The Rag Blog

Taguba knew his report would make him unpopular: “If I lie, I lose. And, if I tell the truth, I lose.”

On the afternoon of May 6, 2004, Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba was summoned to meet, for the first time, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in his Pentagon conference room. Rumsfeld and his senior staff were to testify the next day, in televised hearings before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees, about abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq. The previous week, revelations about Abu Ghraib, including photographs showing prisoners stripped, abused, and sexually humiliated, had appeared on CBS and in The New Yorker. In response, Administration officials had insisted that only a few low-ranking soldiers were involved and that America did not torture prisoners. They emphasized that the Army itself had uncovered the scandal.

If there was a redeeming aspect to the affair, it was in the thoroughness and the passion of the Army’s initial investigation. The inquiry had begun in January, and was led by General Taguba, who was stationed in Kuwait at the time. Taguba filed his report in March. In it he found:

Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees . . . systemic and illegal abuse.

Taguba was met at the door of the conference room by an old friend, Lieutenant General Bantz J. Craddock, who was Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant. Craddock’s daughter had been a babysitter for Taguba’s two children when the officers served together years earlier at Fort Stewart, Georgia. But that afternoon, Taguba recalled, “Craddock just said, very coldly, ‘Wait here.’ ” In a series of interviews early this year, the first he has given, Taguba told me that he understood when he began the inquiry that it could damage his career; early on, a senior general in Iraq had pointed out to him that the abused detainees were “only Iraqis.” Even so, he was not prepared for the greeting he received when he was finally ushered in.

“Here . . . comes . . . that famous General Taguba—of the Taguba report!” Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, “I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting.”

In the meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. “Could you tell us what happened?” Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, “Is it abuse or torture?” At that point, Taguba recalled, “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.”

Rumsfeld was particularly concerned about how the classified report had become public. “General,” he asked, “who do you think leaked the report?” Taguba responded that perhaps a senior military leader who knew about the investigation had done so. “It was just my speculation,” he recalled. “Rumsfeld didn’t say anything.” (I did not meet Taguba until mid-2006 and obtained his report elsewhere.) Rumsfeld also complained about not being given the information he needed. “Here I am,” Taguba recalled Rumsfeld saying, “just a Secretary of Defense, and we have not seen a copy of your report. I have not seen the photographs, and I have to testify to Congress tomorrow and talk about this.” As Rumsfeld spoke, Taguba said, “He’s looking at me. It was a statement.”

At best, Taguba said, “Rumsfeld was in denial.” Taguba had submitted more than a dozen copies of his report through several channels at the Pentagon and to the Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, which ran the war in Iraq. By the time he walked into Rumsfeld’s conference room, he had spent weeks briefing senior military leaders on the report, but he received no indication that any of them, with the exception of General Schoomaker, had actually read it. (Schoomaker later sent Taguba a note praising his honesty and leadership.) When Taguba urged one lieutenant general to look at the photographs, he rebuffed him, saying, “I don’t want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?”

Taguba also knew that senior officials in Rumsfeld’s office and elsewhere in the Pentagon had been given a graphic account of the pictures from Abu Ghraib, and told of their potential strategic significance, within days of the first complaint. On January 13, 2004, a military policeman named Joseph Darby gave the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (C.I.D.) a CD full of images of abuse. Two days later, General Craddock and Vice-Admiral Timothy Keating, the director of the Joint Staff of the J.C.S., were e-mailed a summary of the abuses depicted on the CD. It said that approximately ten soldiers were shown, involved in acts that included:

Having male detainees pose nude while female guards pointed at their genitals; having female detainees exposing themselves to the guards; having detainees perform indecent acts with each other; and guards physically assaulting detainees by beating and dragging them with choker chains.

Taguba said, “You didn’t need to ‘see’ anything—just take the secure e-mail traffic at face value.”

I learned from Taguba that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees. Several of these images, including one of an Iraqi woman detainee baring her breasts, have since surfaced; others have not. (Taguba’s report noted that photographs and videos were being held by the C.I.D. because of ongoing criminal investigations and their “extremely sensitive nature.”) Taguba said that he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.” The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it. Such images would have added an even more inflammatory element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib. “It’s bad enough that there were photographs of Arab men wearing women’s panties,” Taguba said.

On January 20th, the chief of staff at Central Command sent another e-mail to Admiral Keating, copied to General Craddock and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the Army commander in Iraq. The chief of staff wrote, “Sir: update on alleged detainee abuse per our discussion. DID IT REALLY HAPPEN? Yes, currently have 4 confessions implicating perhaps 10 soldiers. DO PHOTOS EXIST? Yes. A CD with approx 100 photos and a video—CID has these in their possession.”

In subsequent testimony, General Myers, the J.C.S. chairman, acknowledged, without mentioning the e-mails, that in January information about the photographs had been given “to me and the Secretary up through the chain of command. . . . And the general nature of the photos, about nudity, some mock sexual acts and other abuse, was described.”

Nevertheless, Rumsfeld, in his appearances before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees on May 7th, claimed to have had no idea of the extensive abuse. “It breaks our hearts that in fact someone didn’t say, ‘Wait, look, this is terrible. We need to do something,’ ” Rumsfeld told the congressmen. “I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn’t.”

Rumsfeld told the legislators that, when stories about the Taguba report appeared, “it was not yet in the Pentagon, to my knowledge.” As for the photographs, Rumsfeld told the senators, “I say no one in the Pentagon had seen them”; at the House hearing, he said, “I didn’t see them until last night at 7:30.” Asked specifically when he had been made aware of the photographs, Rumsfeld said:

There were rumors of photographs in a criminal prosecution chain back sometime after January 13th . . . I don’t remember precisely when, but sometime in that period of January, February, March. . . . The legal part of it was proceeding along fine. What wasn’t proceeding along fine is the fact that the President didn’t know, and you didn’t know, and I didn’t know.

“And, as a result, somebody just sent a secret report to the press, and there they are,” Rumsfeld said.

Taguba, watching the hearings, was appalled. He believed that Rumsfeld’s testimony was simply not true. “The photographs were available to him—if he wanted to see them,” Taguba said. Rumsfeld’s lack of knowledge was hard to credit. Taguba later wondered if perhaps Cambone had the photographs and kept them from Rumsfeld because he was reluctant to give his notoriously difficult boss bad news. But Taguba also recalled thinking, “Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap. There’s no way he’s suffering from C.R.S.—Can’t Remember Shit. He’s trying to acquit himself, and a lot of people are lying to protect themselves.” It distressed Taguba that Rumsfeld was accompanied in his Senate and House appearances by senior military officers who concurred with his denials.

“The whole idea that Rumsfeld projects—‘We’re here to protect the nation from terrorism’—is an oxymoron,” Taguba said. “He and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea of the values and high standards that are expected of them. And they’ve dragged a lot of officers with them.”

In response to detailed queries about this article, Colonel Gary Keck, a Pentagon spokesman, said in an e-mail, “The department did not promulgate interrogation policies or guidelines that directed, sanctioned, or encouraged abuse.” He added, “When there have been abuses, those violations are taken seriously, acted upon promptly, investigated thoroughly, and the wrongdoers are held accountable.” Regarding early warnings about Abu Ghraib, Colonel Keck said, “Former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has stated publicly under oath that he and other senior leaders were not provided pictures from Abu Ghraib until shortly before their release.” (Rumsfeld, through an aide, declined to answer questions, as did General Craddock. Other senior commanders did not respond to requests for comment.)

This is not a story about a woman who raised four children, sent one off to war, and collapsed one day in a fit of screaming at the news that he was dead.

This is not a piece to describe how that woman tried to stay awake for the next three days so as not to have to scream like that again after waking and then remembering that news.

There will be no attempt in this piece to comprehend the maddening indecency of the overgrown frat-boy president who sent her son to kill and die for lies and still had the gall to call her “Mom” and sits day after day– to this day –as the self-appointed, unrestrained king of the world.

This is not a piece about a woman who exposed her grief and her rawest nerves, who sacrificed a twenty-nine year marriage and time with her remaining children, to a country calloused to the daily loss of life and succeeded in stirring many to their feet, into the streets, and to the tops of their lungs.

This is not a piece about how this woman parked herself in the dusty heat of a ditch in Texas and said yes to enough speaking engagements and phone calls from soldiers and late nights with grieving parents to send her own life teetering near its edge because she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t give everything she could to prevent another mother from having to experience the loss that she knew.

This piece is not even about how her loss and her grief were not confined to her son, but extended each day further, to include the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, and further yet, to those cast in the impoverished margins of our planet–including the thousands of children dying each day from starvation–as the U.S. obscenely spends hundreds of billions on constructing and deploying the machinery of mass death.

Nor is this about the millions who learned this woman’s name, whose hearts broke with hers, but whose spirits were lifted and consciences were challenged by the way she seized the moral high ground and much of the spotlight from the world’s biggest liars and most pitiless killers because she was right and she was fearless–to hell with the odds.

This piece isn’t even simply about a culture that demonizes and attacks such a person, that makes their every word or slightest gesture grist for the dishonest mill of the small-minded bloggers, the jones for cruelty of the war-planners, and fascist propagandizing of the major media mouthpieces.

Nor is this about a society that props up mothers as “keepers of the flame,” a counter-balance meant to excuse the war-makers, only to turn on them and call them “whores,” should they dare to do more than weep silently.

This is not merely about this woman’s refusal to be corralled into “realistic” and empire-bound strategies like timetables or phased-redeployment, about her righteous refusal to excuse the funding of the war, about her simple and righteous insistence that the slaughter and torture of human beings stop right now.

And, no, this is not mainly about the many questions that she herself ran up against and has put straight up in front of the movement and that all too many don’t want to speak to. Like why the Democrats won’t bend to the will of the people, or what kind of system only allows for two sides of the pro-war position, or what to do about an American people who are well on their way to becoming Good Germans. Those questions are crucial and agonizing and there are answers to them that can be found or forged. And there is a need for a movement that encourages the debate to rage around these questions and insists on honestly and unsparingly confronting reality. A movement that insists on getting to, and telling the people, the truth.

No, throwing up your hands is never the right response. But to be perfectly honest, this piece is not about what Cindy Sheehan should be doing. Not when really there are 300 million other people in this country who each morning wake up with profound choices to make–and who make them every day, whether they know it or not.

So, no, this article is not about Cindy Sheehan.

This article is about you.

Reading on your computer screen. Smudging black ink off the newsprint in your hands. Breathing in and out, your chest rising even as the chests of other human beings who happen to have been born atop huge reservoirs of oil fall still, as their breath is stolen, as their land is ravaged, as their girls learn to fear their budding breasts and widening hips under the leer of the occupier’s eye, as their fathers lose their minds trying to comprehend the life-danger they’ve become to their own children for being of a different religion than their mother, as the psyche and politics and view of what kind of world is possible, as a whole country and region is forever marked by the apparent indifference of way too many Americans to their sustained destruction… as millions who are also heart-sick flirt with the devastating and impermissible comfort of throwing up their own hands and looking away from the war zone…

This article is about you–because frankly, there is not enough space and not enough time and not enough ink and not enough trees to make enough paper to hold all the ways that the roadblocks hit by a woman like Cindy are a sign of failure. Not of the failure of the possibility for change, nor the failure of those who put everything on the line to make all this stop, but the failure of a society that does not cherish and have room for a woman like her. And the failure of continuing on a course that does not fundamentally challenge the killing confines of the choices this system puts before us.

So, again, this is about you–whether you will hide behind and resign yourself because of the faltering of another or whether you will step into the breech.

This article is about what you think about and do when you wake up each morning. About whose lives you value and prioritize. About whether it is sufficient to register disapproval or whether you are responsible for stretching your limits, risking friendships and family if you must, confronting discomforting truths about this political system, and whether you will dare to inspire and challenge and set an example of living for and impacting something bigger than yourself.

This is about whether you know enough and have seen enough of other people’s sons and daughters dying in the service of empire to say without equivocation that all this must halt. This is about whether you will plunge into and confront the dead-ends that have led so many to disorientation–whether you will look deeper, consider radical solutions, even ones you might once have dismissed.

And, yes, it can seem at times like we are hurling our soft bodies and our embattled dreams up against cold rock, and like the forces aligned against us are made of impenetrable marble. But marble has fissures and faultlines and cracks deep beneath the surface and these can be located and the marble itself can be pried apart by the determined action of millions who dare. So I am struck again with the truth and the enormity of our choices captured in the final words of the World Can’t Wait Call: “History is full of examples where people who had right on their side fought against tremendous odds and were victorious. And it is also full of examples of people passively hoping to wait it out, only to get swallowed up by a horror beyond what they ever imagined. The future is unwritten. WHICH ONE WE GET IS UP TO US.”

The war is still wrong.

GENEVA (Reuters) – Diverting sugar and maize for biofuels could lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths from hunger worldwide, the United Nations’ food envoy warned on Thursday.

Jean Ziegler, U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, accused the European Union (EU), Japan and the United States of “total hypocrisy” for promoting biofuels to cut their own dependency on imported oil.

Fears over climate change have boosted the demand for alternative fuels in wealthy countries, but the rise of biofuel has been criticized by some who say it will put a squeeze on land needed for food.

“There is a great danger for the right to food by the development of biofuels,” Ziegler told a news briefing held on the sidelines of the U.N. Human Rights Council.

“It (the price) will be paid perhaps by hundreds of thousands of people who will die from hunger,” he added.

However, a senior official at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said recently that biofuels were getting a bad press and that rather than being a threat to the poor, they could boost food production.

Ziegler said that more and more sugar cane plantations in northern and eastern Brazil were being used for biofuels, leaving less land for subsistence farmers.

Brazil is the world’s biggest producer of cane-based fuel ethanol, most of which is destined for the domestic market to meet rapidly growing demand from flex-fuel motorists.

In some regions of Mexico, the price of maize rose by 16 percent last year, because of rising demand for use in biofuels, according to the independent U.N. envoy.

“I can understand the Brazilian and Mexican policies which as very indebted countries want to earn hard currency….But from the point of view of the right to food, which must be the decisive one, it is a catastrophe,” Ziegler said.

Some 854 million people worldwide — or one in six — suffer from hunger, according to the sociologist and former Swiss parliamentarian who cited U.N. figures.

Ziegler said famine and chronic hunger were driving many in sub-Saharan Africa to risk their lives on rickety boats bound for Europe, often Spain’s Canary Islands or Lampedusa, Italy.

An estimated 2 million people try to enter the European Union (EU) illegally every year, and about 2,000 of them drown in the Mediterranean Sea, he said.

“Nobody knows how many thousands of other people have died trying to make the journey, but bodies regularly wash up on the beaches or fishermen catch them in their nets,” he said.

May was the worst month for US fatalities in Iraq since 2004, April the worst for British soldiers since the invasion. Sir Christopher Meyer, British ambassador to Washington in the run up to the invasion is the latest establishment figure to call for a rapid US and British withdrawal. Piers Mostyn, for Socialist Resistance, asked GILBERT ACHCAR to provide a balance sheet on Bush’s last ditch “surge” of US troops since the New Year and recent developments in Lebanon.

Gilbert Achcar: It has been above all a surge in bloodshed and a major failure if we measure it by the Bush administration’s goal — nothing short of turning the whole Iraqi failure into a success story. That’s what they tried to achieve through the “surge”, chiefly through a lot of spin. But it very blatantly failed.

The major goal was to create conditions through which they would change the political alignments in Iraq and set up a new alliance that would be close to the US and enable Washington to better manoeuvre in the country. Moqtada al-Sadr was a chief target of this whole operation and we can measure its failure by the way he is now back and very much prominent in the news, after having vanished for a while.

PM: What is the significance of his re-emergence?

GA: I see it — above all — as an indication of the failure of the so-called surge. Knowing that the “surge” targeted him, al-Sadr went into hiding and instructed his followers to adopt a low profile and avoid any direct confrontation with US troops. He wouldn’t clash head-on with US forces as he did previously in 2004 at a very great cost. Then he came to the verge of being arrested or killed and his movement crushed militarily. So he carefully avoided a repeat of the same pattern this time.

He understood a very elementary lesson: that he shouldn’t face the US military frontally because they have overwhelming firepower and weaponry. Instead, when they attack, the right thing to do is to retreat to safe ground or even go into hiding. This is an elementary guerrilla tactic — and the Sadrists applied it quite successfully, also managing to manoeuvre politically quite shrewdly so that they maintained their political clout and even increased it, while the hatred for US troops sharpened as a result of the so-called surge.

PM: He recently made a speech which had a more nationalist anti-sectarian edge, does this signal any change?

GA: I think he probably came to the conclusion that it is high time for him to renew or resume the political stance that he had been following until late 2005 or early 2006. The February 2006 Samarra attack [a devastating Sunni sectarian attack on the Shia mosque there] was a watershed in the Iraqi situation. That is when the image of al-Sadr turned from one of non-sectarian Arab-cum-Iraqi nationalist into one of leader of a Shiite sectarian militia.

He is trying now to restore his previous image. He probably believes that the climate is right for a new attempt — after over a year during which the Shiites let off sectarian steam very intensively in response to the sectarian attacks they had suffered.

PM: Are you saying that the tit for tat sectarian escalation may have played its course and that Moqtada al-Sadr could return to a more nationalist discourse?

GA: Yes precisely. He probably feels that things can calm down now, at a time when it’s more urgent than ever for him to rebuild his image. He needs to reach out to the Sunni Arab Iraqis, because he understands that there is a major political operation going on of which he is a target.

The two Kurdish leaders have recently made statements warning against an ongoing “plot” that aims at overthrowing the Maliki government. The other man who stands at the centre of this “plot” is none other than former US-designated prime minister Iyad Allawi — the closest, most reliable stooge that the US and Britain have in Iraq.

So the situation is getting very sensitive right now. We are at a crucial turning point in the Iraqi situation, facing a decisive moment in the coming weeks and months. And that’s when Moqtada al-Sadr has decided to go back on the offensive politically, which is definitely a clever thing to do for him.

PM: Are there any signs of a response from amongst the Sunni opposition groups?

GA: Well there are. Al-Sadr’s new tone is generally welcomed by the nationalists –in contrast to the sectarians — among Arab Sunnis. If you put aside the al-Qaida type of anti-US anti-Shiite fanatics, there are two types of forces among the Iraqi Arab Sunnis: on the one hand, those chiefly spurred on by sectarian and anti-Iranian views, which are close to the Saudis and willing to make deals with the US against the Shiites.

And, on the other hand, those who consider the US as the main, most dangerous, enemy and who are therefore willing to make an alliance with anti-US Shiite forces — provided (as the fear of Iran is common to all Sunnis) these are forces that they deem to be independent enough from Iran.

That is the case of Moqtada al-Sadr. Although he has obvious links with Tehran, which backed him increasingly over the last few years, he retains a certain degree of political autonomy and is known to be fiercely independent. His followers don’t shy away from making statements criticising Iran. For instance, criticising the recent meeting between Iranian and US

representatives over the issue of Iraq as unacceptable meddling into Iraq’s affairs — as did various forces among the Sunnis.

PM: Given your earlier comments about the failure of the US surge and this sensitive critical political juncture you are describing, do you think we are heading for a crunch point later in the summer? A combination of perhaps a resurgent nationalist unity with the transparent failings of the American military offensive, leading to a decisive point where the Americans will have to change course radically or even withdraw?

GA: It can’t be so simple. I have been describing what al-Sadr is trying to do. I didn’t imply that he is going to succeed. He can certainly find a certain measure of success, but a major success allowing him to be the winner in this whole confrontation is quite difficult to predict at this point. He’s facing quite difficult conditions.

The Allawi operation is still going on. It is essentially an attempt at building a cross-sectarian political coalition using the lure of US support in order to topple the Maliki government and bring Allawi back to the helm as the “strong man” and saviour of Iraq. Although I wouldn’t bet one penny on the success of this operation, you can’t exclude it totally. You can’t exclude some kind of coup that would be backed by the US and the segment of Iraqi military forces that the US believes to be under their reliable control (if there are any actually).

What is certain though is that we will see crucial changes in the coming period. For the Bush administration, the ongoing “surge” is a double or quits operation. They are under intensive pressure in the US. Although we have seen how the Democrats have shied away from pressing forward the issue of a timetable for troop withdrawal — the issue of Iraq is prominent in the presidential election and US public opinion has become much opposed to the continuation of the war.

The Bush administration is playing what appears to be its last card. At the same time, the administration is covering its back by reaching out to Tehran — in a very limited way for a start — for a possible accommodation, as recommended by the Baker-Hamilton report.

PM: They don’t have another plan up their sleeves which they can pull out?

GA: I can’t see what it could be, other than the operation with Allawi. That’s the only trump card they could still use.

PM: Isn’t this plan to install a new strong man almost a return to the Saddam era, except under the control of a nominal Shia?

GA: A return to the Saddam era would be impossible. You can’t reinvent that dictatorship. The situation in Iraq is such that whoever tried to play “Saddam Two” would have a very hard time and would certainly fail. I don’t think that the mass of the Shiite population is ready to accept a new dictatorship, unless it comes out of their own ranks — and Allawi is widely perceived as a traitor, a former Baathist furthermore.

For them to accept a dictator who is backed by the US and appears to prevent the Shiites from reaping the fruits of what they have been waiting for ages — their empowerment as a majority — is quite out of the question, I believe. Iran, moreover, is also part of the game and it won’t accept a scenario of that kind, at least under the present conditions.

So I can’t see any winning strategy or winning card for the US in Iraq. The question is not whether the US can achieve victory or not. The failure is already there and is fundamentally irreversible. The problem is how much further harm they can do to Iraq by trying to implement crazy schemes that are doomed from the start.

PM: Turning to Lebanon, has the siege and bombardment of the Nahr el-Bared Palestinian refugee camp been a relative sideshow simply involving a small Sunni fundamentalist group or does it have deeper connections? The American journalist Seymour Hersh has suggested that “Fatah al Ansar” was originally backed by the Lebanese government and that this is a sort of “blowback”.

GA: There are two kinds of “conspiracy theory” on this issue in Lebanon: on the one hand, the pro-US or “governmental majority” forces claim that “Fatah al-Islam” are manipulated by the Syrian services. They claim that the recent clashes were provoked in order to counter the international tribunal on the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri that Washington, Paris and London had just moved through the UN Security Council.

On the other hand, you have those, many of whom refer to the article by Hersh, who claim that “Fatah al-Islam” has been manipulated by the governmental majority itself, and behind them the Saudis and the United States.

There are only a few facts that can be taken as true. It is known, for instance, that the key leader of “Fatah al-Islam” had been jailed in Syria previously — so there is no solid ground to suspect that the Syrian regime stands behind his group, except for the fact that the situation flared up just after the UNSC voted on the international tribunal.

It is true as well that this brand of Sunni fanatical fundamentalism is usually linked to Saudi sources, whether official or unofficial. It might well be that, at some point, the Hariri bloc had a relationship with such a Sunni Islamic fundamentalist group, which adheres to an anti-Shiite sectarian tradition (and has eventually joined al-Qaida), with a view to a possible all-out confrontation with the Lebanese Shiites mainly represented by Hezbollah. But from that to infer that they are manipulating this group is also quite baseless.

I think that whatever ignited the confrontation, one thing is obvious: it has been immediately exploited for a very definite agenda. This was (1) to test the ability of the Lebanese army to confront other forces, starting with the easiest — Palestinians, against whom Lebanese Shiite and Sunni soldiers alike can be united with no major risk of split along sectarian lines; and (2) to get the army to enter this Palestinian refugee camp in Northern Lebanon and take control of it under the pretext of fighting this group.

This is why at some point Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, came out saying that he considered the penetration by the Lebanese army of the camp to be a “red line.” Why did he say so, despite Hezbollah initially expressing its solidarity with the Lebanese army? Because he realised that this Palestinian camp has become a testing ground for the ability of the Lebanese army to implement a task that is part of UNSC Resolution 1559 (sponsored by Washington, London and Paris in 2004) calling for the disarming of both the Palestinian camps and Hezbollah.

Nasrallah became aware that the battle of Nahr el-Bared is but a first step on a path that leads ultimately to the fight against his own forces. You can see that in the broad display of active solidarity with the Lebanese army in the ongoing confrontation: Washington is sending weapons and inciting all its allies to send whatever hardware the Lebanese army needs.

PM: More broadly what is the current state of play as we approach the first anniversary of last year’s war? Has there been any shift on the ground since the ceasefire?

GA: No, it’s been a complete stalemate. The situation is at a real dead end, which means that it is tense and dangerous. For months now, the country has been on the verge of a sectarian explosion, which could ignite new bloody fighting or even a new civil war.

Hezbollah’s strategy got bogged down completely. This is a result of the limitation inherent in their sectarian view of things, in their conception of power sharing among sectarian communities and existing power blocs. Through a series of clumsy positions, in which their alliance with the Syrian dictatorship played no minor role, they comforted the present sectarian division in this country between Shiites and Sunnis.

Although at some point, it appeared at the beginning of the Israeli offensive last summer that there was a reduction in sectarianism, it soon came back very strongly. Hezbollah’s sectarian nature made it easy for the Hariri camp to exploit Sunni sectarian feelings in very blatant ways. So the whole situation has got bogged down and the opposition has lost the political initiative that they had when they started their mobilisation at the beginning of last winter.

PM: When you say the opposition you mean the movement led by Hezbollah and Aoun against the pro-Western government?

GA: The Shiite Hezbollah and Amal, the Maronite General Aoun and many other smaller forces. In sectarian terms, that means the overwhelming majority of the Shiites plus a sizeable fraction of the Christians in alliance against the majority of the Sunnis, plus the majority of the Druze and another fraction of the Christians. This is the configuration of forces in Lebanon as it stands now — as sectarian as it used to be at the peak of the civil war.

06/13/07 “ICH” — — – It’s funny, in a sad sick almost perverse sort of way, but it seems the only people who listen to George Bush and take him seriously anymore is the insurgency. Several months after his royal hind ass made his now famous “bring em on” statement the insurgency issued their own proclamation saying in affect, we have brought it on do you have anything else you wish to say to us?

The on going political battle over Bushes insane surge, like Custer wishing for ten more men or Westmoreland’s asking for 500,000 more. It belies someone’s ignorance and inability to understand tactic’s and by thinking that what is needed is just more warm bodies to storm the enemy trenches they create a recipe for a blood bath and the certainty of defeat in Iraq.

The siege strategy was used during the crusades against the middle-aged castles of Acre the ultimate irony is the insurgencies battle plan was once used by Saladin the great, it was used by the Russians at Stalingrad and by McArthur in the South Pacific and by the Afghans against the Russians etc. You isolate your enemy and cut him off from resupply or make resupply so difficult that he has to use a disproportionate amount of troops to guaranty his supply lines.

The American forces in Baghdad’s Green zone have no airstrip and are fourteen miles from the airport through Baghdad’s winding ancient narrow roads. General Von Paulus in Stalingrad was promised the Lufftewaffe would keep him supplied but it was an idle boast. The Americans have a more powerful air force to be sure but also a greater dependence on fuel and commodities. The high tech war machine like all war machines is only as good as it’s supply and there is another possibility to consider.

Suspected Sunni insurgents bombed and badly damaged a span over the main north-south highway leading from Baghdad on Tuesday – the third bridge attack in as many days. The attack occurred 35 miles south of Baghdad and just six miles south of a bridge brought down on Sunday by what was believed to be a suicide truck bomber.

On Monday, a parked truck bomb destroyed a bridge carrying traffic over the Diyala River in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. There were no casualties, but vehicles were being forced to detour to a road running through insurgent controlled territory to reach important nearby cities.

Earlier in the month a bomb attack heavily damaged the Sarhart Bridge, a key crossing 90 miles north of the Capital

In March and April, three of Baghdad’s 13 bridges over the Tigris River were bombed. The attacks were blamed on Sunni insurgent or attempts to divide the city’s predominantly Shiite east bank from the mostly Sunni western side of the river but far more likely it was an attempt to negate the American strength in armored vehicles

Is the campaign against the bridges an attempt to lay siege to Baghdad? Or like Khe San a generation before an elaborate ruse to draw attention away prior to a larger coming Tet style offensive. In either case the surge has begun but it has been the insurgents who have surged rather than the US.

At Stalingrad the German panzers became almost useless in the narrow streets, this army like the Americans had been designed for lighting war not for urban street fighting. A thousand eyes kept the Russian army aware of every German move and allowed Russian snipers the choicest targets.

As the occupying power in Iraq the US is responsible for keeping the residents of Baghdad fed and watered. The millions of Baghdad will create just one more burden on US forces already overburdened. Thus the American surge is already defeated without the ability to move freely the already over stretched forces will become unable to support it’s outposts. They will fall one by one just like the firebases around Khe San and the crusaders castles in Lebanon.

At Khe San the US decided to use the massive force of B52 attacks but the focus had already shifted away from victory to self-defense. The enemy had captured something far more precious than a firebase they had taken away from the Americans the certainty of victory. As the North Vietnamese army slipped away and the US forces emerged from their bunkers to claim a hollow victory, a sucker holding the bag on a snipe hunt slowly realizing he has been had. To spend huge amounts of blood and treasure to defend a muddy hill top not for a victory but only to stave off defeat.

The American surge is the latest in an attempt to stave off defeat; the moral battle was lost long ago. The political battle a stalemate, between the forces of timid stupidity verses the forces of entrenched insanity. The greatest megalomaniac’s of the 20th century had drawn up battle plans for the conquest of England and one of the cornerstones of operation sea lion was in avoiding London. Even a madman knew a large metropolis would swallow an army, and as the tide turned at Stalingrad the mad man began to cashier his own generals.

For in his madness it could only be the generals who were not following his orders not the fatal flaw in his own tactics. The mad man brooded over his scale model of the new Berlin much like the current mad man broods over his scale model of what the Iraqi’s call Bush’s palace, the Vatican city sized embassy in Baghdad which will probably never be occupied or at best be used a last redoubt.

Von Paulus pleaded for permission to withdraw and was advised that where a German foot stood a German foot stayed. The politics of cut and run verses the personal pride of the leader, the madness of leadership who view military tactic’s as personal affronts. As Nathan Bedford Forrest succinctly observed “getting there firstest with the mostest.” In regards to our own current surge without the firstest the mostest becomes a mute point the mostest with the latest is a pointless exercise.

As the siege continues the US forces will become more dependent on helicopters for re-supply and will begin to lose them in greater numbers like Von Paulus they will assume a defensive position more interested in holding positions rather than taking. Will the US then call in B52 strikes on Baghdad to try and break the siege? Or will it try sending a reinforcing column to break the siege or will they finally admit the inevitable and withdraw?

BAGHDAD, June 10 — With the four-month-old increase in American troops showing only modest success in curbing insurgent attacks, American commanders are turning to another strategy that they acknowledge is fraught with risk: arming Sunni Arab groups that have promised to fight militants linked with Al Qaeda who have been their allies in the past.

American commanders say they have successfully tested the strategy in Anbar Province west of Baghdad and have held talks with Sunni groups in at least four areas of central and north-central Iraq where the insurgency has been strong. In some cases, the American commanders say, the Sunni groups are suspected of involvement in past attacks on American troops or of having links to such groups. Some of these groups, they say, have been provided, usually through Iraqi military units allied with the Americans, with arms, ammunition, cash, fuel and supplies.

American officers who have engaged in what they call outreach to the Sunni groups say many of them have had past links to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia but grew disillusioned with the Islamic militants’ extremist tactics, particularly suicide bombings that have killed thousands of Iraqi civilians. In exchange for American backing, these officials say, the Sunni groups have agreed to fight Al Qaeda and halt attacks on American units. Commanders who have undertaken these negotiations say that in some cases, Sunni groups have agreed to alert American troops to the location of roadside bombs and other lethal booby traps.

Hedy Epstein, 82, was born in Germany in 1924(1). She was the only child of parents who died in the Nazi extermination camps. She is a tireless worker for human rights and for the dignity of all people.

Hedy decided to visit Palestine in 2003. She returned terribly shocked with what she had seen there, women and children defenceless, Palestinians locked up into ghettos, an entire people brutalized.

She had learned to love the people that she met, and was determined to tell the world of the injustices she had seen. Palestinians were being dispossessed of their land, removed from the homes that they had lived in for centuries. Nothing that anyone has done, no protests that have been made, has made Israel stop its treatment of the Palestinians. In fact, it has become worse every time Hedy has returned.

So, she is joining other human rights advocates who are sailing to Gaza on the boat, FREE GAZA(2) to demand justice for the Palestinians, and a correction of 60 years of oppression by the Israelis.

Silvia Cattori: Your entire life has been devoted to justice. But, since 2003, you have increased that commitment by advocating for justice for the Palestinians. I understand you are going to take some risks to make the world aware of the crimes perpetrated against them!?

Hedy Epstein: I was invited to join the Free Gaza boat by the organizers, and I feel honoured that I was invited to join (3).

Silvia Cattori: Entering the waters of Gaza with Palestinian, international, and Israeli peace activists is sure to be a wonderful project; but it won’t it be full of tension? Are you not anxious about participating in such an expedition?

Hedy Epstein: Of course, I have some concerns. But, does life insure that nothing will happen to me? You know, tomorrow morning when I get out of bed, I might feel so sleepy that I’ll trip over my own feet and fall down and break my back. So what am I going to do, remain in bed for the rest of my life? No.

There are no guarantees in life. Perhaps no one should put herself in a situation that’s dangerous. But my participation is a small contribution that I can make compared to the sufferings that the Palestinians endure every single day. And, if by doing this, we can tell the world what is happening there, then it’s worth going. I’m 82 years old, and I have lived, most of the time, a good life. Let me make a contribution before it’s too late.

Silvia Cattori: This boat going to Gaza coincides with the 60th anniversary of the departure from Marseille of the EXODUS. Don’t you think it’s somewhat controversial to be in a boat sailing to the same place as the EXODUS?

Hedy Epstein: No. What I’m doing is what I believe in, and what I stand for. In some quarters, especially in the mainstream Jewish community, it looks like I’m a traitor, a “self-hating Jew”. Nonsense. I don’t hate myself. Several years ago, the editor of a Jewish weekly newspaper said to me that I shouldn’t have gone to Palestine. Instead I should have gone to Israel to volunteer in a hospital where people were being treated for injuries as a result of a Palestinian suicide bombing.

And I said I’d be happy to volunteer, but if I did help in an Israeli hospital, would he go with me to a Palestinian hospital and help people who have been injured as a result of what the Israelis have done? He was appalled. “In Palestine?” I said, “Yes, you can, I have been there, so you can go there also, and when you do that, then I will be happy to work in your hospital.” That was several years ago, and I have never heard from him yet.

Silvia Cattori: Why did you choose to advocate in a place where the Israelis are so opposed to your involvement?

Hedy Epstein: Let me give you a little bit of my background, so that you will know how I’ve gotten to where I am today. I was born into a Jewish family in Germany. When Hitler came to power, I was eight years old. My parents very quickly realised that Germany was not a safe place for them to stay and to raise a family. They were willing to go anywhere, and they tried desperately to leave. But they were NEVER willing to go to Palestine, because they were ardent anti-Zionists.

I didn’t understand at the time what Zionism was and what being an anti- Zionist was, but I did know that in the village where I lived, which is Kittenheim in South-West Germany, there was a Zionist Jewish group, and I was not allowed to participate in it. I was the only Jewish child in the village who didn’t become a part of that group. Since my parents were ardent anti- Zionists, even though I didn’t understand what this really meant, I was an ardent anti-Zionist also.

Then, in 1939, thanks to my parent’s great love for me, I was able to leave Germany on a children transport to England. When I left in May 1939, it was the last time that I saw my parents and other family members. They all died in the camps. I came to United States in May 1948, about the same time that Israel became a state. I had some mixed feelings about that event. On the one hand I was very happy there was a place for people to go who had survived the holocaust, who perhaps didn’t want or weren’t able to return to their places of origin, but on the other hand, remembering my parents’ ardent anti-Zionism, I was worried that somewhere down the road, no good was going to come of this. What that trouble might be, I couldn’t even imagine. But I was new in the United States, and there were new things to learn. So Israel was on the backburner and remained there for years.

In 1982, I received my personal wake-up call: the terrible massacres in the two refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila in Lebanon. I needed to find out what the tragedy was all about, why it happened, and who was responsible. Then, when I found out, I needed to learn more about the history of what happened between 1948, when Israel became a state, and 1982 in Sabra and Chatila. When I was learning, I realized that I hadn’t paid attention to what was going on with Israel. And the more I learned and the more I understood, the more I became disturbed by what the Israeli government was doing, and doing in my name.

There’s an Aztec legend of a warrior who was in love with a princess. When he left to go into battle, the lovers promised each other eternal love. The warrior died in battle, but to fulfill his promise to the princess, he came back as a brilliant orange flower. That flower now graces Flamboyan trees throughout Latin America. Another Flamboyan legend speaks of the struggle of the Puerto Rican people against colonial domination.

On Sunday, June, 10, 2007, under a Flamboyan tree, the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO) held a press conference to announce the liberation of one of the leaders of the year-long popular struggle for social and economic justice in Oaxaca. Marcelino Coache Verano, secretary general of the free union of Oaxaca municipal workers, had been arrested, severely beaten, and held for six months in prison before he was released on May 31, with all charges against him dismissed

The press conference kicked off a week of actions to commemorate the brutal June 14, 2006 attack by 1,000 armed police against people peacefully demonstrating in support of the demands of some 70,000 teachers for higher wages, improvement of school buildings, and better resources for children. A teacher typically earns the equivalent of $220 every two weeks, and must purchase school supplies herself. Although the Mexican constitution guarantees free education, mothers have to pay registration fees.

State governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz sent in state police, accompanied by dogs, who viciously attacked the sleeping teachers and supporters. They tear-gassed everyone in the vicinity, including pregnant women and children; one woman miscarried as a result. Ninety-two people were wounded. Members of the community reacted with outrage, fighting back with anything they could find. They chased the police from the square, and re-established the camp.

On June 17, several hundred local organizations came together to form the APPO, comprising almost 350 different civil organizations working in areas of indigenous issues, sustainable community development, human rights, and social justice. APPO demanded that Governor Ulises Ruiz step down. Meanwhile, the movement continued to grow, with large but peaceful demonstrations. On August 1, hundreds of women marched, and when denied air time by the government radio station, occupied the station and broadcast their position themselves.

Throughout this period, police raids, beatings, and shooting continued. On October 28, four people were killed, including indymedia journalist and U.S. citizen Brad Will and a Mexican teacher, Emilio Alonso Fabian.

The Mexican government sent in the Federal Preventive Police. On November 25, they appeared in full riot gear and encircled the entire area, firing tear gas. As people fled, many were arrested and beaten. Among the prisoners were some simply on their way to work or to the market place that morning. One hundred seventy people were arrested that day, and most were taken to the far away prison of Nayarit. Thirty four were women, and five were minors.

At various times during the seven month period, nearly 1,500,000 teachers, workers, professors and artists, many of them Indigenous people, occupied Oaxaca’s main plaza. Although the movement crystallized to support the striking teachers, the frustration of the people resulted from deep economic and social problems the government has aggravated and allowed to fester. These problems that have harmed workers were exacerbated by NAFTA and the Bush administration’s neoliberal policies. The majority of the population of Oaxaca is Indigenous, most of whom live in extreme poverty.

Last week, I participated in a human rights delegation of lawyers from the National Lawyers Guild, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, and the National Association of Democratic Lawyers in Mexico to investigate alleged violations of international law by police against the people of Oaxaca during the past year. We met with lawyers, workers and prisoners.

Coache Verano related how he and three other activists had been arrested in Mexico City, on their way to meet with government officials to negotiate an end to the strife. They were stripped naked, beaten, and guards walked on their backs. Coache Verano’s finger was broken. One of the other men was released with Coache Verano. The other two, including APPO leader Flavio Sosa Villavicencio, remain in custody. Coache Verano’s wife and young children told us how they were terrorized for months with death threats and shots fired at their home.

The relationships between governments and investors – especially transnational corporations -are changing rapidly, and this is especially true in Latin America today. Last month, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Nicaragua surprised many international observers by announcing that they would withdraw from the World Bank’s international arbitration body, the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). The ICSID is a place where – under prior arrangement – foreign investors who have a dispute with a host government can submit their case to binding arbitration.

Bolivia’s position is that ICSID is not an impartial arbitrator, and cannot be expected to act as one, so long as it is part of the World Bank. As was highlighted by the recent controversy that led to the resignation of World Bank head Paul Wolfowitz, the Bank may have 185 member countries, but it is really dominated by Washington. The saga continues as the Bush Administration once again has chosen a close neo-conservative associate of President Bush – former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick – to run the institution. The World Bank has long used its power – not only from its own lending of $23 billion annually, but also as part of a “creditor’s cartel” led by the International Monetary Fund – to pressure governments to adopt policies favored by transnational corporations. These include privatizations and removing restrictions on foreign ownership, trade, and investment flows.

The Bolivian government also argues that there are other conflicts of interest involved in having the World Bank’s arbitration panel rule on disputes between governments and foreign investors. Pablo Solón, Bolivia’s Special Ambassador for Trade and Integration, cited the case of Aguas de Illimani, a subsidiary of the French international water giant Suez. It turned out that the International Finance Corporation, a part of the World Bank Group, was a shareholder in Aguas de Illimani. It is clear that the same institution should not be both arbitrator and a party to the dispute.

The ICSID process, like other such international arbitration panels, does not have the transparency, checks and balances, or openness of a real judicial system – like ours in the U.S., for example. It is shrouded in secrecy. And the World Bank’s influence in selecting arbitrators makes it anything but neutral.

Bolivia maintains that their government, which was elected with a majority that was tired of seeing the country’s natural resources drained to make foreign companies rich while their country remained the poorest in South America, needs to change the rules so that they are at less of a disadvantage relative to giant corporations. They have a good case. Since the government raised its royalty rates on hydrocarbons – with the government’s share of the biggest gas fields going from 18 to 82 percent – it has increased its revenue by nearly 7 percent of GDP. This is a huge increase in revenue.

The IMF wrote in their country papers on Bolivia that the country would be hurting itself by raising the royalty rates. They were wrong, as were most of the experts in Washington and the US business press. In these circles it is taken as given that anything which pleases foreign investors is good for the host country, as it will attract foreign investment. Likewise, anything that foreign investors don’t like is generally portrayed as a potential disaster.

In recent years it has not worked out that way, especially in Latin America. At the end of 2001 Argentina engaged in the largest sovereign debt default in history, and most economists and journalists predicted they would suffer terrible consequences for many years to come. But in fact the economy declined for only three months, and then went on to average nearly Chinese levels of growth for the last five years: 8.6 percent annually. Venezuela raised the royalties on foreign investors in the Orinoco basin from 1 percent to 30 percent, and on May first claimed a majority stake in all joint ventures with foreign companies. The big oil companies – Chevron, Exxon Mobil, British Petroleum, ConocoPhillips, and others accepted these changes and are still there, making plenty of money.

In fact, what is happening now in Latin America and other developing countries is an attempt to correct for the extremism that characterized economic policy changes in the 1980s and 90s. Aside from the macroeconomic failures that resulted from these changes, one result was to seriously shift the balance of power to favor foreign investors over governments. The advent and increasing use of “investor-to-state dispute resolution,” with investors able to sue governments directly for actions that infringe upon their profits, is a recent development. About two-thirds of these lawsuits have come about in just the last five years. Similarly, there has been a proliferation of Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITS), now more than 2500, many of them containing provisions for ICSID to arbitrate disputes.

But there does not appear to be any relation between adopting these “investor-friendly” reforms and even the amount of foreign direct investment that a country receives, as even the World Bank’s own research has concluded. For many years China has led all developing countries as a recipient of foreign direct investment. But the main option for foreign companies that have a dispute with the government has been local arbitration through the country’s own China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission (CIETAC).

The new assertiveness of Latin American governments toward foreign investors has proven remarkably successful so far, winning them billions of dollars of new revenues and allowing some of the new democratic governments to deliver on their promises to help alleviate poverty. The conventional wisdom is that these changes are just a temporary result of high prices for oil and other minerals and commodities, and unusually low interest rates – all of which have given developing countries more alternatives and bargaining power. But it is much more likely that these changes are institutional and permanent.

Have your hopes dashed enough and you start to question if there is ever a way out

Imagine that this is your world: a 6 ft by 8 ft cell where everything is steel – the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the toilet, the sink, the bed. Walk two steps in any direction and you hit a wall. There are no windows. The lights are on 24 hours a day. You are allowed out of your cell two hours a day, sometimes at 6am, sometimes at midnight. For those two hours, you are placed in a 6.5 ft by 16.5 ft outdoor cage with a deflated football. You can go weeks without seeing the sun.

Imagine five and a half years away from your family, your wife, your children. You can’t call them. They can’t visit. Mail takes months to get through. When it does, it is heavily censored. Imagine being beaten, stripped naked, humiliated, again and again and again. This is the life of my clients in Guantanamo Bay.

Since 2005, my colleagues and I at Reprieve, a legal charity based in London, have been representing 37 prisoners in Guantanamo. Two of us have passed through the United States military’s screening process and have been to the base. We are the only people in Britain who can actually go and talk to these men.

Every time I visit them, the prisoners ask for just one thing: a fair trial. “I know mistakes are made,” Jamil El Banna, a British refugee from Jordan, told me when we met last month. “I’m not upset about that. But why has it taken this long to correct them? I’ve been here for years and I’ve never seen a judge. Put me on trial. Just give me a chance. Doesn’t anyone care that I’m an innocent man?”

No prisoner in Guantanamo will see a judge any time soon. On Monday, military judges threw out the charges against the only two prisoners actually charged with crimes. As a result, their trials are on hold and no one else’s will start.

Sadly, there is no question that trials in Guantanamo will be unfair. The judges can hear evidence gained from torture. They can sentence someone to death based on hearsay evidence – second, third or even fourth-hand information. The prisoner is not allowed to see the evidence against him. It’s like shadow-boxing for your life.

But despite the patent illegality of the trials, in the bizarre universe of Guantanamo, many of the men actually want to appear before a military commission. The prisoners look at David Hicks, an Australian citizen who pleaded guilty to supporting terrorism and was sent home to Australia to serve a nine-month sentence. They see this result, and they see hope. Maybe they too could cut a deal, whether they are guilty or not. They too could go home. The hell of Guantanamo would end. Then they learn of a ruling like the one on Monday. They are happy, because the process masquerading as justice has been exposed. But at the same time, it means yet another door has slammed shut. And as it does, it crushes that kernel of hope.

Have your hopes dashed enough and you start to question if there is ever a way out. Three men apparently took their own lives last year. Days ago, another man was found dead in his cell; the cause of death is unknown, though he had been on hunger strike for an extended period. Virtually all my clients have told me they have thought about killing themselves.

Despite the fact that they desperately want to be home with their families, despite the fact that Islam prohibits suicide, many have tried. I am a lawyer, but far too often, my role when I visit Guantanamo is social worker and psychologist. I am a poor tool in this regard, but I am all the men have.

Ahmed Belbacha seems to shrink a bit every time I see him. We meet alone in a claustrophobic, windowless room, monitored constantly by a video camera. You can hear the camera shift to track us if we change position. As he sits across from me, shackled to the floor, Ahmed is despondent. “My cell is like a grave,” he said to me four weeks ago. He tells me how everything echoes off those steel cell walls. Doors slam constantly as guards come and go. Large fans drone and screech. Even footsteps seem cacophonous. There is no such thing as quiet in Camp 6. There is no peace. “If I could just sleep…”

Ahmed has never been charged with a crime. He has never been before one of those military judges. Yet, finally, after five and a half years, Ahmed has been cleared to be released. He should be celebrating. But his nightmare may just be beginning. Ahmed is originally from Algeria. He fled there to the UK, seeking asylum after he was threatened repeatedly by Islamic extremists because he worked for a government-owned oil company. But now, the UK is washing their hands of him, refusing to help because Ahmed was a resident, not a citizen. As a result, the United States wants to send him back to Algeria.

(CBS) BERKELEY, Calif. A Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting.

Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed to CBS station KPIX-TV in San Francisco that military leaders had considered, and then subsequently rejected, building the so-called gay bomb.

Edward Hammond, of Berkeley’s Sunshine Project, had used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the proposal from the Air Force’s Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio.

As part of a military effort to develop non-lethal weapons, the proposal suggested, “One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior.”

The documents show the Air Force lab asked for $7.5 million to develop such a chemical weapon.

“The Ohio Air Force lab proposed that a bomb be developed that contained a chemical that would cause enemy soldiers to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistibly attractive to one another,” Hammond said after reviewing the documents.

“The notion was that a chemical that would probably be pleasant in the human body in low quantities could be identified, and by virtue of either breathing or having their skin exposed to this chemical, the notion was that soldiers would become gay,” explained Hammond.

06/12/07 “ICH” — — We are truly in a war. It is not the war we imagine we are in, which is the way our true adversaries want it. It is not a foreign war against a foreign enemy. It is a war on consciousness, a war on our own minds. The global war on terror that is being fought around the world is an embodied reflection in the material world of a deeper, more fundamental war that is going on in the realm of consciousness itself.

We have the most criminal regime in all of our history wreaking unspeakable horror on the entire planet, while simultaneously waging war on the consciousness of its own citizens – US. If we aren’t aware of this, we are unwittingly playing into, supporting and complicit in the evil that is being perpetrated in our name.

A government’s war on the consciousness of its own citizens is by no means unique to the Bush administration. Abusing power over others so as to limit their freedom is an archetypal process that has been endlessly re-enacted by governments throughout history in various forms. With the Bush administration, however, the pathological aspect of this process has become so exaggerated and amped up to such a degree that it is just about impossible not to notice its staggering malignancy. With the Bush administration, the underlying evil that has played out in our government over many years is becoming overwhelmingly obvious for all to see. With the Bush administration, the underlying evil that informs systems of government that are based on “power over” instead of “liberty for” is coming out from hiding in the shadows. Instead of being acted out underground, our government is acting out this evil above ground, in plain sight for all who are courageous enough to look.

Impeaching Bush and Co. ultimately won’t change anything unless we deal with the corrupt powers which control and direct them. George Bush is just a finger-puppet of the hidden hand which animates him. Bush only has apparent power, as he himself is a minion of far more powerful predator-like forces whose nefarious interests he serves. Whether we call it the illuminati, the global elite, a shadow government, or a secret cabal, there is no doubt that there are darker, self-serving forces that have insinuated themselves into and taken over our government. The terrorists that we should be worried about are domestic terrorists who are actually implementing their agendas from deep within our very system of government itself.

The United States Government itself has become a “front” for the underlying military-industrial-financial crime syndicate that animates it. This is not to say that there aren’t many good, well-meaning people in our government – they are simply prohibited by the very nature of the corrupt system they are in from reforming it. Our system of government is rigged in such a way so that there is no way to transform the system within the system itself.

The underlying core of our government has become rotten such that the entire operation simply feeds into and is an expression of the same underlying corruption. All of the scandals continually coming out are like the superficial skin rash of a much deeper systemic disease, like a cancer that is infecting the greater body politic. Citizens who are not aware of our government’s insidious intrusions into our lives are unwittingly feeding the corruption they are looking away from in their very act of looking away.

The “powers” that have taken over our government have become concentrated and centralized in just a few elite hands, proving how easy it is for the few to control the many. They almost control all the levers of power: financial, political and judicial. In this war on consciousness, these powers-that-be are using the most advanced mind-control technology that our world has ever known to make its takeover complete. The essence of mind-control is information control, which is one thing our overly secretive current administration is very good at.

Mind-Control

The private interests that control our government have an incredible mind-control/propaganda machine at their disposal in the form of the mainstream media, which if not quite fully owned and controlled, is certainly under their “influence” enough to serve their underlying self-serving agenda. George Orwell once said that omission is the greatest form of lie – this perfectly describes the corporate owned media of today which is nothing other than the propaganda organ of the state. The corporate world and our government are becoming indistinguishable, which is one of the hallmarks of fascism, or more accurately – corporatism.

In addition to information, our government is adept at putting out dis-information, whose intention is to create distractions and confusion so as to cover its tracks and hide its true intentions. It will purposely leak stories that are not true simply to cover-up what it is really doing. By putting out misleading information, the government hides behind its self-generated smokescreen like an octopus squirting ink.

Quite often, right at the moment when people’s focus is moving towards some area of criminality in the White House, the administration will even create a diversionary event for the public to put their attention on. Memories of those color-coded terror alerts that always seemed to happen right when something bad was starting to happen for the Bush administration come to mind. In creating distractions, our government is able to steer our collective attention in directions that allow it to successfully accomplish its malevolent goal of grabbing all the power it can get.

In a diabolical ploy, the administration will even feed stories to a compliant press, and then reference these stories as justification for enacting its pre-planned agenda. One glaring example is when the administration fed Judith Miller of the New York Times stories about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Once this propaganda appeared on the front page of the Times, the administration was only too happy to use it as evidence for why we should go to war.

WMD could easily stand for “Weapons of Mind Deception”, as our own government is continually trying to “Deceive” our “Minds”, which is the battlefield in which the war on consciousness is being fought. We are all on the front lines in the war on consciousness, whether we know it or not. Instead of shooting us, our government is using cutting-edge mind-control technology to psychically emasculate us. In order to be able to deal with the evil that the Bush regime is perpetrating, we first have to become acquainted with that very same potential evil in ourselves so as to be able to recognize it in the outside world. The way to vanquish our adversary is to be found hidden within the very nature of our own awareness, which contains the key to its own freedom.

The corporate-mainstream media “captivates” our attention, capturing a part of our self-reflective, discriminative awareness, thereby restricting the range of our conscious awareness, which is what hypnotism is all about. Once the attention of the masses becomes entranced, the corporate/government media can then “play with” our mind. This unholy trinity of corporate/government/media can create an obsessive fixation on certain superficial events that “seize” the collective psyche. For example, it feeds the masses sensationalized stories such as Anna Nicole Smith ad nauseam so as to divert our attention from the evil that is being done behind the scenes in our name.

Ex-CIA director Allen Dulles used to say that the most effective way to disguise a secret is to pretend to openly share information. The Bush administration isn’t interested in solving problems as much as creating good PR (Public Relations) for itself. With one hand the Bush administration will try to appear like it is openly sharing information and being transparent, while with its other hand it will be actively obstructing the very process it is seemingly supporting. A vivid example is the government’s 9/11 commission, whose aim was allegedly to shed light on what happened on 9/11, while covertly – behind the scenes – the Bush administration was doing everything it could to hinder the commission’s inquiries (see, for example, 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, by David Ray Griffin). All one has to do is investigate the numerous ties to the core cabal of the neocon Bush administration that the members of the 9/11 commission have and the degree to which it was a deliberate operation to obscure the truth becomes apparent. It was as if the White House was investigating itself; the foxes truly guarding the henhouse. The 9/11 commission and its report, just like the Warren Commission and its report on the Kennedy assassination, was a façade, a show, a display in which it appeared like our government was giving us what we wanted, while actually being part of a deceptive game of smoke-and-mirrors. It is like a magician has hypnotized us, and is stealing what’s in our pockets while they have us under their trance in which we believe they are serving us.

As if by a perverse Jedi mind-trick, the Bush administration has bewitched us into believing that it controls the national dialogue, when in a democracy the opposite is actually true. One of many examples – when confronted with overwhelming evidence that we have been torturing our adversaries, Bush responds by saying he “rejects” that claim, and the conversation stops right there and moves on to other, more superficial topics. Our government is supposed to represent us, which is to say that they are our employees. Bush has turned this around and put himself in the role of the dictator with us as his subjects. And somehow we have allowed him to get away with this. There is no escaping our individual and collective complicity in this sad state of affairs.

One difference between what is happening in our country and the state-controlled media of the old Soviet Union, is that in the Soviet Union, most people were quite aware that what was being presented to them by their corrupt government as news was nothing but mind-warping propaganda. Many Americans have fallen so under the spell of the Bush regime’s criminal lies that they don’t even know they are being lied to. It is like we are living in a land of state-controlled zombies who think they are free citizens of a free country.

It is as if millions of our fellow citizens have fallen asleep, as if they have become hypnotized and brainwashed by the powers-that-be‘s incessant “managing” and “massaging” of reality. These powers simply manipulate an already gullible and highly suggestible public into a game of “divide and conquer.” They get rich off of other’s blood – they incite conflict, and covertly support both sides, as they themselves reap the benefit of the conflict.

The corporate war machine, which is co-dependently entangled with our government, profits wildly from our invading other sovereign countries. The government-military-industrial complex’s solution to the very problem that they created by instigating wars – more war! It’s completely sick and totally insane. And we, in our dulled denial – like hypnotized sheep – simply go along and allow the whole parasitic enterprise to be fed by offering our sons and daughters as fodder. To the extent that we are not shedding light on the utter criminality and insanity of what the Bush administration is doing and saying “No,” we are all complicit in feeding our own genocide.

Bush and our Congressional leaders are mouthpieces for the advertising campaign of distortion and falsehood that is being “bomb-arded” into our psyches on a daily basis. Our “leaders” repetitive slogans and incantations brand and imprint themselves deep into our unconscious, where many who do not have enough psychic resistance fall under the spell. (please see Chapter 8 – “Breaking Bush’s Spell”, in my book The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of our Collective Psychosis). People’s ability to discern truth from fiction has been rendered inoperative by our own government’s pattern of routinely taking liberty with the truth. Government propaganda has inverted the perception of what is actually happening, as lies are presented as truths, and up is portrayed as down in a truly Orwellian universe of confounding doublespeak. Through the “Big Lie” – which is based on that the bigger the lie, the harder it is for people to see the truth – the government has transformed myth into seeming fact, and has achieved its goal of muddling our minds so as to dis-empower us.

Many of us haven’t developed the psychic immunity to be able to fully ward off the toxic effects of our government’s covert, fear-based psychological warfare. An expression of the success of our government’s psy-ops against US is the fact that there’s so little awareness about the government’s assault on our minds that it’s hardly even a part of our national dialogue. The insidiousness of the government’s covert manipulation of our minds is even found in the very term “Global War on Terror”. “The Global War on Terror” is a crazy-making, self-contradictory statement, as we can never stop terror with a war – on the contrary, wars induce terror! This term carries with it a false and self-negating premise that if we accept we’ve already given away our power. If we leave this underlying assumption unquestioned, we unwittingly allow them to frame the agenda on their terms. We have then already fallen under their spell without knowing it, as our capacity to think and respond creatively is undermined. Our inability to creatively respond to the war on our consciousness is an expression of being immobilized in fear as if frozen in trauma. The war on terror is really a war on our psyche. The war on terror is ultimately about control – control of our minds.

What Bush and our Congressional leaders are doing is so morally outrageous that it is literally off the charts of accepted, “normal”, ethical, sane human behavior. In the words of French poet Andre Chenier, Bush and Co. are committing “crimes that make the laws tremble,” as they are covertly undermining our very legal and political system itself. The corruption that has infected our body politic is like a virus that is exploiting weaknesses in our political immune system so as to feed and spread its pathology.

Those of us who are somewhat sane can easily lack the imagination for the depth of depravity that the Bush administration regularly acts out in the world. Our lack of imagination works to the government’s advantage, as it allows them to continue to act out the darkness in a manner which is incomprehensible to us. This is why the great doctor of the soul C. G. Jung counseled us to develop an “imagination for evil,” as being able to imagine the scope of evil that human beings can fall prey to and act out empowers us to see it clearly and thereby deal with it more effectively.