The Rag Blog

Twenty-five years ago we, like you, graduated from Harvard Law School. While we arrived via many different paths and held many different views, we were united in our deep respect for the Constitution and the rights it guaranteed. As members of the post-Watergate generation who chose careers in law, we understood the strong connection between our liberties as Americans and the adherence of public offi cials to the law of the land. We knew that the choice to abide by the law was even more critical when public officials were tempted to take legal shortcuts. Nowhere were we taught that the ends justified the means, or that freedoms for which Americans had fought and died should be set aside when inconvenient or challenging. To the contrary: our most precious freedoms, we learned, need defending most in times of crisis.

So it has been with dismay that we have watched your cavalier handling of our freedoms time and again. When it has been important that legal boundaries hold unbridled government power in check, you have instead used pretextual rationales and strained readings to justify an ever-expanding executive authority. Witness your White House memos sweeping aside the Geneva Conventions to justify torture, endangering our own servicemen and women; witness your advice to the President effectively reading Habeas Corpus out of our constitutional protections; witness your support of presidential statements claiming inherent power to wiretap American citizens without warrants (and the Administration’s stepped-up wiretapping campaign, taking advantage of those statements, which continues on your watch to this day); and witness your dismissive explanation of the troubling firings of numerous U.S. Attorneys, and their replacement with others more “loyal” to the President’s politics, as merely “an overblown personnel matter.” In these and other actions, we see a pattern. As a recent editorial put it, your approach has come to symbolize “disdain for the separation of powers, civil liberties and the rule of law.”

As lawyers, and as a matter of principle, we can no longer be silent about this Administration’s consistent disdain for the liberties we hold dear. Your failure to stand for the rule of law, particularly when faced with a President who makes the aggrandized claim of being a unitary executive, takes this country down a dangerous path.

Your country and your President are in dire need of an attorney who will do the tough job of providing independent counsel, especially when the advice runs counter to political expediency. Now more than ever, our country needs a President, and an Attorney General, who remember the apt observation attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” We call on you and the President to relent from this reckless path, and begin to restore respect for the rule of law we all learned to love many years ago.

Dismayed employees at the U.S. Embassy complained about their security as they work within Baghdad’s Green Zone.

BAGHDAD — U.S. Embassy employees in Iraq are growing increasingly angry over what they say are inadequate security precautions in the heavily fortified Green Zone, where recent mortar and rocket attacks have claimed the lives of six people, including two U.S. citizens.

In spite of the attacks, Embassy employees complain, most staff members still sleep in trailers that one described as ”tin cans” that offer virtually no protection from rocket and mortar fire. The government has refused to harden the roofs because of the cost, one employee said.

NEGLIGENCE ALLEGED

A second official called it ”criminally negligent” not to reduce the size of the embassy staff, which a year ago was estimated at 1,000, in the face of the increasing attacks and blamed the administration’s failure to respond on concerns that doing so might undermine support for President Bush’s Iraq policy.

”What responsible person and responsible government would ask you to put yourself at risk like that? We don’t belong here,” the employee said, adding, “They’re not going to send us home because it’s going to be another admission of failure.”

Embassy employees have been ordered not to talk about security concerns or precautions with reporters, but three State Department employees in Baghdad discussed the issue with McClatchy Newspapers. All three asked not to be identified for fear that they’d lose their jobs.

PUBLICIZED VISITS

The officials also complained that important security precautions appeared to have been set aside during highly publicized official visits. During a March 31 visit from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a high-profile presidential candidate, the embassy lifted a requirement that bulletproof vests and helmets be worn at all times. When a rocket landed outside the U.S. Embassy while Vice President Dick Cheney and several reporters visited last week, no warning sirens were sounded.

”Where were the sirens then?” one official asked. “We don’t belong here, and people are afraid to say it.”

Official spokesmen have rebuffed requests for information about the embassy, citing security concerns, and repeated requests for comment from the Embassy and the State Department in Washington went unanswered Monday. On Sunday, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack called security the ”utmost priority for” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker.

The Green Zone, which is home to the U.S. Embassy and many Iraqi government offices and officials, has long been touted as an oasis of relative peace amid the chaos of Baghdad. Entry into the zone, which covers about four square miles in central Baghdad, requires special permits, and visitors must pass through a maze of checkpoints. Attacks have been relatively rare.

SUICIDE BOMBER

But in the past several months, security in the zone has deteriorated. On April 12, a suicide bomber set off an explosion in the Iraqi parliament’s cafeteria, killing a lawmaker.

In ongoing negotiations between Congress and President Bush about continued funding of the Iraq war, the President late last week began to make accommodating statements about negotiating on “benchmarks” for the Iraqi government.

On May 10, the New York Times reported:

“After a briefing at the Pentagon, Mr. Bush said he had instructed Joshua B. Bolten, the White House chief of staff, to reach “common ground” with lawmakers of both parties over setting firm goals, or benchmarks, to measure progress in Iraq. Mr. Bush had previously insisted that he wanted about $95 billion for the military with no strings attached.

“‘It makes sense to have benchmarks as a part of our discussion on how to go forward,’ Mr. Bush said, even as he threatened to veto the House plan, approved on a 221-to-205 vote Thursday night, which would require him to seek approval in two months for the balance of the war money.”

But these benchmarks are hardly a compromise for the Bush Administration, and the Times, along with most other U.S. news outlets, continue to ignore one of most important of the criteria being used to judge Iraq’s “progress”: legislation imported from the U.S. that threatens to give most of Iraq’s oil to Western oil giants.

Antonia Juhasz, analyst for Oil Change International and author of The Bu$h Agenda: Invading the World One Economy at a Time, notes,

“What this law does is open up at a minimum, two thirds of Iraq’s oil to private, foreign, corporate investment on terms that are literally the most generous available, just about anywhere in the world. Generous to the oil companies, that is. () The foreign oil companies do not need to transfer any technology. They don’t need to share any of their skills. They don’t need to train Iraqi workers, and () they don’t need to invest any of their money in Iraq.”

Though some observers argue that given the instability in Iraq, extracting oil without significant sabotage and resistance damaging operations will be unlikely, Juhasz points out, “If the law passes first of all it offers [the oil companies] as long as 35-year contracts. In addition, the law gives the companies two years within which they could sign the contract but then not even get to work.”

Raed Jarrar, Iraq consultant of the American Friends Service Committee and author of the widely-read “raed in the middle” blog, commented, “The new oil law is a direct intervention in Iraq’s domestic policies. It will result in nothing more than increasing the Iraqi-Iraqi imposed violence, and the Iraqi occupation fight. The best oil law is the law that the Iraqis will choose after the last U.S. soldier leaves.”

The Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions recently announced to the Iraqi government its decision to strike on Monday, May 14th to demonstrate strong opposition to the law now before the Iraqi parliament.

Federation President Hassan Jumaa Awad al Assadi said: ‘The oil law does not represent the aspirations of the Iraqi people. It will let the foreign oil companies into the oil sector and enact privatization under so-called production sharing agreements. The federation calls for not passing the oil law, because it does not serve the interests of the Iraqi people.”

The Union is joined in its condemnation of the pending law by all of Iraq’s other trade unions, a number of political parties, and over 60 senior Iraqi oil experts.

In announcing a San Francisco demonstration (organized on very short notice) in solidarity with the oil workers, National Coordinator of U.S. Labor Against the War Michael Eisenscher wrote,

“The Congress is being sold the idea that Iraq’s adoption of the oil law will assure equitable distribution of the oil revenues, but what they are not being told (or refuse to acknowledge) is that the law has one sentence about equitable distribution, but page after page about how foreign oil companies can secure contracts to control the 2/3 of Iraq’s oil that is yet to be developed and retain that control for a generation or more. To the extent there is equitable distribution, it will be only of the profits that are left after Big Oil takes their cut. The Bush administration and IMF are pressing Iraq to adopt this law. It is shameful for the Congress to become partners in shoving a law that was conceived by, drafted for, and will benefit only the rapacious oil corporations down the throats of the Iraqi people.”

Speaking at the demonstration of veteran labor and anti-war activists in front of the San Francisco Federal Building, Eisenscher, added: “This law is unprecedented in the Middle East. Since the beginning of the war we’ve seen the looting of Iraq’s antiquities. This is a second looting. Iraq’s oil is the cheapest to extract in the world, hence it is the world’s most profitable supply of oil.”

Eisenscher concluded, “It is unjust and immoral for the U.S. to stay there one more day.”

Clarence Thomas, a long-time activist with local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, spoke about his respect for oil workers he met on a labor delegation to Iraq. Thomas recalled that in 2003, one of the major concerns of Iraqi workers he spoke to was privatization, and told the assembled protestors, “this is an example of corpocracy, an alliance of banks, corporations and government promoting the interests of American oil companies.” Thomas saluted the militancy and resilience of the workers, and noted oil worker pay was so low their children were selling gasoline on the sides of highways.

Before the group of thirty or so activists posed for a photo to send to the strikers in Iraq, writer Ted Nace, author of the book Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy, took the microphone.

Nace, who maintains a website focused on the law, stressed the long history of U.S. foreign policy shafting the Iraqi people, from Washington’s 1980’s support for Saddam Hussein, to the first gulf war and the subsequent sanctions regime which killed more than a million Iraqis. Nace explained, “What we’re doing by publicizing the law is buying time to slow down the passage of this law in the Iraqi parliament. We have to continue to get the word out. Democrats like Ted Kennedy still say this is about revenue sharing absolutely not! This law has no redeeming features.”

The protest then formed a picket line which marched in a circle in front of the entrance to the Federal Building and chanted demands that Speaker of the House and San Francisco Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi stop supporting the oil law.

On a related front, last week a majority of Iraqi parliamentarians rejected the continued occupation of their country by signing a legislative petition calling on the U.S. to set a timetable for withdrawal. This has long been the sentiment of the majority of Iraqis: In September 2006, a World Public Opinion poll found that 71% of Iraqis wanted the Iraqi government to ask for U.S.-led forces to be withdrawn within a year or less. The emerging nationalist bloc behind the anti-occupation parliamentary vote is also opposed to the U.S. setting up permanent bases or privatizing Iraq’s oil.

The chaos that derives from the so-called international order can be painful if you are on the receiving end of the power that determines that order’s structure. Even tortillas come into play in the ungrand scheme of things. Recently, in many regions of Mexico, tortilla prices jumped by more than 50 per cent.

In January, in Mexico City, tens of thousands of workers and farmers rallied in the Zocalo, the city’s central square, to protest the skyrocketing cost of tortillas.

In response, the government of President Felipe Calderon cut a deal with Mexican producers and retailers to limit the price of tortillas and corn flour, very likely a temporary expedient.

In part the price-hike threat to the food staple for Mexican workers and the poor is what we might call the ethanol effect — a consequence of the US stampede to corn-based ethanol as an energy substitute for oil, whose major wellsprings, of course, are in regions that even more grievously defy international order.

In the United States, too, the ethanol effect has raised food prices over a broad range, including other crops, livestock and poultry.

The connection between instability in the Middle East and the cost of feeding a family in the Americas isn’t direct, of course. But as with all international trade, power tilts the balance. A leading goal of US foreign policy has long been to create a global order in which US corporations have free access to markets, resources and investment opportunities. The objective is commonly called “free trade,” a posture that collapses quickly on examination.

It’s not unlike what Britain, a predecessor in world domination, imagined during the latter part of the 19th century, when it embraced free trade, after 150 years of state intervention and violence had helped the nation achieve far greater industrial power than any rival.

The United States has followed much the same pattern. Generally, great powers are willing to enter into some limited degree of free trade when they’re convinced that the economic interests under their protection are going to do well. That has been, and remains, a primary feature of the international order.

The ethanol boom fits the pattern. As discussed by agricultural economists C Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, “the biofuel industry has long been dominated not by market forces but by politics and the interests of a few large companies,” in large part Archer Daniels Midland, the major ethanol producer. Ethanol production is feasible thanks to substantial state subsidies and very high tariffs to exclude much cheaper and more efficient sugar-based Brazilian ethanol. In March, during President Bush’s trip to Latin America, the one heralded achievement was a deal with Brazil on joint production of ethanol. But Bush, while spouting free-trade rhetoric for others in the conventional manner, emphasized forcefully that the high tariff to protect US producers would remain, of course along with the many forms of government subsidy for the industry.

Despite the huge, taxpayer-supported agricultural subsidies, the prices of corn — and tortillas — have been climbing rapidly. One factor is that industrial users of imported US corn increasingly purchase cheaper Mexican varieties used for tortillas, raising prices.

The 1994 US-sponsored NAFTA agreement may also play a significant role, one that is likely to increase. An unlevel-playing-field impact of NAFTA was to flood Mexico with highly subsidised agribusiness exports, driving Mexican producers off the land.

Mexican economist Carlos Salas reviews data showing that after a steady rise until 1993, agricultural employment began to decline when NAFTA came into force, primarily among corn producers — a direct consequence of NAFTA, he and other economists conclude. One-sixth of the Mexican agricultural work force has been displaced in the NAFTA years, a process that is continuing, depressing wages in other sectors of the economy and impelling emigration to the US.

It is, presumably, more than coincidental that President Clinton militarised the Mexican border, previously quite open, in 1994, along with implementation of NAFTA.

The “free trade” regime drives Mexico from self-sufficiency in food towards dependency on US exports. And as the price of corn goes up in the United States, stimulated by corporate power and state intervention, one can anticipate that the price of staples may continue its sharp rise in Mexico.

Increasingly, bio fuels are likely to “starve the poor” around the world, according to Runge and Senauer, as staples are converted to ethanol production for the privileged — cassava in sub-Saharan Africa, to take one ominous example. Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, tropical forests are cleared and burned for oil palms destined for bio fuel, and there are threatening environmental effects from input-rich production of corn-based ethanol in the United States as well.

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration ran its warrantless eavesdropping program without the Justice Department’s approval for up to three weeks in 2004, nearly triggering a mass resignation of the nation’s top law enforcement officials, the former No. 2 official disclosed Tuesday.

In testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey said that those he believed were prepared to quit included then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller.

Comey said then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card visited Ashcroft as he lay gravely ill in a hospital bed on March 10, 2004, and pressed him to re-certify the program’s legality. Ashcroft refused.

“I was angry. I thought I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very seriously sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me,” Comey recalled. “I thought it was improper.”

Comey, who’d assumed Ashcroft’s powers on an acting basis, had raced ahead of Gonzales and Card to the George Washington University Hospital, his car’s emergency lights flashing, and dashed up the stairs to Ashcroft’s room, trailed by his security detail.

“That night was probably the most difficult time of my professional life,” Comey recalled.

Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief counsel, David Addington, also challenged the Justice Department’s stand on the legality of the program, which was intended to detect terrorist threats and would have expired on March 11, 2004, if Bush hadn’t reauthorized it, he said.

The revelations dealt a new blow to Gonzales’ efforts to keep his job as Ashcroft’s successor amid congressional and Justice Department investigations into whether he’s politicized his agency with the pursuit of alleged voter fraud, the screening of job applicants based on their party affiliations, and the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, which Gonzales said Tuesday were overseen by Comey’s successor, Paul McNulty.

BAGHDAD, Iraq – When her heart is heaviest, Sahira Kereem tries to think of the little things her husband did that annoyed her. She remembers times when she suggested they visit her parents, and he just rolled his eyes.

The mental trick rarely brings her comfort. The fact remains that Riyadh Juma Saleh, her husband of nearly 15 years, went missing one day nearly three years ago and Kareem has no idea what became of him.

Over the past four years, as sectarian kidnappings and killings have gripped Iraq and U.S. forces have arrested untold numbers in an effort to pacify the country, tens of thousands of Iraqis have vanished, often in circumstances as baffling as that of Kereem’s husband, a Shiite Muslim father of three.

There’s no accurate count of the missing since the war began. Iraqi human rights groups put the figure at 15,000 or more, while government officials say 40 to 60 people disappeared each day throughout the country for much of last year, a rate equal to at least 14,600 in one year.

Way back in 1999, when I was still a Tomdispatch-less book editor, I read a proposal from Chalmers Johnson. He was, then, known mainly as a scholar of modern Japan, though years earlier I had read his brilliant book on Chinese peasant nationalism — about a period in the 1940s when imperial Japan was carrying out its “3-all” campaigns (kill-all, burn-all, loot-all) in the northern Chinese countryside. The proposal, for a book to be called “Blowback” — a CIA term of tradecraft that, like most Americans, I had never heard before — focused on the “unintended consequences” of the Agency’s covert activities abroad and the disasters they might someday bring down upon us. Johnson began with an introduction in which he reviewed, among other things, his experiences in the Vietnam War era when, as a professed Cold Warrior, a former CIA consultant, and a professor of Asian studies at Berkeley, he would have been on the other side of the political fence from me.

In that introduction, he recalled his dismay with antiwar activists who were, he felt (not incorrectly), often blindly romantic about Asian communism and hadn’t bothered to do their homework on the subject. “They were,” he wrote, “defining the Vietnamese Communists largely out of their own romantic desires to oppose Washington’s policies.” He added:

“As it turned out, however, they understood far better than I did the impulse of a Robert McNamara, a McGeorge Bundy, or a Walt Rostow. They grasped something essential about the nature of America’s imperial role in the world that I had failed to perceive. In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the antiwar protest movement. For all its naïveté and unruliness, it was right and American policy wrong.”

It was a reversal of sentiment to which no other American of his age and background, to the best of my knowledge, had admitted. It reflected a mind impressively willing to reconsider and change — and, as it happened, it also reflected a man on a journey out of the world of Cold War anti-communism and into the heart of the American empire. When Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire finally came out in 2000, it was largely ignored (or derided) in the mainstream — until, that is, September 11th, 2001. Then, “blowback,” and the phrase that went with it, “unintended consequences,” entered our language, thanks to Johnson, and the paperback of the book, now seen as prophetic, hit the 9/11 tables in bookstores across the United States, becoming a bestseller.

Johnson’s intellectual odyssey had begun when the Cold War ended, when the Soviet Union disappeared and the American imperial structure of bases (and policy) in Asia remained standing, remarkably unchanged and unaffected by that seemingly world-shaking event. An invitation, five years later, to visit the heavily American-garrisoned Japanese island of Okinawa, in turmoil over a case in which two U.S. Marines and a sailor had raped a 12 year-old Okinawan girl, also strongly affected his thinking. There, Johnson saw firsthand what our global baseworld looked like and what it did to others on this planet. (“I was flabbergasted by the 37 American military bases I found on an island smaller than Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands and the enormous pressures it put on the population there… As I began to study it, though, I discovered that Okinawa was not exceptional. It was the norm. It was what you find in all of the American military enclaves around the world.”)

Now, five and a half years after the 9/11 attacks, Johnson has reached the provisional end of his quest and the single prophetic volume, Blowback, has become “The Blowback Trilogy.” In 2004, a second volume, The Sorrows of Empire, arrived, focused on how the American military had garrisoned the globe and how militarism had us in its grip; and finally, this year, a magisterial third and final volume, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, appeared. No one should miss it. It lays out in chilling detail the ways in which imperial overstretch imperils the American republic and what’s left of our democratic system as well as the American economy.

Now, in a step beyond even his latest book, Johnson considers whether we can end our empire before it ends us. Tom

U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams told a group of Jewish Republicans Thursday that the effort the United States is investing in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is aimed at lessening the pressure from Arabs and Europeans who weren’t happy with the U.S. in its past approach.

Abrams was quoted by sources at the meeting as saying that Arab and European countries want to see that there is at least an attempt or energy being exerted by the U.S. to move the peace process forward.

Abrams said the talks are sometimes not more than “process for the sake of process.”

The comments were made during a breakfast meeting of a forum of Jewish Republicans directed by Congressman Eric Cantor of Virginia, chief deputy minority whip.

Some of the attendees understood Abrams’ comments as an assurance that the peace initiative promoted by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice doesn’t have the full backing of President George W. Bush.

“He was basically telling us that he [the President] will not let it get out of hand,” one of them said.

Abrams has long been seen by Americans and Israelis as the more skeptical member of the team responsible for Middle East diplomacy.

About two weeks ago, Haaretz reported that “Rice even has to contend with skeptics within the ranks of her own department, most notably Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams, who holds the Israeli-Palestinian portfolio in the White House. Israeli Foreign Ministry sources say that Abrams believes her plan will likely fail.”

However, people close to Abrams say it is wrong to portray him as someone who is not in tune with Rice.

The National Security Council, in a statement released Thursday, claimed that it “is inaccurate to suggest that the White House and State Department are at odds on this issue, for the entire administration – including Mr. Abrams – is committed to pursuing it and the rest of the President’s agenda.”

A Washington diplomat commenting on Abrams’ remarks told Haaretz that “it might make him uncomfortable because of the tone, but he really didn’t say anything new.”

The diplomat pointed to comments made by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni during a visit to Washington two weeks ago that “we should negotiate because it’s better than sit and do nothing.”

The Wall Street Journal’s main Hugo Chavez antagonist is its self-styled Latin American “expert” Mary Anastasia O’Grady who makes up for in imagination and vitriol what she lacks in knowledge and journalistic integrity. She, however, wasn’t assigned to write the May 1 Journal attack piece reporters David Luhnow in Mexico City and Peter Millard in Caracas got to do titled “How Chavez Aims to Weaken US.” Of course, when it comes to Venezuela, the issue is oil and Chavez’s having the “audacity” to want his people to benefit most from their own resources, not predatory foreign oil companies the way it used to be when the country’s leadership only served the interests of capital ignoring essential social needs. No longer.

Chavez, of course, announced months ago his government would complete renationalizing his country’s oil reserves when state oil company PDVSA became the majority shareholder May 1 in four Orinoco River basin oil projects with a minimum 60% ownership in joint ventures with foreign partners. The plan was broadly denounced in the US major media with Journal columnist O’Grady writing April 16 “Chavez (was) brimming with bravado as he shredded (the) oil contracts (telling) foreigners to step aside because he’s in charge now (but the move will likely) end up hitting the ‘commandante of the revolution’ in the pocketbook (because of) corruption, incompetence and mismanagement” meaning Venezuela will now run all its own oil operations and forge its own future, not Big Oil O’Grady wants sole right to do it. No longer indeed, and O’Grady’s not pleased. She’s also dead wrong in her outlook for Venezuela’s oil future run by PDVSA with foreign partners, but don’t ever expect her to admit it.

So is the New York Times agreeing April 10 with O’Grady and other corporate media Big Oil cheerleaders. The Times used charged language condemning Chavez’s “revolutionary flourish (and his) ambitious (plan to) wrest control of several major oil projects from American and European companies (with a) showdown (ahead for these) coveted energy resources….” The Times went on to claim this action would undermine Venezuela’s growth hinting Big Oil’s threat to leave might get Chavez to back down enough to get them to stay. It never happened as this writer suggested April 12 in an article titled “Wall Street Journal and New York Times Attack journalism.” The article made it clear oil exploration and production in Venezuela is so profitable that even with a smaller share of the profits US, European and other Big Oil investors wouldn’t dream of leaving. Whine plenty, leave, not likely, and now we know they won’t.

AP’s Natalie Obiko Pearson reported April 26 that “Four major oil companies (stopped whining April 25 and) agreed to cede control of Venezuela’s last remaining (majority-owned) privately run oil projects to President Hugo Chavez’s government” with ConocoPhillips coming around May 1 showing it, too, was all bark and no bite. Those agreeing through signed memorandums of understanding were Chevron, BP(Amoco) PLC, France’s Total SA, Norway’s Statoil ASA, ConocoPhillips, and with most antagonistic of all to the idea ExxonMobil finally doing it privately as was almost certain to happen and then did.

AP reported ConocoPhillips has the most Orinoco basin exposure in two of four projects, Ameriven and Petrozuata with a (former) 50.1% stake in the latter. It was inconceivable the company would abandon them, and on May 1 it announced it would stay on. The one remaining issue to be resolved is compensation with foreign investors having until June 26 to negotiate terms for their reduced stakes. Expect more Big Oil whining followed by capitulation again to Venezuelan Energy Ministry’s expected offer of fair and equitable takeover terms.

On April 26, PDVSA’s web site reported a total of 10 foreign oil companies agreed to transfer majority control of their “Oil Belt” operations to the state-run oil company. Further, the company expects to achieve a daily capacity of 5.85 million barrels in 2012 and said its January 1 taking control of 32 oil fields will advance the country “toward full national sovereignty over (its) natural energy reserves.”

In response to these actions, and on the day it took effect, the Journal went on the attack again with more ahead certain to be as false and misleading. Its writers called Chavez a “self-proclaimed Maoist (wanting to) reshape the global oil business by sidelining the US and making China his country’s chief strategic energy partner” for investment and export. The Journal also accused Chavez of using “oil as a political weapon” since taking office in 1999 offering discounted oil “to dozens of Latin American countries” as his weapon of choice plus forging alliances with US “economic rivals like China and political rivals like Iran.”

Hugo Chavez, in fact, is a self-proclaimed social democrat charting his own independent course toward progressive “21st century socialism” along the lines Latin American expert James Petras calls the “pragmatic left” in contrast to the more “radical left” of Colombia’s FARC guerrillas; elements of “teachers and peasant-indigenous movements in Oaxaca, Guerrero and Chiapas in Mexico;” many “small Marxist groups in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and elsewhere;” and Venezuela’s “peasant and barrio movements,” among others. Other Latin American leaders Petras calls “pragmatic” leftists include Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Cuba’s Castro and many “large electoral parties and major peasant and trade unions in Central and South America” including Mexico’s PRD party, El Salvador’s FMLN, Chile’s Communist Party, “the majority in Peruvian (Ollanta) Humala’s parliamentary party;” and others including “the great majority of left Latin American intellectuals.”

Unlike what the Wall Street Journal and rest of the US corporate media report or imply, Chavez and others on the “pragmatic left” aren’t aiming to destroy capitalism, just tame it. They also plan no wholesale renunciation of accumulated IMF, World Bank and other international lending agency debt, only calling for it to be on more equitable terms; restructuring it to make their nations’ debt burden fair; and aiming to become free from its repressive yoke as Venezuela did paying it off completely with Chavez announcing May 1 his country is pulling out of the IMF and World Bank, formally breaking free from the kind of debt slavery these institutions impose on countries they lend to guaranteeing their people continued impoverishment.

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is trying to evade responsibility for problems at the Guantanamo Bay prison by falsely blaming defense lawyers for the trouble, the New York City Bar says.

The group’s president leveled the criticism in asking Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to abandon a U.S. Justice Department proposal to limit lawyers’ access to the nearly 400 detainees.

In a court filing this month, the department said attorney access via the mail system has “enabled detainees’ counsel to cause unrest on the base by informing detainees about terrorist attacks.”

The mail system was “misused” to inform detainees about military operations in Iraq, activities of terrorist leaders, efforts in the war on terror, the Hezbollah attack on Israel and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, the department said in this month’s court filing.

“This is an astonishing and disingenuous assertion,” the association president, Barry M. Kamins, wrote Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Kamins said many detainees have been held in solitary confinement for prolonged periods and have lost hope of a fair hearing to demonstrate their innocence.