Myths can be innocuous enough, providing pleasure and comfort to believers, for instance, the Jesus birth stories that are celebrated at Christmas or the legends of Abraham and Moses conveying God’s promised land to the Israelites.
But myths can have a darker side when they are embraced as religious or ideological truths. A millennium ago, Christian Crusaders slaughtered tens of thousands of Muslims to secure the Holy Land for Christian pilgrims, and even today many Israeli Jews resist compromises for peace because of the legends contained in the Torah, or Old Testament.
Other Judeo-Christian myths have contributed to horrendous bloodshed. The crucifixion story in one gospel – that of John – shifted blame for the killing of Jesus from the Romans to his fellow Jews, contributing to centuries of vicious anti-Semitism culminating in the Holocaust. Most likely, John’s story reflected a religious rivalry between early Christians and Jews and was a bid to appease the Romans by lessening their role.
Similarly, over the past century, Zionists who advocated a Jewish homeland in ancient Israel exploited the myth of the Diaspora, the supposed Roman dispersal of Jews from the Holy Land to be scattered throughout Europe. The Diaspora justified the return of European Jews to their “original” home, thus correcting a historical injustice.
However, research by Israeli historian Shlomo Sand and others indicates that the Diaspora never happened, that the vast majority of European Jews originated from the religious conversion of large tribes in Eastern Europe and Northern Africa more than a millennium ago, not from some mass exodus organized by the Romans after Jewish uprisings almost two millennia ago.
The research further suggests that most of the original Israelites remained in the Middle East. They either created strong Jewish communities across the region or converted to Islam. In other words, the Palestinians who have been displaced by the modern state of Israel were likely the descendants of the ancient Israelites, not the European Jews who emigrated after World War II.
In that way, when history replaces myth, powerful narratives can change – shifting the sense of right and wrong, often bestowing greater humanity on a persecuted people, whether the Arabs killed by the Crusaders, the Jews persecuted in Europe, or the Palestinians displaced from their land.
Modern Myths
There also have been modern myths used to justify political decisions, whether on a grand scale or more narrowly.
For instance, grand theories about American “exceptionalism” have rationalized U.S. imperial interventions around the world, wars and covert actions that would have been condemned as aggression or even terrorism if carried out by some other nation.
A smaller myth, George W. Bush’s “successful surge” in Iraq, contributed to President Barack Obama following a similar surge strategy in Afghanistan.
Though the “successful surge” myth in Iraq is now a cherished conventional wisdom in Washington, the actual evidence of why Iraqi violence declined points to many other reasons – some predating President Bush’s 2007 order to send in more than 20,000 additional troops. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Explaining the Drop in Iraqi War Dead” and “Obama Pleases the Neocons.”]
Another Afghan-related myth is the hard lesson supposedly learned from the U.S. abandonment of Afghanistan immediately after the Soviets departed in February 1989. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has cited that experience – popularized in the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War” – to explain why the Obama administration must now stick it out there.
Accompanying Gates on a recent trip to Afghanistan, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd described how “Gates promised that America would not repeat its disappearing act of 1989. Flying from Kabul to Iraq, I asked him if … he was driven to war because of guilt at abandoning people we had promised to stand by.
“‘I don’t feel guilt about it, but we made a strategic mistake,’ he said. ‘And it wasn’t just the Afghans. At almost the same time, we basically cut off our relationship with the Pakistanis. And the mistrust that exists today is a reflection of that action on our part.’” [NYT, Dec. 15, 2009]
However, as Gates well knows, there was no sudden disappearing act. Indeed, as the Soviets began pulling out in 1988, Gates – as deputy CIA director – was in the middle of policy discussions about what to do next.
The State Department was open to working with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev who favored a negotiated settlement to the war, followed by a coalition government involving remnants of the communist regime of President Najibullah and representatives of the U.S.-backed mujahedeen.
However, Gates championed the CIA faction that wanted to rebuff Gorbachev and rely on the mujahedeen to quickly wipe out Najibullah.
‘Strung Up’
At the time, I was a Newsweek correspondent covering intelligence issues and I asked some CIA officials why the United States wasn’t willing to just collect its winnings from the Soviet withdrawal and help patch Afghanistan back up as best they could.
One CIA hardliner responded to my question with disgust. “We want to see Najibullah strung up by a light pole,” he snapped.
Gates was on the inside pushing a CIA analysis that Najibullah’s government would fall promptly once the Soviets left, which their final combat units did on Feb. 15, 1989.
By then, Gates had moved from CIA to be President George H.W. Bush’s deputy national security adviser — and Gates’s position carried the day.
Instead of collaborating with Gorbachev on a peace initiative or simply cutting off U.S. covert aid once the original goal of a Soviet withdrawal had been achieved, Bush signed a new finding that justified a continued war on behalf of Afghan “self-determination.”
In the authoritative book on the Afghan conflict, Ghost Wars, author Steve Coll wrote that “throughout 1989, the CIA pumped yet more arms, money, food, and humanitarian supplies into the Paktia border regions where the Arabs [Osama bin Laden’s group] were building up their strength.”
With the CIA determined to oust Najibullah from power, U.S. officials also continued to press Saudi Arabia to continue its massive investment in the Afghan conflict. Only gradually did Congress reduce the level of U.S. funding, though it remained substantial more than a year after the Soviets left.
“For the period from October 1989 through October 1990, Congress cut its secret allocation for the CIA’s covert Afghan program by about 60 percent, to $280 million,” Coll wrote. “Saudi intelligence, meanwhile, provided $435 million from the kingdom’s official treasury and another $100 million from the private resources of various Saudi and Kuwaiti princes. Saudi and Kuwaiti funding continued to increase during the first seven months of 1990, bettering the CIA’s contribution.”
Misjudgment
Contrary to Gates’s expectation, however, the Najibullah government didn’t fall easily. Using its Soviet weapons and advisers, Najibullah’s regime beat back a mujahedeen offensive in 1990. Najibullah hung on – and the war, the violence and the disorder continued ripping Afghanistan apart.
Gates finally recognized that his CIA rapid-collapse analysis was wrong. In his memoir, From the Shadows, he acknowledged that the State Department’s analysis predicting a more resilient Najibullah army had proved correct.
Yet, by the time George H.W. Bush’s administration recognized that Gates and the CIA hardliners were wrong, it was too late to work with Gorbachev on a negotiated settlement. He was struggling to survive a challenge from communist hardliners before the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991 and Boris Yeltsin rose to power.
In his memoir, Gates revealed that he was well aware that the United States did not immediately abandon the Afghan cause once the Soviet troops left in February 1989.
“Najibullah would remain in power for another three years [after the Soviet pull-out], as the United States and the USSR continued to aid their respective sides,” Gates wrote. “On Dec. 11, 1991, both Moscow and Washington cut off all assistance, and Najibullah’s government fell four months later. He had outlasted both Gorbachev and the Soviet Union itself.”
[By the way, Gates and the CIA analytical division that he helped politicize also missed the collapse of the Soviet Union.]
Najibullah’s belated fall in 1992 may have brought an end to the communist regime, but it didn’t stop the war.
The capital of Kabul came under the control of a relatively moderate rebel force led by Ahmad Shah Massoud, an Islamist but not a fanatic. However, Massoud, a Tajik, was not favored by Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, which backed more extreme Pashtun elements of the mujahedeen and funneled most of the covert aid to them.
The various Afghan warlords battled for another four years as the ISI readied its own army of Islamic extremists drawn from Pashtun refugee camps inside Pakistan. With the ISI’s backing, this group, known as the Taliban, entered Afghanistan with the promise of restoring order.
The Taliban seized the capital of Kabul in September 1996, driving Massoud and his Northern Alliance into a northward retreat. The ousted communist leader Najibullah, who had stayed in Kabul, sought shelter in the United Nations compound, but was captured.
The Taliban tortured, castrated and killed Najibullah, his mutilated body hung from a light pole, just as CIA hardliners had envisioned seven years earlier.
Setting the Stage for 9/11
The victorious Taliban then imposed harsh Islamic law on Afghanistan. Their rule was devastating to women who had made gains toward equal rights under the communists, but were forced by the Taliban to live under highly restrictive rules, to cover themselves when in public, and to forgo schooling.
In the late 1990s, the Taliban also granted Saudi exile Osama bin Laden and his extremist al-Qaeda organization a safe haven when they were on the run from the United States angered over bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa and other terrorist attacks.
Bin Laden, who shared the Taliban’s fundamentalist view of Islam, was welcomed back because bin Laden and his fellow Arab militants had collaborated with the CIA-supported Afghan rebels in their war against the Soviets in the 1980s.
By the late 1990s, however, bin Laden and al-Qaeda had a new enemy: the United States. The stage was set for the 9/11 attacks.
Though Gates is familiar with all this ugly history – and even recounts some of it in his memoir – he was happy to exploit the widely accepted myth of the immediate U.S. abandonment of the Afghan cause once the Soviets departed.
Today, the abandonment myth plays into Gates’s desire for an escalated war in Afghanistan rather than serious peace talks aimed at bringing together a coalition government that would include some factions that might be very distasteful to the United States.
As with so many myths that prove useful to powerful interests, the Afghan abandonment myth also obscures the actual history, which – if known – would teach a strikingly different lesson.
If the American journalists traveling with Gates had understood that Gates and other Bush-I officials chose to continue the earlier Afghan war with visions of total triumph dancing in their heads, the reporters might have challenged Gates and argued that the real lesson of 1989 was that an imperfect peace can be preferable to an expanded war.
They also might have recognized that Gates’s reputation as an esteemed Wise Man, who in the words of Washington Post columnist David Broder is “incapable of dissembling,” is another myth. [For more on Gates’s real history, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The Secret World of Robert Gates.”]
So, while myths – whether ancient or modern – can sometimes tell a pleasing tale, they have the capacity to get many people killed.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
Since he began writing a column for the New York Times eight years ago, Nicholas D. Kristof has become the closest thing we have to a voice of conscience on human rights abuses around the world.
His latest book, co-written with his wife Sheryl WuDunn, is the well-received Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.
Kristof was in town recently to speak at a fundraiser for Day One, a Providence organization that provides counseling and advocacy for victims of sexual abuse. The Phoenix sat down with him afterward for a Q&A. His answers are edited and condensed for length.
YOU ARGUE IN HALF THE SKY THAT THE GLOBAL FIGHT FOR WOMEN’S EQUALITY IS THE “PARAMOUNT MORAL CHALLENGE” OF OUR ERA. WHY IS THIS SO? There are a lot of bad things that happen around the world. But one measure of oppression of women is that about 100 million women have been discriminated against to death. There are actually more males than females in the world today and that’s because, although women live longer and there are more women in the U.S. and Europe, in much of the world they’re starved, not treated when they get sick. And, so, more women have died as a consequence of that kind of discrimination than were killed in all the wars of the 20th century. It just feels like a vast problem. And even the slavery side of it — the sexual slavery side of it — is probably substantially bigger than early 19th-century slavery was. So, just put it all together and it just feels like the central moral challenge for us all.
THE BOOK ALSO SUGGESTS THAT ACHIEVING GENDER EQUALITY IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD IS NOT MERELY A MATTER OF JUSTICE BUT OF UNLEASHING NATIONS’ POTENTIAL FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT. CAN THAT ARGUMENT BE PERSUASIVE IN DEEPLY SEXIST CULTURES? I think the argument that women are a huge opportunity actually gets more traction in sexist countries than the rights-based argument. Poor countries want to grow faster economically. They’re looking for any kind of resource they can exploit. And if one can show them that China is booming, partly because it figured out how to use the female half of the population, then that’s an argument that really has resonance for them.
HAVE YOU SEEN EVIDENCE OF THAT SINKING IN? Even in Afghanistan, which is as about as oppressive a place as there is, there are a growing number of people who really do appreciate that girls’ education is a good thing. They’re nervous about it — they want girls only to be taught by women, they are careful about what they think should be taught to girls — but, at the end of the day, they think that it is important for their daughters to be taught. You do see progress, you really do.
THERE IS A CHAPTER IN YOUR BOOK TITLED “IS ISLAM MISOGYNISTIC?” WHAT DO YOU CONCLUDE? Islam started out as an advance for women. Women benefitted when Islam came to a particular area. But conservative schools within Islam haven’t evolved over the last 1200 years. So these days, in more fundamentalist Muslim countries, women are at a real disadvantage and it is Koranic arguments that are used to suppress them. I tend to think that Prophet Muhammad would be horrified if he were to see what was being done in the name of Islam.
SO, IS ISLAM INHERENTLY MISOGYNISTIC IN SOME WAY? No, I do not think Islam is inherently misogynistic, because initially it was an advance.
WHY WAS THAT? It gave women certain rights — inheritance rights, for example, that Christian communities, for example, did not have. And even in areas like polygamy — it reduced polygamy, it limited polygamy, which had been unlimited, to four wives. You had to treat them equally. But then, it kind of stopped there. It said you can’t have female infanticide, things that had been previously accepted. It was socially progressive in its context.
WHAT IS THE SINGLE MOST EFFECTIVE THING WOMEN AND MEN IN THE WEST CAN DO TO ADDRESS GENDER INEQUITY IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD? I’d say that education has the single best record. It’s not perfect and it doesn’t always work right. It’s hard to make a difference in people’s lives. But education has a better record than anything else. And it’s very cheap.
The Obama administration may be trying to mount a case against digital finger-imaging of federal food assistance applicants, a practice four states are implementing in order to combat fraud.
Anti-hunger workers say it discriminates against the country’s poor and treats them like criminals when they are entitled to benefits.
New York City is one of the places that uses finger-imaging.
Angel Jean Seymore, a New York City resident, says she felt degraded when she had to give her digital fingerprint as part of her application to buy food under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). A severe back injury forced her to stop working as a home health aide.
“They treated me in a disgusting way. They did not care that I had a disability,” says Seymore. “I’m a U.S. citizen, born and raised in the Bronx all my life. I have my identity in the health department and Social Security. And yet I’m being treated like a criminal.”
If she lived elsewhere in the state, it wouldn’t have happened. That’s because the rest of the state has opted out of the finger-imaging requirement. Advocates who work with many of the city’s poor are frustrated.
“It’s as if the mayor is saying his own constituents are more criminal,” says Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger.
Berg says finger-imaging discriminates against people who can’t physically come to an office to have it done, either because of work or disabilities. People often feel like it’s a tracking system or they’ve done something wrong. And he says there are other ways to detect fraud, such as computer matching with Social Security numbers.
“There’s only one kind of fraud potentially captured by finger-imaging. That’s when a person actually creates a duplicate identity, like they’re in James Bond. It’s preposterous,” says Berg. “It’s hard enough for an eligible person on the program to get the benefits.”
An Urban Institute study found that finger-imaging deterred 4 percent from completing their application. Critics say that’s tens of thousands of people. But New York City counters that the practice has been one of the best weapons against fraud over the past decade.
Robert Doar, commissioner of the city’s Human Resources Administration, has not seen the study, but he says people aren’t being discouraged from applying. He points to the nearly 300,000 more New Yorkers who received SNAP benefits in the past year.
“It’s not an ink process, like what would take place in some criminal justice situation. It’s easy, it’s simple and fast, and the numbers prove our point,” Doar says.
Yet it puts New York City at odds with most of the rest of the country. Just three other states — Texas, California and Arizona — also use finger-imaging. But a few weeks ago, Agriculture Department Undersecretary Kevin Concannon was in New York City, where he said the practice is under scrutiny.
“We are examining that whole question of the efficacy of it. Does it really do what it’s alleged to do? My biggest concern: Does it have an unintended consequence of dissuading people from coming forward who need the benefits?”
Concannon added that if a state wanted to start the finger-imaging today, the Obama administration wouldn’t approve it. Anti-hunger workers say they’re hopeful a rollback is coming. After all, they say, President Obama is the first president to have grown up in a household where food stamps meant food on the table.
Yesterday the US entered what has been promised to be “a new era of politics”. President Obama has a lot of “change’s” to make in order to fix our international relationships. Like the rest of the world, I too am anxious to see what our “new era of politics” can produce abroad. Obama also has a lot of “change’s” to make in order to regain the support of our citizens, mainly the libertarian crowd and according to mainstream news, the general public.
If you voted for Obama, congratulations! I however did not vote this year and I’ll explain why. Both candidates, Obama and McCain supported things like the Patriot Act, Military Commissions Act, and Extreme Rendition. The worst of all of is Obama claims that there is “clean coal” energy. The scientific community, on the other hand, has flatly rejected the clean coal theory. There is no such thing as “clean” coal, in fact clean coal hasn’t even made it into the climate change discussion since October 08. Obama reportedly has a plan that designates millions of taxpayer dollars to “research” clean coal.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited that the Bush regime has ended and we get to start anew, however if you look into Obama’s economic appointees, and his cabinet you should see a Clintonesque strategy in the Obama camp. Clinton was a buisness republican maqurading as a democrat, just look at our capital during his presidency. I fear Obama might be cut of similar cloth. Clinton made social promises too, like health care and welfare reform. Welfare was reformed alright, but for the wealthy, the rest of his promises went to the wayside. However one must remember how the Clintonites got the US out of debt and awash in capital. Continuing the deregulation of markets that started with Reagan. In fact, those same individuals responsible for our current economic recession are the very same architects of the policies that created it, and are now in top positions in the Obama Whitehouse.
These are a few quotes from Obama’s Inaugural Address:
This is the source of our confidence. The knowledge that God calls on us to fulfill an uncertain destiny.
We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waiver in it’s defense.
For those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents… you cannot out last us and we will defeat you.
This looks like anything but “a new era of politics”.
Despite the so-called “liberal” media’s endless barrage of pro-Israeli propaganda, a significant portion of the U.S. public is opposed to the current attack on Gaza. As the casualties mount and peace is pushed further out of reach, The Indypendent’s Jaisal Noor exposes three big myths of the conflict.
MYTH # 1
The root of the conflict is that Hamas is a terrorist organization bent on the destruction of Israel.
It is true that Hamas commits unjustifiable terrorist acts and is on the United States’ terror list. The “terrorist” label is often used against enemies of U.S.-supported countries. When it was deemed in their interest, Israel and the United States bolstered both Hamas and its predecessor the Muslim Brotherhood. Terrorist tactics were also used by the groups Irgun and the Stern Gang to aid in the creation of a Jewish state. Meanwhile, Israel stands accused of indiscriminately targeting civilians by the United Nations and human rights groups.
The “terror” list currently includes the Lebanese Hezbullah which was born from the resistance to the 1982 Israeli invasion, and until last year included Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress.
Another former member of the U.S. terror list is the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The original PLO charter concurs with the Hamas charter, proclaiming that “armed struggle” be used to reclaim Palestine. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon once accused former PLO leader Yasser Arafat of being a “terrorist,” and refused to negotiate with him. Today the PLO’s biggest party, Fatah, is the preferred peace partner.
Recently, Hamas has firmly maintained that it is now willing to participate in negotiations based on internationally recognized borders and rights. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that as early as 2006, Hamas leader Ismaeil Haniyeh offered “a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders and … a truce for many years.” Haniyeh called on President Bush to launch a dialogue with the Hamas government. “We are not warmongers, we are peacemakers and we call on the American government to have direct negotiations with the elected government.” Hamas re-emphasized this position recently, adding, “our conflict is not with the Jews, our problem is with the occupation.” The United States and Israel ignored the offer.
Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank — which were occupied by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War — are recognized by United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 as the land for a future Palestinian state. This has become the international consensus for peace, with only Israel, the United States and a handful of other nations voting against the annual General Assembly resolution calling for a settlement based on “242.”
MYTH # 2
Hamas is to blame for ending the cease-fire and Israel’s actions are in self-defense.
The three conditions for the June 2008 ceasefire were that (1) Israel would drastically reduce its military blockade of Gaza, (2) Israel would halt all military incursions into Gaza and, (3) Hamas would halt all rocket attacks into Israel.
From the outset of the cease-fire, Israel did little to ease its military blockade. As a result, Gazans continued to suffer from a lack of food, fuel, financial aid, electricity, clean water, medical supplies and more. The United Nations warned that Gaza would face “catastrophe” if the blockade were not lifted. The Israeli government maintained that the blockade was necessary to stop rocket attacks. However, as the Canadian Globe and Mail newspaper reports, Hamas had ceased launching rockets into Israel during the cease-fire and even arrested members of militant groups who did fire a handful of rockets.
Despite the intense blockade against Gazan civilians, the cease-fire held until Nov. 4. On that date, Haaretz reports, it was the Israeli military that made an incursion into Gaza and killed six Palestinians. The Israeli government sought to justify these actions, saying that these Palestinians were suspected of plotting to kidnap Israeli soldiers. Predictably, militants responded to the attack by launching rockets into Israel. Thus began the unraveling of the cease-fire.
Following the end of the cease-fire, Israel moved closer to an invasion, claiming this was the only remaining option to eliminate rocket attacks from Gaza. According to Haaretz, Hamas offered to extend the ceasefire if Israel lifted its blockade. There is evidence that Israel was planning to strike Gaza before and during the cease-fire.
The White House said that Israel will cease its attack when Hamas has agreed to a truce. Hamas has said it would abide by a cease-fire if border crossings were reopened and the economic siege of Gaza ended. Israel has refused this offer.
Meanwhile, Israel unleashed its U.S.-supplied arsenal — which includes unconventional weapons — while attacking its own designated safe-areas. This forced the Red Cross and United Nations to briefly suspend relief work in Gaza, spurring the Vatican to compare the conditions there to a “concentration camp.” The United States abstained from a Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire.
MYTH #3
Israel and the United States are doing everything in their power to achieve peace.
For decades the United States has provided Israel with billions of dollars annually in military aid and backed Israel’s seizure of occupied lands. The number of settlers in the West Bank and Jerusalem has increased from 200,000 in 1990 to more than 460,000 today. Claiming it received secret U.S. approval , Israel announced it would build thousands of new homes in 2008. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon noted that this directly “contravenes both international law and Israel’s obligations” in the peace process.
Israel has also erected a “security barrier” through the West Bank, annexing large swaths of land. In 2004, the International Court of Justice declared construction of the wall “contrary to international law.”
Meanwhile, even outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has recently stated that to achieve peace and recognition by the Arab world, Israel “should withdraw from almost all of the territories, including in East Jerusalem and in the Golan Heights.”
Amid reports that President-elect Obama may reverse U.S. policy and negotiate with Hamas, scholar Norman Finkelstein observes, “Hamas in recent months has supported a two-state settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict, joining the international consensus. It’s abiding by the terms of the truce, showing it can be trusted to abide by its agreements, which means it was becoming a credible negotiating partner.” He adds, “Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni stated in early December 2008 that although Israel wanted to create a temporary period of calm with Hamas, an extended truce ‘harms the Israeli strategic goal, empowers Hamas, and gives the impression that Israel recognizes the movement.’ Translation: a protracted cease-fire that enhanced Hamas’ credibility would have undermined Israel’s strategic goal of retaining control of the West Bank.” Finkelstein concludes: “Israel was facing a new Palestinian peace offensive and therefore it has to knock out Hamas.”
Click here to view a 2008 map of Israeli Settlements and separation barrier in the West Bank produced by the The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, B’TSELEM.
Adam Sheets contributed to this article. THE WORLD STANDS WITH PALESTINE: Pro-Palestinian women in New York City stand next to the Palestinian flag at one of the many demonstrations that have taken place since the Israeli assault on Gaza began in late December. From New York to London to Cairo, hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets. “We are demanding that the Palestinians be protected, but as Americans, we are also demanding that our tax money not be spent on killing innocent civilians,” a protestor told The Indypendent at a Jan. 3 rally in New York City. PHOTO: MARK A. BAILEY
The BART police officer who shot an unarmed man to death on a station platform early on New Year’s Day quit the force Wednesday, avoiding an interview with police internal affairs investigators trying to get to the bottom of an incident that has prompted broad outrage.
Officer Johannes Mehserle, 27, was supposed to make a statement Wednesday about why he shot 22-year-old Oscar Grant as the supermarket worker lay face-down at the Fruitvale Station in Oakland, BART said.
Video recordings made by at least two BART passengers and shown repeatedly on TV news programs have prompted speculation that Mehserle fired without provocation or by accident after Grant and several friends were detained around 2 a.m. in the aftermath of a fight on a train.
Mehserle, however, did not show up for the scheduled interview at 11 a.m. – the same time the funeral for Grant began in his hometown of Hayward. Instead, the officer’s attorney and the president of BART’s police union appeared and handed over a short resignation letter, BART spokesman Linton Johnson said.
“We were prepared to compel him to talk, but he resigned,” Johnson said. “We’re going to continue the investigation, with or without him. … There are many investigations that go on without the key person.”
The resignation prompted cheers and applause when it was announced at an afternoon rally at the Fruitvale Station, where several hundred protesters called for the officer to be arrested and charged.
The protest was peaceful in the daytime but turned violent after dark as groups of people wandered through downtown streets, smashing storefronts and cars, including a police car, and setting some cars ablaze. Police officers in riot gear fired tear gas to break up the crowds, and BART temporarily shut down the Fruitvale, Lake Merritt and 12th Street stations.
Mehserle’s resignation was effective immediately. Christopher Miller, an attorney for the officer, declined to say what Mehserle’s explanation was for shooting Grant or why he had quit. He said Mehserle’s defense would continue to be paid for by a statewide fund for police officers.
Mehserle’s resignation means he does not have to answer questions about the shooting from BART internal affairs investigators. He has previously declined to talk to separate investigators from BART and the district attorney’s office, who will decide whether he should be charged with a crime, officials said.
Alameda County District Attorney Tom Orloff said he plans to move quickly toward a decision on possible charges. Orloff met Wednesday with Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums’ chief of staff, several elected officials and other community leaders who arrived at his Oakland office demanding information about the probe.
“These things normally take weeks rather than days, but I am trying to expedite this and get it resolved as quickly as we can,” Orloff said.
BART had come under fire from John Burris, the attorney for Grant’s family, for not having forced Mehserle to talk with internal affairs investigators since the shooting. Unlike in criminal investigations – in which a suspect has the constitutional right not to talk to police – officers involved in on-the-job shootings must talk to inspectors as part of administrative inquiries or risk being fired.
“I’m not surprised,” Burris said of Mehserle’s departure. “It should have happened long ago. It’s not the end, of course, for the family. They would prefer that he be prosecuted and sent to jail.”
Burris has filed a $25 million claim against BART on behalf of Grant’s mother and 4-year-old daughter, the likely precursor to a lawsuit. In the claim, Burris said Mehserle “mercilessly fired his weapon” at Grant, who he said posed no threat to the officer or any of his colleagues on the Fruitvale Station platform.
Grant was unarmed when he was shot in the back; the bullet apparently went through him and ricocheted off the concrete platform, entering his torso. It was the ricochet wound that caused Grant’s death, the Alameda County coroner’s office said Wednesday.
BART’s Johnson said Mehserle’s attorney postponed a meeting between the officer and internal affairs investigators that had been set for Tuesday and wanted to reschedule it for next week. Instead, BART told Mehserle to show up Wednesday, Johnson said. He would not say where the interview was to have taken place.
BART, Mehserle and the officer’s lawyer have all been silent about why Mehserle opened fire. But a source familiar with the investigation said BART is looking into whether Mehserle mistook his service weapon for a Taser stun gun, among many other possibilities.
For the first time, BART police Chief Gary Gee said Wednesday that Mehserle had been armed with a Taser. The agency has been using the devices for only a few weeks, and Gee said officers are prohibited from wearing them near their gun to avoid confusion.
Grant’s death has attracted attention well beyond the Bay Area, driven in part by the fact that the shooting was filmed by at least two cell phone video cameras. Footage has been widely aired on television stations.
An official of the human rights group Amnesty International USA, Dalia Hashad, said Wednesday before Mehserle resigned that BART’s delay in interviewing the officer “hints at the callousness to the worth of human life to a public that is all too familiar with racial profiling, police brutality and cover-ups.”
Protesters who gathered at the Fruitvale Station on Wednesday, while cheering Mehserle’s resignation, had nothing good to say about him.
“That’s cowardice, if you are going to resign rather than talk,” said Jemar “J. Smallz” Washington, 23, of Oakland.
Kelsi Arceneaux, 32, of Richmond said of the officer, “I’m sure he’s suffering as well. But people’s perception of him would be better if we could at least see that he’s remorseful. Right now, we don’t know anything.”
The UK’s international development secretary urged broadcasters to reconsider airing the appeal [AFP]
The British Broadcasting Corporation has defended its decision not to participate in a television fund-raising appeal for Gaza, saying it did want to avoid compromising public confidence in its impartiality.
Normally all broadcasters show Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) appeals without charge, but in a statement on Friday, the BBC said: “Along with other broadcasters, the BBC has decided not to broadcast the DEC’s public appeal to raise funds for Gaza.
“The BBC’s decision was made because of question marks about the delivery of aid in a volatile situation, and also to avoid any risk of compromising public confidence in the BBC’s impartiality in the context of an ongoing news story.”
DEC ‘unhappy’
The DEC is an umbrella organisation representing a number of aid agencies, including Action Aid, Save the Children, the British Red Cross, Islamic Relief and Oxfam.
The organisation said its members will be providing immediate humanitarian aid, such as medicine, food and blankets, and will be involved in reconstruction in Gaza.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Brendan Gormley, chief executive of the DEC, said he was unhappy about losing the ability to broadcast the DEC’s appeal into people’s homes.
DEC said its members would provide immediate humanitarian aid in Gaza [AFP]
“I’m upset because the tradition over the years has been that we collaborate [with the media], and you know yourself the power of the media,” he said.Gormley said their appeal was a “a simple and cost effective way” for people to show that they care.
“All I can say is if there are journalistic problems with agreeing then that’s their call,” he said.
Gormley said the DEC had three criteria that needed to be met before it launched an appeal, namely that there was an overwhelming unmet need, that they could do something in a timely and effective way, and that there is public concern.
He said he felt all three had been met and that any money raised by the DEC would go to people on the ground.
“A huge amount needs to be done in opening up access. We need a little bit more cash to alleviate suffering. I’m just sorry that we haven’t been able to find an agreement,” Gormley said.
Government appeal
Douglas Alexander, Britain’s international development secretary, has written to Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director-general, as well as the heads of ITV and Sky, the other two British broadcasters who normally air the appeals, urging them to reconsider airing the appeal.
In his letter, Alexander said: “As you know, the support of broadcasters is highly effective and extremely valued by the group of charities and non-governmental organisations who provide humanitarian relief under the DEC umbrella.”The situation is developing on the ground and I understand that Oxfam, Save the Children and others have been able to get some aid into Gaza today.
“But it is clear that the humanitarian situation will be dire for some time to come, with around 100,000 people having left their homes and more than 50,000 people in UN emergency shelters.
“While I recognise that this is a decision rightly taken by broadcasters, I hope that in light of the great human suffering still taking place in Gaza, you will reconsider your decision in relation to the DEC appeal.”
Bill Fletcher on the ‘heresy’ of critiquing Obama and what he wants Obama to do.
Paul Jay speaks to Bill Fletcher Jr. in this last segment of our interview on whether an Obama’s presidency constitutes actual change. Fletcher says, “I worry when [Obama] starts taking shots at Hugo Chavez of Venezuela or when he is silent around the atrocities in Gaza. When he continues to imply that nothing’s off the table when it comes to Iran.” Obama is afraid the charges against him during his campaign of not being ready will come true, or that he won’t be ready for an emergency, Fletcher says. Because of this, like Clinton, he may be inclined to use military force inappropriately, but because many American support his domestic plans, they may turn a blind eye to his foreign policies.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a columnist, activist, author and labor organizer. He is the Executive Editor of The Black Commentator and his newest book, cowritten with Fernando Gapasin, is entitled “Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice”. He is the a cofounder of the Center for Labor Renewal, has served as President of TransAfrica Forum and was formerly the Education Director and later Assistant to the President of the AFL-CIO.
What’s behind Obama’s charm offensive towards the Muslim world
Last week President Obama introduced the new U.S. State Department, including two new special envoys – George Mitchell to the Middle East and Richard Holbrooke to Afghanistan/Pakistan. Early this week the President gave his first sit-in interview in power – to an Arab TV network. He has promised a new partnership with the Arab world based on mutual respect. As groundbreaking as this may seem – compared to the Bush administration’s approach – Pepe Escobar argues that the overall strategy may not be substantially different.
Bio
Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil is the roving correspondent for Asia Times and an analyst for The Real News Network. He’s been a foreign correspondent since 1985, based in London, Milan, Los Angeles, Paris, Singapore, and Bangkok. Since the late 1990s, he has specialized in covering the arc from the Middle East to Central Asia, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has made frequent visits to Iran and is the author of Globalistan and also Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad During the Surge both published by Nimble Books in 2007.
Oxymoron or goal within reach? Industry and environmentalists get down and sooty.
Summary
On the campaign trail, President Obama embraced the coal industry’s vision of “clean coal” technology. But even before he took office, a coalition of environmental groups (including Al Gore’s) launched ads ridiculing the idea as a myth: “In reality, there’s no such thing as clean coal.”
We’re sure to hear more of this debate in coming months. Burning coal creates large quantities of carbon dioxide, the most prevalent of the “greenhouse gases” that scientists say is heating up the planet and Obama has said he wants to reduce.
Is “clean coal” possible? Our answer: Probably, though it would come with a big price tag.
In our Analysis section, we try to shed a little light on the subject.
Analysis
American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity TV Ad: “Obama”
On screen: Clean coal. Promoting energy independence.
Barack Obama: Clean coal technology is something that can make America energy independent.
On screen: Clean coal. Creating jobs.
Obama: And by the way we can create five million new jobs in clean energy technology.
On screen: Clean coal. Meeting the climate challenge.
Obama: This is America — we figured out how to put a man on the moon in 10 years.
On screen: Clean coal. We can. We will.
Obama: You tell me we can’t find a way to burn coal that we mine right here in the United States of America and make it work.
(Soundtrack of audience members clapping, chanting “Yes we can!”)
The coal lobby’s most recent issue ad reminds viewers that the new president has voiced strong support for its side. It features a clip of then-candidate Barack Obama speaking last year, saying “clean coal” is an attainable goal that can create jobs and help the environment:
Obama: This is America – we figured out how to put a man on the moon in 10 years. You tell me we can’t find a way to burn coal that we mine right here in the United States of America and make it work.
That’s just the latest from the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), which represents coal companies, electric utilities and others who profit from mining, hauling and burning coal. Throughout 2008 it ran ads lauding the promise of “clean coal” as the energy source of America’s future. One spot featured individuals saying “I believe” in a variety of fuzzy goals – the future, technology, protecting the environment. The newest ad ends with Obama supporters chanting “Yes we can.”
No We Can’t?
In the opposite corner is the Reality Coalition, a collection of environmental groups spearheaded by ex-Vice President Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection. Its TV spot, which delivers the kicker “In reality, there’s no such thing as clean coal,” began running last month.
It’s a negative message delivered with some wit. The ad shows a man in a hardhat charging through a door to learn about “clean coal” technology, only to find a barren landscape on the other side. Print ads also portray “clean coal” as a ridiculous notion. In the subterranean reaches of a busy D.C. metro station, the group has put up a sequence of wordless posters showing a mermaid, a little green alien and Bigfoot each holding a lump of coal. Nearby panels repeat the message that “there’s no such thing as clean coal,” and add other info: “There are no homes in America powered by clean coal,” “There are roughly 600 coal plants providing electricity in the U.S. Not one of them captures and stores its global warming pollution,” and more.
Besides the Gore group, the Reality Coalition also includes the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the National Wildlife Federation and the League of Conservation Voters.
Both sides say their ad campaigns are national in scope; Brian Hardwick, a spokesman for the Reality Coalition, said his group’s ad was running on CNN, Comedy Central, the several popular Sunday morning talk shows and other widely viewed programming. But neither side would tell us how much they were spending. “There are a whole lot of people gunning for us,” Cathy Coffey, the Northeast Region Communications Director for ACCCE, told FactCheck.org. Hardwick told us only that “We expect to spend what they’re spending.”
Accuracy Quotient?
We find no factual misstatements in these ads, but that’s because they contain practically no factual claims. Obama did indeed say positive things about “clean coal” during the campaign, often in coal-producing states. (The snippets in ACCCE’s TV ad come from an October rally in Virginia coal country.)
Reality Coalition TV Ad: “Clean Coal Plant”
Man in hardhat:Clean coal. Heard a lot about it. So let’s take a tour of this state-of-the-art clean coal facility.
(Goes through door labeled “Clean Coal Facility Entrance,” revealing barren landscape.)
Man in hardhat: Amazing! Machinery’s kinda loud, but that’s the sound of clean coal technology. And while burning coal is one of the leading causes of global warming, the remarkable clean coal technology you see here changes everything. Take a good long look. This is today’s clean coal technology.
On screen: In reality, there’s no such thing as clean coal.
But the Reality Coalition’s ads are true as well. There are no commercial “clean coal” plants operating currently in the U.S.
The larger question posed by these dueling ad campaigns is implied rather than stated outright. Can coal can be “clean” in the future? Is “clean coal” a laudable, achievable goal as Obama and the coal miners and electric utilities would have us believe? Or is it a ridiculous oxymoron on par with “controlled chaos,” as Gore and other environmental groups suggest?
This is partly a matter of opinion, and it’s certainly a matter of speculation. We don’t know what the future will bring. But we expect to see this debate play out in months to come, and we can offer some basic facts about what research has produced so far.
Solving the Coal Conundrum
Here’s the problem: Coal is an abundant domestic source of energy; the U.S. is frequently called the Saudi Arabia of coal, in fact, and there’s enough to last for centuries. It currently provides a bit more than 50 percent of the nation’s electric power, and it plays a huge role in meeting the voracious energy needs of nations whose economies have been growing briskly, such as China and India.
But of all the nation’s coal-fired power plants (there were 616 of them as of 2006), none can be labeled “clean,” which, these days, is defined as being free (or nearly so) of carbon dioxide emissions. Globally, the CO2 that comes from the burning of coal, mainly to generate electricity, accounts for about 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, coal-fired electric utilities in the U.S. put out close to two billion tons of CO2 each year.
Figuring out how to burn this easily available source of energy without causing major CO2 pollution is similar in some ways to the acid rain problem of decades past. Most coal-fired plants in the U.S. now scrub much of the sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide from their flue gases, rather than letting the chemicals escape to react with other substances in the atmosphere and lead to severe damage to forests and other living things. Carbon, though, is a tougher problem.
Most methods being studied to “clean” coal fall under the loose heading of “carbon capture and storage,” or CCS, which involves stripping the CO2 out of the coal-burning or coal-gasifying process and piping it deep underground. A study published in 2007 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that CCS is “the critical enabling technology that would reduce CO2 emissions significantly while also allowing coal to meet the world’s pressing energy needs.”
Carbon capture can occur at three different points. One is pre-combustion: When coal is gasified before it’s burned, an almost pure stream of carbon dioxide can be created, segregated and pumped away. The best-known of the methods in this category is IGCC, or Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle, in which gasified coal is used to run a turbine to produce power. To increase efficiency – because it takes additional energy just to fuel this operation – waste heat from the process is captured as steam and used to create more power.
IGCC is used in industrial processes today, but the CO2 isn’t captured. That’s because there’s no penalty in the U.S. for releasing it into the atmosphere. However, some companies have plans on the books to change that. A joint venture between BP and Rio Tinto, called Hydrogen Energy, is working on a CCS plant in California that could burn coal using IGCC technology to separate the CO2 and capture it.
Other research has focused on trying to strip the CO2 from the gas that remains after coal is burned, which is similar to what’s done with the precursor chemicals to acid rain. Tenaska, Inc. has plans for a large coal-burning plant in Texas that will capture carbon from its flue gases.
Yet another technology, called oxyfuel, can be deployed during the actual combustion process. It involves burning coal in a mix of carbon dioxide, water vapor, and pure oxygen, and eliminates cumbersome steps for separating the resulting CO2 from other substances. Last year a plant in Germany became the first full-cycle oxyfuel demonstration project to begin operating; it provides power for about 1,000 homes. Its waste CO2 is being compressed, transported and buried two miles below a depleted gas field.
As it turns out, putting CO2 underground helps force reluctant liquids lurking there, like oil, to the surface. Selling captured CO2 to oil and gas field operators, as Tenaska plans to do with its Texas plant, and Hydrogen Energy hopes to do in California, can help recoup some of the companies’ investment in CCS technology. There’s been some real-world experience with the sequestration, or storage, part of the equation in other contexts. For example, natural gas produced at theSleipner Field in the Norwegian North Sea contains unusually high levels of CO2 that must be stripped out. Norway’s high tax on carbon emissions justifies the added cost of piping the CO2 2,600 feet under the sea and injecting it into a 200-foot-thick layer of porous sandstone. Similarly, the Weyburn project on this continent has been taking CO2 produced at a synfuels plant in North Dakota and piping it to oil fields in Saskatchewan.
Seven regional partnerships under the Department of Energy’s umbrella have been working on the storage issue in the U.S., identifying where the geology is favorable for holding enormous amounts of CO2. Besides oil and gas fields, deep saline formations are also considered excellent candidates for the task. According to DOE, it would take hundreds of years to fill up all the underground space that it considers suitable for permanent CO2 storage.
Potential problems: CO2 storage will never be geologically foolproof, and a regulatory and legal structure (to deal with liability issues) will have to be set up before any proposal can win public acceptance. The Environmental Protection Agency has already been thinking about that: It’s in the process of finalizing rules covering underground injection of CO2 that would regulate site selection, monitoring techniques, construction of wells, insurance requirements, decommissioning and other steps in the process. In addition, transporting CO2 to storage sites could require, as one observer put it, the underground equivalent of “the highway system on steroids.”
Will storage sites for carbon dioxide draw as much public opposition as, say, Yucca Mountain, the proposed nuclear waste repository in Nevada that’s continually blocked by lawsuits and other obstacles? Maybe not, since CO2 is far less hazardous. But it’s not entirely benign, either: On Aug. 21, 1986 in Cameroon, 1,746 villagers were suffocated in their sleep when a huge cloud of naturally-occurring carbon dioxide that had been at the bottom of Lake Nyos erupted and blanketed the countryside.
Experts believe that significant research and demonstration efforts using CCS technology, such as those that DOE has funded, need to continue. They were disheartened when DOE last year killed its funding for a planned $1.8 billion demonstration plant, called FutureGen, in Matoon, Ill., citing costs. (DOE spokesman John Grasser told FactCheck.org that the project as announced in 2003 was envisioned to cost about $950 million). The single giant project, which was to be a 285-megawatt “living lab” that would test advanced CCS technologies, was a public-private partnership with contributions from several partner nations such as China. It has given way to several much smaller projects, but Illinois lawmakers have been arguing for revival of FutureGen as part of Obama’s stimulus package.
It’s clear, though, that some CCS technology is already far enough along to put into practice at a commercial level, and a few companies, as we note above, are giving it a shot. But it has a major drawback: It’s frightfully expensive, at least for now.
Who’re You Calling “Cheap?”
Here’s one of coal’s biggest selling points: It generates power at a far lower cost than other fossil fuels. According to the Energy Information Administration, in October, 2008, electric utilities paid $2.19 per million Btu for coal, as opposed to $6.94 for natural gas and $16.68 for petroleum. (The cost for petroleum is certain to be lower now, since the per-barrel price of oil has dropped dramatically, but coal is still much cheaper.)
A 2008 McKinsey study estimates that adding “clean coal” technology would increase the capital cost of a power plant by 50 percent – and that doesn’t include the costs of transporting and storing the captured CO2 or operating costs.
McKinsey: Compared to a “normal” power plant, CCS adds four additional costs. Firstly, capture equipment needs to be installed. Secondly, the capture process needs to be powered, leading to additional fuel costs. Thirdly, a transport system needs to be built. And finally, the CO2 needs to be stored. All of this requires both additional capital investment and additional operating cost.
Two Stanford experts, David Victor and Varun Rai, estimate that the cost of a 300 megawatt power plant with 90 percent CO2 capture would be $1 billion to $2.5 billion. But even a 300 megawatt coal-fired plant without carbon capture, proposed in Wisconsin, was projected to cost at least $1.1 billion last year. Many a clean coal project has foundered on the issue of cost. And besides, Victor and Rai say construction of power plants in general, dirty or clean, is at a standstill because of the financial crisis.
Assuming the economy improves, though, investors’ interest in coal-fired plants with CCS may ignite due to mounting pressure to put a price on carbon emissions in the interest of slowing global warming. Some argue that imposing a simple federal tax on carbon emissions would be the easiest regime to manage. The system that President Obama favored during his campaign, known as cap-and-trade, would impose limits on emissions that tightened over time and would require companies to buy and sell allowances to meet the targets.
Obama has committed to pushing for a ”cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent [from 1990 levels] by 2050.” His campaign website also promoted investment in “clean coal.” Under the heading “Develop and Deploy Clean Coal Technology,” it said, “Obama’s Department of Energy will enter into public private partnerships to develop five “first-of-a-kind” commercial scale coal-fired plants with clean carbon capture and sequestration technology.”
In addition, Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Energy and Natural Resources committee, has vowed to pass a cap-and-trade bill out of his committee by Memorial Day. And at least some in the industry are pitching in their ideas along similar lines. On Jan. 15, a consortium of business and environmental groups, ranging from Duke Energy to Conoco Phillips to the Environmental Defense Fund, released a blueprint calling for a cap-and-trade system that would cut emissions 80 percent by 2050 – quite a bit less than Obama’s goal, since it uses 2005 rather than 1990 as its baseline, but still substantial. The detailed plan of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), the product of two years of research and wrangling, also contains financial incentives for the first commercial coal plants to use CCS, would require any coal plant permitted after 2014 to emit a maximum of half the CO2 now considered normal. The idea is to help subsidize CCS until the caps are tight enough that companies simply can’t afford to emit CO2.
The idea is also to get started. “We and some industry leaders believe that right now the technology is there,” says George Peridas, a climate scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is part of USCAP. “We need to begin deployment.”
Whatever pricing mechanism were chosen, the idea is that electric utilities and other coal-burners might find it cheaper to invest in expensive “clean coal” plants than to pay the penalty for emitting CO2. And in fact, executives from two of the companies that have CCS plants in the works have said publicly that their projects only make financial sense because of the looming likelihood that sending CO2 into the air will no longer be free.
Tenaska Vice President Gregory Kunkel, congressional testimony, June 8, 2008: We have developed Trailblazer in anticipation of federal climate change legislation that would support, through placing a price on greenhouse gas emissions and other means, the significant capital and operating costs of carbon capture technology. Without climate legislation, it appears that revenues from enhanced oil recovery CO2 sales will be insufficient to cover all carbon capture costs. With proposed climate legislation, projected compliance cost savings and other effects of climate change legislation, combined with EOR revenues, would provide the needed economic incentives to build and operate Trailblazer.
NRG Energy CEO David Crane, Washington Post, Oct. 14, 2007: The company I run, NRG Energy, emits more than 64 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year — more than the total man-made greenhouse gas emissions of Norway…We do so because CO2 emissions are free…[R]emoving CO2 before or after the combustion process is vastly more expensive and problematic than just venting it into the atmosphere…[W]e need to move as quickly as possible toward implementing the low-emissions ways of combusting coal that are under development or in the case of “coal gasification” technology, are ready for commercial deployment. Effective incentives for these new technologies could easily and readily be included in a cap-and-trade regimen.
Back to “Clean”
Still, a significant bloc of observers, including many environmental activists, believe that getting the carbon dioxide out of coal doesn’t do enough to address the problems with that plentiful fossil fuel. There remain issues such as mountaintop removal, for instance, in which mountain peaks are literally blasted off to get to the coal beneath, with the detritus dumped in valleys and streams of states like West Virginia. And the notion that coal can be truly “clean” was dealt a major blow just before Christmas when 5.4 million cubic yards of watery, toxic coal ash from a coal-burning power plant burst through a retaining wall, flooding a residential area near the Kingston Fossil Plant in the Tennessee Valley. The ash, contaminated with heavy metals and other toxic substances, forced residents to evacuate, destroyed several homes and left contamination that will take months to clean up.
For these critics, coal will never be “clean,” and pursuing that illusion will only take time, attention and dollars away from development of renewable sources of energy that are inherently “cleaner.” The several environmental groups that cooperated with industry in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership were cast as traitors to the green movement by many of their ardent colleagues.
They have a point, too. And we take no position on the merits of CCS technology and the other issues involved in getting coal to burn without creating a carbon dioxide problem; as we noted earlier, we can only say that it’s possible to do, though the cost will be high. But it’s worth noting that, given coal’s domestic abundance, the influence of huge corporations that are invested in the stuff, and the importance of coal-producing states – think Pennsylvania and Ohio, for starters – in the political process, it’s likely to be around as an energy source for a long time.
As evidence, note Steven Chu, Obama’s Nobel laureate Secretary of Energy, who called coal “my worst nightmare” for its climate consequences in a presentation at Berkeley in April 2007. His views now take a back seat to Obama’s, of course, and at Chu’s confirmation hearing Jan. 13 it seemed the nightmare had receded a bit, or at least become more politically astute. Chu told the Senate Energy Committee that, “if the world continues to use coal the way it is using it today, not only in the United States but in Russia, India and China, it is a pretty bad dream.” But no longer a nightmare, perhaps, because Chu also told the senators he didn’t oppose new coal-fired power plants, at least as an interim step, and committed to pushing for more funding for CCS projects.
BART officials conceded Thursday that they had lost the confidence of the public Thursday afternoon when they announced that an outside third-party investigative body would take over the internal affairs investigation into the New Year’s morning shooting incident that left a 22 year-old man beaten and shot to death by two police officers in front of hundreds of train passengers — some of them videotaping the entire incident.
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Matier and Ross reports Thursday evening that BART Police Chief Gary Gee issued an internal memo to his officers giving them instructions on how to donate food items or money to Johannes Mehserle, the former transit police officer who is seen on home videotapes shooting and killing Oscar Grant, who is now facing homicide charges at the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, Calif.
Among other things, Gee asks the rank-and-file to “maintain your professionalism and integrity, despite being exposed to public abuse and the media’s reporting,” the Chronicle reports. “Together, we will weather this storm.”
Food, books, and money for Mehserle
BART Spokesperson Linton Johnson admitted to the Chronicle that “admittedly, this may not have been the best way to put the information out” but said told the newspaper that the memo was not indicative towards the attitudes that internal affairs investigators had when they were looking into the case.
Gee, the BART Police Chief, had promised the public that his department would conduct a “an unbiased, thorough, and detailed investigation into what happened.”
Some angered community members have raised concerns about the legitimacy of those reassurances — saying that the memo urging officers — including what is presumed to be the same officers who are investigating the incident — to donate food and money to the jailed officer is a final nail in the coffin that validates their long-held suspicions that the investigation has been anything but transparent.
“It is unacceptable for the police chief, who ostensibly is investigating Mehserle and other officers, related to their conduct on the night that Oscar Grant was killed, to encourage officers to visit and make financial contributions to Mehserle,” John Burris, the attorney retained by the Grant family — who is suing BART for $25 million — said in a written statement.
Public confidence in the transit agency dipped considerably and anguish heightened again Friday evening when KTVU-TV broadcast a second video clip showing another BART Police officer, Tony Pirone, 36, punching Oscar Grant in the face before he was shot to death.
At a Wednesday morning meeting of the new police review committee of the BART Board of Directors, community leaders from around the Bay Area once again blasted the agency and it’s brass — General Manager Dorothy Dugger and Gee — for overlooking the punching incident and publicly exonerating all other officers of any wrongdoing.
“I came here trying to move forward, but I’m further back than when I started,” an angry community leader told the Board.
No radio communication after shooting
The Chronicle is also giving us a detailed look at what happened the night of the shooting incident, and points out in great detail that BART Police officers who responded to the Fruitvale Station platform on the early morning of New Year’s Day made critical mistakes that allowed witnesses to leave the scene and failed to inform supervisors and other officers down the line via police radios that there had been an officer-involved shooting.
Mehserle, Pirone and five other BART Police officers responding to the station that night were planning to place Oscar Grant and his friend under arrest for resisting arrest. It is unknown why he was being arrested in the first place.
Pirone, an ex-Marine and former Lawrence Livermore Lab police officer, cursed at Grant and his friends and pointed his taser gun at them, threatening to stun them if they were belligerent.
A crucial piece of video that was available for weeks on KTVU-TV’s website ktvu.com showing Pirone striking Grant in the face was either ignored or never uncovered by BART Police investigators until the television station aired it last Friday night. BART Board member Lynette Sweet said, “It’s embarrassing.”
The seven BART officers on the platform that night ordered the operator to close the train doors, and continue on its way after the passengers became infuriated over the handcuffing of one of the members of Grant’s party. In video of the shooting incident, passengers can be seen hurling objects at the seven police officers after Grant is shot to death. Chaos erupted after more passengers realize that the young unarmed man laying on his stomach was shot in the back by Mehserle.
Instead of holding the train at the platform and finding witnesses to interview, the train was sent on its way to Dublin-Pleasanton, where officers were dispatched to find anyone who may have seen the shooting incident. When they arrived at the terminal station and started asking for witnesses, they found none.
Perhaps the most alarming error: BART Police officers did not communicate the officer-involved shooting through their radios leaving other BART officers down the line from the Fruitvale Station unaware of what just happened. Burris, the Grant family lawyer, told the Chronicle that the failure to radio what had happened into the Dispatch center, “creates more of an opportunity for a cover-up.”
The Chronicle points out that BART has been trying to improve its communication in the shooting incident by holding community town hall meetings and establishing a BART Board of Directors Police Review Committee to oversee the transit agency’s law enforcement operations.
The Public Trust
That same committee acknowledged Thursday afternoon that there was little or no public confidence in their agency. They announced plans to pass on the investigation to a yet-to-be-named outside third party to ensure that the investigation would be unbiased. Board Directors said they wanted to restore the public’s trust that they conceded has been lost.
“The BART Police Department and the agency need to rebuild trust with the public and one way to do that is to hand this off to a third party and let the facts take us wherever they go,” BART Director Joel Keller said in a written statement.
The agency also said that they would hire a third-party to examine the police department top-down and look at the police department’s hiring and training protocols.
Turmoil at BART Police
While there is growing pressure for Dugger and Gee to resign from the top posts at BART and BART Police, respectively, the police department is reportedly in deep turmoil over some officers who are upset with their own chief.
The Chronicle reported Thursday that the BART Police Officers Association — the union that represents the 200+ transit cops — are dismayed at the “lack of leadership” and the “reactionary response” of Gee to the shooting incident.
At a Jan. 22 meeting, the police union contemplated holding a vote of no-confidence on the police chief saying telling the Chronicle that they were disappointing with the way the situation was handled.
BART officials report that their officers are facing increasing hostility in the field from enraged members of the community who are shocked and dismayed over the New Year’s Day killing and apparent beating of Oscar Grant. Some officers have been spit upon and yelled at by the public.
Nonetheless, this week’s memo by Gee and BART Police Commander Travis Gibson was a one-page attempt to ask the rank-and-file to hang in there.
“You have our full support,” the two write.
Mehserle will appear at a 2:00 p.m. bail hearing at the Alameda County Superior Courthouse in Oakland Friday. Protesters have already started organizing a rally on local websites. There is no word on whether the Alameda County District Attorney will pursue charges against Pirone, who struck Grant in the face.
Despite Israel’s assault on Gaza, the rocket attacks have continue
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has vowed a “disproportionate” response to rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza.
He was speaking at his weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, soon after at least two rockets hit southern Israel. No casualties were reported.
Two weeks ago, Israel and Hamas – which controls the Gaza Strip – declared separate ceasefires.
They ended Israel’s three-week assault on the Gaza Strip, which Israel said was aimed at stopping rocket attacks.
On Sunday Mr Olmert warned Israel would respond forcefully to renewed rocket fire.
“We’ve said that if there is rocket fire against the south of the country, there will be a disproportionate Israeli response to the fire on the citizens of Israel and its security forces,” he said.
One of Sunday’s rockets landed between two nursery schools in the Eshkol region of southern Israel, media reports said.
On Saturday, a rocket fired from Gaza exploded near the Israeli city of Ashkelon, with no casualties reported, and at least two were fired in the days before.
No ‘tit-for-tat’
“We will not agree to return to the old rules of the game and we will act according to new rules that will guarantee that we are not dragged into an incessant tit-for-tat war that will not allow normal life in the south of the country,” Mr Olmert said.
Israelis go to the polls in nine days
“The situation… in recent days has increased in a manner that does not allow Israel not to retaliate in order to make sure that our position… is understood by those involved in the fire.
“The response will come at the time, the place and the manner that we choose.”
His strong stance was echoed by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defence Minister Ehud Barak.
The ceasefires, independently declared by each side, have been violated several times.
An Israeli soldier was killed in a bomb attack on the Gaza border last Tuesday. Israel responded with air raids and a brief ground incursion by soldiers and tanks.
Elections approach
About 1,300 Palestinians and 10 Israeli soldiers were killed in Israel’s devastating three-week assault on Gaza. Three Israeli citizens died in rocket attacks.
Israel wants the rocket attacks to end and wants to prevent militants in Gaza from being able to rearm.
Analysts say the politicians who ordered the Gaza attack also have an eye on elections on 10 February.
Hamas wants the border crossings into Gaza to be fully opened to end a 18-month blockade of Gaza which has wrecked its economy.
The Egyptians have been leading efforts to broker a permanent ceasefire by holding separate talks with officials from Israel and Hamas.
ANP: Will Congressman Alan Grayson be able to shed a light on the Fed’s secret spending?
So, you know about the Treasury’s $700 billion bailout plan. But you probably don’t know that the Federal Reserve has lent out about $2 trillion since September. Few do. And that is what’s irritating bulldog Congressman Alan Grayson.
Washington is planning billions in subsidies for the ailing automobile industry, and the US Senate is debating a ‘Buy American’ provision in its economic stimulus package. The European Union fears the US is trying to seal off its market — and is using its diplomatic arsenal in a bid to stop the move.
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The European Union is unhappy about a “Buy American” clause in the United States bailout program making its way through Senate this week that officials say reeks of protectionism and could threaten to spark renewed trade wars between the US and Europe.
“President Obama has a major opportunity to give leadership to the world,” said the EU’s ambassador to Washington, John Bruton, on Monday. “If the first major piece of legislation that he signs is one that is seen as damaging to the economic interests of other countries in a way that is unnecessary and wasteful, then his capacity to give the sort of leadership the world needs at this time is considerably and unnecessarily reduced.”
AFP
Tractors made by US manufacturer Caterpillar: The EU is threatening to sue at the WTO if Washington passes protectionist measures.
Last week, Congress prompted international concern that its planned bailout package would include protectionist measures that could seal the US market off from foreign competitors, including those in export-dependent Germany.
Congress, controlled by President Barack Obama’s Democratic Party, is calling for a provision that would only allow US steel and iron to be used in infrastructure projects planned in the $825 billion (€643.2 billion) bailout package. At issue is a sum of about $300 billion that would be invested in infrastructure projects in the coming years like sewage treatment plants, new railroads and bridges as well as the modernization of the US electrical grid, wind farms and solar panels.
EU Ambassador Bruton, in a letter sent to top US politicians including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said that, if approved, the measure would set a “dangerous precedent.” According to the Associated Press, which obtained a copy of the letter, Bruton wrote that the US and other countries had pledged not to resort to protectionism in dealing with the crisis at a meeting of world leaders in November. Failure to meet that obligation “risks entering into a spiral of protectionist measures around the globe that can only hurt our economies further.” In Germany, the world’s largest exporter, companies export goods worth some €70 billion to the US each year.
The Obama administration has not yet stated its official position on the “Buy American” clause, but Vice President Joe Biden said in an interview last week, “I think it’s legitimate to have some portions of ‘Buy American’ in it.”
On Monday, however, the chairman of the conservative Republican Party in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, said he opposed the measures. “I don’t think we ought to use a measure that is supposed to be timely, temporary and targeted to set off trade wars when the entire world is experiencing a downturn in the economy,” McConnell said. “It’s a bad idea to put it in a bill like this, which is supposed to be about jump-starting the economy.”
European steel manufacturers have already called on the European Commission to sue the US at the World Trade Organization if necessary. Bruton said that any “Buy American” clause would, at best, be legally questionable. And, in his letter, Bruton wrote: “Measures of this nature, if they breach WTO rules, are likely to be the subject of legal action. There is always the possibility of retaliatory measures to be taken.”
On Monday, the US Senate began negotiating the economic stimulus package after Congress passed an €819 billion bill. In the Senate, however, that amount is expected to rise to up to €900 billion.
In the Senate version, the “Buy American” clause goes even further, stating that funds from the stimulus package cannot be used “unless all of the iron, steel and manufactured goods used in the projects are produced in the United States.”
‘A Negative Signal’
In both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the Republicans have broadly rejected the protectionist provisions. They have also criticized the package for not containing sufficient tax breaks. The Republicans believe the package, in its current form, won’t have the immediate stimulus effect the Democrats are hoping for.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs denied those charges on Monday. He also said that President Obama would review the “Buy American” provisions, and that changes were likely in the Senate draft before it is put to a vote on Friday. Afterwards, the drafts of the House and Senate version must be reconciled before it goes to President Obama for his approval. Given the divisions over the measures, Obama himself has expressed readiness to compromise. Obama is seeking to implement the stimulus package by mid-February.
In Germany, industry insiders are viewing the draft legislation with skepticism. “The fact that this clause even came to be is a negative signal that worries us,” said Sigrid Zirbel, regional director for America at the Federation of German Industry (BDI), who said she viewed the legislation as a “sign things are moving in the direction of protectionism.” But she said any final conclusions would have to be drawn after the bill is finalized.
On Friday, White House spokesman Gibbs said the Obama administration would review the “Buy American” provisions. “It understands all of the concerns that have been heard, not only in this room but in newspapers produced both up north and down south.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel would likely welcome any shift in American thinking. She has warned against national subsidies and protectionism in the wake of the global economic and financial crisis. “I am very wary of seeing subsidies injected into the US auto industry,” Merkel said last week. “Such periods must not last too long because they inevitably lead to a certain degree of distortion and, quite frankly, constitute protectionism.”
Merkel was also speaking out against comments made by the French government. On Friday, French Economics Minister Christine Lagarde described a little bit of protectionism during times of crisis as a “necessary evil.”
The United Nations has reversed its stance on one of the most contentious and bloody incidents of the recent Israel Defense Forces operation in Gaza, saying that an IDF mortar strike that killed 43 people on January 6 did not hit one of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency schools after all.
It seems that the UN has been under pressure to put the record straight after doubts arose that the school had actually been targeted. Maxwell Gaylord, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Jerusalem, said Monday that the IDF mortar shells fell in the street near the compound, and not on the compound itself.
Gaylord said that the UN “would like to clarify that the shelling and all of the fatalities took place outside and not inside the school.”
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UNRWA, an agency whose sole purpose is to work with Palestinian refugees, said in response Tuesday that it had maintained from the day of attack that the wounded were outside of the school compound. UNRWA said that the source of the mistake in recent weeks had originated with a separate branch of the United Nations.
Senior IDF officials had previously expressed skepticism that the school had been struck, saying that two mortar shells could not kill 43 people and wound dozens more.
Questions about the veracity of the claims that the school had been hit by the IDF were also raised last week by the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail. The newspaper said that a teacher in the UNRWA compound at the time of the strike “was adamant” that no people had been killed inside the compound.
The newspaper quoted the teacher as saying that, “I could see some of the people had been injured… But when I got outside, it was crazy hell. There were bodies everywhere, people dead, injured, flesh everywhere.”
The newspaper said that the teacher had been told by the UN not to speak to the media. “Three of my students were killed,” he said. “But they were all outside.”
A United Nation spokesman on Wednesday accused Hamas police in Gaza Strip of seizing thousands of blankets and food parcels meant for needy residents.
Spokesman Christopher Gunness said Hamas police raided a UN warehouse in Gaza City late Tuesday, snatching 3,500 blankets and over 400 food parcels.
The aid is especially vital now because Gazans are facing hardship after Israel’s three-week military offensive against Hamas, which left thousands homeless.
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The Gaza Strip is ruled by Hamas Islamists, who seized control of the territory from forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in 2007 after winning an election the previous year.
Gunness said Wednesday this was the first time Hamas had seized UN aid, but Israeli officials have charged that the militant group routinely confiscates supplies meant for needy Gazans.
A Hamas government spokesman was not immediately available for comment.
Meanwhile, Abbas’ West Bank-based government on Wednesday annnounced a $600 million reconstruction prograM, most of which would be funded by foreign donors.
Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who heads Abbas’ Western-backed government, said the project would cover all houses destroyed or damaged during a 22-day Israeli military offensive.
“The amount of the project is e600 million. Most of it will come from donors,” Fayyad said in a speech, adding that the details would be announced in the coming days.
Egypt is to host an international conference in coordination with Abbas’s Palestinian Authority on March 2 on Gaza reconstruction, whose cost has been estimated at $2 billion. Saudi Arabia has said it would donate e1 billion.
Last week, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit urged Europe to help with fast aid for the Gaza Strip, saying the reconstruction meeting would require damage assessments and the support of the European Union, the United Nations and others.
Insists ‘there aren’t two sets of rules’ for elite and for other Americans
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama on Tuesday abruptly abandoned his nomination fight for Tom Daschle and a second major appointee who failed to pay all their taxes, telling NBC News: “I screwed up.”
“I’ve got to own up to my mistake. Ultimately, it’s important for this administration to send a message that there aren’t two sets of rules — you know, one for prominent people and one for ordinary folks who have to pay their taxes,” Obama said on NBC’s “Nightly News with Brian Williams.”
The admission came little more than 24 hours after Obama had said he was “absolutely” committed to Daschle’s confirmation as secretary of health and human services, a job in which he would taken the lead in the president’s ambitious plans for the nation’s health care system.
“I’m frustrated with myself, with our team. … I’m here on television saying I screwed up,” Obama said on NBC. He repeated virtually the same words in interviews with other TV anchors.
Hours earlier, the White House had announced that Daschle had asked to be removed from consideration and that Nancy Killefer had made the same request concerning what was to be her groundbreaking appointment as a chief performance officer to make the entire government run better.
Worried about ‘a distraction’ Daschle said in a brief letter to Obama that he refused to “be a distraction” from the new president’s drive for health care reform. Obama said neither he nor Daschle excused the former Senate Democratic leader’s tax errors but that he accepted his friend’s decision “with sadness and regret.”
Personal tax problems had been piling up for the new administration. Last week, the Senate confirmed Timothy Geithner as treasury secretary, but only after days of controversy over the fact that the man who would oversee the Internal Revenue Service had only belatedly paid $34,000 in income taxes.
Bill Richardson bowed out, too, though his difficulties didn’t involve personal taxes. The New Mexico governor, who was Obama’s first choice for commerce secretary, withdrew amid a grand jury investigation into a state contract awarded to his political donors.
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‘Daschle had become a distraction’ Feb. 3: Chief White House Correspondent Chuck Todd reports on the Washington reaction to news of Tom Daschle’s withdrawal.
Nightly News
Questions about Daschle’s failure to fully pay his taxes from 2005 through 2007 had been increasing since they came to light last Friday. Daschle overlooked taxes on income for consulting work and personal use of a car and driver, and also deducted more in charitable contributions than he should have. To resolve it, he paid $128,203 in back taxes and $11,964 in interest last month.
Daschle, chosen to lead the administration’s push for sweeping health care reform, also was facing questions about potential conflicts of interests related to speaking fees he accepted from health care interests and about the advice he provided to health insurers and hospitals through his work at a law firm.
The car and driver were lent by Leo Hindery, head of a firm called InterMedia Advisors and former chief executive of the Global Crossing telecom company. Hindery is a longtime friend of Daschle and a veteran Democratic Party donor.
Killefer statement
Dear Mr. President,
I recognize that your agenda and the duties facing your Chief Performance Officer are urgent. I have also come to realize in the current environment that my personal tax issue of D.C. Unemployment tax could be used to create exactly the kind of distraction and delay those duties must avoid. Because of this I must reluctantly ask you to withdraw my name from consideration.
I am deeply honored to have been selected by you and you have my deep appreciation for your confidence in me. You have my heartfelt support and best wishes for success in all your endeavors.
Respectfully yours,
Nancy Killefer
Tax lien on Killefer Killefer, an executive with consulting giant McKinsey & Co., had been chosen by Obama to serve in two roles: as the first chief performance officer in a White House and as a deputy director at the Office of Management and Budget.
When Obama announced Killefer to much fanfare in early January, The Associated Press reported that the District of Columbia government had filed a $946.69 tax lien on her home in 2005 for failure to pay unemployment compensation tax on household help. She resolved the tax error five months after the lien was filed. Since then, administration officials had refused to say whether her tax problems extended beyond that one issue.
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Daschle ‘emotional’ Feb. 3: NBC’s Andrea Mitchell recounts her conversation with an emotional Tom Daschle, in which he talked about how a New York Times editorial affected his decision to withdraw.
MSNBC
By Tuesday, the tax questions had reached critical mass.
“Today was an embarrassment for us,” Obama said on NBC. He said he was “angry,” “disappointed” and “frustrated with myself” over the Daschle episode.
But the president claimed credit for appointing hundreds of “top notch” executive branch officials who have no tax problems.
“It’s important not to paint (with) a broad brush here, because overall not only have we gotten in place a functioning government in record time, but overall the quality of these people is outstanding.”
Still, the dual-withdrawal fiasco is “something I have to take responsibility for,” Obama told Williams.
“I appointed these folks. I think they are outstanding people. I think Tom Daschle, as an example, could have led this health care effort, a difficult effort, better than just about anybody. But as he acknowledged, it was a mistake. I don’t think it was intentional on his part, but it was a serious mistake. He owned up to it and ultimately made a decision that we couldn’t afford the distraction.”
Heeding The New York Times
Daschle told NBC News that a chiding New York Times editorial played a role in his decision to exit.
In an emotional phone call with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Daschle said he had phoned Obama on Tuesday morning after reading the New York Times editorial calling on him to withdraw.
The editorial described Daschle’s ability to move “cozily between government and industry” as a cloud over any role he might play in changing the nation’s medical insurance system.
“I read the New York Times,” Daschle told Mitchell, adding: “I can’t pass health care if it’s too much of a distraction … so I called the president this morning.”
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the choice to step aside was Daschle’s alone and the former senator “did not get a signal” from the White House to do so. Daschle and Obama spoke Tuesday, and the president was surprised at the news, said White House senior adviser David Axelrod.
Surprised Democrats Democratic lawmakers were surprised, too — and disappointed. Axelrod rushed to Capitol Hill to soothe frayed nerves.
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Daschle ‘emotional’ Feb. 3: NBC’s Andrea Mitchell recounts her conversation with an emotional Tom Daschle, in which he talked about how a New York Times editorial affected his decision to withdraw.
MSNBC
“I was a little stunned. I thought he was going to get confirmed,” said Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, the panel that would have voted on Daschle’s nomination. “It’s regrettable.”
Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Daschle’s former Democratic colleagues had leapt to the former Democratic leader’s defense. And it seemed that the clubby way that senators treat one of their own was likely to help Daschle survive the controversy.
But particularly after the divisive Geithner debate and vote, it apparently became too bitter a pill. Tax issues are easy for the public to understand, and also particularly easy to resent in wealthy officials at a time of widespread economic crisis.
They also created an opening for a drumbeat of criticism from Republicans and on newspaper editorial pages that Obama was engaging in a double standard: proclaiming his administration to be more ethical, responsible and special interest-free than his predecessors’ and yet carving out exceptions almost daily.
GOP Sen. John Ensign of Nevada said Daschle was going to be faced with tough questions from committee members, among them how the wealth he amassed from a lobbying firm — while not technically registered as a lobbyist — “passes the smell test.”
“I think he saved the president from being embarrassed next week in a public hearing,” Ensign said.
Loss for Obama’s agenda But even while Obama aimed to stave off potentially crippling problems in one corner with the withdrawals, he created some new ones.
Obama has promised that moving toward universal health care coverage is one of the pillars of first 100 days agenda — a heavy lift that many believed Daschle, with his long experience in Washington, was uniquely qualified for. Daschle was going to wear two hats for Obama, as White House health czar on top of the post leading the Health and Human Services Department.
“We’re going to do health care reform,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said flatly after the nomination withdrawal. But others reacted differently.
“It really sets us back a step,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. “Because he was such a talent. I mean he understood Congress, serving in the House and Senate he certainly had the confidence of the president.”
Among those considered for the post before it went to Daschle was Howard Dean, the physician-turned-politician who ran for president in 2004 and recently left as head of the Democratic National Committee. Other possible replacements include Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, and Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland.
Egypt on Tuesday prevented two senior Al Jazeera journalists from entering the Gaza Strip through Rafah border, the London-based Arab newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi reported on Wednesday.
The two, Ahmad Mansour and Ghassan Bin Jido, said that the Egyptian authorities did not provide an explanation for their decision, and that employees of other media outlets were allowed to cross into the besieged territory without delay.
During Operation Cast Lead last month, the network’s coverage of the events in Gaza was critical of Egypt’s opposition to Hamas. Mansour and Bin Jido are known for their favorable attitude toward the Palestinian “resistance movement,” as Hamas is known in the Arab world. They said they’d stay put until Egypt provides a “reasonable” explanation for their detention at the border.
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Ben Jido, the head of Al Jazeera’s Lebanon office, interviewed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in the wake of the Second Lebanon War in 2006 and held a special program in honor of the convicted terrorist Samir Kuntar upon his release in a prisoner swap deal last year.
On Tuesday, it was reported that the Israeli government is set to impose sanctions on Israel-based employees Al Jazeera in response to the closure last month of the Israeli trade office in Qatar, which hosts and funds the network. Qatar had closed the office in opposition to Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip.
Following the closure, the Foreign Ministry, in conjunction with the newly-formed national information directorate in the Prime Minister’s Office, considered declaring the station a hostile entity and closing its offices in Israel. After submitting the idea to legal review, however, concerns emerged it would not be permitted by the High Court of Justice.
Instead, it chose to limit the network’s activity in Israel and the Palestinian Authority. First, Israel will not renew the visas of Al Jazeera’s non-Israeli employees or grant visas to new employees. Second, station representatives will have reduced accessibility to government and military bodies, and will not be allowed into briefings or press conferences.
WASHINGTON – A classified Pentagon report urges President Obama to shift US military strategy in Afghanistan, deemphasizing democracy-building and concentrating more on targeting Taliban and Al Qaeda sanctuaries inside Pakistan with the aid of Pakistani military forces.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has seen the report prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but it has not yet been presented to the White House, officials said yesterday.
The recommendations are one element of a broad policy reassessment underway along with recommendations to be considered by the White House from the commander of the US Central Command, General David Petraeus, and other military leaders.
A senior defense official said yesterday that it will probably take several weeks before the Obama administration rolls out its long-term strategy for Afghanistan.
The Joint Chiefs’ plan reflects growing worries that the US military was taking on more than it could handle in Afghanistan by pursuing the Bush administration’s broad goal of nurturing a thriving democratic government.
Instead, the plan calls for a more narrowly focused effort to root out militant strongholds along the Pakistani border and inside the neighboring country, according to officials who confirmed the essence of the report. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the plan publicly.
During a press conference yesterday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs noted the ongoing “comprehensive reviews” of Afghan policy, but did not say when they would be made public.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman would not comment yesterday on the details of the Joint Chiefs’ report, but acknowledged that the US relationship with Pakistan is a critical component for success in Afghanistan.
“When you talk about Afghanistan, you can’t help but also recognize the fact that the border region with Pakistan is obviously a contributing factor to the stability and security of Afghanistan, and the work that Pakistan is doing to try to reduce and eliminate those safe havens, and the ability for people to move across that border that are engaged in hostile intentions,” Whitman said.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reported that Afghan authorities announced yesterday that they had broken up a suicide bombing cell responsible for a string of attacks in the capital, including a massive explosion last month that killed an American serviceman and wounded five other US soldiers.
A spokesman for Afghanistan’s main intelligence service said that the 17 men arrested in Kabul were believed to be affiliated with a Pakistan-based militant group known as the Haqqani network and that the cell’s ringleader was a Pakistani national.
BERLIN – Glaciers from the Andes to Alaska and across the Alps shrank as much as 10 feet, the 18th year of retreat and twice as fast as a decade ago, as global warming threatens an important supply of the world’s water.
Alpine glaciers lost on average 0.7 meters of thickness in 2007, data published yesterday by the University of Zurich’s World Glacier Monitoring Service showed. The melting extends an 11-meter retreat since 1980.
“One year doesn’t tell us much, it’s really these long-term trends that help us to understand what’s going on,” Michael Zemp, a researcher at the University of Zurich’s Department of Geography, said in an interview. “The main thing that we can do to stop this is reduce greenhouse gases” that are blamed for global warming.
The Alps have suffered more than other regions with half of the region’s glacier terrain having disappeared since the 1850s, Zemp said.
Almost 90 percent of the glaciers in the Alps are smaller than 0.4 square mile and some are as thin as 30 meters, he said.
Some maritime glaciers, or those that terminate in the sea, have grown in recent years, including 2007, Zemp said. They include glaciers at Nigardsbreen, Norway, and Alaska that were helped by temperatures that remain below freezing and ample snow.
Glaciers further inland in Alaska in such sites as the Kenai mountains and Scandinavia matched the overall declining trend seen in Chile, Colombia and throughout the Alps.
The World Glacier Monitoring Program has measured 30 glaciers, of an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 worldwide, in nine mountain ranges since 1980. More ice has been lost than gained on average in 25 of the past 28 years with the last year of growth reported in 1989.
Glacier loss is measured by hammering poles into the ice sheet and observing how much the ice has retreated or gained against the measuring rod. Calculations are made, too, at the tongue or end of the glacier while satellite technology is also employed, Zemp said.
The pace of the decline has doubled since the 1990s, when the average loss was about 0.3 meters compared with 0.7 meters now, he said. Glaciers at high altitudes and latitudes, such as Switzerland’s Aletsch and the Devon Ice Cap in Canada, would probably survive a global temperature increase of 3 degrees.
Some glaciers in the Alps have shrunk so much it’s becoming difficult to take accurate measurements, Zemp said. Such ice has not recovered from the 2003 European summer heat wave that melted the snow, revealing darker ice underneath which heats up faster than whiter surfaces.
The global average temperature has risen 1.4 degrees since preindustrial times, according to the UN’s Environment Program.
Charges against suspected al-Qaida bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri over USS Cole attack are dropped by terror judge
The last terror trial at Guantánamo Bay had been halted after the senior military judge dropped charges against a suspect in the 2000 USS Cole bombing, the Pentagon has said.
The military charges against suspected al-Qaida bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri marked the last active war crimes case at the US Navy base in Cuba.
The decision by Susan Crawford, the top legal authority for military trials at Guantánamo, brings all cases into compliance with Barack Obama’s executive order to halt terror court proceedings at the base.
A Pentagon spokesman said Crawford dismissed the charges against al-Nashiri without prejudice. That means new charges can be brought again later. He will remain in prison for the time being.
“It was her decision, but it reflects the fact that the president has issued an executive order which mandates that the military commissions be halted, pending the outcome of several reviews of our operations down at Guantánamo,” the spokesman said.
The ruling also gives the White House time to review the legal cases of all 245 terror suspects held there and decide whether they should be prosecuted in the United States or released to other nations.
Obama is expected to meet families of victims of the Cole incident and the 9/11 attacks at the White House to announce the move today.
Seventeen US sailors died on 12 October 2000, when al-Qaida suicide bombers steered an explosives-laden boat into the Cole, a guided-missile destroyer, as it sat in a Yemen port.
The Pentagon charged al-Nashiri, a Saudi Arabian, last summer with “organising and directing” the bombing and planned to seek the death penalty in the case.
In his 22 January order, Obama promised to shut down the Guantánamo prison within a year. The order also froze all detainees’ legal cases pending a three-month review as the Obama administration decides where or whether to prosecute the suspects who have been held there for years, most without charges.
Two military judges granted Obama’s request for delays in other cases.
But a third military judge, James Pohl, defied Obama’s order by scheduling a n arraignment for al-Nashiri at Guantánamo. That left the decision whether to continue to Crawford, whose delay on announcing what she would do prompted widespread concern at the Pentagon that she would refuse to follow orders and allow the court process to continue.
Last year, al-Nashiri said during a Guantánamo hearing that he confessed to helping plot the Cole bombing only because he was tortured by US interrogators. The CIA has admitted he was among terror suspects subjected to waterboarding, which simulates drowning, in 2002 and 2003 while being interrogated in secret CIA prisons.
Porter: Keane key player in campaign to attack Obama’s plans to withdraw forces from Iraq
In part two of our interview with Gareth Porter, we examine the roots of Obama’s break with the military leadership over Iraq. In doing so, we examine the leading voice for continuing the occupation, Gen. Jack Keane. Keane, like many so-called ‘retired’ military officials, has continued to participate in policy-making at the Pentagon, while simultaneously working in the private military contracting sector and commenting publicly on US foreign policy. In this sense, he serves as an example of the military-industrial complex at work.
Gareth Porter is a historian and investigative journalist on US foreign and military policy analyst. He writes regularly for Inter Press Service on US policy towards Iraq and Iran. Author of four books, the latest of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.
WASHINGTON – As it fights two wars, the Pentagon is steadily and dramatically increasing the money it spends to win what it calls “the human terrain” of world public opinion. In the process, it is raising concerns of spreading propaganda at home in violation of federal law.
An Associated Press investigation found that over the past five years, the money the military spends on winning hearts and minds at home and abroad has grown by 63 percent, to at least $4.7 billion this year, according to Department of Defense budgets and other documents. That’s almost as much as it spent on body armor for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2004 and 2006.
This year, the Pentagon will employ 27,000 people just for recruitment, advertising and public relations — almost as many as the total 30,000-person work force in the State Department.
“We have such a massive apparatus selling the military to us, it has become hard to ask questions about whether this is too much money or if it’s bloated,” says Sheldon Rampton, research director for the Committee on Media and Democracy, which tracks the military’s media operations. “As the war has become less popular, they have felt they need to respond to that more.”
Yet the money spent on media and outreach still comes to only 1 percent of the Pentagon budget, and the military argues it is well-spent on recruitment and the education of foreign and American audiences. Military leaders say that at a time when extremist groups run Web sites and distribute video, information is as important a weapon as tanks and guns.
“We have got to be involved in getting our case out there, telling our side of the story, because believe me, al-Qaida and all of those folks … that’s what they are doing on the Internet and everywhere else,” says Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., who chairs the Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee. “Every time a bomb goes off, they have a story out almost before it explodes, saying that it killed 15 innocent civilians.”
Pumping out press releases On an abandoned Air Force base in San Antonio, Texas, editors for the Joint Hometown News Service point proudly to a dozen clippings on a table as examples of success in getting stories into newspapers.
Eric Gay / AP
Clippings of articles published by the Joint Hometown News Service are shown in their San Antonio office.
What readers are not told: Each of these glowing stories was written by Pentagon staff. Under the free service, stories go out with authors’ names but not their titles, and do not mention Hometown News anywhere. In 2009, Hometown News plans to put out 5,400 press releases, 3,000 television releases and 1,600 radio interviews, among other work — 50 percent more than in 2007.
The service is just a tiny piece of the Pentagon’s rapidly expanding media empire, which is now bigger in size, money and power than many media companies.
In a yearlong investigation, The Associated Press interviewed more than 100 people and scoured more than 100,000 pages of documents in several budgets to tally the money spent to inform, educate and influence the public in the U.S. and abroad. The AP included contracts found through the private FedSources database and requests made under the Freedom of Information Act. Actual spending figures are higher because of money in classified budgets.
The biggest chunk of funds — about $1.6 billion — goes into recruitment and advertising. Another $547 million goes into public affairs, which reaches American audiences. And about $489 million more goes into what is known as psychological operations, which targets foreign audiences.
Staffing across all these areas costs about $2.1 billion, as calculated by the number of full-time employees and the military’s average cost per service member. That’s double the staffing costs for 2003.
Recruitment and advertising are the only two areas where Congress has authorized the military to influence the American public. Far more controversial is public affairs, because of the prohibition on propaganda to the American public.
Pentagon can’t sell policy “It’s not up to the Pentagon to sell policy to the American people,” says Rep. Paul Hodes, D-N.H., who sponsored legislation in Congress last year reinforcing the ban.
Spending on public affairs has more than doubled since 2003. Robert Hastings, acting director of Pentagon public affairs, says the growth reflects changes in the information market, along with the fact that the U.S. is now fighting two wars.
“The role of public affairs is to provide you the information so that you can make an informed decision yourself,” Hastings says. “There is no place for spin at the Department of Defense.”
But on Dec. 12, the Pentagon’s inspector general released an audit finding that the public affairs office may have crossed the line into propaganda. The audit found the Department of Defense “may appear to merge inappropriately” its public affairs with operations that try to influence audiences abroad. It also found that while only 89 positions were authorized for public affairs, 126 government employees and 31 contractors worked there.
In a written response, Hastings concurred and, without acknowledging wrongdoing, ordered a reorganization of the department by early 2009.
Another audit, also in December, concluded that a public affairs program called “America Supports You” was conducted “in a questionable and unregulated manner” with funds meant for the military’s Stars and Stripes newspaper.
The program was set up to keep U.S. troops informed about volunteer donations to the military. But the military awarded $11.8 million in contracts to a public relations firm to raise donations for the troops and then advertise those donations to the public. So the program became a way to drum up support for the military at a time when public opinion was turning against the Iraq war.
The audit also found that the offer to place corporate logos on the Pentagon Web site in return for donations was against regulations. A military spokesman said the program has been completely overhauled to meet Pentagon regulations.
“They very explicitly identify American public opinion as an important battlefield,” says Marc Lynch, a professor at George Washington University. “In today’s information environment, even if they were well-intentioned and didn’t want to influence American public opinion, they couldn’t help it.”
In 2003, for example, initial accounts from the military about the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch from Iraqi forces were faked to rally public support. And in 2005, a Marine Corps spokesman during the siege of the Iraqi city of Fallujah told the U.S. news media that U.S. troops were attacking. In fact, the information was a ruse by U.S. commanders to fool insurgents into revealing their positions.
‘Psychological’ spending doubles The fastest-growing part of the military media is “psychological operations,” where spending has doubled since 2003.
Psychological operations aim at foreign audiences, and spin is welcome. The only caveats are that messages must be truthful and must never try to influence an American audience.
In Afghanistan, for example, a video of a soldier joining the national army shown on Afghan television is not attributed to the U.S. And in Iraq, American teams built and equipped media outlets and trained Iraqis to staff them without making public the connection to the military.
Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, director of strategic communications for the U.S. Central Command, says psychological operations must be secret to be effective. He says that in the 21st century, it is probably not possible to win the information battle with insurgents without exposing American citizens to secret U.S. propaganda.
“We have to be pragmatic and realistic about the game that we play in terms of information, and that game is very complex,” he says.
The danger of psychological operations reaching a U.S. audience became clear when an American TV anchor asked Gen. David Petraeus about the mood in Iraq. The general held up a glossy photo of the Iraqi national soccer team to show the country united in victory.
Behind the camera, his staff was cringing. It was U.S. psychological operations that had quietly distributed tens of thousands of the soccer posters in July 2007 to encourage Iraqi nationalism.
With a new administration in power, it is not clear what changes may be made. Obama administration officials have said they intend to go through the Department of Defense budget closely to trim bloated spending.
Rumsfeld’s Office of Strategic Influence The emphasis on influence operations started with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In 2002, Rumsfeld established an Office of Strategic Influence that brought together public affairs and psychological operations. Critics accused him of setting up a propaganda arm, and Congress demanded that the office be shut down.
Rumsfeld has declined to speak to the press since leaving office, but while defense secretary he spoke bluntly about his desire to revamp the Pentagon’s media operations.
“I went down that next day and said, ‘Fine, if you want to savage this thing, fine, I’ll give you the corpse,’” Rumsfeld said on Nov. 18, 2002, according to Defense Department transcripts of a speech he delivered. “‘There’s the name. You can have the name, but I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have.’”
In 2003, Rumsfeld issued a secret Information Operations Roadmap setting out a plan for public affairs and psychological operations to work together. It noted that with a global media, the military should expect and accept that psychological operations will reach the U.S. public.
“I can tell you there wouldn’t be a single American disappointed with anything that we’ve done that might be out there, that they don’t know about,” says Col. Curtis Boyd, commander of the 4th PSYOP Group, the largest unit of its kind. “Frankly, they probably wouldn’t care because maybe they are safer as a result of it.”
In January 2008, a new report by the Defense Science Board recommended resurrecting the Office of Strategic Influence as the Office of Strategic Communications. But Congress refused to fund the program.
In February, the Army released a new eight-chapter field manual that puts information warfare on par with traditional warfare.
The title of an entire chapter, Chapter 7: “Information Superiority.”
The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
As the wars get longer and personel becomes hard to find, robots are filling the positions. Warfare is now outsourced like software. In these interviews, Amy Goodman from Democracy Now speaks with author P.W. Singer about his Book Wired For War.
Some Venezuelans fear Chavez could turn the country into a version of communist Cuba [Reuters]
Tens of thousands of Venezuelans have demonstrated on the streets of Caracas, the capital, in protest against constitutional changes that could allow the president to run for office indefinitely.
The march, under the slogan “No is no”, was the largest to be held in more than a year by opposition parties and anti-government students who claim Hugo Chavez intends to turn Venezuela into a version of communist Cuba.
March organisers said hundreds of thousands of people took part in the protest, while government television said turnout was low.
“This reform hides, as President Chavez himself has said, the start of what would be a country, a state with a Castro-communist system,” said Manuel Rosales, a former opposition presidential candidate.
Protesters complained about a surge in violent crime under Chavez and wore shirts emblazoned with the phrase “I also want to be president”.
Chavez rebuke
Many people carried Venezuela’s red, yellow and blue flag in the march that stretched from the edge of the city’s largest slum to a wealthy business district.
Chavez, wearing a baseball jersey with the word “Yes” emblazoned across his chest during door-to-door campaigning in a poor Caracas neighbourhood, said: “If we did a march, we would have 100 times the people they brought today.”
Opinion polls give a slight lead to Chavez before a February 15 vote on whether to allow him and other politicians to run for re-election as many times as they like in South America’s top oil exporter.
Voters rejected a similar proposal in 2007.
If he loses, Chavez would leave office in four years, but he has not ruled out staging another attempt to change the electoral law.
Referendum threat
Another referendum defeat for him could embolden opponents and increase resistance to unpopular spending cuts or a currency devaluation that analysts say might result if oil income remains low.
Chavez says he still needs more time to build a “21st century socialism” [Reuters]
But Chavez denies he will prohibit private property and has pointed out the government continues to work with foreign oil companies.A close friend of Fidel Castro, Cuba’s former leader, Chavez is a vocal critic of the United States and provides Cuba with cheap oil in return for doctors and advisers.
He has nationalised industries and raised spending on health and welfare since he took office in 1999, but says he needs more time to build what he calls “21st century socialism” in one of the principal oil suppliers to the United States.
Considerable power
Still popular with about half of the population, he has amassed considerable power and most institutions are run by his allies.
Opponents say Chavez is authoritarian and will turn people’s homes and possessions over to the state.
He has won multiple elections in the past decade and survived a brief coup, a months-long shutdown of the vital oil industry and a recall referendum.
The opposition only recently made gains against Chavez, defeating the 2007 referendum and winning seats in state and city elections last year.
A 56-year-old American athlete claims to have become the first woman on record to swim the Atlantic.
Jennifer Figge took 24 days to swim from the Cape Verde islands off Africa to Trinidad. The exact distance she covered has yet to be calculated.
She swam inside a cage to protect her from sharks.
Figge, who had originally planned to make landfall in the Bahamas, now plans to finish by swimming from Trinidad to the British Virgin Islands.
She first dreamed of swimming across the Atlantic Ocean as a little girl.
Looking back, I wouldn’t have it any other way
Jennifer Figge
The swimmer finally moved nearer her goal when she left Cape Verde Islands on 12 January, facing waves of up to 9m (30 ft).
Each day she would spend up to eight hours in the water at a stretch before returning to her support boat.
Crew members would throw the athlete energy drinks as she swam along, if it was too stormy divers would deliver them in person.
She saw pilot whales, turtles, and dolphins, but no sharks.
“I was never scared,” she told the Associated Press news agency.
“Looking back, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I can always swim in a pool.”
Jennifer Figge’s journey comes 10 years after a French swimmer, Benoit Lecomte, made the first known solo trans-Atlantic swim covering 6,400km (4,000 miles) in 73 days.
Figge had planned to swim 3,380km (2,100 miles), but she was blown off course and reached Trinidad rather than the Bahamas.
With world opinion soured by the recent events in Gaza, Israelis are headed to the polls to elect a new government that is widely expected to move further to the right. Pre-election polls put the conservative Likud in the lead. Labor trailed a distant fourth, behind even the ultra conservative Yisrael Beitenu, despite taking a hawkish turn.
Israel continues to draw criticism from the U.N. for hampering its relief efforts in Gaza. A number of shipments have been stopped at the border, including—and you can’t make this up—the paper needed to print new textbooks for a course in human rights.
The Herald Tribune has a succinct primer on Israeli elections here.
AP via International Herald Tribune:
The top U.N. official in Gaza criticized Israel on Monday for blocking the shipment of paper to print textbooks for a new human rights curriculum that will be taught to children in all grades in the Palestinian territory.
Israel also has refused to allow 12 truckloads of notebooks into Gaza as well as plastic sheeting which is turned into plastic bags to distribute food that the U.N. provides to some 900,000 people, John Ging, head of Gaza operations for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency which helps Palestinian refugees, said in a videoconference with reporters at U.N. headquarters.
Key facts about Israel’s election
Key facts about Israel’s general election:
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WHAT’S AT STAKE: Voters will elect a 120-member parliament, or Knesset, Israel’s 18th.
Citizens vote for party lists, not individual candidates. Seats are allocated in the Knesset according to the percentage of the vote the parties win.
WHO’S RUNNING: Thirty-three parties are fielding candidates. Key parties are the governing Kadima Party, led by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Israel’s chief negotiator with the Palestinians and a supporter of conciliation with the Arab world; Likud, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister who takes a hard line against the Palestinians, and Labor, headed by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, another former premier and a retired army chief who won widespread public approval for his role as point man in Israel’s three-week offensive against Hamas in Gaza last month. Small parties include Green Leaf, which supports the legalization of marijuana, the Pensioners Party, Arab parties and a joint venture of moderate Orthodox Jews and environmentalists. Few, if any. are expected to win representation.
A party must receive at least 2 percent of votes cast to be represented in parliament.
In the 2006 election, 31 parties registered to run but only 12 won enough votes to win seats.
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FORMING A GOVERNMENT: In Israel’s 60-year history, no party has ever won an outright majority of 61 seats, and the country has always been governed by a coalition.
Within seven days after the Feb. 18 publication of official results, Israel’s president meets with party factions to determine which party has the best chance of forming a government. The president then taps the head of that party — usually parliament’s largest — to undertake that task. That person will have up to six weeks to form a coalition. If successful, he or she becomes prime minister; if not, the president chooses another party to try.
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THE VOTE: There are 5,278,985 eligible voters. Most of the 9,263 polling stations across the country opened at 7 a.m. (0500 GMT, 12 a.m. EST) and close at 10 p.m. (2000 GMT, 3 p.m. EST).
Voter turnout in the last election in 2006 was 63.2 percent, the lowest in Israel’s history.
Election Day is a national holiday, and workers have the day off.
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ISRAEL BY THE NUMBERS:
Population: 7.2 million of whom 75 percent (5.5 million) are Jews, 20 percent (1.4 million) are Arabs and the rest are classified as “others,” most of them non-Jewish immigrants.
PROVIDENCE – A Chinese immigrant being held at a Rhode Island detention center was denied medical care, abused, and accused of faking his illness in the weeks before he died of cancer, according to a federal lawsuit filed yesterday by the man’s widow.
Hiu Lui “Jason” Ng, 34, a computer engineer accused of overstaying his visa, died of liver cancer in August, weeks after being taken to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls. His cancer went undiagnosed until days before he died.
Ng’s death prompted a public outcry and state and federal investigations into his detention and treatment. Federal officials determined Ng was mistreated and denied access to medical care. They pulled immigration detainees out of the facility in December before terminating their contract with Wyatt.
“They treated him like he was a piece of furniture. They treated him like an animal,” said Jack McConnell, a volunteer for the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of Ng’s widow, Lin Li Qu.
The lawsuit alleged guards denied Ng the use of a wheelchair, on one occasion dragging him crying and screaming in pain from his cell to an appointment in Hartford to meet with officials from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. During the return trip, guards threw him on the ground and again dragged him by his arms and legs, breaking his back, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages, names the facility’s owners, warden, and staff and another facility in Vermont, where Ng was held before being moved to Wyatt. It also names officials of the federal immigration agency, who it says scheduled the Hartford trip to get back at Ng after his attorney went to federal court to try to get him medical care.
Wyatt spokeswoman Margaret Lynch-Gadaleta said it was premature to comment on the lawsuit.
“It’s not a surprise that a lawsuit was filed,” she said. “There will be discovery and review.”
Michael Gilhooly, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman, would not comment on the allegations, but said the agency’s investigation, done three days before the agency canceled its contract with Wyatt, found employees violated the agency’s national detention standards.
“Any death is certainly tragic and unfortunate, and we review the circumstances of all deaths in custody very closely,” he said.
Updated: Monday, 09 Feb 2009, 7:15 PM EST
Published : Monday, 09 Feb 2009, 7:09 PM EST
Melissa Sardelli
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Reputed mob captain Anthony “the saint” St. Laurent faces charges of trying to pull off a gangland slaying in downtown Providence.
On Monday, St. Laurent participated in a U.S. District Court in Providence by video conference from the federal prison in Massachusetts. St. Laurent is currently serving a sentence for extortion.
St. Laurent, identified by law enforcement as Capo Regime in the Patriarca crime family, tried to hire two men to kill rival Capo, Robert “Bobby” Deluca in 2006, and again from behind bars in 2007.
In a criminal complaint obtained by Target 12, FBI case agent Joseph Degnan wired up an informant ,who recorded a 2006 conversation in St. Laurent’s house.
According to the recording, St. Laurent not only told two men he wanted Deluca dead, but he said he had the permission of “the boss.”
The boss, according to court documents, is Luigi “Baby Shacks” Manocchio, who runs the New England crime family from Providence’s Federal Hill. St. Laurent even drove one of the men to Deluca’s workplace, Sidebar Bar and Grille in Providence.
Shortly after that, St. Laurent was scooped up in a separate extortion plot. But apparently, still raging from behind bars at Fort Devens Federal Prison in Massachusetts, investigators said St. Laurent tried to solicit a hit through fellow inmates.
In a criminal complaint, unsealed on Friday, St. Laurent was charged with solicitation of murder. The FBI released a statement Friday afternoon touting cooperation between Rhode Island State Police, Massachusetts State Police, Providence Police and Boston Police.
Target 12 Investigator Tim White spoke with Deluca’s attorney Artin Coloian late Friday and said his client was informed of the attempted hit and that Deluca is not concerned for his safety.
The owner of the house he lived in at 635 Tower Hill Road, Muriel Miller, 72, said his name is Mark Kilcline and that he had lived with her for about a year.
Miller said that Kilcline was upset about his relationship with a couple of friends and had agreed to let her take him for counseling at Butler Hospital, a private psychiatric hospital in Providence, when the police came to the house.
Miller said that Kilcline, who is her grandson’s best friend, was in his pajamas when he was talking to her and had just gone upstairs to change. She said it was somewhere around 9 a.m. Sunday.
Kilcline was shot by North Kingstown police officers, and an officer was hit by a stray bullet, during a confrontation yesterday morning in the apartment building. Police said he was hit with Tasers and then shot after he refused to drop a knife.
Miller said Kilcline is a bright, generous young man who never gave her any trouble in the year he lived with her. She used to give him rides to the park’ n ‘ride so he could attend Community College of Rhode Island in Warwick, but he had had to drop out for some reason, she said.
Kilcline slept upstairs but used the kitchen and other areas of the house. Miller said Kilcline likes to cook. On Saturday night he had two female friends at the house and had cooked and baked for them, she said.
Sunday morning, one of the young women called Miller upset over a conversation with Kilcline that night. She told Miller that Kilcline had cut his wrist with a steak knife.
That morning Miller talked with Kilcline. She offered to bandage his wound but he declined, Miller said. Kilcline told her he felt the women didn’t really care for him and were talking advantage of him, and he began to cry. She convinced him he needed counseling and he went upstairs to change his clothes so they could go to Butler. She said he stayed at Butler four months ago for five days.
Miller would not talk about anything that occurred after police arrived at the house. The police said Kilcline moved toward them with a knife in a threatening way, and that they asked him to stop before Tasering and then shooting him.
Mary Trout, a friend of Miller’s who lives three houses down, said she feared something had happened to Miler when she saw the police in front of the house.
She was shocked to learn Kilcline had been shot. “He was concerned about his mental health. That turned out to be the least of his problems,” Trout said.
Kilcline’s 10 by 10 foot bedroom is on the right at the top of the stairs in the front of the house. Down a short narrow hallway is an apartment where a couple lives with their son. They were home at the time of the shooting.
Today, drops of blood on the floor led to Kilcline’s bedroom. His clothes, papers and other debris were strewn on the bedroom rug ,along with drops of blood. There was blood on his bedspread. Behind a rocking chair where he had hung a dress jacket, there was half a tray of brownies.
Tenant Bobby Lopez shows Providence inspectors the basement of the two-family house on Heath Street where she lives with her children. For a time, tenants there were without running water.
The Providence Journal / Mary Murphy
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Inspectors Ana Quezada and Bill Packard stand in the hallway outside an illegal third-floor floor apartment on Heath Street. in Silver Lake. They were unable to get into the apartment because the door was padlocked.
–>PROVIDENCE — Inside a neglected double-decker on Heath Street, in the city’s Silver Lake section, three families with young children endure the demands of daily life for weeks with no running water.
They try to keep the problem quiet, but a neighbor calls the city to complain.
One January morning, housing inspector Ana Quezada climbs the narrow staircase to the second-floor apartment and knocks.
Video
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Inside, a woman tries to quiet her three toddlers as Quezada looks around. The kitchen is warm, the inspector notes, so they have heat. Then she notices office-size Poland Spring jugs next to the refrigerator.
“You guys have no water?”
Quezada tries the kitchen faucet. Nothing.
In neighborhoods throughout Providence, the housing market bust and rising unemployment have left a growing population of tenants living in misery: crowded into apartments with broken windows, leaking pipes, crumbling ceilings, jury-rigged electrical wiring –– and, at times, no heat or running water.
Tenants who complain may get the problems fixed –– or they may be ordered to move out.
“People are desperate and they’re doing dangerous things,” said Sheila M. Barrett, the new director of the city’s Department of Inspection and Standards. “They come in looking for help and we tell them: You have to move. They’re not happy about it, but it’s not safe.”
The extent of the problem is not known. The inspections department has no consistent computer record-keeping, although it plans to computerize the records soon. But the department’s tally of minimum housing code violations last year was up 25 percent from 2006.
Paper files stored in battered metal filing cabinets tell stories of hundreds of properties riddled with unresolved code violations:
“Windows don’t open.”
“No key to front door.”
“Repair roof (leaking).”
“Restore heating equipment to proper working order.”
“Rats.”
Landlords must provide water, heat and electricity to comply with the city’s minimum housing codes. If not, the city can condemn the property and give the occupants 10 days to move out.
But if a tenant refuses to let a housing inspector into the house, the inspector has to get a court order just to conduct the inspection. And it can take months, or even years, before the violations get corrected. And those are just the violations the city knows about.
The woman on Heath Street who had no water told the housing inspector that the water was shut off after the man who used to collect the rent stopped coming by. One of the tenants called the city water department and was told they would have to pay $750 for unpaid fees to get the water turned back on. A community organizer managed to negotiate the payment down to $300. But the tenants still had not paid the bill.
“We’re saving money too, to move,” the woman said. “But for now …”
Quezada, the inspector, listened, patiently. Then, she laid down the law.
“If you don’t have water,” she warned, “we have to condemn the building.”
Rental housing is generally the hardest hit during an economic downturn, said Nicolas P. Retsinas, director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. “People who lose their jobs or whose hours are cut back, he said, have a harder time paying their rent — which, in turn, means landlords have less money for repairs.”
In Providence, landlords who do not live in their rental houses are prohibited from getting low-cost repair loans through city or state agencies under a housing plan the city adopted a decade or more ago to promote owner-occupied housing. It’s consistent with a basic tenet of the nation’s housing policy that home ownership improves upward mobility and stabilizes neighborhoods.
“We have tailored our programs to home ownership,” said Thomas E. Deller, the city’s director of planning and development. “We’re not into funding lots of absentee landlords…who have tended to be the problem in our neighborhoods.”
City and community groups don’t want to reward absentee owners by giving them access to credit at a discount, said Ray Neirinkx, at the Rhode Island Housing Resources Commission’s office of home ownership. But with so many properties owned by absentee landlords, he said, that begs the question: “Are we really looking to improve the place? Is it a place-based approach to improve the quality of the home? Or, is it driven by ownership?”
Meanwhile, investors seeking to cash in on falling house prices snatch up multifamily houses at bargain prices, and then post “For Rent” signs.
In the city’s Olneyville neighborhood, a two-family house on Kossuth Street which in 2006 sold for $345,000 was foreclosed just over a year later, only to be bought by an investor last October for $15,000, according to Providence Journal real-estate listings.
Andrea Harris had just been laid off from her job at an after-school program last October and was searching for a cheaper rental when she saw an apartment in the house on Kossuth Street listed for $550 per month.
The house needed a lot of work, Harris recalled, but the landlord had workers who were fixing it up, and he assured her it would be ready by the time she moved in. But shortly after she moved into the second-floor apartment with her five children last November, the gas was shut off. “We had no heat,” she said.
Then the electricity went out.
“When I was helping the kids with homework,” Harris said, “I opened the curtains for light.”
It got so cold that shortly before Christmas she sent her older children to stay with a cousin and she took the younger ones with her to her sister’s house.
Downstairs, Maria Serrer and her children also had no heat and they couldn’t flush their toilet. Serrer complained to the landlord — and then to the city.
“He said, just give him time. Give him time,’” recalled Serrer.
In response to the complaint, Quezada, the housing inspector, inspected the first-floor apartment on Jan. 7 and cited the company that bought the house, Megazone Realty, LLC, for 11 housing code violations. She ordered the owner to “restore heat to kitchen, bedroom and bathroom.”
Thirteen days later, Quezada returned for a follow-up inspection and reported that the two most serious violations –– the lack of heat and broken toilet –– had been corrected.
Teofilo Regus, manager of Megazone Realty, said that he had the old electric meters removed in preparation for installing new ones. The problems in the second-floor apartment, he said, also have been fixed. And he said he’s in the process of evicting the first-floor tenant for nonpayment of rent
“These houses were built like 1930 something. There’s always gonna be an issue with the properties. They’re not perfect,” Regus said. “If they want to live in a Five Star resort they can move into a Westin or something. This is Providence. Olneyville … This is low-income housing. But it’s livable
One morning last this week, Quezada returned to the double-decker on Heath Street — where the apartment had no water — to find out if the tenants had paid the $300 to get their water turned back on. Building inspector William Packard also came along to check out an illegal third-floor attic apartment where a couple and their young children were living.
The driveway was covered in snow and ice; discarded air conditioners leaned next to overflowing garbage cans.
The woman from the second-floor was strapping one of her children into her van’s car seat. Bobby Lopez is 26 and lives with her fiancé and her three children. The man she knew as “Nelson Cruz” who used to come by every month to collect the rent had not been by since last summer. She later learned that he’d died.
Lopez let the inspector into her apartment to show her that the water was back on. Then she led the inspector into a dark, filthy basement. A water heater was leaking onto the cement floor. An extension cord was strung along the ceiling for light. Packard looked at the uncovered electrical box, then at the three gas meters. The house had three apartments but it was only zoned for two.
The building inspector climbed the stairs to the third floor to the attic apartment, but it was padlocked shut. Nobody answered.
The next day, he returned to the house and saw the white van parked in the driveway, but nobody answered the front door. He came back and posted a violation notice on the door.
Less than six miles away, in a neighborhood of neat ranch houses in Pawtucket, the owner of the house on Heath Street had just returned three days earlier from a five-month trip to his native Colombia.
Gil Robinson, a machine operator at a factory in Smithfield, said he heard that the man who had been collecting the rent and paying his mortgage for the property on Heath Street had died of a heart attack.
Robinson said that he had no idea that the water had been shut off because the bill wasn’t paid. If he had known, he would have taken care of it, he said.
Violation notices sent to Robinson at the Heath Street house were returned to the inspections department unopened. “Why they not send it to me here?” said Robinson, seated on his living room couch. “Because I don’t want people to live like that.”
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — A bill has been introduced in the Rhode Island House of Representatives that would repeal a controversial law — never used, but which soon may be implemented — to allow people involved in civil lawsuits to hire, for pay, a retired judge to hear their disputes in private.
The law to allow private civil trials has been on the books since 1984, but never used. Currently, the Rhode Island Supreme Court is considering ways to implement it at the request of one newly retired judge, Howard I. Lipsey of the Family Court, who has expressed an interest in being hired by parties to hear their cases behind closed doors. Lipsey currently gets a 100 percent pension — $150,933 a year –plus health insurance, since he continues to sit several days a week at the Family Court. Lipsey says there is a backog of contested divorce cases that could easily be heard in private.
If implemented, the law would allow all retired judges in Rhode Island to earn extra pay beyond their pensions adjudicating civil cases in private.
The Rhode Island Association for Justice, the state association of plaintiffs’ trial lawyers, has urged the high court not to implement the law, as has the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, trial lawyer Thomas R. Bender, Barbara Meagher, a journalism professor at the University of Rhode Island and president of ACCESS/RI, the state’s freedom of information coalition.
“I don’t think you should be able to rent judges,” Gemma said today in an interview. “The whole idea of secret negotiations and trials is completely anathema to me. The judicial system is public and should be transparent,” the leigslator said.
Gemma also said he thinks the law “really cheapens the system of justice. These retired judges don’t need the money. It just looks like they are money grubbing.” If there’s a backlog in the courts, Gemma said, then have the judges work longer hours.
The bill has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee. No hearing date has yet been set.
In these interviews (1985) former KGB agent Uri Bezmenov gives a detailed explanation of the tactics of the basic propaganda model created centuries earlier. His understanding of world relations and media studies is impressive, and displays real dexterity when talking about America, and it’s future. During the interview he makes predictions about the US and it’s government that are visible today. -Carey
Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.
The stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which collective ownership of the economy under the dictatorship of the proletariat has not yet been successfully achieved.
Socialism\, n. Socialism of the chair [G. katheder socialismus], a term applied about 1872, at first in ridicule, to a group of German political economists who advocated state aid for the betterment of the working classes. Sock \Sock\, v. t. [Perh. shortened fr. sockdolager.] To hurl, drive, or strike violently; — often with it as an object. [Prov. or Vulgar] –Kipling.
Socialism
So”cial*ism\, n. [Cf. F. socialisme.] A theory or system of social reform which contemplates a complete reconstruction of society, with a more just and equitable distribution of property and labor. In popular usage, the term is often employed to indicate any lawless, revolutionary social scheme. See Communism, Fourierism, Saint-Simonianism, forms of socialism. [Socialism] was first applied in England to Owen’s theory of social reconstruction, and in France to those also of St. Simon and Fourier . . . The word, however, is used with a great variety of meaning, . . . even by economists and learned critics. The general tendency is to regard as socialistic any interference undertaken by society on behalf of the poor, . . . radical social reform which disturbs the present system of private property . . . The tendency of the present socialism is more and more to ally itself with the most advanced democracy. –Encyc. Brit. We certainly want a true history of socialism, meaning by that a history of every systematic attempt to provide a new social existence for the mass of the workers. –F. Harrison.
An economic system in which the production and distribution of goods are controlled substantially by the government rather than by private enterprise, and in which cooperation rather than competition guides economic activity. There are many varieties of socialism. Some socialists tolerate capitalism, as long as the government maintains the dominant influence over the economy; others insist on an abolition of private enterprise. All communists are socialists, but not all socialists are communists.
While listening to all the old Cold War propaganda today about “evil socialism” , I feel it’s all ways important to remember the origins of our own society and how it relates to socialism. By exploring the The Visual Thesaurus one can begin to understand the fundamental origins of Capitalism, branches from the many various forms of socialist theory.
After reading the definitions given for socialism one can easily see socialism in our public programs and welfare systems. Socialism is most prominently visible in the US government. It has become one of the most powerful nations on the planet through centralization of power, state owned industry and state owned, capital based economics. In fact, capitalism sits somewhere in between socialism and communism.
So hoping to get a barrage of responses I ask, what’s so bad about socialism anyways?
Greider talks about the Democrats’ role in deregulating the financial markets.
William Greider has covered politics from D.C. for The Washington Post, Rolling Stone Magazine, and currently The Nation. Greider’s most recent book, Come Home America, examines the implications of our country’s predicament. He talks about the Democrats’ current dilemma between representing their funders and their constituents.
Ray McGovern: US attempt to trap the USSR in 1979 is at root of current situation in Afghanistan
As Obama sends 17,000 troops to Afghanistan, we look back to the roots of the conflict. Ray McGovern says that the USSR was “mousetrapped” into invading Afghanistan by the CIA under both the Carter and Reagan administrations. He adds that the CIA policies of that day are “largely responsible” for the existence of today’s armed fundamentalist groups.
Pablo Ruiz: US tax dollars are used to train Latin American soldiers how to oppress their own people
While the US commits 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan, in part to seek out terrorist training camps, many in the US and Latin America are demanding that President Obama shut down what they believe is a terrorist training camp run on US tax dollars, the School of the Americas. One such person is Pablo Ruiz, who spoke to The Real News during his first-ever trip to the US, where, as a survivor of torture carried out by SOA graduates, he is laying out his argument for the immediate closure of the school.
PROVIDENCE –– Jane Dillon knows all about how some great deals on the Web site craigslist.org can be true steals.
On Friday, she saw her bass guitar — stolen the day before from her East Side apartment — selling on the Internet classified site for $250, the police say.
Susanne Lowney learned as well some of the ins and outs of the newest in “e-fencing” when the police called her Monday with news about her stolen electronics, taken two weeks earlier.
Apparently the same thief responsible for breaking into her apartment, she says, had used her computer to help sell Dillon’s guitar.
The cases, the police say, shed light on the growing trend of thieves turning to e-commerce sites to sell their stolen goods.
“A lot of that stuff on craigslist is stolen,” said Providence Detective Lt. Paul Campbell. But in this case, “because of some good detective work, we managed to clear up five separate breaks and return a lot of property back to their owners.”
The man at the center of these two East Side breaks and, the police allege, three others in the last six weeks, appeared in District Court yesterday. The police charged Daniel Goldstein, 20, of 25 Pitman St., with five counts of breaking and entering in which thousands of dollars of electronics were stolen while their owners slept.
Goldstein didn’t travel far to find his victims, the police say: all five breaks occurred either on Pitman or on the adjacent streets of East George or East Manning. In one case, the backyard of the house on East Manning abuts the backyard of the apartment house Goldstein lives in.
The police noticed a pattern to the breaks — each happened early in the morning, before 5 a.m. — and they suspected the perpetrator was walking through the neighborhood checking for unlocked doors.
Michael O’Connell, of East Manning Street, said the police told him this week they had recovered, from Goldstein’s apartment, some of the jewelry and electronics taken from his apartment on Feb. 3.
“I never even thought of looking for it on craigslist,” said O’Connell, who is now considering getting a dog. “I did go to a local pawnshop but didn’t find anything.”
A BREAK in the cases came Friday, when Dillon notified the Providence police that she had seen her stolen bass guitar advertised on craigslist.
The day before, Dillon reported that her East Manning Street apartment had been broken into while she slept and that, besides the guitar, more than $7,000 worth of laptops, Wii game computers and software — and a backpack containing her driver’s license, credits cards and checkbook — had been taken.
Detective )Sgt. Vincent Mansolitto, posing as an interested buyer on the Web site, attempted to make contact with Goldstein through e-mail without success. Then, over the weekend, Detective Sgt. William Dwyer and Detective Angelo Avant joined in, e-mailing Goldstein that they were interested in buying the laptop he had advertised.
Dwyer says the laptop was the Apple iBook taken from Dillon’s apartment.
“He wanted $550 for it,” Dwyer said. “I told him I planned to be in the Providence area in the next day or two, and if it was in good condition, I’d give him $500 for it.”
Dwyer said Goldstein agreed and made arrangements for a meeting at Goldstein’s home on Pitman Street. Goldstein was waiting on the curb while the snow was still falling Monday morning when, Dwyer says, he and two other detectives pulled up in unmarked cars.
Dwyer said Goldstein — who entered no plea at his initial court appearance yesterday in light of the charges being felonies; bail was set at $2,500 — put up no struggle.
E-COMMERCE sites have in many cases replaced the pawnshops where thieves historically have traded their goods.
“E-fencing is a huge issue,” says Michael J. Healey, spokesman for Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch. “The reason people steal stuff is to sell it. Sites like craigslist, eBay, and Yahoo auctions, they really are just the newest markets … And thieves will always find markets to fence their goods.”
Healey said Congress, for a second year in a row, is considering legislation to clamp down on illicit activities on the Web, which run the gamut of selling stolen goods to prostitution. But the best efforts might come from the Web sites improving their own way of doing business.
“It’s really going to take … their changing their approach and trying to introduce more effective screening and verification practices to hold sellers accountable.”
In the meantime, Providence police detectives are still working to retrieve Jane Dillon’s bass guitar.
Some one bought it on craigslist over the weekend, says detective Dwyer, for $150.
Omar al-Bashir says the charges reflect Western hostility towards Sudan
The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Sudan’s president on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur.
But the court in The Hague stopped short of accusing Omar al-Bashir of genocide. He denies the charges and has dismissed any ICC ruling as worthless.
Thousands of protesters took to the streets of the capital, Khartoum, after the announcement, amid fears of unrest.
The UN estimates 300,000 people have died in Darfur’s six-year conflict.
Millions more have been displaced.
Court spokeswoman Laurence Blairon announced the ruling by a panel of judges on the charges presented by ICC prosecutors.
She said Mr Bashir was suspected of being criminally responsible for “intentionally directing attacks against an important part of the civilian population of Darfur, Sudan, murdering, exterminating, raping, torturing and forcibly transferring large numbers of civilians and pillaging their property”.
This decision is exactly what we have been expecting from the court, which was created to target Sudan
Ms Blairon said the violence in Darfur was the result of a common plan organised at the highest level of the Sudanese government, but there was no evidence of genocide.
The court would transmit a request for Mr Bashir’s arrest and surrender as soon as possible to the Sudanese government, she added.
It is the first warrant issued by The Hague-based UN court against a sitting head of state.
ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo made the request for the warrant in July 2008.
‘Toothless’
Reacting to the charges, an aide to Mr Bashir said the ICC judges were biased.
“This decision is exactly what we have been expecting from the court, which was created to target Sudan and to be part of the new mechanism of neo-colonialism,” Mustafa Othman Ismail told Sudanese TV.
Speaking on Tuesday ahead of the announcement, Mr Bashir said the Hague tribunal could “eat” the arrest warrant.
He said it would “not be worth the ink it is written on” and then danced for thousands of cheering supporters who burned an effigy of the ICC chief prosecutor.
Sudan expert Alex de Waal told the BBC the indictment is “pretty toothless” as the ICC does not have a police force.
Heavy security is in place in Khartoum and large pro-Bashir demonstrations were expected.
African and Arab countries have warned that the court’s action will only increase tensions and violence in Sudan.
Egypt said it was “greatly disturbed” by the ICC’s decision and called for a meeting of the UN Security Council to defer implementation of the warrant.
Sudan’s foreign ministry said President Bashir would ignore it and attend an Arab summit scheduled later this month in Qatar.
“With this arrest warrant, the International Criminal Court has made Omar al-Bashir a wanted man,” said Richard Dicker of the New York-based group Human Rights Watch.
The French charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said it had withdrawn foreign staff from Darfur after the Sudanese government ordered them to leave.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged Sudan to “co-operate fully” with all United Nations entities.
He said the UN would “continue to conduct its vital peacekeeping, humanitarian, human rights and development operations and activities in Sudan”.
The war crimes court has already issued two arrest warrants – in 2007 – for Sudanese Humanitarian Affairs Minister Ahmed Haroun and the Janjaweed militia leader Ali Abdul Rahman.
Al-Bashir hit out at the West as he addressed
crowds of supporters in Khartoum [AFP]
Sudan’s president has angrily rejected a warrant for his arrest on charges of war crimes, issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
A defiant Omar al-Bashir told thousands of his supporters gathered in Khartoum on Thursday that Sudan was being targeted by Western powers and that the ICC was a tool of colonialists after Sudan’s oil.
“The true criminals are the leaders of the United States and Europe,” al-Bashir, brandishing a cane, told the roaring crowd outside the Republican Palace.
“We have refused to kneel to colonialism, that is why Sudan has been targeted … because we only kneel to God.”
“Sudan represents the voice that says ‘no’ to all attempts of domination. In the past we said no to occupation … and we succeeded in throwing the occupiers out of Sudan.”
Protesters carried banners branding Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, a criminal.
Cheers of “We are ready to protect religion!” and “Down, down USA!” interrupted al-Bashir’s speech.
‘Regrettable’ decision
The ICC indicted al-Bashir on Wednesday on seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, which included murder, rape and torture.
The three-judge panel said it had insufficient grounds to consider charges of genocide, though the ICC said the non-inclusion of a genocide charge could change “if additional evidence is gathered by the prosecution”.
But international response to the ICC’s decision has been mixed.
While the US has hailed the court’s decision, South Africa called it “regrettable” and others echoed Pretoria’s warning that al-Bashir’s arrest could damage peace negotiations.
“South Africa concurs with the African Union’s initial response that the ICC’s decision is regrettable as it will impact negatively on the current peace processes in the Sudan,” Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, South Africa’s foreign minister, said.
Earlier China, which buys the majority of Sudan’s oil and is one of the country’s most important trading partners, voiced similar concerns.
“China expresses its regret and worry over the arrest warrant for the Sudan president issued by the International Criminal Court,” Qin Gang, China’s foreign ministry spokesman, said in a statement on the ministry’s website.
“China is opposed to any action that could interfere with the peaceful situation in Darfur and Sudan.”
‘Neo-colonialist policy’
The US administration, which has imposed sanctions against Sudan, welcomed the ICC’s decision and the UK and France have also been in favour of the warrant.
The EU has also urged Khartoum to fully co-operate with the ICC.
But the support of Western nations has added fuel to the fire of those who see the ICC’s decision as “neo-colonialist”.
“They do not want Sudan … to become stable,” Mustafa Osman Ismail, an adviser to al-Bashir, said.
The ICC indicted al-Bashir on seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity [EPA]
“The court is only one mechanism of neo-colonialist policy used by the West against free and independent countries.”Sudan’s UN envoy said the government will drop its campaign to have the UN Security Council delay the al-Bashir’s prosecution for a year and would instead demand that the “criminal plot against our country” be stopped.
Amr el-Kahky, Al Jazeera’s correspondent, reporting from Khartoum, said that many in Sudan felt the ICC decision threatened the peace process.
“According to the people … it is doing more harm than good,” he said.
“They say it is de-railing and threatening the peace process between the Sudanese government and the rebels in Darfur on the one hand and … [that] the warrant comes at a very bad time, especially after the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the Justice and Equality Movement [JEM], the biggest rebel faction in Darfur, and the Sudanese Government in the Qatari capital, Doha.”
But inside Sudan, JEM offered some support for the ICC’s arrest warrant.
“This decision will create huge transformation in Sudan,” Ibrahim Khalil, leader of the Justice and Equality Movement, told Al Jazeera.
“We expect Bashir to refuse attending the trail in person, as is the case with all war criminals, but then he will lose eligibility to govern and legitimacy and therefore his rule will be illegitimate.”
OIC condemnation
The Organisation of Islamic Conference also condemned the decision, with Ekmeleddine Ihsanoglu, its secretary-general, saying that the warrant might negatively affect efforts to solve the crisis in Darfur and could threaten stability in Sudan and the whole region.
The Arab League and African Union are sending delegates to the UN to attempt to persuade the body to delay the implementation of the warrant.
“The court is only one mechanism of neo-colonialist policy used by the West against free and independent countries”
Osman Ismail, adviser to al-Bashir
The Rome statute that set up the ICC allows the UN Security Council to pass a resolution to defer or suspend for a year the investigation or prosecution of a case.Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, has urged Sudan to co-operate with the court.
The UN says that up to 300,000 have been killed in Darfur, where the UN is running one of the world’s largest humanitarian missions, while Khartoum says that 10,000 have died.
A further 2.7 million people are estimated to have been uprooted by the conflict, which began when mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms against the government in 2003.
Aid work suspended
Following the ICC’s decision, Sudan revoked the operating licences of up to 10 aid agencies working in Sudan, the UN said.
Alun McDonald, a spokesman for Oxfam, one of the agencies to have its licence revoked, said it was “going to have a devastating effect on hundreds of thousands of people”.
Save the Children, which supports 50,000 children across Sudan, said its suspension would put thousands of lives at risk.
Sudanese government officials have in the past threatened to take action against Darfur-based aid groups which they say are passing evidence on to the global court’s prosecutor – accusations the agencies deny.
The Dominican flag includes the words Dios, Patria, Libertad (God, Fatherland, Liberty).
PROVIDENCE — An administrator at Roger Williams Middle School has been placed on paid leave after he reportedly grabbed a Dominican flag from at least one student and stepped on it.
Several students brought flags to school on Friday to celebrate the Caribbean nation’s 165th independence anniversary, school officials said yesterday. During a confrontation with one or more students, the administrator snatched the flag away, threw it to the floor and stepped on it, according to Sen. Juan Pichardo, D-Providence.
And state Rep. Grace Díaz, D-Providence, said that the administrator said something like, “We mop the floor with your flag.”
School officials said they don’t know what sparked the incident.As word spread, students became increasingly upset and a large food fight broke out in the cafeteria, school officials said. Several students face disciplinary action and possible suspension for taking part.
School spokeswoman Christina O’Reilly refused to release the name of the middle school administrator or the names of the students involved.
Principal Rudy Moseley sent out an automated telephone message that Friday to the student’s parents telling them what happened.
Pichardo said that Latino talk radio was inundated with phone calls from members of the Dominican community who were upset over the incident. Latino students comprise 59 percent of the Providence school population.
“As Dominicans, we feel insulted,” said Lorenzo Acevedo, a Dominican man who heard of the incident on the radio. “We feel that we have been stepped on, like our flag.”
“It means they don’t want us here,” said Prisca Hernández.
“For someone to act like that, you don’t need words,” said Mara Pimentel, who is Puerto Rican. “That’s disrespectful to anybody.”
Jerry Hopper expressed similar outrage, adding the administrator should be fired.
“What kind of example are you setting for the kids?” Hopper asked.
Rather than offering guidance to the students, Hopper said, “It’s like you are killing their hopes and dreams.”
“This is the United States of America. It shouldn’t be happening.”
“In any country, if there is something that one respects, it is the flag, regardless of whose flag it is,” added Acevedo.
On Tuesday, Providence School Supt. Tom Brady sent an e-mail statement to Pichardo and members of the Latino news media who had inquired about the incident. Brady wrote that an administrator “displayed a lack of judgment and cultural insensitivity in his actions toward students who were demonstrating pride in their Dominican heritage.
“In video footage from the school’s security cameras, it does appear that the administrator may have engaged in disrespectful treatment of the Dominican flag,” Brady wrote. “The Providence public school district values the rich diversity and variety of cultural identities of its students, faculty and staff and such blatant disregard for the culture of another by any member of the Providence School Department community is never to be tolerated.”
The administrator, he said, has been placed on paid leave pending the outcome of the investigation.
“We apologize to the students and their families for the apparent actions of this administrator,” Brady concluded, “and I pledge that appropriate personnel action will be taken.”
Yesterday, Pichardo said that he was pleased with Brady’s prompt response, but he asked Brady to hold a public meeting with Roger Williams students and parents to discuss racial sensitivity and asked the School Department to develop a policy regarding the observance of ethnic holidays.
“At this point, I’m happy with their response,” Pichardo said. “But we will not tolerate this type of action toward anyone’s flag. It’s unacceptable.”
It has been nearly 20 years since Berliners hacked away at the Wall that once separated East Germany from the West. Two decades on, its crumbling remnants remain highly controversial. Many would like to see Berlin make more of its unique history, but old wounds are taking time to heal.
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Bernauer Strasse used to be just another unassuming residential street — that is until the Berlin Wall catapulted it to international fame overnight. The street, which was built into the city’s Cold-War-era divide, saw east Berliners flee to the West by clambering out of upper-story windows towards the crowds on the street below.
PHOTO GALLERY: REMEMBERING THE BERLIN WALL
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The historic images were beamed around the world and the road which lined the east-west border became an icon of the human tragedy behind the Berlin Wall. Today, despite its less than central location, Bernauer Strasse, is the site of the capital’s memorial to the Wall, attracting a steady stream of visitors.
Coaches with foreign number plates stand just meters away from the grey concrete slabs of the former wall. Tourists wander through the Berlin drizzle: But those who expect a taste of the city’s dramatic history often leave somewhat bemused.
“Part of visiting Berlin is finding trails of its unique recent history — but it has been hard to find this place,” said Juanjo Gonzalo, a Spanish tourist who was visiting the city for 10 days. “All we found was was a tiny sign reading ‘Wall’ by the metro station”.
Nearby a group of British students stood around a map trying to establish which side of the road used to be the east and which was on the west.
The tourists’ bewilderment has been supported by the German press which, this week, fired some sharp words at the important site. “A virtually indecipherable wasteland,” ran a headline in Die Tageszeitung, while the Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote: “Here Berlin has gambled away an inheritance of international importance.”
PHOTO GALLERY: BERLIN WALL ‘SHOOT TO KILL’ ORDER FOUND
Click on a picture to launch the image gallery (15 Photos)
Indeed, the site is far from straight forward to negotiate. One of its more controversial features is a massive Wall memorial, built by the Stuttgart-based architects Kohlhoff&Kolhoff in 1998. By positioning two steel walls parallel to each other, they wanted the reflections to create the impression of a never-ending wall. Unfortunately the metal has lost its shine and most visitors leave soon after they arrive.
Bernauer Strasse’s Revamp
But the Berlin Wall Foundation, the group which runs the memorial site, rebuffs the critics, saying the current confusion will soon be a thing of the past. Later this year, on Nov. 9 — two decades after the wall was deemed obsolete — a new information pavilion is to be opened. It is part of a broader revamp of the Bernauer Strasse memorial, due to be finished by 2011. Thomas Klein, of the Berlin Wall Foundation, admits there are still some “big deficits” but says the facelift will make the history accessible to more people, using media like animation to guide people through the story of the Wall. Ahead of the anniversary, the site will also host some 50 events including open-air cinema, readings, concerts and art projects.
Klein argues the foundation faces a delicate task. “This is not the site of one serious crime. We need to represent different aspects — the purpose of the divide, the Wall’s victims and also the more positive associations of the end of the Wall era, for example” he told SPIEGEL ONLINE in his office just meters away from the Wall’s bulky remains. “This is a deeply complicated place.”
That complexity is compounded by the emotive power of the Wall for Berliners. Ever since the legendary press conference on Nov. 9, 1989 when Günter Schabowski, a member of East Germany’s Politbüro, surprised journalists with news that people could travel without restrictions, most Berliners wanted to rid their city of what Westerners had dubbed the “Wall of Shame.”
In the immediate aftermath of the news, locals and visitors laid into the concrete divide with chisels and hammers. At Bernauer Strasse, the structure is only intact today because a local priest defended the wall as a warning for future generations, even guarding it at night to ward off hammer-wielding Berliners.
PHOTO GALLERY: REMEMBERING BERLIN WALL VICTIM
Click on a picture to launch the image gallery (10 Photos)
Although the initial anger has faded, the ongoing sensitivity of the issue slows any decision-making. Just this week, amid much debate, the Berlin Wall Foundation, the organization in charge of the official memorial site, unanimously rejected a government call to rebuild a 19-meter-long hole in the surviving stretch of the Wall on Bernauer Strasse. Opposition to the project was strong — with officials rejecting any “Disneyland” style reconstruction. As Klein said: “Building a new artificial wall was simply not an option.”
Historian Brian Ladd, author of the book “The Ghosts of Berlin” also warns that the forthcoming 20th anniversary is an awkward time for Germany, not least because of the slower-than-expected pace of reunification.
“At the time, nearly everyone in Germany greeted the fall of the Wall as the great triumph of German history, an occasion for unalloyed joy. But it soon became clear that division had left wounds that would be difficult to heal,” he told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “Ever since the 1990s, Germans have had to ask: Can we celebrate the event — unlike so much else in German history — or do we have to think of it as a little like May 8, 1945, a time of sober reflection?”
Tourist Traps
But while decision-makers stall, Berlin is luring an increasing number of foreign visitors, many of whom are keen for a glimpse of the city’s divided past. But their options are sorely limited. Aside from Bernauer Strasse, many take a polluted trek alongside the 1,300 meters of the East-Side Gallery — Berlin’s longest segment of the Wall, which borders a six-lane road. There are other, less authentic, responses to the influx of “Wall tourists”. German students dressed up as Cold War border guards, now stand at historic border points like the Brandenburg Gate or Checkpoint Charlie, earning their euros by posing for photos or stamping passports. At Potsdammer Platz, where the no-man’s land has now sprouted skyscrapers, visitors take turns to photograph each other standing in front of a few pieces of the Wall, which have been repositioned near the metro entrance.
REUNIFICATION: HOW THE WALL FELL
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Elsewhere, a central Berlin hotel, the Westin Grand, has responded to the gap in the market by acquiring a large chunk of the former Wall for its foyer. Its guests can hire helmets and hammers to chip away their own chunk of Berlin Wall as a souvenir.
As the capital seeks to attract more visitors to offset the slowing economy, Christian Tänzler from Berlin’s Tourism Marketing GmbH told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that it was time to take a more balanced approach towards the Wall’s history. But he also acknowledged the extent of opposition within the city: “The people who suffered under the Wall still have the need to radically from themselves from it.”
But at the Bernauer Strasse memorial site, standing by the redundant Wall is still a poignant experience for many Germans. Some join services in a simple chapel on the former no-mans-land, built to remember the estimated 136 people who died trying to cross the death strip into West Berlin.
Among those moved by her visit to Bernauer Strasse is Jutta Marten, a former resident of West Berlin who recalled how she tried to visit her grandparents in East Berlin on August 13, 1961, the day the Wall was built.
“Suddenly we were turned away. No one knew what was going on. It all happened incredibly fast,” she said, standing alongside the building site near the Wall. “It is very hard for anyone to imagine how it feels to have your family separated from one day to the next. This place is authentic. It should help people to imagine how it felt.”
Journal Staff Writer WOONSOCKET — No talks between the firefighters union and the city, which wants money-saving contract concessions, were held yesterday and none were set for today as the Fire Department scrambled through its first day with 11 fewer firefighters.
The layoffs took effect at 12:01 a.m. yesterday, made possible by a Superior Court judge’s decision on Wednesday to lift an earlier order barring them.
Joseph A. Andriole, staff representative for the Rhode Island chapter of the International Association of Fire Fighters, said Woonsocket’s action was, to his knowledge, the first instance of firefighter layoffs in Rhode Island for budgetary reasons.
“They were all line personnel,” Andriole said, “firefighters that actually worked in the stations.”
Besides the 11 layoffs, seven vacant positions are going unfilled, cutting the department roster to 115 members.
Chief Kenneth Finlay said he had to keep some firefighters over to another shift to maintain a contract-mandated 28 firefighters per shift yesterday, but he said he was not going to allow anyone to be on duty for more than 48 hours straight.
“There have been quite a few overtime shifts,” he said. “But we knew overtime would go up.” Firefighters alternate two days of 14-hour night shifts with two days of 10-hour day shifts and then four days off.
Finlay said he thought he could maintain adequate staffing as long as the department didn’t suffer a rash of injuries. If too many department members are out too long, he said, he may have to ask the mayor and City Council for permission to bring back some of the laid-off men. He said the best solution would be an agreement on money-saving contract concessions.
“I’m really hoping for a resolution,” he said.
The layoffs are needed, the city says, to help offset an anticipated $3.6 million cut in the state aid the city is expecting from the state for the current year. The city’s chief labor negotiator, Joseph R. Rodio, said the city needs about $729,000 in concessions from the firefighters union to help close that gap. The sides have been talking for more than a month.
Rodio characterized the sides’ positions as “light-years apart.”
Andriole said the firefighters had been willing to meet over the weekend but the city declined.
Rodio said he spent the better part of yesterday in talks with the city’s police union, from which the city is seeking about $530,000 in concessions. He said progress was made in those talks. Police union negotiator Gary Gentile could not be reached for comment.
The city’s two City Hall unions have made concessions, agreeing to unpaid furlough days and a sliding scale of health insurance premium copayments. The city had originally sought 5 percent pay cuts and 15 percent copayments. Rodio said the City Hall union deals achieved the same monetary savings through different means.
Journal Staff Writer PROVIDENCE — A city teenager, partying with friends in the backyard of a house on Friendship Street, was shot and killed early yesterday morning, according to Providence police.
Angelo Camarena, 17, of Somerset Street, died at Rhode Island Hospital yesterday, after being driven there by other party-goers, the police said.
The police were called to Friendship and Pearl streets about 1:40 a.m., where they learned Camarena had been shot while he was in the rear yard of 382 Friendship St.
The police have yet to identify a suspect in the shooting death — the fourth homicide in the city this year.
Camarena, “a known gang associate,” according to Providence police Maj. Thomas F. Oates, was among 20 to 30 people at 382 Friendship St. when an unidentified assailant walked up to the corner lot and opened fire. The gunman fired several shots, striking Camarena once, before running away.
The shooting did not appear to be random, Oates said, though it’s unclear whether Camarena was targeted by the gunman.
Yesterday afternoon, there were no signs of the altercation outside the three-story wood-frame house in Upper South Providence and no one answered a visitor’s knocks on the door of the multi-unit house.
Last night, outside the Camarena family apartment at the corner of Pine and Somerset, in the Indian Village apartment complex, friends and family had set up a memorial of 17 thin white candles.
Rosary beads and a photo of Camarena –– slim, smiling, and wearing a dark Hollister T-shirt –– were taped to the side of the apartment, near the candles. Among the 25 young people was John “Y.C.” Rodriguez, Camarena’s 19-year-old cousin.
He said Camarena had been attending Ocean Tides, a residential program for at-risk boys in Narragansett, for the past two months and only came home for the weekend.
“We don’t know what happened. We were told it was a thing at a birthday party,” said Rodriguez. “The family is going crazy.”
With five sisters, Camarena was the second youngest of the family, which is originally from the Dominican Republic and came to Providence from New York City, said Rodriguez.
As Camarena’s friends wept, a police cruiser stood watch about half a block down and music blared from a party across the street. At one point, an unmarked car with members of the police department’s Gang Unit slowly passed by.
Our overseas military bases are pushing the nation deeper into debt and making the United States and the planet less secure.
In the midst of an economic crisis that’s getting scarier by the day, it’s time to ask whether the nation can really afford some 1,000 military bases overseas. For those unfamiliar with the issue, you read that number correctly. One thousand. One thousand U.S. military bases outside the 50 states and Washington, DC, representing the largest collection of bases in world history.
Officially the Pentagon counts 865 base sites, but this notoriously unreliable number omits all our bases in Iraq (likely over 100) and Afghanistan (80 and counting), among many other well-known and secretive bases. More than half a century after World War II and the Korean War, we still have 268 bases in Germany, 124 in Japan, and 87 in South Korea. Others are scattered around the globe in places like Aruba and Australia, Bulgaria and Bahrain, Colombia and Greece, Djibouti, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar, Romania, Singapore, and of course, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — just to name a few. Among the installations considered critical to our national security are a ski center in the Bavarian Alps, resorts in Seoul and Tokyo, and 234 golf courses the Pentagon runs worldwide.
Unlike domestic bases, which set off local alarms when threatened by closure, our collection of overseas bases is particularly galling because almost all our taxpayer money leaves the United States (much goes to enriching private base contractors like corruption-plagued former Halliburton subsidiary KBR). One part of the massive Ramstein airbase near Landstuhl, Germany, has an estimated value of $3.3 billion. Just think how local communities could use that kind of money to make investments in schools, hospitals, jobs, and infrastructure.
Even the Bush administration saw the wastefulness of our overseas basing network. In 2004, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced plans to close more than one-third of the nation’s overseas installations, moving 70,000 troops and 100,000 family members and civilians back to the United States. National Security Adviser Jim Jones, then commander of U.S. forces in Europe, called for closing 20% of our bases in Europe. According to Rumsfeld’s estimates, we could save at least $12 billion by closing 200 to 300 bases alone. While the closures were derailed by claims that closing bases could cost us in the short term, even if this is true, it’s no reason to continue our profligate ways in the longer term.
Costs Far Exceeding Dollars and Cents
Unfortunately, the financial costs of our overseas bases are only part of the problem. Other costs to people at home and abroad are just as devastating. Military families suffer painful dislocations as troops stationed overseas separate from loved ones or uproot their families through frequent moves around the world. While some foreign governments like U.S. bases for their perceived economic benefits, many locals living near the bases suffer environmental and health damage from military toxins and pollution, disrupted economic, social, and cultural systems, military accidents, and increased prostitution and crime.
In undemocratic nations like Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Saudi Arabia, our bases support governments responsible for repression and human rights abuses. In too many recurring cases, soldiers have raped, assaulted, or killed locals, most prominently of late in South Korea, Okinawa, and Italy. The forced expulsion of the entire Chagossian people to create our secretive base on British Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean is another extreme but not so aberrant example.
Bases abroad have become a major and unacknowledged “face” of the United States, frequently damaging the nation’s reputation, engendering grievances and anger, and generally creating antagonistic rather than cooperative relationships between the United States and others. Most dangerously, as we have seen in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and as we are seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan, foreign bases create breeding grounds for radicalism, anti-Americanism, and attacks on the United States, reducing, rather than improving, our national security.
Proponents of maintaining the overseas base status quo will argue, however, that our foreign bases are critical to national and global security. A closer examination shows that overseas bases have often heightened military tensions and discouraged diplomatic solutions to international conflicts. Rather than stabilizing dangerous regions, our overseas bases have often increased global militarization, enlarging security threats faced by other nations who respond by boosting military spending (and in cases like China and Russia, foreign base acquisition) in an escalating spiral. Overseas bases actually make war more likely, not less.
The Benefits of Fewer Bases
This isn’t a call for isolationism or a protectionism that would prevent us from spending money overseas. As the Obama administration and others have recognized, we must recommit to cooperative forms of engagement with the rest of the world that rely on diplomatic, economic, and cultural ties rather than military means. In addition to freeing money to meet critical human needs at home and abroad, fewer overseas bases would help rebuild our military into a less overstretched, defensive force committed to defending the nation’s territory from attack.
In these difficult economic times, the Obama administration and Congress should initiate a major reassessment of our 1,000 overseas bases. Now is the time to ask if, as a nation and a world, we can really afford the 1,000 bases that are pushing the nation deeper into debt and making the United States and the planet less secure? With so many needs facing our nation, it’s unconscionable to have 1,000 overseas bases. It’s time to begin closing them.
‘He’s just sorry he got caught’: victims of Madoff, their lawyers and those of the disgraced financier react outside court Link to this video The Wall Street fraudster Bernard Madoff swapped his Manhattan penthouse for a prison cell today after pleading guilty to masterminding the biggest investment scam in US financial history.
In front of a New York courtroom packed with angry, embittered victims who lost millions of dollars in Madoff’s $65bn (£47bn) Ponzi scheme, the 70-year-old financier confessed to 11 criminal charges of operating a vast, corrupt business empire dating back to the early 1990s.
Andrew Clark at the sentencing of Madoff in New York Link to this audio Madoff said he was “deeply sorry and ashamed” of his actions and accepted that he had hurt “many, many people”.
Rejecting a request by defence lawyers for Madoff’s bail to be continued pending formal sentencing in June, the judge Denny Chin, sent the financier directly to jail. “In the light of Mr Madoff’s age, he has the incentive to flee and he has the means to flee,” said the judge. “Bail is revoked.”
After a hearing lasting barely 90 minutes, US marshals handcuffed the slim, grey-haired fund manager and led him away to a federal prison. The US government is pressing for the maximum possible punishment of a 150-year jail term.
Madoff’s imprisonment ends three months of house arrest for the once-respected Wall Street fixture, whose clients included Hollywood stars Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon, the author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and scores of charities, hedge funds and pension funds.
Exposed by a meltdown in global financial markets, Madoff’s financial empire began unravelling in December. Statements sent to clients suggested that his fund contained nearly $65bn but investigators have so far found only $1bn.
Hundreds of investors, bystanders and media queued from the early hours of the morning to get a glimpse of Madoff, who arrived at 7.30am in a silver 4×4.
The car’s progress to the court was broadcast live by television helicopters and Madoff, who has been the subject of death threats, was surrounded by a tight security detail.
Once inside, the judge questioned Madoff on whether he understood the charges, whether he had sought adequate legal advice and on his mental fitness. Listing the 11 charges of fraud, money-laundering, false statements and perjury in turn, the judge asked Madoff how he was pleading.
“Guilty,” replied Madoff to each count, in a dull, expressionless tone. Asked to explain exactly what he had done, Madoff gave a brief speech describing how his scheme originated in the early 1990s when a recession made it difficult to produce healthy returns. Instead of investing in stocks and shares, he began using new deposits to pay out fake profits to existing clients.
“I’m actually grateful for this opportunity to publicly speak about the crimes for which I am so deeply sorry and ashamed,” he said.
The financier said that at the outset, he had been falsifying records on a temporary basis: “I believed it would end shortly and that I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme. This proved difficult and, indeed, impossible.”
Madoff accepted that he had been living a lie for many years: “As the years went by, I realised my risk and that this day would inevitably come.”
He described laundering money through a London branch of his company to create a false paper trail, and he accepted concocting sophisticated tales to customers about a purported “split strike” strategy to beat his rivals.
“I’m painfully aware,” said Madoff, “that I have deeply hurt many, many people including clients, my family and my friends,” said Madoff.
The level of anger in the courtroom was palpable. At one stage, Madoff’s lawyer, Ira Sorkin, mentioned that the financier’s wife, Ruth, had paid for guards to monitor her husband’s home detention “at her own expense”. There was loud, outraged laughter from victims who regard her money as ill-gotten proceeds from her husband’s fraud.
Several victims were allowed to address the court. One of those who spoke, George Nierenberg, accused the financier of protecting accomplices to his “egregious” activities: “I know Mr Madoff’s operation was massive. He didn’t commit these crimes alone.”
Stepping towards Madoff, who was staring straight ahead at the judge, Nierenberg said: “I don’t know whether you’ve had a chance to turn around and look at your victims.”
As a marshal moved forward to avert a confrontation and the judge interjected, Madoff turned and briefly glanced over.
Maureen Ebel, a widowed, retired nurse who has been obliged to take a housekeeping job after losing her savings to Madoff, told the court that she objected to the financier’s guilty plea circumventing a full trial.
“If we go to trial, we have more chance to comprehend the global scope of his horrendous crime,” said Ebel, 60. “We can hear and bear witness to the pain that Mr Madoff has inflicted on the young, the old and the infirm.”
Legal experts have expressed surprise that Madoff pleaded guilty without any attempt to bargain for lenient treatment by the prosecution. Some have suggested that a deal fell apart because Madoff refused to confess to a charge of conspiracy, which would have implied that others were involved in his crimes.
Others say that the US government has opted to throw the book at Madoff, mindful of the criticism over federal authorities’ failure to spot his crimes earlier.
“They know there’s a great deal of public outrage,” said Bradley Simon, a former federal prosecutor who believes the authorities will still need Madoff’s help. “There’s no way the government is going to end this case by just prosecuting Bernard Madoff and there’s no way they’re going to bring down anyone else without Madoff’s co-operation.”
Debate over the bill may foreshadow battles over Obama’s $3.55 trillion 2010 budget [AFP]
Barack Obama, the US president, has signed into law a $410bn bill to fund the federal government until the end of September, despite his own concerns and those of Republicans.
Upon signing the budget on Wednesday, Obama demanded that legislators in the Democratic-controlled congress halt the practice of slipping money into spending bills for unrelated state projects.
“I am signing an imperfect omnibus bill because it’s necessary for the ongoing functions of government and we have a lot more work to do,” Obama said.
“We can’t have congress bogged down at this critical juncture in our economic recovery.
“The future demands that we operate in a different way than we have in the past. So, let there be no doubt: this piece of legislation must mark an end to the old way of doing business, and the beginning of a new era of responsibility and accountability that the American people have every right to expect and demand.”
Contentious bill
Republican legislators – the minority in congress – had objected to the large spending commitment in light of soaring national debt.
“In just 50 days, congress has voted to spend about $1.2 trillion,” Mitch McConnell, the Republican senate leader, said. “To put that in perspective, that’s about $24bn a day, or about $1bn an hour – most of it borrowed.”
The newly signed bill includes funds for the departments of transportation and agriculture, as well as measures that begin to roll back strict limits on travel and trade with Cuba.
Under the current law, US citizens can visit their family in Cuba once every three years. The new bill would change that to once a year.
Senators sent the bill to the White House on Tuesday following a contentious fight.
Many Republicans fought the bill because it raised government spending by eight per cent above fiscal 2008 levels, saying that it added more money to programmes already funded by the $787bn economic stimulus package approved last month.
Debate over the bill, which has at times been full of partisan rhetoric, may foreshadow even bigger battles over Obama’s $3.55 trillion budget for 2010, and his plans to overhaul national health care, which congress will turn to in the coming weeks.
By: William Douglas and David Lightman, McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidates Barack Obama and John McCain fought vigorously over who would be toughest on congressional earmarks.
“We need earmark reform,” Obama said in September during a presidential debate in Oxford, Miss. “And when I’m president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely.”
President Barack Obama should prepare to carve out a lot of free time and keep the coffee hot this week as Congress prepares to unveil a $410 billion omnibus spending bill that’s riddled with thousands of earmarks, despite his calls for restraint and efforts on Capitol Hill to curtail the practice.
The bill will contain about 9,000 earmarks totaling $5 billion, congressional officials say. Many of the earmarks — loosely defined as local projects inserted by members of Congress — were inserted last year as the spending bills worked their way through various committees.
So while Obama and McCain were slamming earmarks on the campaign trail, House and Senate members — Democrats and Republicans — were slapping them into spending bills.
“It will be a little embarrassing for the president if he signs a bill with that many earmarks on it,” said Stan Collender , a veteran Washington budget analyst. “He’ll say they’re left over from the Bush years, and he as to say that next year the bill will be clean.”
Experts agree that most earmarks are legitimate. Cary Leahey , senior economist with Decision Economics in New York , said the nation’s economic crisis is a contributing factor to the plethora of earmarks. Lawmakers can argue that for a relatively small price they’ve helped boost the economy.
“One congressman’s earmark is another legislative way to fix a serious problem in his district,” Leahey said.
Kenneth Thomas , a lecturer in finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of business, agrees.
“I generally believe that the priority is getting money into the system sooner rather than later, especially if it’s for projects that will use local contractors and create jobs,” he said.
Still, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. Earmarks have come under fire because of those that seem to provide what Maya MacGuineas , president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, calls “laugh lines,” such as Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere” or North Dakota’s Lawrence Welk Museum .
Obama pledged to take a hard hand on earmarks and warned lawmakers in a Feb. 3 letter from Budget Director Peter Orszag not to decorate the recently signed $787.2 billion stimulus bill with them.
Democrats declared the bill earmark-free. Republicans disagreed.
“While this bill does not include traditional earmarks, we should all understand that there are earmarks in this bill,” said Sen. Mike Enzi , R- Wyo. “There is $850 million … to bail out Amtrak , a $75 million earmark for the Smithsonian, a $1 billion earmark for the 2010 census.”
Democrats have been trying to revamp the earmark process for about two years. In 2007, they instituted a system that required members to explain the contents of each earmark, as well as a justification for why it was included in the legislation that way. They claimed this led to a reduction in earmarks by as much as 43 percent.
But critics contended the system still had problems. Simply making information more available, they said, didn’t address the major criticism: That such projects should go through the regular legislative process, subject to detailed hearings and bipartisan votes.
Not only does this mean the public has no chance to challenge questionable spending, but too often powerful interests who know how to work the system get favorite measures inserted.
For instance, Congressional Quarterly reported recently that more than 100 House members got earmarks for clients of the PMA Group , a lobbying firm with close ties to Rep. John Murtha , D- Pa. , who heads the powerful defense spending subcommittee. The CQ Politics analysis said that in the 2009 defense spending bill, which Congress approved last year, PMA clients got about $300 million .
The CQ study came after reports that the FBI is investigating the possibility of illegal campaign contributions by PMA to Murtha and other lawmakers. A Murtha spokesman said earlier this month that the FBI probe has nothing to do with Murtha. A PMA spokesman declined to comment on the probe.
Appropriations committee chairmen say they are on track to reform the earmark process beginning in fiscal 2010 by requiring members to make public their requests early, so the public can scrutinize them and presumably contact lawmakers.
The change, though, doesn’t apply to the 2009 funding that Congress will consider next week.
Several experts believe that dramatically reducing the number of earmarks, while a laudable goal, is almost impossible. But others contend that earmarks aren’t that big of a problem.
“Earmarks get more attention than they deserve,” said MacGuineas. “The problem is that they cause a loss of confidence in the whole budget process.”
This is a real good example of Capitalist Propaganda. I find it more disturbing that most people lack a fundamental understanding of what Socialism actually is. – Carey
Based on Obama’s response to the economic situation in the U.S., it has become clear that his socialist bent is alive and well! But the proof is in the pudding. In Obama’s case, Wall Street does not seem to have the same confidence that voters had when Obama was elected! Maybe that is because Obama’s solution is to earmark Billions for liberal organizations like ACORN, which has been accused by many of committing voter fraud in the 2008 election on Obama’s behalf. And financial experts believe that there is more downside to come! In the Obama bin Lyin Deck of Deception, we warned about Obama’s proclivity toward Socialism (King of Diamonds) and toward Marxism (Ace of Spades), by pointing out that his remarks to Joe the Plumber that he wanted to “spread the wealth around”. That’s not just semantics, like Obama tried to pass it off as, but pure Marxism! “From each according to his ability, and to each according to his need!”
Put in Cost Accounting terms, “from each according to his ability” is like the selling price of a product, and “to each according to his need” is like the cost to produce a product. The difference is Profit, and in Obama’s world, the profit goes directly to the Federal Government in the form of tax revenue obtained by the 20% of Americans who account for 80% of the tax revenue. That 20% is the small business owner who is successful at what they do through hard work. If Obama had his way, we’d be a socialist economy tomorrow, and we predicted it all in the Obama bin Lyin Deck of Deception!
Ahmad: Obama’s decision to add troops and arm Afghan militias is dangerous Pt.1
Sharmini Peries speaks with Senior Analyst Aijaz Ahmad about the dangers of the long-term US involvement in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Ahmad says the only way for Obama to proceed in the region is to withdraw US military presence there and strengthen regional powers for a stable Afghanistan.
Aijaz Ahmad: Pakistan is in complete chaos – Bad decisions Pt. 2
The recent leadership shifts in Pakistan coupled with wave of terrorist attacks, and the ongoing US Army drone missile from bases inside Pakistan are all wreaking havoc on the Pakistani people. “Pakistan is in complete chaos,” says Aijaz Ahmad, Senior News Analyst for The Real News Network.
Al Jazeera’s recent coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza was unparalleled. The network was the only international broadcaster with reporters on both sides of the border, in Israel and Gaza.
In Depth
The war may now be over but the human suffering continues. Focus on Gaza is a new weekly show that will examine all facets of life in the Gaza Strip.
Presented by Imran Garda, the programme will bring all the latest news and developments in Gaza and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Al Jazeera will also showcase family life in the densely populated area that some describe as the world’s largest open prison.
Focus on Gaza features Al Jazeera’s team in the territory, including correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin, as we continue to lead the way in covering one of the world’s most intractable conflicts.
The Blockade
In the week that British activists arrived in Gaza with 100 trucks of aid, we look at the blockade they broke though, and the impact it is having on quality of life.
We speak to George Galloway himself about why he and his British volunteers made it their mission to bring the goods to Gazans personally.
Also in the programme we feature a cartoon about life under siege made for an Israeli anti-blockade group by the director of acclaimed animation Waltz With Bashir.
And we spend the day out at sea with fisherman off the Gazan coast as they risk their lives for their catch. It’s an industry desperately struggling to remain viable with ever-declining yields as tensions on the ground mean tighter controls imposed out at sea.
Part 1 Focus On Gaza
Part 2 Focus On Gaza
Rebuilding Gaza
Israel’s war on Gaza left 4,000 homes destroyed and 17,000 damaged. Schools, hospitals, police stations, even the parliament building all need to be rebuilt.
The international community has pledged $5bn to fund the reconstruction but the Israeli government is refusing to allow even the most basic building materials into the Strip.
Todd Baer reports on how this is hampering reconstruction efforts and we ask Major Peter Lerner from the Israeli defence ministry, whether the blockade makes a mockery of the pledge.
In our weekly film on family life in Gaza, we follow a father as he tries to get help for his family, which was made homeless by the war.
Part 1 Rebuilding Gaza
Part 2 Rebuilding Gaza
Policing Gaza
Two months to the day since police stations across Gaza were hit in Israeli air strikes, killing dozens and marking the first day of the war, we ask why the Gazan police were Israel’s number one target and how a now ruined Gaza can be policed at all.
We also revisit the Samouni’s – the family Al Jazeera English followed throughout the war – to find out how the children are attempting to go on with their lives after losing their loved ones.
Usama Hamdan, a senior Hamas official, joins the show to discuss Palestinian reconciliation.
Part 1 Policing Gaza
Part 2
A Crime Of War?
Human rights investigators continue to look into allegations that Israeli soldiers may have committed crimes of war during their Gaza military campaign.
The first Focus on Gaza,A Crime of War? looks at the story of an alleged war crime that occurred in the small village of Khuza’a, half a kilometre from the Israeli border.
Ayman Mohyeldin speaks with village residents who tell the story of a Gazan woman who was killed with a single shot to the head while waving a white flag as she led children to safety.
Part 1 A Crime Of War?
Part 2 A Crime Of War?
Focus on Gaza can be seen on Al Jazeera each week at the following times GMT: Friday 1430 and 2030; Saturday 0330 and 2230; Sunday 0830
“We were very close,” says Ronny Silva, who lost his brother, Anthony, in a fire last Saturday in Pawtucket. Silva is shown with the dog his brother gave him, whom they called “Mr. Wendell.”
The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer
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The fire at this apartment house in Pawtucket began when a first-floor tenant apparently left a cigarette burning while she went to the second floor to have supper with her elderly mother.
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ANTHONY SILVA
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Mike Finnegan, 38, lives temporarily with Ronny Silva on Meadow Street in Pawtucket, across the street from the house where Finnegan had lived with his mom and grandmother until a fire last Saturday.
The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer
–>PAWTUCKET Six days later and Ronny Silva has no interest in crossing Meadow Street and walking up to his brother’s third-floor apartment.
“I don’t feel like it,” he was saying yesterday from his living room, the window shades drawn on a sunny morning. “It makes me nervous.”
Six days later, and where his body won’t go, his mind won’t seem to leave.
“I don’t know what happened, that’s the thing,” Silva says. “Nobody knows what happened on that third floor except Anthony.”
His voice starts to break: “I couldn’t make it up to the third floor. There’s a fire escape, but I forgot all about it. I was too busy thinking of her. I couldn’t leave her up there, you know?”
Last Saturday night, at 8:15, Ronny Silva was home watching television when his neighbor Louise Finnegan banged on the door screaming for help. Her three-story tenement house across the street, the one her parents owned for decades, was on fire with her mother trapped inside.
Finnegan, who lives on the first floor, had apparently left a cigarette burning when she went up to the second floor to have supper with her 80-year-old mother, Ingeborg Turkiw. On the way downstairs, she noticed some “fog.” Then she opened the door of her apartment. A blast of superheated air struck her face and singed her hair.
She screamed out for her pets and began to choke on the thick black smoke. Out the front door she stumbled and ran across the street to Ronny Silva’s.
Ronny Silva, 45, knows the house well. Two years ago, after his mother died and he lost the Johnston apartment they shared, Ronny moved in with his older brother Anthony for a couple of months. It’s hard sometimes living with relatives, and harder still in a cramped, one-bedroom apartment.
Ronny, an out-of-work carpenter, eventually moved across the street into a small house he shares with Margaret Martin. Anthony, a seasonal house painter, often came over for supper. On Wednesday evenings, the two brothers, along with Finnegan’s son, Michael, enjoyed what they called their bowling night. They would hook up their Wii computer game to Ronny’s television and bowl for bragging rights.
When Ronny got to the house Saturday night, flames and smoke spewed from windows that had exploded from the heat.
“I tried to get in the side door there, but there was too much smoke and flames,” he says. “Then I ran around the front and I saw [Louise’s mother] in the window. She was yelling ‘Help me.’ ”
Ronny didn’t think about Anthony at first; he had run right past his car parked on the street without noticing it. The elderly lady in the nightgown — there in the window above the front-door portico — had all his attention.
He and another neighbor started climbing the two metal trellises that also serve as support columns for the small roof. The other neighbor “couldn’t take the heat and jumped off,” says Silva, “but I couldn’t leave her ….”
Silva reached the roof, pulled the woman from the window and then tried to climb back down with her. She was too heavy for him to hold with one hand as he gripped the roof railing with his other. “I couldn’t get her all the way down so I dropped her. Thank God there was people down there that caught her. She’s doing OK, only some scratches on her arm.”
It all happened so fast; the fire raging, the poisonous smoke belching. Then, at some point, Ronny Silva saw his brother’s car. The firefighters arrived and pushed him and the others back. “I told them my brother’s up there on the third floor.”
Ronny shakes his head: “I heard nothin’ from him.”
Firefighters took Anthony M. Silva, 47, from the third floor. He died en route to Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island a few blocks away, where Ronny Silva, his two sisters, their father and other relatives gathered and wept.
“They said he tried to make it to the door but there was too much smoke.”
ALL WEEK LONG, friends and relatives stopped by Ronny’s house to offer condolences. Many brought clothes and food to Louise and Michael Finnegan, who lost virtually everything in the fire. The mourners looked across the street at the gutted tenement house with the scorch marks above the first-floor windows and called Ronny Silva a hero.
“I’m not a hero,” he kept telling them.
By Tuesday night, Ronny wanted to get away from it all. The Dunkin’ Donuts Center replaced the destroyed tickets Michael Finnegan had for the Celtic Woman performance with better ones. Ronny and Mike sat close to the stage. Ronny again found himself rejecting the hero title as Michael told some other show patrons what had happened.
The show “took my mind off stuff, definitely,” says Ronny. “For one night anyway.”
Ronny Silva knows he did the best he could. Even if he had remembered that fire escape, even if he could have reached up and grabbed it, the fire was too hot for him to climb to the third floor. “If I got up there, I probably wouldn’t have been able to get back down.”
He just keeps wishing things were different.
On Wednesday, one of Ronny’s sisters negotiated the charred first floor of the tenement house and made it up to Anthony’s apartment. She gathered up a few of the miniature cars and figurines he liked to collect and a suit which Anthony will be buried in next week.
Tomorrow from 1 to 5 p.m., the JK Social Club, 520 Central Ave. in Pawtucket, is hosting a spaghetti dinner to raise money for Anthony’s funeral.
There must be a criminal investigation of the AIG debacle, and it looks as if New York’s top lawman is on the case. The collusion to save this toxic company in order to salvage the rogue financiers who conspired to enrich themselves by impoverishing millions is being revealed as the greatest financial scandal in U.S. history. Instead of taking bonuses, the culprits should be taking perp walks.
I’m not just referring to the swindlers in the Financial Products Subsidiary of AIG who devised and sold those insurance policies on derivatives that brought the world economy to its knees. They do seem deserving of a special place in hell, and presumably the same divine power that according to Scripture labeled usury a high moral crime and threw the money-changers out of the temple will consider that outcome.
However, the enablers are the AIG leaders who, as New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo revealed Tuesday, signed those bonus contracts a year ago to reward the very people “principally responsible for the firm’s meltdown.” That’s a cool $44 million divided among the top 10 shysters, even though the depth of their chicanery was well known to top management.
As Cuomo noted in a letter to Rep. Barney Frank: “The contracts shockingly contain a provision that required most individuals’ bonuses to be 100% of their 2007 bonuses. Thus, in the spring of last year, AIG chose to lock in bonuses for 2008 at 2007 levels despite obvious signs that 2008 performance would be disastrous in comparison to the year before.”
The lame argument that those bonus-baby employees needed to be retained in order to sort out the mess they had created was also shot down by Cuomo, who revealed after his office’s initial investigation had pierced AIG’s veil of secrecy that “[e]leven of the individuals who received `retention’ bonuses of $1 million or more are no longer working at AIG, including one who received $4.6 million.”
But the $165 million in taxpayer funds used to reward them is but a sideshow in a far larger drama of moral decay swirling around the banking bailout. It should not distract from the many billions, not paltry millions, of our dollars being diverted to reward the very folks who brought us such misery. Consider the $12.8 billion of the $170 billion that taxpayers gave AIG in bailout funds that AIG then secretly diverted to Goldman Sachs, a company that evidently has a lock on both the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve no matter which political party is in power. It was the biggest payoff among those that AIG made to a score of foreign and domestic financial giants.
The bailout is a response to a banking crisis that resulted from the radical deregulation pushed by former Goldman Sachs honcho Robert Rubin when he was President Clinton’s treasury secretary. Another Goldman Sachs chairman-turned-treasury-secretary, Henry Paulson, in the Bush administration designed the trillion-dollar bank bailout that will go down as the greatest swindle in U.S. history.
It was because of Paulson that AIG was saved from bankruptcy hours after Goldman rival Lehman Brothers was allowed to go down the drain. Why that reversal of strategy in a top-secret meeting called by then New York Fed Chair Timothy Geithner, a Rubin protégé and now Barack Obama’s treasury secretary? Why was Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein the only financial industry CEO in attendance? When that news leaked out, his role was defended as that of a noninvolved concerned citizen with expert knowledge, and whose firm had no direct monetary stake in the outcome.
That was a lie.
Goldman Sachs was into AIG insurance policies for at least $20 billion, which is why the firm got that $12.8 billion while Paulson was in charge. It took six months for the embarrassing facts to finally come out. The bailout program was administered by Neel Kashkari, a former Goldman Sachs VP; why are we not surprised at that?
Another pretend innocent in all this is AIG’s CEO Edward M. Liddy, famed defender of the $440,000 AIG executive retreat in Monarch Beach, Calif., held on the heels of the taxpayer bailout. His actions now are defended as mistakes made by a well-intentioned outsider who decided to work for a dollar a year after Paulson appointed him head of AIG. That is just garbage.
Liddy was complicit in Goldman Sachs’ role in creating this mess. As a director of Goldman Sachs, he was paid $685,770 in 2007 and would have come in for some questioning if the firm had gone down. Liddy even headed its audit committee during the five years before he resigned that seat to take over AIG in September 2008. As for his salary sacrifice, not to worry; in 2005, when he was still CEO of Allstate Insurance, he received $26.7 million in compensation.
What we have here is a rare glimpse into the workings of the billionaires’ club, that elite gang of perfectly legal loan sharks who, in only the most egregious cases, will be judged as criminals—Bernard Madoff, former chairman of NASDAQ, comes to mind. These other amoral sharks, who confiscated billions from shareholders and the 401(k) accounts of innocent victims, were rewarded handsomely, rarely needing to break the laws their lobbyists had purchased.
Josef Fritzl, the Austrian engineer who held his daughter Elisabeth captive in an underground prison for 24 years, today admitted he was responsible for the death of one of the seven children he fathered with her.
In a shock move on the third day of his trial, the 73-year-old calmly pleaded guilty to all the charges against him, including negligent homicide and enslavement. He had already admitted four of the charges against him – incest, rape, coercion and false imprisonment.
For the first time since his arrest, last April, he also expressed regret for what he had done.
At a press conference this afternoon, the court authorities in St Pölten categorically denied reports that the now 42-year-old Elisabeth Fritzl was in court today. Franz Cutka, the court’s spokesman, said he could neither confirm nor deny that Elisabeth attended yesterday’s hearing. But he did say reports she had watched proceedings from an adjacent room were false. “There is no such room,” he told reporters.
Fritzl’s lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, said he was unable to confirm or deny Elisabeth’s attendance because to do so would breach the rules of the in-camera proceedings.
“You can draw your own conclusions from that,” he said. “I’m the wrong person to ask. If she was there [yesterday], it could have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, in terms of his confession,” he told the Guardian.
He suggested his client’s change of heart today came as a result of the psychological impact of yesterday’s gruelling court session, in which he watched a videotape of Elisabeth giving evidence.
“All I know is that he asked to see a psychiatrist in his cell [after hearing yesterday's testimony] and after that decided to give a full confession.” The case was adjourned this morning and will start again for what is expected to be the final day of the trial tomorrow at 9am Austrian time.
After the lawyers deliver their closing statements, the eight-member jury will retire to consider their verdicts. Under Austrian law, admission of guilt is not enough to pronounce a guilty verdict, so they will still have to consider the evidence they have heard. They will also have to decide whether Fritzl’s 11th-hour confession should be counted as a mitigating factor, which could alter his sentence.
This done, the jury will decide on Fritzl’s final sentence, under the guidance of three judges. He is expected to spend the rest of his days in an institution for the criminally insane.
For the first time in the trial, Fritzl arrived in the courtroom this morning without covering his face with a blue folder.
Opening proceedings, the judge, Andrea Humer, said she wanted to return to Elisabeth’s testimony from yesterday.
“Do you have anything to say to me?” Humer asked Fritzl. “I recognise that I am guilty,” he responded, adding, “I regret it.”
“Why are you saying that now?” asked Humer. “Because of the videotape testimony of my daughter,” said Fritzl.
Referring to the murder charge, Humer asked why Fritzl hadn’t done more to help his newborn baby boy, Michael, who died from breathing difficulties shortly after being born in the cellar in 1996.
“Did you not realise he was gravely ill?”
Fritzl responded: “I just overlooked it. I thought the baby was going to survive. I should have realised. It was only yesterday I realised for the first time how cruel I was to Elisabeth. I had never realised it before.”
Fritzl previously admitted burning the child’s body in an incinerator in his back yard, but had denied he was responsible for the baby’s death. The surviving twin, Alexander, was one of three of Elisabeth’s seven children who “appeared” above ground at the Fritzl’s house in Amstetten, west of Vienna. Alexander was the last of the three children to be raised by Fritzl and his wife, Rosemarie.
Fritzl also changed his plea from partial to full guilt on the rape charge and admitted the slavery charge.
For the first two days of his trial, Fritzl denied that he enslaved Elisabeth in the purpose-built, windowless cellar he constructed under his own home.
The jury heard that Elisabeth was imprisoned under Ybbsstrasse 40 at the age of 18. Her father lured her into the cellar on 29 August 1984 by putting a cloth over her nose and mouth and dragging her into the cellar. He then secured a chain around her stomach so she could not escape. The next day he raped her. As she bore his children over the next 24 years, he repeatedly raped her in front of them, the court heard.
Christiane Burkheiser, the prosecuting lawyer, described the cellar as Fritzl’s “playground”, where he used his daughter like a “toy”.
WASHINGTON – The head of battered insurance giant AIG told Congress on Wednesday that “we’ve heard the American people loudly and clearly” in their rage over executive bonuses.
Under intense pressure from the Obama administration and Congress, the head of the bailed-out insurance giant declared that some of the firm’s executives have begun returning all or part of bonuses totaling $165 million. He said the payouts were a legal obligation of the company, although he called them “distasteful.”
Edward Liddy, brought in last year to oversee a company that has received $182 billion in federal bailout funds, offered no details. Buffeted by congressional outrage, he said he was angry, too, but did not respond directly when advised in pungent terms to pay to the Treasury all the money handed out last weekend in “retention payments.”
“Eat it now. Take it out of your profits down the road. It’s a lot sweeter now than it’s gonna be later,” said Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y.
Liddy slid into the witness chair at a congressional hearing as President Barack Obama sought anew to quell a furor that has bedeviled his administration since word of the bonuses surfaced over the weekend.
Obama, who took office just under two months ago, told reporters his administration was not responsible for a lack of federal supervision of AIG that preceded the company’s demise, nor for the decision made last year to pay what he called “outrageous bonuses.”
Still, he said, “The buck stops with me.” He said that “my goal is to make sure that we never put ourselves in this kind of position again,” and he disclosed the administration was consulting with Congress on the possibility of creating a new agency to govern the meltdown of large financial institutions such as AIG.
He also gave a strong vote of confidence to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who has been the target of growing Republican criticism.
Obama spoke as congressional Democrats worked on legislation designed to recoup most or all of the $165 million by exposing it to new taxes. A House vote was likely Thursday on a bill placing a 90 percent tax on the payments to top-paid executives at companies like AIG that received large bailouts from the federal government.
Republicans raised pointed questions about the extent of Geithner’s advance knowledge of the bonuses, and stressed they had been locked out of discussions earlier this year when Democrats decided to jettison a provision from legislation that could have revoked the payments.
“The fact is that the bill the president signed, which protected the AIG bonuses and others, was written behind closed doors by Democratic leaders of the House and Senate. There was no transparency,” said Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee.
Liddy’s presence in a congressional hearing room was evidence of a bipartisan opposition to the bonuses, although his status as a $1-a-year CEO called out of retirement last year to try and untangle AIG’s financial mess made him a less-than-easy target for expressions of outrage.
“No one knows better than I that AIG has been the recipient of generous amounts of government financial aid,” he said. “We have been the beneficiary of the American people’s forbearance and patience,” he added, acknowledging that patience was wearing thin.
Liddy said that on Tuesday, he had “asked those who have received retention payments in excess of $100,000 or more to return at least half of those payments.” Some have “already stepped forward and returned 100 percent,” he added.
Asked by Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., whether he would turn over the names of individuals who received the money, as well as the amounts, he said he would do so only if assured the information not be made public.
When Frank said he might seek a subpoena, Liddy said he was concerned about the safety of the employees and their families, and read aloud from a death threat received by one of them.
Frank said he would be guided in part by security considerations, but Ackerman later noted that Andrew Cuomo, the New York attorney general, was already seeking the names with a subpoena.
Liddy said he had not yet complied, sidestepped several times when asked whether he would, and finally said “it would be our intent” to do so.
But Cuomo swiftly issued a statement saying Liddy’s pledge was “simply too little, too late. … Rather than take half-measures, AIG should immediately turn over the list, which we have subpoenaed, of who got what and when.”
He added, “We prefer not to go to court on this matter, but AIG is leaving us little choice. I hope the leadership at the company comes to its senses now.”
Separately, AIG spokesman Mark Herr said he could not say how many executives had turned back the money. “Bear in mind, these bonuses were only just paid,” he said.
He added the company may not release that information. Asked why, he responded, “Why is it cloudy today? Because sometimes it just is.”
For his part, Liddy also said the Federal Reserve knew long in advance of the bonus payments and acquiesced in them, noting that officials from the independent agency attend key company meetings. But he said the same was not true of Geithner, adding, “We do our work with the Federal Reserve.”
Liddy gave skeptical committee members what amounted to a tutorial in the practice of paying retention bonuses — he did not call them that — to executives.
He said the money was offered to executives in AIG’s financial products section, where risky investments finally became the entire company’s undoing. He said each executive was offered money to dispose of his “business book,” meaning the transactions he had been in charge of handling, and thus far, the company’s financial derivatives had been reduced from $2.7 trillion to $1.6 trillion.
He had decided it was worth paying the money to retain the services of executives who knew the business best, he said. And he had received legal advice that there were valid contracts requiring the payments.
“I know 165 million is a very large number. It’s a very large number. In the context of 1.6 trillion … we thought it was a good trade,” he said.
Liddy added there was still a risk of financial catastrophe if the remaining $1.6 trillion in financial instruments were not disposed of properly.
But Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., angrily told the witness the contract read like “the captain and the crew of the ship reserving the lifeboats.”
Liddy replied that he was not at the firm when the contracts were negotiated, and said, as he has before, that he would not have approved them.
The FBI is asking for the public’s help in catching a man thought to have robbed a bank in Stoneham, two convenience stores in Cambridge, and another in Revere.
The Stoneham Savings Bank on Main Street was robbed at 3:37 p.m. on March 2. A white male in his late 30s, 6-foot-2 to 6-foot-4 and weighing 325 to 350 pounds, pointed a black handgun at bank employees while demanding money, the FBI said.
“He’s a very, very large man with a gun,” said FBI spokeswoman Gail Marcinkiewicz. “We consider him armed and dangerous.”
The suspect also did something that Marcinkiewicz said was unusual for a bank robber. Rather than simply focusing on bank employees, he also robbed a customer standing in line.
“We’ve never seen that before,” she said.
The other robberies included a Dec. 15 robbery at the Kirkland Convenience Store in Cambridge, a Jan. 29 robbery at the 7 Day Convenience Store in Revere, and a Feb. 10 robbery at the Quick Food Mart in Cambridge.
The FBI asked anyone with information to call its Violent Crimes Task Force at 617-742-5533.
Burning coal, whether within America’s borders or in China, above, contributes to global warming. As sea levels rise, so does the threat of mass migrations of people, intensifying competition for the resources essential for survival.
While pundits and politicians wrestle with immediate issues such as the economic meltdown, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea, global climate change has emerged as one of the most critical and contentious security issues of the 21st century. The new director of national intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, has cited rising temperatures, combined with an increase in weather-related natural disasters, as a major facilitator of governmental instability worldwide, especially in underdeveloped regions. Issues of poverty, infrastructure degradation, social and political collapse and environmental decay will all be exacerbated by global warming. While the crises stemming from climate change will initially manifest themselves most critically in regions of the world already impacted by political, social and economic turmoil, there is a pronounced threat of spillover as entire populations migrate from the stricken regions into areas where humans have a better chance of survival. The severity and longevity of the consequences of severe weather-related events will make current mechanisms of containing and mitigating these crises inadequate. The scope and scale of these massive migrations would be unprecedented in modern history, as would the ensuing conflicts over basic resources such as food and water, not to mention energy.
The potential catastrophe that global climate change could unleash on America makes every other foreign policy crisis pale in comparison. Recognizing the importance of proactive, as opposed to reactive, policy to head off these looming problems, President Obama has crafted a national policy designed to address the principal underlying cause of global climate change: greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gas reduction is one of three pillars on which Obama has constructed his ambitious energy plan, the other two being economic stimulus and increased energy security. In the recent economic stimulus bill signed by the president, some $50 billion of a $789 billion total stimulus package will be set aside for programs related to efficient and renewable energy. This will be followed by an outlay of $150 billion over 10 years for investments in projects related to clean energy, efficient power generation and usage, and improved domestic oil and gas production.
Increased domestic energy production is linked with a broader concept of increased energy security, the stated objectives of which are to reduce American dependency on imported oil from the Middle East and Venezuela, which together account for 33 percent of the United States’ daily consumption, 10 million barrels. Reducing or eliminating this dependency is seen as a mechanism for freeing up American diplomatic and economic options in these critical regions, providing U.S. leaders with more flexibility in crafting solutions deemed to be in the national interest, and not so heavily tied to the need to guarantee continued access to these important sources of energy. But increased domestic energy production will not, in and of itself, deal with the pressing issue of greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, void of a plan to manage greenhouse gas emissions, any massive effort to increase domestic energy production could result in even higher emissions.
The Obama administration does have a plan, in the form of an innovative, ambitious and as such contentious national “cap and trade” system for managing and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Under the plan, the government would establish a national standard for greenhouse gas emissions by various industries, representing a “cap” intended to achieve a reduction of 80 percent by 2050. Industries operating below this “cap” would have “credits” that could then be traded—through for-profit “auctions”—to industries unable to meet the standard.
The Obama administration believes this cap-and-trade proposal will not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the United States but will also generate federal income from the taxation of the revenue obtained from the trading of credits. This revenue would then be invested by the government in new clean energy projects and initiatives. There is even an international aspect of the domestic cap-and-trade system: Heavy U.S. emitters of greenhouse gases would have the option of offsetting their domestic quotas by investing in low-carbon energy projects in the developing world. There are several major obstacles in the way of turning the cap-and-trade concept into reality. First, there is the issue of establishing a domestic framework for defining and enforcing the greenhouse emission caps. The industrial infrastructure that would be most impacted by the caps is arguing for a single national standard, as opposed to caps being set at the state level. Another key issue is the cap itself, how it would be defined, and what benchmarks would be set for implementation of the 80 percent reduction. Until these questions are answered, new energy production initiatives in the United States are frozen.
Second, there is a need to integrate the ambitious American domestic policy into an overarching international policy of controlling greenhouse gas emissions. President Obama has committed to the creation of a Global Energy Forum, which would comprise the core G-8 countries plus major developing nations such as Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa. The forum would focus exclusively on global energy and environmental issues. Obama has also committed to re-engage the United States in the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change (UNFCCC), which is working to build a new global regime of commitments to replace the existing Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
The goals and expectations that individual nations bring to these assemblies, whether it is Obama’s Global Energy Forum or the UNFCCC, differ greatly. As a developed nation, the United States has flexibility in internal operations that nations conducting major development programs, such as China and India, do not. Negotiating viable greenhouse emissions caps with China, India and other major developing nations is essential to defining a realistic emission cap in the United States. Without such a global agreement, U.S. industries may be compelled, because of simple economics, to flee a constrictive American domestic environment for more permissive locations abroad. Such flight would be counterproductive to the Obama economic stimulus plan, which hinges on industries, and their associated jobs, remaining in the U.S. It would also hamper the overall goal of reducing global emissions to make the homeland more secure.
Another problem is the issue of projecting caps in a fair and equitable manner. While the United States and Europe can project with some confidence energy consumption models for the foreseeable future, the same cannot be said of many developing nations. A cap level for the U.S. and Europe projected over a 50-year period is viable. However, for developing nations, population changes alone will radically alter their energy consumption requirements, as well as their population-related infrastructures. Caps using present-day criteria would rapidly become unrealistic, and consequently would be subject to violation. However, adjusting U.S. and European caps based upon such projections would place an even greater burden on the industrial bases of these nations. Managing the issue would be a major challenge for the Obama administration and the rest of the world.
The linkage between global climate change, national security and energy consumption models is not one of normal association. Today, however, the potential impact on global social, political and economic systems simply cannot be ignored. This impact would be not only iterative, but would cumulatively have an effect that is several orders of magnitude greater than what normally would be projected. Preventing, or at least containing and mitigating, the potential dire consequences of global climate change will require sweeping reform which will affect existing global energy consumption models. How this reform is framed, and the manner in which it is implemented, will likewise heavily influence the economic, political and physical aspects of the world energy markets, making global climate change perhaps the most critical issue when it comes to the future of energy security, and national security.
Given the paramount role played by the United States in world affairs today, the energy policies implemented by the Obama administration will have an influence unmatched by any other nation or group of nations. While the Obama energy plan is complex, a major indicator of whether or not the plan is unfolding as expected will be the issue of cap and trade. The success or failure of the cap-and-trade initiative will impact the overall viability of Obama’s clean energy initiatives, domestically and internationally, and as such should be closely monitored by all parties with a vested interest in energy and related security matters. And given the inherent problems confronting the successful implementation of the cap-and-trade initiative, it is imperative that the Obama administration develop alternative plans and courses of action. There might not be enough time to do so if “cap and trade” fails.
The threats faced by America and the rest of the world today from terrorism and so-called rogue states will shrink into insignificance if entire populations begin vying for habitable land and the basic resources required to sustain life. This is a predictable problem, with recognizable solutions. Whether America and the world have the collective wisdom, and courage, to implement these solutions is yet to be seen.
Scott Ritter is a former intelligence and arms control official who was an inspector in the former Soviet Union (1988-1990) and Iraq (1991-1998). He is the author of “Target Iran” (Nation Books, 2007) and the forthcoming “On Dangerous Ground: Following the Path of America’s Failed Arms Control Policy” (Nation Books).
Obama’s unprecedented greeting to Iran is met with an unprecedented response by Grand Ayatollah Khamenei
Investigative historian and journalist, Gareth Porter, speaks to Sharmini Peries about President Obama’s Nowruz greeting to Iran. Noting the significance of this unprecedented move by the US government, and the saying that this is the first time the Iranian leader himself has responded directly to the US, Porter said, “Obama was displaying atmospherics here far more than substance,” adding that, “there really is nothing in the address that gives you a clue as to what change is going to be made in the US posture when they actually sit down with Iran.”
Robert Borosage: Is the timing right for a new ‘1930s Depression era’ movement?
Everyone agrees: The populist fires are burning. But what’s next? Bob Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, thinks our historic moment could push Obama farther to the left. But only if the forces of the left start pushing.
Chomsky: Geithner Plan is recycled Bush/Paulson. We need nationalization and steps towards democratization
Noam Chomsky speaks to Paul Jay on the Obama – Geithner plan. Chomsky says that “they’re simply recycling, the Bush-Paulson measures and changing them a little, but essentially the same idea: keep the institutional structure the same, try to kind of pass things up, bribe the banks and investors to help out, but avoid the measures that might get to the heart of the problem.”
Why you’ll be paying for the occupation for years to come, withdrawal or not.
With last week’s announced escalation of the war in Afghanistan, including an Iraq-like “surge” replete with 4,000 more U.S. troops and a sizable increase in private contractors, President Barack Obama blew the lid off of any lingering perceptions that he somehow represents a significant change in how the U.S. conducts its foreign policy.
In the meantime, more reports have emerged that bolster suspicions that Obama’s Iraq policy is but a downsized version of Bush’s and that a total withdrawal of U.S. forces is not on the horizon.
In the latest episode of Occupation Rebranded, it was revealed that the administration intends to reclassify some combat forces as “advisory and assistance brigades.” While Obama’s administration is officially shunning the use of the term “global war on terror,” the labels du jour, unfortunately, seem to be the biggest changes we will see for some time.
Underscoring this point is a report just released by the War Resisters League, which for decades has closely monitored the military budget, revealing how many tax dollars are actually going to the war machine. The WRL puts out its famous pie chart annually just before tax time as a reminder of what we are doing exactly when we file our returns. Noting that 51 percent of the federal budget goes to military spending, the WRL said it does “not expect the military percentage to change much” under Obama.
While Obama — and public attention — shifted foreign policy focus last week to Afghanistan, lost in the media blitz was another important report that examines how taxpayers will continue to pay for the Iraq occupation for years to come, withdrawal or not. This report, released in March by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, provides a sobering look at Obama’s “massive and expensive” Iraq plan, identifying several crucial questions that have yet to be addressed.
Whether or not the Obama administration actually intends to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq in numbers large enough to claim to be “ending the war” as many believe, this kind of official review of the U.S. reality in Iraq — and the congressional oversight to which Obama will (or will not) be subjected in the coming months — bears intense scrutiny.
First, there’s the money. “Although reducing troops would appear to lower costs, GAO has seen from previous operations … that costs could rise in the near term,” according to the 56-page report, which is titled “Iraq: Key Issues for Congressional Oversight.”
In addition to the massive funds required to move tens of thousands of troops, the GAO points out that the Army estimates “it would cost $12 billion to $13 billion a year for at least two years after the operation ends to repair, replace and rebuild the equipment used in Iraq.”
The cost of closing U.S. bases will also “likely be significant;” even after military units leave Iraq, the Pentagon will need to invest in training and equipment to return these units to levels capable of performing “full spectrum operations.” (The GAO report does not even mention the costs of providing much-needed medical and mental health services to veterans.)
The Obama administration is likely to portray the costs of “withdrawing” from Iraq as a painful necessity made inevitable by the Bush administration. But there are already calls for Obama to not allocate any new funds for such an operation. Retired Army Col. Ann Wright, a veteran diplomat who reopened the U.S. embassy in Kabul after Sept. 11 (and, while in the military, worked on plans for an Iraq invasion), says, “Everyone in the Department of Defense — military and civilian — knows well the expense of going to war and the expense of bringing troops back to the United States.
“DOD has plenty of money to withdraw equipment and personnel and no doubt has had monies specifically for that purpose built into its budgets for years. The Congress should not provide additional funding for withdrawal, but instead require DOD to use existing allocations.”
In fact, the GAO characterizes the Pentagon’s monthly reports on financial obligations under the global war on terrorism as being of “questionable reliability,” adding that it “found numerous problems with DOD’s processes for recording and reporting its war-related costs.”
“Without transparent and accurate cost information,” the GAO warns, “Congress and DOD will not have reliable information on how much the war is costing, sufficient details on how appropriated funds are spent, or the reliable historical data needed to develop and provide oversight of future funding needs.”
Dollars aside, the new GAO report report raises serious questions about how Obama will handle key challenges that will ultimately determine Iraq’s future and the extent of the U.S. presence in the country. Among the questions the Obama administration has yet to answer: How to dismantle or hand over the 283 U.S. installations in Iraq (including more than 50 large military bases); What to do with the 160,000-plus private U.S. contractors in Iraq; Who will provide security for the massive — and likely expanding — army of diplomats deployed in the country at the monstrous U.S. embassy in Baghdad?
Iraqis Could Vote the U.S. Out: Would Obama Listen?
Obama, of course, has always said that his Iraq policy is not set in stone and that he will adjust it according to “conditions on the ground” — a sweeping disclaimer that could mean a 180-degree shift on a dime.
The GAO report acknowledges that under the Status of Forces Agreement, Iraq and the U.S. can “extend the draw-down time frame” if necessary, adding, “Either government can unilaterally terminate the security agreement by providing 12 months advance notice.” In the absence of clearly identified conditions for the stability of the U.S.-backed Iraqi government, one scenario that could result in Obama extending the U.S. occupation is if the Washington-backed Baghdad regime is threatened by an uprising.
Statistics presented by the GAO are worth considering: “[T]he number of Iraqi army and police forces nearly doubled from about 320,000 in January 2007 to just over 600,000 in October 2008. However, according to the Department of Defense, over the same period, the number of Iraqi army units capable of conducting operations independently remained at about 10 percent of total units.”
Iraq is scheduled to have a national referendum on the SOFA this summer, and the GAO report notes that “the Iraqi government has said it would abide by the results.” This means that if Iraqis reject it, “U.S. forces would have to leave Iraq by as early as July 2010.” At this point, it seems impossible to imagine Obama having all U.S. forces out of Iraq a year from now — and certainly not his residual force of up to 50,000 troops. The GAO report suggests that Congress ask the Obama administration, “What are the U.S. contingency plans in the event that Iraqis vote against the security agreement in July 2009?”
More broadly, the GAO asks, “To what extent will the United States attempt to renegotiate provisions of the security agreement if security conditions deteriorate or other conditions are deemed insufficient to draw down responsibly?”
These questions will prove crucial in determining the sincerity of Obama’s campaign pledge to end the war.
Will the U.S. Walk Away From its 283 Bases in Iraq?
In a dramatic understatement, the GAO notes that the U.S. “has an extensive basing footprint in Iraq. … Closing or handing over U.S. installations in Iraq will be time consuming and costly.” With no fewer than 283 such installations throughout Iraq — 51 large bases and 232 smaller bases — the Obama administration has not said how it will approach this formidable task.
This is no minor detail. “According to U.S. Army officials, experience has shown that it takes one to two months to close the smallest platoon — or company – size installations, which contain between 16 and 200 combat soldiers or Marines.”
However, the U.S. “has never closed large, complex installations — such as Balad Air Force Base, which contains about 24,000 inhabitants and has matured over five years. U.S. Army officials estimate it could take longer than 18 months to close a base of that size.” Obama should explain clearly how he intends to dismantle these bases or to what forces he is going to give control over them.
It is very hard to imagine that the U.S. will simply walk away from large bases it spent years building. So, will they be turned over to Iraq? If so, to whom? What guarantee is there that they would not be used as operating bases for death squads? Will some be destroyed? What about the environmental impact?
In addition to the bases, the GAO reveals that, as of of March 2008, “the United States had in place about 170,000 pieces of equipment worth about $16.5 billion that would need to be removed from Iraq.” Erik Leaver, a senior analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies, says,”An example of a tough question: What to do with MRAPs [Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles]?”
“The MRAPs are so heavy, transport back to the U.S., plus the rehab charges may make it cost-effective to actually destroy them,” says Leaver. “Plus, if you need to move 120,000 soldiers in a rapid time frame, do you even have the space to bring them back if you take the MRAPs?”
Then there are the facilities in Iraq currently being run by U.S. contractors. According to the GAO, Defense Contract Management Agency officials estimate “there is at least $3.5 billion worth of contractor-managed government-owned property in Iraq.”
Troops Withdrawal, Contractor Surge?
Despite his much-celebrated troop withdrawal announcement, Obama has said nothing publicly about what he intends to do with the 163,000 “security contractors” deployed in Iraq, whose ranks outnumber U.S. troops. This is most likely because, as the GAO reports, there is no plan.
“From late 2007 through July 2008, planning for the redeployment of U.S. forces did not include a theaterwide plan for redeploying contractors,” the GAO report reveals.
In fact, the GAO raises the prospect that Obama will actually increase reliance on private contractors — including armed contractors like those who work for Blackwater — particularly given the Obama administration’s stated intention to increase diplomatic and reconstruction work in Iraq, which will create a greater need for “diplomatic security.”
According to the GAO, the State Department spent about $1.1 billion from 2006 to 2008 on 1,400 private security contractors in Iraq. As of January 2009, the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security (the main employer of Blackwater and other armed contractors responsible for guarding U.S. diplomats and occupation officials), has already experienced a drastic increase in workload.
“State’s reliance on contractors may increase as the department currently depends on DOD to provide some services,” says the GAO, citing the examples of Bosnia and Kosovo, where “contractors assumed responsibility for certain support functions that had been previously performed by military personnel.”
Of course, executives at private security companies have long suggested that a U.S. military draw down could mean a greater role for private forces in Iraq.
“To what extent does State have contingency plans in place if Embassy Baghdad is unable to decrease its reliance on U.S. civilian government personnel over the next 5 years?” asks the GAO report.
The report also addresses question of accountability for contractors, noting that they are no longer officially immune from prosecution under Iraq’s legal system. Indeed, after the suspension of the Paul Bremer-era Order 17 and the signing of the SOFA, contractors are now ostensibly bound by Iraqi law — but not one has been prosecuted in Iraq for any crime, and it seems doubtful that any U.S. president would allow this to happen.
According to the GAO, “a joint U.S.-Iraqi committee is working to establish procedures and guidelines for exercising Iraqi jurisdiction for private contractors operating in Iraq, including those covered by the security agreement.” In other words, believe it when it happens.
No More Bailouts Until Iraq Has Clean Drinking Water
The GAO report is a pretty dry read, but seasoned observers of the Iraq occupation might find humor in one of the report’s graphs. It maps the drastic decline in the number of nations participating in the Iraq occupation, the so-called coalition of the willing, from 2004 to the present.
“As of March 2009, only three coalition partners remain in Iraq — Australia, Romania and the United Kingdom,” the GAO reports, illustrating the point with a sharp, steep slope. “These coalition partners have an agreement with Iraq to remove their troops by July 2009. At that time, the United States will be the sole remaining nation with troops stationed in Iraq.”
Another important figure included in the report that is anything but humorous — and rarely talked about — is the huge number of people imprisoned or detained by the U.S. in Iraq: 15,000. Many of these prisoners are being held without charge or access to due process. Under existing agreements between Iraq and the U.S., they are slated to either be turned over to Iraq’s legal system or released.
Interestingly, the GAO report does raise concerns about the dismal shape of Iraq’s legal system, citing a December 2008 Human Rights Watch report that “concluded Iraq’s central criminal court ’seriously’ failed to meet international standards of due process and fair trials.” The GAO cites “concerns that detainees in Iraqi custody may be tortured or mistreated because Iraqi officials often rely on coerced confessions instead of physical evidence, particularly in criminal cases.”
It is telling that the GAO raised this concern in a section about the prospect of U.S. contractors being stripped of immunity and subjected to the Iraqi justice system, not Iraqis handed over to the Baghdad regime by the U.S. Regarding the fate of the Iraqi prisoners, the GAO report dryly notes, “many implementing details for this process must be resolved.”
Perhaps the saddest portion of the GAO report relates to what should be done to address the massive suffering in Iraq and what the U.S. responsibility should be for paying for the tremendous devastation of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure over the past 20 years.
Just take the issue of water. As of now, according to the report, “many Iraqis are without water or have access to water that puts them at risk of diseases such as cholera and dysentery, as evidenced by outbreaks in 2007 and 2008. According to the United Nations, only 40 percent of children have reliable access to safe drinking water; with water-treatment plants operating at only 17 percent capacity, large volumes of untreated waste are discharged into Iraq’s waterways. The health risks associated with a lack of access to potable water and proper sewage treatment are compounded by the shortage of medical professionals in Iraq’s health care system.”
According to the World Bank, it would cost $14.4 billion to rebuild the Iraqi public works and water system. In other words, about five weeks of the overall cost of the U.S. occupation.
Instead of discussing U.S. reparations or restitution, as groups like Iraq Veterans Against the War have demanded, the report asks the Obama administration what more the Iraqi government can do to fund reconstruction projects. “We’ve just spent $700 billion to bail out Wall Street,” says IPS’ Erik Leaver. “While the report notes that the U.S. spent $9.5 billion and Iraq budgeted for $17.2 billion for reconstruction of a war torn society. The scale of what we’ve done on the civilian end is absurd.”
Before one more cent is spent on bailing out corrupt corporations that destroyed the U.S. economy, Iraqis should have clean drinking water. After all, it was the illegal U.S. wars that took it from them in the first place. And that is not logic based on lies.
Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
Authorities stand watch outside the American Civic Association in Binghamton, N.Y., where a gunman killed 13 people. WBNG-TV
Shooting Scene
Watch a video of the scene in Binghamton from WBNG-TV.
NPR.org,April 3, 2009 · Bedlam broke out Friday when a gunman walked into the American Civic Association, an immigration services center in downtown Binghamton, N.Y., and opened fire. By the time the shooting ended, 14 people were dead.
Four others were wounded and in critical condition, Police Chief Joseph Zikuski said. Police safely removed 37 people from the building, including more than two dozen who took refuge in the boiler room in the basement, he said.
Zikuski said that police have reason to believe that the shooter was among the dead, but they are not “100 percent sure.”
He said the gunman has not been positively identified, but one deceased man was found wearing a satchel around his neck. It contained ammunition. Two handguns were found at the crime scene.
The episode lasted about four hours. “The police personnel standing around … do seem a lot more relaxed than they have been for a long time,” Bill Jaker, a reporter with member station WSKG, told NPR’s Michele Norris around 4 p.m. Friday. “So the crisis is over and the traffic is beginning to move again on Main Street so things are beginning to return to normal in Binghamton.”
As the nation watched play-by-play images on cable news channels throughout mid-day, uniformed officers surrounded the glass-front center. Members of the city’s SWAT team, FBI agents and officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were dispatched to the scene. The gunman apparently used a car to block the back door of the center, then entered through the front.
The police chief said that the man believed to be the gunman had borrowed a friend’s car to attend a class at the association. That was the car used to barricade the back door. The chief added that the suspect “was no stranger” to people at the immigration center.
Police received a 911 call from a receptionist who had been shot, the chief said. That receptionist remained hospitalized in critical condition Friday.
Those who hid in the basement made contact by telephone with the authorities, NPR’s Brian Mann told Norris. He said the authorities gave them advice on how to bar the door and they remained in that room for at least two hours while SWAT teams swept the building.
At the late afternoon news conference, Binghamton Mayor Matthew Ryan expressed “sorrow and compassion” for all of the victims, their families and friends. He said the investigation will be a lengthy process and victims still need to be identified.
He thanked all agencies — city, county, state and federal — that responded. And he praised his community for coming together in a crisis. Many of the families involved in the tragedy are not originally not from this country, Ryan said.
“This is a horrible situation,” New York Gov. David Paterson said. He called it a “brutal attack” on innocent people.
At the afternoon news conference, flanked by other New York officials, he recited a litany of mass shootings. He asked, rhetorically, when society is going to be able to curb this kind of violence that seems to happen so often it’s hard to keep track of the incidents.
Classes designed to help immigrants obtain American citizenship were scheduled at the center on Friday.
“We have got to figure out a way to deal with this senseless, senseless violence,” said Vice President Biden, who was speaking to a group in New York City. President Obama issued a statement from Europe.
Binghamton, population 47,000, is about 140 miles northwest of New York City. Christina Boyd, a spokesperson for Wilson Medical Center in nearby Johnson City, said that a handful of people were being treated there for gunshot wounds.
During the incident, police banged on the door of a house near the center. Tenant Leslie Shrager, a student at Binghamton University, and five housemates were asleep. The students were told of the shooting and taken outside by police.
“One of our housemates thought they heard banging of some kind. But when you’re living in downtown Binghamton, it’s always noisy,” said Shrager. She is from Slingerlands, just outside of Albany. “Literally two minutes later the cops came and got us out.”
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
PRAQUE, Czech Republic — For half a century, American presidents have talked about easing or eliminating the threat of nuclear annihilation while maintaining an arsenal at the core of U.S. defense strategy.
On Sunday, President Barack Obama committed the United States to a long-term goal of ridding itself and the world of nuclear weapons and said his first step would be to downplay the United States’ nuclear weapons as the keystone of its defense.
“Today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” he said to cheers from an audience of 20,000.
“This goal will not be reached quickly, perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence,” he said.
Obama spelled out a broad three-part plan:
_ Changing U.S. nuclear strategy and working with Russia to further slash their stockpiles of warheads.
_ Working to control the spread of weapons, including creating an international fuel bank to let non-nuclear powers get materials needed for nuclear power without developing the capacity to create material for weapons, as is feared in Iran.
_ Starting a new international effort to secure from terrorists all the materials needed for nuclear weapons.
As if to underscore the threat of attack from any corner, North Korea hours earlier launched a missile that drew international condemnation and sent the United Nations Security Council into session.
Obama had long scheduled the speech on his broad vision for cutting and eliminating the nuclear threat. But he admitted the expected North Korean launch underscored his message, first to maintain a U.S. nuclear deterrent as long as anyone poses a threat but then to rid of the world of the threat altogether.
“This morning, we were reminded again why we need a new and more rigorous approach to address this threat. North Korea broke the rules once more by testing a rocket that could be used for a long-range missile,” he said.
“This provocation underscores the need for action, not just … at the UN Security Council but in our determination to prevent the spread of these weapons,” he said. “Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something.”
Aides said they woke Obama shortly after the launch was confirmed at 4:30 a.m. Praque time, and that he consulted with military and intelligence advisers through the morning.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs declined to say whether the U.S. military had been on alert in anticipation of the launch.
“Had at any moment we determined that this launch posed a threat to the United States of America, we would have taken whatever steps were necessary to ensure the safety and security of the American people,” Gibbs said.
He also declined to say whether the United States had any information to confirm or deny North Korea’s claim that the missile merely launched a satellite and was not a test of a long-range rocket.
Fraught with symbolism, Obama chose to deliver the speech in a city that once tried bravely to defy Soviet oppression in 1968 and where, he said, the Velvet Revolution overthrowing Communist rule in 1989 “proved that moral leadership is more powerful than any weapon.”
And he spoke in the center of a Europe so often divided by war but now “peaceful, united and free because ordinary people believed that divisions could be bridged, that walls could come down; and that peace could prevail.”
Obama stressed that the United States will “maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary” as long as nuclear weapons exist. But he insisted that the United States will “begin the work of reducing our arsenal.”
He echoed his earlier announcement that the United States and Russia will work to negotiate a new treaty this year cutting their nuclear arsenals.
Also, he said he will immediately push for U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
“After more than five decades of talks, it is time for the testing of nuclear weapons to finally be banned,” he said.
On another front, Obama said he’ll work to stop the spread of weapons to non-nuclear countries, by pursuing a new treaty to end the production of fissile materials intended for use in weapons.
“If we are serious about stopping the spread of these weapons, then we should put an end to the dedicated production of weapons-grade materials that create them,” he said.
He’ll also try to strengthen the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with more international inspections and with “real and immediate consequences” for those that break the rules.
“We go forward with no illusions,” he said. “Some will break the rules, but that is why we need a structure in place that ensures that when any nation does, they will face consequences.”
Turning to another potential nuclear threat, Obama said flatly that “Iran has yet to build a nuclear weapon.” He said he will seek engagement with Iran and offer Iran a clear choice between a nuclear energy program with “rigorous inspections” or “increased isolation, international pressure, and a potential nuclear arms race in the region.”
In the meantime, he said, Iran remains a threat and still warrants plans for a controversial missile defense in central Europe.
“As long as the threat from Iran persists, we intend to go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven,” he said as anti-missile defense protestors stood vigil near the square.
“If the Iranian threat is eliminated, we will have a stronger basis for security, and the driving force for missile defense construction in Europe at this time will be removed,” he said.
The rival Palestinian Hamas and Fatah faction have suspended unity talks in Cairo after they were unable to reach an agreement, sources say.
The Egyptian-mediated process will resume in three weeks, Nabil Shaath, a senior Fatah official, said on Thursday.
“There are new creative proposals and each movement needs to consult its leadership,” he said.
However, Shaath refused to call the suspension of the talks a failure, saying “it was neither a failure nor a success”.
Senior delegations from Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, and Fatah, led by Mahmoud Abbas, the West Bank-based Palestinian president, had resumed talks on Wednesday.
It was the third round of meetings between the two factions since Hamas, winners of 2006 parliamentary elections, seized full control of the Gaza Strip in a week of fighting in June 2007.
Transitional government
Hamas and Fatah had previously agreed to form committees that would resolve their differences and form a unity transitional government that would prepare for general elections early next year.
The committees began work last month, but they adjourned their talks after failing to agree on a new government, with Hamas insisting that it would not commit to previous agreements between the Palestinian Authority and Israel.
“The reconciliation process is still slow, burdened with foreign conditions”
Khaled Meshaal,
Hamas’s political leader
Hossam Zaki, the Egyptian foreign ministry spokesman, said earlier on Thursday: “There are no indications of progress yet.”The dialogue is still in the same place when it comes to the important issues of contention. But work is still under way to reach an understanding and ways to overcome these issues.”
Israel’s devastating 22-day war in the Gaza Strip has made the outcome of the talks more important for the Palestinian territory.
In March, international donors pledged $4.5bn in reconstruction aid, but many countries have said they will not deal with the Hamas government in Gaza.
The so-called Quartet of Middle East negotiators – Russia, the United States, United Nations and European Union – has said Hamas must recognise Israel and commit to past Palestinian-Israeli agreements before it deals with the group.
“The reconciliation process is still slow, burdened with foreign conditions,” Khaled Meshaal, Hamas’s exiled political leader, said at a rally in Syria on Thursday.
“What does Israel’s recognition have to do with Palestinian reconciliation?”
Lawrence Summers is the man President Obama turns to for insight into the economy, so it’s more than a little disturbing that the very financial institutions the taxpayers are now rescuing—to the tune of nearly $3 trillion—paid Summers almost $8 million last year. Goldman Sachs & Co., a major beneficiary of the government’s largesse, paid him $135,000 for one speech.
Such revelations can be found in a financial disclosure form released by the White House over the weekend. Read it here (PDF).
Wall Street Journal:
A financial disclosure form released by the White House Friday afternoon shows that Mr. Summers made frequent appearances before Wall Street firms including J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers. He also received significant income from Harvard University and from investments, the form shows.
Financial Disclosures
In total, Mr. Summers made a total of about 40 speaking appearances to financial sector firms and other places, with fees totaling about $2.77 million. Fees ranged from $10,000 for a Yale University speech to $135,000 for an appearance paid for by Goldman Sachs & Co.
The disclosure — in a financial report that is required for federal office holders — comes as Mr. Summers is involved in shaping the Obama administration’s policy decisions on the financial meltdown as well as the broader recession. Among the many decisions the economic team has wrestled with has been whether to step up regulation of hedge funds, one of the most contentious subjects during a summit of world leaders this week. European nations pushed for tougher rules, while the Obama administration preferred a less stringent approach.
Asked to comment, White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said that, “from the first days of the administration, we have bolstered accountability over banks” and made other rules changes so that “the influence of lobbyists is curbed, executive compensation is reined in, and firms are required to show how they will preserve or expand lending using government funds.” He added: “Dr. Summers has been at the forefront of this administration’s work to shore up our nation’s financial system and to put in place a regulatory framework that will strengthen the financial system and its oversight — all in an effort to help the families across America who have paid a very steep price for risky decisions made by Wall Street executives.”
A White House official added that the speeches “long pre-date Summers’s work as an official of the Obama administration or even the Obama transition. He was not an adviser to or an employee of the firms that paid him to speak.”
Lawrence Summers, center, gets ready to speak about the banking crisis at a conference in Washington on Wednesday.
Mr. Summers joined D.E. Shaw Group in late 2006 as a managing director. He helped develop strategies including new businesses and also helped evaluate investments for the New York firm, which oversees about $30 billion in assets, making it one of the biggest hedge-fund managers in the world. A D.E. Shaw spokeswoman couldn’t be reached for comment.
In at least one instance, Mr. Summers shed fees paid to him from a Wall Street firm that received federal funds. His form shows that he received a $45,000 speaking fee from Merrill Lynch on Nov. 12 — about a week after Barack Obama won the election — and that he donated the sum to charity.
The White House official said that when Mr. Summers “became aware that Merrill Lynch would be accepting taxpayer funds through its merger with Bank of America, he attempted to cancel his appearance.” The official added that “when he was unable, he elected to donate those funds to charity.”
Mr. Summers also received significant income from Harvard University, where he served until 2006 as president, and from investments, his disclosure form shows.
In addition to the Summers form, the White House released financial disclosure material for other top aides.
David Axelrod, the president’s top political advisor, reported in his form that he will get $3 million over the next five years from the sale of his two media consulting firms, ASK Public Strategies, LLC and AKP&D Message and Media. In addition, Mr. Axelrod took a salary of $896,776 last year from AKP&D and reported $651,914 in partnership income from the two companies.
In total, Mr. Axelrod reported assets valued between $6.9 million and $9.5 million. Mr. Axelrod’s clients were mostly political campaigns, including those of Rep. Patrick Kennedy, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. He also reported receiving money from large corporations such as AT&T Inc., Comcast Corp. and the nuclear energy company Exelon Corp.
National Security Adviser James Jones reported $900,000 in salary and bonus from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as well as director fees from a number of corporations. He received, for example, $330,000 from Boeing Corp. and $290,000 from Chevron Corp.
Gregory Craig, White House Counsel, reported receiving a salary of $1.7 million last year from Williams & Connolly, the high-powered Washington law firm where he had been a partner since 1999.
White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers collected a $350,000 salary from Allstate Financial as president of the social networking division, as well as $150,000 in board fees from Equity Residential, a real estate investment trust in which she also holds at least $250,000 in stock. She also collected $20,000 in board fees from Blue Cross Blue Shield. Other assets reported in her checking account, stock investments, and mutual funds total at least $2 million.
Valerie Jarrett, assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs, lists a $300,000 salary and $550,000 in deferred compensation from The Habitat Executive Services, Inc., in Chicago.
Ms. Jarrett also disclosed payments of more than $346,000 for service on boards of directors that reflect her political ties, and work in Chicago real estate and community development.
She was paid $76,000 last year for service as a director of Navigant Consulting, Inc. a Chicago-based global consulting group with governmental clients. She received $146,600 for service on the board of USG Corporation, a building materials manufacturer, and $58,000 to serve on the board of Rreef American REIT II, a real estate investment trust based in San Francisco. The Chicago Stock Exchange, Inc., paid her $34,444 to serve on its board.
Deputy National Security Advisor Tom Donilon earned $3.9 million as a partner at the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers LLP, where his clients include Citigroup, Inc., Goldman, Sachs & Co., and Obama fundraiser and heiress Penny Pritzker.
Carol Browner, assistant to the president for energy and climate change, disclosed earnings of between $1 million and $5 million from lobbying firm Downey McGrath Group, Inc., where her husband, Thomas Downey, is a principal. She states $450,000 in “member distribution” income, plus retirement and other benefits from The Albright Group, a lobbying firm whose principals include former Secretary of State Madeline Albright.
Some White House aides received considerably more modest compensation.
Director of Domestic Policy Council Melody Barnes reported modest retirement investments and $88,000 in income from her work on the Obama campaign and transition team, including $30,000 in consulting fees from Washington, D.C.-based firm The Raben Group.
Director of the White House Office of Urban Affairs Adolfo Carrion reported no assets outside of his $160,000 salary earned as borough president of the Bronx and retirement funds for him and his wife.
Patrick Gaspard, Director of the Office of Political Affairs, reported no assets aside from income of $198,000 combined from the SEIU International Union and Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign. His listed liabilities are $10,000 to $15,000 in credit-card debt and $15,000 to $20,000 in student loan debt.
After a deadly outbreak of swine flu, people wearing surgical masks queue for medical checks at Mexico City’s general hospital. Photograph: Dario Lopez-Mills/AP
A killer virus that has caused at least 20 deaths and sparked widespread panic in Mexico has the potential to become a global pandemic, warn health experts.
The World Health Organisation stopped short of issuing a worldwide alert over the swine flu strain – a unique mix of human, pig and bird viruses – but its director general, Dr Margaret Chan, said the option remained “on the table”.
The virus, which may be responsible for a further 48 deaths in Mexico, has thrown the country into confusion. There are a total of 1,004 cases and eight have been detected over the border in Texas and California.
Today, people in Mexico City were being ordered not to kiss or shake hands, football matches went ahead without spectators, theatres, shops and museums closed, staff were inside locked schools scrubbing classrooms with disinfectant and health workers patrolled buses, ordering sickly-looking people home.
Scientists have long feared that a new flu virus could launch a worldwide pandemic. Evolving when different flu viruses infect a pig, a person or a bird, mingling their genetic material, the hybrid could spread quickly because people would have no natural defences.
“We are seeing a range of severity of the disease, from mild to severe and of course death,” said Chan. “The eight cases in the US have been mild in terms of severity and it is too premature to calculate the mortality rate of this disease.”
In New York the results of tests for swine flu on 75 children remain unclear after a school trip returned from Mexico with pupils complaining of illness.
Mexico’s health secretary Jose Angel Cordova said: “We are very, very concerned.”
Any doubts over of the extent of the emergency were dispelled today by the sight of soldiers handing out blue surgical masks to pedestrians and motorists along Mexico City’s central Reforma boulevard. With TV and radio calling on the population to seek medical advice for any flu-like symptoms, queues sprouted at health clinics and hospitals across the city.
President Felipe Calderón said his government learned only on Thursday night what kind of virus Mexico was facing after tests by specialist laboratories in Canada confirmed the outbreak as a type – labelled A/H1N1 – not previously seen in pigs or humans. Few cases have had any contact with live pigs.
The WHO said the virus appeared to be able to spread from human to human and contained human virus, avian virus and pig viruses from North America, Europe and Asia. It might be completely new or has only now been detected.
Given how quickly flu can spread, there might be cases incubating around the world already, said Dr Michael Osterholm at the University of Minnesota: “Hundreds and thousands of travellers come in and out [of Mexico] every day. You’d have to believe there’s been more unrecognised transmission that’s occurred.”
It was unclear how much protection current vaccines might offer. A “seed stock” genetically matched to the new virus has already been created by the US Centers for Disease Control. If the US government decides vaccine production is necessary, it would be used by manufacturers to get started.
At Mexico City’s international airport, passengers were questioned to try to prevent anyone with flu symptoms from boarding aeroplanes and spreading the disease. Britain’s Foreign Office issued a warning to travellers about the outbreak but stopped short of recommending people did not visit Mexico. US health officials did the same, urging visitors to wash their hands frequently.
In Asia, which has fought hard to contain the H5N1 bird flu virus, which has killed at least 257 people worldwide since late 2003, tighter enforcements were being made. Passengers and pork products from Mexico were being checked at many airports. Health authorities in Thailand and Hong Kong said they were closely monitoring the situation.
At Tokyo’s Narita airport – among the world’s busiest with more than 96,000 people using it daily – officials installed a device at the arrival gate for flights from Mexico to measure the temperatures of passengers.
‘We are increasing health surveillance following the outbreak of swine flu,” said Akira Yukitoki, an official at the Japanese airport’s quarantine station. He said 160 passengers arriving from Mexico yesterday were screened.
The airport also plans to put up signs urging tourists to “wear masks, wash hands and gargle”, Yukitoki said.
In the Philippines, the government was also tightening monitoring at all ports to prevent the entry of any pigs or pork from Mexico and the US.
“We’ve seen swine influenza in humans over the past several years, and in most cases, it’s come from direct pig contact. This seems to be different,” said Dr Arnold Monto, a flu expert with the University of Michigan.
“I think we need to be careful and not apprehensive, but certainly paying attention to new developments as they proceed.”
While the fear is palpable among Mexico City’s 20 million residents, confusion mixed with traditional mistrust of official statements means widespread suspicion that the government is not telling the whole truth about the disease. The government had claimed until late on Thursday that there was nothing unusual about the flu cases and the sudden turnaround that saw schools closed across the capital on Friday angered many Mexicans.
Government workers were ordered to wear masks, and authorities urged residents to stay home from work if they felt ill. What seems almost certain is that the doors of all nurseries, kindergartens, schools and universities in the vast metropolis of 20 million people will remain closed this week.
With the authorities urging people to avoid crowds, the atmosphere inside the metro and crowded buses is notably tense. Health secretary Cordova, a devout Catholic, stopped short of urging Mexicans not to go to mass tomorrow, but he did emphasise that a nod of the head was better than a handshake when it came to greeting friends.
ANP: How did Jay Bybee breeze through confirmation for his appointment to the Federal Appeals Court?
Not a single Democrat questioned Bybee at the session, and the proceedings came to a quick conclusion. The following month he was confirmed by the full Senate. Just six months prior to the hearing, Jay Bybee had signed legal memos providing cover for CIA agents torturing detainees — yet Congress voted him to a lifetime on the federal bench. How did this happen? And what will become of Judge Bybee now?
Pepe Escobar on how the rebranded “war on terror” is being sold as a PAKISTANI war.
Still another US air strike killing dozens of civilians in Afghanistan, still another promise by the Pentagon to “investigate”, while in Washington President Obama hosts the AfPak summit with “Af” Hamid Karzai” and “Pak” Ali Zardari. Obama’s surge in Afghanistan will ensure a steady supply of “collateral damage”, even though sane military voices condemn “democracy at gunpoint” and Taliban “tacticians” mock Gen. David Petraeus’ counterinsurgency tactics. The Bush “war on terror” has been rebranded as “overseas contingency operations” (OCO) by the Obama administration. Pepe Escobar argues everything remains the same, but with a new twist: Washington selling OCO in AfPak to US public opinion not as an American war – but as a Pakistani war.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan declared war on its homegrown Islamic extremists Thursday in a dramatic move that could trigger a wider conflagration.
Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, in a late-night televised address to the nation, said Pakistan would launch a full-scale offensive against Pakistani Taliban guerrillas who’ve seized control of the vast Swat valley, which is about 100 miles north of the capital.
Pakistan will no longer “bow our heads before the terrorists,” Gilani said in an 11 p.m. address as he called on citizens to rally behind the armed forces. He said that the government had tried peaceful negotiation with Taliban entrenched in the Swat valley, but the strategy hadn’t worked.
Pakistan had “reached a stage where the government believes that decisive steps have to be taken,” he said, and the army’s job now was to “eliminate the militants and the terrorists.”
Thousands of civilians have fled from Swat and neighboring districts in the fighting between the army and militants in the past week, but hundreds of thousands are unable to move and could be caught in the crossfire. Gilani appealed to the international community for humanitarian aid.
Islamabad acted under intense American pressure and after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned last month that the situation in Pakistan “poses a mortal threat to the security and safety of our country and the world.”
The Taliban, which seized control of Swat in northeastern Pakistan early this week, are linked to al Qaida and other extremist networks in the ungoverned tribal areas along the Afghan border, as well as to cells in Islamabad and across Pakistan. A spinoff of the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani militants are even more extreme and ideologically committed.
In taking on the homegrown Taliban, nuclear-armed Pakistan risks devastating retaliatory terrorist strikes in its cities. Extremists are sure to accuse the pro-Western government of buckling under U.S. pressure. The move conceivably could also trigger terrorist assaults in the West — which would probably require cooperation from al Qaida, as the Pakistani Taliban have no known strike capacity overseas.
The Obama administration, which had been criticizing Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari before his arrival in Washington this week, welcomed the move.
“We have seen, in the last week or two, significant Pakistani military action against . . . the Taliban in Buner District and in clear recognition that the agreement in Swat has failed,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters in Kabul. He added that he was “very satisfied with the strong response that the Pakistani government and army have taken in response to this.”
Ruling out any active role for U.S. combat troops in Pakistan, Gates said that the U.S. “goal is to work with the Pakistani army, with the Pakistani government as they deal with this problem. And we are willing to do all we can to help them.”
In Washington, however, U.S. officials said they’d still seen no indication that the army was pulling any major combat formations off the border with India and preparing to dispatch them or other major ground units to the battle in and around Swat.
The bulk of the government offensive, they said, was still being carried by the frontier corps, a paramilitary force commanded by regular army officers and comprised of troops drawn from the Pashtun tribes that inhabit the area along the border with Afghanistan where most of the Taliban originate. The officials couldn’t be named because they weren’t authorized to speak to the news media.
Swat is a partly urbanized area, making civilian casualties a near-certainty. There are fears of a bloodbath if residents are unable to evacuate the main city, Mingora, and other towns.
Thousands fled southwards as skirmishes broke out in recent days, but according to desperate civilians in Swat, most residents north of Mingora, in towns such as Matta and Bahrain, have been prevented from leaving by an official curfew and by Taliban roadblocks.
“People from the upper areas are trapped,” said a man from Bahrain, too afraid to give his name, who managed to get out by circumventing the roadblocks, but he had to leave his family behind. “The curfews had only been relaxed in Mingora (over the past few days), not in other places.”
The government’s call to arms only seemed possible because of a seismic shift in public opinion against the militants, which only took place in the past few weeks after a deal with the Taliban in Swat went badly sour.
“After a long time, the people see a ray of hope,” said analyst Khadim Hussain, of the Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy, an independent research organization in Islamabad. “For the first time, the majority of the population, the people in the conflict zone, and the military, are thinking along the same lines.”
The February peace accord, following two half-hearted army operations against the Taliban, would’ve imposed Islamic law in Swat. The Taliban, however, failed to disarm as they’d pledged, and invaded the neighboring district of Buner — which put them within 60 miles of Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. The Taliban may have overestimated their invincibility and their popular support.
Many Pakistanis thought that the Taliban and other extremists sought only to root out vices and usher in Islamic law in a country that’s almost entirely Muslim.
Brutal behavior by the Swat extremists had the nation recoiling in horror, realizing that the real agenda was to seize territory and power. As well as the shock of the Buner incursion, a video emerged last month of a young woman being publicly beaten in Swat for alleged adultery, and the Taliban’s political representative, Sufi Mohammad, gave a speech in which he denounced democracy as an “infidel” system.
The ambition of the Taliban brought about an unusual coming together of political and public opinion, although sections of the Islamic right still opposes military action.
Crucially, opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, a religious conservative, spoke out recently against the Taliban advance, following assiduous courting by the U.S. and other Western powers. Sharif, whose base is in Punjab, the most populous Pakistani province, previously had advocated dialogue as the only solution.
“The situation reached a point where we cannot keep talking only, we have to couple it with force,” said Khawaja Asif, a senior member of Sharif’s party, responding to the televised speech. “The country must rally behind the armed forces.”
Pakistan’s army had privately complained that the federal or provincial governments gave it neither firm direction nor strong backing for military action, following the restoration of democracy in early 2008. Now, even the pacifist-inclined Awami National Party, which runs the government of the North West Frontier Province and had promoted the Swat peace accord, supports a military offensive. Nevertheless, there will be condemnation from Islamic nationalists.
“We are opposed to this policy; it is directed against the innocent people of Pakistan, not the militants,” said Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the former head of Jamaat-e-Islami, one of the two mainstream religious parties. “This is for the Americans and the Indians.”
The Taliban, previously based in large numbers only in the tribal areas, began their annexation of Swat in mid-2007. The army’s chief spokesman, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, said the army estimates there 4,000 to 5,000 Taliban fighters in Swat.
The major open question is whether the army will throw more firepower at the operation and employ its full resources, perhaps even moving troops stationed along its eastern border with arch-enemy India.
A meeting of corp commanders, led by the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, took place ahead of Gilani’s announcement. Kayani said in a statement that the “Pakistan army is fully aware of the gravity of internal threat. It will employ requisite resources to ensure a decisive ascendancy over the militants.” In a pointed reference to India, he added: “Concurrently, army is also fully prepared to meet the conventional threat.”
(Shah is a McClatchy special correspondent. Jonathan S. Landay contributed to this article from Washington.)
As President Barack Obama prepares to send some 21,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan, anger is rising in the western province of Farah, the scene of a U.S. bombing massacre that may have killed as many as 130 Afghans, including 13 members of one family. At least six houses were bombed and among the dead and wounded are women and children. As of this writing reports indicate some people remain buried in rubble. The U.S. airstrikes happened on Monday and Tuesday. Just hours after Obama met with U.S.-backed president Hamid Karzai Wednesday, hundreds of Afghans — perhaps as many as 2,000 — poured into the streets of the provincial capital, chanting “Death to America.” The protesters demanded a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
In Washington, Karzai said he and the U.S. occupation forces should operate from a “higher platform of morality,” saying, “We must be conducting this war as better human beings,” and recognize that “force won’t buy you obedience.” And yet, his security forces opened fire on the demonstrators, reportedly wounding five people.
In a phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to outraged members of the Afghan Parliament, the governor of Farah Province, Rohul Amin, said that as many as 130 civilians had been killed, according to a legislator, Mohammad Naim Farahi. Afghan lawmakers immediately called for an agreement regulating foreign military operations in the country.
“The governor said that the villagers have brought two tractor trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the casualties that had occurred,” Mr. Farahi said. “Everyone at the governor’s office was crying, watching that shocking scene.”
Mr. Farahi said he had talked to someone he knew personally who had counted 113 bodies being buried, including those of many women and children. Later, more bodies were pulled from the rubble and some victims who had been taken to the hospital died, he said.
The U.S. airstrikes hit villages in two areas of Farah province on Monday night and Tuesday. The extent of the deaths only came to public light because local people brought 20-30 corpses to the provincial capital. If the estimates of 130 dead are confirmed, it would reportedly be the single largest number of deaths caused by a U.S. bombing since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton initially “apologized” Wednesday for the civilian deaths and Obama reportedly conveyed similar sentiments to Karzai when they met in person, later in the day Clinton’s spokesperson, Robert Wood, framed her apology as being based on preliminary information and, according to AP, said they “were offered as a gesture, before all the facts of the incident are known.” By day’s end, the Pentagon was seeking to blame the Taliban for “staging” the massacre to blame it on the U.S. Last night, NBC News’s Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski said military sources told him Taliban fighters used grenades to kill three families to “stage” a massacre and then blame it on the U.S.
The senior U.S. military and NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, spoke in general terms: “We have some other information that leads us to distinctly different conclusions about the cause of the civilian casualties,” he said. McKiernan left the specific details of the spin to unnamed officials.
According to The Washington Post, “A U.S. defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that ‘the Taliban went to a concerted effort to make it look like the U.S. airstrikes caused this. The official did not offer evidence to support the claim, and could not say what had caused the deaths.” Meanwhile, according to the Associated Press, a senior Defense official who did not want to be identified “said late Wednesday that Marine special operations forces believe the Afghan civilians were killed by grenades hurled by Taliban militants, who then loaded some of the bodies into a vehicle and drove them around the village, claiming the dead were victims of an American airstrike. A second U.S. official said a senior Taliban commander is believed to have ordered the grenade attack.”
As the AP reported, “it would be the first time the Taliban has used grenades in this way.”
While the Pentagon spins its story, the International Committee of the Red Cross has stated bluntly that U.S. airstrikes hit civilian houses and revealed that an ICRC counterpart in the Red Crescent was among the dead. “We know that those killed included an Afghan Red Crescent volunteer and 13 members of his family who had been sheltering from fighting in a house that was bombed in an air strike,” said the ICRC’s head of delegation in Kabul, Reto Stocker. “We are deeply concerned by these events. Tribal elders in the villages called the ICRC during the fighting to report civilian casualties and ask for help. As soon as we heard of the attacks we contacted all sides to warn them that there were civilians and injured people in the area.”
The Times, meanwhile, interviewed local people who contradict the unnamed U.S. Defense officials’ version of events:
Villagers reached by telephone said many were killed by aerial bombing. Muhammad Jan, a farmer, said fighting had broken out in his village, Shiwan, and another, Granai, in the Bala Baluk district. An hour after it stopped, the planes came, he said.
In Granai, he said, women and children had sought shelter in orchards and houses. “Six houses were bombed and destroyed completely, and people in the houses still remain under the rubble,” he said, “and now I am working with other villagers trying to excavate the dead bodies.”
He said that villagers, crazed with grief, were collecting mangled bodies in blankets and shawls and piling them on three tractors. People were still missing, he said.
Mr. Agha, who lives in Granai, said the bombing started at 5 p.m. on Monday and lasted until late into the night. “People were rushing to go to their relatives’ houses, where they believed they would be safe, but they were hit on the way,” he said.
In her earlier statement regarding the bombing, Clinton told Hamid Karzai “there will be a joint investigation by your government and ours.”
But before that investigation began, the Pentagon was already using its unnamed officials to blame the Taliban. It also bears remembering that the U.S. track record of thoroughly “investigating” U.S. massacres is pathetic. The UN said there was convincing evidence that last year’s U.S. attack on the village of Azizabad in western Afghanistan killed 90 civilians, but the military only acknowledged 30 civilian deaths.
Standing between Hamid Karzai and Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari on Wednesday, Obama said the U.S. would “make every effort” to avoid civilian deaths in both countries (which are regularly bombed by the U.S.). But as he was making those remarks, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was arriving in Kabul on Wednesday “to make sure that preparations were moving forward for the troop increase and that soldiers and Marines were getting the equipment they needed.”
Jessica Barry, a spokesperson for the ICRC said, “With more troops coming in, there is a risk that civilians will be more and more vulnerable.”
Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. His writing and reporting is available at RebelReports.com.
The Obama administration has renewed sanctions on Syria because of “serious concerns” over its behavior, despite sending two envoys to Damascus this week to try to improve ties, U.S. officials said on Friday.
“The president felt it was necessary,” said State Department spokesman Robert Wood, referring to the renewal of the sanctions, which is required each year by Congress.
“This shows you that we still have some very serious concerns about Syrian behavior and activities in the world.”
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The sanctions, imposed by former President George W. Bush, prohibit arms exports to Syria, block Syrian airlines from operating in the United States and deny Syrians suspected of being associated with terrorist groups access to the U.S. financial system.
While the United States has made clear it wants better relations with Syria, a nation it has long accused of supporting terrorism, the renewal of sanctions shows Washington is not yet ready for a dramatic improvement in relations.
The announcement came a day after Jeffrey Feltman, the State Department’s top Middle East envoy, held talks with Syrian officials in Damascus.
Feltman was accompanied to Damascus by White House official Daniel
Shapiro. Their trip was part of U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration’s outreach to nations shunned by former President George Bush.
Meanwhile, a U.S. diplomat told Lebanese officials Friday that his country will not pursue relations with Syria at the expense of its ties to Lebanon.
“There is no deal with Damascus at Lebanon’s expense and no compromise on the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon (for the assassination of former premier Rafik Hariri),” US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Hale said after meeting with Lebanese President Michel Suleiman at Baabda palace.
The Lebanese daily an-Nahar said Hale is expected to inform Lebanese officials about the results of Feltman’s meetings in Damascus. He will also reiterate U.S. support for Lebanon.
Syria, which has been a power broker in Lebanon for 30 years, pulled its troops from its small neighboring country in 2005, but still has influential allies in the opposition. Those allies are in a tight race with the majority in Lebanon’s upcoming Parliamentary elections, scheduled for June.
Sut Jhally: On film Peace, Propaganda & The Promised Land: US Media & The Israeli-Palestinian
Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land is a film that provides a comparison of U.S. and international media coverage of the crisis in the Middle East, zeroing in on how structural distortions in U.S. coverage have reinforced false perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This pivotal documentary exposes how the foreign policy interests of American political elites–oil, and a need to have a secure military base in the region, among others–work in combination with Israeli public relations strategies to exercise a powerful influence over how news from the region is reported.
Here’s a link to the full length film Peace Propaganda and The Promise Land….
In her foreword to “The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts,” an important collection of articles on United States militarism and imperialism, edited by Catherine Lutz, the prominent feminist writer Cynthia Enloe notes one of our most abject failures as a government and a democracy: “There is virtually no news coverage—no journalists’ or editors’ curiosity—about the pressures or lures at work when the U.S. government seeks to persuade officials of Romania, Aruba or Ecuador that providing U.S. military-basing access would be good for their countries.” The American public, if not the residents of the territories in question, is almost totally innocent of the huge costs involved, the crimes committed by our soldiers against women and children in the occupied territories, the environmental pollution, and the deep and abiding suspicions generated among people forced to live close to thousands of heavily armed, culturally myopic and dangerously indoctrinated American soldiers. This book is an antidote to such parochialism.
Catherine Lutz is an anthropologist at Brown University and the author of an ethnography of an American city that is indubitably part of the American military complex: Fayetteville, N.C., adjacent to Fort Bragg, home of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School (see “Homefront, A Military City and the American Twentieth Century,” Beacon Press, 2002). On the opening page of her introduction to the current volume, Lutz makes a real contribution to the study of the American empire of bases. She writes, “Officially, over 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in 909 military facilities in 46 countries and territories.” She cites as her source the Department of Defense’s Base Structure Report for fiscal year 2007. This is the Defense Department’s annual inventory of real estate that it owns or leases in the United States and in foreign countries. Oddly, however, the total of 909 foreign bases does not appear in the 2007 BSR. Instead, it gives the numbers of 823 bases located in other people’s countries and 86 sites located in U.S. territories. So Lutz has combined the foreign and territorial bases—which include American Samoa, the District of Columbia, Guam, Johnston Atoll, the Northern Marianas Islands, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Wake Island. Guam is host to at least 30 military sites and Puerto Rico to 41 bases.
The Bases of Empire
By Catherine Lutz
NYU Press, 356 pages
Combining the two numbers is a good idea. Some of the most deplorable conditions in the American military empire exist in U.S. territories, notably in Puerto Rico, where the citizens fought a long battle to stop the naval bombardment of Vieques Island, and in Guam, where the government plans to relocate more than 8,000 Marines from Okinawa together with a $13 billion expansion of Air Force and Navy facilities. The result will be an almost 15 percent increase in Guam’s population, which will significantly exceed the capacity of the island’s water and solid-waste systems. (See “U.S. Military Guam Buildup Spurs Worry over Services,” San Diego Union-Tribune, April 12, 2009.) In the book under review here, Lutz also includes an essay on the state of Hawaii, with its 161 military installations (in 2004) covering 6 percent of the state’s land area (22 percent of the state’s most densely populated island, Oahu). The military is easily Hawaii’s largest polluter, including the secret use of depleted uranium ammunition at the Shofield range, evidence of which was uncovered in 2006.
It should be noted that the BSR for fiscal 2008 has been available since the summer of last year and it somewhat alters Lutz’s figures. It gives details on 761 bases in other people’s countries and 104 U.S. territories, which produces a Lutz total of 865. Such small variations from year to year have been typical of the American empire throughout the Cold War. Some 865 bases located in all the continents except Antarctica is not only a staggeringly large number compared even with the great empires of the past, but one the U.S. clearly cannot afford given its severely weakened economic condition.
Nonetheless, there has been no public discussion by the Obama administration over starting to liquidate our overseas bases or beginning to scale back our imperialist presence in the rest of the world. One must also remember that the BSR is an official source that often conflicts with other reports on the numbers of American military personnel located all over the world. It omits many bases that the Department of Defense wants to conceal or play down, notably those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel. For example, just one of the many unlisted bases in Iraq, Ballad Air Base, houses 30,000 troops and 10,000 contractors, and extends across 16 square miles with an additional 12-square-mile “security perimeter.”
One other subject that Lutz touches on in her introduction and that cries out for a book-length study is the political machinations that every American embassy and military base on earth engages in to undermine and change local laws that stand in the way of U.S. military plans. For years the United States has interfered in the domestic affairs of nations to bring about “regime change,” rig elections, free American servicemen who have been charged with extremely serious felonies against local civilians, indoctrinate the local officer corps in American militarist values (as at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Fort Benning, Ga.), and preserve and protect the so-called Status of Forces Agreements that the United States imposes on all nations with U.S. bases. These SOFAs give our troops extraterritorial privileges such as freedom from local laws and from passport and travel regulations, and they absolve the U.S. from a country’s anti-pollution requirements, noise restrictions and environmental laws.
Mapping U.S. Power
The first essay in Lutz’s collection is by one of the few genuine veterans of military base studies, Joseph Gerson, the New England director of programs for the American Friends Service Committee. He is the editor (along with Bruce Birchard) of “The Sun Never Sets: Confronting the Network of U.S. Military Bases” (Boston: South End Press, 1991). His essay on “U.S. Foreign Military Bases and Military Colonialism: Personal and Analytical Perspectives” is particularly good on the hypocrisy and opportunism that imperialism imposes on our foreign policy, regardless of our intentions. For example, he notes, in the words of the American Declaration of Independence, the “abuses and usurpations” that King George III of England imposed on us though his “standing armies kept among us, in times of peace.”
Today the “abuses and usurpations” of American standing armies “include more than rape, murder, sexual harassment, robbery, other common crimes, seizure of people’s lands, destruction of property, and the cultural imperialism that have accompanied foreign armies since time immemorial. They now include terrorizing jet blasts of frequent low-altitude and night-landing exercises, helicopters and warplanes crashing into homes and schools and the poisoning of environments and communities with military toxins; and they transform ‘host’ communities into targets for genocidal nuclear as well as ‘conventional’ attacks.” When it comes to opportunism, Gerson notes that the Navy’s Indian Ocean tsunami relief operations of 2005 helped open the way for U.S. forces to return to Thailand and for greater cooperation with the Indonesian military.
John Lindsay-Poland’s essay “U.S. Military Bases in Latin America and the Caribbean” is informed by his extensive background in organizing and supporting struggles for the closure and environmental cleanup of U.S. military bases in Panama and Puerto Rico. His essay is comprehensive and historically detailed, although it appears to have been completed in late 2007 or early 2008 and some of the information has been overtaken by recent events. Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa has refused to renew our lease on Manta Air Base when it expires in November 2009; and the U.S. Army’s 2005 attempt to woo Paraguay flopped. After the Americans are expelled from the Manta base in November the only physical facilities of the U.S. military in South America will be in Colombia.
In 2005 and 2006, the United States tried to seduce Paraguay into giving the U.S. a permanent base by sending several hundred soldiers to provide medical assistance and dig wells. As it turned out, these ancient ploys did not work. Suspicions of the American military’s motives were aroused throughout the cone of South America, and the local population pronounced itself fully capable of digging wells unassisted by foreign troops. Lindsay-Poland notes that the “medical attention [in Paraguay] was one-time only, and … U.S. personnel handed out unlabeled medicines indiscriminately, regardless of the differences in medical conditions.”
David Heller and Hans Lammerant have contributed one of the most useful essays in the volume on “U.S. Nuclear Weapons Bases in Europe.” Information on this subject is scarce and the U.S. press is frightened of reporting what little is available for fear of raising a taboo topic. Heller has been actively involved with anti-nuclear and anti-militarist campaigns in Britain, Belgium and other European countries since the early 1990s. Lammerant has long supported the Belgian branch of War Resisters International.
They reveal that there are today still an estimated 350 to 480 free-fall B-61-type tactical nuclear weapons in the territories of the NATO allies, compared with a maximum of 7,300 land, air, and sea-based nuclear weapons based in Europe in 1971. The bombs are housed at eight air bases in six NATO countries, all of which enjoy Bechtel-installed Weapons Storage and Security Systems, type WS-3. These devices are vaults installed in the floors within a “protective aircraft shelter” and allow for the arming of bombs and aircraft inside hangars, offering high degrees of secrecy and (supposedly) security. Heller and Lammerant note that the weapons based in Europe are “secret, deadly, illegal, costly, militarily useless, politically motivated, and deeply, deeply unpopular.” Before they were all withdrawn, ground-launched nuclear missiles were based at Greenham Common and Molesworth in Britain, Comiso in Italy, Florennes in Belgium, and Wuescheim in the former West Germany. Pershing II missiles were based at Schwaebisch-Gmuend, Neu Ulm, and Waldheide-Neckarsulm in West Germany.
One of the themes stressed by Catherine Lutz as editor of this book is the prominent role played by women and women’s organizations in resisting American military imperialism over the years. All of the chapters offer details on the contributions of women to anti-base resistance activities, particularly in the case of the nuclear bases in Europe. Following the U.S. decision to station nuclear weapons at Greenham Common in the south of England, local women created “Women for Life on Earth” and maintained a constant presence in front of the base from 1981 to 2000 (even though the nuclear weapons were secretly removed in 1991).
Heller and Lammerant conclude their essay with details on the early-warning radars, anti-missile bases, military hubs to support operations in Africa, and facilities extant or being constructed at Thule in Greenland, Vardo in Denmark, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Vicenza in northern Italy. On March 17, 2009, the Czech government rejected a proposal by the Pentagon to install a U.S. military radar base in the Czech Republic because the lower house of the Czech parliament seemed certain to vote against it.
Tom Engelhardt’s contribution, “Iraq as a Pentagon Construction Site,” is a cobbled-together version of two essays first published on TomDispatch, of which Engelhardt is editor. All source citations have been removed from the Lutz version, but readers can consult the original essays—“A Basis for Enduring Relationships in Iraq,” Dec. 2, 2007, and “Baseless Considerations,” Nov. 4, 2007.
The essays are tours de force on the construction of probably permanent American military bases in occupied Iraq and of the massive fortress—- as large as the Vatican—in the Green Zone of Baghdad that is the “American Embassy.” Engelhardt’s work is a model of how to glean information from the public press on subjects that the American military is trying to keep secret. This is the best research we have to date on the bases in Iraq and the billions of dollars that flowed into the coffers of Halliburton Corp. to build them. (Truth in reporting: Engelhardt is the editor of all three of my books in the Blowback Trilogy.)
Global Resistance
Roland G. Simbulan’s “People’s Movement Responses to Evolving U.S. Military Activities in the Philippines” is a detailed analysis of how the United States has tried to get back into its former colony after the Philippine Senate voted on Sept. 16, 1991, to close all American military facilities and ordered U.S. troops to withdraw. Simbulan is a professor at the University of the Philippines and he played an active role in the “people’s power” movement that overthrew the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos and led to the 1991 rejection of the bases treaty.
Simbulan is justified in calling his country’s active protests against the Americans and their domestic lackeys “the most vibrant social movement in Southeast Asia,” but he is at pains to stress that the Americans are unreconciled to their colonial defeat. They continue with unabated creativity to invent “visiting forces agreements” aimed at restoring the U.S. troops’ old extraterritorial privileges and “joint military exercises” against domestic criminal gangs such as the Abu Sayyaf bandits in Mindanao and other Islamic provinces of the southern Philippines.
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. has also tried to overstate the threat of Islamic radicalism in the Philippines, even though there has been a slow-burning insurgency by indigenous Muslims for over 20 years, and it has pressured the Philippine government to abandon the anti-nuclear weapons provisions of its 1987 constitution. Americans may also be implicated in a clandestine campaign of selective killings of political activists, peasant and trade union leaders, human rights workers, lawyers and church people “in a pattern that was strikingly similar to that of Operation Phoenix”—the terrorist exercise run by the CIA in Vietnam that took the lives of some 30,000 suspected members of the National Liberation Front. Simbulan has written an important analysis of why the Philippines seems unable to get out from under the shadow of the United States despite the victories of “people power” almost 20 years ago.
David Vine’s and Laura Jeffrey’s article entitled “Give Us Back Diego Garcia: Unity and Division Among Activists in the Indian Ocean,” is a lively treatment of the seemingly hopeless efforts of the indigenous people of the island of Diego Garcia to obtain some measure of justice. In 1964, they were expropriated and forcibly expelled by the British government at the insistence of the U.S. Navy so that it could turn the entire island into an American military base.
This essay builds on Vine’s important monograph “Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia,” Princeton University Press, 2009. Vine is a professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C. Jeffrey holds a postdoctoral fellowship in anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among the Chagossians, the exiled people of Diego Garcia, now living in Mauritius and the United Kingdom.
In 1960, U.S. government officials secretly approached their British counterparts about acquiring the tiny island of Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean as a site for a military base. By 1964, the United Kingdom agreed to detach Diego Garcia and the rest of the surrounding Chagos archipelago from its colony Mauritius and several island groups from colonial Seychelles to create a strategic military colony, the British Indian Ocean Territory. In a flagrant violation of human rights, Britain then removed the native inhabitants of Diego Garcia and Chagos, dumping them in Mauritius and Seychelles, 1,300 miles away, where they live today in abject poverty.
By 1973, the United States had completed the nucleus of a super-secret base that would grow faster than any other U.S. base since the Vietnam War. After the attacks of 9/11, the United States used Diego Garcia’s twin parallel runways, each over two miles in length, to launch its fleet of B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers in its assault on Afghanistan, and its 2003 “shock and awe” campaign against Iraq. Diego Garcia also became the site of a secret CIA detention and torture facility for suspected terrorists.
According to John Pike, who runs the military analysis Web site GlobalSecurity.org, Diego Garcia lies at the center of American imperialist plans in case the nations of East Asia should decide that they have had enough of American military forces based on their territories. According to Pike, “[Diego Garcia] is the single most important military facility we’ve got.” The military’s goal, Pike says, is that “we’ll be able to run the planet from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015, even if the entire Eastern Hemisphere has drop-kicked us from bases on their territory.” With characteristic hypocrisy, the Pentagon has named the Diego Garcia base “Camp Justice.”
Environmental Issues
Environmental and health issues have become the most important new focus in the long-standing conflicts between the U.S. military and civilian communities. Chief evidence is the victory of popular mobilization and civil disobedience against the Navy’s 60-year-long bombing of Vieques, a 51-square-mile island municipality six miles off the southeast coast of the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico. Katherine T. McCaffrey’s expert treatment of the four-year-long movement to force an end to the bombing of Vieques is one the most important pieces in Lutz’s anthology. The bombing of a Caribbean island inhabited by 10,000 American civilians also exposed Puerto Rico’s lack of sovereignty and the second-class status of its residents within the U.S. polity. Emphasis on environmental issues overcame the Puerto Ricans’ traditional reluctance to politicize their plight and created a broad popular movement that mobilized women and caused the Catholic and Protestant churches to join hands.
On April 19, 1999, the Vieques movement was further strengthened and united when it acquired a martyr. Two U.S. Navy F-18 jet aircraft traveling at supersonic speeds accidentally dropped two 500-pound bombs on the compound that the Navy used to survey the shelling. A civilian security guard, David Sanes, who was patrolling the area, was knocked unconscious and subsequently bled to death. The result was that civilians occupied the site for more than a year, causing the Navy to move its bombing range to North Carolina. Given their access to the site, the occupiers also discovered that the Navy was using depleted uranium ammunition on Vieques. In May 2003, the Navy was finally forced off the island. McCaffrey concludes, “After decades of secrecy surrounding its activities, the military is emerging as the single largest polluter in the United States, single-handedly producing 27,000 toxic-waste sites in this country.”
From Vieques, mobilization based on environmental and health concerns spread to the Navy-controlled island of Kahoolawe in Hawaii, where it was equally successful in forcing the Navy to pull out. Kahoolawe had been occupied and bombed by the U.S. Navy since the outbreak of World War II. Kyle Kajihiro’s essay “Resisting Militarization in Hawaii,” touches on this and other military issues in Hawaii. Kajihiro is the American Friends Service Committee’s program director in Hawaii, who since 1996 has been active in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. His article is less a scholarly analysis of the popular protests against the huge military presence in Hawaii than a well-informed, impassioned brief for the rights of the Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiians). Kajihiro also points out that for the first time since World War II, tourism is now a bigger part of the Hawaiian economy than the military installations. His essay is a valuable contribution to the comparatively small literature on the problems of militarism within the United States.
The essay by Ayse Gul Altinay and Amy Holmes, “Opposition to the U.S. Military Presence in Turkey in the Context of the Iraq War,” is important for three reasons. First, there is very little published on the bases in Turkey; second, Incirlik Air Base on the outskirts of Adana, Turkey, is the largest U.S. military facility in a strategically vital NATO ally; and third, the decision on March 1, 2003, of the Turkish National Assembly not to deploy Turkish forces in Iraq nor to allow the United States to use Turkey as an invasion route into Iraq was one of the Bush administration’s greatest setbacks. Public opinion polls in January 2003 revealed that 90 percent of Turks opposed U.S. imperialism against Iraq and 83 percent opposed Turkey’s cooperating with the United States. Nonetheless, major U.S. newspapers either ignored or trivialized Turkey’s opposition to U.S. war plans.
Altinay is a professor of anthropology at Sabanci University, Turkey, and the author of “The Myth of the Military Nation: Militarism, Gender, and Education in Turkey” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Holmes is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Johns Hopkins University and has written extensively on American bases in Germany and Turkey.
Turkey is not an easy place to do research on American bases. Some 41 percent of bilateral agreements between the U.S. and Turkey between 1947 and 1965 were secret. It was not known that the U.S. had stationed missiles on Turkish territory until the U.S. promised to remove them in return for the USSR’s withdrawing its missiles from Cuba. Incirlik became even more central to U.S. strategy after 1974. In that year, Turkey invaded Cyprus and the United States imposed an arms embargo on its ally. As a result, Turkey closed all 27 U.S. bases in the country except for one, Incirlik. As Altinay and Holmes write, “It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of the Incirlik Air Base for U.S. power projection in the Middle East, particularly since the early 1990s; for more than a decade, the entire Iraq policy of the United States hinged on Incirlik.”
My choice of the best article in the Lutz volume is Kozue Akibayashi’s and Suzuyo Takazato‘s “Okinawa: Women’s Struggle for Demilitarization.” The persecution of the native population of the island of Okinawa, Japan’s most southerly and poorest prefecture, by the American occupiers and the Japanese government since at least the Battle of Okinawa in 1945 has been told often and is reasonably well known in mainland Japan and among the U.S. armed forces. Akibayashi and Takazato expertly retell the essence of the story here, but what makes the article a standout is their emphasis on the mistreatment of Okinawan women and girls and their theoretically sophisticated conclusions.
Akibayashi is a researcher at the Institute for Gender Studies of Ochanomizu University in Tokyo. Takazato is one of the best-known activists in the struggle of Okinawan women to escape the threat of sexual violence by American military personnel. She is an elected member of the City Council in Naha, the capital of Okinawa, and one of the founders of Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence, which was created in the wake of the gang rape on Sept. 4, 1995 of a 12-year-old Okinawa schoolgirl by two U.S. Marines and a sailor. The purpose of Takazato’s organization was to prevent a recurrence of attacks by the U.S. military on Okinawan women and to protect the young victim of Sept. 4 from unwanted publicity. The organization subsequently created the Rape Emergency Intervention Counseling Center in Okinawa, and has worked to end the U.S. military occupation of the island chain. Unfortunately, despite heroic efforts to get American military commanders to enforce discipline among their troops and strong representations to the Japanese government to take an interest in the plight of the Okinawans, little has changed. This has led Akibayashi and Takazato to two significant conclusions.
(1) “Integral elements of misogyny infect military training. …The military is a violence-producing institution to which sexual and gender violence are intrinsic. … The essence of military forces is their pervasive, deep-rooted contempt for women, which can be seen in military training that completely denies femininity and praises hegemonic masculinity.”
(2) “The OWAAMV [Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence] movement illustrates from a gender perspective that ‘the protected,’ who are structurally deprived of political power, are in fact not protected by the militarized security policies; rather their livelihoods are made insecure by these very policies. The movement has also illuminated the fact that ‘gated’ bases do not confine military violence to within the bases. Those hundred-of-miles-long fences around the bases are there only to assure the readiness of the military and military operations by excluding and even oppressing the people living outside the gated bases.”
These two propositions—misogyny in the official education of American troops and hypocrisy in describing the benefits to locals of foreign military bases—are significant. I believe that they should inform future research on the American empire around the world to see if they can be verified in many different contexts and to further develop their various implications. Meanwhile, these erudite essays should cause Americans to reflect on the nature of U.S. imperialism just at the point where it is most probably starting to decline due to economic constraints and popular exhaustion with the wars and deaths it has caused.
Chalmers Johnson is the author of “Blowback” (2000), “The Sorrows of Empire” (2004), and “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic” (2006), and editor of “Okinawa: Cold War Island” (1999).
WHEN THE 1981-82 recession put a dent in steak sales, things could have gotten dicey for A1 Steak Sauce. Yet the 100-year-old brand turned adversity into great advertising. You might remember the TV spot: As a family sits around the dinner table, an incredulous kid catches sight of his uncle drowning a burger in A1. “Mom,” the kid blurts out, “he’s putting A1 Steak Sauce on his hamburger!” The boy’s uncle responds, “My dear nephew, what is hamburger, chopped ham? No. It is chopped steak. And what tastes better on steak than A1?” And then the killer tagline: “A1 makes hamburgers taste like steakburgers.”
It was brilliant repositioning. In one bold stroke, A1 shed its filet mignon pedigree in favor of a recession-proof staple. (And it’s been there ever since; Burger King’s $3.79 Steakhouse Burger is slathered in the sauce.) This episode illustrates the cardinal rule of recession marketing: When life gives you hamburger, make chopped steak.
If only it were still so easy. After years of being sold useless stuff, we media-savvy consumers can spot a con job when we see one. We know advertising is a game; our idea of entertainment is watching the cigarette smoke-and-mirrors heyday of Madison Avenue on Mad Men or Trust Me’s Sarah Krajicek-Hunter as she comes to terms with shilling for Dove shampoo (which is, in itself, a genius bit of shilling). So when we see Dodge dealerships offering two-for-one deals or Ed McMahon joking about his home foreclosure while flacking for Cash 4 Gold, we’re less likely to be swayed than wonder if that’s truly the best our sharpest marketing minds can come up with. Still, one feels a twinge of empathy while imagining the flop sweat of the modern-day Don Drapers as they try to figure out how to help their belt-tightening clients keep their belt-tightening customers. And all this at a time when print media seems to be on its deathbed and Internet marketing looks like the Wild West.
In a striking admission of the chaotic new reality, in March the advertising goliath Ogilvy & Mather—which counts Coca-Cola, Ford, Kraft, and IBM among its blue-chip clients—launched a dedicated Recession Marketing Practice. Brochures announcing the new venture ooze confidence, but also give off a slightly ominous vibe; they open with a quote from Charles Darwin (“It is not the strong, nor the intelligent who survive, but those who are quickest to adapt”) and prominently feature Ogilvy’s fatalistic motto: “We sell—or else.” Forget dog eat dog. This is Wild Kingdom meets Glengarry Glen Ross. The timid are about to be culled from the herd.
The key to brand survival, Ogilvy asserts, is for companies to do anything but “go dark”—i.e., fire their ad agency. Conveniently for ad firms, students of recession and depression economics (from Wharton professors to basement-dwelling business bloggers) advise spending as much on ads as possible—to “steer into the skid,” rather than slam on the brakes and wind up in the ditch. According to Ogilvy’s own stats, companies with enough cojones “to increase marketing spend” will dramatically enlarge their market share during the recession and—just as enticingly—recover an average of three times faster once happy days return. Counterintuitively, product visibility, more than price cuts or gimmicks like BOGOF (buy one get one free), drives consumers’ purchases in tough times. Better, in short, to blow your budget on aggressive advertising than to lose money offering discounts.
But the real challenge—the art, even—of recession marketing is perfecting a pitch that doesn’t emphasize your hunger for your cash-conscious buyers’ cash. Ogilvy recommends using “reassurance messages”—acknowledgments of the current situation, couched in a spirit of we’re-in-this-together-ness. A good example is a recent Allstate commercial, in which Dennis Haysbert (known as 24’s crisis-plagued first black president) intones over a Ken Burns-style slideshow of Depression-era photographs, “1931 was not exactly a great year to start a business, but that’s when Allstate opened its doors.” He goes on, “After the fears subside, a funny thing happens: People start enjoying the small things in life—a home-cooked meal, time with loved ones, appreciating the things we do have, the things we can count on. It’s back to basics, and the basics are good.” What exactly home cooking has to do with car insurance is unclear, but that’s the point. Allstate is feeling our pain.
Not that any of this has to be true or even reflect consumers’ best interests: Reassurance messages, Ogilvy notes, “don’t need to be purely rational, of course. Indeed, there is growing evidence that emotionally based messages are more persuasive than rational ones.” Hard to believe companies pay big bucks for news flashes like this.
Ogilvy’s already tried to work its magic for Kool-Aid, a Kraft brand that competes with soft drinks—one of the first things it claims recession-spooked consumers stop buying. “For the price of one bottle of soda, you can mix up five big pitchers of Kool-Aid,” the ad announces, closing with this feel-good tag: “For pennies a glass, keep the whole family refreshed and smiling!” Seriously? Is that all it takes to keep consumers drinking the Kool-Aid?
Maybe so. Like Ogilvy emphasizes, it’s not about intelligence; it’s about speed. In March, after a year of heavy losses, Starbucks announced a new line of instant-coffee packets that sold for less than a dollar apiece. Right idea, but way too late: The coffee juggernaut’s competitors had been attacking its upscale image for months. Dunkin’ Donuts had orchestrated an online “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drink Starbucks” viral campaign. McDonald’s was even blunter, rolling out a line of specialty coffees with the in-your-face slogan “Four bucks is dumb. Now serving espresso.” And just like that, fancy-schmancy coffee had been reclaimed for the masses.
So if a $4 mocha latte is now a ridiculous extravagance, how do aspirational brands advertise their way out of this? The current downturn hit just as Hyundai was completing its transformation from economy to luxury brand, unveiling the $37,000 Genesis 4.6 sedan. It could hardly pitch its new line of Lexus wannabes as a frugal investment, nor could it slash prices. In January, it revealed the ultimate reassurance ploy, the Hyundai Assurance Plan. The premise was simple and eye-catching: Buy one of our cars, and if you lose your job, we’ll buy it back.
Once you get into the fine print, of course, the deal isn’t as great as it sounds. The offer is only good for the first year of ownership, if you have made several payments already (or made a steep down payment), and if you can prove that you lost your job involuntarily or went bankrupt. Even then, the Assurance Plan only covers up to $7,500 worth of depreciation.
But what’s remarkable about the promotion is that Hyundai is betting that most buyers will keep their jobs and any returned cars will retain a significant percentage of their value—two assumptions that echo the gamble that landed us in so much trouble in the housing market. The genius of subprime lending was supposed to be the invincible collateral of a big-ticket item. But when too many buyers default on their payments, that same collateral floods the market and swamps new sales—be that for a house or a car. Still, the pitch worked, at least for a month: Hyundai’s January sales jumped 14 percent compared with January 2008, even as the rest of the auto industry’s dropped 37 percent. With numbers like those, other companies are bound to mimic the strategy. (JetBlue already has.) Whatever it takes to make the unnecessary seem less unnecessary.
Of course, it’s not a bad thing if the recession encourges consumers—and by extension, corporate America—to live more within their means. Just in the past few months, GM has announced that it will eliminate its Hummer brand as part of its restructuring; communities across the country, saddled with the closures of chains like Circuit City and Linens ‘n Things, have passed bans on superstores; and sagging sales for the four largest bottled water labels have led their parent companies to cut back on production. Maybe this truly is the dawning of a new market Darwinism. Who will mourn if gas-guzzling SUVs, big-box stores, and mountains of plastic waste go the way of the dodo?
Madison Avenue will, but it will still find a way to repackage our newfound distrust of the big, the slick, and the entitled. Consider a recent Cheetos campaign that never explicitly mentions the economy but plays out like textbook class warfare. In a spot first aired during what some pessimists dubbed the “Dust Bowl Super Bowl,” a woman munches Cheetos while she listens to a snooty soccer mom go on about her son’s “trilingual immersion program.” In the end, the beleaguered woman smears her orange-cheese-tipped fingers all over the back of the snob’s white jacket.
Another spot features a guy named Alejandro eating Flaming Hot Cheetos until his eyes water and his nose runs; when his Gordon Gekko-type boss mistakes him for sick and orders him home, Alejandro responds in an ironic monotone, “Okay, I’ll do it for the sake of this great American corporation.” The message: Your mass-produced corporate junk food hates rich people as much as you do.
Pepe Escobar: Israeli PM tries everything to subvert Obama’s priorities
Defying enormous expectations, the White House meeting between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was a big let down. Obama wants a Palestinian state, a precondition to solve the decades-long Arab-Israeli conflict. Netanyahu just mentioned an “arrangement”. Obama wants to talk to the leadership of Iran. Netanyahu tried all the time to change the subject from Palestine to – non-existent – Iranian nuclear weapons. Pepe Escobar warns about the danger of the powerful Israel lobby in Washington hijacking the terms of the debate and helping Netanyahu to derail Obama’s strategy.
The Republican National Committee to re-brand the Democratic Party as the “Dem Socialist Party”
The Republican National Committee will conclude a special session with a much-anticipated vote on a resolution to re-brand the Democratic Party as the “Democrat Socialist Party.” ANP senior producer Harry Hanbury roamed the RNC meeting with a camera and spoke with committeemen and state chairs to hear their thoughts on the vote and their ideas about both parties.
Sen. Graham: “The Geneva Convention did not apply until 2006″
ANP: Senator Lindsey Graham was a passionate critic of the Bush Justice attorneys during this past summer’s Armed Services Committee hearings on interrogation. Lately, however, Graham seems to have had second thoughts on the matter. At a recent Judiciary subcommittee hearing investigating the torture memos, Graham mounted a feisty defense of Jay Bybee, John Yoo and the lawyers who provided legal cover for detainee abuse. This performance sent ANP producer Mike Fritz back to the ANP archives to confirm that this was indeed the same Lindsey Graham we remembered from the summer, and sure enough, it was. As this video reveals, same tie – different message.
McGovern: Liz Cheney’s accusation of Wilkerson’s “fantasy stories” would be wonderful if it were true
Paul Jay speaks to Ray McGovern, retired CIA analyst under seven US presidents. On May 17, Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney’s daughter, accused Lawrence Wilkerson, the former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, of creating a “cottage industry” making up “fantasy stories” about her father on the George Stephanopoulos Show. After interviewing Wilkerson, McGovern says “it would be wonderful if it were [a] fantasy. [But] It’s all too real.”
On Monday, former Veep Dick Cheney admitted at long last that there was no link between the Sept. 11 attacks and Iraq, contrary to what the Bush administration had led the nation to believe in 2003 in order to justify waging a war on a country rich in history, culture … and oil. Tens of thousands of Iraqi and American casualties later, we thank you, Dick.
Bloomberg:
By James Rowley and Jonathan D. Salant
June 1 (Bloomberg) — Former Vice President Dick Cheney disavowed intelligence he once cited to suggest that then-Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein collaborated with al-Qaeda to stage the Sept. 11 attacks.
Cheney said today that information by the Central Intelligence Agency of collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda on Sept. 11 “turned out not to be true.” Still, Cheney said a longstanding relationship existed between Hussein and terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, that justified the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
“I thought it was strong at the time and I still feel so today,” Cheney said at a National Press Club lunch in Washington. “There was a relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq that stretched back 10 years. That’s not something I made up.” Citing 2002 Senate testimony by George Tenet, then the CIA director, he said, “We know for a fact that Saddam Hussein was a state sponsor of terrorism.”
On whether Hussein helped al-Qaeda carry out the 2001 terrorist attacks, Cheney said, “I do not believe, and I have never seen any evidence, that he was involved in 9/11.”
Cheney continued his attacks on President Barack Obama’s pledge to close the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where suspected terrorists are being held. Obama has called the indefinite detention of suspects at Guantanamo a “mistake” and said he will close the camp — a vow that has been complicated by the refusal of lawmakers, including Democrats, to provide funding.
Difficult to Close
“I think it’s going to be very difficult to close Guantanamo,” Cheney said. “It’s a good, well-run facility. If you’re going to be engaged in a world conflict such as we are in terms of global war on terrorism, if you don’t have a place where you can hold these people, your only other option is to kill them. We don’t operate that way.”
Several months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney said it was “pretty well” confirmed that Mohamed Atta, one of the leaders of the attack, had met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Prague in April 2000, according to a Washington Post account. Cheney later said the meeting’s existence couldn’t be proven, the Post said.
The presidential commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks concluded in 2004 that meetings or contacts between al- Qaeda and Iraqi officials didn’t result in collaboration between the terrorist group and Hussein’s regime.
Defending Policies
Cheney’s midday speech marked his latest salvo in a personal campaign to defend the Bush administration’s post-9/11 policies while suggesting that Obama’s actions have made the U.S. more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.
In his press club appearance, Cheney said that foreign governments that have criticized Guantanamo haven’t been willing to take in suspects detained there. And if detainees are admitted to the U.S., they would gain certain rights and protections they do not have in the prison in Cuba.
“If you bring them here and a judge rules you can’t hold them any longer, you have to release them in the United States,” Cheney said.
Cheney, 68, has said lives were saved by Bush administration actions, including authorizing the use of harsh interrogation techniques considered to be torture, such as waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning.
Obama has banned waterboarding, saying such actions betray the country’s “ideals” and aren’t necessary to “wage an aggressive battle against organizations like al-Qaeda.
‘Worried’ About GM
Cheney also said today he was “worried” about General Motors Corp.’s bankruptcy protection that was forced upon the automaker by the Obama administration. The bankruptcy plan calls for taxpayers to own more than 60 percent of General Motors. “Once you get into the business of a government running a major corporation like General Motors,” political pressures “come to bear and not economic interests,’” Cheney said.
In an interview before his speech, Cheney said the U.S. will face “enormous pressure” to manage GM in a way that doesn’t cost jobs. Cheney, asked about gay rights at the luncheon, said decisions on whether to legalize same-sex marriages should be made by states, not the federal government.
Cheney, whose daughter, Mary, is gay, indicated that he supports same-sex marriages. “Freedom means freedom for everyone,” he said. “I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish, any kind of arrangement they wish.”
(CNN) — Brazilian, French and Senegalese rescue teams combed vast sections of the Atlantic after an Air France jet disappeared in a possible crash.
Anne and Michael Harris, who lived in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, were two Americans aboard the flight.
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A report of “shiny spots” in the sea along the route of Flight 447 by a crew from the Brazilian airline TAM prompted a search in the territorial waters off Senegal, but without result.
The developments came as more details about the victims of Flight 447 began to emerge Tuesday.
The Airbus A330 encountered heavy turbulence early Monday, some three hours after the jet carrying 228 people left Rio de Janeiro for Paris on an 11-hour flight, according to Air France CEO Pierre-Henri Gourgeon.
At that point, the plane’s automatic system initiated a four-minute exchange of messages to the company’s maintenance computers, indicating that “several pieces of aircraft equipment were at fault or had broken down,” he told reporters.
During that time, there was no contact with the crew, Gourgeon said.
“It was probable that it was a little bit after those messages that the impact of the plane took place in the Atlantic,” he added.
The Airbus A330 was off radar and probably closer to Brazil than to Africa at the time, he said.
Two squadrons from Brazil’s air force launched a search near the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha in the Atlantic Ocean, about 365 kilometers (225 miles) from Brazil’s coast, an air force spokesman told CNN. And French President Nicolas Sarkozy said France sent ships and planes to the area about 400 kilometers (250 miles) from Brazil. See map of suspected crash zone »
“Our Spanish friends are helping us, Brazilians are helping us a lot as well,” he said.
Among the passengers were 126 men, 82 women, seven children and a baby, in addition to the 12 crew members, Air France said. Of the crew, 11 were French and one was Brazilian. Watch latest report on missing aircraft »
An official list of victims by name was not available late Monday, but the only two Americans on board — Michael Harris, 60, and his wife, Anne, 54 — were identified by the couple’s family and his employer.
“Anne and Mike were indeed a beautiful couple inside and out, and I miss them terribly already,” said Anne Harris’ sister, Mary Miley.
Michael Harris was a geologist in Rio de Janeiro for Devon Energy, the largest U.S.-based independent natural gas and oil producer, according to a company spokesman.
The couple had lived in the city since July 2008 and were traveling to Paris for a training seminar for Michael and for a vacation, Miley told CNN.
The airliner identified the nationalities of the other victims as: Argentinean (1); Austrian (1); Belgian (1); Brazilian (58); British (5); Canadian (1); Chinese (9); Croatian (1); Danish (1); Dutch (1); Estonian (1); Filipino (1); French (61); Gambian (1); German (26); Hungarian (4); Icelandic (1); Irish (3); Italian (9); Lebanese (5); Moroccan (2); Norwegian (3); Polish (2); Romanian (1); Russian (1); Slovakian (3); Spanish (2); Swedish (1); Swiss (6); Turkish (1).
Its crew was comprised of three pilots, including a 58-year-old captain who had logged 11,000 hours in flight, and nine cabin crew members, Air France said in a statement. Some 1,700 of the captain’s hours were on two Airbus models. Of the two co-pilots — ages 37 and 32 — one had 3,000 hours of flying experience and the other 6,600 hours. The aircraft had flown 18,870 hours, the statement said.
Of the passengers, 149 had planned to connect to flights going elsewhere in Europe or as far away as China, Gourgeon said.
“This is a catastrophe the likes of which Air France has never seen before,” Sarkozy told reporters at Charles de Gaulle International Airport, where he had met with relatives of the missing aboard the flight.
France asked the U.S. military to assist in the search with U.S. detection satellites, French Transport Minister Jean-Louis Borloo told CNN affiliate France 2. Pentagon officials did not immediately confirm the request.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told reporters in San Salvador, El Salvador, that he had spoken with Sarkozy, but neither leader knew what to say.
“All we could do was thank each other,” Lula said. “He thanked me for the speed with which the Brazilian air force took charge.”
He added, “In times like these, there is little to do but to deeply lament, to wish the families a lot of strength, because there are no words.”
The jet, which was flying at 35,000 feet and at 521 mph, also sent a warning that it had lost pressure, the Brazilian air force said.
The jet took off from Rio de Janeiro’s Galeao International Airport at 11:30 p.m. Sunday. Its last known contact occurred at 02:33 a.m. Monday, the Brazilian air force spokesman said. It was not clear what that final contact was.
It was expected to check in with air traffic controllers at 03:20 a.m. but did not do so. Brazilian authorities asked the air force to launch a search mission just over three hours later.
Exclusive: World’s leading climate change expert says summit talks so flawed that deal would be a disaster
‘We don’t have a leader who is able to grasp [the issue] and say what is really needed. Instead we are trying to continue business as usual,’ say James Hansen. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA
The scientist who convinced the world to take notice of the looming danger of global warming says it would be better for the planet and for future generations if next week’s Copenhagen climate change summit ended in collapse.
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James Hansen talks to Suzanne Goldenberg Link to this audioIn an interview with the Guardian, James Hansen, the world’s pre-eminent climate scientist, said any agreement likely to emerge from the negotiations would be so deeply flawed that it would be better to start again from scratch.
“I would rather it not happen if people accept that as being the right track because it’s a disaster track,” said Hansen, who heads the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
“The whole approach is so fundamentally wrong that it is better to reassess the situation. If it is going to be the Kyoto-type thing then [people] will spend years trying to determine exactly what that means.” He was speaking as progress towards a deal in Copenhagen received a boost today, with India revealing a target to curb its carbon emissions. All four of the major emitters – the US, China, EU and India – have now tabled offers on emissions, although the equally vexed issue of funding for developing nations to deal with global warming remains deadlocked.
Hansen, in repeated appearances before Congress beginning in 1989, has done more than any other scientist to educate politicians about the causes of global warming and to prod them into action to avoid its most catastrophic consequences. But he is vehemently opposed to the carbon market schemes – in which permits to pollute are bought and sold – which are seen by the EU and other governments as the most efficient way to cut emissions and move to a new clean energy economy.
Hansen is also fiercely critical of Barack Obama – and even Al Gore, who won a Nobel peace prize for his efforts to get the world to act on climate change – saying politicians have failed to meet what he regards as the moral challenge of our age.
In Hansen’s view, dealing with climate change allows no room for the compromises that rule the world of elected politics. “This is analagous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced by Winston Churchill,” he said. “On those kind of issues you cannot compromise. You can’t say let’s reduce slavery, let’s find a compromise and reduce it 50% or reduce it 40%.”
He added: “We don’t have a leader who is able to grasp it and say what is really needed. Instead we are trying to continue business as usual.”
The understated Iowan’s journey from climate scientist to activist accelerated in the last years of the Bush administration. Hansen, a reluctant public speaker, says he was forced into the public realm by the increasingly clear looming spectre of droughts, floods, famines and drowned cities indicated by the science.
That enormous body of scientific evidence has been put under a microscope by climate sceptics after last month’s release online of hacked emails sent by respected researchers at the climate research unit of the University of East Anglia. Hansen admitted the controversy could shake public’s trust, and called for an investigation. “All that stuff they are arguing about the data doesn’t really change the analysis at all, but it does leave a very bad impression,” he said.
The row reached Congress today, with Republicans accusing the researchers of engaging in “scientific fascism” and pressing the Obama administration’s top science adviser, John Holdren, to condemn the email. Holdren, a climate scientist who wrote one of the emails in the UEA trove, said he was prepared to denounce any misuse of data by the scientists – if one is proved.
Hansen has emerged as a leading campaigner against the coal industry, which produces more greenhouse gas emissions than any other fuel source.
He has become a fixture at campus demonstrations and last summer was arrested at a protest against mountaintop mining in West Virginia, where he called the Obama government’s policies “half-assed”.
He has irked some environmentalists by espousing a direct carbon tax on fuel use. Some see that as a distraction from rallying support in Congress for cap-and-trade legislation that is on the table.
He is scathing of that approach. “This is analagous to the indulgences that the Catholic church sold in the middle ages. The bishops collected lots of money and the sinners got redemption. Both parties liked that arrangement despite its absurdity. That is exactly what’s happening,” he said. “We’ve got the developed countries who want to continue more or less business as usual and then these developing countries who want money and that is what they can get through offsets [sold through the carbon markets].”
For all Hansen’s pessimism, he insists there is still hope. “It may be that we have already committed to a future sea level rise of a metre or even more but that doesn’t mean that you give up.
“Because if you give up you could be talking about tens of metres. So I find it screwy that people say you passed a tipping point so it’s too late. In that case what are you thinking: that we are going to abandon the planet? You want to minimise the damage.”
• James Hansen’s book Storms of My Grandchildren is published by Bloomsbury, £18.99
The US president’s decision to send 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan has received a mixed reaction from American pundits in Washington.
Tariq Ali, a historian and political activist, told Al Jazeera that Barack Obama’s decision to send more troops echoed the policies of George Bush, the former president.
“Obama is masqueraded as a peace president and he’s now deciding to send more troops… In order to try and appease his own supporters, he’s giving an approximate date for an exit strategy, but that never works.
“We’ve seen this before in Vietnam, where the commander in chief was saying ‘the boys will be home by Christmas next year’ and they didn’t come home for a long time.
“I think Obama has fallen into a trap laid for him by generals… I think it’s a fateful decision and it could determine whether he’s a one-term president.”
‘Masterful job’
But Larry Korb, a former assistant secretary of defence, described Obama’s speech as “a masterful job.”
Korb highlighted the parts of the address where Obama described the US operation in Afghanistan as time-limited and as seeking a partnership with the Afghans.
“I think it’s a fateful decision and it could determine whether he’s a one-term president.”
Tariq Ali, historian
and political activist
“One of the most interesting things he said [to the Afghan people] was that we’re your partner, not your patron. In the final hours it’s going to have to be up to you.”At the end of a speech, when he said the US doesn’t have the resources for an open-ended commitment and can’t solve all the world’s problems, it also was a message to Karzai: ‘I would like you to take more control more in the next 18 months.’”
Nasrine Gross, an Afghan women’s activist based in Washington, also stressed the need for co-operation with Afghans.
“The voice of the Afghan people needs to be heard, the government of Afghanistan needs to be worked with in such a way that not only corruption gets decreased but also services are delivered to ordinary people.
“I’m very happy that the troops are finally going… The troops are very needed. If the troops are not there, the people of Afghanistan are suffering too much.”
War tax
However, Mike Honda, a Democratic congressman, voiced concerned over how the troops will be paid for, and called for a war tax.
“Every war we’ve been engaged in, we’ve always had a tax attached to it. But since we went into Iraq in 2003, we’ve had no war tax to support the effort. We’ve been borrowing against our budget.
“That’s why our deficit and our debts have increased… If we’re going into Afghanistan with 30,000 more troops, let’s pay for it through a war tax so that it’s not going to increase our debt.”
It is already a 30-year war begun by one Democratic president, and thanks to the political opportunism of the current commander in chief the Afghanistan war is still without end or logical purpose. President Barack Obama’s own top national security adviser has stated that there are fewer than 100 al-Qaida members in Afghanistan and that they are not capable of launching attacks. What superheroes they must be, then, to require 100,000 U.S. troops to contain them.
The president handled that absurdity by conflating al-Qaida, which he admitted is holed up in Pakistan, with the Taliban and denying the McChrystal report’s basic assumption that the enemy in Afghanistan is local in both origin and focus. Obama stated Tuesday in a speech announcing a major escalation of the war, “It’s important to recall why America and our allies were compelled to fight a war in Afghanistan in the first place.” But he then cut off any serious consideration of that question with the bald assertion that “we did not ask for this fight.”
Of course we did. The Islamic fanatics who seized power in Afghanistan were previously backed by the U.S. as “freedom fighters” in what was once marketed as a bold adventure in Cold War one-upmanship against the Soviets. It was President Jimmy Carter, aided by a young liberal hawk named Richard Holbrooke, now Obama’s civilian point man on Afghanistan, who decided to support Muslim fanatics there. Holbrooke began his government service as one of the “Best and the Brightest” in Vietnam and was involved with the rural pacification and Phoenix assassination program in that country, and he is now a big advocate of the counterinsurgency program proposed by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal to once again win the hearts and minds of locals who want none of it.
The current president’s military point man, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, served in Carter’s National Security Council and knows that Obama is speaking falsely when he asserts it was the Soviet occupation that gave rise to the Muslim insurgency that we abetted. Gates wrote a memoir in 1996 which, as his publisher proclaimed, exposed “Carter’s never-before-revealed covert support to Afghan mujahedeen—six months before the Soviets invaded.”
Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was asked in a 1998 interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur if he regretted “having given arms and advice to future terrorists,” and he answered, “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?” Brzezinski made that statement three years before the 9/11 attack by those “stirred-up Muslims.”
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So here we go again, selling firewater to the natives and calling it salvation. We have decided to prop up a hopelessly corrupt Afghan government because, as Obama argued in one of the more disgraceful passages of Tuesday’s West Point speech, “although it was marred by fraud, [the recent] election produced a government that is consistent with Afghanistan’s laws and constitution.”
To suggest that the Afghan government will be in seriously better shape 18 months after 30,000 additional U.S. and perhaps 5,000 more NATO troops are dispatched is bizarrely out of touch with the strategy of the McChrystal report, which calls for American troops to restructure life down to the level of the most forlorn village. Surely the civilian and military supporters of that approach who are cheering Obama on have been giving assurances that he will not be held to such an unrealistically short timeline. Evidence of this was offered in the president’s speech when he said of the planned withdrawal of some forces by July of 2011: “Just as we have done in Iraq, we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground. We’ll continue to advise and assist Afghanistan’s security forces to ensure that they can succeed over the long haul.”
A very long haul indeed, if one checks the experience of Matthew Hoh, the former Marine captain who was credited with being as successful as anyone in implementing the counterinsurgency strategy now in vogue. In his letter of resignation as a foreign service officer in charge of one of the most hotly contested areas, Hoh wrote: “In the course of my five months of service in Afghanistan … I have lost understanding and confidence in the strategic purpose of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan. … I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul.”
Maybe they should have given Capt. Hoh the Noble Peace Prize.
After legendary explorer and ecologist J. Michael Fay completed his remarkable 1,200-mile, 455-day trek across the Congo Basin in 2002, he asked Africa’s longest-serving leader, President El Hadj Omar Bongo of Gabon, to sit down for a chat. Bongo agreed to meet the world-famous adventurer, and brought his Cabinet along to listen in. Fay looks like a man who has crossed the heart of Africa more than once, weather-beaten and wiry, handsome and rugged. But it is his message and its trenchant delivery that wins over crowds—and politicians.
In the midst of a PowerPoint presentation that included stunning photos of wildlife in the Basin he believes few humans have ever seen, Fay projected a map of Gabon featuring forest concessions in red that he predicted would soon be clearcut by foreign logging companies. Huge red blotches covered most of the country that hadn’t already been cleared for oil fields and manganese mines. The next slide showed an imaginary, “virtual” Gabon with 13 emerald green patches scattered about the landscape. These, Fay said, could be national parks that would protect hundreds of species of flora and fauna from extinction and create a global magnet for ecotourism, at that moment the fastest-growing sector of the fastest-growing industry in the world. Fay said the parks offered Gabon a golden opportunity to diversify an economy that had become heavily reliant on oil, gas, and other dwindling extractive resources.
Our best chance to fix global warming begins on December 7. Tick. Tick. Tick.
Continued From Above
When Bongo’s Minister of Forest Economy, Emile Doumba, expressed an interest in one of Fay’s proposed parks, Bongo shocked both Fay and his Cabinet by saying he wanted all of them gazetted and opened immediately. He ordered Doumba to produce 13 separate decrees, one for each park, which he agreed to sign that very day. An ecstatic Fay promised to find the money to manage the new parks. He stressed that Gabon was about to become the most ecologically significant nation in Africa, and a world-class experiment in biodiversity preservation. With the stroke of a dictator’s pen, 10 percent of the country’s landmass was placed under protection. “This is one of the most courageous conservation acts in the last 20 years,” declared Dr. Steven Sanderson, president and CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Society and Michael Fay’s boss at the time.
But there was another, more historically significant opportunity facing Gabon that day, one that Fay merely hinted at in his presentation and Sanderson didn’t mention at all. It was the opportunity their own industry, transnational conservation, had in Gabon: to do right by the thousands of tribal people living inside those emerald patches, by allowing them to remain in their homelands and participate directly in the stewardship and management of the new parks. They would then not be passive “stakeholders” relocated to the margins of the park, the typical fate of indigenous peoples who find themselves in conservation “hot spots,” but equal players in the complex and challenging process of defending biological diversity. The goal of such a policy would be the concurrent preservation of nature and culture; Gabon just might come to signify a happy ending of a tense, century-long conflict between global environmentalism and native people, millions of whom have been displaced from traditional homelands in the interest of conservation.
It’s a century-long story of violence and abuse that began in Yosemite Valley in the mid 19th century, when the Ahwahneechee band of Miwoks were chased about, caught on, then forcefully expelled from a landscape they had cultivated for about 200 generations. Militias like the vicious Mariposa Battalion were sent into Yosemite to burn acorn caches and rout native people from remote reaches of the Valley. After the militias came the nature romantics who mythologized the vacated valley as the wilderness it never was, then lobbied state and federal governments to create a national park. They got their wish in 1890, and the remaining Indians were removed from the area, with a few allowed to remain temporarily, as menial laborers in a segregated village of 20-by-20-foot shacks.
Yosemite’s Indian policy spread to Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, Mount Ranier, Zion, Glacier, Everglades, and Olympic National Parks, all of which expelled thousands of tribal people from their homes and hunting grounds so the new parks could remain in an undisturbed “state of nature.” Three hundred Shoshone Indians were killed in a single day during the expulsion from Yellowstone. This was the birth of what would come to be known, worldwide, as the Yosemite model of wildlife conservation. In Africa it would be renamed “fortress conservation,” and like so many other products from the North, the model would be exported with vigor to all other continents.
One consequence of creating a few million conservation refugees around the world has been the emergence of a vast and surprisingly powerful movement of communities that have proven themselves stewards of nature (otherwise conservationists would have no interest in their land), but were turned by circumstance into self-described “enemies of conservation.”
In early 2004, a United Nations meeting was convened for the ninth year in a row to push for passage of a resolution protecting the territorial and human rights of indigenous peoples. During the meeting, one indigenous delegate rose to state that extractive industries, while still a serious threat to their welfare and cultural integrity, were no longer the main antagonist of native cultures. Their new and biggest enemy, she said, was “conservation.” Later that spring, at a meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, of the International Forum on Indigenous Mapping, all 200 delegates signed a declaration stating that “conservation has become the number one threat to indigenous territories.”
Then in February 2008, representatives of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity (IIFB) walked out of a Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) annual meeting, condemning the convention for ignoring their interests. “We found ourselves marginalized and without opportunity to take the floor and express our views,” read their statement. “None of our recommendations were included in [the meeting's report]. So we have decided to leave this process…”
These are all rhetorical jabs, of course, and perhaps not entirely accurate or fair. But they are based on fact and driven by experience, and have shaken the international conservation community. So have a spate of critical studies and articles calling international conservationists to task for their historical mistreatment of indigenous peoples.
Some, but not all, conservation leaders are hearing the indictment and seem open to exploring a new model of protected area, a new conservation paradigm that includes native people and local communities as equal players in humanity’s quest to protect wildlife in wild places. Gabon is set to become the world’s test site for the new paradigm, a global laboratory seeking better ways to do conservation. And indigenous people on every continent are watching closely.
The central strategy of modern transnational conservation relies largely on the creation of so-called protected areas (PAs) like Gabon’s new parks. There are several categories, ranging from rigid exclusionary “wilderness” zones, off-limits to all but a few park guards and an occasional scientist, to community-conserved areas (CCAs) initiated and managed by a local population. While the categories vary widely in style and purpose, the essential goal is the same: protect and preserve biological diversity.
From 1900 to 1950, about 600 official protected areas were created worldwide. By 1960 there were almost a thousand. Today there are at least 110,000, and more are added every month. The size and number of protected areas is a common benchmark for measuring the success of global conservation.
The total area of land now under protection worldwide has doubled since 1990, when the World Parks Commission set a goal of protecting 10 percent of the planet’s surface: Today more than 12 percent of all land, a total area of 11.75 million square miles (18.8 million square kilometers), is set aside. That’s an area greater than the entire landmass of Africa and equal to half the planet’s endowment of cultivated land. At first glance, such a degree of land conservation seems undeniably good, an enormous achievement in doing the right thing for our planet. But the record is less impressive when you consider the social, economic, and cultural impact of the system.
About half the land selected for protection by the global conservation establishment over the past century was either occupied or regularly used by indigenous peoples. In the Americas that number is more than 80 percent. In Guyana, of the 10 new areas gazetted for protection, native people currently occupy 8. And in Chad, which during the 1990s increased protected areas from 1 to 9.1 percent of its national land, all of that newly protected land was previously occupied by what are now an estimated 600,000 displaced people.
No country I could find besides Chad and India, which officially admits to about 100,000 people displaced for conservation (a number that is almost certainly deflated), is counting this growing new class of refugee. Worldwide estimates range from 5 million to tens of millions of refugees created since Yosemite Valley was first gazetted for protection. Charles Geisler, a rural sociologist at Cornell University who has been studying the problem for decades, believes that since the beginning of the colonial era in Africa there could have been as many as 14 million on that continent alone. The true figure, if it were ever known, would depend on the semantics of words like displacement and refugee, over which parties on all sides of the issue argue endlessly.
However, the point is not the exact number of people who have lost their homeland to conservation. It is that these refugees, however defined, exist in large numbers on every continent but Antarctica, banished from lands they thrived on, often for thousands of years, in ways that even some of the conservationists who looked aside while evictions took place have since admitted were sustainable.
Which leads to another complaint heard at one international meeting after another: Relocation often occurs with the tacit approval of one or more of the five largest conservation organizations—The Nature Conservancy (TNC), Conservation International (CI), the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS)—which collectively have been nicknamed the BINGOs (Big International NGOs) by indigenous leaders. All except the Nature Conservancy have offices in Gabon, and they are to divide up management responsibilities for the country’s new parks.
Keeping his promise to President Bongo, Michael Fay returned to the US and began the arduous process of raising the millions that would be needed to turn “paper parks” into real parks and keep them safe from poachers and prospectors—about $50 million was his guess. As an inveterate and well-known conservation lobbyist, with connections to powerful fixers like Gabon’s registered foreign agent, David Barron, and top officials in the State Department, Fay managed to get the attention of key congressmen, most notably Ed Royce, the chairman of the House International Relations Subcommittee on Africa. In 2003, Royce scheduled Fay to testify about his amazing voyage and seek support for protected areas in the Congo Basin, which, Fay would emphasize, hosts a tropical forest second only in size to the Amazon Basin.
“We have an historic opportunity here,” Fay told the legislators, “to create what will be one of the world’s most important national park systems covering over 25 million acres in one of the richest areas for biodiversity on the planet. But we have an opportunity to do much more, really. We have an opportunity to shift how entire landscapes are developed and to assure that future generations can sustain and enhance their lives.”
Those were encouraging words to Gabon’s tribal citizens, the Bakas, Babongo, Akula, Bakoya, and Fang, all of whom are painfully aware of how their counterparts have been treated by conservation projects elsewhere in Africa. Fay went on to speak of “maximizing benefits for local people.”
But then Fay made a revealing observation about American history. “I believe that Teddy Roosevelt had it right,” he said. “In 1907, when the United States was at the stage in its development not dissimilar to the Congo Basin today…President Roosevelt made the creation of 230 million acres of protected areas the cornerstone of [his domestic policy]…My work in the Congo Basin has been basically to try to bring this US model to Africa.”
While he was singing the praises of “wise use” Teddy Roosevelt also proclaimed that “the rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him… It is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners and become the heritage of the dominant world races.”
Is this really the legacy American conservationists wish to be spreading about the world? And is the Northern method of protecting biological diversity, with its paternalistic view of nature and condescending view of traditional knowledge, appropriate to the rest of the planet? Does it even work? A planet tipping into ecological chaos, with more than 40,000 plant and animal species facing extinction and 60 percent of the ecosystem services that support us failing, suggests that what we’ve been doing may not have been working so well after all. Perhaps a new strategy is called for.
Omar Bongo died in June of this year, leaving uncertain the leadership of his country and the fate of the parks he created. The entire Gabonese Parks system has recently been placed under the leadership of Lee White, the British head of the Wildlife Conservation Society. White is currently supporting Omar Bongo’s son Ali as the “green presidential candidate.” White also makes no secret of his intention “to establish and sustain Gabon as a new unique global destination for African rainforest tourism.” What role the parks’ natives will play in that industry has yet to be determined.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers:Here’s a little reminder as we head into the year’s great gift-buying season. If you plan on using Amazon.com to make some of your purchases, whatever they may be, please head there by clicking on any book link or cover image in a TomDispatch post. If you then buy anything at all at Amazon, this site will get a small cut of that purchase (and it won’t cost you an extra cent). Believe me, this makes a difference to us. If it’s books you’re looking for and you want to plunge into another universe, try Booker-Prize-winning author Hillary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety and find yourself, for 750 remarkable pages, inside the (very disposable) heads of those who made the French Revolution. Or, for the afterlife of a more recent conflict, you might consider Beverly Gologorsky’s deeply moving novel, The Things We Do to Make It Home, about a group of Vietnam Vets, their wives and children. (Check out a recent review of it here.) Or you might plunge into the fascinating history of positive thinking in America and its distinctly negative effects via Barbara Ehrenreich’s splendid new book Bright-Sided. All come with the Engelhardt guarantee. I read each of them and was swept away.
One more thing: As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the nifty-looking new version of TomDispatch is now in better working shape, but it still has plenty of kinks in it, especially when it comes to the finding of, and the formatting of older TD posts. Be patient. We’re at work. In the next few weeks, these issues will be ironed out. In the meantime, many thanks for your encouraging emails and your continuing contributions! Tom]
No group with a major stake in health-care reform has seen as many peaks and valleys this year as women’s health activists. After pressuring lawmakers and rolling out initiatives like the “Being a Woman Is Not a Pre-Existing Condition” campaign, they scored three significant victories when the House of Representatives released its health bill in late October. The draft legislation included language that would eliminate the discriminatory practice of “gender rating,” block companies from deeming C-sections and domestic violence “pre-existing conditions,” and require employers to pay for maternity care.
A week later, that momentum came to a screeching halt when Congressman Bart Stupak’s amendment to ban federal funding for most abortions, on public and private insurance plans alike, landed in the House’s legislation. Democratic leaders called the eleventh-hour amendment a necessary political compromise. Women’s health advocates decried the move, and blasted legislators for caving in and dealing a heavy blow to the most contested of reproductive rights. While the public debate over Stupak’s amendment continues, another behind-the-scenes struggle is underway over coverage for crucial preventive health services for women, including basic gynecological “well visits,” for which funding was dropped in the Senate’s comprehensive health bill. Early victories notwithstanding, women’s health advocates have their work cut out for them as health-care reform heads into the next round in Congress.
That’s why Barbara Ehrenreich’s call below for a new women’s health movement geared to the battles ahead couldn’t be more timely. In “Smile or Die: The Bright Side of Cancer,” the first chapter of her recent book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, she plunges you into the pink-ribbon culture she discusses below. It shouldn’t be missed. Tom
Not So Pretty in Pink The Uproar Over New Breast Cancer Screening Guidelines
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Has feminism been replaced by the pink-ribbon breast cancer cult? When the House of Representatives passed the Stupak amendment, which would take abortion rights away even from women who have private insurance, the female response ranged from muted to inaudible.
A few weeks later, when the United States Preventive Services Task Force recommended that regular screening mammography not start until age 50, all hell broke loose. Sheryl Crow, Whoopi Goldberg, and Olivia Newton-John raised their voices in protest; a few dozen non-boldface women picketed the Department of Health and Human Services. If you didn’t look too closely, it almost seemed as if the women’s health movement of the 1970s and 1980s had returned in full force.
Never mind that Dr. Susan Love, author of what the New York Times dubbed “the bible for women with breast cancer,” endorses the new guidelines along with leading women’s health groups like Breast Cancer Action, the National Breast Cancer Coalition, and the National Women’s Health Network (NWHN). For years, these groups have been warning about the excessive use of screening mammography in the U.S., which carries its own dangers and leads to no detectible lowering of breast cancer mortality relative to less mammogram-happy nations.
Nonetheless, on CNN last week, we had the unsettling spectacle of NWHN director and noted women’s health advocate Cindy Pearson speaking out for the new guidelines, while ordinary women lined up to attribute their survival from the disease to mammography. Once upon a time, grassroots women challenged the establishment by figuratively burning their bras. Now, in some masochistic perversion of feminism, they are raising their voices to yell, “Squeeze our tits!”
When the Stupak anti-choice amendment passed, and so entered the health reform bill, no congressional representative stood up on the floor of the House to recount how access to abortion had saved her life or her family’s well-being. And where were the tea-baggers when we needed them? If anything represents the true danger of “government involvement” in health care, it’s a health reform bill that – if the Senate enacts something similar — will snatch away all but the wealthiest women’s right to choose.
It’s not just that abortion is deemed a morally trickier issue than mammography. To some extent, pink-ribbon culture has replaced feminism as a focus of female identity and solidarity. When a corporation wants to signal that it’s “woman friendly,” what does it do? It stamps a pink ribbon on its widget and proclaims that some miniscule portion of the profits will go to breast cancer research. I’ve even seen a bottle of Shiraz called “Hope” with a pink ribbon on its label, but no information, alas, on how much you have to drink to achieve the promised effect. When Laura Bush traveled to Saudi Arabia in 2007, what grave issue did she take up with the locals? Not women’s rights (to drive, to go outside without a man, etc.), but “breast cancer awareness.” In the post-feminist United States, issues like rape, domestic violence, and unwanted pregnancy seem to be too edgy for much public discussion, but breast cancer is all apple pie.
So welcome to the Women’s Movement 2.0: Instead of the proud female symbol — a circle on top of a cross — we have a droopy ribbon. Instead of embracing the full spectrum of human colors — black, brown, red, yellow, and white — we stick to princess pink. While we used to march in protest against sexist laws and practices, now we race or walk “for the cure.” And while we once sought full “consciousness” of all that oppresses us, now we’re content to achieve “awareness,” which has come to mean one thing — dutifully baring our breasts for the annual mammogram.
Look, the issue here isn’t health-care costs. If the current levels of screening mammography demonstrably saved lives, I would say go for it, and damn the expense. But the numbers are increasingly insistent: Routine mammographic screening of women under 50 does not reduce breast cancer mortality in that group, nor do older women necessarily need an annual mammogram. In fact, the whole dogma about “early detection” is shaky, as Susan Love reminds us: the idea has been to catch cancers early, when they’re still small, but some tiny cancers are viciously aggressive, and some large ones aren’t going anywhere.
One response to the new guidelines has been that numbers don’t matter — only individuals do — and if just one life is saved, that’s good enough. So OK, let me cite my own individual experience. In 2000, at the age of 59, I was diagnosed with Stage II breast cancer on the basis of one dubious mammogram followed by a really bad one, followed by a biopsy. Maybe I should be grateful that the cancer was detected in time, but the truth is, I’m not sure whether these mammograms detected the tumor or, along with many earlier ones, contributed to it: One known environmental cause of breast cancer is radiation, in amounts easily accumulated through regular mammography.
And why was I bothering with this mammogram in the first place? I had long ago made the decision not to spend my golden years undergoing cancer surveillance, but I wanted to get my Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) prescription renewed, and the nurse practitioner wouldn’t do that without a fresh mammogram.
As for the HRT, I was taking it because I had been convinced, by the prevailing medical propaganda, that HRT helps prevent heart disease and Alzheimer’s. In 2002, we found out that HRT is itself a risk factor for breast cancer (as well as being ineffective at warding off heart disease and Alzheimer’s), but we didn’t know that in 2000. So did I get breast cancer because of the HRT — and possibly because of the mammograms themselves — or did HRT lead to the detection of a cancer I would have gotten anyway?
I don’t know, but I do know that that biopsy was followed by the worst six months of my life, spent bald and barfing my way through chemotherapy. This is what’s at stake here: Not only the possibility that some women may die because their cancers go undetected, but that many others will lose months or years of their lives to debilitating and possibly unnecessary treatments.
You don’t have to be suffering from “chemobrain” (chemotherapy-induced cognitive decline) to discern evil, iatrogenic, profit-driven forces at work here. In a recent column on the new guidelines, patient-advocate Naomi Freundlich raises the possibility that “entrenched interests — in screening, surgery, chemotherapy and other treatments associated with diagnosing more and more cancers — are impeding scientific evidence.” I am particularly suspicious of the oncologists, who saw their incomes soar starting in the late 80s when they began administering and selling chemotherapy drugs themselves in their ghastly, pink-themed, “chemotherapy suites.” Mammograms recruit women into chemotherapy, and of course, the pink-ribbon cult recruits women into mammography.
What we really need is a new women’s health movement, one that’s sharp and skeptical enough to ask all the hard questions: What are the environmental (or possibly life-style) causes of the breast cancer epidemic? Why are existing treatments like chemotherapy so toxic and heavy-handed? And, if the old narrative of cancer’s progression from “early” to “late” stages no longer holds, what is the course of this disease (or diseases)? What we don’t need, no matter how pretty and pink, is a ladies’ auxiliary to the cancer-industrial complex.
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of 17 books, including the bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. A frequent contributor to Harper’s and the Nation, she has also been a columnist at the New York Times and Time magazine. Her seventeenth book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan Books), has just been published.
The Providence Journal ran a recent piece suggesting, rightly, that pro-life Congressman Jim Langevin will play a more central role in the Congressional tussle over health care reform and abortion than Congressman Patrick Kennedy.
Langevin was among a small group of representatives who tried to work out a compromise that would prevent abortion from scuttling health care reform, only to watch that compromise fall apart on the eve of the House vote. Instead, a strong anti-abortion amendment, the Stupak Amendment, wound up passing – pulling pro-life Democrats into a coalition that narrowly passed the bill, and outraging pro-choice advocates in the process.
The Senate is expected to pass a bill more acceptable to pro-choicers, setting the stage for a showdown between the two chambers. The ProJo piece concludes: “The question for Langevin, as a prominent opponent of abortion, is whether he will work with other abortion foes for strong anti-subsidy language when the final House-Senate compromise is being crafted.”
But it says here that Langevin will stay as far from any push for strong anti-abortion language as possible. He has staked out a compromise position for months – out of principle, perhaps (health care reform must pass), but also out of political calculation, no doubt.
Rhode Island, after all, is strongly pro-choice – as is Langevin’s opponent in next year’s Democratic primary, Betsy Dennigan. And while the incumbent is the odds-on favorite to win that race, nothing would do more to upend the contest than handing Dennigan ammunition on the choice issue. Abortion is the primary line of demarcation between the two.
Joy Fox, a spokeswoman for Langevin, said the congressman is waiting to see what the Senate will do, but ”still feels very strongly about not letting any issue” – read, abortion - kill health care reform.
This will be a tricky issue for the Congressman. There are questions of principle and politics. And in the end, if hard-liners on either side of the issue get strong language attached to the bill, he will have to cast a difficult vote. Indeed, it is in his interest to push hard for a compromise so that he can avoid such a tough vote. And if he can’t get that compromise, well, he’ll be left to make the case that he tried.
At 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, a child walks to school past a pile of trash that had been in front of 90 Paul St. for several weeks, neighbors say.
The Providence Journal / Mary Murphy
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — One month after Mayor David N. Cicilline imposed a new, stricter trash-collection policy, garbage is still piled high in front of some households even as there are signs elsewhere that more residents are recycling.
On Paul Street in the city’s North End, for example, garbage accumulated in front of multifamily residences near the Windmill Street Elementary School because landlords still had not put out the mandatory two recycling bins for each barrel of trash.
Children walking to school have had to step around bags of smelly trash and broken furniture and mattresses on the sidewalks.
By 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, the trash at 90 Paul St., near the Windmill Street Elementary School, had been picked up, leaving the sidewalk clear.
The Providence Journal / Mary Murphy
“It’s becoming a health issue,” said City Councilman Nicholas Narducci, who finally persuaded the city Wednesday to clear away the worst of the trash piles after four weeks. “We’re worried about swine flu, and now we have this to complicate things.”
But that’s not the case everywhere.
On Camp Street in Mount Hope, there was less trash left out on the streets late on Monday, that neighborhood’s trash day.
Mount Hope resident Amelia Rose says she’s seeing a positive response from neighborhood households after some initial protests.
“People are participating or want to participate,” says Rose, who is director for the Environmental Justice League of Rhode Island, an advocacy group that helped the city with community outreach for the program.
In Elmhurst, near Providence College, on Tuesday, there were still visible piles of garbage in front of multifamily houses, but not as many as before.
Trash piles up along Atwells Avenue in Providence early last month, after a new city ordinance took effect requiring residents to put out recyclables in order to have their garbage removed.
The Providence Journal / John Freidah
“Definitely before, there was a lot of garbage left out in my neighborhood,” Tiesha Nieves, a Radcliffe Avenue resident, said. “But this morning, before I went to work, I could see that there were a lot fewer bins with trash in them.”
City officials say recycling rates overall are up, and trash tonnage is down, putting the city on course to meet its goals of doubling its recycling rate and saving money on trash fees at the state landfill.
What happens now in neighborhoods where trash continues to accumulate, though, is unclear.
City Director of Operations Alix Ogden says the city has no plans to clear the trash unless residents fully comply with the program. Starting Dec.7, it will also begin fining landlords $50 for each instance of noncompliance.
But this week, city workers started placing recycling bins in front of houses with the worst piles of trash in order to get the trash picked up.
Ogden says that a “limited number” of recycling bins are being made available to residents who “clearly seem to be having difficulty complying.”
Giving out the bins for free citywide would have cost more than $500,000, said Odgen, and the city didn’t have the money to do it. Instead, about $60,000 is being allocated with money from federal Community Develop Block Grant Funds and the City Council contingency fund.
The city has sold nearly 28,000 of the $5 recycling bins since rolling out the program on Nov. 1.
“This isn’t a free bin giveaway,” said Ogden. “We’re giving these bins out in a systematic and strategic way. … We need to break down the barriers to get people to recycle.”
Said Narducci, the councilor: “I don’t agree with [the free bins] at all. Don’t give them away for nothing. Send the bill to the landlords.”
Meanwhile, criticism about how the program was implemented has not diminished.
For many, the most glaring mistake was how the city explained the program. Early notices left out the crucial detail that two recycling bins, not just one, were required to comply with the program.
The name of the program also caused confusion. In the five communities in the state where a similar policy has been put into action, it has been called “no-bin, no-barrel.” The city officially billed it as “Green Up Providence!”
“What does ‘green up’ mean? It doesn’t have any meaning to anyone,” says City Councilman Miguel Luna, who represents Elmwood. “No-bin, no-barrel. That should have been the message.”
Another failure often cited is the city’s outreach efforts.
In a city where more than 40 languages are spoken, residents say materials should have been more widely translated (rather than just in English and Spanish) and distributed through community-based organizations. Mailings also should have been sent to landlords who live outside the city.
The city is only now addressing some of those shortcomings. It has enlisted the Socio-Economic Development Center for Southeast Asians, in Elmwood, to translate program information into Cambodian, Hmong, Vietnamese and Laotian, according to Ogden.
And, starting two weeks ago, more than 6,500 notices were sent to absentee landlords with buildings of six units or less telling them about the new policy and potential fines.
Wanskuck landlord Michelle Ferrini is one of the many out-of-state property owners still not complying with the recycling program. The two trash barrels in front of her six-unit building on Douglas Avenue were overflowing Wednesday, with bags of trash and boxes leaning against them.
A Boston resident, she says she heard about the program only last week from a tenant and planned on getting the bins before the next garbage day.
Until then? “I’m telling my tenants to keep putting out the trash on the street,” she said. “If the city wants its neighborhoods to look bad, that is their decision.”
BY THE NUMBERS Getting the message
Recycling is up and recycling bins are selling under the city’s month-old Green Up Providence! program.
128 Average weekly tons of recycling for city before program
223Tons of recycling the week of Nov. 23 (third week of city enforcement)
1,300 Average weekly tons of trash for city before program
1,021 Tons of trash for the week of Nov.
2310,000 Maximum number of city recycling bins sold annually up to now
28,000 Number of city recycling bins sold since program began Nov. 1
Obama says US is not an empire as he sends 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan
Part 1
Part 2
Paul Jay speaks to Reese Erlich following Obama’s announcement about dispatching 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
Bio
Reese Erlich is a freelance journalist and author from the United States. His books include the 2003 best-seller, Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You, 2007’s The Iran Agenda: The Real Story of US Policy and the Middle-East Crisis, and his newest release Dateline Havana: The Real Story of US Policy and the Future of Cuba. He has produced many radio documentaries, including a series hosted by Walter Cronkite.
Obama said he plans to unveil a proposal to ‘jump-start’ a new jobs measure next week [AFP]
The number of US job losses declined unexpectedly last month, in the strongest employment report since the recession began nearly two years ago, the US Labour Department has said.
A US government report released on Friday showed that jobless numbers in the country fell last month to ten per cent from 10.2 per cent in October.
In all, employers cut 11,000 thousand jobs in November, which marked a significant decline from the 111,000 jobs lost in October.
The number was well below the 130,000 loss that financial markets had been bracing for and the news surprised economists who predicted the jobless rate would remain the same.
But despite the slight drop in jobless numbers, more than 15 million Americans remained unemployed.
‘Good news’
Barack Obama, the US president, said the report was good news and indicated that better days are ahead for the US economy.
But he warned that there is still more work to do.
“We still have a long way to go. I still consider one job lost one job too many,” he said during a speech in the eastern US state of Pennsylvania.
“The journey from here will not be without setbacks or struggle. There will be more bumps in the road. But the direction is clear.”
Obama said his administration is also working on a proposal to “jump-start” support for a new jobs measure he is expected to unveil next week.
“…The decline has slowed, it has not stopped”
Ron Blackwell, chief economist for the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Unions
“We need to grow jobs and get America back to work as quickly as we can.”On Tuesday, I’m going to speak in greater detail about the ideas I’ll be sending to Congress to help jump-start private sector hiring and get Americans back to work.”
Ron Blackwell, the chief economist for the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Unions, the largest federation of unions in the US and Canada, said the government’s initial economic stimulus plan had brought the country “back from the brink” of the economic crisis.
“But the accurate way to put it is that the decline has slowed, it has not stopped,” he told Al Jazeera.
“We’re going to have to do much more than has been done so far by our government and by other governments, if we’re going to do something to staunch the employment crisis in the United States and in the world.”
Editor’s note: This article was originally printed in The Independent.
“This young woman who upsets people …” was the headline in Lebanon’s L’Orient Littáraire yesterday [Thursday]. The teenager was Anne Frank, who died of typhoid at Bergen-Belsen in 1945 after being betrayed to the Nazi authorities, along with her family, in her Amsterdam “safe house”. The upset people were the Lebanese Hizbollah, who successfully persuaded teachers at a Beirut school to withdraw an English language primer from the library after it discovered extracts from Anne Frank’s world-famous diary in the book. Yesterday, in a brave and literary defence of freedom of speech, Michel Hajji Georgiou told his readers why this act of censorship was against the Arabs.
Anne Frank, he said, was “a child in revolt against fear, against intolerance, against a mad world, who escapes her Lebanese critics … Anne, under injustice, in a suffering transcended by art and writing, is nothing less than the sister of the Palestinian or Lebanese children in the novels of Elias Khoury or Ghassan Kanafani … of the British children in J G Ballard’s Empire of the Sun and John Boorman’s Hope and Glory.”
Jews and Israelis may object to the parallel – indeed, will object to the parallel – between Jewish suffering under the Nazis and Palestinian suffering under the Israelis, but they should at least admire Georgiou’s front-page article. It is accompanied by a large and well-known photograph of Anne, smiling in all innocence into the camera, unaware how short her life will be. The Jewish Holocaust is not a subject which Arabs have learned to live with. While Arab censorship is not as outrageous as Turkish laws against all mention of the 1915 Christian Armenian Holocaust by the Muslim Ottoman Turks – which can send writers to prison – Hitler’s Mein Kampf is freely on sale in Beirut and reference to the Jewish Holocaust has been censored on television.
When I made a two-and-a-half-hour documentary on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Lebanon’s New TV channel initially cut out a 16-minute sequence on the murder of Polish Jews whose surviving families eventually arrived in Israel. Only after angry remonstrations did I persuade the station’s owner to show the uncut film – which he did the following night. But being the first Westerner to put the Jewish Holocaust on a Lebanese television channel did not win any favours. Respectable, well educated families in Beirut argued with me for years afterwards that the Nazi massacres were either exaggerated or non-existent.
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There is no doubt that Israel’s use of the Holocaust to suppress any legitimate criticism of Israel’s current brutality towards the Palestinians has much to do with this. Holocaust denial is anti-Semitic, but the facile slander of anti-Semitism against anyone who condemns Israel’s outrageous behaviour towards its neighbours long ago provoked a deep sense of cynicism among Arabs towards the facts of 20th century Jewish history in Europe. The insistence of Palestinian academics such as Edward Said that the Jewish Holocaust should not be denied – on the basis that a denial of one people’s suffering automatically negated another people’s suffering (the Palestinians, albeit on a far smaller scale) – has received little understanding in the Muslim world. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s ravings about the Holocaust have only encouraged the habit of “denialism”.
A pity. For while serious study of the subject might have been denied to pupils at a school at Mseitbeh – a Shia suburb of Beirut – who were using The Interactive Reader Plus for English Learners, Lebanese students are also deprived of Victor Klemperer’s diaries. Klemperer, a German Jewish academic, condemned the Jewish colonisation of pre-Second World War Palestine even as he and his wife were threatened by the Nazis in his native Dresden. Ironically, I bought my copy of Klemperer’s books in highly Islamic Pakistan.
In other words, not all Jewish Holocaust survivors – or victims – would automatically have supported the creation of the State of Israel. Israel’s constant demonisation of Palestinians as Nazis – the late prime minister Menachem Begin specifically compared Yasser Arafat to Hitler – finds its apotheosis in the Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem outside Jerusalem where the equally late Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini is pictured with Hitler. Al-Husseini’s picture is real; Israel’s racist foreign minister used it a few weeks ago to further demean the Palestinians, although it is immensely to Israel’s credit that the fairest biography of this anti-Jewish figure was written by a former Israeli military governor of Gaza.
Hizbollah, of course, has well and truly managed to put its foot in it in Beirut. Its Al Manar television station criticised Anne Frank’s diaries because they are “devoted to the persecution of the Jews… Even more dangerous still is the dramatic and theatrical way in which the diary is written – it is full of emotion.” Poor 15-year old Anne Frank’s record of her suffering was not unemotional enough for the warriors of the Hizbollah, her book mere proof of “the Zionist invasion of [Lebanese] education.” In fairness, Beirut’s bookshops show no fear of selling books on the Jewish Holocaust and the evils of the Second World War. The Jews of Lebanon were once counted in their thousands; many came from Nazi Germany en route to Palestine but stayed because they loved the country and the Arab people. The government is repairing the old Jewish synagogue whose roof was shot off in 1982 – by an Israeli gunboat.
By Phil Marcelo and Amanda Milkovits
Journal staff writers
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Luis Mendonca, the Pawtucket man who is accusing a Providence police officer of brutality during his arrest two months ago, was found guilty of violating the terms of his probation on previous charges and sentenced to 90 days in prison, following a hearing in Sixth District Court on Friday.
Luis Mendonca, 20, held at the ACI since early November on assault charges, was sentenced Friday to 90 days in prison for violating his probation. He has lodged a brutality complaint against a Providence detective for assaulting him after an arrest. Providence Journal / Kathy Borchers
Video: Security-camera footage of Luis Mendonca allegedly being kicked by one officer as he is being arrested and led away by other officers last month.
Meanwhile, Providence Police Chief Dean M. Esserman said his department has forwarded the results of its own internal-affairs investigation to the Attorney General’s office regarding the detective’s use of force.
“The department takes the matter very seriously,” Esserman said.
In District Court Friday, Judge Elaine T. Bucci also sentenced Mendonca, upon completion of his prison term, to one year probation and a one year suspended sentence on two charges of simple assault.
According to police, Mendonca was arrested by the Providence police and charged with assaulting two RISD officers who had been chasing him because he was suspected of trying to get into the dormitories at RISD’s Mandle Building. He was chased behind the attorney general’s office and into a parking lot, where he tried hiding under a vehicle, according to a police report. After the arrest, he was taken to Rhode Island Hospital, where a spokeswoman said Mendonca remained until Oct. 22.
Mendonca’s lawyer, Alberto Aponte Cordona, says his client will appeal.
Mendonca lodged a brutality complaint against a Providence detective for assaulting him after his Oct. 20 arrest.
Chief Esserman said Friday that the internal review into the officer’s use of force began the night that Mendonca was arrested, a few weeks before Mendonca filed his complaint. Such a review is standard at the department whenever an officer uses force during an apprehension, Esserman said.
Internal-affairs investigators retrieved the video of the arrest soon after it happened, Esserman said. He declined to comment specifically on what the video shows. The investigators also questioned the witnesses and officers at the scene and “reached out to Mendonca,” Esserman said.
The chief wouldn’t comment specifically on the exact use of force or the error-riddled police report written by another officer about the incident that night.
“We are looking into everything,” Esserman said. “One officer is under investigation, but the entire incident is being looked at as well.”
Mendonca, 20, has been held at the ACI since early November on two counts of simple assault against two Rhode Island School of Design police officers.
At the time of his arrest, he had been on probation for one year after pleading no contest in April to a misdemeanor shoplifting charge. He’d also received one year of probation last December when he pleaded no contest to another misdemeanor shoplifting charge, according to court records.
Mendonca has been held without bail at the Adult Correctional Institutions since Nov. 6 for a probation violation, said a spokeswoman for the Department of Correction. Mendonca’s violation hearing had been continued since Nov. 9, said courts spokesman Craig Berke.
The Providence police report on the incident contains several errors and omits any reference to any officer’s use of force. For one, the report lists Mendonca’s last name as Mendoza and also lists his home address on a Providence street that doesn’t exist.
The police report gives the names of the two RISD officers who were allegedly assaulted by Mendonca, but not the names of the Providence police officers who responded to the call. The report also doesn’t say anything about an officer’s use of force or why a rescue was called to take him to Rhode Island Hospital.
There’s just this: “After a brief struggle, the subject was placed in restraints.”
The original version of this story was posted at 11:34 a.m. and updated at 1:54 p.m.
Why women have signed onto marijuana reform — and why they could be the movement’s game-changers.
In September, ladymag Marieclaire ruffled some feathers when it published a piece about women who smoke weed. But its most interesting effect was not the “marijuana moms” chatter it unleashed, and instead the fact that it brought to the mainstream media a more open discussion of the fact that women can be avid tokers, too.
Public acceptance of pot is at an all-time high, and the fact that women have drastically changed their attitudes may be what is most fascinating about the sea change in public opinion — and policy — regarding marijuana. In 2005, only 32 percent of polled women told Gallup they approved legalizing pot, but this year 44 percent of them were for it, compared to 45 percent of men. In effect, women have narrowed what had been a 12-point gender gap.
Women are also smoking more weed. The most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that current marijuana use increased from 3.8 to 4.5 percent among women, while there was no significant statistical change for men.
Indeed, it appears the growing acceptance of marijuana is fueled by women having joined the movement for reform.
Women “can reach people’s hearts and minds,” says Mikki Norris, co-author of Shattered Lives: Portraits from America’s Drug War, managing editor of the West Coast Leaf, and director of the Cannabis Consumers Campaign. “I think we can really take it from the third- to the first-person, and make it personal.”
Norris, who’s participated in numerous successful marijuana campaigns, may be onto something. If pro-weed women are a new momentum behind the normalization of marijuana, they may also become the driving force behind game-changing drug reform.
If that’s the case, then it’s worth examining why some women have signed onto the marijuana reform movement — because it may soon be why many others will as well.
‘A bigger amygdala’
The avenue through which women have been foremost leaders in the movement is medical marijuana advocacy.
Every woman I spoke to referenced cannabis’ medicinal properties as a major reason they are so personally impassioned by the marijuana reform debate.
One of these is Valerie Corral, dubbed “the Mother Teresa of the medical marijuana movement,” by Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance.
Corral was introduced to the medical benefits of marijuana in 1973, when she was the victim of a car crash that left her an epileptic. At one point, while on pharmaceuticals, she was having up to five seizures each day.
In 1974, her husband read an article in a medical journal that described how positively rats had reacted to cannabis when treated for certain ailments. Soon thereafter, Corral started applying a strict regimen of marijuana, and kept a catalog of its effects.
“Within a few weeks, I noticed change,” Corral said. And over time, she was able to control seizure activity in a way that allowed her to wean herself off the prescription drugs. To this day she does not take anything other than marijuana for her epilepsy.
Not only did medical marijuana change Corral’s quality of life, it changed its course. She went on to found Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana (WAMM), a patient collective based in Santa Cruz, Calif. that offers organic medical marijuana and assistance to those who have received a terminal or chronic illness diagnosis.
WAMM currently serves about 170 patients. When I spoke to Corral, she was late to hit the road for her Thanksgiving holiday. She had spent the morning with a patient who was anxious about his radiation therapy. She then spent the afternoon delivering’ marijuana before counseling — “and learning from” — terminal patients.
While Corral knows first-hand the physical benefits of marijuana, she believes its most important effect is “the way it affects how we look at things that are difficult.”
“No matter what else happens to us,” Corral said, “the quality with which we live our lives is so important.”
Cheryl Shuman, a 49-year-old optician in Los Angeles, would agree. Up until she started using cannabis therapy to treat her cancer, she was on a daily regimen of 27 prescription drugs, attached to a mobile intravenous morphine pump, and undergoing constant CAT and MRI scans. In 2006, her doctors told her she’d be dead by the end of that year.
“I had to make a decision [regarding] which way I was going to go and quite frankly, I thought if I am going to die, I want to control how my life is going to be,” Shuman said, her voice breaking. “And the only side-effects were that I was happy and laughing.”
It turns out those may not have been the only effects of her cannabis therapy. Her cancer has been in remission for 18 months now — and that coincides precisely with the start of the marijuana treatment.
Shuman had previously used pot medicinally in 1994, when going through a harrowing divorce. Up to 80 milligrams of Prozac a day, coupled with multiple therapy sessions a week, did not help her get over the sense that she could barely make it through each day.
During one session, she says, “my therapist said, ‘I could lose my license, but I think what would help you more than anything is just smoking a joint.’ I didn’t know how to respond! I said I couldn’t do that — I don’t drink, I’ve never even smoked a cigarette!”
But after researching medical marijuana and realizing that cannabis had been available in pharmacies until the early 20th century, Shuman acquiesced and tried a joint. At 36 — after learning to inhale — Shuman says she found she “finally had some peace.”
Corral, for her part, acknowledges that the role she fills within the marijuana movement is one that fits the traditional female archetype. “Maybe it’s because we have a bigger amygdala,” she laughs, referring to the part of the brain that processes emotions. “It probably is!”
Debby Goldsberry, director of the Berkeley Patients Group, a medical marijuana dispensary, feels similarly: “It’s our job in our families and in our circles of friends to be caregivers. It makes sense that women would gravitate to cannabis.”
In a recent study of a sample of patient reviews at a chain of medical marijuana assessment clinics in California, Craig Reinarman, a sociology professor at UC-Santa Cruz, found that only 27.1 percent of the patients were female. Another study, conducted on a sample of patients at Goldsberry’s Berkeley dispensary, found that 30.7 percent of those patients were women.
Those numbers are close to the general expert estimate that women constitute about a third of marijuana consumers.
Mainstream myth-busting
Since more women are smoking weed, it’s no surprise there has finally been an onslaught of girl stoner coverage in the corporate media.
It probably started with “Weeds” — a Showtime series about a bodacious soccer mom who deals and smokes pot — which is now readying for its sixth season premiere. But the big dam opener this year was the aforementioned publication of the Marieclaire article, “Stiletto Stoners,” which paints the portrait of a whole class of “card-carrying, type A workaholics who just happen to prefer kicking back with a blunt instead of a bottle.”
Julie Holland, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the NYU School of Medicine, has been called onto NBC’s Today Show twice now to explain why women are gravitating towards weed.
During one of her appearances, Holland seemingly shocks the hosts by telling them that 100 million Americans have tried weed — 25 million of them over the past year. The most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that 10.6 million women used marijuana in 2008.
Also surprising to the TV hosts was Holland’s assertion that marijuana is the least addictive substance among many. According to a 1999 Institute of Medicine report, the rate at which people who try a substance and go on to become addicted is 32 percent for nicotine, 23 percent for heroin, 17 percent for cocaine, 15 percent for alcohol, and 9 percent for cannabis.
“Look at what the choices are. Cannabis isn’t toxic to your brain, to your liver, it doesn’t cause cancer, you can’t overdose, and there’s no evidence that it’s a gateway drug,” Holland said. “I believe that the majority of adults can healthfully integrate altered states into their lives, and it makes sense to do it with the least toxic substance you can. “
The public seems to agree.
Societal mores around marijuana are at their most progressive in at least 40 years, when Gallup first started asking Americans whether they believed marijuana ought be legalized. This year, 44 percent of those polled — up from 36 percent in 2005 — said they are in favor of legalization. A May Zogby poll found marijuana legalization was even more popular with its respondents, at 52 percent.
Harry Levine, professor of sociology at Queens College and co-author of Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice, attributes a lot of the mainstreaming of progressive views on pot to the medical marijuana movement.
“What it has done is change the image of marijuana from this tie-dye 1960s hippie-dippy kind of thing to a real drug, a real substance that has medical uses,” he said. “You can separate it from the scary image of drugs.”
Why do girls smoke?
As weed is no longer considered by the public to be a “hard drug,” three presidents — 41, 42, and 43 — have admitted to smoking marijuana. “The whole association of failure and dropouts [with marijuana] has been smashed in an important kind of way,” Levine says.
In other words, you can smoke pot and be successful. Look at Natalie Angier, for example. In her book Woman: Intimate Geography, this Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer interjects a personal note of — and case for — female empowerment through weed:
All the women in my immediate family learned how to climax by smoking grass — my mother when she was over thirty and already the mother of four. Yet I have never seen anorgasmia on the list of indications for the medical use of marijuana. Instead we are told that some women don’t need to have orgasms to have a satisfying sex life, an argument as convincing as the insistence that homeless people like living outdoors.
As Angier writes, alcohol is a “global depressant of the nervous system” so marijuana can be a woman’s best friend. In that vein, Holland has clinically observed that many of her female patients choose marijuana over alcohol — for all kinds of social situations — because it makes them “more present instead of absent.”
“You can relax but not be incapacitated. You can keep your wits about you and protect yourself,” Holland told me, adding that women don’t always tolerate alcohol the way men do.
Diana, 37, a published writer in Madison is one such woman. She uses marijuana as a social lubricant: “If I drink, I know I’ll be throwing up by night’s end, even if it’s only a couple of beers. But with weed, I know I can make it to closing time — and keep up with all the steely-stomached drinkers.”
Paloma, 25, a Bay Area union organizer, told me she smokes weed two to three times a week to “relax, sleep, work on arts and crafts or clean the house and cook” without being distracted by what she calls her “explosive” attention deficit disorder.
A few women smokers said they did not initially like the effects marijuana had on them. Tessa, 29, a doctoral student in Portland, said, she didn’t enjoy weed in college “because I would not be able to do anything besides be high and stupid. Now I know to smoke less — maybe a hit or two — and then relax on that.”
What a lot of women like Tessa don’t know is that there are several kinds of weed that have different effects on the mind and body. Women who live in places where marijuana can be purchased at dispensaries are often more attuned to the fact that cannabis sativa gives a euphoric head high while cannabis indica results in a lazy body high. And then there are hybrids — the equivalent to blends in wine culture.
Ally, 34, an architect and mother in San Francisco, sees weed as similar to vino: “Smoking a joint and taking a bath is what drinking a glass of wine and taking a bath was to my mom,” she says, balancing a baby on her knee. “It’s ‘me’ time!”
Think of the children!
The acceptance of pot has led to discussion of how marijuana reform might positively impact families and children. This may change the debate because family values have long been employed by drug warriors as reasoning for why weed ought remain criminalized.
Enter Jessica Corry, a pro-life Republican from Denver. A mother of girls aged two and four, this 30-year-old newly-minted lawyer is widely hailed as a rising star in Colorado politics. She is currently working on her first book, which she described to me as an “analysis of how race consciousness and political correctness are silencing America’s students and our entrepreneurial spirit.”
A real conservative. Yet she is also one of the most outspoken proponents of marijuana legalization.
In 2006, she started a group called Guarding Our Children Against Marijuana Prohibition, which supported a statewide initiative to legalize marijuana.
“I had high-ranking Republicans politely encouraging me to write my political eulogy,” Corry said. “Fortunately, they were wrong. While the initiative failed, it garnered more general election support than that year’s Republican candidate for governor.”
Corry doesn’t smoke pot — though she is open about past use. “As a mother,” she says, “I’m far more concerned about my kids having access to a medicine cabinet than having access to a joint or a liquor cabinet. Marijuana, when consumed independently, has never been linked to a single death.”
Mothers like Corry are drawn to marijuana regulation as part of a larger appeal that encourages the use of harm reduction to more pragmatically deal with substance abuse. Examples of harm reduction include providing designated drivers for drinkers and clean needles for heroin addicts.
Concerned moms may be moved to action by studies such as the Teen Survey, conducted by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia. This year, there was a 37 percent increase in teens who said pot is easier to buy than cigarettes, beer or prescription drugs. Nearly one-quarter said they can get weed within the hour.
Those stats matter to women. In light of this, children and family will be included in the mission statement of the Women’s Alliance, a group NORML will launch next year. The coordinator, Sabrina Fendrick, plans to include mention of how current marijuana policy undermines the American family and sends mixed messages to young people.
An economic savior?
The harm reduction approach extends itself from families and children to our ailing economy. With the largest economic recession since the Great Depression firmly in place, more people see the benefits of taxing and regulating marijuana for adults.
Economist Jeffrey Miron has calculated that, assuming a national market of about $13 billion annually, legalization would reap state and federal governments about $7 billion each year in extra tax revenues and save about $13.5 billion in law enforcement costs.
This kind of math attracts libertarian support, ranging from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California who recently called for an open discussion on legalization, to Rep. Ron Paul, a physician and Republican congressman from Texas, who has long advocated it.
The problem with a fiscal approach, however, might be that it could have more traction as a top-down rather than a bottom-up movement. Deborah Small, a drug reform veteran and founder of Break the Chains, a group that engages communities of color around drug reform policy, believes the reason the medical marijuana movement has been so successful is that its female leaders have made it a “real grassroots movement.”
“Male-dominated libertarian philosophy and money has dominated” the general marijuana reform movement, Small says, and “there’s a struggle in this next stage to see whether the movement will be driven by people with a lot of money or people on the ground — or if they can agree to work together.”
Perhaps male drug reform leaders can learn from the ladies. Jessica Corry, the GOP mom from Denver, turns the economic discussion back to the home: “It’s generational child abuse to waste billions of dollars every year on marijuana prohibition.”
Mikki Norris, the California marijuana activist, observed gender-specific focus groups in Oakland on Measure Z, a 2004 ballot initiative that ultimately succeeded in making marijuana the lowest law enforcement priority. She heard the women’s group speaking on behalf of their children — “they wanted money for their kids’ education and they didn’t want kids arrested for pot.” Men, on the other hand, were more worried about children getting involved with drugs, she told me.
Norris said, “I just think women have a better grasp of home economics,” or what’s really important in a family.
Today’s economic climate lends itself to easy parallels with the fight to repeal Prohibition in the 1920s, which was also framed as a family issue. Harry Levine, the sociologist, reminded me of Pauline Sabin, a high-society Chicago feminist who organized women in the fight to repeal the 18th Amendment.
“Sabin said that because of the violence, the corruption, the bootleggers, and all the resulting lost tax revenue, that alcohol undermined the home and therefore women should speak out for themselves and children,” Levine said.
Many point to the moment when women joined the fight against Prohibition as the tipping point for the ultimate success of the movement.
Women as a new force
The women in the marijuana reform movement have different reasons for trumpeting policy change. Some see cannabis as a medicinal wonder drug, others see tangible — and sensible — socio-economic benefits to taxing and regulating it.
Trends indicate that as more states legalize the use of cannabis for medical purposes, more people will discover first-hand that legalization of marijuana does not equate with anarchy and instead with more effective control of a substance so readily available to Americans — and American kids — across the country.
And as Californians may next year, Americans will soon be exposed to the choice between regulating marijuana for adult use or continuing a failed drug war that incarcerates 850,000 people a year — tearing apart families, ruining futures, and siphoning from public funds that might otherwise benefit the next generation. All this for a relatively mild psychotropic that at least a third of us has tried.
As the recession continues to unravel communities across the country, the economic incentive to end this drug war will affect the opinions of many who might never otherwise have considered legalization. The time may very well be now.
Similar to the prohibition of alcohol in the early twentieth century, what we have today is a federal policy that is at odds with public opinion. It is a policy without a plurality of citizen supporters.
And many women are at the vanguard of the movement that recognizes this and is fighting for change.
Lawrence Wilkerson: Obama’s campaign rhetoric and his generals put him in a corner on Afghanistan
Bio
Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired United States Army soldier and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson is an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary where he teaches courses on US national security. He also instructs a senior seminar in the Honors Department at the George Washington University entitled “National Security Decision Making.”
The remaining money could be put into a jobs scheme to tackle unemployment [EPA]
The second instalment of the United States’ bank rescue programme is going to cost $200bn less than first estimated, a treasury official has said.
The official’s comments, reported on Monday, mean the administration believes the cost of the bailout’s final stage will be at most $141bn, sharply down from its August estimate of $341bn.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the new projection has not yet been presented to congress, said the reduced estimate reflected faster repayments by big banks and less spending on some of the programmes.
Barack Obama, the US president, is expected to raise the idea of using the repaid funds for a jobs programme aimed at tackling the high unemployment in the US.
Deficit fears
That idea is likely to run into opposition from Republicans, many of whom are opposed to spending the remaining funds on a jobs bill and would rather see it used to lessen the budget deficit.
The deficit for the 2009 budget year, which ended in September, hit a record $1.4 trillion and the administration has projected a slightly higher deficit for the current year.
The US congress authorised $700bn for the financial rescue programme, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Programme (TARP) in October 2008, at the height of the worst financial crisis to hit the country since the 1930s.
The first $350bn were released on in October, 2008, and congress voted to approve the release of the final $350bn in January this year.
Banks have already repaid about $70bn in support they have received from the bailout fund, and Bank of America recently announced it was returning the $45bn in government support it had received.
The summit began with a filmed plea from children, and a welcome from Denmark’s PM
Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen has described the UN climate summit in Copenhagen as an “opportunity the world cannot afford to miss”.
Opening the two-week conference in the Danish capital, he told delegates from 192 countries a “strong and ambitious climate change agreement” was needed.
About 100 leaders are to attend the meeting, which is intended to supplant the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
The UN says an unprecedented number of countries have promised emissions cuts.
AT THE SCENE
Richard Black, BBC environment correspondent
Even before the talks officially opened, fault lines between the various blocs here appeared to be widening.
Although UN climate convention head Yvo de Boer said things were in “excellent shape”, with more countries than ever before proposing emission cuts, two big questions hang over these proposals: will they be acceptable to the developing world, and are they enough to prevent “dangerous” climate change?
At this stage, the answers appear to be “no” and “maybe”. The UN Environment Programme calculates that cuts on the table are nearly enough if every country turns its most ambitious pledges into action.
But other analyses suggest there is still a significant gap between what scientists say is necessary and what is on offer politically.
That is of great concern to governments that feel themselves on the “front line” of climate impacts.
Mr Rasmussen told delegates that the world was looking to the conference to safeguard humanity.
“For the next two weeks,” he said, “Copenhagen will be Hopenhagen. By the end, we must be able to deliver back to the world what was granted us here today: hope for a better future.”
Later, Rajendra Pachauri, who heads the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), criticised the “climategate” affair – the recent publication of e-mails among scientists assessing global warming at Britain’s University of East Anglia.
He said the breaches showed “that some would go to the extent of carrying out illegal acts, perhaps in an attempt to discredit the IPCC”.
On Sunday, UN climate convention head Yvo de Boer expressed optimism about cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
“Never in 17 years of climate negotiations have so many different countries made so many pledges,” he told the BBC.
Tougher targets?
Mr de Boer said offers of finance for clean technology for poor countries were also coming through and that talks were progressing on a long-term vision of massive carbon cuts by 2050.
At the deal’s heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world
Jointly written editorial in 56 newspapers in 45 countries
On Monday, South Africa became the latest country to make an offer – saying it would cut by one-third the growth of its carbon emissions over the next decade, subject to getting more funding and technological help from wealthier countries.
In July, the G8 bloc of industrialised countries and some major developing countries adopted a target of keeping the global average temperature rise since pre-industrial times to 2C.
However now the G77/China bloc – which speaks on behalf of developing countries – is discussing whether to demand a much tougher target of 1.5C
A number of African delegations are backing the argument made by small island states that 2C will bring major impacts to their countries.
BBC environment correspondent Richard Black says this would raise a huge obstacle, because none of the industrialised countries have put forward emission cuts in the range that would be required to meet a 1.5C target.
The African Union has said industrialised countries must help poor ones pay for the transition to cleaner economies – and has threatened to walk out of the talks if it does not get what it wants.
Tougher targets?
Meanwhile, a new poll commissioned by the BBC suggests that public concern over climate change is growing across the world.
In the survey, by Globescan, 64% of people questioned said that they considered global warming a very serious problem – up 20% from a 1998 poll.
COPENHAGEN TALKS
Begin 7 December
To discuss emissions targets and financial measures to combat climate change
To stress the importance of the summit, 56 newspapers in 45 countries are publishing the same editorial on Monday, warning that climate change will “ravage our planet” unless action is agreed, the London-based Guardian reported.
The editorial – to be published in 20 languages – has been thrashed out by editors ahead of the Copenhagen talks, the newspaper said.
“At the deal’s heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world,” the editorial says.
Environmental activists are planning to hold protests in Copenhagen and around the world on 12 December to encourage delegates to reach the strongest possible deal.
//
Any agreement made at Copenhagen is intended to supplant the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which expires in 2012.
World leaders who have pledged to attend include US President Barack Obama, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
The main areas for discussion include:
Targets to curb greenhouse gas emissions, in particular by developed countries
Financial support for mitigation of and adaptation to climate change by developing countries
A carbon trading scheme aimed at ending the destruction of the world’s forests by 2030
Outlining his ambitions for the summit, Mr de Boer said: “I think what we will see coming out of Copenhagen is a package of decisions that define a long-term goal.
“Then, first of all, what will rich countries do to reduce their emissions. Secondly, what will major developing countries do to limit the growth of their emissions and thirdly prompt finance that will allow developing countries to adapt to the impacts of climate change.”
PROVIDENCE –– Two young men were shot to death on a downtown street early Sunday morning and the brother of one of the victims was critically wounded, the police said.
The shootings occurred at about 2:30 a.m. on Dorrance Street in front of the J. Joseph Garrahy Judicial Complex.
All three victims were from Boston, said Providence Police Chief Dean M. Esserman.
Providence police Detective Capt. James Desmarais identified the dead as Domingo Ortiz, 21, of Boston’s Dorchester section, and David Thomas, 22, from Boston’s Mattapan section, an Army private on leave from Georgia.
The survivor, Dwaynne Thomas, 18, of Boston’s Mattapan section, brother of David Thomas, was wounded and taken to Rhode Island Hospital, where he underwent surgery and was listed in critical condition as of midday, Desmarais said.
Later in the day, Esserman said Thomas was conscious though sedated. “I talked to him and to his father,” Esserman said.
Esserman also contacted the Boston Police Department. That agency sent detectives to Providence Sunday, where they worked throughout the day “in support of the Providence police investigation,” Esserman said.
As of late Sunday afternoon, no arrests had been made. Further details of the shooting were not disclosed, though Esserman said, “We think we have a . . . good handle” on what happened.
Responding to a 911 distress call, the police found a car — a Mazda 6 — on Dorrance Street that had been “fired into,” Desmarais said.
The car was in front of the courthouse, between Friendship and Clifford Streets, pointed south, toward Allens Avenue, he said.
Inside the car, the police found two men — later identified as Ortiz and David Thomas — who had suffered gunshot wounds, Desmarais said. They were pronounced dead at the scene, he said.
The police found a third young man, later identified as Dwaynne Thomas, outside the car. He, too, had been shot.
All three were in the car when the vehicle was fired upon, Desmarais said.
Dwaynne Thomas, though wounded, managed to leave the vehicle and approach a nearby car to ask for help, Desmarais said.
On sidewalks and at other locations in front of the courthouse Sunday afternoon, lengths of yellow police tape marked where the shooting occurred.
Desmarais declined to say what might have sparked the shooting, but he said it was not gang-related. “There’s no indication of anything gang-wise whatsoever,” he said.
The shooting occurred just after a number of nightclubs in the neighborhood were closing up, Desmarais said.
The victims were “probably” in Providence to visit one or more clubs, Desmarais said, but he declined to elaborate.
Some people who were in the area of the shooting when it occurred “are being questioned,” Desmarais said.
He declined to provide other details of the shooting.
The car was registered in Georgia, Desmarais said.
Asked whether any of the victims had a criminal record, Desmarais replied, “One subject has had contact” with police in Massachusetts. He declined to elaborate.
Esserman said he was at the scene of the shooting in the early hours, and briefed Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline about the case several times throughout the day. Esserman said he also worked with detectives and met with victims’ family members later in the day.
The two deaths represented the city’s 19th and 20th homicides so far this year.
Desmarais said that anyone with information about the shooting should call the Providence police at (401) 243-6406.
PROVIDENCE — Two city police officers have been put on administrative duty as the department investigates a reported beating of an unarmed suspect on Oct. 20, Chief Dean M. Esserman announced Monday evening.
The statement — released by e-mail from Mayor David N. Cicilline’s spokeswoman — does not name the officers.
But lawyer Alberto Aponte Cardona, who represents 20-year-old Luis Mendonca of Pawtucket, has said the officer who struck Mendonca repeatedly is Detective Robert R. DeCarlo.
Aponte Cardona said he welcomed the news but would like to see more done.
“It’s our position that a crime was committed and administrative [duty] is just not enough,” he said, adding, “What we really want to see is criminal action taken.”
“If it was the other way around, the kid would be looking at some severe charges,” he said.
The incident — which was caught on a surveillance video — remains under investigation by the Providence police internal affairs unit and the state attorney general’s office.
Aponte Cardona said a copy of the video was also forwarded to the FBI.
A spokeswoman for the FBI said she was aware of the incident, but could not confirm or deny if the federal agency was investigating civil-rights violations.
Esserman declined further comment.
According to testimony in District Court, Providence, Mendonca was stopped by the Rhode Island School of Design police at about 7:20 p.m. near Hemenway’s Restaurant on South Main Street after a report of an attempted trespass at a university dormitory at 15 Westminster St.
The university police officers said Mendonca resisted arrest and assaulted the two officers. He was sentenced Friday to one year of probation and one year suspended on each of the simple-assault charges.
He was also sentenced to 90 days in jail for violating probation on an unrelated shoplifting conviction.
The resisting-arrest charge was dropped.
The surveillance video, which has no sound, shows an apparently unarmed and handcuffed Mendonca being dragged from under a car into the center of a parking lot off Benefit Street on the city’s East Side by a group of police officers, including the Providence officers who had responded to the scene.
Mendonca is then seen being kicked and beaten with a flashlight.
The officers are then seen dragging him up a flight of stairs leading to Benefit Street.
WASHINGTON — State labor officials on Monday urged Congress to renew emergency jobless benefits that have been available through economic stimulus funds, but are due to expire this month.
One million workers could lose their benefits in January without the extension, according to a new report on the stimulus act unemployment benefits, written by several labor advocacy groups.
“This is a lifeline,” said Jim Garner, the secretary of the Kansas Department of Labor.
Garner was one of eight state labor officials who appeared at a news conference alongside labor advocates. Though last week’s economic report showed hopeful signs, “We are facing a real catastrophe,” said Christine Owens, the executive director of the National Employment Law Project, one of the co-authors of the report.
Backers of renewing the stimulus act unemployment assistance said it helped families pay for mortgages and other bills and kept money circulating into the economy.
“We stop now, we risk stalling the nascent recovery,” said Heather Boushey, an economist with the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy organization and a co-author of the report.
The unemployment rate dropped slightly last week, to 10 percent, but more than 15 million people remain out of work.
Basic unemployment insurance provides up to 26 weeks of benefits at an average rate of about $284 a week.
The stimulus added as much as a year’s worth of extended aid, depending upon a state’s unemployment rate. It also provided an additional $25 boost in weekly assistance, a health insurance subsidy and a break on federal income taxes. Renewing the programs would cost about $100 billion.
State labor officials and others said they’re hopeful that Congress will act. Though the Senate is bogged down on health care, Congress still must pass an omnibus spending bill to fund the government, which could provide a vehicle for the extended benefits renewal, they said.
Without the extension, nearly 20,000 jobless workers in Missouri, for instance, whose basic unemployment benefits run out this month, would enter 2010 without extended assistance, according to the report.
Kansas, however, would be one of a dozen states forced to dip into their coffers to maintain some extended benefits.
That’s because they signed onto an optional federal program, separate from the stimulus act, for states with high unemployment where the federal and state governments equally shared the costs of extending unemployment benefits.
Under the stimulus program, though, the federal government paid the entire cost. If that money is no longer available, Kansas would still be obligated to pay its share.
Workers exhausting regular state benefits
State ……………. No. of workers
Alabama ………….. 15,539
Alaska …………… 0
Arizona ………….. 38,417
Arkansas …………. 12,213
California ……….. 233,464
Colorado …………. 25,308
Connecticut ………. 0
Delaware …………. 3,928
District of Columbia . 5,794
Florida ………….. 117,324
Georgia ………….. 52,618
Hawaii …………… 5,125
Idaho ……………. 7,563
Illinois …………. 66,217
Indiana ………….. 39,685
Iowa …………….. 10,716
Kansas …………… 0
Kentucky …………. 13,252
Louisiana ………… 13,330
Maine ……………. 4,119
Maryland …………. 18,600
Massachusetts …….. 40,819
Michigan …………. 49,331
Minnesota ………… 0
Mississippi ………. 9,518
Missouri …………. 19,620
Montana ………….. 2,591
Nebraska …………. 6,732
Nevada …………… 0
New Hampshire …….. 0
New Jersey ……….. 0
New Mexico ……….. 0
New York …………. 87,093
North Carolina ……. 0
North Dakota ……… 1,416
Ohio …………….. 40,371
Oklahoma …………. 11,257
Oregon …………… 0
Pennsylvania ……… 0
Rhode Island ……… 0
South Carolina ……. 27,223
South Dakota ……… 541
Tennessee ………… 28,115
Texas ……………. 86,640
Utah …………….. 9,402
Vermont ………….. 0
Virginia …………. 24,195
Washington ……….. 0
West Virginia …….. 4,289
Wisconsin ………… 29,319
Wyoming ………….. 2,645
United States …….. 1,164,330
States with “0″ workers listed in the table above have the Extended Benefits program in place, which is funded 50 percent by the states after the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act expires
Phyllis Bennis: Obama said that there was no military solution, but that’s all he’s really offering
Afghan war not about self-defence
Phyllis Bennis Pt2: Afghan people must fight the Taliban and the warlords, US occupation makes it worse
Bio
Phyllis Bennis is a Senior Analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC. She is the author of Before and After: US Foreign Policy and the September 11 Crisis , Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power. and Understanding the US-Iran Crisis: A Primer.
Bombs go off in quick succession across Iraqi capital, wounding more than 190 people
Iraq today suffered one of its worst days of violence this year as insurgents struck government buildings in Baghdad, killing at least 112 people and injuring up to 197.The explosions happened within minutes of each other, with police saying there could have been as many as four or five. Insurgents, who included suicide bombers, detonated powerful explosives near the labour ministry building, a court complex near the Iraqi-protected Green Zone and the new site of the finance ministry after its previous building was destroyed in attacks in August.
An interior ministry official said at least 99 people were killed and 192 injured in those three assaults.
“We had entered a shop seconds before the blast, the ceiling caved in on us, and we lost consciousness. Then I heard screams and sirens all around,” Mohammed Abdul Ridha, one of the 197 wounded in the blasts, told Reuters.
About an hour before those blasts, a suicide car bomber struck a police patrol in the mostly Sunni district of Dora in southern Baghdad, killing at least three police officers and one civilian, and injuring five people.
The explosions underlined the precarious nature of security in Baghdad ahead of an auction of oilfield contracts at the weekend and with elections due in February. Iraqi and US military officials fear that insurgents will step up their attacks to weaken the authority of Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, ahead of elections that are meant to showcase Iraq’s return to political stability.
Although violence has declined sharply recently – the health ministry last month reported the lowest monthly death toll of civilians in six and a half years – insurgents continue to target Iraqi security forces and civilians.
That attack, and a similar bombing in August, marked a change of tactics. Rather than frequent small-scale attacks against soft targets, such as markets or mosques, insurgent groups have recently carried out far more spectacular and lethal attacks against heavily defended government buildings.
Iraqi authorities blamed the October attacks on loyalists to Saddam Hussein’s banned Ba’athist party, and paraded on national television three suspects who gave what officials termed confessions. But there are questions over whether Iraqi leaders are seeking to divert attention from a possible resurgence of Sunni insurgency led by al-Qaida in Iraq. A rise in violence could undermine the government’s claims that it can provide security without the help of US troops.
On Sunday, Iraqi MPs approved plans to hold parliamentary elections early next year, seen as an important step towards political reconciliation and easing the withdrawal of US troops. The vote, during an emergency session, followed marathon talks to break an impasse over balloting provisions that would satisfy the country’s rival groups.
In an attack yesterday, at least eight people died in an explosion outside a primary school in a Shia district of Baghdad yesterday. Six children, aged between six and 12, were among the dead.
Nigeria’s police have faced strong criticism from human rights groups for carrying out extrajudicial and arbitrary killings.
Amnesty international is presenting the results of a three-year investigation on Wednesday, in which they will describe the level of police killings as shocking.
The BBC has visited the morgue and taken photographs. The images are disturbing.
They show piles of young men, lying on top of one another and strewn about on tables and floors.
In places the corpses are stacked four or five deep.
Officers killed
Records show 75 corpses were delivered to the morgue by police between June and 26 November this year.
Some of the bodies were piled on top of each other
The Chief Medical Director of the hospital, Dr Anthony Mbah, says his staff were forced to carry out a mass burial of between 70 and 80 bodies some weeks ago.
He says that another mass burial is planned to take place soon.
Seven of those in the morgue were arrested, accused of kidnapping, and paraded alive in front of the media in early September.
But their names appear in the morgue register – on 15 and 16 of September.
Police Commissioner Zarewa told the BBC he was unaware of the number of young men lying dead in the morgue.
He says his officers are forced to engage armed robbers in gunfights and that many police officers are also killed.
He insists that his police force operate within the law.
Half-baked Homeland Security is spending millions to develop sensors capable of detecting a person’s level of ‘malintent’ as a counter-terrorism tool.
In the sci-fi thriller Minority Report, Tom Cruise plays a D.C. police detective, circa 2054, in the department of “pre-crime,” an experimental law enforcement unit whose mission — to hunt down criminals before they strike — relies on the psychic visions of mutant “pre-cogs” (short for precognition) who can see the future. It may be futuristic Hollywood fantasy, but the underlying premise — that we can predict (if not see) a person’s sinister plans before they follow through — is already here.
This past February, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) awarded a one-year, $2.6 million grant to the Cambridge, MA.-based Charles Stark Draper Laboratory to develop computerized sensors capable of detecting a person’s level of “malintent” — or intention to do harm. It’s only the most recent of numerous contracts awarded to Draper and assorted research outfits by the U.S. government over the past few years under the auspices of a project called “Future Attribute Screening Technologies,” or FAST. It’s the next wave of behavior surveillance from DHS and taxpayers have paid some $20 million on it so far.
Conceived as a cutting-edge counter-terrorism tool, the FAST program will ostensibly detect subjects’ bad intentions by monitoring their physiological characteristics, particularly those associated with fear and anxiety. It’s part of a broader “initiative to develop innovative, non-invasive technologies to screen people at security checkpoints,” according to DHS.
The “non-invasive” claim might be a bit of a stretch. A DHS report issued last December outlined some of the possible technological features of FAST, which include “a remote cardiovascular and respiratory sensor” to measure “heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration rate, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia,” a “remote eye tracker” that “uses a camera and processing software to track the position and gaze of the eyes (and, in some instances, the entire head),” “thermal cameras that provide detailed information on the changes in the thermal properties of the skin in the face,” and “a high resolution video that allows for highly detailed images of the face and body … and an audio system for analyzing human voice for pitch change.”
Ultimately, all of these components would be combined to take the form of a “prototypical mobile suite (FAST M2) … used to increase the accuracy and validity of identifying persons with malintent.”
Coupled with the Transportation Security Administration’s Behavior Detection Officers, 3,000 of whom are already scrutinizing travelers’ expressions and body language at airports and travel hubs nationwide, DHS officials say that FAST will add a potentially lifesaving layer of security to prevent another terrorist attack. “There’s only so much you can see with the naked eye,” DHS spokesperson John Verrico told AlterNet. “We can’t see somebody’s heart rate…. We may be able to see movements of the eye and changes in dilation of the pupil, but will those give us enough [information] to make a determination as to what we’re really seeing?”
Ideally, Verrico says, FAST mobile units would be used for security, not just at airports, but at “any sort of a large-scale event,” including sporting events or political rallies. (“When the Pope visited Washington D.C.,” he says, “it would have been nice to have something like this at the entrance of the stadium.”)
“Basically,” says Verrico, “we’re looking to give the security folks just some more tools that will help to add to their toolbox.”
If you think eye scanners and thermal cameras sound like the twisted props of some Orwellian dystopia, you’re not alone. FAST may be years from being operational, but civil libertarians have already raised concerns over its implications.
“We think that you have an inherent privacy right to your bodily metabolic functions,” Jay Stanley, director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty program told AlterNet. “Just because somebody can build some high-tech piece of equipment that can detect your pulse and perspiration and breathing and heart rate, that doesn’t mean that it should be open season to detect that on anybody without suspicion.”
Besides, he says, the FAST program is based on “the same old pseudo-scientific baloney that we’ve seen in so many other areas. As far as I can tell, there’s very little science that establishes the efficacy of this kind of thing. And there probably never will be.”
Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and bestselling author who has been one of the most vociferous critics of such new high-tech DHS initiatives, concurs. In fact, he says, all the evidence suggests the opposite. “The problem is the false positives,” he says.
Beyond the fact that ordinary travelers are likely to exhibit many of the symptoms supposedly indicative of malintent (how many people run to catch a plane and end up overheated and out of breath?), compare the rarity of terrorist attacks with the millions of travelers who pass through a security checkpoint. Statistically, Schneier argues, it’s a fool’s errand. “If you run the math, you get several million false positives for every real attack you find. So it ends up being as useless as picking people randomly. If you’re going to spend money on something, you can spend money on dice — it’s cheaper. And equally as effective.”
‘The Theory of Malintent’
The FAST program, and others like it, have been in the works for a few years. In 2007, New Scientistreported on a DHS project called Project Hostile Intent, which “aims to identify facial expressions, gait, blood pressure, pulse and perspiration rates that are characteristic of hostility or the desire to deceive.” Under the purview of DHS’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA), the project would “include heart rate and breathing sensors, infrared light, laser, video, audio and eye tracking.”
According to New Scientist, “PHI got quietly under way on 9 July, when HSARPA issued a ‘request for information’ in which it asked security companies and U.S. government labs to suggest technologies that could be used to achieve the project’s aims. It hopes to test them at a handful of airports, borders and ports as early as 2010 and to deploy the system at all points of entry to the U.S. by 2012.”
Subsequent news reports have conflated Project Hostile Intent and FAST, claiming that the latter is the same program, under a new name. But Verrico says this is incorrect. They are two separate programs, both seeking to “find the things that we can’t see with the naked eye.”
FAST was inspired by what DHS officials refer to as the “Theory of Malintent.” Don’t bother Googling it; it seems to exist primarily in relation to FAST, apparently pioneered in the service of the program. According to Verrico, the theory was — and continues to be — developed by Dr. Dan Martin, an adviser to the program, who posits that one can identify specific physiological cues that are diagnostic of malintent. Currently, Verrico says, researchers are trying to devise an algorithm that can differentiate between people whose heart rate is up because they are, say, afraid of flying, and those who are potential terrorists about to carry out some sort of attack. Verrico says they are searching for the “combination of signs that will tell us the difference between somebody who’s just stressed or out of breath or overheated or whatever … and somebody who really is planning to do something nasty.” But can such (admittedly common) variables really be distilled into an equation and fed into a machine?
Stanley argues that it is misguided to pour so much faith into “this idea that everything can be reduced to machinery and numbers.” He says it shows naivete on the part of government officials about the limits of technology. He also blames it on “vendors pushing expensive new products.” In the search for the next cutting-edge counter-terrorism tool, DHS has thrown millions of dollars at scientists purporting to be developing the Next Big Thing in security technology. As private military contractors know, providing security equals big bucks.
“I’ve heard it called the ‘Security Industrial Complex,’” says Schneier. “There’s money to be made and there are people out there who are going to say it can be done. And, yeah, it’s techie and sexy and sounds good.”
Schneier, who travels around the world speaking about the intersection of security and technology, says this has been especially true since 2001. “After 9/11 the money faucets turned on. And anybody with any half-baked security idea got funded.”
Technology v. Fourth Amendment
It will probably be years before FAST is implemented. “It’s sort of at the ‘gee whiz’ stage,” says Stanley. The technology has only been tested using human subjects twice; once last year, at the Prince George’s County Equestrian Center in Upper Marlboro, MD, and another time this summer at Draper Labs.
According to Verrico, the demonstrations were partly intended to test the theories behind FAST, “but were mostly done to demonstrate the system to government observers and the media.”
“We can’t go into too much detail on the laboratory protocol,” he says, “but basically, participants were told they were going to attend a special event. Some of them were asked to create some sort of disturbance. As they were entering the facility, they were asked a series of questions while being observed by the various sensors. The earlier tests were done to determine whether the sensors could detect the physiological signs we were looking for and to validate their accuracy. For example, some people wore contact heart monitors and readings were compared to those picked up by the remote sensor.”
Verrico is quick to clarify that none of the study’s participants had their personal data stored; last December DHS issued an official Privacy Impact Statement asserting that subjects would have their privacy vigorously protected.
As for broader privacy concerns about the program itself, Verrico denies there’s a problem. “We’re not X-raying you,” he says. Besides, “these are things that you are already presenting. Your body temperature is what it is. The fluctuations on your skin are what they are. Your heart rate is what it is. All we’re doing is trying to see it a little better.”
But when similar logic was presented to the Supreme Court, in Kyllo v. United States a few years back, the justices were unconvinced that this was not a violation of the Fourth Amendment. In that case, federal agents used a thermal imaging device in order to detect an unusual level of heat emanating from the home of an Oregon man named Danny Lee Kyllo. According to authorities, there was an unusually high level of heat radiating from Kyllo’s garage, as compared with the rest of the house, suggesting that there were high-intensity lamps inside, of the type used to grow marijuana. On these grounds, federal agents searched the house, uncovering more than 100 marijuana plants; a crime for which Kyllo was subsequently convicted. Kyllo’s appeal reached the Supreme Court, and in 2001, the justices ruled 5 to 4 in his favor.
“It would be foolish to contend that the degree of privacy secured to citizens by the Fourth Amendment has been entirely unaffected by the advance of technology,” Judge Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority. “The question we confront today is what limits there are upon this power of technology to shrink the realm of guaranteed privacy.”
‘We Don’t Live in a Police State’
Existing precursors to FAST, like the TSA’s SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Technique) program, have so far had pretty dismal results. As I reported last month, in 2008 alone, TSA’s Behavior Detection Officers across the country pulled 98,805 passengers aside for additional screenings, out of whom only 813 were eventually arrested. SPOT’s defenders argue that at least this means we are catching “bad guys” — as Dr. Paul Ekman, who helped pioneer the program told AlterNet, “I would think that the American public would not feel badly that they are catching money or drug smugglers, or wanted felons for serious crimes” — but Bruce Schneier calls this “ridiculous.”
“I can just invent a program where I arrest one in every ten people in the street,” he says. “I guarantee you I’m gonna catch bad guys. I mean, shoot, how about we arrest everybody whose name starts with G?”
“We don’t live in a police state,” says Schneier, “so be careful of the logic, ‘Well, you know, we catch some bad guys.’”
Jay Stanley hopes the FAST machinery will never get off the ground. “But it’s possible that this kind of thing could be perceived as blunderingly effective, even though it’s violating privacy rights and it could catch people who are nervous for other reasons,” he warns. “The authorities could push to expand it and that’s a very troublesome notion. I think that only concerned citizens making their voices heard could stop it if things turn out this way.”
“I think maybe we need more English majors in the Department of Homeland Security,” he jokes, “because each person is like a walking War and Peace: We all have complicated lives that could be written into thousand-page novels. The idea that somebody could take a snapshot of our breathing rate and decide that, of all the possible sources of human stress and excitement, that it is a terrorist attack we’re plotting is simply absurd.”
ACTION FROM BELOW: Climate camp activists protest the coal-fired Hazelwood Power Station Sept. 12 in Australia. PHOTO: FLICKR.COM/HAZELWOOD2009
Hundreds of climate activists swarmed down a hill toward Britain’s largest coal-burning power plant Oct. 17 with the intention of shutting it down. Within minutes, dozens had broken through the perimeter fence, erected specifically for this protest, and entered the site, known as Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station. But 650 police officers rapidly secured the breach and over the next six hours battled about 300 activists determined to topple other sections of the fence.
While a few broke through again to block the main gates and occupy railway tracks, many were injured by police batons or dog bites. By the next day, 57 arrests had been made without a single service interruption at the plant.
Nonetheless, organizers of the event — dubbed the Great Climate Swoop — considered their effort a “massive success.” In a press statement, Natasha Blair, from Camp for Climate Action, said, “We’ve achieved what we came here to do: to show that coal has no future and there is a growing movement which is prepared to take action on climate change.”
British climate activists have been stressing this message for a few years now. In fact, the storming of Ratcliffe came on the heels of a recent announcement by German energy corporation E.ON that it was shelving plans to build Britain’s first new coal-fired power station in 30 years. Although the company blamed the recession, climate activists believe their work was a deciding factor.
Groups like the anarchist-influenced Camp for Climate Action, known for its weeklong gatherings of mostly young people that end in direct action, and the suffragette- inspired Climate Rush have worked with international fixtures like Greenpeace since 2007 to wage a campaign against E.ON. They’ve shut down a coal conveyer belt, blockaded company headquarters in Nottingham, occupied the roof of the PR firm it employs and won a major criminal trial using climate change as a legal defense.
Due to such widespread and effective activism, many see Britain as a climate movement leader. British weekly political magazine The New Statesman recently said, “Climate change activism is more developed in this country than anywhere else in the world.”
Some argue, however, that this perception might be different if developing countries had the same media access as the industrialized world. International groups like Rising Tide and Rainforest Action Network (RAN) continually stress climate organizing by indigenous communities and people of color.
The Great Climate Swoop got more coverage than an even larger action in Thailand last month, which saw 4,000 people in the streets outside the U.N. Climate Talks in Bangkok. Many had come from as far away as Indonesia, Bangladesh and the Philippines.
“Climate change should always be looked at as a justice issue,” said RAN’s Joshua Kahn Russell. Since its founding in 1985, RAN has lent its expertise in finance campaigning — going after banks that invest in projects like rainforest destruction — to native communities fighting on the frontlines.
“We have no illusion that we’re a mostly white NGO from the States,” he said. “We consider ourselves justice-minded climate activists, as opposed to climate justice activists.”
The difference, according to Kahn Russell, is that climate justice groups are led by people affected by issues of class and race. Their work and perspectives have generally been overlooked in the West, perhaps at the peril of building a more cohesive climate movement.
“Even though the issue is beginning to get that kind of force behind it,” said Abigail Singer, an organizer with the Bay Area’s Rising Tide North America, “it needs to be framed more for regular people and folks who tend to be more marginalized.”
Instead, the number of Americans concerned by global warming is dropping. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that only 57 percent “believe there is strong scientific evidence the Earth has gotten hotter over the past few decades.”
A CONTINENT ON FIRE
There is one rich nation, however, that is being forced to accept this reality. Australia is in the midst of an epic drought that could cause its fifth largest city, Adelaide, to run out of drinking water next year. It has also suffered dust storms, fires, cyclones and bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef — all of which scientists have linked to global warming.
Australia has become a hotbed of climate activism, mainly against the coal industry, which is responsible for nearly 50 percent of Australia’s energy and has made it the world’s leading exporter. According to Sourcewatch.org, which tracks nonviolent direct actions against the coal industry, Australians have waged at least a dozen actions in the last year alone, far outpacing the U.K.
Greenpeace has been at the forefront, temporarily shutting down Hazelwood Power Station, one of the world’s worst polluting coal plants, several times. Last month Australia’s first Climate Camp drew 500 people to the country’s oldest coal mine in an effort to block expansion.
THE U.S. AWAKENS
Such mass direct action has only recently surfaced in the United States, where climate activists have relied more on awareness campaigns and symbolic actions. Last March 2 in Washington, D.C., 2,500 people blocked the entrances to the Capitol Power Plant for more than four hours in what organizers called “the largest mass civil disobedience for the climate in U.S. history.”
Many viewed the action as a success because congressional leaders announced that the plant would switch from coal to natural gas, a marginally cleaner fuel. But other activists blamed the organizers for accepting a weak compromise and not taking stronger action while they had the numbers.
“Our intention was to reach out and engage people who did not consider themselves activists and create a positive experience,” said organizer Kahn Russell. “But maybe we shouldn’t have done as much hand-holding.”
Three weeks after the Capital Climate Action, some 200 Kansas residents rallied outside the statehouse in Topeka to protest two proposed new coal plants in the western part of the state. In April, 44 were arrested protesting Duke Energy’s plans to add coal-burning capabilities to its Cliffside plant in Charlotte, N.C.
A number of small groups in Appalachia are seeking to abolish mountaintop removal coal mining — a highly destructive practice that levels mountains and poisons the air, land and drinking water.
“It’s not about protesting the use of coal or about ending the use of coal,” said Mike Roselle, a longtime environmental activist, who helped found radical environmental groups like Earth First! and the Ruckus society and now heads Climate Ground Zero (CGZ). “Coal is really just a symbol of what we have to do with all the fossil fuels, and if we can’t win on mountaintop removal, then there’s very little hope that anything can be done.”
CGZ members say a bottom-up approach can effectively build public support.
“We’re very cognizant of the fact that we’re a part of the broader climate movement,” said Mathew Louis-Rosenberg, an organizer with CGZ. “We believe this issue is the most powerful tool to use against coal. It’s not an invisible gas and a bunch of science that people don’t really understand. … People can look at a mountaintop removal site and go, ‘Oh my God, that’s terrible.’”
Since February, CGZ, has led 16 nonviolent direct actions — with a small number of locals and former underground miners — in the Coal River Valley of West Virginia, resulting in 116 arrests. According to Sourcewatch.org, nearly a third of all nonviolent direct actions against coal have been waged by mountaintop removal activists.
One of the most dramatic involved the arrest of 29 people in late June, including NASA’s top climatologist Dr. James Hansen, the first scientist to warn Congress of the dangers of climate change 20 years ago.
Hansen has come to the aid of activists standing trial, like the ones in Britain who won their case, and has endorsed perhaps the most far-reaching climate campaign yet, known as 350.org.
Started in 2007 by Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, the first book on global warming for a general audience, 350.org attempts to bring the research of Hansen and his colleagues to the mainstream. Using thousands of years of reconstructed climate data and computer simulations, these scientists determined that the safe upper limit of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is 350 parts per million (ppm). Right now it’s at 383 ppm, about 100 ppm greater than before the Industrial Revolution.
In order to get to 350 ppm by 2100, the world will have to completely decarbonize by 2050. To reach 350, we need to produce net negative emissions, which will require large-scale sequestration technologies that go far beyond reforestation.
Almost everyone, including scientists and activists, agrees that effecting such a transformation requires a global treaty with binding commitments to reduce emissions and policies that make renewable technology affordable and prioritize restructuring cities, transportation and agriculture. This is why sights are set on the climate treaty now being developed by the United Nations.
Unfortunately, there are two major obstacles. The United States and European Union are looking to enact what critics call “false solutions,” essentially techno-fixes (such as biofuels) and market mechanisms (like cap and trade) that maintain the status quo.
Second, although the treaty was supposed to be ready by December at a conference in Copenhagen, world leaders, including President Barack Obama, have decided to delay legally binding elements to a second summit next year in Mexico City.
“We’ll need to have a way to explain why whatever mediocre agreement gets signed is at the very best [sic] a beginning — that’s why the number 350 is so useful,” McKibben said.
To get the ball rolling, 350.org put together the first-ever global day of climate action Oct. 24. Through its website, groups and individuals from 181 different countries were able to set up over 5,200 actions, ranging from rallies and marches to concerts and green markets. Since 350.org did not call for direct action, many more radical activists have criticized this education-oriented approach.
“Our not doing nonviolent direct action has less to do with our philosophical approach and more to do with organizing the most people and laying the groundwork that would make mass action possible,” said 350.org organizer Will Bates.
This explains a lot of the new and creative actions in the United States, organized mainly by young people who are just becoming politically aware. They want, as McKibben put it, “new forms of organizing that don’t look like what’s come before.” 350.org is the perfect example, he said, in that it’s “people around the world rallying around a scientific data point, with music and art and faith and passion. Who’d a thunk it?”
FLASH-IN-THE-PAN MOB
Roselle, on the other hand, doesn’t find this fun, all-inclusive protest style all that encouraging. He says that it is unlikely that tactics like flash mobs, where people use social media to assemble a large group for a seemingly spontaneous visual stunt, can pose a real challenge to corporate executives and politicians.
“These types of actions don’t have the element of sacrifice or risk that a powerful action might have,” Roselle said. “Dressing up like a zombie and standing in front of a bank on Halloween isn’t going to work when you’re dealing with a violent and powerful regime.”
While there appears to be a split between direct action-oriented groups and movementbuilding organizations like 350.org, some people are attempting to meld traditional tactics with the new creative approach. University of Utah economics student Tim De- Christopher last year walked into a federal auction of oil and gas leases and posed as a bidder. He outbid speculators for thousands of acres of land worth $1.7 million.
Fueled by frustration with what he called the climate movement’s “path of incrementalism,” DeChristopher was influenced by a group known as the Yes Men, two men who frequently pose as corporate executives at conferences or on major media outlets and either admit wrongdoing or satirize the company’s destructive ideology in an absurd way.
“Everybody’s talking about climate change,” said Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men, “but what we really need to change is the lack of people taking to the streets.”
Along with several other leading organizers, the Yes Men launched a website called BeyondTalk.net, which is attempting to gather 10,000 people willing “to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience.” The primary day of action being organized by a mixture of climate groups, from RAN and Rising Tide to 350.org, has been set for Nov. 30, the 10th anniversary of the nonviolent protests that shut down the World Trade Organization in Seattle.
A GLOBAL MOMENT
As Naomi Klein recently noted in The Nation, “There is certainly a Seattle quality to the Copenhagen mobilization: the huge range of groups that will be there; the diverse tactics that will be on display; and the developing-country governments ready to bring activist demands into the summit. But Copenhagen is not merely a Seattle do-over. It feels, instead, as though the progressive tectonic plates are shifting, creating a movement that builds on the strengths of an earlier era but also learns from its mistakes.”
Klein says, unlike Seattle, which “had a laundry list of grievances and few concrete alternatives,” Copenhagen “is about a single issue — climate change — but it weaves a coherent narrative about its cause, and its cures, that incorporates virtually every issue on the planet.”
In that context, the varied approach to climate activism in the United States and around the world doesn’t seem like the liability activists often make it out to be.
“The climate movement is like a board of chess,” Kahn Russell said. “Different groups are better suited to taking on different opponents.”
For nine years, The Indypendent has printed truth in the face of power. With political and economic systems faltering, there is an opportunity for real change from the bottom up. But this means having a vibrant independent media. Consider supporting The Indypendent as a monthly sustainer, donating as little as $5 a month. Please visit indypendent.org/donate.
PROVIDENCE — The FBI arrested a Woonsocket police officer Thursday on charges of assaulting a juvenile in his custody and obstructing justice.
Officer John H. Douglas pleaded not guilty in U.S. District Court.
A federal grand jury indicted Douglas, 34, with depriving the 16-year-old victim of his right under the Constitution to be free from the use of unreasonable force by someone acting “under color of law,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s office.
The indictment charges that, on Sept. 15, Douglas did “punch, strike, and otherwise assault” the victim, resulting in bodily injury.
The second count of the indictment charges Douglas with obstructing justice by trying to persuade other Woonsocket officers to provide false information to FBI agents who were investigating the matter.
Lt. Eugene Jalette, public-information officer for the Woonsocket police, said that Douglas, who has been with the department for four years, has been placed on unpaid leave pending the outcome of the case. He referred other inquiries to the U.S. Attorney’s office.
Robert M. Laren, a lawyer who represents the teenager, described the youth’s injuries.
“His eye socket was broken, his nose was broken, he had cuts, and he had been Tasered,” Laren said after learning of Douglas’s arrest on Thursday. “He had bruises, typically of what you expect from someone being beaten,” he added.
Laren said he had been informed months ago that three officers had been suspended, and said that, to the best of his knowledge, they remain suspended. He said he believes up to six officers were involved.
Thomas Connell, spokesman for U.S. Attorney Peter F. Neronha, declined to say whether further arrests are contemplated.
The Associated Press quoted Douglas’s lawyer as saying he was “a model policeman.”
Laren said it is “more than likely” that he will sue the City of Woonsocket for damages on behalf of his client.
The brutality allegations were first reported in The Providence Journal on Sept. 18 after Chief Family Court Judge Jeremiah S. Jeremiah Jr. called the newspaper. Jeremiah said that the boy had appeared in his courtroom two days earlier and he was suffering from extensive facial injuries.
In response to Jeremiah’s questions, the boy said that several Woonsocket police officers had punched, kicked and repeatedly shot him with a stun gun. The first beating allegedly took place around 6:15 p.m. in the World War II Memorial State Park in Woonsocket.
After the initial alleged beating, the boy told investigators that the police brought him to police headquarters where he received a second beating. Laren said the police took the boy to Landmark Medical Center in Woonsocket to be treated. Afterward, he said, they brought him back to the police station where several officers allegedly beat him again.
Douglas was arraigned Thursday before Magistrate Judge David L. Martin in U.S. District Court, and was released pending further legal action.
In a news release issued Thursday afternoon, Neronha said that the maximum penalty for the civil-rights allegation would be 10 years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine. The maximum penalty for obstruction of justice would be 20 years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine.
Klein tells AlJazeera why climate change is the single greatest barrier to human development
At the climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, environmental groups have said that while everybody agrees that there is a climate crisis, no action has been taken in accordance with the consensus. Naomi Klein, author and journalist, tells Al Jazeera why climate change has emerged as the single greatest barrier to human development, and why there is a critical need for a mass movement to tackle it. Source: www.therealnews.com
Hickey: Four conservative Dems force Reid on public option; Medicare may be expanded
Bio
Roger Hickey is co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, an organization launched by 100 prominent Americans to expand the national debate about America’s economic future. The Campaign seeks to empower working Americans, middle-class families, and the poor to make their voices heard in support of a populist economic agenda and an expansion of democracy. Recently, Hickey organized and helped to lead a national coalition of citizen leaders known as Americans United to Protect Social Security.
PROVIDENCE — Some education and union officials are warning that Governor Carcieri’s proposed midyear cuts to public schools will have a “devastating impact,” particularly on struggling urban districts that will see the deepest cuts.
But Carcieri’s plan to cut about $40 million between now and June from the state’s 38 school districts, 13 charter schools and 3 state-run schools is more than a budget reduction — it’s a message to Rhode Island’s 14,600 public school teachers. Put simply, Carcieri wants teachers to take the same 3-percent pay cut that state workers accepted earlier this year, and he wants their pension plans reduced.
“These are unprecedented times,” Carcieri said at a news conference at the State House, where he unveiled his method for bridging a $225-million deficit. “There are 75,000 Rhode Islanders out of work. … If everyone takes a little bit of a pay cut, 3 percent, we can keep everyone working and get through the next few years.”
Carcieri said he wants teachers to make the same sacrifice state workers are making. He wants every district to reopen teacher contracts and get the unions to agree to salary reductions rather than increase property taxes, but he also recognizes it is up to municipalities to figure out how they will absorb the cuts.
“I’m a big supporter of education,” Carcieri said. “But all we’re saying is, if people give a little bit this year and next year, we’ll hopefully get through this.”
Carcieri is proposing slashing state aid to schools by $20.5 million, plus cutting another $18.5 million in state payments to teacher pensions — contingent on lawmakers approving his pension-reform plan. In addition, Carcieri plans to take $5 million of $30 million in federal “stabilization” funds earmarked for 2011, and use it this year instead.
Urban districts, in particular, would be hard hit by the proposal. Providence, the state’s largest district with 2,000 teachers, would lose $5.3 million in state aid over the next six months, plus $2.9 million in pension payments. Pawtucket would lose $1.8 million in state aid to schools, and Woonsocket would lose $1.3 million. Central Falls, the state’s poorest district, would lose $1.3 million. Warwick and Cranston, the state’s second- and third-largest districts, respectively, would each lose about $1 million. In contrast, Jamestown, a wealthy town that receives little state education aid, would lose just $12,000.
The General Assembly would have to approve Carcieri’s plan for it to go into effect.
“We’re terribly concerned about the reductions,” said Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist. “We recognize this announcement will mean real difficulty for our districts at the same time we are expecting more from them. I want to offer the support of the department to assist them and help them find ways to have the smallest impact on students.”
Teacher unions decried the governor’s proposal, saying it was unfair to impose an across-the-board cut when teachers earn different salaries in each district. They also lashed out at Carcieri for decreasing school aid even as the federal government pumps millions in the form of stimulus funds to strengthen education during the recession. States had to agree to protect education funding to receive the stimulus “stabilization” money for schools in 2008-09, 2009-10 and 2010-11.
“The real problem with the governor’s proposal is that it targets school districts and their employees for specific cuts at the same time the federal government is doing all it can to protect programs in our schools,” said James Parisi, field representative for the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals. “The federal government has asked states to maintain their support for public schools, and this goes against that promise.”
Robert A. Walsh Jr., executive director of the National Education Association of Rhode Island, said Carcieri is unfairly targeting teachers, some of whom have made concessions in recent contract negotiations, including paying more into health insurance, agreeing to longer school days or school years and, in the case of East Providence, receiving a 5-percent pay cut.
“This is beginning to feel personal,” Walsh said. “A unilateral approach like this … gives no recognition to sacrifices that have already been made.”
Tim Duffy, executive director of the Rhode Island Association of School Committees, called the proposed cuts “devastating,” and said there are many obstacles to school committees reopening teacher contracts, as the governor is urging.
“Some school committees wanted to do away with [teacher assignment based on] seniority,” Duffy said. “All that could get lost in the shuffle if school committees are asking for salary cuts.”
Duffy said it is unlikely lawmakers will approve Carcieri’s plan to eliminate the cost-of-living adjustment that retired public employees, including teachers, now receive since they rejected it last year. He also predicted layoffs and program cuts in urban districts, rather than reductions in teacher pay.Local officials react
The governor says municipal leaders should cut spending, not raise taxes, to cope with the loss of $125 million in local aid. But mayors and town managers say this midyear cut — only months after lawmakers wiped out a $55-million revenue-sharing program — leaves them few options. “They change one bad budget into 39 bad budgets,” says Johnston Mayor Joseph M.
By making paranoia part of pop culture, writers like Dan Brown have made a fortune. Then again, maybe he belongs to a secret cabal.
The paranormal pops up everywhere these days. In the last week, two different people have warned me against Ouija boards. In a video posted on YouTube, Richard Heene—who pretended a few weeks ago that his son was trapped in a runaway weather balloon—ponders the question of whether Hillary Clinton is one of those bloodthirsty, shape-shifting, humanoid alien “reptilians” that conspiracy theorists believe are planning a global takeover. At least three different ghost-hunting reality shows are currently airing on cable, all of them featuring muscular dudes storming down hallways in deserted schools and jails clasping electronic recording devices and howling, “Did you hear that?!”
This is hardly the first time in history that people have suddenly started spouting prophecies and speaking with the dead. These fads come in waves, usually fostered in the wake of unbearable tragedy. What else to do about earthquakes, floods, epidemics, dictators and wars than wonder which demon or deity devised this living hell and why, and what sacrifice or sorcery might make it stop? It is always fear and despair that sets us on this train of thought. During a gold rush or when we’ve just been given a clean bill of health, we need not believe in magic.
In the Black Death-ridden Middle Ages, chilled and starved by a climate shift now known as the Little Ice Age, Europe became obsessed with the body parts of saints. Crystal-encased, gem-bedecked bones and hanks of hair and half-mummified fingers, heads and hearts were credited with curative powers. Pilgrims packed cathedrals housing so-called holy relics, sometimes trampling the sick and weak during stampedes. Centuries later, the occult became the next big thing again as World War I and the 1918 flu epidemic found seances filling entire auditoriums around the world. Yet another paranormal paroxysm crested in the early 1970s: Think Watergate, Vietnam and the post-’60s awareness—a tragedy for some—that nothing would ever be the same again.
And now: Twin Towers. Financial collapse. War. Flood. The H1N1 virus is our plague.
Or is it? “In recognition of the continuing progression of the pandemic, and in further preparation as a nation,” as he put it, Barack Obama declared a national state of emergency on October 23. This declaration allows the federal government to waive certain requirements regarding prevention and treatment procedures because “the potential exists for the pandemic to overburden health care resources in some localities,” Obama said.
But the folks at AntichristIdentity.com would probably say this is just his latest step in “progressing the Antichrist system that is gathering pace after the recent world economic upheaval”—a system that “implicates not only Barack Obama but also Javier Solana of the European Union, Prince Charles of Wales, Queen Beatrix of Netherlands and Prince Hassan of Jordan,” a “power bloc” that “will drive the Antichrist world government.” The folks at BeastObama.com call it “amazing stuff going on here, right before our eyes … and it fits the pattern set out in Revelation 13.”
Every paranormal paroxysm involves politics. That’s only natural. We cannot help but brood about whomever rules the world. Is their might the result of keen diplomacy—or sigils chiseled into halls-of-power floors? Who’s really in that entourage? We cannot help but wonder as, joking-but-not-quite-joking, we doodle cartoons of George W. Bush with devil horns.
It’s all about control, as that’s what wizards, angels, demons, gods and elected officials wield. Is it such a long leap from superpower to supernatural?
Rumors of a secret cabal plotting to create a New World Order have been swirling almost ever since the Old World Order began. The nature of these shady puppeteers depends on who’s doing the worrying. Jews have been evergreen suspects, whether it’s the Elders of Zion or my penniless ancestors slogging through the Polish mud. Secret societies such as the Knights Templar and Freemasons stoke automatic fear: What are they doing in there?
As initiated members of a nondenominational, multiracial, all-male society whose origins are veiled in mystery but was probably founded in the late 16th century, Freemasons base their symbology on the tools of traditional stonemasons and allude, in their top-secret, tell-no-tales rituals, to the building of the Temple of Solomon. They wear lambskin aprons and do things with compasses, and they’ve been blamed for darn near everything. The Vatican officially condemned the brotherhood in 1738 for being “as political as they were religious,” writes Jay Kinney inThe Masonic Myth: Unlocking the Truth About the Symbols, the Secret Rites, and the History of Freemasonry (HarperOne, 2009). And even though George Washington, Paul Revere and Benjamin Franklin were all Masons (lending support to rumors that the Boston Tea Party was a Masonic plot), America’s first third party was the Anti-Masonic Party. It was founded in 1826 and four years later, Kinney tells us, 124 different anti-Masonic newspapers were thriving.
Like others before and after him, Adolf Hitler believed that Freemasonry was a Zionist front. Railing against “the international world Jew” in Mein Kampf, he conjectured that “to strengthen his political position … the governing circles and the higher strata of the political and economic bourgeoisie are brought into his nets by the strings of Freemasonry. … The prohibition of Masonic secret societies,” Hitler predicted, would silence “the hissing of the Jewish world hydra.”
Article 22 of the Hamas Covenant repeats the Jewish/Mason claim, and then some: “With their money, they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies.” Other conspiracy theorists charge the Masons with faking the moon landing, worshiping Satan and assassinating JFK.
“Within the thriving subculture of present-day born-again Christianity,” writes Kinney, a longtime Gnosis magazine editor and 32nd-degree Knight Commander Court of Honor in Freemasonry’s Scottish Rite, “anti-Masonic books are a mainstay,” thanks to evangelists such as Pat Robertson, who has called the brotherhood “a mystery religion designed to replace the old Christian world order of Europe and America.” Kinney mocks those “legions of anti-Masons, most of them superstitious believers in the occult as a demon-infested quagmire,” who “shiver dramatically as they hawk their books and videos.” He also notes that British conspiracy theorist David Icke, the most famous proponent of the reptilian concept, posts material at his Web site alleging that “there are secret tunnels beneath every Masonic lodge to facilitate reptilian rendezvous.” Yet Kinney insists that Freemasonry’s origins were neither alien nor occult: “Rather, it seems to have been an attempt to create a nucleus of men of goodwill, over and above fractious religious conflicts, using the motifs and symbols of temple building as working tools both for the deepening of the individual soul and for building an archetypal temple to the Most High in the collective imagination of humanity.”
Okay, but what are they doing in there? And are they or are they not intertwined with the Illuminati, a soooopersecret club founded in Germany in 1776 and modeled on the Masons but which Kinney claims disbanded in the 1780s but which conspiracy theorists insist still thrives, boasting such members as Barack Obama and both Bushes. “All this chaos, genocide, ethnic cleansing and the overall disasters have a genuine purpose,” we read at Illuminati-News.com:
“It is all very carefully planned by a few people, mostly men, behind the scenes, high up in the society. … These people on top, who basically are of Royal Bloodlines, is currently working on reducing the world population in order to easier maintain their control. … So who are those people I am talking about? They are basically 13 super wealthy families and their off-shoots, with the European Nobility on top, and their fellow travelers are the International Bankers. Their bloodlines go back in time—way back to old Babylon and further.”
As for UFOs: “The sightings, abductions and encounters are so numerous that we can’t ignore them and say that the whole thing is just imagination. That would be stupid. The phenomenon does exist, but the questions are: what is it and what is the agenda?”
Such questions are now bingo-night and soccer-mom staples, thanks mainly to The X-Files and Dan Brown, whose record-breaking thrillers feature history’s most prominent Western artists, scientists, religious figures and rulers enacting sinister global plots as ancient brotherhoods guard mysteries that might just end or save the world. Brown’s book Angels and Demons dangled the notion that the eye-in-the-pyramid on the U.S. dollar was the work of the Illuminati. The Da Vinci Code featured a royal line sired by Jesus Christ. Subterranean Masonic structures beneath Washington D.C. figure in this fall’s The Lost Symbol. By making paranoia part of pop culture, Brown has earned a fortune. Then again, maybe he belongs to a secret cabal.
It all comes down to: Who knows what, how do they know it and what will they do with what they know? In this information age, it’s not such a stretch from Patriot Act surveillance to the possibility of government programs testing and using telepathy, clairvoyance and hypnosis. Now a major motion picture starring George Clooney, The Men Who Stare at Goats is based on British journalist Jon Ronson’s allegedly nonfiction 2005 book of the same name, which explores exactly such a program. Instituted in the U.S. military in 1979, the First Earth Battalion comprised psychic soldiers trained to read minds, make themselves invisible, kill living things just by gazing at them, and walk through walls: “General Stubblebine is confounded by his continual failure to walk through his wall,” Ronson writes, describing a scene that he claims took place in Fort Bragg, North Carolina during the Cold War summer of 1983. “What’s wrong with him that he can’t do it? Maybe there is simply too much in his in-tray for him to give it the requisite level of concentration. There is no doubt in his mind that the ability to pass through objects will one day be a common tool in the intelligence-gathering arsenal. And, when that happens … who would want to screw around with an army that could do that?”
But by 1983, the psychic cold war was already at least two decades old. Created by the CIA and the Defense Department in a desperate struggle to keep pace with mind-control advances in the USSR, the U.S. government’s secret psychic-spy program went by many different names throughout the second half of the 20th century, including Scanate, Sun Streak, Grill Flame, Center Lane and Stargate. According to recently declassified documents, it was employed in searches for terrorists, Soviet missile-storage facilities, and moles but was ended by then-CIA director John Deutch in 1995.
Think of all the money and lives governments could save if they just hired psychics to find stuff. That’s what happens in C.S. Graham’s new psychic-cold-war thriller The Solomon Effect, whose heroine is a hot, honey-haired young Iraq War veteran whose telepathic talents help the CIA hunt for a hidden weapon that unidentified terrorists plan to use in an imminent attack. Although by closing her eyes and entering her “remote-viewing zone” Naval Ensign October Guinness can see where the weapon is but not what it is or who plans to use it, we learn rather quickly that the terrorists are a wildly rich Miami pharmaceutical magnate and a fundamentalist Christian U.S. Army general who share a loathing for Arabs and Jews and have devised a diabolical scheme for eliminating both: “In the end, the world would be a better place. No more endless Middle East crises. No more suicide bombers. No more money-grubbing Jews, siphoning off billions in foreign aid, competing with American arms manufacturers, and wreaking havoc on the world financial scene … The country was flushing itself down the toilet, wasting billions and billions of dollars every month for — what? To wipe the noses of a bunch of ungrateful ragheads in Afghanistan and Iraq? To prop up Israel? Why?”
Concentrate, Ensign Guinness. Concentrate.
Deflecting a skeptic, one government official in the novel asserts, “Remote viewing is not woo-woo. It’s science.”
And science changes everything. A key feature of our current paranormal paroxysm is the fact that science and technology play such a prominent role in it, from YouTube videos allegedly capturing ghosts and guardian angels to music recorded at certain frequencies said to induce instant trance states and miraculously “repair” DNA. Ghosthunters use highly sensitive devices called electronic-voice phenomena—or EVP—machines. Quantum physics is invoked to explain everything from premonitions to astral projection.
In her angry new book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan, 2009), Barbara Ehrenreich describes how she encountered this psychic/science convergence while undergoing chemotherapy, when self-help gurus and fellow cancer patients kept exhorting her to smile. Positive thinking boosts the immune system, went the claim for which Ehrenreich, who holds a Ph.D in cell biology, could find no scientific proof. Visualizing microscopic crusades in which squealing cancer cells are slaughtered follows the same procedure as spells I used to find in paperbacks and perform after school in seventh grade: Burn red candles for love and green for cash, picture kisses and coins and wish.
It’s the exact same easy-come thesis that made a worldwide movement out of Rhonda Byrne’s 2007 megabestselling book The Secret. Courting what Byrne calls the Law of Attraction—and which she claims, surprise surprise, functions via quantum physics—millions now believe that their mere thoughts affect material reality and that if they want something intensely enough, they’ll “attract” it. They post thousands of “mind movies” at YouTube featuring footage of mansions and Corvettes with captions reading “This is my house” and “This is my car.” These captions aren’t true, but … wish.
The socially accepted version of this process is called prayer. Bemused and horrified, Ehrenreich observed “pastorpreneurs” preaching the “prosperity gospel,” in which God “manifests” goodies if you ask. Centimillionaire televangelist Joyce Meyer, whose private jet and $23,000 marble toilet spurred Republican Senator Chuck Grassley to launch an investigation into her wealth in 2007, explains the gospel thusly: “God wants to give us nice things.” Bye-bye, Calvinist ethic, in which God rewards hard work.
The number of megachurches in this country doubled to 1,210 betwen 2001 and 2006, boasting a combined congregation of nearly 4.4 million, Ehrenreich reports. Three of the biggest four tout the prosperity gospel. That’s a hefty voting bloc. Its members worship a candy-man God who showers them with riches. A large but almost entirely separate faction at the far end of the spectrum swore allegiance last year to a presidential candidate who more or less promised to shower his voters with riches. At least in the early months, photographers loved to snap Obama with what looks like a halo: a trick of the light sometimes, or his head ringed just so by his campaign logo or the presidential seal. Children sang virtual Obama hymns. These are scenes from an adulation not entirely secular and unlike any ever seen in U.S. politics before.
Adversaries they are, but both blocs harbor the same hilariously obvious spirituality: Our dear leader makes us rich just because we want him to. One faction calls it grace. The other calls it human rights. Each faction mocks and fears the other’s form of worship and the other’s entity. Liberal children wake screaming from nightmares featuring the Christian Right. Megachurch kids dream fitfully of a fallen angel who steals through taxation what God manifests.
“The dicey subprime and Alt-A categories of mortgages had expanded to 40 percent of total mortgages” in 2006, Ehrenreich notes, “many of them requiring little or no income documentation or down payment.” To “buy” a home under such conditions is to believe in magic. We display this belief every day, as even credit cards are wands granting us things we want with money we don’t have.
But the susceptible among us trusted mortgage brokers just as the susceptible among our ancestors trusted soothsayers and snake-oil salesmen and voices in their heads they thought belonged to spirits of the dead. The rise of truthiness renders it ever harder to draw lines between science, psychology, spirituality, and lies. We find ourselves despairing as Ehrenreich did at a convention watching “life coaches” make outrageous claims about the transformative power of mental “vibrations” and the Law of Attraction and subatomic particles.
“Maybe I should have been impressed,” she muses, “that these positive thinkers bothered to appeal to science at all … in however degraded a form. To base a belief or worldview on science or what passes for science is to reach out to the nonbelievers and the uninitiated. … The alternative is to base one’s worldview on revelation or mystical insight, and these are things that cannot be reliably shared.”
And as we panic over healthcare, job loss and war in this funhouse of the proven and unproven, ascribing otherworldly powers to those who control us lets us off the hook. If they became this strong, this devious, this cruel by paranormal means, then heck: The world’s in bad shape not because I voted wrong or didn’t vote at all or wasn’t a good enough activist. The world’s in bad shape because our rulers are aliens or possess divine DNA or intone incantations under the full moon. In other words, it’s not my fault.
Insurgents in Iraq have hacked into live video feeds from unmanned American drone aircraft, US media reports say.
Shia fighters are said to have used off-the-shelf software programs such as SkyGrabber to capture the footage.
The hacking was possible because the remotely flown planes have an unprotected communications link.
Obtaining such video feeds could provide insurgents with information about sites the military might be planning to target.
ANALYSIS
Mark Ward, technology correspondent, BBC News
As its name implies, SkyGrabber is a program that grabs data being broadcast by satellites – it acts as a radio for data feeds and lets people tune into different data streams as they might radio stations.
Anyone downloading via a wire only shares that net link with a few neighbours. By contrast, anyone using a satellite net connection effectively shares all the data they are getting with everyone in the area covered by a satellite.
Those other people do not see that data because their PC is only watching for what they want. However, SkyGrabber eavesdrops on all the data being downloaded over a link and turns it back into whole files.
The way that data is sent over the net makes it very easy for anyone to reconstruct files. SkyGrabber has proved popular because it has good filters that let people sort the types of files, mp3, wmv, jpg they want to get.
It also knows about many different satellites and can be re-tuned to look at other data streams – such as those coming from drones.
The downside is that SkyGrabber users only get what other people want.
The Associated Press news agency quotes a US Department of Defense official as saying the military has also found evidence of at least one instance where insurgents in Afghanistan monitored drone video.
The breach of the Pentagon surveillance system’s security in Iraq is said to have come to light when footage shot by a Predator drone was found on the laptop of an apprehended insurgent.
A senior Pentagon official is quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying that although militants were able to view the video, there was no evidence that they were able to jam electronic signals from the aircraft or take control of them.
The unnamed official said the US defence department had addressed the issue by working to encrypt all video feeds provided by drones in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Predator drones can fly for several hours, remotely controlled by pilots thousands of miles away. The aircraft can carry out surveillance and attack targets with on-board missiles.
Responding to the reports, a Pentagon spokesman said: “The Department of Defense constantly evaluates and seeks to improve the performance and security of our various systems and platforms.
“As we identify shortfalls, we correct them as part of a continuous process of seeking to improve capabilities and security. As a matter of policy, we don’t comment on specific vulnerabilities or intelligence issues.”
For Isaac Francisco Solnit, born December 17, 2009
It’s clear now that, from her immoveable titanium bangs to her chaotic approximation of human speech, Sarah Palin is a Terminator cyborg sent from the future to destroy something — but what? It could be the Republican Party she’ll ravage by herding the fundamentalists and extremists into a place where sane fiscal conservatives and swing voters can’t follow. Or maybe she was sent to destroy civilization at this crucial moment by preaching the gospel of climate-change denial, abetted by tools like the Washington Post, which ran a factually outrageous editorial by her on the subject earlier this month. No one (even her, undoubtedly) knows, but we do know that this month we all hover on the brink.
I’ve had the great Hollywood epic Terminator 2: Judgment Day on my mind ever since I watched it in a hotel room in New Orleans a few weeks ago with the Superdome visible out the window. In 1991, at the time of its release, T2 was supposedly about a terrible future; now, it seems situated in an oddly comfortable past.
What apocalypses are you nostalgic for? The premise of the movie was that the machines we needed to worry about had not yet been invented, no less put to use: intelligent machines that would rebel against their human masters in 1997, setting off an all-out nuclear war that would get rid of the first three billion of us and lead to a campaign of extermination against the remnant of the human race scrabbling in the rubble of what had once been civilization.
By the time the film was released, the news of climate change was already filtering out. Reports like Bill McKibben’s 1989 book The End of Nature had told us that the machines that could destroy us and our world had, in fact, been invented — a long, long time ago. Almost all of us had been using them almost all the time, from the era of the steam engine and the rise of the British coal economy through the age of railroads and the dawn of petroleum extraction to the birth of the internal-combustion engine and the spread of industrial civilization across the planet. They weren’t “intelligent” and they weren’t in revolt, nor were they led by any one super-machine. It was the cumulative effect of all those devices pumping back into the atmosphere the carbon that plants had so kindly buried in the Earth over the last few hundred million years.
The Superdome is, of course, where thousands of New Orleanians were stranded when Katrina, the hurricane that hit the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, broke the city’s levees and flooded the place. A maelstrom of institutional failures left people trapped in the scalding cauldron of a drowned city for five days while the world looked on aghast. It was a disaster that had been long foretold, and no one had done much to forestall it. No one had repaired those crummy levees or bothered to create a real evacuation plan for the city — and, unlike the revolt of the machines in T2, the future actually arrived. Like climate change.
For many, it was a foretaste of our new era. It may not be clear what role, if any, climate change played in the generation of that particular hurricane, but it is clear that, in this era, there will be, and indeed already have been, many more such calamities: the deadly freak rainstorms in Sicily, Britain, and the Philippines this fall, the increase in the number and intensity of hurricanes in the North Atlantic in recent years, as well as in the intensity of droughts, floods, heat waves, crop failures, and the displacement of populations, as well as the massive melting of glaciers and sea ice in the cold places, rising waters in the coastal ones, and oceans going acidic with devastating effects on marine life.
This is the actual nightmarish “movie” of our times. This is what our less-than-intelligent machines have actually wrought. The World Health Organization estimates that climate change is already responsible for 150,000 deaths annually. Unchecked it will kill far more, and no one’s measuring the despair in the island nations that may disappear and among those who live in, and off of, the melting arctic. Looking at the Superdome during the commercial breaks in T2, I wondered about the apocalypses already under our belts and the bumpy road ahead.
The Governor of the State with the Uncertain Shoreline
The plot of the movie, as most of you undoubtedly recall, is that the Terminator, also played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the low-budget 1984 original, shows up again, sent back from the future 10 years after in the first epic. This time around, he’s not action-heroine Sarah Connor’s nemesis; he’s on the side of humanity, specifically of her son John Connor, the boy with the unambiguous initials who will grow up to lead the resistance to our extermination by machines.
Another more advanced Terminator is, in the meantime, also sent back from the future to destroy the messianic boy and his foulmouthed commando mom. The rest of the movie is a feast of shootouts, chases, explosions, and brilliantly plotted action. It was all surpassingly strange and compelling when I watched it, while wiped out with what was probably swine flu, a fever dream of the past’s nightmares that somehow didn’t manage to anticipate our waking hells.
Now, of course, the movie’s cyborg star is a major force in the real world. He’s my governor, more powerful but less charismatic than in his Terminator incarnation. Recently, he traveled to Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay to release the state’s 2009 Climate Adaptation Strategy, a 200-page document about the array of devastations the state faces and what countermeasures we can take. Early on, that document states:
“Climate change is already affecting California. Sea levels have risen by as much as seven inches along the California coast over the last century, increasing erosion and pressure on the state’s infrastructure, water supplies, and natural resources. The state has also seen increased average temperatures, more extreme hot days, fewer cold nights, a lengthening of the growing season, shifts in the water cycle with less winter precipitation falling as snow, and both snowmelt and rainwater running off sooner in the year.”
Looking to the future, the report predicted that there would be more fires, less water, loss of coastal lands, and up to $2.5 trillion of real estate put at risk by global warming. The Terminator, or governor, was on the island because, with even modest further rises in sea-level, it will disappear entirely. Hasta la vista, baby.
During the years the Bush Administration refused to do anything at all about climate change, Schwarzenegger arrived at the helm of a state that had already developed major innovations in energy efficiency and in creative price-structuring that took away power-company motives to push higher energy consumption. California had also sought to set new standards for carbon-dioxide emissions from vehicles. The bill to do the last of these was crafted in 2002 by Fran Pavley, a newly elected state assemblywoman from Ventura County. When Obama came into office, the roadblocks were finally removed and the bill became the basis for national regulations that will make vehicles 40% more fuel-efficient by 2016. Pavley and Schwarzenegger were there at the Rose Garden signing of the regulations last May.
As Ronald Brownstein reported in the Atlantic this October:
“Ambitious new initiatives have cascaded out of Schwarzenegger’s office — including the two measures raising the renewable-power requirement on utilities, a state subsidy program to encourage the installation of electricity-generating solar panels on 1 million California roofs, and in January 2007, an executive order establishing the nation’s first ‘low-carbon fuel standard,’ which requires a reduction of at least 10 percent in the carbon emissions from transportation fuels by 2020. Schwarzenegger signed a Pavley-sponsored bill imposing the nation’s first mandatory statewide reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. The bill required the state by 2020 to roll back its emissions to the 1990 level — a reduction of about 15 percent from the current level. (By separate executive order, Schwarzenegger also committed the state to an 80 percent reduction by 2050.)”
It’d be easy to go with the Atlantic and frame the governor as a hero, but he landed in office by promising to cut vehicle taxes and has been in bed ever since with the state’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter and the world’s fifth biggest corporation, Chevron. Even the organization that sent him to Copenhagen, Climate Action Reserve, is backed by Chevron and Shell — and the oil and coal industries have been the biggest domestic roadblocks to real climate-change measures. Nonetheless, at the Copenhagen climate conference he talked about R20, the alliance of states and provinces he’s co-founded to implement climate change measures at sub-national levels. And he has suggested that climate-change deniers like Palin are “still living in the Stone Age.”
A Magnitude Shy of What Physics Demands
Think of Schwarzenegger as the hinge between the fantasy of Terminator 2 and the reality of our predicament. Think of Obama…
Well, in T2, there’s Miles Dyson, a slender, well-spoken African-American family man who will engineer the computer technology that will create the intelligent machines that will annihilate practically everything. Sarah — Connor, not Palin — sets out to kill him, but her son shows up with his Terminator-Schwarzenegger sidekick, and they instead convince the not-so-mad scientist he’s about to do something terribly, terribly wrong. He then leads them to his workplace to destroy everything he’s ever done. When their violent erasure program sets off alarms that bring in squadrons of cops, Dyson ends up gravely wounded and holding the trigger to set off the explosion that will wipe out the technologies endangering future humanity — and himself.
Seeing this movie with its acts of self-sacrifice, now offers an occasion to ask: when’s the last time you’ve even seen a major politician who’ll put his finger to that trigger with humanity in mind, no less simply do anything that’s bad for reelection?
What if Obama would say what he has to know, what they all have to know, that saving the planet from our slo-mo, unevenly distributed version of Judgment Day requires destroying the status quo and maybe changing everything? What if he’d just learn from Schwarzenegger that you can do quite a lot and still survive politically?
As a disgusted Bill McKibben recently put it, “Obama will propose 4% reductions in [U.S. greenhouse gas] emissions by 2020, compared with 20% for the Europeans (a number the EU said they’d raise to 30% if the U.S. would go along). Scientists, meanwhile, have made it clear that a serious offer would mean about 40% cuts by 2020. So — we’re exactly an order of magnitude shy of what the physics demands.”
Bill, a normally mild-mannered guy who was overjoyed at Obama’s election, called the president’s position “a lie inside a fib coated with spin.”
Thanks to a sudden decision earlier this month by the Environmental Protection Agency allowing the executive branch to address the issue of climate-change gases under the Clean Air Act, Obama has apparently been given superpowers to act without being completely hamstrung by a reluctant Congress. Or as the Center for Biological Diversity put it, “President Obama can lead, rather than follow, by using his power under the Clean Air Act and other laws to achieve deep and rapid greenhouse emissions reductions from major polluters.”
Will he? Probably not. After all, he’s the man who stood up in Prague last April and said: “I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” For a moment, it almost sounded as if he was going to be the action hero of our antinuclear dreams, wiping out one apocalypse that has hung over us for sixty years. And then he added that he didn’t actually expect to see the abolition of such weaponry in his lifetime, though he didn’t say why.
Now, we’re in an action movie in which the fate of the Earth is truly at stake, and the most powerful man on the planet has allowed himself to be hedged in by timidities, compromises, refusals, denials, and the murderous pressure of corporations. Those too-big-to-die corporations are the reason why the Senate is unlikely to ratify any climate-change treaty that threatens to do much of anything. Really, corporations — half-fictitious, semi-immortal behemoths endowed with human rights in the U.S. and possessed of corrosive global power — already are the ruthless cyborgs of our time. They are, after all, actively seeking a world in which they imagine that, somehow, they will survive, even if many of us and much that we love does not. Sorry poor people, young people, Africa, sorry Arctic summer ice, you’re not too big to fail.
100,000 in the Streets Vs. Three Degrees of Heat
I wish life on this planet really were like an action movie. I wish that a handful of heroic individuals could do battle with the mightiest of forces and decisively alter the fate of the world — and then we could all go home to a planet that’s safe. As we know, however, it’s going to be a lot more intricate and complicated than that. There are millions, maybe billions, of players in this one, and its running time is a lot longer than the two weeks of Copenhagen or the two hours of a movie. For our heroines, we get not the commando-siren Sarah Connor, but the sturdy, ex-middle-school American government teacher and now California state senator Fran Pavley, 61.
Really, though, if there’s going to be a superhero in our world, a friendly Terminator to go up against the villains in suits and ties, it will be civil society. Even for the betterment of humankind, civil society won’t get to shoot anyone or drive a truck through a wall. Instead, it’ll organize, educate, build, and pressure, while working to create models and alternatives. It’ll reelect Pavley and shut down Chevron.
There have already been some moments of great drama with this superhero leading the way — the civil disobedience of the Climate Ground Zero mountaintop coal campaign in Appalachia, the Climate Camps in Britain, the Kingsnorth Six climbers who blocked a coal-power-plant’s smokestack in England last October (and were exonerated by a British jury), the underwater cabinet meeting held in the Maldives this October to protest that low-lying island nation’s possible fate. All this was done in part to get people to take an interest in the fate of their planet, which is not so readily reducible to a blockbuster’s plot as we might like.
The pivotal moment just came — and went. This week in Copenhagen, the Bella Center conference, in which a new climate treaty was supposed to be negotiated, stagnated while repression around it grew furiously. It stagnated because the rich countries were unwilling to either reduce their own emissions significantly or pledge meaningful funding to help poor nations transition to greener economies. Or it stagnated because the poor countries didn’t consent to be crucified for crumbs. The United States, which just spent nearly a trillion dollars bailing out its floundering financial corporations and spends about $700 billion annually on the military, offered an obscenely inadequate $1.2 billion in aid. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged $100 billion way down the road, but only if an unlikely quantity of factors and conditions were to align beforehand.
Outside the center, the Danish police became increasingly brutal as activists from everywhere, representing the poor, developing, and most affected nations, the Arctic, small farmers, indigenous nations, and the environment demonstrated. Inside nongovernmental groups were increasingly excluded from the discussions and then from the actual space itself. None of this prevented the conference from stalling.
On Monday, negotiators from the African nations shut down the climate talks in fury at attempts to undermine the Kyoto accords — a move designed to make the global situation worse at a meeting that was supposed to make it better. On Wednesday, hundreds of delegates inside the Bella Center protested, walking out to join the thousands already in the streets. By all reports the atmosphere was increasingly tense and repressive.
Everyone whose opinion I respect deplores what just went down in Copenhagen. There’s an agreement of sorts, but it was achieved by Obama and a few powerful nations over the objections of the rest in violation of the way the process should have unfolded. Worse, it contains no binding agreements to limit climate change. The so-called agreement acknowledges that we should limit warming to two degrees Celsius, but the actual commitments, if honored, would bring the world to 3.9 degrees Celsius (seven degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. Even two degrees, African negotiator Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping had said, “would condemn Africa to death.” Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed pointed out that three degrees would “spell death for the Maldives and a billion people in low-lying areas.” Three degrees, said Joss Garman of the British branch of Greenpeace, “would lead to the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, droughts across South America and Australia, and the depletion of ocean habitats.”
All that was achieved was consensus that there’s a problem and clarity about what that problem is: the refusal of the wealthy corporations and nations to do what benefits humanity and all other species. Money won. Life lost. Copenhagen is over, a battle lost despite valiant efforts, but the war continues.
The crazy thing about this moment in history is that it isn’t at all like Terminator 2, except that the Earth and our species are in terrible danger, and ruthless superhuman forces push us toward our doom. In the movie, Sarah Connor is the only human being who knows what’s coming, and she’s in an Abu Ghraib-like mental hospital for saying and doing something about it. In our reality, anyone who cares to know what the dangers are should have no problem finding out. Most of us have known, or should have known, for quite a long time. Because we’ve done so little, what a decade ago was imagined as the terrible future has actually, like the Terminator, made it here ahead of time.
The learning curve for so many of us, for so many people and even nations, has been speeding up impressively. If we had 40 years to figure it all out, we might be headed toward just the sort of victory that civil society has, in fact, achieved on so many other environmental and human-rights ideas. But there aren’t decades to spare. It needs to happen now. It should have happened even before the last century ended.
Even in my fever dream, with the Superdome just out the window, I couldn’t help noting the key axiom repeated in Terminator 2: “The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.”
So here’s the lesson: there are no superheroes but us.
And here’s the question: what are you going to do about it?
THE WORLD STANDS WITH PALESTINE: Pro-Palestinian women in New York City stand next to the Palestinian flag at one of the many demonstrations that have taken place since the Israeli assault on Gaza began in late December. From New York to London to Cairo, hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets. “We are demanding that the Palestinians be protected, but as Americans, we are also demanding that our tax money not be spent on killing innocent civilians,” a protestor told The Indypendent at a Jan. 3 rally in New York City. PHOTO: MARK A. BAILEY
Looking back, I wouldn’t have it any other way 
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‘We don’t have a leader who is able to grasp [the issue] and say what is really needed. Instead we are trying to continue business as usual,’ say James Hansen. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA
— Photo: Wikimedia Commons
At 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, a child walks to school past a pile of trash that had been in front of 90 Paul St. for several weeks, neighbors say.
By 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, the trash at 90 Paul St., near the Windmill Street Elementary School, had been picked up, leaving the sidewalk clear.
Trash piles up along Atwells Avenue in Providence early last month, after a new city ordinance took effect requiring residents to put out recyclables in order to have their garbage removed.
