The Rag Blog

While there are deep and divisive fissures across the political spectrum over how to combat terrorism, there is a surprising level of agreement as to its cause. “We fight against poverty because hope is an answer to terror,” George W. Bush told an audience in Mexico in 2002. “Today, billions of people live on the knife’s edge of survival, trapped in a struggle against ignorance, poverty, and disease. Their misery is a breeding ground for the hatred peddled by bin Laden and other merchants of death,” Howard Dean declared during his 2004 presidential run. Kim Dae Jung, the former dissident who became the president of South Korea and won the Nobel Peace Prize, agrees: “At the bottom of terrorism is poverty.” And the editors of the New York Times, arguing that reducing duties on exports from Pakistan can play a significant role in the war on terrorism, wrote in 2004, “Economics cannot be separated from national security. Young Pakistanis who can’t get jobs in factories that export to America sometimes go to training camps to learn how to kill Americans.”

The alleged ringleader of a much vaunted plot to blow up multiple transatlantic airliners using liquid explosives has been cleared of terrorism charges and of being a member of any terrorist group, rendering August’s terror scare another hyped creation of government scare mongering.

Gates unlikely to rein in Pentagon on intelligenceFrom reuters: Robert Gates is unlikely to rein in the Pentagon’s controversial post-September 11 expansion into intelligence, despite concerns the U.S. military is ill-suited for espionage outside the battlefield, experts say.

But Gates, the former CIA director who will be sworn in as defense secretary on Monday, could help heal a rift between the Pentagon and civilian intelligence agencies caused by the confrontational tactics of his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld.

“You’re going to have a real change in tone at the top, and the watchword will be ‘practicality,”‘ said Robert Grenier, former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.

Well-known for his zeal for cooperation, Gates will make good on a public pledge to support U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte, whose 20-month-old office oversees 16 agencies, including several that are operated by the Defense Department.

“I anticipate generally smooth relations between military and civilian intelligence with Gates as secretary of defense,” said former CIA acting Director John McLaughlin…

Even a worm can turn, as appears from the obvious willingness of Mr Blair to begin to understand the need for his Neocon masters to talk politely to both Iran and Syria if they wish to reach any kind of solution to the problems created in Iraq by their illegal and downright stupid war and invasion.

Mr Bush’s former speech-write, Mr David Frum, has spoken on BBC Radio to say that there is no necessary link between the ongoing crisis in the Holy Land and the other difficulties in the Near and Middle East, but his views are as straight as the corkscrew which presumably inspired him to invent the famous bent axis. We have to remember that this bent axis linked together strictly secular Syria, rigidly Shia Islamic Iran and Stalinist North Korea, and clearly pleased Mr Bush, whose misuse of words is notorious, as is his failure to understand even simple expressions couched in the English language.

Mr Bush, from what we saw and heard on our television sets, seems to have gone into a pathological state of denial as to the need at least to pay full attention to what we know as the Baker report and to its suggestions.

We are told that the result of the audience granted by Mr Bush on Thursday to his Scottish lackey is that Mr Blair will now go to the Near and Middle East notionally to restart the Palestine Peace Process, but it is extremely difficult to see what such a man can do. He has no credibility as an “honest broker”, since he has since the beginning been closely linked to the plotting of the invasion of Iraq, and he has always given support to successive Zionist governments, including the present one under the former Gauleiter of Jerusalem.

Israel’s needs and perspectives have guided peace proposals by western negotiators. The biased direction impedes Middle East peace. An example of this bias is British Prime Minister (PM) Tony Blair categorization of Hamas’ refusal to recognize Israel. The British PM emphasized his difficulties with Hamas’ position at his December 7 meeting with President George W. Bush.

“You cannot have a government that everyone can deal with – and you can then negotiate a peace with between Israel and Palestine – unless it is on the basis that everyone accepts the others’ right to exist. That is the difficulty. It is not a kind of technical point. It is absolutely at the heart of it.”

Tony Blair and other western leaders have refused to examine the historical record that prompted the remarks by Hamas leadership and have misled the public in their interpretations of Hamas’ stance.

It has been well known, but only recently revealed by the conventional media, that Israel’s maps, textbooks and declarations to its people show all of the West Bank as part of a “greater Israel.” Peace Now, an Israeli advocacy group has also revealed to all, what has been previously known by many, that 39% (only 39%) of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank have been constructed on privately held Palestinian lands. Add to these inciting reports, the Israeli occupation, the daily killings of Palestinians, destruction of their trees and crops, interference in their daily life and construction of the separation wall that strangles the Palestinian economy, and then have Tony Blair, who should know all of these particulars, ask himself the questions:

Why would Hamas recognize a nation that already claims Hamas’ lands? Wouldn’t Hamas feel that recognition of Israel would be a concession that Israel’s polices towards the Palestinians have been correct? Why would Hamas legitimize Israel’s policies?

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh has not said ‘Hamas will not recognize Israel’s right to exist.” He has said that his “Hamas-led government will never recognize Israel and will continue to fight for the liberation of Jerusalem.” The more exact quote creates a different prospect for negotiations than Blair’s outlook proposes:

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration warned Wednesday against threats by terrorist groups and other nations against U.S. commercial and military satellites, and discounted the need for a treaty aimed at preventing an arms race in space.

Undersecretary of State Robert G. Joseph also reasserted U.S. policy that it has a right to use force against hostile nations or terror groups that might try to attack American satellites or ground installations that support space programs. President Bush adopted a new U.S. space policy earlier this year.

“We reserve the right to defend ourselves against hostile attacks and interference with our space assets,” Joseph said in prepared remarks to the George C. Marshall Institute.

Joseph, the senior arms control official at the State Department, said nations cannot all be counted on to use space purely for peaceful purposes.

“A number of countries are exploring and acquiring capabilities to counter, attack, and defeat U.S. space systems,” Joseph said

He also said terrorists “understand our vulnerabilities and have targeted our economy in the past, as they did on 9/11.” He said terrorists and enemy states might view the U.S. space program as “a highly lucrative target,” while sophisticated technologies could improve their ability to interfere with U.S. space systems and services.

Remember Watergate? I sure do. I lived through the entire sorted mess. But yesterday a particularly chilling image from those days returned to haunt my imagination. It was at the height of the crisis. Nixon, hunkered down in the Oval Office, buzzed his secretary and asked for his chief of staff, Al Haig.

When Haig walked in Nixon thrust a pill bottle at him. It was Valium. A frustrated Nixon asked Haig to open it for him. The bottle had a child-proof cap Nixon could not dislodge. As Haig went to open the bottle he noticed the cap had been nearly chewed off.

I always considered that moment — an American president, the most powerful person on earth, in emotional free fall and desperately chewing the cap of tranquilizer bottle — the most frightening image of my life. That is, until this week.

This week I saw that look again. It was the look Richard Nixon had just weeks before the Valium bottle incident. It’s hard to describe, but unmistakable — an unsettling combination of nonsensical defiance, confusion, Captain Queeg-like paranoia with a dash of self-pity.

I saw that look in George W. Bush’s face twice this week. The first time was during his Wednesday morning photo-op with the members of the Baker/Hamilton Commission. The best way to describe Bush’s manner is that he seemed untethered from what everyone else in the nation considered a momentous moment. He lacked even appropriate voice inflection, delivering disjointed and rambling comments in a monotone. His comments were so bland and generic he might as well have been responding to a report from a local Rotary Club on the importance of good street lighting fighting street crime.

It should come as no surprise that cellphone calls may be tapped by law enforcement.

But authorities also can use cellphones to eavesdrop on suspects, even when the devices are off.

The FBI converted the Nextel cellphones of two alleged New York mobsters into “roving bugs,” microphones that relayed conversations when the phones seemed to be inactive, according to recent court documents.

Authorities won’t reveal how they did this. But a countersurveillance expert said Nextel, Motorola Razr and Samsung 900 series cellphones can be reprogrammed over the air, using methods meant for delivering upgrades and maintenance. It’s called “flashing the firmware,” said James Atkinson, a consultant for the Granite Island Group in Massachusetts.

“These are very powerful phones, but all that power comes with a price. By allowing ring tones and stock quotes and all this other stuff, you also give someone a way to get into your phones,” Atkinson said.

Privacy advocates called such use of roving bugs intrusive and illegal. Webcams and microphones on home computers soon may be fair game for remote-control gumshoes, too, they said.

Antonia Juhasz is a visiting scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time (Regan, HarperCollins Publishers, 2006). She lives in San Francisco.

The Iraq Study Group Report offers a few important recommendations that will help address problems with the U.S. reconstruction debacle in Iraq. However, the Report thoroughly misses the mark on identifying the sources of failure—U.S. corporations and the Bush administration, and therefore the best way to solve the situation, which is to end the U.S. corporate invasion of Iraq.

The Report correctly notes that basic services in Iraq are still provided below or just hovering around prewar levels and that in Baghdad and other particularly war-ravaged areas, the situation is far worse.

The Report also correctly cites the Bush administration’s decision—executed by L. Paul Bremer, head of the former Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq—to fire 120,000 of Iraq’s highest-ranking government bureaucrats from every ministry as one obvious reason for this failure. However, the Report attributes the bulk of the blame to Iraqi government corruption and sectarian bias in the distribution of services and a failed Iraqi judiciary. While each of these critiques may be accurate, they are beyond the purview of the United States to correct. Well within our purview, however, are the past and future actions of our corporations and our government.