The Rag Blog

Go to Google News search and type in the following: “FISA Modernization Act.” It will return 10 meager results, only but one offered by the corporate media. Of course, you should not be surprised.

Bush and the neocons want to deep six FISA, itself a violation of the Fourth Amendment, not that it matters as the Fourth died an ignoble death some time ago. But even FISA is not acceptable to the authoritarian psychopaths running the government. Even as “the administration asks Congress to expand its leeway under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the White House continues to insist on the president’s inherent power to disregard even his preferred version of that law. No wonder J. Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence, received a skeptical reception from Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee when he testified last week in favor of ‘modernizing’ FISA,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

It figures, as well, that a Los Angeles Times op-ed didn’t really find McConnell’s suggestions abhorrent. “But some of what McConnell requested makes sense. The threat of domestic terrorist attack does require greater flexibility, as do changes in technology. FISA was enacted at a time when most international communications traveled by radio or satellite and thus were outside the law’s regulation of wire transmissions; today, those same communications move along fiber-optic cables. Likewise, a court order should not be required just because a phone call or e-mail from one foreign location to another happens to pass through the United States.”

Of course, “modernizing” FISA has nothing to do with a “domestic terrorist attack.” It has to do with surveilling the public at large.

Now for the shell game. It appears there are two versions of this bill—a secret one and yet another sanitized version for public consumption. “The ‘unclassified’ version of this legislation was released only after numerous protests by several organizations with which we work in coalition,” notes Downsize DC. “Our coalition partners have been invited to make ’statements’ about this ‘unclassified’ version but have not been afforded an opportunity to rebut the secret testimony of the Bush administration. How could they, it’s secret.”

In regard to the details:

All we know is that the bill deals with what the Executive Branch can and cannot do with regard to spying—particularly on the American people. And we’re a lot less sure about the “cannot” part than we are about the “can” aspects of this. In other words, this bill may legalize widespread spying on Americans by the President of the United States.

Did you think the Democrats were going to protect you against the lawless Bush administration? You should have heard Intelligence Committee Chairman, Senator Jay Rockefeller, at the “public” portion of their hearings. He didn’t seem resolved to hold the administration accountable for its past civil liberties violations. His was a voice of bi-partisan reconciliation with government lawlessness.

And why not? The Democrats like power too. Perhaps they like the fact that if they give more power to Bush now, they’ll get to use that power too when they get their turn at the wheel, which they expect to happen soon.

The code name for this bill seems to be the “FISA Modernization Act.” The old, supposedly primitive, version of the FISA law at least provided some tissue-thin protections against government spying on innocent Americans. We would prefer NOT to have those protections “modernized” out of existence, thank you very much.

Democrat Bill Nelson of Florida almost reached the promised land, but not quite: “The trick is, we want to go after the bad guys. We want to get the information that we need, but we’re a nation of laws and we want to prevent the buildup of a dictator who takes the law into his own hands, saying I don’t like that. So now we have to find the balance.”

Bill, the balance is in the Fourth Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

BAGHDAD, 10 May 2007 (IRIN) – Eleven-year-old Seif Abdul-Rafiz and his two brothers were left with no choice but to leave school and work so as to help their unemployed parents make ends meet.

Unable to find a job, Seif resorted to making bombs for Sunni insurgents who are fighting US troops in Iraq.

“We work about eight hours a day and are supervised by two men. They give us food and at the end of the day we get paid for our work. Sometimes we get US $7 and sometimes we get $10, depending on how many bombs we make,” Abdul-Rafiz said.

“The bombs are used to fight American soldiers. I was really afraid in the beginning but then my parents told me that it was for two good causes: the first is to help our family eat; and the second is to fight occupation forces,” he added.

Thousands of poor children in Iraq are forced to work to help their families. Many of them work in one way or another for a variety of armed groups that operate in the war-torncountry.

“If I had choice, I would have preferred to be in a classroom but we need to eat. In the beginning, they were very kind with us but later they started to threaten us, saying that if we leave our work they would kill our family,” Abdul-Rafiz said.

According to NGO the Iraq Aid Association (IAA), reports from Anbar province and two mainly Sunni neighbourhoods of the capital show that children from poor families are helping insurgents make bombs.

“They are in direct contact with dangerous chemicals which when wrongly handled can result in their death. We have secure information that at least three children have died making bombs,” Fatah Ahmed, IAA spokesman, said.

But Abdul-Rafiz said that hunger was worse than anything.

Foreign investment and Shiite control are the primary concerns. A White House deadline for passage is in doubt.

BAGHDAD — It has not even reached parliament, but the oil law that U.S. officials call vital to ending Iraq’s civil war is in serious trouble among Iraqi lawmakers, many of whom see it as a sloppy document rushed forward to satisfy Washington’s clock.

Opposition ranges from vehement to measured, but two things are clear: The May deadline that the White House had been banking on is in doubt. And even if the law is passed, it fails to resolve key issues, including how to divide Iraq’s oil revenue among its Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni regions, and how much foreign investment to allow. Those questions would be put off for future debates.

The problems of the oil bill bode poorly for the other so-called benchmarks that the Bush administration has been pressuring Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s government to meet. Those include provincial elections, reversing a prohibition against former Baath Party members holding government and military positions and revision of Iraq’s constitution.

Republican leaders in Washington have warned administration officials that if the Iraqi government fails to meet those benchmarks by the end of the summer, remaining congressional support for Bush’s Iraq policies could crumble. Their impatience was underscored Wednesday by Vice President Dick Cheney during a visit here.

“I did make it clear that we believe it’s very important to move on the issues before us in a timely fashion, and that any undue delay would be difficult to explain,” Cheney told reporters.

But Iraqi lawmakers show little sign of bending to accommodate Bush on an issue as crucial as oil.

“We have two clocks — the Baghdad clock and the Washington clock — and this is a perfect example,” said Mahmoud Othman, a lawmaker from the semiautonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq. “This has always been the case. Washington has been pushing the Iraqis to do things to fit their agenda.”

Iraq is believed to have some of the world’s largest oil reserves, about 115 billion barrels. The country’s 2007 budget is based on predictions that oil proceeds will reach $31 billion, 93% of the government’s revenue.

But war and political instability have kept production down. Just before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, production was 2.6 million barrels per day. U.S. officials predicted a rapid rise to 3 million barrels. Instead, Iraq often has struggled to push the daily total to 2 million barrels because of obsolete equipment and security problems.

The oil law is supposed to change this by opening the industry to foreign investors who could modernize equipment and increase production. U.S. officials hope that spreading oil profit fairly across the country would cause instability to ebb.

Iraq’s cabinet, the Council of Ministers, approved a draft oil measure in February. From there, it was to go to parliament. U.S. officials predicted passage would be quick, but it has stalled.

The USG Open Source Center paraphrases reports in the Jordanian press on US Vice President Dick Cheney’s current round of diplomacy in the Middle East.

Jordanian Dailies Comment on Cheney’s Middle East Tour, Objectives
Jordan — OSC Summary
Friday, May 11, 2007

Jordanian newspapers published on 10 May are observed to carry the following commentaries on the recent tour by US Vice President Dick Cheney to the Middle East, particularly to Iraq.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq’s parliament objected Saturday to the construction of walls around Baghdad neighborhoods and called on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to testify about other security issues.

Construction of the walls — particularly in the Baghdad neighborhood of Azamiyah — has been criticized by residents and Sunni clerics who say it is a form of sectarian discrimination. Even followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr complained, fearing their strongholds in the capital will soon be split by the barriers.

U.S. and Iraqi officials have defended the construction of the barriers, which began last month, as a temporary measure to protect the neighborhood during the 12-week-old security crackdown in Baghdad. When the wall is finished, Azamiyah will be gated and checkpoints manned by Iraqi soldiers will be the only entries, the U.S. military said, stressing that the decision was made in coordination with the Iraqis.

Parliament took up the issue Saturday in a raucous session that included debate on the continuing U.S. military presence in Iraq, security raids and human rights abuses. Lawmakers interrupted each other and speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhdani struggled to maintain order.

“They (security walls) don’t protect residents because these areas are shelled by mortars and Katyusha rockets. … Will they build roofs too?” said Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman. “We must build bridges between the different groups, not build walls to separate them.”

The resolution, voted on by a show of hands, passed 138-to-88 in the 275-member house. The president and his two deputies must unanimously approve the legislation for it to become law, or else it will be sent back to the house for re-examination.
Last month, al-Maliki, a Shiite, said he had ordered a halt to the construction in Azamiyah, but his aides later said he was responding to exaggerated media reports and that construction would continue.

The house was about to vote on another resolution, this time to ban American forces from Baghdad, when officials announced the house no longer had a quorum.

The house also decided to summon al-Maliki and the defense and interior ministers to address other security issues, particularly in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad where there has been a spike in attacks against U.S. and Iraqi forces.

The United States militarist plutocracy wrangled in recent weeks over assigning more than 500 billion of worth-less-and-less foreign creditors’ US dollars to its imperialist war machine. The corporate media tried to foment vain interest in what terms the plutocrats may end up negotiating among themselves for that budget’s approval. To confirm the essential obscenity of the US government and the rubber-stamp-with-vaudeville US legislature, their injustice system has just set free a terrorist – Luis Posada Carriles – despite a formal request from Venezuela that Posada Carriles be extradited for bombing an airliner, killing over 70 civilians.

Inherently inhuman, since it is deliberately operated to prioritize corporate profit, the US political system is geared to generate indiscriminate slaughter and death. Serious counting of people absent by death stopped long ago. Most-favoured-genocides, like Darfur, get a reckoning. US generated slaughter does not. Hence the Bush regime’s dismissal of the authoritative Lancet report on Iraq’s lost hundreds of thousands. In Diyala this week a US helicopter killed at least six school children in a strike on a primary school. Might be more, might be fewer – the US authorities could hardly care less. Remember Colin Powell’s reply to a request for a total figure of Iraqi casualties during Desert Storm, “It’s really not a number I’m terribly interested in.”

Powell’s role in the destruction of Iraq is a bit-part in the wider drama of corporate imperialism’s drive to remake colonialism under the guise of globalization. The main coercive components of that drive are gross trade inequities along with heavily conditioned debt and “aid”, accompanied by constant psychological warfare in the corporate media. When the standard components fail to generate sufficient power, covert action or outright aggression are used. Imperialist terror constantly shadows globalization, purposefully shaping and baiting enemies by way of self-justifying propaganda. Corporate media news manufacture and its atomization of information are among the most pernicious and insidious of the strategies involved.

The systemic terror inflicted on countries like Iraq, Haiti, Afghanistan, Palestine and Somalia is a continuation of unfinished colonial business. The terror system is active within countries too. From Mexico to Egypt to the Philippines to the imperial centres themselves, authorities keen to collaborate in the globalization project replicate imperialist terror strategies on a local rather than a global scale. Even the bitty, piecemeal clues thrown out by the corporate news machine make clear the depth and breadth of the challenge to humanity presented by the United States and its European and Pacific allies.

Depleted Uranium – horror by stealth

The deliberate degradation of Iraq’s health system via years of UN sanctions and subsequent maladministration under military occupation is news in the sense that it provides headlines like “Infant mortality in Iraq soars as young pay the price for war” in the Independent of May 8th. Perhaps a more complete contextual report is the World Socialist Web Site article of May 9th “Iraqi infant mortality soars by 150 percent—a damning revelation of US war crimes”. Both help complete part of the overall picture’s foreground but omit the horrific detail and controversy around depleted uranium-provoked cancers and genetic deformations.

Naturally, the US and British governments deny and where possible censor the steadily accumulating evidence of the horrific effects of their criminally reckless use of depleted uranium munitions in the two Gulf Wars. It is certain these munitions have not only irreversibly damaged the health of many hundreds of US and collaborating troops and mercenaries as well as many thousands of Iraqi military and civilians. They have also condemned future generations of the affected multitude to cancer and deformation. Despite its neutral and heavily technical emphasis, the Wikipedia entry on depleted uranium makes two very pertinent points.

Firstly, “DU is considered both a toxic and radioactive hazard that requires long term storage as low level nuclear waste. DU is relatively expensive to store but relatively inexpensive to produce or obtain. Generally the only real costs are those associated with conversion of uranium hexafluoride (UF6) to metal. DU is extremely dense, 67% denser than lead, only slightly less than tungsten and gold, and just 16% less dense than osmium or iridium, the densest naturally occurring substances known. Its low cost makes it attractive for a variety of industrial and military uses.”

Thus, DU poison costs a lot of money to store safely. Cheaper than tungsten and other expensive metals for producing effective armour piercing shells, DU weapons manufacture solves two problems at once. It camouflages the dispersal of nuclear waste and increases shareholder profits all round by removing high storage costs and converting the poisonous trash into expensive munitions. As so well-signalled by incidents like the Bhopal Union Carbide chemical plant disaster and innumerable other cases, human health has next to no place in the corporate profit equation. Costs of any health care for people suffering the effects of DU radiation exposure can be postponed through decades of obfuscation and denial and finally defrayed onto national governments. Arms corporations ultimately externalize potential health and legal costs by passing them on to forever-deceived taxpayers.

A second point in the non-commital Wikipedia article, here in relation to the link between DU, cancer and genetic defects is, “In general, the prevailing scientific view on the matter is that such data, and other scarce data available, do not conclusively prove a poisoning effect of depleted uranium; but that the possibility exists and cannot be ruled out either, and so a precautionary principle would suggest to suspend the use of such weapons.” But the war criminals who launched their illegal aggression against Iraq in March 2003 explicitly and deliberately trashed all international norms by appealing to their factitious, bogus “war on terror”. With them or against them, human life counts for little or nothing. Witness the Walter Reed hospital scandal and the generally despicable treatment of war veterans. If they treat their own side so callously, what can Iraqis expect? Iraqis bear witness to and suffer the terrifying answer day after day.

Figures from the Spanish group Research Collective on Radioactive Weapons (1) suggest that now in Iraq as many as 20 babies in every 4000 are born eyeless. This source argues that the figure in a normal population should be 1 in every 50 million. The article notes, “In Iraq, they call doomed pregnancies “bellies of jelly”. With reason, since from 1991 unformed lumps of meat have been born with deformations never seen before.” The article cites a report from Al-Jazeera reckoning that since 1991 the incidence of cancer in Iraq has increased tenfold and birth defects fivefold, “due to the use of uranium weapons”.

Cover-up

The response of the US and British authorities has been to repress awkward testimony about the facts of their deployment and use of DU armaments. The same article quoted above notes the case of Riyadh Lafta, an internationally recognised Iraqi epidemiologist highly critical of DU munitions and their use. Riyadh Lafta ” tried fruitlessly for six months to get a visa to travel to Seattle to give a conference in Washington. The British government then refused him a 4-hour transit visa from the Middle East to Canada, where he was invited for another conference.”

Back in 1999, four years before the second Gulf War, Felicity Arbuthnot (2) reported the case of Professor Asaf Durakovic “He is one of the world’s leading experts on radiation, and sees a familiar pattern. ‘Any doctor who becomes involved in this subject is pressurized, fired; records and samples go missing…’ ” Durakovic wrote of his concerns about DU munitions to President Clinton in 1997. “Shortly afterwards his senior position at the Department of Nuclear Medicine at the Veterans’ Administration Authority in Wilmington, Delaware, was terminated.” Arbuthnot goes on to note how at the same time in Britain, Iraq war veterans Ray Bristow and Colin Purcell Lee, returning from research in Iraq, “arrived home ‘to find we had been called traitors by a senior Cabinet Minister’ and that their homes had been raided by Ministry of Defence Police.”

INTRODUCTION

Four years since the US-UK led illegal invasion of Iraq, which has brought the ongoing catastrophe for Iraqi people, all peace loving people and antiwar organizations in the world are appalled by the current Iran-US standoff that has a shocking resemblance to the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. The same neo-conservatives and hawks, headed by Dick Cheney in Washington, who championed the cause of invasion of Iraq, are now shamelessly calling for a military attack on Iran. The same Israeli lobby which pushed for the invasion of Iraq, is now pushing for a military attack on Iran. The same strategy of lies and distortions which was used to dupe the international community and soften it up for the invasion of Iraq, is again used to pave the way for another illegal pre-emptive war of aggression against Iran. As in the case of Iraq, the UN Security Council Resolutions against Iran, obtained by massive US pressure and coercion, would provide a veneer of legitimacy for such an attack.

Contrary to the myth created by the western media, it is not Iran, but the US and its European allies which are defying the overwhelming majority of the international community, in that, they have resisted the call to enter into direct, immediate and comprehensive negotiations with Iran without any pre-conditions. The US and its European allies show their lack of good faith in a diplomatic solution to the standoff by demanding that Iran concede the main point of negotiations, namely, suspension of enrichment of uranium which is Iran’s legitimate right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, before the negotiations actually start.

Here, we examine and debunk the common myths and charges against Iran and provide a list of twenty reasons to oppose sanctions and military intervention in Iran. The Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII) calls for immediate and direct negotiations between the US and Iran without any pre-conditions in order to avert a new even more horrifying catastrophe in the Middle East.

IRAN’S NUCLEAR PROGRAMME: FACTS AND LIES

1. There is no evidence of a nuclear weapons programme in Iran. The US and Israel pressure Iran to prove that it is not hiding a nuclear weapons programme. This demand is logically impossible to satisfy and only serves to make diplomacy fail in order to force regime change. Numerous intrusive and snap visits by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors, totalling more than 2,700 person-hours of inspection, have failed to produce any shred of evidence for a weapons programme in Iran. Traces of highly enriched uranium found at Natanz in 2004, were determined by IAEA to have come with imported centrifuges.

In June 2005, Bruno Pellaud, former IAEA Deputy Director-General for safeguards, was asked by Swissinfo if Iran was intent on building a nuclear bomb. He replied: “My impression is not. My view is based on the fact that Iran took a major gamble in December 2003 by allowing a much more intrusive capability to the IAEA. If Iran had had a military programme they would not have allowed the IAEA to come under this Additional Protocol. They did not have to.” Even the ex-British Foreign Minister, Jack Straw, admitted on 9/4/2006 that “there is no smoking gun and therefore no justification for a military attack”. Still, for the US the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

2. Iran’s need for nuclear power generation is real. Even when Iran’s population was one-third of what it is today, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, negotiating on behalf of President Gerald Ford, persuaded the former Shah that Iran needed nuclear power and over twenty nuclear reactors. [1] Today Iran’s electricity output forecast falls so much short of projected needs that even concerns over the preservation of historic sites did not impede Tehran’s plans to dam a river near the national heritage ruins near Pasargad. With Iran’s population of 70 million fast growing, and its oil resources fast depleting, Iran will be a net importer of oil productions in just over a decade from now. Nuclear energy is thus a realistic and viable solution for electricity generation in the country.

3. The “crisis” over Iran’s nuclear programme lacks the urgency claimed by Washington. Even if it were to militarize its nuclear programme, for which there is no evidence at all, Iran would be many years away from mastering the technology, giving proliferation concerns ample time to be resolved by negotiation. Weapons grade uranium must be enriched at least to 85%. A 2005 CIA report determined that it could take Iran 10 years to achieve this level of enrichment. Many independent nuclear experts have stated that Iran would face formidable technical obstacles if it tried to enrich uranium beyond the 3.5% required for electricity generation. According to Dr Frank Barnaby of the Oxford Research Group, because of contamination of Iranian uranium with heavy metals, Iran cannot possibly enrich beyond even 20% without support from Russia or China [2]. IAEA director, Dr. Mohammad ElBaradei, too, has declared that there is no imminent threat and “We need to lower the pitch.”

4. Iran has met its obligations under the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Iran has fully cooperated in the last three years with the IAEA and had voluntarily accepted and enforced safeguards well above the Additional Protocol until Iran’s nuclear file was reported under the pressure of the US to the Security Council in February 2006. (The U.S., by contrast, has neither signed nor implemented the Additional Protocol, and Israel has refused to sign the NPT.)

Iran’s earlier concealment of its nuclear programme took place in the context of the US-backed invasion of Iran by Saddam; Iraqi chemical weapons provided to Saddam by the US, German and UK companies with the approval of their governments which were used against Iranian soldiers and civilians and Israel’s destruction of Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981 with impunity. Iranian leaders concluded from these gross injustices that international laws are only “ink on paper” as Rafsanjani put it.

But the most direct reasons for Iran’s concealment were the American trade embargo on Iran and Washington’s organized and persistent campaign to stop civilian nuclear technology from reaching Iran from any source. For example, in 1995 Germany offered to let Kraftwerk Union (a subsidiary of Siemens) finish Iran’s Bushehr reactor, but withdrew its proposal under US pressure [3]. The following year, China cancelled its contract to build a nuclear enrichment facility in Isfahan for the same reason [4]. Thus Washington systematically violated, with impunity, Article IV of the NPT, which allows signatories to “facilitate, and have the right to participate in, the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy”.

Nevertheless, Iran’s decision not to declare all of its nuclear installations did not violate any rules. According to David Albright and Corey Hinderstein, who first provided satellite imagery and analysis of the facilities at Natanz and at Arak in December 2002 [5], under the safeguards agreement in force at the time, “Iran is not required to allow IAEA inspections of a new nuclear facility until six months before nuclear material is introduced into it.”

5. Iran has given unprecedented concessions on its nuclear programme. Unlike North Korea, Iran has resisted the temptation to withdraw from the NPT. Besides accepting snap inspections under Additional Protocol until February 2006, Iran has invited Western companies, including American companies, to participate in a consortium to develop Iran’s civilian nuclear programme. Such joint ventures combined with Iran’s pledge to ratify the Additional Protocol for intrusive IAEA inspections, would create the best assurance that the enriched uranium would not be diverted to a weapons programme. Such concessions are very rare in the world, but the U.S. and its allies have refused Iran’s offer.

6. Enrichment of uranium for a civilian nuclear programme is Iran’s inalienable right. Every member of the NPT has the inalienable right to enrich uranium for a civilian nuclear programme and is entitled to full technical assistance.

But with the US as the back seat driver and in violation of their assistance obligations, France, Germany, and the UK insisted in three years of negotiations, that Tehran forfeit its right, in return for incentives of little value. Some European diplomats admitted to Asia Times-on-line on 7th September 2005, that the package offered by the EU-3 was “an empty box of chocolates.” But “there is nothing else we can offer,” the diplomats went on to say. “The Americans simply wouldn’t let us.”

7. The Western alliance has not tried true diplomacy. Washington has refused to participate in talks with Iran and instead outsourced the task to the EU. But negotiators for France, Britain, and Germany were hamstrung by the Bush Administration, which disapproved any substantive incentives, including a US guarantee not to attack Iran. This was the reason Iran ended its two-year voluntary suspension of uranium enrichment.

WESTERN HYPOCRISY

8. The UN resolutions against Iran in contrast to the treatment of South Korea, India, Pakistan, and Israel smack of double standards. The UN Security Council sanctions on Iran expose the double standards of the Western powers, which ignore the NPT violations by Washington’s allies. For example, in the year 2000, South Korea enriched 200 milligrams of uranium to near-weapons grade (up to 77%), but was not referred to the UN Security Council.

India has refused to sign the NPT or allow inspections and has developed an atomic arsenal, but receives nuclear assistance from the US which is a violation of the NPT. More bizarrely, India has a seat on the governing board of IAEA and, under US pressure, voted to refer Iran as a violator to the UN Security Council. Another non-signatory, Pakistan, clandestinely developed nuclear weapons but is supported by the US as a “war on terror” ally.

Israel is a close ally of Washington, even though it has hundreds of clandestine nuclear weapons, has dismissed numerous UN resolutions and has refused to sign the NPT or open any of its nuclear plants to inspections.

05/11/07 “ICH ” — — On 5 June 1968, just after midnight, Robert Kennedy was shot in my presence at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He had just acknowledged his victory in the California primary. “On to Chicago and let’s win there!” were his last public words, referring to the Democratic Party’s convention that would nominate a presidential candidate. “He’s the next President Kennedy!” said the woman standing next to me. She then fell to the floor with a bullet wound to the head. (She lived.)

I had been travelling with Kennedy through California’s vineyards, along unsurfaced roads joined together by power lines sagging almost to porch level, and strewn with the wrecks of Detroit’s fantasies. Here, Latino workers vomited from the effects of pesticide and the candidate promised them that he would “do something”. I asked him what he would do. “In your speeches,” I said, “it’s the one thing that doesn’t come through.” He looked puzzled. “Well, it’s based on a faith in this country… I want America to go back to what she was meant to be, a place where every man has a say in his destiny.”

The same missionary testament, of “faith” in America’s myths and power, has been spoken by every presidential candidate in memory, more so by Democrats, who start more wars than Republicans. The assassinated Kennedys exemplified this. John F Kennedy referred incessantly to “America’s mission in the world” even while affirming it with a secret invasion of Vietnam that caused the deaths of more than two million people. Robert Kennedy had made his name as a ruthless counsel for Senator Joe McCarthy on his witch-hunting committee investigating “un-American activities”. The younger Kennedy so admired the infamous McCarthy that he went out of his way to attend his funeral. As attorney general, he backed his brother’s atrocious war and when John F Kennedy was assassinated, he used his name to win election as a junior senator for New York. By the spring of 1968 he was fixed in the public mind as a carpet-bagger.

As a witness to such times and events, I am always struck by self-serving attempts at revising them. The extract from Chancellor Gordon Brown’s book ‘Courage’: eight portraits that appeared in the New Statesman of 30 April is a prime example. According to the prime-minister-to-be, Kennedy stood at the pinnacle of “morality”, a man “moved to anger and action mostly by injustice, by wasted lives and opportunity denied, by human suffering. [His were] the politics of moral uplift and exhortation.” Moreover, his “moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence”.

05/11/07 “Baltimore Chronicle” — — What is it about impeachment that has the Democratic Party leadership so frightened?

Talking with members of Congress, one hears the same refrain: “I know Bush and Cheney have committed impeachable crimes, but impeachment is a bad idea.”

The rationales offered are many, but all are either specious or based upon flawed reasoning. Let’s consider them separately:

Excuse one, offered by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is that impeachment would be a diversion from Democrats’ main goals of ending the Iraq War, and passing important legislation. The reality, of course, is that many of the administration’s impeachable acts relate directly to the war, so hearings would only build support for ending it. Meanwhile, with the slim majorities in both houses, Democrats cannot pass any significant progressive legislation that could survive a veto (or a presidential signing statement) and the record shows it.

Excuse two is that impeachment is divisive. This seems the height of absurdity. When voters handed Congress to the Democrats, they knew they were setting the stage for divided government. That was the whole point. Moreover, divisiveness in Washington has largely emanated from the White House, not from Congress. Anyhow, given administration intransigence on all the issues that matter to Democrats, they have no alternative but to take a stand.

Excuse three is a claim that the public opposes impeachment. This is simply wrong. The few straightforward scientific polls done on impeachment, such as one published by Newsweek last October, show a majority of Americans to want it. Furthermore, if Bush has committed impeachable acts, it is inappropriate for House members, all of whom swore to uphold and defend the Constitution, not to act.

Excuse four is that old canard that impeaching Bush would mean making Cheney president—a deliberately scary prospect but one which any politician in Washington knows is garbage. Firstly, if Cheney were to become president because of a Bush impeachment or resignation, it would only be for a few months, and given his stunning lack of support among the public—currently about 9 percent and falling—he would be the lamest of lame ducks, unable to do anything. But more importantly, his own party would be certain to remove him before any removal of Bush, and for exactly that reason—they would not want to be going into the 2008 election with Cheney as party leader. This is exactly what happened to Spiro Agnew, whom a Republican attorney general managed to indict and remove before the collapse of Nixon’s presidency. The same thing can be expected to happen to Cheney, who would surely face either a sudden health crisis, or an indictment for corruption.

Finally, excuse five is that the president’s crimes and abuses of power need to be proven before any impeachment bill. This is completely backwards. An impeachment bill can be filed by any member of Congress who believes the president has violated the Constitution. At that point, it is up to the House Judiciary Committee to consider the bill’s merits and decide whether to ask the full House to authorize impeachment hearings. It is at an impeachment hearing where investigations should proceed. After all, only after the Judiciary Committee votes out an impeachment article can the full House consider whether to actually impeach. Calling for investigations before an impeachment hearing is like asking for an investigation before a grand jury investigation. It’s redundant, simply a dodge.

Besides, some of this president’s high crimes are self-evident. Take the case of Bush’s ordering the National Security Agency to spy on Americans’ communications without a warrant. A federal judge has already labeled this violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act a felony. There is no denying this felony occurred, or that Bush is responsible. The only question the House needs to vote on is whether the felony is a “high crime” warranting impeachment.

The same applies Bush’s refusal to enact over 1200 laws or parts of laws duly passed by Congress. Bush doesn’t deny that he has usurped the power of the Congress, as laid down in Article I of the Constitution. Rather, he asserts—with no basis in the wording of that document—that as commander in chief in the war on terror, he has the “unitary executive” authority to ignore acts of Congress. Again, there is no need for an “investigation” to establish whether this happened. What Congress must do is decide whether this usurpation of its Constitutional role is an impeachable abuse of power.

Likewise the president’s authorization of kidnap and torture. We know the president okayed torture. We know too, that he used his “unitary executive” claim to refuse to accept a law passed overwhelmingly by the last Congress outlawing torture. Finally, we know the president did not, as required by US and international law, act to halt torture and punish those up the chain of command who oversaw systematic, widespread torture.

There are many impeachable crimes by this president (and vice president), such as obstruction of justice in the Valeria Plame outing case, conspiracy (or treason) in the Niger “yellowcake” document forgery scandal, conspiracy to engage in election fraud, lying to Congress, criminal negligence in responding to the Katrina disaster, bribery and war profiteering, etc., which would require Judiciary Committee investigations.

In the meantime, though, Democrats need to step up to their responsibility.

05/11/07 “Truth Dig” — — I joined the American Legion a few years back. As a veteran of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, I was eligible to do so for some time but always hesitated, perhaps out of a sense of trying to deny that my days as an active-duty combatant were long past. Every year, on Memorial Day, my fellow firefighters and I would gather in the basement of the local American Legion hall before we paraded before the town we protect. I would look around at the uniforms and faded patches and ribbons worn by the veterans who joined us in the hall and realize that they, too, were deserving of a great deal more support than simply being wheeled out once a year to participate in a parade. So I sent in my application and was accepted.

One of the fringe benefits of membership in the American Legion is a subscription to its monthly journal, The American Legion, billed as “the magazine for a strong America.” It quickly became apparent that The American Legion magazine was a sounding board for many holding quite militaristic and jingoistic opinions based on their rather limited personal experiences, many dating back to World War II. The war in Iraq, together with the overarching “global war on terror,” seems to be viewed by many in the American Legion as an extension of their own past service, and much effort is made to connect World War II and the Iraq conflict as part and parcel of the same ongoing American “liberation” of the world’s oppressed.

It’s a shame for these Legionnaires that the Iraqis couldn’t have turned out to be blond, blue-eyed Germans who looked like us, and whose women could be wooed with chocolate and nylon stockings by the noble American liberator and occupier. Or, short of that, passive Japanese, who freely submitted their women to the massage parlors and barracks of their American conquering heroes while their men rebuilt a shattered society. The simplistic approach of many of the American Legion’s most hawkish advocates for the ongoing disaster in Iraq seems to be drawn from a selective memory which seeks to impose a carefully crafted past experience dating back to the last “good war” (i.e., World War II), expunged of all warts and blemishes, onto the current situation in Iraq in a manner which strips away all reality.

It turns out that the Iraqis aren’t like German or Japanese people at all, but rather a fiercely independent (if overly complex) nation deeply resentful of a so-called liberation which has brought them nothing but pain and agony, primarily at the hands of those who have, unbidden, “freed” them from their past. The fact that the Iraqis resent the ongoing American occupation, and choose to express this resentment through violent resistance instead of submissive passivity, is in turn resented by many of the Legion’s membership. “War has been declared on the United States by those who are envious of our freedom, and they won’t stop until we are under their heel,” writes one Legionnaire in a letter published in the May 2007 issue of “the magazine for a strong America.” The juxtaposition of Iraq with those who perpetrated the events of Sept. 11, 2001, implied in this statement is reflective of a level of ignorance that boggles the mind. Iraq never declared war on the United States, the salesmanship exhibited in our promotion of “freedom” in Iraq leaves nothing to envy, and the Iraqis will stop resisting when we leave their country. Don’t try telling that to the blustery former Marine who authored the letter in question, however. He, like the majority of the Legion, is tired of hearing about “Bush’s war.”

“Death, Not in Vain” is the title of the feature article of the May 2007 issue. The story revolves around how the parents of one Marine who died in Iraq seek to define their son’s sacrifice. “People may not agree with the reason we went to war,” the mother of the fallen Marine is quoted as saying, “but while our troops are over there, we can’t be telling the world what they are doing is wrong. If we say we support them, we have to support what they are doing.” Of course, the nature of the “disagreement” surrounding the Iraq war is never fully articulated in the article. There is no mention made of the discredited claims by President Bush and other war advocates about weapons of mass destruction or connections between Saddam Hussein’s government and al-Qaida. Instead, the reader is told repeatedly about how fallen American service members gave their lives for America and a “free Iraq.” Quoting their fallen sons, the families of Marines killed in Iraq speak proudly of bold statements such as “We need to be there, but it’s going to be hard, and it is going to be a long time.” Yet they never explore the actual “need” cited.

“We’ve got to support the troops and the mission,” the article quotes one family member as saying. “The two are dependent on each other.” I’m all for supporting the troops. But blind support for a mission of such nebulous origin? This is a much different matter, one requiring more introspective investigation. I don’t think it was the magazine’s intent, but a foundation of such an investigation was laid in the very same issue. In his article “Minimizing the Holocaust,” Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz slams those who seek to dismiss Nazi Germany’s effort to commit genocide against Europe’s Jews. It is a very difficult article to digest, not because of the legitimate premise that those who seek to deny or minimize the Holocaust are deserving of condemnation, but rather for the ease with which the moralistic Dershowitz explains the bombing of Dresden in 1945 as a “legitimate act of belligerent reprisal for the relentless bombings of civilians in London and elsewhere,” or the dismissive waving-off of the systematic starvation of 1 million German prisoners of war by the United States after the surrender of Germany as an inconvenient result of a “food crisis across Europe, a result of the continent’s decimation,” and being a “far cry from the 6 million innocents who perished at the hands of the Nazis with absolutely no military justification.”

I would be curious to know how Dershowitz would judge how the families of German soldiers deployed in combat operations should have viewed the Second World War. What if a mother of a young panzer grenadier fighting on the Russian front was to say, “The troops are the mission, and we cannot separate our support for either”? Should blind support for the fighting men likewise have blinded the families of German soldiers to the illegitimacy of their cause? Certainly Dershowitz would favor the “good German,” one who would have sought to deny facilitation of the Holocaust by refusing to support the war which empowered it. Would he so favor the “good American,” one driven by a sense of moral responsibility to speak out against acts perpetrated in Iraq and elsewhere by American fighting forces ostensibly in support of freedom, but in reality an extension of illegitimate policies reeking of global hegemony and American empire? Or would he choose to explain away Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, the CIA’s secret gulag of torture as “legitimate acts of bellicose reprisals” for the events of Sept. 11, 2001? In Dershowitz’s tortured legal brain the events at Haditha and elsewhere, including the Marine massacre of civilians in Afghanistan, likewise assume legitimacy in this newfound legal defense of “legitimate bellicose reprisal.”

In the end, Dershowitz’s opinions are irrelevant. The disturbing reality, however, is that his mind-set is not limited to the soap box he enjoys as a teacher of jurisprudence at one of America’s finest institutions of higher learning but rather is increasingly embraced by American service members deployed in harm’s way. A recent U.S. Army survey shows that some 40 percent of American soldiers and Marines support the use of torture as a means of gathering intelligence. Some 66 percent would refuse to turn in a fellow soldier or Marine for abusive actions against civilians, and less than 50 percent believe that noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect. Ten percent of those surveyed actually admitted to abusing civilians and their property for no reason whatsoever. While acknowledging that this mind-set is at complete odds with official policy concerning the conduct of military personnel in a combat zone, the Pentagon did its best to portray the survey results as clear evidence that there was, in fact, “good leadership” in place, since the desires of the troops had not manifested themselves in large-scale acts of abuse or torture. True, but the survey is also clear evidence that when such abuse or torture does occur, it is not the result of a few “bad apples,” so to speak, but instead indicative of a trend that could easily spiral out of control on any given day.

The survey results should not come as a surprise to anyone. The innumerable home movies shot in Iraq and Afghanistan, some immortalized on YouTube, some in documentary film, some simply shared with friends and family, all show the same disturbing trend. Whether it is a Marine singing the lyrics to the self-written “Hadji Girl,” or soldiers speaking disparagingly about “ragheads” or “sand niggers,” or any other dehumanizing remark imaginable, the reality is our troops aren’t in Iraq to liberate the Iraqi people. We’re there to kill them and we do an extraordinarily good job. The British government recently certified as “sound” the methodologies used by the study published in the medical journal The Lancet which estimates the number of deaths (as of 2006) that can be directly attributed to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath at 655,000. If anything, this number has grown by leaps and bounds since the study was conducted.

One can point to sectarian violence as a major contributor to this total, but as an American I tend to reflect on the American-on-Iraqi violence, such as the barely mentioned deaths of Iraqi children in a recent air-delivered bomb attack against suspected Iraqi insurgents. I’m sure Dershowitz and those American service members desensitized to their own acts of depravity can explain the deaths of these innocents as “legitimate acts of bellicose reprisal.” I call it murder, even if these deaths occurred in time of war.

Every mother and father of every soldier, sailor, airman and Marine deployed in Iraq should reflect on this as well. “Little Johnny” may write home about what he says is a “just war” that “needs to be fought,” but before one embraces the words of someone in harm’s way in desperate need of self-justification for the things he has seen and done, re-examine the area of operations your loved one is serving in or, worse, has perished in. Are they “living among the Iraqi people,” as some would have you believe? Or are they sequestered away in base camps or fire bases, forced to conduct patrols out among a population that for the most part hates them and wants them gone from Iraq? Does “Johnny” himself call the Iraqis ragheads? Does he give a frustrated kick at the Iraqi male he just apprehended, not because of any crime or offense committed, but simply because he was there? Does he point his rifle and scream expletives at the mother or wife or daughter who cries out for a loved one? Does he break a lamp or table to emphasize his point? Or does he do worse, allowing his emotions and frustration to break free as he beats, shoots or rapes those he now hates more than anything else in the world? Freedom? Get real. The mission of our military in Iraq is survival, and that is no military mission at all.

The war in Iraq is as immoral a conflict as the United States has ever been involved in. Past wars were fought in a day and age where information was not readily available on the totality of issues surrounding a given conflict. One could excuse citizens if they were not equipped with the knowledge and information necessary to empower them to speak out against bad policy. Not so today. For someone today to proclaim ignorance as an excuse for inactivity is as morally and intellectually weak an argument as can be imagined. The truth about those who claim they simply “didn’t know” lies in their own lack of commitment to a strong America, one founded on principles and values worth fighting for, and one where every American is committed to the defense of the same. Ignorance is bad citizenship. In this day and age, bad citizenship carries ramifications beyond the environs of our local communities. Given America’s dominant role in the world, bad American citizenship has a way of manifesting itself globally.

I’m not calling the parents of those who have fallen in Iraq and who continue to voice their blind adherence to the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq bad citizens. I understand their need to come to grips with their loss the best way possible, which is to try and extract some meaning from the sacrifice their family has had to make. But I draw the line when these families allow their suffering to translate into blanket suffering for others. As The American Legion magazine quoted one such individual who advocated in favor of the Bush administration: “Are more servicemen and women returning the way my son did, in a casket, as a result of our words and actions? I believe the answer is yes. The perception of a weak American military, should we lose, will make our enemy stronger than we ever imagined. Because we don’t want to be at war any more doesn’t mean the war is over.”

Thus, in a blind effort to find meaning in her son’s death, this mother is willing to inflict suffering on other American families. This may sound like a harsh indictment, but she indicts herself. The same mother concludes the article with the following quote: “I told President Bush last summer that the biggest insult anyone could hand me would be to pull the troops out before the job is complete. If we’re going to quit, at that point I’ll have to ask, ‘Why did my son die?’ ” The question she should have been asking long before his death was, of course, “Why might my son die?” That she failed to do so, and now seeks to send others off to their death in a cause not worthy of a single American life, is where she and those of her ilk stop receiving my sympathy and understanding.

The American Legion magazine, in its May 2007 issue, belittles those who speak out against the war. “While our forefathers gave us the right and privilege to challenge our leaders,” one father of a fallen Marine writes, “the manner and method that some people have chosen to use at this time only emboldens the enemy.” Reading between the lines, freedom of speech is treasonous if you question the motives and actions of those who got us involved in the Iraq war. Alan Dershowitz can only wish that there had been more “good Germans” speaking out about the policies of Adolf Hitler before the Holocaust became reality.

I yearn for a time when “good Americans” will be able to stop and reverse equally evil policies of global hegemony achieved through pre-emptive war of aggression. I know all too well that in this case the “enemy” will only be emboldened by our silence, since at the end of the day the “enemy” is ourselves. I can see the Harvard professor shaking an accusatory finger at me for the above statement, chiding me for creating any moral equivalency between the war in Iraq and the Holocaust. You’re right, Mr. Dershowitz. There is no moral equivalency. In America today, we should have known better, since we ostensibly stand for so much more. That we have collectively failed to halt and repudiate the war in Iraq makes us even worse than the Germans.

[Editor’s Note: We do not normally “feature” reprints from other publications on Axis of Logic. But because it marks the historic end to the bloody 10 year reign of this particular war criminal, we decided to give this WSWS article a special place. Earlier today we heard Tony Blair state on NPR, “Hand on my heart, I thought I was doing the right thing [invading Iraq].” We say, “Tell that to a million Iraqi dead, their families; many more who have been physically and mentally disabled, families destroyed … lives counted as rubbish by the invader-occupiers. Like George Bush and the neocons behind him, if justice is served, they will one day be held accountable for their war crimes. The international anti-war movement will do everything in its power to doggedly hold their crimes over their heads until their very last days on earth. Their victims and our responsibility as human beings insist on nothing less. – Les Blough, Editor]

11 May 2007 – On Thursday, Tony Blair announced the timetable for his departure as leader of the Labour Party and therefore as prime minister. He will not formally leave office until the end of June so as to enable the party to select his successor, which will almost certainly be Chancellor Gordon Brown.

Blair’s announcement is probably the most long-awaited resignation in living memory. Ever since the 2005 general election there has been much talk that Blair’s departure was imminent.

For a man who has made so much of the “hand of history” being on his shoulder and of his “legacy”—a word now being bandied about by Downing Street and the media—there was no good time to announce he would stand aside.

Even more detested in Britain than his mentor Margaret Thatcher—officially the most hated prime minister in recent history—opinion polls record that his legacy is one soaked in the blood of the preemptive war and occupation of Iraq. Some 50 percent of the population believe it is for this ignominious reason that Blair will find his place in the history books. The next highest numbers believe it will be due to his alliance with President George W. Bush.

Blair leaves office as an unindicted war criminal and the first sitting prime minister in history to be interviewed as part of a police investigation (the “cash for honours” scandal). It is no coincidence that Lord Levy had earlier announced that he would stand down as the prime minister’s special Middle East envoy. In his capacity as Blair’s chief fundraiser, Levy has been arrested and questioned under caution by police investigating the alleged sale of peerages in return for party loans.

The prime minister has reportedly been planning his retirement for some time in discussions with the likes of Rupert Murdoch and the then-chief executive of British Petroleum, Lord Browne. It has been suggested that out of concern that he not be seen to be cashing in too quickly, his first project will be to establish a global foundation to foster “greater understanding” between the three “Abrahamic faiths” of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

This is an obscene conceit in itself, considering his role in the Middle East. But no doubt Blair will once again be able to utilise his skills in soliciting donations from rich benefactors. His real money-making venture is expected to be speaking tours of the United States. Estimates as to what he can expect to earn in his first year out of office range between a conservative £5 million and £10 million, and a book deal is estimated to be worth between £5 million and £8 million.

There is no question that Blair will be feted in right-wing circles, especially in the US. This is first of all for his record of unbridled militarism in alliance with Washington. He is also valued in these circles because, just as in the US, his “war on terror” rhetoric has been used to justify the most antidemocratic and authoritarian measures.

Just as importantly, his reputation has been built on the huge transfer of wealth from working people to the global financial corporations and the super-rich that he helped engineer in the UK.

Last month’s Sunday Times Rich List recorded that the richest 1,000 people in Britain more than trebled their wealth under Blair. Their fortunes grew by 20 percent last year alone, to a combined £360 billion.

London has been described as a “magnet for billionaires,” attracted by the UK’s reputation as an “on-shore tax-haven” in which the wealthy—many of whom earned their fortunes through asset-stripping, privatization and financial speculation—pay next to nothing on their incomes.