Empire Burlesque 1.0

Blood Kin: More Bang for Your Buck the Bush Family Way

2005-03-01T16:24:00.001Z

Original version published in The Moscow Times, Dec. 5, 2003.

Imagine these banner headlines, circa, say, 1998: President's Brother in Biz With Red Chinese! President's Brother Beds Hookers as Corporate Perk! President's Brother Hip Deep in War Profiteering: White House Policies Fill Family Pockets!

There would've been a hot time in the old media town with all that, eh? Wall-to-wall coverage, 24/7, Fox News frothing, Washington Post pounding, tabloids screaming – "Oval Evil: Reds, Beds and Milking the Dead!" Earnest clucking in the halls of Congress: "We must get to the bottom of these unsavoury connections." Late-night comics cracking wise: "Hey, when the president's brother orders Chinese, he ain't just talking chow mein: 'Yeah, I'll have the rice, the won-ton, two blondes and a bag of unmarked bills, please.'"

But of course, that was another millennium. In our new, more enlightened, more chastened age, we humbly accept – even celebrate – the special privileges accorded to the great ones among us. And so, with a couple of honorable exceptions, the bigtime American media lay a nice soft comfy quilt of silence over last month's revelations about presidential brother Neil Bush – details which emerged from the nasty divorce suit Neil brought upon himself by his flagrant adultery with a close family friend.

While others quilted, the Los Angeles Times and Houston Chronicle detailed Brother Neil's fat "consulting" contract with Jiang Mianheng, son of recently retired Chinese President Jiang Zemin. Young Jiang and his well-connected Communist capitalists are paying Neil $2 million in stock for his "advice" on manufacturing hi-tech computer circuits – despite Neil's sworn oath that he had "absolutely no background" in the field. "But I've been working in Asia for a long time," he added.

He certainly has. Neil also admitted that he'd experienced carnal canoodling with several women during his many business jaunts to Asia over the years. He told the divorce court that these brazen hussies had simply knocked on his hotel door, came in and had sex with him. These encounters were not emollients offered by the businessmen courting his favor and royal name, Neil insisted. Why, he's not even sure these anonymous women offering themselves to him unbidden actually were prostitutes, because "they never asked for money and I didn't pay them." If it's true – as he swears under oath – that he didn't know why those women came to see him, then the best you can say about Brother Neil is that he is an idiot of the highest order. (A possibility not to be discounted, given his illustrious pedigree.)

But of course Neil is no idiot. He first entered the public eye for a sweet scam he pulled during the Reagan-Bush years. As a director of a Colorado savings-and-loan bank, he steered $100 million of homeowners' savings to his own business partners – without telling his fellow directors of the personal connection. The partners defaulted, and Bush, using his family links to Argentine strongman Carlos Menem, tried to hide the losses in some bait-and-switch deals south of the border, as the Austin Chronicle reports.

When the feds finally caught up with him in 1990, Bush had cost American taxpayers $1.3 billion in bailouts to cover his mismanagement. But as the son of the sitting president, Neil could not possibly go to jail for stealing $100 million; the high-born don't do hard time. No, he was merely fined $50,000 and banned from all banking activities. Naturally, Neil didn't pay his own fine; fatcat Republican fundraisers covered it for him.

We told you he was no idiot.

Now comes the sweetest deal of all – enriched by the blood sugar seeping out from the bodies of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. Yes, Neil has dipped his silver spoon into the reconstruction gravy being ladled out by his brother George, the White House warlord. Neil is now being paid a fat annual fee to "help companies secure contracts in Iraq," the Financial Times reports.

Bush is co-chairman of a pork funnel called Crest Investment Corporation. His partner, Jamal Daniel, is wired into the chief private conduit of war profits, New Bridge Strategies, a lobbying firm packed with Bush family retainers, many of whom left government service this spring to leap into the Iraq money pit. And what does Neil do to earn his crust of bloodsoaked bread? He told the divorce court that he "answers the phone when Jamal Daniel calls to ask for advice."

And what does Jamal Daniel get out of this unusual arrangement? Why, he gets to say, "I was just talking to my partner, the president's brother" when he's negotiating with Bush administration officials to win "reconstruction" contracts for his clients. As long as Brother George keeps tossing cannon fodder into the Iraqi cauldron, Brother Neil will keep padding his fat Bush wallet.

Neil's sordid saga exemplifies the Bush clan's prime "family value": rake it in from all sides, blood and honor be damned. We've often noted here that Neil and George's grandpa, Prescott Bush, was a huge investor in the Nazi war machine, maintaining his profitable Hitlerian arrangements even after America was at war with Germany. Some of these assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act. But last month, newly uncovered government documents showed that Prescott and his partners, including Democrat bigwig Averill Harriman, actually held onto to more than a dozen other Nazi assets throughout the war, the New Hampshire Gazette reports.

Did anyone go to jail for these crimes? Of course not! Instead, Prescott founded a political dynasty that has used aggressive war, insider trading, covert operations, government corruption and sweetheart deals with virulently anti-democratic patrons (the bin Ladens, Saudi Wahabbi extremists, the Chinese Communist Party, cult leader Sun Myung Moon, etc.) to enrich themselves and their cronies.

If you have no honor, no integrity, and don't care if people die to make you rich, why then, the world is just a nameless woman who shows up at your door unasked and lets you have your way with her.

Right, Neil?

Ring of Fire: The Fallujah Inferno

2005-03-01T10:25:00.001Z

Originally published in The Moscow Times on November 19, 2004.

"The inferno…is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
-- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.

There is of course no space, nowhere to move or breathe in the sealed chamber of the American Infoglomerate – the vast entanglement of corporate media and government propaganda that smothers the body politic with hysterical outpourings of diversion, drivel and deadening white noise. Here, events occur in a total vacuum: they have no history, no context, no consequences. Stripped of the heft and scope of reality, they can easily be molded and distorted to fit the prevailing political and business agendas. Amnesia, ignorance, confusion and fear are left to rule the day: excellent fuel for the stokers of the inferno, who use the heat to work their alchemical magic – transforming human blood into gold.

"There are more and more dead bodies on the streets and the stench is unbearable. Smoke is everywhere. It's hard to know how much people outside Fallujah are aware of what is going on here. There are dead women and children lying on the streets. People are getting weaker from hunger. Many are dying are from their injuries because there is no medical help left in the city whatsoever. Some families have started burying their dead in their gardens."

This was a voice from the depths of the inferno: Fadhil Badrani, reporter for the BBC and Reuters, trapped in the iron encirclement along with tens of thousands of civilians. It was a rare breath of truth. The reality of a major city being ground into rubble was meant to be obscured by the Infoglomerate's wall of noise: murder trials, state visits, Cabinet shuffles, celebrity weddings – and, above all, the reports of "embedded" journalists shaping the "narrative" into its proper form: a magnificent feat of arms carried out with surgical precision against an enemy openly identified by American commanders as "Satan," the Associated Press reports.

One of the first moves in this magnificent feat was the destruction and capture of medical centers. Twenty doctors – and their patients, including women and children – were killed in an airstrike on one major clinic, the UN Information Service reports, while the city's main hospital was seized in the early hours of the ground assault. Why? Because these places of healing could be used as "propaganda centers," the Pentagon's "information warfare" specialists told the NY Times. Unlike the first attack on Fallujah last spring, there was to be no unseemly footage of gutted children bleeding to death on hospital beds. This time – except for NBC's brief, heavily-edited, quickly-buried clip of the usual lone "bad apple" shooting a wounded Iraqi prisoner – the visuals were rigorously scrubbed.

So while Americans saw stories of rugged "Marlboro Men" winning the day against Satan, they were spared shots of engineers cutting off water and electricity to the city – a flagrant war crime under the Geneva Conventions, as CounterPunch notes, but standard practice throughout the occupation. Nor did pictures of attack helicopters gunning down civilians trying to escape across the Euphrates River – including a family of five – make the TV news, despite the eyewitness account of an AP journalist. Nor were tender American sensibilities subjected to the sight of phosphorous shells bathing enemy fighters – and nearby civilians – with unquenchable chemical fire, literally melting their skin, as the Washington Post reports. Nor did they see the fetus being blown out of the body of Artica Salim when her home was bombed during the "softening-up attacks" that raged relentlessly – and unnoticed – in the closing days of George W. Bush's presidential campaign, the Scotland Sunday Herald reports.

What they saw instead were two loudly devout Christians, Bush and Tony Blair, clasping hands and proclaiming that Artica Salim had been torn to shreds in order to fight terrorism – specifically, the terrorism of Jordanian thug Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The city's alleged refusal to turn over Zarqawi was the ostensible reason for the attack; yet halfway through the assault, with dead civilian bodies already stinking in the streets, Coalition commanders finally admitted the truth: Zarqawi wasn't in Fallujah – and hadn't been there for weeks, perhaps months.

But then, Zarqawi leads a peculiarly charmed life. Three times before the war, U.S. forces were set to kill him and destroy his organization. It wasn't that difficult; after all, he was operating in Kurdish-held Iraqi territory, where the U.S. military had free rein. Yet each time, Bush called off the strike, the Wall Street Journal reports. He needed Zarqawi for his pre-war propaganda, so he could point to an "al Qaeda ally in Iraq" – even though Zarqawi was on Bush's Iraqi turf, not Saddam's. And Bush still needs Zarqawi, or someone like him – a killer whose lurid malefactions obscure the even larger crime that set all these atrocities in motion: an unprovoked aggressive war based on lies, whose only goal is the imposition of a regime that will enrich Bush's cronies while advancing American dominance of the world's resources.

Bush and Zarqawi are mirror-image enemies: foreign terrorists breaking into Iraq to spread indiscriminate death and ruin in pursuit of their brutal visions. Everywhere they go, everything they touch, everyone they draw to their cause becomes inferno.

ANNOTATIONS:
"Inside Fallujah: One Family’s Diary of Terror [Artica Salim],"
Scotland Sunday Herald, Nov. 14, 2004
http://www.sundayherald.com/46056

"Smoke and Corpses,"BBC, Nov. 11, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4004873.stm

"20 Doctors Killed in Strike on Clinic: Red Crescent,"
UN Integrated Regional Information Network, Nov. 10, 2004
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=44075&SelectRegion=Iraq_Crisis&SelectCountry=IRAQ

"US Strikes Raze Fallujah Hospital,"BBC, Nov. 6, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3988433.stm

"Civilians Killed While Crossing Euphrates,"
Associated Press, Nov. 14, 2004
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041114/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_escaping_fallujah_1

"Ghost City Calls for Help,"BBC, Nov. 13, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4008887.stm

"Questions Mount on Bush Failure to Hit Zarqawi Camp,"
Wall Streent Journal, Oct. 25, 2004
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB109866031609354178-IdjgYNhlaR3n52paIKIaKmGm4,00.html

"Civilian Cost of Battle for Fallujah Emerges,"The Observer, Nov. 14, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5062732-103550,00.html

"Fallujah a Sea of Rubble and Death After Offensive,"
Reuters, Nov. 14, 2004
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/GEO446775.htm

"A City lies in Ruins, Along with the Lives of the Wretched Survivors,"
The Independent, Nov. 15, 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=582915

"The Enemy Has Got a Face: He's Called Satan,"
Associated Press, Nov. 6, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041106/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq&cid=540&ncid=716

"Marlboro Men Kick Butt in Fallujah,"New York Post, Nov. 10, 2004
http://www.nypost.com/seven/11102004/index.shtml

"Let Them Drink Sand: War Crimes in Fallujah,"CounterPunch, Nov. 13, 2004
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11132004.html

"American Heroes,"
Baghdad Burning, Nov. 16, 2004
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2004_11_01_riverbendblog_archive.html#110063119588554403

"Beyond Embattled City, Rebels Roam Free,"Los Angeles Times, Nov. 12, 2004
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/latimes392.html

"Sy Hersh: The Relentless Bombing of Iraq,"
Editor and Publisher, Nov. 11, 2004
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000717958

"A City in Ruins, Sky Full of Smoke: 'Let's Kick Ass the American Way!"
The Guardian, Nov. 14, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5062701-103550,00.html

"I Got My Kills; I Just Love my Job,"Daily Telegraph, Nov. 9, 2004
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/11/09/wirq109.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/11/09/ixnewstop.html

"Marine Kills Injured Prisoner in Falluhah Mosque,"MSNBC, Nov. 15, 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6496898/

"'This One's Faking He's Dead.' 'He's Dead Now,"
The Independent, Nov. 16, 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=583322

"Running Out of Patients: Fallujah Hospital Bombing,"The Village Voice, Nov. 7, 2004
http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/bushbeat/archive/000514.php

"Iraq Hospitals Could be Used as Propaganda Centers, says Pentagon,"New York Times, Nov. 8, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/08/international/08CND_IRAQ.html?ei=5094&en=8b32979d8c8d9235&hp=&ex=1099976400&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print&position=

"We're Not Focused on Zarqawi, General Says,"
Washington Post, Nov. 14, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49798-2004Nov14?language=printer

"A Wrecked Nation, a Desert, a Ghost Town. And This Will Be Called Victory,"
The Times, Nov. 17, 2004
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1059-1361818,00.html

"John Pilger: The Unthinkable Becomes Normal,"
New Statesman, Nov. 12, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=3965

"Few Foreign Fighters Among Insurgents,"Los Angeles Times, Nov. 16, 2004
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/la-fg-fighters16nov16,0,3409500,print.story?coll=sfla-home-headlines

"US Suspects Many Insurgents Have Fled,"Washington Times, Nov. 12, 2004
http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20041112-120122-7344r

"Fallujah 101,"In These Times, Nov. 12, 2004
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/print/fallujah_101/

Cranks, Kleptocrats and Killers: The "Good War" on the Ground

2009-07-27T14:18:00.003+01:00

While dozens of innocent people continue to die each week in the political and sectarian violence unleashed in Iraq by America's invasion and continuing occupation, the main attention of the bipartisan Terror Warriors in Washington – and their sycophantic outriders in the corporate media – continues to be what they call, in the imperial jargonizing that lumps the vast complexities of myriad human communities into reductive, thought-killing soundbites, the "Af-Pak" front.

This, as we all know, is the "good war," the one that most "serious" progressives touted for years as the healthy alternative to the "bad war" that George W. Bush got us into in Iraq, where his "incompetence" and "failures" tarnished the exalted ideal of "humanitarian intervention." (Known in the trade by the acronym "KTC-STC" – "Kill the Children to Save the Children.") . If only we could get out the quagmire in Iraq, cried the serious progs, and do the Terror War "right" in Afghanistan! Well, their wish has come true (except of course for the 130,000 American troops and equal number of mercenaries still prowling around in Iraq; but that's OK, because Obama is in charge now, and what ser-progs once vehemently denounced as a blatant, bloody war crime can now be described, in the immortal words of the president himself, as "an extraordinary achievement"). The Obama Administration is throwing billions of new dollars and thousands of more troops into the eight-year-old conflict, while greatly expanding the cross-border attacks on the sovereign soil of America's ally, Pakistan. And while Obama has retained the core of the Terror War directorate that Bush installed – notably Pentagon warlord Robert Gates and the surgin' general, David Petraeus – he has now put his own man in charge of the "good war": longtime "dirty war" and death squad maven Stanley McChrystal. (Expertise in rubouts, snatches and "strenuous interrogation" is obviously what you need to win "hearts and minds" in humanitarian interventions.)

So here we are, with the imperial mind bent at last on the "Af-Pak" front. But where, exactly, are we? What is the real situation on the "Af-Pak" ground? Two natives of the Terror War targets give us a view from the ground. First, Malalai Joya, from Afghanistan:

In 2005, I was the youngest person elected to the new Afghan parliament. Women like me, running for office, were held up as an example of how the war in Afghanistan had liberated women. But this democracy was a facade, and the so-called liberation a big lie....

Almost eight years after the Taliban regime was toppled, our hopes for a truly democratic and independent Afghanistan have been betrayed by the continued domination of fundamentalists and by a brutal occupation that ultimately serves only American strategic interests in the region.

You must understand that the government headed by Hamid Karzai is full of warlords and extremists who are brothers in creed of the Taliban. Many of these men committed terrible crimes against the Afghan people during the civil war of the 1990s.

For expressing my views I have been expelled from my seat in parliament, and I have survived numerous assassination attempts. The fact that I was kicked out of office while brutal warlords enjoyed immunity from prosecution for their crimes should tell you all you need to know about the "democracy" backed by Nato troops....

So far, Obama has pursued the same policy as Bush in Afghanistan. Sending more troops and expanding the war into Pakistan will only add fuel to the fire. Like many other Afghans, I risked my life during the dark years of Taliban rule to teach at underground schools for girls. Today the situation of women is as bad as ever. Victims of abuse and rape find no justice because the judiciary is dominated by fundamentalists. A growing number of women, seeing no way out of the suffering in their lives, have taken to suicide by self-immolation.

This week, US vice-president Joe Biden asserted that "more loss of life [is] inevitable" in Afghanistan, and that the ongoing occupation is in the "national interests" of both the US and the UK.

I have a different message to the people of Britain. I don't believe it is in your interests to see more young people sent off to war, and to have more of your taxpayers' money going to fund an occupation that keeps a gang of corrupt warlords and drug lords in power in Kabul.

What's more, I don't believe it is inevitable that this bloodshed continues forever. Some say that if foreign troops leave Afghanistan will descend into civil war. But what about the civil war and catastrophe of today? The longer this occupation continues, the worse the civil war will be.

Next, Tariq Ali reports from Pakistan:

This is a country whose fate is no longer in its own hands. I have never known things so bad. The chief problems are the United States and its requirements, the religious extremists, the military high command, and corruption, not just on the part of President Zardari and his main rivals, but spreading well beyond them.

This is now Obama’s war. He campaigned to send more troops into Afghanistan and to extend the war, if necessary, into Pakistan. These pledges are now being fulfilled. On the day he publicly expressed his sadness at the death of a young Iranian woman caught up in the repression in Tehran, US drones killed 60 people in Pakistan. The dead included women and children, whom even the BBC would find it difficult to describe as ‘militants’. Their names mean nothing to the world; their images will not be seen on TV networks. Their deaths are in a ‘good cause’....

In May this year, Graham Fuller, a former CIA station chief in Kabul, published an assessment of the crisis in the region in the Huffington Post. Ignored by the White House, since he was challenging most of the assumptions on which the escalation of the war was based, Fuller was speaking for many in the intelligence community in his own country as well as in Europe. It’s not often that I can agree with a recently retired CIA man, but not only did Fuller say that Obama was ‘pressing down the same path of failure in Pakistan marked out by George Bush’ and that military force would not win the day, he also explained to readers of the Huffington Post that the Taliban are all ethnic Pashtuns, that the Pashtuns ‘are among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalised and xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader’ and ‘in the end probably more Pashtun than they are Islamist’. ‘It is a fantasy,’ he said, ‘to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.’ And I don’t imagine he is the only retired CIA man to refer back to the days when Cambodia was invaded ‘to save Vietnam’....

[U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Anne] Patterson can be disarmingly frank. Earlier this year, she offered a mid-term assessment to a visiting Euro-intelligence chief. While Musharraf had been unreliable, saying one thing in Washington and doing its opposite back home, Zardari was perfect: ‘He does everything we ask.’ What is disturbing here is not Patterson’s candour, but her total lack of judgment. Zardari may be a willing creature of Washington, but the intense hatred for him in Pakistan is not confined to his political opponents. He is despised principally because of his venality. He has carried on from where he left off as minister of investment in his late wife’s second government. Within weeks of occupying President’s House, his minions were ringing the country’s top businessmen, demanding a share of their profits.

Take the case of Mr X, who owns one of the country’s largest banks. He got a call. Apparently the president wanted to know why his bank had sacked a PPP member soon after Benazir Bhutto’s fall in the late 1990s. X said he would find out and let them know. It emerged that the sacked clerk had been caught with his fingers literally in the till. President’s House was informed. The explanation was rejected. The banker was told that the clerk had been victimised for political reasons. The man had to be reinstated and his salary over the last 18 years paid in full together with the interest due. The PPP had also to be compensated and would expect a cheque (the sum was specified) soon. Where the president leads, his retainers follow. Many members of the cabinet and their progeny are busy milking businessmen and foreign companies. ‘If they can do it, so can we’ is a widely expressed view in Karachi, the country’s largest city. Muggings, burglaries, murders, many of them part of protection rackets linked to politicians, have made it the Naples of the East....

These rumours came into the open at the end of June, when the head of the Bhutto clan, Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, chairman of the Sind National Front, publicly accused Zardari at a press conference, alleging that ‘the killer of Murtaza Bhutto had also murdered Benazir . . . Now I am his target. A hefty amount has been paid to mercenaries to kill me.’ (Zardari is generally regarded as having ordered his brother-in-law Murtaza’s death. Shoaib Suddle, the police chief in Karachi, who organised the operation that led to Murtaza Bhutto’s death, has now been promoted and is head of the Intelligence Bureau.)

You should read both pieces in their entirety to get the bigger, grimmer picture. So here we are -- in bed with extremists, misogynists, kleptocrats and killers.

But wait a minute: isn't this where we came in?

Moloch's Altar: Child Sacrifice and the War on Terror

2009-01-09T14:47:00.002Z

"Tell me yourself, I challenge you—answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature....and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears: would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.” -- Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov. [For a recent American answer to this challenge, see The Karamazov Question.]

AP tells the harrowing story of the hundreds of children who have been slaughtered -- and the hundreds of thousands more who have been terrorized and traumatized -- by Israel's "war of choice" on Palestinians in Gaza. From AP:

Tiny bodies lying side by side wrapped in white burial shrouds. The cherubic face of a dead preschooler sticking up from the rubble of her home. A man cradling a wounded boy in a chaotic emergency room after Israel shelled a U.N. school.

Children, who make up more than half of crowded Gaza's 1.4 million people, are the most defenseless victims of the war between Israel and Hamas. The Israeli army has unleashed unprecedented force in its campaign against Hamas militants, who have been taking cover among civilians.

"Taking cover among civilians." This is a curious locution. When you launch missiles to kill the democratically elected officials of a government -- especially when you target their private homes -- where else do you expect to find them? Gaza is a giant, open-air prison which no one can leave and where, as the story notes, 1.4 million people live in densely-packed urban areas and refugee camps. Where else are the "Hamas militants" supposed to exist in this seething sardine tin except "among civilians"? Naturally, it would be far more convenient if every member of Hamas -- including, again, the democratically elected officials of the government -- painted themselves bright red and gathered in, say, a soccer stadium, where Israel could then drop bombs on them with no muss, no fuss. But we are dealing with the real world, where human beings of every description, profession, ideology and belief must of necessity live and work in close proximity to one another -- especially in the reconstruction of the Warsaw Ghetto that is Gaza today.

But of course, in order to smuggle the smallest nugget of truth about Gaza into the American media, it must first be larded with huge dollops of mitigating "context" to mask the horrific brutality and naked aggression of the Israeli campaign. And the "human shield" gambit is the probably the most frequently employed fig leaf by the apologists of oppression.

Curiously enough, I did see a shocking example of the use of human shields in Gaza just the other day, on BBC News. One of their reporters was "embedded" with a squadron of plucky Israeli soldiers as they made their way through a Gaza neighborhood. The report showed our heroes taking over the home of a Palestinian family, shunting the house's large number of refugees -- including several children and infants, crying from hunger -- to a cramped space on the bottom floor, while the Israeli soldiers took up residence on the top floor, where they could rain sniper fire on any nearby "militants" and help coordinate air strikes and missile fire on "militant" hotbeds like schools, ambulances, UN relief trucks -- and other houses packed with refugees who had been directed there by the Israelis themselves.

Naturally, if anyone fired back at the Israelis in the house commandeered in the BBC report, they would hit the civilians who were being held prisoner in their own home. This use of human shields seems like a highly criminal and deeply immoral act to me; but then, I'm not a "serious" person, not like the wise and savvy statesmen and stateswomen of the U.S. Senate, who this week declared their unflagging, uncritical, unquestioning support for Israel's attack in tones so slavish they would have made Stalin's Politburo blush.

In any case, after its ritual dip in the cleansing context pool, the AP story marshals fact after fact to hammer home the relentless torture of children in the "shock and awe" operation:

A photo of 4-year-old Kaukab Al Dayah, just her bloodied head sticking out from the rubble of her home, covered many front pages in the Arab world Wednesday. "This is Israel," read the headline in the Egyptian daily Al-Masry Al-Youm. The preschooler was killed early Tuesday when an F-16 attacked her family's four-story home in Gaza City. Four adults also died.

As many as 257 children have been killed and 1,080 wounded — about a third of the total casualties since Dec. 27, according to U.N. figures released Thursday.

Hardest on the children is the sense that nowhere is safe and adults can't protect them, said Iyad Sarraj, a psychologist hunkering down in his Gaza City apartment with his four stepchildren, ages 3-17. His 10-year-old, Adam, is terrified during bombing raids and has developed asthma attacks, Sarraj said....

Children have been killed in strikes on their houses, while riding in cars with their parents, while playing in the streets, walking to a grocery and even at U.N. shelters.

Sayed, Mohammed and Raida Abu Aisheh — ages 12, 8 and 7 — were at home with their parents when they were all killed in an Israeli airstrike before dawn Monday. The family had remained in the ground floor apartment of their three-story building, while the rest of the extended clan sought refuge in the basement from heavy bombardment of nearby Hamas installations.

Those in the basement survived. The children's uncle, Saber Abu Aisheh, 49, searched Thursday through the rubble, a heap of cement blocks, mattresses, scorched furniture and smashed TVs.

He said Israel gave no warning, unlike two years earlier when he received repeated calls from the Israeli military, including on his cell phone, that a nearby house was going to get hit and that he should evacuate.

"What's going on is not a war, it's a mass killing," said Abu Aisheh, still wearing the blood-splattered olive-colored sweater he wore the night of the airstrike.

Then there is the now-infamous case of the Zeitoun house where four young children were found beside their dead mothers. They had been there for days while Israeli forces prevented Red Cross workers from reaching them. As Haaretz reports:

The International Committee of the Red Cross on Thursday accused Israel of delaying ambulance access to the Gaza Strip and demanded it grant safe access for Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances to return to evacuate more wounded.

Relief workers said they found four starving children sitting next to their dead mothers and other corpses in a house in a part of Gaza City bombed by Israeli forces, the Red Cross said on Thursday.

"This is a shocking incident," said Pierre Wettach, ICRC chief for Israel and the Palestinian territories. "The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but did not assist the wounded. Neither did they make it possible for us or the Palestinian Red Crescent to assist the wounded." The agency said it believed Israel had breached international humanitarian law in the incident...

Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances and ICRC officials managed to reach several houses in the Zeitoun area of Gaza City on Wednesday after seeking access from Israeli military forces since last weekend, the ICRC statement said.

The rescue team "found four small children next to their dead mothers in one of the houses," the ICRC said. "They were too weak to stand up on their own. One man was also found alive, too weak to stand up. In all there were at least 12 corpses lying on mattresses," it said.

In another house, the team found 15 survivors of Israeli shelling including several wounded, it said. Three corpses were found in another home. Israeli soldiers posted some 80 meters (yards) away ordered the rescue team to leave the area which they refused to do, it said.

Back to AP:

Medic Mohammed Azayzeh said he retrieved the bodies of a man and his two young sons from central Gaza on Wednesday. One of the boys, a 1-year-old, was cradled in his father's arms.

In the Jebaliya refugee camp, five sisters from the Balousha family, ages 4, 8, 11, 14 and 17, were buried together in white shrouds on Dec. 29. An Israeli airstrike on a mosque, presumably a Hamas target, had destroyed their adjacent house. Only their parents and a baby girl survived....

In the ongoing chaos of Gaza, it's difficult to get exact casualty figures. Since Dec. 27, at least 750 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza Health Ministry official Dr. Moawiya Hassanain.

Of those, 257 were children, according to the U.N.'s top humanitarian official, John Holmes, citing Health Ministry figures that he called credible and deeply disturbing.

"We are talking about urban war," said Abdel-Rahman Ghandour, the Jordan-based spokesman for UNICEF in the Middle East and North Africa. "The density of the population is so high, it's bound to hurt children ... This is a unique conflict, where there is nowhere to go."

...Sarraj, the psychologist, said he fears for this generation: Having experienced trauma and their parents' helplessness, they may be more vulnerable to recruitment by militants.

Of course the survivors of the current bloodbath will be more vulnerable to recruitment by militants. Like all of the acts of state terror falsely called "counterterrorism," the Israeli attacks will breed much more of the very thing they are purporting to combat. But as we noted the other day, the Israelis know this very well -- and they don't care. As with all the other practitioners of state terror -- in Washington, London, Moscow, and elsewhere -- their goal is not "fighting terrorism" but imposing domination, and perpetuating their militarist power structures.

The international Terror Warriors, and their multitude of sycophants, worship war: it thrills them, it arouses them, it imbues them with a sense of power and purpose and righteousness and superiority. Whatever their professed faith -- and almost all of them make a great show of their devotion to a great benevolent deity in the sky -- their true god is Moloch: earthbound, blood-steeped, ravenous for sacrifice. And his devotees -- our elites, our "leading citizens," our "great and good" -- are happy to obey, eagerly offering up their god's favorite dish -- innocent flesh -- on his blazing altars.

Surging Into Syria: American Incursion Opens New Front in Quagmire

2008-10-27T13:34:00.002Z

Taking a page from the new bipartisan strategy now being employed in Afghanistan -- waging cross-border military raids into sovereign countries in order to protect a failing military occupation in a neighboring country -- the United States has apparently launched its first known incursion into Syria: the usual assault from on high with the usual tally of children as "collateral damage."

The BBC reports that American forces launched a small ground-air attack on the border village of Sukkiraya on Sunday, with military helicopters disgorging a squad of troops who attacked a building and killed "a man, his four children and a married couple."

Officially, the Pentagon has neither confirmed nor denied the attack, but the brass leaked word to the Associated Press that the shiv-stab into Syrian territory did indeed take place, and that it was aimed at -- wait for it -- "foreign fighters linked to al-Qaeda." As the leaky Pentagon mouthpiece told AP: "We are taking matters into our own hands."

(And isn't it remarkable how every single person killed by American forces in the global War on Terror is somehow "linked to al-Qaeda"? Even the children. I guess American bullets and bombs have some kind of super-secret al-Qaeda sorting software embedded in them, guiding the munitions directly to the evil ones -- including the little evil ones: the doctrine of "pre-emption" in its purest form -- and sparing everyone else.)

Why has the Bush Administration raided Syria now, after years of accusing Damascus of aiding and abetting "al Qaeda-linked terrorist" funneling into Iraq? Well, most beserker militarist regimes have myriad reasons behind their various lashings-out, so there is probably a number of different factors invovled.

One might be the recent moves that Syria has made toward trying to end its pariah status, as the Guardian notes:

The attack comes as Syria takes another step in from the cold today when its foreign minister, Walid al-Mualim, visits London to hear praise for its newly conciliatory policies in Lebanon...

In recent months Syria has established diplomatic relations with Lebanon and held several rounds of indirect talks with Israel, with Turkey acting as broker. In July, President Assad was invited to an EU summit in Paris.

The BBC report also touches on this theme:

[The attack's] timing is curious, coming right at the end of the Bush administration's period of office and at a moment when many of America's European allies - like Britain and France - are trying to broaden their ties with Damascus, our correspondent adds.

As we have often seen, whenever one of the American elite's designated demons starts trying to make nice and act moderate, they are generally poked with a sharp stick in hopes of making them snarl again -- thereby continuing their highly useful function as bogey-men to keep scaring the American people into giving trillions of dollars (and the blood of their children) to the Pentagon and its corporate associates in the war profiteering industry.

Of course, petty murderous spite can never be overlooked in anything the Bushists do. From the Guardian:

Joshua Landis, an American expert on Syria, commented last night: "The Bush administration must assume that an Obama victory will force Syria to behave nicely in order to win favour with the new administration. Thus White House analysts may assume that it can have a "freebee" - taking a bit of personal revenge on Syria without the US paying a price."

Some have also offered the idea that Bush is trying to make sure that Barack Obama is thoroughly tied down in the region when he takes office, forced to contend with a newly enraged Syria on the Iraq border, which the Bushists obviously hope will spur more terrorist attacks in Iraq -- on American forces and civilians -- thereby creating the "dangerous conditions" that will "justify" a continuing U.S. presence in the conquered land. (Yes, Virginia, fomenting terrorist attacks has long been a strategy of the American government, as we noted here -- and here -- years ago.)

It's unlikely that Obama will need much encouragement to keep a substantial U.S. military force in Iraq; that's been his plan all along. And as he has also advocated "carefully targeted" cross-border strikes into Pakistan, he can hardly object to the same tactic in Iraq. What's more, Joe Biden has already warned us that he and Obama are going to plunge head-first into an unspecified "foreign crisis" sometime next year, adopting highly unpopular policies that the poor, dumb benighted citizenry are just not going to be able to understand at first. A major incursion into Syria would certainly fit that bill -- although, admittedly, the venues and opportunities for Barry and Joe to prove their "toughness" are legion, given the vast and goading scope of America's military empire.

II.
Of course, one can speculate on motives until the cows come home. (Or rather, until the chickens come home to roost, in the form of revengeful blowback against Americans. But none of the well-wadded, well-protected bipartisan Beltway barons are worried about that. After all, the more blowback, the more "emergency powers" they accrue.) But we should remember that Syria has been in the cross-hairs of several powerful factions in our militarist empire for years. The same gang that brought you the Iraq war -- and would love to bring you the Iran war -- have long been howling to put tanks on the road to Damascus.

Below is a piece that I wrote for the Moscow Times back in April 2003. Although a few details have changed since then, the column is still depressingly apt as an example of the imperial mindset that animates both parties in the corridors of Beltway power.

Some cynics claim that George W. Bush and his closest advisors -- whom cynics cynically refer to as "bloodthirsty corporate pimps" -- are just a bunch of vicious, shifty liars. But this column takes enormous umbrage at the heaping of such unsupported calumny upon the good names of these great leaders. They have been maligned, slandered, falsely accused. For when it comes to their plans for world conquest, these so-called "pimps" are as honest as the day is long.

As we all know, the rape of Iraq (or as future historians will doubtless call it, "The Dawn of the Shiite Empire") was planned openly several years ago by a hard-right agitprop cell led by Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. Now it turns out that the recent big-monkey chest-beating aimed at Syria -- threats of sanctions, "surgical" strikes, and "regime change" -- was also carefully planned, by many of the same people, long before the Bush Regime seized power.

As we've often reported here, in September 2000 the Cheney-Rumsfeld outfit, Project for the New American Century, proudly published their blueprint for the direct imposition of U.S. "forward bases" throughout Central Asia and the Middle East. They even foresaw the need for what they called a "Pearl Harbor-type event" to galvanize the American public into supporting their ambitious program. Their reasons for this program were also stated quite openly: to ensure U.S. political and economic domination of the world, while strangling any potential "rival" or any viable alternative to the rapacious crony capitalism favored by the PNAC extremists. This dominance would be enforced by the ever-present threat -- and frequent application -- of violence. (A tactic known elsewhere as "terrorism.")

PNAC was also very honest about the role of Iraq in this crusade for empire, stating plainly that the need for a U.S. military presence in the area "superseded" the "issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." There was no sanctimonious posturing about "liberation," weapons of mass destruction or terrorist connections. To dominate the oil wealth centered in that region -- and hence the economic/political development of the world in the coming decades -- they needed a military presence in Iraq; it's as simple as that.

....A few months before PNAC's prophetic 2000 report, an allied group with an overlapping membership published a similar document outlining steps to be taken against Syria: first "tightening the screws" with denunciations and economic sanctions, then escalating to military action, as Jim Lobe of Inter-Press Agency reports. The architects of this document included Elliot Abrams, the convicted perjurer now running Bush's Middle East policy; Douglas Feith, one of [Don Rumsfelds'] top aides; Paula Dobriansky, undersecretary to Colin Powell; and influential Pentagon advisors such as David Wurmser, Michael Leeden and everyone's sweetheart, Richard "Influence-Peddler" Perle.

The report sprang largely from the loins of the United States Committee for a Free Lebanon, a curious grouping of right-wing American Christians, right-wing American Jews, and a sprinkling of Lebanese exiles. They object -- rightly -- to the fact that Syria has maintained "long-term access to major military bases" in Lebanon, using this minatory presence to exercise undue sway over Lebanon's political and economic life. Of course, some cynics would say this situation is remarkably akin to Israel's own 18-year occupation of, er, Lebanon, or the United States' decades-long -- and still-continuing -- military presence in Japan, Korea, Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Panama, etc. But you know what cynics are like.

The USCFL also provides highly insightful and very nearly literate analyses of vital regional issues, such as its seminal paper, "Even Arabs Don't Like Arabs." But the mindset of the group -- whose members now stalk the corridors of power in Imperial Washington -- is perhaps best displayed in its thoughtful 2001 treatise, "A Petition Demanding War Against Governments That Sponsor Terrorism" (Except, of course, for governments who enforce their will by the ever-present threat and use of violence -- i.e. terrorism -- but are run by nice white men educated at Yale and Oxford.)

Here, the proto-Bushist group demands that six "rogue nations" -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya and Sudan -- "turn over their governments to the United States" on pain of massive military response. The United States will then "occupy these territories until proper governments" -- ones that allow "long-term access" to major military bases, no doubt -- "can be established." And just how massive should that threatened U.S. military response be? The USCFL is, as always, admirably -- and brutally -- forthright: "America must set a clear example-identical to that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If you tread on me, I will wipe you off the face of the earth."

Is this what the Bushists are really talking about in their fear-mongering diatribes about seeing "terrorism's smoking gun in a mushroom cloud"?

Disorderly Conduct: Subverting the Bipartisan Paradigm on Iraq

2008-07-11T13:26:00.002+01:00

William Pfaff is one of the sanest writers in the mainstream media, and in his latest piece in the International Herald Tribune, he succinctly subverts the arguments for a continuing American presence in Iraq.

There are basically three main rationales for keeping the imperial adventure in Mesopotamia going in one form or another. First, that it is a fight against terrorism, a battle to uphold the values of civilization against the evil Islamofascist hordes. (This is the argument always offered for public consumption, and it may well be that a few of its champions actually believe it.) Second, that the United States must dominate this all-important oil region as a matter of vital national interest, regardless of the "legality" or "morality" of the project. (This is the "savvy" insider view, the realpolitik of the Cheney Faction and "gritty realist" commentators.) Third, that U.S. forces must remain in Iraq until the country is stable enough to ensure an "orderly" withdrawal. (This is Barack Obama's public stance -- one which, as we noted the other day, virtually guarantees many more years of occupation. Not to mention Obama's plan to leave behind a "residual" force -- of up to 80,000 troops -- even after his "orderly" withdrawal.)

Pfaff upends each of these arguments -- counterterrorism, realpolitik and caution -- and calls instead for the only course that has ever made sense, once this criminal action had been launched: immediate withdrawal, orderly or not. Perpend:

The New York Times published an editorial last week demanding that the American presidential candidates debate what they intend to do about “a swift and orderly withdrawal from Iraq.” Such a withdrawal surely is desirable, and is what Barack Obama has promised, but is it feasible?

What about a disorderly withdrawal? What if that is the only available withdrawal? In that case, is it the larger American interest to stay indefinitely in Iraq, fighting on for the sake of staying, or to leave in disorder?

The Defense Department and this administration are ferociously committed to staying in Iraq, in order to hold onto the huge military bases constructed there, and for Iraq’s oil. They will pay a lot for that...But actually how important are the U.S. bases? Edward Luttwak, an astute and unsentimental commentator, recently wrote in Britain’s Prospect magazine that the Middle East is no longer important enough to fight over. He said the Arab-Israel conflict has been largely irrelevant strategically since the Cold War ended, and “global dependence on Middle Eastern oil is declining”—which despite the speculation-driven run-up in the oil price is still true.

In any case, oil’s availability does not, and never has, depended on military domination of the region. Oil sells on an international market to those who can buy it, and no significant producer can afford to boycott the biggest purchasers, the U.S., Japan and Western Europe. As Charles Glass (a former prisoner of Hezbollah in Lebanon) comments, Luttwak’s conclusion logically should be that the U.S. stop giving $5.5 billion in aid annually to Israel and selling billions of dollars worth of jet aircraft, heavy armor and other weapons to Saudi Arabia, a country that has never fought a war.

It should also get out of Iraq, whether in orderly or disorderly fashion, since what happens afterward is surely the business of the Iraqis, who in the past—before the 2003 invasion—have always managed in one way or another to settle their own affairs. What happens to Iraq now can pose no serious threat to the United States.

“It could become a terrorist training ground” is the witless objection usually heard regarding a departure in disorder. But surely the terrorists have no need of even more “training grounds” than they already have. An isolated farm or ranch in Utah could serve just as well as a training ground, and the training comes without cost via the Internet.

Pfaff also takes on Obama's version of the Terror War, that nightmarish engine of destruction, blowback and war profits which the Democratic nominee has pledged to continue:

The New York Times editorial congratulated Obama on his intention to have the U.S. “withdraw from Iraq so it can finish the fight in Afghanistan,” where the Allies’ situation is deteriorating and more U.S soldiers are being killed than in Iraq. But just how will President Obama (or President McCain) “finish off” the Taliban?

Early in the election campaign, Obama suggested doing it by invading Pakistan, an American ally, where al-Qaida and the Taliban take refuge. Then the United States could simultaneously fight the Pakistan army, the Taliban, al-Qaida and the tribal warriors of Waziristan. Where’s the vital American interest in that?

There is no vital American interest in any of this, of course. That is to say, nothing about the Terror War and its many offshoots benefits the American people in any way. It does, however, greatly benefit a bipartisan clot of special interests and ideologues that has a stranglehold on the American power structure. A withdrawal of these forces from the land they occupy would also be welcome. But that seems even less likely than a genuine pullout from Iraq.

Big Dog, Little Tail: The American Elite Resolves for War on Iran

2008-06-27T00:56:00.001+01:00

I.
Let's be clear about one thing: Israel will not attack Iran without the full knowledge and approval of the United States government. The trigger of the "warning shot" of Israel's long-range air-strike exercise last week was actually pulled in Washington. The Israelis will not force or deceive the U.S. government into an attack on Iran; that attack – which grows more certain by the hour – will take place because America's bipartisan foreign policy establishment and military-industrial complex (to the extent that there is any real difference between the two) want it to happen, or are willing to let it happen.

It is of course an article of faith for some people that the Israeli tails wags the big American dog. This rather ludicrous assertion is nothing more than the pernicious doctrine of "American exceptionalism" tricked out in "dissident" drag. For its underlying assumption is that good ole true-blue American elites would never commit war crimes or seek empire and geopolitical dominion unless they had somehow been tricked into it by those wily Jews. This is exactly backwards. If Israel was of no use to the American elite's domination agenda, then it would be discarded, or at least downgraded in terms of military, economic and diplomatic support.

When a nation serves the American elite's interests well, it is rewarded, and its various shortcomings are overlooked, however egregious they might be. Saudi Arabia is a prime example. Egypt is another. Iraq is a negative example. When Saddam's regime was thought useful, it was supported, copiously. When Saddam was no longer useful – especially when he threatened the Bush Family's long-time business partners in Kuwait – then he became "a new Hitler." When Iran was governed by a tyrant friendly to Washington, it was lauded – and larded with the usual military support and diplomatic muscle. When unfriendly tyrants took over, Iran became a land of Persian devils. The list of such examples from American history goes on and on.

If Israel had, say, opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it would have found itself shorn of much of its American largess very quickly. Israel is in fact almost entirely dependent on the United States for its military and economic well-being; in return it gives unstinting support to the interests of the American elite. It is in many ways one of the most abject client states in the world today, outside of Iraq or Afghanistan. The fact that there is a convergence of interests and ideology between militarist elites in the United States and Israel is hardly surprising. It would only be surprising if this were not the case. And so we see a cross-pollination of ideas, strategies, techniques, technologies – and even, in some cases, personnel (e.g. the "Clean Break" group) – between these elites.

For the same reasons, we also see a strong "Jewish Lobby" in the United States. For although those lobbying organizations do not actually represent the viewpoint of the majority of American Jews, they do offer unwavering support to the American elite's domination agenda. These organizations – like Israel itself – also serve as useful stalking horses and lightning rods. In the first instance, they can stake out radical positions which would be too impolitic for America's governing elite to espouse too openly. In the second instance, they can always be conveniently blamed for "radicalizing" or "duping" the American elite if one of the latter's schemes for loot and dominion go wrong. And of course they can be used to punish domestic politicians who fail to hew slavishly enough to the elite's imperial line. But if AIPAC came out tomorrow with, say, a demand that America dismantle its worldwide empire of military bases, or condemned the invasion of Iraq as a war crime, we would see its influence decline almost instantly. Again, it is the convergence of interests with the American elite, and their willingness to serve those interests, that give the government of Israel and non-representative organizations like AIPAC such a prominent role.

For example, AIPAC has played the stalking horse in helping push Resolution 362, the "Iran War Resolution," toward its virtually guaranteed passage by the House. The bill – supported by the usual broad spectrum of the "bipartisan foreign policy establishment" – calls for, among other things, a full blockade of Iran. This is of course an outright act of war, and one aimed directly and purposely at the Iranian people, who would be subjected to the same kind of treatment that left at least a million Iraqis dead during the many years of American-led, bipartisan sanctions against Saddam's regime. This fact – an impending act of war that could inflict untold suffering upon millions of innocent people, even before the first shot is fired – does not seem to trouble anyone in the American establishment, nor in the "progressive blogosphere."

Arthur Silber has a few choice words on this situation here, including:

In the fearsome, awful, terrifying wake of an attack on Iran, as the economy crumbles, as violence spreads throughout the Middle East, Asia and possibly elsewhere, as life falls apart in the United States, do you think anyone will give a damn about FISA? Do you think anyone will even remember FISA? Do you doubt that the government will seize and utilize powers that will make FISA look like child's play? Do you doubt that the government will do all this with the active, eager participation of the Democrats?

II.
The stated casus belli in the "Iran War Resolution" – which replicates exactly the bellicose intentions and deceptions of the Bush Administration – is Iran's "nuclear enrichment activities." This is presented as an unmitigated evil worthy of the most severe measures, including an act of war like a blockade. The truth, of course, is that these enrichment activities are entirely legal under international treaties governing nuclear proliferation, and are being carried out under the most extensive and stringent international supervision ever imposed on a nation, as Kaveh Afrasiabi notes in the Asia Times. Afrasiabi also details the rank falsehoods about Iran's nuclear programme, and the international inspection program overseeing it, that permeate the American media:

...in an article in The Wall Street Journal, US Congresswoman Jane Harman, who chairs the powerful Homeland Security Intelligence Committee, cites Iran's steady progress in installing new centrifuges and the dangers posed by "unsupervised, weapons-grade material" in Tehran's hands.

Never mind that IAEA reports clearly confirm that all of Iran's enrichment-related facilities are under the agency's "containment and monitoring", or that IAEA inspectors have had nine "unannounced visits" at the enrichment facility in Natanz since March 2007.

Thus, for instance, in a front-page article in the New York Times, dated June 20, Michael Gordon and Eric Schmitt break the sensational news about Israel's extensive maneuvers in preparation for an attack on Iran, indirectly rationalizing Israel's belligerency by omitting any mention of the IAEA's latest report confirming the absence of any evidence of military nuclear diversion and, instead, confining themselves to the following comment: "In late May, the IAEA reported that Iran's suspected work on nuclear matters was a 'matter of serious concern' and that the Iranians owed the agency 'substantial explanation'."

What ought to have been added was that the same IAEA report states unequivocally that it had received "no credible information" regarding the alleged "weaponization studies", nor has the agency detected any nuclear activity connected to those alleged studies. Besides, the same IAEA report more than a dozen times stresses the evidence of peacefulness of Iran's nuclear program...

To turn to another example of flawed coverage of Iran by the US media, a recent editorial in the Dallas News states categorically that the IAEA "has recently accused Iran of developing its program of enriching uranium". The editors appear unaware that the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which Iran is a signatory, does not prohibit Iran's uranium-enrichment program.

The IAEA has never declared Iran in material breach of its obligations and, certainly, has never "accused" Iran of pursuing a program sanctioned under the NPT. Rather, the governing board of the IAEA has simply requested from Iran to suspend its sensitive nuclear program as a "confidence-building measure", that is, as a time-bound and thus temporary "legally non-binding" step.

As Sam Gardiner notes, Bush and his minions are now pounding the "enrichment" theme as their chief drumbeat for war with Iran. And they have obviously succeeded in demonizing the entirely legal and carefully supervised process of enrichment, as demonstrated by the Congressional resolution and the press coverage, both of which also take up "enrichment" as an evil that must be stopped at all costs.

No doubt this is in response to the IAEA reports noted by Afrasiabi, which have found no credible information about "weaponization studies." (And those are just studies, mind you, not actual weaponization programs.) This is of course not the first time that the Bush Administration has moved the goalposts in its fearmongering campaign. As we noted here last December, just after the Administration's own intelligence agencies declared that Iran had no active nuclear weapons program, Bush announced that

Iran will not be "allowed" to acquire even the "scientific knowledge" required to build a nuclear weapon. Previous "red lines" which could trigger an attack had been based on Iran actually building a weapon; now even nibbling at the forbidden fruit of nuclear knowledge could serve as "justification" for a "pre-emptive strike" to quell the "danger." After all, as Bush rather illiterately told reporters, "What's to say they couldn't start another covert nuclear weapons program?" Better safe than sorry, right?

And at the very least, moving the goalposts in this manner will allow the Bush Regime to portray Iran as a dangerous, defiant menace for merely carrying on with its fully legal nuclear power program, as authorized by international treaty and monitored by the IAEA. Thus no matter what Iran actually does – or doesn't do – the Bushists will continue to use the "Persian menace" as fodder for the imperial war machine.

We see this playing out again today, in the scary talk – and Congressional resolutions – damning Iran's "enrichment activities." What was true then is true now: there is literally nothing that Iran can do – or not do – to divert the American elite's desire to strike at their land and bring it under domination. And apparently there is nothing that anyone in America with any power or a major platform will do to stop it either.

Arthur Silber concludes his damning analysis of our unforced march to new horror with a heartbreaking quote from Martin Luther King Jr. Let it serve as the last word here as well; no one will put it better:

There is such a thing as being too late.... Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with lost opportunity.... Over the bleached bones of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late."

Torturegate: Truth, But No Consequences

2008-06-20T01:46:00.004+01:00

This has been one of the most extraordinary weeks in modern American history. The many isolated streams of evidence about the Bush Administration's torture system – and the direct responsibility of the Administration's highest officials for this vast crime – have now converged into a mighty flood: undeniable, unignorable, pouring through the halls of Congress and media newsrooms, lashing at the walls of the White House itself. In the course of the past few days, a series of events has laid bare the stinking sepsis at the heart of the Bush Regime for all to see.

It began last Sunday with the launch of a remarkable series by McClatchy Newspapers, detailing the torture, brutality, injustice and murder that has riddled the Bush gulag from top to bottom. Then came fiery Senate hearings, in which long-somnolent legislators finally bestirred themselves to confront and denounce some of the torture system's architects, including Dick Cheney pointman William Haynes III, who was left reeling, shuffling, dissembling – and bracing for perjury charges after his blatantly mendacious testimony.

Companion hearings in the House produced stunning confirmation of mass murder in the Bush gulag – a bare minimum of 27 killings, among the 108 known cases of death among Terror War captives. This evidence came from rock-solid Establishment figure Col. Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell. (Of course, as many captives have been and are being held in "secret prisons," and an untold number of others have been hidden from the Red Cross, there is no way of knowing at this point how many prisoners have actually died or been murdered – or even how many prisoners there are in the gulag.)

And while the McClatchy series and Congressional hearings were going forward, a retired major general of the United States Army directly and openly accused the commander-in-chief of committing a war crime: authorizing "a systematic regime of torture." Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba – forced out of the service in 2006 for trying to honestly investigate the atrocities at Abu Ghraib – was unequivocal in his statement in a new report by Physicians for Human Rights:

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account…The commander-in-chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture."

This shocking, perhaps unprecedented declaration by a senior military officer was just one of many instances during the week when Establishment figures – not just retired officials like Wilkerson and Taguba, but serving officers as well – confirmed and condemned the injustice and criminality of the Bush gulag system. Even corporate media types began openly using the "T" word, after years of ridiculing or marginalizing those who dare call the Administration's "harsh interrogation techniques" what they plainly are.

By week's end, the evidence that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other top government officials had deliberately created a system of torture which they knew was illegal – indeed, a capital crime – under U.S. law was so plain, so overwhelming, and so handily concentrated that it broke through the levees of institutional cover-up and media complicity that had held this clear truth at bay for so long. The grim facts had finally worked their way into "conventional wisdom." It was now permissible for good "centrist" folk to speak of such things, even condemn them, without being automatically relegated to ranks of "the haters," the "unserious," the "shrill partisans," etc.

And yet, even as this new consensus was forming, you could see the sandbags piling up in the background to make sure that the water didn't reach too far. A line of defense was being laid that would allow the purveyors of conventional wisdom to vent a bit of righteous outrage at official wrongdoing without actually having to do anything about it or admitting of any flaws in their fundamentalist doctrine of American exceptionalism. No one need take any risks, make any effort, or discomfort themselves in any way to rectify the injustice; indeed, even the perpetrators should be left undisturbed. Instead, our uniquely good and smooth-running political system will magically make everything all better, and somehow prevent the bad things from happening again.

II.
This nascent coventional wisdom line was perfectly illustrated in a new piece by Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times. Rutten is a lifelong newsman, a liberal of the old school, whose columns have been scathing in their criticism of Bush and all his works. In his latest outing, Rutten doesn't flinch from telling it like it is on Bush's torture regime. Drawing on the Congressional hearings and other sources, Rutten gives chapter and verse on "how the White House forced the adoption of torture as state policy of the United States."

He notes also the highly significant fact that one major impetus behind the construction of the torture system was the Bush Faction's extremist "unitary executive" theory: the crank belief that a president can exercise unbridled, unaccountable authoritarian power in his role as "commander-in-chief." This includes the power to break the law -- and order others to break the law -- as he sees fit. As Rutten puts it:

The fact that these guys seem to have defined executive branch power as the ability to hold people in secret and torture them pushes the creepy quotient into areas that probably require psychoanalytic credentials.

In paragraph after paragraph, Rutten marshals the evidence that "has established definitively that the drive to make torture an instrument of U.S. policy originated at the highest levels of the Bush administration." He notes that the panicky reaction to these revelations in right-wing bastions like the Wall Street Journal "stems from an anxiety that congressional inquiries, like that of [the Senate] committee, will lead to indictments and possibly even war crimes trials for officials who participated in the administration's deliberations over torture and the treatment of prisoners."

In short, Rutten – an experienced, respected, liberal journalist writing for one of the largest newspapers in the land – lays out a compelling case that the President of the United States and his chief officers have committed capital crimes under American law. And what does he propose we do about it?

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing. In fact, he relegates all those who would seek redress of these high crimes to – where else? – the ranks of the unserious, the cranks, the effete whiners:

It's true that there are a handful of European rights activists and people on the lacy left fringe of American politics who would dearly like to see such trials, but actually pursuing them would be a profound -- even tragic -- mistake. Our political system works as smoothly as it does, in part, because we've never criminalized differences over policy. Since Andrew Jackson's time, our electoral victors celebrate by throwing the losers out of work -- not into jail cells.

The Andrew Jackson reference is puzzling. When did early (or late) American electoral victors ever throw the losers into jail cells? Did Thomas Jefferson clap John Adams in irons after besting him for the presidency? Did John Quincy Adams lock Jackson away after his disputed victory in their first contest? But Rutten's lack of historical clarity is nothing compared to the moral muddle that follows:

The Bush administration has been wretchedly mistaken in its conception of executive power, deceitful in its push for war with Iraq and appalling in its scheming to make torture an instrument of state power. But a healthy democracy punishes policy mistakes, however egregious, and seeks redress for its societal wounds, however deep, at the ballot box and not in the prisoner's dock.

The cognitive dissonance of this conclusion was so painful and severe that I had to read it several times to fully take in that it meant exactly what it said: Rutten believes with all his heart that the official practice of deliberate, systematic torture – a clear and unambiguous war crime which he himself has just outlined in careful detail – is ultimately nothing more than a “wretched mistake,” a “policy difference” that should not be “criminalized.” And how can this be? The answer is obvious, if unspoken: because it was done by the United States government – and nothing the United States government ever does can possibly be criminal, or evil. It can only be, at most, a mistake, a conceptual error, an ill-considered policy, a botched attempt at carrying out a noble intention.

If any other country had a policy “to make torture an instrument of state power, " Rutten would undoubtedly condemn it as a vicious evil. In fact, he might well bring out the quote from Thucydides that he used just a few weeks ago, in a piece lauding the stricken "Lion of the Senate," Ted Kennedy:

Kennedy's brother, Bobby, was fond of quoting the ancient Greeks. One of them, Thucydides, once was asked, "When will there be justice in Athens?" He replied, "There will be justice in Athens when those who are not injured are as outraged as those who are."

But it appears that Rutten's outrage at injustice has its limits. It does not extend to actually punishing those responsible for torture and murder – if those responsible are the leaders of the American government. They are to be allowed to finish their terms, then live out their lives in wealth, privilege, comfort and safety. To otherwise, says Rutten – to insist that no one is above the law – "risks the stability of our own electoral politics."

(This is a point that I've never quite understood about American exceptionalists. On the one hand, they say the system is so strong and resilient that it can magically heal itself no matter what happens. On the other hand, it is apparently so weak and unstable that any attempt to actually apply its laws to the powerful could bring down the whole house of cards. A curious conundrum indeed; but then again, fundamentalisms invariably rest on such ineffable mysteries.)

Somehow, the "ballot box" will redress these "egregious mistakes," says Rutten. Yet surely the real lesson that future leaders (whatever side of the "ballot box" they are on) will take away from this shameful episode is that they will never be held legally accountable for any abuse of power, "however egregious," however clearly criminal it is. Sure, personal peccadilloes like financial chicanery or sexual hanky-panky might land you in hot water. But whatever you do as a matter of state – especially if it involves the infliction of suffering, ruin and death – will not be prosecuted.

This, to Rutten – and the conventional wisdom he represents here – is the mark of "a healthy democracy." Only weird foreigners and sissies ("the lacy fringe left") would wring their hands over bringing torturers and murderers to justice. Sure, mistakes have been made, but the system is strong, the system works smoothly, the system is self-correcting. All will be well, and all manner of things will be well. This is the quintessence of good "centrist" thought. This is the soft, fluffy quilt that will soon envelop the staggering revelations of capital crimes that we saw this week.

As we noted here a few weeks ago, Barack Obama – who has been busy this week bolstering supporters of executive tyranny and appointing a gaggle of dim warhawks, has-beens and imperial factotums as his national security team) – has given every indication he too sees the Administration's high crimes as "dumb policies" that don't require any legal redress:

Obama says that any decision to pursue "investigation" of "possibilities" of "genuine crimes" would be "an area where I would exercise judgment." He stressed the need to draw a distinction between "really dumb policies and policies that rise to the level of criminal activity." He said he would not want "my first term to be consumed by what would be perceived by Republicans as a partisan witch hunt."

He then tied his thinking on torture, illegal wiretapping, aggressive war and all the other depredations of the Bush Regime to his stance on impeachment:

"I often get questions about impeachment at town hall meetings. And I've often said, I do not think that would be something that would be fruitful to pursue. I think impeachment should be reserved for exceptional circumstances."

In other words, very strong, credible, evidence-based charges of launching a criminal war of aggression based on deception is not an "exceptional circumstance" worthy of the investigative and prosecutorial process of impeachment. It might just be a "very dumb policy." Very strong, credible, evidence-based charges of knowingly, deliberately creating a regimen of systematic torture is not an "exceptional circumstance" worthy of impeachment; it might not even be worth further investigation by the Justice Department. It too could just be a "dumb policy" that we should forget about – especially if Republicans are going to make a fuss about it.

In any case, it is obvious that to Obama, "what we already know" does not constitute "exceptional circumstances" – otherwise he would already be pressing for criminal investigation, via the impeachment process or by calling for a special prosecutor… He pretends that it is still an open question – "an exercise of judgment" – whether these crimes should even be investigated further, much less prosecuted. He pretends – or even worse, actually believes – that we are not in the grip of "exceptional circumstances," but are apparently just rolling along with business as usual, aside from a few "dumb policies" which he will tinker with and set right.

It has indeed been a remarkable week in American politics. But I fear that the most remarkable thing about it will turn out to be that it had no lasting effect at all.

Dark Passage: PNAC's Blueprint for Empire

2005-03-27T11:37:00.001+01:00

(Original version published Sept. 20, 2002 in the Moscow Times. This is the expanded version from the book, Empire Burlesque.)

Not since Mein Kampf has a geopolitical punch been so blatantly telegraphed, years ahead of the blow.

Adolf Hitler clearly spelled out his plans to destroy the Jews and launch wars of conquest to secure German domination of world affairs in his 1925 book, long before he ever assumed power. Despite the zig-zags of rhetoric he later employed, the various PR spins and temporary justifications offered for this or that particular policy, any attentive reader of his vile regurgitation could have divined his intentions as he drove his country – and the world – to murderous upheaval.

Similarly – in method, if not entirely in substance – the Bush Regime's foreign policy is also being carried out according to a strict blueprint first written ten years ago, then renewed a few months before the Regime was installed in power by the judicial coup of December 2000.

What does the plan call for? An attack on Iraq. Vast increases in military spending. Planting new American bases all over the world, from the jungles of South America to the steppes of Central Asia. Embracing the concept of "pre-emptive war" and unilateral action as cornerstones of national strategy.

These policies may seem like reactions to the "changed world" confronting America after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But in fact, each one of them – and many other policies now being advanced by the Bush Administration – was planned long before the first plane ever struck the doomed Twin Towers.

They are the handiwork of an obscure but influential conservative group called Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose members – including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld – now sit in the highest reaches of power. The papers they produced during the 1990s are like a roadmap of the course that America is following – a course which PNAC hopes will lead to a "benign" but utterly dominant "American Empire."

The Unipolar Moment
Not surprisingly, the roots of PNAC go back to the first Bush Administration. In 1992, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney asked two of his top aides, Paul Wolfowitz (now assistant secretary of Defense) and Lewis Libby (now Cheney's chief of staff), to draw up a "Defense Guidance Plan" to shape American strategy in the post-Cold War world. They produced an aggressive, ambitious document calling for the unilateral use of American military might to "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." Military intervention would be "a constant fixture" of what Wolfowitz and Libby called a "new order" which the United States – not the United Nations – would "establish and protect."

The goal was to seize the opportunity offered by the collapse of the Soviet Union – which left the United States without a serious international rival – and extend this "unipolar moment" of American dominance for decades to come; indeed, into a "New American Century."

The report was leaked in the midst of the 1992 presidential campaign, sparking controversy over its "imperial ambitions," and was publicly disowned by President George H.W. Bush. After the Bush team was defeated by Bill Clinton, a lame-duck Cheney finally issued a watered-down version of the paper as official policy. The Clinton Administration then scrapped it upon taking office.

But the unipolar vision of American dominance was not forgotten. During the 1990s, it was refined and expanded in a number of conservative think tanks – the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Hudson Institute, the Center for Security Policy and others – whose memberships often overlapped. And now that they were out of office, the advocates of dominance could speak more freely.

One former member of Cheney's Defense Department team, Zalmay Khalilzad (now Bush's special emissary to Afghanistan), wrote openly that the U.S. must "be willing to use force" to express its "global leadership" and preclude the rise of potential rivals. Others, such as former Reagan official and AEI stalwart Richard Perle (now head of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board) and Douglas Feith (now assistant secretary of Defense), worked with Israel's Likud Party, drawing up plans calling for American-led "regime change" efforts in Iraq, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Finally, in 1997, Project for the New American Century was formed as a focal point for disseminating the dominance ideal. It was a "big tent" of Great Power adherents: Beltway players like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, former Vice President Dan Quayle, and former Reagan education secretary turned public scold, William Bennett; Christian "social conservatives" like Gary Bauer; and the so-called "neoconservatives" (often former Democrats whose staunch anti-communism had led them to the Reagan Right), including Elliot Abrams, who'd been convicted of lying to Congress in the Iran-Contra scandal but was pardoned by George Bush Sr. (and now serves on the White House director of Middle East policy). Other notable figures joining PNAC included the Afghan-born Khalilzad, publisher and presidential candidate Steve Forbes, and Jeb Bush, younger brother of the president-to-be.

"A New Pearl Harbor"
PNAC fired its first shot across the bow in 1998, with letters to President Clinton and Congressional leaders calling for "regime change" in Iraq, by force if necessary, and the establishment of a "strong U.S. military presence in the region." Then in September 2000, just months before the disputed election that brought George W. Bush to power, the group published a highly detailed, 90-page "blueprint" for transforming America's military – and the nation's role on the world stage.

The document, "Rebuilding America's Defenses," acknowledged its adherence to the "basic tenets" of the controversial 1992 Wolfowitz-Libby report, and advocated a series of "transformations" in national defense and foreign affairs. These included:

--- Projecting American dominance with a "worldwide network of forward operating bases" – some permanent, others "temporary access arrangements" as needed for various military interventions – in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. These additions to America's already-extensive overseas deployments would act as "the cavalry on the new American frontier" – a frontier that PNAC declared now extended throughout the world.

--- Withdrawing from arms control treaties to allow for the development of a global missile shield, the deployment of space-based weapons and the production of a new generation of "battlefield nuclear weapons," especially "bunker-busters" for penetrating underground fortifications.

--- Raising the U.S. military budget to at least 3.8 percent of gross domestic product, with annual increases of tens of billions of dollars each year.

--- Developing sophisticated new technologies to "control the global commons of cyberspace" by closely monitoring communications and transactions on the Internet.

--- Pursuing the development of "new methods of attack – electronic, 'non-lethal, biological…in new dimensions, in space, cyberspace and perhaps the world of microbes." Just this month, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was complaining to Congress about long-standing international chemical weapons treaties which have "tangled us up so badly" and prevented the use of non-lethal chemical arms in subduing enemy armies – and enemy populations.

--- Developing the ability to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars." This means moving beyond the "two-war standard" of preparedness which has guided U.S. strategy since World War II in order to account for "new realities and potential new conflicts." It lists countries such as Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Korea and Libya as targets for those potential new conflicts, and urges Pentagon warplanners to consider not merely containing them or defeating them in battle, but "changing their regimes."

Oddly enough, although "regime change" in Iraq was still clearly a priority for PNAC, it had little to do with Saddam Hussein and his brutal policies or his aggressive tendencies. Instead, removing Saddam was tied to the larger goal of establishing a permanent U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf in order to "secure energy supplies" and preclude any other power from dominating the vital oil regions of the Middle East and Central Asia. The PNAC report puts it quite plainly:

"The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

This is why the Bush Regime has offered a constantly shifting menu of rationales for the impending attack on Iraq: because the decision to remove Saddam was taken long ago, as part of a larger strategic plan, and has little to do with any imminent threat from the broken-backed Iraqi regime, which is constantly bombed, partially occupied (with U.S. forces already working in the autonomous Kurdish territories) and now swarming with UN inspectors. If the strategic need for the attack "transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein," then almost any rationale will do.

Perhaps due to the presence of Washington heavyweights like Cheney and Rumsfeld, the PNAC report recognized that thorny political difficulties could stand in the way of implementing the group's radical designs. Indeed, in one of the most striking and prescient passages in the entire 90-page document, PNAC acknowledged that the "revolutionary" changes it envisaged could take decades to bring about – unless, that is, the United States was struck by "some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor."

The Path of Action
That "new Pearl Harbor" did come, of course, in the thunderclap of September 11, 2001. And the PNAC alumni now in government were quick to capitalize on this "catalyzing event." All of the PNAC recommendations listed above were put into place, with almost no debate from a shellshocked Congress and a populace reeling from the unprecedented assault on American security. In the very first days following the attack, Rumsfeld urged the Bush cabinet to make "Iraq a principal target of the first round in the war against terrorism," despite the lack of any proof connecting Baghdad to the terrorist atrocity, according to Bob Woodward's insider account, Bush at War.

But Rumsfeld was overruled by Colin Powell, who counseled that "public opinion has to be prepared before a move against Iraq is possible." So the "war on terrorism" was launched initially against Afghanistan, where the Taliban regime was harboring Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden and his band of international extremists. The attack on Afghanistan was accompanied by the construction of new American bases and "temporary access arrangements" throughout Central Asia, giving America a military "footprint" in the strategically vital region for the first time. At the same time, new U.S. forces were dispatched to East Asia, to the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere, and to South America, to help Colombia combat "narco-terrorists" and to protect that nation's vital oil pipelines.

Meanwhile, at home, military budgets skyrocketed to deal with the "new realities and potential new conflicts." The Bush Administration withdrew from the landmark ABM arms control treaty and began construction of missile defense facilities. There were new funds and more research for the militarization of outer space (dubbed "Full Spectrum Dominance"), and the development of "non-lethal" biochemical weapons. Pentagon technicians, led by another convicted Iran-Contra figure, John Poindexter, began the development of Internet "data-mining" and monitoring technology (which, despite some recent Congressional restrictions, continues today). And the U.S. announced a new "nuclear posture," including the willingness to use tactical nuclear weapons – a move supported by the Republican-led House of Representatives, which approved Pentagon plans to develop the "bunker-buster" nukes specifically recommended by PNAC.

"The Savage Wars of Peace"
The existence of PNAC and its influence on the Bush Administration is not some "conspiracy theory." It follows a pattern frequently seen in American history: a group of like-minded people band together in think tanks, foundations, universities and other institutions, where they lay out their vision for America's future. And when they at last have access to the levers of power, they try to make that vision a reality.

What is different now is that the September 11 attacks have given this particular group an unprecedented amount of political capital – not to mention cold, hard federal cash – to put their long-held dreams into practice, virtually without opposition. (In contrast, consider the bitterly partisan political struggles between Congress and Lincoln during the Civil War.) What is also different is the essential content of that vision: the establishment – by force – of an American Empire.

This Empire is to be different from the old Roman or British models, of course. It will not entail settlement or direct control of foreign lands, but will instead offer paternal "protection" and "guidance" – backed up with strategically placed military bases and "temporary access arrangements" for the inevitable "constabulatory duties" required to enforce PNAC's longed-for "Pax Americana." However, the intent is not outright conquest, but the chance to bring "the single sustainable model of national success" to all the world, to set people, and their markets, free – as long as no "regional or global challenges to America's leadership" arise, of course.

But there will be costs to taking up what Thomas Donnelly, the principal author of the PNAC blueprint, calls "the free man's burden." Donnelly, a former journalist and legislative aide, wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs last year that America should look to its "imperial past" as a guide to its future. Reviewing The Savage Wars of Peace, a pro-Empire book by journalist Max Boot, Donnelly cites approvingly the "pacification" of the Philippines by American forces in 1898-1900, in which at least 100,000 Filipinos were killed in a bid for independence. He also points to the U.S. Army's success in subduing the Native American tribes in a series of small wars, and, closer to our time, the efficient "constabulatory operation" in Panama, which was invaded by the first President Bush in 1989. Similar "savage wars of peace" – pacifications, counterinsurgencies, police actions, invasions – will be required to maintain the new American Empire, says Donnelly.

And here too, George W. Bush has clearly echoed the thinking of the PNAC members who now surround him in the White House. Speaking at a Republican fundraiser last August, the President seemed keenly aware of the heavy price in blood and treasure the nation will have to pay to maintain its imperium in the New American Century: "There's no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland."

The Beautiful Song of War
These texts spring from the Dominators' quasi-religious cult of "American exceptionalism," the belief in the unique and utter goodness of the American soul – embodied chiefly by the nation's moneyed elite, of course – and the irredeemable, metaphysical evil of all those who would oppose or criticize the elite's righteous (and conveniently self-serving) policies.

Anyone still "puzzled" over the Bush Regime's behavior need only look to these documents for enlightenment. They have long been available to the media – which accepted Bush's transparent campaign lies about a "more humble foreign policy" at face value – but have only now started attracting wider notice, in the New Yorker this spring, and this week in the Glasgow Sunday Herald.

The documents explain America's relentless march across Afghanistan, Central Asia and soon into the Middle East. They explain the Bush Regime's otherwise unfathomable rejection of international law, its fanatical devotion to so-called "missile defense," its gargantuan increases in military spending – even its antediluvian energy policy, which mandates the continued primacy of oil and gas in the world economy. (They can't conquer the sun or monopolize the wind, so there's no profit, no leverage for personal gain and geopolitical power in pursuing viable alternatives to oil.) The Sept. 11 attacks gave the Regime a pretext for greatly accelerating this published program of global dominance, but they would have pursued it in any case.

So there will be war: either soon, after immediately the November mid-term elections, or – in the event that Iraq's new offer for inspections is accepted – then later, after some "provocation" or "obstruction," no doubt in good time before the 2004 presidential vote. The purse-lipped rhetoric about "evil" and "moral clarity" is just so much desert sand being thrown in our eyes. Backstage, the Bush Regime is playing Mafia-style hardball, warning reluctant allies to get on board now, or else miss out on their cut of the loot when America – not a "democratic Iraq" – divvies up Saddam's oilfields: a shakedown detailed last week by the Economist, among many others.

The Dominators dream of empire. Not only will it extend their temporal power, they believe it will also give them immortality. Indeed, one of their chief gurus, Reaganite firebreather Michael Ledeen, says that if the Dominators have the courage to reject "clever diplomacy" and "just wage total war" to subjugate the Middle East, "our children will sing great songs about us years from now."* This madness, this bin Laden-like megalomania is now driving the hijacked American republic – and the world – to murderous upheaval.

It's all there in the text, set down in black and white.

Read it and weep.

Chris Floyd

*This quote is widely attributed to Richard Perle, but the dubious honor belongs to Leeden alone.

Worried Yet? Saudis Prepare for "Sudden Nuclear Hazards" After Cheney Visit

2008-03-24T17:35:00.002Z

I. One Tick Closer to Midnight
Last Friday, Dick Cheney was in Saudi Arabia for high-level meetings with the Saudi king and his ministers. On Saturday, it was revealed that the Saudi Shura Council -- the elite group that implements the decisions of the autocratic inner circle -- is preparing "national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may affect the kingdom following experts' warnings of possible attacks on Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactors," one of the kingdom's leading newspapers, Okaz, reports. The German-based dpa news service relayed the paper's story.

Simple prudence -- or ominous timing? We noted here last week that an American attack on Iran was far more likely -- and more imminent -- than most people suspect. We pointed to the mountain of evidence for this case gathered by scholar William R. Polk, one of the top aides to John Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and to other indicators of impending war. The story by Okaz -- which would not have appeared in the tightly controlled dictatorship without approval from the top -- is yet another, very weighty piece of evidence laid in the scales toward a new, horrendous conflict.

We don't know what the Saudis told Cheney in private -- or even more to the point, what he told them. But the release of this story now, just after his departure, would seem to be a clear indication that the Saudis have good reason to fear a looming attack on Iran's nuclear sites and are actively preparing for it.

II. A Nuclear Epiphany in Iran?
And they certainly should be bracing themselves. A U.S. attack on Iran will come suddenly, and if it is indeed aimed at destroying Iran's nuclear capabilities -- a "threat" being talked up again with new urgency by both Cheney and Bush lately -- it has the potential for unimaginable consequences. As we noted here in a previous piece:

Twelve hours. One circuit of the sun from horizon to horizon, one course of the moon from dusk to dawn. What was once a natural measurement for the daily round of human life is now a doom-laden interval between the voicing of an autocrat's brutal whim and the infliction of mass annihilation halfway around the world.
Twelve hours is the maximum time necessary for American bombers to gear up and launch an unprovoked sneak attack – a Pearl Harbor in reverse – against Iran, the Washington Post reports….And when this attack comes – either as a stand-alone "knock-out blow" or else as the precursor to a full-scale, regime-changing invasion, like the earlier aggression in Iraq – there will be no warning, no declaration of war, no hearings, no public debate. The already issued orders governing the operation put the decision solely in the hands of the president: he picks up the phone, he says, "Go" – and in twelve hours' time, up to a million Iranians could be dead.

This potential death toll is not pacifist hyperbole; it comes from a National Academy of Sciences study sponsored by the Pentagon itself, as The Progressive reports. (Although Bush's military brass like to peddle the public lie that "we don't do body counts" of the enemy, in reality, like all good businessmen they keep precise accounts of their production outputs: i.e., corpses.) The Pentagon's NAS study calibrated the kill-rate from "bunker-busting" tactical nukes used to take out underground facilities – such as those which house much of Iran's nuclear power program.

Another simulation by scientists, using Pentagon-devised software, was even more specific, measuring the aftermath of a "limited" nuclear attack on the main Iranian underground site in Esfahan, the magazine reports. This small expansion of the Pentagon franchise would result in stellar production figures: three million people killed by radiation in just two weeks, and 35 million people exposed to dangerous levels of cancer-causing radiation in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Bush has about 50 nuclear "earth-penetrating weapons" at his disposal, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Nor is the idea of a nuclear strike on Iran mere "liberal paranoia." Bush himself pointedly refused to take the nuclear option "off the table" this week. But what's more, Bush has made the use of nuclear weapons a centerpiece of his "National Security Strategy of the United States," issued last month, The Progressive notes. While reaffirming the criminal principle of "pre-emptive" attacks on perceived enemies which may or may not be threatening America with weapons they may or may not possess, Bush declared that "safe, credible and reliable nuclear forces continue to play a critical role" in the "offensive strike systems" that are now a key part of America's "deterrence."

In the depraved jargon of atomic warmongering, a "credible" nuclear force is one that can and will be used in the course of ordinary military operations. It is no longer to be regarded as a sacred taboo. This has long been the dream of the Pentagon's "nuclear priesthood" and its acolytes, going back to the days of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For decades, a strong faction within the American power structure has been afflicted with a perverted craving to unleash these weapons once more. An almost sexual frustration can be discerned in their laments as time and again, in crisis after crisis, their counsels for "going nuclear" were rejected – often at the very last moment. To justify their aberrant desire, they have relentlessly demonized an ever-changing array of "enemies," painting each one as an imminent, overwhelming threat, led by "madmen" in thrall to pure evil, impervious to reason, fit only for destruction. Evidence for the "threat" is invariably exaggerated, manipulated, even manufactured; this ritual cycle has been enacted over and over, leading to many wars – but never to that ultimate, orgasmic release.

Now this paranoid sect has at last seized the commanding heights of American power....
And they have found a most eager disciple in the peevish dullard strutting in the Oval Office. Under their sinister tutelage, Bush has eviscerated 40 years' worth of arms control treaties; officially "normalized" the use of nuclear weapons, even against non-nuclear states; rewarded outlaw proliferators like India, Israel and Pakistan; and is now destroying the last and most effective restraint on the spread of nuclear weapons: the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

The treaty guarantees its signatories – such as Iran – the right to establish nuclear power programs in exchange for rigorous international inspections. But Bush has arbitrarily decided that Iran – whose nuclear program undergone perhaps the most extensive inspection process in history – must end its lawful activities. Why? Because the country is led by "madmen" in thrall to pure evil, impervious to reason, who one day may or may not threaten America with weapons they may or may not have.

So the NPT is dead. As with the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution, it now means only what Bush says it means. Force of arms, not rule of law, is the new world order. The attack on Iran is coming….

The nuclear sectarians have waited decades for this moment. Such a chance may never come again. Will they let it pass, when with just a word, in just twelve hours, they can see their god rising in a pillar of fire over Persia?

No Country for Old Men: The Reality of Iran in the Shadow of War

2008-03-19T13:51:00.003Z

(Note: Apologies for the broken links. We are working on fixing them now.)

What will become of us without barbarians?
Those people were some sort of a solution.
– C.P. Cavafy, "Waiting for the Barbarians," trans. by Evangelos Sachperoglou

When it comes, it will come quickly. No big build-up, no new "roll-out of the product." The groundwork has already been laid, the specious casus belli already embraced, enthusiastically, by Congress. Proposed legislation to "compel" Bush to seek Congressional approval for an attack will be ignored, just as Bush blatantly ignores any Congressional stricture he dislikes. If he decides to launch an attack on Iran, no institutional or legal fetter will stop him. That's the stark truth of the matter.

The attack will probably be a limited one at first, with the immediate "reasons" being offered up afterwards or in media res. After all, who is going to seriously question the Commander-in-Chief when our brave boys are in the air over enemy territory in Iran?

They had parliamentary elections in Iran last week. It was not good news for the cause of peace. Why? Because reform candidates did unexpectedly well, while hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad saw a deep split in the conservative majority, with many in his own faction rejecting his Bush-like belligerence and incompetence. This might sound like glad tidings at first glance – but it actually makes an attack more likely. It undermines the carefully crafted cartoon image of Iran as a monolithic, maniacal horde of barbarians intent on senseless destruction. If a truer picture of Iranian society is allowed to take hold, it would pose a serious threat to the agenda of the Crawford Caligula and his militarist handlers.

After all, they fought long and hard to get rid of the moderate government of former president Mohammed Khatami – spurning Tehran's extraordinary offer in 2003 of complete cooperation on nuclear safeguards, helping establish security in Iraq, ending armed support for Palestinian militias, cooperating against terrorism, and recognizing Israel. Instead, the Bushists hoped for a more demonizable figure whom they could use to "justify" their goal of establishing a pliable client state in the oil-rich, strategically located land. And just as with their openly stated wish in 2000 for a "new Pearl Harbor" that would "catalyze" the American public into supporting their radical imperialist program, they got lucky again with the election of Ahmadinejad – a sinister clown made to order for scaremongering propaganda, even though his actual powers are quite limited. Any development that complicates the cartoon, such as the recent elections, is bad for business.

And make no mistake, the Bush faction's predatory designs on Iran are business – big business. The entire "War on Terror" is an engine for crony profiteering on a monstrous scale – and the greatest transfer of public wealth into private hands the world has ever seen. Those who believe that the Bushists would hold back from striking Iran because it is too "risky" don't understand the stakes these warmongers are playing for. As they will never suffer personally or financially from even the worst outcome of their policies, the game is well worth the candle for them. Others will do the dying. Others will face the ruin. Others will weep with pain and grief.

But who will be killed in the attack on Iran, and the subsequent, inevitable escalation? For most Americans, the image of Iran is still the one that was seared onto their television screens in 1979 and 1980: the angry, violent hostage-takers, fundamentalist zombies blindly obedient to the will of an evil, black-robed tyrant. Less visual, but still potent, are the later press descriptions of Iranian hordes swarming in suicidal waves across the battlefields with Iraq. Such images and impressions – endlessly recapitulated in the media and in the political rhetoric of both parties – constitute the picture of the Iranian "enemy" that many Americans hold in their minds today.

It is these mad, maniacal, frothing zealots who will die in any attack, most people think – when they consider the matter at all. One might oppose a strike on practical grounds, of course, as Admiral William Fallon, recently removed as head of U.S. Central Command, allegedly did; but not from any concern over the fate of those "ants," as Fallon described the Iranians, in a perfect encapsulation of the general consensus.

Even at the time of their creation, these images were gross exaggerations of Iranian society; today they are wildly absurd, even hallucinatory in their lack of connection to reality. Consider just one fact: almost 70 percent of Iran's population is under 30. Most Iranians were not even born at the time of the 1979 revolution. The overwhelming majority of Iranians are too young to have played the slightest part in the war with Iraq. Most Iranians are also too young to play any substantial role in governing the country now. It has one of the youngest populations in the world. And beneath the rigid outward shell of its repressive system, this nation of youth is seething with change, growing toward new freedoms, making its own way toward a future that – if allowed to develop – will doubtless be much different than any scenario imagined by the militarists in Washington or the old men in Qom.

This week in the Observer, Peter Beaumont provided an insightful portrait of young Iran, particularly the women – who now outnumber the men in the nation's universities: a circumstance unimaginable in Iraq or Afghanistan, the lands "liberated" by the Terror War. An excerpt:

The rules of the coffee houses - in comparison with the street - reflect the fundamental division in Iran. It is not the divide between the 'Reforms' and the 'Principalists' of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who competed for Iran's parliamentary elections on Friday. For many of the young… those elections represented an increasingly irrelevant distinction in a clerical system they feel is stacked in favour of itself. Instead, the division is between what Iranians do and say in private, or in places where they feel comfortable, and how they are forced to behave in public.

The inevitable tension between the two is defining the boundaries of the country's culture wars. For it is here, rather than in the polling booths, that Iran's most crucial competition is taking place - over the limits of what is acceptable self-expression. It is the struggle to push the boundaries of freedom in Iran.

In Tehran, it is visible in the girls who wear their scarves pushed far back on their heads, hair springing free, faces heavily made up or tight jackets worn over their knee-length mantles in a challenge to the system. Even those attempting to push the boundaries insist that, despite the image of Iran in the West as virtually a totalitarian regime, Iranians enjoy more freedoms than they are credited with. Two of those are Sohrab Mahdavi, editor of the online Tehranavenue.com, and his friend Ramin Sadighi, a musician and director of a record label, who are involved in a project to bring more music into public places.

'The crucial thing to understand about Iran,' said Mahdavi, 'is that we do have freedoms. The important issue is the separation between public and private space in Iranian life. Since the revolution, public space has been tightly controlled [by the clerical authorities], so people have created their own "public spaces" in private. A consequence is that what is acceptable in private is now constantly in the process of trying to nibble away at the controlled public arena.'

'And you have to bear in mind,' said Sadighi, 'how youthful the population is here. They are the fruits of the system in many respects. But they are going in an opposite direction to it. There is no social movement that is represented by them - and I think that is probably a good thing for the future of Iran - but what is happening is that people have joined together to form small colonies of interest.'

It is a business that is explained by a young Iranian teacher. 'In the private space, you don't have to hide yourself. There are no restrictions. No boundaries. On what I read. What I believe. What I want to know.'

These "islands of freedom" – as yet unconnected into a larger movement, still under threat – will be destroyed by an American attack and the subsequent, inevitable strengthening of the hardliners – or, in the extreme case, the subsequent collapse of Iranian society into the kind of murderous chaos Bush and his Establishment enablers have inflicted on Iraq.

These are the people who will die – innocent, young, hopeful, human – in any attempt to extend the militarists' empire of corruption and domination ever deeper into the oil lands.

Another Act of Evil: Slow Murder at Gitmo

2008-03-14T17:46:00.005Z

(NOTE: Temporarily blogging here until my regular site (www.chris-floyd.com) is freed from a hacker hijack.)

One grows weary, so weary, of plowing through filth, day after day – the unspeakable, blood-soaked, stinking filth of torture, murder, lies and degradation that pours in a relentless, unending stream from the belching pits of the Bush Regime. And let's be clear: we speak here of deliberate evil – not good works gone wrong, not mere "incompetence," not misguided policies or ignorance or even ideological blindness– but fully concious acts of evil which the perpetrators themselves know are evil.

One such act is in the concentration camp in Guanatanamo Bay: the slow, deliberate murder of an innocent man, who is being killed with the collusion of oath-breaking physicians. In an important piece at Salon.com, Candace Gorman tells the story of Abdul Hamid Al-Ghizzawi, who was forced to flee from his home by American bombing raids in the early days of the attack on Afghanistan, and was then sold to American forces by local bounty hunters in December 2001. He has never been charged with any crime; indeed, one of Bush's own military panels declared that Al-Ghizzawi was not an "enemy combatant." One of the officers on the panel testified, under oath, that the evidence against the purchased prisoner was "garbage." But Al-Ghizzawi has been left to rot in Guantanamo, where he is now dying of liver disease, a condition that was allowed to deteriorate while medical officials helped hide his true condition from American courts. Gorman, who is acting as his attorney, takes up the story:

Military officials claim he has been given proper healthcare. But Al-Ghizzawi appears to have acute liver disease, among other ailments, and the military is allowing his condition to deteriorate without proper diagnosis or treatment, according to a doctor with the International Committee of the Red Cross who has observed Al-Ghizzawi and his medical records at the prison. A leading medical expert who has reviewed Al-Ghizzawi's case agrees with that conclusion, as do I, based on my observations of my client during repeated visits to Guantánamo. Military and government officials have refused to grant me access to my client's medical records.

Al-Ghizzawi, now 45, is a Libyan-born man who had been living quietly in Afghanistan with his Afghan wife. They had a small shop selling honey and spices that they later expanded to a bakery. They have a young daughter, now 6 years old, whom Al-Ghizzawi last saw when she was just a few months old. When the American bombs started to fall in late 2001 on Jalalabad, the city where Al-Ghizzawi lived with his family, he did what most people would do: He fled. He took his wife and infant daughter to his wife's parents' home away from the city. Unfortunately, Al-Ghizzawi was not well known in his in-laws' village. Bounty hunters turned Al-Ghizzawi over to the Northern Alliance in December 2001, who then handed him over to the United States. (Our government offered millions of dollars for captured "murderers and terrorists," and few questions were asked when Arab men were turned over for those bounties.) By March 2002, Al-Ghizzawi was sent to Guantánamo, where he was never charged with a crime or given the opportunity to prove his innocence....

The duration and isolation of his indefinite confinement are appalling enough, but now Al-Ghizzawi appears to be dying of liver disease. Eighteen months ago, in August 2006, I filed an emergency motion with the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., to try to get copies of Al-Ghizzawi's medical records, which the government refused to turn over. Bush administration lawyers submitted an affidavit in response from the then medical director at Guantánamo, Dr. Ronald Sollock, who acknowledged that Al-Ghizzawi had a "history of hepatitis B," and stated that the military had run "routine" tests on Al-Ghizzawi. The results, he said, came back "normal." Sollock also noted in his affidavit that Al-Ghizzawi became infected with tuberculosis while at Guantánamo. This was the first that Al-Ghizzawi had learned of his having a "history of hepatitis B" and of being infected with tuberculosis. But U.S. District Judge Bates denied my motion to gain access to the medical records.

I brought Al-Ghizzawi's ill health to the attention of the International Committee for the Red Cross. Representatives of the ICRC who are granted access to Guantánamo and its population have watched the medical deterioration of some prisoners there, but they are apparently helpless to do anything to stop it. One ICRC doctor, expressing anger and frustration, told me that he had sought healthcare for Al-Ghizzawi after looking at his test results from the military, but said that military officials had ignored him. He also told me he believed that Sollock's affidavit appeared to have been written to conceal or downplay Al-Ghizzawi's test results, rather than adequately explain them to the court.

When I visited Al-Ghizzawi last October, he told me that a military doctor had finally conceded that he had a severe liver infection. According to Al-Ghizzawi, the doctor asked to do a liver biopsy, but also told Al-Ghizzawi that the procedure was dangerous and could damage his organs. (The military has denied that anyone spoke to Al-Ghizzawi of such a risk.) Al-Ghizzawi declined the biopsy, and the medical staff has apparently failed to treat his liver infection. But according to Dr. Juerg Reichen, a leading expert on liver disease who has reviewed Al-Ghizzawi's case, a biopsy would not have been necessary to diagnose and treat him properly.

I filed another emergency motion on my client's behalf in February. Judge Bates then ordered the government to update him on Al-Ghizzawi's health, and in mid-February the government submitted an affidavit from the new medical director at Guantánamo, Dr. Bruce Meneley, a dermatologist by specialty. In that Feb. 15 affidavit, Meneley admitted that tests were performed on Al-Ghizzawi as far back as November 2006 -- shortly after the judge had denied my initial request for medical records -- showing that Al-Ghizzawi's liver was not "normal" as Sollock had testified in October 2006.

So why did military doctors, after learning of Al-Ghizzawi's liver problems in fall 2006, fail to start treating him properly, and instead move this ill man to the isolation of Camp 6? The answers to these questions remain unknown. But Reichen, the expert on liver disease, said in an affidavit submitted to the court on Feb. 19, "It is evident that [military doctors at Guantánamo] withhold information without any military value, misinterpret it and try to withhold treatment from Mr. Al-Ghizzawi."

I continue to visit with Al-Ghizzawi every other month for two days at a time, and monitor his dying. In our meetings we talk about his legal case and his family, but mostly we discuss his deteriorating health. Al-Ghizzawi has become weaker and weaker and at times he is barely able to talk...With his own death looming, Al-Ghizzawi has given me his last will and testament and instructions for the disposition of his remains. I don't have the heart to tell him that one simple request will almost certainly never be granted by our military: to have his remains tested to see exactly what killed him, so that if such testing does confirm a history of hepatitis B, his wife and daughter can be tested to ensure their health is not compromised by this same disease.

Why was Al-Ghizzawi not freed long ago, when it was first determined that he was not an "enemy combatant," and therefore, even under the ludicrous legal theories of the Bush gulag, should not have been subject to indefinite detention without charge or trial? Perhaps a clue can be found in the words of one of the minions most directly responsible for imposing Bush's perverse lust for torture: William J. Haynes II, the general counsel of the Defense Department. At Harper's, Scott Horton references the accounts given by Col. Morris Davis, the former chief military prosecutor in Guantánamo, of his conversations with Haynes. As noted in the Nation:

“[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time,” recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions.’”

"If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off?" This has been the crux of the matter for a long time concerning the many prisoners in Guantanamo who are innocent of any wrong-doing. (And it should be noted that all of the prisoners at Guantanamo are being held under an illegal and unjust system, backed up by force and torture -- a system that is a complete repudiation of the "civilized values" that the Terror War purports to defend.) What indeed can the Bush Regime -- and its willing executioners in Congress, including the Democratic "opposition," who have done nothing to shut down this shameful enterprise -- do with all these innocent people they've held captive for so long? It would be too embarrassing to admit that their incarceration was a mistake -- much less the crime that it undoubtedly is. And while some prisoners have been released from time to time -- usually under a cloud, often rendered into custody elsewhere -- it is clear that the Bush Regime's Gitmo endgame strategy is simple: put some of the captives on trial in the kangaroo court of rigged "military tribunals, and leave others, like Al-Ghizzawi, to rot and die in darkness, in silence, forgotten by the world.

The Courtier's Choice: Arthur Schlesinger and the Willing Executioners of Democracy

2008-02-17T21:11:00.006Z

(UPDATED BELOW.)

The late Arthur Schlesinger was long regarded as one of the leading lights of the American Establishment: a great public intellectual, a prize-winning historian of the nation's political heritage, a much sought-after commentator on current affairs, and a liberal lion of the old school – stalwart of the New Deal, anti-communist left; keeper of the Kennedy flame, etc. In short, one of the great and good, the meritocratic elite who keep the flame burning in the "shining city on the hill" that is America.

But there is one aspect of Schlesinger's glittering resume that goes unmentioned in the encomiums that invariably attend evocations of his brilliant career: his role as a willing conspirator to destroy democracy in a small, impoverished nation.

The story is told in a chapter of Mark Curtis' remarkable book, Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses. As the title would indicate, American depredations in this regard play a secondary – if indispensable – part in the book, which is based largely on partly declassified UK government documents. And the chapter in question here describes perhaps the least destructive of the many Anglo-American interventions over the past 60 years -- interventions which, as Curtis details, have resulted in approximately 10 million deaths. What's more, Schlesinger's role in this particular destruction of a nascent democracy is very small, confined to a few bits of advice passed on to his boss in the White House, John F. Kennedy.

But even so, it is instructive to watch our great and good operate behind the scenes, and to see how they really feel about freedom, democracy and liberation for the poor and oppressed – those rhetorical tropes that have adorned our transatlantic rhetoric for so long, both in the halls of government, and in the weighty pronouncements of our great public intellectuals.

Curtis tells the tale of a ten-year effort by Britain and the United States to prevent the most popular party in what was then British Guiana (now Guyana) from taking power. It began in 1953, when the colony – which had been in Britain's control since 1814, when they seized it from the Dutch – attempted to use the limited self-government it had been "granted" by Her Majesty to vote the People's Progressive Party (PPP) into office. Led by Cheddi Jagan, the party's platform was the usual mixture of land reform, social programs and nationalist feeling (which is called "patriotism" when it occurs in America and Britain, but is denigrated as a troublesome aberration when it rears its ugly head amongst the lesser breeds) that arose across the "third world" in the post-war years. These were all treated – without exception, whatever their various ideological, ethnic, or religious character – as dire threats to American and British "interests." That is, the successful implementation of these programs would have slightly reduced the profits of a few vast foreign-owned industrial and corporate combines that held whole nations in their thrall. Each of these movements were denounced as "communist" by Western leaders – even when the leaders knew, and admitted freely among themselves, that the movements and their leaders were not communists, and would not align their nations with the Soviet bloc.

But more than the bloated profit margins of favored corporations were at stake. There was also the West's overriding fear of a successful challenge to Anglo-American domination of subject nations. The fact that the overwhelming majority of these movements sought good relations with the United States and Britain, and were peaceful, law-abiding parties seeking power through the democratic process meant nothing; because they stood for the principle of national independence, non-alignment, and self-determination – i.e., because they would not automatically submit to the dictates of Washington and London – they could not be allowed to succeed. All measures were "justified" to prevent them from taking power – or to overthrow them in the event they were elected by their people. In order to subvert these popular movements, successive, bipartisan governments in the United States and Britain repeatedly armed, funded, trained and supported what they fully recognized were the worst elements in a given society: corrupt political hacks, feudal lords and rapacious corporate bosses, criminal gangs, power-mad military tyrants, religious extremists, warlords, death squads, and so on. The end result was almost always the same: moderate forces were destroyed, their remnants were radicalized, societies were violently polarized, economies were wrecked, and ordinary, innocent people suffered – and sometimes died – by the millions.

The historical record of this process is long and clear: Guatemala, Iran, Iraq (the two CIA-assisted coups that put the Baathists in power, and the present-day policy of arming and supporting both Shiite and Sunni extremists to maintain an obedient client state and prevent the emergence of any genuine independence), Yemen, Indonesia, Nigeria, Kenya, El Salvador, Colombia, Nicaragua, Uganda, Chile (perhaps the epitome of this dark art), and many others.

And so in 1953, the British sent troops and warships to Guyana to overturn the people's election of Cheddi Jagan and the PPP. For the next few years, the colony was ruled directly from London. But in 1961, when elections were again allowed, the PPP won again. By this time, Britain had promised to "grant" Guyana its independence – but the idea that the "independent" country should be allowed to choose its own leaders was not to be borne. After all, it was clear that they would vote the "wrong way" again. What's more, the preceding decade had seen an acceleration in the withering of Britain's imperial pretensions; it was now recognized in official US and UK papers that Guyana "was in the US, not the UK, sphere of interest." Thus London was willing to defer to whatever Washington desired for the newly "independent" nation.

Curtis quotes a number of US and UK intelligence reports and diplomatic papers that make clear that leaders on both sides of the Atlantic knew that the PPP was not a communist party. They also openly acknowledged that Jagan was "the ablest leader in British Guiana," as one State Department report described him. Curtis describes the main outlines of the American view from government papers at the time:

[The U.S. thought] that Jagan was not a 'controlled instrument of Moscow' but 'a radical nationalist who may play both sides of the street but will not lead British Guiana into [Soviet] satellite status.

U.S. intelligence reports quoted by Curtis noted that Jagan would "make a more determined effort to improve economic conditions" in Guyana. The Party drew its strength not only from its main base of "poverty-stricken rural and urban workers" among the Indian community, but also from "a considerable number of small businessmen."

After Jagan won the 1961 pre-independence election with 45 percent of the vote – easily outpointing the main opposition party led by the Anglo-American favorite, Forbes Burnham – the Americans came up with a two-fold plan. First, Washington would make a public show of offering Jagan technical and economic assistance to prepare the country for independence. But behind the scenes, they would launch a covert operation to destroy the PPP, bring down Jagan and put a suitable leader in his place.

And here the liberal lion and champion of democracy Arthur Schlesinger enters the documentary picture. Writing in his capacity as Special Assistant to the President, Schlesinger pointed out to Kennedy that the two prongs of Washington's plan were in blatant conflict: obviously, Washington could not support Jagan and overthrow him at the same time. So what did Schlesinger recommend? That Kennedy eschew the low-down and undemocratic path of covert action, and instead help the people of Guyana – and their freely elected leader – to step into independence with the full support and blessing of "the world's leading democracy?"

Of course not. Taking his courtier's pen (or typewriter) in hand, Schlesinger wrote that the conflict between the benevolent public pronouncements and the plans for dirty pool "means that the covert program must be handled with the utmost discretion."

That's it. That's Schlesinger's analysis, that's the extent of his morality, of his Pulitzer Prize-winning political convictions: "If we're going to strangle Guyana's democracy in its cradle, then for God's sake, let's do it quietly."

And that's how it was done. Again, a tried-and-true path was followed. As Curtis details, the CIA funded and organized strikes and riots to bring economic and political chaos to Guyana. These American-created upheavals were then cited by U.S. and UK officials as "proof" that Jagan was leading the country to ruin. (This technique was perfected years later in Chile, when the US spent millions of dollars to foment unrest under the Allende regime. Curtis quotes U.S. Ambassador Edward Korry's candid assessment of the strategy: "[We must] do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty;" i.e., to make them suffer for the crime of exercising their freedom and voting the "wrong way.")

Meanwhile, Britain engineered a "constitutional coup" in setting up the structure of the soon-to-be independent state. The Brits imposed an electoral system on Guyana which their own major parties had always rejected (and still do): proportional representation. They recognized that in any winner-take-all system, Jagan and the PPP would continue to win. But a system of proportional representation – which gives losing parties additional seats as the "second choice" of voters – would allow a coalition of pro-American interests to cobble together a ruling coalition.

And so it proved. In the last pre-independence election in 1964, Jagan and the PPP won 46 percent of the vote – again, by far the largest share. But with proportional representation, minority parties won enough votes to put together a coalition headed by – of course – Forbes Burnham. As Curtis notes, "now that the acceptable leadership had taken office, Guyana could be granted independence, which proceeded in 1966."

Both London and Washington – and Arthur Schlesinger – knew that the people of Guyana had been ill-served by these undemocratic machinations. Curtis quotes UK Colonial Secretary Iain MacLeod writing to Schlesinger in February 1962: "If I had to make a choice between Jagan and Burnham as head of my country, I would choose Jagan any day of the week." But the welfare of the Guyanese people didn't amount to a hill of beans to our great public intellectual – and certainly not to the highly respected statesmen he so assiduously served.

As we said before, the subversion of democracy in Guyana was actually very small beer for a system that killed millions of people to maintain its elites in wealth and privilege. But even the deadliest of these operations have found – and still find – avid assistants and staunch apologists among our great and good. And what would Schlesinger have advised if instead of a plan to "merely" overturn a democratic election and plunge a nation into chaos, upheaval and hardship, he had been presented with a CIA scheme to, say, blow Cheddi Jagan's brains out?

Given the nature of our great public intellectuals, and their characteristic attitude toward those in power, I think it's clear what Schlesinger's answer would have been in such a case. Drawing on the excellent Harvard education that he and his president shared, he would have plucked a passage from the highest reaches of Western culture, and scribbled in the margins of the plan: "If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly:"

UPDATE: Winter Patriot takes a look at the post above, and adds much pertinent historical detail and political analysis to my more narrowly focused – and hack-harrassed – effort.

Fighting Back From the Hacks

2008-02-18T10:25:00.001Z

As you may know, the regular Empire Burlesque site has been hit by a relentless series of cyber-attacks, which have taken down the site or hijacked it outright, over and over again in recent days. The website has always been a target for hackers, but these have been the worst hacks we've ever had; they are harder to fend off, and they leave behind more wreckage and take longer to recover from than before. We will get on top of the problem eventually, but whenever the regular site is down, we will be shifting to this older site as a temporary measure. If you are a regular EB reader, you might want to bookmark this site, and keep it handy if you find the main site shut down or in the hands of bellicose hijackers. Thanks very much for your patience in this trying time.

The Bomb in the Shadows: Proliferation, Corruption and the Way of the World

2008-02-15T00:05:00.000Z

This week, the Sunday Times lifted the lid on one of the most important stories of the last quarter-century: how American officials sold nuclear arms technology to illegal proliferators -- including ideological allies of al Qaeda -- in return for bribes and other inducements. This widespread corruption has been protected from exposure by the highest levels of the U.S. government, which has gone to enormous lengths to protect the truth from coming out. The entire planet has been put at grave risk by the greed -- and geopolitical gamesmanship -- that lies behind this criminal enterprise, which actually is even more extensive, and goes back further in time, than the newspaper's remarkable revelations.

The Sunday Times story is based on the evidence provided by former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, who has been subjected to an unprecedented campaign of state-enforced muzzling by the Bush Administration since she first tried to speak out about the corrupt connections between American officials and foreign agents she discovered when reviewing transcripts associated with the 9/11 investigation. As even the leaders of the whitewashing 9/11 Commission themselves now admit, that investigation was deliberately sabotaged by the Bush Administration – in part to cover up the nuclear proliferation network that has directly or indirectly enriched so many in the American elite over the past decades – including the sitting president of the United States, George W. Bush.

I.
Edmonds' revelations should be seen in their larger historical context, as an outgrowth of the activities of BCCI, the "Bank of Credit and Commercial International," a supposed financial group that a U.S. Senate investigation called "one of the largest criminal enterprises in history." BCCI was a prime vehicle for clandestine nuclear proliferation, among many other illegal activities, and was also used by the CIA and the White House for various covert operations, including secret military and financial support for Saddam Hussein. It also paid numerous grandees of the Democratic and Republican parties to front its operations – and gave George W. Bush $25 million to rescue one of his many business failures.

Although BCCI as a "bank" eventually failed, spectacularly, costing its unsuspecting customers more than $10 billion, almost no one was punished for its myriad crimes, and the full extent of the organization's activities continue to be shielded by the many national governments that became entangled in its operations, including the United States and Great Britain, where the Labour government has made extraordinary interventions in court cases to protect BCCI's secrets, invoking the most draconian state secret laws to quash a lawsuit against the Bank of England for the blind but knowing eye that the regulator turned toward BCCI's deadly fraud.

Before exploring these deeper connections further, let's review the tip of the iceberg that Edmonds has courageously exposed, despite the very real threat of retaliation from the U.S. government. From the Times:

"Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions. Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.

"The name of the official – who has held a series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims. However, Edmonds said: 'He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.'

"She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names – who were aiding foreign agents. 'If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials,' she said."

Edmonds goes on to provide details of the operation, which "appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States," under the protection of Pentagon and State Department officials. Turkish and Israeli cut-outs were used to get nuclear info to the ultimate recipient, Pakistan's intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and Abdul Qadeer Khan, "father" of Pakistan's nuclear bomb. As the Times notes:

"The Pakistani operation was led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, then the ISI chief…Intelligence analysts say that members of the ISI were close to Al-Qaeda before and after 9/11. Indeed, Ahmad was accused of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately before the attacks.

"The results of the espionage were almost certainly passed to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist. Khan was close to Ahmad and the ISI. While running Pakistan's nuclear programme, he became a millionaire by selling atomic secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea. He also used a network of companies in America and Britain to obtain components for a nuclear programme. Khan caused an alert among western intelligence agencies when his aides met Osama Bin Laden."

While the Times declined to name the top State Department official cited by Edmonds, elsewhere she has said it was Mark Grossman, "former #3 at the State Department, former ambassador to Turkey, and current Vice President at The Cohen Group, the lobbying company run by former Secretary of Defense William Cohen," notes the blogger Lukery, who has long done sterling service in publicizing Edmonds' plight and her revelations – which, as Lukery notes, are not confined to the nuclear proliferation angle featured in the Sunday Times.

Lukery goes on to note that the other "household names" mentioned by Edmonds include "Richard Perle and Douglas Feith and possibly Paul Wolfowitz. Less familiar names include Eric Edelman, Feith's replacement at the Pentagon, and former Congressman Stephen Solarz."

Lukery also zeroes in on this telling revelation:

"The Times article then notes something that I reported 18 months ago. Immediately after 911, the FBI arrested a bunch of people suspected of being involved with the attacks -- including four associates of key targets of FBI's counterintelligence operations. Sibel heard the targets tell Marc Grossman: 'We need to get them out of the US because we can't afford for them to spill the beans.' Grossman duly facilitated their release from jail and the suspects immediately left the country without further investigation or interrogation.

"Let me repeat that for emphasis: The #3 guy at the State Dept facilitated the immediate release of 9/11 suspects at the request of targets of the FBI's investigation."

(Grossman has denied all of Edmonds' allegations, telling the Sunday Times: "If you are calling me to say somebody said that I took money, that’s outrageous . . . I do not have anything to say about such stupid ridiculous things as this.")

The nuclear proliferation-for-profit ring is just one of the criminal operations that a genuine investigation of the 9/11 attacks would bring to light. Because once you start exploring any part of the dark nexus where so much of the world's business is really conducted – the shadowlands where covert operations, criminal networks, terrorism, high finance and state policy mingle, and battle, in profitable murk – all manner of chicanery is bound to emerge. And so, much as the probe into the assassination of John Kennedy was short-circuited in part to prevent exposure of a wide range of "black ops" involving the U.S. government, the Mob and other unsavoury players, so too the 9/11 attacks will never receive a full, unfettered investigation, but will remain forever – and deliberately – a matter of dispute, breeding arrant crankery and disturbing truth in equal measure, with the latter always tarred and obscured by the former.

II.
This is also true, in some respects, of the 1992 U.S. Senate investigation into what was known as "the BCCI Affair," which left several stones unturned and many questions unanswered. There are two main differences, however. First, the Senate investigation – although it operated within fairly circumscribed limits, pulled many punches, and shied away from some evidence that clearly led to the highest echelons of government -- was actually much more thorough than the official probes of the Kennedy assassination and 9/11. And second, unlike those two investigations, which continue to generate heated interest year after year, the BCCI Affair has been almost completely erased from public memory. Yet a grasp of BCCI's operations – many of which simply continued in other guises when the "bank" itself disappeared – is essential to understanding much of what is happening in the political world today, including Edmonds' revelations.

(The amnesia surrounding BCCI is even more remarkable when you consider that the man who led the 1992 probe – which turned up so much dirt involving the first Bush administration – was none other than Senator John Kerry. Yet Kerry – who knew where so many Bush bones were buried, and who had once displayed genuine moral courage in denouncing the Vietnam War after his service there – used none of this knowledge, and showed none of this courage, when seeking to oust the second Bush Administration, which retained many tainted figures from the first reign, and was headed by a man who had taken millions of dollars from BCCI. Instead Kerry spent the campaign – as he had spent much of his Senate career – trying to prove to the corporate and militarist elite that he was a "safe pair of hands," someone who wouldn't really rock the boat or kill the elite's flock of golden geese. Having thus disarmed himself, he failed to generate the landslide he would have needed to overcome the Bush Faction's election-skewing machinery – although it is very likely that Kerry would have won the election anyway had Ohio's votes been counted fairly. But here too he folded and refused to fight, choosing, like Al Gore before him, not to risk his insider status with a serious, genuine challenge to the system.)

The full details of BCCI's origins and activities – and its bipartisan corruption of American politics – can be found in the Senate report of its investigation, which is available in full at the website of the Federation of American Scientists. It is a long report, but repays reading. The extent of the criminality and moral corruption it documents is truly mind-boggling. Below is a very brief précis of the Senate's findings.

BCCI was founded by Pakistan tycoon Agha Hasan Abedi, who used what Senate investigators called his "extraordinary personal charisma" to charm his way into friendships with the world's global elite, including U.S. President Jimmy Carter and, more crucially for the operation's development, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, the illiterate ruler of Abu Dhabi, who had been installed as leader of the oil-rich state in 1966, after the British engineered a coup against his brother. Abedi became in effect the personal manager of Sheik Zayed's money – and the vast wealth of Abu Dhabi – which he used to fund the creation of BCCI.

As described by the Senate, BCCI's organization set-up sounds remarkably like the one set up later by Bush Family paymaster Ken Lay with his Enron Corporation:

"BCCI was from its earliest days made up of multiplying layers of entities, related to one another through an impenetrable series of holding companies, affiliates, subsidiaries, banks-within-banks, insider dealings and nominee relationships. By fracturing corporate structure, record keeping, regulatory review, and audits, the complex BCCI family of entities created by Abedi was able to evade ordinary legal restrictions on the movement of capital and goods as a matter of daily practice and routine. In creating BCCI as a vehicle fundamentally free of government control, Abedi developed in BCCI an ideal mechanism for facilitating illicit activity by others, including such activity by officials of many of the governments whose laws BCCI was breaking."

And what were the illicit activities that BCCI facilitated for its entangled crime gangs and government agents? The Senate report:

"BCCI's criminality included fraud by BCCI and BCCI customers involving billions of dollars; money laundering in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas; BCCI's bribery of officials in most of those locations; support of terrorism, arms trafficking, and the sale of nuclear technologies; management of prostitution; the commission and facilitation of income tax evasion, smuggling, and illegal immigration; illicit purchases of banks and real estate; and a panoply of financial crimes limited only by the imagination of its officers and customers."

The Senate investigators found that the CIA lied about is extensive, long-term contacts with BCCI, although the Kerry panel often couched this flagrant falsehood in more decorous tones, e.g., "the CIA inadvertently failed" to tell the proper federal officials about BCCI's criminal activities (emphasis added). Still, much of the findings are straightforward on this point: "After the CIA knew that BCCI was as an institution a fundamentally corrupt criminal enterprise, it continued to use both BCCI and First American, BCCI's secretly held U.S. subsidiary, for CIA operations."

The criminals of BCCI were intimately involved in the execution of U.S. foreign policy during the Reagan-Bush administrations, including the Iran-Contra scandal, in which Reagan officials shipped weapons to American hostage-takers in Iran in exchange for clandestine cash for the terrorist army it was using to wage proxy war against Nicaragua. When George Bush Sr. became president, BCCI became a primary conduit for funneling secret aid to Saddam Hussein. The organization also received extraordinary protection from the White House when lower-level federal prosecutors began indicting BCCI associates for laundering drug cartel money and running guns and money to Iraq.

As I have noted elsewhere, the Italian bank BNL was one of BCCI's main tentacles. BNL's Atlanta branch was the primary conduit used to send millions of secret dollars to Saddam for arms purchases, including deadly chemicals and other WMD materials supplied by the Chilean arms dealer Cardoen and various politically-connected operators in the United States like, weapons merchant Matrix Churchill.

When three BNL officials were indicted in 1991 for a fraud scam used to mask payments to Saddam, Bush I moved to throttle the investigation. He appointed lawyers from both Cardoen and Matrix to top Justice Department posts – where they supervised the officials investigating their old companies. The overall probe was directed by Justice Department investigator Robert Mueller. Meanwhile, White House aides applied heavy pressure on other prosecutors to restrict the range of the probe – especially the fact that Bush cabinet officials Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger had served as consultants for BNL during their pre-White House days as partners in Henry Kissinger's lobbying outfit, Kissinger Associates.

[In addition to these connections with the criminal network, another of Kissinger's partners, retired Brazilian diplomat Sergio da Costa "served as the front-man" for the BCCI takeover of a Brazilian bank, Senate investigators found. Tellingly, the Senate report's chapter on Kissinger Associates' contacts with BCCI was deleted from the final, published version – reportedly after pressure from Kissinger himself – although it can still be found in the FAS version noted above. Kissinger, of course, would later turn down an appointment from Bush II to direct the official investigation into the 9/11 attacks – in order to avoid public scrutiny of his business affairs.]

The Kerry report found that the 1991 BNL probe had been unaccountably "botched" – witnesses went missing, CIA records got "lost," all sorts of bad luck. Most of the big BCCI players went unpunished or got off with wrist-slap fines and sanctions.

One of the White House aides who unlawfully intervened in the BNL prosecution was a certain factotum named Jay S. ByBee. In 1994, ByBee was appointed by George W. Bush to a place on the federal appeals court – a lifetime sinecure of perks and power. Mueller, meanwhile wound up as head of the FBI, appointed to the post in by George W. in July 2001, where directed the FBI's response – or lack of response – to the torrent of terrorism alerts during that fateful summer.

III.
Bush II had good reason to reward those who helped his father provide cover for BCCI. In addition to the continuing "shadowland" relationships between U.S. intelligence and key players in BCCI operations (especially the ISI connections which had used BCCI to fund Pakistan's secret nuclear arms program), George Walker Bush had benefited materially from his own connection to BCCI. As Kevin Phillips points out in his devastating – and woefully ignored – book on the Bushes, American Dynasty, Bush II's first large-scale business enterprise, the Arbusto oil company, was almost certainly financed in part with investments from American frontmen for BCCI-connected Saudi grandees Salem bin Laden, older brother of Osama bin Laden and then the head of the family, and Khalid bin Mahfouz, a major stockholder in BCCI.

The failing Arbusto was later bought out by Harken Energy in a sweetheart deal that landed business failure Bush a plum spot on the Harken board and plenty of stock to play with. Bush soon worked his magic touch on Harken: the company began to tank. It was saved by an unusual infusion of $25 million from the Union Bank of Switzerland, one of BCCI's associates. The deal was brokered by long-time Bush family contributor Jackson Stephens – who, curiously enough, was also a major paymaster for Bill Clinton's political rise. In fact, in 1992, Stephens was the largest individual contributor to both Bush I and Clinton in their presidential contest.

Phillips quotes a 1991 Wall Street Journal story on young Bush's myriad ties to the criminal organization: "The mosaic of BCCI connections surrounding Harken Energy may prove nothing more than how ubiquitous the rogue bank's ties were," the paper wrote. "But the number of BCCI-connected people who had dealings with Harken – all since George W. Bush came on board – likewise raises the question of whether they mask an effort to cozy up to a presidential son."

Given the copious documentation by the Senate and media investigations of Bush I's extensive use of BCCI to fund his and Reagan's illegal dealings with Saddam, Iran, drug cartels and the Contras, and Bush's strenuous efforts to block investigations of BCCI, the latter's huge payoffs to Bush II look more like payments for services rendered by the Bush Family, rather than just attempts to curry presidential favor.

IV.
Many of the same interests that employed BCCI for various black ops turn up again in Sibel Edmond's revelations: the ISI and Abdul Qadeer Khan, and Turkish and Israeli criminals/covert operators. Indeed, the latter played a key role in one of the Senate report's more chilling segments: "Training of Cartel Death Squads." From the report:

"In April 1989, a network of Israeli arms traffickers, operating out of Miami, made a shipment of 500 Israeli manufactured machine guns through the Caribbean island of Antigua for the use of members of the Medellin cartel. Later, one of these weapons was used in the assassination of Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan, and several other of the weapons were found in the possession of cartel kingpin Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha after his death in a gunfight with Colombian drug agents.

"The principals in the arms trafficking included Yair Klein, who had previously been identified in Colombian drug enforcement documents as involved in training paramilitary squads for the cocaine cartel in Medellin; Pinchas Shahar, an Israeli intelligence operative, and Maurice Sarfati, an Israeli "businessman" operating out of Miami and Paris.

"The scandal broke after a broadcast by NBC News on August 21, 1989 about Klein's activities, and a Colombian judge charged Klein with having engaged in criminal conspiracy in training the private armies for the cartel. In the months that followed, the scandal extended to Antigua as well, an island with no substantial military force and no need for the 500 machine guns its foreign minister ordered from Israeli military industries."

Oddly enough, the arming and training of death squads in Antiqua grew out of yet another corruption of Reagan-Bush policy by BCCI: a U.S. government loan of $2 million to Sarfati, supposedly for a melon farm he was to establish in Antiqua. The money was funneled through the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a prime channel of crony pork – and cover for covert operations – for decades. The loan was obtained after BCCI officials vouched for Sarfati's worthiness to OPIC. The Senate report says:

"Ultimately, OPIC lost its entire investment in the melon farm and concluded that it had been defrauded by Sarfati. After filing suit against Sarfati, OPIC sold its remaining interest in the melon farm, at a loss of 50 cent on the dollar, to an Israeli businessman, Bruce Rappaport, and an entity owned by him called the Swiss American Bank. Rappaport, a confidante of former CIA director William Casey, was in this period also in frequent contact with BCCI's original U.S. contact, Bert Lance [who had been forced to resign as Jimmy Carter's budget chief during a corruption scandal. Lance was also a major partner with Jackson Stephens and others in BCCI-related deals.] Coincidentally, one of BCCI's principal board members, Alfred Hartmann, who was also chairman of BCCI's secretly-owned Swiss affiliate BCP, also sat on the board of another of Rappaport's banks."

This is the way the world works. Behind the glitz and gossip of presidential campaigns, behind all the earnest "policy debates" on Capitol Hill, behind all the "position papers" and "vision statements" of think tanks and political parties, behind all the great panoply of state and our august Establishment institutions, thieves and murderers have their way, in league with the great and good.

Anyone who ascends to national power has to make a deal with the devil: either directly to plunge their hands into filth and blood, or else swaddle themselves in "plausible deniability," looking away from the grubby details but knowing full well that their minions, agents and backers are doing "whatever it takes" to keep the machine of power and money rolling on.

This doesn't mean that leaders can't also try to do good things as well, and occasionally accomplish them. After all, Al Capone was famous for his acts of benevolence. Indeed, some leaders pursue idealistic or ameliorative policies in order to "justify" the crimes and lies that sustain the system which has raised them on high. But the devil will have his due, and the price of power must always be paid – and it is ordinary people, especially the most innocent and vulnerable among us, who always end up paying it.

American Psycho: An Elite Exposed in an Exit Speech

2008-02-16T00:01:00.000Z

If you would like to see just how sick the American elite really is – how morally depraved, how intellectually diseased, how addicted to the taste of human flesh, the scent of human blood, and the sight of human suffering – then you need go no further than the speech given by Mitt Romney to the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 7, 2008.

Now you might say that Mitt Romney is old news. After all, this was the very speech where he declared he was quitting the presidential race. He's toast, he's over, the fork has been stuck into his well-roasted hide; who cares what he says? This is of course the witless "horse-race" view that dominates political discourse in America: who's up, who's down, who's getting the column inches, who's on TV? But in reality, the American elite – or the Establishment, or the power structure, call it what you will (as long as you don't call it what it really is: the ruling class) – is like an iceberg: most of its vast bulk exists unseen, it plows on beneath the surface, unperturbed by the media storms that rage around the small bit of exposed material at the summit.

Mitt Romney is an immensely wealthy, well-connected man, a former governor of the state of Massachusetts, born and bred in an extensive web of privilege and power. His defeat in a presidential campaign changes none of that. He will simply submerge – for a time – back into those depths where the real business of the elite is largely done. Thus his words to the conservative activists remain a highly relevant indication of the mindset that holds sway over the world's most powerful nation. They show the barbarism, hatemongering and bloodlust that are considered perfectly acceptable in the polite company of our rulers and their sycophants.

Indeed, the most remarkable thing about Romney's speech is that there is nothing remarkable about it; it is entirely typical of the kind of red meat that many leading lights of American society routinely throw to the slavering rightwing faithful. It takes a strong effort to wrench your mind free from the media-besotted mentality that regards such a speech as "normal" (even if you disagree with it), and see it for the debased, bestial raving that it really is.

The smoldering core of Romney's vomitous offering can perhaps be found in his passing remarks on Europe. Again, in one sense, this was just a crowd-pleasing throwaway: a good Eurobash always gets the CPAC froth flowing. But in a deeper sense, it cuts right to the corroded heart of the matter, right down to the vicious, primitive, genocidal racism that has shaped and driven so many of the policies of Western elites for centuries. In the midst of a long diatribe about liberal "attacks" on "American culture," Romney pauses for a glance across the Atlantic, to evoke a hideous nightmare that could soon be America's future:

Europe -- Europe is facing a demographic disaster. That's the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life, and eroded morality.

By "demographic disaster," Romney simply means that there are more non-white people in Europe than there used to be. To Romney and his fellow elites, this fact in itself constitutes a genuine "disaster." Although the population of Europe is still overwhelmingly white (much more so than the population of the United States), even the smallest dilution of racial purity across the continent is to be lamented, decried – and rolled back. Here of course Romney is channeling fearmongers like Martin Amis, Mark Steyn, and Christopher Hitchens, whose trembly sexual panic in the face of hot-blooded, fast-breeding darkies would be comical, if it were not so sinister – and so useful to the warmakers and global dominationists in the ruling elite.

Romney makes the sexual and racial subtext abundantly clear in his remarks about Europe's loss of religious faith, eroded morality, etc. The Euros are plainly too busy having abortions and watching porn to do their duty by the race and breed bigger families kept under strict religious discipline. And thus the shabby denizens of an alien faith are breeding like rats in the cellarage of Western Civilization, gnawing away at the foundations and conquering it from within. The fact that "Muslims" are substituted for "Jews" in these formulations and implications of Hitchens, Amis, Romney, et al, does not lessen the precision with which their diatribes mirror those that saturated Germany (and many other nations) in the first four decades of the 20th century. For the elites, there is always a dark, sexually potent "other" out there, whose overwhelming threat to white supremacy can only be overcome by….giving the elites more and more power.

Oddly enough, there has been a demographic disaster in Europe -- but it has nothing to do with virile Muslim men and their fertile females. It is never mentioned by Romney and his elitist ilk -- because it is the result of their own philosophy, their own policies, and their own desires. We speak of course of the demographic collapse in Russia, where the population is dwindling while death rates remain almost twice as high as in the United States and Western Europe. The Russian people are still reeling from the catastrophic "shock therapy" inflicted on them by Boris Yeltsin's "Chicago School" market fundamentalists. (The harrowing story is well-told in Naomi Klein's study of "disaster capitalism," The Shock Doctrine.)

The Western elites were very glad to watch the Russian people sink to their knees, die off in droves and suffer in poverty, chaos and fear -- as long as a juicy slice of Russia's oil, mineral and industrial wealth was in the offing. The West's sudden distaste for Kremlin strongman Vladimir Putin has nothing to do with his egregious crackdowns on civil freedoms. Putin's depredations are hardly less egregious than those of Yeltin, who actually sent in troops and tanks to destroy the democratically elected parliament 1993, then ran roughshod over every vestige of law in harnessing the entire power of the state -- and the private sector as well - to ensure a victory in his re-election bid in 1996. After that, he laid open the entire economy to the rapacious looting of his corporate cronies and their Western allies. It is the fact that Putin has taken much of this loot off the table for Westerners -- and given it to his own cronies -- that has provoked the West's new-found concern for the rights and well-being of the Russian people.

In his swan song, Romney makes it clear that he and his elites want to continue pressing their "shock therapy" on the American people as well, rolling back the very mild attempts in the past to ameliorate, slightly, some of the worst excesses and inequities of unhinged corporate greed. In fact, Romney identifies these tepid measures as dire threats to "American culture" itself:

The threat to our culture comes from within. In the 1960s, there were welfare programs that created a culture of poverty in our country. Now, some people think we won that battle when we reformed welfare. But the liberals haven't given up. At every turn, they tried to substitute government largess for individual responsibility. They fight to strip work requirements from welfare, to put more people on Medicaid, and remove more and more people from having to pay any income tax whatsoever. Dependency is death to initiative, risk-taking and opportunity. Dependency is culture killing. It's a drug. We've got to fight it like the poison it is.

The ignorance -- and inhumanity - of this statement is breathtaking. Think of it: there was no poverty in the United States until "liberals" came along in the 1960s and "created" it with their welfare programs. (Before this "culture of poverty" was created, apparently, the few poor people in America just died off discreetly, like Russians, instead of hanging around a bit longer on government handouts, the way they do now, the shiftless, no-good wretches. Oh yeah, and they breed a lot too, more than white folks.) And even though Bill Clinton (uncredited here, of course, but the elite are well aware of his sterling services) finally drove the stake through the welfare program, these evildoers will still not rest. Just look at what they want to do: "put more people on Medicaid," and "remove more and more people from having to pay any income tax whatsoever." (Wait a minute; I thought red-meat-chomping CPACkers were in favor of people paying no taxes. I guess that only applies to the right sort of people.)

All of this -- especially the stuff about "risk-taking" and "dependency" on government largess -- is pretty rich coming from an avatar of a ruling class that is glutted with pampered heirs of wealth and power who, like Romney, begin their totally risk-free careers at the very top of the ladder, and who are continually fattened with no-bid contracts, kickbacks, tax breaks, subsidies, war profits and myriad other forms of "government largess." But beyond the transparent hypocrisy – and the ludicrous pretense that the "liberals" in today's Democratic Party pose some kind of genuine threat to this cornucopia – Romney's blast is a perfect encapsulation of the elite's hatred for the rabble they use as cannon fodder and cash cows. Let them get sick, let them die, let them languish in poverty, let them lose their homes, let them work three jobs to make ends meet – but by God don't you ever do anything, anything at all, to change the system that produces these chronic inequities and keeps the pampered elite in clover. That's evil. That's "poison." And it won't be allowed.

The speech goes on and on in this way; reading it is like wading through the sewage pipe of an abattoir. China and India and other Asian nations pose a challenge that must be confronted and beaten down. Why? Because they may "pass us by as the economic superpower, just as we passed England and France during the last century." And we must stop the yellow devils, because "the prosperity and security of our children and grandchildren depend on us." Apparently, it is not possible for Asian nations and the United States to be secure and prosperous at the same time; "our children" can only prosper at the expense of others. This too is transparently ludicrous, even nonsensical, if taken literally. Of course, ordinary Asians and Americans could be prosperous at the same time. What Romney really means is that the American elite cannot exert dominance and gorge itself in the manner to which it has become accustomed if other nations are secure and prosperous in their own right.

And that is where the "War on Terror" – the linchpin of Romney's speech, and the justification he offers for folding his campaign – comes in. The Terror War is simply an extension of the long-held goal of the American elite (and their British "junior partners") to maintain and extend their dominion over the world's natural resources and political arrangements – and the exorbitant profits this dominion produces. There is ample evidence in the historical record of the Anglo-American elite's abiding – and quite open – anxieties on this score, going back for generations. Literally millions of people all over the world have been sacrificed to these ambitions and anxieties, which have not abated but grow more frantic and acute with each passing year.

And thus the climax of Romney's peroration: a frantic blithering about "evil and radical jihad" and "the inevitable military ambitions of China" and the burning need to "raise military spending to 4 percent of our GDP" and overriding imperative to keep the Terror War raging, particularly on its central front in Iraq. None of this is remotely connected to the actual wellbeing, security and prosperity of the American people; quite the opposite. It is, however, absolutely vital to the preservation of the elite's power, privilege, self-image and status. And as they demonstrate day after day, they don't care how many people must die or suffer for this.

This is moral psychosis on a monumental scale. It is the complete and utter repudiation of every civilized ideal, of every fragment of enlightenment wrenched from the blood-drenched slagheap of human history. Yet it passes for normality in our political discourse.

A Conquered Continent: The True Relationship Between Europe and America

2007-09-25T23:13:00.000+01:00

The cartoon version America's relationship to Europe – and a cartoon version is of course the only version of foreign relations on offer in the corporate media – goes something like this: Old World and New World are now more estranged from one another than at any time in living memory, due to the Bush Administration's aggressive policies and disdain for international institutions and diplomatic niceties.

In America, those on the Right think this cartoon is a good thing: Europe is weak, crumbling, Godless, on the wrong side of history, on the brink of being devoured by the Islamic caliphate, etc., etc.; who cares what those panty-waist pinkos think? Those on the left regard the cartoon as a calamity: See how Bush has thrown away 60 years of amity and cooperation with our strongest allies, the great civilized democracies, leaving America isolated and feared in the world.

Of course, the truth of the matter is that the cartoon is wrong. There is not now nor has there been at any time during Bush's tenure any significant estrangement between the ruling elites in Europe and the United States. UCLA historian Perry Anderson gives a very detailed analysis of the reality of the situation in the latest London Review of Books (via a steer from the Angry Arab).

Much of the piece is given over to an examination of how post-Cold War Europe really works (and it has very little to do with the ignorant frothings of Mark Steyn and his comrades in fear of dark, manly, prodigiously breeding Muslims). But lower down in the piece, Anderson delves into the specifics of the U.S.-Europe relation today, and finds very little distance but a great deal of continuity – and a continuity that helps explain what Anderson rightly calls the "surrender of Europe" to the United States. This is expressed most sharply in the actions (as opposed to rhetoric) of European governments in regard to Bush's Terror War, where they have countenanced the war of aggression in Iraq and played a major role in the vile rendition program of Bush's gulag.

Here are some excerpts:

Why then has there been that sense of a general crisis in transatlantic relations? … In the EU, media and public opinion are at one in holding the conduct of the Republican administration outside Nato to be essentially responsible. Scanting the Kyoto protocols and the International Criminal Court, sidelining the UN, trampling on the Geneva Conventions, and stampeding into the Middle East, the Bush regime has on this view exposed a darker side of the United States, that has understandably been met with near universal abhorrence in Europe, even if etiquette has restrained expressions of it at diplomatic level. Above all, revulsion at the war in Iraq has, more than any other single episode since 1945, led to the rift recorded in the painful title of Habermas’s latest work, The Divided West.

In this vision, there is a sharp contrast between the Clinton and Bush presidencies, and it is the break in the continuity of American foreign policy – the jettisoning of consensual leadership for an arrogant unilateralism – that has alienated Europeans. There is no question of the intensity of this perception. But in the orchestrations of America’s Weltpolitik, style is easily mistaken for substance. The brusque manners of the Bush administration, its impatience with the euphemisms of the ‘international community’ and blunt rejection of Kyoto and the ICC, offended European sensibilities from the start. Clinton’s emollient gestures were more tactful, if in practice their upshot – neither Kyoto nor the ICC ever risked passage into law while he was in office – was often much the same. More fundamentally, as political operations, a straight line led from the war in the Balkans to the war in Mesopotamia. In both, a casus belli – imminent genocide, imminent nuclear weapons – was trumped up; the Security Council ignored; international law set aside; and an assault unleashed.

United over Yugoslavia, Europe split over Iraq, where the strategic risks were higher. But the extent of European opposition to the march on Baghdad was always something of an illusion. On the streets, in Italy, Spain, Germany, Britain, huge numbers of people demonstrated against the invasion. Opinion polls showed majorities against it everywhere. But once it had occurred, there was little protest against the occupation, let alone support for the resistance to it. Most European governments – Britain, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Denmark, Portugal in the West; all in the East – backed the invasion, and sent troops to bulk up the US forces holding the country down. Out of the 12 member states of the EU in 2003, just three – France, Germany and Belgium – came out against the prospect of war before the event. None condemned the attack when it was launched. But the declared opposition of Paris and Berlin to the plans of Washington and London gave popular sentiment across Europe a point of concentration, confirming and amplifying its sense of distance from power and opinion in America. The notion of an incipient Declaration of Independence by the Old World was born here.

Realities were rather different. Chirac and Schröder had a domestic interest in countering the invasion. Each judged his electorate well, and gained substantially – Schröder securing re-election – from his stance. On the other hand, American will was not to be trifled with. So each compensated in deeds for what he proclaimed in words, opposing the war in public, while colluding with it sub rosa. Behind closed doors in Washington, France’s ambassador Jean-David Levitte – currently Sarkozy’s diplomatic adviser – gave the White House a green light for the war, provided it was on the basis of the first generic UN Resolution 1441, as Cheney wanted, without returning to the Security Council for the second explicit authorisation to attack that Blair wanted, which would force France to veto it. In ciphers from Baghdad, German intelligence agents provided the Pentagon with targets and co-ordinates for the first US missiles to hit the city, in the downpour of Shock and Awe. Once the ground war began, France provided airspace for USAF missions to Iraq (which Chirac had denied Reagan’s bombing of Libya), and Germany a key transport hub for the campaign. Both countries voted for the UN resolution ratifying the US occupation of Iraq, and lost no time recognising the client regime patched together by Washington.

…Sweden, where once a prime minister could take a sharper distance from the war in Vietnam than De Gaulle himself, has a new minister for foreign affairs to match his colleague in Paris: Carl Bildt, a founder member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, along with Richard Perle, William Kristol, Newt Gingrich and others…Spaniards and Italians may have withdrawn their troops from Iraq, but no European government has any policy towards a society America has destroyed that is distinct from the outlook in Washington.

For the rest, Europe remains engaged to the hilt in the war in Afghanistan, where a contemporary version of the expeditionary force dispatched to crush the Boxer Rebellion has killed more civilians this year than the guerrillas it seeks to root out. The Pentagon did not require the services of Nato for its lightning overthrow of the Taliban, though British and French jets put in a nominal appearance. Occupation of the country, which has a larger population and more forbidding terrain than Iraq, was another matter, and a Nato force of five thousand was assembled to hold the fort around Kabul, while US forces finished off Mullah Omar and Bin Laden. Five years later, Omar and Osama remain at large; the West’s puppet ruler, Karzai, cannot move without a squad of mercenaries from DynCorp International to protect him; production of opium has increased tenfold; the Afghan resistance has become steadily more effective; and Nato-led forces – now comprising contingents from 37 nations, from Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Turkey, Poland down to such minnows as Iceland – have swollen to 35,000, alongside 25,000 US troops. Indiscriminate bombing, random shooting and ‘human rights abuses’, in the polite phrase, have become commonplaces of the counter-insurgency.

In the wider Middle East, the scene is the same. Europe is joined at the hip with the US, wherever the legacies of imperial control or settler zeal are at stake. Britain and France, original suppliers of heavy water and uranium for the large Israeli nuclear arsenal, which they pretend does not exist, demand along with America that Iran abandon programmes it is allowed even by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, under menace of sanctions and war. In Lebanon, the EU and the US prop up a cabinet that would not last a day if a census were called, while German, French and Italian troops provide border guards for Israel. As for Palestine, the EU showed no more hesitation than the US in plunging the population into misery, cutting off all aid when voters elected the wrong government, on the pretext that it must first recognise the Israeli state, as if Israel had ever recognised a Palestinian state, and renounce terrorism (read: any armed resistance to a military occupation that has lasted forty years without Europe lifting a finger against it). Funds now flow again, to protect a remnant valet in the West Bank.

….The war on terror knows no frontiers and the crimes committed in its name have stalked freely across the continent, in the full cognisance of its rulers. Originally, the subcontracting of torture – ‘rendition’, or the handing over of a victim to the attentions of the secret police in client states – was, like so much else, an invention of the Clinton administration, which introduced the practice in the mid-1990s. Asked about it a decade later, the CIA official in charge of the programme, Michael Scheuer, simply said: ‘I check my moral qualms at the door.’ As one would expect, it was Britain that collaborated with the first renditions, in the company of Croatia and Albania.

Under the Bush administration, the programme expanded. Three weeks after 9/11, Nato declared that Article V of its charter, mandating collective defence in the event of an attack on one of its members, was activated. By then American plans for the descent on Afghanistan were well advanced, but they did not include European participation in Operation Enduring Freedom; the US high command had found the need for consultation in a joint campaign cumbersome in the Balkan War, and did not want to repeat the experience. Instead, at a meeting in Brussels on 4 October 2001, the allies were called on for other services. The specification of these remains secret, but as the second report to the Council of Europe – released in June this year – by the courageous Swiss investigator Dick Marty, has shown, a stepped-up programme of renditions must have been high on the list. Once Afghanistan was taken, Baghram airbase outside Kabul became both interrogation centre for the CIA and loading-bay for prisoners to Guantánamo. The traffic was soon two-way, and its pivot was Europe. In one direction, captives were transported from Afghan or Pakistani dungeons to Europe, either to be held there in secret CIA jails, or shipped onwards to Cuba. In the other direction, captives were flown from secret locations in Europe for requisite treatment in Afghanistan.

Though Nato initiated this system, the abductions it involved were not confined to members of the North Atlantic Council. Europe was eager to help America, whether or not fine print obliged it to do so. North, south, east and west: no part of the continent failed to join in. New Labour’s contribution occasions no surprise: with up to 650,000 civilians dead from the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, it would have been unreasonable for the Straws, Becketts, Milibands to lose any sleep over the torture of the living. More striking is the role of the neutrals. Under Ahern, Ireland furnished Shannon to the CIA for so many westbound flights that locals dubbed it Guantánamo Express. Social-democratic Sweden, under its portly boss Göran Persson, now a corporate lobbyist, handed over two Egyptians seeking asylum to the CIA, who took them straight to torturers in Cairo. Under Berlusconi, Italy helped a large CIA team to kidnap another Egyptian in Milan, who was flown from the US airbase in Aviano, via Ramstein in Germany, for the same treatment in Cairo. Under Prodi, a government of Catholics and ex-Communists has sought to frustrate the judicial investigation of this kidnapping, while presiding over the expansion of Aviano. Switzerland proffered the overflight that took the victim to Ramstein, and protected the head of the CIA gang that seized him from arrest by the Italian judicial authorities – he now basks in Florida.

Further east, Poland did not transmit captives to their fate in the Middle East, but incarcerated them for treatment on the spot, in torture chambers constructed for ‘high-value detainees’ by the CIA at the Stare Kiejkuty intelligence base, Europe’s own Baghram – facilities unknown in the time of Jaruzelski’s martial law. In Romania, a military base north of Constanza performed the same services, under the superintendence of the country’s current president, the staunchly pro-Western Traian Basescu. In Bosnia, six Algerians were illegally seized at American behest, and flown from Tuzla – beatings in the aircraft en route – to the US base at Incirlik in Turkey, and thence to Guantánamo, where they still crouch in their cages. In Macedonia, scene of Blair’s moving encounters with refugees from Kosovo, there was a combination of the two procedures, as a German of Lebanese descent was kidnapped at the border; held, interrogated and beaten by the CIA in Skopje; then drugged and shipped to Kabul for more extended treatment.

….Almost six years in, we seem no closer to pulling ourselves out of this quagmire.’ Indeed. Not a single European government has conceded any guilt, while all continue imperturbably to hold forth on human rights. We are in the world of Ibsen – Consul Bernick, Judge Brack and their like – updated for postmoderns. Pillars of society, pimping for torture.

What has been delivered in these practices are not just the hooded or chained bodies, but the deliverers themselves: Europe surrendered to the United States. This rendition is the most taboo of all to mention.

Letter from the Frontier: Hard Duty in Defense of Civilization

2007-09-12T23:37:00.000+01:00

*Originally published in The Moscow Times on April 18, 2002.*

Gaius Aelius Messala, legatus, XVII Legion, to his brother, Quintus.
Germania Magnia. 19 October [8 A.D].

Brother! Warmest greetings from the River Elbe. Tonight you recline on soft couches with your friends, feasting and drinking – and talking rot – while we poor soldiers shiver in our tents, eating hard bread and sharpening our blades for tomorrow's battle. Even now your arm is encircling some tender waist – is it still Livilla, or has Agrippina mounted the throne once again? Such lusty campaigners! – while my only company is cold bronze, a flickering lamp, and the ugly mug of Brutus, the slave Father sent with his last dispatch. He smiles as he writes this for me – quite right, Brutus! We must take our misfortunes in good part, eh?

But in truth, Brother, I would not change places with you tonight. Our fight tomorrow is a noble one, an act of justice that will bring fresh glory to Rome. We strike at the barbarians who devastated Noviomagus this summer, a murderous raid across the Rhine, on our own territory, leaving thousands dead – an affront to Roman power that cannot go unanswered. We have pursued these beasts deep into their own lair, and now they are cornered. Tomorrow they will pay the price for their evil.

So much for them. Now, Quintus, Father sends disturbing news – your continuing acquaintance with those so-called 'republicans' who snipe and peep and whisper their calumnies against the great Augustus. I know the type well; indeed, in my own youth I was given to much the same tomfoolery, duped by tales of 'ancient liberties lost' and fearsome rants against 'tyranny'. But you are now reaching an age when you must put aside this kind of sentimentality, and recognise that the measures taken by our Imperator have in fact saved the Republic from its own worst excesses.

Where is this 'tyranny'? You are in Rome – look around, what do you see? The old forms and formalities are still observed – indeed, more strictly than ever. The Senate still meets, debates, makes policy. The assemblies still hold their elections, the praetors still exercise their constitutional powers. Political factions still jostle for primacy, poets and playwrights still revel in decadence, courts are still filled with wrangling advocates chewing over every jot and tittle – tyranny should present a more placid face, don't you think? The bumptious course of our public life should be smoothed and flattened by the iron hand of the autocrat. But as you see, it is not so.

Yes, Quintus, I know the whispers. I know that Augustus has taken on many of the burdens of state that once were dispersed among several hands. But note well: at each stage, these powers have been granted by the Senate, ratified by law, in the best Roman tradition. And note too, dear brother: this accumulation of powers is temporary. They were given to Augustus in a time of crisis, when through his wisdom and his auctoritas, his moral authority, he delivered the commonwealth from chaos and preserved our way of life from those who would destroy it. Once we are past these dangerous shoals, the concentration of powers will end, never fear.

So yes, to preserve those 'ancient liberties,' we must relinquish them, in part, for a time. Perhaps this paradox is hard to fathom there in the comfort of Rome; but for us on the frontier, its truth stands out in stark relief. We are here to carry on that work of preservation, to save our way of life and pass it down to our posterity. I want my son to grow strong and wise, secure in the bounty of our family lands. I want him to fish in the peaceful waters on our estate, as I did, listening to the learned slaves reciting Virgil, Seneca, Horace and Livy. He should never know want or fear or hunger: those ravening wolves which spring from the chaos that Augustus has mastered – and which these barbarians, in their envy and ignorance, would unleash upon us again.

How many generations have shed their blood to bring us to this pinnacle of civilisation! How much toil and treasure have been expended to maintain it! Yet your whispering friends speak of 'aggression,' of 'violent conquest' and 'oppression' of other peoples They would have us still in mud huts, trembling by the Tiber. Yes, we project our dominance – because we must. First and foremost, to preserve our patrimony, as is right and just – but also to bring enlightenment to the dark places of the earth. Why else has Fortune favoured us, above all nations in the history of the world, except to carry out this divine mission? I am proud to play my small part in such noble endeavours; and I hope that you too, dear Quintus, will come to know this pride as well.

The night grows thin; dawn is near. I must finish this tomorrow – if Jupiter and Minerva, deities of our house, see fit to bring me through.

20 October. Evening.

The battle was short, our losses light. The barbarians have been destroyed. The best of our men went about it quickly – the only mercy in this kind of thing – but some fell short, alas. I had to execute three of my soldiers – dispatched them with my own hand – for the bestial way they handled the women and children, making slow sport of the business.

By afternoon, the killing was done, and the village put to the torch. We marched up to the surrounding hills and made camp on the western slope, the far side, away from the smoking valley.

I am weary now and will write no more. Commend me to our father, and attend well what I have told you. Put away childish things and gird yourself: we have much hard work ahead.

One in a Million: More on the Killing of Khalid Hassan

2007-07-16T13:28:00.000+01:00

Here's an update on the previous post. The NYT has now followed up on the killing of their reporter, Khalid Hassan, in Baghdad. He was apparently gunned down by militiamen after his car had been diverted into the backstreets by an American roadblock. It was a two-stage hit; he was forced off the road by a black Mercedes and shot, but survived. As he was calling his mother to say that he was OK, a second car came along, carrying a gunman who shot Hassan twice more and killed him.

The impenetrable murk which covers the atrocities on all sides in Iraq will almost certainly make it impossible to determine just who killed Hassan, and why. As the NYT's John F. Burns reports:

The murderous turmoil in Baghdad has reached a point where many families never know the killers of their loved ones, or their motives. Sunni insurgents? Shiite militias? Killers who mimic one or the other, while pursuing more private motives of greed, spite or revenge? Or, in Mr. Hassan’s case, the nature of his employment, which placed him doubly at risk: as an Iraqi journalist, and as an Iraqi working for Americans?

With a police force that barely functions because of the bludgeoning it has taken from Sunni insurgents — and that has spawned Shiite death squads — families can rarely hope to see killers tracked down. Now, that may be the fate of Mr. Hassan’s family, for whom he was the principal breadwinner. After his parents separated during his teenage years, Mr. Hassan supported his mother and four sisters, all under 18, by selling cosmetics door to door and, for the last four years, using a polished colloquial English learned through movies, for The New York Times.

Hassan's neighborhood is riddled with the virulent sectarian strife that Bush's rape of Iraq has unleashed -- and which the "surge" is ostensibly designed to quell. But as we've often noted here, the United States -- and tag-along Britain -- have themselves been waging a relentless "dirty war" in the country since the first months after the invasion, arming some violent groups, infiltrating and steering others, throwing in with murderers, torturers, thieves, extremists and provocateurs, setting in motion a multitude of deep-delving plots whose ultimate consequences are far beyond the control of their begetters.

Hassan's family -- Palestinians who came to Iraq in 1948, fleeing Israel's takeover there -- believe that Hassan was most likely killed by operatives of the Mahdi Army, loyal to cleric Motqada al-Sadr, who, as we noted yesterday, has been one of the mainstays of the Bush-backed Maliki goverment. If so, then Hassan was killed by the very forces that Bush has empowered in the conquered land. Burns notes that Shiite extremists have been entering Hassan's district in police uniforms, then changing into mufti to carry out their killings. Thus they are almost certainly Iraqi policemen who have been trained, armed and paid by American forces.

Hassan's death is just one more of the "excess deaths" caused by Bush's war. The number of such deaths -- i.e., in excess of the ordinary death rate under Saddam's regime -- was estimated at some 650,000 last year by The Lancet, the authoritative medical journal whose findings on the death count were upheld by Tony Blair's own experts (although Blair himself mendaciously derided the figures, as did Bush). Follow-up studies using the Lancet's rigorous methodology have advanced that figure to almost a million by now -- more than were killed in Rwanda. An equivalent death toll in the United States would be roughly 12 million people -- twice the size of the Holocaust.

We know about Hassan's killing because he worked for a Western news organization. But most of these "excess deaths" are just tiny droplets in a vast and spreading swamp of blood. They fall without notice in the wider world -- but their echoes will still be reverberating in the lives of our children and grandchildren.

Out, Vile Jelly: The Blinding of America

2007-07-13T16:51:00.001+01:00

"I carry a wounded horizon/In the seasons of my eye." -- Marty Matz

I."Who's Your Baghdaddy?"

New York Times Journalist Killed in Baghdad (NYT)
Khalid W. Hassan, 23, an interpreter and reporter in the New York Times’s news bureau in Baghdad, was shot and killed today, John F. Burns, the bureau chief, reported...Mr. Hassan was shot in the Seiydia district of south central Baghdad while driving to work under unclear circumstances, Mr. Burns said. He had called the bureau earlier and said his normal route to the office had been blocked by a security checkpoint. “I’m trying to find another way,” he told the bureau staff. About a half an hour he called his mother, with whom he lived, telling her, “I’ve been shot.”His family later called the bureau to report that he had been killed.

I guess that'll teach them not to write editorials calling for the end of L'il Pretzel's big adventure in Babylon.

We're told that Hassan was killed "under unclear circumstances" while driving to work. Perhaps the circumstances were similar to this:

“This unit sets up this traffic control point, and this 18-year-old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun,” he said. “This car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split-second decision that that’s a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts 200 rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father and two kids. The boy was aged 4 and the daughter was aged 3. And they briefed this to the general. And they briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, ‘If these fucking hajis learned to drive, this shit wouldn’t happen.’”

That's from the remarkable new Truthdig/Nation article by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian: Iraq Vets Break Silence on Devastating Realities of War. The authors interviewed "fifty combat veterans of the Iraq War from around the United States in an effort to investigate the effects of the four-year-old occupation on average Iraqi civilians." The result is a shattering portrayal of the true nature of the ongoing atrocity launched by George W. Bush and his multitude of willing executioners in the American Establishment:

From these collected snapshots a common theme emerged. Fighting in densely populated urban areas has led to the indiscriminate use of force and the deaths at the hands of occupation troops of thousands of innocents. Many of these veterans returned home deeply disturbed by the disparity between the reality of the war and the way it is portrayed by the US government and American media. The war the vets described is a dark and even depraved enterprise, one that bears a powerful resemblance to other misguided and brutal colonial wars and occupations, from the French occupation of Algeria to the American war in Vietnam and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

Hassan, killed while driving to work, was probably "lit up" at one of the impromptu checkpoints thrown up at anytime, anywhere, around the city. Or perhaps he ran afoul of a convoy:

When these columns of vehicles left their heavily fortified compounds they usually roared down the main supply routes, which often cut through densely populated areas, reaching speeds over sixty miles an hour. Governed by the rule that stagnation increases the likelihood of attack, convoys leapt meridians in traffic jams, ignored traffic signals, swerved without warning onto sidewalks, scattering pedestrians, and slammed into civilian vehicles, shoving them off the road. Iraqi civilians, including children, were frequently run over and killed. Veterans said they sometimes shot drivers of civilian cars that moved into convoy formations or attempted to pass convoys as a warning to other drivers to get out of the way...

Sergeant Flatt recalled an incident in January 2005 when a convoy drove past him on one of the main highways in Mosul. “A car following got too close to their convoy,” he said. “Basically, they took shots at the car. Warning shots, I don’t know. But they shot the car. Well, one of the bullets happened to just pierce the windshield and went straight into the face of this woman in the car. And she was--well, as far as I know--instantly killed. I didn’t pull her out of the car or anything. Her son was driving the car, and she had her--she had three little girls in the back seat. And they came up to us, because we were actually sitting in a defensive position right next to the hospital, the main hospital in Mosul, the civilian hospital. And they drove up and she was obviously dead. And the girls were crying.”

...“We’re using these vulnerable, vulnerable convoys, which probably piss off more Iraqis than it actually helps in our relationship with them,” Sgt. Flanders said, “just so that we can have comfort and air-conditioning and sodas--great--and PlayStations and camping chairs and greeting cards and stupid T-shirts that say, Who’s Your Baghdaddy?”

In any case, one more set of eyes and ears for the Western media -- whose overwhelmingly white representatives are unable to move freely in the occupied land -- has been destroyed.

II. Only One Way Out
But Hassan was not the only Western-employed journalist killed in Iraq this week. Just yesterday, two Reuters employees -- photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and driver Saeed Chmagh -- were killed in what the Iraqi police called "a random American bombardment" of a Baghdad neighborhood, the Washington Post reports.

The Reuters men were among 11 people killed in an "intense" six-hour attack on the neighborhood by "240 U.S. soldiers in 65 Humvees, several Bradley Fighting Vehicles and two Apache attack helicopters," the Post said. Two children were also injured in the attack on the residential area. A camera believed to belong to Noor-Eldeen was found at the scene of the assault, but it was "taken away to be processed by military authorities." U.S. military officials said the operation was launched to root out Shiite militamen from the Mahdi Army of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr -- whose party is one of the mainstays of the Bush-backed Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki.

But that was not the only American attack on Shiite positions in Baghdad in the last 24 hours. In a bizarre firefight in Baghdad early on Friday, American forces battled Iraqi policemen -- yes, the very Iraqi police that American forces are arming and training -- after capturing an Iraqi police lieutenant who was allegedly leading a cell of Shiite militiamen attacking U.S. forces, the Washington Post reports. American forces called in an airstrike to help quell the assault from the Iraqi police squad and unidentified "gunmen" -- presumably Shiite militiamen. In the end, U.S. troops killed six of their Iraqi police proteges, and seven of the "gunmen."

Now here comes the twist. U.S. officials said the bad lieutenant was actually an Iranian agent, "linked to the Quds Force, a branch of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards," the Post reports. This is yet another staccato pounding of the wardrums against Iran, which has reached a new, deafening crescendo this week, with the U.S. Senate smearing its collective chest with blood-red ochre and joining the frenzied war dance.

Note well the careful calibration of propaganda that's going on. As Glenn Greenwald and others have noted, every Sunni insurgent is now "al Qaeda." And now, every Shiite militiaman -- i.e., the majority of the military and police forces of the Bush-backed Iraqi government -- is being morphed into an "Iranian agent." Americans are clearly being conditioned to believe that all the violence in Iraq, all resistance to the Dear Leader's gentle liberation, comes solely from the dastards who attacked us on 9/11 and the evil mullahs who held our embassy people hostage way back when. Thus, by extension, anyone who opposes the Dear Leader's war in Iraq is in fact a tacit -- if not active -- supporter of al Qaeda and Iran.

There is a persistent belief -- or rather, delusion -- that Bush and his minions and keepers have somehow been chastened by the catastrophic failure of their criminal enterprise in Iraq, or by the plunging poll numbers of the Administration, or by criticism from Republican mandarins, or by losing control of both houses of Congress last November. It is thought in some quarters that these setbacks and humiliations will at last force the Bush Faction to modify its modus operandi in some way, or rein in some of their radical ambitions for "projecting dominance" abroad and transforming America into an authoritarian "Commander-in-Chief" state. But the Bushists have not changed their M.O. or diminished their ambitions by a single iota. They are employing the same blunt, crude propaganda tactics that led to the invasion of Iraq, while accelerating their ambitions -- first by escalating the war in Iraq with the "surge," and now by seeking to spread the conflict to Iran.

As noted earlier, the White House has officially notified Congress that it will not accept any legislative restrictions on the president's power to wage unrestricted war in Iraq and Iran. By Bush's own admission then, there is no "room for compromise," no basis for "negotiations" with Congress, no "middle ground" to be reached by good will and bipartisanship; it is, as it has always been, his way or the highway. There is only one avenue left for ending the war crime in Iraq and stopping another one in Iran: the removal of the president and vice president from office. Thus any Congressional plan for "curtailing the war" that does not have impeachment as its aim is meaningless; worse, it is complicit in the murder, ruin and dishonor that Bush has laid at America's door.

Impeachment or complicity: this is the only choice facing American lawmakers today. They can stand up and make history -- or they can go howling into the hell of shame and infamy that will be the Bush Administration's eternal legacy.

Down in the Flood: The Senate's Blank Check for War On Iran

2007-07-13T16:50:00.001+01:00

(UPDATED BELOW. Updated again.)

As you may know -- unless you rely on the corporate media for your news, of course -- yesterday the U.S. Senate unanimously declared that Iran was committing acts of war against the United States: a 97-0 vote to give George W. Bush a clear and unmistakable casus belli for attacking Iran whenever Dick Cheney tells him to.

The bipartisan Senate resolution – the brainchild (or rather the bilechild) of Fightin' Joe Lieberman – affirmed as official fact all of the specious, unproven, ever-changing allegations of direct Iranian involvement in attacks on the American forces now occupying Iraq. The Senators appear to have relied heavily on the recent New York Times story by Michael Gordon that stovepiped unchallenged Pentagon spin directly onto the paper's front page. As Firedoglake points out, John McCain cited the heavily criticized story on the Senate floor as he cast his vote.

It goes without saying that all of this is a nightmarish replay of the run-up to the war of aggression against Iraq: The NYT funneling false flag stories from Bush insiders. Warmongers citing the NYT stories as "proof" justifying any and all action to "defend the Homeland." Credulous and craven Democratic politicians swallowing the Bush line hook and sinker.

To be sure, stout-hearted Dem tribunes like Dick Durbin insisted that their support for declaring that Iran is "committing acts of war" against the United States should not be taken as an "authorization of military action." This is shaky-knees mendacity at its finest. Having officially affirmed that Iran is waging war on American forces, how, pray tell, can you then deny the president when he asks (if he asks) for authorization to "defend our troops?" Answer: you can't. And you know it.

This vote is the clearest signal yet that there will be no real opposition to a Bush Administration attack on Iran. This is yet another blank check from these slavish, ignorant goons; Bush can cash it anytime. This is, in fact, the post-surge "Plan B" that's been mooted lately in the Beltway. As you recall, there was much throwing about of brains on the subject of reviving the "Iraq Study Group" plan when the "surge" (or to call it by its right name, the "punitive escalation") inevitably fails. Bush put the kibosh on that this week ("Him not gonna do nothin' that Daddy's friends tell him to do! Him a big boy, him the decider!"), but that doesn't mean there isn't a fall-back position – or rather, a spring-forward position: an attack on Iran, to rally the nation behind the "war leader" and reshuffle the deck in Iraq.

Of course, the United States is already at war with Iran. We are directing covert ops and terrorist attacks inside Iran, with the help of groups that our own government has declared terrorist renegades. We are kidnapping Iranian officials in Iraq and holding them hostage. We have a bristling naval armada on Iran's doorstep, put there for the express purpose of threatening Tehran with military action. The U.S. Congress has overwhelmingly passed measures calling for the overthrow of the Iranian government. And now the U.S. Senate has unanimously declared that Iran is waging war on America, and has given official notice that this will not be tolerated. It is only a very small step to move from this war in all but name to the full monty of an overt military assault.

We've said it before and we'll say it again: there is madness at work here. There is no other word for it. As I noted a few years ago:

Homo sapiens is the only species that dreams of its own total demise. Our brief history of conscious thought is replete with vivid scenarios of the end of life on earth....Religion has produced most of these -- giddy, voluptuous nightmares of universal extinction, usually by fire, at divine order. A favored remnant is always saved in such tales, of course, but only after being transformed into some different, higher order of being. The gross human body -- that bleeding, fouling, endlessly replicating sack of earth -- is gleefully consigned to eternal oblivion.

It seems that some ineradicable nihilism pervades us, like a virus, now dormant, now flaring: something in us that wants to die, to be done with the long, overhanging doom of mortality -- and to take the world with us. Our grandiose visions of the future seem to hide, at their core, a secret, desperate anxiety about the profound meaninglessness of existence -- an anxiety that often disguises itself in elaborate fantasies of the afterlife, in dreams of "dominance" for one's "own kind" (nation, tribe, faith, race, ideology, etc.), or in the eroticizing of death, war and destruction.

Instincts for preservation, sentiments of affection, the drive for pleasure -- from the most basic bodily urges to the most sublime creations and apprehensions of the intellect -- act as counterweights to this dark virus, of course. They provide for most of us, most of the time, enough fragments of meaning -- or at least sufficient distraction -- to get on with things, without too much resort to world-engulfing visions or the extremes of nihilistic anxiety.

On the individual level, the calibration of these competing impulses can be intricate, subtle, ever-shifting, because the individual mind is so complex and all-encompassing, yet also so enclosed, so unlockably private as well: an infinitely supple tool for managing the conflicts and contradictions of reality. But on the broader level -- species, nation, group -- human consciousness is, of necessity, a far more blunt and brutal instrument.

There, our brain-fevers and anxieties rage more virulently, lacking the counterweights of individual feeling and the quick, intimate responsiveness of the private mind. In the group-mind, the fantasies that root in the muddy fear of meaninglessness can emerge full-blown. Thought and discourse are reduced to broad strokes, slogans, codes and incantations, with little correspondence to reality. Awareness of this tendency can mitigate some of its effects; but the group-mind's fundamental falsity and irreality almost invariably infects the thoughts and actions of group leaders -- and eventually many of the group members as well.

Thus we can sometimes say, not entirely metaphorically, that nations "go mad," hurtling themselves toward ruin, embracing self-destruction, lusting for violence and death, sick with nihilism -- although this sickness is always painted in the colors of patriotic fervor or religious zeal, or both…

Now draw these dangerous streams together, and you have a portrait of the blunt and brutal group-mind at work in the leadership of the world's most powerful nation. The folly, fantasy and death-fetish of the Bush Regime -- long evident to anyone who cared to see -- were finally "revealed" in the mainstream media recently by the quasi-official Establishment oracle, Bob Woodward. His latest insider portrait, Plan of Attack, offers -- in the usual, easily-gummed pabulum form -- a few tastes of the bitter truth behind the Regime's mad, ruinous war crime in Iraq.

The corrosive nihilism at the heart of the enterprise ate through the gaudily-painted surface most tellingly in a single anecdote. Woodward asks George W. Bush how he thinks history will regard his adventure in Iraq. Bush, gazing out the window, shrugs and waves the question away. "History, we don't know," he says. "We'll all be dead." No fine, faith-filled talk here about God and Jesus and the immortal soul responsible for its actions throughout all eternity -- the kind of zealous patter Bush favors in public statements. This was just the cold, rotten, meaningless core of his grand vision: "We'll all be dead." So who cares? Après moi, le deluge.

Who would have thought the floodwaters of this death vision would have risen so high again so soon? Yet here they are again, beating against the gates.

UPDATE: Jonathan Schwarz points out that all of the Senate's Democratic candidates for president voted for Lieberman's Iran War amendment: Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, and Joe Biden. Just in case you were expecting a saner foreign policy after the 2008 election.

UPDATE II: Meanwhile, George Milhouse Bush wants to make one thing perfectly clear: even in the highly unlikely (if not totally impossible) event that the Senate grows a rudimentary spine and tries to place the slightest obstacle in the way of a military attack on Iran, the Commander Guy will peremptorily veto it and instigate the mass murder anyway.

Spencer Ackerman at TPM Cafe found this gem of arrogant defiance in "a little-noticed letter from the White House to Carl Levin (D-MI), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee." The main subject of the letter was a similar vow to veto any restrictions on Bush's ability to continue his war crime in Iraq. The passsage concerning Iran might seem redundant now, after the Senate's vote on Lieberman's "Persia delenda est!" measure, which puts a gun in Bush's hand and screams for him to pull the trigger, but the President is obviously taking no chances.

Once More Unto the Breach

2007-07-10T17:26:00.000+01:00

Well, here we are back at the old place. If you've found your way here, then you already know that the regular Empire Burlesque has been hacked yet again. From what I can tell after a quick search around the net, this particular hack is not aimed specifically at my site, as some earlier ones have been; I can see that over the past few days, a whole slew of sites have been hacked by a crew called "Captain Crunch Team" or ccteam.ru, operating out of Russia. For all I know, this might be part of some kind of global virus or some other infestation creeping around the world. And there are some circumstances that might prevent our addressing the problem for a while. (Could be hours, might be days, or even weeks, conceivably.) Anyway, once again, I'll be blogging here for the interim, so bookmark this site. I'll also be crossposting any substantial posts at Atlantic Free Press and Pacific Free Press. But do keep checking back at www.chris-floyd.com. We'll be up and running there as soon as possible.

"They Have Destroyed Everything": Terms of Debate on Iraq

2007-07-10T17:15:00.000+01:00

Death everywhere, death every day, nothing but death and the stench of death and the never-ending agony of the aftermath of death. This is the true and only meaningful context of all the punditry and political posturing around the "issue" of Iraq. While the White House maneuvers to "buy time" for the president and provide "political cover" for continuing the war – and the Democrats make plans to float some "proposals" on "beginning to redeploy some forces" – the cry of an Iraqi grandfather whose entire family was murdered in the bombing at Amerli rips like a knife to the heart of the matter:

"We were wiped out mercilessly, and we blame the Americans, the Iraqi government, the criminals and all the politicians who brought us catastrophe and destruction. They have destroyed everything with their sectarianism and politics."

These were the words of Zainulabideen Rustam Abdullah, who "lost his wife, three daughters, his grandson and his daughter-in-law" in last Saturday's attack, the Washington Post reports. I have never read anywhere a more succinct and accurate portrayal of the hell-hole that George W. Bush has created in Iraq with his unprovoked invasion and destruction of that country. The war is in truth a merciless act, a brutal act of hubris, of avarice, of cynical deliberation and wilful ignorance. The sectarianism that it has unleashed – and abetted – and the thuggish politics in both Washington and Baghdad have indeed "destroyed everything."

None of it was necessary. None of it was justified. Abdullah's grandson was shredded into fragments of meat and bone because George W. Bush wanted to be a "war president" and prance around in his "Commander-in-Chief" socks. Abdullah's wife had her brains dashed out because Dick Cheney wanted to impose American dominance over the oil lands of the Middle East, for the greater glory and profits for his oil cronies and his military servicing paymasters. Abdullah's daughters were mutilated and disemboweled by shrapnel because the blind, monstrous engines of barbaric militarism and greasy war contracting have spread their moral rot from the swamp called Hell's Bottom where the Pentagon was built throughout the entire American Republic. Abdullah's daughter-in-law had her skin eaten away by ravenous fire because the leading lights of the American Establishment -- in government, in media, in business, in academia, in "think tanks" and "policy centers" – were giddy at the thought of empire, or dazzled by the prospect of loot, or maddened by ideological fervor, or driven by some private evil… or turned into cowards by 9/11, ready to sacrifice anything and everything – morality, reason, common sense, legality, the lives of their nation's soldiers and endless multitudes of innocent foreigners – in order to keep themselves safe, to keep living high on the hog, to stay well-wadded, cozy and comfy, forever protected from any adverse consequences of the destructive policies that have enriched them.

The Bush Faction's violence and extremism have been answered with violence and extremism. Their mass slaughter of civilians has been answered with the mass slaughter of civilians. The inherent criminality of their invasion has unleashed and begotten criminality on a massive scale. Their attempt to use war and death for political advantage in the region has been answered by other countries trying to use the Iraqi carnage for their own political advantage. As long as human beings are what they are – frail, foul, savage, broken, vulnerable creatures – there can be no other outcome to such brutal, senseless policies. Just death, everywhere, nothing but death.

This is the context of the "debate." This is what it's all about. Everything else is just posturing, just empty talk – empty talk from mouths dripping blood.

Bone Dance: A Late Epiphany at the New York Times

2007-07-09T01:11:00.000+01:00

This is the sound of a very large bone, lodged for a very long time, being hocked up at last:

"It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit." -- the New York Times, July 8, 2007.

Only four years -- and hundreds of thousands of dead bodies -- too late, of course. And it might have been nice if the Times editorialists had noted the very large part their own paper played in what they now call -- they now call -- "this unnecessary invasion."

Still, one can only hope -- wanly, I'm afraid -- that this turnaround will embolden the timorous spirits now guiding the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. Sure, they blithely ignored the will of the anti-war majority of the American people who elected them, and not only did not take concrete steps to end the war, but even acquiesced in a major escalation of the crime. What did you expect? Nobody cares what the rubes out there have to say. But the New York Times now, that's a different matter! If they say it's OK to end the war, if you have that Establishment seal of approval, why then, you might be able take a few steps toward reining in this thing -- without risking the ire of your corporate donors.

So we shall see. I would imagine that we are now headed for the kind of "grand compromise" already being mooted by Bob Gates and others: a large-scale withdrawal of combat troops before the end of Bush's term, in exchange for leaving a hefty "residual force" behind. The final, panicky bugout will be left to the Crawford Caligula's successor.

But no matter what form the inevitable withdrawal (or partial withdrawal) takes, one thing is almost certain: the Bushists will rain mountains of fire and death on Iraq before the pullout, in a spate of frenzied attacks and offensives and air strikes that will be billed as "cracking down hard on the terrorists before handing over responsibility for security to our Iraqi allies" or some such -- but will in fact be a harsh and brutal act of revenge on the Iraqis for making America look bad.

Then of course, there's always the Iran option...and the Times is showing every indication of being on board for that. There is much more fall of blood to come before we even begin to see the beginning of the end of Bush's war.

Comeback Trail: Regular EB is Back Up Now

2007-07-09T09:51:00.000+01:00

Many thanks to all who followed the trail to this site. The technical difficulties to the regular version of Empire Burlesque site are now resolved, and the site is back up. As it happened, this shut-down was unrelated to the series of hack attacks that have assailed the site of late, so that's good news, of a sort. Anyway, thanks for hanging in. You might want to bookmark this site for future use, just in case. I'm renaming this site "Empire Burlesque 1.0."