Time For The US To Go Home

Text of Colonel Reese’s Memo

Published: July 30, 2009
Courtesy Of The New York Times

Text of memo from Col. Timothy R. Reese, Chief, Baghdad Operations Command Advisory Team, MND-B, Baghdad, Iraq.

As the old saying goes, “guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” Since the signing of the 2009 Security Agreement, we are guests in Iraq, and after six years in Iraq, we now smell bad to the Iraqi nose. Today the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) are good enough to keep the Government of Iraq (GOI) from being overthrown by the actions of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the Baathists, and the Shia violent extremists that might have toppled it a year or two ago. Iraq may well collapse into chaos of other causes, but we have made the ISF strong enough for the internal security mission. Perhaps it is one of those infamous paradoxes of counterinsurgency that while the ISF is not good in any objective sense, it is good enough for Iraq in 2009. Despite this foreboding disclaimer about an unstable future for Iraq, the United States has achieved our objectives in Iraq. Prime Minister (PM) Maliki hailed June 30th as a “great victory,” implying the victory was over the US. Leaving aside his childish chest pounding, he was more right than he knew. We too ought to declare victory and bring our combat forces home. Due to our tendency to look after the tactical details and miss the proverbial forest for the trees, this critically important strategic realization is in danger of being missed.

Equally important to realize is that we aren’t making the GOI and the ISF better in any significant ways with our current approach. Remaining in Iraq through the end of December 2011 will yield little in the way of improving the abilities of the ISF or the functioning of the GOI. Furthermore, in light of the GOI’s current interpretation of the limitations imposed by the 30 June milestones of the 2008 Security Agreement, the security of US forces are at risk. Iraq is not a country with a history of treating even its welcomed guests well. This is not to say we can be defeated, only that the danger of a violent incident that will rupture the current partnership has greatly increased since 30 June. Such a rupture would force an unplanned early departure that would harm our long term interests in Iraq and potentially unraveling the great good that has been done since 2003. The use of the military instrument of national power in its current form has accomplished all that can be expected. In the next section I will present and admittedly one sided view of the evidence in support of this view. This information is drawn solely from the MND-B area of operations in Baghdad Province. My reading of reports from the other provinces suggests the same situation exists there.

The general lack of progress in essential services and good governance is now so broad that it ought to be clear that we no longer are moving the Iraqis “forward.” Below is an outline of the information on which I base this assessment:

1. The ineffectiveness and corruption of GOI Ministries is the stuff of legend.

2. The anti-corruption drive is little more than a campaign tool for Maliki

3. The GOI is failing to take rational steps to improve its electrical infrastructure and to improve their oil exploration, production and exports.

4. There is no progress towards resolving the Kirkuk situation.

5. Sunni Reconciliation is at best at a standstill and probably going backwards.

6. Sons of Iraq (SOI) or Sahwa transition to ISF and GOI civil service is not happening, and SOI monthly paydays continue to fall further behind.

7. The Kurdish situation continues to fester.

8. Political violence and intimidation is rampant in the civilian community as well as military and legal institutions.

9. The Vice President received a rather cool reception this past weekend and was publicly told that the internal affairs of Iraq are none of the US’s business.

The rate of improvement of the ISF is far slower than it should be given the amount of effort and resources being provided by the US. The US has made tremendous progress in building the ISF. Our initial efforts in 2003 to mid-2004 were only marginally successful. From 2004 to 2006 the US built the ISF into a fighting force. Since the start of the surge in 2007 we have again expanded and improved the ISF. They are now at the point where they have defeated the organized insurgency against the GOI and are marginally self-sustaining. This is a remarkable tale for which many can be justifiably proud. We have reached the point of diminishing returns, however, and need to find a new set of tools. The massive partnering efforts of US combat forces with ISF isn’t yielding benefits commensurate with the effort and is now generating its own opposition. Again, some touch points for this assessment are:

1. If there ever was a window where the seeds of a professional military culture could have been implanted, it is now long past. US combat forces will not be here long enough or with sufficient influence to change it.

2. The military culture of the Baathist-Soviet model under Saddam Hussein remains entrenched and will not change. The senior leadership of the ISF is incapable of change in the current environment.

a) Corruption among officers is widespread

b) Neglect and mistreatment of enlisted men is the norm

c) The unwillingness to accept a role for the NCO corps continues

d) Cronyism and nepotism are rampant in the assignment and promotion system

e) Laziness is endemic

f) Extreme centralization of C2 is the norm

g) Lack of initiative is legion

h) Unwillingness to change, do anything new blocks progress

i) Near total ineffectiveness of the Iraq Army and National Police institutional organizations and systems prevents the ISF from becoming self-sustaining

j) For every positive story about a good ISF junior officer with initiative, or an ISF commander who conducts a rehearsal or an after action review or some individual MOS training event, there are ten examples of the most basic lack of military understanding despite the massive partnership efforts by our combat forces and advisory efforts by MiTT and NPTT teams.

3. For all the fawning praise we bestow on the Baghdad Operations Command (BOC) and Ministry of Defense (MoD) leadership for their effectiveness since the start of the surge, they are flawed in serious ways. Below are some salient examples:

a) They are unable to plan ahead, unable to secure the PM’s approval for their actions

b) They are unable to stand up to Shiite political parties

c) They were and are unable to conduct an public relations effort in support of the SA and now they are afraid of the ignorant masses as a result

d) They unable to instill discipline among their officers and units for the most basic military standards

e) They are unable to stop the nepotism and cronyism

f) They are unable to take basic steps to manage the force development process

g) They are unable to stick to their deals with US leaders

It is clear that the 30 Jun milestone does not represent one small step in a long series of gradual steps on the path the US withdrawal, but as Maliki has termed it, a “great victory” over the Americans and fundamental change in our relationship. The recent impact of this mentality on military operations is evident:

1. Iraqi Ground Forces Command (IGFC) unilateral restrictions on US forces that violate the most basic aspects of the SA

2. BOC unilateral restrictions that violate the most basic aspects of the SA

3. International Zone incidents in the last week where ISF forces have resorted to shows of force to get their way at Entry Control Points (ECP) including the forcible takeover of ECP 1 on 4 July

4. Sudden coolness to advisors and CDRs, lack of invitations to meetings,

5. Widespread partnership problems reported in other areas such as ISF confronting US forces at TCPs in the city of Baghdad and other major cities in Iraq.

6. ISF units are far less likely to want to conduct combined combat operations with US forces, to go after targets the US considers high value, etc.

7. The Iraqi legal system in the Rusafa side of Baghdad has demonstrated a recent willingness to release individuals originally detained by the US for attacks on the US.

Yet despite all their grievous shortcomings noted above, ISF military capability is sufficient to handle the current level of threats from Sunni and Shiite violent groups. Our combat forces’ presence here on the streets and in the rural areas adds only marginally to their capability while exposing us to attacks to which we cannot effectively respond.

The GOI and the ISF will not be toppled by the violence as they might have been between 2006 and 2008. Though two weeks does not make a trend, the near cessation of attacks since 30 June speaks volumes about how easily Shiite violence can be controlled and speaks to the utter weakness of AQI. The extent of AQ influence in Iraq is so limited as to be insignificant, only when they get lucky with a mass casualty attack are they relevant. Shiite groups are working with the PM and his political allies, or plotting to work against him in the upcoming elections. We are merely convenient targets for delivering a message against Maliki by certain groups, and perhaps by Maliki when he wants us to be targeted. Extremist violence from all groups is directed towards affecting their political standing within the existing power structures of Iraq. There is no longer any coherent insurgency or serious threat to the stability of the GOI posed by violent groups.

Our combat operations are currently the victim of circular logic. We conduct operations to kill or capture violent extremists of all types to protect the Iraqi people and support the GOI. The violent extremists attack us because we are still here conducting military operations. Furthermore, their attacks on us are no longer an organized campaign to defeat our will to stay; the attacks which kill and maim US combat troops are signals or messages sent by various groups as part of the political struggle for power in Iraq. The exception to this is AQI which continues is globalist terror campaign. Our operations are in support of an Iraqi government that no longer relishes our help while at the same time our operations generate the extremist opposition to us as various groups jockey for power in post-occupation Iraq.

The GOI and ISF will continue to squeeze the US for all the “goodies” that we can provide between now and December 2011, while eliminating our role in providing security and resisting our efforts to change the institutional problems prevent the ISF from getting better. They will tolerate us as long as they can suckle at Uncle Sam’s bounteous mammary glands. Meanwhile the level of resistance to US freedom of movement and operations will grow. The potential for Iraqi on US violence is high now and will grow by the day. Resentment on both sides will build and reinforce itself until a violent incident break outs into the open. If that were to happen the violence will remain tactically isolated, but it will wreck our strategic relationships and force our withdrawal under very unfavorable circumstances.

For a long time the preferred US approach has been to “work it at the lowest level of partnership” as a means to stay out of the political fray and with the hope that good work at the tactical level will compensate for and slowly improve the strategic picture. From platoon to brigade, US Soldiers and Marines continue to work incredibly hard and in almost all cases they achieve positive results. This approach has achieved impressive results in the past, but today it is failing. The strategic dysfunctions of the GOI and ISF have now reached down to the tactical level degrading good work there and sundering hitherto strong partnerships. As one astute political observer has stated “We have lost all strategic influence with the GoI and trying to influence events and people from the tactical/operational level is courting disaster, wasting lives, and merely postponing the inevitable.”

The reality of Iraq in July 2009 has rendered the assumptions underlying the 2008 Security Agreement (SA) overcome by events — mostly good events actually. The SA outlines a series of gradual steps towards military withdrawal, analogous to a father teaching his kid to ride a bike without training wheels. If the GOI at the time the SA was signed thought it needed a long, gradual period of weaning. But the GOI now has left the nest (while continuing to breast feed as noted above). The strategic and tactical realities have changed far quicker than the provisions and timeline of the SA can accommodate. We now have an Iraqi government that has gained its balance and thinks it knows how to ride the bike in the race. And in fact they probably do know how to ride, at least well enough for the road they are on against their current competitors. Our hand on the back of the seat is holding them back and causing resentment. We need to let go before we both tumble to the ground.

Therefore, we should declare our intentions to withdraw all US military forces from Iraq by August 2010. This would not be a strategic paradigm shift, but an acceleration of existing US plans by some 15 months. We should end our combat operations now, save those for our own force protection, narrowly defined, as we withdraw. We should revise the force flow into Iraq accordingly. The emphasis should shift towards advising only and advising the ISF to prepare for our withdrawal. Advisors should probably be limited to Iraqi division level a higher. Our train and equip functions should begin the transition to Foreign Military Sales and related training programs. During the withdrawal period the USG and GOI should develop a new strategic framework agreement that would include some lasting military presence at 1-3 large training bases, airbases, or key headquarters locations. But it should not include the presence of any combat forces save those for force protection needs or the occasional exercise. These changes would not only align our actions with the reality of Iraq in 2009, it will remove the causes of increasing friction and reduce the cost of OIF in blood and treasure. Finally, it will set the conditions for a new relationship between the US and Iraq without the complications of the residual effects of the US invasion and occupation.

Related

U.S. Adviser’s Blunt Memo on Iraq: Time ‘to Go Home’ (July 31, 2009)

10,000 Uighur's Went Missing

By Chisa Fujioka
Source: Reuters
Wednesday, July 29, 2009 6:44 AM
Courtesy Of The Washington Post

TOKYO (Reuters) - Nearly 10,000 Uighurs involved in deadly riots in China's northwestern Xinjiang region went missing in one night, exiled Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer said Wednesday, calling for an international investigation.

Kadeer's visit to Tokyo was condemned by China. The vice foreign minister summoned the Japanese ambassador in Beijing to express China "strong dissatisfaction" and to "demand the Japanese government take effective action to stop her anti-China, splittist activities in Japan," the Foreign Ministry said.

In Xinjiang's worst ethnic violence in decades, Uighurs on July 5 attacked Han Chinese in the regional capital of Urumqi after police tried to break up a protest against fatal attacks on Uighur workers at a factory in south China.

Han Chinese in Urumqi launched revenge attacks later that week.

"The nearly 10,000 (Uighur) people who were at the protest, they disappeared from Urumqi in one night," Kadeer told a news conference in Tokyo through an interpreter. "If they are dead, where are their bodies? If they are detained, where are they?"

She called on the international community to send an independent investigative team to Urumqi to uncover details of what had taken place.

The official death toll from the riots stands at 197, most of whom were Han Chinese who form the majority of China's 1.3 billion population. Almost all the others were Uighurs, a Muslim people native to Xinjiang and culturally tied to Central Asia and Turkey.

More than 1,000 people were detained in the immediate aftermath of the riots, and over 200 more in recent days, state media said. None has been publicly charged.

China has accused Kadeer, who lives in exile in Washington, of triggering the riots and of spreading misinformation. It took great glee in pointing out that pictures she said were taken in Urumqi actually came from an unrelated incident in another part of the country.

Kadeer, who rejects the Chinese accusations, said she thought the death toll was much higher after learning that there was random gunfire one night when electricity in the city was shut down.

In a measure of continued nervousness and lack of information in Urumqi, the city government was forced to deny rumors sweeping the Han population that Uighurs were kidnapping Han to exchange them for detained Uighurs, a Chinese newspaper said.

Beijing does not want to lose its grip on Xinjiang. The vast territory borders Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, has abundant oil reserves and is China's largest natural gas-producing region.

(Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard and Lucy Hornby in Beijing; Editing by Nick Nacfie)

Israel Admits White Phosphorus Use

UPDATED ON: Friday, July 31, 2009
01:25 Mecca time, 22:25 GMT
Courtesy Of Al-Jazeera

Israel had initially denied using white phosphorus, a chemical agent that causes severe burns [AFP] Israel has admitted to using white phosphorus during its war on the Gaza Strip earlier this year, but says it did so in accordance with international law. The admission came in a 163-page document published by the Israeli foreign ministry on Thursday ahead of a UN report next week. The Israeli army "used munitions containing white phosphorus" in Gaza, the document said, but it denied violating international law, saying it had not fired such weapons inside populated areas. Al Jazeera's Sherine Tadros, reporting from Jerusalem, said the Israeli army had initially denied using white phosphorus, a chemical agent that causes severe burns. "During the war, when we first started seeing the white phosphorous, the Israeli army said that everything it was using was in compliance with international law; it would not tell us whether or not it was using it," she said. Legitimate Use "As the campaign went on, it became very obvious [on television] that it was being used and the Israeli army, as well as government spokesmen, told us that it was being used," our correspondent said. IN DEPTH Gaza's phosphorus legacy UN releases Gaza attack photos War crimes convictions after Gaza? Timeline: Gaza crisis Video: Gaza speaks out on white phosphorus use "The caveat that the Israeli army pressed on was that it was being used within the rules of war; that meant it was not being used amid a civilian population and that it was being used to provide a smokescreen legitimately, as opposed to illegitimately." International law permits the use of white phosphorus as an "obscurant" to cover troop movements and prevent enemies from using certain guided weapons. The Israeli government report follows charges from the UN and human rights groups that Israeli forces committed war crimes and violated international law during the operation. UN officials have also said that they have evidence that white phosphorus was used in an attack on the UN relief agency's main building in Gaza that left three people injured. But the government defended its military campaign as a "necessary and proportionate" response to Hamas rocket fire at Israel. "Israel had both a right and an obligation to take military action against Hamas in Gaza to stop Hamas' almost incessant rocket and mortar attacks," it said. Misconduct Investigation The Israeli government also said it is investigating 100 complaints of misconduct by its forces during the three week war that began on December 27. Our correspondent said the report follows several testimonies from witnesses and human rights organisations about the Israeli military's conduct. "What we've seen in the past few months since the end of the war are various human rights reports from Amnesty International, the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, as well as testimonies coming out from army soldiers themselves," she said. "What really ties all of these reports together is the idea that there was no proportionality and a deliberate use of force against the civilian population in Gaza." Israeli 'Acknowledgment' John Ging, the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, welcomed the report as an "acknowledgment that an investigation has to be done into what happened" during the conflict. Human rights groups have charged the Israeli army with violating international law during the war [AFP] But he told Al Jazeera that the process has taken "far too long". "What we actually need is an independent investigation that is credible for both sides," he said. "The litmus test is that [any investigation] has to be credible to both sides. As is well documented, both sides have certain concerns and they have to be addressed. "We have to see the rule of international law applied and upheld, even-handedly, with the confidence of both populations." Israel has consistently said its troops respected international law during the war which ended in January. Palestinian officials say 1,417 Palestinians were killed, including 926 civilians. But Israel says that the number killed is considerably lower, and that only 295 of the dead were civilians.

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

Obama's Secret Police

Government Spies Infiltrate Antiwar Movement

By Justin Raimondo,
July 31, 2009
Courtesy Of Anti-War News

Well, we can relax, because the bad old days of the Bush administration, when government agencies routinely spied on the antiwar movement and other dissidents, are over — right?

Wrong – very wrong.

The indispensable Amy Goodman has the scoop: The Seattle Port Militarization Resistance (SPMR) group in Washington state thought their listserv coordinator, who went by the name "John Jacob," was one of them: a dedicated antiwar activist and self-described anarchist. They trusted him, they put him in a key position, they befriended him – and then they found out that he was a government informant.

His real name: John Towery (here’s his myspace page, and here is a photo). He claimed to be a civilian employee at Washington state’s Ft. Lewis: in reality, he was and is a functionary of the force protection unit, i.e. military personnel. His job: spying on the antiwar movement.

Towery was "outed" when one of SPMR’s members filed a public records request in the city of Olympia for any documents, including emails, in the city’s possession that referenced communications between the city police and the military regarding "anything on anarchists, anarchy, anarchism, Students for a Democratic Society or the Industrial Workers of the World," as local antiwar activist Brendan Maslauskas Dunn described it to Amy Goodman on her "Democracy Now" program. The results were startling: "I got back hundreds of documents from the city."

It was in going through this material that he and his fellow activists discovered the truth about "John Jacob": that he was a spy sent in to keep track of antiwar activity in the area, and a member of the Force Protection Service at Ft. Lewis. His fellow activists confronted him, and, as Dunn stated:

"He admitted to several things. He admitted that, yes, he did in fact spy on us. He did in fact infiltrate us. He admitted that he did pass on information to an intelligence network, which … was composed of dozens of law enforcement agencies, ranging from municipal to county to state to regional, and several federal agencies, including Immigration Customs Enforcement, Joint Terrorism Task Force, FBI, Homeland Security, the Army in Fort Lewis. … He admitted to other things, too. He admitted that the police had placed a camera, surveillance camera, across the street from a community center in Tacoma that anarchists ran called the Pitch Pipe Infoshop. He admitted that there were police that did put a camera up there to spy on anarchists, on activists going there."

Oh, but he had a story: it wasn’t as bad as it seemed, he hadn’t completely betrayed his friends and associates, who had known him since 2007, when he first insinuated himself into local activist circles: because, you see, the Olympia and Tacoma cops had been planning to raid the Pitch Pipe Infoshop, as well as a house in Olympia where many activists lived, and they wanted their informant to tell them about all the guns, and drugs, and bombs that they imagined – hoped – were stockpiled there. Because, as everyone knows, no self-respecting anarchist is ever without a bomb to throw. "And, of course," says Dunn, "John told them, no, we didn’t have any of that stuff. He told them the truth."

"Of course" is maybe giving Towery too much of the benefit of a doubt: after all, if his friends were arrested, and the anarchist "conspiracy" broken up, his intelligence-gathering activities would be rendered more difficult. Perhaps Dunn is allowing his residual feelings for someone he describes as a former "close friend" get in the way of a more realistic assessment. Towery did his job all too well.

Be that as it may, this incident throws the spotlight on a shadowy national network of domestic spies – in effect, Obama’s political police, who infiltrate dissident groups of whatever sort and send the information back to what are called "fusion centers," part of the new "integrated" approach to fighting our eternal "war on terrorism" — a war that isn’t only being fought on the battlefields of Afghanistan.

The enemy is not just the Taliban – it’s Americans, too. And we aren’t just talking about the various weirdos and would-be mini-Osama bin Ladens, like John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo. The national hysteria over the alleged threat of "homegrown" terrorism is being stoked to a fever pitch by the latest FBI "catch," a rural North Carolina "terrorist cell" supposedly headed by the proprietor of the local drywall contractor — a former "soldier of fortune" who allegedly fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets by the name of Daniel Patrick Boyd ("also known as Mohammed"), and a good old boy if there ever was one.

The next logical stage in our carefully-stoked national hysteria is to cast the "anti-terrorist" net wider – to include antiwar organizations like SPMR, and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which Towery took a particular interest in. The antiwar movement is not a collection of "terrorist cells," and yet that is precisely how the US government is dealing with them: infiltrating and spying on our organizations, planning "raids" on activist gathering places and homes, and no doubt engaging in further disruptive activities yet to be revealed. How is this possible in the land of the free?

It’s possible – and, indeed, inevitable – due to the post-9/11 national security industry that grew up in the wake of 9/11. A vast bureaucracy sprang up around the stream – nay, river – of tax dollars that flowed out of Washington in the wake of the worst terrorist attack on American soil in our history. No expense was spared, no contractor was left behind – and the money spigot has only been opened wider now that Obama and his Keynesian advisors have decreed we must spend our way out of the economic recession. All these people, busily compiling "intelligence" on anything deemed "suspicious," are a police state waiting to be born.

The "fusion centers" are the product of a supposedly "wholistic" theory of intelligence-gathering adopted by the burgeoning Homeland Security bureaucracy in the post-9/11 era, an approach that integrates the personnel and facilities of various government agencies and pools them in designated "fusion centers." Fusing the civilian and the military, the local cop on the beat and the national security bureaucracy, the new apparatus of surveillance and repression is the virtual embodiment of government "work." Unable to get anywhere near Al Qaeda, they have to produce something to justify their funding, and naturally began to broaden the definitional limits of the "terrorist" label to include an ever-widening array of "suspicious" activities. The antiwar movement soon came into their purview, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Towery apparently worked for one such "fusion center," located at Ft. Lewis, where he routinely transmitted information about local antiwar organizations to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, including military intelligence, the FBI, Homeland Security, and the immigration authorities. With his intimate knowledge of the politics and personal activities of every key member of the local "radical" scene – quite aside from having the names, addresses, phone numbers, and other personal information of every person on the local antiwar listserv – he was a valuable asset to anyone who wanted to throw a monkey wrench into the works. What every local activist, and anyone who’s ever signed their name to an antiwar petition or attended a meeting, needs to ask themselves is: how many other "John Jacob"s are hanging around – and to what purpose?

It can’t happen here? It has happened here.

You won’t hear or read about this in the "mainstream" media: Amy Goodman’s "Democracy Now" broke the story, and it hasn’t gone much further than that. The reason: the media is in the tank for Obama, and they don’t want to further tarnish his "progressive" credentials. After all, it’s bad enough he’s following the Bushian path on government secrecy, detainee policy, and the unprecedented expansion of presidential power.

Now that the Democrats are in power, they’re for all these things – because, after all, the Good Guys hold the reins. I can hear the Obama cultists now: They would never spy on the antiwar movement – why, for goodness sakes, most of those antiwar types voted for Obama! And now he’s sent his spies to disrupt their organizations? I don’t believe it!

Yet that, in effect, is what happened: not that the President personally ordered "Agent Orange" – as Towery was known on the listserv – to infiltrate and spy on the Washington antiwar movement. It wasn’t necessary: the "fusion centers" that dot the American landscape are merely doing what spy agencies are supposed to do, and they’re doing the same thing under President Obama that they did under George W. Bush. Obama hasn’t put a stop to it because he’s fighting an expanded version of the same war, and is loath to let a bunch of left-wing hippies stand in his way.

We have been through this before: go back and read Seymour Hersh’s exposés of government "cointelpro" operations conducted on antiwar activists and other dissidents during the 1970s. The Socialist Workers Party, at one point, had something close to a majority of police agents in its ranks, and the SWP case is a particularly egregious example of what was a widespread phenomenon during that tumultuous era.

It looks to me like we are going back in time, rather than progressing – an odd phenomenon when you consider that there’s an alleged "progressive" in the White House. To get a handle on what’s happening, consider the thoroughly reactionary Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of "eternal recurrence" – with the added fillip that each time some infamous chapter in our history repeats itself, the brazen hypocrisy of the miscreants grows worse.

At least with people like Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, we had some kind of ideological consistency and honesty: those guys thought they had the right – and the duty — to carry out their crimes against the Constitution, and didn’t make any bones about it. It’s the "progressives," who claim fealty to civil libertarian values, and yet countenance the Obama administration’s continuation and expansion of the surveillance state, that are the real danger. Because they manage to fool an awful lot of people – the very same people who wrote to me in anger and puzzlement when I first began to take on the Obama-ites. Give him a chance, they whined. He’s only just gotten into office.

Okay, well, he’s had his chance, and he hasn’t taken it. President Obama is presiding over an even wider war than George W. Bush ever dreamed of, and because of that the antiwar movement is a natural target for his spy agencies, whose reach continues to grow. Why any of this is surprising to anyone is beyond me, but then again I’ve not been inducted into the Obama cult.

One wonders what it will take for what passes for the "left" these days to wake up. If I were them, I would heed the words of Murray Rothbard, the great libertarian theorist and onetime ally of the New Left, and apply it to their own movement:

"For the libertarian, the main task of the present epoch is to … discover who his friends and natural allies are, and above all, perhaps, who his enemies are."

Read more by Justin Raimondo

• The ‘Superpower’ Conceit – July 28th, 2009
• The Honduran Coup and the Clinton Connection – July 26th, 2009
• Eastern Europe and the Habit of Servitude – July 23rd, 2009
• Israel and the Nutbar Factor – July 21st, 2009
• Back to Iraq? – July 19th, 2009

Dismantling The Empire

By Chalmers Johnson
posted July 30, 2009 10:28 am
Courtesy Of Tom Dispatch

The Obama administration's plan to end production of the F-22 Raptor has received plenty of press coverage, but the Pentagon budget itself, even though it's again on the rise, hardly rates a bit of notice. In fact, amid the plethora of issues large and small -- from health care reform to Gates-gate, from energy policy to the culpability of Michael Jackson's doctor -- that make up the American debate in the media, in Washington, and possibly even in the country, what Chalmers Johnson has called "our empire of bases" goes essentially unmentioned. Not that we don't build them profligately. At one point, we had 106 of them -- mega to micro -- in Iraq alone; right now, we have at least 50 forward operating bases and command outposts in Afghanistan to go with a few giant bases (and the Pentagon is evidently now considering the possibility of creating a single, privatized, mercenary force to defend them, according to the Washington Post).

This is all staggering expensive. In an era when the need for funds at home is self-evident, on purely practical grounds -- and there are obviously others -- the maintenance of our global imperial stance, not to speak of the wars, conflicts, and dangers that go with it, should be at the forefront of national discussion. Instead, it has largely been left to oppositional websites to keep this crucial issue alive.

Our military empire, and the vast national security state and bureaucracy that go with it, have been perhaps the central focus of TomDispatch since it launched in late 2002. This site has concentrated on our military bases, the Pentagon's blue-sky thinking about future weaponry, air war as the American way of war, the defense budget, and the out-of-control nature of the Pentagon, among many other related issues. Nick Turse, associate editor at this site and an expert on the Pentagon, has even put its properties on "the auction block."

Since Chalmers Johnson first wrote of that empire of bases at this site back in 2004, no one has more cogently analyzed the dangers of militarism, military Keynesianism, and a Pentagon budget spun out of control. His trilogy of books on the subject, Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis are already classics, and assumedly on the shelves of all TomDispatch readers.

Today, he turns to the issue which should be, but isn't, central to our moment: dismantling the empire. Think of this as the American health care reform program that no one is discussing. Tom

Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire

And Ten Steps to Take to Do So
By Chalmers Johnson

However ambitious President Barack Obama's domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.

According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories. We deploy over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military forces living and working there -- 49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan.

These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony -- that is, control or dominance -- over as many nations on the planet as possible.

We are like the British at the end of World War II: desperately trying to shore up an empire that we never needed and can no longer afford, using methods that often resemble those of failed empires of the past -- including the Axis powers of World War II and the former Soviet Union. There is an important lesson for us in the British decision, starting in 1945, to liquidate their empire relatively voluntarily, rather than being forced to do so by defeat in war, as were Japan and Germany, or by debilitating colonial conflicts, as were the French and Dutch. We should follow the British example. (Alas, they are currently backsliding and following our example by assisting us in the war in Afghanistan.)

Here are three basic reasons why we must liquidate our empire or else watch it liquidate us.

1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism

Shortly after his election as president, Barack Obama, in a speech announcing several members of his new cabinet, stated as fact that "[w]e have to maintain the strongest military on the planet." A few weeks later, on March 12, 2009, in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington DC, the president again insisted, "Now make no mistake, this nation will maintain our military dominance. We will have the strongest armed forces in the history of the world." And in a commencement address to the cadets of the U.S. Naval Academy on May 22nd, Obama stressed that "[w]e will maintain America's military dominance and keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever seen."

What he failed to note is that the United States no longer has the capability to remain a global hegemon, and to pretend otherwise is to invite disaster.

According to a growing consensus of economists and political scientists around the world, it is impossible for the United States to continue in that role while emerging into full view as a crippled economic power. No such configuration has ever persisted in the history of imperialism. The University of Chicago's Robert Pape, author of the important study Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005), typically writes:

"America is in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq war, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today's world of rapidly spreading knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back on the Bush years as the death knell of American hegemony."

There is something absurd, even Kafkaesque, about our military empire. Jay Barr, a bankruptcy attorney, makes this point using an insightful analogy:

"Whether liquidating or reorganizing, a debtor who desires bankruptcy protection must provide a list of expenses, which, if considered reasonable, are offset against income to show that only limited funds are available to repay the bankrupted creditors. Now imagine a person filing for bankruptcy claiming that he could not repay his debts because he had the astronomical expense of maintaining at least 737 facilities overseas that provide exactly zero return on the significant investment required to sustain them… He could not qualify for liquidation without turning over many of his assets for the benefit of creditors, including the valuable foreign real estate on which he placed his bases."

In other words, the United States is not seriously contemplating its own bankruptcy. It is instead ignoring the meaning of its precipitate economic decline and flirting with insolvency.

Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books, 2008), calculates that we could clear $2.6 billion if we would sell our base assets at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and earn another $2.2 billion if we did the same with Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. These are only two of our over 800 overblown military enclaves.

Our unwillingness to retrench, no less liquidate, represents a striking historical failure of the imagination. In his first official visit to China since becoming Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner assured an audience of students at Beijing University, "Chinese assets [invested in the United States] are very safe." According to press reports, the students responded with loud laughter. Well they might.

In May 2009, the Office of Management and Budget predicted that in 2010 the United States will be burdened with a budget deficit of at least $1.75 trillion. This includes neither a projected $640 billion budget for the Pentagon, nor the costs of waging two remarkably expensive wars. The sum is so immense that it will take several generations for American citizens to repay the costs of George W. Bush's imperial adventures -- if they ever can or will. It represents about 13% of our current gross domestic product (that is, the value of everything we produce). It is worth noting that the target demanded of European nations wanting to join the Euro Zone is a deficit no greater than 3% of GDP.

Thus far, President Obama has announced measly cuts of only $8.8 billion in wasteful and worthless weapons spending, including his cancellation of the F-22 fighter aircraft. The actual Pentagon budget for next year will, in fact, be larger, not smaller, than the bloated final budget of the Bush era. Far bolder cuts in our military expenditures will obviously be required in the very near future if we intend to maintain any semblance of fiscal integrity.

2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us

One of our major strategic blunders in Afghanistan was not to have recognized that both Great Britain and the Soviet Union attempted to pacify Afghanistan using the same military methods as ours and failed disastrously. We seem to have learned nothing from Afghanistan's modern history -- to the extent that we even know what it is. Between 1849 and 1947, Britain sent almost annual expeditions against the Pashtun tribes and sub-tribes living in what was then called the North-West Frontier Territories -- the area along either side of the artificial border between Afghanistan and Pakistan called the Durand Line. This frontier was created in 1893 by Britain's foreign secretary for India, Sir Mortimer Durand.

Neither Britain nor Pakistan has ever managed to establish effective control over the area. As the eminent historian Louis Dupree put it in his book Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 425): "Pashtun tribes, almost genetically expert at guerrilla warfare after resisting centuries of all comers and fighting among themselves when no comers were available, plagued attempts to extend the Pax Britannica into their mountain homeland." An estimated 41 million Pashtuns live in an undemarcated area along the Durand Line and profess no loyalties to the central governments of either Pakistan or Afghanistan.

The region known today as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan is administered directly by Islamabad, which -- just as British imperial officials did -- has divided the territory into seven agencies, each with its own "political agent" who wields much the same powers as his colonial-era predecessor. Then as now, the part of FATA known as Waziristan and the home of Pashtun tribesmen offered the fiercest resistance.

According to Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, experienced Afghan hands and coauthors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story (City Lights, 2009, p. 317):

"If Washington's bureaucrats don't remember the history of the region, the Afghans do. The British used air power to bomb these same Pashtun villages after World War I and were condemned for it. When the Soviets used MiGs and the dreaded Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships to do it during the 1980s, they were called criminals. For America to use its overwhelming firepower in the same reckless and indiscriminate manner defies the world's sense of justice and morality while turning the Afghan people and the Islamic world even further against the United States."

In 1932, in a series of Guernica-like atrocities, the British used poison gas in Waziristan. The disarmament convention of the same year sought a ban against the aerial bombardment of civilians, but Lloyd George, who had been British prime minister during World War I, gloated: "We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers" (Fitzgerald and Gould, p. 65). His view prevailed.

The U.S. continues to act similarly, but with the new excuse that our killing of noncombatants is a result of "collateral damage," or human error. Using pilotless drones guided with only minimal accuracy from computers at military bases in the Arizona and Nevada deserts among other places, we have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unarmed bystanders in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Pakistani and Afghan governments have repeatedly warned that we are alienating precisely the people we claim to be saving for democracy.

When in May 2009, General Stanley McChrystal was appointed as the commander in Afghanistan, he ordered new limits on air attacks, including those carried out by the CIA, except when needed to protect allied troops. Unfortunately, as if to illustrate the incompetence of our chain of command, only two days after this order, on June 23, 2009, the United States carried out a drone attack against a funeral procession that killed at least 80 people, the single deadliest U.S. attack on Pakistani soil so far. There was virtually no reporting of these developments by the mainstream American press or on the network television news. (At the time, the media were almost totally preoccupied by the sexual adventures of the governor of South Carolina and the death of pop star Michael Jackson.)

Our military operations in both Pakistan and Afghanistan have long been plagued by inadequate and inaccurate intelligence about both countries, ideological preconceptions about which parties we should support and which ones we should oppose, and myopic understandings of what we could possibly hope to achieve. Fitzgerald and Gould, for example, charge that, contrary to our own intelligence service's focus on Afghanistan, "Pakistan has always been the problem." They add:

"Pakistan's army and its Inter-Services Intelligence branch... from 1973 on, has played the key role in funding and directing first the mujahideen [anti-Soviet fighters during the 1980s]… and then the Taliban. It is Pakistan's army that controls its nuclear weapons, constrains the development of democratic institutions, trains Taliban fighters in suicide attacks and orders them to fight American and NATO soldiers protecting the Afghan government." (p. 322-324)

The Pakistani army and its intelligence arm are staffed, in part, by devout Muslims who fostered the Taliban in Afghanistan to meet the needs of their own agenda, though not necessarily to advance an Islamic jihad. Their purposes have always included: keeping Afghanistan free of Russian or Indian influence, providing a training and recruiting ground for mujahideen guerrillas to be used in places like Kashmir (fought over by both Pakistan and India), containing Islamic radicalism in Afghanistan (and so keeping it out of Pakistan), and extorting huge amounts of money from Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf emirates, and the United States to pay and train "freedom fighters" throughout the Islamic world. Pakistan's consistent policy has been to support the clandestine policies of the Inter-Services Intelligence and thwart the influence of its major enemy and competitor, India.

Colonel Douglas MacGregor, U.S. Army (retired), an adviser to the Center for Defense Information in Washington, summarizes our hopeless project in South Asia this way: "Nothing we do will compel 125 million Muslims in Pakistan to make common cause with a United States in league with the two states that are unambiguously anti-Muslim: Israel and India."

Obama's mid-2009 "surge" of troops into southern Afghanistan and particularly into Helmand Province, a Taliban stronghold, is fast becoming darkly reminiscent of General William Westmoreland's continuous requests in Vietnam for more troops and his promises that if we would ratchet up the violence just a little more and tolerate a few more casualties, we would certainly break the will of the Vietnamese insurgents. This was a total misreading of the nature of the conflict in Vietnam, just as it is in Afghanistan today.

Twenty years after the forces of the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan in disgrace, the last Russian general to command them, Gen. Boris Gromov, issued his own prediction: Disaster, he insisted, will come to the thousands of new forces Obama is sending there, just as it did to the Soviet Union's, which lost some 15,000 soldiers in its own Afghan war. We should recognize that we are wasting time, lives, and resources in an area where we have never understood the political dynamics and continue to make the wrong choices.

3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases

In March, New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert noted, "Rape and other forms of sexual assault against women is the great shame of the U.S. armed forces, and there is no evidence that this ghastly problem, kept out of sight as much as possible, is diminishing." He continued:

"New data released by the Pentagon showed an almost 9 percent increase in the number of sexual assaults -- 2,923 -- and a 25 percent increase in such assaults reported by women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan [over the past year]. Try to imagine how bizarre it is that women in American uniforms who are enduring all the stresses related to serving in a combat zone have to also worry about defending themselves against rapists wearing the same uniform and lining up in formation right beside them."

The problem is exacerbated by having our troops garrisoned in overseas bases located cheek-by-jowl next to civilian populations and often preying on them like foreign conquerors. For example, sexual violence against women and girls by American GIs has been out of control in Okinawa, Japan's poorest prefecture, ever since it was permanently occupied by our soldiers, Marines, and airmen some 64 years ago.

That island was the scene of the largest anti-American demonstrations since the end of World War II after the 1995 kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by two Marines and a sailor. The problem of rape has been ubiquitous around all of our bases on every continent and has probably contributed as much to our being loathed abroad as the policies of the Bush administration or our economic exploitation of poverty-stricken countries whose raw materials we covet.

The military itself has done next to nothing to protect its own female soldiers or to defend the rights of innocent bystanders forced to live next to our often racially biased and predatory troops. "The military's record of prosecuting rapists is not just lousy, it's atrocious," writes Herbert. In territories occupied by American military forces, the high command and the State Department make strenuous efforts to enact so-called "Status of Forces Agreements" (SOFAs) that will prevent host governments from gaining jurisdiction over our troops who commit crimes overseas. The SOFAs also make it easier for our military to spirit culprits out of a country before they can be apprehended by local authorities.

This issue was well illustrated by the case of an Australian teacher, a long-time resident of Japan, who in April 2002 was raped by a sailor from the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, then based at the big naval base at Yokosuka. She identified her assailant and reported him to both Japanese and U.S. authorities. Instead of his being arrested and effectively prosecuted, the victim herself was harassed and humiliated by the local Japanese police. Meanwhile, the U.S. discharged the suspect from the Navy but allowed him to escape Japanese law by returning him to the U.S., where he lives today.

In the course of trying to obtain justice, the Australian teacher discovered that almost fifty years earlier, in October 1953, the Japanese and American governments signed a secret "understanding" as part of their SOFA in which Japan agreed to waive its jurisdiction if the crime was not of "national importance to Japan." The U.S. argued strenuously for this codicil because it feared that otherwise it would face the likelihood of some 350 servicemen per year being sent to Japanese jails for sex crimes.

Since that time the U.S. has negotiated similar wording in SOFAs with Canada, Ireland, Italy, and Denmark. According to the Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces (2001), the Japanese practice has become the norm for SOFAs throughout the world, with predictable results. In Japan, of 3,184 U.S. military personnel who committed crimes between 2001 and 2008, 83% were not prosecuted. In Iraq, we have just signed a SOFA that bears a strong resemblance to the first postwar one we had with Japan: namely, military personnel and military contractors accused of off-duty crimes will remain in U.S. custody while Iraqis investigate. This is, of course, a perfect opportunity to spirit the culprits out of the country before they can be charged.

Within the military itself, the journalist Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007), speaks of the "culture of unpunished sexual assaults" and the "shockingly low numbers of courts martial" for rapes and other forms of sexual attacks. Helen Benedict, author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq (Beacon Press, 2009), quotes this figure in a 2009 Pentagon report on military sexual assaults: 90% of the rapes in the military are never reported at all and, when they are, the consequences for the perpetrator are negligible.

It is fair to say that the U.S. military has created a worldwide sexual playground for its personnel and protected them to a large extent from the consequences of their behavior. As a result a group of female veterans in 2006 created the Service Women's Action Network (SWAN). Its agenda is to spread the word that "no woman should join the military."

I believe a better solution would be to radically reduce the size of our standing army, and bring the troops home from countries where they do not understand their environments and have been taught to think of the inhabitants as inferior to themselves.

10 Steps Toward Liquidating the Empire

Dismantling the American empire would, of course, involve many steps. Here are ten key places to begin:

1. We need to put a halt to the serious environmental damage done by our bases planet-wide. We also need to stop writing SOFAs that exempt us from any responsibility for cleaning up after ourselves.

2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of the "opportunity costs" that go with them -- the things we might otherwise do with our talents and resources but can't or won't.

3. As we already know (but often forget), imperialism breeds the use of torture. In the 1960s and 1970s we helped overthrow the elected governments in Brazil and Chile and underwrote regimes of torture that prefigured our own treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. (See, for instance, A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors [Pantheon, 1979], on how the U.S. spread torture methods to Brazil and Uruguay.) Dismantling the empire would potentially mean a real end to the modern American record of using torture abroad.

4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening train of camp followers, dependents, civilian employees of the Department of Defense, and hucksters -- along with their expensive medical facilities, housing requirements, swimming pools, clubs, golf courses, and so forth -- that follow our military enclaves around the world.

5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial complex that our military establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs, scientific research, and defense. These alleged advantages have long been discredited by serious economic research. Ending empire would make this happen.

6. As a self-respecting democratic nation, we need to stop being the world's largest exporter of arms and munitions and quit educating Third World militaries in the techniques of torture, military coups, and service as proxies for our imperialism. A prime candidate for immediate closure is the so-called School of the Americas, the U.S. Army's infamous military academy at Fort Benning, Georgia, for Latin American military officers. (See Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire [Metropolitan Books, 2004], pp. 136-40.)

7. Given the growing constraints on the federal budget, we should abolish the Reserve Officers' Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote militarism in our schools.

8. We need to restore discipline and accountability in our armed forces by radically scaling back our reliance on civilian contractors, private military companies, and agents working for the military outside the chain of command and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (See Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater:The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army [Nation Books, 2007]). Ending empire would make this possible.

9. We need to reduce, not increase, the size of our standing army and deal much more effectively with the wounds our soldiers receive and combat stress they undergo.

10. To repeat the main message of this essay, we must give up our inappropriate reliance on military force as the chief means of attempting to achieve foreign policy objectives.

Unfortunately, few empires of the past voluntarily gave up their dominions in order to remain independent, self-governing polities. The two most important recent examples are the British and Soviet empires. If we do not learn from their examples, our decline and fall is foreordained.

Chalmers Johnson is the author of Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006), and editor of Okinawa: Cold War Island (1999).

[Note on further reading on the matter of sexual violence in and around our overseas bases and rapes in the military: On the response to the 1995 Okinawa rape, see Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, chapter 2. On related subjects, see David McNeil, "Justice for Some. Crime, Victims, and the US-Japan SOFA," Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 8-1-09, March 15, 2009; "Bilateral Secret Agreement Is Preventing U.S. Servicemen Committing Crimes in Japan from Being Prosecuted," Japan Press Weekly, May 23, 2009; Dieter Fleck, ed., The Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces, Oxford University Press, 2001; Minoru Matsutani, "'53 Secret Japan-US Deal Waived GI Prosecutions," Japan Times, October 24, 2008; "Crime Without Punishment in Japan," the Economist, December 10, 2008; "Japan: Declassified Document Reveals Agreement to Relinquish Jurisdiction Over U.S. Forces," Akahata, October 30, 2008; "Government's Decision First Case in Japan," Ryukyu Shimpo, May 20, 2008; Dahr Jamail, "Culture of Unpunished Sexual Assault in Military," Antiwar.com, May 1, 2009; and Helen Benedict, "The Plight of Women Soldiers," the Nation, May 5, 2009.]

Copyright 2009 Chalmers Johnson

Obama's Empire

By Catherine Lutz
Published 30 July 2009
Courtesy Of The New Statesman

The 44th president of the United States was elected amid hopes that he would roll back his country’s global dominance. Today, he is commander-in-chief of an unprecedented network of military bases that is still expanding.

In December 2008, shortly before being sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama pledged his belief that, "to ensure prosperity here at home and peace abroad", it was vital to maintain "the strongest military on the planet". Unveiling his national security team, including George Bush's defence secretary, Robert Gates, he said: "We also agree the strength of our military has to be combined with the wisdom and force of diplomacy, and that we are going to be committed to rebuilding and restrengthening
alliances around the world to advance American interests and American security."

Unfortunately, many of the Obama administration's diplomatic efforts are being directed towards maintaining and garnering new access for the US military across the globe. US military officials, through their Korean proxies, have completed the eviction of resistant rice farmers from their land around Camp Humphreys, South Korea, for its expansion (including a new 18-hole golf course); they are busily making back-room deals with officials in the Northern Mariana Islands to gain the use of the Pacific islands there for bombing and training purposes; and they are scrambling to express support for a regime in Kyrgyzstan that has been implicated in the murder of its political opponents but whose Manas Airbase, used to stage US military actions in Afghanistan since 2001, Obama and the Pentagon consider crucial for the expanded war there.

The global reach of the US military today is unprecedented and unparalleled. Officially, more than 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in approximately 900 military facilities in 46 countries and territories (the unofficial figure is far greater). The US military owns or rents 795,000 acres of land, with 26,000 buildings and structures, valued at $146bn (£89bn). The bases bristle with an inventory of weapons whose worth is measured in the trillions and whose killing power could wipe out all life on earth several times over.

The official figures exclude the huge build-up of troops and structures in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, as well as secret or unacknowledged facilities in Israel, Kuwait, the Philippines and many other places. In just three years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, £2bn was spent on military construction. A single facility in Iraq, Balad Airbase, houses 30,000 troops and 10,000 contractors, and extends across 16 square miles, with an additional 12 square mile "security perimeter". From the battle zones of Afghanistan and Iraq to quiet corners of Curaçao, Korea and Britain, the US military domain consists of sprawling army bases, small listening posts, missile and artillery testing ranges and berthed aircraft carriers (moved to "trouble spots" around the world, each carrier is considered by the US navy as "four and a half acres of sovereign US territory"). While the bases are, literally speaking, barracks and weapons depots, staging areas for war-making and ship repairs, complete with golf courses and basketball courts, they are also political claims, spoils of war, arms sale showrooms and toxic industrial sites. In addition to the cultural imperialism and episodes of rape, murder, looting and land seizure that have always accompanied foreign armies, local communities are now subjected to the ear-splitting noise of jets on exercise, to the risk of helicopters and warplanes crashing into residential areas, and to exposure to the toxic materials that the military uses in its daily operations.

The global expansion of US bases - and with it the rise of the US as a world superpower - is a legacy of the Second World War. In 1938, the US had 14 military bases outside its continental borders. Seven years later, it had 30,000 installations in roughly 100 countries. While this number was projected to shrink to 2,000 by 1948 (following pressure from other nations to return bases in their own territory or colonies, and pressure at home to demobilise the 12 million-man military), the US continued to pursue access rights to land and air space around the world. It established security alliances with multiple states within Europe (Nato), the Middle East and south Asia (Cento) and south-east Asia (Seato), as well as bilateral agreements with Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Status of Forces Agreements (Sofas) were crafted in each country to specify what the military could do, and usually gave US soldiers broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed and environmental damage caused. These agreements and subsequent base operations have mostly been shrouded in secrecy, helped by the National Security Act of 1947. New US bases were built in remarkable numbers in West Germany, Italy, Britain and Japan, with the defeated Axis powers hosting the most significant numbers (at one point, Japan was peppered with 3,800 US installations).

As battles become bases, so bases become battles; the sites in east Asia acquired during the Spanish-American war in 1898 and during the Second World War - such as Guam, Thailand and the Philippines - became the primary bases from which the US waged war on Vietnam. The number of raids over north and south Vietnam required tons of bombs unloaded at the naval station in Guam. The morale of ground troops based in Vietnam, as fragile as it was to become through the latter part of the 1960s, depended on R&R (rest and recreation) at bases outside the country, which allowed them to leave the war zone and yet be shipped back quickly and inexpensively for further fighting. The war also depended on the heroin the CIA was able to ship in to the troops on the battlefield in Vietnam from its secret bases in Laos. By 1967, the number of US bases had returned to 1947 levels.

Technological changes in warfare have had important effects on the configuration of US bases. Long-range missiles and the development of ships that can make much longer runs without resupply have altered the need for a line of bases to move forces forward into combat zones, as
has the aerial refuelling of military jets. An arms airlift from the US to the British in the Middle East in 1941-42, for example, required a long hopscotch of bases, from Florida to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Trinidad, British Guiana, north-east Brazil, Fernando de Noronha, Takoradi (now in Ghana), Lagos, Kano (now in Nigeria) and Khartoum, before finally making delivery in Egypt. In the early 1970s, US aircraft could make the same delivery with one stop in the Azores, and today can do so non-stop.

On the other hand, the pouring of money into military R&D (the Pentagon has spent more than $85bn in 2009), and the corporate profits to be made in the development and deployment of the resulting technologies, have been significant factors in the ever larger numbers of technical facilities on foreign soil. These include such things as missile early-warning radar, signals intelligence, satellite control and space-tracking telescopes. The will to gain military control of space, as well as gather intelligence, has led to the establishment of numerous new military bases in violation of arms-control agreements such as the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. In Colombia and Peru, and in secret and mobile locations elsewhere in Latin America, radar stations are primarily used for anti-trafficking operations.

Since 2000, with the election of George W Bush and the ascendancy to power of a group of men who believed in a more aggressive and unilateral use of military power (some of whom stood to profit handsomely from the increased military budget that would require), US imperial ambition has grown. Following the declaration of a war on terror and of the right to pre-emptive war, the number of countries into which the US inserted and based troops radically expanded. The Pentagon put into action a plan for a network of "deployment" or "forward operating" bases to increase the reach of current and future forces. The Pentagon-aligned, neoconservative think tank the Project for the New American Century stressed that "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of ­Saddam Hussein".

The new bases are designed to operate not defensively against particular threats but as offensive, expeditionary platforms from which military capabilities can be projected quickly, anywhere. The Global Defence Posture Review of 2004 announced these changes, focusing not just on reorienting the footprint of US bases away from cold war locations, but on remaking legal arrangements that support expanded ­military activities with other allied countries and prepositioning equipment in those countries. As a recent army strategic document notes, "Military personnel can be transported to, and fall in on, prepositioned equipment significantly more quickly than the equivalent unit could be transported to the theatre, and prepositioning equipment overseas is generally less politically difficult than stationing US military personnel."

Terms such as facility, outpost or station are used for smaller bases to suggest a less permanent presence. The US department of defence currently distinguishes between three types of military facility. "Main operating bases" are those with permanent personnel, strong infrastructure, and often family housing, such as Kadena Airbase in Japan and Ramstein Airbase in Germany. "Forward operating sites" are "expandable warm facilit[ies] maintained with a limited US military support presence and possibly prepositioned equipment", such as Incirlik Airbase in Turkey and Soto Cano Airbase in Honduras. Finally, "co-operative security locations" are sites with few or no permanent US personnel, maintained by contractors or the host nation for occasional use by the US military, and often referred to as "lily pads". These are cropping up around the world, especially throughout Africa, a recent example being in Dakar, Senegal.

Moreover, these bases are the anchor - and merely the most visible aspect - of the US military's presence overseas. Every year, US forces train 100,000 soldiers in 180 countries, the presumption being that beefed-up local militaries will help to pursue US interests in local conflicts and save the US money, casualties and bad publicity when human rights abuses occur (the blowback effect of such activities has been made clear by the strength of the Taliban since 9/11). The US military presence also involves jungle, urban, desert, maritime and polar training exercises across wide swathes of landscape, which have become the pretext for substantial and permanent positioning of troops. In recent years, the US has run around 20 exercises annually on Philippine soil, which have resulted in a near-continuous presence of US soldiers in a country whose people ejected US bases in 1992 and whose constitution forbids foreign troops to be based on its territory. Finally, US personnel work every day to shape local legal codes to facilitate US access: they have lobbied, for example, to change the Philippine and Japanese constitutions to allow, respectively, foreign troop basing and a more-than-defensive military.

Asked why the US has a vast network of military bases around the world, Pentagon officials give both utilitarian and humanitarian arguments. Utilitarian arguments include the claim that bases provide security for the US by deterring attack from hostile countries and preventing or remedying unrest or military challenges; that bases serve the national economic interests of the US, ensuring access to markets and commodities needed to maintain US standards of living; and that bases are symbolic markers of US power and credibility - and so the more the better. Humanitarian arguments present bases as altruistic gifts to other nations, helping to liberate or democratise them, or offering aid relief. None of these humanitarian arguments deals with the problem that many of the bases were taken during wartime and "given" to the US by another of the war's victors.

Critics of US foreign policy have dissected and dismantled the arguments made for maintaining a global system of military basing. They have shown that the bases have often failed in their own terms: despite the Pentagon's claims that they provide security to the regions they occupy, most of the world's people feel anything but reassured by their presence. Instead of providing more safety for the US or its allies, they have ­often provoked attacks, and have made the communities around bases key targets of other nations' missiles. On the island of Belau in the Pacific, the site of sharp resistance to US attempts to instal a submarine base and jungle training centre, people describe their experience of military basing in the Second World War: "When soldiers come, war comes." On Guam, a joke among locals is that few people except for nuclear strategists in the Kremlin know where their island is.

As for the argument that bases serve the national economic interest of the US, the weapons, personnel and fossil fuels involved cost billions of dollars, most coming from US taxpayers. While bases have clearly been concentrated in countries with key strategic resources, particularly along the routes of oil and gas pipelines in central Asia, the Middle East and, increasingly, Africa, from which one-quarter of US oil imports are expected by 2015, the profits have gone first of all to the corporations that build and service them, such as Halliburton. The myth that bases are an altruistic form of "foreign aid" for locals is exploded by the substantial costs involved for host economies and polities. The immediate negative effects include levels of pollution, noise, crime and lost productive land that cannot be offset by soldiers' local spending or employment of local people. Other putative gains tend to benefit only local elites and further militarise the host nations: elaborate bilateral negotiations swap weapons, cash and trade privileges for overflight and land-use rights. Less explicitly, rice imports, immigration rights to the US or overlooking human rights abuses have been the currency of exchange.

The environmental, political, and economic impact of these bases is enormous. The social problems that accompany bases, including soldiers' violence against women and car crashes, have to be handled by local communities without compensation from the US. Some communities pay the highest price: their farmland taken for bases, their children neurologically damaged by military jet fuel in their water supplies, their neighbours imprisoned, tortured and disappeared by the autocratic regimes that survive on US military and political support given as a form of tacit rent for the bases. The US military has repeatedly interfered in the domestic affairs of nations in which it has or desires military access, operating to influence votes and undermine or change local laws that stand in the way.

Social movements have proliferated around the world in response to the empire of US bases, ever since its inception. The attempt to take the Philippines from Spain in 1898 led to a drawn-out guerrilla war for independence that required 126,000 US occupation troops to stifle. Between 1947 and 1990, the US military was asked to leave France, Yugoslavia, Iran, Ethiopia, Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Vietnam, Indonesia, Peru, Mexico and Venezuela. Popular and political objection to the bases in Spain, the Philippines, Greece and Turkey in the 1980s gave those governments the grounds to negotiate ­significantly more compensation from the US. Portugal threatened to evict the US from important bases in the Azores unless it ceased its support for independence for its African colonies.

Since 1990, the US has been sent packing, most significantly, from the Philippines, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Vieques and Uzbekistan. Of its own accord, for varying reasons, it decided to leave countries from Ghana to Fiji. Persuading the US to clean up after itself - including, in Panama, more than 100,000 rounds of unexploded ordnance - is a further struggle. As in the case of the US navy's removal from Vieques in 2003, arguments about the environmental and health damage of the military's activities remain the centrepiece of resistance to bases.

Many are also concerned by other countries' overseas bases - primarily European, Russian and Chinese - and by the activities of their own militaries, but the far greater number of US bases and their weaponry has understandably been the focus. The sense that US bases represent a major injustice to the host community and nation is very strong in countries where US bases have the longest standing and are most ubiquitous. In Okinawa, polls show that 70 to 80 per cent of the island's people want the bases, or at least the marines, to leave. In 1995, the abduction and rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl by two US marines and one US sailor led to demands for the removal of all US bases in Japan. One family in Okinawa has built a large peace museum right up against the edge of the Futenma Airbase, with a stairway to the roof that allows busloads of schoolchildren and other visitors to view the sprawling base after looking at art depicting the horrors of war.

In Korea, the great majority of the population feels that a reduction in US presence would increase national security; in recent years, several violent deaths at the hands of US soldiers triggered vast candlelight vigils and protests across the country. And the original inhabitants of Diego Garcia, evicted from their homes between 1967 and 1973 by the British on behalf of the US for a naval base, have organised a concerted campaign for the right to return, bringing legal suit against the British government, a story told in David Vine's recent book Island of Shame. There is also resistance to the US expansion plans into new areas. In 2007, a number of African nations baulked at US attempts to secure access to sites for military bases. In eastern Europe, despite well-funded campaigns to convince Poles and Czechs of the value of US bases and much sentiment in favour of accepting them in pursuit of closer ties with Nato and the EU, and promised economic benefits, vigorous pro­tests have included hunger strikes and led the Czech government, in March, to reverse its plan to allow a US military radar base to be built in the country.

The US has responded to action against bases with a renewed emphasis on "force protection", in some cases enforcing curfews on soldiers, and cutting back on events that bring local people on to base property. The department of defence has also engaged in the time-honoured practice of renaming: clusters of soldiers, buildings and equipment have become "defence staging posts" or "forward operating locations" rather than military bases. Regulating documents become "visiting forces agreements", not "status of forces agreements", or remain entirely secret. While major reorganisation of bases is under way for a host of reasons, including a desire to create a more mobile force with greater access to the Middle East, eastern Europe and central Asia, the motives also include an attempt to prevent political momentum of the sort that ended US use of the Vieques and Philippine bases.

The attempt to gain permanent basing in Iraq foundered in 2008 on the objections of forces in both Iraq and the US. Obama, in his Cairo speech in June, may have insisted that "we pursue no bases" in either Iraq or Afghanistan, but there has been no sign of any significant dismantling of bases there, or of scaling back the US military presence in the rest of the world. The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, recently visited Japan to ensure that it follows through on promises to provide the US with a new airfield on Okinawa and billions of dollars to build new housing and other facilities for 8,000 marines relocating to Guam. She ignored the invitation of island activists to come and see the damage left by previous decades of US base activities. The myriad land-grabs and hundreds of billions of dollars spent to quarter troops around the world persist far beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, and too far from the headlines.

Catherine Lutz is a professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and editor of "The Bases of Empire: the Global Struggle against US Military Posts" (Pluto Press, £17.99)

"The War Is With The Arabs"

The True Height of Insecurity

By HANNAH MERMELSTEIN
Weekend Edition
July 24-26, 2009
Courtesy Of COUNTERPUNCH

I saw this sign as I was entering Nablus last week, again on my way to Ramallah, and again near Bethlehem. The phrase is printed in Hebrew, presumably by Israeli settlers, on huge signs throughout the West Bank. Israeli racism rarely shocks me anymore, but its blatant display still makes me stop and catch my breath as I translate it into other contexts. Imagine driving through the middle of a predominantly black neighborhood in a US city or town and seeing a enormous sign that says, “The war is with the Blacks.”

I think about security. Israel’s abuse of the word has rendered the concept almost meaningless in the region, but the importance of security on individual and communal levels cannot be underestimated. However, most discussions I see in the media about security ignore the Palestinian people’s right to security. “The war is with the Arabs” is a new sign, as far as I know, but for years in the West Bank I have seen stars of David scrawled on Palestinian shops and homes, and signs like “Death to Arabs” and “Kahane was right” (Kahane was an extremist political leader who promoted ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people; this sign is essentially equivalent to “Hitler was right” in the middle of a Jewish neighborhood).

But signs are not only created; they are also destroyed. Since 1948, Palestinian people inside Israel have experienced erasure and denial of their identities that is perhaps stronger than that of any other group of Palestinian people. I visited a friend in Lyd last week who lives on Giborai Yisrael (“Heroes of Israel”) Street. Driving around the Palestinian neighborhoods in Lyd, we passed roads bearing the names of Herzl, Jabotinsky, and other Zionist leaders. None of the old Arabic street names remain. Even large cities with considerable Palestinian populations are now seeing Arabic names officially erased from signs. In Arabic script, “Yaffa” will become “Yafo,” “Nasra” will become “Natzeret,” and “Al Quds” will become “Yerushalayim.”

Lack of security goes beyond denial of identity and history as visually expressed through signs. A Palestinian friend with Israeli citizenship told me he has heard a rumor that a huge piece of land in Jordan is being cleared and built up for the eventual arrival of the Palestinian population of Israel after they are transferred from their homes. “It may be conspiracy theory,” he said, “but I don’t know.”

“I’d like to think that Israel couldn’t get away with that,” I responded.

“Of course they can,” another friend from Lyd said, “and if the conditions are right, they will.”

Imagine living day to day thinking you might be expelled from your country in the near future. Or in Gaza, wondering if you will be killed tomorrow, or if you will ever be able to come in and out of your country at will. Or in the West Bank, if your son will be arrested, or if you will be able to get through the checkpoint in the morning to get to work. Or in Jerusalem, if your residency will be stripped or your house destroyed.

Imagine little correlation between choice and consequence, an arbitrary relationship between cause and effect. If you are just as likely to get shot and killed sipping tea in your doorway, or sitting in your fourth grade classroom, or participating in a demonstration, or joining the armed resistance, is it any surprise that some choose each?

A friend of mine from the West Bank once told me that she never feels safe, so safety is not a consideration for her in making decisions. As much as I may try, I cannot truly imagine this lack of control.

I met a woman in Jerusalem who was displaced from her home by settlers, physically removed from her house by dozens of Israeli soldiers in the middle of the night. Twice a refugee (1948 and 2008), Um Kamel currently lives in a tent near her house that has been destroyed and re-pitched six times in the past six months. This is perhaps the height of insecurity, yet Um Kamel stays strong and determined. Many in Palestine would call it sumoud, or steadfastness.

This kind of strength is seen remarkably often in Palestine, and indicates a deeper security that comes in part from faith. Faith in God, sometimes, but also faith in each other, in the justice of one’s cause, in the tide of history that has shown that no single occupation in Palestine lasts forever. This, of course, is also Israel’s deepest fear. That no matter how many walls they build, how many people they imprison, how many homes they destroy, how many signs they erase, and how many people they expel, true security will remain elusive, and eventually, Zionism will fail. As many older Palestinian people have said to me, with security, “We have lived through many occupations. This too shall pass.”

Hannah Mermelstein is co-founder of Birthright Unplugged and Students Boycott Apartheid. She lives in Brooklyn, NY and works with the New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel and the Palestine Education Project. She can be reached at hmermels@hotmail.com

Israeli Warships In The Red Sea

Threat Diplomacy

By NADIA HIJAB
July 23, 2009
Courtesy Of COUNTERPUNCH

Two Israeli missile class warships sailed through Egypt's Suez Canal into the Red Sea this week, some days after one of their nuclear submarines. The news barely blipped the media surface of the United States.

It should have raised a few questions: Will Israel really attack Iran? What does the law have to say to Israel -- and to Egypt? Will the world act to prevent war?

The idea of an Israeli attack on Iran is almost unthinkable. It could devastate Iran and have repercussions beyond a counter-attack on Israel. Nuclear fallout could affect neighboring countries. Americans in the region and elsewhere could be vulnerable. Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz through which about 20% of world oil flows, perhaps felling a global economy already on its knees. As French president Nicolas Sarkozy said at the G8 summit, such a unilateral act would be an "absolute catastrophe."

Barack Obama wants a diplomatic resolution of the standoff over Iran's nuclear program, so perhaps all we are seeing is Israeli sabre-rattling. If this is all, it is still useful to Israel. Israeli strategists have openly said they prefer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power -- his inflammatory rhetoric is more likely to keep Iran at loggerheads with the world -- and an external threat strengthens Ahmadinejad against his reformist rivals. Israeli military maneuvers also reinforce Iran's determination to seek a nuclear deterrent, thus keeping the country isolated. And it distracts attention from Israel's relentless colonization program in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Yet an attack cannot be ruled out: Israel has been known to do the unthinkable. The world cannot afford to wait and see. The United States in particular needs to take more muscular action. The Obama administration does not have to expend political capital by taking Israel on by itself. It can make use of the protection provided by the United Nations and international law.

There's plenty to work with: An Israel strike against Iran would be against the law. Any state's use of force must be justified as self-defense; otherwise, it is a fundamental violation of the United Nations Charter. What's more, International law expert Richard Falk says, even the threat to use force is unlawful.

Israel's "threat diplomacy" is "explicitly prohibited by the Charter," the American Jewish law professor explains, because the threat to use force can be as disruptive as the use of force itself. It constitutes a crime against peace, as it was defined at the Nuremburg Tribunal after World War II, becoming a principle of international law. It promotes an arms race and escalates tension.

Today, there are tensions indeed, and they evoke eerie echoes of the June 1967 war. The weeks before the war were full of military maneuvers and tough talk that culminated in the lightning Israeli attack on and victory over Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.

Israel knew full well that the Arabs did not intend war. The late premier Menachem Begin told the Israel National Defense College in 1982: "We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack [Nasser]." The military swagger provided the cover for Israel's strike.

If the world doesn't want to spend the next 42 years trying to unravel the consequences of another Israeli attack -- this time against Iran -- it must act fast.

First, countries must be careful not to be complicit in Israel's "threat diplomacy." So while Egypt has no right to block the passage of Israeli vessels through the Suez Canal, Falk refers to the concept of "innocent passage" in international law. Whether Israel's deployment of its warships and nuclear submarines can be seen as innocent -- given the threats it has been making -- is a tricky question under international law. Egypt may well have a duty to the international community not to allow such passage. And if so, the international community must support it in this position.

Second, countries must lay down the law. Obama was quick to deflect Joe Biden's claim that Israel, as a "sovereign nation" was entitled to decide on a strike against Iran. Obama underscored that America had "absolutely not" given Israel a green light. He even appeared to slap his vice president on the wrist by saying it was very important that his administration be as clear and "as consistent as it can be."

But Obama did not go far enough. Biden's remark is not just another unguided missile: It is not consistent with international law. No state, however sovereign, has the right to threaten world peace unless it is acting in self-defense or has a mandate from the United Nations Security Council.

This is what Biden should have said, what Obama must say, and what all countries, Egypt included, must uphold. Otherwise we will all pay a heavy price.

Nadia Hijab is an independent analyst and a senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies.

21st Century Coups d'Etat

Stronger Measures are Needed

By LAURA CARLSEN
July 23, 2009
Courtesy Of COUNTERPUNCH

The consolidation of power through brute force represents a serious step backward for the region. How is it possible that a coup d'etat could take place and survive in the 21st century? This is the question that the international community faces after the coup d'etat that Honduras suffered on June 28. On that day, the Honduran Armed Forces kidnapped the democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya, and forced him onto a flight bound for Costa Rica. The Organization of American States (OAS), the UN General Assembly, the U.S. government, and every Latin American nation have denounced the coup and demanded the immediate reinstatement of President Zelaya. The international diplomatic response was strong and swift, leaving the de facto regime in Honduras isolated. Many believed that this response would be sufficient to force Roberto Micheletti, the "president" imposed by the architects of the coup, to renounce his claim to rule by force.

It has been several decades since Central America emerged from a tragic and bloody era of military dictatorships, in several cases supported by the U.S. government. Times have changed. President Obama united with the global call to restore democracy in the impoverished Central American nation of Honduras. The country has been hit with economic sanctions through the temporary closing of borders with neighboring Central American countries, the freezing of loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the suspension of oil imports from Petrocaribe, and the suspension of USD $16.5 million in U.S. aid, among other sanctions.

However, the coup leaders are stubbornly holding on to power. They did not allow the plane carrying President Zelaya and the president of the UN General Assembly, Miguel D'Escoto, to land in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa on July 7. Micheletti has stated that he will remain in power until elections slated for November, and will never permit Zelaya to return as president. There is currently a curfew in place across the country, military roadblocks in various regions, and arrest warrants filed against leaders of unions and campesino, indigenous, and human rights movements. Security forces have killed at least three people. Social movements continue to rally in the streets and their numbers and degree of organization have increased daily as they fight for the return of President Zelaya and his right to consult the public on a constitutional assembly. It was this issue that sparked the coup, implemented by the armed forces, and conservative politicians and businessmen.

In an attempt to diffuse the situation, President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica began mediating talks between the two sides. It soon became clear that the mediation effort offered little hope of success, since Micheletti refused any possibility of allowing President Zelaya's return—an obligatory condition for Zelaya, the international community, and the citizens' movements of Honduras. Micheletti returned to Honduras after just one day of negotiations, refusing to meet with Zelaya and leaving behind a delegation that, because of the intransigence of the coup leaders, does not have the power to advance the talks. The second round of talks the weekend of July 18 produced the same result. Given that the regime is isolated, sanctioned, and being confronted by its own people, how is it possible that the coup is now entering its fourth week, tenaciously maintaining a control that has been widely declared illegitimate?

It is time to recognize that diplomatic pressure alone has not worked. The U.S. government, along with other countries, needs to move past talk and start implementing concrete actions. Although it has applied limited economic sanctions, much more needs to be done based on an official declaration from the State Department that a coup has taken place in Honduras. Commercial measures under CAFTA must also be applied. This implies an incredibly high price, not only for the de facto regime, but also for the Honduran people. The people have made it clear that these measures are necessary and have demanded that the U.S. government and others apply these sanctions. The coup leaders and the international far-right that support them are aware that Honduras is a test case for the Obama administration and the world. If the coup leaders succeed in consolidating power based on military force it will represent a serious step backward for the rule of law in the region.

The Honduran people have shown their willingness to take the personal risks of demonstrating in the streets against the coup and enduring the consequences of more sanctions. The rest of the world should follow their example in the fight for democracy and demand that their governments implement stronger measures to restore Honduras' constitutional order. Only then will it be possible to send a message once and for all that military coups are unacceptable in the 21st century.

Translated for the Americas Program by Monica Wooters.

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

How To Argue Against Torture

Always Wrong; Always Illegal; Always Unjustifiable

By BERNARD CHAZELLE
July 22, 2009
Courtesy Of COUNTERPUNCH

A signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture, the United States "does not torture." Yet abundant evidence indicates that it does, directly or by proxy—and in fact always has. An old American tradition of state-sponsored torture even has its own lexicon: SOA, Kubark, Phoenix, MK-Ultra, rendition, CIA's "no-touch" paradigm, etc. It is quite popular, too. Torture enjoys more than twice the public support in the US that it does in France, Spain, and the UK. One of the most watched TV dramas, 24, is but an extended ode to the glories of torture. The former director of a prominent human rights center at Harvard writes of the judicious use of sleep deprivation, hooding, and targeted assassinations; he concedes the government's need to "traffic in evils." The nation's most celebrated defense attorney recommends "torture warrants" and "the sterilized needle being shoved under the fingernails" ("sterilized" because he is a liberal). The most cited legal scholar in the land writes: "If the stakes are high enough, torture is permissible. No one who doubts that this is the case should be in a position of responsibility."

Anti-torture voices have been left sounding defensive, insecure, incoherent. Yet, while boasting the world's highest incarceration numbers and supermax prisons characterized by a warden as a "clean version of hell," the US has also begun to question its tolerance of torture. The debate is on, and torture is winning. I intend here to lay the foundation for a strong, cogent anti-torture position. It rests upon three principles:

Torture is always wrong;
Torture must be banned by law unconditionally;
Not all torture decisions should be morally codified.

The first two principles reject torture on moral grounds (it's wrong) and legal ones (it's bad). Unfortunately, they do not imply that one should never torture. If, indeed, our only choice is between two acts that are immoral, these two rules alone won't tell us what to do. This central dilemma arises in principle—we can all imagine ourselves in an extreme situation about which we cannot say with certainty that we would not torture—but does it arise in practice? Many say, with some justification, that it does not. Whatever the case may be, there is a hefty price to pay for dismissing the central dilemma on implausibility grounds, as many liberals are wont to do. Once the improbable is deemed morally irrelevant, torture can no longer claim the status of absolute wrong, for there is no such thing as an "absolute-wrong-in-practice." Any serious condemnation of torture must account for the central dilemma.

Hence my third principle. It stipulates that no ethical code (ie, universal decision procedure) should tell a would-be torturer what to do in all situations. This is to avoid rationalization and, beyond it, the dilution of moral responsibility in the hypothetical case where not to torture is no less an immoral option than to do so (the central dilemma). The third principle is a point of meta-ethics. It is not a moral rule per se, but a statement about the inapplicability of moral rules. It is designed to overcome the justificatory purposes embedded in any ethical code. One may object that the central dilemma arises with any moral wrong, so why single it out? Because it lies at the core of the "torture issue" itself, which, with the wide support it enjoys, is indeed an issue. How to aggregate universal moral principles into decision procedures, a central problem in ethics, is in my view the only interesting aspect of the torture question; the rest is straightforward.

Like many, I feel strongly enough about torture to find the very notion of a "torture debate" distasteful. But sentiment alone means nothing. I feel strongly about racism, too. But racism is not wrong because it offends my sensibilities. It is wrong because it violates reason and human dignity. Likewise, if we cannot offer a reasoned account of the absolute wrongness of torture (especially given the wide public support for it) then our impassioned opposition, indispensable though it may be, will still be, strictly speaking, meaningless. It also matters because one cannot fight effectively for a cause one does not understand. Is it a coincidence that torture has remained so popular in this country amidst such an impoverished public discourse?

I. Why Torture Is Always Immoral

What is torture? "I know it when I see it" is a fine answer and rough agreement with common intuition will do. Supermax incarceration and prison rape can be construed as institutionalized forms of torture. For the purpose of this essay, however, I narrow down the definition to the forced exchange of information for the relief of unbearable pain. Much like slavery, torture is coerced trade. To many, its abhorrence requires no empirical evidence: it is a priori, intuitive, and visceral. So much so, in fact, that even asking why seems immoral, as if merely speaking of a ghost might make it appear.

But, if torture is so evil, why is it so hard to explain why? Let's try. Some say a society that allows torture loses its soul and brings shame on its members. This is true, but it explains nothing—at least no more than calling murder wrong because it makes you a bad person. A line often heard is that torture does not work. Never mind the fragility of a proposition that is both unprovable and falsifiable. Even if true, this claim is a gift to the torturers: "Make it work, Mr Inquisitor, and the moral turf is yours." It's like rejecting slavery because "it does not work" or opposing cannibalism on nutritional grounds. Consequentialism is thin gruel against torture. Beware of the sentence that ends with the words, "therefore torture is evil." Better for it to start, "Torture is evil, therefore..."

This brings us to the deontological perspective. Do we recoil from torture because it treats a person only as a means to an end? It is a principled view that might account for our rational rejection of torture, but Kant's Categorical Imperative is too much at variance with Anglo-American norms to explain the instinctive revulsion the practice commonly elicits. (As the death penalty illustrates, note that popularity does not contradict abhorrence.) In his paeans to torture, Dershowitz is merely echoing Bentham and, beyond it, the reigning utilitarianism of our time, which, from conditional welfare to advertising, routinely flouts Kantian ethics. And yet, is there a doubt that the wrongness of torture finds its source, not in a holy book or in the final link of a chain of observations, but deep in humanity's moral intuition? On this we all agree.

Or do we? Few would argue that waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was worse than shooting him in the head. Yet killing does not make us wince the way torture does. Why? Could it be the excruciating pain? Doubtful. Baby Mohammed lost both legs during Shock-and-Awe and, over a 10-hour period, bled to death stuck in the debris of his home, a horror entirely foreseen in its outline, if not its particulars, by the architects of the war. The baby's pain vastly exceeded that of his namesake. Yet if Rumsfeld must one day cross Europe off his travel plans, it will be because of Khalid Mohammed, not baby Mohammed—despite the former SecDef's direct responsibility in the latter's agony. Pain and death do not explain why torture feels so evil.

Then what does? Perhaps the deadly mix of fear, humiliation, abandonment, and open-ended sadism that the practice connotes. The torturer never says, "I go home at 5." Torture stirs in all of us the age-old anxiety of a cruel deity that keeps us forever conscious to suffer an endless agony. Pain, like relativity, distorts time. (A root-canal patient can tell you all about eternity.) Past a certain point, the victim's fear is no longer that he will die but that he won't. Torture is a window into hell, with a satanic god cast as a human sadist. I believe one cannot grasp the role of torture in the imagination without integrating its metaphysical resonance. Torture rehearses eternal damnation. And that's not a good thing, because hell scares the hell out of everyone, even those who don't believe in it.

To add insult to injury, the torturer reflects back to us a magnified image of that repressed speck of sadism buried in all of us. This did not always bother us. God gave Moses not one but two commandments against lust, and not a single one against cruelty; likewise, Augustine deemed cupidity a more serious offense. It was not until Montaigne and Montesquieu that cruelty acquired a special status in moral philosophy. Our revulsion toward torture is hardly universal—children can be astonishingly cruel to animals—but, rather, the sign of a certain liberal disposition. Torture offends us through its frontal assault on human dignity. Beyond subverting free will into "anti-will"—your being tortured does not simply violate you: it makes you violate yourself—it denies something even more fundamental than freedom: personhood. It dehumanizes not only the victim and the torturer, but society as a whole. Or so our modern liberal sensibilities tell us.

II. Why Torture Should Always Be Illegal

Should torture be legalized in exceptional circumstances? The answer is an unequivocal no. The ban must be unconditional. Why? Because grotesquely evil behavior must be criminalized? Pleasing though it may be, this simple answer won't do. We must first examine whether there might not be a utilitarian reason to make legal exceptions. (Even the most committed deontologist will recognize the need to test laws against their consequences.) I will show that there is no room for exceptions by revisiting the three arguments central to the issue: TBS, self-defense, and torture creep. I'll also discuss the criminal prosecution of torturers.

The ticking bomb scenario (TBS) would appear to beg for an exception—see for a definition. (I'll assume the usual conditions of imminence, gravity, proportionality, and certainty, without which TBS is not worthy of consideration.) The first issue to address is consistency. TBS advocates often lack the courtesy to grant the same rights to their enemies. They remain oddly silent on whether, say, the Taliban would be entitled to torture captured American soldiers thought to know about imminent drone attacks. There might appear to be a normative basis for the double standard. After all, we're the good guys and they're not, so why should we grant them the same moral latitude? That's nonsense. Our own code of warfare, such as it is, dictates that it apply equally to both sides—as do the Geneva Conventions. Whether it should be so or not is an interesting philosophical question, but in practice this point is already settled.

The legal issue hangs on the "rarity principle." We all see the need for a law against murder. But do we need a law for a bad act that happens at one millionth the rate of murder? Probably not. Legality should offer only a blurry reflection of morality, not its mirror image. Whereas morals delineate complex fractal lines, laws should follow smooth contours free of singularities. As the saying goes, "Hard cases make bad laws." This is not a weakness of the law but a strength: that's how it can be both universal and enforceable. TBS theorists will agree but say: "Look, 1,000,000/1,000,000 = 1, so an action likely to cause one million deaths at one millionth the rate of murder matches the expected harm of murder, and hence merits its own law; ergo, legalize torture. QED." A three-word refutation: Break the law. No one's yet suggested a new speed limit sign: "55 — Unless You're Taking Your Dying Uncle To The Hospital." Speed up if you must, and pay the price later. Tucking exceptions into law is courting the same trouble as overfitting a machine learning classifier, ie, loss of generalizing power and diminished appeal to universality.

Self-defense was invoked in the infamous Bybee "torture memos." On the face of it, this is preposterous. A torture victim is not a threat. A captive terrorist such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a culpable bystander, not a culpable aggressor. Therefore, first, the argument would need to appeal to self-preservation and not self-defense; second, this in turn would crash against the accepted legal doctrine that bystanders, even guilty ones, may not be hurt intentionally. Perhaps a legal argument of "distributive" justice could be made that, if harm is unavoidable, it is preferable to inflict it on the guilty party if there is the option. But, by that logic, a gunman who shoots you might be forced to give you his organs to save your life: if one life has to go, hey, guess which one? Trouble is, this constitutes a brand of justice far too alien to our own to be acceptable. To that normative consideration, I would also guard against the slippery notion of "collective self." Most aggressive wars in history have been fought in the name of self-defense. This might then justify the torture of war prisoners when one's country is under attack, thus losing the classical distinction between jus ad bellum (why one may go to war) and jus in bello (how one may fight a war). Even if all other options have been tried, the torture of terrorists cannot be called self-defense.

The case of individual, non-state sponsored TBS is not as clear-cut. You're entitled to stab a man on self-defense grounds if you see him break into your house and try to strangle your daughter. (No one will dispute that your "self" may extend to her.) So why can't you do the same if he refuses to divulge her location after he's kidnapped her and buried her alive with 20 minutes left to live? Simple: because the man is not attacking your daughter. But isn't his silence every bit as much a weapon as his hands? After all, he can wield either one at will to decide her fate. One can draw two distinctions, neither of which resists scrutiny.

The first one is epistemic: your belief that the man knows the burying location of your daughter and that she is still alive cannot match the certainty of your witnessing her strangulation. This can be postulated away—certainty is an accepted part of any serious TBS narrative. (No need to assume here that what you believe is true: only that you have no reason to doubt it.) The other distinction, silence vs strangling, ie, omission vs commission, concerns neither causality nor intentionality—in both cases the man acts willfully to kill. It rests solely on timing, a consideration of no discernable normative relevance. One can, likewise, torture by omission. If the captive were diabetic, it would be torture to withhold his insulin until he talks, since this would fit our characterization of torture as a form of coerced trade. In sum, tying a stand on torture to a distinction between omission and commission is dicey. And even a plausible self-defense plea (which, it is fair to say, would never happen in practice) must give precedence to the rarity principle: break the law if you must.

Torture creep is yet another reason to make the legal ban watertight. The historical record indicates that the slightest legal opening to torture will metastasize into widespread institutional abuse. This "cancerous" spread affects intention, which leads to intimidation, submission, and extraction of false confessions. Even a state that allows torture only in rare cases will soon insist on competent torturers; hence torture schools, torture experts, torture research, and, given the gravity of the matter, an administrative state structure to oversee it all. In other words, it will build itself a "School of the Americas." The evidence is overwhelming: torture intended as a security tool will always morph into an instrument of power. That alone justifies a total ban on torture.

Finally, how much leniency should a judge extend in hypothetical cases of torture that demonstrably save lives? It would seem wise to grant judges enough sentencing discretion to keep would-be torturers in the dark and induce them to proceed on worst-case assumptions. Just as torturers may not invoke the Nuremberg defense, so anyone who orders torture, directly or by proxy, must be held legally responsible. Wartime torture admittedly poses a conundrum. There is empirical evidence that it is an inevitable by-product of aggressive warfare. If so, it may thus fall under the rubric of war crime (like executing children) and lose its categorical singularity. The issue of punishment becomes more complex. In theory, the jurisprudence on war crime should provide the relevant legal authority. Right, but in theory war criminals are dragged before a judge even when their side wins the war. In theory.

If torture is illegal at home, subcontract it overseas. Extraordinary rendition is the process of handing suspects over to third-world dictators with the promise that they won't be tortured and the certainty that they will. If only because of the rank hypocrisy behind it, one should not extend to rendition the customary distinction between directly causing harm and merely allowing it. If anti-torture activism results only in increased rendition, what is being morally gained? Torture is barbaric; rendition is barbaric and hypocritical. It must be an integral part of the fight against torture.

III. Why Not All Torture Decisions Should Be Morally Codified

Most opponents of torture would declare the matter settled: always immoral; always illegal. They would be wrong, for neither morality nor the law can answer the question: were you to face your daughter's kidnapper, may you torture him? The answer, whatever it is, must remain unjustifiable, so as to impose upon you, and you alone, the full moral weight of your action. This is the only subtle point of this essay, so I'll begin with a gentle introduction.

There are two common objections to the TBS question itself, neither of them wise. One is that it is a trap set up by torture lovers to force a small concession from their opponents, shift the debate to "settling the price," and then gloat: "See, we agree!" Of course, it's used as a trap. But the question is legitimate, in fact necessary, and the dreaded shift is easy to avoid. The second objection is that "it never happens," so why even discuss it? This collapses on three grounds. First, the claim is unprovable. Second, if it never happens, why should you care about the moral outcome? (Do you worry about my ethical take on green Martians?) Perhaps you care out of concern for torture creep: if so, address it on its own merits. Third, the philosophical value of hypotheticals is undeniable. Yes, the field of ethics has been hard on fat men being shoved in front of trolleys, but as in mathematics these "singular" points can be the lampposts that light up the dark street. Just as the corners of a triangle tell us all there is to know about its shape, so extreme cases help us read our moral compass.

The unease that accompanies the discussion comes from elsewhere. It stems from a confusion between morals and ethical codes, ie, between moral principles and the decision processes by which we make moral choices. Morality is about right and wrong. A moral (deontological) system may include specific injunctions, "Do not kill," as well as abstract precepts, "The Golden Rule." It is preferably universal in a Kantian (negative) sense, in that it should, at the very least, not contradict its adoption by everyone else: "I may leave a restaurant without paying for my meal" cannot be a moral maxim, for its wide adoption would quickly cause all restaurants to close shop, which in turn would contradict my desire to eat out. Moral systems consist mostly of intuitive, a priori judgments, unshackled from the need for empirical validation. Lying is wrong and so is tormenting a child. These are truisms. But what do we tell a terminally ill child who asks: "Am I going to die?" We lie, of course. Are we thereby signifying that honesty is less important than compassion? Not at all. For example, most of us would agree that empathy may not always excuse perjury. Honesty and compassion are both universal moral values, but their relative ranking may vary depending on the context. Unfortunately, there is no simple rule to tell us which should prevail when. We can always follow our moral intuition. But that can be dangerous: hate, self-interest, prejudice, biases can be all too "intuitive." And we are all so good at lying to ourselves.

Far better for us to turn to an ethical code, ie, a decision procedure to convert our moral beliefs into action. To guard against egoism, we'll try to make it universal so others might want to adopt it, too. We're all familiar with ethical codes: etiquette; chivalry; just-war theory; political ideologies, etc. The conservative code, for example, tells us that the best way for government to help the poor is not to help them at all. This is so weird we might never have come up with anything like it on our own. But it meets the three criteria of an ethical code: it seeks to match our actions with our morals; it is not self-evident (if it were we wouldn't need it); and it is effective (it helps us identify whom to vote for).

The ideal ethical code would be a big handbook—infinitely long, to be precise—with, next to each possible situation, a list of moral actions to choose from. This being somewhat unwieldy, a code will look more like an "algorithm," ie, a coherent set of interconnected generalization and abstraction rules based on representative cases that mesh with our intuitions. A perfect code would have to be complete, meaning that it covers all cases, but that is unrealistic. We might hope for it to be sound, ie, never to prescribe actions that violate our moral intuitions. To fix such violations, Rawls suggested tweaking rules and intuitions back and forth until we reach some sort of stable, "reflective" equilibrium. Inevitably, an ethical code will be on occasion intractable, meaning that it may actually tell us not to do X in situation Y but we're just too dumb to figure that out by the time Y has passed. The complexity of a code must be honored. It is in fact unethical to gerrymander moral boundaries to make it easier to lead a moral life—Bush tried to do just that with his "You're with us or against us." Naturally, to adopt an ethical code is itself a moral decision. (The vigilant reader will immediately spot the self-referential implication but I'll leave that one for another day.)

It is beyond dispute that an ethical code that advises us to lie to the dying child can be sound. But can all moral dilemmas be resolved by sound ethical codes? No code can be expected to be complete and always tractable, so the only reasonable answer is no. Fine, but what about torture? A ruling cannot be derived a priori, unless perhaps one considers torture a wrong universally greater than all others, a proposition clearly untenable. So what do we do? David Luban argues on incompleteness grounds that moral systems (hence ethical codes) should not apply to TBS. I agree, but for somewhat different reasons. I plant a flag right in the middle of the TBS swamp with the sign, "No Ethical Code Here." By that, I am not simply stating the impossibility or intractability of always reaching a decision via a universal code, something of which I cannot be sure. Rather, I am decreeing it. I disallow any code for TBS not because I have to (Luban's position), but because I choose to. My rejection of an ethical code appeals to an existentialist intuition. If morality is going to be incapable of helping us decide, then our choice should engage us fully so as to avoid any rationalization. It should be the ultimate act of free will. The would-be torturer must accept full moral responsibility and be denied both alibis: "My code made me do it" and "I was confused." The latter says that even incompleteness is no excuse. Here is a quick explanation.

Considering the real-life story of a young Frenchman in the 1940s torn between his urge to fight the Germans to avenge the execution of his brother and his desire to stay with his heartbroken mother, Sartre reviewed various moral systems to highlight the difficulty of teasing ethical guidance out of them. His point was that ethical codes are dressed up as advisory devices when in fact they serve only justificatory purposes. In other words, how do we know that ethical codes aren't rationalization engines in disguise, mechanisms for evading responsibility, sophisticated dodges? This points to the exculpatory nature of an ethical code. The neat thing about being advised, you see, is that we can always blame the advisor.

Sophie is given a choice: to kill one of her two children or have both of them killed. She has no choice but to act immorally. This is not my judgment but hers; more accurately, it is an a posteriori inference from the knowledge that she'll be racked with guilt for the rest of her life. Sophie's choice falls within the world of morals but beyond the human reach of moral guidelines. The injunction, "Spare the child who..." is morally impermissible. Sophie is thus able to act in a way that, though necessarily immoral, is not ethically mistaken. No one can ever tell her, "You saved the wrong child." In fact, we so believe that no ethical code should apply that we'd be shocked to hear Sophie justify her choice by appealing to some holy book claiming that God prefers, say, older siblings. "My religion made me do it" would reek of bad faith (in the Sartrean sense of self-lying) and suggest that perhaps Sophie preferred her older child but blamed her faith instead. It is morally imperative for her to renounce any ethical code and take full responsibility for her choice—or, as an existentialist would put it, to admit that she is condemned to be free.

The kidnapping story is identical except in one key aspect: the temptation of a code. Faced with the kidnapper and the mental picture of your daughter imploring you to do everything in your power to save her, your intuition is likely to whisper in your ear, "Torture the bastard!" Unlike Sophie's, your choice may even seem entirely obvious. This intuition may help you decide but, even after integrating the moral relevance of family, it still violates the deontological constraint of treating torture as a universal moral wrong: after all, your intuition might be quite different if the "bastard" were your son and the captive girl the past killer of your daughter. To give up on an ethical code altogether may be quite difficult, in fact. But this is the only way to respect the absolute wrongness of torture. If you're going to do it, you'd better be ready to "own it" and take all the blame. In this instance, free will implies carrying out, and accepting to carry out, your own decision in the belief that you would do it again in the future. In other words, neither of these excuses is acceptable: "I was foolish"; or "I did what I thought was best but that was against my will."

Consider a variant of TBS where torturing one person prevents the torturing of two other people elsewhere. Should you do it? Basic utilitarianism of rights says yes. The danger is that moral calculus is nothing but the exercise of an ethical code, hence a rationalization. I am not saying this is not allowed to influence your decision—one cannot shield oneself from all moral calculus. I am saying that in the end you must be the only owner of your decision. You must accept the guilt for your action as the necessary consequence of your freedom and you must reject any attempt to justify your choice. What if you are ordered to torture? Assuming a moral choice is possible, ie, disobedience is not punishable by death, you should refuse to torture unless you are confident that you would give the same order—were you in a position to do so—if you also knew that you had to carry it out yourself. (Merely believing that you would give the order is not enough.)

The final verdict on torture: always wrong; always illegal; always unjustifiable.

Bernard Chazelle is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and author of The Discrepancy Method: Randomness and Complexity. He can be reached at: chazelle@CS.Princeton.EDU

The Coup and he U.S. Airbase In Honduras

Zelaya, Negroponte and the Controversy at Soto Cano

By NIKOLAS KOZLOFF
July 22, 2009
Courtesy of COUNTERPUNCH

The mainstream media has once again dropped the ball on a key aspect of the ongoing story in Honduras: the U.S. airbase at Soto Cano, also known as Palmerola. Prior to the recent military coup d’etat President Manuel Zelaya declared that he would turn the base into a civilian airport, a move opposed by the former U.S. ambassador. What’s more Zelaya intended to carry out his project with Venezuelan financing.

For years prior to the coup the Honduran authorities had discussed the possibility of converting Palmerola into a civilian facility. Officials fretted that Toncontín, Tegucigalpa’s international airport, was too small and incapable of handling large commercial aircraft. An aging facility dating to 1948, Toncontín has a short runway and primitive navigation equipment. The facility is surrounded by hills which makes it one of the world’s more dangerous international airports.

Palmerola by contrast has the best runway in the country at 8,850 feet long and 165 feet wide. The airport was built more recently in the mid-1980s at a reported cost of $30 million and was used by the United States for supplying the Contras during America’s proxy war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua as well as conducting counter-insurgency operations in El Salvador. At the height of the Contra war the U.S. had more than 5,000 soldiers stationed at Palmerola. Known as the Contras’ “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” the base housed Green Berets as well as CIA operatives advising the Nicaraguan rebels.

More recently there have been some 500-to-600 U.S. troops on hand at the facility which serves as a Honduran air force base as well as a flight-training center. With the exit of U.S. bases from Panama in 1999, Palmerola became one of the few usable airfields available to the U.S. on Latin American soil. The base is located approximately 30 miles north of the capital Tegucigalpa.

In 2006 it looked as if Zelaya and the Bush administration were nearing a deal on Palmerola’s future status. In June of that year Zelaya flew to Washington to meet President Bush and the Honduran requested that Palmerola be converted into a commercial airport. Reportedly Bush said the idea was “wholly reasonable” and Zelaya declared that a four-lane highway would be constructed from Tegucigalpa to Palmerola with U.S. funding.

In exchange for the White House’s help on the Palmerola facility Zelaya offered the U.S. access to a new military installation to be located in the Mosquitia area along the Honduran coast near the Nicaraguan border. Mosquitia reportedly serves as a corridor for drugs moving south to north. The drug cartels pass through Mosquitia with their cargo en route from Colombia, Peru and Bolivia.

A remote area only accessible by air, sea, and river Mosquitia is full of swamp and jungle. The region is ideal for the U.S. since large numbers of troops may be housed in Mosquitia in relative obscurity. The coastal location was ideally suited for naval and air coverage consistent with the stated U.S. military strategy of confronting organized crime, drug trafficking, and terrorism. Romeo Vásquez, head of the Honduran Joint Chiefs of Staff, remarked that the armed forces needed to exert a greater presence in Mosquitia because the area was full of “conflict and problems.”

But what kind of access would the U.S. have to Mosquitia? Honduran Defense Secretary Aristides Mejía said that Mosquitia wouldn’t necessarily be “a classic base with permanent installations, but just when needed. We intend, if President Zelaya approves, to expand joint operations [with the United States].” That statement however was apparently not to the liking of eventual coup leader and U.S. School of the Americas graduate Vásquez who had already traveled to Washington to discuss future plans for Mosquitia. Contradicting his own colleague, Vásquez said the idea was “to establish a permanent military base of ours in the zone” which would house aircraft and fuel supply systems. The United States, Vásquez added, would help to construct air strips on site.

Events on the ground meanwhile would soon force the Hondurans to take a more assertive approach towards air safety. In May, 2008 a terrible crash occurred at Toncontín airport when a TACA Airbus A320 slid off the runway on its second landing attempt. After mowing down trees and smashing through a metal fence, the airplane’s fuselage was broken into three parts near the airstrip. Three people were killed in the crash and 65 were injured.

In the wake of the tragedy Honduran officials were forced at long last to block planes from landing at the notoriously dangerous Toncontín. All large jets, officials said, would be temporarily transferred to Palmerola. Touring the U.S. airbase himself Zelaya remarked that the authorities would create a new civilian facility at Palmerola within sixty days. Bush had already agreed to let Honduras construct a civilian airport at Palmerola, Zelaya said. “There are witnesses,” the President added.

But constructing a new airport had grown more politically complicated. Honduran-U.S. relations had deteriorated considerably since Zelaya’s 2006 meeting with Bush and Zelaya had started to cultivate ties to Venezuela while simultaneously criticizing the American-led war on drugs.

Bush’s own U.S. Ambassador Charles Ford said that while he would welcome the traffic at Palmerola past agreements should be honored. The base was used mostly for drug surveillance planes and Ford remarked that “The president can order the use of Palmerola when he wants, but certain accords and protocols must be followed.” “It is important to point out that Toncontín is certified by the International Civil Aviation Organization,” Ford added, hoping to allay long-time concerns about the airport’s safety. What’s more, the diplomat declared, there were some airlines that would not see Palmerola as an “attractive” landing destination. Ford would not elaborate or explain what his remarks were supposed to mean.

Throwing fuel on the fire Assistant Secretary of State John Negroponte, a former U.S. ambassador to Honduras, said that Honduras could not transform Palmerola into a civilian airport “from one day to the next.” In Tegucigalpa, Negroponte met with Zelaya to discuss Palmerola. Speaking later on Honduran radio the U.S. diplomat said that before Zelaya could embark on his plans for Palmerola the airport would have to receive international certification for new incoming flights. According to Spanish news agency EFE Negroponte also took advantage of his Tegucigalpa trip to sit down and meet with the President of the Honduran Parliament and future coup leader Roberto Micheletti [the news account however did not state what the two discussed].

Needless to say Negroponte’s visit to Honduras was widely repudiated by progressive and human rights activists who labeled Negroponte “an assassin” and accused him of being responsible for forced disappearances during the diplomat’s tenure as ambassador (1981-1985). Moreover, Ford and Negroponte’s condescending attitude irked organized labor, indigenous groups and peasants who demanded that Honduras reclaim its national sovereignty over Palmerola. “It’s necessary to recover Palmerola because it’s unacceptable that the best airstrip in Central America continues to be in the hands of the U.S. military,” said Carlos Reyes, leader of the Popular Bloc which included various politically progressive organizations. “The Cold War has ended and there are no pretexts to continue with the military presence in the region,” he added. The activist remarked that the government should not contemplate swapping Mosquitia for Palmerola either as this would be an affront to Honduran pride.

Over the next year Zelaya sought to convert Palmerola into a civilian airport but plans languished when the government was unable to attract international investors. Finally in 2009 Zelaya announced that the Honduran armed forces would undertake construction. To pay for the new project the President would rely on funding from ALBA [in English, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas] and Petrocaribe, two reciprocal trading agreements pushed by Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez. Predictably the Honduran right leapt on Zelaya for using Venezuelan funds. Amílcar Bulnes, President of the Honduran Business Association [known by its Spanish acronym COHEP] said that Petrocaribe funds should not be used for the airport but rather for other, unspecified needs.

A couple weeks after Zelaya announced that the armed forces would proceed with construction at Palmerola the military rebelled. Led by Romeo Vásquez, the army overthrew Zelaya and deported him out of the country. In the wake of the coup U.S. peace activists visited Palmerola and were surprised to find that the base was busy and helicopters were flying all around. When activists asked American officials if anything had changed in terms of the U.S.-Honduran relationship they were told “no, nothing.”

The Honduran elite and the hard right U.S. foreign policy establishment had many reasons to despise Manuel Zelaya as I’ve discussed in previous articles. The controversy over the Palmerola airbase however certainly gave them more ammunition.

Nikolas Kozloff is the author of Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008)

"A Damned Murder Inc."

By Alexander Cockburn
Weekend Edition
July 24-26, 2009
Courtesy Of COUNTERPUNCH

Some time in early or mid-1949 a CIA officer named Bill (his surname is blacked out in the file, which was surfaced by John Kelly in the early 1990s) asked an outside contractor for input on how to kill people. Requirements included the appearance of an accidental or purely fortuitous terminal experience suffered by the Agency’s victim.

Bill’s friend – internal evidence suggests he was a doctor – offered practical advice: “Tetraethyl lead, as you know, could be dropped on the skin in very small quantities, producing no local lesion, and after a quick death, no specific evidence would be present.” Another possibility was “the exposure of the entire individual to X-ray.” (In fact these two methods were already being inflicted on a very large number of Americans in lethal doses, in the form of leaded gasoline and radioactive fallout from the atmospheric nuclear test program in Nevada.) “There are two other techniques,” Bill’s friend concluded bluffly, which “require no special equipment beside a strong arm and the will to do such a job. These would be either to smother the victim with a pillow or to strangle him with a wide piece of cloth, such as a bath towel.”

As regular as congressmen being taken in adultery or receiving cash bribes, every year or two the Central Intelligence Agency has go into damage-control mode to deal with embarrassing documents like the memo to Bill, and has to square up to the question – does it, did it ever, have its in-house assassins, a Double O team.

It just happened. In mid-July the news headlines were suddenly full of allegations that in the wake of the 9/11/2001 attacks, vice president Dick Cheney had ordered the formation of a CIA kill squad and expressly ordered the Agency not to disclose the program even to congressional overseers with top security clearances, as required by law. As soon as CIA offials disclosed the program to CIA director Leon Panetta, he ordered it to be halted.

And regular as the congressmen taken in adultery seeking forgiveness from God and spouse, the CIA rolled out the familiar response that yes, such a program had been mooted, but there had been practical impediments. “It sounds great in the movies, but when you try to do it, it’s not that easy,” one former intelligence official told the New York Times. “Where do you base them? What do they look like? Are they going to be sitting around at headquarters on 24-hour alert waiting to be called?” The C.I.A. insisted it had never proposed a specific operation to the White House for approval.

With these pious denials we enter the Theater of the Absurd. We’re talking about a US Agency that ran the Phoenix Program, that supervised executive actions across Latin America, that…

Before irrefutable evidence of its vast kidnapping and interrogation program in the post-2001 period surfaced the CIA similarly used to claim, year after year, that it had never been in the torture business either. Torture manuals drafted by the Agency would surface - a 128-page secret how-to-torture guide produced by the CIA in July 1963 called “Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation”, another 1983 manual, enthusiastically used by CIA clients in the "contra" war against Central American leftist nationalists in President Reagan's years – and the Agency would deny, waffle and evade until the moment came simply to dismiss the torture charge as “an old story.”

In fact the Agency took a practical interest in torture and assassination from its earliest days, studying Nazi interrogation techniques avidly and sheltering noted Nazi practitioners. As it prepared its coup against the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1953 the Agency distributed to its agents and operatives a killer’s training manual (made public in 1997) full of hands-on advice:

“The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. … The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the "horrified witness", no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary.

“…In all types of assassination except terroristic, drugs can be very effective. An overdose of morphine administered as a sedative will cause death without disturbance and is difficult to detect. The size of the dose will depend upon whether the subject has been using narcotics regularly. If not, two grains will suffice.

“If the subject drinks heavily, morphine or a similar narcotic can be injected at the passing out stage, and the cause of death will often be held to be acute alcoholism.”

What about targets of assassination attempts by the CIA, acting on presidential orders? We could start with the bid on Chou En-lai’s life after the Bandung Conference in 1954; they blew up the plane scheduled to take him home, but fortunately for him, though not his fellow passengers, he’d switched flights. Then we could move on to the efforts, ultimately successful in 1961, to kill the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, in which the CIA was intimately involved, dispatching among others the late Dr Sidney Gottlieb, the Agency’s in-house killer chemist, with a hypodermic loaded with poison. The Agency made many efforts to kill General Kassim in Iraq. The first such attempt on October 7, 1959 was botched badly, and one of the assassins, Saddam Husssein, was, spirited out to an Agency apartment in Cairo. There was a second Agency effort in 1960-1961 with a poisoned handkerchief. Finally they shot Kassim in the coup of February 8/9, 1963.

The Kennedy years saw deep US implication in the murder of the Diem brothers in Vietnam and the first of many well-attested efforts by the Agency to assassinate Fidel Castro. It was Lyndon Johnson who famously said shortly after he took office in 1963, "We had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.” Reagan’s first year in office saw the inconvenient Omar Torrijos of Panama downed in an air crash. In 1986 came the Reagan White House’s effort to bomb Muammar Q’addafi to death in his encampment , though this enterprise was conducted by the US Air Force. Led by that man of darkness, William Casey, in 1985 the CIA tried to kill the Lebanese Shiite leader Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah by setting off a car bomb outside his mosque. He survived, though 80 others were blown to pieces.

In his Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II Bill Blum has a long and interesting list starting in 1949 with Kim Koo, Korean opposition leader, going on to efforts to kill Sukarno, President of Indonesia, Kim Il Sung, Premier of North Korea, Mohammed Mossadegh, Claro M. Recto (the Philippines opposition leader), Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Norodom Sihanouk, José Figueres,Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, Gen. Rafael Trujillo, Charles de Gaulle, Salvador Allende, Michael Manley, Ayatollah Khomeini, the nine comandantes of the Sandinista National Directorate, Mohamed Farah Aideed, prominent clan leader of Somalia, Slobodan Milosevic…

And we should not forget that the CIA is by no means the only US government player in the assassination game. The US military have their own teams. A friend of mine once had a gardener – “a very scary looking guy” -- who remarked that he’d been part of a secret unit in the U.S. Marine Corps, murdering targets in the Caribbean.

In sum, assassination has always been an arm of US foreign policy, just as in periods of turbulence, as in the Sixties, it has always been an arm of domestic repression as well. This is true either side of the executive order, issued by president Gerald Ford in 1976, banning assassinations. "No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination," states Executive Order 11905.

One way to read the brou-ha-ha of the past few days is as an effort at pre-emptive damage control by the CIA. Remember, in the months following the 2001 attacks, Americans were looking for blood. They wanted teams to hunt down Osama and his crew and kill them. They cheered the reports – now resurfacing – of U.S., British and French special forces presiding over and directing the slaughter in November, 2001, of about 1,000 prisoners of war by the Northern Alliance at Mazar-e-Sharif, with the Taliban prisoners shut in containers left out in the sun with an okay by US personnel, till their occupants roasted and suffocated. Over the next few months and years, more terrible stories will probably surface. Attorney General Eric Holder told Newsweek recently he was “shocked and saddened” after reading the still secret 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on the torture of detainees at CIA “black sites.” “Shocked and saddened”, after what we know and what we have seen already? It must be pretty bad. As William Polk remarks on this site today of the evidence of sodomy, rape and torture captured in the photograph collection that Obama first wanted to release and then changed his mind: “Those who profess to know say that what these pictures show is truly horrible. Some have compared them to the vivid record the Nazis kept of their sadism.”

The CIA death squads and kindred units from the military killed and tortured to death many, many people and most certainly there was extensive “collateral damage” – meaning innocent people being murdered. As regards numbers, we have this public boast in 2003 by president George Bush: "All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies."

The CIA’s former counter-terrorism chief of operations, Vincent Cannistraro, recently remarked that "There were things the agency was involved with after 9/11 which were basically over the edge because of 9/11. There were some very unsavory things going on. Now they are a problem for the CIA," he said. "There is a lot of pressure on the CIA now and it's going to handicap future activities." Just because vice president Dick Cheney may have been supervising Murder Inc it doesn’t mean that CIA officers who became his operational accomplices won’t be legally vulnerable. At the moment President Obama is trying to keep the lid on still secret crimes committed by US government agencies in the Global War on Terror in the Bush years. The CIA is clearly positioning itself for further disclosures. So is Dick Cheney.

Ending the “Third Degree”

“Eighty years ago, with the publication of the Wickersham Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement, America learned that torture didn’t work…and promptly forgot.

“Debates on the morality and practical efficacy of torture periodically erupt in American politics. Now, the issue has re-emerged with the efforts of ex-Bush administration officials and allies to defend their legacy and their legal impunity against the current administration’s stated desire to move beyond coercive interrogations…”

This is Peter Lee in our latest CounterPunch newsletter, in an enthralling piece of historical excavation about how a commission appointed by Herbert Hoover managed to include a savage expose of torture as practiced by US police departments. Lee shows how exactly the torture techniques of our current era and their rationales mirror those of the practitioners and sponsors of torture in the last century.

Also in this crackerjack issue is Marcus Rediker’s diary of his lectures in Auburn Prison on pirates and how the inmates responded to them.

Only in CounterPunch.

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A shorter version of the first item appears in The First Post.

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

Renounce The Nuremberg Defense?

Shrinks and Torture

By STEPHEN SOLDZ
July 27, 2009
Courtesy Of COUNTERPUNCH

The long-standing struggle within the American Psychological Association over involvement of psychologists in potentially abusive national security interrogations is heating up again, this time with a dispute over its ethics code. In 2002, the APA added the infamous standard 1.02 to its code. This standard allows psychologists to ignore the other provisions of the code when it conflicts with "law, regulations, or other governing legal authority."
With its echoes of the universally reviled Nuremberg Defense - "I was just following orders" - of the Nazi doctors and others tried for war crimes after World War II, this standard has been deeply disturbing to many APA members and others. This code is binding upon all APA members and upon most licensed psychologists in the country as most, perhaps all, states require those receiving licenses to adhere to the APA code. Standard 1.02 built a loophole into the ethics code that allowed any unethical behavior by those following military or other governmental orders.

Interestingly, in an unenforceable aspirational section of the ethics code, the wording is different:

"If the conflict is unresolvable via such means, psychologists may adhere to the requirements of the law, regulations, or other governing authority in keeping with basic principles of human rights." [Emphasis added.]

After World War II, as the allies planned the prosecution of Germans for crimes committed during the war, they anticipated the possibility that defendants would use the defense that they were "just following orders" and were thus not morally culpable for their actions. The rules governing the Nuremberg trials stated:

"The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."

This defense of following orders has been known ever since as the "Nuremberg defense" and has been regularly rejected in both U.S. and international law. In fact, the very term "Nuremberg defense" is often derided as the attempt of scoundrels to avoid moral and criminal responsibility.

In the wake of reports of psychologists aiding the Bush regime program of torture and detainee abuse, having the Nuremberg Defense in the APA's ethics code took on added significance. Potentially, it could allow psychologists involved in detainee abuse or torture to escape future liability for these abuses before the APA or state ethics committees. Further, since violating professional ethics could be introduced as evidence in the unlikely possibility of future war crimes trials, 1.02 could provide some protection in potential future trials.

Human rights advocates within the APA have experienced revulsion at an ethics code that is effectively gutted by including the Nuremberg Defense. As Ken Pope, a former Chair of the APA Ethics Committee who has since resigned from the association wrote in a statement sent to thousands of psychologists:

Nuremberg’s message of inescapable ethical responsibility and accountability came at an unfathomable price. It should never be set aside and forgotten, especially in a profession’s formal statement of its ethical values.

The APA Council directed as early as 2005 that the association's Ethics Committee evaluate and recommend an alternative to this standard; some discussions were held, but year after year, no action was taken. At its August 2008 meeting, Council again directed the Ethics Committee to make a recommendation regarding changes that would resolve the discrepancy between the aspirational "in keeping with basic principles of human rights" and the absence of any human rights restriction to following orders in the enforceable section of the code. This recommendation was to be presented to the August 2008 Council meeting.

During the year there was an open comment period during which over 80 psychologists posted comments on the APA web site. Interestingly, a number of military psychologists objected strongly to changing this standard. Among these were Morgan Banks and Larry James, both of the APA's infamous PENS [Psychological Ethics and National Security] task force that, dominated as it was by military psychologists, gave the stamp of approval to psychologists participating in Bush-era interrogations. Also among those against changing 1.02 was Debra Dunivin, a Former BSCT psychologist at Guantanamo and wife of a former top APA official, Russ Newman, who played a major behind the scenes role in guiding the PENS task force. All three of these commentators served in chains of command that have been accused of abuses.

Joining the military psychologists in rejecting change were virtually all of the most powerful committees within the APA's governance structure. Thus, the powerful Committee on Legal Issues, the Board for the Advancement of Psychology in the Public Interest, the Board of educational Affairs, the Board of Professional Affairs, and the Board of Scientific Affairs recommended against any change in 1.02. several, more peripheral committees, including the Committee on Aging, the Committee on Disability Issues in Psychology, the Committee on International Relations in Psychology, and the Committee on Animal research and Ethics did support change.

One month before this August's Council meeting, the Ethics Committee made its recommendation. After four years of deliberations, they recommended no change in standard 1.02, but, rather, an additional lengthy period of discussion.. They did issue an apparently hastily-written statement that they would not accept a defense of "following orders" to ethics violations involving torture. This statement, however, is totally inadequate for several reasons:

• First, it is of dubious legality, as it directly conflicts with the code (1.02) itself.

• Second, such a statement is not binding on future Ethics Committees.

• Third, it has no status with state licensing boards that adopt the APA code.

• Finally, and most important, there are many other human rights abuses that may be authorized by law or orders that the EC statement will not cover.

The Ethics Committee recommendation follows on the heels of a letter from the APA Board on the torture-interrogations issues that was deemed woefully inadequate by association critics and activists seeking change. This Board letter recently was criticized in an Open Letter from a broad range of psychological, health, and human rights organizations. This Letter called for five actions by the APA, including change in 1.02 and other problematic sections of the ethics code. In particular, it calls upon the APA to:

"Develop a clear and rapid timetable to remove Sections 1.02 and 1.03 [the `Nuremberg defense' of following orders] from the APA Code of Ethics. [We note that the APA Ethics Committee has stated that they will not accept a defense of following orders to complaints regarding torture; this statement is a welcome improvement but it is clearly inadequate as it is not necessarily binding on future committees nor does it cover abuses falling under the category of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.] Revoke the equally problematic Section 8.05 of the Code, which dispenses with informed consent `where otherwise permitted by law or federal or institutional regulations,' and Section 8.07, which sets an unacceptably high threshold of `severe emotional distress' for not using deception in the ethics of research design."

The Ethics Committee recommendation rejects this and many other calls for change. If Council concurred with this recommendation, the Nuremberg Defense wouldl stay in the code for at least the many additional years of deliberation called for by the Committee.

The Ethics Committee's recommendation was met with withering criticism from members. After initially refusing to respond to critics, the APA President and Board, sensing a pending PR disaster, responded positively to a motion from the members of Council who wrote the 2008 resolution directing the Ethics Committee to act by this august. Now these resolution Movers, as they were know, the President and the Board have united behind another six month delay, directing the Ethics Committee to recommend changes in 1.02 by the February Council meeting. Notice that they entrust this important task to the same Ethics Committee that only weeks before concluded four years of effort by recommending no change.

In a typical APA fashion, the Ethics Committee suddenly saw the wisdom of what they had just rejected. Presumably, those committees that had weighed in heavily against change will, for the time being at least, miraculously discover its value.The association is set for another long wait to see if this promise of change is any more sincere than any of the others over the last our years.

Whether or not it ultimately gets reversed, the Ethics Committee's embrace of the Nuremberg Defense also was taken by many as yet another sign that the loyalty of the APA leadership to the military-intelligence establishment is greater than its loyalty to its members. After all, last September those members decisively rebuked the APA leadership by passing by a 59% to 41% margin a referendum declaring that psychologists, whether involved in interrogations or treatment of detainees, do not belong in detention centers violating international law or the Constitution: "unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights" [There is an exception for those psychologists treating US military personnel.]

The APA leadership, while nominally acknowledging the passage of the referendum and placing it "in effect" have treated it as an abstract statement with no direct action implications. They have undermined the clear sense of the voting members that psychologists do not belong at Guantanamo or other sites. This leadership has stymied efforts to apply the referendum to any actually existing detention facility, such as Guantanamo or Bagram, where indefinite detention without trial and other violations of human rights are still in effect.

In response to the disappointing Ethics Committee recommendation, leading to, at best, additional delay in removing the Nuremberg Defense from the Ethics Code, as well as the failure to fully implement the member-passed referendum, activists are discussing how to respond to what they view as an unacceptable bending of professional ethics to the wishes of the military-intelligence establishment. Some members are contemplating resigning, joining many who have previously taken that step. Others may hold their breathe and see if, this time, perhaps, APA leaders really mean change. Meanwhile there has been no action on the other major actions, including other essential ethics code revisions, recommended in the Psychologist/Human Rights groups Open Letter:

"1. Fully implement the 2008 referendum as an enforceable section of the APA Code of Ethics. This entails a public announcement that APA policy and ethical standards oppose the service of psychologists in detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, Bagram Air Base, CIA secret prisons, or in the rendition program.

"2. Annul the June 2005 PENS Report due to the severe and multiple conflicts of interest involved in its production.

"3. Bring in an independent body of investigative attorneys to pursue accountability for psychologists who participated in or otherwise contributed to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. APA should also: (a) clarify the status of open ethics cases and (b) remove the statute of limitations for violations involving torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, so as to allow time for information on classified activities to become public.

"4. Develop a clear and rapid timetable to remove Sections 1.02 and 1.03 [the "Nuremberg defense" of following orders] from the APA Code of Ethics. [We note that the APA Ethics Committee has stated that they will not accept a defense of following orders to complaints regarding torture; this statement is a welcome improvement but it is clearly inadequate as it is not necessarily binding on future committees nor does it cover abuses falling under the category of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.] Revoke the equally problematic Section 8.05 of the Code, which dispenses with informed consent “where otherwise permitted by law or federal or institutional regulations,” and Section 8.07, which sets an unacceptably high threshold of “severe emotional distress” for not using deception in the ethics of research design.

"5. Retain an independent investigatory organization to study organizational behavior at APA. Due to potential conflicts of interest, independent human rights organizations should be enlisted to select this investigatory entity. The study should address, among other things, possible collusion in the PENS process and the 2003 APA-CIA-Rand conference on the Science of Deception, attended by the CIA’s apparent designers of their torture program [James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen] during which “enhanced interrogation” techniques were discussed. The study should explore how the APA governance system permits the accumulation of power in the hands of a very small number of individuals who are unresponsive to the general membership. It should also propose measures to return the APA to democratic principles, scientific integrity, and beneficence, including restructuring for greater transparency and the assimilation of diverse viewpoints."

Until these five actions are undertaken, the APA will still not have extricated itself from its close engagement with the Dark Side.

Stephen Soldz is a psychoanalyst, psychologist, public health researcher, and faculty member at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He edits the Psyche, Science, and Society blog. He is a founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, one of the organizations working to change American Psychological Association policy on participation in abusive interrogations. He is also a Steering Committee member of Psychologists for Social Responsibility [PsySR]. He can be reached at: mailto:ssoldz@bgsp.edu

On The Right Of Resistance

The Siege Of Gaza

By RAMZY KYSIA
July 27, 2009
Courtesy Of COUNTERPUNCH

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

- Desmond Tutu

We live in an era defined by its brutality. Our challenge is whether to accept this - or to take the risks necessary to transform our world commons in beloved community.

A year ago this August, forty-four ordinary people from seventeen different countries sailed to Gaza in two, small wooden boats. We did what the world would not do - we broke through the siege of Gaza. Over the last year the Free Gaza Movement has organized seven more voyages, successfully arriving to Gaza on five separate occasions. Ours remain the only international ships to reach the Gaza Strip in over forty-two years.

In the Middle-East, the struggle for justice is an uncertain endeavour in the best of times. On all sides human rights workers are beset with difficulties and distress. The Arab states are tyrannies, their peoples subject to secret police, arbitrary arrest, torture, and oppression. Within their societies, the Arab world is equally fractured by ethnic and class tensions, poverty, and political stagnation. From the outside, from the West, the Middle-East faces both open and covert acts of intimidation, intervention, economic destabilization, and even war, invasion, and mass killings.

Standing astride all these troubles, blocking near every attempt at progress in the region are the twin colossi of big oil and Israel. Seldom have a people been cursed with burdens more bitter, more devastating, and seemingly more intransigent than have the Arabs with oil and Israel.

Nowhere is this truer today than in Gaza. In 1999, British Gas discovered huge natural gas fields, worth billions of dollars, in Palestinian territorial waters off the coast of Gaza. Israel has already built a horizontal pipeline to siphon off gas from at least one of these fields. If there is an unspoken reason for the siege of Gaza - this is it.

Israel maintains effective control of all points of entry and exit to Gaza, as well as de facto control of Gaza’s revenues and economy. As such, and despite the closure of settlements in Gaza in 2005, Israel remains an occupying power in Gaza as in the rest of Palestine. As an occupying power, Israel is responsible for the well-being of the people it occupies and cannot legally impose a blockade, particularly one the collectively punishes the entire population of Gaza. These are clear crimes and the Israeli government and military should be prosecuted for them.

For the last three and a half years the Israeli siege has become increasingly ruthless. Less than twenty percent of normal trade is allowed into Gaza today. The siege has caused the local economy to collapse, leading to steep increases in unemployment, poverty and childhood malnutrition rates.

Because of Israel’s siege there is little fuel to run Gaza’s power plant - so electricity is scarce and intermittent. Without electricity, water and sanitation systems do not function. On March 27, 2008 two elderly women in their 70s, a teenage girl, and two babies were killed by a flood of sewage in Umm Naser. Last year alone, well over 16 billion litres of raw sewage had to be dumped in the sea, turning the Mediterranean into a toilet and creating a public health disaster.

Gaza is a tiny coastal plain, barely twenty-five miles long by four to seven miles wide. It does not have the ability to independently support the one and a half million human beings who live in one of the most densely populated places on the planet. Two-thirds of Gaza’s people are refugees, driven out of historical Palestine during Israel’s founding war in 1948. Over half the population are children.

Israel has a long history of violence against Palestinian children. A few examples: In December 2004, the IDF shot and killed seven-year old Rana Siyam. Earlier that year, nine-year old Raghda Alassar was shot and killed in her school while she was taking an English test. Thirteen-year old Iman al-Hams was shot seventeen times by the IDF as she was walking home after class in Gaza. An Israeli captain went up to her corpse and shot her again in the head – "dead-checking" the schoolgirl. The IDF prosecuted him, but not for murder. He was charged with "illegal use of his weapon," and - despite admitting that he emptied his entire magazine into a little girl - he was found "not guilty."

Over the summer of 2006, the IDF killed three-year old Bara Habib, three-year old Rajaa Abu Shaban, six-year old Rawan Hajjah, nine-year old Aya Salmeya, and over thirty-five other children just in Gaza alone. On January 16th, 2007, the IDF killed ten-year old Abir Aramin, the daughter of a Palestinian peace activist, as she was walking home from school. These are only a handful of cases. The Israeli human rights organization B'tselem estimates that over 900 Palestinian children were killed by the Israeli military between 2000 and 2008.

Israel has already recreated the worst aspects of the Warsaw Ghetto in Gaza - transforming this small strip of land into the world’s largest open-air prison, and the humanitarian condition of the one and a half million men, women, and children illegally incarcerated in Gaza is now at its worst point in the last forty-two years of Israeli occupation.

But there are darker histories waiting to be reborn. The simple and terrifying truth is that Israel is pushing the world on a path towards genocide. We are all en route to the slow-drip destruction of the Palestinian people. This reality must be forcefully confronted and fully overcome before it’s too late.

It's now been more than six months since the end of Israel's latest assault on the Gaza Strip, which led to the killing of over 1,400 Palestinians, and the people of Gaza are still living in rubble. Israel's hermetic closure has created a man-made and deliberately-sustained humanitarian catastrophe. The continuing failure of the international community to enforce its own laws and protect the people of Gaza demands that we as private citizens directly intervene to take action commensurate with the crisis. We must act because our governments refuse to do so.

Regardless of Israeli threats or intimidation, Free Gaza volunteers intend to continue sailing unarmed boats to Gaza. Now more than ever – we need the people of the world to join with us.

The siege of Gaza only serves to strengthen authoritarian structures on all sides of this conflict, entrenching centralized control, rallying people against a common enemy. The isolation of Gaza reinforces a belief that the world has forgotten Palestine, and little cares how Palestinians are forced to live or even whether they live or die.

In contrast, civil resistance and citizens’ action movements are not only aimed against the injustices that we face - they are also strategies for social change. Nonviolent resistance empowers everyone with the knowledge that any among us can reach out, organize, and act to change the entire world. Time and again, history demonstrates that even the greatest of tyrannies can crumble to the ground when confronted with an organized and determined resistance.

Join us, whether in whole or in part. Join the Free Gaza Movement, the International Solidarity Movement, and the BDS Movement. Join us and other campaigns in the struggle for justice for Palestine. We need volunteers to do research and writing, web updates, translation, graphic design, local organizing in their communities, and much more.

Become part of the resistance.

We are often told that resistance is either unwarranted or impossible. Liberal apologists for Israel, such as Thomas Friedman, are constantly demanding that Palestinians lay down their arms, all the while exhorting Israelis to pick them up in ever increasing acts of violence and degradation.

When faced with violence in our world, our elites tell us that we have two - and only two - choices: capitulate to the violence, or go to war. Of course, which of these two choices is the right and proper course of action depends on who you are. Faced with Palestinian violence, Israelis must, rightly and properly, go to war. Faced with Israeli violence, Palestinians must, rightly and properly, capitulate. In Tel Aviv and Washington D.C. this is called “moral clarity:” the supposed necessity of pursuing Israeli security through deliberately creating massive insecurity among Palestinians. This is lunacy.

But even mainstream “peace” movements in the West try to delegitimize resistance by calling on both Palestinians and Israelis to renounce overt acts of violence, equating Palestinians who commit suicide bombings with Israelis who send F-16s, D9 military bulldozers, and Apache attack helicopters to level entire neighborhoods.

The problem is that the usually random and individual acts of violence by Palestinians against Israelis are not equal to the myriad structural oppressions and cruelties imposed on Palestinians through Israeli government policies. No Palestinian fighter jets bomb Israeli cities - because Palestine has no fighter jets. No Palestinian bulldozers demolish Israeli homes - because Palestine has no military bulldozers. No Palestinian soldiers invade Israeli neighbourhoods, terrorizing the populace - because there is no Palestinian army. The conflict in Palestine is a war of Israeli state terror against a largely unarmed and defenceless civilian population.

Even immoral and self-defeating acts of violence against Israeli civilians (such as some suicide bombings are) cannot be equated with the daily humiliations, terror, and death that Israel inflicts on Palestinians by deliberate policy. Contrary to its presentation in the mainstream media, this conflict is neither a righteous war against evil Arab terrorists, nor a religious or ethnic dispute between two opposing and equally self-justified groups of people. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is the struggle of two irreconcilable and unequal causes: the struggle of an oppressed people for freedom, justice, and self-determination against their oppressors’ struggle to maintain (and even expand) their domination. Under these circumstances resistance is not only a right - it's a moral imperative.

This is not to say that any and all acts of resistance are acceptable. Clearly they are not. But it grows tedious to continually hear well-meaning, but otherwise clueless, Westerners try to equate the two sides of this conflict. I am past tired of hearing white people passively whine, or shrilly demand, “Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?”

With respect, just because some people have chosen to remain ignorant of the long and deep history of Palestinian nonviolent resistance - from the 1936 Boycott to Bil’in today - does not mean that it does not exist. The Free Gaza Movement struggles in solidarity with an already vibrant Palestinian civil resistance.

Similarly, the other criticism of resistance - that it is futile - is equally mistaken. There is a widespread delusion among many that Israel and the Israeli lobby are simply too powerful to be challenged, let alone defeated. This is not the case.

On June 30th 2009 Israeli Occupation Forces forcibly boarded one of our boats, the SPIRIT OF HUMANITY, and kidnapped 21 human rights workers and journalists who were on their way to deliver much needed humanitarian and reconstruction supplies to besieged Gaza, including Nobel peace prize laureate Mairead Maguire and former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. They were held in jail for a week before being deported.

Though we were stopped on this particular voyage, it was not a “failure.” In the month after our boat was hijacked, over 100,000 news stories, essays, blog entries, action alerts, and radio and television segments were made on Israel’s violent response to our mission. It’s true that the ordeal of our 21 volunteers pales in comparison to the 11,000 Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli prisons. The seizure of our small cargo of 3 tons of medical aid and reconstruction kits is insignificant in light of the $4 billion (USD) of aid promised to Gaza - aid that has not and will not be delivered because of the Israeli blockade.

But that too misses the point. By choosing to violently confront and kidnap unarmed human rights workers on a mission of mercy, Israel publicly demonstrated both the illegality and the absurdity of the Gaza siege. The siege is abjectly not about “security.” No one could possibly have believed that our small boat was a physical threat to Israel,

This public demonstration of the siege’s illegality resulted in record action at the governmental level as well. Both the Irish and Greek governments formally intervened to protect their citizens and property. Despite having no diplomatic relationship and refusing to recognize the legitimacy of Israel's government - the King of Bahrain personally & successfully intervened to force Israel to immediately release the five Bahraini human rights workers kidnapped from the SPIRIT. The British parliament held a formal debate on the issue, and even the U.S. State Department was forced to hold a national conference call on for family and friends of the kidnap victims, as well as for Arab-American civil rights groups.

This was unprecedented, but it’s not enough.

The Free Gaza Movement started our small part in this struggle in 2006. We began on hope alone. Many thought it couldn’t be done, yet we did it. We broke through the Israeli blockade. We will sail again, and we are absolutely determined to reach the Gaza Strip on our next voyage. We intend to non-violently escalate our response. By sending a cargo ship, we will escalate the challenge to the blockade by bringing in significant amounts of banned reconstruction materials. By sending more boats on our next mission, we will significantly escalate the logistical difficulties Israel faces should they decide to violently attack us again. By sending even more parliamentarians, dignitaries, journalists, and human rights workers to accompany the boats, we will significantly escalate the political difficulties Israel faces should they decide to violently attack us again.

The journey to Gaza is dangerous. The Israeli navy rammed our flagship, the Dignity, when we attempted to deliver medical supplies to Gaza during their vicious assault in December/January. In June, they hijacked our small boat and kidnapped everyone on board. Israel has even threatened to open fire on our unarmed ships, rather than allow us to deliver humanitarian and reconstruction supplies to the people of Gaza.

But the risks we take on our voyages are insignificant compared to the risks imposed every day upon the people of Gaza.

The purpose of nonviolent direct action and civil resistance is to take risks - to put ourselves “in the way” of injustice. We take these risks well aware of what the possible consequences may be. We do so because the consequences of doing nothing are so much worse. Any time we allow ourselves to be bullied, every time we pass by an evil and ignore it - we lower our standards and allow our world to be made that much harsher and unjust for us all.

Israel can threaten our boats and passengers - we will keep coming. Israel can illegally disrupt our communications and navigation systems - we will keep coming. Israel can open fire around our boats, or attempt to ram and sink them. Israel can choose to forcibly board and highjack our boats, and abduct our volunteers.

It doesn’t matter. We will keep coming. Armed only with the love of justice, and in the rite of resistance - we will go to Gaza again and again and again, until this siege is forever shattered and the people of Gaza have free access to the rest of the world.

Ramzi Kysia is an Arab-American essayist and an organizer with the Free Gaza Movement. If you would like to support these efforts, please visit www.FreeGaza.org, or email donations[at]freegaza.org. If you would like to volunteer with Free Gaza, please send an email to volunteer[at]freegaza.org

Cheney’s Plans For A Military Coup

By Scott Horton
July 27, 10:00 AM, 2009
Courtesy Of Harper's Magazine

On Saturday, Mark Mazetti and David Johnston of the New York Times, quoting sources close to former President Bush, revealed that former Vice President Dick Cheney had advocated deploying the military for domestic policing purposes. Bush apparently declined to take Cheney’s advice. The discussions occurred against the backdrop of the so-called “Lackawanna Six” case, involving a group of six Yemeni-Americans from the Buffalo area who later pleaded guilty to charges of providing material support to Al Qaeda and received prison sentences.

The disclosures shed considerable light on two memoranda prepared in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel by John Yoo (with the help of Robert J. Delahunty on the second memo) at the request of then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. The principal memo was part of a group published by the Obama Administration on May 16, provoking widespread public concern. In the memo, Yoo argued that the Fourth Amendment could be viewed as suspended in the event of domestic operations by the military in war time. The second memo, not yet released but discussed here by Prof. Kim Scheppele on the basis of references to it in other documents, apparently attempted to read the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which forbids the domestic deployment of the military for police functions, into oblivion. In “George W. Bush’s Disposable Constitution,” I argued that Yoo’s memo was the formula for a dictatorship. Yoo responded to this objection in the Wall Street Journal, arguing that the memo had been authored with a very narrow set of facts in mind, namely an invasion like the sort of attack that was launched on Mumbai on November 26, 2008. But the latest disclosures make clear, once more, that Yoo’s claims are dishonest.

Even the Times article makes clear that other considerations drove the preparation of the Yoo memoranda, namely to “test the Constitution.” The Lackawanna Six were being tightly monitored by the FBI, which believed it had the situation well in hand. But Cheney lacked confidence in the nation’s criminal justice system, as many of his public comments reflect.

Former officials said the 2002 debate arose partly from Justice Department concerns that there might not be enough evidence to arrest and successfully prosecute the suspects in Lackawanna. Mr. Cheney, the officials said, had argued that the administration would need a lower threshold of evidence to declare them enemy combatants and keep them in military custody. Earlier that summer, the administration designated Jose Padilla an enemy combatant and sent him to a military brig in South Carolina. Mr. Padilla was arrested by civilian agencies on suspicion of plotting an attack using a radioactive bomb.

Those who advocated using the military to arrest the Lackawanna group had legal ammunition: the memorandum by Mr. Yoo and Mr. Delahunty. The lawyers, in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, wrote that the Constitution, the courts and Congress had recognized a president’s authority “to take military actions, domestic as well as foreign, if he determines such actions to be necessary to respond to the terrorist attacks upon the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, and before.” The document added that the neither the Posse Comitatus Act nor the Fourth Amendment tied a president’s hands.

So the Yoo memoranda were almost certainly prepared in order to support a case for the domestic use of the military and in the hopes that by deploying the military, the Constitutional limitations on police action and arrests could simply be avoided. The Yoo memoranda set the stage for a military dictatorship, following exactly the sort of phased introduction that occurred in the cone of South America in the seventies and eighties. As Yale law professor Jack Balkin puts it, “This is not a debate about whether the army would have to read Miranda rights to suspects captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. It was a plan to have the military arrest people in the United States in order to get around civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.” A large number of memoranda written by Yoo appear to be a quest for a “state of exception” to the Constitution. Effectively, he was looking for a way to make the president into a dictator.

The latest disclosures occur during a mounting feud between Bush and Cheney that was launched with Time magazine’s disclosure that Bush rebuffed Cheney’s aggressive play to secure a full pardon for his close friend and former chief of staff, Scooter Libby. Cheney responded to the Time article with a barely civil statement to the effect that Libby had been entitled to the pardon. The new disclosure seems again designed to show Cheney as an extremist whose advice was not always followed by Bush.

But it is relevant to another issue now looming before the Obama Administration. The theories that Yoo and his colleagues concocted on White House commission were realized in a sense when Bush agreed to designate certain individuals as “enemy combatants” and then have them held by the military outside of the American legal system. This step was uncontroversial when applied to a person captured on a foreign battlefield. But when applied to an American citizen who arrived off a plane at O’Hare Airport (Jose Padilla), or to a foreign national lawfully in the country on a student visa (Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri), it raised serious questions. President Obama has stated that he is now considering whether he has the power to order the detention of persons outside of both the laws of armed conflict and the U.S. criminal justice system. While the Yoo memoranda have been repudiated, their arguments of almost limitless presidential power seem almost as appealing to the current White House as the old one.

But the Times story shows that Cheney’s concerns that the criminal justice system couldn’t properly cope with the problems in Lackawanna were simply false. The six were arrested, pleaded guilty, and were sentenced. This would not have been the case had soldiers been sent onto the streets of Buffalo to enforce the president’s orders. A recently updated report by two retired federal prosecutors, Richard B. Zabel and James J. Benjamin, makes this case convincingly. It shows that counterterrorism cases have been brought in federal courts in substantial numbers and that they tend to swiftly move to convictions, with little to suggest that claimed shortcomings in the use of evidence and intelligence in the process stand in the way of successful prosecution. In sum, the shortcomings that form the constant basis of claims from figures like Cheney and Karl Rove are without a sound basis in fact. Considered carefully, without hysterical fear, they fall apart.

Cruel Truths From Basra

Abuse Of Iraqi Prisoners Reveals A Lack Of Discipline Among UK Troops and Arrogance At The MoD

By Richard Norton-Taylor
Wednesday 22 July 2009 23.30 BST
Courtesy Of The Guardian

In the summer of 2002, as British troops were preparing to invade Iraq, a senior army officer emailed a colleague about a meeting that had taken place on how to handle prisoners. The officer noted that the meeting was addressed by a US army captain "who told us all about what they were doing in Bagram [in Afghanistan] and Guantánamo". The British officer continued: "It did enable me to remind the assembled crowd ... not to get too wound up in prisoners' rights at the expense of intelligence."

This telling exchange is among many heard over the past two weeks at the thinly attended public inquiry, adjourned today until the autumn, into the death of Baha Mousa, a Basra hotel receptionist, in the custody of British soldiers in September 2003. The inquiry has already painted a picture of a military chain of command either unsure of what interrogation techniques are prohibited under domestic and international law, or willing to ignore them. As far back as 1965, the joint intelligence committee issued a directive to military interrogators. Apart from moral considerations, it said: "Torture and physical cruelty of all kinds are professionally unrewarding, since a suspect may be persuaded to talk, but not to tell the truth."

British and US military interrogators and security and intelligence agencies chose to forget this axiom as they captured suspected insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were also ignorant, we are told, of past controversies. After evidence of abuse in Northern Ireland, Edward Heath told the Commons in 1972 that five techniques – wall-standing, hooding, subjection to noise, sleep deprivation, and deprivation of food and drink – would be banned "in any future operations worldwide, unless parliament decided otherwise". A hitherto secret document released at the Baha Mousa inquiry heard that senior British officers responsible for the conduct of military operations claimed they were unaware of the ruling "until it was raised in the last two weeks". The document was dated 17 May 2004, well after Mousa's death but a few days after another incident involving allegations of abuse of Iraqi civilians.

The inquiry heard how a British soldier screamed at hooded Iraqi prisoners, and others made Iraqis cry out in an "orchestrated choir". According to hitherto unreported evidence at the inquiry, one soldier who happened to be passing a room in the British detention centre in Basra described seeing an Iraqi detainee "kneeling on the floor with his legs crossed behind him and his hands tied behind his back. He was hooded and had his head bowed. There was a soldier beating him really hard. The detainee had his hands tied behind his back, he couldn't fight back."

The inquiry heard how another detainee "was struggling to maintain the stress position and [a British soldier] was screaming at him, 'Sit up, Grandad!'. A large soldier was kneeing this detainee hard in the back ... All of the detainees were in a state of distress. They were shaking, whimpering and crying, and they had soiled themselves. He says there was a really strong smell and there were pools of faeces and urine."

As the inquiry was getting under way in London, the Ministry of Defence was being forced in the high court to concede a separate independent inquiry into allegations that British soldiers mutilated and murdered civilians in Amara, north of Basra, on 14 May 2004. It was forced to do so after it infuriated senior judges by withholding from the court vital evidence, including correspondence with ministers, about the incident.

These incidents, and there may be more, reveal a worrying lack of discipline among British soldiers and arrogance among senior defence officials. The good thing is that lawyers, judges and human rights laws are subjecting their activities to unprecedented scrutiny.

US & UK Prepared To Talk With Taliban

Britain: Next Step in Helmand Operation Is Talks with Local Taliban

Military Touts Southern Helmand "Progress" Despite Rising Toll

By Jason Ditz,
July 27, 2009
Courtesy Of Anti-War News

British officials say that stage one of the massive military offensive in the Helmand River Valley, the largest single ground operation in Afghanistan since the Soviet occupation, is completed and now they are moving on two the next step, courting what it described as “second-tier” Taliban leaders.

The prospect of seeking a rapprochement with lower level Taliban in an attempt to drive a wedge between them and their top leadership is nothing new: indeed US and Afghan officials had been talking openly about it last year. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has also made talks with Taliban a key part of his strategy if reelected. So far, however, those attempts have all met with failure.

But British officials say that the Helmand operation has created another opportunity to try to come to terms with them, and some are talking openly of power-sharing deals which would give them a measure of official local authority in regions where they are already in de facto control.

The Obama Administration’s escalation has hit British forces particularly hard, with 20 soldiers killed this month alone. There is growing concern among US officials that unrest will eventually force Britain to change tactics, which may be the source of this new attempt to calm the Helmand Province, where the British forces are based.

Related Stories

• July 16, 2009 -- Obama Administration Fears Growing UK Unrest Over Afghan War Toll
• July 10, 2009 -- Eight British Soldiers Killed in Helmand in 24 Hours
• May 1, 2009 -- Out of Iraq – Britain Warily Eyes Afghan Escalation

Israeli's: "Down With America"

Jerusalem Anti-Obama Rally Predicts US Disintegration

Rabbis Condemn "Insolent" US President Over Settlement Demands

By Jason Ditz,
July 27, 2009
Courtesy Of Anti-War News

Roughly 1,500 Israelis attended a pro-settler, anti-Obama in front of the home of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem today, at which rabbis condemned President Obama as a “racist” and predicted that his demands that Israel halt its settlement growth would lead to the disintegration of the United States.

At least three members of the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) were involved in the rally, which culminated in the protesters marching toward the US Consulate, waving torches and chanting for US envoy George Mitchell to “go home.”

The protesters expressed outrage at US criticism of the West Bank settlements, with one of the speakers caution that President Obama’s “insolence” would bring about his ruin. They urged Netanyahu to fulfill his campaign promises to support the settlements, instead of worrying about US pressure.

The Obama Administration has called for a Palestinian state, albeit one with severe restrictions, and has sought to restrict Israeli settlement growth, despite Israeli claims that they had secret “understandings” with the Bush Administration, though Bush-era officials appeared to disagree over whether such a deal actually existed.

Related Stories

• July 19, 2009 -- Israel Rejects US Call, Will Expand East Jerusalem Settlement
• July 8, 2009 -- State Department Denies Israel Settlements ‘Deal’
• June 17, 2009 -- Clinton, Israeli FM Clash Over Settlements

Paranoia About The Pashtuns

By Juan Cole and Tom Engelhardt,
July 28, 2009
Courtesy Of Anti-War News

These days, it seems as though the United States is conducting its wars in places remarkably unfamiliar to most Americans. Its CIA-operated drone aircraft, for instance, have been regularly firing missiles into Waziristan, where, in one strike in June, an estimated 80 tribespeople were killed while at a funeral procession for the dead from a previous drone strike.

Waziristan? If you asked most Americans whether their safety depended on killing people in Waziristan, they might wonder what you were talking about. But not in Washington, where Waziristan, the Swat Valley, the Lower Dir district, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, also known as FATA, and the Northwest Frontier Province, among other places you’d previously never heard of, are not only on the collective mind but evidently considered crucial to the well-being, and even existence, of the United States. Perhaps that’s simply the new norm. After all, we now live in a thoroughly ramped-up atmosphere in which “American national security” – defined to include just about anything unsettling that occurs anywhere on Earth – is the eternal preoccupation of a vast national security bureaucracy whose bread and butter increasingly seems to be worst-case scenarios.

The ongoing hysteria about lightly settled, mountainous Pashtun tribal lands in Pakistan on or near the ill-defined Afghan border might seem unique to our imperial moment. So imagine my surprise when Juan Cole told me it actually has a history more than a century old. And there’s nothing like a little history lesson, is there, to put the strange hysterias of our moment into perspective?

Cole has just written a whole book about America’s “Islam Anxiety,” Engaging the Muslim World, and his invaluable Web site Informed Comment is one of my first daily online stops – so who better to offer a little history lesson in imperial delusions of grandeur and peril? If you feel like a more extensive lesson in what to make of the gamut of issues where the U.S. and the Muslim world meet, or rather collide, don’t miss his book. It’s a continual eye-opener. Tom

Armageddon at the Top of the World: Not!

A Century Of Frenzy Over The NorthWest Frontier

by Juan Cole

WHAT, what, what,
What’s the news from Swat?
Sad news,
Bad news,
Comes by the cable led
Through the Indian Ocean’s bed,
Through the Persian Gulf, the Red
Sea and the Med-
Iterranean – he ’s dead;
The Ahkoond is dead!

- George Thomas Lanigan

Despite being among the poorest people in the world, the inhabitants of the craggy northwest of what is now Pakistan have managed to throw a series of frights into distant Western capitals for more than a century. That’s certainly one for the record books.

And it hasn’t ended yet. Not by a long shot. Not with the headlines in the U.S. papers about the depredations of the Pakistani Taliban, not with the CIA’s drone aircraft striking gatherings in Waziristan and elsewhere near the Afghan border. This spring, for instance, one counter-terrorism analyst stridently (and wholly implausibly) warned that “in one to six months” we could “see the collapse of the Pakistani state,” at the hands of the bloodthirsty Taliban, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the situation in Pakistan a “mortal danger” to global security.

What most observers don’t realize is that the doomsday rhetoric about this region at the top of the world is hardly new. It’s at least 100 years old. During their campaigns in the northwest in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, British officers, journalists, and editorialists sounded much like American strategists, analysts, and pundits of the present moment. They construed the Pashtun tribesmen who inhabited Waziristan as the new Normans, a dire menace to London that threatened to overturn the British Empire.

The young Winston S. Churchill even wrote a book in 1898, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, about a late-19th-century British campaign in Pashtun territory, based on his earlier journalism there. At that time, London ruled British India, comprising all of what is now India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, but the British hold on the mountainous northwestern region abutting Afghanistan and the Himalayas was tenuous. In trying to puzzle out – like modern analysts – why the predecessors of the Pakistani Taliban posed such a huge challenge to empire, Churchill singled out two reasons for the martial prowess of those Pashtun tribesmen. One was Islam, of which he wrote, “That religion, which above all others was founded and propagated by the sword – the tenets and principles of which are instinct with incentives to slaughter and which in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men – stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism.”

Churchill actually revealed his prejudices here. In fact, for the most part, Islam spread peacefully in what is now Pakistan, by the preaching and poetry of mystical Sufi leaders, and most Muslims have not been more warlike in history than, for example, Anglo-Saxons.

For his second reason, he settled on the environment in which those tribesmen were supposed to thrive. “The inhabitants of these wild but wealthy valleys” are, he explained, in “a continual state of feud and strife.” In addition, he insisted, they were early adopters of military technology, so that their weapons were not as primitive as was common among other “races” at what he referred to as “their stage” of development. “To the ferocity of the Zulu are added the craft of the Redskin and the marksmanship of the Boer,” he warned.

In these tribesmen, he concluded, “the world is presented with that grim spectacle, ‘the strength of civilization without its mercy.’” The Pashtun were, he added, excellent marksmen, who could fell the unwary Westerner with a state-of-the-art breech-loading rifle. “His assailant, approaching, hacks him to death with the ferocity of a South-Sea Islander. The weapons of the nineteenth century are in the hands of the savages of the Stone Age.”

Ironically, given Churchill’s description of them, when four decades later the Pashtuns joined the freedom movement against British rule that led to the formation of independent Pakistan and India in 1947, politicized Pashtuns were notable not for savagery, but for joining Mahatma Gandhi’s campaign of nonviolent non-cooperation.

Nevertheless, the Churchillian image of primitive, fanatical brutality armed with cutting-edge technology, which singled Pashtuns out as an extraordinary peril to the West, survived the Victorian era and has now made it into the headlines of our own newspapers. Bruce Riedel, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst, was tasked by the Obama administration to evaluate security threats in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Arnaud de Borchgrave of the Washington Times reported breathlessly on July 17 that Riedel had concluded:

“A jihadist victory in Pakistan, meaning the takeover of the nation by a militant Sunni movement led by the Taliban … would create the greatest threat the United States has yet to face in its war on terror … [and] is now a real possibility in the foreseeable future.”

The article, in true Churchillian fashion, is titled “Armageddon Alarm Bell Rings.”

In fact, few intelligence predictions could have less chance of coming true. In the 2008 parliamentary election, the Pakistani public voted in centrist parties, some of them secular, virtually ignoring the Muslim fundamentalist parties. Today in Pakistan, there are about 24 million Pashtuns, a linguistic ethnic group that speaks Pashto. Another 13 million live across the British-drawn “Durand Line,” the border – mostly unacknowledged by Pashtuns – between Pakistan and southern Afghanistan. Most Taliban derive from this group, but the vast majority of Pashtuns are not Taliban and do not much care for the Muslim radicals.

The Taliban force that was handily defeated this spring by the Pakistani army in a swift campaign in the Swat Valley in the Northwest Frontier province, amounted to a mere 4,000 men. The Pakistani military is 550,000 strong and has a similar number of reservists. It has tanks, artillery, and fighter jets. The Taliban’s appeal is limited to that country’s Pashtun ethnic group, about 14 percent of the population, and, from everything we can tell, it is a minority taste even among them. The Taliban can commit terrorism and destabilize, but they cannot take over the Pakistani government.

Some Western analysts worry that the Taliban could unite with disgruntled junior officers of the Pakistani army, who could come to power in a putsch and so offer their Taliban allies access to sophisticated weaponry. Successful Pakistani coups, however, have been made by the chief of staff at the top, not by junior officers, since the military is quite disciplined. Far from coup-making to protect the Taliban, the military has actually spent the past year in hard slogging against them in the Federally Administered Tribal Area of Bajaur and more recently in Swat.

Today’s fantasy of a nuclear-armed Taliban is the modern equivalent of Churchill’s anxiety about those all-conquering, ultramodern Pashtun riflemen with the instincts of savages.

Frontier Ward and Watch

On a recent research trip to the India Office archives in London to plunge into British military memoirs of the Waziristan campaigns in the first half of the 20th century, I was overcome by a vivid sense of déjà vu. The British in India fought three wars with Afghanistan, losing the first two decisively, and barely achieving a draw in the third in 1919. Among the Afghan king Amanullah’s demands during the third war were that the Pashtun tribes of the frontier be allowed to give him their fealty and that Britain permit Afghanistan to conduct a sovereign foreign policy. He lost on the first demand, but won on the second and soon signed a treaty of friendship with the newly established Soviet Union.

Disgruntled Pashtun tribes in Waziristan, a no-man’s land sandwiched between the Afghan border and the formal boundary of the British-ruled Northwest Frontier province, preferred Kabul’s rule to that of London, and launched their own attacks on the British, beginning in 1919. Putting down the rebellious Wazir and Mahsud tribes of this region would, in the end, cost imperial Britain’s treasury three times as much as had the Third Anglo-Afghan War itself.

On May 2, 1921, long after the Pashtun tribesmen should have been pacified, the Manchester Guardian carried a panicky news release by the British viceroy of India on a Mahsud attack. “Enemy activity continues throughout,” the alarmed message from Viceroy Rufus Isaacs, the marquess of Reading, said, implying that a massive uprising on the subcontinent was underway. In fact, the action at that point was in only a small set of villages in one part of Waziristan, itself but one of several otherwise relatively quiet tribal areas.

On the 23rd of that month, a large band of Mahsud struck “convoys” near the village of Piazha. British losses included a British officer killed, four British and two Indian officers wounded, and seven Indian troops killed, with 26 wounded. On the 24th, “a picket [sentry outpost] near Suidgi was ambushed, and lost nine killed and seven wounded.” In nearby Zhob, the British received support from friendly Pashtun tribes engaged in a feud with what they called the “hostiles,” and – a modern touch – “aeroplanes” weighed in as well. They were, it was said, “cooperating,” though this too was an exaggeration. At the time, the Royal Air Force (RAF) was eager to prove its colonial worth on the imperial frontiers in ways that extended beyond simple reconnaissance, even though in 1921 it maintained but a single airplane at Peshawar, the nearest city, which had “a hole in its wing.” By 1925, the RAF had gotten its wish and would drop 150 tons of bombs on the Mahsud tribe.

On July 5, 1921, a newspaper report in the Allahabad Pioneer gives a sense of the tactics the British deployed against the “hostiles.” One center of rebellion was the village of Makin, inhabited by that same Mahsud tribe, which apparently wanted its own irrigation system and freedom from British interference. The British Indian army held the nearby village of Ladka. “Makin was shelled from Ladka on the 20th June,” the report ran.

The tribal fighters responded by beginning to move their flocks, though their families remained. British archival sources report that a Muslim holy man, or faqir, attempted to give the people of Makin hope by laying a spell on the 6-inch howitzer shells and pledging that they would no longer explode in the valley. (Overblown imperial anxiety about such faqirs or akhonds, Pashtun religious leaders, inspired Victorian satirists such as Edward Lear, who began one poem, “Who, or why, or which, or what, Is the Akond of Swat?”)

The faqir’s spells were to no avail. The shelling, the Pioneer reported, continued over the next two days, “with good results.” Then on the 23rd, “another bombardment of Makin was carried out by our 6-inch howitzers at Ladka.” This shelling “had a great moral effect,” the newspaper intoned, and revealed with satisfaction that “the inhabitants are now evacuating their families.” The particular nature of the moral effect of bombarding a civilian village where women and children were known to be present was not explained. Two days later, however, thanks to air observation, the howitzers at Ladka and the guns at “Piazha camp” made a “direct hit” on another similarly obscure village.

Such accounts of small, vicious engagements in mountainous villages with (to British ears) outlandish names fit oddly with the strange conviction of the elite and the press that the fate of the Empire was somehow at stake – just as strangely as similar reports out of exactly the same area, often involving the very same tribes, do in our own time. On July 7, 2009, for instance, the Pakistani newspaper The Nation published a typical daily report on the Swat valley campaign which might have come right out of the early 20th century. Keep in mind that this was a campaign into which the Obama administration forced the Pakistani government to save itself and the American position in the Greater Middle East, and which displaced some 2 million people, risking the actual destabilization of the whole northwestern region of Pakistan. It went in part:

“[T]he security forces during search operation at Banjut, Swat, recovered 50 mules loaded with arms and ammunition, medicines, and ration and also apprehended a few terrorists. During search operation at Thana, an improvised explosive device (IED) went off causing injuries to a soldier. As a result of operation at Tahirabad, Mingora, the security forces recovered surgical equipment, nine hand grenades, and office furniture from the house of a militant.”

The unfamiliar place names, the attention to confiscated mules, and the fear of tribal militancy differed little from the reports in the Pioneer from nearly a century before. Echoing Viceroy Rufus Isaacs, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on July 14, “Our national security as well as the future of Afghanistan depends on a stable, democratic, and economically viable Pakistan. We applaud the new Pakistani determination to deal with the militants who threaten their democracy and our shared security.”

As in 1921, so in 2009, the skirmishes were ignored by the general public in the West despite the frenzied assertions of politicians that the fate of the world hung in the balance.

A Paranoid View of the Pashtuns, Then and Now

On July 21, 1921, a “correspondent” for the Allahabad Pioneer – as anonymous as he was vehement – explained how some firefights in Waziristan might indeed be consequential for Western civilization. He attacked “Irresponsible Criticism” of the military budget required to face down the Mahsud tribe. He asked, “What is India’s strategical position in the world today?” It was a leading question. “Along hundreds of miles of her border,” he then warned darkly in a mammoth run-on sentence, “are scores of thousands of hardy fighters trained to war and rapine from their very birth, never for an instant forgetful of the soft wealth of India’s plains, all of whom would descend to harry them tomorrow if they thought the venture safe, some of whom are determinedly at war with us even now.”

Note that he does not explain the challenge posed by the Pashtun tribes in terms of typical military considerations, which would require attention to the exact numbers, training, equipment, tactics, and logistics of the fighters, and which would have revealed them as no significant threat to the Indian plains, however hard they were to control in their own territory. The “correspondent” instead ridicules urban “pen-pushers,” who little appreciate the “heavy task” of “frontier ward and watch.”

Not only were the tribes a danger in themselves, the hawkish correspondent intoned, but “beyond India’s border lies a great country [Afghanistan] with whom we are not even yet technically at peace.” Nor was that all. The recently established Soviet Union, with which Afghanistan had concluded a treaty of friendship that February, loomed as the real threat behind the radical Pashtuns. “Beyond that again is a huge mad-dog nation that acknowledges no right save the sword, no creed save aggression, murder, and loot, that will stay at nothing to gain its end, that covets avowedly a descent upon India above all other aims.”

That then-Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, who took an extremely dim view of colonialism and seriously considered freeing the Central Asian possessions of the old czarist empire, was then contemplating the rape of India is among the least believable calumnies in imperial propaganda. The “correspondent” would have none of it. Those, he concludes, who dare criticize the military budget should try sweet-talking the Mahsud, the Wazir, and the Bolsheviks.

In our own day as well, pundits configure the uncontrolled Pashtuns as merely the tip of a geostrategic iceberg, with the sinister icy menace of al-Qaeda stretching beneath, and beyond that greater challenges to the U.S. such as Iran (incredibly, sometimes charged by the U.S. military with supporting the hyper-Sunni, Shi’ite-hating Taliban in Afghanistan). Occasionally in this decade, attempts have even been made to tie the Russian bear once again to the Pashtun tribes.

In the case of the British Empire, whatever the imperial fears, the actual cost in lives and expenditure of campaigning in the Hindu Kush mountain range was enough to ensure that such engagements would be of relatively limited duration. On Oct. 26, 1921, the Pioneer reported that the British government of India had determined to implement a new system in Waziristan, dependent on tribal mercenaries.

“This system, which was so successfully inaugurated in the Khyber district last year,” the article explained, “is really an adaptation of the methods in vogue 40 years ago.” The tribal commander provided his own weapons and equipment, and for a fee, protected imperial lines of communication and provided security on the roads. “Thus he has an interest in maintaining the tranquility of his territory, and gives support to the more stable elements among the tribes when the hotheads are apt to run amok.” The system would be adopted, the article says, to put an end to the ruinous costs of “punitive expeditions of merely ephemeral pacificatory value.”

Absent-minded empire keeps reinventing the local tribal levy, loyal to foreign capitals and paid by them, as a way of keeping the hostiles in check. The U.S. Council on Foreign Relations reported late last year that “U.S. military commanders are studying the feasibility of recruiting Afghan tribesmen … to target Taliban and al-Qaeda elements. Taking a page from the so-called ‘Sunni Awakening’ in Iraq, which turned Sunni tribesmen against militants first in Anbar province and then beyond, the strategic about-face in Afghanistan would seek to extend power from Kabul to the country’s myriad tribal militias.” Likewise, the Pakistani government has attempted to deploy tribal fighters against the Taliban in the Federally Administered areas such as Bajaur. It remains to be seen whether this strategy can succeed.

Both in the era between the two world wars and again in the early 21st century, the Pashtun peoples have been objects of anxiety in world capitals out of all proportion to the security challenge they actually pose. As it turned out, the real threat to the British Isles in the 20th century emanated from one of what Churchill called their “civilized” European neighbors. Nothing the British tried in the Northwest Frontier and its hinterland actually worked. By the 1940s the British hold on the tribal agencies and frontier regions was shakier than ever before, and the tribes more assertive. After the British were forced out of the subcontinent in 1947, London’s anxieties about the Pashtuns and their world-changing potential abruptly evaporated.

Today, we are again hearing that the Waziris and the Mahsuds are dire threats to Western civilization. The tribal struggle for control of obscure villages in the foothills of the Himalayas is being depicted as a life-and-death matter for the North Atlantic world. Again, there is aerial surveillance, bombing, artillery fire, and – this time – displacement of civilians on a scale no British viceroy ever contemplated.

In 1921, vague threats to the British Empire from a small, weak principality of Afghanistan and a nascent, if still supine, Soviet Union underpinned a paranoid view of the Pashtuns. Today, the supposed entanglement with al-Qaeda of those Pashtuns termed “Taliban” by U.S. and NATO officials – or even with Iran or Russia – has focused Washington’s and Brussels’ military and intelligence efforts on the highland villagers once again.

Few of the Pashtuns in question, even the rebellious ones, are really Taliban in the sense of militant seminary students; few so-called Taliban are entwined with what little is left of al-Qaeda in the region; and Iran and Russia are not, of course, actually supporting the latter. There may be plausible reasons for which the U.S. and NATO wish to spend blood and treasure in an attempt to forcibly shape the politics of the 38 million Pashtuns on either side of the Durand Line in the 21st century. That they form a dire menace to the security of the North Atlantic world is not one of them.

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell professor of history at the University of Michigan. His most recent book, Engaging the Muslim World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), was published this spring. He has appeared widely on television, radio, and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and he has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 15 books and authored 65 journal articles and chapters. He is the proprietor of the Informed Comment weblog on current affairs.

Copyright 2009 Juan Cole

Read more by Tom Engelhardt

• Facing the American World We Created – July 23rd, 2009
• Serial Warriors – July 21st, 2009
• The Face in the Mirror – July 19th, 2009
• Everything That Happens in Afghanistan Is Based on Lies or Illusions – July 16th, 2009
• The Remaking of Iraq – July 14th, 2009

Middle East Show Of Farce

By Jeff Huber,
July 28, 2009
Courtesy Of Anti-War News

A July 17 article at the Guardian leads with “In preparation for a possible attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, two Israeli missile-class warships have sailed through the Suez Canal 10 days after a submarine capable of launching a nuclear missile strike.”

The fifth paragraph begins, “The deployment into the Red Sea, confirmed by Israeli officials, according to the Associated Press yesterday, was a clear signal that Israel was able to put its strike force within range of Iran at short notice.”

This is utter bosh.

Israel’s German-made, diesel-electric powered Dolphin class submarines supposedly carry nuclear missiles with a range of over 900 miles. If that’s the case, the subs don’t have to deploy to the Suez to hit Iran; they can do that pierside in their home port in Haifa. Israel’s Sa’ar class corvettes carry self-defense weapons and the Harpoon anti-ship missile that has a range of between 58 and 196 miles, far too short to hit Iran from the Suez.

Israel and Iran both possess sea-denial navies that are glorified coast guards. To attack Israel’s navy, Iran’s navy would have to pass down the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman, steam west across the North Arabian Sea into the Gulf of Aden, then hike up the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal and enter the Mediterranean. Israel’s navy would have to take the reverse route to attack Iran’s. Either navy would likely run out of gas or sink of natural causes before it reached the other one. They might agree to meet in the middle, but in an expanse the size of the North Arabian Sea they probably couldn’t find each other. We might give Israel’s navy a lift to the Gulf of Oman on a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, but as soon as its puddle paddlers unloaded and drove into the Hormuz, the Iranians would shoot their tokheses off with shore-launched missiles (the Iranians might stick one up the carrier’s fantail as well).

Israel’s cardboard-saber-rattling supposedly signals concerns about Iran’s intentions to develop nuclear weapons. That would be well and good if Iran had intentions to develop nukes, but all indications are that they don’t. As I’ve often noted, our own intelligence admits that Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program, and the International Atomic Energy Agency can’t find a trace of one. For the Iranians to develop nukes would be astronomically stupid, tantamount to painting a bull’s eye on their backs. Israel would have a perfect excuse to schwack Iran’s nuclear energy infrastructure with a preemptive strike, and from what we just saw the Israelis do to Gaza, they’d likely firebomb Iran’s cities as well.

Despite what hate radio and Fox News and the Polly-cracker mainstream media have told you over and over, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has never said Iran would use nukes to destroy Israel, or anything remotely like that, and neither has anyone else in Iran’s government. Iran is incapable of projecting land power more than a few miles from its border, its navy is as potent as root beer outside of the Persian Gulf, and its air force is almost as old and broken down as North Korea’s.

Demonizing Iran has been a long-term project of Dick Cheney’s. Through his Iranian Directorate and his lip-lock with the Likud and neoconservatives cabals, he was able to have Iran declared to be our greatest “challenge,” even though Iran’s military budget is less than 1 percent the size of ours and less than half the size of Israel’s, and despite the Cheneyacs’ failure to prove a single one of their assertions regarding Iran’s nuclear intentions or its meddling in Iraq and the Bananastans.

Iran-baiting has become so popular that it’s practically a national pastime. Maybe that’s why Hillary Clinton has joined the likes of Newt Gingrich aboard Cheney’s crazy train.

I voted against Hillary in the Virginia primary because she’d so clearly rolled over for the neocons for fear they’d call her a girly-man if she didn’t. As secretary of state, lamentably, she’s still putting on a tomboy act for them. In a July 22 speech in Thailand, Hillary said the U.S. would extend its “defense umbrella” to protect its Middle East allies from a nuclear-armed Iran. “We’ll take actions,” she said, “crippling action, working to upgrade the defense of our partners in the region.”

A little song, a little dance; a little seltzer down your pantsuit. The Iranians don’t have a nuclear weapons program and common sense says they never will, they’re surrounded by U.S. forces and outgunned by their neighbors, if they ever did acquire a nuclear weapon and use it on someone our retaliation would mean the virtual end of the millennia-old Persian culture, and Hillary wants to further cripple our economy by dumping more American-made arms into the region. Where do we find such women?

Bush/Cheney foreign policy turned the Middle East into an analog of Cold War Europe, and incredibly, they managed to cast pismire Iran as the second coming of the Soviet Union. That the Obama administration is conducting the same clownish statecraft is a sure sign that the American Empire will end not with a bang or a whimper, but with pie on its face.

Read more by Jeff Huber

• Cheney’s Inferno – July 21st, 2009
• The Persian Ploy – July 13th, 2009
• Bull Pulpit – July 6th, 2009
• Killing Them Softly – June 29th, 2009
• The New Praetorians – June 22nd, 2009

The Big Lie Of Afghanistan

My Country Hasn't Been Liberated: It's Still Under The Warlords' Control, and NATO Occupation Only Reinforces Their Power

By Malalai Joya
Saturday 25 July 2009
Courtesy Of The Guardian

In 2005, I was the youngest person elected to the new Afghan parliament. Women like me, running for office, were held up as an example of how the war in Afghanistan had liberated women. But this democracy was a facade, and the so-called liberation a big lie.

On behalf of the long-suffering people of my country, I offer my heartfelt condolences to all in the UK who have lost their loved ones on the soil of Afghanistan. We share the grief of the mothers, fathers, wives, sons and daughters of the fallen. It is my view that these British casualties, like the many thousands of Afghan civilian dead, are victims of the unjust policies that the Nato countries have pursued under the leadership of the US government.

Almost eight years after the Taliban regime was toppled, our hopes for a truly democratic and independent Afghanistan have been betrayed by the continued domination of fundamentalists and by a brutal occupation that ultimately serves only American strategic interests in the region.

You must understand that the government headed by Hamid Karzai is full of warlords and extremists who are brothers in creed of the Taliban. Many of these men committed terrible crimes against the Afghan people during the civil war of the 1990s.

For expressing my views I have been expelled from my seat in parliament, and I have survived numerous assassination attempts. The fact that I was kicked out of office while brutal warlords enjoyed immunity from prosecution for their crimes should tell you all you need to know about the "democracy" backed by Nato troops.

In the constitution it forbids those guilty of war crimes from running for high office. Yet Karzai has named two notorious warlords, Fahim and Khalili, as his running mates for the upcoming presidential election. Under the shadow of warlordism, corruption and occupation, this vote will have no legitimacy, and once again it seems the real choice will be made behind closed doors in the White House. As we say in Afghanistan, "the same donkey with a new saddle".

So far, Obama has pursued the same policy as Bush in Afghanistan. Sending more troops and expanding the war into Pakistan will only add fuel to the fire. Like many other Afghans, I risked my life during the dark years of Taliban rule to teach at underground schools for girls. Today the situation of women is as bad as ever. Victims of abuse and rape find no justice because the judiciary is dominated by fundamentalists. A growing number of women, seeing no way out of the suffering in their lives, have taken to suicide by self-immolation.

This week, US vice-president Joe Biden asserted that "more loss of life [is] inevitable" in Afghanistan, and that the ongoing occupation is in the "national interests" of both the US and the UK.

I have a different message to the people of Britain. I don't believe it is in your interests to see more young people sent off to war, and to have more of your taxpayers' money going to fund an occupation that keeps a gang of corrupt warlords and drug lords in power in Kabul.

What's more, I don't believe it is inevitable that this bloodshed continues forever. Some say that if foreign troops leave Afghanistan will descend into civil war. But what about the civil war and catastrophe of today? The longer this occupation continues, the worse the civil war will be.

The Afghan people want peace, and history teaches that we always reject occupation and foreign domination. We want a helping hand through international solidarity, but we know that values like human rights must be fought for and won by Afghans themselves.

I know there are millions of British people who want to see an end to this conflict as soon as possible. Together we can raise our voice for peace and justice.

India Launches Indigenous Nuclear Sub

(Above Photo: Courtesy Of Dawn.com)

Anuj Chopra, Foreign Correspondent
Last Updated: July 26. 2009 10:36PM UAE
July 26. 2009 6:36PM GMT
Courtesy Of The National

MUMBAI // In a display of its fast-growing military prowess, India launched its first indigenously built nuclear-powered submarine yesterday.

The 6,000-tonne submarine, which will be commissioned in the Indian navy as INS Arihant – or “Destroyer of Enemies” – was kept in a dry dock in the southern Indian port city of Vishakhapatnam. It was flooded with water, marking its launch in a ceremony attended by Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister.

The launch came as India marked the 10th anniversary of the conflict with Pakistan-based infiltrators in 1999 on the icy frontier of Kargil in the disputed Kashmir region.

Mr Singh called the launch of the submarine a “historic milestone in the country’s defence preparedness”, but said the intention of the launch was in no way belligerent.
“We don’t have any aggressive designs nor do we seek to threaten anyone,” he said.
This is the first of three such submarines the country proposes to build in the coming years. The launch allows India to rub shoulders with an elite group of five countries – the US, Britain, Russia, China, and France – that currently builds -nuclear-powered submarines.

“This is a significant psychological milestone,” Uday Bhaskar, the director of the National Maritime Foundation, a New Delhi-based defence think tank, said. “It enhances India’s military strategic profile on the world stage.”

The sea is a growing security concern for India, and launching this kind of a deterrent at sea is crucial to the country’s safety, Mr Bhaskar said.

But it is not expected to immediately augment India’s military might. The vessel will undergo a series of extensive and lengthy sea trials in the Bay of Bengal, the Indian navy said, indicating it was still two years away from active service.

After the tests are completed, and the submarine is eventually deployed, it will be able to carry 100 sailors. It will have the potential to remain submerged for prolonged periods. That makes this submarine significantly removed from India’s current ageing fleet of diesel-powered submarines, which cannot remain underwater for long periods.

“This is a big strategic advancement of India’s nuclear capabilities, but it has a slew of limitations,” said Ashok Mehta, a retired Indian army general and a defence expert based in New Delhi.

The most pressing drawback, Mr Mehta points out, is that this submarine will be able to launch 12 nuclear missiles with a limited target range of 700km.

“If the missile range is poor, it implies that the submarine has to get perilously close to the target in order to strike,” he explained. “What we need is a missile with a range of up to 3,500km, so it can strike into the heart of a country that attacks India.”

Stunned by last year’s terrorist attack on Mumbai – terrorists breached India’s borders via the sea route – India announced it would hike its defence spending for 2009-2010 to US$29.39 billion (Dh108bn), an increase of nearly 25 per cent. The money will be used to upgrade its largely Soviet-era weapons systems and overhaul its security forces.

An additional $562 million will be used to boost its border security.

Beyond the defence spending to bolster security, a submarine with enormous nuclear firepower was vital as a powerful deterrent to prevent any future attacks, Mr Mehta said.

“It is significant to project this submarine as a deterrent with second strike capability,” he said, pointing out that India currently adheres to a no-first-use policy.

Although the prime minister said that India’s intentions were not aggressive, the country is acutely worried of the tenuous security situation in its neighbourhood, he said.

There are concerns of Pakistan descending into the throes of a civil war. India is also increasingly suspicious about China’s growing presence in its neighbourhood.

Both India and China, two Asian behemoths widely touted as future global superpowers, are engaged in a competition for supremacy in South Asia.

India’s chief for the air force, Air Chief Marshal Fali Homi Major, last month called China, which has a significant naval presence in the region, a “bigger threat than Pakistan”.

“Today’s launch does not add to India’s military might right away,” Mr Bhaskar said, “but it reflects the strategic direction India is headed in.”

achopra@thenational.ae

U.S.-Allied Refugees Still Branded As 'Terrorists?'

By Marisa Taylor
Posted on Sunday, July 26, 2009
Courtesy Of McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Almost every day for three years, prison guards at one of Saddam Hussein's most notorious prisons tortured Sami Alkarim.

Now, in a cruel twist of fate, the accomplished Iraqi artist is being treated like a terrorist by the U.S., the country where he sought refuge.

U.S. officials have told him they can't give him permanent residency in Denver because of messenger work he did as a teenager for the same political party that counts the current prime minister of Iraq as a member.

Alkarim's problems have their roots in post-Sept. 11 anti-terrorism laws that the Obama and Bush administrations vowed to fix.

Despite that pledge, the number of people who've been told their requests for refugee status, asylum or green cards won't be processed because of the laws has risen from 5,304 in December to 7,286 in June.

The broad language of the Patriot Act and other laws bars refugees and asylum seekers from living and working in the U.S. if they supported or were members of an armed group in their homelands. They're considered terrorists or supporters of terrorists even if they opposed dictators or helped the U.S. government.

Although Congress has attempted to give the executive branch the power to grant waivers in such cases, the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, has yet to set up an efficient way to handle them, refugee advocates say.

"As far as I can tell, the situation has only grown worse," said Thomas Ragland, a former Justice Department lawyer attorney who now represents several immigrants affected by the laws. Ragland's clients include an Iraqi, an Ethiopian, a Nepali, and a Burmese.

Department of Homeland Security officials in charge of reviewing the matter declined a request for an interview.

Matthew Chandler, a DHS spokesman, said the department has granted more than 10,500 waivers to people impacted by the laws, proof that the cases aren't being ignored.

"While the department views this achievement as significant, we also understand that a more efficient authorization process than the one that has been in place would reach even more people," he said.

DHS is working with other agencies, such as the State Department, to come up with a solution that also would weigh U.S. security interests, he said.

Immigrants and their lawyers, however, remain mystified by the government's inability to cut through the red tape to eliminate such problems. Many of the waivers were given to Burmese refugees, while other worthy refugees and asylum seekers are overlooked, advocates said.

"I can't tell how much of this madness is policy and how much of it is just madness," said Anwen Hughes, the senior counsel for Human Rights First's Refugee Protection Program.

Previously, immigrants who were denied a green card after being given asylum were told they wouldn't be deported. Officials said their cases would eventually be resolved.

However, the DHS began recently sending some immigrants letters informing them that the agency intends to revoke their asylum. As a result, they'd be deported.

The cases include immigrants who were granted asylum after fleeing Zimbabwe as members of the Movement for Democratic Change, the main opponent of autocrat Robert Mugabe. In June, President Obama met with the leader of the party, Morgan Tsvangirai, and praised him for his courage.

Some of the most startling stories involve Iraqis — some of whom have worked for the U.S. government under threat of death and now could have even more to fear as U.S. troops are redeployed.

In one recent case, a middle-aged Iraqi mother of two teenagers was deemed a terrorist and barred refuge in the U.S. despite her work for the State Department as an economic development adviser.

Anna, as she is known by her American colleagues, is seen as a supporter of terrorism because of her work for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a mainstream Iraqi political party that the current president of Iraq belongs to. She's no longer active in the party.

Anonymous callers have warned her that they'd take revenge for her work for the U.S. government.

Now, she wonders in a phone call from Iraq punctuated by sirens and static, "What will be my future?"

Army Lt. Col. Dennis Chapman, who worked with her when he was the chief of a military transition team in the Kurdish region of Iraq, said he doesn't understand why the U.S. government would reject someone who's proved to be an ally in need of help.

"It's an absurd finding," he said. "It deprives the word 'terrorism' of any meaning."

Anna, who's being helped by the international law firm Holland & Knight, is appealing the decision. As part of a nonprofit effort, the law firm has helped more than 300 Iraqis affiliated with the U.S. government.

Alkarim, who fled as a refugee to the U.S. in February 2001, can't work or travel, even though his wife and children have already become U.S. citizens.

In 2007, Alkarim sued the U.S. government in an effort to get his green card application moving. Although the Obama administration tried to get the lawsuit dismissed, a federal judge in Denver has allowed it to proceed and could rule soon.

Alkarim's lawyer, Jeff Joseph, agreed to take the case free. Justice Department attorneys, however, have told him if DHS is ordered by the judge to act, they'll likely deny Alkarim's request for permanent residency. The government lawyers suggested that his client might have better luck if he simply dropped the suit.

Recently, Alkarim's artwork was selected to be shown at Italy's Biennial of Florence, which bills itself as one of the largest exhibition of contemporary art in the world.

His abstract expressionist paintings were considered subversive by Saddam Hussein's regime — one of the reasons he was imprisoned.

His artwork will be displayed in December without him, however, because he doesn't have his green card. He said he's also had to turn down invitations to galleries in Switzerland, Dubai, France and London.

"It would be an honor to represent the United States," the 43-year-old said. "But I can't say I'm American."

MORE FROM MCCLATCHY

U.S. allies losing asylum bids over definition of 'terrorist'

Law enforcement officials secretly profiling immigrants

Immigration officials detaining, deporting American citizens

Can Barack Obama undo Bush's tangled legal legacy?

Follow the latest politics news at McClatchy's Planet Washington

Extremist, Jihadist, Islamist, Terrorist

By Neil Kitson,
July 27, 2009
Courtesy Of Anti-War News

"Recalling the relevant international counter-terrorism conventions and in particular the obligations of parties to those conventions to extradite or prosecute terrorists…"
– United Nations Security Council Resolution 1267 [.pdf], Oct. 15, 1999

In the informed debate of the last 10 years regarding "terrorism," there’s a missing acronym to define this dreadful new menace, a menace fearful enough to provoke civilized nations into abandoning the Nuremberg principles, the Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, the Statute of Rome, the American Constitution, and here in Canada, the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act. It would have to be pretty damn serious for that to happen, but as Ollie North’s secretary, Fawn Somebody, said: "Sometimes you have to go above the law." I was never clear where that was, or how it was different from breaking the law.

"The Harper government was warned shortly after it came to office in 2006 that Sudan’s notorious military intelligence agency was ready to ‘disappear’ Abousfian Abdelrazik, a Canadian citizen, unless Ottawa allowed him to go home, The Globe and Mail has learned."

Anyway, I now have a solution for the missing acronym that defines the terrorist enemy: Extremist Jihadist Islamist Terrorist (EJIT). Have I left anything out? I don’t think so. I was going to add "fundamentalist," but that would drag in unwanted religion to muddy the waters of the 1267 Committee. I myself am an agnostic fundamentalist, and I don’t think I deserve to be on the "no-fly" list either. I admit the 1267 Committee has an ominous ring to it, implying an organization not to be messed with, and certainly not one to come to the attention of, but other than that it conveys no information. If we’re going to report somebody to this committee, however, we should have a clear idea what we’re looking for.

So let’s define EJIT. What is "extremist"? I don’t know. How about somebody willing to do violence not sanctioned by international law? That’s a long list. It includes much of the American executive branch. Nevertheless, the expression "Islamist extremist" is not hard to find at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, just to pick one example at random. But how about Richard Armitage’s threat to bomb Pakistan "back into the Stone Age" if it didn’t co-operate after 9/11? That seems pretty extreme. I recall the Stone Age is a favorite destination for American warriors like Curtis LeMay, who wanted to bomb Hanoi back to the Stone Age. Why the Stone Age, one wonders, and not the Iron Age? I suppose if you’ve got iron, you’ve got the railway, and once you’ve got the railway you’ve got nuclear fission. The total obliteration of other humans seems a little extreme, and the most organized form of it, in Nazi Germany, is now the epitome of evil, as recognized by the Nuremberg Tribunal and all subsequent war crimes legislation and international humanitarian law.

What is "jihadist"? From Wikipedia’s disputed entry:

"According to scholar John Esposito, Jihad requires Muslims to ’struggle in the way of God’ or ‘to struggle to improve one’s self and/or society.’[3][4] Jihad is directed against Satan’s inducements, aspects of one’s own self, or against a visible enemy.[1][5] The four major categories of jihad that are recognized are Jihad against one’s self (Jihad al-Nafs), Jihad of the tongue (Jihad al-lisan), Jihad of the hand (Jihad al-yad), and Jihad of the sword (Jihad as-sayf).[5] Islamic military jurisprudence focuses on regulating the conditions and practice of Jihad as-sayf, the only form of warfare permissible under Islamic law, and thus the term Jihad is usually used in fiqh manuals in reference to military combat.[5][6]"

But perhaps closer to the spirit of the 1267 Committee is the definition of Daniel Pipes, scholar, writer, idiot non-savant:

"The purpose of jihad, in other words, is not directly to spread the Islamic faith but to extend sovereign Muslim power (faith, of course, often follows the flag). Jihad is thus unabashedly offensive in nature, with the eventual goal of achieving Muslim dominion over the entire globe."

Well, it doesn’t get any clearer that that, or more shallow.

"Islamist." What is this? Is this Muslim, or Islamic? No. I think we’ve gotten to the stage where Islamist has connotations on the scale "Muslim-Islamic-Islamist" that are roughly the same as the old "negro-nigrah-n*gger" epithet, which carried an increasing weight of hate, fear, and contempt as it moved closer to the gutter. If Dan isn’t going to hold back, why should anyone else? Let’s call a spade a spade. I’m only saying, if you’re going to put Islamist together with words like extremist, radical, or terrorist, you might as well say "n*gger," and "uppity n*gger" at that.

"Terrorist." This word gets a lot of attention, but the definition is not all that complicated, which is anyone committing violence against civilians to achieve political or military goals. Hiroshima comes to mind, or of course the Blitz, or Operation Barbarossa, or 9/11, or 7/7, or 6/23.

6/23?

On June 23, 1985, two bombs exploded within an hour of each other, one on Air India Flight 182 over the North Atlantic, resulting in the deaths of 325 people, and the other at Narita Airport in Tokyo, resulting in two deaths and four serious injuries (it was actually meant to be transferred to an Air India Flight 301 as baggage). It was a genuine terrorist operation with al-Qaeda-like timing (possibly bin Laden or al-Zawahiri were paying attention), but planned and built in Canada, in all probability as a result of the invasion of the Golden Temple a year earlier. It resulted in almost no convictions, a very expensive trial, and no UN Security Council Resolutions. Now that I think of it, al-Zawahiri was a dermatologist, or maybe that was his brother, and I heard Che Guevara was a dermatologist, though I’m not sure about that, and I’m a dermatologist. Don’t join the dots, people; sometimes a dot is just a dot. You see the trouble with information that isn’t information.

Despite the provisions of Chapter VII of the UN Charter (and in particular Article 41) and the atrocities of 6/23, there is no UN "Consolidated List" of Sikhs in British Columbia or elsewhere, or for that matter a "Consolidated List" of people from Oklahoma known to have associated with Tim McVeigh, like the residents of Elohim City, for example, a "gated community" started by a Canadian funnily enough, which had as many links to Timothy McVeigh as Abousfian Abdelrazik had to any EJIT. So the rooting out of international terrorism has a distinctly ethnic flavor, and Abdelrazik just lived a year in the Canadian embassy in Sudan to prove it.

According to the CBC:

"As we mentioned in our last half-hour, Abousfian Abdelrazik is back at home in Canada. He was stranded in Sudan for six years, jailed twice and accused of supporting al-Qaeda. He also spent a little more than a year sleeping on a cot in the Canadian embassy in Khartoum.

"The RCMP and CSIS – the Canadian Security Intelligence Service – cleared him of any criminal wrongdoing. But he couldn’t come home because the Canadian government said he was still a security risk and refused to grant him a passport. Until a Federal Court judge this month ordered the government to allow him to return to Canada.

"His story has prompted comparisons to the story of Josef K, the protagonist in Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial. So The Current’s Aaron Brindle and Chris Wodskou put the two stories side-by-side to see where they intersect.

"John Zilcosky and Amir Attaran both agreed to help. John Zilcosky is the author of Kafka’s Travels and the chair of the department of Germanic languages and literature at the University of Toronto. And Amir Attaran is a professor in the law and medicine departments at the University of Ottawa who has worked on Abousfian Abdelrazik’s case. The documentary is called Abdelrazik’s Trial. It first aired on The Current in April.

"At the time this documentary first went to air we requested interviews with Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon and his parliamentary secretary, Deepak Obhrai. They were not available."

It’s a genuine Canadian disgrace. What saves us is the Federal Court judge, Justice Zinn, who ordered him brought home to appear in court as bona fides of the execution of the court order:

"Memorandum to file from Honourable Mr. Justice Zinn dated 08-JUL-2009 further to the hearing held in Montréal on 07-JUL-2009 requesting that the following comments be made a formal part of the Court’s record: ‘In my Judgment of June 4th, I ordered that Mr. Abdelrazik be repatriated to Canada and that he appear before me today. … Mr. Abdelrazik, I urge you to let your future be shaped by the present, and not by the past. This hearing is concluded.’"

When I read that, I was proud of Canada. However, we have work to do.

Read more by Neil Kitson

• Americanada? No Thanks – May 11th, 2009

9/11 and Cyber Terrorism

Did The Real "Cyber 9/11" Happen On 9/11?

By James Corbett
Source: The Corbett Report
July 17, 2009
Courtesy Of Global Reserach

Government sources immediately began blaming North Korea for the recent cyberterror attacks on South Korea and the U.S., despite having no evidence to back up those claims.[1] Now, an examination of the evidence by independent computer experts show that the attack seems to have been coordinated from the UK.[2] The hysterical media coverage in the attack's wake, however, echoing the government line that it was likely the work of North Korea, has served to cement in the minds of many that this was an act of cyberwarfare.

The idea that this surprisingly unsophisticated attack[3] could have come from a well-organized, hostile state or terrorist group comes as a blessing in disguise to those groups, agencies and advisors who have been calling for greater and greater federal snooping powers in the name of stopping a "cyber 9/11" from happening.

The "cyber 9/11" meme stretches back almost to 9/11 itself. Back in 2003, Mike McConnell, the ex-director of the National Security Agency (NSA), was fearmongering over the possibility of a cyber attack "equivalent to the attack on the World Trade Center" if a new institution were not created to oversee cyber security.[4] Since then, report[5] after report[6] has continued to use the horror of 9/11 as a way of raising public hysteria over "cyber terrorism," a subject more often associated with juvenile hackers and lone misfits than radical terrorist organizations.

The real reason behind the invocation of 9/11 in the context of "cyber terror" was revealed last year by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig. He told a technology conference that former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke admits there is a cyber equivalent of the constitution-destroying Patriot Act ready to be rubber stamped into law; all it requires is a "cyber 9/11" to make such legislation politically viable.[7] In effect, the cyber security establishment-the advisors, agents and experts in the newly-minted multi-billion dollar cyber security industry[8]-are waiting for a spectacular cyber terrorist attack to go ahead with plans for 'identity management' schemes like fingerprinting for internet access which would put an end to the free Internet as we have known it.[9]

What the cyber security establishment does not want you to know is that the most incredible cyber terrorist story of all time began 15 years ago. And it centers on 9/11. The establishment is interested in suppressing this story because it demonstrates that the very investigative bodies that are clamoring for more power on the pretext of the "cyber terror" hysteria are the exact same bodies that failed to investigate the documentable links between government-designated terrorists and a software company with direct access to some of the most sensitive computer systems in the United States. FBI agents whose investigation into this story were suppressed have even said that these investigations could have prevented 9/11.

It is a story of international terror and terrorist financiers. It stretches from New England to Saudi Arabia and involves businessmen, politicians and terror networks. And it begins in the most unlikely of places: the offices of an enterprise architecture software firm in Quincy, Massachusetts.

Enterprise Architecture: The God's-Eye View of Systems and Infrastructure

"Enterprise architecture software" refers to a computer program that allows someone to look at all of the data produced throughout an organization's structure in real time. This effectively gives the program user a god's-eye view of an enterprise, allowing for the mapping, visualization and analysis of all transactions, interactions, systems, processes and personnel in the entirety of a business or agency. This type of software could, for example, be used for robust business modeling, allowing for extremely detailed and accurate projections of how changes in an organization's structure or processes would effect a business' bottom line. What would happen if two departments were merged, for example, or if a business were to outsource one of its processes.

As this software began to mature in the 1990s, however, it went from a merely useful tool to something truly incredible. Sophisticated enterprise architecture software could, for example, examine all of the transactions taking place across a financial institution in real time and examine that data for possible money laundering operations or rogue traders. Such software could even have potentially detected and identified the insider trading leading up to 9/11.[10] Combined with rudimentary a.i. capabilities, such a program would not only be able to alert the appropriate personnel about such transactions, but even stop them as they are happening. If the software were sophisticated enough, it may even be able to identify the possibility of such transactions before they happen.

The utility of such software for organizations of all stripes should be obvious enough. It is unsurprising, then, that numerous government agencies and powerful corporations were hungry for this software in the 1990s. A surprising number of them, including DARPA, the FBI, the Secret Service, the White House, the Navy, the Air Force, the FAA, NATO, IBM, Booz Allen Hamilton and Price Waterhouse Coopers (amongst many others) turned to a small New England-based software firm called Ptech.[11]

Ptech: Not Your Average Software Firm

Ptech was founded in Quincy, Mass. in 1994 and by 1996 had secured a contract with DARPA to help transfer commercial software methodologies to the defense sector.[12] In 1997, it gained security clearance to bid on sensitive military contracts and bid on work for a range of other government agencies.[13] Within four years Ptech had built up a stable of clients that would make any third-party software vendor green with envy. From the inner sanctum of the White House to the headquarters of the FBI, from the basement of the FAA to the boardroom of IBM, some of the best-secured organizations in the world running on some of the most protected servers housing the most sensitive data welcomed Ptech into their midst. Ptech was given the keys to the cyber kingdom to build detailed pictures of these organizations, their weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and to show how these problems could be exploited by those of ill intent. For all of its incredible success, however, many of the firm's top investors and employees were men with backgrounds that should have been raising red flags at all levels of the government.

The firm was founded on $20 million of startup money, $5 million of which was provided by Yassin al-Qadi[14], a wealthy and well-connected Saudi businessman who liked to brag about his acquaintance with Dick Cheney.[15] He also had connections to various Muslim charities suspected of funding international terrorism.[16] In the wake of 9/11 he was officially declared a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the U.S. government and his assets were frozen.[17] At the time, Ptech's owners and senior management denied that al-Qadi had any involvement with the company other than his initial investment, but the FBI now maintains they were lying and that in fact al-Qadi continued investing millions of dollars in the company through various fronts and investment vehicles. [18] Company insiders told FBI officials that they were flown to Saudi Arabia to meet Ptech's investors in 1999 and that al-Qadi was introduced as one of the owners.[19] It has also been reported that Hussein Ibrahim, Ptech's chief scientist, was al-Qadi's representative at Ptech[20] and al-Qadi's lawyers have admitted that al-Qadi's representative may have continued to sit on Ptech's board even after 9/11.[21]

Ibrahim himself was a former president of BMI, a New Jersey-based real estate investment firm that was also one of the initial investors in Ptech and provided financing for Ptech's founding loan. Ptech leased office space and computer equipment from BMI[22] and BMI shared office space in New Jersey with Kadi International, owned and operated by none other than Ptech's sweetheart investor and Specially Designated Global Terrorist, Yassin al-Qadi.[23] In 2003, counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke said: "BMI held itself out publicly as a financial services provider for Muslims in the United States, its investor list suggests the possibility this facade was just a cover to conceal terrorist support." [24]

Suheil Laheir was Ptech's chief architect. When he wasn't writing the software that would provide Ptech with detailed operational blueprints of the most sensitive agencies in the U.S. government, he was writing articles in praise of Islamic holy war. He was also fond of quoting Abdullah Azzam, Osama Bin Laden's mentor and the head of Maktab al-Khidamat, which was the precursor to Al-Qaeda.[25]

That such an unlikely cast of characters were given access to some of the most sensitive agencies in the U.S. federal government is startling enough. That they were operating software that allowed them to map, analyze and access every process and operation within these agencies for the purpose of finding systemic weak points is equally startling. Most disturbing of all, though, is the connection between Ptech and the very agencies that so remarkably failed in their duty to protect the American public on September 11, 2001.

Ptech on 9/11: The Basement of the FAA

For two years prior to 9/11, Ptech was working to identify potential problems or weaknesses in the FAA's response plans to events like a terrorist hijacking of a plane over U.S. airspace. According to their own business plan for their contract with the FAA, Ptech was given access to every process and system in the FAA dealing with their crisis response protocols. This included examining key systems and infrastructure to analyze the FAA's "network management, network security, configuration management, fault management, performance management, application administration, network management and user desk help operations." [26] In short, Ptech had free reign to examine every FAA system and process for dealing with the exact type of event that was to occur on 9/11. Even more incredible, researcher Indira Singh points out that Ptech was specifically analyzing the potential interoperability problems between the FAA, NORAD and the Pentagon in the event of an emergency over U.S. airspace.[27]

Ptech also presumably had operational information about the systems that the FAA, NORAD and others employed during crisis response exercises like Vigilant Guardian[28], the NORAD exercise that was taking place on 9/11 and included simulations of hijacked jets being flown into New York[29] and hijacked jets being flown into government buildings.[30] This is significant because there is every indication that just such drills were confusing NORAD's response to the real hijackings that were taking place that day. As researcher Michael Ruppert points out, a rogue agent with access to a Ptech backdoor into the FAA's systems could have been deliberately inserting fake blips onto the FAA's radars on 9/11[31]. That scenario would explain the source of the phantom Flight 11 that the FAA reported to NORAD at 9:24 a.m. (well after Flight 11 had already hit the World Trade Center)[32], a report whose source the 9/11 Commission claims they were unable to find.[33]

In short, Ptech's software was running on the critical systems responding to the attacks of 9/11 on 9/11 itself. The software was designed for the express purpose of giving its users a complete overview of all the data flowing through an organization in real time. The father of enterprise architecture himself, John Zachman, explained that with Ptech-type software installed on a sensitive server "You would know where the access points are, you'd know how to get in, you would know where the weaknesses are, you'd know how to destroy it."[34]

Stifled Investigations

In the late 1990s, Robert Wright-an FBI special agent in the Chicago field office-was running an investigation into terrorist financing called Vulgar Betrayal.[35] From the very start, the investigation was hampered by higher-ups; the investigation was not even allocated adequate computers to carry out its work.[36] Through Wright's foresight and perseverance, however, the investigation managed to score some victories, including seizing $1.4 million in U.S. funds that traced back to Yassin al-Qadi.[37] Wright was pleased when a senior agent was assigned to help investigate "the founder and the financier of Ptech", but the agent did no work and merely pushed papers during his entire time on the case.[38]

Shortly after the 1998 African embassy bombings, Vulgar Betrayal began to uncover a money trail linking al-Qadi to the attack.[39] According to Wright, when he proposed a criminal investigation into the links, his supervisor flew into a rage, saying "'You will not open criminal investigations. I forbid any of you. You will not open criminal investigations against any of these intelligence subjects." Wright was taken off the Vulgar Betrayal investigation one year later and the investigation itself was shut down the following year.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Indira Singh-a risk management conultant for JP Morgan-was looking for enterprise architecture software to implement the next generation of risk management at the financial juggernaut. Impressed by their client list, Singh invited Ptech to demonstrate their software. It wasn't long before she began discovering the connections between Ptech and international terrorist financing. She worked exhaustively to document and uncover these links in an effort to persuade the FBI in Boston to open their own investigation into Ptech, but she was told by one agent that she was in a better position to investigate this than someone inside the FBI.[40] Despite the persistent efforts of Singh and the testimony of company insiders, the FBI did not inform any of the agencies contracting with Ptech that there were concerns about the company or its software.

In late 2002, Operation Green Quest-a Customs Department-led multi-agency investigation into terrorist financing-raided Ptech's offices due to its ties to al-Qadi and others.[41] The very same day of the raid White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer declared the company and its software safe.[42] Mainstream news articles defending Ptech after the story broke, however, blithely admit that the company was informed of the raid weeks in advance, hoping perhaps that readers will not notice that his completely defeats the purpose of such a raid or calls into question its results.[43] Eventually, Michael Chertoff led an effort to give the FBI total control over Greenquest, leading to Customs officials accusing him of sabotaging the investigation.[44] No indictments were laid in the immediate aftermath of the Ptech raid against al-Qadi or anyone else related to the company. Chertoff went on to become the head of Homeland Security.

The 9/11 Commission Report, obviously, does not mention Ptech. Given the incredible information about this company and its links to Specially Designated Global Terrorist Yassin al-Qadi, this is perhaps surprising. This startling omission becomes more ominous however, when it is understood that the 9/11 Commission co-chair, Thomas Kean, made $24 million dollars off a land deal with al-Qadi linked organization BMI.[45]

For over a decade, investigations into Ptech, its employees and its investors have been stifled, suppressed or derailed by people in key positions. But all of that finally changed this week.

A Break in the Case

On Wednesday, the Boston Field Office of the FBI unsealed a 2007 indictment of Oussama Ziade, Ptech's former CEO, and Buford George Peterson, the former CFO and COO.[46] The indictment charges that the pair knowingly lied to investigators about the extent of al-Qadi's investments and ties with Ptech. Another unsealed indictment, this one from 2005, alleges Ziade attempted to engage in transactions involving al-Qadi's property, a federal offence as al-Qadi was a Specially Designated Global Terrorist at the time. If the pair are convicted on the charges, they face 30 years in prison and a $1 million fine.

Whether this represents a significant breakthrough in the case and the beginning of the official unraveling of the Ptech story will likely depend on whether political pressure is brought to bear by an informed public who are concerned with this story. Given that the public has been whipped into cyber-hysteria over the North Korean figments of the government's imagination, it will require the media to stop parroting the government's talking points and begin informing the public about the very real, documentable links between terrorist financiers and the technological capability to override key emergency response systems on 9/11.

Two questions remain to be answered: Did the real "cyber 9/11" happen on 9/11? And will the public care enough to demand the answer to that question? If the answer to either question is 'yes,' concerned readers are advised to download the mp3 file of Episode 045 of The Corbett Report podcast, "Ptech and the 9/11 software," and begin distributing it to others to bring awareness to this incredible story.[47]

Notes

[1] http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/2009/07/behind-cyberattacks-on-america-and.html
[2] http://blog.bkis.com/?p=718
[3] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/mydoom/
[4] http://www.smh.com.au/cgi-bin/common/popupPrintArticle.pl?path=/articles/2003/04/21/1050777200225.html
[5] http://www.nationalterroralert.com/updates/2008/04/10/michael-chertoff-cyber-terror-threats-on-par-with-911/
[6] http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/04/digital_pearl_harbor_cyber_911.html
[7] http://www.infowars.net/articles/august2008/050808i911.htm
[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/us/31cyber.html?_r=1
[9] http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0602/p01s04-ussc.htm
[10] http://www.business.uiuc.edu/poteshma/research/poteshman2006.pdf
[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptech
[12] http://www.govexec.com/archdoc/rrg96/0996rrg5.htm
[13] http://www.islamicsupremecouncil.org/CMS/Topics/insideUS/1218159502002.htm
[14] http://www.boston.com/news/daily/03/ptech.htm
[15] http://www.saudia-online.com/newsoct01/news30.shtml
[16] http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a91qlimoney#a91qlimoney
[17] http://ustreas.gov/press/releases/po689.htm
[18] http://boston.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel09/bs071509.htm
[19] http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a99alqadiptech#a99alqadiptech
[20] http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a94ptechbmi#a94ptechbmi
[21] http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a99alqadiptech#a99alqadiptech
[22] http://www.boston.com/news/daily/03/ptech.htm
[23] http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/case_docs/81.pdf
[24] http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/testimony/77.pdf
[25] http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=8245
[26] http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/012705_ptech_pt2.shtml
[27] ibid.
[28] http://www.911readingroom.org/whole_document.php?article_id=278
[29] http://hcgroups.wordpress.com/2009/06/14/two-days-before-911-military-exercise-simulated-suicide-hijack-targeting-new-york/
[30] http://www.boston.com/news/packages/sept11/anniversary/wire_stories/0903_plane_exercise.htm
[31] http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/012705_ptech_pt2.shtml
[32] http://www.911blogger.com/node/19181
[33] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5233007
[34] http://www.nationalcorruptionindex.org/pages/profile.php?profile_id=6
[35] http://www.laweekly.com/2004-08-26/news/a-vulgar-betrayal
[36] http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,54070,00.html
[37] http://www.apfn.org/apfn/Wtc_whistleblower3.htm
[38] http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a0498nowork#a0498nowork
[39] http://web.archive.org/web/20021220054102/http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/primetime/DailyNews/FBI_whistleblowers021219.html
[40] http://www.911blogger.com/2005/07/indira-singh-ptech-researcher.html
[41] http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/Northeast/12/06/ptech.raid/
[42] http://www.forbes.com/2002/12/06/cx_ah_1206raid.html
[43] http://www.boston.com/news/daily/03/ptech.htm
[44] http://www.newsweek.com/id/58250/output/print
[45] http://www.insider-magazine.com/911Kean.pdf
[46] http://boston.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel09/bs071509.htm
[47] http://www.corbettreport.com/index.php?ii=88&i=Documentation

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