview. About the Stones he remarked,“They’re not in the same class, music-wise or power-wise. Never were. And Mick always resented it. I never said anything, I always admired them because I like their funky music and I like their style.… [But Jagger] is obviously so upset by how big the Beatles are compared to him, and he never got over it.” Lennon was particularly angry that the Stones seemed to copy the Beatles. “I’d just like to list what we did and what the Stones did two months after, on every fuckin’ album and every fuckin’ thing we did, Mick does exactly the same. He imitates us.”

6 The fact that the Beatles had briefly been disciples of the pacifistic Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1967 did not help their reputation with new leftists. Probably the young militants would have turned apoplectic had they known that around the same time, the Beatles considered buying a remote Greek island, where they planned to build four high-tech homes, connected by underground tunnels to a central glass dome.

7 According to promoters, the high ticket prices were necessary because the Stones demanded so much money up front. Most tickets ranged from $4.50 to $6.50, which would amount to between $20 and $33 today. By contrast, average tickets for the band’s 2005 U.S. tour were $134, and at some shows, prime seats went for $377.

8 The Beatles’ huge outdoor shows in 1965 and 1966 were the exception; their music was piped through existing P.A. systems, and to the extent that anyone could hear them play, they must have sounded terrible.

LOVABLE MOP-TOP ORGY PARTICIPANTS

On July 26, 1968, Mick Jagger flew from Los Angeles to London for a birthday party thrown in his honor at a hip new Moroccan-style bar called the Vesuvio Club—“one of the best clubs London has ever seen,” remembered proprietor Tony Sanchez. Under black lights and beautiful tapestries, some of London’s trendiest models, artists, and pop singers lounged on huge cushions and took pulls from Turkish hookahs, while a decorative, helium-filled dirigible floated aimlessly about the room. As a special treat, Mick brought along an advance pressing of the Stones’ forthcoming album, Beggars Banquet, to play over the club’s speakers. Just as the crowd was “leaping around” and celebrating the record—which would soon win accolades as the best Stones album to date—Paul McCartney strolled in, and passed Sanchez a copy of the forthcoming Beatles single “Hey Jude/Revolution,” which had never before been heard by anyone outside of Abbey Road Studios. Sanchez recalled how the “slow, thundering buildup of ‘Hey Jude’ shook the club”; the crowd demanded that the seven minute song be played again and again. Finally, the club’s disc jockey played the flip side, and everyone heard “John Lennon’s nasal voice pumping out ‘Revolution.’ ”“When it was over,” Sanchez said,“Mick looked peeved.The Beatles had upstaged him.”

“It was a wicked piece of promotional one-upsmanship,” remembered Tony Barrow, the Beatles’ press officer. By that time, the mostly good-natured rivalry between the Beatles and the Stones had been ongoing for several years. Although the Beatles were more commercially successful, the two bands competed for radio airplay and record sales throughout the 1960s, and on both sides of the Atlantic teens defined themselves by whether they preferred the Beatles or the Stones. “If you truly loved pop music in the 1960s… there was no ducking the choice and no cop-out third option,” one writer remarked. “You could dance with them both,” but there could never be any doubt about which one you’d take home.

Much of this was by design. With their matching suits, moptops, and cheeky humor, the Beatles largely obscured their origins as working-class Liverpudlians; by contrast, under the influence of their wily manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones cultivated a decadent, outlaw image, even though they mostly hailed from the London suburbs. “The Beatles were thugs who were put across as nice blokes,” someone remarked, “and the Rolling Stones were gentlemen who were made into thugs by Andrew.”

Many in the media were quick to notice the two groups’ contrasting styles. When the Rolling Stones arrived in the United States, the first Associated Press (AP) report described them as “dirtier, streakier, and more disheveled than the Beatles.” Tom Wolfe put things more sharply: “The Beatles want to hold your hand,” he quipped, “but the Stones want to burn down your town.” Since these comparisons proved useful to everyone, both the bands and the journalists collaborated on the charade. In the early 1960s, Keith Richards remarked, “nobody took the music seriously. It was the image that counted, how to manipulate the press and dream up a few headlines.” Peter Jones, who wrote about both bands for the Record Mirror, recalled being in a “difficult position” because he was expected to “gloss over” the Beatles’ tawdry indiscretions.“It was decreed that the Beatles should be portrayed as incredibly lovable, amiable fellows, and if one of them, without mentioning any names, wanted to
have a short orgy with three girls in the bathroom, then I didn’t see it.”

Whether one preferred the Beatles or the Stones in the 1960s was largely a matter of aesthetic taste and personal temperament. Though clichéd and sometimes overdrawn, most of the Beatles/Stones binaries contain a measure of plausibility: the Beatles were Apollonian, the Stones Dionysian; the Beatles pop, the Stones rock; the Beatles erudite, the Stones visceral. But in the United States, during the watershed summer of 1968, the Beatles/Stones debate suddenly became a contest of political ideologies, wherein the Beatles were thought to have aligned themselves with flower power and pacifism, and the Stones with New Left militance. Though both of these immensely talented bands helped to construct images of youth culture that generated powerful confidence, self-awareness, and libidinal energy among their listeners, neither of them ever articulated, or proved willing to defend, a coherent political cosmology. The supposed “ideological rift” between the two bands was nearly as stylized as the contrasting costumes they wore on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Nowhere was the Beatles/Stones debate more fiercely fought than in American underground newspapers, which by 1968 could be found in every pocket of the country, and had a readership that stretched into the millions.“The history of the sixties was written as much in the Berkeley Barb as in the New York Times,” claimed literary critic Morris Dickstein. Freewheeling and accessible to all manner of left-wing writers, these papers generated some of the earliest rock criticism, and provided a nexus for a running conversation among rock enthusiasts nationwide.To recall how youths assayed the Beatles/Stones rivalry is to be reminded that when rock and roll was in its juvenescence, youths interrelated with their music heroes in a way that today seems scarcely fathomable. Amid the gauzy idealism and utopian strivings that characterized the late-1960s youthquake, they believed that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—the biggest rock stars in the world!—should speak to them clearly and directly, about issues of contemporary significance, in a spirit of mutuality, and from a vantage of authenticity. Young fans believed that rock culture was inseparable from the youth culture that they created, shared, and enjoyed. In some fundamental way, they believed themselves to be part of the same community as John and Paul, and Mick and Keith. They believed they were all fighting for the same things.

THE BEATLES ON VIETNAM: “THERE’S NOT MUCH WE CAN DO ABOUT IT.”

Although the Beatles are sometimes credited with expanding the expressive possibilities of pop music—thereby helping to turn it into “art”—it bears remembering that when the Fab Four landed in the States in 1964, music critics did not receive them warmly. In fact, establishment writers were so distracted by their shaggy hairdos, and the hysterical reactions they elicited from teenage girls, that they barely discussed the Beatles’ music at all; when they did, they regarded it with varying degrees of condescension, suspicion, and contempt. Even after the Beatles broadened their sonic and emotional palette with their albums Rubber Soul (1965) and Revolver (1966), the mainstream press continued to treat the band as a puzzling cultural phenomenon. Surprisingly, the first New York Times review of any Beatles record did not appear until June 1967, when the band released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

By contrast, underground rock journalists hailed the Beatles for their genius, and generally supposed the Rolling Stones to be working in their shadow. A few months after the Beatles recorded “Yesterday,” McCartney’s poignant song about lost love that featured a string quartet, the Stones came out with “As Tears Go By,” a soulful ballad on which Jagger was likewise accompanied by a string orchestra. Later that year, the Beatles released Rubber Soul, their most “mature,” reflective, and lyrically sophisticated album to date; the following spring, the Stones critically repositioned themselves in a similar way with Aftermath. Not long after the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper, the Stones came out with Their Satanic Majesties Request, a “psychedelic” record that was widely panned as ersatz Beatles. Though both bands were hugely popular, there was some measure of truth to a quip attributed to John Lennon:
“The Stones did everything the Beatles did, six months later.”

Underground press writers also hailed the Beatles for their discernible intelligence, subversive charisma, and drug experimentation. Some observed that the group helped to establish the byways of the emerging youth culture. The Beatles will “long abide as arbiters of a new aesthetic,missionaries for an emerging lifestyle and resident gurus to a generation,” effused a writer for the San Diego Door. Others claimed that underground journalism and rock and roll both helped to “dissolve many of the tensions” between the strategic, political radicalism of the New Left, and the expressive, lifestyle radicalism of the counterculture. “Even those who did not share the profound cultural alienation of the hippies were likely to share a liking for the Beatles, some respect for their collective visibility, and a desire to at least experiment with marijuana,” said sociologist Dick Flacks.

Curiously, the Beatles garnered this respect even though they were never very political during most of the 1960s. True, the group sometimes delighted in unmasking snobbery and puncturing class pretensions; but none of the Beatles joined the crusade to ban atomic weapons, or got involved in the civil rights movement. In 1966, when Lennon provoked a minor controversy by informing a journalist that the Beatles opposed the Vietnam War, he hardly sounded like an activist. “We don’t agree with it. But there’s not much we can do about it,” he said. “All we can say is we don’t like it.” Arguably the only overt protest song the band ever recorded was George Harrison’s “Taxman,” an acid complaint about the huge amount of Beatles’ earnings that were going to the Inland Revenue.

Nevertheless, through the mid-1960s, enthusiasm for the Beatles was all but ubiquitous in the New Left. A new Beatles album “was an event,” memoirist Geoffrey O’Brien recalls.“Friends gathered to share the freshness of the never-to-be-recaptured first hearing.” According to another baby boomer critic,“the first flush of exuberance that was Beatlemania” is almost indescribable; “you really had to be there.” A writer for New York’s Rat held that the “sensibility and style of the Beatles” was so omnipresent “that to enter their world”—whether through listening
to their music or watching them on film—“is sometimes as personal as having a dream.” In 1967, a young writer plausibly claimed that no other artist in history had ever commanded “the power and audience of the Beatles. The allure, the excitement, the glory of Beatlemusic,” he continued, “is the suspicion that the Beatles might just succeed where the magicians of the past have failed.”

The Beatles also provided an alluring soundtrack for many activists. Once, after a long meeting in 1966, a group of Berkeley students joined hands and clumsily attempted to sing the old labor song “Solidarity Forever”… until it became apparent that hardly anyone knew the words. A moment later, the group erupted in a joyous rendition of “Yellow Submarine,” a new song from their own culture. “With a bit of effort,”Todd Gitlin remembered, “the song could be taken as the communion of hippies and activists, students and nonstudents, who at long last felt they could express their beloved single-hearted community.” Another memoirist recalls that when he helped to occupy a Columbia University building in the spring of 1968, hundreds of students bonded over the Beatles just before they were arrested. We “were no longer strangers… but brothers and sisters weaving in ritual dance. We sang the words of Beatles’ songs [and] danced round and round in a circle.”

Beatles albums were frequently scrutinized for profound or hidden meanings, and a few fans went so far as to imbue the group with superhuman stature and mystical significance. Even though the Beatles almost never spoke about politics, a Willamette Bridge writer observed that youths turned to “the Beatles myth”—the idea that the Beatles possessed some secret insight, shamanic influence, or untapped reservoir of power—for solutions to problems as diverse and intractable as the Vietnam War, the atomic bomb, the civil rights struggle, and campus unrest. Writing in the Berkeley
Barb in early 1967, Marvin Garson remarked, “At idle moments more imaginative men in government must be haunted by a persistent nightmare… [that] Lennon and McCartney will go on to lead an anti-war sit-in at the Pentagon.”

BITTER, ACCESSIBLE MISOGYNISTS

Of course, some left-wing youths more closely identified with the Rolling Stones. In 1964, Tom Wolfe profiled Baby Jane Holzer, a successful model, in the New York Herald Tribune. Though ignorant about the Stones’ provenance, she raved about them in a typical way: “They’re so sexy! They’re pure sex! They’re divine! The Beatles, well, you know, Paul McCartney—sweet Paul McCartney.… He’s such a sweet person. I mean, the Stones are bitter… they’re all from the working class, you know? the East End.… [Photographer David] Bailey says the Beatles are passé, because now everybody’s mum pats the Beatles on the head.” The following year, countercultural activist Emmett Grogan distributed mimeographed flyers declaring the Stones to be “the embodiment of everything we represent, a psychic evolution… the breaking up of old values.”

Some of the Stones’ songs frankly addressed topics not normally treated in rock music, like middle-class drug abuse (“Mother’s Little Helper”) and depression (“Paint It Black”), but the band was only inferentially political. Among many rebellious youths, the Stones were popular simply because they seemed so dangerously cool. “I went with the Stones, once they started coming up with songs like ‘Under My Thumb,’ and ‘Satisfaction,’” remembers cultural critic John Strausbaugh. “I didn’t have the slightest idea what those songs were about. I just knew they were somehow bad, and bad’s what I wanted to be.”

To some radicals, the Stones also seemed more accessible. On May 16, 1965, Ken Kesey’s group, the Merry Pranksters—who were just then emerging as the West Coast’s premier LSD proselytizers—drove from San Francisco to Long Beach, where they partied with the Stones and plied the band’s dissolute guitarist, Brian Jones, with a fistful of acid. (By contrast, when the Beatles completed a U.S. tour at San Francisco’s Cow Palace in 1965, the Pranksters tried to host a party in their honor, but the group never showed.)1 In 1966, when London’s new underground paper International Times threw a launch party, Jagger showed up with Marianne Faithfull, while Paul McCartney lurked around in a disguise. Actor Peter Coyote recalled that when he and a group of “twenty-odd rockers, bikers, and street people” visited the Beatles in London,the band and their management were visibly frightened.

The Stones also inadvertently won some radical bona fides in 1967, when Jagger and Keith Richards were busted for drugs at Richards’s country mansion in Sussex; earlier that day, George Harrison and his wife, Pattie Boyd, had been there too, but the police apparently waited for them to leave before swarming through Richards’s home and turning up heroin, amphetamines, and cannabis resin. According to Richards, the police took malicious, voyeuristic delight in busting the Stones, but at that point they dared not arrest a Beatle. Harrison agreed:“There was the kind of social pecking order… in the pop world,” he said. First, the drug squad “busted Donovan… then they busted the Rolling Stones, and they worked their way up and they busted John and Yoko, and me.”

LENNON VS. THE BLACK DWARF

“Even beyond the usual hysterical interest attracted by any new Beatles record,” Time magazine announced, “‘Hey Jude/Revolution,’” was “special.” Released in the United States on August 26, 1968, it soon became one of the best-selling 45s in music history. Many were drawn to “Hey Jude” for its infectious chorus and unconventional four-minute fadeout, but it was Lennon’s raucous “Revolution,” on side B, that captured the attention of American radicals that summer. “That’s why I did it,” Lennon later said. “I wanted to talk, I wanted to say my piece about revolutions.”

“Revolution” opens with Lennon screaming abrasively over heavily distorted guitars, but it quickly settles into a bluesy stomp, and it soon becomes apparent that Lennon’s sonic epistle to the New Left does not express solidarity, but disaffection. Though Lennon says he shares the goals of many radicals (“We all want to change the world”) he disavows the tactics of ultramilitants (“When you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out?”)2 Elsewhere, he expresses skepticism of the New Left’s overwrought rhetoric (“Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright?”) and says he’s tired of being pestered for money for left-wing causes (“You ask me for a contribution,well you know / We’re all doing what we can”). The final verse amounted to an endorsement of the apolitical counterculture, and a toxic kiss-off to Movement radicals:

You say you’ll change the
Constitution, well you know
We all want to change your head.
You tell me it’s the institution, well
you know
You’d better free your mind instead.
But if you go carrying pictures
of Chairman Mao
You ain’t gonna make it with anyone
anyhow.

Anyone in the late 1960s who was unfamiliar with the controversy the song provoked would have to have been a “Cistercian Monk,” remarked one journalist.“The Beatles have said something and what they have said is not going to be popular with a great many,” announced Ralph Gleason, an influential music critic who helped found Rolling Stone. “The more political you are, the less you will dig the Beatles’ new song ‘Revolution.’” But Gleason approved of the song’s message. Countercultural politics, he believed, would ultimately prove more transformative than “real” politics. Instead of presenting another ineffectual “Program for the Improvement of Society,” he argued that the Beatles were teaching youths to transform their entire consciousness. Wrote Gleason: “The Beatles aren’t just more popular than Jesus, they are also more potent than SDS.”

Distributed through Liberation News Service (LNS), Gleason’s essays provoked debate in numerous underground papers. But even more widely circulated was a back-and-forth about the song between Lennon and an otherwise obscure socialist named John Hoyland,
which first appeared in the British newspaper the Black Dwarf. Hoyland initiated the exchange with “An Open Letter to John Lennon.” The last thing radicals needed to do, he said, was change their heads. Instead, they needed to pursue an aggressive politics of confrontation: “In order to change the world, we’ve got to understand what’s wrong with the world. And then — destroy it. Ruthlessly.” Hoyland also
lampooned the Beatles’ recent ventures into hip capitalism. “What will you do when Apple is as big as Marks and Spencer and one day its employees decide to run it for themselves?… [W]ill you call in the police—because you are a businessman, and Businessmen Must Protect their Interests?”3 Finally, Hoyland impertinently told Lennon that his songwriting had recently “lost its bite,” whereas the Rolling Stones were “getting stronger and stronger.” The Stones, “helped along a bit by their experiences with the law… refuse to accept the system that’s fucking up our lives,” he maintained.

Lennon was so disturbed by the letter that he phoned the Black Dwarf’s editor, Tariq Ali, to complain; Ali encouraged Lennon to write a rebuttal, which appeared in a subsequent issue. In it, Lennon labored to defend the position he enunciated in “Revolution,” while simultaneously trying to maintain his radical credentials.“ I’m not only up against the establishment, but you too, it seems,” Lennon said. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with [the world]—People— so do you want to destroy them? Ruthlessly? Until you/we fix your/ our heads there’s no chance.” Lennon added that Apple Co. was less a moneymaking venture than a vehicle for the Beatles’ creative experimentation, and he professed not to care much about it.

But Lennon was disingenuous: “Look man, I was/am not against you,” he said, even though Hoyland— who championed the revolutionary overthrow of the State— was exactly the type of person that “Revolution” targeted. Then when radicals like Hoyland objected, Lennon pandered to them by suggesting the song didn’t really mean what it seemingly meant. Still, he was pissed.“Instead of splitting hairs about the Beatles and the Stones,” Lennon added,“think a little bigger…”

Though Hoyland’s reply seemed to be written in the first person, it was actually written by the Black Dwarf editorial collective, which maintained that “Revolution” amounted to a betrayal. The feeling’s [sic] I’ve gotten from songs like “Strawberry Fields” and “A Day in the Life” are part of what made me into the kind of socialist I am. But then you suddenly kicked us in the face with “Revolution.” That’s why I wrote you—to answer an attack you made on us, to criticize a position you took… in relation to the revolutionary socialist movement— knowing that what you said would be listened to by millions, whereas whatever reply we make here is read by only a few thousand.

During this period, countless other rock enthusiasts turned volteface against the Beatles. The underground press “ate the Beatles alive,” one journalist remembered. A writer for San Diego’s Teaspoon Door disparaged “Revolution” as an “unmistakable call for counter-revolution.” Village Voice critic Robert Christgau was likewise disappointed that the Beatles went out of their way to criticize the political left. A writer for New Left Review called the song a “lamentable petty bourgeois cry of fear.” In Ramparts, Jon Landau called the song a “betrayal.”

Balanced against this, a few others read a more complicated message in Lennon’s song. Some held that its musical textures overwhelmed its lyrical content.“‘Revolution’ isn’t the strumming of a folk guitar, it is the crashing explosions of a great rock ’n’ roll band,” wrote Greil Marcus. “There is freedom in the movement, even as there is sterility and repression in the lyrics.” “We owe an apology to the Beatles,” said another radical journalist. “However shitty the lyrics of ‘Revolution’ may be, the message”—that is, the question of whether a revolution was desirable or necessary, and how to go about effecting one—had at least provoked a useful conversation. Another writer credited the song with generating “more thought and discussion over the whole question of violence and revolution among young people than any other single piece of art or literature.” Yet another fan simply would not be deterred. “The Beatles’ politics are terrible,” he said, “but they’re on our side.”

THE VIOLENT PALACE REVOLUTION

Contra to “Revolution” was the Stones new single from Beggars Banquet “Street Fighting Man,” which was released in the United States on August 30, 1968, just four days after “Revolution.” (Years before, the two groups had agreed never to release their records on the same day, so as not to divide their fans.) Fearful that the song would further inflame the passions of militants involved in the now famous chaos surrounding the Democratic National Convention, most Chicago radio stations refused to play it. “No song better captured the feeling of 1968 than ‘Street Fighting Man,’” historian Jon Wiener argues. Jagger supposedly penned its lyrics after attending a March 1968 antiwar rally at London’s Grosvenor Square, where demonstrators and mounted policemen skirmished outside the U.S. Embassy. Witnesses are divided about the extent of Jagger’s participation; one remembers him “throwing rocks and having a good time,”while another recalls him “hiding [and] running.” Supposedly to his regret, Jagger had to abandon the protest after being recognized by fans and reporters. The song’s refrain was thought by some to evoke his feelings of impotence and frustration (“But what can a poor boy do? / except to sing for a rock ’n’ roll band? / ’Cause in sleepy London town / there’s just no place for a street fighting man”). Others saw the refrain as a hedge against the song’s more provocative lyrics.

Soon after its release, New York’s Rat printed the lyrics to “Street Fighting Man” in a sidebar: “Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet boy / ’Cause the summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the street.” Since they were delivered menacingly, over a charging beat, some regarded the song as a “demonstration clarion call.” Protesting the police assassination of Fred Hampton in Chicago, SDSer Jonah Raskin recalls marching up New York’s Fifth Avenue in December 1968. When someone beside him started whistling the song’s tune, Raskin writes,“I chanted the words myself: ‘The time is right for violent revolution.’ I arched one stone after the other; the whole plate glass window collapsed.”4 When the Stones played Madison Square Garden,
a group of New York radicals called the Mad Dogs draped a nine-by-twelve-foot National Liberation Front (NLF) flag from the top of the balcony. When they played Chicago in November 1969, Jagger dedicated “Street Fighting Man” to the people of that city, “and what you did here last year.” When the tour reached Seattle, members of Weatherman crashed the gates and passed out leaflets. In Oakland, yet another group of new leftists distributed a flyer:“Greetings and welcome Rolling Stones, our comrades in the desperate battle against the maniacs who hold power. The revolutionary youth of the world hears your music and is inspired to even more deadly acts…”

Fearful of being sent to prison after his 1967 drug arrest, Mick Jagger declared on a British television show,“I don’t really want to form a new code of living or a code of morals or anything like that. I don’t think anyone in this generation wants to.” But in 1969, he left some believing that he did in fact endorse a general uprising. Asked about “Street Fighting Man” being banned by Chicago radio stations, Jagger mused, “They must think a song can make a revolution. I wish it could.”

Notes

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – The U.S. military denied on Tuesday that one of its convoys opened fire on demonstrators who had blocked a main road near Baghdad, after residents and police said the unit had wounded up to 18 people.

U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Donnelly confirmed protesters had stopped a convoy in the town of Khalis, 80 km (50 miles) north of Baghdad on the main road linking the capital to the northern city of Kirkuk.

“There was small arms fire and thrown rocks received from somewhere in the vicinity of the protest. We fired warning shots and smoke to screen anyone from aiming at our units. At no time did the unit fire at the crowd,” Donnelly said in an email in reply to questions from Reuters.

He said the provincial joint coordination centre had reported four injuries, although he did make clear how these injuries occurred.

One of the protesters, Fuad Hameed, 40, told Reuters that residents had been protesting the lack of security in the town. Seventeen mortar rounds hit different parts of Khalis on Saturday, killing seven people.

He said U.S. troops in the convoy at first tried to disperse the protesters with teargas and then opened fire and at least 17 people were wounded, mostly in the lower parts of their bodies.

Police said 18 people had been wounded, some of them seriously.

Hameed said residents continued their protest after the U.S. convoy moved on. They are demanding more action from local authorities and the police to curb the violence.

In Unprecedented Order, FISA Court Requires Bush Administration to Respond to ACLU’s Request That Secret Court Orders Be Released to the Public.

WASHINGTON – In an unprecedented order, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has required the U.S. government to respond to a request it received last week by the American Civil Liberties Union for orders and legal papers discussing the scope of the government’s authority to engage in the secret wiretapping of Americans. According to the FISC’s order, the ACLU’s request “warrants further briefing,” and the government must respond to it by August 31. The court has said that any reply by the ACLU must be filed by September 14.

“Disclosure of these court orders and legal papers is essential to the ongoing debate about government surveillance,” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. “We desperately need greater transparency and public scrutiny.We’re extremely encouraged by today’s development because it means that, at long last, the government will be required to defend its contention that the orders should not be released.”

The ACLU filed the request with the FISC following Congress’ recent passage of the so-called “Protect America Act,” a law that vastly expands the Bush administration’s authority to conduct warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ international phone calls and e-mails. In their aggressive push to justify passing this ill-advised legislation, the administration and members of Congress made repeated and veiled references to orders issued by the FISC earlier this year. The legislation is set to expire in six months unless it is renewed.

“These court orders relate to the circumstances in which the government should be permitted to use its profoundly intrusive surveillance powers to intercept the communications of U.S. citizens and residents,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “The debate about this issue should not take place in a vacuum.It’s imperative that the public have access to basic information about what the administration has proposed and what the intelligence court has authorized.”

FISC orders have played a critical role in the evolution of the government’s surveillance activities over the past six years. After September 11, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to inaugurate a program of warrantless wiretapping inside the United States. In January 2007, however, just days before an appeals court was to hear the government’s appeal from a judicial ruling that had found the NSA program to be illegal in a case brought by the ACLU, Attorney General Gonzales announced that the NSA program would be discontinued. Gonzales explained that the change was made possible by FISC orders issued on January 10, 2007, which he characterized as “complex” and “innovative.” Those orders are among the documents requested by the ACLU.

Since January 2007, government officials have spoken publicly about the January 10 orders in congressional testimony, to the media and in legal papers – the orders remaining secret all the while. They have also indicated that the FISC issued other orders in the spring that restricted the administration’s surveillance activities. House Minority Leader John Boehner stated that the FISC had issued a ruling prohibiting intelligence agents from intercepting foreign-to-foreign calls passing through the United States. To a large extent, it was the perception that the FISC had issued an order limiting the administration’s surveillance authority that led Congress to pass the new legislation expanding the government’s surveillance powers. Yet the order itself, like the January 2007 order, has remained secret.

The ACLU’s request to the FISC acknowledges that the FISC’s docket includes a significant amount of material that is properly classified. The ACLU argues, however, that the release of court orders and opinions would not raise any security concern to the extent that these records address purely legal issues about the scope of the government’s wiretap authority, and points out that the FISC has released such orders and opinions before. The ACLU is seeking release of all information in those judicial orders and legal papers the court determines, after independent review, to be unclassified or improperly classified.

A copy of the FISA court order, the ACLU’s motion to the FISC, as well as information about the ACLU’s lawsuit against the NSA and other related materials are available online at: www.aclu.org/spying.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States stood tall — militarily invincible, economically unrivalled, diplomatically uncontestable, and the dominating force on information channels worldwide. The next century was to be the true “American century,” with the rest of the world molding itself in the image of the sole superpower.

Yet, with not even a decade of this century behind us, we are already witnessing the rise of a multipolar world in which new powers are challenging different aspects of American supremacy — Russia and China in the forefront, with regional powers Venezuela and Iran forming the second rank. These emergent powers are primed to erode American hegemony, not confront it, singly or jointly.

How and why has the world evolved in this way so soon? The Bush administration’s debacle in Iraq is certainly a major factor in this transformation, a classic example of an imperialist power, brimming with hubris, over-extending itself. To the relief of many — in the U. S. and elsewhere — the Iraq fiasco has demonstrated the striking limitations of power for the globe’s highest-tech, most destructive military machine. In Iraq, Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to two U.S. presidents, concedes in a recent op-ed, “We are being wrestled to a draw by opponents who are not even an organized state adversary.”

The invasion and subsequent disastrous occupation of Iraq and the mismanaged military campaign in Afghanistan have crippled the credibility of the United States. The scandals at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Guantanamo in Cuba, along with the widely publicized murders of Iraqi civilians in Haditha, have badly tarnished America’s moral self-image. In the latest opinion poll, even in a secular state and member of NATO like Turkey, only 9% of Turks have a “favorable view” of the U.S. (down from 52% just five years ago).

Yet there are other explanations — unrelated to Washington’s glaring misadventures — for the current transformation in international affairs. These include, above all, the tightening market in oil and natural gas, which has enhanced the power of hydrocarbon-rich nations as never before; the rapid economic expansion of the mega-nations China and India; the transformation of China into the globe’s leading manufacturing base; and the end of the Anglo-American duopoly in international television news.

Many Channels, Diverse Perceptions

During the 1991 Gulf War, only CNN and the BBC had correspondents in Baghdad. So the international TV audience, irrespective of its location, saw the conflict through their lenses. Twelve years later, when the Bush administration, backed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, invaded Iraq, Al Jazeera Arabic broke this duopoly. It relayed images — and facts — that contradicted the Pentagon’s presentation. For the first time in history, the world witnessed two versions of an ongoing war in real time. So credible was the Al Jazeera Arabic version that many television companies outside the Arabic-speaking world — in Europe, Asia and Latin America — showed its clips.

Though, in theory, the growth of cable television worldwide raised the prospect of ending the Anglo-American duopoly in 24-hour TV news, not much had happened due to the exorbitant cost of gathering and editing TV news. It was only the arrival of Al Jazeera English, funded by the hydrocarbon-rich emirate of Qatar — with its declared policy of offering a global perspective from an Arab and Muslim angle — that, in 2006, finally broke the long-established mold.

Soon France 24 came on the air, broadcasting in English and French from a French viewpoint, followed in mid-2007 by the English-language Press TV, which aimed to provide an Iranian perspective. Russia was next in line for 24-hour TV news in English for the global audience. Meanwhile, spurred by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Telesur, a pan-Latin-American TV channel based in Caracas, began competing with CNN in Spanish for a mass audience.

As with Qatar, so with Russia and Venezuela, the funding for these TV news ventures has come from soaring national hydrocarbon incomes — a factor draining American hegemony not just in imagery but in reality.

Russia, an Energy Superpower

Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia has more than recovered from the economic chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. After effectively renationalizing the energy industry through state-controlled corporations, he began deploying its economic clout to further Russia’s foreign policy interests.

In 2005, Russia overtook the United States, becoming the second largest oil producer in the world. Its oil income now amounts to $679 million a day. European countries dependent on imported Russian oil now include Hungary, Poland, Germany, and even Britain.

Russia is also the largest producer of natural gas on the planet, with three-fifths of its gas exports going to the 27-member European Union (EU). Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, and Slovakia get 100% of their natural gas from Russia; Turkey, 66%; Poland, 58%; Germany 41%; and France 25%. Gazprom, the biggest natural gas enterprise on Earth, has established stakes in sixteen EU countries. In 2006, the Kremlin’s foreign reserves stood at $315 billion, up from a paltry $12 billion in 1999. Little wonder that, in July 2006 on the eve of the G8 summit in St Petersburg, Putin rejected an energy charter proposed by the Western leaders.

Soaring foreign-exchange reserves, new ballistic missiles, and closer links with a prospering China — with which it conducted joint military exercises on China’s Shandong Peninsula in August 2005 — enabled Putin to deal with his American counterpart, President George W. Bush, as an equal, not mincing his words when appraising American policies.

“One country, the United States, has overstepped its national boundaries in every way,” Putin told the 43rd Munich Trans-Atlantic conference on security policy in February 2007. “This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations…This is very dangerous.”

Condemning the concept of a “unipolar world,” he added: “However one might embellish this term, at the end of the day it describes a scenario in which there is one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making…It is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And this is pernicious.” His views fell on receptive ears in the capitals of most Asian, African, and Latin American countries.

The changing relationship between Moscow and Washington was noted, among others, by analysts and policy-makers in the hydrocarbon-rich Persian Gulf region. Commenting on the visit that Putin paid to long-time U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar after the Munich conference, Abdel Aziz Sagar, chairman of the Gulf Research Center, wrote in the Doha-based newspaper The Peninsula that Russia and Gulf Arab countries, once rivals from opposite ideological camps, had found a common agenda of oil, anti-terrorism, and arms sales. “The altered focus takes place in a milieu where the Gulf countries are signaling their keenness to keep all geopolitical options open, reviewing the utility of the United States as the sole security guarantor, and contemplating a collective security mechanism that involves a host of international players.”

In April 2007, the Kremlin issued a major foreign policy document. “The myth about the unipolar world fell apart once and for all in Iraq,” it stated. “A strong, more self-confident Russia has become an integral part of positive changes in the world.”

Gargantuan loan guarantees for a “new generation” of nuke reactors define the Senate’s version of the Energy Bill that Congress will consider right after Labor Day.

Its backers say the $50 billion-plus in radioactive pork will give us “inherently safe” reactors–which is what they said about the last crop, including Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and hundreds of billions in cost overruns and abysmal failure.

Nuke reactors are no safer than those coal mines just littered with fresh corpses, than that collapsed Minnesota bridge, or than the levees that let Katrina swamp New Orleans, and are poised to do it again.

The first “new generation” nuke is already swamped with cost overruns and absurd miscalculations. Finnish regulators are screaming at Areva, the French-based nuke pushers, about corner-cutting and costly delays.

But these are merely the latest in the endless flow of “nuke nuggets” that have made the world’s 430-plus reactors history’s most lethal and expensive technological failure:

Faulty plumbing forced one US nuke operator to shut on-site toilet facilities while the cooling system was in use;

At another US reactor, a basketball wrapped in tape was used to stop up a critical reactor tube;

Consecutive global-warmed “hundred-year floods” threatened to swamp the two Prairie Island reactors (south of that collapsed Minnesota bridge) nearly irradiating the entire downstream Mississippi River;

Like coal miners, uranium miners die en masse from lung cancer and tunnel collapses;

Steam releases killed and maimed at least four workers at Virginia’s North Anna complex;

“Too cheap to meter” was atomic energy’s mantra until it delivered gargantuan cost overruns and ramshackle reactors in what Forbes Magazine has called “the largest managerial disaster in business history”;

In the 2000-1 deregulation scam, the nuke industry portrayed its own reactors as being “uncompetitive,” thus demanding $100 billion in “stranded cost” subsidies for their bad reactor investments;

The Yucca Mountain nuke waste repository, which may never open, has already absorbed $10 billion, but its minimum official cost is now estimated at around $60 billion, which is likely to soar to at least $100 billion;

In 1957 the industry promised independent insurance companies would insure reactors against catastrophic accidents, but that has never happened, either for old nukes or for the proposed new ones;

Before March 28, 1979, nuke owners said the melt-down that destroyed Three Mile Island Two was “impossible”;

Before April 26, 1986, nuke owners said the explosion that destroyed Chernobyl Four was “impossible”;

For nine years, TMI’s owners said there was no significant fuel melt, until a robotic camera showed that nearly ALL the fuel had melted;

TMI’s owners say “no one died” there, but stack monitors failed during the accident and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not know exactly how much radiation escaped, where it went or who it affected;

No official systematic monitoring of the health of the people around TMI was initiated when the plant opened, or when it melted, and none has been maintained;

Some 2400 central Pennsylvania families have tried to sue for damages since TMI’s fall-out hit them, but have been denied a federal trial for nearly three decades;

Some 800,000 drafted clean-up “liquidators” were forced into Chernobyl, thousands of whom are dying of cancer;

Seven atomic reactors in Japan were significantly damaged by an earthquake despite decades of official assurances that they were safe;

Japanese authorities now admit that the recent earthquake exceeded—by a factor of three—the design specifications of the seven reactors it damaged;

Far stronger earthquakes are expected soon at all or most of Japan’s 55 reactors, where experts say at least some could be reduced to radioactive rubble;

Four reactors in California, one in Ohio and two in New York are among the many American nukes built very close to active earthquake faults;

The Perry nuke, east of Cleveland, whose owners denied it was in any danger from a nearby “geological anomaly,” was significantly damaged by a January 31, 1986 earthquake;

Despite a lawsuit by Ohio’s governor, Perry was allowed to open amidst damage to area roads and bridges that would have made evacuation impossible, and that could have meant disaster had it been operating at the time;

Near Toledo, dripping boric acid ate through the Davis-Besse pressure vessel, bringing it within a fraction of an inch of a catastrophe capable of irradiating Cleveland and all of Lake Erie;

Davis-Besse’s owner blacked out the entire northeast, including much of Canada, partly due to uneven power surges from its nukes and the deterioration of its electric power grid;

On September 11, 2001, the terrorists who crashed into the World Trade Center flew directly over the two active reactors at Indian Point, but did not hit them, apparently believing that they were protected by surface-to-air missiles;

Not one of the 100-plus US reactors is protected by surface-to-air missiles;

Virtually every US reactor has failed simple tests of security systems meant to protect them from terror attacks;

Early official government studies warned that a single meltdown could make permanently uninhabitable “an area the size of Pennsylvania”;

An attack on the Indian Point reactors on 9/11/2001 could have rendered the entire New York region — including the World Trade Centers — permanently uninhabitable, causing millions of long-term human casualties and trillions of dollars in damage, from which the US economy likely would never have recovered;

Huge heat emissions make atomic reactors major contributors to global warming, as do CO2 emissions from construction, decommissioning, the mining, milling and enrichment of uranium fuel, waste disposal, and more;

Despite being billed as a “solution to global warming,” French reactors were recently shut because they overheated local rivers with their waste cooling water;

Despite being billed as a “solution to global warming,” one reactor at Alabama’s Browns Ferry was forced shut, and two cut back 25%, as summer river temperatures hit 90 degrees, the federal limit;

These shut-downs come precisely when power is most needed for air conditioning, and when the REAL solution to global warming, solar energy, is most abundant;

In 1975, a Browns Ferry reactor suffered a $100 million fire when a worker ignited its insulation with a candle;

Reactor regulators report a constant flow of “incidents” that endanger reactor operations and the public safety;

The former head of the Atomic Energy Commission’s health research efforts has calculated that “normal” reactor emissions could kill some 32,000 Americans every year;

A dollar spent on energy conservation saves ten times the energy produced by a dollar spent on a nuke;

This tragic, terrifying “nugget” list could extend on for another few hundred pages, as per THE NUGGET FILE, by a former industry insider, and FISSION STORIES by David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

With a crippled infrastructure and corner-cutting mentality, the corporate operatives building these reactors are no more competent or trustworthy than the ones in charge of coal mines, bridges, levees.

Homer Simpson will run the new nukes, just like the old nukes.

Wall Street knows it. Does Congress? Better tell them.

Jose Padilla’s conviction on terrorism charges on August 16 was a victory, not for justice, but for the US Justice (sic) Department’s theory that a US citizen can be convicted, not because he committed a terrorist act but for allegedly harboring aspirations to commit such an act. By agreeing with the Justice (sic) Department’s theory, the incompetent Padilla Jury delivered a deadly blow to the rule of law and opened Pandora’s Box.

Anglo-American law is a human achievement 800 years in the making. Over centuries law was transformed from a weapon in the hands of government into a shield of the people from unaccountable power. The Padilla Jury’s verdict turned law back into a weapon.

The jury, of course, had no idea of what was at stake. It was a patriotic jury that appeared in court with one row of jurors dressed in red, one in white, and one in blue (Peter Whoriskey, Washington Post, August 17, 2007).
It was a jury primed to be psychologically and emotionally manipulated by federal prosecutors desperate for a conviction for which there was little, if any, supporting evidence. For the jury, patriotism required that they strike a blow for America against terrorism. No member of this jury was going to return home to accusations of letting off a person who has been portrayed as a terrorist in the US media for five years.

The “evidence” against Padilla consists of three items:

(1) seven intercepted telephone conversations,

(2) a 10-year old non-relevant video of Osama bin Laden, and

(3) an alleged application to a mujahideen (not terrorist) training camp with Padilla’s fingerprints. We will examine each in turn.

The International Herald Tribune and Associated Press reported in detail on the telephone intercepts (June 19, 2007): “Accused al-Qaida operative Jose Padilla was never overheard using purported code words for violent jihad in intercepted telephone conversations and spoke often about his difficulties in learning Arabic while studying in Egypt, the lead FBI case agent testified Tuesday. The questioning of FBI Agent James T. Kavanaugh by Padilla’s attorney, Michael Caruso, focused on seven intercepted telephone calls on which Padilla’s voice is heard mostly talking about his marriage and his studies but never about Islamic extremism. . . . Caruso asked Kavanaugh if Padilla ever was heard using what prosecutors say were code words for violent jihad . . . ‘No, he does not,’ Kavanaugh replied. . . . Caruso asked Kavanaugh if Padilla was ever overheard discussing jihad training. ‘No jihad training that I’ve seen,’ Kavanaugh said. . . . ‘He’s not referring to anything here but studying Arabic, correct? Study means study, right?’ Caruso asked. ‘That’s what they’re talking about,’ Kavanaugh testified.”

Despite the FBI’s testimony that the intercepted telephone messages contained no incriminating evidence, the “patriotic” jury accepted the federal prosecutor’s unsupported accusation that there were hidden code words in the message indicating that Padilla was a terrorist. After all, who but a terrorist would want to learn Arabic?

The video of bin Laden had no relevance whatsoever to the charges in the case. The video is 10 years old and makes no reference to any of the defendants. Moreover, none of the defendants were accused of ever being in contact with bin Laden. The only purpose of the video was to arouse in jurors fear, anger, and disturbing memories associated with September 11, 2001. The fact that the judge let prosecutors sway a fearful and vengeful patriotic jury with emotion and passion rather than evidence is obviously grounds for appeal.

Whoriskey reports that in their closing arguments prosecutors mentioned al-Qaeda more than 100 times and urged jurors to think of al-Qaeda and groups alleged to be affiliated with it as an international murder conspiracy. Padilla “trained to kill,’ Assistant US Attorney Brian Frazier misinformed the jury in his closing statement.

Who Padilla wished to kill was never identified, but according to the prosecutors he had been wanting to kill persons unknown since 1998. Padilla was convicted for harboring alleged intentions, not for committing any acts. Indeed, no harmful acts are charged to Padilla. The incompetent jury fell for the prosecutors’ wild tale of a murder conspiracy many years old that had no results.

As Andrew Cohen put it, Padilla and the two co-defendants were convicted on the charge of “terrorist-wannabes” on the basis of “evidence that federal authorities did not believe amounted to a crime when it was gathered back before 2001.” Cohen concludes: “it’s further proof that if you can convince an American jury that a man in the dock had anything to do with al-Qaeda, you can pretty much bank on a conviction no matter how tenuous the evidence” (washingtonpost.com, August 16, 2007).

The training camp application form is as suspect as any evidence can be.

Moreover, the prosecution had no evidence that Padilla actually attended such a camp. Padilla was held illegally for 3.5 years and tortured. At any time during his illegal detention and torture, Padilla could have been handed a form, thus tainting it with his fingerprints.

Amy Goodman, the forensic psychiatrist Dr. Angela Hegarty, the Christian Science Monitor and others have described how US interrogators abused Padilla and destroyed his mind. To expect a person as badly tortured and abused as Padilla to retain the wits not to touch a piece of paper handed to him, or forced into his hands, is unreasonable.
When Padilla was arrested five years ago in 2002, the US government charged that he was about to set off a radioactive “dirty bomb” in a US city that would kill tens or even hundreds of thousands of Americans. The story was a total lie, a fabrication designed to keep the fear level high after 9/11 in order to keep support for the Bush regime’s wars and domestic police state. None of the charges on which Padilla was illegally held, during those years before the US Supreme Court intervened and ordered the Bush regime to release Padilla or bring him to trial, were part of the charges on which Padilla was tried.

There is little doubt that Padilla’s conviction, and probably also the convictions of the two co-defendants, is a terrible injustice. But the damage done goes far beyond the damage to the defendants. What the red, white, and blue “Padilla Jury” has done is to overthrow the US Constitution and give us the rule of men.

The US Constitution and Anglo-American legal tradition prevent indictments, much less convictions, based on a prosecutor’s theory that a person wanted to commit a crime in the past or might want to in the future. Padilla has harmed no one. There is no evidence that he made an agreement with any party to harm anyone whether for money or ideology or any reason. The FBI testified that the telephone calls were innocuous. The bin Laden video was evidence of nothing pertaining to the defendants. The piece of paper, alleged to be a personnel form recovered from an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan is nothing but a piece of paper and an assertion.

As Lawrence Stratton and I demonstrated in our book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions (2000), the protective features of law had been seriously eroded prior to the Bush regime’s assault on civil liberty in the name of “the war on terror.” The US Constitution and the Bill of Rights rest on Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. Blackstone explained law as the protective principles against tyranny –habeas corpus, due process, attorney-client privilege, no crime without intent, no retroactive law, no self-incrimination.

Jeremy Bentham claimed that these protective principles were outmoded in a democracy in which the people controlled the government and no longer had reasons to fear it. The problem with Blackstone’s “Rights of Englishmen,” Bentham said, is that these civil liberties needlessly limit the government’s power and, thus, its ability to protect citizens from crime. Bentham wanted to preempt criminal acts by arresting those likely to commit crimes in advance, before the budding criminals entered into a life of crime. Bentham, like the Bush regime, the “Padilla Jury,” and the Republican Federalist Society, did not understand that when law becomes a weapon, liberty dies regardless of the form of government. If they do understand, they prefer unaccountable government power to individual liberty.

The incompetent “Padilla Jury” has done Americans and their liberty far more damage than will ever be done by terrorists, other than those in our criminal justice (sic) system who now wield the powers that Bentham wanted to give them.

The Padilla case was the way the Bush Justice (sic) Department implemented its strategy for taking away the legal principles that protect American citizens. Padilla is an American citizen. He was denied habeas corpus and his rights to an attorney and due process. He was tortured in an attempt to coerce him into self-incrimination. In treating Padilla in these ways, the US Department of Justice (sic) violated both the US Constitution and federal law. There is no doubt whatsoever that the Justice (sic) Department committed far more crimes than did Padilla.

By the time the Supreme Court finally intervened, Padilla was universally known as the demonized “dirty bomber,” an “enemy combatant” who was arrested before he could set off a radioactive bomb in a US city. The Injustice Department could now simultaneously convict Padilla and enshrine Benthamite law simply by appealing to fear and patriotism. And that is what happened.

Under Benthamite law, the individual has no rights. The new calculus is “the greatest good for the greatest number” as determined by the wielders of power. On the basis of this new law, not written by Congress but invented by the Injustice Department and made precedent by the “Padilla Jury” verdict, the US can lock up people based on the percentage of crime committed by their race, gender, income class, or ethnic group.

Under Benthamite law, people can be arrested and prosecuted for thought crimes. Under Benthamite law, it is the government that protects the people, not the Constitution and Bill of Rights that protect the individual. Benthamite law makes “advocacy speech,” for example, a call for the overthrow of the US government, upheld in the 1969 Supreme Court decision, Brandenburg v. Ohio, a serious federal crime.

The “Padilla Jury” has opened Pandora’s Box. Unless the conviction is overturned on appeal, American liberty died in the “Padilla Jury’s” verdict.

BAGHDAD: The United States is pressing ahead with an American-financed effort to recruit and pay local Sunni Arabs to protect neighborhoods in districts scattered across a wide swath of central Iraq.

The initiative has generated deep skepticism in some members of the Shiite-led Iraqi government, who fear that the strategy could intensify the already intense sectarian warfare here.

The American military says it is not arming the new forces, at least initially, but in some areas, tribal groups bring their own weapons.

On Saturday, in the ravaged Sunni neighborhood of Ghazaliya, freshly recruited members of the local force were on display in crisp new cargo pants and flak jackets during a visit by the top American commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and the American ambassador, Ryan Crocker. Both made it clear that the United States sees the creation of the so-called Guardian forces as a major new initiative to improve security on the streets of Iraq.

The effort is loosely based on successes the United States has had in Anbar, the desert province where Sunni tribes have been paid to ally themselves with American-led multinational forces in fighting insurgent groups. In an interview in the back of a tiny shop in Ghazaliya, Petraeus said that the United States was pressing to set up Guardian forces in places where the tribes were not strong or prevalent enough to serve as a backbone of the program.

Iraqi streets are both protected and terrorized by militias of all kinds, leaving the United States open to criticism that it could simply be creating a fighting force whose loyalty to the legitimate government is open to question.

Some of the existing militias are loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, some to other Shiite political groups and many to no one but local commanders. At the same time, the Sunni tribes have armed wings, and a wide spectrum of insurgent groups and criminal gangs also wield the power of the gun.

The Guardians could also be seen as natural targets for some Shiite militias, potentially generating violence even as they try to tamp it down.

Asked whether he supported the Guardian program, whether he thought it should be put in place countrywide and whether he thought it could improve security, Petraeus replied, “Yes, yes and yes.”

But he said that the effort would have to be tailored to individual neighborhoods.

Variants of such forces have turned up in Amiriya and Abu Ghraib neighborhoods in western Baghdad, in Diyala Province in the east, in Falluja in Anbar Province and elsewhere. On Saturday, the No. 2 commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, reviewed a similar force in Yusufiya, in a deadly region just south of the capital.

Even though the initiative could be seen as a sign of mistrust for the Iraqi police forces, Petraeus said it was supported by high-ranking members of the Iraqi government, including Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. The police are heavily infiltrated by members of Shiite militias that are accused of sowing terror among Sunnis in Baghdad.

But Iraq’s deputy national security adviser and a member of its reconciliation council, Safa al-Sheik, said that the Iraqi government had not been involved when the Americans began the program and it was divided on it now. “Some of the people think it is arming the Sunnis,” Sheik said. “They believe it will be preparation for civil war.”

Partly for those reasons, he said, the prime minister generally favors the program but is not ready to endorse it.

Even Fox’s Chris Wallace wants to know why Bush’s newly departed advisor had to paint Democrats as traitors.

On Fox News Sunday morning, Karl Rove played the victim. He told host Chris Wallace that in the wake of his resignation as White House deputy chief of staff, his enemies were on the hunt. Rove compared himself to a legendary monster whom the ancient Anglo-Saxon hero Beowulf sought to slay. “I mean, I’m a myth, and they’re … You know, I’m Grendel. … They’re after me.”

But Rove, who pursued his Democratic foes with a relentless repertoire of dirty tricks, smears, and outright lies, won’t win many sympathizers by depicting himself as unfairly maligned. He is likely to be remembered above all for his own expertise at demonization, specifically for his ability to paint his political opponents as unreliable partners in the “war on terror” — as traitors to the United States. A master propagandist, he portrayed his rivals as fellow travelers with Osama bin Laden, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. Like Cain, from whom Grendel was said to be descended, Rove was more interested in fratricide than in the welfare of his people.

While the Democrats were debating on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday morning, Rove appeared on the other three political talk shows. Surprisingly, it was Wallace of “Fox News Sunday” who asked Rove to defend his rhetorical legacy. For about a fourth of his interview, Wallace pushed Rove again and again to explain his willingness to cast aspersions on the patriotism of Democrats.

First, he asked Rove about the decision of the White House to turn the “war on terror” into a campaign issue in the 2002 midterms. He cited as an example the Republican attacks on Democratic Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia as weak on national security.

Cleland, a veteran who lost an arm and both of his legs in Vietnam, faced Republican Saxby Chambliss, who had never worn a uniform. Yet Chambliss lashed out at Cleland “for breaking his oath to protect and defend the Constitution,” accusing him of treason. Chambliss won the election. Many believe that Rove advised Chambliss and other Republican candidates to pursue this sort of smear campaign. Terrorism, Rove observed, is a good issue for the Republicans to take to the country.

Among Rove’s techniques was to identify every stance, every word, in every piece of legislation put forward by President Bush as identical with the welfare and security of the United States, and therefore any opposition to any jot or tittle of it as inimical to the country’s essential interests. That is, he inscribed the nation on the person of George W. Bush, so that opposition to the president was coded as betrayal of America.

Pressed by Wallace on Sunday to explain what made Cleland a traitor, Rove responded by attacking the former Georgia senator yet again, this time for having wanted to allow employees of the Department of Homeland Security to have a union. He did not explain why such stances made Cleland a menace to the Constitution, unless one holds that unions are unconstitutional.

Wallace followed up by asking Rove to justify the notorious June 22, 2005, speech he gave before the New York Conservative Party, in which he alleged that Democrats were soft on terror. It is worth recalling at length what Rove said on that occasion: “Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. In the wake of 9/11, conservatives believed it was time to unleash the might and power of the United States military against the Taliban; in the wake of 9/11, liberals believed it was time to … submit a petition.”

Rove’s diatribe depended for its effect on a series of deft substitutions, both explicit and implied. First, he misrepresented liberals by coding MoveOn.org, the grass-roots Internet activists who did urge alternatives to a frontal assault on the Taliban, as representative of liberal opinion generally. Then, by mentioning Democratic Party figures such as Howard Dean and Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, he implied that he was speaking about that party. Unless we assume that most Democrats are not liberals, then the attack was certainly partisan. It was also false. In polling soon after the 2001 attacks, 84 percent of self-identified liberals supported military action in response, and 80 percent of Democrats favored war against Afghanistan. Democratic members of Congress largely supported the Afghanistan war as well, with the senators voting for it unanimously.

08/18/07 “Global Research” — — Canadian jurisdiction over its Northern territories was redefined, following an April 2002 military agreement between Ottawa and Washington. This agreement allows for the deployment of US troops anywhere in Canada, as well as the stationing of US warships in Canada’s territorial waters.

Following the creation of US Northern Command in April 2002, Washington announced unilaterally that NORTHCOM’s territorial jurisdiction (land, sea, air) extended from the Caribbean basin to the Canadian arctic territories.

“The new command was given responsibility for the continental United States, Canada, Mexico, portions of the Caribbean and the contiguous waters in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans up to 500 miles off the North American coastline. NorthCom’s mandate is to “provide a necessary focus for [continental] aerospace, land and sea defenses, and critical support for [the] nation’s civil authorities in times of national need.”

(Canada-US Relations – Defense Partnership – July 2003, Canadian American Strategic Review (CASR), http://www.sfu.ca/casr/ft-lagasse1.htm

NORTHCOM’s stated mandate was to “provide a necessary focus for [continental] aerospace, land and sea defenses, and critical support for [the] nation’s [US] civil authorities in times of national need.”

(Canada-US Relations – Defense Partnership – July 2003, Canadian American Strategic Review (CASR), http://www.sfu.ca/casr/ft-lagasse1.htm)

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld boasted that “the NORTHCOM – with all of North America as its geographic command – ‘is part of the greatest transformation of the Unified Command Plan [UCP] since its inception in 1947.'” (Ibid)

Canada and US Northern Command

In December 2002, following the refusal of (former) Prime Minister Jean Chrétien to join US Northern Command (NORTHCOM), an interim bi-national military authority entitled the Binational Planning Group (BPG) was established.

Canadian membership in NORTHCOM would have implied the integration of Canada’s military command structures with those of the US. That option had been temporarily deferred by the Chrétien government, through the creation of the Binational Planning Group (BPG).

The BPG’s formal mandate in 2002 was to extend the jurisdiction of the US-Canada North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) to cover sea, land and “civil forces”,

“to improve current Canada–United States arrangements to defend against primarily maritime threats to the continent and respond to land-based attacks, should they occur.”

Although never acknowledged in official documents, the BPG was in fact established to prepare for the merger of NORAD and NORTHCOM, thereby creating de facto conditions for Canada to join US Northern Command.

The “Group” described as an “independent” military authority was integrated from the outset in December 2002 into the command structures of NORAD and NORTHCOM, both operating out the same headquarters at the Paterson Air Force base in Colorado. In practice, the “Group” functioned under the jurisdiction of US Northern Command, which is controlled by the US Department of Defense.

In December 2004, in the context of President Bush’s visit to Ottawa, it was agreed that the mandate of the BPG would be extended to May 2006. It was understood that this extension was intended to set the stage for Canada’s membership in NORTHCOM.

In March 2006, two months before the end of its mandate, the BPG published a task force document on North American security issues:

“‘A continental approach’ to defense and security could facilitate binational maritime domain awareness and a combined response to potential threats, ‘which transcends Canadian and U.S. borders, domains, defense and security departments and agencies,’ (quoted in Homeland Defense watch, 20 July 2006)

The BPG task force report called for the establishment of a “maritime mission” for NORAD including a maritime warning system. The report acted as a blueprint for the renegotiation of NORAD, which was implemented immediately following the release of the report.

On April 28, 2006, an agreement negotiated behind closed doors was signed between the US and Canada.

The renewed NORAD agreement was signed in Ottawa by the US ambassador and the Canadian Minister of Defense Gordon O’Connor, without prior debate in the Canadian Parliament. The House of Commons was allowed to rubberstamp a fait accompli, an agreement which had already been signed by the two governments.

“‘A continental approach to defense and security could facilitate binational maritime domain awareness and a combined response to potential threats, “which transcends Canadian and U.S. borders, domains, defense and security departments and agencies,’ the report says.” (Homeland Defense Watch, May 8, 2006)

While NORAD still exists in name, its organizational structure coincides with that of NORTHCOM. Following the April 28, 2006 agreement, in practical terms, NORAD has been merged into USNORTHCOM.

NORTHCOM Commander Gen. Gene Renuart, USAF happens to be Commander of NORAD, Maj. Gen. Paul J. Sullivan who is NORTHCOM Chief of Staff, is Chief of Staff of NORAD.

With a exception of a token Canadian General, who occupies the position of Deputy Commander of NORAD, the leadership of NORAD coincides with that of NORTHCOM. (See photo gallery below).

These two military authorities are identical in structure, they occupy the same facilities at the Peterson Air Force base in Colorado.

There was no official announcement of the renewed NORAD agreement, which hands over control of Canada’s territorial waters to the US, nor was there media coverage of this far-reaching decision.

The Deployment of US Troops on Canadian Soil

At the outset of US Northern Command in April 2002, Canada accepted the right of the US to deploy US troops on Canadian soil.

“U.S. troops could be deployed to Canada and Canadian troops could cross the border into the United States if the continent was attacked by terrorists who do not respect borders, according to an agreement announced by U.S. and Canadian officials.” (Edmunton Sun, 11 September 2002)

With the creation of the BPG in December 2002, a binational “Civil Assistance Plan” was established. The latter described the precise “conditions for deploying U.S. troops in Canada, or vice versa, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack or natural disaster.” (quoted in Inside the Army, 5 September 2005).

Canadian Sovereignty

In August 2006, the US State Department confirmed that a new NORAD Agreement had entered into force, while emphasizing that “the maritime domain awareness component was of ‘indefinite duration,’ albeit subject to periodic review.” (US Federal News, 1 August 2006). In March 2007, the US Senate Armed Services Committee confirmed that the NORAD Agreement had been formally renewed, to include a maritime warning system. In Canada, in contrast, there has been a deafening silence.

In Canada, the renewed NORAD agreement went virtually unnoticed. There was no official pronouncement by the Canadian government of Stephen Harper. There was no analysis or commentary of its significance and implications for Canadian territorial sovereignty. The agreement was barely reported by the Canadian media.

Operating under a “North American” emblem (i.e. a North American Command), the US military would have jurisdiction over Canadian territory from coast to coast; extending from the St Laurence Valley to the Queen Elizabeth archipelago in the Canadian Arctic. The agreement would allow for the establishment of “North American” military bases on Canadian territory. From an economic standpoint, it would also integrate the Canadian North, with its vast resources in energy and raw materials, with Alaska.

Ottawa’s Military Facility in Resolute Bay

Ottawa’s July 2007 decision to establish a military facility in Resolute Bay in the Northwest Passage was not intended to reassert “Canadian sovereignty. In fact quite the opposite. It was established in consultation with Washington. A deep-water port at Nanisivik, on the northern tip of Baffin Island is also envisaged.

The US administration is firmly behind the Canadian government’s decision. The latter does not “reassert Canadian sovereignty”. Quite the opposite. It is a means to eventually establish US territorial control over Canada’s entire Arctic region including its waterways. This territory would eventually fall under the jurisdiction of US Northern Command (NORTHCOM).

The Security and Prosperity Partnership Agreement (SPP)

The Security and Prosperity Partnership Agreement (SPP) signed between the US, Canada and Mexico contemplates the formation of a North American Union (NAU), a territorial dominion, extending from the Caribbean to the Canadian arctic territories.

The SPP is closely related to the Binational Planning Group initiative. An Independent Task Force sponsored by The Council on Foreign Relations calls for the transformation of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) into a “multiservice Defense Command”. The CFR document entitled “North American Community” drafted on behalf of the SPP endorses the BPG March 2006 recommendations:

“As recommended in a report of the Canadian-U.S. Joint Planning Group [BPG], NORAD should evolve into a multiservice Defense Command that would expand the principle of Canadian-U.S. joint command to land and naval as well as air forces engaged in defending the approaches to North America. In addition, Canada and the United States should reinforce other bilateral defense institutions, including the Permanent Joint Board on Defense and Joint Planning Group, and invite Mexico to send observers.

(North American Community, Task Force documented sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) together with the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and the Consejo Mexicano de Asuntos Internacionales)

The accession of Canada to this Multiservice Defense Command, as recommended by the CFR, has already been established, signed and sealed, approved by the Canadian Parliament in May 2006, in the context of the renewal of the NORAD agreement.

In all likelihood, the formal merging of “the renewed NORAD” and US NORTHCOM will be on the agenda at the August Security and Prosperity Partnership Agreement (SPP) Summit meeting of President Bush, Prime Minister Harper and President Calderon at Montebello, Quebec. This decision would lead to the formation of a US-Canada NORTHCOM, with a new name, but with substantially the same NORTHCOM rhetorical mandate of “defending the Northern American Homeland” against terrorist attacks. The military of both the US and Canada would also be called to play an increasing role in civilian law enforcement activities.

The real objective underlying the SPP is to militarize civilian institutions and repeal democratic government.

“Integration” or the “Annexation” of Canada?

Canada is contiguous to “the center of the empire”. Territorial control over Canada is part of the US geopolitical and military agenda. It is worth recalling in this regard, that throughout history, the “conquering nation” has expanded on its immediate borders, acquiring control over contiguous territories.

Military integration is intimately related to the ongoing process of integration in the spheres of trade, finance and investment. Needless to say, a large part of the Canadian economy is already in the hands of US corporate interests. In turn, the interests of big business in Canada tend to coincide with those of the US.

Canada is already a de facto economic protectorate of the USA. NAFTA has not only opened up new avenues for US corporate expansion, it has laid the groundwork under the existing North American umbrella for the post 9/11 integration of military command structures, public security, intelligence and law enforcement.

No doubt, Canada’s entry into US Northern Command will be presented to public opinion as part of Canada-US “cooperation”, as something which is “in the national interest”, which “will create jobs for Canadians”, and “will make Canada more secure”.

Ultimately what is at stake is that beneath the rhetoric, Canada will cease to function as a Nation:

-Its borders will be controlled by US officials and confidential information on Canadians will be shared with Homeland Security.

-US troops and Special Forces will be able to enter Canada as a result of a binational arrangement.

-Canadian citizens can be arrested by US officials, acting on behalf of their Canadian counterparts and vice versa.

But there is something perhaps even more fundamental in defining and understanding where Canada and Canadians stand as nation.

By endorsing a Canada-US “integration” in the spheres of defense, homeland security, police and intelligence, Canada not remains a full fledged member of George W. Bush’s “Coalition of the Willing”, it will directly participate, through integrated military command structures, in the US war agenda in Central Asia and the Middle East, including the massacre of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the torture of POWs, the establishment of concentration camps, etc.

Canada would no longer have an independent foreign policy. Under an integrated North American Command, a North American national security doctrine would be formulated. Canada would be obliged to embrace Washington’s pre-emptive military doctrine, its bogus “war on terrorism which is used as a pretext for waging war in the Middle East.

08/18/07 “ICH” — – With habeas corpus a thing of the past, with arrest and detention without charge permitted, with torture and spying without court oversight all the rage, with prosecutors free to tape conversations between lawyers and their clients, and with the judicial branch now infested by rightwing judges who would have been at home in courtrooms of the Soviet Union or Hitler’s Germany, for all they seem to care about common law tradition, the only real thing holding the line against absolute tyranny in the U.S. has been the jury.

Now, with Jose Padilla–a US citizen who was originally picked up and held incommunicado on a military base for three and a half years, publicly accused (though never charged) with planning to construct and detonate a so-called “dirty” nuclear device (this a guy without a high school education!), all based upon hearsay, evidence elicited by torture, and a few overheard wiretapped conversations where prosecutors claimed words like “zucchini” were code for explosive devices-convicted on a charge of “planning to murder,” we see that juries in this era of a bogus “war on terror” are ready to believe anything.

That last line of defense-the common sense or ordinary citizens in a jury box-is gone too.

The jury in this case apparently accepted the government’s contention that Padilla was a member of Al Qaeda, and had returned from a trip to Pakistan full of plans to wreak mayhem on his own country. They cared not a whit for the fact that the government had used methods against Padilla (three years of isolation and total sensory deprivation that had driven him insane) which would have made medieval torturers green with envy. They cared not a whit that there was no real evidence against Padilla.

This was, in the end, a case that most closely resembled the famous Saturday Night Live skit in which witches were dunked underwater to “prove” whether they were in fact witches, and where if they drowned, they were found to be innocent. In the end, Padilla’s jury simply bought the government’s wild and wild-eyed story. They decided he hadn’t drowned, so he must be guilty.

Padilla can now expect to spend what’s left of his life in prison. Since the government has already driven him insane, he will have the added burden of being mentally unbalanced from the outset of his incarceration. His survival prospects are not good.

The president promptly thanked the jury for their “good judgment.”

We can no doubt expect many more Padillas now that the way has been paved for this kind of totalitarian approach to law enforcement.

Beginning today, we can expect the government to begin arresting people on an array of trumped-up charges, locking them away in black sites, on military bases, or maybe even overseas, subjecting them to all manner of torture, and then finally bringing them to trial on trumped-up charges. We can also expect juries, made fearful by breathless warnings that “evil ones” mean us and our nation harm, to buy the government’s stories.

Who is at risk? That’s hard to say, but it’s clear that it won’t just be hardened terrorist types. A presidential executive order signed by Bush on July 17 declares that anything that “undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction (sic) and political reform (sic) in Iraq” could be deemed a crime making the perpetrator subject to arrest. Would writing essays critical of the president, the war in Iraq, or the “reconstruction” effort in Iraq meet that standard? Who knows? Would being interviewed for commentary as part of a news story on English-language Al Jezeera TV (which Bush and Cheney have declared to be supportive of the Iraqi insurgency, and which Bush reportedly at one point considered bombing!)?

And how about anti-war protesters? We already have Washington, DC, under pressure from Homeland Security, threatening the organization World Can’t Wait with multiple $10,000 fines for posting flyers around the city announcing an anti-war march and rally on September 15. If they go ahead with the protest, will they be joining Padilla?

I have little doubt that this administration would love to lock up journalistic critics and protesters in military brigs, so the question is: how would juries respond to charges that American journalists and protesters against the war were treacherously undermining the Bush war effort?

I used to be confident that most juries would laugh such cases out of court. After the Padilla decision, I’m not so sure.

You want to think that your fellow citizens have at least some measure of common sense, but this case suggests otherwise–that they are easily frightened, gullible, and willing to believe the most fantastic claims of the government.