The Rag Blog

GENEVA, July 6 (UNHCR) – The UN refugee agency made a fresh call Friday on donors to help countries hosting hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees and said Syria and Jordan were still waiting for help despite expressions of support made during a major international conference on Iraq in April.

“It is unconscionable that generous host countries be left on their own to deal with such a huge crisis. We strongly urge governments to step forward now to support them in dealing with this situation and renew our call for international solidarity and burden sharing,” UNHCR spokesman Ron Redmond told reporters in Geneva on Friday.

Main host countries Syria and Jordan, with an estimated 2 million Iraqi refugees between them, are struggling to cope. Syria continues to receive about 2,000 Iraqis a day, and about 30,000 a month end up staying.

“The growing refugee population and the communities that host them are facing enormous hardships that will only get worse if the international community doesn’t put its money where its mouth is,” Redmond said.

At April’s UNHCR-organized conference, the UN refugee agency told the more than 400 delegates from governments and international and non-governmental organizations that its US$60 million programme for Iraqi refugees and displaced was just a drop in the ocean compared to the huge needs in the region.

While contributions to UNHCR have been generous, now totalling some $70 million with another $10 million pledged or in the pipeline, the organization has said it cannot do everything alone.

“We stressed then – and we say it again – donors must provide direct bilateral support to these host countries whose schools, hospitals, public services and infrastructure are seriously overstretched because of the presence of millions of Iraqis they have so generously welcomed,” Redmond said.

In Syria, for example, only 32,000 of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugee children in the country are actually in school. Syria, with 1.4 million Iraqis, is the only country in the region that allows free public school access for all Iraqi children. But there is not enough space to take them all in.

To try to cope, Syrian education officials have been forced to convert scores of public schools back to the double-shift system, which the country had planned to end by 2010. A whole generation of Iraqi children is in danger of missing out on an education.

UNHCR is working with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to have at least 150,000 Iraqi children in school in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon by the end of this year. But the task of providing more classrooms, teachers, educational materials and other support must be done in coordination with the Syrian education ministry – and it is not getting the help it needs.

The health infrastructure is also under severe strain and thousands of Iraqis are suffering because they cannot get proper help. “Every week, we’re seeing sick and maimed Iraqis – including many burn and trauma victims – arriving in Syria in search of medical help,” Reedmond said, adding that UNHCR had set up three primary care medical posts and was building two more.

“But it’s not enough. We’re currently referring 10,000 Iraqis a month to Syrian doctors and health care facilities, including 3,000 to hospitals. About 15 percent of those 3,000 are in urgent need of serious medical help,” he added.

I’ve been musing a bit lately on a failed scheme from my youth. As some of you know, after college I headed directly to PhD school, to a program in social ethics. I found out pretty quickly that I wasn’t quite cut out for the hard-core academic life. But along the way I had a brilliant idea for a dissertation. Since I was studying ethics, I thought, why not write my dissertation on the best person in the world?

And who might that be? This was my topic of conversation and speculation whenever anyone would talk to me those days. Mother Theresa? Nelson Mandela? Martin Luther King?

Meanwhile I was living with two other graduate students in a big empty house in Echo Park. This was in the late 1970’s, when a lot of Southeast Asian refugees were making their ways to Los Angeles. The Jewish community got revved up during those days and took some leadership in sponsoring refugees. I called up a synagogue and asked if I could help them with their refugee family. “Sure,” they said. “Can they live with you?” That’s how my roommates and I had the great pleasure of hosting Pruong Pin and his family — refugees from rural Cambodia, four years in a Thai camp and then on an airplane to the USA, to their first electricity, first flush toilets, first telephones, many firsts.

The three of us hosts had the greatest admiration for Pin in particular, for his remarkable humor and flexibility and grace under what must have been mind-boggling challenges. We’d see him cuddling his two-year-old and so-gently teasing her, struggling gamely to formulate a question about our lives with his handful of English words, trying to work our blender and shooting coffee and ice cubes all over the ceiling. Pin and his family lived with us for something like six weeks. When they moved into their own apartment, we found scraps of paper all over the house that said, in Pin’s first handwriting, PRUONGPIN12345678910. We even found those letters and numerals written on the back of our old naugahyde couch. We thought about Pin and his wife trying on their own to learn to write, along with everything else they had to learn, and their courage almost made us cry.

So one day I thought about my imaginary dissertation; why am only I thinking of the most famous great people, the ones whose goodness has been the most monumental? Do you have to change the world to be truly good? Maybe, in fact, the best person in the world was living right in my house. What could possibly be any better than being warm and sweet and sane, consoling your family, making friends, laughing? Not even to mention surviving upheaval, traversing worlds, and keeping your center while doing so?

I was thinking about this again recently because of a project I’m involved with. I’m part of a group which is trying to do, I dare say, some very good things. To do these things we are making proposals and securing grants (successfully, thank you!) and hiring staff and so on. We actually have an ambitious plan and a substantial budget. But everyone is overworked, and we are a little panicked about the benchmarks we have set. And we need to raise even more money to reach our goals, and these themselves are set to be bigger in year two than they are in year one and so on. There is never enough…

And, even though I understand the economy of good deeds, how the world’s need is enormous, and how you can never do enough, and more deeds are always better then fewer, for a moment I found myself flashing back to my search for “the best person in the world.” And it has gotten me thinking about the virtue of moral smallness.

You may well know (if only from Andre Schwartz-Bart’s tragic novel) about the tradition that there are, at any given moment, at least thirty-six righteous people who, by their goodness, assure the continuation of the world. These lamed-vavniks (lamed-vav spelling “36”) are hidden. You won’t see them on the front page of the Times. Bill Moyers will not interview them. They chop wood for the poor widow in the middle of the night and leave it anonymously outside her door. They make conversation with the most awkward person at the party.

Only now as I am writing this do I think of my beloved text about “deeds without measure whose reward is without measure…” I have never really considered the first part of this formula. Who can take the measure of a deed? Who can say that something accomplished on a world scale is more important than something accomplished around a dinner table at home? And what are these deeds without measure? Honoring your parents. Showing up for people’s simchas and their sorrows. Making peace between friends who are at odds. You know the list. Deeds which are, for the most part, small, intimate, local. When a new baby is blessed, we say, “Zeh ha-katan, gadol yihyeh.” “This little one, may he become great.” Great yes, indeed — but may she not entirely forget the importance of being small.

I know well that the peace and joy of my household is built on many small kindnesses. So too the road I live on, and the several interlocking communities of which I am a part. So I can extrapolate that small generosities and hidden goodnesses actually do sustain the world.

Rosh Hodesh Ellul begins Tuesday, August 14. With Ellul comes the formal time of taking stock — of our lives, our achievements, our deeds, our successes and our failures. Far be it from me to discourage any of you from anything grand. But I hope we will not lose sight of the small gestures: those we have made and those made towards us, those we have wished for and those we have failed to offer. “May our deeds be small…”

I hope you have a wonderful, peaceful, freilich summer. We’ll get back to larger matters soon enough!

In the 1989 Marine Corps Gazette article where I and four colleagues first laid out the Four Generations of Modern War, we foresaw two potential futures. One, the way the world has gone, was 4GW. The other, the direction the Pentagon has taken, became known as the Revolution in Military Affairs, or, more recently, Transformation. This vision of future war, a vision anchored in hi-tech, high-price “systems,” is, I am happy to report, militarily dead.

While its corpse still twitches in Iraq and Afghanistan, its obituary was published in April, in Israel, when the Winograd Commission published its report (is Winograd, one wonders, the city in Galicia where old Polish generals go to die of cirrhosis?) On May 29, a summary of its findings by Haninah Levine was made available by the Center for Defense Information. The defense industry fat cats must have read it and wept.

The Winograd Commission was established to examine the Israeli debacle in Lebanon last summer. According to the Levine summary, its first lesson is, “Western militaries are in active state of denial concerning the limitations of precision weapons.” Speaking of the then-IDF Chief of Staff General Dan Halutz – Israel’s first and, I suspect, last Chief of Staff drawn from the Air Force – Levine writes:

Halutz encouraged the civilian leaders to believe that Israel could launch a precision air and artillery offensive without getting dragged into a broad ground offensive. … the failure of Halutz and the General Staff to appraise the enemy’s abilities correctly at the outbreak of the war stemmed not from incorrect intelligence or analysis, but from a willed denial of the limitations of the IDF’s precision weapons.

In how many valleys of Afghanistan is the same sad lesson being taught? In how many towns of Diyala province in Iraq, or streets in Sadr City?

Levine continues,

The Winograd Commission traces studiously the origins of the General Staff’s error of judgment. The commission outlines the changes which took place in Israeli military doctrine over the preceding decade in response both to strategic developments…and to technological developments – the so called “revolution in military affairs,” whose keystone is the advent of precision air-to-surface and surface-to-surface weapon systems…

The first lessen of the Second Lebanon War is… that wishful thinking concerning the capabilities of precision weapon systems overpowered the General Staff’ s analytical abilities…. Faith in advanced air and artillery systems as magical “game-changing” systems absolved the General Staff from the need to consider what capabilities (such as distributed and hardened facilities) the enemy possessed, and led the IDF into a strategic trap it had recognized in advance.

This lesson, I think, can be extrapolated in two useful ways in the American context. First, the strategic or more precisely doctrinal, trap set by the RMA has long been recognized. The trap, quite simply is that for the RMA to succeed, it had to contradict the nature of war.

The RMA reduces war to putting fires on targets. It promises to use new technology to make everything targetable. But this means it also promises to eliminate uncertainty, to make war transparent, to eliminate the quality that defines war, the independent hostile will of the enemy. In other words, it is bunk. The fact that it is bunk was evident to a great many people from the outset, even people in Washington.

Why, then, did it get as far as it did (it remains DOD policy even today)? Here we can extrapolate again from the Winograd Commission’s finding: the RMA’s hi-tech systems are indeed magically “game changing.” But the game they change is the budget game, not war. The RMA has given the Pentagon such magical results as bomber aircraft that cost more per unit than the Navy’s ships (the B-2), three fighters for one billion dollars (the F-22), and the most magical system of all, the Army’s Future Contract System, a system no one can describe but costs more than any program in any other service. Boy, that’s magic! Even the Wizard of Id must be jealous.

The fact is, Pentagon policy has nothing to do with war, which has a great deal to do with why we are losing two wars. The Pentagon is the last Soviet industry. It is not about producing a product, least of all a product that works. It is solely, entirely, about acquiring and justifying resources. That the RMA does supremely well.

(NewsTarget) An increasing number of doctors are contesting the claim that annual mammograms decrease women’s risk of dying from breast cancer.

Danish researcher Dr. Peter Gotzsche first made this claim in a study published in “The Lancet” in October 2006. Gotzsche had re-analyzed the studies originally done on the benefits of mammograms and found them unconvincing.

Since then, other doctors have begun to assert that in addition to failing to offer protection, mammograms — which involve exposing patients to radiation —may actually increase women’s risk of cancer.

“The latest evidence shifts the balance towards harm and away from benefits,” said Dr. Michael Baum of University College in London.

According to Canadian columnist Dr. W. Gifford -Jones, women between the ages of 40 and 49 who have regular mammograms are twice as likely to die from breast cancer as women who are not screened.

“Experts say you have to screen 2,000 women for 10 years for one benefit,” he wrote recently.

Gifford-Jones also points to other risks, from the physical to the psychological. According to some authorities, the squeezing of women’s breasts during mammograms may rupture blood vessels, causing cancer to spread to other parts of the body and actually increasing a patient’s risk of death.

He also pointed to the trauma suffered by women who receive false positives from their mammograms, and to the dangerous sense of security felt by those who receive false negatives.

Studies show that mammograms fail to detect cancer 30 percent of the time in women aged 40 to 49. In addition, it can take eight years before a breast tumor is large enough to detect, by which time the cancer could have spread to other parts of the body.

A state-of-the-art research study published in October 12, 2006 issue of The Lancet (the most prestigious British medical journal) concluded that–as of a year ago–600,000 Iraqis had died violently due to the war in Iraq. That is, the Iraqi death rate for the first 39 months of the war was just about 15,000 per month.

That wasn’t the worst of it, because the death rate was increasing precipitously, and during the first half of 2006 the monthly rate was approximately 30,000 per month, a rate that no doubt has increased further during the ferocious fighting associated with the current American surge.

The U.S. and British governments quickly dismissed these results as “methodologically flawed,” even though the researchers used standard procedures for measuring mortality in war and disaster zones. (They visited a random set of homes and asked the residents if anyone in their household had died in the last few years, recording the details, and inspecting death certificates in the vast majority of cases.) The two belligerent governments offered no concrete reasons for rejecting the study’s findings, and they ignored the fact that they had sponsored identical studies (conducted by some of the same researchers) in other disaster areas, including Darfur and Kosovo. The reasons for this rejection were, however, clear enough: the results were simply too devastating for the culpable governments to acknowledge. (Secretly the British government later admitted that it was “a tried and tested way to measuring mortality in conflict zones”; but it has never publicly admitted its validity).

Reputable researchers have accepted the Lancet study’s results as valid with virtually no dissent. Juan Cole, the most visible American Middle East scholar, summarized it in a particularly vivid comment: “the US misadventure in Iraq is responsible [in a little over three years] for setting off the killing of twice as many civilians as Saddam managed to polish off in 25 years.”

Despite the scholarly consensus, the governments’ denials have been quite effective from a public education point of view, and the few news items that mention the Lancet stody bracket it with official rebuttals. One BBC report, for example, mentioned the figure in an article headlined “Huge Rise in Iraqi Death Tolls,” and quoted at length from President Bush’s public rebuttal, in which he said that the methodology was “pretty well discredited,” adding that “six-hundred thousand or whatever they guessed at is just… it’s not credible.” As a consequence of this sort of coverage, most Americans probably believe that Bush’s December 2005 figure of 30,000 Iraqi civilian deaths (less than 10% of the actual total) is the best estimate of Iraqi deaths up to that time.

COUNTING HOW MANY IRAQIS THE OCCUPATION HAS KILLED

These shocking statistics are made all the more horrific when we realize that among the 600,000 or so victims of Iraqi war violence, the largest portion have been killed by the American military, not by carbombings or death squads, or violent criminals–or even all these groups combined.

The Lancet interviewers asked their Iraqi respondents how their loved ones died and who was responsible. The families were very good at the cause of death, telling the reporters that over half (56%) were due to gunshots, with an eighth due each to car bombs(13%), air strikes (13%) and other ordinance (14%). Only 4% were due to unknown causes.

The families were not as good at identifying who was responsible. Although they knew, for example, that air strike victims were killed by the occupation, and that carbomb victims were killed by insurgents, the gunshot and ordinance fatalities often occurred in firefights or in circumstances with no witnesses. Many times, therefore, they could not tell for sure who was responsible. Only were certain, and the interviewers did not record the responsible party if “households had any uncertainly” as to who fired the death shot.

The results are nevertheless staggering for those of us who read the American press: for the deaths that the victims families knew for sure who the perpetrator was, U.S. forces (or their “Coalition of the Willing” allies) were responsible for 56%. That is, we can be very confident that the Coalition had killed at least 180,000 Iraqis by the middle of 2006. Moreover, we have every reason to believe that the U.S. is responsible for its pro rata share (or more) of the unattributed deaths. That means that the U.S. and its allies may well have killed upwards of 330,000 Iraqis by the middle of 2006.

The remainder can be attributed to the insurgents, criminals, and to Iraqi forces. And let’s be very clear here: car bombs, the one source that was most easy for victims’ families to identify, was responsible for 13% of the deaths, about 80,000 people, or about 2000 per month. This is horrendous, but it is far less than half of the confirmed American total, and less than a quarter of the probable American total.

Even if we work with the lower, confirmed, figured of 180,000 Iraqi deaths caused by the occupation firepower, which yields an average of just over 5,000 Iraqis killed every month by U.S. forces and our allies since the beginning of the war. And we have to remember that the rate of fatalities was twice as high in 2006 as the overall average, meaning that the American average in 2006 was well over 10,000 per month, or something over 300 Iraqis every day, including Sundays. With the surge that began in 2007, the current figure is likely even higher.

HOW COME WE DON’T KNOW ABOUT THIS?

These figures sound impossible to most Americans. Certainly 300 Iraqis killed by Americans each day would be headline news, over and over again. And yet, the electronic and print media simply do not tell us that the U.S. is killing all these people. We hear plenty about car bombers and death squads, but little about Americans killing Iraqis, except the occasional terrorist, and the even more occasional atrocity story.

How, then, is the US accomplishing this carnage, and why is it not newsworthy? The answer lies in another amazing statistic: this one released by the U.S. military and reported by the highly respectable Brookings Institution: for the past four years, the American military sends out something over 1000 patrols each day into hostile neighborhoods, looking to capture or kill insurgents and terrorists. (Since February, the number has increased to nearly 5,000 patrols a day, if we include the Iraqi troops participating in the American surge.)

These thousands of patrols regularly turn into thousands of Iraqi deaths because these patrols are not the “walk in the sun” that they appear to be in our mind’s eye. Actually, as independent journalist Nir Rosen described vividly and agonizingly in his indispensable book, In the Belly of the Green Bird, they involve a kind of energetic brutality that is only occasionally reported by an embedded American mainstream journalist.

This brutality is all very logical, once we understand the purpose and process of these patrols. American soldiers and marines are sent into hostile communities where virtually the entire population is supports the insurgency. They often have a list of suspects’ addresses; and their job is to interrorgate or arrest or kill the suspect; and search the house for incriminating evidence, particularly arms and ammunition, but also literature, video equipment, and other items that the insurgency depends upon for its political and military activities. When they don’t have lists of suspects, they conduct “house-to-house” searches, looking for suspicious behavior, individuals or evidence.

In this context, any fighting age man is not just a suspect, but a potentially lethal adversary. Our soldiers are told not to take any chances: in many instances, for example, knocking on doors could invite gunshots through the doors. Their instructions are therefore to use the element of surprise whenever the situation appears to be dangerous”to break down doors, shoot at anything suspicious, and throw grenades into rooms or homes where there is any chance of resistance. If they encounter tangible resistance, they can call in artillery and/or air power rather than try to invade a building.

Here is how two Iraqi civilians described these patrols to Asia Times reporter Pepe Escobar:

“Hussein and Hasan confirm that the Americans usually come at night, sometimes by day, always protected by helicopters.’ They “sometimes bomb houses, sometimes arrest people, sometimes throw missiles'”

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.