The Rag Blog

NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union and New York Civil Liberties Union today filed a federal civil rights lawsuit charging that a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) official and JetBlue Airways illegally discriminated against an American resident based solely on the Arabic message on his t-shirt and his ethnicity.

JetBlue and the TSA official, identified as “Inspector Harris,” would not let Raed Jarrar board his flight at John F. Kennedy Airport until he agreed to cover his t-shirt, which read “We Will Not Be Silent” in English and Arabic script. According to the complaint, Harris told Jarrar that it is impermissible to wear an Arabic shirt to an airport and equated it to a “person wearing a t-shirt at a bank stating, ‘I am a robber.'”

“It is a dangerous and slippery slope when we allow our government to take away a person’s rights because of his speech or ethnic background,” said Reginald Shuford, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program. “Racial profiling is illegal and ineffective and has no place in a democratic society.”

Jarrar, an architect and political analyst of Arabic descent, has lived in the United States since 2005 with his wife, who is an American citizen. On August 12, 2006, Jarrar attempted to fly on JetBlue from New York to Oakland, California, where he lived at the time. Although Jarrar successfully cleared two security checkpoints, he was approached by Inspector Harris while waiting at the boarding gate. Harris brought Jarrar to the JetBlue counter and told him that he would have to remove his shirt because other passengers were not comfortable with the Arabic script.

“It was clear that Mr. Jarrar was not a security threat and was singled out solely because of his ethnicity and the constitutionally protected speech on his t-shirt,” said Aden Fine, an ACLU senior staff attorney who represents Jarrar. “Rather than censor Raed, the TSA official and Jet Blue should have assured any uncomfortable passengers that there was absolutely no public safety or security risk. We hope this case sends the message to TSA officials and to airlines that they cannot discriminate against passengers because of their race or the content of their speech.”

Jarrar attempted to assert his constitutional right to wear the t-shirt, but became intimidated after he was surrounded by Harris and several JetBlue officials. He worried he would miss his flight or be arrested and detained indefinitely. The lead JetBlue customer service crewmember stated that she would buy Jarrar a new shirt to wear on top of his own t-shirt as a “compromise.” Left with no other choice, Jarrar reluctantly agreed, and was allowed on the plane only after the JetBlue agents ripped up his boarding pass and changed his seat from the front of the plane to the very back of the plane. He was then forced to board the plane first, even before disabled passengers and those traveling with children.

“I believe it is my right and responsibility as a new U.S. resident and taxpayer to fight for my freedoms and for the right of all people in this country to be free of discrimination,” said Jarrar, who is currently employed with the American Friends Service Committee, an organization committed to peace and social justice. “It was not my goal to offend anyone with my t-shirt, but it is a shame that racial profiling and censorship are still rampant in America’s airports.”

The ACLU said Jarrar’s case is part of a disturbing pattern of discriminatory acts at airports against individuals perceived to be Arab, especially those engaged in expressive activities that visibly display their ethnic background or religious faith. According to the Department of Transportation, it has received complaints of discrimination by air carriers every month from January 2002 to June 2007, the last month for which statistics are available. Several of those discrimination complaints have been lodged against JetBlue.

The ACLU filed the complaint today in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. The complaint charges that TSA Inspector Harris and JetBlue violated Jarrar’s civil rights under the First and Fifth Amendments and federal, state and city anti-discrimination laws.

In addition to Fine and Shuford, attorneys in this case are: Dennis Parker, Director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program, and Palyn Hung of the NYCLU.

VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)

The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense.

A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.

As many grunts will tell you, this is a near-routine event. Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias.

Similarly, Sunnis, who have been underrepresented in the new Iraqi armed forces, now find themselves forming militias, sometimes with our tacit support. Sunnis recognize that the best guarantee they may have against Shiite militias and the Shiite-dominated government is to form their own armed bands. We arm them to aid in our fight against Al Qaeda.

However, while creating proxies is essential in winning a counterinsurgency, it requires that the proxies are loyal to the center that we claim to support. Armed Sunni tribes have indeed become effective surrogates, but the enduring question is where their loyalties would lie in our absence. The Iraqi government finds itself working at cross purposes with us on this issue because it is justifiably fearful that Sunni militias will turn on it should the Americans leave.

In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear. (In the course of writing this article, this fact became all too clear: one of us, Staff Sergeant Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a “time-sensitive target acquisition mission” on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive and is being flown to a military hospital in the United States.) While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse — namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force.

Given the situation, it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.

Coupling our military strategy to an insistence that the Iraqis meet political benchmarks for reconciliation is also unhelpful. The morass in the government has fueled impatience and confusion while providing no semblance of security to average Iraqis. Leaders are far from arriving at a lasting political settlement. This should not be surprising, since a lasting political solution will not be possible while the military situation remains in constant flux.

The Iraqi government is run by the main coalition partners of the Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance, with Kurds as minority members. The Shiite clerical establishment formed the alliance to make sure its people did not succumb to the same mistake as in 1920: rebelling against the occupying Western force (then the British) and losing what they believed was their inherent right to rule Iraq as the majority. The qualified and reluctant welcome we received from the Shiites since the invasion has to be seen in that historical context. They saw in us something useful for the moment.

Now that moment is passing, as the Shiites have achieved what they believe is rightfully theirs. Their next task is to figure out how best to consolidate the gains, because reconciliation without consolidation risks losing it all. Washington’s insistence that the Iraqis correct the three gravest mistakes we made — de-Baathification, the dismantling of the Iraqi Army and the creation of a loose federalist system of government — places us at cross purposes with the government we have committed to support.

Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict — as we do now — will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.

At the same time, the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps in bordering countries. Close to two million more are internally displaced and now fill many urban slums. Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and sanitation. “Lucky” Iraqis live in gated communities barricaded with concrete blast walls that provide them with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than any sense of security we would consider normal.

In a lawless environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act. Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages. As an Iraqi man told us a few days ago with deep resignation, “We need security, not free food.”

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.

Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.

We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.

A peace symbol hangs from a chain around my neck. Soon after I bought the necklace, I decided I wouldn’t take it off until the war ended. On Tuesday afternoon, I sat in a physician’s examining room. The doctor mentioned my peace symbol and said that people who oppose the war fail to acknowledge the successes in Iraq-that northern Iraq is a thriving area of commercial achievement. “Ah, the Kurds,” I said just before he plunged a tongue depressor down my throat. I was hoping to present my position-that I’m not a critic of the G. W. Bush war strategy or lack thereof–you know, one who championed the invasion but believes the war has been mismanaged with insufficient troops to accomplish the job.

I wanted him to know that from the beginning, with the rumblings about weapons of mass destruction and the Bush lies to link Iraq to 9/11, I spoke against an incursion I knew would become an occupation. The truth is that I don’t perceive war as successes and failures. War is tragedy-the ultimate human error and an inability to empathize. Each time I tried to opine, the doc stuck his fingers in my mouth.

Later, at home, I turned on the news to hear that northern Iraq had been hit by a series of almost simultaneous suicide bombings, leaving more than 250 people dead and at least 300 injured. As I write, the number of dead has climbed and could be as high as 500.

Often, I lie awake, wondering about the people who support George Bush and his reign of terror against the Iraqi and Afghan populations. I ask myself if these Bushies are aware of the landscape of destruction. Do they think about Iraqi and Afghan children? Do they look at their own children and imagine what it would be like to be a parent in Iraq or Afghanistan? Do they ever for even a second allow themselves to consider what our sophisticated bombs, depleted uranium, and white phosphorous are doing? Have they convinced themselves that our weaponry targets only those who are poised to kill coalition forces? Are they at all troubled about what our country is doing-committing acts of atrocity against other human beings who did nothing to antagonize us? NOTHING.

Members of the Bush Fan Club don’t just include the Armageddonites who rhapsodize about “The Rapture” and who believe that George Pied Piper Bush was anointed by God to lead in the clash of civilizations. Fellow Bush junkies are those who buy the absurd “if we leave Iraq, the terrorists will follow us home” rather than the findings of the National Intelligence Estimate that the occupation of Iraq has inspired terrorism and that the longer we stay, the less secure we will be.

Meanwhile, we have lost over 3,700 U.S. troops in a catastrophe that George Bush was determined to start and is stubbornly refusing to end despite the advice of experts and, finally, the disapproval of the American public. Iraqis are suffering unfathomable loss. Suicide bombings are not becoming less frequent. Rather, they are becoming more advanced. Those who strap on explosives or fill their vehicles with ammo to kill and maim as many people as possible share certain defining commonalities: they are destructive of themselves and others; they ignore reason; and they are not guided by the normal mores of society.

It is not a leap to say that George Bush fits comfortably into these parameters, with one exception–Bush’s self destruction will come not from an actual detonation that shatters his body but through the judgment of his presidency as the worst in the history of this country.

It’s no coincidence that the American corporate media is the wealthiest communication systems in the world, yet also one of the worst in terms of educating its citizens. Extraordinary riches require extraordinary efforts to divert public attention from extreme inequality and the democratic deficit under which Americans suffer. Despite the abundance of media sources throughout this country, Americans still endure a staggering ignorance regarding the reality of U.S. foreign policy. Horrendous media coverage no doubt accounts for much of this ongoing tragedy. While there may be more information available today than at any time in history (in light of the rise of cable news, the Internet, and other technological developments), the quality of that news leaves much to be desired.

News reports today do not provide the public with the context needed to evaluate the events happening around them in a critical way. This lack of context is of no surprise to those who understand that media coverage is designed to indoctrinate and divert attention, rather than to educate. The prolific comic George Carlin has this insight to share concerning the American media’s commitment to class warfare:

“The real owners [are] the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, the judges. And they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear. They spend billions every year lobbying to get what they want. Well we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everyone else. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people. That’s against their interests. They want obedient workers.”

There’s an easy enough way to create apathetic, obedient consumers: simply take away any meaningful content from the media system upon which they rely. This is perhaps best seen in the mass media’s extreme reliance on junk food and fluff “news,” at the expense of real stories that might have some direct relevance to our lives. A brief survey of television news coverage puts this reality into better perspective. A poll done by the Pew Research Center showed that, in the sample period studied (the week of February 12th, 2007), “While 6% of coverage on all media sectors (newspapers, network TV, cable TV, radio and the Internet) was devoted to [Anna Nicole] Smith’s death, fully 20% of cable news focused on this story. At the height of the media’s feeding frenzy (the two day period immediately following Smith’s death), 24% of all coverage and 50% of cable news was devoted to the story.” The effects of such disproportionate coverage did not go unnoticed by viewers or researchers. When asked who they had heard the most about in the news, the “most memorable people” listed in the study was Anna Nicole (recognized by 38% of viewers), followed by George Bush (28%), Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (both 3%), and Nancy Pelosi (1%).

In other words, Anna Nicole Smith had more name recognition than all of the other highest scoring figures combined. This is particularly disturbing for those with even a minimal commitment to democracy, considering that the Anna Nicole story ranked at the very bottom of the list in terms stories viewers felt were “deserving more of my time” (only 3% of viewers felt Anna Nicole deserved more of their time, as opposed to 15% and 12% respectively who felt the Iraq war and the 2008 campaign deserved more time). Viewers can look forward to a deluge of celebrity gossip “news” if they tune into the cable news networks this summer. A brief review of CNN shows that in the 99 days of summer from early May through early August, viewers could find a news feature on one of three celebrities (Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, and Nicole Richie) on average once every other day. That’s a pretty extraordinary frequency considering the stories covered just three people.

While cable news may be the worst medium to follow for those who are interested learning something from the news, this hardly excuses print news, which has also performed pitifully in terms of publishing meaningful stories and information. A summary of the following stories gives us a better picture of how much is missing from print media.

1. Hugo Chavez & Iran

A New York Times story from early August repeated complaints from Argentinean Jews about Chavez’s close ties with their government, in light of Venezuela’s close relationship with Iran. As the story explained, such complaints come at a particularly sensitive time, in light of the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s supposed promise to “wipe Israel off the map.” Of course, Chavez has also been routinely demonized by American media outlets for his alleged “totalitarian” and “anti-American” disposition, which is thought to justify the Bush administration’s aggressive and belligerent rhetoric and actions against his government and people.

What you won’t hear

Such stories consistently and conveniently leave out the fact that 1. far from an authoritarian, Chavez has been democratically elected twice by the people of Venezuela in heavily monitored elections. Over 72% of Venezuelans voted in the 2006 election, in which Chavez received nearly 63% of the vote – over 20% more than Bush received in 2004 when he claimed to have earned the “political capital” of the American people.

Chavez is quite popular due to his populist disposition and his commitment to redistributive politics, much to the chagrin of America’s corporate and political elites. 2. Chavez is not “anti-American,” at least if we understand “America” to include the 300 million Americans who inhabit it. Far from being a hate-monger, Chavez has actually expressed deep admiration and sympathy for the American people.

It is the Bush administration that originally incited antagonism toward Chavez, not the other way around. It doesn’t take a genius, but rather access to decent news coverage, to understand why. It is now known that the Bush administration conspired with Venezuelan military leaders during a failed 2002 coup that briefly overthrew Chavez, and ordered for the dissolution of the country’s democratically elected National Assembly, its constitution, and Supreme Court. Chavez was quickly returned to power, however, after a popular uprising against the conspirators. Good luck finding such revelations regularly reported in the American press ­ hysterical anti-Chavez rhetoric plays much better with American elites who are more concerned with destroying Venezeula’s democracy than preserving it. Of course, one can only imagine what American reporters would say about Chavez if he had taken part in a coup aimed at overthrowing the Bush administration. At the very least, a military invasion and overthrow against Venezuela would be considered quite legitimate amongst American media reporters, owners, and editors. The equivalent prescription ­ that the Bush administration must be overthrown by Venezuela ­ is considered unthinkable in the minds of America’s politico-media elite. Better to leave such double standards unaddressed though, as they fail to flatter American political and economic elites.

2. The Anti-War Movement

An August 7th story in the Chicago Tribune reported on the activities of anti-war protestors throughout America’s heartland. The article focused on the activities of two protestors, Ashley Casale and Michael Israel, who are traveling to towns and cities across the country spreading their message against the occupation of Iraq.

What you won’t hear

Don’t expect to actually hear anything substantive about why Casale and Israel are protesting the war ­ those reasons are nowhere to be found in the Tribune piece. While the story is full of references to various anti-war banners carried by the protestors reading “Peace,” “Bring the Troops Home,” and “War is not the Answer,” there is not a single coherent argument against the war visible throughout the 1,000-word piece. The lack of a context for understanding anti-war arguments is not isolated to the Tribune’s coverage. A content analysis of articles printed in 2007 (from January to July) in the New York Times discussing withdrawal from Iraq reveals a similar pattern. At a time when the majority of Americans are opposed to the occupation and favor withdrawal within a year, there are virtually no criticisms of the war (from quoted sources) reflected in the New York Times coverage. Criticisms of the occupation as driven by imperialism or a desire to control Iraqi oil are not mentioned a single time in the coverage. Neither is the challenge that the U.S. is conducting an illegal occupation. No source is cited arguing for withdrawal on grounds condemning U.S. terrorism and American responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

Majority Iraqi public opposition to the occupation is never mentioned by a quoted source in a single story either. Concern with excess American military casualties is also left out of quoted sources entirely. Even pragmatic assessments that the war is unwinnable or too costly are not mentioned at all. In fact, the only criticisms that appear at all amongst quoted sources in 2007 coverage include just one mention of Iraqi nationalism as a motivating force for rebellion (in a story on Iraqi political leader Moqtada al-Sadr), and three references to American public opposition to the war. These four quoted sources arguing for withdrawal throughout 2007 can hardly be characterized as fulfilling the requirements of a robust debate over the reasons for staying in or leaving Iraq.

On the other hand, arguments for the war from quoted sources are well represented in the New York Times coverage. Sources who oppose withdrawal are cited regularly arguing that Iraq faces civil war in light of current conditions or withdrawal (a claim that shows up in 23% of stories). In addition, those who oppose withdrawal cite the threat of Iraqi terrorists and Iraqi militias/insurgents in 19% and 8% respectively in the Times articles. Far and away, the largest number of justifications for remaining in Iraq come from those who reference the importance of supporting the troops. References to the troops show up in 51% of all the Times stories. It is perhaps fitting that the “support the troops” rationale is the most commonly appearing defense of the war in stories on withdrawal, at least if the point of media coverage is to deter meaningful public policy debate. The “support the troops” claim is clearly the most vacuous of all the pro-war arguments. In-and-of-itself, the claim doesn’t constitute a serious defense of the occupation, considering that both pro and anti-war critics cite the need to “support the troops” when arguing in favor of, and in opposition to, withdrawal. Even President Bush has admitted that both pro-and anti-war advocates support the troops. Such references, then, can hardly serve as the crux of a substantive pro-war argument.

3. Iran, the U.S., & the Nuclear “Threat”

Iran’s alleged nuclear threat to the United States and its allies has been a mainstay of American media coverage for at least the last four years. This is clearly the case when reviewing major media coverage. A content analysis of the Washington Post’s news stories, editorials, and op-ed coverage of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons shows a pattern of deception, one-sidedness, and manipulation. A review of over 230 Post news stories, 31 editorials, and 58 op-eds from 2003 through 2007 shows that assertions suggesting Iran may or is developing nuclear weapons appeared twice as often as claims or assertions that Iran is not or may not be developing such weapons. The paper’s op-eds and editorials are even more slanted, as 90% of editorials and 93% of op-eds suggest Iran is developing nuclear weapons, as opposed to o% of editorials and 16% of op-eds suggesting Iran may not be developing such weapons. Belligerent rhetoric is also used far more often in regards to the Iranian “threat” (of which there is no evidence of to date) than to the far larger U.S. and Israeli military threat to Iran (which has been announced vocally and shamelessly over and over throughout the American and Israeli press). Belligerent terms are applied twice as often in regards to Iranian development of nuclear weapons. Such terms, portray Iran as a “threat,” and discuss the “fear” invoked by a potentially nuclear armed Iran, as well as the “danger” of such a development ­ as contrasted with similar references to a U.S. “threat,” to the “fear” of a U.S. or Israeli attack, or the “danger” both countries pose to Iran.

What you won’t hear

While there is plenty of vilification featured throughout the stories on Iranian WMD, you can forget about reading a level-headed review of the actual intelligence available discussing whether Iran is actually developing such weapons. While the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is referenced in 61% of the Post’s editorials and 29% of its op-eds, the IAEA’s actual conclusion that there is “no evidence” Iran is developing nuclear weapons is referenced in just 1 editorial (3% of all editorials) and in only 1 op-ed (2% of all op-eds). Similarly, the IAEA is cited in 73% of all the Post’s news stories on Iranian weapons, despite the fact that the paper tilts by a ratio of 2:1 in favor of assertions that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. It appears that the IAEA itself, rather than its actual conclusions, has propaganda value for U.S. media and political elites.

Don’t bother looking for damning evidence implicating the U.S. for double standards and hypocrisy in dealing with Iran either ­ you won’t find them. References to the fact that it was the U.S. itself that originally supported Iranian uranium enrichment show up in just 1% of the Post’s news stories, and in just 3% of all op-eds, and none of the paper’s editorials. The same goes for admissions that the United States is undertaking a similar project of enriching its own uranium for use in a new generation of American nuclear weapons (the major distinction, however, is that the U.S. openly admits to its project, while Iran has admitted to no such program). The very activity that U.S. leaders are condemning Iran for secretly pursuing is arrogantly advocated and pursued by the United States (the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons on civilians), although one wouldn’t know any of this from looking at the coverage. U.S. enrichment of uranium for use in nuclear weapons receives not a single mention in Post editorials and op-eds, and receives only fleeting mention in the paper’s news stories.

Similarly, while the global nuclear non-proliferation treaty (preventing its signatories from developing nuclear weapons) is mentioned in regards to Iran in 38% of the Post’s news stories, 39% of editorials, and 14% of op-eds, the treaty is not brought up in a single news story, and appears in only 3% of editorials and 2% of all op-eds in terms of it its application to the United States. The conclusion couldn’t be more obvious to the astute reader ­ though both the U.S. and Iran have both signed the agreement, it only realistically applies to the U.S. International non-proliferation law is meant only for American enemies: the United States is bound by no such rules, even when it has ratified them.

Any honest reading of the results above can lead to no other conclusion: U.S. media coverage has reached appalling levels. Short of conducting a major research project like one of those undertaken above, it is very difficult for citizens to acquire the critical information needed to arrive at realistic assessments of what is going on in the world. How can citizens make informed decisions regarding public policy when they are subject to systematically skewed, propagandistic news coverage?

America’s parochial press is not designed to promote debate or to educate, but rather to repeat the official line. Citizens (outside the intellectual, political, and business elite) are expected to conform to the ideal of the apathetic consumers who know little about international affairs, and care even less. Such ignorance is encouraged in a mass media more concerned with selling products than engaging citizens. As Noam Chomsky cogently argues: in a democracy, “You can no longer control people by violence. You can’t just throw them into a torture chamber. You have to find other means. One means is propaganda. Another means is rabid consumerism, to try to drive people into massive consumption. In the United States the economy has suffered under the neoliberal policies, as has been the case worldwide, and is maintained to a high extent by consumer spendingFrom infancy children are deluged by propaganda telling them: buy, buy, buy, and so onThese are devices to try to control the populations and ensure that the private tyrannies endure.” The American press is not producing enlightened citizens, but rather alienated consumers. Whether the public will stand up and rebel against such contempt, however, is a question yet to be answered.

08/17/07 “ICH” — — At a time when even the Wall Street Journal has disappeared into the maw of a huge media conglomerate, the New York Times remains an independent newspaper. But it doesn’t show any independence in reporting or in thought.

The Times issued a mea culpa for letting its reporter, Judith Miller, misinform readers about Iraq, thus helping the neoconservatives set the stage for their invasion. Now the Times’ reporting on Iran seems to be repeating the mistake. After the US commits another senseless act of naked aggression by bombing Iran, will the Times publish another mea culpa?

The Times editorials also serve as conduits for propaganda. On August 13, a Times editorial jumped on China for “irresponsible threats” that threaten free trade. The Times’ editorialists do not understand that the offshoring of American jobs, which the Times mistakenly thinks is free trade, is a far greater threat to America than a reminder from the Chinese, who are tired of US bullying, that China is America’s banker.

Let’s briefly review the “China threat” and then turn to the real problem.

Members of the US government believe, as do many Americans, that the Chinese currency is undervalued relative to the US dollar and that this is the reason for America’s large trade deficit with China. Pressure continues to be applied to China to revalue its currency in order to reduce its trade advantage over goods made in the US.

The pressure put on China is misdirected. The exchange rate is not the main cause of the US trade deficit with China. The costs of labor, regulation and harassment are far lower in China, and US corporations have offshored their production to China in order to benefit from these lower costs. When a company shifts its production from the US to a foreign country, it transforms US GDP into imports. Every time a US company offshores goods and services, it adds to the US trade deficit.

Clearly, it is a mistake for the US government and economists to think of the imbalance as if it were produced by Chinese companies underselling goods produced by US companies in America. The imbalance is the result of US companies producing their goods in China and selling them in America.

Many believe the solution is to force China to revalue its currency, thereby driving up the prices of 70% of the goods on Wal-Mart shelves. Mysteriously, members of the US government believe that it would help the US consumer, who is as dependent on imported manufactured goods as he is on imported energy, to be charged higher prices.

China believes that the exchange rate is not the cause of US offshoring and opposes any rapid change in its currency’s value. In a message issued in order to tell the US to ease off the public bullying, China reminded Washington that the US doesn’t hold all the cards.

The NYT editorial expresses the concern that China’s “threat” will cause protectionist US lawmakers to stick on tariffs and start a trade war. “Free trade, free market” economists rush to tell us how bad this would be for US consumers: A tariff would raise the price of consumer goods.

The free market economists don’t tell us that dollar depreciation would have the same effect. Goods made in China would go up 30 percent in price if a 30 percent tariff was placed on them, and the goods would go up 30 percent in price if the value of the Chinese currency rises 30 percent against the dollar.

So, why all the fuss about tariffs?

The fuss about tariffs makes even less sense once one realizes that the purpose of tariffs is to protect domestically produced goods from cheaper imports. However, US tariffs today would be imposed on the offshored production of US firms. In the era of offshoring, corporations are not a constituency for tariffs.

Tariffs would benefit American labor, something that the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the Republican Party would strongly oppose. A wage equalization tariff would wipe out much of the advantage of offshoring. Profits would come down, and with lower profits would come lower CEO compensation and shareholder returns.

Obviously, the corporate interests and Wall Street do not want any tariffs.

The NYT and “free trade” economists haven’t caught on, because they mistakenly think that offshoring is trade. In fact, offshoring is labor arbitrage. US labor is simply removed from production functions that produce goods and services for US markets and replaced with foreign labor. No trade is involved. Instead of being produced in America, US brand names sold in America are produced in China.

It is not China’s fault that American corporations have so little regard for their employees and fellow citizens that they destroy their economic opportunities and give them to foreigners instead.

It is paradoxical that everyone is blaming China for the behavior of American firms. What is China supposed to do, close its borders to foreign capital?

When free market economists align, as they have done, with foreigners against American citizens, they destroy their credibility and the future of economic freedom. Recently the Independent Institute, with which I am associated, stressed that free market associations “have defended completely open immigration and free markets in labor,” emphasizing that 500 economists signed the Independent Institute’s Open Letter on Immigration in behalf of open immigration.

Such a policy is satisfying to some in its ideological purity. But what it means in practice is that the Americans, who are displaced in their professional and manufacturing jobs by offshoring and work visas for foreigners, also cannot find work in the unskilled and semi-skilled jobs taken over by illegal immigrants. A free market policy that gives the bird to American labor is not going to win acceptance by the population. Such a policy serves only the owners of capital and its senior managers.

Free market economists will dispute this conclusion. They claim that offshoring and unrestricted immigration provide consumers with cheaper prices in the market place. What the free market economists do not say is that offshoring and unrestricted immigration also provide US citizens with lower incomes, fewer job opportunities, and less satisfying jobs. There is no evidence that consumer prices fall by more than incomes so that US citizens can be said to benefit materially. The psychological experience of a citizen losing his career to a foreigner is alienating.

The free market economists ignore that a country that offshores its production also offshores its jobs. It becomes dependent on goods and services made in foreign countries, but lacks sufficient export earnings with which to pay for them. A country whose workforce is being reallocated, under pressure of offshoring, to domestic services has nothing to trade for its imports. That is why the US trade deficit has exploded to over $800 billion annually.

Among all the countries of the world, only the US can get away with exploding trade deficits. The reason is that the US inherited from Great Britain, exhausted by two world wars, the reserve currency role. To be the reserve currency country means that your currency is the accepted means of payment to settle international accounts. Countries pay their oil import bills in dollars and settle the deficits in their trade accounts in dollars.

The enormous and continuing US deficits are wearing out the US dollar as reserve currency. A time will come when the US cannot pay for the imports, on which it has become ever more dependent, by flooding the world with ever more dollars.

Offshoring and free market ideology are turning the US into a third world country. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, one-quarter of all new US jobs created between June 2006 and June 2007 were for waitresses and bartenders. Almost all of the net new US jobs in the 21st century have been in domestic services.

Democracy and hope in Latin America have been revived by Venezuela’s leader. But the forces allied against him are formidable

I walked with Roberto Navarrete into the national stadium in Santiago, Chile. With the southern winter’s wind skating down from the Andes, it was empty and ghostly. Little had changed, he said: the chicken wire, the broken seats, the tunnel to the changing rooms from which the screams echoed. We stopped at a large number 28. “This is where I was, facing the scoreboard. This is where I was called to be tortured.”

Thousands of “the detained and the disappeared” were imprisoned in the stadium following the Washington-backed coup by General Pinochet against the democracy of Salvador Allende on September 11 1973. For the majority people of Latin America, the abandonados, the infamy and historical lesson of the first “9/11” have never been forgotten. “In the Allende years, we had a hope the human spirit would triumph,” said Roberto. “But in Latin America those believing they are born to rule behave with such brutality to defend their rights, their property, their hold over society that they approach true fascism. People who are well-dressed, whose houses are full of food, bang pots in the streets in protest as though they don’t have anything. This is what we had in Chile 36 years ago. This is what we see in Venezuela today. It is as if Chávez is Allende. It is so evocative for me.”

In making my film The War on Democracy, I sought the help of Chileans like Roberto and his family, and Sara de Witt, who courageously returned with me to the torture chambers at Villa Grimaldi, which she somehow survived. Together with other Latin Americans who knew the tyrannies, they bear witness to the pattern and meaning of the propaganda and lies now aimed at undermining another epic bid to renew both democracy and freedom on the continent.

The disinformation that helped destroy Allende and give rise to Pinochet’s horrors worked the same in Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas had the temerity to implement modest, popular reforms. In both countries, the CIA funded the leading opposition media, although they need not have bothered. In Nicaragua, the fake martyrdom of La Prensa became a cause for North America’s leading liberal journalists, who seriously debated whether a poverty-stricken country of 3 million peasants posed a “threat” to the United States. Ronald Reagan agreed and declared a state of emergency to combat the monster at the gates. In Britain, whose Thatcher government “absolutely endorsed” US policy, the standard censorship by omission applied. In examining 500 articles that dealt with Nicaragua in the early 1980s, the historian Mark Curtis found an almost universal suppression of the achievements of the Sandinista government – “remarkable by any standards” – in favour of the falsehood of “the threat of a communist takeover”.

The similarities in the campaign against the phenomenal rise of popular democratic movements today are striking. Aimed principally at Venezuela, especially Chávez, the virulence of the attacks suggests that something exciting is taking place; and it is. Thousands of poor Venezuelans are seeing a doctor for the first time in their lives, having their children immunised and drinking clean water. New universities have opened their doors to the poor, breaking the privilege of competitive institutions effectively controlled by a “middle class” in a country where there is no middle. In barrio La Línea, Beatrice Balazo told me her children were the first generation of the poor to attend a full day’s school. “I have seen their confidence blossom like flowers,” she said. One night in barrio La Vega, in a bare room beneath a single lightbulb, I watched Mavis Mendez, aged 94, learn to write her own name for the first time.

More than 25,000 communal councils have been set up in parallel to the old, corrupt local bureaucracies. Many are spectacles of raw grassroots democracy. Spokespeople are elected, yet all decisions, ideas and spending have to be approved by a community assembly. In towns long controlled by oligarchs and their servile media, this explosion of popular power has begun to change lives in the way Beatrice described.

It is this new confidence of Venezuela’s “invisible people” that has so inflamed those who live in suburbs called country club. Behind their walls and dogs, they remind me of white South Africans. Venezuela’s wild west media is mostly theirs; 80% of broadcasting and almost all the 118 newspaper companies are privately owned. Until recently one television shock jock liked to call Chávez, who is mixed race, a “monkey”. Front pages depict the president as Hitler, or as Stalin (the connection being that both like babies). Among broadcasters crying censorship loudest are those bankrolled by the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA in spirit if not name. “We had a deadly weapon, the media,” said an admiral who was one of the coup plotters in 2002. The TV station, RCTV, never prosecuted for its part in the attempt to overthrow the elected government, lost only its terrestrial licence and is still broadcasting on satellite and cable.

Yet, as in Nicaragua, the “treatment” of RCTV is a cause celebre for those in Britain and the US affronted by the sheer audacity and popularity of Chávez, whom they smear as “power crazed” and a “tyrant”. That he is the authentic product of a popular awakening is suppressed. Even the description of him as a “radical socialist”, usually in the pejorative, wilfully ignores the fact that he is a nationalist and social democrat, a label many in Britain’s Labour party were once proud to wear.

In Washington, the old Iran-Contra death squad gang, back in power under Bush, fear the economic bridges Chávez is building in the region, such as the use of Venezuela’s oil revenue to end IMF slavery. That he maintains a neoliberal economy, described by the American Banker as “the envy of the banking world” is seldom raised as valid criticism of his limited reforms. These days, of course, any true reforms are exotic. And as liberal elites under Blair and Bush fail to defend their own basic liberties, they watch the very concept of democracy as a liberal preserve challenged on a continent about which Richard Nixon once said “people don’t give a shit”. However much they play the man, Chávez, their arrogance cannot accept that the seed of Rousseau’s idea of direct popular sovereignty may have been planted among the poorest, yet again, and “the hope of the human spirit”, of which Roberto spoke in the stadium, has returned.

Yesterday a radio interviewer in South Africa asked me what had been the response of the “mainstream media in the United States” to Just Foreign Policy’s ongoing estimate of the Iraqi death toll from the U.S. invasion and occupation, which on Thursday crossed the one million mark.

Sadly, I had to report that it has been ignored by mainstream media, even the wire services. But this is hardly surprising. A main motivation for constructing the web counter was to keep the “Lancet study” alive. The “Lancet study,” you’ll recall, was a study published last fall in the British medical journal The Lancet, which estimated that more than 600,000 Iraqis had had been killed as a result of the invasion as of July 2006. The media largely buried the Lancet study when it was published – and have largely ignored the question of the overall death toll from the U.S. invasion – so it’s little surprise that they have ignored our attempt to shine a light on this question.

The Lancet study is the only existing study that uses the method accepted all over the world for estimating deaths due to large-scale violent conflict: a cluster survey. Its principal deficit for understanding the current situation is that the survey it was based on is now a year old, so that when people want to invoke the Lancet study to describe the death toll, they are likely to say, “a year ago the death toll was over 600,000” – leaving out what has happened since. Since the Lancet study is “old news,” it’s progressively easier to ignore it over time. It was this problem that gave us the idea of constructing an ongoing, rough update.

The tally of deaths reported in the Western media by Iraq Body Count, although it gives an inaccurate picture of the overall death toll, does have the advantage that it is regularly updated. So while the Iraq Body Count tally, by itself, doesn’t help us understand the overall death toll, it does give us some information about the trend over time, because one can compare, for example, the Iraq Body Count tally today with the Iraq Body Count tally from July 2006.

Thus, we constructed our ongoing online estimate – for which we provide the code so you can include it on your own web page – by extrapolating from the Lancet estimate using the trend provided by Iraq Body Count.

Our extrapolation assumes that Iraq Body Count is capturing a fixed proportion of the true level of deaths over time. This is a conservative assumption, because it is likely that Iraq Body Count is capturing a smaller share of the true death toll over time, as reporting from Iraq becomes progressively more difficult. By assuming that Iraq Body Count captures a constant share, we will tend to underestimate the true death toll.

Note that the number we focus on is the Lancet estimate of excess deaths due to violence. Thus, we understate the death toll by ignoring, say, increased deaths due to cholera which could be attributed, at least in part, to the destruction resulting from the U.S. invasion and occupation.

Note further that a straight-line extrapolation from the Lancet study – ignoring any increase in the death rate in the last year from the average between March, 2003 and July, 2006 – an average that includes the first year of the occupation, when by all accounts the death rate was lower – would still result in more than 750,000 excess deaths due to violence.

Increasingly, the U.S. occupation is described as a passive onlooker to the violence. This is deeply misleading for two reasons. First, the civil war – or civil wars – that have been unleashed in Iraq was a predictable – and predicted – result of the U.S. invasion. Everything is predicted if one searches enough, but in this case, for example, James Baker gave the threat of unleashing a civil war as a key reason why the U.S. didn’t go to Baghdad in 1991, so it’s absurd to treat this as an unforeseeable consequence. Second, the picture is being obscured by [vastly – The Rag] underreporting in the U.S. of deaths from U.S. air strikes, raids, and shooting at checkpoints.

WASHINGTON – When a top U.S. commander in Iraq reported last week that attacks by Shiite militias with links to Iran had risen to 73 percent of all July attacks that had killed or wounded U.S. forces in Baghdad, he claimed it was because of an effort by Iran to oust the United States from Iraq, referring to “intelligence reports” of a “surge” in Iranian assistance.

But the obvious reason for the rise in Shiite-related U.S. casualties, — ignored in U.S. media coverage of Lt. General Raymond Odierno’s charge — is that the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr was defending itself against a rising tempo of attacks by U.S. forces at the same time attacks by al-Qaeda forces had fallen.

In his press briefing on Aug. 5, Odierno, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq, blamed the rise in the proportion of U.S. casualties attributable to Shiite militias on Iran “surging their support to these groups based on the September report” — a reference to the much-anticipated report by General David Petraeus on the U.S.’s own surge strategy.

Odierno claimed intelligence reports supported his contention of an Iranian effort to influence public perceptions of the surge strategy. “They’re sending more money in, they’re training more individuals and they’re sending more weapons in.”

He repeated the charge in an interview with Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times published on its front page Aug. 8 under the headline, “U.S. Says Iran-Supplied Bomb Is Killing More Troops in Iraq.” In that interview, he declared of Iran, “I think they want to influence the decision potentially coming up in September.”

What Odierno framed in terms of an Iranian policy, however, can be explained much more simply by the fact that the U.S. military mounted more operations on Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army during the spring and summer.

The U.S. command has not provided any statistics on the targets of its operations in recent months, but news reports on those operations reveal a pattern of rising U.S. attacks on Mahdi Army personnel since March 2007.

Between Apr. 26 and Jun. 30, the U.S. command in Baghdad announced dozens of military operations in Baghdad — the vast majority in Sadr City — solely for the purpose of capturing or killing Shiites belonging to what were called “secret cells” — a term used to describe Mahdi Army units alleged to be supported by Iran.

In July the Mahdi Army resisted these raids in many cases. On Jul. 9, for example, U.S. troops cordoned off an area in Sadr City and began searching for members of what the U.S. command called a “criminal militia” accused of planting roadside bombs. According to the official military press release, the U.S. troops were “engaged by rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire from numerous locations.”

In short, the rise in deaths of U.S. troops in Baghdad in July reflected the increased pace of U.S. operations against the Mahdi Army and the Mahdi Army’s military response.

Odierno conceded as much in the same press conference: “Because of the effect we’ve had on al-Qaeda in Iraq and the success against them and the Sunni insurgency,” he said, “we are focusing very much more on the special groups of the Jaish al-Mahdi [Mahdi Army] here in Baghdad.”

The major briefing by the U.S. command on alleged Iranian support for Iraqi Shiite militias in recent weeks appears to contradict Odierno’s claim that intelligence showed increased Iranian assistance to those militias. Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner told reporters on Aug. 2 — after a “surge” in Iranian assistance had allegedly taken place — that the rate of training of militia groups in Iran had remained stable for a long time.

The transcript of the briefing also shows that Bergner did not claim any recent increase in financial assistance to the Mahdi Army.

Odierno’s reference to “sending more weapons in” continued the practice of the George W. Bush administration to claim that Iranian officials actually ship weapons to Shiite militias in Iraq, despite the fact that no evidence of such a role has been found after four years of trying.

Odierno told the New York Times that explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) accounted for one-third of combat deaths suffered by “U.S.-led forces” — including Iraqi and British forces — in July. But he said nothing about the proportion of total U.S. troops killed or wounded by them.

The Bush administration continues to assert that EFPs are provided by the Iranian government, despite numerous discoveries by U.S. forces of workshops manufacturing such devices in Iraq.

Odierno’s charges are the latest addition to an ongoing Bush administration narrative about developments in Iraq that treats all Shiite activity outside the Iraqi government as reflecting Iranian policy.

Its central theme of an Iranian policy to drive the U.S. out of Iraq by killing U.S. troops, first introduced in January, has branched out into several sub-themes, one of which is that Sadr has lost control over the Mahdi Army. The U.S. command has been claiming it has broken up into “rogue units” — also called “special groups” or “secret cells”. Those “rogue units” in turn are said to have become instruments of Iranian policy.

Although the Mahdi Army operates on a highly decentralised basis, and some units have been involved in sectarian activities that Sadr did not approve, the U.S. military has never produced evidence that a significant number of units are no longer loyal to Sadr.

The “rogue units” line has been used to suggest that those units that were loyal to Sadr were cooperating with the United States and to justify U.S. attacks on the Mahdi Army both in Baghdad and in Southern Iraq.

Gen. Petraeus claimed publicly that Sadr had agreed in talks with Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to the deployment of U.S. troops to Baghdad’s Sadr City district in return for assurances that searches and raids would be conducted in a “respectable manner”.

Sadr’s spokesman in parliament said, however, that the understanding had been that Iraqi forces would conduct searches and that U.S. troops would intervene only if they faced resistance. The spokesman said U.S. troops had violated the understanding.

At first, Sadr’s troops stayed off the streets and did not resist U.S. troops. But in March Sadr’s office denounced the U.S. troop deployment in Sadr City and called on people to take to the streets in protest. And a Shiite cleric loyal to Sadr exhorted followers at Friday prayers not to cooperate with the U.S. occupation of Sadr City.

On Apr. 8, Sadr issued a statement urged the Iraqi army and police to stop cooperating with the United States and told his guerrilla fighters to concentrate on pushing U.S. forces out of the country.

Thus it requires no Iranian hand to explain the escalation of the conflict between the Mahdi Army and the U.S. military that accounts for the changing pattern of U.S. casualties in Baghdad.

WASHINGTON — As President Bush escalates the United States’ confrontation with Iran across a broad front, U.S. allies in Europe and the Middle East are growing worried that the steps will achieve little, but will undercut diplomacy and increase the chances of war.

In the latest step, Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are considering designating Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the elite military force that serves as the guardian of Iran’s Islamic state, as a foreign terrorist organization.

News of the decision was leaked to newspapers in what a senior State Department official and Washington-based diplomats said was a sign of an intensifying internal struggle within the U.S. government between proponents of military action and opponents, led by Rice.

State Department officials and foreign diplomats see Rice’s push for the declaration against the Revolutionary Guards as an effort to blunt arguments by Vice President Dick Cheney and his allies for air strikes on Iran. By making the declaration, they feel, Rice can strike out at a key Iranian institution without resorting to military action while still pushing for sanctions in the United Nations.

Partisans of military force argue that Rice’s strategy has failed to change Tehran’s behavior.

“It really does seem this is more tied to the internal debate that is going on in the administration on Iran, rather than a serious attempt to influence Iranian behavior,” said an Arab diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.

“How that debate will play out is what’s concerning” Arab and European countries, he said.

Designating the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group “is the State Department trying to do something short of war,” said former U.S. diplomat Charles Dunbar, a professor of international relations at Boston University.

“What else can we do?” said Dunbar, who worked for the State Department in Tehran from 1963 to 1967.

The Revolutionary Guard would be the first military unit of a sovereign government ever placed on the department’s list of terrorist organizations. The move would allow the Treasury Department to go after the group’s finances and those of its reputed business network inside and outside Iran.

The Bush administration has been engaging Iran in a increasingly strident war of words since the spring, when the Bush administration demanded tougher U.N. sanctions over Iran’s nuclear energy program. The White House says that Bush remains committed to diplomatic and financial actions to persuade Iran to stop enriching nuclear fuel, which the U.S. says can be made into a bomb but that Iran insists is intended only for electricity generation.

Recently, the administration has stepped up the rhetoric, accusing Iran of providing Shiite Muslim militias in Iraq with particularly deadly roadside bombs that have killed dozens of U.S. service members.

“We are confronting Iranian behavior across a variety of different fronts on a number of different, quote- unquote, battlefields, if you will,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Wednesday.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon temporarily moved an additional aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf as a warning to Iran. U.S. commanders in Iraq have also highlighted intelligence they say shows that the Revolutionary Guard’s Qods force is shipping sophisticated road-side bombs, known as explosively formed penetrators, into Iraq.

Bush and his aides also have accused Iran of playing an unhelpful role in Afghanistan — although some State Department officials say the reality is much more complicated.

Finally, Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates traveled to the Middle East in late July and early August, bearing promises of billions in weapons sales to friendly Arab states and a $30 billlion, 10-year military aid package to Israel. The rationale: Iran.

What remains unclear is what the administration will do if none of those steps has an impact on Iran, whose leaders seem confident as they see Bush unpopular at home and bogged down in Iraq.

“The coercion … undermines diplomacy. And once diplomacy is undermined, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

By early 2008, “You’re in a position where you have a series of escalatory measures … And then the military option becomes something you can consider,” Takeyh said.

On the nuclear front, since taking office in 2005, Rice has backed a European-led effort to persuade Iran to stop enriching uranium in exchange for economic, political and security benefits.

The U.N. Security Council has passed two resolutions imposing sanctions on Iran for its nuclear work. But negotiations on a third have stalled and a September deadline for enacting new sanctions will likely be missed, say State Department officials and diplomats.

Critics say that designating the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group could further undermine the effort, and also scuttle U.S.-Iranian talks in Baghdad on Iraq’s security. Those talks have achieved little.

On Iran’s role in Iraq, U.S. ground commanders in Iraq oppose proposals from Cheney and his allies to counter-attack inside Iran itself, saying they believe they can contain Iran’s growing influence without acting outside Iraq.

Privately, some are hostile to suggestions that the military strike another country, saying they are mired in Iraq.

“Let them put on the uniform and go there then,” said one military official in Baghdad who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the topic.

Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the No. 2 commander in Iraq, said Friday that Shi’ite factions, backed by Iranian groups, are now responsible for nearly half the attacks in Iraq, compared to 30 percent in January.

Odierno said he could deal with the problem inside Iraq, without going over the border into Iran. But he conceded that the military still is learning about how Iranian networks run through Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: The State Department is coming under criticism this week for refusing to allow a prominent South African social scientist to enter the country. Adam Habib was scheduled to speak at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in New York this past weekend, but the government refused to give him a visa.

Ironically, the theme of this year’s sociology conference was “Is Another World Possible?” At the conference, the ASA planned a series of sessions to assess the potential for progressive social change both in the US and in the world and to invite a serious discussion of “economic globalization” and its consequences.

One of the most highly anticipated sessions was to feature Jeffrey Sachs, an internationally known economist and a former special advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, versus Naomi Klein, the Canadian journalist and author. But shortly before the ASA conference opened, Sachs pulled out. Unclear if it was related to the fact that Naomi Klein takes him on in her forthcoming book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. The theme of her talk was “Lost Worlds.” This is Naomi Klein.

NAOMI KLEIN: As we think about reaching this other possible world, I want to be very clear that I don’t believe the problem is a lack of ideas. I think we’re swimming in ideas: universal healthcare; living wages; cooperatives; participatory democracy; public services that are accountable to the people who use them; food, medicine and shelter as a human right. These aren’t new ideas. They’re enshrined in the UN Charter. And I think most of us still believe in them.

I don’t think our problem is money, lack of resources to act on these basic ideas. Now, at the risk of being accused of economic populism, I would just point out that in this city, the employees of Goldman Sachs received more than $16 billion in Christmas bonuses last year, and ExxonMobil earned $40 billion in annual profits, a world record. It seems to me that there’s clearly enough money sloshing around to pay for our modest dreams. We can tax the polluters and the casino capitalists to pay for alternative energy development and a global social safety net. We don’t lack ideas. Neither are we short on cash.

And unlike Jeffrey Sachs, I actually don’t believe that what is lacking is political will at the highest levels, cooperation between world leaders. I don’t think that if we could just present our elites with the right graphs and PowerPoint presentations — no offense — that we would finally convince them to make poverty history. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe we could do it, even if that PowerPoint presentation was being delivered Angelina Jolie wearing a (Product) Red TM Gap tank top and carrying a (Product) Red cell phone. Even if she had a (Product) Red iPhone, I still don’t think they would listen. That’s because elites don’t make justice because we ask them to nicely and appealingly. They do it when the alternative to justice is worse. And that is what happened all those years ago when the income gap began to close. That was the motivation behind the New Deal and the Marshall Plan. Communism spreading around the world, that was the fear. Capitalism needed to embellish itself. It needed to soften its edges. It was in a competition. So ideas aren’t the problem, and money is not the problem, and I don’t think political will is ever the problem.

The real problem, I want to argue today, is confidence, our confidence, the confidence of people who gather at events like this under the banner of building another world, a kinder more sustainable world. I think we lack the strength of our convictions, the guts to back up our ideas with enough muscle to scare our elites. We are missing movement power. That’s what we’re missing. “The best lacked all convictions,” Yeats wrote, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Think about it. Do you want to tackle climate change as much as Dick Cheney wants Kazakhstan’s oil? Do you? Do you want universal healthcare as much as Paris Hilton wants to be the next new face of Estee Lauder? If not, why not? What is wrong with us? Where is our passionate intensity?

What is at the root of our crisis of confidence? What drains us of our conviction at crucial moments when we are tested? At the root, I think it’s the notion that we have accepted, which is that our ideas have already been tried and found wanting. Part of what keeps us from building the alternatives that we deserve and long for and that the world needs so desperately, like a healthcare system that doesn’t sicken us when we see it portrayed on film, like the ability to rebuild New Orleans without treating a massive human tragedy like an opportunity for rapid profit-making for politically connected contractors, the right to have bridges that don’t collapse and subways that don’t flood when it rains. I think that what lies at the root of that lack of confidence is that we’re told over and over again that progressive ideas have already been tried and failed. We hear it so much that we accepted it. So our alternatives are posed tentatively, almost apologetically. “Is another world possible?” we ask.

This idea of our intellectual and ideological failure is the dominant narrative of our time. It’s embedded in all the catchphrases that we’ve been referring to. “There is no alternative,” said Thatcher. “History has ended,” said Fukuyama. The Washington Consensus: the thinking has already been done, the consensus is there. Now, the premise of all these proclamations was that capitalism, extreme capitalism, was conquering every corner of the globe because all other ideas had proven themselves disastrous. The only thing worse than capitalism, we were told, was the alternative.

Now, it’s worth remembering when these pronouncements were being made that what was failing was not Scandinavian social democracy, which was thriving, or a Canadian-style welfare state, which has produced the highest standard of living by UN measures in the world, or at least it did before my government started embracing some of these ideas. It wasn’t the so-called Asian miracle that had been discredited, which in the ’80s and ’90s built the Asian “tiger” economies in South Korea and Malaysia using a combination of trade protections to nurture and develop national industry, even when that meant keeping American products out and preventing foreign ownership, as well as maintaining government control over key assets, like water and electricity. These policies did not create explosive growth concentrated at the very top, as we see today. But record levels of profit and a rapidly expanding middle class, that is what has been attacked in these past thirty years.

What was failing and collapsing when history was declared over was something very specific in 1989, when Francis Fukyama made that famous declaration, and when the Washington Consensus was declared, also in 1989. What was collapsing was centralized state communism, authoritarian, anti-democratic, repressive. Something very specific was collapsing, and it was a moment of tremendous flux.

And it was in that moment of flux and disorientation that several very savvy people, many of them in this country, seized on that moment to declare victory not only against communism, but against all ideas but their own. Now, this was the Fukuyama chutzpah, when he actually said — and it seems so strange to read it now — in his famous 1989 speech, that the significance of that moment was not that we were reaching an end of ideology, as some were suggesting, or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as Gorbachev was suggesting, it was not that ideology had ended, but that history as such had ended. He argued that deregulated markets in the economic sphere combined with liberal democracy in the political sphere represented the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the final form of human government.

Now, what was interesting and never quite stated in this formulation was that you basically had two streams: you had democracy, which you can use to vote for your leaders, and then you had a single economic model. Now, the catch was that you couldn’t use your vote, you couldn’t use your democracy to reshape your economy, because all of the economic decisions had already been decided. There was only — it was the final endpoint of ideological evolution. So you could have democracy, but you couldn’t use it to change the basics of life, you couldn’t use it to change the economy. This moment was held up as a celebration of victory for democracy, but that idea, that democracy cannot affect the economy, is and remains the single most anti-democratic idea of our time.

Now, I was drawn to the slogan that was chosen for this year’s ASA gathering, because I think, as many of you know and have read in the program, it comes from the World Social Forum. And I was at the first World Social Forum six-and-a-half years ago — more than six-and-a-half years ago in January 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. I was one of only a handful of North Americans who attended. And we gathered under that same slogan, but I think it’s significant and interesting that it wasn’t posed as a question back then. There was a proud exclamation mark at the end of the sentence: “Another world is possible!”

I wrote a feature article for The Nation when I came back from Brazil, trying to explain to readers in the US — the event wasn’t covered at all in this country, although it was covered very heavily in the international press — what it felt like to be there with 10,000 other people. And a lot of people were saying that they felt like we were making history. And what I wrote was that what it really felt like was the end of the end of history. That’s what it felt like to be in that room. It was this powerful gust of wind that you could suddenly breathe more deeply. You were free to imagine. Our minds were unleashed.

And it wasn’t just Porto Alegre, because Porto Alegre was the culmination of these types of spontaneous — often spontaneous uprisings that were happening around the world whenever world leaders were gathering to advance the so-called Washington Consensus, whether it was in Seattle at the WTO meeting in 1999, whether it was the IMF/World Bank meetings a few years later in Washington, then in Genoa during the G8. And, of course, the Zapatistas and the MST in Brazil were at the forefront.

And the theme in Porto Alegre was democracy. That was the — it was about redefining democracy to include the economy: deep democracy, participatory democracy. And it was a challenge to this idea that these two streams could not intersect. The right to land as a form of democracy, the right to biodiversity, to independent media. But what was most extraordinary about Porto Alegre was that — you know, certainly there were some politicians there, there were some big NGOs there, but the people who were at the podiums, who were shaping the discussion, were the people who were the casualties of this economic model, who were themselves discarded, made landless, forced to occupy pieces of land, chop down fences and plant food and make decisions democratically.

So, you know, Jeffery Sachs talks about these model villages that he’s building in Africa. And many of them, you know, are making tremendous progress. But I can’t help thinking back to these field trips that we made in Porto Alegre to MST villages, where it was the people themselves, the landless people themselves, who were showing us their own model villages and were asking for our solidarity. And I think as sociologists, you understand this key distinction, that it was the actors who were the protagonists of their history, and that was what was historic. It was breaking the charity model in a very real way.

Now, I look at where we are now, six-and-a-half years later, and it does feel that we have moved backwards in many areas. Talk of fixing the world has become an astonishingly elite affair. Davos — now, Porto Alegre was in rebellion against the Davos Summit every year in January. This was the anti-Davos. Davos has been re-legitimized, and now solving the world’s problems appears to be a matter between CEOs and super-celebrities. And the idea that we don’t need to challenge these mass disparities, what we need is sort of noblesse oblige on a mass scale, that is very different than what we were talking about in Porto Alegre those years ago.

Now, we know what closed that window of possibility, that freedom that opened up in 2001, and it was September 11th in this country. And the window didn’t close everywhere, but it did close, at least temporarily, in North America, that sense of possibility, that putting these issues and the people affected by these policies at the center of the political debate. Now, the shock of those attacks, I think we can see with some hindsight, was harnessed by leaders in this country and their allies around the world to abruptly end the discussion of global justice that was exploding around the world. There was a door that had opened, and it was suddenly slammed shut. We heard that phrase again and again: 9/11 changes everything. And one of the first things we were told that it had changed was that trade, privatization, labor rates, all the things we were fighting for just so recently no longer mattered. It was Year Zero. Wipe the slate clean. And it was another one of these rebooting history moments. History was apparently starting all over again from scratch, and nothing we knew before mattered. It was all relegated to pre-9/11 thinking.

Now, the Bush administration justified this by saying that all that mattered was security and the war on terror. And in Canada, we were told that — by the US ambassador — that security trumps trade. That became the new slogan, that before 9/11 it was economic priorities that drove the US administration, but post-9/11 the only thing that mattered was security. So talk of economic justice, corporate greed, the loss of the public sphere, the talk of Porto Alegre, was suddenly retro, so 2001.

Now, the irony that we can now see is that, while denying the importance of this economic project, the Bush administration used the dislocation of 9/11 to pursue the very same pre-9/11 radical capitalist project, now with a furious vengeance, under the cover of war and natural disasters. So forget negotiating trade deals at the World Trade Organization. When the US invaded Iraq, Bush sent in Paul Bremer to seize new markets on the battlefields of his preemptive war. He didn’t have to negotiate with anyone. He just rewrote the country’s entire economic architecture in one swoop. But, of course, if you said that the war had anything to do with economics, you were dismissed as naïve. It was, of course, about security, about liberating Iraqis from Saddam.

Meanwhile, at home the administration quickly moved to exploit the shock that gripped the nation to push through a radical vision of hollow government, in which everything from waging wars to reconstructing from those wars to disaster response became an entirely for-profit venture. This was a bold evolution of market logic. Rather than the ’90s approach of selling off existing public companies, like water and electricity, the Bush team was creating a whole new framework for its actions. That framework was and is the war on terror, which was built to be private, privately managed from the start. The Bush administration played the role of a kind of a venture capitalist for the startup security companies, and they created an economic boom on par with the dotcom boom of the 1990s. But we didn’t talk about it, because we were too busy talking about security.

Now, this feat required a kind of two-stage process, which was using 9/11, of course, to radically increase the surveillance and security powers of the state, concentrated in the executive branch, but at the same time to take those powers and outsource them to a web of private companies, whether Blackwater, Boeing, AT&T, Halliburton, Bechtel, the Carlyle Group. Now, in the ’80s, the goal of privatization — and in the ’90s — was devouring the appendages of the state. But what was happening now is it was the core that was being devoured, because what is more central to the very definition of a state of a government than security and disaster response? Now, this is one of the great ironies of the war on terror, is that it proved such an effective weapon to furthering the corporate agenda precisely because it denied that it has, and continues to deny that it has, a corporate agenda at all.

Now, it had another benefit, too, which was the ability to pay anyone who opposed this system as aligned with potential terrorists and so on. So our movement, which was already facing extreme repression before 9/11, was put on notice as traitorous. Looking back, it’s clear that the shock, the disorientation caused by the attacks, was used to reassert this economic agenda, to reassert that consensus that never really was. The window that was opened at the end of the ’90s in the movement known as the anti-globalization movement, but which was always a pro-democracy movement, was slammed shut, at least in North America. And it was terror that slammed it shut. The alternatives started to disappear.

Now, I want to use the rest of my time just to say that this was not the first time, that this — if we look back at the past thirty-five years, we see this slamming of the door on alternatives just as they are emerging repeating again and again. Many of you were here for the opening address from Ricardo Lagos, the former president of Chile, who talked about another September 11th, which was another one of those moments, a far more significant one, when a very important democratic alternative, the real third way, not Tony Blair’s third way, but the real third way between totalitarian communism and extreme capitalism was being forged in Chile. And that was the great threat.

And we know that now through all of the declassified documents. There’s a really revealing one: a correspondence between Henry Kissinger and Nixon, in which Kissinger says very bluntly that the problem with Allende’s election is not what they were saying publicly, which was that he was aligned with the Soviets, that he was only pretending to be democratic, but that he was really going to impose a totalitarian system in Chile. That was the spin at the time. What he actually wrote was, “The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on — and even precedent value for — other parts of the world…The imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.” So that alternative, that other world, had to be blasted out of the way, and extreme violence was used in order to accomplish that.

Now, this kind of preemptive attack on our democratic alternatives, the persistent dream of a third way, of a real third way, has come up again and again. And this is what I discuss at length in the book, but I want to mention a couple of examples — unless I’m totally out of time? OK — examples of moments where there was a similar sense of effervescent possibility of being able to breathe more and dream more fully.

One of them was in Poland in 1989. June 4th was the day of the historic elections in Poland that elected Solidarity as the new government. They hadn’t had elections there in decades. And this was the event that really set off the domino — what’s now referred to as the domino effect in Eastern Bloc countries — and ultimately resulting in the breaking apart of the Soviet Union. But it’s worth remembering what it actually looked like in June of 1989. In Poland, people didn’t think that history was over, because they had just elected Solidarity as their government. They thought that history was just beginning and that they were finally going to be able to implement what the movement, which was a labor movement, had always seen as the third way, the third way not taken. Now, Solidarity’s vision was not a rejection of socialism. They said that they were calling for “real socialism,” as socialists often do, and it was a rejection of the Communist party. They were everything that the party was not: dispersed where it was centralized, democratic where it was authoritarian, participatory where it was bureaucratic. And Solidarity had ten million members, which gave them the power to completely shut down the state.

So when people went to the polls and elected a Solidarity government, what were they voting for? What did they think they were voting for? Did they think that they were voting to become a free market economy on the model that Francis Fukuyama was talking about? No, they didn’t. They thought they were voting for the labor party that they had helped to build.

And I just want to read you a short passage from Solidarity’s economic program, which was passed democratically in 1981. They said, “The socialized enterprise should be the basic organizational unit in the economy. It should be controlled by the workers’ council representing the collective” and should be operated — cooperatively run by a director appointed through competition, recalled by the council, workers’ cooperatives. So the idea was to get the party out of control of the economy, to decentralize it and have the people who were doing the work actually control their workplaces. And they believed that they could make them more sustainable.

Now, did they get the chance to try that, to act on that vision of a worker cooperative economy as the centerpiece of the economy, to have democratic elections but still have socialism? Did they get that chance when they voted for Solidarity? No, they didn’t. What they got was an inherited debt, and they were told that the only way that they would get any relief from that debt and any aid is if they followed a very radical shock therapy program. Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the person who prescribed that shock therapy program was Jeffery Sachs. And I — no, I say that because I really had hoped that we could debate these different worlds, because there are differences, there are real differences that we must not smooth over.

Now, in 2006, 40% of young workers in Poland were unemployed, 40%, last year. That’s twice the EU average. And Poland is often held up as a great success story of transition. In 1989, 15% of the Poland’s population was living below the poverty line. In 2003, 59% of Poles had fallen below the line. That’s that opening of that gap. That’s what these economic policies do. And then, we can say we’re very, very worried about the people at the bottom, let’s bring them up, but let’s be clear about what we’re talking about. These jarring levels of inequality and economic exclusion are now feeding a resurgence of chauvinism, racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, rampant homophobia in Poland. And I think we can see, actually, that it’s inevitable that this would be the case, because they tried communism, they tried capitalism, they tried democratic socialism, but they got shock therapy instead. After you’ve tried all that, there really isn’t a whole lot left but fascism. It’s dangerous to suppress democratic alternatives when people invest their dreams in them. It’s risky business.

Another one of these powerful dreams was Tiananmen Square, and it’s a sort of a very sad fluke of history that on the same day that Solidarity won those historic elections and that dream was betrayed, what they voted for was betrayed, tanks rolled in Tiananmen Square, and that was the day of the massacre: June 4, 1989. It was another bloody end to a moment of effervescent possibility.

Now, the way those protests were always reported on in the West was that students in Beijing just wanted to live like in the United States. And they, you know, put a goddess to democracy that looked a lot like the Statue of Liberty. So it was reported on CNN as just kind of pro-American–style democracy protests.

But in recent years, an alternative analysis of those events has emerged. And what we’re starting to hear from what’s being called China’s New Left, and people like Wang Hui, who’s a wonderful academic, is that this was a vast oversimplification of what was driving the pro-democracy movement in 1989 in China. What was driving it was that the government of Deng Xiaoping was radically restructuring the economy along with the lines that had been prescribed by Milton Friedman — economic shock therapy — and people were seeing their quality of life devalued. Workers were losing their rights. And they were taking to the streets and demanding democratic control over the economic transition.

So democracy wasn’t an abstract idea. It wasn’t just “We want to vote.” It was, “We want to control this transition. We want to have a say in it.” It was a direct challenge to the Fukuyama formulation, which, by the way, was made that same year: the idea that you would have these two streams and that they wouldn’t intersect.

I just want to read one other thing, which is another one of these paths not taken, because we know how that one ended in Tiananmen Square: that dream was crushed. Another historic moment of possibility, when we look back on our recent history, was 1994, when the ANC government won landslide elections in South Africa. That was a victory for people power. That was one of the most hopeful days that I can remember.

I think we should remember what South Africans thought they were voting for in those historic elections. You know, it was just portrayed as something very simple: it was an end to apartheid. But what did an end to apartheid mean to South Africans? And we can get an answer from that actually from Nelson Mandela, who wrote a little note two weeks before he was released from prison. And he wrote this note because there was a growing concern that he had been in prison so long that he had forgotten the promise of liberation, which was not just to have elections, but to change the economy of the country and redistribute the wealth. And Mandela was under so much pressure that he had to release this very short statement just to clarify this point. And what he said was, “The nationalization of the mines, banks and monopoly industry is the policy of the ANC and a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable in our situation. State control of certain sectors of the economy is unavoidable.” And this was a reiteration of South Africa’s Freedom Charter, which is the platform of the ANC, which calls for the national wealth of South Africa, the heritage of the country, to be restored for the people, the mineral wealth and so on.

Now, I say this because this was one of those worlds that wasn’t chosen, one of those paths that wasn’t chosen. And I spent the past four years pulling these stolen and betrayed alternatives out of the dustbin of our recent history, because I think it matters. I think it matters that we had ideas all along, that there were always alternatives to the free market. And we need to retell our own history and understand that history, and we have to have all the shocks and all the losses, the loss of lives, in that story, because history didn’t end. There were alternatives. They were chosen, and then they were stolen. They were stolen by military coups. They were stolen by massacres. They stolen by trickery, by deception. They were stolen by terror.

We who say we believe in this other world need to know that we are not losers. We did not lose the battle of ideas. We were not outsmarted, and we were not out-argued. We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by think tanks, I mean the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks. Now, most effective we have seen is when the army tanks and the think tanks team up. The quest to impose a single world market has casualties now in the millions, from Chile then to Iraq today. These blueprints for another world were crushed and disappeared because they are popular and because, when tried, they work. They’re popular because they have the power to give millions of people lives with dignity, with the basics guaranteed. They are dangerous because they put real limits on the rich, who respond accordingly. Understanding this history, understanding that we never lost the battle of ideas, that we only lost a series of dirty wars, is key to building the confidence that we lack, to igniting the passionate intensity that we need.

In late June, as parliamentarians were packing up for the summer, Stephen Harper seemed to suggest a potential shift in his minority government’s approach to the war in Afghanistan. In a departure from months of rhetoric by government and military leaders about an open-ended or even decades-long extension of the military role, the Prime Minister stated that extending Canada’s mission in Kandahar beyond February 2009 would require “consensus” from all four parties in the House of Commons.

Globe and Mail columnist Lawrence Martin was among those who interpreted Harper’s statement as a veiled admission that a major concession would be coming on this most important foreign policy file, and that Harper would not seek to extend the counter-insurgency operation beyond the current 2009 end date. “Make no mistake,” Martin wrote, “these were code words for the end of our war mission. He was essentially saying that in a year and a half, other North Atlantic Treaty Organization partners can take their turn at the combat role.” (1)

As Martin pointed out, such an about-face would be a concession to public opinion, and it would certainly seem difficult to imagine a “consensus” in the House that would please the Conservatives. But was Harper’s statement really a preview of a change in course, or merely a hint of a new PR campaign to prolong Canada’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan. The Prime Minister may well only be signaling a new strategy of co-opting the language of mushy “opposition” to the Afghan debacle coming from the bulk of his parliamentary opponents.

Both the Liberals and Bloc Quebecois have said that they want the current mission to end in 2009, though they have made it clear to varying degrees that they would continue to support the occupation of Afghanistan in other ways, perhaps with a deployment to a less volatile region. The Liberals, of course, are hypocrites of the highest order when they try to position themselves as being in favour of peace. It was under Paul Martin, in 2005, that Canadian troops were sent to Kandahar without any debate. And it was only with the help of the votes of high profile Liberal MPs like Michael Ignatieff that Harper was able to push the 2009 extension through parliament. (Almost five years too late, Ignatieff recently expressed regret for his support of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but there is no sign of such a mea culpa on the Afghanistan vote). The New Democratic Party’s policy, meanwhile, does call for an immediate withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan.

A recent Strategic Counsel poll indicates that a clear majority is now opposed to Canada’s role in that Central Asian country (2). Conducted July 12-16, the results found 59% opposed to the mission compared to only 36% in favour. For those with intense feelings on the matter the margin was even wider, with 27% strongly opposed compared to a mere 7% strongly supporting. In Quebec, a staggering 75% said they were opposed. This sampling of public opinion, notably, comes on the heels of a sustained and costly publicity push by the government. It seems that all the military ads and boosterism – the Stanley Cup’s trip to Kandahar for a ball hockey game featuring Rick Hillier and Dave “Tiger” Williams stands out as a memorable example of this disturbing trend – have been unable to overcome the grim reality of the war. Canadian troop fatalities now stand at 66, while Afghan civilian casualties (never reported as dramatically, when they are covered at all) are taken in the dozens by air strikes on a regular basis.

While we all ponder what strategy Harper will try to push when parliament reconvenes, a certain George W. Bush is coming to Canada next week, in what will surely be the last official visit by the deeply unpopular war president. Bush last visited in November 2004 and, despite riding an election win high, sparked anti-war protests across Canada. (You might remember Bush’s joke about thanking those who waved at his motorcade with “all five fingers”). This time, Bush will meet with Harper and their Mexican partner Felipe Calderon. They will gather under a heavy police and military presence just outside of Ottawa in Montabello, Quebec, to discuss implementation of the Orwellian-named Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), a framework for initiating what has been called a ‘NAFTA Homeland Security model’.

Bush’s fondness for “Steve” Harper is well established. White House spokesperson Tony Snow reported that a July 31 phone call between the two discussed the August summit, and that Bush thanked the Prime Minister for Canada’s ongoing role in Afghanistan. The war is bound to be a major topic of discussion behind the closed doors, security fences, and riot police at Montebello. Outside the perimetre, and in cities across the country, protesters will be condemning both the domestic implications of the SPP and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Vancouver, a Monday August 20 rally by No One Is Illegal gets underway at 3p.m outside Canada Place (Waterfront Station), meeting up later with a 5:30pm protest at the Vancouver Art Gallery organized by StopWar, the Council of Canadians and the Vancouver & District Labour Council.

The anti-war movement, for its part, won’t be changing course until the troops are brought home from Afghanistan. Harper, in the past, has said that he would not change course on the war even if that meant losing power in Ottawa. Bush’s visit can only further weaken support for the Prime Minister’s handling of the war. It’s a safe bet that Harper’s PR flacks and handlers are working overtime this summer in order to “nuance” the “messaging” of the Afghanistan operation, but not in order to really change the nature of Canada’s involvement in the occupation. Rather, the PM is looking for a new spin, in order to prolong the war and the better to overcome a population in Canada that now seems stubbornly averse to warmongering.

-Derrick O’Keefe is co-chair of the Vancouver StopWar Coalition, and a member of the Canadian Peace Alliance steering committee.

Notes

(1) “It’s about time Mr. Harper listened to the people,” Lawrence Martin, Globe and Mail, June 25, 2007.

In a Democracy Now! national broadcast exclusive, forensic psychiatrist Dr. Angela Hegarty speaks for the first time about her experience interviewing Jose Padilla for 22 hours to determine the state of his mental health.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you conclude he had been tortured?

MIAMI (Aug. 16) – Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen held for 3 1/2 years as an enemy combatant, was convicted Thursday of helping Islamic extremists and plotting overseas attacks in a case that came to symbolize the Bush administration’s zeal to clamp down on terrorism.

Padilla, wearing a dark suit and wire-rimmed glasses, showed no emotion and started straight ahead as he heard the verdict that could bring him a life sentence in prison. One person in the family section started to sob.

But it was hardly a resounding victory for the government. When Padilla was arrested in the months following the 2001 terrorist attacks, authorities touted him as an al-Qaida terrorist who planned to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in a U.S. city. That allegation never made it to court.

Instead, after a three-month trial and only a day and a half of deliberations, the 36-year-old Padilla and his foreign-born co-defendants were convicted of conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim people overseas and two counts of providing material support to terrorists.

U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke set a Dec. 5 sentencing date.

The three were accused of being part of a North American support cell that provided supplies, money and recruits to groups of Islamic extremists. The defense contended they were trying to help persecuted Muslims in war zones with relief and humanitarian aid.

Two weeks after the presiding judge upbraided prosecutors for being “light on facts” in its conspiracy allegations,[23] one of the three charges against Padilla was dismissed and another was dismissed in part.

The first of the three counts Padilla was charged with, conspiracy to murder (punishable by life imprisonment), was dismissed on August 16, 2006, on the grounds that it was duplicative of the other two counts pending against him. The second count was conspiracy to materially aid terrorists under 18 U.S.C. § 371 (punishable by five years in prison) and the third was 18 U.S.C. § 2339A (punishable by 15 years in prison). The trial court ordered that the government elect only a single criminal statute in its second count of the indictment. However, on January 30, 2007, the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit reversed the ruling and reinstated a charge of conspiracy to “murder, kidnap, and maim.”[24]

Allegation of torture during imprisonment

In the criminal case, legal brief filed on behalf of Padilla alleges that during his imprisonment he has been subjected to torture, including sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, and enforced stress positions.[25]

George Monbiot, writing in The Guardian, reports that Padilla’s mental faculties have been so impaired by the conditions of incarceration and interrogation that:[26]

…he appears to have lost his mind. I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean that his mind is no longer there.

The forensic psychiatrist who examined him says that he “does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, ie, post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation”.