Go to Original
By Donald Macintyre
In shocking testimonies that reveal abductions, beatings and torture, Israeli soldiers confess the horror they have visited on Hebron
The dark-haired 22-year-old in black T-shirt, blue jeans and red Crocs is understandably hesitant as he sits at a picnic table in the incongruous setting of a beauty spot somewhere in Israel. We know his name and if we used it he would face a criminal investigation and a probable prison sentence.
The birds are singing as he describes in detail some of what he did and saw others do as an enlisted soldier in Hebron. And they are certainly criminal: the incidents in which Palestinian vehicles are stopped for no good reason, the windows smashed and the occupants beaten up for talking back – for saying, for example, they are on the way to hospital; the theft of tobacco from a Palestinian shopkeeper who is then beaten "to a pulp" when he complains; the throwing of stun grenades through the windows of mosques as people prayed. And worse.
The young man left the army only at the end of last year, and his decision to speak is part of a concerted effort to expose the moral price paid by young Israeli conscripts in what is probably the most problematic posting there is in the occupied territories. Not least because Hebron is the only Palestinian city whose centre is directly controlled by the military, 24/7, to protect the notably hardline Jewish settlers there. He says firmly that he now regrets what repeatedly took place during his tour of duty.
But his frequent, if nervous, grins and giggles occasionally show just a hint of the bravado he might have displayed if boasting of his exploits to his mates in a bar. Repeatedly he turns to the older former soldier who has persuaded him to speak to us, and says as if seeking reassurance: "You know how it is in Hebron."
The older ex-soldier is Yehuda Shaul, who does indeed "know how it is in Hebron", having served in the city in a combat unit at the peak of the intifada, and is a founder of Shovrim Shtika, or Breaking the Silence, which will publish tomorrow the disturbing testimonies of 39 Israelis – including this young man – who served in the army in Hebron between 2005 and 2007. They cover a range of experiences, from anger and powerlessness in the face of often violent abuse of Arabs by hardline Jewish settlers, through petty harassment by soldiers, to soldiers beating up Palestinian residents without provocation, looting homes and shops, and opening fire on unarmed demonstrators.
The maltreatment of civilians under occupation is common to many armies in the world – including Britain's, from Northern Ireland to Iraq.
But, paradoxically, few if any countries apart from Israel have an NGO like Breaking the Silence, which seeks – through the experiences of the soldiers themselves – as its website puts it "to force Israeli society to address the reality which it created" in the occupied territories.
The Israeli public was given an unflattering glimpse of military life in Hebron this year when a young lieutenant in the Kfir Brigade called Yaakov Gigi was given a 15-month jail sentence for taking five soldiers with him to hijack a Palestinian taxi, conduct what the Israeli media called a "rampage" in which one of the soldiers shot and wounded a Palestinian civilian who just happened to be in the wrong place, and then tried to lie his way out of it.
In a confessional interview with the Israeli Channel Two investigative programme Uvda, Gigi, who had previously been in many ways a model soldier, talked of "losing the human condition" in Hebron. Asked what he meant, he replied: "To lose the human condition is to become an animal."
The Israeli military did not prosecute the soldier who had fired on the Palestinian, as opposed to Gigi. But the military insists "that the events that occurred within the Kfir Brigade are highly unusual".
But as the 22-year-old soldier, also in the Kfir Brigade, confirms in his testimony to Breaking the Silence, it seems that the event may not have been exceptional. Certainly, our interview tells us, he was "many times" in groups that commandeered taxis, seated the driver in the back, and told him to direct them to places "where they hate the Jews" in order to "make a balagan" – Hebrew for "big mess".
Then there is the inter- clan Palestinian fight: "We were told to go over there and find out what was happening. Our [platoon] commander was a bit screwed in the head. So anyway, we would locate houses, and he'd tell us: 'OK, anyone you see armed with stones or whatever, I don't care what – shoot.' Everyone would think it's the clan fight..." Did the company commander know? "No one knew. Platoon's private initiative, these actions."
Did you hit them? "Sure, not just them. Anyone who came close ... Particularly legs and arms. Some people also sustained abdominal hits ... I think at some point they realised it was soldiers, but they were not sure. Because they could not believe soldiers would do this, you know."
Or using a 10-year-old child to locate and punish a 15-year-old stone-thrower: "So we got hold of just some Palestinian kid nearby, we knew that he knew who it had been. Let's say we beat him a little, to put it mildly, until he told us. You know, the way it goes when your mind's already screwed up, and you have no more patience for Hebron and Arabs and Jews there.
"The kid was really scared, realising we were on to him. We had a commander with us who was a bit of a fanatic. We gave the boy over to this commander, and he really beat the shit out of him ... He showed him all kinds of holes in the ground along the way, asking him: 'Is it here you want to die? Or here?' The kid goes, 'No, no!'
"Anyway, the kid was stood up, and couldn't stay standing on his own two feet. He was already crying ... And the commander continues, 'Don't pretend' and kicks him some more. And then [name withheld], who always had a hard time with such things, went in, caught the squad commander and said, 'Don't touch him any more, that's it.' The commander goes, 'You've become a leftie, what?' And he answers, 'No, I just don't want to see such things.'
"We were right next to this, but did nothing. We were indifferent, you know. OK. Only after the fact you start thinking. Not right away. We were doing such things every day ... It had become a habit...
"And the parents saw it. The commander ordered [the mother], 'Don't get any closer.' He cocked his weapon, already had a bullet inside. She was frightened. He put his weapon literally inside the kid's mouth. 'Anyone gets close, I kill him. Don't bug me. I kill. I have no mercy.' So the father ... got hold of the mother and said, 'Calm down, let them be, so they'll leave him alone.'"
Not every soldier serving in Hebron becomes an "animal". Iftach Arbel, 23, from an upper-middle class, left-of-centre home in Herzylia, served in Hebron as a commander just before the withdrawal from Gaza, when he thinks the army wanted to show it could be tough with settlers, too. And many of the testimonies, including Mr Arbel's, describe how the settlers educate children as young as four to throw stones at Palestinians, attack their homes and even steal their possessions. To Mr Arbel, the Hebron settlers are "pure evil" and the only solution is "to remove the settlers".
He believes it would be possible even within these constraints to treat Palestinians better. He adds: "We did night activity. Choose a house at random, on the aerial photo, so as to practise combat routine and all, which is instructive for the soldiers, I mean, I'm all for it. But then at midnight you wake someone up and turn his whole house upside down with everyone sleeping on the mattresses and all."
But Mr Arbel says that most soldiers are some way between his own extreme and that of the most violent. From just two of his fellow testifiers, you can see what he means.
As one said: "We did all kinds of experiments to see who could do the best split in Abu Snena. We would put [Palestinians] against the wall, make like we were checking them, and ask them to spread their legs. Spread, spread, spread, it was a game to see who could do it best. Or we would check who can hold his breath for longest.
"Choke them. One guy would come, make like he was checking them, and suddenly start yelling like they said something and choke them ... Block their airways; you have to press the adams apple. It's not pleasant. Look at the watch as you're doing it, until he passes out. The one who takes longest to faint wins."
And theft as well as violence. "There's this car accessory shop there. Every time, soldiers would take a tape-disc player, other stuff. This guy, if you go ask him, will tell you plenty of things that soldiers did to him.
"A whole scroll-full ... They would raid his shop regularly. 'Listen, if you tell on us, we'll confiscate your whole store, we'll break everything.' You know, he was afraid to tell. He was already making deals, 'Listen guys, you're damaging me financially.' I personally never took a thing, but I'm telling you, people used to take speakers from him, whole sound systems.
"He'd go, 'Please, give me 500 shekels, I'm losing money here.' 'Listen, if you go on – we'll pick up your whole shop.' 'OK, OK, take it, but listen, don't take more than 10 systems a month.' Something like this.
"'I'm already going bankrupt.' He was so miserable. Guys in our unit used to sell these things back home, make deals with people. People are so stupid."
The military said that Israeli Defence Forces soldiers operate according to "a strict set of moral guidelines" and that their expected adherence to them only "increases wherever and whenever IDF soldiers come in contact with civilians". It added that "if evidence supporting the allegations is uncovered, steps are taken to hold those involved to the level of highest judicial severity". It also said: "The Military Advocate General has issued a number of indictments against soldiers due to allegations of criminal behaviour ... Soldiers found guilty were punished severely by the Military Court, in proportion to the committed offence." It had not by last night quantified such indictments.
In its introduction to the testimonies, Breaking the Silence says: "The soldiers' determination to fulfil their mission yields tragic results: the proper-normative becomes despicable, the inconceivable becomes routine ... [The] testimonies are to illustrate the manner in which they are swept into the brutal reality reigning on the ground, a reality whereby the lives of many thousands of Palestinian families are at the questionable mercy of youths. Hebron turns a focused, flagrant lens at the reality to which Israel's young representatives are constantly sent."
A force for justice
Breaking the Silence was formed four years ago by a group of ex-soldiers, most of whom had served in Israel Defence Forces combat units in Hebron. Many of the soldiers do reserve duty in the military each year. It has collected some 500 testimonies from former soldiers who served in the West Bank and Gaza. Its first public exposure was with an exhibition of photographs by soldiers serving in Hebron and the organisation also runs regular tours of Hebron for Israeli students and diplomats. It receives funding from groups as diverse as the Jewish philanthropic Moriah Fund, the New Israel Fund, the British embassy in Tel Aviv and the EU.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
No Peace Without Hamas
Go to Original
By Mahmoud al-Zahar
GAZA -- President Jimmy Carter's sensible plan to visit the Hamas leadership this week brings honesty and pragmatism to the Middle East while underscoring the fact that American policy has reached its dead end. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acts as if a few alterations here and there would make the hideous straitjacket of apartheid fit better. While Rice persuades Israeli occupation forces to cut a few dozen meaningless roadblocks from among the more than 500 West Bank control points, these forces simultaneously choke off fuel supplies to Gaza; blockade its 1.5 million people; approve illegal housing projects on West Bank land; and attack Gaza City with F-16s, killing men, women and children. Sadly, this is "business as usual" for the Palestinians.
Last week's attack on the Nahal Oz fuel depot should not surprise critics in the West. Palestinians are fighting a total war waged on us by a nation that mobilizes against our people with every means at its disposal -- from its high-tech military to its economic stranglehold, from its falsified history to its judiciary that "legalizes" the infrastructure of apartheid. Resistance remains our only option. Sixty-five years ago, the courageous Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose in defense of their people. We Gazans, living in the world's largest open-air prison, can do no less.
The U.S.-Israeli alliance has sought to negate the results of the January 2006 elections, when the Palestinian people handed our party a mandate to rule. Hundreds of independent monitors, Carter among them, declared this the fairest election ever held in the Arab Middle East. Yet efforts to subvert our democratic experience include the American coup d'etat that created the new sectarian paradigm with Fatah and the continuing warfare against and enforced isolation of Gazans.
Now, finally, we have the welcome tonic of Carter saying what any independent, uncorrupted thinker should conclude: that no "peace plan," "road map" or "legacy" can succeed unless we are sitting at the negotiating table and without any preconditions.
Israel's escalation of violence since the staged Annapolis "peace conference" in November has been consistent with its policy of illegal, often deadly collective punishment -- in violation of international conventions. Israeli military strikes on Gaza have killed hundreds of Palestinians since then with unwavering White House approval; in 2007 alone the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed was 40 to 1, up from 4 to 1 during the period from 2000 to 2005.
Only three months ago I buried my son Hussam, who studied finance at college and wanted to be an accountant; he was killed by an Israeli airstrike. In 2003, I buried Khaled -- my first-born -- after an Israeli F-16 targeting me wounded my daughter and my wife and flattened the apartment building where we lived, injuring and killing many of our neighbors. Last year, my son-in-law was killed.
Hussam was only 21, but like most young men in Gaza he had grown up fast out of necessity. When I was his age, I wanted to be a surgeon; in the 1960s, we were already refugees, but there was no humiliating blockade then. But now, after decades of imprisonment, killing, statelessness and impoverishment, we ask: What peace can there be if there is no dignity first? And where does dignity come from if not from justice?
Our movement fights on because we cannot allow the foundational crime at the core of the Jewish state -- the violent expulsion from our lands and villages that made us refugees -- to slip out of world consciousness, forgotten or negotiated away. Judaism -- which gave so much to human culture in the contributions of its ancient lawgivers and modern proponents of tikkun olam -- has corrupted itself in the detour into Zionism, nationalism and apartheid.
A "peace process" with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees. Given what we have lost, it is the only basis by which we can start to be whole again.
I am eternally proud of my sons and miss them every day. I think of them as fathers everywhere, even in Israel, think of their sons -- as innocent boys, as curious students, as young men with limitless potential -- not as "gunmen" or "militants." But better that they were defenders of their people than parties to their ultimate dispossession; better that they were active in the Palestinian struggle for survival than passive witnesses to our subjugation.
History teaches us that everything is in flux. Our fight to redress the material crimes of 1948 is scarcely begun, and adversity has taught us patience. As for the Israeli state and its Spartan culture of permanent war, it is all too vulnerable to time, fatigue and demographics: In the end, it is always a question of our children and those who come after us.
By Mahmoud al-Zahar
GAZA -- President Jimmy Carter's sensible plan to visit the Hamas leadership this week brings honesty and pragmatism to the Middle East while underscoring the fact that American policy has reached its dead end. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acts as if a few alterations here and there would make the hideous straitjacket of apartheid fit better. While Rice persuades Israeli occupation forces to cut a few dozen meaningless roadblocks from among the more than 500 West Bank control points, these forces simultaneously choke off fuel supplies to Gaza; blockade its 1.5 million people; approve illegal housing projects on West Bank land; and attack Gaza City with F-16s, killing men, women and children. Sadly, this is "business as usual" for the Palestinians.
Last week's attack on the Nahal Oz fuel depot should not surprise critics in the West. Palestinians are fighting a total war waged on us by a nation that mobilizes against our people with every means at its disposal -- from its high-tech military to its economic stranglehold, from its falsified history to its judiciary that "legalizes" the infrastructure of apartheid. Resistance remains our only option. Sixty-five years ago, the courageous Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose in defense of their people. We Gazans, living in the world's largest open-air prison, can do no less.
The U.S.-Israeli alliance has sought to negate the results of the January 2006 elections, when the Palestinian people handed our party a mandate to rule. Hundreds of independent monitors, Carter among them, declared this the fairest election ever held in the Arab Middle East. Yet efforts to subvert our democratic experience include the American coup d'etat that created the new sectarian paradigm with Fatah and the continuing warfare against and enforced isolation of Gazans.
Now, finally, we have the welcome tonic of Carter saying what any independent, uncorrupted thinker should conclude: that no "peace plan," "road map" or "legacy" can succeed unless we are sitting at the negotiating table and without any preconditions.
Israel's escalation of violence since the staged Annapolis "peace conference" in November has been consistent with its policy of illegal, often deadly collective punishment -- in violation of international conventions. Israeli military strikes on Gaza have killed hundreds of Palestinians since then with unwavering White House approval; in 2007 alone the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed was 40 to 1, up from 4 to 1 during the period from 2000 to 2005.
Only three months ago I buried my son Hussam, who studied finance at college and wanted to be an accountant; he was killed by an Israeli airstrike. In 2003, I buried Khaled -- my first-born -- after an Israeli F-16 targeting me wounded my daughter and my wife and flattened the apartment building where we lived, injuring and killing many of our neighbors. Last year, my son-in-law was killed.
Hussam was only 21, but like most young men in Gaza he had grown up fast out of necessity. When I was his age, I wanted to be a surgeon; in the 1960s, we were already refugees, but there was no humiliating blockade then. But now, after decades of imprisonment, killing, statelessness and impoverishment, we ask: What peace can there be if there is no dignity first? And where does dignity come from if not from justice?
Our movement fights on because we cannot allow the foundational crime at the core of the Jewish state -- the violent expulsion from our lands and villages that made us refugees -- to slip out of world consciousness, forgotten or negotiated away. Judaism -- which gave so much to human culture in the contributions of its ancient lawgivers and modern proponents of tikkun olam -- has corrupted itself in the detour into Zionism, nationalism and apartheid.
A "peace process" with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees. Given what we have lost, it is the only basis by which we can start to be whole again.
I am eternally proud of my sons and miss them every day. I think of them as fathers everywhere, even in Israel, think of their sons -- as innocent boys, as curious students, as young men with limitless potential -- not as "gunmen" or "militants." But better that they were defenders of their people than parties to their ultimate dispossession; better that they were active in the Palestinian struggle for survival than passive witnesses to our subjugation.
History teaches us that everything is in flux. Our fight to redress the material crimes of 1948 is scarcely begun, and adversity has taught us patience. As for the Israeli state and its Spartan culture of permanent war, it is all too vulnerable to time, fatigue and demographics: In the end, it is always a question of our children and those who come after us.
Food - The Ultimate Weapon Of The Ruling Elite
Go to Original
By William Bowles
Using food as a weapon is as old as the siege but today’s barbarians have upped the anté by several orders of magnitude.
“…There are only two possible ways in which a world of 10 billion people can be averted. Either the current birth rates must come down more quickly. Or the current death rates must go up. There is no other way. There are, of course, many ways in which the death rates can go up. In a thermonuclear age, war can accomplish it very quickly and decisively. Famine and disease are nature’s ancient checks on population growth, and neither one has disappeared from the scene … To put it simply: Excessive population growth is the greatest single obstacle to the economic and social advancement of most of the societies in the developing world.” — Speech to the Club of Rome by Robert McNamara, Oct. 2, 1979
“Overpopulation and rapid demographic growth of Mexico is already today one of the major threats to the national security of the United States. Unless the U.S.-Mexico border is sealed, we will be up to our necks in Mexicans for whom we cannot find jobs.” —Robert McNamara, then World Bank president, March 19, 1982
McNamara’s thinly veiled genocidal utterances took place over thirty years ago, echoing the wealthy and the privileged’s fear of the ’great unwashed’ when ‘over-population’ was the buzzword. So not much has changed has it, we’re hearing the same, tired old messages being rolled out once again by the ruling elites and their spin doctors. McNamara’s cries of fear about being up to his neck in Mexicans is exactly same as the current bogey doing the rounds in Europe, only now they’re Africans.
Thus the current explosions in Haiti, Eygpt, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere over the rocketing price of basic foodstuffs such as cooking oil and rice prompted the BBC to describe them as first and foremost “a potential threat to Western security” (BBC News 24, 13 April, 2008), never mind the threat to human life, but then it reveals exactly where the BBC’s head is at, protecting the status quo.
To add insult to injury, the crétin Gordon Brown has the damn nerve to say,
“Rising food prices threaten to roll back progress we have made in recent years on development. For the first time in decades, the number of people facing hunger is growing.”
Progress? What planet does our glorious leader live on? Standards of living have been falling for everybody (except the rich who, as a consequence, have just gotten even richer by stealing even more from the poor), since the 1970s when the ‘neo-liberal’ agenda was initiated and not only have the poorest been the hardest hit but we’ve seen millions of the formerly ‘middle classes’ dumped unceremoniously back where they ‘belong’, with the poor. Social status doesn’t put food on the table. So much for the capitalist ‘good life’.
These are the facts: real wages in the US have fallen since the 1970s. It’s reckoned that around 40 million Americans now live under the ‘official’ poverty level, but at least they can still eat something, not so the millions of people in the so-called developing world who already immiserated by so-called free trade, have been hit with a double whammy, nay, a quintuple whammy.
Whammy #1: ‘Free Trade’
The poor countries of the world have been ‘persuaded’ that growing food for export so as to earn foreign currency which they then have to use to buy imported food (guess where from?), is better than growing food in their back yard. And to make sure they live up to their end of the ‘bargain’, under WTO ‘rules’ they get punished if they try to control imports.
Countries grew their own food which not only fed them but also created employment, now grow food and things like flowers, for export in order to ‘earn’ the precious dollar which obviously they have to spend on importing the food they once grew. Worse, the subsidized food imports wipe out what remains of indigenous agriculture, it simply can’t compete. What an insane setup! It only makes sense when you realize that the managers who setup this ‘deal’ work for BIg Business, they call the shots. If it were a ‘Mafia’ deal it would be called criminal extortion.
Of course, we in the West with our wealth subsidize the production of food, so the poor of the planet get hit with a whammy within a whammy. Not having the resources to subsidize their own food production, as the cost of importing food rises but not the price they get for exporting food to us, they are truly caught between a rock and a barren place.
And it’s the same IMF and World Bank policies which created the latest crisis to hit the poor of our planet, that are responsible for creating such an unequal relationship in the first place.
Whammy #2: Energy
And of course to grow all these crops for export needs lots of energy and lots of water, and lots of fertilizer, and lots of pesticides, all of which must be bought with precious foreign currency (and until recently, only dollars would be accepted). With oil now selling at over $113 a barrel, the cost of producing anything has shot through the roof. The winners: The Big Oil Cartels. No need to tell you who the losers are.
But the actual cost of producing the oil hasn’t risen much at all, the entire responsibility for these increases has to be placed where it belongs, on the commodities speculators and the Big Five oilcos. In other words, on all those grimy gamblers in investment corps and pension fund managers. It’s the system.
Whammy #3: ‘Bio-fuels’
The latest addition to the armoury of food used as a weapon and perhaps the most obvious example to date, is converting production from food staples to so-called bio-fuels.
For rather than us just using less energy, we buy it from the poor of the planet in the form of ‘bio-fuels’. Brilliant isn’t it. What poor country needs to produce ethanol? It has no possible use except perhaps to make moonshine.
But we knew that this would happen and everybody told our cretinous, criminal leaders what would happen. They’re too busy producing wheat for export to feed all those damn cows, cows that we turn into hamburgers for our consumption, but now, instead of producing wheat for export to make burgers, we’re producing ethanol to put in our automobiles. Either way it’s madness!
And in any case, as a leaked EU report shows, bio-fuels do nothing to halt the production of greenhouse gases (they may even increase it), the entire ‘bio-fuels’ thing is one gigantic scam, largely to do with what is the most profitable crop to grow (see ‘Industry asks for biofuels policy U-turn).
Whammy #4: Water
Fact: It takes 1,000-2,000 litres of water to produce 1 kilo of wheat
Fact: It takes 10,000-13,000 litres of water to produce 1 kilo of meat (Source: FAO)
And guess what gets produced the most, largely for Western consumption—burgers. And not surprisingly, the ‘neo-liberal’ agenda has seen the enforced privatization of water across the planet along with other key resources formerly held in communal ownership.
Whammy #5: Climate Change
Predictably, climate change impacts on those least able to deal with it, the poor. And lest we forget, the majority of the planet’s population are poor. The connectedness between everything must surely be apparent to you, the reader, the fact that messing up the biosphere the way we have been doing for the past two hundred years reverberates throughout the planet. And our political elites call themselves civilized!
Meanwhile, back in the land of the powerful, we’re busy planning for endless war in order to preserve our privilege, so even as our glorious leaders pontificate on about this or that crisis facing us, they’re spending billions on developing robots to shit bombs on the planet’s poor from a comfortable armchair some distance from the scene of the ‘action’.
“UAV Market to Top $13 Billion by 2014
Washington, D.C. (PRWEB) April 14, 2008 — The global war on terrorism has prompted the United States to pump significant amounts of money into its Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) programs, asserts Forecast International analyst Larry Dickerson.” — www.aviationtoday.com/webinars/2008_0417.html
How can anybody in his or her right mind not view these people and the entire class in whose interests they work so tirelessly, not see them not only as war criminals but as destroyers of life! These are truly barbarians in every sense of the word, for they destroy everything of beauty and value including entire countries in order to preserve their piece of the action.
No wonder the Hollywood obsession with ‘saving the planet’ but when will we see a movie about saving ourselves and our home from these predatory mass murderers?
So why is it that we turn away from the carnage ostensibly wrought in our name? After all, people give generously to so-called charities, so it’s not that people don’t care about the plight of others.
Again, I come back to the corporate/state media for surely without their active complicity in covering up the endless atrocities being committed would we stand for it? I think not, but then I’m an eternal optimist about the real nature of the human spirit once we stop fearing and start thinking and feeling.
The major reason is the media’s (never mind the politicians) failure to connect events with the underlying economics that drives them to act the way they do. Thus the ‘credit-crunch’ is so misnamed in order to hide the fact that it’s the economic and political policies of our governments in cahoots with Big Business that created the crisis in the first place (as it has all previous crises).
The ‘credit-crunch’ is merely symptomatic of a sick system that needs to be replaced poste haste.
The issue is really quite simple, as long as we have ruling elites joined at the hip to Big Capital, running the show, they will never, not in a million years entertain the idea of doing away with the present economic system—which is the cause of all our miseries—and replacing it with a saner and more modest way of earning a buck, there’s too much at stake and for so few, dammit! Only we, the so-called people can do that, they won’t even begin to change things unless we either force them to or failing that, get rid of them.
By William Bowles
Using food as a weapon is as old as the siege but today’s barbarians have upped the anté by several orders of magnitude.
“…There are only two possible ways in which a world of 10 billion people can be averted. Either the current birth rates must come down more quickly. Or the current death rates must go up. There is no other way. There are, of course, many ways in which the death rates can go up. In a thermonuclear age, war can accomplish it very quickly and decisively. Famine and disease are nature’s ancient checks on population growth, and neither one has disappeared from the scene … To put it simply: Excessive population growth is the greatest single obstacle to the economic and social advancement of most of the societies in the developing world.” — Speech to the Club of Rome by Robert McNamara, Oct. 2, 1979
“Overpopulation and rapid demographic growth of Mexico is already today one of the major threats to the national security of the United States. Unless the U.S.-Mexico border is sealed, we will be up to our necks in Mexicans for whom we cannot find jobs.” —Robert McNamara, then World Bank president, March 19, 1982
McNamara’s thinly veiled genocidal utterances took place over thirty years ago, echoing the wealthy and the privileged’s fear of the ’great unwashed’ when ‘over-population’ was the buzzword. So not much has changed has it, we’re hearing the same, tired old messages being rolled out once again by the ruling elites and their spin doctors. McNamara’s cries of fear about being up to his neck in Mexicans is exactly same as the current bogey doing the rounds in Europe, only now they’re Africans.
Thus the current explosions in Haiti, Eygpt, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere over the rocketing price of basic foodstuffs such as cooking oil and rice prompted the BBC to describe them as first and foremost “a potential threat to Western security” (BBC News 24, 13 April, 2008), never mind the threat to human life, but then it reveals exactly where the BBC’s head is at, protecting the status quo.
To add insult to injury, the crétin Gordon Brown has the damn nerve to say,
“Rising food prices threaten to roll back progress we have made in recent years on development. For the first time in decades, the number of people facing hunger is growing.”
Progress? What planet does our glorious leader live on? Standards of living have been falling for everybody (except the rich who, as a consequence, have just gotten even richer by stealing even more from the poor), since the 1970s when the ‘neo-liberal’ agenda was initiated and not only have the poorest been the hardest hit but we’ve seen millions of the formerly ‘middle classes’ dumped unceremoniously back where they ‘belong’, with the poor. Social status doesn’t put food on the table. So much for the capitalist ‘good life’.
These are the facts: real wages in the US have fallen since the 1970s. It’s reckoned that around 40 million Americans now live under the ‘official’ poverty level, but at least they can still eat something, not so the millions of people in the so-called developing world who already immiserated by so-called free trade, have been hit with a double whammy, nay, a quintuple whammy.
Whammy #1: ‘Free Trade’
The poor countries of the world have been ‘persuaded’ that growing food for export so as to earn foreign currency which they then have to use to buy imported food (guess where from?), is better than growing food in their back yard. And to make sure they live up to their end of the ‘bargain’, under WTO ‘rules’ they get punished if they try to control imports.
Countries grew their own food which not only fed them but also created employment, now grow food and things like flowers, for export in order to ‘earn’ the precious dollar which obviously they have to spend on importing the food they once grew. Worse, the subsidized food imports wipe out what remains of indigenous agriculture, it simply can’t compete. What an insane setup! It only makes sense when you realize that the managers who setup this ‘deal’ work for BIg Business, they call the shots. If it were a ‘Mafia’ deal it would be called criminal extortion.
Of course, we in the West with our wealth subsidize the production of food, so the poor of the planet get hit with a whammy within a whammy. Not having the resources to subsidize their own food production, as the cost of importing food rises but not the price they get for exporting food to us, they are truly caught between a rock and a barren place.
And it’s the same IMF and World Bank policies which created the latest crisis to hit the poor of our planet, that are responsible for creating such an unequal relationship in the first place.
Whammy #2: Energy
And of course to grow all these crops for export needs lots of energy and lots of water, and lots of fertilizer, and lots of pesticides, all of which must be bought with precious foreign currency (and until recently, only dollars would be accepted). With oil now selling at over $113 a barrel, the cost of producing anything has shot through the roof. The winners: The Big Oil Cartels. No need to tell you who the losers are.
But the actual cost of producing the oil hasn’t risen much at all, the entire responsibility for these increases has to be placed where it belongs, on the commodities speculators and the Big Five oilcos. In other words, on all those grimy gamblers in investment corps and pension fund managers. It’s the system.
Whammy #3: ‘Bio-fuels’
The latest addition to the armoury of food used as a weapon and perhaps the most obvious example to date, is converting production from food staples to so-called bio-fuels.
For rather than us just using less energy, we buy it from the poor of the planet in the form of ‘bio-fuels’. Brilliant isn’t it. What poor country needs to produce ethanol? It has no possible use except perhaps to make moonshine.
But we knew that this would happen and everybody told our cretinous, criminal leaders what would happen. They’re too busy producing wheat for export to feed all those damn cows, cows that we turn into hamburgers for our consumption, but now, instead of producing wheat for export to make burgers, we’re producing ethanol to put in our automobiles. Either way it’s madness!
And in any case, as a leaked EU report shows, bio-fuels do nothing to halt the production of greenhouse gases (they may even increase it), the entire ‘bio-fuels’ thing is one gigantic scam, largely to do with what is the most profitable crop to grow (see ‘Industry asks for biofuels policy U-turn).
Whammy #4: Water
Fact: It takes 1,000-2,000 litres of water to produce 1 kilo of wheat
Fact: It takes 10,000-13,000 litres of water to produce 1 kilo of meat (Source: FAO)
And guess what gets produced the most, largely for Western consumption—burgers. And not surprisingly, the ‘neo-liberal’ agenda has seen the enforced privatization of water across the planet along with other key resources formerly held in communal ownership.
Whammy #5: Climate Change
Predictably, climate change impacts on those least able to deal with it, the poor. And lest we forget, the majority of the planet’s population are poor. The connectedness between everything must surely be apparent to you, the reader, the fact that messing up the biosphere the way we have been doing for the past two hundred years reverberates throughout the planet. And our political elites call themselves civilized!
Meanwhile, back in the land of the powerful, we’re busy planning for endless war in order to preserve our privilege, so even as our glorious leaders pontificate on about this or that crisis facing us, they’re spending billions on developing robots to shit bombs on the planet’s poor from a comfortable armchair some distance from the scene of the ‘action’.
“UAV Market to Top $13 Billion by 2014
Washington, D.C. (PRWEB) April 14, 2008 — The global war on terrorism has prompted the United States to pump significant amounts of money into its Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) programs, asserts Forecast International analyst Larry Dickerson.” — www.aviationtoday.com/webinars/2008_0417.html
How can anybody in his or her right mind not view these people and the entire class in whose interests they work so tirelessly, not see them not only as war criminals but as destroyers of life! These are truly barbarians in every sense of the word, for they destroy everything of beauty and value including entire countries in order to preserve their piece of the action.
No wonder the Hollywood obsession with ‘saving the planet’ but when will we see a movie about saving ourselves and our home from these predatory mass murderers?
So why is it that we turn away from the carnage ostensibly wrought in our name? After all, people give generously to so-called charities, so it’s not that people don’t care about the plight of others.
Again, I come back to the corporate/state media for surely without their active complicity in covering up the endless atrocities being committed would we stand for it? I think not, but then I’m an eternal optimist about the real nature of the human spirit once we stop fearing and start thinking and feeling.
The major reason is the media’s (never mind the politicians) failure to connect events with the underlying economics that drives them to act the way they do. Thus the ‘credit-crunch’ is so misnamed in order to hide the fact that it’s the economic and political policies of our governments in cahoots with Big Business that created the crisis in the first place (as it has all previous crises).
The ‘credit-crunch’ is merely symptomatic of a sick system that needs to be replaced poste haste.
The issue is really quite simple, as long as we have ruling elites joined at the hip to Big Capital, running the show, they will never, not in a million years entertain the idea of doing away with the present economic system—which is the cause of all our miseries—and replacing it with a saner and more modest way of earning a buck, there’s too much at stake and for so few, dammit! Only we, the so-called people can do that, they won’t even begin to change things unless we either force them to or failing that, get rid of them.
Carter's Peace Mission
Go to Original
By Mike Whitney
There's way out of this mess that doesn't involve slaughtering each others children
Jimmy Carter arrived in Syria today in an effort to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. He is scheduled to meet with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Hamas political leader Khaled Meshal. Carter has been severely criticized in the western media for meeting with Hamas and was snubbed by Israeli leaders during his stay in Israel. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu, all refused to meet with the former president. They believe that Carter’s trip undermines Israel’s current policy towards the Palestinians and will force them to negotiate with a group they think is a terrorist organization.
Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 and has devoted his life to spreading democracy, human rights, and ending poverty. He has no interest in upstaging the Bush or Olmert. His only interest is stopping the bloodshed and ensuring security for both Israelis and Palestinians.
Carter has been a good friend to Israel and doesn’t deserve the chilly treatment he received. In 1978 Carter brought Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to Camp David for negotiations which ended in a historic treaty. When negotiations stalled, Carter rushed to Cairo and helped Sadat and Begin work out a compromise. That ended the state of war between Eqypt and Israel and led to the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Sinai Peninsula. The treaty has endured for 30 years. Israel is a safer place because of Jimmy Carter.
The official Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is both brutal and irrational. Hamas won in elections that were monitored by the international community and were declared "free and fair". They are the legitimate government in the occupied territories. Israel needs to accept that fact and move on. The real reason that Israel does not want to negotiate with Hamas has nothing to do with terrorism. Olmert has made this clear in an interview he gave as Minister of Industry and Trade in 2003:
"We are approaching the point where more and more Palestinians will say: we have been won over. We agree with [National Union leader Avigdor] Lieberman. There is no room for two states between the Jordan and the sea. All that we want is the right to vote. The day they do that, is the day we lose everything. Even when they carry out terror, it is very difficult for us to persuade the world of the justice of our cause. We see this on a daily basis. All the more so when there is only one demand: an equal right to vote....The thought that the struggle against us will be headed by liberal Jewish organizations who shouldered the burden of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa scares me."
Olmert makes important point, that Israel feels that its future as a Jewish state is threatened by a "demographic time-bomb"; that if they fail to impose their own unilateral settlement on the Palestinians---by seizing land and creating de facto borders--Jews will eventually become a minority in Israel. This’s the fear that’s driving the policy, not racism or terrorism.
Olmert adds:
"Had I believed that there is a real chance of reaching an agreement, I would have recommended making an effort. But that is not the case. The choice we will be facing will be between less than a Geneva Accord -- which means a return to the 1967 border, the crushing of Jerusalem, and a struggle to our last breath to ward off the international pressure to absorb hundreds of thousands of refugees into the shrinking State of Israel -- and a comprehensive unilateral move, and I stress the word comprehensive. Through such a move we will define our borders, which under no circumstances will be identical to the Green Line and will include Jerusalem as a united city under our sovereignty."
Olmert is merely implementing Ariel Sharon’s policy of "disengagement" which cuts off all real dialog with the Palestinians and imposes a unilateral settlement. That’s why Carter has been treated so brusquely; his trip just draws attention to the intransigence of Israeli policy.
On Friday, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Hamas Foreign Minister, Mahmoud al-Zahar which clearly articulates the position of Hamas. It is well worth reading in its entirety. Al Zahar, whose 21 year old son, Hussam, was tragically killed three months ago in an Israeli air-strike, was studying finance and planned to become and accountant. Al Zahar lost another son and a son in law in 2003.
Al Zahar: "President Jimmy Carter’s sensible plan to visit the Hamas leadership this week brings honesty and pragmatism to the Middle East while underscoring the fact that American policy has reached its dead end. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice acts as if a few alterations here and there would make the hideous straitjacket of apartheid fit better. While Rice persuades Israeli occupation forces to cut a few dozen meaningless roadblocks from among the more than 500 West Bank control points, these forces simultaneously choke off fuel supplies to Gaza; blockade its 1.5 million people; approve illegal housing projects on West Bank land; and attack Gaza City with F-16’s, killing men, women and children. Sadly, this is "business as usual" for the Palestinians.
Last week’s attack on the Nahal Oz fuel depot should not surprise critics in the West. Palestinians are fighting a total war waged on us by a nation that mobilizes against our people with every means at its disposal -- from its high-tech military to its economic stranglehold, from its falsified history to its judiciary that "legalizes" the infrastructure of apartheid. Resistance remains our only option. Sixty-five years ago, the courageous Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose in defense of their people. We Gazans, living in the world’s largest open-air prison, can do no less.
Al Zahar claims that Israel has tried to negate the results of what was called "the fairest election ever held in the Arab Middle East" and used it to wage a new war against the people of Gaza; a war that was approved by the Bush White House.
"Now, finally, we have the welcome tonic of Carter saying what any independent, uncorrupted thinker should conclude: that no "peace plan," "road map" or "legacy" can succeed unless we are sitting at the negotiating table and without any preconditions."
Al-Zahar then presents a litany of Palestinian grievances mixing in a bit of the conflict’s bitter history:
"Our movement fights on because we cannot allow the foundational crime at the core of the Jewish state -- the violent expulsion from our lands and villages that made us refugees -- to slip out of world consciousness, forgotten or negotiated away. Judaism -- which gave so much to human culture in the contributions of its ancient lawgivers and modern proponents of tikkun olam -- has corrupted itself in the detour into Zionism, nationalism and apartheid."
A "peace process" with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees. Given what we have lost, it is the only basis by which we can start to be whole again." (Washington Post)
These are difficult issues and will require intensive negotiations before they can be resolved. But the present policy provides no path for resolution or reconcilliation; just more animosity and bloodshed. The Bush-Olmert plan is a failure; the killing has only increased.
Carter’s trip is a reminder that there’s still a way out of this mess that doesn’t involve slaughtering each others children.
By Mike Whitney
There's way out of this mess that doesn't involve slaughtering each others children
Jimmy Carter arrived in Syria today in an effort to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. He is scheduled to meet with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Hamas political leader Khaled Meshal. Carter has been severely criticized in the western media for meeting with Hamas and was snubbed by Israeli leaders during his stay in Israel. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu, all refused to meet with the former president. They believe that Carter’s trip undermines Israel’s current policy towards the Palestinians and will force them to negotiate with a group they think is a terrorist organization.
Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 and has devoted his life to spreading democracy, human rights, and ending poverty. He has no interest in upstaging the Bush or Olmert. His only interest is stopping the bloodshed and ensuring security for both Israelis and Palestinians.
Carter has been a good friend to Israel and doesn’t deserve the chilly treatment he received. In 1978 Carter brought Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to Camp David for negotiations which ended in a historic treaty. When negotiations stalled, Carter rushed to Cairo and helped Sadat and Begin work out a compromise. That ended the state of war between Eqypt and Israel and led to the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Sinai Peninsula. The treaty has endured for 30 years. Israel is a safer place because of Jimmy Carter.
The official Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is both brutal and irrational. Hamas won in elections that were monitored by the international community and were declared "free and fair". They are the legitimate government in the occupied territories. Israel needs to accept that fact and move on. The real reason that Israel does not want to negotiate with Hamas has nothing to do with terrorism. Olmert has made this clear in an interview he gave as Minister of Industry and Trade in 2003:
"We are approaching the point where more and more Palestinians will say: we have been won over. We agree with [National Union leader Avigdor] Lieberman. There is no room for two states between the Jordan and the sea. All that we want is the right to vote. The day they do that, is the day we lose everything. Even when they carry out terror, it is very difficult for us to persuade the world of the justice of our cause. We see this on a daily basis. All the more so when there is only one demand: an equal right to vote....The thought that the struggle against us will be headed by liberal Jewish organizations who shouldered the burden of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa scares me."
Olmert makes important point, that Israel feels that its future as a Jewish state is threatened by a "demographic time-bomb"; that if they fail to impose their own unilateral settlement on the Palestinians---by seizing land and creating de facto borders--Jews will eventually become a minority in Israel. This’s the fear that’s driving the policy, not racism or terrorism.
Olmert adds:
"Had I believed that there is a real chance of reaching an agreement, I would have recommended making an effort. But that is not the case. The choice we will be facing will be between less than a Geneva Accord -- which means a return to the 1967 border, the crushing of Jerusalem, and a struggle to our last breath to ward off the international pressure to absorb hundreds of thousands of refugees into the shrinking State of Israel -- and a comprehensive unilateral move, and I stress the word comprehensive. Through such a move we will define our borders, which under no circumstances will be identical to the Green Line and will include Jerusalem as a united city under our sovereignty."
Olmert is merely implementing Ariel Sharon’s policy of "disengagement" which cuts off all real dialog with the Palestinians and imposes a unilateral settlement. That’s why Carter has been treated so brusquely; his trip just draws attention to the intransigence of Israeli policy.
On Friday, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Hamas Foreign Minister, Mahmoud al-Zahar which clearly articulates the position of Hamas. It is well worth reading in its entirety. Al Zahar, whose 21 year old son, Hussam, was tragically killed three months ago in an Israeli air-strike, was studying finance and planned to become and accountant. Al Zahar lost another son and a son in law in 2003.
Al Zahar: "President Jimmy Carter’s sensible plan to visit the Hamas leadership this week brings honesty and pragmatism to the Middle East while underscoring the fact that American policy has reached its dead end. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice acts as if a few alterations here and there would make the hideous straitjacket of apartheid fit better. While Rice persuades Israeli occupation forces to cut a few dozen meaningless roadblocks from among the more than 500 West Bank control points, these forces simultaneously choke off fuel supplies to Gaza; blockade its 1.5 million people; approve illegal housing projects on West Bank land; and attack Gaza City with F-16’s, killing men, women and children. Sadly, this is "business as usual" for the Palestinians.
Last week’s attack on the Nahal Oz fuel depot should not surprise critics in the West. Palestinians are fighting a total war waged on us by a nation that mobilizes against our people with every means at its disposal -- from its high-tech military to its economic stranglehold, from its falsified history to its judiciary that "legalizes" the infrastructure of apartheid. Resistance remains our only option. Sixty-five years ago, the courageous Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose in defense of their people. We Gazans, living in the world’s largest open-air prison, can do no less.
Al Zahar claims that Israel has tried to negate the results of what was called "the fairest election ever held in the Arab Middle East" and used it to wage a new war against the people of Gaza; a war that was approved by the Bush White House.
"Now, finally, we have the welcome tonic of Carter saying what any independent, uncorrupted thinker should conclude: that no "peace plan," "road map" or "legacy" can succeed unless we are sitting at the negotiating table and without any preconditions."
Al-Zahar then presents a litany of Palestinian grievances mixing in a bit of the conflict’s bitter history:
"Our movement fights on because we cannot allow the foundational crime at the core of the Jewish state -- the violent expulsion from our lands and villages that made us refugees -- to slip out of world consciousness, forgotten or negotiated away. Judaism -- which gave so much to human culture in the contributions of its ancient lawgivers and modern proponents of tikkun olam -- has corrupted itself in the detour into Zionism, nationalism and apartheid."
A "peace process" with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees. Given what we have lost, it is the only basis by which we can start to be whole again." (Washington Post)
These are difficult issues and will require intensive negotiations before they can be resolved. But the present policy provides no path for resolution or reconcilliation; just more animosity and bloodshed. The Bush-Olmert plan is a failure; the killing has only increased.
Carter’s trip is a reminder that there’s still a way out of this mess that doesn’t involve slaughtering each others children.
Truth as a Causality of War
Go to Original
By Dan Glazebrook
Robert Fisk has a well-earned reputation as one of the most honest and hard hitting foreign correspondents in the British media.
He has worked in Northern Ireland, where he exposed the presence of the SAS in the mid-1970s, as well as Bosnia, Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon. It was here, as a witness to the immediate aftermath of the Israeli-organised Sabra and Shatila massacre of 2000 Palestinian refugees, that his journalism took on its current form: angry, passionate, and as he puts it “partial on the side of the victims” – a style of journalism which, unfortunately, is not shared by many of his colleagues in the profession. In the midst of a torrent of lies and propaganda emanating from our media about British and US policy on the Middle East, Fisk’s writings are a breath of fresh air – although the hellish reality he depicts does not always make for pleasant reading.
When I met him in Christchurch College, sandwiched between an earlier speaking engagement in Bristol, and a lecture at the Oxford Literary Festival – seemingly without a moment’s rest – we began by talking about the role of journalism in times of war. Firstly, I wanted to know, does journalism, by sanitising or justifying war, also have a role in perpetuating it?
“There are several things. First of all, there’s the inability of many journalists from the United States to actually tell the truth about the Israel-Palestine situation – hence, occupied territories are called disputed territories, the wall is called the security barrier, a colony or settlement is called a neighbourhood or an outpost. Which means that if you see a Palestinian chucking a stone, if it’s about an occupation, you can understand it, but if it’s about a dispute, which you can presumably settle over a cup of tea, then obviously the Palestinians are generically violent. So you demean one side in this appalling conflict.
Then you have this business where television will not show what we see, for reasons of so-called “bad taste”. I remember once being on the phone to a TV editor in London when Aljazeera were asked to feed some tape of children killed and wounded by British shell fire in Basra, and the guy started saying, “there’s no point feeding us this, we can’t show this”…the first excuse was, “people will be having their tea, so we can’t put it on”, and then it was, “this is sort of pornography, we don’t show this”. And it ended up – it is mesmeric to listen to this stuff - the last thing was “We have to show respect for the dead”. So we don’t show any respect for them when they are alive, we blow them to bits, and then we show respect for them…So because of this - and these bloodless sandpits with ex-generals pontificating - it becomes a game; you start propagating this idea that war is primarily about victory or defeat - when in fact, it’s about death, and the infliction of massive pain.
I was in Iraq in 1991, when the British and Americans had been bombing one of the highways. There were women and children dead and in bits, and all these dogs came out of the desert and started eating them…If you saw what I saw you would never ever think of supporting war of any kind against anyone again.
But of course, the politicians – our leaders – are very happy that these pictures are not shown, because they make war more attractive, less painful.”
Do the British public never get to see this, more realistic, picture of war?
“Look, if an Iraqi soldier is obliging enough to die by the side of the road in a romantic pose, and you can get him against the skyline without any boiled flesh - you know, “the price of war: an Iraqi soldier lies dead”, you know the sort of caption by now - you can do that.” But that’s about it.
Journalistic standards are degenerating rapidly in other areas too. Watching the news two weeks ago, I was shocked to see Yassin Nassari and Abdul Patel referred to by the BBC as ‘terrorists’ – not “alleged” or “suspected”, but straight down the line “terrorists” - when the only charges they faced related to “possession of materials” (Islamist literature and video), and they had not even been accused of planning terrorist attacks, let alone carrying any out. Has ‘terrorism’ become a ‘catch-all’ phrase?
“I’ve seen cases in the United States where the evidence of terrorism is a copy of a Lebanese newspaper.
I’ve just had an interesting example of what’s going on. I was lecturing in Ottawa to 600 Muslim Canadians, and I said to them “you are absolutely right to exercise your right to free speech to attack the United States and Israel when they kill people, commit torture, occupy other people’s lands- but why don’t I ever hear you condemning the regimes in Egypt, Damascus, Libya and so on?” Silence. I couldn’t work it out.”
So what was going on? “Later, I was driving across Canada with two Muslims and they told me. In Canada, if they speak out against these regimes – the Syrian regime, or the Egyptian – what happens is that these various countries have their own mukhabarat people in Canada – security people – who will then pass home the message that certain people are speaking up against Mubarak, Assad, or whoever. Then, under the new friendship between intelligence services, the Syrian or Egyptian regime tells the Canadians that there is a potential terrorist – anti-regime, right? – and CSIS, the Canadian version of the FBI, starts putting taps on them. So, by exercising their freedom of speech against dictatorships, they end up being suspected of terrorism by their new country of citizenship. So the result is, at the end of the day, they are silent. As I would be too, in their position.”
What about the silence of the rest of us, who are not so easily excused? With ever dwindling numbers on the anti-war demonstrations, have we forgotten what is really going on in those countries suffering Western “liberation”?
“You keep having to say to people in London, “but it’s real” – because most people don’t have any experience of war in the West anymore. There isn’t a single one of our political leaders with any experience of war. Bush dodged it, Cheney dodged it, Powell was in Vietnam, but he’s gone. Hollywood is their experience of war. And when you send people off to war, and your experience is Hollywood, you might be a bit shocked when they start dying. At the end of the day, it isn’t real to them.”
But it’s all too real to the inhabitants of the Middle East, who have been subject to Western sponsored blitzkrieg and massacre for decades – from the ongoing Nakbah (Catastrophe) against the Palestinians, through Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the US arming of Iraq in the 8 year war against Iran, the 1991 Gulf ‘War’, and subsequent economic genocide of UN sanctions on Iraq – not to mention the West’s backing for the dictatorships in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. All of this has been witnessed first hand by Fisk, who believes the Muslim world has shown incredible restraint in the face of all this oppression: “I’m surprised 9-11 didn’t happen before, that it took that long. Now, whether that is because it took a lot of planning, I don’t know, but I am amazed that you can knock on a front door in the West Bank and not have them slap you in the face – instead of that, they offer you in for coffee and a meal. Can you imagine putting it the other way around – if we were being bombed and occupied by Arab armies and a friendly Arab reporter turned to chat, I don’t know if I would open the door; would you?”
The true extent of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan has been masked by the massive use of mercenaries – hidden from the troop figures. Estimates suggest 1000 have been killed in Iraq alone. He is one of very few journalists to call them by their name, as opposed to the “contractor” euphemism: “just as the wall is called a fence instead of a wall, and it’s a neighbourhood not a settlement, so these are now contractors rather than mercenaries. I’ve always called them mercenaries. When they say two ‘contractors’ have been murdered, the idea that they are going around in an armoured humvee loaded with weapons doesn’t come into the brain pod immediately does it?” What is his experience with these mercenaries?
“I noticed that in 2003, they were popping up with belts loaded with machine gun bullets in the hotel I was in. It was obvious they were going to attract attacks like honey. So I went to some of them and said “look, for god’s sakes, can’t you just keep your weapons in your room?” - in those days, you weren’t being attacked in the street - “you’re making this out to be a barracks – you’re endangering yourselves and you’re endangering us.” And this guy walked up to me with two rifles – he’d overheard the conversation – and he said, “well when you’re in trouble mate, don’t come asking me for help”. I said I don’t want your fucking help, I want you to leave.”
But they didn’t leave. And the big excuse for staying now is, of course, the looming spectre of civil war. Is there, then, a functional value to the occupation of the “civil war theory”?
“The first man I ever heard mention the danger of civil war in Iraq was Dan Semor, spokesman for the occupying power in the Green Zone in August 2003. No one had ever heard about the danger of civil war before, no Iraqi ever mentioned it. I remember thinking, what are they trying to do, frighten the Iraqis into obedience?
I’m not suggesting that the American military are trying to stir up sectarian strife, but it’s not impossible that there are certain institutions operating either at one remove – i.e. with Iraqis or not - in order to get militias to fight each other rather than fight the Americans. The French did that in Algeria – it’s a fact. I don’t know if the same thing is happening in Iraq, but given everything else that’s gone on – murder, torture, etc – who knows?
But you don’t actually have to set off car bombs to do this. Look at the way we as journalists publish all these maps, you know – Shi’ites at the bottom, Sunnis in the middle, Kurds at the top. The British did the same in Belfast - green for Catholics, Orange for protestants, medium sherry colour for mixed areas, for people who are inconsiderate enough to marry across the religious divide. But we don’t, obviously, do these ethnic maps about Birmingham or Bradford or Washington. I could draw you an ethnic map of Toronto, with the suburb of Mississauga green for Muslim. But they wouldn’t print it. Because in our superior, civilised Western society, we don’t acknowledge it. In their society, we spend our time pointing it out to them. I was in New York some months ago, and on the front cover of Time was “How to tell a Sunni from a Shia.” Can you imagine it? And one of the ways was look at the licence plate of the car. So, you know, we contribute to civil strife, by constantly saying, “look at the guy in the next village”. So you don’t need to set up car bombs to divide people, you can do it quite successfully just by constant repetition - civil war, Shiites, militias, Sunnis, power. You create the narrative. And then in due course, people fall into line because it is the only one they get.
I once asked the brother of s Sunni dentist who had been shot dead, “So, will there be civil war?” He replied, “Why do you people want us to have a civil war? I’m married to a Shi’ite – do you want me to kill my wife?” He said, “We’re not a sectarian society, we’re a tribal society – the Duleimis have got lots of Sunnis and Shias.” And that was a response, you see, to an idea that had been set off by Dan Semor, the official spokesman for the occupying power.”
Unfortunately, the sectarian lines are becoming clearer in Iraq by the day, with the US army building walls to create separate ghettoes in Baghdad, and with the Kurdish north now negotiating its own oil deals. The Western imposed solution for Bosnia was full-scale ethnic partition. Will this be the future of Iraq?
“Bosnia was in Europe, so eventually, we wanted to switch the war off. Iraq is a different matter – we’re in Iraq for oil. If the national product of Iraq was asparagus, we would not be there, I promise. There are parallels with Bosnia, not least indifference towards the Muslim victims – we did nothing for them until the war had consumed a quarter of a million of them – and we don’t care about the Iraqis. But I think there are big differences with Bosnia. There are more parallels, I think, between the NATO-Serb Kosovo war, because that is where we got people used to the idea that bombing civilian trains on railway bridges, bombing hospitals, bombing TV stations was OK. So when we hit lots of civilians in Iraq, it was “well, we were doing that back in Serbia, weren’t we?”. We bombed Aljazeera in Kabul, they bombed Aljazeera in Baghdad, which was not even an Iraqi station. So I think the Kosovo war started off the acceptability of doing these things.”
Whatever the occupier’s plans for Iraq, and whatever barbarities it imposes, one thing is for sure – the future of that country is not entirely in their hands. Even with their full scale promotion of sectarian violence in 1950s Algeria, the French were still forced to leave. The dilemma for the US in Iraq, as Fisk puts it, is that “they must leave, they will leave, but they can’t leave – that is the equation that turns sand into blood”. For those who want to understand this process, and what it means in human terms, rather than simply be lied to about it, Robert Fisk’s reporting is a good place to start.
By Dan Glazebrook
Robert Fisk has a well-earned reputation as one of the most honest and hard hitting foreign correspondents in the British media.
He has worked in Northern Ireland, where he exposed the presence of the SAS in the mid-1970s, as well as Bosnia, Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon. It was here, as a witness to the immediate aftermath of the Israeli-organised Sabra and Shatila massacre of 2000 Palestinian refugees, that his journalism took on its current form: angry, passionate, and as he puts it “partial on the side of the victims” – a style of journalism which, unfortunately, is not shared by many of his colleagues in the profession. In the midst of a torrent of lies and propaganda emanating from our media about British and US policy on the Middle East, Fisk’s writings are a breath of fresh air – although the hellish reality he depicts does not always make for pleasant reading.
When I met him in Christchurch College, sandwiched between an earlier speaking engagement in Bristol, and a lecture at the Oxford Literary Festival – seemingly without a moment’s rest – we began by talking about the role of journalism in times of war. Firstly, I wanted to know, does journalism, by sanitising or justifying war, also have a role in perpetuating it?
“There are several things. First of all, there’s the inability of many journalists from the United States to actually tell the truth about the Israel-Palestine situation – hence, occupied territories are called disputed territories, the wall is called the security barrier, a colony or settlement is called a neighbourhood or an outpost. Which means that if you see a Palestinian chucking a stone, if it’s about an occupation, you can understand it, but if it’s about a dispute, which you can presumably settle over a cup of tea, then obviously the Palestinians are generically violent. So you demean one side in this appalling conflict.
Then you have this business where television will not show what we see, for reasons of so-called “bad taste”. I remember once being on the phone to a TV editor in London when Aljazeera were asked to feed some tape of children killed and wounded by British shell fire in Basra, and the guy started saying, “there’s no point feeding us this, we can’t show this”…the first excuse was, “people will be having their tea, so we can’t put it on”, and then it was, “this is sort of pornography, we don’t show this”. And it ended up – it is mesmeric to listen to this stuff - the last thing was “We have to show respect for the dead”. So we don’t show any respect for them when they are alive, we blow them to bits, and then we show respect for them…So because of this - and these bloodless sandpits with ex-generals pontificating - it becomes a game; you start propagating this idea that war is primarily about victory or defeat - when in fact, it’s about death, and the infliction of massive pain.
I was in Iraq in 1991, when the British and Americans had been bombing one of the highways. There were women and children dead and in bits, and all these dogs came out of the desert and started eating them…If you saw what I saw you would never ever think of supporting war of any kind against anyone again.
But of course, the politicians – our leaders – are very happy that these pictures are not shown, because they make war more attractive, less painful.”
Do the British public never get to see this, more realistic, picture of war?
“Look, if an Iraqi soldier is obliging enough to die by the side of the road in a romantic pose, and you can get him against the skyline without any boiled flesh - you know, “the price of war: an Iraqi soldier lies dead”, you know the sort of caption by now - you can do that.” But that’s about it.
Journalistic standards are degenerating rapidly in other areas too. Watching the news two weeks ago, I was shocked to see Yassin Nassari and Abdul Patel referred to by the BBC as ‘terrorists’ – not “alleged” or “suspected”, but straight down the line “terrorists” - when the only charges they faced related to “possession of materials” (Islamist literature and video), and they had not even been accused of planning terrorist attacks, let alone carrying any out. Has ‘terrorism’ become a ‘catch-all’ phrase?
“I’ve seen cases in the United States where the evidence of terrorism is a copy of a Lebanese newspaper.
I’ve just had an interesting example of what’s going on. I was lecturing in Ottawa to 600 Muslim Canadians, and I said to them “you are absolutely right to exercise your right to free speech to attack the United States and Israel when they kill people, commit torture, occupy other people’s lands- but why don’t I ever hear you condemning the regimes in Egypt, Damascus, Libya and so on?” Silence. I couldn’t work it out.”
So what was going on? “Later, I was driving across Canada with two Muslims and they told me. In Canada, if they speak out against these regimes – the Syrian regime, or the Egyptian – what happens is that these various countries have their own mukhabarat people in Canada – security people – who will then pass home the message that certain people are speaking up against Mubarak, Assad, or whoever. Then, under the new friendship between intelligence services, the Syrian or Egyptian regime tells the Canadians that there is a potential terrorist – anti-regime, right? – and CSIS, the Canadian version of the FBI, starts putting taps on them. So, by exercising their freedom of speech against dictatorships, they end up being suspected of terrorism by their new country of citizenship. So the result is, at the end of the day, they are silent. As I would be too, in their position.”
What about the silence of the rest of us, who are not so easily excused? With ever dwindling numbers on the anti-war demonstrations, have we forgotten what is really going on in those countries suffering Western “liberation”?
“You keep having to say to people in London, “but it’s real” – because most people don’t have any experience of war in the West anymore. There isn’t a single one of our political leaders with any experience of war. Bush dodged it, Cheney dodged it, Powell was in Vietnam, but he’s gone. Hollywood is their experience of war. And when you send people off to war, and your experience is Hollywood, you might be a bit shocked when they start dying. At the end of the day, it isn’t real to them.”
But it’s all too real to the inhabitants of the Middle East, who have been subject to Western sponsored blitzkrieg and massacre for decades – from the ongoing Nakbah (Catastrophe) against the Palestinians, through Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the US arming of Iraq in the 8 year war against Iran, the 1991 Gulf ‘War’, and subsequent economic genocide of UN sanctions on Iraq – not to mention the West’s backing for the dictatorships in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. All of this has been witnessed first hand by Fisk, who believes the Muslim world has shown incredible restraint in the face of all this oppression: “I’m surprised 9-11 didn’t happen before, that it took that long. Now, whether that is because it took a lot of planning, I don’t know, but I am amazed that you can knock on a front door in the West Bank and not have them slap you in the face – instead of that, they offer you in for coffee and a meal. Can you imagine putting it the other way around – if we were being bombed and occupied by Arab armies and a friendly Arab reporter turned to chat, I don’t know if I would open the door; would you?”
The true extent of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan has been masked by the massive use of mercenaries – hidden from the troop figures. Estimates suggest 1000 have been killed in Iraq alone. He is one of very few journalists to call them by their name, as opposed to the “contractor” euphemism: “just as the wall is called a fence instead of a wall, and it’s a neighbourhood not a settlement, so these are now contractors rather than mercenaries. I’ve always called them mercenaries. When they say two ‘contractors’ have been murdered, the idea that they are going around in an armoured humvee loaded with weapons doesn’t come into the brain pod immediately does it?” What is his experience with these mercenaries?
“I noticed that in 2003, they were popping up with belts loaded with machine gun bullets in the hotel I was in. It was obvious they were going to attract attacks like honey. So I went to some of them and said “look, for god’s sakes, can’t you just keep your weapons in your room?” - in those days, you weren’t being attacked in the street - “you’re making this out to be a barracks – you’re endangering yourselves and you’re endangering us.” And this guy walked up to me with two rifles – he’d overheard the conversation – and he said, “well when you’re in trouble mate, don’t come asking me for help”. I said I don’t want your fucking help, I want you to leave.”
But they didn’t leave. And the big excuse for staying now is, of course, the looming spectre of civil war. Is there, then, a functional value to the occupation of the “civil war theory”?
“The first man I ever heard mention the danger of civil war in Iraq was Dan Semor, spokesman for the occupying power in the Green Zone in August 2003. No one had ever heard about the danger of civil war before, no Iraqi ever mentioned it. I remember thinking, what are they trying to do, frighten the Iraqis into obedience?
I’m not suggesting that the American military are trying to stir up sectarian strife, but it’s not impossible that there are certain institutions operating either at one remove – i.e. with Iraqis or not - in order to get militias to fight each other rather than fight the Americans. The French did that in Algeria – it’s a fact. I don’t know if the same thing is happening in Iraq, but given everything else that’s gone on – murder, torture, etc – who knows?
But you don’t actually have to set off car bombs to do this. Look at the way we as journalists publish all these maps, you know – Shi’ites at the bottom, Sunnis in the middle, Kurds at the top. The British did the same in Belfast - green for Catholics, Orange for protestants, medium sherry colour for mixed areas, for people who are inconsiderate enough to marry across the religious divide. But we don’t, obviously, do these ethnic maps about Birmingham or Bradford or Washington. I could draw you an ethnic map of Toronto, with the suburb of Mississauga green for Muslim. But they wouldn’t print it. Because in our superior, civilised Western society, we don’t acknowledge it. In their society, we spend our time pointing it out to them. I was in New York some months ago, and on the front cover of Time was “How to tell a Sunni from a Shia.” Can you imagine it? And one of the ways was look at the licence plate of the car. So, you know, we contribute to civil strife, by constantly saying, “look at the guy in the next village”. So you don’t need to set up car bombs to divide people, you can do it quite successfully just by constant repetition - civil war, Shiites, militias, Sunnis, power. You create the narrative. And then in due course, people fall into line because it is the only one they get.
I once asked the brother of s Sunni dentist who had been shot dead, “So, will there be civil war?” He replied, “Why do you people want us to have a civil war? I’m married to a Shi’ite – do you want me to kill my wife?” He said, “We’re not a sectarian society, we’re a tribal society – the Duleimis have got lots of Sunnis and Shias.” And that was a response, you see, to an idea that had been set off by Dan Semor, the official spokesman for the occupying power.”
Unfortunately, the sectarian lines are becoming clearer in Iraq by the day, with the US army building walls to create separate ghettoes in Baghdad, and with the Kurdish north now negotiating its own oil deals. The Western imposed solution for Bosnia was full-scale ethnic partition. Will this be the future of Iraq?
“Bosnia was in Europe, so eventually, we wanted to switch the war off. Iraq is a different matter – we’re in Iraq for oil. If the national product of Iraq was asparagus, we would not be there, I promise. There are parallels with Bosnia, not least indifference towards the Muslim victims – we did nothing for them until the war had consumed a quarter of a million of them – and we don’t care about the Iraqis. But I think there are big differences with Bosnia. There are more parallels, I think, between the NATO-Serb Kosovo war, because that is where we got people used to the idea that bombing civilian trains on railway bridges, bombing hospitals, bombing TV stations was OK. So when we hit lots of civilians in Iraq, it was “well, we were doing that back in Serbia, weren’t we?”. We bombed Aljazeera in Kabul, they bombed Aljazeera in Baghdad, which was not even an Iraqi station. So I think the Kosovo war started off the acceptability of doing these things.”
Whatever the occupier’s plans for Iraq, and whatever barbarities it imposes, one thing is for sure – the future of that country is not entirely in their hands. Even with their full scale promotion of sectarian violence in 1950s Algeria, the French were still forced to leave. The dilemma for the US in Iraq, as Fisk puts it, is that “they must leave, they will leave, but they can’t leave – that is the equation that turns sand into blood”. For those who want to understand this process, and what it means in human terms, rather than simply be lied to about it, Robert Fisk’s reporting is a good place to start.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Shades of 1929: the global implications of the US banking collapse
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By Nick Beams
Socialist revolution
By Nick Beams
The following is the final part of a report delivered by Nick Beams, national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in Australia and a member of the World Socialist Web Site international editorial board, to public meetings in Sydney and Melbourne on April 9 and 15. Part 1 was published on April 16 and Part 2 on April 17. Beams, an international authority on Marxist political economy, is the author of regular WSWS articles and analyses on globalisation and political economy.
What are the implications of this economic and financial crisis?
In the World Socialist Web Site editorial board statement of March 18, we explained that the political tasks facing the working class centred on the fight for an international socialist program that “aims at ending the subordination of the economy to the dictates of private profit and utilising the vast wealth which is created by the labour of working people the world over for the benefit of all.”
Was that just some kind of obligatory rhetoric? Is there not perhaps some more immediate, practical, reform of the financial system to which we should give our support?
Let us examine the possible proposals. One is for new regulations to control the type of predatory practices that have led to the present disaster. But we seem to have heard this somewhere before. Was this not put forward in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom collapses at the end of the 1990s? What was the result? The type of criminal activity with which those two companies, and others, became synonymous was simply extended on an even wider scale.
There was legislation introduced in the form of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. Bush signed it into law on July 30, 2002, declaring that it included “the most far-reaching reforms of American business practices since the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt.”
But this legislation has been under fire ever since, because tighter US regulations have disadvantaged Wall Street as a financial centre in relation to London. Accordingly, the recent regulatory proposals set out by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson seek to lessen, not increase, oversight of the financial system. In other words, regulation is a pipedream in conditions where the financial market is global in scope and subject to the ever-more ferocious competition between the different nationally-centred markets.
Moreover, the very nature of a financial crisis renders bankrupt regulatory procedures. Earlier, we noted the comment of SEC chairman Cox that Bear Stearns had met all the necessary supervisory standards. No doubt it had. But those standards proved completely useless. The reason lies in the irrational nature of the market itself, based as it is on the private interests of massive financial institutions.
There is a fundamental contradiction at the very centre of the market that no amount of regulation can overcome—that is, the contradiction between individual rationality and the system as a whole.
Over-indebted individuals or individual firms have three choices: to cut spending, to sell assets or to declare bankruptcy. If too many cut spending, a downturn in the economy will occur, causing further problems. If too many assets are sold, their value will drop even further, leading to more pressure to sell before prices fall again. And if too many default then the financial intermediaries, which provided insurance, are hit. In other words, while it may be completely rational for an individual to take any one of these actions, the consequences may worsen the overall situation.
In a speech on March 6, Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, explained the way this contradiction unfolds.
“The current episode has a basic dynamic in common with all past crises. As market participants have moved to reduce exposure to further losses, to step on the brake, the brake became the accelerator, amplifying the shock. Measured risk has increased more quickly than many institutions have been able to reduce it, and attempts to reduce it have added to volatility and downward pressure in prices, further increasing measured exposure to risk. Uncertainty about the market value of securities and about counterparty risk has increased, and many hedges have not performed as intended. The rational actions taken by even the strongest financial institutions to reduce exposure to further losses have caused significant collateral damage to market functioning. This, in turn, has intensified the liquidity problems for a wide range of bank and nonbank financial institutions. ...
In other words what is rational for the individual financial institution can produce disastrous consequences.
As Geithner continued: “This self-reinforcing dynamic within financial markets has intensified the downside risks to growth for an economy that is already confronting a very substantial adjustment in housing and the possibility of a significant rise in household savings.”
Faced with increased exposure to risky assets, banks, or their SIVs (structured investment vehicles), move to sell them off, lessening their exposure and increasing their holdings of cash. But the consequence is a fall in the price of those financial assets, worsening the position of other institutions that hold them. This leads, in turn, to a further weakening in the position of other banks and financial institutions which may not have been affected by the initial downturn. They may not have even held the asset class that was initially affected.
Northern Rock, the collapsed British bank, was not exposed to American subprime mortgages. But it was highly dependent on the short-term money market for the funds that it used to finance mortgages. As interest rates in this market began to rise, Northern Rock collapsed. This “self-reinforcing dynamic” as Geithner terms it, involves vast sums ... in some cases, amounts of money larger than entire economies. It is completely rational for an institution facing problems caused by risky assets to sell them. But that rational action can lead to a whole series of forced sales, resulting eventually in a major financial crisis and an economic collapse.
Millions of people’s lives, their welfare, their jobs, the future education of their children, are dominated by the workings of a system over which they have no control and over which no one has any control. That is, the market rationality for the individual bank or financial institution produces social irrationality and madness. This madness cannot be cured by regulation, but only through the abolition of the financial markets and their replacement with a system of social control over the wealth and assets created by the labour of society as a whole.
The perspective of socialist revolution is grounded on objective processes in the historical development of capitalism. The current global financial crisis constitutes the opening of a new chapter in that history.
To understand its significance let us place it in context. In 1919, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky commented on the fact that the press of the day was preoccupied with the names of Lenin, the leader of the revolution, and Woodrow Wilson, the president of the United States, who had journeyed to Europe to try to prevent its spread to the rest of Europe. “Lenin and Wilson—these are the two apocalyptic principles of modern history,” he remarked.
Which would conquer? We now know the answer to that question. With the greatest difficulty, and only with the assistance rendered to it by the social democratic and Stalinist leaderships, through their betrayals of the working class, was the United States, after three decades of bloody war, depression, fascism and the death of tens of millions, able to restabilise the world capitalist system.
Economically, the new equilibrium rested on the strength of American capitalism. Now we have a crisis—the most serious since the 1930s—which has struck at its very heart.
This crisis signifies the passing of an entire historical era. For decades, the United States functioned as the stabiliser of world capitalism. Now it is the great destabiliser. Just as the rise of American economic power changed the course of world history, its decline will have even more far-reaching consequences.
The decline of American capitalism stretches back over decades. In the early 1980s, it sought to overcome the first phase of its decline by undertaking a vast process of restructuring. But the very processes it set into motion at that time have now given rise to a crisis of even greater proportions.
All the issues that confronted the working class in the first decades of the twentieth century and that saw millions of workers, youth and socialist-minded intellectuals enter the struggle for international socialism have returned with renewed force. Not only do we face the threat of a global slump, if not a depression, but escalating economic tensions among the major capitalist powers, resulting from the decline of the US, must increase the danger of war.
For the past 35 years, the world economy has functioned on the basis of the US dollar as the chief global reserve currency. This has conferred enormous advantages on the United States. But the decline of the dollar means that the US will face new challenges to its supremacy. This is not a matter of anyone’s bad intentions, but arises from the logic of economic processes. How long can the rest of the capitalist world—the old powers in Europe and Japan, together with the new rising powers, China and India, as well as the oil exporting countries of the Middle East—go on funding the US to the tune of $2 billion a day, placing vast reserves in US debt instruments that are steadily losing their value?
Of course all the capitalist powers have an interest in preserving global stability—no one wants to provoke a crisis. But at a certain point, the costs of maintaining the present system become prohibitive.
How will the US respond to such a situation? We have already seen the answer to that question in Iraq. It will seek to maintain its position by military means.
Once again global humanity faces the danger of depression and war. The only answer to this threat is the struggle for an international socialist program. This is the perspective of the SEP and the ICFI.
Concluded
Second mistrial in Liberty City “terror” case
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By Kate Randall
By Kate Randall
A mistrial has been declared for a second time in the case of a group of Miami men charged by the US government with plotting with Al Qaeda to carry out terrorist acts within the US.
US District Judge Joan Lenard declared the mistrial when the 12-member jury deadlocked after 12 days of deliberations on charges against the six “Liberty City” defendants, named for the impoverished, predominantly Haitian immigrant Miami neighborhood where they lived.
The defendants were retried after the first trial ended in a mistrial last December. In those proceedings, one of the Liberty City 7, Lyglenson Lemorin, was acquitted and the jury failed to reach a verdict on the other six. (See “Miami: Collapse of Liberty City 7 case exposes fraud of ‘war on terror’”)
This second mistrial is a blow to federal prosecutors and underscores the fraudulent nature of the charges brought against the defendants.
The six men faced four terror-related conspiracy charges. The central charge was conspiracy to provide “material support” to Al Qaeda in connection with plans to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower and two Miami-area federal government buildings. At trial, defense attorneys were able to convince a section of the jury that the driving force of the alleged terrorist plot was a paid FBI informant posing as an “Al Qaeda representative.”
Each of the defendants—Narseal Batists, 33; Patrick Abraham, 28; Burson Augustin, 23; Rothschild Augustine, 24; Stanley Grant Phanor, 32; and Naudimar Herrar, 24—faced up to 70 years in prison if convicted on all four terror-related conspiracy counts.
The panel of seven women and five men, picked anonymously for the second trial because of the judge’s concerns with potential jury tampering, were led away from the federal courthouse by US marshals and have made no comments to the press about their deliberations.
Judge Lenard set a status conference for April 23, by which time federal prosecutors are to decide whether to try the six defendants for a third time. Defense attorneys indicated they will be seeking to have the men released on bail at next week’s hearing. They have been imprisoned for nearly two years, since their June 2006 arrest.
At the time of their arrest, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales charged that the Liberty City group represented a “new brand of terrorism” created by “the convergence of globalization and technology.” The White House hailed their arrest as “yet another important victory in the war on terrorism.” However, at the second trial as at the first, prosecutors were unable to back up these claims.
The FBI produced no evidence of explosives, weapons or blueprints for any planned terrorist activity. Rather, prosecutors held up as their central incriminating evidence a videotape of defendants pledging an “oath” to Al Qaeda. This video was recorded in a warehouse set up by the FBI and the group was led there by an informant.
The other key evidence presented by the prosecution was alleged surveillance photos of the FBI building and federal courthouse complex in Miami-Dade County. An FBI informant provided the camera and car for this purpose. The two government informants involved in the case—Abbas al-Saidi and Elie Assad—were paid over $130,000 for their services.
At trial, the defense was able to demonstrate that rather than uncovering a terrorist plot, the government had concocted the plan and manipulated the impoverished defendants, who had no terrorist motives, but hoped to benefit financially from their relationship with the FBI informants posing as Al Qaeda operatives.
During closing arguments in late March, Ana Jhones, Narseal Batiste’s attorney, told the jury, “This is not a crime of terrorism, this is a sad, sad state of affairs.” She described Batiste—portrayed as the mastermind of the terror plot by the prosecution—as a “dirt poor” contractor and father of four motivated by a desperate need for money.
Defense attorneys argued that the six men tried to trick the FBI informant out of the $50,000 he claimed would be provided by Al Qaeda for the operation, while never having any intention of carrying it out. Jhones also said that Batiste pawned a camera he was given by the informant for $56 in order to buy food for his family.
Assistant US Attorney Jacqueline Arango argued that it didn’t matter whether Batiste’s association with Al Qaeda was for financial or ideological purposes, and that the central argument of the defense was “just silliness.”
At the time of the arrests, while the FBI claimed it had preempted a terrorist plot, it acknowledged that the targets of this plot were never in any real danger. Even in the early stages of the case, FBI Deputy Director John Pistole stated that the alleged plot was “more aspirational than operational”—i.e., that there were no terrorist plans in place.
The managing director of the Sears Tower, as well as the Chicago Police Department, were assured by federal authorities at the time that there was never a credible threat to the skyscraper.
At the first trial, Narseal Batiste testified that none of the other defendants had any knowledge of the Sears Tower plot. “Nobody knew about it,” he said. “Like I said, this was imagination. I would have been deeply embarrassed if any of the brothers knew I was engaging in that kind of conversation.”
Jeffrey Agron, an attorney and the jury foreman in the first trial, predicted the jury would deadlock the second time around. He said some jurors would have doubts about the prosecution’s central case—that the defendants intended to carry through on the terrorist plot after taking Al Qaeda loyalty oaths in front of the FBI informant.
He told the Miami Herald, “These cases where the government will go after groups that are more aspirational than operational may present problems for the jury.” He said many jurors would be more likely to believe the defense’s presentation of the case—that the defendants were motivated solely by the prospect of making some money.
The collapse of the government’s case a second time round in the Liberty City case highlights the fraudulent character of the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism,” a political pretext for war abroad and attacks on democratic rights at home accepted and defended by both big business parties and the media.
The administration has mounted a series of “anti-terror” prosecutions in an attempt to justify military aggression and a vast expansion of the police powers of the government.
In these cases, the government has utilized the services of informants and concocted scenarios of terrorist plots with weak or nonexistent evidence. Unlike the outcome in the Liberty City trials, the government has won convictions in a number of these cases.
* Hamid Hayat, a US citizen of Pakistani descent, was convicted in April 2006 of providing material support for terrorism based on testimony of an informant who was paid $250,000 for his services. Hayat was sentenced to 24 years in prison. No evidence was presented to prove the prosecution’s claims that he attended an Al Qaeda training camp.
* Shahawar Matin Siraj, a Pakistani-American, was convicted in 2006 of an alleged plot to bomb a New York subway station. An informant—paid $100,000—concocted the plot. Siraj received a 30-year sentence.
* Jose Padilla, a US citizen, was sentenced to 17 years and four months in January following a conviction on terrorism conspiracy charges last August. Padilla was arrested in May 2002, the government claiming he was plotting to explode a “dirty bomb” in the US. (See “US ‘enemy combatant’ Jose Padilla sentenced to 17 years in prison”)
He was held for three-and-a-half years as an “enemy combatant” in a Navy brig, where he was interrogated and tortured. After a number of court rulings rejecting the government’s claims that he could be held without charges or access to legal counsel, his case was transferred to the civilian court system, where he was tried on charges unconnected to the “dirty bomb” allegation.
See Also:
Miami “terror” arrests—a government provocation
[24 June 2006]
Bill Would Boost US Power to Prosecute War Fraud
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Washington - The U.S. government would have greater power to prosecute cases of fraud in contracts for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan under a measure introduced in Congress on Friday.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, and Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, said the bipartisan legislation would update a World War Two-era law against contracting fraud to ensure that it applies to U.S. military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The lawmakers said billions of dollars have been awarded to contractors who have delivered defective products to U.S. troops in the two countries.
Congress approved resolutions that allowed President George W. Bush to use military force in those countries, but never officially declared war against them.
Leahy and Grassley said that as a result, the 66-year-old law addressing U.S. statutes of limitations on contract fraud during times of war does not apply to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Current law suspends statutes of limitations during declared wars and then gives the government up to three years after the war has ended to prosecute cases of contracting fraud.
The legislation would extend the law to cover officially undeclared conflicts and give the government up to five years after the end of hostilities to prosecute fraud cases.
"It's a common-sense reform that's good for taxpayers and good for public confidence that war contracting is not a free-for-all with no criminal accountability," Grassley said in a statement.
Washington - The U.S. government would have greater power to prosecute cases of fraud in contracts for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan under a measure introduced in Congress on Friday.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, and Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, said the bipartisan legislation would update a World War Two-era law against contracting fraud to ensure that it applies to U.S. military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The lawmakers said billions of dollars have been awarded to contractors who have delivered defective products to U.S. troops in the two countries.
Congress approved resolutions that allowed President George W. Bush to use military force in those countries, but never officially declared war against them.
Leahy and Grassley said that as a result, the 66-year-old law addressing U.S. statutes of limitations on contract fraud during times of war does not apply to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Current law suspends statutes of limitations during declared wars and then gives the government up to three years after the war has ended to prosecute cases of contracting fraud.
The legislation would extend the law to cover officially undeclared conflicts and give the government up to five years after the end of hostilities to prosecute fraud cases.
"It's a common-sense reform that's good for taxpayers and good for public confidence that war contracting is not a free-for-all with no criminal accountability," Grassley said in a statement.
NATO Admits Mistakenly Supplying Arms and Food to Taliban
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By Anil Dawar
NATO forces mistakenly supplied food, water and arms to Taliban forces in southern Afghanistan, officials today admitted.
Containers destined for local police forces were dropped from a helicopter into a Taliban-controlled area of Zabul province.
The coalition helicopter had intended to deliver pallets of supplies to a police checkpoint in Ghazni, a remote section of Zabul late last month.
By mistake they were dropped some distance from the checkpoint where it was taken by the Taliban, the Internal Security Affairs Commission of the Wolesi Jirga - the Afghan parliament's lower house - was told.
Hamidullah Tukhi, a local politician from Zabul, told the parliamentary commission that the consignment had been taken by a local Taliban commander.
A NATO spokesman said the pallets were carrying rocket propelled grenades, ammunition, water and food.
Afghan politicians have said they do not believe the drop was an accident.
NATO's General Carlos Branco blamed it on "human error" when the navigator confused two very similar grid references.
A spokesman at NATO headquarters in Brussels denied the suggestion the alliance had deliberately armed the Taliban. "We are aware of it but we are not fired up about it. It sounds like someone made a mistake. It was a cock-up rather than a conspiracy.
"The forces on the ground are working to get the message across that we do not deliberately supply the Taliban with arms."
By Anil Dawar
NATO forces mistakenly supplied food, water and arms to Taliban forces in southern Afghanistan, officials today admitted.
Containers destined for local police forces were dropped from a helicopter into a Taliban-controlled area of Zabul province.
The coalition helicopter had intended to deliver pallets of supplies to a police checkpoint in Ghazni, a remote section of Zabul late last month.
By mistake they were dropped some distance from the checkpoint where it was taken by the Taliban, the Internal Security Affairs Commission of the Wolesi Jirga - the Afghan parliament's lower house - was told.
Hamidullah Tukhi, a local politician from Zabul, told the parliamentary commission that the consignment had been taken by a local Taliban commander.
A NATO spokesman said the pallets were carrying rocket propelled grenades, ammunition, water and food.
Afghan politicians have said they do not believe the drop was an accident.
NATO's General Carlos Branco blamed it on "human error" when the navigator confused two very similar grid references.
A spokesman at NATO headquarters in Brussels denied the suggestion the alliance had deliberately armed the Taliban. "We are aware of it but we are not fired up about it. It sounds like someone made a mistake. It was a cock-up rather than a conspiracy.
"The forces on the ground are working to get the message across that we do not deliberately supply the Taliban with arms."
Inside Story - Carter to meet Hamas
Inside Story, with presenter Imran Garda, previews the Carter-Meshaal meeting.
Pentagon Institute Calls Iraq War "a Major Debacle" With Outcome "in Doubt"
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By Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott
By Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott
Washington - The war in Iraq has become "a major debacle" and the outcome "is in doubt" despite improvements in security from the buildup in U.S. forces, according to a highly critical study published Thursday by the Pentagon’s premier military educational institute.
The report released by the National Defense University raises fresh doubts about President Bush ’s projections of a U.S. victory in Iraq just a week after Bush announced that he was suspending U.S. troop reductions.
The report carries considerable weight because it was written by Joseph Collins, a former senior Pentagon official, and was based in part on interviews with other former senior defense and intelligence officials who played roles in prewar preparations.
It was published by the university’s National Institute for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research center.
"Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle," says the report’s opening line.
At the time the report was written last fall, more than 4,000 U.S. and foreign troops, more than 7,500 Iraqi security forces and as many as 82,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed and tens of thousands of others wounded, while the cost of the war since March 2003 was estimated at $450 billion .
"No one as yet has calculated the costs of long-term veterans’ benefits or the total impact on service personnel and materiel," wrote Collins, who was involved in planning post-invasion humanitarian operations.
The report said that the United States has suffered serious political costs, with its standing in the world seriously diminished. Moreover, operations in Iraq have diverted "manpower, materiel and the attention of decision-makers" from "all other efforts in the war on terror" and severely strained the U.S. armed forces.
"Compounding all of these problems, our efforts there (in Iraq ) were designed to enhance U.S. national security, but they have become, at least temporarily, an incubator for terrorism and have emboldened Iran to expand its influence throughout the Middle East ," the report continued.
The addition of 30,000 U.S. troops to Iraq last year to halt the country’s descent into all-out civil war has improved security, but not enough to ensure that the country emerges as a stable democracy at peace with its neighbors, the report said.
"Despite impressive progress in security, the outcome of the war is in doubt," said the report. "Strong majorities of both Iraqis and Americans favor some sort of U.S. withdrawal. Intelligence analysts, however, remind us that the only thing worse than an Iraq with an American army may be an Iraq after a rapid withdrawal of that army."
"For many analysts (including this one), Iraq remains a ’must win,’ but for many others, despite obvious progress under General David Petraeus and the surge, it now looks like a ’can’t win.’"
The report lays much of the blame for what went wrong in Iraq after the initial U.S. victory at the feet of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld . It says that in November 2001 , before the war in Afghanistan was over, President Bush asked Rumsfeld "to begin planning in secret for potential military operations against Iraq ."
Rumsfeld, who was closely allied with Vice President Dick Cheney , bypassed the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the report says, and became "the direct supervisor of the combatant commanders."
" . . . the aggressive, hands-on Rumsfeld," it continues, "cajoled and pushed his way toward a small force and a lightning fast operation." Later, he shut down the military’s computerized deployment system, "questioning, delaying or deleting units on the numerous deployment orders that came across his desk."
In part because "long, costly, manpower-intensive post-combat operations were anathema to Rumsfeld," the report says, the U.S. was unprepared to fight what Collins calls "War B," the battle against insurgents and sectarian violence that began in mid-2003, shortly after "War A," the fight against Saddam Hussein’s forces, ended.
Compounding the problem was a series of faulty assumptions made by Bush’s top aides, among them an expectation fed by Iraqi exiles that Iraqis would be grateful to America for liberating them from Saddam’s dictatorship. The administration also expected that " Iraq without Saddam could manage and fund its own reconstruction."
The report also singles out the Bush administration’s national security apparatus and implicitly President Bush and both of his national security advisers, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley , saying that "senior national security officials exhibited in many instances an imperious attitude, exerting power and pressure where diplomacy and bargaining might have had a better effect."
Collins ends his report by quoting Winston Churchill , who said: "Let us learn our lessons. Never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. . . . Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think that he also had a chance."
On the Web
Read the report by the National Defense University.
Congressman introduces bill to decriminalize personal marijuana use
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Text of Thursday’s press release, from Rep. Frank’s Congressional website, follows.
Congressman, 4th District, Massachusetts 2252 Rayburn Building · Washington, D.C. 20515 · (202) 225-5931
April 17, 2008
FRANK INTRODUCES LEGISLATION TO REMOVE FEDERAL PENALTIES ON PERSONAL MARIJUANA USE
Congressman Also Files Bill Permitting Medical Use of Marijuana in States that Choose to Allow it with Doctor’s Recommendation
Congressman Barney Frank today introduced bi-partisan legislation aimed at removing federal restrictions on the individual use of marijuana. One bill would remove federal penalties for the personal use of marijuana, and the other – versions of which Frank has filed in several preceding sessions of Congress – would allow the medical use of marijuana in states that have chosen to make its use for medical purposes legal with a doctor’s recommendation. Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) joined Frank as a cosponsor of the federal penalties bill. The cosponsors of the medical marijuana bill are Rep. Paul, along with Reps. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), and Sam Farr (D-CA).
Congressman Frank released the following statement explaining the legislation.
“I think it is poor law enforcement to keep on the books legislation that establishes as a crime something which in fact society does not seriously wish to prosecute. In my view, having federal law enforcement agents engaged in the prosecution of people who are personally using marijuana is a waste of scarce resources better used for serious crimes. In fact, this type of prosecution often meets with public disapproval. The most frequent recent examples have been federal prosecutions of individuals using marijuana for medical purposes in states that have voted – usually by public referenda – to allow such use. Because current federal law has been interpreted as superseding state law in this area, most states that have made medical use of marijuana legal have been unable to actually implement their laws.
"When doctors recommend the use of marijuana for their patients and states are willing to permit it, I think it’s wrong for the federal government to subject either the doctors or the patients to criminal prosecution. More broadly speaking, the norm in America is for the states to decide whether particular behaviors should be made criminal. To make the smoking of marijuana, whether for medical purposes or not, one of those extremely rare instances of federal crime – literally, to make a ‘federal case’ out of it – is wholly disproportionate to the activity involved. We do not have federal criminal prohibitions against drinking alcoholic beverages, and there are generally no criminal penalties for the use of tobacco at the state and federal levels for adults. There is no rational argument for treating marijuana so differently from these other substances.”
To those who say that the government should not be encouraging the smoking of marijuana, my response is that I completely agree. But it is a great mistake to divide all human activity into two categories: those that are criminally prohibited, and those that are encouraged. In a free society, there must be a very considerable zone of activity between those two poles in which people are allowed to make their own choices as long as they are not impinging on the rights, freedom, or property of others. I believe it is important with regard to tobacco, marijuana and alcohol, among other things, that we strictly regulate the age at which people may use these substances. And, enforcement of age restrictions should be firm. But, criminalizing choices that adults make because we think they are unwise ones, when the choices involved have no negative effect on the rights of others, is not appropriate in a free society.”
“If the laws I am proposing pass, states will still be free to treat marijuana as they wish. But I do not believe that the federal government should treat adults who choose to smoke marijuana as criminals. Federal law enforcement is a serious business, and we should be concentrating our efforts in this regard on measures that truly protect the public.”
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