9/11 and the Great American Decline

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

The author begins with his encounter with two Israelis on the banks of the Hudson River as the second tower fell at the World Trade Center, and proceeds through the brief euphoria at “victory” in Iraq, and subsequent reversals in U.S. fortunes. “9/11 may one day be viewed much like the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, in 1914: as an occurrence that merely served to ignite the inevitable. The Bush regime desperately wanted a global war, and it got one.” But rather than ushering in an era of unchallenged American hegemony, the U.S. entered into irreversible decline.

9/11 and the Great American Decline

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“9/11 was wielded as a kind of weapon to take down the planet.”

“So, what do you think will happen now?” The question was posed by the taller of two young Israelis, my sole companions in this section of Liberty State Park on the Jersey City side of the Hudson River, the morning of September 11, 2001.

“Everything has changed,” I replied, unaware that the same phrase was simultaneously forming on the lips of millions around the globe.

“Yes, everything has changed,” said the Israeli, looking not at all displeased. He turned to resume taking photos of the great smoking space that had been the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, and of the huge, low cloud that drifted across New York Bay to Brooklyn.

My fellow witnesses to the collapse of the second tower were already positioned at the riverbank when I arrived at the scene on foot after having rushed past police who blocked all vehicular entrance to the park. The athletic, military age duo were clicking away with two very expensive-looking cameras. They spoke excitedly to each other in Hebrew – a language I instantly recognized from my two decades as a Manhattanite – but clumsily claimed to be “Polish” when I asked where they were from. I pretended to believe they were visitors from Poland.

“The athletic, military age duo were clicking away with two very expensive-looking cameras.”

Informed that I was a reporter, the taller, more gregarious one laughed giddily and exclaimed, “Yes, we are reporters, too!” He opened an attaché case to display two laminated New Jersey press cards that looked just like mine – except they were the wrong color. He cheerfully admitted the press cards were phony. “They are easy to make,” he said, still laughing.

Their new-smelling car was parked nearby; it was the only vehicle in the lot, since the young men had clearly arrived before the police sealed the entrances to the park. When we were done gawking at the awful hole in the skyline across the river, the visitors allowed me to hitch a short ride home. As the day unfolded, news reports told of other, small groups of Israelis positioned at vantage points on the Jersey side of the Hudson. Some behaved shamelessly, loudly welcoming the new era in which “everything has changed.”

My own theory is that my companions were probably senior students in a graduating class of one or another Israeli intelligence agencies. Co-ed groups of military-age Israelis pretending to be students of a non-existent Tel Aviv “arts school” had earlier that year been caught attempting to visit – “infiltrate” – sensitive U.S. security sites, as authoritatively reported at the time by a number of corporate media outlets.

At the very least, Israel knew something was up, and arranged for their graduate-spies to be witnesses to history.

In the intervening years I have always maintained that, in one sense, it doesn’t really matter what the Israelis or the U.S. government knew or did not know. The essence of the event lies in how it was received, framed and acted upon by the Bush regime: as a god-send – no matter how it was actually sent or by whom.

“Israel knew something was up, and arranged for their graduate-spies to be witnesses to history.”

The Bush gang could no more conceal their excitement at the possibilities now opened to them by mass murder at the Twin Towers, than could my Israeli interlocutors at Liberty State Park. 9/11 was wielded as a kind of weapon to take down the planet, justification for a final assault on international order, itself.

In its convulsive “response” to 9/11 – the worldwide “War on Terror” – the United States seized the opportunity to put in motion planetary aggressions that already existed in the blueprints of the neo-con’s Project for a New American Century (PNAC). In effect, Washington was claiming revenge as the motive for crimes that it had long been planning to commit. Precise causality for the specific events of 9/11 becomes near-irrelevant, submerged in the much larger aggression that was conceived long before the towers fell.

The strategic offensive to establish permanent U.S. global hegemony by force of arms, beginning with an invasion of Iraq, is truly the event that was meant to “change everything.” In the broad sweep of history, 9/11 may one day be viewed much like the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, in 1914: as an occurrence that merely served to ignite the inevitable. The Bush regime desperately wanted a global war, and it got one.

And they became drunk, much like biblical descriptions of men drunk on their own ambitions. With the seemingly easy seizure of Baghdad and the apparent capitulation of the international community, the Bush regime drank fully of their own propaganda. Triumphalist Capital and millennialist Christians and Zionists, speaking in tongues of pure aggression, imagined they had sealed the fates – ended the history – of all the “lesser peoples” of the planet. Defense chief Donald Rumsfeld whirled in rabid dementia, convinced that Iraqis were burning Baghdad in celebration of U.S. victory. “They’re free,” he frothed. “And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”

“Washington was claiming revenge as the motive for crimes that it had long been planning to commit.”

The corporate media began to speak of America as the “New Rome” – which was, tellingly, the same way Osama bin Laden started referring to the United States. But in Washington’s version, there was no fall at the end of empire – no end at all, only a final equilibrium with the U.S. at the top.

Rome looms large in the imagination of white America (which does exist, despite what Barack Obama says). Europeans have long noted that the United States has far more Roman- and Greek-styled columns than do Rome and Greece. These decadent, ostentatious knockoffs were the standard facades of Deep South mansions, each of them soaked in slave blood. America, conceived by its founders as an empire in-the-making, has always dreamed of out-doing Rome. For a brief time, the U.S. Lords of Capital and tens of millions of American racial chauvinists thought they were on the brink of a pan-Earth empire – until the Iraqi resistance halted Washington’s grand offensive.

Stopped in their tracks, the would-be Romans now faced the same contradictions that had propelled them to declare endless war in the first place – but multiplied by bacchanalian military expenditures, steady shift of productive forces from North and West to South and East, dramatic erosion of the dollar’s artificial supremacy, and a determination among nations to disentangle themselves from the dangerous, unhealthy American Centurion.

Looming like Doom is the Mother of All Bubbles, $750 trillion in derivatives and other monetary inventions that former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and many of Europe’s social democrats call “fictitious capital.” When the bubble bursts, which it must, then it can truly be said, “everything has changed.”

Every picture tells a story

• • Seth Freedman

“It’s very easy for the Israeli public to believe that Palestinians are lying when it’s just their word against the word of a soldier or settler”, explained B’Tselem’s spokesperson, Sarit Michaeli. The Israeli human rights group has brought several high-profile cases to the public’s attention this summer, providing vital video evidence of the scale of the violence meted out by settlers and soldiers alike. In the process the footage has seriously dented efforts to smear Palestinians complaining of assault. According to Michaeli, “[The video evidence] makes it much easier for us to demonstrate the reality on the ground, and to show Israelis what is being done in their names in the occupied territories.”

B’Tselem’s Shooting back campaign has also compelled the security forces in the West Bank to carry out more thorough investigations. Michaeli adds:

It forces the police to do their duty: to investigate and bring to justice suspected attackers. However, a systemic change is still needed in the way the law is enforced in the occupied territories; at present the army are doing very well in terms of protecting settlers, but they are failing in their duty to protect Palestinians from attack.

The status quo is hardly surprising, given the crystal clear evidence of collusion between the settlers and the army, and the recent admission by senior West Bank police officers that they prefer to “turn a blind eye” to settler violence, rather than risk confrontations with fellow Israelis. On top of this, said Michaeli, there is the constant threat of retaliation against those wielding cameras on the Palestinian side.

“The Amira family [whose daughter filmed the harrowing scenes of a soldier shooting a blindfolded Palestinian man at point-blank range] suffered reprisals, partly as a result of the embarrassment caused to the Israeli security forces”, Michaeli noted. Salam Amira’s father was recently arrested in the village of Nil’in by soldiers who reportedly boasted “We caught Salam’s dad”: when he asked his captors for water, their response, allegedly, was “Eat your camera”. Michaeli also pointed to cases of settlers attacking Palestinians holding cameras, and of soldiers confiscating and destroying tapes.

On a visit last week to the village of T’uba, lunch with our Palestinian hosts was disrupted by reports of a confrontation between one of the sons of the family and a jeepful of IDF soldiers.

We hurried out into the roasting midday sun, squinting through the haze at the stand-off on the next hilltop. The soldiers were, apparently, unhappy that the boy was grazing his sheep in that particular spot, and the rest of the family watched anxiously to see what kind of punishment would be meted out. One of his brothers suddenly leaned down, rummaged around in a box, and – as though he were drawing a pistol from its holster – whipped out a video camera and aimed it in the direction of the troops.

His weapon had been supplied by B’Tselem, and is this season’s must-have accessory in the West Bank; the latest technology available to the Palestinians in their continuing fight for their human rights under the oppressive regime of Israeli occupation. However, while there is no doubt that the project has greatly empowered those taking part, there is also the worry that if it fails to bring about any serious change in the way they are treated, Palestinian participants will lose heart pretty quickly.

The most obvious comparison to Shooting back is the infamous Rodney King video, which sent shockwaves through America, and proved conclusively that the black community’s complaints of police racism and harassment were by no means a figment of their imagination.

However, when an LA jury still found the footage insufficient evidence with which to convict the policemen involved, the upshot was some of the fiercest race riots seen in the US for decades. If a similar backlash is not to occur in the occupied territories, the army has to be seen to investigate properly every cast-iron case presented to them by way of B’Tselem’s recordings.

If a picture tells a thousand words, then a video tells 10 times that, when used to undeniably back up accusations of crimes carried out by settlers and soldiers, who would otherwise see themselves as above the law. I’ve witnessed the superiority complex of settlers on numerous occasions, even recording my own video of a settler teen threatening to kill me on one particularly charged trip to Hebron. Thus B’Tselem’s aim of restoring the rule of law in the wild West Bank is a noble aspiration, but not one that will be by any means easily achieved.

However, despite the uphill struggle. B’Tselem have every reason to persist in their task. The reaction of the international media to both the Nil’in and Susya tapes was huge, and a massive shot in the arm to those behind its release.

The more pressure that can be put on the Israeli authorities to hold its own troops and settlers accountable for their crimes, from both inside and outside Israel, the better for all the victims of the violence. The world is watching, and thanks to B’Tselem’s efforts to bring the truth to their television screens, thousands more pairs of eyes are scrutinising the situation with every new tape released.

Ron Paul Statement to the National Press Club

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The American Majority

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.

Carroll Quigley – Author of Tragedy & Hope

The coverage of the presidential election is designed to be a grand distraction. This is not new, but this year, it’s more so than ever.

Pretending that a true difference exists between the two major candidates is a charade of great proportion. Many who help to perpetuate this myth are frequently unaware of what they are doing and believe that significant differences actually do exist. Indeed, on small points there is the appearance of a difference. The real issues, however, are buried in a barrage of miscellaneous nonsense and endless pontifications by robotic pundits hired to perpetuate the myth of a campaign of substance.

The truth is that our two-party system offers no real choice. The real goal of the campaign is to distract people from considering the real issues.

Influential forces, the media, the government, the privileged corporations and moneyed interests see to it that both party’s candidates are acceptable, regardless of the outcome, since they will still be in charge. It’s been that way for a long time. George Wallace was not the first to recognize that there’s “not a dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties. There is, though, a difference between the two major candidates and the candidates on third-party tickets and those running as independents.

The two parties and their candidates have no real disagreements on foreign policy, monetary policy, privacy issues, or the welfare state. They both are willing to abuse the Rule of Law and ignore constitutional restraint on Executive Powers. Neither major party champions free markets and private-property ownership.

Those candidates who represent actual change or disagreement with the status quo are held in check by the two major parties in power, making it very difficult to compete in the pretend democratic process. This is done by making it difficult for third-party candidates to get on the ballots, enter into the debates, raise money, avoid being marginalized, or get fair or actual coverage. A rare celebrity or a wealthy individual can, to a degree, overcome these difficulties.

The system we have today allows a President to be elected by as little as 32% of the American people, with half of those merely voting for the “lesser of two evils”. Therefore, as little as 16% actually vote for a president. No wonder when things go wrong, anger explodes. A recent poll shows that 60% of the American people are not happy with the two major candidates this year.

This system is driven by the conviction that only a major party candidate can win. Voters become convinced that any other vote is a “wasted” vote. It’s time for that conclusion to be challenged and to recognize that the only way not to waste one’s vote is to reject the two establishment candidates and join the majority, once called silent, and allow the voices of the people to be heard.

We cannot expect withdrawal of troops from Iraq or the Middle East with either of the two major candidates. Expect continued involvement in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Georgia. Neither hints of a non-interventionist foreign policy. Do not expect to hear the rejection of the policy of supporting the American world empire. There will be no emphasis in protecting privacy and civil liberties and the constant surveillance of the American people. Do not expect any serious attempt to curtail the rapidly expanding national debt. And certainly, there will be no hint of addressing the Federal Reserve System and its cozy relationship with big banks and international corporations and the politicians.

There is only one way that these issues can get the attention they deserve: the silent majority must become the vocal majority.

This message can be sent to our leaders by not participating in the Great Distraction—the quadrennial campaign and election of an American President without a choice. Just think of how much of an edge a Vice President has in this process, and he or she is picked by a single person—the party’s nominee. This was never intended by the Constitution.

Since a principled non-voter sends a message, we must count them and recognize the message they are sending as well. The non-voters need to hold their own “election” by starting a “League of Non-voters” and explain their principled reasons for opting out of this charade of the presidential elective process. They just might get a bigger membership than anyone would guess.

Write-in votes should not be discouraged, but the electoral officials must be held accountable and make sure the votes are counted. But one must not be naïve and believe that under today’s circumstances one has a chance of accomplishing much by a write-in campaign.

The strongest message can be sent by rejecting the two-party system, which in reality is a one-party system with no possible chance for the changes to occur which are necessary to solve our economic and foreign policy problems. This can be accomplished by voting for one of the non-establishment principled candidates—Baldwin, Barr, McKinney, Nader, and possibly others. (listed alphabetically)

Yes, these individuals do have strong philosophic disagreements on various issues, but they all stand for challenging the status quo—those special interest who control our federal government. And because of this, on the big issues of war, civil liberties, deficits, and the Federal Reserve they have much in common. People will waste their vote in voting for the lesser of two evils. That can’t be stopped overnight, but for us to have an impact we must maximize the total votes of those rejecting the two major candidates.

For me, though, my advice—for what it’s worth—is to vote! Reject the two candidates who demand perpetuation of the status quo and pick one of the alternatives that you have the greatest affinity to, based on the other issues.

A huge vote for those running on principle will be a lot more valuable by sending a message that we’ve had enough and want real change than wasting one’s vote on a supposed lesser of two evils.

Italy upsets US over Georgia

By Guy Dinmore in Rome
martedì set 9 2008 13:30
Once a favoured ally rewarded for his support of the US invasion of Iraq, Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s centre-right prime minister, has evolved into a serious irritant for the Bush administration in handling Russia’s invasion of Georgia.

Strains in the transatlantic relationship were on display in Rome on Tuesday as Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, and Mr Berlusconi read out statements.

Mr Cheney strongly condemned Russia’s “unilateral efforts to alter by force of arms Georgia’s internationally recognised boundaries”, and reiterated that Nato had agreed on eventual membership for Georgia and Ukraine.

The US delegation, in Italy for five days, had pushed for clear endorsement from Mr Berlusconi. Instead, he did not utter a word of criticism against Russia. The Italian premier said he had tried to explain to Mr Cheney his personal success in helping to defuse “what happened in Ossetia and then in Georgia”. He stressed the importance of sustaining the Nato-Russia council, the joint forum he inaugurated in 2002 with President George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, then Russia’s president.

According to European diplomats, Bush administration hawks view with suspicion Mr Berlusconi’s close personal ties to the Russian leader and worry about Italy’s presidency of the G8 from January. Italy has already made clear it intends to invite Mr Putin to the summit in Sardinia.

An attempt by Italy to call a routine meeting of the Nato-Russia council after the invasion of Georgia was blocked by the US.

Concerns grew in Washington that Italy was undermining unity when Franco Frattini, Italy’s foreign minister, went to Moscow last Thursday – on the same day that Mr Cheney was in Georgia and Ukraine, and ahead of Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president leading EU peace efforts and now among Washington’s favourites.

US hawks are alarmed by Italy’s tight energy relationship with Russia, particularly the “strategic partnership” reached between Moscow’s Gazprom and Italy’s part state-owned Eni in 2006, and the South Stream pipeline planned to take Russian gas across the Black Sea.

“Italy is Russia’s Trojan horse in Europe,” said a diplomat from a former Soviet satellite state of the west’s reliance on Russian gas. Italian officials deny Mr Berlusconi has turned his back on the Bush administration.

One Italian statement that did win Mr Cheney’s approval was Mr Frattini’s assertion that Europe needed an energy strategy and should be united when negotiating with Russia, Libya and Algeria.

Privately, Italian officials argue that the US should be the last country to lecture Europe on the dangers of energy dependency, and that Mr Bush and Mr Cheney will soon move on, but Mr Putin and Russia’s gas will not.

● Competing pipeline projects that would connect Europe with new sources of gas in the Caucasus and central Asia have provided the Cheney delegation with maps showing a crazy paving of dotted lines.

Umberto Quadrino, chief executive of Edison, Italy’s second-largest energy group, is lobbying the Bush administration to put its full weight first behind Edison’s ITGI Corridor project and, later, the more ambitious but still somewhat hypothetical Nabucco pipeline. Both would bypass Russia but transit Georgia.

ITGI would take 8bn cubic metres of gas from Azerbaijan’s Shah Deniz field in the Caspian all the way to Italy. Azeri gas is already reaching Georgia and Turkey and can be extended to Greece. The only “missing link” is an undersea pipeline across to Italy to be built by Edison and Greece’s Depa.

“We are ready to do it,” Mr Quadrino told the Financial Times after the Ambrosetti conference in northern Italy where he lobbied the Cheney delegation.

http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto090920081437329398&page=2

Israeli History Envy – WRH

US colonel offers Iraq an apology of sorts for devastation of Babylon

Tags:

• IRAQ

In an act of at least partial contrition, an officer in charge of the US military occupation of Babylon in 2003 and 2004 has offered to make a formal apology for the destruction his troops wrought on the ancient site.

Webmaster’s Commentary:

One of the great crimes committed against the people of Iraq was the looting of the Baghdad Museum and the destruction of many important ancient sites inside Iraq. More to the point, I think that destruction of ancient sites is deliberate policy.

Egypt is literally littered with the ruins of the ancient temples and palaces of her rulers. As much as has been found, it is estimated that only 1/3 of Egypt’s archeological wonders have been uncovered. A newly discovered temple was uncovered while digging a sewer line, and a cache of finely preserved mummies was literally stumbled over by a cow in a pasture.

Iraq’s ancient heritage was enshrined in its ancient sites and museum. As a result of the war, many of those sites have been damaged or destroyed. Part of the ancient city or Ur now lies underneath a US air base runway. The treasures of the museum have only partly been recovered. The treasures from the looted archaeological sites have been scattered to the world.

All of this wealth of archaeological treasures must of course annoy Israel. We are raised from birth with Old Testament tales of the greatness of the ancient Israelites, of the powerful kingdoms of Solomon and David and the first temple. Yet Israel, while rich in antiquities, is almost totally devoid of artifacts from this supposedly glorious time in her history. The existence of the fabled First Temple was supported with just two artifacts, a carved staff ornament in the shape of a pomegranate and the Jehoash tablet. Both of these artifacts have been exposed as frauds. We are told that once there was a magnificent temple on that hill, but it “all went away.” The wonders emerging from the soil of Egypt, Iraq, and Iran serve as a constant reminder that ancient buildings of such a scale as we are told the First Temple was simply do not vanish without a trace.

There is considerable reason to suspect that the tales told in the Old Testament are just that; tales. The Bible is not science, it is the collected stories of a primitive tribal people telling each other how important they are. And like fishermen talking about the won that got away, or Ramses with his temple carvings of the did-not-really-happen victory over the Hittites at Kadesh, the writers of the ancient testaments assumed that the people they were telling stories to had no way to verify the claims for themselves. So “embellishment” was a low-risk activity.

We do know from the available archaeological evidence that the Exodus probably actually happened to the Hyksos, not the Israelites. We know that the story of Moses is suspect because no Egyptian princess would hide a Hebrew child inside Pharaoh’s household, then give the kid a Hebrew name (“Moses” is actually an Egyptian title meaning “Prince” and is included in the names of many Pharaoh’s names such as Tut-Moses, Ah-Moses, Ra-Moses (Ramses) etc.) But a good story is a good story and the writers of the ancient texts were probably not thinking much further into the future than the guys who pen the “Celebrity dates space alien” stories you see at supermarket checkout lines. The fact that the celebrity is a real person does not prove the space alien exists. It’s just a story.

But, over time, entire religions with attendant wealth and power structures have been built on the premise that these stories really happened exactly as written. And today, here in the 21st century world, technology has started to catch up with these ancient legends and call many of them into doubt.

So, for a nation that justifies its existence on the writings of the Old Torah, the plethora of sites and artifacts confirming the ancient histories of Egypt, Iraq, Iran, etc. etc. etc. must seem a dire political threat for a nation whose own ancient history seems to have left little if any traces.

In that context, the strange behavior of the US military which posted guards around the Iraq oil ministry while leaving the Baghdad museum unguarded suddenly starts to make sense, if the supporters of a very insecure nation decide that leveling the archaeological playing field is preferable to allowing the obvious disparity in archaeological proofs of claimed ancient histories to stand clear in the world’s view!

How the GOP Turned the US Into a Hideous Police State

Len Hart

When laws become unjust, tyrannical and stupid, everyone becomes a terrorist. The GOP ‘national convention is a picture of the continuing GOP police state. Otherwise peaceful demonstrators, exercising free speech guaranteed them by the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights were arrested, roughed-up, jailed, and accused of being terrorists! Under GOP supported laws, opposition to Bush is a ‘terrorist’ act.Patriot Act II laid the ground work!

Like Hitler’s enabling act, Patriot II made opposition to Bush an act of terrorism, giving Bush the ‘authority’ to define US obligations to the Geneva Convention as he saw fit. Those ‘deemed’ to be ‘enemy combatants are, thus, prohibited from fighting back and, of course, ‘fighting back’, defending one’s country, then becomes an act of terrorism. I have news for Bush: ‘deeming’ is not ‘due process’ which is guaranteed in the US Constitution.
At home, hot dogs, most police departments, self-appointed Bushies, have taken it all to heart in a wave of often fatal tasering, rarely seen even in the US. More worrisome is that a wave of arrests of peace protesters are then charged with being ‘terrorists’. It follows, that if one is deemed a ‘terrorist’ under the Patriot II, being an American citizen will not prevent your being water boarded. In other words, ‘terrorism’ is whatever Bush doesn’t like.

The rule of law and Due Process mean absolutely nothing to this administration or the GOP. Silence gives consent. John McCain has, therefore, signed off on tyranny! McCain represents Bush’s ‘third term’; therefore, Bush need not declare a national emergency to assume dictatorial powers. He he exercises them already. The wholesale arrests of peaceful demonstrators is just the tip of the ice burg.
This wave of abuse proves that McCain’s GOP, the Bush administration specifically, has turned the US into a fascist police state! Whenever you are ‘deemed’ by the Bush administration to be a ‘terrorist’, you can kiss the protections of the Constitution, and possibly your ass, good bye. The ‘authorities’ may deem the following acts as ‘acts of terrorism:

• Destruction of any property, which is deemed punishable by any means of the military tribunal’s choosing.
• Any violent activity whatsoever if it takes place near a designated protected building, such as a charity building
• A change of the definition of “pillaging” which turns all illegal occupation of property and all theft into terrorism. This makes squatters and petty thieves enemy combatants.

In the wake of Patriot II, journalist Greg Palast has been hounded by Homeland Security, accused of giving terrorists information about ‘US critical infrastructure’ and film of Exxon’s Baton Rouge refinery! This is information that they could have gotten with a google search and goggle earth! It’s just an excuse to harass and intimidate a reporter.
There is a fascist chill in America. As I have often stated: Bushco (and that includes McCain Palin) is a clear and present danger. Bush, his minions and material support, are traitors who have betrayed the people of the US even as they worked to subvert the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, indeed, the very ‘rule of law’, replaced by decrees, signing statements, signed by Bush.

(WSWS) — On Wednesday eight members of the anarchist prof est group the Republican National Convention Welcoming Committee (RNCWC) were charged under provisions of the Minnesota a state version of the Patriot Act with “Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism.”The eight charged are all young, and could face up to seven-and-a-half years in prison under a provision that allows the enhancement of charges related to terrorism by 50 percent. They are: Monica Bicking, Eryn Trimmer, Luce Guillen Givins, Erik Oseland, Nathanael Secor, Robert Czernik, Garrett Fitzgerald and Max Spector….

—RNC in Twin Cities: Eight prof esters charged with terrorism under Patriot Act

In what appears to be the first use of criminal charges under the 2002 Minnesof a version of the Federal Patriot Act, Ramsey County Prosecutors have formally charged 8 alleged leaders of the RNC Welcoming Committee with Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism. Monica Bicking, Eryn Trimmer, Luce Guillen Givins, Erik Oseland, Nathanael Secor, Robert Czernik, Garrett Fitzgerald, and Max Spector, face up to 7 1/2 years in prison under the terrorism enhancement charge which allows for a 50% increase in the maximum penalty. Affidavits released by law enforcement which were filed in support of the search warrants used in raids over the weekend, and used to support probable cause for the arrest warrants, are based on paid, confidential informants who infiltrated the RNCWC on behalf of law enforcement. They allege that members of the group sought to kidnap delegates to the RNC, assault police officers with firebombs and explosives, and sabotage age airports in St. Paul. Evidence released to date does not corroborate these allegations with physical evidence or provide any of her evidence for these allegations than the claims of the informants. Based on past abuses of such informants by law enforcement, the National Lawyers Guild is concerned that such police informants have incentives to lie and exaggerate threats of violence and to also act as agent provocateurs in raising and urging support for acts of violence. –Bruce Nestor, Information Clearing House, RNC 8 Charged as Terrorists Under State Patriot Act

Stupid, asinine and unjust laws inspired by the original stupid law, the Patriot Act, make a mockery of our Constitution and the principles of our founding.

The charges represent an abuse of the criminal justice system and seek to intimidate any person organizing large scale public demonstrations potentially involving civil disobedience. –Bruce Nestor, president of the Minnesota Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild

Real violence is trivialized with transparent attempts to put on ‘trial’ the political views of the defendants. This tactic is un-patriotic and un-American. In another case, Joe Previtera, 21 of Boston College was charged with felonies after he dressed up in a hooded Iraqi prisoner ‘dress’ as seen in the iconic Abu Ghraib torture photo. Apparently, a man in a dress is a threat to the military grunts in the recruitment center in Tremont St., downtown Boston. He was arraigned and bond was set at $10,000. — Boston Student Joe Previtera Gets Felony Charges For Iraq Prof est Only the naive still believe that the various police forces throughout the nation take seriously their oaths to ‘protect and serve’. Rather, the police have become a Praetorian Guard of entrenched power and elite, monied interests. It’s the GOP way! I wonder how many ‘cop shops’ are directly controlled by Bush’s ‘Homeland Security”.

…[it] Seems almost inarguable but it leads to lesser military effectiveness in a myriad of situations, but nowhere more than in anti-insurgency operations where the willingness of American troops to blow away civilians if there is even a miniscule chance that might make troops safer has actually lead to troops being less safe, because it has increased the number of people who have reason to want to kill American troops.

The US has an image of itself as a country of the brave. Perhaps George W. Bush was the perfect President for the US as it now is. A country of hollow, self righteous showmen. I certainly hope not, but –looking at McCain’s polling numbers– it may be so. In which case the US will get what it deserves –and Heaven Help the rest of us.Certainly, there’s a balance between foolhardiness and courage and between safety and responsibility. In US police enforcement that balance has skewed to the point where all a police officer needs to justify the shooting, the electrocution, the punching, the stomping, the battering of the citizens and visitors of this country is to state they were afraid for their safety. That excuses all. The job of US Police Officers is to keep themselves safe. The citizenry do not matter. There is no longer any pretense that the police forces in the US are here to serve the community. They are in the business of control. They protect the very rich and powerful. We have come full circle to police as enforcers for the rich in a feudal-like system of economic serfs and masters.–Authoritarian Police Forces we have in the US

The GOP has been taken over by Bush-like neo-nazis, particularly John McCain and his mentally constipated running-mate –Sarah Palin, a Stepford Wife on speed! Merely making plans to blockade traffic or disrupt the GOP is now considered to be ‘terrorism’. This is absurd. Authorities say they want to put the defendants views on trial. I submit that it is time we put Bush, McCain, Palin views on trial. And later, war criminals are to be put on trial at the Hague.

It is time that the Bush administration be charged with violations of its own terrorist act. [See: CIA Leak May Violate Patriot Act ] It is time that Bush be charged with violations of US Codes, Title 18, Section 2441, capital crimes. It is time that Bush be charged for his own violations of Patriot Acts I and II. It is time that we held both Bush and McCain to their own standards. It is time that we expose the GOP to be the fascist, terrorist party in a nation that had been –at one time –free! See: YouTube Activists charged with TerrorismIn the meantime, America’s last growth industry is the surveillance of the domestic population. As home prices were taking a beating and GDP struggled, US government wiretaps remained bullish with ‘eavesdropping’ boasting an increase of 14 percent over 2006 levels. In 2007, some 4,580 state and federal wiretaps were OKd by judges. That’s up from 4,015 in 2006.

State police applications for wiretaps were up 27% in 2007 over 2006. Ninety-four percent targeted cell phones. In 2007 –according stats released by the US Courts’ administrator –state judges approved 1,751 criminal wiretap applications without turning any of them down. [See: report (.pdf).] That’s about a three fold increase since 1997.

Tyrants Snooping on Americans (TSA) have installed a naked X-ray machine at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Virginia.

“Whole body imaging” machines treat Security Screeners to a peep show featuring passengers’ moles, scars, sores, sweat, nipples, and genitals. However, the scanners cannot see through plastic or rubber materials that resemble skin, Peter Siegel, a senior scientist at the California Institute of Technology, told USA Today. “You probably could find very common materials that you could wrap around you that would effectively obscure” weapons or bomb parts.

TSA snoops are already enjoying the naked X-rays at airports in Baltimore, New York, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, and Albuquerque. The peep show also travels to Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas, and Miami this month. —Naked X-Rays at More U.S. Airports

As the corrupt establishment abuses both law and its enforcement on behalf of a partisan position, the Taser is increasingly used against innocent citizens to injure, kill, or deprive them of their rights under the US Constitution. To insist upon treatment within the Constitution is often enough to enrage a hot dog who is out to prove he knows how to ‘subdue’ or use a Taser! What idiot doesn’t? The abuse of tasers has become epidemic, an outrage, a threat to the rule of law, an overt violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, and, in many cases, it’s use is a felony violation of US Codes, and state laws. It the worst cases, it is murder! The epidemic of taser abuse is characteristic of fascist police states run riof when those sworn to uphold the law become not hing more than thugs and/or murderers.

We have serious concerns about the use of electro-shock devices in law enforcement, both as regards their safety and their pof ential for misuse. Portable and easy to use, with the capacity to inflict severe pain at the push of a button without leaving substantial marks, electro-shock weapons are particularly open to abuse, as our organization has documented in numerous cases around the world. While in the United States police operate under professional standards,(8) we are concerned that many US police departments are using Tasers to subdue non-compliant or disturbed individuals who do not pose a serious danger to themselves or of hers. As our reports have documented, there are many cases where we believe use of Tasers has contravened international standards which require that police use force only when strictly necessary, in proportion to the threat posed, only for as long as the threat exists and in a manner designed to minimize pain or injury. We have documented disturbing instances where we believe that Taser use has amounted to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment which is absolutely prohibited under international law. (Emphasis added)The UN Committee against Torture has called on the United States to deploy Tasers only as a non-lethal alternative to using firearms. We are particularly concerned about the capacity of Tasers to be used in close contact situations as a stun weapon – including in situations where individuals appear to be already effectively in custody – and to inflict repeated shocks over a relatively prolonged period. While we believe the drive-stun mode is especially open to abuse, we not e that in dart-mode also there have been instances of alleged abuse, with officers able to inflict repeated shocks once the darts have taken hold.We are also concerned that Tasers are being widely deployed in the United States before the results of rigorous, independent and comprehensive testing of their safety and pof ential health risks.–USA, Amnesty International’s concerns about Tasers: Statement to the US Justice Department inquiry into deaths in custody

The manufacture of tasers should be banned by law, their use made a felony, and the moronic hot dogs who get their jollies tasering folk should be locked up for life or, in those cases in which the victims dies, the taser freaks, taser crazy cops, should be charged with capital crimes, tried, found guilty and given a dose of Texas ol’ sparky! Tasers have become a symptom of the modern police state –atrocity ‘lite’.It would appear that a ‘shot heard round the world’ had been fired. Bush/McCain, their minions and kiss up Nazi wannabes have thrown down the gauntlet. Simply –if you object to Bush’s treasonous and arbitrary, unauthorized re-write of the US Constitution, you may be charged with terrorism. This administration is not behaving as if it plans to leave office at the end of the term.
Clearly –this is Bush/McCain/GOP strategy, the strategy of brownshirts! A first step in this direction was taken in the year 2000 when GOP ‘brownshirts’ stormed recount rooms in Florida, physically attacking those who were counting the very votes that most certainly would have made Al Gore President of the United States. Had that happened, this nightmare of nearly eight years might have been avoided! There is no choice but to crush the GOP, a hate-filled pseudo party characterized by its thinly veiled bigotry, provincialism and eitism. There are lessons to be found in our recent past. The Civil Rights movement was an incipient revolution. Martin Luther King’s ‘dream’ was a revolutionary manifesto. He was murdered! John F. Kennedy pledged “New Frontiers”. Because JFK promised to smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and abolish the oil depletion allowance, and, in other less dramatic ways, subvert the ruthless, selfish power of a tiny, un-elected elite, he was gunned down in the streets of Dallas, arguably the most conservative and reactionary city in America. I know who killed JFK! He was killed by those who later covered up their crime as Bush has covered the crime of 911.

Those who murdered JFK worked assiduously to propagate the mindless ‘Warren Commission Report’, a report whom no one of even modest intelligence believes. Innocent people have no crimes to cover up. The guilty, by contrast, always do. We know who JFKs killers were. It is because this crime is still covered up and the nation has not yet come to grips with the ugly beast that was unleashed that we are stuck with the likes of Bush, McCain, Palin and similar evil and repugnant ilk!

Where’s the sense – where’s the profit in all the artificial fear, all the hate and all the aggression? Recently they’ve begun to destroy the very instruments of dialogue and discussion. In their haste to attack Iraq, they destroyed the Atlantic Alliance, did major damage to the United Nations, and managed to severely wound the NATO alliance. How can they hope to triumph against such a background of belligerence and destruction? What’s left to crush or threaten once we’ve finished declaring ourselves to be the Supreme Rulers of the World?
It turns out that most of the above has only been a side-show, an ‘introductory video’ of what will happen to the United States and to all its citizens if we should fail to comply with every command on the Bushwhacker’s hit list of rights to be taken, property to be stolen, or dreams to be denied. It seems there is a plan beneath all this after all.

This little nightmare called FEMA – The Federal Emergency Management Agency – was brought to us by Richard Nixon. And over the years each consecutive president has contributed to its continuing health and viability – until we got to ’41,’ bullyboy’s daddy. GWH Bush saw to it that this weapon against the people was armed and ready – the only thing not in place was a sufficient excuse to implement it.

What exactly is FEMA, in terms of its powers, once it is activated?

“EXECUTIVE ORDER 11921 allows the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency to develop plans to establish control over the mechanisms of production and distribution, of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit and the flow of money in U.S. financial institution in any undefined national emergency. It also provides that when a state of emergency is declared by the President – Congress cannot review the action for six months.”

A complete explanation is here: http://www.sonic.net/sentinel/gvcon6.html

Then came the events of 9-11. Here was the beginning of the real possibility to make the transition from a science fiction fantasy to living reality. http://www.rense.com/general36/hoax.htm

To facilitate the onset of civil unrest in the United States, a number of actions by the executive branch of government have been undertaken with the complicity and collusion of both the Congress and the courts under the direction of a loosely defined coalition of the eager that involves both the USA and a faction of extremists within the government of Israel. All of this is being financed by you and me through the monetary choices we have allowed this government to make since the ascension of the Bush Crime Family to their executive posts in Washington D.C.

—The Fema Plan to Kill America

Our strategy in response is this: we will put the Bush/McCain ‘dictatorship’ on trial! We will organize to challenge in court every unlawful arrest! We will organize to file class action lawsuits seeking millions against all corporations that have materially supported and, in other ways, facilitated this police state and its attentdent atrocities upon the American people and the world! We will organize to boycott the MSM and its sponsors. We will shop and buy green! We will peacefully obstruct and oppose! We will throw a spanner into the works and gum up the evil machine. When millions are so motivated, the underpinnings of this dictatorship of less than one percent of the nation will collapse. The whole rotten edifice will come crashing down! We will wage revolution and win!

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Revolution: Cure for Tyranny?

Record corporate bailout reveals the bankruptcy of American capitalism

By Barry Grey

The US government takeover of the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has dealt a shattering blow to the ideology of market capitalism, which has been used for decades to justify a relentless assault on the working class and a vast transfer of wealth to the American ruling elite.

The endless invocations of the virtues of private enterprise, individual entrepreneurship and self-reliance, used to demonize socialism and defend a system that exploits the vast majority for the benefit of a financial elite, have been exposed as frauds. When it comes to big capital, losses are socialized. Only profits remain private.

The same forces who year after year have inveighed against “big government” in order to justify the removal of all legal impediments to the accumulation of corporate profits and private fortunes, and carry out the destruction of social safeguards for the working class, have engineered a massive expansion of government power to safeguard the interests of the financial elite.

The bailout has as well exposed the real relations of political power and influence behind the façade of American democracy. The largest government bailout of private companies in world history—whose ultimate cost to taxpayers is likely to reach hundreds of billions—was sanctioned in advance by the Democratic Congress and given instant approval by the leadership of both parties and both of their presidential candidates.

There have been no investigations into the greatest financial scandal in world history. Neither party has any interest in bringing to light the swindling and skullduggery of the Wall Street moguls, because they are both bound hand and foot to those responsible for the financial debacle.

What has been revealed is the existence in the United States, behind the increasingly tattered veneer of democratic institutions, of a plutocracy—the political rule of the rich. When it comes to the basic interests of the financial aristocracy, both parties and all of the official institutions of society snap to attention and do the bidding of their Wall Street masters.

The bailout of the two mortgage giants—which account for 80 percent of new home mortgages in the US—is a demonstration of the historic failure of American capitalism and the profit system on a global scale. It was precipitated by the deepest economic crisis since the Depression of the 1930s, whose epicenter is the United States. The Bush administration moved to take over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under conditions of a rapid erosion of international confidence in the solvency of not only these two companies, but of the United States government itself.

Over the past several months, global investors, including central banks and government investment funds, primarily in Asia and Russia, have been dumping their vast holdings in mortgage-backed securities issued by the US government-sponsored firms. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have a combined liability of $5.3 trillion in mortgage-backed securities which they own or guarantee. The run on their assets has not only intensified the crisis of the two companies, which are massively leveraged and have suffered billions of dollars in losses as a result of the collapse of the US housing market, it has thrown into question the status of all US government debt, including US Treasury bonds.

The US, by far the world’s largest debtor nation, with a current account deficit of nearly $800 billion, is sustained by the inflow of hundreds of billions of dollars from abroad. It currently imports $1 trillion in foreign capital every year, or over $4 billion every working day.

But the assumption by the US government of the debts of the two mortgage companies, while averting an immediate financial meltdown, only compounds the crisis of American capitalism. As Martin Wolf, the financial correspondent of the Financial Times wrote on Tuesday, “As a result, US housing finance has been brought under direct government control and, in the process, the gross liabilities of the US government, properly measured, have increased by $5,400 billion, a sum equal to the entire publicly held debt and 40 percent of gross domestic product.”

At a stroke, US sovereign debt has doubled and is now roughly equal to America’s gross domestic product. On July 14, one day after US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson called for legislation to give him unilateral and unlimited powers to use public funds to rescue Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Wall Street Journal editorialized on the implications of a government bailout of the two companies. It wrote: “But with financial woes mounting, some investors are betting they may profit from weighing the unthinkable question: Could the US government default?”

This immense increase in US government indebtedness can only further undermine international confidence in the credit-worthiness of US Treasury bonds, resulting in a further decline in the dollar and a sharp increase in the interest paid by the US to borrow from its international creditors.

The claims made by the Bush administration, echoed by the US media, that the bailout of the two mortgage finance companies will consume at most $200 billion in public funds—itself a massive amount that eclipses previous corporate bailouts, including the $160 billion bailout of the savings and loans industry less than two decades ago—are not credible. An indication of the sums envisioned by US policy makers is the fact that the legislation passed last July giving Paulson the power to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac raised the US debt limit by $800 billion, increasing the cushion between the debt limit and current government indebtedness to $1.1 trillion.

Some sense of the social priorities of the US ruling elite and its two parties can be gleaned from a comparison between the sums being extended to bail out just these two companies and those allocated by the federal government in 2008 for education ($67.5 billion), unemployment benefits ($37.3 billion), highways and mass transit ($53.1 billion) and housing ($7.4 billion).

Moreover, the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is only the prelude to a far broader use of public funds to bolster the balance sheets of major corporations. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and his Republican opponent John McCain are both supporting a $50 billion bailout of the US auto companies, which will inevitably entail further cuts in jobs and wages. And the plunge of the Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers toward bankruptcy—the firm’s stock fell by 45 percent on Tuesday—poses another rescue operation similar to the $29 billion bailout of Bear Stearns last March.

It is already being widely broached that the government establish a permanent mechanism for using taxpayer funds to buy billions of dollars in failing assets from major banks and financial companies. The Wall Street Journal wrote on Tuesday, “Creating a government-backed entity to buy up these assets could jump-start the market for home loans and relieve banks and other financial institutions, which are taking big hits to their balance sheets as they fall in value.”

The Financial Times sounded the same theme, declaring, “The US government might end up having to support the recapitalization of a much wider range of financial institutions in order to curb the credit crunch.”

These statements give the lie to the attempt to portray Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as aberrations, which in their reckless speculation and pursuit of super profits departed from the norm. On the contrary, they typify the financial parasitism and outright criminality that have become pervasive characteristics of the workings of American capitalism and the social physiognomy of the US corporate elite.

The operations of the two government-sponsored firms are entirely in line with the unbridled speculation, based on an immense expansion of debt, that has become the hallmark of American capitalism. Their role in the housing and credit boom that has now come crashing down was of a piece with the creation of the vast edifice of paper values, engineered through the so-called “securitization” of debt, which sustained the super profits and immense salaries raked in by Wall Street.

In the wake of the bailout, press reports have noted the bloated salaries of the companies’ CEOs. Before they were sacked as part of the government takeover, Fannie Mae CEO Daniel Mudd and Freddie Mac chief Richard Syron took in between them $29.5 million over the several years they headed their respective corporations. And they stand to receive another $29 million as part of their exit packages.

But these sums are by no means exceptional. The Financial Times reported last week that compensation for major executives of the seven biggest US banks totaled $95 billion between 2005 and 2007.

The collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is a paradigm of the US economy as a whole. Over the past three decades, the decay of American capitalism has taken the form of a vast growth of financial parasitism. At its heart, this involves the separation of wealth creation from the creation of real value in the production process. The American ruling elite has largely dismantled the productive base of the US economy, ruthlessly downsizing manufacturing at the cost of millions of jobs and the destruction of working class living standards, in order to reap higher profits from increasingly reckless forms of financial speculation.

The indices of the growth of financial speculation in the US economy are staggering: In 1982, the profits of US financial companies accounted for 5 percent of total after-tax corporate profits. In 2007, they made up 41 percent of corporate profits.

This process has generated ever greater levels of social inequality, the most telling symptom of the degenerate state of the US profit system. A report by the Congressional Research Service, updated July 31, provides a measure of the ever growing chasm between the ruling elite and the broad mass of the American people. It states that the share of national income accounted for by the top 1 percent of earners (as reported on tax returns) reached 21.8 percent in 2005—a level not seen since 1928. The report further noted that in 2006, corporate profits totaled 12.4 percent of national income, a level not reached in 50 years.

The cost of the ever-expanding bailout of American big business will be borne squarely by the working class. Even in the midst of growing unemployment and poverty and a flood of home foreclosures, there is much talk in the media about the American people “living beyond their means.”

That the next administration, whether headed by McCain or Obama, will sharply intensify the assault on working class living standards was spelled out by the New York Times, which editorialized Tuesday: “Senators John McCain and Barack Obama have both voiced support for the bailout, which shows good judgment. But what the next president will need to worry about, and both candidates need to talk about, is the depth of the country’s economic problems. It will take discipline and sacrifice to address them.”

The only alternative to a rapid lowering of working class living standards and the only rational and progressive solution to the financial crisis is a socialist program of nationalization of the entire financial system under the democratic control of the working people, with provisions to secure the investments of small depositors and share-holders. The wealth and resources of the country must be developed and allocated to meet the social needs of the population, not the money-mad strivings of financial speculators.

This policy can be carried out only through the independent political mobilization of the working class in opposition to the two-party system and the financial aristocracy which it serves. The Socialist Equality Party is dedicated to the building of such a mass socialist movement of the working class.

Military offensive displaces 300,000 in north-west Pakistan

By James Cogan

A major offensive by the Pakistani military against Islamist militants in the country’s Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA) and North West Frontier Province (NWFP) has effectively become a campaign of collective punishment against the fiercely independent Pashtun tribes that live in the region. As tens of thousands of refugees pour out of the remote Bajaur agency, they are reporting indiscriminate air strikes and helicopter gunship attacks, devastated villages and farmlands, and hundreds of dead and wounded civilians.

Government troops were dispatched into Bajaur on August 6 to seize control of the Afghan-Pakistan border crossing near the town of Loyesam from militants loyal to Tehrik-e-Taliban—the so-called Pakistani Taliban. Fierce Taliban resistance inflicted significant casualties on Pakistani forces, forcing them to pull back to positions in and around the town of Khar, the administrative headquarters of Bajaur.

Since August 10, the military has stayed in those defensive positions but aerial bombing and artillery barrages have been used to literally depopulate Bajaur and areas of the adjoining agency of Mohmand. After more than two weeks of indiscriminate attacks against alleged militant positions, it is estimated that 300,000 people have been forced to flee from their homes—a significant proportion of the population in the areas not under government control.

The roads out of Bajaur and Mohmand have been filled with desperate families attempting to reach relatives in NWFP or refugee camps that the Pakistani government has established to the east and north of the tribal agencies. The impact of the government campaign is revealed in the few media reports from the area and interviews with displaced tribal people.

Journalists for Pakistan’s News International in Bajaur reported on August 18: “The major towns of the agency like Khar, Raghagan, Hajilawant, Jar and others were completely deserted, no sign of life was seen there… Some of the houses and a religious seminary near Jar village had been dashed to the ground after being hit by missiles fired from gunship helicopters or jet fighters that were used in the operation…”

In another News International report on August 21, a refugee from Zigai said he had fled his home in the Zigai area because “the military helicopter gunships had started pounding civilian targets”. Another man said: “They [the military] are not hitting the known targets of the militants but blitzing the civilian abodes.”

In an article the following day on the conditions in a refugee camp near Peshawar, Fazl-e-Akbar from Loyesam told News International: “Around 30 people were killed in our village during the operation which forced us to leave the town.”

A woman who refused to be named said: “I am in a miserable condition here in the camp, but I cannot return to our home due to continued shelling, which has already wounded my daughter and destroyed our house.” A new arrival at the camp said: “We arrived here this morning as our village, Nawagai, was heavily shelled by gunship helicopters.”

The News International journalist described the conditions facing people in the camp as “pitiable, as they did not have the required facilities, including power, potable water, toilets, etc.”

Journalist Daud Khan reported in an August 22 article for the Korean website Ohmy News that “the internally displaced people of Bajaur said the troops did not target the militant centres, which are located at stone throws distance from their bases.” A man named Gul Zamin, from an area near Khar, said: “Rather, the helicopters and artillery target the civilian population, resulting in mounting civilian casualties.”

Pakistani officials claimed on Thursday that its operation had killed over 480 Taliban fighters, at the cost of 25 troops. There are no credible reports as to the number of civilians who have been killed or wounded but the anecdotal evidence suggests that it runs into the hundreds.

US-directed operationThere is no doubt that the Bush administration is behind the Pakistani government’s decision to wage war in the tribal agencies. The assault on Bajaur was launched in the wake of Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani’s visit to Washington in late July, where he was presented with US demands that Pakistan prevent the FATA being used as a safe haven by insurgents fighting American and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

In return, the Bush administration appears to have encouraged former dictator and close ally Pervez Musharraf to step down as president, which he did on Monday. The following day, the head of the Pakistani military, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, flew to Kabul for high-level talks with US and NATO commanders on coordinating operations against the insurgents on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border.

On Thursday, President Bush reportedly called Musharraf to thank him for his support for the bogus US “war on terror” over the past seven years. He then called Gilani to insist that the Pakistani government intensify its operations against the anti-US militants.

Since the US invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, the Bajaur agency has been used as a base by the Afghan Hezb-e-Islami movement headed by Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, which is the main anti-occupation force fighting for control of the eastern provinces of Afghanistan. This year, it has inflicted significant casualties on both American and Afghan government troops in border districts such as Paktika, Khost, Paktia, Nangahar, Konar and Nurestan.

The Pakistani tribal agencies of South Waziristan and North Waziristan are the strongholds of the overall head of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, as well as the safe haven for the Afghan Taliban forces led by Jalaluddin Haqqani. Between them, the two Islamist warlords are believed to command 20,000 to 30,000 fighters, who are conducting an increasingly effective guerilla war against the US and NATO forces in southern Afghanistan.

Analysts believe the Taliban and Hekmatyar’s forces are pursuing a similar military plan to that used during the CIA-backed guerilla war against the Soviet military occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. They are gradually extending the areas under their control, positioning themselves to disrupt supply routes to the major cities and, ultimately, encircle Kandahar and Kabul.

The US demands for a crackdown in the tribal agencies to disrupt the Afghan insurgency may end up plunging Pakistan into severe political instability or even civil war. The brutal character of the offensive in Bajaur is provoking outrage among the millions of Pakistanis, especially in the Pashtun-populated FATA and NWFP, who oppose the US occupation of Afghanistan.

Anger over the offensive has the potential to shatter the unstable ruling coalition between Gilani’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) led by Nawaz Sharif just six months after it took government.

Sharif has threatened to leave the coalition over the PPP’s refusal to reinstate a number of senior judges sacked by Musharraf. The tremendous suffering being caused by the government offensive is likely to trigger further calls for a break with the PPP. Most PML-N supporters label the war in Afghanistan as “America’s war” and oppose using the Pakistani armed forces against Islamic militants in the Pashtun tribal agencies.

Jamaat-e-Islami, the oldest Islamic-based party in Pakistan, is organising demonstrations by its supporters and refugees from the FATA, denouncing Gilani and demanding an end to the military operation. The Pashtun-based Awami National Party, which holds the provincial government in NWFP and is a minor partner of the ruling coalition, is under intense pressure to come out openly against the offensive.

Yesterday, NWFP Religious Affairs Minister Namroz Khan denounced the invasion of Afghanistan as a neo-colonial war for control of Central Asia. “No one can deny the fact that Pakistan and Afghanistan are the gateway to the rich oil and gas reserves of the Central Asian republics,” he said. “The ‘war on terror’ was started to gain control of these reserves.”

The Pakistani Taliban is heightening the political instability with a vicious campaign of suicide bombings against police and military facilities in various parts of the country.

Two bombers blew themselves up on Thursday at the gates of the heavily-guarded Wah armaments factory, just 30 kilometres from the capital Islamabad. As many as 78 people were killed and over 100 wounded. Most of the casualties were workers leaving their shift. Taliban spokesman and Bajaur tribal leader Maulvi Omar told journalists via telephone: “If it [the offensive in the FATA] doesn’t stop, we will continue such attacks. The Wah factory is a killer factory where arms are being produced to kill our women and children.”

On Tuesday, a suicide bomber blew himself up in the waiting room of a major hospital in Dera Ismail Khan, a city in the southern region of NWFP. The purported target was a police unit that had been deployed to the hospital to keep control of the family of a local Shiite leader, Basit Ali, who had been gunned down earlier in the day. The family had gathered at the hospital to grieve and protest. At least 32 people were killed, including seven police and 14 relatives of Basit Ali, and another 55 injured.

The Taliban has denied that the attack had anti-Shiite motives. However, the Islamist movement adheres to an extremist trend of Sunni Islam, which views Shiite Muslims as heretics.

The attacks against targets far from the tribal agencies are intended to demonstrate the reach of the Taliban and pressure the government to call off its offensive. On August 19, Mehsud offered to take part in peace talks, provided that the Pakistani government repudiated “the pro-US policies pursued by the Musharraf-led regime”.

However, the PPP-led government, which is just as beholden to Washington as Musharraf, has shown no signs that it intends to call off military operations in the tribal areas.

Afghan president blames “the West” for Islamic extremism

By James Cogan

The propaganda used to justify the US-led occupation in Afghanistan typically leaves out any explanation of the origins of tendencies such as Al Qaeda, the Taliban movement and other Islamist groups resisting American and NATO troops. The spin merchants of the so-called “war on terror” would have people believe that the US and its allies are fighting religious fanatics who have no support in the country and are motivated by an inexplicable and irrational hatred of Western civilisation.

On rare occasions, however, someone deviates from the script and draws attention to historical facts regarding present-day Islamic extremism that Washington and its allies prefer to leave unmentioned. One occasion was an interview on August 19 with Time magazine with a very close American ally—Hamid Karzai, the man who was installed by the Bush administration as President of Afghanistan in 2002.

Challenged by Time to answer how an enemy could be fought that “only has annihilation as its goal”, Karzai felt compelled to note the current situation was a by-product of US support in the 1980s for the creation of an Islamic fundamentalist army to wage a jihad or holy war against a pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan and embroil the Soviet military itself in a decade-long guerilla conflict.

Karzai told Time: “In order to fix terrorism at large, we need to remedy the wrongs of the past 30 years. Remedy means to undo. The world pushed us [Afghan jihadists] to fight the Soviets. And those who did walked away and left all the mess spread around. September 11 is a consequence of this …

“In the years of fighting against the Soviets, radicalism was the main thing. Someone like me would be called half a Muslim because we were not radical. The more radical you were the more money you were given. Radicalism became not only an ideological tool against the Soviets but a way forward economically. The more radical you presented yourself, the more money the West gave you.”

When Time protested that “it wasn’t just the West; it was Saudi Arabia, Pakistan”, who fomented Islamic extremism in Afghanistan, Karzai answered: “[T]hey were led by the West. The moderates were undermined. Afghan history and nationalism were called atheism. The more you spoke of radicalism, the better you were treated. That’s what we are paying for now.”

Karzai is intimately familiar with the US backing for Afghan jihadists in the 1980s. He ran the office of Sebghatullah Mojadeddi, the leader of one of the Mujahedin groups, and undoubtedly liaised with CIA and other US officials. His bitterness over US policy stems from the fact that the Mojadeddi faction was regarded as “moderate” as compared to the “radicals” who received the lion’s share of financial support.

From 1979 on, the US urged its allies such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to give military and financial aid to the Islamist-based Afghan insurgents as a means of undermining the Soviet Union. Combined with direct American funds, as much as $2 billion poured in each year—the CIA’s Afghan project was by far the largest covert operation of the entire Cold War.

The largest beneficiary of US aid during the 1980s was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami, which is believed to have received as much as $600 million in US weapons and cash. Another figure the CIA worked with closely was Jalaluddin Haqqani, a guerilla commander who built a large military force in the ethnic Pashtun provinces of southern Afghanistan.

At the same time, large sums of Saudi money were used to finance the camps to which thousands of Islamic militants came from every corner of the world between 1985 and 1992. One of the main figures involved in creating what came to be called “The Base”, or Al Qaeda in Arabic, was Osama bin Laden, the son of a Saudi Arabian billionaire. While the CIA denies ever working with the foreign fighters or so-called “Afghan Arabs”, its claims are not credible. Al Qaeda was an integral part of the overall anti-Soviet jihad in which the CIA collaborated closely with Pakistani and Saudi intelligence agencies.

Rise of the TalibanThe proxy war that the Islamists fought for the United States from 1979 on was a contributing factor in the economic and political crisis that gripped the Soviet Union in the 1980s and led the Stalinist regime to restore capitalist relations and ultimately, dissolve the USSR itself.

Afghanistan, however, was virtually destroyed in the process. Before the Soviet forces withdrew in 1988, their brutal counter-insurgency tactics had killed over one million Afghans, wounded as many as 1.5 million and forced five million people to flee to Pakistan.

The US continued to back the Islamists in their campaign to overthrow the weak pro-Soviet government of Mohammad Najibullah, but increasingly relied on the Pakistani military to oversee the financing and arming of the Mujahedin. Washington’s focus had shifted. The crisis of the Soviet Union had led the US ruling elite to conclude that an opportunity existed to realise their long-held ambitions to dominate the oil-rich Middle East. The Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was provoked into invading Kuwait, creating the pretext for the deployment of more than half-a-million American troops into Saudi Arabia and, in March 1991, the first Gulf war against Iraq.

In Afghanistan, the Pakistani-backed forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar conducted a murderous civil war for control of the country against other Mujahedin factions, whose warlord commanders were receiving support from rival regional powers such as India, Iran and Russia. Hekmatyar troops, still well-equipped with American-supplied weapons, carried out several wholesale bombardments of the capital Kabul, in which much of it was destroyed and thousands of people killed. In June 1993, he was installed as the prime minister, supplanting a government in which Karzai had briefly served as deputy foreign minister.

The brutality of the civil war, the desperate social conditions facing the population and the plight of millions of refugees in Pakistan created the breeding ground for the Taliban—or “religious students”. Radical Islamic clerics led by Mullah Omar won support among embittered youth with promises that harsh Islamic law would suppress the criminal warlords and give a long-suffering people respite from war. Assembling a military force in the Pakistani refugee camps in 1994, the Taliban seized control of much of Afghanistan and finally took Kabul in 1996. When it first emerged, Karzai, like many Pashtuns, backed the Taliban as the means for undermining the power of their ethnic rivals.

Pakistan, which had come to view Hekmatyar as an unreliable proxy, played a crucial role in organising the Taliban’s armed forces. Units of the Pakistani military are believed to have actively fought alongside them. Another factor in the Taliban successes was the decision by Jalaluddin Haqqani in 1995 to align his large ethnic Pashtun militia with them. Haqqani served as the Minister for Borders and Tribal Affairs in the Taliban government from 1996 until the US invasion in October 2001.

The Taliban never controlled the entire country and was engaged in virtually constant warfare against the warlords who received backing from India, Russia and, to some extent, Iran. In large areas of southern Afghanistan, however, the population, while resenting the Taliban’s enforcement of harsh sharia law and bans on female education, enjoyed their first years of relative peace in over 17 years. The legacy is a degree of sympathy and even nostalgia for the Taliban, particularly when their rule is compared with the violence of the US occupation and the corruption of the drug barons and strongmen who dominate Karzai’s puppet government.

The US government and major American oil conglomerates initially welcomed the advances by the Taliban. Rich new oil and gas fields were being developed in former Soviet Central Asian republics such as Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan and the potential existed for pipelines to be constructed through Afghanistan to refineries and ports in Pakistan and India. None were ever constructed, however, due to the Taliban’s inability to completely end the civil war. Relations between Washington and the Taliban began to break down in 1998, ostensibly over their protection of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

US policy and Al Qaeda terrorismThe terrorist acts directed by Islamic extremists against the United States in the late 1990s were a consequence of the 1991 Gulf War. Islamist radicals who believed they had fought to liberate Afghanistan from non-Muslim infidels were outraged that the Saudi monarchy had allowed American troops—as much as infidels as the Soviets—to set foot in the country that is supposed to protect the holiest shrines of Islam at Mecca and Medina. This sense of betrayal intensified when, after the shattering of Iraq, the US military maintained bases not only in Saudi Arabia, but also in Kuwait and other Gulf states.

Osama bin Laden, who had returned to Saudi Arabia, publicly denounced the monarchy and was forced into exile in the Sudan. In 1996, he moved back to Afghanistan, where he reforged his ties with figures such as Haqqani, who had used many Afghan Arabs in his guerilla forces.

Al Qaeda’s outlook reflected the resentment felt by a disgruntled section of the ruling class in the Middle East over the domination of the region by the United States. Its reactionary perspective of committing terrorist atrocities against American targets had only one aim: to pressure Washington into removing its troops from Muslim countries as the basis for establishing a new relationship with imperialism.

In February 1998, bin Laden called for a jihad against the United States from his new base in Afghanistan, appealing for his supporters to kill Americans until the US government agreed to “liberate” the Israeli-held al-Asqa mosque in Jerusalem and the al-Haram mosque in Mecca. The character of the so-called “holy war” was revealed when Al Qaeda attacked the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, murdering more than 200 innocent people and wounding over 4,000. In retaliation, the Clinton administration ordered cruise missile strikes on alleged Al Qaeda bases near Khost in Afghanistan and a “terrorist factory” in Sudan.

By 2000, the US military had developed its plans for an invasion of Afghanistan. The objective was the installation of a pro-US government. Pipeline projects could then proceed and the US would be able to construct military bases in the very heart of Central Asia, projecting force against Iran to the west, Russia to the north and China to the east. All that was lacking was a justification.

September 11, 2001 provided it. In a still unexplained security stand-down, 19 Islamists—mostly Saudis—were able to hijack aircraft and fly them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon despite several of them being on CIA or FBI “watch lists”. The ability of Al Qaeda to carry out such an attack is all the more suspicious given the long relationship between American intelligence agencies and Islamic extremists. While bin Laden turned on his erstwhile US ally in 1991, it is unlikely that the CIA lost all its informants and agents in his network.

Within a month of 9/11, the US invasion of Afghanistan had begun. Nearly seven years later, the war has no end in sight. The Taliban have proven able to recruit guerilla forces on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, feeding off the poverty and despair of a largely rural population and anger at the US invasion that has brought nothing but more death and hardship.

Since the collapse of the Taliban government in 2001, Jalaluddin Haqqani and his sons are believed to have regrouped their military forces in the country’s south, capitalising on safe havens in the ethnic Pashtun Federally Administrated Tribal Agencies (FATA) of Pakistan. At the same time, Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami has re-established itself in parts of eastern Afghanistan by joining with the Taliban in calling for resistance to the US and NATO.

While the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and what remains of his Afghanistan-based network is not definitively known, they are most likely operating from bases inside the FATA where Al Qaeda operated with US, Saudi and Pakistani backing during the Soviet-Afghan war.

Inside Pakistan, Taliban-linked movements now control most of the FATA and are spreading their influence into the North West Frontier Province, Balochistan and even into the economic hub of the country, Karachi. Last month, Asif Al Zardari, now president of Pakistan, declared that the “world is losing the war” and “at the moment they [the Taliban] definitely have the upper hand”.

Stemming the resurgence of Islamic extremism—which the US fomented in the 1980s—is the primary pretext for an escalation of the Afghan conflict. In the United States, the Democratic and Republican parties are in agreement that thousands more troops must be sent. Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate for president, has declared that any administration he heads will have “no greater priority” than defeating the Taliban.

Obama has stated he would order US military operations into Pakistan without the permission of the Pakistani government, if it proves unwilling or incapable of preventing Islamist guerillas using the FATA as a sanctuary from which to attack US and NATO forces in Afghanistan. The real objective of this shift in US policy is to advance Washington’s strategic and economic ambitions in Central Asia.

Obama’s policy is already being adopted by the Bush administration. This month, US ground troops carried out the first acknowledged attack on alleged Taliban targets inside Pakistan. The action provoked an outpouring of anger and a unanimous vote in the Pakistani parliament that the country’s military should use force to prevent any future American incursions.

The result of 30 years of US meddling in the affairs of Afghanistan is a tinder box of instability and hatred of American imperialism that threatens to ignite war throughout the region.

RoboCops: Professional Policing of Political Protest

Last week, hundreds of protesters in St. Paul were arrested outside the Republican National Convention by helmeted police officers wearing black uniforms and full body armor reminiscent of scenes from the 1987 movie, RoboCop featuring: “Part man. Part machine. All Cop. The future of law enforcement.”

In an operation supervised by federal agents, informants were recruited and paid to infiltrate media and protest groups. Preemptive search warrants were served on their gathering places by masked officers in riot gear armed with assault rifles, and video cameras, computers, journals and political pamphlets were seized.

Officers marching in formations and shouting military chants used pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion grenades, smoke bombs and excessive force against predominately peaceful demonstrators. Specifically targeted, independent and credentialed journalists covering the protests were arrested, violently detained and charged with felony rioting.

The present encroachment by the federal government into matters of local law enforcement results in part from powers seized by President Bush following 9-11. He recently reaffirmed: “Consistent with … the National Emergencies Act …, I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency I declared on September 14, 2001, … with respect to … the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States. Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency … and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency, must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2008.”

President Bush has appointed himself to ensure our “continuity of government”; however, the actual limits on his “powers and authorities” remain secret, even from Congress. Any “Enduring Constitutional Government” will be run by the president alone, and any “cooperative” role played by Congress or the Supreme Court will be at his pleasure as a “matter of comity.”

Watching these events unfold, and reflecting back upon the experiences and observations of a 45-year career in America’s justice system, I have concluded that while law enforcement may have improved as a profession, police officers have become less conscious of who it is they are sworn to protect and to serve.

Flashback

In the summer of 1968, I transferred to the Los Angeles Police Department after having worked for five years as a police officer at a small department in San Diego County. Many of us at the time considered ourselves to be a “new breed” of police officers dedicated to developing law enforcement into a true profession.

I had served as president of the San Diego County Chapter of the statewide police organization responsible for the Law Enforcement Code of Ethics and for California becoming the first state to adopt a Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) program. The 1967 President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice had just recommended that all states establish POST Commissions.

Race-related riots were exploding in many cities throughout the Sixties, with major conflicts occurring in New York City, Rochester, Jersey City, Paterson, Elizabeth, Chicago and Philadelphia in 1964, the Watts Riot in 1965, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Atlanta in 1966, and Boston, Tampa, Buffalo, Memphis, Newark, Plainfield, Detroit and Milwaukee in 1967.

Although there had been no riots in San Diego County, it was a time of widespread discontent about the Vietnam War, and there had been a violent clash in June 1967 between LAPD officers and 10,000 antiwar protestors outside the Century Plaza Hotel where President Johnson was attending a fund-raising dinner.

With a large military presence in the County, our administrators thought it prudent to get prepared. Many of us received training provided by the FBI in which we were issued long batons and taught to maintain wedge formations and skirmish lines to force protestors and rioters to disburse.

Other than for helmets, we received no protective gear and our faces were uncovered. We were in gabardine uniforms, with ties, badges and name plates. Being one of the taller officers, I often found myself at the point, as in this newspaper photograph.

Following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968, riots immediately erupted all over the country. At least 125 cities suffered violence and destruction and more than 56,000 federal and National Guard troops were mobilized in 18 states and 36 cities. The worst riots were in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Kansas City and Newark. In Chicago, Mayor Daley ordered the police, who had received no civil disorder training, to shoot to kill. More than 700 fires raged in Washington, D.C. and the White House was turned into a “fortress.”

After graduating from the Los Angeles Police Academy and completing my one-year probation, I commenced evening law school. During the day and for the next two years, I researched and wrote the Department’s Policy Manual establishing the principles and philosophy governing policing in the city, including the meaning of “To Protect and To Serve.” Policies were established for the use of force, including firearms, and the Department’s response to riots.

During “unusual occurrences,” I was also assigned to temporarily staff the Emergency Control Center where I served as the Situation Report Officer compiling all information and intelligence into hourly and daily reports for commanding officers and political leaders. Major events included the all-day shootout on December 8, 1969 between the LAPD and barricaded Black Panthers on South Central Avenue and the East LA riots in August and September 1970, during which Times columnist Rubén Salazar was killed by sheriff deputies and a bomb was exploded in the federal building next door to the LA police headquarters.

There were many other less publicized acts of violence in LA during the late Sixties and early Seventies: In 1968, the employment office at Cal State Northridge was firebombed because of defense contracts; a shrapnel bomb exploded at the Hollywood Selective Service office; five heavy-duty Army trucks were dynamited in Van Nuys; and students occupied the administration building at Cal State Northridge and held the president and other administrators at knife point for four hours. The following year, a pipe bomb exploded at a Navy and Marine Corps Training Center in Compton and an airplane dropped an incendiary device outside a military installation. In 1970, two Selective Service offices sustained heavy damage during bombings; two men were arrested as they attempted to firebomb the National Guard armory in San Pedro; and an explosion and fire caused $10,000 damage at UCLA’s ROTC facility.

Los Angeles was not alone in experiencing public disorder and violence during this era as rage against the war and racial discrimination resulted in riots and civil disorder across the country. In addition to the widespread riots following the murder of Dr. King and in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention, riots in 1968 also occurred in New York City, Orangeburg, South Carolina, Baltimore, Kansas City, Salisbury, Maryland, and Louisville.

New York City was again stuck by rioting in 1969 followed by a riot in York, Pennsylvania. During the “Days of Rage,” the Weathermen, a militant offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society, violently confronted the police in response to the trial of the “Chicago Eight.”

In March 1970, three Weathermen died during a failed attempt to construct a bomb in Greenwich Village, and four students were shot by National Guardsmen during a demonstration at Kent State in May. Several days later, construction workers wearing hard hats attacked a student antiwar demonstration in Wall Street injuring 70 and stormed City Hall to demand raising the flag which had been lowered in mourning for the Kent State students.

Continuing in 1970, there were riots in Augusta and Asbury Park. Bombs exploded at: the Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; a courtroom in San Rafael, California; an armory in Santa Barbara; the ROTC building at the University of Washington, the University of California, Berkeley in October; and a replica of the Liberty Bell in Portland.

Violence continued in 1971 when the “Weather Underground” exploded a bomb causing $300,000 damage at the U.S. Capitol building to protest the invasion of Laos; there were prison riots at Attica and San Quentin; a Black Muslim riot in Baton Rouge; May Day protests in Washington, D.C. and a riot in Camden, New Jersey.

As a result of the widespread violence sweeping the country and coincident with his presidential campaign, President Nixon appointed a National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals in 1972. Although I was still attending law school and employed by the LAPD, I was placed on loan to the Commission to work on the staff of the Police Task Force. My assignment over the next year was to write the introductory chapters defining the role of police officers in America and their relationship with the communities they serve.

The Commission published its initial reports in 1973, including specific recommendations to upgrade the quality of police personnel by improved recruitment and selection processes and for mandatory and extensive basic and in-service training requirements. Most basically, the Commission recommended continuance of primary local and state – versus federal – responsibility for domestic law enforcement. To the greatest extent possible, policing was to be community based.

Having completed law school, I was employed by the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) in 1973 to work on the implementation of national standards and goals. After a year in Washington, D.C., I was appointed as a Deputy District Attorney in Los Angeles and prosecuted criminal cases for the next three years. I then opened a public interest law practice in the City of Long Beach in which I primarily represented juveniles accused of serious crimes and undertook a variety of pro bono cases that attracted my interest.

Some of the last battles in America’s urban war were fought by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) formed in 1973 to engage in guerrilla warfare against “the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.” Following the murder of the Oakland Schools superintendent for requiring students to carry identification, the SLA kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst and committed a bank robbery in which a customer was killed. The LAPD closed in on the SLA in May 1974 and six heavily armed members died in a shootout and fire. In August of the next year, surviving SLA members attempted to bomb several LAPD patrol cars.

The National Advisory Commission released its final report by the Task Force on Disorders and Terrorism in 1976. The report differentiated civil disorders from terrorism in finding that civil disorders are “manifestations of exuberance, discontent, or disapproval on the part of a substantial segment of the community.” Terrorism was defined as “the deliberately planned work of a small number of malcontents or dissidents who threaten the security of the entire community.”

The Task Force observed that “very little American violence has been insurrectionary. Mass protest in this country has been directed at modifying our system of government, not overthrowing it. Terrorism in this country has been limited, unpopular, and disorganized.”

The Task Force concluded that “the nature of American society enables it to absorb a considerable amount of violence without damaging its political structure.” Finally, the Task Force predicted that “terrorist activities will increase and intensify. In contrast, civil disturbances appear to be cyclical and are the products of local, social and political conditions.”

A Mellowing of Discontent

Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Food Stamp Act of 1964, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, the Higher Education Act of 1965, the Social Security Act of 1965, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 brought an end to many of the institutionalized causes of racial segregation and discrimination in America. Combined with a generalized increase in the standard of living for most people, many of the root causes for violent protests by minorities were removed.

The antiwar movement sputtered out following American’s withdrawal from Vietnam, and the country experienced a significant reduction in violent political protests during the Eighties and Nineties.

Law enforcement continued to improve as a profession with all states adopting POST programs and a significant portion of police officers obtained college degrees. After peaking in 1991, the crime rate began to dramatically drop. While some of the reduction can be traced to the aging of the baby boomers, improved police administration and practices certainly made a substantial contribution.

As a part of the continuing professionalization of law enforcement, I was recruited by two former LAPD commanding officers in 1984 to serve as general counsel and operations officer for a high-level private security consulting and investigation company they had established. Primarily deploying operatives with law enforcement backgrounds, our clients included a number of major Fortune 500 corporations, including several that operated nuclear weapons sites for the U.S. Department of Energy. When my principals sold their business in 1988, I reopened my law practice in Long Beach and concentrated on investigative law.

Back to the Future

The bombings of the World Trade Center in February 1993 and the Oklahoma City federal building in April 1995 were pure mass-casualty terrorist attacks and were unrelated to any domestic protest movement.

There were only two major urban riots during the Eighties and Nineties and both shared similar causation. The Miami riot in 1980 resulted from the acquittal of five white police officers accused of beating an African-American insurance salesman to death after he attempted to surrender. The Liberty City area erupted in two days of rioting in which 150 fires were set, 17 people died, 1,300 were arrested and there was $50 million in property damage.

Twelve years later, in April 1992, four white Los Angeles police officers were acquitted by a jury of charges they had used excessive force while arresting an African-American driver after a high-speed chase. The beating was videotaped by a bystander and the film was widely shown on television. Following the verdict, a white truck driver was dragged from his truck and was beaten by African-American youths as the assault was broadcast live from a television station news helicopter.

Rioting immediately spread throughout Los Angeles and adjoining cities violence and destruction prevailed for three days, until the National Guard was able to restore order. Fifty-two people died during the rioting, 2,499 were injured and 6,559 were arrested for riot-related crimes; 1,120 buildings suffered more than $446 in damage and 377 were totally destroyed.

The primary difference between the 1992 riot and all other previous urban riots was that it spread throughout the metropolitan area and rioters represented all socioeconomic and racial groups.

The Emergence of RoboCops

One of the more unsettling trends in recent years has been the increasing militarization of local police forces in response to protest activities unrelated to terrorism. While we have become accustomed to seeing specialized units, such as SWAT teams outfitted in black coveralls and other combat gear, police officers are now appearing as “RoboCops” with military weapons at political demonstrations, such as the anti-globalization protests in 1999 in Seattle against the World Trade Organization.

The Department of Homeland Security was created in November 2002 to supervise, fund and coordinate “local first responders.” Since then, billions have been spent to equip and train police, fire and medical personnel to respond to high consequence-low probability terrorist events.

Homeland Security has provided local law enforcement agencies with almost unlimited funds to purchase militaristic equipment to fight the war against terrorism. Once agencies equip every officer with black tactical suits, full body armor, dark-visored helmets and assault weapons and train them to respond to highly unlikely terrorist events, police administrators are much more likely to deploy overwhelming force against political protesters, who usually constitute a pain in the ass rather than a real threat to public order.

Acting under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security, as many as 40 different law enforcement agencies blanketed Miami in November 2003 during meetings relating to the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Protest groups were infiltrated by the police, and the corporate media was “embedded” with law enforcement.

In what has become known as the “Miami Model,” an aggressive police deployment is characterized by mass preventive arrests, a violent police response to nonviolent demonstrators, and the arrest and harassment of independent journalists working among the protestors. In addition, Miami deployed unidentifiable police “extraction teams” wearing full body armor and ski masks in unmarked vans to haul away protestors.

Adopting a “zero tolerance” of protest, the New York City police department used “Miami” tactics in 2004 at the Republican National Convention. Hundreds of peaceful demonstrators and innocent bystanders were illegally arrested, fingerprinted, photographed, and subjected to prolonged detention in wire cages before being released without prosecution.

Repressive tactics were also used the same year as a counter-terrorism measure at the Democratic National Convention, where Boston police established a designated fenced enclosure topped by razor wire as the “free speech zone.” Protestors could only demonstrate in the “zone,” which was well away from the convention and beyond the view of participants and the news media.

Another full-court press against protest occurred in 2004 at the G8 Summit on Sea Island just off the coast from Brunswick, Georgia. The governor declared a month-long state of emergency along the coast and more than 25,000 local, state and federal police officers and military units in armored assault vehicles were deployed in or near the small coastal town, which only has a population of 15,000 residents. Local businesses closed up for the week and boarded up their windows, and the federal government spent more than $25 million to protect the summit against terrorism; however, less than 250 activists showed up to demonstrate, including three who protested that the local pigeons had more freedom than they did.

The 2008 National Political Conventions

Approximately 150 demonstrators were arrested by law enforcement officers in Denver during the 2008 Democratic National Convention; however, many were released without charges and the others were primarily charged with offenses including obstruction, throwing stones, assault, illegal dumping and possession of drugs and illegal weapons. Most pled guilty and were fined $100 plus court costs and given a five-day suspended sentence.

Other than for authorized marches, protesters were required to remain in a “Freedom Cage” separated from the Denver convention center by metal fences on top of concrete barricades. Although some officers turned out in riot gear, they all had badges and identification numbers displayed on their chests and the use of force was mainly restricted to the defensive use of pepper spray. It appears that both protesters and the police considered the gathering to be a political protest, rather than a terrorist activity, and there was a determined effort by both sides to avoid violent confrontations.

It was a different story during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. Early on, the police department promised protest organizers that the entire city of St. Paul would be a “free speech zone,” police officers would not infiltrate protest organizations, officers would wear uniforms rather than tactical gear, and the local police would be in charge of policing rather than federal authorities. None of these promises were kept. Instead, the police relied upon the classic Miami Model to control and oppress political dissent.

Prior to the Republican Convention, the FBI-directed Minneapolis Joint Terrorist Task force recruited paid “moles” to infiltrate protest groups and to report on their plans and activities. In the week before the convention, local authorities supervised by the FBI and aided by informants conducted a series of preemptive raids leading to seizures of video cameras, computers, journals and political materials.

Teams of 25-30 RoboCops waving assault rifles and shotguns entered homes of protesters forcing everyone present to the floor and to be handcuffed and photographed. Even attorneys on the scene to represent detainees were handcuffed.

More than 10,000 protesters gathered to demonstrate during the convention. Officers responded wearing helmets with face shields and full body armor without badges or any form of personal identification. They marched about in formation shouting military chants. Officers used pepper spray, rubber bullets, smoke bombs, concussion grenades and excessive force to arrest more than 800 protesters, including a 78-year-old Catholic nun. Many of those arrested were overcharged with felony rioting making it more difficult for them to be released from custody.

Journalists were specifically targeted for harassment and arrest. Two independent photojournalist groups were subjected to preemptive searches, and journalists who were present were detained at gunpoint. Video equipment and computers were seized from “I-Witness Video,” a media watchdog group that monitors law enforcement to protect civil liberties, and the “Glass Bead Collective,” another video documentary group.

Associated Press photographer Matt Rourke was arrested while on assignment after police encircled the demonstrators he was photographing. Even though he displayed convention credentials, Rourke was kicked to the ground, arrested, and his camera was seized. Subsequently several other members of the media, including AP reporters Amy Forliti and Jon Krawczynski were trapped with protesters on a bridge. They were forced to sit with their hands over their heads until being led away for processing. They were cited for unlawful assembly and were released. Two student photographers and their faculty advisor were also held without charges for 36 hours.

At least 19 journalists were detained during the convention; however, the most sensational arrest was of prominent broadcast journalist Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!”, who was arrested for attempting to speak to a police commanding officer about the arrest of two accredited coworkers. Within seconds, she was grabbed and pulled behind the police line. Her arms were forcibly twisted behind her back and her wrists were tightly bound with rigid plastic cuffs. When she repeated that she was an accredited journalist, an unidentified Secret Service agent walked up and said, “Oh really?” and ripped her convention credential from her neck.

Goodman’s producers, Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar, had been arrested after being forced into a parking lot along with protesters and surrounded by police officers. Salazar was trapped between parked cars and thrown to the ground; her face was smashed into the pavement and she was bleeding from the nose. One officer had a boot or knee on her back and another officer was pulling on her leg. Sharif was thrown against a wall and kicked in the chest. He was bleeding from his arm.

Both “Democracy Now!” producers were charged with suspicion of felony rioting, and Amy Goodman was charged with obstruction of a police officer. She said, “There’s a reason our profession is explicitly protected by the Constitution – because we’re the check and balance on power, the eyes and ears. And when the eyes and ears are closed, it’s very dangerous for democratic society.”

St. Paul Police Chief John Harrington says his officers “did not overreact” and that they “responded appropriately” in dealing with demonstrators: “If a reporter is committing crimes while they’re under their credentials, I think they become regular citizens.”

Although the era of Internet journalism makes it more difficult for law enforcement officers to identify legitimate media representatives, the Constitution makes no distinction between those who are “accredited” and those who are not. The First Amendment protects the rights of all journalists to do their jobs, especially at political events and public protests. Reporters not only have a right to be present at such events, but they have a duty to mix with participants and to inform the public of their observations, especially how they are treated by those who have taken an oath to protect and to serve the public.

What Now?

I ended the last phase of my career in the justice system last year as a prosecutor for the State Bar of California, essentially policing the legal profession. I have now retired and have dedicated my remaining years to writing in an attempt to bring about a more peaceful and representative government; however, I fear for the future of the American people.

There are two things for certain: First, if the violent protest events of the Sixties and Seventies were to occur today, the Constitution would be suspended and all of us would be living under martial law. Second, things will get worse before they get better! Not only are we in a severe recession in which hundreds of thousands of us are losing our jobs, homes, health and our way of life, but the absolute risk of mass-casualty terrorism has not been diminished by the “War on Terrorism” – indeed it has been made much more likely by the manner in which it has been conducted.

The thing I fear most is the class war being waged on the working and middle class by the political and economic elites of America. They have seized most of the wealth, income and political power and they control the corporate media and the ability to shape our opinions, beliefs and attitudes. At some point we have to fight back and we will not win unless those who enforce the laws do so on our behalf.

Today, there is little difference between the two main political parties and irrespective of who will be president during the next four years of turmoil, I fear his or her use of the extraordinary and secret powers that have been aggrandized to the presidency, as we begin to increasingly protest our loss of freedoms, rights, and livelihoods.

I continue to respect and to identify with those professional police officers who wear the badges we issue them and who form the thin blue line between peaceful political protest and the violence of terrorism, but my faith in our ability to survive the difficulties we confront together is fading fast.

Just as police officers must recognize that our political protests are not acts of terrorism, we must be able to see their faces, to know who they are, to trust that they are on our side, and that they will act as professionals.

Contrary to the propaganda of those who seek unlimited power over us, the law enforcement model has worked well for more than 200 years to protect the security and freedoms of Americans. We must resist with all of our might the use and deployment of the military and federal agents within this country to enforce our local laws. We must trust our local police to protect us and our right to dissent.

Years ago as a brash young man I attempted to define the meaning of the motto, “To Protect and To Serve,” painted on the side of LAPD patrol cars. Today, as a much older and hopefully wiser man, I believe the motto should be, “The People and Their Police – Peers for Peace.” It speaks for itself.

William John Cox is a retired supervising prosecutor for the State Bar of California. Acting as a public interest, pro bono, attorney, he filed a class action lawsuit in 1979 on behalf of every citizen of the United States petitioning the Supreme Court to order the other two branches of the federal government to conduct a National Policy Referendum; he investigated and successfully sued a group of radical right-wing organizations in 1981 that denied the Holocaust; and he arranged in 1991 for publication of the suppressed Dead Sea Scrolls. His 2004 book, You’re Not Stupid! Get the Truth: A Brief on the Bush Presidency is reviewed at http://www.yourenotstupid.com, and he is currently working on a fact-based fictional political philosophy. His writings are collected at http://www.thevoters.org, and he can be contacted at u2cox@msn.com.

Zardari, Karzai slam US for civilians death

Zardari, Karzai slam US for civilians death
Tue, 09 Sep 2008 15:38:33 GMT

Pakistani and Afghan presidents criticize the US presence in the region, saying the American troops are targeting the innocent civilians.

Pakistan’s just sworn-in president Asif Ali Zardari told the news conference the government had protested to the United States, adding: “Casualties of war are taking place. We cannot deny that innocents are dying”.

Zardari made the comments addressing a joint press conference with Afghan president Hamid Karzai in Islamabad shortly after taking oath as the Head of State.

“I will not only protest but I will ask the world to look upon us. We are the victim of the terrorism,” Zardari added.

Zardari promised to stand by Pakistan’s neighbors to solve shared problems.

“We shall stand with our neighbors … and look the problems in the eye and tell the world that we are bigger than the problems,” Zardari said.

Zardari comments came after taking office as many Pakistanis were furious with the United States after a bloody incursion by US ground troops into a remote village on the Afghan border last week and a string of missile strikes by CIA-operated drone aircraft.

Karzai also called international forces to avoid civilian casualties after a spate of such incidents in which scores of Afghans were killed.

“The war against terrorism will only be won if we have the people with us. In order to have the people with us we must avoid civilian casualties,” Karzai said.

But “in the long term and as the only solution, it is the building of the Afghan state institutions that matters. This included Afghanistan being able to “defend its territory and provide safety and for the people on its own,” Karzai added.

Karzai comments came before the US President George W. Bush was due to announce later Tuesday about 4,500 extra troops for Afghanistan from November with an accompanying drawdown in Iraq.

Karzai also said Afghanistan and Pakistan are so much alike that they suffer from the same evils.

His criticism also comes amid growing anger among Afghans about the number of civilians being killed in the country. Last Month, a UN commission found that more than 90 civilians, most of them women and children, were killed in air strikes in the western province of Herat .

Both countries have suffered a wave of violence, and thousands of Pakistanis and Afghans have been killed since the US-led invasion in the region in 2001.

Iran demands U.N. response to Israeli “threats”

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Iran demanded on Tuesday a “resolute and clear response” from the United Nations to what it called dangerous threats against it by Israel, and said Tehran would not hesitate to respond to any attack.

A letter from Iran’s U.N. Ambassador Mohammad Khazaee to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described comments by two Israeli ministers as “vicious threats … in blatant violation of the most fundamental principles of international law.”

Israel, which is thought to have the Middle East’s only atomic arsenal, believes Iran could have a nuclear bomb by 2010, a development it says would threaten the existence of the Jewish state.

Khazaee said remarks attributed to Pensioners Affairs Minister Rafi Eitan by German magazine Der Spiegel this week “yet again put on display the aggressive and terrorist nature of the Israeli regime.”

Der Spiegel quoted Eitan as saying in an interview that while the era of Israel hunting down former Nazi officials abroad was over, “that’s not to say that such operations are a thing of the past.”

Asked to explain, he was quoted as saying, “It could very well be that a leader such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suddenly finds himself before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.”

Last week, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in an interview with Al Jazeera television that Israel was serious about using “any option” if diplomacy did not curb Iran’s nuclear program.

“These dangerous threats of resorting to criminal acts … require a resolute and clear response on the part of the United Nations, particularly the Security Council,” Khazaee said.

“Iran … in accordance with its inherent right under Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, would not hesitate to act in self-defense to respond to any attack against the Iranian nation and to take appropriate defensive measures to protect itself, its people and its officials.”

The Security Council has passed three rounds of sanctions against Iran because of its refusal to stop uranium enrichment, which the West fears is aimed at making atomic bombs but Tehran says is solely for power generation.

PSU’s weapons research tests the limits

Submitted by voicesweb on Fri, 2008-09-05 14:18.

by Bryan Farrell

When it comes to replicating war, films like Saving Private Ryan or even the video game Call of Duty have nothing on a football game at Beaver Stadium. Underscoring George Carlin’s famous rant describing the sport as a “20th century new-world-order paramilitary power struggle,” fans at last spring’s Blue-White Game were treated to more than just the typical combat metaphors of “blitz” and “aerial assault.” At halftime, attendees were asked to applaud the choice to join the military during a mock swearing-in ceremony held at midfield for high school students who had recently enlisted.

This encroaching militarization of American culture conjured scant resistance. The lone voice of dissent to appear in the area newspapers came from a class of ’83 alumnus who attended the game. His fellow letter-to-the-editor writers—most of whom were students—roundly dismissed his questioning of “whether participating in the military is still the right thing to do” when “our leaders ignore international law, national and world opinion.”

There was a time, however, when college campuses were the epicenter of anti-war sentiment. In 1972—around the same time Carlin debuted his football bit, not coincidentally—thousands of Penn State students protested the Vietnam War by sealing off the entire State College business district for a day and then surrounding the Applied Research Laboratory on campus—a major Department of Defense contractor—forcing it to shut down for three days.

The campus climate in 2008, on the other hand, is much less volatile. The major reason is, no doubt, the absence of a draft, but with more than five years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the prospect of another war in Iran and a slew of domestic issues directly affecting the nation’s youth—namely debt, inflation, access to health care and a faltering climate—it’s surprising that the weekly peace vigils at the Allen Street gates remain modest in number.

“Very few students have participated in the Iraq-era actions,” said State College Borough Council member and Peace Center Treasurer Peter Morris. “Some show up at the big ones, like the fifth anniversary.”

But when “big” only amounts to 150 participants—of which a dozen or so are students, by Morris’ estimate—the difference on campus between now and previous war times is “night and day.”

Perhaps this silence is a result of how little Penn State students know about the deep-seated and influential military culture that has taken hold of the university, particularly at their expense.

Since 2000, universities have seen defense-related research contracts increase 900 percent, from $4.4 billion in 2000 to $46.7 billion in 2006. As recently as 2003, Penn State ranked 48th on the Department of Defense’s Research Development Technology and Expenditure Top 100 list, pulling in nearly $63 million in contract awards. But when all forms of Defense Department funding get added in—for a number of obscure or untraceable projects—the grand total is slightly more than $75 million.

Given that more than 50 percent of income tax dollars goes to the Pentagon, students and their parents are, in effect, helping to pay this bill. And with tuition rising another 5.9 percent this coming school year—the 41st consecutive tuition increase at Penn State—it’s no wonder two-thirds of the student body are in debt.

Meanwhile, the university pulled in $1.6 billion in endowment funds last year, a 20 percent increase over the previous year, making it the 46th wealthiest university in the country. Not surprisingly, such corporate gifts come from defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Exxon Mobil, which, in exchange, get the privilege of recruiting students to work for the war machine.

Since Penn State is home to one of the U.S. Navy’s top civilian research facilities, the aforementioned Applied Research Laboratories, science and engineering students are a prized commodity to the ever-expanding defense industry. ARL, which was founded in 1945, has also become the university’s single largest research unit, with well over 1,000 employees and students working under its umbrella.

Penn State taps the “nonlethal” weapons market

Aside from the labs’ longstanding work on traditional combat technologies—such as hydrodynamics, propulsors and torpedo defense—ARL has branched out into a field that’s being touted by many military experts as the future of warfare, known best as nonlethal weapons.

Initially funded by a $42.5 million five-year contract with the U.S. Marine Corps in 1998, ARL’s Institute for Non-Lethal Defense Technologies continues to pull in millions more every year for what INLDT Director Andy Mazzara calls “a tremendously altruistic endeavor.”

While the fundamental purpose of these weapons is to resolve a conflict without anyone getting killed—a far superior objective to typical combat or law enforcement—the benevolence Mazzara describes comes with several caveats.

First is the issue of effectiveness. Although there are no actual rules governing nonlethal weapons, most experts agree that for a weapon to be a weapon, it must produce the same results on everyone. And for a weapon to be truly nonlethal, it must not cause serious harm or injury.

That simply has not been the case with Tasers, perhaps the most well-known nonlethal weapon. According to Amnesty International, there have been more than 290 Taser-related deaths since 2001. Some have even been ruled homicides, as with the 21-year-old Louisiana man who was shot nine times with a Taser while in handcuffs last January.

“Whenever a nonlethal weapon or technology causes a serious injury or death, there is always concern,” said Mazzara, whose researchers at the INLDT routinely test Tasers. “But the incidence of serious injury and/or death seems to be extremely remote when compared against the actual numbers of employment.”

That might be somewhat reassuring if the overall use of Tasers weren’t on the rise. In 2002, there were roughly 2,000 law enforcement agencies using Tasers. By 2007, that number had risen to 11,500, encompassing two-thirds of all U.S. police departments. The U.S. military has also recently deployed Taser-mounted robots in Iraq.

Another device being tested by the INLDT is the Light Emitting Diode Incapacitator, which was developed by a company in California. It produces a bright and pulsating light that temporarily blinds and disorients its subject so authorities can safely subdue the person. But according to the developers and the Department of Homeland Security, which has called the device a “puke ray,” the LED Incapacitator also causes dizziness, vertigo and nausea.

Mazzara insists those reports are purely anecdotal and that there is no evidence of any nonlethal weapon causing any such sickness, as it would not be an effective technique, given that some people are more prone to nausea than others.

Even so, Danger Room, Wired Magazine’s blog on defense technologies, reported in December that the INLDT was developing a device that combined “aversive noises with light to produce some special debilitating effects.” Reporter Sharon Weinberger called it “another potential ‘puke ray.’” But if you ask the INLDT, it is more like a “PA system on steroids.”

Named the Distributed Sound and Light Array Debilitator, its aim is “to be used on land at security checkpoints to stop vehicles and onboard ships or helicopters to hail approaching small watercrafts,” Mazzara said. Beaver Stadium was one of the test sites this summer, and Mazzara has bragged the device could be heard more than a mile away.

Whether or not it also produces that undesirable effect of nausea—something Weinberger concedes is based on purely anecdotal evidence—the long-term effects of nonlethal weapons need more consideration. For instance, when it comes to acoustic devices like the DSLAD, very little is known, and may not be known until the damage is done.

In reporting on another acoustic device being developed by INLDT—nicknamed “sonic blaster” by Danger Room—Weinberger noted, “There isn’t really any reliable data on the effects on humans as you move up the decibel range.” But due to current safety standards, human testing can only be conducted up to a certain decibel level, a level the INLDT has called “far too conservative.”

Although Mazzara could not comment on “specific protocols under consideration” by Penn State’s institutional review board, the committee that governs all research involving humans, the INLDT has reportedly sought approval to conduct testing at 130 decibels to see if sound can force “behavior modification.” But according to Weinberger, “The problem with making this into a weapon is that it is hard, perhaps even impossible, to develop a device that can really deter an aggressor without damaging their hearing.”

Winning friends and influencing people

This issue highlights the dilemma facing the developing field of nonlethal weapons. If the objective is to usher in an age where the children of the world perceive U.S. soldiers as peacekeepers—a declared objective in the INLDT’s work—then, clearly, nonlethal weapons need to be far less horrifying and injurious than current models.

Even if that were somehow achievable—which goes against the very nature of weaponry—the idea of U.S. forces being received with open arms based solely on the use of less-deadly weapons completely belies the intentions of U.S. foreign policy, which former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark once called “the greatest crime since World War II.”

It’s not hard to see why. U.S. military force has been used 45 times in nearly 30 countries since 1947, involving the overthrow of democratically elected leaders, the installation of brutal dictators and the deaths of millions of civilians. Not only do those involved in the development of nonlethal weapons see no stop to interventions of this sort, they expect their products to be of great import.

On its Web site, the INLDT says, “The roles of the U.S. military and the nature of the threat to our forces have significantly changed over the past two decades as illustrated by U.S. interventions in Panama, Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia. These engagements, unlike those anticipated during the Cold War era, were against small units that were armed with inferior, yet effective, weapons and that often used the civilian populace as a shield.”

While that may be an accurate assessment, it says nothing about what those interventions were about and why insurgencies sprung up. One big reason is that the United States had been a longtime supporter of hated dictatorships in Panama, Somalia and Haiti. So it seems doubtful that nonlethal weapons can overcome years of aggressive foreign policy—a rather foreboding prospect given the historically lethal role the United States has played in the Middle East, for example.

If nonlethal weapons fail in their effort to foster fewer enemies, then they will surely fail in their other objective, which is to generate positive PR on the home front. As the percentage of civilian deaths increases with each new war—up to 90 percent of total deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, as opposed to 70 percent in Vietnam and 50 percent in World War II—so does the level of dissent by the American people.

Given that scenario, it seems more likely that nonlethal weapons will be used on protest lines than on the front lines abroad. In preparing for this year’s Republican National Convention, the St. Paul Police Department ordered enough Tasers to equip every officer—a precaution that’s clearly aimed at preventing a repeat of the 2004 RNC in New York City, where more than 1,800 individuals were arrested.

There’s also the microwave-like “pain ray,” called the Active Denial System, which causes a serious burning sensation on the skin. (Our INLDT didn’t get to test this one.) It’s very close to being deployed in Iraq, but not before—as Pentagon officials have suggested—it is first used on “American citizens in crowd-control situations.” 60 Minutes ran a segment in March on this device in which military personnel posing as peaceful protestors—carrying signs that read “Love for All” and “World Peace”—got zapped by the pain ray and quickly retreated.

With more supposedly nonlethal weapons entering the market—essentially offering police the excuse of an easy and less messy way to solve a problem—displays of First Amendment rights will likely become even more infrequent. This serves to show that the military’s idea of altruism is just another form of repression.

Demilitarizing college campuses

It’s important that Americans realize that the biggest deterrent to war and violence is not the creation of less lethal fighting instruments, but rather citizens promoting a worldview that questions the motives of those who say war and violence are needed in the first place. And what better place is there to develop and promote such a worldview than in the classrooms and on campuses in our own country?

Sen. J. William Fulbright, namesake of the Fulbright Scholar Program, warned that “in lending itself too much to the purposes of government, a university fails its higher purposes.”

Those tied to what Fulbright called the “military-industrial-academic complex” may argue that schools would suffer and whole fields of study would be crippled without funding from the Defense Department. But according to Nick Turse, a defense expert and author of the book The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, “No one ever explains why all this federal money (to universities) needs to flow through the organization charged with war-making.”

“There isn’t any compelling reason why the Pentagon has to be the top federal agency to fund fields of high-tech research or be the major federal funder of electrical engineering,” he said. “I imagine that if, say, the Environmental Protection Agency was the major funder, research thrusts would be radically different and would not, likely, end up furthering lethal technologies or war-making capabilities.”

That may seem like a tough proposition for a school that’s staked its reputation on a strong defense—both in football and academics—but it’s something for students to think about while they pay their taxes and tuition and pay off their loans before entering a faltering job market. Perhaps the next time they’re crammed into the stands at Beaver Stadium and asked to applaud the choice to join the military, they’ll realize that they’ve already been enlisted.

US ‘in need of rebellion’

Has the US been irretrievably damaged in the eyes of the world? [GALLO/GETTY] Al Jazeera speaks to Howard Zinn, the author, American historian, social critic and activist, about how the Iraq war damaged attitudes towards the US and why the US “empire” is close to collapse. Q: Where is the United States heading in terms of world power and influence? HZ: America has been heading – for some time, and is heading right now – toward less and less world power, less and less influence. In focus In-depth coverage of the US election Obviously, since the war in Iraq, the rest of the world has fallen away from the United States, and if American foreign policy continues in the way it has been – that is aggressive and violent and uncaring about the feelings and thoughts of other people – then the influence of the United States is going to decline more and more.This is an empire which is on the one hand the most powerful empire that ever existed; on the other hand an empire that is crumbling – an empire that has no future … because the rest of the world is alienated and simply because this empire is top-heavy with military commitments, with bases around the world, with the exhaustion of its own resources at home. [This is] leading to more and more discontent and home, so I think the American empire will go the way of other empires and I think it is on its way now. Q: Is there any hope the US will change its approach to the rest of the world? HZ: If there is any hope, the hope lies in the American people. Zinn says the US needs a new popular movement [AFP] [It] lies in American people becoming resentful enough and indignant enough over what has happened to their country, over the loss of dignity in the world, over the starving of human resources in the United States, the starving of education and health, the takeover of the political mechanism by corporate power and the result this has on the everyday lives of the American people.[There is also] the higher and higher food prices, the more and more insecurity, the sending of the young people to war. I think all of this may very well build up into a movement of rebellion. We have seen movements of rebellion in the past: The labour movement, the civil rights movement, the movement against the war in Vietnam. I think we may well see, if the United States keeps heading in the same direction, a new popular movement. That is the only hope for the United States. Q: How did the US get to this point? HZ: Well, we got to this point because … I suppose the American people have allowed it to get it to this point because there were enough Americans who were satisfied with their lives, just enough. Of course, many Americans were not, that is why half of the population doesn’t vote, they’re alienated. But there are just enough Americans who have been satisfied, you might say getting some of the “goodies” of the empire, just some of them, just enough people satisfied to support the system, so we got this way because of the ability of the system to maintain itself by satisfying just enough of the population to keep its legitimacy. And I think that era is coming to an end. Q: What should the world know about the United States? HZ: What I find many people in the rest of the world don’t know is that there is an opposition in the United States. Zinn says “corruption” of the US system enabled Bush to win office [EPA] Very often, people in the rest of the world think that Bush is popular, they think ‘oh, he was elected twice’, they don’t understand the corruption of the American political system which enabled Bush to win twice.They don’t understand the basic undemocratic nature of the American political system in which all power is concentrated within two parties which are not very far from one another and people cannot easily tell the difference. So I think we are in a situation where we are going to need some very fundamental changes in American society if the American people are going to be finally satisfied with the kind of society we have. Q: Do you think the US can recover from its current position? HZ: Well, I am hoping for a recovery process. I mean, so far we haven’t seen it. You asked about what the people of the rest of the world don’t know about the United States, and as I said, they don’t know that there is an opposition. “We have a long history in this country of violent expansion and I think not only do most people in other countries [not] know this, most Americans don’t.” Howard Zinn There always has been an opposition, but the opposition has always been either crushed or quieted, kept in the shadows, marginalised so their voices are not heard.People in the rest of the world hear the voices of the American leaders. They do not hear the voices of the people all over this country who do not like the American leaders who want different policies. I think also, people in the rest of the world should know that what they see in Iraq now is really a continuation of a long, long term of American imperial expansion in the world. I think … a lot of people in the world think that this war in Iraq is an aberration, that before this the United States was a benign power. It has never been a benign power, from the very first, from the American Revolution, from the taking-over of Indian land, from the Mexican war, the Spanish-American war. It is embarrassing to say, but we have a long history in this country of violent expansion and I think not only do most people in other countries [not] know this, most Americans don’t know this. Q: Is there a way for this to improve? HZ: Well you know, whatever hope there is lies in that large number of Americans who are decent, who don’t want to go to war, who don’t want to kill other people. It is hard to see that hope because these Americans who feel that way have been shut out of the communications system, so their voices are not heard, they are not seen on the television screen, but they exist. I have gone through, in my life, a number of social movements and I have seen how at the very beginning of these social movements or just before these social movements develop, there didn’t seem to be any hope. I lived in the [US] south for seven years, in the years of the civil rights movements, and it didn’t seem that there was any hope, but there was hope under the surface. And when people organised, and when people began to act, when people began to work together, people began to take risks, people began to oppose the establishment, people began to commit civil disobedience. Well, then that hope became manifest … it actually turned into change. Q: Do you think there is a way out of this and for the future influence of the US on the world to be a positive one? HZ: Well, you know for the United States to begin to be a positive influence in the world we are going to have to have a new political leadership that is sensitive to the needs of the American people, and those needs do not include war and aggression. [It must also be] sensitive to the needs of people in other parts of the world, sensitive enough to know that American resources, instead of being devoted to war, should be devoted to helping people who are suffering. You’ve got earthquakes and natural disasters all over the world, but the people in the United States have been in the same position as people in other countries. The natural disasters here [also] brought little positive reaction – look at [Hurricane] Katrina. The people in this country, the poor people especially and the people of colour especially, have been as much victims of American power as people in other countries. Q: Can you give us an overall scope of everything we talked about – the power and influence of the United States? “Ultimately power rests on the moral legitimacy of a system and the United States has been losing moral legitimacy.” Howard Zinn HZ: The power and influence of the United States has declined rapidly since the war in Iraq because American power, as it has been exercised in the world historically, has been exposed more to the rest of the world in this situation and in other situations. So the US influence is declining, its power is declining. However strong a military machine it is, power does not ultimately depend on a military machine. So power is declining. Ultimately power rests on the moral legitimacy of a system and the United States has been losing moral legitimacy. My hope is that the American people will rouse themselves and change this situation, for the benefit of themselves and for the benefit of the rest of the world.

Jewish impact on US democracy

Jewish participation in US politics greater than in any European country

Yoram Ettinger

Intense Jewish participation in US elections has been nurtured by home-court conditions: The US considers Judaism a key factor in the foundation of its cultural, ideological, legal and political systems.

The trilateral covenant among the US, the Jewish people and the Jewish State was established by the Puritans during the 17th century, expanded by the Founding Fathers and sustained until today.A marble replica of Moses’ head is featured at the House Chamber on Capitol Hill, facing the seat of the House Speaker.

The sculpture of Moses, holding the Tablets, hangs above the table of the US Supreme Court Justices. A granite rock, shaped like the Two Tablets, welcomes visitors to the Texas Legislature in Austin. In fact, a US Federal Judge rejected an appeal to relocate the rock (lest it violate, supposedly, separation of Church and State), contending that it was not a religious monument, but rather an evidence of the moral-cultural foundation of Texas and the US.

The Bible in particular, and Judaism in general, have inspired the US Constitution, the centrality of Liberty and the Bill of Rights, as well as Western democracy. The Puritans, who founded the 13 Colonies, highlighted the legacy of The Exodus. They considered Britain, the Atlantic Ocean and America to be modern-day Egypt, Red Sea and the Promised Land.

The authors of the Constitution were inspired by the political structure of the 12 Jewish Tribes in the desert, who were governed by Moses the Executive, Aharon, the Priests and the Legislature of 70 elders. They regarded themselves as “the modern-day People of the Covenant.” Hence, the term “Federalism,” a derivative of the Latin word for “Covenant” – Foedus.

Judaism a competitor at best

Thomas Paine, the author of “Common Sense”, the 1776 moral and intellectual touchstone, articulating the case against British Monarchy, referred to the Prophet Samuel and to the Judge Gideon (e.g. “For the will of the Almighty as declared by Gideon, and the Prophet Samuel, expressly disapproves of government by kings.”).

The US is the most religious Western country, which views the Old and the New Testaments as civilian cornerstones. Over 1,000 towns and other locations bear biblical names, such as Salem (Jerusalem), Zion, Beth El, Dothan, Efrata, Hebron, Jericho, Canaan, Pisgah, etc. Ninety percent of Americans believe in G-D, 80% hold Judeo-Christian beliefs, 86% wish to keep “In God We Trust” on US currency, “Endowed by the Creator” in the Declaration of Independence and “One Nation Under God” in the “Pledge of Allegiance.”

Over 40% frequent church on Sundays, exposed to biblical sermons, and 15 million copies of the Bible are sold annually in the USA. The Liberty Bell bears an inscription from Leviticus 25:10: “Proclaim liberty throughout the land and unto all the inhabitants thereof,” which inspired the anti-slavery movement in general and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in particular.

Lowell Thomas, the US radio icon, told his listeners on May 14, 1948: Today, as the Jewish State is established, Americans read through the Bible as a historical reference book.

American leaders often quote from the Bible on the merit of the Bible and on the merit of politics, since the US public respects the Bible. For instance, FDR stated, during a 1935 Fireside Chat: “We cannot read the history of our rise and development as a nation without reckoning with the place the Bible has occupied in shaping the advances of the Republic.”

In January 2001, Senator Mitch McConnell introduced President Bush at a Senate luncheon: “We trust that you shall lead us in the best tradition of Joshua and Caleb.” David’s lamentation featured prominently during the eulogies for George Washington and Lincoln, and President Bush mentioned Abraham, Moses, David and Jeremiah during his May 2008 speech at the Knesset.

In contrast with Europe’s Christianity, which considers Judaism a competitor at best and a foe at worst, US Christianity considers Judaism an ally in principles and values. Such a state-of-mind has facilitated a most successful integration of Jews into every aspect of US society, including the political arena.

Such a reality has maximized Jewish voting turnout and has enhanced political participation by Jewish voters, advisors, contributors and publicists, much more than is displayed by any Jewish European community.

Big Three Block Iran Attack

William O. Beeman

The United States is in a huge foreign policy muddle in the Middle East. It wants to dominate and control Iran but requires the support of the world community to accomplish its aims. Diplomacy and sanctions require only a low level of support. On the other hand, to launch a military attack or green-light one by Israel, the United States needs far more backing.

This support does not appear to exist, and recent U.S. foreign policy actions are eroding that support even further. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on August 13 that the United States refused to give the go-ahead to Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities in talks between Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Could it be that the Bush administration finally knows when it is licked?

Israeli officials acknowledge that it would be difficult to launch such an attack without approval from Russia, China, and India, something that the United States would have to lobby those nations to achieve. The chances at present are extremely slim that any of the three will acquiesce.

U.S. condemnation of Russia’s military action to defend the breakaway region of South Ossetia, combined with the determination of the Bush administration to install missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, virtually guarantee that Russia will not do anything to help the United States foment more violence in its neighborhood.

Beijing owns much of the U.S. debt, continues to be one of Tehran’s largest trade partners, and is not about to be dictated to by Washington. India has defied the United States by entering into a pipeline deal with Iran. Exhaustive three-year nuclear treaty negotiations between the United States and India are utterly stalled. If the treaty is not presented to Congress in September, it will be dead.

Russia and China have repeatedly said that they see no nuclear weapons danger in Iran. Besides the tension over the pending treaty with the United States, India has little to say, since it is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, as Iran is. The skepticism of these nations is yet another reason why support for an Iranian attack is evaporating.

So the Bush administration is hoisted with its own petard. Whatever the more hawkish denizens of Washington want to do to Iran, they are not going to get the international support necessary for their desired action.

The most obvious alternative for the United States is to engage with Iran diplomatically. This is particularly difficult for the Bush administration because of its carefully burnished tough-guy approach. When Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs William J. Burns merely appeared at the negotiating table with European Union members and Iran for the first time, the right-wing media reaction was swift and vitriolic. Critics on the right, , including two editorials in one week on the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page, accused the Bush administration of “capitulation” to Iran.

Nevertheless international conditions with Russian, China and India may force expansion of this diplomatic approach, regardless of right-wing reaction.

The irony is that talking to Iran could be easy if the Bush administration would just relax. All the Iranians want for real talks to begin is to be treated as equals at the negotiating table, and to start the talks with no pre-conditions. This, too, is what Russia, India, and China want – not only for Iran, but for themselves as well.

The Bush crowd, however, is determined to patronize and insult everyone. During the current conflict in Georgia, Washington has implied that Russia is “not yet” part of the international community. The Bush administration coerced and threatened India over its nuclear program and the oil pipeline deal with Iran. China has been treated somewhat more gently, but the Chinese, too, chafe at criticisms of their environmental record, politics toward Tibet, and international dealings in the Sudan and elsewhere, which they see as hypocritical and intrusive.

When it comes to Iran, all three countries have signaled that they’ve had enough of Washington’s bullying. If however, the United States decides to treat Iran with mutual respect at the negotiating table, it might discover not only a way out of the impasse in the Middle East but improved relations with other key countries around the world.

Foreign Policy In Focus contributor William O. Beeman is professor and chair of the department of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. He is president of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association and the author, most recently, of The “Great Satan” vs. the “Mad Mullahs”: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other.