Free Thought Manifesto

God Has Left The Building

2009-11-28T05:00:00.001-05:00

If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you,
you have schizophrenia.~~Thomas S. Szasz, The Second Sin

By Sheila Samples
November 25, 2009
Courtesy Of "Information Clearing House"

Several months ago, CNN published the results of a couple of disturbing polls about Americans and their religious beliefs. The first found that more Americans are rejecting religion and thus, according to CNN, America is becoming "less Christian." The second, a Pew survey of only 742 mostly white evangelical Protestants, revealed that more than six in 10 of them believe that torture is often or sometimes justified.

More than six in 10? What this says about those claiming to be God's own is that perhaps they should use their Bibles for more than "thumping." Because not one in 10 -- not one in 10 thousand -- not one in 10 million -- Christians believes that torture can ever be justified. Ever.

Anyone who has paid attention to the growing number of evangelical zealots over the past couple of decades must be aware that there is a growing chasm between Religion and Christianity. Today, the term, "religious Christians" is nothing if not oxymoronic. It seems when folks become apocalyptic frothing-at-the-mouth religious, they ultimately stray from the light and life of Christianity, while descending deeper into the darkness and death of Religion.

Because, all religion is politics. CNN quoted Mark Silk of Trinity College, who said, "In the 1990s, it really sunk in on the American public generally that there was a long-lasting 'religious right' connected to a political party, and that turned a lot of people the other way." Silk cited the obvious link between the Republican Party and groups such as the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family.

Tony Perkins, the right-wing evangelical president of the Family Research Council, told CNN not to worry. He said people will return to their faith in droves; that soon, the decline will ease and religion will be an even greater part of people's lives. The good news, according to Perkins, is, "As the economy goes downward, I think people are going to be driven to religion." (emphasis added)

Yes, as more Americans lose their jobs, their homes, their very reasons for living, those like Perkins see them as Manchurian congregations -- flocks driven to religion like cattle -- bawling, shuffling, pushing, milling around with tags in their ears, looking for a leader. Even now, they can be seen in mammoth mega-churches, some with arms raised -- fists clutching at dead air -- others writhing in the aisles, moaning, begging for some "sign" from their rigidly religious God. Perhaps their panic stems from the instinctive knowledge that God, unable to get a word in edgewise, has left the building.

The conservative religious right is a frightening political force driven in its efforts to divide and conquer by greed, an insatiable lust for power, and an ideology of hate. Its members, unable to drag God down to their level, have no qualms about elevating themselves to what they perceive as His level. They succeed in controlling the flock because fear -- especially fear of God -- is a great motivator. They use God not only as a weapon against millions who stand between them and their goals of replacing democracy with theocracy and of controlling the worlds resources and its people -- but as a divine justification for the destruction they leave in their wake.

No one was more adept at giving God credit for his killing fields than former president George W. Bush, who openly bragged that God had hired him to remove evil from the face of the earth. "I trust God speaks through me," Bush said in 2004. "Without that, I couldn't do my job." And, even before that, in 2003, Bush tried to round up a "coalition of the willing" for his Iraq slaughter on God's behalf. According to Charleston Gazette editor James A. Haught, Bush told then French President Jacques Chirac that "Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse." Haught wrote...

"Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins."

But some presidents, such as Lyndon Johnson, were not so magnanimous. God got the blame, not the credit, for the Vietman atrocity. Ronnie Dugger, in his book, "The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson," writes that Johnson told Austrian ambassador Ernst Lemberter in 1966 that the Holy Ghost regularly visited him..."He comes to me about 2 o'clock in the morning," Johnson said, "--when I have to give word to the boys, and I get the word from God whether to bomb or not."

Now, you don't have to be a Christian to reject the right-wing bull hockey that the God who appeared in a blinding flash of light and spoke to Paul on the road to Damascus has sunk to the evangelical depths where He emits not even a glimmer as He bends our presidents' ears on who to slaughter, urges televangelist Pat Robertson to ask a woman about her sex life, and is still deciding if He wants Michelle Bachman or Sarah Palin to be president.

Christians should be lauded for rejecting modern-day Religion. When the God they are taught to love is either credited -- or blamed -- for all hell on earth; when they search in vain for Jesus, and finally find Him, hanging out in a secretive townhouse on Washington's C Street with the greedy, war-mongering gang who refer to themselves as "The Family," it's time to take a second look at the direction in which this nation is hurtling.

For years, conservative right-wingers have hidden out in the C Street "church," where they are free to conduct all manner of fraud and to carry on adulterous affairs. People who have sold their souls; who have no sense of morality, and who use God as a Trojan Horse to hide their political manipulations to replace both Democrats and Democracy are quite mad, you know. Right-wing evangelicals and neocon operatives are consumed with religious hate, not Christian love. Their modus operandi is, as Weekly Standard operative William Kristol said, "go for the kill."

And, those who are familiar with Kristol know he wasn't referring just to health care. Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition protege, the now disgraced Ralph Reed, dubbed in 1995 by Time magazine as "the right hand of God," was a master at evangelical politics, which he said was like Viet Cong-style guerrilla warfare. Reed said, "I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't know until election night."

Anyone doubting the viciousness with which Reed would "go for the kill" should have a talk with Vietnam War hero and amputee Max Cleland, who not only found himself crammed into a body bag on election night 2002, thanks to Ralph Reed, but was in there with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

But Reed and others are tyros when it comes to those most likely to cause Christians to reject religion -- those whom CNN failed to mention who incite violence by preaching sermons laced with politics, religion, racism -- and hate. Those like Tempe, Arizona's Steven Anderson, who has no college degree nor formal Bible training, but is qualified to preach because he "has memorized almost half of the New Testament." Anderson started his own church -- Faithful Word Baptist -- in 2005 on Christmas Day. A firey right-wing preacher, he's against homosexuality, liberalism -- and President Barack Obama.

In August, Anderson gave a breathtakingly vile speech entitled, "Why I Hate Obama," in which he said about President Obama, among many other things...

"Obama is a madman in control of this country."
"Obama is NOT my president."
"Obama mocks the Bible."
"Obama is a socialist devil murderer."
"I hope he dies and goes to hell."
"God looks down and says, 'Man -- I HATE that guy!'"

Anderson, and those like him, epitomize the breach between Religion and Christianity. The religious believe that God belongs to them. Christians know that they belong to God. It's that simple. Thus, CNN polls notwithstanding, America cannot become "less Christian" as a result of members of the flock jerking the tags from their ears -- and rejecting modern-day religion.

Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites.

The Perils Of Plan Mexico

2009-11-28T01:00:00.004-05:00

Going Beyond Security to Strengthen US-Mexico Relations

By LAURA CARLSEN
November 24, 2009
Courtesy Of CounterPunch

I have been a political analyst and writer in Mexico for the past two decades. I'm also a mother faced with the challenge of raising children there. As a human rights advocate and a mother, today I speak to you, frankly, with a great sense of urgency.

Mexico is the United States' closest Latin American neighbor and yet most U.S. citizens receive little reliable information about what is happening within the country. Instead, Mexico and Mexicans are often demonized in the U.S. press. The single biggest reason for this is the way that the entire binational relationship has been recast in terms of security over the past few years.

From a neighbor and a trade partner, Mexico has been portrayed as a threat to U.S. national security. Immigrants are no longer immigrants, but criminals, "removable aliens," and even potential terrorists. Latinos, mostly Mexicans, are now the largest group of victims of hate crimes in the United States.

Although Mexico-bashing has been a favorite sport of the right for years, this terrible conversion of Mexico, from an ally to a "failed state" and narco-haven in the media and policy circles, began in earnest under the Bush administration and has only intensified since then. The Merida Initiative and the militarization of Mexico are the direct outgrowth of the national security framework imposed on bilateral relations.

There is a misconception that the Merida Initiative, named after a meeting between Presidents Calderon and Bush in the city of Merida, originated when Calderon requested assistance in the drug war from the U.S. government. The U.S. government, this story goes, agreed to comply. When the U.S. government cited its share of responsibility in the transnational drug trade as the world's largest market, pundits heralded the admission as unprecedented and a new step in binational cooperation.

This is largely myth. In fact, Plan Mexico—as it was first called—has its roots in the Security and Prosperity Partnership that grew out of the North American Free Trade Agreement. When the regional trade agreement was expanded into a security agreement, the Bush administration sought a means to extend its national security doctrine to its regional trade partners. This meant that both Canada and Mexico were to assume counter-terrorism activities (despite the absence of international terrorism threats in those nations), border security (in Mexico's case, to control Central American migrants), and protection of strategic resources and investments. Assistant Secretary of State Tom Shannon called it "arming NAFTA."

The Bush announcement of the three-year Merida Initiative in October of 2007 extended U.S. military intervention in Mexico from this base. The plan is dubbed a "counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics, and border security initiative" although it's the war on drugs that has received the most attention. Although U.S. troops cannot operate by law in Mexican territory, the plan significantly increases the presence of U.S. agents and intelligence services, now estimated at 1,400, and of U.S. private security companies throughout Mexico.

The terms of the Merida Initiative sends the full $1.3 billion appropriated so far to U.S. defense, security, information technology and other private-sector firms, and the U.S. government. One hundred percent of the money stays in the United States since the plan prohibits cash payments to Mexico.

In other words, what it does is ensure an expanding market for defense and security contracts, in an undeclared war that has no exit strategy in sight.

Does this sound familiar?

It's important to note that despite obvious threats to Mexican sovereignty, the Calderon government lobbied actively for the Merida Initiative, balking only at certain human rights conditions. There is a reason for Calderon's enthusiasm, which has to do with this particular moment in Mexico's fragile democracy.

Recall that Felipe Calderon took office after courts proclaimed he had won the elections by half a percentage point. The courts blocked a demand for a full recount, despite evidence of irregularities and the narrow margin. The elections decision enraged an already divided populace and failed to resolve accusations of fraud.

The military had enabled Calderon to take office by physically escorting him into a Congress occupied by protestors and placing the presidential banner over his shoulder. The country was in the throes of massive protests involving at least half the populace.

Once in office, Calderon launched the war on drugs. This strategy allowed a weak president with little popular legitimacy to cement his power, based on building an alliance with the armed forces under a militarized counternarcotics model.

The war on drugs model created an external enemy to distract from the internal protests and division. With its focus on interdiction and supply-side enforcement, the model was originally developed by President Richard Nixon in the 70s to increase presidential power, by taking counternarcotics efforts out of the hands of communities, where it was treated largely as a community health issue, and placing it in the hands of the executive, where it was treated as a security issue.

Applied in Mexico, the immediate effect was to send more than 45,000 army troops into Mexican communities. The presence of the army in all aspects of public security is now the major cause of the grave increase in human rights violations and drug-related violence in Mexico.

The militarization of Mexico has led to a steep increase in homicides related to the drug war. It has led to rape and abuse of women by soldiers in communities throughout the country. Human rights complaints against the armed forces have increased six-fold.

Even these stark figures do not reflect the seriousness of what is happening in Mexican society. Many abuses are not reported at all for the simple reason that there is no assurance that justice will be done. The Mexican Armed Forces are not subject to civilian justice systems, but to their own military tribunals. These very rarely terminate in convictions. Of scores of reported torture cases, for example, not a single case has been prosecuted by the army in recent years.

The situation with the police and civilian court system is not much better. Corruption is rampant due to the immense economic power of the drug cartels. Local and state police, the political system, and the justice system are so highly infiltrated and controlled by the cartels that in most cases it is impossible to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

The militarization of Mexico has also led to what rights groups call "the criminalization of protest." Peasant and indigenous leaders have been framed under drug charges and communities harassed by the military with the pretext of the drug war. In Operation Chihuahua, one of the first military operations to replace local police forces and occupy whole towns, among the first people picked up were grassroots leaders—not on drug charges but on three-year old warrants for leading anti-NAFTA protests. Recently, grassroots organizations opposing transnational mining operations in the Sierra Madre cited a sharp increase in militarization that they link to the Merida Initiative and the NAFTA-SPP aimed at opening up natural resources to transnational investment.

All this—the human rights abuses, impunity, corruption, criminalization of the opposition—would be grave cause for concern under any conditions. What is truly incomprehensible is that in addition to generating these costs to Mexican society, the war on drugs doesn't work to achieve its own stated objectives.

We know this not only from the relatively recent Mexican experience, but from other places— especially Colombia and the Andean region. As Plan Colombia goes into its tenth year, the cost of drugs on U.S. streets has gone down and regional production has risen. In Mexico, interdictions dropped between 2007 and 2008. The number of arrests went up but seems to have little effect on the hydra-headed cartels. Actual indictment and prosecution rates following arrests are suspiciously not reported. Illegal drug flows to the U.S. market appear to be unaffected overall.

The U.S. Role

To understand the U.S. role in this mess, it's necessary to step back a moment. There is no question that the power of organized crime in Mexico is real. There is also no question that the current approach to combating it is a disaster in its effects on human rights and democracy, and a quagmire in strategic terms.

In this context, the question is why, particularly now that George Bush is out of office, would the U.S. government continue to concentrate its aid to Mexico in a way that demonstrably empowers corrupt security forces, violates Mexican human rights, and leads to an increase in violence? This is a huge mistake with extremely high costs.

At a time when Mexico faces one of its worst economic crises in history, U.S. foreign policy toward our neighbor to the south reduces one of our most important and complex bilateral relations to miscast and failed security cooperation under a discredited war on drugs model. We know that there are powerful economic and political interests behind creating a war front in Mexico. But we also know that we too can have a powerful voice. The question is how?

Many U.S. citizen groups have been grappling with that issue. The effort to place human rights conditions on the military-police aid package to Mexico turned out to be counterproductive. The original conditions withheld 15% of some Merida Initiative aid pending progress on the prohibition against torture—a common practice by Mexican security forces to punish community leaders and extract confessions, consultation with human rights groups, transparency, and committing the army to civilian courts where permitted under law. None of that happened in a real way.

Nevertheless, the State Department recently sent a human rights report to Congress showing that the Mexican government had not made significant progress on conditions, while asking Congress to release the funds on the basis of good intentions. Congress promptly complied.

For this reason, our organization and many other U.S. and Mexican groups are calling for a halt to Plan Mexico as the three-year cycle closes. The Obama administration has pledged to continue military funding to Mexico and Central America under the plan, but we believe that a thorough analysis of the results and consequences will demonstrate the need for a more integral and effective aid strategy and help us chart a binational relationship focused on peaceful cooperation and community-building.

We are not alone in demanding that the war on drugs model be replaced.

In Mexico, recent polls show that the majority of the population has lost faith in the drug war model. Last May, 52 Mexican human rights organizations called for an end to military aid to their government under the Merida Initiative. Their letter reads:

"We respectfully request that the U.S. Congress and Department of State, in both the Merida Initiative as in other programs to support public security in Mexico, does not allocate funds or direct programs to the armed forces …

"We urge the United States to consider ways to support a holistic response to security problems; based on tackling the root causes of violence and ensuring the full respect of human rights; not on the logic of combat."

In the United States, the AFL-CIO has come out against the Merida Initiative, in part as a protest against the violation of labor rights particularly in the case of the mining union but also as a rejection of the drug war model. U.S. labor took this position even before Calderon used the army last week to wipe out Mexico's oldest union and throw 45,000 unionized workers out of jobs overnight. The drug war facilitated the use of the army to take over the state-owned company's installations.

The 1.7 million-person Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, non-governmental organizations including CIP Americas Program and Global Exchange, religious organizations including Witness for Peace, the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, and Tikkun, and grassroots activist organizations like the Latin America Solidarity Coalition, Alliance for Democracy, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, and Friends of Brad Will have all called for U.S. citizens to oppose the plan and redirect aid to Mexico to health and development programs.

The immediate change needed is relatively simple, although the situation is not. The U.S. government should:

1) Understand shared responsibility in the transnational drug war not as intervention into Mexican security issues but as assuming its own responsibilities in reducing demand, increasing health services, and attacking corruption within its borders. Much public funding and political commitment is needed here, as well as a serious search for models to replace the failed drug war.

2) The U.S. government must rechannel harmful security aid to Mexico into development and anti-crisis aid that will address the root factors that have led to the expansion of drug consumption and trafficking in Mexico. Proposals for this type of aid have already been presented before Congress.

Militarization is not the way to deal with Mexico's political crisis and infusing government money into industries based on blood is not the way to deal with the U.S. economic crisis.

Mexico should be a U.S. priority. But providing exclusively security-focused equipment and training to Mexico is like pouring gas on a fire.

Citizens in both countries stand to lose by viewing the complex binational relationship through the reductionist lens of national security. Critical issues have fallen from the agenda or receive merely lip service. Among them: trans-border livelihoods in the world's most integrated borderlands, immigration, regional environmental threats, trade, and a sustainable energy future.

We must return the U.S.-Mexico relationship to the simple equation that a healthy neighbor equals better trade, security, and cultural relations.

A strong and mutually beneficial relationship must cover the full range of issues between the two nations. The Obama administration and Congress must reorient the militarized relationship with Mexico. A new approach must go to the roots of the illegal drug trade by addressing inequality, poverty, employment, and the high costs of prohibitionist policies. Instead of seeking to bolster the Calderon administration, and police and military forces characterized by corruption, we must stand by human rights, democratic institutions, and a strong role for civil society.

Laura Carlsen is director of the Americas Policy Program in Mexico City. She can be reached at: (lcarlsen(a)ciponline.org).

This text is a speech presented to the Chicago Religious Leadership Network on Oct. 22, 2009.

Occupy Everything!

2009-11-27T21:00:00.002-05:00

Behind the Privatization of the UC, a Riot Squad of Police

By GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER
November 24, 2009
Courtesy Of CounterPunch

This was bound to be a big week in California regardless, as the threat of a 32 percent tuition and fee increase across the University of California system made a crashing entrance into reality with Wednesday’s vote by the UC Board of Regents. Perhaps the Regents and UC President Mark Yudof expected that their diversionary tactics--lament the crisis and direct blame to Sacramento’s budget cuts--would pay off. But this was not to be.

Aided in no small part by the explosive exposé published by UC Santa Cruz Professor of Political Science Bob Meister, the student, faculty, and workers’ movements the length and breadth of the state were no longer willing to accept privatization disguised as crisis-imposed budget cuts. As Meister explained in no uncertain terms, the proposed (and now passed) tuition increase has nothing whatsoever to do with budget cuts, but the cuts merely provided the pretext for a long-planned drive (and Reaganite wet dream) to privatize public education in California once and for all.

Anti-Capital Projects

A statewide day of action on September 24th generated mass walkouts and sporadic occupations, both successful (at UC Santa Cruz) and not (at UC Berkeley). A UC-centric assembly called for a month later yielded mixed results: a plan to build for a March 4th action, but only the vaguest of decisions regarding what such actions would entail. This sporadic guerrilla struggle, however, would yield a full-scale war of maneuver once the stakes of the November 18th UC Regents meeting became clear.

A coalition of organizations at UC Berkeley endorsed a three day strike in which the third day, contingent upon the expected Regents’ decision, called simply for “Escalation.” On Thursday the 19th, UCLA protestors seized Campbell Hall (now renamed “Carter-Huggins Hall” after the slain Black Panthers who lost their lives between those very walls in 1969). Across campus, protestors confronted the Regents themselves as they voted for the fee hikes, with the militarized atmosphere sparking first clashes on Wednesday and then a veritable state of siege in Thursday from which the Regents were forced to flee the angry crowds.

Just a few short hours later, UCSC students marched from the already-occupied Kresge Town Hall to Kerr administration building, gaining unexpected access to and holding the building until Sunday. Also on Thursday, hundreds of UC Davis students occupied the Mrak administrative building on campus, clearly touching a nerve and prompting 52 arrests. Less than 24 hours later, students again occupied: this time in Dutton Hall, where they remained until being dispersed by police. As this goes to press, Mrak is again in the crosshairs.

At Berkeley on Wednesday afternoon, after a rally and march of some 1,000 students, workers, and faculty at UC Berkeley, a group of more than thirty surreptitiously gained access to the diminutive Architects and Engineers Building, nestled between Sproul and Barrows Halls and which hosts UCB’s capital projects. Responding in part to Meister’s revelation that it was capital projects rather than budget cuts that were driving the cuts and fee increases, activists responded with a communiqué and website aptly entitled “Anti-Capital Projects”:

The arriving freshman is treated as a mortgage, and the fees are climbing. She is a future revenue stream, and the bills are growing. She is security for a debt she never chose, and the cost is staggering… No building will be safe from occupation while this is the case. No capital project but the project to end capital.

The occupation of the Capital Projects Building, however, would be short-lived, as police soon gained access and occupiers negotiated a strategic withdrawal on the promise that they would not engage in any other unlawful activity for a week. But a week is a long time at moments like these.

Lines of Force are Revealed

At around 6am on Thursday morning, UCPD became aware that Wheeler Hall, a prominent and massive building at the very heart of the Berkeley campus, had been occupied by more than 40 protesters. Police quickly gained access to the lower floors of the building, arresting three occupiers, who were immediately and vindictively charged not with trespassing, but with felony burglary. By 6:30a.m., an already surprising number of supporters, in the dozens, had received word of the occupation and gathered on the west side of Wheeler to show their support. By mid-morning, the number had increased to hundreds. As the crowd grew, UCPD responded with a mutually-reinforcing combination of aggression and fear: aggressively smashing into the growing crowds to install metal barriers where caution tape had proven insufficient, and calling desperately for backup first to Berkeley PD, then to the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department, and finally to Oakland PD.

Around 1pm, the skies opened up in a downpour that might have, in other conditions and other situations, dispersed the crowd entirely. But instead, umbrellas popped up like mushroom caps, tents were erected, and plastic bags distributed as makeshift ponchos as the crowd of hundreds persisted. Had the police gained access to the occupiers during the storm, the day would have ended much differently. But as it turned out, the occupiers held strong, the skies cleared, and as evening fell, the crowds began to swell further. One demonstrator confessed nostalgia at the sight of the umbrellas, and the reminder they offered of another seminal moment in trans-sectoral unity: that of the 1999 anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle that sparked the alter-globalization movement.

The occupiers, visible through a series of windows on the west side of Wheeler, relayed their demands to the gathering crowds by megaphone:

Rehire all 38 AFCSME custodial workers recently laid off;
Drop all charges and provide total amnesty to all persons occupying buildings and involved in student protests concerning budget cuts;
Maintain the current business occupants of the bears lair food court and enter into respectful and good faith negotiations;
Preserve Rochdale apartments leased to Berkeley student cooperative for $1 a year in perpetuity.

It became clear that the police and university administration were in no mood to negotiate on these terms: this much they communicated non-verbally with their pepper spray under the door, with their battering rams and wedges, and verbally with their promises of violence, as occupiers were told to “get ready for the beatdown.” Some of the occupiers, overtaken by the unmistakable candor of such threats, sought a last-minute compromise that would allow them to leave unscathed.

For a while it seemed as though such negotiations had failed dismally. Demonstrators outside could hear the police making a final offensive to smash down the door, and the occupiers could be seen as dusk fell, back to the window, visible only in outline with their hands raised to be arrested. But the atmosphere was tense, and the swelling crowd had no plans to let the police carry the arrestees out without a fight. Hours earlier, tactical groups had been preemptively dispatched to all possible exits from the network of underground tunnels that connect Wheeler to the neighboring buildings. Students who, by all outward appearance, could have been members of sororities or fraternities, demanded to know where bodies were most needed to maintain a strong and impermeable perimeter.

Let this be clear: if the students were arrested and carried out, there was going to be a fight. A riot? Perhaps (this much depended on the police). A fight? Mos def.

A “Victory”?

As with all massively important political moments, the rancid stench of opportunism was never far off, emanating from some student leaders and faculty alike. While many faculty members performed admirably during the standoff (some, like Professor of Integrative Biology Robert Dudley even being arrested for their efforts), some skillfully substituted their own voices and their own demands for those of the students engaged in the occupation.

Particularly egregious in this respect was Democratic Party “framing” strategist and self-styled movement guru George Lakoff. Visibly angered by the occupiers’ refusal to leave Wheeler voluntarily (without any of their demands having been met, of course), Lakoff seized the megaphone to spew the morally bankrupt argument that since the students knew they would be met with police violence, they would themselves be responsible for creating that violence if they chose to remain. No more repulsive a phrase was uttered that day. And were this not sufficient, Lakoff was even heard lying repeatedly to the occupiers, insisting that there had been no police violence, no rubber bullets, and no injuries outside the building, all in an effort to manipulate those inside into abandoning the occupation.

In speaking with more than a dozen of the occupiers, one sentiment above all was expressed regarding the role of many faculty that day: a deep sense of betrayal. As one occupier told me: “we asked the faculty to mediate and to negotiate with the administration as a way to get our demands out, but apparently they interpreted this as a call to negotiate with us so that we would leave the building.” In fact, many of those mediating--be they faculty, ASUC officials, and leaders of student organizations--were self-appointed and drawn almost unanimously from the ranks of those who had opposed the tactic of occupation to begin with. And this would show: according to many of the occupiers, these mediators, in focusing their attention on calming the crowds outside and encouraging the occupiers to leave, had effectively performed a “policing function” that protected the administration from the protesters.

Ali Tonak, a UC Berkeley graduate student, summarizes the feeling that many expressed:

They have a warped understanding of how power works. They think that calming people outside was keeping the people inside safe, when it was really the opposite: the only thing that was keeping the folks inside safe was people being rowdy outside. In the end, the negotiators were doing the job of the state.

And this opportunism was not limited to faculty. As word came down that a deal had been struck to allow the students to walk out the front doors of Wheeler with nothing but misdemeanors, those who had spent the day attempting to calm the angry crowds shifted their demobilizing efforts into full gear, shutting down any and all possible debate regarding what had transpired. The crowd was urged to sit (ironically, while chanting that they were “fired up,” and that students should “stand up” for their rights), and self-appointed student leaders, most of whom had opposed the occupation plans from the very beginning, set about explaining that the day had been a “victory.”

Of course, in a sense it had been a victory of sorts, but not in the sense that it was presented to the crowd. It was no coincidence that all interruptions from the crowd, from those who wondered aloud, “What about the demands? What about the layoffs? What about the fees?” were quickly and summarily dismissed and silenced by self-appointed “mediators” whose only common feature was their previous opposition to occupations.

A recent statement from the UCLA occupation of Carter-Huggins Hall sets its sights on student body president Cinthia Flores, “a junior politician careerist bent on control,” and in so doing provides an acute diagnosis of the more general danger of political opportunism, a danger which must be fought tooth-and-nail if the movement is to move forward:

These people thrive on the status quo, it’s their realm, and they always want to drag back those who escape. There are CINTHIA’s everywhere who make up and direct the movement-police to be encountered at any site of struggle. Occupation takes power and immediately destroys its concentrated form. Beware of bureaucrats, occupy everything!

A “Peaceful” Ending?

And the claim that the occupiers had emerged victorious erased more than their unfulfilled demands. It also concealed the aggressively violent response that UCPD and its imported proxies had unleashed that day. As mentioned above, this violence began early on, as UCPD attempted to install metal barricades by wading into the growing crowds and attacking anyone standing their ground. As the day progressed, police from various forces were seen ruthlessly pounding any and all protestors who disobeyed the momentary absoluteness of their sovereignty, with one such protestor being shot in the chest with an unidentified projectile.

The pettiness of such sovereignty and the repulsiveness of its executors were in no case so clear as that of UC Berkeley graduate student Zhivka Valiavicharska. As this video shows, an unidentified member of (what appears to be) the UCPD suddenly found his authority called into question by the fact that Zhivka’s hands were on a police barrier, and found it necessary to threaten her and strike the barrier with his baton. What the video does not show occurred just a minute later, when the officer again approached the barrier and smashed Zhivka’s hand with full force, breaking two fingers and nearly reducing one to pulp so that it was hanging by threads.

As Zhivka herself describes the attack:

I was holding on to the barrier with one of my hands, and this cop came up and started rudely shouting at me, telling me to take my hand off and threatening me. My hand remained there. The cop made me withdraw my hand by hitting the rail right next to it. When I leaned it again on the rail, he smashed it with full force. It was very deliberate, very skillful, and extremely excessive, since no one was challenging the barriers where I was at that moment.

Who was the officer that maliciously and intentionally attacked a member of the student population with the intention to do serious bodily harm? What of the witnessing officer, J. Williams, Badge #93, who is clearly identifiable in the video? Will UCPD and Chancellor Birgeneau immediately begin an investigation into the officer’s identity, suspend him immediately, and press criminal charges?

Former Berkeley undergraduate Yaman Salahi was present to witness the police violence, and immediately penned a thoughtful and necessary letter to the UC Berkeley community in which he heaps responsibility, quite rightly, onto the shoulders of Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, for not only loosing these various police forces onto the campus community, but also for attempting to cover up the violence he himself had unleashed in an email dispatch later sent to the entire campus community. Despite the many instances of documented violence by police, the Chancellor nevertheless insisted that the situation “ended peacefully” and thanked the police for playing a positive role.

Salahi demands a “statement against the deployment of non-UCPD personnel against students on this campus in the future,” adding that “In addition to students’ limbs, something has been broken, and Chancellor Birgeneau’s cover-up will not fix it.” But while I agree with Salahi’s general concerns, it is worth noting that it was not OPD, BPD, or the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department that smashed Zhivka’s fingers. It was UCPD, a force which remains as alien to the university community as OPD is to East Oakland. When we challenge their privatizing efforts, they will meet us with whatever force is at their disposal and with whatever violence is deemed necessary. As I write this, however, it appears as though Salahi’s call is meeting some receptive ears, and a group of prominent faculty members have begun an investigation into the police brutality deployed against students all across the UC system.

Remembrance the Past, Realizing Our Power

Remembering and reinscribing the violence of this police response into our collective memory of the occupation is of more than historical interest, however, and consists of more than merely remembering the pain inflicted upon our comrades, however necessary this may be. It is in this violent police response that a strategically correct interpretation of events lies, and this fact makes efforts to conceal the conflict of the day more than merely an effort to prevent further violence. The police response showed precisely what was at stake in the occupation, and what remains at stake in the movement more generally. The police response showed exactly how far the UC Regents, President Yudof, and the local administrations are willing to go in order to drive the privatization of public education down our unwilling throats. It showed us, in short, that we were doing something right, and we can expect more of the same if we ever hope to win.

And that’s not all: the final police and administration response--that of opting to let the occupiers walk out of Wheeler of their own accord--tells even more of the story. It tells us just how powerful our collective presence was on that day. There can be no doubt that every single occupier would have been arrested, likely beaten and abused to some degree, and hit with the trumped-up felony charges, had the crowd not been assembled outside. And this was not merely because the crowd was bearing witness to injustice or expressing its verbal non-consent.

It was not moderation and negotiation that created and sustained this pivotal moment and generated its outcome: it was the unmistakable show of force that the students gathered represented, a force that was not merely symbolic. As the great revolutionary CLR James once put it: “The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.” The same could be said of today’s privatizers of public education, and those running things more generally. Oakland’s Oscar Grant rebellions taught us this much in January, as it was only the threat of continued rioting that put BART officer Johannes Mehserle behind bars. The Berkeley occupation movement teaches us the same lesson today.

And we have late word of a library occupation at Cal State Fresno, and more are on the way, at Berkeley and elsewhere. Earlier today, marchers occupied the UC Office of the President in downtown Oakland to demand a face-to-face with Mark Yudof. Further, the contagion is international, as the students who have held Austria in a constant state of occupation for weeks on end descended en masse yesterday onto the US embassy in Vienna as a demonstration of solidarity with the California occupations and outrage at the images of police violence that have been broadcast across the globe. This is a force that is expanding as we speak, and will do so as the months pass and contradictions become more acute. The university struggle has turned a crucial corner on the UC Berkeley campus, and a qualitative leap in consciousness has occurred, by weight not of peaceful entreaties but of forceful demands.

George Ciccariello-Maher is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at U.C. Berkeley. He can be reached at gjcm(at)berkeley.edu.

Mission Creep: Counter-Insurgency in Salinas

2009-11-27T17:00:00.003-05:00

Using The Military To Fight American Gangs

By WILLIAM S. LIND
November 24, 2009
Courtesy Of CounterPunch

One of the ongoing themes of this column has been gangs and the role they play in a Fourth Generation world. Here in the United States they already serve as an alternative primary loyalty (alternative to the state) for many urban young men. Gangs will likely be a major player in 4GW because gang members are expected to fight. Those who won’t do not remain gang members.

The November 15 Washington Post had a story about gangs in Salinas, California, that deserves close attention from 4GW theorists. Salinas is reportedly overrun with Hispanic gangs. The Post wrote that its homicide rate is three times that of Los Angeles. It quoted a Salinas police officer, Sgt. Mark Lazzarini, on one of the classic results of state breakdown, chaos:

“Only half of our gangs are structured; the Norteños,” he said. “The southerners are completely unstructured. Half of our violence is kids who get into a car and go out and hunt. These kids don’t know their victims. How do you stop that? It’s very chaotic.”

Salinas’s new slogan might be, “Salinas: where even the lettuce has tattoos.”

But what is interesting in the Post’s article is not the gangs themselves. It is a new response to the gangs. Salinas has brought in the U.S. military to apply counter-insurgency doctrine to a situation on American soil. The Post reports that:

Since February combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have been advising Salinas police on counterinsurgency doctrine, bringing lessons from the battlefield to the meanest streets in an American city…

“It’s a little laboratory,” said retired Col. Hy Rothstein, the former Army career officer in Special Forces who heads the team of 15 faculty members and students (from the Naval Postgraduate School), mostly naval officers…

Rothstein…notes the “significant overlap with how you deal with insurgencies and how you deal with cities that are under siege from gangs.”…

Leonard A. Ferrari, provost of the naval Postgraduate School, embraced the project from the start, hearing…an opportunity for a school “in transition from just a defense institution to a national homeland and even a human security institution.”…

“The idea was, not just Salinas,” Ferrari said, “but is there a national model for this?”

From the perspective of 4GW theory, this is an important development. The Naval Postgraduate School is a DOD institution, part of the U.S. government. Its involvement in Salinas marks the federal government’s formal recognition of Fourth Generation war on American soil, and the need for a “national model” to counteract it. If we must involve the U.S. military to lead counterinsurgency efforts in American cities, then it is difficult to deny that we face something like insurgencies in those same cities. Again, the significance is that this is now formally admitted by the U.S. government, not merely noted by “outside the beltway” observers of 4GW.

The U.S. military officers advising Salinas on how to wage an anti-gang counterinsurgency are doing so as volunteers, according to the Post, to avoid Constitutional issues. But the camel’s nose is obviously inside the tent. Many wars have begun by sending “volunteers.” If, as likely, the volunteers prove insufficient, regular troops will follow.

As someone who believes in a strictly limited federal government, the government envisioned by our Founders, I find this troubling. But from a 4GW perspective, I also know it is inevitable. As I have said time and again, the main Fourth Generation threat we will face will be on our own soil, not halfway around the world, where we are currently pouring our strength out into the sand. We will come to regret that waste bitterly.

Objectively, what the Washington Post has reported is a milestone, to be neither praised nor regretted but merely noted. It denotes another step toward 4GW here at home. It is a step we cannot avoid. As both imported and domestically-generated Fourth Generation entities ramp up their warfare on American soil, the U.S. military will be drawn in. As is the case in 4GW overseas, it will probably fail. Old Uncle Karl was right: the state will wither away. But what follows will not be communism. It will be chaos.

William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.

The Self-Delusionary American Tragedy

2009-11-27T13:00:00.002-05:00

A Disconnect Between Cause and Effect

By Rev. WILLIAM E. ALBERTS
November 23, 2009
Courtesy Of CounterPunch

President Obama is following in the footsteps of George W. Bush as America’s Disconnector-in-Chief. Obama went to Fort Hood, Texas, where 13 soldiers were killed and many wounded by military psychiatrist Major Nadal Malik Hasan, and continued the self-delusionary American tragedy of disconnecting cause and effect. Calling the shootings “even more incomprehensible” because the Americans were killed here and not on a foreign battlefield, Obama said, “It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy. But,” he continued, “this much we know—no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. And for what he has done,” Obama declared, “we know that the killer will be met with justice—in this world, and the next.” (“Obama’s speech at Fort Hood: The Transcript,” The Washington Post, Nov. 11, 2009). Obama himself is “twist[ing] logic” by his overriding need to disconnect cause and effect.

“No faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor.” In fact, the illegal, falsely-based invasion and occupation of Iraq, the killing of well over one million innocent men, women and children, the destruction of the country’s life-sustaining infrastructure, the triggering of horrible and extensive sectarian violence, and the displacing of over four million Iraqi citizens—these “murderous and craven acts”—were justified by a “Jesus changed my heart,” peace-praying President Bush, who, led by “faith,” repeatedly proclaimed, “Freedom is not America’s gift to the world, it is Almighty God’s gift to every man and woman in the world.” (The New York Times, Sept. 3, 2004)

“Twisted logic.” In the face of America’s crimes against humanity in Iraq, President Obama told his Fort Hood audience, “In Iraq, we are working to bring a war to a successful end, as there are still those who would deny the Iraqi people the future that Americans and Iraqis have sacrificed so much for.” (Ibid.) Whose war? A successful end? For whom? It is about US political leaders’ war crimes that have denied a future to countless millions of Iraqis—and to tens of thousands of Americans and their allies. It is about the US-orchestrated and-controlled UN sanctions that led to the deaths and denial of a future to half a million Muslim Iraqi children under five between 1991 and 1998 alone. (UNICEF, Aug. 12, 1999).

“Twisted logic.” President Obama demonstrated more of it at Fort Hood with, “In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the same extremists who killed nearly 3,000 Americans continue to endanger America, our allies, and innocent Afghans and Pakistanis.” (“Obama’s speech at Fort Hood.”) Like former president Bush, Obama is using the tragic 9/11 deaths of “nearly 3,000 Americans” to justify an immoral, power-maintaining, imperialistic and arms and energy industries-driven war in which “innocent Afghans and Pakistanis” continue to be victims of American aggression. Thousands of Afghan civilians have been indiscriminately killed by US airstrikes. All civilians, including women and children, are “endangered”—in their homes, in other buildings, in cars, at wedding parties, in their mosques, in their villages. The primary result of the Bush administration’s politically motivated revenge for 9/11 is the installation of a US-puppet as Afghanistan’s president, who is known for his corruption not his integrity and for his widespread election fraud not his spreading of freedom.

Matthew P. Hoh, Senior US Civilian Representative in Afghanistan’s Zabul Province, who recently resigned his position in protest of the Obama administration’s “twisted logic,” challenges the president’s use of the “killing of nearly 3,000 Americans” to justify continuing the criminal eight-year war in Afghanistan: “The September 11th attacks, as well as the Madrid and London bombings, were primarily planned and organized in Western Europe; a point that highlights the threat is not one tied to traditional geographic or political boundaries.” Hoh finds “specious the reasons we ask for bloodshed and sacrifice from our young men and women in Afghanistan. If honest,” he continued, “our stated strategy of securing Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda resurgence or regrouping would require us to additionally invade and occupy western Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, etc.” Hoh challenges the war’s “twisted logic” in stating, “My resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.” He concludes, “The dead return only in bodily form to be received by families who must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence that such assurance can any more be made.” (Sept. 10, 2009).

“Innocent Pakistanis” are “endangered,” but far more by America’s occupation-intended military than by homegrown “extremists.” In Pakistan, CIA Predator drone air attacks have indiscriminately killed hundreds of civilians, which have helped to fan intense anti-American rage across the country. The US-pressured and –equipped Pakistani army and air force continue to bomb Taliban-held strongholds, a reported consequence of which is “some 3 million refugees [fleeing] towns and cities turned into rubble and are now huddled in makeshift shelters in 28 camps, where only one in five is under canvass in the broiling heat . . . with the number expected “to climb to 4 million.” (“Pakistani refugees: 3 million and counting,” by Armand de Borchgrave, UPI Editor at Large, UPE Asia.com, June 12, 2009). The four million refugees may be reached soon, as 250,000 Pakistanis are reported to have already fled the Pakistani army’s major offensive against the Taliban in South Waziristan. (“Pakistani Taliban assault may see 250,000 refugees,” The China Post, Oct. 20, 2009)

President Obama’s stated concern for the well-being of the Pakistani people is “twisted logic” for American public consumption. When untwisted, his logic is to disconnect cause and effect by the propagandistic peddling of an unjust war to its American victims and the electorate. Polls indicate the reconnected reality of the Pakistan people. For example, the Pew Research Center’s August survey “showed that 64 percent of Pakistanis regard the U.S. as the enemy.” And “a poll released Oct. 2nd by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland shows 90 percent of Pakistanis think the U.S. abuses its power, the highest among the 22 countries surveyed.” (“Obama Drone Attacks Help Pakistan TV Hosts Fan Distrust of U.S.,” Bloomberg.com, Oct. 22, 2009). The “anti-American vilification . . . sweeping” Pakistan is also documented by McClatchy Newspapers: “Pakistanis are reacting to what many here see as an ‘imperial’ American presence, echoing Iraq and Afghanistan, with Washington dictating to the Pakistani military and the government. Polls” the report continues, “show that Pakistanis regard the U.S., formerly a close ally and the country’s biggest donor, as a hostile power.” (“Anti-Americanism rises in Pakistan over U.S. motives,” by Saeed Shah, Sept. 7, 2009).

Another poll, “funded by the quasi-governmental US Institute of Peace and designed by the University of Maryland’s Programme on International Policy Attitudes,” and reported by the Asia Times, “found that a strong majority of Pakistanis consider the US military presence in Asia and neighboring Afghanistan a much more critical threat to their country than al-Qaeda or Pakistan’s own Taliban movement in the tribal regions along the border with Afghanistan.” The poll revealed that “only 5% of respondents said the Pakistani government should permit US or other foreign troops to enter Pakistan to pursue or capture al-Qaeda fighters, compared to a whopping 80% who said such actions should not be permitted.” Concerning perceived “US goals in the region, . . . 78% cited Washington’s alleged desire ‘to maintain control over the oil resources of the Middle East’ . . . 75% cited ‘to spread Christianity’; and 86% cited ‘to weaken and divide the Islamic world.’” (“Pakistanis see US as greatest threat,” by Jim Lobe, www.atimes.com, Jan. 8, 2008).

It is about the “twisted logic” of a president who lauds America’s military as “the finest fighting force the world has ever known . . . serving together to protect our people, while giving others half a world away the chance to lead a better life [italics added].” (“Obama’s speech at Fort Hood”) It is about the “twisted logic” of a president, whose job is to disconnect the high treason of political leaders from their sacrificing of young American lives for power and the government-connected corporate profits of the military industrial complex. It is about glorifying the sacrifice of these young Americans to justify their exploitation in the service of American imperialism.

It is about the “twisted logic” of a president who quoted President Lincoln’s words that “instead of claiming God for our side,” we should “always pray to be on the side of God.” (Ibid) The “twisted logic” of a president who ended his Fort Hood address by saying “goodbye to those who now belong to eternity,” as “we press ahead in the pursuit of the peace that guided their service. And may God bless the United States of America.” (Ibid) Translation: “God is on our side.”

It is not about whether Major Hasan became “psychologically disturbed” and “snapped.” It is about political leaders’ and mainstream media’s use of his assumed “insanity” to dissociate America from its horrible crimes against Muslim and Arab people. It is about the insanity of patriotic American “exceptionalism” that allows our government to exploit and kill Muslim and Arab people in our name under the guise of spreading “freedom” and “democracy.” It is about the tragic inability of many Americans to connect cause and effect, i.e. the consequences of the violation of the Golden Rule.

It is about the human logic of the rising suicides and post-traumatic stress and domestic violence of young deployed and returning American soldiers, traumatized by an immoral war in which their precious humanness became a casualty. It is about wives and husbands and mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and friends grieving as the remains of their casketed loved ones are memorialized in sacred places in villages and towns and cities across America.

It is about burying precious loved ones with honor, as awareness of the political and corporate and religious imperialism that led to the unnecessary Bush administration-launched war is too much for many American families to bear. Yet it is this painful awareness of cause and effect that will prevent more young Americans from being needlessly killed and maimed by political and corporate and religious motives hiding behind service to “God and country.”

It is about connecting cause and effect, and ending US tyranny abroad and its horrible effects there and at home. It is about stopping the American-instigated and –supported “murderous and craven acts” against Muslim and Arab people in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq and elsewhere. America’s moral stature and security lie in connecting and being guided by cause and effect.

Rev. William E. Alberts, Ph.D. is a hospital chaplain and a diplomate in the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy. Both a Unitarian Universalist and a United Methodist minister, he has written research reports, essays and articles on racism, war, politics and religion. He can be reached at william.alberts@bmc.org.

The US Congressman Who Sold His Soul To The Israel Lobby

2009-11-27T09:00:00.002-05:00

How Tom Perriello Became A Slave Of Israel

By Adam Shapiro
Courtesy Of Redress Information & Analysis

Adam Shapiro tells the story of a hitherto principled friend and campaigner for justice and human rights, Tom Perriello, who ran for Congress and, once elected, betrayed all of his principles and became a mere tool of the pro-apartheid American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC.

”...the consistent lack of US credibility in the world spans Democrats and Republicans and is a consequence of our relationship with Israel and the exceptionalism applied to an occupier nation foisting apartheid on the Palestinians.”

One year ago, I watched election results coming in for Virginia’s Fifth Congressional District, where my friend and colleague Tom Perriello was challenging incumbent Virgil Goode, Jr. CNN kept flipping the winner because the vote was close. Finally, Tom emerged with a 727-vote victory. I was elated, because I knew Tom and knew his deeply rooted principles. And daring to accept that there might be something to this overall atmosphere of change and hope espoused by the president-elect, I felt encouraged by the seemingly new direction and new leaders the country was embracing.

Two years earlier, I met Tom in Afghanistan when he arrived as a consultant with the United Nations to explore transitional justice possibilities for the country. I was already working for a human rights organization, promoting rule of law, women’s rights and transitional justice. Tom had done similar work in Liberia helping launch a truth and reconciliation commission.

We quickly saw eye to eye on the work and became friends over discussions about the role of law in achieving justice in extremely difficult conflict and post-conflict circumstances. I took Tom hiking in the hills overlooking Kabul and we strategized on how to strengthen the justice sector in Afghanistan. Of course, my work on Palestine came up and Tom usually brought the discussion to the role of international law and the need for accountability on all sides – considerations that clearly help protect civilians, particularly Palestinians living under occupation.

A year later, back in the US, Tom invited me to join a group of dynamic young social entrepreneurs for a strategy/brainstorming meeting that led to the creation of Avaaz – a kind of MoveOn.org [[http://moveon.org/]] for the international community to organize for human rights, the environment and other progressive causes. One of the first campaigns launched by Avaaz was to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza in January 2009 and for a robust international response to assure the lasting cessation of violence.

Shortly after that founding meeting of Avaaz, I received an email from Tom explaining that he was going to run for Congress in a long-shot attempt to unseat a conservative Republican. It was a surprise, but Tom was insistent he was going to retain his principles and values if he won. He was excited about the prospect of making real change if Obama became president. I shed my typical cynicism and encouraged friends to contribute to his campaign.

Fast forward one year, to the present, and I have been shocked and disappointed to learn that my friend Tom – a staunch supporter of international law, human rights and equality for all – has voted as a Congressman in favour of apartheid. On the face of it, House Resolution 867 “Calling on the president and the secretary of state to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the ‘Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’ in multilateral fora” was a typical AIPAC -inspired (or even written) resolution to push the US Congress to support Israel when it got into hot water internationally. Already the White House and State Department have rejected the Goldstone Report, named after preeminent South African judge Richard Goldstone, a well-known Zionist and staunch supporter of Israel. Human rights organizations around the world support the report, and the credentials of the commission were outstanding. Judge Goldstone himself has repeatedly pointed out that the report also calls to task Hamas for violations of international law.

So why did Tom vote in favour of H.Res. 867 and how is this apartheid?

I believe Congressman Perriello’s vote resulted from the almost-obligatory fealty to AIPAC displayed by members of Congress – and perhaps his desire to get re-elected.

Incumbents have learned over the years not to cross AIPAC if re-election is important to them. This is not a tangential correlation – ask former Representative Cynthia McKinney, former Senator Charles Percy and former President George H.W. Bush what happened to them when they took stands helpful to securing Palestinian rights. So the logic behind his vote is pretty simple.

But is winning everything? Even when it means voting for apartheid? Where do accountability to self and the bedrock principles we discussed in the Kabul hills enter the equation?

If the Goldstone Report concerned any other country than Israel as the main perpetrator and any other people as victims than the Palestinians, there is no doubt that the report would be fully endorsed in Congress and perhaps there would be House Resolutions praising the work of the commission, supporting the role of the UN in investigating war crimes and affirming the need for the US government to take action to support implementing the findings. That this resolution was introduced against the report because the primary victims were Palestinian is an extension of Israel’s policies of discrimination that set Palestinians apart as a people with inferior rights. Voting in favour was akin to a stamp of approval that Palestinian lives are not equal: yes, they were killed, but so what, their deaths are not worth investigating. Such blatant disregard for a specific people’s humanity and human rights in favour of another people’s superior rights and privileged standing can only be understood as apartheid. Congressman Perriello and his colleagues have turned their backs on international law and human rights. They failed to offer a word of support for Palestinian freedom and the lives of the more than 300 Palestinian children killed by Israel in the winter war.

President Obama, unlike a well-trained and increasingly sycophantic Congress, has set out to change America’s image in the world. This image is not undermined because of our relationship with Ireland, Thailand or Chile – or even by North Korea, Iran, Pakistan or Afghanistan, despite the seeming inadequacy of US policy to meet these challenges. No, the consistent lack of US credibility in the world spans Democrats and Republicans and is a consequence of our relationship with Israel and the exceptionalism applied to an occupier nation foisting apartheid on the Palestinians. Most of the world grasps immediately the hypocrisy of the Congress when it votes against the carefully-documented work of Judge Goldstone, who has devoted his life to fighting racism and apartheid.

When my friend Tom told me he was trying to become a Congressman, he assured me that he would maintain who he was. The man I knew was someone who fought for justice, who worked tirelessly to promote international law and human rights, and who was aware of the reality of Congress but determined to be different. Congressman Perriello, I am afraid, has become like so many of his colleagues, a mere tool of a hard-right AIPAC agenda that has no business dictating American policy. He has become part of an American dog wagged by an Israeli and AIPAC tail.

Voters are again disengaging because they continue to see too much business as usual. Tom is just the latest manifestation of a politician abandoning core beliefs.

What is most disappointing, perhaps, is not that my friend Tom is missing in this incarnation of Congressman Perriello – who seems willing to trade fundamental human rights for political expedience – but that in the end I was right to be cynical.

Adam Shapiro is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and human rights activist, currently working with the Free Gaza Movement.

We Are All War Criminals

2009-11-27T05:00:00.002-05:00

By Dahlia Wasfi
November 24, 2009
Courtesy Of "Information Clearing House"

Our nation is still recovering from the November 5, 2009, shootings at Ft. Hood in Killeen, Texas. We are waiting for some sense of normalcy to return after such a shocking event. How unbelievable it is for this tragedy to occur; after all, our occupations had been going so well until this point. Just ask the Iraqi people. Wait, scratch that. Ok, ask the Afghan people. Nevermind. Just ask U.S. veterans. Oh boy. If we ask the people who are living the horrors, then maybe what happened at Ft. Hood isn’t so shocking at all. What is surprising is that we haven’t seen more of the same.

In the first ten months of 2009, ten soldiers based at Ft. Hood killed themselves; that was the second-highest for the nation, behind the sixteen suicides at Kentucky’s Ft. Campbell. In January 2009 alone, twenty-four soldiers across the country killed themselves. "This is terrifying," an Army official said. "We do not know what is going on." Well, let me help you out, random Army official. When you issue illegal orders for people to go commit atrocities overseas (because that’s the best word to sum up what’s happening in Iraq and Afghanistan), and they fail to refuse said orders in compliance with the Uniform Code of Military Justice, you end up with people in trouble, people with PTSD. Some of them turn their trauma inward, self-destructing and committing suicide. Some of them express their trauma outward, committing homicide. One report documents Former Pfc. Johnathon Klinker, 22, who was sentenced to 40 years in prison for killing his 7-week-old daughter, Nicolette, in October 2006. Another report tells of the murder spree by three Iraq veterans at Ft. Carson, which included the death of a 19-year-old nursing student who was stabbed six times after the trio ran her over with their car in October 2007. And now, you have Major Nidal Hasan, who may have been experiencing secondary PTSD (not to mention degradation by his brothers-in-arms for his ethnicity and religion). THAT is what is going on; it’s all connected to our illegal occupations.

We hear reports now that the military is not taking care of its soldiers. According to allegations from clinical psychiatrist Dr. Kernan Manion—who believes he was dismissed for his complaints—Marines at Camp Lejeune are getting poor care for their PTSD. And it’s not much better in the Army, according to veteran, Sgt. Chuck Luther, who was discharged after twelve years of service with a “personality disorder” instead of being diagnosed with and receiving benefits for PTSD. Here’s what I want to know: WHY ARE WE SURPRISED? Do we not know how this story ends, with a quarter of the homeless population on America’s streets comprised of veterans? Do we not recognize the brutality and dehumanization—of recruits and the “enemy” (whatever the flavor of the month is)—that is the foundation of basic training? Do we really think the military and government are going to one day take care of the US armed forces, when they send them overseas to die for corporate profit? I wouldn’t put my dog’s welfare in the hands of an Army drill sergeant; Americans are handing over their flesh and blood to them. Yes, there is a recession and jobs are scarce, but the military is made up of less than 1% of the U.S. population. There are a whole lot of people who are struggling economically and not choosing to enlist. We are in some serious denial here.

But the denial isn’t just a civilian disorder. As Luther describes on his website, he “was deployed to Taji, Iraq from October 2006 to July 2007. SGT Luther unknowingly suffered PTSD after living in the combat environment.” He was “living” in the combat environment. How innocent that sounds. Under further probing, Luther describes “Violence breeds violence. I was trained to be very violent in combat as a scout ... we killed or detained Iraqis before anyone else got there.” Before there could be any witnesses to your crimes. From the Bible, Galatians VI (King James Version), “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” Yes, Luther is suffering now. And only he and his fellow scouts know the misery and pain they brought to who knows how many families who did nothing to us. If you break into someone’s home, it is not “self-defense” to attack the people who live there. It is assault and battery. It is terrorism. It is murder. Power of pride? I don’t think so.

And because these crimes are committed in all of our names, we are all the war criminals. We load the weapons; the soldiers and Marines do our dirty work. November 5, 2009, was sort of a “take your family to work” day at Ft. Hood. Military families got to see first-hand the environment where their loved ones earn a paycheck. All of us had a brief glimpse into the horrors that we visit on Iraqi and Afghani families everyday.

But we were lucky, for it wasn’t quite the same. The victims weren’t raped before they were murdered; their bodies were not set on fire after their last breaths were taken. The victims’ children were not tied up while their fathers were detained before they were shot. Ft. Hood soldiers were not stacked into naked pyramids and tortured to death, nor were there families killed in their homes by airstrikes. That is the reality of occupation, and none of us are without blood on our hands—civilian or military. American soldiers and Marines are not guiltier than the rest of us, but they sure as hell aren’t any more innocent. If we want the madness to stop, we all must stop the madness.

Dahlia Wasfi is an activist and speaker, currently working on a book. She supports the rapid redeployment of all overseas American military personnel back to the U.S., specifically to the offices of Goldman Sachs, AIG, and the Federal Reserve, where they should remain until they receive the benefits they were promised. Her website is www.liberatethis.com.

The Resistance Of The Oppressed

2009-11-27T01:00:00.003-05:00

The Indian [was thought] as less than human and worthy only of extermination. We did shoot down defenseless men, and women and children at places like Camp Grant, Sand Creek, and Wounded Knee. We did feed strychnine to red warriors. We did set whole villages of people out naked to freeze in the iron cold of Montana winters. And we did confine thousands in what amounted to concentration camps. — Wellman, The Indian Wars of the West, 1934

By Paul Balles
November 24, 2009
Courtesy Of "Information Clearing House"

On Thursday, November 26, 2009, Americans will celebrate Thanksgiving. The holiday is celebrated in remembrance of the pilgrims and in order to give thanks for the harvest. About the holiday, Professor Robert Jensen has written:

European invaders exterminated nearly the entire indigenous population to create the United States. Without that holocaust, the United States as we know it would not exist. The United States celebrates a Thanksgiving Day holiday dominated not by atonement for that horrendous crime against humanity but by a falsified account of the “encounter” between Europeans and American Indians.

Today there are approximately 310 American Indian reservations (or should we refer to them as Bantustans?) in the continental U.S. Perhaps we should call the forced Palestinian enclaves reservations. North America, South Africa, Palestine--all invaded and occupied with indigenous populations exterminated and imprisoned.

Their lands and homes have been taken by settlers protected by troops. They've been herded onto refugee camps called reservations or Bantustans and kept in poverty and despair.

Their fathers tell them stories of how they or their grandfathers resisted the oppressors and how their arrows or stones were no match for the guns and cannons used by the foreign settlers.

Now, the young tribesmen read newspapers in English and watch television. Some even have computers and the Internet.

They see films about Japanese Kamikaze pilots during WWII and about the French resistance. We read about Palestinians blowing themselves up because the settlers in Palestine have been their oppressors.

If I die while killing 20 of my enemies, doesn't that serve my people in their war against oppression? Hasn't this been the justification for all soldiers dying in all wars?

Didn’t we send our youth into Iraq because we approved the certain suicide of all those who would die? That's what's so attractive about invading places like Afghanistan and Iraq: we can act like oppressive settlers again.

Perhaps that's what Americans love about Israel. Israelis act like America's early settlers and garrisons of troops murdering and maiming tribes of people they consider lesser breeds.

America has forgotten the outcome of other conquests by nations and empires that over-extended themselves. All have fallen! America should know better, having fallen to resistance in Viet Nam. How many young lives succumbed to our leaders' suicidal commitment?

But what about the resistance to occupations? Isn't South Korea feeling occupied? What about the Philippines? Japan recently complained about American troops in Okinawa. How about all the other places where America has over-extended its military presence?

What would the U.S. do if a number of American Indian tribesmen decided they had been occupied long enough, been impoverished long enough? Suppose they rose up against the oppression.

Should there be an American Indian uprising--a resistance move after generations of submission—would the only path for America to take and remain true to itself be to eliminate the terrorists? Isn’t that what Israel does now?

Destroy their homes and camps; force them across borders into Canada and Mexico, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria. Build walls. Wipe out all potential weapons sources. Don't call it genocide! Call it “eliminating terrorism”! Call it “self defense”!

Paul Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.

The Memory Scrub About Why Ft. Hood Happened

2009-11-26T19:00:00.001-05:00

Is Almost Complete ... If It Weren't for Archives

That Maj. Hasan tried to get a military discharge before the massacre is largely being erased -- we're supposed to keep focusing on the Muslim part.

By Mark Ames,
Posted November 23, 2009.
Courtesy Of Alter Net

What happened to all the initial reports that accused Fort Hood killer Maj. Nidal Hasan snapped because he was distraught over the Army's refusal to grant him either a discharge or an exemption from being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, wars which the Muslim psychiatrist abhorred -- and how it was this callous Army refusal to accommodate Maj. Hasan that led to his downward spiral into despondency, rage and mass murder?

We heard quite a bit about this in the first couple of days, and then -- poof! That part of the Fort Hood story disappeared so neatly that I almost started to wonder if I'd imagined it -- such is the power of media bombardment versus a mere soap bubble like the human memory. I might have forgotten too and gone along with the reality-scrub, the way all of Official America has gone, but thanks to all the news archives, it was possible to check the record as it was first reported on November 5, and trace how a key part of the Nidal Hasan story was airbrushed away from reality.

The Army's pig-headed failure to accommodate Maj. Hasan was, for a time, the most important -- and most damaging -- detail forunderstanding his shooting rampage. Because if Maj. Hasan tried to get out of his deployment, and if he telegraphed every warning signal possible (emailing terrorists, cruising 7-11s in his Al Qaeda costume) to bolster his case to reverse his deployment orders, and all the while the Army bureaucracy ignored him despite his 20 years' service -- then that means the massacre can't be blamed just on one crazy Islamofascist's inner evil.

Instead, much of the blame for driving Maj. Hasan to crack would fall on his superiors in the Army, who held his fate in their hands. They could have shown some flexibility, but instead treated with the kind of callous bureaucratic insolence and nasty ethnic harassment you'd expect to find in a 19th century army, not 21st century America. If the Army really did fail to respond to a million-billion signals from Maj. Hasan, then it means we'd have to investigate more than just his evil little Muslim soul. We'd also have to look at the environment that changed him from a good loyal soldier into a cracked lunatic. That would mean examining just how screwed up the Army culture really is, how poorly it manages its resources and personnel, and why we went so long without knowing how bad things were…

We'd also have to examine the link between Hasan's rampage and the Army's record number of suicides this year -- which so far nearly equals the total number of US combat deaths in Iraq. A lot of this year's suicides involve Army personnel which hadn't yet shipped out to the war zones, like Maj. Hasan -- a grim statistic that belies the chickenhawks' screeching attacks denying the existence of pre-combat stress syndrome.

But the problem with investigating questions like these is that the answers could be one giant bummer -- nothing makes an American's brain switch into "hibernate" mode more quickly.

The point being that as the horror of the Fort Hood massacre started to emerge, a lot of people were interested in superimposing a more comforting, simplistic version of events over the ambiguous, demoralizing reality. According to the new version of what led to the Fort Hood Massacre, all along Maj. Hasan was a sleeper-jihadist moled up inside the Army structure, patiently waiting for his Al Qaeda handlers in AfPak to give him the Jihadi signal -- and in the meantime, the Islamofascist sleeper cell ran around Walter Reed scaring the shit out of his Army colleagues for two years straight with his frothing lectures threatening to behead Infidels and pour hot oil down their necks.

This counter-intuitive version has so far managed to stick, but only because everyone's officially forgotten how Hasan had desperately tried to convince his superiors not to deploy him. There was no way that this detail could be allowed to survive if the new official version was going to take hold; it wouldn't make sense that Hasan would simultaneously be plotting for two straight years to commit mass-murder, while at the same time trying to find a way out of deployment. A Jihadist would not try to get discharged from his terror target. Doesn't make sense. He'd keep quiet as he successfully wormed his way closer and closer to his Fort Hood target, if that's their story (why didn't he shoot up Walter Reed if he's a jihadist?), and not do anything that might alert his superiors to potential danger. So you can see why a lot of people would have liked to make disappear the part about how they ignored Hasan's repeated requests --not just the Army personnel whose asses are on the line, but the entire country which has invested so much faith and trust into the military.

As Americans lost faith in every other institution, the military stands as the last thing we believe in. According to a recent Gallup poll, the military is by far the most trusted institution -- 78 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the military, as opposed to a 20 percent favorable rating for the federal government.

Can we survive another attack of cognitive dissonance by popping that bubble too? Now that we've dispatched with the embarrassing detail about how the Army failed to respond to Maj. Hasan's pleas, honest patriots were finally freed up to tell the harsh truth: that Major Hasan actually wanted to remain in the Army and in Fort Hood, because he was a Muslim sleeper-cell terrorist on a mission to kill Americans and though the always-alert, ever-sensitive Army personnel spotted the terrorist early, they were oppressed by the terror of political-correctness, a terror which trumped Islamic terrorism. And just like that, everyone high and low echoed the new line. Whether it was John McCain saying in a speech this month, "We ought to make sure 'political correctness' never impedes national security." Or way down the power-chain to bland middle-of-the-road columnists like Margaret Colson at Bloomberg: "Who'd think the U.S. Army could be seized with a sudden case of political correctness? And with regard to Muslims, no less."

Yeah, who'd think?

But here's the problem: there's far too much evidence out there in the public record that contradicts our new Army-friendly version of events, which implicates the exact opposite of political-correctness. What this evidence shows is that if the Army been even marginally politically-correct, or at the very least, intelligent and reasonable, the massacre could have been avoided, lives saved, and Maj. Hasan might have been discharged to freely marry his online Burqa Queen. Instead, he faced a cold, unresponsive and abusive Army bureaucracy which over time drove Maj. Hasan to despair.

I've gone back through the record and collected the early accounts that were more sympathetic to Maj. Hasan, and the point at which those sympathetic details got scrubbed out of the narrative, allowing the rightwing's Monty Python version to replace it. There are some other surprising details I found, details which show even more parallels to a classic going postal rampage shooting. First, here are some of the most credible early sources which prove that Maj. Hasan tried and failed to get the Army to relieve him. On November 5th, I found these statements by Texas Republican congressman Michael McCaul:

U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, a Republican from Austin, was briefed by military officials and said Hasan had taken some unusual classes for someone studying about mental health.

"He took a lot of extra classes in weapons training, which seems a little odd for a psychiatrist," McCaul said.

McCaul said Hasan had received poor grades for his work at Walter Reed and was not happy about his situation in Fort Hood, where Hasan apparently felt like "he didn't fit in."

"He's disgruntled because he had a poor performance evaluation, he doesn't believe in the mission, he's looking at getting transferred to Afghanistan or Iraq," McCaul said. "He's not happy about all that."

McCaul added that officials planned to interview Hasan to try to determine for sure that he was not working with foreign agents.

Note the Republican congressman's use of the word "disgruntled"--the adjective synonymous with "going postal" workplace shooters. Already one of the best-informed locals likens the shooting to a workplace massacre--"he didn't fit in," "he's not happy about all that"--and makes no suggestion of terrorism. Another thing that stands out: early reports of Maj. Hasan taking several weapons training classes have also vanished--and I'd doubt there are too many people at Fort Hood eager to offer details about who trained him, how many classes he took, and how he behaved during training. And then there's Texas Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, who was the most quoted and best informed of all public figures on the day of the massacre. As early reports of the shooting were making news, Sen. Hutchison repeatedly said the shooter was a disgruntled military man:

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) said Hasan - who had worked with the wounded for years at Walter Reed Army Medical Center - was angry about being sent to war and tried to get his orders changed.

Later that day, on CNN's Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, Sen. Hutchison repeated again that he was disgruntled, and that he'd tried to get out of his deployment but was rebuffed. She added another key detail that again proves this was a workplace rage massacre rather than terrorism: Hasan didn't fire at random but rather singled out his perceived tormentors, many of whom he knew. He went to the center for a reason: to avenge those he believed had destroyed his life. This again shows that Maj. Hasan's motive wasn't a random hatred of all Americans, but rather a going-postal attack on his tormentors:

BLITZER: Joining us on the phone is Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, Fort Hood obviously in her state. She's been very helpful to us in our coverage Do you have any more information about this individual and what his motive may or may not have been?

SEN. KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON (R), TEXAS: Well, all I can say is that I know he was scheduled to be deployed and appeared to be upset about that.

And so I think that there is a lot of investigation going on now into his background and just, you know, what he was doing that was not known before.

BLITZER: When you say he was being deployed, was he off to Iraq, to Afghanistan? Do you know?

HUTCHISON: I have heard Iraq. I was told earlier that he was scheduled to go to Iraq, as most of the people there were. It was a number of guard units that were there who were being processed to go to Iraq and possibly some to Afghanistan. It was not clear if there were some going to Afghanistan, but I think so. And it was some guard members and others who were in the processing facility. And I heard that he probably knew some of the people that he was shooting, but that's not confirmed. [Bold by author for emphasis]

This incredible detail, that he targeted his victims and spared others, was confirmed by a Dallas TV reporter from KXXV who was at Fort Hood:

Texas TV station KXXV reported that the gunman told a civilian as he passed that he was shooting only military men.

She said he targeted specific people as he stalked through a deployment center, two handguns blazing.

As late as November 9, four days after the shooting, there is this account which again shows that Maj. Hasan targeted specific people whom he knew. An Islamofascist terrorist by definition doesn't selectively murder Infidels he knows while sparing others in his gun's sights. But this is how the shooting was described by Texas Republican Congressman Michael Conaway and investigators at Fort Hood, according to the New York Times:

Mr. Hasan began shooting around 1:20 p.m., investigators say.

As he methodically moved around the room, he spared some people while firing on others several times. He seemed to discriminate among his targets, though it is unclear why. All but one of the dead were soldiers.

"Our witnesses said he made eye contact with a guy and then moved to somebody in uniform," said Representative K. Michael Conaway, Republican of Texas.

Not only did politicians, reporters and investigators say that Hasan did everything he could to convince his superiors not to deploy him into combat against fellow Muslims, but so did officers and soldiers familiar with the gunman.

Fox News, oddly enough, reported in an early account:

Retired Army Col. Terry Lee, who said he worked with Hasan, told Fox News that Hasan had hoped President Barack Obama would pull troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Hasan got into frequent arguments with others in the military who supported the wars, Lee said, and had tried hard to prevent his pending deployment.

And again, there were others who knew Hasan whose accounts mirror Col. Lee's and Sen. Hutchison's, including one acquaintance of Maj. Hasan's from his time in Fort Hood as the NYT reported:

He was obviously upset," said Duane Reasoner Jr., an 18-year-old who attended the mosque and ate frequently with Major Hasan at the Golden Corral restaurant. "He didn't want to go to Afghanistan."

On top of this were the numerous accounts by Maj. Hasan's Arab relatives all confirming that not only was he trying to get out of being deployed this year, but that he'd been pushing for a full discharge from the Army as early as 2004, and that Maj. Hasan had even seen a lawyer and had offered to pay the Army back for the money they'd invested into his education -- but he was denied then as he was denied this year, and subsequently he grew desperate, distant, and increasingly bat-shit insane as the deployment date neared.

Reading through these credible accounts now, you can see how everyone from the PR flaks in the military to the rightwing machine would want somehow distract people from all the accounts of their pigheaded refusal to exempt or discharge Maj. Hasan, and you can then start to imagine how a lot of editors and viewers wouldn't put up much of a fuss if the story changed to something more palatable to the American public. So with no one interested in protecting Maj. Hasan's motives, and everyone interested in protecting the Army's behavior, the story gets changed from one of "it could have been prevented if Army bureaucrats/officers weren't such raging assholes to Maj. Hasan" to a barrage of leaks from unnamed Army officials, who argued that Maj. Hasan never said peep to anyone about wanting out of the service (note however the fine language--they narrowed from deployment to discharge to "record of" requesting a discharge). And that it was really the US Army's Judeo-Christian word against Major Hasan's Muslim-terrorist relatives' "word." And who best to print a made-to-order reality-scrub than the corrupt neocons running the Washington Post:

Hasan Did Not Formally Seek To Leave Military, Army Official Says

WASHINGTON -- The Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people last week at Fort Hood, Texas, did not formally seek to leave the military as a conscientious objector or for any other reason, an Army official said, despite claims by one of his relatives that he had done so.

Note the sly re-framing from "not getting deployed" to "discharge," a significant technicality; and the glaring omission here of all the other credible sources who were already on record testifying that Hasan had tried to get out of being deployed, in addition to getting a discharge. There's no more mention of all the Christian Americans -- the military sources and Republican politicians familiar with the case -- who supported the family's version. [Oddly enough, the original version of this Washington Post story, posted November 11, 2009, no longer exists on the Post's site.

Even the cached version is gone from Google and Bing; all redirect to a new address of a totally modified version of this story, with a new headline, angle and new lead paragraphs, and this lead paragraph I quote above pushed lower down in the story. This original Post version was widely distributed all over the internet and printed in newspapers all across America--it was the big scoop on that day. A friend tracked down a yahoo cached version of the original article, which is still up (poor lowly Yahoo, the Post's scrubbers didn't even bother tampering with it). In case that gets scrubbed, here is a .pdf file of the article. Even though the Nov. 11 web address exists, it automatically redirects to the newer modified version of this article, which changes the headline from "Hasan Did Not Formally Seek To Leave Military, Army Official Says" to a completely different story: "Army sought ways to channel Hasan's absorption with Islam."

So a day after the Post disseminated an unsourced story that ended talk about how the Army callously dismissed Maj. Hasan's repeated pleas, the rewritten Nov. 12 version of the same article takes the PR whitewash to an even more ludicrous level: now we're told that rather than treating Maj. Hasan poorly, the multiculturalism-friendly Army was Maj. Hasan's bestest buddy and life coach, going the extra mile to accommodate Hasan's Islamic alienation, enrolling him in Islamic sensitivity classes. So now the question is: Why did the Post furtively rewrite the original own story and scrub all the cached versions? The question has to be asked because there's no explanation of the modification, which usually appears at the end of the story. It may be nothing. But if the purpose of this rewrite-and-scrub of the original story was because some editor understood that the story was too poorly sourced to stand behind, then the Post should acknowledge the modification somewhere. Whatever the reason for that mystery, the effect was very clear: after this was published, the media stopped talking about how Maj. Hasan tried getting out of the Army, and turned instead towards making Hasan into the face of Islamofascist evil.] The Post makes yet another false assertion, that only "one of his relatives" -- Maj. Hasan's aunt -- claimed Hasan had tried to get a discharge, when in fact several of Maj. Hasan's relatives confirmed it.

For example, there's a cousin, Nadar Hasan:

Around 2004, Major Hasan started feeling disgruntled about the Army, relatives said. He described anti-Muslim harassment and sought legal advice, possibly from an Army lawyer, about getting a discharge. [Bold mine-author]

But because the Army had paid for his education, and probably because the Army was in great need of mental health professionals and was trying to recruit Arab-Americans, he was advised that his chances of getting out were minuscule, relatives said.

"They told him that he would be allowed out only if Rumsfeld himself O.K.'d it," said a cousin, Nader Hasan, referring to Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the secretary of defense. Relatives said they were unclear whether Major Hasan sought assistance from a private lawyer; then, about two years ago, his cousin Nader Hasan said, he resigned himself to staying in the Army through the end of his commitment.

And here's Number 3, also a cousin, this one named Malik Hasan, as reported in the AP:

"He told (them) that as a Muslim committed to his prayers he was discriminated against and not treated as is fitting for an officer and American," said Mohammed Malik Hasan, 24, a cousin, told the AP from his home on the outskirts of the Palestinian city of Ramallah. "He hired a lawyer to get him a discharge."

Whether you choose to believe them or not is one matter; but it's another matter when the Post reporters or fact-checkers, among the best-trained in the business, are suddenly struck with a case of collective laziness, and don't bother fact-checking the most significant assertion in the article's lead paragraph.

Again, the fact that they wiped the original version off the net may suggest that the Post realized that the original version was problematic enough to warrant a rewrite and thematic-shift. To see just how big a difference the WaPo's article claiming that Maj. Hasan hadn't sought a discharge makes, imagine if that same lead paragraph above, quoted all over the country on November 11, was rewritten according to the true facts:

The Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people last week at Fort Hood, Texas, did not formally seek to leave the military as a conscientious objector or for any other reason, an Army official said, despite claims by at least three relatives that he had sought a discharge, as well as public statements by three Texas Republican congressmen, officers and others who knew Maj. Hasan.

Put this way -- the accurate, factual way -- it makes the Army look bad. As if they're hiding something. The Army official claim lacks credibility and looks incredibly suspicious. Because the unnamed Army official has a reason to want to lie to us (which is why he's always "unnamed"): to divert attention away from the Army's failure to respond in any reasonable way to Maj. Hasan's desperate pleas to be discharged exploring that angle means exploring the toxic culture of callous bureaucratic indifference and ethnic bullying and discrimination that Maj. Hasan faced in the Army.

It wasn't just his superiors; even young grunts were having a laugh at this ranking senior office, because to them Maj. Hasan was nothing but a camel jockey. It was this culture that transformed Maj. Hasan from a patriot who eagerly joined the Army as a teenager, so eager to Americanize himself apart from his Jordan-born parents that he enlisted over their objections. Hasan then traveled down a 20-year transformation from wide-eyed Arab-American patriot to the increasingly angry, alienated, and finally murderously insane Maj. Hasan.

That's the Hasan one we know, the one who unleashed a bloodbath on military personnel, whom he targeted specifically like so many rage murderers do, perhaps even targeting people he knew whom he believed had destroyed him, as Sen. Hutchison suggested. That's the version that could cause a lot of problems and a lot of cognitive dissonance here, so it had to be scrubbed out with a new unsourced and slyly-crafted lie claiming what everyone hoped to hear: that Maj. Hassan never tried to get discharged, and the poor military and intel people were helpless to stop the crazed terrorist in their midst.

The Washington Post, as we saw, subsequently altered this story the next day, once the damage was done, transforming it into an even weirder story about Army sensitivity to Maj. Hasan's religious needs, enrolling him in a kind of Islam Sensitivity Training course. Note again how there's not a single named source for the story, headlined "Army sought ways to channel Hasan's absorption with Islam":

Army psychiatrists at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who supervised Maj. Nidal M. Hasan's work as a psychiatric fellow tried to turn his growing preoccupation with religion and war into something productive by ordering him to attend a university lecture series on Islam, the Middle East and terrorism, according to a Walter Reed staff member familiar with Hasan's medical training. The psychiatric staff at Walter Reed did not discuss kicking him out of the service, according to the staff member. In fact, Hasan was initially considered a good medical school candidate because he had spent time as an enlisted soldier and had cared for his siblings after his parents died, both attributes that supervisors believed indicated he had a healthy work ethic. ...

The idea that Hasan attend the lectures, which he did late last year or early this year, came up during discussions among the psychiatric staffs of the hospital and the Army's medical university about what was perceived as Hasan's lack of productivity and his constant interest in Muslims whose religious beliefs conflicted with their military duties.

"You're at an institution of higher learning. He seems to want to do work in an area no one knows anything about," the staff member, who also requested anonymity because he had not been authorized to speak publicly, said of the order. "You don't want to close him down just because it's different."

Indeed.

Meanwhile, the Hasan-Never-Told-Us-He-Was-Unhappy story ran again under a different outlet, the AP. And just as with the Post's account, the AP relied on the same "unnamed" sources to back it up while totally omitting all the credible sources who were already on the record contradicting these "unnamed sources":

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has found no evidence that Hasan formally sought release from the Army as a conscientious objector or for any other reason, two senior military officials told The Associated Press. Family members have said he wanted to get out of the Army and had sought legal advice, suggesting that Hasan's anxiety as a Muslim over his pending deployment overseas might have been a factor in the deadly rampage.

Hasan had complained privately to colleagues that he was harassed for his religion and that he wanted to get out of the Army. But there is no record of Hasan filing a complaint with his chain of command regarding any harassment he may have suffered for being Muslim or any record of him formally seeking release from the military, the officials told the AP.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is under investigation.

With the AP and Washington Post both running versions of this new line within 24 hours of each other, every paper and media outlet in America would pick it up.

The other key element in making this rather crude fact-scrubbing work is that the audience--Americans--didn't really want to hear the depressing truth of what this bastard went through before he went postal. It's easier to make him out to be "evil" and a "terrorist" from an entirely alien, bloodthirsty religion which bears no relation to our civilized, peace-loving Judeo-Christianity.

It was amazing how quickly everyone rallied around the facile "terrorist" explanation, as if by osmosis. One hack who was instrumental in pushing this new, pat "terrorist" explanation was Time magazine's Nancy Gibbs, who wrote the cover story, featuring a giant close-up photo of Hasan's face and a black bar with the words "TERRORIST" postered across his eyes. Gibbs dismisses the idea that Hasan's environment, rather than his evil Muslim soul, drove him to massacre, despite all the evidence.

This isn't the first time Nancy Gibbs has whitewashed a massacre to make it fit a facile, comforting narrative. A few months after the Columbine massacre in 1999, as more Americans started to question whether bullying and the schools' toxic culture might have helped cause the shootings, Gibbs sneered at the sudden cultural change acknowledging bullying's toxic effects on kids, and the sense that it shouldn't be tolerated--a sensibility that Gibbs dismissed as nothing but a bunch of politically-correct namby-pambies:

So if you aren't allowed to wear a hat, toot your horn, form a clique or pick on a freshman, all because everyone is worried that someone might snap, it's fair to ask: Are high schools preparing kids for the big ugly world outside those doors -- or handicapping them once they get there? High school was once useful as a controlled environment, where it was safe to learn to handle rejection, competition, cruelty, charisma. Now that we've discovered how unsafe a school can be, it may have become so controlled that some lessons will just have to be learned elsewhere.

Gibbs was telling her readers that bullying makes you a man, and anyone who says it had anything to do with causing rampage shootings was nothing but a touchy-feely politically-correct wimp. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth, and only a willfully ignorant jerk could possibly go on the record dismissing bullying. In the months and years since Gibbs defended the positive educational and character-building benefits of bullying, several states and local school districts have enacted laws and rules outlawing bullying. Numerous studies show that bullied kids tend to suffer serious psychological and cognitive damage throughout their lives--they have a much greater chance of suffering from depression, and have difficulties making friends, socializing, and succeeding as compared to other children.

Researchers have detailed just how savagely the Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were bullied, and how their school tolerated and nurtured the bullying jocks while dismissing, Gibbs-style, the whining complaints of bullied kids and their parents. Before their massacre, Klebold and Harris left behind diaries explaining their goals and their plans. Unlike people searching for meaning in Maj. Hasan's "Allahu Akhbar" Klebold and Harris left no doubt at all that their goal was to commit terrorism: "we will hijack a hell of a lot of bombs and crash a plane into NYC with us inside firing away as we go down."

That wasn't Hasan or any other Muslim: that was the white Christian American Eric Harris, and his half-Jewish co-murderer, Dylan Klebold.

But again, just as with the Maj. Hasan rampage, it's too disturbing for too many Americans--so bullying has nothing to do with it in Columbine or Walter Reed.

At last, we have the new nicely-scrubbed Soviet version of events that we've come to accept: No one told the Army that Maj. Hasan wanted a discharge. Army officials figured out that he was a crazy Muslim--because that $700 billion we pour into our military every year isn't wasted!--and they even tried to enroll him into Islamic sensitivity training. But the problem is, our 2 million man military was so terrified of hippies and feminists terrorizing them with political-correctness-hectoring that our nation's finest kept all of their fears about Hasan to themselves.

That's it. That's the story. Sure, it's fucking ridiculous. But it's what the country now all agrees happened.

Here, for example, is Rush Limbaugh:

"I tell you something, folks, political correctness and a lot of other things are gonna lead to our downfall."

And then here is Newt Gingrich on Fox News's Greta Van Susteren show:

I think the American people and the Congress should look at the kind of political correct indoctrination now under way at the FBI and elsewhere, designed to make sure that they're not insensitive.

And finally, going back to the Washington Post again, here is their star pundit, the man who fucked up and called wrong every important event of the last decade-plus: Charles Krauthammer:

Was anything done about this potential danger? Of course not. Who wants to be accused of Islamophobia and prejudice against a colleague's religion?

We know that the FBI and the Army knew how dangerous Hasan was. Those soldiers were scared for their lives and tried to do something. This is what happens to everyone who speaks out about jihad in the private sector, in academia, in the media, etc., but for the FBI and the Army to be more concerned with the feelings of terrorists and pedophiles than with the lives of our soldiers, first responders, and civilians is unconscionable. It appears that the CIA, the NSA, and the DNI have the same priorities.

Despicable.

I could never have imagined the pervasiveness of out-and-out treason in our government and our military.

Yowza, he's on fire! Okay but seriously, what can you expect from an imbecile like Krauthammer, whose columns consist of nothing but a series of reckless lies, lazy posturing, and an unusual talent for predicting everything exactly wrong, with disastrous results every time, like some kind of fascist Mr Magoo hellbent on subjugating the planet through military force if only he can find his glasses, he'll start subjugating ... O where did he put them? ...

To see just how totally unreliable Krauthammer's fungus-infested mind is, I offer his reading into the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, when Korean-American student Seun-Hui Cho killed 33 people. Krauthammer answers it as though his brain has been sucked into a parallel universe very close to our own, and he's responding to a question about Middle East violence:

KRAUTHAMMER: What you can say, just -- not as a psychiatrist, but as somebody who's lived through the a past seven or eight years, is that if you look at that picture [of the Virigina Tech shooting], it draws its inspiration from the manifestos, the iconic photographs of the Islamic suicide bombers over the last half decade in Palestine, in Iraq and elsewhere. That's what they end up leaving behind, either on al Jazeera or Palestinian TV. And he, it seems, as if his inspiration for leaving the message behind in that way, might have been this kind of suicide attack, which, of course, his was. And he did leave the return address return "Ismail Ax." "Ismail Ax." I suspect it has some more to do with Islamic terror and the inspiration than it does with the opening line of Moby Dick.

BRIT HUME: Which was, "My name is Ishmael."

Can we call you "Dumber" for short? Seriously, it reads like the transcript of a couple of washed-up valium junkies sitting in front of the telly. In a meritocracy, Brit Hume would be fired and driven into exile for failing to remember three simple words in the most famous sentence in American literature. But if the point is to be wrong, and to rub it in, then it makes sense -- because that's exactly what Krauthammer does. He's even lazier, in his own way: Brit vacuously reads the big news item of the day; and Krauthammer blames the same ol' reliable villains: Islamofascist terrorists abroad, and the liberal fifth column here at home. There's not even a fake attempt at linking the two, not even a conjoining clause. It's as though he just sheds his hatreds unconsciously, like flakes of dead skin.

But Krauthammer's account of the Fort Hood massacre goes further than the usual cover-up and deflection. This time, he goes all the way, accusing America's tolerance-mad liberals of not merely weakening the country from within out of naive good intentions, but instead he says something far more threatening. Krauthammer argues that America's liberals are actually sabotaging the military and intelligence agencies as part of some kind of conspiracy to destroy America and pave the way for an Islamic-socialist-liberal takeover. Which makes the liberals guilty of treason. Treason is a capital offense.

Read more of Mark Ames at eXiledonline.com. He is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond.

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Why They Hate Us

2009-11-26T15:00:00.002-05:00

On Military Occupation

By Stephen M. Walt
Courtesy Of Foreign Policy Magazine

Mon, 11/23/2009 - 11:58am

One of the many barriers to developing a saner U.S. foreign policy is our collective failure to appreciate why military occupations generate so much hatred, resentment, and resistance, and why we should therefore go to enormous lengths to avoid getting mired in them. Costly occupations are an activity you hope your adversaries undertake, especially in areas of little intrinsic strategic value. We blundered into Somalia in the early 1990s without realizing that we weren't welcome; we invaded Iraq thinking we would be greeted as liberators, and we still don't fully understand why many Afghans resent our presence and why some are driven to take up arms against us.

The American experience is hardly unique: Britain's occupation of Iraq after World War I triggered fierce opposition, and British forces in Mandate Palestine eventually faced armed resistance from both Arab and Zionist groups. French rule in Algeria, Syria, Lebanon, and Indochina spawned several violent resistance movements, and Russia has fought Chechen insurgents in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. The Shiite population of southern Lebanon initially welcomed Israel's invasion in 1982, but the IDF behaved badly and stayed too long, which led directly to the formation of Hezbollah. Israelis were also surprised by the first intifida in 1987, having mistakenly assumed that their occupation of the West Bank was benevolent and that the Palestinians there would be content to be governed by the IDF forever.

Military occupation generates resistance because it is humiliating, disruptive, arbitrary and sometimes terrifying to its objects, even when the occupying power is acting from more-or-less benevolent motives. If you've ever been caught in a speed trap by a rude or abusive policeman (I have), or selected out for special attention crossing a border (ditto), you have a mild sense of what this is like. You are at the mercy of the person in charge, who is inevitably well-armed and can do pretty much whatever he (or she) wants. Any sign of protest will only make things go badly -- and in some situations will get you arrested, beaten, or worse -- so you choke down your anger and just put up with it. Now imagine that this is occurring after you've waited for hours at some internal checkpoint, that none of the occupiers speak your language, and that it is like this every single day. And occasionally the occupying power kills innocent people by mistake, engages in other forms of indiscriminate force, and does so with scant regard for local customs and sensibilities. Maintain this situation long enough, and some members of the local population will start looking for ways to strike back. Some of them may even decide to strap on explosive vests or get behind the wheel of a explosives-laden truck, and sacrifice themselves.

It is sometimes said that Americans don't understand this phenomenon because the United States has never been conquered and occupied. But this simply isn't true. After the Civil War, a "foreign army" occupied the former Confederacy and imposed a new political order that most white southerners found abhorrent. The first Reconstruction Act of 1867 put most southern states under formal military control, supervised the writing of new state constitutions, and sought to enfranchise and empower former slaves. It also attempted to rebuild the south economically, but the reconstruction effort was undermined by corruption and poor administration. Sound familiar? However laudable the aims may have been, the results were precisely what one would expect. Northern occupation eventually triggered violent resistance by the Ku Klux Klan, White League, Red Shirts, and other insurgent groups, which helped thwart Reconstruction and paved the way for the Jim Crow system that lasted until the second half of the 20th century.

Nor should we forget how long a profound sense of anger and resentment lasted. I was recently discussing this issue with a distinguished American journalist who grew up in the South, and he told me that one hundred years after the end of the Civil War, he was still being taught songs that expressed a lingering hatred of what the Yankees had done. Here are a coupl of stanzas from one of them -- "I'm a Good Old Rebel" -- written by a former Confederate officer and first published in 1914:

I hates the Yankee nation, and everything they do,
I hates the Declaration of Independence too.
I hates the glorious Union, 'tis dripping with our blood
I hates their striped banner, I fought it all I could.

Three hundred thousand Yankees lie stiff in Southern dust;
We got three hundred thousand, before they conquered us
They died of Southern fever, and Southern steel and shot,
I wish they was three million, instead of what we got.

Or to take a more recent (1974), less poetic example, from Lynyrd Skynyrd:

Well I heard Mr. Young sing about her,
Well I heard old Neil put her down.
Well, I hope Neil Young will remember,
A Southern man don't need him around anyhow.

This is what defeat in war and prolonged occupation does to a society: it generates hatred and resentment that can last a century or more. Hatred of the "party of Lincoln" kept the South solidly Democratic for decades, and its political character remains distinctly different even today, nearly 150 years after the civil war ended. (Among other things, Barack Obama has favorable job approval ratings in every region of the country except the South). And don't forget that unlike our current presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, the occupying forces of the North spoke the same language and had been part of the same country prior to the war; in some cases, there were even strong family connections on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Yet defeat in war and military occupation were an enduring source of division for many years thereafter.

The bottom line is that you don't need to be a sociologist, political scientist, or a student of colonialism or foreign cultures to understand why military occupation is such a poisonous activity and why it usually fails. If you're an American, you just need to read a bit about Reconstruction and reflect on how its effects -- along with the effects of slavery itself -- have persisted across generations. If that's not enough, visit a society that is currently experiencing occupation, and take the time to go through a checkpoint or two. Then you might understand why the local population doesn't view the occupying forces as benevolent and isn't as grateful as occupiers often think they ought to be.

ADAM JAN/AFP/Getty Images

Blackwater's Secret War In Pakistan

2009-11-26T11:00:00.003-05:00

By Jeremy Scahill
November 23, 2009
Courtesy Of The Nation

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.

The source, who has worked on covert US military programs for years, including in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has direct knowledge of Blackwater's involvement. He spoke to The Nation on condition of anonymity because the program is classified. The source said that the program is so "compartmentalized" that senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence.

The White House did not return calls or email messages seeking comment for this story. Capt. John Kirby, the spokesperson for Adm. Michael Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Nation, "We do not discuss current operations one way or the other, regardless of their nature." A defense official, on background, specifically denied that Blackwater performs work on drone strikes or intelligence for JSOC in Pakistan. "We don't have any contracts to do that work for us. We don't contract that kind of work out, period," the official said. "There has not been, and is not now, contracts between JSOC and that organization for these types of services."

The previously unreported program, the military intelligence source said, is distinct from the CIA assassination program that the agency's director, Leon Panetta, announced he had canceled in June 2009. "This is a parallel operation to the CIA," said the source. "They are two separate beasts." The program puts Blackwater at the epicenter of a US military operation within the borders of a nation against which the United States has not declared war--knowledge that could further strain the already tense relations between the United States and Pakistan. In 2006, the United States and Pakistan struck a deal that authorized JSOC to enter Pakistan to hunt Osama bin Laden with the understanding that Pakistan would deny it had given permission. Officially, the United States is not supposed to have any active military operations in the country.

Blackwater, which recently changed its name to Xe Services and US Training Center, denies the company is operating in Pakistan. "Xe Services has only one employee in Pakistan performing construction oversight for the U.S. Government," Blackwater spokesperson Mark Corallo said in a statement to The Nation, adding that the company has "no other operations of any kind in Pakistan."

A former senior executive at Blackwater confirmed the military intelligence source's claim that the company is working in Pakistan for the CIA and JSOC, the premier counterterrorism and covert operations force within the military. He said that Blackwater is also working for the Pakistani government on a subcontract with an Islamabad-based security firm that puts US Blackwater operatives on the ground with Pakistani forces in counter-terrorism operations, including house raids and border interdictions, in the North-West Frontier Province and elsewhere in Pakistan. This arrangement, the former executive said, allows the Pakistani government to utilize former US Special Operations forces who now work for Blackwater while denying an official US military presence in the country. He also confirmed that Blackwater has a facility in Karachi and has personnel deployed elsewhere in Pakistan. The former executive spoke on condition of anonymity.

His account and that of the military intelligence source were borne out by a US military source who has knowledge of Special Forces actions in Pakistan and Afghanistan. When asked about Blackwater's covert work for JSOC in Pakistan, this source, who also asked for anonymity, told The Nation, "From my information that I have, that is absolutely correct," adding, "There's no question that's occurring."

"It wouldn't surprise me because we've outsourced nearly everything," said Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff from 2002 to 2005, when told of Blackwater's role in Pakistan. Wilkerson said that during his time in the Bush administration, he saw the beginnings of Blackwater's involvement with the sensitive operations of the military and CIA. "Part of this, of course, is an attempt to get around the constraints the Congress has placed on DoD. If you don't have sufficient soldiers to do it, you hire civilians to do it. I mean, it's that simple. It would not surprise me."

The Counterterrorism Tag Team in Karachi

The covert JSOC program with Blackwater in Pakistan dates back to at least 2007, according to the military intelligence source. The current head of JSOC is Vice Adm. William McRaven, who took over the post from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC from 2003 to 2008 before being named the top US commander in Afghanistan. Blackwater's presence in Pakistan is "not really visible, and that's why nobody has cracked down on it," said the source. Blackwater's operations in Pakistan, he said, are not done through State Department contracts or publicly identified Defense contracts. "It's Blackwater via JSOC, and it's a classified no-bid [contract] approved on a rolling basis." The main JSOC/Blackwater facility in Karachi, according to the source, is nondescript: three trailers with various generators, satellite phones and computer systems are used as a makeshift operations center. "It's a very rudimentary operation," says the source. "I would compare it to [CIA] outposts in Kurdistan or any of the Special Forces outposts. It's very bare bones, and that's the point."

Blackwater's work for JSOC in Karachi is coordinated out of a Task Force based at Bagram Air Base in neighboring Afghanistan, according to the military intelligence source. While JSOC technically runs the operations in Karachi, he said, it is largely staffed by former US special operations soldiers working for a division of Blackwater, once known as Blackwater SELECT, and intelligence analysts working for a Blackwater affiliate, Total Intelligence Solutions (TIS), which is owned by Blackwater's founder, Erik Prince. The military source said that the name Blackwater SELECT may have been changed recently. Total Intelligence, which is run out of an office on the ninth floor of a building in the Ballston area of Arlington, Virginia, is staffed by former analysts and operatives from the CIA, DIA, FBI and other agencies. It is modeled after the CIA's counterterrorism center. In Karachi, TIS runs a "media-scouring/open-source network," according to the source. Until recently, Total Intelligence was run by two former top CIA officials, Cofer Black and Robert Richer, both of whom have left the company. In Pakistan, Blackwater is not using either its original name or its new moniker, Xe Services, according to the former Blackwater executive. "They are running most of their work through TIS because the other two [names] have such a stain on them," he said. Corallo, the Blackwater spokesperson, denied that TIS or any other division or affiliate of Blackwater has any personnel in Pakistan.

The US military intelligence source said that Blackwater's classified contracts keep getting renewed at the request of JSOC. Blackwater, he said, is already so deeply entrenched that it has become a staple of the US military operations in Pakistan. According to the former Blackwater executive, "The politics that go with the brand of BW is somewhat set aside because what you're doing is really one military guy to another." Blackwater's first known contract with the CIA for operations in Afghanistan was awarded in 2002 and was for work along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

One of the concerns raised by the military intelligence source is that some Blackwater personnel are being given rolling security clearances above their approved clearances. Using Alternative Compartmentalized Control Measures (ACCMs), he said, the Blackwater personnel are granted clearance to a Special Access Program, the bureaucratic term used to describe highly classified "black" operations. "With an ACCM, the security manager can grant access to you to be exposed to and operate within compartmentalized programs far above 'secret'--even though you have no business doing so," said the source. It allows Blackwater personnel that "do not have the requisite security clearance or do not hold a security clearance whatsoever to participate in classified operations by virtue of trust," he added. "Think of it as an ultra-exclusive level above top secret. That's exactly what it is: a circle of love." Blackwater, therefore, has access to "all source" reports that are culled in part from JSOC units in the field. "That's how a lot of things over the years have been conducted with contractors," said the source. "We have contractors that regularly see things that top policy-makers don't unless they ask."

According to the source, Blackwater has effectively marketed itself as a company whose operatives have "conducted lethal direct action missions and now, for a price, you can have your own planning cell. JSOC just ate that up," he said, adding, "They have a sizable force in Pakistan--not for any nefarious purpose if you really want to look at it that way--but to support a legitimate contract that's classified for JSOC." Blackwater's Pakistan JSOC contracts are secret and are therefore shielded from public oversight, he said. The source is not sure when the arrangement with JSOC began, but he says that a spin-off of Blackwater SELECT "was issued a no-bid contract for support to shooters for a JSOC Task Force and they kept extending it." Some of the Blackwater personnel, he said, work undercover as aid workers. "Nobody even gives them a second thought."

The military intelligence source said that the Blackwater/JSOC Karachi operation is referred to as "Qatar cubed," in reference to the US forward operating base in Qatar that served as the hub for the planning and implementation of the US invasion of Iraq. "This is supposed to be the brave new world," he says. "This is the Jamestown of the new millennium and it's meant to be a lily pad. You can jump off to Uzbekistan, you can jump back over the border, you can jump sideways, you can jump northwest. It's strategically located so that they can get their people wherever they have to without having to wrangle with the military chain of command in Afghanistan, which is convoluted. They don't have to deal with that because they're operating under a classified mandate."

In addition to planning drone strikes and operations against suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Pakistan for both JSOC and the CIA, the Blackwater team in Karachi also helps plan missions for JSOC inside Uzbekistan against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, according to the military intelligence source. Blackwater does not actually carry out the operations, he said, which are executed on the ground by JSOC forces. "That piqued my curiosity and really worries me because I don't know if you noticed but I was never told we are at war with Uzbekistan," he said. "So, did I miss something, did Rumsfeld come back into power?"

Pakistan's Military Contracting Maze

Blackwater, according to the military intelligence source, is not doing the actual killing as part of its work in Pakistan. "The SELECT personnel are not going into places with private aircraft and going after targets," he said. "It's not like Blackwater SELECT people are running around assassinating people." Instead, US Special Forces teams carry out the plans developed in part by Blackwater. The military intelligence source drew a distinction between the Blackwater operatives who work for the State Department, which he calls "Blackwater Vanilla," and the seasoned Special Forces veterans who work on the JSOC program. "Good or bad, there's a small number of people who know how to pull off an operation like that. That's probably a good thing," said the source. "It's the Blackwater SELECT people that have and continue to plan these types of operations because they're the only people that know how and they went where the money was. It's not trigger-happy fucks, like some of the PSD [Personal Security Detail] guys. These are not people that believe that Barack Obama is a socialist, these are not people that kill innocent civilians. They're very good at what they do."

The former Blackwater executive, when asked for confirmation that Blackwater forces were not actively killing people in Pakistan, said, "that's not entirely accurate." While he concurred with the military intelligence source's description of the JSOC and CIA programs, he pointed to another role Blackwater is allegedly playing in Pakistan, not for the US government but for Islamabad. According to the executive, Blackwater works on a subcontract for Kestral Logistics, a powerful Pakistani firm, which specializes in military logistical support, private security and intelligence consulting. It is staffed with former high-ranking Pakistani army and government officials. While Kestral's main offices are in Pakistan, it also has branches in several other countries.

A spokesperson for the US State Department's Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC), which is responsible for issuing licenses to US corporations to provide defense-related services to foreign governments or entities, would neither confirm nor deny for The Nation that Blackwater has a license to work in Pakistan or to work with Kestral. "We cannot help you," said department spokesperson David McKeeby after checking with the relevant DDTC officials. "You'll have to contact the companies directly." Blackwater's Corallo said the company has "no operations of any kind" in Pakistan other than the one employee working for the DoD. Kestral did not respond to inquiries from The Nation.

According to federal lobbying records, Kestral recently hired former Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega, who served in that post from 2003 to 2005, to lobby the US government, including the State Department, USAID and Congress, on foreign affairs issues "regarding [Kestral's] capabilities to carry out activities of interest to the United States." Noriega was hired through his firm, Vision Americas, which he runs with Christina Rocca, a former CIA operations official who served as assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs from 2001 to 2006 and was deeply involved in shaping US policy toward Pakistan. In October 2009, Kestral paid Vision Americas $15,000 and paid a Vision Americas-affiliated firm, Firecreek Ltd., an equal amount to lobby on defense and foreign policy issues.

For years, Kestral has done a robust business in defense logistics with the Pakistani government and other nations, as well as top US defense companies. Blackwater owner Erik Prince is close with Kestral CEO Liaquat Ali Baig, according to the former Blackwater executive. "Ali and Erik have a pretty close relationship," he said. "They've met many times and struck a deal, and they [offer] mutual support for one another." Working with Kestral, he said, Blackwater has provided convoy security for Defense Department shipments destined for Afghanistan that would arrive in the port at Karachi. Blackwater, according to the former executive, would guard the supplies as they were transported overland from Karachi to Peshawar and then west through the Torkham border crossing, the most important supply route for the US military in Afghanistan.

According to the former executive, Blackwater operatives also integrate with Kestral's forces in sensitive counterterrorism operations in the North-West Frontier Province, where they work in conjunction with the Pakistani Interior Ministry's paramilitary force, known as the Frontier Corps (alternately referred to as "frontier scouts"). The Blackwater personnel are technically advisers, but the former executive said that the line often gets blurred in the field. Blackwater "is providing the actual guidance on how to do [counterterrorism operations] and Kestral's folks are carrying a lot of them out, but they're having the guidance and the overwatch from some BW guys that will actually go out with the teams when they're executing the job," he said. "You can see how that can lead to other things in the border areas." He said that when Blackwater personnel are out with the Pakistani teams, sometimes its men engage in operations against suspected terrorists. "You've got BW guys that are assisting... and they're all going to want to go on the jobs--so they're going to go with them," he said. "So, the things that you're seeing in the news about how this Pakistani military group came in and raided this house or did this or did that--in some of those cases, you're going to have Western folks that are right there at the house, if not in the house." Blackwater, he said, is paid by the Pakistani government through Kestral for consulting services. "That gives the Pakistani government the cover to say, 'Hey, no, we don't have any Westerners doing this. It's all local and our people are doing it.' But it gets them the expertise that Westerners provide for [counterterrorism]-related work."

The military intelligence source confirmed Blackwater works with the Frontier Corps, saying, "There's no real oversight. It's not really on people's radar screen."

In October, in response to Pakistani news reports that a Kestral warehouse in Islamabad was being used to store heavy weapons for Blackwater, the US Embassy in Pakistan released a statement denying the weapons were being used by "a private American security contractor." The statement said, "Kestral Logistics is a private logistics company that handles the importation of equipment and supplies provided by the United States to the Government of Pakistan. All of the equipment and supplies were imported at the request of the Government of Pakistan, which also certified the shipments."

Who is Behind the Drone Attacks?

Since President Barack Obama was inaugurated, the United States has expanded drone bombing raids in Pakistan. Obama first ordered a drone strike against targets in North and South Waziristan on January 23, and the strikes have been conducted consistently ever since. The Obama administration has now surpassed the number of Bush-era strikes in Pakistan and has faced fierce criticism from Pakistan and some US lawmakers over civilian deaths. A drone attack in June killed as many as sixty people attending a Taliban funeral.

In August, the New York Times reported that Blackwater works for the CIA at "hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company's contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft." In February, The Times of London obtained a satellite image of a secret CIA airbase in Shamsi, in Pakistan's southwestern province of Baluchistan, showing three drone aircraft. The New York Times also reported that the agency uses a secret base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to strike in Pakistan.

The military intelligence source says that the drone strike that reportedly killed Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, his wife and his bodyguards in Waziristan in August was a CIA strike, but that many others attributed in media reports to the CIA are actually JSOC strikes. "Some of these strikes are attributed to OGA [Other Government Agency, intelligence parlance for the CIA], but in reality it's JSOC and their parallel program of UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] because they also have access to UAVs. So when you see some of these hits, especially the ones with high civilian casualties, those are almost always JSOC strikes." The Pentagon has stated bluntly, "There are no US military strike operations being conducted in Pakistan."

The military intelligence source also confirmed that Blackwater continues to work for the CIA on its drone bombing program in Pakistan, as previously reported in the New York Times, but added that Blackwater is working on JSOC's drone bombings as well. "It's Blackwater running the program for both CIA and JSOC," said the source. When civilians are killed, "people go, 'Oh, it's the CIA doing crazy shit again unchecked.' Well, at least 50 percent of the time, that's JSOC [hitting] somebody they've identified through HUMINT [human intelligence] or they've culled the intelligence themselves or it's been shared with them and they take that person out and that's how it works."

The military intelligence source says that the CIA operations are subject to Congressional oversight, unlike the parallel JSOC bombings. "Targeted killings are not the most popular thing in town right now and the CIA knows that," he says. "Contractors and especially JSOC personnel working under a classified mandate are not [overseen by Congress], so they just don't care. If there's one person they're going after and there's thirty-four people in the building, thirty-five people are going to die. That's the mentality." He added, "They're not accountable to anybody and they know that. It's an open secret, but what are you going to do, shut down JSOC?"

In addition to working on covert action planning and drone strikes, Blackwater SELECT also provides private guards to perform the sensitive task of security for secret US drone bases, JSOC camps and Defense Intelligence Agency camps inside Pakistan, according to the military intelligence source.

Mosharraf Zaidi, a well-known Pakistani journalist who has served as a consultant for the UN and European Union in Pakistan and Afghanistan, says that the Blackwater/JSOC program raises serious questions about the norms of international relations. "The immediate question is, How do you define the active pursuit of military objectives in a country with which not only have you not declared war but that is supposedly a front-line non-NATO ally in the US struggle to contain extremist violence coming out of Afghanistan and the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan?" asks Zaidi, who is currently a columnist for The News, the biggest English-language daily in Pakistan. "Let's forget Blackwater for a second. What this is confirming is that there are US military operations in Pakistan that aren't about logistics or getting food to Bagram; that are actually about the exercise of physical violence, physical force inside of Pakistani territory."

JSOC: Rumsfeld and Cheney's Extra Special Force

Colonel Wilkerson said that he is concerned that with General McChrystal's elevation as the military commander of the Afghan war--which is increasingly seeping into Pakistan--there is a concomitant rise in JSOC's power and influence within the military structure. "I don't see how you can escape that; it's just a matter of the way the authority flows and the power flows, and it's inevitable, I think," Wilkerson told The Nation. He added, "I'm alarmed when I see execute orders and combat orders that go out saying that the supporting force is Central Command and the supported force is Special Operations Command," under which JSOC operates. "That's backward. But that's essentially what we have today."

From 2003 to 2008 McChrystal headed JSOC, which is headquartered at Pope Air Force Base and Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where Blackwater's 7,000-acre operating base is also situated. JSOC controls the Army's Delta Force, the Navy's SEAL Team 6, as well as the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment and 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and the Air Force's 24th Special Tactics Squadron. JSOC performs strike operations, reconnaissance in denied areas and special intelligence missions. Blackwater, which was founded by former Navy SEALs, employs scores of veteran Special Forces operators--which several former military officials pointed to as the basis for Blackwater's alleged contracts with JSOC.

Since 9/11, many top-level Special Forces veterans have taken up employment with private firms, where they can make more money doing the highly specialized work they did in uniform. "The Blackwater individuals have the experience. A lot of these individuals are retired military, and they've been around twenty to thirty years and have experience that the younger Green Beret guys don't," said retired Army Lieut. Col. Jeffrey Addicott, a well-connected military lawyer who served as senior legal counsel for US Army Special Forces. "They're known entities. Everybody knows who they are, what their capabilities are, and they've got the experience. They're very valuable."

"They make much more money being the smarts of these operations, planning hits in various countries and basing it off their experience in Chechnya, Bosnia, Somalia, Ethiopia," said the military intelligence source. "They were there for all of these things, they know what the hell they're talking about. And JSOC has unfortunately lost the institutional capability to plan within, so they hire back people that used to work for them and had already planned and executed these [types of] operations. They hired back people that jumped over to Blackwater SELECT and then pay them exorbitant amounts of money to plan future operations. It's a ridiculous revolving door."

While JSOC has long played a central role in US counterterrorism and covert operations, military and civilian officials who worked at the Defense and State Departments during the Bush administration described in interviews with The Nation an extremely cozy relationship that developed between the executive branch (primarily through Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) and JSOC. During the Bush era, Special Forces turned into a virtual stand-alone operation that acted outside the military chain of command and in direct coordination with the White House. Throughout the Bush years, it was largely General McChrystal who ran JSOC. "What I was seeing was the development of what I would later see in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Special Operations forces would operate in both theaters without the conventional commander even knowing what they were doing," said Colonel Wilkerson. "That's dangerous, that's very dangerous. You have all kinds of mess when you don't tell the theater commander what you're doing."

Wilkerson said that almost immediately after assuming his role at the State Department under Colin Powell, he saw JSOC being politicized and developing a close relationship with the executive branch. He saw this begin, he said, after his first Delta Force briefing at Fort Bragg. "I think Cheney and Rumsfeld went directly into JSOC. I think they went into JSOC at times, perhaps most frequently, without the SOCOM [Special Operations] commander at the time even knowing it. The receptivity in JSOC was quite good," says Wilkerson. "I think Cheney was actually giving McChrystal instructions, and McChrystal was asking him for instructions." He said the relationship between JSOC and Cheney and Rumsfeld "built up initially because Rumsfeld didn't get the responsiveness. He didn't get the can-do kind of attitude out of the SOCOM commander, and so as Rumsfeld was wont to do, he cut him out and went straight to the horse's mouth. At that point you had JSOC operating as an extension of the [administration] doing things the executive branch--read: Cheney and Rumsfeld--wanted it to do. This would be more or less carte blanche. You need to do it, do it. It was very alarming for me as a conventional soldier."

Wilkerson said the JSOC teams caused diplomatic problems for the United States across the globe. "When these teams started hitting capital cities and other places all around the world, [Rumsfeld] didn't tell the State Department either. The only way we found out about it is our ambassadors started to call us and say, 'Who the hell are these six-foot-four white males with eighteen-inch biceps walking around our capital cities?' So we discovered this, we discovered one in South America, for example, because he actually murdered a taxi driver, and we had to get him out of there real quick. We rendered him--we rendered him home."

As part of their strategy, Rumsfeld and Cheney also created the Strategic Support Branch (SSB), which pulled intelligence resources from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA for use in sensitive JSOC operations. The SSB was created using "reprogrammed" funds "without explicit congressional authority or appropriation," according to the Washington Post. The SSB operated outside the military chain of command and circumvented the CIA's authority on clandestine operations. Rumsfeld created it as part of his war to end "near total dependence on CIA." Under US law, the Defense Department is required to report all deployment orders to Congress. But guidelines issued in January 2005 by former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone stated that Special Operations forces may "conduct clandestine HUMINT operations...before publication" of a deployment order. This effectively gave Rumsfeld unilateral control over clandestine operations.

The military intelligence source said that when Rumsfeld was defense secretary, JSOC was deployed to commit some of the "darkest acts" in part to keep them concealed from Congress. "Everything can be justified as a military operation versus a clandestine intelligence performed by the CIA, which has to be informed to Congress," said the source. "They were aware of that and they knew that, and they would exploit it at every turn and they took full advantage of it. They knew they could act extra-legally and nothing would happen because A, it was sanctioned by DoD at the highest levels, and B, who was going to stop them? They were preparing the battlefield, which was on all of the PowerPoints: 'Preparing the Battlefield.'"

The significance of the flexibility of JSOC's operations inside Pakistan versus the CIA's is best summed up by Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "Every single intelligence operation and covert action must be briefed to the Congress," she said. "If they are not, that is a violation of the law."

Blackwater: Company Non Grata in Pakistan

For months, the Pakistani media has been flooded with stories about Blackwater's alleged growing presence in the country. For the most part, these stories have been ignored by the US press and denounced as lies or propaganda by US officials in Pakistan. But the reality is that, although many of the stories appear to be wildly exaggerated, Pakistanis have good reason to be concerned about Blackwater's operations in their country. It is no secret in Washington or Islamabad that Blackwater has been a central part of the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan and that the company has been involved--almost from the beginning of the "war on terror"--with clandestine US operations. Indeed, Blackwater is accepting applications for contractors fluent in Urdu and Punjabi. The US Ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, has denied Blackwater's presence in the country, stating bluntly in September, "Blackwater is not operating in Pakistan." In her trip to Pakistan in October, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dodged questions from the Pakistani press about Blackwater's rumored Pakistani operations. Pakistan's interior minister, Rehman Malik, said on November 21 he will resign if Blackwater is found operating anywhere in Pakistan.

The Christian Science Monitor recently reported that Blackwater "provides security for a US-backed aid project" in Peshawar, suggesting the company may be based out of the Pearl Continental, a luxury hotel the United States reportedly is considering purchasing to use as a consulate in the city. "We have no contracts in Pakistan," Blackwater spokesperson Stacey DeLuke said recently. "We've been blamed for all that has gone wrong in Peshawar, none of which is true, since we have absolutely no presence there."

Reports of Blackwater's alleged presence in Karachi and elsewhere in the country have been floating around the Pakistani press for months. Hamid Mir, a prominent Pakistani journalist who rose to fame after his 1997 interview with Osama bin Laden, claimed in a recent interview that Blackwater is in Karachi. "The US [intelligence] agencies think that a number of Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders are hiding in Karachi and Peshawar," he said. "That is why [Blackwater] agents are operating in these two cities." Ambassador Patterson has said that the claims of Mir and other Pakistani journalists are "wildly incorrect," saying they had compromised the security of US personnel in Pakistan. On November 20 the Washington Times, citing three current and former US intelligence officials, reported that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, has "found refuge from potential U.S. attacks" in Karachi "with the assistance of Pakistan's intelligence service."

In September, the Pakistani press covered a report on Blackwater allegedly submitted by Pakistan's intelligence agencies to the federal interior ministry. In the report, the intelligence agencies reportedly allege that Blackwater was provided houses by a federal minister who is also helping them clear shipments of weapons and vehicles through Karachi's Port Qasim on the coast of the Arabian Sea. The military intelligence source did not confirm this but did say, "The port jives because they have a lot of [former] SEALs and they would revert to what they know: the ocean, instead of flying stuff in."

The Nation cannot independently confirm these allegations and has not seen the Pakistani intelligence report. But according to Pakistani press coverage, the intelligence report also said Blackwater has acquired "bungalows" in the Defense Housing Authority in the city. According to the DHA website, it is a large residential estate originally established "for the welfare of the serving and retired officers of the Armed Forces of Pakistan." Its motto is: "Home for Defenders." The report alleges Blackwater is receiving help from local government officials in Karachi and is using vehicles with license plates traditionally assigned to members of the national and provincial assemblies, meaning local law enforcement will not stop them.

The use of private companies like Blackwater for sensitive operations such as drone strikes or other covert work undoubtedly comes with the benefit of plausible deniability that places an additional barrier in an already deeply flawed system of accountability. When things go wrong, it's the contractors' fault, not the government's. But the widespread use of contractors also raises serious legal questions, particularly when they are a part of lethal, covert actions. "We are using contractors for things that in the past might have been considered to be a violation of the Geneva Convention," said Lt. Col. Addicott, who now runs the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas. "In my opinion, we have pressed the envelope to the breaking limit, and it's almost a fiction that these guys are not in offensive military operations." Addicott added, "If we were subjected to the International Criminal Court, some of these guys could easily be picked up, charged with war crimes and put on trial. That's one of the reasons we're not members of the International Criminal Court."

If there is one quality that has defined Blackwater over the past decade, it is the ability to survive against the odds while simultaneously reinventing and rebranding itself. That is most evident in Afghanistan, where the company continues to work for the US military, the CIA and the State Department despite intense criticism and almost weekly scandals. Blackwater's alleged Pakistan operations, said the military intelligence source, are indicative of its new frontier. "Having learned its lessons after the private security contracting fiasco in Iraq, Blackwater has shifted its operational focus to two venues: protecting things that are in danger and anticipating other places we're going to go as a nation that are dangerous," he said. "It's as simple as that."

About Jeremy Scahill
Jeremy Scahill, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, published by Nation Books. He is an award-winning investigative journalist and correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!. more...

Obama Quietly Backs PATRIOT Act Provisions

2009-11-26T07:00:00.002-05:00

By William Fisher,
November 24, 2009
Courtesy Of Anti-War News

With the health care debate preoccupying the mainstream media, it has gone virtually unreported that the Barack Obama administration is quietly supporting renewal of provisions of the George W. Bush-era USA PATRIOT Act that civil libertarians say infringe on basic freedoms.

And it is reportedly doing so over the objections of some prominent Democrats.

When a panicky Congress passed the act 45 days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, three contentious parts of the law were scheduled to expire at the end of next month, and opponents of these sections have been pushing Congress to substitute new provisions with substantially strengthened civil liberties protections.

But with the apparent approval of the Obama White House and a number of Republicans – and over the objections of liberal Senate Democrats including Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Dick Durbin of Illinois – the Senate Judiciary Committee has voted to extend the three provisions with only minor changes.

Those provisions would leave unaltered the power of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to seize records and to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mail in the course of counterterrorism investigations.

The parts of the act due to expire on Dec. 31 deal with:

National Security Letters (NSLs)

The FBI uses NSLs to compel Internet service providers, libraries, banks, and credit reporting companies to turn over sensitive information about their customers and patrons. Using this data, the government can compile vast dossiers about innocent people.

The "Material Support" Statute

This provision criminalizes providing "material support" to terrorists, defined as providing any tangible or intangible good, service, or advice to a terrorist or designated group. As amended by the PATRIOT Act and other laws since Sept. 11, this section criminalizes a wide array of activities, regardless of whether they actually or intentionally further terrorist goals or organizations.

FISA Amendments Act of 2008

This past summer, Congress passed a law that permits the government to conduct warrantless and suspicion-less dragnet collection of U.S. residents’ international telephone calls and e-mails.

Asked by IPS why committee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and other Democrats chose to make only minor changes, Chip Pitts, president of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, referred to "the secret and hypocritical lobbying by the Obama administration against reforms – while publicly stating receptiveness to them." White House pressure, he speculated, "was undoubtedly a huge if lamentable factor."

He added that some committee members were cautious because of the recent arrests of Najibullah Zazi and others.

Zazi , a citizen of Afghanistan and a legal U.S. resident, was arrested in September as part of a group accused of planning to carry out acts of terrorism against the U.S. Zazi is said by the FBI to have attended courses and received instruction on weapons and explosives at an al-Qaeda training camp in Pakistan.

Leahy acknowledged that, in light of these incidents, "This is no time to weaken or undermine the tools that law enforcement relies on to protect America."

Pitts told IPS, "Short-term and political considerations driven by dramatic events once again dramatically affected the need for a more sensible long-term, reasoned, rule-of-law approach."

"In the eight years since passage of the original PATRIOT Act, it’s become clear that the escalating political competition to appear tough on terror – and avoid being accused of being ’soft on terror’ – brings perceived electoral benefits with few costs, with vital but fragile civil liberties being easily sacrificed," he added.

In contrast to the Senate, the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee approved a version of the legislation containing several significant reforms. In a 16-10 party-line vote, the committee’s version curbs some of the government’s controversial surveillance powers.

The PATRIOT Act, passed by a landslide after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to provide law enforcement and intelligence agencies additional powers to thwart terrorist activities, was reauthorized in 2005.

The legislation has been criticized by many from across the ideological spectrum as a threat to civil liberties, privacy, and democratic traditions. Sections of the original act have been ruled unconstitutional, with certain provisions violating protected rights.

Judiciary Chair John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, said the goal of the new legislation was to "craft a law that preserves both our national security and our national values."

The proposed new legislation would permit the so-called "lone wolf" provision to sunset. This authority removed the requirement that an individual needed to be an agent of a foreign power to be placed under surveillance by intelligence officials and permitted surveillance of individuals with a much lower evidentiary threshold than allowed under criminal surveillance procedures.

It was intended to allow the surveillance of individuals believed to be doing the bidding of foreign governments or terrorist organizations, even when the evidence of that connection was lacking.

The Justice Department maintains that the "lone wolf" authority is necessary, even though there is no evidence that it has been used. Its opponents believe that existing authorities are sufficient to achieve the goals of the lone wolf provision while more effectively protecting the rights of innocent citizens.

The proposed new House legislation would also restrict the use of national security letters. According to a Congressional Research Service report, "National security letters (NSL) are roughly comparable to administrative subpoenas. Intelligence agencies issue them for intelligence gathering purposes to telephone companies, Internet service providers, consumer credit reporting agencies, banks, and other financial institutions, directing the recipients to turn over certain customer records and similar information."

Under current law, intelligence agencies have few restrictions on the use of NSLs, and in numerous cases, have abused the authority. An FBI inspector general report in 2007 "found that the FBI used NSLs in violation of applicable NSL statutes, Attorney General Guidelines, and internal FBI policies." The reform provisions seek to create greater judicial scrutiny of NSL use.

The bill approved in the Senate contains much more modest reforms. It would retain the lone wolf provision, and is, in general, much more in line with the wishes of the administration. Should both bills pass and go into conference to be reconciled, it is unclear which approach would prevail.

House and Senate versions still need to be voted on by each body separately and then reconciled into a single bill to send to the president for signature.

Pitts told IPS, "President Obama’s flip-flop on PATRIOT Act issues does as much damage as did his flip-flop on the FISA Amendments Act and telecom immunity last year. But it’s imperative that we fight, while we still can, to comprehensively reinsert requirements for fact-based, individualized suspicion, checks and balances, and meaningful judicial review prior to government intrusions."

In a report on the PATRIOT Act, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said, "More than seven years after its implementation there is little evidence that the PATRIOT Act has been effective in making America more secure from terrorists. However, there are many unfortunate examples that the government abused these authorities in ways that both violate the rights of innocent people and squander precious security resources."

(Inter Press Service)

US Confirms Secret Talks With Taliban

2009-11-26T04:00:00.001-05:00

Pakistan's ISI a Key Player in Talks

By Jason Ditz,
November 23, 2009
Courtesy Of Anti-War News

Top US diplomat Richard Holbrooke confirmed that the United States is engaged in secret, back-channel talks with the leadership of the Taliban, sponsored by the Saudi government. Holbrooke was quick to emphasize that the talks were not direct.

Instead, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Agency is doing the negotiations on behalf of the United States. And well it might: the ISI receives roughly one third of its annual budget directly from the CIA.

CIA Director Leon Panetta’s Friday visit to Pakistan, ostensibly to visit Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani, was actually to receive a direct update from the ISI about the progress of the negotiations.

But the Taliban leadership isn’t directly involved either. Instead, a handful of Taliban sympathizers, ostensibly acting on their behalf, are doing the talking on their side.

While this might raise some hope for a diplomatic settlement, it mustn’t be forgotten that the Saudi government was reported to be holding similar talks over a year ago and it turned out that the ostensible Taliban representative was someone they had severed all ties with years prior. Unfortunately in indirect talks it remains possible that the “United States” and the “Taliban” might come to an agreement without either side being satisfied with the deal.

Rabbi's Followers 'Terror Cell In Parliament'

2009-11-26T01:00:00.005-05:00

Tribute To Kahane Planned By Israeli Legislators

"In 1994, Kach was declared a terrorist organisation by Israel and the United States after Baruch Goldstein, a supporter, went on an armed rampage through the Ibrahimi mosque in the Palestinian city of Hebron, killing 29 worshippers and injuring 150. Despite the ban, Kach is still active in many West Bank settlements, especially in and around Hebron, where shrines to Kahane and Goldstein regularly attract large numbers of devotees."

By Jonathan Cook
(Friday, November 20, 2009)
Courtesy Of Media Monitors

A plan by right-wing legislators in Israel to commemorate the anniversary this month of the death of Meir Kahane, whose banned anti-Arab movement is classified as a terrorist organisation, risks further damaging the prospects for talks between Israel and the Palestinians, US officials have warned.

A move to stage the commemoration in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, is being led by Michael Ben-Ari, who was elected this year and is the first self-declared former member of Kahane’s party, Kach, to become a legislator since the movement was banned 15 years ago.

The US Embassy, in Tel Aviv, has sent a series of e-mails to Reuven Rivlin, the parliamentary speaker, asking that he intervene to block the event.

According to US officials, pressure is being exerted on behalf of George Mitchell, the US president Barack Obama’s envoy to the region, who is concerned that it will add to his troubles as Israeli and Palestinian leaders clash over a possible move by the Palestinians to issue a unilateral declaration of statehood.

Some Israeli legislators have warned that Mr. Ben-Ari and his supporters are gaining a stronger foothold in parliament, in an indication of the country’s increasing lurch rightwards.

“Ben-Ari and the advisers he has brought with him are unabashed representatives for Kach and Kahane’s ideas,” said Ahmed Tibi, an Arab legislator and the deputy speaker. “What we have is in effect a terrorist cell in the parliament.”

Kahane, a US rabbi who emigrated to Israel in the early 1970s, advocated the expulsion of all Arabs from “Greater Israel”, an area that the far right believes encompasses not only Israel but also the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and parts of neighbouring Arab states.

Kahane was elected to parliament in 1984 but was barred from standing again four years later. He was assassinated by an Egyptian-American in New York in November 1990.

In 1994, Kach was declared a terrorist organisation by Israel and the United States after Baruch Goldstein, a supporter, went on an armed rampage through the Ibrahimi mosque in the Palestinian city of Hebron, killing 29 worshippers and injuring 150.

Despite the ban, Kach is still active in many West Bank settlements, especially in and around Hebron, where shrines to Kahane and Goldstein regularly attract large numbers of devotees.

Mr. Ben-Ari, one of four members of the National Union elected to the 120-seat parliament, has included as his parliamentary advisers two former Kach activists, Baruch Marzel and Itimar Ben Gvir, who are leaders of the far-right Jewish National Front. Mr. Ben-Ari has never disavowed his support for Kahane, telling the Jerusalem Post newspaper this month that Kahane “dedicated his whole life to Israel … He was a great man and a great leader.”

This month Mr. Ben-Ari was the voice on an advertisement on the Israeli radio station Reshet Bet to promote a public memorial service for Kahane held by his family. It was also reported that for the first time posters had been placed in many central areas of Jerusalem publicising the event and declaring “We all know now – Meir Kahane was right”.

The United States has expressed more concern, however, at a commemoration being planned in parliament.

Michael Perlstein, the second secretary at the US Embassy, is reported to have e-mailed Mr. Rivlin several times, asking whether the commemoration was likely to be approved. According to e-mails leaked to the Israeli media, he added: “This is something Senator Mitchell and his team are following with some concern.”

An embassy spokesman reiterated those concerns last week: “To stir up controversy at the same time that we are trying to get people back to the [negotiating] table, is not productive of that effort. It is only natural that Senator Mitchell would be paying attention to that – and the US government as well.”

Mr. Rivlin has reassured the United States that he has refused Mr. Ben-Ari permission to stage a commemoration but has also admitted that it would be difficult for him to stop a “stunt” by Kahane supporters in the chamber.

“We are talking about a provocation,” Mr. Rivlin told the Haaretz newspaper. “The man [Kahane] and his outlawed movement cannot be separated. This is an attempt to bring the Kach movement into the Knesset through the back door.”

Last week, Mr. Ben-Ari appealed against the speaker’s decision to the House Committee, which rules on issues of parliamentary procedure. Mr. Rivlin has said he will abide by the committee’s decision.

Its chairman, Yariv Levine of the ruling Likud Party, said he was not happy with Mr. Rivlin’s refusal and is reported to be working with the speaker and Mr. Ben-Ari to find a solution.

Mr. Ben-Ari responded angrily to the US concern: “I was elected to the Knesset by citizens of the independent state of Israel. The flagrant involvement of Mitchell has crossed a red line and it testifies to the bowed head of the Knesset speaker that is turning the Knesset into a dish rag.”

Mr. Ben-Ari is probably not the only former member of Kach in parliament. Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister and leader of the far-right Yisrael Beitenu party, the third largest in parliament, is believed to have joined Kach when he first arrived in Israel in the 1970s. His membership was revealed in February by Yossi Dayan, the movement’s former secretary general.

Last week Mr. Ben-Ari had to cancel a trip to the United States, his first overseas visit, after he was refused a US visa. He had intended to speak to American Jewish groups to encourage emigration to Israel.

To date, the only authorised parliamentary commemorations are for Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister assassinated by a right-wing Jew in 1995, and for Rehavam Zeevi, a former general and leader of a far-right anti-Arab party, who was assassinated by Palestinian gunmen in 2001.

------------------------------------------------

A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.

Source:

Israeli Spies Infiltrated International Airports

2009-11-25T20:00:00.002-05:00

South Africa Deports Airline Official After Investigation

"Mr. Garb’s accusations have been supported by an investigation by the regulator for South Africa’s private security industries...They have also been confirmed by human rights groups in Israel, which report that Israeli security staff are carrying out racial profiling at many airports around the world, apparently out of sight of local authorities."

By Jonathan Cook
(Monday, November 23, 2009)
Courtesy Of Media Monitors

South Africa deported an Israeli airline official last week following allegations that Israel’s secret police, the Shin Bet, had infiltrated Johannesburg international airport in an effort to gather information on South African citizens, particularly black and Muslim travellers.

The move by the South African government followed an investigation by local TV showing an undercover reporter being illegally interrogated by an official with El Al, Israel’s national carrier, in a public area of Johannesburg’s OR Tambo airport.

The programme also featured testimony from Jonathan Garb, a former El Al guard, who claimed that the airline company had been a front for the Shin Bet in South Africa for many years.

Of the footage of the undercover reporter’s questioning, he commented: “Here is a secret service operating above the law in South Africa. We pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. We do exactly what we want. The local authorities do not know what we are doing.”

The Israeli foreign ministry is reported to have sent a team to South Africa to try to defuse the diplomatic crisis after the government in Johannesburg threatened to deport all of El Al’s security staff.

Mr. Garb’s accusations have been supported by an investigation by the regulator for South Africa’s private security industries.

They have also been confirmed by human rights groups in Israel, which report that Israeli security staff are carrying out racial profiling at many airports around the world, apparently out of sight of local authorities.

Concern in South Africa about the activities of El Al staff has been growing since August, when South Africa’s leading investigative news show, Carte Blanche, went undercover to test Mr. Garb’s allegations.

A hidden camera captured an El Al official in the departure hall claiming to be from “airport security” and demanding that the undercover reporter hand over his passport or ID as part of “airport regulations”. When the reporter protested that he was not flying but waiting for a friend, El Al’s security manager, identified as Golan Rice, arrived to interrogate him further. Mr. Rice then warned him that he was in a restricted area and must leave.

Mr. Garb commented on the show: “What we are trained is to look for the immediate threat – the Muslim guy. You can think he is a suicide bomber, he is collecting information. The crazy thing is that we are profiling people racially, ethnically and even on religious grounds … This is what we do.”

Mr. Garb and two other fired workers have told the South African media that Shin Bet agents routinely detain Muslim and black passengers, a claim that has ignited controversy in a society still suffering with the legacy of decades of apartheid rule.

Suspect individuals, the former workers say, are held in an annex room, where they are interrogated, often on matters unrelated to airport security, and can be subjected to strip searches while their luggage is taken apart. Clandestine searches of their belongings and laptops are also carried out to identify useful documents and information.

All of this is done in violation of South African law, which authorises only the police, armed forces or personnel appointed by the transport minister to carry out searches.

The former staff also accuse El Al of smuggling weapons – licensed to the local Israeli embassy – into the airport for use by the secret agents.

Mr. Garb went public after he was dismissed over a campaign he led for better pay and medical benefits for El Al staff.

A South African Jew, he said he was recruited 19 years ago by the Shin Bet. “We were trained at a secret camp [in Israel] where they train Israeli special forces and they train you how to use handguns, submachine guns and in unarmed combat.”

He added that he was assigned to “armed security” in the early 1990s. “Armed security is being undercover, carrying a weapon, a handgun and at that time as well, sounds crazy but we carried Samsonite briefcases with an Uzi submachine gun in it.”

Mr. Garb claimed to have profiled 40,000 people for Israel over the past 20 years, including recently Virginia Tilley, a Middle East expert who is the chief researcher at South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council. The think tank recently published a report accusing Israel of apartheid and colonialism in the Palestinian territories.

“The decision was she should be checked in the harshest way because of her connections,” Mr. Garb said.

Ms. Tilley confirmed that she had been detained at the airport by El Al staff and separated from her luggage. Mr. Garb said that during this period an agent “photocopied all [her] documentation and then he forwarded it on to Israel” – Mr. Garb believes for use by the Shin Bet.

Israeli officials have refused to comment on the allegations. A letter produced by Mr. Garb – signed by Roz Bukris, El Al’s general manager in South Africa – suggests that he was employed by the Shin Bet rather than the airline. Ms. Bukris, according to the programme, refused to confirm or deny the letter’s validity.

The Israeli Embassy in South Africa declined to discuss evidence that it, rather than El Al, had licensed guns issued to the airline’s security managers. Questioned last week by Ynet, Israel’s largest news website, about the deportation of the airline official, Yossi Levy, an Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, said he could not “comment on security matters”.

A report published in 2007 by two Israeli human rights organisations, the Nazareth-based Arab Association for Human Rights and the Centre Against Racism, found that Israeli airline staff used racial profiling at most major airports around the world, subjecting Arab and Muslim passengers to discriminatory and degrading treatment in violation both of international law and the host country’s laws.

“Our research showed that the checks conducted by El Al at foreign airports had all the hallmarks of Shin Bet interrogations,” said Mohammed Zeidan, the director of the Human Rights Association. “Usually the questions were less about the safety of the flight and more aimed at gathering information on the political activities or sympathies of the passengers.”

The human rights groups approached four international airports – in New York, Paris, Vienna and Geneva – where passengers said they had been subjected to discriminatory treatment, to ask under what authority the Israeli security services were operating. The first two airports refused to respond, while Vienna and Geneva said it was not possible to oversee El Al’s procedures.

“It is remarkable that these countries make no effort to supervise the actions of Israeli security personnel present on their territory, particularly in light of the discriminatory and humiliating procedures they apply,” the report states.

------------------------------------------------

A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.

Right-Wing Terrorism Must Be Stopped

2009-11-25T16:00:00.002-05:00

The tactics of anti-choice extremists are designed to change policy by terrorizing Americans. How do we stop them from committing violent acts?

By Rachel Maddow,
Source: MSNBC.
Posted June 8, 2009
Courtesy Of Alter Net

Editor's Note: The following is an edited version of a transcript from the Rachel Maddow Show.

We begin tonight with another deadly act of domestic terrorism. The first time a doctor was murdered by the modern anti-abortion terrorist movement in America was March 1993. Anti-abortion demonstrators were protesting at a clinic in Pensacola, Florida. As Dr. David Gunn arrived at a clinic, a young man named Michael Griffin shot Dr. Gunn several times in the chest with a snub-nose .38 revolver.

Michael Griffin, the killer, became a cause celebre among anti-abortion extremists. He was associated with the group called Rescue America, which said after Griffin killed Dr. Gunn that while they did not condone the killing, they didn‘t condemn it either.

Five months after Dr. David Gunn was killed, another doctor, George Tiller—yes, the same Dr. Tiller from today‘s headlines—was shot by a woman named Shelly Shannon. Shannon had written letters of support for Michael Griffin, who killed Dr. David Gunn. She called him a hero.

In 1992 and 1993, Shelly Shannon set fires and used acid to attack at least 10 abortion clinics in Oregon, California, Idaho and Nevada. In 1993, she went to Wichita, Kansas, and used a semiautomatic pistol to shoot Dr. George Tiller in each of his arms outside the clinic at which he worked.

While she was in prison, Ms. Shannon signed on to a pledge of support for Paul Hill, the murderer of yet another American doctor. In June 1994, Paul Hill shot to death Dr. George Britton and a 74-year-old clinic escort named James Barrett, and he seriously wounded Mr. Barrett‘s wife.

Six months later, a man named John Salvi walked into two clinics in Brookline, Massachusetts, and killed two receptionists and wounded five other people. In January 1998, yet another murder—security guard Robert Sanderson was killed and a nurse named Emily Lyons was critically injured by a nail bomb that exploded at an Alabama abortion clinic at which they worked. That bomb was planted by a man named Eric Rudolph.

Eric Rudolph had also bombed another abortion clinic and a gay bar in Atlanta the year before and he had famously bombed the Atlanta Olympics the year before that, killing Alice Hawthorne and wounding 111 other people. The Atlanta Olympics bombing was a terrorist act committed by an anti-abortion extremist.

In October 1998, another murder—in Amherst, New York, Dr. Barnett Slepian was standing inside his house when James Kopp shot and killed him with a sniper rifle. Kopp was a member of an anti-abortion extremist group that calls itself the Lambs of Christ.

And [last Sunday], George Tiller was shot again. This time, it was inside his church in Wichita. He was killed instantly. A man named Scott Roeder is the suspect in custody in this case. He‘s known in extremist anti-abortion circles. He has had writings published in a newsletter called “Prayer and Action News,” which promotes the idea of killing people who provide abortion services as justifiable homicide.

Someone calling himself Scott Roeder had participated in anti-abortion discussion at a Web site of the group called Operation Rescue. The group‘s founder, Randal Terry, spoke at the National Press Club today and celebrated Dr. George Tiller‘s death.

RANDALL TERRY, FOUNDER, OPERATION RESCUE: I stand before you today saying about George Tiller what I said in his life. He was a mass murderer. George Tiller was a mass murderer. He killed tens of thousands of innocent human beings at his own hand. George Tiller was a murderer and he was doing something that was literally demonic.

RACHEL MADDOW: Another anti-abortion extremist group, Operation Save America, also put out a statement celebrating George Tiller‘s murder today, saying, quote, “He is now vowing before Jesus and confessing that Jesus is right and that he, George Tiller, was wrong.”

If you go to the Web site of the Army of God, you will find hagiographic websites for anti-abortion terrorist movement heroes, like Paul Hill and Eric Rudolph and Shelly Shannon. You can actually scroll through pages and pages of mug shots and descriptions of bombings and shootings and murders and attempted murders—all praising the perpetrators, and even suggesting ways to get away with the same types of crimes that these people committed but you could do it without getting caught.

On their front page today—there‘s Dr. George Tiller, just murdered, under the caption, “The lives of innocent babies scheduled to be murdered by George Tiller are spared by the action of American hero, Scott Roeder.”

There‘s an anti-abortion terrorist movement in the United States that operates relatively openly. They advocate and their members commit acts of violence, including murder, against Americans who are not breaking the law, who are engaged in protected legal activity on American soil.

These acts of violence are politically motivated. They are designed to change American policies and to terrorize Americans. They have succeed in making providing abortion services to American women so dangerous, so intimidating that there are only a handful of doctors in the entire country who provide late-term abortions—as Dr. Tiller did—abortions late in pregnancy.

In other words, this terrorism is working. Violence as a political strategy is working to make abortions so unsafe for doctors that they are unwilling to bear the risk of performing it so women can‘t actually get one regardless of whether or not it‘s legal. It‘s the same outcome as if abortion had been outlawed. They‘re winning.

What‘s the strategy to stop them?

Joining us now is Jonathan Turley, professor of constitutional law at George Washington University.

Professor Turley, thanks for joining us tonight.

JONATHAN TURLEY, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR: Hi, Rachel.

MADDOW: I‘m making these observations politically just as a citizen, but I wanted to ask you tonight if it‘s legally appropriate, legally useful, to approach this problem as terrorism?

TURLEY: Well, in some cases, it is. You know, some of these past cases have elements of terrorism. Rudolph is a good example of that—although, you know, he was not just anti-abortion, he was anti-homosexual. He was sort of at war with the world. And that makes this definition a little more difficult.

Some of us, particularly on the civil libertarian side, are uncomfortable with using the terrorism label because, you know, the Bush administration expanded this definition to the breaking point. I testified not long ago in Congress of how the Bush administration would classify what were rudimentary criminal cases as terrorism cases and use these laws against them.

The problem we have, as you know, is to deal with lone actors like this. I don‘t believe that the man who killed Dr. Tiller was a classic terrorist. I think that he was a murderer. He assassinated him.

But I don‘t see the elements of an organized terrorist plot. And in many ways, he‘s the most dangerous thing that we face.

I think the Clinton administration got this right when they really saw the danger as the McVeigh type—this lone actor who goes out there, who may be fueled by rhetoric, but who‘s acting alone. In this case, it looks like he targeted this very doctor who had been demonized by many.

MADDOW: To the extent that there is a movement that this man saw himself as part of, and I spent a lot of time in very dark corners of the Web today looking at the websites and publications ...

TURLEY: Yes.

MADDOW: ... of the organizations that identify themselves as part of this movement. Famously in the 1990s, there was a statement put out in support of one of the people who was found guilty of killing an abortion provider, saying, “We, the undersigned, believe these actions to be justifiable” and encourage others to do them because—in order to save the unborn.

To the extent that there is something beyond the loner, the lone murderer here, to the extent that there is a rhetorical association, there are organizations that support this sort of thing, does it give law enforcement any additional tools to consider them while they prosecute this crime? I‘m with you on the civil libertarian concerns about these things -- freedom of association, freedom of the press are to be protected, freedom of speech are to be protected at any cost -- but are there law enforcement tools that would be useful in these cases to acknowledge those ties?

TURLEY: There are, Rachel. I mean, you have the FACE Act, which protects access to abortion clinics. There have been prosecutions under that. It was upheld by courts. And you also have standard prosecutions for intimidation. In fact, the FACE Act has intimidation as one of the elements.

So, there are ways to prosecute. The FBI‘s done a very, very good job, you know, for many years now at focusing on these domestic organizations. But as you‘ve already noticed or referenced, we have this difficult line to walk between free speech and preventive law enforcement. And it all—that line is often found on violent speech.

And the Supreme Court said in the Brandenburg case that violent speech is protected. In fact, I‘ve represented people accused of violent speech, including terroristic speech. And that is a very difficult line, because it is, in fact, protected, to say all abortion doctors should be killed. And what the Supreme Court said was that we have to look where that violent speech raises an imminent threat of violence, and then, you can prosecute that person.

But it‘s obviously a very difficult line to walk.

MADDOW: And it‘s an intelligence matter, oddly, as well. We think of intelligence in terms of where our—in terms of where the dividing lines are within our own government about the tools that are available to people who work for the U.S. government. That‘s an important distinction between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for example.

We collect intelligence on foreign bodies. In terms of what we do domestically to disrupt homegrown terrorist plots, to disrupt criminal enterprises, to break up organized crime in these efforts, there‘s—I mean, there‘s civil liberties concerns, there‘s also strategic concerns about how these things can be done legally on American soil.

TURLEY: Yes, but I would also caution though is that no matter what we do—we‘re probably never going to be able to stop the lone actor, the McVeigh, or the individual today, without becoming a totalitarian regime. I mean, lone actors are dangerous because they don‘t come up on the radar screen.

What we‘ve learned—ever since cases like Brandenburg—is speech isn‘t the problem. In fact, you want them to speak. You want the speech to be protected so they come up on the radar screen and you can watch them. And the FBI has a long history and a very effective history and a commendable history of following these dangerous groups.

But we can‘t do what we‘ve done in the past and say, “Because there was an attack, our system must not be working.” I think we have to accept that, unfortunately, we‘re not going to be able to protect against all attacks. And this guy represents the greatest vulnerability in the law and in terms of law enforcement.

The guy who‘s out there, you know, some dark corner, filled with hate, against the world, and he takes it upon himself to personify it into one person—we may not be able to stop that. And efforts to try to stop that, I think, are going to likely be fruitless.

But the reason I appreciate what you‘re saying is that you‘re very mindful that we walk this careful line ...

MADDOW: Yes.

TURLEY: ... in protecting speech and looking for that speech that presents imminent threats.

MADDOW: And looking for the—yes, exactly, protecting our constitutional values, protecting the reason that it matters that we have an America, as opposed to any other country, but also taking these threats to security seriously. It‘s what we‘ve been talking about in all of these different contexts for eight years now.

Constitutional law professor, Jonathan Turley, thank you so much for your time tonight. It‘s really helpful.

TURLEY: Thank you, Rachel.

MADDOW: In the context of an extremist anti-abortion movement that has seen the murder of seven abortion providers and clinic workers in a five-year period during the course of the ‘90s, that saw another doctor shot by a sniper in his own home in the late ‘90s, a movement that publicly, openly celebrates the people who have killed these doctors as heroes—what should we make of it when figures in the media denounce other doctors already targeted by these groups as Nazis, as killers, as people with blood on their hands?

Back in April, the Department of Homeland Security was lambasted by conservatives for publishing a report on the potential for violence from right-wing extremist groups. It was the Bush administration that had actually commissioned the report and they had done one on the potential for violence from left-wing groups, too, but that did not stop conservatives from getting very, very angry about that report.

At least three Republican members of Congress, Michele Bachmann, John Carter, and Michael Burgess said that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano should resign for having issued that report. Republican Minority Leader John Boehner said that report meant that Napolitano had an awful lot of explaining to do.

That report actually warned for the potential for violent behavior from far right-wing groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion. DHS got even more specific in March, warning about, quote, “antiabortion extremism” groups and “sovereign citizen movement” such as a group called the “Freemen.”

We know now the man who is the chief suspect in the killing of Dr. George Tiller was reportedly associated both, with extremist anti-abortion groups and with the sovereign citizen movement known as the Freemen.

Still think Janet Napolitano ought to resign for that outrageous warning about guys like Scott Roeder?

(START VIDEO CLIP)

BILL O‘REILLY, FOX NEWS HOST: Tiller the baby killer out in Kansas, acquitted—acquitted today of murdering babies. I wanted George Tiller, Tiller the baby killer, going—hey, I can‘t make more money killing babies now. Tiller the baby killer. As “The Factor” has been reporting, this man will terminate fetuses at anytime for $5,000.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What do you think about Dr. George Tiller?

KATHLEEN SEBELIUS, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES SECRETARY: I don‘t think anything about Dr. George Tiller.

O‘REILLY: She doesn‘t seem to be real upset about this guy operating a death mill.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: Death mill. That was FOX News host, Bill O‘Reilly then.

During the life of George Tiller, for four years, he repeatedly accused Dr. Tiller of murder, of infanticide. He publicly compared him to everything, from Nazis, to pedophiles, to al Qaeda. He described him as having blood on his hands.

Now that Dr. Tiller has been murdered inside his own church, here is Mr. O‘Reilly tonight.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

O‘REILLY: Anarchy and vigilantism will ensure the collapse of any society. Once the rule of law breaks down, a country is finished. Thus, clear-thinking Americans should condemn the murder of late-term abortionist, Tiller. Even though the man terminated thousands of pregnancies, what he did is within Kansas law.

The 67-year-old Tiller had performed abortions for more than 35 years. “The Washington Times” estimates he destroyed about 60,000 fetuses. Very few American doctors will perform the operation. None of that seemed to matter to Tiller, nicknamed “the baby killer” by pro-life groups, who stated he was helping women—Tiller stated that.

I report honesty. Every single thing we said about Tiller was true. My analysis was based on those facts. It is clear that the far left is exploiting—exploiting, the death of the doctor. Those vicious individuals want to stifle any criticism of people like Tiller. That and hating FOX News is the real agenda here.

Finally if these people were so compassionate, so very compassionate, so concerned for the rights and welfare of others, maybe they might have written something, one thing, about the 60,000 fetuses who will never become American citizens.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: Do you think he‘s sorry that Dr. Tiller is dead?

Mr. O‘Reilly went on to claim he never tried to incite anything, he was just reporting.

Joining us now is Frank Schaeffer, who grew up in the religious far right, who made a documentary anti-abortion film series in the 1970s, and whose latest book is titled, “Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elects, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All or Almost All of It Back.”

Mr. Schaeffer, thank you very much for your time tonight.

FRANK SCHAEFFER, AUTHOR, “CRAZY FOR GOD”: Thank you for having me on, Rachel.

MADDOW: Writing at “Huffington Post,” you apologized, as a former member of the religious right, for what happened to Dr. Tiller. Why did you feel the need to apologize?

SCHAEFFER: Well, words have consequences.

And what we did in the ‘70s and ‘80s, my father, Dr. Francis Schaeffer, Dr. C. Everett Koop, who became Reagan surgeon general, members of the Republican Party who worked with us to make abortion part of the Republican agenda, the Roman Catholic allies that we had in the church, various people—we talked and our talk got more and more extreme, and less and less democratic. Until, finally, my dad actually went so far as to write a book called “A Christian Manifesto,” where he said the use of force to change Roe v. Wade and roll back the law legalizing abortion would be legitimate and he compared Roe and the American government to Hitler‘s Germany in the 1930s.

And when you look at what happened to Dr. Tiller, there‘s a direct line connecting the rhetoric that I was part of as a young man and this murder. And so, people, like me, are responsible for what we said and what we did and the way we raised the temperature on this debate out of all bounds. And so, when O‘Reilly talks about the fact that these people of the far left are against FOX or against him or trying to muzzle the debate, he‘s telling a lie.

I am not a member of the far right—until I voted for Barack Obama in the last election, I am lifelong Republican. I am still pro-life. I also believe abortion should be legal, but I agree with Barack Obama when he says we ought to find ways to help women, help children, give contraceptives, sex education, to lessen the number of abortions. I think abortion is a tragedy.

But I also think that pretending that you can call abortion murder and Tiller the baby killer, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera—and that these worlds don‘ words don‘t have an impact, is crazy.

So, this is what helps unhinge a society, talking like this. And I was part of that, and that‘s why I apologize—and I would apologize again I am sorry for what I did.

And I think that people who say extreme things should stand up and take the consequences and admit when they were wrong. And in this case, we were wrong. We were wrong more really. We were wrong politically.

And as a believing Christian, I was wrong in terms of someone who says he follows Jesus Christ.

MADDOW: There are a lot of people in this country, obviously, who are part of the pro-life movement, the legal pro-life movement, and who hold pro-life views and who seek to change the laws of this country about abortion. There‘s obviously what I consider to be a terrorist movement who believes not that the laws should be changed but that the laws should—but that people who are legally engaged in providing abortion services are legitimately targets of violence that they should be intimidated, harassed and in some cases killed.

Those two movements are not the same thing. And it‘s important to me as an American that people who are pro-life feel that they can safely articulate those views and that they are not being attacked for what extremists have done.

SCHAEFFER: Right.

MADDOW: But I also don‘t want to excuse anybody who incites violence, or who, I guess, makes excuses for the violent wing of this movement, that has two very different wings. How do you see the connection there?

SCHAEFFER: Well, you know, the book you mentioned earlier, “Crazy for God,” has a number of chapters talking about the way we took the movement from its early stages when it was more a moral concern, not so much about politics and not so much about changing the law, and radicalized that movement. I follow the step by step process. Secret meetings with Pat Robertson down at the 700 Club, Jerry Falwell sending his jet up to me to bring me down to his church to speak a couple of times.

And what we did is we talked one game to the large public and we talked another game amongst ourselves. And amongst ourselves, we were very radical. And I don‘t think it takes much imagination to guess that, tonight, there are people who are publicly saying, “This is terrible, we never advocated killing, abortion is murder, but we didn‘t mean people to take us this seriously.” But in private, you know, if these folks popped champion bottles, they would be drinking a toast to this murder tonight.

I know that this is the case because of the fact that I was part of the movement, but also understood very well what we were doing back then was to attack the political issue when we talked to people like Ronald Reagan and the Bush family and Jack Kemp—the late Jack Kemp that we were very close to in all this. But on a private side, we also were egging people on to first pick at abortion clinics, then chain themselves to fences, then go to jail.

We knew full well that in a country that had seen the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther king, two Kennedy brothers and others, that what we were also doing was opening a gate here. And I think there‘s no way to duck this. We live in a country in which guns are all over the place. We have plenty of people with a screw loose, plenty of people on the edge. It only takes one.

And what scare me is that I see the rhetoric of the Republican Party right now—including the former vice president—about our newly elected African-American president has the same sort of coded stuff in it. He‘s not a real American. He‘s making America less safe. He‘s a secret Muslim. Some Christians in the same groups that are pro-life groups are running around saying he‘s the anti-Christ.

They also know full well that we have people out there who will take it to the next step and say, “Well, gee, if he‘s the anti-Christ, if he‘s anti-American, if he‘s a communist, maybe the best thing we can do is pull another trigger some other day.”

We live in a country where people get killed for their views sometimes. We‘re a very divided nation coming out of this culture war.

It is irresponsible for people to make these wild statements—like Bill O‘Reilly does—and then step back after it happens and say, “Oh, I never meant that.” Yes, they did mean it. They meant exactly what they said.

And when you start calling people those sorts of names—the way I did back in the ‘70s and the early ‘80s—for which I am apologizing today, not just because of this but other incidents like this, if people don‘t stand up and actually take back these words, take back these angry word, they are still culpable for the next event that happens. And we need to be able to just call it what it is.

MADDOW: Frank Schaeffer is author of the book, “Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elects, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All or Almost All of It Back”—Mr. Schaeffer, it‘s just bracing testimony from you tonight. Thanks for—thanks for being here on the show.

SCHAEFFER: Thanks for having me on.

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Christian Right Is 'Trolling For Assassins'

2009-11-25T12:00:00.003-05:00

Schaeffer: "There is a crazy fringe [receiving] messages that have been pouring out of FOX News ... talking about doing away with Obama, asking God to kill him."

November 19, 2009
Courtesy Of Alter Net

The following is an excerpt of a transcript from a recent episode of the Rachel Maddow Show:

Rachel Maddow: With our president overseas, Republicans and conservatives here at home have been taking the opportunity to crank up their criticism of him. Former Vice President Dick Cheney telling Politico.com that President Obama advertised weakness when he bowed ceremonially to the emperor of Japan. Cheney said, quote, “Our friends and allies don‘t expect it and our enemies see it as a sign of weakness. There is no reason for an American president to bow to anyone.”

He does have a point. I mean, imagine an American president bowing to anyone. [Maddow displays photos of various U.S. presidents bowing to foreign leaders] Imagine. Imagine, say, oh, President Nixon bowing to Chairman Mao in China. Imagine, say, President Nixon -- oh, there he is, again, bowing to Japanese Emperor Hirohito, that was here in America. Imagine President Eisenhower bowing to Charles de Gaulle of France -- France!

And four our pals in the press, when a former vice president, like, Dick Cheney says something like there‘s no reason for an American president to bow to anyone, the appropriate response is to say, “What else do you have against President Eisenhower, sir, or President Nixon?” Or you could just copy down what Cheney says and write a whole story as if Cheney really has a point, which, of course, he doesn‘t—at all. But I digress.

Beyond the former vice president, Mr. Obama‘s trip abroad has generally brought out the unhinged among the president‘s critics. The troubled conservative “Washington Times” newspaper, for example, allowed their editor emeritus, Wesley Pruden, to assess President Obama‘s trip abroad this way, quote, “”Mr. Obama, unlike his predecessors, likely knows no better. It‘s no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of the 57 states is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the third world and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.”

That was published in an actual newspaper.

On an actual cable TV channel, host Glenn Beck assessed Democratic efforts at health reform with equal intellectual rigor:

Genn Beck, Fox Host: America has spoken clearly, consistently, we are—excuse this analogy but I feel like it‘s true—we‘re the young girls saying, “No, no, help me” and the government is Roland Polanski.

Maddow: From the same network, another host, Bill O‘Reilly, couldn‘t help himself either, calling into Mr. Beck‘s radio program with this warning to the Democratic speaker of the House:

Bill O' Reilly, Fox Host: I think people, when they figure out how badly they‘re going to get hurt in the next few years, there‘s going to be a tea party on taxes and it‘s going to get nasty. Nancy Pelosi is going to be bobbing up and down in the Boston Harbor.

Maddow: And then, there‘s this biblical quote making the rounds in anti-Obama circles. As reported this week in the “Christian Science Monitor,” “Pray for President Obama, Psalm 109, verse eight.” What‘s psalm 109 version eight? Well, it reads, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.” Let his days be few. It‘s followed immediately by another verse, “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”

And don‘t forget, that sentiment is now being merchandised on bumper stickers, on mouse pads, on Teddy Bears on aprons, framed tiles—those are nice. Keepsake boxes, t-shirts? “Let his days be few”—cute on a Teddy Bear.

Has anybody else crept out by this?

Joining us now is Frank Schaeffer, whose father, Francis Schaeffer helped shape the evangelical movement in the United States. Mr. Shafer grew up in the religious far-right and he‘s the author of “Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don‘t Like Religion (or Atheism).”

Mr. Schaeffer, thanks very much for coming back on the show.

Frank Schaeffer: Thanks for having me on.

Maddow: “Let his days be few; and let another take his office,” “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.” This is such strong language in secular terms about President Obama. Can you tell me if this means something less threatening to people hearing this in a biblical context?

Schaeffer: No, actually, it means something more threatening. I think the situation that I find genuinely frightening right now is that you have a ramping up of biblical language—language from the antiabortion movement, for instance, death panels and this sort of thing. And what it‘s coalescing into is branding Obama as Hitler, as they‘ve already called him, as something foreign to our shores. We‘re reminded of that. He‘s born in Kenya—as brown, as black, above all, as not us. He is Sarah Palin‘s not a real American.

But now, it turns out, that he joins the ranks of the unjust kings of ancient Israel, unjust rulers, to which all these biblical illusions are directed who should be slaughtered, if not by God, then by just men.

So, there‘s a direct parallel here with Timothy McVeigh‘s t-shirt on the day of the Oklahoma City bombing in which he said that the tree of liberty had to be watered occasionally by the blood of tyrants. And that quote, we saw again at a meeting at which Obama was present being carried on a placard by someone carrying a loaded weapon.

What we‘re looking at right now is two things going on. We see the evangelical groups that I talk about in my new book, “Patience with God,” enthralled by an apocalyptic vision that I go into in some detail there. They represent the millions of people who have turned the “Left Behind” series into best sellers. Most of them are not crazy, they‘re just deluded.

But there is a crazy fringe to whom all these little messages that have been pouring out of FOX News, now on a bumper sticker, talking about doing away with Obama, asking God to kill him.

Really, this is trolling for assassins. And this is serious business.

It‘s un-American. It‘s unpatriotic.

And it goes to show that the religious right, the Republican far right, have coalesced into a group that truly want American revolution. And if it turns out to be blood in the streets and death, so be it. This is not funny stuff anymore. They cannot be dismissed as just crazies on the fringe. It only takes one.

You know, look at “The Boston Globe” article a few weeks ago saying that the threat level faced by the Secrete Service has gone up 400 percent, higher than any other time in 52 years for any president, Democrat or Republican. These are no jokes.

And as I talk about in “Patience with God,” if you trace these origins back to this paranoid, evangelical group, of which me and my father, sadly, were not only leaders, but leaders in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the foot soldiers that people like Dick Armey and others are using now to push their political agenda onto health care, are also people that have within their ranks, people, such as the person who murdered Dr. Tiller and killed three police officers in Pittsburgh because they thought Obama would take away their guns.

This bumper sticker simply says to them: “It‘s open season.”

Maddow: And to be clear—I mean, over-the-top political criticism is as American as apple pie. And incredibly intense criticism has been lobbied against George W. Bush and against every president that‘s gone before modern times. But you‘re saying that there‘s essentially a religious inflection in the most extreme of the commentary against Obama, that sort—that‘s operating on a religious level, that‘s a signal to a religiously-minded audience.

Schaeffer: Absolutely. Look, this is the American version of the Taliban. The Taliban quotes the Quran and al Qaeda quotes certain verses in the Quran, in and out of context, calling for jihad and bloody war and the curse of Allah on infidels.

This is the Old Testament biblical equivalent of calling for “Holy War.” Now, most Americans will just see the bumper sticker and smile and think that it‘s facetious. Unfortunately, there are 22 million Americans or so who just call themselves super-conservative evangelicals. Of this, a small minority might be violent, but the general atmosphere here is really getting heated.

And what surprises me is that responsible—if you can put it that way—Republican leadership and the editors of some of these Christian magazines, et cetera, et cetera, do not stand-up in holy hour (ph) and denounce this.

You know, they‘re always asking, “Where is the Islamic leadership denouncing terrorism? Why aren‘t the moderates speaking out?” Well, I challenge the folks who I used to work with, that I talk about in my book, “Patience with God,” and I would just say to them, “Where the hell are you? This is not funny anymore. And be it on your head if something happens to our president, if you are going to go around supporting and not speaking out against this stuff.

It‘s just not a question of who‘s doing it. The bigger question is: Where are the people speaking out against these things? I don‘t hear those voices raised in the evangelical fundamentalist community. And until I do, I—and my opinion is, they are culpable.

One last thing on this, I think it points at the fact that Obama supporters, of which I have been one since he began running, have better start speaking up in support of him and not sniping at him all the time because he‘s not moving toward change as fast as we‘d like in every area. This is serious stuff. The chips are down. He has real enemies. Some of them are violent.

And as far as I‘m concerned, it‘s time to support our president, stand with him, and not only wish him the best, but as a believing Christian myself, pray for his safety in the face of these religious maniacs, who every day, you know, one time I was on your show awhile back and they were talking about, “Is he the antichrist?” Now, they are asking he‘s an unjust ruler and they‘re asking God to strike him down. There are very not many steps left on this insane path.

See more stories tagged with: christian right, assassination, rachel maddow, frank schaeffer, right-wing assasin

Anti-Muslim 'McCarthyism' Making Us Less Safe

2009-11-25T08:00:00.003-05:00

Wave of prejudice among Republican politicians may actually be frustrating anti-terrorism efforts Maddow says.

By David Edwards,
Raw Story.
Posted November 20, 2009.
Courtesy Of Alter Net

A wave of anti-Muslim "McCarthyism" among Republican politicians in the wake of the Fort Hood shooting is not only not helping make America safer, it may actually be frustrating anti-terrorism efforts, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow says.

In a segment on The Rachel Maddow Show Thursday night, Maddow aired numerous clips of Republican and conservative figures advocating for racial profiling, or even suggesting infiltration of the US government by "Al Qaeda sympathizers."

Maddow equated the recent political trend to the McCarthyism of the 1950s, when Sen. Joe McCarthy used fear of communist infiltration to gain political power and influence.

But Maddow's most salient point came in pointing out that the anti-Muslim sentiment being aired on the nation's newscasts could frustrate a recent effort by the CIA to recruit more Arab-Americans, in an effort to better prosecute the war on terrorism.

Those potential recruits' "language skills alone are considered a vital tool for America fighting terrorism," Maddow said.

According to the Associated Press, the agency has begun airing new recruitment ads in Michigan, and plans to take them nationwide in the next few months.

The ads are "part of an ambitious outreach effort to communities the CIA deems critical to reducing the threat of terrorism in the US. The agency has a five-year plan to boost fluency in Arabic and other languages," AP reports.

AP's own analysis backs up Maddow's claim that the anti-Muslim atmosphere being whipped up in Washington could harm the CIA's efforts.

"Resistance could come from US Arabs who have felt the sting of suspicion since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Many Arabs and Muslims have been dubious of the government's intelligence gathering and believe spying is going on in mosques and other places," the news agency reported.

Maddow's report began with footage of televangelist Pat Robertson declaring that Islam is "not a religion" but rather a "violent political system." She moved on to a clip of ex-Alaska governor Sarah Palin advocating in favor of racial profiling.

And she noted that Attorney General Eric Holder was "momentarily rendered speechless" during Senate hearings this week when Republican senators suggested that the Justice Department had been infiltrated by Al Qaeda sympathizers.

"The decision to bring [Guantanamo] detainees to the United States and afford them civilian trials is highly questionable," said Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA). "I want to know more about who is advising you on these decisions. There are attorneys at the Justice Department working on this issue who either represented Guantanamo detainees or worked for groups who advocated for them."

Maddow played a clip of Holder responding to the accusations. "I don't even know where to begin," the attorney general said.

This video is from MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast Nov. 19, 2009.

Download video via RawReplay.com

See more stories tagged with: msnbc, rachel maddow, maddow, anti-muslim, mccarthyism

Congress Demonizing Investigation Of Israel's War Crimes

2009-11-25T04:00:00.004-05:00

Recognition of human rights expert Richard Goldston's investigation is essential to the peace process in Israel and Palestine -- and the Congress is trying to demonize it.

By Bill Moyers,
Bill Moyers Journal.
Posted November 20, 2009
Courtesy Of Alter Net

Editor's Note: The following is a transcript of Bill Moyers' must-read interview with Richard Goldstone, who accused both the Israel Defense Forces and Hamas of war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity during Israel's invasion of Gaza in the winter of 2008-2009 in his report submitted to the UN's Human Rights Council. The Council offically endorsed the findings of the report. Early this November the House of Representatives voted 344 to 36, to condemn Goldstone's report. As Human Rights Watch researcher Fred Abrahams writes, "The 179 Democrats and 165 Republicans who voted yea are helping to shield those responsible on both sides."

Bill Moyers: There could not have been a more thankless job in the world this year than investigating allegations of war crimes between Israelis and Palestinians. You're about to meet the man who shouldered that task after others had turned it down. And sure enough, he is at the center now of a raging controversy.

Judge Richard Goldstone was born and raised in South Africa, where he came to prominence investigating the vicious behavior of white security forces during apartheid.

In 1994, the UN named him to lead its investigation of war crimes in what was once Yugoslavia, including ethnic cleansing, the deadliest violence in Europe since the Second World War. That same year he was asked to prosecute genocide in Rwanda, where almost a million people were slaughtered. Goldstone went on to uncover Nazi war criminals hiding in Argentina, and to lead an independent inquiry into war crimes in Kosovo.

Time and again he has placed himself in harm's way and smack in the middle of controversy, but a few months ago he took on what was to become the greatest challenge of his legal career. It came after years of Hamas militants firing their missiles from the Gaza strip into southern Israel. Israel retaliated last December with Operation Cast Lead: 22 days of military action targeting Gaza, those 139 square miles between Israel and Egypt that are recognized as Palestinian territory. More than twelve hundred Palestinians died. Three Israeli civilians were killed and 10 soldiers, four of them the result of friendly fire. When Israeli forces withdrew, Gaza was left devastated and reeling. Not only had military targets been destroyed but thousands of homes as well as hospitals, schools and mosques. The United Nations Human Rights Council called for an investigation. And Goldstone agreed to lead it, but only after expanding the fact-finding mission's mandate to include charges against Hamas as well as Israel.

Over the next several months, Judge Goldstone and his team would thread their way through a minefield of accusation and denial.

In September, he submitted their report, 574 pages, scorching in their detail. The report accused both the Israel Defense Forces and Hamas of war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity. While condemning Palestinian rocket attacks, the report's harshest language was reserved for Israel's treatment of civilians in Gaza.

Richard Goldstone: These attacks amounted to reprisals and collective punishment, and constitute war crimes. The government of Israel obviously has a duty to protect its own citizens. That in no way justifies a policy of collective punishment of a people under effective occupation, destroying their means to live a dignified life and the trauma caused by the kind of military intervention the Israeli government called Operation Cast Lead.

The report and the angry debate surrounding it have exposed Goldstone to strident and bitter criticism. Nonetheless, late last week, the UN's Human Rights Council officially endorsed his findings. Richard Goldstone joins me now. Currently a visiting professor at Fordham Law School in New York, last spring he received the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Award for International Justice. His books include "For Humanity: Reflections of a War Crimes Investigator."

Judge Richard Goldstone, welcome to the Journal.

Goldstone: Thank you very much.

Moyers: Let me put down a few basics first. Personally, do you have any doubt about Israel's right to self-defense?

Goldstone: Absolutely not. And our approach to our mission and in our report the right of Israel to defend its citizens is taken as a given.

Moyers: So the report in no way challenges Israel's right to self-defense-

Goldstone: Not at all. What we look at is how that right was used. We don't question the right.

Moyers: Do you consider Hamas an enemy of Israel?

Goldstone: Well, anybody who's firing many thousands of rockets and mortars into a country is, I think, in anybody's book, an enemy.

Moyers: Were those rocket attacks on Israel a threat to the civilians of Israel, to the population of Israel?

Goldstone: Absolutely. The people within the range of those rockets and mortars in southern Israel and Sderot and Ashkelon have been living under circumstances of tremendous terror. Schoolchildren in particular, people, women and men, have less than 45 seconds to seek shelter when the Israelis know that rockets are coming. And often, they don't. And the fact that the death toll in southern Israel wasn't higher, is really happenstance. It's remarkable that none of those rockets caused a great deal more death and injury than they did.

Moyers: And Israel, in your judgment, was justified in trying to put an end to those rocket attacks-

Goldstone: Absolutely. No country can be expected to accept that with equanimity.

Moyers: You're Jewish, and a Zionist as well. When you say, "I'm a Zionist," in your case, what does that mean?

Goldstone: Well, what it means, that I fully support Israel's right to exist. That's for the Jewish people to have their own national homeland, in Israel.

Moyers: So why, as a Jew and a Zionist, concerned for Israel's survival, did you agree to stand in judgment on Israel's action in Gaza?

Goldstone: Well now, it was a question of conscience really. I've been involved in investigating very serious violations in my own country, South Africa, and I was castigated by many in the white community for doing that. I investigated serious war crimes in the Balkans and the Serbs hated me, hated me for that. And I was under serious death threat, both in South Africa and in respect of the Balkans. And then I went onto Rwanda, and many people hated me for doing that. I've been a co-chair of the International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute, and for the last five years, I've been sending letters of protest weekly to countries like China and Syria and you name it, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, complaining about violations of human rights. So I've been involved in this business for the last fifteen years or so, and it seemed to me that being Jewish was no reason to treat Israel exceptionally, and to say because I'm Jewish, it's all right for me to investigate everybody else, but not Israel.

Moyers: But you, you know, you have so many ties to Israel. You were on the board, I understand, of Hebrew University-

Goldstone: I still am. That's correct.

Moyers: -and that's not, you still are then. I mean, you had to know you were going to antagonize a lot of your friends.

Goldstone: That's correct, but I've also got the support of many of my friends. You know, it's something that goes both ways, but antagonizing friends was inevitable. Not only in respect of this investigation but in respect of previous investigations.

Moyers: Your report, as you know, basically accuses Israel of waging war on the entire population of Gaza.

Goldstone: That's correct.

Moyers: I mean, there are allegations in here, some very tough allegations of Israeli soldiers shooting unarmed civilians who pose no threat, of shooting people whose hands were shackled behind them, of shooting two teenagers who'd been ordered off a tractor that they were driving, apparently carrying wounded civilians to a hospital, of homes, hundreds, maybe thousands of homes destroyed, left in rubble, of hospitals bombed. I mean there are some questions about one or two of your examples here, but it's a damning indictment of Israel's conduct in Gaza, right?

Goldstone: Well, it is outrageous, and there should have been an outrage. You know, the response has not been to deal with the substance of those allegations. I've really seen or read no detailed response in respect of the incidents on which we report.

Moyers: Why is that?

Goldstone: Well, you know, I don't know. I suppose people hate being attacked. There's a knee-jerk reaction to attack the messenger rather than the message. And I think this is typical of that. And of course, a lot of the allegations, I certainly don't claim anything like infallibility. But I would like to see a response to the substance, particularly the attack on the infrastructure of Gaza, which seems to me to be absolutely unjustifiable.

Moyers: What did you see with your own eyes when you went there?

Goldstone: Well, I saw the destruction of the only flour-producing factory in Gaza. I saw fields plowed up by Israeli tank bulldozers. I saw chicken farms, for egg production, completely destroyed. Tens of thousands of chickens killed. I met with families who lost their loved ones in homes in which they were seeking shelter from the Israeli ground forces. I had to have the very emotional and difficult interviews with fathers whose little daughters were killed, whose family were killed. One family, over 21 members, killed by Israeli mortars. So, it was a very difficult investigation, which will give me nightmares for the rest of my life.

Moyers: Those particular incidents, what makes actions like that a crime in war? I mean, war is such a horrendous mess-

Goldstone: Absolutely.

Moyers: What makes those acts war crimes, as you say?

Goldstone: Well, humanitarian law, really fundamentally is what's known as the "principle of distinction." It requires all people involved, commanders, troops, all people involved in making war, it requires them to distinguish between civilians and combatants. And then there's a question-

Moyers: Combatants, right?

Goldstone: -and combatants. And then there's a question of proportionality. One can, in war, target a military target. And there can be what's euphemistically referred to as acollateral damage,' but the acollateral damage' must be proportionate to the military aim. If you can take out a munitions factory in an urban area with a loss of 100 lives, or you can use a bomb twice as large and take out the same factory and kill 2000 people, the latter would be a war crime, the former wouldn't.

Moyers: Who is to say that? Who is to make that distinction?

Goldstone: Well, that distinction must be made after the event. I think the military must be given a fairly wide margin of appreciation, in the sense that there must be room for mistakes, and ultimately, it's a question of looking at the intent, at the care, at any question of negligence on the people who take the decision.

Moyers: You wrote, quote, the military operation, this military operation in Gaza, was a result of the disrespect for the fundamental principle of adistinction' in international humanitarian law. So in layman's language, the distinction between what and what?

Goldstone: Between combatants and innocent civilians.

Moyers: And you're saying Israel did not do that, in many of these incidents.

Goldstone: That's correct.

Moyers: Did you find evidence that that is deliberate on their part?

Goldstone: Well, we did. We found evidence in statements made by present and former political and military leaders, who said, quite openly, that there's going to be a disproportionate attack. They said that if rockets are going to continue, we're going to hit back disproportionately. We're going to punish you for doing it. And that's not countenanced by the law of war.

Moyers: So they were doing, on the ground, what they had said earlier they intended to do.

Goldstone: That's correct.

Moyers: -so there was intention.

Goldstone: Well, certainly. You know, one thing one can't say about the Israel Defense Forces is that they make too many mistakes. They're very, a sophisticated army. And if they attack a mosque or attack a factory, and over 200 factories were bombed, there's just no basis to ascribe that to error. That must be intentional.

Moyers: The Israelis admit that they bombed some of what you call civilian targets in your report, but they argue that because Hamas is the elected leadership in Gaza, some of those facilities are, in fact, part and parcel of the Hamas infrastructure.

Goldstone: Right. Well, there's certainly room for difference of opinion in respect of some of them. We had a look, for example, at the legislative assembly. Now the legislative assembly consists of members of Hamas in the majority, but also opposition parties. And certainly, as we understand international law, international humanitarian law, that to bomb the legislative assembly is unlawful. It's not a military target, it's a civilian target. I mean, to give an example closer to home, if the United States is at war it would be legitimate to bomb the Pentagon; I would suggest it would be illegitimate to bomb the Congress.

Moyers: But we did bomb the Bundestag in Germany, during World War II. The Allies did.

Goldstone: Well, I think the standards of World War II are a little outdated. I think the, we've had since then, the 1949 Geneva Conventions, the 1977 additional optional protocols to the Geneva Conventions, so the law has moved considerably. And I don't believe one can judge a war in 2008 and 2009 by the standards of the 1940s.

Moyers: But what about, for example, as you talk, you make me think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the United States deliberated incinerated two cities, with atomic bombs, knowing that tens of thousands of civilians, including women and children, would perish-

Goldstone: Well, times have changed, the law has changed. And I have little doubt that if a similar situation arose today, it's highly unlikely that there would be the use of nuclear power in respect of cities and having a civilian toll that one had in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Moyers: What's the heart of the Geneva Convention and those protocols, as you see them, as an international lawyer?

Goldstone: Right. Well again, it's to give heightened protection to civilians, and not only in international armed conflict, but also in non-international armed conflict. So the whole topic has expanded considerably, really under the guidance and the guardianship of the International Committee of the Red Cross. And I think it's important to bear in mind that the 1949 Geneva Conventions is the first international instrument that's been ratified by every single member of the United Nations, so that's the law. It's not only treaty law, but it's become customary international law.

Moyers: Does it apply to a situation like Gaza?

Goldstone: Absolutely. And it applies, as we held in our report, it applies clearly to Israel as a state party to the Geneva Conventions, and it applies also to Hamas as a non-state party, under customary international law.

Moyers: Did you find war crimes by Hamas?

Goldstone: Oh, indeed.

Moyers: What were they?

Goldstone: We found that the firing of many thousands of rockets and mortars at a civilian population to constitute a very serious war crime. And we said possibly crimes against humanity.

Moyers: But Hamas is not a party to the Geneva Convention, right? I mean, they are not law-

Goldstone: Well it can't be, because it's not a state party.

Moyers: It's not-

Goldstone: But it's bound by customary international law and by international human rights law, and that makes it equally a war crime to do what it's been doing.

Moyers: Yet critics say that by focusing more on the actions of the Israelis and, then on the Palestinians, you are, in essence making it clear whom you think is the more responsible party here.

Goldstone: I suppose that's fair comment, Bill. I think it's difficult to deal equally with a state party, with a sophisticated army, with the sort of army Israel has, with an air force and a navy, and the most sophisticated weapons that are not only in the arsenal of Israel, but manufactured and exported by Israel, on the one hand, with Hamas using really improvised, imprecise armaments. So it's difficult to equate their power. But that having been said, one has to look at the actions of each. And one has to judge the criminality, or the alleged criminality, of each. And it's really, that the reason that we've, our main recommendation is to urge both sides to look at themselves, to have their own internal investigations to judge what each did. To have a criminal investigation and to prosecute and punish the people responsible.

Moyers: Was it possible, among the casualties in Gaza, to distinguish between militants and civilians?

Goldstone: Now, I can't believe that the Israel intelligence doesn't enable them to do it to, certainly to a higher degree. I'm not suggesting that there can be any infallibility. But, I'll give you an example. We spoke to the owner of a home in Gaza City. He said he looked out of his window and he saw some militants, whether Hamas or other Palestinian groups, setting up their mortar launchers in his yard. He ran out and said, "Get out of here. I don't want you doing this here. You're going to endanger my family, because they going to bomb. Get out." And in fact, they left. Whether that was typical or atypical, I don't know, we didn't, obviously, cover the field. But assuming they had disobeyed them, assuming they had launched the rockets from over the objections of the household owner, and his family, they launched the rockets and disappeared. It would be a war crime, as I understand it, for Israel to have bombed the home of that innocent household, who didn't want this to happen.

Moyers: But the Israelis would respond, I think, based on the evidence I've looked at, the record I've read of their response to your report, they would say that that was probably an exception, or could have been an exception, that many of those militants in Gaza were embedded in homes, embedded in hospitals, embedded in schools and the like.

Goldstone: Well, you know, the investigations, and we didn't, as I said, we couldn't cover the field. There were really hundreds of incidents.

Moyers: You chose about 36 representative-

Goldstone: We chose 36. And it could have been 3,600.

Moyers: Why those 36?

Goldstone: We chose those 36 because they seemed to be, to represent the most serious, the highest death toll, the highest injury toll. And they appear to represent situations where there was little or no military justification for what happened. We didn't want to investigate situations where we would be called upon to second-guess decisions made by Israeli Defense Force leaders or soldiers, in what's called the afog of battle'. It's really unfair to do that, especially without hearing the other side. So we tried to concentrate on issues which seem to be less likely to be justifiable by applying those standards.

Moyers: Did you find evidence that Israel tried to avoid targeting civilians?

Goldstone: In some cases, yes. I, you know, we gave Israel full credit for some of the leaflets that were dropped in the Rafah area, where they were specific. They said "During such-and-such a period, we're going to be bombing between X street and Y street, and A street and B street. Get out, for your own safety." And that saved a lot of innocent lives. But many hundreds of thousands of other leaflets were really unhelpful-

Moyers: Why?

Goldstone: -dropped in many parts of Gaza, saying, warning, "We are going to be bombing. Get out of your homes." Didn't say when. Didn't say where. And also, it didn't, where could people go? It's such an overcrowded civilian area, one and a half million, in a tiny area, and with closed borders. There was little action families could take to react to that sort of warning.

Moyers: I didn't know until I read your report that the Israelis had actually called, 100,000 calls to telephones in Gaza and said, in effect, "Get out," right? They were intending to target, and they were giving the occupants a chance to move.

Goldstone: Well, first, move to where? And secondly, in consequence of the overwhelming majority of those warnings, there was no attack. So it was, it caused confusion and terror rather than saving lives.

Moyers: But confusion and terror are part of war, right?

Goldstone: Well no, there shouldn't be confusion and terror applied to a civilian population. If you're going to give warnings, they should be specific.

Moyers: But when the terrorists, the militants, whatever one wants to call them, are known to be embedded in, as you say, those tight, complex, concentrated areas, what's the other army to do?

Goldstone: It's for example, to launch commando actions, to get at the militants and not the innocent civilians. And there's an element of punishment, if one looks at the attacks on the infrastructure, on the food infrastructure, one sees a pattern of attacking all of the people of Gaza, not simply the militants.

Moyers: Why do you think they bombed the infrastructure so thoroughly?

Goldstone: Well, we've found that the only logical reason is collective punishment against the people of Gaza for voting into power Hamas, and a form of reprisal for the rocket attacks and mortar attacks on southern Israel.

Moyers: So that would be the explanation for why, if they were interested only in stopping the bombing, they didn't have to destroy the land.

Goldstone: No, this was a political this was a political decision, I think, and not a military one. I think they were telling the people of Gaza that if you support Hamas, this is what we're going to do to you.

Moyers: Talk a little more about that. Give me some more examples of what you see as a pattern in the destruction of the infrastructure.

Goldstone: Right. Well, I'd start with the bulldozing of agricultural fields, apparently pretty random. It wasn't as though these farms were owned by Hamas militants. That's, I haven't seen that allegation made. The bombing of some 200 industrial factories. As I mentioned, the only flour-producing factory, the water supply facilities of Gaza, the sanitation facilities, which caused an overflow of filth and muck into well over a square kilometer of land.

Moyers: Do you know if these were targeted, or were they the consequence of actions aimed at militants?

Goldstone: Well clearly, there can be no question of militants running 200 factories. There can be no, we know, from our investigation, that the owner of the flour factory, in fact, had one of the rare documents the Israelis give which allowed the owner to go into Israel, he dealt with Israeli counterparts. He received, and it's an interesting case, he received a warning to evacuate. He evacuated his staff. Nothing happened. They went back, and he made inquiries through a friend in Israel, who contacted the Israel Defense Force and said, "Don't worry. They're not going to bomb your factory." They went back. A few days later, he gets another telephone call saying, "Evacuate." Doesn't come to him, it comes to their switchboard. He again makes inquiries. "Don't worry. We're not going to bomb." So they go back. Nothing happens. Third warning to evacuate. They evacuate and they bomb the factory. Now if there was any militants involved, firstly, the Israelis know who they're dealing with, they'd given him a document allowing him to go into Israel. It's that sort of conduct which indicates to us an intent to punish civilians in Gaza for what their leaders were complicit in doing.

Moyers: It's difficult for us, in this country, to understand this intimacy of self-destruction, you know, that you just described. A Gazan factory owner calls a friend in Israel, who calls the military, and then he calls back to the factory. I mean, that, just right across an invisible border, right?

Goldstone: It's the sort of evidence which has some credibility to it. It's not the sort of evidence that this man is going to concoct.

Moyers: What were your standards of evidence, as you conducted these discussions, investigations and hearings in Gaza?

Goldstone: Well, we spoke to well over 100 witnesses. We didn't, obviously, take at face value everything we were told.

Moyers: Yeah, one criticism was that those witnesses were supplied by Hamas militants.

Goldstone: Well, in fact, that's not correct. We made our own inquiries, and we decided who we would see. We weren't given a list by Hamas or anybody else. We chose incidents, 36 out of as I say, could have been hundreds. But we chose the people we wanted to see, and certainly, there was no Hamas presence anywhere near the vicinity of where we saw people. There were malicious statements to the effect that they were, but I can give you every assurance that it didn't happen. And I can assure you that if it did happen, I wouldn't have been prepared to continue to operate under those situations. I would have insisted that they leave. And if I couldn't achieve that, I would have abandoned the investigation.

Moyers: Was there a moment when you thought, why am I doing this?

Goldstone: Oh, there've been frequent moments-

Moyers: No, I mean, during the time you were conducting the investigation. I know since then, you might have had second thoughts.

Goldstone: But even then, it was a very difficult, you know, I was, quite frankly, nervous going into Gaza. I had nightmares about being kidnapped. You know, it was very difficult, especially for a Jew, to go into an area controlled by Hamas. So I did. It was, you know, I went in with a certain amount of fear and trepidation.

Moyers: And were there moments when you were apprehensive, when you thought, perhaps-

Goldstone: No, no. On the contrary, I was struck by the warmth of the people, that we met and who we dealt with in Gaza. You know, my fears were put aside. When I went back for the second visit to Gaza, I went with a much more equanimity and level of acceptance.

Moyers: But since they knew you were coming to try to prove that Israel had committed war crimes, you would have expected some hospitality, right?

Goldstone: No, no. No, but there was criticism when my appointment was announced, there were some Hamas statements, objecting to a Jew being appointed and expecting a Jew to be even-handed. I was certainly very conscious of being Jewish, offering me no excuse to refuse to do it. You know, anymore than it would have- I could have lived with myself being a white South African looking into terrible violations committed by white South African.

Moyers: Were you frightened then?

Goldstone: Yes, I was. Absolutely.

Moyers: Your life was in danger then-

Goldstone: It was. Very much so.

Moyers: You had to have-

Goldstone: I had security.

Moyers: Yeah. And what about Rwanda, and the Balkans? Were you ever fearful in those other situations? You seem to keep walking into the heart of darkness, if I may say.

Goldstone: You know, I went through some pretty difficult situations, especially flying into Sarajevo during the war, in helicopters, having flak jackets, flying into an airport that was under heavy attack by the Bosnian Serb forces. That was a hair-raising, probably one of the most nervous situations I've ever been in.

Moyers: Why do you do these things?

Goldstone: Well, you know, I think one accepts these duties and obligations, not knowing where they're going to lead. And then one has to do one's duty.

Moyers: Yeah, but why do you have to do your duty? I mean, what made a Richard Goldstone?

Goldstone: Well, I think it's one's experience. I've felt as I certainly I got involved in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa because of my anger and frustration at the unfairness of racial oppression. And I was privileged to be able to get involved and make a difference. And then I found myself really, as a result, solely of pressure from Nelson Mandela, getting involved in the war crimes tribunal in the Yugoslavia. I didn't want to do it. But he twisted my arm, and he's a very good arm-twister, and I found myself in Bosnia. Then the Security Council asked me to do Rwanda. The Swedish Prime Minister asked me to do Kosovo. Kofi Annan asked me to do Oil-for-Food. These are all, I mean, difficult, difficult inquiries. I think, I must confess, I've got a tremendous amount of satisfaction from doing that, which has put me into a position of working with absolutely outstanding people. So, really one thing leads to the other.

Moyers: But this is an occasion in which being a Jew, some right-wing Jews in Israel have accused you of betraying your people. This has never happened before, has it? Maybe the white South Africans accused you of betraying white South Africa, but this is different, isn't it?

Goldstone: Well, it's different, but it's symptomatic of the same disease.

Moyers: Which is?

Goldstone: Which is a form of racism. Why should my being Jewish stop me from investigating Israel? I just don't see it. I think a friend should be open to criticism from friends. I think it's more important. I think true friends criticize their friends when they do wrong things.

Moyers: Let me come back to some of that criticism, because I've tried to read as much as I can of the response to your report, as well as reading the report, which is compelling and terrifying, actually, but Israelis claim that if you hold them to this standard that you'd just described, that law prescribes for conflict, any democracy that's fighting terrorism is likely to find itself dragged into an international court of justice. I mean, do you consider that a valid concern?

Goldstone: No. Absolutely not. Take the United States fighting wars in Kosovo and Iraq and Afghanistan. They have certainly at a high level, gone to extremes to protect innocent civilians. Where they've made mistakes, and mistakes have been made, in Kosovo, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, apologies have followed. The United States, in general, has accepted and tried its best, with the assistance of military lawyers, has tried its best to avoid violating international humanitarian law. So, it seems to me this is a smokescreen. I've got no doubt that the laws of war are sufficient to cover the situation of fighting what is now termed asymmetric war. It's not easy; I concede that. But there's a line over which you just don't transgress, without clearly violating the law.

Moyers: Many Israelis said that if they took your findings to heart, they would not be able to root out the terrorists that surround them, and Israel does live in a sea of animosity.

Goldstone: Well, you know, I just don't accept that. I don't accept that the destruction of the food infrastructure is necessary to fight terrorism from Gaza.

Moyers: Let me show you a clip from the speech made at the United Nations by the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: A democracy legitimately defending itself against terror is morally hanged, drawn and quartered, and given an unfair trial to boot. By these twisted standards, the UN Human Rights Council would have dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war criminals. What a perversion of truth. What a perversion of justice… The same UN that cheered Israel as it left Gaza, the same UN that promised to back our right of self-defense now accuses us - my people, my country - of being war criminals? And for what? For acting responsibly in self-defense. For acting in a way that any country would act. With a restraint unmatched by many. What a travesty. Ladies and gentlemen, Israel justly defended itself against terror. This biased and unjust report provides a clear-cut test for all governments. Will you stand with Israel or will you stand with the terrorists?

Moyers: What were you thinking as you just listened to that?

Goldstone: When I was thinking it's a complete misunderstanding, and lack of appreciation of what of what humanitarian law is all about. And again, it's no answer to say that there's a right of self-defense. As I say, I accept the right of Israel, absolutely, to defend itself. But let me give you an example. Assuming the United States fighting Taliban, started bombing the whole food infrastructure of the people in the area where Taliban are- plowing up fields, bombing food factories, I don't believe that this would be accepted as legitimate by the people of the United States.

Moyers: Do we need to change the rules of war in fighting terrorism?

Goldstone: Not at all, and you know, it struck me when I heard that Prime Minister Netanyahu suggested that the law of war needs to be changed. It seems to me to contain an implicit acceptance that they broke the law that now is, and that's why it needs to be changed.

Moyers: From the get-go, Israel refused to cooperate with you. Israel would not even let you in the country to conduct investigations. How could you expect to do a good job, then, with only one side of the story?

Goldstone: Well, you know I, naively, I must confess, with hindsight, believed that Israel would cooperate. I thought that I'd obtained an even-handed mandate, really for the first time, from the Human Rights Council. I really expected the Israeli government to seize this opportunity of using an even-handed mission to its advantage. And I pleaded with the Israeli government in one letter directly to Prime Minister Netanyahu, I said, "Please, meet with me. Tell me how you want us to implement the mandate. Tell- give us advice as to how we should go about it." I assume they'd do that.

Moyers: Did you hear from him?

Goldstone: The final refusal came some two and a half months later, after we were busy involved. We were committed. It was really- it seems to me too late to withdraw at that stage.

Moyers: What is your judgment as to why Israel refused to cooperate?

Goldstone: Well, you know, I don't know. I understand the objection to the Human Rights Council. I've been an outspoken critic of the Human Rights Council, acting exceptionally against Israel and giving it the overemphasis of the Middle East, and condemnation of Israel, on the agendas of the Human Rights Council.

Moyers: That's been a pattern, hasn't it? That the United Nations has focused far more on Israel as a target of challenges on human rights than anybody else.

Goldstone: Absolutely, and this is why I thought this was a new departure, which should be taken advantage of and used as a lever to stop this partiality in the future. And even though it wasn't accepted by Israel, certainly, I believe I hope not immodestly, that I'm now in a position to criticize the Human Rights Council if it continues to act in that unfair way.

Moyers: So you took this on, knowing the record of bias on the part of UN, the United Nations toward Israel, and-

Goldstone: Absolutely.

Moyers: Because you hope to change that?

Goldstone: Because I hope to change it, and I thought it was in the interest of Israel for me to do it.

Moyers: And you insisted, as I understand it, that the mandate be changed. I mean, let me read you from the original mandate from the United Nations Human Rights Commission. Quote, "…investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law by the occupying power, Israel, against the Palestinian people, throughout the occupied Palestinian territory, particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip." Now that's pretty charged language, Judge. Not a single mention of Hamas or the other militants, who were firing thousands of rockets into Israel. Did that language set off an alarm for you?

Goldstone: No, it led to me refusing the invitation. I was invited on the basis of that, and I refused it. And I thought, that's the end of it.

Moyers: Because the language was charged.

Goldstone: Because it was stacked against Israel, and would have been a one-sided investigation, and I wasn't prepared, let alone as a Jew, but as a human being, to get involved in investigating under a one-sided mandate. And I refused. And I was then invited by the president of the Human Rights Council to visit with him. And he asked me what I thought would be an even-handed mandate, and I told him, and he said, "Write it out for me." And I wrote it out. And he said, "Well, that's the mandate that I'm giving you, if you're prepared to take it." Well, it was very difficult to refuse, in that situation, to get a mandate that I'd written for myself.

Moyers: What did you want it to say?

Goldstone: That the mandate should cover all crimes committed by both sides, within the context of Operation Cast Lead, whether committed before, during or after the military operations.

Moyers: You wanted it directed not just at Israel, but at-

Goldstone: Absolutely.

Moyers: -the militants.

Goldstone: Correct. And it was impossible to do a full job without that, because clearly, the Israeli operations were directly linked to the rocket fire. I still, frankly, feared that the Human Rights Council might use our report as an a la carte menu, and use those parts against Israel and reject those parts against Hamas. But it didn't do that, at the meeting of the Human Rights Council last week. It adopted the whole report, which is the clearest ex post facto approval of the even-handed mandate we got. And then, even then, I complained when I was in Bern, Switzerland, last week, that the first draft resolution left Hamas out of the picture, because our report was buried in a whole lot of resolutions and paragraphs condemning Israel, and as a result of my complaint, not only, but certainly, I think it played an important role, a paragraph was added, condemning all targeting of civilians. And calling for accountability on all sides.

Moyers: Your report recommends that both Israel and Hamas conduct their own investigations, and that if there are war crimes alleged and proven, that those participants, those perpetrators, Israelis or Hamas, be taken to the International Criminal Court.

Goldstone: No, that they should be punished in their own countries. Only if there are no investigations - the International Criminal Court is a court of last resort. If nations investigate their own war crimes in good faith, then the International Court has no jurisdiction. And that's the out Israel and Hamas have - if they have good faith investigations, that's the end of criminal investigations at the international level.

Moyers: So what are they afraid of, as you read Israel?

Goldstone: Well, I can only assume they're afraid of an even-handed, good faith investigation, proving that serious war crimes were committed. And that they don't want.

Moyers: Do you think Hamas will likely call- do an investigation itself?

Goldstone: Well, I think there'd be tremendous pressure on them to do that, if Israel did.

Moyers: You said recently that to understand international justice, you have to understand the politics of international justice. What do you mean by that?

Goldstone: Well, you know, without the political will, we wouldn't have had an international war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. That was a huge departure. If you think what's happened since 1993 and 2009, there's been a rapid development. Nobody anticipated a permanent international criminal court, now with 110 nations actively involved in it, every member of the European Union. Japan. One wouldn't have expected that. But none of that would have happened without the political will, and particularly, the political will of the United States. It was the Clinton administration, and particularly Madeleine Albright, who drove that whole policy. Without Madeleine Albright, I believe that there wouldn't have been a Yugoslavia tribunal, there wouldn't have been a Rwanda tribunal, and Kofi Annan wouldn't have been encouraged to call a diplomatic conference to set up an International Criminal Court. So it was political will on the part of the United States, perhaps ironically, in hindsight. But without that, these things wouldn't have happened.

Moyers: Why does the world need an International Court of Justice?

Goldstone: It really is a question of principle. Until 1993, war criminals had literally impunity. They didn't have to fear justice at home, because at home, they were usually war heroes and not war criminals. And there wasn't a single international court with jurisdiction over them. There were no individual nations that were prepared to use universal jurisdiction against war criminals. That's changed. War criminals have trouble traveling around many countries of the world. One of the things worrying the Israeli government, that if they don't have their own investigation, they're going to face investigations in some of the European countries and some of the African countries, including my own country, South Africa. So there's a lot of political reasons that indicate that it's in their interest, and really, on what basis should they refuse, to have their own domestic investigation?

Moyers: Not everyone has been critical of your report, in fact, just this week, the "Financial Times," very respected British-based newspaper ran an editorial saying that: "Goldstone's Gaza report is balanced. Israel is not alone in the dock," it said, "it simply looms larger." So it's hard to understand why Israel is so vociferously opposed to what you say is a necessary act of justice.

Goldstone: The only reason they've given has come, I really think from Defense Minister Barak, who says that an independent investigation will in some way downgrade the military investigating themselves. Well, that would be a good thing. I think one of the things that disturbs me about the internal military investigation- it's now, what, seven months since the end of the war. There's only been one successful prosecution against a soldier, who stole a credit card, which is really almost fodder for cartoonists, in the plethora of alleged war crimes. But what concerns me is, in those military investigations, as far as I've read, in only one cases have the military even approached the victims in Gaza. And obviously, to have a full investigation, one needs, as you say, to hear both sides.

Moyers: The Israelis say that there's no government better at investigating their own actions of the military, whether it's the two wars in Lebanon, or Bus 300, all of these incidents, Israel says, "We go out and hold our military accountable."

Goldstone: Well, to do it in secrecy? And, you know, I always quote Justice Brandeis, who said, "The best disinfectant is sunlight." And this is happening in the dark. And even with the best good faith in the world on the part of the military investigators, the victims are not going to accept decisions that are taken in the dark, and don't involve them.

Moyers: But if you were an Israeli, would you not be fearful of a United Nations that historically has been biased against the country?

Goldstone: Yes, but I would go out of my way to meet that head on. And not to simply put one's head in the sand and say, "Well, the United Nations is biased; I'm going to ignore it." That's not the way one succeeds in the modern world.

Moyers: The "Financial Times" says it is your reputation, Judge Richard Goldstone's reputation, the Israeli government fears and not your methods. What do they have to be afraid of?

Goldstone: The only thing they can be afraid of is the truth. And I think this is why they're attacking the messenger and not the message.

Moyers: What do you hope happens now?

Goldstone: Well, I certainly hope that there'll be sufficient drive within Israel, within the government and in the general public to force the Israeli government to set up an independent, open inquiry. And it can do it. It's got a wonderful legal system, its got a great judicial system, its got retired judges who certainly, in my book, would earn the respect of the overwhelming number of people around the world, including the Arab world, who, if they held open, good faith inquiries, would put an end to this.

Moyers: But just this week, the Israeli defense minister said, we don't want any investigations. He says, "There's no need for a committee of inquiry. The Israeli military knows how to examine itself better than anyone else." And he blocked a meeting this week that was going to discuss whether or not Israel should launch an investigation.

Goldstone: Well the question is whether he's going to succeed. You know, Ariel Sharon, when he was defense minister, did exactly the same blocking, unsuccessfully, in respect of Sabra and Shatila, and a very appropriate independent investigation was set up under judges and the then attorney general. And of course, they found Sharon guilty, and forced his dismissal as defense minister. So there's precedent both for the minister blocking it, and for his losing, and I hope that will happen here.

Moyers: The Israeli Cabinet this week set up a special cabinet lobbying group to urge the United States to use its veto power in the Security Council to prevent any legal action against the Israelis. What do you make of that?

Goldstone: Well, you know, that's the sort of politics you and I were talking about, not too many minutes ago. That's using the political route rather than the legal route.

Moyers: Our state department has come right out and said, your findings are unfair toward Israel.

Goldstone: Well, you know, those are statements it's impossible to respond to, because there's no detail. They haven't said why it's unbalanced. They've said there are flaws in the report. And I really do hope and invite the administration to indicate where the report is flawed or unbalanced. And I certainly would welcome learning where we went wrong, and if and I'm easily- I would be easily convinced. And if we if we made mistakes in those are pointed out, I would be the first person to admit it.

Moyers: So you have Israel saying that your report is an impediment to peace, and you say that it is essential to peace. Why do you think a report like this is essential to the peace process?

Goldstone: Well, because certainly, it's been my experience in the countries in which I've been involved and many in which I haven't been involved, that in the aftermath of serious human rights violations, you cannot get enduring peace if you leave rancor and calls for revenge in the victim population. What victims need is acknowledgement. They need official acknowledgement of their victimization. And whether that's done by Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, as we did in South Africa, or through domestic prosecutions or international prosecutions, that official truth-telling is an essential building brick to lasting peace.

Bill Moyers is the host of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS.

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15 Signs American Society Is Coming Apart At The Seams

2009-11-25T00:00:00.002-05:00

Are we nearing a tipping point as rapacious elites push a heavily armed populace too far?

By David DeGraw,
Amped Status.
Posted November 21, 2009.
Courtesy Of Alter Net

Editor's note: The following is an edited excerpt from the Amped Status report, "The Critical Unraveling of U.S. Society."

The economic elite have launched an attack on the U.S. public and society is unraveling at an increased rate. You may have missed it in the mainstream news media, but statistical societal indicators are reading red across the board. Let’s look at the top 15 statistics that prove we are under attack.

1) The inequality of wealth in the United States is soaring to an unprecedented level. The U.S. already had the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world prior to the financial crisis. Since the crisis, which has hit the middle class and poor much harder than the top 1 percent, the gap between the top 1 percent and the remaining 99 percent of the U.S. population has grown to a record high.

2) As the stock market went over the 10,000 mark and just surged to a 13-month high, the three big banks that took taxpayer money and benefited the most from the government bailout have just set a new global economic record by issuing $30 billion in annual bonuses this year, “up 60 percent from last year.” Bloomberg reported: “Goldman Sachs, the most profitable securities firm in Wall Street history, had a record profit in the first nine months of this year and set aside $16.7 billion for compensation expenses.” Goldman Sachs is on pace for the best year in the firm’s history, and it is also benefiting by only paying 1 percent in taxes.

3) The profits of the economic elite are “now underwritten by taxpayers with $23.7 trillion worth of national wealth."

As the looting is occurring at the top, the U.S. middle class is just beginning to collapse.

4) Workers between the ages of 55 to 60, who have worked for 20 to 29 years, have lost an average of 25 percent off their 401k. During the same time period, the wealth of the 400 richest Americans went up by $30 billion, bringing their total combined wealth to $1.57 trillion.

5) Home foreclosure filings "hit a record high in the third quarter (of 2009)… They were the worst three months of all time… 937,840 homes received a foreclosure letter" in this three-month period; “3.4 million homes are expected to enter foreclosure by year’s end, with some experts estimating that next year will be even worse.”

President Obama has enacted a $75 billion taxpayer funded program that has been a spectacular failure in stemming the foreclosure crisis and has proven to be another massive waste of billions of taxpayer dollars.

6) 25 million people are unemployed or underemployed.

This means we have 25 million people who urgently need to increase their income, and they’re quickly running out of options. The unemployment rate is expected to rise further and remain high for several years. “The president’s chief economic adviser warned that the nation’s unemployment rate could stay ‘unacceptably high’ for years to come."

The New York Times reports: "Americans now confront a job market that is bleaker than ever in the current recession, and employment prospects are still getting worse. Job seekers now outnumber openings six to one, the worst ratio since the government began tracking….” As this ratio continues to grow, it will lead to a further reduction in wages -- average worker wages have seen a sharp decline over the past year.

Economist Nouriel Roubini, a man who accurately predicted our current crisis, just reported on unemployment stating: “Think the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the U.S. labor markets are awful and worsening…. So we can expect that job losses will continue until the end of 2010 at the earliest. In other words, if you are unemployed and looking for work and just waiting for the economy to turn the corner, you had better hunker down. All the economic numbers suggest this will take a while. The jobs just are not coming back.”

7) As the few elite banks thrive, there have been 123 U.S. bank failures thus far this year. Recently, three banks that the government declared “healthy” and gave taxpayer money, have folded. The Wall Street Journal reports: “U.S. regulators have seized or threatened at least 27 banks that got capital infusions from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, including some lenders government officials knew were troubled when they awarded the money. The troubles put taxpayers at risk of losing as much as $5.1 billion invested in the banks since TARP was launched in October 2008.”

8) As bankruptcies surge across the board, 10 U.S. states are on the verge of bankruptcy, with several ready to declare a financial state of emergency. California, Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island and Wisconsin are all “barreling toward economic disaster, raising the likelihood of higher taxes, more government layoffs and deep cuts in services."

9) This is occurring at a time when the “federal budget deficit for the fiscal year that just ended was $1.4 trillion, nearly a trillion dollars greater than the year before." In total, "U.S. public debt topped $12 trillion for the first time in history… The public debt topped $10 trillion in September 2008. The debt is quickly approaching the statutory limit of $12.104 trillion, meaning Congress would have to raise the ceiling to prevent a shutdown of government operations."

Economist Dean Baker explains the risk of running such a large deficit: "The debt limit must be increased at regular intervals in order to allow the government to function normally because the government is currently operating at a deficit. If the debt limit is not passed, then at some point the government will not be able to pay workers and contractors. It won’t be able to send out Social Security checks or make payments for Medicaid and unemployment insurance to state governments. And, it will not be able to make interest payments on government bonds, effectively defaulting on the national debt."

Needless to say, all of this will make life drastically more difficult for American citizens. As the middle class continues on the path of economic decline, the number of citizens living in poverty has already hit an all-time high.

10) Although the government’s official figure tries to low-ball the number, 47.4 million U.S. citizens live in poverty, and the U.S. poverty rate is the highest in the industrialized world.

Predictably, homelessness is rising at an increased rate as well. "The U.S. government does not tally the numbers but interested organizations say that more than 3 million people were homeless at some point over the past year…. The fastest growing segment of the homeless population is families with children.”

Children have been hit especially hard by the economic crisis:

11) * 50 percent of U.S. children, one out of every two children, will need to use food stamps to eat.

One out of every two children in the United States of America will need to use a food stamp… to EAT!

If you didn’t think starvation was a serious threat in the U.S., just read this new Washington Post report: “The nation’s economic crisis has catapulted the number of Americans who lack enough food to the highest level since the government has been keeping track, according to a new federal report, which shows that nearly 50 million people — including almost one child in four — struggled last year to get enough to eat… Several independent advocates and policy experts on hunger said that they had been bracing for the latest report to show deepening shortages, but that they were nevertheless astonished by how much the problem has worsened. 'This is unthinkable. It’s like we are living in a Third World country,' said Vicki Escarra, president of Feeding America."

The United States Department of Agriculture released these findings in a study that was completed in December 2008, which means these numbers don’t take into account the millions more unemployed throughout 2009. The numbers of people living in poverty and struggling to eat has seen a significant increase since then.

This a national tragedy. But it gets much worse.

12) In 2008, according to the Census Bureau, the number of U.S. citizens without health care grew to a record 46.3 million. “The new figures, however, understate the severity of the economic downturn because a large portion of the nation’s job losses and unemployment rate increases occurred after the Census survey data was collected in March as part of the annual Current Population Survey."

13) Lack of health insurance has caused 45,000 preventable U.S. citizen deaths in the past year. The American Journal of Medicine recently released a study that stated, “Nearly two out of three bankruptcies stem from medical bills, and even people with health insurance face financial disaster if they experience a serious illness.”

A Johns Hopkins Children’s Center study reported that 17,000 children have died due to lack of health care. You can also add in a recent report that revealed that 2,266 U.S. veterans have died in 2008 due to lack of insurance.

The 50 million now uninsured and the 45,000 preventable deaths per year statistics are expected to drastically rise over the next few years. As the Senate continues to strip meaningful amendments from a health care bill that wouldn’t even take effect until 2013, it has become clear that, despite the media hype, the health care bill is going to fall far short of meaningful reform and continue to rig the game in favor of large insurance company profits at the expense of the U.S. population. With the highest cost healthcare in the world, current trends will continue and much needed change is not on the horizon.

Never before has the United States had so many citizens with so little means, little to no income and heavy debt. Debt and costs of living have now shackled U.S. citizens just as they have shackled people throughout the world. The economic hit men have now hit the United States as well and millions of American citizens are now effectively sentenced to a slow death.

Economic Imperial blowback has hit the mainland.

And the clock is ticking louder by the day…

And here’s two more facts for you:

14) The gun and ammunition manufacturing industry in the United States has over 200 companies producing billions of dollars in annual revenues. This huge manufacturing base cannot fulfill demand quickly enough. The demand for guns and ammunition has hit a record high and the gun industry cannot produce enough bullets to keep up with orders.

Americans are arming themselves to the teeth!

15) In the past year, 100 new armed militia groups have been formed, as militia members have doubled in numbers. Federal authorities are gravely concerned about the “uptick in militia activities." One federal authority recently said, “All it’s lacking is a spark. I think it’s only a matter of time before you see threats and violence."

So let’s break down these numbers.

You have a population of 50 million people who are in desperate need of money, they most likely have no health insurance and can’t afford to get health care or help of any kind. Part of this population probably also has loved ones who can’t get life sustaining medical treatments, or loved ones who have already died due to lack of costly medical treatment. The clock is ticking loud for these people and they are running out of options fast, and time delayed is time closer to death.

While the richest 1 percent have never had it so good, a significant percentage of the U.S. population now has firsthand experience in this. Millions upon millions of Americans are poor, broke, struggling, starving, desperate… and armed.

We are sitting on a powder keg!

We are now witnessing the critical unraveling of U.S. society.

You can read the rest of the report here.

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US Builds Up Its Bases In Oil-Rich South America

2009-11-24T19:00:00.001-05:00

From the Caribbean to Brazil, political opposition to US plans for 'full-spectrum operations' is escalating rapidly

By Hugh O'Shaughnessy
Sunday, 22 November 2009
Courtesy Of The Independent

The United States is massively building up its potential for nuclear and non-nuclear strikes in Latin America and the Caribbean by acquiring unprecedented freedom of action in seven new military, naval and air bases in Colombia. The development – and the reaction of Latin American leaders to it – is further exacerbating America's already fractured relationship with much of the continent.

The new US push is part of an effort to counter the loss of influence it has suffered recently at the hands of a new generation of Latin American leaders no longer willing to accept Washington's political and economic tutelage. President Rafael Correa, for instance, has refused to prolong the US armed presence in Ecuador, and US forces have to quit their base at the port of Manta by the end of next month.

So Washington turned to Colombia, which has not gone down well in the region. The country has received military aid worth $4.6bn (£2.8bn) from the US since 2000, despite its poor human rights record. Colombian forces regularly kill the country's indigenous people and other civilians, and last year raided the territory of its southern neighbour, Ecuador, causing at least 17 deaths.

President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who has not forgotten that US officers were present in government offices in Caracas in 2002 when he was briefly overthrown in a military putsch, warned this month that the bases agreement could mean the possibility of war with Colombia.

In August, President Evo Morales of Bolivia called for the outlawing of foreign military bases in the region. President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras, overthrown in a military coup d'état in June and initially exiled, has complained that US forces stationed at the Honduran base of Palmerola collaborated with Roberto Micheletti, the leader of the plotters and the man who claims to be president.

And, this being US foreign policy, a tell-tale trail of oil is evident. Brazil had already expressed its unhappiness at the presence of US naval vessels in its massive new offshore oilfields off Rio de Janeiro, destined soon to make Brazil a giant oil producer eligible for membership in Opec.

The fact that the US gets half its oil from Latin America was one of the reasons the US Fourth Fleet was re-established in the region's waters in 2008. The fleet's vessels can include Polaris nuclear-armed submarines – a deployment seen by some experts as a violation of the 1967 Tlatelolco Treaty, which bans nuclear weapons from the continent.

Indications of US willingness to envisage the stationing of nuclear weapons in Colombia are seen as an additional threat to the spirit of nuclear disarmament. After the establishment of the Tlatelolco Treaty in 1967, four more nuclear-weapon-free zones were set up in Africa, the South Pacific, South-east Asia and Central Asia. Between them, the five treaties cover nearly two-thirds of the countries of the world and almost all the southern hemisphere.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the world's leading think-tank about disarmament issues, has now expressed its worries about the US-Colombian arrangements.

With or without nuclear weapons, the bilateral agreement on the seven Colombian bases, signed on 30 October in Bogota, risks a costly new arms race in a region. SIPRI, which is funded by the Swedish government, said it was concerned about rising arms expenditure in Latin America draining resources from social programmes that the poor of the region need.

Much of the new US strategy was clearly set out in May in an enthusiastic US Air Force (USAF) proposal for its military construction programme for the fiscal year 2010. One Colombian air base, Palanquero, was, the proposal said, unique "in a critical sub-region of our hemisphere where security and stability is under constant threat from... anti-US governments".

The proposal sets out a scheme to develop Palanquero which, the USAF says, offers an opportunity for conducting "full-spectrum operations throughout South America.... It also supports mobility missions by providing access to the entire continent, except the Cape Horn region, if fuel is available, and over half the continent if un-refuelled". ("Full-spectrum operations" is the Pentagon's jargon for its long-established goal of securing crushing military superiority with atomic and conventional weapons across the globe and in space.)

Palanquero could also be useful in ferrying arms and personnel to Africa via the British mid-Atlantic island of Ascension, French Guiana and Aruba, the Dutch island off Venezuela. The US has access to them all.

The USAF proposal contradicted the assurances constantly issued by US diplomats that the bases would not be used against third countries. These were repeated by the Colombian military to the Colombian congress on 29 July. That USAF proposal was hastily reissued this month after the signature of the agreement – but without the reference to "anti-US governments". This has led to suggestions of either US government incompetence, or of a battle between a gung-ho USAF and a State Department conscious of the damage done to US relations with Latin America by its leaders' strong objections to the proposal.

The Colombian forces, for many years notorious for atrocities inflicted on civilians, have cheekily suggested that with US help they could get into the lucrative business of "instructing" other armies about human rights. Civil strife in Colombia meant some 380,000 Colombians were forced from their homes last year, bringing the number of displaced since 1985 to 4.6 million, one in ten of the population. This little-known statistic indicates a much worse situation than the much-publicised one in Islamist-ruled Sudan where 2.7 million have fled from their homes.

Amnesty International said: "The Colombian government must urgently bring human rights violators to justice, to break the links between the armed forces and illegal paramilitary groups, and dismantle paramilitary organisations in line with repeated UN recommendations."

Palanquero, which adjoins the town of Puerto Salgar on the broad Magdalena river north-west of the capital, Bogota, is one of the seven bases that the government of President Alvaro Uribe gave to Washington last month despite howls from many Colombians. Its hangars can take 100 aircraft and there is accommodation for 2,000 personnel. Its main runway was constructed in the 1980s after Colombia bought a force of Israeli Kfir warplanes. At 3,500 metres, it is 500 metres longer than the longest in Britain, the former US base outside Campbeltown, Scotland. The USAF is awaiting Barack Obama's signature on a bill, already passed by the US Congress, to devote $46m to works at the base.

Many Colombians are upset at the agreement between the US and Colombia that governs – or, perhaps more accurately, fails to govern – US use of Palanquero and the other six bases. The Colombian Council of State, a non-partisan constitutional body with the duty to comment on legislation, has said that the agreements are unfair to Colombia since they put the US and not the host country in the driving seat, and that they should be redrafted in accordance with the Colombian constitution.

The immunities being granted to US soldiers are, the council adds, against the 1961 Vienna Convention; the agreement can be changed by future regulations which can totally transform it; and the permission given to the US to install satellite receivers for radio and television without the usual licences and fees is "without any valid reason".

President Uribe, whose studies at St Antony's College, Oxford, were subsidised by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, has chosen to disregard the Council of State.

Out Of Iraq, Into The Gulf

2009-11-24T14:00:00.000-05:00

By Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt,
November 23, 2009
Courtesy Of Anti-War News

So here’s the mystery. You have a country that only recently had upward of 300 military bases, monster to micro, in a single war-torn land, Iraq. It probably now has something like 300 bases combined in Iraq and Afghanistan (where base-building is on the rise). Outside of those war zones, it has perhaps 800 more “facilities” (as they’re called) around the globe and thousands more at home. Some of them are absolutely enormous, the equivalent of small American towns

with all the amenities of home.

Without a doubt, this represents an accomplishment of some sort. Historically speaking, it’s news of the first order. No other great power, from the Han Chinese and the Romans to the British Empire, has ever built so many military outposts in such far-flung places.

So is this empire of bases a matter of pride at home? Hardly. It’s rarely thought about. It’s not a matter for general discussion or mainstream debate, nor is it news, except on the rarest of occasions (usually when the government threatens to shut down domestic bases and job losses loom). Changes in Pentagon global basing policy are for Washington policy wonks, not ordinary Americans, and certainly not American reporters. From the mainstream media, you get at best a kind of shrug on the subject. Yes, from time to time, you can find a decent piece on an American military base abroad, but normally they are places where American TV reporters can safely set up their cameras and discuss other matters entirely. News about U.S. military bases being built or upgraded in distant lands is usually left to Web sites like TomDispatch to keep track of.

When it comes to the Middle East, the building of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem or the West Bank, or of secret nuclear facilities in Iran are major news subjects, but the building up of U.S. base infrastructure in the region? Not so much. If, for the first time in its history, the U.S. Navy sets up a permanent strike force based in Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, Expeditionary Strike Group 5, remember to check the National, the English-language paper in the United Arab Emirates, for it, not your local rag or the Washington Post, New York Times, or Wall Street Journal. Mind you, we’re talking about the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf, the unsettled oil and natural gas heartland of the planet, yet not a peep.

A basic principle taught to any young reporter is: “follow the money.” A similar principle should apply to U.S. foreign policy reporting: follow the bases. As striking facts-on-the-ground, such bases tell us much about bedrock U.S. policy, whatever the policy debates in Washington. If the mainstream media ignores such bases, TomDispatch has long made it a policy of keeping an eye on them. Recently, Nick Turse, this site’s associate editor and the award-winning author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, reported on a story only modestly and partially covered here: the way the Pentagon has been pouring money into building up its base infrastructure in Afghanistan.

Now, he turns to the Persian Gulf region where the news is focused on a future U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. It turns out, however, that we’re withdrawing into something – that, in fact, there’s been a massive, if hardly noticed, Pentagon buildup in this region, too. You’d think it might be news. Now, at TomDispatch, thanks to Turse, it is. Tom

The Pentagon Garrisons the Gulf

As Washington talks Iraq withdrawal, the Pentagon builds up bases in the region

by Nick Turse

Despite recent large-scale insurgent suicide bombings that have killed scores of civilians and the fact that well over 100,000 U.S. troops are still deployed in that country, coverage of the U.S. war in Iraq has been largely replaced in the mainstream press by the (previously) “forgotten war” in Afghanistan. A major reason for this is the plan, developed at the end of the Bush years and confirmed by President Obama, to draw down U.S. troops in Iraq to 50,000 by August 2010 and withdraw most of the remaining forces by December 2011.

Getting out of Iraq, however, doesn’t mean getting out of the Middle East. For one thing, it’s likely that a sizable contingent of U.S. forces will remain garrisoned on several large and remotely situated U.S. bases in Iraq well past December 2011. Still others will be stationed close by – on bases throughout the region where, with little media attention since the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, construction to harden, expand, and upgrade U.S. and allied facilities has gone on to this day.

Appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee early this year, Gen. David Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), stated: “The Arabian Peninsula commands significant U.S. attention and focus because of its importance to our interests and the potential for insecurity.” He continued:

“[T]he countries of the Arabian Peninsula are key partners … CENTCOM ground, air, maritime, and special operations forces participate in numerous operations and training events, bilateral and multilateral, with our partners from the Peninsula. We help develop indigenous capabilities for counter terrorism; border, maritime, and critical infrastructure security; and deterring Iranian aggression. As a part of all this, our FMS [foreign military sales] and FMF [foreign military financing] programs are helping to improve the capabilities and interoperability of our partners’ forces. We are also working toward an integrated air and missile defense network for the Gulf. All of these cooperative efforts are facilitated by the critical base and port facilities that Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE [United Arab Emirates], and others provide for U.S. forces.”

In fact, since 2001 the Pentagon has been pouring significant sums of money into the “critical base and port facilities” mentioned by the general – both U.S. sites and those of its key regional partners. These are often ignored facts on the ground, which signal just how enduring the U.S. military presence in the region is likely to be, no matter what happens in Iraq. Press coverage of this long-term infrastructural buildup has been remarkably minimal, given the implications for future conflicts in the oil heartlands of the planet. After all, Washington is sending tremendous amounts of military materiel into autocratic Middle Eastern nations and building-up bases in countries whose governments, due to domestic public opinion, often prefer that no publicity be given to the growing American military “footprint.”

Given that the current conflict with al-Qaeda stemmed, in no small part, from the U.S. military presence in the region, the issue is obviously of importance. Nonetheless, coverage has been so poor that much about U.S. military efforts there remains unknown. A review of U.S. government documents, financial data, and other open-source material by TomDispatch, however, reveals that an American military building boom yet to be seriously scrutinized, analyzed, or assessed is underway in the Middle East.

Consider, then, what we can at present know now about this Pentagon buildup, country by country from Qatar to Jordan, and while you’re reading, think about what we don’t know – and why Washington has chosen this path.

Qatar: The Pentagon’s Persian Gulf Pentagon

In 1996, although it had no air force of its own, the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar built al- Udeid Air Base at a cost of more than $1 billion. The goal: attracting the U.S. military. In September 2001, U.S. aircraft began to operate out of the facility. By 2002, tanks, armored vehicles, dozens of warehouses, communications and computing equipment, and thousands of troops were based at and around al-Udeid. In 2005, the Qatari government spent almost $400 million to build a cutting-edge regional air operations center.

Today, Qatar is all but indispensable to the U.S. military. Just recently, for example, Central Command redeployed 750 personnel from its Tampa, Fla., headquarters to its new forward headquarters at al-Udeid to test its “staff’s ability to seamlessly transition command and control of operations in the event of a crisis in the CENTCOM area of responsibility or a natural disaster in Florida.”

Qatar has not, however, picked up the whole tab for the expanding U.S. military infrastructure in the country. The Pentagon has also been investing large amounts of money in upgrading facilities there for the last decade. From 2001-2009, the U.S. Army, for example, awarded $209 million in contracts for construction in the energy-rich emirate. In August, Rizzani de Eccher, an Italian engineering and construction giant, signed a $44 million deal with the Pentagon to replace an unspecified facility at al-Udeid. In September, the Department of Defense (DoD) awarded Florida-based IAP Worldwide Services a $6 million contract for “construction of a pre-engineered warehouse building … warehouse bay and related site work and utilities” at the base.

Later in the month, American International Contractors, a global construction firm that specializes in “U.S.-funded Middle East and African infrastructure projects,” inked a deal for nearly $10 million to build a Special Operations Forces Training Range, complete with “a two-story shooting house, an indoor range, breach and storage facilities[,] a test-fire bunker, and bunker road” in Qatar. Just days after that, the Pentagon awarded a $52 million contract to Cosmopolitan-EMTA JV to upgrade the capacity of al-Udeid’s airfield by building additional aircraft parking ramps and fuel storage facilities.

Bahrain’s Bases and Kuwait’s Subways

In nearby Bahrain – a tiny kingdom of 750,000 people – the U.S. stations up to 3,000 personnel, in addition to regular visits by the crews of Navy ships that spend time there. Between 2001-2009, the Navy awarded $203 million in construction contracts for military projects in the country. One big winner over that span has been the engineering and construction firm Contrack International. It received more than $50 million in U.S. government funds for such projects as building two “multi-story facilities for the U.S. Navy” complete with state-of-the-art communication interfaces and exterior landscaping.

In September 2009, the company was awarded a new $27 million deal “for the design/bid/build construction of the waterfront development program, US Naval Support Activity, Bahrain.” This facility will join the Navy’s undisputed crown jewel in Bahrain – a 188,000 square-foot mega-facility known as “the Freedom Souq” that houses a PX or Navy Exchange (NEX). The NEX, in turn, offers “an ice cream shop, bicycle shop, cell phone shop, tailor shop, barber and beauty shops, self-serve laundry, dry-cleaning service, rug Souq, nutrition shop, video rental, and a 24/7 mini-mart,” while selling everything from cosmetics and cameras to beer and wine.

Work is also going on in nearby Oman where, in the 1930s, the British Royal Air Force utilized an airfield on Masirah Island for its ventures in the Middle East. Today, the U.S. Air Force and members of other service branches do much the same, operating out of the island’s Camp Justice. From 2001-2009, the Army and Air Force each spent about $13 million on construction projects in the sultanate. Contractor Cosmopolitan-EMTA JV is now set to begin work there, too, after recently signing a $5 million contract with the Pentagon for an “Expeditionary Tent Beddown” (presumably an area meant to accommodate a potential future influx of forces). Meanwhile, in the neighboring United Arab Emirates, the U.S. Army alone spent $46 million between 2001-2009 on construction projects.

In 1991, the U.S. military helped to push Saddam Hussein’s army out of Kuwait. After that, however, the country’s leader, Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah, refused to return home “until crystal chandeliers and gold-plated bathroom fixtures could be reinstalled in Kuwait City’s Bayan Palace.” Today, about 30 miles south of the plush palace sits another pricey complex. Camp Arifjan grew exponentially as the Iraq War ramped up, gaining notoriety along the way as the epicenter of a massive graft and corruption scandal. Today, the base houses about 15,000 U.S. troops and features such fast-food favorites as Pizza Hut, Hardees, Subway, and Burger King.

Another facility in Kuwait that has become a major stopover point on the road to and from Baghdad is Camp Buehring. Located north of Kuwait City, near the town of Udairi, the installation is chock-a-block full of amenities, including three PXs; telephone centers; two Internet cafés; Morale, Welfare, and Recreation centers; a movie theater; chapel; gym; volleyball court; basketball court; concert stage; gift shop; barber shop; jewelry store; and a number of popular eateries, including Burger King, Subway, Baskin Robbins, and Starbucks.

Writing about the base recently, Captain Charles Barrett of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 3rd Heavy Brigade Combat Team remarked, “There’s a USO with computers and a café. You know the café is good because it has that little mark over the letter ‘e.’ Soldiers are gaming on Xbox, PlayStation, and Wii. There are phone banks and board games and a place where parents can read to their kids and have the DVD mailed home.”

The price tag for living the big-box-base lifestyle in Kuwait has, however, been steep. From 2003 to 2009, the U.S. Army spent in excess of $502 million on contracts for construction projects in the small, oil-rich nation, while the Air Force added almost $55 million and the Navy another $7 million. Total military spending there has been more massive still. Over the same span, according to U.S. government data, the Pentagon has spent nearly $20 billion in Kuwait, buying huge quantities of Kuwaiti oil and purchasing logistical support from various contractors for its facilities there (and elsewhere), among other expenditures.

In 2006, for example, the international construction firm Archirodon was awarded $10 million to upgrade airfield lighting at al-Salem and al-Jaber, two Kuwaiti air bases used by American forces. Recently, there has also been a major scaling up of work at Camp Arifjan. In September, for example, the Pentagon awarded CH2M Hill Contractors a nearly $26 million deal to build a new communications facility on the base. Just days later, defense contractor ITT received an almost $87 million contract for maintenance and support services there.

Saudi Base Building and Jordan’s U.S. Army Training Complex

According to a recent Congressional Research Service report, “From 1950 through 2006, Saudi Arabia purchased and received from the United States weapons, military equipment, and related services through foreign military sales (FMS) worth over $62.7 billion and foreign military construction services (FMCS) worth over $17.1 billion.” Between 1946 and 2007, the Saudis also benefited from almost $295 million in foreign assistance funding from the U.S. military.

From the lead-up to the First Gulf War in 1990 through the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military stationed thousands of troops in Saudi Arabia. The American presence in the kingdom – the location of some of the holiest sites in Islam – was a major factor in touching off al-Qaeda’s current war with the United States. In 2003, in response to fundamentalist pressure on the Saudi government, the U.S. military announced it was pulling all but a small number of trainers out of the country. Yet while many U.S. troops have left, Pentagon contracts haven’t – a significant portion of them for construction projects for the Saudi Arabian military, which the U.S. trains and advises from sites like Eskan Village, a compound 20 kilometers south of Riyadh, where 800 U.S. personnel (500 of them advisers) are based.

Between 2003-2009, the U.S. Army awarded $559 million in contracts for Saudi construction projects. In 2009, for example, it gave a $160 million deal to construction firm Saudi Oger Limited for the construction of facilities for a Saudi mechanized brigade based at al-Hasa, a $127 million contract to Saudi Lebanese Modern Construction Co. to erect structures for the Prince Turki Bin Abdul Aziz Battalion, and an $82 million agreement to top Saudi construction firm al-Latifia Trading and Contracting Company to build ammunition storage bunkers, possibly at the Saudi Arabian National Guard’s Khashm al-An Training Area.

Additionally, military weaponry has continued to flow into Saudi Arabia by way of the Pentagon and so, too, have contracts to provide support services for that materiel. For example, earlier this year, under a U.S. Air Force contract extension, Cubic Corporation was awarded a $9.5 million deal “to continue to operate and maintain the air combat training system used to support F-15 fighter pilot training for the Royal Saudi Air Force.”

Like the Saudis, Jordan’s leader, King Abdullah II, has long had a complex relationship with the U.S. shaped by domestic concerns over U.S. military action in the region and support for Israel. As with Saudi Arabia, none of that has stopped the U.S. military from forging ever closer ties with the kingdom.

Recently, after testing and evaluating various training systems at multiple U.S. Army bases, the Jordanian Armed Forces selected Cubic’s combat training center system and under the auspices of the U.S. Army, the company was “awarded an $18 million contract to supply mobile combat training center instrumentation and training services to the Kingdom of Jordan.”

The Pentagon has also invested in Jordanian military infrastructure. Between 2001-2009, the Army awarded $86 million in contracts for Jordanian construction projects. One major beneficiary was again Archirodon which, between 2006-2008, worked on the construction of the King Abdullah II Special Operations Training Center (KASOTC) – a state-of-the-art military and counter-terrorism training facility owned and operated by the Jordanian government but built, in part, under a $70 million U.S. Army contract. In 2009, Archirodon was awarded two additional contracts for $729,000 and $400,000, by the Air Force, for unspecified work in Jordan.

When that 1,235-acre $200 million Jordanian training center was unveiled earlier this year, King Abdullah II himself gave the inaugural address, speaking “of his vision for KASOTC as a world-class special forces training center.” Not surprisingly, Gen. Petraeus was also on hand to give a speech in which he lauded Jordan as “a key partner … [which] has placed itself at the forefront of police and military training for regional security forces.”

Garrisoning the Gulf

Even as it lurches toward a quasi-withdrawal from Iraq, the U.S. military has been hunkering down and hardening its presence elsewhere in the Middle East with little fanfare or press coverage. There has been almost no discussion in this country of a host of possible repercussions that might come from this, ranging from local opposition to the U.S. military’s presence to the arming of undemocratic and repressive regimes in the region. With the sole exception of Iran, the U.S. military has fully garrisoned the nations of the Persian Gulf with air bases, naval bases, desert posts, training centers, and a whole host of other facilities, while also building up the military capacity of nearby Jordan.

The CIA efforts to topple Iran’s government in the 1950s, Washington’s support for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1980s, the Pentagon’s troop presence in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s – all were considered canny geopolitical moves in their time; all had unforeseen and devastating consequences. The money the Pentagon has recently been pouring into the nations of the Persian Gulf to bulk up base infrastructure has only tied the U.S. ever more tightly to the region’s autocratic, often unpopular regimes, while further arming and militarizing an area traditionally considered unstable. The Pentagon’s Persian Gulf base buildup has already cost Americans billions in tax dollars. What the costs in “blowback” will be remains the unknown part of the equation.

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. Turse is currently a fellow at New York University’s Center for the United States and the Cold War. A paperback edition of his book The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books) was published earlier this year. His Web site is NickTurse.com.

Japanese Govt Reveals Secret US Nuke Pact

2009-11-24T10:00:00.004-05:00

Former Govt Repeatedly Denied 1960 Deal Existed

By Jason Ditz,
November 22, 2009
Courtesy Of Anti-War News

As the only nation to ever suffer an attack from nuclear weapons, Japan’s public is understandably phobic about having nuclear weapons, even in transit, on their soil. Yet Japan’s former government apparently didn’t see things that way.

Japan’s recently elected government says it has found documents that prove that the nation indeed signed a secret 1960 pact with the United States allowing it to transport nuclear weapons through Japanese territory.

The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which had a virtually unbroken hold on power for the last half a century, had repeatedly denied that the long-rumored pact existed, but just days after taking office the new Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) government launched a probe into it.

Since the announcement from the Foreign Ministry, a former vice foreign minister from the LDP has come out anonymously to confirm that he saw the minutes from the 1960 meetings related to the pact when he was in office.

The government says the probe is still ungoing, but the final report won’t be released until January. When that happens, it may further strain relations between the US and Japan’s new government, which has suggested it wouldn’t let a nuclear pact stand.