R7

Chuck Hagel

2007-02-02T06:54:00.000-05:00

Right Hook

Conservatives rebel against the War Party

You know the War Party is in trouble when a prominent Republican like Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska) starts criticizing their policies of endless war and repression on the home front, as in this Fox News interview. Notice how the Fox News war-bot, Chris Wallace, tries to trap him in a partisan vise:

"Let's go over some of your positions and put them up on the screen. You favor direct talks with Iran, Syria and Hamas. Three weeks ago you called for an immediate truce with Hezbollah, saying the Israeli offensive was hurting our standing in the Middle East. You've been very critical, as we've just heard, of U.S. policy in Iraq. And you have problems with NSA wiretaps and parts of the Patriot Act. When it comes to national security, are you closer to John Kerry than you are to George W. Bush?"

Wallace also tries to paint Hagel as a Ned Lamont clone, but the Senator – and, we'll bet, the voting public – isn't buying it:

"I don't base my analysis and judgment and votes on war, national security, on a party position. I don't think that's the right thing to do. I don't think Americans really want us to do that.

"Now, if you look at my record, my voting record – I've been in the Senate 10 years. Do you have any idea what my voting record is in support of the Bush administration position the last six years, the Republican Party? It's about 95 percent over 10 years. My record is about as conservative as any conservative Republican in the United States Senate. It is constantly – the American Conservative Union constantly rates me as one of the highest. So I don't apologize, Chris, to you or anyone else for my position. My conservative credentials are pretty clear."

Right on, Senator! You don't have to apologize to the neocons for your critique of their eminently anti-conservative foreign policy: after all, what could be more revolutionary, more destabilizing, more antithetical to the conservative agenda than a crusade to conquer the world? And, from what I hear, their conservative credentials aren't all that solid: how many of these guys were Trotskyites (or, at best, Scoop Jackson Democrats) only up until relatively recently?

Hagel, widely expected to launch a bid for the White House, isn't alone on the Right in opposing the neocons' war. George Will has recently excoriated the War Party for its hubris, its blindness, and for what he calls its "unrealism." The American Conservative magazine has been among the best of the antiwar periodicals, building up an intellectually substantial – and growing – base of foreign policy "realists" who oppose the neocon agenda. Pat Buchanan, a founding editor of TAC, was against the Iraq war – including Iraq War I – from the beginning.

What is interesting, however, is that the Republican base is beginning to crack. A majority believe the President has made a lot of mistakes when it comes to the war: Hagel, who has said that the White House is "completely disconnected from reality" on the question of foreign policy, senses the shifting mood of conservative voters, and is moving to position himself as the only realist in the GOP pack. It is going to be a winning position, as the war in Iraq goes from bad to worse and the prospect of war with Iran darkens the political horizon. The American people are war-weary, and not without reason: they see that the occupation of Iraq is winning us nothing but more enemies, and isn't making us any safer here at home.

Yet the War Party shows no signs of being properly chastised. In response to Will's critique, White House strategic initiatives director Peter H. Wehner declared: "Mr. Will's kind of 'stability' and 'realism' – a kind of world-weary belief that nothing can be done and so nothing should be tried – would eventually lead to death and destruction on a scale that is almost unimaginable."

What is almost unimaginable is the extent to which this administration is so completely the captive of its own hyperbolic rhetoric: to these people, there are no ordinary disasters, only "death and destruction" on a Wagnerian scale. These people have what George W. Bush called in his infamous second inaugural address "a fire in the mind," which is, in reality, a fever in the brain – a sign of profound dysfunction.

Just how unhinged the neocons have become is exemplified by their calls for yet more wars – with Iran, Syria, and god-knows-who-else, when a full 61% of the American people oppose the current war. What world are these people living in?

We are on the brink of disaster in Iraq, and the situation in Lebanon threatens, daily, to veer out of control and spark a wider war. Yet there is hope: Hagel's dissent, and the growing disharmony on the Right over the war is an indication that the War Party's support is plummeting where it counts – in the Republican heartland. Once these people desert the President, and his neoconservative confreres, it is the beginning of the end for them. On the receiving end of a strong right hook, the neocons are staggering and may yet fall. That is why we at Antiwar.com have always emphasized – even over-emphasized – opposition to our interventionist foreign policy coming from the Right side of the political spectrum. Here, listen to what Senator Hagel has to say about the link between foreign and domestic policy, and see if you don't think, as I do, that it has genuine appeal, and not just to conservatives and antiwar liberals:

"Where is the fiscal responsibility of the party I joined in '68? Where is the international engagement of the party I joined, fair, free trade, individual responsibility, not building a bigger government, but building a smaller government? I think we've lost our way."

God bless Senator Hagel, and let us hope he has the courage to take his campaign for realism in foreign policy to the American people. They are certainly ready for it: I know I am.

by Justin Raimondo

http://anti-war.com/justin/?articleid=9614

The War On Trial

2007-01-25T21:56:00.000-05:00

An Army Officer Risks Prison To Argue That Bush's War Is Illegal

It is a sad day in American jurisprudence when a soldier of conscience is court-martialed — not for lying, but for telling the truth; not for breaking a covenant with the military, but for upholding the rule of law in wartime.

The court-martial of First Lt. Ehren Watada is set for Feb. 5 in Fort Lewis, Wash. The 28-year-old soldier from Hawaii is the first commissioned officer to refuse deployment to Iraq.

He is charged with "missing movement" and "conduct unbecoming an officer" including the "use of contemptuous words for the President."

The story has received a fair amount of media attention, in part because the Pentagon is trying to force three journalists to testify against Watada (see "A Reporter Stands Up to the Army," 1/10/07).

But the soldier's story is significant on its own.

A year ago, when Watada was on leave and out of uniform, he delivered a moving address to a Veterans for Peace convention. Watada is not a conscientious objector. He even offered to serve in Afghanistan.

But he questioned the legality of the war in Iraq, and he denounced the known lies of the George W. Bush administration. He said nothing more than what the world already knows, and he did not encourage any other soldiers to follow his example.

All the major issues of the Iraq fiasco — the fraudulent basis for the war, the absence of a formal declaration from Congress (which has no constitutional authority to transfer its war-declaring power to another branch), the war crimes, the flagrant violations of international treaties such as the United Nations Charter — are coming to a head in this historic battle between a junior officer and an army whose Abu Ghraib torture scandals shocked the world.

Ordinarily, the truth of a claim is a strong defense against any charge of defamation. Not in the Army, however. Army prosecutors do not intend to allow Watada any opportunity to prove in court that everything he said about the president is true. Prosecutors told the presiding judge, Lt. Col. John Head, that the truthfulness of Watada's speech is irrelevant to the case.

THE WAR OF CHOICE

On the charge of refusing deployment, Watada's case may seem weak — he is, after all, an officer in the military, and he has failed to obey a direct order to go to Iraq. But his defense actually has legal merit: his actions are based on hard evidence about military conduct in Iraq and a clear understanding of the law.

Watada is raising matters of principle that concern the right of all soldiers to full protection of the law. Under the Constitution and the standard enlistment contract, every soldier has a right, even a duty, to disobey illegal orders. The legality of Watada's orders pursuant to a "war of choice" is the central issue of the trial.

"The war in Iraq is in fact illegal," Watada told TruthOut.org. "It is my obligation and my duty to refuse any orders to participate in this war. An order to take part in an illegal war is unlawful in itself. So my obligation is not to follow the order to go to Iraq."

No American soldier has any obligation to participate in military aggression, "crimes against peace," or any operation that violates the Geneva Conventions. Under constitutional government, the authority of military command derives not from one person alone but from the rule of law itself.

There are only two conditions in which a war is legal under international law: when force is authorized by the United Nations Security Council or when the use of force is an act of national self-defense and survival. The UN Charter, based on the Nuremberg Principles, prohibits war "as an instrument of policy." And the war in Iraq is just that — a war of choice.

There is a common tendency among lawyers and military commanders to sneer at international law. But the Constitution is unambiguous: Article VI states, "All Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby."

In a celebrated case in 1900 (United States v. Paquete Habana), the Supreme Court ruled, "International law is part of the law of the United States and must be ascertained and administered by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction as often as questions of right depending upon it are duly presented for determination."

There is no exception for the military, no wall between domestic and international law.

In his speech to the veterans Watada noted that the US Army Field Manual states, "Treaties relating to the law of war have a force equal to that of laws enacted by Congress. Their provisions must be observed by both military and civilian personnel with the same strict regard for both the letter and spirit of the law which is required with respect to the Constitution and statutes...."

THE POLITICAL QUESTION

In the end, though, none of that may matter.

The strength of Watada's legal case will make little difference if Army prosecutors succeed in preventing him from presenting evidence in his own defense in court, especially if judges adhere to the Machiavellian view that "in war, the laws are silent."

The American judiciary has a long, sorry record of ignoring the right of American soldiers to due process and the treaty clause and war-power clause in the Constitution. Too often, judges and prosecutors, both military and civilian, claim war is a political question, a foreign policy matter, something beyond judicial review. Hence, commanders can do as they please, and those who disagree can be imprisoned.

The political question doctrine, as it is known among lawyers, is the primary way by which judges circumvent international law. It is a way by which prowar judges and commanders foreclose any substantive discussion of the legalities of a war.

Few Americans remember the dark days of wartime jurisprudence four decades ago, when US courts refused to hear GI challenges to the Vietnam War. The full implications of the Watada trial can be understood in that context.

In the mid-1960s and early 1970s, American soldiers and marines were imprisoned for refusing to commit war crimes.

For example, Dr. Howard Levy, a Green Beret dermatologist, spent two years in prison after he refused to train special forces in dermatology. He argued that to do so would violate the Hippocratic Oath; the Green Berets, he insisted, used medicine as a political tactic in Vietnam, and for him to assist them would cause increased suffering.

In 1965, David Henry Mitchell II, who was eventually convicted of willful failure to report for induction, challenged the legality of Lyndon Johnson's war. He raised basic constitutional issues: the absence of a formal declaration, broken treaties, a pattern of war crimes on the battlefield. No soldier, Mitchell argued, should be forced to participate in criminal policies, to choose between near-sedition and the commission of war crimes.

Federal Judge William Timbers refused to hear the evidence. When Mitchell's attorneys argued that under the Nuremberg Principles soldiers have a duty to disassociate themselves from war crimes, the judge freaked out. It is, he said, "a sickening spectacle for a 22-year-old citizen to assert such tommyrot." The judge argued that treaties and conventions are "utterly irrelevant as a defense on the charge of willful refusal to report for induction." The message was clear, and a deadly precedent was set: even if war is manifestly illegal, soldiers are still expected to participate. United States v. Mitchell was the first in a series of infamous cases through which courts placed presidential war beyond the arm of the law.

In a 1966 ruling against Army Private Robert Luftig, Federal Judge Alexander Holtzoff ruled that the war "is obviously a political question that is outside the judicial function." With "no discussion or citation to authority," the Federal Appeals Court concurred. In the most celebrated trial of the period, that of the Fort Hood Three — soldiers who demanded the protection of the Constitution and international law — District Judge Edward Curran refused to hear any evidence of systematic war crimes. He called the war a political issue beyond judicial cognizance.

Taken together, the Vietnam War rulings contradict the landmark precedent Marbury v. Madison. In 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall captured the essence of judicial abdication: "It cannot be presumed that any clause in the Constitution is intended to be without effect.... To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing, if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?... It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."

In this case the argument is particularly clear: Watada is not taking a political position as part of his defense. The United States may be overextended; the invasion may create blowback; unilateral actions may alienate allies; war debts may boomerang on the economy; anarchy in Iraq may be unavoidable.

These are political questions, but they aren't what the first lieutenant is talking about. Watada is challenging the legality, not the political wisdom, of the war.

The president, he argues, is the final arbiter of foreign policy — but only so long as policies are carried out in accordance with the rule of law.

SAME OLD STORY

History has long since vindicated the soldiers of conscience who spoke out against the Vietnam War — soldiers who tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to uphold the Constitution and international law; soldiers who warned their beloved nation long before the My Lai massacre of America's impending descent into barbarism. How many Vietnamese lives could have been saved? How many American soldiers might be home today with their grandchildren had American judges as well as presiding military commanders confronted the legal monstrosities of the war against Vietnam?

The cost of judicial abdication in the Vietnam War years, when American judges averted their eyes from the emerging holocaust in Indochina, is incalculable. Without judicial immunity, many of the horrendous deeds of the Johnson-Nixon years might never have occurred.

There were more than a dozen opportunities for American judges to confront the constitutional issues evoked by that undeclared war. When Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who publicly acknowledged the illegality of US invasions in Indochina, offered to hear a war-challenge appeal, his colleagues on the court overruled him.

So today we ask: How many more Iraqis and Americans will die before American judges fulfill their current obligation to uphold and enforce the rule of law? How long will it be before the infamous Vietnam War rulings are reversed, before the blood-drenched political question doctrine is buried for good?

Lt. Col. Head, presiding at Watada's court-martial, is already preparing to repeat the follies of the past. At a pretrial hearing Jan. 17, he denied all defense motions to present hard evidence of systematic war crimes in Iraq. He rejected the Nuremberg defense. He also upheld a pivotal government motion "to prevent the defense from presenting any evidence on the illegality of the war." Like past accomplices, he claimed that Watada's case is a "political issue" beyond the jurisdiction of the court.

Capt. Daniel Kuecker, the prosecutor in the pretrial hearings, could not be reached for comment, but Watada's civilian attorney, Eric Seitz, expressed outrage at Head's judicial abdication. These rulings, he told the press after the hearing, "are extraordinarily broad and subjective, which I find reprehensible. They are essentially saying there is no right to criticize, which we all know is not true." He added, "These rulings are about as horrible and inept as I could have imagined.

The question can no longer be avoided. Do American soldiers have any rights that their commanders and judges are bound to respect? As civilians, do we not have an obligation to provide our troops full protection of the laws for which they risk their lives? *

Paul Rockwell, who taught constitutional law at Midwestern University in Texas, is the author, with Cindy Sheehan, of Ten Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military, published by New Press in 2006.

http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_id=2663&catid=&volume_id=254&issue_id=278&volume_num=41&issue_num=17

Foreign Policy As Nonsense

2007-01-24T10:02:00.000-05:00

Our Delusional Hedgehog

In the beginning, George W. Bush sent American forces into Iraq with no apparent thought about the sectarian tensions that could explode once Saddam Hussein was ousted. Now, nearing the end of his presidency, Bush is sending more American forces into Iraq with no apparent regard for the verdict of the American people, rendered in November's election, that they've had it with his war. And, by the evidence of all available polling, with Bush himself.

The decline in Bush's support to Watergate-era Nixonian depths since he announced that his new Iraq policy was his old Iraq policy, only more so, stems, I suspect, from three conclusions that the public has reached about the president and his war. The first, simply, is that the war is no longer winnable and, worse, barely comprehensible since it has evolved into a Sunni-Shiite conflict. The second is that Bush, in all matters pertaining to his war, is a one-trick president who keeps doing the same thing over and over, never mind that it hasn't worked. In Isaiah Berlin's typology of leaders, Bush isn't merely a hedgehog who knows one thing rather than many things. He's a delusional hedgehog who knows one thing that isn't so.

The third, and politically most dangerous, conclusion is that Bush appears genuinely indifferent to the electoral judgment of the American people, who seem to believe that they are, in some vague sense, sovereign, at least on Election Day. The Post-ABC News poll released Monday, in which Bush's approval rating had sunk to a record-low 33 percent, also showed a corollary decline in the public's assessment of Bush's personal attributes. The two questions about Bush's personal qualities on which he polled the lowest, and that most closely mirrored his overall approval rating, concerned his willingness "to listen to different points of view" (36 percent) and his understanding of "the problems of people like you" (32 percent). Turns out that if you blow off the clear mandate of a national election, people actually notice.

In the war itself, meanwhile, our current policy has achieved new depths of senselessness. The administration is lining up support from our longtime Sunni allies in the region -- Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt in particular -- as a buffer against the spreading influence of Shiite Iran within Iraq and across the Middle East. Inside Iraq, meanwhile, we have cast our lot with the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a sectarian Shiite with long-standing ties to Iran, and hedged our bet by cultivating the support of another Shiite leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who is even closer to Iran.

Hakim heads the Iranian-backed Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). His deputy, Adel Abdul Mahdi, was in the running to become prime minister until the head of SCIRI's rival Shiite party, Moqtada al-Sadr, threw his support to Maliki. According to a New York Times report on Sunday, some administration officials are discussing quietly shifting our backing to Hakim's party. Others oppose this, pointing out that the raid in which U.S. forces seized Iranian operatives in Baghdad last month took place within Hakim's own compound.

More broadly, our plan for stability in Iraq is to bolster whichever Shiite administration governs the country, no matter its closeness to Iran, in the groundless hope that it will establish nonsectarian order. Our plan for stability in the region is to enlist Sunni states to contain Iran. These plans cancel each other out.

This isn't an example of Kissingerian subtlety -- waging the Cold War, for instance, by tilting toward China over the Soviet Union. This is an example of world-class incoherence, entirely of our own making. We charged into Iraq with some dim sense that Hussein's successor government would be headed by representatives of the long-persecuted Shiite majority, but we assumed that comity would prevail between the Shiites and the displaced Sunnis. Then we rendered that dicey proposition all but impossible by sacking the Iraqi army and most of the civil service -- in effect, plunging the Sunni population into mass unemployment with no prospect of reemployment. We fed the Sunni resistance, which fed the Shiite retaliation.

Now, we are stuck backing an Iran-friendly Shiite sectarian regime in Iraq, even as we plan to spend hundreds of millions in aid to the Lebanese army to fend off the Shiite sectarian forces of Hezbollah, and even as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice scuttles from one Sunni state to the next in an attempt to build a firewall around Iran. This is foreign policy as nonsense, as the American people have apparently figured out.

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, January 24, 2007; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/23/AR2007012301563.html?referrer=email

George Bush Is No Napoleon Bonaparte

2007-01-11T20:52:00.000-05:00

For their relevance this morning, the words of the conservative politician Pat Buchanan deserve to be written in marble:

"We will soon launch an imperial war on Iraq with all the 'On to Berlin' bravado with which French poilus and British tommies marched in August 1914. But this invasion will not be the cakewalk neoconservatives predict ... For a militant Islam that holds in thrall scores of millions of true believers will never accept George Bush dictating the destiny of the Islamic world ...

"The one endeavour at which Islamic peoples excel is expelling imperial powers by terror and guerrilla war. They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon... We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before."

Bush's New Strategy - The March of Folly

So into the graveyard of Iraq, George Bush, commander-in-chief, is to send another 21,000 of his soldiers. The march of folly is to continue...

There will be timetables, deadlines, benchmarks, goals for both America and its Iraqi satraps. But the war against terror can still be won. We shall prevail. Victory or death. And it shall be death.

President Bush's announcement early this morning tolled every bell. A billion dollars of extra aid for Iraq, a diary of future success as the Shia powers of Iraq still to be referred to as the "democratically elected government" march in lockstep with America's best men and women to restore order and strike fear into the hearts of al-Qa'ida. It will take time oh, yes, it will take years, at least three in the words of Washington's top commander in the field, General Raymond Odierno this week but the mission will be accomplished.

Mission accomplished. Wasn't that the refrain almost four years ago, on that lonely aircraft carrier off California, Bush striding the deck in his flying suit? And only a few months later, the President had a message for Osama bin Laden and the insurgents of Iraq. "Bring 'em on!" he shouted. And on they came. Few paid attention late last year when the Islamist leadership of this most ferocious of Arab rebellions proclaimed Bush a war criminal but asked him not to withdraw his troops. "We haven't yet killed enough of them," their videotaped statement announced.

Well, they will have their chance now. How ironic that it was the ghastly Saddam, dignified amid his lynch mob, who dared on the scaffold to tell the truth which Bush and Blair would not utter: that Iraq has become "hell" .

It is de rigueur, these days, to recall Vietnam, the false victories, the body counts, the torture and the murders but history is littered with powerful men who thought they could batter their way to victory against the odds. Napoleon comes to mind; not the emperor who retreated from Moscow, but the man who believed the wild guerrilleros of French-occupied Spain could be liquidated. He tortured them, he executed them, he propped up a local Spanish administration of what we would now call Quislings, al-Malikis to a man. He rightly accused his enemies Moore and Wellington of supporting the insurgents. And when faced with defeat, Napoleon took the personal decision "to relaunch the machine" and advanced to recapture Madrid, just as Bush intends to recapture Baghdad. Of course, it ended in disaster. And George Bush is no Napoleon Bonaparte.

No, I would turn to another, less flamboyant, far more modern politician for prophecy, an American who understood, just before the 2003 launch of Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq, what would happen to the arrogance of power. For their relevance this morning, the words of the conservative politician Pat Buchanan deserve to be written in marble:

"We will soon launch an imperial war on Iraq with all the 'On to Berlin' bravado with which French poilus and British tommies marched in August 1914. But this invasion will not be the cakewalk neoconservatives predict ... For a militant Islam that holds in thrall scores of millions of true believers will never accept George Bush dictating the destiny of the Islamic world ...

"The one endeavour at which Islamic peoples excel is expelling imperial powers by terror and guerrilla war. They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon... We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before."

But George Bush dare not see these armies of the past, their ghosts as palpable as the phantoms of the 3,000 Americans let us forget the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis already done to death in this obscene war, and those future spirits of the dead still living amid the 20,000 men and women whom Bush is now sending to Iraq. In Baghdad, they will move into both Sunni and Shia "insurgent strongholds" as opposed to just the Sunni variety which they vainly invested in the autumn because this time, and again I quote General Odierno, it is crucial the security plan be " evenhanded". This time, he said, "we have to have a believable approach, of going after Sunni and Shia extremists".

But a "believable approach" is what Bush does not have. The days of even-handed oppression disappeared in the aftermath of invasion.

"Democracy" should have been introduced at the start not delayed until the Shias threatened to join the insurgency if Paul Bremer, America's second proconsul, did not hold elections just as the American military should have prevented the anarchy of April 2003. The killing of 14 Sunni civilians by US paratroopers at Fallujah that spring set the seal on the insurgency. Yes, Syria and Iran could help George Bush. But Tehran was part of his toytown "Axis of Evil", Damascus a mere satellite. They were to be future prey, once Project Iraq proved successful. Then there came the shame of our torture, our murders, the mass ethnic cleansing in the land we said we had liberated.

And so more US troops must die, sacrificed for those who have already died. We cannot betray those who have been killed. It is a lie, of course. Every desperate man keeps gambling, preferably with other men's lives.

But the Bushes and Blairs have experienced war through television and Hollywood; this is both their illusion and their shield.

By Robert Fisk
01/11/07 "The Independent"

more at: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2144057.ece

Hurricane Carter

2007-01-07T00:41:00.000-05:00

Former President Jimmy Carter's new book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, provoked an uproar even before its publication. The reason for the controversy was the book's title more than its content, for it seemed to suggest that the avatar of democracy in the Middle East may be on its way to creating a political order that resembles South Africa's apartheid model of discrimination and repression, albeit on ethnic-religious rather than racial grounds.

Since the appearance of the book coincided with the recent Congressional elections, leaders of the Democratic Party went into near panic and fell over one another disassociating themselves from Carter's book and his criticisms of certain Israeli policies. Indeed, the panic was so intense that so independent-minded a man as Howard Dean, chair of the party, who in the past has had the courage to challenge the conventional wisdom of the party's establishment on a whole range of issues, joined the herd as well.

None of this, of course, is in the least surprising. In the face of overwhelming international criticism of President Bush for his failure to engage in the Middle East peace process and for his unbalanced support of Israel, the Democratic Party's Congressional leadership has managed to criticize Bush for being too soft on the Palestinians and not sufficiently supportive of Israel. So the criticism of President Carter is noteworthy only for what it reveals about the ignorance of the American political establishment, both Democrat and Republican, on the subject of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

I would challenge the incoming Democratic chair of the House International Relations Committee, Tom Lantos (not to mention the outgoing chair, Henry Hyde), to identify the author of the following comment, made at the time when Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was about to bring Rehavam Ze'evi, head of Israel's Moledet Party, into his Cabinet. Ze'evi and his party were advocates of "transfer," a euphemism for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank and in other parts of "Greater Israel":

The transfer party's joining the government is a profound political, moral and social stain, a dangerous infection penetrating [Israel's] government. Anyone who includes the transfer [party] among the Zionist parties of the coalition is in effect confirming the UN Resolution that says Zionism is racism.

Had an American made such a statement, he would unquestionably have been accused of hostility to the State of Israel, if not anti-Semitism. If the person had been Jewish, he would have been branded a self-hating Jew.

In fact, the author of this statement was Benny Begin, the right-wing son of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, a Likud "prince" who relentlessly attacked the Labor Party for recognizing the PLO, which he insisted, even after Oslo, was nothing more than a terrorist organization. And the man who was described at the time in the Jerusalem Post as "the most vociferous among the cabinet ministers opposing the appointment, saying it was inconceivable that a man with Ze'evi's ideology should serve as a minister," was none other than Ehud Olmert, another Likud prince.

When Olmert, as deputy prime minister in Ariel Sharon's government, proposed that Israel withdraw unilaterally from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, his justification was that given Palestinian demographics, a continuation of the occupation would sooner or later turn Israeli Jews into a minority. He warned that the Jewish State would then find itself under attack from American Jewish organizations that boycotted South Africa's apartheid regime.

Several months ago, the same Olmert who worried publicly about the stigma of apartheid appointed Avigdor Lieberman, a man of racist and antidemocratic convictions, as his deputy prime minister. Lieberman, who heads a right-wing party of mostly Russian immigrants, Yisrael Beiteinu, holds political views that would have made Rehavam Ze'evi sound like a charter member of the ACLU. Neither Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of France's anti-immigrant National Front, nor Austria's neofascist Jörg Haider (whose role in forming an Austrian government provoked international outrage that led to a diplomatic boycott), has called for measures as outrageous as Lieberman. Lieberman advocates not only the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from the occupied territories but getting rid of Arabs who are Israeli citizens. He has urged that Arab members of Israel's Knesset be executed for having contacts with Hamas or for failing to celebrate Israel's Independence Day.

Lieberman was also appointed by Olmert as the minister in charge of responding to "strategic threats" to Israel. If Israel does indeed face an existential threat from Iran--and listening to Iran's Ahmadinejad's rantings at an obscene event he orchestrated in Tehran for Holocaust deniers, it is difficult not to take the threat seriously--it is hard to imagine a more effective way of trivializing that threat than with the appointment of Lieberman. Indeed, the decision is so reckless as to suggest it is Olmert and his government--including his Labor Party partners, who overwhelmingly approved Lieberman's appointment--who pose the existential threat to their country.

The appointment also raises the question of how a government whose deputy prime minister is a man who does not recognize the right of Palestinians to even one square inch of territory in Palestine can impose draconian sanctions on a Hamas government that will not recognize Israel's legitimacy. Talk about double standards!

Not the least of the ironies of the controversy generated by Carter's book, or by its title, is that on any day of the week, there appear in virtually all major Israeli newspapers and in its other media far more extreme criticisms of the policies of various Israeli governments than one finds anywhere in the United States. Most of Israel's adversarial editorializing would not be accepted in the op-ed pages of America's leading newspapers.

It is also worth noting how uninformed Democratic and Republican mavens are even about the voting patterns of American Jews. The panic aroused by Carter's book title was based on the belief of these mavens that American Jews share the hard-line right-wing views of organizations like the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and AIPAC, organizations that would go out of business if Israelis elected a government committed to a political solution rather than a military one. Indeed, when former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin came into office in 1992 and concluded that Israel's security would be far better served by a peace agreement that recognizes Palestinian rights than by beating the Palestinians into submission, both the Conference of Presidents and AIPAC went into institutional eclipse, from which they did not emerge until Benjamin Netanyahu came to power in 1996.

The uncritical pro-Israel advocacy of these organizations has never been an accurate barometer of the political thinking or behavior of American Jews. Surely there is something Republican and Democratic leaders can learn from the fact that after six years of the presidency of the man believed by Israelis and by the pro-Israel lobby in the United States to be "the best American president Israel ever had," 87 percent of American Jews voted for the Democratic Party, whose chair is seen by the pro-Israel lobby as untrustworthy at best.

To be sure, the overwhelming majority of American Jews care deeply about Israel's security and well-being. But that concern does not translate for most of them into mindless support for the policies of Israeli governments that seem to undermine Israel's security. Most American Jews understand how recklessly both Democratic and Republican politicians manipulate the Israel-Palestine issue to their own advantage, just as most Israelis understand the same about many of their own politicians.

Carter's book recapitulates the crucial role he played as convener of the Camp David summit meeting in 1978, which resulted in the landmark peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. His description of the two fascinating protagonists, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, makes for compelling reading no matter how familiar the story's general outline.

When President Sadat met Carter at the White House not long after Carter assumed the presidency in 1977, Carter was surprised by how "well developed" Sadat's determination to work with him on peace negotiations with Israel already was. Even more surprising was a letter Carter received from Sadat following this meeting, in which he urged that the President not do anything that would interfere with Sadat's determination to negotiate directly with the Israelis--in dramatic contrast to Sadat's fellow Arab leaders, for whom any contact with Israel, however indirect, was anathema.

Equally surprising was Carter's impression of Begin when the two first met in Washington. He found Begin to be a man of far less rigid views than widely believed to be the case, and open to the ideas Carter had discussed with Sadat.

The optimism sparked by these initial encounters, which were dramatically reinforced by Sadat's precedent-shattering visit to Jerusalem--a display of extraordinary political courage for which Sadat was soon to pay with his life--was seriously undermined by his deep disillusionment with Begin's return visit to Egypt, at which time Begin insisted that Israeli settlements remain in the Sinai. Sadat saw his conversations with Begin as a fatal setback to his peace initiative and planned to publicly condemn Begin as a betrayer of the peace process in a speech he had scheduled to deliver in the United States. He was persuaded to drop that idea only after intense efforts by Carter. The Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty was intended to bring about not only an end to the conflict between Israel and Egypt but a process that would grant autonomy--or "full autonomy," a term Begin oddly insisted on--to Palestinians, something the treaty did not deliver.

Under the terms of the Camp David agreement, Israel and the Egyptians established a joint committee to implement the treaty's provisions that dealt with Palestinian national rights and the creation of a self-governing Palestinian authority. Both Moshe Dayan and Ezer Weizman represented Israel on this committee, and both resigned when they realized that Begin was not serious about implementing those provisions. Begin replaced them with a more trustworthy member of his Cabinet, Dr. Joseph Burg, a venerable leader of the Mizrahi, the religious Zionist organization (and father of Abraham Burg, a former head of the Jewish Agency and Speaker of the Knesset).

The older Burg was a close friend of my family, and I often visited him when I was in Israel. I once saw him while he served on this joint Egyptian-Israeli committee and asked him what progress was being made. Burg, who was a marvelous raconteur, answered with a story. There is an old Jewish tale about a prince who asked a poor and simple Jew in the Pale of Settlement to teach his dog to speak and threatened to expel the Jews who lived within his princely domain if this Jew failed to do so within a year. When the Jew came home with the prince's dog and explained to his startled wife what had happened, she became hysterical. Her husband calmed her by saying that he had an entire year before the prince returned, and that by then "either the prince will die or the dog will die."

I told Burg I knew the story. "Then let me tell you the sequel," Burg said, which he had obviously made up himself. The prince returned a year later and summoned the Jew, who showed up without the dog. The prince angrily demanded that the Jew produce the dog immediately, but the Jew pleaded with the prince to allow him to explain the situation. He assured the prince that the dog had indeed learned to speak, but that once he did, the dog began telling embarrassing stories. "What kind of stories?" asked the alarmed prince. "Stories about where you regularly took him at night when you told your wife you were taking the dog for a long walk." The prince went into a panic and ordered the Jew to produce the dog immediately so that he could shoot him. "Don't worry," said the Jew. "I already did it for you, dear prince."

That, said Burg, is what has happened with the Israeli-Egyptian talks on Palestinian autonomy. We shot the dog.

Carter places the blame for Israel's failure to implement the provisions of the Camp David agreement for "full Palestinian autonomy" squarely on Begin because of his violation of a promise to freeze further settlement activity. Carter blames himself for not having obtained Begin's promise in writing, and sees that as "the most serious omission of the Camp David talks." In Carter's view, Begin saw the peace treaty with Egypt as providing him "renewed freedom to pursue the goals of a fervent and dedicated minority of [Israel's] citizens to confiscate, settle and fortify the occupied territories."

The destructive impact of Israel's continued confiscation of Palestinian land for its ever-expanding settlements on all subsequent efforts to end this conflict, and of the draconian regime imposed by Israel's army on the occupied territories--which today include well over 500 Israeli military checkpoints and hundreds of other physical obstacles that have utterly shattered Palestinian life--is the thread that runs through the various chapters in Carter's book, in which he reviews the Oslo agreement, the Camp David summit in 2000 and Clinton's peace proposals, the road map, the Geneva Accord of 2003 and Sharon's unilateral disengagement from Gaza, as well as the legislative elections won by Hamas, the war in Lebanon and the deteriorating situation in Gaza.

The recent cease-fire announced by Mahmoud Abbas and Ehud Olmert, and the conciliatory tone--if not the unremarkable content--of Olmert's latest speech in Sde Boker, led some to believe that a breakthrough in the long-stalled peace process was imminent. But these hopes were quickly dashed by Olmert's rejection of the Iraq Study Group's recommendation that President Bush re-engage vigorously in the Israel-Palestine peace process, not only to put an end to one of the world's longest-lasting conflicts but also because an Israeli-Palestinian agreement could significantly improve America's standing in the region and the ability of friendly Arab states to assist it in extricating itself from the Iraqi quagmire.

That a serious engagement in peacemaking by an American President who has been embarrassingly one-sided in his support of Israel's government would so frighten Olmert and his Cabinet tells us all we need to know about the sincerity of his search for a Palestinian peace partner. The avoidance of a bilateral process in order to set Israel's boundaries unilaterally has been the strategic objective of both Sharon's Likud government and now of Olmert's Kadima-Labor coalition government. It is a strategic goal that apparently remains unchanged despite Olmert's repeated promises to meet with Mahmoud Abbas, a meeting for which he had not been able to clear his calendar for almost a year. That meeting has finally taken place. Not surprisingly, Olmert used it to announce some limited humanitarian gestures and financial assistance to help strengthen Abbas's security forces in their confrontation with Hamas's forces. Olmert's own foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, noted dryly that these gestures (none of which have been implemented as of this writing) did nothing to bring a peace process any closer.

Indeed, whatever little good Olmert's gestures might have done was undone within forty-eight hours of the meeting, when Israel's government announced it had authorized the establishment of a new settlement in the Jordan Valley, well outside the so-called security fence it is building. And if that were not enough to discredit Abbas and vindicate Hamas, it was also revealed that various Israeli governmental ministries secretly collaborated in the construction of permanent new housing in illegal outposts that Olmert (and previously Sharon) had promised the United States would be dismantled.

Carter's harsh condemnation of Israeli policies in the occupied territories is not the consequence of ideology or of an anti-Israel bias. He expresses deep admiration for the Israeli people and their remarkable achievements and empathy for the suffering they have endured as a result of Palestinian suicide bombings, and warns Palestinians that terrorism is discrediting their national cause. Carter repeatedly cites three conditions that he believes are necessary for a resumption of the peace process and a resolution of the conflict, of which the first is guarantees for Israel's security, the second a complete end to Palestinian violence and terrorism, and the third recognition by Israel of the Palestinian right to statehood within pre-1967 borders.

But Carter is equally empathetic to the suffering of the Palestinian people under occupation, which he has seen firsthand during his many visits there. For most Westerners, including most Israelis, the Palestinian ordeal is invisible and might as well be taking place on the far side of the moon for all they know or seem to care about it.

Accusations by Alan Dershowitz and others that Carter is indifferent to Israel's security only prove that no good deed goes unpunished. Arguably, the single most important contribution to Israel's security by far was the removal of Egypt--possessing the most powerful of the military forces in the Arab world--from the Arab axis that was intent on the destruction of the State of Israel in its early years. Egypt's peace agreement with Israel permanently removed the possibility of such a combined Arab assault against the Jewish State, something for which the late Syrian president Hafez Assad could not get himself to forgive Sadat, even after he was assassinated.

Assad's bitterness over Sadat's "betrayal" was a major theme of a four-hour meeting I had with him in 1994. He cited it as the reason he would not meet with Rabin or engage in other confidence-building measures that would help dispose Israelis to support the return of the Golan Heights, something I had urged him to do. He insisted that any concessions before an agreement is fully signed would be seen by the Syrian people as a repeat of Sadat's betrayal.

Carter's book provides an important reminder that the Camp David agreement not only created a durable peace between Egypt and Israel but served as a model for all of the major Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives that were to follow. Oslo's concepts of a self-governing Palestinian Authority, of a five-year process that concludes with agreements on permanent-status issues, of negotiations on such issues that begin no later than in the third year of the agreement and of an armed Palestinian police force to maintain order are all spelled out in the Camp David agreement. And the outline of what an Israeli-Palestinian settlement would have to look like if an agreement is to be reached is also adumbrated in the Camp David accords of 1978, which included Begin's acceptance of Egypt's insistence on the return of all Egyptian territory held by Israel. The magnitude of that accomplishment places the pettiness of the critics of President Carter and his latest book in proper perspective.

by Henry Siegman
The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070122/siegman

Chirac Slams Iraq War as Boost to Terrorism

2007-01-06T00:53:00.000-05:00

French President Jacques Chirac has unleashed a torrent of criticism against the US-led war in Iraq, saying the conflict, which he fiercely opposed, had boosted the spread of terrorism.

In a wide-ranging New Year's foreign policy speech Friday, Chirac fired a broadside at what he called Washington's "adventure" in the Middle Eastern country, torn by sectarian strife almost four years after the invasion.

"As France had foreseen and feared, the war in Iraq has sparked upheavals that have yet to show their full effects," Chirac told the French diplomatic corps gathered in Paris.

He said the conflict, which the United States still describes as part of the "war on terror" it launched in 2001 following the September 11 attacks, had "offered terrorism a new field for expansion."
Chirac said it had "exacerbated the divisions between communities and threatened the very integrity of Iraq". "It undermined the stability of the entire region, where every country now fears for its security and its independence."

As US President George W. Bush prepares next week to announce a major overhaul in Washington's military strategy in Iraq, Chirac said "the priority, more than ever, is to restore full sovereignty to the Iraqi people."

Although Chirac, at 74, is thought deeply unlikely to stand for a third term in France's presidential elections in April, he has delivered a string of combative New Year's speeches to defend his 12-year legacy and fight off suggestions he is a "lame-duck" president.

The French leader attacked the "pitfalls of unilateralism" in foreign affairs -- a scarcely veiled reference to Washington's decision to launch the Iraq war without United Nations backing.

Chirac said France looked forward to the emergence of a "multipolar" world, as China, India and Brazil take on "the status of global powers", with influence shared between the the old and new giants.

He predicted their "rise will mark the end of the centuries long, undivided Western domination of the world", and hopefully address the "persistence of extreme poverty in a world growing ever richer" -- "a moral scandal as much as an economic absurdity and a major political threat."

Speaking of the broader tensions gripping the Middle East, Chirac made a fresh appeal to Tehran in the standoff over its nuclear programme.

Iran "is feeding the world's apprehension through its proliferation activities and the unacceptable and provocative statements of some of its leaders."

"It is up to it to restore trust through a sovereign gesture," he said, urging Iran to suspend uranium enrichment-related activities and resume talks with the international community.

The UN Security Council voted unanimously on December 23 to impose sanctions on Iran for its refusal to suspend activites which it fears are a cover for nuclear weapons development.

Chirac also renewed a call for an international conference on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, that would "provide the security guarantees sought by both parties, without dictating the terms of a settlement."

"What still lacks is trust. It is up to the international community to kickstart the process that will allow the restoration of trust."

The French president -- who spoke Thursday with Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora to organise details of a January 25 Paris aid conference for the war-wracked country -- appealed to the Lebanese people to rally behind the premier and "build their future regardless of outside interference".

Siniora's authority is contested by the Lebanese opposition loyal to Syria, which was the powerbroker in its smaller neighbour for decades until its troops left the country in 2005.

http://www.afp.com/english/home/

For America's Sake

2007-01-06T00:27:00.000-05:00

The following is an adaptation of remarks made by Bill Moyers to a December 12 gathering in New York sponsored by The Nation, Demos, the Brennan Center for Justice and the New Democracy Project. --The Editors

You could not have chosen a better time to gather. Voters have provided a respite from a right-wing radicalism predicated on the philosophy that extremism in the pursuit of virtue is no vice. It seems only yesterday that the Trojan horse of conservatism was hauled into Washington to disgorge Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist and their hearty band of ravenous predators masquerading as a political party of small government, fiscal restraint and moral piety and promising "to restore accountability to Congress...[and] make us all proud again of the way free people govern themselves."

Well, the long night of the junta is over, and Democrats are ebullient as they prepare to take charge of the multitrillion-dollar influence racket that we used to call the US Congress. Let them rejoice while they can, as long as they remember that while they ran some good campaigns, they have arrived at this moment mainly because George W. Bush lost a war most people have come to believe should never have been fought in the first place. Let them remember, too, in this interim of sweet anticipation, that although they are reveling in the ruins of a Republican reign brought down by stupendous scandals, their own closet is stocked with skeletons from an era when they were routed from office following Abscam bribes and savings and loan swindles that plucked the pockets and purses of hard-working, tax-paying Americans.

As they rejoice, Democrats would be wise to be mindful of Shakespeare's counsel, "'Tis more by fortune...than by merit." For they were delivered from the wilderness not by their own goodness and purity but by the grace of K Street corruption, DeLay Inc.'s duplicity, the pitiless exploitation of Terri Schiavo, the disgrace of Mark Foley and a shameful partisan cover-up, the shamelessness of Jack Abramoff and a partisan conspiracy, and neocon arrogance and amorality (yes, amoral: Apparently there is no end to the number of bodies Bill Kristol and Richard Perle are prepared to watch pile up on behalf of illusions that can't stand the test of reality even one Beltway block from the think tanks where they are hatched). The Democrats couldn't have been more favored by the gods if they had actually believed in one!

But whatever one might say about the election, the real story is one that our political and media elites are loath to acknowledge or address. I am not speaking of the lengthy list of priorities that progressives and liberals of every stripe are eager to put on the table now that Democrats hold the cards in Congress. Just the other day a message popped up on my computer from a progressive advocate whose work I greatly admire. Committed to movement-building from the ground up, he has results to show for his labors. His request was simple: "With changes in Congress and at our state capitol, we want your input on what top issues our lawmakers should tackle. Click here to submit your top priority."

I clicked. Sure enough, up came a list of thirty-four issues--an impressive list that began with "African-American" and ran alphabetically through "energy" and "higher education" to "guns," "transportation," "women's issues" and "workers' rights." It wasn't a list to be dismissed, by any means, for it came from an unrequited thirst for action after a long season of malignant opposition to every item on the agenda. I understand the mindset. Here's a fellow who values allies and appreciates what it takes to build coalitions; who knows that although our interests as citizens vary, each one is an artery to the heart that pumps life through the body politic, and each is important to the health of democracy. This is an activist who knows political success is the sum of many parts.

But America needs something more right now than a "must-do" list from liberals and progressives. America needs a different story. The very morning I read the message from the progressive activist, the New York Times reported on Carol Ann Reyes. Carol Ann Reyes is 63. She lives in Los Angeles, suffers from dementia and is homeless. Somehow she made her way to a hospital with serious, untreated needs. No details were provided as to what happened to her there, except that the hospital--which is part of Kaiser Permanente, the largest HMO in the country--called a cab and sent her back to skid row. True, they phoned ahead to workers at a rescue shelter to let them know she was coming. But some hours later a surveillance camera picked her up "wandering around the streets in a hospital gown and slippers." Dumped in America.

Here is the real political story, the one most politicians won't even acknowledge: the reality of the anonymous, disquieting daily struggle of ordinary people, including the most marginalized and vulnerable Americans but also young workers and elders and parents, families and communities, searching for dignity and fairness against long odds in a cruel market world.

Everywhere you turn you'll find people who believe they have been written out of the story. Everywhere you turn there's a sense of insecurity grounded in a gnawing fear that freedom in America has come to mean the freedom of the rich to get richer even as millions of Americans are dumped from the Dream. So let me say what I think up front: The leaders and thinkers and activists who honestly tell that story and speak passionately of the moral and religious values it puts in play will be the first political generation since the New Deal to win power back for the people.

There's no mistaking that America is ready for change. One of our leading analysts of public opinion, Daniel Yankelovich, reports that a majority want social cohesion and common ground based on pragmatism and compromise, patriotism and diversity. But because of the great disparities in wealth, the "shining city on the hill" has become a gated community whose privileged occupants, surrounded by a moat of money and protected by a political system seduced with cash into subservience, are removed from the common life of the country. The wreckage of this abdication by elites is all around us.

Corporations are shredding the social compact, pensions are disappearing, median incomes are flattening and healthcare costs are soaring. In many ways, the average household is generally worse off today than it was thirty years ago, and the public sector that was a support system and safety net for millions of Americans across three generations is in tatters. For a time, stagnating wages were somewhat offset by more work and more personal debt. Both political parties craftily refashioned those major renovations of the average household as the new standard, shielding employers from responsibility for anything Wall Street didn't care about. Now, however, the more acute major risks workers have been forced to bear as employers reduce their health and retirement costs--on orders from Wall Street--have made it clear that our fortunes are being reversed. Polls show that a majority of US workers now believe their children will be worse off than they are. In one recent survey, only 14 percent of workers said that they have obtained the American Dream.

It is hard to believe that less than four decades ago a key architect of the antipoverty program, Robert Lampman, could argue that the "recent history of Western nations reveals an increasingly widespread adoption of the idea that substantial equality of social and economic conditions among individuals is a good thing." Economists call that postwar era "the Great Compression." Poverty and inequality had declined dramatically for the first time in our history. Here, as Paul Krugman recently recounted, is how Time's report on the national outlook in 1953 summed it up: "Even in the smallest towns and most isolated areas, the U.S. is wearing a very prosperous, middle-class suit of clothes, and an attitude of relaxation and confidence. People are not growing wealthy, but more of them than ever before are getting along." African-Americans were still written out of the story, but that was changing, too, as heroic resistance emerged across the South to awaken our national conscience. Within a decade, thanks to the civil rights movement and President Johnson, the racial cast of federal policy--including some New Deal programs--was aggressively repudiated, and shared prosperity began to breach the color line.

To this day I remember John F. Kennedy's landmark speech at the Yale commencement in 1962. Echoing Daniel Bell's cold war classic The End of Ideology, JFK proclaimed the triumph of "practical management of a modern economy" over the "grand warfare of rival ideologies." The problem with this--and still a major problem today--is that the purported ideological cease-fire ended only a few years later. But the Democrats never re-armed, and they kept pinning all their hopes on economic growth, which by its very nature is valueless and cannot alone provide answers to social and moral questions that arise in the face of resurgent crisis. While "practical management of a modern economy" had a kind of surrogate legitimacy as long as it worked, when it no longer worked, the nation faced a paralyzing moral void in deciding how the burdens should be borne. Well-organized conservative forces, firing on all ideological pistons, rushed to fill this void with a story corporate America wanted us to hear. Inspired by bumper-sticker abstractions of Milton Friedman's ideas, propelled by cascades of cash from corporate chieftans like Coors and Koch and "Neutron" Jack Welch, fortified by the pious prescriptions of fundamentalist political preachers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the conservative armies marched on Washington. And they succeeded brilliantly.

When Ronald Reagan addressed the Republican National Convention in 1980, he a told a simple story, one that had great impact. "The major issue of this campaign is the direct political, personal and moral responsibility of Democratic Party leadership--in the White House and in Congress--for this unprecedented calamity which has befallen us." He declared, "I will not stand by and watch this great country destroy itself." It was a speech of bold contrasts, of good private interest versus bad government, of course. More important, it personified these two forces in a larger narrative of freedom, reaching back across the Great Depression, the Civil War and the American Revolution, all the way back to the Mayflower Compact. It so dazzled and demoralized Democrats they could not muster a response to the moral abandonment and social costs that came with the Reagan revolution.

We too have a story of freedom to tell, and it too reaches back across the Great Depression, the Civil War and the American Revolution, all the way back to the Mayflower Compact. It's a story with clear and certain foundations, like Reagan's, but also a tumultuous and sometimes violent history of betrayal that he and other conservatives consistently and conveniently ignore.

Reagan's story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control--a Jeffersonian ideal at the root of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and the license to buy the political system right out from under everyone else, so that democracy no longer has the ability to hold capitalism accountable for the good of the whole.

And that is not how freedom was understood when our country was founded. At the heart of our experience as a nation is the proposition that each one of us has a right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." As flawed in its reach as it was brilliant in its inspiration for times to come, that proposition carries an inherent imperative: "inasmuch as the members of a liberal society have a right to basic requirements of human development such as education and a minimum standard of security, they have obligations to each other, mutually and through their government, to ensure that conditions exist enabling every person to have the opportunity for success in life."

The quote comes directly from Paul Starr, one of our most formidable public thinkers, whose forthcoming book, Freedom's Power: The True Force of Liberalism, is a profound and stirring call for liberals to reclaim the idea of America's greatness as their own. Starr's book is one of three new books that in a just world would be on every desk in the House and Senate when Congress convenes again.

John Schwarz, in Freedom Reclaimed: Rediscovering the American Vision, rescues the idea of freedom from market cultists whose "particular idea of freedom...has taken us down a terribly mistaken road" toward a political order where "government ends up servicing the powerful and taking from everyone else." The free-market view "cannot provide us with a philosophy we find compelling or meaningful," Schwarz writes. Nor does it assure the availability of economic opportunity "that is truly adequate to each individual and the status of full legal as well as political equality." Yet since the late nineteenth century it has been used to shield private power from democratic accountability, in no small part because conservative rhetoric has succeeded in denigrating government even as conservative politicians plunder it.

But government, Schwarz reminds us, "is not simply the way we express ourselves collectively but also often the only way we preserve our freedom from private power and its incursions." That is one reason the notion that every person has a right to meaningful opportunity "has assumed the position of a moral bottom line in the nation's popular culture ever since the beginning." Freedom, he says, is "considerably more than a private value." It is essentially a social idea, which explains why the worship of the free market "fails as a compelling idea in terms of the moral reasoning of freedom itself." Let's get back to basics, is Schwarz's message. Let's recapture our story.

Norton Garfinkle picks up on both Schwarz and Starr in The American Dream vs. the Gospel of Wealth, as he describes how America became the first nation on earth to offer an economic vision of opportunity for even the humblest beginner to advance, and then moved, in fits and starts--but always irrepressibly--to the invocation of positive government as the means to further that vision through politics. No one understood this more clearly, Garfinkle writes, than Abraham Lincoln, who called on the federal government to save the Union. He turned to large government expenditures for internal improvements--canals, bridges and railroads. He supported a strong national bank to stabilize the currency. He provided the first major federal funding for education, with the creation of land grant colleges. And he kept close to his heart an abiding concern for the fate of ordinary people, especially the ordinary worker but also the widow and orphan. Our greatest President kept his eye on the sparrow. He believed government should be not just "of the people" and "by the people" but "for the people." Including, we can imagine, Carol Ann Reyes.

The great leaders of our tradition--Jefferson, Lincoln and the two Roosevelts--understood the power of our story. In my time it was FDR, who exposed the false freedom of the aristocratic narrative. He made the simple but obvious point that where once political royalists stalked the land, now economic royalists owned everything standing. Mindful of Plutarch's warning that "an imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics," Roosevelt famously told America, in 1936, that "the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man." He gathered together the remnants of the great reform movements of the Progressive Age--including those of his late-blooming cousin, Teddy--into a singular political cause that would be ratified again and again by people who categorically rejected the laissez-faire anarchy that had produced destructive, unfettered and ungovernable power. Now came collective bargaining and workplace rules, cash assistance for poor children, Social Security, the GI Bill, home mortgage subsidies, progressive taxation--democratic instruments that checked economic tyranny and helped secure America's great middle class. And these were only the beginning. The Marshall Plan, the civil rights revolution, reaching the moon, a huge leap in life expectancy--every one of these great outward achievements of the last century grew from shared goals and collaboration in the public interest.

So it is that contrary to what we have heard rhetorically for a generation now, the individualist, greed-driven, free-market ideology is at odds with our history and with what most Americans really care about. More and more people agree that growing inequality is bad for the country, that corporations have too much power, that money in politics is corrupting democracy and that working families and poor communities need and deserve help when the market system fails to generate shared prosperity. Indeed, the American public is committed to a set of values that almost perfectly contradicts the conservative agenda that has dominated politics for a generation now.

The question, then, is not about changing people; it's about reaching people. I'm not speaking simply of better information, a sharper and clearer factual presentation to disperse the thick fogs generated by today's spin machines. Of course, we always need stronger empirical arguments to back up our case. It would certainly help if at least as many people who believe, say, in a "literal devil" or that God sent George W. Bush to the White House also knew that the top 1 percent of households now have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. Yes, people need more information than they get from the media conglomerates with their obsession for nonsense, violence and pap. And we need, as we keep hearing, "new ideas." But we are at an extraordinary moment. The conservative movement stands intellectually and morally bankrupt while Democrats talk about a "new direction" without convincing us they know the difference between a weather vane and a compass. The right story will set our course for a generation to come.

Some stories doom us. In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond tells of the Viking colony that disappeared in the fifteenth century. The settlers had scratched a living on the sparse coast of Greenland for years, until they encountered a series of harsh winters. Their livestock, the staple of their diet, began to die off. Although the nearby waters teemed with haddock and cod, the colony's mythology prohibited the eating of fish. When their supply of hay ran out during a last terrible winter, the colony was finished. They had been doomed by their story.

Here in the first decade of the twenty-first century the story that becomes America's dominant narrative will shape our collective imagination and hence our politics. In the searching of our souls demanded by this challenge, those of us in this room and kindred spirits across the nation must confront the most fundamental progressive failure of the current era: the failure to embrace a moral vision of America based on the transcendent faith that human beings are more than the sum of their material appetites, our country is more than an economic machine, and freedom is not license but responsibility--the gift we have received and the legacy we must bequeath.

In our brief sojourn here we are on a great journey. For those who came before us and for those who follow, our moral, political and religious duty is to make sure that this nation, which was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that we are all created equal, is in good hands on our watch.

One story would return America to the days of radical laissez-faire, when there was no social contract and the strong took what they could and the weak were left to forage. The other story joins the memory of struggles that have been waged with the possibility of victories yet to be won, including healthcare for every American and a living wage for every worker. Like the mustard seed to which Jesus compared the Kingdom of God, nurtured from small beginnings in a soil thirsty for new roots, our story has been a long time unfolding. It reminds us that the freedoms and rights we treasure were not sent from heaven and did not grow on trees. They were, as John Powers has written, "born of centuries of struggle by untold millions who fought and bled and died to assure that the government can't just walk into our bedrooms and read our mail, to protect ordinary people from being overrun by massive corporations, to win a safety net against the often-cruel workings of the market, to guarantee that businessmen couldn't compel workers to work more than forty hours a week without extra compensation, to make us free to criticize our government without having our patriotism impugned, and to make sure that our leaders are answerable to the people when they choose to send our soldiers into war." The eight-hour day, the minimum wage, the conservation of natural resources, free trade unions, old-age pensions, clean air and water, safe food--all these began with citizens and won the endorsement of the political class only after long struggles and bitter attacks. Democracy works when people claim it as their own.

It is only rarely remembered that the definition of democracy immortalized by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address had been inspired by Theodore Parker, the abolitionist prophet. Driven from his pulpit, Parker said, "I will go about and preach and lecture in the city and glen, by the roadside and field-side, and wherever men and women may be found." He became the Hound of Freedom and helped to change America through the power of the word. We have a story of equal power. It is that the promise of America leaves no one out. Go now, and tell it on the mountains. From the rooftops, tell it. From your laptops, tell it. From the street corners and from Starbucks, from delis and from diners, tell it. From the workplace and the bookstore, tell it. On campus and at the mall, tell it. Tell it at the synagogue, sanctuary and mosque. Tell it where you can, when you can and while you can--to every candidate for office, to every talk-show host and pundit, to corporate executives and schoolchildren. Tell it--for America's sake.

by Bill Moyers
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070122/moyers

Rattled America Will Find It Can't Spin Itself Out of This One

2007-01-05T23:48:00.000-05:00

George Bush will be hard put persuading three, four or five thousand American soldiers, marines and reservists who have already been there to go back to Iraq this year, to face 4 million Sunnis displeased by the Saddam hanging. Hard put too to persuade Nuri al-Maliki to stay in office, and stay alive, till they get there.
In the meantime the spinning of the killing of Saddam continues. The US had nothing to do with it; we merely guarded him for three years, then took him to the house of death and flew his coffined body to Tikrit. We tried to stop it happening so soon. We would have "handled it differently". What's all this fuss? The last 60 seconds of a tyrant's life matter less than the first 60 years. We've killed his two sons and his 14-year-old grandson and we'll kill his half-brother tomorrow, so the "process of national healing" can begin. Has any "process of national healing" been so mismanaged in world history? Has any filmed event won fewer hearts and minds? JFK's killing perhaps, though it pleased a good few Southern schoolboys, who cheered at the news.

If we only look at the politics of lynching a warrior-hero, abusing him on the gallows, keeping him awake the night before by banging on his cell door and flaunting before his bleary eyes the hangman's rope, we can see just how dim the whole plan was. What Sunni will pose beside Maliki now? What Arab leader, Sunni or Shiite, will praise his political skill?

And who will trust the Americans now, after this and Abu Ghraib and hurricane Katrina, to get any process right in any country including their own? Not the British soldiers on the ground in Helmland Province, Afghanistan. Not the Australian "security guards" in downtown Baghdad. Not the Iraqi dentists, doctors, nurses, restaurateurs and university lecturers daily fleeing the country. Not the children with toothache. Not the pregnant women with nowhere to go to give birth. Not the grandmothers of dead babies in humidicribs whose electricity gave out. Not the middle-class parents afraid to put their children on school buses lest they never see them again.

And who in the US will trust the American Army, the State Department and the current American rulers of Baghdad either? Not the 30,000 boys and girls wounded, nor their families. Not the 13,000 or 15,000 parents and siblings bereaved. Not the mayors of the towns the 3000 dead kids came from. Not the Democrat local members Bush is now asking for more soldiers, more weapons, more money, more patience, more time in a Long War as long, perhaps, as the Cold War.

The US is facing outright defeat — and worldwide contempt as never before — because of the Saddam gallows Grand Guignol and the secular Golgotha his jeering, black-hooded captors turned it into. And none of this need have happened. All the cluey US spin-men had to do, after consulting a few legal experts, was yield him up to lengthy trial by the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague; let him give big speeches the media would soon tire of; and let him grow very old and sad in jail.

But they didn't, and the consequences are dire and daily mounting. Soon they'll have Tariq Aziz to deal with. He's a Christian, a friend of Pope John Paul, and literate, well-spoken, Anglicised evidence of how broad-based a secular government Saddam ran, and how much 4 million university graduates, civil servants, medical professionals, lawyers, judges, soldiers, police and schoolteachers miss him now, in a world of veils and checkpoints and daylight kidnappings and suicide bombings and 10,000 policemen killed in two years.

Will Tariq Aziz hang? Will his breaking neck and open eyes and slowly swinging corpse be telerecorded too? Will he be allowed his beloved P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie paperbacks in his cell on death row? Will he get a final press conference? Will he be allowed to wear a suit and tie? What questions will he be allowed to answer?

In freedom's name we have helped the US start this barbarous process. In freedom's name we too are called barbarians now, by fairly civilised peoples who may have a point.

And we Australians are in the thick of it. Staying on, to "finish the job". The job may not be all that's finished by the time we're done.

Bob Ellis is an author and commentator.

http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0105-22.htm

The Age Company Ltd.

Stop This War, Now!

2007-01-05T23:36:00.000-05:00

The president of the United States does not have the sense God gave a duck—so it’s up to us. You and me, Bubba.

I don’t know why Bush is just standing there like a frozen rabbit, but it’s time we found out. The fact is we have to do something about it. This country is being torn apart by an evil and unnecessary war, and it has to be stopped now.

This war is being prosecuted in our names, with our money, with our blood, against our will. Polls consistently show that less than 30 percent of the people want to maintain current troop levels. It is obscene and wrong for the president to go against the people in this fashion. And it’s doubly wrong for him to send 20,0000 more soldiers into this hellhole, as he reportedly will announce next week.

What happened to the nation that never tortured? The nation that wasn’t supposed to start wars of choice? The nation that respected human rights and life? A nation that from the beginning was against tyranny? Where have we gone? How did we let these people take us there? How did we let them fool us?

It’s a monstrous idea to put people in prison and keep them there. Since 1215, civil authorities have been obligated to tell people with what they are charged if they’re arrested. This administration has done away with rights first enshrined in the Magna Carta nearly 800 years ago, and we’ve let them do it.

This will be a regular feature of mine, like an old-fashioned newspaper campaign. Every column, I’ll write about this war until we find some way to end it. STOP IT NOW. BAM! Every day, we will review some factor we should have gotten right.

So let’s take a step back and note, for example, that before the war one of the architects of the entire policy, Paul Wolfowitz, testified to Congress that Iraq had no history of ethnic strife. Sectarian and ethnic strife is a part of the region. And the region is full of examples of Western colonial powers trying to occupy countries, take their resources and take over the administration of their people—and failing.

The sectarian bloodbath we see daily completely refutes Wolfowitz. And now Bush has given him the World Bank to run. Wonder what he’ll do there.

And let’s keep in mind that when the Army arrived in Baghdad, we, the television viewers, watched footage of a bunch of enraged and joyous Iraqis pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein, their repulsive dictator, in Firdos Square. Only one thing was wrong. The event was staged. Taking down the statue was instigated by a Marine colonel, and a PSYOP (psychological operations) unit made it appear to be a spontaneous show of Iraqi joy.

When we later saw the whole square, only 30 to 40 people were there—U.S. military people, press and some Iraqis. And a U.S. tank pulled the statue down with a cable. We, the television viewers, saw the square being presented as though the people of Iraq had gone into a frenzy and spontaneously pulled down the statue. Fake images and claims have been a part of this fiasco from the beginning.

We need to cut through all the smoke and mirrors and come up with an exit strategy, forthwith. The Democrats have yet to offer a cohesive plan to get us out of this mess. Of course, it’s not their fault—but the fact is we need leaders who are grown-ups and who are willing to try to fix it. Bush has ignored the actual grown-ups from the Iraq Study Group and the generals and all the other experts, who are nearly unanimous that more troops will not help.

So, as I said, it’s up to you and me, Bubba. We need to make sure that the new Congress curbs executive power, which has been so misused, and asserts its own power to make this situation change. Now.

By Molly Ivins

http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0105-30.htm

Hanging Saddam...A Foregone Conclusion

2007-01-03T20:33:00.000-05:00

Saddam's Execution

The execution of Saddam Hussein, though he was undeniably guilty of a notorious series of crimes against humanity, represents a major setback in the pursuit of justice in Iraq. The trial and the sentence were both problematic. The opportunity for future trials, and to present evidence of U.S. complicity in some of Saddam’s crimes, has been lost. And the overall message -- that leaders face justice only if they run afoul of U.S. authority – undermines international legal norms.

It is impossible to mourn the passing of the tyrant. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to mourn the manner of his demise. The political implications of his execution may set back efforts for peace and reconciliation in Iraq.

Trial and Sentence

Saddam’s trial was no paragon of justice. The prosecution failed to disclose key evidence to Saddam’s attorneys and limited the right of the defendant to confront witnesses. Three defense lawyers and a witness were assassinated. The first presiding judge resigned, and the second engaged in a series of outbursts that undermined his impartiality. Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, called for the postponement of the execution, observing that “there were a number of concerns as to the fairness of the original trial, and there needs to be assurance that these issues have been comprehensively addressed." Despite President George W. Bush’s insistence that it was a fair trial, Amnesty International noted that “the execution appeared a foregone conclusion, once the original verdict was pronounced, with the Appeals Court providing little more than a veneer of legitimacy for what was, in fact, a fundamentally flawed process.” However guilty Saddam may be of the charges against him, his execution without a fair trial allows Saddam’s supporters to continue to deny the crimes themselves.

Saddam Hussein was tried by a judicial body set up under the occupation authority of a foreign government that illegally invaded his country. Indeed, U.S. government lawyers largely drafted the rules governing the tribunal. The Bush administration also contributed more than $100 million to build the special courtroom and provided the prosecution with advisers, lawyers and forensic investigators. If viewed as “victor’s justice,” Saddam Hussein’s execution will appear to have resulted not from an objective assessment of the seriousness of his crimes but because he was on the losing side of a war.

Furthermore, the full seriousness of his crimes was not revealed. He was executed for ordering the killings of scores of people in the Iraqi town of Dujail following a 1982 assassination attempt. He will not face trial for even worse war crimes, such as the Anfal campaign against Kurdish civilians during the late 1980s. The likelihood that Saddam’s defense lawyers would have presented evidence of complicity by the U.S. government, which was supporting Saddam at that time, may have played a role in the Bush administration’s push for an early execution.

Then there’s the problem of the death penalty itself. In virtually every country in recent decades where a dictatorship was overthrown, the new governments have moved quickly to abolish the death penalty. In Iraq, however, a U.S. occupation authority initially replaced the dictator. The only Western industrialized democracy that still executes its prisoners, the United States insisted that Iraq maintain a system of capital punishment. According to Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch, the United States rejected an international tribunal in part because the Bush administration "wanted to make sure (the verdict) would include the death penalty, which wouldn't happen in an international court."

Whose War Crimes?

The United States has repeatedly demonstrated its lack of concern regarding the war crimes of allies. For example, Indonesia's General Suharto, who ruled his predominantly Muslim Southeast Asian nation for 34 years, has even more blood on his hands than does Saddam Hussein. He oversaw the purges of suspected leftists in the mid-1960s which took over a half million lives. His invasion and occupation of East Timor ten years later resulted in the deaths of 200,000 people, more than 100 times the estimated number of Kuwaitis killed under Saddam’s 1990-91 occupation of that oil-rich sheikdom. Yet Suharto was a favorite ally of the United States under both Republican and Democratic administrations until a largely nonviolent popular uprising ousted the dictator in 1998. He currently lives in comfortable retirement, and the United States has made no effort to bring him to justice.

The United States helped stymie efforts to prosecute its one-time ally General Augusto Pinochet, who died of natural causes last month, despite widespread crimes against humanity during his bloody rule in Chile. The Bush administration – with bipartisan support in Congress – also provided strong diplomatic, military, and financial support for Ariel Sharon while he served as Israeli prime minister, despite his responsibility for a series of war crimes over several decades.

The United States rejected calls by international human rights groups, prominent jurists, and many Iraqis to try Saddam Hussein in a UN-sponsored international tribunal, such as the one prosecuting former Liberian president and notorious warlord Charles Taylor. Special UN-sponsored war crimes tribunals have also been set up to prosecute the perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide as well as those responsible for ethnic cleansing and other war crimes in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, including former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration – with bipartisan Congressional support – has consistently sought to undermine the International Criminal Court (ICC), established in July 2002, in the apparent belief that the United States alone has the right to determine who gets to be tried for war crimes and who does not. For example, Congress overwhelmingly passed a law in 2002 that prohibits U.S. cooperation with the ICC, restricts U.S. participation in UN peacekeeping operations to situations where U.S. forces are explicitly exempt from prosecution for any war crimes, bans the sharing of U.S. intelligence with the ICC, prohibits most foreign aid to countries that ratify the ICC statute, and authorizes the president to use “all means necessary and appropriate” to free from captivity “any U.S. or allied personnel held by or on behalf of the ICC,” including a U.S. military attack on The Hague.

Washington’s message: a war criminal will only be brought to justice if he challenges U.S. foreign policy prerogatives. By contrast, if a war criminal is an American ally, he is not only safe but will be openly supported.

Shaping Saddam’s Legacy

As long as the United States opposes the ICC and uses the prosecution of war criminals as a sinister political tool rather than a universal principle of justice, the impact of Saddam’s execution will increase the polarization and resistance in Iraq rather than help mend a nation that has suffered so much from dictatorship, war, sanctions, occupation and increasing civil conflict. Even many Iraqi opponents of Saddam’s regime are troubled by the sight of their former president, once the most powerful political figure in the Arab world, executed not in an Iraqi prison but at the U.S. military base Camp Justice just north of Baghdad.

As a result of such American policies, many in the Arab and Islamic world may unfortunately come to view Saddam Hussein not as the notorious tyrant and war criminal that he was but as a martyr and victim of U.S. imperialism.

Stephen Zunes | January 1, 2007
Editor: John Feffer

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3846

Stephen Zunes is the Foreign Policy In Focus Middle East editor (www.fpif.org). He is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and the author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Courage Press, 2003).

Iraq Study Group vs AIPAC

2006-12-14T12:32:00.000-05:00

Is James Baker a Match for AIPAC?

The report by the Iraq Study Group is an attempt by elder statesmen of the American political establishment to take U.S. foreign policy out of the incompetent hands of President Bush and the self-serving hands of the Israeli Lobby. The Iraq Study Group's effort may or may not succeed.

Others have expressed disappointment that the ISG elder statesmen did not call for Bush's impeachment and immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq. Such wishful thinking caused writers to pour cold water over the establishment's attempt to save Bush and the U.S. from a "grave and deteriorating" situation.

Even war critic Pat Buchanan is dismissive of the ISG report. Buchanan, however, comes closer to the truth than the report's other critics when he writes that the purpose of the report is to save the establishment from any responsibility for the debacle that Bush and his neoconservative government have produced.

The Iraq Study Group, which includes Bush's new secretary of defense, Robert Gates, realizes that far from being the macho superpower that controls the world's destiny, the U.S. does not even control its own destiny. The U.S. is in a "grave and deteriorating" situation that can easily result in a far greater calamity than merely a bruised ego from a lost war. The entire Middle East can come undone.

The real problem is the Israeli Lobby's powerful influence – about which the Lobby brags – over U.S. policy in the Middle East and Israel's inflexibility toward the Palestinians, whose land Israel has stolen. As long as Israel exercises a veto over U.S. policy in the Middle East, the powder keg will remain alight.

The members of the ISG are elder statesmen. They have held high positions and accumulated the honors. Their careers are behind them. They have nothing to lose. They can afford to tell the truth and to address the real problem.

If news reports are correct (see, for example, this), former Secretary of State James Baker has proposed a Middle East peace conference without Israeli participation. According to an official quoted by Insight magazine, "As Baker sees this, the conference would provide a unique opportunity for the United States to strike a deal without Jewish pressure. This has become the hottest proposal examined by the foreign policy people over the last month."

According to Insight, "officials said the Baker proposal to exclude Israel garnered support in the wake of Vice President Dick Cheney's visit to Saudi Arabia on Nov. 25. They said Mr. Cheney spent most of his meetings listening to Saudi warnings that Israel, rather than Iran, is the leading cause of instability in the Middle East." The official told Insight that the administration "has fallen in line," but that "Bush is not in the daily loop. He is shocked by the elections and he's hoping for a miracle on Iraq."

President Bush lacks the knowledge, judgment, and experience to be in the Oval Office. He has been deceived and manipulated by neoconservatives who live in the fantasy world of their own ideology and who have been aligned with Israel's right-wing Likud Party for most of their careers.

The neoconservatives put Bush and the U.S., along with Iraqis, Afghans, and Lebanese, in harm's way. Their fantasy enterprise failed, and now they damn Bush for a lost war that they said would be a cakewalk. Neoconservatives told Bush that U.S. troops would have flowers thrown at them, not bombs.

Many neoconservatives have been cleared out of the Bush administration. But other neoconservatives still occupy media positions, which they will continue to use to lie to the American public. As long as the neoconservatives' protector, Vice President Cheney, continues to have influence, the Israeli Lobby might again succeed in overthrowing American public opinion and win its war against the Iraq Study Group.

Paul Craig Roberts
http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=10160

Annan Bows Out Of UN With Attack On Bush

2006-12-12T23:42:00.000-05:00

Secretary General Accuses US of Human Rights Abuses

Washington 'abandoned its ideals' in war on terror

Kofi Annan yesterday used his final speech as the United Nations secretary general to deliver a parting shot at the Bush administration, accusing the US of committing human rights abuses in the name of fighting terror.

After three years of increasingly vocal opposition to the war on Iraq, Mr Annan's speech yesterday amounted to a broad condemnation of the neoconservative ideology guiding America's foreign policy under George Bush - a clear break with protocol for a departing UN chief.

In his most explicit rebuke, Mr Annan said America had sacrificed its global leadership on human rights because of its methods in the war on terror. "When it appears to abandon its own ideals and objectives, its friends abroad are naturally troubled and confused," Mr Annan said, according to a prepared text of his remarks released by the UN.

The broadside is merely the latest sign of Mr Annan's anger at the administration since US forces invaded Iraq in March 2003 without the approval of the security council. Earlier this month, he upset the White House by saying that many Iraqis believe they were better off under Saddam Hussein, and he has said he does not believe the country can rebuild on its own.

Mr Annan has also had an antagonistic relationship with the US ambassador, John Bolton, who has been a vociferous promoter of the idea that Washington should use the UN mainly to promote its national interests. Mr Bolton is also leaving his post, expecting that he would not be confirmed by a Democratic Congress.

Mr Annan hands over to the South Korean diplomat Ban Ki-moon on December 31 after 10 years at the UN, and his speech was a sermon on the importance of multilateral institutions. He offered his critique in the guise of a primer on international affairs, speaking on global responsibility, the rule of law, and mutual accountability for rich and poor nations.

The Mr Annan's speech was delivered during a visit at the Harry Truman presidential library in Independence, Missouri.

"When power, especially military force, is used, the world will consider it legitimate only when convinced that it is being used for the right purpose - for broadly shared aims in accordance with broadly accepted norms," Mr Annan said.

He said the security council was not a platform to act out national interests, but a management system for the world community, and said it was folly to believe security rested solely on military strength. "No nation can make itself secure by seeking supremacy over all others." He also called for expansion of the security council - which Washington opposes.

It is unlikely that Mr Bush will take kindly to the advice. Although Mr Annan was given a farewell dinner at the White House last week, Mr Bolton told reporters that "nobody sang 'Kumbaya'".

Mr Annan, told of Mr Bolton's comments, joked in return: "Does he know how to sing it?"

by Suzanne Goldenberg
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1212-04.htm

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2006

Bush & His Dangerous Delusions

2006-10-12T23:34:00.000-04:00

In George W. Bush’s world, Saddam Hussein defied United Nations demands that he get rid of his weapons of mass destruction and barred U.N. inspectors; al-Qaeda’s public statements must be believed even when contradicted by its private comments; and U.S. withdrawal from Iraq is unthinkable because it would let al-Qaeda “extend the caliphate,” a mythical state that doesn’t really exist.

There’s always been the frightening question of what would happen if a President of United States went completely bonkers. But there is an equally disturbing issue of what happens if a President loses touch with reality, especially if he is surrounded by enough sycophants and cowards so no one can or will stop him.

At his Oct. 11 news conference, Bush gave the country a peak into his imaginary world, a bizarre place impenetrable by facts and logic, where falsehoods, once stated, become landmarks and where Bush’s “gut” instinct, no matter how misguided, is the compass for finding one’s way.

In speaking to White House reporters, Bush maneuvered casually through this world like an experienced guide making passing references to favorite points of interest, such as Hussein’s defiance of U.N. resolutions banning WMD (when Hussein actually had eliminated his WMD stockpiles).

“We tried the diplomacy,” Bush said. “Remember it? We tried resolution after resolution after resolution.” Though the resolutions had worked – and left Hussein stripped of his WMD arsenal – that isn’t how it looks in Bush’s world, where the resolutions failed and there was no choice but to invade.

At other news conferences, Bush has filled in details of his fictional history. For instance, on July 14, 2003, just a few months after the Iraq invasion, Bush began rewriting the record to meet his specifications.

“We gave him [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power,” Bush told reporters.

In the real world, of course, Hussein admitted U.N. inspectors in fall 2002 and gave them unfettered access to search suspected Iraqi weapons sites. It was Bush who forced the U.N. inspectors to leave in March 2003 so the invasion could proceed.

Over the past three years, Bush has repeated this false claim about the barred inspectors in slightly varied forms as part of his litany for defending the invasion on the grounds that it was Hussein who “chose war,” not Bush.

Meeting no protest from the Washington press corps, Bush continued repeating his lie about Hussein showing “defiance” on the inspections. For instance, at a news conference on March 21, 2006, Bush reprised his claims about his diplomatic efforts.

“I was hoping to solve this [Iraq] problem diplomatically,” Bush said. “The world said, ‘Disarm, disclose or face serious consequences.’ … We worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny the inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did. And the world is safer for it.”

Determined to Invade

In reality, documentary evidence shows that Bush was determined to invade Iraq regardless of what U.S. intelligence found or what the Iraqis did.

For instance, the so-called “Downing Street Memo” recounted a secret meeting on July 23, 2002, involving British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top national security aides. At that meeting, Richard Dearlove, chief of the British intelligence agency MI6, described his discussions about Iraq with Bush’s top advisers in Washington.

Dearlove said, “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

At an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 31, 2003, Bush and Blair discussed their determination to invade Iraq, though Bush still hoped that he might provoke the Iraqis into some violent act that would serve as political cover, according to minutes written by Blair’s top foreign policy aide David Manning.

So, while Bush was telling the American people that he considered war with Iraq “a last resort,” he actually had decided to invade regardless of Iraq’s cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors, according to the five-page memo of the Oval Office meeting.

The memo also revealed Bush conniving to deceive the American people and the world community by trying to engineer a provocation that would portray Hussein as the aggressor. Bush suggested painting a U.S. plane up in U.N. colors and flying it over Iraq with the goal of drawing Iraqi fire, the meeting minutes said.

“The U.S. was thinking of flying U-2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours,” the memo said about Bush’s scheme. “If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Time to Talk War Crimes.”]

Regardless of whether any casus belli could be provoked, Bush already had “penciled in” March 10, 2003, as the start of the U.S. bombing of Iraq, according to the memo. “Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning,” Manning wrote. [NYT, March 27, 2006]

In other words, neither the U.N. inspectors’ negative WMD findings nor the Security Council’s refusal to authorize force would stop Bush’s invasion on March 19, 2003. [For more on Bush's pretexts for war in Iraq, see Consortiumnews.com’s “President Bush, With the Candlestick…”]

Comfortable History

But Bush remains so comfortable with his fabricated history – and so confident that the White House press corps won’t contradict him – that he now sketches the false landscape in a few quick strokes, as in “Remember it? We tried resolution after resolution after resolution.”

When Bush is not taking gullible people on a tour of his imaginary history, he is testing how well sophistry works as logic, such as his oft-repeated claim that Americans must believe what Osama bin Laden says.

“What I say to the American people when I’m out there is all you got to do is listen to what Osama bin Laden says” regarding al-Qaeda’s goals and the importance of Iraq, Bush said at the Oct. 11 news conference.

Yet, while Bush argues that bin Laden’s public ravings should seal the deal – and thus lock U.S. troops into Iraq for the indefinite future – Bush never considers the well-documented possibility that al-Qaeda is playing a double game, baiting the United States about leaving Iraq to ensure that U.S. troops will stay.

In a rational world – if one wanted to give any weight to al-Qaeda’s thinking – you would look at unguarded, internal communications, not the public propaganda.

For instance, more credence would be given to an intercepted Dec. 11, 2005, communiqué from a senior bin Laden lieutenant known as “Atiyah” to the then-chief of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a document discovered by the U.S. military at the time of Zarqawi’s death in June 2006.

In the letter about al-Qaeda’s strategy in Iraq, Atiyah told Zarqawi that “prolonging the war is in our interest.” A chief reason, Atiyah explained, was that Zarqawi’s brutal tactics had alienated many Iraqi Sunni insurgents and thus a continued U.S. military presence was needed to buy time for al-Qaeda to mend fences and put down roots.

The “Atiyah letter” – like a previously intercepted message attributed to al-Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman Zawahiri – indicated that a U.S. military pullout could be disastrous for al-Qaeda’s terrorist bands, which are estimated at only about 5 to 10 percent of the anti-U.S. fighters in Iraq.

Without the U.S. military presence to serve as a rallying cry and a unifying force, the al-Qaeda contingent faced disintegration from desertions and attacks from Iraqi insurgents who resented the wanton bloodshed committed by Zarqawi’s non-Iraqi terrorists.

The “Zawahiri letter,” which was dated July 9, 2005, said a rapid American military withdrawal could have caused the foreign jihadists, who had flocked to Iraq to battle the Americans, to simply give up the fight and go home.

“The mujahaddin must not have their mission end with the expulsion of the Americans from Iraq, and then lay down their weapons, and silence the fighting zeal,” said the “Zawahiri letter,” according to a text released by the office of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence.

The “Atiyah letter,” which was translated by the U.S. military’s Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, also stressed the vulnerability of al-Qaeda’s position in Iraq.

“Know that we, like all mujahaddin, are still weak,” Atiyah told Zarqawi. “We have not yet reached a level of stability. We have no alternative but to not squander any element of the foundations of strength or any helper or supporter.”

Indeed, the “Atiyah” and “Zawahiri” letters suggest that one of al-Qaeda’s biggest fears is that the United States will pull out of Iraq before the terrorist organization has built the necessary political infrastructure to turn the country into a future base of operations.

The Caliphate Scam

Zawahiri was so concerned about the possibility of mass desertions after a U.S. withdrawal that he suggested that al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq talk up the “idea” of a “caliphate” along the eastern Mediterranean to avert a disintegration of the force.

Even with these two fretful al-Qaeda letters in hand, Bush continued to warn Americans about al-Qaeda’s intent to follow up a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq by turning the country into a launching pad for a vast Islamic “empire” that would spell the strategic defeat of the United States.

In a Sept. 5, 2006, speech, Bush declared, “This caliphate would be a totalitarian Islamic empire encompassing all current and former Muslim lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia,” Bush said. “We know this because al-Qaeda has told us.”

Bush returned to this theme in his Oct. 11 news conference. His administration’s “strategic goal is to help this young democracy [Iraq] succeed in a world in which extremists are trying to intimidate rational people in order to topple moderate governments and to extend the caliphate,” Bush said. “They want to extend an ideological caliphate that has no concept of liberty inherent in their beliefs.”

But – like much of Bush’s world – al-Qaeda’s “caliphate” doesn’t really exist. Indeed, before the Bush administration took power in 2001, Islamic extremists had been routed across the Arab world, from Algeria to Egypt to Jordan to Saudi Arabia – explaining why so many al-Qaeda leaders were exiles holed up in caves in Afghanistan.

Plus, given the strife between Sunni and Shiite sects, it’s hard to conceive how a unified global Islamic “caliphate” would be imaginable. Most likely, if the U.S. government dealt with Muslims with greater sophistication, they would take care of al-Qaeda and similar extremists like they did before.

In Bush’s world, however, the “caliphate” is not just a ploy by al-Qaeda leaders to keep impressionable young jihadists in line; it is an entity that would be “extended” if U.S. forces withdraw from Iraq.

So, as he rationalizes the horrendous death toll in Iraq – estimated at about 655,000 dead by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health – Bush doesn’t see a disaster of historic proportions. In his world, the bloodshed is simply another reaffirmation of his decision to invade.

“I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the face of violence,” Bush said. “I am amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to – that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate.”

It's difficult to envision any rational person making such a statement. If anything, the level of killing in Iraq is a combination of sectarian violence and the determination of many Iraqis to drive out what they see as the American invaders. But in Bush world, such realities never intrude.

Still, perhaps, the greatest danger from Bush's delusions is that they will come to supplant any American notion of reality and spell the doom of the United States as a democratic Republic based on an informed electorate.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/101106.html

Habeas Corpus

2006-10-12T13:33:00.000-04:00

The Lynchpin of Freedom

In the recently enacted Military Commissions Act, Congress acceded to President Bush’s request to remove the power of federal courts to consider petitions for writ of habeas by foreign citizens held by U.S. officials on suspicion of having committed acts of terrorism. While it might be tempting to conclude that the writ of habeas corpus is some minor legal procedural device that the president and the Congress have now canceled, nothing could be further from the truth. The writ of habeas corpus is actually the lynchpin of a free society. Take away this great writ and all other rights — such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, gun ownership, due process, trial by jury, and protection from unreasonable searches and seizures and cruel and unusual punishments — become meaningless.

The Framers considered the writ of habeas corpus so important that they specifically provided for its protection in the Constitution: “The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” As Alexander Hamilton put it, the writ of habeas corpus, along with the prohibition against ex post facto laws, “are perhaps greater securities to liberty” than any others in the Constitution.

Let’s assume that the president involves the nation in another foreign war but this time one in which there are significant military reversals involving the deaths of thousands of U.S. troops. Congress grants the president’s request to enact a draft to replenish the Pentagon’s human coffers. Federal spending, the national debt, income taxes, and inflation soar. To compound the crisis, terrorist bombs are exploded in a few American cities.

Assume also that this time the American people are angry and outraged over the president’s and Congress’s actions. They point out that the Constitution prohibits the president from starting and waging a war without an express declaration of war from Congress. They oppose subjecting themselves and their children to a draft and another foreign war. They point out that the terrorist bombs are a retaliatory response to U.S. foreign policy. Newspaper editorials protest the war. Demonstrations erupt across the nation.

At the height of the crisis, the president announces that criticism of federal policy is helping the terrorists. Congress grants his request to criminalize criticism of the federal government (much as the newly installed regime in Iraq, which U.S. officials continue to insist is now a free country, has done). The president issues an executive order as commander in chief extending the cancellation of habeas corpus in the Military Commission Act to U.S. citizens who aid and abet the enemy.

On orders of the president, FBI agents and U.S. military personnel begin rounding up recalcitrant newspaper editors, Internet critics, and anti-war protestors as “enemy combatants” for giving moral and intellectual aid to the enemy. The action, the president assures the nation, is temporary. The detentions will last only until the war on terrorism is won.

“But they couldn’t do that,” people might cry. “The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech.”

Granted, but how is that provision enforced? Editors, critics, and protestors would be languishing in some military detention center, perhaps even the one at Guantanamo Bay. What good would it do to point out that people have the constitutional right to speak their mind, criticize government policy, and petition the government for redress of grievances? The president and the military would be in charge. They might listen politely, but then again they might simply take more people into custody in order to send a message: “Remain silent.” The doors to the cells would remain locked. The prisoners would be unconditionally subject to whatever treatment their jailers wished to impose. The prisoners would be prohibited from going to court to complain or to seek redress.

That’s where habeas corpus, a legal procedure whose use stretches back to 14th-century England, comes in. Over the centuries of struggle against royal tyranny, the English people came to the realization that rights were meaningless unless they could be enforced against government officials who jailed them for exercising them.

Moreover, the English people had learned what our American ancestors had learned — that the greatest threat to people’s fundamental rights and freedoms lay not with foreign enemies but rather with their own government officials. After all, don’t forget that the reason that our American ancestors expressly mentioned Congress in the First Amendment is that they recognized that Congress was an enormous threat to people’s freedom of speech and other fundamental rights.

Thus, the English people demanded and got the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, which stated that “the writ of Habeas Corpus cannot be denied.” A hundred years later, Americans, who had just a few years before been Englishmen who had revolted against their own government, inserted a similar restriction in the U.S. Constitution.

In the absence of habeas corpus, the detainee must continue languishing in prison for having criticized the government, comforted only by the notion that he lives in a country in which the Constitution says that people have freedom of speech. He has no way to get out of jail or force his jailers to treat him properly, other than to apologize, convince his jailers that he has reformed, promise that he will never do it again, and plead for mercy.

With habeas corpus, there is another alternative. The prisoner files a petition with the federal judiciary, which the Framers made a separate branch of government, equal to that of the executive and legislative branches. In the petition, he tells a federal judge, who is independent of presidential and congressional control, that he is being held without just cause. The judge issues a writ of habeas corpus, which commands the U.S. official who is holding the petitioner to appear in his courtroom post haste to show cause why he is holding the prisoner. If the jailer refuses to do so, the judge cites the official for contempt of court and issues a writ for his arrest. U.S. marshals are charged with serving the writs and enforcing them.

Under our system of government, the judicial branch’s interpretation of law, including constitutional law, trumps that of the other two branches. Once a U.S. district judge issues a writ of habeas corpus or any other judicial writ, the other two branches must comply.

At the hearing on the writ of habeas corpus, the judge hears sworn testimony. If he determines that the prisoner is being held without just cause, he orders the jailer to release him, and the jailer is required to comply with the judge’s order. In our example, the judge might say, “The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the right of people to criticize their government and its policies and there are no exceptions for crises or emergencies, including war. The law that converts government critics into aiders and abetters of terrorism is unconstitutional. You are hereby ordered to release the petitioner immediately.” Absent appeals, the prisoner would go free at the conclusion of the hearing. In the event of appeals, petitions for writ of habeas corpus are usually given priority over most other appellate cases.

In the absence of the power of federal courts to issue writs of habeas corpus, all the other rights and guarantees in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights become dead letters. If there is no way to enforce the First Amendment, for example, through a writ of habeas corpus seeking the release from custody of a government critic, critical speech is inexorably suppressed. After all, how many newspaper editors, Internet critics, and war protesters would continue their criticism knowing that other critics were languishing in some dark, perhaps even secret, detention camp without hope of challenging their detention in court through a writ of habeas corpus?

Americans might feel comforted by the fact that the president and the Congress limited the removal of habeas corpus to foreign citizens and did not apply it to Americans. If so, they know little about the history of government oppression. Once people accede to the cancellation of judicial protections for “other people” — a grave wrong in and of itself — it is just a matter of time before the cancellation is extended to include them. After all, American officials would argue at the height of a new crisis, what is the difference between a foreign terrorist and an American terrorist? Shouldn’t they be treated the same? Aren’t they equally dangerous? Of course the suspension of habeas corpus should be extended to American terrorists, the argument would go. After all, aren’t American terrorists also traitors?

Consumed by fear that “the terrorists” are coming to get them, conquer the United States, and take over the federal government, Americans continue to blithely permit their government officials to erode their rights. Their indifference to the cancellation of the Great Writ — the writ of habeas corpus, the lynchpin of a free society — is an affront those who struggled for centuries to ensure its enshrinement and protection. It also constitutes one of the gravest and most ominous threats to freedom of the American people in the history of our nation.

Mr. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0610d.asp

Behind The Republicans Torture-At-Will Bill

2006-10-01T12:21:00.000-04:00

"...to ensure that government personnel would be immunized from prosecution for any treatment of detainees before the end of 2005 that was cruel, inhuman or degrading."

Memo Fueled Deep Rift in Administration on Detainees

By TIM GOLDEN

In June 2005, two senior national security officials in the Bush administration came together to propose a sweeping new approach to the growing problems the United States was facing with the detention, interrogation and prosecution of terrorism suspects.

In a nine-page memorandum, the two officials, Gordon R. England, the acting deputy secretary of defense, and Philip D. Zelikow, the counselor of the State Department, urged the administration to seek Congressional approval for its detention policies.

They called for a return to the minimum standards of treatment in the Geneva Conventions and for eventually closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The time had come, they said, for suspects in the 9/11 plot to be taken out of their secret prison cells and tried before military tribunals.

The recommendations of the paper, which has not previously been disclosed, included several of the major policy shifts that President Bush laid out in a White House address on Sept. 6, five officials who read the document said. But the memorandum’s fate underscores the deep, long-running conflicts over detention policy that continued to divide the administration even as it pushed new legislation through Congress last week on the handling of terrorism suspects.

When the paper first circulated in the upper reaches of the administration, two of those officials said, it so angered Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that his aides gathered up copies of the document and had at least some of them shredded.

“It was not in step with the secretary of defense or the president,” said one Defense Department official who, like many others, would discuss the internal deliberations only on condition of anonymity. “It was clear that Rumsfeld was very unhappy.”

The internal debate over detention issues that began within weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has come to light before. But interviews show that the struggle, pitting top officials against one another, intensified behind the scenes over the last year as criticism of the administration’s approach grew in the United States and abroad. Crucial elements of that approach were struck down by the Supreme Court on June 29, forcing a resolution of disputes that had gone on for months.

On one side of the fight were officials, often led by Vice President Dick Cheney, who said the terrorism threat required that the president have wide power to decide who could be held and how they should be treated. On the other side were officials, primarily in the State Department and the Pentagon, who portrayed their disagreement as pragmatic.

They said the administration had claimed more authority than it needed, drawing widespread criticism and challenges in the courts.

Those officials initially hailed the president’s Sept. 6 announcement. Mr. Bush publicly discussed the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret detention program for the first time, saying he had ordered its remaining 14 prisoners sent to Guantánamo and tried before military tribunals. The same day, Pentagon officials presented new directives that effectively renounced military use of highly coercive interrogation methods.

But even as the White House negotiated with Congress in recent weeks, administration forces led by the vice president’s office reasserted themselves. Officials said Mr. Cheney’s staff and its bureaucratic allies — having agreed reluctantly to the disclosure of the C.I.A. operation and other changes — were closely involved in guiding the talks with Republican senators. Their adversaries in the administration, meanwhile, had to scramble just to keep up with details of the bargaining.

“Basically, they were left to get back whatever they could from Congress,” one senior administration official said of the Cheney group. “And they did.”

In the end, the White House pressed Republican senators to accept a broad definition of “unlawful enemy combatants” whom the government can hold indefinitely, to maintain some of the president’s control over C.I.A. interrogation methods and to allow the government to present some evidence in military tribunals that is based on hearsay or has been coerced from witnesses.

The administration did concede to the senators on some rules for military commissions, as the tribunals are called. It also backed off its effort to limit its obligations under the Geneva Conventions, but fought to ensure that government personnel would be immunized from prosecution for any treatment of detainees before the end of 2005 that was cruel, inhuman or degrading.

Still, several officials said privately that the detainee legislation might fail to meet a primary goal of those inside the administration who had advocated change: quelling domestic and international criticism and moving past the federal lawsuits that have tied up parts of the detention apparatus since 2002.

“There have been so many times when we thought we had broken through and turned things around, and then the forces on the other side kept charging back,” said one administration lawyer who has supported such changes. Now, the official added, “even after what was supposed to be this major legislation to resolve these issues, we are going to be back at it.”

At the time the England-Zelikow memorandum was written, in mid-June 2005, several officials said they saw little enthusiasm for reconsidering the detention system that had been set up after 9/11, primarily by a small group of lawyers in the White House, the Justice Department and the Defense Department.

That system had begun to come under increasing attack. An erroneous item in Newsweek magazine, about a Koran being flushed down a toilet at Guantánamo, led to violent demonstrations overseas. Criticism of the detention camp grew sharper in Europe. Some influential Republicans in Congress began to voice complaints as well.

Mr. Zelikow, who served as staff director for the national commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks, joined the State Department in early 2005 with strong views on the detention issue, other officials said. Early on, he began to push the idea that high-level C.I.A. captives held in connection with the 9/11 attacks should be brought to justice, these officials said.

Mr. England took over as Mr. Rumsfeld’s acting deputy in April 2005 while continuing to serve as secretary of the Navy. (He was confirmed as deputy secretary in April 2006.) He, too, had experience with the detainee issue, having spent months working to overhaul what many military officers saw as a flawed screening process for prisoners at Guantánamo.

Two other officials who had worked extensively on detention issues during Mr. Bush’s first term also participated in the drafting of the memorandum, officials said. One of them, Matthew C. Waxman, was Mr. Rumsfeld’s chief aide for detainee issues. The other, John B. Bellinger III, was the State Department’s legal counsel.

The proposals in the paper were not entirely new. But what was different, one administration official said, was an effort at “a big-bang solution,” to persuade senior officials or the president himself to adopt a comprehensive new approach to the detention problems of the policy. Failing that, officials said, the authors hoped to foster new debate about how to shape a strategy that would be more sustainable diplomatically, politically and in the federal courts.

Three years after Mr. Bush had determined he would not apply the Geneva Conventions in fighting terrorists, the memorandum urged a return to the conventions’ minimum standards, including the ban on “humiliating and degrading treatment” contained in the provision known as Common Article 3. The authors advocated that move not because they believed it was required by international law, officials said, but to win broader support from American allies and make court intervention less likely.

The paper did not advocate abandoning the covert interrogation program, but restricting it to the shorter-term questioning of more important suspects, officials said. After repatriating many of the Guantánamo detainees, the authors argued, the detention center could be shut down and the remaining prisoners transferred to a long-term detention facility in the United States. They did not specify what kind of facility it should be, two of the officials who read the paper said.

In a passage that underscored the views of Mr. Zelikow, one official said, the paper argued that efforts to bring to justice the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks must produce more than the chaotic trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the French-born militant who remains the only person to have been charged in an American court with involvement in the attacks.

The paper specifically called for taking Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and others held by the C.I.A. before military commissions, officials said, arguing that much of the information that would be disclosed by their trials was already widely known.

Officials said the memorandum was well received by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who forwarded it to senior officials at the National Security Council. But the hope that it would lead to a broader discussion of options within the administration was quashed by Mr. Rumsfeld, they said.

Some of the defense secretary’s ire over the paper appeared to be substantive, several Pentagon officials said. At various times, Mr. Rumsfeld raised objections to taking over responsibility for the C.I.A. detainees, and he was reluctant to consider closing Guantánamo without a viable alternative in sight, the officials said.

Most important, they said, Mr. Rumsfeld was angered that his new deputy, Mr. England, had worked on the memorandum with officials outside the Pentagon without his authorization. “England’s wings got clipped after that,” one Defense Department aide said.

A spokesman for the department, Col. Gary L. Keck, said it would not discuss its deliberations on detainee policy or any “predecisional documents.” But he denied that Mr. Rumsfeld was ever angered by those deliberations or instructed anyone to destroy documents.

“This is a difficult and complex issue that has profound operational, diplomatic, legal and political implications not only for the Department of Defense, but for many other executive agencies,” Colonel Keck said in a statement. “In any discussion on such an important topic there will be differences of opinion — this is to be expected.”

In early August 2005, after a long internal debate, new rules for the Guantánamo military tribunals were published which did not include changes that many military lawyers had advocated. Officials said David S. Addington, who was then Mr. Cheney’s counsel and is now his chief of staff, was prominent among those who opposed modifications like an explicit ban on evidence obtained by torture, contending that it would wrongly hint that the government had sanctioned torture at all.

At the Pentagon, Mr. England continued to pursue the idea of adopting Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions in a directive that would set guidelines for prisoner treatment and interrogations. In late August, he called a meeting with some of the vice chiefs of staff of the armed forces and senior uniformed and civilian lawyers to consider the matter.

According to officials who attended the meeting, several of those present spoke in favor of the Geneva provision, including the senior Army lawyer, Maj. Gen. Thomas J. Romig. In an unusual move, Mr. England called for a show of hands. All but two of those present endorsed the provision. But those two officials were among the most influential in the room: the department’s under secretary for intelligence, Stephen A. Cambone, and its general counsel, William J. Haynes II.

Their concerns, which were later echoed by aides to Mr. Cheney, started with the fact that the president had explicitly rejected the Geneva standard in February 2002. They also disputed the idea that Article 3 would necessarily give clear guidance to soldiers, citing what they called its vague prohibition on “outrages upon personal dignity.”

Debate over both the proposed prisoner-treatment directive and an Army field manual for interrogations would go on for another year. For the time being, though, the idea of adopting Common Article 3 directly as the standard of treatment went no further.

There was little high-level discussion of alternatives to Guantánamo, several officials said. But the C.I.A.’s secret prisons had been a subject of rising concern since at least 2004, when unease over the open-ended detentions became evident within the agency and the Supreme Court ruled that detainees held by the United States at Guantánamo — and, by implication, elsewhere around the world — could challenge their detention in American courts.

By late 2005, as reports in The Washington Post and other news media about the secret prisons raised a storm of complaints among foreign governments, the C.I.A. began to move more quickly to transfer some captives to the custody of their own and other foreign governments, officials familiar with the program said.

By the end of 2005, military lawyers also began to review the C.I.A.’s evidentiary files on the high-value detainees to consider their possible prosecution by the military commissions at Guantánamo. Ultimately, military officials concluded that they could make solid cases against the C.I.A. prisoners without unduly exposing the agency’s covert program or even having to depend heavily on statements that had been obtained during highly coercive interrogations, several officials said.

There was also new pressure for action from within the C.I.A. Intelligence officers involved in detention and interrogations were increasingly worried about the legal implications of the program, officials said. Some foreign governments had declined to house covert detention centers, and the furor over those sites created friction with other intelligence agencies, the officials said.

Still, some senior figures in the administration, including Mr. Cheney and his chief of staff, Mr. Addington, remained unconvinced that the C.I.A. program could be made public and its prisoners taken before military commissions while continuing to protect what they saw as a vital intelligence asset, several officials said.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney, Lea Anne McBride, said his office would have no comment on its role in policy deliberations, as did spokesmen for the State Department and the National Security Council.

“The problem fell for some period of time into the too-hard category,” one senior administration official said. “It fell so far into the too-hard category that it was lost from view.”

Interagency meetings on the detention issue with officials just below the cabinet level went around and around for months, officials said. In the late spring, they added, the president’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, began pushing senior officials to agree on options they could present to the president.

Many officials said the most important factor in forcing a new approach was the Supreme Court’s ruling in June that the military commissions set up by the administration could not proceed. That decision, which also upheld the minimum Geneva standards of prisoner treatment as binding law, led the administration to seek Congressional authorization for new tribunals and, some officials said, left the C.I.A.’s interrogation program on even more tenuous ground.

In late July, two officials said, Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides dropped their longstanding concerns about taking custody of the C.I.A. detainees, and Mr. Hadley moved to approve the arrangements for their transfer to Guantánamo.

The two officials said that Mr. Cheney was never entirely persuaded of the wisdom of emptying the C.I.A.’s detention sites and making its interrogation program public, but supported the move when Mr. Bush decided in late August to go ahead.

“The vice president knows the president has made the right decisions to make Americans safer and support the men and women on the front lines in the war on terror who are fighting this brutal enemy,” Mr. Cheney’s spokeswoman, Ms. McBride, said.

The element of the new legislation that raised the sharpest criticism among legal scholars and human rights advocates last week was the scaling back of the habeas corpus right of terrorism suspects to challenge their detention in the federal courts. But in dozens of high-level meetings on detention policy, officials said, that provision was scarcely even discussed.

TIM GOLDEN

http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/fairenough/nyt498.html

IDF Used Cluster Bombs

2006-09-14T23:18:00.000-04:00

When Rockets and Phosphorous Cluster

"In Lebanon, we covered entire villages with cluster bombs, what we did there was crazy and monstrous," testifies a commander in the Israel Defense Forces' MLRS (Multiple Launch Rocket System) unit. Quoting his battalion commander, he said the IDF fired some 1,800 cluster rockets on Lebanon during the war and they contained over 1.2 million cluster bombs. The IDF also used cluster shells fired by 155 mm artillery cannons, so the number of cluster bombs fired on Lebanon is even higher. At the same time, soldiers in the artillery corps testified that the IDF used phosphorous shells, which many experts say is prohibited by international law. According to the claims, the overwhelming majority of the weapons mentioned were fired during the last ten days of the war.

The commander asserted that there was massive use of MLRS rockets despite the fact that they are known to be very inaccurate - the rockets' deviation from the target reaches to around 1,200 meters - and that a substantial percentage do not explode and become mines. Due to these facts, most experts view cluster ammunitions as a "non-discerning" weapon that is prohibited for use in a civilian environment. The percentage of duds among the rockets fired by the U.S. army in Iraq reached 30 percent and the United Nations' land mine removal team in Lebanon claims that the percentage of duds among the rockets fired by the IDF reaches some 40 percent. In light of these figures, the number of duds left behind by the Israeli cluster rockets in Lebanon is likely to reach half a million.

According to the commander, in order to compensate for the rockets' imprecision, the order was to "flood" the area with them. "We have no option of striking an isolated target, and the commanders know this very well," he said. He also stated that the reserve soldiers were surprised by the use of MLRS rockets, because during their regular army service, they were told these are the IDF's "judgment day weapons" and intended for use in a full-scale war.

The commander also said that at least in one case, they were asked to fire cluster rockets toward "a village's outskirts" in the early morning: "They told us that this is a good time because people are coming out of the mosques and the rockets would deter them." In other cases, they fired the rockets at a range of less than 15 kilometers, even though the manufacturer's guidelines state that firing at this range considerably increases the number of duds. The commander further related that during IDF training exercises hardly any live rockets are fired, for fear that they would leave duds behind and fill the IDF's firing grounds with mines.

After being discharged from his reserve duty, the commander sent a letter to Defense Minister Amir Peretz and protested the number of cluster rockets fired in Lebanon, which "perhaps the generals forgot to mention." "As far as the duds are concerned," he wrote, "we have no control over who is hurt. Sooner or later they will explode in people's hands." He has yet to receive a response from the defense minister.

At the same time, soldiers are reporting that they fired phosphorous shells, which are supposed to be used by the IDF for marking or setting fire to areas, in order to start fires in Lebanon. The artillery commander says he saw trucks with phosphorous shells en route to artillery batteries in the North.

A direct hit from a phosphorous shell causes severe burns and a painful death. Around a year ago, there was an international scandal after a television crew presented harsh pictures of the charred bodies of Iraqis injured by phosphorous bombs during the course of the American attack on the city of Fallujah.

International law prohibits the use of weapons that cause "excessive damage and unnecessary suffering," and many experts feel that phosphorous is included in this category. The International Red Cross determined that international law prohibits the use of phosphorous against humans. The American "Book of War," published in 1999, which sets down the rules of war for the American army, states: "The ground war law prohibits the use of phosphorous against human targets." The pact on prohibiting or limiting flammable weapons bans the use of phosphorous against civilian targets and against military targets found amid large civil populations.

The IDF Spokesperson said: "International law does not contain a sweeping ban on the use of cluster bombs. The Conventional Weapons Pact does not stipulate a ban on the use of inflammatory weapons (i.e., phosphorous - M.R.), rather it only offers rules for organizing the use of this weapon. For understandable operational reasons, the IDF will not comment on a detailed listing of the weaponry at its disposal. The IDF uses only methods and weapons that are permitted according to international law. The firing of artillery in general, including the firing of artillery to demolish a target, was initiated in response to firing at the State of Israel only." The defense minister's bureau said in response that it had yet to receive an inquiry on the matter of firing cluster rockets.

By Meron Rapoport

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/761910.html

Gaza Is Dying

2006-09-10T13:37:00.000-04:00

'Gaza Is A Jail. Nobody Is Allowed To
Leave. We Are All Starving Now'

Gaza is dying. The Israeli siege of the Palestinian enclave is so tight that its people are on the edge of starvation. Here on the shores of the Mediterranean a great tragedy is taking place that is being ignored because the world's attention has been diverted by wars in Lebanon and Iraq.

A whole society is being destroyed. There are 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in the most heavily populated area in the world. Israel has stopped all trade. It has even forbidden fishermen to go far from the shore so they wade into the surf to try vainly to catch fish with hand-thrown nets.

Many people are being killed by Israeli incursions that occur every day by land and air. A total of 262 people have been killed and 1,200 wounded, of whom 60 had arms or legs amputated, since 25 June, says Dr Juma al-Saqa, the director of the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City which is fast running out of medicine. Of these, 64 were children and 26 women. This bloody conflict in Gaza has so far received only a fraction of the attention given by the international media to the war in Lebanon.

It was on 25 June that the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was taken captive and two other soldiers were killed by Palestinian militants who used a tunnel to get out of the Gaza Strip. In the aftermath of this, writes Gideon Levy in the daily Haaretz, the Israeli army "has been rampaging through Gaza - there's no other word to describe it - killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately". Gaza has essentially been reoccupied since Israeli troops and tanks come and go at will. In the northern district of Shajhayeh they took over several houses last week and stayed five days. By the time they withdrew, 22 Palestinians had been killed, three houses were destroyed and groves of olive, citrus and almond trees had been bulldozed.

Fuad al-Tuba, the 61-year-old farmer who owned a farm here, said: "They even destroyed 22 of my bee-hives and killed four sheep." He pointed sadly to a field, its brown sandy earth churned up by tracks of bulldozers, where the stumps of trees and broken branches with wilting leaves lay in heaps. Near by a yellow car was standing on its nose in the middle of a heap of concrete blocks that had once been a small house.

His son Baher al-Tuba described how for five days Israeli soldiers confined him and his relatives to one room in his house where they survived by drinking water from a fish pond. "Snipers took up positions in the windows and shot at anybody who came near," he said. "They killed one of my neighbours called Fathi Abu Gumbuz who was 56 years old and just went out to get water."

Sometimes the Israeli army gives a warning before a house is destroyed. The sound that Palestinians most dread is an unknown voice on their cell phone saying they have half an hour to leave their home before it is hit by bombs or missiles. There is no appeal.

But it is not the Israeli incursions alone that are destroying Gaza and its people. In the understated prose of a World Bank report published last month, the West Bank and Gaza face "a year of unprecedented economic recession. Real incomes may contract by at least a third in 2006 and poverty to affect close to two thirds of the population." Poverty in this case means a per capita income of under $2 (£1.06) a day.

There are signs of desperation everywhere. Crime is increasing. People do anything to feed their families. Israeli troops entered the Gaza industrial zone to search for tunnels and kicked out the Palestinian police. When the Israelis withdrew they were replaced not by the police but by looters. On one day this week there were three donkey carts removing twisted scrap metal from the remains of factories that once employed thousands.

"It is the worst year for us since 1948 [when Palestinian refugees first poured into Gaza]," says Dr Maged Abu-Ramadan, a former ophthalmologist who is mayor of Gaza City. "Gaza is a jail. Neither people nor goods are allowed to leave it. People are already starving. They try to live on bread and falafel and a few tomatoes and cucumbers they grow themselves."

The few ways that Gazans had of making money have disappeared. Dr Abu-Ramadan says the Israelis "have destroyed 70 per cent of our orange groves in order to create security zones." Carnations and strawberries, two of Gaza's main exports, were thrown away or left to rot. An Israeli air strike destroyed the electric power station so 55 per cent of power was lost. Electricity supply is now becoming almost as intermittent as in Baghdad.

The Israeli assault over the past two months struck a society already hit by the withdrawal of EU subsidies after the election of Hamas as the Palestinian government in March. Israel is withholding taxes owed on goods entering Gaza. Under US pressure, Arab banks abroad will not transfer funds to the government.

Two thirds of people are unemployed and the remaining third who mostly work for the state are not being paid. Gaza is now by far the poorest region on the Mediterranean. Per capita annual income is $700, compared with $20,000 in Israel. Conditions are much worse than in Lebanon where Hizbollah liberally compensates war victims for loss of their houses. If Gaza did not have enough troubles this week there were protest strikes and marches by unpaid soldiers, police and security men. These were organised by Fatah, the movement of the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, which lost the election to Hamas in January. His supporters marched through the streets waving their Kalashnikovs in the air. "Abu Mazen you are brave," they shouted. "Save us from this disaster." Sour-looking Hamas gunmen kept a low profile during the demonstration but the two sides are not far from fighting it out in the streets.

The Israeli siege and the European boycott are a collective punishment of everybody in Gaza. The gunmen are unlikely to be deterred. In a bed in Shifa Hospital was a sturdy young man called Ala Hejairi with wounds to his neck, legs, chest and stomach. "I was laying an anti-tank mine last week in Shajhayeh when I was hit by fire from an Israeli drone," he said. "I will return to the resistance when I am better. Why should I worry? If I die I will die a martyr and go to paradise."

His father, Adel, said he was proud of what his son had done adding that three of his nephews were already martyrs. He supported the Hamas government: "Arab and Western countries want to destroy this government because it is the government of the resistance."

As the economy collapses there will be many more young men in Gaza willing to take Ala Hejairi's place. Untrained and ill-armed most will be killed. But the destruction of Gaza, now under way, will ensure that no peace is possible in the Middle East for generations to come.

The deadly toll

* After the kidnap of Cpl Gilad Shalit by Palestinians on 25 June, Israel launched a massive offensive and blockade of Gaza under the operation name Summer Rains.

* The Gaza Strip's 1.3 million inhabitants, 33 per cent of whom live in refugee camps, have been under attack for 74 days.

* More than 260 Palestinians, including 64 children and 26 women, have been killed since 25 June. One in five is a child. One Israeli soldier has been killed and 26 have been wounded.

* 1,200 Palestinians have been injured, including up to 60 amputations. A third of victims brought to hospital are children.

* Israeli warplanes have launched more than 250 raids on Gaza, hitting the two power stations and the foreign and Information ministries.

* At least 120 Palestinian structures including houses, workshops and greenhouses have been destroyed and 160 damaged by the Israelis.

* The UN has criticised Israel's bombing, which has caused an estimated $1.8bn in damage to the electricity grid and leaving more than a million people without regular access to drinking water.

* The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem says 76 Palestinians, including 19 children, were killed by Israeli forces in August alone. Evidence shows at least 53 per cent were not participating in hostilities.

* In the latest outbreak of violence, three Palestinians were killed yesterday when Israeli troops raided a West Bank town in search of a wanted militant. Two of those killed were unarmed, according to witnesses.

By Patrick Cockburn in Gaza

09/08/06 "The Independent"

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1372026.ece

Was There Ever Any Doubt

2006-09-08T18:46:00.000-04:00

Senate Panel Finds No Prewar Iraq-Qaeda Link

Saddam Hussein had no relationship with al Qaeda, including Iraq-based guerrilla Abu Musab al Zarqawi, despite claims by President George W. Bush and other administration officials, a Senate report released on Friday said.

The report, one of two newly declassified reports released by the Senate Intelligence Committee, drew on a previously undisclosed October 2005 CIA assessment as Americans prepared to mark the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the United States by al Qaeda.

The reports quickly became part of a political battle on Capitol Hill where Democrats and Republicans are wrestling over national security issues before congressional elections in November.

The other report said the administration chose to provide funding to the Iraqi National Congress, or INC, exile group in 2002 over a warning by the Defense Intelligence Agency that the INC had been penetrated by "hostile intelligence services" and was intent on influencing U.S. policy toward Saddam.

The documents, part of the Senate panel's probe of prewar Iraq intelligence, were issued as Bush seeks to address flagging public support for the Iraq war he views as a central front in the U.S. war on terrorism. They were the latest in a series of investigations into the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Bush launched to counter a threat of weapons of mass destruction that were never found.

Democrats said the data showed that top administration officials, including Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, misled the public to drum up support for war in Iraq by alleging a link between Saddam and the militant network.

"Today's reports show that the administration's repeated allegations of a past, present and future relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq were wrong and intended to exploit the deep sense of insecurity among Americans in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks," said Sen. John Rockefeller of West Virginia, the panel's ranking Democrat.

'UNFOUNDED ALLEGATIONS'

The committee's Republican chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, accused Democrats of presenting their own misleading views.

"The additional views of the Committee's Democrats are little more than a rehashing of the same unfounded allegations they've used for over three years," he said in a statement.

Roberts also expressed misgivings about the 208-page INC report, saying its conclusions were not always supported by underlying fact.

Critics of the 2003 Iraq invasion have long argued the administration used flawed information from the INC to bolster their case for war, while ignoring contradictory intelligence.

Roberts said there was no evidence the INC knowingly provided false information to the administration and described the exile group as having "a minimal role" in prewar U.S. judgments.

Another Democrat, Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, used the report to accuse Bush himself of making a false statement about ties between Saddam and Zarqawi, the one-time al Qaeda leader in Iraq who was killed by U.S. forces in June.

Bush asserted as recently as an August 21 news conference that Saddam had links with Zarqawi.

"The president's statement, made just two weeks ago, is flat-out false," Levin said.
Bush administration officials pointed to supposed links between Saddam and al Qaeda to help justify their case for war before the war.

The CIA report's assessment was similar to the conclusion reached by the bipartisan 9/11 commission, which found in 2004 there had been no "collaborative relationship" between Saddam and al Qaeda.

David Morgan
(Additional reporting by Thomas Ferraro)
Reuters

The Persistence of Illusion

2006-09-08T12:10:00.000-04:00

The Middle East has always been a place where illusion paves the road to disaster. In 1095, Pope Urban's religious mania launched the Crusades, the reverberations of which still echo through the region. In 1915, Winston Churchill's arrogance led to the World War I bloodbath at Gallipoli. In 2003, George Bush's hubris ignited a spiral of chaos and civil war in Iraq.

Illusions once again threaten to plunge the Middle East into catastrophe. The central hallucination this time is that the war in Lebanon was a “proxy war” with the mullahs in Tehran, what one senior Israeli commander has called “Iran's western front.” Behind this hallucination is yet another. According to William O. Beeman, a professor of anthropology and Middle East studies at Brown University, there is “a longstanding U.S. foreign policy myth that believes terrorism cannot exist without state support.”

In short, if Hezbollah exists, it is solely because of Iran. This particular illusion, according to a number of journalists, is behind the carte blanche the White House handed the Israelis during the war in Lebanon (see Stephen Zunes, How Washington Goaded Israel).

Israeli Fallout

As a result of the Lebanon debacle, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's Kadima Party is almost certainly dead. A Dahaf Institute poll found that 63% of Israelis want the Prime Minister out, and 74% want to oust Defense Minister and Labor Party leader Amir Peretz. The latter is busy trying to shift the blame to Israeli Chief of Staff Lt. General Dan Halutz (54% want him to resign) for claiming that Hezbollah could be destroyed from the air.

The army is whispering that the politicians held them back, and the politicians are grumbling that the army mishandled its budget. Olmert is stonewalling a formal inquiry on the war, which almost 70% of the population is demanding, and the reservists are up in arms. After 34 days of war, Hezbollah is intact, and the two soldiers whose capture kicked the whole thing off are still in its hands. Last but not least, the war knocked 1% off Israel's GNP.

The war's outcome is giving some Israelis pause, and there are some interesting straws in the wind. Amir Peretz, for instance, has called for negotiations with the Palestinians. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni says she is willing to “explore” the idea of talks with Syria. Public Security Minister Avi Dichter has gone even further and says Israel should give up the Golan Heights.

It is not clear where these discussions are going. If nothing else, however, the war has energized an Israeli peace movement, one rather more inclusive than such movements in the past.

Islamofascists?

For the Bush administration and its neoconservative allies, the ceasefire is just a break between rounds in the president's war on “Islamofascism.” Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says the United States is “in an emerging third world war.” William Kristol calls the Lebanon war an “act of Iranian aggression” and urges the United States to attack Iranian nuclear sites. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, neocon heavy Max Boot calls for a U.S. attack on Syria.

According to journalist Sidney Blumenthal in Salon, the neocons in the administration, specifically Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Agency Middle East Director Elliott Abrams, have been funneling U.S. intelligence intercepts to the Israelis as part of a plan to target Syria and Iran (see Tom Barry, Hunting Monsters with Elliott Abrams).

Those intercepts were behind the recent House Intelligence Committee report blasting U.S. spy agencies for their reluctance to say that Hezbollah is nothing more than an extension of Iran, that Tehran is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons, and that Iran poses a clear and present danger to the United States.

The author of the House report, Frederick Fleitz, was a former special assistant to current UN Ambassador John Bolton. Bolton was a key figure in gathering the now-discredited intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

According to Blumenthal, Cheney and his Middle East aide David Wurmser have dusted off a 1996 document called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” The study was authored by Wurmser, ex-Pentagon official Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle, disgraced former head of the Defense Policy Board.

The “Break”—originally written for then-Likud prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—advocates that the Israelis, with support from the United States, dump the 1992 Oslo Agreement with the Palestinians, target Syria and Iraq, and redesign the Middle East.

A key ingredient in the document, and one central to current administration thinking, is that since terrorism is state-supported, the war on terrorism can be won by changing regimes. Hence, to defeat Hezbollah, you have to overthrow Syria and Iran.

Iran's Non-Role

Brown University's Beeman argues that Iran has no direct control over Hezbollah. While Iran does provide the organization some $200 million a year, that money “makes up a fraction of Hezbollah's operating budget.” The major source of the group's funding is the “sakat,” or the tithe required of all Muslims.

Georgetown University professor Daniel Byman, writing in Foreign Affairs, says that Iran “lacks the means to force significant change in the [Hezbollah] movement and its goals. It [Iran] has no real presence on the ground in Lebanon and a call to disarm or cease resistance would likely cause Hezbollah's leadership, or at least its most militant elements, to simply sever ties with Tehran's leadership.”

If a wider war is to be avoided, argues Christopher Layne of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, the United States “will have to engage in direct diplomacy with Syria and Iran—both of which have important stakes in the outcome of security issues in the Middle East, including those involving Israel's relations with the Palestinians and with Hezbollah in Lebanon.”

Recently a group of 21 former generals, admirals, ambassadors, and high ranking security advisers proposed exactly that, calling on the Bush administration to “engage immediately in direct talks with the government of Iran without preconditions.” The group warned that “an attack on Iran would have disastrous consequences for security in the region and U.S. forces in Iraq. It would inflame hatred and violence in the Middle East and among Muslims everywhere.”

Just as Middle East illusions have done for almost a millennium.

Conn Hallinan is an analyst for FPIF.

Editor: John Feffer, IRC

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3481

Why Do We Hate Them?

2006-08-19T14:27:00.000-04:00

Fear and Loathing in the Occident

Islamophobia is a mental and spiritual affliction. And our Western ruling elites bear the responsibility for inflicting it upon the psyches of the masses.

Now that the Stalinist/Maoist regimes have collapsed or evolved toward capitalism and no fascist states with imperial ambitions exist (besides the United States and its few allies), the American Empire needed to find a new "enemy” to replace Stalinists and Nazis. Much of the soft power employed by the leaders of America’s “top down democracy” stems from psychological manipulation of “the mob”. Mobilization of the masses against a common enemy “threatening the very existence of the American Way” has long been a staple in the United States’ ruling elites’ ongoing push to monopolize the world’s wealth, power, and prestige.

And who better to vilify than Islamic people? Many are dark-skinned and live in developing nations, meaning their lives are inconsequential in the prevailing moral calculus of the West. The Middle East is predominately Islamic, its sands are oozing with crude oil, and it is home to Israel. From the perspective of the Empire, what better region to target than the Middle East?

And whether one believes that 9/11 was a false flag operation perpetrated by the US government or the work of radical Islamic Fundamentalists, the members of the Bush Regime obviously shed their crocodile tears publicly while privately celebrating the event as their Pearl Harbor. 3,000 civilian deaths and the demolition of a powerful symbol of the Western “value” of avaricious Capitalism whipped the American public into a furor against the “evil Muslims” who “hate our freedoms”.

Never mind the fact that the United States and Israel have undertaken a nearly unparalleled program of military aggression and ethnic cleansing throughout the Middle East since the formation of the illegitimate colonial nation in Palestine. Given the premises for founding Israel, someone needs to remind Great Britain and the United States that it is incumbent upon them to create a homeland for homosexuals and Romani people. After all, they were also Holocaust victims and are people without a nation. And like the Palestinians, the other inhabitants of the Middle East are more akin to animals than human beings. So why not establish two more colonies on their land?

On August 13, Sixty Minutes aired a segment that revealed a great deal about Islamophobia and the role the corporate media plays in its proliferation.

In his recent open letter to Mike Wallace, Michael K. Smith declared:

Your interview with Iranian Prime Minister Ahmadinejad was a disgrace to the journalistic profession. You began with the condescending manner of a school principal lecturing the class clown for immature behavior and squandered the entire interview on hypocritically accusatory questions. If gall were an Olympic sport, you'd take the Gold Medal.

Michael made some fine points throughout his letter. However, I opine that he was too generous when he called Wallace’s vituperative verbal assault an interview. What I witnessed was Mike Wallace, the Ugly American. Brimming with contempt, impatience, hubris, and belligerence, he more closely resembled the Grand Inquisitor than a journalist.

Did Wallace truly fail to grasp that he was acting as an apologist and cheerleader for bellicose, heartless, and ruthless perpetrators of war crimes on behalf of Israel, and thus is a Zionist (as Ahmadinejad suggested)? Through its grossly biased coverage of the “War on Terrorism” and mindless perpetuation of the inane myth that Israel has the right to annihilate an unlimited number of civilians to protect its “right to exist”, CBS News has joined the squad of corporate media cheerleaders which has been shamelessly complicit in the Empire’s egregious crimes against humanity. I submit that one can be a Zionist and a journalist. Mike Wallace is living proof.

Yet in spite of Wallace’s tenacious efforts, the “devil incarnate”, Ahmadinejad, remained composed. At times Ahmadinejad seemed to thoroughly enjoy Wallace’s obvious “flustration” in attacking him from what has become an absurdly untenable position, both morally and logically. For those of us who don’t believe the Western media fairy tale that the United States is a force for good engaged in a noble struggle in its bid to rid the world of the evil of Islam and defend Israel’s “right to exist”, Wallace’s ill-fated attempt to expose the malevolence of the “enemy” was quite entertaining.

Just as Wallace scrambled madly in a hopeless attempt to prevail intellectually in his interrogation of Ahmadinejad, the debt-ridden, aging American Empire and its allies are flailing wildly in a desperate attempt to claim military victory in the Middle East. And like Ahmadinejad, those who comprise the resistance to occupation and exploitation in the Middle East are facing down their occupiers with a deft persistence, filled with a confidence born from the knowledge that recent history has not been kind to imperial invaders facing a people determined to expel them (i.e. Vietnam, Lebanon, and Iraq).

In the perverse worldview of the Neocons, Israel, and AIPAC, Iran is considered to be a part of the “Axis of Evil”. Since Wallace championed the cause of the “benevolent” United States in his Sixty Minutes interrogation of the leader of one of the members of the “Axis”, it is instructive to consider the “evils” Iran and resistance groups like Hamas and Hezbollah have perpetrated.

While various resistance groups in the Middle East have certainly committed war crimes by killing civilians, the “leader of the free world” and its counterpart in Palestine have annihilated hundreds of thousands more civilians than have the so-called “terrorists”.

Yes, militant Fundamentalist Islamic individuals wield much of the power in Iran. But let’s put on our thinking caps to discern how that situation evolved. In 1979 hard-line anti-American Islamic clerics assumed control of the Iranian government when they ousted the Shah (the corrupt US puppet who tortured and killed tens of thousands of Iranian “dissidents” during his reign of terror). Ironically, the Iranian government the United States loves to hate exists because the CIA and MI6 facilitated the Shah taking power from Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. The significance? Mossadegh was a democratically-elected secular prime minister who had had the audacity to nationalize the oil industry because the British oil companies were grossly exploiting the Iranian people. By acting in typical fashion (by taking out a populist leader and replacing him with a vicious tyrant), the United States provided an incubator for powerful anti-American sentiment. Thus the United States and Great Britain are responsible for the theocracy in Iran which they fear and despise.

Corporate media pundits like Michelle Malkin and Anne Coulter are the vanguards in spreading pernicious distortions which fan the rapidly spreading emotional flames of fear, prejudice, and hatred comprising Islamophobia. Two of the most disturbing and inflammatory perversions of the truth the Western media entities disseminate are that all adherents of the Islamic faith are radical fundamentalists and that Sharia Law is universally harsh and grossly inferior to the Empire’s system (which provides “liberty and justice for all”).

Just as Christianity encompasses a broad spectrum of people with varying ways of practicing and expressing their faith, the Islamic world is filled with human beings who have diverse ways of expressing their religious beliefs. There are liberal, moderate, and Fundamentalist Muslims. And surprising as it may seem, most practitioners of Fundamentalist Islam, like most Fundamentalist Christians, are essentially peaceful individuals. In fact, a Muslim truly following the tenets of Islam practices moderation and tolerance. Many Muslims are no more willing to strap plastic explosives to their belts for a suicide mission than most Christians would be to bomb an abortion clinic. There are radicals from both religions, but they are very much in the minority.

Another lie deeply embedded in the barrage of communications we receive from the Western corporate media is that the United States and its allies are morally superior to the “evil Muslims”. One aspect of Islam they offer as “proof” of this faulty conclusion is that many Islamic nations incorporate Sharia into their legal systems. While Sharia can involve harsh and rigid forms of justice, it exists to varying degrees in the many Muslim nations around the globe. Judiciaries in Islamic nations manifest the influence of Sharia in ways that span the spectrum from extremely dogmatic to highly secular and liberal.

While the Western media’s blistering criticism of the more draconian actions of some Islamic nations (i.e. Iran’s execution of teenagers) is definitely warranted, the Empire has a great deal of house-cleaning to do before it is in a position to preach to other nations on human rights issues.

Here are but a few recent examples of the United States’ own flagrant human rights abuses:

1. carrying out quite a number of its own executions in a manner recently discovered to inflict a great deal of suffering on the victim

2. routinely torturing and suspending justice for suspected “enemy combatants”

3. funding the Israeli Apartheid and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians

4. occupying a nation where it has killed over a million Iraqi civilians since the Gulf War invasion (through brutal economic sanctions and military actions).

5. funding the Israeli devastation of Lebanon

6. supporting numerous ruthless and murderous regimes (as long as they are friendly to US corporations)

7. having cynically embraced Saddam Hussein as an ally (knowing of his crimes against humanity) when it furthered US interests and invading Iraq preemptively to topple him when he ceased to be useful.

8. having kept the House of Saud in power for years despite its harsh practice of Sharia (i.e. thieves’ hands are severed and adulterers are stoned).

9. maintaining the largest prison population in the world through a legal system so unjust that 50% of those incarcerated are Black when Blacks comprise 14% of the general population.

10. engaging in numerous outright massacres of civilians (i.e. Haditha, Fallujah)

In light of the above, how long will it be before a significant portion of the Muslim population falls prey to an extreme prejudice against all Westerners called Anglo-Christophobia? Let’s hope it does not happen any time soon.

Speaking of Christians (at least the Fundamentalist ones), their demonization of Islam is actually rather amusing. Christian Fundamentalists share more common ground with the extreme members of the Islamic faith than they perhaps realize. Some Muslim nations treat homosexuality as a crime. Abortion is illegal in virtually every circumstance throughout much of the Middle East. Separation of church and state does not exist in nations like Iran. Implementation of the death penalty is common in the Middle East. How can men like John Hagee reconcile their cognitive dissonance in advocating war against Iran, a model of the theocracy they strive to implement in the United States?

CBS, Mike Wallace and the rest of the United States’ corporate media can continue to do the Empire’s bidding from now until the world comes to an end (which may not be as far away as I make it sound if sanity and humanity do not prevail over greed, ignorance, and hatred). However, their nearly endless bombardment of intelligently crafted lies readily distributed to nearly every corner of the globe are powerless to alter the truth.

In truth, Israeli and American lives are no more precious than those of the Arab and Persian human beings populating the Middle East. And neither the United States/Israel/Great Britain nor the nations and groups comprising the resistance in the Middle East are innocent of the deep transgression of murdering innocents. Each nation or group also commits human rights abuses against its own people in some fashion. However, Western exploiters and invaders are culpable of far more frequent and grievous war crimes than the Middle Easterners who are defending themselves, their resources, and their people.

If the majority of the human beings controlling the corporate media had a shred of moral decency they would focus their efforts on informing their viewers, listeners, and readers of the vast number of war crimes committed by Israel and the United States. They would start portraying the “terrorists” as the resistors of oppression they truly are. They would make a distinction between the various Middle Eastern resistance groups’ legitimate attacks on their occupiers’ militaries and the war crimes they commit against civilians. And they would devote most of their remaining substantial resources to the inundation of news consumers with stories, photos and video footage depicting the tragic and gruesome civilian suffering and death.

As it is, the Western corporate media shamelessly serve the Neocons by perpetuating a virtually endless cycle of hatred and violence. They incite and feed Islamophobia and they fabricate a plethora of false justifications for the malevolent actions of Israel and the United States. But then in a fascist nation, corporations are wedded with the state, militarism is the state’s primary focus, scapegoats and enemies are essential, and the function of the Fourth Estate is to provide the propaganda to control the masses.

Just imagine if the mainstream media in the United States actually began fulfilling its role (in what is ostensibly a free society) and acted as a check on our government rather than its accomplice. If more Americans knew more truth, instead of hating Islamic people and pushing to intensify the war in the Middle East, the masses would be demanding that reason, justice, and peace prevail. They would demand that the United States completely withdraw its military from the Middle East and leave Israel to stand on its own, which would force the Israelis to finally settle the Palestinian issue in a just manner and to cooperate with their neighbors as equals.

If the major media entities of the West were living up to their responsibilities as members of the Fourth Estate, perhaps 3 year old Ali Ahmad Hashim of Qana would not have been bombed to death, the members of the Ghalia family would not have been obliterated on a Gaza beach, 76 year old wheel-chair bound amputee Abdul Hamid Hassan Ali would not have been massacred at Haditha, Cindy Sheehan would not be grieving for a son lost to a war of imperial aggression, and Reuven Levy of Haifa would not have been annihilated by a rocket attack as he was doing his job for Israel Railways.

I am not holding my breath waiting for money-driven enablers of war like Rupert Murdoch to start heeding the advice of Jiminy Cricket. However, I will not succumb to their assault of malicious distortions. I refuse to fear, hate, or consider myself at war with 20% of the world’s population simply because they choose to follow the teachings of the Qur’an.

Islamophobia is an intellectual and spiritual malignancy. Reason and humanity are the cures.

Jason Miller is a 39 year old sociopolitical essayist with a degree in liberal arts and an extensive self-education (derived from an insatiable appetite for reading). He welcomes responses at willpowerful@hotmail.com or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.

Be Very, Very Skeptical

2006-08-19T14:23:00.000-04:00

The Timing is Political

We should be sceptical about this alleged plot, and wary of politicians who seek to benefit

Nine days on, nobody has been charged with any crime. For there to be no clear evidence yet on something that was "imminent" and would bring "mass murder on an unbelievable scale" is, to say the least, peculiar. A 24th person, arrested amid much fanfare on Tuesday, was quietly released without charge the following day.

Media analysis has been full of information from police and security sources. By and large journalists are honourable in this kind of reporting. Their sources, unfortunately, are not - viz the non-existent ricin, the Forest Gate "chemical weapons vest", or Jean Charles de Menezes leaping the barriers. Unlike the herd of security experts, I have had the highest security clearance; I have done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis; and I have been inside the spin machine. And I am very sceptical about the story that has been spun.

None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not have passports. It could be pretty difficult to convince a jury that these individuals were about to go through with suicide bombings, whatever they bragged about on the net.

What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for more than a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.

Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information from people desperate to stop or avert torture. What you don't get is the truth.

We also have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing arrests the weekend before they were made. Why? Both in domestic trouble, they longed for a chance to change the story. The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a chance. Comparisons with 9/11 were all over front pages.

And we have the appalling political propaganda of John Reid, the home secretary, warning us all in advance of the evil that threatens us and complaining that some people "don't get" why we have to abandon traditional liberties.

We will now never know if any of those arrested would have gone on to make a bomb or buy a plane ticket. Most do not fit the "loner" profile you would expect. As they were all under surveillance, and on airport watch lists, there could have been little danger in letting them proceed closer to maturity: that is what we would have done with the IRA.

In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. More than 1,000 British Muslims have been arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, but only 12% have been charged. That is harassment on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% were acquitted. Most of the few convictions - just over 2% of arrests - are nothing to do with terrorism, but some minor offence the police happened upon while trawling through the lives they have wrecked.

Plainly, Islamist terrorism does exist. But its growth is encouraged by our adherence to neocon foreign policy, by our support for appalling regimes abroad, and by our trampling on the rights of Muslims in the UK. Now David Cameron has joined Blair and Reid in the rush to benefit politically from the fear thus engendered. Be very wary of politicians who seek to benefit from terror.

Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical.

Craig Murray, who was posted to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004, is the author of Murder in Samarkand - A British Ambassador's Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror - www.craigmurray.co.uk

Court To Bush !No Can Do!

2006-08-18T10:55:00.000-04:00

Wiretap Ruling Affirms That Presidents Aren't Monarchs

For the past five years, the Bush administration has operated as if the horrific events of 9/11 not only changed fundamental aspects of national security and public safety, but also changed the very nature of government.

President Bush has unilaterally declared what parts of new laws he wishes to enforce. He has created military tribunals unauthorized by Congress. And, perhaps most ominously, he has authorized eavesdropping on phone calls to and from the USA without court orders.

Bush has done these things by simply asserting that the powers of the presidency enumerated in Article II of the Constitution — particularly the clause making him the "Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy" — are much more sweeping than previously imagined. In short, he has acted like a king.

Fortunately, the courts have begun to rein in his royal ambitions. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the military tribunals. And on Thursday, federal Judge Anna Diggs Taylor struck down the warrantless surveillance program, finding it to be a violation of the First and Fourth Amendments and the principle of separation of powers. "There are no hereditary Kings in America," she wrote.

The ruling by Taylor, who was appointed by President Carter, is far from the final word. The wiretapping program will continue while the administration appeals. It is not hard to see other courts ruling differently by saying that the plaintiffs, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, should not have been given standing to bring the case because they could not show they were harmed by the eavesdropping.

But the ruling does undermine Bush's main argument — that the program is constitutional because the administration says it is constitutional. Taylor gives little credence to this argument, as one might expect from a representative of the judicial branch, the place where questions of constitutionality are properly resolved.

Since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was adopted in 1978, presidents have had an effective and constitutional way to speedy court approval for surveillance. FISA even allows for retroactive approval in urgent investigations.

If this law is overly restrictive or somehow unequal to the task of combating today's global terror threat, the president can and should go to Congress to make the case for new legislation. Given the mood of the country and the continuing threat exemplified by the alleged airline bombing plot in Britain last week, Congress would surely make addressing the problem a priority.

By ignoring the law, and making specious arguments that powers contained in Article II make the president virtually unaccountable to either the courts or Congress, the president shows contempt for the other branches and exposes his determination to concentrate power within his own — with no particular gain for the war on terrorism.

Much has changed since terrorists rammed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But one thing that has not is that America is a constitutional democracy with checks and balances. A ruling such as Thursday's is a useful and forceful affirmation of that.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-08-17-our-view_x.htm

"Look What You've Done!"

2006-08-17T20:29:00.000-04:00

AIPAC Congratulates Itself on the Slaughter in Lebanon

"My fellow American," Howard Friedman, President of AIPAC, begins his letter of July 30 to friends and supporters of AIPAC, "Look what you've done"! After warning that "Israel is fighting a pivotal war for its life," by which he means Israel's wanton slaughter and all-out destruction in Lebanon, Freiedman condemns "the expected chorus of international condemnation of Israel's actions" and Europe's call for "a cease-fire immediately." Then he exults: "only ONE nation in the world came out and flatly declared: Let Israel finish the job. . That nation is the United States of America--and the reason it had such a clear, unambiguous view of the situation is YOU and the rest of America Jewry." (All emphases in the original here and below.) Here I must take issue with President Friedman since I bet that most Jewish Americans, in contrast to the AIPAC crowd, were horrified by the slaughter in Lebanon. In fact if anyone other than President Friedman wrote this, he would be accused of fabricating a Jewish plot and labeled a nutty conspiracy theorist and scurrilous anti-semite.)

"How do we do it"? President Friedman asks a little further on. The answer is "decades of long hard work which never ends." Not only is it hard work--but it's eternal. However, President Friedman is not content with generalities and gives us some of AIPAC's trade secrets. Here are two notables:

"AIPAC meets with every candidate running for Congress. These candidates receive in-depth briefings to help them completely understand the complexities of Israel's predicament and that of the Middle East as a whole. We even ask each candidate to author a 'position paper' on their views of the U.S.-Israel relationship--so it's clear where they stand on the subject." (Would it not be great to see these "position papers"? I wonder how many candidates would release them? And what do the candidates get for all this effort? A pat on the back?)

"Members of Congress, staffers and administration officials have come to rely on AIPACs memos. They are VERY busy people and they know that they can count on AIPAC for clear-eyed analysis.. We present this information in concise form to elected officials. The information and analyses are impeccable--after all our reputation is at stake. This results in policy and legislation that make up Israel's lifeline." (Another way to read this is that the pea-brained hillbillies who make up most of the Congress can be led by the nose if the memos are simple enough. Testimony to this fact enters my mailbox, as I write, in the form of a must-read interview with Noam Chomsky, which details just how distorted the discussion of Israel and the war on Lebanon has become in the U.S.)

President Friedman's letter continues with more headliners: "Unfortunately, our work has just begun"! "Hizballah must be defeated." And finally, "The war is a diversion"!!!! This last section argues that the war in Lebanon is a "distraction," to "divert attention away from Iran's nuclear weapons program"! (In case you haven't noticed President Friedman loves exclamation points, which leads one to wonder whether a good dose of lithium might not be in order.) But this "analysis' is hopelessly confused since Israel started the war on Lebanon using a minor border skirmish as an excuse - as Chomsky points out in the interview alluded to above. It leaves one wondering about AIPAC's analyses. Are they "clear-eyed" as Friedman claims, or wild-eyed?

President Friedman closes with the exhortation: "Now is the time for us, American Jews, to stand up and tell our elected officials that they must demand Iran halt its pursuit of atomic arms." In other words, next stop Iran if AIPAC can swing it. And in that lies a great danger. The Bush administration is losing ever more of its base and only the neocon establishment and AIPAC remain securely in its camp. (Even some of the born-agains are deserting.) With the November elections coming, Rove and Bush desperately need AIPAC support, and so they may be even more susceptible than usual to its demands for going after Iran. Indeed this is a dangerous time.

John Walsh can be reached at john.endwar@gmail.com.

He thanks President Friedman for much of the material in this article, which is taken directly from his latest fundraising letter to AIPAC supporters and members.

http://www.counterpunch.com/walsh08162006.html

The Failures Of The Antiwar Movement, Summer ’06

2006-08-09T12:32:00.000-04:00

Summer is quickly winding down. President Bush is off to Crawford for his usual R&R. Cindy Sheehan, who just purchased a piece of land near the Bush ranch, is setting up camp in hopes of drawing Bush out from his dark quarters and into the light. The war in Iraq, even though it’s bloodier than ever, has taken a back seat to the crisis in Lebanon, where Israel has opted to target and kill innocent civilians to brandish Hezbollah. Conflict in the Middle East is worse than it was just one year ago.

The only visible opposition to all this madness here in the US is Cindy Sheehan and her followers. If it wasn’t for her bravery and commitment it’s certain the antiwar movement would still be sitting here without a voice or a conscious. But for all the wonderful things Sheehan has done for us, I still don’t think she understands the importance of breaking with the Democratic Party -- the two-faced warmongers that they are.

Granted, Sheehan doesn’t support the warmongers. She hates Hillary Clinton and her West Coast apparition Dianne Feinstein, both of whom want to “stay the course” in Iraq and support Israeli aggression at all costs. But frankly, Clinton and Feinstein, just two of the Democrats Sheehan denounces, are easy to dislike. They are feckless, trigger-happy and exceedingly corrupt. If they called themselves Republicans their constituents wouldn’t even consider voting them into office. The “D” next to their names is their only saving grace.

In Clinton’s Senate re-election campaign, Sheehan has opted to put her weight behind Jonathan Tasini, a progressive Democrat who is doing all he can to change the path of the Democratic Party. But Tasini is a dud. Not because he isn’t right on the issues, but because he’s waging his battle against the establishment from inside the party. And like so many do-gooders before him, Tasini will end up failing with little to show for his efforts but a few campaign buttons and news clippings.

Sheehan certainly should have known better, for Tasini is playing in a rigged match. Here’s an example: The Tasini campaign has been hoping all along that they could land a debate with Hillary before the primary vote in September. It seems to make sense. He got on the Democratic ballot with ample signatures and is even polling in the double digits. But, as one might expect, Tasini (much like Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan in years past) will never step into the ring to debate Hillary Clinton.

NY1, the New York City TV affiliate has offered to host a debate between Hillary Clinton and Jonathan Tasini at Pace University in late August, but has opted not to as Tasini has yet to raise $500,000. Tasini’s camp has cried foul. But what can you expect from a Party that continually turns its back on its grassroots? They never wanted a debate to begin with. Tasini, whether the majority of Democrats agree with him or not, will never pose any genuine threat to the party brass as long as he remains a Democrat himself. That threat will only blossom when his following, like Howard Dean’s and Dennis Kucinich’s before him, up and leave the Democratic Party which refuses to represent them, let alone hear their pleas.

Tasini should have seen it coming. NY1 is owned by Time Warner, who just happens to support Hillary Clinton and has even given her campaign over $100,000. Time Warner clearly has their own reasons for not broadcasting a debate between Hillary Clinton and her well-intentioned opponent.

And this gets to the heart of why Cindy Sheehan and other antiwar activists shouldn’t support Tasini or other Democratic reformers.

Thinking a progressive Democrat can ruffle the feathers of a party bigwig in the primaries is like betting on Shoeless Joe Jackson to reappear in an Iowa cornfield this summer. It ain’t going to happen (and no, Ned “I support Israel” Lamont doesn’t count). And after the September primary vote, which Hillary will easily walk away with, Tasini’s bid for US Senate will be over. Most New Yorkers will not have had a chance to vote for his candidacy because the Democratic primary is a closed primary. Meanwhile all his money and support could have been going to a genuine antiwar candidate who will be on the ballot in November when it matters most, like Green candidate Howie Hawkins.

But I’m afraid Cindy Sheehan and the rest of the antiwar movement are missing an important opportunity to challenge Hillary Clinton as she makes her way toward the White House in 2008 because of their uncritical support for Jonathan Tasini. And I ask, how many times will we have to be let down before we realize that working with the Democrats only impairs our movement against the war?

By Joshua Frank

09 August, 2006
Countercurrents.org

http://www.countercurrents.org/us-frank090806.htm

Joshua Frank, author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, edits http://www.BrickBurner.org

Moral Bankruptcy of the West

2006-08-08T01:36:00.000-04:00

Israel's Latest Invasion of Lebanon and Western Culpability

"The current events in the Occupied Palestine and Lebanon once again have shown the utter moral bankruptcy of the West and its leadership, especially of the USA and the UK. Hypocrisy is its hallmark. The West can preach equality, liberty, democracy and human rights, but they truly don’t mean them when it comes to vast majority of non-whites."

It should be quite obvious by now that Israel’s latest invasion of Gaza and Lebanon had very little to do with rescuing her fallen soldiers. As I write, the rogue state, run by some of the worst war-criminals of our time, has killed some 750 unarmed Lebanese civilians - mostly women and children, destroyed mosques, bridges, roads, houses, schools, hospitals and much of the infra-structure of southern half of Lebanon. As in 1996, the terrorist state has massacred scores of civilians in Qana this past weekend (July 30, 2006).

Israel has bombed Red Cross center and ambulances, and a UN observation post killing 4 observers. She has displaced a million people inside the country, some of whom are forced to take shelters in even prisons. Infants have been forcibly separated from their parents, and the elderly from their care-taking children. Relief supplies are difficult to get to the internally displaced refugees. Nothing is immune from Israel’s bombing campaign.

If a small fraction of these crimes were to be committed by any invading state, in contravention to international laws, Christ-loving Bush and Blair and their European friends in the NATO would be screaming aloud demanding cease-fire, failing which they would threaten the invading nation with all kinds of actions - UN sanctions, embargo and war. But when it comes to crimes of Israel, these western warlords are her greatest cheer-leaders and are insanely, as if demon-possessed, unperturbed by gruesome killings and massive destruction, wreaked by the pariah state. Like psychopathic and megalomaniac serial killers, they want to see more Muslim blood, more destruction, literally hell on earth and not cease-fire, because to them Muslim lives and properties are cheap and expendable. What a display of compassionate conservatism by Bush and Blair!

As Michael Schure, an ex-CIA analyst and the foremost expert on al-Qaeda, has said, Bush and Blair through their both overt and covert supports of such monumental crimes against Muslims have repeatedly shown that they are the worst enemies of Muslims. They have given credence to everything that their adversaries -- conveniently depicted in the West as the ‘bad’ guys, the so-called terrorists -- have been saying about the West. No bones about it. Truly, it is not OBL and al-Zawahiri that is radicalizing Muslims throughout the world, but these two white-collar Christian warlords that epitomize evil and hypocrisy. With world leaders like these, who needs OBL to bring the Armageddon on earth?

Exchange of prisoners between contending parties is not new. It takes place all the time. Even Israel has, in the past, negotiated such exchanges. Moreover, the demand of Hizbullah and Hamas to exchange captured Israeli soldiers for Muslims prisoners held by Israel is justified given the fact that it is Israel that for decades has been holding thousands of Palestinian prisoners and hundreds of Lebanese citizens -- many of whom are women, children and (even) infants -- some literally kidnapped.

Remember that although Israel was forced to withdraw from southern Lebanon in 2000, some 22 years after its invasion, she continued to hold onto the Sheba Farms in defiance of UN Security Council resolution 425, and refused the release of 300 Lebanese prisoners including a number of Hizbullah leaders. Israel also refused to handover to the Lebanese government the map of land mines planted in south Lebanon. She continued to violate the air, water and land sovereignty of Lebanon. Even the plea of Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora with the Bush Administration to pressure Israel did not produce any result. So, when all the options for a peaceful resolution of these legitimate concerns were balked at by the Zionist regime, Hizbullah captured two Israeli soldiers when they violated Lebanese sovereignty on July 12.

Like any honest dealer, Hizbullah promptly called for the exchange of prisoners. Unfortunately, Israel does not care about the fate of those soldiers. She used the event as a pretext for something more sinister, something that remained unfulfilled from the Zionist blueprint for six-decade long history of annexation and annihilation, massacre and manipulation – all sanctioned as ‘kosher’ acts by her goy western patrons. The current murderous campaign of Israel inside Lebanon cannot, therefore, be grasped without an understanding of statements of its founding fathers -- all conniving individuals, if not homicidal terrorists, some later to be honored as ministers and presidents in the pariah state of Israel.

In 1919, the World Zionist Organization submitted to the Versailles Peace Conference, held near Paris its official plan for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. The submitted map included the southern part of Lebanon to the Litani River, the Syrian Golan Heights, and the West and East banks of the Jordan River. -

Theodore Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, said of his negotiation with the German Chancellor: "He asked what territory we wanted to have, whether as far north as Beirut or even beyond that. I said: We will ask for what we need - more immigrants, the more land." (The Complete Diaries of Theodore Herzl, p. 701) That was probably in late 19th or early 20th century, before his death. Now let us see what the founder of Zionist state of Israel, David Ben Gurion, wrote in his diary on May 21, 1947: "The Achilles heel of the Arab coalition is the Lebanon. Muslim supremacy in this country is artificial and can be easily overthrown. A Christian state ought to be set up there, with its southern frontier on the river Litani. We would sign a treaty of alliance with the state. Thus, when we have broken the strength of the Arab legion and bombed Amman, we could wipe out Trans-Jordan; after that Syria could fall. And if Egypt still dared to make war on us, we would bomb Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo. We should thus end the war and would have paid to Egypt, Assyria and Chaldea on behalf of our ancestors."[1] He also said, “The present map of Palestine was drawn by the British mandate. The Jewish people have another map which our youth and adults should strive to fulfill -- From the Nile to the Euphrates."

Moshe Dayan told the Times of London (June 25, 1969) that, "Our fathers had reached the frontiers which were recognized in Partition Plan. Our generation reached the frontiers of 1949. Now the Six-day generation (referring to those who participated in 1967 war) has managed to reach Suez, Jordan and the Golan Heights. This is not the end. After the present cease-fire lines, there will be new ones. They will extend beyond Jordan - perhaps to Lebanon and perhaps to Central Syria as well."

From the sample of statements of Zionist leaders, shared above, it is not difficult to fathom why Israeli Prime Minister Olmert preferred invasion of Lebanon over negotiation to exchange prisoners. Israel has always been a colonial enterprise that thrives on opportunities for practicing state-run terrorism and colonization against Arabs.[2] The capture of Israeli soldiers provides that criminal justification to destroy and slaughter, let alone an opportunity to set up a client state in the plundered territory that would safeguard Israel’s so-called inalienable rights to intervene. Invasion comes rather easy with Israeli warlords. To these hawks, Barak’s 2000 pullout from the ‘Security zone’ was a mistake and needed to be corrected. They want a ‘Buffer zone.’

Taking advantage of civil war inside Lebanon, arisen out of power struggle between various Lebanese factions and foreign meddling, Israel occupied south Lebanon in March 1978. She withdrew in June after transferring control of the territories to her surrogate Christian South Lebanese Army (SLA). In 1981, fight broke out between Israeli-supported Christians and Syrian forces, and Beirut was heavily bombed by Israel. In June 1982 in a genocidal mood, Ariel Sharon’s Israel Defense Forces (IDF) invaded Lebanon to eliminate the PLO. According to western analysts nearly 18,000 Muslims were killed, about a million rendered homeless, another half-a-million awaiting death in Israeli seized territories of southern Lebanon.

After destroying much of Beirut and southern Lebanon, and aiding in the massacre of thousands of refugees in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps, the IDF partially evacuated from occupied Lebanon (holding onto what it described as the 'southern security zone' that ran along Israel's northern border and extended 18 miles deep into Lebanese territories in the south) and let multi-national forces from U.S., Britain, France and Italy to enter into the arena. These so-called "peace keepers", instead of really preserving and working for peace as neutral arbiters, took the side of Israel and her surrogate forces among the Falangists. Worse still, the U.S. Sixth Fleet fired mortars that killed hundreds of Muslim civilians, destroyed villages, towns and mountains that were lived by the Shi’a and Druze.

Such atrocities and betrayals brought about the emergence of resistance fighters of Hizbullah, born in families of the Shi’ite victims and out of the ashes of south Lebanon. As the USA and France acted more like proxies to pro-Israel forces in the region, the U.S. Embassy (April 1983), and French and U.S. Army barracks (October 23, 1983) were attacked by these resistance fighters killing nearly 300. By the time the Civil War ended, Hizbullah, with its militia, refused to disarm in fighting the Israeli presence in the security zone. The Lebanese government with a weak military was in no position to contest IDF and found it prudent to overlook Hizbullah’s efforts to securing the southern border. Thus, the latter had a de facto approval from its constituency. [A poll conducted by the Arab-American Institute as recently as April of 2006 showed widespread support for Hizbullah. Only 6% of Lebanese people agreed to a disarmament of the group.] [3]

Hizbullah also did a superb job building clinics, hospitals and schools, paving roads and constructing homes, and rebuilding houses and other infrastructure in war-torn Lebanon. These activities earned them immense popularity in the south and made them a major political and social force to be reckoned with.

The presence of the IDF and its surrogate SLA in the south was a source of constant irritation for Lebanon and her people, and led to hostilities with Hizbullah and the Lebanese forces. In April 1996, during Israeli "Grapes of Wrath" campaign to destroy Hizbullah guerrillas, Israeli artillery gunners shelled a United Nations base in Qana, east of the port city of Tyre, killing more than 100 civilians sheltering there. That massacre at Qana galvanized the western leaders to arrange a ceasefire.

Fighting between the Hizbullah and the IDF resumed again in June of 1999. In May 2000, under the new Prime Minister Ehud Barak, the IDF started to gradually withdraw from southern Lebanon turning over its positions to its ally - the SLA. However, amidst incessant pressure from the Hizbullah, SLA collapsed, leading Israel to accelerate its withdrawal, which it accomplished by late May. Nonetheless, she held on to the Sheba Farms.

On Sunday, July 30, 2006, under new Prime Minister Olmert, the IDF repeated the war crimes of 1996 through missile strikes in the village of Qana. Villagers had gathered in a shelter in one of Qana's buildings, probably thinking that the massacre of 1996 would not be repeated by savage Israelis. But they were wrong. Lebanese Red Cross officials said that 58 people died in the Israeli assault on the village, including 34 children. Rescuers dug through the debris to remove dozens of bodies.[4]

In 1996, Qana was the price Lebanon had to pay for world leaders to end the killing. But this time, with the US and its neoconservative, pro-Likud, Bible-believing leadership (with members in the Senate and Congress, with rare exceptions) firmly behind Israel’s war-crimes, no such ceasefire is in the making. So, when the rest of the world cries out foul and is saddened with savagery of Israel, and demonstrates for ceasefire, leaders like Bush, Blair and Condi Rice show how evil western leadership has become. Their behavior is immoral, demented, sadistic and criminal. Truly, if we are looking for a modern-day Nero, we have it in these blood-thirsty maniacs.

In their delirious mindset, these warlords and war-criminals have forgotten that when the doors of negotiation, seeking fairness and justice, are shut down, radical elements -- prone to seek alternative ways to redress their grievances -- always emerge. If that happens, don’t mumble ‘why they hate us?’ It is events like Qana that produces recruits for 9/11, 7/11 and 7/7.

The current events in the Occupied Palestine and Lebanon once again have shown the utter moral bankruptcy of the West and its leadership, especially of the USA and the UK. Hypocrisy is its hallmark. The West can preach equality, liberty, democracy and human rights, but they truly don’t mean them when it comes to vast majority of non-whites. So, when Israel commits monumental crimes against Arabs, violating scores of international laws and UN charters, the USA and her western allies have consistently cheered and supported her criminal activities.

It is a high time for conscientious human beings around the world to demand trial of President Bush of USA and Prime Minister Blair of UK in the International Court of Justice for aiding in the massacre of hundreds of civilians in Lebanon and the Gaza strip (let alone causing deaths and destruction in Iraq), failing which, I am afraid, the UN and its agencies will increasingly be viewed, and justifiably so, only as a club to inflict pain on victims and never to redress their grievances.

It is said that when criminals and demons rule our world, it is better for human beings to be dead than alive. How long will humanity let these modern-day Neroes to rule our world?

Notes:

[1]. See also: Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.

[2]. Vladimir Jabotinsky, considered the spiritual godfather of many Likudniks, said, “Zionist colonization must either be terminated or carried out against the wishes of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, be continued and make progress only under the protection of a power independent of the native population - an iron wall, which will be in a position to resist the pressure to the native population. This is our policy towards the Arabs. … A voluntary reconciliation with the Arabs is out of the question either now or in the future. If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison for the land, or find some rich man or benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf. Or else-or else, give up your colonization, for without an armed force which will render physically impossible any attempt to destroy or prevent this colonization, colonization is impossible, not difficult, not dangerous, but IMPOSSIBLE!... Zionism is a colonization adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important... to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot - or else I am through with playing at colonizing.” ((The Iron Wall, 1923)

[3]. What must be done in Lebanon by Dr. James Zogby, Arab American Institute, Washington D.C.

[4]. See http://habibsiddiqui.unibd.org for pictures of war from Lebanon

by Habib Siddiqui

http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/33576