The Rag Blog

MUNICH: Russian President Vladimir Putin, in one of his harshest attacks on the United States in seven years in power, accused Washington on Saturday of attempting to force its will on the world.

In a speech in Germany, that one US senator said smacked of Cold War rhetoric, Putin accused the United States of making the world a more dangerous place by pursuing policies aimed at making it “one single master”.

Attacking the concept of a “unipolar” world in which the United States was the sole superpower, he said: “What is a unipolar world? No matter how we beautify this term it means one single centre of power, one single centre of force and one single master.”

“It has nothing in common with democracy because that is the opinion of the majority taking into account the minority opinion,” he told the gathering of top security and defence officials.

“People are always teaching us democracy but the people who teach us democracy don’t want to learn it themselves,” he said.

The Kremlin has for several weeks been dropping hints that Putin, who steps down next year after two terms in power, was preparing a major foreign policy speech that would point the way for his successor.

Its delivery at the prestigious annual Munich meeting on security was clearly aimed at attracting maximum attention.

“The message I got from his speech was that Putin wants Russia to have the same position in the world as the former Soviet Union,” a senior European official said.

Putin spoke against a background of increasing Russian agitation over US policy on Iraq, and on the Iran and North Korea nuclear issues, as well as growing self-confidence as an emerging energy superpower.

02/10/07 “Tomdispatch” — — It has once again become fashionable for the dwindling supporters of President Bush’s futile war in Iraq to stress the danger of “Islamo-fascism” and the supposed drive by followers of Osama bin Laden to establish a monolithic, Taliban-like regime — a “Caliphate” — stretching from Gibraltar to Indonesia. The President himself has employed this term on occasion over the years, using it to describe efforts by Muslim extremists to create “a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom.” While there may indeed be hundreds, even thousands, of disturbed and suicidal individuals who share this delusional vision, the world actually faces a far more substantial and universal threat, which might be dubbed: Energo-fascism, or the militarization of the global struggle over ever-diminishing supplies of energy.

Unlike Islamo-fascism, Energo-fascism will, in time, affect nearly every person on the planet. Either we will be compelled to participate in or finance foreign wars to secure vital supplies of energy, such as the current conflict in Iraq; or we will be at the mercy of those who control the energy spigot, like the customers of the Russian energy juggernaut Gazprom in Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia; or sooner or later we may find ourselves under constant state surveillance, lest we consume more than our allotted share of fuel or engage in illicit energy transactions. This is not simply some future dystopian nightmare, but a potentially all-encompassing reality whose basic features, largely unnoticed, are developing today.

These include:

• The transformation of the U.S. military into a global oil protection service whose primary mission is to defend America’s overseas sources of oil and natural gas, while patrolling the world’s major pipelines and supply routes.
• The transformation of Russia into an energy superpower with control over Eurasia’s largest supplies of oil and natural gas and the resolve to convert these assets into ever increasing political influence over neighboring states.
• A ruthless scramble among the great powers for the remaining oil, natural gas, and uranium reserves of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia, accompanied by recurring military interventions, the constant installation and replacement of client regimes, systemic corruption and repression, and the continued impoverishment of the great majority of those who have the misfortune to inhabit such energy-rich regions.
• Increased state intrusion into, and surveillance of, public and private life as reliance on nuclear power grows, bringing with it an increased threat of sabotage, accident, and the diversion of fissionable materials into the hands of illicit nuclear proliferators.

02/11/07 “The Independent” — — There was unprecedented élite condemnation of the plans to invade Iraq. Sensible analysts were able to perceive that the enterprise carried significant risks for US interests, however conceived. Phrases thrown in by the official Presidential Directive from the standard boilerplate about freedom that accompany every action, and are close to a historical universal, were dismissed as meaningless by reasonable people. Global opposition was utterly overwhelming, and the likely costs to the US were apparent, though the catastrophe created by the invasion went far beyond anyone’s worst expectations. It’s amusing to watch the lying as the strongest supporters of the war try to deny what they very clearly said.

On the US motives for staying in Iraq, I can only repeat what I’ve been saying for years. A sovereign Iraq, partially democratic, could well be a disaster for US planners. With a Shia majority, it is likely to continue improving relations with Iran. There is a Shia population right across the border in Saudi Arabia, bitterly oppressed by the US-backed tyranny. Any step towards sovereignty in Iraq encourages activism there for human rights and a degree of autonomy – and that happens to be where most of Saudi oil is.

Sovereignty in Iraq might well lead to a loose Shia alliance controlling most of the world’s petroleum resources and independent of the US, undermining a primary goal of US foreign policy since it became the world-dominant power after the Second World War. Worse yet, though the US can intimidate Europe, it cannot intimidate China, which blithely goes its own way, even in Saudi Arabia, the jewel in the crown – the primary reason why China is considered a leading threat. An independent energy bloc in the Gulf area is likely to link up with the China-based Asian Energy Security Grid and Shanghai Cooperation Council, with Russia (which has its own huge resources) as an integral part, and with the Central Asian states (already members), possibly India. Iran is already associated with them, and a Shia-dominated bloc in the Arab states might well go along. All of that would be a nightmare for US planners and their Western allies.

There are, then, very powerful reasons why the US and UK are likely to try in every possible way to maintain effective control over Iraq. The US is not constructing a palatial embassy, by far the largest in the world and virtually a separate city within Baghdad, and pouring money into military bases, with the intention of leaving Iraq to Iraqis. All of this is quite separate from the expectations that matters can be arranged so that US corporations profit from the vast riches of Iraq.

These topics, though high on the agenda of planners, are not within the realm of discussion, as can easily be determined. That is only to be expected. These considerations violate the fundamental doctrine that state power has noble objectives, and while it may make terrible blunders, it can have no crass motives and is not influenced by domestic concentrations of private power. Any questioning of these Higher Truths is either ignored or bitterly denounced, also for good reasons: allowing them to be discussed could undermine power and privilege.

SEATTLE – Former U.S. Attorney John McKay said his resignation was ordered by the Bush administration without explanation seven months after he received a favorable job evaluation.

“I was ordered to resign as U.S. attorney on Dec. 7 by the Justice Department,” McKay said Wednesday in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C. “I was given no explanation. I certainly was told of no performance issues.”

McKay, who had led the Justice Department’s Western Washington office, previously said only that he was resigning because it was time for him to move on.

His comments came one day after Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty acknowledged to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Justice Department had fired seven U.S. attorneys in the West in the past year, most of them for “performance-related” reasons he would not divulge.

The dismissals have been heavily criticized by Democratic lawmakers and others.

“John McKay has worked diligently for our region and it is deeply disconcerting that he could have been let go for political reasons,” said Sen. Patty Murray (news, bio, voting record), D-Wash.

Robert Lasnik, the chief federal judge for the Western District of Washington, said he and fellow judges could not understand the firing and were dismayed that the Justice Department implied there was anything wrong with McKay’s performance.

“This is unanimous among the judges: John McKay was a superb U.S. attorney,” Lasnik said. “For the Justice Department to suggest otherwise is just not fair.”

Recall, back in May of 2004, a superficially contrite New York Times editorial staff admitting it published “questionable” information about claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, information that ultimately paved the way for the slaughter of 650,000 Iraqis.

In an rather unconvincing and apparently obligatory mea culpa, the editors shifted blame for publishing this blatantly false and obvious propaganda, more accurately described as neocon spawned fairy tales, to convicted embezzler Ahmad Chalabi and “a circle of Iraqi informants,” refusing to admit they were used as a propaganda tool by the neocons, described merely as “hard-liners within the Bush administration,” not psychopathic warmongers. “We consider the story of Iraq’s weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight,” the newspaper concluded.

Of course, the New York Times didn’t really mean it, as “unfinished business” would necessitate sweeping out the rogues and neocon agents ensconced deeply within its editorial offices. One such rogue is Michael R. Gordon, “the same Times reporter who, on his own, or with Judith Miller, wrote some of the key, and badly misleading or downright inaccurate, articles about Iraqi WMDs in the run-up to the 2003 invasion,” notes Greg Mitchell, writing for Editor and Publisher.

Recall Gordon’s absurd claim, following Colin Powell’s theatrical dog and pony show held before the gathered at the United Nations in the orchestrated lead-up mass murder in Iraq, “it will be difficult for skeptics to argue that Washington’s case against Iraq is based on groundless suspicions and not intelligence information.” As we now know, and some of us knew at the time, Powell’s evidence was little more than a donkey cart of steaming dung, rolled out into the public arena, offered as gospel truth, thus straining credulity, at least for those of us who recognized the stench immediately.

Gordon is at it again. “The Bush administration is expected to make public this weekend some of what intelligence agencies regard as an increasing body of evidence pointing to an Iranian link, including information gleaned from Iranians and Iraqis captured in recent American raids on an Iranian office in Erbil and another site in Baghdad,” the seasoned propagandist is allowed to write.

MediaAs Glenn Greenwald points out, the NY Times has apparently regressed to pre-Iraq stenographer mode when it comes to reportage about Iran. Witness today’s front page headline:

Deadliest Bomb in Iraq Is Made by Iran, U.S. Says

It is painfully clear that any headline asserting that the “U.S. Says” anything at all should be greeted with a very healthy dose of skepticism.

It was none other than the Times that treated us to these pre-Iraq war beauties:

U.S. Says Iraq Retools Rockets For Illicit Uses (March 10, 2003, Cushman & Weisman)

U.S. Says Iraqi Indicated Atom Project Is Continuing (December 10, 2002, Sanger)

Michael Gordon, the reporter whose story ran today, co-authored this gem with Judith Miller on Sept. 8, 2002:

U.S. SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS

Many such stories refer to “administration officials,” “military officers,” “intelligence sources” or “intelligence officials.” Anonymity was often granted because the matter was classified or the source was not authorized to discuss it. (Of course, one might argue the source needs anonymity because the bullshit s/he’s peddling is a flat-out lie and s/he doesn’t want to get caught in it, but that’s another story.)

NEW YORK — New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller today announced that the paper’s longtime staff writer Michael Gordon is not an actual person, but rather a voice-activated tape recorder.

“I’m not sure why everyone didn’t figure this out before now,” said Keller, pointing to the fact that, in Gordon’s 26-year career, all of “his” stories have consisted entirely of transcribed statements by anonymous government officials.

According to Jill Abramson, the paper’s Managing Editor, Gordon was purchased for $27.95 at a Radio Shack on West 43rd Street. Describing the situation as “a prank” that had “gotten slightly out of hand,” Abramson said the paper had decided to acknowledge Gordon’s identity because—after the tape recorder’s front page story today, “Deadliest Bomb in Iraq Is Made by Iran, U.S. Says”—there “was no place left to take the joke.”

Keller described how he and Abramson “really had a good laugh” while editing the Iran story, which is based on the following sourcing:

U.S. Says…United States intelligence asserts…reflects broad agreement among American intelligence agencies…civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies provided…military officials say…The officials said…The assessment was described in interviews over the past several weeks with American officials…Administration officials said…according to the intelligence…According to American intelligence…Some American intelligence experts believe…they assert…notes a still-classified American intelligence report…a senior administration official said…according to Western officials…Officials said…An American intelligence assessment described to The New York Times said…Other officials believe…American military officers say…American officials say…According to American intelligence agencies…Assessments by American intelligence agencies say…Marine officials say…American intelligence agencies are concerned…Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week.

“You can’t deny that’s funny,” said Keller, adding that the lack of skepticism displayed by Gordon was “literally inhuman.” Keller and Abramson asserted that the Iran article is “even more hilarious” than Gordon’s 2002 stories on Iraq’s purported nuclear program, written with Judith Miller.

Crimes Listed by the Nuremberg Standard of 1947: a war of aggression, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for its accomplishment; murder or ill-treatment of civilian populations in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war; plunder of public or private property; wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity; crimes against humanity such as murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war.

Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Fallujah, the rape of Lebanon, the concentration camps in the West Bank and Gaza, clandestine prisons, the Iraq embargo of the 1990s, Halliburton, and Black Water. There are more, but these will suffice to compare against the Nuremberg Standard. It will not be a difficult task. For example, start with Halliburton and the plunder of public (American taxpayers’) property.

How many of you recognize the name of Army Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, Jr.?

I do because he and I stood on and flew over the same ground nearly 40 years ago. Like him, I left a little blood and a lot of sweat in a Godforsaken place halfway around the world, earning four battle stars in 11 months. Plus some cheap tin and ribbon medals made even cheaper by the good friends who never came home with me. Thompson did, too.

Hugh was a helicopter pilot who aimed his guns at American soldiers–members of my brigade — to keep them from slaughtering civilians in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai 4. Spotting massacred civilians around My Lai, Thompson and his two-man crew landed beside wounded civilians to give medical help as the infantry company commander and others present kept shooting the wounded. Thompson ordered his crew to open fire if the slaughter continued. No more civilians were shot.

Thompson’s story is critical because the march to a nuclear war against Iran has begun, and YOU will the ones carrying it out. There is no way to effectively “confront” Iran except with tactical nuclear weapons. Tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children will die outright or suffer lingering deaths from horrible radiation sicknesses. It will be murder, pure and simple. Look at the suffering around you and multiply it by hundreds.

No doubt you know that back home, 80 per cent of the American people voted in the last election to end the Iraq debacle, but no one in Washington listened. Our two-faced media watchdogs are a gaggle of neocon propaganda peddlers, corporate whores and New World Order shills who helped orchestrate and cheerlead the slaughter, and they sneer at your patriotism behind your backs.

The offer of a ceasefire by one of the main Sunni insurgent groups will be received with interest in Washington. But there is scant chance it will be accepted by the Bush administration as a serious basis for a negotiated exit from Iraq – or that such talks are even practical amid the current chaos in the country.

Feelers between the two sides are not new. Over the past two years, as the depth and scope of the insurgency grew, reports surfaced of back-channel contacts between US military representatives and the insurgents – including the “1920 Revolution Brigade”, a wing of the Islamic Resistance Movement that is behind the latest offer.

Details of the talks, never officially confirmed by the US, were sketchy. But insurgent leaders were said to have been willing to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force, as the US forces pulled out. Then as now, however, Washington refused to accept anything resembling a fixed timetable for a pull-out.

The goal of the US in these talks was to detach home-grown insurgents – the “deadenders” from the fallen regime of Saddam Hussein, as the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld once called them – from the foreign fighters who had joined the war against the occupiers, above all al-Qa’ida. But while Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qa’ida commander in Iraq, was killed by the US in June 2006, insurgent attacks on US troops have continued and, if anything, become more sophisticated.

The new offer has some points acceptable to the US, notably the involvement of the UN and the Arab League in any deal. But the US would be required to sit down publicly with “terrorists”. Implicitly, too, it would be siding against the Shia-dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki, to which the Bush administration is still committed.

It took an astonishingly stupid bomb scare in my town last week to really make me feel old for the first time.

“Old” isn’t the proper word, I guess, since I am only midway through my 30s. I live in Boston, temporary home to nearly one million students from September to June every year, and so I am surrounded by kids all the time. I used to teach high school English to roomfuls of teenagers. Neither of these things made me feel old. The now-infamous Lite-Brite Bomb Fiasco of 2007 that unspooled here last week didn’t make me feel old either, so much as it made me feel out of touch, for the first time, with those who are ten or fifteen years younger than me.

The gulf between my feelings and thoughts that day, and the feelings and thoughts of the twenty-somethings I talked to about it afterward, could not have been wider. Not to put too fine a point on it, that whole thing scared the almighty cheese out of me. The reports started coming in around noon – “suspicious items” that had “wires” and “electronics,” which were found strapped to critical infrastructure all over the city, according to the news media – and for a few hours, I entertained the possibility that my darkest fears were becoming a reality.

My fears were inspired by all the stuff I’ve been trying to telegraph to people for the last several years. This Iraq occupation, I’ve been arguing since the fall of 2002, will inspire more terrorism. A ten year old girl in Baghdad gets blown sideways out of her kitchen, a mother gets blasted in a sectarian street-battle in Fallujah, a father has menstrual blood smeared on his face in a cement cage in Abu Ghraib by leering US troops looking to humiliate those of his faith, a son gets shot by a US sniper in Najaf … and the families of those people are going to pick up a gun and volunteer to die that they might kill.

Combine this manufacture of terrorists with the legal aftermath of 9/11, the evaporation of Constitutional protections put in place “for our safety,” and the rancid motivations of those in power, and you have a recipe for catastrophe. The terrorists we are manufacturing in Iraq are not going to the beach, or heading off to a camping trip at the local KOA. Play the tape to the end, and one has to operate under the assumption that, sooner or later, they are going to show up here. If and when they do, they will not need to take down buildings to create mayhem.

A few hand grenades at a mall in Duluth, a car bomb in St. Louis, or a few bridges blown up in Boston, and that’s the ball game. We will see a declaration of “Red Alert,” which is martial law, the suspension of habeas corpus, the suspension of posse comitatus, and the end of the rule of Constitutional law in America. This great experiment in government of, by and for the people, with all its flaws and all its strengths, will be shelved, and a great light will be, perhaps forever, extinguished.

That is what I thought I was watching here in Boston last week. The places they were finding these items – a main railway bridge, an overpass on the city’s main highway, the hospital a few scant blocks from my apartment – are precisely the kind of soft targets that, if destroyed, would create chaos. Attacking infrastructure is one of the oldest and most effective tactics of warfare, and here it was in my neighborhood, or so I feared. I thought I was watching the Last Day, and it sickened me in a place within that words cannot touch.

This was not, of course, the case. Once images of those stupid little cartoon things made it to television screens, I was able to relax. When it came out that the whole mess was an advertising campaign for a cartoon, I thought my brain was going to leap out of my skull. The rest of the country saw those things and had a hearty laugh at our expense, especially the twenty-somethings who recognized it immediately.

So, was my fear an over-reaction? It is easy to say so in hindsight. How can anyone think one of those Lite-Brite things was a bomb? Easy. You spend a few hours watching the TV news people natter about “wiring” and “electronics” and things strapped to bridges and hospitals, but you’re not shown the actual items by those same news people. It was hours before I saw what they were talking about, and in that simple fact, we find one of the central afflictions of our wretched estate.