The Rag Blog

The latest Statistics of Income (SOI) released by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) this month point to a marked social polarization in the US over the recent period, compounded by stagnating wages for the majority of the population and huge tax breaks for the rich.

A preliminary analysis of the SOI data reveals that over the past several years a small fraction of the top one percent of the US population has been massively expanding its share of the national income at the expense of everyone else.

The income figures cited in the report are in terms of what the IRS calls “adjusted gross income (AGI) less deficit.” This is a figure intended by the IRS to serve as an estimate of a taxpayer’s actual gross income that year before taxes and is based upon reported income figures submitted by taxpayers. A taxpayer may be an individual or a household that files tax returns jointly.

According to this most recent data, which dates back to 2005, the broad majority of those paying taxes in the US are just barely making ends meet. In 2005, 91 million American taxpayers, or more than two-thirds of those filing taxes, reported making $50,000 a year or less. About 48 million taxpayers, more than one in three, reported making less than $20,000. Approximately 25 million taxpayers, around one in five, reported making under $10,000; while 13 million taxpayers, or one in ten, reported income between $5,000 and nothing at all.

The average or mean income for a taxpayer in 2005 was about $55,238, compared to $55,714 in 2000, adjusted for inflation. The years 2000 and 2001 saw a sharp decline in average income in the US, largely attributed to the collapse of the “dot-com” market boom of the late 90s and the economic fallout from the September 2001 terrorist attacks. Although average income has risen steadily over the past several years, it is still below the 2000 figure in real terms.

About 70 percent of the population earned below the mean in 2005—a sign of a highly polarized society. A large section of American taxpayers in 2005 likely found themselves either directly in poverty, or one paycheck or medical bill away from poverty.

In the same country in 2005, the number of taxpayers drawing in $10 million or more stood at 13,776, and this handful of taxpayers pulled in a combined $376 billion in income. This is more than the combined income of all those making $15,000 or less, or the poorest quarter of all American taxpayers. To put that another way, by sacrificing the 2005 income of these 13,776 taxpayers—around 0.01 percent of tax filings—the income of the poorest quarter of American society could have been more than doubled.

During the period between 2000 and 2005, the number of taxpayers drawing in more than $1 million each went from 239,685 in 2000 to 303,817 in 2005—a growth of 26 percent.

These figures help confirm an earlier study by Prof Emmanuel Saez of University of California-Berkeley and Prof. Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, which found that in 2005, the top 10 percent of the population in the US had its largest share of income since 1928, just before the Great Depression.

The IRS statistics, however, surely understate the real economic situation. First of all, it is worth remembering that there presently exists an enormous “tax gap,” estimated at between $300 and $400 billion per year. This is the difference between what the population should have paid in taxes and what the government actually receives. The chief source of this gap is underreported income, primarily from the richest sections of American society.

This means that there are literally trillions of dollars, accumulated in recent years, sloshing around at the top, undeclared to the IRS.

Income is also not necessarily a good index of the general welfare of the working class, as an individual working class taxpayer’s income will resist dropping below a certain point. For example, once a household’s primary breadwinner stops making enough to pay the bills at a certain job, he or she might take on overtime or a second job, a spouse could take on a new job, and so on to make up the difference. That taxpayer’s income could remain the same or even rise under those circumstances, even while economic hardship was increasing.

An individual taxpayer’s reported income is not necessarily a reflection of wages. A taxpayer’s gross income may reflect wages from his own job or jobs as well as those of his spouse, so an income of $75,000 is not necessarily an indication that the taxpayer holds a job that pays the same.

These circumstances make the capital gains and dividends tax cuts enacted by the Bush administration all the more extreme. Following the sharp decline in the stock market in 2000-2001, the rich found that they had lost a significant amount of money and desperately sought a means to replenish their coffers. In this context, the Bush tax cuts amounted to little more than throwing open the doors to the federal treasury and telling the rich, “Help yourselves!”

According to an August 10 report by Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ), of the $91 billion in taxes that went unpaid in 2005 as a result of these cuts, more than three quarters went to that 0.6 percent making $500,000 or more. This amounts to a handout of around $81,000 each.

According to CTJ, those making more than $10 million in 2005 received more than a quarter of the handouts—or an average of $1,876,280 each.

By comparison, CTJ reports, the poorest half of American taxpayers, those making $30,000 or less, received an average of $5 each, or 0.4 percent of the total tax breaks. Those making $75,000 or less, which includes the vast majority of the population, received together a total of around 3.2 percent of the tax breaks.

It is worth pointing out that since the Democratic Party took control of Congress following the 2006 mid-term elections, no serious effort has been made to repeal these tax cuts, which continue to channel tens of billions of dollars of government tax revenue into the hands of the rich and super-rich.

According to the most recent tax data, as of 2005 the rich had nearly returned to their 2000 income levels, with the average taxpayer making over $500,000 per year earning approximately $1.7 million. This group of taxpayers in 2005, numbering 828,323—around 0.6 percent of those filing tax returns—hauled in around $1.4 trillion in income that year.

To put the above figure in perspective, the $1.4 trillion in income received by the richest 828,323 taxpayers is roughly equal to the combined reported income of the poorest 81 million taxpayers, or 60 percent of the total number of returns in 2005.

American society is becoming rapidly polarized. For the majority of people, rising gas prices, health care costs and interest rates are increasingly a major source of economic distress. Meanwhile, wages and benefits are stagnating or declining.

The news that U.S. Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct charges stemming from an investigation into sexual activity at a men’s restroom in the Minneapolis airport will not come as a surprise to those like me who have heard the gay rumors about him for years.

His office must have been working overtime to suppress the news of the arrest, because it happened in June and only leaked today in a Roll Call report.

Craig paid $500 in fines and fees, had a 10-day jail sentence stayed and received one year of probation in the case, according to Roll Call. The Blade is currently investigating and will have updated reports as we get more information.

Craig is a conservative Republican with an abysmal record on gay issues and a 100 percent favorable rating from the Christian Coalition. Oh, and he’s married.

Last year, I received a visit from a reporter at the Idaho Statesman who was investigating rumors that Craig sought gay sex in D.C.-area restrooms, specifically in Union Station. He went so far as to stake out the bathroom, armed with glossy photos of Craig to show those using the facilities on the chance that someone had seen him there engaged in sexual activities. Not much came of his prolonged investigation, but now it appears he was staking out the wrong toilets.

Craig’s office is once again in full damage control mode, denying the senator did anything wrong. Craig reportedly told police he didn’t intend to tap his foot or invade the space of the neighboring stall. He just has a “wide stance” in the bathroom and reached down to pick up a piece of paper from the floor. The undercover cop in the adjacent stall says there was no piece of paper.

The hypocrisy of a closeted conservative politician voting against the interests of the gay community while engaging in some of the most stereotypically harmful behavior attributed to gays is maddening. We will now have to endure breathless reporting about tawdry toilet sex on CNN, thanks to Craig.

Alleged billion dollar thief Hazem Shaalan isn’t Ayad Allawi’s only infamous friend. Allawi is also a close ally of the head of Iraq’s largest intelligence service — a man who takes his billions from Washington, not Baghdad.

On the ground in Baghdad is a sprawling intelligence operation called the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, or INIS. Only INIS isn’t really “National” at all. To the great chagrin of the Maliki government, it’s financed and controlled by the CIA. And its boss is a longtime Allawi friend and CIA asset, Muhammed Shahwani.

Who’s Muhammed Shahwani? He’s a former Iraqi military officer who, along with Allawi, helped plot a botched coup against Saddam Hussein in 1996. Despite the failure, the CIA considered him a valuable asset, largely on the strength of his considerable knowledge of Saddam’s military apparatus. In his memoir, ex-CIA Director George Tenet writes that when Shahwani returned to Iraq as part of “the Agency-sponsored Iraqi paramilitary group known as ‘the Scorpions'” he became “key to developing a strong network inside Iraq for the Agency.”

How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins — he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq.

You start off as a well-connected bureaucrat: in this case, as an Air Force civil engineer, a post from which Robbins was responsible for overseeing 70,000 servicemen and contractors, with an annual budget of $8 billion. You serve with distinction for thirty-four years, becoming such a military all-star that the Air Force frequently sends you to the Hill to testify before Congress — until one day in the summer of 2003, when you retire to take a job as an executive for Parsons, a private construction company looking to do work in Iraq.

Now you can finally move out of your dull government housing on Bolling Air Force Base and get your wife that dream home you’ve been promising her all these years. The place on Park Street in Dunn Loring, Virginia, looks pretty good — four bedrooms, fireplace, garage, 2,900 square feet, a nice starter home in a high-end neighborhood full of spooks, think-tankers and ex-apparatchiks moved on to the nest-egg phase of their faceless careers. On October 20th, 2003, you close the deal for $775,000 and start living that private-sector good life.

A few months later, in March 2004, your company magically wins a contract from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to design and build the Baghdad Police College, a facility that’s supposed to house and train at least 4,000 police recruits. But two years and $72 million later, you deliver not a functioning police academy but one of the great engineering clusterfucks of all time, a practically useless pile of rubble so badly constructed that its walls and ceilings are literally caked in shit and piss, a result of subpar plumbing in the upper floors.

You’ve done such a terrible job, in fact, that when auditors from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction visit the college in the summer of 2006, their report sounds like something out of one of the Saw movies: “We witnessed a light fixture so full of diluted urine and feces that it would not operate,” they write, adding that “the urine was so pervasive that it had permanently stained the ceiling tiles” and that “during our visit, a substance dripped from the ceiling onto an assessment team member’s shirt.” The final report helpfully includes a photo of a sloppy brown splotch on the outstretched arm of the unlucky auditor.

When Congress gets wind of the fias­co, a few members on the House Oversight Committee demand a hearing. To placate them, your company decides to send you to the Hill — after all, you’re a former Air Force major general who used to oversee this kind of contracting operation for the government. So you take your twenty-minute ride in from the suburbs, sit down before the learned gentlemen of the committee and promptly get asked by an irritatingly eager Maryland congressman named Chris Van Hollen how you managed to spend $72 million on a pile of shit.

You blink. Fuck if you know. “I have some conjecture, but that’s all it would be” is your deadpan answer.

The room twitters in amazement. It’s hard not to applaud the balls of a man who walks into Congress short $72 million in taxpayer money and offers to guess where it all might have gone.

Next thing you know, the congressman is asking you about your company’s compensation. Touchy subject — you’ve got a “cost-plus” contract, which means you’re guaranteed a base-line profit of three percent of your total costs on the deal. The more you spend, the more you make — and you certainly spent a hell of a lot. But before this milk-faced congressman can even think about suggesting that you give these millions back, you’ve got to cut him off. “So you won’t voluntarily look at this,” Van Hollen is mumbling, “and say, given what has happened in this project . . . “

“No, sir, I will not,” you snap.

“. . . ‘We will return the profits.’ . . .”

“No, sir, I will not,” you repeat.

Your testimony over, you wait out the rest of the hearing, go home, take a bath in one of your four bathrooms, jump into bed with the little woman. . . . A year later, Iraq is still in flames, and your president’s administration is safely focused on reclaiming $485 million in aid money from a bunch of toothless black survivors of Hurricane Katrina. But the house you bought for $775K is now ­assessed at $929,974, and you’re sure as hell not giving it back to anyone.

“Yeah, I don’t know what I expected him to say,” Van Hollen says now about the way Robbins responded to being asked to give the money back. “It just shows the contempt they have for us, for the taxpayer, for everything.”

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein’s Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush’s war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity — to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it’s not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over — not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureauc­racy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profit­eering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure — American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.

It was an awful idea, perhaps the worst America has ever tried on foreign soil. But if you were in on it, it was great work while it lasted.

Since time immemorial, the distribution of government largesse had followed a staid, paper-laden procedure in which the federal government would post the details of a contract in periodicals like Commerce Business Daily or, more ­recently, on the FedBizOpps Web site. Competitive bids were solicited and contracts were awarded in accordance with the labyrinthine print of the U.S. Code, a straightforward system that worked well enough before the Bush years that, as one lawyer puts it, you could “count the number of cases of criminal fraud on the fingers of one hand.”

There were exceptions to the rule, of course — emergencies that required immediate awards, contracts where there was only one available source of materials or labor, classified deals that involved national security. What no one knew at the beginning of the war was that the Bush administration had essentially decided to treat the entire Iraqi theater as an exception to the rules. All you had to do was get to Iraq and the game was on.

But getting there wasn’t easy. To travel to Iraq, would-be contractors needed permission from the Bush administration, which was far from blind in its appraisal of applicants. In a much-ballyhooed example of favoritism, the White House originally installed a clown named Jim O’Beirne at the relevant evaluation desk in the Department of Defense. O’Beirne proved to be a classic Bush villain, a moron’s moron who judged applicants not on their Arabic skills or their relevant expertise but on their Republican bona fides; he sent a twenty-four-year-old who had never worked in finance to manage the reopening of the Iraqi stock exchange, and appointed a recent graduate of an evangelical university for home-schooled kids who had no accounting experience to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget. James K. Haveman, who had served as Michigan’s community-health director under a GOP governor, was put in charge of rehabilitating Iraq’s health-care system and decided that what this war-ravaged, malnourished, sanitation-deficient country most urgently needed was . . . an anti-smoking campaign.

Town-selectmen types like Haveman weren’t the only people who got passes to enter Iraq in the first few years. The administration also greenlighted brash, modern-day forty-niners like Scott Custer and Mike Battles, a pair of ex-Army officers and bottom-rank Republican pols (Battles had run for Congress in Rhode Island and had been a Fox News commentator) who had decided to form a security company called Custer Battles and make it big in Iraq. “Battles knew some people from his congres­sional run, and that’s how they got there,” says Alan Grayson, an attorney who led a whistle-blower lawsuit against the pair for defrauding the government.

Before coming to Iraq, Custer Battles hadn’t done even a million dollars in business. The company’s own Web site brags that Battles had to borrow cab fare from Jordan to Iraq and arrived in Baghdad with less than $500 in his pocket. But he had good timing, arriving just as a security contract for Baghdad International Airport was being “put up” for bid. The company site raves that Custer spent “three sleepless nights” penning an offer that impressed the CPA enough to hand the partners $2 million in cash, which Battles promptly stuffed into a duffel bag and drove to deposit in a Lebanese bank.

Custer Battles had lucked into a sort of Willy Wonka’s paradise for contractors, where a small pool of Republican-friendly businessmen would basically hang around the Green Zone waiting for a contracting agency to come up with a work order. In the early days of the war, the idea of “competition” was a farce, with deals handed out so quickly that there was no possibility of making rational or fairly priced estimates. According to those familiar with the process, contracting agencies would request phony “bids” from several contractors, even though the winner had been picked in advance. “The losers would play ball because they knew that eventually it would be their turn to be the winner,” says Grayson.

To make such deals legal, someone in the military would simply sign a piece of paper invoking an exception. “I know one guy whose business was buying ­weapons on the black market for contractors,” says Pratap Chatterjee, a writer who has spent months in the Mideast researching a forthcoming book on Iraq contracts. “It’s illegal — but he got military people to sign papers allowing him to do it.”

The system not only had the advantage of eliminating red tape in a war zone, it also encouraged the “entrepreneurship” of patriots like Custer and Battles, who went from bumming cab fare to doing $100 million in government contracts practically overnight. And what business they did! The bid that Custer claimed to have spent “three sleepless nights” putting together was later described by Col. Richard Ballard, then the inspector general of the Army, as looking “like something that you and I would write over a bottle of vodka, complete with all the spelling and syntax errors and annexes to be filled in later.” The two simply “presented it the next day and then got awarded about a $15 million contract.”

The deal charged Custer Battles with the responsibility to perform airport ­security for civilian flights. But there were never any civilian flights into Baghdad’s airport during the life of their contract, so the CPA gave them a job managing an airport checkpoint, which they failed miserably. They were also given scads of money to buy expensive X-ray equipment and set up an advanced canine bomb-sniffing system, but they never bought the equipment. As for the dog, Ballard reported, “I eventually saw one dog. The dog did not appear to be a certified, trained dog.” When the dog was brought to the checkpoint, he added, it would lie down and “refuse to sniff the vehicles” — as outstanding a metaphor for U.S. contractor performance in Iraq as has yet been produced.

Like most contractors, Custer Battles was on a cost-plus arrangement, which means its profits were guaranteed to rise with its spending. But according to testimony by officials and former employees, the partners also charged the government millions by making out phony invoices to shell companies they controlled. In another stroke of genius, they found a bunch of abandoned Iraqi Airways forklifts on airport property, repainted them to disguise the company markings and billed them to U.S. tax­payers as new equipment. Every time they scratched their asses, they earned; there was so much money around for contractors, officials literally used $100,000 wads of cash as toys. “Yes — $100 bills in plastic wrap,” Frank Willis, a former CPA official, acknowledged in Senate testimony about Custer Battles. “We played football with the plastic-wrapped bricks for a little while.”

The Custer Battles show only ended when the pair left a spreadsheet behind after a meeting with CPA officials — a spreadsheet that scrupulously detailed the pair’s phony invoicing. “It was the worst case of fraud I’ve ever seen, hands down,” says Grayson. “But it’s also got to be the first instance in history of a defendant leaving behind a spreadsheet full of evidence of the crime.”

But even being the clumsiest war profit­eers of all time was not enough to bring swift justice upon the heads of Mr. Custer and Mr. Battles — and this is where the story of America’s reconstruction effort gets really interesting. The Bush administration not only refused to prosecute the pair — it actually tried to stop a lawsuit filed against the contractors by whistle-blowers hoping to recover the stolen money. The administration argued that Custer Battles could not be found guilty of defrauding the U.S. government because the CPA was not part of the U.S. government. When the lawsuit went forward despite the administration’s objections, Custer and Battles mounted a defense that recalled Nuremberg and Lt. Calley, arguing that they could not be guilty of theft since it was done with the government’s approval.

French Egypt and American Iraq can be considered bookends on the history of modern imperialism in the Middle East. The Bush administration’s already failed version of the conquest of Iraq is, of course, on everyone’s mind; while the French conquest of Egypt, now more than two centuries past, is all too little remembered, despite having been led by Napoleon Bonaparte, whose career has otherwise hardly languished in obscurity. There are many eerily familiar resonances between the two misadventures, not least among them that both began with supreme arrogance and ended as fiascoes. Above all, the leaders of both occupations employed the same basic political vocabulary and rhetorical flimflammery, invoking the spirit of liberty, security, and democracy while largely ignoring the substance of these concepts.

The French general and the American president do not much resemble one another — except perhaps in the way the prospect of conquest in the Middle East appears to have put fire in their veins and in their unappealing tendency to believe their own propaganda (or at least to keep repeating it long after it became completely implausible). Both leaders invaded and occupied a major Arabic-speaking Muslim country; both harbored dreams of a “Greater Middle East”; both were surprised to find themselves enmeshed in long, bitter, debilitating guerrilla wars. Neither genuinely cared about grassroots democracy, but both found its symbols easy to invoke for gullible domestic publics. Substantial numbers of their new subjects quickly saw, however, that they faced occupations, not liberations.

My own work on Bonaparte’s lost year in Egypt began in the mid-1990s, and I had completed about half of Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East before September 11, 2001. I had no way of knowing then that a book on such a distant, scholarly subject would prove an allegory for Bush’s Iraq War. Nor did I guess that the United States would give old-style colonialism in the Middle East one last try, despite clear signs that the formerly colonized would no longer put up with such acts and had, in the years since World War II, gained the means to resist them.

The Republic Militant Goes to War

In June of 1798, as his enormous flotilla — 36,000 soldiers, thousands of sailors, and hundreds of scientists on 12 ships of the line — swept inexorably toward the Egyptian coast, the young General Napoleon Bonaparte issued a grandiose communiqué to the bewildered and seasick troops he was about to march into the desert without canteens or reasonable supplies of water. He declared, “Soldiers! You are about to undertake a conquest, the effects of which on civilization and commerce are incalculable.”

The prediction was as tragically inaccurate in its own way as the pronouncement George W. Bush issued some two centuries later, on May 1, 2003, also from the deck of a great ship of the line, the aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln. “Today,” he said, “we have the greater power to free a nation by breaking a dangerous and aggressive regime. With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians.”

Both men were convinced that their invasions were announcing new epochs in human history. Of the military vassals of the Ottoman Empire who then ruled Egypt, Bonaparte predicted: “The Mameluke Beys who favor exclusively English commerce, whose extortions oppress our merchants, and who tyrannize over the unfortunate inhabitants of the Nile, a few days after our arrival will no longer exist.”

Bonaparte’s laundry list of grievances about them consisted of three charges. First, the beys were, in essence, enablers of France’s primary enemy at that time, the British monarchy which sought to strangle the young French republic in its cradle. Second, the rulers of Egypt were damaging France’s own commerce by extorting taxes and bribes from its merchants in Cairo and Alexandria. Third, the Mamluks ruled tyrannically, having never been elected, and oppressed their subjects whom Bonaparte intended to liberate.

This holy trinity of justifications for imperialism — that the targeted state is collaborating with an enemy of the republic, is endangering the positive interests of the nation, and lacks legitimacy because its rule is despotic — would all be trotted out over the subsequent two centuries by a succession of European and American leaders whenever they wanted to go on the attack. One implication of these familiar rhetorical turns of phrase has all along been that democracies have a license to invade any country they please, assuming it has the misfortune to have an authoritarian regime.

George W. Bush, of course, hit the same highlights in his “mission accomplished” speech, while announcing on the Abraham Lincoln that “major combat operations” in Iraq “had ended.” “The liberation of Iraq,” he proclaimed, “is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We’ve removed an ally of al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding.” He put Saddam Hussein’s secular, Arab nationalist Baath regime and the radical Muslim terrorists of al-Qaeda under the sign of September 11th, insinuating that Iraq was allied with the primary enemy of the United States and so posed an urgent menace to its security. (In fact, captured Baath Party documents show that Saddam’s fretting security forces, on hearing that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had entered Iraq, put out an all points bulletin on him, imagining — not entirely correctly — that he had al-Qaeda links.) Likewise, Bush promised that Iraq’s alleged “weapons of mass destruction” (which existed only in his own fevered imagination) would be tracked down, again implying that Iraq posed a threat to the interests and security of the U.S., just as Bonaparte had claimed that the Mamluks menaced France.

According to the president, Saddam’s overthrown government had lacked legitimacy, while the new Iraqi government, to be established by a foreign power, would truly represent the conquered population. “We’re helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq,” Bush pledged, “as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people.” Bonaparte, too, established governing councils at the provincial and national level, staffing them primarily with Sunni clergymen, declaring them more representative of the Egyptian people than the beys and emirs of the slave soldiery who had formerly ruled that province of the Ottoman Empire.

Liberty as Tyranny

For a democracy to conduct a brutal military occupation against another country in the name of liberty seems, on the face of it, too contradictory to elicit more than hoots of derision at the hypocrisy of it all. Yet, the militant republic, ready to launch aggressive war in the name of “democracy,” is everywhere in modern history, despite the myth that democracies do not typically wage wars of aggression. Ironically, some absolutist regimes, like those of modern Iran, were remarkably peaceable, if left alone by their neighbors. In contrast, republican France invaded Belgium, Holland, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Egypt in its first decade (though it went on the offensive in part in response to Austrian and Prussian moves to invade France). The United States attacked Mexico, the Seminoles and other Native polities, Hawaii, the Spanish Empire, the Philippines, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic in just the seven-plus decades from 1845 to the eve of the U.S. entry into World War I.

Freedom and authoritarianism are nowadays taken to be stark antonyms, the provinces of heroes and monsters. Those closer to the birth of modern republics were comforted by no such moral clarity. In Danton’s Death, the young Romantic playwright Georg Büchner depicted the radical French revolutionary and proponent of executing enemies of the Republic, Maximilien Robespierre, whipping up a Parisian crowd with the phrase, “The revolutionary regime is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.” And nowhere has liberty proved more oppressive than when deployed against a dictatorship abroad; for, as Büchner also had that famed “incorruptible” devotee of state terror observe, “In a Republic only republicans are citizens; Royalists and foreigners are enemies.”

That sunlit May afternoon on the USS Abraham Lincoln, President Bush seconded Büchner’s Robespierre. “Because of you,” he exhorted the listening sailors of an aircraft carrier whose planes had just dropped 1.6 million pounds of ordnance on Iraq, “our nation is more secure. Because of you, the tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free.”

Security for the republic had already proved ample justification to launch a war the previous March, even though Iraq was a poor, weak, ramshackle Third World country, debilitated by a decade of sanctions imposed by the United Nations and the United States, without so much as potable drinking water or an air force. Similarly, the Mamluks of Egypt — despite the sky-high taxes and bribes they demanded of some French merchants — hardly constituted a threat to French security.

The overthrow of a tyrannical regime and the liberation of an oppressed people were constant refrains in the shipboard addresses of both the general and the president, who felt that the liberated owed them a debt of gratitude. Bonaparte lamented that the beys “tyrannize over the unfortunate inhabitants of the Nile”; or, as one of his officers, Captain Horace Say, opined, “The people of Egypt were most wretched. How will they not cherish the liberty we are bringing them?” Similarly, Bush insisted, “Men and women in every culture need liberty like they need food and water and air. Everywhere that freedom arrives, humanity rejoices; and everywhere that freedom stirs, let tyrants fear.”

Not surprisingly, expectations that the newly conquered would exhibit gratitude to their foreign occupiers cropped up repeatedly in the dispatches and letters of men on the spot who advocated a colonial forward policy. President Bush put this dramatically in 2007, long after matters had not proceeded as expected: “We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude. That’s the problem here in America: They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq.”

Liberty in this two-century old rhetorical tradition, moreover, was more than just a matter of rights and the rule of law. Proponents of various forms of liberal imperialism saw tyranny as a source of poverty, since arbitrary rulers could just usurp property at will and so make economic activity risky, as well as opening the public to crushing and arbitrary taxes that held back commerce. The French quartermaster Francois Bernoyer wrote of the Egyptian peasantry: “Their dwellings are adobe huts, which prosperity, the daughter of liberty, will now allow them to abandon.” Bush took up the same theme on the Abraham Lincoln: “Where freedom takes hold, hatred gives way to hope. When freedom takes hold, men and women turn to the peaceful pursuit of a better life.”

“Heads Must Roll”

In both eighteenth century Egypt and twenty-first century Iraq, the dreary reality on the ground stood as a reproach to, if not a wicked satire upon, these high-minded pronouncements. The French landed at the port of Alexandria on July 1, 1798. Two and a half weeks later, as the French army advanced along the Nile toward Cairo, a unit of Gen. Jean Reynier’s division met opposition from 1,800 villagers, many armed with muskets. Sgt. Charles Francois recalled a typical scene. After scaling the village walls and “firing into those crowds,” killing “about 900 men,” the French confiscated the villagers’ livestock — “camels, donkeys, horses, eggs, cows, sheep” — then “finished burning the rest of the houses, or rather the huts, so as to provide a terrible object lesson to these half-savage and barbarous people.”

On July 24, Bonaparte’s Army of the Orient entered Cairo and he began reorganizing his new subjects. He grandiosely established an Egyptian Institute for the advancement of science and gave thought to reforming police, courts, and law. But terror lurked behind everything he did. He wrote Gen. Jacques Menou, who commanded the garrison at the Mediterranean port of Rosetta, saying, “The Turks [Egyptians] can only be led by the greatest severity. Every day I cut off five or six heads in the streets of Cairo…. [T]o obey, for them, is to fear.” (Mounting severed heads on poles for viewing by terrified passers-by was another method the French used in Egypt…)

That August, the Delta city of Mansura rose up against a small French garrison of about 120 men, chasing them into the countryside, tracking the blue coats down, and methodically killing all but two of them. In early September, the Delta village of Sonbat, inhabited in part by Bedouin of the western Dirn tribe, also rose up against the Europeans. Bonaparte instructed one of his generals, “Burn that village! Make a terrifying example of it.” After the French army had indeed crushed the rebellious peasants and chased away the Bedouin, Gen. Jean-Antoine Verdier reported back to Bonaparte with regard to Sonbat, “You ordered me to destroy this lair. Very well, it no longer exists.”

The most dangerous uprisings confronting the French were, however, in Cairo. In October, much of the city mobilized to attack the more than 20,000 French troops occupying the capital. The revolt was especially fierce in the al-Husayn district, where the ancient al-Azhar madrassa (or seminary) trained 14,000 students, where the city’s most sacred mosque stood, and where wealth was concentrated in the merchants and guilds of the Khan al-Khalili bazaar. At the same time, the peasants and Bedouin of the countryside around Cairo rose in rebellion, attacking the small garrisons that had been deployed to pacify them.

Bonaparte put down this Egyptian “revolution” with the utmost brutality, subjecting urban crowds to artillery barrages. He may have had as many rebels executed in the aftermath as were killed in the fighting. In the countryside, his officers’ launched concerted campaigns to decimate insurgent villages. At one point, the French are said to have brought 900 heads of slain insurgents to Cairo in bags and ostentatiously dumped them out before a crowd in one of that city’s major squares to instill Cairenes with terror. (Two centuries later, the American public would come to associate decapitations by Muslim terrorists in Iraq with the ultimate in barbarism, but even then hundreds such beheadings were not carried out at once.)

The American deployment of terror against the Iraqi population has, of course, dwarfed anything the French accomplished in Egypt by orders of magnitude. After four mercenaries, one a South African, were killed in Falluja in March of 2004 and their bodies desecrated, President Bush is alleged to have said “heads must roll” in retribution.

An initial attack on the city faltered when much of the Iraqi government threatened to resign and it was clear major civilian casualties would result. The crushing of the city was, however, simply put off until after the American presidential election in November. When the assault, involving air power and artillery, came, it was devastating, damaging two-thirds of the city’s buildings and turning much of its population into refugees. (As a result, thousands of Fallujans still live in the desert in tent villages with no access to clean water.)

Bush must have been satisfied. Heads had rolled. More often, faced with opposition, the U.S. Air Force simply bombed already-occupied cities, a technology Bonaparte (mercifully) lacked. The strategy of ruling by terror and swift, draconian punishment for acts of resistance was, however, the same in both cases.

The British sank much of the French fleet on August 1, 1798, marooning Bonaparte and his troops in their newly conquered land. In the spring of 1799, the French army tried — and failed — to break out through Syria; after which Bonaparte himself chose the better part of valor. He slipped out of Egypt late that summer, returning to France. There, he would swiftly stage a coup and come to power as First Consul, giving him the opportunity to hone his practice of bringing freedom to other countries — this time in Europe. By 1801, joint British-Ottoman forces had defeated the French in Egypt, who were transported back to their country on British vessels. This first Western invasion of the Middle East in modern times had ended in serial disasters that Bonaparte would misrepresent to the French public as a series of glorious triumphs.

Ending the Era of Liberal Imperialism

Between 1801 and 2003 stretched endless decades in which colonialism proved a plausible strategy for European powers in the Middle East, including the French enterprise in Algeria (1830-1962) and the British veiled protectorate over Egypt (1882-1922). In these years, European militaries and their weaponry were so advanced, and the means of resistance to which Arab peasants had access so limited, that colonial governments could be imposed.

That imperial moment passed with celerity after World War II, in part because the masses of the Third World joined political parties, learned to read, and — with how-to-do-it examples all around them — began to mount political resistance to foreign occupations of every sort. While the twenty-first century American arsenal has many fancy, exceedingly destructive toys in it, nothing has changed with regard to the ability of colonized peoples to network socially and, sooner or later, push any foreign occupying force out.

Bonaparte and Bush failed because both launched their operations at moments when Western military and technological superiority was not assured. While Bonaparte’s army had better artillery and muskets, the Egyptians had a superb cavalry and their old muskets were serviceable enough for purposes of sniping at the enemy. They also had an ally with advanced weaponry and the desire to use it — the British Navy.

In 2007, the high-tech U.S. military — as had been true in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, as was true for the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s — is still vulnerable to guerrilla tactics and effective low-tech weapons of resistance such as roadside bombs. Even more effective has been the guerrillas’ social warfare, their success in making Iraq ungovernable through the promotion of clan and sectarian feuds, through targeted bombings and other attacks, and through sabotage of the Iraqi infrastructure.

From the time of Bonaparte to that of Bush, the use of the rhetoric of liberty versus tyranny, of uplift versus decadence, appears to have been a constant among imperialists from republics — and has remained domestically effective in rallying support for colonial wars. The despotism (but also the weakness) of the Mamluks and of Saddam Hussein proved sirens practically calling out for Western interventions. According to the rhetoric of liberal imperialism, tyrannical regimes are always at least potentially threats to the Republic, and so can always be fruitfully overthrown in favor of rule by a Western military. After all, that military is invariably imagined as closer to liberty since it serves an elected government. (Intervention is even easier to justify if the despots can be portrayed, however implausibly, as allied with an enemy of the republic.)

For both Bush and Bonaparte, the genteel diction of liberation, rights, and prosperity served to obscure or justify a major invasion and occupation of a Middle Eastern land, involving the unleashing of slaughter and terror against its people. Military action would leave towns destroyed, families displaced, and countless dead. Given the ongoing carnage in Iraq, President Bush’s boast that, with “new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians,” now seems not just hollow but macabre. The equation of a foreign military occupation with liberty and prosperity is, in the cold light of day, no less bizarre than the promise of war with virtually no civilian casualties.

Who exactly is the US fighting in Iraq? Graphed by self-confessed identity of captives, it is largely Sunni Arab Iraqis, often motivated primarily by the opportunity to earn some money from the resistance leaders.

When pressed on the slow pace of recovery in the Gulf Coast, President Bush insists the federal government has fulfilled its promise to rebuild the region. The proof, he says, is in the big check the federal government signed to underwrite the recovery — allegedly more than $116 billion. But residents of the still-devastated Gulf Coast are left wondering whether the check bounced.

“$116 billion is not a useful number,” says Stanley Czerwinski of the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ investigative arm.

For starters, most federal money — about two-thirds — was quickly spent for short-term needs like debris removal and Coast Guard rescue. As Czerwinski explains, “There is a significant difference between responding to an emergency and rebuilding post-disaster.”

That has left little money for long-term Gulf Coast recovery projects. Although it’s tricky to unravel the maze of federal reports, our best estimate of agency data is that only $35 billion has been appropriated for long-term rebuilding.

Even worse, less than 42 percent of the money set aside has even been spent, much less gotten to those most in need. For example:

Washington set aside $16.7 billion for Community Development Block Grants, one of the two biggest sources of rebuilding funds, especially for housing. But as of March 2007, only $1 billion — just 6 percent — had been spent, almost all of it in Mississippi. Following bad publicity, HUD spent another $3.8 billion on the program between March and July, leaving 70 percent of the funds still unused.

The other major source of rebuilding help was supposed to be FEMA’s Public Assistance Program. But of the $8.2 billion earmarked, only $3.4 billion was meant for nonemergency projects like fixing up schools and hospitals.

Louisiana officials recently testified that FEMA has also “low-balled” project costs, underestimating the true expenses by a factor of four or five. For example, for 11 Louisiana rebuilding projects, the lowest bids came to $5.5 million — but FEMA approved only $1.9 million.

After the failure of federal levees flooded 80 percent of New Orleans, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers received $8.4 billion to restore storm defenses. But as of July 2007, less than 20 percent of the funds have been spent, even as the Corps admits that levee repair won’t be completed until as late as 2011.

The fact that, two years later, most federal Katrina funds remain bottled up in bureaucracy is especially shocking considering that the amounts Washington allocated come nowhere near the anticipated costs of Gulf rebuilding.

For example, the $3.4 billion FEMA has available to recover local public infrastructure would only cover about one-eighth of the damage suffered in Louisiana alone. But this money is spread across five states — Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas — and covers damage from three 2005 hurricanes, Katrina, Rita and Wilma.

Congress has acted on some of the money holdups, like changing a requirement in the Stafford Act that mandates local governments pay 10 percent of rebuilding projects up front before receiving federal aid. The Bush administration had refused to waive the rule — like it did for New York after 9/11 — grounding countless projects. The effect of the rule was particularly devastating in the hardest-hit places like Mississippi’s Hancock County, where communities lost most of their tax base after the storms.

Many in Washington claim that state and local governments are to blame: The money’s there, they say, but the locals just aren’t using it. And it’s true that there have been problems below the federal level. For example, Louisiana’s “Road Home” program — created by Congress but run by the state — has been so poorly managed that 18 months after the storms only 630 homeowners had received checks. Closings have sped up since then, but administrators admit many won’t see money until 2008, if at all — the program is facing a projected $3 billion shortfall.

But the White House and Congress have done little to exercise oversight of these federally backed programs, much less step in to remove red tape and make sure taxpayer money gets to its intended destination.

This is especially true when it comes to tax breaks and rebuilding contracts. Included in the $116 billion figure is $3.5 billion in tax breaks to jump-start business in Gulf Opportunity Zones — “GO Zones” — across 91 parishes and counties in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. But many of the breaks have been of questionable benefit to Katrina survivors, like a $1 million deal to build 10 luxury condos next to the University of Alabama football stadium — four hours from the Gulf Coast.

Federal contracts for rebuilding and recovery have also been marked by scandal, fraud and abuse. An August 2006 study by the office of Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., identified 19 contracts worth $8.75 billion that experienced “significant overcharges, wasteful spending or mismanagement.”

For thousands of Gulf residents, the end result is that federal support for recovery after Katrina’s devastation has been insufficient, too slow and hasn’t gotten to those most in need.

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.