No Touch Torture

Music as torture / Music as weapon
By Suzanne G. Cusick
Mar 24, 2007, 06:41

Abstract

One of the most startling aspects of musical culture in the post-Cold War United States is the systematic use of music as a weapon of war. First coming to mainstream attention in 1989, when US troops blared loud music in an effort to induce Panamanian president Manuel Norriega’s surrender, the use of “acoustic bombardment” has become standard practice on the battlefields of Iraq, and specifically musical bombardment has joined sensory deprivation and sexual humiliation as among the non-lethal means by which prisoners from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo may be coerced to yield their secrets without violating US law.

The very idea that music could be an instrument of torture confronts us with a novel—and disturbing—perspective on contemporary musicality in the United States. What is it that we in the United States might know about ourselves by contemplating this perspective? What does our government’s use of music in the “war on terror” tell us (and our antagonists) about ourselves?

This paper is a first attempt to understand the military and cultural logics on which the contemporary use of music as a weapon in torture and war is based. After briefly tracing the development of acoustic weapons in the late 20th century, and their deployment at the second battle of Falluja in November, 2004, I summarize what can be known about the theory and practice of using music to torture detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo. I contemplate some aspects of late 20th-century musical culture in the civilian US that resonate with the US security community’s conception of music as a weapon, and survey the way musical torture is discussed in the virtual world known as the blogosphere. Finally, I sketch some questions for further research and analysis.

Exordium

This paper reports on the earliest stages of a project that began not in my musicological work but in a moment of my real life. In spring, 2003, I was reading Nuha al-Radi’s Baghdad Diaries, an account of her life before, during and after the first Gulf War. I read

After the war ended, the Allies spent all day and all night flying over our heads, breaking the sound barrier. Just like Panama when they blasted Noriega, holed up in the Vatican Embassy with music. For fifteen days, Bush deafened the poor ambassador and Noriega with hard rock. Our torture went on for months-- 20 or 30 times, day or night... (al-Radi 1998: 58)

“So,” I thought, “perhaps it wasn’t just silliness, the actions of bored or excitable soldiers who’d seen Apocalypse Now too many times. Perhaps it was a policy.” As press reports conflating music’s use on the battlefield with its use in interrogations proliferated, I began desultory research on a phenomenon of the current “global war on terror” that particularly wounds me as a musician–wounds me in that part of my sensibility that remains residually invested in the notion that music is beautiful, even transcendent–is a practice whose contemplation would always lead me to contemplation of bodies and pleasures. Not bodies in pain.

It is not my intention here to engage the moral, ethical and political debates around torture, interesting as they are. Rather, I offer today a rough taxonomy of the complex subject denoted by my title--the US government’s use of sound and music as a battlefield weapon and its use of music during the interrogation of “detainees” in the current GWOT. It is a taxonomy peppered with questions and speculations about the ways that these uses of music interact with more familiar aspects of recent musical culture in the United States.

Read the rest here.

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Arabs Didn't Invent the Car Bomb

The Political History of the Car Bomb
By RON JACOBS

There's a novel by Russian author Ilya Ehrenburg titled The Life of the Automobile that chronicles humanity's relationship with that form of transportation. As any critical observer knows (whether they drive a car or not) the automobile has forever changed the world in which we live, for better and worse. This is an essential point of Ehlenburg's witty and underhandedly sarcastic novel. Mike Davis's newest offering, Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, could be considered a bloody sequel to Ehlenburg's novel. It is, of course, not a novel but a disheartening recitation of incident after murderous incident of death and mayhem caused by lots of explosives packed into automobiles by numerous different groups with just as many agendas.

The title is taken from the carriage bomb set off by the anarchist Marco Buda on Wall Street in protest of the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti. According to Davis, this bomb was the genesis of the "poor man's air force" -- a weapon that killed as indiscriminately as the explosives dropped from airplanes in almost every war since the Wright Brothers. The comparison between air war and car bombs is not made lightly here. Indeed, Davis refers to the morality involved in both and constantly reminds the reader of the moral high ground car bombing removes from a group claiming to fight for justice. At the same time, he asks the reader why the same moral outrage the media reserves for car bombings is not displayed when a superpower carpet bombs an opponent with considerably less resource: the US Air Force versus Vietnam, for example.

In what is certain to be a revelation for many supporters of the state of Israel, Davis explains the car bomb's modern origins in the tactics of the Zionist terrorists known as the Stern Gang. This group, composed of men -- some who went on to help rule Israel -- was ruthless in its application of car bombs. They genuinely did not seem to care who died in the explosions they caused, although they preferred them to be Arab. It was the success of their terror campaign that helped "cleanse" Palestine of Palestinians so that Israelis could take the lands. The Stern Gang's success would also prove to cause what we nowadays call blowback. Indeed, car bombs set off in civilian spaces have been a favorite tactic of the Palestinian resistance to Israel ever since its founding. Davis relates this story, too.

The anonymous nature of the car bomb is what makes it appealing to those guerrilla groups that use them. It is also why they have an appeal to intelligence agencies whose goal is to discredit legitimate insurgent groups. From Saigon, where CIA agents assisted a Vietnamese warlord in his car bomb campaign against Saigon and Hanoi and after his death continued on their own, to Baghdad, where rumors fly daily about which governments are really behind the assorted bombings of that day, the car bomb has been used to manipulate the public and kill the rulers' enemies. Nowhere did this secret government affinity for car bombing have a greater effect than in the campaign of terror unleashed by then CIA director William Casey in Afghanistan. With the general approval of the Reagan administration, Mr. Casey's minions trained, armed and ran interference for the holy warriors of the Afghani mujahedin, providing car bomb technical assistance and materials. Of course, it is the descendants of that same group that Casey's company trained that would eventually hatch the various plots against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- car bombs with wings, as it were. More importantly, those acts have inspired many more such plots and acts, with no real end in sight.

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Cindy Sheehan's Got It Right

Betrayed!
By Cindy Sheehan
Gold Star Families for Peace

How the Democratic Congress betrayed American voters, the troops in Iraq and extended the occupation for at least another 18 months.

03/24/07 "ICH" -- -- THE DEMOCRATS ARE FUNDING IRAQ ESCALATION: The Democratic leadership has proposed $100 billion of supplemental funding for an increased troop presence in Iraq. The leadership opted for the "slow bleed" policy over a month ago. This extends the occupation for at least another 18 months, and allows permanent placement of troops thereafter for “training” or “combating terrorism”. It also will permit the Bush Administration to initiate a war with Iran without Congressional oversight. The surge of 20,000 troops recently increased to 30,000 and will likely increase to 100,000 by year-end. Will the hapless Democrats then claim, “If only I knew then what I know now” as they have for the past year?

The “slow bleed” policy has some toothless requirements for presidential assertions of progress like those we’ve heard for the past four years from the Administration; these reporting requirements allow “slow bleed” proponents to make the preposterous claim they are “ending the war” by funding it. Amendments that would require withdrawal of US forces this year, the policy overwhelming favored by Americans, and the troops themselves, are not even being allowed for a vote by the leadership! The shameless short-term purpose of the Democratic policy is to embarrass Republicans with a Senate filibuster of the supplemental, or a presidential veto, and the longer-term aim is to help Democrats in the 2008 election by saddling the Republicans with intervention in an untenable civil war.

In 2002 the Democrats authorized Bush to invade Iraq (or any other country he deemed to support terrorism, for example Iran) in hope he would become involved in an unpopular war which would produce a Democratic White House. The Democrats 2007 policy is equally political, and may have the paradoxical effect of producing Republican victories in 2008. The prolongation of the occupation is now opposed by two-thirds of all Americans; we want our troops safely home by this Christmas, not political chicanery. As a consequence Americans now think even more poorly of Congress than ever; the failure to withdraw from Iraq dropped Democratic support of Congress from 44% to 33% according to the latest Gallup poll. The Democrats failure to stem what has become a Democrats war will be a factor in the 2008 elections.

A year ago 72% of the troops in Iraq said all troops should come home in 2006 but politicians did not heed their message. How much better we would be if our support included listening to them. Not another drop of blood should be spilled to protect cowardice by both political parties.

AMERICANS WANT TROOP WITHDRAWAL: The Democratic leadership has disregarded national polls showing that 60% of all Americans and 80% of Democratic voters oppose the increase troop levels in Iraq. Grassroots progressive organizations overwhelmingly oppose the occupation of Iraq and the recent escalation. One group closely allied to the Democratic leadership, MoveOn, has used antiwar sentiment to triple both its membership and fundraising, but has been AWOL from antiwar activity; its members are prohibited from demonstrations, and only vigils for the war dead are posted as events on their website. A month ago I wrote that MoveOn began efforts to support "slow bleed" while antiwar forces actively opposed it. Recently MoveOn fabricated a biased push-poll in which “85%” of respondents supported “slow bleed”; however, the 96% of the MoveOn members who favor withdrawal, and who were not offered a vote on that option, refused to participate in a sham. Congressional sources report that the spurious MoveOn poll, together with intensive bullying and bribing, was used to erode the principled opposition of congressional progressives.

A reliable poll conducted by True Majority, another group with progressive membership, found that only 24% favored the “slow bleed” policy while 76% favored immediate or near-term withdrawal. A Zogby poll sponsored by CODEPINK found that 90% of progressives/liberals favored near-term withdrawal. 96% of progressives question the push-poll used by MoveOn that gave such contrary results. Antiwar groups that fought for withdrawal (United for Peace and Justice, Progressive Democrats of America, US Labor Against the War, After Downing Street, Democrats.com, Peace Action, Code Pink, Democracy Rising, True Majority, Gold Star Families for Peace, Military Families Speak Out, Backbone Campaign, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Voters for Peace, Veterans for Peace, the Green Party) are irate at the MoveOn duplicity.

MoveOn is now raising funds from antiwar supporters to attack Senate opposition to the supplemental., but the activist community is now aware that MoveOn is not the cathartic needed to address Democratic Party constipation. There is at least one Democratic senator, Russ Feingold, who could oppose the funding farce. MoveOn is an autocratic organization run by a small group of elitist wannabe power-brokers; it cannot be reformed, but you can let their politburo know your feelings eli@moveon.org, Namrita.Chaudhary@gmail.com , tom@moveon.org, and you can unsubscribe! You also can refuse to lend them your name (their petitions are mainly for fund-raising), your efforts, and your money, and instead join with one of the many active progressive and antiwar organizations (check out United for Peace and Justice- UFPJ for a detailed listing of local and national groups, which incidentally does not include MoveOn). None of the MoveOn leadership has served their country in the armed forces; like Dick Cheney and 95% of Congress they had more important things to do, which did not and do not include supporting the troops that are in harms way.

The “slow bleed” strategy favored by the Democratic leadership and MoveOn is an immoral political calculation that will cause more heartache and disaster in Iraq. That leadership should understand that being perceived as “weak on principle” is much worse politically than being “weak on defense”. Democratic politicians need to vote their conscience on the supplemental. On November 7th we voted for an antiwar, anti-Bush policy; make that vote count for peace.

Please tell the Democratic leadership: Bring Our Troops Home Now!

Please visit the Gold Star Families for Peace Website

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Tracking Iraq Fraud and Corruption

Marking Up The Reconstruction: Part 1
IraqSlogger Takes You Inside The Profits of War
By DAVID PHINNEY 03/23/2007 11:55 AM ET

One day, not so long ago, the US State Department handpicked Texas-based DynCorp for an $800-million contract to train over 100,000 Iraqi police officers, a top-priority project of the Bush administration’s effort to stabilize the war-torn country and strengthen the fragile civilian government there. But State Department wanted a contractor with strong ties in Iraq, so DynCorp obligingly teamed up in 2004 with a company known as Corporate Bank Financial Service, a Washington-based business better known as The Sandi Group.

It seemed to have the makings of a winning partnership. DynCorp had a track record for building police forces in Haiti, Bosnia and other trouble spots around the Globe for the State Department since the early 1990s, so it easily won the contract with little competition and supplied 700 or so trainers largely recruited from police departments in the United States and other coalition allies.

The Sandi Group, run by Rubar Sandi, an Iraqi who immigrated to the United States in the late 1970s, would perform the logistics, provide security, hire interpreters, and perform other services as required. The 54-year-old Sandi, a member of a wealthy Kurdish family, had the well-established political and social connections in Iraq. Those connections and his entrepreneurial know-how served Sandi very well, not only in Iraq, but at the State Department where he had been an influential advisor to the "Future of Iraq Project", a pre-war planning effort,

After the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, Sandi immediately opened shop in Iraq where he took control of major Baghdad hotels, a newspaper, and several banks. The one-time Kurdish resistance fighter also recruited an armed private security force with a payroll of 7,500, laid plans for establishing an Iraqi airline, and positioned himself for US-administered contracts in the reconstruction effort. Those contracts included dozens with DynCorp for construction projects, leases on posh hotels, security, logistics and other support services as needed.

“Could You Determine Any Value Added?”

All the while, The Sandi Group kept a low profile in Washington until its affiliate, Corporate Bank, was singled out in a February 7 Congressional hearing for its controversial handling of a multimillion-dollar DynCorp contract to build an Iraqi police training camp in Baghdad near parade grounds of Adnan Palace, a once luxurious domed castle used by Saddam Hussein’s family.

Two weeks after receiving the $55.1-million DynCorp contract in August 15, 2004, Sandi’s Corporate Bank hired an Italian company, Cogim SpA, for $47.1 million to do all the work in the contract, which included providing 1,048 living trailers and building an Olympic-sized swimming pool. On paper, the deal had the look of an effortless $8-million profit for Sandi at the US taxpayers expense -- just for being the middleman and flipping the contract to Cogim.

A skeptical Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., laid out the arrangement before the crowded House congressional hearing teeming with scribbling reporters and TV cameras.

“The problem is the tiering of all these contracts. You have a general contractor, a subcontractor and a sub-subcontractor and a sub-sub-sub contractor,” Lynch noted to witness Stuart Bowen, the leading investigator of the US-funded reconstruction efforts in Iraq.

Chances are there could be plenty of sub-sub-sub-subs in the final mix, but Lynch was especially keen on Corporate Bank’s $8 million handling fee. His eyes widened with the puzzled look of a straight man setting up the punch line: “I just want to understand, is that right?”

Bowen didn’t crack a smile. Sitting with hands calmly folded on the witness desk during his testimony before the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, the special inspector general for Iraq Reconstruction cascaded into what is now a familiar, but still opaque, explanation for deciphering the contracting chaos in Iraq. The mess squandered $10 billion in taxpayer money through sloppy bookkeeping, job delays, bloated expenses and work that was paid for, but never performed.

“Quality assurance,” Bowen said, “expects that the contractor execute a quality control program over his subcontractors and the lack of visibility by the operational overseer of the government doing the program results in the loss of visibility and cost control.”

(Translation: The government tossed cost control and job performance issues to DynCorp. The government didn’t have a clue to what was going on except for what it learned from DynCorp.)

Lynch reframed his question about the $8 million flip: “Could you determine any value added?”

“No we didn’t,” Bowen said, but stopped short of singling out a possible bad guy.

Someone using the screen name %u201CNancy Pelosi%u201D instantly uploaded the C-SPAN video of Bowen%u2019s testimony on to youtube.com, but Lynch may have had his curiosity more satisfied by catching a short cab ride to The Sandi Group’s elegant office just 1 ½ miles away on Connecticut Avenue in the fashionable DuPont Circle neighborhood of Washington, DC.

After passing a wall-sized collage of folded dollar bills portraying an American flag near the front door, Lynch may have found a digital trail littered with dozens of contracts and agreements of Sandi’s work for Dyncorp with apparently even larger paper profits.

‘Corporate Stuff’: Cash Margins and Profit

According to Adnan Palace agreements leaked out on the Internet more than a year ago, Sandi indeed planned to make $8 million on the Adnan Palace while giving the work to Cogim. That was the charge to DynCorp an -- 11 percent for general administration costs, known as G&A, and 6 percent profit for an exact total of just over $8 million. The contracts between DynCorp and Corporate Bank and Corporate Bank and Cogim read almost exactly the same. An administrative assistant sitting at a computer could have easily employed a copy-and-paste approach and just replaced a few words with “Cogim.”

Tim Crawley, who left DynCorp as vice president of contracting last June to join The Sandi Group as executive vice president and general manager of The Sandi Group, defends the standard G&A and profit included in the contract as an industry standard. The G&A reimburses the back office administration; it keeps the office lights on, pays for health insurance, payroll systems, legal advice, business development, “thought processes” and operational “guidance.”

“There’s a lot of confusion about this,” he said. “It pays for the corporate stuff.”

Meanwhile, the profit is, well, profit. “Six percent is pretty low, especially in Iraq,” he said, before concluding his interview at The Sandi Group’s office. “There was a large cash outlay and it took 90 days from the first notice to proceed to the time of reimbursement.”

Read the rest of Part I here, and read Part II here.

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On Aiming - A Sunday Snapshot

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The Politics of Fear - the BushCo Mantra

Terrorized by 'War on Terror'
How a Three-Word Mantra Has Undermined America
By Zbigniew Brzezinski
Sunday, March 25, 2007; Page B01

The "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration's elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America's psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.

The damage these three words have done -- a classic self-inflicted wound -- is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare -- political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants.

But the little secret here may be that the vagueness of the phrase was deliberately (or instinctively) calculated by its sponsors. Constant reference to a "war on terror" did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue. The war of choice in Iraq could never have gained the congressional support it got without the psychological linkage between the shock of 9/11 and the postulated existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Support for President Bush in the 2004 elections was also mobilized in part by the notion that "a nation at war" does not change its commander in chief in midstream. The sense of a pervasive but otherwise imprecise danger was thus channeled in a politically expedient direction by the mobilizing appeal of being "at war."

To justify the "war on terror," the administration has lately crafted a false historical narrative that could even become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By claiming that its war is similar to earlier U.S. struggles against Nazism and then Stalinism (while ignoring the fact that both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were first-rate military powers, a status al-Qaeda neither has nor can achieve), the administration could be preparing the case for war with Iran. Such war would then plunge America into a protracted conflict spanning Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and perhaps also Pakistan.

The culture of fear is like a genie that has been let out of its bottle. It acquires a life of its own -- and can become demoralizing. America today is not the self-confident and determined nation that responded to Pearl Harbor; nor is it the America that heard from its leader, at another moment of crisis, the powerful words "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"; nor is it the calm America that waged the Cold War with quiet persistence despite the knowledge that a real war could be initiated abruptly within minutes and prompt the death of 100 million Americans within just a few hours. We are now divided, uncertain and potentially very susceptible to panic in the event of another terrorist act in the United States itself.

That is the result of five years of almost continuous national brainwashing on the subject of terror, quite unlike the more muted reactions of several other nations (Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, to mention just a few) that also have suffered painful terrorist acts. In his latest justification for his war in Iraq, President Bush even claims absurdly that he has to continue waging it lest al-Qaeda cross the Atlantic to launch a war of terror here in the United States.

Such fear-mongering, reinforced by security entrepreneurs, the mass media and the entertainment industry, generates its own momentum. The terror entrepreneurs, usually described as experts on terrorism, are necessarily engaged in competition to justify their existence. Hence their task is to convince the public that it faces new threats. That puts a premium on the presentation of credible scenarios of ever-more-horrifying acts of violence, sometimes even with blueprints for their implementation.

That America has become insecure and more paranoid is hardly debatable. A recent study reported that in 2003, Congress identified 160 sites as potentially important national targets for would-be terrorists. With lobbyists weighing in, by the end of that year the list had grown to 1,849; by the end of 2004, to 28,360; by 2005, to 77,769. The national database of possible targets now has some 300,000 items in it, including the Sears Tower in Chicago and an Illinois Apple and Pork Festival.

Just last week, here in Washington, on my way to visit a journalistic office, I had to pass through one of the absurd "security checks" that have proliferated in almost all the privately owned office buildings in this capital -- and in New York City. A uniformed guard required me to fill out a form, show an I.D. and in this case explain in writing the purpose of my visit. Would a visiting terrorist indicate in writing that the purpose is "to blow up the building"? Would the guard be able to arrest such a self-confessing, would-be suicide bomber? To make matters more absurd, large department stores, with their crowds of shoppers, do not have any comparable procedures. Nor do concert halls or movie theaters. Yet such "security" procedures have become routine, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and further contributing to a siege mentality.

Government at every level has stimulated the paranoia. Consider, for example, the electronic billboards over interstate highways urging motorists to "Report Suspicious Activity" (drivers in turbans?). Some mass media have made their own contribution. The cable channels and some print media have found that horror scenarios attract audiences, while terror "experts" as "consultants" provide authenticity for the apocalyptic visions fed to the American public. Hence the proliferation of programs with bearded "terrorists" as the central villains. Their general effect is to reinforce the sense of the unknown but lurking danger that is said to increasingly threaten the lives of all Americans.

The entertainment industry has also jumped into the act. Hence the TV serials and films in which the evil characters have recognizable Arab features, sometimes highlighted by religious gestures, that exploit public anxiety and stimulate Islamophobia. Arab facial stereotypes, particularly in newspaper cartoons, have at times been rendered in a manner sadly reminiscent of the Nazi anti-Semitic campaigns. Lately, even some college student organizations have become involved in such propagation, apparently oblivious to the menacing connection between the stimulation of racial and religious hatreds and the unleashing of the unprecedented crimes of the Holocaust.

The atmosphere generated by the "war on terror" has encouraged legal and political harassment of Arab Americans (generally loyal Americans) for conduct that has not been unique to them. A case in point is the reported harassment of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for its attempts to emulate, not very successfully, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Some House Republicans recently described CAIR members as "terrorist apologists" who should not be allowed to use a Capitol meeting room for a panel discussion.

Social discrimination, for example toward Muslim air travelers, has also been its unintended byproduct. Not surprisingly, animus toward the United States even among Muslims otherwise not particularly concerned with the Middle East has intensified, while America's reputation as a leader in fostering constructive interracial and interreligious relations has suffered egregiously.

The record is even more troubling in the general area of civil rights. The culture of fear has bred intolerance, suspicion of foreigners and the adoption of legal procedures that undermine fundamental notions of justice. Innocent until proven guilty has been diluted if not undone, with some -- even U.S. citizens -- incarcerated for lengthy periods of time without effective and prompt access to due process. There is no known, hard evidence that such excess has prevented significant acts of terrorism, and convictions for would-be terrorists of any kind have been few and far between. Someday Americans will be as ashamed of this record as they now have become of the earlier instances in U.S. history of panic by the many prompting intolerance against the few.

In the meantime, the "war on terror" has gravely damaged the United States internationally. For Muslims, the similarity between the rough treatment of Iraqi civilians by the U.S. military and of the Palestinians by the Israelis has prompted a widespread sense of hostility toward the United States in general. It's not the "war on terror" that angers Muslims watching the news on television, it's the victimization of Arab civilians. And the resentment is not limited to Muslims. A recent BBC poll of 28,000 people in 27 countries that sought respondents' assessments of the role of states in international affairs resulted in Israel, Iran and the United States being rated (in that order) as the states with "the most negative influence on the world." Alas, for some that is the new axis of evil!

The events of 9/11 could have resulted in a truly global solidarity against extremism and terrorism. A global alliance of moderates, including Muslim ones, engaged in a deliberate campaign both to extirpate the specific terrorist networks and to terminate the political conflicts that spawn terrorism would have been more productive than a demagogically proclaimed and largely solitary U.S. "war on terror" against "Islamo-fascism." Only a confidently determined and reasonable America can promote genuine international security which then leaves no political space for terrorism.

Where is the U.S. leader ready to say, "Enough of this hysteria, stop this paranoia"? Even in the face of future terrorist attacks, the likelihood of which cannot be denied, let us show some sense. Let us be true to our traditions.

*****
Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, is the author most recently of "Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower" (Basic Books).

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The Prisoner, or How I Planned to Kill the Poodle

US doco shows Abu Ghraib 'horror'
By Christine Kearney in New York
March 25, 2007 12:00
Article from: Reuters

ABU Ghraib prison is notorious for images that surfaced in 2003 showing horrific abuses of Iraqis by US soldiers, but a new documentary aims to highlight the plight facing many innocent Iraqis by depicting the humdrum misery there.

US filmmaker Michael Tucker won critical acclaim for his documentary Gunner Palace, about American soldiers taking up residence in Saddam Hussein's former palace.

Now his film The Prisoner, or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, made with his wife Petra Epperlein, tells the story of Yunis Khatayer Mr Abbas, an Iraqi journalist captured by American soldiers in 2003.

In the film, Mr Abbas recalls the humiliation of his interrogation, which led to him being told he was suspected of plotting to assassinate British Prime Minister Tony Blair, before being sent to Abu Ghraib.

But the film does not focus on any of the graphic images or depictions of abuses that made the prison an international scandal. And that is exactly the point, Tucker said.

"People are so jaded with basic human suffering that unless it is sensational, they don't respond to it," he said.

The interrogations innocent Iraqis like Mr Abbas suffer every day deserve as much attention as the now infamous photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib, Tucker said.

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P. Cockburn - They're Lying About the Rest of Iraq

BushCo repeatedly tells us it is only the "Sunni triangle" that is so violent and that the rest of Iraq is quite peaceful. Bullshit.

And they call it peace: Inside Iraq, four years on
Published: 25 March 2007

In a personal diary to mark the fourth anniversary of the war, our award-winning correspondent Patrick Cockburn journeys through a country riven with violence and chaos

Sunday 18 March. Khanaqin

The difficulty of reporting Iraq is that it is impossibly dangerous to know what is happening in most of the country outside central Baghdad. Bush and Blair hint that large parts of Iraq are at peace; untrue, but difficult to disprove without getting killed in the attempt. My best bet was to go to Sulaymaniyah, an attractive city ringed by snow-covered mountains in eastern Kurdistan. I would then drive south, sticking to a road running through Kurdish towns and villages to Khanaqin, a relatively safe Kurdish enclave in north-east Diyala province, one of the more violent places in Iraq.

We start for the south through heavy rain, and turn sharp east at Kalar, a grubby Kurdish town, to Jalawlah, a mixed Kurdish and Arab town where there has been fighting. Ominously, there are few trucks coming towards us. I was on this road last year and it was crowded with them.

We go to the heavily guarded office of the deputy head of the PUK, Mamosta Saleh, who says the situation in Diyala is getting worse. The insurgents have control of Baquba, the provincial capital. He says: "They are also attacking a Kurdish tribe called the Zargosh in the Hamrin mountains." Security is so bad that government rations had not been delivered for seven months.

I do the rounds of the town and hear on all sides that "security is good in the centre". Everybody says this in Iraq, even in villages that do not seem to have a centre. I know that six weeks earlier a bomb killed 12 and wounded 40 people in the centre of Khanaqin.

Baquba is only 30 miles from Baghdad. It is as if the government in London had lost control of Reading. I say I want to meet some refugees from Baquba or Baghdad. A grim-looking policeman is given the job of guiding us. We drive a long way out of town behind his red car. Then he stops and talks to some men. The conversation seems too long if he is only asking the way. We are nervous of kidnappers so we race back into town.

The mayor, Mohammed Amin Hassan Hussein, explains why there are no trucks on the road: the government in Baghdad has shut the nearby border with Iran, a serious blow to Khanaqin, which depends on cross-border trade.

Monday 19 March. Sulaymaniyah

I drive up into the mountains behind Sulaymaniyah. The snow is melting and the grass is green. After the Kurdish uprising was crushed in March 1991, the Baghdad government brought us here to show they had recaptured it. In these same hills, a mechanical grab was unearthing the bodies of Iraqi government security men from muddy mass graves. Reviled as torturers and killers, they expected no mercy from the Kurds and had fought to the last man.

Tuesday 20 March. Kirkuk

I drive to Kirkuk. The cliché was to describe it as "the powder keg" of Iraq, where Kurds and Arabs competing for control, along with the Turkoman, who had the trump card of Turkish support. The explosion is yet to happen, but every city and town in Iraq can now claim to be a powder keg, so people have forgotten how dangerous Kirkuk can be. I was here when the city fell to the Kurds in 2003. The PUK forces captured Kirkuk with no resistance. The Arabs and Turkoman were deeply unhappy.

They still are. The day before I arrived, there were seven bomb attacks, killing 12 people and injuring 39. It is not as bad as Baghdad - few places are - but dead bodies, often tortured, turn up every few days.

I was conscious we were driving a car with number plates identifying it as coming from Arbil, the Kurdish capital. Many people have been killed in Iraq because their number plates identify them as an enemy.

Wednesday 21 March. Sulaymaniyah

It is Nowruz, the Kurdish New Year, and almost every shop in the city is shut. Kurdish woman are all wearing bright shimmering traditional dresses. The Kurds are keen on picnics, and from early in the morning they are streaming out of Sulaymaniyah with baskets of food into the hills and mountains.

Read the rest of it here.

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Grateful Dawg Is Singin' On Sunday

Jerry Garcia & David Grisman: Friend of the Devil

Recorded 15 September 1993.

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Nixing Free Speech in HS Once Again

For another example, see this post from a few days ago.

Play About Iraq War Divides a School
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN
The New York Times

WILTON, Conn. (March 24) - Student productions at Wilton High School range from splashy musicals like last year's "West Side Story," performed in the state-of-the-art, $10 million auditorium, to weightier works like Arthur Miller's "Crucible," on stage last fall in the school's smaller theater.

For the spring semester, students in the advanced theater class took on a bigger challenge: creating an original play about the war in Iraq . They compiled reflections of soldiers and others involved, including a heartbreaking letter from a 2005 Wilton High graduate killed in Iraq last September at age 19, and quickly found their largely sheltered lives somewhat transformed.

"In Wilton, most kids only care about Britney Spears shaving her head or Tyra Banks gaining weight," said Devon Fontaine, 16, a cast member. "What we wanted was to show kids what was going on overseas."

But even as 15 student actors were polishing the script and perfecting their accents for a planned April performance, the school principal last week canceled the play, titled "Voices in Conflict," citing questions of political balance and context.

The principal, Timothy H. Canty, who has tangled with students before over free speech, said in an interview he was worried the play might hurt Wilton families "who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving as we speak," and that there was not enough classroom and rehearsal time to ensure it would provide "a legitimate instructional experience for our students."

"It would be easy to look at this case on first glance and decide this is a question of censorship or academic freedom," said Mr. Canty, who attended Wilton High himself in the 1970s and has been its principal for three years. "In some minds, I can see how they would react this way. But quite frankly, it's a false argument."

At least 10 students involved in the production, however, said that the principal had told them the material was too inflammatory, and that only someone who had actually served in the war could understand the experience. They said that Gabby Alessi-Friedlander, a Wilton junior whose brother is serving in Iraq, had complained about the play, and that the principal barred the class from performing it even after they changed the script to respond to concerns about balance.

"He told us the student body is unprepared to hear about the war from students, and we aren't prepared to answer questions from the audience and it wasn't our place to tell them what soldiers were thinking," said Sarah Anderson, a 17-year-old senior who planned to play the role of a military policewoman.

Bonnie Dickinson, who has been teaching theater at the school for 13 years, said, "If I had just done 'Grease,' this would not be happening."

Frustration over the inelegant finale has quickly spread across campus and through Wilton, and has led to protest online through Facebook and other Web sites.

"To me, it was outrageous," said Jim Anderson, Sarah's father. "Here these kids are really trying to make a meaningful effort to educate, to illuminate their fellow students, and the administration, of all people, is shutting them down."

First Amendment lawyers said Mr. Canty had some leeway to limit speech that might be disruptive and to consider the educational merit of what goes on during the school day, when the play was scheduled to be performed. But thornier legal questions arise over students' contention that they were also thwarted from trying to stage the play at night before a limited audience, and discouraged from doing so even off-campus.

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Speaking of Junior - Our Saturday Snapshot

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Ares

"There Must Be Peace"
Newberry, Piano Sonata #3 in C "ares"

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Disdain for Facts

The Dead-Enders: Being a neocon means never having to say you're sorry
by Justin Raimondo

Christopher Hitchens isn't sorry. Not about being a Commie all those years ago; after all, he was a Trotskyite, not one of those icky Stalinists, which merits a "Get Out of Jail Free" card. Not about being frequently drunk in public: after all, it's part of his image as the Courtney Love of punditry. And, most of all, he's not sorry about doing his bit to gin up the Iraq war:

"Four years after the first coalition soldiers crossed the Iraqi border, one can attract pitying looks (at best) if one does not take the view that the whole engagement could have been and should have been avoided. Those who were opposed to the operation from the beginning now claim vindication, and many of those who supported it say that if they had known then what they know now, they would have spoken or voted differently.

"What exactly does it mean to take the latter position? At what point, in other words, ought the putative supporter to have stepped off the train?"

Instead of stepping off the train, the neocons – and Hitchens most of all – have stepped in front of it. In terms of their own credibility, what they did was the equivalent of lying down on the tracks and letting the train run over them. By staking their reputations as serious commentators on the success of a war that Gen. William E. Odom trenchantly and accurately described as the greatest strategic disaster in American military history, they have ensured their place in the pantheon of mistaken prognosticators, along with the inventors of phrenology and the makers of the Edsel.

Oh, a few have recanted, most notably and sincerely Francis Fukuyama. The rest, particularly Kenneth "Cakewalk" Adelman and, most obnoxiously, Andrew Sullivan, have taken to blaming President Bush's supposedly inconsistent and even halfhearted effort to implement their grand theories – much like Trotsky's disciples blamed Stalin's "counter-revolutionary" shortcomings for the inconsistent implementation of the Marxist-Leninist grand design. Hitchens, who has been both a Trot and a warmonger, is a particularly hard case: a dead-ender, in short, who stubbornly sticks to the Revealed Truth even as reality rudely intrudes.

Hitchens sets up a phony dialogue between himself and his interlocutors and lobs himself a lot of softball questions, which he disposes of with his characteristic disdain for facts. It's as if Scooter Libby had cross-examined himself. How pathetic that a writer who used to be so interesting and fun to read, even if one disagreed with him, has descended to this very threadbare bag of tricks.

Hitchens first raises a fundamentally phony question: Oh, but didn't Saddam violate a whole bunch of UN resolutions? Wasn't the credibility of the UN at stake? Why Americans should care about the UN, or why the U.S. military should be put at the disposal of the Security Council, is never made clear. Besides which, if we set up a mechanism whereby an invasion is automatically launched against any country that violates a given number of UN resolutions, we'd have bombed Tel Aviv long ago. At any rate, I don't recall Hitchens being much of a UN fan to begin with, but I guess when your back's against the wall any maneuver will do.

It was "correct," insists Hitchens, to send U.S. forces to the Gulf, because only the threat of force caused the Iraqis to cave on the inspections issue. So Hitchens admits the Iraqis were ready to comply with the UN demand to admit inspectors without conditions – what he doesn't admit is that the U.S. thwarted Saddam's pathetic attempts to effectively surrender, and instead launched a series of provocations designed to torpedo a negotiated settlement. Aside from that, however, the very act of sending military forces to the Gulf made war a foregone conclusion: by that time, the president had invested so much of his own political capital – and America's prestige – in this misadventure that the administration could argue that backing down now, even a little bit, would do irreparable damage to our credibility. Such an argument was, of course, completely unreasonable, but in the Bizarro World we had fallen into post-9/11 – and are only now showing signs of climbing out of – such illogic is perversely "logical."

Hitchens throws himself a few more underhand pitches, all centered on the question of Iraq's degree of cooperation with the UN inspectors, but he never addresses the overarching reality, which is that there weren't any "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. Period. As Scott Ritter pointed out long ago in an article in Arms Control Today, the Iraqis had been disarmed by the stringent UN inspections regime and would not be able to reconstitute it. Whether Saddam tried to wriggle out of the straightjacket imposed by the IAEA is irrelevant: what matters is that – contrary to what Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Hitchens were telling us at the time – he didn't succeed.

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Where Are the Parlor Warriors?

Where are the Laptop Bombardiers Now?
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Pick almost any date on the calendar and it'll turn out that the US either started a war, ended a war, perpetrated a massacre or sent its UN Ambassador into the Security Council to declare to issue an ultimatum. It's like driving across the American West. "Historic marker, 1 mile", the sign says. A minute later you pull over and find yourself standing on dead Indians. "On this spot, in 1879 Major T and a troop of US cavalry "

It's three o'clock in the afternoon, Sunday March 18, one day short of the anniversary of US planes embarking on an aerial hunt of Pancho Villa in 1916;of the day the U.S. Senate rejected (for the second time) the Treaty of Versailles in 1920; of the end of the active phase of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2002; of the 10 pm broadcast March 19, 2003, by President G.W. Bush announcing that aerial operations against Iraq had commenced.

This was the attack on Dora Farms outside Baghdad where some Iraqi whispered into his phone that Saddam Hussein was visiting his children. Down hurtled four 2000-pound bunker-busters and 40 cruise missiles. There were high fives in the White House situation room at news of a mangled Saddam being hauled from the rubble. It all turned out to be nonsense, like most military bulletins out of Iraq. The bunker busters all missed the compound. Saddam Hussein wasn't there. Uday and Qusay weren't there. Fifteen civilians died, including nine women and a child.

Here I was, a couple of days shy of four years later, in a used paperback store in a mall in Olympia, Washington, flicking through Tina Turner's side of the story on life with Ike. My cell phone rang. It was my brother Patrick, calling from Sulaimaniyah, three hours drive east through the mountains from the Kurdish capital of Arbil, in northern Iraq. He gave me a brisk précis of the piece he'd file the next day. Every road was lethally dangerous; every Iraqi he met had a ghastly tale to tell of murder, kidnappings, terror-stricken flights, searches for missing relatives. Life was measurably far, far worse for the vast majority of Iraqis than it had been before the 2003 onslaught. He'd talked that day to Kassim Naji Salaman, a truck driver replacing his murdered brother at the wheel of an oil tanker. Salaman was now the sole bread earner for 18 women and children because so many of his male relatives had been killed "I can't even visit the village where they live," he told Patrick. "Soldiers or militia or just men in masks might kill me. I don't even know how to send them money".

I've had many such phone calls from Patrick since March 2003, as he returned time after time to Iraq, either to Baghdad or to the north. Unlike the embedded reporters he's never felt moved to announce a "turning point", as when they blew away Uday and Qusay on July 22,2003. CNN's studio generals said on the news that night it was a big blow to the Iraqi resistance. Then Saddam was hauled out of a hole on December 15, 2003, just in time for Christmas. Maybe the death knell of the resistance, the studio generals exulted. Then came one "new dawn" for Iraq after another: the handback of Iraqi sovereignty in June 2004, the two elections and the new constitution in 2005. Now we have the "surge" into Baghdad, designed to whip the Shi'a back into line.

Contemptuous of all such bulletins, right from the start Patrick has relentlessly described the disintegration of Iraq, by measurements large and small. Remember that 13 years of sanctions ­- a horrible international onslaught of the health and well-being of a civilian population, enthusiatically supported by liberals in the US and Europe ­- Iraq's plight was already dire. When the war began, Baghdad had 20 hours of power a day. Now it's down to 2. Not thousands, not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died. Not hundreds of thousands but two million have fled the country, mostly to Syria and Jordan. It's the largest upheaval of a population in the Middle East since the Palestinian Naqba of 1948. Dawn after dawn rises over Iraq to reveal tortured corpses in the river beds, on the rubbish dumps, by the side of the road: bodies riddled with bullets, punctured by drills, whipped with wire cable, blown apart.

The U.N. says that in the two months before this last Christmas 5,000 Iraqi civilians were killed. The months since have probably been as bad. Saddam dragged his country into ruin. Then the US took it from ruin to the graveyard, plundering the corpse as it did so.

There's plenty of blame to go round. You'd think these days that the cheerleaders for war were limited to a platoon of neocons, as potent in historical influence as were supposedly the Knights Templar. But it was not so. The coalition of the enablers spread far beyond Cheney's team and the extended family of Norman Podhoretz. Atop mainstream corporate journalism perch the New York Times and the New Yorker, two prime disseminators of pro-invasion propaganda, written at the NYT by Judith Miller, Michael Gordon and, on the op ed page, by Thomas Friedman. The New Yorker put forth the voluminous lies of Jeffrey Goldberg and has remained impenitent till this day.

The war party virtually monopolized television. AM radio poured out a filthy torrent of war bluster. The laptop bombardiers such as Salman Rushdie were in full war paint. Among the progressives the liberal interventionists thumped their tin drums, often by writing pompous pieces attacking the antiwar "hard left". Mini-pundits Todd Gitlin and Michael Berube played this game eagerly. Berube lavished abuse on Noam Chomsky and other clear opponents of the war, mumbling about the therapeutic potential of great power interventionism, piously invoking the tradition of "left internationalism". Others, like Ian Williams, played supportive roles in instilling the idea that the upcoming war was negotiable, instead of an irreversible intent of the Bush administration, no matter what Saddam Hussein did. "The ball will be very much in Saddam Hussein's court," Williams wrote in November, 2002. "The question is whether he will cooperate and disarm, or dissimulate and bring about his own downfall at the hands of the U.S. military." (In fact Saddam had already "disarmed", as disclosed in Hussein Kamel's debriefings by the UNSCOM inspectors, the CIA and MI6 in the summer of 1995 when Kamel told them all, with corroboration from aides who had also defected, that on Saddam Hussein's orders his son-in-law had destroyed all of Iraq's WMDs years earlier, right after the Gulf War. This was not a secret. In February 2003 John Barry reported it in Newsweek.Anyone privy to the UNSCOM, CIA and MI6 debriefs knew it from 1995 on.)

As Iraq began to plunge ever more rapidly into the abyss not long after the March, 2003 attack, this crowd stubbornly mostly stayed the course with Bush. "Thumpingly blind to the war's virtues" was the head on a Paul Berman op ed piece in February, 2004.Christopher Hitchens lurched regularly onto Hardball to hurl abuse at critics of the war.

But today, amid Iraq's dreadful death throes, where are the parlor warriors? Have those Iraqi exiles reconsidered their illusions, that all it would take was a brisk invasion and a new constitution, to put Iraq to rights? Have any of them, from Makiya through Hitchens to Berman and Berube had dark nights, asking themselves just how much responsibility they have for the heaps of dead in Iraq, for a plundered nation, for the American soldiers who died or were crippled in Iraq at their urging ? Sometimes I dream of them, -- Friedman, Hitchens, Berman -- like characters in a Beckett play, buried up to their necks in a rubbish dump on the edge of Baghdad, reciting their columns to each other as the local women turn over the corpses to see if one of them is her husband or her son.

Post coldwar Liberal interventionism came of age with the onslaught on Serbia. Liberal support for the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq were the afterglows. Now that night has descended and illusions about the great crusade shattered for ever, let us tip our hats to those who opposed this war from the start ­ the real left, the libertarians and those without illusions about the "civilizing mission" of the great powers.

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Psychoanalysing Junior (Again)

Bush and the Psychology of Incompetent Decisions
By John P. Briggs, MD, and J.P. Briggs II - Truthout
Mar 22, 2007, 17:51

*****************
Editorial Comment: There is only thing missing from this otherwise exemplary analysis of the mind and behavior of George W. Bush. It is the absence, if not direct negation - of the people who have been exploiting Bush's incompetence from behind the scenes. While their article provides important insight into the mind and behavior of George W. Bush, the authors imbue him with power that clearly lies outside his ability or grasp. The deep penetration of executive decision-making inside the White House by "think tanks" like the Council on Foreign Relations, American Enterprise Institute and Project for New American Century is well-known.

The Office of Special Plans created inside the Pentagon for the purpose of building a case for war on Iraq and feeding false information to Bush about WMD, Al Queda, etc. provides an obvious example of how important foreign policy decisions are made. Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, John Bolton, James Woolsley, Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, Elliot Abrams, Robert Kagan, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, Frank Gaffney, Joshua Muravchic, Daniel Pipes and their media apologists (e.g. William Kristol) are the known architects of the war in Iraq and are now pushing the U.S. government for another war against the people of Iran, another Israeli target.

Lest we forget, it was Kenneth Adelman, a member of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board who wrote for the Washington Post in 2002:

"I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.”

It was David Frum a former speechwriter for President Bush who allegedly coined the phrase “axis of evil”.

Authors of the article below, John P. Briggs, MD, and J.P. Briggs II, PhD, skoff at "speculation" that Dick Cheney is one of Bush's puppeteers. The authors state: "Bush is the president; he gets his way, and they know it" ... and even suggest that Cheney himself is a victim of the "Stockholm Syndrome", vis-a-vis a victim of Bush himself.

Of course Bush is the unstable bully whose intra-psychic processes are described so well by the authors of this article. There is no doubt that he bullies the White House staff and others on a personal level - as a cover for his own emotional insecurity and worsening mental status. We can even agree that his psychopathology feeds into policy-making and is exploited by the policy-makers. But he architecture and execution of domestic and foreign policy clearly comes from outside the Oval Office, using George W. Bush as a patsy when things turn public against the interests of the people of the United States. We now see the architects of the Iraq war turning against Bush via the corporate media at the behest of those who made him president. We now watch as they crawl into the woodwork, first offering up Rumsfeld as the cause of the slaughter and now leaving Bush holding the bag with the Democrats standing in the wings - recipients of $250 million from AIPAC and the spoils of the bloody war they funded. A perfect crime? Only if we let them get away with it.

Finally, it is interesting that the power-elite are now using the Valerie Plame affair and the firing of Federal Prosecutors to burn Bush instead of pressing for an indictment for his war crimes as we see happening this week in the International Court in the Hague. Despite imputing gratuitous power to George W. Bush, within their area of expertise (psychiatry), authors John P. Briggs, MD, and J.P. Briggs II, PhD, provide important insight with their excellent analysis into the crippling parental influence, emotional instability and twisted thought processes of the president. - Les Blough, Editor

© Copyright 2007 by AxisofLogic.com
Thursday 18 January 2007
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President George W. Bush prides himself on "making tough decisions." But many are sensing something seriously troubling, even psychologically unbalanced, about the president as a decision-maker. They are right.

Because of a psychological dynamic swirling around deeply hidden feelings of inadequacy, the president has been driven to make increasingly incompetent and risky decisions. This dynamic makes the psychological stakes for him now unimaginably high. The words "success" and "failure" have seized his rhetoric like metaphors for his psyche's survival.

The president's swirling dynamic lies "hidden in plain sight" in his personal history. From the time he was a boy until his religious awakening in his early 40s, Bush had every reason to feel he was a failure. His continued, almost obsessive, attempts through the years to emulate his father, obtain his approval, and escape from his influence are extensively recorded.

His biography is peppered with remarks and behavior that allude to this inner struggle. In an exuberant moment during his second campaign for Texas governor, Bush told a reporter, "It's hard to believe, but ... I don't have time to worry about being George Bush's son. Maybe it's a result of being confident. I'm not sure how the psychoanalysts will analyze it, but I'm not worried about it. I'm really not. I'm a free guy."

A psychoanalyst would note that he is revealing here that he has been worrying about being his father's son quite a lot.

Resentment naturally contaminated Bush's efforts to prove himself to his father and receive his father's approval. The contradictory mix showed up in his compulsion to re-fight his father's war against Iraq, but this time winning the duel some thought his father failed to win with Saddam. He could at once emulate his father, show his contempt for him, and redeem him. But beneath this son-father struggle lies a far more significant issue for Bush - a question about his own competence, adequacy and autonomy as a human being.

We have seen this inner question surface repeatedly, and we have largely conspired with him to deny it.

* On September 11, 2001, we saw (and suppressed) the image of him sitting stunned for seven minutes in a crowd of school children after learning that the second plane had hit the Twin Towers, and then the lack of image of him when he vanished from public view for the rest of the day. Instead, we bought the cover-up image, three days after the attack, of the strong leader, grabbing the bullhorn in New York City and issuing bellicose statements.

* In 2004, we saw and denied the insecurity displayed when the president refused to face the 9/11 Commission alone and needed Vice President Cheney to go with him.

* In 2003, we saw and suppressed the dark side of the "Mission Accomplished" aircraft carrier landing, in which a man who had ducked out on his generation's war and dribbled away his service in the Texas Air National Guard dressed up like Top Gun and pretended that he was a combat pilot like his father.

* Asked by a reporter if he would accept responsibility for any mistakes, Bush answered, "I hope I don't want to sound like I've made no mistakes. I'm confident I have. I just haven't - you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I'm not quick - as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one." What we heard, and yet didn't hear, was a confession of his feelings of inadequacy and an arrogant denial those feelings all at once.

* In early 2006, when his father moved behind the scenes to replace Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the son responded, "I'm the decider and I decide what's best" - and when he clenched his fist at a question about his father's influence, proclaiming, "I'm the Commander in Chief" - we glimpsed what was going on.

To cover up and defend himself against his feelings of his inadequacy and incompetence, Bush developed a number of psychological defenses. In his school years he played the clown. (His ability to joke about his verbal slip-ups is an endearing adult application of this defense to public life.) His heavy drinking was a classic way to anesthetize feelings of inadequacy. Indeed, drinking typically makes the alcoholic grandiose, which has led some commentators to argue that Bush has the "dry drunk" syndrome, where the individual has stopped drinking but retains the brittle psychology of the alcoholic. Other defenses now play especially powerful roles to protect the president against his internal feelings of insufficiency.

The Christian Defense

Bush has carefully let it be known that he believes the decisions he makes in office are directed by God. His famous claim to make decisions by "gut" ("I'm a gut player," he told Bob Woodward) equates with his claim of the spiritual inspiration he receives through prayer, his own and the prayers of others. Whatever else it is, this equation of his own choices with God's will has unparalleled advantages. It creates the perfect defense against any doubts he or anyone else might have that he can't make the right decision. The need to engage in analysis and explore alternatives to get there comes off the table. Instead, he has his gut; he has his God.

Being "born again" also allows the president to present himself as having relegated to the past all those previously inadequate behaviors of his younger days: the poor academic performance, the drinking, the failed businesses. He's a new man, no longer incompetent but now supremely competent as a result of his faith.

When Woodward asked Bush if he had consulted his father before invading Iraq, he replied, "He is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to." How wonderfully that appeal must seem to resolve the internal conflict about adequacy we have described above.

The Bully Defense

Bush's mother, Barbara (sarcastic, mean, disciplinarian, always with an acid-tongued retort), is probably the model for another major defense Bush deploys to defend himself against feelings of inadequacy. A friend at the time described her as "sort of the leader bully."

That bullies are insecure people is well known and fairly obvious. A bully covers insecurity with bluster and intimidation so that others won't find an opening to see how weak he feels.

Much of the world outside the US considers Bush a bully. "You're either with us or against us" is a bully's threat that anyone can recognize. The Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strikes is a bully's doctrine.

For his intimates and those closer to home, Bush appears to be what is called an emotional bully. An emotional bully gains control using sarcasm, teasing, mocking, name calling, threatening, ignoring, lying, or angering the other and forcing him to back down. Bush administration insider accounts describe this sort of behavior from the president. He's well known for his dismissive remarks. His penchant for giving nicknames to everyone has its dark, bully's side. Naming people is a way to control them.

In report by Gail Sheehy in 2000, recalled recently by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, we get a glimpse of how Bush's pervasive fear of failure (his absolute refusal to consider "failure as an option") and his bully defense go together. Sheehy interviewed friends from his teenage years and college years. In basketball or tennis games he would insist points be played over because he wasn't ready; he would force opponents who had beaten him to continue playing until he beat them. At Yale he would interrupt his fellow students' studying for exams (helping them fail) to compete in a popular board game, "The Game of Global Domination," at which he was the player noted for taking the most risks, being the most aggressive.

It's likely that speculations about Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice functioning as Bush's puppet-masters are 180 (or at least 160) degrees off. Bush is the president; he gets his way, and they know it. Chances are they have learned to channel his "gut" and give him policy advice that matches it. They may even imagine they are steering him, not clear about the ways that he has bullied them, elicited in them "The Stockholm Syndrome," in which hostages come to identify with and even defend the very person who is threatening them. This is the same dynamic evident in the behavior of battered spouses and members of gangs.

Ron Suskind described the small group around the president: "A disdain for contemplation or deliberation, an embrace of decisiveness - a sometimes bullying impatience with doubters and even friendly questioners."

Biographical reports tell us that Bush's parents taught him to keep his inner feelings to himself. As psychiatrist Justin A. Frank noted in Bush on the Couch, this results in a "self-protective indifference to the pain of others." This is another aspect of his bully defense, projecting his inner pain onto others. Bush's remarkable drive for the power to torture terrorist suspects and his reported glorying in Texas executions during his terms as governor testify to his lack of compassion, despite his recent statement of qualms about seeing Saddam Hussein drop through the trap.

The Man of Splits and Oppositions

Being in the world, for all of us, involves the challenge to somehow integrate the opposites of our nature and to select our way through the many opposing choices presented us in life. The bully polarizes the natural ambivalence (the internal opposition) anyone feels about whether he is strong or weak, safe or vulnerable. A person who needs to feel invulnerable and completely adequate all the time, or who always feels helpless and inadequate, has polarized these emotions and leads a deformed life. The degree of internal polarization in President Bush appears to be serious - and widespread. Commentators have made lists of the president's polarities: the proclaimed uniter who is a relentless divider, the habit of "saying one thing and doing another," as Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords put it. The list is long and growing. It should include the oppositions that show up in his famous Bushisms, such as:

There is no doubt in my mind that we should allow the world's worst leaders to hold America hostage, to threaten our peace, to threaten our friends and allies with the world's worst weapons.

They [the terrorists] never stop thinking of ways to harm our country and our people - and neither do we.

To a psychiatrist, these are not mere malapropisms and mistakes in speech. They suggest ambivalence oscillating violently between poles. They suggest a desperate uncertainty about everything that the president reflexively seeks to hide by taking absolutist, rigid positions about "victory," "success," "mission accomplished," "stay the course," "compassion," "tax cuts," "no child left behind," and a host of other issues.

The Presidential Defense

Once Bush took the bullhorn at ground zero, he found perhaps the ultimate defense for his secret fears of inadequacy. As he told Bob Woodward, in Bush at War, "I'm the commander - see, I don't need to explain - I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation." As commander in chief, as a war president, he could assemble his other psychological defenses around him. He could split the world into good and evil and the country would follow. His internal oppositions could be projected without much resistance from the populace or his adversaries. He could be the gut-led, divinely inspired "Decider," to save the country. He could project own internal fears of being "discovered as a fraud" into a threat "out there" waiting to happen. He could surround himself with loyalists whom he could emotionally bully, creating a new family that would admire him and that he could control. Meanwhile the ambiguities of political decisions that can always be rationalized offer a safe haven. Until history judges me (and that's a long way off, maybe never) I can't be definitively seen as incompetent.

But as much as the presidency is a perfect defense for disguising incompetence, it's also the perfect trap. It accelerates the positive feedback loop that was set in motion when he "changed his heart" around age 40 (committing himself to God) and presumably put his failures, and his feelings of failure behind him.

In recent weeks, anyone following the news must have intuitively sensed from watching and hearing the president that he would reject the Iraq Study Group's report, co-authored by a person he must have felt was the emissary of his father come to tell him that he had failed again. He chose escalation, the one solution most knowledgeable people agree cannot succeed, in order to keep alive the fiction that success still lies in the future.

The dynamic is becoming obvious to almost everybody.

But how much is Bush aware of this psychological dynamic and of the secret he's keeping? Not aware enough. That's the problem. Psychotherapists use the term "unconscious," but it isn't quite an accurate descriptor. We are aware of feelings, sensations and scripts that occur when one of our unseen psychic mechanisms is triggered. So, when an interviewer asked about the generals who demanded Rumsfeld be removed, and the president knew his father had been working behind the scenes to replace Rumsfeld, the question would not have triggered the conscious thought: there goes dad again trying to make me feel incompetent. Instead, the president may have felt a hollow sensation or a flush of anger, an urge to form a clownish grin to cover his watery feelings, and a script that would come out of his mouth as "I'm the decider." Beneath that would be the inadequacy and cover-up dynamic outlined here.

A president's psychology and his inner secrets are his or her own business, except in one important area. That is area covered by the question, "Does the psychology of this individual interfere with his or her ability to make sound decisions in the best interest of the nation?" Recent history has certainly been witness to presidents with psychodynamics that have damaged their historical legacies. Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon come to mind. But in neither case was the very ability to make sound decisions compromised to the extent we believe it is with this president.

A Failed Process

Many accounts of the president suggest that his decision-making process is a failed one; in an important sense, it is no process at all.

Ambivalent feelings are normal at certain stages of decision-making, and the ability to tolerate ambivalence has been shown to be the hallmark of creative thinkers. The inability to tolerate uncertainty because you think that may imply incapacity brings decision-making to an end.

Thus, instead of focusing on the process needed to arrive at a decision, Bush marshals his defenses in order not to feel incompetent. That doesn't leave much room for exploring the alternatives required of competent decision-making. Not interested in discussion or detail (where the devil often lies), he seeks something minimal, just enough so he can let the decision come to him; it's his "gut" (read "God") that will provide the answer. But these gut feelings are the very feelings associated with his deep sense of inadequacy and his defenses against those feelings. So while he brags that he makes the "tough decisions," psychologically, he's defending himself against the very feelings of uncertainty that are the necessary concomitant to making tough decisions. His tough decision-making is a sham.

In the recent maneuvering toward the "new strategy" in Iraq, we have witnessed a great pretense of normal decision-making. But the president clearly made up his mind almost as soon as the "surge" alternative appeared, and apparently moved to cow others, including his new secretary of defense Robert Gates (his father's man) in the process. "Success" is the only alternative for him. "Failure" and disintegration of Iraq is unthinkable because it would be synonymous with his own internal disintegration.

As his decisions go awry, he exudes a troubling, uncanny aura of certitude (though some find it reassuring). He seems to expect to feel despised and alone (and probably has always felt that), as he has always secretly expected to fail. That expectation of failure leads to sloppy, risky, incompetent decisions, which in turn compel him to swerve from his fears of incompetence.

At this point, the president seems to have entered a place in his psyche where he is discounting all external criticism and unpopularity, and fixing stubbornly on his illusion of vindication, because he's still "The Decider," who can just keep deciding until he gets to success. It's hard not to feel something heroic in this position - but it's a recipe for bad, if not catastrophic, decisions.

Psychologically, President Bush has received support for so long because many have thought of him as "one of us." Most of us feel inadequate in some way, and watching him we can feel his inadequacies and sense his uncertainties, so we admire him for "pulling it off." His model tells us, "If you act like you're confident and competent, then you are." We are the culture that values the power of positive thinking and seeks assertiveness training. We believe that the right attitude can sometimes be more important than brains or hard work. He's bullied us, too. We don't dare to really confront the scale of his incompetent behavior, because then we would have to face what it means to have such an incompetent and psychologically disabled decision-maker as our president. It raises everyone's uncertainty. And that is, in fact, happening now.

John P. Briggs, MD, is retired from over 40 years of private practice in psychotherapy in Westchester County, New York. He was on the faculty in psychiatry at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City for 23 years and was a long-time member of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. He trained at the William Alanson White Institute in New York. J.P. Briggs II, PhD, is a Distinguished CSU professor at Western Connecticut State University and is the senior editor of the intellectual journal The Connecticut Review. He is author and co-author of books on creativity and chaos, including Fire in the Crucible (St. Martin's Press); Fractals, the Patterns of Chaos (Simon and Schuster); and Seven Life Lessons of Chaos (HarperCollins), among others. He is currently at work with Philadelphia psychologist John Amoroso on a book about the power of ambivalence in the creative process.

Source: www.truthout.org

Source

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Queeg's Silver Balls

Latin American - delusion and reality
by toni solo
March 23, 2007

The irony of attacks on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez by cynical, sadistic country-wreckers like Condoleezza Rica and John Negroponte can be lost only on them. While Venezuela advances steadily towards prosperity and social equity, the Bush regime commits its extraordinary rendition of the US people to military disaster and falling living standards. Speaking to a Congressional hearing on February 7th this year, Rice declared, ""I do believe that the president of Venezuela is really, really destroying his own country, economically, politically."(1)

People walked out on the fictional Captain Queeg (2) when he took out some silver balls on the court martial witness stand and proceeded to fidget with them as his testimony collapsed into paranoid mumblings. In real life, Prince of Delusion George W. Bush, has yet to face outright mutiny from his fellow dysfunctional political leaders. Presumably the motley corporate-behoven crew running the single party US ship of State are waiting until they and the rest of the world are in the lifeboats.

In Latin America people may be more tuned-in to reality. When respected mainstream political analyst and historian Luiz Moniz Bandeira publicy affirms that Brazil sees a US invasion of Amazonia as its main external military threat, the Bush regime's jaded-Reaganaut State Department's "freedom and democracy" rhetoric has clearly lost whatever slap-it-on-thick-maybe-they'll-never-notice credibility it ever had. Although Bandeira discounts the likelihood of such an invasion, he says it is the main premise for the Brazilian army's strategic planning. He notes, the US military "does not exist to defend its national frontiers but rather for planetary domination and aggression to secure sources of energy and raw materials." (3)

Shifting the perspective

It is now commonplace to argue that the US government is engaged in a losing battle to defend its waning prestige and influence in Latin America. Only the spell of North America's habitual narcissism renders that interpretation of much interest. Looked at from south of the Rio Grande, the potential breadth and depth of imperial collapse is perhaps less interesting than the nature, scale and ambition of the integration processes under way. If the US has lost influence, the wider imperialist global corporate Thing seems to have adapted well, mutating fast to continue its parasitic gorging on the peoples of Latin America.

Even so, when Captain Queeg toured five Latin American countries recently, his tour underlined the comprehensive failure of his regime's feints at regional leadership. Serious high level visits by Chinese and Russian political leaders contrast with the contemptible, stagnant "do what we want, or else" corporate arrogance of US govenment diplomacy. In that context, the fact that China has prioritised Ecuador and Bolivia for increased oil and gas investment incentives to Chinese companies (4) is very much worth noting. When Russian and Chinese leaders visit Latin America they are pushing at a door to the imperial Bluebeard's Castle the US government left poorly guarded, now prised wide open by the peoples once prisoners inside.

President Putin of Russia visited Cuba in 2000 and Mexico, Brazil and Chile in 2004. Chinese President Hu Jintao also made an extensive visit to Latin America in 2004. Russian Prime Minister Mijail Fradkov visited Brazil, Argentina and Chile in 2006. Just prior to Queeg's Latin American jaunt, Russia's vice-Foreign Minister Serguei Kisliak declared during a speech in Uruguay to the Association for Latin American Integration on March 9th "Russia wants to increase political and economic cooperation with the countries of Latin America". (5)

The changing compass of Latin American diplomacy and the deep political conflicts its competing integration initiatives have engendered also indicate the extent to which people in Latin America are focusing on their own needs, leaving the North American imperial corporate plutocrat elite and their local allies to negotiate from relative weakness. 2007 has a sparse electoral calendar compared to the 2006 flurry of presidential elections. But the elections in Guatemala in November and those in Argentina in October will probably reveal a great deal about the durability of current trends against the legacy of twenty years of Washington Consensus economic policy, the latest stage in five centuries of colonial subjugation.

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Another Danger for Iraqis

Here's another of those "lackluster services" to which CNN, the dog of the mealy state mouthpiece, was referring yesterday.

Shortage of safe water risks cholera in Iraq -U.N.
Thu Mar 22, 2007 2:35PM EDT
By Suleiman al-Khalidi

AMMAN, March 22 (Reuters) - United Nations agencies working in Iraq warned on Thursday a chronic shortage of safe drinking water risks causing more child deaths and an outbreak of waterborne disease such as cholera during the summer.

Four years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, millions of Iraqi children still find that safe water is no easier to access, said a statement issued by leading U.N. aid agencies operating in Iraq.

The agencies, whose offices are based in Amman, issued the statement to mark World Water Day.

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said shortages of drinking water threatened to push up diarrhoea rates, particularly among children. Diarrhoea is already the second highest cause of child illness and death in Iraq, it said.

"Latest reports suggest we are already seeing an increase in diarrhoea, even before the usual onset of the diarrhoea season in June," said Roger Wright, UNICEF representative in Iraq.

Efforts to repair Iraq's damaged water networks have been hampered by electricity shortages, attacks on technicians, infrastructure and engineering works and underinvestment in the water sector, the agencies said.

Iraq was still relying on U.N. support to provide essential water treatment chemicals with UNICEF alone providing 1,650 tonnes of chlorine last year, the statement said.

The suspension of water tankering services to tens of thousands of people in Baghdad, especially to displaced families and communities hosting them, increased the risk of cholera outbreaks, the agencies warned.

"Under the circumstances, Iraq has done extremely well to keep outbreaks of waterborne diseases, especially cholera, largely at bay so far. But this achievement is at risk unless more reliable sources of safe water reach families as soon as possible," the joint statement said.

Read the rest here.

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Spicy Chicken and Pean Fritters for Foodie Friday

West Coast African Spicy Chicken and Pean Fritters

This dish was called “Chicken Yassa” by Jessica B. Harris when I saw it one afternoon on the Food Network. I didn’t like the name, so there you go. I made quite a few changes to the chicken recipe and there were no black-eyed pea fritters in her presentation. Ya’ better duck a little when you eat this one.


West Coast African Spicy Chicken

1 2-pound chicken, cut into pieces and trimmed of fat
Salt and pepper to taste
1 large white onion, halved and sliced thin
Juice of 2 large lemons, seeds removed
1/4 cup grapeseed oil
1 habañero chile, pierced several times with a fork
1/2 to 1 teaspoon finely minced habañero chile (optional)

Place onions, lemon juice, and oil (and minced habañero, if using) into a large ceramic or glass bowl, mixing thoroughly. I usually rinse the chicken a little, cleaning the last bits of crud, then pat the pieces dry. Salt and pepper the chicken all over, then nestle chicken pieces into the onions, ensuring pieces are well covered. In the center of the bowl, nestle the pierced habañero chile into the liquid. Marinate, covered with plastic wrap, for 8 to 24 hours in the refrigerator (bigger is better, in this case).

20 kalamata olives, pitted and diced
3 large carrots, cleaned and sliced
1 large ripe tomato, diced
1/2 cup Riesling wine
2 tablespoons spicy mustard (I used New Braunfels Smokehouse Sweet and Spicy Mustard; my other preference would be Keen’s or Coleman’s hot mustard with a teaspoon of honey)

When the chicken has marinated well, remove the pieces to a broiling pan, reserving the onions and liquid. Broil the chicken (or grill over a hot barbeque fire) until golden brown on all sides (about 3 to 5 minutes per side).

While chicken is browning, place onions into a hot, large, lightly-oiled pot and sauté until transparent. Stir in the carrots and olives, sautéing for another couple of minutes. Then add the reserved marinade liquid, tomato, wine, mustard, pierced habañero chile, and browned chicken. Add additional water to half cover chicken only if necessary. Simmer for 35 or 40 minutes, until tender, stirring from time to time. We served this delicious dish with:


Black-Eyed Pea Fritters

1/4 cup dried black-eyed peas
1 cup bottled water

Soak peas in water for three hours (until peas are swollen). Drain water and discard it. Place beans into a small pot and just cover with water and bring to a boil. Turn heat to low and simmer for 30 minutes. Drain beans completely.

1 small white onion, minced
2 small cloves Italian garlic, minced
1/2 teaspoon habañero sauce (I like Marie Sharp’s)
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 to 4 teaspoons bottled water

Whisk above ingredients, excepting the water, in a medium bowl. In a separate bowl, mash the cooked and drained peas until soft and “fluffy.”

In the meanwhile, heat about 2 cups of canola, peanut or vegetable oil in an 8-inch deep pot until it reaches 375° F.

Mix the egg mixture into the mashed beans, until even more “fluffy,” adding water as required to make it an easy fritter batter with which to work. Drop single tablespoons of this mixture into the hot oil and deep fry for just 3 to 4 minutes, until crispy. Do not crowd the pot and drain on paper towel.

The sweet / hot mustard and tomato make this a subtle sweet dish, but still spicy. The fritters make a fine complement.

Richard Jehn

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A Glimmer of Sunshine

Last week, Avaaz campaigners hand-delivered our 100,000-signature climate change petition to the environment ministers of the world's most polluting countries. It worked. The chair of the meeting waved the petition in the air, calling on his fellow ministers to act--and they agreed that climate change would be the #1 issue at the G8 summit in June.

The momentum is on our side. Let's build on it. Next Tuesday, another high-level group will meet to move forward with G8 planning -- and we can keep the focus on the climate issue by showing that the call for action is growing. Can you help us reach our ambitious goal of 150,000 signatures by Tuesday by forwarding this email to ten friends? Your friends can sign the petition here:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/climate_action_g8

Here's how our campaigner Iain Keith, who presented the petition, describes his experience:

When my turn came to speak to the Environment ministers, I was so nervous that I thought my voice would quiver. But I wasn't just speaking for myself--I was there on behalf of 100,000 Avaaz members, and I couldn't let them down. I walked to the microphone, took a deep breath, and said, "Dear Ministers, ladies and gentlemen, m y name is Iain Keith and I'm here on behalf of the 1 Million members of Avaaz. Avaaz is a new online community where global citizens can go to take action on the biggest issues facing our world. I have here, in my hands, a petition from our members who would like to tell you that they are scared of climate change, and the lack of action being taken. The countries represented in this room are responsible for the majority of global greenhouse gas emissions. As ministers of the environment you are in an excellent position to persuade your leaders to make tackling climate change the number one priority for the next G8 summit. Our members humbly request that you accept this petition as a reminder of your responsibilities, and to help persuade your leaders."

I handed the petition to the German environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel. The meeting continued, with speeches on other issues from other organizations. I wondered if all of the work had been worth it.

And then came Minister Gabriel's closing speech.

I could hardly believe it: he was saying that climate change must be the number one priority at the G8 summit. And he was holding our petition.

"Thanks to increased pressure from people around the world," he said, "the tide is turning. When an international NGO can gather this many signatures" (here he holds up the petition), "we cannot ignore this problem anymore... As Environmental ministers, we have a responsibility both to the environment and our voters to make sure our heads of state act!"

And a few days later, German Chancellor and G8 President Angela Merkel vowed to put climate change at the top of the agenda for the G8 Leaders Summit.

We did it!!

Iain's right. And we can do even more. Can you forward this email to ten friends, and help us reach our goal of 150,000 signatures by Tuesday?

http://www.avaaz.org/en/climate_action_g8

It's amazing what can happen when we work together. Thanks for all that you do.

With hope,
Ben, Iain, Ricken, Lee-Sean, Galit, Graziela, and the rest of the Avaaz team

P.S. For a more detailed report of the meeting, including photos, visit the Avaaz blog

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The MSM Hard at Work

Listen to the cynicism from the state parrots. They call having electricity less than 4 hours a day and gasoline that is 10 times the cost it was 4 years ago "lackluster services."

Report raps poor planning for Iraq reconstruction
POSTED: 4:58 a.m. EDT, March 22, 2007

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Planners for Iraq reconstruction did not anticipate conditions after the 2003 invasion, setting the scene for lackluster services that still plague the country, according to a report by the Pentagon's inspector.

The report, released Thursday, made nine recommendations for improvements for future nation-building plans by the United States.

Among the suggestions is for Congress to develop better coordination between the Departments of Defense and State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the primary agencies that work with other governments and international agencies.

"There is fairly wide agreement that pre-war planning for relief and reconstruction should have been better, and one of the challenges we are seeing in reviewing that is the interagency problem," Special Inspector General Stuart Bowen told reporters Wednesday ahead of the report's release.

The efforts of the Defense Department, USAID and the State Department "bumped into each other," causing much of the difficulty, Bowen said.

"There was a lack of clarity of roles and responsibility and a lack of effective joint-ness. By that I mean a unity of command, and that needs to be developed before we go to war," he said.

The initial plan, the new report says, was for an Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) to handle reconstruction efforts. That office's plan, picked up by the Coalition Provisional Authority in April 2003, was for Iraq to "assume complete sovereignty, including full responsibility for relief and reconstruction efforts" within 12 to 18 months of the start of the war.

Read it here.

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We've Said It Before, And We'll Say It Again

Under the laws pushed through by this corrupt regime, YOU COULD BE NEXT !!!

Top-Secret Torture: What's stopping the Democrats in Congress from investigating?
Tuesday, March 20, 2007; Page A18

KHALID SHEIK Mohammed's cold-blooded confession of responsibility for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and other horrific crimes before a tribunal in Guantanamo Bay got a lot of attention when the Pentagon released a partial transcript last week -- and understandably so. But another set of disclosures by the al-Qaeda leader that could also be sensational received almost no attention. That's because the Pentagon swiftly classified a document submitted by Mr. Mohammed in which he detailed the torture he says he suffered. The rationale is that disclosure of those allegations would harm national security. In fact, the harm the Bush administration's abuse of prisoners has already done to this country's ability to combat Islamic extremism will only be compounded if it succeeds in making this shameful record a state secret.

The administration claims it has not used torture on prisoners such as Mr. Mohammed. Yet it has been working aggressively to ensure that he and 13 other accused terrorists formerly held in secret CIA prisons are never allowed to reveal how they were treated. In addition to classifying Mr. Mohammed's statement, the administration is making the surreal argument in court that in being subjected to "alternative" interrogation methods, al-Qaeda detainees were receiving top-secret information -- and so may be prohibited from ever discussing their experience, even to the defense attorneys seeking to represent them.

The government claims that this looking-glass policy is necessary to prevent al-Qaeda members still at large from learning of the CIA's methods so that they can train against them. Yet some of the harshest action taken against Mr. Mohammed has already been widely reported: He was treated to "waterboarding," or simulated drowning, an ancient torture method that every U.S. administration prior to this one has considered illegal. CIA detainees are also known to have been subjected to temperature extremes and sleep deprivation. The administration has assured Congress that it has dropped some of these methods, including waterboarding. If that's true, Mr. Mohammed's statement will not alert future detainees, but it will open a debate about whether the CIA's past practices were legal or morally justifiable.

That is what the administration is really trying to stop. If al-Qaeda members are allowed to talk about the abuse they suffered, President Bush's frequent contention that no one was tortured will come under question; so will his determination to maintain the CIA's secret detention "program." If the administration strategy succeeds, much of the trials and appeals of the al-Qaeda suspects will have to be conducted in secret -- something that will strip the proceedings of credibility and legitimacy.

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And to help emphasize this matter:

Bush Paves the Way for Martial Law: 2007 National Defense Authorization Act overturns Posse Comitatus Act
Global Research, March 21, 2007

"Paradoxically, preserving liberty may require the rule of a single leader--a dictator--willing to use those dreaded 'extraordinary measures,' which few know how, or are willing, to employ." -- Michael Ledeen, White House advisor and fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, "Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules Are As Timely and Important Today As Five Centuries Ago"

"Gen. Tommy Franks says that if the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government." -- NewsMax, November 21, 2003

In October 2006, Bush signed into law the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007. Quietly slipped into the law at the last minute, at the request of the Bush administration, were sections changing important legal principles, dating back 200 years, which limit the U.S. government's ability to use the military to intervene in domestic affairs. These changes would allow Bush, whenever he thinks it necessary, to institute martial law--under which the military takes direct control over civilian administration.

Sec. 1042 of the Act, "Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies," effectively overturns what is known as posse comitatus. The Posse Comitatus Act is a law, passed in 1878, that prohibits the use of the regular military within the U.S. borders. The original passage of the Posse Comitatus Act was a very reactionary move that sealed the betrayal of Black people after the Civil War and brought the period of Reconstruction to an end. It decreed that federal troops could no longer be used inside the former Confederate states to enforce the new legal rights of Black people. Black people were turned over to the armed police and Klansmen serving the southern plantation owners, and the long period of Jim Crow began.

During the 20th century, posse comitatus objectively started to play a new role within the bourgeois democratic framework: as a legal barrier to the direct influence of the powerful military establishment and the armed forces over domestic U.S. society. It served to some degree as an obstacle against military coups and presidents seizing military control over the country. (However, National Guard troops have been legally available to the ruling class for use inside the U.S., and there have been other loopholes to the prohibition of the use of armed forces domestically, as in the mobilization of Marine troops during the 1992 L.A. Rebellion.)

So the changes to posse comitatus signed into law by Bush are extremely significant and ominous. Bush has modified the main exemptions to posse comitatus that up to now have been primarily defined by the Insurrection Act of 1807. Previously the president could call out the army in the United States only in cases of insurrection or conditions where "rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State or Territory by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings." Under the new law the president can use the military in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, a terrorist attack or "other condition in which the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to the extent that state officials cannot maintain public order."

The new law requires the President to notify Congress "as soon as practicable after the determination and every 14 days thereafter during the duration of the exercise of the authority." However Bush, as he has often done during his presidency, modified this requirement in his signing statement, which declared, "The executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent with the President's constitutional authority to withhold information the disclosure of which could impair foreign relations, the national security, the deliberative processes of the Executive." In other words, Bush claims that he does not even need to inform Congress that martial law has been declared!

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