Go to Original
By Ian MacKinnon and Julian Borger
Bush urges leadership to accept US help as officials declare at least 22,000 dead.
The toll from the Burmese cyclone disaster continued to rise yesterday as the government announced that 22,000 were dead and 41,000 missing, while aid agencies warned many more could die if assistance could not be delivered quickly.
Relief workers who penetrated the worst-hit areas in the rice-growing belt of the Irrawaddy delta south-west of the main city, Rangoon, talked of hundreds of bodies strewn about the paddy fields. The Burmese government identified 15 townships in the Irrawaddy delta that had suffered worst. Seven of them had lost 90 to 95% of their homes with 70% of their population dead or missing. One community, Bogalay, was said to have been wiped out, with 10,000 people feared dead.
"We have a major humanitarian catastrophe on our hands," said Chris Kaye, Burma country director for the UN's World Food Programme.
"The numbers are harrowing. Certainly, we know that in areas in the southern delta, towns like Bogalay and Laputta were very, very badly affected by the storm surge. A surge in low-lying areas coupled with high winds served to flatten areas, taking villages and villagers with it. It's a tragic and serious situation."
Burma's normally secretive regime was forced to go public with the scale of the humanitarian crisis. The information minister, Kyaw Hsan, staged a rare news conference where he admitted the authorities were struggling to cope with a disaster starting to rival Asia's worst cyclone that hit Bangladesh in 1991, killing 143,000.
"The task is very wide and extensive and the government needs the cooperation of the people and wellwishers from at home and abroad," he said. "We will not hide anything."
But despite the Burmese authorities' pleas for help international aid agencies were still having difficulty yesterday securing visas for their workers. Food aid has been dispatched but is not clear whether import duties will have to be paid for it and whether the government will insist on controlling its distribution.
The US, which pledged $3m (£1.5m) to UN agencies to help with emergency food distribution, has navy ships in the area which Washington said could be used in the aid distribution effort, but the Burmese government, which accuses the US of fomenting revolt in Burma, is unlikely to allow them to enter its waters.
President George Bush appealed yesterday to the junta: "Let the US come and help you." However, the regime is unlikely to have been impressed by the occasion he used to make the announcement, signing legislation awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to Burmese democracy advocate Aung San Suu Kyi.
The EU announced it was giving $2m (£1.5m) to the aid effort, while China said it would give $1m.
The authoritarian regime, which has held power for 46 years, did however make one concession. It relented over plans to hold a controversial constitutional referendum on Saturday, which analysts said would cement the generals' hold on power. The government said it would be delayed until May 24 in the worst-hit areas of Rangoon and the Irrawaddy delta.
Given the unprecedented scale of the havoc wrought by the 13ft storm surge and catastrophic winds that battered the low-lying area that grows most of Burma's rice, the two-week delay appeared optimistic.
"We're talking of something on the scale of the tsunami," said Andrew Kirkwood, Burma country director for Save the Children. "Initially we thought we were looking at a response over a couple of months, but now it looks like a couple of years."
Teams from the agency have been in the outlying areas of Rangoon and Irrawaddy region assessing the true extent of the destruction to gauge the level of need. But with so many homes resembling piles of matchwood the task of providing for the survivors of a storm that affected more than a quarter of Burma's 53 million population is mind-boggling.
Infrastructure in the broad swath of low-lying coastal area has been devastated, with hulking iron and concrete bridges that straddle the countless waterways turned into heaps of twisted junk.
Boats that served as a lifeline for the delta's inhabitants sank in the storm, leaving aid agencies scrambling to get relief to those survivors among the 1 million homeless who have already spent four days braving the elements.
"It's going to be a massive logistical operation and very, very difficult," said Save the Children's Kirkwood. "The scale of the disaster is unprecedented in living memory in these areas."
With the onset of the rainy season the priority for the agencies with teams in the country already is providing shelter, in the form of plastic sheeting, and clean drinking water to prevent an outbreak of waterborne disease.
Tens of thousands of people have been sheltering in schools, temples and monasteries, making the provision of sanitation a pressing need.
Teams from aid agencies already operating in the country have started distributing food, cooking utensils, mosquito nets and even cash in some areas where people are still able to buy food, though prices have jumped between 50% and 100%.
"We hope to fly in more assistance within the next 48 hours," said Paul Risley, WFP spokesman in Bangkok. "The challenge will be getting to the affected areas with road blockages everywhere."
Even in Rangoon the situation remains bleak, though the roads were being slowly cleared of the debris of fallen trees and telegraph poles.
"Basically the services are all down," said Mark Canning, the British ambassador in Rangoon. "There's no electricity, no telephone, no water and very little food. Drinking water is in very short supply. But the crucial thing is the diesel needed to keep backup pumps going."
Thailand was among those trying to alleviate the tragedy, flying in another plane load of supplies yesterday, while India said it was loading two naval vessels to carry emergency aid to the Irrawaddy area. A host of others including Singapore, China, Japan the EU and US, have also pledged support.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Lawyers for Guantanamo Inmates Accuse US of Eavesdropping
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By William Glaberson
One lawyer for Guantánamo detainees said he replaced his office telephone in Washington because of sounds that convinced him it had been bugged. Another lawyer who represents detainees said he sometimes had other lawyers call his corporate clients to foil any government eavesdroppers.
In interviews and a court filing Tuesday, lawyers for detainees at Guantánamo said they believed government agents had monitored their conversations. The assertions are the most specific to date by Guantánamo lawyers that officials may be violating legal principles that have generally kept government agents from eavesdropping on lawyers.
"I think they are listening to my telephone calls all the time," said John A. Chandler, a prominent lawyer in Atlanta and Army veteran who represents six Guantánamo detainees.
Several of the lawyers, including partners at large corporate law firms, said the concerns had changed the way they went about their work apart from Guantánamo cases. A lawyer in Chicago, H. Candace Gorman, said in an affidavit that she was no longer accepting new clients of any type because she could not assure them of confidentiality.
The new filing, by the Center for Constitutional Rights, came in a 2007 lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act in which Guantánamo lawyers are seeking records to determine whether they have been targets of surveillance.
The Justice Department declined to comment Tuesday. But in a legal response in March, its lawyers said they could neither confirm nor deny that detainees' lawyers had been targets of such surveillance "because doing so would compromise the United States Intelligence Communities sources and methods."
Justice Department officials have said in the past that they had not used their terrorist surveillance powers to single out lawyers but that telephone "calls involving such persons would not be categorically excluded."
Since 2001, lawyers representing terrorism suspects not being held at Guantánamo have said they suspected government eavesdropping. Justice Department officials have said they intercepted such lawyers' conversations rarely and inadvertently.
But some detainees' lawyers say they believe there may be a comprehensive effort to monitor their communications at Guantánamo and elsewhere.
In the Tuesday filing in United States District Court in Manhattan, Thomas B. Wilner, a partner at Shearman & Sterling, said government officials insisting on anonymity had told him twice that he "should be careful in my electronic communications."
In addition to being a leading Guantánamo lawyer, Mr. Wilner is an international trade law specialist. "You need to be very careful in what you say on the telephone," he said in an interview.
Ms. Gorman's court filing said that during a visit to the Guantánamo naval base in Cuba, her military escort "referred in conversation to personal information about my family that I had not disclosed to him," leaving her to wonder how that information had been obtained.
Several of the lawyers said a program of surveillance would be consistent with obstacles they had encountered in representing detainees. In 2004, officials proposed "real-time monitoring" of lawyers' interviews with Guantánamo detainees.
A federal judge barred that, saying that listening to lawyers' meetings failed to recognize "the exceptional place in the legal system of the United States" for attorney-client communications.
Guantánamo officials say they monitor attorney-client meetings for the safety of lawyers with video cameras but that meeting areas are not wired for sound.
But several lawyers said their clients had told them that shortly after detainees met with lawyers, interrogators had asked the detainees about topics that had been discussed.
The Guantánamo spokeswoman, Cmdr. Pauline A. Storum, said interrogators were trained not to inquire about attorney-client meetings.
Shayana Kadidal, the lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights handling the freedom of information case, said there were many practical consequences of surveillance concerns. For example, he said, lawyers challenging the Bush administration's detention policies must travel worldwide for meetings with witnesses to avoid potential telephone or e-mail monitoring.
Jonathan Hafetz of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University represents two brothers from Qatar, Jarallah al-Marri, who is held at Guantánamo, and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who is held at the navy brig in Charleston, S.C., the only person on the American mainland known to be held as an enemy combatant.
After 16 months during which Ali al-Marri was held incommunicado, Mr. Hafetz was permitted to discuss the case with him. In 2006, Mr. Hafetz said, a guard commander told Mr. Marri that he had to speak in English during a conversation with his lawyer.
Mr. Hafetz wrote government officials asking whether the English-only requirement indicated that his conversations with his client were being monitored.
Mr. Hafetz said the commander of the brig later said there was no military surveillance. Mr. Hafetz said he never received a response about whether other agencies had listened to their conversations.
By William Glaberson
One lawyer for Guantánamo detainees said he replaced his office telephone in Washington because of sounds that convinced him it had been bugged. Another lawyer who represents detainees said he sometimes had other lawyers call his corporate clients to foil any government eavesdroppers.
In interviews and a court filing Tuesday, lawyers for detainees at Guantánamo said they believed government agents had monitored their conversations. The assertions are the most specific to date by Guantánamo lawyers that officials may be violating legal principles that have generally kept government agents from eavesdropping on lawyers.
"I think they are listening to my telephone calls all the time," said John A. Chandler, a prominent lawyer in Atlanta and Army veteran who represents six Guantánamo detainees.
Several of the lawyers, including partners at large corporate law firms, said the concerns had changed the way they went about their work apart from Guantánamo cases. A lawyer in Chicago, H. Candace Gorman, said in an affidavit that she was no longer accepting new clients of any type because she could not assure them of confidentiality.
The new filing, by the Center for Constitutional Rights, came in a 2007 lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act in which Guantánamo lawyers are seeking records to determine whether they have been targets of surveillance.
The Justice Department declined to comment Tuesday. But in a legal response in March, its lawyers said they could neither confirm nor deny that detainees' lawyers had been targets of such surveillance "because doing so would compromise the United States Intelligence Communities sources and methods."
Justice Department officials have said in the past that they had not used their terrorist surveillance powers to single out lawyers but that telephone "calls involving such persons would not be categorically excluded."
Since 2001, lawyers representing terrorism suspects not being held at Guantánamo have said they suspected government eavesdropping. Justice Department officials have said they intercepted such lawyers' conversations rarely and inadvertently.
But some detainees' lawyers say they believe there may be a comprehensive effort to monitor their communications at Guantánamo and elsewhere.
In the Tuesday filing in United States District Court in Manhattan, Thomas B. Wilner, a partner at Shearman & Sterling, said government officials insisting on anonymity had told him twice that he "should be careful in my electronic communications."
In addition to being a leading Guantánamo lawyer, Mr. Wilner is an international trade law specialist. "You need to be very careful in what you say on the telephone," he said in an interview.
Ms. Gorman's court filing said that during a visit to the Guantánamo naval base in Cuba, her military escort "referred in conversation to personal information about my family that I had not disclosed to him," leaving her to wonder how that information had been obtained.
Several of the lawyers said a program of surveillance would be consistent with obstacles they had encountered in representing detainees. In 2004, officials proposed "real-time monitoring" of lawyers' interviews with Guantánamo detainees.
A federal judge barred that, saying that listening to lawyers' meetings failed to recognize "the exceptional place in the legal system of the United States" for attorney-client communications.
Guantánamo officials say they monitor attorney-client meetings for the safety of lawyers with video cameras but that meeting areas are not wired for sound.
But several lawyers said their clients had told them that shortly after detainees met with lawyers, interrogators had asked the detainees about topics that had been discussed.
The Guantánamo spokeswoman, Cmdr. Pauline A. Storum, said interrogators were trained not to inquire about attorney-client meetings.
Shayana Kadidal, the lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights handling the freedom of information case, said there were many practical consequences of surveillance concerns. For example, he said, lawyers challenging the Bush administration's detention policies must travel worldwide for meetings with witnesses to avoid potential telephone or e-mail monitoring.
Jonathan Hafetz of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University represents two brothers from Qatar, Jarallah al-Marri, who is held at Guantánamo, and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who is held at the navy brig in Charleston, S.C., the only person on the American mainland known to be held as an enemy combatant.
After 16 months during which Ali al-Marri was held incommunicado, Mr. Hafetz was permitted to discuss the case with him. In 2006, Mr. Hafetz said, a guard commander told Mr. Marri that he had to speak in English during a conversation with his lawyer.
Mr. Hafetz wrote government officials asking whether the English-only requirement indicated that his conversations with his client were being monitored.
Mr. Hafetz said the commander of the brig later said there was no military surveillance. Mr. Hafetz said he never received a response about whether other agencies had listened to their conversations.
The Night the Old Politics Died
Go to Original
By Brent Budowsky
By Brent Budowsky
Editor’s Note: Often it’s hard to assess genuine turning points. Sometimes what looks important one day fades into irrelevance a week later; other times, history-changing events occur and are missed in the rush of daily events.
In this guest essay, former congressional staffer Brent Budowsky – a backer of Barack Obama – argues that the May 6 results marked a crushing defeat for a long-running era of political negativity and manipulation:
The old politics died on May 6, 2008 as the predictable and inevitable happened and the voters said no to business as usual.
The voters said no to the most phony and fraudulent proposal in memory for a gas tax cut that would never happen, that would profit the oil companies that Senator Clinton falsely said she was fighting with it, that would do nothing for the people she falsely claimed she was helping with it.
The most reprehensible and shameful aspect of this gas tax fraud was that it was the cheap exploitation of people who are hurting, and fearful. There is nothing lower in politics than exploiting people who are hurting, trying to deceive them. The voters said no.
The voters said no to the politics embodied by the shameful ABC debate of Gibson and Stephanopoulos that was nothing more than an oppo research festival.
Voters said no to the Tim Russert “Meet the Press” that insulted them last Sunday, that wasted time with more than a dozen questions about Jeremiah Wright rather than a serious discussion of national issues. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “US Media Trivializes Campaign 2008.”]
The voters said no to the insider pundits who pontificated about what a brilliant and clever tactic the gas tax fraud was, about how Hillary is on a huge roll and Barack looked broken and on his heels only hours before he won a crushing and devastating victory.
Soon, as I predicted some time ago, Hillary will withdraw and the superdelegates surge will reach a juggernaut pace that has already begun.
Soon, there will be new talk about 2 million Obama donors that will rise to 3 million. There will be talk of a historic voter registration program that has already been approved and will exponentially strengthen democracy and build even more voter turnout, voter excitement and voter enthusiasm.
Soon, there will be talk about a Democratic landslide throughout the Congress as Democrats come together and coordination begins between the presidential and the congressional Democrats.
Soon, there will be talk about the outpouring of enthusiasm around the world from good people everywhere ready to begin a new day of American world leadership based on the great role we have played in the past.
It was the night they drove old Dixie down, the night the old politics ended, the night a great new era in American politics truly began.
The battle now begins in earnest. On Tuesday, May 6, 2008 the Rubicon was crossed.
Oil steady above $122 a barrel after record
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Oil prices steadied Wednesday after hitting a record near $123 a barrel in the previous day's session on worries over supply disruptions.
Prices were supported by concerns about supply disruptions in Nigeria, where production at a Royal Dutch Shell PLC facility was cut after a weekend attack. The main militant group in Nigeria's oil-rich southern region said Tuesday it is willing to cease hostilities if the federal government allows conflict mediation by a former U.S. president.
A string of pipeline bombings in recent weeks has cut oil production in Nigeria by tens of thousands of barrels per day, contributing to the sharp rise in oil prices. The country is Africa's largest producer and a major U.S. supplier.
Light, sweet crude for June delivery rose 5 cents to $121.89 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange by noon in Europe. The contract on Tuesday soared to a record $122.73 a barrel before retreating to settle at $121.84, up $1.87.
"Clearly there's a lot of concerns about supply at the moment. The market's very jittery on any type of news, particularly supply disruptions," said Mark Pervan, senior commodity strategist at ANZ Bank in Melbourne.
"There are many in the market who think these prices are as good as it gets and are positioned to see lower prices but we continue to see one-off supply issues keeping prices high," Pervan said.
The rise in crude futures also gained momentum Tuesday as investors bought on a Goldman Sachs prediction that oil prices could rise to $150 to $200 within two years.
Still, expectations that U.S. crude supplies increased last week were helping to limit oil's rise ahead of the release of the U.S. Energy Information Administration's report on fuel inventories later Wednesday.
Analysts surveyed by energy research firm Platts expected the report to show that crude oil inventories rose by 1.5 million barrels last week.
Gasoline stocks were projected to drop by 500,000 barrels, according to the Platts survey. Inventories of distillates, which include heating oil and diesel, were expected to have risen by 1.3 million barrels.
In its newsletter, Vienna's JBC Energy noted that the latest EIA forecasts on demand — an estimated 170,000 barrels a day lower in the second quarter of this year over the same period last year — also worked to keep a lid on prices and offered its own, lower forecast decline; 230,000 barrels a day.
In other Nymex trading, heating oil and gasoline futures were both up slightly at $3.3568 and $3.1024 a gallon. Natural gas futures were flat at $11.146 per 1,000 cubic feet.
In London, Brent crude futures rose 4 cents to $120.35 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange.
Oil prices steadied Wednesday after hitting a record near $123 a barrel in the previous day's session on worries over supply disruptions.
Prices were supported by concerns about supply disruptions in Nigeria, where production at a Royal Dutch Shell PLC facility was cut after a weekend attack. The main militant group in Nigeria's oil-rich southern region said Tuesday it is willing to cease hostilities if the federal government allows conflict mediation by a former U.S. president.
A string of pipeline bombings in recent weeks has cut oil production in Nigeria by tens of thousands of barrels per day, contributing to the sharp rise in oil prices. The country is Africa's largest producer and a major U.S. supplier.
Light, sweet crude for June delivery rose 5 cents to $121.89 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange by noon in Europe. The contract on Tuesday soared to a record $122.73 a barrel before retreating to settle at $121.84, up $1.87.
"Clearly there's a lot of concerns about supply at the moment. The market's very jittery on any type of news, particularly supply disruptions," said Mark Pervan, senior commodity strategist at ANZ Bank in Melbourne.
"There are many in the market who think these prices are as good as it gets and are positioned to see lower prices but we continue to see one-off supply issues keeping prices high," Pervan said.
The rise in crude futures also gained momentum Tuesday as investors bought on a Goldman Sachs prediction that oil prices could rise to $150 to $200 within two years.
Still, expectations that U.S. crude supplies increased last week were helping to limit oil's rise ahead of the release of the U.S. Energy Information Administration's report on fuel inventories later Wednesday.
Analysts surveyed by energy research firm Platts expected the report to show that crude oil inventories rose by 1.5 million barrels last week.
Gasoline stocks were projected to drop by 500,000 barrels, according to the Platts survey. Inventories of distillates, which include heating oil and diesel, were expected to have risen by 1.3 million barrels.
In its newsletter, Vienna's JBC Energy noted that the latest EIA forecasts on demand — an estimated 170,000 barrels a day lower in the second quarter of this year over the same period last year — also worked to keep a lid on prices and offered its own, lower forecast decline; 230,000 barrels a day.
In other Nymex trading, heating oil and gasoline futures were both up slightly at $3.3568 and $3.1024 a gallon. Natural gas futures were flat at $11.146 per 1,000 cubic feet.
In London, Brent crude futures rose 4 cents to $120.35 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange.
Bush administration moves to exploit Burma cyclone disaster
Go to Original
By Joe Kay
The Bush administration lost no time in seeking to exploit the devastating tragedy in Burma (Myanmar). It has seized upon the cyclone that struck the country over the weekend, killed at least 20,000 and likely many more, to aggressively push its foreign policy agenda in Asia.
On Tuesday, Bush held a special ceremony at the White House to sign a bill giving Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi a Congressional Gold Medal. He used the occasion to place deliberately provocative conditions on any disbursement of aid to the ravaged country, beyond an initial token sum.
“The United States has made an initial aid contribution, but we want to do a lot more,” Bush declared. “We’re prepared to move US Navy assets to help find those who’ve lost their lives, to help find the missing, to help stabilize the situation. But in order to do so, the military junta must allow our disaster assessment teams into the country.”
So far, the US embassy has authorized the release of a paltry $250,000—less than half the cost of a single Tomahawk cruse missile of the type used by the US Navy to kill a Somali rebel last week. Later Tuesday, the administration pledged an additional $3 million to be allocated by a USAID disaster response team.
The very fact that the US is making aid to Burma conditional upon the satisfaction of certain demands is itself an outrage. Bush did not say why it was necessary for the US to carry out its own assessment in order to release more aid, nor did he elaborate on what was meant by promises that the US military would help “stabilize the situation.” US Navy ships are standing by off the coast of Thailand to intervene.
These pledges are certainly not intended as selfless humanitarian gestures. The Bush administration has been seeking to undermine the Burmese military regime for years and seized on protests last year by Buddhist monks to slap economic sanctions on the country and its rulers. There is no doubt that the United States would be happy to exploit the current tragedy to get a military foothold in the country.
The World Socialist Web Site holds no brief for the Burmese military junta, a brutal regime that has exercised dictatorial control over a largely impoverished country. However, US and European machinations, including the promotion of Suu Kyi, have nothing to do with concern for the democratic rights or economic well-being of the population. As always, the humanitarian pretensions of the US government are carefully calibrated to coincide with the interests of the American ruling class.
In the case of Burma, the US is interested in countering the influence of China, which has closer ties with the military regime and sees the country as a critical point of access into the Indian Ocean. As far as the Bush administration is concerned, the population of the country is only a bargaining chip in the pursuit of geo-strategic objectives.
US energy giants, including the Chevron oil corporation, also have interests in Burma. While the Bush administration has placed economic sanctions on the country, these have not affected Chevron’s multibillion-dollar investments through its subsidiary Unocal. Human rights groups have accused Chevron of complicity in abuses in Burma intended to protect its pipeline routes.
The statements by the Bush administration must also be seen in the context of its treatment of populations around the world, including in the United States itself. On Monday, US First Lady Laura Bush was the first from the White House to respond to the cyclone, using the opportunity to chastise the government for failing to warn the population and adequately prepare for the consequences.
“Although they were aware of the threat,” she said, “Burma’s state-run media failed to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm’s path. The response to the cyclone is just the most recent example of the junta’s failure to meet its people’s basic needs.”
The hypocrisy and cynicism of this statement are so glaring that one wonders if it is not intentionally provocative. This August 29 will mark the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the massive storm that struck Louisiana and Mississippi, killing at least 1,800 people. The hurricane destroyed and flooded New Orleans, a major American city.
The US and local governments had been aware for decades of the potential for a deadly flood in New Orleans, but there was no evacuation plan in place, and no plan to meet the needs of those trapped or displaced. Tens of thousands remained trapped for days in the Louisiana Superdome. Many thousands who lost their homes were placed in temporary FEMA trailers, and in 2007 it was revealed that these trailers contained extremely high levels of formaldehyde, a toxic chemical.
The devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina was largely preventable, but due to gross governmental indifference and negligence, the levee systems of New Orleans were denied necessary investments and allowed to decay—only one of many examples of the American government’s “failure to meet its people’s basic needs.”
By Joe Kay
The Bush administration lost no time in seeking to exploit the devastating tragedy in Burma (Myanmar). It has seized upon the cyclone that struck the country over the weekend, killed at least 20,000 and likely many more, to aggressively push its foreign policy agenda in Asia.
On Tuesday, Bush held a special ceremony at the White House to sign a bill giving Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi a Congressional Gold Medal. He used the occasion to place deliberately provocative conditions on any disbursement of aid to the ravaged country, beyond an initial token sum.
“The United States has made an initial aid contribution, but we want to do a lot more,” Bush declared. “We’re prepared to move US Navy assets to help find those who’ve lost their lives, to help find the missing, to help stabilize the situation. But in order to do so, the military junta must allow our disaster assessment teams into the country.”
So far, the US embassy has authorized the release of a paltry $250,000—less than half the cost of a single Tomahawk cruse missile of the type used by the US Navy to kill a Somali rebel last week. Later Tuesday, the administration pledged an additional $3 million to be allocated by a USAID disaster response team.
The very fact that the US is making aid to Burma conditional upon the satisfaction of certain demands is itself an outrage. Bush did not say why it was necessary for the US to carry out its own assessment in order to release more aid, nor did he elaborate on what was meant by promises that the US military would help “stabilize the situation.” US Navy ships are standing by off the coast of Thailand to intervene.
These pledges are certainly not intended as selfless humanitarian gestures. The Bush administration has been seeking to undermine the Burmese military regime for years and seized on protests last year by Buddhist monks to slap economic sanctions on the country and its rulers. There is no doubt that the United States would be happy to exploit the current tragedy to get a military foothold in the country.
The World Socialist Web Site holds no brief for the Burmese military junta, a brutal regime that has exercised dictatorial control over a largely impoverished country. However, US and European machinations, including the promotion of Suu Kyi, have nothing to do with concern for the democratic rights or economic well-being of the population. As always, the humanitarian pretensions of the US government are carefully calibrated to coincide with the interests of the American ruling class.
In the case of Burma, the US is interested in countering the influence of China, which has closer ties with the military regime and sees the country as a critical point of access into the Indian Ocean. As far as the Bush administration is concerned, the population of the country is only a bargaining chip in the pursuit of geo-strategic objectives.
US energy giants, including the Chevron oil corporation, also have interests in Burma. While the Bush administration has placed economic sanctions on the country, these have not affected Chevron’s multibillion-dollar investments through its subsidiary Unocal. Human rights groups have accused Chevron of complicity in abuses in Burma intended to protect its pipeline routes.
The statements by the Bush administration must also be seen in the context of its treatment of populations around the world, including in the United States itself. On Monday, US First Lady Laura Bush was the first from the White House to respond to the cyclone, using the opportunity to chastise the government for failing to warn the population and adequately prepare for the consequences.
“Although they were aware of the threat,” she said, “Burma’s state-run media failed to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm’s path. The response to the cyclone is just the most recent example of the junta’s failure to meet its people’s basic needs.”
The hypocrisy and cynicism of this statement are so glaring that one wonders if it is not intentionally provocative. This August 29 will mark the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the massive storm that struck Louisiana and Mississippi, killing at least 1,800 people. The hurricane destroyed and flooded New Orleans, a major American city.
The US and local governments had been aware for decades of the potential for a deadly flood in New Orleans, but there was no evacuation plan in place, and no plan to meet the needs of those trapped or displaced. Tens of thousands remained trapped for days in the Louisiana Superdome. Many thousands who lost their homes were placed in temporary FEMA trailers, and in 2007 it was revealed that these trailers contained extremely high levels of formaldehyde, a toxic chemical.
The devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina was largely preventable, but due to gross governmental indifference and negligence, the levee systems of New Orleans were denied necessary investments and allowed to decay—only one of many examples of the American government’s “failure to meet its people’s basic needs.”
US Navy resurrects Fourth Fleet to police Latin America
Go to Orogonal
By Humberto Santana
Washington announced at the end of last month that it is resurrecting the long-ago moth-balled Fourth Fleet to reassert US power in the Caribbean and Latin America. Created at the time of World War II to combat German submarines attacking merchant shipping convoys in the South Atlantic, the Fourth Fleet was seen as no longer necessary after the Second World War and was disbanded in 1950.
The Pentagon’s a statement on the revival of the fleet gave a far vaguer indication of its new duties, saying it would “conduct varying missions including a range of contingency operations, counter narco-terrorism, and theater security cooperation activities.”
“Rear Admiral James Stevenson, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command, said the re-establishment of the Fourth Fleet will send a message to the entire region, not just Venezuela,” AHN news reported.
The “message” began to be transmitted just weeks after Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia came into sharp conflict over a border provocation caused by the Colombian military’s bombardment of an encampment of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrillas inside Ecuadorian territory.
The Fourth Fleet will begin operations on the first day of July out of the Mayport US Naval Station, a nuclear facility in the state of Florida. The fleet, which will operate as part of the Pentagon’s Southern Command, will be comprised of various ships, including aircraft carriers and submarines, and will operate from the Caribbean to the southern tip of South America.
While the new naval unit does not yet possess large numbers of arms and personnel, it will be equipped and granted similar importance as the Fifth Fleet, now deployed in the Persian Gulf, and the Sixth, operating in the Mediterranean.
The thrust of this decision is to give the US Navy a far broader role than it currently plays in Latin America. While Washington can point to no imminent military threat in the region, the reactivation of the Fourth Fleet has a powerful symbolic significance, indicating a return to gunboat diplomacy.
It is a demonstration of US intentions to maintain absolute military dominance over the region, and in particular over those countries with large reserves of petroleum and natural gas, including those that are governed by supposed enemies of Washington, like the governments of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia.
The central objective of the Fourth Fleet will be to further the military and political “security and stability” of the region, according to the commander of naval forces for US Southern Command, Vice Admiral James Stevenson. The fleet will “certainly bring a lot more stature to the area and increase our ability to get things done,” Stevenson told reporters.
“This change increases our emphasis in the region on employing naval forces to build confidence and trust among nations through collective maritime security efforts that focus on common threats and mutual interests,” said Admiral Gary Roughead, chief of naval operations.
According to the official statement issued by the Pentagon, the reactivation of the Fourth Fleet “demonstrates US commitment to regional partners,” among which Colombia stands out, given the billions of dollars of US aid granted its right-wing government to conduct the so-called “war on drugs” as well as its counterinsurgency campaign against the FARC, an organization that the US classifies as “terrorist,” on the same level as Al-Qaeda.
Significantly, the officer tapped to head the new fleet is Rear Admiral Joseph Kernan, the current commander of the Naval Special Warfare Command, which includes counterinsurgency units like the Navy SEALS, which are utilized in the so-called war on terror.
The Navy distributed a press release in which it enumerated more specific and immediate objectives for the resurrected fleet, including “acting together with the navies of allied nations on bilateral and multilateral training operations and operations against narco-trafficking originating in the region.”
According to the Pentagon, in recent years the Colombian drug cartels have gone so far as to utilize secretly built submarines to get their product to foreign markets.
But it is not merely the drug cartels that are in the Pentagon’s sights. The Venezuelan navy is also a potential target. In June of last year, President Chavez signed an agreement with Moscow to acquire nine Russian submarines at a price which is estimated at between one and two billion dollars. According to the Pentagon, the reactivation of the Fourth Fleet is also justified by this change in the correlation of forces in the region.
To lend this expansion of military power in the region a veneer of legitimacy in international circles, the Pentagon needs to promote the pretext that the Colombian FARC or the crisis-ridden government of Hugo Chavez represent a similar danger to the world and “democracy” as that which Washington has attributed to Al Qaeda and other Islamist groups in the Middle East.
As far as democracy goes, a far greater danger is posed by Washington’s closest ally, the government of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, who is personally implicated in the operations of drug traffickers and right-wing paramilitary death squads which, with CIA and US military training, have specialized in the killing of trade unionists, peasants and university students.
The drive by the Pentagon to expand its military control over Latin America is not new. For a number of years, it has sought to establish new military bases in the region. The presence of drug trafficking - which has continued unabated despite the decades-old “war on drugs” - and Hugo Chávez and his “arms race” represent only most convenient pretexts for promoting this expansion.
The US appears likely to lose its only permanent military base in South America - located in Ecuador’s port city of Manta - when the Pentagon’s lease on the air force facility expires in November of next year. Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa has vowed not to renew it, while the country’s constituent assembly is drafting a new constitution that is to include a prohibition against any foreign bases on Ecuadorian soil.
In the meantime, the American military is searching for other possible bases, including in Paraguay. “We’re always looking for opportunities for what I call lily pads — places we can go in for a week or two and then get out,” Lt. Gen. Norman Seip, commander of US Air Forces Southern Command told the US military newspaper Stars and Stripe. “It increases our presence, and makes us more unpredictable in operations.”
Reestablishing the Fourth Fleet, with its aircraft carriers as well as US Marine and Navy Seal contingents, provides a floating base for US interventions throughout the continent.
Behind the resurrection of the Fourth Fleet lie the same fundamental tendencies underlying the explosion of American militarism on a world scale. It is the attempt by US imperialism to offset its relative decline as an economic power by reliance on its continuing military supremacy. Europe and increasingly China are playing a growing role in Latin American trade and investment at the expense of US interests.
Trade between Latin America and China topped $100 billion last year, a 46 percent increase over 2006. Meanwhile, the European Union, which is second only to the US in terms of Latin American trade and foreign investment, is increasingly outstripping Washington in the negotiation of free trade agreements on the continent. Today, the US accounts for less than 20 percent of the exports from Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Peru.
The one area where US imperialism can still demonstrate unquestioned superiority against its economic rivals is in the deployment of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines, which is just what it is now preparing to do off the coasts of Latin America.
By Humberto Santana
Washington announced at the end of last month that it is resurrecting the long-ago moth-balled Fourth Fleet to reassert US power in the Caribbean and Latin America. Created at the time of World War II to combat German submarines attacking merchant shipping convoys in the South Atlantic, the Fourth Fleet was seen as no longer necessary after the Second World War and was disbanded in 1950.
The Pentagon’s a statement on the revival of the fleet gave a far vaguer indication of its new duties, saying it would “conduct varying missions including a range of contingency operations, counter narco-terrorism, and theater security cooperation activities.”
“Rear Admiral James Stevenson, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command, said the re-establishment of the Fourth Fleet will send a message to the entire region, not just Venezuela,” AHN news reported.
The “message” began to be transmitted just weeks after Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia came into sharp conflict over a border provocation caused by the Colombian military’s bombardment of an encampment of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrillas inside Ecuadorian territory.
The Fourth Fleet will begin operations on the first day of July out of the Mayport US Naval Station, a nuclear facility in the state of Florida. The fleet, which will operate as part of the Pentagon’s Southern Command, will be comprised of various ships, including aircraft carriers and submarines, and will operate from the Caribbean to the southern tip of South America.
While the new naval unit does not yet possess large numbers of arms and personnel, it will be equipped and granted similar importance as the Fifth Fleet, now deployed in the Persian Gulf, and the Sixth, operating in the Mediterranean.
The thrust of this decision is to give the US Navy a far broader role than it currently plays in Latin America. While Washington can point to no imminent military threat in the region, the reactivation of the Fourth Fleet has a powerful symbolic significance, indicating a return to gunboat diplomacy.
It is a demonstration of US intentions to maintain absolute military dominance over the region, and in particular over those countries with large reserves of petroleum and natural gas, including those that are governed by supposed enemies of Washington, like the governments of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia.
The central objective of the Fourth Fleet will be to further the military and political “security and stability” of the region, according to the commander of naval forces for US Southern Command, Vice Admiral James Stevenson. The fleet will “certainly bring a lot more stature to the area and increase our ability to get things done,” Stevenson told reporters.
“This change increases our emphasis in the region on employing naval forces to build confidence and trust among nations through collective maritime security efforts that focus on common threats and mutual interests,” said Admiral Gary Roughead, chief of naval operations.
According to the official statement issued by the Pentagon, the reactivation of the Fourth Fleet “demonstrates US commitment to regional partners,” among which Colombia stands out, given the billions of dollars of US aid granted its right-wing government to conduct the so-called “war on drugs” as well as its counterinsurgency campaign against the FARC, an organization that the US classifies as “terrorist,” on the same level as Al-Qaeda.
Significantly, the officer tapped to head the new fleet is Rear Admiral Joseph Kernan, the current commander of the Naval Special Warfare Command, which includes counterinsurgency units like the Navy SEALS, which are utilized in the so-called war on terror.
The Navy distributed a press release in which it enumerated more specific and immediate objectives for the resurrected fleet, including “acting together with the navies of allied nations on bilateral and multilateral training operations and operations against narco-trafficking originating in the region.”
According to the Pentagon, in recent years the Colombian drug cartels have gone so far as to utilize secretly built submarines to get their product to foreign markets.
But it is not merely the drug cartels that are in the Pentagon’s sights. The Venezuelan navy is also a potential target. In June of last year, President Chavez signed an agreement with Moscow to acquire nine Russian submarines at a price which is estimated at between one and two billion dollars. According to the Pentagon, the reactivation of the Fourth Fleet is also justified by this change in the correlation of forces in the region.
To lend this expansion of military power in the region a veneer of legitimacy in international circles, the Pentagon needs to promote the pretext that the Colombian FARC or the crisis-ridden government of Hugo Chavez represent a similar danger to the world and “democracy” as that which Washington has attributed to Al Qaeda and other Islamist groups in the Middle East.
As far as democracy goes, a far greater danger is posed by Washington’s closest ally, the government of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, who is personally implicated in the operations of drug traffickers and right-wing paramilitary death squads which, with CIA and US military training, have specialized in the killing of trade unionists, peasants and university students.
The drive by the Pentagon to expand its military control over Latin America is not new. For a number of years, it has sought to establish new military bases in the region. The presence of drug trafficking - which has continued unabated despite the decades-old “war on drugs” - and Hugo Chávez and his “arms race” represent only most convenient pretexts for promoting this expansion.
The US appears likely to lose its only permanent military base in South America - located in Ecuador’s port city of Manta - when the Pentagon’s lease on the air force facility expires in November of next year. Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa has vowed not to renew it, while the country’s constituent assembly is drafting a new constitution that is to include a prohibition against any foreign bases on Ecuadorian soil.
In the meantime, the American military is searching for other possible bases, including in Paraguay. “We’re always looking for opportunities for what I call lily pads — places we can go in for a week or two and then get out,” Lt. Gen. Norman Seip, commander of US Air Forces Southern Command told the US military newspaper Stars and Stripe. “It increases our presence, and makes us more unpredictable in operations.”
Reestablishing the Fourth Fleet, with its aircraft carriers as well as US Marine and Navy Seal contingents, provides a floating base for US interventions throughout the continent.
Behind the resurrection of the Fourth Fleet lie the same fundamental tendencies underlying the explosion of American militarism on a world scale. It is the attempt by US imperialism to offset its relative decline as an economic power by reliance on its continuing military supremacy. Europe and increasingly China are playing a growing role in Latin American trade and investment at the expense of US interests.
Trade between Latin America and China topped $100 billion last year, a 46 percent increase over 2006. Meanwhile, the European Union, which is second only to the US in terms of Latin American trade and foreign investment, is increasingly outstripping Washington in the negotiation of free trade agreements on the continent. Today, the US accounts for less than 20 percent of the exports from Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Peru.
The one area where US imperialism can still demonstrate unquestioned superiority against its economic rivals is in the deployment of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines, which is just what it is now preparing to do off the coasts of Latin America.
The Air Force Above All
Go to Original
By William J. Astore
Dominating the Air, Space, and Cyberspace
By William J. Astore
Dominating the Air, Space, and Cyberspace
When I first joined the Air Force, its mission statement was straightforward: to fly and fight. The recruiting slogan was upbeat: the Air Force was "a great way of life," and the ROTC program I enrolled in was the "gateway to a great way of life."
Mission statements and slogans are easy to poke fun at and shouldn’t, perhaps, be taken too seriously. That said, the people who develop them do take them seriously, which is why they can’t be ignored.
Consider the Air Force’s new slogan: "Air Force -- Above All."
Okay, I admit it’s catchy, even cute, if, that is, you can get past the "high ground" conceit and ignore the Germanic über alles overtones. Its literal meaning is obvious enough and it does fit with the Air Force’s most basic precept, that mastery of the air means mastery of the ground. Yet today’s Air Force seeks more than that. It wants to extend its "mastery" to space ("the new high ground") and even to cyberspace. This is yet another disturbing manifestation of our military’s quest for "full spectrum dominance," achieved at debilitating cost to the American taxpayer -- and a potentially destabilizing one to the planet.
Striving to be "above all" everywhere is ambitious to the point of folly. By comparison, the slogans of the Air Force’s sister services seem modest. The poor, embattled Army is simply "Army Strong." The Navy now promises to "Accelerate Your Life." Yawn. The Marines, always faithful, refuse to tinker with their slogan, which remains: "The Few. The Proud. The Marines." Meanwhile, the Air Force soars above such slavish adherence to tradition -- as well as any reasonable sense of boundaries or restraint.
The new slogan may also serve as a reminder to airmen to keep their service branch "above all" in their hearts and minds -- despite the fact that the Air Force is currently shedding 40,000 airmen as it tries to pay for a new generation of high-tech fighter jets. It most certainly is a measure of the service’s determination to deny the use of space to powerful rivals, whether China, Russia -- or the U.S. Navy.
Perhaps the slogan even expresses a certain moral superiority -- as in an Air Force pilot’s comment I once overheard that, when aloft, he felt "morally superior" to the little people scampering around on the ground below him. High ground, indeed.
Flying and Fighting, Everywhere!
So much for slogans. The Air Force’s new mission statement begins -- and do bear with me for a moment --
The Mission of the United States Air Force is to deliver sovereign options for the defense of the United States of America and its global interests to fly and fight in air, space and cyberspace.
Flying and fighting in cyberspace sounds exciting -- think Neo in The Matrix. And flying and fighting in space -- which might yet come to pass -- is so Star Wars, especially if the "good" side of the Force is with you, which it must be if you’re defending America.
But wait. The Air Force mission statement makes an instant, and anything but defensive u-turn, and promptly lays out a "vision" of "Global Vigilance, Reach and Power," which, it claims, "orbits around three core competencies: Developing Airmen, Technology-to-Warfighting and Integrating Operations." How a vision can orbit three cores I don’t know -- and I once completed the "Space Operations Short Course" at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Nonetheless, this trinity of core competencies somehow enables six "capabilities," which are unapologetically offensive.
The first of the six is "air and space superiority" with which we "can dominate enemy operations in all dimensions: land, sea, air and space." Capability 2 turns out to be "global attack," enabling us to "attack anywhere, anytime and do so quickly and with greater precision than ever before." (In Bush-speak, we’ll kill them there, so they don’t kill us here.)
And when we attack, capability 4, "precision engagement," theoretically ensures that we put bombs on target, as we used to say in simpler times. Today’s "precision" vision is more prolix: "the essence [of precision engagement] lies in the ability to apply selective force against specific targets because the nature and variety of future contingencies demand both precise and reliable use of military power with minimal risk and collateral damage."
I pity the recruits who have to recite that mouthful of gobbledygook. As bloodless and evasive as such prose may be, however, the mission statement doesn’t pull punches about just what "above all" really means. It wields words like "attack," "force," "power," and, most revealingly, "dominate." They reflect what matters most in the new Air Force vision -- and by extension, of course, that of our country. And if you don’t believe me, go to the Air Force website and click on the icons for "air dominance," "space dominance," and "cyber dominance."
Death at a Distance
Our capability to deliver damage and death across the globe -- at virtually no immediate risk to ourselves -- gives extra meaning to the words "above all." But with great power comes great responsibility, a tagline I learned as a teen from Spider-Man comic strips, but which is no less true for that. The problem is that our "global reach" often exceeds the grasp of our collective wisdom to employ "global power" responsibly.
Listen to the Air Force’s own pitch for its "global reach" and "global power," and you know that today’s service is indeed an imperial instrument focused on "power projection" and "dominance" (with nary a thought of how others may respond to being dominated). Worse yet, our "capabilities" have so detached us from delivering death that it’s become remarkably close to a video-game-like exercise.
Twenty-five years ago, I watched a recruiting film that predicted the coming age of remote-control warfare. And where would the Air Force find its new "pilots," the narrator asked rhetorically? The film promptly cut to a 1980s video arcade, where young teens were blasting away with abandon in games like "Missile Command."
I remember the audience laughing, and it tickled my funny bone as well, but I’m not so amused anymore. For what was prophesied a generation ago has come true. Using unmanned drones, armed with missiles and "piloted" by joystick-wielding warriors, often thousands of miles away from the targets being attacked, the Air Force need not risk any aircrew in "battle." Our military speaks blithely, even with excitement, of "killing ’Bubba’ from the skies"; but, in actuality, what that means is: from air bases tucked safely far behind the lines, whether in Qatar on the Arabian peninsula or outside of Las Vegas. (In this case, what happens in Vegas definitely does not stay in Vegas.)
I’m not suggesting that our Global Hawk, Predator, and Reaper (What a name!) pilots are anything less than dedicated to their assigned missions, including minimizing "collateral damage." Rather, the technology of unmanned aerial vehicles itself serves to detach them from their targets. Tracking the enemy, often with infrared sensors that show people as featureless blobs of heat-light, how can they not become human versions of the ruthless alien hunter that blasted its way through Arnold Schwarzenegger’s unit in a movie coincidentally named Predator?
As our weapons technology weakens ground-level empathy and understanding, it simultaneously emboldens the Air Force to seek (deceptively) "clean" kills. It’s well known, for example, that, in the opening days of the invasion of Iraq, in March 2003, the Bush administration tried to "decapitate" Saddam Hussein and his inner circle with precision weapons. (In fact, only Iraqi civilians were killed in these coordinated attacks aimed at the Iraqi leadership as the war began.)
Terrorist networks like Al Qaeda provide even fewer and more elusive "high-value" targets than do organized governments. Yet, when the U.S. succeeds with "decapitation" strikes against such networks, new heads often emerge, hydra-like, especially when "collateral damage" includes dead civilians -- and live avengers.
Control Fantasies in Space
The Air Force’s vision of total domination used to stop at the stratosphere. Yet, according to its grandiose website, it now extends "to the shining stars and beyond." I hesitate to ask what lies beyond. God? Certainly, there’s something unbounded, almost god-like, in the Air Force’s space fantasy.
When it turns to space, the Air Force readily admits its desire to dominate all potential foes. As Peter B. Teets, a former Air Force undersecretary and director of the National Reconnaissance Office, declared back in 2002: "If we do not exploit space to the fullest advantage across every conceivable mode of war fighting, then someone else will -- and we allow this at our own peril."
There’s nothing surprising about this "king of the hill" mentality. A decade ago, as a uniformed officer, I attended a space conference in Colorado Springs. Major topics of discussion included space weaponry already on the drawing board and being funded. Included were space-based directed energy weapons ("ten to twenty years away" was the prediction back then) and "Brilliant Pebbles," a constellation of thousands of miniature killer-satellites, proposed in the 1980s, that would be used to intercept ballistic missiles and which, fortunately, went unfielded, though not for want of lobbying to revive the project.
Much of the argument then -- undoubtedly abstruse to outsiders -- was about whether space represented a "revolution in military affairs" or a "strategic center of gravity." It turned out that it didn’t matter. Either way, we clearly had to seize it and dominate it first, since space, as "the ultimate high ground," was going to be critical in future wars.
Several enthusiasts called for a new, separate, and independent space force, a fifth service, with its own unique doctrine -- an idea the Air Force has, so far, fought off valiantly. Among my notes from the occasion was a statement by General Howell M. Estes III, then Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Space Command, that the Air Force simply couldn’t afford to lose the space mission -- not just to "the enemy," but to the dreaded U.S. Navy and U.S. Army, both of which were, he claimed, already exploiting space assets more skillfully than the Air Force.
Dominating space (and again the other services) certainly sounds seductive. Having worked in the Space Surveillance Center in Cheyenne Mountain, however, I can tell you that near-earth orbital space is already overcrowded with satellites and space junk -- and the delicate sensors on these satellites are highly vulnerable to space shrapnel traveling at 17,000 miles per hour. Explosive battles in space would degrade, rather than enhance, any existing advantage in space-based intelligence and communication the U.S. does have. Demilitarizing space is the only sensible strategy, yet it’s the one that promises few lucrative contracts for aerospace firms and no new command billets for an Air Force seeking global (and supra-global) dominance.
Closing the Empathy Gap
As the Air Force flexes its earth, space, and cyber muscles, we rarely stop to think of the asymmetrical advantages enjoyed by the military -- the overwhelming advantage in firepower, mobility, and technology. This has created what can only be called an empathy gap.
Fortunately, Americans have never been on the receiving end of a sustained bombing campaign in this country. Two shocking days excepted -- December 7, 1941 at Pearl Harbor (where my uncle dodged aerial strafing at Schofield barracks), and September 11, 2001 in New York City and Washington -- the skies have always been friendly to us, even the repository of our hopes and dreams. When fighter jets scream overhead, our first thought isn’t "death," it’s display. We look up in curiosity or wonder; we don’t panic and run for our lives. We expect the opening of a sporting event or aerial acrobatics, not the arrival of "precision guided munitions."
As a result, we have trouble realizing that our ability to soar "above all" and rain death from the skies generates resistance and revenge, rather than awe and retreat, or submission and rapprochement. We marvel that our enemies just don’t get the message -- but our signals are mixed, and our receivers flawed.
Flying and fighting so far above it all has proven deceptive indeed. It leaves us with little idea of the new realities we are creating down below, and blind to the disturbing inequities and resentments generated by our global/galactic/cyber power.
It turns out that the higher you soar -- the more "above all" you perceive yourself to be -- the less likely it is that you’ll understand the little people beneath you, and the more likely it is that those same "little people" will resent being dominated. And the solution to that problem lies not in dominating the stars or some other higher physical realm, but in looking within to a higher moral realm. "Above All" in moral courage -- now there’s a slogan toward which I’d willingly soar.
Executive or Imperial Branch?
Go to Original
By Ivan Eland
By Ivan Eland
Editor’s Note: Lost amid the U.S. news media’s focus on important matters, like Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s latest outburst, has been any interest in trivial questions, such as how George W. Bush has trampled the U.S. Constitution, stampeded the nation into a disastrous war and walked all over Congress.
In this guest essay, the Independent Institute’s Ivan Eland takes a stab at getting the American people to pay some attention to the future of the Republic:
More memos recently have surfaced that were written early in the Bush administration by John C. Yoo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel -- the man who gave us the administration’s horrifyingly narrow definition of torture.
As difficult as it is to believe, the recently released memos are even scarier than the original torture memo.
Yoo boldly asserts that the president’s power during wartime is nearly unlimited. For example, he argues that Congress has no right to pass laws governing the interrogations of enemy combatants and the commander in chief can ignore such laws if passed, and can, without constraint, seize oceangoing ships.
The memos also argue that military operations in the United States against terrorists are not subject to the Fourth Amendment requirement for search warrants or the Fifth Amendment requirement for due process.
This broad interpretation of executive power and the president’s commander-in-chief role would make the nation’s founders jump out of their graves.
Purposefully, the Constitutional Convention enumerated the large number of Congress’s powers in Article I, and gave most powers related to defense and foreign affairs to the people’s branch.
In particular, the war power was given to Congress. The chief executive, whose powers were enumerated in the much more brief Article II, was given the commander-in-chief role, but this was intended narrowly, only as commander of U.S. troops on the battlefield.
Instead of declaring war, which has fallen out of fashion, the Congress, after 9/11, passed a resolution authorizing the president to go after al-Qaeda overseas but deliberately omitted domestic activities from that authorization.
Democrats and Republicans alike declared that they were not endorsing a broad expansion of the president’s authority as commander-in-chief.
An important example from the nation’s infancy shows how narrowly the founders regarded the president’s role as commander in chief.
During the Quasi-War with France in the last years of the 1700s, Congress authorized President John Adams to seize armed ships sailing to French ports. Adams exceeded the congressional authorization by ordering the seizure of vessels sailing to or from French ports.
The Supreme Court, in the case Little v. Barreme, ruled that Adams had exceeded the authority Congress had delegated to him. So much for Bush’s supposed intrinsic authority to seize all oceangoing ships without congressional authorization.
In 1952, President Truman, the first imperial president, seized the steel mills under his alleged "inherent power" as commander in chief -- supposedly to prevent paralysis of the national economy and using the rationale that soldiers in the Korean War needed weapons and ammunition.
By a wide margin, in the case Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, the Supreme Court struck down Truman’s executive order to seize the mills because it had no statutory or constitutional basis. Essentially, the court ruled that the president may be commander in chief of the armed forces but not the country.
Yoo’s assertion that Congress has no right to pass laws that impinge on the president’s claim to a broad interpretation of his role as commander in chief violates the core of the constitutional system of checks and balances, and for which the United States regularly criticizes despots in foreign countries.
Finally, the Fourth Amendment (requiring warrants for any search) and the Fifth Amendment (the right to due legal process) contain no exceptions for wartime. In fact, in a republic -- where the rule of law should be king -- crises and wartime are exactly when people’s rights are most likely to be endangered and when safeguards are especially needed.
Even more tragic and dangerous than the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan have been President Bush’s usurping of power from the other two branches of government and the creation of the "hyperimperial" presidency.
Troop withdrawal added to war funding bill
Go to Original
By Deirdre Walsh
Defying President Bush's demand to send him a clean war funding bill, House Democratic leaders unveiled legislation Tuesday that conditions the money on withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq and adds billions of dollars in domestic spending.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wisconsin, outlined a $183.7 billion package that combines money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the remainder of 2008 with additional funding requested by the administration to continue military operations through early 2009.
Democrats insisted that their bill stays roughly within the overall spending limit set by the White House, but they included two major domestic items -- unemployment assistance and a new GI Bill that expands college benefits for veterans -- that would cost about $12 billion.
Obey argued that the add-ons are emergency spending and therefore shouldn't be included in the overall price tag.
The bill would redirect more than $3 billion of the president's request to pay for international food aid, levees in New Orleans and more resources for military child-care centers and hospitals.
Obey said that Democratic leaders turned down more than 100 requests for other domestic programs, such as summer jobs and infrastructure projects, and that they limited spending to things they deemed true emergencies.
"There is not a single piece of pork, not a single member project," he said.
The Democrats' plan would place a number of restrictions on the administration, Obey said. It would tie the war money to a requirement that the Pentagon begin withdrawing U.S. troops, with the goal of removing all combat forces by 2010, and it directs the Pentagon to give troops the same amount of rest time at home as they spend on combat assignments.
The bill would also require the United States to adhere to prisoner interrogation standards set out in the U.S. Army Field manual, which bans torture, including "waterboarding."
It would require all U.S. agreements with the government of Iraq to be submitted to Congress in the form of a treaty needing Senate ratification. The legislation would also force the Iraqi government to shoulder more of the costs for reconstruction projects. Half of the funds for these projects would be grants, the other half loans.
In order to move the bill quickly and avoid attempts to change it, Democratic leaders are bypassing the usual committee process. The plan is to hold three votes Thursday on the House floor: one on the war funding itself, one on the funding restrictions and one on the additional domestic spending. The entire package would then go to the Senate, but a senior Democratic leadership aide said it's unlikely the funding restrictions would pass.
By keeping the overall cost of the bill close to the president's limit, Democrats hope he will not veto it. The leadership aide argued that the GI bill and money for unemployment benefits should pass the Senate, increasing pressure on the White House to accept the entire bill.
Obey said Democrats want to avoid a veto, but he asked, "How can you be for squirreling away $200 billion on this misbegotten, godforsaken war and not be for providing a GI Bill expansion?"
House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, denounced the bill.
"It is unacceptable and, indeed, unimaginable for Congress to continue to hold our troops hostage for political leverage," he said. "If House Democrats want to ramp up spending on other government programs, those items should be considered separately. A troop funding bill should fund the troops. Period."
By Deirdre Walsh
Defying President Bush's demand to send him a clean war funding bill, House Democratic leaders unveiled legislation Tuesday that conditions the money on withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq and adds billions of dollars in domestic spending.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wisconsin, outlined a $183.7 billion package that combines money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the remainder of 2008 with additional funding requested by the administration to continue military operations through early 2009.
Democrats insisted that their bill stays roughly within the overall spending limit set by the White House, but they included two major domestic items -- unemployment assistance and a new GI Bill that expands college benefits for veterans -- that would cost about $12 billion.
Obey argued that the add-ons are emergency spending and therefore shouldn't be included in the overall price tag.
The bill would redirect more than $3 billion of the president's request to pay for international food aid, levees in New Orleans and more resources for military child-care centers and hospitals.
Obey said that Democratic leaders turned down more than 100 requests for other domestic programs, such as summer jobs and infrastructure projects, and that they limited spending to things they deemed true emergencies.
"There is not a single piece of pork, not a single member project," he said.
The Democrats' plan would place a number of restrictions on the administration, Obey said. It would tie the war money to a requirement that the Pentagon begin withdrawing U.S. troops, with the goal of removing all combat forces by 2010, and it directs the Pentagon to give troops the same amount of rest time at home as they spend on combat assignments.
The bill would also require the United States to adhere to prisoner interrogation standards set out in the U.S. Army Field manual, which bans torture, including "waterboarding."
It would require all U.S. agreements with the government of Iraq to be submitted to Congress in the form of a treaty needing Senate ratification. The legislation would also force the Iraqi government to shoulder more of the costs for reconstruction projects. Half of the funds for these projects would be grants, the other half loans.
In order to move the bill quickly and avoid attempts to change it, Democratic leaders are bypassing the usual committee process. The plan is to hold three votes Thursday on the House floor: one on the war funding itself, one on the funding restrictions and one on the additional domestic spending. The entire package would then go to the Senate, but a senior Democratic leadership aide said it's unlikely the funding restrictions would pass.
By keeping the overall cost of the bill close to the president's limit, Democrats hope he will not veto it. The leadership aide argued that the GI bill and money for unemployment benefits should pass the Senate, increasing pressure on the White House to accept the entire bill.
Obey said Democrats want to avoid a veto, but he asked, "How can you be for squirreling away $200 billion on this misbegotten, godforsaken war and not be for providing a GI Bill expansion?"
House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, denounced the bill.
"It is unacceptable and, indeed, unimaginable for Congress to continue to hold our troops hostage for political leverage," he said. "If House Democrats want to ramp up spending on other government programs, those items should be considered separately. A troop funding bill should fund the troops. Period."
Banks' credit card bluster rings hollow
Go to Original
By David Lazarus
I just love it when the credit card industry threatens to take its toys and go home.
That, in effect, was what card issuers said in response to the announcement by federal regulators last week that they planned to crack down on some of the industry's more consumer-unfriendly practices.
To increase fairness, the Federal Reserve and two other agencies would, among other things, require card issuers to mail out statements at least 21 days before a payment's due date and prohibit issuers from applying partial payments only to balances with the lowest interest rates -- thus leaving costlier, higher-rate balances intact.
Edward Yingling, president of the American Bankers Assn., said in a statement that the Fed's proposals represent "an unprecedented regulatory intrusion into marketplace pricing and product offerings."
He said the measures would "result in less competition, higher consumer prices, fewer consumer choices and reduced consumer access to credit cards."
In other words, if the industry had to play by the proposed rules, it wouldn't be able to offer as much plastic to as many people.
Nonsense. No amount of regulation has ever resulted in card issuers scaling back their offerings. More than 5 billion solicitations were mailed to U.S. households last year alone.
But if banks suddenly decided not to make plastic as readily available to people with spotty credit records, fine. All things considered, that would probably be a good thing.
Just ask Victoria Ramirez. The San Jose elementary school teacher once had as much as $45,000 in debt on six different cards.
Now she and her husband have whittled that down to a balance of about $10,000 on a single card.
Ramirez, 37, said card issuers make it all too easy to get into trouble.
"They loan you a big amount of money that you can't take care of," she said.
This isn't so different from what's happening in the housing market. One reason so many people are in danger of losing their homes right now is because banks handed out high-risk loans to folks who had no business getting deep into debt.
To be sure, many such loan recipients deserve a share of the blame for being so reckless with their personal finances. But they wouldn't have gotten into trouble without the willing complicity of lenders, which encouraged virtually all home buyers to take the plunge, regardless of their ability to repay loans.
According to the Fed, Americans are now carrying $951.7 billion in revolving credit card debt, up 5.9% from a year ago. The average household with credit card debt runs a balance of about $8,000.
We could use a little tough love. Efforts to teach people to be more debt-savvy clearly haven't worked out. (The banking industry's "education" programs have always struck me as being much like the tobacco industry's programs to discourage smoking. Somehow they just don't seem sincere.)
Yingling of the American Bankers Assn. said he found the Fed's proposed safeguards "particularly perplexing" because they'd result in "a reduction in credit availability at the very time the Fed is working to increase access to credit in the marketplace."
Perhaps he'd be less perplexed if he understood that the Fed isn't seeking a credit free-for-all out there. What it wants, and what consumers should have, is access to the credit that they're qualified to handle.
Of course, that's not what the banking industry is about. Lenders collected a record $18.1 billion in credit card penalty fees last year, up 69% from 2003, according to consulting firm R.K. Hammer Investment Bankers in Thousand Oaks.
Banks aren't about to cut back on credit for anyone. Why? Because they don't care whether consumers can handle debt. Cynical as it may be to say, they're happiest when we can't.
Yingling said lenders will be busy submitting comments to the Fed, the Office of Thrift Supervision and the National Credit Union Administration about their proposed measures over the next couple of months.
People who want to balance the equation can do so by visiting the Fed's website at federalreserve.gov. Follow the links to the comment form for Regulation AA.
Windfall oil profits
Speaking of government roles in business, I received nearly 200 e-mails in response to Sunday's column on whether a windfall profits tax would be a good idea for the big-bucks-earning oil industry.
Much of the response focused on the headline -- "Levy is needed on oil profit windfalls" -- which didn't exactly jibe with my conclusion in the column that "a windfall profits tax isn't the solution" (although I advocated some sort of socially responsible levy that could be applied to alternative energy and public transportation).
Many readers pointed out that the industry's 8% profit margin isn't out of line with what other businesses pull down. For example, Bennett Pridgen wrote to say this amount "is not an unreasonable company profit and is expected by stockholders."
In fact, the oil industry is fond of citing its relatively benign profit margin when consumers bellyache about high pump prices. But when it comes to Wall Street, the industry prefers to be judged by its return on equity, a measure of how well companies use capital from investors.
According to the Congressional Research Service, the oil industry had a very healthy average return on equity last year of almost 23%. Exxon Mobil, the world's largest oil company, had a return on equity of 33.4%. Chevron's return on equity was 24.2%.
By comparison, investor darling Google had a return on equity of just 21.1%.
That's not to say all this money represents a windfall. But it's a lot of dough.
By David Lazarus
I just love it when the credit card industry threatens to take its toys and go home.
That, in effect, was what card issuers said in response to the announcement by federal regulators last week that they planned to crack down on some of the industry's more consumer-unfriendly practices.
To increase fairness, the Federal Reserve and two other agencies would, among other things, require card issuers to mail out statements at least 21 days before a payment's due date and prohibit issuers from applying partial payments only to balances with the lowest interest rates -- thus leaving costlier, higher-rate balances intact.
Edward Yingling, president of the American Bankers Assn., said in a statement that the Fed's proposals represent "an unprecedented regulatory intrusion into marketplace pricing and product offerings."
He said the measures would "result in less competition, higher consumer prices, fewer consumer choices and reduced consumer access to credit cards."
In other words, if the industry had to play by the proposed rules, it wouldn't be able to offer as much plastic to as many people.
Nonsense. No amount of regulation has ever resulted in card issuers scaling back their offerings. More than 5 billion solicitations were mailed to U.S. households last year alone.
But if banks suddenly decided not to make plastic as readily available to people with spotty credit records, fine. All things considered, that would probably be a good thing.
Just ask Victoria Ramirez. The San Jose elementary school teacher once had as much as $45,000 in debt on six different cards.
Now she and her husband have whittled that down to a balance of about $10,000 on a single card.
Ramirez, 37, said card issuers make it all too easy to get into trouble.
"They loan you a big amount of money that you can't take care of," she said.
This isn't so different from what's happening in the housing market. One reason so many people are in danger of losing their homes right now is because banks handed out high-risk loans to folks who had no business getting deep into debt.
To be sure, many such loan recipients deserve a share of the blame for being so reckless with their personal finances. But they wouldn't have gotten into trouble without the willing complicity of lenders, which encouraged virtually all home buyers to take the plunge, regardless of their ability to repay loans.
According to the Fed, Americans are now carrying $951.7 billion in revolving credit card debt, up 5.9% from a year ago. The average household with credit card debt runs a balance of about $8,000.
We could use a little tough love. Efforts to teach people to be more debt-savvy clearly haven't worked out. (The banking industry's "education" programs have always struck me as being much like the tobacco industry's programs to discourage smoking. Somehow they just don't seem sincere.)
Yingling of the American Bankers Assn. said he found the Fed's proposed safeguards "particularly perplexing" because they'd result in "a reduction in credit availability at the very time the Fed is working to increase access to credit in the marketplace."
Perhaps he'd be less perplexed if he understood that the Fed isn't seeking a credit free-for-all out there. What it wants, and what consumers should have, is access to the credit that they're qualified to handle.
Of course, that's not what the banking industry is about. Lenders collected a record $18.1 billion in credit card penalty fees last year, up 69% from 2003, according to consulting firm R.K. Hammer Investment Bankers in Thousand Oaks.
Banks aren't about to cut back on credit for anyone. Why? Because they don't care whether consumers can handle debt. Cynical as it may be to say, they're happiest when we can't.
Yingling said lenders will be busy submitting comments to the Fed, the Office of Thrift Supervision and the National Credit Union Administration about their proposed measures over the next couple of months.
People who want to balance the equation can do so by visiting the Fed's website at federalreserve.gov. Follow the links to the comment form for Regulation AA.
Windfall oil profits
Speaking of government roles in business, I received nearly 200 e-mails in response to Sunday's column on whether a windfall profits tax would be a good idea for the big-bucks-earning oil industry.
Much of the response focused on the headline -- "Levy is needed on oil profit windfalls" -- which didn't exactly jibe with my conclusion in the column that "a windfall profits tax isn't the solution" (although I advocated some sort of socially responsible levy that could be applied to alternative energy and public transportation).
Many readers pointed out that the industry's 8% profit margin isn't out of line with what other businesses pull down. For example, Bennett Pridgen wrote to say this amount "is not an unreasonable company profit and is expected by stockholders."
In fact, the oil industry is fond of citing its relatively benign profit margin when consumers bellyache about high pump prices. But when it comes to Wall Street, the industry prefers to be judged by its return on equity, a measure of how well companies use capital from investors.
According to the Congressional Research Service, the oil industry had a very healthy average return on equity last year of almost 23%. Exxon Mobil, the world's largest oil company, had a return on equity of 33.4%. Chevron's return on equity was 24.2%.
By comparison, investor darling Google had a return on equity of just 21.1%.
That's not to say all this money represents a windfall. But it's a lot of dough.
Rattling the Cage Daniel Pearl's Last Words, Uncensored
Go to Original
By LARRY DERFNER
I was surfing YouTube one day and decided, just out of curiosity, to listen to Daniel Pearl's last words. (Not to see the video, only to listen to the audio.) I heard the famous part, "My name is Daniel Pearl... My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am a Jew." Then he went on to mention his father's Zionism, his family's trips to Israel and the street in Bnei Brak named for his great-grandfather. All this was in line with the heroic story of Daniel Pearl as it has come to be known in the Jewish world, which was the story I knew.
But then I heard Pearl go on to say things I hadn't expected, that were completely out of character with the legend:
"...only now do I think about some of the people in Guantanamo Bay..."
"...this is the sort of problem that Americans are going to have anywhere in the world now."
"We can't be secure, we can't walk around free as long as our government policies are continuing and we allow them to continue."
"We Americans cannot continue to bear the consequences of our government's actions, such as the unconditional support given to the State of Israel. Twenty-four uses of the veto power to justify massacres of children. And the support for the dictatorial regimes in the Arab and left-wing world. And also the continued American military presence in Afghanistan."
I WASN'T shocked, of course, that Pearl made such statements - he was being held captive by his soon-to-be executioners, and he recited any propaganda they told him to recite. That's what hostages do - they have no choice and are in no position to resist.
Still, I was surprised to hear these last words because according to the legend of Daniel Pearl, his last words were, "My mother is Jewish. My father is Jewish. I am a Jew." The words that came afterward have been edited out of his legend.
I surfed some Jewish Web sites and found tributes to the way Pearl "stood up to his terrorist captors to assert his Jewish identity, illustrated by his last words, 'My mother is Jewish. My father is Jewish. I am a Jew.'" The way he "quietly defied his captors." That "as the world would later learn, Pearl never capitulated to his captors, acknowledging his nationality, his religion and his beliefs openly and proudly."
I'm sorry, that's not what happened. Daniel Pearl was a hostage. From the tone and content of his last words, he wasn't defiant, he wasn't assertive, he made no ringing declarations of anything - everything he said, he said under duress. In captivity, he was not a hero. How exactly could he have been a hero in such circumstances? How could he have resisted? No, Daniel Pearl was a victim. He was helpless in front of his captors. He didn't die a hero, he died a martyr.
BUT WHY can't we accept that? Why does the Jewish world, the Jewish establishment, the caretakers of the image of the Jewish people, have to airbrush out the part where Pearl calls down America and Israel - even though Jews, like everyone else, know that he said what he said under orders from armed terrorists?
I don't mean to take issue with anything Pearl's family has done to commemorate him; that's their business, not mine or anybody else's. I'm taking issue, instead, with the Jewish public memory of Pearl's words.
I imagine that some Jews realize that his statement "I am a Jew" was part of a forced confession, and that what they're doing, consciously, is turning it into an affirmation as a way of avenging Pearl's murder and telling his kidnappers that ultimately, he defeated them.
That would be an honorable gesture, and an honest one. But I don't think that's how world Jewry at large remembers his last words. Pearl was murdered over six years ago, and as time passes, history and historical figures tend to be shorn in the public memory of their complexities and contradictions, becoming reduced to images out of a child's coloring book - exaggerated, oversimplified, distorted.
World Jewry at large doesn't acknowledge Pearl's coerced statements against America and Israel. My guess is that most Jews don't even know he made them. Those other last words of his have been dropped down the memory hole.
And why? Why does the truth of Pearl's behavior before he was murdered have to be abridged, "fixed up" for popular Jewish consumption? Why does he have to be turned into a Superman? Why can't he be left as a human being who, from the evidence, reacted to the terrorists who kidnapped him more or less like any human being would probably react to being kidnapped by terrorists?
The answer, unfortunately, is that societies create myths about heroes who showed surpassing loyalty in standing up to the enemy, who showed superhuman courage in the society's cause. Invariably, this involves some touching-up, some additions and deletions in the story. By turning a human story into a superhuman legend, a society not only magnifies the hero, it magnifies itself. The greater the hero's courage, the greater his or her willingness to sacrifice for the society's cause, the worthier that cause becomes.
A Daniel Pearl who obeyed his captors' demands by confessing to being Jewish and castigating America's treatment of Muslims together with its "unconditional support" for Israel and the "massacres of children" - that's not an image that can inspire Jews and strengthen Jewish identity. What's needed is a Daniel Pearl who, with his last words, verbally spat in the eye of his captors and declared with quiet assertiveness, pride and defiance: "My mother is Jewish. My father is Jewish. I am a Jew." End of story.
The problem with this story is that it's not true. It's a distortion of the truth - about Pearl, about the Jewish people, about any people. It may be okay for children to believe such a legend, but adults should know better.
By LARRY DERFNER
I was surfing YouTube one day and decided, just out of curiosity, to listen to Daniel Pearl's last words. (Not to see the video, only to listen to the audio.) I heard the famous part, "My name is Daniel Pearl... My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am a Jew." Then he went on to mention his father's Zionism, his family's trips to Israel and the street in Bnei Brak named for his great-grandfather. All this was in line with the heroic story of Daniel Pearl as it has come to be known in the Jewish world, which was the story I knew.
But then I heard Pearl go on to say things I hadn't expected, that were completely out of character with the legend:
"...only now do I think about some of the people in Guantanamo Bay..."
"...this is the sort of problem that Americans are going to have anywhere in the world now."
"We can't be secure, we can't walk around free as long as our government policies are continuing and we allow them to continue."
"We Americans cannot continue to bear the consequences of our government's actions, such as the unconditional support given to the State of Israel. Twenty-four uses of the veto power to justify massacres of children. And the support for the dictatorial regimes in the Arab and left-wing world. And also the continued American military presence in Afghanistan."
I WASN'T shocked, of course, that Pearl made such statements - he was being held captive by his soon-to-be executioners, and he recited any propaganda they told him to recite. That's what hostages do - they have no choice and are in no position to resist.
Still, I was surprised to hear these last words because according to the legend of Daniel Pearl, his last words were, "My mother is Jewish. My father is Jewish. I am a Jew." The words that came afterward have been edited out of his legend.
I surfed some Jewish Web sites and found tributes to the way Pearl "stood up to his terrorist captors to assert his Jewish identity, illustrated by his last words, 'My mother is Jewish. My father is Jewish. I am a Jew.'" The way he "quietly defied his captors." That "as the world would later learn, Pearl never capitulated to his captors, acknowledging his nationality, his religion and his beliefs openly and proudly."
I'm sorry, that's not what happened. Daniel Pearl was a hostage. From the tone and content of his last words, he wasn't defiant, he wasn't assertive, he made no ringing declarations of anything - everything he said, he said under duress. In captivity, he was not a hero. How exactly could he have been a hero in such circumstances? How could he have resisted? No, Daniel Pearl was a victim. He was helpless in front of his captors. He didn't die a hero, he died a martyr.
BUT WHY can't we accept that? Why does the Jewish world, the Jewish establishment, the caretakers of the image of the Jewish people, have to airbrush out the part where Pearl calls down America and Israel - even though Jews, like everyone else, know that he said what he said under orders from armed terrorists?
I don't mean to take issue with anything Pearl's family has done to commemorate him; that's their business, not mine or anybody else's. I'm taking issue, instead, with the Jewish public memory of Pearl's words.
I imagine that some Jews realize that his statement "I am a Jew" was part of a forced confession, and that what they're doing, consciously, is turning it into an affirmation as a way of avenging Pearl's murder and telling his kidnappers that ultimately, he defeated them.
That would be an honorable gesture, and an honest one. But I don't think that's how world Jewry at large remembers his last words. Pearl was murdered over six years ago, and as time passes, history and historical figures tend to be shorn in the public memory of their complexities and contradictions, becoming reduced to images out of a child's coloring book - exaggerated, oversimplified, distorted.
World Jewry at large doesn't acknowledge Pearl's coerced statements against America and Israel. My guess is that most Jews don't even know he made them. Those other last words of his have been dropped down the memory hole.
And why? Why does the truth of Pearl's behavior before he was murdered have to be abridged, "fixed up" for popular Jewish consumption? Why does he have to be turned into a Superman? Why can't he be left as a human being who, from the evidence, reacted to the terrorists who kidnapped him more or less like any human being would probably react to being kidnapped by terrorists?
The answer, unfortunately, is that societies create myths about heroes who showed surpassing loyalty in standing up to the enemy, who showed superhuman courage in the society's cause. Invariably, this involves some touching-up, some additions and deletions in the story. By turning a human story into a superhuman legend, a society not only magnifies the hero, it magnifies itself. The greater the hero's courage, the greater his or her willingness to sacrifice for the society's cause, the worthier that cause becomes.
A Daniel Pearl who obeyed his captors' demands by confessing to being Jewish and castigating America's treatment of Muslims together with its "unconditional support" for Israel and the "massacres of children" - that's not an image that can inspire Jews and strengthen Jewish identity. What's needed is a Daniel Pearl who, with his last words, verbally spat in the eye of his captors and declared with quiet assertiveness, pride and defiance: "My mother is Jewish. My father is Jewish. I am a Jew." End of story.
The problem with this story is that it's not true. It's a distortion of the truth - about Pearl, about the Jewish people, about any people. It may be okay for children to believe such a legend, but adults should know better.
Doubting the Evidence Against Iran
Go to Original
By MARK KUKIS AND ABIGAIL HAUSLOHNER
American circles in Baghdad and Washington are probably not pleased with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's plan for a special panel to investigate allegations of Iranian interference in Iraq. Many U.S. officials are already convinced of the worst and, for years, U.S. officials have aired accusations against Iran, insisting that Tehran is stoking Iraq's violence by keeping up a flow of money, weapons and trained fighters into the country. The Iraqi government, however, remains unconvinced — with good reason.
"We want to find really good evidence and not evidence made on speculations," Ali al-Dabbagh, a spokesman for the Iraqi government, told reporters in Baghdad on Sunday. Last week an Iraqi government delegation went to Tehran to discuss the allegations of Iranian involvement in the Iraqi militias, the government said. Details of the evidence presented in Tehran remains hazy, but at the same time American officials in Baghdad and Washington have never offered a convincing case publicly to support their allegations. [In the meantime, Tehran announced that it would not hold a new round of talks — the third of their kind with American representatives — regarding security in Iraq unless the U.S. ceased its operations against Iraqi Shi'ites. American forces have been working with the Iraqi Army against Shi'ite militias in Baghdad's sprawling slum, Sadr City.]
Indeed, the U.S. allegations appear to be based on speculation, spurred by the appearance about a year ago of a new breed of roadside bomb in Iraq. Explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, proved effective at piercing American armor by firing a concave copper disc from a makeshift cannon, which transformed the slug midair into a molten jet of super-heated metal. Accusations that Iran was shipping the things into Iraq grew louder as U.S. casualties from the weapon rose. But no concrete evidence has emerged in public that Iran was behind the weapons. U.S. officials have revealed no captured shipments of such devices and offered no other proof.
Instead, the Americans argued their case publicly with deductive reasoning: the copper slugs used in EFPs had to be precisely tooled with a heavy press in order to work properly, they said; no such heavy presses were in operation in Iraq, according to the Americans, therefore the slugs had to have been machined in Iran and moved into Iraq. It is, however, not impossible that such heavy presses may well be operating in Iraq. Three major cities in southern Iraq (Basra, Karbala and Najaf) have gone without a significant U.S. military presence for more than a year. These cities, which U.S. officials believe form hubs for the flow of arms into Baghdad, may indeed have such presses.
The U.S. has also alleged that Tehran was passing rockets to militia elements in Iraq for use against American troops and, lately, the Iraqi government living under American protection in the Green Zone. Recovered materials from some of the rockets reveal Iranian markings, American officials have said, without however producing convincing physical evidence.
The third leg in the U.S. argument against Iran is the longstanding assertion that the Qods Force, a paramilitary wing of the Iranian army, trains Iraqi militants inside Iran and then supports their guerrilla activity back in Iraq. The U.S. military has offered its most convincing public argument on this point, revealing details in July 2007 of the interrogation of an alleged Hizballah operative captured in Basra. TIME also interviewed two Iraqi guerrilla fighters who said they trained in Iran.
Taken altogether, the U.S. evidence offered publicly about Iran's supposedly nefarious activities in Iraq is far from a slam-dunk case, a fact Dabbagh was at pains to make when speaking to reporters in Baghdad. "If it turns out there is hard evidence, the government will deal with it," Dabbagh said.
The Americans in Iraq, for now, seem content to wait for the Iraqi government to change its view on Iran, a country that al-Maliki and other Iraqi leaders largely see as a friend rather than a foe. "It looks like now that the government of Iraq wants to set up an official process to discuss Iranian interference with the Iranians, between official representatives of the Iraq government and the official Iranian government and when they do that, they'll gather whatever evidence they find and discuss that in dialogue with the Iranians," said Rear Admiral Patrick Driscoll, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad. "We've made the case. Now I think it's proper for the Iraqi government to make their case based on their interpretation of the facts, and have a dialogue with the government of Iran."
By MARK KUKIS AND ABIGAIL HAUSLOHNER
American circles in Baghdad and Washington are probably not pleased with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's plan for a special panel to investigate allegations of Iranian interference in Iraq. Many U.S. officials are already convinced of the worst and, for years, U.S. officials have aired accusations against Iran, insisting that Tehran is stoking Iraq's violence by keeping up a flow of money, weapons and trained fighters into the country. The Iraqi government, however, remains unconvinced — with good reason.
"We want to find really good evidence and not evidence made on speculations," Ali al-Dabbagh, a spokesman for the Iraqi government, told reporters in Baghdad on Sunday. Last week an Iraqi government delegation went to Tehran to discuss the allegations of Iranian involvement in the Iraqi militias, the government said. Details of the evidence presented in Tehran remains hazy, but at the same time American officials in Baghdad and Washington have never offered a convincing case publicly to support their allegations. [In the meantime, Tehran announced that it would not hold a new round of talks — the third of their kind with American representatives — regarding security in Iraq unless the U.S. ceased its operations against Iraqi Shi'ites. American forces have been working with the Iraqi Army against Shi'ite militias in Baghdad's sprawling slum, Sadr City.]
Indeed, the U.S. allegations appear to be based on speculation, spurred by the appearance about a year ago of a new breed of roadside bomb in Iraq. Explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, proved effective at piercing American armor by firing a concave copper disc from a makeshift cannon, which transformed the slug midair into a molten jet of super-heated metal. Accusations that Iran was shipping the things into Iraq grew louder as U.S. casualties from the weapon rose. But no concrete evidence has emerged in public that Iran was behind the weapons. U.S. officials have revealed no captured shipments of such devices and offered no other proof.
Instead, the Americans argued their case publicly with deductive reasoning: the copper slugs used in EFPs had to be precisely tooled with a heavy press in order to work properly, they said; no such heavy presses were in operation in Iraq, according to the Americans, therefore the slugs had to have been machined in Iran and moved into Iraq. It is, however, not impossible that such heavy presses may well be operating in Iraq. Three major cities in southern Iraq (Basra, Karbala and Najaf) have gone without a significant U.S. military presence for more than a year. These cities, which U.S. officials believe form hubs for the flow of arms into Baghdad, may indeed have such presses.
The U.S. has also alleged that Tehran was passing rockets to militia elements in Iraq for use against American troops and, lately, the Iraqi government living under American protection in the Green Zone. Recovered materials from some of the rockets reveal Iranian markings, American officials have said, without however producing convincing physical evidence.
The third leg in the U.S. argument against Iran is the longstanding assertion that the Qods Force, a paramilitary wing of the Iranian army, trains Iraqi militants inside Iran and then supports their guerrilla activity back in Iraq. The U.S. military has offered its most convincing public argument on this point, revealing details in July 2007 of the interrogation of an alleged Hizballah operative captured in Basra. TIME also interviewed two Iraqi guerrilla fighters who said they trained in Iran.
Taken altogether, the U.S. evidence offered publicly about Iran's supposedly nefarious activities in Iraq is far from a slam-dunk case, a fact Dabbagh was at pains to make when speaking to reporters in Baghdad. "If it turns out there is hard evidence, the government will deal with it," Dabbagh said.
The Americans in Iraq, for now, seem content to wait for the Iraqi government to change its view on Iran, a country that al-Maliki and other Iraqi leaders largely see as a friend rather than a foe. "It looks like now that the government of Iraq wants to set up an official process to discuss Iranian interference with the Iranians, between official representatives of the Iraq government and the official Iranian government and when they do that, they'll gather whatever evidence they find and discuss that in dialogue with the Iranians," said Rear Admiral Patrick Driscoll, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad. "We've made the case. Now I think it's proper for the Iraqi government to make their case based on their interpretation of the facts, and have a dialogue with the government of Iran."
Iran: Will it be jaw-jaw or war-war?
Go to Original
By Pat Buchanan
Is war with Iran inevitable, even imminent? Or is peace at hand?
From the public diplomacy of the administration, either conclusion may be reached. Consider:
"West Offers Iran 'Refreshed' Deal," ran the headline in the May 3 Washington Times. The story described an offer to Iran, agreed to by all five members of the Security Council – the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China – of a sweetened grand bargain, if Tehran will suspend its enrichment of uranium.
Blessing the offering in London was Condi Rice.
Details will not be made public, but the offer is said to include Western aid to Iran for a civilian nuclear program, a light-water reactor and a five-year stock of enriched uranium held for Iran by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
America's contribution would be support for Iran's admission to the World Trade Organization, a conference to discuss regional security in the Gulf, a U.S. offer to sell Iran spare parts for its U.S.-built civilian aircraft and a beginning of the lifting of three decades of U.S. sanctions.
News of this offer, plus the relaxed mood in Washington, which is utterly unlike the tense atmosphere prior to March 2003, suggests that war with Iran is far from the mind of this city.
But to take the warnings and threats of the civilian and military leaders of this administration at face value would lead one to conclude the opposite – that war with Iran is indeed inevitable, and probably soon. Consider:
Last month, Gen. David Petraeus was asked by Joe Lieberman, "Is it fair to say that the Iranian-backed special groups in Iraq are responsible for the murder of hundreds of American soldiers and thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians?"
"It certainly is. ... That is correct," answered the general.
The next day, Petraeus testified, "Unchecked, the 'special groups' pose the greatest long-term threat to the viability of a democratic Iraq."
Petraeus has since been promoted to command of all U.S. forces in the region.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, known as an opponent of war on Iran, followed Petraeus, accusing Tehran of being "hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons." Last week, Gates was out front again. "What the Iranians are doing is killing American servicemen and -women inside Iraq."
Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, is now also pounding the war drum. Iran's "irresponsible influence," its support of terror and its pursuit of atomic weapons, he said last week, is creating a "perfect nightmare" for the region. The Pentagon, said the chairman, is planning for "potential military ... action" because of Iran's "increasingly lethal and malign influence."
"It would be a mistake to think that we are out of combat capacity," Mullen declared. A second U.S. carrier just entered the Persian Gulf.
CBS reports that a target list of U.S. military planners includes the headquarters of the Quds Force and plants where Iran produces enhanced IEDs and the rockets used against the Green Zone. The network also reports that the State Department has begun drafting an ultimatum.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmal Khalilzad has chimed in: "Iran and Syria must stop the flow of weapons and foreign fighters into Iraq, and their malign interference in Iraq."
Iraqi Maj. Gen. Qasim Atta says 700 rockets and mortars have been fired at Coalition forces and the Green Zone, and most of the "Katyusha and Grad rockets and smart roadside bombs" were Iranian-made. The U.S. military is preparing a dossier on Iran's role in the Iraq war.
In the Landon Lecture at Kansas State, CIA Director Michael Hayden declared, "It ... is the policy of the Iranian government, approved to the highest level ... to facilitate the killing of Americans in Iraq." That day, State designated Iran the "most significant" and "most active" state sponsor of terror on earth.
From the White House to State to the Pentagon to CIA, the Bush administration is now singing from the same song sheet: Iran's Quds Force, with the knowledge of President Ahmadinejad, is arming and directing "special groups" to kill U.S. soldiers and prevent a U.S. victory.
Is the White House rattling sabers to prod Iran into talks?
Perhaps. But the administration has also painted itself, and us, into a corner with the war talk. And there are only three ways out.
The first is that Iran halts the attacks, ends its intervention and negotiates on the six-nation offer. The second is that Iran rejects the deal, refuses to stop the attacks and U.S. air strikes begin.
The third is that Bush is bluffing and goes home railing against an axis-of-evil nation killing American soldiers, having done nothing.
With Israel, the Israeli lobby, the neocons and Dick Cheney insisting on air strikes, and even Hillary Clinton talking about Iran being "obliterated," the last course would seem the least probable.
We are likely headed either for negotiations with Iran or war, after Bush returns from the 60th anniversary celebration of Israel's birth.
"To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war," said Winston Churchill in 1954, whose career often contradicted his wise counsel.
By Pat Buchanan
Is war with Iran inevitable, even imminent? Or is peace at hand?
From the public diplomacy of the administration, either conclusion may be reached. Consider:
"West Offers Iran 'Refreshed' Deal," ran the headline in the May 3 Washington Times. The story described an offer to Iran, agreed to by all five members of the Security Council – the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China – of a sweetened grand bargain, if Tehran will suspend its enrichment of uranium.
Blessing the offering in London was Condi Rice.
Details will not be made public, but the offer is said to include Western aid to Iran for a civilian nuclear program, a light-water reactor and a five-year stock of enriched uranium held for Iran by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
America's contribution would be support for Iran's admission to the World Trade Organization, a conference to discuss regional security in the Gulf, a U.S. offer to sell Iran spare parts for its U.S.-built civilian aircraft and a beginning of the lifting of three decades of U.S. sanctions.
News of this offer, plus the relaxed mood in Washington, which is utterly unlike the tense atmosphere prior to March 2003, suggests that war with Iran is far from the mind of this city.
But to take the warnings and threats of the civilian and military leaders of this administration at face value would lead one to conclude the opposite – that war with Iran is indeed inevitable, and probably soon. Consider:
Last month, Gen. David Petraeus was asked by Joe Lieberman, "Is it fair to say that the Iranian-backed special groups in Iraq are responsible for the murder of hundreds of American soldiers and thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians?"
"It certainly is. ... That is correct," answered the general.
The next day, Petraeus testified, "Unchecked, the 'special groups' pose the greatest long-term threat to the viability of a democratic Iraq."
Petraeus has since been promoted to command of all U.S. forces in the region.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, known as an opponent of war on Iran, followed Petraeus, accusing Tehran of being "hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons." Last week, Gates was out front again. "What the Iranians are doing is killing American servicemen and -women inside Iraq."
Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, is now also pounding the war drum. Iran's "irresponsible influence," its support of terror and its pursuit of atomic weapons, he said last week, is creating a "perfect nightmare" for the region. The Pentagon, said the chairman, is planning for "potential military ... action" because of Iran's "increasingly lethal and malign influence."
"It would be a mistake to think that we are out of combat capacity," Mullen declared. A second U.S. carrier just entered the Persian Gulf.
CBS reports that a target list of U.S. military planners includes the headquarters of the Quds Force and plants where Iran produces enhanced IEDs and the rockets used against the Green Zone. The network also reports that the State Department has begun drafting an ultimatum.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmal Khalilzad has chimed in: "Iran and Syria must stop the flow of weapons and foreign fighters into Iraq, and their malign interference in Iraq."
Iraqi Maj. Gen. Qasim Atta says 700 rockets and mortars have been fired at Coalition forces and the Green Zone, and most of the "Katyusha and Grad rockets and smart roadside bombs" were Iranian-made. The U.S. military is preparing a dossier on Iran's role in the Iraq war.
In the Landon Lecture at Kansas State, CIA Director Michael Hayden declared, "It ... is the policy of the Iranian government, approved to the highest level ... to facilitate the killing of Americans in Iraq." That day, State designated Iran the "most significant" and "most active" state sponsor of terror on earth.
From the White House to State to the Pentagon to CIA, the Bush administration is now singing from the same song sheet: Iran's Quds Force, with the knowledge of President Ahmadinejad, is arming and directing "special groups" to kill U.S. soldiers and prevent a U.S. victory.
Is the White House rattling sabers to prod Iran into talks?
Perhaps. But the administration has also painted itself, and us, into a corner with the war talk. And there are only three ways out.
The first is that Iran halts the attacks, ends its intervention and negotiates on the six-nation offer. The second is that Iran rejects the deal, refuses to stop the attacks and U.S. air strikes begin.
The third is that Bush is bluffing and goes home railing against an axis-of-evil nation killing American soldiers, having done nothing.
With Israel, the Israeli lobby, the neocons and Dick Cheney insisting on air strikes, and even Hillary Clinton talking about Iran being "obliterated," the last course would seem the least probable.
We are likely headed either for negotiations with Iran or war, after Bush returns from the 60th anniversary celebration of Israel's birth.
"To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war," said Winston Churchill in 1954, whose career often contradicted his wise counsel.
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