November 22, 2004
Destroying Iraq to Save It by Michael Kinsley
LATimes: Destroying Iraq to Save It
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-kinsley21nov21,0,7794529.column?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
MICHAEL KINSLEY
Destroying Iraq to Save It
Michael Kinsley
November 21, 2004
Has there ever before been a war that so many people disapproved of but so few wanted to stop? Have the reasons for starting a war ever been so thoroughly discredited without turning into reasons for ending it?
The Vietnam-era antiwar movement had an agenda: Bring the troops home. Or, in two words - suitable for a picket sign or a T-shirt - "Out now."
What seems to be today's antiwar position - it was a terrible mistake and it's a terrible mess, but we can't just walk away from it - was actually the pro-war position during Vietnam. In fact, it was close to official government policy for more than half the length of that war.
Today's antiwar cause doesn't even have a movement, to speak of, let alone an agenda. It consists of perhaps 47% of the citizenry - the ones who voted for John Kerry - who are in some kind of existential opposition to the war but don't know what they want to do about it.
Meanwhile, U.S. soldiers die by the hundreds and Iraqis - military and civilian - by the thousands in a cause these people (and I'm one of them) believe to be a horrible mistake.
Kerry spent months untangling the knots of his Iraq position while tangling new ones even faster. He pounded George W. Bush over the phantom weapons of mass destruction, and he mocked Bush's confusion of Osama bin Laden with Saddam Hussein. Kerry said, famously, that Bush's invasion of Iraq was "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." So was he in favor of ending it? No, his position was that he would try, but not promise, to bring the troops home in four years. Four years! U.S. involvement in World War II lasted 3 1/2.
Bush had a good point when he wondered how, as commander in chief, Kerry could ask American soldiers to die for the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. Of course, that problem does not vindicate Bush's belief that Iraq is the right war in the right etc. etc. etc.
But Bush's apparently sincere belief does relieve him from needing to explain why he doesn't want the war to end now. Kerry's studiously confused position was not, or not just, a political stratagem. It was an accurate reflection of the views of his constituency. Most of them deplore the war, but only a tiny fraction favor an immediate pull-out. Anyone who opposes the war but isn't ready to demand peace needs an answer to the question, "Why on Earth not?"
There are answers, possibly even adequate answers. But none of them shine with the kind of obvious truth that makes the question unnecessary, let alone uninteresting, which is how it is being treated. The answers fall in two categories, each associated with a secretary of State.
The Henry Kissinger answer is, in a word, credibility. A superpower that announces a goal and gives up without achieving it will not be super for long. In the end, President Nixon and Kissinger added five years to the length of the Vietnam War, and we lost it anyway. Did that add to our superpower credibility? Well, maybe. In the Kissingerian world of High Strategy, a reputation for pigheaded stupidity can be almost as valuable as a reputation for wise persistence. What could be more credible than a reputation for staying the course no matter how disastrous it turns out to be?
The Colin Powell answer goes by the nickname "Pottery Barn," referring to the alleged policy of that purveyor of yuppieware that "if you break it, you own it." In fact, Pottery Barn's breakage policy is much kinder and gentler than that. But it's certainly true that a well-brought-up foreign policy doesn't occupy a country, wreck it and move on like a rock band checking out of a hotel room. The question is whether at this point we're actually helping to tidy up, or only making a bigger mess.
The lead Page 1 headline in Monday's Los Angeles Times was, "Iraqi City Lies in Ruins." That would be Fallouja, a city of 300,000 (metro area) that Americans had never heard of until we felt impelled to destroy it. And our reasons were neither trivial nor contemptible. They followed with confident logic from the premise that Hussein was an intolerable danger to the United States. If so, he had to be taken down. And if that destabilized the country, we had to occupy it for a while and calm it down. And you can't run a national occupation with rebels occupying a major city, so you have to besiege the city and kill a lot of people and leave the place "in ruins."
An American general in Vietnam famously said, "We had to destroy the village to save it." This has become the definitive expression of the macabre futility of war. Last week, we destroyed an entire city in order to save it (progress!), but our capacity to find that sort of thing ironic seems to have become shriveled and harmless.
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
Posted by Chuck at 09:16 PM | Comments (0)
November 12, 2004
Michigan Greens Keep Growing -- Even in a "Rebuilding Year"
Ecological Wisdom * Social Justice *
Grassroots Democracy * Non-Violence
>> Green Party of Michigan <<
http://www.migreens.org
>>> ---------------- <<<
>>> News Release <<<
>>> ---------------- <<<
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
---------------------
November 8, 2004
For More Information Contact:
----------------------------
John Anthony La Pietra
Elections Co-ordinator, GPMI
elections@migreens.org
Michigan Greens Keep Growing -- Even in a "Rebuilding Year"
===========================================================
Despite Fierce Top-Down Pressures to Abandon Alternative Parties,
Voters Continue to Show Interest -- Especially at the Local Level
Four Statewide Candidates Top Threshold, Keep Party on Ballot;
Myatt Gets 90,000 Green Votes for Oakland County Executive
Moreno Top Choice in Mount Pleasant, Re-Elected to City Commission;
Green-Endorsed Kestenbaum Upsets Incumbent to Win Washtenaw Clerk
Charlevoix Drain Commissioner Beemon Swamped by Business Lobby
After Her Lead Role in People's Campaign to Keep Wal-Mart Out
Party Welcomes Passage of Ferndale IRV Initiative, Restoration of
People's Control Over Detroit Schools with Defeat of Proposal E;
Disappointed by Vote for Discriminatory State Proposal 04-2
Despite being caught -- along with all the people of Michigan --
between the fires of the two sides of the duopoly in a battleground
state, Michigan Greens kept on growing in the 2004 elections . . .
especially at the county, city, and township levels.
One county-wide candidate, Art Myatt, got over 90,000 votes as
the only challenger to L. Brooks Patterson for the post of Oakland
County Executive. This was Greens' highest vote count in the state
in 2004, and second only to Susan Fawcett in 2002 as the highest ever
for someone running as a Green in Michigan.
Just behind Myatt in Green votes were the party's 2004 candidates
for the four statewide education boards -- Peter Ponzetti III for the
State Board of Education, Nathaniel Damren for U-M regent, Ben Burgis
for MSU trustee, and Margaret Guttshall for WSU governor.
These candidates received four to five times the 17,033 votes
needed to re-qualify the Green Party of Michigan (GPMI) for the 2006
ballot. Even with the extreme pressure suppressing vote counts for
David Cobb and Patricia LaMarche at the top of the ticket, statewide
Green candidates averaged more votes this year than in 2002.
Greens *not* running in the whole state picked up over 200,000
local votes across Michigan. And non-Greens endorsed by local groups
received another 100,000 -- 80,000 of them for newly-elected Washtenaw
County clerk Lawrence Kestenbaum.
One of the two Green incumbents up for re-election won. Jim
Moreno was the top vote-getter among five candidates for two seats
on the Mount Pleasant City Commission. Moreno, who won passage of
a resolution urging the state to provide health care for all as a
right guaranteed in the Michigan Constitution, will serve another
three-year term.
Charlevoix County drain commissioner Joanne Bier Beemon suffered
attacks by the Republican-dominated county commission and the land-
development lobby, and lost her bid for re-election. Beemon and her
running mates, prosecutor candidate Ellis Boal and Charlevoix Township
trustee candidate Joseph King, played leading roles in a popular
campaign to block Wal-Mart from coming into the township.
Greens were also active in other campaigns, welcoming passage of
a local issue in Ferndale to begin using Instant Runoff Voting (IRV)
for election of the city's mayor and council once compatible voting
systems are found -- and defeat of Detroit Proposal E, which would
have weakened the upcoming return of locally-elected control over
the city's public schools.
However, Greens had also taken a strong stand against statewide
Proposal 04-2, and were disappointed by the passage of the initiative
enshrining discrimination against same-sex marriage (and other forms
of personal partnership) in the Michigan Constitution.
Pretty Good for a "Rebuilding Year"
-----------------------------------
If GPMI elections co-ordinator John La Pietra can be excused
for offering one more sports metaphor about the 2004 election season,
he points out that 2004 could be seen as a "rebuilding year" for
Greens in the state and nationally.
"Our biggest-name player became a free agent this year, so it's
no surprise the Green 'team' wasn't expected to do as well. That
meant we had to work even harder to get noticed at all -- other than
as potential spoilers of someone else's championship run. And, of
course, in this game expectations and attention are a big part of
scoring . . . and winning."
For example, Myatt notes, expectations that an alternative-party
candidate couldn't win such a high-profile race as Oakland County
Executive may have helped limit media attention to his campaign, and
ultimately keep anywhere from 70,000 to 100,000 Kerry voters in the
county from voting for Myatt.
On the other hand, the results also show that over 87,000 Oakland
County voters who weren't such hard-core believers in Green principles
that they voted for either Cobb or 2000 Green nominee Ralph Nader
(570 + 2,768 = 3,338) voted for Myatt.
Led by Myatt, Green candidates below the statewide level won
almost ten times as many votes as in 2002 -- averaging roughly 5,000
votes each, as opposed to barely 1,100 in the previous election.
21 non-statewide candidates this year got more than that previous
average.
Statewide candidates won twice as many total votes in 2002 as in
2004 -- largely because there were more than twice as many of them.
The major state offices will be on the ballot again in 2006, as well
as one of Michigan's US Senate seats.
The barrage of TV and radio ads, mailers, automated phone calls,
and other pressure on voters to stay with their traditional major
parties may also have trickled down from the Presidential race to
the US House campaigns. Greens saw little or no growth overall here,
due in part to the fact that the 7th District, where one-time leading
Democratic candidate Jason Seagraves ran in the Green column, was the
one race considered vulnerable.
Seagraves was "pretty depressed" for a day or so after the results
came in. "We raised and spent more than $10,000, outperformed the
other candidates at virtually every forum and debate, received loads
of favorable press coverage, put up yard signs, aired radio ads, and
campaigned full-time for five solid months. I had hoped for more
than just 1.33% of the vote. But the 4,008 people who chose to
endorse me with their vote chose to endorse *me* -- not hereditary
allegiance to party, nor hope of being on the 'winning side'.
"So, taking what I have learned from this five-month ordeal,
I will use it to build upon for future efforts. If someone were
to take the Green mantle and raise $10,000 for a run in 2006,
I think I could help her better achieve the goals that I set for
myself. . . . I plan to run in 2006, but it will be for an office
on a smaller scale, where my goals will not be arbitrary vote
totals -- but winning."
Impact Not Limited to Winning
-----------------------------
But the exposure Green candidates and values got may have affected
some races Greens didn't win. Ben Burgis got about 75,000 votes, a
new high for a Green in the MSU Board of Trustees race, though he ran
what he calls "a far more radical platform than either of the previous
Green candidates" for MSU Trustee . . . and he may have spoiled the
race for Democrat Phil Thompson, who lost to Republican Melanie Foster
by less than 1/4%.
In his comments on the race, Burgis notes that Thompson "failed,
even after it was rather dramatically brought to his attention by
student protestors and by my campaign, to sign on to the long-running
demands of progressive student groups for MSU to join U of M and over
100 other universities in joining the Workers' Rights Consortium --
which would ensure that Spartan caps and T-shirts aren't going to be
stitched together in sweatshops by people working 16 hours a day in
countries where $2 a day is considered a good wage and union
organizers are routinely targeted by death squads.
"For this alone, he didn't deserve the votes of those progressive
Democrats that defected to me in this race."
Greens may have helped swing the Washtenaw County clerk's office
from the Republicans to the Democrats; Green-endorsed Kestenbaum won
by less than 4% over incumbent Peggy Haines. Washtenaw County Greens
chair Peter Schermerhorn has already sent Kestenbaum congratulations,
and expressed "our wish to work with him to implement IRV in the City
of Ann Arbor."
There is a movement now active in Ann Arbor to join Ferndale in
amending its charter to adopt IRV for local elections, as is permitted
by state law. Ann Arbor for Instant Runoff Voting (A2IRV) is working
to collect 6,000 signatures from registered Ann Arbor voters and put
IRV on the ballot there next spring or next fall.
Ferndale's Proposal B, with backing from many other groups and
parties as well as the Greens, passed "overwhelmingly" by a 70-30
margin (6,522 to 2,828), according to Howard Ditkoff of Ferndale for
Instant Runoff Voting (F-IRV).
Greens Around the State Pleased with
Progress -- and Focused on the Future
-------------------------------------
Greens are not only moving forward in the party's "traditional"
strongholds, such as Washtenaw County. Candidates and votes are
also piling up in many parts of the state.
Tom Shea, secretary of the Grand Traverse County Green Party,
notes with approval the campaigns of Tom Mair for county clerk and
Jason Glover for the non-partisan Northwestern Michigan College
board.
Mair got 5,838 votes (15.63%) as the only opponent to the
incumbent clerk. Glover did even better -- receiving 10,410 votes
(18.98%) in a four-candidate race for two seats; he finished
behind a 12-year incumbent and a very prominent local realtor,
but beat a retired university dean.
Comments Shea: "I think these two Green candidates and all
those who helped them did a terrific job bringing the Green Party
to the attention of Grand Traverse County. A big thanks to all of
you."
Mair is "excited by the reality of having a Green Party ballot
line, and getting 15% of the vote for county clerk. 5,838 people
made a decision to vote Green Party in a county of roughly 39,000
voters! This is what we petitioned for in '87, '88, & 2000.
Mair, who predicts that in 2006 more Greens will run in his area
than Democrats, adds, "In 2000 the best precinct in town fetched a
7% vote. We doubled that percentage this time. I've never been more
proud to be part of this movement."
In Kalamazoo County, co-chair and clerk candidate James Wilber
has a similar focus: "The measure of growth is, 'Did you do better
than last time?' In Kalamazoo County, that can be answered with a
resounding YES." He also says local Greens did a better job of
campaigning this year -- and he thinks he knows why.
"In the months leading up to the election, the Green Party of
Kalamazoo has become a stable organization, with members dedicated
to bringing about change now and in the future. We are more than
just an issue or a candidate. Within the last year we have become
a real party and a force in Kalamazoo politics. People know who we
are -- and they are listening."
Against the benchmark of Nader's 2000 Presidential race, Wilber
notes that the biggest difference is that "we actually had two
local candidates this year." And both of them -- Wilber and sheriff
candidate Stephanie Frizzell -- got more votes and higher percentages
of the vote in 2004 than Nader did in 2000. And Greens in statewide
races did better in Kalamazoo than overall, he adds.
In neighborhoods as diverse as Vine and Westnedge Hill, Kalamazoo
Greens saw that, "yes, hard work does pay off . . . and grassroots
campaigning does make a difference. Now what if we were a political
party with 100 years of established history, a full slate of
candidates, and 100 times more money?" Wilber wonders.
Schermerhorn agrees. "Some good came of this election. We had
pretty good showings by Don Hadden and Elliott Smith in Pittsfield
and Ypsilanti Townships, respectively, for County Commission. There
is more support there than expected.
"We had a great showing by Keith Agdanowski in Ypsilanti for
City Council. I am convinced that ten more, maybe even five more,
dedicated volunteers could have gotten the less than 500 extra votes
that Keith needed to win his district. Keith ran for the same
position in 2002, and increased his percentage by 5%. This is a
seat that Keith can win.
"Marc Reichardt made a respectable showing in the Council race
in Ann Arbor, against a very popular incumbent, and without running
a negative campaign -- asking people to consider sending him to
Council to offset the now 10 out of 11 voices that are the same on
the Council. . . . odd-numbered year elections for Council seem to
be far more amenable to a third-party run at this point, and I
would encourage Marc to seek the Council seat in 2005, against
freshman Councilmember Leigh Greden.
"Our statewide candidates all earned about 6,000 votes in the
county -- which shows we have much more support here than anyone
thought. If we can find where those 6,000 people came from, I think
we can build on these numbers respectably in 2005 and beyond."
To La Pietra, the biggest piece of good news for the future
is the growing number of Michigan voters who found themselves on
Election Day with one or more local Greens on the ballot. This,
he feels, is a big part of why Green candidates for county and local
office got thousands of votes in 2004 where they got hundreds in
2002 -- why a dozen Greens and seven more Green-endorsed candidates
topped 10% of the vote in their races, compared to only five in 2002.
As voters see Green candidates more and more often, the vote
totals and the percentages -- and the number of elected Greens in
Michigan -- will keep growing. And that trend will accelerate as
some get the added experience of seeing how Greens in office live
up to their values and principles.
"Greens are a worldwide movement as well as a party. We don't
run just to get elected -- and when we win, we don't govern just
to get re-elected. Running for office and serving in office are
two ways to express Green values."
La Pietra promises that Greens will continue to be involved and
active in issues of social justice, ecological wisdom, grassroots
democracy, and non-violence. "We will stay visible on the Michigan
ballot -- and in agitating for true election and campaign-finance
reform.
"And we're hearing from more people since the election -- people
who have decided they've had enough of voting for what they don't
really want, in order to vote against what they really don't want.
They want something to vote, and work, for."
--------------------------------------------------
For more information on GPMI, its state platform and past
public statements on issues, the over 40 Green candidates on
the 2004 ballot, and how you can contact Green locals in your
area, please visit our Web site:
http://www.migreens.org
--------------------------------------------------
contact persons with campaigns and
groups mentioned in this release:
================================
Ben Burgis
candidate, MSU Board of Trustees
Howard Ditkoff
co-ordinator, Ferndale for Instant Runoff Voting (F-IRV)
Ana Iacob
Libby Hunter
contacts, Ann Arbor for Instant Runoff Voting (A2IRV)
Jason Seagraves
candidate, US House/7th Congressional District
Peter Ponzetti III
candidate, State Board of Education
Pete Schermerhorn
Chair, Green Party of Washtenaw County
Tom Shea
secretary, Grand Traverse County Green Party
James Wilber
candidate, Kalamazoo County Clerk &
co-chair, Green Party of Kalamazoo
# # #
Green Party of Michigan
548 S. Main Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
734-663-3555
-----------------------
The Green Party of Michigan was formed in 1987 to
address environmental issues in Michigan politics.
Greens are organized in all 50 states and the
District of Columbia. Each state Green Party sets
its own goals and creates its own structure, but
US Greens agree on Ten Key Values:
Ecological Wisdom
Grassroots Democracy
Social Justice
Nonviolence
Community Economics
Decentralization
Feminism
Respect for Diversity
Personal and Global Responsibility
Future Focus/Sustainability
created/distributed using donated labor
Posted by Chuck at 12:01 AM | Comments (0)
November 11, 2004
Neo-Con Agenda by Jim Lobe
Published on Saturday, November 6, 2004 by the Inter Press Service
Neo-Con Agenda: Iran, China, Russia, Latin America...
by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - An influential foreign-policy neo-conservative with long-standing ties to top hawks in the administration of President George W Bush has laid out what he calls ''a checklist of the work the world will demand of this president and his subordinates in a second term.''
The list, which begins with the destruction of Fallujah in Iraq and ends with the development of ''appropriate strategies'' for dealing with threats posed by China, Russia and ''the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America,'' also calls for ''regime change'' in Iran and North Korea.
The list's author, Frank Gaffney, the founder and president of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), also warns that Bush should resist any pressure arising from the anticipated demise of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to resume peace talks that could result in Israel's giving up ''defensible boundaries.''
While all seven steps listed by Gaffney in an article published Friday morning in the 'National Review Online' have long been favored by prominent neo-cons, the article itself, 'Worldwide Value', is the first comprehensive compilation to emerge since Bush's re-election Tuesday.
It is also sure to be contested, not just by Democrats who, with the election behind them, are poised to take a more anti-war position on Iraq, but by many conservative Republicans in Congress. They blame the neo-cons for failing to anticipate the quagmire in Iraq and worry their grander ambitions, like those expounded by Gaffney, will bankrupt the Treasury and break an already-overextended military.
Yet its importance as a road map of where neo-conservatives -- who, with the critical help of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, dominated Bush's foreign policy after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon -- want U.S. policy to go, was underlined by Gaffney's listing of the names of his friends in the administration who he said, ''helped the president imprint moral values on American security policy in a way and to an extent not seen since Ronald Reagan's first term.''
In addition to Cheney and Rumsfeld, he cited the most clearly identified -- and controversial -- neo-conservatives serving in the administration: Cheney's chief of staff, I Lewis ''Scooter'' Libby; his top Middle East advisors, John Hannah and David Wurmser; weapons proliferation specialist Robert Joseph and top Mideast aide Elliott Abrams, on the National Security Council (NSC).
Also on the roster are: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith; Feith's top Mideast aide William Luti, in the Pentagon; Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, and for global issues, Paula Dobriansky at the State Department.
Virtually all of the same individuals have been cited by critics of the Iraq War, including Democratic lawmakers and retired senior foreign service and military officials, as responsible for hijacking the policy and intelligence process that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Indeed, in a lengthy interview about the war on the most-watched public-affairs TV program, '60 Minutes', last May, the former head of the U.S. Central Command and Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief Middle East envoy until 2003, retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, called for the resignation of Libby, Abrams, Wolfowitz and Feith, as well as Rumsfeld, for their roles in the attack.
Zinni also cited former Defense Policy Board (DPB) chairman, Richard Perle, who has been close to Gaffney since both of them served, along with Abrams, in the office of Washington State Senator Henry M Jackson in the early 1970s.
When Perle became an assistant secretary of defense under Reagan he brought Gaffney along as his deputy. When Perle left in 1987, Gaffney succeeded him before setting up CSP in 1989.
As Perle's long-time protégé and associate, Gaffney sits at the center of a network of interlocking think tanks, foundations, lobby groups, arms manufacturers and individuals that constitute the coalition of neo-conservatives, aggressive nationalists like Cheney and Rumsfeld and Christian Right activists responsible for the unilateralist trajectory of U.S. foreign policy since 9/11.
Included among CSP's board of advisers over the years have been Rumsfeld, Perle, Feith, Christian moralist William Bennett, Abrams, Feith, Joseph, former United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, former Navy Undersecretary John Lehman and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director James Woolsey.
Woolsey also co-chairs the new Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), another prominent neo-con-led lobby group that argues Washington is now engaged in ''World War IV'' against ''Islamo-fascism.''
Also serving on its advisory council are executives from some of the country's largest military contractors, which -- along with wealthy individuals sympathetic to Israel's governing Likud Party, such as prominent New York investor Lawrence Kadish and California casino king Irving Moskowitz, and right-wing bodies, such as the Bradley, Sarah Scaife and Olin Foundations -- finance CSP's work.
Gaffney, a ubiquitous ''talking head'' on TV in the run-up to the war in Iraq, sits on the boards of CPD's parent organisations, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) and Americans for Victory Over Terrorism (AVOT). He was a charter associate, with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz and Abrams, of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), another prominent neo-conservative-led group that offered up a similar checklist of what Bush should do in the ''war on terrorism'' just nine days after the 9/11 attacks.
His article opens by trying to pre-empt an argument that is already being heard on the right against expanding Bush's ''war on terrorism'': that since a plurality of Bush voters identified ''moral values'' as their chief concern, the president should stick to his social conservative agenda rather than expand the war.
''The reality is that the same moral principles that underpinned the Bush appeal on 'values' issues like gay marriage, stem-cell research and the right to life were central to his vision of U.S. war aims and foreign policy,'' according to Gaffney.
''Indeed, the president laid claim squarely to the ultimate moral value -- freedom -- as the cornerstone of his strategy for defeating our Islamofascist enemies and their state sponsors, for whom that concept is utterly (sic) anathema.''
To be true to that commitment, policy in the second administration must be directed toward seven priorities, according to Gaffney, beginning with the ''reduction in detail of Fallujah and other safe havens utilized by freedom's enemies in Iraq''; followed by ''regime change -- one way or another -- in Iran and North Korea, the only hope for preventing these remaining 'Axis of Evil' states from fully realizing their terrorist and nuclear ambitions.''
Third, the administration must provide ''the substantially increased resources needed to re-equip a transforming military and rebuild human-intelligence capabilities (minus, if at all possible, the sorts of intelligence 'reforms' contemplated pre-election that would make matters worse on this and other scores) while we fight World War IV, followed by enhancing ''protection of our homeland, including deploying effective missile defenses at sea and in space, as well as ashore.”
Fifth, Washington must keep ''faith with Israel, whose destruction remains a priority for the same people who want to destroy us (and ... for our shared 'moral values) especially in the face of Yasser Arafat's demise and the inevitable, post-election pressure to 'solve' the Middle East problem by forcing the Israelis to abandon defensible boundaries.''
Sixth, the administration must deal with France and Germany and the dynamic that made them ''so problematic in the first term: namely, their willingness to make common cause with our enemies for profit and their desire to employ a united Europe and its new constitution -- as well as other international institutions and mechanisms -- to thwart the expansion and application of American power where deemed necessary by Washington.''
Finally, writes Gaffney, Bush must adapt ''appropriate strategies for contending with China's increasingly fascistic trade and military policies, (Russian President) Vladimir Putin's accelerating authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness toward the former Soviet republics, the worldwide spread of Islamofascism, and the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America'', which he does not identify.
''These items do not represent some sort of neo-con 'imperialist' game plan'', Gaffney stressed. ''Rather, they constitute a checklist of the work the world will demand of this president and his subordinates in a second term.''
© Copyright 2004 IPS - Inter Press Service
Posted by Chuck at 11:52 PM | Comments (0)
The U.S. and Torture
Cover story -- The U.S. and Torture
This week's stories | Home Page
Issue Date: November 5, 2004
Roots of Abu Ghraib in CIA techniques
50 years of refining, teaching torture found in interrogation manuals
By JAMES HODGE and LINDA COOPER
Last April when Americans found themselves looking at photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing naked and hooded Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison, it’s a safe bet that most didn’t realize they were looking at torture techniques refined by the Central Intelligence Agency over the last half century.
The Bush administration worked overtime to convince Americans that what they were seeing was the work of a “few bad apples,” whom the president said exhibited “disgraceful conduct” that “dishonored our country and disregarded our values.”
Even as late as July, the Army’s inspector general, Paul Mikolashek, claimed that “these abuses should be viewed as what they are: unauthorized actions taken by a few individuals.”
A month later, after human rights groups pointed to evidence of much wider culpability, two government reports -- one released by an Army panel chaired by Major Gen. George Fay, the other by a commission headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger -- confirmed what many already sensed: that the abuse went far beyond the seven arrested MPs.
“People will say anything to stop pain,” McCoy said. “The information extracted is inherently unreliable. And that’s the problem the CIA solved with these psychological methods.”
The basic techniques -- the use of stress positions, sensory deprivation and sexual humiliation -- are aimed at making victims feel responsible for their own pain and suffering. But McCoy added that while it appears less abusive than physical torture, the psychological torture paradigm causes deep psychological damage to both victims and their interrogators, who can become capable of unspeakable physical cruelties.
The results of the CIA torture experiments were codified in 1963 in a secret manual known as “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation.” Four years later, the CIA was operating some 40 interrogation centers in Vietnam as part of its Phoenix Program, McCoy said. Eventually the CIA’s psychological methods were spread worldwide through the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Public Safety program and U.S. Army Mobile Training Teams.
In 1983, the KUBARK manual provided the model for the CIA’s “Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual,” whose methods were used by the brutal, U.S.-trained Honduran Battalion 3-16 during the tenure of then-U.S. ambassador to Honduras John Negroponte, now ambassador to Iraq.
About the same time, the CIA compiled the “Psychological O
A similar defense has been mounted for the other interrogation manuals. The Reagan administration, for example, claimed that the CIA’s contra manual had not been officially approved and was the work of an “overzealous freelancer” under contract with the CIA.
It’s the photographic evidence that separates the current scandal from those in the past.
“We were caught red-handed,” said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst for the National Security Archive. “I think the types of abuses and human rights atrocities committed by our allies like Augusto Pinochet had a degree of separation for the American public. But this scandal eliminates that distance. The abuse was not only committed directly by the U.S. military but it was captured on digital camera.”
Posted by Chuck at 11:35 PM | Comments (0)
November 04, 2004
Kerry won!
Kerry Won
By Greg Palast
TomPaine.com
Thursday 04 November 2004
Kerry won. Here's the facts.
I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.
Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.
So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.
Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, "An Election Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]
Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.
The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.
And not all vote spoil equally. Most of those votes, say every official report, come from African American and minority precincts. (To learn more, click here.)
We saw this in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it didn't match the official count. That's because the official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, excluded 179,855 spoiled votes. In Florida, as in Ohio, most of these votes lost were cast on punch cards where the hole wasn't punched through completely-leaving a 'hanging chad,'-or was punched extra times. Whose cards were discarded? Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks. (To read the report from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, click here.)
And here's the key: Florida is terribly typical. The majority of ballots thrown out (there will be nearly 2 million tossed out from Tuesday's election) will have been cast by African American and other minority citizens.
So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again. Because unlike last time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to count these cards with the not-quite-punched holes (called "undervotes" in the voting biz).
Ohio is one of the last states in America to still use the vote-spoiling punch-card machines. And the Secretary of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell, wrote before the election, “the possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity.”
But this week, Blackwell, a rabidly partisan Republican, has warmed up to the result of sticking with machines that have a habit of eating Democratic votes. When asked if he feared being this year's Katherine Harris, Blackwell noted that Ms. Fix-it's efforts landed her a seat in Congress.
Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this time? Blackwell's office, notably, won't say, though the law requires it be reported. Hmm. But we know that last time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced their typical loss-that's 110,000 votes-overwhelmingly Democratic.
The Impact Of Challenges
First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But the Democrat wasn't punched out by punch cards alone. There were also the 'challenges.' That's a polite word for the Republican Party of Ohio's use of an old Ku Klux Klan technique: the attempt to block thousands of voters of color at the polls. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the GOP laid plans for poll workers to ambush citizens under arcane laws-almost never used-allowing party-designated poll watchers to finger individual voters and demand they be denied a ballot. The Ohio courts were horrified and federal law prohibits targeting of voters where race is a factor in the challenge. But our Supreme Court was prepared to let Republicans stand in the voting booth door.
In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming, but they were there. Many apparently resulted in voters getting these funky "provisional" ballots-a kind of voting placebo-which may or may not be counted. Blackwell estimates there were 175,000; Democrats say 250,000. Pick your number. But as challenges were aimed at minorities, no one doubts these are, again, overwhelmingly Democratic. Count them up, add in the spoiled punch cards (easy to tally with the human eye in a recount), and the totals begin to match the exit polls; and, golly, you've got yourself a new president. Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio.
Enchanted State's Enchanted Vote
Now, on to New Mexico, where a Kerry plurality-if all votes are counted-is more obvious still. Before the election, in TomPaine.com, I wrote, "John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one ballot has yet been counted."
How did that happen? It's the spoilage, stupid; and the provisional ballots.
CNN said George Bush took New Mexico by 11,620 votes. Again, the network total added up to that miraculous, and non-existent, '100 percent' of ballots cast.
New Mexico reported in the last race a spoilage rate of 2.68 percent, votes lost almost entirely in Hispanic, Native American and poor precincts-Democratic turf. From Tuesday's vote, assuming the same ballot-loss rate, we can expect to see 18,000 ballots in the spoilage bin.
Spoilage has a very Democratic look in New Mexico. Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State, who voted more than two to one for Kerry, are five times as likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter. Counting these uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush 'plurality.'
Already, the election-bending effects of spoilage are popping up in the election stats, exactly where we'd expect them: in heavily Hispanic areas controlled by Republican elections officials. Chaves County, in the "Little Texas" area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic population, plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet George Bush "won" there 68 percent to 31 percent.
I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the election, and he told me that this huge spoilage rate among Hispanics simply indicated that such people simply can't make up their minds on the choice of candidate for president. Oddly, these brown people drive across the desert to register their indecision in a voting booth.
Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally of provisional ballots.
"They were handing them out like candy," Albuquerque journalist Renee Blake reported of provisional ballots. About 20,000 were given out. Who got them?
Santiago Juarez who ran the "Faithful Citizenship" program for the Catholic Archdiocese in New Mexico, told me that "his" voters, poor Hispanics, whom he identified as solid Kerry supporters, were handed the iffy provisional ballots. Hispanics were given provisional ballots, rather than the countable kind "almost religiously," he said, at polling stations when there was the least question about a voter's identification. Some voters, Santiago said, were simply turned away.
Your Kerry Victory Party
So we can call Ohio and New Mexico for John Kerry-if we count all the votes.
But that won't happen. Despite the Democratic Party's pledge, the leadership this time gave in to racial disenfranchisement once again. Why? No doubt, the Democrats know darn well that counting all the spoiled and provisional ballots will require the cooperation of Ohio's Secretary of State, Blackwell. He will ultimately decide which spoiled and provisional ballots get tallied. Blackwell, hankering to step into Kate Harris' political pumps, is unlikely to permit anything close to a full count. Also, Democratic leadership knows darn well the media would punish the party for demanding a full count.
What now? Kerry won, so hold your victory party. But make sure the shades are down: it may be become illegal to demand a full vote count under PATRIOT Act III.
I used to write a column for the Guardian papers in London. Several friends have asked me if I will again leave the country. In light of the failure-a second time-to count all the votes, that won't be necessary. My country has left me.
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Greg Palast, contributing editor to Harper's magazine, investigated the manipulation of the vote for BBC Television's Newsnight. The documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes," based on his New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has been released this month on DVD.
Posted by Chuck at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)