Marijuana : It's High Time to Tax the Pot Crop

It's time for the government to cash in on the marijuana crop.
Time to tax marijuana

[With] budget deficits and a worsening recession, it only makes sense to stop spending money to fight marijuana use and start taxing that use to help balance both state and federal budgets.

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / July 19, 2009

California recently thought they had fixed their financial problems on the state level, but they were wrong. The state government is still experiencing a huge shortfall in income. There are some in the state who believe it is time to legalize marijuana and tax it to help solve their financial crises.

Using the quantity of marijuana seized by authorities last year as a guide, it is estimated that the marijuana crop in California last year was worth about $17 billion. Personally, I think that's a very conservative estimate. But even using the government's $17 billion figure, that dwarfs any other agricultural crop in the state.

The top tax collector in the state says if they tax marijuana just like they tax liquor, the state could collect taxes worth $1.3 billion. That would solve California's deficit problem. But California is not the only state with a huge marijuana crop or deficit problems. Most states, especially in the West and South, have large illegal crops of marijuana. Marijuana can even be grown as far north as Alaska, as we found out a few years ago when it was legal for a while there.

Frankly, it is time for the federal government to legalize marijuana. While marijuana alone could not pay off the federal deficit, it could be used to keep that deficit from growing larger. Currently, the federal government is searching for ways to pay for health care reform and a public health insurance system. Why not put a substantial tax on marijuana? It could be taxed even more heavily than alcohol, and most users would gladly pay it. A marijuana tax could pay a substantial portion of health care reform.

The only reason marijuana is illegal is because of many years of government propaganda -- most of it either wrong or outright lies. The fact that the government still classes marijuana as though it were a dangerous drug like heroin or cocaine or methamphetamine is ridiculous. The truth is that marijuana is far less dangerous than either alcohol or tobacco -- both of which are legal (and should remain so). Furthermore, many many deaths can be attributed to alcohol or tobacco each year in America, while not one death can be attributed to marijuana.

There is a myth that marijuana is a "gateway" drug -- that users of marijuana will go on to use more dangerous drugs. That is simply a lie. If it has even a small gateway effect, it is because a user quickly learns the government has been lying to him/her about marijuana use. They then wonder what other drugs the government has been lying about. Separating marijuana from the other drugs and legalizing it will kill this small gateway effect caused by government lies.

Millions of honest hard-working tax-paying Americans use marijuana on a fairly regular basis. They do this even though the plant is illegal. They don't break any other laws. They don't steal from or hurt any other people. Why do we want to criminalize and punish these people? They just want to make their own choices about their own lives. For some marijuana is a stress-reliever or a sleeping aid, while others just use it recreationally.

Criminalizing and punishing these people actually hurts our country without accomplishing anything positive. We must not only pay for their incarceration, but once they have a record and have difficulty finding work because of that, they are much more likely to actually participate in criminal behavior -- behavior that actually would be harmful to persons or property.

Our attempt to enforce this second prohibition has been as big a failure as the first one was. In the twenties and thirties, we found that people would use alcohol whether it was legal or not. Making it illegal simply gave organized crime a big payday -- so big they were killing each other to control it. Marijuana (and other drug) prohibition has done the same. People are going to smoke marijuana whether it is legal or not. Isn't it time to take this money out of the hands of the drug gangs?

We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on the so-called "war on drugs," and it's been like throwing that money away because nothing has been accomplished. The drug war has been an abysmal failure, and anyone thinking clearly can see that. A good start to fixing this problem would be the legalization of marijuana. We might even find fewer people willing to try the illegal drugs if marijuana were legal.

In a time of budget deficits and a worsening recession, it only makes sense to stop spending money to fight marijuana use and start taxing that use to help balance both state and federal budgets.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger, an excellent Texas political blog.]

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David Zeiger : This is Where We Take Our Stand

Episode One : For Those Who Would Judge Me



This is Where We Take Our Stand
A web series about Winter Soldier

By David Zeiger / The Rag Blog / July 18, 2009

I am more than pleased to announce to Rag Blog readers that the web series produced by Bestor Cram and me about last year's Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan Investigation is finally starting. Throughout the summer we will be posting six episodes of This is Where We Take Our Stand, one every two weeks, at www.thisiswherewetakeourstand.com. Episode one is available now, along with the trailer for the series, and I want to urge all of you to not only watch but post, promote, and help spread the series throughout the internet.

Why this series, and why now? you may ask. Good question. Last year we spent three months following and filming the complicated, intense and emotional process of bringing two hundred and fifty veterans and active duty soldiers to Washington, DC, to expose the realities of America's occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan from their own experience. With strong support from the antiwar and progressive funding community, we hoped and expected to have a film available in six months. But surprise! Along came Barack Obama and suddenly that support was dust in the wind. I won't go into details -- I think you know the reasons.

In my view, there is no better time than now to present this series. In the name of "not looking backward," the very policies and strategic goals put in place by the Bush administration in the Gulf region stand fundamentally unchallenged and unchanged by the Obama administration. Am I overstating the case here? Yes, the rhetoric is different, and Obama has even called the invasion of Iraq a mistake. A mistake?! If it's a "mistake," that means the goals are valid and righteous, they're just being pursued with the wrong tactics-as Obama has repeatedly said in the name of "supporting the troops."

Well, I beg to differ. At the risk of stating the obvious, if these wars were illegal and immoral under Bush, by what logic are they not illegal and immoral under Obama?

Below is the statement about the series written by Bestor and me. I hope that our series will do a little to rattle the sleep out of many people's eyes, as these occupations continue and, in the case of Afghanistan, expand. Please help us make that happen.

[David Zeiger is an award-winning film producer and director whose highly–acclaimed film Sir! No Sir! documented the little-known GI resistance to the Vietnam War. His production company is Displaced Films.]

This is Where We Take Our Stand:

The series that tells the riveting and timely story of the hundreds of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who testified at last year's Winter Soldier investigation, has now begun. We hope to reach thousands, even millions worldwide as the six episodes are released throughout the summer:

• Episode One: For Those Who Would Judge Me available now. See above or click here.
• Episode Two: Rules of Engagement will launch July 27, 2009.
• Episode Three: Why We Fight will launch August 10, 2009.
• Episode Four: Broken Soldier will launch August 24, 2009.
• Episode Five: This is Not Human Nature will launch September 7, 2009.
• Episode Six: No Longer a Monster will launch September 20, 2009.

Where's the debate?

Are we watching passively while Barack Obama carries out the same policies as George W. Bush?

When an American bombing raid this May killed over two hundred civilians in a village in Afghanistan, it was met with a deafening silence. When Obama's promised "withdrawal" from Iraq leaves 130,000 troops there for at least two more years and 50,000 permanently, it's hailed as an end to the occupation. And who is demanding to know just what the mission really is when 30,000 more troops are sent to Afghanistan?

Where's the debate?

In March of 2008, two hundred and fifty veterans and active duty soldiers marked the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by gathering in Washington, DC, to testify from their own experience about the nature of the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. It was chilling, horrifying, and challenging for all who witnessed it. Against tremendous odds, they brought the voices of the veterans themselves into the debate. That was then.

This is now. Today, we present to you This is Where We Take Our Stand, the inside story of those three days and the courageous men and women who testified. And we present this story today, told in six episodes, because we believe it is as relevant now as it was one year ago. Maybe more.

Here is our challenge to you: Watch the series; spread it far and wide; and ask yourself, Is this about the past, or the present and future? Then add your voice.

If you are a veteran or active duty, present your own testimony. If you are not, but you are still a living, breathing member of the human race, then do whatever you can to join and fan the flames of debate.

- Displaced Films and Northern Light Productions

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The Demand Crisis and the Wall Street Pirates. Aaaargh!

The Demand Crisis

We could demand that all the pirate trunks of 'toxic assets' be loaded onto flatbed trucks and driven back to California where they belong. Overnight, California would need no more IOU's.

By Greg Moses / The Rag Blog / July 17, 2009

They tell us we're experiencing a crisis of demand, but they have a backward idea of it.

To turn the picture right side up, we begin with the biggest lesson from the financial sucker punch hitting workers of the world this year -- human value comes from having real work to do.

Today's value crisis hits hardest where profits -- and this is why they are called earnings -- are failing to produce new tools. This is the demand crisis. Our demand that leaders take better care of the people's tools has not been heard.

Of course, as the great London philosopher sez in Capital Volume One, tools are contradictory things. The better tools get, the fewer workers needed per unit. Hence the labor-management contradiction. Hence the iron law of social revolution. Dearborn, then and now. Once you start making better tools you can't help but create -- what shall we call it? Change?

And the big problem with change is that people try to go around or over or under or WITHOUT the progressive re-production of tools. No new tools, no real change.

Capitalism is of course the holy system which speaks the language of the Gospel and promises to keep tool making dynamic and efficient so that value flies up from work. And it does have a metaphysical charm owing to our impression that profit and tools derive from some conjoined living form.

The great San Francisco economist Henry George said interest payments are legitimate social demands because the wealth we put back into tools needs to grow like anything else. Of course any living thing can demand disgusting amounts of fodder and grow to obscene proportions on that basis, but it should not use the words of Henry George as an excuse for that.

Now, if we are consistent in our terminology here, we could say that anyone who kills the living conjunction between earnings and tools can be considered anti-capital. But if we were consistent in just this way, we would demand triple damages from Wall Street for a trillion or more anti-capital crimes.

Instead of consistent terminology, however, what we are getting fed these days is nonsense soup. For example, in my home there is an electric soap box where people sit for hours yammering about how outraged they are at outsized cash payments going to workers at institutions who once made a contest of stashing wages and profits into silos that nobody can find.

Well, who was it let go of that money in the first place? Who should demand it back? Predatory lending is piracy. Predatory lending that inflates a mortgage bubble is piracy. To find pirates, you don't have to go all the way to Tortuga or Mogadishu.

Today there is some question about how to value "toxic assets" that derive from predatory debt. But there's a simple way to value the cost of such piracy. How much would it cost to give every penny back?

We can solve this demand crisis in at least two ways. First, we could demand that all the pirate trunks of "toxic assets" be loaded onto flatbed trucks and driven back to California where they belong. Overnight, California would need no more IOUs.

Or second -- because to be honest about it we secretly admire pirates and sometimes find ourselves dreaming that we could join them -- we can demand that all these big-bonus banking houses show us how they are putting their talents to work funding the next generation of tools that we have been needing as a nation since about this time last year.

We demand that they assist California, too.

Meanwhile, we know what the yammering soap boxers want us to believe about the demand crisis. They want us to believe anything really that will keep us from connecting the dots. In that direction there's a demand crisis, too.

[Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review. He can be reached at gmosesx@gmail.com.]

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Through the Windshield

Seen at the corner of E. 12th St. and Pleasant Valley Rd., in Austin, Texas,
an unlikely art sale. Perhaps it's the heat...
Mariann Wizard

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John Ross on the Mexican Elections : The Dinosaur is Back

Jurassic fallout from the Mexican election:
The dinosaur is back, but for how long?

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / July 16, 2009

Also see 'No more environmental pretensions: The Green PRI,' By John Ross, Below.

MEXICO CITY -- Nine years ago on a sultry July morning, Mexicans woke up and discovered to their great amazement that the Dinosaur that had hunkered down at the foot of their beds for 71 years was gone. This July 6th, when Mexicans rose in the morning, the Dinosaur was back.

In the famous short poem by Augusto Monterroso, the Dinosaur is the PRI -- the Institutional Revolutionary Party -- once the longest-ruling political dynasty in the known universe that controlled the destiny of Mexicans from the cradle to the grave for seven interminable decades until it was dislodged from power by the right-wing PAN party in the July 2000 presidential elections.

In its unslakable thirst for power, the PRI committed unspeakable crimes against the Mexican peoples, stealing elections from the most humble city hall to the presidential palace, jailing and torturing and executing those who stood in its way, and emptying out public treasuries in an unmatched kleptocracy that was a legend throughout Latin America, "the perfect dictatorship" Latin American novelist Mario Vargas Llosa once dubbed it (for which the PRI had him tossed out of the country.)

"Have we Mexicans lost our memories and our minds?" asks Sylvia Insulza from behind the counter of her newspaper dispensary in the old quarter of the capital. Tears of frustration crystallize in the corners of her eyes.

The depth and breadth of the PRI victory July 5th is nothing short of stunning. From a distant third place finish in the 2006 presidential fiasco in which the rightist PAN stole the election from Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) and his left-wing PRD party by .57% of the popular vote, the PRI ("proven experience and a new attitude" is its current campaign slogan) took 37% of the total ballots cast, nearly doubling its votes three years back, and taking control of congress for the first time since 1997.

The once-upon-a-time ruling party's alliance with the so-called Mexican Green Environmental Party (see story below) will give it 259 seats out of 500 in the lower house, an absolute majority. In nine out of 31 states, the PRI won every office up for grabs -- federal congressional representatives, local congresses, and municipal officials, a "carro completo" or "full car" in the Institutionals' curious lexicon.

The Dinosaurs also proved triumphant in five out of six governors' races, winning two statehouses in which the PAN had resided for 12 years. Only in the northern border state of Sonora where the PRI governor was seen as complicit in the tragic incineration of 48 babies in a Hermosillo day care center a month before the election, was the PAN able to squeeze out a victory in an election in which the PAN and PRI candidates were cousins.

Moreover, the PRI won cities like Naucalpan, an upper middle class Mexico City suburb the right-wingers have controlled since the 1980s, and the nation's second city, Guadalajara, which the PAN has owned since 1995. In alliance with the Mexican Green Environmental Party, the PRI won its first elected office in Mexico City since 1994. Although the left PRD maintains control of the nation's capital, the Party of the Aztec Sun does so by a greatly reduced margin. Whereas the PRD registered 51% of the vote in Mexico City in 2006, three years later it weighs in with just 29%.

But Sylvia's tears of frustration may soon dry. Whether the Dinosaurs are really back or just staying overnight (in Jurassic time) is not yet clear. Mid-term elections are referendums on the sitting president and his administration's management of the country and July 5th represented a crushing vote of no confidence in Felipe Calderon on whose watch the economy has tumbled into freefall -- "growth" in 2009 will measure a negative 8%, the worst slide since the Great Depression of 1929-32.

Calderon, who campaigned as the "President of Employment" has presided over the loss of 2,000,000 jobs. The president's ill-advised war on the drug cartels has soaked the country in blood -- over 12,000 lives have been lost -- and fueled corruption and human rights abuses on the part of the military and the police. Calderon's panic-driven handling of this spring's Swine Flu "PAN-demic" kicked the bricks out from under the tourist industry, the nation's third source of dollars, and his arrogant imposition of candidates in the July 5th vote-taking angered and turned many in his own party against him.

Ceding the PRI a 10-point advantage (37% to 27%) in the national vote and the loss of congress to the Institutionals' absolute majority effectively shuts down Calderon's legislative agenda. Indeed the PANista may be the weakest president in a century -- no Mexican president since the 1910-1919 revolution has ever ruled with the opposition holding an absolute majority in the lower house. Felipe Calderon will be a lame duck for the next three years -- in real terms, his presidency ended July 5th.

One of the first casualties of the debacle was PAN party president German Martinez, a creature of Calderon, who tossed in the towel the morning after his party's most devastating defeat since its founding in 1939. Similar demands for the resignation of PRD president Jesus "Chucho" Ortega, who orchestrated the left party's worst showing since 1991, are legion.

The Party of the Aztec Sun plummeted from 38% of the national vote in 2006 when Lopez Obrador was at the top of the ticket, to just 12% three years later and its congressional delegation was decimated, retaining only 71 seats out of the 126 it held in the outgoing legislature. Cities in the misery belt girdling the capital such as Nezahualcoyotl, Chalco, and Ecatepec with a total population of 6,00,000 that have been in the PRD's pocket for years fell to the Dinosaurs.

Despite hanging on to its hegemony in the capital, the PRD lost four out of 16 delegations or boroughs for the first time since it took power here in 1997 although the leftists still have a commanding advantage in the local legislative assembly. In the battles for the delegations, the PAN picked up three of the wealthiest enclaves in the city and the tiny Party of Labor won the megalopolis's biggest and poorest demarcation -- Iztapalapa -- by ten points after Ortega and his co-conspirators persuaded the nation's top electoral court to substitute their candidate at the last minute for one supported by Lopez Obrador.

AMLO responded by mobilizing his considerable base, including the "Adelitas," hundreds of working women dressed in the outfits of women soldiers during the Mexican revolution, who last year fended off the privatization of the state oil monopoly PEMEX with a campaign of civil disobedience. Adelitas like Berta Robledo, a retired nurse, descended on Iztapalapa walking the precincts day after day to expose the flimflam and support Lopez Obrador's candidate, a local soccer coach everyone knows as "Juanito." Now, with Iztapalapa under his belt, AMLO, the once-wildly popular Mexico City mayor who still styles himself as "the legitimate president of Mexico," has forcibly demonstrated that he is still very much a factor in Mexican electoral politics.

Despite the PRI Dinosaur's big numbers, it was the Party of No that was the hands- down winner July 5th. Absenteeism hovered between 55 and 60% in the south and center of the country and in northern states like Chihuahua and Baja California where Calderon's drug war rages, only 25 to 30% of the electorate went to the polls. A national movement to cast protest votes or deface ballots with no-holds-barred slurs against all the political parties, gained resonance throughout the country. The number of "votos nulos" cast doubled from 3% in 2006 to a shade under 6%, and in Mexico City, the votos nulos multiplied by 400% to 10 to 13% of the vote. This reporter observed one disgusted voter in a neighborhood polling place here in the old quarter of the capital angrily ball up his unmarked ballot and cram it through the slot in the "urna."

Because a recount must be ordered when the number of votos nulos exceeds the margin of victory between the first and second-place finishers, ballot boxes had to be opened and counted out vote by vote in as many as 27,000 out of 140,000 polling places. Indeed, the number of votos nulos -- 1.8 million (a half million cast in Mexico City and Mexico state alone) -- establishes the Nulos as the fifth electoral force in the country behind the PRI, PAN, PRD, and PVEM but ahead of the PT, Democratic Convergence, New Alliance, and the Social Democrats (who, failing to win 2% of the national vote, lost their registration.)

On the Mexican political calendar, the conclusion of mid-term elections signals the kick-off for the next presidential race three years down the pike in 2012. The big pro-PRI turnout puts the Dinosaurs in the driver's seat to recover Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, which it held hostage from 1928 through the new millennium.

At this fledgling stage, the PRI frontrunner is Mexico state governor Enrique Pena Nieto, a short, pretty boy politico with deep pockets, a trademark pompadour, and a glamorous soap opera star (Angelica Rivera AKA "The Seagull") on his arm -- Pena Nieto, who Lopez Obrador labels "a male Barbie," is a darling of Mexico's two-headed television monopoly, Televisa and TV Azteca.

The governor's resounding sweep of Mexico state municipal (97 out of 125 city halls) and federal elections in the nation's most populous and economically active state puts him double digits above his closest rival, Manlio Fabio Beltrones, the leader of the PRI's senate delegation, and a Mafia-like political boss who is often mocked as "Don Beltrones." The "Don" is a longtime crony of the much-reviled Carlos Salinas, the former president who fell into public disgrace after his brother was imprisoned for masterminding the gangland execution of a political rival. The return of the Dinosaurs marks a possible revival of Salinas's fortunes. The bald-pated, big-eared former chief of state was pictured depositing his ballot in a large, front-page El Universal photo July 6th just to remind readers who exactly was back.

Also in the mix for the PRI nomination is the voluminous party president Beatriz Paredes, a Dinosauress whose wardrobe contains a different hand-made Indian huipil (a loose-fitting muumuu-like gown) for every day of the year.

To add to Felipe Calderon's woes, the PAN has no "bueno" or fair-haired boy in the pipeline to succeed him as president -- his young protégé, Juan Camilo Mourino, the recently-appointed Interior Secretary, was killed last November in a mysterious Mexico City air crash after returning from overseeing drug war operations in the north. The PAN's affairs are managed by a council of aging elders who appear reduced to recycling bland party hacks like Senator Santiago Creel, hardly one of the premium numbers on Calderon's cell phone dial.

Who the PRD nominee will be depends largely on how long Jesus Ortega's chokehold on the party is allowed to continue. Bloodied by the July 5th debacle, the chief Chucho seems determined to compound his party's misery by expelling Lopez Obrador from the PRD on the grounds that he violated the by-laws by backing the PT in Iztapalapa. AMLO remains the most popular -- if polemical -- politico in Mexico with powers of convocation that far exceed any other party's front-running candidates. Having insured that the PT and Democratic Convergence retained their registration by endorsing their candidates, Lopez Obrador guaranteed himself a place on the 2012 ballot even if Ortega is successful in expelling him from the PRD.

El Peje as he is affectionately called will no doubt face-off against his successor as Mexico City mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, a strapping, well-spoken but distinctly uncharismatic politician, for the votes of Mexico's leftists in 2012.

Despite its abysmal showing July 5th, the Mexican Left by whatever initials it shows itself is hardly down for the count. The PRI's overwhelming win at the polls only represents 16% of 77,000,000 registered Mexican voters when absenteeism and votos nulos are factored into the July 5th results. The Dinosaurs staged a modest congressional comeback in 2003 mid-term elections only to be steamrolled by AMLO and Calderon in 2006. Failure to cope with continuing economic and social turmoil and the predictably polluted performance of PRI elites like the Salinas clan that seem to exult in political mayhem and armed thuggery, are bound to revive left fortunes in the next three years.

According to evolutionists, the dinosaurs went extinct 60,000,000 years ago either because a giant asteroid plunged into the Atlantic Ocean off the Yucatan peninsula lowering world temperatures by ten degrees, or because climate change so thinned out the oxygen count that the dinosaurs' huge respiratory systems no longer functioned. As climate change once again threatens Planet Earth, the comeback of the PRI dinosaurs will, no doubt, be short-lived.

Photo from AFP.

No more environmental pretensions:
The Green PRI

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / July 16, 2009

The Mexican Green Ecologist Party or PVEM, which will partner with the PRI to form an absolute majority in the lower house of congress (259 out of 500 seats), is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Gonzalez Torres family. Founded by father Jose Gonzalez Torres, a wealthy construction tycoon, with ample investment from brother Victor, the king of the largest chain of generic pharmacies in Mexico, the party is presided over by Jose's young scion, Jose Emilio Gonzalez, dubbed "El Nino Verde" or "The Green Child."

Although the PVEM touts its roots in Mexico's growing environmental movement -- the elder Gonzalez Torres was a player in the failed fight to shut down Laguna Verde in Veracruz, Mexico's only nuclear power plant, and active in protests against Mexico City's killer smog in the late 1980s -- the Gonzalez Torres clan soon discovered that juicy government subsidies to Mexican political parties could pump up family fortunes.

First aligned with the leftist PRD and subsequently with the right-wing PAN, Gonzalez Torres had his sights set on becoming environmental secretary after the election of PANista Vicente Fox in 2000 but when he was passed over for the post, he delivered the PVEM to the PRI with which he has lined up ever since.

Having abandoned its environmental pretensions, the only green the Mexican Green Environmental party has pursued in recent years is the long green of filthy lucre. In 2004, the Nino Verde was secretly filmed soliciting a seven-figure bribe from developers keen on trashing the coastline of Caribbean Cancun. Scant days before the July 5th shakedown, a PVEM senator was nabbed at a Chiapas airport with a million pesos bundled up in his carry-on baggage.

The centerpiece of the Green Party's July 5th campaign was the restitution of the Death Penalty, which earned it the condemnation of European-based environmental parties and the PVEM has been excommunicated from the Global Greens Network. During the run-up to the recent elections, political cartoonists substituted a vulture for the party's colorful emblem, a toucan.

As the PRI's partner in crime in the new legislature, reintroducing the death penalty will be the big enchilada on the PVEM's plate. The "Greens" are also expected to lobby for rescinding electoral reforms that deprived Televisa and TV Azteca of millions in political advertising revenues in the prologue to the July 5th mid-terms -- the reforms were introduced after the broadcasting giants abused the use of television and radio spots in the 2006 presidential election. To this end, Ninfa Salinas Pliego, daughter of the owner of TV Azteca, has been named to head the PVEM bench in the incoming congress.

[John Ross is an American author, poet, freelance journalist, and activist who lives in Mexico City. John Ross will present Iraqigirl, the diary of a teenager growing up under U.S. occupation in northern Iraq, at 7 p.m on July 30th at Modern Times Bookstore, 888 Valencia Street in San Francisco's Mission District. Ross developed and edited the Haymarket Books volume.]

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Freedom of Choice : No Nanny State

The Marlboro Man: The picture of Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller, now an Iraq War vet, raised a stink among anti-smoking activists when it appeared in scores of newspapers in 2004. Photo by Luis Sinco.

It does not matter whether it's the right trying to force religion on me or the left trying to force 'healthiness' on me -- it is tyranny either way, and I categorically reject it.

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / July 16, 2009

Anyone who has read very many of my posts knows that I hate conservatives who want to force everyone into accepting their own particular religious and political beliefs. But some may be surprised to learn that I hate the "nanny state" liberals equally as much.

To me, freedom means having the ability to make my own choices, and allowing everyone else to do the same. As long as my choices don't hurt someone else, then no one should be able to force me to do something different. It does not matter whether those choices are "good" for me or not.

There are liberals who want to tell us what we can't eat such as a ban on certain cooking oils or fatty foods. They want to tell me what I can't drink such as carbonated soft drinks. And of course, they want to keep me from using tobacco products. These people don't care that I'm an adult, perfectly capable of making my own choices. They have already decided what is best for me and will happily codify it with a law.

This is not freedom. It does not matter whether it's the right trying to force religion on me or the left trying to force "healthiness" on me -- it is tyranny either way, and I categorically reject it. Whatever happened to letting each citizen make his or her own choices?

In a free country, you have the right to try and convince me of anything you want -- until I ask you to stop. Write articles, send mail, buy advertisements and try any other non-invasive measures to change my mind if you want. But you have stepped over the line when you try to force my compliance with a law or a ban, because then you are taking my freedom of choice away. And I will not willingly give up ANY freedom!

The latest freedom-grabbing measure is aimed at the very soldiers who are fighting for our country in a war zone. A "study" commissioned by the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs has decided that their own views of tobacco use should be forced on our military troops -- the same troops who are supposedly fighting for our "freedom".

They want to ban tobacco use on all military bases, and ban the sale of all tobacco products on military bases. They even want to extend this ban to military troops stationed in a war zone. Fortunately Secretary Gates has refused to do this. He cites as his excuse the high stress levels in a war zone. He should just say that soldiers who fight for freedom should have the freedom to make their own choices.

Frankly, this is a stupid thing for a country to do -- especially when that country is having trouble filling its military enlistment quotas. They are telling all tobacco users that they don't respect their freedom to choose, and really don't want them to join the military.

I am left to wonder exactly what this "freedom" is that is so celebrated and that so many have given their lives to establish. Is it just the freedom to follow the orders of those in power? That's not freedom -- that's tyranny wrapped in an American flag. And tyranny wrapped in an American flag is no better than any other tyranny.

How about you? Do you want the freedom to make your own choices, or are you happy to left those in power make your choices for you?

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger, an excellent Texas political blog.]

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Dick Cheney Isn't the Only One Who Planned Assassinations

When a person repeats precisely the same behaviour over and over again, but expects the result to be different, that is Einstein's definition of insanity.

Americans have been doing the same thing over and over again for 200 years, somehow expecting things to turn out differently. Until we get it through our thick skulls that voting for the establishment will result in the same establishment garbage over and over and over, we will not change America.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

The Democrats' Selective Amnesia on Assassination: Clinton Did It and Obama Does It Too
By Jeremy Scahill / July 15, 2009

While the focus is on Dick Cheney’s role, the U.S. has long had a bi-partisan assassination program.

Members of Congress have expressed outrage over the “secret” CIA assassination program that former vice president Dick Cheney allegedly ordered concealed from Congress. But this program—and the media descriptions of it—sounds a lot like the assassination policy implemented by President Bill Clinton, particularly during his second term in office.

Partisan politics often require selective amnesia. Over the past decade, we have seen this amnesia take hold when it comes to many of President Bush’s most vile policies. And we are now seeing a pretty severe case overtake several leading Democrats. It makes for good speechifying to act as though all criminality began with Bush and—particularly these days—Cheney, but that is extreme intellectual dishonesty. The fact is that many of Bush’s worst policies (now being highlighted by leading Democrats) were based in some form or another in a Clinton-initiated policy or were supported by the Democrats in Congress with their votes. To name a few: the USA PATRIOT Act, the invasion of Iraq, the attack against Afghanistan, the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, the widespread use of mercenaries and other private contractors in US war zones and warrant-less wire-tapping.

Regarding the Bush-era assassination program, there is great reason to be skeptical that the program CIA Director Leon Panetta alleges was concealed from Congress is actually the program the public is currently being led to believe it is. Why would the CIA need to conceal a program that never was implemented and, if it never was implemented, why did Panetta need to shut it down? Moreover, who was running this inactive program from the minute Obama was sworn in until June 24 when Panetta supposedly announced its cancellation? This program—as it is currently being described— should hardly be a major scandal to members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, as some are now treating it. As they well know, President Obama has continued the Bush targeted assassination program using weaponized drones and special forces teams hunting “high value targets.” As former CIA Counter-terrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro and others have pointed out, “The CIA runs drones and targets al Qaeda safe houses all the time.” Cannistraro told Talking Points Memo that there is no important difference between those kinds of attacks and “assassinations” with a gun or a knife.

Now, if it turns out that the actual plan Cheney allegedly concealed is something other than what has been publicly described, that will be a different matter. For instance, if the CIA had a secret post-9/11 program planning assassinations on US soil or of US citizens and it was ordered concealed by Cheney. Or, if it was a plan to target in other ways “enemies of the state” within the U.S. as Seymour Hersh has suggested: “The Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state,” Hersh said in March. “Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.”

Let’s look at the program the Democrats claim was kept secret. The Bush administration reportedly authorized the CIA to use small paramilitary teams to hunt down and assassinate “al Qaeda” leaders around the world. It is currently being reported that this plan was never implemented and was born after 9/11. Both of these assertions are very, very doubtful.

The plan, as currently described in the press and by Democrats, is one that continues to exist under the Obama administration right now. In fact, this program has been part of official U.S. policy—under Democratic and Republican administrations—for decades.

By way of background, there is technically a U.S. ban on assassination that dates back to President Ford in 1976. “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination,” states Executive Order 11905. That was then updated by President Carter who dropped the term “political” simply prohibiting “assassination.” The current Executive Order, 12333, was signed by president Reagan in 1981 and has remained on the books through every administration since. What is brutally ironic about Reagan signing this ban was that he authorized repeated assassinations, notably the 1986 attempt on Col. Moammar Gadhafi, which failed to kill Gadhafi but instead killed his infant daughter. But in that brutal apparent contradiction is the truth: the U.S. does not have a ban on assassinations as long as government lawyers can figure out some legal acrobats for the president to use in sidelining the ban. Every president from Reagan to Obama has reserved the right to assassinate kill “terrorists” by claiming it as a military operation or a preemptive strike.

It is pretty clear that when the Bush administration took over, it picked up the Clinton administration’s policy on assassination and ran with it—albeit with more of a missionary zeal for killing and a removal of some of the layers of lawyering. In short, the Bush team expanded and streamlined the longstanding U.S. government assassination program.

Throughout the 1990s, the question of covert assassinations was a source of major discussion within the Clinton White House and it is clear assassinations were attempted with presidential approval. Newsweek magazine reported on how, in 1995, U.S. Special Forces facilitated the assassination of a Libyan “terrorist” in Bosnia, saying, “American authorities justified the assassination under a little-known 1993 ‘lethal finding’ signed by President Bill Clinton that gave permission to target terrorists.” A former senior Clinton official speaking shortly after 9/11 called on the Bush administration not to escalate the U.S. assassination program, saying “We have a war on drugs, too, but we don’t kill drug lords.” But then, with no apparent sense of contradiction, the official added, “we have proxies who do.”

Clinton-era officials’ attempt to hide behind “proxies” is a stunning trampling of the assassination ban as it currently exists. Not only does it ban U.S. government personnel from engaging in or conspiring to engage in “assassination,” it also bans “Indirect Participation,” stating: “No agency of the Intelligence Community shall participate in or request any person to undertake activities forbidden by this Order.”

The truth is, under Clinton, it wasn’t just proxies authorized to do the assassinations.

The Clinton White House worked for years with the CIA to craft an assassination policy—specifically relating to “al Qaeda” in general and Osama bin-Laden and his top deputies specifically. CIA operatives like Billy Waugh complained in the early and middle years of the Clinton presidencies that they were lawyered to death by Clinton’s attorneys in their attempts to get the green light to kill bin Laden in Sudan. “[I]n the early 1990s we were forced to adhere to the sanctimonious legal counsel and the do-gooders,” recalled Waugh. Among Waugh’s rejected ideas was an alleged plot to kill bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan and dump his body at the Iranian Eembassy in an effort to pin the blame on Tehran. Eventually, however, Clinton did authorize what amounted to assassination squads to hunt down and kill bin Laden and other “al Qaeda leaders.” That happened officially in 1998 with Clinton’s signing of a Memorandum of Notification authorizing the CIA to carry out covert assassinations. George W Bush was not the president and Dick Cheney was not the vice president. Of course, current CIA Director Leon Panetta was Clinton’s chief of staff from 1994 to 1997 and would have been party to years worth of discussion on this issue when Clinton was president.

Under Clinton, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued secret rulings stating that the Ford/Reagan ban on assassinations did not apply to “military targets or “to attacks carried out in preemptive self-defense,” according to Steve Coll, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Ghost Wars.

Shortly after 9/11, Clinton stated this position publicly, supporting the Bush administration’s “war on terror” targeted assassination policy, saying on NBC News, “The ban that was put in effect under President Ford only applies to heads of state. It doesn’t apply to terrorists.” That is a stunning statement that is a true legal stretch given the explicit language of the ban. Moreover, Clinton did, in fact, try to kill a head of state on April 22, 1999, when he ordered a NATO airstrike on the home of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Clinton and Gen. Wesley Clark also authorized an assassination attempt on Serbian Information Minister, Aleksander Vucic, bombing Radio Television Serbia when Vucic was scheduled to appear via satellite on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” Vucic was not killed, but 16 media workers were.

Clinton also publicly acknowledged his own administration’s attempt to assassinate bin Laden. “I worked hard to try to kill him,” Clinton said. “I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since.” Clinton’s National Security Advisor Sandy Berger said after Clinton issued his 1998 “lethal finding,” U.S. operatives worked with Afghan rebels for two years in an attempt to kill Bin Laden. “There were a few points when the pulse quickened, when we thought we were close,” Berger later recalled. Among the alleged attempts on bin Laden’s life taken by Clinton was the 1998 bombing of Afghanistan (which was coupled with a massive strike on the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan).

As Coll observed of the Clinton policy: “Clinton had demonstrated his willingness to kill bin Laden, without any pretense of seeking his arrest.”

After 9/11, the CIA, which had been frustrated by some of the hurdles to assassination posed by the Clinton administration’s legal team, now had the conditions and the commander-in-chief it needed to take its assassination program to the next level. The main operations were run out of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) headed by J. Cofer Black, who had served as Clinton’s CIA station chief in Sudan when bin Laden was there in the 1990s. After 9/11, Black’s division at the CIA was authorized by President Bush —with the consent of Congress—to hunt down bin Laden and others alleged to be responsible for 9/11. As I describe in my book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army:

Before the core CIA team, Jawbreaker, deployed [to Afghanistan] on September 27, 2001, Black gave his men direct and macabre directions. “Gentlemen, I want to give you your marching orders, and I want to make them very clear. I have discussed this with the President, and he is in full agreement,” Black told covert CIA operative Gary Schroen. “I don’t want bin Laden and his thugs captured, I want them dead… . They must be killed. I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the President. I promised him I would do that.” Schroen said it was the first time in his thirty-year career he had been ordered to assassinate an adversary rather than attempting a capture. Black asked if he had made himself clear. “Perfectly clear, Cofer,” Schroen told him. “I don’t know where we’ll find dry ice out there in Afghanistan, but I think we can certainly manufacture pikes in the field.” Black later explained why this would be necessary. “You’d need some DNA,” Black said. “There’s a good way to do it. Take a machete, and whack off his head, and you’ll get a bucketful of DNA, so you can see it and test it. It beats lugging the whole body back!”

The actions of the teams run by Cofer Black were certainly known to Congress. In fact, Black himself testified in front of Congress in 2002 about what he called the new “operational flexibility” being employed in the “war on terror.” “This is a very highly classified area, but I have to say that all you need to know: There was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11,” Black said. “After 9/11 the gloves come off.” By 2004, Black claimed that “over 70 percent” of Al Qaeda’s leadership had been arrested, detained, or killed, and “more than 3,400 of their operatives and supporters have also been detained and put out of an action.” The existence of this program is not secret. It has been documented in books by former CIA operatives, is discussed in public speeches by former officials and is a reflected extensively in the Congressional record.

Obviously, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees should investigate the assassination policy under the Bush administration. Cheney’s role is central to that. Prosecutors should also be authorized to do the same. If there is a nefarious program that the public is unaware of and was unlawfully concealed, it should be brought out into the light. But, the truth is that a real investigation—one that actually seeks to get to the broader truths of these matters— would require investigating the current assassination program under Obama and the roots of the program that preceded the day when George W Bush took power. That means looking at the Clinton White House and further back. It means looking at both Democratic and Republican assassination teams. The sad fact is that nobody on Capitol Hill has demonstrated in any way that they have the political courage to do that.

Source / Rebel Reports

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Tom Hayden Comic : The Long War

The Long WarText by Tom Hayden.Illustrated by Sam Marlow and Ellis Rosen. Edited by Paul Buhle.
Published by The Rag Blog.

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[Tom Hayden, a prime mover in the Sixties New Left, was a California State Senator. A respected activist and author, he was a founder of Progressives for Obama and is the author of Ending the War in Iraq (2007), The Voices of the Chicago Eight (2008), and Writings for a Democratic Society, the Tom Hayden Reader (2008).]

[Sam Marlow and Ellis Rosen are graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Together they self-published two comics. Marlowe also worked as a digital colorist for Chicago comic artist, Paul Hornshemeier, on titles such as “The Three Paradoxes”, and Marvel Comics’ “Omega the Unknown.” He recently completed a short science fiction comic about the end of the world. He is currently volunteering at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. Rosen lives in NewYork where he also works part time at the Barry Friedman Gallery.]

[Paul Buhle is an educator and a historian. He published the New Left journal Radical America during the 1960s and has written or edited many books on radicalism and culture. He now organizes leftwing comic books.]

Go here for earlier Tom Hayden comics published by The Rag Blog.

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Robert Jensen : Getting Radicalized, Slow and Painful

Portrait of Robert Jensen by Robert Shetterly.
Becoming a radical:
The grief and the joy

Becoming radicalized politically allowed me to see that I was suffering because I didn’t want to fit into a world shaped by unjust systems; the problem wasn’t my values and desires but the pathology of those systems.

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / July 15, 2009

[Rob Shetterly, the artist who created the Americans Who Tell the Truth website, asked some of the people he painted to respond to this query: “Everywhere I go, kids and adults want to know how you got started. What was the defining moment that triggered your dedication to fighting for justice or peace, or the environment?” Below are my thoughts.]

My transition to political radicalism -- going to the root of problems, recognizing that dramatic and fundamental change in the way society is organized is necessary if there is to be a decent human future -- involved a lot of pain, in two different ways.

The first concerned the process of coming to know about the pain of the world. I had never been a naïve person who thought the world was a happy place, but like many people who have privilege (in my case, being white, male, a U.S. citizen, and economically secure, though never wealthy) I was able to remain ignorant of the depth of the routine suffering in the world.

I was able to ignore how white supremacy, patriarchy, U.S. imperialism, and a predatory capitalist economic system routinely destroy the bodies and spirits of millions of people around the world. When I made a conscious choice to stop ignoring those realities -- in my case, when I returned to a university for graduate education with the time to read and study -- the process of coming to know about that pain was wrenching. But I found myself wanting to know more.

Why would someone with privilege press to know more about the pain of the world when that knowledge creates tension and emotional turmoil? In my case, coming to understand that the world’s pain is the product of profoundly unjust social systems helped me understand a different kind of personal pain I had been struggling with.

Most of my life I had felt like a bit of a freak, like someone out of step with the culture around him. There’s nothing dramatically wrong with me physically or psychologically, but I always struggled to fit in. I had always had a lingering sense that I didn’t want what others around me seemed to want.

Because of my privilege, the world offered me a lot, and I am grateful for much of what I have -- work I have usually enjoyed, an adequate income, relative safety. But I could never figure out how to be normal -- how to kick back with the guys; how to get excited about sports, television, or the latest hit music; how to care about what kind of car I drove. In many ways I had it made, on the surface, but that sense of being out of step always dragged me down.

The best way to deal with our individual struggles is to put them in a larger context. That means both understanding the forces that shape our world as well as placing our problems in perspective. Becoming radicalized politically allowed me to see that I was suffering because I didn’t want to fit into a world shaped by unjust systems; the problem wasn’t my values and desires but the pathology of those systems.

That didn’t solve all my personal problems, but it sure helped. Radical politics also helped me understand more clearly how others were suffering much more than I; it shook me out of my self-absorption. Both realizations led me to want to continue the search for more knowledge and understanding about how this all worked, and to commit as much time and energy as I had to movements for social justice.

The paradox is that since I have immersed myself in the pain of the world, I have been able to find new joy. I still understand that the world is not a happy place, and to be truly alive we must face what my friend Jim Koplin calls the “sense of profound grief” that comes with looking honestly at the world. As the writer Wendell Berry has put it, we live on “the human estate of grief and joy” [The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996), p. 106].

Grief is inevitable, and it is only through an honest embrace of the grief that real joy is possible. The conventional world tries to sell us many pleasures, but it offers us little joy. That’s because the conventional world is also trying to sell us many ways to numb our pain, which keeps us from that grief. So long as we are out of touch with the grief, we are unable to feel the joy. We are left only with the desperate search for pleasure and a panicked scramble to avoid pain.

This process has, for me, been slow and gradual -- there have been no epiphanies. I don’t believe in epiphanies, and I don’t trust people who claim to have epiphanies. I don’t think the deep understanding of the world that we strive for can come in a single moment. It comes from the long and painful struggle, with the world and with ourselves. Insight doesn’t magically descend upon us. We have to work for it, and that always takes time.

As the singer/songwriter Eliza Gilkyson (who also happens to be my partner) has put it, “Those are lost who/try to cross through/the sorrow fields too easily” [“He Waits for Me,” from the CD “Beautiful World,” Red House Records, 2008]. To expand on her metaphor, we cross those fields not in search of a utopia somewhere ahead. Our life is that journey across those fields, facing the grief and celebrating the joy along the way.

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice (Soft Skull Press, 2009). Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. His posts to The Rag Blog are here, and his articles can also be found here.

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A Stimulus Plan With Jubilee Vouchers. Hallelujah!

Keeping the bear at bay:
Jubilee Vouchers and a complete stimulus plan

If we don’t get a serious world-historical plan in place before the real Bear Market hits we’ll soon be thinking of 'mere unemployment' as the good old days.

By Greg Moses / The Rag Blog / July 15, 2009

In a world where one class manufactures credit and the other class clings to hope, how bad can a debt economy be? Of course, we could have that long-awaited revolution where the hopeful class clobbers the lending class and puts an end to the disparities that make borrowing necessary. But what would happen the week after that?

On the other hand we could recover the wisdom of the legendary Jubilee by placing the lending class on notice that every seven years we're going to have a write-down party, beginning with the summer of 2009.

I offer this as a "mustard seed" (with kudos to Larry Kudlow for the Gospel term that he applies to the salvation of capitalism). Jubilee Vouchers could be sown into "green shoots" and harvested as part of the next stimulus plan. If such debt-relief were offered directly to all the people, all at once, you would surely short the future of any politician who tried to get in the way.

The only moral problem with this idea is how to respect and reward all the good people who didn't get caught up in debt mania. We should acknowledge their moral superiority and sacrifice.


Therefore, the Federal Reserve Bank shall distribute to each taxpayer a book of Jubilee Vouchers totaling $10,000 which shall be accepted by any creditor in return for debt relief. Any unused Jubilee Vouchers held by people of moral superiority and good sense may be presented to the IRS for tax credits that will be good for as many years as the balance may last.

We'll let the big brains at the Federal Reserve Bank work out the technicalities of what happens next. Maybe they can open up a $2.25 trillion jubilee line of credit to be paid down with interest from the lenders they support. They could call it The People’s Bank.

Or the Fed could refuse to redeem Jubilee Vouchers from lenders who have proven to be predatory, forcing them into immediate bankruptcy. Where the Fed is concerned the world has full faith that when it comes to credit, if there’s a will, there’s a way. (Cap and trade on the national debt anyone?)


Perhaps there is a moral concept of modern economics that will be transgressed by the revival of Jubilee wisdom, but since we're borrowing our financial language from the Gospel, why not invite those without financial sin to cast the first stones?

For example, there are people who get paid by huge broadcasting conglomerates who sometimes puff themselves up as saints -- as if the whole credit scheme never leaks into the advertising budgets that fund their creditable livelihoods. We could invite them to stone us, but they'd stone us anyway.

The point is that credit mania became a thoroughgoing social mood that ate and fed all of us with the same collective spoon. Nobody stopped it why? Because we were all hooked into the accelerated experience of the leveraged life.

Since we haven’t got the appetite to prosecute debt pushers or their officious collaborators, and since it is probably true what Greenspan says -- that we will never outlaw greed -- at least we might offer some meaningful ritual comforts to all the addicts who get left with nothing but the spasm of withdrawal.


In addition to Jubilee Vouchers, two other fronts need funding -- which we can visualize via that odd couple at CNBC, Cramer and Kudlow.

Jim Cramer says we need a real New Deal jobs program. Kudlow says we need business tax cuts. Publisher Mortimer Zuckerman has joined issue with Cramer in calling for a real job-stimulus program. And any number of old supply-siders are lining up along the Kudlow-Laffer axis to fight for Capital first.

But enough of the bickering already. Do we need labor or capital? Cramer or Kudlow? Why not both?

At any rate let’s not do as a nation what the readers of the Wall Street Journal did in their online responses to Zuckerman’s sober proposal. Zuckerman stayed focused on the needs of the people and how the government might do its duty. The readers of the Wall Street Journal diverted precious pixels into a childish blame game of whose fault?

Fact is, there are very few of us behaving like part of the solution these days, and Congress could probably get all this done in early August if we make it a condition of their summer break. Get Zuckerman to print the bill, roll it down the aisle in a wheelbarrow, and nothing of the usual diligence or transparency of American democracy would be sacrificed

But if we don’t get a serious world-historical plan in place before the real Bear Market hits we’ll soon be thinking of “mere unemployment” as the good old days.

[Greg Moses is a frequent contributor to these pages. He can be reached at gmosesx@gmail.com.]

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Juan Cole on Cheney's Criminal Irrelevance - II

Truth Commission Needed to Examine Cheney, Assassination Squads, Cover-Ups
By Juan Cole / July 13, 2009

It turns out that the secret CIA program that Leon Panetta cancelled, and which former VP Richard Bruce Cheney ordered hidden from Congress, was in fact an assassination squad focusing on al-Qaeda figures.

The problem with assassination teams is that they are extra-judicial. They are killing people who have not been proven to have done anything wrong. The long litany of mistakes that security organizations have made in recent years, targeting innocents, should form a legion of cautionary tales about just killing people. Maher Arar, for instance, might as well have simply been shot down like a dog as shackled and sent for torture by the Baath Party in Damascus. He was innocent. Murat Kurnaz might have as easily had two bullets put behind his right ear as to have been arrested and sent for "interrogation" to Guantanamo (this is the link for his book). Then there was that little Khaled el-Masri 'oops' moment, which would have been even more embarrassing to the US government if he had been shot between the eyes by a US government sniper. I could go on and on (the majority of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay now appears to have been clueless innocents, and Bush-Cheney appears to have wanted to sentence them to life imprisonment without a trial; they could have as easily just been shot on sight).

It could be argued that the CIA would be more careful about who it killed than about who it had detained or had tortured, but we cannot really be sure of that, can we? In fact, Cheney did the CIA itself a grave disservice by putting it in the position of having to plan, at least, to act extra-judicially and beyond the reach of any oversight except his own (shudder). A bureaucracy dedicated to fighting a struggle needs mechanisms for judging its performance and needs to be told when it has gone too far.

My neighbor congressman Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) seems to think that the issue is how much money was spent on this program, which apparently never got off the ground. That it was a small program is not important. September 11 itself probably only cost al-Qaeda $500,000 or so, yet resulted in large loss of innocent life. The issues are ones of constitutionality, good governance, and ethics.

Since we now know that the CIA 007's were only in training and it is alleged at least, that they were not actually put into the field with a mission, a dark thought crosses my mind. What if Cheney, who notoriously disliked the CIA, decided to give the assassination missions to the military special ops, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), as detailed by Seymour Hersh, instead? That is, the program Panetta closed down may not be the one that went operational. Who is in charge of JSOC now? Anyone? Still Cheney?

Then there is the issue of congressional oversight. I know Congress can be leaky. But frankly you cannot have any sort of democracy if you have a covert organization carrying out black operations with no oversight from any branch of government but the Executive. The CIA is in the executive branch and so can hardly be policed by it. There will always be the temptation to use covert operations to influence American public opinion, and even to influence the outcome of elections. In the 1962 Operation Northwoods, even the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed committing terrorism against Americans to whip up sentiment in favor of intervention in Cuba. And the JCS is not even a covert organization. Some assassinations could drag the United States into war if their circumstances became known, and you could never be sure they would not be. Even just a supposedly simple rendition (kidnapping), like that of Abu Omar from Milan, unwound like a silent-era Keystone Cops episode; then what about actually killing someone? Nor would all the agents involved defend their actions in Milan; if they regret that, how would they feel if they had been ordered to kill Abu Omar (who, by the way, may never have committed any crimes)?

Me, I think terrorists operating in societies at peace are criminals and should be dealt with as a police matter. I don't deny that there may be extraordinary circumstances in which direct and immediate action might save a lot of lives; but then, I would put that under the rubric of policing, as well.

Senator Diane Feinstein thinks Cheney may have broken the law by keeping Congress in the dark about the program. If he didn't, then the law needs to be rewritten!

Now that it is becoming clear that Cheney's warrantless wiretapping program at the National Security Agency was just enormous, and that he was at the heart of efforts to stonewall after the Valerie Plame leak, it seems to me only a matter of time until so many of Cheney's crimes become public that pressure will grow to at least have a fact-finding commission on his dirty deeds.

Cheney is a traitor for his role in outing Valerie Plame (and yes, he had Irv Lewis Libby, his chief of staff, try like hell to out her; it is not relevant that Bob Novak took the information from Armitage first). He hid covert operations from Congress. He contemplated assassination squads and for all we know ran some. If Congress doesn't want to look mean-spirited or to risk disillusioning the public with government by prosecuting the former vice president, let's at least have a truth commission that gets documents declassified and lays out his full role so we don't have to wait until 2039 to judge it.

The only thing worse than impunity for crimes is a decades-long cover-up of those crimes from the American people. Complete sunshine on Richard Bruce Cheney's misdeeds is the minimum necessary to work against them being repeated by the next administration.

Source / Informed Comment

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Obama's Non-Nuclear World: A Hiroshima Survivor's Thoughts

Hiroshima: Ten Years Later. "I'm Just Waiting For Death." Those are the words of Mrs. Yoskio Nishikawa, 43, bedridden "A-Bomb widow" who lives on $22 a month in charity. Yukiko, 15, one of her four children, cools her forehead with a wet towel as the 70-pound widow rests in their nine-foot square room, part of a frame charity home housing families of 20 widows. A small wooden Shinto shrine, in memory of her blacksmith husband who was killed while riding to work, occupies a place of honor. Mrs. Nishikawa suffers from radiation effects because she combed the city searching for her husband after the bomb fell. She has a bad heart and liver trouble. (1955) Photo: Source.
A Flash of Memory
By Issey Miyake / July 13, 2009

Tokyo -- IN April, President Obama pledged to seek peace and security in a world without nuclear weapons. He called for not simply a reduction, but elimination. His words awakened something buried deeply within me, something about which I have until now been reluctant to discuss.

I realized that I have, perhaps now more than ever, a personal and moral responsibility to speak out as one who survived what Mr. Obama called the “flash of light.”

On Aug. 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on my hometown, Hiroshima. I was there, and only 7 years old. When I close my eyes, I still see things no one should ever experience: a bright red light, the black cloud soon after, people running in every direction trying desperately to escape — I remember it all. Within three years, my mother died from radiation exposure.

I have never chosen to share my memories or thoughts of that day. I have tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to put them behind me, preferring to think of things that can be created, not destroyed, and that bring beauty and joy. I gravitated toward the field of clothing design, partly because it is a creative format that is modern and optimistic.

I tried never to be defined by my past. I did not want to be labeled “the designer who survived the atomic bomb,” and therefore I have always avoided questions about Hiroshima. They made me uncomfortable.

But now I realize it is a subject that must be discussed if we are ever to rid the world of nuclear weapons. There is a movement in Hiroshima to invite Mr. Obama to Universal Peace Day on Aug. 6 — the annual commemoration of that fateful day. I hope he will accept. My wish is motivated by a desire not to dwell on the past, but rather to give a sign to the world that the American president’s goal is to work to eliminate nuclear wars in the future.

Last week, Russia and the United States signed an agreement to reduce nuclear arms. This was an important event. However, we are not naïve: no one person or country can stop nuclear warfare. In Japan, we live with the constant threat from our nuclear-armed neighbor North Korea. There are reports of other countries acquiring nuclear technology, too. For there to be any hope of peace, people around the world must add their voices to President Obama’s.

If Mr. Obama could walk across the Peace Bridge in Hiroshima — whose balustrades were designed by the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi as a reminder both of his ties to East and West and of what humans do to one another out of hatred — it would be both a real and a symbolic step toward creating a world that knows no fear of nuclear threat. Every step taken is another step closer to world peace.

[Issey Miyake is a clothing designer. This article was translated by members of his staff from the Japanese.]

Source / New York Times

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Food Safety Meets Organic Farming: Destroying the Conceptual Foundations by Hyper-Technologizing

Farmworkers harvest organically grown lettuce at Lakeside Organic Gardens Farm in Watsonville. Photo: Paul Chinn/The Chronicle.
Crops, ponds destroyed in quest for food safety
By Carolyn Lochhead / July 13, 2009

Washington -- Dick Peixoto planted hedges of fennel and flowering cilantro around his organic vegetable fields in the Pajaro Valley near Watsonville to harbor beneficial insects, an alternative to pesticides.

He has since ripped out such plants in the name of food safety, because his big customers demand sterile buffers around his crops. No vegetation. No water. No wildlife of any kind.

"I was driving by a field where a squirrel fed off the end of the field, and so 30 feet in we had to destroy the crop," he said. "On one field where a deer walked through, didn't eat anything, just walked through and you could see the tracks, we had to take out 30 feet on each side of the tracks and annihilate the crop."

In the verdant farmland surrounding Monterey Bay, a national marine sanctuary and one of the world's biological jewels, scorched-earth strategies are being imposed on hundreds of thousands of acres in the quest for an antiseptic field of greens. And the scheme is about to go national.

Invisible to a public that sees only the headlines of the latest food-safety scare - spinach, peppers and now cookie dough - ponds are being poisoned and bulldozed. Vegetation harboring pollinators and filtering storm runoff is being cleared. Fences and poison baits line wildlife corridors. Birds, frogs, mice and deer - and anything that shelters them - are caught in a raging battle in the Salinas Valley against E. coli O157:H7, a lethal, food-borne bacteria.

In pending legislation and in proposed federal regulations, the push for food safety butts up against the movement toward biologically diverse farming methods, while evidence suggests that industrial agriculture may be the bigger culprit.

'Foolhardy' approach

"Sanitizing American agriculture, aside from being impossible, is foolhardy," said UC Berkeley food guru Michael Pollan, who most recently made his case for smaller-scale farming in the documentary film "Food, Inc." "You have to think about what's the logical end point of looking at food this way. It's food grown indoors hydroponically."

Scientists do not know how the killer E. coli pathogen, which dwells mainly in the guts of cattle, made its way to a spinach field near San Juan Bautista (San Benito County) in 2006, leaving four people dead, 35 with acute kidney failure and 103 hospitalized.

The deadly bug first appeared in hamburger meat in the early 1980s and migrated to certain kinds of produce, mainly lettuce and other leafy greens that are cut, mixed and bagged for the convenience of supermarket shoppers. Hundreds of thousands of the bug can fit on the head of a pin; as few as 10 can lodge in a salad and end in lifelong disability, including organ failure.

Going national

For many giant food retailers, the choice between a dead pond and a dead child is no choice at all. Industry has paid more than $100 million in court settlements and verdicts in spinach and lettuce lawsuits, a fraction of the lost sales involved.

Galvanized by the spinach disaster, large growers instituted a quasi-governmental program of new protocols for growing greens safely, called the "leafy greens marketing agreement." A proposal was submitted last month in Washington to take these rules nationwide.

A food safety bill sponsored by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, passed this month in the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It would give new powers to the Food and Drug Administration to regulate all farms and produce in an attempt to fix the problem. The bill would require consideration of farm diversity and environmental rules, but would leave much to the FDA.

An Amish farmer in Ohio who uses horses to plow his fields could find himself caught in a net aimed 2,000 miles away at a feral pig in San Benito County. While he may pick, pack and sell his greens in one day because he does not refrigerate, the bagged lettuce trucked from Salinas with a 17-day shelf life may be considered safer.

The leafy-green agreement is based on available science, but it is just a jumping-off point.

Large produce buyers have compiled secret "super metrics" that go much further. Farmers must follow them if they expect to sell their crops. These can include vast bare-dirt buffers, elimination of wildlife, and strict rules on water sources. To enforce these rules, retail buyers have sent forth armies of food-safety auditors, many of them trained in indoor processing plants, to inspect fields.

Keeping children out

"They're used to working inside the factory walls," said Ken Kimes, owner of New Natives farms in Aptos (Santa Cruz County) and a board member of the Community Alliance With Family Farmers, a California group. "If they're not prepared for the farm landscape, it can come as quite a shock to them. Some of this stuff that they want, you just can't actually do."

Auditors have told Kimes that no children younger than 5 can be allowed on his farm for fear of diapers. He has been asked to issue identification badges to all visitors.

Not only do the rules conflict with organic and environmental standards; many are simply unscientific. Surprisingly little is known about how E. coli is transmitted from cow to table.

Reducing E. coli

Scientists have created a vaccine to reduce E. coli in livestock, and a White House working group announced plans Tuesday to boost safety standards for eggs and meat. This month, the group is expected to issue draft guidelines for reducing E. coli contamination in leafy greens, tomatoes and melons.

Some science suggests that removing vegetation near field crops could make food less safe. Vegetation and wetlands are a landscape's lungs and kidneys, filtering out not just fertilizers, sediments and pesticides, but also pathogens. UC Davis scientists found that vegetation buffers can remove as much as 98 percent of E. coli from surface water. UC Davis advisers warn that some rodents prefer cleared areas.

Produce buyers compete to demand the most draconian standards, said Jo Ann Baumgartner, head of the Wild Farm Alliance in Watsonville, so that they can sell their products as the "safest."

State agencies responsible for California's water, air and wildlife have been unable to find out from buyers what they are demanding.

They do know that trees have been bulldozed along the riparian corridors of the Salinas Valley, while poison-filled tubes targeting rodents dot lettuce fields. Dying rodents have led to deaths of owls and hawks that naturally control rodents.

Unscientific approach

"It's all based on panic and fear, and the science is not there," said Dr. Andy Gordus, an environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Game.

Preliminary results released in April from a two-year study by the state wildlife agency, UC Davis and the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that less than one-half of 1 percent of 866 wild animals tested positive for E. coli O157:H7 in Central California.

Frogs are unrelated to E. coli, but their remains in bags of mechanically harvested greens are unsightly, Gordus said, so "the industry has been using food safety as a premise to eliminate frogs."

Farmers are told that ponds used to recycle irrigation water are unsafe. So they bulldoze the ponds and pump more groundwater, opening more of the aquifer to saltwater intrusion, said Jill Wilson, an environmental scientist at the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board in San Luis Obispo.

Wilson said demands for 450-foot dirt buffers remove the agency's chief means of preventing pollution from entering streams and rivers. Jovita Pajarillo, associate director of the water division in the San Francisco office of the Environmental Protection Agency, said removal of vegetative buffers threatens Arroyo Seco, one of the last remaining stretches of habitat for steelhead trout.

Turning down clients

"It's been a problem for us trying to balance the organic growing methods with the food safety requirements," Peixoto said. "At some point, we can't really meet their criteria. We just tell them that's all we can do, and we have to turn down that customer."

Large retailers did not respond to requests for comment. Food trade groups in Washington suggested calling other trade groups, which didn't comment.

Chiquita/Fresh Express, a large Salinas produce handler, told the advocacy group Food and Water Watch that the company has "developed extensive additional guidelines for the procurement of leafy greens and other produce, but we consider such guidelines to be our confidential and proprietary information."

Seattle trial lawyer Bill Marler, who represented many of the plaintiffs in the 2006 E. coli outbreak in spinach, said, "If we want to have bagged spinach and lettuce available 24/7, 12 months of the year, it comes with costs."

Still, he said, the industry rules won't stop lawsuits or eliminate the risk of processed greens cut in fields, mingled in large baths, put in bags that must be chilled from packing plant to kitchen, and shipped thousands of miles away.

"In 16 years of handling nearly every major food-borne illness outbreak in America, I can tell you I've never had a case where it's been linked to a farmers' market," Marler said.

"Could it happen? Absolutely. But the big problem has been the mass-produced product. What you're seeing is this rub between trying to make it as clean as possible so they don't poison anybody, but still not wanting to come to the reality that it may be the industrialized process that's making it all so risky."

Some major recent outbreaks of food-borne illness

The Food and Drug Administration lists 40 food-borne pathogens. Among the more common: E-coli O157:H7, salmonella, listeria, campylobacter, botulism and hepatitis A.

June 2009: E. coli O157:H7 found in Nestle Toll House refrigerated cookie dough manufactured in Danville, Va., resulted in the recall of 3.6 million packages. Seventy-two people in 30 states were sickened. No traces found on equipment or workers; investigators are looking at flour and other ingredients.

October 2008: Salmonella found in peanut butter from a Peanut Corp. of America plant in Georgia. Nine people died, and an estimated 22,500 were sickened. Criminal negligence was alleged after the product tested positive and was shipped.

June 2008: Salmonella Saintpaul traced to serrano peppers grown in Mexico. More than 1,000 people were sickened in 41 states, with 203 reported hospitalizations and at least one death. Tomatoes were suspected, devastating growers.

April 2007: E. coli O157:H7 found in beef, sickening 14 people. United Food Group recalled 5.7 million pounds of meat.

December 2006: E. coli O157:H7 traced to Taco Bell restaurants in New Jersey and Long Island, N.Y. Green onions suspected, then lettuce. Thirty-nine people were sickened, some with acute kidney failure.

September 2006: E. coli O157:H7 found in Dole bagged spinach processed at Earthbound Farms in San Juan Bautista (San Benito County). The outbreak killed four people, sent 103 to hospitals, and devastated the spinach industry.

Source / San Francisco Chronicle

Thanks to Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog

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Sen. Sessions : Alabama Hypocrite Would Sit in Judgment

Graphic: US News & World Report, June, 16, 1986.

Click on image to enlarge.

There is great irony here in the once rejected nominee [for federal judge] now trying to sharpen his claws on Judge Sotomayor. But she is lots tougher and sharper than Sessions could ever be, and is letting him claw away, as he loudly displays his lightweight duplicity and demagoguery.

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / July 14, 2009

The Republican Party's finest continue to exhibit just how sorry, brazen, and unprincipled many of them can be as questioning of Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor has gotten underway. One of the worst and most shameless of the GOP interrogators is Alabama junior senator, Jeff Sessions.

In 1986 Sessions himself sat in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee as a Reagan nominee for a federal judgeship, and was promptly rejected because of his history of racially insensitive remarks and a poor civil rights record. One of those questioning Sessions was Senator Edward Kennedy who even back in 1986 called him "a throwback to a shameful era."

Today, after 23 years of playing the good old boy politician, becoming a U.S. Senator in 1997, Sessions, who switched from the Democratic to the Republican party, was assigned to be the Ranking Member on the Senate Judiciary Committee less than three months ago.

There is great irony here in the once rejected nominee now trying to sharpen his claws on Judge Sotomayor. But she is lots tougher and sharper than Sessions could ever be, and is letting him claw away, as he loudly displays his lightweight duplicity and demagoguery.

In his confrontational opening statement of the confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor, Sessions, in his high nasal whine, he lectured the nominee about 'prejudice' in the legal system.

Twenty years ago when Sessions sat before the very panel he now heads, he was asked about well documented reports of his publicly recognized racism. His response, "I may have said something about the NAACP being un-American or Communist, but I meant no harm by it."

Sessions allegedly referred to the (NAACP) and the (ACLU) as "un-American" and "Communist inspired" because they "forced civil rights down the throats of people." At his confirmation hearings, Sessions said that the groups could be un-American when "they involve themselves in un-American positions" in foreign policy.

Sessions had been frequently accused of "gross insensitivity” on racial issues by his detractors. Among a variety of blatant racial comments his opponents pointed to, was his joking reference to the Ku Klux Klan which he said "was not so bad until he found out that some of them smoked marijuana." Sessions, with a straight face, claimed his remarks were made in jest.

The panel didn't buy it, and rejected him. One of those voting against him was Alabama Democratic Senator Howell Heflin.

Today Republican Senator Sessions is but one more example of GOP leadership tinged with documented hate, racism, anti immigration xenaphobia, and unrealistic conservative dreams of "keeping things like they have always been."

The almost certain approval of Judge Sotomayor will, indeed, not be the way things have always been. That is the point of President Obama's having nominated her to the join the ranks of what has historically been the dominion of white men only, with only recent minor exceptions.

Meanwhile Senator Sessions may well be called into other hearings since he was one of of only nine opponents of Senator John McCain's anti-torture amendment. Sessions supports former Vice President Dick Cheney's proposal to exempt the (CIA) from any ban on the use of torture.

Session's is a real humanist too. Last month reportedly during testimony by a 42-year-old Filipino woman scheduled to be deported, the mother of two American children, who had been in the USA for 23 years, Sessions was clearly heard telling one one of his aides, "Enough with the histrionics," when the woman's 12-year-old son began crying during the testimony.

And now he lectures a Supreme Court nominee about "prejudice in the legal system."

The only thing more disgusting and upsetting than Sessions' troubling racist past are the voters out there who are nodding their heads in agreement with his "tough questioning."

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor. He also posts at The iHandbill.]

The Rag Blog

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Obama's Nuclear Gambit : Savvy or Softy?

Above, John Bolton: a neocon looks backward. Below, Barack Obama with Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. Photo by Dmitry Astakhov / AFP / Getty Images.
Obama's nuclear gambit:
Cold warrior Bolton says he gave too much

These views never made much sense during the dreary days of the Cold War. They are even sillier and more self-defeating in the present context.

By Steve Weissman / July 14, 2009

Former UN Ambassador John Bolton, the mustachioed neocon, sometimes gets it half right. President Barack Obama is, in fact, reducing America's nuclear advantage over Russia, just as Bolton argues. But the hell-for-leather Bolton fails completely to understand what Obama is doing and why, as do many Obama supporters.

"Americans may have voted for a lower profile in Iraq, but they did not vote for a weaker United States globally," Bolton wrote right before Obama's trip to Moscow.

Obama would, in Bolton's view, give the Russians everything they wanted: "Major new restrictions on strategic nuclear weapons, postponing construction on US missile-defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic and, indeed, downsizing America's entire missile-defense program, sidelining Georgia's and Ukraine's NATO membership applications, and leaning hard on Israel to stop all West Bank settlement construction and accept a Palestinian state."

Caught up in yesterday's Cold War, Bolton can only see these as unwarranted concessions to an unrelenting rival, for which the United States would get little in return.

After the signing of the "Joint Understanding" in Moscow, Bolton berated Obama even more. "Obama's policy is risky for America and its global allies who shelter under our nuclear umbrella," Bolton wrote. "Although Obama hopes dramatic US nuclear weapons reductions will discourage proliferation, the actual result will be the exact opposite."

No doubt, Bolton is playing Republican politics by painting Obama as a naïve idealist who would endanger American security and that of our allies, notably the Israelis.

Sadly, many nonpartisan analysts join Bolton in seeing Obama's efforts through the prism of an outdated arms race with the Soviet Union. They also see American military power as the prime deterrent to the nuclear ambitions of Iran, North Korea and any other nation that might seek the bomb.

These views never made much sense during the dreary days of the Cold War. They are even sillier and more self-defeating in the present context.

To expand on Henry Kissinger's recent remark in Der Spiegel, Obama works like a chess master playing several matches at the same time. In playing the Russians, he started from a simple calculation. The United States has enjoyed an overwhelming nuclear superiority over both Russia and the Chinese, as Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press explained in the March 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs.

"Today, for the first time in almost 50 years, the United States stands on the verge of attaining nuclear primacy," they wrote. "It will probably soon be possible for the United States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike."

With increasing tensions between the Russians and the West since 2006, they have apparently made some efforts to catch up. But, even with America's nuclear advantage, Washington found no way to use it to modify Russia's behavior, not even in Georgia and Ukraine. Short of threatening a nuclear shoot-out, having more nukes than Moscow actually hurt rather than helped.

Obama has opted to play a softer game against the Russians, to which they responded by not standing in the way of a new deal for an airbase in Kyrgyzstan and opening their own airspace for American supply flights to US and NATO troops in Afghanistan. Better that Russia help persuade Obama to get out of Afghanistan while he still can, but give the two governments credit for moving toward win-win agreements rather than the win-lose confrontations of the past.

Obama's second chess game tries to get Moscow to help pressure Tehran to rein in its nuclear energy program and stop short of atomic weapons. Here the Russians have mixed interests. They do not look happily on the prospect of nearby Iran getting the bomb and have quietly put obstacles in the way during its construction of the Iranian nuclear reactor in Bushehr. But the Russians have a large commercial interest in providing the reactor and other nuclear equipment, and also in selling costly conventional weapons, not the least anti-aircraft defenses to protect Iran against Israel or American air strikes.

In a third chess game, Obama is playing directly with Iran and other countries looking for nuclear arsenals of their own. Without Russia and the United States cutting their own nuclear arsenals, as the two countries committed to do in the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, Obama has no chance of bringing Iran and the others to the table.

This is where Bolton and those who share his views most misunderstand reality. American military power failed utterly to prevent China, India, Pakistan and Israel from getting nuclear weapons, and it will not stop any other nation that sees the bomb as a way to deter a military attack by rivals, large or small.

The most dramatic evidence of this came from the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, in the recently released transcripts of his interrogations by and casual conversations with the FBI. Saddam, it turns out, let the Bush administration believe he had nukes and other weapons of mass destruction because he feared looking weak to Iran.

As the Arabic-speaking FBI interrogator summed it up, "Hussein stated he was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq's weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for his refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq."

The ruse cost Saddam his country and his life. But that is how important nuclear deterrence has become to the less-than-Great Powers of the Middle East and Persian Gulf. Obama, the chess master, hopes to find a way around the problem with his nuclear summit in Washington next March. In the meantime, he would do well to stop the threats to Iran coming from the Israelis and from within his own administration.

[A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France.]

Source / truthout

The Rag Blog

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Robert Jensen : The Color of the Race Problem is White (Video)

The Color of the Race Problem is White
By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog

“The Color of the Race Problem Is White” was a lecture by Professor Robert Jensen, recorded at the University of Texas at Austin on March 30, 2009. The lecture itself is 28 minutes and also includes 24 minutes of discussion. Jensen is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege.

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois suggested that the question white people so often want to ask black people is, “How does it feel to be a problem?” This program turns the tables and recognizes some simple facts: Race problems have their roots in a system of white supremacy. White people invented white supremacy. Therefore, the color of the race problem is white. White people are the problem. White people have to ask ourselves: How does it feel to be a problem?

Following the ideas in his book The Heart of Whiteness, Jensen argues that -- even decades after the significant achievements of the civil rights movement and with an African-American president -- it is still appropriate to describe the United States as a white-supremacist society, in terms of how we think and how we live.

Through an analysis of contemporary racial ideology, Jensen presents a framework for critiquing the naturalizing of power and privilege in other arenas of our lives (gender, class, nationality, and ecology). How have we come to accept so easily systems of domination and subordination? How did we become resigned to hierarchy? How can we challenge the unjust and unsustainable nature of the systems in which we live?

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. Among his books is The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005) Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary filmAbe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing, which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist. Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online here.]

The Rag Blog / Posted July 14, 2009

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'Magic' Poet, 'Weed Ambassador' Simon Vinkenoog Dead at 80

Poet Simon Vinkenoog, a Sixties icon.

With the death of Simon Vinkenoog Amsterdam loses one more of its iconic ambassadors of the 'Swinging Sixties'... when the Dutch capital gained its reputation as a drugs-friendly Magic Centre...

By Rob Kievit / July 14, 2009

AMSTERDAM -- Poet and author Simon Vinkenoog, who had been known as Amsterdam's "weed ambassador" since the 1960s, has died aged 80, his family said on Sunday. He had been ill for some time, having undergone a leg amputation and suffered a fatal brain hemorrhage.

His first volume of poems, entitled Wondkoorts ("Traumatic Fever"), appeared in 1950; one of his last works was a bundle of translations of Allen Ginsberg's poetry, Me and my peepee (2001). Twenty years earlier he had also turned his attention to the American Beat Poets of the 1950s, publishing Jack Kerouac in Amsterdam. Vinkenoog loved the city where he was born and where he lived, as he expressed in his ode to his native town Am*dam Madmaster, published last year.

In 2004 Simon Vinkenoog was elected Poet of the Fatherland (Dutch poet laureate), a position which he held until 2005.

Drugs advocate

In 1965 he served six weeks in jail for possessing marijuana, a drug he continued to enjoy until he died. Vinkenoog was an advocate of recreational drugs use, as illustrated by titles like How to Enjoy Reality (1968). He often appeared in public reciting his poetry. One of his most recent appearances was in 2007, when he lent his support to a demonstration in Amsterdam against a proposed ban on magic mushrooms. In the 2006 general elections, he was a figurehead candidate for a small party which promoted the legalisation of cannabis. The party did not succeed in winning any seats in the Lower House.

In addition to his purely literary work, Vinkenoog wrote profusely about his experiences with drugs. Esoteric magazine Bres published an apparently never-ending series of articles, starting with an exploration of LSD in 1968, and ending in 2004.

1960s fading away

With the death of Simon Vinkenoog Amsterdam loses one more of its iconic ambassadors of the 'Swinging Sixties' (1960s), when the Dutch capital gained its reputation as a drugs-friendly Magic Centre, which it has managed to retain to this day. Earlier this year, performance artist Robert Jasper Grootveld died. Grootveld was known for his large-scale open-air ceremonies in the mid-Sixties in which he mocked bourgeois hypocrisy.

Source / RNW

Thanks to Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog

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Darth Vader Redux : Cheney and the CIA's 'Executive Assassination Ring'

President George W. Bush and George J. Tenet, then director of the CIA, meet at the agency headquarters in 2001, the year the secret program began. Photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP / Washington Post.
Dick Cheney and the CIA:
The hits just keep on coming

By mcjoan / July 14, 2009

CIA linked to Bhutto's murder? Video Below.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the secret CIA program Dick Cheney ordered kept from Congress was aimed at capturing and killing al Qaeda members.

According to current and former government officials, the agency spent money on planning and possibly some training. It was acting on a 2001 presidential legal pronouncement, known as a finding, which authorized the CIA to pursue such efforts. The initiative hadn't become fully operational at the time Mr. Panetta ended it.

In 2001, the CIA also examined the subject of targeted assassinations of al Qaeda leaders, according to three former intelligence officials. It appears that those discussions tapered off within six months. It isn't clear whether they were an early part of the CIA initiative that Mr. Panetta stopped.

Those discussions must have "tapered off" when Cheney decided that it was more important to start torturing detainees to get false intelligence to justify an invasion of Iraq. And then of course, the actual invasion of Iraq, which pretty much ended any real effort to fight al Qaeda--the enemy actually responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

This report contradicts other reporting that the program was "an 'on-again, off-again' attempt to create a new intelligence capability and said it was related to the collection of information on suspected terrorists that was instituted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks." If true, it goes far beyond intelligence collection. It also circles us back to the speculation that arose when the story first broke that the program might be related to Sy Hersh's allegations of an "executive assassination ring" that reported to Cheney.

That's one possibility, but it raises more questions, as Zachary Roth details. Would the reaction of Panetta and the Democrats be warranted by this program?

Perhaps most importantly, a program, launched immediately after September 11 to capture or kill top al Qeada operatives just doesn't seem sufficiently radioactive to have provoked the kerfuffle it has. To be sure, Congress outlawed targeted CIA assassinations in the 1970s in response to the excesses of 50s and 60s, and the issue played a key role in the move during the same period to give Congress greater powers to oversee the agency. And if the program allowed CIA to act without the consent or knowledge of liaison services in the countries where the targets were located, that's obviously a big deal.

Still, the US military has openly been trying to get Osama Bin Laden and other top Qaeda leaders "dead or alive" since shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Would CIA involvement in that effort be so explosive that it would not only need to be kept from Congress in the first place, but would also have been shut down by Panetta as soon as he learned about it?

By the same token, it was Democratic lawmakers who brought the issue into the news last week by complaining that they had for years been kept in the dark on the unidentified program. Would they have chosen to initiate that spat when it seems to allow them to be portrayed as opposing an effort to hunt down al Qaeda terrorists?

Or, was it something else entirely? TIME says maybe domestic spying:

[T]wo former ranking CIA officials have told TIME that there's another equally plausible possibility: The program could have required the Agency to spy on Americans. Domestic surveillance is outside the CIA's purview -– it's usually the FBI's job –- and it's easy to see why Cheney would have wanted to keep it from Congress.

Both officials say they were never told what was in the program, and that they're only making calculated guesses. But their theory gibes with other reports, quoting ex-CIA officials, that say the program had to do with intelligence collection, not assassinations.

"People may want this to be about hit squads bumping off shady Saudis in Geneva, but that's very unlikely," says one official. "More likely, it was a plan to spy on some suspicious American citizens or organizations, without telling the FBI."

The IGs' report released last week demonstrated that there was a greater CIA involvement in the NSA warrantless wiretapping scheme than was previously known, but did it go beyond threat assessments to its own spying program? You couldn't put it past either the CIA or Cheney.

Source / Daily Kos

CIA linked to Bhutto's murder?



Thanks to Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog

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Contempt for Humanity: Increasingly Commonplace

Ad Showing West Bank Barrier Angers Palestinians
July 13, 2009

JERUSALEM -- An Israeli cell phone commercial showing soldiers playing football near Israel's West Bank separation barrier has angered Palestinians who say it is in poor taste and exploits their suffering.

The company behind the ad, Cellcom, said that in showing the soldiers kicking a stray ball back and forth across the wall with unseen Palestinians it wanted to send a positive message about communicating beyond barriers.

At least one Israeli peace group agreed, calling the ad "brave." Some Palestinians disagreed.

The commercial, which began airing in Israel this week, shows soldiers patrolling along the barrier's towering concrete slabs. A football hits their patrol jeep, setting off an impromptu game with people on the other side. "What do we want, after all? A bit of fun," a narrator says.

"It is weird and despicable to use the suffering and occupation as a means of advertisement," said Saeb Erekat, a top aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Erekat said he found the ad "distasteful and sickening."

The Palestinians say the barrier, which runs largely inside the West Bank and leaves about 10 percent of its territory on the Israeli side, serves to sever them from their land, disrupts their lives and cripples their economy. Israel began building the fences and walls that make up the barrier in the midst of a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings targeting Israeli cities, and maintains that it is a crucial security measure.

In a response to the criticism, Cellcom said it did not intend a political message and that its only goal was to "allow a connection between people."

"The goal of the campaign was to get the message across that when people separated by religion, race and gender want to communicate they can, under any circumstances," read a statement from the company. "The campaign has no cynical or hurtful intention and does not take any position."

An Israeli Arab lawmaker called on the company to pull the ad, but the Israeli peace group Peace Now weighed in on Cellcom's side.

"I think the message of this advertisement is that there are people, normal human beings, on the other side of the fence who simply want to play football. For a commercial advertisement it is a brave move and I believe it is welcome," Peace Now's director, Yariv Oppenheimer, told Channel 2 TV.

Cellcom is not the first to make creative use of the barrier. In 2004, the Israeli fashion company Comme il Faut used the cement slabs as a backdrop for a catalog in what it said was an attempt to draw attention to the hardships caused by the barrier.

In the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, which is hemmed in by the barrier, one owner of a seafood restaurant had his menu painted on the wall, saying last year that he was "making something positive out of a negative situation."

Source / AP / New York Times

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'Medicare Advantage?' Advantage Big Business

Health care reform and the 85 percent solution

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / July 13, 2009

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” -- Nicolo Machiavelli.

"The President has told visitors that he would rather have 70 votes in the Senate for a [health care] bill that gives him 85% of what he wants rather than a 100% satisfactory bill that passes 52 to 48." -- David Broder, Washington Post.

The President's statement as quoted once again points to his uncertainty in assuming the office. It would seem far more rational to seek first rate health care, administered in a professional way, rather than the 85% solution produced by the despicable salaaming to the corporations now in control. This appears to be a continuation of the inept management that the administration has shown in facing the nation's financial crises, turning to the folks who caused the disaster so that they can overcome their own misdeeds.

Is this the same administration that refuses to investigate the past administration's use of torture, illegal detention, and spying on its own citizens? Is it the same administration that refuses to investigate the Bush administration’s perversion of the Justice Department for political advantage? One wonders if Mr. Obama is driven by naiveté in deferring to the Republicans in the interest of "bipartisanship" or whether deep within he feels that he and his family are threatened by the perverted, hate-filled right wing gun nuts who abound in our society today.

Laura Flanders addresses this issue in an article from The Huffington Post entitled "Obama Hushes Healthcare Advocates."

But I digress… I have addressed the subject of "Medicare Advantage" in prior postings. We were aware that this was part of the Bush, “free enterprise"/neoliberal economic plan to do away with the social network that has given comfort to the American people since the administrations of FDR. Initially Mr. Bush attempted to "privatize" social security and by some fortuitous quirk of fate failed in the Congress to do so.

Step two was to gradually do away with Medicare as an entity. Initially there was the pseudo-prescription drug plan that was passed under the guise of helping the elderly, but indeed was a massive, multibillion dollar payoff to the insurance industry and Pharma. Then Bush and his advisers initiated the Medicare Advantage plans which sold much of the Medicare Trust Fund to the private insurance industry, and will in time accelerate the depletion of those funds. This clearly grew from the mentality of “screw the tax payer, screw the elderly, destroy the safety net;” however, it was not until the other day that I realized how badly this program helps destroy the physician and in doing so undermines the doctor/patient relationship.

This past Friday I had an appointment with my dermatologist, a dedicated physician, a great human being who who still practices for the well-being of the patient and has not integrated himself into the business community by becoming a cosmetologist and thus denying us all of necessary medical care. While I was waiting in an examining room I became aware of the following posted notice:

Important Message Regarding Medicare Advantage Plans... Please be advised that although we do participate in Medicare, we DO NOT participate in Medicare Advantage Plans (except for Highmark). According to the Medicare Advantage Plan rules, AS A NON-PROVIDER WE ARE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE PATIENTS switching to such plans. Although we disagree with such rules and find it disruptive to the patient-doctor relationship, we must abide by the rules until this “glitch" in the healthcare system is fixed.

To avoid misunderstandings, please carefully consider how your coverage is affected by your changing from traditional Medicare to a Medicare Advantage Plan. We have observed much confusion and misinformation given to our patients from representatives of these plans.

The resulting impact of these the Bush-created monsters is Byzantine and nefarious. There are multiple Medicare Advantage plans, each of which has its own rules and paperwork. A solo practice physician soon becomes overburdened by filling out forms and he or his secretary must also spend hours on the phone obtaining advance permission to see the patient, while his other patients are kept waiting.

But the worst is to come. If the physician inadvertently sees one of these patients, on any specific plan, he is automatically contractually bound to all patients in the plan and all of the terms and conditions unique to the given plan. The buzz word in the industry is that the doctor becomes "DEEMED" contractually bound to the plan’s rules by virtue of just seeing the one patient. In other words: a unilateral contractual agreement without signatures! Ordinarily, a patient seeking care from a non-provider would at least have the option of seeing the physician if willing to and capable of paying for the services himself. However, by the Medicare Advantage rules, the non-provider is even prohibited from SEEING the patient, let alone charging the patient.

Thus the Bush administration not only conned the public but took a giant step towards destroying the patient/physician relationship. The Republicans, the Blue Dog Democrats in the House, and the well bribed Senators would now refuse the American public access to decent, open, non-complicated health care. And the President will not stand up to this immorality and unethical behavior.

We need health care that is open and uncomplicated, with free choice of physician, or specialist, and choice of hospital; with consultation between the doctor and patient. The doctor must once again be able to admit and discharge patients from the hospital and not be guided by the dictates of the insurance. We need health care commensurate to that in other developed nations without a credulous public being misled by devious ads regarding health care in other nations, frequently passed off as “news” as CNN has recently done. Nick Baumann has written about this, as has Robert Parry ("False Health Care Scare Ad on CNN).

We might be better off should Mr. Obama abandon his attempt to pass legislation prior to the August recess; it might be wiser to await the return of our elected representatives in September with the hope that they may be pressured locally to pass a decent, unfettered health care bill such as single-payer, or a plan with an uncluttered "public option.” If the public were to show just a fraction of the zeal exhibited in response to the death of Michael Jackson perhaps, just perhaps, we could do something worthwhile.

Indeed, if the Congress can pass nothing but a monstrosity of a bill, dictated by the insurance industry, Pharma, the AMA, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the AARP, we might be better advised to do nothing at all. Perhaps if nothing is done the public as a whole will awaken and demand a rational plan that benefits the people rather than the corporations.

Meanwhile, back on the cannabis front, the Webb Crime Bill is moving in the House. The Webb bill that would impact our entire outlook on crime, punishment, and especially the approach to drug policy, punishment and sentencing, is making progress. There are 30 cosponsors in the Senate and Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass) has introduced a companion bill in the House of Representatives. Sen. Webb feels that there is a good chance of passage. Mother Jones editor Monika Bauerlein provides excellent background on this issue.

Once again we ask that the administration request the Congress to revise Medicare Part D, making it a plan where the elderly can obtain pharmaceuticals at a negotiated price, as can be done in most advanced countries. Further, we must eliminate the Medicare Advantage plans which are merely a sop to the insurance cartels. Finally, we should support the Webb amendment and bring some rationality -- and billions in savings -- to the taxpayer, by revising the official policy concerning marijuana and its medical use, opening up the possibility of using the financial savings to underwrite universal medical care.

[Dr. Stephen R. Keister, a retired physician who is active in health care reform, lives in Erie, PA. His previous articles on The Rag Blog can be found here.]

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A Revolution Books Event in New York City

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NAACP Turns 100; Convention Met by Anti-War Protest

Benjamin Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP with long-time civil rights activist Hazel Dukes. Photo by Thomas Good / NLN / The Rag Blog
Demonstrators at NAACP confab protest presence of army recruiters

As the NAACP kicked off its convention and 100th birthday bash inside the Sixth Avenue Hilton, a group of protesters from the World Can’t Wait and the Granny Peace Brigade held a protest outside the hotel.

By Thomas Good / The Rag Blog / July 13, 2009

NEW YORK -- The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is celebrating its 100th birthday this year —- with a convention in the city where the association was born.

New York has been home to many civil rights and anti-war organizations. This weekend saw something unusual -- an anti-war protest outside a civil rights convention. As the NAACP kicked off its convention and 100th birthday bash inside the Sixth Avenue Hilton, a group of protesters from the World Can’t Wait and the Granny Peace Brigade held a protest outside the hotel. Their issue: that NAACP president and CEO Benjamin Jealous had invited “Army Strong” recruiters to the convention.

The NYPD was also in position outside the hotel, providing security for the event. Officers told protesters they had to move into protest pens around the corner. Protesters stood their ground, arguing that they would be invisible on the side street and that they had a legal right to engage in First Amendment protected activity. Shortly after a legal observer from the National Lawyers Guild arrived on scene police relented.

As police and protesters negotiated, the NAACP held a press conference. Roslyn Brock, vice-chair of the NAACP’s board of directors introduced Leon Russell, a national board member from Clearwater, Florida. Russell gave an overview of the convention program which includes an appearance by President Barack Obama, making good on a campaign promise, and the issuing of an award to NAACP chairman and venerable civil rights activist Julian Bond.

Hazel Dukes, chair of the New York State chapter of the NAACP told the assembled journalists, “I hope that when you write this story that you tell the world that the NAACP is alive and well.” Dukes went on to say that she expected 2000 young people would be in attendance at the conference and that in some ways the convention was a passing of the torch. Dukes introduced the current president and CEO of the NAACP, saying that some of the older members of the association had decided to “take a chance” and give the reins of leadership to a “new baby, thirty-six years old, Benjamin Todd Jealous.”

Jealous spoke about the continued relevance of the association in the modern age noting that, despite an African-American president being in office, little has changed for working families.

“The distance between a child’s aspiration and family’s situation is the exact measurement of a parent’s frustration,” he said.

Referring to upcoming Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Jealous said that “We are on the eve of the first woman of color being appointed to the Supreme Court.” Jealous said that “We would like to see Senator [Jeff] Sessions tone down his rhetoric.”

“The Republican Party needs to lift up the legacy of their historical leader, of our historical inspiration, President Lincoln, and stop trying to resurrect the nonsense of Jefferson Davis,” Jealous added.

John Payton, president of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, spoke about the historic role of the association in the civil rights struggle, asking the crowd, “What would we look like as a country if we had not had the NAACP?”

Payton provided a list of Supreme Court nominee Sotomayor’s impressive achievements, saying that if he didn’t mention that the judge was a woman and Puerto Rican, people would be united in saying “who better understands the needs of our country?”

Cesar Perales of Latino Justice / Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund thanked the NAACP for all of its contributions to the Latino community. Perales echoed Payton’s positive assessment of Sotomayor and asked the NAACP faithful to stand behind her during the confirmation hearings.

In a question and answer segment following the prepared remarks an anti-war protester who had written a letter to Benjamin Jealous before the event asked the NAACP CEO why he had invited Army recruiters to the convention.

Jealous told the activist that the NAACP had worked to desegregate the military and would have the traditional dinner to honor those who served.

“While we do oppose this war we are very proud of their service,” he said.

When pressed on the issue by a second activist, Jealous denied that the Army was intending to recruit youth attending the convention, saying that “these are your words, not ours.” He declined to comment further saying that he had already answered the question.

The NAACP’s convention will run through Thursday, July 16. President Obama will address the final plenary on Thursday.

[Thomas Good is the editor of Next Left Notes.]

Photo by Thomas Good / NLN / The Rag Blog
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Coup in Honduras : Talks Reach Stalemate as Demonstrations Continue

Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. Photo by AFP/Getty.
Costa Rican President Óscar Arias mediates controversial talks between Zelaya and Micheletti stand-ins while demonstrations against coup in Honduras continue.

By David Holmes Morris / The Rag Blog / July 13, 2009

After two days of closed meetings in Costa Rica, representatives of deposed Honduran president Manuel Zelaya and de facto president Roberto Micheletti appear not to have reached any substantive agreement.

Acting as mediator, Costa Rican President Óscar Arias met with the two groups at his residence in San José last Thursday and Friday, July 9 and 10, after meeting separately with each of the two claimants to the presidency. Zelaya has asked that the next meeting be in Honduras, but Arias disagrees and so far no further meetings have been scheduled.

Since Zelaya’s term expires next January, a long delay in his reinstatement could make questions of the legality of the de facto government moot.

Arias had accepted the position of mediator at the urging of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Zelaya and Micheletti, neither of whom has expressed any willingness to compromise, agreed to send representatives but declined to attend the sessions themselves. After meeting with Arias, Micheletti returned to Honduras and Zelaya left for the Dominican Republic and later flew toWashington.

The meetings in San José and Arias’ part in them have been criticized by leaders of anti-coup forces in Honduras and by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who see them as legitimizing Micheletti’s de facto presidency. Carlos Reyes, director of the Frente Nacional de Resistencia contra el Golpe de Estado, a coalition of Honduran groups opposing the coup, has reportedly called the arranged meetings a delaying tactic meant to give more room to the imperialists who have been supporting the pro-coup forces in Honduras.

“How horrible it was to see a legitimate president receiving one who had usurped his position, giving him equal treatment,” Chávez told reporters. “This de facto president should have been arrested in Costa Rica.”

Honduran activists have claimed prominent Venezuelan and Cuban rightists, including Robert Carmona-Borjas, in exile in the United States since the failed 2002 coup in Venezuela, and members of the Miami-based Cuban exile group Alfa 66, were in Honduras at the time of the coup and may have been involved in carrying it out.

Large demonstrations against the coup government continue in Honduras, recently blocking several important highways. And reports have surfaced that as many as 800 demonstrators have been jailed since the coup, most of them immediately after the massive demonstration last Sunday at the Toncontín Airport, when authorities declared in late afternoon that the curfew would begin at 6:30 instead of the usual 10:00, giving the activists little time to find safety.

The Salvadoran website El Faro quotes Honduran Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga as saying, “Lately I have verified something that didn’t exist in Honduras before, and that is class hatred. And it is something that appears in a systematic form. Mel Zelaya had advisors from Venezuela, and class hatred was the strategy.”

In the meantime, anti-coup activists point out that Roberto Micheletti was one of a group of representatives who introduced a bill in 1985 to transform the legislature into a constituent assembly for the purpose of modifying the 1982 constitution to permit the re-election of President Roberto Suazo Córdoba, a member of Micheletti’s own Partido Liberal. The bill eventually failed. The coup government claims Zelaya’s effort to poll the citizens on writing a new constitution was intended to permit his reelection and cite it as the illegal act that justified his removal from office.

[San Antonio native David Holmes Morris is an army veteran, a language major, a retired printer, a sometime journalist, and a gay liberationist.]

For previous Rag Blog coverage of Honduras, go here.

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Bhopal: Twenty-Five Years Later, Hundreds of New Victims Born Each Year

Nida, 17 months old Bhopali girl with a congenital birth defect. Photograph: Money Sharma/EPA.
Poisoned legacy
By Billy Briggs / July 12, 2009

The Hiroshima of the chemical industry is still claiming victims – babies born 25 years later with serious birth defects.

Bhopal -- UNABLE TO steer safely in the mud, the driver of our rickshaw pulls into the side of the road to allow us to take shelter from torrential rain. There, under a shop's awning, a small crowd of people are standing together waiting for the weather to break. They include Sapna Sharma and her brother-in-law, Sanjay. Sanjay is holding his 18-month-old nephew, Anshul, who has kohl-rimmed eyes and silver bracelets on his ankles. As we stand talking, some of the people start pointing to the child's hands and feet while speaking animatedly to us in Hindi. Through our translator, Sapna then explains that her son was born with 12 toes and 12 fingers.

Shortly afterwards, about half a mile away in the Shankar Nagar area of Bhopal, we meet another Indian child with congenital defects, three-year-old, Raj, who is blind, cannot walk and whose head is oversized.

"The doctors said bad water could have been a cause of my son's condition. Older people here are gas victims and now the younger people are victims of the water," says his mother, Poona.
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Here, in the capital city of Madhya Pradesh in India, hundreds of children are being born with deformities and mental health problems. As we walk back to our rickshaw after the interview we come across more afflicted youngsters who have followed us along the road out of curiosity. They include Rajesh, 12, who is barefoot and bald. The other children make fun of him - his mother, Yashdabai, explains that they do so because they believe that her son is "mad".

Rajesh's older sister, Sonia, a pretty girl with her black hair pulled back off her face, scolds the other children and tells us that she always has to protect her brother from bullies. Sonia is barefoot, too, and as she speaks a colleague notices that the young girl has huge feet.

This is the horrendous legacy the city of Bhopal is facing 25 years on from one of the world's worst industrial accident. The Bhopal gas disaster, as it became known, occurred shortly after midnight on December 3, 1984, when a cloud of poisonous gas escaped from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in the city. It has been dubbed the "Hiroshima of the chemical industry". The accidental release of 42 tonnes of methyl isocyanate (MIC) from the factory exposed more than 500,000 people to toxic gases and up to 10,000 inhabitants are thought to have died within the first 72 hours after the leak.

At least 25,000 people exposed to the gas have since died, and today in Bhopal tens of thousands more Indians suffer from a variety of debilitating gas-related illnesses such as respiratory and psychiatric problems, joint pains, menstrual irregularities, tuberculosis and cancers. More disturbingly, the escalating number of birth defects in children include cleft palates, webbed feet and hands, twisted limbs, brain damage and heart problems.

Shankar Nagar is a slum area of the city just north of the derelict Union Carbide factory site. For years local campaigners have been demanding that Union Carbide - now owned by US multinational Dow Chemicals - clean up the abandoned pesticide plant, but so far their pleas have been ignored.

In 1999, a Greenpeace investigation found severe chemical contamination of the environment surrounding the former Union Carbide factory, including pollution with heavy metals and chemical compounds.

The Greenpeace report also said: "Analysis of water samples drawn from wells serving the local community has also confirmed the contamination of groundwater reserves with chemicals arising either from previous or ongoing activities and/or incidents.

"As a result of the ubiquitous presence of contaminants, the exposure of the communities surrounding the plants to complex mixtures of hazardous chemicals continues on a daily basis. Though less acute than the exposure which took place as a result of the 1984 MIC release, long-term chronic exposure to mixtures of toxic synthetic chemicals and heavy metals is also likely to have serious consequences for the health and survival of the local population."

Amnesty International's 2004 Clouds Of Injustice report said: "Toxic wastes continue to pollute the environment and water supply and it is appalling that no-one has been held account for the leak and its appalling consequences."

The abandoned factory site is now a vast wasteland of weeds and trees that is home to packs of wild dogs. The buildings and structure have been left to rot while tank 610, from where the poison gas escaped, sits like an old rusting locomotive in the sun. Piles of dangerous chemicals are lying in the open air and inside one of the abandoned labs we saw dozens of dusty brown bottles containing chemicals. Campaigners say drums of Sevin - the pesticide Union Carbide was producing at the time using MIC - have never been removed from the site and remain locked in one of the sheds under police guard.

"There are sacks of poisons, mercury drops, toxic carbaryl rocks from which toxic tars ooze into the earth, and subsoil water and tarry liquids that overflow when the monsoon comes," explained our translator and guide, Sanjay Sharma, 24, a student who lost his three sisters, two brothers and parents in the 1984 disaster. He has one sister left after his only other brother, Sunil, committed suicide on July 26, 2006. Sunil had been 12 at the time of the disaster and was a vociferous campaigner on behalf of victims until be became severely depressed.

"My brother hanged himself. When they found him he was wearing a T-shirt that said, No More Bhopalis'."

Survivors campaigning for clean water petitioned the Supreme Court of India, which in May 2004 ordered that clean, safe water be piped into the communities, but to date the state government has ignored this order.

In January this year, a major study was embarked upon to try to ascertain the extent of the current health problems facing the population. The year-long investigation is being carried out by the Sambhavna Clinic in Bhopal, an innovative medical facility built in the centre of the city most badly affected by the gas leak. Researcher Santosh Kshatria said 22 different communities near the factory site were believed to be drinking from a contaminated water supply.

"There are 10 researchers. I'm covering 20,000 people in 17 neighbourhoods. So far I have surveyed 5000 people and found more than 200 cases of children with congenital defects. Many have twisted limbs and many have mental health issues. Anecdotally, this is a very high rate of incidence," she says.

In many cases these are the same families from the poorest slum areas who were decimated by the gas in 1984. They have no option but to drink the water and complain of aches and pains, rashes, fevers, eruptions of boils, headaches, nausea, lack of appetite, dizziness and constant exhaustion.

Lead, mercury and organochlorines have been found in the milk of nursing mothers living near the factory with the result that women are terrified to breastfeed their babies in case they are giving them poison.

Another legacy for Bhopali females is that men have reservations about marrying so-called "gas victims" so many young local women face living in dire poverty having been stigmatised and left single.

Investigations into the 1984 disaster revealed that something had gone fundamentally wrong with a tank that stored methyl isocyanate. During the early hours of December 3, 1984, large amounts of water entered tank 610, containing the highly toxic chemical. The resulting reaction increased the temperature inside the tank to more than 200C, raising the pressure to a level it was not designed to withstand and eventually releasing a large volume of toxic gases.

Union Carbide has always claimed that its Indian subsidiary - Union Carbide India Limited, which was 49%-owned by the state - was solely responsible for the management of the plant and that the accident was the result of sabotage.

Union Carbide was taken over by Dow Chemicals, one of the producers of Agent Orange, in 2001, and the latter insists that all liabilities were settled in 1989 when Union Carbide paid around £300 million to the Indian government to be allocated to survivors. Furthermore, Union Carbide says it did all it could to alleviate the human suffering following the disaster and that it paid for a hospital in Bhopal to offer free medical care to victims.

The company also denies allegations that it abandoned the plant and says UCIL removed tens of thousands of pounds of MIC from the plant and spent around £1.5m undertaking additional clean-up work. The firm also says that a 1998 study of water sources near the plant site by the Madhya Pradesh Pollution Control Board did not find any traces of chemicals linked to any substance used at the UCIL plant.

In 1991, however, Bhopal's authorities charged Union Carbide's chief executive, Warren Andersen, with manslaughter. To date the retired American has avoided an international arrest warrant and a US court summons. Andersen was declared a fugitive from justice by the Chief Judicial Magistrate of Bhopal in 1992 for failing to appear at court. Although orders were passed to the Indian government to press for his extradition from America, Bhopal campaigners say ministers have not pushed the case, fearing a backlash from foreign investors.

A quarter of a century on the campaign for justice in Bhopal continues unabated. In June, 27 members of the US Congress appealed to Dow Chemicals to pay to clean up the derelict site and to meet survivors' demands for medical and economic rehabilitation. The politicians also asked the company to send a representative to take part in court proceedings in India.

"Bhopal is widely regarded as the worst industrial disaster in human history, a catastrophe with widespread implications for the chemical industry, globalisation and human rights," they said in a letter initiated by Frank Pallone, a Democrat from New Jersey.

They say the polluter, rather than taxpayers, should bear responsibility for environmental damage. Meanwhile, Bhopal's environmental crisis continues.

Source / Scotland Sunday Herald

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The Spirit of Humanity: An Interview with Cynthia McKinney

Cynthia McKinney is a former US Representative who served from 1993-2003 and from 2005-2008 . She was the 2008 Green Party presidential nominee and has been an active member of the Free Gaza Movement. In 2004, The Backbone Campaign awarded her the fifth annual Backbone Award "because she was willing to challenge the Bush administration and called for an investigation into 9/11 when few others dared to air their criticism and questions." Here, Ishmahil Blagrove, Jr. talks to McKinney about her experience with the situation in Gaza and her views on today’s political landscape.

Last year in the midst of the Israeli onslaught against the people of Gaza, you attempted to break the Israeli siege by entering by boat. What happened?

We were rammed by the Israelis. There I got a chance to see the complicity of the media. We had CNN on board and the CNN reporter was literally arguing in the midst of a tragedy; he was arguing with headquarters because they didn’t believe what he was telling them. They would have rather run the story as the Israelis told them. I have seen how the media self-censor, twist, contort themselves to report misleading stories and then they report outright lies.

What is the situation in Gaza and explain to me why you feel so passionate about getting into Gaza and assisting?

I think we all know at least what we all saw on Al Jazeera Arabic and Press TV: the images of white phosporous and the F16’s and the helicopters. We saw all of that and those two stations in particular ran almost 24-hour coverage. People in the United States couldn’t see those images on CNN because CNN was missing in action, but through the power of and access to the internet, people in the United States were able to see the images. Never have we been able to discuss what US policy is in Israel, but we were able to see the F16’s given to Israel by the United States, the depleted Uranium munitions given to Israel by the United States, the white phosperous given to Israel by the United States. And so the United States is as complicit and even more complicit; the Israelis used it but the Americans gave them the wherewithal to use it.

Why do believe there has not been more international attention given to the plight of the Palestinians?

The media as we know it – and I can only speak mainly about US media and the media that is owned by the US media in other parts of the world – they are what I call special interest media and the special interest media have demonstrated amply that they serve the political aims and values of certain special interests inside the United States, whose goal is to affect the formulation of policy. And so we don’t get a discussion of Gaza and the Palestinian plight inside the United States as we should because it doesn’t serve the special interests in Washington, DC who lobby for a particular point of view that does not favor the Palestinians. There was an advert for Gaza that the BBC were supposed to run and they refused to run it and it was unprecedented that they would refuse to run an advert requesting help, relief for besieged people; but that shows the power of special interests operating in Britain. The Zionist lobby is powerful in the United States; it is the most powerful lobby that operates in Washington, DC and we saw it flex its muscle in Britain during Operation Cast Lead with the BBC.

What are President Obama’s policies in the region?

On the day that we were turned away from embarking upon our peace mission in Cyprus, President Obama signed over a 100 billion dollar supplemental appropriation for more war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. The drones continue to kill people in Pakistan, the increase level of troops in Afghanistan, the perception of Russia and China as enemies throw back to the days of the cold war, the continued search for a home for AFRICOM: these are not things that we should be proud of coming from a President with the name Barrack Hussein Obama. But, in fact, this is what is happening under his administration. We also have seen the greatest transfer of wealth out of the hands of African Americans that we have ever seen probably since slavery, not only out of the hands of African Americans, but out of the hands of Latinos and increasingly out of the hands of middle-class white Americans as well

Many people suggest that because there is an African American president, that change has come. Are you hopeful?

What American people and the global community were subjected to was very well financed Madison Avenue propaganda. A slick media campaign to promote someone whom the United States people didn’t even know. He and I were sworn in together in 2005 in the Congress; this was when he walked into a Senate seat virtually unopposed. Now, when was the last time an African American ever was given a Senate seat? I don’t think it’s ever happened, even during the times of reconstruction when we had black Senators, black Governors; those positions of power were earned, through the blood and the toil of black people who went to the polls and voted in what, at that time, were fair elections.

Then why do you believe that President Obama was elected?

I think the American people were looking for dignity. I think the dignity of our country had been stripped from us as a result of the publication of the photos around Abu Ghraib, the information came out about the lies of Iraq and we had been through 9/11 and the Administration knowingly lied and tied 9/11 to Iraq and so there were a lot of things that the American people wanted desperately to take a blue pill for. And I’m referring to the blue pill of the Matrix, where one takes the blue pill and slips into a world of make believe and so that’s where many people are.

What do you think it will take to get that dramatic shift in American public opinion?

The American people need information. If you look at what happened in Vietnam, the policy was taken out of the hands of the joint Chiefs and put into the hands of the people. When the television images came into every living room in the United States, people understood that they needed to change policy themselves. I hope the American people only need information because once their conscience is pricked with that information then they will be compelled to do something different.

You are back in Cyprus for a second time; what is the purpose of your mission now?

The purpose of the mission is to assert our belief in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That it is our right to travel anywhere in the world that we so choose and it is the right of people in other parts of the world to receive us, if they choose to do so.

Why have you taken up the cause of the Palestinian people?

I have been asked that a lot because I am not Arab, I’m not Muslim. So, why do I care? Well, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said it best: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” And this is clearly a gross injustice; this is genocide, crimes against humanity. How can anyone remain silent in the face of this? During the civil rights movement, we were outraged at our treatment and we just couldn’t vote; here, Palestinians can’t live.

July 2009

This video is the last footage taken onboard the Spirit Of Humanity before its voyage to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza was prematurely halted by Isreali special forces. It shows the atmosphere inside the cabin as the crew try to negotiate with the Israeli ship via radio.

Source / Rice 'N' Peas

Thanks to Jeffrey Segal / The Rag Blog

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Singin' on Sunday - Dick Gaughan

Dick Gaughan - Handful of Earth


From a 1983 BBC Spectrum Documentary. Dedicated to all the workers out there.

Thanks to Erich Seifert / The Rag Blog

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Film / 'The Hurt Locker' : Kathryn Bigelow's Explosive Iraq War Movie

The Hurt Locker will deepen your understanding of what our soldiers have been enduring in Iraq for twelve to fifteen months at a stretch.

By Tod Ensign / The Rag Blog / July 11, 2009

See 'The Hurt Locker, Ticking Time Bomb of a Movie,' by Scott Foundas, and Movie Trailer, Below.

Yesterday, I saw a powerful new Iraq War film, The Hurt Locker, directed by Kathryn Bigelow. While it's a theatrical film, shot mostly in Jordan, it packs all the wallop of a down and dirty documentary. It focuses on the war experiences of three soldiers who are assigned to a IED detection and detonation unit... I found some of the scenes to be so intense that they were almost unwatchable. (Warning: some Iraq and Afghan combat vets may find this film emotionally overwhelming.)

I strongly urge everyone to make a special effort to see The Hurt Locker First, because . Second, because we need to talk up and support this kind of film so that it won't just vanish from theatres in the next few days.

At present, I believe that it's only playing in a few large cities. (It's currently in six NYC theatres.) As often happens, it probably won't be available in many communities (e.g., the Salmon Mall adjacent to Fort Drum in New York) that would most benefit from seeing it. I just fantasized that somehow we could make it available to every potential recruit before he or she signed their enlistment contract!

[Tod Ensign is a veteran's rights lawyer and director of Citizen Soldier, a non-profit GI and veteran rights advocacy group.]

The Hurt Locker, Ticking Time Bomb of a Movie

By Scott Foundas / June 24, 2009

Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker is a full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender, and twists your guts into a Gordian knot.

Set during the last month in the year-long rotation of a three-man U.S. Army bomb squad stationed in Baghdad, it may be the only film made about Iraq -- documentary or fiction -- that gives us a true sense of what it feels like to be on the front lines of a war fought not in jungles but in cities, where bombs rise up from the ground instead of raining down from the sky, every narrow alley portends an ambush, and every onlooker is a potential insurgent.

It's an experiential war movie -- one that calls to mind the title of the 1950s docudrama series You Are There -— but also a psychologically astute one, matching its intricate sensory architecture with an equally detailed map of the modern soldier's psyche, a diagram of what motivates the volunteers in a volunteer army.

The movie begins with a typically bracing set piece in which the soldiers of Bravo Company's Explosive Ordnance Disposal team come upon an IED planted in the center of a busy Baghdad marketplace. When their remote-controlled bomb-detonating robot hits a snag, the team's affable leader (Guy Pearce) dons a thick Kevlar suit and attempts to set the charge manually. He does not return. His replacement, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), is a career soldier of an entirely different breed, one who prefers to handle bombs up close and personally instead of by remote control, and whose Kevlar suit is part of his daily wardrobe—not just for special occasions.

At first glance, Sgt. James seems like the closest thing to a stock character -- the gonzo alpha male living out his childhood cowboy fantasies -- in a picture markedly devoid of small-town rubes, poetry-quoting intellectuals, or any other easily reducible war-movie "types." But like most things in The Hurt Locker, there is considerably more to him than meets the eye. Beneath his blustery macho surface, he may be the movie's most intricately wired explosive device.

Written by former Village Voice columnist Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker belongs to that subset of Bigelow's work -- including her biker-gang debut The Loveless and the bank-robbing-surfers caper Point Break -- devoted to the ethos of hyper-masculine communities, the men who choose to live in them, and those who emerge as their leaders.

Sgt. James is one such character, and Bigelow, Boal, and especially Renner excel at showing us how his reckless displays of bravado are both a coping mechanism and an addiction, a battlefield genius and a form of madness. A secular god with sports hero stats (873 disarmed bombs and counting!), he inspires envy in some, contempt in others, and both in the men under his command—two comparatively by-the-book sergeants (very well played by Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty) who also want to prove their mettle as men of war, as long as they go home in one piece.

But for James, who has an ex-wife and child waiting for him somewhere, the adrenaline-rush alterna-reality of Iraq is vastly preferable to the home front, with its prison of domestic responsibility. Like the jacked-in wire trippers of Bigelow's futuristic Strange Days, he yearns for something more visceral, more cinematic than everyday life.

With her strength of revealing character through action, Bigelow comes closer to the tradition of Anthony Mann, Sam Fuller, and other bygone practitioners of the classic Hollywood war movie than to today's dominant breed of studio A-listers, who create (mostly incoherent) action at the expense of character. Not that The Hurt Locker, which I take to be the best American film since Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, much resembles any war movie we've ever seen before. Here, combat is more often a solitary rather than a group endeavor -- a lone man tracing a rat's nest of wires back to its source, or exchanging long-distance fire with a single sniper across a vast desert expanse.

There is little, if any, talk about patriotism or homeland security, and there are fewer American flags on display than in any American war movie in memory. When The Hurt Locker premiered last fall at the Venice and Toronto film festivals, this prompted some observers to tag it as an "apolitical" war picture, which is really a way of saying that Bigelow's film is mercifully free of ham-fisted polemics. Instead of setting out to prove a point, it seeks to immerse us in an environment -- something Bigelow does with a conceptual rigor usually associated with those directors whose work is confined to film societies and art houses.

Time is Bigelow's organizing principle here -- the time left in Iraq for the men of Bravo company (displayed on the screen as chapter headings throughout), the time that ticks away between the discovery of a bomb and its eventual disarming or detonation, and the time that, in those unbearably tense moments, seems to stretch out indefinitely toward the horizon. War may be hell, but in The Hurt Locker, it's also an incredibly pellucid waking dream.

Source / Village Voice

The Hurt Locker -- Trailer



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Woodstock: The Memories Live On for These Two

Love It: Everyone quoted in the story sounds like they're still trippin'!

Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog

Iconic Woodstock Couple Keeps Festival Spirit Alive

By Adam Horne / July 11, 2009

Forty years after the legendary festival in Bethel, N.Y., a photo of two lovebirds taken at Woodstock has become an iconic symbol of love. Having only met three months prior, the picture captures a young couple -- Nick and Bobbi Ercoline, both now 60 -- embracing underneath a dirty blanket, surrounded by exhausted concertgoers. To the Ercolines' surprise, the image became the cover of the 'Woodstock' album in 1970 and was featured on posters for the subsequent documentary film.

What resonates most about the photo is that it speaks to what many Woodstock veterans consider to be the true meaning of the festival -- not just music but a movement of peace, love and unity. In a recent interview with Spinner, Woodstock performer Richie Havens cited a Martin Luther King Jr. speech, saying "It's not him or him or him, it's all of us or nothing. That was our thing, that's what we went against the war with."

The couple themselves acknowledge the social significance of the now legendary picture. "It's an honest representation of a generation. When we look at that photo ... I see our generation," Nick told the NY Daily News.

Original Santana percussionist Michael Carabello witnessed firsthand how his generation came together for three days in 1969. "It was about the music and it was about everything else, but it was more about us getting along." Noting the hectic and exhausting nature of the festival (as evidenced by the background of the photo), Carabello told Spinner, "You know, you get so absorbed in it you just don't want to hear it anymore, you forget about it, so the only thing you can do is become a family. You just help one another out."

Certainly Woodstock has been romanticized over the years, but for many, the image of Nick and Bobbi wrapped in a blanket represents exactly what Carabello is talking about.

What's more, the couple has been together ever since.

Source / Spinner

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Evidence of War Crimes in Afghanistan Coming to Light

Juan Cole says it as well as it can be said: "I can tell by various web metrics that you guys are not interested in the Afghanistan story. You should be and I am going to parse it today anyway. It is one of the advantages of being non-profit that I write what I want and you can read it or not as you like. But really, you should be following this war."

I agree with Professor Cole. We should not only be following what is happening in Afghanistan, we should also be doing our utmost to end the carnage there. War has outlived its usefulness as 'a solution.' I say this especially to those who make remarks on this blog that "there will always be war." Yes, there will - just as long as there are too many people who say there will always be war. When there are too many people who say "there is a better way," wars will end.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

The forces of Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, shown on horseback at a campaign rally, were said to have killed Taliban prisoners. Photo: David Guttenfelder/Associated Press.
U.S. Inaction Seen After Taliban P.O.W.’s Died
By James Risen / July 10, 2009

WASHINGTON — After a mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush administration officials repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode, according to government officials and human rights organizations.

American officials had been reluctant to pursue an investigation — sought by officials from the F.B.I., the State Department, the Red Cross and human rights groups — because the warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, was on the payroll of the C.I.A. and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces in 2001, several officials said. They said the United States also worried about undermining the American-supported government of President Hamid Karzai, in which General Dostum had served as a defense official.

“At the White House, nobody said no to an investigation, but nobody ever said yes, either,” said Pierre Prosper, the former American ambassador for war crimes issues. “The first reaction of everybody there was, ‘Oh, this is a sensitive issue; this is a touchy issue politically.’ ”

It is not clear how — or if — the Obama administration will address the issue. But in recent weeks, State Department officials have quietly tried to thwart General Dostum’s reappointment as military chief of staff to the president, according to several senior officials, and suggested that the administration might not be hostile to an inquiry.

The question of culpability for the prisoner deaths — which may have been the most significant mass killing in Afghanistan after the 2001 American-led invasion — has taken on new urgency since the general, an important ally of Mr. Karzai, was reinstated to his government post last month. He had been suspended last year and living in exile in Turkey after he was accused of threatening a political rival at gunpoint.

“If you bring Dostum back, it will impact the progress of democracy and the trust people have in the government,” Mr. Prosper said. Arguing that the Obama administration should investigate the 2001 killings, he added, “There is always a time and place for justice.”

While President Obama has deepened the United States’ commitment to Afghanistan, sending 21,000 more American troops there to combat the growing Taliban insurgency, his administration has also tried to distance itself from Mr. Karzai, whose government is deeply unpopular and widely viewed as corrupt.

A senior State Department official said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, had told Mr. Karzai of their objections to reinstating General Dostum. The American officials have also pressed his sponsors in Turkey to delay his return to Afghanistan while talks continue with Mr. Karzai over the general’s role, said an official briefed on the matter. Asked about looking into the prisoner deaths, the official said, “We believe that anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated.”

The Back Story

While the deaths have been previously reported, the back story of the frustrated efforts to investigate them has not been fully told. The killings occurred in late November 2001, just days after the American-led invasion forced the ouster of the Taliban government in Kabul. Thousands of Taliban fighters surrendered to General Dostum’s forces, which were part of the American-backed Northern Alliance, in the city of Kunduz. They were then transported to a prison run by the general’s forces near the town of Shibarghan.

Some members of the Taliban were held at a prison in Shibarghan in February 2001. A mass grave of Taliban prisoners of war is thought to be in a desert stretch just outside Shibarghan. Photo: Claro Cortes IV/Reuters.

Survivors and witnesses told The New York Times and Newsweek in 2002 that over a three-day period, Taliban prisoners were stuffed into closed metal shipping containers and given no food or water; many suffocated while being trucked to the prison. Other prisoners were killed when guards shot into the containers. The bodies were said to have been buried in a mass grave in Dasht-i-Leili, a stretch of desert just outside Shibarghan.

A recently declassified 2002 State Department intelligence report states that one source, whose identity is redacted, concluded that about 1,500 Taliban prisoners died. Estimates from other witnesses or human rights groups range from several hundred to several thousand. The report also says that several Afghan witnesses were later tortured or killed.

In Afghanistan, rival warlords have had a history of eliminating enemy troops by suffocating them in sealed containers. General Dostum, however, has said previously that any such deaths of the Taliban prisoners were unintentional. He has said that only 200 prisoners died and blamed combat wounds and disease for most of the fatalities. The general could not be reached for comment, and a spokesman declined to comment for this article.

While a dozen or so bodies were examined and several were autopsied, a full exhumation was never performed, and human rights groups are concerned that evidence has been destroyed. In 2008, a medical forensics team working with the United Nations discovered excavations that suggested the mass grave had been moved. Satellite photos obtained by The Times show that the site was disturbed even earlier, in 2006.

In a 2001 mass killing, bodies were said to have been buried at a mass grave in Dasht-i-Leili. Photo: Physicians for Human Rights.

“Our repeated efforts to protect witnesses, secure evidence and get a full investigation have been met by the U.S. and its allies with buck-passing, delays and obstruction,” said Nathaniel Raymond, a researcher for Physicians for Human Rights, a group based in Boston that discovered the mass grave site in 2002.

Seeking an Investigation

The first calls for an investigation came from his group and the International Committee of the Red Cross. A military commander in the United States-led coalition rejected a request by a Red Cross official for an inquiry in late 2001, according to the official, who, in keeping with his organization’s policy, would speak only on condition of anonymity and declined to identify the commander.

A few months later, Dell Spry, the F.B.I.’s senior representative at the detainee prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, heard accounts of the deaths from agents he supervised there. Separately, 10 or so prisoners brought from Afghanistan reported that they had been “stacked like cordwood” in shipping containers and had to lick the perspiration off one another to survive, Mr. Spry recalled. They told similar accounts of suffocations and shootings, he said. A declassified F.B.I. report, dated January 2003, confirms that the detainees provided such accounts.

Mr. Spry, who is now an F.B.I. consultant, said he did not believe the stories because he knew that Al Qaeda trained members to fabricate tales about mistreatment. Still, the veteran agent said he thought the agency should investigate the reports “so they could be debunked.”

But a senior official at F.B.I. headquarters, whom Mr. Spry declined to identify, told him to drop the matter, saying it was not part of his mission and it would be up to the American military to investigate.

“I was disappointed because I believed that, true or untrue, we had to be in front of this story, because someday it may turn out to be a problem,” Mr. Spry said.

The Pentagon, however, showed little interest in the matter. In 2002, Physicians for Human Rights asked Defense Department officials to open an investigation and provide security for its forensics team to conduct a more thorough examination of the gravesite. “We met with blanket denials from the Pentagon,” recalls Jennifer Leaning, a board member with the group. “They said nothing happened.”

Pentagon spokesmen have said that the United States Central Command conducted an “informal inquiry,” asking Special Forces personnel members who worked with General Dostum if they knew of a mass killing by his forces. When they said they did not, the inquiry went no further.

“I did get the sense that there was little appetite for this matter within parts of D.O.D.,” said Marshall Billingslea, former acting assistant defense secretary for special operations, referring to the Department of Defense.

High-Level Conversation

Another former defense official, who would speak only on condition of anonymity, recalled that the prisoner deaths came up in a conversation with Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense at the time, in early 2003.

“Somebody mentioned Dostum and the story about the containers and the possibility that this was a war crime,” the official said. “And Wolfowitz said we are not going to be going after him for that.”

In an interview, Mr. Wolfowitz said he did not recall the conversation. However, Pentagon documents obtained by Physicians for Human Rights through a Freedom of Information Act request confirm that the issue was debated by Mr. Wolfowitz and other officials.

As evidence mounted about the deaths, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell assigned Mr. Prosper, the United States ambassador at large for war crimes, to look into them in 2002. He met with General Dostum, who denied the allegations, Mr. Prosper recalled. Meanwhile, Karzai government officials told him that they opposed any investigation.

“They made it clear that this was going to cause a problem,” said Mr. Prosper, who left the Bush administration in 2005 and is now a lawyer in Los Angeles. “They would say, ‘We have had decades of war crimes. Where do you start?’ ”

In Washington, Mr. Prosper encountered similar attitudes. In 2002, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, then the White House coordinator for Afghanistan, made it clear that he was concerned about efforts to investigate General Dostum, Mr. Prosper said. “Khalilzad never opposed an investigation,” Mr. Prosper recalled. “But he definitely raised the political implications of it.”

Mr. Khalilzad, who later served as the American ambassador to Afghanistan, did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Prosper said that because of the resistance from American and Afghan officials, his office dropped its inquiry. The State Department mentioned the episode in its annual human rights report for 2002, but took no further action.

Source / New York Times

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Loving: The Four Horsemen of Agriculture

Cartoon by Charlie Loving / The Rag Blog

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Democrats in Texas : Lone Star State Turning Blue?

The Democrats: Houston mayor Bill White, left, is expected to make a run for the Senate and Gene Locke is a leading candidate to succeed him as mayor of Houston. Another top mayoral candidate is openly gay City Controller Annise Parker. Photo by Kevin Fujii / Houston Chronicle.
The red and the blue in the Lone Star State:
High hopes for Texas Dems

By The Economist / July 10, 2009

The elected sheriff of Dallas County is a lesbian Latina. The leading candidates to become mayor of Houston in November include a black man and a gay white woman. The speaker of the House of Representatives is the first Jew to hold the job in 164 years of statehood and only the second speaker to be elected from an urban district in modern times.

In this year’s legislative session, bills to compel women to undergo an ultrasound examination before having an abortion (to bring home to them what they are about to do) and to allow the carrying of guns on campus both fell by the wayside; a bill to increase compensation for people wrongly convicted sailed through. Lakewood, in Houston, the biggest church not just in Texas but in America, claims to welcome gays. As Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” might have said, we’re not in Texas any more.

Or at least, not in Texas as we have recently come to know it. A Democratic-voting Texas would be nothing new, but political memories are short, and the blunders of the Bush presidency have coloured global perceptions of what Texas is like. It mostly voted Democratic in presidential elections until 1968, when, alone among the former Confederate states, it went for Hubert Humphrey, and 1976, when it voted for Jimmy Carter. Many of those voters were highly conservative “Dixiecrats” and later flipped to the Republicans. But there has always been a strong radical streak too. William Jennings Bryan was hugely popular in Texas. Jim Hightower, a former Texas agriculture commissioner and the perennial voice of Texas populism, says that “Texas has always been a purple state”—up for grabs by either the red Republicans or the blue Democrats.

It had a Democratic governor, in the feisty and liberal shape of Ann Richards, until as recently as 1995; but since that year, which saw George Bush’s ascent to the governor’s mansion, the Republicans have been firmly in control, and no Democrat has won statewide office. Since 2003 the Republicans have controlled the House as well as the Senate, monopolising every lever of power in the state. Now the pendulum is swinging back.

With no prospect of a local son to vote for in future elections (a Bush has been on the ballot paper for six of the past eight presidential votes), the Republicans have lost one big advantage. In the 2008 election the Democrats did much better all over the state. They won the presidential vote in all the big cities except Fort Worth (see map). They made big inroads into the Republicans’ dominance of the suburbs, where American elections are lost and won these days. Overall they took 44% of the vote, up from 38% in 2004, even though Barack Obama barely campaigned in Texas.

They secured a blocking minority, 12 seats out of 31, in the heavily gerrymandered state Senate, and almost took control of the Texas House of Representatives: the Republicans now hold it by just 76 seats to 74. The conservative speaker was promptly ousted and replaced by Joe Straus, who depended for his election on a sizeable block of Democratic votes.

The mild-mannered and charming Mr Straus has turned out to be a bipartisan and moderate figure, though he insists that he made no promises to the Democrats who backed him. But this year’s legislative session showed the Democrats flexing their muscles in the House, blocking a bill on voter identification that they said discriminated against their supporters.

The rise of the Democrats poses a dilemma for Republicans in Texas, just as it does nationally. And just as the national party seems to be lapsing into fratricide, so a vicious internal war has broken out over the governorship. Rick Perry is running for a third full term in the job, but the main challenge he faces is not from the Democrats who, oddly, have come up with a remarkably unconvincing candidate: Tom Schieffer, who used to be Mr Bush’s business partner and who is famous mainly because his brother is a TV presenter. The real rival is within, in the shape of Kay Bailey Hutchison, probably the most popular politician in the state. Mrs Hutchison has served as one of Texas’s two senators in Washington, DC, since 1993, and was last re-elected in 2006 with 62% of the vote.


Internecine warfare

Mr Perry has a strong economic record to run on, but because his toughest fight is against a fellow Republican, this has already turned into a battle for the souls of the 600,000 conservative sorts who vote in the Republican primary, due to be held next March. Mr Perry has lurched to the right to woo this atypical electorate.

Thus, he has backed allowing “Choose Life” to be an official Texas car licence-plate motto. This hurts Mrs Hutchison, who is in trouble with social conservatives for having once voted against overturning Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court decision that protects the right to abortion. He has also refused to take up a big chunk of the stimulus funds offered to Texas to help pay unemployment benefit, on the ground that this would create a long-lasting obligation.

No one doubts that Mrs Hutchison would beat Mr Perry or anyone else in Texas in a general election, but recent polls have her lagging behind Mr Perry in the primary. If she does formally enter the race, as expected, she will have to face being branded as a baby-killer and a creature of spendthrift Washington, DC.

Mrs Hutchison insists that “it’s very important that we don’t build a party around an issue [abortion] that is so personal, on which even families disagree.” She is surely right, but primary voters may not see it that way. This race matters hugely to Texas: it is a moment when the state’s Republicans will have to decide which wing of the party they are on.

The Democrats, meanwhile, are pinning their hopes for the 2010 election on securing a majority in the state House of Representatives and on winning a US Senate seat (which may come up sooner if Mrs Hutchison resigns to concentrate on her race for governor). Their chances in the House are good: as the recession starts to bite in Texas, later than elsewhere in the country, support for the Democrats is likely to rise. On the other hand Barack Obama will not be at the head of the ticket in 2010, as he was in 2008—though in Texas he was never quite the draw he was on the coasts.

The steady rise in the Hispanic population, coupled with a slow but continuous increase in Latinos’ tendency to vote, bodes well for the Democrats. George Bush did an impressive job courting the Hispanic vote, but the Republican Party threw that advantage away by rejecting his plans for immigration reform in 2006-07. In the 2008 presidential election Texas Latinos voted Democrat by 63% to 37%. Mr Obama’s nomination of the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice is unlikely to hurt, and nor will his commitment to immigration reform. As Hispanics increasingly spread out across the state they will start to tip the balance in many suburban counties, which is where the big political battles in America are being fought.

In the Senate race the Democrats’ probable candidate will be Bill White, the current mayor of Houston. He has done an excellent job balancing the needs of business with those of his core voters, and he will have a lot of money behind him.

Texas had become used to being at the centre of events, having supplied the president, the vice-president or at least the treasury secretary for all but a handful of the past 50 years. Now it does not even have a senator in the majority party, meaning that Texas has no voice in any of the big deliberations in Washington, DC. That will help the Democrats too.

But it does seem fair to ask what Texas Democrats actually stand for. They say they want more money spent on health and education, but pretty much every politician in Texas says the same, and the party’s leadership shows no appetite for delivering this by taxing Texans more heavily. Hardly anyone seeks to abolish the death penalty, even though, in most years, Texas executes as many people as the rest of America put together. Gun control and recognition of gay marriage are off the table. Everyone has jumped on the renewable-energy bandwagon.

It would, in short, be possible to imagine Texas slipping back to the Democrats without much happening in consequence, except for two considerations. The first is that, should Texas go Democratic at the presidential level, the Republicans nationally would be in deep trouble: with its 34 electoral-college votes, Texas is the only big state they have regularly won in recent presidential elections. The second consideration is the Hispanics. As they become ever more powerful in an ever stronger Democratic Party, there is every chance that they will turn against a model that has left far too many of them behind.

Source / The Economist

Thanks to Vik Verma / The Rag Blog

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James Retherford : Who Watches the Watchman? The Espionage Octopus

Part III
Who Watches the Watchman?

COINTELPRO and the Federal Government’s
Clandestine Attack on the U.S. Constitution

Using FBI and CIA intelligence reports, the federal government compiled a Rabble Rouser Index of activists. By 1973 the National Security Council compiled a 'watch list' of 300,000 domestic dissidents with alleged subversive foreign connections.

By James Retherford / The Rag Blog / July 10, 2009

[A version of this series was originally researched and written six years ago. It describes in chilling detail how the U.S. government surreptitiously conspired to maintain lockdown social control of American citizens in the period up to and including post-Watergate. Go here for the introduction to and first two parts of “Who Watches the Watchman.”]

The Federal Bureau of Investigation did not work alone in creating its modern-day conspiratorial shadow government.

The Central Intelligence Agency in 1967 launched Operation CHAOS, a far-reaching and illegal program targeting American dissidents. The National Security Agency, a virtually “invisible” intelligence-gathering agency with a huge budget and workforce, in 1969 expanded what became Operation MINARET, a program for electronically eavesdropping on overseas communications.

In addition, various military intelligence agencies participated in spying not only on dissident military personnel but also on American civilians. Army Intelligence developed its own 100,000-name “enemies” list. Finally, the FBI and other federal agencies developed close working and information sharing relationships with the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Postal Service; the bureau’s postal connection facilitated mail spying while IRS connection was used effectively to investigate the finances of targeted groups and individuals. In time the IRS compiled an 11,000-name investigation list at the bureau’s behest.

Over the years these large intelligence-gathering agencies had developed internecine rivalries prompted at least in part by the profession’s apparently pathological aversion to sharing the fruits of their labor with anyone else, including, in some cases, the Justice Department and the president. Following Eisenhower’s 1956 example, succeeding administrations called upon the National Security Council to bring together the nation’s spy agencies into a joint covert domestic operation. Using FBI and CIA intelligence reports, the federal government compiled a Rabble Rouser Index of activists. By 1973 the National Security Council compiled a “watch list” of 300,000 domestic dissidents with alleged subversive foreign connections. More than 26,000 activists were targeted under Nixon’s presidential order for detention in the event of some unspecified “national emergency.”

According to David Kaplan, director of the Center for Investigative Reporting

Until 1974, the CIA conducted a widespread, illegal spying operation within the United States. According to Congressional reports, the names of 300,000 U.S. citizens were cross-indexed within agency files, and thousands of Americans were placed on “watch lists” to have their mail opened and telegrams read. The Pentagon’s intelligence operations spilled into a highly questionable area during the 1960s and early 1970s. The U.S. Army Intelligence Command, among others, ran a far-reaching domestic spying program that, at its height, fielded over 1,500 plainclothes agents from 350 offices to spy on anti-war and civil rights groups. The Army’s program was, in the words of a Congressional subcommittee, “both massive and unrestrained,” and compiled an estimated 100,00 dossiers on U.S. citizens. The Secretary of the Army subsequently ordered those files destroyed, although, like the CIA, there are now indications that such activities may have continued.

The FBI, CIA, NSA, and other governmental agencies, despite many obvious instances in which agents operated with obvious disregard for state and federal laws, nonetheless felt inhibited from engaging in certain types of direct action which, if detected, could bring serious political damage to the agencies themselves and quite possibly to the White House. The simple solution was to create so-called extra-jurisdictional agencies that could operate independent of federal control to carry out the agenda of domestic “counterintelligence.” In 1956 the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit (LEIU) was the first such semiofficial agency to set up shop with the CIA providing funding, training, surveillance equipment, and a national computer database.


The FBI and various military intelligence commands worked in much the same way with local police departments to create funding conduits via the Law Enforcement Assistance Agency (LEAA) which supplied money, arms, and equipment to paramilitary vigilante groups. For example the 113th Military Intelligence Group provided money and arms to the Chicago Police Department’s “Red Squad.” These resources were, in turn, channeled to the Legion of Justice paramilitary group noted for violent attacks on the underground press and on New Left activists as well as for the break-in and theft of Chicago Seven conspiracy trial defense files.

In San Diego, where the Republicans initially planned to convene their 1972 national convention, one covert action campaign culminated in the January 6, 1972, assassination attempt on anti-convention organizer Peter Bohmer by the so-called “Secret Army Organization” of rightwing militia, a group formed, subsidized, armed, and protected by the FBI.

[James Retherford knows firsthand what it was like to be targeted by COINTELPRO. A founder and editor of The Spectator in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1966, Retherford is a director of the New Journalism Project, the nonprofit organization that publishes The Rag Blog.]

Please see

• James Retherford: Who Watches the Watchman?, Introduction,
• James Retherford: Who Watches the Watchman? J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO, Part I.
and
• James Retherford: Who Watches the Watchman? Attacks on 'Negroism' and CPUSA, Part II.

Also see James Retherford : Brandon Darby, The Texas 2, and the FBI's Runaway Informants by James Retherford / The Rag Blog / May 26, 2009

And for more background on the history of informants in Texas, read The Spies of Texas by Thorne Dreyer / The Texas Observer / Nov. 17, 2006.

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