The Rag Blog

British police barred hundreds of anti-war activists and democracy campaigners from completing their annual march around the US military base at Menwith Hill for the first time in 20 years on Wednesday.

The Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases (CAAB) has organised a rally around the perimeter of the base, which is widely believed to play a key role in the shady Anglo-US ECHELON domestic surveillance programme, every US Independence Day for two decades.

But a cordon was put up to prevent protesters, who included socialist comedian Mark Steel and writer Alan Bennett, from completing this year’s demonstration.

Veteran CAAB campaigner Lindis Percy explained that the protest aims to highlight the crucial role that Menwith Hill plays in orchestrating wars of aggression.

“Menwith Hill epitomises all that is wrong in the unhealthy, dependent and moribund relationship between the US and British governments,” Ms Percy said.

“The base is crucial to the crazy and dangerous US missile defence programme. It is key to the illegal war in Iraq and key to the mess of Afghanistan.”

She charged that the base, which is the largest intelligence-gathering and surveillance base outside the US, monitors millions of email and telephone communications.

“Yet it is totally unaccountable to the British electorate. MPs have repeatedly asked questions about the base, only to face a wall of silence,” Ms Percy said.

Yorkshire CND activist Dave Webb reported that police had arbitrarily defined the demonstration as a “procession,” suggesting that this had been done so as to make it “more politically acceptable to stop us asserting our rights.”

Around 250 peaceful demonstrators faced around 100 police, with at least four mounted officers present.

Several arrests were made under clause 12 of the 2005 anti-terror Bill, which outlaws trespassing on nuclear sites.

Witnesses reported that one man was hauled off for wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a slogan condemning the Bill.

Protesters presented Mr Steel, who was celebrating his birthday, with a cake and beer.

He described the rally as “jolly,” but he poured scorn on the heavy-handed police presence.

“I thought they were paparazzi because they were sticking their cameras in everyone’s faces,” he said.

When it was slipped under doors in a freshman dorm at Boston College, it was pronounced a fire hazard–never mind the glut of menus and invitations routinely crammed under the same doors throughout the school year. When it was handed directly to freshmen, a resident adviser called the cops. Twice.

The object of controversy is Freshman Disorientation, a free 32-page publication sponsored by Boston College activists in the campus’ Global Justice Project. It is packed with opinionated articles, essays, class recommendations, resource lists, and a peek into progressive activism on campus. Typical headlines include “The Problem with Tolerance: ‘But I Have Three Black Friends . . .'” and “Gender at Boston College: Sex(ism) in the University.”

Compare that to the fare served up at the college’s official summer orientation session. Discussions about sexual orientation and gender equality make nary a ripple in the three-day schedule, and race issues are crammed into an hour-and-a-half session titled “Reflections on Multiculturalism.”

Freshman Disorientation is intended to fill in the cavernous gaps. The guide challenges the saccharinely harmonious message delivered at the orientation and undercuts assumptions held by many at the private school. And administrators aren’t happy about it. This is why members of the Global Justice Project distribute their 500 copies to incoming students guerrilla style: speeding through dorms, evading cops, and dodging resident advisers.

“It comes down to the college’s paternalistic attitude,” says Katherine Adam, who was part of the distribution team as a Boston College senior. “They want to protect freshmen from hearing dissenting voices.”

Summer orientation for new college students is typically a three-day affair that attempts to provide class planning, placement tests, campus tours, and a taste of college life via skits and testimony by juniors and seniors. Most official orientations promote the local sexual assault hotline and crisis center, and many give a nod to the diversity of sexual orientations. But the discussion rarely goes deep enough to help incoming students negotiate the complexities of their new social realities. How does a young woman with curvy hips flourish in a community populated by rail-thin classmates? How does a gay student come out to his roommate? How should a student of color respond to the assumption that she’s only on campus because of affirmative action? How can one have a social life while one is working two jobs in order to pay for school? Enter the disorientation guide.

These guides, also called disguides, have emerged at more than a dozen campuses around the United States and Canada. The publications may be printed, posted online, or both. Some appear annually; most are published irregularly. It’s typical for writers to remain anonymous. In addition to race and gender, disguides often discuss topics such as campus corporatization, militarism, hate crimes, queer issues, labor and fair trade activism, environmentalism, and students’ rights in relation to the campus police.

Each disguide also adapts to its specific community. At Boston College, a Jesuit school, Freshman Disorientation featured an article on the religious left. The University of Texas at Austin’s disguide article “Divide and Conquer: Asian Americans, Women, and Affirmative Action” was particularly notable at a campus shaped by its state’s 1996 ban on affirmative action. Disguides focus on feminism and the experiences of marginalized students in a way that is wholly unpalatable to the official campus-orientation structure, which is obliged to stay on point with the college’s message.

The regular orientation does not prepare you for being a woman in Boston College culture,” says Katrina Quisumbing King, a senior at the college and an editor of the school’s current disguide. “I don’t feel comfortable, for example, on game days, when groups of men are yelling at you.”

Facts about sexually transmitted diseases, safe sex, and area resources for sexually active students are trademarks of disguides–and they’re of particular importance at an institution like Boston College, where students are not given access to condoms or birth control prescriptions.

So the disguides are getting information out there. But amid the slew of parties, classes, symposia, and other to-dos scheduled during the first week of college, are freshmen getting the message?

Harvard freshman Jessica Ranucci thinks so. “It is very easy to see Harvard as Harvard, the institution that has so much clout in everyone’s minds,” she says. It is important to see that though it’s a great place, it has its faults.”

The editorial board of the Harvard Crimson, the daily student newspaper, was nonplussed by the debut of a disguide on its campus. “Perhaps its creators aim to recruit a revolutionary army from the ranks of incoming freshmen,” read one Crimson editorial. “Or maybe its goal is to spark debate at any cost. . . . Often, the guide presents a legitimate topic of debate, but it quickly offers a biased view without even the slightest counterargument, confusing naive readers and infuriating more knowledgeable ones.”

Kelly Lee, who penned an article for the Harvard Disguide titled Rage: I’m a Working-Class Queer Black Woman, confirms that the guide met with mixed opinions — proof that it hit a nerve.

It should come as little surprise that the Harvard students who are most excited about building on this year’s disguide template are women, queer folks, and people of color. Says Lee: “These are the groups who have particular experiences on campus that they want to share with the student body.”

News stories do not always collide with symbolic resonance ­ and especially not in close proximity to such an esteemed event as America’s Day of Independence ­ but two particular stories, in the last few days, have conspired to demonstrate the twin extremes of the Bush administration’s disregard for the law.

On the one hand, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, close advisor to Dick Cheney and convicted perjuror, had his two and a half year sentence ­ for covering his boss’s ass and lying about the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame ­ conveniently dismissed by the President, who called it “excessive.” Libby, sensitive news outlets informed us, will still have to pay a fine of $250,000 and suffer two years of probation, but while his story, which emerged on 2 July, was still dominating the media, Independence Day itself was marked by an Associated Press article which focused on those at the other end of Bush’s scale of justice: the “enemy combatants” of Guantánamo Bay, who, we learned from the recently installed prison commander Navy Rear Admiral Mark H. Buzby, may, after 2,000 days of illegal imprisonment without charge and without trial, be allowed to watch a movie once a week.

Buzby explained that this privilege would initially be extended to the “best-behaved” prisoners, the 45 men ­ mostly Afghans ­ held in Camp 4, a communal block reserved for the “most compliant” prisoners, and explained that the authorities had recently started allowing these prisoners to watch soccer matches and other programs vetted for jihadi content, including nature documentaries and episodes of “Deadliest Catch,” a Discovery Channel series about crab fishing crews off the Alaskan coast. Buzby added that there were even plans to introduce TV-watching privileges to the 330 or so prisoners held in Camps 5 and 6, the blocks modeled on “Supermax” prisons on the mainland, where the prisoners are held in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day in windowless cells. After describing plans to increase the almost non-existent recreational areas in both these camps, Buzby said that the authorities were considering a way to allow the prisoners in Camp 6 ­ “and possibly Camp 5,” reserved for the “least compliant” prisoners, or those with purported “intelligence value” ­ to watch some television, perhaps putting the TV set on a cart so that they could watch programs in the recreation area. “We’re proceeding cautiously forward with these initiatives and as long as everybody behaves themselves we will probably be able to provide these things,” the commander added.

There is, of course, more to this story than is at first apparent. What Buzby failed to mention was that those held in solitary confinement in Camps 5 and 6 include at least 80 prisoners who have been cleared for release for at least a year, and that, unlike prisoners on the US mainland ­ say, for example, convicted mass murderers ­ who are regularly allowed visits by family members, and, typically, have unlimited access to books, TV, music, pens and paper, the prisoners in Guantánamo have, for five and a half years, only been allowed to have a copy of the Koran, have never been allowed family visits, have persistently had all correspondence to and from their families either “misplaced,” delayed or heavily censored, have only had sporadic access to books, have had no access to TV, except when granted as a reward for cooperation by their interrogators, and have had no access to music ­ with the exception of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” which was played every morning in the early days of Camp X-Ray, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which, until 2005, was regularly broadcast to interrupt evening prayers, and, it should be noted, the songs by, amongst others, Eminem, Li’l Kim and Rage Against the Machine that were regularly played at deafening volume, and for many long hours, as part of the process of “setting the conditions” for interrogations that were introduced by Major General Geoffrey Miller during his tenure as the prison commander in 2002 and 2003, when this aural assault was frequently accompanied by strobe lighting, and took place in rooms where the prisoners were short-shackled in painful positions and frequently left alone until they soiled themselves.

As for writing materials, a forthcoming book of poems by Guantánamo prisoners, Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, edited and compiled by law professor Marc Falkoff, who represents 17 Yemeni prisoners, notes that poems written in Guantánamo by a wrongly imprisoned Afghan poet were scratched into a Styrofoam cup with a pebble and were then passed in secret from cell to cell. When the guards discovered what was happening, they smashed the cups and threw them away, fearing that it was a way of passing coded messages. As the military explained, poetry “presents a special risk, and DoD [Department of Defense] standards are not to approve the release of any poetry in its original form or language,” out of a fear that poetry’s allegorical imagery could be used to convey coded messages to militants outside.

Such is the military’s paranoia that when Clive Stafford Smith, the legal director of the charity Reprieve, who represents several dozen prisoners in Guantánamo, met with Ahmed Errachidi, the wrongly imprisoned Moroccan chef who was recently released, he realized that there was no way that the recipes that Errachidi eagerly wrote out for him during their meetings would get past the military censors. Because Errachidi dared to speak out about the prisoners’ treatment in Guantánamo, he was regarded, erroneously, as an al-Qaeda commander, and Stafford Smith realized that his recipes would undoubtedly be construed by the authorities as coded plans for the construction of a nuclear bomb.

Small wonder, then, that when asked by the Associated Press for comments on the latest developments at Guantánamo, Marc Falkoff declared, “These Band-Aid measures are going to do nothing to help alleviate the hopelessness and despair that many of our clients are fighting,” and added, “I hope that learning about these ‘improvements’ will help the public understand how harsh our clients’ lives have been for more than five years.”

The Federal Government says oil is a key reason to keep Australian troops in Iraq, but says it was not the reason for the original invasion.

As it released the defence update, the Government said oil security is one of the reasons for staying on in Iraq.

The Defence Minister, Brendan Nelson, says it is in Australia’s interests.

“Energy security is extremely important to all nations throughout the world, and of course, in protecting and securing Australia’s interests,” he said.

“The Middle East itself, not only Iraq, but the entire region is an important supplier of energy oil, in particular, to the rest of the world.”

But the Treasurer Peter Costello disagrees.

“We’re fighting for something much more important here than oil, this is about democracy,” he said.

Prime Minister John Howard told radio 2GB Iraq is not about oil.

“We are not there because of oil,” he said.

“We didn’t go there because of oil and we don’t remain there because of oil.”

The Greens say it is a damning admission that the war was about oil, not weapons of mass destruction and the Australian Democrats say after years of denials the Government’s conceded that the war was about oil.

Labor has asked why the Government cites oil now, when it has previously denied any link.

Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd earlier accused Mr Howard of “making it up as he goes along” on Iraq.

He says the statement is a clear backflip on what the Howard Government said when the Iraq war started.

[This is a slightly revised version of a panel talk given at the U.S. Social Forum June 27- July 1, Atlanta Georgia. The panel, “Lesson from Venezuela for the U.S.,” was organized by Venezuelanalysis.com. The other panelists included Olaf Ciliberto — student leader at the Central University of Venezuela, Carmen Morantes — lawyer with the National Technical Office for the Regularization of Urban Land, Greg Wilpert — Venezuelanalysis.com, and Luis Diaz — member of the Latin American Parliament. They spoke at various lengths and in detail about the changes occurring in Venezuela and surrounding region.]

As a U.S. based activist, organizer and alternative media maker, I want to pose three broad questions about lessons from Venezuela for the U.S.:

1) How should movements in the U.S. interpret the changes occurring in Venezuela?

2) How should those changes translate for our movements in the U.S. and the world?

3) What is our role and what are the forces shaping how we defend Venezuela from within the U.S.?

Beginning with the first question of interpreting those changes, which will illustrate how I want to approach this topic, imagine two people with an illness, in advanced stages, which is life threatening. They are neighbors from down the block. One of them shows the other that they have begun seeking treatment for the illness and are doing better and making improvements. The other simply listens, and is happy about the changes, sees that they are compelling, and is very supportive but in no way takes in ideas about how they could make things better for themselves. On the one hand, they support the other getting treatment and making progress, but on the other hand they let the example of seeking positive change pass over or bounce off them.

Venezuela is making strides toward national and societal structural transformation. The U.S. Left should not only listen, support and defend such changes, but should also try to draw lessons for how what is happening there can inform our movements here.

Here in the U.S. we are doing a lot of damage control with our organizing. We are facing unprecedented upward redistribution of wealth, power and privileged. We are fighting to save social services that have already been cut and continue to take a beating. We are fighting a rollback of women’s rights, attacks on immigrants, and widespread systemic racism. We are trying to stop our own government’s current war making while knowing that plans are in the works for future wars. In short we are trying to change our government’s foreign and domestic policy on a whole range of issues.

In contrast, Venezuela is struggling to free itself from an international political and economic order dominated by our government’s strategic considerations. While domestically, they are undergoing mass structural transformation on a national scale.

Our struggles are in very different stages. The contrast illustrates that the Venezuelan population is much further along than we are in its consciousness – in being aware of the structural roots of their nation’s historical and present condition.

Lesson #1 Our organizing and activism should seek to affect consciousness about the structural roots of the social and material crisis affecting the U.S. population as well as how U.S. global dominance adversely affects the well being of people in other countries.

Now it is true that the U.S. Left does do this to some extent. However, most of our activism and organizing fails to make the connection that our social and material ills – class division, racism and sexism, are deeply rooted in the underlying structures of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, etc. Where is this among our anti-war, anti-corporate globalization and other social movements? Is it prevalent in our day to day organizing, activism and events, or just occasionally? How often do we seek to raise our own consciousness, in this way, internally to our movements? How about in our outreach to others outside the Left? In my own experience there is usually very little of this done in our movement building. Beyond my own experience I suspect the same is true or worse. We are all at fault.

But there is more. Consequentially, the U.S. Left is unable to arouse desire and passion for a new world among its domestic population. Again, it is true that this desire for societal transformation exists in some sectors of the Left, among a minority, but for the most part it is absent. In Venezuela, passion and consciousness seemingly deepen and spread as empowerment and structural changes deepen and spread. The Venezuelans are much further along, and because of their consciousness, are much more deliberate about structural transformation — its human aims and aspirations. This structural transformation is in many cases empowering Venezuelans to have more decision making say over the institutions and policies that affect their lives. We don’t know where it will lead. It could all unravel next month. But it is this structural transformation, empowering the population, which is arousing hope and desire. The Venezuelans believe they can win. Our own efforts should seek reforms that empower our movements to also have more decision making say over the institutions and policies affecting their lives. We need a strategy where we gain more and more power, eventually seeking to displace elite power. Similar to the process unfolding in Venezuela, these reforms could range from winning redistributive taxes, changes in workplace relations; especially in the division of labor, more participation in budgeting and workplace decision making, more access to information, and collective control over the production, consumption and allocation of the material means of life. Advances should be sought in ways that expand desires rather than delimit them. This would mean setting a course for winning a series of reforms that would eventually lead to new institutions, new consciousness and a new society – to victory.

Lesson #2 We need to replicate the Venezuelans in this respect by proposing, debating, and sharing visions of what a new society and world might look like, and how to get there, so we can arouse hope, passion and desire within our movements in the U.S. We need to replicate the Venezuelan attitude that we can win.

In Venezuela, this discourse is around a “21st Century Socialism” that is rooted in its national history through the Bolivarian Revolution. The struggle for a post-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-sexist society, in the U.S., should also be rooted in its national history of struggle and emancipation, drawing lessons from our own classical and new left movements. However, if we are going to propose we make history at the magnitude of centuries, through a “21st Century Socialism,” our vision should aspire to transcend the failures of last century’s centrally planned economies, with corporate divisions of labor and a managerial elite called the coordinator class.

The model I and others advocate for the U.S. is classless and self-managing. Through federations of worker and consumer councils, decentralized participatory planning, balanced job complexes in the work place – where all share a balanced work load comparable in desirability and empowerment – and where all are remunerated for effort and sacrifice. This model is called participatory economics (Albert & Hahnel), and seeks to promote solidarity, equality, diversity, self-management and economic efficiency.

However the modern day lesson in structural transformation and hope offered by Venezuela go far beyond the U.S. For social change to be truly successful it will have to happen internationally. Using the Social Forum model to illustrate this possibility, under the banner of “Another World is Possible!”, the 2001 World Social Forum brought together 20,000 participants. The 2002 WSF had 60,000 participants. The WSF of 2003 brought in 100,000 participants. These kinds of exponential leaps in numbers are what we need to eventually win. But in order for people to stick to the movement we need to offer them hope that another world really is possible. Imagine a 2010 World Social Forum that decided to celebrate a decade of global movement building with a qualitative shift in its content and character. Instead of talking about what is wrong with the world in the many thousands of workshops that have taken place since 2001, we would instead seek to understand how our movements are interrelated; and develope, debate and discuss possibilities for widely shared visions of what another world might actually look like, in this century; along with strategic ways forward. Visions for a new society could be offered in all realms including economics, culture, kinship, politics, education, science, urban planning, sports, etc. These social forums could be, as has already happened, replicated on smaller city, regional, state, or national scales, such as a future U.S. social forum might offer. This is just a glimpse of what is possible if we begin to use our imagination to envision structural transformation such as Venezuela is actually carrying out while challenging global capitalism and U.S. global domination.

Thus the importants of Venezuela, the opportunities it opens and inspires, should not be understated. This leads me to the last portion of my presentation:

What is our role and what are the forces shaping how we defend Venezuela from here?

A June 27 report from Reuters, carried in major mainstream media outlets across the U.S. says, “Insecurity, ‘malignant narcissism’ and the need for adulation are driving Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s confrontation with the United States.”

“Eventually, these personality traits are likely to compel Chavez to declare himself Venezuela’s president for life.”

These comments come from a Dr. Jerrold Post who has just completed so called “psychological profile” for the U.S. Air Force. Post has a 21 year career history at the CIA.

Post told Reuters that Chavez “has been acting increasingly messianic and so he is likely to either get the constitution rewritten to allow for additional terms or eventually declare himself president-for-life.”

This extremist anti-Chavez propaganda is reminiscent of the cold war and offers one example of the work we need to counter in our own government’s misinformation and vilification of Chavez. U.S. elites want to instill the belief among the population that Chavez is a mad man, a dictator, and that he threatens free speech, human rights and all that is democratic. However it is not Chavez himself that bothers U.S. elites. From punishment of Palestinians for voting in Hamas, to attempts to vilify Chavez — it is their absolute contempt and hatred for democratic efforts, unfolding in Venezuela today, as in other countries in the past, and a country’s struggle for a development path independent from Washington, which really causes them to froth rabidly at the mouth. The most recent example of course being U.S. elite and mainstream media response to Chavez not renewing the broadcast license of the opposition’s RCTV. By simply imagining an analogous situation in the U.S., where a media network was found complicit in an attempt to over throw the U.S. president (lets stretch the imagination by assuming he was democratically elected), one could quite easily see how an entire network could be shut down, bureaucrats in charge being jailed, facing potential prison sentences for life, if not handed the death sentence outright. Chavez did not jail nor imprison, but rather, in comparison to the U.S. hypothetical above, used a seemingly judicious, albeit not perfect, approach in dealing with the opposition media and license renewal of RCTV.

Three veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan share the nightmare experiences that war has brought into their lives.

Statistics are one way to tell the story of the approximately 1.4 million servicemen and women who’ve been to Iraq and Afghanistan. According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2004, 86 percent of soldiers in Iraq reported knowing someone who was seriously injured or killed there. Some 77 percent reported shooting at the enemy; 75 percent reported seeing women or children in imminent peril and being unable to help. Fifty-one percent reported handling or uncovering human remains; 28 percent were responsible for the death of a noncombatant. One in five Iraq veterans return home seriously impaired by post-traumatic stress disorder.

Words are another way. Below are the stories of three veterans of this war, told in their voices, edited for flow and efficiency but otherwise unchanged. They bear out the statistics and suggest that even those who are not diagnosably impaired return burdened by experiences they can neither forget nor integrate into their postwar lives. They speak of the inadequacy of what the military calls reintegration counseling, of the immediacy of their worst memories, of their helplessness in battle, of the struggle to rejoin a society that seems unwilling or unable to comprehend the price of their service. Strangers to one another and to me, they nevertheless tried, sometimes through tears, to communicate what the intensity of an ambiguous war has done to them.

One veteran, Sue Randolph, put it this way: “People walk up to me and say, ‘Thank you for your service.’ And I know they mean well, but I want to ask, ‘Do you know what you’re thanking me for?'” She, Rocky, and Michael Goss offer their stories here in the hope that citizens will begin to know.

***

Michael Goss, 29, served two tours in Iraq. He grew up in Corpus Christi and returned there after his other-than-honorable discharge. He lives with his brother. He is divorced and sees his children every other weekend while working the graveyard shift as a bail bondsman. He is quietly intelligent, thoughtful and attentive, always saying “ma’am” and opening the door for people. He struggles with severe PTSD and is obsessed with learning about the insurgency by studying reports and videos online. He is awaiting treatment from the Veterans Administration. He has been waiting for over a year.

Michael Goss:

I gave the Army seven years. It was supposed to be my career. I did two tours in Iraq, in 2003 and 2005. But during the last one, I started to get depressed. I lost faith in my chain of command. I became known as a rogue NCO. That’s how I got my other-than-honorable discharge.

One night they said to me, “Sgt. Goss, gather your best guys.” I say, “Where we going?” They say, “Don’t worry about it, just come on.” So we get in the car and go. We drive three blocks away, and there’s six dead soldiers on the ground. They say, “You’re casualty collecting tonight.” I’m not prepared for that. I wasn’t taught how to do that. But you’re there. So you pick them up, and you put them in a body bag, pieces by pieces, and you go back to your unit, and you stand inside your room. And they’re like, “You’re going on a patrol, come on.” You’re like, “Hang on a minute. Let me think about what I just did here.” I just put six American guys in damn body bags. Nobody’s prepared for that. Nobody’s prepared for that thing to blow up on the side of the road. You’re talking, and you’re driving, and then something blows up, and the next thing you know, two of your guys are missing their faces. They just want you to get up the next day and go, go, let’s do it again, you’re a soldier. Yeah, I got the soldier part, OK?

Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder — one of the great evils of our time?

On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder — one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

These ways of thinking — cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on — have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.

National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours — huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction — what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.

Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.

That self-deception started early.

When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession.”

When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men, women and children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: “It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.”

On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our “Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence.” After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: “We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country.”

It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went to war.

We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, “to civilize and Christianize” the Filipino people.

As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: “The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.”

We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.

Yet they are victims, too, of our government’s lies.

How many times have we heard President Bush tell the troops that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for “liberty,” for “democracy”?

One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by Providence. Today we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who announced on the campaign trail in 2004 that God speaks through him.

We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.

Israeli historian Benny Morris is famous in his country for reopening the forgotten history of the expulsion of the Palestinians during the 1948 “war of independence” and deconstructing the Israeli myth that they freely chose to abandon their homes.

By five years ago, however, he had lost faith in a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians and was openly saying everybody would have been better off in the long run if one side or the other had won a decisive victory in 1948.

If Israel had conquered all of Palestine and expelled all the Palestinians in 1948, Morris wrote, “today’s Middle East would be a healthier, less violent place, with a Jewish state between Jordan and the Mediterranean and a Palestinian Arab state in Transjordan. Alternatively, Arab success in the 1948 war, with the Jews driven into the sea, would have obtained the same, historically calming result. Perhaps it was the very indecisiveness of the geographical and demographic outcome of 1948 that underlies the persisting tragedy of Palestine.”

Well, of course, but most outcomes are indecisive. Like many knowledgeable people in the Middle East, Morris’s mood was strikingly pessimistic even before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but five years later the mood is darker still.

Beyond forecasts of civil war in Iraq, however, there has been little effort to discern what the Middle East will actually look like after the U.S. troops go home.

There is already a civil war in Iraq, and it might even get worse for a time after American troops leave, but these things always sputter out in the end.

There will still be an Iraqi state, plus or minus Kurdistan, and regardless of whether or not the central government in Baghdad exercises real control over the Sunni-majority areas between Baghdad, Mosul and the Syrian border.

The Sunni Arab parts of Iraq have been turned into a training ground for Islamist extremists from all parts of the Arab world by the American invasion.

Once the American troops are gone, however, the action will soon move elsewhere, for the U.S. defeat in Iraq has dramatically raised the prestige of Islamist revolutionaries throughout the Arab world and beyond.

It’s not possible to predict which Arab states will fall under Islamist control, and they certainly aren’t all going to: the pipe-dream of a world-spanning Islamic empire remains precisely that.

But it will be astonishing if one or more of the existing Arab regimes does not fall to an Islamist revolution in the next few years.

For the citizens of the country or countries in question, that could be quite a big problem, since it would probably mean not democracy and prosperity, but just more decades of poverty and a different kind of tyranny. For people living outside the Middle East, however, it would probably make little difference.

Islamist-ruled states are not the same as bands of freelance fanatics. If they have oil to export, then they will go on exporting it, because no major oil producer can do without the income those exports provide; they need it to feed their people.

And they would have little incentive to sponsor terrorist attacks outside the region, for they would have fixed addresses, and interests to protect.

For Israel, however, the situation has changed fundamentally. For the first 20 years of its existence, Israel was a state under siege. For the past 40 years, since the conquests of 1967, it has had the luxury of debating with itself how much of those conquered lands it should return to the Arabs in return for a permanent peace settlement. (The answer was always “all of them,” but that was not an answer many Israelis would hear.)

Now the window is closing. Before long, some of the Arab states that Israel needs to make peace with are likely to fall to Islamist regimes that have an ideological commitment to its destruction. (Hamas’s capture of the Gaza Strip is a foretaste of what is to come.) Israelis trying to evade hard choices have long complained that they had “nobody to negotiate with.” It is about to become true.

Israel faces another generation of confrontation and quite possibly of war, and the Palestinians face another generation of military occupation.

Significant chunks of the Arab world face Islamist revolutions that would bring more poverty and a new kind of oppression.

Ain’t this a bitch?

I get all busy for a day, hunkered down in a basement in Jersey editing video–shitty FM radio signal, no AM at all, and no free WiFi signal to be had in the hood, (Plainfield) so I was kinda cut off–and totally focused on choppin’ up about an hour of digital zeroes and ones…

And I come home at one a.m., check the blogs and find… THIS?

For about fifteen seconds, I was all “What the fuck? I’ll be damned! Aw, hell-to-the-naw!”

For about fifteen seconds, that is.

And then I remembered that I’d heard more than a few folks I trust, recently talking about the dipshit-no-one-wants-to-admit-they-voted-for-as-president-in-’04- except-for-Joe-Lieberman’s-scrotum-faced-self, having a “Why not do it?” attitude when it came to tossing Scooter’s sentencing salad.

“What the fuck’s gonna happen? His poll numbers are gonna drop some more? Please. He may as well.”

And so, the dipshit-no-one-wants-to-admit-they-voted-for-as-president-in-’04- except-for-Joe-Lieberman’s-scrotum-faced-self, most certainly did just that, on Monday afternoon.

Now, you may ask…why did my desire to box-grater the bastard’s testes over this ass-rape of justice last but a mere fifteen seconds?

Because I saw that pic of Bush from yesterday morning–before he did Scooter that solid. Look at the scuttling little cockroach in the pic from the Times’s link [here].

That boy’s as we say around the way, “gettin’ up”.

“Doin’ the low run”

Perambulating like a sweaty, Goddamned boost artist trying to get out of Macy’s front door with a pants-front full of shoplifted panties, barbecue utensils, and a shit-on legacy.

The dude ain’t doin’ his bullshit, overcompensating Texas “swagger”, here. He is skulking off like a criminal on the lam, looking over one shoulder to see if security’s chasing him to the front doors. And I so wanted to see Scooter in the big house, the pokey, joint, hoosegow and the jug. Oh yeah…The Rock Farm and Barsville, too.

But you know what? All this commutation does is give people one more thang to rain stale fruit, spit, and the dog shit you just scooped in that black plastic bag down on this light-scurrying pest of a president. Think it’s going well for him on this reaction to pressure from his baby-chomping veep?

This part made me laugh–They turned off the White House comment line this afternoon in the wake of Bush’s little reach-around. FUCKING TURNED OFF THE WHITE HOUSE COMMENT LINE. That’s what you call…that’s right, a bunker mentality, kids. What could possess a “non-poll listening”, alleged man of principle to so nakedly run like Gerry Cooney from the Larry Holmes-esque right hands of overwhelming disapproval with the act?

Oh yeah. Lookit that! The answer’s right there in the question.

So, instead of us wondering what color knit hats Scooter was gonna be knitting for Adebisi in stir for awhile, we get to see a squirming, punk-running Bush try to hide from an increasingly angry mob of Americans over yet another self-inflicted fuck-up.

And the likes of Scooter’s backers such as Rudy and Fred? get to defend their statements backing him–good ol’ “Law & Order” Fred? and law and order Rudy should have great fun parsing this one.

“Rudy! Will you do the same thing for your friend Bernie Kerik if you’re elected?”

“Mr. Thompson? Doesn’t this bring back memories of Watergate for you, sir?”

CUT TO: A SHOT OF RUDY AND FRED SHRINKING RAPIDLY WITH SHAME, LIKE FRED AND BARNEY IN THE CLASSIC FLINTSTONES EPISODE “THE DRIVE IN”.

Oh yeah, a few wingnuts’ll crow…wanly though, ’cause Bush is still soft on them damned meskins, and the hook-up ain’t quite enough to slake that thirst for the level of evil needed to feel like the wanton, shit-dumping alpha dogs they once were.

Bush has forever branded himself, and much to the GOP’s old-guard kingmakers chagrin–the whole party, especially post-their hounding of Clinton and jailing of Susan McDougal (who did her fucking time) as punk-assed, special-treatment addicted crooks. Broderella, Tweety, The Crotch Sniffer and their ilk will tut-tut and disagree…but that walk/run, and the hiding in the attic as the phone beep-beep-beeps off its hook speaks volumes.

Nothin’ to lose, so he doubles down, of course.

Loses the bet.

Nothing to cover it.

Escorted to the back where a dude/the public with a ballpeen hammer awaits to extract payment from freshly-powdered knuckles.

Heckuva job, George. You’re dead-set on making this more fun every week you have left. Impeachment? It would be fun–can’t lie. But it’s such a drawn-out trip to get there. Damned if it isn’t almost as much fun though, seeing you caught naked time and again, eyes popped like Don Knotts on crack, picking up leaves to cover your wee, cold-shrunken gonads, only to realize–ooops! I did it again! “I fucking grabbed Poison Ivy!”

WICHITA, Kan. (July 4) – As stabbing victim LaShanda Calloway lay dying on the floor of a convenience store, five shoppers, including one who stopped to take a picture of her with a cell phone, stepped over the woman, police said.

The June 23 situation, captured on the store’s surveillance video, got scant news coverage until a columnist for The Wichita Eagle disclosed the existence of the video and its contents Tuesday.

Police have refused to release the video, saying it is part of their investigation.

“It was tragic to watch,” police spokesman Gordon Bassham said Tuesday. “The fact that people were more interested in taking a picture with a cell phone and shopping for snacks rather than helping this innocent young woman is, frankly, revolting.”

The woman was stabbed during an altercation that was not part of a robbery, Bassham said. It took about two minutes for someone to call 911, he said.

Calloway, 27, died later at a hospital.

Two suspects have been arrested. A 19-year-old woman was charged with first-degree murder. Another suspect who turned himself in had not been charged as of Tuesday, the Sedgwick County prosecutor’s office said.

The district attorney’s office will have to decide whether any of the shoppers could be charged, Bassham said.

It was uncertain what law, if any, would be applicable. A state statute for failure to render aid refers only to victims of a car accident.

Eagle columnist Mark McCormick told The Associated Press he learned about the video when he called Wichita Police Chief Norman Williams to inquire about a phone call he had received from a reader complaining about a Police Department policy that requires emergency medical personnel to wait until police secure a crime scene before rendering aid. McCormick said Williams then unloaded on him about the shoppers in the stabbing case.

In a small still mostly segregated section of rural Louisiana, an all white jury heard a series of white witnesses called by a white prosecutor testify in a courtroom overseen by a white judge in a trial of a fight at the local high school where a white student who had been making racial taunts was hit by black students. The fight was the culmination of a series of racial incidents starting when whites responded to black students sitting under the “white tree” at their school by hanging three nooses from the tree. The white jury and white prosecutor and all white supporters of the white victim were all on one side of the courtroom. The black defendant, 17 year old Mychal Bell, and his supporters were on the other. The jury quickly convicted Mychal Bell of two felonies – aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery. Bell, who was a 16 year old sophomore football star at the time he was arrested, faces up to 22 years in prison. Five other black youths await similar trials on attempted second degree murder and conspiracy charges.

Yes, you read that correctly. The rest of the story, which is being reported across the world in papers in China, France and England, is just as chilling. The trouble started under “the white tree” in front of Jena High School. The “white tree” is where the white students, 80% of the student body, would always sit during school breaks.

In September 2006, a black student at Jena high school asked permission from school administrators to sit under the “white tree.” School officials advised them to sit wherever they wanted. They did.

The next day, three nooses, in the school colors, were hanging from the “white tree.” The message was clear. “Those nooses meant the KKK, they meant ‘Niggers, we’re going to kill you, we’re going to hang you till you die,'” Casteptla Bailey, mom of one of the students, told the London Observer.

The Jena high school principal found that three white students were responsible and recommended expulsion. The white superintendent of schools over-ruled the principal and gave the students a three day suspension saying that the nooses were just a youthful stunt. “Adolescents play pranks,” the superintendent told the Chicago Tribune, “I don’t think it was a threat against anybody.”

The African-American community was hurt and upset. “Hanging those nooses was a hate crime, plain and simple,” according to Tracy Bowens, mother of students at Jena High.

But blacks in this area of Louisiana have little political power. The ten person all-male government of the parish has one African-American member. The nine member all-male school board has one African American member. (A phone caller to the local school board trying to find out the racial makeup of the school board was told there was one “colored” member of the board). There is one black police officer in Jena and two black public school teachers.

Jena, with a population of less than 3000, is the largest town in and parish (county) seat of LaSalle Parish, Louisiana. There are about 350 African Americans in the town. LaSalle has a population of just over 14,000 people – 12% African-American.

This is solid Bush and David Duke Country – GWB won LaSalle Parish 4 to 1 in the last two elections; Duke carried a majority of the white vote when he ran for Governor of Louisiana. Families earn about 60% of the national average. The Census Bureau reports that less than 10% of the businesses in LaSalle Parish are black owned.

Jena is the site of the infamous Juvenile Correctional Center for Youth that was forced to close its doors in 2000, only two years after opening, due to widespread brutality and racism including the choking of juveniles by guards after the youth met with a lawyer. The U.S. Department of Justice sued the private prison amid complaints that guards paid inmates to fight each other and laughed when teens tried to commit suicide.

Black students decided to resist and organized a sit-in under the “white tree” at the school to protest the light suspensions given to the noose-hanging white students.

The white District Attorney then came to Jena High with law enforcement officers to address a school assembly. According to testimony in a later motion in court, the DA reportedly threatened the black protesting students saying that if they didn’t stop making a fuss about this “innocent prank I can be your best friend or your worst enemy. I can take away your lives with a stroke of my pen.” The school was put on lockdown for the rest of the week.

Racial tensions remained high throughout the fall.

On the night of Thursday November 30, 2006, a still unsolved fire burned down the main academic building of Jena High School.

On Friday night, December 1, a black student who showed up at a white party was beaten by whites. On Saturday, December 2, a young white man pulled out a shotgun in a confrontation with young black men at the Gotta Go convenience store outside Jena before the men wrestled it away from him. The black men who took the shotgun away were later arrested, no charges were filed against the white man.

On Monday, December 4, at Jena High, a white student–who allegedly had been making racial taunts, including calling African American students “niggers” while supporting the students who hung the nooses and who beat up the black student at the off-campus party–was knocked down, punched and kicked by black students. The white victim was taken to the hospital treated and released. He attended a social function that evening.

Six black Jena students were arrested and charged with attempted second degree murder. All six were expelled from school.

The six charged were: 17-year-old Robert Bailey Junior whose bail was set at $138,000; 17-year-old Theo Shaw – bail $130,000; 18-year-old Carwin Jones–bail $100,000; 17-year-old Bryant Purvis–bail $70,000; 16 year old Mychal Bell, a sophomore in high school who was charged as an adult and for whom bail was set at $90,000; and a still unidentified minor.

Many of the young men, who came to be known as the Jena 6, stayed in jail for months. Few families could afford bond or private attorneys.

Mychal Bell remained in jail from December 2006 until his trial because his family was unable to post the $90,000 bond. Theo Shaw has also remained in jail. Several of the other defendants remained in jail for months until their families could raise sufficient money to put up bonds.