The Rag Blog

In the Philippines Bush’s War On Terror has become a War Of Terror. Last week Elias Mabundas, 25, and Auling Bugahod, 50, both left wing activists were gunned down by the Philippine military as they were driving down a freeway.

On Wednesday, April 18, Carmelo Palacios, 41, became the 51st journalist to be killed since Gloria Macapagal Arroyo came to power in 2001. Two days prior to the Palacios killing Willie Jerus, 43, a member of the National Peasant Movement (KMP) and a local organizer was gunned down in front of his wife by an unidentified gunman. He was the 843rd leftist to be killed, usually by the same proverbial unidentified gunman/gunmen since Arroyo came to power. In addition to those known killed an additional 210 are reported as missing. Most on the left place full responsibility for the killings and disappearances on the military, the Arroyo government And the Bush administration because of its close ties to Arroyo and the Philippine military.

Rebuked by the UN and the Permanent Peoples Tribunal over human rights abuses and the ongoing killings Arroyo and the U.S. have begun to be held to account. Those murdered have been from every region of the Philippine archipelago and represent a cross section of society. They include priests, journalists, farmers, human rights workers, union leaders and those in the health field among others. Two weeks prior to the for mentioned killings two other KMP activists were found shot, stabbed and placed in garbage bags.

Arthur Orpilla and Dionisio Baltad were found 240 miles north of Manila near a military base. The list of deaths has been compiled by Karapatan, the Philippines most prominent human rights organization.

Among those killed about ten percent have been women and a large number of the disappeared have been women.

On March 31, Grecil Gelacio, nine years old, was gunned down by members of the Philippine Army’s 101st Infantry Brigade. The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) as a whole, the Arroyo administration and the U.S. government needs to be held accountable for the deaths of hundreds of innocent people across the Philippines that have occurred over the past 6 years.

The U.S. Military has had a long time training program with the Philippine Military and Philippine National Police. The U.S. Embassy in Manila provides information on the most pertinent joint training program between the U.S. Military and the Philippines, an except from this program description reads- “The International Military Education and Training (IMET) program is an important component of U.S. efforts to professionalize the AFP. The IMET program strives to strengthen the AFP’s professionalism, commitment to human rights, discipline and technical expertise. IMET graduates populate top AFP ranks and actively promote close and professional U.S. and Philippine military-to-military relationships.” Philippine Military assistance from the U.S. went from $14.6 million in 2001 to $86.5 million a year in 2005. The U.S./Philippine joint military training includes small unit and sniper training. The only suspension that occurred of this joint training was when a rift developed between the two countries when a U.S. Marine was tried and convicted of raping a Philippine national.

The U.S. government upset that their rapist was put in a Philippine jail suspended the joint exercises until he was transferred to the U.S. Embassy. Raul Gonzalez, Arroyo’s justice secretary was pivotal in making sure the U.S. was accommodated in this case and generally seems side with the U.S. government over the well being of his own people.

Oil and social gains

“The forces opposing Washington’s policy of endless war–whether waged through sanctions, coups, invasions, bombings or sabotage–should stand with Iran, recognize its accomplishments, defend its gains and oppose imperialism’s efforts to re-colonize the country.”

Why is Iran increasingly a target of U.S. threats? Who in Iran will be affected if the Pentagon implements plans, already drawn up, to strike more than 10,000 targets in the first hours of a U.S. air barrage on Iran?

What changes in policy is Washington demanding of the Iranian government?

In the face of the debacle U.S. imperialism is facing in Iraq, U.S. threats against Iran are discussed daily. This is not a secret operation. They can’t be considered idle threats.

Two aircraft carriers–USS Eisenhower and USS Stennis–are still off the coast of Iran, each one accompanied by a carrier strike group containing Hornet and Superhornet fighter-bombers, electronic warfare aircraft, anti-submarine and refueler planes, and airborne command-and-control planes. Six guided-missile destroyers are also part of the armada.

Besides this vast array of firepower, the Pentagon has bases throughout the Middle East able to attack Iran with cruise missiles and hundreds of warplanes.

In fact, the U.S. is already engaged in a war on Iran. Ever-tightening sanctions, from both the U.S. and U.N., restrict trade and the ordering of equipment, spare parts and supplies.

Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker magazine a year ago that U.S. special operations forces were already operating inside Iran in preparation for a possible attack. U.S.-backed covert operatives had entered Iran to organize sabotage, car bombings, kidnappings and attacks on civilians, to collect targeting data and to foment anti-government ethnic-minority groups.

News articles have reported in recent months that the Pentagon has drawn up plans for a military blitz that would strike 10,000 targets in the first day of attacks. The aim is to destroy not just military targets but also airports, rail lines, highways, bridges, ports, communication centers, power grids, industrial centers, hospitals and public buildings.

It is important to understand internal developments in Iran today in order to understand why this country is the focus of such continued hatred by U.S. corporate power.

Every leading U.S. political figure has weighed in on the issue, from George W. Bush, who has the power to order strikes, to Hillary Clinton, who has made her support for an attack on Iran clear, to John McCain, who answered a reporter’s question on policy toward Iran by chanting “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ song, “Barbara Ann.” The media–from the New York Times to the Washington Post to banner headlines in the tabloid press to right-wing radio talk shows–are playing a role in preparing the public for an attack.

The significance of oil production and oil reserves in Iran is well known. Every news article, analysis or politician’s threat makes mention of Iran’s oil. But the impact of Iran’s nationalization of its oil resources is not well known.

It is hard for an outsider to get a grip on Venezuela, or the country’s President Hugo Chávez. Pick up a copy of the Financial Times , the Economist, the Independent, Wall Street Journal or the New York Times and you will be presented with a frightening vision of a “ranting populist demagogue” (In the words of a British former foreign-office minister, Denis MacShane), an anti-semite who has captured the hearts and purchased the support of hoards of irrational poor people while destroying the country’s economy.

In the United States, the rise of “authoritarianism” in Venezuela has led to progressive increases in funding allocated to the country’s “democracy promotion” agency the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), while the “security threat” posed by the country prompted the Bush administration to set up a special intelligence committee on Venezuela.

A cursory glance at the reports of the Inter American Press Association or NED-funded Reporters Without Borders reflects a country where freedom of speech is under threat and human rights under daily assault. The misiones, the Venezuelan government’s extensive package of social policy programmes are also subject to blistering criticism. Variously described by critics as a clientilist tool, indication of fiscal profligacy and / or an unsustainable welfare initiative generating a culture of dependency, this $6 billion programme has no redeeming features.

The view from Venezuela

Contrast this with opinion-poll surveys, election results and statistical information “on the ground”. Hugo Chávez was re-elected to the presidency in December 2006 with 1.7 million more votes than when he was first elected in December 1998. A March 2007 poll by Datanalisis shows that 64.7% of Venezuelans have a positive view of Chávez’s performance in office. Moreover, the majority of Venezuelans are optimistic and confident about the future and there is a high level of support for the new institutional and constitutional framework that the government has established.

According to Latinobarometro polling, the percentage of Venezuelans satisfied with their political system increased from 32% in 1998 to over 57% and Venezuelans are more politically active than the citizens of any other surveyed country – 47% discuss politics regularly (against a regional average of 26%) while 25% are active in a political party (the regional average is 9%). 56% believe that elections in the country are “clean”, (regional average 41%) and along with Uruguayans, Venezuelans express the highest percentage of confidence in elections as the most effective means of promoting change in the country (both 71%, compared to 57% for all of Latin America).

The economy is booming, country risk perceptions have fallen and despite the perception of antagonism, Venezuela remains north America’s second most important regional trading partner, and the twelfth largest in global terms. There is a vibrant new community media and a highly combative and antagonistic opposition controlled private-sector media – despite the much publicised dispute that was sparked in January 2007 over the licensing of opposition stalwart RCTV.

As for the misiones, nearly three-quarters of Venezuelans receive some form of state-sponsored health, education, housing assistance or food provision. Poverty and critical poverty are on a downward trend and the World Bank has acknowledged that: “Venezuela has achieved substantial improvements in the fight against poverty”.

Although critics have sniffed at the poverty reduction record – on the premise that high oil prices since 2003 should translate 2006 into an inevitable fall in poverty – the reductions achieved to date are a significant achievement given the critical situation Chávez inherited, the disastrous impact of opposition stoppages on the economy in 2001 and 2002, and the historical absence of state institutions capable of delivering welfare provision. In the Datanalisis survey of March 2007, the government’s performance in education, food and health service delivery received high approval ratings (68.8%, 64.7%, and 64.2% respectively) – and, to give a human touch to a favourable picture, a second Latinobarometro poll of regional perceptions found that Venezuela (along with Brazil) is viewed as the friendliest country among Latin Americans.

Is the information cited above an example of naïve “solidarity journalism”, an attempt to further embed new “myths” about the country by someone with no direct stake in the outcome?

Insights from the naïve

In one way or another, we all have a stake, direct or indirect, in the politics of Venezuela. That Venezuela’s citizens have such a manifestly different perception of their democracy than that held by external actors such as the United States and its National Endowment for Democracy is significant and important. The disconnect needs serious discussion, not least because it may illuminate why US “democracy promotion” is proving so counterproductive, anti-American sentiment so prevalent and, in Venezuela, why NED-backed groups are so reviled. If the misiones are delivering improvements in welfare and poverty reduction, then they merit detailed consideration. If there are lessons that can be learned from one, some or all of the misiones, they should not be discarded simply because of subjective prejudices toward Chávez or critiqued merely as a means of de-legitimising his government.

Engaged and balanced reporting, analysis and discussion has been required for a long time. It is even more necessary now given the acceleration of the Bolivarian revolution following the presidential election of December 2007.

Toward 21st-century socialism

Following his victory in the December 2006, Chávez unveiled plans to deepen the revolutionary agenda of the government. Central to this process is the concept of the “five motors” driving the country toward the model of “21st-century socialism” first outlined by Chávez in 2005. 21st-century socialism is seen as distinct from the “failed” Marxist experiments of the 20th century, it is strongly nationalist in influence – responding to the social and economic realities of Venezuela, and its elucidation reflects the evolution of Chávez’s thinking, away from an initial position exalting Tony Blair and the “third way” model and toward a new set of “socialist” ideas that emphasis cooperation, participation and organisation.

The five motors included: the granting of enabling powers to the executive – as a means of introducing reforms to the institutional and economic framework of the state; constitutional reform; educational reform; expansion of communal power and the creation of a new geometry of power, the latter intended to enhance the responsibilities and political importance of communal councils.

Communal councils are a vitally important element of this revolutionary deepening and planned restructuring of the state and constitution. The government has experimented with a variety of organisational forms as part of its quest to create a new model of “participatory democracy” and in response to the explosion of social organization across the country since 1999 (see Diana Raby, Democracy and Revolution: Latin America and Socialism Today, Pluto Press, 2006).

In 2006, legislation was introduced recognising community councils as a principle form of political organisation. The councils complement and bring coherence to the multiple networks of social organisations that deliver the misiones programmes and organise political activities, such as the water committees, land committees, health committees, electoral battle-units and endogenous development groups. Based on 200 to 400 families in urban areas and twenty to thirty in rural settings, the councils are governed by citizens’ assembles and their financial affairs overseen by public auditing processes. By the end of 2006, there were 16,000 communal councils across the country.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration has made the “war on terror” the centerpiece of its domestic and foreign policy. Bush cries terror where there is none – as in Iraq and in the communications of ordinary Americans. Meanwhile, he protects the real terrorists in our midst.

Luis Posada Carriles is a Cuban-born terrorist who has accurately been called the Osama bin Laden of the Western hemisphere. He boasted of helping to detonate deadly bombs in Havana hotels 10 years ago. Declassified FBI and CIA documents at the National Security Archive reveal that Posada was the mastermind of a 1976 bombing of a civilian Cuban airplane that killed 73 people. He escaped from a Venezuelan prison where he was being tried for his role in the first in-air bombing of a commercial airliner. Posada then played a central role in the illegal Iran-Contra scandal.

Posada entered the United States in March 2005 using false papers and was charged in El Paso with lying to Immigration and Customs officials. FBI agent Thomas Rice swore in a June 2005 affidavit that “the FBI is unable to rule out the possibility that Posada Carriles poses a threat to the national security of the United States.” Yet on April 19, 2007 Posada was released on bail despite being a flight risk.

This stranger-than-fiction story has a logical explanation. Posada has a long history of ties to the U.S. government. He became a CIA agent in 1961. The U.S. government claims his CIA service ended in 1976. But on April 30, Posada filed a motion in federal court declaring that he continued to work for the CIA for more than 25 years. That puts him on the CIA’s payroll when he engineered the terrorist airline bombing. In his motion, Posada asserted the right to present evidence of his CIA work as a defense to the perjury charges. The specter of Posada revealing the dirty deeds committed by the CIA when George H.W. Bush was director of the CIA was intolerable to Washington.

The government was caught between a rock and a hard place. There had been intense pressure to try Posada for his terrorist crimes, as required by Security Council resolution 1373 and three international treaties. Resolution 1373, passed in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, mandates that all countries deny safe haven to those who commit terrorist acts, and ensure that they are brought to justice. These provisions of resolution 1373 are mandatory, as they were adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. The treaties require the United States to extradite Posada to Venezuela for trial or try him in U.S. courts for offenses committed abroad. The Department of Justice elected instead to charge him with perjury for lying about how he entered the United States in 2005.

But the government could not take the risk that Posada might sing like a canary. On Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Kathleen Cardone dismissed all charges against Posada. In her ruling, Cardone wrote that “the Government engaged in fraud, deceit, and trickery” by using a “routine” immigration interview to investigate possible criminal charges against Posada. But questions about Posada’s prior criminal conduct were relevant to the moral character determination at the immigration interview. Posada is not a “routine” guy and his lawyer was present throughout the interview to protect him against self-incrimination. Cardone found the government’s tactics “grossly shocking and so outrageous as to violate the universal sense of justice.” She then disingenuously claimed, “This Court’s concern is not politics; it is the preservation of justice.”

It is shocking and outrageous that Luis Posada Carriles, whose crimes rival those of al Qaeda, is now walking free in Miami. And Cardone’s decision is deeply political.

Rep. William Delahunt has called for a congressional hearing to examine the U.S. government’s role in promoting impunity in the Posada case. Delahunt sent a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales requesting an explanation as to why the Justice Department did not invoke the USA Patriot Act to declare Posada a terrorist and detain him, stating, “The release of Mr. Posada puts into question our commitment to fight terrorism.”

That commitment is also belied by the way Washington has dealt with the Cuban Five. These men peacefully infiltrated criminal exile groups in Miami to prevent terrorism against Cuba. The Five turned over the results of their investigation to the FBI. But instead of working with Cuba to fight terrorism, the U.S. government arrested the five Cubans and tried and convicted them of conspiracy-related offenses. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta reversed their convictions, finding they could not receive a fair trial in Miami. In August 2006, a majority of the full circuit rejected the earlier ruling and sent the matter back to the panel where further appeals are pending. The U.S. media has been irresponsibly silent on the case of the Cuban Five and the irregularities of the trial.

The Los Angeles Times, however, showed singular insight on April 20 when it said the release of Posada “exposed Washington to legitimate charges of hypocrisy in the war on terror.” The editorial criticized the U.S. for holding men at Guantánamo without due process while releasing Posada. “The U.S. government has done many odd things in 46 years of a largely failed Cuba policy,” the Times said, “but letting a notorious terrorist walk stands among the most perverse yet.”

Patrick Cockburn has been hailed by Sidney Blumenthal in Salon as “one of the most accurate and intrepid journalists in Iraq.” And that’s hardly praise enough, given what the man has done. The Middle Eastern correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, he’s been on the spot from the moment when, in February 2003, he secretly crossed the Tigris River into Iraq just before the Bush administration launched its invasion.

Here, for instance, is a typical striking passage of his, written in May 2003, just weeks after Baghdad fell. If you read it then, you hardly needed the massive retrospective volumes like Thomas Rick’s Fiasco that took years to come out:

“[T]he civilian leadership of the Pentagon… are uniquely reckless, arrogant and ill informed about Iraq. At the end of last year [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz was happily saying that he thought the Iraqi reaction to the capture of Baghdad would be much like the entry of the U.S. Army into Paris in 1944. He also apparently believed that Ahmed Chalabi…, then as now one of the most unpopular men in Iraq, would be the Iraqi Charles de Gaulle.

“These past mistakes matter because the situation in Iraq could easily become much worse. Iraqis realize that Saddam may have gone but that the United States does not have real control of the country. Last week, just as a[n] emissary [from head of the U.S. occupation Paul Bremer] was telling academics at Mustansiriyah, the ancient university in the heart of Baghdad, who should be purged from their staff, several gunmen, never identified, drove up and calmly shot dead the deputy dean.”

How much worse it’s become can be measured by the two suicide bombs that went off at the same university a month apart early in 2007, killing not a single deputy dean but more than 100 (mostly female) students.

Or it can be measured by this telling little tidbit written in October 2003: “The most amazing achievement of six months of American occupation has been that it has even provoked nostalgia in parts of Iraq for Saddam. In Baiji, protesters were holding up his picture and chanting: ‘With our blood and with our spirit we will die for you Saddam.’ Who would have believed this when his statue was toppled just six months ago?”

Or by this description, written in the same month, which offers a vivid sense of why an insurgency really took off in that country:

“US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops… Asked how much his lost orchard was worth, Nusayef Jassim said in a distraught voice: ‘It is as if someone cut off my hands and you asked me how much my hands were worth.'”

Or by this singular detail from June 2004 that caught the essence of the lawlessness the U.S. occupation let loose: “Kidnap is now so common [that] new words have been added to Iraqi thieves’ slang. A kidnap victim is called al-tali or the sheep.”

Or this summary of the situation in May 2004, one year after Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech: “Saddam should not have been a hard act to follow. After 30 years of disastrous wars, Iraqis wanted a quiet life. All the Americans really needed to do was to get the relatively efficient Iraqi administration up and running again. Instead, they let the government dissolve, and have never successfully resurrected it. It has been one of the most extraordinary failures in history.”

Last September, typically, Cockburn travelled on his own to dangerous Diyala Province just as the fighting there was heating to a boil. He summed up the situation parenthetically, as well as symbolically, when he commented that Diyala was not a place “to make a mistake in map reading.”

Cockburn should gather in awards for guts, nerve, understanding, and just plain great war reporting. Before heading back to Iraq yet again, he put his years of reporting and observation together in an already classic book, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq, which no political library should be without. The following essay that he just wrote in Baghdad will be the introduction to the paperback edition of that book, when released this fall — and special thanks go to his publisher, Verso, for letting this site post it. Tom

AMSTERDAM, May 9 (Reuters) – A Dutch appeals court raised the prison sentence of a Dutch businessman to 17 years after confirming on Wednesday he was guilty of complicity in war crimes for selling chemicals to Iraq used in deadly gas attacks.

Frans Van Anraat was sentenced in 2005 to 15 years in prison for complicity in war crimes for supplying raw materials that were used to make poison gas by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1980-1988 war with Iran.

The poison gas was also used against Iraq’s own Kurdish population, including an attack on the town of Halabja in 1988 which killed an estimated 5,000 people.

Van Anraat had appealed against the sentence but the court turned down his appeal and increased the sentence by two years.

“The court decided to increase the jail sentence because Van Anraat committed these crimes several times, not just once, out of pure greed,” the spokeswoman for the appeals court in The Hague said.

In the appeals trial, prosecutors tried to raise charges of genocide against Van Anraat for the second time.

Van Anraat was acquitted of genocide charges in 2005, and the court acquitted him again, because it could not be proven he knew exactly how the chemicals would be used, a spokeswoman said.

An Iraqi prosecutor last December showed the court trying Saddam an internal memo from the president’s office which praised van Anraat for supplying Iraq “with rare and banned chemical weapons.”

In a magazine interview in 2003, van Anraat admitted to supplying the chemicals but denied knowing they were destined for Iraq and that they would be used to make poison gas.

On a recent trip to the hardware store I was looking over the mill files which hung right beside the display of hammers. A fellow was examining the hammers intently. I fell to musing about us moderns and our tools. Here were dozens of different types of hammers the products of modern metallurgy and manufacturing processes. Haven’t we come to a place of knowledge and sophistication in human history that would be the envy of our forebearers? After all, what would a person from 20,000 years ago make of this display of hammers? Would he not be amazed and embarrassed at our capability and knowledge compared with his own?

I most certainly doubt it.

When called upon to apply his mettle to a real and substantial endeavor, Oomog would have taken out his hammer stone. Dipping into the same tool pouch, we moderns invariably come up with the only tool we really have …. money. Our supposed skills as it turns out have nothing whatever to do with the real world, they cannot solve real problems. Instead if we are hungry, bored, in want of clothes, shelter, transport, you name it, the only tool we have with which to procure it is money.

A letter came from Et Ux’s Alma Mater. On the outside of the envelope it was stamped We need your help!!. Affecting Johnny Carson’s old routine of the Great Karnak, I held the envelope to my head and psychically read the contents. They wanted ‘help’, eh? Volunteer to teach a class, cook in the cafeteria, mow the grass, paint the dorm? No. They wanted money. Just that.