Anarchopacifist Poet

Must Read Books

2007-03-31T22:20:00.000-07:00

Arkin, William M. Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs, and

Operations in the 9/11 World. Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2005.

Blum, William. Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II.

Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995.

Nieto, Clara. Masters of War: Latin America and U.S. Aggression. New York: Seven

Stories Press, 2003.

Rieff, David. At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention. New

York: Simon and Schuster, 2005.

Sullivan III, Michael J. American Adventurism Abroad: Thirty Invasions, Interventions,

and Regime Changes Since World War II. Newport, CT: Praeger, 2004.

Vidal, Gore. Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated. New

York: Nation Books, 2002.

I'm still here; more to come soon!

2006-12-08T14:08:00.000-08:00

I'm still here. I'll post more in 2007!

namaste,

glen

The Distance from Guernica to Lebanon

2006-08-04T15:01:00.000-07:00

The Distance from Guernica to Lebanon

by Ramzi Kysia

Published on Monday, July 17, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

As I write this, I can hear Israeli warplanes flying overhead, breaking the sound barrier and rattling all of our windows. In the distance there are explosions. I don't know where the bombs are dropping, but it's not close to me. I can't hear the screaming of the survivors from where I sit.

Hezbollah and Hamas may possess the ability to kill dozens of Israeli civilians and terrorize countless others, but they are not an existential threat to Israel. As events on the ground have unmistakably demonstrated over this past month, today it is Israel that is a clear and present danger to the further existence of the Lebanese and Palestinian peoples. A danger, if not to their very lives - then certainly to the continuation of their nations.

This is the third, catastrophic attack I've lived through. I was in New York City on September 11. I was in Baghdad during "Shock and Awe." It's not something you ever get used to. That so much hatred can live in the world, so much indifference to human suffering-- living under that hatred and indifference is almost as hard as living under the bombs.

As I write this, over two hundred Lebanese have been killed. Almost all of them were civilians.

I think of Guernica.

On April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the German Air Force, siding with fascist dictator Francisco Franco, began a bombing campaign against the city of Guernica. Some 1,600 people were killed, and the city was reduced to rubble. Guernica is remembered as the first time air power was used against a civilian population with the intent of causing complete destruction.

When it happened, Guernica shocked the world. Today, we do not shock so easily. Lebanon is being sacrificed without so much as a casual protest.

Israel has bombed power plants, roads, and bridges all across Lebanon. Israel has bombed gas stations and fuel depots, grain silos, lighthouses, the seaports in Beirut, Tripoli, Jounieh and Tyre. Beirut's airport is in flames. Beirut's Shi'a suburbs have been almost completely demolished. Firefighters are pleading for help, because they do not have enough water to put out the blazes. (1)

I think of Guernica.

Israel has ordered all of the people living in Southern Lebanon to flee their homes and villages. Avi Dichter, Israel's Minister of Internal Security, told us that "tens of thousands of Lebanese who will flee towards the north will create the right pressure on Hezbollah." (2)

Two nights ago, eighteen people in the South were burned alive when Israel bombed their fleeing convoy with incendiary shells. Eleven of the dead were children under the age of twelve. Mahmoud Ghannam, the father of two of the killed children, broke down when he saw their bodies. He struck himself in the head repeatedly and cried, "my God, my God. I can't make out the faces of my children. They are burnt black... Which ones are my children?" (3)

A copy of Pablo Picasso's famous painting of the annihilation of Guernica was hung outside the chambers of the UN Security Council, as a reminder of why the United Nations was created, and of what the Security Council is supposed to prevent. In 2003, the United States ordered the eleven foot painting covered, so as not to even subtly embarrass American diplomats pressing for a war against Iraq. (4)

We are supposed to forget what modern warfare means.

Living in Lebanon today, I cannot forget. I remember Guernica.

Today, Lebanon is being forced toward total ruin. If Israel's intent is just to destroy Hezbollah, then why are they bombing Christian and Sunni neighborhoods and towns? Why did Israel wait until July 15 to bomb Hezbollah's headquarters in Beirut, making sure to first bomb power plants, bridges and roads throughout the entire country? Israel's clear intent is to trash this entire country, smash everything that makes Lebanon a modern nation, and demolish all of the work the Lebanese have done over the last fifteen years to rebuild their country.

As Lebanon is ravaged, U.S. President George Bush loudly and proudly asserts Israel's right to "self-defense." (5)

As Lebanon is ravaged, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rica announces that Israel should continue bombing to "reduce the threat" from Hezbollah. (6)

Do Arabs possess the right to defend themselves from Israel?

As Lebanon is laid to waste, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has secured himself newfound adulation within Israel. Everyone apparently loves a killer. (7)

As Lebanon is destroyed, Olmert has announced that he will refuse to meet with a UN delegation attempting to secure a cease-fire (8), George Bush has publicly refused to call for a cease-fire (9), and the United States is blocking other nations on the Security Council from calling for a cease-fire (10).

On "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," Condoleezza Rice not only defended Israel's actions in Lebanon and U.S. policy in Iraq, but said "[Mid-East] hostilities were not very well contained, as we found out on Sept. 11, and so the notion that somehow policies that finally confront extremism are actually causing extremism, I find grotesque."

Grotesque. As if Lebanon or Iraq--or even Hamas or Hezbollah--had anything whatsoever to do with September 11.

I remember what is grotesque. I remember Guernica.

When Westerners speak of "smashing the infrastructure of terror," it is understand that they mean all of the Arab peoples themselves. Arabs are "the infrastructure of terror."

Speaking against a cease-fire, Rice added, "We have to go at the root cause. . It's fine to have a cessation of violence. .But unless we go to the fundamentals here, we're going to continue to have these spikes of violence in the Middle East as we have had for the past 30 years." (11)

According to the Washington Post, going to these fundamentals means that Israel and the United States are going to prevent any cease-fire and continue bombing Lebanon for "several weeks" in order to establish their version of peace in the region. (12)

Indeed. I remember Guernica. I understand the peace of the jackboot and whip.

Dare any American or Israeli ever again ask, "Why do they hate us?"

The clear conviction being spoken by all of the politicians in Israel and America is that their absolute security is absolutely dependent on the complete insecurity of Arabs everywhere. And the clear lesson being taught to generations of children growing up in the rubble of what once was the shining jewel of the Middle East is simply this: their security can only be dependent on the future insecurity of America and Israel.

Former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich also took the opportunity to strongly defend this point of view. In an interview on Saturday, Gingrich said that Israel and America must be forceful because, "we need to have the militancy that says 'We're not going to lose a city.'"

So, apparently, Lebanon is going to lose several.

Gingrich belittled the idea of negotiations or a possible ceasefire by saying, "this idea that we have this one-sided war where the other team gets to plan how to kill us and we get to talk, is nuts." (13)

A hundred years ago President Teddy Roosevelt famously told Americans to "talk softly and carry a big stick." Today the spiritual, if not political, heirs to Generalissimo Franco are riding high in Tel Aviv and Washington D.C., and they've gone one better than Roosevelt.

Today, they don't talk at all.

Ramzi Kysia is an Arab-American essayist and peace activist. He spent a year in Iraq with Voices in the Wilderness, the Chicago-based predecessor to Voices for Creative Nonviolence. He is currently living in Lebanon, and working on a book about his experiences.

Sources

1. "Israelis intensify bombardment of Lebanon's civilian infrastructure," Daily Star (17 July 2006)

2. "Lebanese villagers ordered out," AFP (17 July 2006)

3. "Jets 'incinerate' fleeing family," AFP (16 July 2006)

4. "The Lessons of Guernica," Toronto Star (9 February 2003)

5. "Mideast flare-up follows Bush to Russia," AP (14 July 2006)

6. "Rice Says Israel May Need to Prolong Offensive," New York Times (16 July 2006)

7. "War Gives Israeli Leader Political Capital," New York Times (16 July 2006)

8. "Lebanon bows on border demand," The Australian (17 July 2006)

9. "Bush won't pressure Israel for cease-fire," AP (14 July 2006)

10. "Lebanon: U.S. blocking call for cease-fire," AP (15 July 2006)

11. "Rice Defends Israel, Calls Criticisms of Bush Policy 'Grotesque'," ABC News Online (16 July 2006)

12. "Strikes Are Called Part of Broad Strategy," Washington Post (16 July 2006)

13. "Let's face it, it's WWIII, Gingrich says," Seattle Times (16 July 2006)

Collective Punishment (it's a war crime)

2006-08-04T15:00:00.000-07:00

Collective Punishment (it's a war crime)

This week it's impossible as a Jew and as an American to not notice a new human rights violation by Israel....

Anyone who has ever faced the crippling heat of the desert-like conditions of southern Israel or the Gaza strip knows the desperation for water that comes each summer. So when Israel bombed and destroyed the electricity system for 1.2 million Gazans and thereby made all electric pumps inoperable, they inflicted a collective punishment on the entire Gazan population.

Rabbi Michael Lerner

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Pictures of the bombing of Lebanon

http://www.fromisraeltolebanon.org

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Radicals, Rabbis and Peacemakers: Conversations with Jewish Critics of Israel,

edited by Seth Farber

reviewed by Steve Kowit

In the Jewish-American community one can exhibit complete indifference to Jewish culture and be an outspoken atheist and yet remain a perfectly acceptable member of the tribe. On the other hand, any Jew who openly disapproves of the State of Israel is at risk of being branded a traitor, a dupe of the ubiquitous anti-Semitic enemy, and a self-loathing Jew. Most of the writers and activists represented in Seth Farber’s Radicals, Rabbis and Peacemakers are unapologetic anti-Zionists, and thus “traitors” in precisely that most honorable sense.

Farber’s book, lively and provocative, reflects not only the author’s commitment to social justice, but, according to a brief biographical note, “his faith in prophetic Judaism as a medium of spiritual/social transformation.” So these conversations serve a dual purpose: on the one hand they explore the Palestinian/Israeli struggle from a progressive Jewish point of view and, on the other, they engage the question of contemporary Judaism itself, a post-Holocaust faith that has largely replaced the love of Yahweh with the worship of Israel.

Noam Chomsky, in his conversation with the author, asserts that the very concept of a state that is not the state of its citizens but of the Jewish people is an illegitimate principle upon which to have founded the nation of Israeli. He clarifies his advocacy of the two-state solution by explaining that he conceives such a political configuration to be no more than a stepping stone toward a binational state, but just how the creation of a tiny Palestinian state can lead to Israel and Palestine becoming a single binational nation Chomsky does not make clear, and it is not impossible that his current position reflects his own ambivalence about that issue. He also hedges his bet on the right of return: the Palestinians must not be forced to give up that right, he declares, “but the expectation that it will be implemented is completely unrealistic. And to advocate that is just to cause pain and disaster to the refugees.” Although this is a common enough position among progressive Zionists, it is much the sort of logic Alice encountered after tumbling down the rabbit hole. In similar fashion, Chomsky admits that the Jews had no more right to establish a state on land that was not theirs than did the American colonists, but then dismisses this most sticky and fundamental of issues with the casual comment that he doesn’t “see a lot of point in these discussions.”

Joel Kovel, author and former psychoanalyst, is less equivocal: “Zionism is a horrible mistake.” Israel is illegitimate in much the way Apartheid South Africa was illegitimate. Because of its privileging of one racial group above others, it is not capable of “joining the community of nation states that are grounded in universal human rights.” Nor does Kovel have a particularly high opinion of ancient Judaism, observing that despite the “transcendent ethical potential” of its beliefs, ancient Judaism had “not just a sense of superiority but a rejection of everybody else.”

Adam Shapiro, one of the founders of the International Solidarity Movement, who became momentarily newsworthy in the United States when his parents were threatened by outraged Brooklyn Zionists, observes that “any anti-Semitism that you find in Muslim countries today is the direct result of the policies of Israel vis-à-vis Palestinians.” When Farber suggests how ironic it is that the Jews turned into oppressors, Shapiro replies that he does not find it at all surprising. “Over and over and over in human history those who have been oppressed have turned into the oppressors.” And when Farber suggests that something in Jewish ethical tradition might have kept them moral for all those centuries, Shapiro reminds him that those supposed Jewish values are nowhere in evidence in those colorful biblical stories in which various peoples are exterminated by the pious Hebrews under God’s mandate.

Phyllis Bennis, author of Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN, reminds us of something that is rarely acknowledged: even if the three-quarters of a million Palestinians had fled in 1948 at the bequest of the Arab invaders, as the Israeli version of history had for so long insisted, “those refugees still would have the right to go home. It doesn’t matter the reason they fled. Their right to return is not conditional on having fled for the right reason.” Bennis also makes the important point that the US Mobilization for Peace and Justice, by making opposition to US support for Israeli occupation a central component at its mass anti-war demonstrations, has helped break through the solid wall of US support for Israeli aggression.

Another conversation is with Steve Quester, an activist with the New York organization Jews Against the Occupation who remarks, in a fascinating aside, that being queer allowed him to figure out that everything he’d been taught about Israel was a lie: “Whereas for straight Jews who’ve never gone through this process of realizing that they’ve been systematically lied to by all aspects of the society, it’s much harder for them to let go of all the lies they’ve been taught about Israel.” Another conversation is with Ora Wise, the passionately outspoken daughter of a “very Zionist” Conservative rabbi, a young woman who worked with Rabbis for Human Rights in the West Bank and was a founding member of the Ohio State Committee for Justice in Palestine. Dealing head on with the criticism that the Palestinians should organize non-violent resistance, she reminds us that terrorist attacks are “the product of a brutal, vicious, controlling, oppressive military occupation that is destroying the lives of millions of Palestinians and is deliberately destroying Palestinians’ ability to organize in non-violent ways….”

The conversation with Norman Finkelstein, perhaps, by now, the most famous Jewish-American critic of Zionist machinations, is peppered with statements by various eyewitnesses to Israeli crimes and with chilling remarks by such luminaries as Moshe Dayan and David Ben-Gurion and is followed by a brief essay by Finkelstein on Israel and Zionism. Finkelstein’s discussion of Israeli “race-nationalism” in particular, and Zionist ideology in general, is sharply focused and forceful, in that incendiary take-no-prisoners polemic style that makes his own books such a sizzling read. When Farber quotes to Finkelstein a remark by the Jewish theologian Marc Ellis, to the effect that those Jews struggling for Palestinian rights “may ultimately decide the future of the covenant… and the Jewish people,” Finkelstein dismisses the notion saying “I have no interest in covenants. I don’t know who the Jewish people are. These are all metaphysical, extraneous terms for me.”

But they are not extraneous for Farber. Rather, for him, they are absolutely central. To focus on such questions, Farber has chosen to include conversations with Norton Mezvinsky, an advocate of the universalist humanism promoted by early Reform Judaism, and with two orthodox Jewish thinkers: Daniel Boyarin and Rabbi David Weiss, both of whom are anti-Zionists.

Mezvinsky, who was singled out by Daniel Pipes’ Campus Watch for “spewing anti-Semitic calumnies,” is another who believes that Zionism is inherently a racist ideology. On the matter of the two-state solution, he argues that what the Israeli leadership has always meant by a Palestinian state is a small “autonomous region” without any real sovereignty. Considering that 40% of the water for all Israel comes from aquifers the Israelis have built in the West Bank, it is hardly likely, he argues, that they will return the West Bank to the Palestinians. If neither a single state nor two genuine states is currently realistic, why not opt, Mezvinsky suggests, for the better, more democratic and just approach― a binational state.

The two orthodox Jews have a difficult time squaring their hatred of Israel’s military aggression with their biblical literalism. Though Daniel Boyarin believes that Zionism is “out-and-out heresy,” he is clearly uncomfortable when Farber reminds him of Yahweh’s commands that the Israelites commit genocide against various peoples. He insists that such questions are simply “not relevant anymore,” though clearly, if one is a literalist, they are indeed relevant. When Farber poses the same sort of question to David Weiss, a rabbi of the Neturie Karta community, the rabbi can only fumble helplessly in response:

But it’s not my issue to try to answer for G-d why he would want such a thing which is in the bible which is accepted. I could look and try to find, according to the Kabbalah, reasons, you know… that’s secret as far as, you know, there’s a deeper meaning for everything…

For Weiss, the reestablishment of Jewish legitimacy over the holy land is a perfectly legitimate goal ― so long as it occurs after the return of the Messiah.

If Farber’s least favorite Jewish progressive is Rabbi Michael Lerner, who has famously argued that Jews had the right to steal the Palestinian homeland as an act of “affirmative action,” the figure whose position the author most fully seems to respect is the theologian and philosopher Marc Ellis, who apparently refused or was unable to participate in this project. Farber has included a brief essay by Ellis and has made that author the subject of both his introductory and concluding essays. Like Mezvinsky, Ellis advocates a Jewish theology of liberation based on the tradition of the later prophets and is opposed to “Constantinian Judaism,” the notion that the secular power of a national state is the true fulfillment of the Jewish covenant. His is another variation of Reform Judaism’s early but long abandoned commitment to universal brotherhood.

It would have been useful for Common Courage Press to have hired a decent copyeditor to correct the shocking number of distracting typos and help the author organize the material a bit more gracefully. The conversations seem to have been transcribed to the page unedited, interviewer and interviewee constantly - and at times disconcertingly - interrupting one other. A good editing of the individual conversations would have helped. Those caveats aside, for anyone seriously interested in the question of Zionism, Israeli colonialism, and the Palestinian struggle, Radicals, Rabbis and Peacemakers will be a provocative and absorbing read. The complexity and richness of the discussions are not the least of the book’s virtues. And for those struggling with the issue of how believing Jews can frame their faith and confront the disconcerting issues of Israeli aggression and Zionist supremacism, it will prove doubly provocative and doubly a pleasure.

Steve Kowit has won two Pushcart Prizes and an NEA fellowship for his poetry. His latest collection is The Gods of Rapture from City Works Press. His poem Intifada, a poem of Jewish solidarity with the Palestinian people, can be purchased from the publisher, Caernarvon Press in San Diego, or directly from the author, skowit@aabol.com. He teaches at Southwestern College in Chula Vista.

Logos 5.2 - spring/summer 2006

Fleeing Lebanese Speak of Indiscriminate Bombing

2006-08-04T14:59:00.000-07:00

Fleeing Lebanese Speak of Indiscriminate Bombing

by Dahr Jamail

Published on Monday, July 17, 2006 by the Inter Press Service

ADDABBAOUSIYEH (northern Lebanese border) - People fleeing the bombing of Lebanon say the Israelis are targeting civilian neighbourhoods and vital infrastructure, and not just Hezbollah centres.

The bombing has killed more than 100 Lebanese civilians so far.

Several border points between Syria and Lebanon are being deluged with refugees. Lebanon has a long border with Syria towards its south, east and north. The refugees include both Lebanese and tourists.

"Everything is being bombed," a teacher from the United States who was on vacation in Beirut told IPS. "It's terror. We've literally been terrorised."

Twenty-five-year-old social studies teacher Abdul Rahman was living with his family in downtown Beirut near the United Nations building before they all decided to flee.

"We have not slept for three days because we were living in terror and never knew when the Israelis would bomb us since they were hitting everything," he told IPS.

"If they want to hit Hezbollah, let them hit Hezbollah, but not the civilians. But civilians are all that they are hitting."

His mother feared for her 96-year-old father who they had to leave behind. "We cannot move him because he is too frail," she said. "And now all we can do is worry, since the Israelis are taking it out on the innocent people."

On Sunday, the Israeli army also re-entered the Palestinian-ruled Gaza Strip. According to reports from Gaza, three members of Hamas were killed after Israeli tanks and bulldozers entered Beit Hanun town early morning.

Gunfire and shelling by the Israelis is also reported to have killed a 75-year-old woman and wounded 10 others, along with a baby.

Israel launched several air strikes in Gaza as well. An Israeli army spokeswoman claimed they destroyed a Hamas operations room in the Jabaliya refugee camp.

Israel's stated goal in Gaza is to free a soldier captured by Hamas. So far Israeli actions there have left one Israeli soldier dead, along with 82 Palestinians.

Hamas is demanding the release of prisoners from Israeli jails in exchange for the Israeli soldier.

Israel is now embroiled in fighting on two fronts. The impact of the fighting with Lebanon is being felt widely in Syria.

Abud Aziz, a 31-year-old Lebanese pastry chef from Beirut crossed the border into Syria carrying his suitcase and looking for food and water. There had been no water or electricity in Beirut since Saturday, he said.

"Yesterday I saw two hospitals bombed," he told IPS. "Nobody who remains in Beirut can be safe. No way."

A 25-year-old construction worker named Hamed also said he saw warplanes bomb a hospital in Beirut.

"I saw them bomb a hospital yesterday," he told IPS. "I left just hours ago. They are bombing everything -- houses, casinos, fuel stations and so many bridges."

Meanwhile, on Sunday Hezbollah fired more than 20 rockets into the city of Haifa, Israel's third largest city, killing eight and wounding at least a dozen.

The Hezbollah clearly have the means to strike back at Israel. They are a well-armed and well-organised political and military group of Shia Muslims in Lebanon. Sustained military attacks by the Hezbollah forced Israel to vacate southern Lebanon in May 2000.

But the Hezbollah are not supported by all Lebanese. About 60 percent of the 3.8 million population of Lebanon is Muslim, most of them Shia. This is where Hezbollah draws its support.

The rest of the population is almost all Christian. A 15-year civil war between Muslim and Christian groups ended in 1991. The Hezbollah are believed to draw more support from outside the country than from many within.

In the wake of Hezbollah strikes into Israel, Israeli authorities have declared a 48-hour period of martial law over the northern part of the country. Hezbollah groups have fired more than 400 rockets into Israel, killing at least 16 civilians in the last five days.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned Lebanon of "far-reaching" consequences after the rocket attacks. The Israeli army said that it had warned all civilians to leave southern Lebanon.

Many of those who have left report panic conditions in Lebanon. "The Israelis bombed a bridge to the airport near us and killed many people," 26-year-old Hasna told IPS. "When other people went on the bridge to help the wounded, the planes bombed it again."

Ambulances are usually not available because of the danger, she said. "We were the last people to leave our area. The road there was nearly empty."

Alham Aras, a Danish woman who was vacationing in Tripoli in Lebanon, drove up to the border with her six children Sunday. She said she had left on instructions from her embassy.

"The warplanes bombed the Palestinian camps in Tripoli," she said, "They are attacking up and down the coast, and the port in Tripoli was also attacked."

Her 14-year-old daughter Barihan al-Jassim said, "Somebody should stop this madness. How is it possible for a country to be bombed like this and nobody stops them from doing it?"

What I am watching in Lebanon each day is an outrage

2006-08-04T14:58:00.000-07:00

What I am watching in Lebanon each day is an outrage

By Robert Fisk in Mdeirej, Central Lebanon

07/15/06 "The Independent" -- - - The beautiful viaduct that soars over the mountainside here has become a "terrorist" target. The Israelis attacked the international highway from Beirut to Damascus just after dawn yesterday and dropped a bomb clean through the central span of the Italian-built bridge a symbol of Lebanon's co-operation with the European Union sending concrete crashing hundreds of feet down into the valley beneath. It was the pride of the murdered ex-prime minister Rafik Hariri, the face of a new, emergent Lebanon. And now it is a "terrorist" target.

So I drove gingerly along the old mountain road towards the Bekaa yesterday - the Israeli jets were hissing through the sky above me - turned the corner once I rejoined the highway, and found a 50ft crater with an old woman climbing wearily down the side on her hands and knees, trying to reach her home in the valley that glimmered to the east. This too had become a "terrorist" target.

It is now the same all over Lebanon. In the southern suburbs - where the Hizbollah, captors of the two missing Israeli soldiers, have their headquarters - a massive bomb had blasted off the sides of apartment blocks next to a church, splintering windows and crashing balconies down to parked cars. This too had become a "terrorist target.

One man was brought out shrieking with pain, covered in blood. Another "terrorist" target. All the way to the airport were broken bridges, holed roads. All these were "terrorist" targets. At the airport, tongues of fire blossomed into the sky from aircraft fuel storage tanks, darkening west Beirut. These too were now "terrorist" targets.

At Jiyeh, the Israelis attacked the power station. This too was a "terrorist" target.

Yet when I drove to the actual headquarters of Hizbollah, a tall building in Haret Hreik, it was totally undamaged. Only last night did the Israelis manage to hit it.

So can the Lebanese be forgiven - can anyone here be forgiven - for believing that the Israelis have a greater interest in destroying Lebanon than they do in their two soldiers?

No wonder Middle East Airlines, the national Lebanese airline, put crews into its four stranded Airbuses at Beirut airport early yesterday and sneaked them out of the country for Amman before the Israelis realised they were under power and leaving.

European politicians have talked about Israel's "disproportionate" response to Wednesday's capture of its soldiers. They are wrong. What I am now watching in Lebanon is an outrage. How can there be any excuse for the 73 dead Lebanese blown these past three days?

The same applies, of course, to the four Israeli civilians killed by Hizbollah rockets. But - please note the exchange rate of Israeli civilian lives to Lebanese civilian lives now stands at 1 to more than 15. This does not include the two children who were atomised in their home in Dweir on Thursday and whose bodies cannot be found. Their six brothers and sisters were buried yesterday, along with their mother and father. Another "terrorist" target. So was a neighbouring family with five children who were also buried yesterday. Another "terrorist" target.

Terrorist, terrorist, terrorist. There is something perverse about all this, the slaughter and massive destruction and the self-righteous, constant, cancerous use of the word "terrorist". No, let us not forget that the Hizbollah broke international law, crossed the Israeli border, killed three Israeli soldiers, captured two others and dragged them back through the border fence. It was an act of calculated ruthlessness that should never allow Hizbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, to grin so broadly ay his press conference. It has brought unparalleled tragedy to countless innocents in Lebanon. And of course, it has led Hizbollah to fire at least 170 Katyusha rockets into Israel.

But what would happen if the powerless Lebanese government had actually unleashed air attacks across Israel the last time Israel's troops crossed into Lebanon? What if the Lebanese air force then killed 73 Israeli civilians in bombing raids in Ashkelon, Tel Aviv and Israeli West Jerusalem? What if a Lebanese fighter aircraft bombed Ben Gurion airport? What if a Lebanese plane destroyed 26 road bridges across Israel? Would it not be called "terrorism"? I rather think it would. But if Israel was the victim, it would also probably be Word War Three.

Of course, Lebanon cannot attack Tel Aviv. Its air force comprises three ancient Hawker Hunters and an equally ancient fleet of Vietnam-era Huey helicopters. Syria, however, has missiles that can reach Tel Aviv. So Syria - which Israel rightly believes to be behind Wednesday's Hizbollah attack is not going to be bombed. It is Lebanon which must be punished.

The Israeli leadership intends to "break" the Hizbollah and destroy its "terrorist cancer". Really? Do the Israelis really believe they can "break" one of the toughest guerrilla armies in the world? And how?

There are real issues here. Under UN Security Council Resolution 1559 - the same resolution that got the Syrian army out of Lebanon - the Shia Muslim Hizbollah should have been disarmed. They were not because, if the Lebanese Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, had tried to do so, the Lebanese army would have had to fight them and the army would almost certainly broken apart because most Lebanese soldiers are Shia Muslims. We could see the restarting of the civil war in Lebanon - a fact which Nasrallah is cynically aware of - but attempts by Siniora and his cabinet colleagues to find a new role for Hizbollah, which has a minister in the government (he is Minister of Labour) foundered. And the greatest now is that the Lebanese government will collapse and be replaced by a pro-Syrian government which could re-invite the Syrians back into the country.

So there's a real conundrum to be solved. But it's not going to succeed with the mass bombing of the country by Israel. Not the obsession with terrorists, terrorists, terrorists.

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Triumph of the authoritarians

2006-08-04T14:57:00.000-07:00

Triumph of the authoritarians

By John W. Dean | July 14, 2006

CONTEMPORARY CONSERVATISM and its influence on the Republican Party was, until recently, a mystery to me. The practitioners' bludgeoning style of politics, their self-serving manipulation of the political processes, and their policies that focus narrowly on perceived self-interest -- none of this struck me as based on anything related to traditional conservatism. Rather, truth be told, today's so-called conservatives are quite radical.

For more than 40 years I have considered myself a ``Goldwater conservative," and am thoroughly familiar with the movement's canon. But I can find nothing conservative about the Bush/Cheney White House, which has created a Nixon ``imperial presidency" on steroids, while acting as if being tutored by the best and brightest of the Cosa Nostra.

What true conservative calls for packing the courts to politicize the federal judiciary to the degree that it is now possible to determine the outcome of cases by looking at the prior politics of judges? Where is the conservative precedent for the monocratic leadership style that conservative Republicans imposed on the US House when they took control in 1994, a style that seeks primarily to perfect fund-raising skills while outsourcing the writing of legislation to special interests and freezing Democrats out of the legislative process?

How can those who claim themselves conservatives seek to destroy the deliberative nature of the US Senate by eliminating its extended-debate tradition, which has been the institution's distinctive contribution to our democracy? Yet that is precisely what Republican Senate leaders want to do by eliminating the filibuster when dealing with executive business (namely judicial appointments).

Today's Republican policies are antithetical to bedrock conservative fundamentals. There is nothing conservative about preemptive wars or disregarding international law by condoning torture. Abandoning fiscal responsibility is now standard operating procedure. Bible-thumping, finger-pointing, tongue-lashing attacks on homosexuals are not found in Russell Krik's classic conservative canons, nor in James Burham's guides to conservative governing. Conservatives in the tradition of former senator Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan believed in ``conserving" this planet, not relaxing environmental laws to make life easier for big business. And neither man would have considered employing Christian evangelical criteria in federal programs, ranging from restricting stem cell research to fighting AIDs through abstinence.

Candid and knowledgeable Republicans on the far right concede -- usually only when not speaking for attribution -- that they are not truly conservative. They do not like to talk about why they behave as they do, or even to reflect on it. Nonetheless, their leaders admit they like being in charge, and their followers grant they find comfort in strong leaders who make them feel safe. This is what I gleaned from discussions with countless conservative leaders and followers, over a decade of questioning.

I started my inquiry in the mid-1990s, after a series of conversations with Goldwater, whom I had known for more than 40 years. Goldwater was also mystified (when not miffed) by the direction of today's professed conservatives -- their growing incivility, pugnacious attitudes, and arrogant and antagonistic style, along with a narrow outlook intolerant of those who challenge their thinking. He worried that the Republican Party had sold its soul to Christian fundamentalists, whose divisive social values would polarize the nation. From those conversations, Goldwater and I planned to study why these people behave as they do, and to author a book laying out what we found. Sadly, the senator's declining health soon precluded his continuing on the project, so I put it on the shelf. But I kept digging until I found some answers, and here are my thoughts.

For almost half a century, social scientists have been exploring authoritarianism. We do not typically associate authoritarianism with our democracy, but as I discovered while examining decades of empirical research, we ignore some findings at our risk. Unfortunately, the social scientists who have studied these issues report their findings in monographs and professional journals written for their peers, not for general readers. With the help of a leading researcher and others, I waded into this massive body of work.

What I found provided a personal epiphany. Authoritarian conservatives are, as a researcher told me, ``enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, antiequality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian and amoral." And that's not just his view. To the contrary, this is how these people have consistently described themselves when being anonymously tested, by the tens of thousands over the past several decades.

Authoritarianism's impact on contemporary conservatism is beyond question. Because this impact is still growing and has troubling (if not actually evil) implications, I hope that social scientists will begin to write about this issue for general readers. It is long past time to bring the telling results of their empirical work into the public square and to the attention of American voters. No less than the health of our democracy may depend on this being done. We need to stop thinking we are dealing with traditional conservatives on the modern stage, and instead recognize that they've often been supplanted by authoritarians.

John W. Dean, former Nixon White House counsel, just published his seventh nonfiction book, ``Conservatives Without Conscience." []

The Force Is Not with Them

2006-08-04T14:49:00.000-07:00

The Force Is Not with Them

The Middle East Aflame and the Bush Administration Adrift

by Tom Engelhardt

Published on Monday, July 17, 2006 by Tom Dispatch

So, as the world spins on a dime, where exactly are we?

As a man who is no fan of fundamentalists of any sort, let me offer a proposition that might make some modest sense of our reeling planet. Consider the possibility that the most fundamental belief, perhaps in all of history, but specifically in these last catastrophic years, seems to be in the efficacy of force -- and the more of it the merrier. That deep belief in force above all else is perhaps the monotheism of monotheisms, a faith remarkably accepting of adherents of any other imaginable faith – or of no other faith at all. Like many fundamentalist faiths, it is also resistant to drawing any reasonable lessons from actual experience on this planet.

The Bush administration came to power as a fundamentalist regime; and here I'm not referring to the Christian fundamentalist faith of our President. After all, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, and our Vice President seem not to be Christian fundamentalists any more than were Paul Wolfowitz or Douglas Feith. Bush's top officials may not have agreed among themselves on whether End Time would arrive, or even on the domestic social issues of most concern to the Christian religious right in this country, but they were all linked by a singular belief in the efficacy of force.

In fact, they believed themselves uniquely in possession of an ability to project force in ways no other power on the planet or in history ever could. While hardly elevating the actual military leadership of the country (whom they were eager to sideline), they raised the all-volunteer American military itself onto a pedestal and worshipped it as the highest tech, most shock-and-awesome institution around. They were dazzled by the fact that it was armed with the smartest, most planet-spanning, most destructive set of weapons imaginable, and backed by an unparalleled military-industrial complex as well as a "defense" budget that would knock anyone's socks off (and their communications systems down). It was enough to dazzle the administration's top officials with dreams of global domination; to fill them with a vision of a planet-wide Pax Americana; to send them off to the moon (which, by the way, was certainly militarizable).

Force, then, was their idol and they bowed down before it. When it came to the loosing of that force (and the forces at their command), they were nothing short of fervent utopians and blind believers. They were convinced that with such force (and forces), they could reshape the world in just about any way they wanted to fit their visionary desires.

And then, of course, came 9/11, the "Pearl Harbor" of this century. Suddenly, they had a divine wind at their back, a terrified populace before them ready to be led, and everything they believed in seemed just so… well, possible. It was, in faith-based terms, a godsend. Not surprisingly, they promptly began to prepare to act in the stead of an imperially angry god and to bring the world -- particularly its energy heartlands -- to heel.

First, however, because they had long been People of the Word, they created their sacred texts, their doctrine. In the form of "preventive war" and keeping other potential superpowers or blocs of powers from ever rising up to challenge the United States, they enshrined force at the apex of their pantheon of deities in their National Security Strategy of 2002. (The term "preventive war" was in itself reasonably unique. Usually even the most aggressive dictators don't label their planned wars with terms that creep right up to the edge of "aggressive" and then promote them that way to the world.) At the same time, the President then began speaking out about the need not to wait until the threat of destruction was upon us as in his 2002 State of the Union Address where he said: "We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."

Soon enough, his advisors began raising Iraqi mushroom clouds over American cities and describing fantasy Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles that might spray those cities with chemical or biological weapons in order to make an already scared populace and cowed Congress into believers as well. This was, of course, in the period when their long-time supporters and a supportive corps of pundits, radio talk-show hosts, and communicators of various sorts were speaking proudly, even boastfully, about the United States as the sole "hyperpower" on the planet or the globe's New Rome; when even a liberal Canadian commentator, Michael Ignatieff, could publish a piece in the New York Times Magazine extolling George Bush's U.S. as "a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known." He wrote as well of the necessity of Americans shouldering the "burden of empire" in Iraq. (Historically, there's only one such "burden," by the way – and it's Rudyard Kipling's nineteenth century "white man's burden.")

Those, of course, were the good times when "neoconservatism" (partially a shorthand term for this religious bent, for the love of "the most awesome military power the world has ever known") was truly ascendant. That term was also shorthand for an imperial mission to be shouldered by officials convinced that our empire should stand tall, alone, and on one leg -- the leg of "force."

In any case, having enshrined "preventive war" at the heart of the Bush Doctrine, they went in search of someplace to loose it on the world, someplace that might look militarily strong enough and heinous enough, but would be weak enough to make a point fast. They needed a roguish country, preferably run by a nasty dictator, preferably smack in the oil heartlands of the globe, that could be taken down quickly as a demonstration of that "awesome military power," a place that could be shock-and-awed into instant submission. It would be both a cakewalk and a case in point for the rest of the region about what a group of determined fundamentalists might do to anyone who opposed their religion and their wishes.

Well, we know the place; we know how they first shock-and-awed Congress and the American people into an invasion; and we all remember how they put their plan into practice -- with a confidence and lack of planning for any alternative possibilities or realities that was typical of true believers. And so, on March 20, 2003, they loosed their cruise-missile-styled lightning bolts on Baghdad because they knew one thing -- that the force was with them and that, because the United States was the military superpower of all superpowers in all of history, it was theirs alone…

Stock and Awe: The Force of an Anxious Market

Now, let's jump a few familiar years ahead on our fast-spinning, wobbly globe and see if we can land on the present moment, July 16, 2006. In the process, let's also take a little spin through our "empire lite," that vaunted New Rome, that Pax Americana as it's developed since the Bush administration decided to "take the gloves off," and apply its power fully and brutally from Iraq to Guantanamo. In fact, let's do a fly-by of what the neocons' once called "the arc of instability" three years later:

In Afghanistan, as an ABC network news journalist touring American bases reported the other night, American officers are begging for more troops. (The Brits, just taking over in the south, are already desperately sending them in!) This is a response to the "eradicated" Taliban unexpectedly ramping up their force levels; narco-warlords growing ever more entrenched; the security situation in the capital, Kabul, and elsewhere deteriorating; and American bombing runs (including the use of B-52s) increasing. Force has truly become the arbiter of Afghanistan's terrible fate.

The situation has, in fact, deteriorated so rapidly in the Bush administration's model "nation-building" project that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, on a quick dash through sunny Tajikistan last week, suggested that bad news, looked at in another light, might actually be splendid tidings. According to David S. Cloud of the New York Times, "Mr. Rumsfeld acknowledged that the number of Taliban attacks may be up this year. But he said the increasingly brazen tactics had made it easier for American, Afghan and NATO forces to find them. ‘Every time they come together,' he said, 'they get hit and they get hurt. So the fact that we see a somewhat different method of operation during this period is correct, but it has not necessarily been disadvantageous because the more that are in one place, the easier they are to attack.'"

For a while, back in 2003-04, when things began to go sour in Iraq, various neocons suggested that the country might providentially prove to be a kind of global "flypaper" drawing all the terrorists to one spot for what, in near biblical terms, would prove to be a terrorist-zapping Armageddon. The theory was quietly dropped into the dustbin of history when only its first half proved accurate; but here it is back with us again in devolving Afghanistan and on the lips of our Secretary of Defense because… well, the idea of overwhelming force solving all problems just feels so good and sounds so right to a believer when things are going so wrong.

In the former flypaper-land of Iraq, the Bush administration's application of full-frontal force has, by now, released every two-bit sectarian thug, death-squad killer, jihadi fanatic, and angry rebel onto the streets of the capital, Baghdad -- where perhaps a fifth or more of the country's population lives -- armed to the teeth and ready to maim, mutilate, torture, and kill. Not surprisingly, overwhelming, shock-and-awe force has released a nightmare of counterforce there that has shoved every other, more peaceable possible way of doing or thinking about anything into the shade and onto the sidelines (if not simply into the morgue).

In the wake of the killing of Abu Musad al-Zarqawi, a potential turning-of-the-tide moment, according to our President, the Iraqi capital, in particular, has been drenched in a high tide of blood; and, despite all the talk about possible "draw-downs" of American troops, commanding general George W. Casey, Jr. has just called for yet more American soldiers to be sent into the lawless, uncontrollable capital. At the same time, in America's fantasy Iraq, a single, relatively quiet southern province bordering Saudi Arabia has just been officially "turned over" to the charge of Iraqi security forces and the act declared a "milestone" by Casey and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. (When any American official even mutters "milestone," or "tidal change," or "turning point" in relation to Iraq, watch out!)

In fact, Iraqis seem to be paying ever less attention to American commands, demands, and orders -- and no wonder, since over the last four years every attempt to impose the administration's will on Iraq purely by force of arms and in an imperial manner has failed dismally -- and to this dismal failure there is neither an end in sight, nor an imaginable bottoming-out tidal moment.

Meanwhile, as no one could have missed by now, the Mediterranean edge of the Middle East is teetering at the edge of full-scale war, behind which lurks the threat of an even wider regional war of some previously almost unimaginable sort. There, too, the recourse to arms has overwhelmed any other possible option. Hamas guerrillas broke into Israel, killed two soldiers and captured another. They certainly must have had a sense of what the Israeli reaction to such a raid might be; but for the sake of argument, let's say they didn't.

In the meantime, at the Lebanese border with Israel, the guerrillas of the Hezbollah movement watched the Israelis mercilessly take out a power plant, government offices, and various other infrastructural targets in Gaza, while killing civilians and hammering urban areas as a "response" to the capture of their soldier. Hezbollah then launched their own incursion into Israel, killing several soldiers and capturing two more. With the example of Gaza in front of them, they had to know just exactly what the Olmert government would do to the civilian infrastructure of Lebanon itself -- and clearly it made no difference.

As for the Israelis, at this point they visibly feel free of all outside restraint or constraint, given the Bush administration, and so can bomb, blockade, missile, and attack almost at will -- and, with their eyes on Syria and Iran, are threatening to widen this war yet further, setting the region ablaze. As in the slums of Baghdad, so too in Gaza, Lebanon, and possibly elsewhere, the urge is to settle historic grudges via shock-and-awe tactics. And yet, as Rami Khouri has written recently, the Israelis are "in the bizarre position of repeating policies that have consistently failed for the past 40 years." The last time this happened, the Israelis made it all the way to Beirut and ended up stuck in Lebanon for 18 years before withdrawing ignominiously. In the process, they helped midwife the Hezbollah movement and give it luster, a reputation, and strength.

We seem today to be headed into Lebanon redux in a region where the principle of force has been set loose to trump all else. On all sides, fundamentalists in the religion of force are thundering threats and imprecations, while issuing sets of impossible demands. In the typical words of Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah (whose home and office had just been wiped out by Israeli missiles): "You wanted an open war, and we are heading for an open war… We are ready for it… The surprises that I have promised you will start now." And, of course, as in Gaza where random Palestinian civilians suffer and die under Israeli attack, so in Israel random civilians are wounded or die under a barrage of Hezbollah rockets; so, in Lebanon, helpless civilians die in homes, on highways, wherever, under a rain of Israeli bombs and missiles.

And all this is happening without either Iran, the third member of George Bush's axis of evil, or Syria, the unspoken fourth member (like an unindicted co-conspirator), have truly entered the fray (except, possibly, by proxy through their stand-ins in Gaza and Lebanon). Yet Iran is already offering up increasingly bloodcurdling threats. Emboldened by the American disaster in Iraq, its fundamentalist leaders, too, seem in a rush to threaten force and more force.

Now, just try to imagine an American attack on suspected Iranian nuclear facilities -- something that journalist Seymour Hersh, in a recent New Yorker piece, reports a "senior military official" claiming Secretary of Defense Donald Rumfeld and his "senior aides" still "really think they can do… on the cheap, and they underestimate the capability of the [Iranian] adversary." In a similar fashion, the Iranian leadership undoubtedly underestimates its bogged-down American adversary. It's the nature of such a faith to overestimate your own ability to use force and underestimate the capabilities of your opponents.

If Bush and his top officials arrived on the Iraqi scene believing that the force was with them and only them, the last three-plus years have offered (if not taught) a rather different lesson. After all, they now find themselves in a roiling crowd of medium-sized and smaller states, stateless movements, and extremist grouplets, all passionately devoted to the same principle of force as them. The fundamentalist belief in force, once let loose in this fashion -- once (you might say) modeled by the globe's reigning hyperpower -- turns out to be a distinctly pagan faith. From the streets of Gaza to the slums of Baghdad, from the mountains of Afghanistan to Beirut International Airport and the halls of the Pentagon, this is a religion open to one and all, ready to embrace many contradictory gods into its pantheon.

And here's the irony. The hyperpower that loosed this singular round of force on our world seems strangely sidelined, while others move boldly to apply its most essential principles profligately, every one of them emboldened both by our example and by our dismal failure. Talk about Pandora's Box (without Hope anywhere in sight)!

What force has done, thanks to the Bush administration's utopian foolishness, is to tie the region's many competing groups, movements, and states into an ever-tightening, Gordion-style knot -- and that knot, in turn, has been ever more tightly hitched to the global economy, so that every tug on any loose end now sends oil prices up another disastrous notch and trembling stock markets into convulsions. (Call it stock-and-awe!) Just Friday, the Dow Jones completed a three-day, 400 point shuddering drop, while oil, not so long ago hovering in the vicinity of $30 for a barrel of crude, managed to hit a staggering $78.40 a barrel by the end of last week -- and remember, this was just based on "nerves," not on more oil supplies actually going off the market, as would certainly happen, one way or another, in a widening conflict in the region.

In fact, the oil heartlands of the planet look to be heading for further rounds of violence and turmoil and, potentially, the American and global economy with them -- and the only tool imaginable to anybody is still: Force.

The Bush administration had no wish for other tools -- that was the meaning, after all, of "unilateralism" -- and so now it has no other tools in its "arsenal." It lost most of its allies while in its unilateral dream-state. Focusing all its attention on the Pentagon and on military-to-military relations globally, it also lost whatever modest capacity might have been available to it not just to head down another path, but to deploy the most basic tools of diplomacy. What it has left is, of course, force; but its own on-the-ground forces are dangerously depleted and it's evidently no longer obvious to top administration officials exactly where American force (and forces) should be applied (much as they may loathe the Iranians and Syrians).

They launched a force party in the Middle East. Now it's in full swing; the club's pilled high with dancers; many of the exits are bolted shut; the bouncers are no longer at the front door; and, on stage, the performers are brandishing blowtorches, while the Earth's last hyperpower and its hyper-commander-in-chief President are watching, helplessly, from the sidelines. As Dan Froomkin, the fine Washington Post on-line columnist, pointed out this week in a column headlined Bush the Bystander, "stopping off in Germany on his way to the G-8 summit in Russia," as the Middle East caught fire, "Bush reserved his greatest enthusiasm for tonight's pig roast -- technically, a wild-boar barbecue -- bringing it up three times. ‘I'm looking forward to that pig tonight,' he gushed."

Conceptually, what else could he do but offer his support to the Israelis (with but polite demurrals about "restraint" from his Secretary of State). After all, what are the Israelis doing but fighting their own hopeless "war on terrorism" American-style?

As journalist Warren Strobel summed up the regional situation: "Virtually every president faces a plethora of global crises, sometimes simultaneously. What's new is that the United States' ability to influence events has shrunk, largely because U.S. troops and treasure remain mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Iraq war has diminished foreign confidence in American leadership, according to foreign policy experts and some U.S. officials." Former Israeli cabinet minister Yossi Beilin made a similar point to Haaretz. "The worsening conflict in the Middle East is a blatant reflection of the weakness of the American partner,"

Everywhere this administration is being less attended to. Everywhere, others are sharpening their knives, loading their weapons, and preparing to smite their enemies, inspired by the American example, liberated by its failure.

Hair-trigger World

Oh, and while I've been mentioning the international face of the two-faced religion of force, I've forgotten to mention how it's been playing out at home.

After all, in the Bush years the Pentagon and the military have been fully elevated to the role of first providers (of everything) -- a role for which they are visibly unprepared. Nation-building and diplomacy have largely become military, not State Department, matters, as has intelligence-gathering of every sort. For the first time, a permanent, peacetime North American Command (Northcom) has been established for the continental U.S., while the military, not the civil government, is now to be the initial, and possibly main, responder in situations ranging from disastrous hurricanes to a potential Avian flu pandemic.

But for overwhelming force to be effective at home or abroad, it must be, in the minds of fundamentalists like, say, our grey and secretive Vice President, or his own eminence gris, David Addington, not to speak of eager force-hounds like "torture memo" author John Yoo or former Former General Counsel for the Pentagon William J. Haynes II, now up for for a federal appeals court judgeship, applied in a timely fashion and effectively. Democracy, officially to be spread to the world, turns out to be such a messy contraption in "time of war" at home. If you're a believer, then you don't want anything, certainly not congressional oversight or an informed public, to get in the way of that necessary, firm, and preventive application of force in a time of crisis -- and what time isn't?

Of course, what you really need to concentrate force effectively elsewhere -- consider this to be the unwritten part of the Bush Doctrine -- is a concentration of power at home in a single figure, not the President (a peace-time title describing a fettered office), but the President as "commander-in-chief" -- a military man, freed in "wartime" of all those nasty checks and balances, and so able to act decisively in any way necessary to make force utterly effective, whether in a distant, recalcitrant foreign land or in a nearby prison.

That summarizes, of course, the now-infamous unitary executive theory of government, a creative form of not-exactly-strict constructionism, which essentially was aimed at reinventing the Constitution (like the wheel), neutering Congress, and sidelining the American people in favor of… a single commander-in-chief preserving democracy for the rest of us as he sees fit -- essentially, when you come right down to it, an autocrat or king. And we know how our present commander-in-chief saw fit. In fact, he -- they -- came so very close, even managing to get two new justices on the Supreme Court who were, above all else, believers in the most extreme theory of the presidency ever proposed.

But as in Iraq, force, or the domestic equivalent -- the "preventive" politics of fear, manipulation, lies, and secrecy -- proved not quite enough and so at home, as abroad, the President's foes in Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the courts, and elsewhere, watching the opinion polls, noting his faltering performance, absorbing the sinkhole quality of Iraq, sensing that this administration was losing its forcefulness began pushing back or paying less attention. In turn, as with the recent Supreme Court decision on detainees at Guantanamo (or the NSA surveillance issue), the administration has been slowly giving way, twisting and squirming, parsing words and pretzeling meanings as it retreats.

If your religion is force, then showing weakness, not smiting your foes, only encourages the look of a woebegone commander-in-chief presidency. In that light, the recent Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision of the Supreme Court was but another blow to the President's unfettered self.

And yet old faiths, and the habits that go with them, die hard. When the Hamdan decision came down, the President's reaction was an interesting (if hardly noted) one. He immediately said: "We will seriously look at the findings, obviously, and one thing I am not going to do, though, is that I am not going to jeopardize the safety of the American people." The findings? Was he under the impression that a Supreme Court decision was like the "findings" of a presidentially appointed commission, like the 9/11 Commission, offering advice to the President to be seriously looked at and considered?

Then again, that was just his first reaction. With time and further thought, here's what he said about the decision at a news conference in Chicago last week: "I am willing," he assured the assembled journalists and the American public, "to abide by the ruling of the Supreme Court." He was now willing to abide… hmmm. If that wasn't the imperial commander-in-chief of our nation hanging in there, I don't know what would be. He added: "They didn't [say] we couldn't have done -- made that decision, see. They were silent on whether or not Guantanamo -- whether or not we should have used Guantanamo. In other words, they accepted the use of Guantanamo, the decision I made." Aha…

And, of course, the acolytes of his fundamentalist faith haven't exactly gone away either. Last week, for instance, the Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony from Steven Bradbury, head of the Justice Department's office of legal counsel. Vermont's Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy asked him about the President's claim that the Court's Hamdan decision "upheld his position on Guantanamo."

LEAHY: Was the President right or was he wrong?

BRABURY: It's under the law of war --

LEAHY: Was the President right or was he wrong?

BRADBURY: The President is always right.

The President's record in the Middle East and elsewhere tells us otherwise, of course. From Pyongyang to Tehran, Baghdad to Gaza and Tel Aviv, smaller powers -- or simply parties, militias, or mass movements -- are going their own way, considering their own narrow interests, and exploring just how far force can take them, while ignoring the words of the Bush administration. In this sense, they learned their new religious catechism well: If you can't impose it on me by force of arms, then to hell with you.

So here we are armed to the teeth in a hair-trigger world with a bevy of angry states happy to declare their own unilateral "wars on terror" and pursue their own armed solutions. They've all got the fervor and the faith. As for the rest of us, who knows what we're sliding into or how in the world to put on the brakes.

Out of the last Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon came both the fundamentalist extremism of Hezbollah and of Ariel Sharon. Who knows what will come from this round of the same -- certainly, nothing good as long as force is the only ruling deity in our world.

Oh, and there's one fundamentalist character I've left out of the mix, someone who definitely bows down to force. Call everything that's happened these last few years Osama's dream. It's hard not to think of William Butler Yeats' poem, "The Second Coming," and then wonder: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, is now available in paperback.

Neocons Rise From Mideast Ashes

2006-08-04T14:47:00.000-07:00

Neocons Rise From Mideast Ashes

by Robert Dreyfuss

Published on Monday, July 17, 2006 by TomPaine

Israel’s reckless, high-stakes decision to launch simultaneous wars against both Hamas and Hezbollah last week is a critical, perhaps world-shattering event. It cannot be seen merely in its local context, that is, as an act by the unilateralist regime in Jerusalem to crush the armed wings of two Islamic fundamentalist organizations in Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon. Nor can it be seen merely in its regional context, that is, as an effort to raise the stakes in the struggle against Syria, Iran and rejectionist factions in occupied Iraq. Rather, Israel’s actions must be seen, first and foremost, in the context of global politics.

The key question: Is the Israeli offensive designed as a calculated effort to catapult the hard-right, neoconservative ideologues back to power in Washington?

The terrorist attacks of 9/11, the 21st century’s Pearl Harbor, allowed Vice President Dick Cheney—along with Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, John Bolton, et al.—to steer President George W. Bush and the U.S. government toward a global war, including the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; the endless “war on terrorism” and the militarization of American foreign policy. Since then, and especially as the adventure in Iraq bogged down, the less adventurous realists in the American foreign policy establishment have begun to eclipse the previously hegemonic neoconservatives. For the past year or so, the Pollyannas amid the chattering classes have told us that the neoconservatives’ moment has passed, and that the adults are back in control in the nation’s capital. What they forgot—and what Israel’s criminal attacks on Gaza and Lebanon have reminded us—is that the neoconservative war party is global, not domestic. Outflanked, temporarily, in the United States, the neocons are now flexing their muscle outside the United States in a way that can give them added new leverage at home.

Let’s analyze the current crisis, piece by piece.

First, Israel’s actions in no way can be seen as a legitimate response to the small-scale attacks from Hamas and Hezbollah. Instead, what Israel has done has used the pretext of those pin-prick attacks—a couple of border raids and a handful of errant rockets—to launch a strategic attack whose goals are to crush Hamas and the remaining institutions of Palestinian self-rule and decapitate and destroy Hezbollah politically and militarily in Lebanon.

Second, it’s clear that Israel would never have launched this war without having made the calculation that it would win the support of the United States. The rest of the world is solidly aligned against Israel’s outrageously disproportionate attacks, but none of that matters. No diplomatic mission from the feeble United Nations, no angry statements from the Arab League, no fulminations from Western Europe will deter Israel. As long as Israel has the support of the United States, it will forge ahead relentlessly. So far, in a shocking display of craven capitulation to the Israeli fait accompli, President Bush has repeatedly endorsed Israel’s aggression. But Israel is clearly counting on more than just Bush’s support for its actions in Gaza and Lebanon. More broadly, Israel is seeking to shift the balance in the Bush administration back in favor of the neocons, the hawks, and their radical “New American Century” comrades.

Third, by invading and bombing Lebanon and acting brutally to crush the Palestinian Authority, Israel has created a unified field theory of the Middle East’s crises, uniting the escalating world showdown with Iran, the unraveling civil war in Iraq, the crisis over Syria’s role in Lebanon, and the Arab-Israeli conflict itself into one big tangle. To be sure, all of those conflicts were always linked. But now they are as one. And in each case, the United States now faces a huge dilemma.

A sane U.S. policy would (1) exert backbreaking pressure on Israel to halt its attacks; (2) open a dialogue with Iran and Syria about containing Hezbollah and Hamas; (3) take drastic steps to stop the Iraqi civil war by making across-the-board concessions to Iraq’s Sunnis and forcing the Shiites to swallow it, while starting a phased U.S. withdrawal; and (4) getting the White House directly involved in the Israel-Palestine peace process as if their lives depended on it.

But Israel, and its neoconservative allies, are counting on none of that to happen. Instead, they’ve gambled that in each case President Bush will fall back under the spell of Dick Cheney and the neocons, and do precisely the opposite: continue to give Israel the green light, throw rhetorical bombs at Damascus and Teheran, escalate the counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, and take Israel’s side in its wall-building, settlement-defending, no-talks-with-Hamas unilateralism.

Make no mistake: Until last week, before Israel went to war, the neoconservatives were losing across the board. They watched in horror as the war in Iraq faltered, and they were appalled by President Bush’s Condi-led opening to Iran. Indeed, to many it seemed as if the entire post-9/11 project to remake the Middle East and build American hegemony on that cornerstone was in jeopardy.

Speaking at a forum at the American Enterprise Institute last week, Frederick Kagan warned that the United States is in “danger of losing everything” because the war in Iraq is not being pursued aggressively enough. “All of this success can and will be undone … if we do not get the security situation [in Iraq] under control, and fast,” he said, accurately enough. Now that Israel is at war, they have the chance once again to go on the offensive, against Iran, in Iraq, against Syria, and against the mythical Terrorist International that they warn about so regularly. You can imagine what Cheney and his allies are whispering to the president: Be resolute, be strong—and bring ‘em on!

Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone. He can be reached through his website: www.robertdreyfuss.com.

New York Times Tells a Whopper About Legality and Morality of Israel’s Actions

2006-08-04T14:46:00.001-07:00

New York Times Tells a Whopper About Legality and Morality of Israel’s Actions

by Matthew Rothschild

Published on Monday, July 17, 2006 by the Progressive

The lead editorial for The New York Times on July 15 was entitled “Playing Hamas’s Game,” and it told a whopper.

It exonerated Israel for any responsibility in the current crisis. Its only critical word toward Israel was to be prudent tactically.

“It is important to be clear about not only who is responsible for the latest outbreak, but who stands to gain most from its continued escalation,” the Times intoned. “Both questions have the same answer: Hamas and Hezbollah.”

And while it is certainly true that the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers by Hamas and Hezbollah were illegal acts of provocation, Israel’s response was not designed to get the soldiers back safely. “That cannot be achieved by military means,” as Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery has noted.

(Avnery says “the real aim is to change the regime in Lebanon and to install a puppet government,” as well as to burnish the image of the Israeli military.)

The Times loudly condemned Hamas and Hezbollah—which deservedly earns more condemnation every day, most recently for the disgusting bombing of the Haifa train station on Sunday—but the Times only softly cautioned Israel.

“Israel needs to be careful that its far-reaching military responses, however legally and morally justifiable, do not end up advancing the political agenda that Hamas and Hezbollah hard-liners had in mind,” the Times said.

Check out that clause once more: “however legally and morally justifiable.”

Let’s look at legally first.

Amnesty International, which knows a thing or two about the law, calls Israel’s actions “a war crime.”

It says Israel has been guilty of imposing collective punishment both in Gaza and in Lebanon by destroying civilian infrastructure.

And it cites chapter and verse.

To wit:

The Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 33, prohibits “collective penalties.”

Article 147 of the Convention prohibits “extensive destruction . . . not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.”

Protocol 1 Additional to the Geneva Conventions, Article 48, states: “In order to ensure respect for and protection of the civilian population and civilian objects, the Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operation only against military objectives.”

Finally, Amnesty notes, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court says that “intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects” is a war crime.

Now let’s look at morally.

How is it morally justifiable for Israel to cause a humanitarian crisis in Gaza by blowing up the power station, which is necessary to purify the water supply?

How is it morally justifiable for Israel to bomb crowded neighborhoods in Lebanon or to fire on fleeing refugees?

Is the killing of children morally justifiable?

Here is Robert Fisk’s account of one of Israel’s attacks.

“They came first to the little village of Dweir near Nabatiya in southern Lebanon where an Israeli plane dropped a bomb on to the home of a Shia Muslim cleric,” Fisk wrote.

“He was killed. So was his wife. So were eight of his children. One was decapitated. All they could find of a baby was its head and torso, which a young villager brandished in fury in front of the cameras. Then the planes visited another home in Dweir and disposed of a family of seven.”

The same day that the Times editorial ran, Steven Erlanger reported for the Times that 66 Lebanese had been killed in the prior 72 hours and 4 Israelis.

The Times editorial did say that Israel should do “far more to minimize the damage to civilian bystanders.”

But if Israel, by the Times' own admission, is not doing enough to minimize civilian casualties, how can the Times bless the legality and morality of what Israel is doing?

Matthew Rothschild has been with The Progressive since 1983. His McCarthyism Watch web column has chronicled more than 150 incidents of repression since 9/11.

We're Being Set Up for Wider War in the Middle East

2006-08-04T14:46:00.000-07:00

We're Being Set Up for Wider War in the Middle East

by Paul Craig Roberts

July 17, 2006

The old adage, "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" does not apply to Americans, who have shown that they can be endlessly fooled.

Neoconservatives deceived Americans into an illegal attack and debilitating war in Iraq. American neoconservatives are closely allied with Israel's Likud Party. In the past, some neocons lost their security clearances because of "mishandling" of classified information. According to Insight magazine, "the Pentagon has banned security clearance to Americans with relatives in Israel. Government sources and attorneys said the Pentagon has sought and succeeded in removing security clearance from dozens of Americans, mostly Jews, who either lived, worked, or have relatives in Israel."

Despite questions of dual loyalties, neocons hold high positions in the Bush regime. Ten years ago these architects of American foreign and military policy spelled out how they would use deception to achieve "important Israeli strategic objectives" in the Middle East. First, they would focus "on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq." This would open the door for Israel to provoke attacks from Hezbollah. The attacks would let Israel gain American sympathy and permit Israel to seize the strategic initiative by "engaging Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon."

Today, this neoconservative plan is unfolding before our eyes. Israel has used the capture of two of its soldiers in Lebanon as an excuse for an all-out air and naval bombardment against Lebanese civilian targets. However, a number of commentators have pointed out that such a massive attack requires weeks if not months of preparation that could not be done overnight in response to the capture of the soldiers.

Regardless, in the first two days of the Israeli military attack on Lebanon more than a hundred civilians, including Canadians, have been killed by Israeli bombs (gifts from U.S. taxpayers). The Beirut International Airport has been repeatedly bombed, as have residential neighborhoods, roads, bridges, ports, and power stations.

Soldiers are a legitimate military target. Civilians, civilian neighborhoods, tourists, and international airports are not. Under the Nuremberg standard used to sentence Nazi war criminals to death, the Israeli government is clearly guilty of war crimes.

Meanwhile, the Israelis are committing identical war crimes in Gaza. Again Israel's excuse is the capture of an Israeli soldier. However, the distinguished Israeli professor Ran HaCohen said that the Israeli army "had been demanding a massive attack on Gaza long before the Israeli soldier was kidnapped."

By blocking UN Security Council action against Israel for its massacre of civilians in Gaza, the Bush regime has made itself complicit in these monstrous war crimes. Just as Germans who supported Hitler were deemed to be complicit in his war crimes, Americans who support Bush are complicit in Bush's war crimes.

Hezbollah is not the Lebanese government. It does not rule Lebanon. Hezbollah is the militia organization founded in 1982 in response to Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Hezbollah defeated the Israeli army and drove out the Israeli invaders six years ago.

According to the BBC, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said that the two Israeli soldiers "were captured to pressure Israel to release the thousands of Palestinian prisoners in its jails," especially the women and children.

The BBC also notes that although Hezbollah operates "from Lebanese territory and the militant group has two ministers in the Lebanese government, the central government is almost powerless to influence the militant group." (Note that the BBC applies the loaded word "militant" to Hezbollah but not to Israel.) Hezbollah, reports the BBC, "is also very popular in Lebanon and highly respected for its political activities, social services, and its military record against Israel."

The prime minister of Lebanon, who was installed with President Bush's approval when Syria, under Bush's pressure, recently withdrew its troops from Lebanon, has twice appealed to Bush to pressure Israel to stop its criminal attacks. Our great moral, democratic, Christian leader has twice rebuffed the appeal from the legal representative of the Lebanese people. Instead, Bush is willingly going along with the 1996 neocon script. Bush is laying the blame on Syria and Iran, exactly as the neocon script calls for him to do.

When Bush demands that Syria "stop Hezbollah attacks," he forgets that he was the one who forced Syria out of Lebanon (to enable Israel to attack Lebanon). If Americans were attentive, they would be ashamed to witness "their" president acting as an Israeli propagandist.

Fox "News," CNN, and the rest of the Bush propaganda ministry are echoing the lie that innocent Israel is under attack from the "terrorist states" of Syria and Iran through their surrogate, Hezbollah. Americans, who are sick of the Iraq occupation and want the troops home, are being fooled again and set up for wider war in the Middle East.

Evangelical "Christians" are part of the propaganda show. Three thousand of them, under the lead of the Rev. John C. Hagee, are heading to Washington for a "Washington/Israel summit" to demand, needlessly, that the neocon Bush regime show "stronger support for Israel."

It is difficult to see how Bush could show any stronger support without using the U.S. military to assist Israel in its attacks, which is, of course, what the "Christian" Rev. Hagee intends when he declares: "There's a new Hitler in the Middle East [he doesn't mean Bush or Olmert]. The only way he will be stopped will be by a preemptive military strike in Iran."

Present at Rev. Hagee's "Washington/Israel Summit" will be Israel's former Minister of Defense, Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya'alon, Israeli Ambassador Daniel Ayalon, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, Republican Senators Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, and Gary Bauer.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful lobby in Washington, expressed its thanks to Rev. Hagee for demonstrating "the depth and breadth of American support" for Israel. Recently, AIPAC has been under investigation as a suspected nest for Israeli spies.

David Brog, former chief of staff for Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, has gone to work for Rev. Hagee. Brog, who is Jewish, says he works for Hagee's evangelical enterprise because "we're bringing into a pro-Israel camp millions of Christians who love Israel and giving them a political voice. Israel's enemies are our enemies, and this group instinctively understands that." Brog goes on to say that Hagee's evangelicals understand that they are not supposed to talk about Jesus, only about saving Israel: "Christians who work with Jews in supporting Israel realize how sensitive we are in talking about Jesus. They realize it will interfere with what they are trying to do."

Gentle reader, is this an admission that evangelicals have set aside Jesus for war? Do these bloody-minded evangelicals really believe they will be wafted to Heaven for helping Israel involve the U.S. in more war? Have evangelicals forgotten that "an eye for an eye" is Old Testament? "Turn the other cheek" is New Testament.

On July 14, Reuters reported that alone among Christians, the "Vatican condemns Israel for attacks on Lebanon."

Whose delusion is the greatest – the evangelical "rapture" delusion, the neocon delusion about American power, or the Zionist delusion? The three together mean disaster for America, Israel, and the world.

One of the great evangelical/Zionist/neocon myths is that "tiny Israel" armed with 200 nuclear weapons is threatened by Muslim Middle Eastern countries. In actual fact, Egypt and Pakistan, which have the bulk of the Middle Eastern Muslim population, are ruled by American puppets. Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the oil emirates are totally dependent on U.S. protection and, thereby, are also under the American thumb. Iran is Persian, not Arab, and has no common borders with Israel. Hezbollah was created when Israel tried to seize Lebanon in 1982. Hamas is a Palestinian response to the atrocities Palestinians have suffered for a half century at Israel's hands.

Israel's land-stealing policy is the source of Middle Eastern instability. America is hated because American money and weapons are what enable Israel to steal Palestine from Palestinians.

As numerous Middle East experts have pointed out, what is decried as "Arab terrorism against Israel" is, in fact, the only tactic Muslims have for calling the world's attention to the plight of the Palestinians, about which Americans are generally ignorant.

It is absurd for Bush to condemn Syria for not behaving as an American puppet and for not fighting Israel's battles by taking on Hezbollah. Syria and Iran (and Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion) are the only Middle Eastern countries independent of American control. It is far beyond the boundaries of reason and morality to expect these two remaining independent countries to give up their independence in order to enable Israel to steal Palestine and southern Lebanon.

It is the refusal of Syria and Iran (and Saddam Hussein's Iraq) to stand with Israel against Palestine that has made them targets for American attack. Neocons have total control of U.S. foreign policy in the Bush regime, and they have morphed our strategic interests into Israel's.

As the neoconservative architects of Bush's wars revealed in 1996, their concern lies with Israeli strategic objectives.

Find this article at:

http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=9317

Will We Go to War for Israel?

2006-08-04T14:44:00.000-07:00

Will We Go to War for Israel?

Israel says "Jump!"

Americans ask: "How high?"

by Justin Raimondo

July 17, 2006

Listening to Newt Gingrich bloviate on Meet the Press, advocating U.S. intervention on Israel's behalf against Syria and Iran – and the pathetic Joe "Me Too" Biden effectively agreeing with him – one can only wonder how or why anybody listens to these crazies. As Newt, the megalomaniacalhas-been, gleefully declares that "World War III" is in progress, and weaves a conspiracy theory linking Iran, Syria, North Korea, Hezbollah, and – believe it or not! – Venezuela, old Joe just sits there nodding out. Given a chance to reply, his only objection to Gingrich's vision of war on all fronts is that, yes, we need to go to war, but we have to do it with the support of our allies. "Fighting Joe" Biden is no weenie: his voice hardens as he avers we should tell the North Koreans that we have the capacity to "annihilate" them. Gingrich smiles.

He has good reason to smile. Aside from his fondness for the concept of annihilation, he knows that the War Party's "liberal" Democratic wing is falling into line. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon – which many predict will include the de facto annexation of a southern "buffer zone" – has the fulsome support of both parties. When the Israelis tell the Americans to jump, the only question Biden and the Democratic party leadership have is: How high?

What Israel wants is what they have always wanted: to use American power, American tax dollars, and American lives to advance their own expansionist agenda. Twenty-five thousand Americans are in Lebanon at the present moment, all of them at risk from Israeli bombs – but that didn't factor into Tel Aviv's calculations, any more than Lebanese or Palestinian lives matter one whit to them. The Israelis put Israel first – and so does Washington. If all 25,000 American tourists and others have to perish in the flames of Israeli air strikes, then so be it. No sacrifice is too great – just as long as our Israel-centric foreign policy remains firmly in place.

Unleashed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the presence of a substantial American force in the midst of Mesopotamia, the Israelis are the tip of an American spear aimed at Syria and Iran. And Israel's amen corner in Washington and the media are doggedly pushing the talking point that these two spokes on the "axis of evil" are churning the Lebanese waters. MSNBC assures us that Iran "created" Hezbollah: knowledgeable analysts can only laugh at this agitprop – but then they aren't cited in this piece. Only a former Israeli general is.

Hezbollah, of course, was "created," not by Iran, but by the Israeli invasion of 1982. The group gained prestige and adherents as it drove the invading Israelis back over the border and set up an elaborate network of social service organizations, standing candidates for office and entering the Lebanese Parliament. The mere sight of an Arab entity successfully defying Israel, and not only living to tell the tale but also prospering, is impermissible: Russian President Vladimir Putin was not alone in saying that there was more to the Israeli agenda than merely getting back their captured – um, I mean "kidnapped" – soldiers.

Another war, a silent war, is going on in the corridors of power, and the fighting in the Middle East, in an important sense, is merely a reflection of a long, bitter internecine struggle in Washington. Those Republican "realists" we hear so much about – holdovers from the Bush I regime, "realist" policy wonks, and those Republicans who look at the polls – have their champion (or best hope, at any rate) in Condoleezza Rice. Her personal relationship with the president and her elevation to head of the State Department have led severalcommentators to equate this as a victory for the "realists."

The neoconservative ideologues, who have been the radical vanguard of the War Party all along, certainly believe this, which is why Richard Perle recently took her on in the Washington Post. The Condi faction temporarily gained the upper hand when they came out with a policy on Iran that had been worked on in secret and took the road of negotiation rather than outright military confrontation and "regime change."

The Israeli answer: invade Lebanon, force the issue, and go for the throat. With the Israel lobby going full-bore and the propaganda mills churning, the invasion undermines the Rice faction and puts the issue of regime-change back on the administration's agenda. While that change of regime will, initially, be limited to southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah operates a de facto independent state, it will eventually – the neocons hope – extend to the whole of the country, topple Bashar al-Assad in Syria – and, eventually, spill over into Iran.

Dan Rather said on Chris Matthews' Sunday show that the road is littered with the corpses of those who underestimated Dick Cheney, and the reassertion of the neoconservative voice within this administration – a voice that many thought had been nearly stilled by the grotesque failure of our Iraqi disaster – is a testament to the validity of his thesis.

The neocons' comeback is made possible by the Democrats' complete prostration before the Israeli offensive. Biden's babbling that our lack of allies has crippled our ability to mediate the Middle East conflict is completely wrong – and beside the point, in any case. To begin with, all the Arab killer regimes – the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the dictators, the kings, the petty tyrants and emirs – are taking the line that Hezbollah, and not Israel, is to blame. The Lebanese, they say, have brought this on themselves and now have to bear the consequences of Hassan Nasrallah's actions.

Yet a state of war still exists between Israel and Lebanon – no peace treaty was ever signed. And the border is closely watched by both parties: it's hard to imagine the Israelis failed to realize that sending in a few unguarded troops so close to Hezbollah positions would likely result in their capture. Hezbollah took the bait, and the trap snapped shut.

The question boils down to this: can the Israelis win a war with Hezbollah without American intervention? The answer, clearly, is no: look what happened last time. The Americans, lured into Beirut, suffered 241 casualties – after bombing Beirut's suburbs – and Reagan wisely withdrew. Israel, in the end, was driven out. The neocons are determined that, this time, the Americans will not only stay – they'll go for Damascus.

The call for American military intervention is bound to come up, rather shortly, and get louder as the long "precision" bombing of the Lebanese continues. The Israelis will pound Lebanon in a display of U.S.-backed military power, and the only debate in Washington will be over to what extent we ought to intervene, rather than whether we ought to get involved at all.

In the end, some combination of UN-NATO-American military intervention will do for the Israelis what they could never accomplish on their own: neutralize all opposition to their conquest of Palestine coming from the Levant. The "debate" in Washington is only over how to achieve that goal: the Democrats say we have to do it "multilaterally," and the Republicans, with Jacksonian disdain, say we don't have to answer to anybody (except the Israelis, of course).

There is no "solution" to the Middle East's many conflicts, and American attempts to formulate one are doomed to failure. Some problems are just not solvable by human efforts, and this is one of them. Our intervention only serves to exacerbate the situation and spread the conflict – with blowback that can and did have deadly consequences as far as our own interests are concerned.

American interests play little or no role in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, and we all know why. What scholars John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt said in their now famous study [.pdf] of "the Lobby," as they call it, is being confirmed in spades by this latest episode:

"For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centerpiece of U.S. Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread 'democracy' throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized not only U.S. security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the U.S. been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state?"

Their answer: "The unmatched power of the Israel Lobby."

That Lobby is now furiously demanding – and getting – unconditional support for the violation of Lebanon's sovereignty not only from the president, but from the leaders of both political parties and the major mandarins of the commentariat. The Mearsheimer-Walt thesis has now been confirmed. The question is: what do we do about it?

America's real interests in the Middle East are in securing two primary goals: (1) Making sure that war and political factors don't obstruct the free flow of commerce – and oil – to American markets, and (2) neutralizing the Osama bin Ladens of the Middle East ideologically, not necessarily in that order. Regarding the first goal, I merely refer you to current oil prices. On the second matter, our unconditional support for Israel's brazen invasion is now the chief recruiting tool for bin Laden and his gang.

While the War Party runs roughshod over authentic American interests, the U.S. political landscape, at this point, lacks anything remotely resembling a Peace Party. Don't look to the Democrats, as a party, to come to our rescue. They won't. "The Lobby" works both sides of the partisan fence, and, as we all know, "politics ends at the water's edge" – which is how we've been dragged into every war of modern times, despite popular opposition.

Perhaps, some day, an administration and a Congress that puts America first will regain control of Washington. That prospect, however, appears dim at the moment. As Americans wake up to World War IV on the horizon, however, it is not completely out of the question. War teases out new trends and creates new patterns in the politics of a nation, and it does so rather rapidly. In any case, we have to hope – because the alternative is so unappealing.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

I apologize for sounding a note of weariness, and even despair, in the above paragraph. It is provoked, I fear, by the sheer repetition involved in writing a column such as this. In pointing out the dangers inherent in our foreign policy, and underscoring the probable consequences of our reckless arrogance, I sometimes think I am writing the same column, over and over again, and that the real trick is in introducing some variation of language. So, rather than simply saying "I told you so!", I have compiled a few quotes from previous columns on the subject of Israel, Lebanon, and the prospect of a gathering regional war.

Note: I have left the original links in, in spite of the maddening practice of many news organizations in deleting or moving their online content.

May 7, 2003

"Will this same gang of warmongers entrap us in a war with Syria, and drag us back into Lebanon, where we are sure to confront the ghosts of our past errors? The battle-cry has already been sounded: Stay tuned as we hear news of Syria's 'weapons of mass destruction" and the inevitable question: 'Is Saddam in Syria?'

"As Yogi Berra once said: 'This is like deja-vu all over again!'"

Feb. 16, 2005

"Wars don't respect national borders, and it's only a matter of time before the Americans' ongoing battle against the Iraqi insurgency spills over into Syria. As I predicted in September 2003, 'We are a border incident away from taking the war into Syria, and beyond,' and that analysis seems borne out by events.

"All the elements of a regional conflagration are now in place, and the assassination of Hariri has set the fuse to burning. How long before the troops move out is anyone's guess, but make no mistake about it: Syria is next on the War Party's agenda.

"As I have said from the very beginning, the war in Iraq was and is just a means to the ends of finally securing Israel's 'security' – by making it the dominant power in the region. This is now being confirmed as the U.S. takes aim at Syria and moves against Hizbollah."

Dec. 12, 2005

"Syria is now girding for the imposition of economic sanctions and trying to head off the campaign to destabilize the country on two fronts: by restarting talks with Israel, and by cooperating with the request to permit Syrian officials to be questioned in the Hariri investigation. I have the funny feeling, however, that this is not going to do them a lot of good, as far as their enemies in the West are concerned. As we have seen in the case of Iraq, when the U.S. wants to manufacture a case for war, it can be done pretty easily: Congress is not likely to ask inconvenient questions until it's too late, and the American people can hardly be expected to keep up with arcane doings in faraway Lebanon, the scene of the intrigue and obscure religious-ethnic rivalries that could spark another Mideast war. Acting pretty much without either congressional or public scrutiny, this administration thinks it can get away with anything when it comes to Syria – and in that, they are probably right."

March 2, 2005

"Two years after the invasion and conquest of Iraq, and what have we gained? An Islamic state in Iraq, a looming confrontation with Syria, and the increasingly likely prospect of Lebanon reverting to a state of civil war."

Feb. 23, 2005

"We are in for a long buildup to direct intervention in Lebanon, and Syria. … It's all so predictable, and boring, that I can't even write about it for another minute, except to say: They've only just begun…"

Jan. 2, 2006 – New Year's column

"The escalation of the war against the Iraqi insurgencies – yes, I mean that to be a plural – into a regional conflict is a possibility that will increasingly present itself in 2006. The New Year had barely dawned when reports of U.S. planning for a military strike on Iran were coming from UPI and the Jerusalem Post. It is Syria, however, that represents a real opportunity for the War Party to effect some 'regime change' in the region: the process of setting up Bashar al-Assad as the latest edition of Ba'athist Evil in the Middle East is already well underway. Contrary to most of the evidence, including the most basic considerations of common sense, Syria has been tagged as the murderer of Lebanese entrepreneur-politician Rafik Hariri, who was killed in a Beirut car blast last year, and the UN 'investigation' is taking on all the appearances of a propaganda campaign directed at Damascus.

"Hillary has already signed on to the campaign to provoke a conflict with Syria, and she won't hear any argument from McCain on this matter. When the alleged Democratic 'dove' Nancy Pelosi touts her support of sanctions against Syria – in spite of the very valuable cooperation proffered by Damascus in tracking down Islamist terrorist cells – the chances of avoiding a military conflict with Damascus appear dim."

Oct. 24, 2005

"The U.S. is ratcheting up its campaign against Syria, even as the principal proponents of confronting Damascus – Libby, Hadley, Hannah, Wurmser, et al. – find themselves in Fitzgerald's sights. In effect, the prosecutor is running a race with the War Party: can they provoke a war with Syria before he brings charges? For the sake of the country, I dearly hope Fitzgerald's staff has writer's cramp by now from furiously tapping out indictments."

March 29, 2006

"The battle will not be joined all at once, however: don't expect a full-scale frontal assault on Iran any time soon. The struggle will break out between Iranian proxies – the Shi'ite party militias, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iranian-backed factions based in Syria – and the U.S. and its allies in the region, including not only the Israelis but also the Kurds and the Christian Lebanese factions."

Find this article at:

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=9314

What Bush's Open Mic Revealed

2006-08-04T14:40:00.000-07:00

What Bush's Open Mic Revealed

by Robert Scheer

Published on Wednesday, July 19, 2006 by TruthDig

Bombs were exploding and innocents dying, from Beirut to Haifa to Baghdad, and yet George Bush managed to pose for yet another photo op, smiling as he gave the thumbs up at the close of the G8 summit. Thanks to an unsuspected open mic, however, we could also glimpse the mindset of a leader unaccountably pleased with his ignorance of the world.

What seemed to interest him most at that farewell get together of leaders bitterly divided over a disintegrating Mideast was not some last-minute proposal for peace but rather the fact that it would take China President Hu Jintao eight hours to fly home from St. Petersburg to Beijing.

Bush had started the exchange by noting, absurdly, that, “This is your neighborhood, doesn’t take you long to get home.” Uh, yeah, incurious George, sure thing. Never mind that St. Petersburg is in Europe, on Russia’s northwestern corner, due north of Turkey, and Beijing is on the eastern edge of mainland Asia.

“You, eight hours? Me too. Russia’s a big country and you’re a big country,” he said when corrected, sounding for all the world like an earnest kindergartner, processing new information. “Russia’s big and so is China.”

Unfortunately, Bush’s private remarks to British Prime Minister Tony Blair several minutes later also revealed a cluelessness about more important matters: Israel’s bloody assault on Lebanon, its causes and possible solutions.

“See, the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, and it’s over,” he said, apparently referring to the guerilla force’s firing of rockets into Israel. “I felt like telling Kofi to get on the phone with [Syrian leader Bashir] Assad and make something happen.”

While it is refreshing to note that our president employs language that would earn a radio shock jock a fine from his own rabid obscenity-sniffers at the FCC, his profound ignorance is appalling. Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah all have their own hardcore agendas—Syria is just one player in the tortured region. Furthermore, Bush’s complete disinterest in the Mideast peace process—especially as an “honest broker” between Israel and the Palestinians—since the Supreme Court handed him the job in 2000 has paved the way for this moment.

But should we be surprised at Bush’s poor grasp of the world he supposedly leads? After all, the blundering of the Bush administration has seriously undermined secular politics in the Mideast and boosted the religious zealots of groups like Hezbollah to positions of preeminence throughout the region, from savagely violent Iraq to the beleaguered West Bank and Gaza.

But what is truly “ironic” is that the Bush administration, having overstretched our militarily and generated no foreign policy ideas beyond the willy-nilly “projection” of military force, has become a helpless bystander as the entire region threatens to burn.

Responding to Bush, Blair at least sounded somewhat constructive, offering to go directly to the Mideast and pave the way for a visit by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In this, he seemed to be unwittingly aligned with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who expressed on Sunday frustration with her successor for not leaving the conference to engage in emergency shuttle diplomacy in the Mideast.

Where Albright was critical of the “disaster” in Iraq for distracting from the dormant Mideast peace process, Rice was shrilly defensive.

“For the last 60 years, American administrations of both stripe—Democrat, Republican—traded what they thought was security and stability and turned a blind eye to the absence of democratic forces, to the absence of pluralism in the region,” she said Sunday. “That policy has changed.”

While this is certainly a dramatic sound bite, the words have no logical meaning: The U.S. continues to embrace the dictatorships of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, as has been the case for sixty years. In fact, Bush has added Libya to the “approved” list. Meanwhile, Israel is attacking elected governments in the Palestinian Authority and Lebanon with U.S. support.

As for the democracy in Iraq that Bush wants Russia to emulate, things haven’t worked out as neocons like invasion architect Richard Perle had hoped when he fantasized about Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi leading Baghdad to recognize Israel. On Sunday, according to Reuters, the notoriously divided Iraqi parliament UNANIMOUSLY passed a motion condemning the Israeli offensive and urging the U.N. Security Council and Group of Eight leaders meeting to intervene “to stop the ... Israeli criminal aggression.”

Instead of creating a malleable U.S.-Israel ally, the overthrow of the secular Sunni leader Saddam Hussein has extended a fiery arc of Shiite-dominated religious fanaticism blazing across the Mideast skyline that betrays Bush’s claim to be bringing democracy and stability to the region.

Robert Scheer is the editor of truthdig.com and author of “Playing President.” Email to: rscheer@truthdig.com.

Syd Barrett Obits

2006-08-04T14:39:00.000-07:00

Syd Barrett, a Founder of Pink Floyd, Dies at 60

By JON PARELES

The New York Times

July 12, 2006

Syd Barrett, the erratically brilliant songwriter and singer who created the psychedelic rock of Pink Floyd only to leave the band in 1968 with mental problems, died on July 7 at his home in Cambridgeshire, England. He was 60.

His death was confirmed by a spokesman for his former band, Doug Wright of LD Communications, who did not give a cause. Mr. Barrett had long suffered from diabetes.

A statement from Mr. Wright said: “The band are very naturally upset and sad to hear of Syd Barrett’s death. Syd was the guiding light of the early band lineup and leaves a legacy which continues to inspire.”

With Pink Floyd, and on two haunting solo albums, Mr. Barrett became a touchstone for experimental pop musicians. He was also renowned both as an LSD casualty and as a symbol of how close creativity can be to madness.

Mr. Barrett wrote most of the songs on Pink Floyd’s debut album, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.” In Mr. Barrett’s songs like “Astronomy Domine,” whimsy and wordplay merged with a playful sense of structure and sound. “Let’s try it another way/You’ll lose your mind and play,” he wrote in “See Emily Play.”

He also helped to conceive the band’s performances as spectacles. “We have only just started to scrape the surface of effects and ideas of lights and music combined,” Mr. Barrett told the trade newspaper Melody Maker in 1967.

But under the pressures of rock stardom and after frequent use of LSD, Mr. Barrett had a breakdown in the late 1960’s and spent most of his life as a recluse. Pink Floyd, with its bassist, Roger Waters, taking over as songwriter, went on to become a multimillion-selling arena-rock band in the 1970’s. Pink Floyd sang about Mr. Barrett in one of its hits, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.”

Roger Keith Barrett, nicknamed Syd as a teenager, was born in Cambridge, England, on Jan. 6, 1946. He played the piano as a child and then took up the guitar, joining his first band at 16.

Pink Floyd began with boyhood friendships. Mr. Barrett attended the same elementary school as Mr. Waters. David Gilmour, who eventually replaced him as Pink Floyd’s guitarist, was another teenage friend.

In 1965, while Mr. Barrett studied painting and fine art at Camberwell art school in South London, Mr. Waters, the drummer Nick Mason and the keyboardist Rick Wright were studying architecture at Regent Street Polytechnic. They recruited Mr. Barrett to join their blues band. Mr. Barrett combined the first names of two bluesmen, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, to name the group Pink Floyd.

Blues-rock soon receded in Pink Floyd’s music, giving way to songs that built on the Beatles’ pop innovations and the expanded perceptions of the 1960’s. The music followed Mr. Barrett’s lyrics through meter changes, improbable interludes and the otherworldly sound effects the band was generating onstage at London clubs like UFO, a bastion of psychedelia. Mr. Barrett used an echo machine and slid a Zippo lighter along his guitar strings to create one of Pink Floyd’s sonic signatures.

In early 1967, Pink Floyd signed to EMI Records. Its first two singles — “Arnold Layne,” a fond song about a transvestite, and “See Emily Play” — reached the British Top 20. Pink Floyd made its debut album at Abbey Road Studios, as the Beatles worked on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” next door. “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” was a definitive psychedelic album. Its songs mixed childlike wonder with portents of disaster, and its music veered off on exuberant tangents before returning to pop choruses.

Onstage, the music was more free-form and anarchic. Band members have said Mr. Barrett was unstable even before he began extensive drug use, and he developed a reputation for odd behavior. For one show, he tried to slick down his hair with a combination of Brylcreem and crushed Mandrax tranquilizer pills, which were melted by stage lights and started to ooze down his face as he played. Playing the Fillmore West on Pink Floyd’s 1967 American tour, Mr. Barrett stood staring into space and detuning the strings on his guitar. The band cut short its American tour.

During 1967, Mr. Barrett was taking LSD every day, and that often left him incapable of performing. Mr. Gilmour joined Pink Floyd late in 1967, and by the spring of 1968, Mr. Barrett was out of the band. He wrote the song that closes “A Saucerful of Secrets,” Pink Floyd’s second album: “Jugband Blues,” which includes a Salvation Army band playing on one section. “It’s awfully considerate of you to think of me here,” he sang, “and I’m most obliged to you for making it clear/that I’m not here.”

Without Mr. Barrett, Pink Floyd’s music changed. Whimsy gave way to majestic anthems on best-selling albums like “Dark Side of the Moon,” a concept album about insanity.

Mr. Barrett was treated in psychiatric hospitals and quietly began recording songs and fragments of songs. Some were solo recordings with an acoustic guitar that other musicians were brought in to accompany; others were recorded with fellow musicians in the studio, or with Mr. Barrett working over finished backup tracks. The irregular structures of Mr. Barrett’s songs frustrated studio musicians and various producers, but Mr. Waters and Mr. Gilmour eventually took over production and completed “The Madcap Laughs,” released in January 1970.

Mr. Gilmour and Mr. Barrett returned to the studio to make “Barrett,” released in November 1970. On both albums, Mr. Barrett sounds fragile but oddly serene, following his rhymes whether they lead to nonsense or revelation.

Mr. Barrett appeared on BBC Radio and played one brief show at the London Olympia in 1970 (accompanied by Mr. Gilmour), walking offstage after four songs. In 1972, he made a last attempt to lead a band, Stars, which played a half-dozen shows in England before disbanding. Recording sessions in 1974 were unproductive.

Since then, Mr. Barrett lived quietly, spending some of his time painting. He showed up at unlikely moments: he appeared unannounced, for instance, at a 1975 Pink Floyd session as the band recorded “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond.” A British magazine reported that he was institutionalized for two years in the early 1980’s. Outtakes from his solo albums were released in 1988 as “Opel,” and a boxed set collecting all three solo albums, “Crazy Diamond,” was released in 1993. He learned he had Type II diabetes in 1998.

Mr. Barrett’s survivors include a brother, Alan, and a sister, Rosemary.

For someone with such a brief career, Mr. Barrett has never been forgotten. Indie-rockers have long tried to emulate his twisted craftsmanship, paying tribute in songs like Television Personalities’ “I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives.” Sir Tom Stoppard’s new play, “Rock ’n’ Roll,” invokes him as a lost free spirit.

Syd Barrett, 60; As Drugs Took Toll, Key Figure in Pink Floyd Was Exiled From Band

By Geoff Boucher

Times Staff Writer

July 12, 2006

Los Angeles Times

Syd Barrett, an enigmatic figure in rock history as the founding frontman of Pink Floyd and a young drug casualty who was exiled from the band on the brink of its staggering stardom, died Friday after years in seclusion. He was 60.

Barrett died of complications from diabetes, according to news reports in London.

Born Roger Keith Barrett in Cambridge, England, the future art student and rock star changed his name as a teenager to acknowledge one of his idols, British musician Sid Barrett. But his stage name would also serve in the years to follow as a winking reference to acid, the hallucinogenic drug LSD, which was widely viewed as the path to Barrett's career downfall. FOR THE RECORD:

Syd Barrett obituary: The obituary of former Pink Floyd member Syd Barrett in Wednesday's California section incorrectly referred to a Live 8 concert this year. The concert was in 2005. —

There are only a few bands in rock history that have had the longevity and singular imprint of Pink Floyd. Barrett fits into that legacy in a curious way: The band's defining music, from such albums as "Dark Side of the Moon" in 1973 and "The Wall" in 1979, was recorded well after Barrett's departure, but his status as a shaper of the group's unique persona endured.

The band's 1975 album, "Wish You Were Here," and its title track are generally accepted as melancholy valentines to Barrett, who by then was a recluse on the order of Howard Hughes.

The band came together in 1965, with chief songwriter and singer Barrett, bass player Roger Waters, drummer Nick Mason and keyboardist Richard Wright performing under a collective nickname that Barrett conjured up as a tribute to two gritty blues guitarists from the Carolinas, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, both born in the early 1900s.

Barrett penned the band's early singles "See Emily Play" and "Arnold Layne," and he was the chief architect of its first album, the trippy 1967 classic "Piper at the Gates of Dawn." The music was as edgy as the drug-laced London underground scene in that year of the Summer of Love, but even as the psychedelic sound made its way into the mainstream, Barrett found himself blinking into the intense spotlight of big-time pop music.

Late in 1967, Pink Floyd found its way to the stage of "American Bandstand," where the television audience heard Barrett singing "See Emily Play" but, on the screen, saw the sullen rocker boycotting the show's lip-sync format by keeping his lips sealed. That was followed by a painfully awkward appearance on "The Pat Boone Show."

In 1968, Floyd toured with Jimi Hendrix, but Barrett's voracious drug use made him a less and less reliable presence in the band. David Gilmour was brought in to be a second singer and guitarist behind the increasingly erratic Barrett. In short order, though, Gilmour, an old friend of Barrett's, would become his substitute instead of his second.

Barrett finished the decade on his own, not so much fired from the band as increasingly left behind. In 1970, as reports pinged through the rock world that Barrett was suffering from profound mental illness, his previously recorded studio sessions yielded enough material for two solo albums, "The Madcap Laughs" and "Barrett," which have become cult classics. Waters and Gilmour played on some of the sessions, a nod to their enduring goodwill toward their former bandmate.

Wayne Coyne — lead singer of the Flaming Lips, one of the most successful American psychedelic bands of the last two decades — said those two caches of desperate and experimental music still have a profound echo.

"There was a sense of this fractured guy, very innocent and very cool, who was losing himself," Coyne told The Times. "It was like you were hearing him in the process of losing it. He was there in the studio and he was thinking, 'I can't sing like I thought I could sing; I can't play like I thought I could play.' And the music he made was stunningly original."

Pink Floyd would go on to historic global success, playing stadium tours, making chart history with the unmatched sales longevity of "Dark Side of the Moon" and lending its music to film in Alan Parker's 1982 opera of the surreal, "Pink Floyd: The Wall." Barrett would go deeper into a life of quiet separation from the microphone.

During the sessions for "Wish You Were Here," Barrett — bald and heavier than he had been in his Pink Floyd days — reportedly went by the historic Abbey Road Studios in London to see his old mates, who were attempting to follow up their incredible "Dark Side" success with an album that put to music their devotion to their old friend. The surprise visit, according to accounts published in later years, was awkward, with Barrett appearing disheveled and brushing his teeth as he wandered the corridors.

The album included the track "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," a clear reference to Barrett with the affectionate line: "Remember when you were young? You shone like the sun." Those sessions at Abbey Road would mark the last time the original members of Pink Floyd were in the same building.

The band, without Barrett, went on to a surly middle age; Waters and Gilmour became archrivals in matters both legal and creative. They did reunite at the Live 8 charity concerts earlier this year. Waters, reputedly one of rock's most prickly characters, seemed on the verge of tears while commenting from the stage about the band's legacy and then singing "Wish You Were Here." His connection to Barrett had been the longest — they had been schoolmates and had the shared experience of losing their fathers at an early age.

Barrett's strange and stunted trip through music made a major mark on a generation of avant-garde musicians, especially in England. David Bowie said in a statement Tuesday that as a fan he watched Barrett perform with Floyd at London hotspots that set a rhythm for his own musical aspirations.

"Syd was a major inspiration for me. The few times I saw him perform in London at UFO and the Marquee clubs during the '60s will forever be etched in my mind," Bowie said. "He was so charismatic and such a startlingly original songwriter…. His impact on my thinking was enormous. A major regret is that I never got to know him. A diamond indeed."

Pink Floyd Frontman Syd Barrett Dies

By Adam Bernstein

Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, July 12, 2006; B06

Syd Barrett, 60, the singer-songwriter-guitarist who co-founded the British rock band Pink Floyd and whose drug-fueled mental collapse became a cautionary tale of rock lore, died of complications from diabetes July 7 at his home in Cambridgeshire, England.

Darkly handsome and with brooding, poetic eyes, Mr. Barrett was the charismatic early frontman of Pink Floyd. He wrote several of its psychedelic pop hits of the late 1960s, including "Arnold Layne," about a transvestite who steals women's underwear from clotheslines, "See Emily Play," about a schoolgirl groupie, and "Astronomy Domine," which tried to sonically reproduce an LSD trip.

Mr. Barrett became known for compelling experiments on guitar, including slide and echo effects; extended solos on songs such as "Interstellar Overdrive"; and using the teeth of his Zippo lighter to strum his instrument. This became as much a part of the band's mystique as its mesmerizing visual effects in concert.

With band mates Roger Waters on bass, Rick Wright on keyboard and Nick Mason on drums, Mr. Barrett helped Pink Floyd challenge the Rolling Stones and the Beatles as the most-dynamic English export. Mr. Barrett would not be around when the band had its greatest success in the 1970s with the albums "Dark Side of the Moon," "Wish You Were Here" and "The Wall."

His abundant LSD use, captured in the short 1966 film "Syd Barrett's First Trip," seemed to worsen his fragile grip on reality. His mischievous, sometimes mean backstage behavior and increasingly catatonic onstage presence led to his replacement by David Gilmour, a close friend.

Pink Floyd band mates paid tribute to Mr. Barrett, who retreated to a largely hermetic life, on the recordings "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" and "Wish You Were Here." Other musicians covered his songs, and David Bowie said in a statement yesterday, "His impact on my thinking was enormous."

Peter Jenner, a former Pink Floyd manager-producer, said of Mr. Barrett in a 1990 interview: "The pressures which hit him were the pressures from going from just being another guy on the block to being the spokesman of your generation. Especially during the psychedelic thing, there was a lot of heavy messiah-ism going around. People would come up and ask him the meaning of life -- that put a young person who'd just written a song and played a bit of guitar under enormous pressure."

Roger Keith Barrett was born Jan. 6, 1946, in Cambridge, England, where his father was a university lecturer in pathology. He was drawn to jazz and blues early on, playing ukulele and later switching to guitar, and he hung out in music clubs. He took his nickname from a old Cambridge jazz drummer he knew, Sid Barrett, and used a "y" for effect.

Mr. Barrett was an indifferent art student in London when he joined his high school friend Waters in a rock band that included Mason and Wright. Mr. Barrett wrote many of the group's early songs, inspired mostly by prodigious drug use and an astronomical atlas he carried everywhere.

He also renamed the band, formerly the Screaming Abdabs, after two obscure American bluesmen, Pink Anderson and Floyd "Dipper Boy" Council.

In 1967, Pink Floyd won a contract with EMI and began recording its debut LP, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn," at London's Abbey Road Studios. The release took its name from a chapter title in Mr. Barrett's favorite children's book, "The Wind in the Willows."

With its hallucinogenic "space-rock" sound effects, "Piper" was meant to compete with the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album, which was being recorded down the hall. Mr. Barrett played a large creative role in the engineering of the Pink Floyd album.

"He wouldn't do anything unless he thought he was doing it in an artistic way," group co-manager Andrew King once said. "He would throw the levers on the board up and down apparently at random, making pretty pictures with his hands."

The Pink Floyd recording was a popular success and led to television appearances, but Mr. Barrett proved an embarrassment. Several times, he stood in silence as the music played or as a host asked him a question. Once, he rubbed a gooey Brylcreem-laced concoction on his hair that, dissolved under studio lights, made his face appear to melt.

He constantly detuned his guitar during performances or strummed the instrument absent-mindedly. His band mates did not find this endearing and eventually dropped him altogether, but not before he sang the track "Jug Band Blues" on "A Saucerful of Secrets" (1968), which many consider his farewell:

It's awfully considerate of you to think of me here

And I'm most obliged to you for making it clear

That I'm not here

Mr. Barrett recorded two solo albums in 1970, "The Madcap Laughs" and "Barrett," which veered between whimsical and rambling. His public appearances became intolerable, with a reviewer for Melody Maker remarking, "The fingers on his left hand met the frets like strangers."

After brief hospitalization, Mr. Barrett was cared for by his mother, and he rarely left home. After his mother died in 1991, his health worsened, and his eyesight began to fail. He enjoyed gardening, however, and was said to be skillful at stuffing peppers.

The Crackdown in Cairo

2006-08-04T14:38:00.000-07:00

The Crackdown in Cairo

President Bush stands by while the democratic movement he helped to inspire is crushed.

Wednesday, July 19, 2006; A18

WITH THE TACIT consent of the Bush administration, authoritarian Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is continuing his campaign against the democratic movement that sprouted in his country last year. His latest target is the fledgling independent press, which in recent months has dared to publish stories about rampant official corruption, criticize Mr. Mubarak's promotion of his son's political career and promote the liberal democratic reforms that President Bush once advocated for Egypt. Last week Mr. Mubarak's ruling party reaffirmed a law that makes it a crime, punishable by imprisonment, to "affront the president of the republic" -- or insult parliament, public agencies, the armed forces, the judiciary or "the general public interest."

This violates a promise Mr. Mubarak made two years ago to end the jailing of journalists -- and it is more than a mere threat. On June 26 a court sentenced the editor of one of the new independent newspapers and a reporter to prison for the "crime" of having reported on a lawsuit that accused Mr. Mubarak, plausibly, of "wasting the government's resources," "squandering foreign aid" and turning "Egypt into a monarchy." (The plaintiff is also in jail.) A few weeks earlier two Egyptian bloggers covering an opposition demonstration were arrested, jailed for several weeks and brutally treated; at least one was raped in a police station.

The crackdown on the press was predictable, because it followed Mr. Mubarak's assault on opposition political parties and on a judges' reform movement -- the two other key elements of Cairo's promising Spring of 2005. In May the secular liberal candidate who ran against Mr. Mubarak for president, Ayman Nour, lost his final appeal against a five-year sentence on trumped-up charges. Hundreds of members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which won 20 percent of parliamentary seats in last year's elections, were arrested that month. In June the president forced through a new law on the judiciary that squashed the judges' demands for independence. That followed the prosecution of several leading jurists who had dared to denounce fraud in the elections.

The only hopeful news is that Egypt's new democratic forces are bravely resisting Mr. Mubarak's crackdown. More than two dozen newspapers suspended publication for a week this month to protest the press law; the judges are threatening their own strike. Opposition bloggers continue to work, despite the regime's assaults on them; anyone who doubts the reports of brutality can view videos, posted on the Internet, of police beating female protesters. On Sunday a prominent former member of Mr. Mubarak's party, Osama Ghazali Harb, announced the formation of a new liberal democratic political party, with the goal of fighting for the reforms that Mr. Mubarak once promised.

Those promises were made at a time when Mr. Bush was publicly pressing Egypt to "lead the way" in Arab democratization. Now, in Cairo and around the Middle East, the common view is that Mr. Bush has abandoned that policy. Each step of Mr. Mubarak's crackdown prompts a tepid demur from the State Department -- which last week meekly asked Egyptian officials "to take a look at any law that they might be considering . . . in the context of the importance of freedom of the press." High-level Egyptian-U.S. contacts have been stepped up and the administration has strongly urged Congress not to subtract a single dollar from Egypt's $2 billion in annual aid.

Egypt's democrats feel betrayed by the United States -- and rightly so. In its opening manifesto, Mr. Harb's new Democratic Front denounced the "hypocrisy of those who preach the right way but stray away from it with their actions." The words apply to George W. Bush as well as to Hosni Mubarak.

Wiretap Surrender

2006-08-04T14:36:00.000-07:00

Sen. Specter's bill on NSA surveillance is a capitulation to administration claims of executive power.

Saturday, July 15, 2006; A20

SENATE JUDICIARY Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) has cast his agreement with the White House on legislation concerning the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance as a compromise -- one in which President Bush accepts judicial review of the program. It isn't a compromise, except quite dramatically on the senator's part. Mr. Specter's bill began as a flawed but well-intentioned effort to get the program in front of the courts, but it has been turned into a green light for domestic spying. It must not pass.

The bill would, indeed, get the NSA's program in front of judges, in one of two ways. It would transfer lawsuits challenging the program from courts around the country to the super-secret court system that typically handles wiretap applications in national security cases. It would also permit -- but not require -- the administration to seek approval from this court system, created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, for entire surveillance programs, thereby allowing judges to assess their legality.

But the cost of this judicial review would be ever so high. The bill's most dangerous language would effectively repeal FISA's current requirement that all domestic national security surveillance take place under its terms. The "compromise" bill would add to FISA: "Nothing in this Act shall be construed to limit the constitutional authority of the President to collect intelligence with respect to foreign powers and agents of foreign powers." It would also, in various places, insert Congress's acknowledgment that the president may have inherent constitutional authority to spy on Americans. Any reasonable court looking at this bill would understand it as withdrawing the nearly three-decade-old legal insistence that FISA is the exclusive legitimate means of spying on Americans. It would therefore legitimize whatever it is the NSA is doing -- and a whole lot more.

Allowing the administration to seek authorization from the courts for an "electronic surveillance program" is almost as dangerous. The FISA court today grants warrants for individual surveillance when the government shows evidence of espionage or terrorist ties. Under this bill, the government could get permission for long-term programs involving large numbers of innocent individuals with only a showing that the program is, in general, legal and that it is "reasonably designed" to capture the communications of "a person reasonably believed to have communication with" a foreign power or terrorist group.

The bill even makes a hash out of the generally reasonable idea of transferring existing litigation to the FISA court system. It inexplicably permits the FISA courts to "dismiss a challenge to the legality of an electronic surveillance program for any reason" -- such as, say, the eye color of one of the attorneys.

This bill is not a compromise but a full-fledged capitulation on the part of the legislative branch to executive claims of power. Mr. Specter has not been briefed on the NSA's program. Yet he's proposing revolutionary changes to the very fiber of the law of domestic surveillance -- changes not advocated by key legislators who have detailed knowledge of the program. This week a remarkable congressional debate began on how terrorists should face trial, with Congress finally asserting its role in reining in overbroad assertions of presidential power. What a tragedy it would be if at the same time, it acceded to those powers on the fundamental rights of Americans.

Nuking Iran Is Not Off the Table/ Jorge Hirsch

2006-07-21T15:21:00.000-07:00

Nuking Iran Is Not Off the Table
by Jorge Hirsch
July 6, 2006

"The (for any rational human being) bizarre possibility of a U.S. nuclear strike against Iran first reached public consciousness in early April 2006, when investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote in the New Yorker magazine that it was one of six plans being considered by the administration. Now Hersh reports that the plan is off the table. Hersh is wrong on both counts. The "nuclear option" against Iran was, and still is, the only game in town."

******
"Hersh himself unwittingly reveals the key reason why Iran will be nuked: he reports that the Air Force argued that conventional rather than nuclear bunker busters should be used against the Natanz underground facility, because they would achieve the objective "without provoking an outcry over what would be the first use of a nuclear weapon in a conflict since Nagasaki." That is the problem."

The opposition of the military to the nuclear strike option is confirming the nuclear hawks' worst nightmare: nuclear weapons are becoming unusable, and as a consequence, they are not "credible" as a "deterrent." Today, Iran is not deterred from continuing its enrichment program by the threat of a U.S. nuclear strike, because, as the Hersh article tells us, such an action would be "politically unacceptable."

*******
"America needs to constrain the authority of the president to order nuclear strikes against non-nuclear states. Immediately. Change the law, change the Constitution. Congress is derelict in its responsibility by continuing to ignore this imminent threat.

"The United Nations needs to address the first-use of nuclear weapons, and the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states. Immediately.

"The last use of nuclear weapons needs to remain Nagasaki, so that the world's nuclear nations will be "deterred" from using nuclear weapons ever again. The day the last use of nuclear weapons becomes Natanz, humanity will be irremediably doomed. And the greatest democracy in the world will be responsible."

Read entire article HERE

Israel Crosses the Line

2006-07-21T15:14:00.000-07:00

Israel Crosses the Line
And you read it here first…
by Justin Raimondo
July 14, 2006

The Israeli offensive against Iran – until now, purely polemical – morphed into military action the moment the IDF crossed the border into Lebanon and took on Hezbollah. As our regular readers know, this turn of events was predicted in this space three months ago:

"War with Iran will probably not begin with a frontal assault by the U.S. and/or Israel on Iran's alleged nuclear weapons facilities, or even a skirmish along the Iraq-Iran border. Look to Lebanon and Syria for the first battlegrounds of this developing regional war. The Israelis know perfectly well that Iran's nuclear ambitions, if they ever materialize, are not an immediate threat: their real concern is their volatile northern border, where their deadly enemies – Hezbollah – are an effective obstacle to Israeli influence. The Israelis are also looking to exploit growing opportunities to make trouble in Syria, where the restive Kurds are their reliable allies, and the brittleness of the Ba'athist dictatorship is an invitation to regime change."

....
The U.S. must unequivocally condemn the invasion of Lebanon and call for the unconditional withdrawal of all Israeli forces from Lebanese soil. Furthermore, the naval and aerial blockade of Lebanon must end: thousands of tourists and others are pouring into Syria, where they may not be safe for very much longer. This is an intolerable act of war against the whole civilized community, and for the United States government to not only stand by but implicitly condone it is unforgivable. The "war on terrorism" apparently requires enabling Israeli state terrorism.

Find this article at HERE

To hush all ignorance

2006-06-11T21:23:00.000-07:00

To hush all ignorance

By Glen Beninsky Motyl

when
einsteinium is on the husbandry horizon, and the
now erstwhile bluster is riddled with bunkum
all the bhang will hoard together and fill the bunghole

when
the iguana of disunity draws her diagnosis, and the
zigzag boa constricts the ghoul,
europium will sink the wicked yachtsman.

then eyes
will yield and all burdens erode
fiends will beseech gurus,
but hubris will still hush all ignorance.

Roister of Zunis

2006-06-05T20:14:00.000-07:00

Roister of Zunis

By Glen Beninsky Motyl

Hallucinatory habitat of joy

sticks injuriously to the nadir of the nexus

While the tiara-adorned giantess stumbles

through a luau of the soul

And the mnemonic horrendous oaf

meanders serendipitously backwards

The moist rhododendron of principled agronomy

And the lascivious bewitchment of idolatry

spins frenetic ignominious beatitudes

Towards the Roister of Zunis

unerringly grand plan to

Vulcanize the ladybug’s hue as the

roebuck portends needlessly

Now fate pans down upon

a tabernacle niche and eyes

find the quintessence of a quivering

Newsreel

[Burning lignite in a rash abandoned stable]

The “no” of denial present in Yahweh-absence

as every practiced punctilio is framed and

every pun well rehearsed

War is Over (If You Want It)

2006-03-11T11:06:00.000-08:00

A way to end the war and prevent the nuking of Iran:

It is up to our friends and family members in the military to STAND DOWN and REFUSE any orders regarding this immoral, unjust, illegal, and unnecessary global war
that may very well lead to species self-annihilation!

And that is an order from General Pace!

Military Refusal: This may be our only hope!

READ AGAIN: THIS MAY BE OUR ONLY HOPE!

I'm deadly serious!

The political machine is broken and corrupt beyond repair.
Elections are permanently rigged and are not a solution
but media smoke-screen.
They have all been blackmailed or bought-off and fear and greed rule the day; Cheney and Rumsfeld are their names.
Many of them have no idea the evil force their greed and fear blind them to.

We can't wait for impeachment.
The permanent destruction of the Bill of Rights has taken place this week with the signing of the Patriot Act and the legitimizing of warrantless wiretapping upon executive order with no oversight or checks and balances. This effectively makes most activism ineffective (but that is not a reason to stop protesting-- because only the blues will keep the blues at bay). Torture, secret detentions, kidnaping, and endless war continue unabated. They are studying the mercenary military occupation of New Orleans for future "actions" within the US. Women have been stripped of their most basic rights in South Dakota, Mississippi (goddamn) is next, and so the dominoes fall)...

Violence against the leaders of the U.S. is an option I refuse as a principled pacifist...
(although at this point, it would be a "just" response, but highly unlikely to succeed)

Please encourage anyone you know who is in the U.S. military to listen to General Pace and take him very seriously on this response:

General Peter Pace's statement, February 17, 2006:

"It is the absolute responsibility of everybody in uniform to disobey an order that is either illegal or immoral."

in response to the question:

"Should people in the U.S. military disobey orders that they believe are illegal?"

Read all Hirsch's Articles Here:

The U.S./Israeli bombing of Iran will be the beginning of the great unraveling. We must stop it. Join the movement today:

Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII)

Stop War on Iran

I stand in solidarity with the people of Venezuela!
I stand in solidarity with the people of Iran!
I stand in solidarity with the resistance in Iraq!

If I can't have peace, I join them in their cry for justice!

As I write this:
3 million a year die of thirst!
Over one billion people lack access to clean drinking water.
Genocide is taking place and not just in Darfur.
This is my responsibility! For I prosper. I live in constant comfort!

Four days until last moon.
The Ides of March is upon us!

namaste,
glen motil

"Mabus plus tost alors mourra, viendra,
De gens & bestes vn horrible defaite:
Puis tout à coup la vengeance on verra,
Cent, main, faim quand courra la comete."

"We're not scaremmongering/
This is really happening"
--IDIOTEQUE
RADIOHEAD
KID A

Who's in a bunker? Who's in a bunker?
Women and children first
And the children first
And the children
I laugh until my head comes off
Swallow till I burst
Until I burst
Until I
Who's in a bunker?
Who's in a bunker?
I have seen too much
You haven?t seen enough
You haven?t seen it
I'll laugh until my head comes off
Women and children first
And children first
And children

Here I'm allowed
Everything all of the time
Here I'm allowed
Everything all of the time

Ice age coming
Ice age coming
Let me hear both sides
Let me hear both sides
Let me hear both
Ice age coming
Ice age coming
Throw 'em in the fire
Throw 'em in the fire
Throw 'em on the
We're not scaremmongering
This is really happening
Happening
We're not scaremongering
This is really happening
Happening
Mobiles skwrking
Mobiles chirping
Take the money and run
Take the money and run
Take the money

Here I'm alive
Everything all of the time
(x4)
The first of the children

2/11, Shootergate, and the Coming War on Iran

2006-02-20T22:03:00.000-08:00

2/11, Shootergate, and the Coming War on Iran
By Glen Motil

"One of the problems we have as a government is our inability to keep secrets."

This quote, taken from Cheney's interview describing shootergate-- the same interview where he expresses no remorse...
- does not utter the words "I'm sorry" to his "friend," his friend's family, the secret service, his medical team, or even to his supposed boss or boss' staff---or to the American people--(his real boss)--
--all of whom were affected by his drunken accident----
--which probably actually occurred by an inebriated Cheney dropping his weapon at close range to his victim--
--(this is perfectly in line with a sociopathic personality, BTW)--
is almost a word-for-word quote from Representative Cheney praising war criminal, terrorist and drug smuggler Oliver North at the Iran-Contra hearing in summer 1987.

This time he is not defending the importance of covering up lying to Congress about the secret sale of weapons to an enemy state to use the money to support terrorist activity, death squads and mercenaries against the people of Nicaragua-- but he is talking about the importance of covering up lying to Congress about his support of secret prisons of mind control and torture around the world and the unitary executive's (dictator's) right to infringe on the privacy of United States citizens and workers without court approval or any oversight.

He doesn't even recount being apologetic to Whittington in the moment--
Cheney recalls his first words to Whittington as being "I had no idea you were there." Cheney defines it as HIS own worse day! I don't think it was actually that great a day for his "friend."

This was not an act of contrition, but an act of defiance and a retrenching of Cheney's commitment to secret government.

The events of the past week remind us all once again who is running the nation with an iron fist and fear of blackmail. Bush is a puppet and Rove his puppet master. Cheney and Rumsfeld are in charge and they have been plotting this since they both sprouted from the head of Dick Nixon.

This includes holding the nuclear football-- the briefcase that holds the codes that begin the process which leads to the launching a nuclear war.

This last element makes shootergate very important, for we know that Cheney and Rumsfeld are intent on launching a nuclear war on Iran in the very near future.

Shootergate is our godsend. We must not let up. Someone must ask about Cheney's "nuclear war plans" during the hunting accident. This will expose the fact that he does indeed have them with him at all times and may lead to more questions.

Failure to defend the U.S. on 9/11 (and probably direct involvement). Illegal wars based on lies. Torture. Illegal spying. Secret prisons. The deliberate flooding of New Orleans and murder of thousands there:
All of these are grounds for impeachment.

Cheney and Rumsfeld must be removed from power.
The very fate of humanity is at stake! I am not being hyperbolic.

"The vice president's military aides refused to have their bags searched - they were carrying classified nuclear war plans that are supposed to be with Cheney at all times."
from "Cheney Pledges Support to Afghan Democracy," Monday December 19, 2005 7:46 PM, By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer

On the coming nuclear war on Iran--
Read all eleven articles by UCSD Physics Professor Jorge Hirsch
+ dozens of links as a primer on the reason behind the Bush Doctrine of Preventive War and Nuclear First Strike (dogMA BUSh)

Stop the War on Iran!

StopWaronIran Blog

There is not a moment to waste!
Their vile plans must be stopped!
We are on the precipice!

ONE MOON REMAINS!
The Ides of March are upon us!

namaste,
glen motil

Dick's interview:
"I'm the one who pulled the trigger"

The White House, President George W. Bush
For Immediate Release
Office of the Vice President
February 15, 2006
Interview of the Vice President by Brit Hume, FOX News
Vice President's Ceremonial Office
Eisenhower Executive Office Building
2:01 P.M. EST

Q Mr. Vice President, how is Mr. Whittington?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, the good news is he's doing very well today. I talked to him yesterday after they discovered the heart problem, but it appears now to have been pretty well resolved and the reporting today is very good.

Q How did you feel when you heard about that?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, it's a great relief. But I won't be, obviously, totally at ease until he's home. He's going to be in the hospital, apparently, for a few more days, and the problem, obviously, is that there's always the possibility of complications in somebody who is 78-79 years old. But he's a great man, he's in great shape, good friend, and our thoughts and prayers go out to he and his family.

Q How long have you known him?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I first met him in Vail, Colorado, when I worked for Gerry Ford about 30 years ago, and it was the first time I'd ever hunted with him.

Q Would you describe him as a close friend, friendly acquaintance, what --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, an acquaintance.

Q Tell me what happened?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, basically, we were hunting quail late in the day --

Q Describe the setting.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's in south Texas, wide-open spaces, a lot of brush cover, fairly shallow. But it's wild quail. It's some of the best quail hunting anyplace in the country. I've gone there, to the Armstrong ranch, for years. The Armstrongs have been friends for over 30 years. And a group of us had hunted all day on Saturday --

Q How many?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Oh, probably 10 people. We weren't all together, but about 10 guests at the ranch. There were three of us who had gotten out of the vehicle and walked up on a covey of quail that had been pointed by the dogs. Covey is flushed, we've shot, and each of us got a bird. Harry couldn't find his, it had gone down in some deep cover, and so he went off to look for it. The other hunter and I then turned and walked about a hundred yards in another direction --

Q Away from him?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Away from him -- where another covey had been spotted by an outrider. I was on the far right --

Q There was just two of you then?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Just two of us at that point. The guide or outrider between us, and of course, there's this entourage behind us, all the cars and so forth that follow me around when I'm out there -- but bird flushed and went to my right, off to the west. I turned and shot at the bird, and at that second, saw Harry standing there. Didn't know he was there --

Q You had pulled the trigger and you saw him?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I saw him fall, basically. It had happened so fast.

Q What was he wearing?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: He was dressed in orange, he was dressed properly, but he was also -- there was a little bit of a gully there, so he was down a little ways before land level, although I could see the upper part of his body when -- I didn't see it at the time I shot, until after I'd fired. And the sun was directly behind him -- that affected the vision, too, I'm sure.

But the image of him falling is something I'll never be able to get out of my mind. I fired, and there's Harry falling. And it was, I'd have to say, one of the worst days of my life, at that moment.

Q Then what?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, we went over to him, obviously, right away --

Q How far away from you was he?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I'm guessing about 30 yards, which was a good thing. If he'd been closer, obviously, the damage from the shot would have been greater.

Q Now, is it clear that -- he had caught part of the shot, is that right?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: -- part of the shot. He was struck in the right side of his face, his neck and his upper torso on the right side of his body.

Q And you -- and I take it, you missed the bird.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I have no idea. I mean, you focused on the bird, but as soon as I fired and saw Harry there, everything else went out of my mind. I don't know whether the bird went down, or didn't.

Q So did you run over to him or --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Ran over to him and --

Q And what did you see? He's lying there --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: He was laying there on his back, obviously bleeding. You could see where the shot had struck him. And one of the fortunate things was that I've always got a medical team, in effect, covering me wherever I go. I had a physician's assistant with me that day. Within a minute or two he was on the scene administering first-aid. And --

Q And Mr. Whittington was conscious, unconscious, what?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: He was conscious --

Q What did you say?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I said, "Harry, I had no idea you were there." And --

Q What did he say?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: He didn't respond. He was -- he was breathing, conscious at that point, but he didn't -- he was, I'm sure, stunned, obviously, still trying to figure out what had happened to him. The doc was fantastic --

Q What did you think when you saw the injuries? How serious did they appear to you to be?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I had no idea how serious it was going to be. I mean, it could have been extraordinarily serious. You just don't know at that moment. You know he's been struck, that there's a lot of shot that had hit him. But you don't know -- you think about his eyes. Fortunately, he was wearing hunting glasses, and that protected his eyes. You -- you just don't know. And the key thing, as I say, initially, was that the physician's assistant was right there. We also had an ambulance at the ranch, because one always follows me around wherever I go. And they were able to get the ambulance there, and within about 30 minutes we had him on his way to the hospital.

Q And what did you do then? Did you get up and did you go with him, or did you go to the hospital?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, I had -- I told my physician's assistant to go with him, but the ambulance is crowded and they didn't need another body in there. And so we loaded up and went back to ranch headquarters, basically. By then, it's about 7:00 p.m. at night. And Harry --

Q Did you have a sense then of how he was doing?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, we're getting reports, but they were confusing. Early reports are always wrong. The initial reports that came back from the ambulance were that he was doing well, his eyes were open. They got him into the emergency room at Kingsville --

Q His eyes were open when you found him, then, right?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes. One eye was open. But they got him in the emergency room in the small hospital at Kingsville, checked him out further there, then lifted him by helicopter from there into Corpus Christi, which has a big city hospital and all of the equipment.

Q So by now what time is it?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't have an exact time line, although he got there sometime that evening, 8:00 p.m., 9:00 p.m.

Q So this is several hours after the incident?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I would say he was in Kingsville in the emergency room probably within, oh, less than an hour after they left the ranch.

Q Now, you're a seasoned hunter --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I am, well, for the last 12, 15 years.

Q Right, and so you know all the procedures and how to maintain the proper line and distance between you and other hunters, and all that. So how, in your judgment, did this happen? Who -- what caused this? What was the responsibility here?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, ultimately, I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry. And you can talk about all of the other conditions that existed at the time, but that's the bottom line. And there's no -- it was not Harry's fault. You can't blame anybody else. I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend. And I say that is something I'll never forget.

Q Now, what about this -- it was said you were hunting out of vehicles. Was that because you have to have the vehicles, or was that because that's your -- the way you chose to hunt that day?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, the way -- this is a big ranch, about 50,000 acres. You cover a lot of territory on a quail hunt. Birds are oftentimes -- you're looking for coveys. And these are wild quail, they're not pen-raised. And you hunt them

-- basically, you have people out on horseback, what we call outriders, who are looking for the quail. And when they spot them, they've got radios, you'll go over, and say, get down and flush the quail. So you need --

Q So you could be a distance of a miles from where you spot quail until the next place you may find them?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, usually you'll be, you know, maybe a few hundred yards. Might be farther than that; could be a quarter of a mile.

Q Does that kind of hunting only go forward on foot, or is it mostly --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, you always -- in that part of the country, you always are on vehicles, until you get up to where the covey is. Then you get off -- there will be dogs down, put down; the dogs will point to covey. And then you walk up on the covey. And as the covey flushes, that's when you shoot.

Q Was anybody drinking in this party?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No. You don't hunt with people who drink. That's not a good idea. We had --

Q So he wasn't, and you weren't?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Correct. We'd taken a break at lunch -- go down under an old -- ancient oak tree there on the place, and have a barbecue. I had a beer at lunch. After lunch we take a break, go back to ranch headquarters.. Then we took about an hour-long tour of ranch, with a ranch hand driving the vehicle, looking at game. We didn't go back into the field to hunt quail until about, oh, sometime after 3:00 p.m.

The five of us who were in that party were together all afternoon. Nobody was drinking, nobody was under the influence.

Q Now, what thought did you give, then, to how -- you must have known that this was -- whether it was a matter of state, or not, was news. What thought did you give that evening to how this news should be transmitted?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, my first reaction, Brit, was not to think: I need to call the press. My first reaction is: My friend, Harry, has been shot and we've got to take care of him. That evening there were other considerations. We wanted to make sure his family was taken care of. His wife was on the ranch. She wasn't with us when it happened, but we got her hooked up with the ambulance on the way to the hospital with Harry. He has grown children; we wanted to make sure they were notified, so they didn't hear on television that their father had been shot. And that was important, too.

But we also didn't know what the outcome here was going to be. We didn't know for sure what kind of shape Harry was in. We had preliminary reports, but they wanted to do a CAT scan, for example, to see how -- whether or not there was any internal damage, whether or not any vital organ had been penetrated by any of the shot. We did not know until Sunday morning that we could be confident that everything was probably going to be okay.

Q When did the family -- when had the family been informed? About what time?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, his wife -- his wife knew as he was leaving the ranch --

Q Right, what about his children?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I didn't make the calls to his children, so I don't know exactly when those contacts were made. One of his daughters had made it to the hospital by the next day when I visited. But one of the things I'd learned over the years was first reports are often wrong and you need to really wait and nail it down. And there was enough variation in the reports we were getting from the hospital, and so forth -- a couple of people who had been guests at the ranch went up to the hospital that evening; one of them was a doctor, so he obviously had some professional capabilities in terms of being able to relay messages. But we really didn't know until Sunday morning that Harry was probably going to be okay, that it looked like there hadn't been any serious damage to any vital organ. And that's when we began the process of notifying the press.

Q Well, what -- you must have recognized, though, with all your experience in Washington, that this was going to be a big story.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, true, it was unprecedented. I've been in the business for a long time and never seen a situation quite like this. We've had experiences where the President has been shot; we've never had a situation where the Vice President shot somebody.

Q Not since Aaron Burr.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Not since Aaron Burr --

Q Different circumstances.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Different circumstances.

Q Well, did it occur to you that sooner was -- I mean, the one thing that we've all kind of learned over the last several decades is that if something like this happens, as a rule sooner is better.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, if it's accurate. If it's accurate. And this is a complicated story.

Q But there were some things you knew. I mean, you knew the man had been shot, you knew he was injured, you knew he was in the hospital, and you knew you'd shot him.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Correct.

Q And you knew certainly by sometime that evening that the relevant members of his family had been called. I realize you didn't know the outcome, and you could argue that you don't know the outcome today, really, finally.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: As we saw, if we'd put out a report Saturday night on what we heard then -- one report came in that said, superficial injuries. If we'd gone with a statement at that point, we'd have been wrong. And it was also important, I thought, to get the story out as accurately as possible, and this is a complicated story that, frankly, most reporters would never have dealt with before, so --

Q Had you discussed this with colleagues in the White House, with the President, and so on?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I did not. The White House was notified, but I did not discuss it directly, myself. I talked to Andy Card, I guess it was Sunday morning.

Q Not until Sunday morning? Was that the first conversation you'd had with anybody in the -- at the White House?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes.

Q And did you discuss this with Karl Rove at any time, as has been reported?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, Karl talks to -- I don't recall talking to Karl. Karl did talk with Katherine Armstrong, who is a good mutual friend to both of us. Karl hunts at the Armstrong, as well --

Q Say that again?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I said Karl has hunted at the Armstrong, as well, and we're both good friends of the Armstrongs and of Katherine Armstrong. And Katherine suggested, and I agreed, that she would go make the announcement, that is that she'd put the story out. And I thought that made good sense for several reasons. First of all, she was an eye-witness. She'd seen the whole thing. Secondly, she'd grown up on the ranch, she'd hunted there all of her life. Third, she was the immediate past head of the Texas Wildlife and Parks Department, the game control commission in the state of Texas, an acknowledged expert in all of this.

And she wanted to go to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, which is the local newspaper, covers that area, to reporters she knew. And I thought that made good sense because you can get as accurate a story as possible from somebody who knew and understood hunting. And then it would immediately go up to the wires and be posted on the website, which is the way it went out. And I thought that was the right call.

Q What do you think now?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I still do. I still think that the accuracy was enormously important. I had no press person with me, I didn't have any press people with me. I was there on a private weekend with friends on a private ranch. In terms of who I would contact to have somebody who would understand what we're even talking about, the first person that we talked with at one point, when Katherine first called the desk to get hold of a reporter didn't know the difference between a bullet and a shotgun -- a rifle bullet and a shotgun. And there are a lot of basic important parts of the story that required some degree of understanding. And so we were confident that Katherine was the right one, especially because she was an eye-witness and she could speak authoritatively on it. She probably knew better than I did what had happened since I'd only seen one piece of it.

Q By the next morning, had you spoken again to Mr. Whittington?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: The next morning I talked to his wife. And then I went to the hospital in Corpus Christi and visited with him.

Q When was that?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Oh, it was shortly after noon on Sunday.

Q Now, by that time had the word gone out to the newspaper?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I believe it had. I can't remember what time Katherine actually talked to the reporter. She had trouble that morning actually finding a reporter. But they finally got connected with the reporter, and that's when the story then went out.

Q Now, it strikes me that you must have known that this was going to be a national story --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Oh, sure.

Q -- and it does raise the question of whether you couldn't have headed off this beltway firestorm if you had put out the word to the national media, as well as to the local newspaper so that it could post it on its website. I mean, in retrospect, wouldn't that have been the wise course --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, who is going to do that? Are they going to take my word for what happened? There is obviously --

Q Well, obviously, you could have put the statement out in the name of whoever you wanted. You could put it out in the name of Mrs. Armstrong, if you wanted to. Obviously, that's -- she's the one who made the statement.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Exactly. That's what we did. We went with Mrs. Armstrong. We had -- she's the one who put out the statement. And she was the most credible one to do it because she was a witness. It wasn't me in terms of saying, here's what happened, it was --

Q Right, understood. Now, the suspicion grows in some quarters that you -- that this was an attempt to minimize it, by having it first appear in a little paper and appear like a little hunting incident down in a remote corner of Texas.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: There wasn't any way this was going to be minimized, Brit; but it was important that it be accurate. I do think what I've experienced over the years here in Washington is as the media outlets have proliferated, speed has become sort of a driving force, lots of time at the expense of accuracy. And I wanted to make sure we got it as accurate as possible, and I think Katherine was an excellent choice. I don't know who you could get better as the basic source for the story than the witness who saw the whole thing.

Q When did you first speak to -- if you spoke to Andy Card at, what, mid-day, you said, on Sunday?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Sometime Sunday morning.

Q And what about -- when did you first -- when, if ever, have you discussed it with the President?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I talked to him about it yesterday, or Monday -- first on Monday, and then on Tuesday, too.

Q There is reporting to the effect that some in the White House feel you kind of -- well, look at what Scott McClellan went through the last couple days. There's some sense -- and perhaps not unfairly so -- that you kind of hung him out to dry. How do you feel about that?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, Scott does a great job and it's a tough job. It's especially a tough job under these conditions and circumstances. I had a bit of the feeling that the press corps was upset because, to some extent, it was about them -- they didn't like the idea that we called the Corpus Christi Caller-Times instead of The New York Times. But it strikes me that the Corpus Christi Caller-Times is just as valid a news outlet as The New York Times is, especially for covering a major story in south Texas.

Q Well, perhaps so, but isn't there an institution here present at the White House that has long-established itself as the vehicle through which White House news gets out, and that's the pool?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I had no press person with me, no coverage with me, no White House reporters with me. I'm comfortable with the way we did it, obviously. You can disagree with that, and some of the White House press corps clearly do. But, no, I've got nothing but good things to say about Scott McClellan and Dan Bartlett. They've got a tough job to do and they do it well. They urged us to get the story out. The decision about how it got out, basically, was my responsibility.

Q That was your call.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: That was my call.

Q All the way.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: All the way. It was recommended to me -- Katherine Armstrong wanted to do it, as she said, and I concurred in that; I thought it made good sense.

Q Now, you're talking to me today -- this is, what, Wednesday?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Wednesday.

Q What about just coming out yourself Monday/Tuesday -- how come?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, part of it obviously has to do with the status of Harry Whittington. And it's a difficult subject to talk about, frankly, Brit. But most especially I've been very concerned about him and focused on him and feel more comfortable coming out today because of the fact that his circumstances have improved, he's gotten by what was a potential crisis yesterday, with respect to the developments concerning his heart. I think this decision we made, that this was the right way to do it.

Q Describe if you can your conversations with him, what you've said to him and the attitude he's shown toward you in the aftermath of this.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: He's been fantastic. He's a gentleman in every respect. He oftentimes expressed more concern about me than about himself. He's been in good spirits, unfailingly cheerful --

Q What did he say about that? You said, "expressed concern" about you -- what did he say?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, when I first saw him in the hospital, for example, he said, look, he said, I don't want this to create problems for you. He literally was more concerned about me and the impact on me than he was on the fact that he'd been shot. He's a -- I guess I'd describe him as a true Texas gentleman, a very successful attorney, successful businessman in Austin; a gentleman in every respect of the word. And he's been superb.

Q For you, personally, how would you -- you said this was one of the worst days of your life. How so?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: What happened to my friend as a result of my actions, it's part of this sudden, you know, in less than a second, less time than it takes to tell, going from what is a very happy, pleasant day with great friends in a beautiful part of the country, doing something I love -- to, my gosh, I've shot my friend. I've never experienced anything quite like that before.

Q Will it affect your attitude toward this pastime you so love in the future?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I can't say that. You know, we canceled the Sunday hunt. I said, look I'm not -- we were scheduled to go out again on Sunday and I said I'm not going to go on Sunday, I want to focus on Harry. I'll have to think about it.

Q Some organizations have said they hoped you would find a less violent pastime.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, it's brought me great pleasure over the years. I love the people that I've hunted with and do hunt with; love the outdoors, it's part of my heritage, growing up in Wyoming. It's part of who I am. But as I say, the season is ending, I'm going to let some time pass over it and think about the future.

Q On another subject, court filings have indicated that Scooter Libby has suggested that his superiors -- unidentified -- authorized the release of some classified information. What do you know about that?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's nothing I can talk about, Brit. This is an issue that's been under investigation for a couple of years. I've cooperated fully, including being interviewed, as well, by a special prosecutor. All of it is now going to trial. Scooter is entitled to the presumption of innocence. He's a great guy. I've worked with him for a long time, have enormous regard for him. I may well be called as a witness at some point in the case and it's, therefore, inappropriate for me to comment on any facet of the case.

Q Let me ask you another question. Is it your view that a Vice President has the authority to declassify information?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: There is an executive order to that effect.

Q There is.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes.

Q Have you done it?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I've certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions. The executive order --

Q You ever done it unilaterally?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't want to get into that. There is an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously focuses first and foremost on the President, but also includes the Vice President.

Q There have been two leaks, one that pertained to possible facilities in Europe; and another that pertained to this NSA matter. There are officials who have had various characterizations of the degree of damage done by those. How would you characterize the damage done by those two reports?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: There clearly has been damage done.

Q Which has been the more harmful, in your view?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't want to get into just sort of ranking them, then you get into why is one more damaging than the other. One of the problems we have as a government is our inability to keep secrets. And it costs us, in terms of our relationship with other governments, in terms of the willingness of other intelligence services to work with us, in terms of revealing sources and methods. And all of those elements enter into some of these leaks.

Q Mr. Vice President, thank you very much for doing this.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Brit.

END 2:28 P.M. EST

Return to this article at:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/02/20060215-3.html

nuff said

2006-02-10T13:12:00.000-08:00

all right...
nuff is e nuff!

the bastards knowingly and willfully murdered new orleans...
it is time (well past time.. we show them the door... )

how much more do we need to take?:

*failed to protect u.s. citizens and workers on 9/11 (or willfully allowed attack to occur or, worse still, took part in the plan)
[9/11=inside job]

*acts of state terrorism on the people of afghanistan killing 3-10,000 civilians in a war for poppies and petrol pipeline

*lied the us into an immoral, unjust, illegal, and unnecessary war and brutal occupation in iraq (to expand imperial base and secure oil interests)
killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of iraqi and us citizens and workers... and creating mental illness, addiciton, and domestic and community violence problems that will plague both populations for as long as the depleted uranium cancer keeps them alive

*toppled democratically elected government in haiti and tried to do the same on several occasions in venezuela

*implemented nazi antichristic nuclear first strike preventive war doctrine, which may spell our doom

*torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners

*torture prisoners to death

*secret prisons in former soviet gulags

*total destruction of the bill of rights, and desecration or disregard of and towards the universal declaration of human rights, geneva conventions, convention against torture, united nations charter and icbm treaty with russia, the last of which will destroy us all

*directly responsible, through what they have done and what they fail to do, for increased nuclear proliferation, which WILL destroy all
humanity

*allowed other states (israel, saudi arabia, pakistan, egypt, jordan, etc.) to hijack or dictate us foreign policy and put u.s. soldiers, citizens, and workers in harm's way for the national interests of foreign, corrupt--and usually dictatorial--regimes and/or corporations. [in the process exposed an undercover operative for the cia... the cia, which should be abolished, I might add...)

*spied on us citizens and workers

*murdered new orleans [for the purpose of ethnic cleansing? mercenary police-state trial?]
(were the levees bombed? is that what will be confirmed next? if so, they'll probably blame it on syria and/or iran)

*preparations in place for an implementation of nuclear first strike doctrine on the citizens and workers of iran

*lest we forget the judicial coup of 2000? the military coup of 2001?
the stolen die-bold elections of 2002 and 2004? the one-party system for the past four years controlling the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government as well as the major corporate state media?

*the placing of two white male fascist catholics on the supreme court, bringing to a total five catholics (four fascists, one conservative) on the highest court of a predominantly liberal protestant nation

*allowed a minority of pseudo-religious violent reactionary zealots (christian right or christian zionists) to dominate discourse and abrogate scientific advancment and the liberal enlightenment education system

*a bunch of shit i am sure we don't even know about yet! (what does tomorrow's scandal hold?)

+ standard corporate corruption running rampant!
("money talks" scandals running amok: cunningham, delay, hastert, frist, abramoff, etc. proving: they believe in nothing-- the majority of both dems and repubs are paid-off!)

i don't ask for much (he says with a grin)

end anglo-american empire!
no nukes! no war! no torture! no militarism!
abolish secret government! abolish slavery! abolish the prison system!
there can be no "war on terrorism." war is terrorism.
support all veterans!
support no troops!
support nonviolent resistance!
support military refusal!

namaste,
glen motil,
bluesman

http://anarchopacifistpoet.blogspot.com/

http://motility.newsvine.com/

"I pledge to you, my sister, I will never cease. I mean to say, I want to see a better world. I mean to say, I want to see some peace somewhere. I mean to say, I want to see some honesty, some fair play. I want to see kindness and justice. This is what I want to see."
--poet maya angelou, from her eulogy to sister coretta scott king

"...we, here in this world right now, are suffering from complications, of cancer from materialism and greed and selfishness and arrogance, and elitism, and poverty, and racism, and perversion, and obscenity, and misogyny, and idolatry, and militarism, and violence, and it is a cancer that's eating away at the very essence and nation of what God created human kind to be..."
--rev. elder bernice king, jd, from her eulogy to her mother, sister coretta

White House Knew of Levee's Failure on Night of Storm
By ERIC LIPTON
February 10, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/politics/10katrina.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

*****
Files Show White House Knew Levees Had Failed on First Day
Senate Democrats say 28 agencies were aware of the breaches hours after Katrina struck.
From Associated Press
February 10, 2006

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-levees10feb10,1,3681822.story

***
Ex-FEMA Chief Brown Blames DHS
By LARA JAKES JORDAN
The Associated Press
Friday, February 10, 2006; 11:36 AM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/10/AR2006021000267.html

Bravo Joel Stein!

2006-01-25T21:50:00.000-08:00

Joel Stein, the young left-of-center "humorist," who has replaced the great and fearless Robert Scheer (immaturely and involuntarily retired from the page after over a decade of outstanding service by the shortsighted and ungrateful new owners of the Times) on the "liberal" column of the Tuesday Op-Ed page of the LA Times, represents exactly the tone and style of writing I hate; it is a passive-aggressive, pampered, ego-driven extended whine, dripping with negative cynicism disguised as poorly-wrought self-deprecating humor and sprinkled with extremely lazy attempts at social analysis atop a perch that disparages all who actually believe in anything. It is for this reason that I can no longer read the likes of Time magazine and its kin, who staff their publication with writer’s of similar style. Now the style and tone is creeping into the national newspapers via the opinion and commentary pages in an attempt for these newspapers to become hip to their nearly non-existent under-25 audience.

However, this being said, I must take a moment to applaud Mr. Stein this time around. Although the article below is filled with unexamined false assumptions, flagrant misconceptions, and all the things I hate to hate listed in the above paragraph, it also contains the kernel of noble, unvarnished, unmitigated, heroic truth: the thesis that it is impossible to "support the troops" if one is opposed to acts of imperialism in which said troops are engaged. Joel has also stumbled upon the great philosophical questions of our time, essential to any human progress: They are questions not properly addressed since the great Camus post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima essay "Neither Victim nor Executioner," namely, Is a soldier responsible for his or her own actions? When is it okay to ask someone to kill for me? (We may now add: torture for me? Spy on me?)

Yes, I do think Joel Stein can be funny, but it is a humor that doesn't really challenge us and usually reinforces stereotypes and the status quo, primarily because it is grounded in a spoiled-child's perspective coupled with a very reactionary, soulless disbelief in human progress (not to be confused with philosophical pessimism, which is actually very sincere and honest and provides the space and the soil for hope to grow). The attempted irony of writing like Stein’s is ironically erroneous. It is unwittingly Bob Hope in Richard Pryor's shoes; they just don't fit.

Such is the case with Stein's off-handed dismissal of pacifists as "wusses," even though he prides himself with being such a wuss--which if given further review and consideration, in a future column of greater length perhaps, would allow a critique of the military's inherent fear of all things homosexual male (in spite of all its homoerotic traditions and undertones) and an intense hatred of anything feminine: and why homophobia and misogyny is not an unintended byproduct of American militarism but a necessary component for the maintenance of that militarism. If he means that pacifists are cowards, he knows not pacifists but those who engage in passive acquiescence (of which he may proudly be one---and this is not to disparage perpetrators of passive acquiescence-- they may in many cases simply be survivors).

This is also the case in his assumption that the United States' "all-volunteer" military is anything but a myth. The United States military is hardly volunteer, but a hodge-podge of poverty conscription, wayward idealists incapable of self-honesty, outright mercenaries, and societal rejects. The majority are poverty conscripts and are usually unaware of what they are getting themselves into, but even if they are aware they are driven not by a belief-system, but by a willingness to engage in indentured servitude for a number of years in exchange for a ticket out of their current situation (normally in the form of what should be human rights: adequate housing, health care, education, and a modicum of social security). The fact that this legalized slavery may include killing other poor people who were never a threat to the recruit or his family or nation, or the fact that he may die himself in the process, is an indication not of the conscript's selflessness, but in the hopelessness of his situation before signing up. Many of the idealists are victims of mass state-media propaganda and the poor public education system--and under different circumstances, given different tools and an honest understanding of recent history, would be our greatest progressive leaders-- rather than leading others to their death or ordering others to kill. The societal rejects would not be "supported" if they were not in the company of the others and will cease being "supported" once they are ejected from that company as surely as they were dejected from the society from which they came. Which leaves us with mercenaries (mostly overt white-supremacists and Nazi types) and a return to the primary philosophical question: do you want to pay someone to kill for you? So Stein's conjecture that most military personnel know that they are signing up for imperialism is very questionable, although unfortunately embraced by the majority who still believe in the "volunteer" myth.

“We” didn’t send “our troops” to fight in an immoral, unjust, illegal, unnecessary, and unwise war—as Stein suggests—George W. Bush and Dick Cheney did—we allowed them to send our family, neighbors, and friends who just happen to be in the military to do Bush and Cheney’s “dirty work” not “ours.” Any guilt that “we” have should come from our allowing Cheney to remain in power.

We should feel no guilt because as Stein says:

“The truth is that people who pull triggers are ultimately responsible, whether they're following orders or not. An army of people making individual moral choices may be inefficient, but an army of people ignoring their morality is horrifying.”

Unless, of course, you happen to be Chief Warrant Officer Lewis E. Welshofer Jr. – then you may stuff a defenseless prisoner into a sleeping bag head first and suffocate him to death during a torture session and then plead that you were just following orders and didn’t realize that what you were doing was illegal or wrong in any way. And then a military tribunal finds you guilty but punishes you with a slap on the wrist while some conscientious objectors get up to a year in the brig. Yes that is Bush and Cheney’s America: torture prisoners to death, get a deal (and probably a medal), refuse to kill, go to jail: put that on a bumper sticker. Support our torture. (Welshofer must fit in the mercenary category above—but he is also a coward who does not want to accept responsibility and a prime example of why we should not support killing/torture being done in our name by these people who refuse to protect the United States Constitution out of their loyalty to the giggling murderer who has been placed in the White House.

Lastly, is Mr. Stein's repeating of the oft-sited myth of returning Vietnam veterans getting spit upon in anything other than a metaphorical sense (and by anyone other than the power elite which send them in the first place). If this ever happened I don't know for sure, but the story of it happening has circulated since at least the U.S.-Korean war. We won’t get over Vietnam until we come to grips with the fact that it, like all wars, was evil—and everyone who participated in it engaged in evil or the support thereof. This is the lesson we should learn from Vietnam. Those who don’t face that and deal with it live with the torture of that internal contradiction. Vietnam veterans: the war was wrong; the war was a “mistake” in the words of the war criminal who sent you: Robert McNamara. He, and Nixon, and Johnson, and the rest are the ones who spit in your face: face it.

But I applaud Mr. Stein for approaching a position which may actually indicate that he does believe in something after all and a proposal that may actually challenge his readers to think. The last time I read something this revealing and courageously honest from a cynical comedian is when Bill Maher proposed that it is time to bring Saddam Hussein back to rule Iraq-- since he would be rested and ready and the U.S. was having a hard time controlling the people there (which inherently begs the question of "democracy" being possible through military conquest and occupation). For this is what makes for a great comic cynic. Maher, though I often disagree with him (usually due to his curious periodic lapses into naiveté) but adore his commitment and sincerity, is a cynic with an idealist's heart and soul. The younger generation who mimic the likes of Maher possess the cynicism while never suffering through the idealism: there was never any soul-building there-- only an exterior-- like a dry-wall and stucco, erected overnight, tracked housing multi-million dollar monstrosities that pass for suburban SoCal dwellings: how can anything really creative and original take place within?

And maybe I will begin to learn to appreciate Joel's style a bit more. But I wouldn’t count on it.

Now I hope Mr. Stein's next column will follow his logic to the area addressed by anarchopacificit Tolstoy in his examination pitting the question "Patriotism or Christianity?" Cindy Sheehan has recently come closest to this in her new essay defining "matriotism" as a replacement for the war-torn, bloody soulless and hopeless patriotism.

As for me, it was when I realized that patriotism is social disease that I began to purge myself of its hold on me.

Enjoy!

And remember:

No nukes! No War! No Militarism!

There can be no “war on terrorism.” War is terrorism.
Support no troops!
Support nonviolence resistance!
Support military refusal!

namaste,
glen motil

Warriors and wusses
Joel Stein
January 24, 2006

I DON'T SUPPORT our troops. This is a particularly difficult opinion to have, especially if you are the kind of person who likes to put bumper stickers on his car. Supporting the troops is a position that even Calvin is unwilling to urinate on.

I'm sure I'd like the troops. They seem gutsy, young and up for anything. If you're wandering into a recruiter's office and signing up for eight years of unknown danger, I want to hang with you in Vegas.

And I've got no problem with other people - the ones who were for the Iraq war - supporting the troops. If you think invading Iraq was a good idea, then by all means, support away. Load up on those patriotic magnets and bracelets and other trinkets the Chinese are making money off of.

But I'm not for the war. And being against the war and saying you support the troops is one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have ever taken - and they're wussy by definition. It's as if the one lesson they took away from Vietnam wasn't to avoid foreign conflicts with no pressing national interest but to remember to throw a parade afterward.

Blindly lending support to our soldiers, I fear, will keep them overseas longer by giving soft acquiescence to the hawks who sent them there - and who might one day want to send them somewhere else. Trust me, a guy who thought 50.7% was a mandate isn't going to pick up on the subtleties of a parade for just service in an unjust war. He's going to be looking for funnel cake.

Besides, those little yellow ribbons aren't really for the troops. They need body armor, shorter stays and a USO show by the cast of "Laguna Beach."

The real purpose of those ribbons is to ease some of the guilt we feel for voting to send them to war and then making absolutely no sacrifices other than enduring two Wolf Blitzer shows a day. Though there should be a ribbon for that.

I understand the guilt. We know we're sending recruits to do our dirty work, and we want to seem grateful.

After we've decided that we made a mistake, we don't want to blame the soldiers who were ordered to fight. Or even our representatives, who were deceived by false intelligence. And certainly not ourselves, who failed to object to a war we barely understood.

But blaming the president is a little too easy. The truth is that people who pull triggers are ultimately responsible, whether they're following orders or not. An army of people making individual moral choices may be inefficient, but an army of people ignoring their morality is horrifying. An army of people ignoring their morality, by the way, is also Jack Abramoff's pet name for the House of Representatives.

I do sympathize with people who joined up to protect our country, especially after 9/11, and were tricked into fighting in Iraq. I get mad when I'm tricked into clicking on a pop-up ad, so I can only imagine how they feel.

But when you volunteer for the U.S. military, you pretty much know you're not going to be fending off invasions from Mexico and Canada. So you're willingly signing up to be a fighting tool of American imperialism, for better or worse. Sometimes you get lucky and get to fight ethnic genocide in Kosovo, but other times it's Vietnam.

And sometimes, for reasons I don't understand, you get to just hang out in Germany.

I know this is all easy to say for a guy who grew up with money, did well in school and hasn't so much as served on jury duty for his country. But it's really not that easy to say because anyone remotely affiliated with the military could easily beat me up, and I'm listed in the phone book.

I'm not advocating that we spit on returning veterans like they did after the Vietnam War, but we shouldn't be celebrating people for doing something we don't think was a good idea. All I'm asking is that we give our returning soldiers what they need: hospitals, pensions, mental health and a safe, immediate return. But, please, no parades.

Seriously, the traffic is insufferable.

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

Art, Truth, and Politics by Harold Pinter

2005-12-11T20:51:00.000-08:00

Art, Truth and Politics
by Harold Pinter
Published on Thursday, December 8, 2005 by the Guardian

In 1958 I wrote the following:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.

Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.

The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is 'What have you done with the scissors?' The first line of Old Times is 'Dark.'

In each case I had no further information.

In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn't give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.

'Dark' I took to be a description of someone's hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.

In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), 'Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don't you buy a dog? You're a dog cook. Honest. You think you're cooking for a lot of dogs.' So since B calls A 'Dad' it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn't know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.

'Dark.' A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. 'Fat or thin?' the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.

It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can't dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.

So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.

But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.

Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.

In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focussing on an act of subjugation.

Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour.

Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others.

But as they died, she must die too.

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.

But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America's favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued - or beaten to death - the same thing - and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America's view of its role in the world, both then and now.

I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: 'Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.'

Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. 'Father,' he said, 'let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.' There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.

Finally somebody said: 'But in this case "innocent people" were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?'

Seitz was imperturbable. 'I don't agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,' he said.

As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.

I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: 'The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.'

The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.

The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.

I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies' which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a 'totalitarian dungeon'. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.

Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.

The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. 'Democracy' had prevailed.

But this 'policy' was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's called the 'international community'. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally - a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man's land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You're either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.

The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications having failed to justify themselves - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.

How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they're interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.

Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks.

Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. 'When do I get my arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn't holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television.

The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.

Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, 'I'm Explaining a Few Things':

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.
Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.
Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives.
Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.
And you will ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets! *

Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda's poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.

I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as 'full spectrum dominance'. That is not my term, it is theirs. 'Full spectrum dominance' means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.

The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don't quite know how they got there but they are there all right.

The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity - the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons - is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.

Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force - yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.

I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man.

'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it.'

A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection - unless you lie - in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.

I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called 'Death'.

Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?
Who was the dead body?
Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?
Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?
Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?
What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?
Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.

* Extract from "I'm Explaining a Few Things" translated by Nathaniel Tarn, from Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems, published by Jonathan Cape, London 1970. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

busy, busy, busy....

2005-11-13T20:56:00.000-08:00

So sorry for the lack of posts of late.

I’ve been extremely busy working two jobs and trying to keep up.

It is not that there has been too little to write about.

It is that there has been too much!

Way too much!

Things are happening in such rapid-fire succession, it is hard to keep up with events, let alone provide commentary and analysis.

Yeah, yeah... excuses, excuses...

Anywho....

Here is a blog that I just love, and I can say writes about what I would write about if I had the time (or made the time) each day...

It is called “Whatever it is, I’m Against It,” and like a true Marxist (Groucho style) Lennonist (John Walrus style), that I am, I highly commend it to all my faithful readers. And when the two of you read this, please visit that great daily blog. Also see the sites I have posted along the side of my own blog—especially Antiwar.com and Citizens for Legitimate Government. Another great source is Truthout.com. Listen to Democracy Now daily and Randi Rhodes and Mike Malloy whenever you get the chance.

For those interested in speculation—this is how Borders Books classifies it now,-- (you know, the conspiracy buffs—I just love this stuff—but try not to get too paranoid)... check out From the Wilderness and Prison Planet.

I’ll get back to work as soon as possible.

Ado,

And May Pleasantries Abound,

glen

Harold Pinter for leader of the free world (or free-er of the lead world!)

Secret SS "Jose" and Martial Law Coming Soon

2005-10-13T20:54:00.000-07:00

No one can deny that the United States of America (continental empire) is now firmly in the grip of fascism. The long night is upon us.
The criminal cowards are backed into a corner and all of their weakness is exposed. They are a frightened, hungry beast. We must be the patient, compassionate beast-whisperers. Those who don't calm will perish; their evil will devour itself. The sight will be ugly. There will be much pain. The fire will burn itself out. Let us look to the communes. Let us not depend upon "them" to save us. Let us look to the sun for our energy. Let us not be corralled in our fear. Let us not lay down before their guns and razor wire. That is your brother behind that vizored helmet; project love to his being. Perhaps he will feel; perhaps not. Don't obey.

13 moons, she alerted us in March; 6 moons remain.
"After Gehenna, the women planted corn."

Choose nonviolence always. You will be protected.
Love one another. Create every day. Laugh every day. Dance every day. Play every day.
"Break on through / to the other side"
Travel light with a travel lite!

namaste,
glen motil

DNI AND D/CIA ANNOUNCE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE NATIONAL CLANDESTINE SERVICE
Fact Sheet
13 October 2005
***
Undercover CIA official to oversee new National Clandestine Service
By Katherine Shrader
ASSOCIATED PRESS
9:45 a.m. October 13, 2005
***
"They're determined to have martial law."
Republican Congressman Slams Bush On Militarized Police State Preparation
Ron Paul says indictment story is far more damaging than media is portraying, avian flu martial law provisions aimed at gun confiscation
Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones | October 12 2005

***
DNI AND D/CIA ANNOUNCE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE NATIONAL CLANDESTINE SERVICE
Fact Sheet
13 October 2005

The Director of National Intelligence, John D. Negroponte, and the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Porter J. Goss, today announced the creation of the National Clandestine Service (NCS) at CIA.

The initiative will strengthen the direction and leadership of human intelligence throughout the Intelligence Community (IC). The plan reflects the thinking of some of the most seasoned veterans in human intelligence collection, men and women with decades of experience in the field.

In announcing this new approach, Director Goss said, "The decision to create the NCS at CIA underscores CIA’s proud position as the center of gravity for HUMINT in our Intelligence Community. No agency has greater skill and experience in this difficult, complex, and utterly vital discipline of intelligence." Goss added, "The announcement represents a grant of trust and an expression of confidence in CIA from the President, the DNI, and our partners throughout government."

The National Clandestine Service at CIA will incorporate the current Directorate of Operations and will be led by the Director of the National Clandestine Service (D/NCS) to whom the D/CIA will delegate his day-to-day National HUMINT Manager responsibilities. The D/NCS will coordinate, de-conflict, and assess HUMINT operations throughout the IC and will report directly to the D/CIA. The D/NCS will also work with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to implement the DNI's statutory authorities.

The D/NCS will be assisted by two deputies -- one will lead the daily activities of the CIA's Clandestine Service while the other will focus on human intelligence activities across the IC.

"These changes hold the potential to make our HUMINT operations better than they were before—from training and tradecraft to technology and counterintelligence," Goss said. "They hold the potential to make our Intelligence Community even more of a Community. It is up to us to make that potential real, and in the process to make the United States safer and stronger. I have every confidence that we will meet that goal."

*******
Undercover CIA official to oversee new National Clandestine Service
By Katherine Shrader
ASSOCIATED PRESS
9:45 a.m. October 13, 2005

WASHINGTON – A top CIA manager who remains undercover will soon oversee the traditional human spying activities for the entire intelligence community, a new position created in the post-Sept. 11 intelligence reforms.
Publicly, he is referred to simply as "Jose," said U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan's full details had yet to be released.

Jose's posting as head of the new National Clandestine Service ends weeks of debate over whether the CIA would retain its role as the primary agency responsible for traditional human spywork, as an increasing number of U.S. national security agencies take on this type of work.

He'll now broadly coordinate operations for the FBI, Defense Department and other agencies involved in human intelligence, or the information gathered by people, rather than by technical means.

Jose now serves as the director of the CIA's clandestine service, which handles the agency's human intelligence gathering.

"This is another positive step in building an Intelligence Community that is more unified, coordinated and effective," National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said in a statement about the new service Thursday.

Forming a National Clandestine Service was one of more than 70 recommendations from President Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction, which released a bruising report in March about the current capabilities of the 15 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community.

The report concluded that the "toughest targets remain largely impenetrable" to human spying operations.

CIA Director Porter Goss drafted a plan that would place the National Clandestine Service under his chain of command. The plan's acceptance is viewed as a victory for the CIA.

Intelligence veterans have said for months that any arrangement that somehow undermined the CIA's role as the top producer of human intelligence would hurt the agency's clout and deepen problems with agency morale.

In a statement, Goss said the decision represents "an expression of confidence in the CIA" from Bush and Negroponte. "No agency has greater skill and experience in this difficult, complex, and utterly vital discipline of intelligence," Goss said.

*****
Republican Congressman Slams Bush On Militarized Police State Preparation
Ron Paul says indictment story is far more damaging than media is portraying, avian flu martial law provisions aimed at gun confiscation
Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones | October 12 2005

Congressman Ron Paul has accused the Bush administration of attempting to set in motion a militarized police state in America by enacting gun confiscation martial law provisions in the event of an avian flu pandemic. Paul also slammed as delusional and dangerous plans to invade Iran, Syria, North Korea and China.

Ron Paul represents the 14th Congressional district of Texas. He also serves on the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee, and the International Relations committee.

Paul appeared on the Alex Jones show yesterday and raised some interesting points about the possibility of imminent indictments of top Bush administration figures.

"I think there's a lot more excitement coming and it's not going to be good for the Republicans," stated Paul.

"The things that I hear have to do with Karl Rove and Abramoff and that's much much worse than anybody would believe and it involves DeLay as well."

"And that type of an indictment will be much more serious than the indictment of shifting campaign funds around.....there's some political infighting which could make that really interesting."

On the subject of the police state, Paul stated,

"If we don't change our ways we will go the way of Rome and I see that as rather sad.....the worst things happen when you get the so-called Republican conservatives in charge from Nixon on down, big government flourishes under Republicans."

"It's really hard to believe it's happening right in front of us. Whether it's the torture or the process of denying habeas corpus to an American citizen."

"I think the arrogance of power that they have where they themselves are like Communists....in the sense that they decide what is right. The Communist Party said that they decided what was right or wrong, it wasn't a higher source."

Paul responded to President Bush's announcement last week that he would order the use of military assets to police America in the event of an avian flu outbreak.

"To me it's so strange that the President can make these proposals and it's even plausible. When he talks about martial law dealing with some epidemic that might come later on and having forced quarantines, doing away with Posse Comitatus in order to deal with natural disasters, and hardly anybody says anything. People must be scared to death."

Paul, himself a medical doctor, agreed that the bird flu threat was empty fearmongering.

"I believe it is the President hyping this and Rumsfeld, but it has to be in combination with the people being fearful enough that they will accept the man on the white horse. My first reaction going from my political and medical background is that it's way overly hyped and to think that they have gone this far with it, without a single case in the whole country and they're willing to change the law and turn it into a military state? That is unbelievable! They're determined to have martial law."

Paul opined that the martial law provisions now being promoted by the Bush administration were a direct response to people's unwillingness to relinquish their firearms, as was seen in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

"I think they're concerned about the remnant, the remnant of those individuals who don't buy into stuff and think that they should take care of themselves on their own, that they should have their own guns and their own provisions and they don't want to depend on the government at all and I think that is a threat to those who want to hold power. They don't want any resistance to their authoritarian rule."

Paul opined that the government was on a delusional power trip that threatened the country.

"These guys are ready to start a war with Iran, Syria, North Korea or China. They can't possibly do that, it's so insane, we don't have the money, we don't have the troops, we probably don't even have the ammunition."

"But, if they are truly delusional they just might do something that's totally irrational."

Paul expressed his hope that finally some conservatives are waking up to the fact that the Bush administration is a trojan horse, especially after arch-liberal Harriet Miers was chosen by Bush to supposedly move the Supreme Court to the right, even though her record is atrocious and she has been involved in the past covering up for the Bush crime family's activities.

Bullet Points on the Flooding of New Orleans

2005-09-13T21:06:00.000-07:00

* Privatized Military Occupation in a U.S. City

* Martial Law with Shoot to Kill Orders

* Ethnic Cleansing Operation and Blatant Institutionalized Racism

* FEMA Concentration Camps

* And Moloch is Fed as the Blood Washes away the Foul Footstep’s Pollution

* Speculation about Weather Control Weapons (It is a fact that they are working on it—this is well documented)

* Speculation that the Levees were Intentionally Breached by Explosion

We are here, friends. It has arrived.

Some have speculated that the entire “we weren’t prepared” narrative is a set-up.
The pro-war Democrats will now be at the forefront demanding new rules allowing the Federal government to declare martial law more expeditiously-- and override posse comitatus...

They'll give Bush everything he wants...he will play hard to get.. and they'll BEG him to take on more powers (and MoveOn will be right there moving it along)... same as the Homeland Security Dept that got us into this mess...

and guess what?
Couple martial law with Bush's newly acquired "right" to detain without charge or trial (Padilla case)-- and a Roberts/Scalia/Thomas/Gonzales(?)/Luttig (?) / Brown(?) court to uphold it, and we have Dictatorship 101. But they won't abuse these powers, will they?

Important Dates in the death of the American Republic/Plutocracy and the establishment of an Imperial Fascist Theocracy:

December 12, 2000: Electoral/Judicial Coup
September 11, 2001: Military Coup
October 26, 2001: Patriot Act
December 12, 2001: Withdrawal from ABM treaty
September 17, 2002: dogMA BUSh (establishing the Bush Doctrine of Preventive War and Torture)
November 25, 2002: Homeland Security Department
March 19, 2003: Illegal Invasion and Occupation of Iraq
June 2004: Establishment of the Spy Fuhrer position (w/ war criminal Negroponte)
August 2005: Appointment of war criminal John Bolton as US UN ambassador
September 10, 2005: “Right” upheld for unelected dictator to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely without charge or trial
September 10, 2005: floated plan for policy advocating nuclear first strike in preventive war by the most powerful empire to ever exist on the face of the earth
(first step toward the end of civilization)

August 29, 2005: The Flooding of New Orleans
Sometime soon: the establishment of the Roberts Court

forgive us, we know what we do.

namaste,
glen motil
(chicken little richard, crushed by fallen sky fragments)

When “Freedom” Means “No Charge(s)” and “No Trial”

2005-09-13T20:50:00.000-07:00

Bush given dictatorial powers to detain U.S. citizens at will, with no charges and no right to a trial

U.S. Can Confine Citizens Without Charges, Court Rules
By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 10, 2005; A01
washingtonpost.com

[Clarification to This Article: A previous online version of this story did not specify that the court ruling applied only during wartime. That has been changed in this version.]
*****
Court Gives Bush Right to Detain U.S. Combatant
By NEIL A. LEWIS
The New York Times
September 10, 2005
*****
U.S. Wins Court Ruling in 'Dirty Bomb' Case
An appellate panel says Jose Padilla can be detained indefinitely without trial or charge.
By Richard A. Serrano
Times Staff Writer
September 10, 2005
*****
U.S. Can Confine Citizens Without Charges, Court Rules
By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 10, 2005; A01
washingtonpost.com

[Clarification to This Article: A previous online version of this story did not specify that the court ruling applied only during wartime. That has been changed in this version.]

A federal appeals court yesterday backed the president's power to indefinitely detain a U.S. citizen captured on U.S. soil without any criminal charges, holding that such authority is vital during wartime to protect the nation from terrorist attacks.

The ruling, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, came in the case of Jose Padilla, a former gang member and U.S. citizen arrested in Chicago in 2002 and a month later designated an "enemy combatant" by President Bush. The government contends that Padilla trained at al Qaeda camps and was planning to blow up apartment buildings in the United States. Padilla has been held without trial in a U.S. naval brig for more than three years, and his case has ignited a fierce battle over the balance between civil liberties and the government's power to fight terrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. A host of civil liberties groups and former attorney general Janet Reno weighed in on Padilla's behalf, calling his detention illegal and arguing that the president does not have unchecked power to lock up U.S. citizens indefinitely.

Federal prosecutors asserted that Bush not only had the authority to detain Padilla but also that such power is essential to preventing terrorist strikes. In its ruling yesterday, the three-judge panel overturned a lower court.

A congressional resolution passed after Sept. 11 "provided the President all powers necessary and appropriate to protect American citizens from terrorist attacks," the decision said. "Those powers include the power to detain identified and committed enemies such as Padilla, who associated with al Qaeda . . . who took up arms against this Nation in its war against these enemies, and who entered the United States for the avowed purpose of further prosecuting that war by attacking American citizens."

Padilla is one of two U.S. citizens held as enemy combatants since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The other, Yaser Esam Hamdi, was released and flown to Saudi Arabia last year after the Supreme Court upheld the government's power to detain him but said he could challenge that detention in U.S. courts.

Legal experts were closely watching the Padilla case because of a key difference between the two: Hamdi was captured on a battlefield in Afghanistan with forces loyal to that country's former Taliban rulers, and Padilla was arrested in the United States.

Legal experts said the debate is likely to reach the Supreme Court. Andrew Patel, an attorney for Padilla, said he might appeal directly to the Supreme Court or first ask the entire 4th Circuit to review the decision. "We're very disappointed," he said.

The ruling limits the president's power to detain Padilla to the duration of hostilities against al Qaeda, but the Bush administration has said that war could go on indefinitely.

The decision reignited the passions triggered by Padilla's arrest at O'Hare International Airport in May 2002.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales hailed the ruling as reaffirming "the president's critical authority to detain enemy combatants who take up arms on behalf of al Qaeda."

Richard A. Samp, chief counsel for the Washington Legal Foundation, a conservative public-interest law firm, said the court "gave the government needed flexibility in dealing with the war on terrorism. You can't treat every terrorist as though they are just another criminal defendant."

But Avidan Cover, a senior associate at Human Rights First, said the ruling "really flies in the face of our understanding of what rights American citizens are entitled to." Opponents have warned that if not constrained by the courts, Padilla's detention could lead to the military being allowed to hold anyone who, for example, checks out what the government considers the wrong kind of reading materials from the library.

The 4th Circuit decision could also play a role in the debate over whom President Bush will nominate to the Supreme Court seat to be vacated by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. The decision was written by Judge J. Michael Luttig, a favorite of conservative groups who is considered to be among the leading candidates for the nomination. He was joined in the ruling by judges William B. Traxler Jr. and M. Blane Michael, both Clinton administration appointees.

Sean Rushton, executive director of the conservative Committee for Justice, which was formed to support Bush's judicial nominees, said he doubted that Luttig's ruling would affect his chances. He pointed out that Luttig has issued strongly pro-government decisions in other terrorism cases since Sept. 11, including in the prosecution of convicted conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.

"I'm not sure that we really knew anything new about Michael Luttig from this case," Rushton said.

But Cover said groups opposed to a potential Luttig nomination will carefully review the decision. "This gives our group, and I think many others, very serious concerns about his views on civil liberties and presidential powers," Cover said.

The government originally described Padilla as plotting with al Qaeda to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" but has since focused on allegations that he planned to blow up apartment buildings by filling them with natural gas. Prosecutors told the 4th Circuit that he worked with such senior al Qaeda leaders as former operations chief Khalid Sheik Mohammed on that plan.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

*****
Court Gives Bush Right to Detain U.S. Combatant
By NEIL A. LEWIS
The New York Times
September 10, 2005

WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 - A three-judge federal appeals court panel ruled unanimously on Friday that President Bush had the authority to detain as an enemy combatant an American citizen who fought United States forces on foreign soil.

The panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, based in Richmond, Va., threw out a ruling by a trial judge in South Carolina that Mr. Bush had overstepped his bounds by detaining Jose Padilla, a Chicago native, for three years.

The military has asserted that Mr. Padilla (pronounced pa-DILL-uh) was an operative of Al Qaeda who fought in Afghanistan, was trained by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, and was considering various terrorist plots in the United States. Law enforcement authorities have also identified Mr. Padilla as a former gang member in Chicago who converted to Islam.

In an opinion written by Judge J. Michael Luttig, who has been considered by President Bush for a nomination to the Supreme Court, the panel said Mr. Bush had the right to detain Mr. Padilla as an enemy combatant under the powers granted the president by Congress after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and at the Pentagon.

"The exceedingly important question before us is whether the president of the United States possesses the authority to detain militarily a citizen of this country who is closely associated with Al Qaeda, an entity with which the United States is at war," Judge Luttig wrote. "We conclude that the president does possess such authority," citing the Congressional authorization.

Joining Judge Luttig in the ruling were Judges M. Blane Michael and William B. Traxler Jr.

Although Mr. Padilla lost his challenge to being detained, his situation is vastly different today than when he first came to public attention after his arrest at O'Hare International Airport on May 8, 2002.

For one thing, the government no longer presents as the main charge against him that he had intended to set off a "dirty bomb" that would spew radiation in some American city. Instead, as his case made its way through the court system for the second time, the government all but eliminated that accusation, saying he may have been planning to use gas lines to destroy apartment buildings.

Government lawyers argued that the main new reason he should be detained as an enemy combatant was that he fought American forces in Afghanistan alongside Qaeda colleagues. Another difference is that all parties, even the Bush administration, appear to accept that Mr. Padilla is entitled to some kind of hearing at which he could contest the accusations against him.

Both changes are the results of the altered legal landscape that followed the Supreme Court's rulings on June 28, 2004, when the justices considered a set of challenges to the administration's legal strategy to detain suspected terrorists.

In those cases, the justices ruled that a person who appeared to also be an American citizen, Yaser Esam Hamdi, could be detained by President Bush as an enemy combatant because he was purportedly captured while fighting in Afghanistan. But the court also said he was entitled under the Constitution to contest the allegations made against him by "a neutral decision maker."

The court declined to rule that day on Mr. Padilla's case, saying that his challenge to detention had been wrongly filed in New York federal court rather than in South Carolina, where he was being held in a Navy brig.

In his ruling, Judge Luttig cited the Supreme Court ruling in the Hamdi case repeatedly. For their part, government lawyers tailored their most recent affidavits regarding Mr. Padilla's offenses to more closely resemble those attributed to Mr. Hamdi, notably fighting American forces in Afghanistan.

The appeals court ruling did not directly address the issue of what kind of hearing Mr. Padilla is entitled to, but that is almost certain to be the subject of another round of litigation. Mr. Hamdi was sent back to his home country, Saudi Arabia, before that issue was resolved.

Jonathan M. Freiman, a New Haven lawyer who represents Mr. Padilla, said that he would appeal Friday's ruling. He said it was a "a sad day for the nation when a federal court finds the president has the power to detain indefinitely and without criminal charge any American citizen whom he deems an enemy combatant."

Mr. Freiman said the only fair hearing for Mr. Padilla would be a trial in an American civilian court. But Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, in her controlling opinion in the Hamdi case, wrote that some kind of military tribunal with rules of evidence more favorable to the prosecution than in civil courts might suffice for Mr. Hamdi.

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said in a statement on Friday that he was pleased that the appeals court "has reaffirmed the president's critical authority to detain enemy combatants who take up arms on behalf of Al Qaeda and travel to the United States to kill innocent Americans. "

"As the court noted today,' Mr. Gonzales continued, "the authority to detain enemy combatants like Mr. Padilla plays an important role in protecting American citizens from the very kind of savage attack that took place almost four years ago to the day."

Prof. Neal Katyal of the Georgetown University Law School, who is challenging the government in a case involving another detainee, said he believed that the appeals ruling was fair.

"It's a quite reasonable interpretation given the facts as presented," Professor Katyal said.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

******
U.S. Wins Court Ruling in 'Dirty Bomb' Case
An appellate panel says Jose Padilla can be detained indefinitely without trial or charge.
By Richard A. Serrano
Times Staff Writer
September 10, 2005

WASHINGTON - A federal appeals court ruled Friday that Jose Padilla, held for more than three years after federal officials said he planned to set off radiological devices, or "dirty bombs," could be detained indefinitely without trial.

The unanimous decision by a panel of the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals significantly boosts the Bush administration's program of jailing key Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects without filing criminal charges or holding trials - whether the detainees were Americans arrested in the U.S. or citizens of other countries seized abroad - in an effort to squeeze intelligence information from alleged terrorist operatives.

The ruling could have major implications for detainees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where many, like Padilla, have been deemed "enemy combatants." Judge J. Michael Luttig wrote the decision for the three-member panel in Richmond, Va. He is considered to be on President Bush's short list of candidates to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court.

Padilla's attorneys plan to appeal the ruling to the high court. If they do not prevail, Friday's ruling apparently would seal Bush's controversial use of executive authority to skirt the U.S. courts.

"The court's ruling effectively declares the entire world, including the United States, to be a battlefield subject to military jurisdiction, where American citizens can be stripped of their constitutional rights," said Deborah Pearlstein, director of the U.S. law and security program at Human Rights First, an advocacy group in New York and Washington.

At the heart of the White House argument to indefinitely detain half a dozen terrorist suspects in this country, as well as the captives at Guantanamo Bay, was the fear that they could be acquitted at trial and then released.

The Authorization for Use of Military Force joint resolution, which Congress enacted after the Sept. 11 attacks, allows the president to indefinitely detain suspected terrorists "in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States," the appeals court said.

Equally important, administration officials said, was the need to interrogate suspects to learn about potential attacks.

In Padilla's case, Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales indicated Friday that his continuing incarceration had paid off in new U.S. intelligence about terrorist activities.

"Multiple intelligence sources separately confirmed Padilla's involvement in planning future terrorist attacks against the United States with Al Qaeda leaders," Gonzales said.

Those alleged targets are believed to have been apartment buildings and gas stations in the United States; the weapons allegedly being developed were radiological dispersal devices, or dirty bombs.

Despite the government's determination to keep Padilla locked up, his chief attorney, Donna Newman of New York, said she never sought his automatic release from a Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. Rather, she said, she wanted the government to try him. "They're not giving him a chance to fight this," she said. "They're telling him he's going to be held forever, that he has no rights. What they're saying is worse than a life sentence."

Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, questioned what intelligence Padilla could provide after more than three years in jail, because many terrorist operatives he is believed to have known, among them Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, have also been arrested.

"Why not go ahead and prosecute him?" Tobias asked. "What is there more to get from him? Except to make an example of him."

Tobias also questioned whether Luttig should have recused himself from the case, given his potential nomination to the Supreme Court. Luttig's situation parallels that of Judge John G. Roberts Jr., who recently participated in an appellate court ruling that allowed the administration to conduct military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay. At the time the ruling was issued, Roberts was being considered for a Supreme Court vacancy. On Monday, Bush nominated him to be chief justice of the United States.

Padilla, 34, was born in New York and raised in Chicago. As an adult in South Florida, he embraced Islam and moved to the Middle East and Central Asia.

According to Friday's legal opinion, which included information provided by the government, Al Qaeda operatives recruited Padilla to train for jihad in Afghanistan in February 2000, while he was on a religious pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia.

He met Al Qaeda leaders, was taught how to build and detonate explosives, and served as an armed guard "at what he understood to be a Taliban outpost" in Afghanistan, the ruling said.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, when the United States invaded Afghanistan, "Padilla and other Al Qaeda operatives moved from safe house to safe house to evade bombing or capture," the opinion said. He eventually escaped to Pakistan, armed with an assault rifle.

There, he met with Mohammed, who "directed Padilla to travel to the United States for the purpose of blowing up apartment buildings, in continued prosecution of Al Qaeda's war on terror against the United States."

"After receiving further training, as well as cash, travel documents and communication devices, Padilla flew to the United States in order to carry out his accepted assignment," the ruling said.

Padilla landed at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport on May 8, 2002. He was then arrested by FBI agents and sent to New York, where he was held on a material witness warrant.

On June 9, 2002, Bush designated him an "enemy combatant" and he was moved to the Navy brig in South Carolina.

In February, U.S. District Judge Henry F. Floyd, appointed two years ago by Bush, ruled that the government must charge Padilla or set him free. Stating that Americans have the right to due process of law, the judge found that Padilla's "indefinite detention without trial" violated his constitutional rights.

The appeals court panel said Friday that Padilla posed a real threat of returning someday "to the battlefield against the United States" and that his "detention "is thus necessary and appropriate."

The president, the ruling said, "is unquestionably authorized" to hold him without charges or trial.

Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

Game Over: dogMA BUSh Nuke Option Takes World One Step Closer to the End

2005-09-13T20:46:00.000-07:00

Pentagon Revises Nuclear Strike Plan
Strategy Includes Preemptive Use Against Banned Weapons
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 11, 2005; A01
washingtonpost.com
*****
Pentagon Studies Pre-Emptive Nuclear Strikes
By DAVID S. CLOUD
The New York Times
September 11, 2005
*****
War on Terrorism May Add a Nuclear Option
From Times Wire Reports
September 12, 2005
*****
Draft US Defense Paper Outlines Preventive Nuclear Strikes
Published on Sunday, September 11, 2005 by Agence France Presse
*****
Pentagon Revises Nuclear Strike Plan
Strategy Includes Preemptive Use Against Banned Weapons
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 11, 2005; A01
washingtonpost.com

The Pentagon has drafted a revised doctrine for the use of nuclear weapons that envisions commanders requesting presidential approval to use them to preempt an attack by a nation or a terrorist group using weapons of mass destruction. The draft also includes the option of using nuclear arms to destroy known enemy stockpiles of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

The document, written by the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs staff but not yet finally approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, would update rules and procedures governing use of nuclear weapons to reflect a preemption strategy first announced by the Bush White House in December 2002. The strategy was outlined in more detail at the time in classified national security directives.

At a White House briefing that year, a spokesman said the United States would "respond with overwhelming force" to the use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States, its forces or allies, and said "all options" would be available to the president.

The draft, dated March 15, would provide authoritative guidance for commanders to request presidential approval for using nuclear weapons, and represents the Pentagon's first attempt to revise procedures to reflect the Bush preemption doctrine. A previous version, completed in 1995 during the Clinton administration, contains no mention of using nuclear weapons preemptively or specifically against threats from weapons of mass destruction.

Titled "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations" and written under the direction of Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the draft document is unclassified and available on a Pentagon Web site. It is expected to be signed within a few weeks by Air Force Lt. Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, director of the Joint Staff, according to Navy Cmdr. Dawn Cutler, a public affairs officer in Myers's office. Meanwhile, the draft is going through final coordination with the military services, the combatant commanders, Pentagon legal authorities and Rumsfeld's office, Cutler said in a written statement.

A "summary of changes" included in the draft identifies differences from the 1995 doctrine, and says the new document "revises the discussion of nuclear weapons use across the range of military operations."

The first example for potential nuclear weapon use listed in the draft is against an enemy that is using "or intending to use WMD" against U.S. or allied, multinational military forces or civilian populations.

Another scenario for a possible nuclear preemptive strike is in case of an "imminent attack from adversary biological weapons that only effects from nuclear weapons can safely destroy."

That and other provisions in the document appear to refer to nuclear initiatives proposed by the administration that Congress has thus far declined to fully support.

Last year, for example, Congress refused to fund research toward development of nuclear weapons that could destroy biological or chemical weapons materials without dispersing them into the atmosphere.

The draft document also envisions the use of atomic weapons for "attacks on adversary installations including WMD, deep, hardened bunkers containing chemical or biological weapons."

But Congress last year halted funding of a study to determine the viability of the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator warhead (RNEP) -- commonly called the bunker buster -- that the Pentagon has said is needed to attack hardened, deeply buried weapons sites.

The Joint Staff draft doctrine explains that despite the end of the Cold War, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction "raises the danger of nuclear weapons use." It says that there are "about thirty nations with WMD programs" along with "nonstate actors [terrorists] either independently or as sponsored by an adversarial state."

To meet that situation, the document says that "responsible security planning requires preparation for threats that are possible, though perhaps unlikely today."

To deter the use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States, the Pentagon paper says preparations must be made to use nuclear weapons and show determination to use them "if necessary to prevent or retaliate against WMD use."

The draft says that to deter a potential adversary from using such weapons, that adversary's leadership must "believe the United States has both the ability and will to pre-empt or retaliate promptly with responses that are credible and effective." The draft also notes that U.S. policy in the past has "repeatedly rejected calls for adoption of 'no first use' policy of nuclear weapons since this policy could undermine deterrence."

Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee who has been a leading opponent of the bunker-buster program, said yesterday the draft was "apparently a follow-through on their nuclear posture review and they seem to bypass the idea that Congress had doubts about the program." She added that members "certainly don't want the administration to move forward with a [nuclear] preemption policy" without hearings, closed door if necessary.

A spokesman for Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said yesterday the panel has not yet received a copy of the draft.

Hans M. Kristensen, a consultant to the Natural Resources Defense Council, who discovered the document on the Pentagon Web site, said yesterday that it "emphasizes the need for a robust nuclear arsenal ready to strike on short notice including new missions."

Kristensen, who has specialized for more than a decade in nuclear weapons research, said a final version of the doctrine was due in August but has not yet appeared.

"This doctrine does not deliver on the Bush administration pledge of a reduced role for nuclear weapons," Kristensen said. "It provides justification for contentious concepts not proven and implies the need for RNEP."

One reason for the delay may be concern about raising publicly the possibility of preemptive use of nuclear weapons, or concern that it might interfere with attempts to persuade Congress to finance the bunker buster and other specialized nuclear weapons.

In April, Rumsfeld appeared before the Senate Armed Services panel and asked for the bunker buster study to be funded. He said the money was for research and not to begin production on any particular warhead. "The only thing we have is very large, very dirty, big nuclear weapons," Rumsfeld said. "It seems to me studying it [the RNEP] makes all the sense in the world."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

*****
Pentagon Studies Pre-Emptive Nuclear Strikes
By DAVID S. CLOUD
The New York Times
September 11, 2005

WASHINGTON, Sept. 10 - The Pentagon is preparing new guidelines governing the use of nuclear weapons that foresee possible pre-emptive strikes against terrorist groups or nations planning to use unconventional weapons against the United States.

The draft document, the Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations, updates procedures for using nuclear weapons that were last changed in 1995. The plan is undergoing final review by the Pentagon's joint staff and by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, and it could be finished in the next several weeks, according to a Pentagon official. The document was first reported by The Washington Post.

Much of the document restates longstanding procedures for launching a nuclear strike, including declarations that such a decision requires explicit presidential approval.

A Pentagon official confirmed that a copy of the document posted on the national security Web site GlobalSecurity.org was authentic.

The Bush administration said in 2002 that a pre-emption strategy was necessary to deal with emerging threats from terrorist groups seeking unconventional weapons and from the proliferation of nuclear capability to numerous countries.

Although the unclassified document reasserts the longstanding American position that it will not make definitive statements about when nuclear weapons will be used, it describes several scenarios for using them, including circumstances under which pre-emptive use might be necessary.

The scenarios for a possible attack described in the draft include one in which an enemy is using "or intending to use" unconventional weapons against the United States, its allies or civilian populations. Another scenario for a possible pre-emptive strike is in the event of an "imminent attack from adversary biological weapons that only effects from nuclear weapons can safely destroy."

The draft document also envisions the use of atomic weapons for "attacks on adversary installations," including "deep, hardened bunkers containing chemical or biological weapons."

A copy of the draft document dated March 15 was posted on a Pentagon Web site for several months but was removed over the summer, according to the Pentagon official, who said he could not explain why it was taken down.

The draft says that to deter a potential adversary from using unconventional weapons, the United States must make it "believe the United States has both the ability and will to pre-empt or retaliate promptly with responses that are credible and effective." The draft also says American policymakers have "repeatedly rejected calls for adoption of 'no first use' policy of nuclear weapons since this policy could undermine deterrence."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

*****
War on Terrorism May Add a Nuclear Option
From Times Wire Reports
September 12, 2005

A Pentagon planning document being updated to reflect the doctrine of preemption declared by President Bush in 2002 envisions the use of nuclear weapons to deter terrorists from using weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies.

The "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations" was last updated 10 years ago.

A Pentagon spokesman said Saturday that Navy Cmdr. Dawn Cutler, a public affairs officer for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had issued a statement saying a draft was still being circulated among the various services, field commanders, Pentagon lawyers and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's office. The draft's existence was initially reported by the Washington Post on Sunday.

Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

*****
Draft US Defense Paper Outlines Preventive Nuclear Strikes
Published on Sunday, September 11, 2005 by Agence France Presse

A new draft US defense paper calls for preventive nuclear strikes against state and non-state adversaries in order to deter them from using weapons of mass destruction and urges US troops to "prepare to use nuclear weapons effectively."

The document, titled "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations" and dated March 15, was put together by the Pentagon's Joint Staff in at attempt to adapt current procedures to the fast-changing world after the September 11, 2001, attacks, said a defense official.

But the official, who spoke to AFP late Saturday on condition of anonymity, said it has not yet been signed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and thus has not been made official policy.

"It's in the process of being considered," the official said.

A copy of the draft obtained by AFP urges US theater force commanders operating around the world to prepare specific plans for using nuclear weapons in their regions -- and outlines scenarios, under which it would be justified to seek presidential approval for a nuclear strike.

They include an adversary using or planning to use weapons of mass destruction against US or allied forces as well as civilian populations.

Preventive nuclear strikes could also be employed to destroy a biological weapons arsenal belonging to an enemy, if there is no possibility to take it out with conventional weapons and it is determined the enemy is poised for a biological attack, according to the draft.

They could also be seen as justified to destroy deep, hardened bunkers containing enemy chemical or biological weapons or the command and control infrastructure required to execute a chemical, biological or nuclear attack.

However, a number of scenarios allow nuclear strikes without enemy weapons of mass destruction in the equation.

They could be used, for instance, to counter potentially overwhelming conventional adversaries, to secure a rapid end of a war on US terms, or simply "to ensure success of US and multinational operations," the document indicates.

In the context of the US-led "war on terror", the draft explicitly warns that any attempt by a hostile power to hand over weapons of mass destruction to militant groups to enable them to strike a devastating blow against the United States will likely trigger a US nuclear response against the culprit.

Regional US commanders may request presidential approval to go nuclear "to respond to adversary-supplied WMD use by surrogates against US and multinational forces or civilian populations," the draft says.

The doctrine also gives the Pentagon the green light to deploy nuclear weapons to parts of the world where their future use is considered the most likely and urges troops to constantly train for nuclear warfare.

"To maximize deterrence of WMD use, it is essential US forces prepare to use nuclear weapons effectively and that US forces are determined to employ nuclear weapons if necessary to prevent or retaliate against WMD use," the document states.

The doctrine surfaced after the US Congress moved over the past several months to revive a controversial weapons research program aimed at enabling the US military to conduct precision nuclear strikes against hardened underground facilities.

In separate measures, both the Senate and the House of Representatives approved four million dollars for fiscal 2006 to study the feasibility of the so-called Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, also known as the "bunker-buster" bomb, a program that was interrupted last year under intense international and domestic criticism.

Moreover, under the 2002 Moscow Treaty, the United States will be able to retain up to 2,200 operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads all the way through 2012.

The doctrine reminds that while first use of nuclear weapons may draw condemnation, "no customary or conventional international law prohibits nations from employing nuclear weapons in armed conflict."

© Copyright 2005 AFP

Wasserman's Orphan Nagasaki

2005-08-10T20:01:00.000-07:00

Orphan Nagasaki
by Harvey Wasserman
Published on Tuesday, August 9, 2005 by the Free Press (Colombus, Ohio)

Like Nagasaki, August 9 is an orphan of history.

And in that history, new, definitive evidence has finally surfaced that the atomic bombing there was completely unjustified.

More than 80,000 human beings perished in Nagasaki three days after at least that many died in Hiroshima.

The Bomb that destroyed this historic city was made of plutonium (Hiroshima's was uranium).

Whatever the case for nuking Hiroshima, it was far weaker for Nagasaki.

The US had already shown it had this ultimate weapon. It showed it was willing to use it. And it now had time to wait for the Japanese to gather themselves and surrender, which so many believe they were trying to do.

Lingering doubts about Hiroshima and Nagasaki have only multiplied over six decades. Statements from American strategists include one to the effect that the first bomb showed we had it and were willing to use it, while the second showed we were willing to use it irrationally.

Many believe the US used the both to scare the Soviets.

But the Soviets were probably the real reason Japan surrendered. New evidence, finally unearthed after six decades, indicates the Japanese wanted to avoid Soviet troops dissecting their island as they had already divided Germany. The Bomb may have had little to do with their submission.

Which is a tremendous multiple irony.

For years Franklin Roosevelt lobbied Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to enter the war against Japan. FDR did not want to go it alone in a land invasion.

Stalin had his hands full with Hitler. And after beating the Germans, his country was decimated. Stalin was not eager for more expensive warfare against the Japanese, with whom he had maintained an uneasy neutrality.

But Roosevelt died in April, 1945. Relations between the US and USSR deteriorated. Harry Truman was far more hostile to the Soviets than FDR had been.

And he was willing to use the Bomb to intimidate Stalin---or so he thought.

Stalin's spy network had already made him well aware of the Bomb and what it could do. Nor is there reason to believe he ever doubted Truman would use it.

By August, 1945, Truman was far less eager to have the Soviets marching into Japan than FDR had been. Victory seemed certain. The Americans were not keen to share an occupation with the Russians, as they had to do in Germany.

The immediate American rationale for using the Bomb was that it would avoid the need for a land invasion of Japan. The much-publicized estimated cost of a million American lives was at best a guess, based on no hard numbers.

In any event, the US was in no position to invade at least until November. With the Russians coming from the east, Japan faced an inescapable vice.

So why August 6, and then August 9?

First was a desire that the Japanese surrender BEFORE the Soviets could get there.

Second was a desire to show Japan, the Soviets and the world that the US had this weapon, and was willing to use it.

Third, and most plausible: $2 billion had been spent to develop these weapons. Jimmy Byrnes, Truman's Karl Rove of the day, warned that if they weren't used, Congress and the American public would demand to know where all that money went.

So why Nagasaki?

First and foremost, because a second bomb had been made, and it needed a place to be dropped.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were two cities of very marginal military value. They had been purposely preserved from heavy bombing precisely so aerial photographs would cleanly illustrate the A-bombs' power. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have long been listed by the US military as "announced nuclear tests."

Kyoto was spared because of pleas from Secretary of War Henry Stimson and his wife that the cultural legacy of its many ancient temples should be preserved. But had there been a third bomb, Kyoto might not have been so lucky.

In Hiroshima, and then Nagasaki, humans were vaporized and irradiated primarily because the US had the technology to do it.

Three decades later, the Nagasaki anniversary finally acquired a happier aspect. On August 9, 1974, Richard Nixon's resignation became effective at noon. He had wanted to nuke Vietnam, but wrote in his autobiography that he feared the power of the anti-war movement, which eventually helped bring him down.

Perhaps that's the best way to balance the place of August 9 in our historic memory.

The gratuitous bombing of Nagasaki is the only blot on our national soul that could exceed the one from Hiroshima. But the forced departure of a man who was only barely stopped from repeating the nuclear horror has helped at least to begin the day's redemption.

So let's celebrate at least that much about August 9. And lets hope that by this time next year, George W. Bush will have followed in Nixon's footsteps.

Harvey Wasserman is author of Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States.

© 2005 Free Press