When I got back to Amsterdam last week and checked into my headquarters at the 420 Café, I received an urgent message from the proprietor, Michael Veling, in response to my last column, which talked about attempts to restrict access to cannabis in the Netherlands:
Mike has owned and operated the 420 Café (formerly Café deKuil) for more than 20 years and has been a cannabis activist even longer. He's worked through the coffeeshop registration edicts of the mid-1990s, the imposition of the on-site 500-gram limit, the reduction from 30 to five allowable grams per consumer, the replacement of Dutch currency with the euro in 2000, the banning of alcohol sales in coffeeshops in 2007 (deKuil was a bar for 100 years or so), and the proscription against tobacco smoking the next year. Through it all, he has conformed with official policy while maintaining a successful establishment that supplies its patrons with the finest of weed and hash in a friendly, comfortable environment.
Mike was also a founder of Amsterdam's coffeeshop coalition, Cannabis Bond, and is a careful observer of the political scene as it pertains to the local cannabis culture. For several years he was active in the local branch of the (then) Dutch ruling party, the Christian Democrats (CDA) — sort of equivalent to the Republicans in America — and served a term as deputy to a CDA Amsterdam council member in order to force the party to accept a coffeeshop owner into its ranks despite the party's traditional stance against cannabis legalization.
So when Mike dismissed the current government's plan to turn the coffeeshops into private clubs, "accessible only to people officially living in the Netherlands" (DutchNews.nl) in order to "reduce drugs-related tourism and public nuisance," I felt better already, because the several people I'd spoken with before leaving town had been uniformly pessimistic about the chances for survival of the established system that works so well for everyone except the anti-drug fanatics in Parliament.
I'm still trying to get my head around the proposal, because it seems totally idiotic and so drastically un-Dutch. It seems to stem from a 2009 study by a government commission, which found that "the bigger the coffee shops get, the more likely they are to be in the hands of organized crime. To that end, the commission recommended cafes become smaller and should only sell to locals," according to DutchNews.nl.
"The government is also planning to increase efforts to drive organized crime out of the production and trade of marijuana. ... The illegal growing industry is thought to be worth some 2 billion euros [$2,840,000,000] a year. According to the Dutch newspaper Telegraaf, some 40,000 people are involved in marijuana cultivation and some 5,000 plantations are busted every year."
Duh! Under the present system, where retail sale of cannabis is permitted but cultivation and distribution remain strictly illegal (beyond the five plants adults are allowed to cultivate for their own use), growing marijuana is organized crime per se.
If cannabis were fully legalized, organized crime would be replaced by an above-ground industry that would employ thousands of people and generate enormous tax revenues for the Dutch coffers from the cannabis businesses themselves, the personal income taxes of the owners and operators, and the employment and earnings taxes on the workers.
The current government seems to have been emboldened by a ruling from European Union (EU) Advocate General Yves Bot, who said the Netherlands was within its rights to ban tourists from coffee shops if the move is necessary to protect public order and reduce the nuisance caused by drugs tourism. Bot felt further that the Dutch ban would contribute to the EU's efforts to combat the illegal drugs trade.
The border town of Maastricht has already closed its coffee shops to tourists on the "public nuisance" tip, while Roosendaal and Bergen op Zoom have banned coffeeshops altogether. Currently the Council of State, Holland's highest court, has appealed to the European judiciary to determine whether the Maastricht ban conflicts with EU laws.
Finally, DutchNews.nl reports with a straight face, "Ministers say they expect the closure of coffee shops to tourists will lead to a reduction in drugs-related tourism. Nevertheless, 'adequate measures' will be taken by police and officials to make sure the move does not lead to an increase in street dealing." Hmmm, sounds like they wanna embrace the American Dream of a real War on Drugs with a powerful police state apparatus to hound the tourists and their street-level suppliers.
Let's get one thing straight: When they say "drugs-related tourism" they're talking about people who come to Holland to smoke pot — or, in the case of the border towns, to cop some weed over the counter and take it back to Belgium or Germany or France and smoke it at home. If my memory serves, the little city of Maastricht itself took in about 13 million euros (about $18,500,000) last year from "drugs-related tourism."
My informants, including Michael Veling, Ravi Dronkers of the Sensi Seeds combine and Sidney Daniels of Ceres Seeds and the Hempshopper, have pointed out that the figures cited by the Telegraaf — 40,000 people involved in marijuana cultivation generating 2 billion worth of business — are ridiculously underestimated, and predict that the numbers would increase exponentially if cultivation and wholesale distribution were fully legalized.
The really sick thing is that this reactionary move by the Dutch government takes place in the face of the recent call by the official Global Commission on Drug Policy for an end to the War on Drugs, to shift "from criminalization to public health and from incarceration to ... decriminalization to legalization and regulation."
There has been a long string of officially commissioned studies that have basically reached the same conclusion, but this international commission includes "four former presidents, United Nations dignitaries, authors and intellectuals, health and security officials, NGO directors and entrepreneurs."
The run-up to the War on Drugs began 50 years ago, in 1961, when the United Nations initiated the UN Single Drug Convention on Narcotic Drugs. Ten years later, on June 17, 1971, Richard Nixon declared: "America's public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out ... worldwide offensive."
"So began a war," Charles M. Blow wrote in The New York Times, "that has waxed and waned, sputtered and sprinted, until it became an unmitigated disaster, an abomination of justice and a self-perpetuating, trillion-dollar economy of wasted human capital, ruined lives and decimated communities ... one of the biggest, most expensive, most destructive social policy experiments in American history: The war on drugs."
Since 1971, more than 40 million arrests have been conducted for drug-related offenses. And, according to UN estimates, between 1998 and 2008, annual consumption has grown by 34.5 percent for opiates, 27 percent for cocaine and 8.5 percent for cannabis, whose users worldwide number 160 million.
That's an awful lot of us, and maybe our screams of pain as victims of the War on Drugs are beginning to be heard and maybe even heeded. It's about time!
John Sinclair, founder of the White Panthers, is a poet. His latest book is It's All Good.
Friday, June 24, 2011
Getting Green Between the Sheets The Eco-Sex Movement By BINOY KAMPMARK
Annie Sprinkle, PhD has been in the sex advocacy business for years. She was colorfully present on Friday, along with her partner in crime Elizabeth M. Stephens, at the Femina Potens Gallery on Mission Street in San Francisco. A good crowd had turned up for the signing of the Ecosex Manifesto. (‘We make love to the Earth,’ seems to be the expression of the evening.) Sprinkle was an unmistakable presence: fascinator of peacock feathers and a bright dress. Across her right breast was a named tag pasted across naked flesh. (Her carriage is enormous and almost as well known as their owner.)
What’s the fuss about? Green sex, sexecology, sustainable sex. Coitus can be environmentally friendly after all. Locate, urge organizers of the new movement, your ‘e-spot’. Let us all be ecovestites. Fancy juggling arboreal frottage?
The art displays are amusing themselves (one features Sprinkle on the ground, legs spread in a vegetable patch, with Stephens watering her pubis), but as with many ideological movements, its rehearsed humor, stage managed in terms of imagery. The canned laugher hits you hard. To have a genuine chuckle about sex would be unthinkable, precisely because people take it so seriously.
That said the slightly clumsy collages featuring the mining in Appalachia make perfect environmental sense. The earth is being violated, and the issue of seeking its consent would hardly bother mining company executives. Sprinkle and Stephens then take the next step and argue that such an avid, dedicated raping requires natural healing and counseling – hence this Ecosex manifesto, with its penitent promises by the human race to make love to earth itself. ‘I promise to love, honor and cherish you Earth, until death brings us closer together, forever.’ Rutting has never been so earthy.
Then come the signatures, and the launching of the manifesto. Everyone is so chatty with the flowing chardonnay and punch the messages are already muddled. Nor do the pens work. Sprinkle gives one of the girls taking photo shoots her own camera. ‘Do you know how to work this thing?’ she inquires.
Ideology of any sort is unhealthy. It controls, packages, limits. Followers, however green, red or yellow they might be, resemble incurious automata, chanting and mumbling the central mantras and nostrums. Sex movements are no different, because the discussion, however free, is premised on the idea of ironing out contradictions. Even a free sex movement will eventually have partitions and red books of instruction and prohibitions. The habit of streamlining is irresistible to founders and high priests and priestesses alike.
Sex, precisely because it lies at the basis of life, is stunningly hard to pin down, to control. In The World of Lawrence, Henry Miller attempts to decipher the mystique of sex. ‘Sex is the great Janus-faced symbol of life and death. It is never one or the other, it is always both. The great lie of life here comes to the surface; the contradiction refuses to be resolved.’ Hence coitus, annihilation, liberation.
The body of literature available for perusal at the gallery, like any texts that seek to bolster the columns of followers, or win new ones, is unintentionally humourous. Stefanie Iris Weiss has a few tips to offer the lady with child in Eco-sex. No raw meat, deli-meat, no pate, no shell fish. In short, a half-decent Japanese diet with the occasional French trimming is off limits to the eco-sexualist. The idea, incidentally, is not because Weiss is bleeding for the animals of the sea or the unfortunates who get slaughtered for the dinner table. She is simply concerned about diseases and toxins.
Sprinkle and company may wish to have ceremonial reactions to nature (along with Stephens, she has, in all seriousness married the moon, fulfilling that old Republican observation that, ‘These people will marry anything’), but nature mocks them. One can’t help but cast a thought to George Bernard Shaw on the essential rapaciousness of humanity: ‘Man,’ he wrote in 1928, ‘remains what he has always been; the cruelest of all the animals, and the most elaborately and fiendishly sensual.’
Besides, sex is complicated enough without more instruction manuals or dictates that already clutter the modern Californian home. But let us not be too pessimistic. And go back to the punch and extensive fruit platters.
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
What’s the fuss about? Green sex, sexecology, sustainable sex. Coitus can be environmentally friendly after all. Locate, urge organizers of the new movement, your ‘e-spot’. Let us all be ecovestites. Fancy juggling arboreal frottage?
The art displays are amusing themselves (one features Sprinkle on the ground, legs spread in a vegetable patch, with Stephens watering her pubis), but as with many ideological movements, its rehearsed humor, stage managed in terms of imagery. The canned laugher hits you hard. To have a genuine chuckle about sex would be unthinkable, precisely because people take it so seriously.
That said the slightly clumsy collages featuring the mining in Appalachia make perfect environmental sense. The earth is being violated, and the issue of seeking its consent would hardly bother mining company executives. Sprinkle and Stephens then take the next step and argue that such an avid, dedicated raping requires natural healing and counseling – hence this Ecosex manifesto, with its penitent promises by the human race to make love to earth itself. ‘I promise to love, honor and cherish you Earth, until death brings us closer together, forever.’ Rutting has never been so earthy.
Then come the signatures, and the launching of the manifesto. Everyone is so chatty with the flowing chardonnay and punch the messages are already muddled. Nor do the pens work. Sprinkle gives one of the girls taking photo shoots her own camera. ‘Do you know how to work this thing?’ she inquires.
Ideology of any sort is unhealthy. It controls, packages, limits. Followers, however green, red or yellow they might be, resemble incurious automata, chanting and mumbling the central mantras and nostrums. Sex movements are no different, because the discussion, however free, is premised on the idea of ironing out contradictions. Even a free sex movement will eventually have partitions and red books of instruction and prohibitions. The habit of streamlining is irresistible to founders and high priests and priestesses alike.
Sex, precisely because it lies at the basis of life, is stunningly hard to pin down, to control. In The World of Lawrence, Henry Miller attempts to decipher the mystique of sex. ‘Sex is the great Janus-faced symbol of life and death. It is never one or the other, it is always both. The great lie of life here comes to the surface; the contradiction refuses to be resolved.’ Hence coitus, annihilation, liberation.
The body of literature available for perusal at the gallery, like any texts that seek to bolster the columns of followers, or win new ones, is unintentionally humourous. Stefanie Iris Weiss has a few tips to offer the lady with child in Eco-sex. No raw meat, deli-meat, no pate, no shell fish. In short, a half-decent Japanese diet with the occasional French trimming is off limits to the eco-sexualist. The idea, incidentally, is not because Weiss is bleeding for the animals of the sea or the unfortunates who get slaughtered for the dinner table. She is simply concerned about diseases and toxins.
Sprinkle and company may wish to have ceremonial reactions to nature (along with Stephens, she has, in all seriousness married the moon, fulfilling that old Republican observation that, ‘These people will marry anything’), but nature mocks them. One can’t help but cast a thought to George Bernard Shaw on the essential rapaciousness of humanity: ‘Man,’ he wrote in 1928, ‘remains what he has always been; the cruelest of all the animals, and the most elaborately and fiendishly sensual.’
Besides, sex is complicated enough without more instruction manuals or dictates that already clutter the modern Californian home. But let us not be too pessimistic. And go back to the punch and extensive fruit platters.
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
Still Here Against Travel By DAVID Ker THOMSON It’s cloud illusions I recall. —Joni Mitchell
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America's Energy Problems Are Political, Not Technological Nuclear Power? What's the Alternative? By JOE GIAMBRONE
Glad you asked. It turns out that the alternative energy market is the new gold rush of the 21st century. That's the good news.
In the wake of Italy's overwhelming rejection of high-risk atomic power, Reuters tells us:
"Enel Green Power, Italy's biggest renewable company, was up 2.9 percent and K.R.Energy was up 14 percent. Kerself was up 11.6 percent, Pramac up 11.5 percent and Ergycap up 12 percent." (Reuters, June 13)
We even have a new solar power tower design that can continue generating electricity through the night. Located in Seville, Spain this 19.9 MW plant by Torresol Energy is the first solar plant able to store enough heat to continue feeding the turbines after dark.
One glance at the project summons memories of the mid 1970s, and particularly the cover of the October 1975 issue of Popular Science. Lo and behold, this exact "Solar Power Tower" was featured at newsstands everywhere 36 years ago. For trivia buffs, James Bond's nemesis The Man With the Golden Gun also built a solar power tower of sorts back in 1974.
The Power Tower needs no high technology yet to be developed. It simply bounces light from mirrors -- lots of mirrors, synchonized to follow the sun. Not rocket science, not waiting for nanotechnology or advances in space travel. Mirrors.
I offer that America's energy problems are primarily political and not technological at all. Clean, safe and decentralized technologies have been fought and brought to a standstill because large, dirty, centrally-controlled, deep-pocketed interests don't like competition.
The buzzword / acronym to watch for is "Concentrated Solar Power" (CSP).
Look to the Parabola
A less grandiose solar station design employs mirrors shaped like troughs that can focus the energy on a pipe located at the proper focal distance. A Boulder City Nevada installation by Acciona takes up 400 acres and generates 64 MW.
"The plant employs 760 parabolic concentrators with more than 182,000 mirrors that concentrate the sun's rays onto more than 18,240 receiver tubes. Fluid that heats up to 735°F flows through these tubes and is used to produce steam that drives a conventional turbine, which is connected to a generator that produces electricity." (Acciona website)
An Israeli company called ZenithSolar has a breakthrough photovoltaic collector scheme. Each sun-tracker looks something like a satellite dish, and features "two 11 square meter semi-parabolic optical mirror collectors." It then focuses the sun beams onto both a PV and a heat collector to get more energy out of the sunlight. The company claims "up to 75% efficiency" and wants to power entire cities with large arrays of these devices.
But what about your rooftop?
Efficiency advances in solar collectors and the new solar roof shingles continue at a steady pace, but what's holding it back?
Again, the political situation has corporations at an advantage over individual homeowners. Most places (such as my native California) will let you sell some energy back to the grid. The meter will run backwards, up to a point. You aren't allowed to make a profit however.
A homeowner with a windmill and solar array cannot become a profitable energy seller, unlike utilities and some private energy corporations.
What is the reasoning behind this?
It seems illustrative of a captured regulatory system designed to keep the little fish from competing effectively against the big fish. Why aren't people simply encouraged to produce as much electricity as they can, thereby reducing the burden on (polluting) utility companies? The fact that they aren't is a form of market manipulation in favor of large interests at the expense of individuals.
What about small to medium-sized businesses with large flat rooftops?
I tried to find the answer to that question, but good luck navigating the labyrinth at PG&E's website. Each locale and each energy company treats the little fish differently, with all sorts of come and go temporary "programs" that are not only confusing but discourage long-term investments.
A recent push for "Net Energy Metering" in California has provided some token opportunities and good public relations, but it's highly limited in scope. A "cap" of five percent of the "utility's aggregate peak energy demand" limits the competition from small suppliers.
These problems are structural political issues more so than technological limitations. If everyone had been allowed to enter the much touted "market" then the alternative energy sector would be much larger today than it currently is. The costs of R&D and mass-producing the energy collectors would drop far below what we see even now.
Many of the companies at the leading edge of clean renewable technologies are not American. The jobs will be created elsewhere. The rewards will be accumulated overseas.
And the bad news...
Still Obama clings to his big nuclear plant subsidy scheme, his Department of Energy having the brass cojones to label nuclear "clean energy." In the wake of Fukushima, the DOE continues to claim:
"With the significant energy and environmental challenges facing the nation in this new century, the benefits of clean and safe nuclear energy are increasingly apparent."
I suppose the people at the Department of Energy are too busy to read a newspaper. Not clean. Not safe. Change your absurd web page please and the absurd policies that accompany it.
Nuclear industry flaks will tirelessly argue their case, usually based on dollars per kilowatt hour with cooked numbers that ignore most of nuclear's real costs and damage to society. One wonders how their calculus is faring over in Japan these days.
Closer to your home, AP reports three quarters of all American nuclear plants leak radioactive water from old rusty pipes. Often water containminated with Tritium leaks down into groundwater. Representative Edward Markey(D) said, "There would be no warning because no one ever checks the integrity of these underground pipes."
Tell us something we don't know.
I've read a pro-nuclear defense of Tritium, as it's the stuff inside your watch that makes it glow. Allegedly safe then, except trapping it in a metal and glass box and ingesting it are two completely different things.
I'm quite tired of the nuclear industry's position that we have no choice but to be exposed to their radiation. We aren't supposed to complain, nor to stop them from poisoning us and our children further. We're supposed to be grateful, apparently, that the doses aren't immediately lethal. It doesn't seem to occur to them that we have a say in the matter as well.
That's quite a bit to digest, and perhaps we'll tackle wind, tide generation, fuel cells and geothermal heat mining another day. Cold fusion? Is that for real? A whole host of inventions, proposals, implementations and outside the box ponderings awaits.
In the wake of Italy's overwhelming rejection of high-risk atomic power, Reuters tells us:
"Enel Green Power, Italy's biggest renewable company, was up 2.9 percent and K.R.Energy was up 14 percent. Kerself was up 11.6 percent, Pramac up 11.5 percent and Ergycap up 12 percent." (Reuters, June 13)
We even have a new solar power tower design that can continue generating electricity through the night. Located in Seville, Spain this 19.9 MW plant by Torresol Energy is the first solar plant able to store enough heat to continue feeding the turbines after dark.
One glance at the project summons memories of the mid 1970s, and particularly the cover of the October 1975 issue of Popular Science. Lo and behold, this exact "Solar Power Tower" was featured at newsstands everywhere 36 years ago. For trivia buffs, James Bond's nemesis The Man With the Golden Gun also built a solar power tower of sorts back in 1974.
The Power Tower needs no high technology yet to be developed. It simply bounces light from mirrors -- lots of mirrors, synchonized to follow the sun. Not rocket science, not waiting for nanotechnology or advances in space travel. Mirrors.
I offer that America's energy problems are primarily political and not technological at all. Clean, safe and decentralized technologies have been fought and brought to a standstill because large, dirty, centrally-controlled, deep-pocketed interests don't like competition.
The buzzword / acronym to watch for is "Concentrated Solar Power" (CSP).
Look to the Parabola
A less grandiose solar station design employs mirrors shaped like troughs that can focus the energy on a pipe located at the proper focal distance. A Boulder City Nevada installation by Acciona takes up 400 acres and generates 64 MW.
"The plant employs 760 parabolic concentrators with more than 182,000 mirrors that concentrate the sun's rays onto more than 18,240 receiver tubes. Fluid that heats up to 735°F flows through these tubes and is used to produce steam that drives a conventional turbine, which is connected to a generator that produces electricity." (Acciona website)
An Israeli company called ZenithSolar has a breakthrough photovoltaic collector scheme. Each sun-tracker looks something like a satellite dish, and features "two 11 square meter semi-parabolic optical mirror collectors." It then focuses the sun beams onto both a PV and a heat collector to get more energy out of the sunlight. The company claims "up to 75% efficiency" and wants to power entire cities with large arrays of these devices.
But what about your rooftop?
Efficiency advances in solar collectors and the new solar roof shingles continue at a steady pace, but what's holding it back?
Again, the political situation has corporations at an advantage over individual homeowners. Most places (such as my native California) will let you sell some energy back to the grid. The meter will run backwards, up to a point. You aren't allowed to make a profit however.
A homeowner with a windmill and solar array cannot become a profitable energy seller, unlike utilities and some private energy corporations.
What is the reasoning behind this?
It seems illustrative of a captured regulatory system designed to keep the little fish from competing effectively against the big fish. Why aren't people simply encouraged to produce as much electricity as they can, thereby reducing the burden on (polluting) utility companies? The fact that they aren't is a form of market manipulation in favor of large interests at the expense of individuals.
What about small to medium-sized businesses with large flat rooftops?
I tried to find the answer to that question, but good luck navigating the labyrinth at PG&E's website. Each locale and each energy company treats the little fish differently, with all sorts of come and go temporary "programs" that are not only confusing but discourage long-term investments.
A recent push for "Net Energy Metering" in California has provided some token opportunities and good public relations, but it's highly limited in scope. A "cap" of five percent of the "utility's aggregate peak energy demand" limits the competition from small suppliers.
These problems are structural political issues more so than technological limitations. If everyone had been allowed to enter the much touted "market" then the alternative energy sector would be much larger today than it currently is. The costs of R&D and mass-producing the energy collectors would drop far below what we see even now.
Many of the companies at the leading edge of clean renewable technologies are not American. The jobs will be created elsewhere. The rewards will be accumulated overseas.
And the bad news...
Still Obama clings to his big nuclear plant subsidy scheme, his Department of Energy having the brass cojones to label nuclear "clean energy." In the wake of Fukushima, the DOE continues to claim:
"With the significant energy and environmental challenges facing the nation in this new century, the benefits of clean and safe nuclear energy are increasingly apparent."
I suppose the people at the Department of Energy are too busy to read a newspaper. Not clean. Not safe. Change your absurd web page please and the absurd policies that accompany it.
Nuclear industry flaks will tirelessly argue their case, usually based on dollars per kilowatt hour with cooked numbers that ignore most of nuclear's real costs and damage to society. One wonders how their calculus is faring over in Japan these days.
Closer to your home, AP reports three quarters of all American nuclear plants leak radioactive water from old rusty pipes. Often water containminated with Tritium leaks down into groundwater. Representative Edward Markey(D) said, "There would be no warning because no one ever checks the integrity of these underground pipes."
Tell us something we don't know.
I've read a pro-nuclear defense of Tritium, as it's the stuff inside your watch that makes it glow. Allegedly safe then, except trapping it in a metal and glass box and ingesting it are two completely different things.
I'm quite tired of the nuclear industry's position that we have no choice but to be exposed to their radiation. We aren't supposed to complain, nor to stop them from poisoning us and our children further. We're supposed to be grateful, apparently, that the doses aren't immediately lethal. It doesn't seem to occur to them that we have a say in the matter as well.
That's quite a bit to digest, and perhaps we'll tackle wind, tide generation, fuel cells and geothermal heat mining another day. Cold fusion? Is that for real? A whole host of inventions, proposals, implementations and outside the box ponderings awaits.
An Irrational, Authoritarian Institution Our Corporate Military By KEVIN CARSON
Nicholas Kristoff, in a New York Times op-ed ("Our Lefty Military," June 16), lauds the "astonishingly liberal ethos" that governs the military internally — single-payer health insurance, job security, educational opportunities, free daycare — in support of Gen. Wesley Clark's description of it as "the purest application of socialism there is."
For me — an avowed libertarian socialist as well as a market anarchist — at least two howlers stand out here. First, when I think of "socialism," I think of all the liberatory things originally associated with that term back in the days of the early working class and classical socialist movement in the nineteenth century: Empowerment of the working class, worker control of production, and all the rest. Last I heard, the U.S. military isn't set up as a worker cooperative, with enlisted men electing officers, managing their own work, or voting on whether or not to go to war. Taking orders from a boss "because I said so" isn't my idea of socialism.
Second, the primary external mission of the U.S. military is to keep the world — or rather the corporate pigs who claim to own it — safe from anything remotely resembling worker empowerment. To me, that's pretty unsocialistic. For the past sixty-odd years since WWII (a lot longer, actually), the primary focus of American national security policy has been to protect feudal landed oligarchs from land reform, protect Western-owned corporations from nationalization, act as collector of last resort for the company store known as the World Bank, and enforce the draconian "intellectual property" protectionism which is the central bulwark of global corporate power today. Kristoff's "socialist" military's primary mission is keeping the world firmly in the hands of its corporate rulers.
Aside from that, I think Kristoff has it exactly backward: The military is almost a parody of American corporate culture. It's riddled with hierarchy, with Taylorist/Weberian bureaucratic work rules and standard operating procedures, and all the irrationality that goes with them. The only difference is, the pointy-haired bosses wear a different kind of uniform. If you've ever seen the movie "Brazil," or read Dilbert on a regular basis, you get the idea.
Kristoff has one point on his side: The differentials between production workers and senior management are a lot lower in the military than in present-day Corporate America. But that just means the military is structured more along the lines of old-style bureaucratic "Organization Man" capitalism of the sixties (as described by J.K. Galbraith), in which CEO salaries were typically only fifty times that of a production worker, rather than the current pathological model of cowboy capitalism where it's more like five hundred.
The military, like the large corporation, is plagued by enormously high overhead costs (the cost of training a soldier), and enormously wasteful capital outlays. The military, like an oligopoly corporation, can afford to be so wasteful because it doesn't bear the full cost of its own activities.
Corporate America's prevailing management accounting system, invented almost a century ago by Donaldson Brown of DuPont and GM, equates consumption of inputs to creation of value. You know, like the Soviet centrally planned economy. Administrative costs like management salaries, along with wasteful capital expenditures, are incorporated — through the practice known as "overhead absorption" — into the transfer price of goods "sold" to inventory. And in an oligopoly market, the corporation is able to pass those costs — plus a profit markup — on to the customer through administered pricing. The military shares that pricing system, with its incentives to maximize costs (Paul Goodman called "the great kingdom of cost-plus"). Ever hear of those $600 toilet seats? But in the case of the military, the administered pricing is called "taxation."
In short the military, like the large corporation, is a giant, bureaucratic, irrational, and authoritarian institution which can only survive through parasitism — enabled by the state — on the working class.
For me — an avowed libertarian socialist as well as a market anarchist — at least two howlers stand out here. First, when I think of "socialism," I think of all the liberatory things originally associated with that term back in the days of the early working class and classical socialist movement in the nineteenth century: Empowerment of the working class, worker control of production, and all the rest. Last I heard, the U.S. military isn't set up as a worker cooperative, with enlisted men electing officers, managing their own work, or voting on whether or not to go to war. Taking orders from a boss "because I said so" isn't my idea of socialism.
Second, the primary external mission of the U.S. military is to keep the world — or rather the corporate pigs who claim to own it — safe from anything remotely resembling worker empowerment. To me, that's pretty unsocialistic. For the past sixty-odd years since WWII (a lot longer, actually), the primary focus of American national security policy has been to protect feudal landed oligarchs from land reform, protect Western-owned corporations from nationalization, act as collector of last resort for the company store known as the World Bank, and enforce the draconian "intellectual property" protectionism which is the central bulwark of global corporate power today. Kristoff's "socialist" military's primary mission is keeping the world firmly in the hands of its corporate rulers.
Aside from that, I think Kristoff has it exactly backward: The military is almost a parody of American corporate culture. It's riddled with hierarchy, with Taylorist/Weberian bureaucratic work rules and standard operating procedures, and all the irrationality that goes with them. The only difference is, the pointy-haired bosses wear a different kind of uniform. If you've ever seen the movie "Brazil," or read Dilbert on a regular basis, you get the idea.
Kristoff has one point on his side: The differentials between production workers and senior management are a lot lower in the military than in present-day Corporate America. But that just means the military is structured more along the lines of old-style bureaucratic "Organization Man" capitalism of the sixties (as described by J.K. Galbraith), in which CEO salaries were typically only fifty times that of a production worker, rather than the current pathological model of cowboy capitalism where it's more like five hundred.
The military, like the large corporation, is plagued by enormously high overhead costs (the cost of training a soldier), and enormously wasteful capital outlays. The military, like an oligopoly corporation, can afford to be so wasteful because it doesn't bear the full cost of its own activities.
Corporate America's prevailing management accounting system, invented almost a century ago by Donaldson Brown of DuPont and GM, equates consumption of inputs to creation of value. You know, like the Soviet centrally planned economy. Administrative costs like management salaries, along with wasteful capital expenditures, are incorporated — through the practice known as "overhead absorption" — into the transfer price of goods "sold" to inventory. And in an oligopoly market, the corporation is able to pass those costs — plus a profit markup — on to the customer through administered pricing. The military shares that pricing system, with its incentives to maximize costs (Paul Goodman called "the great kingdom of cost-plus"). Ever hear of those $600 toilet seats? But in the case of the military, the administered pricing is called "taxation."
In short the military, like the large corporation, is a giant, bureaucratic, irrational, and authoritarian institution which can only survive through parasitism — enabled by the state — on the working class.
Kevin Carson is a research associate at the Center for a Stateless Society. his written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.
Why Jon Stewart and Politifact are Wrong About Public Misinformation Mediated Ignorance By ANTHONY DiMAGGIO
The recent “debate” between Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart and the non-partisan Politifact group is largely missing the point with regard to the current state of public ignorance. Stewart recently argued in an interview on Fox News that public opinion polls show Fox viewers are consistently more ignorant with regard to basic political facts. Politifact counters, contending that national polls fail to consistently document a pattern between consumption of Fox and political ignorance. Neither side is presenting a completely accurate picture of reality.
Politifact, a non-partisan project of the St. Petersburg Times, was originally created to research the truthfulness and accuracy of statements emanating from Washington. Sadly, it seems to be falling victim to the same weaknesses of “objective” journalists, who parrot a “one side is as good as another” framework with regard to Washington officialdom. This problem is rather stark with regard to their recent claims about Fox News consumption and misinformation. In criticizing Jon Stewart’s claim that Fox viewers “are the most consistently misinformed media viewers” in “every poll” undertaken, Politifact muddies the waters in relation to the polls they examine. They claim that Fox News consumption is only inconsistently associated with being misinformed, citing a number of Pew Research Center polls which find that Fox News viewers are no less likely than other types of media consumers to accurately answer civic I.Q. questions with regard to questions such as: which party controls the House of Representatives, who is the Prime Minister of Britain, who is the Secretary of State?” etc. In contrast, the group discounts studies done by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), which find that Fox News viewers were consistently more misinformed with regards to foreign policy-Iraq related issues and domestic, electorally-related topics. As someone who has spent years intimately analyzing raw data comprising these specific polls, I feel I’m in a relevant position to offer some insights.
A brief look at the PIPA surveys of news consumption does suggest that Fox News viewers are systematically misinformed. PIPA’s 2003 Iraq survey found that Fox News viewers were far more likely than other types of news viewers to hold a variety of misperceptions regarding the war, including: opinions that Iraq possessed WMD, that Iraq had ties to al Qaeda, that WMD had been found in Iraq following the invasion, and that the international community strongly supported the U.S. invasion. The 2010 PIPA survey examined a number of misperceptions, including: opinions that Obama’s stimulus did not include tax cuts for most Americans, opinions that the scientists don’t agree that climate change is occurring, that health care reform will increase the deficit, and that Obama was not born in the U.S., among other false attitudes. Of the eleven questions PIPA surveyed in 2010, Fox News viewers were more likely to hold misinformed opinions on nine of them.
Politifact wishes away the authoritative PIPA findings by suggesting that they are problematic, in part because some pundits in the mass media disagree with them. Politifact prefers the Pew Center’s civics I.Q. questions over the more in-depth measures from PIPA, since questions about who is the Vice President are difficult to politicize, whereas questions about Obama’s tax agenda have long been politicized and the subject of heated partisan “discussion” in the mass media.
I won’t spend much time refuting Politifact’s misguided dismissal of the PIPA surveys in favor of Pew’s extremely low (arguably non-existent) standard for what constitutes an “informed” citizen. Jane Hamsher does a splendid job in exploding Politifact’s inaccuracies in a recent piece on Firedoglake (see Hamsher’s: “Fact Checking Politifact: Wrong about Jon Stewart’s Use of the Word ‘Misinformed’”). Regarding the three Pew surveys, Hamsher argues:
“The three polls measure how informed viewers are. They don’t even belong in the discussion, because they don’t go to Stewart’s point. “Do you know who the Secretary of State is” or “what is the name of the Vice President” are questions that you can answer if you’re paying attention. There is no shortage of people who go glassy-eyed and stupid while staring at cable news, and I’m proud to be one of them. I can feel the lull of Kathleen Parker’s voice shaving points off my IQ. I might be able to tell you who the Secretary of Education is under ordinary circumstances, but freely admit that listening to Bill Bennett drone on about anything is enough to flip the switch on enough synapses that answering any question becomes a challenge. It’s a guilty pleasure for people who don’t smoke pot.”
Hamsher continues: “On the other hand, the two PIPA studies measure how misinformed viewers are. That’s a very different yardstick. Listening to Dana Bash may freeze a few neurons in the “off” position, and I may not get the news value that I should out of the segment, but unless she says something that is manifestly untrue I can’t claim to have been misinformed.”
In short, Hamsher is arguing that the placing of the Pew and PIPA surveys alongside each other is tantamount to comparing apples and oranges. One set of surveys measures basic civics literacy with regard to uncontroversial textbook questions of government. The stakes with regards to these uncontroversial questions are nil. The other surveys from PIPA measure how misinformed the public is with regard to the official manipulation and propaganda that dominates discourse in Washington D.C. and in the national media (and is most extreme in the right-most elements of the mass media).
If Politifact is interested in assessing the seriousness of various polls in measuring public misinformation, it would do well to consult scholarly experts in the field of public opinion, rather than partisan pundits in the mass media. The latter of these two groups share zero understanding of the complexities of public opinion research, while the former have spent their entire careers closely studying these issues. If Politifact had consulted enough experts in this area, it would find that many scholars reject civics I.Q. questions (of the Pew variety) altogether due to their superficiality in measuring public information levels. These questions have little to do with the processes by which Americans interact on a day to day basis with the political system. They aren’t representative of the grand questions that the public faces with regard to the policy process – questions which PIPA comes much closer to measuring in its surveys of domestic and foreign policy issues. In short, they aren’t of much value in measuring the public’s exposure to misinformation, propaganda, and indoctrination.
And yet, in pointing out Politifact’s shortcomings here, I should point out that I do not fully agree with Jon Stewart either. Stewart is a liberal pundit operating in the mass media, and his program tends to privilege Democratic and mainstream liberal points of view, while skewering conservative ones. As a result, his limited insights are unlikely to uncover the larger problem in the American political-media system. This larger problem, simply stated, is the consistent correlation between political attentiveness and media consumption across all media outlets, and the corresponding increase in political misinformation resulting from this exposure.
As an expert in the study of mass media and public opinion, I’ve devoted my academic career to studying questions of media exposure and public ignorance. After closely tracking media content and public opinions surveys over the last ten years, I can confidently conclude that there is much truth in the saying: “the more you watch, the less you know.” I’ve tracked the relationship between increased political-media attentiveness and political ignorance with regard to a handful of issues, including the following foreign policy subjects: the wars in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the rhetorical war with Iran, and opinions of Islam as a “terrorist threat,” and with regard to domestic issues, including: the national health care debate, the Tea Party, the 2001 tax cuts, and the 2009 stimulus. On every single one of these issues, I find a positive correlation between increasingly reactionary media coverage and growing public embrace of right-wing political views. This relationship, in and of itself, does not suggest widespread public ignorance (among those consuming such right-wing news and rhetoric), although a closer examination of the issues suggests that misinformation and confusion is rampant among those paying closest attention to national reporting and political debate.
A brief review of my findings puts the state of the problem in better perspective:
With regard to Libya and Afghanistan, those paying closest attention to the national reporting and to political debate in Washington on the U.S. (2011) Libya bombing and the (2009) Afghan “surge” were consistently more likely to support the interventions. Sympathetic media coverage was enough to convince a majority of Americans, a majority of which were at first opposed to both interventions (in 2009 and 2011 respectively), to shift their opinions and grant majority support. In short, an increasingly reactionary political-media debate convinced most Americans to support policies that went against their previously expressed opinions and wishes.
With respects to Iraq and Iran, those paying closest attention to national reporting and political debate with regard to non-existent WMD “threats” (faithfully disseminated in media propaganda) were consistently more likely to think (erroneously) that these countries represented a serious danger to U.S. national security.
Concerning attitudes toward Islam, those getting most of their information about the religion and its adherents from the mass media were most likely to hold a variety of misperceptions regarding Islamic beliefs and culture. Those most reliant on the mass media were the most likely to embrace racist anti-Muslim views.
In relation to health care reform, those paying closest attention to the national reporting and debate were consistently more likely to be confused about such reforms at a time (in 2009 and 2010) when coverage was dominated by propagandistic discourse over non-existent Obama “socialism” and “death panels,” and fictitious “government takeovers” of private care. The most attentive were also the most likely to oppose reform in light of the increasingly reactionary state of media coverage.
With regard to the 2001 tax cuts and the 2009 stimulus, those paying closest attention to the national reporting and debate on these issues were consistently more likely to support the tax cuts and oppose the stimulus during periods when my analysis of media found that support for the tax cuts were high and criticism of the stimulus was growing.
Concerning the Tea Party, those paying closest attention to national reporting and debate were consistently more likely to hold favorable opinions of the group at a time when the mass media was celebrating the group as a “mass movement.” Increasing public support was driven by inaccurate assumptions that the Tea Party was a grassroots rebellion, despite my extensive, year-long national and local research project which suggested the group is largely a top-down, elite out-growth of corporate and Republican interests.
The problem of mass-mediated ignorance is encouraged by journalists’ over-reliance on increasingly reactionary bi-partisan political elites in Washington. These officials set the agenda with regard to what issues will be talked about and how they will be discussed. Public ignorance across the “mainstream” parts of the political spectrum is ignored in the “debate” over whether Fox News viewers are misinformed. Of course Fox viewers display a staggering ignorance; but at the end of the day, that ignorance is not substantively different from that seen among most media consumers.
A more constructive and engaging research agenda would analyze the ways in which the entire media-political system fosters ignorance and misinformation. At a time when both parties are embracing right-wing views, media coverage is increasingly moving to the right and having predictable effects on public attitudes. Mediated ignorance is a cancer afflicting the American populace. That cancer has its roots in the entire political-economic-media system, rather than in its most extreme sectors. We would do well not to exaggerate Fox viewers’ ignorance in light of these findings.
Politifact, a non-partisan project of the St. Petersburg Times, was originally created to research the truthfulness and accuracy of statements emanating from Washington. Sadly, it seems to be falling victim to the same weaknesses of “objective” journalists, who parrot a “one side is as good as another” framework with regard to Washington officialdom. This problem is rather stark with regard to their recent claims about Fox News consumption and misinformation. In criticizing Jon Stewart’s claim that Fox viewers “are the most consistently misinformed media viewers” in “every poll” undertaken, Politifact muddies the waters in relation to the polls they examine. They claim that Fox News consumption is only inconsistently associated with being misinformed, citing a number of Pew Research Center polls which find that Fox News viewers are no less likely than other types of media consumers to accurately answer civic I.Q. questions with regard to questions such as: which party controls the House of Representatives, who is the Prime Minister of Britain, who is the Secretary of State?” etc. In contrast, the group discounts studies done by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), which find that Fox News viewers were consistently more misinformed with regards to foreign policy-Iraq related issues and domestic, electorally-related topics. As someone who has spent years intimately analyzing raw data comprising these specific polls, I feel I’m in a relevant position to offer some insights.
A brief look at the PIPA surveys of news consumption does suggest that Fox News viewers are systematically misinformed. PIPA’s 2003 Iraq survey found that Fox News viewers were far more likely than other types of news viewers to hold a variety of misperceptions regarding the war, including: opinions that Iraq possessed WMD, that Iraq had ties to al Qaeda, that WMD had been found in Iraq following the invasion, and that the international community strongly supported the U.S. invasion. The 2010 PIPA survey examined a number of misperceptions, including: opinions that Obama’s stimulus did not include tax cuts for most Americans, opinions that the scientists don’t agree that climate change is occurring, that health care reform will increase the deficit, and that Obama was not born in the U.S., among other false attitudes. Of the eleven questions PIPA surveyed in 2010, Fox News viewers were more likely to hold misinformed opinions on nine of them.
Politifact wishes away the authoritative PIPA findings by suggesting that they are problematic, in part because some pundits in the mass media disagree with them. Politifact prefers the Pew Center’s civics I.Q. questions over the more in-depth measures from PIPA, since questions about who is the Vice President are difficult to politicize, whereas questions about Obama’s tax agenda have long been politicized and the subject of heated partisan “discussion” in the mass media.
I won’t spend much time refuting Politifact’s misguided dismissal of the PIPA surveys in favor of Pew’s extremely low (arguably non-existent) standard for what constitutes an “informed” citizen. Jane Hamsher does a splendid job in exploding Politifact’s inaccuracies in a recent piece on Firedoglake (see Hamsher’s: “Fact Checking Politifact: Wrong about Jon Stewart’s Use of the Word ‘Misinformed’”). Regarding the three Pew surveys, Hamsher argues:
“The three polls measure how informed viewers are. They don’t even belong in the discussion, because they don’t go to Stewart’s point. “Do you know who the Secretary of State is” or “what is the name of the Vice President” are questions that you can answer if you’re paying attention. There is no shortage of people who go glassy-eyed and stupid while staring at cable news, and I’m proud to be one of them. I can feel the lull of Kathleen Parker’s voice shaving points off my IQ. I might be able to tell you who the Secretary of Education is under ordinary circumstances, but freely admit that listening to Bill Bennett drone on about anything is enough to flip the switch on enough synapses that answering any question becomes a challenge. It’s a guilty pleasure for people who don’t smoke pot.”
Hamsher continues: “On the other hand, the two PIPA studies measure how misinformed viewers are. That’s a very different yardstick. Listening to Dana Bash may freeze a few neurons in the “off” position, and I may not get the news value that I should out of the segment, but unless she says something that is manifestly untrue I can’t claim to have been misinformed.”
In short, Hamsher is arguing that the placing of the Pew and PIPA surveys alongside each other is tantamount to comparing apples and oranges. One set of surveys measures basic civics literacy with regard to uncontroversial textbook questions of government. The stakes with regards to these uncontroversial questions are nil. The other surveys from PIPA measure how misinformed the public is with regard to the official manipulation and propaganda that dominates discourse in Washington D.C. and in the national media (and is most extreme in the right-most elements of the mass media).
If Politifact is interested in assessing the seriousness of various polls in measuring public misinformation, it would do well to consult scholarly experts in the field of public opinion, rather than partisan pundits in the mass media. The latter of these two groups share zero understanding of the complexities of public opinion research, while the former have spent their entire careers closely studying these issues. If Politifact had consulted enough experts in this area, it would find that many scholars reject civics I.Q. questions (of the Pew variety) altogether due to their superficiality in measuring public information levels. These questions have little to do with the processes by which Americans interact on a day to day basis with the political system. They aren’t representative of the grand questions that the public faces with regard to the policy process – questions which PIPA comes much closer to measuring in its surveys of domestic and foreign policy issues. In short, they aren’t of much value in measuring the public’s exposure to misinformation, propaganda, and indoctrination.
And yet, in pointing out Politifact’s shortcomings here, I should point out that I do not fully agree with Jon Stewart either. Stewart is a liberal pundit operating in the mass media, and his program tends to privilege Democratic and mainstream liberal points of view, while skewering conservative ones. As a result, his limited insights are unlikely to uncover the larger problem in the American political-media system. This larger problem, simply stated, is the consistent correlation between political attentiveness and media consumption across all media outlets, and the corresponding increase in political misinformation resulting from this exposure.
As an expert in the study of mass media and public opinion, I’ve devoted my academic career to studying questions of media exposure and public ignorance. After closely tracking media content and public opinions surveys over the last ten years, I can confidently conclude that there is much truth in the saying: “the more you watch, the less you know.” I’ve tracked the relationship between increased political-media attentiveness and political ignorance with regard to a handful of issues, including the following foreign policy subjects: the wars in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the rhetorical war with Iran, and opinions of Islam as a “terrorist threat,” and with regard to domestic issues, including: the national health care debate, the Tea Party, the 2001 tax cuts, and the 2009 stimulus. On every single one of these issues, I find a positive correlation between increasingly reactionary media coverage and growing public embrace of right-wing political views. This relationship, in and of itself, does not suggest widespread public ignorance (among those consuming such right-wing news and rhetoric), although a closer examination of the issues suggests that misinformation and confusion is rampant among those paying closest attention to national reporting and political debate.
A brief review of my findings puts the state of the problem in better perspective:
With regard to Libya and Afghanistan, those paying closest attention to the national reporting and to political debate in Washington on the U.S. (2011) Libya bombing and the (2009) Afghan “surge” were consistently more likely to support the interventions. Sympathetic media coverage was enough to convince a majority of Americans, a majority of which were at first opposed to both interventions (in 2009 and 2011 respectively), to shift their opinions and grant majority support. In short, an increasingly reactionary political-media debate convinced most Americans to support policies that went against their previously expressed opinions and wishes.
With respects to Iraq and Iran, those paying closest attention to national reporting and political debate with regard to non-existent WMD “threats” (faithfully disseminated in media propaganda) were consistently more likely to think (erroneously) that these countries represented a serious danger to U.S. national security.
Concerning attitudes toward Islam, those getting most of their information about the religion and its adherents from the mass media were most likely to hold a variety of misperceptions regarding Islamic beliefs and culture. Those most reliant on the mass media were the most likely to embrace racist anti-Muslim views.
In relation to health care reform, those paying closest attention to the national reporting and debate were consistently more likely to be confused about such reforms at a time (in 2009 and 2010) when coverage was dominated by propagandistic discourse over non-existent Obama “socialism” and “death panels,” and fictitious “government takeovers” of private care. The most attentive were also the most likely to oppose reform in light of the increasingly reactionary state of media coverage.
With regard to the 2001 tax cuts and the 2009 stimulus, those paying closest attention to the national reporting and debate on these issues were consistently more likely to support the tax cuts and oppose the stimulus during periods when my analysis of media found that support for the tax cuts were high and criticism of the stimulus was growing.
Concerning the Tea Party, those paying closest attention to national reporting and debate were consistently more likely to hold favorable opinions of the group at a time when the mass media was celebrating the group as a “mass movement.” Increasing public support was driven by inaccurate assumptions that the Tea Party was a grassroots rebellion, despite my extensive, year-long national and local research project which suggested the group is largely a top-down, elite out-growth of corporate and Republican interests.
The problem of mass-mediated ignorance is encouraged by journalists’ over-reliance on increasingly reactionary bi-partisan political elites in Washington. These officials set the agenda with regard to what issues will be talked about and how they will be discussed. Public ignorance across the “mainstream” parts of the political spectrum is ignored in the “debate” over whether Fox News viewers are misinformed. Of course Fox viewers display a staggering ignorance; but at the end of the day, that ignorance is not substantively different from that seen among most media consumers.
A more constructive and engaging research agenda would analyze the ways in which the entire media-political system fosters ignorance and misinformation. At a time when both parties are embracing right-wing views, media coverage is increasingly moving to the right and having predictable effects on public attitudes. Mediated ignorance is a cancer afflicting the American populace. That cancer has its roots in the entire political-economic-media system, rather than in its most extreme sectors. We would do well not to exaggerate Fox viewers’ ignorance in light of these findings.
What's Really Going On at the Israeli Institute for Biological Research? Exposing Israel's Most Dangerous Secret By SALEH EL-NAAMI
Drivers will only dart a glance at that mammoth structure nestled in the dunes south of Rishon Litsion southeast of Tel Aviv as they speed on their way. It is forbidden to turn off the Tel Aviv-Rishon Litsion highway onto the side road leading up to that building, which is barricaded by cement walls equipped with state-of-the-art surveillance and warning systems developed by Israel's military industries.
That fortress-like structure is the Israeli Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) where Israel develops its biological and chemical weapons and prepares for any eventuality of biological or chemical warfare. It is the most top-secret military installation in Israel. So tightly is it guarded by military censorship that the Israeli press has to turn to Western sources for scraps of information made available to them, very intermittently, by special contacts inside the institute.
Only once has the Israeli press been given leeway to discuss what goes on behind those high security walls. That was last month when Avisha Klein filed a suit against the IIBR administration for harassment and emotional abuse. A long-term employee at the institute, Klein has served in various positions, one of which was as part of a team to develop an ointment to protect the skin from mustard gas. But this is only one of the many details that have come to light in the course of the proceedings, which have shed considerable light on the nature and scope of the institute's work.
The IIBR is staffed by some 300 scientists and technicians employed in one or more of its many departments, each of which specialises in a specific area of chemical or biological research generally aimed at the production of chemical or biological weaponry. One of these departments, for example, is reported to have developed the poison that was used by the notorious Mossad assassination unit, Kidon, in its botched attempt to eliminate Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshaal in 1997. Nevertheless, if there remains some question over the accuracy of this information, which was reported in Haaretz, no one disputes that the first time the institute's products were used in an assassination operation was in late 1977 when then prime minister Menachem Begin ordered Mossad to eliminate Wadie Haddad.
A leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Haddad was accused by Israel of responsibility for several terrorist operations, the last of which was the hijacking of an Israeli passenger plane en route to Entebbe in 1976. According to a recently published book by the Israeli journalist Aharon Klein, Haddad had a great fondness for Belgian chocolates. Mossad obtained some of these special chocolates, coated them with a slow-acting poison, and had them delivered to Haddad, who was then living in Baghdad, by an Iraqi official who was a Mossad agent and who had struck up a friendship with Haddad. Klein relates that the deadly substance was first developed in the IIBR and that its slow-acting and undetectable properties ensured that the agent and the instrument of death would not be discovered.
And indeed, following a gradual but severe deterioration in his health, Haddad was flown to a hospital in East Germany where he was diagnosed with leukaemia and eventually died on 28 March 1978. It was not until 32 years later that the truth came to light: that the real cause of death was a poison produced by IIBR.
It is not unlikely that Mossad conducted many assassination operations in this way, so as not to leave its fingerprints. In other words, the seemingly accidental deaths of many individuals that Israel regarded as a threat may have actually been caused by substances produced by IIBR. Most likely, the poison that Mossad agents injected into Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh in Dubai in February 2010 came from IIBR.
According to information that has recently come out, the institute contains a department specialising in the production of vaccines against biological weapons. One of the chief focuses of research and development, here, was anthrax, which Israel fears the Arabs and resistance organisations will use against it in a confrontation. The institute also has a department for developing remedies to minimise and counter the effects of chemical weaponry. The whole presents a gruesome picture of a curious chemical and biological race, with the institute virtually competing with itself to produce antidotes to weapons that it, itself, is producing, or that it fears others will use against Israel in an eventual confrontation.
The IIBR works closely and in full coordination with the Israeli army and intelligence, which furnish the institute with their lists of priorities in light of their strategic threat forecasts. For example, information that has come to light during the coverage of Klein's suit reveals that many years ago the Israeli military establishment was concerned that Arab states might use such chemical agents as mustard gas in an potential assault against Israel and, therefore, instructed the institute to develop a chemical substance to minimise the effects of the gas. Not surprisingly, the institute coordinates closely with the Israeli army's medical corps, which receives the antidotes and distributes them to its branches in the military in accordance with demand.
The institute also works closely with Mossad and Shin Bet, the agencies primarily responsible for most of the assassination and liquidation operations against Arab and Muslim targets. Also, since Mossad and the military intelligence unit "Aman" are responsible for gathering enemy intelligence and presumably monitor nonconventional weapons programmes in Arab countries, they would instruct IIBR to develop the necessary biological or chemical responses to these programmes.
However, the IIBR has another purpose on top of developing and producing biological and chemical weapons and antidotes. It is also a major hard currency income-generator. The Hebrew Haaretz website reports: "The institute has received a grant of hundreds of millions of dollars to develop an anthrax vaccine." The grant followed an attack in the US by a home-grown terrorist group that developed a concentrated strain of anthrax spores and delivered them to several individual targets in US; the vaccines that IIBR was commissioned to develop were destined for use in the US.
More importantly, we learn from the website that Israeli soldiers have been used to test the vaccines, causing some permanent physical damage. Reports of the internationally banned use of human guinea pigs raised moral hackles in Israel and sharpened suspicions that the lives of Israeli soldiers had deliberately been put to risk for the sake of financial gain received for promoting the security of another country, namely the US in this case.
The IIBR has a live animals department, where rabbits, pigs, monkeys and other animals are used in experiments. And perhaps human beings as well, judging by the suits soldiers filed against the Israeli Ministry of Defence after they were used in the anthrax experiments. The soldiers demand that they be officially recognised as disabled veterans and receive compensation accordingly. The case remains in the courts, but the IDF, caving into pressure from the families of the soldiers and public opinion, recently announced that it would no longer conduct experiments on soldiers.
It was Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who ordered the construction of the IIBR on the basis of the advice of a number of Jewish scientists. Throughout his rule, from 1948 to 1963 (with the exception of the years 1953-1955 when �Moshe Sharett served as prime minister), Ben-Gurion was directly responsible for the institute and every detail in it. The staff were forbidden to disclose to anyone even the smallest tid-bit of data or information without first obtaining Ben-Gurion's approval. That continued to apply even during that interstice when Sharrit was in power, for when this prime minister visited the institute in 1954 scientists had to apologise for not being able to show him the programmes they were working on at the time.
Although many scientists have taken a turn to direct the IIBR, it is generally believed that the one to have left the greatest imprint is its current director, Avigdor Shafferman. Shafferman, who has been named in Klein's suit, has the reputation of being something of a powerhouse but also being very strict and quick to fire staff members on disciplinary grounds.
Nevertheless, as significant as the details that have come to light in this rare glimpse into the workings of the IIBR may be, little attention has focussed on a larger truth. As the international community hounds a host of countries for pursuing conventional weapons programmes that pale in scale next to Israel's, it refuses to budge an inch to deter Israel, which only encourages Tel Aviv's belligerent and tyrannical behaviour.
That fortress-like structure is the Israeli Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) where Israel develops its biological and chemical weapons and prepares for any eventuality of biological or chemical warfare. It is the most top-secret military installation in Israel. So tightly is it guarded by military censorship that the Israeli press has to turn to Western sources for scraps of information made available to them, very intermittently, by special contacts inside the institute.
Only once has the Israeli press been given leeway to discuss what goes on behind those high security walls. That was last month when Avisha Klein filed a suit against the IIBR administration for harassment and emotional abuse. A long-term employee at the institute, Klein has served in various positions, one of which was as part of a team to develop an ointment to protect the skin from mustard gas. But this is only one of the many details that have come to light in the course of the proceedings, which have shed considerable light on the nature and scope of the institute's work.
The IIBR is staffed by some 300 scientists and technicians employed in one or more of its many departments, each of which specialises in a specific area of chemical or biological research generally aimed at the production of chemical or biological weaponry. One of these departments, for example, is reported to have developed the poison that was used by the notorious Mossad assassination unit, Kidon, in its botched attempt to eliminate Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshaal in 1997. Nevertheless, if there remains some question over the accuracy of this information, which was reported in Haaretz, no one disputes that the first time the institute's products were used in an assassination operation was in late 1977 when then prime minister Menachem Begin ordered Mossad to eliminate Wadie Haddad.
A leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Haddad was accused by Israel of responsibility for several terrorist operations, the last of which was the hijacking of an Israeli passenger plane en route to Entebbe in 1976. According to a recently published book by the Israeli journalist Aharon Klein, Haddad had a great fondness for Belgian chocolates. Mossad obtained some of these special chocolates, coated them with a slow-acting poison, and had them delivered to Haddad, who was then living in Baghdad, by an Iraqi official who was a Mossad agent and who had struck up a friendship with Haddad. Klein relates that the deadly substance was first developed in the IIBR and that its slow-acting and undetectable properties ensured that the agent and the instrument of death would not be discovered.
And indeed, following a gradual but severe deterioration in his health, Haddad was flown to a hospital in East Germany where he was diagnosed with leukaemia and eventually died on 28 March 1978. It was not until 32 years later that the truth came to light: that the real cause of death was a poison produced by IIBR.
It is not unlikely that Mossad conducted many assassination operations in this way, so as not to leave its fingerprints. In other words, the seemingly accidental deaths of many individuals that Israel regarded as a threat may have actually been caused by substances produced by IIBR. Most likely, the poison that Mossad agents injected into Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh in Dubai in February 2010 came from IIBR.
According to information that has recently come out, the institute contains a department specialising in the production of vaccines against biological weapons. One of the chief focuses of research and development, here, was anthrax, which Israel fears the Arabs and resistance organisations will use against it in a confrontation. The institute also has a department for developing remedies to minimise and counter the effects of chemical weaponry. The whole presents a gruesome picture of a curious chemical and biological race, with the institute virtually competing with itself to produce antidotes to weapons that it, itself, is producing, or that it fears others will use against Israel in an eventual confrontation.
The IIBR works closely and in full coordination with the Israeli army and intelligence, which furnish the institute with their lists of priorities in light of their strategic threat forecasts. For example, information that has come to light during the coverage of Klein's suit reveals that many years ago the Israeli military establishment was concerned that Arab states might use such chemical agents as mustard gas in an potential assault against Israel and, therefore, instructed the institute to develop a chemical substance to minimise the effects of the gas. Not surprisingly, the institute coordinates closely with the Israeli army's medical corps, which receives the antidotes and distributes them to its branches in the military in accordance with demand.
The institute also works closely with Mossad and Shin Bet, the agencies primarily responsible for most of the assassination and liquidation operations against Arab and Muslim targets. Also, since Mossad and the military intelligence unit "Aman" are responsible for gathering enemy intelligence and presumably monitor nonconventional weapons programmes in Arab countries, they would instruct IIBR to develop the necessary biological or chemical responses to these programmes.
However, the IIBR has another purpose on top of developing and producing biological and chemical weapons and antidotes. It is also a major hard currency income-generator. The Hebrew Haaretz website reports: "The institute has received a grant of hundreds of millions of dollars to develop an anthrax vaccine." The grant followed an attack in the US by a home-grown terrorist group that developed a concentrated strain of anthrax spores and delivered them to several individual targets in US; the vaccines that IIBR was commissioned to develop were destined for use in the US.
More importantly, we learn from the website that Israeli soldiers have been used to test the vaccines, causing some permanent physical damage. Reports of the internationally banned use of human guinea pigs raised moral hackles in Israel and sharpened suspicions that the lives of Israeli soldiers had deliberately been put to risk for the sake of financial gain received for promoting the security of another country, namely the US in this case.
The IIBR has a live animals department, where rabbits, pigs, monkeys and other animals are used in experiments. And perhaps human beings as well, judging by the suits soldiers filed against the Israeli Ministry of Defence after they were used in the anthrax experiments. The soldiers demand that they be officially recognised as disabled veterans and receive compensation accordingly. The case remains in the courts, but the IDF, caving into pressure from the families of the soldiers and public opinion, recently announced that it would no longer conduct experiments on soldiers.
It was Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who ordered the construction of the IIBR on the basis of the advice of a number of Jewish scientists. Throughout his rule, from 1948 to 1963 (with the exception of the years 1953-1955 when �Moshe Sharett served as prime minister), Ben-Gurion was directly responsible for the institute and every detail in it. The staff were forbidden to disclose to anyone even the smallest tid-bit of data or information without first obtaining Ben-Gurion's approval. That continued to apply even during that interstice when Sharrit was in power, for when this prime minister visited the institute in 1954 scientists had to apologise for not being able to show him the programmes they were working on at the time.
Although many scientists have taken a turn to direct the IIBR, it is generally believed that the one to have left the greatest imprint is its current director, Avigdor Shafferman. Shafferman, who has been named in Klein's suit, has the reputation of being something of a powerhouse but also being very strict and quick to fire staff members on disciplinary grounds.
Nevertheless, as significant as the details that have come to light in this rare glimpse into the workings of the IIBR may be, little attention has focussed on a larger truth. As the international community hounds a host of countries for pursuing conventional weapons programmes that pale in scale next to Israel's, it refuses to budge an inch to deter Israel, which only encourages Tel Aviv's belligerent and tyrannical behaviour.
The War on Immigrants Alabama, Where Intolerance is King By CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI
Now that Alabama has passed what some describe as the harshest anti-immigration law in the country, it is interesting to see how Alabama has improved on the harsh anti-immigration ordinances passed by a small municipality.
In 2006 Hazleton, Pennsylvania passed two ordinances, one with the cheerful title of the "City of Hazleton Illegal Immigration Relief Act Ordinance" (IIRAO) and the other known as the "Rental Registration Ordinance (RRO)." The RRO requires, among other things, that anyone wanting to rent a residential property in Hazleton must first obtain an occupancy permit from the city. Any owner who permits people to occupy rental units without an occupancy permit must pay $1000 for each tenant who lacks the permit plus $100 per day per tenant for each day the tenant lacks a permit. Illegal aliens cannot receive permits.
The IIRAO provides that an employer hiring an illegal immigrant will lose its business license and gives individual employees the right to sue their employer for damages if they are fired when illegal aliens are employed. In 2010 the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit struck down most of the ordinances' provisions. As a result, illegal immigrants who don't mind living in a hostile environment continue to live and work in Hazleton. (That may soon change. On June 6 the U.S. Supreme Court granted a writ of certiorari to Hazleton that had appealed the Third Circuit's decision. The Supreme Court remanded the case to the Third Circuit to reconsider its earlier decision in light of a case decided by the Court in Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting on May 26. By the time the Hazleton case finds its way back to the Supreme Court , Chief Justice Roberts and four of his colleagues may well give the immigrants reason to leave Hazleton.)
Although Hazleton's approaches seemed harsh, Alabama has equaled if not exceeded them in a new law enacted in June. Known as the "Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act", the Alabama legislation includes a number of provisions that Hazleton forgot to include. That is hardly surprising since the Alabama law is 76 pages in length, considerably longer than the Hazleton ordinances. One of its more offensive provisions deals with education.
The Alabama statute requires K-12 schools to determine the legal status of each of its students. This can presumably be done on the first day of school by having the kindergarten teacher begin the day by cheerfully saying to the kindergarteners: "Do we have any illegal aliens with us today?" If no one raises a hand the teacher can go on to other matters. (If a hand is raised the act imposes certain Gestapo like requirements on the school that can be reviewed in Section 28 of the Act. The child may, however, continue as a student. At the college level the rule is different. The Act says an "alien who is not lawfully present in the United States shall not be permitted to enroll in or attend any public postsecondary education institution" in Alabama. That provision will insure that illegal aliens who stay in Alabama undetected will, in addition be uneducated, a condition that may not distinguish them from the legislators who passed the law, and will make it difficult for them to become productive members of society.
As in Hazleton, employers who hire illegal aliens are subject to sanctions that may be enforced by co-workers who are adversely affected by the hiring of the illegal alien. Section 17(a) of the Act says it is a "discriminatory practice for a business entity . . . to fail to hire a job applicant who is a United States citizen. . . . or discharge an employee working in Alabama who is a United States citizen. . . while retaining or hiring an employee who the business entity. . . knows, or reasonably should have known, is an unauthorized alien." An aggrieved person who is not an "unauthorized alien" may sue and is entitled to compensatory relief. This provision offers employment security to the incompetent worker who cannot be discharged if the employer has an illegal alien on the payroll.
In what might be described as an "anti-hitchhiking" provision, the Alabama bill makes it a crime to transport illegal immigrants in vehicles. It says it is a crime to "transport. . .an alien in furtherance of the unlawful presence of the alien in the United States . . . ." Since driving the alien any distance would further the alien's unlawful presence it would be best not to pick up hitchhikers in Alabama. On second thought it may be just as well not to visit Alabama. It is joining Hazleton and many states in trying to return to a time when intolerance was king. The U.S. Supreme Court may well turn out to be its most reliable ally.
CORRECTION: In last week's column I incorrectly stated that Libya hired Goldman Sachs in a fiduciary capacity to invest $1.3 billion. Although that amount was given to Goldman to invest, Libya instructed Goldman what investments to make and the investments were not selected by Goldman.
In 2006 Hazleton, Pennsylvania passed two ordinances, one with the cheerful title of the "City of Hazleton Illegal Immigration Relief Act Ordinance" (IIRAO) and the other known as the "Rental Registration Ordinance (RRO)." The RRO requires, among other things, that anyone wanting to rent a residential property in Hazleton must first obtain an occupancy permit from the city. Any owner who permits people to occupy rental units without an occupancy permit must pay $1000 for each tenant who lacks the permit plus $100 per day per tenant for each day the tenant lacks a permit. Illegal aliens cannot receive permits.
The IIRAO provides that an employer hiring an illegal immigrant will lose its business license and gives individual employees the right to sue their employer for damages if they are fired when illegal aliens are employed. In 2010 the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit struck down most of the ordinances' provisions. As a result, illegal immigrants who don't mind living in a hostile environment continue to live and work in Hazleton. (That may soon change. On June 6 the U.S. Supreme Court granted a writ of certiorari to Hazleton that had appealed the Third Circuit's decision. The Supreme Court remanded the case to the Third Circuit to reconsider its earlier decision in light of a case decided by the Court in Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting on May 26. By the time the Hazleton case finds its way back to the Supreme Court , Chief Justice Roberts and four of his colleagues may well give the immigrants reason to leave Hazleton.)
Although Hazleton's approaches seemed harsh, Alabama has equaled if not exceeded them in a new law enacted in June. Known as the "Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act", the Alabama legislation includes a number of provisions that Hazleton forgot to include. That is hardly surprising since the Alabama law is 76 pages in length, considerably longer than the Hazleton ordinances. One of its more offensive provisions deals with education.
The Alabama statute requires K-12 schools to determine the legal status of each of its students. This can presumably be done on the first day of school by having the kindergarten teacher begin the day by cheerfully saying to the kindergarteners: "Do we have any illegal aliens with us today?" If no one raises a hand the teacher can go on to other matters. (If a hand is raised the act imposes certain Gestapo like requirements on the school that can be reviewed in Section 28 of the Act. The child may, however, continue as a student. At the college level the rule is different. The Act says an "alien who is not lawfully present in the United States shall not be permitted to enroll in or attend any public postsecondary education institution" in Alabama. That provision will insure that illegal aliens who stay in Alabama undetected will, in addition be uneducated, a condition that may not distinguish them from the legislators who passed the law, and will make it difficult for them to become productive members of society.
As in Hazleton, employers who hire illegal aliens are subject to sanctions that may be enforced by co-workers who are adversely affected by the hiring of the illegal alien. Section 17(a) of the Act says it is a "discriminatory practice for a business entity . . . to fail to hire a job applicant who is a United States citizen. . . . or discharge an employee working in Alabama who is a United States citizen. . . while retaining or hiring an employee who the business entity. . . knows, or reasonably should have known, is an unauthorized alien." An aggrieved person who is not an "unauthorized alien" may sue and is entitled to compensatory relief. This provision offers employment security to the incompetent worker who cannot be discharged if the employer has an illegal alien on the payroll.
In what might be described as an "anti-hitchhiking" provision, the Alabama bill makes it a crime to transport illegal immigrants in vehicles. It says it is a crime to "transport. . .an alien in furtherance of the unlawful presence of the alien in the United States . . . ." Since driving the alien any distance would further the alien's unlawful presence it would be best not to pick up hitchhikers in Alabama. On second thought it may be just as well not to visit Alabama. It is joining Hazleton and many states in trying to return to a time when intolerance was king. The U.S. Supreme Court may well turn out to be its most reliable ally.
CORRECTION: In last week's column I incorrectly stated that Libya hired Goldman Sachs in a fiduciary capacity to invest $1.3 billion. Although that amount was given to Goldman to invest, Libya instructed Goldman what investments to make and the investments were not selected by Goldman.
The Lessons of the Bonus Army America's Tahrir Square By DAVID ROSEN
The world is watching in stunned amazement as the Arab Spring plays out. People in one nation after another in North Africa and the Middle East have taken up the tactic of nonviolent, mass popular assembly to shame political leaders into addressing outstanding grivences.
The mass nonviolent assemblies that marked the earliest stage of the Arab Spring uprisings have been taken up by an increasing number of Europeans contesting the intensifying austerity programs being imposed on them. Tens of thousands of working people have come out in strikes, protests and rallies in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain. These demonstrations signal mounting popular opposition to the budget-slashing, tax-increasing, pension-cutting austerity plans European governments are imposing to placate finance capital.
With the exception of the popular rallies held in Madison and a handful of other cities earlier this spring, Americans have been noticeably quiet in the face of the imposition of austerity. Reactions to higher unemployment rates, mounting debt and growing foreclosures have yet to find a political voice.
Nevertheless, Americans have a long tradition of popular assembly to protest perceived grivences. However uninformed Sarah Palin might be, Tea Party activists never fail to remind their fellow Americans that the country was founded on campaigns of popular protest. Sadly, these "activists" don't recognize the nonviolent rallies, demonstations and protetsts of the 1960s are part of the nation's legacy of popular redress of grievances.
Nonviolent assembly was only part of the '60s uprisings that included far more violent urban riots in Detroit, Newark and other cities. Tea Party activities run from the June 1969 New York Stonewall riot that kicked-started the modern gay rights movement. Tea Party activists fail to acknowledge that the call for freedom finds new expressions with each historical era.
However, the rebellions of the '60s and many, many other popular actions draw upon the legacy of the all-but-forgotten Bonus Army assembly and riot that took place in Washington, DC, in the summer of 1932. This event suggests a very likely senario by which the U.S. government will act if mass demonstrations spread to the U.S. As the Great Recession drifts deeper into a possible replay of the Great Depression, watch out for police and military actions to repress militant mass mobilizations.
* * *
The powers-that-be in the various North African and Middle East countries that witnessed or are witnessing popular uprisings have responsed in very different ways. They have ranged from the surprising acceptance of the legitmacy of political opposition to the outright slaughter of demonstators.
The most remarkable responses to mass, nonviolent civil actions occurred in Tunisia and Egypt. In these cases, the military refused to fire on the assembled populus, thus unofficially supporting the agenda for social change.
Having learned the lessons from Tunisia and Egypt, the governments of Algiera, Jordan and Morocco moved quickly to use selective violence by police and/or military forces to suppress popular demontrations. Things escalated in Bahrain, where a violent crackdown by state forces responded to popular demonstrations ending with the entry of Saudi troops to putdown the uprising.
A further escalation in state-sanctioned repression of popular actions is taking place in Syria and Yemen. Local authorities are using the military and riot police to quash these initiatives, leading to mass arrests, injuries and killings of protesters.
The civil war in Libya represents the end-point in state reactions to popular protest. Following the popular uprising that gained control of the country's second-largest city, Benghazi, the government of Colonel al-Gaddafi deployed state elite military forces and foreign mercenaries in an attempt to put down the uprising. However, the intervention of U.S. and NATO air forces and on-the-ground "advisors" turned the uprising into an all-out civil war that will probably not end until Gaddafi is killed or forced to flee.
America's history of social protest reflects attributes of many of the responses playing out in North Africa and Europe. Over the last 40 years, a handful of representative popular actions suggest the range of options the state employes to deal with popular assembly.
Major nonviolent gatherings draw little police violence. The August 1963 March on Washington drew 250,000 people to hear, among many others, Martin Luther King delivered his legendary "I have a dream" speech; little violence was reported. Similarly, in October 1967, 70,000 rallied in Washington, D.C. to protest the Vietnam War, with little violence; in '68, a follow-up rally grew to a half-million people. In May 1968, a month after King's assassination, the SCLC's Poor People's Campaign organized "Resurrection City" in Washington that drew thousands of people; it closed after two weeks and its goal, an economic bill of rights, was not enacted.
Forgotten today but not unlike the sparks of self-immolation that set off the Arab Spring, Norman Morrison, a Quaker activist, set himself afire in 1965 protesting the Vietnam war.
The nonviolent demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic party convention were greeted by a riot by the Chicago police. And then there was the June 1969 Stonewall raids that led to a police riot by New York's finest. However, the urban riots in late '60s in Detroit, Newark and other cities led to armed Nation Guard combatants to kill many citizens and occupy cities.
* * *
Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur and George Patton were three U.S. generals who led major military campaigns during World War II and who have come to symbolize the nation's global prowess. Eisenhower commanded the Normandy invasion and was the 34th president; MacArthur oversaw the war in the Pacific and was the Supreme Commander of the occupation of Japan; and Patton's heroics inspired Stanley Kubrick's 1970 movie that starred George C. Scott.
Forgotten by mainstream history, these generals got their strips commanding a U.S. military campaign against World War I veterans and their families in Washington, DC, during the summer of 1932.
In 1924, Congress approved a bonus for veterans, but did not authorized the expenditure of funds. As the Depression deepened and unemployment mounted, a growing movement of veterans, calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, demanded payment. In May, the first wave of veterans, their families and many unemployed supporters descended on Washington, setting up a Hooverville camp at the Anacostia Flats across from the Capitol and demanding their bonuses. In time, some 43,000 people assembled, included 17,000 veterans.
Under mounting pressure, the House enacted a bonus payment plan only to have the Senate reject it. This set the stage for a showdown on July 28th pitting unarmed vets and their supporters against Gen. MacArthur's 600 armed troops, horse-mounted cavelry (with Patton leading the charge) and even a half-dozen tanks. After an initial confrontation at the Capitol, President Herbert Hoover ordered the military offensive halted.
MacArthur refused the President's order, claiming Communists were behind the vets campaign. He drove the assembled vets at the Capitol and attacked their encampments. While no guns were fired, the military used bayonetted rifles and gas grenades to disperse the vets, arresting 135 people and injuring hundreds. According to the New York Times, "Flames rose high over the desolate Anacostia flats at midnight tonight, and a pitiful stream of refugee veterans of the World War walked out of their home of the past two months, going they knew not where."
(Writing much later, Eisenhower, who served as MacArthur's junior aide, claims he advised his boss: "I told that dumb son-of-a-bitch not to go down there. … I told him it was no place for the Chief of Staff.")
In the wake of the assault on the Bonus Marchers, vets and their supporters scattered, defeated. However, public reaction to Hoover's backing of MacArthur's assault increased as news reports and newsreels got the story out. The incident contributed to Franklin Roosevelt's election that fall.
* * *
H. Rap Brown once famous noted, "Violence is American as apple pie." As the Great Recession deepens into a possible second Great Depression, mass popular demonstrations may begin in take place throughout the country. These mobilization might link today's vets (who are terribly underserved by the government) with the unemployed, the poor, the foreclosed and others. If enraged, these activists may follow the models pioneered in the Arab Spring and now being picked up in many European countries to challenge the policies of imposed austerity.
As we acknowledge the 79th anniversary of the Bonus March, we should not forget how truly violent things can get, especially how federal troops can be used against American people.
The mass nonviolent assemblies that marked the earliest stage of the Arab Spring uprisings have been taken up by an increasing number of Europeans contesting the intensifying austerity programs being imposed on them. Tens of thousands of working people have come out in strikes, protests and rallies in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain. These demonstrations signal mounting popular opposition to the budget-slashing, tax-increasing, pension-cutting austerity plans European governments are imposing to placate finance capital.
With the exception of the popular rallies held in Madison and a handful of other cities earlier this spring, Americans have been noticeably quiet in the face of the imposition of austerity. Reactions to higher unemployment rates, mounting debt and growing foreclosures have yet to find a political voice.
Nevertheless, Americans have a long tradition of popular assembly to protest perceived grivences. However uninformed Sarah Palin might be, Tea Party activists never fail to remind their fellow Americans that the country was founded on campaigns of popular protest. Sadly, these "activists" don't recognize the nonviolent rallies, demonstations and protetsts of the 1960s are part of the nation's legacy of popular redress of grievances.
Nonviolent assembly was only part of the '60s uprisings that included far more violent urban riots in Detroit, Newark and other cities. Tea Party activities run from the June 1969 New York Stonewall riot that kicked-started the modern gay rights movement. Tea Party activists fail to acknowledge that the call for freedom finds new expressions with each historical era.
However, the rebellions of the '60s and many, many other popular actions draw upon the legacy of the all-but-forgotten Bonus Army assembly and riot that took place in Washington, DC, in the summer of 1932. This event suggests a very likely senario by which the U.S. government will act if mass demonstrations spread to the U.S. As the Great Recession drifts deeper into a possible replay of the Great Depression, watch out for police and military actions to repress militant mass mobilizations.
* * *
The powers-that-be in the various North African and Middle East countries that witnessed or are witnessing popular uprisings have responsed in very different ways. They have ranged from the surprising acceptance of the legitmacy of political opposition to the outright slaughter of demonstators.
The most remarkable responses to mass, nonviolent civil actions occurred in Tunisia and Egypt. In these cases, the military refused to fire on the assembled populus, thus unofficially supporting the agenda for social change.
Having learned the lessons from Tunisia and Egypt, the governments of Algiera, Jordan and Morocco moved quickly to use selective violence by police and/or military forces to suppress popular demontrations. Things escalated in Bahrain, where a violent crackdown by state forces responded to popular demonstrations ending with the entry of Saudi troops to putdown the uprising.
A further escalation in state-sanctioned repression of popular actions is taking place in Syria and Yemen. Local authorities are using the military and riot police to quash these initiatives, leading to mass arrests, injuries and killings of protesters.
The civil war in Libya represents the end-point in state reactions to popular protest. Following the popular uprising that gained control of the country's second-largest city, Benghazi, the government of Colonel al-Gaddafi deployed state elite military forces and foreign mercenaries in an attempt to put down the uprising. However, the intervention of U.S. and NATO air forces and on-the-ground "advisors" turned the uprising into an all-out civil war that will probably not end until Gaddafi is killed or forced to flee.
America's history of social protest reflects attributes of many of the responses playing out in North Africa and Europe. Over the last 40 years, a handful of representative popular actions suggest the range of options the state employes to deal with popular assembly.
Major nonviolent gatherings draw little police violence. The August 1963 March on Washington drew 250,000 people to hear, among many others, Martin Luther King delivered his legendary "I have a dream" speech; little violence was reported. Similarly, in October 1967, 70,000 rallied in Washington, D.C. to protest the Vietnam War, with little violence; in '68, a follow-up rally grew to a half-million people. In May 1968, a month after King's assassination, the SCLC's Poor People's Campaign organized "Resurrection City" in Washington that drew thousands of people; it closed after two weeks and its goal, an economic bill of rights, was not enacted.
Forgotten today but not unlike the sparks of self-immolation that set off the Arab Spring, Norman Morrison, a Quaker activist, set himself afire in 1965 protesting the Vietnam war.
The nonviolent demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic party convention were greeted by a riot by the Chicago police. And then there was the June 1969 Stonewall raids that led to a police riot by New York's finest. However, the urban riots in late '60s in Detroit, Newark and other cities led to armed Nation Guard combatants to kill many citizens and occupy cities.
* * *
Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur and George Patton were three U.S. generals who led major military campaigns during World War II and who have come to symbolize the nation's global prowess. Eisenhower commanded the Normandy invasion and was the 34th president; MacArthur oversaw the war in the Pacific and was the Supreme Commander of the occupation of Japan; and Patton's heroics inspired Stanley Kubrick's 1970 movie that starred George C. Scott.
Forgotten by mainstream history, these generals got their strips commanding a U.S. military campaign against World War I veterans and their families in Washington, DC, during the summer of 1932.
In 1924, Congress approved a bonus for veterans, but did not authorized the expenditure of funds. As the Depression deepened and unemployment mounted, a growing movement of veterans, calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, demanded payment. In May, the first wave of veterans, their families and many unemployed supporters descended on Washington, setting up a Hooverville camp at the Anacostia Flats across from the Capitol and demanding their bonuses. In time, some 43,000 people assembled, included 17,000 veterans.
Under mounting pressure, the House enacted a bonus payment plan only to have the Senate reject it. This set the stage for a showdown on July 28th pitting unarmed vets and their supporters against Gen. MacArthur's 600 armed troops, horse-mounted cavelry (with Patton leading the charge) and even a half-dozen tanks. After an initial confrontation at the Capitol, President Herbert Hoover ordered the military offensive halted.
MacArthur refused the President's order, claiming Communists were behind the vets campaign. He drove the assembled vets at the Capitol and attacked their encampments. While no guns were fired, the military used bayonetted rifles and gas grenades to disperse the vets, arresting 135 people and injuring hundreds. According to the New York Times, "Flames rose high over the desolate Anacostia flats at midnight tonight, and a pitiful stream of refugee veterans of the World War walked out of their home of the past two months, going they knew not where."
(Writing much later, Eisenhower, who served as MacArthur's junior aide, claims he advised his boss: "I told that dumb son-of-a-bitch not to go down there. … I told him it was no place for the Chief of Staff.")
In the wake of the assault on the Bonus Marchers, vets and their supporters scattered, defeated. However, public reaction to Hoover's backing of MacArthur's assault increased as news reports and newsreels got the story out. The incident contributed to Franklin Roosevelt's election that fall.
* * *
H. Rap Brown once famous noted, "Violence is American as apple pie." As the Great Recession deepens into a possible second Great Depression, mass popular demonstrations may begin in take place throughout the country. These mobilization might link today's vets (who are terribly underserved by the government) with the unemployed, the poor, the foreclosed and others. If enraged, these activists may follow the models pioneered in the Arab Spring and now being picked up in many European countries to challenge the policies of imposed austerity.
As we acknowledge the 79th anniversary of the Bonus March, we should not forget how truly violent things can get, especially how federal troops can be used against American people.
Obama's Presumptions About Palestinians Writing Our Own Stories By SUSAN ABULHAWA
Anger was my first reaction after listening to US president Barack Obama's two recent speeches, one to the world and another to AIPAC, the powerful Israeli lobby in the US. I went around to my friends with questions like "who does he think he is, presuming to tell Palestinians how they may or may not achieve freedom," or "what makes him think his vision for Palestinian dignity actually trumps the vision of Palestinians themselves," or "how dare he talk to us like a parent chastising a small child," or "when will we have a president who can and will tell the truth," or "I think AIPAC wrote his speech for him."
My friends are used to hearing impassioned political commentary from me. The ones close to me always advise me to let the anger dissipate before I write anything so that what I put into words is coming from a clear head. That's where I am now -- no anger, calm and clear-headed. And here is my reaction.
Who does Obama think he is, presuming to tell Palestinians how they may or may not achieve freedom? What makes Obama think his vision for the future of Palestine, indeed vision for the Arab world, trumps the vision of Palestinians or Arabs for themselves? How dare he talk to Palestinians like we're his bad little children in need of (his) parental direction? And will the US ever have a president capable of speaking frankly and truthfully? Because he has just put Israeli propaganda in his own voice for the world.
After paying lip service to the Arab Spring, Obama outlined how he plans to help -- read manipulate -- the new governments, and then he launched into the "cornerstone" of his vision, which pertains to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, although he referred to it as "the conflict between Israelis and Arabs." That wording is important. It is the obfuscating verbiage that Israel has employed for years in order to lump Palestinians into miscellaneous Arabs, instead of a distinct people native to the Holy Land, being wiped away and swept into other Arab lands. The president dutifully spewed Israeli diplomatic speak or hasbara. And that was just the first sentence on the subject.
In the second sentence, he managed to present Israelis as poor victims living in constant fear for the lives of their children and in pain because, according to Obama, Palestinians teach their children to hate them. Again, here the president is regurgitating the racist Israeli hasbara that contradicts the most basic facts of this conflict. In fact, over 100 Palestinian children have been killed for every Israeli child. Thousands of Palestinian children have been maimed for a single injured Israeli. Prisons in that land have been filled with Palestinian children, not Israelis.
The thousands of school children cut off from their schools and teachers are Palestinian children, not Israeli. The bombed, destroyed homes and schools belonged to Palestinians, not Israelis. The ones who have to watch their mothers, fathers, grandparents and siblings humiliated, beaten and systematically terrorised are Palestinian children, not Israeli. In more than 60 years, it has been Palestinians who have not known a single day of security or peace. And yet, Obama's sympathy is with the Israelis because a few Palestinians have committed acts to make Israelis pay a price for their colonial project that steals the Palestinian people's heritage, inheritance and history.
That wretched sentence was followed by a condescending attempt to describe what it has meant to us Palestinians to have our hearts wrenched from our bodies. Obama said it has been "humiliating" for us. Really? Tell that to my grandmother (and thousands like her) who died in a bug-infested shack so more Jews from Brooklyn could come and take her home and destroy the graves of her ancestors. And even in that reluctant reference to our humanity, Obama manages to insert another bit of Israeli hasbara by adding that our humiliation also stems from "never living in a nation of [our] own."
Despite my initial reaction, I have to smile at this statement, because no one can say or do anything to alter the fact that Palestinian families, including my own, have been rooted in that land for centuries and millennia. That's a claim that no Jewish man or woman from Eastern Europe, like Netanyahu, Tzipi Livni and other Israeli leaders, can ever make. Those Israelis came to Palestine, changed their names and said they had returned home. Then they proceeded to destroy and expel the indigenous population.
They have not only stolen our land, but they have also stolen our story, for it is the Palestinians who are the natural inhabitants of that land and who have descended from its various tribes throughout time, including the Hebrew tribes. But maybe Obama's sympathies stem from America's own history, since the early settlers did the same to the Native Americans. But that's as shameful a history as slavery. Or maybe Obama is just a politician who doesn't have what it takes to be a leader and cannot speak beyond the limits of his own narrow self-interest, even if it means upholding the shameful logic of inherent entitlement that underpins the state of Israel.
No matter. He managed to write himself out of history in that speech, of which I've only touched on three sentences. The next sentence was pure hypocrisy. He said, "we support a set of universal rights. Those rights include free speech; the freedom of peaceful assembly; freedom of religion; and equality for men and women under the rule of law." For the record, every one of those rights is denied to Palestinians by Israel. Palestinian Muslims and Christians in Ramallah, for example, cannot travel the 15 minutes it would take to get to Jerusalem to pray. I also note that Obama said nothing of equality between Jews and non-Jews, the opposite of which is enshrined in the very foundation of the state of Israel.
That's barely a paragraph from Obama's abominable speech. It's hasbara and the pandering quotients only got worse in the version he delivered to AIPAC. However, we need not despair, and we need not fear. It might not be so obvious right now, but Israel is a sinking ship, because as history has taught us over and over again, regimes that seek to create a "pure race" -- with whatever twisted ideas of purity -- do not last. Oppression has a short shelf life, as brave Arab men and women are demonstrating to the world, one Arab nation at a time.
When David Grun and Gold Mabovitch came from Poland and the former Russian Empire, they changed their names to David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir, committed massacres, and drove out the native people. Ben Gurion predicted that the Palestinians, now refugees, would disappear as "the old will die and the young will forget." They told a story of "a land without a people for a people without a land." Meir tried to convince the world that the Palestinians were not even real when she declared to the world that "Palestinians do not exist."
When we finally fought back, they spoke for us and told a story of a depraved, violent and irrational people. They controlled the dominant narrative, presuming not only to speak for us, but also for God. Golda Meir once said that Israel "exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy." In this narrative, God became a real-estate agent and the Bible a property deal. It was an alluring, albeit absurd, narrative, and the world bought it. But amongst themselves, Israelis understood its miscalculation, which came in a candid admission from Judah Magnes years later when he said "we seem to have thought of everything... except the Arabs."
Today, in the halls of power in both the US and Israel, many people are ironically echoing those words decades after they were uttered by Magnes because the orientalist assessment of the native population does not encompass their aspirations for freedom or their willingness to fight for basic human dignity. The mistake of the United States, of Israel, and of the client Arab rulers was to believe that we are backward, unrefined, uncivilised, fearful and easily controlled by force.
In truth, the greatest and most successful weapon used against the Palestinians has not been Israeli tanks, airplanes, guns and soldiers; it has not been their checkpoints, walls, fences, or settlements; it has not even been their powerful propaganda machine that suffuses nearly all mainstream western media outlets; nor has it been their near complete control of the US Congress or successive US administrations.
Instead, the greatest weapon Israel has used against us has been our own minds. They succeeded, for a while at least, in making us believe ourselves small and powerless and that they are bigger than we are. Their greatest weapon has been their ability to make us believe that we need their permission to live with dignity; that we need their blessing and the blessing of the US to achieve freedom; that our lives depend on currying favour with them; that we must negotiate for the right to live in our own homes, inherit our own heritage, and live with the human rights that are accorded along with the rest of humanity.
Their great weapon has been to make us believe that we must give everything we have, everything dear to us, so that they will stop oppressing us and leave us a pittance and the crumbs of what is already rightfully ours. Perhaps, in their despair and shock, our parents and grandparents bought into this; but no more. Ben Gurion could not have been more wrong. The young have not forgotten, and they are tearing away at these untruths that have kept us chained.
First, Tunisians, ordinary citizens, together took down their ruthless leader, followed by Egyptians, who managed to dismantle a regime that seemed unmovable and all-powerful. In doing so, they destroyed the façade of power. They broke the greatest weapons against us and helped restore our belief in ourselves. Our brothers and sisters in Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and beyond are now waging their lives en masse to confront and dismantle long-standing injustices, as Palestinians have been doing for decades.
The politics and issues might differ from one country to the next, but a common narrative runs through them all. It is simply that we are ancient societies with splendid histories and cultures. We are also a people that have been maligned, dehumanised and oppressed by various mechanisms, a people whose voice has been muted and whose story has been told by others, a people who are finally demanding to speak in their own voices, to tell their own story, to define themselves for the world, and to hold the reins of their own destiny.
In that context, it doesn't matter what Obama says to AIPAC or to the world. His vision does not matter and nor does Netanyahu's. Egyptians did not need America's permission to act. They didn't need Israel's either. They needed only their own resolve and fortitude; and they also needed the eyes and solidarity of the ordinary people of the world. That's all we as Palestinians need in order to demand and claim our place among humanity as a people deserving of human rights that are afforded to the rest of the world. We do not need the US or Israel to give us these rights. We were born with them. We don't need to negotiate for them, because they're non-negotiable.
We are a people who stand firmly on moral ground, demanding basic human rights and freedom. Let them say or do what they will. Ours is a demand for inclusion, while theirs is for exclusion. Ours is for the diverse, multi-religious society that Palestine had always been before the declaration of the state of Israel. Theirs is a Jewish-only country. Ours involves equality under the law regardless of religion, while theirs is a demand for privilege and entitlement only for those belonging to the Jewish religion. Ours is a claim based on history, heritage, law, and personal lineage; theirs is a claim based on an omnipotent landlord. Ours is for justice. Theirs is for power.
But Israel's power exists only at the narrow corrupted top where the Obamas and Mubaraks of the world dwell. It's the power of weapons and brute force. Our power is on the wide expansive ground, where the call for justice swells all over the world. It's the space of human solidarity and moral conscience that fights the good fight for freedom and dignity, regardless of religion or race. That's where we are, and here the emperor's speeches are irrelevant.
The Palestinians have not forgotten, nor will we. We carry our homes, our stories and our wounds in our skin and give birth to them all over again with every new generation. Just as Jews cannot forget the Shoah, so Palestinians cannot forget the Nakba, the Naksa, and the ongoing ethnic cleansing taking place. More importantly, we know who we are and where we come from. That is where we're headed and we will make it home, thanks to our resolve and thanks to the solidarity of individuals and organisations all over the world. And when we are finally home, we will remember the solidarity shown to Palestine here and everywhere.
Israel should not see this as a threat, and Israelis should not fear true democracy. Israel has a chance to heed the calls of their brave young people who refuse to be the brutalizers it wants them to be -- the ones who refuse to serve in the military, the ones breaking the silence, or the ones boycotting their own illegal settlements. They are the conscience of Israel. These young people are Israel's redemption. Because the day will come when the racist Israeli system that measures human worth by religion will crumble. The day will come when military force is not enough to stop people from pouring into the streets to march for justice; and a critical mass all over the world will say enough.
Israel exists amidst a great body of Arabs and amidst very old civilisations where historically Jews thrived. Whether in the Middle East, North Africa, or Spain, Jews found strength, protection, home and opportunity under Muslim rule before Israel was established. Israel's best hope is to work to restore that solidarity. To find a way to the understanding that we are not children of a lesser God whom they can destroy and oppress at will.
My friends are used to hearing impassioned political commentary from me. The ones close to me always advise me to let the anger dissipate before I write anything so that what I put into words is coming from a clear head. That's where I am now -- no anger, calm and clear-headed. And here is my reaction.
Who does Obama think he is, presuming to tell Palestinians how they may or may not achieve freedom? What makes Obama think his vision for the future of Palestine, indeed vision for the Arab world, trumps the vision of Palestinians or Arabs for themselves? How dare he talk to Palestinians like we're his bad little children in need of (his) parental direction? And will the US ever have a president capable of speaking frankly and truthfully? Because he has just put Israeli propaganda in his own voice for the world.
After paying lip service to the Arab Spring, Obama outlined how he plans to help -- read manipulate -- the new governments, and then he launched into the "cornerstone" of his vision, which pertains to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, although he referred to it as "the conflict between Israelis and Arabs." That wording is important. It is the obfuscating verbiage that Israel has employed for years in order to lump Palestinians into miscellaneous Arabs, instead of a distinct people native to the Holy Land, being wiped away and swept into other Arab lands. The president dutifully spewed Israeli diplomatic speak or hasbara. And that was just the first sentence on the subject.
In the second sentence, he managed to present Israelis as poor victims living in constant fear for the lives of their children and in pain because, according to Obama, Palestinians teach their children to hate them. Again, here the president is regurgitating the racist Israeli hasbara that contradicts the most basic facts of this conflict. In fact, over 100 Palestinian children have been killed for every Israeli child. Thousands of Palestinian children have been maimed for a single injured Israeli. Prisons in that land have been filled with Palestinian children, not Israelis.
The thousands of school children cut off from their schools and teachers are Palestinian children, not Israeli. The bombed, destroyed homes and schools belonged to Palestinians, not Israelis. The ones who have to watch their mothers, fathers, grandparents and siblings humiliated, beaten and systematically terrorised are Palestinian children, not Israeli. In more than 60 years, it has been Palestinians who have not known a single day of security or peace. And yet, Obama's sympathy is with the Israelis because a few Palestinians have committed acts to make Israelis pay a price for their colonial project that steals the Palestinian people's heritage, inheritance and history.
That wretched sentence was followed by a condescending attempt to describe what it has meant to us Palestinians to have our hearts wrenched from our bodies. Obama said it has been "humiliating" for us. Really? Tell that to my grandmother (and thousands like her) who died in a bug-infested shack so more Jews from Brooklyn could come and take her home and destroy the graves of her ancestors. And even in that reluctant reference to our humanity, Obama manages to insert another bit of Israeli hasbara by adding that our humiliation also stems from "never living in a nation of [our] own."
Despite my initial reaction, I have to smile at this statement, because no one can say or do anything to alter the fact that Palestinian families, including my own, have been rooted in that land for centuries and millennia. That's a claim that no Jewish man or woman from Eastern Europe, like Netanyahu, Tzipi Livni and other Israeli leaders, can ever make. Those Israelis came to Palestine, changed their names and said they had returned home. Then they proceeded to destroy and expel the indigenous population.
They have not only stolen our land, but they have also stolen our story, for it is the Palestinians who are the natural inhabitants of that land and who have descended from its various tribes throughout time, including the Hebrew tribes. But maybe Obama's sympathies stem from America's own history, since the early settlers did the same to the Native Americans. But that's as shameful a history as slavery. Or maybe Obama is just a politician who doesn't have what it takes to be a leader and cannot speak beyond the limits of his own narrow self-interest, even if it means upholding the shameful logic of inherent entitlement that underpins the state of Israel.
No matter. He managed to write himself out of history in that speech, of which I've only touched on three sentences. The next sentence was pure hypocrisy. He said, "we support a set of universal rights. Those rights include free speech; the freedom of peaceful assembly; freedom of religion; and equality for men and women under the rule of law." For the record, every one of those rights is denied to Palestinians by Israel. Palestinian Muslims and Christians in Ramallah, for example, cannot travel the 15 minutes it would take to get to Jerusalem to pray. I also note that Obama said nothing of equality between Jews and non-Jews, the opposite of which is enshrined in the very foundation of the state of Israel.
That's barely a paragraph from Obama's abominable speech. It's hasbara and the pandering quotients only got worse in the version he delivered to AIPAC. However, we need not despair, and we need not fear. It might not be so obvious right now, but Israel is a sinking ship, because as history has taught us over and over again, regimes that seek to create a "pure race" -- with whatever twisted ideas of purity -- do not last. Oppression has a short shelf life, as brave Arab men and women are demonstrating to the world, one Arab nation at a time.
When David Grun and Gold Mabovitch came from Poland and the former Russian Empire, they changed their names to David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir, committed massacres, and drove out the native people. Ben Gurion predicted that the Palestinians, now refugees, would disappear as "the old will die and the young will forget." They told a story of "a land without a people for a people without a land." Meir tried to convince the world that the Palestinians were not even real when she declared to the world that "Palestinians do not exist."
When we finally fought back, they spoke for us and told a story of a depraved, violent and irrational people. They controlled the dominant narrative, presuming not only to speak for us, but also for God. Golda Meir once said that Israel "exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy." In this narrative, God became a real-estate agent and the Bible a property deal. It was an alluring, albeit absurd, narrative, and the world bought it. But amongst themselves, Israelis understood its miscalculation, which came in a candid admission from Judah Magnes years later when he said "we seem to have thought of everything... except the Arabs."
Today, in the halls of power in both the US and Israel, many people are ironically echoing those words decades after they were uttered by Magnes because the orientalist assessment of the native population does not encompass their aspirations for freedom or their willingness to fight for basic human dignity. The mistake of the United States, of Israel, and of the client Arab rulers was to believe that we are backward, unrefined, uncivilised, fearful and easily controlled by force.
In truth, the greatest and most successful weapon used against the Palestinians has not been Israeli tanks, airplanes, guns and soldiers; it has not been their checkpoints, walls, fences, or settlements; it has not even been their powerful propaganda machine that suffuses nearly all mainstream western media outlets; nor has it been their near complete control of the US Congress or successive US administrations.
Instead, the greatest weapon Israel has used against us has been our own minds. They succeeded, for a while at least, in making us believe ourselves small and powerless and that they are bigger than we are. Their greatest weapon has been their ability to make us believe that we need their permission to live with dignity; that we need their blessing and the blessing of the US to achieve freedom; that our lives depend on currying favour with them; that we must negotiate for the right to live in our own homes, inherit our own heritage, and live with the human rights that are accorded along with the rest of humanity.
Their great weapon has been to make us believe that we must give everything we have, everything dear to us, so that they will stop oppressing us and leave us a pittance and the crumbs of what is already rightfully ours. Perhaps, in their despair and shock, our parents and grandparents bought into this; but no more. Ben Gurion could not have been more wrong. The young have not forgotten, and they are tearing away at these untruths that have kept us chained.
First, Tunisians, ordinary citizens, together took down their ruthless leader, followed by Egyptians, who managed to dismantle a regime that seemed unmovable and all-powerful. In doing so, they destroyed the façade of power. They broke the greatest weapons against us and helped restore our belief in ourselves. Our brothers and sisters in Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and beyond are now waging their lives en masse to confront and dismantle long-standing injustices, as Palestinians have been doing for decades.
The politics and issues might differ from one country to the next, but a common narrative runs through them all. It is simply that we are ancient societies with splendid histories and cultures. We are also a people that have been maligned, dehumanised and oppressed by various mechanisms, a people whose voice has been muted and whose story has been told by others, a people who are finally demanding to speak in their own voices, to tell their own story, to define themselves for the world, and to hold the reins of their own destiny.
In that context, it doesn't matter what Obama says to AIPAC or to the world. His vision does not matter and nor does Netanyahu's. Egyptians did not need America's permission to act. They didn't need Israel's either. They needed only their own resolve and fortitude; and they also needed the eyes and solidarity of the ordinary people of the world. That's all we as Palestinians need in order to demand and claim our place among humanity as a people deserving of human rights that are afforded to the rest of the world. We do not need the US or Israel to give us these rights. We were born with them. We don't need to negotiate for them, because they're non-negotiable.
We are a people who stand firmly on moral ground, demanding basic human rights and freedom. Let them say or do what they will. Ours is a demand for inclusion, while theirs is for exclusion. Ours is for the diverse, multi-religious society that Palestine had always been before the declaration of the state of Israel. Theirs is a Jewish-only country. Ours involves equality under the law regardless of religion, while theirs is a demand for privilege and entitlement only for those belonging to the Jewish religion. Ours is a claim based on history, heritage, law, and personal lineage; theirs is a claim based on an omnipotent landlord. Ours is for justice. Theirs is for power.
But Israel's power exists only at the narrow corrupted top where the Obamas and Mubaraks of the world dwell. It's the power of weapons and brute force. Our power is on the wide expansive ground, where the call for justice swells all over the world. It's the space of human solidarity and moral conscience that fights the good fight for freedom and dignity, regardless of religion or race. That's where we are, and here the emperor's speeches are irrelevant.
The Palestinians have not forgotten, nor will we. We carry our homes, our stories and our wounds in our skin and give birth to them all over again with every new generation. Just as Jews cannot forget the Shoah, so Palestinians cannot forget the Nakba, the Naksa, and the ongoing ethnic cleansing taking place. More importantly, we know who we are and where we come from. That is where we're headed and we will make it home, thanks to our resolve and thanks to the solidarity of individuals and organisations all over the world. And when we are finally home, we will remember the solidarity shown to Palestine here and everywhere.
Israel should not see this as a threat, and Israelis should not fear true democracy. Israel has a chance to heed the calls of their brave young people who refuse to be the brutalizers it wants them to be -- the ones who refuse to serve in the military, the ones breaking the silence, or the ones boycotting their own illegal settlements. They are the conscience of Israel. These young people are Israel's redemption. Because the day will come when the racist Israeli system that measures human worth by religion will crumble. The day will come when military force is not enough to stop people from pouring into the streets to march for justice; and a critical mass all over the world will say enough.
Israel exists amidst a great body of Arabs and amidst very old civilisations where historically Jews thrived. Whether in the Middle East, North Africa, or Spain, Jews found strength, protection, home and opportunity under Muslim rule before Israel was established. Israel's best hope is to work to restore that solidarity. To find a way to the understanding that we are not children of a lesser God whom they can destroy and oppress at will.
The day after Barack Obama took office, he signed a series of executive orders mandating the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as well as the global network of secret, CIA-run "black site" prisons. In addition, he committed the United States to observe the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture. The Bush administration had exempted U.S. interrogators from these two treaties, arguing that the Global War on Terror presented unprecedented intelligence-gathering challenges that had to be overcome by all means necessary.
Obama's stated commitment to ban torture also extended to the outsourcing of interrogations to countries where torture could be employed without the legal barriers that exist within the U.S. military and civilian justice systems. He vowed to end the "extraordinary rendition" program whereby terror suspects were disappeared by U.S. agents, transferred into the custody of third-party intelligence services and tortured by foreign agents asking questions provided by the CIA. The European Parliament estimated that the CIA flew at least 1,245 rendition flights between 2001 and 2007, but all information on those flights, including who the passengers were and how many people were abducted, remains shrouded in secrecy. Such a policy contrasts with "rendition to justice," a transfer that takes place at least nominally within the legal system. This kind of rendition requires that the detainee be arraigned and tried in court on arrival in the United States — without having been tortured during the capturing process.
More than two years later, the Obama administration has not followed through on most of these promises, even reversing several commitments. For one, the administration confirmed that Guantanamo not only remains open, but that it will even take in new "high-value" detainees in the event of their capture. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, at least 20 secret prisons are still actively torturing "short-term transfer" detainees. The only change Obama has brought to these classified prisons is granting access to the facilities by the International Committee of the Red Cross (their reports, issued to the executive branch of the detaining power, are seldom released to the public or even to Congress). Instead of operating directly under CIA control, they are run by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Nevertheless, CIA personnel still participate in the interrogations held within their anonymous concrete walls.
This evidence alone is enough to raise serious questions about the Obama administration's willingness and ability to reverse the Bush era's use of kidnapping, extrajudicial detention and torture in the fight against terrorism. Granted, the administration has faced vocal and vehement opposition from congressional Republicans on many issues, including the closure of Guantanamo, and it is no secret that the military and intelligence services of the United States are slow to accept changes, to say the least. But Obama's political about-face raises questions about the sincerity of the administration's professed desire to wield American power in a more principled manner that conforms to international law. In order to find out more about the current administration's re-branding of the so-called war on terror, it is necessary to delve deeper into what Dick Cheney famously called the "dark side." The culture of secrecy and impunity that has come to characterize the executive branch, which the Obama administration has continued to cultivate, poses a serious threat to democracy, pitting the state's definition of security against the security of individuals.
Torture and Rendition
Before becoming president, Obama was a professor of constitutional law. Before that, he was president of the Harvard Law Review. He knew that the United States under Ronald Reagan had signed the UN Convention Against Torture. He had read the Geneva Conventions and knew the obligations warring powers face regarding the treatment of detainees.
Because of this background, the president had to know that the United States was violating international law with its policy of extraordinary rendition, more than ever under the Bush administration. Under the Convention Against Torture, a country may not knowingly pass a detainee into the custody of a country where the detainee will "more likely than not" face torture. If there is any doubt about the recipient country's record on torture, the detaining country must receive assurance that the detainee will not be tortured. According to human rights attorney Scott Horton, the Bush administration "turned [the Convention's provisions] into a complete joke: people were being turned over to countries where they would be tortured, [constituting] a violation of both domestic and international law."
The agents who turned detainees over to foreign interrogators did obtain assurances from recipient countries like Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Morocco, Poland, Macedonia, Kosovo, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and even Libya, that detainees would not be abused. But in practice, these assurances were as empty and dishonest as George W. Bush's repeated claims that the U.S. "government does not torture people." One rendition victim, Canadian-Syrian engineer Maher Arar, was rendered to Syria and imprisoned there for nearly a year where he was tortured regularly. After he was freed and cleared of all charges, the Canadian government lodged an official complaint against the United States for transferring a Canadian citizen into the custody of a country with a record of torture. Arar filed suit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft only to have the case thrown out due to the executive invocation of the "state secrets privilege," claiming that evidentiary information on the rendition program would endanger U.S. national security.
When the Obama administration came to power, it could have disclosed evidence necessary to bring justice for Maher Arar and other victims of the federal government's rendition program. Instead Attorney General Eric Holder followed his predecessor's lead, blocking Arar's case all the way to the Supreme Court. And indeed it wasn't long into the new administration's term before the continued practice of rendition came to light.
In April 2009, a 45-year old Lebanese businessman named Raymond Azar went to Afghanistan on behalf of his employer, Lebanese-based defense contractor Sima Salazar Group. Previously, his underling Dinorah Cobos had made arrangements to give $100,000 to an FBI agent posing as a contracts officer in order to secure contracts for Sima. The FBI was thus luring the pair to Afghanistan as part of a sting operation. In Kabul, eight FBI agents seized the two contractors, stripping Azar naked, subjecting him to a cavity search and blindfolding and shackling him. He was first transported to Bagram air base in Afghanistan, and later taken to Virginia where he was arrested and charged with fraud.
U.S. agents inside Afghanistan are only authorized to detain and transfer suspects out of the country if the suspect is deemed to pose an imminent threat, which Azar most certainly did not. Officials from the Departments of Justice and State claim that they received the consent of the Afghan government to conduct the rendition, but Afghan officials deny having ever been informed of the operation.
Azar pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery, but his maximum five-year sentence was reduced to only six months due to the abusive treatment he received in U.S. custody. More than anything, the rendition of Raymond Azar was an embarrassment for the Obama administration. According to Scott Horton, the unwanted controversy surrounding the Azar will push the administration to proceed with caution with the kind of renditions that the Bush administration pursued. "I can't find any evidence of extraordinary renditions under Obama," Horton told me, "but there's really no problem with normal extradition."
Rendition — particularly extraordinary rendition — turned out to be a public relations nightmare for the Bush administration, and despite the media's lack of attention to the Azar case, it doesn't seem to be gaining any fans during the Obama administration either. Thus to avoid negative publicity, the Obama administration has pursued a different strategy toward suspected terrorists (and whoever else happens to be in their vicinity): killing them.
Kill More, Imprison Less
Despite the rhetorical shift that Obama heralded, and the promises made by executive order, the president chose not to dismantle some of the most legally questionable tactics that the Bush administration employed in the conduct of the so-called War on Terror. Perhaps most importantly, Obama has maintained the government's right to kill foreign nationals and American citizens alike, anywhere in the world, whom the president deems "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests," evidence of guilt and constitutional rights notwithstanding.
The government's claim was recently challenged on behalf of one of the targets on the executive hit list, Anwar al-Awlaki. The Yemeni-American Muslim cleric has for some time been a celebrity lecturer amongst extremists and has a large online following. Allegedly, he inspired the Fort Hood shooter, as well as the failed Times Square and "underwear" bombers. His father, with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), filed a lawsuit against the government arguing that he did not pose an imminent threat. The judge threw out the case at the request of the executive. According to his lawyer, Maria Lahood, Judge John Bates called the issue of extrajudicial targeted killing "a political question which could not be adjudicated by the court. It was essentially up to the executive to decide if someone they'd identified as a terrorist should be killed and the court didn't have any place to review that." The judge also denied that al-Awlaki's father had legal standing to argue the case on behalf of his son.
More recently, the government and media alike have revived the policy of targeted killing to justify the murder of an unarmed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan by U.S. Special Forces. But even bin Laden's supposed guilt does not confer any legal legitimacy on his assassination.
Where the use of Special Forces is deemed impracticable, the CIA has a large fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles — drones — to rain down Hellfire missiles on targeted suspects in various countries — by remote control from fortified bases thousands of miles away. Indeed, just days after bin Laden's death, a drone strike targeting al-Awlaki missed its mark, killing two bystanders instead.
As reported by the Los Angeles Times last month, the Obama administration has killed more alleged terrorists than it has imprisoned. Indeed, the Obama administration launched more drone strikes in two years than the Bush administration did during its entire eight years. In 2010 Agence France Presse reported a total of more than 100 drone strikes that killed over 670 people. With a rate of civilian casualties estimated to be as high as 90 percent, drone strikes have fueled anti-American sentiment in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen.
Africa: Exporting Torture
The practice of extraordinary rendition has not disappeared completely. When the practice of kidnapping people and sending them to unknown locations to be tortured struck a sour note with the American voting public, the White House stepped away from the policy. But, like lead paint, DDT and asbestos, domestic regulations haven't stopped the export of extraordinary rendition to poorer countries.
Washington has been fighting the war on terror in East Africa since the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings and it believes a significant network of al-Qaeda militants have been in league with local jihadist groups. The CIA presence in the region has ballooned, and much-needed humanitarian aid became linked to military cooperation with the Pentagon. And U.S. allies practiced what Washington preached in terms of fighting terrorism.
In 2007, U.S.-backed Kenyan security forces abducted more than 150 men, women, and children, mostly Somali Muslims, near the border between Somalia and Kenya. Racial profiling such as this has become all too common under regimes that oppress ethnic minorities to maintain power, and it has received the seal of approval from the United States and its allies under the auspices of counter-terrorism.
The arbitrariness of the 2007 mass arrests is evident. Only one detainee was charged in Kenya, and the rest were either deported back to their home countries or illegally rendered to Ethiopia via Somalia. Ethiopian forces subjected detainees to numerous human rights abuses, torturing several of them. FBI and British agents also interrogated the suspects, looking for terrorist connections, but just one more detainee was charged in Ethiopia, bringing the grand total to two out of hundreds. About half of the rendition victims were later released without charge, dumped at the Somali border untreated for medical issues resulting from torture. But some were held for years with no access to lawyers or their families — disappeared indefinitely. Many have been released thanks to the tireless efforts of human rights advocates in Kenya, but 22 are not accounted for according to the most recent Human Rights Watch report on the issue.
Last year, Kenyan authorities rendered several Kenyan Muslims to Uganda in connection with a suicide bombing in Kampala. In Uganda, the notorious Rapid Response Unit tortured the suspects in between interrogations by U.S. and British agents. One of the initial rendition victims, Omar Awadh Omar, is a prominent Kenyan human rights activist and an outspoken critic of the clampdown of repression in East Africa. Later, the U.S.-backed Ugandan dictatorship targeted Al-Amin Kimanthi, the leader of Kenya's Muslim Human Rights Forum and the loudest voice in the East African struggle against illegal rendition and torture. Even his colleague Clara Gutteridge, a British human rights lawyer with whom I communicated in researching this article, was detained and deported from Kenya for attempting to investigate matters further.
Increased U.S. military involvement in East Africa and the export of extraordinary rendition to that region have clear strategic motivations. The U.S. military has long kept a major base in Djibouti, where naval cruisers can monitor and secure oil shipments through the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Moreover, the Horn of Africa is home to untapped oil reserves.
What's Next in the Search for Justice?
The Obama administration's approach to torture and rendition has been challenged, though the most meaningful dissenting voices come from outside the country. The U.S. Congress has failed to challenge the state secrets doctrine and the concomitant executive impunity it implies, and has actively sought to keep Guantanamo active. Despite the efforts of Congresspersons like Ed Markey (D-MA) to ban renditions, the legislative branch is not likely to effectively challenge the Obama administration. The Judiciary has similarly recused itself from checking the executive. Last month, in rejecting a case brought by five innocent torture victims against the CIA contractor that flew them to black-site prisons, the Supreme Court upheld an appeals court ruling affirming the president's right to kill any case he pleased if he felt that evidence would reveal state secrets.
However, in Britain, Germany, Poland, Spain, Italy, and Australia, investigations into the global kidnapping ring known as extraordinary rendition have been set in motion. The Italian case is perhaps the most notable, as Italian prosecutors were able to overcome intense pressure from both the U.S. and Italian governments in their pursuit of 26 conspirators involved in the kidnapping of Muslim cleric Abu Omar in Milan, who was tortured by the notorious Egyptian Mukhabarat. The Italian case blew the covers of 21 CIA agents, who were each sentenced in absentia to five years in prison. Robert Lady, the former CIA station chief in Milan, received an eight-year prison sentence. Although the judge granted diplomatic immunity to other defendants, including the ringleader of the operation, Rome station chief Jeff Castelli, prosecutors plan to challenge the merits of the designation. Meanwhile, the United States has refused to cooperate with the prosecutors of the case, and the Italian government, under U.S. pressure, is not seeking to extradite those convicted. But the European Union issued arrest warrants for the conspirators, which translates into an effective travel ban to Europe.
Elsewhere, as documented by WikiLeaks, the U.S. diplomatic corps under both the Bush and Obama administrations has worked hard to kill foreign investigations into CIA renditions. In Germany, U.S. arm-twisting succeeded in stifling the prosecution of 13 CIA agents involved in the rendition of German citizen Khaled al-Masri from Macedonia to Afghanistan, where he was tortured. In Spain, U.S. diplomats threatened Spanish politicians and political appointees with Uncle Sam's cold shoulder if they failed to prevent prosecutors from investigating allegations of illegal rendition and torture of Spanish citizens, but those cases remain open. Even the family of drone victims in Pakistan have filed suit against the United States for the wrongful deaths of two loved ones. The odds of success may seem nil, but the desire for justice is enormous.
The WikiLeaks revelations may empower foreign governments and judiciaries, with broad popular support, to continue to challenge Washington on its illicit record of kidnapping and torturing foreign nationals. But the United States won't give up the fight easily, whether the continued expansion of the renditions program in the Horn of Africa or the heavy-handed meddling in European jurisprudence.
Obama's stated commitment to ban torture also extended to the outsourcing of interrogations to countries where torture could be employed without the legal barriers that exist within the U.S. military and civilian justice systems. He vowed to end the "extraordinary rendition" program whereby terror suspects were disappeared by U.S. agents, transferred into the custody of third-party intelligence services and tortured by foreign agents asking questions provided by the CIA. The European Parliament estimated that the CIA flew at least 1,245 rendition flights between 2001 and 2007, but all information on those flights, including who the passengers were and how many people were abducted, remains shrouded in secrecy. Such a policy contrasts with "rendition to justice," a transfer that takes place at least nominally within the legal system. This kind of rendition requires that the detainee be arraigned and tried in court on arrival in the United States — without having been tortured during the capturing process.
More than two years later, the Obama administration has not followed through on most of these promises, even reversing several commitments. For one, the administration confirmed that Guantanamo not only remains open, but that it will even take in new "high-value" detainees in the event of their capture. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, at least 20 secret prisons are still actively torturing "short-term transfer" detainees. The only change Obama has brought to these classified prisons is granting access to the facilities by the International Committee of the Red Cross (their reports, issued to the executive branch of the detaining power, are seldom released to the public or even to Congress). Instead of operating directly under CIA control, they are run by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Nevertheless, CIA personnel still participate in the interrogations held within their anonymous concrete walls.
This evidence alone is enough to raise serious questions about the Obama administration's willingness and ability to reverse the Bush era's use of kidnapping, extrajudicial detention and torture in the fight against terrorism. Granted, the administration has faced vocal and vehement opposition from congressional Republicans on many issues, including the closure of Guantanamo, and it is no secret that the military and intelligence services of the United States are slow to accept changes, to say the least. But Obama's political about-face raises questions about the sincerity of the administration's professed desire to wield American power in a more principled manner that conforms to international law. In order to find out more about the current administration's re-branding of the so-called war on terror, it is necessary to delve deeper into what Dick Cheney famously called the "dark side." The culture of secrecy and impunity that has come to characterize the executive branch, which the Obama administration has continued to cultivate, poses a serious threat to democracy, pitting the state's definition of security against the security of individuals.
Torture and Rendition
Before becoming president, Obama was a professor of constitutional law. Before that, he was president of the Harvard Law Review. He knew that the United States under Ronald Reagan had signed the UN Convention Against Torture. He had read the Geneva Conventions and knew the obligations warring powers face regarding the treatment of detainees.
Because of this background, the president had to know that the United States was violating international law with its policy of extraordinary rendition, more than ever under the Bush administration. Under the Convention Against Torture, a country may not knowingly pass a detainee into the custody of a country where the detainee will "more likely than not" face torture. If there is any doubt about the recipient country's record on torture, the detaining country must receive assurance that the detainee will not be tortured. According to human rights attorney Scott Horton, the Bush administration "turned [the Convention's provisions] into a complete joke: people were being turned over to countries where they would be tortured, [constituting] a violation of both domestic and international law."
The agents who turned detainees over to foreign interrogators did obtain assurances from recipient countries like Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Morocco, Poland, Macedonia, Kosovo, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and even Libya, that detainees would not be abused. But in practice, these assurances were as empty and dishonest as George W. Bush's repeated claims that the U.S. "government does not torture people." One rendition victim, Canadian-Syrian engineer Maher Arar, was rendered to Syria and imprisoned there for nearly a year where he was tortured regularly. After he was freed and cleared of all charges, the Canadian government lodged an official complaint against the United States for transferring a Canadian citizen into the custody of a country with a record of torture. Arar filed suit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft only to have the case thrown out due to the executive invocation of the "state secrets privilege," claiming that evidentiary information on the rendition program would endanger U.S. national security.
When the Obama administration came to power, it could have disclosed evidence necessary to bring justice for Maher Arar and other victims of the federal government's rendition program. Instead Attorney General Eric Holder followed his predecessor's lead, blocking Arar's case all the way to the Supreme Court. And indeed it wasn't long into the new administration's term before the continued practice of rendition came to light.
In April 2009, a 45-year old Lebanese businessman named Raymond Azar went to Afghanistan on behalf of his employer, Lebanese-based defense contractor Sima Salazar Group. Previously, his underling Dinorah Cobos had made arrangements to give $100,000 to an FBI agent posing as a contracts officer in order to secure contracts for Sima. The FBI was thus luring the pair to Afghanistan as part of a sting operation. In Kabul, eight FBI agents seized the two contractors, stripping Azar naked, subjecting him to a cavity search and blindfolding and shackling him. He was first transported to Bagram air base in Afghanistan, and later taken to Virginia where he was arrested and charged with fraud.
U.S. agents inside Afghanistan are only authorized to detain and transfer suspects out of the country if the suspect is deemed to pose an imminent threat, which Azar most certainly did not. Officials from the Departments of Justice and State claim that they received the consent of the Afghan government to conduct the rendition, but Afghan officials deny having ever been informed of the operation.
Azar pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery, but his maximum five-year sentence was reduced to only six months due to the abusive treatment he received in U.S. custody. More than anything, the rendition of Raymond Azar was an embarrassment for the Obama administration. According to Scott Horton, the unwanted controversy surrounding the Azar will push the administration to proceed with caution with the kind of renditions that the Bush administration pursued. "I can't find any evidence of extraordinary renditions under Obama," Horton told me, "but there's really no problem with normal extradition."
Rendition — particularly extraordinary rendition — turned out to be a public relations nightmare for the Bush administration, and despite the media's lack of attention to the Azar case, it doesn't seem to be gaining any fans during the Obama administration either. Thus to avoid negative publicity, the Obama administration has pursued a different strategy toward suspected terrorists (and whoever else happens to be in their vicinity): killing them.
Kill More, Imprison Less
Despite the rhetorical shift that Obama heralded, and the promises made by executive order, the president chose not to dismantle some of the most legally questionable tactics that the Bush administration employed in the conduct of the so-called War on Terror. Perhaps most importantly, Obama has maintained the government's right to kill foreign nationals and American citizens alike, anywhere in the world, whom the president deems "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests," evidence of guilt and constitutional rights notwithstanding.
The government's claim was recently challenged on behalf of one of the targets on the executive hit list, Anwar al-Awlaki. The Yemeni-American Muslim cleric has for some time been a celebrity lecturer amongst extremists and has a large online following. Allegedly, he inspired the Fort Hood shooter, as well as the failed Times Square and "underwear" bombers. His father, with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), filed a lawsuit against the government arguing that he did not pose an imminent threat. The judge threw out the case at the request of the executive. According to his lawyer, Maria Lahood, Judge John Bates called the issue of extrajudicial targeted killing "a political question which could not be adjudicated by the court. It was essentially up to the executive to decide if someone they'd identified as a terrorist should be killed and the court didn't have any place to review that." The judge also denied that al-Awlaki's father had legal standing to argue the case on behalf of his son.
More recently, the government and media alike have revived the policy of targeted killing to justify the murder of an unarmed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan by U.S. Special Forces. But even bin Laden's supposed guilt does not confer any legal legitimacy on his assassination.
Where the use of Special Forces is deemed impracticable, the CIA has a large fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles — drones — to rain down Hellfire missiles on targeted suspects in various countries — by remote control from fortified bases thousands of miles away. Indeed, just days after bin Laden's death, a drone strike targeting al-Awlaki missed its mark, killing two bystanders instead.
As reported by the Los Angeles Times last month, the Obama administration has killed more alleged terrorists than it has imprisoned. Indeed, the Obama administration launched more drone strikes in two years than the Bush administration did during its entire eight years. In 2010 Agence France Presse reported a total of more than 100 drone strikes that killed over 670 people. With a rate of civilian casualties estimated to be as high as 90 percent, drone strikes have fueled anti-American sentiment in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen.
Africa: Exporting Torture
The practice of extraordinary rendition has not disappeared completely. When the practice of kidnapping people and sending them to unknown locations to be tortured struck a sour note with the American voting public, the White House stepped away from the policy. But, like lead paint, DDT and asbestos, domestic regulations haven't stopped the export of extraordinary rendition to poorer countries.
Washington has been fighting the war on terror in East Africa since the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings and it believes a significant network of al-Qaeda militants have been in league with local jihadist groups. The CIA presence in the region has ballooned, and much-needed humanitarian aid became linked to military cooperation with the Pentagon. And U.S. allies practiced what Washington preached in terms of fighting terrorism.
In 2007, U.S.-backed Kenyan security forces abducted more than 150 men, women, and children, mostly Somali Muslims, near the border between Somalia and Kenya. Racial profiling such as this has become all too common under regimes that oppress ethnic minorities to maintain power, and it has received the seal of approval from the United States and its allies under the auspices of counter-terrorism.
The arbitrariness of the 2007 mass arrests is evident. Only one detainee was charged in Kenya, and the rest were either deported back to their home countries or illegally rendered to Ethiopia via Somalia. Ethiopian forces subjected detainees to numerous human rights abuses, torturing several of them. FBI and British agents also interrogated the suspects, looking for terrorist connections, but just one more detainee was charged in Ethiopia, bringing the grand total to two out of hundreds. About half of the rendition victims were later released without charge, dumped at the Somali border untreated for medical issues resulting from torture. But some were held for years with no access to lawyers or their families — disappeared indefinitely. Many have been released thanks to the tireless efforts of human rights advocates in Kenya, but 22 are not accounted for according to the most recent Human Rights Watch report on the issue.
Last year, Kenyan authorities rendered several Kenyan Muslims to Uganda in connection with a suicide bombing in Kampala. In Uganda, the notorious Rapid Response Unit tortured the suspects in between interrogations by U.S. and British agents. One of the initial rendition victims, Omar Awadh Omar, is a prominent Kenyan human rights activist and an outspoken critic of the clampdown of repression in East Africa. Later, the U.S.-backed Ugandan dictatorship targeted Al-Amin Kimanthi, the leader of Kenya's Muslim Human Rights Forum and the loudest voice in the East African struggle against illegal rendition and torture. Even his colleague Clara Gutteridge, a British human rights lawyer with whom I communicated in researching this article, was detained and deported from Kenya for attempting to investigate matters further.
Increased U.S. military involvement in East Africa and the export of extraordinary rendition to that region have clear strategic motivations. The U.S. military has long kept a major base in Djibouti, where naval cruisers can monitor and secure oil shipments through the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Moreover, the Horn of Africa is home to untapped oil reserves.
What's Next in the Search for Justice?
The Obama administration's approach to torture and rendition has been challenged, though the most meaningful dissenting voices come from outside the country. The U.S. Congress has failed to challenge the state secrets doctrine and the concomitant executive impunity it implies, and has actively sought to keep Guantanamo active. Despite the efforts of Congresspersons like Ed Markey (D-MA) to ban renditions, the legislative branch is not likely to effectively challenge the Obama administration. The Judiciary has similarly recused itself from checking the executive. Last month, in rejecting a case brought by five innocent torture victims against the CIA contractor that flew them to black-site prisons, the Supreme Court upheld an appeals court ruling affirming the president's right to kill any case he pleased if he felt that evidence would reveal state secrets.
However, in Britain, Germany, Poland, Spain, Italy, and Australia, investigations into the global kidnapping ring known as extraordinary rendition have been set in motion. The Italian case is perhaps the most notable, as Italian prosecutors were able to overcome intense pressure from both the U.S. and Italian governments in their pursuit of 26 conspirators involved in the kidnapping of Muslim cleric Abu Omar in Milan, who was tortured by the notorious Egyptian Mukhabarat. The Italian case blew the covers of 21 CIA agents, who were each sentenced in absentia to five years in prison. Robert Lady, the former CIA station chief in Milan, received an eight-year prison sentence. Although the judge granted diplomatic immunity to other defendants, including the ringleader of the operation, Rome station chief Jeff Castelli, prosecutors plan to challenge the merits of the designation. Meanwhile, the United States has refused to cooperate with the prosecutors of the case, and the Italian government, under U.S. pressure, is not seeking to extradite those convicted. But the European Union issued arrest warrants for the conspirators, which translates into an effective travel ban to Europe.
Elsewhere, as documented by WikiLeaks, the U.S. diplomatic corps under both the Bush and Obama administrations has worked hard to kill foreign investigations into CIA renditions. In Germany, U.S. arm-twisting succeeded in stifling the prosecution of 13 CIA agents involved in the rendition of German citizen Khaled al-Masri from Macedonia to Afghanistan, where he was tortured. In Spain, U.S. diplomats threatened Spanish politicians and political appointees with Uncle Sam's cold shoulder if they failed to prevent prosecutors from investigating allegations of illegal rendition and torture of Spanish citizens, but those cases remain open. Even the family of drone victims in Pakistan have filed suit against the United States for the wrongful deaths of two loved ones. The odds of success may seem nil, but the desire for justice is enormous.
The WikiLeaks revelations may empower foreign governments and judiciaries, with broad popular support, to continue to challenge Washington on its illicit record of kidnapping and torturing foreign nationals. But the United States won't give up the fight easily, whether the continued expansion of the renditions program in the Horn of Africa or the heavy-handed meddling in European jurisprudence.
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