The Ethical Failure of Corporate Amerikkka

Pfizer Facing 4 Court Cases in Nigeria
By HEIDI VOGT, AP, Posted: 2007-08-11 00:29:41

KANO, Nigeria (AP) - A security guard in this dusty Nigerian city is living with tragedy - a 14-year-old son whose dazed eyes, slow speech and uneven gait signal brain damage. Mustapha Mohammed says he knows who to blame - Pfizer Inc., the world's largest drug maker.

New York-based Pfizer is facing four court cases - two filed by the Nigerian government and two by officials in the northern Nigerian state where Mohammed lives - over a decade-old drug study that included Mohammed's son.

The company, which denies any wrongdoing, is accused of using a 1996 meningitis epidemic to push through a sloppily managed drug study that contributed to death in some and infirmities in others.

The fallout provides a case study of the ethical dilemmas that arise when Western medical priorities run into Third World poverty and ignorance. The communication gap between those handing out medical alms and those receiving has bred mistrust and anger in Kano - with damaging, far-reaching effect.

The Pfizer case was cited as one reason residents of Kano and the state of the same name boycotted a polio vaccine in 2003, fearing it was a plot to make Africans infertile. Polio exploded in Nigeria and eventually spread to 25 previously polio-free countries.

Though the meningitis epidemic is long over and the polio vaccination program is back on track, misinformation and suspicion persist.

Mohammed is sure no one asked his permission to test a drug on his child. But he also wasn't asking many questions when he rushed his son to the hospital in 1996.

"We were desperate for drugs. We just took it in good faith," said Mohammed, who lives in a tiny house off a dirt road in one of Kano's poorer neighborhoods. Mohammed - who can't read or write - only later found out that the pink paper he kept with Pfizer's name and treatment dates meant his son had been in the study.

Pfizer says it explained the study to families using practices in line with U.S. and international guidelines, even employing Nigerian nurses and doctors who spoke Hausa, a main Nigerian language. Written permission was obtained when possible, or oral consent if parents were illiterate.

Across town, Abu Abdullahi Madaki can't be sure if her daughter Firdausi took part in the Pfizer study. Citing privacy concerns, Pfizer has declined to release the names of the 200 children it treated.

All Madaki knows is she took a feverish 8-month-old infant to the hospital in 1996, and now her daughter suffers severe brain damage that left her unable to sit up or talk.

Meningitis - a brain infection - leaves 10 percent to 20 percent of survivors with mental damage, hearing loss, or learning disabilities, according to the World Health Organization.

But Madaki said: "My younger sister had meningitis, but it was nothing like this. My younger sister is now a mother with children."

Madaki, who is illiterate, said she'd always felt that the hospital did something wrong. She decided when she heard about the charges against Pfizer on the radio that her daughter must have been in the study.

Pfizer says it brought the drug - an antibiotic called Trovan - to Nigeria as a humanitarian effort. Trovan had already been tested on humans in the U.S. It was a tablet, which could be easier to use with children than the standard meningitis treatment - a painful injection.

More than 11,000 children died in Nigeria during the epidemic.

"When this epidemic occurred, the government asked people to come and help them," said Ngozi Edozien, regional director of the Pfizer branch that covers Nigeria. She said Pfizer wanted to help, but could only offer Trovan through a clinical study because the drug was not yet approved.

Edozien argued that approval to use Trovan to treat epidemic meningitis would not have been a windfall for the company, but for the poor countries that face the disease. She also noted that Pfizer donated medical supplies and equipment to the government to help in the epidemic.

Trovan was approved in the U.S. in 1997 to treat a number of infections, though not for meningitis. It was later pulled from the market because it was shown to cause serious liver damage.

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Keeping Us in a Chronic State of Fear

New York Officials Monitor Terror Threat
AP, Posted: 2007-08-11 07:42:43

NEW YORK (Aug. 11) - Authorities were taking extra counterterrorism precautions Friday in response to what they said was an unsubstantiated radiological threat to the city.

Officials said they had not changed the city's terror alert status in response to online chatter mentioning a truck packed with radioactive material. But police deployed extra radiological sensors on street, water and air patrols, and were stopping vehicles at checkpoints in lower Manhattan and around the city.

Deputy Police Commissioner Paul J. Browne called the measures "strictly precautionary." He said an Israeli Web site reported that online posts were made following a video released Sunday featuring an American member of al-Qaida threatening foreign diplomats and embassies across the Islamic world.

"We are closely monitoring the situation," said Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke. "There continues to be no credible information telling us that there's a threat to the homeland at this time."

The FBI also said there was no credible threat.

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China Will Not Be Bullied

China’s “Nuclear Option” is real
By Paul Craig Roberts

08/11/07 "ICH' -- -- Twenty-four hours after I reported China’s announcement that China, not the Federal Reserve, controls US interest rates by its decision to purchase, hold, or dump US Treasury bonds, the news of the announcement appeared in sanitized and unthreatening form in a few US news sources.

The Washington Post found an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin to provide reassurances that it was “not really a credible threat” that China would intervene in currency or bond markets in any way that could hurt the dollar’s value or raise US interest rates, because China would hurt its own pocketbook by such actions.

US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, just back from Beijing, where he gave China orders to raise the value of the Chinese yuan “without delay,” dismissed the Chinese announcement as “frankly absurd.”

Both the professor and the Treasury Secretary are greatly mistaken.

First, understand that the announcement was not made by a minister or vice minister of the government. The Chinese government is inclined to have important announcements come from research organizations that work closely with the government. This announcement came from two such organizations. A high official of the Development Research Center, an organization with cabinet rank, let it be known that US financial stability was too dependent on China’s financing of US red ink for the US to be giving China orders. An official at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences pointed out that the reserve currency status of the US dollar was dependent on China’s good will as America’s lender.

What the two officials said is completely true. It is something that some of us have known for a long time. What is different is that China publicly called attention to Washington’s dependence on China’s good will. By doing so, China signaled that it was not going to be bullied or pushed around.

The Chinese made no threats. To the contrary, one of the officials said, “China doesn’t want any undesirable phenomenon in the global financial order.” The Chinese message is different. The message is that Washington does not have hegemony over Chinese policy, and if matters go from push to shove, Washington can expect financial turmoil.

Paulson can talk tough, but the Treasury has no foreign currencies with which to redeem its debt. The way the Treasury pays off the bonds that come due is by selling new bonds, a hard sell in a falling market deserted by the largest buyer.

Paulson found solace in his observation that the large Chinese holdings of US Treasuries comprise only “one day’s trading volume in Treasuries.” This is a meaningless comparison. If the supply suddenly doubled, does Paulson think the price of Treasuries would not fall and the interest rate not rise? If Paulson believes that US interest rates are independent of China’s purchases and holdings of Treasuries, Bush had better quickly find himself a new Treasury Secretary.

Now let’s examine the University of Wisconsin economist’s opinion that China cannot exercise its power because it would result in losses on its dollar holdings. It is true that if China were to bring any significant percentage of its holdings to market, or even cease to purchase new Treasury issues, the prices of bonds would decline, and China’s remaining holdings would be worth less. The question, however, is whether this is of any consequence to China, and, if it is, whether this cost is greater or lesser than avoiding the cost that Washington is seeking to impose on China.

American economists make a mistake in their reasoning when they assume that China needs large reserves of foreign exchange. China does not need foreign exchange reserves for the usual reasons of supporting its currency’s value and paying its trade bills. China does not allow its currency to be traded in currency markets. Indeed, there is not enough yuan available to trade. Speculators, betting on the eventual rise of the yuan’s value, are trying to capture future gains by trading “virtual yuan.” The other reason is that China does not have foreign trade deficits, and does not need reserves in other currencies with which to pay its bills. Indeed, if China had creditors, the creditors would be pleased to be paid in yuan as the currency is thought to be undervalued.

Despite China’s support of the Treasury bond market, China’s large holdings of dollar-denominated financial instruments have been depreciating for some time as the dollar declines against other traded currencies, because people and central banks in other countries are either reducing their dollar holdings or ceasing to add to them. China’s dollar holdings reflect the creditor status China acquired when US corporations offshored their production to China. Reportedly, 70% of the goods on Wal-Mart’s shelves are made in China. China has gained technology and business knowhow from the US firms that have moved their plants to China. China has large coastal cities, choked with economic activity and traffic, that make America’s large cities look like country towns. China has raised about 300 million of its population into higher living standards, and is now focusing on developing a massive internal market some 4 to 5 times more populous than America’s.

The notion that China cannot exercise its power without losing its US markets is wrong. American consumers are as dependent on imports of manufactured goods from China as they are on imported oil. In addition, the profits of US brand name companies are dependent on the sale to Americans of the products that they make in China. The US cannot, in retaliation, block the import of goods and services from China without delivering a knock-out punch to US companies and US consumers. China has many markets and can afford to lose the US market easier than the US can afford to lose the American brand names on Wal-Mart’s shelves that are made in China. Indeed, the US is even dependent on China for advanced technology products. If truth be known, so much US production has been moved to China that many items on which consumers depend are no longer produced in America.

Now let’s consider the cost to China of dumping dollars or Treasuries compared to the cost that the US is trying to impose on China. If the latter is higher than the former, it pays China to exercise the “nuclear option” and dump the dollar.

The US wants China to revalue the yuan, that is, to make the dollar value of the yuan higher. Instead of a dollar being worth 8 yuan, for example, Washington wants the dollar to be worth only 5.5 yuan. Washington thinks that this would cause US exports to China to increase, as they would be cheaper for the Chinese, and for Chinese exports to the US to decline, as they would be more expensive. This would end, Washington thinks, the large trade deficit that the US has with China.

This way of thinking dates from pre-offshoring days. In former times, domestic and foreign-owned companies would compete for one another’s markets, and a country with a lower valued currency might gain an advantage. Today, however, about half of the so-called US imports from China are the offshored production of US companies for their American markets. The US companies produce in China, not because of the exchange rate, but because labor, regulatory, and harassment costs are so much lower in China. Moreover, many US firms have simply moved to China, and the cost of abandoning their new Chinese facilities and moving production back to the US would be very high.

When all these costs are considered, it is unclear how much China would have to revalue its currency in order to cancel its cost advantages and cause US firms to move enough of their production back to America to close the trade gap.

To understand the shortcomings of the statements by the Wisconsin professor and Treasury Secretary Paulson, consider that if China were to increase the value of the yuan by 30 percent, the value of China’s dollar holdings would decline by 30 percent. It would have the same effect on China’s pocketbook as dumping dollars and Treasuries in the markets.

Consider also, that as revaluation causes the yuan to move up in relation to the dollar (the reserve currency), it also causes the yuan to move up against every other traded currency. Thus, the Chinese cannot revalue as Paulson has ordered without making Chinese goods more expensive not merely to Americans but everywhere.

Compare this result with China dumping dollars. With the yuan pegged to the dollar, China can dump dollars without altering the exchange rate between the yuan and the dollar. As the dollar falls, the yuan falls with it. Goods and services produced in China do not become more expensive to Americans, and they become cheaper elsewhere. By dumping dollars, China expands its entry into other markets and accumulates more foreign currencies from trade surpluses.

Now consider the non-financial costs to China’s self-image and rising prestige of permitting the US government to set the value of its currency. America’s problems are of its own making, not China’s. A rising power such as China is likely to prove a reluctant scapegoat for America’s decades of abuse of its reserve currency status.

Economists and government officials believe that a rise in consumer prices by 30 percent is good if it results from yuan revaluation, but that it would be terrible, even beyond the pale, if the same 30 percent rise in consumer prices resulted from a tariff put on goods made in China. The hard pressed American consumer would be hit equally hard either way. It is paradoxical that Washington is putting pressure on China to raise US consumer prices, while blaming China for harming Americans. As is usually the case, the harm we suffer is inflicted by Washington.

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Ellsberg Says Elect Sheehan, Sort Of

We were fairly okay with this, right up to the part about installing Nancy Pelosi in the White House. Frankly, what has to happen is that the ruling class is simply eliminated from Amerikkkan politics once and for all time. Then there would be a remote chance of political sanity in the future.

Daniel Ellsberg: A Personal Vision for Cindy Sheehan's Campaign
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Fri, 08/10/2007 - 9:17am. Guest Contribution

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Daniel Ellsberg

[Remarks of Daniel Ellsberg at a press conference August 9, 2007 at which Cindy Sheehan announced her independent candidacy for the 8th Congressional District of California, an office now held by Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House.]

I don't speak for Cindy Sheehan -- whom I admire unreservedly -- or for her campaign. When I say "we" in what follows, I'm really just giving my own perspective on this campaign, as one of her supporters.

I see this campaign as aiming much higher than putting Cindy Sheehan in Congress in 2009. Well before that time, we aim to help restore our Constitution, to end a war and avert starting a new one, and to remove from power, two officials -- George W. Bush and Richard Cheney -- who block those objectives before they can do more harm in their remaining months in office.

That's an ambitious project; but there's a clear path to achieving it. We will work to change public awareness and, as a result, Nancy Pelosi's policies as Speaker of the House well before the election, by revealing to the public real alternatives to the courses she and the Democrats have followed so far, and demonstrating the breadth and strength of public support for those alternatives.

The truth is that Democrats, and even Republicans, can do much better than they have been doing, under Pelosi's leadership in the House, to protect our freedoms and our security. In this campaign, we will publicize specifics of what can and should be done, and let the public tell the politicians which approach they want.

One essential demand is for Pelosi to encourage, rather than to block, Congressional investigations of past and ongoing Administration deception, unwisdom, illegality, and unconstitutionality in pursuing an aggressive war and in curtailing our rights. Such investigations, calling forth testimony under oath of current and former officials, many of whom are eager to tell the truth at last, as well as demonstrating continued Administration stonewalling will almost surely lead to what does not yet exist: irresistible pressure from a belatedly informed public for the impeachment and removal of Bush and Cheney.

Further, we need Pelosi's leadership in rescinding the unconstitutional parts -- which will not leave much -- of the PATRIOT Acts, the Military Commissions Act, and the recent, outrageous legislation purporting to legalize warrantless wiretaps and data mining. And -- absolutely essential to ending our war in Iraq, ever -- public pressure is needed to demand that Congress defund our indefinite occupation, providing funds only for the orderly, safe withdrawal of all our troops, contractors, and bases on an announced timetable.

If this campaign can help bring about even the first of these, it will also, almost incidentally, put Cindy Sheehan within reach of success in the election. This is, in fact, a historic campaign opportunity, exploiting an opening unique in American politics. At this moment, Cindy appears to face insuperable odds, opposing without party support, a powerful, heavily funded incumbent. But we aim to change that. All we are asking is for Nancy Pelosi to do what she should: to uphold her oath of office, which is not to obey a Commander-in-Chief or to enlarge a Democratic majority but to uphold and defend the Constitution.

If we can induce her to do that, then a year from now, Cindy Sheehan should be running for an open seat, or against a brand-new incumbent appointed by our Republican governor. Nancy Pelosi, third in line for succession when Bush and Cheney are impeached and removed, will be in the White House. That will, as it happens, leave an open field for Cindy.

So you see, it's nothing personal for us. After all, as representatives of big business go, Nancy Pelosi is better than most. We don't aim to kick her out of politics; we aim to kick her upstairs. And there's a bonus: President Pelosi as a write-in candidate in November. She's far from ideal, from the point of view of members of this campaign, but for Democrats, we could do a lot worse. Off the record, some of us see this as the best strategy for keeping Hillary out of the White House without letting a Republican in.

So there it is: a vision for 2009 that can evoke some real enthusiasm: Cindy in the House, Pelosi in the White House, the U.S. out of Iraq, our Constitution back, and Bush and Cheney under criminal indictment.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Daniel Ellsberg, a former official in the State and Defense departments who released the Pentagon Papers, is the author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.

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Iran

Tehranophobia
Dilip Hiro, August 9, 2007 8:30 PM

George Bush's pronouncements on the relationship between Iran and Afghanistan lower his credibility even further.

On Monday, the Iranophobia of US president George Bush was once again on display. The occasion was the joint press conference he gave at his Camp David resort along with Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai.

Contradicting Karzai's statement in a CNN interview on Sunday that Iran was "a helper and a solution" to his country, Bush urged him to be "very cautious about whether or not the Iranian influence there in Afghanistan is a positive force".

Such a statement could only come from someone ignorant of the recent history of Tehran's relationship with its eastern neighbour.

Long before 9/11, the Iranian regime was at loggerheads with the Taliban who captured Kabul in September 1996. As orthodox Sunnis of the Hanafi code, the Taliban held Shias in low esteem, and banned their annual ritual of Ashura.

When the Taliban authorities held a dozen Iranian diplomats hostage in Mazar-e Sharif in the summer of 1998, relations between the two neighbours deteriorated to the point when a war between them seemed imminent. In the end cool heads prevailed. Iran withdrew the revolutionary guard troops it had amassed along the Afghan-Iranian border.

Following 9/11, as the Bush administration prepared to attack the Taliban, the Iranians shared intelligence with it surreptitiously.

At their urging, Ismail Khan, the anti-Taliban Afghan leader based in the Iranian city of Mashhad, along with his fighters, coordinated his attack on the Taliban in western Afghanistan with the Pentagon's campaign in the north and the east. Ismail Khan's militia captured Herat, an important city near the Iranian border.

At the international conference held in Bonn, Germany, in late December 2001, Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, actively co-operated with the Americans to install Hamid Karzai as the leader of the post-Taliban Afghanistan.

At the subsequent international donors' gathering, in Tokyo, Iran pledged $500m aid to Afghanistan over five years. Unlike many other nations at the Tokyo conference, it has fulfilled its initial promise. It has been involved in several infrastructure and health care projects, particularly in western Afghanistan.

In 2003, when Ismail Khan, an ethnic Tajik, refused to send an envoy to Kabul when Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun, was formally installed as president, it was the Iranian government which persuaded him to fly his son for the inaugural ceremony. In return, Karzai appointed Khan's son as a cabinet minister.

Furthermore, ever since the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, the Iranian regime has been battling the Afghan drug dealers who use Iran as a transit route for shipping their products to Europe. In the course of hundreds of fire fights between the smugglers and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (charged with monitoring the national borders), a few thousand guards have lost their lives.

The anti-narcotic campaign by Iran, which has continued since the overthrow of the Taliban in December 2001, has been praised not only by the Karzai government but also by the UN.

However, given Bush's deep-seated aversion towards the Islamic Republic, it was unlikely that a brief history of Iran's anti-narcotic campaign was conveyed to him during the "more than a fair amount of time" he spent with Karzai discussing the fact that Afghanistan accounted for 95% of the world's poppy production used to produce heroin.

Overall, in the light of the recent history of the region, Karzai's description of Iran as "a helper and a solution" of Afghanistan was rooted in facts.

By contrast, Bush damaged his already low credibility in foreign affairs when he went on to claim that Iran had a government "that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon."

This statement is false. On September 12 2004, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei issued a fatwa (religious decree) that it was "un-Islamic" to use an atom bomb.

In his Friday prayer sermon on November 5 2004, Khamanei declared that "developing, producing or stockpiling nuclear weapons is forbidden under Islam" and for "our believing nation", and added: "They accuse us of pursuing nuclear weapons program. I am telling them as I have said before that we are not even thinking about nuclear weapons." (See Middle East International, Issue December 4 2004.)

But then again, in George Bush the world is dealing with a politician who prides himself on acting on gut feeling - rather than facts, expertise or historical experience.

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Cheney urging strikes on Iran
By Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — President Bush charged Thursday that Iran continues to arm and train insurgents who are killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq, and he threatened action if that continues.

At a news conference Thursday, Bush said Iran had been warned of unspecified consequences if it continued its alleged support for anti-American forces in Iraq. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker had conveyed the warning in meetings with his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad, the president said.

Bush wasn't specific, and a State Department official refused to elaborate on the warning.

Behind the scenes, however, the president's top aides have been engaged in an intensive internal debate over how to respond to Iran's support for Shiite Muslim groups in Iraq and its nuclear program. Vice President Dick Cheney several weeks ago proposed launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iran run by the Quds force, a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to two U.S. officials who are involved in Iran policy.

The debate has been accompanied by a growing drumbeat of allegations about Iranian meddling in Iraq from U.S. military officers, administration officials and administration allies outside government and in the news media. It isn't clear whether the media campaign is intended to build support for limited military action against Iran, to pressure the Iranians to curb their support for Shiite groups in Iraq or both.

Nor is it clear from the evidence the administration has presented whether Iran, which has long-standing ties to several Iraqi Shiite groups, including the Mahdi Army of radical cleric Muqtada al Sadr and the Badr Organization, which is allied with the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, is a major cause of the anti-American and sectarian violence in Iraq or merely one of many. At other times, administration officials have blamed the Sunni Muslim group al Qaida in Iraq for much of the violence.

For now, however, the president appears to have settled on a policy of stepped-up military operations in Iraq aimed at the suspected Iranian networks there, combined with direct American-Iranian talks in Baghdad to try to persuade Tehran to halt its alleged meddling.

The U.S. military launched one such raid Wednesday in Baghdad's predominantly Shiite Sadr City district.

But so far that course has failed to halt what American military officials say is a flow of sophisticated roadside bombs, known as explosively formed penetrators, into Iraq. Last month they accounted for a third of the combat deaths among U.S.-led forces, according to the military.

Cheney, who's long been skeptical of diplomacy with Iran, argued for military action if hard new evidence emerges of Iran's complicity in supporting anti-American forces in Iraq; for example, catching a truckload of fighters or weapons crossing into Iraq from Iran, one official said.

The two officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to talk publicly about internal government deliberations.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice opposes this idea, the officials said. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has stated publicly that "we think we can handle this inside the borders of Iraq."

Lea Anne McBride, a Cheney spokeswoman, said only that "the vice president is right where the president is" on Iran policy.

Bush left no doubt at his news conference that he intended to get tough with Iran.

"One of the main reasons that I asked Ambassador Crocker to meet with Iranians inside Iraq was to send the message that there will be consequences for . . . people transporting, delivering EFPs, highly sophisticated IEDs (improvised explosive devices), that kill Americans in Iraq," he said.

He also appeared to call on the Iranian people to change their government.

"My message to the Iranian people is, you can do better than this current government," he said. "You don't have to be isolated. You don't have to be in a position where you can't realize your full economic potential."

The Bush administration has launched what appears to be a coordinated campaign to pin more of Iraq's security troubles on Iran.

Last week, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the No. 2 U.S. military commander in Iraq, said Shiite militiamen had launched 73 percent of the attacks that had killed or wounded American troops in July. U.S. officials think that majority Shiite Iran is providing militiamen with EFPs, which pierce armored vehicles and explode once inside.

Last month, Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, a multinational force spokesman, said members of the Quds force had helped plan a January attack in the holy Shiite city of Karbala, which lead to the deaths of five American soldiers. Bergner said the military had evidence that some of the attackers had trained at Quds camps near Tehran.

Bush's efforts to pressure Iran are complicated by the fact that the leaders of U.S.-supported governments in Iraq and Afghanistan have a more nuanced view of their neighbor.

Maliki is on a three-day visit to Tehran, during which he was photographed Wednesday hand in hand with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Unconfirmed media reports said Maliki had told Iranian officials they'd played a constructive role in the region.

Asked about that, Bush said he hadn't been briefed on the meeting. "Now if the signal is that Iran is constructive, I will have to have a heart-to-heart with my friend the prime minister, because I don't believe they are constructive. I don't think he in his heart of hearts thinks they're constructive either," he said.

Bush and Afghan President Hamid Karzai differed on Iran's role when they met last weekend, with Karzai saying in a TV interview that Iran was "a helper" and Bush challenging that view.

The toughening U.S. position on Iran puts Karzai and Iraqi leaders such as Maliki in a difficult spot between Iran, their longtime ally, and the United States, which is spending lives and treasure to secure their newly formed government.

A senior Iraqi official in Baghdad said the Iraqi government received regular intelligence briefings from the United States about suspected Iranian activities. He refused to discuss details, but said the American position worried him.

The United States is "becoming more focused on Iranian influence inside Iraq," said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss private talks with the Americans. "And we don't want Iraq to become a zone of conflict between Iran and the U.S."

Proposals to use force against Iran over its actions in Iraq mark a new phase in the Bush administration's long internal war over Iran policy.

Until now, some hawks within the administration — including Cheney — are said to have favored military strikes to stop Iran from furthering its suspected ambitions for nuclear weapons.

Rice has championed a diplomatic strategy, but that, too, has failed to deter Iran so far.

Patrick Clawson, an Iran specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said a strike on the Quds camps in Iran could make the nuclear diplomacy more difficult.

Before launching such a strike, "We better be prepared to go public with very detailed and very convincing intelligence," Clawson said.

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China's Power Over the Value of the Buck

Uncle Sam, Your Banker Will See You Now ... In the Hole to China
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Early this morning China let the idiots in Washington, and on Wall Street, know that it has them by the short hairs. Two senior spokesmen for the Chinese government observed that China’s considerable holdings of US dollars and Treasury bonds “contributes a great deal to maintaining the position of the dollar as a reserve currency.”

Should the US proceed with sanctions intended to cause the Chinese currency to appreciate, “the Chinese central bank will be forced to sell dollars, which might lead to a mass depreciation of the dollar.”

If Western financial markets are sufficiently intelligent to comprehend the message, US interest rates will rise regardless of any further action by China. At this point, China does not need to sell a single bond. In an instant, China has made it clear that US interest rates depend on China, not on the Federal Reserve.

The precarious position of the US dollar as reserve currency has been thoroughly ignored and denied. The delusion that the US is “the world’s sole superpower,” whose currency is desirable regardless of its excess supply, reflects American hubris, not reality. This hubris is so extreme that only 6 weeks ago McKinsey Global Institute published a study that concluded that even a doubling of the US current account deficit to $1.6 trillion would pose no problem.

Strategic thinkers, if any remain who have not been purged by neocons, will quickly conclude that China’s power over the value of the dollar and US interest rates also gives China power over US foreign policy. The US was able to attack Afghanistan and Iraq only because China provided the largest part of the financing for Bush’s wars.

If China ceased to buy US Treasuries, Bush’s wars would end. The savings rate of US consumers is essentially zero, and several million are afflicted with mortgages that they cannot afford. With Bush’s budget in deficit and with no room in the US consumer’s budget for a tax increase, Bush’s wars can only be financed by foreigners.

No country on earth, except for Israel, supports the Bush regimes’ desire to attack Iran. It is China’s decision whether it calls in the US ambassador, and delivers the message that there will be no attack on Iran or further war unless the US is prepared to buy back $900 billion in US Treasury bonds and other dollar assets.

The US, of course, has no foreign reserves with which to make the purchase. The impact of such a large sale on US interest rates would wreck the US economy and effectively end Bush’s war-making capability. Moreover, other governments would likely follow the Chinese lead, as the main support for the US dollar has been China’s willingness to accumulate them. If the largest holder dumped the dollar, other countries would dump dollars, too.

The value and purchasing power of the US dollar would fall. When hard-pressed Americans went to Wal-Mart to make their purchases, the new prices would make them think they had wandered into Nieman Marcus. Americans would not be able to maintain their current living standard.

Simultaneously, Americans would be hit either with tax increases in order to close a budget deficit that foreigners will no longer finance or with large cuts in income security programs. The only other source of budgetary finance would be for the government to print money to pay its bills. In this event, Americans would experience inflation in addition to higher prices from dollar devaluation.

This is a grim outlook. We got in this position because our leaders are ignorant fools. So are our economists, many of whom are paid shills for some interest group. So are our corporate leaders whose greed gave China power over the US by offshoring the US production of goods and services to China. It was the corporate fat cats who turned US Gross Domestic Product into Chinese imports, and it was the “free trade, free market economists” who egged it on.

How did a people as stupid as Americans get so full of hubris?

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com.

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BushCo Supports Terrorism

Bush Administration Condoned Supporting Terrorism in Colombia
Written by Cyril Mychalejko
Thursday, 09 August 2007

The Bush Administration is now incriminated in the recent scandal involving Chiquita Brands International Inc. financially supporting a Colombian terrorist organization.

Chiquita was forced to pay a $25 million settlement to the U.S. Justice Department for providing $1.7 million in "protection money" to United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a group the State Department designated a "Foreign Terrorist Organization" in October 2001.

In April 2003 a former Chiquita executive told Secretary of Homeland Security (who at the time was assistant attorney general) Michael Chertoff that the company was paying off this paramilitary group. Chertoff recognized that the payments were illegal, but wasn't quite sure whether they were really that wrong. It was reported that he told the company to wait to do anything--like possibly stop financing a terrorist group--until he got back to them. He never did, and Chiquita made an additional $134,000 in payments over the next year.

In 2002, the Justice Department under John Ashcroft issued an indictment charging leaders of AUC with "trafficking over 17 tons of cocaine into the United States and Europe since 1997." In addition, "In 2001, the AUC killed at least 1,015 civilians, a statistic that greatly surpasses the 197 civilians killed by the FARC. The AUC also committed over 100 massacres in 2001, a typical terror tactic used to displace large portions of the peasant population…the U.S. State Department noted that the AUC was responsible for about 43 percent of Colombia's internally displaced people in 2001." So what Chiquita calls "protection money", others might call blood money.

"Even though Chiquita didn't murder anyone, that's what the money was used for -- to buy weapons," a former prosecutor in the Chiquita case told the Wall Street Journal.

The Washington Post reported that Chiquita's illegal activities in Colombia may have gone beyond financing weapons--the company actually helped smuggle them. It reported that "An Organization of American States report in 2003 said that Chiquita participated in smuggling thousands of arms for paramilitaries into the Northern Uraba region, using docks operated by the company to unload thousands of Central American assault rifles and ammunition."

The Post also uncovered that "For some high-level administration officials, Chiquita's payments were not aiding an obvious terrorism threat such as al-Qaeda; instead, the cash was going to a violent South American group [even though it is designated a terrorist group by the State Department] helping a major U.S. company maintain a stabilizing presence in Colombia."

So for the Bush Administration murders, massacres and forced displacements constitutes a "stabilizing presence." And of course terrorism is OK when it is not Islamic and when it serves U.S. corporate interests. In Latin America, this is referred to as "business as usual."

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We Don't Want to Create New Capitalists Here

Venezuela’s Co-Managed Inveval: Surviving in a Sea of Capitalism
By: Kiraz Janicke – Venezuelanalysis.com
Friday, Jul 27, 2007

Venezuela´s Bolivarian Revolution and in particular its experiments with workers co-management and in some instances workers control, is at the cutting edge of the global movement against capitalism. With the bosses’ lockout in 2002-2003, which shut down much of the Venezuelan economy for a period of two months, hundreds of factories were closed down and workers turned out onto the streets to fend for themselves. However, workers have stepped up to the challenge and it is estimated that some1200 factories have been taken over and occupied after being shut down. In 2005 the Chavez government initiated a series of decrees to allow for expropriation of industry and workers’ co-management in the interests of ‘public utility.’ On July 24 I was able to visit Inveval, a valve manufacturing company that has been under workers control since April 2005, with a delegation from the International Miranda Center to talk to the workers and find out more about their struggle, their history, their experience of workers control, the challenges they face as well as the broader question of how workers are strategizing to transform Venezuelan society in the struggle for ‘Socialism in the 21st Century’.

Whilst showing us around the factory Francisco Pinero, Inveval’s treasurer, explained that although Inveval is legally constituted as a cooperative with 51% owned by the state and 49% owned by the workers, “real power lies with the workers assembly.” Rather than supervisors, the workers at Inveval elect, through a workers assembly, recallable ‘coordinators of production,’ for a period of one year.

“Everyone here gets paid exactly the same, whether they work in administration, political formation, security or keeping the grounds clean,” another worker, Marino Mora added.

“We want the state to own 100%, but for the factory to be under workers control, for workers to control all production and administration. This is how we see the new productive model; we don't want to create new capitalists here,” Pinero made clear.

This contrasts sharply with the experience of Invepal, (a Venezuelan paper company) where a workers’ cooperative became private owners of 49% of the company, and began to contract out the work to casual workers, becoming bosses themselves in the process and reproducing capitalist relations within the factory.

“Initially we never had in mind workers control, we were just struggling for our jobs,” Pinero added.

However, he said, the formation of the workers' assembly in the factory developed organically, “We were members of the union [Sintrametal – formerly aligned to the old corrupt CTV], however, when we wanted to take over the factory we asked the union for legal help, but they didn’t help us. Because the union didn't help us we began to form assemblies, and through that process began to negotiate with the Minister [of Labor, then Maria Christina Iglesias], who helped us a lot.”

“We spent two years picketing at the gates before we decided to take it over. Through this process we developed political maturity very fast, not just through our own personal struggle, but the broader political struggles of the constituent assembly and the recall referendum.”

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Suing for Justice from Needless Violence

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The Greatest Act of Mass Terror in History?

Nine-eleven? Beirut? Bali?

Not exactly ....



We Are All Living on Planet Hiroshima
by Mark T. Harris, August 07, 2007

When the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, two-year-old Sadako Sasaki was at home with her family. Unlike tens of thousands of others, she was fortunate enough to survive the immediate blast of the 15-kiloton Uranium-235 bomb.

But the young, athletic girl who liked to run could not escape the grim reality of what it meant to live through an atomic blast. Nine years later Sadako would contract leukemia, dying a year later in a Hiroshima hospital at the age of 12. In death she joined the legions of the hibakusha, the Japanese term for the victims of radiation poisoning.

An estimated 140,000 people died as a result of the Hiroshima blast, tens of thousands of them instantly or within the next few months and almost all of them noncombatants and children. Three days later at Nagasaki, another bomb was dropped, killing thousands more. Eventually over 200,000 people would die as a result of the attacks, either during the bombings or later from illness. By any objective measure the nuclear attacks by the U.S. military constitute the largest acts of mass murder in the history of the world.

They also constitute acts shrouded in lies. At the time President Truman told Americans the targets were military sites. It was necessary to use the bombs to force Japan's surrender, he declared. The public was also told-falsely-that leaflets were dropped prior to the bombings warning people to leave. Later, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson claimed that the atom bomb saved the United States from an invasion of Japan that might have cost a million American casualties.

But U.S. official McGeorge Brundy came up with the million figure, based on nothing, as he later acknowledged. Consider only the assessment of Admiral William Leahy, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1945, who years later wrote: "It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan." The admiral compared the use of the bombs to adoption of "an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages."

The Age of 'Collateral Damage'...

Truman indeed knew Japan's surrender was imminent, according to now declassified records. But if nuclear weapons were unnecessary to end the war, they did send a forceful global message about which country would dominate the post-war era. Truman did not intend for it to be the Soviet Union. And so the dead and victimized of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not only the last casualties of World War II, but also the first casualties of the Cold War.

Dark ages indeed. In our world the deliberate slaughter of civilians in war is very much the norm. The atrocities of the Nazis and Japanese militarists are well known, but less so was the intentional targeting by Britain's air force of the concentrated worker housing of Hamburg, Germany. Ignoring the factories and U-boat construction yards south of the Elbe, British bombers under the command of extreme reactionary Arthur Harris instead spent months dropping incendiaries and high explosives on Hamburg's civilians. Some British military leaders did not support this policy, but it prevailed and was driven not only by strategic war aims but also by what science historian David Bodanis in "Electric Universe" describes as Harris' acute hatred of the working classes.

More evidence. In the Errol Morris documentary, "Fog of War," former Secretary of State Robert McNamara admits a reasonable case could have been made to have tried as war criminals the group that organized the mass death firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities. It's a significant admission since McNamara was part of that group. McNamara also acknowledges that the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution passed by Congress, giving President Johnson the authority to unleash war in Vietnam, was based on a lie. The alleged torpedo attack by North Vietnam on the U.S.S. Maddox in 1964 never happened.

Fast forward 40 years. Other than Fox News Host Sean Hannity and other venerated thinkers, the whole world now knows the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was based on an equally fabricated justification: Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. They didn't exist. Nor does the shining "democracy" whose exportation became the fallback rationale to justify Iraq's ongoing occupation. What does exist in Iraq's chaotic civil strife is the more shadowy reality of regular indiscriminate killing by the U.S. military of Iraqi civilians. "A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi," says one member of the Third Brigade, First Infantry Division, to The Nation's investigative reporters Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian. The GI was describing his impression of the general attitude among U.S. troops who operate the patrols and supply convoys, man checkpoints, and conduct raids and arrests.

And dead Iraqis there are. An estimated 68, 347 and 74,753 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the military intervention, according to the log of reported deaths kept by Iraq Body Count. In the chaos of occupation and civil war, this is invariably a conservative figure.

...And Also Madness and Irony

What also exists are Democratic candidates identified as "antiwar" such as Hilary Clinton, who attacks Barack Obama because for about five seconds he said he would rule out the use of nuclear weapons as a foreign policy option. "I don't believe that any president should make any blanket statements with respect to the use or non-use of nuclear weapons," Clinton said.

Yes, they can. They can at minimum adopt a no-first strike policy. They can reaffirm support for non-proliferation treaties and work vigorously to eliminate nuclear weapons from their own and the world's arsenals. They can question why the United States arms itself with a military force whose budget equals almost half of all world military spending. They can repudiate a foreign policy tradition that takes as a given the American right to send troops and establish bases anywhere in the world.

Unfortunately, Obama quickly scratched his anti-nuclear thought, keeping the one about invading Pakistan in pursuit of Al-Qaeda (and this is key) regardless of whether Pakistan approves. It's a sad, imperial state of affairs when the President's biggest critics scramble to show which among them is most willing to mimic the current administration's belligerent posturing on world affairs.

Sad, and also dangerous. Because 62 years after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world remains perilously trapped in conflict. "In the year 2007 the average yield of a nuclear weapon is about 10 times greater than the 15-kton Hiroshima bomb," writes Raymond G. Wilson, professor emeritus of physics at Illinois Wesleyan University, for the Peace and Conflict Monitor. "Throughout the 50 years following 1945, the average rate of creation of nuclear weapons in world arsenals was the equivalent of about 70 Hiroshima bombs per day, every one of those 18,250 days."

The threat of nuclear annihilation remains real. Yet the irony of our age is that for the first time in human history the science, technology, manufacturing and agriculture exist to eliminate all want. But in the context of a world also driven by the acquisition of corporate profits and deep-set class and nationalist divisions, the world's people instead face an increasingly uncertain and violent future. Or even the possibility of no future.

When the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the famous physicist Albert Einstein publicly protested. The U.S. government responded by adding Einstein's protests to his FBI file. Now we have a President who effectively abandons nonproliferation treaties for a vision of a new generation of tactical nuclear and other weapons. The President who attacked a country based on a blatant lie also considers it his prerogative to warn non-nuclear states even they are not safe from his willingness to initiate a nuclear attack. Is it really that hard to grasp why such policies will invariably engender more nuclear proliferation and more jihadi terrorism?

No doubt there is plenty of reason to despair. But then there is also the story of young Sadako Sasaki, who did not deserve to die at age 12. Sadako's story is only one among countless millions of tragic accounts of "man's inhumanity to man," of the innocents whose lives over the last century have been cheap fodder for the killing machines of state power, whether of the democratic, fascist, or other variety.

During her months of hospitalization Sadako undertook a project to fold a thousand paper cranes in the hope that, according to Japanese legend, her prayer for life would be granted. It was perhaps just the wish of a child. But Sadako never gave up and folded the cranes up until the day of her death. In Japan, after her death young people inspired by her story organized to collect money to build a statue of Sadako, which was unveiled in Hiroshima Peace Park in 1958. There is also a statue of Sadako in Seattle's Peace Park.

At the bottom of the statute in Japan of Sadako holding a golden crane is the inscription, "This is our cry, This is our prayer, Peace in the world."

Sixty-two years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed, they remain words to remember and live by in this mad age.

***

Mark T. Harris is a journalist living in Bloomington, Illinois. He has written for Utne, Dissent, Chicago's Conscious Choice, and other magazines. Email: TheEditorPage@aol.com. Website: www.Mark-T-Harris.com.

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The War Was Doomed, Period

Iraq Is About to Become a Lot Worse
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted August 7, 2007.

The sad truth about Iraq in the near future is that it will get much, much worse, whether American troops stay or leave.

The war in Iraq is about to get worse -- much worse. The Democrats' decision to let the war run its course, while they frantically wash their hands of responsibility, means that it will sputter and stagger forward until the mission collapses. This will be sudden. The security of the Green Zone, our imperial city, will be increasingly breached. Command and control will disintegrate. And we will back out of Iraq humiliated and defeated. But this will not be the end of the conflict. It will, in fact, signal a phase of the war far deadlier and more dangerous to American interests.

Iraq no longer exists as a unified country. The experiment that was Iraq, the cobbling together of disparate and antagonistic patches of the Ottoman Empire by the victorious powers in the wake of World War I, belongs to the history books. It will never come back. The Kurds have set up a de facto state in the north, the Shiites control most of the south and the center of the country is a battleground.

There are 2 million Iraqis who have fled their homes and are internally displaced. Another 2 million have left the country, most to Syria and Jordan, which now has the largest number of refugees per capita of any country on Earth. An Oxfam report estimates that one in three Iraqis are in need of emergency aid, but the chaos and violence is so widespread that assistance is impossible. Iraq is in a state of anarchy. The American occupation forces are one more source of terror tossed into the caldron of suicide bombings, mercenary armies, militias, massive explosions, ambushes, kidnappings and mass executions. But wait until we leave.

It was not supposed to turn out like this. Remember all those visions of a democratic Iraq, visions peddled by the White House and fatuous pundits like Thomas Friedman and the gravel-voiced morons who pollute our airwaves on CNN and Fox News? They assured us that the war would be a cakewalk. We would be greeted as liberators. Democracy would seep out over the borders of Iraq to usher in a new Middle East. Now, struggling to salvage their own credibility, they blame the debacle on poor planning and mismanagement.

There are probably about 10,000 Arabists in the United States -- people who have lived for prolonged periods in the Middle East and speak Arabic. At the inception of the war you could not have rounded up more than about a dozen who thought this was a good idea. And I include all the Arabists in the State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence community. Anyone who had spent significant time in Iraq knew this would not work. The war was not doomed because Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz did not do sufficient planning for the occupation. The war was doomed, period. It never had a chance. And even a cursory knowledge of Iraqi history and politics made this apparent.

This is not to deny the stupidity of the occupation. The disbanding of the Iraqi army; the ham-fisted attempt to install the crook and, it now turns out, Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi in power; the firing of all Baathist public officials, including university professors, primary school teachers, nurses and doctors; the failure to secure Baghdad and the vast weapons depots from looters; allowing heavily armed American units to blast their way through densely populated neighborhoods, giving the insurgency its most potent recruiting tool -- all ensured a swift descent into chaos.

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For the really Bad Cops it will be ChocoCat !!!

Thai officials hope Hello Kitty can shame errant cops

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) -- Thai police officers who break rules will be forced to wear hot pink armbands featuring "Hello Kitty," the Japanese icon of cute, as a mark of shame, a senior officer said Monday.

Police officers caught littering, parking in a prohibited area, or arriving late -- among other misdemeanors -- will be forced to stay in the division office and wear the armband all day, said Police Col. Pongpat Chayaphan. The officers won't wear the armband in public.

The striking armband features Hello Kitty sitting atop two hearts.

"Simple warnings no longer work. This new twist is expected to make them feel guilt and shame and prevent them from repeating the offense, no matter how minor," said Pongpat, acting chief of the Crime Suppression Division in Bangkok.

"(Hello) Kitty is a cute icon for young girls. It's not something macho police officers want covering their biceps," Pongpat said.

He said police caught breaking the law will be subject the same fines and penalties as any other members of the public.

"We want to make sure that we do not condone small offenses," Pongpat said, adding that the CSD believed that getting tough on petty misdemeanors would lead to fewer cases of more serious offenses including abuse of power and mistreatment of the public by police officers.

Hello Kitty, invented by Sanrio Co. in 1974, has been popular for years with children and young women. The celebrity cat adorns everything from diamond-studded jewelry, Fender guitars and digital cameras to lunch boxes, T-shirts and stationery.

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Nine-Eleven: A Failure of Political Attention

Bush Isn't Spying on al Qaeda ... He's Spying on You
By Robert Parry, Consortium News. Posted August 4, 2007.

The extraordinary secrecy surrounding the spying operations revealed in Alberto Gonzales' Senate testimony is not aimed at al-Qaeda, but at the American people.

The dispute over whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales committed perjury when he parsed words about George W. Bush's warrantless surveillance program misses a larger point: the extraordinary secrecy surrounding these spying operations is not aimed at al-Qaeda, but at the American people.

There has never been a reasonable explanation for why a fuller discussion of these operations would help al-Qaeda, although that claim often is used by the Bush administration to challenge the patriotism of its critics or to avoid tough questions.

On July 27, for instance, White House press secretary Tony Snow fended off reporters who asked about apparent contradictions in Gonzales's testimony by saying:

"This gets us back into the situation that I understand is unsatisfactory because there are lots of questions raised and the vast majority of those we're not going to be in a position to answer, simply because they do involve matters of classification that we cannot and will not discuss publicly."

Discussion closed.

But al-Qaeda terrorists always have assumed that their electronic communications were vulnerable to interception, which is why 9/11 attackers like Mohamed Atta traveled overseas for face-to-face meetings with their handlers. They limited their phone calls to mostly routine conversations.

The terrorists also had no reason to know or to care that the U.S. government was or wasn't getting wiretap approval from the secret court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They simply took for granted that their communications could be intercepted and acted accordingly.

It never made sense to think that al-Qaeda terrorists suddenly would get loose-lipped just because the FISA court was or wasn't in the mix. The FISA court rubber-stamps almost all wiretap requests from the Executive Branch for domestic spying, and overseas calls don't require a warrant.

Can anyone really imagine a conversation like "Gee, Osama, since Bush has to get FISA approval, we can now call our sleeper agents and plan the next attack."

Similarly, there's no reason to think terrorists would change their behavior significantly if they knew that the U.S. government was engaged in massive data-mining operations, poring through electronic records of citizens and non-citizens alike.

The 9/11 attackers mostly stayed off the grid and many of their transactions, such as renting housing, would not alone have raised suspicions. Indeed, the patterns that deserved more attention, such as enrollment in flight-training classes and the arrival of known al-Qaeda operatives, were detected by alert FBI agents in the field but ignored by FBI officials in Washington -- and by Bush while on a month-long vacation in Texas.

The 9/11 attacks were less a failure of intelligence than a failure of political attention by Bush's national security team.

Americans in the Dark

So what's the real explanation for all the secrecy about the overall structure of the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program?

The chief reason, especially for the excessive secrecy around the data-mining operations, appears to be Bush's political need to prevent a full debate inside the United States about the security value of these Big Brother-type procedures when weighed against invasions of Americans' privacy.

Bush knows he could run into trouble if he doesn't keep the American people in the dark. In 2002, for instance, when the Bush administration launched a project seeking "total information awareness" on virtually everyone on earth involved in the modern economy, the disclosure was met with public alarm.

The administration cited the terrorist threat to justify the program which involved applying advanced computer technology to analyze trillions of bytes of data on electronic transactions and communications. The goal was to study the electronic footprints left by every person in the developed world during the course of their everyday lives -- from the innocuous to the embarrassing to the potentially significant.

The government could cross-check books borrowed from a library, fertilizer bought at a farm-supply outlet, X-rated movies rented at a video store, prescriptions filled at a pharmacy, sites visited on the Internet, tickets reserved for a plane, borders crossed while traveling, rooms rented at a motel, and countless other examples.

Bush's aides argued that their access to this electronic data might help detect terrorists, but the data could prove even more useful in building dossiers on anti-war activists or blackmailing political opponents. A targeted individual would have almost no privacy in the face of an all-knowing government.

Despite the administration's assurance that political abuses wouldn't happen, the capability would be a huge temptation for political strategists like Karl Rove who have made clear that they view anyone not supporting Bush's war on terror as a terrorist ally.

In 2002, the technological blueprint for this Orwellian-style project was on the drawing board at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's top research and development arm. DARPA commissioned a comprehensive plan for this electronic spying -- and did so publicly.

"Transactional data" was to be gleaned from electronic data on every kind of activity -- "financial, education, travel, medical, veterinary, country entry, place/event entry, transportation, housing, critical resources, government, communications," according to the Web site for DARPA's Information Awareness Office.

The program would then cross-reference this data with the "biometric signatures of humans," data collected on individuals' faces, fingerprints, gaits and irises. With this knowledge at its fingertips, the government would have what it called "total information awareness" about pretty much everyone.

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Junior's Good-Is-Bad Philosophy

An Immoral Philosophy
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times, Posted August 1, 2007.

What kind of philosophy says that it's O.K. to subsidize insurance companies, but not to provide health care to children?

When a child is enrolled in the State Children's Health Insurance Program (Schip), the positive results can be dramatic. For example, after asthmatic children are enrolled in Schip, the frequency of their attacks declines on average by 60 percent, and their likelihood of being hospitalized for the condition declines more than 70 percent.

Regular care, in other words, makes a big difference. That's why Congressional Democrats, with support from many Republicans, are trying to expand Schip, which already provides essential medical care to millions of children, to cover millions of additional children who would otherwise lack health insurance.

But President Bush says that access to care is no problem -- "After all, you just go to an emergency room" -- and, with the support of the Republican Congressional leadership, he's declared that he'll veto any Schip expansion on "philosophical" grounds.

It must be about philosophy, because it surely isn't about cost. One of the plans Mr. Bush opposes, the one approved by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in the Senate Finance Committee, would cost less over the next five years than we'll spend in Iraq in the next four months. And it would be fully paid for by an increase in tobacco taxes.

The House plan, which would cover more children, is more expensive, but it offsets Schip costs by reducing subsidies to Medicare Advantage -- a privatization scheme that pays insurance companies to provide coverage, and costs taxpayers 12 percent more per beneficiary than traditional Medicare.

Strange to say, however, the administration, although determined to prevent any expansion of children's health care, is also dead set against any cut in Medicare Advantage payments.

So what kind of philosophy says that it's O.K. to subsidize insurance companies, but not to provide health care to children?

Well, here's what Mr. Bush said after explaining that emergency rooms provide all the health care you need: "They're going to increase the number of folks eligible through Schip; some want to lower the age for Medicare. And then all of a sudden, you begin to see a -- I wouldn't call it a plot, just a strategy -- to get more people to be a part of a federalization of health care."

Now, why should Mr. Bush fear that insuring uninsured children would lead to a further "federalization" of health care, even though nothing like that is actually in either the Senate plan or the House plan? It's not because he thinks the plans wouldn't work. It's because he's afraid that they would. That is, he fears that voters, having seen how the government can help children, would ask why it can't do the same for adults.

And there you have the core of Mr. Bush's philosophy. He wants the public to believe that government is always the problem, never the solution. But it's hard to convince people that government is always bad when they see it doing good things. So his philosophy says that the government must be prevented from solving problems, even if it can. In fact, the more good a proposed government program would do, the more fiercely it must be opposed.

This sounds like a caricature, but it isn't. The truth is that this good-is-bad philosophy has always been at the core of Republican opposition to health care reform. Thus back in 1994, William Kristol warned against passage of the Clinton health care plan "in any form," because "its success would signal the rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the very moment that such policy is being perceived as a failure in other areas."

But it has taken the fight over children's health insurance to bring the perversity of this philosophy fully into view.

There are arguments you can make against programs, like Social Security, that provide a safety net for adults. I can respect those arguments, even though I disagree. But denying basic health care to children whose parents lack the means to pay for it, simply because you're afraid that success in insuring children might put big government in a good light, is just morally wrong.

And the public understands that. According to a recent Georgetown University poll, 9 in 10 Americans -- including 83 percent of self-identified Republicans -- support an expansion of the children's health insurance program.

There is, it seems, more basic decency in the hearts of Americans than is dreamt of in Mr. Bush's philosophy.

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When Did the Maker Ask Us to Build Prisons?

Under an I-35 Bridge with Saint Benezet: Safe Passage for Willie Nelson
By GREG MOSES, August 6, 2007

Friday evening around sundown I found Saint Benezet passing through Austin. He was standing on Lady Bird Lake checking out the I-35 bridge, and I asked him why.

“The Maker's favorite son Willie is driving this way, and I want to make sure he's okay,” said the famed Saint of Le Pont d'Avignon as the palms of his hands cupped a beam. Then he asked me why I was looking so puzzled.

“Well,” I said. “Isn't Willie coming to town on a marijuana mission? Won't he be raising money for a bunch of folks who are pro pot?”

“Do you think that bothers us?” asked the young saint as convoys of freight trucks flew overhead. “Didn't The Maker make grapes, too?”

I tried to remember when any god was last reported to be denouncing wine.

“On the other hand,” said the young saint, “when did The Maker ever ask you folks to build prisons.”

As he moved to the next beam, I recalled that he was always a plain speaking saint, telling powerful people what they needed to do next. If there was any divine directive to build more prisons for marijuana offenders, he would say so.

“And what are you doing here?” he asked.

“I came to talk to the river,” I replied.

“You mean the lake?”

“Okay, the dammed river,” I grinned.

And he grinned, too.

As Saint Benezet glided West towards the bridges at Congress Avenue and Boulevard Mirabeau Bonaparte Lamar, the water rippled with a cool breeze. In the wind, I heard him singing, “Les musiciens font comme ça. . . .”

Note: Willie Nelson headlines the Austin Freedom Fest at The Backyard near Austin August 10, with proceeds going to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), The Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), and the Women's Alliance for Medical Marijuana (WAMM).

Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence. When not speaking with saints on water, he attempts to keep up with demands of a heteronomous will. He can be reached at gmosesx@prodigy.net.

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Losing the War by Handing Out Free Guns

Someday, I want someone to explain to me how electing a brain-dead president resulted in the entire federal government becoming incompetent mental midgets.

US loses track of weapons in Iraq
By David Morgan in Washington
August 06, 2007 02:53pm

THE Pentagon cannot account for 190,000 AK-47 rifles and pistols given to Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005 - about half the weapons earmarked for soldiers and police.

The Government Accountability Office(GAO), the investigative arm of the US Congress, said in a July 31 report to lawmakers that the Defence Department also could not account for 135,000 items of body armour and 115,000 helmets reported to be issued to Iraqi forces as of September 22, 2005.

The GAO said the Pentagon concurred with its findings and had begun a review to ensure full accountability for the program to train and equip Iraqi forces.

"However, our review of the 2007 property books found continuing problems with missing and incomplete records," the GAO report said.

The report raised concerns that weapons provided by the United States could be falling into the hands of Iraqi insurgents, just as politicians and policymakers in Washington await a September report on the success of US President George W. Bush's surge strategy for stabilising Baghdad.

One senior Pentagon official told The Washington Post some weapons probably were being used against US troops. He said an Iraqi brigade created in Fallujah disintegrated in 2004 and began fighting American soldiers.

Many in Washington view the development of effective Iraqi army and police forces as a vital step toward reducing the number of US troops in Iraq.

Since 2003, the United States has provided about $US19.2 billion ($22.55bn) to develop Iraqi security forces, the GAO said. The Defence Department has recently asked for another $US2bn ($2.35bn) to continue the train-and-equip program.

Congress funded the program for Iraqi security forces outside traditional security assistance programs, providing the Pentagon with a large degree of flexibility in managing the effort, the GAO said.

"Officials stated that since the funding did not go through traditional security assistance programs, the DOD accountability requirements normally applicable to these programs did not apply," the GAO report said.

Military officials in Iraq reported issuing 355,000 weapons to Iraqi security forces from June 2004 through September 2005, including 185,000 rifles and 170,000 pistols, the GAO said.

But the Defence Department could not account for 110,000 rifles and 80,000 pistols, the GAO said. Those sums amount to about 54 per cent of the total weapons distributed to the Iraqi forces.

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Michael Moore Is Having an Impact

Sicko Spurs Audiences Into Action
By Josh Tyler: 2007-07-01 17:15:27

Long time readers of this site no doubt know that I live in Texas. As everyone knows there’s no more conservative state in the Union than here. And I don’t just live in Texas; I live in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. Dallas isn’t some pocket of hippy-dippy behavior. This isn’t Austin. Dallas is the sort of place where guys in cowboy hats still drive around in giant SUV’s with “W” stickers on the back windshield, global warming and Iraq be damned. It’s probably the only spot left in America where you stand a good chance of getting the crap kicked out of you for badmouthing the president.

So when I went to see Sicko for a second time this afternoon, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the audience. I wasn’t watching it downtown, where the city’s few elitist liberals congregate and drink expensive lattes. I went to a random mall in the mid-cities, where folks were likely to be just folks. As I sat down, right behind me entered an obligatory, cowboy hat wearing redneck in his 50s. He announced his presence by shouting across the theater in a thick Texas drawl to his already seated wife “you owe me fer seein this!”

Sicko started; the stereotypical Texas guy sat down behind me and never stopped talking. He talked through the entire movie… and I listened. The first ten to twenty minutes of the film he spent badmouthing Moore to his wife and snorting in disgust whenever MM went into one of his trademark monologues. But as the movie wore on his protestations became quieter, less enthusiastic. Somewhere along the way, maybe at the half way point, right before my ears, Sicko changed this man’s mind. By the forty-five minute mark, he, along with the rest of the audience were breaking into spontaneous applause. He stopped pooh-poohing the movie and started shouting out “hell yeah!” at the screen. It was as if the whole world had been flipped upside down. This is Texas, where people support the president and voting democratic is something only done by the terrorists. Michael Moore should be public enemy number one.

By the time the movie was over, public enemy number one had become George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy all rolled together. When the credits rolled the audience filed out and into the bathrooms. At the urinals, my redneck friend couldn’t stop talking about the film, and I kept listening. He struck up a conversation with a random black man in his 40s standing next to him, and soon everyone was peeing and talking about just how fucked everything is.

I kept my distance, as we all finished and exited at the same time. Outside the restroom doors… the theater was in chaos. The entire Sicko audience had somehow formed an impromptu town hall meeting in front of the ladies room. I’ve never seen anything like it. This is Texas goddammit, not France or some liberal college campus. But here these people were, complete strangers from every walk of life talking excitedly about the movie. It was as if they simply couldn’t go home without doing something drastic about what they’d just seen. My redneck compadre and his new friend found their wives at the center of the group, while I lingered in the background waiting for my spouse to emerge.

The talk gradually centered around a core of 10 or 12 strangers in a cluster while the rest of us stood around them listening intently to this thing that seemed to be happening out of nowhere. The black gentleman engaged by my redneck in the restroom shouted for everyone’s attention. The conversation stopped instantly as all eyes in this group of 30 or 40 people were now on him. “If we just see this and do nothing about it,” he said, “then what’s the point? Something has to change.” There was silence, then the redneck’s wife started calling for email addresses. Suddenly everyone was scribbling down everyone else’s email, promising to get together and do something… though no one seemed to know quite what. It was as if I’d just stepped into the world’s most bizarre protest rally, except instead of hippies the group was comprised of men and women of every age, skin color, income, and walk of life coming together on something that had shaken them deeply, and to the core.

In all my thirty years on this earth, I have never ever seen any movie have this kind of unifying effect on people. It was like I was standing there, at the birth of a new political movement. Even after 9/11, there was never a reaction like this, at least not in Texas. If Sicko truly has this sort of power, then Michael Moore has done something beyond amazing. If it can change people, affect people like this in the conservative hotbed of Texas, then Sicko isn’t just a great movie, seeing it may be one of the most important things you do all year.

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When Will I Die?

A Week in the Death of Iraq
By Dr. Mohammed

08/05/07 "Washington Post" -- -- -When will I die? That's the question circling in my head when I awake on Wednesday. I'm sweating, as usual. My muscles ache from another long night of no electricity in weather only slightly cooler than hell. As I dress for work, other questions assail me: How will I die? Will it be a shot in the head? Will I be blown to pieces? Or be seized at a police checkpoint because of my sect, then tortured and killed and thrown out on the sidewalk?

I gaze at my wife as she sleeps, her face twisted in discomfort from the heat. What will happen to her if I die? Soon she'll have no one in Iraq but me. Will she be able to identify my body? Will I get a proper burial?

I'm a dentist in my mid-20s, married to an aspiring dentist. My father is a prominent orthopedist who fled Iraq after being threatened by both Sunni radicals in al-Qaeda in Iraq (which wanted to recruit him and extorted money for his life when he refused) and Shiite ones in Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army (because he is a Sunni). My father-in-law, who works in the oil ministry, has also been menaced; he will leave the country at the end of this month.

In fact, my wife and I left Iraq in July 2006 and went to Jordan. But I wasn't able to find any work there, so we came back to Baghdad. Now we live here as quietly as possible, keeping a low profile. I don't use my family name anymore. (And I am not using my full name for this piece.)

I walk to my job at a government clinic 15 minutes from my home at the intersection of a Sunni and a Shiite neighborhood. We've had lots of bombings nearby. On my way, I see the hulks of burned-out cars. Barbed wire and concrete blocks line the streets. The ground is strewn with bullet casings. Death is in the air. A car passes me slowly in an alley, my heart beats rapidly and I pray that I won't be kidnapped or asked what sect I belong to.

At the clinic's gate, I greet the guards. (I'm afraid of them; they might be members of a militia. Here in Baghdad, everyone's suspect until proven otherwise.) I sign in and get the bad news: The diesel generator is almost out of fuel. We have enough for about one more day, and my boss thinks it could be a month or longer before the ministry of health will provide us any more.

How can we treat our patients? I ask angrily. My boss shrugs. We were already short of supplies. I feel bad for the patients, some of whom are really in pain, so I work as fast as I can. The clinic is open from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., and we have five dentists and three chairs. Normally, we can take 15 patients a day, but on this day, I treat eight myself.

* * *

I'm proud of my work today as I head home, where, as usual, there is no electricity.

In my neighborhood (and most of Baghdad), we depend on ourselves for power. In most places, there's someone who owns a large generator and sells other residents eight hours of electricity a day. I pay $120 a month for that service. For an additional three hours a day, I use my home generator. That costs me about $150 a month because fuel here is so expensive. We have to wait six to eight hours in line to get any at the gas stations, which close at 6 or 7 p.m. The curfew starts at 11 p.m., so many people sleep in their cars until the stations reopen in the morning. This farce has created a booming black market in which fuel sells for double its official price.

Over lunch, my wife, who has just finished the final exams for her last year of dental school, tells me how scared, bored and hopeless she feels. How long will we stay in Iraq? she asks me. Until one of us dies?

If we leave again, I want to go to a country where we might have a future. I want children, but I promised myself that I wouldn't have any as long as I'm living in Iraq. My children don't deserve to be born in this country. I won't make the mistake my parents made.

Later that day, we go shopping for food. This is the only entertainment we have in our lives, apart from the Internet. It's so hot. I wish I could go out in shorts. But the militias don't allow it. It's too much to ask in Iraq. It's too much to ask to be able to wear a goatee or a gold necklace. It's too much to ask to drive my BMW because I could be killed for it. There's too much that's too much to ask for in Baghdad.

We have fun at the market, but on the way back, a pickup truck drives by with a dead body in the back.

* * *

On Thursday before dawn, an explosion rocks our house. I lie in bed, unable to get back to sleep, until it's time to get up for work.

When I arrive at the clinic, my fellow dentists are sitting on chairs in the yard. That means we are out of diesel. We'll have four hours with nothing to do (because we're required to stay at work even if we can't do any work), so I join them. The talk turns to the situation in Baghdad and the U.S. presence here.

"As soon as the Americans leave Iraq, Iranian jets will be over Baghdad bombarding every neighborhood that is not loyal to them, whether Shiite or Sunni," one of the doctors says. I offer my opinion: "The U.S. should stay, because it's not just Iran or neighboring countries that we have to fear. The Iraqi National Guard and the police are also our enemies now."

In contrast, many uneducated or less educated Iraqis think that the U.S. military is at the root of every problem. They believe that if the Americans leave, there will be peace. I agree, up to a point, that U.S. troops are responsible for some of the trouble we have, but I don't blame them. I blame the Iraqis who let this happen, who enjoy destruction and death -- the sectarian government and the militias. They are the real cause of this tragedy.

We talk about the insurgents and the militias, both Sunni and Shiite, and about sectarian violence, which is skyrocketing. So are civilian casualties and the government's lies, which are supposed to convince the world that it's doing its job, that it's winning victories against terrorism and that the terrorists are fleeing Iraq. Aren't they ashamed of themselves? The only ones fleeing Iraq are good, honest Iraqis.

"What do the insurgents want?" another doctor asks. "What have they achieved after all those explosions and all those people dead?"

They have achieved nothing that a sane person would consider an achievement, I respond. They've made the country impossible to live in; they've terrorized people, killed Americans, made us afraid to leave our homes. They've taken control of neighborhoods after the people who lived there fled for their lives. All of this is an achievement to them, but not to a sane person like you or me. They have been brainwashed by fanatical religious clerics; they have been tempted by the money that flows from Iran and other countries or that they get from kidnapping and crime.

In the end, we all agree: The only losers are honest, patriotic Iraqi people. For them, democracy, liberation and freedom are just myths. All we want is to live a normal life.

When I get back from work, my wife and I take a taxi to Adhamiya, the district where my father-in-law lives. We normally spend Thursday and Friday with him. The driver, as usual, is afraid to enter the neighborhood, so he leaves us at the gate in Antar Square and we walk from there.

As we make our way to my father-in-law's house, a confrontation starts behind us. We dash into an alley. I relive in my mind what happened the previous week: A sniper from the Iraqi National Guard shot at us and forced us to cower in a ruined building for what seemed like hours. It was on the same street, the only open road that leads to Adhamiya. People call it the "street of death."

We finally make it to my father-in-law's. After dinner, we decide to sleep upstairs, but just as my head hits the pillow, there's an explosion in front of the house, followed by gunfire all around. We rush downstairs, where it's safer, and sleep on the floor. We spend another day full of nonstop explosions and gunfire at my father-in-law's before heading back home at noon on Saturday.

* * *

Sunday is a beautiful day. My wife and I make popcorn, sip cola and watch the Iraqi national soccer team beat Saudi Arabia 1 to 0 in the final for the Asian Cup. My neighborhood erupts in celebratory gunfire. Why don't the shooters think about where their bullets might go when they hit the ground? Two people are killed and six are wounded from falling rounds.

After the shooting stops, I head out to buy cigarettes. I am amazed by what I see. There's unity at last. People stream from Adhamiya and al-Saab and al-Kahira and meet at the al-Nidaa mosque intersection. They are celebrating on the same spot where on other days confrontations erupt, blood flows and people die. An Iraqi National Guard convoys rolls through, with soldiers dancing on top of the Humvees. I laugh out loud and feel safe for the first time since returning to Iraq.

I hurry home to get my wife and the digital camera. We head out to Palestine Street to watch the crowd and snap pictures. Then my wife gets an uneasy look on her face. All these people, she says, might attract a suicide bomber. We go home.

On the news that night: 16 people dead and 66 injured in Zaiona; 10 dead and an unknown number injured in Mansor. They were innocents celebrating the victory of their soccer team. Can't they give us one happy day? Is that too much to ask? May God have mercy on their souls.

* * *

The next day, dozens more die across my country. This has become normal. We're used to it. Iraqi lives are worth nothing; we're just numbers in the news. In the past, Iraqis would wear black to mourn a young man for many years. They would cry forever. But not anymore. Now we bury in the morning and forget by the evening.

On Tuesday, my wife gets her grades from dental school. She has done well. I am so happy that I vow to confront terrorism and live a normal life for one day. I decide to drive my own car and take my wife to a nice lunch at the only good restaurant left in Baghdad. I leave work early, head home and remove the cover from my car for the first time in a year. And with it, I remove my fear.

Oh, how I've missed my BMW. When I tell my wife that we're taking the car, she is afraid, but I convince her that nothing will happen. It's just one day, I say. For once, we'll live like normal people. I drive to the restaurant and feel so happy -- and fearful at the same time. But we arrive safely, although I'm stopped at a police checkpoint and asked about my sect. Normally, they just ask where you live or where you're heading, which are also clues, but this time they ask me directly. I have to lie, but luckily I have a neutral name that isn't obviously either Sunni or Shiite.

We have a wonderful time at lunch. But much later, after I finally go to bed at 3 a.m., after the neighborhood generator stops, the eternal questions start up again. Will it ever end? When will I die?

last.of.iraqis@gmail.com - Dr. Mohammed writes the blog Last of Iraqis at www.last-of-iraqis.blogspot.com.

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The Peace Movement Is Not United on Afghanistan

The Other War
by Cindy Sheehan
August 05, 2007, CommonDreams.org

I was sitting behind the stage at Union Square the other day when a young woman with a cameraman in tow approached me and asked me if she could ask me a “question.” Seldom when I am approached to answer “a” question does it turn out to be just one question and this person looked like she was about 14 years old.

“Sure,” I answered her. With eyes brimming with tears, this was her question, prefaced by a comment:”I am a soldier and I served in Afghanistan, what do you have to say to the troops who are over there?”

I don’t know what told me this soldier was not “pro-war,” she had on jeans and a non-descript striped shirt with a collar. Neither she, nor her cameraman had any anti-war paraphernalia. I think it was her watery eyes that gave her away as being anti-war. I couldn’t be sure though because it has become certain groups and individuals’ life’s missions to harass me.

My heart is always with our troops no matter what these “pro-murder, pro-destruction, pro-Bush” people think. My own son was a soldier and, although he didn’t have any kind of killer instinct and a fear of having to kill someone when he went to Iraq, he was a good soldier and he loved his Army family and proved that love by dying to save some of them. I think most of our troops are in Iraq and Afghanistan to support their “buddies” as a young soldier wrote to me:

“I did not know your son, but we lived on the same little FOB, and I recognize his name, and face. I was infantry, and he must have been in 182 since I don’t recognize him from the other INF. companies.

I hear many people ask why are we dying for nothing. NOTHING, could be further from the truth. We do not fight, and die for a man. We do not fight, and die for a cause, or corporation. We fight, and die for each other, nothing more. I will not have it said in my presence that your son died for nothing. He died for me, he died for his brothers, and sisters in arms. That is why we all fight. That is why we all die.”

I understand that kind of camaraderie and love. There are many people whom I would die for and I would have traded places with Casey in a heartbeat if given the choice. What I don’t understand is a cowardly commander-in-chief and his vice-war lord sending our brave troops to die for each other. Even the troops know there is no “noble cause” other than the bond that glues them together. I have met hundreds of vets from the Iraq/Afghanistan mistakes on down to the Korean War mistake and they all tell me that they would have taken Casey’s place, too.

When the young vet confronted me with the camera in Union Square the other day, I could only speak from my heart. I answered her:

“Oh, honey. It must seem like the peace movement in the US has forgotten about our troops in Afghanistan and the Afghani people. I know that I don’t talk about that conflict enough, although I think that it is morally wrong, too. I know that our soldiers are dying and being harmed there, too. As much as the media doesn’t cover what’s happening in Iraq, it pays even less attention to Afghanistan. However, the peace movement is not united on Afghanistan, because many people think that it is a “good war.” I believe no such thing and I promise you that I will be more vigilant about exposing that war crime, too.”

Then I hugged her and whispered in her ear: “Your buddies deserve honor and attention, too and I am so sorry for what you have had to go through!”

She replied to me: “I am going to send this to my friends in Afghanistan and I just want to let you know that we are all behind you.” That quick exchange had an enormous impact on me and I will fulfill my promise to that young woman.

Why did our country and a criminal international coalition invade Afghanistan? Is it for a strategic placement of oil pipelines? Was it to install a former oil executive as a US controlled puppet president? Was it because Osama bin Laden may have been in the country (and as many accuse, allowed to escape at Tora Bora?) We know for a fact that Osama was armed, trained and supported by the US when he was part of the mujahadin that fought against the USSR, that caused the collapse of the Soviet Union along with its rampant militarism. We know that bin Forgotten is still at large and that, in the initial invasion of Afghanistan, more innocent civilians were killed than on 9-11.

We also know for a fact that poppy production is at historically profitable levels and the Taliban is extorting bribe money from the growers to finance its insurgency against the US. When the Taliban controlled the country opium production was illegal and the penalties were harsh. Women are still oppressed and besides a Coca-Cola bottling plant and war-profiteering not much has been accomplished.

According to www.icasualties.org, 421 US troops have been killed and 6,213 have been wounded in Afghanistan. One of the fatalities was John Torres who was apparently murdered by a fellow soldier because John was exposing the active drug trade on his base. The true circumstances of Pat Tillman’s murder were covered up in the highest echelons of BushCo and we may never know the truth or the profound implications of that crime. Both these incidents demonstrate that not everybody fighting wars are watching out for their buddies, and besides, may be of the paid mercenary persuasion.

Most of our troops are courageous and only trying to survive under unconscionable conditions and I want to publicly honor our young people who have had their lives stolen by the war machine in Afghanistan and send my heartfelt condolences to their families. Not even the evil empire of BushCo can corrupt or diminish our children’s forced sacrifices.

Our troops stationed in Afghanistan need to know that the US peace movement supports them by working to get them home, too.

Note: For people who have been asking, my formal announcement as a candidate against Nancy Pelosi has been pushed back to August 9th due to logistical concerns. www.CindyForCongress.org should be going live soon with more details and a way to donate to my campaign.

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