From rich.wenzel at lycos.com Fri Mar 1 09:49:13 2002 From: rich.wenzel at lycos.com (Richard Wenzel) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:04 2006 Subject: [R-G] [GlobalGreens] Major Antiwar Protest in April - D.C. Message-ID: -- --------- Forwarded Message --------- DATE: Wed, 27 Feb 2002 23:11:08 From: Mitchel Cohen To: actiongreens@yahoogroups.com,gpusa-talk@greens.org Now we're getting somewhere!!! A big shout out to the ANSWER Coalition and to the International Action Center for biting the bullet, so to speak, and changing the date of its march on Washington to April 20th, so that there will be ONE massive antiwar presence in D.C. for April 19-22. Someone needed to make that first step and, as one of the Green Party USA representatives to ANSWER, I'm proud of us all. Right on! Argue out differences, sure, but unite around the common enemy -- Bush's permanent war, the crackdown on civil liberties, the coming depression. Way to go, ANSWER! Now let's get out there and ORGANIZE! - Mitchel Cohen APRIL MARCH ON WASHINGTON UNITY STATEMENT FROM THE A.N.S.W.E.R. COALITION - Issued February 27 - In response to calls for unity in the anti-war movement the International A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism) is announcing that it is moving its National March on Washington Against War and Racism from April 27 to April 20, 2002. *For a Calendar of Activities for April 19-22, scroll to bottom* Clearly everyone understands the need for many activists from many movements to be in Washington D.C. to protest the dangerous U.S. corporate world resources war(s) drive that threatens the people of the planet and to fight Bush and Ashcroft’s attempts to dismantle the Bill of Rights, criminalize dissent, and investigate and imprison people based on racial and religious profiling. A.N.S.W.E.R. calls on people to rally at the White House at 11 a.m. on April 20, 2002, before marching to the Justice Department and on to a unified rally with the other coalition. This march will be the first that breaks the ban on demonstrations in front of the White House that was unconstitutionally imposed prior to anti-war demonstrations in September during the head-long rush to war. A.N.S.W.E.R. has been organizing for an anti-war March on Washington since November 2001 and widely disseminated a call for April 27 in December. The Coalition settled on the April 27 date out of deference to the National Colombia Mobilization taking place April 19-22. In recent weeks other groups and individuals have come together to call an anti-war march on April 20. It became evident that having two anti-war demonstrations on succeeding weekends on seemingly similar themes, without very compelling reasons, would be a disservice to the movement. Upon learning about the April 20 mobilization, A.N.S.W.E.R. took the initiative to try to open lines of ommunication in an effort to rectify this unfortunate situation. People around the country are saying that what the movement needs on April 20 is a united front. This means those with political differences marching with independence while showing that we can come together to fight the war makers. All movements have different currents. The only way we are going to stop George Bush’s declared “endless war” is to have a movement that comes together against this common foe. A.N.S.W.E.R. believes that the anti-war movement must be broad, that it must embrace the workers movement, unions, communities of faith, immigrants, students and youth, and particularly communities of color. We also believe that the movement must strongly express its solidarity with the struggling people of the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, who are fighting to determine their own destinies free from U.S. imperialist and colonial domination and that of the transnational corporations. Our experience since forming the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition on September 14 has proven that you do not have to choose between being broad and embracing the oppressed peoples of the world and making the connections between their fight and the fight of the people in the U.S. The A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition includes more than 500 organizations and prominent individuals who have campaigned against U.S. intervention in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East and Asia, and organizations that have campaigned for social and economic justice for poor people and civil rights inside the United States. The steering committee includes Nicaragua Network, Mexico Solidarity Network, IFCO/Pastors for Peace, International Action Center, Partnership for Civil Justice LDEF, Kensington Welfare Rights Union, Middle East Children’s Alliance, Committee for Justice to Defend Palestinian Rights, Bayan USA (Filipino community) and the Korea Truth Commission. The A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition rejects the opportunistic use by the Bush administration of the tragedy of September 11, to pursue, through military means, pre-existing imperialist objectives while simultaneously ramming through domestic policies that strengthen corporate rule, attack civil rights and attempt to crush dissent, all at the expense of working people. As the war and occupation in Afghanistan is continuing, the Bush administration has sent almost 700 troops to the Philippines, has increased their support for the Colombian government’s intensified war against the Colombian people and the Israeli repression of the Palestinian people. A.N.S.W.E.R. will take a stand against any new war carried out by the Bush administration, whether it’s in Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Iran, North Korea, Yemen, Indonesia or elsewhere. We must not only oppose war and racism at home. We must stand firmly with the people’s struggles of the world. A.N.S.W.E.R. demands that the Bush Administration’s war budget of more than a billion dollars a day be converted into funds for human needs, jobs, education, health care, and assistance for the poor. We call on all those who believe the people of the world are not our enemies and are our brothers and sisters to join together in the National March on Washington D.C. If you support self-determination, not U.S. military and corporate domination, meet at the White House at 11 a.m. on April 20. A.N.S.W.E.R. calls on activists and organizations everywhere to work doubly hard to fill the streets of Washington with protestors April 19 -22. We encourage people to support the National Colombia Mobilization and the protests against the IMF and World Bank. We have also learned that Ariel Sharon will be the featured speaker along with President Bush at a right-wing pro-war conference organized by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) over the same weekend as these protests. Sharon and Bush are scheduled to speak at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, April 22nd. A.N.S.W.E.R. and other organizations are calling a demonstration at that time and appeal to those who are coming to Washington for the weekend to stay over if at all possible to participate in that very important demonstration. As we build our grassroots movement against the war towards our spring National March on Washington, we encourage activists to focus on important upcoming dates such as April 4, the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination and his Beyond Vietnam speech, as well as tax day April 15, to organize local events. STOP THE RACIST WAR MACHINE - ALL OUT FOR APRIL 20! FOR MORE INFORMATION see http://www.internationalanswer.org, or email ANSWER@afgj.org, or call New York 212-633-6646, Washington 202-543-2777, Chicago 773-583-7728, San Francisco 415-821-6545 TO ENDORSE, GO TO http://www.internationalanswer.org/campaigns/april/a20-endorse.html CALENDAR OF EVENTS APRIL 19-22 National Colombia Mobilization http://www.colombiamobilization.org APRIL 20 NATIONAL MARCH ON WASHINGTON DC Assemble 11 am at the White House The people of the world are not our enemy - solidarity against U.S. world domination! http://www.internationalanswer.org APRIL 20 Stop the War at Home and Abroad http://www.a20stopthewar.org APRIL 20-21 Protest the IMF and World Bank http://www.globalizethis.org APRIL 22 Protest Ariel Sharon and George Bush - 7 pm at the annual conference of American Israeli Public Affairs Committee FOR MORE INFORMATION see http://www.internationalanswer.org, or email ANSWER@afgj.org, or call New York 212-633-6646, Washington 202-543-2777, Chicago 773-583-7728, San Francisco 415-821-6545 2,000,000,000 Web Pages--you only need 1. Save time with My Lycos. http://my.lycos.com From hunterbadbear at earthlink.net Fri Mar 1 11:10:11 2002 From: hunterbadbear at earthlink.net (Hunter Gray) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] John Salter's new book [highly recommended] Message-ID: <000301c1c14c$55db5f80$efa90e3f@ibm22761429477> This note is simply to indicate that my oldest son, John Salter, has a book of his very excellent short stories due to appear forthwith. Until my name change, I was John R. Salter, Jr. and he was John R Salter III. The book is called ALBERTA CLIPPER and is published by Livingston Press/University of West Alabama. It will be available in both cloth and paper. Obviously, I highly recommend this fine work. And I am far from alone in doing so. He's published in some of the finest literary journals in the country -- and has won top writer's awards. ALBERTA CLIPPER will be readily available through all of the conventional sources. Here's my kid's bio -- drawn from his 2001 McKnight Writers Award data. We also urge you to check out his developing website http://johnsalter.org/ Unknown to Eldri and me [ again, his proud parents] he chose as an introductory website photograph our "jailing" of him in our back-yard Southern prison. ===================================================================== >From the 2001 McKnight Writers Fellowship Award data: John Salter was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1965. He grew up all over the United States, living in such diverse locations as Seattle, Chicago, and the Navajo Nation. He was home-schooled from the eighth grade until he started college. After earning a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of North Dakota, he spent three years working with the Mountain Maidu of northern California on educational and cultural projects before returning to the northern plains to write. He frequently draws on his Wabanaki/Iroquois and Finnish/Norwegian heritage in his stories, which have appeared in such journals as Massachusetts Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Nebraska Review, Third Coast, Washington Review, Florida Review, and Fourteen Hills. He has worked as a store clerk, assistant postmaster, and taught English at three different colleges. He and his wife, Nancy, and their three small children presently live in Glyndon, Minnesota. And, again, John Salter's developing website: http://johnsalter.org/ Hunter [Hunterbear] Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] www.hunterbear.org (social justice) From tomcondit at igc.org Fri Mar 1 12:27:10 2002 From: tomcondit at igc.org (Tom Condit) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] ON mike moores"stupid white guy" In-Reply-To: References: <20020219202433.AB0151703E@ns.istop.com> Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.0.20020301112547.02dc6bd0@pop.igc.org> At 10:54 AM 2/21/02 -0700, Bob Anderson wrote: >[snip] >The next election Moore jumped on the obvious rising trend of change, the >Nader-Green Party wagon but now he is out on his own and is setting working >people against each other with racial characterization of power. Thanks >Mike for taking us back to the victim hood poverty programs days of LBJ when >what we need now is a revolutionary theory to fight global capitalism. >Neither Ho Chi Minh nor Martin Luther King, Jr. would not utter the lines >Michael Moore puts forth as enlightenment. Why so many give him credibility >is amazing. Actually, he supported Nader until Nader started campaigning in "swing" states like Florida, at which point Moore strongly attacked him for endangering Al Gore's election chances. From hunterbadbear at earthlink.net Fri Mar 1 09:38:49 2002 From: hunterbadbear at earthlink.net (Hunter Gray) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] John Salter's new book [highly recommended] Message-ID: <000601c1c13f$a4a8a260$efa90e3f@ibm22761429477> This note is simply to indicate that my oldest son, John Salter, has a book of his very excellent short stories due to appear forthwith. Until my name change, I was John R. Salter, Jr. and he was John R Salter III. The book is called ALBERTA CLIPPER and is published by Livingston Press/University of West Alabama. It will be available in both cloth and paper. Obviously, I highly recommend this fine work. And I am far from alone in doing so. He's published in some of the finest literary journals in the country -- and has won top writer's awards. ALBERTA CLIPPER will be readily available through all of the conventional sources. Here's my kid's bio -- drawn from his 2001 McKnight Writers Award data. We also urge you to check out his developing website http://johnsalter.org/ Unknown to Eldri and me [ again, his proud parents] he chose as an introductory website photograph our "jailing" of him in our back-yard Southern prison. ===================================================================== >From the 2001 McKnight Writers Fellowship Award data: John Salter was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1965. He grew up all over the United States, living in such diverse locations as Seattle, Chicago, and the Navajo Nation. He was home-schooled from the eighth grade until he started college. After earning a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of North Dakota, he spent three years working with the Mountain Maidu of northern California on educational and cultural projects before returning to the northern plains to write. He frequently draws on his Wabanaki/Iroquois and Finnish/Norwegian heritage in his stories, which have appeared in such journals as Massachusetts Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Nebraska Review, Third Coast, Washington Review, Florida Review, and Fourteen Hills. He has worked as a store clerk, assistant postmaster, and taught English at three different colleges. He and his wife, Nancy, and their three small children presently live in Glyndon, Minnesota. And, again, John Salter's developing website: http://johnsalter.org/ Hunter [Hunterbear] Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] www.hunterbear.org (social justice) From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri Mar 1 14:19:12 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] Convictions Overturned on 3 Officers in Louima Attack Message-ID: <000901c1c166$bd36e180$76195218@vc.shawcable.net> March 1, 2002 Convictions Overturned on 3 Officers in Louima Attack By ROBERT D. McFADDEN federal appeals court in New York yesterday threw out the conviction of a white former police officer for taking part in the 1997 station- house torture of the Haitian immigrant Abner Louima, and overturned verdicts that the officer and two others had conspired to obstruct justice. It was yet another stunning day in a case that became a national symbol of police brutality and distrust of government by minorities, one that tarnished the Giuliani administration and the Police Department and, through successful prosecutions, cracked the blue wall of silence that has long protected officers at the expense of justice. The ruling leaves the main defendant convicted in a brutality case that was the most politically explosive in the city's history. That former officer, Justin A. Volpe, pleaded guilty, acknowledging that he rammed a broken broomstick up the rectum of a handcuffed Mr. Louima in the bathroom of a Brooklyn station house. He is serving a sentence of 30 years. In reversing jury verdicts in two lower courts, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan did not assess the guilt or innocence of the three former officers in what happened at the 70th Precinct station house on the night of Aug. 9, 1997. rest: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/01/nyregion/01LOUI.html ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international "They are all Enron, we are all Argentina" --WEF protesters. ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From aaron at istop.com Fri Mar 1 14:54:28 2002 From: aaron at istop.com (aaron@istop.com) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] (no subject) Message-ID: <20020301215428.802F217033@ns.istop.com> From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Mar 1 17:14:57 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] How Can We Justify This? Representative Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) Message-ID: <200203020014.g220EvE25361@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> February 17, 2002 How Can We Justify This? By Representative Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) Let us pray that our nation will remember that the unfolding of the promise of democracy in our nation paralleled the striving for civil rights. That is why we must challenge the rationale of the Patriot Act. We must ask why should America put aside guarantees of constitutional justice? How can we justify in effect canceling the First Amendment and the right of free speech, the right to peaceably assemble? How can we justify in effect canceling the Fourth Amendment, probable cause, the prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure? How can we justify in effect canceling the Fifth Amendment, nullifying due process, and allowing for indefinite incarceration without a trial? How can we justify in effect canceling the Sixth Amendment, the right to prompt and public trial? How can we justify in effect canceling the Eighth Amendment, which protects against cruel and unusual punishment? We cannot justify widespread wiretaps and internet surveillance without judicial supervision, let alone with it. We cannot justify secret searches without a warrant. We cannot justify giving the Attorney General the ability to designate domestic terror groups. We cannot justify giving the FBI total access to any type of data which may exist in any system anywhere such as medical records and financial records. We cannot justify giving the CIA the ability to target people here in the United States for intelligence surveillance. We cannot justify a government which takes from the people our right to privacy and then assumes for its own operations a right to total secrecy. The Attorney General recently covered up a statue of Lady Justice showing her bosom as if to underscore that there is no danger of justice exposing herself at this time, before this administration. Let us pray that our nation's leaders will not be overcome with fear. Because today there is great fear in our great Capitol. And this must be understood before we can ask about the shortcomings of Congress in the current environment. The great fear began when we had to evacuate the Capitol on September 11. It continued when we had to leave the Capitol again, when a bomb scare occurred as members were pressing the CIA during a secret briefing. It continued when we abandoned Washington when anthrax, possibly from a government lab, arrived in the mail. It continued when the Attorney General declared a nationwide terror alert and then the Administration brought the destructive Patriot Bill to the floor of the House. It continued in the release of the Bin Laden tapes, at the same time the President was announcing the withdrawal from the ABM treaty. It remains present in the cordoning off of the Capitol. It is present in the camouflaged armed national guardsmen who greet members of Congress each day as we enter the Capitol campus. It is present in the labyrinth of concrete barriers through which we must pass each time we go to vote. The trappings of a state of siege trap us in a state of fear, ill equipped to deal with the Patriot Games, the Mind Games, the War Games of an unelected President and his unelected Vice President. Let us pray that our country will stop this war. "To promote the common defense" is one of the formational principles of America. Our Congress gave the President the ability to respond to the tragedy of September the Eleventh. We licensed a response to those who helped bring the terror of September the Eleventh. But we the people and our elected representatives must reserve the right to measure the response, to proportion the response, to challenge the response, and to correct the response. Because we did not authorize the invasion of Iraq. We did not authorize the invasion of Iran. We did not authorize the invasion of North Korea. We did not authorize the bombing of civilians in Afghanistan. We did not authorize permanent detainees in Guantanamo Bay. We did not authorize the withdrawal from the Geneva Convention. We did not authorize military tribunals suspending due process and habeas corpus. We did not authorize assassination squads. We did not authorize the resurrection of COINTELPRO. We did not authorize the repeal of the Bill of Rights. We did not authorize the revocation of the Constitution. We did not authorize national identity cards. We did not authorize the eye of Big Brother to peer from cameras throughout our cities. We did not authorize an eye for an eye. Nor did we ask that the blood of innocent people, who perished on September 11, be avenged with the blood of innocent villagers in Afghanistan. We did not authorize the administration to wage war anytime, anywhere, anyhow it pleases. We did not authorize war without end. We did not authorize a permanent war economy. Yet we are upon the threshold of a permanent war economy. The President has requested a $45.6 billion increase in military spending. All defense-related programs will cost close to $400 billion. Consider that the Department of Defense has never passed an independent audit. Consider that the Inspector General has notified Congress that the Pentagon cannot properly account for $1.2 trillion in transactions. Consider that in recent years the Dept. of Defense could not match $22 billion worth of expenditures to the items it purchased, wrote off, as lost, billions of dollars worth of in-transit inventory and stored nearly $30 billion worth of spare parts it did not need. Yet the defense budget grows, with more money for weapons systems to fight a cold war which long ago ended, weapon systems in search of new enemies, to create new wars. This has nothing to do with fighting terror. This has everything to do with fueling a military industrial machine with the treasure of our nation, risking the future of our nation, risking democracy itself with the militarization of thought which follows the militarization of the budget. United States Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) Email responses to Dkucinich@aol.com From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Mar 1 17:15:58 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] The Enron-Cheney-Taliban Connection? AlterNet Message-ID: <200203020016.g220G8E26346@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> http://www.alternet.org/print.html?StoryID=12525 AlterNet February 28, 2002 The Enron-Cheney-Taliban Connection? By Ron Callari, Albion Monitor Enron is a scandal so enormous that it's hard to wrap your mind around it. Not just a single financial disaster, it's actually a jigsaw of interlocking scandals, each outrageous in its own right. There's Enron the Wall St. con game, where company bookkeepers used slight of hand to turn four years of steady losses into stunning profits. There's Enron the reverse Robin Hood, which stole from its own employees even as its executives were hauling millions of dollars out the backdoor. There's Enron's Ken Lay the Kingmaker, who used the corporation's fraudulent wealth to broker elections and skew public policy to his liking. And then there are the Enron coverups, as documents are shredded and the White House seeks to conceal details about meetings between Enron and Vice President Cheney. The coverups are still very much a mystery. What were the documents that were fed into the shredder -- even after the corporation declared bankruptcy? What is the White House fighting to keep secret, even going to the length of redefining executive privilege and inviting the first Congressional lawsuit ever filed against a president? Were the consequences of releasing these documents more damaging than the consequences of destroying them? Could the Big Secret be that the highest levels of the Bush Administration knew during the summer of 2001 that the largest bankruptcy in history was imminent? Or was it that Enron and the White House were working closely with the Taliban - including Osama bin Laden - up to weeks before the Sept. 11 attack? Was a deal in Afghanistan part of a desperate last-ditch "end run" to bail out Enron? Here's a tip for Congressional investigators and federal prosecutors: Start by looking at the India deal. Closely. Enron had a $3 billion investment in the Dabhol power plant, near Bombay on India's west coast. The project began in 1992, and the liquefied natural gas- powered plant was supposed to supply energy-hungry India with about one-fifth of its energy needs by 1997. It was one of Enron's largest development projects ever (and the single largest direct foreign investment in India's history). The company owned 65 percent of Dabhol; the other partners were Bechtel, General Electric and State Electricity Board. The fly in the ointment, however was that the Indian consumers could not afford the cost of the electricity that was to be produced. The World Bank had warned at the beginning that the energy produced by the plant would be too costly, and Enron proved them right. Power from the plant was 700 percent higher than electricity from other sources. Enron had promised India that the Dabhol power would be affordable once the next phase of the project was completed. But to cut expenses, Enron had to find cheap gas to fuel it. They started burning naphtha, with plans that they would retrofit the plant to gas once it was available. Originally, Enron was planning to get the liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Qatar, where Enron had a joint venture with the state-owned Qatar Gas and Pipeline Company. In fact, the Qatar project was one of the reasons why Enron selected India to set up Dabhol: it had to ensure that its Qatar gas did not remain unsold. In April 1999, however, the project was cancelled because of the global oil and gas glut. With Qatar gone, Enron was back to square one in trying to locate an inexpensive LNG supply source. Enter the Afghanistan connection. Where the "Great Game" in Afghanistan was once about czars and commissars seeking access to the warm water ports of the Persian Gulf, today it is about laying oil and gas pipelines via the untapped petroleum reserves of Central Asia, a region previously dominated by the former Soviet Union, with strong influence from Iran and Pakistan. Studies have placed the total worth of oil and gas reserves in the Central Asian republics at between $3 and $6 trillion. Who has access to that vast sea of oil? Right now the only existing export routes from the Caspian Basin lead through Russia. U.S. oil companies have longed dreamed of their own pipeline routes that will give them control of the oil and gas resources of the Caspian Sea. Likewise, the U.S. government also wants to dominate Central Asian oil in order to reduce dependency on resources from the Persian/Arabian Gulf, which it cannot control. Thus the U.S. is poised to challenge Russian hegemony in a new version of the "Great Game." Construction of oil and natural gas export pipelines through Afghanistan was under serious consideration during the Clinton years. In 1996, Unocal -- one of the world's leading energy resource and project development companies -- won a contract to build a 1,005-mile oil pipeline in order to exploit the vast Turkmenistan natural gas fields in Duletabad. The pipeline would extend through Afghanistan and Pakistan, terminating in Multan, near the India border. Multan was also the end point for another proposed pipeline, this one from Iran. This project never left the drawing boards, however; the pipeline would be much longer (over 1,600 miles) and more expensive. Still, this route was being seriously considered as of early 2001, and it increased the odds that gas would be flowing into Multan from somewhere. Unocal wasn't the only energy company laying pipe. In 1997, Enron announced that it was going to spend over $1 billion building and improving the lines between the Dabhol plant and India's network of gas pipelines. Follow the map: Once a proposed 400-mile extension from Multan, Pakistan to New Delhi, India was built, Caspian Sea gas could flow into India's network to New Delhi, follow the route to Bombay -- and bingo! A plentiful source of ultra-cheap LNG that could supply Enron's plant in India for three decades or more. Besides the route to Multan, another proposed spur of the pipeline would have ended on the Pakistan coast, where an estimated one million barrels of LNG per day could be shipped to Japan and Korea, the largest consumers of LNG in the world. For Enron, there was an upside here as well. Entering the South Eastern Asian markets, which offered vast growth potential, could position Enron well in the global marketplace and offset some of their losses in other markets. There was one gotcha: It looked like the trans-Afghan section of the pipeline might never be built. Afghanistan was controlled by religious extremists who didn't want to cooperate. Enter the Taliban. >From 1997 to as late as August 2001, the U.S. government continued to negotiate with the Taliban, trying to find a stabilizing factor that would allow American oil ventures to proceed with this project without interference. To this end, in December 1997, Unocal invited the Taliban contingency to Texas to negotiate protection while the pipeline was under construction. At the end of their stay, the Afghan visitors were invited to Washington to meet with the government officials of the Clinton Administration. But in August, 1998, terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden bombed two U.S. embassies in East Africa. After a few cruise missiles were fired into Afghanistan and the Pentagon boasted that we had disabled bin Laden's "terrorist network," Unocal said they were abandoning plans for a route through the country. But was such a potentially lucrative deal really dead? Not hardly. Although Unocal had the largest share, the "Central Asian Gas Pipeline" (CentGas) consortium had six other partners, including companies in Saudi Arabia's Delta Oil Company -- the next largest shareholder with 15 percent -- and groups in Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Turkmenistan. They vowed to continue the project, and had strong national interests in seeing the Afghanistan pipeline built. The U.S. looked for other options, and the Trade and Development Agency commissioned a feasibility study for an improbable east-to-west route that would cross the Caspian Mountains and end at a Mediterranean seaport in Turkey. The company hired for that study was Enron. If that pipeline were to be constructed, Turkmenistan signed an agreement that it would be built by Bechtel and GE Capital Services -- the same American companies that were Enron's business partners in the Dabhol power plant. No matter which direction the Central Asia natural gas would eventually flow, Enron would profit. Should it go south towards ships waiting on the Pakistan coast, it would be still only a few hundred miles at sea to Dabhol. The trip from the Mediterranean would be farther (and thus more expensive for Enron to buy gas), but it was also the least likely route to be constructed. Estimated costs were almost $1 billion more than the route through Afghanistan, and engineering plans had not even started. No, the only practical route for the Caspian Sea gas was through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the border of India. All that was lacking was the political will to make it happen. Enter George W. Bush. Bush's long and personal relationship with Enron's former CEO Kenneth Lay is now well known, as is his generous contribution of over $600,000 to advance the political career of the man who now holds the White House. Not so well known is how Bush has helped Enron. In 1988, Bush allegedly called Argentina's Minister of Public Works to pressure him into awarding Enron a $300 million contract shortly after his father won the presidency. Rodolfo Terragno recalled that the younger George Bush said that giving Enron the project "would be very favorable for Argentina and its relations with the United States." Terragno didn't know whether this message was from the White House or whether Bush was working a business deal on his own. (Although unlikely, it is possible that Terragno was called by brother Neil Bush, who would later seek an oil drilling deal in Argentina. The Bush Sr. campaign denied that George W. made the call. This was, however, the time period when Lay began to cultivate his friendship with George W. and there is no known association between Neil Bush and Lay. That two Bush brothers are suspects, however, speaks to the levels of power that this family wields.) By the time George W. became president, the India project was in serious trouble. Enron's reputation as a bully in India was legion. The Human Rights Watch released a report that indicated human rights violations had occurred as a result of opposition to the Dabhol Power project. Beginning in late 1996 and continuing throughout 1997, leading Indian environmental activists and employee organizations organized to oppose the project and, as a direct result of their opposition were not paid and subjected to repeated short-term detention. One ghastly report actually states that police stormed the homes of several women in western India who had led a massive protest against Enron's new natural-gas plant near their fishing village. According to Amnesty International, the women were dragged from their homes and beaten by officers paid by Enron. The crisis came just a few months after the Bush inauguration. Contractors walked off the job, saying they hadn't been paid for over a month. The [India state of] Maharashtra Electricity Board stopped paying for Dabhol's power in May 2001, saying it was too expensive. Enron counter-charged that the Board owed them $64 million. The plant was closed, although it is said to be 97 percent complete. All that was missing was a source for cheap, cheap, natural gas. Enter Dick Cheney. Scarcely a month after Bush moves into the White House, Vice President Cheney has his first secret meeting with Ken Lay and other Enron executives on February 22, 2001. Other meetings follow on March 7 and April 17. It is the details of these meetings that the Bush Administration is seeking to keep private. It's clear the Cheney had his own conflicts of interest with Enron. A chief benefactor in the trans-Caspian pipeline deal would have been Halliburton, the huge oil pipeline construction firm which was previously headed by Cheney. After Cheney's selection as Bush's Vice Presidential candidate, Halliburton also contributed a huge amount of cash into the Bush-Cheney campaign coffers. So the obvious question: Did Enron lobby Cheney for help in India? It has already been documented that the Vice President's energy task force changed a draft energy proposal to include a provision to boost oil and natural gas production in India in February of last year. The amendment was so narrow that it apparently was targeted only to help Enron's Dabhol plant in India. Later, Cheney stepped in to try to help Enron collect its $64 million debt during a June 27 meeting with India's opposition leader Sonia Gandhi. But behind the scenes, much more was cooking. A series of e-mail memos obtained by the Washington Post and NY Daily News in January revealed that the National Security Council led a "Dabhol Working Group" composed of officials from various Cabinet departments during the summer of 2001. The memos suggest that the Bush Administration was running exactly the sort of "war room" that was a favorite subject of ridicule by Republicans during the Clinton years. The Working Group prepared "talking points" for both Cheney and Bush and recommended that the need to "broaden the advocacy" of settling the Enron debt. Every development was closely monitored: "Good news" a NSC staff member wrote in a e-mail memo: "The Veep mentioned Enron in his meeting with Sonia Gandhi." The Post commented that the NSC went so far that it "acted as a sort of concierge service for Enron Chairman Kenneth L. Lay and India's national security adviser, Brajesh Mishra" in trying to arrange a dinner meeting between the Indian official and Lay. While lobbying India, it appears that the Bush Administration was also raising the heat on the Taliban to allow the pipeline. The book "Bin Laden: the Forbidden Truth" by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasique claims that the U.S. tried to negotiate the pipeline deal with the Taliban as late as August, 2001. According to the authors, the Bush Administration attempted to get the Taliban on board and believed they could depend upon the regime to stabilize the country while the pipeline construction was underway. Bush had already indirectly given the Taliban $43 million for their supposed efforts to stamp out opium-poppy cultivation. Was this an award -- or a bribe? The circumstances make this a valid question. Enron was unraveling at the seams, yet in early August, Kenneth Lay seemed optimistic, even exuberant. Was he whistling past the graveyard, or did he have secret information? The last meeting between U.S. and Taliban representatives took place five weeks before the attacks on New York and Washington; on that occasion, Christina Rocca, in charge of Central Asian affairs for the U.S. government, met the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan in Islamabad on August 2, 2001. Rocca said the Taliban representative, Mr. Zaeef, was aware of the strong U.S. commitment to help the Afghan people and the fact that the United States had provided $132 million in relief assistance so far that year. Lay's last documented e-mail was sent on August 27th, about the same time the Taliban allowed the International Red Cross to visit jailed foreign aid workers in Afghanistan. In it, Lay waxes optimistic about the strength and stability of his company, and exhorts his employees to buy into the company's stock program. Was Kenneth Lay anticipating a new pipeline deal, and an Enron contract, courtesy of George W. Bush? If a deal was at hand, he had every reason to be optimistic about the future. Even though the trans-Caspian pipeline and the extension into India would be years from completion, Enron's conceit of working above the law was ultimately the guiding beacon in all of its transactions. They had played the game of subterfuge for so long, they were near experts at covering their tracks. Even if Lay knew at this point that bankruptcy was imminent, Enron had always survived major hurdles in the past, right? The possibility of a total meltdown was most likely not even a consideration -- there could always be an 11th hour federal bailout. However, from all records, relationships became strained. The Taliban had demanded that the U.S. should also reconstruct Afghanistan's infrastructure and that the pipeline be open for local consumption. Instead, the U.S. wanted a closed pipeline pumping gas for export only and was not interested in helping to rebuild the country. In turn, the U.S. threatened the Taliban during the negotiations. The directive of "we'll either carpet you in gold or carpet you in bombs" was bantered about in the press to underscore the emerging willfulness of the U.S. But sometime in late August, apparently the whole deal went sour. Enron had one last card to play, and that was selling the Dabhol plant for quick cash -- if it could. If Enron could get its asking price of $2.3 billion, then maybe the company could pull out of its bankruptcy nose dive. In late August, Lay appeared to threaten India in an article in the London Financial Times. We expect full price for the plant, he warned; if they received anything less, there could be backlash: "There are laws that could prevent the U.S. government from providing any aid or assistance to India going forward if, in fact, they expropriate property of U.S. companies," he said. When Indian officials called these statements "strong arm tactics," an Enron statement claimed Lay "was merely referring to U.S. laws." Again Lay appeared to threaten India in a Sept. 14 letter to the Prime Minister, insisting that the $2.3 billion price was reasonable because they had a "legal claim" of up to $5 billion. But the house of cards collapsed dramatically on November 8, when Enron disclosed that it had overstated earnings dating back to 1997 by almost $600 million. That same day, an e-mail ("Importance: High"), whose sender and recipient are blacked out, warned, "President Bush cannot talk about Dabhol as was already mentioned." The memo also said that Bush economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey could not discuss Enron either. Lindsey had been an Enron consultant. The end came in December 2001, as Enron fired the 300 remaining workers at the plant. Enron also filed a $200 million claim with the U.S. government's Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a U.S. taxpayer-funded insurance fund for American companies abroad, in an attempt to recoup losses from the Dabhol Power Corporation. On the last day of the year, President Bush appointed Zalmay Khalilzad as his special envoy to Afghanistan. Khalilzad is a former Unocal consultant, whose positions on Afghanistan changed in sync with Unocal's own. When it looked like the pipeline would be built in 1996, Khalilzad advocated that the U.S. should work with moderate elements in the Taliban. By 2000 Unocal was out of the project, and Khalilzad was writing that the U.S. must undermine the Taliban. It's clear that once again the Great Game is afoot, now that the Taliban are gone. Today, Khalilzad is the Special Assistant to the President and National Security Council member responsible for setting up the post-Taliban "Pro-Unocal" regime in Afghanistan. International oil men euphemistically call the project the new "Silk Road." On Feb. 8, Afghanistan's interim leader Hamid Karzai and Pakistan's president agreed to revive plans for a trans-Afghanistan route for Iranian gas. The next day, Turkmenistan chimed in that they hoped their trans-Afghanistan route would be soon built. It's all but certain that gas from somewhere will reach Multan -- and the Dabhol plant beyond. For investors, Dabhol should be a bitter lesson. Enron was a company known for its hubris that tried to accomplish too much, too quickly, playing too fast and loose with financial realities. In the end, Enron found that its far-reaching global clout could no longer circumvent the rules of basic economics -- nor could it count on the players they helped bring into power. Until there is a full investigation, questions will remain about how far the Bush team went to try to save their buddies at Enron. Vice President Dick Cheney's refusal to release details about his private April meeting with Lay is suspicious. It is already known that Cheney accepted seven out of eight national energy policy recommendations made by Lay; so what are they so damned determined to keep secret? What could be more incriminating than that? On Feb. 22, the GAO sued Cheney, who has stated that the White House will go to court to fight the release of the documents. (However, John W. Dean, former Nixon staffer and Watergate witness, is quick to point out that executive privilege is unique to the president, not the vice president.) With recent discovery that a highest-level "Dabhol Working Group" was set up in the Bush Administration, it appears that there is much more to be uncovered. Is the White House covering up that it was molding foreign policy as well as energy policy to suit Enron? Did the Bush Administration know that Enron's collapse was coming as early as August? If any of these are true, the largest bankruptcy in American history may well connect with the greatest political scandal in American history. Ron Callari is a freelancer writer. This article originally appeared in the Albion Monitor. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Mar 1 17:17:16 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] Prison fury: the betrayal - John Pilger Message-ID: <200203020017.g220HGE27691@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> The Mirror (UK) March 1, 2002 War on terror Prison fury: the betrayal Our politicians have run a concentration camp where emaciated men are held and interrogated in breach of international law. Their actions are, in effect, no different from fascists or terrorists By John Pilger The conditions in which prisoners are being held brutally and illegally in an American concentration camp on Cuba go to the heart of the "war on terrorism", and mark the Blair government for its betrayal of the basic rights of British citizens to the interests of a foreign power. Shafiq Rasul, from Tipton, near Birmingham, is one of five Britons being held without charge and in contravention of every international convention at Camp X -Ray. A man well over 6ft in height, with a thin frame and a normal weight of less than 11st, he has lost 3st and is described by his brother as "seriously emaciated". His family believes they glimpsed him on television, on February 21, shackled to a stretcher. In this state, he was interrogated by agents of the British security service, MI5 - which itself contravenes the Geneva Convention on prisoners-of-war. At the same time, the Foreign Office claims it does not know the circumstances of the five men's arrests. This brings to mind the evidence of a British official, Mark Higson, at the arms-to-Iraq scandal inquiry in 1994. Higson described a "culture of lying" pervading the Foreign Office. All 194 prisoners on Cuba, it is now becoming clear, have committed no crime. That is true of all but a handful of the 400 captured in Afghanistan many of whom do not belong to al-Qaeda. In three months of investigation by an army of FBI and other police officers, not a shred of evidence has been produced linking them to the attacks of September 11 or identifying them as "terrorists fighting America". Yet, in the House of Commons, ministers have defamed them as "among the most dangerous men in the world", echoing almost word for word the statements of Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defence. This is the man who has admitted setting up an office in the Pentagon with the sole function of lying to foreign governments and foreign media about the "war on terrorism". Acting for the family of Shafiq Rasul is Gareth Peirce, the solicitor and fighter against miscarriages of justice who was portrayed in the film In The Name Of The Father. She says: "Given that (Shafiq) was so clearly emaciated, it means that we are letting loose our agents on to those detainees for the purpose of interrogating them in wholly unsafe circumstances and acting parasitically on the backs of wholly unlawful detentions by the Americans." Another British solicitor and human rights campaigner, Louise Christian, represents 22-year-old Feroz Abassi. She is threatening the British Government with legal action for collaborating with the US in Feroz's "illegal interrogation". She has been told by the government solicitor to delay her application for a judicial review by the High Court because Tony Blair and his ministers have yet to decide what to do. IN other words, they are asking the Americans how they should act on the human rights of British citizens against whom there is clearly no case. Recently, an Algerian pilot, Lotfi Raissi, was released from Belmarsh prison after five months on remand and without any terrorism charge being laid against him. The bogus reasons for the "war on terrorism" are unravelling by the day, as is Blair's complicity with its crimes of violence in Afghanistan and denial of rights. The original purpose of Camp X-Ray was as a piece of grotesque theatre for the ever-manipulated American public. In releasing deliberately provocative photographs of cowed men in chains, the Bush regime believed it could distract public opinion from the debacle of its "war" in Afghanistan, in which its war machine failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden or a single senior member of al-Qaeda. Even the Taliban leader Mullah Omar got away. All they got was the Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan, a relatively minor functionary. The price of this American disaster for the people of Afghanistan was, according to a recent study at the University of New Hampshire, at least 5,000 civilian lives. For all the posed photographs of American troops against desert landscapes, hardly any of them have seen combat. Instead, impoverished people in dusty villages are killed from the sky. Not even the cost of an American B52 bomber has reached the Afghan people in aid - in spite of "pledges" by America and Europe and the "we-shall-never-desert-Afghanistan-again" windbaggery of Blair. In spite of a public relations drive to prove that the American-installed regime in Kabul is radically different from that of the Taliban, the main changes are a return to a bloody civil war and feudalism and the renewal of the heroin trade. As for the human rights of the long-suffering population, the new government will, like the Taliban, impose sharia Islamic law on its people. Judge Ahamat Ullha Zarif says that public executions and amputations will continue, but there will be one variation: "For example, the Taliban used to hang the victim's body in public for four days. We will only hang the body for a short time, say 15 minutes." Judge Zarif made clear that the ultimate penalty would remain in force for adulterers, both male and female. They would still be stoned to death, "but we will use only small stones". This is the regime whose leaders have a bodyguard of British soldiers. And still the Americans bomb - while famine sweeps the north and west of Afghanistan in the wake of the American attacks. On February 12, a World Vision Health and Nutrition Team reported from the North West that "numerous groups of women and children are scavenging the valley fields for weeds, roots and grass to eat". The French aid agency Medecins sans Frontieres says that more and more people are becoming malnourished. "The food system is not working," said a nurse, Jenny Andersson. "Although the World Food Programme has been providing food for more than 300,000 people, it simply isn't reaching the people that need it." NONE of these horrors has been addressed by the American or British governments, the principal partners in the Washington-bribed "coalition" claiming responsibility for the Afghanistan disaster, which Jack Straw calls "our vindication". It is not surprising that, even as ex-Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic stands trial in The Hague, the Americans are pressing for an end to war crimes trials altogether. This means that the Bush administration is afraid that the process might slip out of its control and become a permanent fixture, encouraging the setting up of an International Criminal Court, which Washington opposes. It fears that such a body might act truly judicially and order the arrest of "our" war criminals - that is, American and British politicians and officials who have ordered, or aided and abetted the bombing to death of thousands of innocent men, women and children and have run or collaborated in the running of a concentration camp like that in which emaciated men who are held and interrogated in breach of international law. In his play Ashes To Ashes, Harold Pinter uses the images of Nazism and the Holocaust, while interpreting them as a warning that the totalitarian actions of western politicians seeking dominance over other human beings are no different, in principle and effect, from those of fascists - and terrorists. The reality behind the Prime Minister's pretensions as a "war leader" become clearer every day. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Mar 1 17:18:20 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] The Great Deception: Elusive Enemy, Endless War - Howard Zinn Message-ID: <200203020018.g220IZE28719@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> AlterNet February 27, 2002 The Great Deception: Elusive Enemy, Endless War We have enemies in caves and compounds abroad, but perhaps our greatest danger comes from the corporate boardrooms and governmental offices where decisions are made that take away our tax dollars and satisfy the greed for profit and power. By Howard Zinn, TomPaine.com It is becoming clearer every day that the nation has been seriously, tragically deceived by the Bush administration, with the collaboration of a timorous Democratic Party. The clue to this was in Bush's State of the Union Address. He began by saying we are "winning the war on terror." A few paragraphs later he said "tens of thousands of terrorists are still at large," and, "Terror training camps still exist in at least a dozen countries." If so, how can we be "winning" the war on terrorism? And if it is clear that we are not, why have we bombed Afghanistan, an already bombed and starving country, for four months? Why have we killed a thousand or two thousand or four thousand (no one knows the exact number) innocent men, women, and children? Was not the bombing intended to destroy the Al Qaeda network? The Boston Globe reported on February 21st: "Four months into the campaign in Afghanistan, U.S. officials acknowledged that American forces have killed or captured only one senior Al Qaeda figure and seven far less prominent leaders." In fact, there was no chance from the beginning that we could "win" a war on terrorism because terrorism is not that kind of phenomenon. It is not Japan or Germany in World War II, or Iraq in the Gulf War. It is a phenomenon that can spring from any country in the world where there are people who are angry at the United States. The prospect is for a war without end. For, as the President says: "These enemies view the entire world as a battlefield, and we must pursue them wherever they are." He says: "The campaign may not be finished on our watch." He will pass on the war to the next president, and perhaps the next and the next. How useful to have an enemy who is so elusive, whose defeat will require an endless war. Because so long as the nation is in a state of war, it is possible to control the population by saying: we are at war, and this is no time for division, we must sacrifice our freedoms. But it is exactly when the nation is at war, when we are dealing with life and death matters, that freedom of speech is most necessary. We are told we have all sorts of enemies to fear: non-citizens and dissidents at home, an infinite number of mysterious enemies abroad. We will have to concentrate not only our resources, but our attention, on that endless war. We will be looking everywhere in the world for our enemies. The "war on terrorism," which cannot locate the perpetrators of the crime of September 11th, is useful for our political leaders, because while searching for an invisible enemy we will not be paying attention to what the government is doing to the citizens of this country in the name of that war. If citizens are forced to concentrate on a "war against terrorism" they may not have time to consider that perhaps our most serious problem, despite the awful event of September 11th, is a political system in which the government can fund four hundred billions for its military machine, but cannot find the money to give free health care, decent housing, minimum family incomes -- all those requisites for children to grow up healthy. Is it possible that the war being waged is really a war against us? Yes, we do have enemies in caves and compounds abroad, but perhaps our greatest danger comes from the corporate boardrooms and governmental offices where decisions are made that take away our tax dollars and satisfy the greed for profit and power. If that is so, we will need a resurgence of democracy, a revival of free speech, a new citizens movement, a mobilization of Americans to insist that the nation's wealth be used for human needs, not for war. Joined to similar movements abroad, it could be the beginning of global solidarity, looking to a long-delayed sharing of the fruits of the earth. Howard Zinn is an historian and author of A People's History of the United States. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Mar 1 17:19:34 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] U.N. chief demands Israeli withdrawal from refugee camps - IPS Message-ID: <200203020019.g220JYE29584@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> Inter Press Service March 1, 2002 U.N. chief demands Israeli withdrawal from refugee camps by Thalif Deen UNITED NATIONS - Thursday's Israeli military invasion of Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank drew sharp criticism from UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who called for the immediate withdrawal of all troops. "What distresses me this time", he said, "is the large number of Palestinians reported dead or injured as a result of incursions into refugee camps by the Israel Defense Force." The raids, in the West Bank town of Nablus, claimed the lives of 11 Palestinians, with more than 100 injured, according to early estimates. Battle tanks and helicopter gun ships supported the attacks, described as the fiercest since the current Palestinian uprising began in September 2000. The United Nations remained virtually paralyzed in the face of continued Israeli attacks, and Annan called on the invading Israeli military forces to "withdraw from these camps immediately." "I implore both sides to refrain from further actions which may endanger yet more civilians lives," he added. Annan also expressed serious concern that some of the Israeli military attacks have continued without any due respect "to the immunity of humanitarian facilities, including those of the United Nations." In the last 48 hours, five Israelis and 16 Palestinians have lost their lives in escalating violence in the Israeli-occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. So far, the 17-month-old Palestinian uprising has claimed a heavy death toll on the Palestinian side: more than 1,000 killed. Some 288 Israelis have died. Annan's appeal notwithstanding, the United Nations has remained helpless in the face of increasing military attacks by the Israelis against a spate of suicide bombings by Palestinians. A meeting of the UN Security Council Tuesday, called specifically to discuss the Middle East crisis, ended without any tangible results, although ambassadors from 30 of the 189 UN member states spoke. Faced with the threat of a U.S. veto, Arab countries held back a draft resolution demanding "the immediate cessation of all acts of violence, provocation and destruction, as well as the return to the positions and arrangements which existed prior to September 2000." Since September 2000, the Israelis have isolated the Palestinians and barred their movement outside the occupied territories. According to the UN Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), there are 72 permanent Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank now, and nine in Gaza. The draft resolution, which never reached the Council, emphasized that "there is no military solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict". It also reaffirmed the need for an "Israeli withdrawal from the territories it occupied in June 1967 and for establishing normal relations among all states of the region based on mutual recognition and respect." This is in conformity with a recent proposal by Saudi Arabia for collective Arab recognition of Israel in return for Israel's withdrawal from all occupied territory, including the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, all of which were annexed by the Israelis after the Six Day War in 1967. The resolution also called for international involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, a proposal strongly opposed by both Israel and the United States. Malaysian Ambassador Hasmy Agam told the Security Council the time was ripe for it to take decisive action to ease the growing tension in the Middle East. "The Security Council has remained effectively sidelined over the years, and prevented from playing a legitimate role in the search for peace in the Middle East," he said. "The United Nations could intervene effectively by dispatching a mission to monitor the situation, ease the tension, and maintain peace and security on the ground." Last year, the United States vetoed a proposal for the creation of a UN monitoring force to keep the peace in the West Bank and Gaza. An Arab diplomat told IPS: "As long as the United States continues to stand by Israel - right or wrong - there is nothing the United Nations or even European Union can do to resolve the conflict." Annan has called for third party mediation, perhaps even the intervention of the 15-member European Union (EU), but such efforts are also being resisted both by Israel and the United States. Meanwhile, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has been blocked from leaving his compound and the only airport in the occupied territories remains closed. Earlier this month, Annan said that although Arafat is the leader of the Palestine Authority, his isolation and his house arrest have made it difficult for him to lead. "He's being asked to stop the violence. He's being asked to lead and yet, as leader, he and his institutions are under so much pressure that I really do not see how that is going to help," Annan said. Last week, he warned that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict risked sliding towards a full-fledged war. "Truly, we are nearing the edge of the abyss," Annan said. From cbcox at ilstu.edu Fri Mar 1 20:15:51 2002 From: cbcox at ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] ON mike moores"stupid white guy" References: <20020219202433.AB0151703E@ns.istop.com> <5.0.2.1.0.20020301112547.02dc6bd0@pop.igc.org> Message-ID: <3C8043E7.47C462F0@ilstu.edu> Tom Condit wrote: > > At 10:54 AM 2/21/02 -0700, Bob Anderson wrote: > >[snip] > > >The next election Moore jumped on the obvious rising trend of change, the > >Nader-Green Party wagon but now he is out on his own and is setting working > >people against each other with racial characterization of power. [clip] > > Actually, he supported Nader until Nader started campaigning in "swing" > states like Florida, at which point Moore strongly attacked him for > endangering Al Gore's election chances. > He's a fucking wobbler. But when he wobbles our way he can be useful. :-) Carrol From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Fri Mar 1 21:42:29 2002 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] Fw: DynCorp: Beyond the Rule of Law Message-ID: <01a001c1c1a4$a90d6830$33378d18@Indy1> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lysander Zimmerman" To: "Defend Civil Liberties" Sent: Friday, March 01, 2002 11:21 PM Subject: DynCorp: Beyond the Rule of Law > DynCorp: Beyond the Rule of Law > > http://www.colombiareport.org/colombia78.htm > by Robert Lawson > > Despite the fact that a company contracted by the U.S. government to carry > out its program of fumigating and eradicating coca crops in Colombia has > been caught smuggling heroin out of the country, no attempts have been made > to bring it to justice. For more than a year the Office of Prosecutions has > failed to render a decision on the case, while the police official > responsible for setting the whole process in motion has since retired from > active duty. This is not the first time a case against DynCorp employees has > disappeared in the labyrinth known as Colombia's judicial system. > > On May 12, 2000, according to an official U.S. Drug Enforcement > Administration document obtained by The Nation magazine under the Freedom of > Information Act, Colombian police intercepted a parcel sent from DynCorp's > Colombia offices to its air base in Florida. > > Colombian authorities discovered two small bottles of a thick liquid in a > package which, when tested, was found to be laced with heroin worth more > than $100,000. When authorities discovered the name of the company > responsible for shipping the heroin they turned the results of the > 'narcotest' over to the Immediate Reaction Unit, which then set into motion > prosecution procedure 483064. However, the heroin bust remained a secret for > more than a year until The Nation began its investigation and now it seems > the evidence has simply disappeared. > > Apparently, a similar situation occurred last year when 29-year-old Michael > Demons, a paramedic member of DynCorp's team, suffered a cardiac arrest and > was taken to a hospital in Florencia, in southeastern Colombia, where he > died. Forensic tests conducted at the time revealed that the cause of death > was a cocaine overdose. Mysteriously, when the Colombian Central Office of > Prosecutions took an interest in the death and requested more information, > all related documents, such as the legal medical reports, vanished. > > And two years ago, the records of ten DynCorp employees involved in the > illicit trade of amphetamines also disappeared. "Faced with evidence of the > scandal, DynCorp decided to expel these employees from the country and so > drop the heat on the issue," a government investigator told Colombia's > Semana magazine. > > These discoveries might only be the tip of the iceberg as DynCorp's > activities are conducted in absolute secrecy and appear to be beyond the > jurisdiction of any governmental body. A high ranking police official in > Colombia, who has known about DynCorp since their 1993 arrival in Colombia, > told Semana magazine, "no authority, whether the Civil Aviation Authority, > police or army, is authorized to search DynCorp's planes. Nobody knows what > they carry on their return to the United States because they are > untouchable." > > Some Colombian officials who disagree with DynCorp's involvement in Colombia > believe the pilots of the company are nothing more than mercenaries who > travel around the world offering their services. According to another > high-ranking police official who did not wish to disclose his name, "They > are very difficult people to deal with. Most of them consume large amounts > of drugs. Many inject before flying. Several officials have had open > confrontations with these pilots because they don't respect the disciplines > of military bases. And our officials don't accept that these people, no > matter how experienced they are in the field of war, consume drugs on > military grounds" (see, U.S. Mercenaries in Colombia) > > According to the Guardian Weekly, the U.S. government's contract with > DynCorp is full of ambiguities, giving the company even more leeway to avoid > oversight by both Colombian and U.S. authorities. This not only increases > the opportunities for DynCorp employees to personally profit from > drug-trafficking, but also enables the company to conduct counter-insurgency > operations for the U.S. government that go far beyond their official role of > assessing and implementing the fumigation of illicit crops. > > The lack of transparency with regards to DynCorp's role in Colombia has led > Human Rights Watch to accuse the Pentagon of using companies like DynCorp to > violate conditions demanded by the United Stated Congress when it approved > Plan Colombia. The U.S. aid package allows for a maximum of 500 troops and > 300 civilian contractors in Colombia at any given time. But according to > Human Rights Watch, the policy of subcontracting the war has resulted in > some 1,000 professionals with links to the United States working in > Colombia, many of whom have retired from U.S. Special Forces and are now > employed by private companies like DynCorp (see, Are They Civilians or > Mercenaries?). > > Consequently, Washington is sitting pretty. It may secretly approve of and > encourage counter-insurgency operations conducted by DynCorp, but it doesn't > have to take responsibility for them. Clearly, serious questions need to be > answered regarding the role of both the U.S. government and DynCorp in Plan > Colombia and why personnel from DynCorp are being implicated in drug > trafficking. > > The fact that nothing has been done to bring DynCorp employees to justice > implies a high level of corruption and complicity with regards to these > crimes. It also raises the question as to why a poor Colombian drug > smuggling mule should be sentenced to many years in prison while highly paid > U.S. mercenaries remain 'untouchable'. > > Robert Lawson, English Ecologists in support of Campesinos of Colombia > www.colombiareport.org > http://indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=142935&group=webcast > From hunterbadbear at earthlink.net Sat Mar 2 12:21:42 2002 From: hunterbadbear at earthlink.net (Hunter Gray) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] Iroquois activism in Far Western fur trade Message-ID: <001201c1c21f$7e0954c0$39a90e3f@ibm22761429477> Note by Hunterbear: This is with respect to well done material relating in part to the exploitation of fur-hunters -- Native and otherwise -- at the hands of Hudson's Bay Company et al. ========================= Hunterbear: Louis Proyect's excerpts and comment from the Jack Weatherford book, "Indian Givers: How the Indians of America Transformed the World" are quite welcome. [I'm sending a copy of this Marxism Discussion post to RedBadBear and to several other lists as well.] Native fur hunters often fought back very vigorously against HBC and other exploitation -- and one of the most successfully activist groups to do so was the predominately Mohawk band [with several St. Francis Abenakis, including Joseph Annance], led primarily by John Gray [Mohawk/Scottish] from St. Regis. I have some material on my large website www.hunterbear.org on John Gray and his family, the Iroquois et al. in the Far West, notes on our Gray [sometimes erroneously called Grey] family name, etc. This is listed and easily found in related sections via the upper portion of the inside Index on our Site. Here is a bit of that from my writing: This pattern is suggested as early as 1824, when the devoutly Catholic, knife-fighting, half-blood Mohawk fur hunter from up-state New York, John Gray (Ignace Hatchiorauquasha) rallied other Iroquois trappers in their successful labor disputes with frightened fur entrepreneur Alexander Ross in the Columbia and Snake River country -- and repeated such behavior in striking Peter Skene Ogden's camp a year later in their successful opposition to an exploitative pricing system and quasi-indentured servitude. In Don Berry's fascinating account of those turbulent times, A Majority of Scoundrels: An Informal History of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1961), page 97, there is this paragraph depicting John Gray at Ogden's camp: "Gray -- Ross had described him the year before as "a turbulent blackguard, a damned rascal" -- then launched into a denunciation of the policies of HBC [Hudson's Bay Company] in general and the men of the Columbia Department in particular: ". . .The greatest villains in the World & if they were here this day I would shoot them. . ." Merle Wells, Idaho State Historical Society and one of the region's most capable and empathetic historians, in his comprehensive essay, "Ignace Hatchiorauquasha," The Mountain Men and the Fur Trade of the Far West, Vol. 7, LeRoy R. Hafen, editor, [Glendale CA, Arthur Clark Co., 1969], pages 161-175, has commented with insight on John Gray's extraordinary role as a committed Native rights advocate -- and half-blood -- in the wild history of the Western fur trade: "His unusual ability to deal with the whites enhanced his stature as an Iroquois chief. . .he stood out as a gifted leader of his people, understanding and following their ways in a manner that would have been difficult for a white man. . . he not only explored the wilderness. . .he also helped to bridge the cultural gap between Indians and whites during the years of the fur trade, even though much of the time the Iroquois and white trappers did not get along together at all well , and the whites often resented his position on the Indian side when there were differences in outlook. More than that, his leadership of the Iroquois out of Ogden's camp, May 24, 1825, contributed substantially to the Hudson's Bay Company adoption of competitive pricing that limited the expansion of the St. Louis fur trade in the Oregon country." Hunter [Hunterbear] Hunter Gray [ Hunterbear ] www.hunterbear.org ( social justice ) From mstainsby at tao.ca Sat Mar 2 19:48:54 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] forwarded from Bob Anderson Message-ID: <004301c1c25d$f5e11300$76195218@vc.shawcable.net> This is important because folks who are serious about changing the nature of our corporate state need to be aware the Michael Moore is not our friend, and in fact is working against us for his own self interest and will work with the liberals to attack us. Buyer of his books beware! bob On Friday, March 1, 2002, at 12:27 PM, Tom Condit wrote: Actually, he supported Nader until Nader started campaigning in "swing" states like Florida, at which point Moore strongly attacked him for endangering Al Gore's election chances. > ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international "They are all Enron, we are all Argentina" --WEF protesters. ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Mar 2 22:36:24 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] Billy Bragg E-Card! Message-ID: <200203030536.g235aOE09877@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> >Billy Bragg is back with a brand new single, N.P.W.A., and a brand new >album England, Half English. The song is on radio stations everywhere and >the album is in stores March 5. Check out the e-card and pass it on! > >To download your free NPWA E-Card, visit: > http://ecards.elektra.com/pickup.asp?id=npwa&pid=23524 From aaron at istop.com Sun Mar 3 05:47:20 2002 From: aaron at istop.com (aaron@istop.com) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] a joke Message-ID: <20020303124720.6ACC917033@ns.istop.com> Robert Saint-Louis wrote: > A New York man was forced to take a day off from work to appear for a > minor > traffic summons. He grew increasingly restless as he waited hour after > endless hour for his case to be heard. > > When his name was called late in the afternoon, he stood before the > judge, > only to hear that court would be adjourned for the rest of the afternoo n > > and he would have to return the next day. > > What for?" he snapped at the judge. > > His honor, equally irked by a tedious day and sharp query, roared, > "Twenty > dollars contempt of court. That's why!" Then, noticing the man checking > his > wallet, the judge relented, "That's all right. You don't have to pay > now." > > The young man replied, "I'm just seeing if I have enough for two more > words. From hunterbadbear at earthlink.net Sun Mar 3 09:24:59 2002 From: hunterbadbear at earthlink.net (Hunter Gray) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] Dakota "justice" [Sisseton-Wahpeton Nation very justifiably angry] Message-ID: <000b01c1c2cf$f8d7de00$f0a90e3f@ibm22761429477> Note by Hunterbear: South Dakota -- traditionally dominated by meat packing outfits in the east and Homestake Mining in the Black Hills [though that dimension has played out] -- continues to display one of its traditionally consistent negative dimensions: rank, virulent and pervasive anti-Indian prejudice and discrimination. Never forget and always remember the Wounded Knee Massacre of hundreds of unarmed Natives in 1890, and the Wounded Knee Native protests of 1973 -- and several thousand other events that attest to the ills and sins of South Dakota. And to the courage and perseverance of the Natives -- and some others of good will and decency. Governor Bill Janklow -- who has Forever been around in one political incarnation or another -- has sometimes been tagged the Ross Barnett [old 1960-64 arch-racist Gov of Mississippi] of the Northern Plains. I wouldn't quarrel with that characterization -- ever. No Indian would -- and not many labor people, either. Tom Daschle was just one of the Dakota Democrats [South and North] who -- along with all of the Republicans -- didn't lift one finger on behalf of Leonard Peltier's freedom. Nor did they utter a word of criticism when Bill Clinton failed to pardon Leonard. And North Dakota should certainly never be off the hook on any of these issues -- or even on the outgoing edge. It has some very, very racist areas in its own right: e.g. Devils Lake -- where we fought many Native rights battles in the late 80s and early '90s; Leonard Peltier was "convicted" at Fargo in that notoriously rigged trial; and no one yet has been arrested for the September 2001 murders of the three Native men at Grand Forks where the racial situation has been going steadily down hill. We continue to be much involved in North Dakota Native rights and general race relations matters. I have a vast number of former University of North Dakota students -- Native and non-Native -- all over the Dakotas, much of Minnesota, many in Montana and Manitoba. I hear with regularity from a good number to this very moment. Things are becoming tough [ and tougher ] all over that whole, general region for everyone "of the fewest alternatives" -- a category which is now including more and more folks. Farmers and ranchers have been very hard hit for decades -- and for Native people it's always been extremely rough. Dakota "justice" is known for its lop-sided selectivity: cruel to Natives and Chicanos -- and other racial minorities -- and hostile to poor people generally. Ideological discussion and abstraction are fine in their place and quantitative stuff certainly has its uses. But I'm one of those who looks first at the actual and tangible "people" dimension. And in this situation, the whole "justice" thing is once again put into its stark, dreary human perspective -- one of obviously developing tragedy. Jake Thompson, Sisseton-Wahpeton vice-chairman, is both a former student [who took every UND course I offered] and a very old friend. When Jake says something, it's solid. "There is a double standard of justice, and it's been going on a long time," said Jake Thompson, vice-chairman of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux Tribe. [From the news story.] So here's the yet-another Dakota story: ========================================= Teen's jailing angers tribe By LEE WILLIAMS Argus Leader published: 3/3/02 http://www.argusleader.com/news/Sundayfeature.shtml Sisseton-Wahpeton allege unfair treatment; county says charges justified SISSETON - Adelia Godfrey spends her days alone in a dimly lit basement cell. She is wondering whether to kill herself. Godfrey, 17, was first arrested for misdemeanor charges nearly a month ago, but a fight with officers at the Roberts County Jail led to two felony charges. Now the Roberts County state's attorney wants to prosecute her as an adult. If convicted, she could be sentenced to 30 years in prison. "At night, I get panic attacks, and I worry I'll stop breathing," Godfrey said Thursday before a court hearing in the case. "I get real scared and depressed. I pray that I can go to sleep. There's no one for me to talk to. I think I'm losing my mind." Members of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux Tribe, of which Godfrey is an enrolled member, say her case is an example of a dual system of justice in Roberts County. The county is 68 percent white and 30 percent Native American. Tribal members, who protested her incarceration last week, contend Native American youth are targeted by police and want Godfrey moved to a tribal facility instead of the adult jail. Law enforcement officials say the girl is being held in the basement cell in the Grant County Jail - called "the dungeon" by the sheriff who oversees it - because there is no juvenile facility in the area that can take her. The Roberts County state's attorney and the Sisseton chief of police say Native Americans are treated no differently than whites. They say Godfrey "went ape" in the jail, sprayed an officer with a fire extinguisher, spit and tried to bite another officer. The charges fit the crime, authorities say. Godfrey was one of several girls who cut themselves with broken light bulbs while housed in a state juvenile prison in Plankinton. Her thin arms are still covered with scars, some as thick as cigars. The girl's family worries she may attempt suicide. "She asked me ... if we have two lives," said Godfrey's mother, Shirley Duggan, through tears. "I told her, 'No, honey, we only have just one. ... Please take care of it.' " Tribal members say Godfrey's case may be the most egregious example of a legal system that preys upon tribal members, especially youth. "There is a double standard of justice, and it's been going on a long time," said Jake Thompson, vice-chairman of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux Tribe. Nontribal law enforcement officers scrutinize the actions of Native American youths more than non-Indian youths, and that constitutes racial profiling, he said. "I've been told that by my own children, and the court stats will prove that out," Thompson said. Statistics are not available to show the numbers of whites and Indians prosecuted for crimes in Roberts County or elsewhere in the state. Gov. Bill Janklow commissioned a study of race in the justice system following a series of complaints that culminated with a meeting of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in Rapid City in December 1999. He criticized the report developed from that session but asked a University of South Dakota political science professor to study the issue. That report is due out this summer. Thompson used a less-scientific method. Turning to the court page of the Feb. 26 edition of The Sisseton Courier newspaper, he pointed to the names of several people convicted in Roberts County courts. "Indian, Indian, Indian, Indian. They're almost all Indians," he said, his finger dancing from name to name. Robert's County State's Attorney Kay Nikolas said she does not file charges against people based on their race. "I charge people on the basis of the crimes that they committed," Nikolas said. Assault on police Shirley Duggan called the police for help with her daughter around 2 a.m. on Feb. 9. Adelia Godfrey had been drinking with friends and was suspected of breaking several windows out of her own home. Her mother later learned that one of the other youths had broken the windows. The teen-agers scattered when they saw the police car, but officers found them nearby and took them to the Roberts County Jail, said Doug Flannery, Sisseton's chief of police. "When she found out she was going to be detained, she went ape," Flannery said. Godfrey ran from the booking area into a nearby office, grabbed a fire extinguisher and leaped onto a desk, Flannery said. She threatened to discharge the extinguisher at the officer - and then did. "He had to go to the hospital," Flannery said. "He broke out in a rash." The unnamed officer and a Roberts County deputy sheriff pulled Godfrey from the desk, handcuffed her and placed her in a restraint chair, Flannery said. While subduing the 98-pound girl, the officers were kicked, Flannery said. "She tried to bite the deputy," he said. "And she spit." Flannery said the two resulting aggravated assault charges, each of which carries a maximum prison sentence of 15 years, were appropriate for the offense. "When you kick and spit at officers, that's what you get," he said. "My officer got assaulted, sprayed with the fire extinguisher." 'The dungeon' Since Roberts County has no facilities for holding juvenile offenders, Godfrey was taken to Milbank and lodged in the Grant County Jail. The Grant County Jail is a two-level, 16-bed facility. It has eight beds on the ground floor and eight beds in the basement. Grant County doesn't have a separate unit for minors but keeps juveniles in the basement unit if there are no adult inmates housed there. When Godfrey arrived Feb. 9, the only inmates in the jail were six adult males, housed on the ground floor. She was placed in the basement, a poorly lighted open bay, by herself. Grant County Sheriff Michael McKernan has a name for the basement unit. "We call it the dungeon," he said. Godfrey's new living quarters are damp and dark and smell of mold. There are no windows, and the two dim bulbs are never turned off. There's no natural light source and no way to know whether it's day or night. A camera tracks Godfrey's every move. When she showers, she crouches down behind a waist-high concrete wall to limit what can be seen of her body on the television monitor in the dispatch office. There are no recreation or exercise facilities. Sheriff McKernan said either he or his only deputy try to take prisoners outside, if time allows. But Godfrey said her only exercise has been a walk to the squad car while she was being taken to court in Sisseton last week. McKernan has been sheriff for 12 years. The jail, which he inherited, was built in 1972. He's tried to commence renovations, but there's no money in the budget, he said. "I get the heebie-jeebies when I'm down there," Godfrey said. "It's scary. The only time I get to talk to anybody is the lunch lady, when I get my meals, and just for a couple minutes." The conditions of Godfrey's confinement are worrisome to one juvenile corrections expert. Marc Schindler is an attorney for the Washington, D.C.-based Youth Law Center. His firm successfully sued the state and spawned major changes in its juvenile corrections program after the death of Gina Score at the girls boot camp in Plankinton. Given Godfrey's history of self-harm, Schindler had a warning for the state's attorney and law enforcement in Sisseton. "If the local officials are aware of these conditions and aware of her age and background, they're putting themselves in serious liability by allowing her to stay there," Schindler said. "They're facing major liability issues... "She needs to be moved immediately." The protest Godfrey's first court appearance last Thursday morning was accompanied by a small protest outside the courthouse and a Dakota drum group from Agency Village. Roberts County Sheriff Neil Long led Godfrey into the courtroom. She was wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and leg shackles. Thursday was juvenile court day, and the courtroom was full of children and their families. Circuit Judge Jon Flemmer was halfway through explaining their constitutional rights when the drum group started outside the courtroom. Godfrey's 13-year-old sister entered the courtroom carrying one of the protest signs and was quickly ushered out by Sheriff Long. The hearing was brief. Godfrey was appointed an attorney and told she would remain in the Grant County Jail until her next hearing Thursday. There is no bail. The state's attorney said Godfrey should remain in custody "for her own protection and the protection of society." Godfrey's mother told the court that her daughter was not a flight risk because she was unemployed, had no money and all of her relatives lived in the Sisseton area. "Milbank is cruel and unusual punishment," Duggan told the court. "It doesn't make any sense to me." Godfrey burst into tears when Flemmer ruled she would be returned to the Grant County Jail. In an interview after the hearing, Flemmer said he has seen no evidence of racial profiling during his time on the bench. "There isn't anything I've seen in Roberts County that leads me to believe that law enforcement is out there selecting who they prosecute or arrest," he said. "It's obvious there may be some societal problems." Magistrate Judge Tony Portra holds court in Sisseton every Tuesday. Portra's father is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Tribe in North Dakota. "I would say there's an inordinate amount of Native Americans in court compared to the percentage of Native Americans in the community," Portra said. "I don't know why. I don't see any evidence of (racial profiling) in court, but I'm not out following the officers around." Chief Flannery said his officers don't profile by race. "We have a policy against it," he said. But Godfrey said Native American youths get labeled by the town's police and, once labeled, are subjected to harassment. Flannery disagreed. "We understand the kids that we're having a lot of trouble with, and when they're around, we keep an eye on them," he said. "But we don't label anyone." 'Nothing else I can do' Shirley Duggan wonders why her daughter faces years in prison when another teen killed a youth and was charged with only driving while intoxicated. "It's a double standard," she said. In August 2000, Justin Redday, a tribal member, was struck and killed on a rural road by a white teen. A grand jury indicted the driver for vehicular homicide, but then-State's Attorney Kerry Cameron dismissed the count and charged the driver in juvenile court with drunken driving. Cameron lost his job as Robert's County state's attorney to Nikolas in the November 2000 election. He is now the court-appointed defense attorney for Roberts County, though he was not given Godfrey's case. Della Eastman, who founded the Eastern Dakota Chapter of the American Indian Movement in Sisseton, organized protests after Redday was killed. She sat through Godfrey's hearing with Darlene Pipeboy, Godfrey's great-aunt. "I see the court as being one-sided. There's a dual justice system here," Eastman said. "They try (tribal) members differently than non-Indians. I don't agree with the court's decision." Pipeboy, a respected elder, also is concerned about the result of the hearing. "The racial profiling offsets the feeling the youth should have that they're a member of the community," Pipeboy said. "They can't come and go as they please." Godfrey was fatalistic about what transpired. "I have to accept the court's decision," she said. "There's nothing else I can do." Rose Chase, 66, is one of several of Godfrey's surrogate grandmothers. "All of this is repetitive," she said. "When I was young, the Indian agents used to chase me around and bring me home. My mother, who didn't speak English, worried about me. Eventually, they put me in Plankinton, just like Adelia (Godfrey)." Said Pipeboy: "The Dakota word for children - wakaneja - means sacred people. That's how we as a people feel about our youth. But this perspective is not heard in a courtroom, where Indians are looked upon as troublemakers." From furuhashi.1 at osu.edu Sun Mar 3 10:56:08 2002 From: furuhashi.1 at osu.edu (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] Thu., Mar. 7: "Sanction on Iraq: Children Are Still Dying" Message-ID: Critical Perspectives on Wars, Classes, & Empires "Sanction on Iraq: Children Are Still Dying" Speaker: Connie Hammond Thursday, March 7, 5:00 p.m. 115 Stillman, OSU, 1947 College Rd., Columbus, OH Connie Hammond is on the coordinating committee of the National Network to End the War Against Iraq (the NNEWAI Home Page: ), as well as actively involved in the Columbus Campaign for Arms Control and the Progressive Peace Coalition. NNEWAI is a nationwide coalition of over sixty organizations united to work for a common cause: ending the illegal, unjust, and inhumane war being waged against the people of Iraq by member states of the United Nations, led by the United States. Guided by the spirit of grassroots democracy, NNEWAI seek to end the sanctions against Iraq; abolish the illegal no-fly zones; stop ongoing bombing; ban Depleted Uranium (DU) weapons; and repair human and environmental damages caused by DU and other weapons. Watch the video "In Iraq, the Children Are Still Dying..." - featuring a 2 November 2001 speech by Hans von Sponeck, former administrator of the U.N. Oil for Food Program - and join our discussion on how to end the war on Iraq! "Approximately 250 people die every day in Iraq due to the effect of the sanctions." -- UNICEF, April 1998 "More than one million Iraqis have died -- 567,000 of them children -- as a direct consequence of economic sanctions?." -- U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), December 1995 "In fact, the UN Security Council is sustaining sanctions that are killing about 7,000 Iraqi children each month and they know that. That is intentional; that is genocide." -- Dennis Halliday, former U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq Sponsors: the Student International Forum and Social Welfare Action Alliance. OSU Campus Map: . Calendar of Events: . For more info, contact Yoshie Furuhashi at or 614-668-6554; or Keith Kilty at or 614-292-7181. Download the flyer for the teach-in at . Download the flyer for other upcoming SIF/SWAA events at . -- Yoshie * Calendar of Events in Columbus: * Anti-War Activist Resources: * Student International Forum: * Committee for Justice in Palestine: From mstainsby at tao.ca Sun Mar 3 19:48:21 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] Press release, massacres in India Message-ID: <001301c1c327$101d96c0$76195218@vc.shawcable.net> Forwarded from Dr. Hari P. Sharma- who will be speaking on the recent violence at Douglas College (in New Westminster), date to be announced later- Macdonald.) SANSAD South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy 8027 Government Road, Burnaby, BC, V5A 2E1, Canada phone : (604) 420-2972; FAX: (604) 420-2970 Electronic mail: sansad@sfu.ca [Incorporated in British Columbia under the Society Act as a Non-Profit Society, # S-31797] March 3, 2002 Press Release What has been happening in India for the last many days, especially in the western State of Gujarat, is a cause of deep pain and much shame. Hundreds of innocent people have been brutally slaughtered in mob violence; many have been burnt alive. The carnage is continuing. What is happening now is a continuation of the violence that was unleashed when L. K. Advani, presently the Minister of Home Affairs, launched his countrywide "chariot-journey" in 1990 to whip up the Hindutava passions. The "chariot" left a massive trail of blood on its path: Muslim blood; innocent people's blood. It is a continuation of the bloody orgy that followed the frenzied demolition of Babri Mosque in 1992. It is a continuation of systematic attacks on churches and members of the Christian community all over the country for the last ten years. It is a continuation of the murder of thousands of Sikhs by frenzied mobs in 1984. In the present situation of Gujarat, we witness yet another case of a profound failure of Indian state. Massacres happen while the entire state machinery sits idle and watches. It is not a conflict between Hindus and Muslims, or Hindus and non-Hindus. In the name of Hindu religion, organizations like VHP, RSS, Shiv Sena and Bajrang Dal are terrorizing the whole people, and creating schisms among them. It is time these organizations are banned universally to stop their fascist terror. To express our pain, anguish and concern, and to register our protest we call for a Vigil and a Rally Today, March 3, at 11 a.m. Roundhouse Community Centre (courtyard) Corner of Pacific Boulvard and Davie, Vancouver Hari P. Sharma, Ph.D. President, SANSAD ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international "They are all Enron, we are all Argentina" --WEF protesters. ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From aaron at istop.com Sun Mar 3 20:34:21 2002 From: aaron at istop.com (aaron@istop.com) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] ATL:UPDATE ON APRIL 20 A.N.S.W.E.R COALITION SCENARIO Message-ID: <20020304033421.BD5EC17013@ns.istop.com> UPDATE ON APRIL 20 A.N.S.W.E.R COALITION SCENARIO March 3, 2002 We are heartened by the large volume of positive responses to the announcement issued by the A.N.S.W.E.R. steering committee (February 27) that the coalition was shifting the date of its demonstration to Saturday, April 20. The change to April 20 was in turn a response to a large number of requests asking for a united date for anti-war forces to converge this spring in Washington DC. The A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition has been and continues to be in communication with other groups organizing on the weekend of April 19-22 for a variety of activities. The demonstration couldn’t come at a more important moment. We are focusing the political protest against the Bush administration’s expanding war against oppressed peoples all over the world. The Bush program represents the extreme right wing of corporate America. It represents a violent assault on people’s rights at home and abroad and a dangerous assault on the environment. On April 20, anti-war activists, workers, trade unionists, communities of color, women, lesbian, gay, bi and trans communities, communities of faith, and others will take to the streets of Washington DC to say that Bush cannot speak in our name as his administration carries out the anti-people, pro-corporate, militarist agenda. WE WILL ASSEMBLE AT THE WHITE HOUSE AT 11 AM ON SATURDAY, APRIL 20 in order to protest against the real “axis of evil”: war, racism and poverty. In the early afternoon of April 20, we will MARCH from the White House, east on Pennsylvania Ave. directly in front of the White House, and proceeding on Pennsylvania Ave. to the Justice Department. At the Justice Department--directly across the street from the J. Edgar Hoover FBI building--we will rally in defense of civil rights and civil liberties and to demand the repeal of Ashcroft’s USA Patriot Act. Following the rally at the Justice Department, it will be our goal to link up with the other anti-war coalition that is planning activities on April 20. We recognize that the anti-war movement includes people and organizations from a range of traditions, beliefs, and political currents. But, we also recognize that thousands and thousands of people must march shoulder to shoulder in the streets in Washington DC if we are to build an anti-war, anti-racist movement strong enough to dismantle the Bush perpetual war machine. MASS ASSEMBLY AT THE WHITE HOUSE - 11 AM At the White House, we will condemn the massive bombing of Afghanistan that has killed thousands of civilians. At this moment, U.S. forces have launched a new offensive in Afghanistan using experimental “thermobaric” bombs that suffocate all living things. During the war, the U.S. has used fuel-air explosives, cluster bombs and other weapons, the use of which, by definition, constitutes a war crime. The Bush administration has used the war in Afghanistan as a springboard to establish new U.S. military bases in South/Central Asia. We will demand that these bases be dismantled and that the troops be brought home immediately. At the White House, we will show our solidarity with the besieged people of Palestine, who are at this very moment resisting fierce aggression in the Balata and Jenin refugee camps in the occupied West Bank. Ariel Sharon is giving the orders to carry out these massacres - but he could not do it without the support of the Bush administration. U.S.-backed-and-financed Israeli forces are today bulldozing the homes of civilians in Occupied Territories, they have intentionally destroyed the sole source of water into the Balata camp, and they have deliberately destroyed the electrical system. These Israeli war crimes are being sponsored by the Bush administration. At the White House, we will show our solidarity with the people of the Philippines and Yemen, where Bush has already dispatched a growing number of U.S. Special Operations forces to occupy and wage war in their countries. In the same manner, we will show solidarity with the people of Somalia, who fear a repetition of the murderous U.S. military actions taken against them in 1993. The Bush administration seeks to portray these interventions as “limited police actions in the war against terrorism.” Let us never forget that that is precisely how the Kennedy administration initially explained the introduction of U.S. troops into Vietnam in the early 1960s. At the White House, we will condemn the new aggression waged by the Colombian government and its paramilitary proxies against the people. The Pastrana government is giving the orders to cancel negotiations and wage war - but we well know that the Colombian government would never dare to have taken this step if it had not been given the money, the weapons and the political support for this aggression given by the Bush administration. At the White House, we will raise our voices to demand “No New War Against the People of Iraq” and we will demand the immediate elimination of all sanctions on Iraq that in the last decade have taken the lives of more than 1.5 million Iraqi civilians. At the White House, we will stand with the people of Korea, who reject the new threats delivered by Bush in his State of the Union message. The Korean people want the removal of the 37,000 U.S. troops that occupy South Korea. The Korean people must be allowed to pursue their own destiny, including the right to the reunification of their divided nation. At the White House, we will extend a hand of solidarity to the people of Iran who too are threatened by Bush’s “axis of evil” stratagem that seeks to demonize in advance the potential targets of U.S. military aggression. At the White House, we will demand an immediate end to the U.S. blockade of Cuba. We will protest the wrongful designation by the U.S. government of Cuba as a “terrorist state” and demand freedom for the five U.S.-held Cuban political prisoners, who have been given harsh prison sentences for defending their country from U.S.-sponsored terrorism. At the White House, we will demand that the Bush administration immediately move to extend unemployment benefits for the millions of workers who are suffering unemployment. We will tell Bush “HANDS OFF SOCIAL SECURITY.” We will demand money for jobs, education, health care and housing - not for wars of aggression in the Third World. We will stand against union busting. At the White House, condemn the Bush administration’s reintroduction of a form of apartheid in law enforcement through the USA Patriot Act that strips non-citizens of essential democratic rights and legalizes racial and religious profiling. We will make it clear that we will not allow the Bush administration to use the “war on terrorism” to implement the long-standing agenda of the ultra-right and corporate America to stifle progressive dissent. At the White House, we demand an end to the use of methods of racist terror in the United States, most notably the death penalty. George Bush, while governor of Texas, executed more people than any governor in U.S. history (152 human beings). He is the face of the death penalty. The people of the world have let it be known that they consider the use of the death penalty in the United States to be an unconscionable abrogation of fundamental human rights. FOR MORE INFORMATION see http://www.internationalanswer.org, or email ANSWER@afgj.org, or call New York 212?633?6646, Washington 202?543?2777, Chicago 773?583?7728, San Francisco 415?821?6545 TO ENDORSE, GO TO http://www.internationalanswer.org/campaigns/a27/a27-endorse.html#endo ---------------------------- PARTIAL LIST OF ENDORSERS: A.N.S.W.E.R. STEERING COMMITTEE - IFCO/Pastors for Peace - Nicaragua Network - Mexico Solidarity Network - Partnership for Civil Justice LDEF - Committee for Justice to Defend Palestinian Rights-USA - Bayan-USA - Kensington Welfare Rights Union - International Action Center - Middle East Children's Alliance - Korea Truth Commission ENDORSERS (partial list) - Black Voices for Peace - Howard Zinn, Author, Historian - Ramsey Clark, former U.S. attorney general - Al-Awda Palestine Right to Return Coalition - American Muslims for Global Peace and Justice - Bay Area Anti-War Coalition - Students for International Peace and Justice - Palestine Aid Society - Inglewood Anti-War Coalition - Charlotte Coalition for Peace & Justice, North Carolina - Chicago Coalition Against War & Racism - International League of Peoples' Struggle (ILPS) - National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA), Brooklyn NY - Queers For Racial & Economic Justice - Rev. Graylan Hagler, Senior Minister, Plymouth Congregational Church - Bishop Thomas Gumbelton, Auxilliary Bishop, Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit - Chuck Turner, council member, Boston City Council, District 7, Massachusetts - Sally Davies, President, Council 92 AFSCME - Prof. Richard Lewontin, Harvard University - Rev. Curtis Gatewood, Durham, North Carolina - The Feminist Coalition Emmanuel College, Boston - Women For Peace, Iowa - Anti-Racist Action, Denver - Anarchist Action of Rochester - Students And Youth Against Racism, Penn State University - Int'l Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu Jamal (ICFFMAJ) - Anti-War Committee, Minnesota - High Country Citizens for Peace and Justice, NC - Chicago Anti-Bashing Network - Simmons College Feminist Union, Boston - WESPAC (Westchester People's Action Coalition) - Gloria La Riva, President, Typographical Sector, Northern California Media - Bay Area Iranians for Peace and Social Justice - Committee on US-Latin American Relations (CUSLAR) - Ray LaForest, District Council 1707 AFSCME - Prof. Asha A. Samad, Muslims against Racism and War - Community Church of Boston - Berkeley Women in Black - Leslie Feinberg, activist and author - Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Penn State University - Collier County Anti-War Coalition, Naples, FL - Nicaragua Solidarity Committee of Chicago - Rainbow Flags for Mumia - Jim Fennerty, President, Chicago Chapter, National Lawyers Guild* - Colombia Solidarity Committee, Chicago - Freedom Road Socialist Organization - Falmouth AntiWar, Cape Cod, Mass - Justice for Political Prisoners in Turkey, Boston - United American Indians of New England - Womens Fightback Network, Boston - Hammerhard MediaWorks - David Sole, President UAW Local 2334, Detroit - Moroccans for Peace and Justice - Bus Riders Union, Los Angeles - Committee to Defend Amer Jubran and Palestinian Free A.N.S.W.E.R. APRIL 20 CALL TO ACTION: http://www.internationalanswer.org/campaigns/april/call.html FULL LIST OF ENDORSERS: http://www.internationalanswer.org/campaigns/april/a20-endorsers.html A.N.S.W.E.R. COALITION ENDORSERS: http://www.internationalanswer.org/endorsers.html TO ENDORSE, GO TO: http://www.internationalanswer.org/campaigns/a27/a27-endorse.html#endo ---------------------------- APRIL MARCH ON WASHINGTON UNITY STATEMENT FROM THE A.N.S.W.E.R. COALITION: http://www.internationalanswer.org BUSES, VANS & CAR CARAVANS COMING TO DC FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY: http://www.internationalanswer.org/campaigns/april/contacts.html FOR MORE INFORMATION: Email: ANSWER@afgj.org , or call New York 212-633-6646, Washington 202-543-2777, Chicago 773-583-7728, San Francisco 415-821-6545. http://www.InternationalANSWER.org ---------------------------- CALENDAR OF EVENTS APRIL 19-22 National Colombia Mobilization http://www.colombiamobilization.org APRIL 20 NATIONAL MARCH ON WASHINGTON DC Assemble 11 am at the White House The people of the world are not our enemy - solidarity against U.S. world domination! http://www.internationalanswer.org APRIL 20 Stop the War at Home and Abroad http://www.a20stopthewar.org APRIL 20-21 Protest the IMF and World Bank http://www.globalizethis.org APRIL 22 Protest Ariel Sharon and George Bush - 7 pm at the annual conference of American Israeli Public Affairs Committee ------------------ Send replies to iacenter@action-mail.org This is the IAC activist announcement list. Anyone can subscribe by sending any message to To unsubscribe From hunterbadbear at earthlink.net Mon Mar 4 05:40:56 2002 From: hunterbadbear at earthlink.net (Hunter Gray) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] Left Solidarity [was the "12 step program for recovering fundamentalists"] References: <3C815FC7.2DAAFB8C@yahoo.com> <003401c1c34d$ef99b290$89685d3f@FRED> Message-ID: <003501c1c379$da07fbe0$dca90e3f@ibm22761429477> This is a response, E., regarding your rather facetious post on religious fundamentalism --with a take-off on the program of Alcoholics Anonymous: "12 step program for recovering fundamentalists." Because it, in its own way and however inadvertently, addresses a number of issues concerning Left solidarity [and the lack of it], I'm posting it in several other places where these kinds of issues, literally and symbolically, have recently arisen. I am doing so minus your name [simply as an amenity.] In a very friendly way, E. -- and, using the old Mississippi term, that "I do so politely" -- I'm frankly not quite sure why you're on this particular trail. As you've gathered, and I haven't yet gotten the impression that you and I differ much in this context, I don't "Red bait." I make my own decisions on who and with what I hook up and work -- and I speak my own piece. I certainly have and have always had my strong loyalties -- personally and organizationally. I can and do debate with passion. But I'm much, much more inclined to focus my activist attention and my activist attacks on the bosses and Federal finks et al., and lend my efforts toward the achievement of social justice and socialist democracy, than I am on the intricacies of someone's Left affiliations -- now or decades ago. I've always been inclined to wonder why some Left folk, sometimes even very nice ones, try to secure a measure of "respectability" or bolster their sense of personal security -- say, in the eyes of the power structure or even the liberals! -- at the public expense of other Left persons and groups. I may have been the only guy -- barely into his twenties -- who, in the continuing Red Scare [especially in challenging places like Arizona] could work congenially with three editors from three differing radical traditions: Fred Thompson [Industrial Worker], the Wobbly; Bert Cochran [American Socialist], the former Trotskyist -- and fiercely independent socialist; and Charles Humboldt [Mainstream], the Communist --and a very ecumenical one indeed who was, very sadly for his publication and his personal vision, cruelly hatcheted by, as his loyal colleague, the very good and always enduringly creative Dr Annette Rubinstein put it so bitingly well in Encyclopedia of the American Left, the "ever more rigidly philistine" forces. The witch-hunters didn't like those guys or the journals they edited or the very decent things for which they as humans and editors stood. And the witch-hunters obviously didn't and don't like me at all. The 3,000 plus pages of my FBI files that I finally got [not counting several hundred other pages FBI refuses to give me] and in various batches over many years in the 1980s, have various things hostile to the publications those three fine editors edited -- and hostile to much, much more [e.g., other labor and radical things, Native rights, civil rights and civil liberties, peace, socialism and much else indeed from the Sunny Side.] Those three veteran Left editors certainly helped me, a very young and geographically isolated and hot-eyed radical Indian kid just out of the Army who was learning to organize and write. We were all on the same basic side. To them, and to many others like them, I owe a debt that's more than just considerable -- and that holds true for many other Left editors and persons of various Left faiths right into this present moment. Again, I have my loyalties and commitments. But, in the last analysis, I guess I make my judgments on the basis of what people actually do -- are tangibly doing -- to effectively help, in a variety of ways, the "people of the fewest alternatives." You, E., are certainly and personally doing your best on that critical front. On the matter of AA: Fortunately, I'm not an alcoholic -- only by the luck of whatever draw. I am, however, very careful about how I personally handle alcohol. And, in my extended family and circle of friends and acquaintances, there has been considerable alcohol-related tragedy. A good part of my volunteer time is often spent working with alcoholics [of all sorts of ethnicities] and their families and that's brought me into very close association with AA and its related programs -- for which I have the highest respect. I would never comment on AA and its endeavours jokingly or lightly. To come to the really specific matter at hand: I spend virtually no time at all worrying about someone else's religion. In the Deep South over a six year period [1961-67], much of it characterized by the highest drama and the most extreme danger, I spoke in hundreds of fundamentalist Black churches. Some of my more poignant memories, "forever etched," are driving through the dark and hot and lethal Southern night to a particular rural church -- in piney woods, or swampland, or cotton or tobacco turf -- where the frightened but brave minister waited with his frightened but brave flock to hear the message of the frightened but brave young organizer with his bundle of leaflets and other activist materials. And then, in due course, all of those frightened but brave people [including the organizer] were in frightened but brave public demonstrations -- facing an array of utterly reactionary and violent forces whose desperate viciousness we came to realize indicated depths and heights of fear far, far greater than ours could ever be. Let me tell you -- using the very broad "you:" There are many, many times when the Movement [with its various attendant dangers] and the social justice trail one has to take and will -- and in the end, the long range, will take successfully -- is enhanced mightily by singing, say, "Solidarity Forever" or "Joe Hill" or -- "We Shall Overcome" [with the words, of course, "we are not afraid" and "God is on our side."] I never worry about someone's religion or the Bible or the Book of Mormon or the Koran -- or whatever else embodies their particular beliefs in that realm [or, as far as that goes, books that involve the lack of religious beliefs.] That's their business. They have their views, I have mine. If t he institutional Church gets in the way of an organizing campaign, then we'll find ways to deal effectively with that roadblock -- and push past it and on toward the Sun. But on personal religious beliefs, I hold to the Indian Way: leave me alone with My Way, good luck with Yours, and we'll see where we all wind up -- wherever and when. We may all be surprised. In the final scenes of that fine film, the old version of "Inherit the Wind" -- the Scopes trial, of course -- Spencer Tracy as Henry Drummond [Darrow] stands in the empty Tennessee courtroom. They've all gone -- including his very facetious agnostic friend, [Henry Mencken -- played by Gene Kelly.] "Darrow" [and, from what I've heard of the great Attorney for the Damned, this could well be quite precisely what happened] stands with the Bible in one hand and the Origin of the Species in the other. With a privately quizzical expression, he weighs each one. And then, smiling, he claps them together -- and walks out of the court and on to the Next Dragon. Let's go after the Dragons and not each other. Yours, Hunter Gray [Hunterbear, John R Salter, Jr] Micmac / St Francis Abenaki / St Regis Mohawk Hunter Gray [ Hunterbear ] www.hunterbear.org ( social justice ) From tomcondit at igc.org Mon Mar 4 14:57:06 2002 From: tomcondit at igc.org (Tom Condit) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] Dakota "justice" [Sisseton-Wahpeton Nation very justifiably angry] In-Reply-To: <000b01c1c2cf$f8d7de00$f0a90e3f@ibm22761429477> Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.0.20020304135613.02d75cc0@pop.igc.org> The last time I looked, 50% of those in the South Dakota prison system were Native Americans -- far higher, needless to say, than their percentage of the population. From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Mar 4 17:22:55 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] Italy's left confronts Berlusconi - BBC Message-ID: <200203050022.g250MtE03213@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1851000/1851950.stm The BBC Sunday, 3 March, 2002 Italy's left confronts Berlusconi Protesters accused Berlusconi of breaking promises By David Willey BBC Rome correspondent More than 100,000 left-wingers have marched through the streets of Rome in a major protest against the labour, welfare and justice policies of Silvio Berlusconi's government. It was an effective demonstration of the increasingly vocal opposition by Italy's left to the way in which media magnate Mr Berlusconi, Italy's wealthiest businessman, appears to be forcing through legislation favouring above all himself and his business cronies. A general strike has been called for the week after Easter by the main labour unions. Widespread industrial unrest played a key role in bringing down Mr Berlusconi's first government after only seven months in 1994. But the prime minister appears unfazed by threats of more strikes in the public services. He told a meeting of Italian industrialists that his popularity rating was still 70%. He hinted that he was prepared to reconsider his plans to rewrite a key clause in a labour law that gives workers who feel they have been fired without just cause the automatic right to get their jobs back. The prime minister insists that Italy must remain competitive within the European Union. The only way for this to happen, he argues, is to abandon previous labour legislation which stifles industrial flexibility. The weakness of the left-wing opposition lies in its fragmentation and internal rivalries. Even the leadership of the main left-wing party is in dispute. When one of Mr Berlusconi's leading independent political opponents, the former public prosecutor Antonio di Pietro, tried to address the demonstrators at the end of the Rome rally, he was refused permission to speak from the platform. From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Mar 4 18:06:10 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] Let's return to responsible capitalism Message-ID: <200203050106.g2516AE09803@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> International Herald Tribune March 4, 2002 Let's return to responsible capitalism Under American pressure, deregulation became the ruling theory in all of the international economic institutions, setting the course and terms of globalization in the non-Western world. by William Pfaff PARIS -- The Enron scandal is the result of a profound and malignant mutation that has taken place in American capitalism during recent decades, affecting the capitalist model everywhere. The scandal has revealed the predatory and corrupting side to the new corporate system, its social irresponsibility and exploitative nature, which affect the lives of every American who works for a large business, every corporate stockholder and every regulatory official and political officeholder in the national government. The mutation began, as most bad things do, in a theory. This theory turned Adam Smith's observation that a market provides the best mechanism for arbitrating values and establishing the general interest into an essentially utopian justification of business laissez-faire, ignoring the pragmatism, social insight and ethical content of Smith's argument. The modern version said that if you cease to regulate corporate behavior - "get government out of business" - and if each corporation and individual seeks its own self-interest, an economy of maximized efficiencies will result, to general benefit. The theory's most powerful appeal to individuals, corporations and politicians obviously was that it rationalized the pursuit of self-interest. That alone should have been a warning. Americans are supposed to know that there is no free lunch; eventually, you pay. The utopianism of the new theory combined with its blessing of greed to make it irresistible. Promoted in the business schools and press during the 1970s, it underlay the economic doctrine of the Reagan administration. It was installed in Britain by the indomitable Margaret Thatcher and eventually came to dominate public policy choices as well as business practice in most of the advanced industrial states. Under American pressure, deregulation became the ruling theory in all of the international economic institutions, setting the course and terms of globalization in the non-Western world. Its practical effect was not only to remove external restraints on corporate conduct but to dismiss internalized ethical inhibitions. The theory destroyed the kind of capitalism that had been practiced in the United States from the time, early in the 20th century, when Theodore Roosevelt broke up abusive "trusts" and established the Commerce and Labor departments to regulate corporate behavior. A new form of popular capitalism then emerged, which paid high wages (as Henry Ford argued, so that workers could buy the cars they manufactured) and considered itself obligated to respond to community interest. Public policy regulated natural monopolies and public services. The new American capitalism that Enron exemplifies has failed to produce the economic justice it promised. Its natural tendency has been to produce oligopolies striving to become monopolies. This has happened in airlines, media, communications, banking, aerospace and defense industries and most other major industrial sectors. It has also produced a huge and morally indefensible transfer of wealth and power from the workers who directly produce wealth to executives and the stockholders who supply capital (usually irresponsibly so; during the run-up in dot-com stocks, the average individual holding in a company like Yahoo was seven days). It has subordinated both short- and long-term corporate interest to quarterly profit return and the logically absurd stock market demand for constant profit growth, an expectation resembling a belief in fairies. This profit demand corrupted company accounts, prompting a rich variety of dissimulations and lies to the public as well as to the market analysts. This happened despite the fact that "everyone" in the markets knew what was going on - but thought that it could be kept going on. It further tainted the U.S. accounting profession, already accustomed to double-dipping, consulting for a client while auditing it. Now virtually no one any longer believes that U.S. company reports are trustworthy or that American corporate profits are what they are claimed to be. According to a Merrill Lynch survey of fund managers, there has been a 20 percent drop in confidence, to under 40 percent. Abroad, the opinion of American business is worse yet. The system made executives wealthy, while they increased "productivity" by firing employees and working the rest harder. The executives and directors' roles too often were objectively predatory, devoid of responsibility either to society or to long-term company or stockholder interest. Today those who profited do not even defend the system. They squeal on one another and pass the blame. The former head of Enron, Jeffrey Skilling, says he never really understood how he was making all that money. The public, however, has grasped that the rules of deregulated market capitalism licensed a system of organized swindle. The anxiety in the U.S. Congress over Enron shows that legislators sense the public outrage, even if the Bush administration seems completely deaf to what has happened. The drunken party is over. Some of the party-givers and party-goers are now on their way to jail. We need a return to responsible capitalism. From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Mar 4 18:07:15 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] Has the US lost its way? The Observer Message-ID: <200203050107.g2517FE10874@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> The Observer March 3, 2002 Has the US lost its way? Does everybody hate America? Maybe the world is just concerned at the lack of visionary leadership from such a powerful nation by Paul Kennedy 'By what right,' an angry environmentalist demanded at a recent conference I attended, 'do Americans place such a heavy footprint upon God's Earth?' Ouch. That was a tough one because, alas, it's largely true. We comprise slightly less than 5 per cent of the world's population; but we imbibe 27 per cent of the world's annual oil production, create and consume nearly 30 per cent of its Gross World Product and - get this - spend a full 40 per cent of all the world's defense expenditures. By my calculation, the Pentagon's budget is nowadays roughly equal to the defense expenditures of the next nine or 10 highest defence-spending nations - which has never before happened in history. That is indeed a heavy footprint. How do we explain it to others - and to ourselves? And what, if anything, should we be doing about this? I pose these questions because recent travel experiences of mine - to the Arabian Gulf, Europe, Korea, Mexico - plus a shoal of letters and emails from across the globe all suggest that this American democracy of ours is not as admired and appreciated as we often suppose. The sympathy of non-Americans for the horrors of 11 September was genuine enough, but that was sympathy for innocent victims and for those who had lost loved ones - workers at the World Trade Center, the policemen, the firemen. There was also that feeling of pity that comes out of a fear that something similar could happen, in Sydney, or Oslo, or New Delhi. But this did not imply unconditional love and support of Uncle Sam. On the contrary, those who listen can detect a groundswell of international criticisms, sarcastic references about US government policies, and complaints about our heavy 'footprint' upon God's Earth. Even as I write, a new e-mail has arrived from a former student of mine now in Cambridge (and a devoted Anglophile), who talks of the difficulty of grappling with widespread anti-American sentiments. And this in the land of Tony Blair! It's lucky he's not studying in Athens, or Beirut, or Calcutta. Many American readers of this column may not really care about the growing criticisms and worries expressed by outside voices. To them, the reality is that the United States is unchallenged Number One, and all the rest - Europe, Russia, China, the Arab world - just have to accept that plain fact. To act as if it were not so is a futile gesture, like whistling in the wind. But other Americans I listen to - former Peace Corps workers, parents with children studying abroad (as they themselves once did), businessmen with strong contacts overseas, religious men and women, environmentalists - really do worry about the murmurs from afar. They worry that we are isolating ourselves from most of the serious challenges to global society, and that, increasingly, our foreign policy consists merely of sallying forth with massive military heft to destroy demons like the Taliban, only to retreat again into our air bases and boot camps. They understand, better than some of their neighbors, that America itself has been largely responsible for creating an ever more integrated world - through our financial investments, our overseas acquisitions, our communications revolution, our MTV and CNN culture, our tourism and student exchanges, our pressure upon foreign societies to conform to agreements regarding trade, capital flows, intellectual property, environment and labor laws. They therefore recognize that we cannot escape back to some Norman Rockwell-like age of innocence and isolationism, and fear we are alienating too much of a world to which we are now tightly and inexorably bound. After my recent travels, this viewpoint makes more and more sense to me. So what is to be done? One way to clearer thinking might be to divide outside opinion into three categories: those who love America, those who hate America and those who are concerned about America. The first group is easily recognizable. It includes political figures such as Lady Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev; businessmen admirers of US laissez-faire economics; foreign teenagers devoted to Hollywood stars, pop music and blue jeans, and societies liberated from oppression by American policies against nasty regimes. The second group also stands out. Anti-Americanism is not just the hallmark of Muslim fundamentalists, most non-democratic regimes, radical activists in Latin America, Japanese nationalists and critics of capitalism everywhere. It also can be found in the intellectual salons of Europe, perhaps especially in France, where US culture is regarded as being crass, simplistic, tasteless - and all too successful. Since there is little that can be done to alter the convictions of either of those camps, our focus ought to be upon the third and most important group, those who are inherently friendly to America and admire its role in advancing democratic freedoms, but who now worry about the direction in which the US is headed. This is ironic, but also comforting. Their criticisms are directed not at who we are, but at America's failure to live up to the ideals we ourselves have always articulated: democracy, fairness, openness, respect for human rights, a commitment to advancing Roosevelt's 'four freedoms'. Three times in the past century most of the world looked with hope and yearning toward an American leader who advocated transcendent human values: for Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Kennedy made hearts rise abroad when they rejected narrow 'America First' sentiments and spoke of the needs of all humankind. It is a return to this tolerant and purposeful America that so many worried and disappointed foreign friends want to see. Unilateralist US policies on land mines, an international criminal court and Kyoto environmental protocols fall well below those expectations. Underfunding the United Nations seems both unwise and contrary to solemn pledges. Committing an extra $48 billion to defense, but not committing to amounts or percentages for next month's Monterrey conference on financing development looks hypocritical. In fact, a few of these US policies (for example, on the early Kyoto proposals) can probably be well defended. But the overall impression that America has given of late is that we simply don't care what the rest of the world thinks. When we require assistance - in rounding up terrorists, freezing financial assets and making air bases available for US troops - we will play with the team; when we don't like international schemes, we'll walk away. My guess is that every American ambassador and envoy abroad these days spends most of his time handling such worries - worries expressed, as I said above, not by America's foes but by her friends. Finally, individual policy changes matter much less than the larger issue. There is a deep yearning abroad these days for America to show real leadership. Not what Senator William J. Fulbright once termed 'the arrogance of power', but leadership of the sort perhaps best exemplified by Roosevelt. This seems to be what EU external affairs commissioner Chris Patten wants when he voices his worries about America shifting into 'unilateral overdrive'. It would be a leadership marked by a breadth of vision, an appreciation of our common humanity, a knowledge that we have as much to learn from others as we have to impart to them. It would be a leadership that spoke to the disadvantaged and weak everywhere, and that committed America to join other advantaged and strong nations in a common endeavor to help those who can scarce help themselves. Above all, it would be a leadership that turned openly to the American people and explained, time and time again, why our deepest national interest lies in taking the fate of our planet seriously and in investing heavily in its future. Were that to happen, we would fulfill America's promise - and probably get a surprise at just how popular we really are. Paul Kennedy CBE, Professor of History and Director of International Security Studies at Yale University, is the author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. E-mail: paul.kennedy@yale.edu From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Mar 4 18:08:10 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] Patriotic stupor: White House junta is undermining democracy Message-ID: <200203050108.g2518AE11659@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> The Daytona Beach News-Journal March 2, 2002 Editorial Patriotic stupor: White House junta is undermining democracy In the months following Sept. 11 the debate about waging war on terrorism has been understandably mute. With rare exceptions, the question boiling out of the nation's anger hasn't been whether to fight a war or where to fight it, but how quickly. Once it began, President Bush's strangely paradoxical promise that the war would certainly be won but that its duration would be open-ended should have been the first warning that such a colossal national commitment deserves less vagueness and clearer strategy, if not accountability. Nothing of the sort has happened. The president has instead redefined success to mean whatever his administration says it means. Victory was attained in Afghanistan, even though Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leader are still at large and anarchy promises to be the Afghan spring's bitterest crop. The war on terrorism is being won even though probable terrorists in custody can be counted on one hand. Meanwhile the Pentagon keeps announcing troop deployments Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Georgia, Pakistan, the Philippines as if Asian geography were a game of Risk. The rubble remains of Somalia, the Sudan and Yemen are being cobbled into a minor league axis of evil. And the president has all but set a television schedule for the war against Iraq. (The May sweeps, perhaps.) For all this, the Bush administration is demanding a free hand on the world stage, wartime allegiance at home, and a blank check on military spending, even if most of the coming billions are to be spent on weaponry useless in the war on terrorism or any foreseeable war. So the response to a few powerful Democrats on Thursday who questioned the direction of the war and the president's imperial wish list should not be "How dare you," as Trent Lott, the Senate minority leader put it, but "What took you so long?" And "Why so few questions?" It's an election year. Congress is naturally timid to seem critical of a president whose approval ratings are still flirting with stardust. But the nation's loyalty is turning into groupthink. How else explain a president who, playing on the war's most visceral slogan, gets away with justifying an obscene corporate tax cut as "economic security," a build-up of defense industry stock as "homeland security," and an exploitative assault on the nation's most pristine lands as "energy security"? How else explain his contempt for Congress, his Nixonian fixation on secrecy, his administration's junta-like demeanor in Washington since September? Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle merely asked for "a clearer understanding of what the direction" of the war will be hardly a criticism, hardly a request for an accounting, hardly the reality check so needed at this point. That he was summarily vilified by the junta's Lott-like henchmen points to the real front in this alleged war on terrorism. The danger right now is not terrorism. It isn't even to those "troops in the field" Lott is so worried about (not when a minimalist army can invade a whole nation and lose only one man in the bargain). The danger is here at home, where zealotry is substituting for policy-making, where the flag is turning into the administration's fig leaf, and where slander is any opposition's reward. Without robust dissent democracy might as well pack up and head for the hills. So far, Daschle's grumbles included, dissent has been non-existent. This is not unity. It's not patriotism. It's stupor. From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Mar 4 18:09:04 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] MIT team tied to questionable missile studies - Boston Globe Message-ID: <200203050109.g25194E12677@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> The Boston Globe March 4, 2002 MIT team tied to questionable missile studies by David Abel A Pentagon agency, two major military contractors, and an independent research team led by MIT scientists produced flawed studies that exaggerated the success of a key test used to justify spending billions of dollars on the fledgling national missile defense program, according to two reports obtained by the Globe. The long-awaited reports, to be released today by the General Accounting Office, detail the flawed analysis of critical missile-defense technologies provided by the contractors, Boeing Co. and TRW, verified by senior researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory, and hailed by the Pentagon's recently renamed Missile Defense Agency. In reports about a highly sophisticated sensor used in the first test of the missile-defense program - a technology similar to one now designed for the vital task of distinguishing decoys from warheads - contractors described its performance as ''excellent'' and the overall test as a ''success.'' The team directed by two MIT scientists, which evaluated the contractors' reports of the test, pronounced them ''basically sound.'' And officials in the Missile Defense Agency called the first test of the technology in space ''highly successful.'' Yet the review by the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, found that crucial elements of the 1997 test failed - prompting investigators to raise questions about the oversight of a program that has already cost billions of dollars and could, if the Bush administration has its way, ultimately cost taxpayers as much as $238 billion, according to a recent estimate by the Congressional Budget Office. ''The data are garbage - they had to use all these software shenanigans and throw out two-thirds of the data to make it look like a success,'' said a congressional source close to the GAO investigation. ''Up to now, there has been no independent verification of the contractors' claims. This pulls out the rug from those calling the test a success. By any definition, there's no way to call it a success.'' The main defect in the test, according to the GAO, was that the infrared sensor built by Boeing failed to cool to a sufficient temperature to function properly. Also, the power supply of the sensor turned out to be much louder than expected. The excess heat and noise, missile specialists said, caused a significant distortion, by a factor of up to 200 times, in the ability of the sensor to detect targets. As a result, the sensor often detected targets where none existed. The performance of the sensor is crucial because the planned land-based national missile defense system might have only one chance to hit its target. And once the military launches an antimissile against an incoming ballistic missile, military analysts say they believe it would almost certainly face a barrage of decoys. Moving at great speeds, it would have to distinguish the fake from the real in a matter of minutes. Regarding what became known in defense circles as the ''MIT study,'' a review of the contractors' findings that the Pentagon used to champion missile defense spending, the GAO faulted the team led by scientists at Lincoln Lab for relying on data processed by TRW - instead of seeking the contractor's raw data. Although the team reported that TRW's sensor contained a few software glitches, GAO investigators said the scientists' use of the processed data allowed them to review only 14 of 54 seconds worth of data. The limited look at the sensor's performance, according to the GAO, skewed the scientists' review and led them to pronounce the sensor's software well designed and say it worked properly. The failure to review the raw data, investigators wrote in the report, means ''the team cannot be said to have definitively proved or disproved TRW's claim that its software successfully discriminated the mock warhead from the decoys.'' For MIT physicist Theodore Postol, a frequent critic of the Pentagon's missile defense plans, the omissions of his colleagues and their stamp of approval for the Missile Defense Agency amounts to scientific fraud. Postol recently lodged complaints with the MIT Corporation about the study - charging that the university's president, Charles M. Vest, knew of the alleged misconduct and did nothing about it. ''This certainly has the appearance of a well-orchestrated fraud,'' Postol said. ''The managers at Lincoln Lab either knew or should have known that this experiment was a total failure - and they falsely represented it as a success. The implications of that deceit could cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.'' MIT officials did not return calls for comment. But Roger Sudbury, a spokesman for Lincoln Lab, told the Globe last month that the Lexington-based research arm of MIT received no complaints from contractors or the Pentagon about their review, and he said, ''There is no evidence of fraud.'' Lieutenant Colonel Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency, which oversees the Pentagon's effort to develop an overlapping air, land, sea, and space-based missile shield, insisted that, as far as he knows, the sensor guiding Boeing's ''kill vehicle'' worked as planned. Still, in the scheme of the overall missile defense plan, he said, the 1997 test is irrelevant. Not long after the test, the Pentagon decided to use a sensor built by Raytheon Corp., one with ''totally different'' technology than the one designed by Boeing. ''I would guess our people will take issue with this report,'' Lehner said. ''At face value, the only thing I was told was that the Boeing kill vehicle did discriminate against the decoys and warhead. Until the agency tells me otherwise, I have to go with that.'' The GAO reports, requested by Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, and two other members of Congress, were sought nearly two years ago after Postol sent the White House a detailed analysis of the 1997 test, alleging both Boeing and TRW misrepresented the results. The MIT professor analyzed the raw data of the test, which he obtained through Nira Schwartz, a senior staff engineer at TRW who was fired after she reported that the software her company developed would not distinguish decoys from warheads. Schwartz, who is suing TRW, and Postol insisted it's a fallacy to say the 1997 test is irrelevant. Because both the Boeing and Raytheon sensor use ''infrared eyes,'' ''It's the equivalent of looking at a bunch of suitcases with only your eyes and trying to find a bomb inside,'' Postol said. ''If I give you a telescope, a microscope, or dark glasses when you look at the suitcase, none will tell you which has the bomb.'' Despite the allegations, the GAO studies stop short of calling the reports and exaggerated results fraud. Unlike most GAO reports, and despite congressional requests for them, they don't include recommendations. The reason, another congressional source close to the investigation said, is political. The reports, delayed by sluggish responses from the Pentagon and contractors for documents, were vetted very closely to avoid casting too much blame on any one party, the source said. ''Much of the findings were buried inside the text and purposely written in technical language so as not to highlight many things,'' the source said. ''There are many political pressures, and the report was certainly edited for political reasons.'' With billions of dollars at stake and $100 million a pop for each antimissile test, a lot is riding on whether it is technically possible to build a national missile defense that works. Over the past five years, three out of the five antimissile tests hit their targets. But during that time, the tests have been downgraded in complexity, now using only one decoy that is much larger and brighter than the mock warhead. For the Bush administration, which vowed to build a robust national missile defense during its campaign two years ago, fielding a viable system is one of its highest priorities. In December, President Bush announced the United States would withdraw in June from the 30-year-old ABM treaty, which bars a nationwide missile shield. In a statement about the GAO reports, Markey, who has proposed a bill calling for independent oversight of the missile shield, cautioned that relying on questionable technology could amount to a massive waste of taxpayer dollars. ''The national missile defense program needs independent oversight and testing milestones to ensure that it works before we spend countless billions of dollars deploying it,'' he said. ''If it can't tell the warhead apart from a decoy, what good is it?'' From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Mar 4 18:12:53 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] 'Bombing Saddam is ignorance' - The Observer Message-ID: <200203050112.g251CrE15879@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> The Observer March 3, 2002 'Bombing Saddam is ignorance' Robert Baer, the ex-CIA man in Iraq during the failed uprising in 1995, says the US is not in a position to strike against Iraq because it does not understand anything about the country by Henry Porter Robert Baer's objections to an attack on Iraq could hardly be principled. As the CIA's point man in Iraq during the failed uprising in 1995, he encouraged dissident groups to believe that the United States wanted the overthrow and death of Saddam Hussein. Yet Baer, whose memoir of life in the CIA, See No Evil, is published in Britain tomorrow, is appalled at the idea of a US strike against Iraq today. 'If the US is to bomb Saddam and his army until there is no army, what comes after that? No one is discussing the ethnic composition of Iraq or what Iran is likely to do.' Few in America appreciate the tribal ethnic and religious faultlines that run through the Middle East as Baer does. Iraq is particularly divided. In the south there is a Shia majority which now looks to Iran for support. Occupying the geographical and political center of the country are the followers of the Sunni sect, which includes Saddam's tribe, and in the north are the Kurds, who are split into two warring parties, the PUK and the KDU. 'The US is in no position to rejigger this because we don't understand anything about the country. If I were the Iranians, for instance, I would try to set up a state in southern Iraq and add three million barrels a day to my account. That could begin to rival Saudi Arabia. Of course, I don't know this is going to happen, but the US government doesn't know either. The heart of the debate is about taking out all Saddam's tanks in a couple of weeks.' Baer worked for the CIA's Directorate of Operations for 25 years, with postings in Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, Tajikistan, India and Europe. His devastating portrait of the agency's decline adds much to the understanding of why America was caught off guard on 11 September, but as important is what he has to say about American sluggishness when it comes to institutional reform. Towards the end of his time, he searched CIA computer for files on subjects that interested him, for example, the Pasdaran (the Iranian Intelligence service), the Saudi royal family and Syria. 'You know what? There was nothing there. Nothing. They didn't have anything. That's America now, you know. It can't reform.' After a quarter of century abroad, Baer hardly recognizes the States and is appalled at the level of public ignorance. 'There is no debate,' he says. 'People will not address the question of Palestine in the context of the World Trade Center attacks. It's not in the terms of the discussion. They simply believe that Israel has the right to defend its democracy like the US does. They don't understand that Israel gives no democratic rights to the Palestinians whatsoever. They don't see that it's not a democracy.' An affable but watchful man in his late forties, Baer is aware that the CIA is mightily displeased with his first literary effort. It can't help that the book has been on the New York Times' bestseller list for four weeks in a row; that Warner Brothers bought an option and hope to develop the project with the team that made Traffic; and that Baer is never off US television, often doing three national shows in an evening. He seems to have few regrets about leaving the CIA. 'I would rather drive a taxi than serve in the CIA,' he says convincingly over lunch at the Alistair Little restaurant in West London. 'Don't ask me how it happened, but the people who work in it just don't match up to the people who got to Silicon Valley or the people who make cruise missiles or design derivatives.' It's in the innocuous detail that Baer's book is telling. At one point he remembers taking over from a female officer in the Paris station and being handed her list of contacts and agents. When he followed them up, he found that instead of using them to gather intelligence she had been trying to recruit them to a religious sect. The serving US ambassador to France was also involved in the sect. When the two of them were observed handing out leaflets in the street, the French security service thought some kind of operation was in progress. With good reason he is a pessimist about the CIA and US foreign policymaking. Examples of incompetence abound in See No Evil. In 1986, he was contacted in Germany by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood who wanted a meeting. He went to Dortmund and listened to Syrian contacts propose an intelligence alliance against President Assad. He wrote up a report (on a typewriter, whose ribbon he destroyed afterwards) and sent it to the US embassy in Bonn. A message came back that they weren't interested. But that was not the last he heard of it. In the wake of 11 September, 16 years later, the FBI contacted Baer to say that associates of the Syrian contacts had been involved in al-Qaeda. That channel, closed down so peremptorily, might have led them to Mohamed Atta. Over lunch we circled the problem of Iraq. He mentioned that it is easily within Saddam's power to forestall the long-announced air attacks from US bases in Diego Garcia. He could, says Baer, 'simply move his tanks into Syria and proclaim that he was going to liberate the Palestinians', thus pitching Israel into a war with an Arab state. If there is a fault in Baer's analysis of the Iraqi problem, it is that while he acknowledges Saddam's willingness to use force against civilians he does not believe that the accumulation of weapons of mass destruction is anything but defensive. Baer says we should look at it through Saddam's regional mentality and that his chief concern is, as it always has been, Iran. See No Evil, by Robert Baer, Crown Publications £12.99. From mstainsby at tao.ca Mon Mar 4 19:58:25 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] A query... Message-ID: <019c01c1c3f1$9eb85620$76195218@vc.shawcable.net> (This discussion has been in a lull for too long. We need to get back on track. I sent this out to comrades and friends locally, now I'm sending it out as a kickstarter for the discussion lists. What use are these lists if they don't serve practice? Glorified navel gazing... but anonymously.---Macdonald) Dear comrades and friends: the bombers of Afghanistan, according to "popular" media, used their most severe bombing run yet in the "War On Terror?" Yesterday. This heaviest bombing was followed by the first real casualty toll revealed by the Pentagon. Perhaps we should consider calling a meeting to discuss what is to be our reaction to these developments. The government may have fallen, but the bombings (and therefore civilian casualties) increase... ...and the death toll will now include body bags coming back home to North America, it appears, on a larger scale than seen since Vietnam. We would be foolish to neglect the potentially large impact on organising for this new reality. Are there other voices that wish to begin a discussion of MAWAR responses? To put it mildly, we cannot afford to sit quietly while Imperialism slaughters these people. So what do people want to do? ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international "They are all Enron, we are all Argentina" --WEF protesters. ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Mar 5 12:21:19 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] Urgent Action: Trade union leaders arrested in Korea (fwd) Message-ID: <200203051921.g25JLJE02151@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: LabourStart News Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2002 14:35:16 GMT Subject: Urgent Action: Trade union leaders arrested in Korea Emergency Call for Urgent Action: Trade Union Leaders Arrested in Korea As you may know, the South Korean government has been cracking down hard on strikes by railway workers and power workers in recent days. A number of union leaders have been arrested; others are in hiding. The International Transport Workers Federation has issued an urgent appeal for messages to be sent to the President of South Korea, Kim Dae Jung. The details -- including a sample letter -- can be found here: http://www.itf.org.uk/solidarity/040302.htm You can send a solidarity message to the Korean strikers here: http://www.jinbo.net/maybbs/form.php?mod=write&db=base21&code=soli We have just now received a report that the government is attempting to shut down the website of the Korean power workers, located at http://baljeon.nodng.net (in Korean only). The Korean progressive network, Jinbonet, has coverage in English of these developments, here: http://www.base21.org There is full coverage of all these developments on the website of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) -- http://www.kctu.org -- and on LabourStart's Korean news page (in English) -- http://www.labourstart.org/korea/ Please forward this message to other trade union and progressive lists. Spread the word! Thank you. Eric Lee From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Mar 5 17:18:06 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] An Israeli spy network was dismantled in the United States - Le Monde Message-ID: <200203060018.g260I6E11257@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> To summarize the long article in Le Monde that follows, I've translated some key parts - Richard du Boff Le Monde 5 March 2002 An Israeli spy network was dismantled in the United States It is without doubt the biggest case of Israeli espionage in the US made public since 1986. In June 2001, an investigative report detailed the activities of more than a hundred Israeli agents, some presenting themselves as fine arts students, others as linked to high-tech Israeli companies. All have been questioned and interrogated by the [US] authorities, and a dozen are still incarcerated. One of their missions was to track Al-Qaida terrorists within the United States, without, nonetheless, warning [US] federal authorities. Parts of the investigation, taken up the American TV network Fox News, reinforces the idea according to which Israel did not transmit to the United States all the facts in its possession about the preparations for the attacks of September 11 . . . According to the chief editor of Intelligence Online, Guillaume Dasquié, this "vast network of Israeli intelligence agents was neutralized by the counter-espionage services of the Department of Justice." The Americans "apprehended or expelled nearly 120 Israeli nationals." Mr. Dasquié confirms a "61 page summary report" of June 2001 remitted to the head of the Justice Department by a "task force" comprising agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the INS, with which the FBI and the USAir Force investigation office worked. Asked by Le Monde, Will Glaspy of the Public Affairs department of the DEA authenticated this report, of which the DEA "has a copy"... After the attacks of September 11, information, with few details, was brought out about the arrest of 60 Israeli agents. Finally, from December 11 to 14, 2001, the Fox TV network broadcast a four-part investigation on Israeli espionage in the US, in the program "Carl Cameron Investigates." The Israeli Embassy in Washington immediately stated that it contained "nothing that was true." American Jewish organizations-JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs), AIPAC (America-Israel Political Action Committee) and others denounced it as a "plot." Fox removed from its internet site, a day and a half after posting, all the reports related to the investigation. Le Monde asked Fox News, three times, to send it the cassette of the broadcast. This was never done. Fox told our correspondent in New York that sending it would pose "a problem," without any explanation . . . Le Monde nevertheless learned what was in the transcript of the [Fox] investigation . . . [which] focussed on two points. One: could the Israelis have had knowledge beforehand of the September 11 attacks and not informed the Americans? According to Carl Cameron, his sources told him that "the main question is how could they not have known it." On the TV, the chief editor of the report then says to [Cameron]: "Certain reports confirm that the Mossad sent representatives to the US to warn it, before September 11, about the imminence of a major terrorist attack. This isn't what you'd call an absence of a warning." Cameron's answer: "The problem isn't an absence of a warning, but an absence of useful details." =============== LE MONDE Mardi 5 mars 2002 Un réseau d'espionnage israélien a été démantelé aux Etats-Unis C'est sans doute la plus grosse affaire d'espionnage israélien aux Etats-Unis rendue publique depuis 1986. En juin 2001, un rapport d'enquête détaille les activités de plus d'une centaine d'agents israéliens, certains se présentant comme étudiants en beaux-arts, d'autres étant liés à des sociétés de high-tech israéliennes. Tous ont été interpellés par les autorités, interrogés et une douzaine d'entre eux seraient encore incarcérés. L'une de leurs missions aurait été de pister les terroristes d'Al-Qaida sur le territoire américain, sans pour autant en avertir les autorités fédérales. Des éléments de cette enquête, repris par la télévision américaine Fox News, renforcent la thèse selon laquelle Israël n'aurait pas transmis aux Etats-Unis tous l! es éléments en sa possession sur les préparatifs des attentats du 11 septembre. Un vaste réseau d'espionnage israélien opérant sur le territoire américain a été démantelé, révèle dans sa dernière livraison la Lettre d'Intelligence Online, publication spécialisée dans les questions de renseignement. C'est l'affaire la plus spectaculaire mettant en cause l'activité du Mossad (la sécurité extérieure israélienne) aux Etats-Unis depuis la condamnation à la prison à vie de Jonathan Pollard, un employé de l'US Navy, en 1986, pour espionnage au profit d'Israël. Quelle était l'envergure réelle de ce réseau ? Les faits évoqués par un rapport d'enquête américain n'indiquent pas s'il a pu accéder à des informations de premier ordre, ou si les autorités l'ont démantelé dans sa phase initiale. Selon le rédacteur en chef d'Intelligence Online, Guillaume Dasquié, ce "vaste réseau d'agents de renseignement israélien a été neutralisé par les services de contre-espionnage du département de la justice". Les Américains auraient "appréhendé ou expulsé près de 120 ressortissants israéliens". M. Dasquié fait état d'un "rapport de synthèse de 61 pages" de juin 2001, remis au ministère américain de la justice par une "task force" constituée d'agents de la DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration, service de répression des stupéfiants) et de l'INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) "auxquels ont été associés le FBI [police fédérale] et le bureau d'enquêtes de l'US Air Force". Interrogé par Le Monde, Will Glaspy, du département Public Affairs de la DEA, a authentifié ce rapport, dont la DEA "détient une copie". Ce n'est pas la première fois que des informations relatives à l'espionnage israélien apparaissent aux Etats-Unis depuis l'affaire Pollard. En juin 1999, la revue Insight avait longuement évoqué une enquête "secrète" de la division 5 du FBI quant à des écoutes téléphoniques israéliennes ciblant la Maison Blanche, le département d'Etat et le Conseil national de sécurité. Après les attentats du 11 septembre, des informations peu détaillées avaient évoqué l'arrestation d'une soixantaine d'Israéliens. Enfin, du 11 au 14 décembre 2001, la chaîne de télévision Fox a diffusé une enquête en quatre parties sur l'espionnage israélien aux Etats-Unis, dans l'émission "Carl Cameron Investigates". L'ambassade d'Israël à Washington a immédiatement indiqué qu'elle ne contenait "rien de vrai". Des organismes juifs américains - le Jinsa (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs), l'Aipac (America-Israel Political Action Committee) et d'autres - ont dénoncé une "machination". Fox a retiré de son site Internet, un jour et demi après son installation, tout le matériel lié à cette enquête. Le Monde a demandé à trois reprises à Fox News de lui fournir une cassette de l'émission. Ce ne fut jamais fait. Le 26 février, Fox a répondu à notre correspondant à New York que l'envoi posait "un problème", sans autre précision. Le Monde a cependant pris connaissance du script intégral de cette enquête. Carl Cameron y évoque "une vaste enquête tenue secrète" concernant "140 Israéliens se faisant passer pour des étudiants de l'Université de Jérusalem ou de l'Académie des Beaux-Arts Betzalel [qui ont] sans cesse cherché à entrer en contact avec des fonctionnaires et, selon un document, ciblé et pénétré des bases militaires, des douzaines de bâtiments de la DEA et du FBI et d'autres". Son enquête se focalise sur deux aspects. Un: les Israéliens pouvaient-ils avoir une connaissance préalable des attentats du 11 septembre et ne pas avoir informé les Américains ? Ses sources, explique Carl Cameron, lui disent: "La question principale est 'comment auraient-ils pu ne pas savoir ?'." A l'écran, son rédacteur en chef lui dit alors: "Certains rapports confirment que le Mossad a envoyé des représentants aux Etats-Unis pour les prévenir, avant le 11 septembre, de l'imminence d'une attaque terroriste majeure. Cela ne va pas dans le sens d'une absence de mise en garde." Réponse de Cameron: "Le problème n'est pas l'absence de mise en garde, mais l'absence de détails utiles" par rapport à ceux que des services américains soupçonnent Israël d'avoir détenus. Le second volet de l'enquête touche à des sociétés israéliennes prestataires d'administrations ou de sociétés américaines, qui déroberaient des informations. Sont visés le fabricant de logiciels Amdocs, coté à Wall Street, qui liste, pour les 25 premières sociétés de téléphone aux Etats-Unis, tous les appels passés sur, vers et à partir du territoire américain, ainsi que les sociétés Nice et Comverse Infosys, cette dernière fournissant des programmes informatiques aux administrations américaines autorisées à procéder à des écoutes. Comverse est soupçonnée d'avoir introduit dans ses systèmes des "portes dérobées" afin d'"intercepter, enregistrer et emmagasiner" ces écoutes. Ce matériel rendrait l'"écouteur" lui-même "écouté". Question à Cameron: "Y a-t-il des raisons de croire le gouvernement israélien impliqué ?" Réponse: "Non, aucune, mais une enquête classée top secret est menée." L'émission avait été préalablement montrée aux plus hauts responsables de la CIA, du FBI, de la NSA (l'agence d'écoutes téléphoniques), de la DEA et du ministère américain de la justice, qui n'avaient pas émis d'objection à sa diffusion. Le rapport remis au ministère américain de la justice, auquel Le Monde a eu accès, montre que beaucoup des "étudiants en art plastique" soupçonnés d'activité illicite ont un passé militaire dans le renseignement ou des unités de technologies de pointe. Certains sont entrés et sortis des Etats-Unis à plusieurs reprises, restant chaque fois pour de courtes périodes. Plusieurs sont liés aux sociétés de high-tech israéliennes Amdocs, Nice et Retalix. Interpellée, une "étudiante" a vu sa caution de 10 000 dollars payée par un Israélien travaillant chez Amdocs. Interrogés, deux autres reconnaissent être employés par Retalix. Le Monde a obtenu d'autres informations non contenues dans ce rapport. Six des "étudiants" interceptés possédaient un téléphone cellulaire acheté par un ex-vice-consul israélien aux Etats-Unis. Deux autres seraient, à un moment non spécifié, arrivés à Miami par vol direct de Hambourg pour se rendre au domicile d'un agent du FBI, lui proposer des tableaux, repartir à l'aéroport pour Chicago, se rendre au domicile d'un agent du ministère de la justice puis reprendre directement l'avion pour Toronto ; le tout en un jour. Plus du tiers de ces "étudiants", qui, selon le rapport, se sont déplacés dans au moins 42 villes américaines, ont déclaré résider en Floride. Cinq au moins ont été interceptés à Hollywood, et deux à Fort Lauderdale. Hollywood est une bourgade de 25 000 habitants au nord de Miami, près de Fort Lauderdale. Or, au moins 10 des 19 terroristes du 11 septembre ont été domiciliés en Floride. Quatre des cinq membres du groupe ayant dérouté le vol no 11 d'American Airlines - Mohammed Atta, Abdulaziz Al-Omari, Walid et Waïl Al-Shehri - ainsi qu'un des cinq terroristes du vol United 175, Marwan Al-Shehhi, ont tous été domiciliés à divers moments à... Hollywood, en Floride. Quant à Ahmed Fayez, Ahmed et Hamza Al-Ghamdi et Mohand Al-Shehri, du vol United 75, comme Saïd Al-Ghamdi, Ahmed Al-Haznawi et Ahmed Al-Nami, du vol United 93 qui s'est écrasé le 11 septembre en Pennsylvanie, et Nawaq Al-Hamzi, du vol AA 77 (tombé sur le Pentagone), ils ont tous été un moment domiciliés à Delray Beach, au nord de Fort Lauderdale. Cette concordance peut être, entre autres, à l'origine de la conviction américaine selon laquelle l'une des missions des "étudiants" israéliens aurait été de pister les terroristes d'Al-Qaida sur leur territoire, sans en informer les autorités fédérales. Deux énigmes demeurent. Pourquoi le réseau israélien "tamponnait-il" en priorité des agents de la répression des stupéfiants ? Une hypothèse: la DEA est le principal organisme américain enquêtant sur le blanchiment d'argent. Un réseau comme Al-Qaida usait de filières "sales", et l'Afghanistan des talibans était le premier exportateur d'opium au monde. Pourquoi cette étonnante "couverture", de faux étudiants démarcheurs pour de piètres tableaux ? Le réseau israélien semblait détenir des listes nominales. Ses membres savaient à quel bureau ou à quelle résidence privée se rendre. L'objectif était, semble-t-il, d'entrer en contact, même pour un court moment. Selon un spécialiste israélien de l'espionnage, "cette histoire est une farce ridicule, pas sérieuse". Contactés, les services du premier ministre israélien n'avaient, lundi soir 4 mars, toujours pas répondu à nos questions. Le ministère américain de la justice nous a indiqué qu'"une douzaine" de ces "étudiants" seraient toujours incarcérés, les autres auraient tous été relâchés ou expulsés. Le FBI nous a indiqué qu'il ne faisait "aucun commentaire à ce stade". La CIA, le FBI, la DEA, l'INS, la NSA, le ministère de la justice et le Pentagone ont tous désigné un enquêteur sur ce dossier. Sylvain Cypel En 1986, l'affaire Pollard Jonathan Pollard a été condamné en 1986 à la prison à perpétuité pour espionnage en faveur d'Israël. Tous les gouvernements israéliens l'ont, depuis, présenté comme un "petit poisson" ayant agi par "amour d'Israël". Dans l'hebdomadaire The New Yorker du 18 janvier 1999, Seymour Hersh, à l'évidence puissamment alimenté par des sources de renseignement américaines, avait, à l'inverse, accrédité la version d'un espion de haut vol. Pollard y était accusé d'avoir fourni aux Israéliens, pour beaucoup d'argent, le Rasin (pour Radio Signal Notations), manuel de base en dix volumes de la NSA, l'agence américaine d'écoutes téléphoniques, ainsi que le Sigint (Signal Intelligence) fournissant les codes d'accès et de cryptage du Rasin. En octobre 1998, lorsque le premier ministre israélien Benyamin Nétanyahou avait demandé sa libération à Bill Clinton, le directeur de la CIA et le chef d'état-major de la marine américaine avaient menacé de démissionner sur-le-champ. From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Mar 5 17:16:43 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] Israeli army 'faces defeat' in war against Palestinians - Daily Telegraph Message-ID: <200203060016.g260GhE09893@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> The Daily Telegraph 1/03/2002 Israeli army 'faces defeat' in war against Palestinians By Alan Philps Israel's leading military historian has a bleak message for the country's generals: the army is winning the battle against Palestinian armed groups, but the final result can only be defeat - and perhaps civil war at home. Martin van Creveld, professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, believes that the might of the Israeli army is proving to be "99 per cent irrelevant" in the battle now in its 17th month. More important, he believes, will be the morale of the Israeli army, which is showing signs of strain at the burden of keeping millions of Palestinians under control to prevent terrorists entering Israel. Already 280 Israeli reserve officers and NCOs have signed a petition refusing to serve in the occupied territories on grounds of conscience, and the first two "refuseniks" were jailed for 28 days on Monday. They are sergeants in the paratroops and the armoured corps. Two reserve officers have abandoned their posts in protest at the strains put on their soldiers through manning checkpoints for impossibly long hours amid a hostile population. "The Israel Defence Force is doing better than other armies faced with this challenge. Its intelligence is good - the key in this type of conflict. The number of casualties in IDF ranks is low. It is managing to prevent a large proportion of planned acts of sabotage," Prof van Creveld said in an interview. "For the first year we had no serious problems of morale. But soon we will enter the second half of the second year, and morale is going down. I think the number of refuseniks will grow as more are put in prison." On paper the Israeli army is the second most powerful on earth, most of its weapons as modern as those used by the Americans. "It really is very impressive. But it cannot cope with no more than a few hundred terrorists. The problem is that we have no targets to hit. Ninety-nine per cent of everything we have is irrelevant." Prof van Creveld is internationally admired for his standard text books on warfare, which are studied by the US military. But his unorthodox views - he has criticised the modern Israeli army as having grown flabby - make him an outsider at home, particularly as he never did military service. He believes that "utter defeat" is the fate that awaits regular armies fighting nationally motivated insurgents, and Israel will be hard pressed to avoid this. The problem is not just casualties, which are deeply felt in Israel, but the sapping of morale. "Fighting a weak opponent is difficult for a strong, sophisticated army," he said. "If you do it once, it is a crime, but at least it is over. We are committing an endless series of crimes, day by day, night by night, against the unarmed, against the young, against the pregnant. Even when the Palestinians are armed, they are still just poor fellows. Armies collapse when they can no longer look themselves in the face." The strain on the army, he believes, will raise tensions between Left and Right in Israel and threaten civil war. The only solution is to build a wall separating Israel from the Palestinian territories, and ending the dream of the Israeli Right to settle the whole of the Biblical land of Israel. Walls have served their purpose in history - the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, and the fence dividing Cyprus. "We have to minimise friction between Israelis and Palestinians," Prof van Creveld said. "I believe that if we do not do that, our state is doomed." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2002%2F03%2F01%2Fwm id101.xml From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Mar 5 17:21:52 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] Former chief of warcrimes court blasts Del Ponte Message-ID: <200203060021.g260LqE14941@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> Agence France Presse March 5, 2002 Former chief of warcrimes court blasts Del Ponte Rome - The former head of the UN war crimes tribunal on Tuesday accused war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte of damaging the case against Slobodan Milosevic by playing to the media before the trial. Antonio Cassese, an Italian, accused the Swiss prosecutor of damaging the tribunal in an outspoken attack in an interview with Italy's ANSA news agency three weeks into the former Serbian leader's trial for alleged war crimes in the Balkans. And he criticised the United States for the way it made millions of dollars in development aid conditional on Milosevic's handover by Belgrade. "All Ms Del Ponte's statements before the debate, in which she shouted from the rooftops about having damning evidence against Milosevic, have allowed him to use the ICTY as a political platform," said Cassese, chairman of the UN court from 1995-1999. "My concern is that the ICTY, in such a big trial, is being transformed into a political platform. It's what Milosevic is doing, it's what on some occasions Carla Del Ponte has a tendency to do. That creates a malaise and is damaging to the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia). Justice is not done by statements to the media. I must say that it's Ms Del Ponte who started it," said Cassese, who is professor of international law at Florence University. He added that the trial had functioned well until now but warned of the danger of it becoming a political stage. Del Ponte "must prove not only that Milosevic had effective control of the crimes committed by his subordinates, but also that they were really his subordinates, including Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, and that he had effective control over them." Asked about how some believe Milosevic is a victim, Cassese said: "These people are right concerning the not very proper way in which Milosevic was handed over to the tribunal in The Hague. "Deep down, it was bargaining. The Americans were putting pressure, saying 'we won't give you any money if you don't give us Milosevic.'" Cassese noted that four other officials had been indicted along with Milosevic, but had been largely forgotten about since his handover last April. "If the Americans want to be coherent and believe in justice, then they must bring pressure to bear so that all five are brought to trial." The four are incumbent Serbian President Milan Milutinovic, currently residing in Belgrade, former Yugoslav deputy prime minister Nikola Sainovic, former Yugoslav army chief of staff Dragoljub Ojdanic, and former Serbian interior minister Vlajko Stojiljkovic. They have been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity for crimes allegedly committed in Kosovo. As Serbian president, Milutinovic currently enjoys immunity, as do Sainovic and Stojiljkovic, who are deputies in the Yugoslav parliament. Former Yugoslav president Milosevic has been on trial in The Hague court for the past three weeks on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Mar 5 17:22:41 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] Egypt counsels against Iraq attack - AP Message-ID: <200203060022.g260MfE15781@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39314-2002Mar5.html Associated Press Tuesday, March 5, 2002 Egypt counsels against Iraq attack By Barry Schweid Washington -- While winning American praise for proposing an Israeli-Palestinian summit to rebuild trust, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt is counseling the United States not to attack Iraq in its war on terror. Mubarak's mixed message to the Bush administration on terrorism is that he supports the U.S.-led campaign generally but that any attack on Iraq that killed civilians would harm the United States' already shaky standing among many Arabs. "We have to be very careful there - very, very careful," Mubarak told The Washington Times, "Unless the people know definitely there is something real there, I am afraid (of) the public opinion." Before his late Tuesday meeting with President Bush at the White House, the Egyptian president discussed on Monday his proposal to play host to an Israeli-Palestinian summit meeting with Secretary of State Colin Powell. "It's an interesting idea," Powell said after sounding out Mubarak. Powell said a decision ultimately was up to Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. At a brief news conference, Powell said the situation in the Middle East had become "terrible" because of escalating violence between Israel and the Palestinians. He said the Bush administration was redoubling its efforts to halt the strife and that a peace proposal by Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was a positive development. "It is a vision that we all have to examine, and hopefully it's a vision that all Arab nations and Israel will look at, and that all of us together in the European Union, the United States and other leaders around the world will look at this vision and see what we can do to make this vision a reality," Powell said. Javier Solana, the European Union's senior diplomat, said after talking to Powell that he, too, was worried about the fighting. The Europeans were determined to be helpful, Solana said. Powell said he still looked to Arafat to represent the Palestinians in any peacemaking. "He is seen by the Palestinians as their leader," Powell said. For three decades the United States has counted on Egypt's support in peacemaking. Mubarak's help may be essential because the Middle East is in the throes of violence, and many Arab governments consider the Bush administration tilted in Israel's favor. Many Egyptians privately do. Discussing his summit proposal on CNN, Mubarak said he had told Sharon: "I have no problem with you. There's no problem with Egypt and Israel. "The main problem is the Palestinian problem, and the one that is going on. .... Let us give the people some hope that peace could prevail. That's my intention, and that I'm to ask Sharon and Arafat to come and sit. We're not going to solve all the problems in one day; just as a change, to change the atmosphere," Mubarak said. The spokesman at the Israeli Embassy, Mark Regev, said Monday: "We support Egyptian proposals to stabilize the situation and bring about a cease-fire, but surely it is an illusion to believe a summit in itself can solve all our problems." Regev added: "We've had countless summits with the Palestinian leadership since the beginning of the violence a year and a half ago, and unfortunately those summits produced very little. We don't need talk, we need Palestinians to live up to their own commitments and to take concrete steps against the terrorists." Powell met with Mubarak for 45 minutes at Blair House, the presidential guest house across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. They made no statement afterward. Powell then followed up with a meeting with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher while Mubarak met for 75 minutes with Vice President Dick Cheney and a half-hour with Condoleezza Rice, Bush's assistant for national security. Egypt is aligned with the Arab League and Arab governments in trying to dissuade Bush from considering an attack against Iraq, which the president says is part of an "axis of evil" with Iran and North Korea. From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Mar 5 17:23:31 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] Can the war turn out badly for U.S. forces in Afghanistan? G&M Message-ID: <200203060023.g260NVE16598@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> The Globe and Mail Tuesday, March 5, 2002 Can the war turn out badly for U.S. forces in Afghanistan? By Paul Koring Washington -- Intense, high-altitude combat in remote Afghan mountain redoubts is a long way from the hostile lowlands of Vietnam in time, space and objectives -- but one overriding challenge is exactly the same. In Afghanistan, the bombing and killing by U.S.-led foreign forces has enjoyed broad support from the majority of Afghans so far. Most rejoiced to have the brutal Taliban regime smashed. But if that support erodes, just as it did across Southeast Asia more than a generation ago, Afghanistan could quickly become the same kind of military quagmire that defeated the armies of the British and Soviet empires. Thus it is no surprise that top U.S. officials insist at every turn that Washington seeks no occupation of Afghanistan -- they don't even like the notion of the British-led international security force extending its currently limited scope beyond Kabul. Instead, the officials say, Washington wants to pour money and effort into building a truly representative Afghan army, drawn from across the ethnic and linguistic patchwork that underpins centuries of feuding and warlord rule. Afghanistan has rarely united save to oust foreign powers, so the U.S. strategy makes eminent sense: Get in, topple the Taliban, root out pockets of al-Qaeda resistance, help create an indigenous Afghan army under the control of a representative and broadly acceptable government, then get out as soon as possible. Like all good military strategies, it is simple and sensible. It also embodies a vitally important element, which is to minimize U.S. casualties and the American profile in the country. But wars are seldom simple or sensible, and barely five months into the conflict, tactical demands are beginning to bedevil the strategic objectives. U.S. President George W. Bush has made no secret that the war against international terrorism will be a long one, and that victory will be hard to measure. Short campaigns with limited casualties pose little threat to undermining domestic support in the U.S., a crucial bedrock. But the Afghan campaign is threatening to become long and bloody. It is already twice as long as the 1991 Persian Gulf war and the 1999 air war over Kosovo. Despite quickly toppling the Taliban with a combination of overwhelming air power and ground fighting by Afghan proxies, the tough sledding in Afghanistan may be just beginning. "The task is far from over," U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday as fierce mountain fighting raged in the remote Shahi Kot area of Afghanistan. "Not all Taliban and al-Qaeda forces have been defeated. Substantial pockets of resistance remain. They're determined. They're dangerous. They will not give up without a fight. They are hiding in the villages and in the mountains and just across the borders, in a number of directions from Afghanistan." In 1979, the Soviet army toppled the regime in Kabul less than a week after its Christmas Day invasion. But Moscow retreated in defeat a decade later, after thousands of Soviet casualties, without ever controlling much more than cities and main roads. That is exactly what today's U.S.-backed interim government holds. Warlords rule the hinterlands. By the Pentagon's own admission, pockets of heavily armed, battle-hardened Taliban and other determined anti-U.S. forces remain scattered throughout. If the current bloody operation near Gardez is a harbinger, then the chances of Washington getting bogged down in an unpopular war will rise. It is still far too early to know whether rooting out the remaining Taliban and al-Qaeda forces will take weeks, months or years. For most Americans, the warnings of a long, hard fight with casualties have until now been overshadowed by quick and painless gains. But the ghosts of Southeast Asia are never very far away for the current generation of top U.S. commanders, many of whom faced their first combat there in a deeply unpopular and ultimately unwinnable war. Yesterday, as General Tommy Franks, commander of the operations in Afghanistan, expressed sorrow over the latest U.S. casualties, he misspoke, saying they had died fighting for their country "in Vietnam." From Malky53 at aol.com Wed Mar 6 11:34:01 2002 From: Malky53 at aol.com (Malky53@aol.com) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] Can the war turn out badly for U.S. forces in Afghanistan? G&M Message-ID: <81.18928a24.29b7bb19@aol.com> A serious analysis of the extent of the US Victory in Afghanistan would show that the US and its allies including Afghan Collaborators have a faltering control over the main cities. If control of the cities amounted to victory in Afghanistan then Breshnev and the USSR would not have been defeated. The reality is that US opponents 'melted away' to fight another day another place. This is far from over From pieinsky at igc.org Wed Mar 6 13:52:44 2002 From: pieinsky at igc.org (Jay Moore) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] A Whole New War Game? Message-ID: <005201c1c550$e5ec2ac0$5b7cf2d0@bypass.com> Asia Times - March 6, 2002 A whole new war game in Afghanistan By Syed Saleem Shahzad KARACHI - The past few days have seen surprise ambushes, raids and resistance by Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in most parts of eastern Afghanistan, and in some areas in the south, with the United States and its allied troops sustaining more losses than they had expected. Since Saturday, when heavy ground and air fighting began in eastern Afghanistan, US forces have encountered their fiercest opposition since stepping into the country toward the end of last year. Indeed, they helped push the Taliban from control of the country in less than two months, watching almost as bystanders as major towns fell with hardly a fight. As previously reported in Asia Times Online, the reason for this was simple. The Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters were saving themselves for another day, and that day has now arrived. After retreating from Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad and so on, the top Taliban leaders either fled to the border tribal areas of Pakistan or took refuge in remote and isolated areas in Afghanistan, while middle and lower-rank Taliban easily melted into the local population, from where many of them had come in the first place. Some local commanders who had sided with the Taliban when they took power in 1996 returned to their pre-Taliban party disciplines, such as the Jamiat-i-Islami, the Ittehad-i-Islami and the Hizb-i-Islami. Here they were accepted without question, and they were given protection. These Taliban remained in close contact with one another, waiting for the weather to warm up toward the end of March, at which time they had planned a major guerrilla campaign in the country. In anticipation of this, United States forces, with the support of soldiers from a number of other countries as well as Afghans loyal to the administration of interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai, began a major offensive in the rugged terrain around Gardez in Paktia province on suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda strongholds. Their target in this operation, code-named Anaconda, was Mullah Saifur Rehman Mansoor and his troops, who had become active with sniping raids on US positions in the area. But unlike previously, this time around the US has found a very determined and deadly opponent. Previously, the boundaries between the Taliban and their opponents were clearly defined. As a result, the Taliban were easy to point out and easy to target by US planes. But now there are no clear boundaries. In addition to Saturday's clashes near Gardez, when US forces and the Taliban squared off, US-led forces also faced assaults in regions controlled by pro-Karzai forces. According to Taliban sources, the Taliban have established small pockets across the country, particularly in eastern areas. And given the mountainous terrain, it is nearly impossible to locate bands of 10-15 people, even with the help of the local population. And passing helicopters or military convoys become easily targets in such conditions. Apart from this guerrilla strategy, information this correspondent has acquired from Afghanistan appears to be in contrast to what is being projected in the US media. According to sources, the war has now begun on all fronts in Paktia and Khost provinces, with US military installations coming under attack from the small bands of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters that had been in hiding around them. By Tuesday the US had reported seven of its soldiers killed and more than 40 wounded, although the figures could be higher. On Monday, the first US helicopter in the five-month-old war was shot down in Zarmat, a second was destroyed between Sata Kundao and Mata Chena (Khost), while two more helicopters were destroyed during a raid at Khost Airport. Taliban sources claim that about 160 US, Afghan and allied soldiers have killed in these incidents. Taliban and al-Qaeda fatalities are believed to run into hundreds. Fierce fighting has erupted in Logar province adjacent to Kabul. Different group of fighters from the Taliban, the Hizb-i-Islami and other factions have banded together to take control of many areas. According to sources, US planes had to come to the rescue of the pro-Karzai administration in Logar, but the million-dollar question now is where to drop the bombs as it is impossible to tell who is friend and who is foe. Similarly, the Taliban have taken positions in Orguzan and Himand provinces in the south, but the administration of Kandahar, previously the Taliban headquarters, is reluctant to take action against them because once the fighting begins in earnest in southern Afghanistan, pockets of resistance are likely to mushroom all over Kandahar and create havoc. Sources in the Taliban say that the next fighting is likely to be in eastern Wardaz province, from where they will strive to take control of Kunhar from the pro-Karzai administration that is currently in place. http://atimes.com/c-asia/DC06Ag04.html From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Mar 6 17:02:15 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:05 2006 Subject: [R-G] Military lands exactly where it didn't want to - LAT Message-ID: <200203070002.g2702GE15120@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-000016764mar06.story The Los Angeles Times March 6, 2002 Military lands exactly where it didn't want to Afghanistan: The ground war is taking U.S. forces into rocky terrain and thin air, the sort of conditions that felled the Soviets. By Esther Schrader Washington -- The fierce combat unfolding in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan is just what the Pentagon had hoped to avoid in this campaign: a battle in which superior air power and technology aren't trump cards and hundreds of U.S. troops are fighting hardened guerrillas in rocky terrain, thin air and brutally cold weather. The large ground assault near the town of Gardez is taking the U.S. military into precisely the sort of conditions that felled the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s--and precisely the sort of battle the Clinton administration assiduously avoided in Kosovo. It is also the ground war Al Qaeda apparently wanted. "Cities and mountains are two places where you don't want to fight," said one defense official who has been involved in planning the Gardez operation. "But if you're a terrorist and you hear that, that's where you want to go." Despite the heaviest U.S. combat casualty tolls of the war--eight servicemen dead and about 40 injured in the fighting to date--officials said the U.S.-led force of more than 2,000 will continue battling Al Qaeda and Taliban forces until the militants are either dead or captured. But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters Monday that the Gardez combat is not likely to mark the end of the war. Indeed, he said future battles are expected to look more like this large-scale operation than the air campaign that marked the war's early months. "There will be other battles of this type" against "sizable pockets" of resistance scattered across the Central Asian nation until the Afghan government can assert full control, Rumsfeld said. Soldiers Plunging Into Vulnerable Situations In opting for this strategy of heavy U.S. troop deployment, the Pentagon hopes to seal off escape routes and avoid the problems that plagued earlier battles, when friendly Afghan forces did the heavy fighting but let hundreds or thousands of militants flee. But the U.S. is knowingly plunging ahead in areas where it is most vulnerable. The Pentagon is using MH-47 Chinook helicopters flying low to the ground, even though it knows from hard experience in Somalia--where 18 U.S. soldiers died in an ill-fated 1993 battle that saw two Black Hawk helicopters shot down--that the aircraft is highly susceptible to ground fire. Special operations forces are engaged in risky combat and searches in and around caves--something Pentagon officials said in the early days of the war they wanted to avoid at all costs. And ground troops are fighting in rugged, snow-covered mountains at elevations as high as 11,000 feet, where temperatures have dipped to about 15 degrees at night, even though only a few U.S. military units still engage in extensive cold weather training. Most U.S. troops are using cold weather gear first designed in the 1950s, rather than the new, high-tech materials and technologies widely available in the private market for cold weather activities. U.S. forces do not have much recent experience fighting in such conditions. "We're best trained for the last war that we've fought, and if you look at the last wars, you had Somalia, the [Persian] Gulf War, back to Vietnam," Marine Corps Capt. Ken Walker said. "All of those are very hot environments. There are not a lot of guys who can talk about what it's like to fight in cold weather. It is one of the hardest environments to fight in, but it just has not been a real focus in a long time." The tactics and difficulties U.S. forces are facing in Gardez are already raising some concerns among current and former military commanders. "It pretty much follows the trajectory of the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, which was very successful at the beginning and then dragged on for years," said retired Marine Corps Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, commander from 1991 to 1994 of the U.S. Central Command, which has responsibility for operations in Afghanistan. "If it were easy, our proxies could do it," Hoar said. "I don't think we have any choice." Richard K. Betts, director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, said he hopes the Gardez fight turns out to be an anomaly. "If it looks like there might be an indefinite problem of suppressing guerrilla operations and raids by small, surviving groups of these people, it will raise all the questions of whether this was risking suffering the fate of the Soviets," Betts said. With eight U.S. servicemen dead already in the battle, a debate has begun among current and former officers over the decision to mount a large ground assault. Use of Ground Forces Rejected in Kosovo In the 1999 effort to drive Yugoslav forces from Kosovo, Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark called repeatedly for the use of ground troops supported by Apache attack helicopters but was overruled by policymakers in Washington afraid to risk casualties. The thinking in the current campaign by advocates of ground force is that the only way to prove the usefulness of infantry troops is to overcome the fear of taking casualties. "I think there was an element of guys wanting to see this kind of fight," said a recently retired senior military officer. "There's a whole school of thought that wants to get U.S. ground forces engaged. They are afraid that if they don't get them engaged and show their utility, that people are going to start questioning how much [money] should be allocated to ground forces." But military officers said the U.S. will adapt as it goes along. While AC-130 gunships, which attack ground forces, were never used in Somalia to help the besieged Black Hawk choppers, they are being used extensively in Gardez. "We're going to learn a hell of a lot out of this engagement, so when we go on to other projects we will do things differently," said retired Gen. Ronald R. Fogleman, Air Force chief of staff until 1997. "I don't think anybody will be taking people in Chinook helicopters in the same circumstances. They may have learned a lesson from that. We'll adapt." From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Mar 6 17:03:41 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] A whole new war game in Afghanistan - Asia Times Message-ID: <200203070003.g2703fE16447@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> Asia Times March 6, 2002 A whole new war game in Afghanistan By Syed Saleem Shahzad Karachi - The past few days have seen surprise ambushes, raids and resistance by Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in most parts of eastern Afghanistan, and in some areas in the south, with the United States and its allied troops sustaining more losses than they had expected. Since Saturday, when heavy ground and air fighting began in eastern Afghanistan, US forces have encountered their fiercest opposition since stepping into the country toward the end of last year. Indeed, they helped push the Taliban from control of the country in less than two months, watching almost as bystanders as major towns fell with hardly a fight. As previously reported in Asia Times Online, the reason for this was simple. The Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters were saving themselves for another day, and that day has now arrived. After retreating from Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad and so on, the top Taliban leaders either fled to the border tribal areas of Pakistan or took refuge in remote and isolated areas in Afghanistan, while middle and lower-rank Taliban easily melted into the local population, from where many of them had come in the first place. Some local commanders who had sided with the Taliban when they took power in 1996 returned to their pre-Taliban party disciplines, such as the Jamiat-i-Islami, the Ittehad-i-Islami and the Hizb-i-Islami. Here they were accepted without question, and they were given protection. These Taliban remained in close contact with one another, waiting for the weather to warm up toward the end of March, at which time they had planned a major guerrilla campaign in the country. In anticipation of this, United States forces, with the support of soldiers from a number of other countries as well as Afghans loyal to the administration of interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai, began a major offensive in the rugged terrain around Gardez in Paktia province on suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda strongholds. Their target in this operation, code-named Anaconda, was Mullah Saifur Rehman Mansoor and his troops, who had become active with sniping raids on US positions in the area. But unlike previously, this time around the US has found a very determined and deadly opponent. Previously, the boundaries between the Taliban and their opponents were clearly defined. As a result, the Taliban were easy to point out and easy to target by US planes. But now there are no clear boundaries. In addition to Saturday's clashes near Gardez, when US forces and the Taliban squared off, US-led forces also faced assaults in regions controlled by pro-Karzai forces. According to Taliban sources, the Taliban have established small pockets across the country, particularly in eastern areas. And given the mountainous terrain, it is nearly impossible to locate bands of 10-15 people, even with the help of the local population. And passing helicopters or military convoys become easily targets in such conditions. Apart from this guerrilla strategy, information this correspondent has acquired from Afghanistan appears to be in contrast to what is being projected in the US media. According to sources, the war has now begun on all fronts in Paktia and Khost provinces, with US military installations coming under attack from the small bands of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters that had been in hiding around them. By Tuesday the US had reported seven of its soldiers killed and more than 40 wounded, although the figures could be higher. On Monday, the first US helicopter in the five-month-old war was shot down in Zarmat, a second was destroyed between Sata Kundao and Mata Chena (Khost), while two more helicopters were destroyed during a raid at Khost Airport. Taliban sources claim that about 160 US, Afghan and allied soldiers have killed in these incidents. Taliban and al-Qaeda fatalities are believed to run into hundreds. Fierce fighting has erupted in Logar province adjacent to Kabul. Different group of fighters from the Taliban, the Hizb-i-Islami and other factions have banded together to take control of many areas. According to sources, US planes had to come to the rescue of the pro-Karzai administration in Logar, but the million-dollar question now is where to drop the bombs as it is impossible to tell who is friend and who is foe. Similarly, the Taliban have taken positions in Orguzan and Himand provinces in the south, but the administration of Kandahar, previously the Taliban headquarters, is reluctant to take action against them because once the fighting begins in earnest in southern Afghanistan, pockets of resistance are likely to mushroom all over Kandahar and create havoc. Sources in the Taliban say that the next fighting is likely to be in eastern Wardaz province, from where they will strive to take control of Kunhar from the pro-Karzai administration that is currently in place. From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Mar 6 17:04:39 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Why the "War on Terror" won't work - CounterPunch Message-ID: <200203070004.g2704dE17465@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> http://www.counterpunch.org/christison1.html CounterPunch March 4, 2002 Former senior CIA officer: Why the "War on Terror" won't work By Bill Christison Bill Christison joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis, a 250-person office. These remarks, which he has made available to CounterPunch, have been recently delivered to various peace groups in New Mexico. His wife Kathy also worked in the CIA, retiring in 1979, since when she has been mainly preoccupied by the issue of Palestine. On January 15 the Attorney General of the United States, John Ashcroft, held a press conference in order to describe the initial criminal charges that the government would make against John Walker, the 20-year-old American citizen who had joined the Taliban military forces. In his talk, Ascroft said this ­ and I quote: "The United States does not casually or capriciously charge one of its own citizens with providing support to terrorists. We are impelled to do so today by the inescapable fact of September the 11th, a day that reminded us in no uncertain terms that we have enemies in the world and that these enemies seek to destroy us. We learned on September 11 that our way of life is not immune from attack, and even from destruction." The guts of what Ashcroft said is ­ and I quote again ­ "We have enemies in the world and these enemies seek to destroy us." Unquote. I submit to you that this is simply not a true statement. The evidence I've seen shows that the real objective of the Muslim extremists led by Osama bin Laden was to rid the Muslim world itself of American domination and influence. They wanted NOT to destroy the United States; rather they wanted the U.S. out of their own land. Bin Laden and his supporters also wanted, and those yet alive still want, to unite Muslim nations behind an extreme version of Islam, believing that the Islamic world can thereby better control its own future. I think they realize full well there is no possibility they can "destroy " the United States, and their objective, while still pretty grandiose, is considerably more limited. Their aim, according to one recent analysis that appeared in the New York Review of Books ­ and I quote again ­ "is to create one Islamic world. This is a call to purify the Islamic world of the idolatrous West, exemplified by America. The aim is to strike at American heathen shrines, and show, in the most spectacular fashion, that the U.S. is vulnerable, a paper tiger." Unquote. These Islamic extremists are not nice people. Those still alive, and other future adherents to their cause, will continue to try to kill innocent people in the U.S. and elsewhere. But what the extremists see themselves as trying to do is to stop the United States from continuing its drive for global hegemony, including hegemony over the Islamic world. I think it's important to understand this, because if people in the United States believe that some enemy is trying to "destroy" the U.S. ­ and actually has some possibility of doing so ­ then waging an all-out war against that enemy can be more easily justified. But what if the U.S. is not trying to prevent its own destruction, but instead is trying to preserve and extend its global hegemony? In that case, I think we should all step back and start demanding of our government a serious public debate over future U.S. foreign policies. We should be strenuously debating the degree to which the people in this country, given all of our own domestic problems, want the U.S. government to continue foreign policies intended to strengthen U.S. hegemony over and domination of the rest of the world in the political, economic, and militarily areas. In short, Ashcroft's claim that enemies are seeking to destroy the United States makes it easier for the U.S. government to avoid any limits that might otherwise be imposed on its "war against terrorism" by an informed public opinion. President George W. Bush's references in his own speeches to America's enemies as "the evil ones" tend in the same direction. Although acts of terrorism ­ which I'm defining here as killings of, or other violence against, innocent noncombatants ­ are always inexcusable, simply labeling perpetrators as "the evil ones" makes it easier for the U.S. government to avoid any inconvenient discussion of ways in which the U.S. might modify its foreign policies to reduce the likelihood of future terrorist acts. But are all Afghans "evil ones?" Or all members of the Taliban? Or did only a few Taliban leaders know about the planned terrorist attacks before September 11? In any case, is it clear that all Taliban members were accomplices of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden? And if they were accomplices, is it not true that the better legal systems of the world do not punish accomplices to a crime as severely as the criminals themselves? Is it right that in this war the U.S. is punishing the accomplices just as much the criminals themselves? It seems to me that the use of the term "evil ones" is intended to avoid discussion of a lot of nuances. My own view is that the United States is now, almost five months after September 11, heading into an extraordinarily difficult time, when substantial changes in our foreign policies will be required. Yet all the polls seem to show that up to 90 percent of the people in this country still don't even want to listen to anyone who proposes alternatives to our present foreign policies. So I guess that shows that only ten percent of Americans care much about our policies toward the rest of the world. But I'll bet that in this room right now, a much higher proportion of you do care about the rest of the world and do want to see changes in our foreign policies The first and most basic belief I have about the current situation is that military action will never be effective in solving the problem of terrorism against the United States. At best it will only prevent terrorism temporarily. As I've already mentioned, there's little doubt that the U.S. will somehow kill or capture or otherwise neutralize Osama bin Laden and most of his lieutenants. The U.S. has already pretty much pulverized Afghanistan by bombing, and has incidentally killed an unknown number of innocent noncombatants in the process. The U.S. government, by the way, seems uninterested in even estimating how many innocent noncombatants have in fact been killed, but it is possible that the number is as large as or larger than the 3,000 killed in the U.S. on September 11. Whatever the military success of the U.S., however, a couple of years hence new extremists just as clever as bin Laden, and hating the U.S. even more, will almost certainly arise somewhere else in the world. That's why we need to understand the root causes behind the terrorism. If I am right that military action will not prevent future terrorism, but only delay it, we should start working on these root causes right away. We should not wait until the military actions are finished before looking at root causes, as some people would urge us to do. So let's go. I'm going to list six major root causes of the terrorism that I think are important. Either Kathy or I will make some comments on each one and then propose how we should change our foreign policy on each. The critical thing you should keep in mind on all of these six issues is that there is a great deal of disagreement in Washington and elsewhere over the relative importance of one compared to another. With that caveat, here are the six root causes of terrorism against the U.S. that we've chosen to talk about. I've arranged them in a rough order that starts with those I think are most difficult to deal with, but the order does not necessarily reflect their relative importance. My personal feeling is that all six are of equal importance. ONE: My number one root cause is the support by the U.S. over recent years for the policies of Israel with respect to the Palestinians, and the belief among Arabs and Muslims that the United States is as much to blame as Israel itself for the continuing, almost 35-year-long Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. My first comment on this issue is that it is a more controversial root cause than any of the others on our list. The government of Israel, and many supporters of Israel in the United States, really did not want to talk about any root causes immediately after September 11. Top leaders in the United States, most of whom strongly support Israel, preferred to talk only in general terms ­ about how the terrorists were mad and irrational, and how they had attacked "freedom itself," out of mindless hatred. More recently, when pressured to talk about root causes at all, the Israelis and their supporters have gone to great lengths to reject arguments that Israel's behavior toward the Palestinians, or U.S. support for Israel, are in any way even a partial cause of the terrorism. When forced to say something positive about root causes, they tend to allege a broader Islamic religious hatred of the West and its modern technology than I think exists. They also emphasize the internal tensions within the Arab world, the lack of democracy and the dictatorial rulers of Arab nations, who are depicted as trying to distract their people from their own internal grievances by whipping up hatred of Israel. I need to digress for a moment. In a situation where there are clearly multiple root causes of terrorism, it's in the interest of any person or nation that might be blamed for one of the root causes to emphasize instead the other root causes. In the last couple of months, a sizable propaganda campaign has been launched suggesting that Saudi Arabia is the most important root cause of the September 11 terrorism. I certainly agree that the dictatorial and decrepit Saudi government and its support throughout the Muslim world for a harsh and immoderate version of Islam can be seen as one ­ but only one ­ of the root causes behind the recent terrorism. I'll have more to say about this later. What I want to point out here is that I suspect supporters of Israel are aggressively pressing this campaign against Saudi Arabia, in the hope of persuading other world leaders that the issue of Palestine is NOT a significant root cause. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is a leading practitioner of this pro-Israel campaign. Both Kathy and I believe, however, that the United States' strong support for Israel and for its occupation and colonization of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is indeed is a major root cause of the terrorism against the U.S. After I go through the rest of the root causes, Kathy is going to talk in much more detail about the Israel-Palestine issue and its tragic consequences. Kathy will also give you her thoughts on changes in U.S. foreign policy that might be necessary if the U.S. does in fact desire a peaceful resolution of this issue ­ a resolution that would also help to reduce the likelihood of future terrorism against the U.S. TWO: My number two root cause is the present drive of the United States to spread its hegemony and its version of big-corporation, free enterprise globalization around the world. At the same time, the massive poverty of average people, not only in Arab and Muslim nations but also in the whole third world, has become more important as a global political issue. The gap between rich and poor nations, and rich and poor people within most of the nations, has grown wider during the last 20 years of globalization or, more precisely, the U.S. version of globalization. Animosities against the United States have grown among the poor of the world, who have watched as the U.S. has expanded both its hegemony and a type of globalization based on its own economic system, while they themselves have seen no or very little benefit from these changes. This problem of poverty around the world is so immense that it's almost impossible to grasp. Global statistics are far from perfect, buy they show that the world's population hit 6 billion last year. 2.8 billion people, almost half of the world's total, have incomes of less than two dollars a day. Here's another statistic: the richest one percent of the world's people receive as much income as the poorest 57 percent. And here's a final statistic: The richest 25 million people in the United States receive more income than the 2 billion poorest people of the world ­ one third of the world's total population. Can we here, sitting in this room, even comprehend the magnitude of the injustice that these figures represent? And have no doubt ­ we in the United States are, rightly or wrongly, blamed for these figures. The catalog of reasons for animosity toward the U.S. throughout the world includes a number of things in addition to our overbearing assertion of both economic and political hegemony: our arrogance in insisting that whatever we say goes, our penchant for abrogating or ignoring international treaties that we don't happen to like, as well as the influence of U.S. corporations that exploit cheap labor in third world countries to make consumer goods for Americans, Take all these things together and you have a wide sense among the poor people of the world of being oppressed by the United States. This in turn made it possible for Osama bin Laden and the fundamentalists around him to instill and spread intense hatred of us, just as a sense of being oppressed by the Allies after World War I made it possible for Hitler to arouse the kind of fear and hatred among Germans that led both to the slaughter of Jews and to World War II. The pressures arising from the complex and related problems of U.S. hegemony, globalization and the immense gap in wealth will grow steadily more explosive. My proposal is that the U.S. should immediately develop and implement, with active participation of the U.N. and the European Union (E.U.), a new, very large, and long-term "Marshall Plan" type of aid program for all of the poor nations of the world. This plan should specifically be aimed at reducing the size of the income gap between the poorest and richest nations, and at reducing the income gap between the rich and poor within nations. This type of plan could contribute significantly to reducing the likelihood of future terrorism against the United States. It would also show a far more generous side of the United States to people who at present see only a U.S. version of globalization that seems to them highly selfish and beneficial largely to big corporations and the rich of the world. I've been talking about a massive aid program for the world's poor since last October, when I spoke to a number of peace groups in Santa Fe. More recently, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, has proposed a similar plan, in the amount of $100 billion for each of the next four years. My own suggestion as to the amount is $350 billion spread over three years. $350 billion is, after all, just about what the U.S. military budget will probably amount to in the next ONE fiscal year. One would think that we could find an equal amount to spend over a three-year period for what I would regard as a better purpose. About now some of you are probably thinking, how unrealistic can this guy get! He of all people ­ meaning me ­ should be aware of how corrupt the governments of most third-world nations are, and you can just see all this money simply going down the drain. My answer is that solving the problem of massive income inequalities around the world is absolutely critical to the future stability of the world, and so far the U.S. version of globalization has not improved the situation at all. I think there are enough intelligent people in the U.N., U.S., Europe, and the underdeveloped countries themselves that we could set up a planning and monitoring group to oversee the wise use of such large funds and to hold the level of corruption to a minimum. The United States should not run such a program unilaterally, and the institutions set up to manage it should not be used to perpetuate and strengthen U.S. global hegemony, as the case now with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. When you hear charges of unrealism before some new program is even in the detailed planning stages, I think you're entitled to ask if those making the charges aren't really opposing the new program for some other reason. My own feeling is that the world is in such a mess, and the inequality problem is so severe, that maybe we should worry less about alleged "unrealism" and more about getting on with the business of planning, followed by real action, to do something about the problem. THREE: The number three root cause I want to discuss is the continuing sanctions and lack of food and medicines for the people of Iraq, deaths of Iraqi children, and the almost daily bombing of Iraq by the U.S. and Great Britain. Right or wrong, the Arab and Muslim "street" blames this on the U.S., not on Saddam Hussein. I don't have much to comment about on this one. The sanctions and the bombings have been in effect for ten years, and have neither brought about the ouster of Saddam Hussein nor significantly weakened him. And they have caused the deaths of children variously estimated at up to or over a million. The U.S. government's position is that Saddam himself is to blame for the troubles of the Iraqi people, but the fact remains that after all these years, the Iraqi people are the ones hurt by U.S. actions, not Saddam. My view is that simple justice argues for an end to both the sanctions and the bombings. My proposal is that we do precisely that. FOUR: My number four root cause is the continued presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. Ten years ago this was the principal cause of Osama bin Laden's hostility toward the United States. (His hostility on account of U.S. actions against Iraq and then the massive U.S. support for Israel came later and in both cases may be tactical ­ an effort to broaden his own popularity in the Arab world.) Today the thousands of U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia are a constant irritant in Saudi-U.S. relations. The Saudi people clearly do not want them there. Unless we plan to invade Iraq again, I doubt there is any longer a vital reason to keep men and U.S. ground-based military facilities there. My proposal? The obvious one ­ that we remove the troops. I understand, of course ­ you'd have to be blind and deaf not to know this ­ that some people at high levels in the U.S. government do want to invade Iraq again. All I can say is, I hope such people do not carry the day. I can't think of a thing that would do more to broaden this "war on terrorism" into a Judeo-Christian war against Islam ­ despite any U.S. governmental protestations to the contrary. FIVE: The fifth root cause on my list is the dissatisfaction and anger of many average and even elite Arabs and Muslims over their own authoritarian, undemocratic, and often corrupt governments, which are supported by the United States. My first comment here is that Osama bin Laden is a good example of this particular root cause. His extremist wrath was directed as much against the Saudi government, for example, as it was against the United States. His opposition to what used to be his own government was probably the main reason why he had the support of a majority of the young men under 25 in Saudi Arabia. He received similar support from many young men in other Arab and Muslim states as well. Right now these groups of angry young men obviously no longer have a viable leader in Osama bin Laden, but other extremist leaders are almost sure to arise. In addition, the next generation of leaders in at least some of these states may well emerge from among these young men. If any of them do come into power, their future governments will likely be more anti-American than the present governments, which Washington likes to call "moderate," but which are really nothing of the sort. If we have not reduced our energy dependence on oil in the meantime, we may face serious trouble. In my view, this IS a truly difficult problem. My proposal is that we should adopt draconian measures immediately to reduce our overall energy usage, including but not limited to cutting our dependence on Mideast oil. We should, for example, change our tax structure to make energy as expensive to consumers in the United States as it is in Europe and Japan. This will require significant life-style changes in the U.S. I think we kid ourselves if we believe that we can solve any coming energy crunch by expanding alternative power sources or by increasing "clean coal" usage, nuclear power usage, and Alaskan oil usage. The shortages will be too great; so will the long-term environmental costs; and so will the political costs in our relationships with other nations that have already accepted higher energy prices for consumers as a necessary burden of 21st Century life. We also should not count on new oil supplies from Central Asia allowing us to forget about the need for conservation and to stop being concerned about the stability of Saudi Arabia or other areas of the Middle East. Even assuming that massive supplies of oil from Central Asia become available quickly, all we'll be doing is transferring our support from the dictatorships of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States to the dictatorships of Central Asia. That is not a prospect that we should blithely accept. In my view, conservation is the route we must follow. I think we should, at the same time, gradually reduce the closeness of our ties with the present authoritarian governments in Arab and Muslim states, and try to develop a better understanding of and improved relations with groups in these states that oppose their own present governments. We should seek out groups that appear to be democratically inclined and "moderate" in the true meaning of the word. Difficult? Of course it will be. But it is the best shot we've got, in my opinion, to have a decent relationship with many Muslim states in the future. It's also the best shot we've got if we wish to diminish, over time, the support for future Osama bin Ladens that arises from the anger of Arabs and Muslims with their own governments. SIX. The sixth and last root cause on my list arises directly from the U.S. "war on terrorism." It has to do with the kind of war the U.S. is now able to fight. On three recent occasions ­ the Gulf War of 1990-1991, the Kosovo war of 1999 against Yugoslavia, and the current war against Afghanistan ­ the United States has easily achieved victories by relying almost exclusively on air power, on missiles launched from a great distance, and now even on drone aircraft with no humans on board. The U.S. has won these wars with practically no casualties among its own forces. But while few Americans get killed, sizable numbers of other nationalities do. Most people in the United States are proud both of these victories and of the low U.S. casualties in these three wars. From the viewpoint of anyone who supports the wars, this prowess of U.S. armed forces deserves to be honored. But elsewhere in much of the world, especially the underdeveloped world, this overwhelming invincibility of the U.S. military intensifies the frustrations about and hatred of the United States. This in turn makes future terrorist acts against the U.S. ­ or what is now called by U.S. strategic thinkers asymmetrical warfare ­ even more likely. Those in underdeveloped lands who oppose the U.S. drive for worldwide hegemony are increasingly coming to see no means other than terrorism as an effective method of opposing the United States. I think this is an issue that demands a lot more discussion than it's been getting, and I think it goes to the heart of our future foreign policies. For the immediate future, perhaps the next five or ten years, I think it's going to be tempting for any government of the United States to implement and enforce whatever foreign policies it chooses by going to war, because it will be confident ­ even overconfident ­ that it won't lose a military confrontation and won't suffer many casualties. In this same five to ten year period, the readily available military option will also encourage the U.S. to avoid facing up to the hard decisions necessary for a peaceful resolution of our more intractable foreign policy problems. Among these intractable problems will be the already-mentioned gross income inequalities around the world and the Israel-Palestine issue. Without a peaceful settlement of these issues, long-term productive relations between the United States and the whole underdeveloped world are likely to be impossible. This leads me to a very important conclusion. Since hatred of the U.S. is markedly intensified by the very way in which the U.S. can now fight wars, I think that the U.S. should, in the future, voluntarily stop employing warfare based on airpower and bombing as a means of combating future acts of terrorism. The fact that U.S. bombs and missiles have already killed innocent civilians is tragic and puts us on a par with the extremists who committed the September 11 acts. We should stop, right now, all further military action that risks killing more civilians. At the same time, I want to emphasize that I am quite sure there is enough evidence of Osama bin Laden's complicity in the September 11 terrorist actions to arrest and indict him. Assuming he is still alive, I would therefore support covert or Green-Beret-type operations to capture, but not assassinate, him. Maximum precautions should be taken, however, to prevent such operations from killing or injuring any more innocent civilians. Once captured, bin Laden should be prosecuted and tried in an international court. I fully understand that compared to most views you hear concerning the U.S. "war on terrorism," my views are RADICAL. But I believe that unless the U.S. moves in the directions I've been suggesting throughout this talk, in five or ten years the terrorism against the United States will become so intense that our global relationships with other nations will be in shambles. On the other hand, if the U.S. government voluntarily moves toward the kind of foreign policy changes I've been talking about, I think that its actions might start a trend toward a considerably more peaceful, and stable, 21st Century than now seems likely. From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Mar 6 17:05:35 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Bush vs Saddam: The empire strikes back - Asia Times Message-ID: <200203070005.g2705ZE18524@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> http://www.atimes.com/c-asia/DC06Ag01.html Asia Times March 6, 2002 Bush vs Saddam: The empire strikes back By Pepe Escobar Paris - It may be a geopolitical "window of opportunity". In Washington's calculations, Saddam Hussein has to go. As soon as possible. The devil, as usual, is in the details. Geopolitician Francois Lafargue, professor at the Paris Group School of Management, sheds some light on how Washington's view of Iraq and its leader changed from Bush father to Bush son. "Since 1980, Washington has had only one objective - to destroy the emerging powers of the region, Iran and Iraq. Beyond the theological squabbles between Sunnis and Shi'ites, the main political issue in the region is the role of Saudi Arabia. Shi'ites as a whole deny the legitimacy of the House of Saud - which considers itself to be the guardian of the sacred places of Islam. That's why Saudi Arabia in the 1990s was one of the main advocates in favor of Saddam Hussein remaining in power." The main groups of the Iraqi population are 20 percent Sunnis, 55 percent Shi'ites and 25 percent Kurds. During a Kurd rebellion 11 years ago, the aim was to establish an independent state north of Iraq. An independent Kurdistan would be oil-rich, and thus capable of financing other Kurdish independent movements, especially in Turkey. This was the immediate post-Gulf War period in the early 1990s. Although George Bush senior had stigmatized Saddam Hussein as "the new Hitler", the last thing that Washington had in mind at the time was a fragmentation of Iraq and the rise of an independent Kurdistan. Washington privileged the territorial integrity of Turkey against Kurdish aspirations. No wonder. Turkey is the leading army in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization after the US. It is an essential strategic ally. Turkey offers the US strategic bases such as Incirlik, listening posts that cover the whole Caucausus, and it also controls access to the Black Sea. Lafargue points out that "a democratic Iraq would most probably imply a Shi'ite Arab in power [because they constitute the majority of the population]. This would be an untenable situation to the monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, because a Shi'ite power in Baghdad could find many common grounds with Iran, where two-thirds of the population is Shi'ite". This was the post-Gulf War scenario. In the post-Afghan War scenario, Washington's Iraq approach is something completely different. It is a two-pronged strategy, as Asia Times Online has learned. The first part is already in place: it could be designated as the "diplomatic solution". It involves renewing United Nations sanctions against Iraq, and demanding total access all over Iraq to UN nuclear-weapons inspectors. European diplomats widely agree that this "solution" will inevitably fail. The road in this case would be open to the much-preferred "military solution". The UN Security Council meets in May to renew the already harsh sanctions against Iraq. But Washington does not want to wait until May. Already in mid-December 2001, the headquarters of the US 3rd Army was moved to Kuwait. And the target-planning activity in ultra-high-tech Prince Sultan airbase near Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, has been nothing short of frenetic. The White House and the Pentagon have been actively considering a "variety of options" - according to Secretary of State Colin Powell - to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Powell recently told the Senate that the US has no plans to start a war - at least for the moment - against two of the other "evils", Iran and North Korea. But the breathing space allowed President Seyed Mohammad Khatami and Great Leader Kim Jong-il does not apply to Saddam Hussein. Most of Washington is still in love with the "Afghan solution": a quick and easy "victory" with practically no loss of American lives. The fact that this "victory" means that Osama bin Laden, all of the al-Qaeda leadership and all of the Taliban leadership are still alive, well and on the loose obviously is not taken into account. Applied to Iraq, the "Afghan model" - Northern Alliance "freedom fighters" supported by US Special Forces and overwhelming aerial supremacy - has led the Pentagon to build the ideal scenario of an Iraqi nationalist - and Kurdish - uprising against Saddam, supported by the US agents who have been roaming northern Iraq gauging possible Kurdish support for this American-incited revolt. A key player in the uprising will be the Iraqi National Congress (INC) - the opposition in exile. But the INC remains extremely disorganized, and is essentially controlled by a bunch of gangsters. The INC has been receiving a lot of attention in Washington lately, but still no promise of military training. According to one particular Pentagon scenario, Kurds, Iraqi Shi'ites and at least 100,000 US troops would be involved in an also two-pronged invasion of Iraq. Half of the US troops would invade from the mini-Kurdistan area set up in northern Iraq, and the other half would invade from Kuwait - everybody of course supported by hellish aerial firepower. The idea, though, is not exactly feasible. The US 3rd Army commander, Lieutenant-General Paul Mikolashek, has already said he would need between 150,000 and 200,000 combat troops, plus another 200,000 for support and logistic operations. Military analysts agree the whole operation would need close to 500,000 troops - roughly the equivalent used during the Gulf War. The "street" in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan - not to mention Syria, Lebanon and everywhere else in the Middle East - would certainly go mad. It took the greatest armada ever almost two weeks to establish "aerial supremacy" over a bunch of bearded mullahs with walkie-talkies. Saddam Hussein's is no ragtag medieval army. According to the latest data, it may have 350,000 combat troops, 2,700 tanks, 90 fighter jets and 100 helicopters. Most of the troops, though, are no more prepared than fleeing Taliban. The cream of the crop are 50,000 soldiers in seven Republican Guard divisions, and 26,000 Special Guards - tribals recruited by Saddam Hussein in his native Tikrit. These people hold 1,200 Russian T-52 tanks, and actually get paid: four times the salary of a regular soldier. They also can lay their hands on 300 mobile anti-aircraft missile launchers - recently paid for with oil money: sanctions or no sanctions, smuggling remains an extremely prosperous industry between Iraq and neighbors Turkey, Syria and Jordan. Saddam Hussein is not just sitting and waiting to be on the receiving end of American wrath. Lafargue says that in 2002, Iraq will export 560 million barrels of oil - two-thirds of its production in 1990. "Some of the revenue is deposited into accounts managed by the UN, but the war machine is back in place thanks to smuggling. And the international embargo was ineffective." Iraq, little by little, is coming back from isolation. Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri will meet UN Secretary General Kofi Annan next week in New York. Contemplating the perspective of American strikes, Iraq is now apparently interested in renewing dialogue with the UN. Meanwhile, US Vice President Dick Cheney will personally advance the groundwork for the military solution. This month he will visit three key Iraqi neighbors - Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Jordan - plus Britain, Egypt, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman. Cheney's targets: to muster political support and occasional access to airbases, essential for the whole operation. The "Afghan General", Tommy Franks, head of the US Central Command and most certainly the man in charge in the case of an attack against Iraq, said that the Pentagon has not opted for a military plan - yet. Sources in Brussels assure Asia Times Online that the Pentagon would need at least a few months to wrap up the New Afghan War and start the New Iraqi War. There are insistent rumors in diplomatic circles that a strike against Iraq could happen as early as May. In this case, it will follow the Taliban spring guerrilla incursions against the Hamid Karzai regime in Kabul. The US is already bombing eastern Afghanistan in an effort to prevent a buildup of opposition forces there. George W Bush and the Pentagon may be itching to reduce one-third of the axis of evil to rubbish. But first they must consider three crucial issues. 1) A mad-as-hell Saddam Hussein may decide to unleash his fabled "weapons of mass destruction" against Americans - and Israelis - if he is attacked at home. 2) No one can tell for sure how many American ground forces are needed: the figure of almost 500,000 is considered exorbitant, and it would take months to assemble. 3) Turkey, the key US ally, is terribly worried about the possibility of an independent Kurdistan rising from the ashes of the Saddam Hussein regime and destabilizing the whole region. To top it all: everybody and his neighbor cannot begin to imagine the fallout from a huge US military operation right "at home". But this is peanuts when you're sitting on top of an unlimited military budget, and you're on a mission of Good against Evil. From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Mar 6 17:06:30 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] How to torpedo the Saudis - Uri Avneri Message-ID: <200203070006.g2706UE19318@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> http://www.counterpunch.org/avnerysaudis.html CounterPunch March 4, 2002 How to torpedo the Saudis Thirty five years of occupation and settlement have eroded Israel's abilty to reason, leaving instead a mixture of arrogance and folly By Uri Avnery If, in May 1967, an Arab prince had proposed that the whole Arab world would recognize Israel and establish normal relations with it, in return for Israel's recognition of the Green Line border, we would have believed that the days of the Messiah had arrived. Masses of people would have run into the street, singing and dancing, as they did on November 29, 1947, when the United Nations called for the establishment of a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine. But then disaster struck: we conquered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Labor and Likud governments filled them up with settlements, and today this offer sounds to many like a malicious anti-Semitic plot. The leaders of Israel tell us: Don't worry. Just as we survived Pharaoh, so we shall survive Emir Abdallah.* This is an allusion to a famous Israeli song. So what will happen? In Israel, every international initiative designed to put an end to the conflict passes through three stages: (a) denial, (b) misrepresentation, (c) liquidation. That's how the Sharon-Peres government will deal with this one, too. It can draw on 53 years of experience, during which both Labor and Likud governments have succeeded in scuttling every peace plan put forward. (We must nor suspect, God forbid, that the successive Israeli governments were opposed to peace. Not at all. Every one of them wanted peace. They all longed for peace. "Provided peace gives us the whole country, at least up to the Jordan river, and lets us cover all of it with Jewish settlements." Until now, all peace plans have fallen short of that.) PHASE A is designed to belittle the offer. "There is nothing new there," the Political Sources would assert. "It is offered solely for tactical purposes. It is a political gimmick". If the offer comes from an Arab: "He says it to the international community, but not to his own people". In short, "It's not serious." One proven method is to concentrate on one word and argue that it shows the dishonesty of the whole offer. For example, before the October 1973 war, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt made a far-reaching peace offer. Golda Meir rejected it out of hand. Her Arabists (there are always intellectual whores around to do the dirty job) discovered that Sadat spoke of "salaam" but not of "sulh, which "proves" that he does not mean real peace. More than 2000 Israel soldiers and tens of thousand Egyptians paid with their lives for this word. After that, a salaam treaty was signed. Such methods are already being applied now to the Saudi offer. First it was said that Crown Prince Abdullah had spoken about his initiative only with an American journalist, but not addressed his own people. When it transpired that it was widely published in all Saudi papers, both at home and in London, another argument was put forward: the prince has made his offer only because Saudis had become unpopular in the United States after the Twin Towers outrage. (As if this matters.) In short, Abdullah has not become a real Zionist. This point was widely discussed in the Israeli media. Commentators commentated, scholars showed their scholarly prowess. But not one (not one!) of them discussed the actual content of the offer. PHASE B is designed to outsmart the offer. We do not reject the offer. Of course not! We a longing for peace! So we welcome the "positive trend" of the offer and kick the ball out of the field. The best method is to ask for a meeting with the Arab leader who proposed the offer, "to clarify the issues". That sounds logical. Americans think that, if two people have a quarrel, they should meet and discuss the matter, in order to end it. What can be more reasonable than that? But a conflict between nations does not resemble a quarrel between two people. Every Arab peace offer rests on a two-part premise: You give back the occupied territories, and you get recognition and "normalization". Normalization includes, of course, meetings of the leaders. When the Israeli government demands a meeting with Arab leaders "to clarify details", it actually tries to get the reward (normalization) without delivering the goods (withdrawal from the occupied territories). A beautiful trick, indeed. If the Arab leaders refuse to meet, well, it only shows that their peace offer is a sham, doesn't it? Many peace offers have fallen into this trap. Ben-Gurion offered to meet with Muhammad Naguib, the Egyptian ruler after the 1952 revolution. Several Prime Ministers asked to meet Hafez al-Assad. Only Sadat outsmarted the smart ones and turned the tables on them. He came to Jerusalem on his own initiative. When the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted resolution 242, the Israeli government did not accept it. Only much later, when there was no way out, it accepted it "according to the Israeli interpretation". This concentrated on the article "the" that is missing in the English version (which demands withdrawal from "occupied territories" instead of from "the occupied territories"), contrary to the French version, in which the article duly appears. (The Soviets were caught napping, because there is no article in the Russian language.) The preferred method is to kill the spirit of the offer slowly, to talk about it endlessly, to interpret it this way and that way, to drag negotiations on and on, to put forward condition which the other side cannot accept, until the initiative yields in silence. That's what happened to the Conciliation Committee in Lausanne, that is what happened to most of the European and American peace plans. PHASE C: If phases A and B have not worked, the liquidation stage arrives. Nowadays it is called "targeted prevention" or, simply, "ascertained killing" by the army. Against the original UN mediator, the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, "targeted prevention" was applied literally: he was shot and killed. The killers were "dissidents", but Ben-Gurion did not shed any tears. Usually, Israeli governments use two deadly torpedoes in their arsenal: the US Congress and the American media. William Rogers, President Nixon's secretary of state, for example, proposed a peace plan that included the withdrawal of Israel to the pre-1967 border, with "insubstantial changes". Israel released its torpedoes and sunk Rogers together with his plan. His job was taken over by the Jewish megalomaniac, Henry Kissinger, and that was the end of peace plans. Can the Saudi initiative be scuttled in the same way? If the Saudis stay their course, it will not be easy to intercept it. This time the target is not a small frigate, not even a destroyer, but a mighty aircraft carrier. A great effort will be needed to torpedo it. But Shimon Peres and his foreign office are experts at this kind of job; they have been at it for decades. Ariel Sharon will push them. The pitiful Labor party, under the leadership of a small-time copy of Sharon, will join the chorus. Faced with the terrible threat of having to end the occupation, the Israeli media will rally behind the government. Nobody revolts, nobody cries out. In Israel, real public discourse has died long ago. The national instinct of survival has become blunted. Thirty five years of occupation and settlement have eroded the nation's abilty to reason, leaving instead a mixture of arrogance and folly. A great, perhaps unique opportunity may be missed. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands may pay for it with their lives. They will not dance in the streets any more. From DavidMcR at aol.com Mon Mar 4 23:42:07 2002 From: DavidMcR at aol.com (DavidMcR@aol.com) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Re: Left Solidarity [was the "12 step program for recovering fundamentalists"] Message-ID: <66.1d08085e.29b5c2bf@aol.com> Not sure whre AA came in, since I gather this post started on another list (and while I've hit "reply to all" I suspect I'll get the usual note that I'm not subscribed to more than one of the lists). I liked Hunter's letter, the memories, the names, and the reminder that even within the "monolithic" Communist Party there were free souls. My only actual reason for responding at all is for whoever out there MIGHT have an alcohol problem, as I certainly have had for many years, don't knock AA because of the higher power business. AA works for about 50% of those who try it - a better record than any other program. Not perfect. The God business is a problem - but mainly for folks who want any excuse at all to hold onto their bottle. Make the group itself your higher power. More atheists than you have dreamed of, Horatio, went into AA drunk and came out sober and still good atheists. Yes, there are lots and lots and lots of problems. It can become an end in itself, so you go to meetings of AA rather than a political group. Alcoholism is so deeply complex, with so many different answers and aspects, and so different as an addiction from something such as smoking (and I'm a survivor of both addictions) that all discussions are tentative. I only know that without AA I would never have made it. The old slogan of AA is still good - "take what you need from the program and leave the rest". There was a rule, when I joined, and the group I joined in Greenwich Village was partly bohemian, partly queer, partly Bowery folks including a number of blacks, that we were not to speak in the meeting if we had used any "mood altering substance" such as tranquilizers. Forgive me - please - for this personal note but I know I'm not the only one on the Left who has had to face this problem. I have used valium for many years to offset "nerves" and I stopped when I went into AA and went nearly up the wall. I finally went back on it, remembering that I hadn't gone into AA to stop smoking, or to stop taking valium, but to stop drinking. Take what you need, leave the rest. It worked for me. If anyone wants to talk off line about drinking, drop me a note. Fraternally, and still a day at a time, David McReynolds << Subj: Left Solidarity [was the "12 step program for recovering fundamentalists"] Date: 3/4/02 7:43:08 AM Eastern Standard Time From: hunterbadbear@earthlink.net (Hunter Gray) Reply-to: socunity@topica.com To: Redbadbear@yahoogroups.com, marxist@yahoogroups.com, marxism@lists.panix.com (Marxism Discussion List), rad-green@lists.econ.utah.edu (Rad-Green), antiracismdsa@topica.com (DSA Anti-Racism), socunity@topica.com (socunity), asdnet@igc.topica.com (ASDNET) This is a response, E., regarding your rather facetious post on religious fundamentalism --with a take-off on the program of Alcoholics Anonymous: "12 step program for recovering fundamentalists." Because it, in its own way and however inadvertently, addresses a number of issues concerning Left solidarity [and the lack of it], I'm posting it in several other places where these kinds of issues, literally and symbolically, have recently arisen. I am doing so minus your name [simply as an amenity.] In a very friendly way, E. -- and, using the old Mississippi term, that "I do so politely" -- I'm frankly not quite sure why you're on this particular trail. As you've gathered, and I haven't yet gotten the impression that you and I differ much in this context, I don't "Red bait." I make my own decisions on who and with what I hook up and work -- and I speak my own piece. I certainly have and have always had my strong loyalties -- personally and organizationally. I can and do debate with passion. But I'm much, much more inclined to focus my activist attention and my activist attacks on the bosses and Federal finks et al., and lend my efforts toward the achievement of social justice and socialist democracy, than I am on the intricacies of someone's Left affiliations -- now or decades ago. I've always been inclined to wonder why some Left folk, sometimes even very nice ones, try to secure a measure of "respectability" or bolster their sense of personal security -- say, in the eyes of the power structure or even the liberals! -- at the public expense of other Left persons and groups. I may have been the only guy -- barely into his twenties -- who, in the continuing Red Scare [especially in challenging places like Arizona] could work congenially with three editors from three differing radical traditions: Fred Thompson [Industrial Worker], the Wobbly; Bert Cochran [American Socialist], the former Trotskyist -- and fiercely independent socialist; and Charles Humboldt [Mainstream], the Communist --and a very ecumenical one indeed who was, very sadly for his publication and his personal vision, cruelly hatcheted by, as his loyal colleague, the very good and always enduringly creative Dr Annette Rubinstein put it so bitingly well in Encyclopedia of the American Left, the "ever more rigidly philistine" forces. The witch-hunters didn't like those guys or the journals they edited or the very decent things for which they as humans and editors stood. And the witch-hunters obviously didn't and don't like me at all. The 3,000 plus pages of my FBI files that I finally got [not counting several hundred other pages FBI refuses to give me] and in various batches over many years in the 1980s, have various things hostile to the publications those three fine editors edited -- and hostile to much, much more [e.g., other labor and radical things, Native rights, civil rights and civil liberties, peace, socialism and much else indeed from the Sunny Side.] Those three veteran Left editors certainly helped me, a very young and geographically isolated and hot-eyed radical Indian kid just out of the Army who was learning to organize and write. We were all on the same basic side. To them, and to many others like them, I owe a debt that's more than just considerable -- and that holds true for many other Left editors and persons of various Left faiths right into this present moment. Again, I have my loyalties and commitments. But, in the last analysis, I guess I make my judgments on the basis of what people actually do -- are tangibly doing -- to effectively help, in a variety of ways, the "people of the fewest alternatives." You, E., are certainly and personally doing your best on that critical front. On the matter of AA: Fortunately, I'm not an alcoholic -- only by the luck of whatever draw. I am, however, very careful about how I personally handle alcohol. And, in my extended family and circle of friends and acquaintances, there has been considerable alcohol-related tragedy. A good part of my volunteer time is often spent working with alcoholics [of all sorts of ethnicities] and their families and that's brought me into very close association with AA and its related programs -- for which I have the highest respect. I would never comment on AA and its endeavours jokingly or lightly. To come to the really specific matter at hand: I spend virtually no time at all worrying about someone else's religion. In the Deep South over a six year period [1961-67], much of it characterized by the highest drama and the most extreme danger, I spoke in hundreds of fundamentalist Black churches. Some of my more poignant memories, "forever etched," are driving through the dark and hot and lethal Southern night to a particular rural church -- in piney woods, or swampland, or cotton or tobacco turf -- where the frightened but brave minister waited with his frightened but brave flock to hear the message of the frightened but brave young organizer with his bundle of leaflets and other activist materials. And then, in due course, all of those frightened but brave people [including the organizer] were in frightened but brave public demonstrations -- facing an array of utterly reactionary and violent forces whose desperate viciousness we came to realize indicated depths and heights of fear far, far greater than ours could ever be. Let me tell you -- using the very broad "you:" There are many, many times when the Movement [with its various attendant dangers] and the social justice trail one has to take and will -- and in the end, the long range, will take successfully -- is enhanced mightily by singing, say, "Solidarity Forever" or "Joe Hill" or -- "We Shall Overcome" [with the words, of course, "we are not afraid" and "God is on our side."] I never worry about someone's religion or the Bible or the Book of Mormon or the Koran -- or whatever else embodies their particular beliefs in that realm [or, as far as that goes, books that involve the lack of religious beliefs.] That's their business. They have their views, I have mine. If t he institutional Church gets in the way of an organizing campaign, then we'll find ways to deal effectively with that roadblock -- and push past it and on toward the Sun. But on personal religious beliefs, I hold to the Indian Way: leave me alone with My Way, good luck with Yours, and we'll see where we all wind up -- wherever and when. We may all be surprised. In the final scenes of that fine film, the old version of "Inherit the Wind" -- the Scopes trial, of course -- Spencer Tracy as Henry Drummond [Darrow] stands in the empty Tennessee courtroom. They've all gone -- including his very facetious agnostic friend, [Henry Mencken -- played by Gene Kelly.] "Darrow" [and, from what I've heard of the great Attorney for the Damned, this could well be quite precisely what happened] stands with the Bible in one hand and the Origin of the Species in the other. With a privately quizzical expression, he weighs each one. And then, smiling, he claps them together -- and walks out of the court and on to the Next Dragon. Let's go after the Dragons and not each other. Yours, Hunter Gray [Hunterbear, John R Salter, Jr] Micmac / St Francis Abenaki / St Regis Mohawk Hunter Gray [ Hunterbear ] www.hunterbear.org ( social justice ) >> From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Mar 6 19:02:54 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Can the war turn out badly for U.S. forces in Afghanistan? G&M References: <81.18928a24.29b7bb19@aol.com> Message-ID: <005701c1c57c$32cb85e0$76195218@vc.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: > The reality is that US opponents 'melted away' to fight another day another > place. > > This is far from over ----- My reason for believing this to be exactly right stems from the fact the media are calling them "Taliban and Al Qaeda" troops that are dug in on the mountains. The fact that they even admit calling them Taliban says something, since they proclaimed the death of the Taliban in November and December. The number must be very significant for the media to allow the Americans to speak of Taliban now. It appears that real guerrilla warfare of the type that Afghanistan is famous for has begun. If it remains that Americans (and eventually other imperialists) continue to return home in body bags, then there could be a new force of non-Afghan combatants to fight the invaders. And that could be an entirely new war and therefore change the global situation as per the "free hand" of Empire. That itself would be progress. That also might save lives in Iraq. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international "They are all Enron, we are all Argentina" --WEF protesters. ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Wed Mar 6 23:59:37 2002 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Israel's army of peace Message-ID: <007d01c1c5a5$a51be8f0$33378d18@Indy1> ----- Original Message ----- From: Lysander Zimmerman To: IMC-Ontario Stories Sent: Thursday, March 07, 2002 1:59 AM Subject: Israel's army of peace ----- Original Message ----- From: mart-remote To: lwright@rhc.cu ; msd ; Communist Party of Canada - Int. ; Vicki ; eleanor@sgci.com ; Irina Cc: Jim Yarker ; Kim ; Roger ; Action Center ; antinato@topica.com ; pttp@yahoogroups.com ; com-int ; sam ; Lysander Zimmerman Sent: Wednesday, March 06, 2002 3:14 AM From:"Karen Lee Wald" Subject:Fw: Israel's army of peace Date:Tue, 5 Mar 2002 23:33:09 -0800 ========================== Karen Lee Wald 2175 Aborn Road, apt. 164 San Jose, CA 95121 telephone 408-532-6147 kwald@california.com ----- Original Message ----- From: JosePertierra@aol.com To: Newscapsules@aol.com Sent: Tuesday, March 05, 2002 6:32 PM Subject: Israel's army of peace Israel's army of peace Battle-scarred reservists are refusing to serve in the occupied territories. They are nothing less than heroes Jonathan Freedland Tuesday March 05 2002 The Guardian Even the most stoic of Israelis are beginning to feel scared. The sight of a single family - father, mother and two daughters, one aged seven, the other a toddler - wiped out on a busy Jerusalem street has shocked those who thought they could be shocked no more. Even the Israelis who live in a kind of internal exile - avoiding the news, listening only to music stations on the radio, steering clear of reality - were jolted by that Saturday bomb, aimed deliberately at a crowd of mothers, children and babies in pushchairs. And the attacks have not let up. Yesterday saw another killing spree: a restaurant shooting in Tel Aviv, a suicide bus bombing in Afula, a drive-by attack in the West Bank and a mortar raid on Sderot - not a settlement, but a town inside Israel-proper. At times like this, Israelis are not much in the mood for criticism. They feel desperate, the victims of a relentless war which makes targets of the most vulnerable: burger bars, buses and babies. So now is not an easy time for Israel to be told of the errors of its ways; the wounds are too raw. It helps that any critics can be dismissed so easily. If they are Palestinian or Arab, they are enemies of the state. If they are outsiders they are, at best, meddling know-nothings or, at worst, anti-semites implacably hostile both to Jews and their aspiration to have a place of their own. If they are Jews from outside Israel, they are "armchair" snipers, sounding off from the comfortable sidelines. The less charitable version says any Jewish critic of Israel is, simply, a self-hating Jew. But now there is a group who cannot be dismissed. They are not outsiders, do not sit in armchairs and hate no one, least of all themselves or their country. They are Israeli soldiers - battle-scarred combat veterans including a number of senior officers - engaged on perhaps their toughest ever mission. They are the "refuseniks", and their mission is peace. It began with a newspaper ad, signed by 50 army reservists, declaring that when they were called up for their annual month of military service they would refuse to serve in the occupied territories. In the month that has passed, the ranks of Ometz Le-Sarev have swelled. There are now 314 signatories to that original declaration, with 200 more refuseniks allied to a similar group: 500 recruits to Israel's army of peace. Thanks to the central place of Israel's conscript army in the nation's life, they ooze credibility. Not only have they all worn the country's uniform, but they are the men in their 20s and 30s the Israeli army regards as its new generation of commanders. Nor are they fringe lefties outside the Israeli consensus: more than 10 of the early refuseniks wear the crocheted skullcaps that serve as the badge of religious Zionism. All are avowed patriots, who insist they are happy to do their regular reserve duty but who refuse to act as occupiers on the West Bank or in Gaza. They adamantly believe in a Jewish state - they just want no part in ruling over another people. All that makes them impossible for their fellow Israelis to ignore. Opponents can throw none of the usual accusations. They know these men are not cowards: they have risked death before and their current stance exposes them to the prospect of at least a month in jail. Three are already behind bars. Even their critics have to concede that these men are motivated by love of country. If they merely wanted to avoid the personal agony of a West Bank tour, they could fly abroad or develop a convenient health problem - both familiar techniques. Instead they are taking a stand in public and on principle. Lest anyone accuse them of providing succour to the country's enemies, they refuse to give on-the-record interviews to the foreign media: it is Israel they want to persuade. And so Israel has to listen. The refuseniks tell their personal stories, explaining why they can no longer serve in an occupation force, and no one can wave aside their testimony as anti-Israel propaganda. Uri Dotan of the Nahal Infantry Brigade wonders if his personal breaking point was "the pregnant woman that my soldier did not let through the roadblock in Hebron because her stomach was not big enough. She later gave birth to a stillborn child in the crooked paths she followed in order to skirt the checkpoint on her way to hospital". N oam Ziv, a paratrooper, tells of one night when he was sent in to Nablus to arrest a terror suspect. The man had a four-year-old boy at home and, realising they could not leave the child alone, the soldiers took the boy along with his father. But "because the orders are to cover suspects' heads with sacks, at dawn I found a four-year-old boy sitting in the detainees' shack next to his handcuffed father, both of them with sacks on their heads. They didn't hesitate to put a sack over the head of a four-year-old". No one can close their ears to this testimony, crying media bias or anti-semitism. These are Israel's soldiers speaking, in their own words. And so the refusal movement has had a seismic impact on Israeli society. It has dominated the comment pages and the phone-in shows. High-level backing has come from writers, politicians and retired military brass. Israel's former attorney-general, Michael Ben Yair, says: "History's verdict will be that their refusal was the act that restored our moral backbone." Perhaps the greatest compli ment has come from Ariel Sharon: he blamed the latest wave of terror on the refuseniks, suggesting they have got even the warrior PM rattled. I admit, I initially had my doubts. My first thought was that, one day (soon, I hope) a progressive Israeli government will order the army to withdraw from the occupied territories and to evacuate, by force if necessary, the Jewish settlements on those lands. That will be a great test, as the Israeli state turns on thousands of its own citizens. My fear was that the current resistance would set a precedent - allowing rightwing reservists to defy the orders of a future, peace-making PM. I have been won over - by the desperation of the times, by the enormous moral impact this protest is already having, and by the sheer immorality of the occupation. In a democracy, the elected government has every right to demand the obedience of its army. That rule still applies, and should, where Israel remains vibrantly democratic- inside the pre-1967 borders. But in the West Bank and Gaza no democracy has applied for 35 years; to demand citizens enforce a military occupation in the name of democracy is a logical absurdity. So now I regard these men not as traitors, as their enemies allege, but as exponents of the very best in Jewish and Zionist tradition. Their protest is an act of great bravery, and they - every last one of them - are nothing less than heroes. You can make donations to the refuseniks by via Bank Hapoalim. Branch: Pinkas, Tel Aviv. Branch number: 754. Account No. 105377. Name of account holder: Ometz Le-sarev. www.seruv.org.il j.freedland@guardian.co.uk Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited ------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------ Courtesy of: The Law Office of Jose Pertierra 1010 Vermont Avenue, NW #620 Washington, DC 20005 202 783 6666 JosePertierra@aol.com ------------------------------------------------ Do You Yahoo!? Try FREE Yahoo! Mail - the world's greatest free email! From miyachi9 at gctv.ne.jp Thu Mar 7 01:06:47 2002 From: miyachi9 at gctv.ne.jp (miychi) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] About existing " socialist cuntires In-Reply-To: <66.1d08085e.29b5c2bf@aol.com> Message-ID: Comrade There are many debate about market socialism, economic characater of cuba,evaluation of Roemer,etc. We(BUND a faction of new left)already defined current world as " Transitional world which included to define existing "socialist,or communist contry as transitional contry toward socialism,and capitalist contries as credit capitalcountiries which become to contradict itself toward association society, so, our definition was not to recognize any socialist countries existed. Below is published inj 1978 in order to summerize critique of USSR& China party. It can go under current situaiton MIYACHI TATSUO Psychiatric Department KOMAKI MUNICIPAL HOSPITAL JOHBUSHI,1-20 KOMAKI CITY AICHI Pre JAPAN 0568-76-4131 miyachi9@gctv.ne.jp study of the criticism against the $B!H(J gang of the Four$B!I(J by the Chinese Commmunist Party A; criticism by Wu Lien The china-Soviet dispute can be traced back to the 20th convention pf the CPSU in 1956,but it did not become public untill 1963. The CCP formed a different view on distribution acording to labor from tha of the CPSU in the rocess of faction struggle with the CPSU about their termination of socialistic reform by enlargement of pepole$B!G(Js communes. This unique view has much to do with the problem whether there are classes and class struggle, whether there is a need for proletarian dictorship in a socialist society, and particularly in China whether socialism is a reality in present Soviet or Chinese society. Wu Lien$B!G(Js artic;e which was published inj 1960 in $B!H(J the study of economics; no.5$B!I(J defines socialist society as a transitional society from the view-point that in a scoalist society there are classes, $B!H(Jtwo roads$B!I(J, and a need for the power of tge proletarian dictorship. Wu Lien argue thqat the whole process of transformation from a capitalist society to a higher stage of communist society is the transitional period and, therefore, so is the socialist society which is the first stage of communism,(Wu Lien does not emphasize the necessity of the proletariat dictorship. The CCP came to emphasize its necessity after the CPSU declared the dissolution of the proletarian dictorship and the establishment of $B!H(J the whole people$B!G(Js state$B!I(J at the 22nd Congress of the CPSU in October, 961), Wu Lien$B!G(Js argument confronted the revisionist nature of Khrushchev$B!G(Js policy in the 20th Congress of the CPSU where the general move from a socialist society to a higher state of communism was discussed, and it became a weapon of criticism against the dissolution of the proletarian dictorship at the 22nd Congress. Wu Lien$B!G(Js understanding on distribution accroding to labor is, however, based on a subjective interpretation of $B!H(J the birth-marks of the old scoety$B!I(J and $B!H(J bourgeois right$B!I(J described in $B!H(J Critique of the Gotha Programme$B!I(J. The criticism by the CCP in the China-Soviet is politically correct, but some subjective interpretation in it should be corrected. In $B!H(JCritique of the Gotha Programme$B!I(J, Marx$B!G(Js description of socialist society states that it is $B!H(J......still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges " Wo Lien in turn, depicts "the birth-marks ofn the old scociety" as follows. $B!X(J This remnant of the old society appears in every aspect of the socialisy production relationship. First, in the field of possession of production means ,althoguh economic ownership by all the people has done away with bourgeois right in ralation to production means,due to the influence of the socialist material interest principle , there is an incentive wage system in national coroporations, in which a small portion of the profits is used fro the welfare of a group of employee ot individulals, and here a bourgoies right is retained. At th same tome ,ata certaion stage of socialism i.e. at an unddeceloped stage, there are two types of joint ownership-economic ownership by all th4 people and socialist collective owbership. Socialist collective ownersgip is what negates private ownership, and there production means are basically public-owned and no exploitation is allowed..... Collective ownership is ,however , a transitional forms of economy from private possession to economic ownership by all the people, and when compared to economic ownership by all the people , it has quite a few remnents and traces of private ownership. This is because members of a commune still have their own holdings of land and their tools-avocations. Collecitive economy itself still has traces of private ownership. That is, in collective ownership common property is still low and its scope is limited. Here again a bourgoris right has been retained. Secondaly, in human relationships n the process of labor, there is basically no antagonism between people, but it is impossible to sweep away all the influences of the old customs, to establish communistic equal relationships ovetnight, and there is also a diffrence between industry and agriculture, between a city and a framing village, between manual labor and brain labor. Due to this diffrenece, whereas socialist distribution has become common distirubution under collective production, distribution of personal comsumer goods is still based on the scale of quantity of labor given by each worker, and still embodies the principle of equivalent exchange; here again a bourgoeis tight is retained.$B!Y(J As quoted above, Wu Lien cites three exapmles of " the birth-marks of the old society" in socialist society and calls them " bourgeis rights". The first one is the incentive wage system in national corporations distributing their profits. The secomd one is holdings of land or lack of common property in the collective ownership economy. The third one is distribution according labor. The first and second ones are no other than traces of the old society present in today's China, but distirubution according to labor defined by marx has not yet been realized either in the USSR or Chin. Hence, to regard these three indiscirimately as traces of bourgeois right is cunfusing., The confusuin is based on the fact that Wu Lien grasp the present Chinese society as that of the first stage of vommunism. As a result, traces of the old society in today's China are understood as " the birth-marks of the old society" in the socialist society as the as the first stage of communism, and, in the field of distribution, what is in practice a wage system is difined as distribution according to labor. This confusion lead Wu Lien to come to state as follows; $B!X(J As we undserstand, the bourgoeis right is in its fulll sense private ownership, that is, ownership pf vommodities.$B!Y(J In his "Critique of the Gotha Programme, describing distribution in the first stage of of comminism, Marx points out, " In the cooperative society based on common ownership of the means of production, a pruducer does not exchage his product" Accrodingly, it is evident that the socialist society in Marx's mind is not a society like today's USSR ot China where the exchange of commodities still exists. Distribution accroding to labor in a society where commodity exchange is extinct is defined as " a bourgeois right in principle"(ibd,) because " when personal consumption means are distributed amonf individual producers, the ruling principle is the same as that of exchange of equivalent value-one from of labor is exchanged for another form of labor of the same value,"(ibid) In short, didtribution according to labor is ruled by the same law that rules the exchange of commodities, and a right in this distribution is "accompanied by a bourgoeis limiation," This is why Marx called it " the birth-marks of the old society" and a " bourgoeis right" Distirubition accroding to labor is , therefore, comletely different from the wage system in the USSR ot China under which a worker is ranked acccording to the quantity of his labor and by the money he receives with which he purchases from the state materials for consumption as commodities. As Wu Lien grasped the wage systems of China as distribution accroding to labor, he took bouegoeis right for ownership of commodities, and by so doing, he took Marx's " the birth-marks of the old society" for remnants of the old society of China , exchange of commodities and profits. Distribution according to labor was also taken for a remnant of the old society in China. $B!X(J Distiribution in a socialsit society is , on the one hand, common distribution under communist collective production. Each worker must work for the society according his ability; and all the products belongs to the worker as a whole, are distrubited collectively and systematically. A part of ther products( sueplus pruducts) is distributed accroding to the needs of the society. All thse poits i sovialist distribution are communist elements. On the other hand, considering the fact consumer goods are distributed by the measure of labor, the principle of equivalent exchange still persists, and it is not a characteristic of socialism but a trace of bourgeois right.$B!Y(J The above is Wu Lien's staemnet concerning bourgeois right. He undetstands that, in socialsit distribution, collective and systematic distribution, and distribution according to the needs of the sociey are communist elements, but that distribution of oersonal consumption materials according to labor, and call the former communist. BUt his theory perverts the meaning " accroding to needs " in a higher stage of communist society. It is not what co-exists with distribution according to labor, but what is far beyond it. Nevertheless, it must be seen that Wu lien's view reflects the distribution policy of the CCP in the transitional period. He describs the wage policy of China as follows; $B!X(JIn a wage system , the polivy is yo emphasize payment by the hour rather than a piece wage and to increase the welfare of the groups. Besides this, in farming villages distribution is done by the vombination of a wage system which is mainly a recompence according to labor and a rationing system which is distribution according to thr needs in embryo.. These systems have already in part broken the frame of bougeois right, and with the development of pruduction and the awakening of the people and the public, will break it up further.$B!Y(J Wu Lien regards the wage system as distribution to labor and the rationing system as that according tyo need in the present Chinese distribution system. And he suggests that to increase the latter is to break the bourgeois right. As was discussed beforem though the wage system in the transitiona period is essentially diffrent from wage slavery in a capitalisy society. it is based on the economic development stage where there exists commodity production and vairous kinds of labor forces can be produced by giving s worker a different amount of material for comsumption . Therefore, what part is by rationing and what part by wage is dicided by various conditions of production, and the Chinese rationing system is no longer than a part of wage system. Distribution according to labor will be realized in a future stage of economic developmet when the repoduction ability of various facets of the labor forve will decide the amount of consumer goods for each worker, and it will mean the extinction of the wage system. Even if there is a difference in the amount of consumer goos, it will not brought about by th economic need to ensure a variety in tje labor force. The reason Wu Lien reprsented the ruling opinion of the CCP is that in the transitional period the Chinese economy to a large extent was not modernized in the field of industry and agriculture, and it was a historical period when most of the producers were of about equal quality as the labor force. B Yao-yuan's point of view In "The Social Basis for Lin Piao's Anti-party Group"(Pekin weekly, no,11 1975), Yao Wen-yuan states " the exisistence of bourgeois right is an important economic basis for producing new bourgeois elements" and elabarates as follows; $B!X(JIn a socialist society, there still are two types of joint ownership-economic ownership by all the people and socialist collective ownership. Due to this, what we have is the commodity system. Both the analyses of Lenin and Chairman Mao tell us tjat bourgeois rights which inevitably exists in the fields of distribution and exchage must be restricted under the prolrtarian dictorship, and that ny so doing we must reduce the three main diffrences and class differences, and must endeavor to create material and spiritual conditions for tjem in the long process of the socialist revolution.$B!Y(J Yao Wen-yuan regards the remnants of the old society in socialism as the "commodity system" and it follows that bourgeois rights in the field of ditribution and exchange is an inevitable result of existing " commodity system". He shares the idea with Wu Lien that ther remnant of the old society in present China are bourgeois rights, but he takes a more radical view about restricting them. This radical view is the result of the China-Soviet dispute. While the CPSU maintain at the 22nd Congress that the Soviet Union had established the first stage of communism and there was no longer a need for the prolertarian dictorship, and that it has become the whole people's state, the CCP argued that the proletarian dictorship needed to exist in the whole process from a capitalist sovieity to a higher stage of communist society and that there is class struggle between bourgeois and proletariat in a socialist society. The CCP tightly exposed Khrushchev's revisionism by manintaining that " every socialist country should hold fast to the proletarian dictorship"( The dispute of General road in the International Cummunist Movement). It did not ,however succeed sufficietly with a theoretical critisism og Khrushchev's revisionism. What the CCP sould have criticized is Khrushchv's claim that the USSR has realized socialim. The USSR has not yet established a socialist society, but still is in the transitional period from capitalism to ther first stage of socialism,.and there is , therefore, the need for proletarian dictorship. The CCP, however ,criticized Khrushvhev from the standpoint that the proletarian dictotship souid exist in socialism, and thus brought about confusion and revision in the communist theory of Marx-Leninism. The CCP, in claimimg the necessity of class struggles between the bourgeois and proletariat in a socialsit society, needed to clalify the ground for the the appearance of a bourgoies class in the production relationship of a socialist society which had been presented by Marx. And it found the ground in bourgeois rights-the birth-marks of th old society. Wu Lien thouht it was impossible to elimminate bourgoeis rights, and he expected that ny invreasing distribution according yo need, it would be possible to realize the transtion to a higher stage of communism. Yao-Wen-yuan, on the other hand, interpreted bourgoies right as elements and , therefore, they should be restricted. He describes th eappearnce of vourgeios element as follows; $B!X(J A minority controls goods and money through certain legal routes of distribution and through many illegal routes. This " material stimulation" will induce the capitalist to think of money making and prifrit earning, tje possibility pf converting public property to private ownership, speculation. corruption. theft, and bribery, The princple of caitalist commodity exchage will invade political life and intra-party life, and the planned economy of socialism will collapse. Capitalist exploitation by converting commodities and money into capital and making labor power commoditiesw will appear , and in departments and unites in which revisionism is practiced, the character of ownership will change and the state of suppressing and exploiting the working people will reapear. As the result, from among patry members, workers, rich farmers, and bureaucrats of governmental organization, will appear a few bourgeois elements and upstarts who will betray the proletarian class and working$B!Y(J people,(ibd) This phenomena is what is happening in present chinese society and is what is inevitable in the transitional period. The partty must fight against these bourgeiois elements with the proletarian dictorship. What Yao-Wen-yuan describes is this struggle, but he does not undetstand that this is normal in the transitional period from capitalism to the first stage of communism, and thus he takes it for class struggle against the bourgeios elements as the struggle against bourgeois rights which will exist in a future socialist socieity. Yao Wen-Yuan developed Wu Lien's theory, but they boyj still share a common misunderstanding. What they defined as distribution accroding to labor is in reality the wage system pf the transitional period. The wage system is inevitable in a proletarian dictorship state such as China where modernizaition of industry and agriculture is necessary, and the differences expressed in the system are determined by ecnomic neeed to obtain a variety in the labor force, It is incorrect to regard " materialistic interest" as a socialist element as Khrushchev did, but it is nesessary to from material pre-conditions to aid in developimg socialistic elements. As Yao-Wen-yuan did, tomregard the wage system as distribution accroding to labor and to ngate " materialistic interest" in the name of restrivting bourgeois right will negate the economic elements nesesary for formimg the material preconditions of the development of socialist elements, and will ,thus, be against the economic development of ht society in the transitional period. The Chinese theory of class sturggle played a definite role in criticizing Khrushchev's revsionism, but with its limited revision of Marx-Leninism, it failed to combine the economic development of socialist elements. This was expressed politically the dawonfal of the " Gang of the Four" B. The conversion in China 1. critisism of the " Gang of the Four" in compliance eith the " Four Modernization The new interpretation of distribution according to labor by the CCP was published in Pekin Weekly(no,7 and no.31.1978) In no.7, Li pang-lin interpterets bourgeois rights as stated by Marx in his " Critique of the Gotha Programme as follows; $B!X(J that it indicates only the exchange of equivalent labor is clear. In a capitalist society, evrything is commodity and exchange of commodity is ruled by the exchange of equinalent labor. In a socialist society, too, distribution of material for personal consumption is ruled by the same principle. Marx described it only from this point as bourgeois rights in principle.$B!Y(J In this interpretation, Li Pang-lin critisizes the claim by the " gang of the four" that " bourgeois right(i.e.. distribution according to labor) is the way to pruduce the bourgeois class" Yao Wen-yuan grasped bourgeois right not only in didtribution according to kabor, but also in the commodity system inj general, but Li-Oang-lin disregards this and concentrates on proving that bourgeois rights in distrib $B!!(Jution according tyo labor does not produce bourgeois elements. Li-Oang-lin maintains that bourgeois elements in a socialsit society are " not produced by distribution according to labot, but they appear through speculation, corruption, and theft or by speculation on collevtive ort or oersonal property through various illegal privileges" In oppsition yo the view that bourgeois elements are pruduced by saving a part of the wage and speculating with it as capital. LI objects by stating that" speculation with wages saved can not be blamed on the principle of distribution according to labor" He concludes that the " economic system od socialsm, distruibution according to labor,is not absolutely not the ground for the pruducing bourgeois elements" In an article in the Peking-Weekly(no.31), a reviewer of the People's Daily further develops Li-Pang- lin's view. He first states the influence of the " Gang of thr Four" as follows; $B!X(J They caused great confusion by falsely maintaining that distribution according to labor is theoretically " practice revisionism" and " to resurrect capitalism" Due to their accusation some of our comrades questioned whether it is necessary to practice distribution according to labor in the period of socialsm. Im the field of practice, the "Gang of the Four " tried to distube and destory the prectice of distribution according to labor. And they evene tried to negate all the efficiency wages and material incentives and also time wages.$B!Y(J It is very clear what the opposition around the distiribution according to labor was. It was whether to introduce efficiency wages and material incentives. The "Gang of the Four" were against them from the point of restricting bourgeois rights and the review's article defend them on the ground that bourgeois rights do not produce bourgeois elements. The reviewer's article gives a new interpretation yo the " Critique of the Gotha Programme" and criticizes the view od the " Gang og the Four". He gives a frank oplinion about the characteristics of the lower stages of a communist society and the acheivements of real Chinese society. He first confrims that " In the first stage pf a communist society in Marx's ideal, there will no longer be commodity production and exchange through money" and then critisize the " Gang of the Four" by stating that" nobody can say that there still exists a bourgeois class or capitalism in such a society" He describes the oresent development stage of Cinese society and the ground for the appearance of bourgeois elements in it as follows; $B!X(JOur oresent society, of course, has not reached the first stage of communism depicted by Marc. This is due to to the fact that we still have commodity production and exchange throutgh money in our society, and also there are classes and class struggle,and newly born bourgeois and capitalist elements, But this fact does not strengthen the logic of the " Gang of the Four". This is because, first, though out present society has not reached the first stage of communism,. this fact does not imply that the socialist principle of distribution according to labor is capitalistic. Secondly, in our present society there exists newly-born bourgoeois elements and capitalistic factors, but they do not appear from socialistic pruduction relationship,nor from the socialistic princple of distribution according to labor, Thet have emerged from the destruction of th socialistic production and distribution accordinf to labor(ibd) $B!Y(J The reviewer's articlehas drastically changed ther Chinese socialist theory which had been consistent since Wu Lien's article. CCP's socialist theory since Wu Lien has been to difene real Chinese society as that of socialismn, to regard the remnants of old society there as the bouegois rights described in the "Critique of the Gotha Programme" and, by so doing, tyo justify the existence of bouegeois rights aned clasds sturuggle in a socialist society. Acccoridngly, Marx's assupmtion that a socialist society has no commodity production or class has been negated. The reviewer's article,however,accepts Marx's assumption and admits that chinese society has not regarded this level i.e. socialist society. Theoretically, The CCP'S thoery of socialism since Wu Lien's is wrong and the reviewer's article is correct. But the latter neglects the fact that the former had benn formed through the sturggle against Khrushchev's revisionism and had played the part of a weapon in ther factional struggle against revisonism, and , therefore, it can not rightly summarize previous theorie of socialism. As a result, the reviewr's article is not different from the revisionist thoery. On the top of that, there is a decisively important confusing point in the article. If the reviewer admits that in Marx's assumtion that commdity production and classes are extinct in a socialist society and that Chinese society has not reached that development stage yet, it is a contradiction to claim that distrubution according to labor is practiced in present Chinese society which Marx applied to the production relationship in the first stage of communism. If he tried to stand completely on Marx'S theory, he should state that distribution accroding to labor has not been realiazed in China and sitll is a goal to attain. And this ambiguity is the reason for its unconvincing criticism of the " Gang pf the Four" and its vague difference from revisionism. If the reviewer states that distribution accoring to labor has bee realized in China and deducts " materalistic interest" from this distribuition principle, it is the same as Khrushchev's revisionism. In present China, it is necessary to organiaze " materialistic interst" anf to maintain certain wage differences. But this necessity does not come from distrubution according to labor. It is necessqary to realize, in the transitional period, that modermizaition of industry and agriculture is needed for the development toward a socialist society. The necessity to organize " materialistic interest" is determined by economic need for modernizaiton and for the increase of labor producctivity. It depend on the CCP's plolicy whether this modernizaition and the increase of labor productivity willbe utilized for the development of socialistic elements. If it deduces this economic nedd from the principle of distrubution according to labor and claims it to be a socialistic element, the CCP,like the XPSU,can not develop socialistic ekements through modernizaition and increase of labor activity. C.criticism of tevisionism in the new policy As marx states" at all times, distribution of consumer goods is merely trhe resultof division of production conditions rhemselves"( Critique of the Gotha Programme). Accrodingly, it is incorrect to organize the communist movement by means of the distribution problem. When we evaluate the societies of Russsia and China today, however, the analysis of distribution of consumer goods is useful in that it throws light on the reality of division of production conditions. In these state-owned economies, what determines the character of a socieity is the relationhsip betweeen the state which owns the production means and the immediate producer, and this relationhsip and the policies of the party regulates each other. The party which leads the class sturggle in the transitional period need to recognize accurately the economic laws of the state-owned economy of the transitional period and the practice of the party and of the proletariat. This task is fulfilled when it bases itself on Marx-Leninism and summarises the prectice of the party and the proletariat correcyly. Stalin looked on nationalizaition of produciton means in industry and ther formation of collective ownership in agriculture as completion of socialist reformation in ownership, and prescribed that the USSR had reached the first stage of communism. Due to this definition, he was forced to come up with a new theory that allowed commodity production and value law in a socialist society, and thus he revised the Marx's view of communist society. Stalin's revision was enlarged further by Khrushchev, and it became a tool to claim that bourgeois elements in USSR society were commmunistic elements. We have endevoured to expose Stalin's and Khrusgchev's revisonism on distribution according to labor by claryfying the change of the CPSU's dfefinition about the wage system in the USSR. This revisionism turns black into wite inj every field of USSR society, by giving the name " all the people's state" to the bourgeois character of the USSR state which oppress the proletariat and ethnic groups, and beutifies the economic slavery of the pruducers who are alienated from co-ownership of the state-owned production means through the deteriration of the party and the state as " socialistic possession" The CCP criticized Khrushcheve's revisionisim and claimed that there still would be remnants of the old society after socialistic reform of ownership and that there would be class struggle between bourgeois and proletariat in a socialist society and therefore there was a need for thr dictorship of the proletarian. This claim was further developed in thr process of the Great Cutltural Revolution as a criticisim against Liu Shao-Chi plolicy.; we can't attain complete victory of socialism only by socialist reformation of production means ownership.,but we must struggle against bourgeios remnants in human relationships and in the field of distribution. However. state ownership and collective ownership of production means is the starting point of socialist ownership, and not the completion ofn it. The CCP rightly insisted on the struggle against bourgeois remnants in human relationships and in the field of disdtribution, but it coud not accept the limits of Stalin'S doctrine which regarded state-and-collective ownership as the completion of socialist ownership. When the " Gang og the Four" criticized the " Four modernizaiton and insisted on the " restricttion of bourgeois rights", that is in reality, impartialism, thet based it on the view that socialistic reformation in human relationships and in the field of distribution.. The CCP has advocated the " Four modernizaition" after the downfall of the " Gang of the Four", but cannnot tightly criticize their errors and thus tends to be revisionistic. In order to develop socialistic elements through the " Four Nodernization",the CCP needs to criticize Stalin's doctrine of socialism, and must ovetcome its own limitations that criticism against Khrushchec by the CCP, especially Mao Tse-tong,has been based on Stalin's doctrine. Natioanlizaition and collective ownership does not mean the completion of socialistic reform of ownership. Socialistic ownership is nothing else than common ownership pf producers, and state and collective ownership is what must be further reformed toward this. In China, the " Four Modernizaitions " and the development of production power based on them is the premise of htis further reformation. The " Gang of the Four" could not grasp correctly the role of production power, because they clung to to the dogma that the reform of ownership had been completed, and by doing so they confined productionpower within the frame of the state and collective ownership. In order to reform this ownership in the direction of common ownership of producers, there must be the material premise of the " Four Modernizaition" and the development of production power, and there needs to be communist policies of the party. After the downfall of the " Gang of the Four", the economic development stage of China made it necessary for the CCP to adopt " material interest" in order to realize the "Four Modernizaition". But it is revisonism to derive this " material interest" from the socialist principle of disdtribution according to labor and to define it as a socialst element. This revisionism must be severely criticized. Whether the " Four Modernizaiton" lead sto the development of socialstic element or to the resurrection of capitalist element the CCP, to take the first step. must criticize Stalin's doctrine of socialism, recover that of Marxism and conquer the Stalinistic limitation of Maoism. From hunterbadbear at earthlink.net Thu Mar 7 09:38:47 2002 From: hunterbadbear at earthlink.net (Hunter Gray) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Robeson / Mine-Mill / Peace Arch Commemoration -- Excellent CD Message-ID: <000901c1c5f6$8ff4db20$82a90e3f@ibm22761429477> Note by Hunterbear: Although I've mentioned this earlier, this signal event is well worth reiterating broadly and generally -- and especially for people in the Pacific Northwest. Although not indicated in this release, the May 18 1952 Peace Arch Concert was followed by another successful Robeson Peace Arch concert/demonstration -- August 16 1953. Paul Robeson's very fine songs and words from each of those Peace Arch concerts -- as well as solid comment from Harvey Murphy, a major Canadian Mine-Mill leader -- are all readily available on a recent CD: "Paul Robeson: The Peace Arch Concerts." It's quickly secured via conventional commercial sources and from its producer, Folk Era Records. Their website is http://www.folkera.com We secured several as soon as they appeared. giving some away to friends. Our experience with the CD -- and all feedback from friends -- has been extremely positive. [Among the many songs are two classic renditions of "Joe Hill." ] Hunterbear ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------Paul Robeson Centennial Celebration Robeson Peace Arch Concert Anniversary On May 18, 1952 Paul Robeson stood on the back of a flat bed truck and sang songs of defiance and solidarity to 40,000 people on the US-Canadian border. Fifty years later, on May 18, 2002, that event will be commemorated with another concert on the border. The 1952 Concert The venue was an odd one for one of the great artists of the 20th century, and the sponsor, the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers equally curious, or maybe not. "Mine Mill", as it was known, had been founded in a jail cell in Idaho in 1893. It was a union that represented some of the most militant North American workers, the hard rock miners, whose battles with the mine owners were legendary. Paul Robeson, whose own uncompromising militancy in the face of oppression and injustice was equally well known, had been invited to sing at the Fourth Canadian Convention of the union in Vancouver in February of 1952. The American authorities, however, had seized Robeson's passport, and he was denied permission to leave his country. The convention heard Robeson sing over the telephone and promised to organize a concert on the US-Canadian border, and indeed they did. Accompanied by Lawrence Brown on piano, Robeson sang and spoke for 45 minutes. He introduced his first song stating "I stand here today under great stress because I dare, as do you -- all of you, to fight for peace and for a decent life for all men, women and children". He proceeded to sing spirituals, folk songs, labour songs, and a passionate version of Old Man River, written for him in the 20's, slowly enunciating "show a little grit and you land in jail", underlining the fact that his government had turned the entire country into a prison for Robeson and many others. It was a magnificent performance and a triumph for a movement facing the scourge of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. The Korean War was at its height, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were under sentence of death, and it seemed the social and political gains of the previous generation were being eroded by a right-wing offensive. The Peace Arch Concert was a rare victory, a massive solidarity, and a demonstration that the dream of a different world was still alive. The concert was recorded and issued as a record by the union. It now is available as a CD. The 2002 Anniversary Celebration To commemorate that event, and to show that what Robeson fought for is still worth fighting for, a committee has been formed in Vancouver to organize a concert exactly 50 years after the Robeson concert. The members of the committee are cultural and social activists and trade unionists; the same kind of folks who put together the 1952 concert. The piano Robeson played, lovingly kept all these years, will once again adorn a flat bed truck for a stage. Artists who live, work and sing for the things that Robeson represented, "peace and a decent life for all men, women, and children", will sing from that truck. Groups supporting a wide array of struggles will be invited to participate in an information fair, giving the event a practical turn. The committee will do everything in its power to draw the largest crowd possible and to show that the dream that inspired Robeson still lives in the hearts and minds of many thousands. Some of the issues we face would be familiar to Robeson solidarity in the face of war, racism, and oppression; others have new names such as globalization, or neo-liberalism, but the struggle is the same. We are asking individuals and organizations that share the beliefs that Paul Robeson represented, who cherish the memory of an uncompromising artist, and who believe in bringing together thousands of people to publicly celebrate those beliefs and that artist, to give as generously as they can. Stand with us! For more information on the Robeson anniversary concert plans, contact Seth Klein, Director of the BC Office, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, tel. 604-801-5121. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- >From People's Voice Hunter Gray [ Hunterbear ] www.hunterbear.org ( social justice ) From mstainsby at tao.ca Thu Mar 7 12:01:51 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Robeson / Mine-Mill / Peace Arch Commemoration -- Excellent CD References: <000901c1c5f6$8ff4db20$82a90e3f@ibm22761429477> Message-ID: <004c01c1c60a$8a73c4e0$76195218@vc.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Hunter Gray" > Paul Robeson's very fine songs and words from each of those Peace Arch > concerts -- as well as solid comment from Harvey Murphy, a major Canadian > Mine-Mill leader -- are all readily available on a recent CD: "Paul > Robeson: The Peace Arch Concerts" I secured this CD a couple of years back and it was the main reason I understood the giant of Robeson. He speaks in the last track of the CD for 123 minutes, laying down the reasons for his unwillingness to back down from McCarthyist witchhunts, his desire to stay a true friend of the Rhondda Valley (my ancestral home, along with Mark Jones) and his determination to never waver. I have siad this before, but as the witchhunts thicken from day to day, it is of immediate need for activists of my generation (I am 26 years old) to familiarise themselves with the man in Paul Robeson. His dignity in defiance of the butchers is an inspiration for those of us who, in the next few years, will face a military tribunal or some such thing if our work is successful. The CD Hunter speaks of is wonderful, Robeson even sings the Chinese National Anthem - partly in Chinese. Macdonald From mstainsby at tao.ca Thu Mar 7 12:42:20 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Re: Robeson / Mine-Mill / Peace Arch Commemoration -- Excellent CD References: <000901c1c5f6$8ff4db20$82a90e3f@ibm22761429477> <004c01c1c60a$8a73c4e0$76195218@vc.shawcable.net> Message-ID: <00c001c1c610$32752940$76195218@vc.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Macdonald Stainsby" Commemoration -- Excellent CD >>He speaks in the last track of the CD for 123 minutes, That should read 12 minutes. Coffee makes for fun errors. Macdonald From wmmmandel at earthlink.net Thu Mar 7 12:55:34 2002 From: wmmmandel at earthlink.net (William Mandel) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [Redbadbear] Re: [R-G] Robeson / Mine-Mill / Peace Arch Commemoration -- ExcellentCD References: <000901c1c5f6$8ff4db20$82a90e3f@ibm22761429477> <004c01c1c60a$8a73c4e0$76195218@vc.shawcable.net> Message-ID: <3C87C5B6.E598B5E4@earthlink.net> You'll find a lot of Robeson in my autobiography, described in the signature tag below. I was in the bodyguard at the 1949 Peekskill Riot against him, where we literally stopped fascism for that period of history. The next year I broke the blacklist against him by convincing the party running me for Congress to change our closing rally to a paid Robeson concert. My father said in later years that I cried in introducing Robeson. I remember best that glorious smile at the end, backstage, when he extended his hand and said: "Thanks, Bill." In the following presidential election we traveled together to a rally/concert in the adjacent state, in a car with four Harlem hoods who had offered him unconditional protection. With them, he, a master of our language and others, spoke Black English. Incidentally, I still have his record of Chinese songs on a 78 rpm platter. William Mandel Macdonald Stainsby wrote: > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Hunter Gray" > I have said > this before, but as the witchhunts thicken from day to day, it is of immediate > need for activists of my generation (I am 26 years old) to familiarise > themselves with the man in Paul Robeson. His dignity in defiance of the butchers > is an inspiration for those of us who, in the next few years, will face a > military tribunal or some such thing if our work is successful. > > The CD Hunter speaks of is wonderful, Robeson even sings the Chinese National > Anthem - partly in Chinese. > > Macdonald ======================================================== My autobiography, SAYING NO TO POWER (Creative Arts, Berkeley, 1999), was written for the general reader. However, if you teach in the social sciences consider it for student reading. It is a history of how the American people fought to defend and expand its rights in my lifetime, employing the form of the life story of one who was involved in most serious movements: labor, student, peace with the USSR, civil rights South and North, civil liberties (I seriously damaged the Senate Internal Security Committee, the McCarthy Committee, and the House Un-American Activities Committee with spectacular testimonies that may be heard/seen on my website, http://www.billmandel.net ), the RADIO OF DISSENT (37 YEARS ON PACIFICA), with very extensive information on its history) and the feminist movement, although I am male. The book contains some fifty pages on my late wife, Tanya, appearing appropriately throughout the book. They may be found in the index under Mandel, Tanya. My activities began in 1927. I am 84. The book is available through all normal sources. If you want an autographed copy, send me $23 at 4466 View Pl., Apt. 106, Oakland, CA. 94611 ======================================================== From Malky53 at aol.com Thu Mar 7 13:24:54 2002 From: Malky53 at aol.com (Malky53@aol.com) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Can the war turn out badly for U.S. forces in Afghanistan? G&M Message-ID: <102.11a7bd84.29b92696@aol.com> In a message dated 07-03-02 03:06:33, mstainsby@tao.ca writes: << The number must be very significant for the media to allow the Americans to speak of Taliban now. >> I have seen reports that put US and allied deaths at 160 THIS WEEK !! with perhaps 2-3 times that among their opponents. Chinooks are at their limit if not beyond it at that altitude. Moreover there are serious doubts about the navigational software on chinooks in adverse weather and near mountains. The UK House of Lords has just blamed the Chinook and not the pilots for a crash 10-12 years ago that all but wiped out the British Inteligence (I know what oxymoron is) community in the north of Ireland. To quote one famous imperialist This may not be the end or even the beginning of the end but perhaps it is the end of the beginning. Perhaps it is the Afghan equivalent of the Tet offensive From tomcondit at igc.org Thu Mar 7 13:42:42 2002 From: tomcondit at igc.org (Tom Condit) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Re: Left Solidarity [was the "12 step program for recovering fundamentalists"] In-Reply-To: <66.1d08085e.29b5c2bf@aol.com> Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.0.20020307124212.00a10d90@pop.igc.org> A friend of mine in AA always maintained that her "higher power" was Leon Trotsky. That said, it seems peculiar to North America that the model in dealing with alcohol, drugs, sex, etc., is that your choice is between abuse and abstinence (and it's an *individual* choice, abstracted from family, community and society). Everywhere else, they say "Don't drink so much." From tomcondit at igc.org Thu Mar 7 13:46:06 2002 From: tomcondit at igc.org (Tom Condit) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Can the war turn out badly for U.S. forces in Afghanistan? G&M In-Reply-To: <005701c1c57c$32cb85e0$76195218@vc.shawcable.net> References: <81.18928a24.29b7bb19@aol.com> Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.0.20020307124316.00a0ed90@pop.igc.org> The war can, of course, go badly for U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Still, the Taliban has far less popular support and far fewer allies on the ground than either the Communist-led forces or the Mujaheddin had during the long civil war. In their brief period in power, they managed to make a lot of enemies, and not gain very many friends. I think the left has to give up fantasizing about how someone else, somewhere else, is going to beat imperialism. Either we build a movement "in the belly of the beast" which can overthrow capitalism, or the world is doomed. As Rosa Luxemburg put it, "Where the chains of capitalism are forged, there and there alone can they be smashed." Tom From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Mar 7 16:55:00 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Israel's Army of Peace - The Guardian Message-ID: <200203072355.g27Nt0E10485@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> The Guardian March 6, 2002 Israel's Army of Peace Battle-scarred reservists are refusing to serve in the occupied territories. They are nothing less than heroes By Jonathan Freedland Even the most stoic of Israelis are beginning to feel scared. The sight of a single family - father, mother and two daughters, one aged seven, the other a toddler - wiped out on a busy Jerusalem street has shocked those who thought they could be shocked no more. Even the Israelis who live in a kind of internal exile - avoiding the news, listening only to music stations on the radio, steering clear of reality - were jolted by that Saturday bomb, aimed deliberately at a crowd of mothers, children and babies in pushchairs. And the attacks have not let up. Yesterday saw another killing spree: a restaurant shooting in Tel Aviv, a suicide bus bombing in Afula, a drive-by attack in the West Bank and a mortar raid on Sderot - not a settlement, but a town inside Israel-proper. At times like this, Israelis are not much in the mood for criticism. They feel desperate, the victims of a relentless war which makes targets of the most vulnerable: burger bars, buses and babies. So now is not an easy time for Israel to be told of the errors of its ways; the wounds are too raw. It helps that any critics can be dismissed so easily. If they are Palestinian or Arab, they are enemies of the state. If they are outsiders they are, at best, meddling know-nothings or, at worst, anti-semites implacably hostile both to Jews and their aspiration to have a place of their own. If they are Jews from outside Israel, they are "armchair" snipers, sounding off from the comfortable sidelines. The less charitable version says any Jewish critic of Israel is, simply, a self-hating Jew. But now there is a group who cannot be dismissed. They are not outsiders, do not sit in armchairs and hate no one, least of all themselves or their country. They are Israeli soldiers - battle-scarred combat veterans including a number of senior officers - engaged on perhaps their toughest ever mission. They are the "refuseniks", and their mission is peace. It began with a newspaper ad, signed by 50 army reservists, declaring that when they were called up for their annual month of military service they would refuse to serve in the occupied territories. In the month that has passed, the ranks of Ometz Le-Sarev have swelled. There are now 314 signatories to that original declaration, with 200 more refuseniks allied to a similar group: 500 recruits to Israel's army of peace. Thanks to the central place of Israel's conscript army in the nation's life, they ooze credibility. Not only have they all worn the country's uniform, but they are the men in their 20s and 30s the Israeli army regards as its new generation of commanders. Nor are they fringe lefties outside the Israeli consensus: more than 10 of the early refuseniks wear the crocheted skullcaps that serve as the badge of religious Zionism. All are avowed patriots, who insist they are happy to do their regular reserve duty but who refuse to act as occupiers on the West Bank or in Gaza. They adamantly believe in a Jewish state - they just want no part in ruling over another people. All that makes them impossible for their fellow Israelis to ignore. Opponents can throw none of the usual accusations. They know these men are not cowards: they have risked death before and their current stance exposes them to the prospect of at least a month in jail. Three are already behind bars. Even their critics have to concede that these men are motivated by love of country. If they merely wanted to avoid the personal agony of a West Bank tour, they could fly abroad or develop a convenient health problem - both familiar techniques. Instead they are taking a stand in public and on principle. Lest anyone accuse them of providing succour to the country's enemies, they refuse to give on-the-record interviews to the foreign media: it is Israel they want to persuade. And so Israel has to listen. The refuseniks tell their personal stories, explaining why they can no longer serve in an occupation force, and no one can wave aside their testimony as anti-Israel propaganda. Uri Dotan of the Nahal Infantry Brigade wonders if his personal breaking point was "the pregnant woman that my soldier did not let through the roadblock in Hebron because her stomach was not big enough. She later gave birth to a stillborn child in the crooked paths she followed in order to skirt the checkpoint on her way to hospital". Noam Ziv, a paratrooper, tells of one night when he was sent in to Nablus to arrest a terror suspect. The man had a four-year-old boy at home and, realizing they could not leave the child alone, the soldiers took the boy along with his father. But "because the orders are to cover suspects' heads with sacks, at dawn I found a four-year-old boy sitting in the detainees' shack next to his handcuffed father, both of them with sacks on their heads. They didn't hesitate to put a sack over the head of a four-year-old". No one can close their ears to this testimony, crying media bias or anti-Semitism. These are Israel's soldiers speaking, in their own words. And so the refusal movement has had a seismic impact on Israeli society. It has dominated the comment pages and the phone-in shows. High-level backing has come from writers, politicians and retired military brass. Israel's former attorney-general, Michael Ben Yair, says: "History's verdict will be that their refusal was the act that restored our moral backbone." Perhaps the greatest compliment has come from Ariel Sharon: he blamed the latest wave of terror on the refuseniks, suggesting they have got even the warrior PM rattled. I admit, I initially had my doubts. My first thought was that, one day (soon, I hope) a progressive Israeli government will order the army to withdraw from the occupied territories and to evacuate, by force if necessary, the Jewish settlements on those lands. That will be a great test, as the Israeli state turns on thousands of its own citizens. My fear was that the current resistance would set a precedent - allowing rightwing reservists to defy the orders of a future, peace-making PM. I have been won over - by the desperation of the times, by the enormous moral impact this protest is already having, and by the sheer immorality of the occupation. In a democracy, the elected government has every right to demand the obedience of its army. That rule still applies, and should, where Israel remains vibrantly democratic - inside the pre-1967 borders. But in the West Bank and Gaza no democracy has applied for 35 years; to demand citizens enforce a military occupation in the name of democracy is a logical absurdity. So now I regard these men not as traitors, as their enemies allege, but as exponents of the very best in Jewish and Zionist tradition. Their protest is an act of great bravery, and they - every last one of them - are nothing less than heroes. You can make donations to the refuseniks by via Bank Hapoalim. Branch: Pinkas, Tel Aviv. Branch number: 754. Account No. 105377. Name of account holder: Ometz Le-sarev. http://www.seruv.org.il/defaultEng.asp From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Mar 7 16:56:03 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Defiant Sharon ignores US rebuke - The Sydney Morning Herald Message-ID: <200203072356.g27Nu3E11450@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> The Sydney Morning Herald March 7, 2002 Defiant Sharon ignores US rebuke Gy Ross Dunn, Herald correspondent in Jerusalem and agencies Israel has rejected a rare rebuke from the United States, by using tanks and warplanes to launch new attacks on Palestinian targets. The Israeli offensive continued despite Washington Israel's staunchest ally directing some of its toughest criticism yet at the Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon. "If you declare war on the Palestinians and think you can solve the problem by seeing how many Palestinians can be killed I don't know that [that] leads us anywhere," the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, told a congressional hearing on Wednesday. "Prime Minister Sharon has to take a hard look at his policies to see whether they work," he said. But there was no let-up in the Israeli offensive, with dozens of tanks rolling into the Palestinian-ruled city of Tulkarm and air raids launched in the West Bank, just hours after an attack on the West Bank headquarters of the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat. Mr Arafat, who has been confined to Ramallah by Israeli forces for three months, was meeting the European Union Middle East envoy Miguel Angel Moratinos when a missile slammed into an adjacent building. No-one was hurt. Elite Israeli commando units took control of parts of Tulkarm and two nearby refugee camps, confining people to their homes, as they carried out house-to- house searches for terrorist suspects. At least two Palestinians were reported killed in one of the camps, while a third was shot dead by Israeli troops in a village south of the West Bank city of Jenin. Mr Sharon rejected Mr Powell's criticism, saying that the military operations were carried out in self-defence. "The Palestinian Authority and its leader [Mr Arafat] declared war on Israel, and those who have initiated the war also have the power to stop it," he said. Mr Sharon received the backing of his Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres, often a strong critic of the military strategy and who supports an immediate return to negotiations. Mr Peres said he objected to Mr Powell's remarks. Israel was "not fighting the Palestinian people", he said, only those bent on killing Israelis. On Monday Mr Sharon said that before peace talks with the Palestinians could resume, "they must first be hit hard ... so that they understand terrorism will achieve nothing". "Only after they are beaten will we be able to hold talks, and I want a peace deal," he said. Mr Powell had also spoken to Mr Sharon earlier in the week, saying Israel and the Palestinians were following policies that would lead to more violence. "It's a tragic situation," he said. "I am not satisfied that both sides have thought through the consequences of the policies they are following." The United Nations warned that the situation was spiralling out of control. The UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, called on Mr Arafat and Mr Sharon to halt the fighting and begin talking. "History will judge them harshly. And their people will not absolve them if they fail to do so." The carnage and the hostile rhetoric between the two sides appalled him, he said. "The situation has clearly got completely out of hand, and the risks are great." From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Mar 7 16:57:21 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] On the trail of the anthrax killer - G&M Message-ID: <200203072357.g27NvLE12781@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> The Globe and Mail Wednesday, March 6, 2002 On the trail of the anthrax killer Letter to FBI falsely accusing scientist a possible clue pointing to U.S. Army lab By Paul Koring Washington -- Somebody hated Ayaad Assaad, hated the Egyptian-born scientist enough to try to finger him as a biowarfare terrorist. "Dr. Assaad is a potential bioterrorist," warned an anonymous letter sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation last fall. "I have worked with Dr. Assaad, and I heard him say that he has a vendetta against the U.S. government and that if anything happens to him, he told his sons to carry on." Until 1997, the scientist, a U.S. citizen with top-security clearance, had worked at Fort Detrick, Md. There, the U.S. Army conducted top-secret biological warfare research, including "weaponizing" anthrax of exactly the sort that killed five Americans and terrified the country after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The FBI received thousands of tips after anthrax-laced letters were sent to two prominent senators and several media outlets. What makes the letter about Dr. Assaad unusual is that it was sent on or about Sept. 25 -- before the first anthrax case was even diagnosed. On Oct. 3, Dr. Assaad, now a senior scientist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, sat in a windowless cell in downtown Washington being interrogated by FBI officials. Dr. Assaad, who says he and other Arab scientists were subjected to racial slurs and harassment while working at Fort Detrick, says he broke into tears when confronted with the letter. A day earlier, Robert Stevens, a 63-year-old photo editor with the tabloid Sun was admitted to a hospital in Boca Raton, Fla., with an unidentified illness that included chills, fever and nausea. He would die three days later, the first victim of inhalation anthrax. As the FBI closes in on the anthrax terrorist, now believed to be a scientist at Fort Detrick or one of a handful of civilian contractors who participated in the secret weaponized-anthrax efforts, the circle of suspects numbers only a handful. And the emerging scenario is not that of a botched biological-terrorist attack by al-Qaeda or other terrorists but rather a disgruntled scientist seeking to send a wake-up call to a government that had slashed biological-warfare research. Dr. Assaad, 53, believes the person who wrote the anonymous letter to the FBI and the person who sent the anthrax-laced envelopes, with messages praising Allah and denouncing Americans, are one and the same. "My theory is, whoever this person is knew in advance what was going to happen [and named me as a] scapegoat for this action," he said. "You do not need to be a Nobel laureate to put two and two together." The FBI has cleared Dr. Assaad of any involvement in the anthrax attacks. But it has refused to comment on whether it is investigating a link between the letter fingering him and the anthrax mailer. There were people at Fort Detrick who harboured an "intense dislike" of Dr. Assaad, the scientist's lawyer, Rosemary McDermott, said in an interview. After her client was dismissed in 1997, when cutbacks during the previous administration slashed funding, Dr. Assaad sued the government, alleging age discrimination. His suit, which is still pending, details a bizarre and vicious atmosphere in which he and other Arab scientists -- all U.S. citizens with top-security clearances -- were denigrated and ridiculed at Fort Detrick. Dr. Assaad believes the letter to the FBI "was a deliberate attempt to frame him," Ms. McDermott said. She said the letter was clearly written by a former colleague, who knew the details of Dr. Assaad's work and family and even the commuter train he took. What has emerged from the investigation so far is that the anthrax originated not in some Afghanistan cave or Iraqi laboratory, as first feared, but at Fort Detrick or one of a handful of other labs involved in U.S. biological warfare research. (Despite signing a treaty outlawing biological weapons, the Pentagon says its secret program was legal because the weapons-grade anthrax was made to test vaccines and countermeasures.) But FBI director Robert Mueller said last week that despite months of efforts, investigators have not pinpointed which lab may have been the source of the anthrax. "All indications are that the source of the anthrax is domestic," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said recently. He denied that a single suspect had emerged. Yet a leading U.S. expert on biological warfare believes the FBI has identified a prime suspect, and is concerned that no arrest has been made. "I think I know who it is," said Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a microbiologist at the State University of New York who also heads the Federation of American Scientists working group on bioweapons. In an interview, Dr. Rosenberg said she believes the FBI identified a prime suspect before she did. Dr. Rosenberg and dozens of other scientists were asked by the FBI to assist in narrowing the search by helping identify those who had the expertise, access and possible motive to mail anthrax to the two senators and several media outlets. In an interview, Dr. Rosenberg suggested the government might be dragging its feet because of fears that the perpetrator might reveal dark secrets about the extent of U.S. biological-warfare programs. Certainly, whoever mailed the anthrax knew enough about its enormous deadly potential to not deliver it in a way to maximize casualties. Even the small amounts contained in the letters could -- if dumped in Washington's subway system, for example -- have infected thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people. "All the indications are that the perpetrator was not trying to kill [large numbers]," Dr. Rosenberg said, adding she believes "there was a personal element in this." Which leaves the question of motive. Washington is swirling with theories, trying to make sense of the horrifying possibility that someone with access to U.S. weapons-grade anthrax played a high-stakes game that could have gone even more horribly wrong than it did. One theory is the anthrax mailer was trying to force the government to vastly increase spending on bioweapons, and chose his targets deliberately to gain maximum publicity. Another theory is that the anthrax mailing, occurring in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, would force Washington to attack Iraq, which is known to have an anthrax bioweapons program. This could explain the clumsy efforts to suggest Arabic or Muslim authorship of the anthrax-laden letters. The FBI's profile of the anthrax mailer, issued last fall, suggests the suspect was likely an insecure, non-confrontational, male who chose his victims carefully and knew the Trenton, N.J., area, from where the tainted letters were mailed. Key dates in crisis Sept. 18, 2001: Letters postmarked in Trenton, N.J., are sent to The New York Post and NBC anchor Tom Brokaw. They will later test positive for anthrax. Sept. 30: Bob Stevens, photo editor at the supermarket tabloid Sun in Boca Raton, Fla., feels ill. Oct. 4: First public announcement that Mr. Stevens has contracted anthrax. It is dismissed by U.S. Health Secretary Tommy Thompson as "an isolated case and it's not contagious," adding that there is no evidence of bioterrorism. Oct. 5: Mr. Stevens dies. Oct. 9: A letter postmarked in Trenton is sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. It later tests positive for anthrax. Oct. 12: Officials announce that Erin O'Connor, an aide to Mr. Brokaw, developed skin anthrax; she had noticed a lesion Sept. 28. Oct. 15: A letter containing anthrax is opened in Mr. Daschle's office. The office is quarantined. Oct. 16: Twelve Senate offices are closed; staffers tested. Oct. 17: About 30 people at the U.S. Capitol test positive for exposure to anthrax. House of Representatives closes for testing. New York Governor George Pataki's Manhattan office is evacuated after anthrax is detected. Oct. 19: Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge says anthrax bacteria strains in Florida, New York and Washington may have been from same batch. Oct. 20: Tests confirm anthrax traces found in mail-bundling machine at House office building near the Capitol. Oct. 21: Washington postal worker Thomas Morris dies of inhalation anthrax. Another postal worker, Joseph Curseen, goes to Maryland hospital complaining of flu-like symptoms and is sent home. Officials begin testing thousands of postal employees. Oct. 22: Mr. Curseen returns to hospital and dies of inhalation anthrax. House and Senate reopen. Oct. 23: Anthrax is found on machinery at military base that sorts mail for White House; all tests at White House come back negative. Oct. 24: U.S. Surgeon-General David Satcher admits "we were wrong" not to respond more aggressively to tainted mail. Oct. 25: Mr. Ridge says the anthrax in the Daschle letter was highly concentrated and made "to be more easily absorbed." Oct. 26: Supreme Court building ordered closed for testing. Oct. 28: A New York hospital worker, Kathy Nguyen, goes to hospital with symptoms of anthrax. Dies three days later. Nov. 1: Investigators establish the bacteria that killed Ms. Nguyen were virtually identical to germs found in letters to New York news outlets and Mr. Daschle. Nov. 21: Ottilie Lundgren, a 94-year-old retiree, dies of inhalation anthrax in Connecticut. Dec. 17: For first time, White House says it is "increasingly looking like" the anthrax bacteria had a domestic source, perhaps in a military lab. Feb. 25, 2002: Federal authorities subpoena documents and anthrax samples from U.S. scientific laboratories to narrow source through genetic analysis. AP From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Mar 7 16:58:04 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] UN critical of US action in Afghanistan - AP Message-ID: <200203072358.g27Nw4E13477@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> Associated Press Wednesday, March 6, 2002 UN critical of US action in Afghanistan BERLIN -- The United Nations' top human rights official charged Wednesday that the U.S. military action in Afghanistan has led to excessive civilian casualties. Mary Robinson, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, stressed to the Die Zeit newspaper in an interview that she is not soft on terrorism. But Robinson said the intervention in Afghanistan "was carried out in such a way that it could lead to disproportionate numbers of victims in the civilian population." "I can't accept that one causes `collateral damage' in villages and doesn't even ask about the number and names of the dead," she said, using the Pentagon expression for civilian deaths. Afghan and U.S. authorities have not given a number for how many Afghan civilians died in the war against terrorism after Sept. 11. Two Afghan groups are attempting a tally, and New York-based Human Rights Watch also plans a study. Robinson didn't refer to any specific incidents. The U.S. military has admitted to errors that killed Afghan civilians, but the Pentagon has stressed they were never deliberately targeted. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apeurope_story.asp?category=1103&slug =Germany%20Robinson From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Mar 7 16:58:51 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Afghan rivalries blamed for US military setback - FT Message-ID: <200203072358.g27NwpE14209@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> The Financial Times March 5, 2002 Afghan rivalries blamed for US military setback By Charles Clover in Gardez, Afghanistan, and FT.com staff Local political rivalries in Afghanistan's eastern Pakhtia province appear to have contributed to the initial defeat of the US-led attack on al-Qaeda forces on Saturday and the worst US casualties since the war started last October. Fighting continued on Wednesday in mountainous territory near Gardez, where US and Afghan forces are trying to force Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters from a network of mountain caves and bunkers. Militia commanders in Gardez and Kabul said the US may have made the mistake of relying on a few local commanders who, accidentally or deliberately, gave wrong estimates of enemy troop numbers and backed out on pledges to assist in the battle. Commander Abdul Mateen Hassankheil, whose soldiers are among the 1,500-strong Afghan contingent fighting in Shahi-kot, in mountains near Gardez, on Tuesday criticised the running of the operation. He said: "The US does not understand our local politics. It does not know whom to trust, and trusts the wrong people." The battle for Shahi-kot has cost at least eight American lives, including six on Monday, when a US helicopter was shot down. Commander Hassankheil said the beginning of the battle was badly planned because the US relied on intelligence from Padshah Khan, a powerful local commander ousted as governor of the province weeks ago after clashes with militias in Gardez. He said Mr Khan told the US the enemy at Shahi-kot was less numerous than was actually the case. Mr Khan had also told American commanders he was engaging the al-Qaeda units when his forces were nowhere near the area. He said the US led a force of Afghans up the mountain to attack al-Qaeda on Friday night, without proper air support, believing they would assist Mr Khan's forces. Instead they were ambushed on Saturday morning and forced to flee. Mr Khan had previously provided misleading information to the US, according to many people in Gardez, including the new Kabul-appointed governor Taj Mohammed. He said: "The US used to rely on Padshah Khan for information but I doubt they will any more." Many in Gardez believe that Mr Khan is using his US links to have his enemies removed, by implicating them as members of al-Qaeda. Mr Khan, reached by satellite telephone on Tuesday, denied that he had misled the US, and insists that everyone in Gardez making accusations against him were members of al-Qaeda. http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3LWYUAGYC&liv e=true&tagid=IXLB0PYY8CC From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Mar 7 18:11:51 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] This is the way the world ends - Al-Ahram Weekly Message-ID: <200203080111.g281BpE18769@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2002/576/op9.htm Al-Ahram Weekly 7 - 13 March 2002 Issue No.576 Reflections This is the way the world ends By Hani Shukrallah Is global capitalism in direr straits than anyone previously thought, or is it doing what it's doing simply because it can? War mongering, national hysteria, jingoism, rampant racism, assaults on civil liberties: historically they have always accompanied intractable systemic crises, are, indeed, the system's way of dealing with major threats, if not to its existence, then to the minimum requirements for its reproduction under fairly stable conditions. But where is the threat? What has become of the market-driven global village, the praises of which were being sung with such abandon barely a year before the 11 September attacks, during Kofi Annan's millennium extravaganza just a few blocks away from the ill-fated twin towers? The Soviet Union and its "evil empire" had collapsed, not by virtue of war or nuclear holocaust, but courtesy of an implosion so pathetic as to evoke revulsion, rather than sympathy, in the hearts of all but the blindest of its one time supporters. Well before, the "phantom of communism" had ceased haunting Europe (it was always a mere shadow of itself in North America), having stimulated as well as transmutated into social democracy's welfare state; ironically, the very hallmark of capitalism's "golden age." The Reagan/Thatcher era put the lid on the welfare state; trade unionism was all but destroyed; labour became New Labour; and social democrats, when in power, had no compunction about advocating and implementing the deregulation policies their conservative adversaries had already put in place. If anything, the fate of "the communist/socialist threat" in the Third World (which Mao had designated "the centre of world revolution") was even more ironic. Third World communism's greatest triumph, in Vietnam in 1975, was also its swan song. The dreaded "domino effect" was sunk in the marshes of Cambodia's killing fields, and barely a decade was to pass before the most populous "communist" country in the world was setting itself up as international capitalism's most promising growth market. The wave of Third World liberation movements, which had produced a host of populist/corporatist socialisms (producing also the Non-Aligned Movement, Afro-Asian Solidarity and a certain UN clout) were to be found, repentant and hat in hand, queuing up before the doors of the IMF, the World Bank and, of course, the White House. Once triumphant liberation movements (as in defunct Zaire) were making deals with multinational corporations even before they had finished "liberating" their capital cities. And an old "dependista" theorist such as Enrique Fernando Cardoso could become president in Brazil in order to push forward the free market and greater integration into the world economy while old Stalinists could return to power in this or that eastern European country to do pretty much the same thing. A single product is on offer for the whole world; only the size and the packaging vary. What's left? Al-Qa'eda, rogue states, the Muslim world and its alleged deeply-rooted cultural/civilisational antipathy to modernism? No world power in history has ever had to contend with such a sorry group of enemies. Admittedly, the scale of the 11 September attacks, by virtue of their shockingly graphic symbolism as much as the devastating toll in civilian casualties, sent Americans crying for vengeance. But what do we really have here? An organisation of a few hundred, or even a few thousand underground militants, long-nurtured by the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence service but now hounded by the intelligence services of the whole world, including such repentant "rogues" as Sudan's Al-Bashir and Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh. The Egyptian Jihad organisation, which seems to have provided the ideological and organisational backbone of Al-Qa'eda, was effectively crushed inside Egypt, thanks largely to an insouciant attitude towards due process and basic civil and human rights, i.e. the very same attitude that is being embraced today in defence of Western "democratic values." And what if a group of the world's least industrialised, most authoritarian, corrupt and inept regimes take up or reject modernism, whatever that means? The whole question is farcical; in particular, given that Islamic fundamentalism had for decades been fostered and supported by the "modernist" West as a bulwark against communism and secularist nationalism. A state that is spending $379 billion a year on its military is supposed to be afraid of war-and-sanctions devastated Iraq and/or any of the rest of the sundry group of states designated as "evil" by an intellectually-challenged American president and his warmongering aides? If anything, it is the absence of any real threat to world capitalism and the overpowering hegemony of its imperial centre that seems to provide the most distinctive feature of today's world in contrast to that of two decades ago. Yet undeniably there is anger, seething, unbearable, and growing in intensity as the avenues available for its expression shrink. Dominant systems are supposed to survive by virtue of more than mere coercion. There is supposed to be some sort of compact between the dominant and the dominated: rules of the game; a certain room for manoeuvre by the oppressed; a rationale by which they may, however grudgingly and rebelliously, accept their lot. Indeed, it is the disintegration of such compacts that, throughout history, has lent impetus to the transformation of the daily acts of resistance and subversion by the oppressed, turning them into revolutions. What we see today is naked power, unmitigated by compacts or any semblance of reason, shameless in the flaunting of its stupidity and sheer madness. But there are no revolutions, no real rebellions, only ever-growing, ever-futile anger. And, of course, such things as a fluke but devastating attack on the twin towers, a monstrous Eid-eve butchery of a journalist, Muslims killing Copts in an Egyptian village; Hindus massacring Muslims in Ahmadabad, Muslims massacring Hindus on a train -- the world of (very) late capitalism, aptly ruled over by Dubbya Bush. From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Mar 7 18:29:23 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Palestinian groups plan in secret to succeed Arafat - Washington Times Message-ID: <200203080129.g281TNE02275@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020307-6316170.htm The Washington Times 3/7/2002 Palestinian groups plan in secret to succeed Arafat By Andrew Borowiec NICOSIA, Cyprus - Radical Palestinian groups, fearful that Israel will succeed in its effort to undermine Palestinian Authority chief Yasser Arafat, have begun clandestine efforts to establish an alternative organization to replace him. Reports on the groups' efforts have appeared in the Saudi press and have been confirmed by Arab and European diplomats. An Arab source said the effort is still in the stage of "secret and serious consultation." Extremist Palestinian groups expected to participate in the attempt to depose Mr. Arafat are said to include Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Hamas and PFLP-General Command. The new organization would include members of Mr. Arafat's mainstream Fatah movement, according to the Saudi daily Al-Watan, which has reported on the scheme. The newspaper said the organizers are motivated by concern that the Palestinian Authority (PA) "is gradually collapsing" under Israeli pressure, and that the Jewish state may succeed in replacing it with "a Palestinian leadership subservient to it." Israel has used tanks and troops to keep Mr. Arafat confined to his office complex in the West Bank city of Ramallah since December. They pulled back only recently to allow him to leave his office. Authorities in Tel Aviv have said their purpose, at least in part, is to undermine Mr. Arafat and his organization in the hope that he will be replaced by someone more centrist. "The possibility of the complete collapse of the PA is high on the agenda of the Israeli officials," said Al-Watan. "Therefore, preparations must be made from now on for the next phase." Some diplomats believe the effort to create a new Palestinian body might disrupt an Arab League summit scheduled for Beirut at the end of this month. Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the 22-nation Arab League, has traveled to Syria, Libya and Saudi Arabia, apparently trying to muster a common strategy for a peace plan in the Middle East built around a proposal floated by Saudi Arabia. Introduced last month by Crown Prince Abdullah, Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler, the proposal suggested that Israel withdraw "from all occupied territories" in exchange for Arab recognition of the Jewish state and establishment of "normal" relations. The plan had been criticized by Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi and Syrian President Bashar Assad, but both, after considerable pressure, withdrew their opposition. Still, Arab diplomatic sources say the Saudi plan, based on the old and oft-pitched formula of "land for peace," has little chance of succeeding. One of the unanswered questions is the future of an estimated 7 million Palestinians scattered throughout the Arab world. The prevailing Arab view was summarized by Dubai's Al-Bayan newspaper, which wrote: "If the Arab side wants to be approached with the highest degree of seriousness, it will have to be prepared to extend meaningful backing to the armed Palestinian resistance, and to state that position publicly. "In any event, the fire of the resistance needs to remain raging and unrelenting as the negotiating process goes on." From mstainsby at tao.ca Thu Mar 7 19:00:56 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Can the war turn out badly for U.S. forces in Afghanistan? G&M References: <102.11a7bd84.29b92696@aol.com> Message-ID: <003801c1c645$16a8f860$76195218@vc.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: > Perhaps it is the Afghan equivalent of the Tet offensive > I won't hold my breath for that...but a question: would such an offensive be a good thing? Macdonald From mstainsby at tao.ca Thu Mar 7 19:12:07 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Can the war turn out badly for U.S. forces in Afghanistan? G&M References: <81.18928a24.29b7bb19@aol.com> <5.0.2.1.0.20020307124316.00a0ed90@pop.igc.org> Message-ID: <003e01c1c646$a62a87a0$76195218@vc.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tom Condit" > than either the Communist-led forces or the Mujaheddin had during the long > civil war. In their brief period in power, they managed to make a lot of > enemies, and not gain very many friends. > I wholly agree with you that it is high time we stop asking brown people to do the killing and dying against imperialists. That all said, your comment above makes a false statement. The Taliban came to power in 96 as a "stabilising force"- they were the antidote to the chaos of the Warlords from 92 on. The Taliban did have popular backing. They were the only militia of religious nuts who did not rape and killed those who did... their repressions were not that out of the ordinary among the contenders for power and their state eliminated the excesses and bandit rule left behind when Gorby sold out the Afghan People's Party. I also cannot believe that a people who would be so completely anti-Soviet would welcome the American invasion. So, who aside from the Taliban would the average warrior who wants to defend his land join? only Al Qaeda and the Taliban are resisiting- the others are collaborators. This matters. However (and with that all said...), you are very right to get us to stop navel gazing at peasants to kill B 52's. So what do we do? Here's my personal contradiction: "Marxist-Leninist" parties here have no rudder and usually no clue. The rising anti-glob movement(s) are led by what amounts to autonomism. Yet, these same Autonomists have some utterly horrible politics- attacking Cuba for instance, not getting the Nato war, not trying to educate and build links among North Americans with groups like the Farc Ep or the CPN (M). How do I reconcile the idiocy of their analysis of imperialism with the idiocy of the "Leninist" approach to fighting revolution here? It is absolutely painful to listen to comrades attack the Cuban revolution- even more pathetic to hear comrades who support Fidel call for building new Social Democratic Parties... The split is deep and the chasm seems terminal. Macdonald From hunterbadbear at earthlink.net Thu Mar 7 19:06:06 2002 From: hunterbadbear at earthlink.net (Hunter Gray) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] FWD from Julian Bond: Pickering Challenge Message-ID: <001201c1c645$d10fc800$4ea90e3f@ibm22761429477> The Judiciary Committee has agreed to a one-week delay on the vote on Charles Pickering in a desperate attempt to salvage the nomination of this segregationist judge. Please re-contact your Senators - both on the Committee and not - to insure they remain firm in opposition to this candidate. He has a nearly half-century record of opposition to basic justice. Like his sponsor, Senator Trent Lott (R - Ms), he has consorted with segregationist groups. He lied about it at his confirmation hearing in 1990, testifying he "never had any contact with the State Sovereignty Commission", the state-sponsored organization that attacked the civil rights movement with espionage and sabotage. As a law student, he encouraged the Mississippi legislature to heighten punishment for interracial couples. As a State Senator and Judge, he was hostile to protecting the voting rights of African-Americans. Every NAACP Chapter in Mississippi opposes him. The NAACP State Conferences in Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana oppose him. Please insure your Senator stands strong against this nominee. Julian Bond ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ + GOP Delays Vote on Bush Nominee to Federal Appeals Court By Jesse Holland WASHINGTON - Republicans forced a one-week delay Thursday in a racially-charged showdown over U.S. District Judge Charles Pickering's nomination to the federal appeals court, hoping to stave off an embarrassing defeat for President Bush. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, coupled his request for a delay with a withering attack on "extreme left Washington special interest groups" that he said were conducting a "lynching" designed to keep Bush's judicial nominees from gaining approval. "They want activists on the bench who support their views, regardless of the law," Hatch said. Much of the opposition to Pickering has come from civil rights groups who say he supported segregation as a young man in Mississippi. Supporters point to numerous examples of support for civil rights as far back as the mid- to late-1960s. Under Senate Judiciary Committee rules, any senator can gain a one-week delay simply by asking for it. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the panel's chairman, said he remains opposed to Pickering's nomination, a decision he said he made based on hearing testimony and not on pressure from outside groups. Still, in a remarkable disclosure, he said one outside group, which he did not name, had called his office to say that "because I was Catholic, I was having a religious test, applying a religious test on Charles Pickering." He said a Jewish member of the committee also "got a phone call saying the opposition was on religion." Leahy called such tactics "distasteful." It seemed unlikely a delay would change the minds of any of the Democratic senators on the committee who were poised to scuttle Pickering's nomination on a party-line vote. But Republicans renewed their call to have the nomination be sent to the Senate floor, where all 100 senators could vote, and where Pickering's supporters say they could prevail. Hatch's remark about a lynching echoed Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's angry claim 11 years ago that he was the victim of a "high tech lynching for uppity blacks." Thomas was ultimately confirmed over the objections of liberals, but only after the committee agreed to send his nomination to the floor. Additionally, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said Democrats were using Pickering as a "warmup" for any nominees that Bush names to the Supreme Court. The committee delay came one day after Bush greeted Pickering and supporters at the white House and accused Democrats of playing politics with the nomination. "I think the country is tired of people playing politics all the time in Washington, and I believe that they're holding this man's nomination up for political purposes," the president said in an Oval Office meeting with Picring. Pickering would sit on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, which serves Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana. He has faced criticism from women's, civil rights and liberal groups, some of the same factions likely to line up against a Bush pick to the Supreme Court. Senate Democrats have questioned Pickering about efforts to reduce the sentence of a man convicted of burning a cross on an interracial couple's lawn. They questioned him about his actions on abortion and voting rights as a state senator and federal judge. "It is very critical that the judicial nominees, especially for the appeals and the Supreme Court positions, are people of moderate philosophical temperament and have an impeccable past," Daschle said. Bush shrugged off the criticism, noting that the former Mississippi prosecutor easily won Senate confirmation in 1990 as a judge in a U.S. District Court. He called Pickering a man who "respects the rights of all citizens." White House press secretary Ari Fleischer shrugged off questions about Pickering's views on race in the 1950s and 1960s. "If actions taken by people 40 years ago were the criteria, there'd be some senators who are voting on this nomination whose very history would come into play," Fleischer said. Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., was a member of the Ku Klux Klan before coming to Congress in the 1950s; Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina waged the longest filibuster in Senate history to oppose a 1957 civil rights bill and ran for president as a segregationist. The two men have since supported civil rights and hired black staff members. Thurmond is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Byrd is not. From hunterbadbear at earthlink.net Fri Mar 8 05:08:38 2002 From: hunterbadbear at earthlink.net (Hunter Gray) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Change Can Come -- and Good Change Will: A Southern Tale Message-ID: <000701c1c699$fcd99b60$cca90e3f@ibm22761429477> Note by Hunterbear: Another very early morning in the Idaho mountains -- and one that's cold, windy, and snowy. Even my great and loyal buddy, my half-Bobcat cat, has returned to sleep. On the SNCC list recently, our very old friend -- Joan [Trumpauer] Mulholland, one of we of the well-known, violently-attacked Jackson '63 Woolworth sit-in situation and photo, who has twice visited us here, commented astutely on " . . .Hunterbear's fluffy kitty -- but watch those claws!" But the Clawy Kitty is off chasing rabbits in dreamland. Anyway. Writing just now to a good colleague in New Mexico, I wound up telling -- as Indians and Other Ethnicities and Real Westerners and the Working Class -- always do so very well: telling a story or two. Many people like these and a few don't. And if you don't, cut out. Anyway, to my friend in the Great Southwest, I wrote in part: ================= I have a strong hunch you were hatched right into civil rights and civil liberties -- and, unlike many, you are still going strong: like the Santa Fe chugging resolutely across the Southwestern canyons and ranges. I'm a great train man, too [I fly -- but my technological travel acceptance really stopped with trains.] And I miss the little now-gone branch lines and out-of-the-way deals -- that were always so shaped by interesting local geographies and "sub-cultures." [Including fascinating local food.] My idea of socialist democracy does not involve cultural monolith-ism at the people grassroots. I'm a strong pluralism person. Within reason -- my reason -- of course. I remember taking -- as a full-time civil rights organizer -- increasingly archaic trains from Mississippi deep into Louisiana, very early Fall or so '63, and eventually passing through a succession of little Louisiana pine-timber towns. At one, an Anglo family was putting on -- entraining, so to speak -- the "old" mother/mother-in-law. Helped by her goodbye-murmuring kin, she and they mounted into the passenger car. Then! Then she saw several Blacks sitting therein [as per the increasingly effective ICC rulings] -- and her public comment was really very, very crude. Even my resilient ears were jarred, burned. Several people at least in our car were visibly startled -- interracially -- as were even a couple of the younger folk in her group. Quickly, the aged conductor reached for her -- simultaneously assuring her family members: "I'll take very good care of her. She will be just fine. You all don't worry one bit." Reassured and embarrassed, they stepped back down, and the conductor, very grandly, almost elegantly, escorted her, the still-smoking outburster, out of the passenger car and through a door. And the train jolted hard a time or two, and then commenced its rolling-along through the edges of the little town and back into the piney woods. And I wondered. "Where in the hell did he take her?" When the conductor returned without his distraught charge, I finally got up and went casually but sociologically through that door. And I had to go through several doors and cars until -- Suddenly! I was in an intriguingly ancient old "living room" car. Tired flowers clung to their water base in very old vases. There was a rug of distinctly conservative color. A kind of wall-paper depicted pleasant antebellum themes and times. And there They were -- not just one but several of Them: Five or six old Southern white ladies -- including the now ostensibly calm recent addition -- sat silently in bolted down chairs -- staring bleakly, drearily out the windows. Lonely, but segregated. Racial Integrity -- as the Citizens Council zealots would approvingly note. This was well before, of course, the '64 Civil Rights Act -- but, as I say, the trains and other trans-state public conveyances were covered by slowly effective ICC orders and regs. Hence, the desegregation in my car and elsewhere on the train -- save for this intriguing little exception which, if technically illegal, was, in its own way, in everyone's best psychological interests. American pragmatism. Just as soon as I was hatched, literally, my father gave me a very nicely done and intricate sketch in which the Mohawk chief, Thayendanegea [Joseph Brant] is standing -- grim, determined, and partially in shadow -- and partially in firelight: the firelight of a burning settler's cabin as he watches his warriors, one with tomahawk raised, doing in some settlers in the Cherry Valley region of New York. That sketch has always been with me -- and presently hangs on my office wall right here with a number of other notable activists [Frank Little, Cherokee, metal miner, and IWW organizer lynched at Butte by the Copper Trust on August 1, 1917]; my old photo of John Reed [which just surfaced the other day as it periodically does -- a sign]; other bona fide and committed social justice radicals. And I also, believe it or not -- read GWTW [every word -- something that's always interested Southern oral historians] while I was in the third grade, after seeing the flick. In that Great Fantasy, the always perceptive and trenchantly ironic Rhett Butler comments to Scarlett, as he studies the aging white folk of Atlanta, "The Old Guard dies but it never surrenders." But, as I saw the lonely and old segregationist ladies sitting in their drab and fading -- but racially exclusive -- version of splendor, I knew the Old Guard, if not yet dead, was definitely surrendering. We-all were out in the vigorous and visiting Big Train Country -- and they, encased and hushed, were prisoners in a tiny canyon -- deep and arid. They weren't even looking at one another. Lifeless. And the Old South, however slowly and -- in some quarters, however bitterly and sometimes bloodily -- was passing. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------ Anyway, that's the story I've just told my friend down in New Mexico. The South was tough -- but we all won some very significant things in that one. Significant for the country, for the world. And we'll win again -- and again -- all of us together -- as we travel toward the Sun. As Ever, Hunter [Hunterbear] Hunter Gray [ Hunterbear ] www.hunterbear.org ( social justice ) From pieinsky at igc.org Fri Mar 8 10:03:29 2002 From: pieinsky at igc.org (Jay Moore) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] On the Current Fighting in Afghanistan Message-ID: <005101c1c6c3$2f2104e0$297df2d0@bypass.com> Their extreme right-wing Zionist cheerleading is hard to stomach. But I've found the Israeli intelligence source Debka (www.debka.com) to be a pretty reliable source on matters of political and military strategy. Last fall, they predicted that the Afghan War was far from being over and that the Taliban had retreated to the mountains to prepare for a guerilla war of attrition. Lo and behold now, that's exactly what's happening. What seems to be happening to me is that the Islamicists have begun to achieve what Che called for but could not achieve -- that is, "Two, Three, Many Vietnams" spreading out the imperialists and hitting them from different directions. Guerilla war on a global scale. Where this will all lead is going to be very interesting to see -- and if the Left can benefit somehow now, too, from this situation. jay www.neravt.com/left/ ********** Slow Progress in Afghanistan May Delay US Iraq Offensive DEBKAfileMilitary Analysis 8 March: DEBKAfileTs military experts report the intense fighting over the past week in the mountains of Afghanistan south of Gardez, between the US 101st Airborne and 10th Mountain divisions and al-Qaeda and Taliban forces, is beginning to impinge on US preparations for its coming assault on Iraq. A poor showing by the hundreds of Afghans fighting alongside US troops has forced US military planners to pour into the battle zone American reinforcements that were earmarked for other combat arenas. DEBKAfiles military sources say general Tommy Franks, the US Central Command chief, transferred to the Gardez battlefield US forces standing by on Omans Masirah Island base for the US offensive against Iraq. Several thousand more may have to follow, if fighting flares up in additional Taliban-al Qaeda pockets around Afghanistan. US forces in Gardez commanded by major general Frank Hagenbeck faced a hard fact this week: the joint US-Afghan force was unable to stem the influx of Taliban and al-Qaeda reinforcements from Pakistan, only several dozen kilome ters away, and from among additional enemy concentrations in Afghanistan  particularly since Thursday, when the mountain region was struck with blinding snow storms. DEBKAfiles military sources say that, while the Americans were pouring additional soldiers, 17 assault helicopters and tank-busting A-10 aircraft into the area, the other side was moving in reinforcements too, equipped with large quantities of anti-tank missiles and various shoulder-held surface-to-air missiles, including US-made Stingers. US spy satellites and drones spotted groups of Taliban and al-Qaeda converging on the battle zone from as far away as the Hindu Kush mountains, north of the city of Jalalabad, and the Zabul province south of Gardez. US commanders had hoped to win the battle before the enemy reinforcements arrived. But military experts watching the fighting judged this hope illusory. They estimate the engagement will continue past the weekend and into its second week, reaching a climax at mid-week. DEBKAfiles military experts report that the Taliban and al Qaeda commanders in Pakistan appear to be bucked up enough by their success in standing up to the American-led assault to revise their planning. Previously, Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorist attacks had been plotted for US forces, UN peacekeepers and other targets linked to the interim government of Hamid Karzai, in major Afghan cities, such as Kabul, Kandahar and Mazer e-Sharif. The bulk of their forces were to have been reserved in enclaves for a summer counter-offensive to be launched around the country in mid-June or early July. But now, Taliban and al-Qaeda chiefs have decided to delay no longer. Instead of waiting for the United States to move against their enclaves, they are going on the offensive to try and draw US forces to the strongholds. Taliban and al-Qaeda commanders see the balance of war tilting to their side, noting that Afghan fighters in the Gardez front do not share US troops enthusiasm and dedication to their missions. Back in December, during the assault on the Tora Bora cave complex, Afghans were clearly reluctant  even for good pay  to carry on fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The same manifestation recurred in this weeks battles. The escalating Israeli-Palestinian conflict too further complicates Americas military situation. Should the violence spill over and the Lebanese Hizballh  buttressed by al Qaeda militants - join the fray to ease Israels military pressure on the Palestinians, Washingtons plans and timetable for its Iraq campaign would be set back once again. From tomcondit at igc.org Fri Mar 8 10:36:07 2002 From: tomcondit at igc.org (Tom Condit) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Can the war turn out badly for U.S. forces in Afghanistan? G&M In-Reply-To: <003e01c1c646$a62a87a0$76195218@vc.shawcable.net> References: <81.18928a24.29b7bb19@aol.com> <5.0.2.1.0.20020307124316.00a0ed90@pop.igc.org> Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.0.20020308093001.00a18c50@pop.igc.org> At 06:12 PM 3/7/02 -0800, Macdonald Stainsby wrote: >[snip] >I wholly agree with you that it is high time we stop asking brown people to do >the killing and dying against imperialists. That all said, your comment above >makes a false statement. The Taliban came to power in 96 as a "stabilising >force"- they were the antidote to the chaos of the Warlords from 92 on. > >The Taliban did have popular backing. They were the only militia of religious >nuts who did not rape and killed those who did... their repressions were not >that out of the ordinary among the contenders for power and their state >eliminated the excesses and bandit rule left behind when Gorby sold out the >Afghan People's Party. I also cannot believe that a people who would be so >completely anti-Soviet would welcome the American invasion. So, who aside from >the Taliban would the average warrior who wants to defend his land join? >only Al >Qaeda and the Taliban are resisiting- the others are collaborators. This >matters. Yes, but then they engaged in a series of steps which undermined that popular backing. First, they were Pashtun chauvinists (and limited in their roots even with the Pashtun communities), and systematically attacked and alienated all the small national groups. Second, they outlawed music, alienating even wider segments of the population. You must remember that the Taliban were very largely composed of war orphans without ties to family, village or clan, and were as effective in battle as they were precisely because of this Janissary-like character, but that alienation also severely limited them politically. In that, they are not unlike the alienated and atomized individuals who make up many left groups, and contribute to the political ineffectuality of those groups, however good they may be at hawking newspapers and carrying banners. From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Fri Mar 8 11:21:53 2002 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] How NSA access was built into Windows Message-ID: <003f01c1c6ce$1fa934f0$33378d18@Indy1> PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY This is important information for anyone who does not want authoritarian state thugs scanning their computer for information. ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Paul" > To: > Sent: Wednesday, March 06, 2002 1:37 PM > Subject: How NSA access was built into Windows > > > > > > Two other sites with similar story > > http://exn.ca/Stories/1999/09/03/02.asp > > > http://www.idg.net/idgns/1999/09/03/UPDATE2NewWindowsCryptoBackdoorSaid.shtm > > l > > > > > > How NSA access was built into Windows > > Duncan Campbell 04.09.1999 > > > > > Careless mistake reveals subversion of Windows by NSA. > > > > > A CARELESS mistake by Microsoft programmers has revealed that > > special access codes prepared by the US National Security Agency > > have been secretly built into Windows. The NSA access system is > > built into every version of the Windows operating system now in > > use, except early releases of Windows 95 (and its predecessors). > > The discovery comes close on the heels of the revelations > > earlier this year that another US software giant, Lotus, had > > built an NSA "help information" trapdoor into its Notes system, > > and that security functions on other software systems had been > > deliberately crippled. > > > > > The first discovery of the new NSA access system was made two > > years ago by British researcher Dr Nicko van Someren. But it was > > only a few weeks ago when a second researcher rediscovered the > > access system. With it, he found the evidence linking it to NSA. > > > > > Computer security specialists have been aware for two years that > > unusual features are contained inside a standard Windows > > software "driver" used for security and encryption functions. > > The driver, called ADVAPI.DLL, enables and controls a range of > > security functions. If you use Windows, you will find it in the > > C:\Windows\system directory of your computer. > > > > > ADVAPI.DLL works closely with Microsoft Internet Explorer, but > > will only run crypographic functions that the US governments > > allows Microsoft to export. That information is bad enough news, > > from a European point of view. Now, it turns out that ADVAPI > > will run special programmes inserted and controlled by NSA. As > > yet, no one knows what these programmes are, or what they do. > > Dr Nicko van Someren reported at last year's Crypto 98 > > conference that he had disassembled the ADVADPI driver. He found > > it contained two different keys. One was used by Microsoft to > > control the cryptographic functions enabled in Windows, in > > compliance with US export regulations. But the reason for > > building in a second key, or who owned it, remained a mystery. > > > > > A second key > > > > > Two weeks ago, a US security company came up with conclusive > > evidence that the second key belongs to NSA. Like Dr van > > Someren, Andrew Fernandez, chief scientist with Cryptonym of > > Morrisville, North Carolina, had been probing the presence and > > significance of the two keys. Then he checked the latest Service > > Pack release for Windows NT4, Service Pack 5. He found that > > Microsoft's developers had failed to remove or "strip" the > > debugging symbols used to test this software before they > > released it. Inside the code were the labels for the two keys. > > One was called "KEY". The other was called "NSAKEY". > > > > > Fernandes reported his re-discovery of the two CAPI keys, and > > theirsecret meaning, to "Advances in Cryptology, Crypto'99" > > conference held in Santa Barbara. According to those present at > > the conference, Windows developers attending the conference did > > not deny that the "NSA" key was built into their software. But > > they refused to talk about what the key did, or why it had been > > put there without users' knowledge. > > > > > A third key?! > > > > > But according to two witnesses attending the conference, even > > Microsoft's top crypto programmers were astonished to learn that > > the version of ADVAPI.DLL shipping with Windows 2000 contains > > not two, but three keys. Brian LaMachia, head of CAPI > > development at Microsoft was "stunned" to learn of these > > discoveries, by outsiders. The latest discovery by Dr van > > Someren is based on advanced search methods which test and > > report on the "entropy" of programming code. > > > > > Within the Microsoft organisation, access to Windows source code > > is said to be highly compartmentalized, making it easy for > > modifications to be inserted without the knowledge of even the > > respective product managers. > > > > > Researchers are divided about whether the NSA key could be > > intended to let US government users of Windows run classified > > crypto systems on their machines or whether it is intended to > > open up anyone's and everyone's Windows computer to intelligence > > gathering techniques deployed by NSA's burgeoning corps of > > "information warriors". > > > > > According to Fernandez of Cryptonym, the result of having the > > secret key inside your Windows operating system "is that it is > > tremendously easier for the NSA to load unauthorized security > > services on all copies of Microsoft Windows, and once these > > security services are loaded, they can effectively compromise > > your entire operating system". The NSA key is contained inside > > all versions of Windows from Windows 95 OSR2 onwards. > > > > > "For non American IT managers relying on Windows NT to operate > > highly secure data centres, this find is worrying", he added. > > "The US government is currently making it as difficult as > > possible for "strong" crypto to be used outside of the US. That > > they have also installed a cryptographic back door in the > > world's most abundant operating system should send a strong > > message to foreign IT managers". > > > > > "How is an IT manager to feel when they learn that in every copy > > of Windows sold, Microsoft has a 'back door' for NSA - making it > > orders of magnitude easier for the US government to access your > > computer?" he asked. > > > > > Can the loophole be turned round against the snoopers? > > > > > Dr van Someren feels that the primary purpose of the NSA key > > inside Windows may be for legitimate US government use. But he > > says that there cannot be a legitimate explanation for the third > > key in Windows 2000 CAPI. "It looks more fishy", he said. > > Fernandez believes that NSA's built in loophole can be turned > > round against the snoopers. The NSA key inside CAPI can be > > replaced by your own key, and used to sign cryptographic > > security modules from overseas or unauthorised third parties, > > unapproved by Microsoft or the NSA. This is exactly what the US > > government has been trying to prevent. A demonstration "how to > > do it" program that replaces the NSA key can be found on > > Cryptonym's website. > > > > > According to one leading US cryptographer, the IT world should > > be thankful that the subversion of Windows by NSA has come to > > light before the arrival of CPUs that handles encrypted > > instruction sets. These would make the type of discoveries made > > this month impossible. "Had the next generation CPU's with > > encrypted instruction sets already been deployed,we would have > > never found out about NSAKEY." > > > > > > -----------end forwarded text-------------- > > > > > > > From Malky53 at aol.com Fri Mar 8 12:34:37 2002 From: Malky53 at aol.com (Malky53@aol.com) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Can the war turn out badly for U.S. forces in Afghanistan? G&M Message-ID: In a message dated 08-03-02 02:53:36, mstainsby@tao.ca writes: << I won't hold my breath for that...but a question: would such an offensive be a good thing? >> not judging the issue militarily - I am not a general or even an ordinary soldier However, what ever the faults of the Taliban and they were legion, the USA is the dominant imperialism in the world and if someone took them on I thinks socialists would be bound to look for the defeat of the USA. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Mar 8 12:55:12 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Deja vu all over again Message-ID: <200203081955.g28JtDE06440@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> The Federal News Service, March 4, 2002 "Good afternoon. Well, thanks to all of you for coming today. "What I want to do this afternoon is provide an update, a situation report, if you will, on our ongoing operations in Paktia Province in Afghanistan. "First let me say that our thoughts and prayers go out to the families and the friends of the service members who have lost their lives in our ongoing operations in Vietnam." -- U.S. Central Command chief Gen. Tommy Franks, speaking at a March 4 news conference in Tampa, Florida From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri Mar 8 14:34:39 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Can the war turn out badly for U.S. forces in Afghanistan? G&M References: <81.18928a24.29b7bb19@aol.com> <5.0.2.1.0.20020307124316.00a0ed90@pop.igc.org> <5.0.2.1.0.20020308093001.00a18c50@pop.igc.org> Message-ID: <007401c1c6e9$0dce7b80$76195218@vc.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tom Condit" > In that, they are not unlike the > alienated and atomized individuals who make up many left groups, and > contribute to the political ineffectuality of those groups, however good > they may be at hawking newspapers and carrying banners. Perhaps I betray my cynicism a bit too strongly now, but the first thing I thought when you said that is "but at least the Taliban took state power and tried to put their twisted vision into reality". Macdonald From wmmmandel at earthlink.net Thu Mar 7 12:55:34 2002 From: wmmmandel at earthlink.net (William Mandel) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [Redbadbear] Re: [R-G] Robeson / Mine-Mill / Peace Arch Commemoration -- ExcellentCD References: <000901c1c5f6$8ff4db20$82a90e3f@ibm22761429477> <004c01c1c60a$8a73c4e0$76195218@vc.shawcable.net> Message-ID: <3C87C5B6.E598B5E4@earthlink.net> You'll find a lot of Robeson in my autobiography, described in the signature tag below. I was in the bodyguard at the 1949 Peekskill Riot against him, where we literally stopped fascism for that period of history. The next year I broke the blacklist against him by convincing the party running me for Congress to change our closing rally to a paid Robeson concert. My father said in later years that I cried in introducing Robeson. I remember best that glorious smile at the end, backstage, when he extended his hand and said: "Thanks, Bill." In the following presidential election we traveled together to a rally/concert in the adjacent state, in a car with four Harlem hoods who had offered him unconditional protection. With them, he, a master of our language and others, spoke Black English. Incidentally, I still have his record of Chinese songs on a 78 rpm platter. William Mandel Macdonald Stainsby wrote: > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Hunter Gray" > I have said > this before, but as the witchhunts thicken from day to day, it is of immediate > need for activists of my generation (I am 26 years old) to familiarise > themselves with the man in Paul Robeson. His dignity in defiance of the butchers > is an inspiration for those of us who, in the next few years, will face a > military tribunal or some such thing if our work is successful. > > The CD Hunter speaks of is wonderful, Robeson even sings the Chinese National > Anthem - partly in Chinese. > > Macdonald ======================================================== My autobiography, SAYING NO TO POWER (Creative Arts, Berkeley, 1999), was written for the general reader. However, if you teach in the social sciences consider it for student reading. It is a history of how the American people fought to defend and expand its rights in my lifetime, employing the form of the life story of one who was involved in most serious movements: labor, student, peace with the USSR, civil rights South and North, civil liberties (I seriously damaged the Senate Internal Security Committee, the McCarthy Committee, and the House Un-American Activities Committee with spectacular testimonies that may be heard/seen on my website, http://www.billmandel.net ), the RADIO OF DISSENT (37 YEARS ON PACIFICA), with very extensive information on its history) and the feminist movement, although I am male. The book contains some fifty pages on my late wife, Tanya, appearing appropriately throughout the book. They may be found in the index under Mandel, Tanya. My activities began in 1927. I am 84. The book is available through all normal sources. If you want an autographed copy, send me $23 at 4466 View Pl., Apt. 106, Oakland, CA. 94611 ======================================================== ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Buy Stock for $4. No Minimums. FREE Money 2002. http://us.click.yahoo.com/BgmYkB/VovDAA/ySSFAA/.zNplB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: Redbadbear-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Mar 8 16:05:04 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Ex-king says U.S. war is 'stupid and useless' - AP Message-ID: <200203082305.g28N54E13453@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> http://www.msnbc.com/news/720627.asp?cp1=1 Associated Press March 7, 2002 Ex-king says U.S. war is 'stupid and useless' Ahead of his return to Kabul, Shah urges end to American campaign ROME -As his hoped-for return to Kabul approaches, Afghanistan's last king has been quoted as describing the U.S.-led war on terror as "stupid and useless" and calling for its immediate end. La Stampa, a Turin daily, ran the comments by Mohammad Zaher Shah in Thursday's paper. It is "a stupid and useless war and it would be better if it ended immediately," the 87-year-old monarch, who has lived in Rome since 1973 when he was ousted in a coup, was quoted as saying. "My people have always fought for freedom and democracy," he added, saying the terrorists are "foreigners who come from other parts of Asia ... to disturb and destroy my people." The king had said previously he wanted to be back home in time for March 21, a spring holiday that was banned by the Taliban regime which was ousted last fall during the U.S.-led military intervention in Afghanistan. In the published comments, he declined to give the exact date, but said his return would happen "very soon." "We cannot confirm the exact date because of security concerns," Hamid Sidig, the king's secretary, told The Associated Press on Thursday. He added that the date would be announced very soon. A NEW AFGHANISTAN La Stampa ran the king's comments in what it said was an interview conducted Wednesday evening at the king's villa. Denying there was any interview, Siddig declined to comment on the assessment of the anti-terror war as being useless. Later, La Stampa said its journalist had gone into the villa as part of an Italian delegation paying a call on the king. The king was not aware that a journalist was among his guests when he made his remarks, La Stampa said. "I'm as happy as I'm sad. I've been so homesick during these endless years!" Zaher Shah was quoted as saying of his return, after almost 30 years in exile. "The joy is for seeing Afghanistan again, the terror is (for the conditions) in which I'll find it: destroyed, with people dead, friends gone." The former king is widely seen as a unifying figure among the country's various ethnic groups. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Mar 8 16:06:05 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] U.S. rejects hard line by Sharon - IHT Message-ID: <200203082306.g28N65E14585@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> http://www.iht.com/articles/50571.htm The International Herald Tribune Friday, March 8, 2002 U.S. rejects hard line by Sharon By David E. Sanger, The New York Times Washington - Alarmed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's comments that Israel would intentionally cause casualties among the Palestinians to force them to the bargaining table, the Bush administration has decided to terminate its unequivocal support for Sharon's hard-line strategy and declared that his approach would likely fail. A senior administration official said Sharon's statements this week that the Palestinians had to be "hit hard" and that they would only negotiate after they were "beaten" amounted to "a declaration that he thought he could bomb the Palestinians into submission." [On Thursday, President George W. Bush announced that he was dispatching Anthony Zinni, the U.S. envoy, to the Middle East to try to quell the Israeli-Palestinian fighting, Reuters reported from Washington. ["I am deeply concerned about the tragic loss of life and escalating violence in the Middle East," Bush declared in the White House Rose Garden. Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell were at his side. [Bush, under pressure from Arab leaders for a stronger U.S. role in the Middle East, said Zinni would return to the region next week. He said Zinni's prospects for progress were unclear, adding that "there are no assurances" but "that's not going to prevent our government from trying."] In interviews Wednesday, officials said the administration had decided Tuesday that it had to respond strongly to Sharon, lest the Israeli prime minister interpret Washington's silence as implicit permission to intensify the conflict or declare an all-out war. "We had to make clear to him that there is simply no evidence that approach will succeed," an official involved in the discussion said. "At a minimum, it is a policy that will not work. More likely it will be counterproductive." That determination led Powell to tell a House subcommittee on Wednesday that the prime minister "has to take a hard look at his policies to see whether they will work." Powell repeated that position in testimony Thursday. In a pointed statement that senior administration officials prepared earlier in the week, Powell told the House subcommittee, "If you declare war against the Palestinians thinking that you can solve the problem by seeing how many Palestinians can be killed, I don't know that that leads us anywhere." Powell's statement was significant because, until now, Sharon's strategy of retaliation for Palestinian terrorist attacks has rarely prompted even the mildest reaction from the White House. Indeed, when pressed about Sharon's actions, administration officials generally have responded that Israel had to undertake whatever steps it felt was needed to defend itself. But that changed, a senior administration official said Wednesday evening, when President Bush and Powell read Sharon's new articulation of his strategy. Powell's comments on Wednesday were the sharpest criticism to date of Sharon's tough policy toward the conflict. They came a day after President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt implored the administration to become more involved in seeking ways to stop the violence in the Middle East. It also came a few days before Cheney was scheduled to leave for the region on a journey to rally leaders to support a U.S.-led campaign to oust President Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Within hours of Powell's comments, Sharon shot back that he, like Bush, was simply fighting terrorism. In a statement, Sharon's office said that the war was started by the Palestinian Authority and would only end when Yasser Arafat, the head of the authority, ordered an end to the attacks. "Israel is only fighting back against the terrorist organization in the context of its right to self-defense," Sharon said. "The one who initiated this war has the power to stop it, but he continues to prefer the war of terrorism." The only previous public disagreement between Sharon and the Bush administration came in early October, when Sharon stunned the White House by calling on the United States not to "repeat the terrible mistake of 1938, when enlightened European democracies decided to sacrifice Czechoslovakia so as to reach a convenient temporary solution" to Nazi expansion before World War II. Sharon warned Bush not to "appease the Arabs at our expense; we cannot accept it." After a rebuke from the White House was delivered through official channels, Sharon backed down slightly. Still, such scenes have been rare. From the beginning of his presidency, Bush has embraced the Israeli leader, seeing and praising him repeatedly while refusing to meet with Arafat. But in recent days, as scenes of carnage and helicopter attacks have played across the television sets in the West Wing, senior administration officials decided they needed to rein in Sharon. The alternative, one official said, was that "Sharon would feel free to conduct a full-scale war, declared or undeclared." The effort started modestly Tuesday evening, when Bush appeared at the White House with the Egyptian president. Bush condemned "this cycle of violence," but then seemed to place the onus on Arafat. Repeating a frequently used phrase, he said peace was "only possible if there is a maximum effort to end violence throughout the region, starting with the Palestinian efforts to stop attacks against Israelis." He did not deliver a similar warning, however, to Sharon. By Wednesday morning, when Powell spoke at a congressional hearing on the State Department budget, he had clearly determined to toughen the tone in ways that Israel would notice. He took time on Wednesday to express sympathy with Palestinian frustrations - though not their tactics. "The Palestinians are experiencing enormous difficulties," he said, noting that they were largely unable to travel to their jobs. But Powell continued his criticism of Arafat and said that peace initiatives by Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United States were of little use as the fighting worsens. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Mar 8 16:07:10 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] We risk charges of war crimes, Peres tells Cabinet - Independent Message-ID: <200203082307.g28N7AE15832@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=271739 The Independent 7 March 2002 We risk charges of war crimes, Peres tells Cabinet By Paul Peachey Signs of deep rifts within the Israeli Cabinet became apparent yesterday as senior figures clashed over the continuing fierce bombardment of the Palestinians. In a sharp exchange during a Cabinet meeting, the Foreign minister Shimon Peres said excessively harsh military measures could lead to accusations of war crimes. A newspaper report of Mr Peres' bitter exchange with the infrastructure minister, Avigdor Lieberman, was confirmed yesterday by Mr Lieberman's spokesman. According to the report in the Yediot Ahronot newspaper, Mr Lieberman urged that Palestinians be told to halt all terror activity or face wide-ranging attacks. "At 8am we'll bomb all the commercial centres... at noon we'll bomb their gas stations... at two we'll bomb their banks," Mr Lieberman reportedly told the meeting before Peres interrupted to say: "And at 6pm you'll receive an invitation to the international tribunal in The Hague." Mr Peres yesterday sounded the cautionary notes as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon promised that Israel would continue to strike "without let-up" unless Palestinian attacks were reined in. The escalating violence has fuelled debate inside Mr Sharon's government over whether any political resolution can be found after days of bloodshed. Mr Peres said yesterday that force alone was not the answer. "A ceasefire cannot be achieved just by using fire," he said. Citing the "terrible, terrible" violence of recent days, Mr Peres said that Israel should demand from the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat a clear-cut declaration that he would halt terror, but also have its own army do everything possible "not to escalate the situation". From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Mar 8 16:08:09 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:06 2006 Subject: [R-G] Sharon says ready to drop demand for seven days of quiet - Haaretz Message-ID: <200203082308.g28N8AE17051@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> Haaretz March 9, 2002 Sharon says ready to drop demand for seven days of quiet By Aluf Benn Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suggested Friday that he was dropping his insistence on a week of calm before the two sides begin implementing a truce. Sharon said that negotiations for a cease-fire will be held while the conflict continues. "Negotiations to stop the shooting will be held under fire," Sharon told Channel Two Television. Sharon also informed U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell of his decision during a phone conversation earlier in the day. The decision follows a new U.S. intiative which proposes that the two sides begin to implement the Tenet plan immediately, without waiting for a drop in the violence, with the goal of then moving on to the Mitchell Report's plan for resuming negotiations. Bush sends envoy back to Mideast President George W. Bush dispatched his Middle East envoy, Anthony Zinni, back to the region Thursday in hopes of halting widening violence. Citing American sources, Israel Radio reported that the American envoy would arrive in the region at the latter part of next week. Bush, under pressure from Arab leaders for a stronger U.S. role in the Middle East, said Zinni would go back to the region next week. He said Zinni's prospects for progress are unclear. When announcing the new effort, Bush said "there are no assurances" it would lead to a resumption of peace talks. "That's not going to prevent our country from trying," Bush told reporters at the White House Rose Garden, with Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary Powell at his side. "I'm deeply concerned about the tragic loss of life and the escalating violence," Bush said. Under the new American initiative, Zinni would stay in the region to monitor execution of the PA's commitments under the Tenet plan, which include arresting wanted terrorists and collecting illegal weapons. The new plan also includes support for a Saudi peace initiative, under which the Arab world would promise Israel full normalization in exchange for full withdrawal to the 1967 borders, and efforts to revitalize the Palestinian economy. In particular, the U.S. is proposing that Israel use frozen Palestinian Authority funds - which currently total more than NIS 1 billion - to fund economic projects in the territories. A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Bush made the decision after his national security team advised that the action could help break a rising cycle of Middle East violence. The official said Bush was prompted by positive developments in the region, which the official refused to specify. The announcement came just hours after White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said no envoy would be sent unless there was an "opening where a return by General Zinni that would do some good." U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Kurtzer met this week with Ariel Sharon, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer and other politicians to discuss the initiative. Kurtzer said that Bush would kick it off with a speech emphasizing the depth of American commitment to resolving the conflict. Bush said Thursday that Zinni's mission in the region will be to implement the Tenet and Mitchell plans. In his speech, he urged PA Chairman Yasser Arafat to take steps to end the violence and refrained from directly criticizing Sharon, who he referred to as "my friend." Sharon, said Bush, understands that peace cannot be achieved by escalating the violence - and the U.S., he added, understands that a country must defend itself, just as America is doing. U.S. officials, who have long placed the onus on Palestinian President Yasser Arafat to crack down on violence against Israelis, have recently taken a tougher stance toward Sharon. "I, once again, call upon Chairman Arafat to make maximum effort to end terrorism against Israel, which undermines the prospects for peace," Bush said. "I'm counting on all parties in the region -- Prime Minister Sharon included -- to do everything they can to make these efforts a success." Zinni has made two trips to the Middle East, the last one ending on Jan. 7. Bush has declined to send him back since, apparently judging that the two sides were not ready for any fresh peace effort. Bush said that he believed the time was now right. http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=138871&contrassID =1&subContrassID=0&sbSubContrassID=0 From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Mar 8 16:09:40 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:07 2006 Subject: [R-G] Eyes-only memos show who done it (Argentina) - Gregory Palast Message-ID: <200203082309.g28N9eE18708@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> Thursday, February 7, 2002 Eyes-only memos show who done it by Greg Palast In Buenos Aires, the Paris of Latin America, police gunned down two dozen Argentines in December after they chose to face bullets rather than starvation. The nation's currency had crumbled and unemployment had shot up from a grim 16 percent to millions more than the collapsing government could measure. The economy had been murdered in cold blood. Who done it? The killers left fingerprints all over the warm corpse. A "Technical Memorandum of Understanding," dated September 5, 2000, was signed by Pedro Pou, president of Argentina's Central Bank for transmission to Horst Köhler, managing director of the International Monetary Fund. I received a complete copy of the inside report from . . . let's just say the envelope lacked a return address. The "understanding" required Argentina to cut the government budget deficit from $5.3 billion in 2000 to $4.1 billion in 2001. Think about that. Eighteen months ago, when the "understanding" was drafted, Argentina was already on the cliff-edge of a depression. One in six workers were unemployed. Even the half-baked economists at the IMF should have known that holding back government spending in a contracting economy would be like turning off the engines of an airplane in stall. The IMF is never wrong without being cruel as well. Under the boldface heading, "Improving the Conditions of the Poor," the agency directed Argentina to cut 20 percent from $200 monthly salaries paid under an emergency employment program. The "understanding" also promised a 12 to 15 percent cut in civil servant salaries and a pension "rationalization" (IMF-speak for a 13 percent cut in payments to the elderly). Salted in the IMF plans for pensioners and the poor were economic forecasts bordering on the delusional. The report projected that, once Argentina snuffed consumer spending, somehow the nation's economic production would leap by 3.7 percent and unemployment would fall. It didn't. The IMF plan kneecapped industrial production, which fell 25 percent in the first quarter of last year before keeling over completely to interest rates that by summer were running up to 90 percent on dollar-denominated earnings. ANOTHER ENVELOPE that walked onto my desk contained the memorandum for Argentina's "Country Assistance Plan" for the next four years. The June 25 document, signed by World Bank President James Wolfensohn, included a warning that recipients must use it "only in the performance of their official duties." My duty as a reporter is to tell you that the plan amounts to a breathtaking mix of cruelty and Titanic-sized self-deception. With the economy already in its death spiral, Wolfensohn claimed that "despite the setbacks, the goals set out in the last [year's] report remain valid and the strategy appropriate." The IMF plan, cooked up with the World Bank, would "greatly improve the outlook for the remainder of 2001 and for 2002, with growth expected to recover in the later half of 2001." In this eyes-only document, the World Bank president expressed particular pride that Argentina's government had made "a $3 billion cut in primary expenditures accommodating the increase in interest obligations." In other words, the government gouged spending on domestic needs to pay interest to creditors, mostly foreign banks. Crisis, indeed, has its bright side, as Wolfensohn crowed to his banker readers: "A major advance was made to eliminate outdated labor contracts." And "labor costs" had fallen due to "labor market flexibility induced by the de facto liberalization of the market via increased informality." Translation: Workers lost unionized jobs and turned to selling trinkets in the street. What on Earth would lure Argentina into embracing this program? The bait was a $20 billion emergency loan package and "stand-by" credit from the IMF, the World Bank and their commercial bank partners. But there is less to this generosity than meets the eye. The "understanding" assumed Argentina would continue its "Convertibility Plan," a 1991 policy that pegged the peso, the nation's currency, to the Yankee dollar at an exchange rate of one-to-one. The currency peg hadn't come cheap: Foreign banks working with the IMF had demanded that Argentina pay a whopping 16 percent risk premium above U.S. Treasury lending rates for the dollars needed to back the scheme. Now do the math. When Wolfensohn wrote his memo, Argentina owed $128 billion in debt. Normal interest plus the premium amounted to $27 billion a year. In other words, Argentina's people didn't net one penny from the $20 billion in "bailout" loans. The debt grew, but none of the money escaped New York, where it lingered to pay interest to U.S. creditors holding the bonds. The creditors range from big fish, led by New York-based Citibank, to little biters such as Steve Hanke, president of Toronto Trust Argentina, an "emerging market" fund. Hanke's outfit loaded up 100 percent on Argentine bonds during a 1995 currency panic. Cry not for Steve, Argentina. His 79.25 percent profit that year put his fund at the top of the speculators' league. Players call it "vulture investing": betting on the failure of the IMF policies. In his day job as a Johns Hopkins University economics professor, Hanke freely offers a cure for Argentina's woes. The advice would put him out of business: "Abolish the IMF," he told me. And, Hanke advised, abolish the one-for-one exchange rate. The currency peg forced Argentina to beg and borrow a steady supply of dollars to back each peso, and this became the rationale for the IMF and World Bank to let loose in the pampas their Four Horsemen of neoliberal policy: liberalized financial markets, reduced government, privatization and free trade. The "liberalizing" means allowing capital to flow freely across national borders. Capital has indeed flowed freely. Last year, Argentina's elite dumped its pesos for dollars and sent the hard loot to investment havens abroad, bleeding as much as $750 million a day from the country. Once upon a time, government-owned national and provincial banks supported their nation's debts. But in the mid-1990s, President Carlos Saúl Menem's government sold these off to foreign operators such as Citibank and Boston-based Fleet Bank. Former World Bank advisor Charles Calomiris told me these bank privatizations were a "really wonderful story." Wonderful for whom? With the foreign-owned banks unwilling to repay Argentine depositors, the government froze savings accounts December 3, effectively seizing money from the middle class to pay off the foreign creditors. To keep the foreign creditors smiling, the IMF "understanding" also required "reform of the revenue sharing system." This is the kinder, gentler way of stating that the U.S. banks would be paid by siphoning off tax receipts that the provinces had earmarked for education and other public services. The "understanding" also found cash in "reforming" (cutting from) the nation's health insurance system. And when cuts aren't enough to pay creditors, one can always sell "grandma's jewels," as Argentines describe the privatizations. The government sold much of the nation's water system in 1995 to Vivendi Universal. The French conglomerate promptly cut staff and raised prices, including 400 percent hikes in some areas. In his confidential memo, the World Bank's Wolfensohn sighs, "Almost all major utilities have been privatized," so now there's really nothing left to sell. The coup de grâce, spelled out in the "understanding," was the imposition of "an open trade policy." This pushed Argentina's exporters (with their products priced in U.S. dollars, via the peg) into a pathetic, losing competition against Brazilian goods priced in that nation's devalued currency. Have the World Bank and IMF learned from their errors? They learn the way a pig learns to sing: It can't, it won't and, if it tries, the resulting noise is unbearable. On January 9, with the Argentine capital in flames, IMF Deputy Managing Director Anne Krueger ordered the country's new president, Eduardo Duhalde, to cut still deeper into government expenditures. Interestingly, President George W. Bush backed the IMF budget-cutting advice-the same week he demanded that the U.S. Congress adopt a $50 billion scheme to spend the United States out of recession. WOLFENSOHN'S MEMO summed up the program: All Argentina needed to do was "reduce the cost of production," a step that required only a "flexible workforce." Translation: further cuts in pensions and wages or, better yet, no wages at all. To the dismay of Argentina's elite, however, the worker bees proved inflexibly obstinate in agreeing to their impoverishment. One such worker, Anibal Verón, a 37-year-old father of five, lost his job as a bus driver from a company that owed him nine months' pay. Verón joined unemployed Argentines, known as "piqueteros," who block roads. In November 2000, while clearing a blockade, the military police killed him with a bullet to the head. Yet globalization boosters portray resistance to the New World Order as a lark of pampered, naïve, western youths curing their ennui by "indulging in protest," as British Prime Minister Tony Blair put it. The U.S. and European media play to this theme, focusing on protests in Seattle and Genoa, while burying news of general strikes honored by millions of Argentine workers. The July 20 killing of Genoa protester Carlo Giuliani made front pages across the United States and Europe. But these newspapers ignored Verón's death and the June 17 killings of Argentine protesters Carlos Santillán, 27, and Oscar Barrios, 17, gunned down by police in a churchyard in General Mosconi, a northern town. Only in December, when Argentina failed to make an interest payment on foreign-held debt, did the Euro-American press report a "crisis." To implement their "reforms," the IMF and World Bank work with locals such as Domingo Cavallo, who resigned as economy minister in December after mass protests. Argentines remember him as head of the nation's Central Bank during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship. Mindful of that era, the Buenos Aires-based Peace and Justice Service (SERPAJ) is documenting cases in which police tortured northern protesters. SERPAJ leader Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980, told me his group has filed a formal complaint charging police with recruiting children as young as age 5 as informers for paramilitary squads. He compared the operation to the Hitler Youth, the organization that trained German boys in Nazi principles. Pérez Esquivel, who last year led protests against the proposed Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, says economic "liberalization" and political repression go hand in hand. ### More information on this topic can be found in Greg's latest books, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Democracy and Regulation, both of which will be published in April Greg Palast is an investigative journalist who writes a column called "Inside Corporate America" for the Observer, Britain's most respected Sunday newspaper. View all of Greg's columns at http://www.gregpalast.com http://www.americas.org/News/Features/200202_Argentina/200202EyesOnlyMemos.h tm From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Mar 8 16:10:41 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:07 2006 Subject: [R-G] US expands its presence across the globe - Guardian Message-ID: <200203082310.g28NAgE19735@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> The Guardian March 8, 2002 >From Suez to the Pacific US expands its presence across the globe By Ewen MacAskill Today, almost six months after the attacks on New York and Washington, the US is putting in place a network of forward bases stretching from the Middle East across the entire length of Asia, from the Red Sea to the Pacific. US forces are active in the biggest array of countries since the second world war. Troops, sailors and airmen are now established in countries where they have never before had a presence. The aim is to provide platforms from which to launch attacks on any group perceived by George Bush to be a danger to the US. Footage released by the Pentagon this week of US combat soldiers in the field in eastern Afghanistan graphically illustrated the extent to which the US has totally overcome its decade-long horror of putting troops on the ground. Forward bases are rapidly multiplying. Washington announced at the weekend the establishment of yet another base in Central Asia, a region where before September 11 there was no US presence. The new base will be at Manas in Kyrgystan. Until recently, US troops in that country would have been unthinkable, both as a former part of the Soviet Union and also close to the Chinese border. The base will have 3,000 personnel - troops, communications specialists and technical support - and combat aircraft. According to defense analysts, the intention is to have a host of such forward bases - manned by a few thousand troops and technicians all year round - that can provide support for huge reinforcements as required. These bases are being built in or near any country that Mr Bush decides constitutes "a clear and present danger". Tim Garden, an associate fellow of the London-based Royal Institute of International Affairs, said yesterday: "Everyone was expecting, when the Bush administration came in, that it would see America draw into itself and concentrate on long-range capability and reducing its presence on the ground. "Instead, they are looking at forward basing in lots of areas that may be of use to them for operations in the future." The long and growing list of bases underlines the extent to which the US has shifted from the "Black Hawk Down" era, when the ugly scenes that accompanied the killing of US soldiers in Somalia in 1993 so scarred the American psyche that the then president, Bill Clinton, vowed never again to commit ground troops abroad if there was any chance of them sustaining casualties. In support of US forces fighting in Afghanistan, the US has established bases, each manned by 3,000 troops, in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. US troops are also stationed in Pakistan, close both to the Afghan and Iranian borders. The US administration says publicly that it will leave the Central Asian bases after the "war on terrorism" is over but privately officials admit they are there to stay. As well as bases, the US is sending in military advisers to a host of countries. In another move into the former Soviet empire, the US announced in the last week that it is to send to Georgia up to 200 advisers plus Huey helicopters to help battle elements of al-Qaida as well as Chechen rebels. The US, in its hunt for al-Qaida fighters, has been patrolling the waters that encompass Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Within the last week, Saana, the Yemeni news agency, disclosed that the US is to send 100 military advisers to Yemen to help its republican guard take on tribal leaders alleged to be sympathetic to Osama bin Laden. US special forces are believed to be in the Sudan working with opposition groups from Somalia, gathering information about possible al-Qaida supporters in Somalia. In the Philippines, 660 US soldiers are helping to train and equip 3,800 Filipino soldiers in the fight against Islamist rebels, the Abu Sayyaf group, in the mountainous island of Basilan. Ivo Daadler, an international affairs specialist at the Brookings Institute in Washington, disputed that Mr Bush had ever been isolationist. He said Mr Bush was opposed only to the kind of humanitarian interventionism of the Clinton administration in places such as the Balkans, Haiti and Somalia, but not to intervention in what Mr Bush regarded as America's interest. Like the cold war, he predicted the war will last for years, if not decades, and will be "all-consuming". There will be further bases if Mr Bush resorts to force to implement the policy decision to remove the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein. The build-up of US forces in the Middle East will dwarf the 50,000 US servicemen at present operating between the Red Sea and the Philippines. Saudi Arabia, already keen to see the US pull out of its existing bases in the kingdom, is unlikely to allow the US to launch an attack on Iraq from its territory. Instead, the US will have to look elsewhere, to Kuwait and Turkey. The bases Afghanistan Combat role Pakistan Bases Uzbekistan Base Tajikistan Base Kyrgystan Base Georgia Military advisers and base Philippines Military advisers Red Sea Naval patrols Yemen Military advisers Sudan Military advisers in preparation for action in Somalia Saudi Arabia Base Kuwait US will need to beef up presence if action is taken against Iraq Turkey US will need big bases in the country if action is taken against Iraq From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Mar 8 16:58:44 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:07 2006 Subject: [R-G] The Arrogance of Occupation - Tikkun Magazine Message-ID: <200203082358.g28NwiE03216@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> http://www.tikkun.org/index.cfm/action/current/article/79.html Tikkun 12.14.2001 The Arrogance of Occupation An Israeli political scientist speaks out. By Lev Grinberg This last month has been marked by a dramatic change in the US and European attitudes towards the Israeli occupation. The US first, and subsequently the EU, have adopted the Israeli view that the core of the problem is Yasir Arafat. Bombing Arafat helicopters, confining him to the besieged city of Ramalla, and the recent occupation of parts of the city, have nothing to do with Israeli security or " the struggle against terror". The Israeli Government targeted Arafat, and succeeded to convince first the Israeli public and now the international community that this policy is legitimate. Present Israeli action against Arafat was preceded by the construction of an arrogant and paternalist discourse on the "character of Arafat". We, Israelis, are at liberty to dismiss one leader and appoint another in his place. This arrogance, in relation to Arafat, highlights the underlying dimension of the failed Oslo peace process and the Camp David Summit. The discourse labeling Arafat as the essence of the Palestinian problem did not achieve predominance by virtue of the campaign waged by the settlers' leaders in the occupied territories and the extreme right. Rather, it is the discourse of former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and his foreign minister, Shlomo Ben Ami, developed after the Camp David Summit aiming to hide their resounding failure. The over-simplified reduction of the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the character of Arafat, and hence the self-evident magic-wand solution of "removing the obstacle", was constructed by the leaders of the "Left", following their need to explain away the fiasco of their term of office. The arrogant discourse is reflected in the urge to enthrone in Arafat's place an alternative, more "obliging" leader, and in the paternalistic argument that "we know what is better for the Palestinians". In effect, each wing of Israel's political spectrum opts for a leader who would best serve its respective purposes. The "moderates" in the Government prefer a moderate, dressed in a business suit who would consent to deal in a rational Western manner, and the "extremists" fancy a Hamas type who could legitimize an open and sanguinous war against "the Palestinian evil". The two camps share the same discourse that the burden for resolving the crisis is on Arafat's shoulders, while simultaneously avoiding Israel's own responsibility. In fact the Government is fighting Arafat and his forces, preventing him and the Palestinian authorities from succeeding in any possible effective struggle against extremist Islam, because Palestinian extremism and terror facilitates hiding the core problem of occupation. Arrogance and paternalism is the underlying effect of occupation, which is not peculiar to the Israeli situation. European settlers that occupied regions inhabited by non-Europeans have developed similar discourses. The local inhabitants were classified as inferior and primitive, and deserving no individual rights, certainly no collective right to their homeland. Such has been the state of affairs in Israel / Palestine since the onset of the colonization, and the Oslo peace accords introduced no fundamental change. The land belongs to us, Israelis, we are its masters, and the Palestinians must accept whatever we are benevolent enough to offer them. The indignation of the "Left" towards the Palestinians following Camp David is over their ingratitude and their refusal to accept Barak's "generous" offer. The support of the US for the Israeli attitude caused despair among the Palestinians. The Oslo accords were shaped according to the hegemonic arrogance of occupation. Having been initially "granted" Jericho and Gaza, Arafat was placed "on probation". If he passed the test, he would be awarded additional territory; if not, the process would be halted, as Rabin proclaimed (Netanyahu was more direct, as in the slogan he coined: "If they provide results, they'll get more, if they don't, they won't!"). Resumption of the Oslo process depended upon Arafat's "good conduct", his grades to be determined by Israel. Arafat was expected to deliver what the Israeli army had failed to: security to the Israelis. However, he wasn't entitled to protect the security or independence of his people. Hence Arafat's authority was not derived from the Palestinian people and their legitimate rights, rather from Israel's consent to his presence; hence it is also feasible to expel him. What did Israel undertake in return? Merely to vacate the larger Palestinian towns (and some land in their vicinity, as Israel found fit) thus, allowing Arafat to appoint governors and policemen, but not enabling territorial contiguity or sovereignty. Israel did not take upon itself relinquishment of military control, the creation of a Palestinian state, the granting of economic independence, withdrawal to 1967 borders, and certainly not the resolution of volatile issues such as Jerusalem or the Palestinian refugees. Israel did not even halt or slow down its colonization drive in the occupied territories. The entire agreement rested upon Israeli goodwill. Thus, the second indispensable pre-condition for the success of the Oslo accords was Rabin's retention of power. Rabin's assassination and Arafat's failure to provide for Israel's security rendered the Oslo accords doomed. Ariel Sharon is completing now the historical project that he started in 1982 with the occupation of Lebanon. He is working with the same logic based on military power used to destroy the legitimate representation of the Palestinian people. In the case of Lebanon, he was stopped by the international community that prevented him from entering the besieged Beirut. However, he succeeded to enthrone Bashir Jumayel as president of Lebanon. As will be recalled, Jumayel was assassinated within days after his appointment, while the Israeli army was drawn into the 18-year occupation and fight against Lebanese militias that ended in Israel's forcible removal from Lebanon. The Palestinians learned well the lessons of Lebanon, and are weary of the Oslo accords that they regard as an alibi for continued occupation. Arafat did not instigate the Intifada, although he may endeavor to lead it so as to retain his status as the leader of the people for whom he is accountable. Unless we, the Israelis, cast off our arrogant mode of thinking, and our position as an occupying power, the present cycle of bloodshed can only intensify, with Arafat and even more so, in his absence. Europe, that has witnessed the arrogance of colonialism as a dominant power, should not return now to adopt similar attitudes even when their source is the Jewish State. International intervention to stop Sharon is urgently needed for the sake of the Palestinians and the Israelis as well. Lev Grinberg is a political sociologist, and the Director of the Humphrey Institute for Social Research at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. From mstainsby at tao.ca Sat Mar 9 05:10:47 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:07 2006 Subject: [R-G] AFP: Milosevic trial update Message-ID: <00a701c1c763$741c8380$76195218@vc.shawcable.net> AFP. 8 March 2002. Milosevic argues Kosovo conflict a struggle against al-Qaeda. THE HAGUE -- Slobodan Milosevic waved an FBI document at his war crimes trial Friday to support his claim the bloodshed in Kosovo was a struggle against terrorists backed by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network. As his trial wound up its fourth week, the Serbian leader turned to one of his chief defenses: that he was struggling against separatists and terrorists to hold a crumbling Yugoslav republic together. "Neither the army nor the police have been implicated in war crimes," he told the UN tribunal. Cross-examining a Kosovo human rights activist, Milosevic suggested al-Qaeda and other Islamic mujahedin fighters were actively supporting the guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) during the 1998-99 conflict. He entered into evidence what he called a statement by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation to the US Congress which said, "al-Qaeda supports Muslim fighters in Bosnia, Chechnya and Kosovo." When rights activist Sabit Kadriu reiterated his testimony that the Serbs went on a spree of "mutilating and killing civilians," Milosevic shot back: "We know whose specialty this is. It is the al-Qaeda branch in Kosovo." Milosevic's brother Borislav said last month that the KLA had direct ties to al-Qaeda. He said bin Laden traveled to Albania in 1998. The former Balkans leader spent the day sparring with Kadriu, an Albanian Kosovar, in a cross-examination laced with political polemics that drew exasperated rebukes for both sides from impatient judges. Clearly frustrated by the tribunal's efforts to rein in his questioning, Milosevic snapped back at Presiding Judge Richard May: "I'd like to ask you not to give me instructions, please." Kadriu, a teacher and branch leader of the Council for the Defense of Human Rights and Freedoms, testified about Serb savagery in Kosovo, including massacres of Albanians, mutilations and public rapes in 1999. Milosevic dismissed the accounts as "sheer, unadulterated lies" and came back Friday with his own litany of atrocities he said were perpetrated on Serbian Kosovars. He grilled Kadriu on alleged killings, burnings and rapes of Serbs as well as the destruction of their forests, orchards and cemeteries in the predominently Albanian province of Serbia. "Do you know how many inhabitants of Kosovo, under pressure from Albanian violence, had to leave the province?" the Serbian leader thundered. "Do you know, or do you not know?" The two men clashed over the deaths of more than 60 members of one Kosovar family. Kadriu said they were massacred in their house by Serb forces; Milosevic said they were KLA members killed in action. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international "They are all Enron, we are all Argentina" --WEF protesters. ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Sat Mar 9 15:12:54 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:07 2006 Subject: [R-G] Hundreds of Sept. 11 Detainees Still in N.J. Jails Message-ID: <003601c1c7b7$90595240$76195218@vc.shawcable.net> I don't understand *at all* why the North American left has said next to nothing about the Pinochet-esque dissappeared people- racially profiled to get there, and remaining because of the silence of their neighbours (us). This should be one of the top priorities. No excuses. Macdonald ------- AP. 9 March 2002. Hundreds of Sept. 11 Detainees Still in N.J. Jails. NEWARK, N.J. -- Khalid Musa was like a lot of other Middle Eastern men who came to the United States last summer: young, eager to see relatives, and hoping to make a few dollars while they were here. And he is like a lot of other Middle Eastern men who have been sitting in jail cells in the United States since last fall. They have been caught up in a wave of mass detentions, leaving hundreds still behind bars on immigration charges, with little or no evidence linking them to a serious crime, let alone the Sept. 11 attacks. The 23-year-old Saudi native, who has Australian citizenship but lives in Jordan, was arrested Oct. 4 as the government's roundup of recent immigrants was kicking into high gear. At its peak it took in more than 1,100 foreigners, mostly of Arab or South Asian descent. Hundreds have since been released or deported, but the Justice Department says about 326 remain in custody, most of them in New Jersey jails. Special Agent Sandra Carroll, a spokeswoman from the Newark FBI office, could not offer an estimation of how many of those arrested after Sept. 11 were charged with crimes other than immigration violations. Musa's only transgression was staying in the U.S. beyond the 90 days permitted under a waiver program that admits people from certain countries without requiring a visa. "He can't understand, and we can't either, why he's been in jail for five months," said Musa's brother-in-law, Samer Mahmoud of Yonkers, N.Y. "He said he's afraid he's going to spend the rest of his life there." Musa was cleared by the FBI in November, but remains in jail on immigration charges. In mid-February, his lawyer sued the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to get him deported. Regis Fernandez said he was told Musa would be put on a plane as soon as travel arrangements could be made and his belongings retrieved, but that hasn't happened yet. The detainee population hit its height in late November, just as the Muslim holy month of Ramadan began. Detainees complained they were not allowed to pray properly, and were not given halal food prepared according to Muslin law. Some New Jersey detainees staged a hunger strike during Ramadan to protest their continued detention. Since then, immigration officials granted them more space for communal prayer meetings and gave them halal food on religious holidays. The government has taken advantage of the secrecy and indefinite suspensions permitted under the much looser immigration law, instead of the more rigorous provisions of criminal law. It often refuses to release their names, countries of origin, what they were charged with, or at times even how many were being held. While the detentions may be legal, rights groups say they're far from just. The government "rounded up a thousand people and hardly found anything," said New Jersey immigration attorney Sohail Mohamed. "It shows how desperate they are to show that they're doing something." The American Civil Liberties Union's New Jersey chapter is suing in an effort to get names of all INS detainees. But INS spokesman Bergeron said the paucity of information will continue. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international "They are all Enron, we are all Argentina" --WEF protesters. ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Sat Mar 9 16:14:07 2002 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:07 2006 Subject: [R-G] The putdown "You're not a conspiracy theorist, are you?" has had its day!! Message-ID: <002f01c1c7c0$1d1afa00$33378d18@Indy1> PLEASE FORWARD real conspiracy theory (english) Thursday 07 Mar 2002 author: reposted from Straight Goods by lee summary: The putdown "You're not a conspiracy theorist, are you?" has had its day!! Important article by the host of VisionTV Insight's "The Great Deception", Barrie Zwicker. http://indymedia.org/print.php3?article_id=146186 From hunterbadbear at earthlink.net Mon Mar 4 05:40:56 2002 From: hunterbadbear at earthlink.net (Hunter Gray) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:07 2006 Subject: [R-G] [Redbadbear] Left Solidarity [was the "12 step program for recovering fundamentalists"] References: <3C815FC7.2DAAFB8C@yahoo.com> <003401c1c34d$ef99b290$89685d3f@FRED> Message-ID: <003501c1c379$da07fbe0$dca90e3f@ibm22761429477> This is a response, E., regarding your rather facetious post on religious fundamentalism --with a take-off on the program of Alcoholics Anonymous: "12 step program for recovering fundamentalists." Because it, in its own way and however inadvertently, addresses a number of issues concerning Left solidarity [and the lack of it], I'm posting it in several other places where these kinds of issues, literally and symbolically, have recently arisen. I am doing so minus your name [simply as an amenity.] In a very friendly way, E. -- and, using the old Mississippi term, that "I do so politely" -- I'm frankly not quite sure why you're on this particular trail. As you've gathered, and I haven't yet gotten the impression that you and I differ much in this context, I don't "Red bait." I make my own decisions on who and with what I hook up and work -- and I speak my own piece. I certainly have and have always had my strong loyalties -- personally and organizationally. I can and do debate with passion. But I'm much, much more inclined to focus my activist attention and my activist attacks on the bosses and Federal finks et al., and lend my efforts toward the achievement of social justice and socialist democracy, than I am on the intricacies of someone's Left affiliations -- now or decades ago. I've always been inclined to wonder why some Left folk, sometimes even very nice ones, try to secure a measure of "respectability" or bolster their sense of personal security -- say, in the eyes of the power structure or even the liberals! -- at the public expense of other Left persons and groups. I may have been the only guy -- barely into his twenties -- who, in the continuing Red Scare [especially in challenging places like Arizona] could work congenially with three editors from three differing radical traditions: Fred Thompson [Industrial Worker], the Wobbly; Bert Cochran [American Socialist], the former Trotskyist -- and fiercely independent socialist; and Charles Humboldt [Mainstream], the Communist --and a very ecumenical one indeed who was, very sadly for his publication and his personal vision, cruelly hatcheted by, as his loyal colleague, the very good and always enduringly creative Dr Annette Rubinstein put it so bitingly well in Encyclopedia of the American Left, the "ever more rigidly philistine" forces. The witch-hunters didn't like those guys or the journals they edited or the very decent things for which they as humans and editors stood. And the witch-hunters obviously didn't and don't like me at all. The 3,000 plus pages of my FBI files that I finally got [not counting several hundred other pages FBI refuses to give me] and in various batches over many years in the 1980s, have various things hostile to the publications those three fine editors edited -- and hostile to much, much more [e.g., other labor and radical things, Native rights, civil rights and civil liberties, peace, socialism and much else indeed from the Sunny Side.] Those three veteran Left editors certainly helped me, a very young and geographically isolated and hot-eyed radical Indian kid just out of the Army who was learning to organize and write. We were all on the same basic side. To them, and to many others like them, I owe a debt that's more than just considerable -- and that holds true for many other Left editors and persons of various Left faiths right into this present moment. Again, I have my loyalties and commitments. But, in the last analysis, I guess I make my judgments on the basis of what people actually do -- are tangibly doing -- to effectively help, in a variety of ways, the "people of the fewest alternatives." You, E., are certainly and personally doing your best on that critical front. On the matter of AA: Fortunately, I'm not an alcoholic -- only by the luck of whatever draw. I am, however, very careful about how I personally handle alcohol. And, in my extended family and circle of friends and acquaintances, there has been considerable alcohol-related tragedy. A good part of my volunteer time is often spent working with alcoholics [of all sorts of ethnicities] and their families and that's brought me into very close association with AA and its related programs -- for which I have the highest respect. I would never comment on AA and its endeavours jokingly or lightly. To come to the really specific matter at hand: I spend virtually no time at all worrying about someone else's religion. In the Deep South over a six year period [1961-67], much of it characterized by the highest drama and the most extreme danger, I spoke in hundreds of fundamentalist Black churches. Some of my more poignant memories, "forever etched," are driving through the dark and hot and lethal Southern night to a particular rural church -- in piney woods, or swampland, or cotton or tobacco turf -- where the frightened but brave minister waited with his frightened but brave flock to hear the message of the frightened but brave young organizer with his bundle of leaflets and other activist materials. And then, in due course, all of those frightened but brave people [including the organizer] were in frightened but brave public demonstrations -- facing an array of utterly reactionary and violent forces whose desperate viciousness we came to realize indicated depths and heights of fear far, far greater than ours could ever be. Let me tell you -- using the very broad "you:" There are many, many times when the Movement [with its various attendant dangers] and the social justice trail one has to take and will -- and in the end, the long range, will take successfully -- is enhanced mightily by singing, say, "Solidarity Forever" or "Joe Hill" or -- "We Shall Overcome" [with the words, of course, "we are not afraid" and "God is on our side."] I never worry about someone's religion or the Bible or the Book of Mormon or the Koran -- or whatever else embodies their particular beliefs in that realm [or, as far as that goes, books that involve the lack of religious beliefs.] That's their business. They have their views, I have mine. If t he institutional Church gets in the way of an organizing campaign, then we'll find ways to deal effectively with that roadblock -- and push past it and on toward the Sun. But on personal religious beliefs, I hold to the Indian Way: leave me alone with My Way, good luck with Yours, and we'll see where we all wind up -- wherever and when. We may all be surprised. In the final scenes of that fine film, the old version of "Inherit the Wind" -- the Scopes trial, of course -- Spencer Tracy as Henry Drummond [Darrow] stands in the empty Tennessee courtroom. They've all gone -- including his very facetious agnostic friend, [Henry Mencken -- played by Gene Kelly.] "Darrow" [and, from what I've heard of the great Attorney for the Damned, this could well be quite precisely what happened] stands with the Bible in one hand and the Origin of the Species in the other. With a privately quizzical expression, he weighs each one. And then, smiling, he claps them together -- and walks out of the court and on to the Next Dragon. Let's go after the Dragons and not each other. Yours, Hunter Gray [Hunterbear, John R Salter, Jr] Micmac / St Francis Abenaki / St Regis Mohawk Hunter Gray [ Hunterbear ] www.hunterbear.org ( social justice ) ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Buy Stock for $4. No Minimums. FREE Money 2002. http://us.click.yahoo.com/BgmYkB/VovDAA/ySSFAA/.zNplB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: Redbadbear-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ From mstainsby at tao.ca Sat Mar 9 19:39:50 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:07 2006 Subject: [R-G] Former Black Power Activist Convicted Message-ID: <023d01c1c7dc$da903160$76195218@vc.shawcable.net> AP. 9 March 2002. Former Black Power Activist Convicted in Shooting Death of Sheriff's Deputy. ATLANTA -- H. Rap Brown, the 1960s black power radical turned Muslim cleric, was convicted of murder Saturday in the shooting of a sheriff's deputy who tried to serve him with a warrant two years ago. Jurors deliberated 10 hours over two days before finding the Muslim cleric now called Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin guilty of shooting to death Deputy Ricky Kinchen and wounding Deputy Aldranon English on a southwest Atlanta street. The trial now moves to a penalty phase, in which jurors will decide whether to recommend execution or life in prison for the 58-year-old Al-Amin. He was found guilty of 13 counts, including murder, aggravated assault on a police officer, obstruction and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. The verdict came at the end of the third week of the trial, which was postponed once after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks because the judge feared anti-Muslim sentiment would taint the jury pool. English testified that Al-Amin - a prominent Muslim iman in Atlanta's West End community - pulled a high-powered assault rifle and opened fire when he and Kinchen tried to serve him with a warrant on minor Cobb County charges on March 16, 2000. Prosecutors said Al-Amin shot Kinchen three times in the groin with a 9 mm as he lay bleeding in the street. English picked Al-Amin out of a photo lineup from his hospital bed the day after the shooting and identified him again in court. Defense attorneys tried to convince jurors that English was mistaken in his identification and that someone else shot the deputies. They also suggested that Al-Amin was framed as part of a government conspiracy they said had dogged him since his days as a prominent Black Panther in the '60s. Al-Amin was arrested four days after the shootings in White Hall, Ala. The .223-caliber assault rifle and handgun were recovered in the woods near the area where he was arrested. The defense suggested that the weapons were planted by federal authorities. Al-Amin leads one of the nation's largest black Muslim groups, the National Ummah. The movement, which has formed 36 mosques around the nation, is credited with revitalizing poverty-stricken pockets such as Atlanta's West End, where Al-Amin owned a grocery store. Al-Amin is better known as H. Rap Brown, who served as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Brown changed his name when he converted to the Dar-ul Islam movement in the '70s while serving a five-year sentence for his role in a robbery that ended in a shootout with New York police. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international "They are all Enron, we are all Argentina" --WEF protesters. ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Sat Mar 9 23:12:03 2002 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:07 2006 Subject: [R-G] VIDEO ARCHIVES OF MILOSEVIC "TRIAL" Message-ID: <001b01c1c7fa$7f342600$33378d18@Indy1> VIDEO ARCHIVES OF MILOSEVIC "TRIAL" (english) by John Flaherty 5:39pm Sat Mar 9 '02 (Modified on 7:24pm Sat Mar 9 '02) address: www.icdsm.org You can watch the testimony (of various KLA people) and cross-examination (by Milosevic) at The Hague's kangaroo court at http://hague.bard.edu/video.html http://indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=147582&group=webcast From hunterbadbear at earthlink.net Thu Mar 7 09:38:47 2002 From: hunterbadbear at earthlink.net (Hunter Gray) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:07 2006 Subject: [R-G] [Redbadbear] Robeson / Mine-Mill / Peace Arch Commemoration -- Excellent CD Message-ID: <000901c1c5f6$8ff4db20$82a90e3f@ibm22761429477> Note by Hunterbear: Although I've mentioned this earlier, this signal event is well worth reiterating broadly and generally -- and especially for people in the Pacific Northwest. Although not indicated in this release, the May 18 1952 Peace Arch Concert was followed by another successful Robeson Peace Arch concert/demonstration -- August 16 1953. Paul Robeson's very fine songs and words from each of those Peace Arch concerts -- as well as solid comment from Harvey Murphy, a major Canadian Mine-Mill leader -- are all readily available on a recent CD: "Paul Robeson: The Peace Arch Concerts." It's quickly secured via conventional commercial sources and from its producer, Folk Era Records. Their website is http://www.folkera.com We secured several as soon as they appeared. giving some away to friends. Our experience with the CD -- and all feedback from friends -- has been extremely positive. [Among the many songs are two classic renditions of "Joe Hill." ] Hunterbear ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------Paul Robeson Centennial Celebration Robeson Peace Arch Concert Anniversary On May 18, 1952 Paul Robeson stood on the back of a flat bed truck and sang songs of defiance and solidarity to 40,000 people on the US-Canadian border. Fifty years later, on May 18, 2002, that event will be commemorated with another concert on the border. The 1952 Concert The venue was an odd one for one of the great artists of the 20th century, and the sponsor, the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers equally curious, or maybe not. "Mine Mill", as it was known, had been founded in a jail cell in Idaho in 1893. It was a union that represented some of the most militant North American workers, the hard rock miners, whose battles with the mine owners were legendary. Paul Robeson, whose own uncompromising militancy in the face of oppression and injustice was equally well known, had been invited to sing at the Fourth Canadian Convention of the union in Vancouver in February of 1952. The American authorities, however, had seized Robeson's passport, and he was denied permission to leave his country. The convention heard Robeson sing over the telephone and promised to organize a concert on the US-Canadian border, and indeed they did. Accompanied by Lawrence Brown on piano, Robeson sang and spoke for 45 minutes. He introduced his first song stating "I stand here today under great stress because I dare, as do you -- all of you, to fight for peace and for a decent life for all men, women and children". He proceeded to sing spirituals, folk songs, labour songs, and a passionate version of Old Man River, written for him in the 20's, slowly enunciating "show a little grit and you land in jail", underlining the fact that his government had turned the entire country into a prison for Robeson and many others. It was a magnificent performance and a triumph for a movement facing the scourge of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. The Korean War was at its height, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were under sentence of death, and it seemed the social and political gains of the previous generation were being eroded by a right-wing offensive. The Peace Arch Concert was a rare victory, a massive solidarity, and a demonstration that the dream of a different world was still alive. The concert was recorded and issued as a record by the union. It now is available as a CD. The 2002 Anniversary Celebration To commemorate that event, and to show that what Robeson fought for is still worth fighting for, a committee has been formed in Vancouver to organize a concert exactly 50 years after the Robeson concert. The members of the committee are cultural and social activists and trade unionists; the same kind of folks who put together the 1952 concert. The piano Robeson played, lovingly kept all these years, will once again adorn a flat bed truck for a stage. Artists who live, work and sing for the things that Robeson represented, "peace and a decent life for all men, women, and children", will sing from that truck. Groups supporting a wide array of struggles will be invited to participate in an information fair, giving the event a practical turn. The committee will do everything in its power to draw the largest crowd possible and to show that the dream that inspired Robeson still lives in the hearts and minds of many thousands. Some of the issues we face would be familiar to Robeson solidarity in the face of war, racism, and oppression; others have new names such as globalization, or neo-liberalism, but the struggle is the same. We are asking individuals and organizations that share the beliefs that Paul Robeson represented, who cherish the memory of an uncompromising artist, and who believe in bringing together thousands of people to publicly celebrate those beliefs and that artist, to give as generously as they can. Stand with us! For more information on the Robeson anniversary concert plans, contact Seth Klein, Director of the BC Office, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, tel. 604-801-5121. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- >From People's Voice Hunter Gray [ Hunterbear ] www.hunterbear.org ( social justice ) ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Buy Stock for $4. No Minimums. FREE Money 2002. http://us.click.yahoo.com/BgmYkB/VovDAA/ySSFAA/.zNplB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: Redbadbear-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ From mstainsby at tao.ca Sun Mar 10 12:49:12 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:07 2006 Subject: [R-G] Police armed with tear gas as thousands prepare to descend on Barcelona Message-ID: <001001c1c86c$a8373ca0$76195218@vc.shawcable.net> British protesters flock to summit Police armed with tear gas as thousands prepare to descend on Barcelona Paul Harris and Burhan Wazir Sunday March 10, 2002 The Observer Thousands of British protesters have drawn up plans to descend upon a European summit in Spain this week amid fears of a repeat of riots in Genoa last year that saw one protester killed by police. Tens of thousands of anti-globalisation activists are travelling to Barcelona for the meeting of European Union heads of state and government. The summit, on 15-16 March, will be the first such meeting since the summit in Genoa, which saw the worst rioting in western Europe for decades. British protesters, ranging from hardcore anarchists to environmentalists, are travelling to the city. London-based Global Resistance is organising transport from Madrid to Barcelona. 'We expect a big turnout. We need to show people how powerful we can be,' said organiser Guy Taylor. Police surveillance on suspected British troublemakers has been stepped up. Special Branch detectives have been monitoring the movements of known activists, using intelligence gathered in Genoa and during last year's May Day protests, which brought London's West End to a halt and caused several hundred thousand pounds of damage. Spanish police are determined to prevent any breakdown in law and order and have focused on anarchist groups. Since Genoa, anarchist protests have been labelled potentially terrorist activities in the EU, according to security reports seen by The Observer. One report, studying terrorist trends in Europe over the past 12 months, concluded: 'The possibility of a resurrection of the left-wing and anarchist terror groups is existent.' That raises the possibility that anarchist demonstrators arrested in Barcelona could be charged with terrorism, not public order, offences. Security measures to protect the summit and the European leaders who will be in Barcelona are to be as strict as those in Genoa. More than 8,500 police will be on the city's streets, including 3,000 officers drafted in from other parts of Spain. Riot police will be armed with tear gas and plastic bullets as well as pistols with live ammunition. Ambulance teams have been set up to deal with expected casualties and mobile 'police intervention units' will act as a mobile police force moving quickly to any area of the city if rioting breaks out. Police have been carrying out random identity checks in city squares chosen for demonstrations and have raided several squats. A security zone is to be set up around the conference centre around the Avenida Diagonal and the Catalonia Palace of Congresses, where the summit is being held. Similar zones will be set up around the two main hotels used by delegations at the summit, the Juan Carlos and Princess Sofia. University campuses will also be closed down and private cars banned from the zone from midday on Thursday to midday on Saturday. 'The situation is high risk. We know that and we prepared for it,' said a senior EU source. The Observer has learnt that at least 1,000 protesters from 'Black Bloc' groups will be attending the protests. Made up mainly of extremist anarchists from Germany and eastern Europe, they will try to breach the security zone and enter the summit buildings. Unlike the vast majority of peaceful protesters, Black Bloc activists use violence to achieve their ends. Similar plans took place in Genoa but were stopped by the Italian police in pitched battles that trashed large areas of the city centre. 'It is inevitable that the Black Bloc will arrive in Barcelona to show their strength. Genoa descended into a free-for-all with heavy violence. And the Black Bloc has taken all the credit for that. Barcelona proves irresistible,' said Richard Green, a protester from Bristol who will travel to Barcelona. Another British demonstrator, Andy Wallace, 31, is taking a coach to Barcelona this weekend. He expects violence from the Spanish authorities: 'I think protesters in Barcelona next weekend will expect the worst.' Spanish officials have applied to the EU for permission to refuse entry to anyone suspected of coming to Barcelona to participate in unrest. Similar tactics were tried before Genoa, but failed to prevent large numbers of protesters entering Italy. However, the clampdown has been condemned by human rights groups and protesters' organisations. In Barcelona, residents' groups have criticised the high-profile police presence and accused the city authorities of adopting a siege mentality. 'There is an alarmist climate being created by the police. It is one thing guaranteeing safety and another turning the city into a bunker, preventing to a large extent the freedom of movement of its citizens,' said a spokesman for the Federation of Neighbourhood Associations of Barcelona. Spanish police have liaised with their Italian counterparts to try to avoid a repeat of the Genoa violence. They have prepared special fast-track court procedures which could see people sentenced within 12 to 72 hours of being picked up by the police. Although European leaders, including Tony Blair, initially praised the hardline taken by police in Genoa, a picture later emerged of brutality and beatings. One Italian protester, 23-year-old Carlos Giuliani, was shot and killed. One protester who will not be in Barcelona this week is Norman Blair, 38, the Briton who is taking legal action against the Italian government after being kidnapped and tortured by police in Genoa. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international "They are all Enron, we are all Argentina" --WEF protesters. ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Sun Mar 10 13:05:37 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:07 2006 Subject: [R-G] Journalist Admits Lying Abour Balkans Massacre Message-ID: <003c01c1c86e$f2af0a40$76195218@vc.shawcable.net> Journalist Admits Lying Abour Balkans Massacre VETERAN 60 Minutes reporter Richard Carleton has admitted he had misled and lied to viewers by showing footage from another massacre site to illustrate a story about the massacre of Srebrenica. Mr Carleton, 60 Minutes executive producer John Westacott and producer Howard Sacre are suing the ABC and its Media Watch team over two Media Watch segments in July 2000 accusing 60 Minutes of lifting footage from an earlier BBC documentary. Mr Carleton told the ACT supreme court yesterday that being accused of plagiarism was the journalistic equivalent of paedophilia. But under cross-examination by counsel for the ABC, Media Watch presenter Paul Barry and former executive producer Peter McEvoy, Mr Carleton conceded he had knowingly used footage of a morgue and a mass grave site far away from Srebrenica to illustrate the Channel Nine report. Asked by barrister Terence Tobin if he had misled viewers, Mr Carleton said: "In the technical meaning of the word misleading, yes." Asked had he lied, he said: "In so far as the meaning of the word lie is taken (to mean) misleading, yes." But Mr Carleton denied he had behaved unethically as a journalist and said the footage had enhanced viewers' understanding of the 1995 massacre of Muslim residents by Bosnian Serbs. The hearing before Justice Terence Higgins is continuing. /rlt/rz ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international "They are all Enron, we are all Argentina" --WEF protesters. ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From aaron at istop.com Sun Mar 10 17:12:18 2002 From: aaron at istop.com (aaron@istop.com) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:07 2006 Subject: [R-G] Youth profiled as Terrorist by Brits Message-ID: <20020311001218.B4CBC17027@ns.istop.com> Brits Arrest Highland Park Youth in Terrorist Scare Insanity. Highland Park, Michigan - "I am not satisfied that your intentions to study are genuine and realistic not that you will leave the United Kingdom on completion of your studies," was the statement on the official letter barring sixteen year old Highland Park resident and his five companions from jolly old England. Six African American teenagers were profiled as terrorist by British and US authorities, denied entry to England and jailed overnight February 24 after a Continental Airlines pilot initially refused to return to the US with them abroad. The youth had expected to spend six month in Birmingham, England studying the Quran and the Arabic language at the Al-Hira Islamic College and to seeing another country for the first time. The other youth, 17 and 18 are from New York. Instead, they went straight to jail after being interrogated about Osama Bin Laden. Sixteen-year-old Highland Park resident, Muhammad Abdullah stated "It made me feel very angry. We went to that country to learn, thinking of this new opportunity to see another country, and they wouldn't let us in because we are Muslim." "They asked me about Osama Bin Laden, do I think he's a bad Muslim or a good Muslim and do I feel sorry for the people who died at the World Trade Center. They asked me about the war, would I fight for America or Afghanistan. I told them I'm just going to fight for my religion." During the young men's detention, they were not allowed to make contact with Abdullah's stepfather Amam Ramee Muhammad, a teacher at the school who had come to the Birmingham International Airport to meet them, or their parents in the US. When they final flew back to the US on two separate flights they were once again interrogated along similar lines by police in Newark before being released to return home. A disgruntled recently laid off police officer in Highland Park was asked for comments on the detention of the youth and stated, "I know what it means to profile. If these kids fit the profile, what kind of damn profile is that?" Abdullah's mother, Zaynab Abdullah said there are no schools in the United States that offer a complete study of the Arabic language in addition to the study of the Quran. She said the Al-Hira College is a highly reputable institute and was selected over institutes in Syria and Sudan because she felt that the youth would be more comfortable in familiar surroundings. The disgruntled laid off police officer stated upon hearing the above comment, "That's too damn familiar for me." Joe F. From pieinsky at igc.org Sun Mar 10 19:27:53 2002 From: pieinsky at igc.org (Jay Moore) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:07 2006 Subject: [R-G] Interesting Report from the "Other Side" Message-ID: <003f01c1c8a4$5cc9b800$657df2d0@bypass.com> US CEASES OPERATION ANACONDA AND INITIATES NEGOTIATIONS TO FREE 18 CAPTURED US SOLDIERS Special Report(Daily Ummat): Reliable sources have disclosed that the US has offered to negotiate with the Mujahideen and make some deal in exchange for the freedom of 18 US soldiers, captured by the Mujahideen. These arrested US soldiers include at least two senior high ranking officers. It is believed that Operation Anaconda has been stopped because of American concern as to the fate of these 18 prisoners. More to come shortly, Allah Willing. http://www.azzam.com Daily news, articles and interviews on the Jihad in Afghanistan From pieinsky at igc.org Sun Mar 10 19:36:06 2002 From: pieinsky at igc.org (Jay Moore) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:07 2006 Subject: [R-G] U.S. Running into Military Trouble Message-ID: <005b01c1c8a5$8604b8e0$657df2d0@bypass.com> This is the battle that was supposed to be over in a "matter of days". Now, they're pulling back to "regroup": http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/central/03/10/ret.afghanistan.fighting /index.html See also the analysis at www.debka.com which says that they may use tactical Nukes next. jay From mstainsby at tao.ca Sun Mar 10 21:00:04 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:07 2006 Subject: [R-G] An Open Letter to the anti-capitalist movement Message-ID: <003601c1c8b1$3a799e20$76195218@vc.shawcable.net> This is an open letter to anti-capitalist activists under the age of thirty. My name is Macdonald Stainsby, though those of you who know me would probably call me Mac. I am writing this today after attending the memorial services for a man in Vancouver, BC, Canada by the name of Harry Rankin. I am moved to write this partly out of my own sense of duty coming away form this memorial, partly out of my own frustration emanating from a serious lack of people from my own generation at this memorial. Harry Rankin was the subject but the subliminal story line of the meeting was far more than that: it was a history lesson about where we fit in as fighters for a better world in the year 2002. It was an opportunity to learn what great privilege we possess to stand in these shadows; to learn what great responsibility we carry on our shoulders everyday. It is urgent that we begin to understand our own trajectory, our own history. We are not going to see the history books written to favour dissidents and revolutionaries- that is, until we create the new world free of hunger, homelessness and war that we are striving for. We need to understand something: however great our current victories- we sure as hell didn't invent anti-capitalism, struggle or resistance. We all say we know that, but we act like we don't. I will first try to explain it through a personal tale. I was raised with very strong "Never again!" sentiments. From an early time in life, the horrors of WWII were impressed upon me, even though it wasn't from a radical perspective. It dawned on me quite early on just how important it was to know what had happened to us before now, so as to get a better picture of where it is we are. Ahead to six years ago: I found myself, after taking political science courses in college, someone who was definitely against the capitalist system. I retained the viciously anti-fascist sentiments I had been raised with and continued to consider history part of where we come from. We in the movement all have a moment or a memory of something that turns you upside down and steels your attitude; a moment that helps define not what you think or how you feel- but rather that you are a force for something better. For me, the greatest anger I ever had (up to that point) with our global rulers came with the bombing of Yugoslavia- and a moment that changed my attitude forever was a man from Serbia at a demonstration in Vancouver. I don't know his name and probably would not recognise him if I were to see his face today, only three years on. But his impact was permanent. Some local activists had set up a speaker system where the sounds of the air raid sirens and the bombs falling on Belgrade were played so the crowd could hear. The noise, even when fictional, was enough to cause internal silence and reflection. Then "he" turned around. He was probably 80 years old. He asked me for my "target" sign- the symbol of the Yugoslav resistance that I had been carrying. When he got it, he wrote on the cardboard "SMRT FASIZMU, SLOBODA NARODU". He stared me down and pointed a finger at me and said, "You understand? It means `smash fascism, freedom to the people'. Go and tell all your friends, make them understand." I said thanks, and stood there somewhat silently for awhile (which is really saying something). That was almost like a movie scene. I felt like I gained an understanding not in my mind, but inside my gut. At that moment, I was a part of something so much greater than what I had ever believed, understood or felt before that. Bigger- not only physically than Canada, but bigger in time in that my generation was picking up where the struggles against the Nazis had been before. The man tapped me on the shoulder, looked at me sternly and I walked away. Later in that same demonstration was the only time I ever got to hear Harry Rankin speak publicly. I didn't know much about him, except that he was a well-known figure on the left in Vancouver. All he had to say was his own experience fighting in WWII and that the people involved in the bombing of Yugos lavia were "god-damned fascists, they're fascists!" I respected the toughness of his words and was proud that we would try to do the same fighting. Now, perhaps it was hyperbole rather than analysis to call Nato and their leaders "fascists" (this is not to deny they are certainly guilty war criminals!), but our generation really needs to take stock of what it is to fight fascism in the era of the "War on Terror". The governments of both North American countries have set up laws where they can imprison you based on your political association. Let me state that a different way: the governments of North America have made political thoughts a possible crime. There are laws in effect now that removed the safe guards of human rights for non-citizens of the country. You don't have a passport? You don't get a lawyer and you don't get due process. In fact, you don't get a phone call and your family doesn't have the right to know where you are. You just- disappear. There are several hundred people- all racially profiled and imprisoned because of their country of origin and the pigment of their skin. This isn't a "maybe" or "soon"-it's reality and it exists right now. I want to say that one at least once more: The governments in North America are now making people they don't like disappear. The implications should be obvious, but our silence about this problem has been deafening. Witch-hunts were once common place for the people who came before us in the struggle to rid the world of exploitation and war. In the stories told at the tribute to Harry today were many examples of how he dealt with them with defiance and dignity. We need to begin to get that understanding. As one speaker pointed out, many working class fighters were kept out of jail by the work of people like Harry Rankin- and we will see that familiar line crop up very soon indeed, if there is to be any success in our struggle against these people. What we are facing now is unprecedented. Many of the people from our generation have already been intimidated and frightened by these actions. Another speaker today mentioned how real courage is fighting on even when you are terrified. That is something we need to grasp as well. This is not going to be as fun as it was seven months ago. Remember that? Many of us were waiting for the IMF meetings on September 29th in Washington DC to see where the young movement was going. Never quite made it to that meeting. This intimidation and real fear is clearly not to be celebrated, nor is it an excuse for us to simply surrender. And essentially, this is what I hope to impress on us: we have a real need for everything that we can grasp onto for strength. Nothing gives more internal strength than realising that these eras of deep right wing reaction have come before. We stand in the tradition of those who fought rid the world of fascism and defend the rights of workers here- right here in BC. These traditions are not to be scorned because "communism didn't work" or some other such dismissive nonsense. We owe far too much to the history of who came before us in the radical movement. We also need to learn how to struggle- really struggle- in the face of very real repression. All around us are great lessons on how to be defiant- how to do precisely that. Most importantly, a human being that understands where they come from can figure out where they are going. If we do not begin to really understand and value the history of what we stand for- we won't have any idea what to do. The traditions of our struggles are long and very mighty. We have much to be proud of in the train of revolutionary history. Are we up to the task of respecting our place in that history? The story of Harry Rankin and what it was like for him reminded me of a beautiful song, written and performed by Leon Rosselson. It is called "Song of the Old Communist", here's a couple of lines from it: He was one of those dogged old men, who live in the past, telling stories you don't want to know Of how it was then, the hunger, the hardships the hopes and the struggles of so long ago. [.] You may think we were duped, well we paid for our dreams, Broken lives, broken marriages, jobs lost and jail. Some lost heart and left, some betrayed us for metal There are always some turncoats whose souls are for sale But the best of us never surrendered our vision And we kept the faith through the bleakest defeats- Do you think that was easy, surrounded by hatred, The sneer of indifference, the hurt of deceit? And our lives were made rich by the cause that we fought for The friendships, the fellowship, sharing ones name To transform society, end exploitation- And that day will come yet! But not in my time. --- The understanding that we who speak against capitalism are standing in this tradition (and many others) is a heavy burden. It is a lot for all of us to live up to, and we are starting from a much weaker place. There is a global superpower that has both political and military power that Hitler could never even have dreamt of. There is also a stark lack of organised resistance. We can make a start into changing that. The first thing to do is for us to get rid of our generational arrogance. The fact is, we don't know what to do now. However, we cannot leave this struggle, the entire history of the human race weighs in the balance. The "War on Terror" is even more global than the first two world wars. Environmental destruction is waiting, if not a simple nuclear holocaust. We have no choice left. So we must be very good at learning. When we begin to feel our small part in the proud history of resistance, we arm ourselves with the strength of history, the impenetrable weapon of knowing the justness of our cause and the self-confidence we so badly need. Often these days, we are against this or that, but what are we *for*? We are able to say it when we feel it- and the lives of those who fought before are filled with so much of what it is we are duty bound to struggle for simply in how they fought. We speak often of the need to connect up the issues: globalization, privatisation, civil liberties and war, for only a couple of examples. Now, let us also connect up the generations. Finally, I want to mention two last things: one of the memorial speakers, a woman by the name of Elsbeth Gardiner, spoke of how to best remember and honour Harry Rankin. She began by saying that Harry was a man who believed in socialism- an end to capitalism. The best single way to honour Harry is to struggle in the 21st Century to end those things that plagued us in the 20th Century- poverty and war. She then asked that all the young people (and commented on the striking lack of them) carry on the fight to end exploitation and capitalism, as we are going into a period of great danger, war and reaction. She asked us to carry the torch once more. I was moved very strongly, and I had to have a quick word with her after she spoke. I promised her that I would. We have much to be proud of, and it started long before we were born. Our sense of our own history- separate from the "heroes" we are always told about, but including those we are asked to forget- that can sustain our spirit when the fight gets to us. Thinking to myself on the way home today, I was reminded of a line from Paul Robeson, another one of our great but deliberately suppressed heroes. It was at the first "Peace Arch concert" in 1952- where he was singing as a result of having his passport stolen due to the McCarthyist hysteria that reached across North America. He said: "I want everyone in the range of my voice to hear, that there is no force on earth that will make me move backwards- one thousandth part of one, little inch". We need to be just as unapologizing. I carry a little article around in my wallet that I cut out from the corporate press while hitchhiking last summer to Edmonton for the G8 planning spokescouncil. The article sums a lot of it up, if it does so too bluntly, with just the title: "Quickly bid farewell to your youth. You've got a world to save." It's wrong. We must embrace our youth- but let us embrace the responsibility that comes with it. We have no hope at all to chart a course for our future if we are not connected to our past. Our past makes us- current facts disguise us. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international "They are all Enron, we are all Argentina" --WEF protesters. ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From furuhashi.1 at osu.edu Mon Mar 11 08:44:46 2002 From: furuhashi.1 at osu.edu (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:07 2006 Subject: [R-G] Thu., March 14: Remembering Argentina's Dirty War Message-ID: Critical Perspectives on Wars, Classes, & Empires "Surviving Terror: Remembering Argentina's Dirty War" Speaker: Graciela Rennella Thursday, March 14, 5:00 p.m. 115 Stillman, OSU, 1947 College Rd., Columbus, OH Watch _Las Madres: The Mothers of Plaza De Mayo_ (Dir. Susana Mu?oz and Lourdes Portillo, 1985), and discuss Argentina's Dirty War, a "war on terrorism" in the 1970s. During the six year reign (1976-1983) by a military junta, which had overthrown an elected government, nearly 30,000 people were "disappeared" in Argentina. In 1999, "the FBI was forced to acknowledge its years of cooperation with the six Latin American dictatorships [Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, & Brazil] that organized Operation Condor in the seventies. Condor was a secret agreement to join forces in exterminating political dissidents. When Paraguayans opened five tons of Condor archives - 'archives of terror,' they named them - they found a trove of evidence detailing Washington's encouragement and support. Asked to comment, a State Department official brushed the matter aside as 'ancient history'" (Patrick Smith, _The Nation_ 20 Sep. 1999). Let us resist historical amnesia and reclaim the memories of Los Desaparecidos. Por la Memoria, la Verdad, y la Justicia "First we will kill all the subversives; then, their collaborators; later, those who sympathize with them; afterward, those who remain indifferent; and finally, the undecided." -- General Ib?rico Saint Jean, governor of the Province of Buenos Aires under the military junta Sponsors: the Student International Forum and Social Welfare Action Alliance. OSU Campus Map: . Calendar of Events: . For more info, contact Yoshie Furuhashi at or 614-668-6554; or Keith Kilty at or 614-292-7181. Download the flyer for the event at . Download the flyer for other upcoming SIF/SWAA events at . -- Yoshie * Calendar of Events in Columbus: * Anti-War Activist Resources: * Student International Forum: * Committee for Justice in Palestine: From hunterbadbear at earthlink.net Sun Mar 3 09:24:59 2002 From: hunterbadbear at earthlink.net (Hunter Gray) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:07 2006 Subject: [R-G] [Redbadbear] Dakota "justice" [Sisseton-Wahpeton Nation very justifiably angry] Message-ID: <000b01c1c2cf$f8d7de00$f0a90e3f@ibm22761429477> Note by Hunterbear: South Dakota -- traditionally dominated by meat packing outfits in the east and Homestake Mining in the Black Hills [though that dimension has played out] -- continues to display one of its traditionally consistent negative dimensions: rank, virulent and pervasive anti-Indian prejudice and discrimination. Never forget and always remember the Wounded Knee Massacre of hundreds of unarmed Natives in 1890, and the Wounded Knee Native protests of 1973 -- and several thousand other events that attest to the ills and sins of South Dakota. And to the courage and perseverance of the Natives -- and some others of good will and decency. Governor Bill Janklow -- who has Forever been around in one political incarnation or another -- has sometimes been tagged the Ross Barnett [old 1960-64 arch-racist Gov of Mississippi] of the Northern Plains. I wouldn't quarrel with that characterization -- ever. No Indian would -- and not many labor people, either. Tom Daschle was just one of the Dakota Democrats [South and North] who -- along with all of the Republicans -- didn't lift one finger on behalf of Leonard Peltier's freedom. Nor did they utter a word of criticism when Bill Clinton failed to pardon Leonard. And North Dakota should certainly never be off the hook on any of these issues -- or even on the outgoing edge. It has some very, very racist areas in its own right: e.g. Devils Lake -- where we fought many Native rights battles in the late 80s and early '90s; Leonard Peltier was "convicted" at Fargo in that notoriously rigged trial; and no one yet has been arrested for the September 2001 murders of the three Native men at Grand Forks where the racial situation has been going steadily down hill. We continue to be much involved in North Dakota Native rights and general race relations matters. I have a vast number of former University of North Dakota students -- Native and non-Native -- all over the Dakotas, much of Minnesota, many in Montana and Manitoba. I hear with regularity from a good number to this very moment. Things are becoming tough [ and tougher ] all over that whole, general region for everyone "of the fewest alternatives" -- a category which is now including more and more folks. Farmers and ranchers have been very hard hit for decades -- and for Native people it's always been extremely rough. Dakota "justice" is known for its lop-sided selectivity: cruel to Natives and Chicanos -- and other racial minorities -- and hostile to poor people generally. Ideological discussion and abstraction are fine in their place and quantitative stuff certainly has its uses. But I'm one of those who looks first at the actual and tangible "people" dimension. And in this situation, the whole "justice" thing is once again put into its stark, dreary human perspective -- one of obviously developing tragedy. Jake Thompson, Sisseton-Wahpeton vice-chairman, is both a former student [who took every UND course I offered] and a very old friend. When Jake says something, it's solid. "There is a double standard of justice, and it's been going on a long time," said Jake Thompson, vice-chairman of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux Tribe. [From the news story.] So here's the yet-another Dakota story: ========================================= Teen's jailing angers tribe By LEE WILLIAMS Argus Leader published: 3/3/02 http://www.argusleader.com/news/Sundayfeature.shtml Sisseton-Wahpeton allege unfair treatment; county says charges justified SISSETON - Adelia Godfrey spends her days alone in a dimly lit basement cell. She is wondering whether to kill herself. Godfrey, 17, was first arrested for misdemeanor charges nearly a month ago, but a fight with officers at the Roberts County Jail led to two felony charges. Now the Roberts County state's attorney wants to prosecute her as an adult. If convicted, she could be sentenced to 30 years in prison. "At night, I get panic attacks, and I worry I'll stop breathing," Godfrey said Thursday before a court hearing in the case. "I get real scared and depressed. I pray that I can go to sleep. There's no one for me to talk to. I think I'm losing my mind." Members of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux Tribe, of which Godfrey is an enrolled member, say her case is an example of a dual system of justice in Roberts County. The county is 68 percent white and 30 percent Native American. Tribal members, who protested her incarceration last week, contend Native American youth are targeted by police and want Godfrey moved to a tribal facility instead of the adult jail. Law enforcement officials say the girl is being held in the basement cell in the Grant County Jail - called "the dungeon" by the sheriff who oversees it - because there is no juvenile facility in the area that can take her. The Roberts County state's attorney and the Sisseton chief of police say Native Americans are treated no differently than whites. They say Godfrey "went ape" in the jail, sprayed an officer with a fire extinguisher, spit and tried to bite another officer. The charges fit the crime, authorities say. Godfrey was one of several girls who cut themselves with broken light bulbs while housed in a state juvenile prison in Plankinton. Her thin arms are still covered with scars, some as thick as cigars. The girl's family worries she may attempt suicide. "She asked me ... if we have two lives," said Godfrey's mother, Shirley Duggan, through tears. "I told her, 'No, honey, we only have just one. ... Please take care of it.' " Tribal members say Godfrey's case may be the most egregious example of a legal system that preys upon tribal members, especially youth. "There is a double standard of justice, and it's been going on a long time," said Jake Thompson, vice-chairman of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux Tribe. Nontribal law enforcement officers scrutinize the actions of Native American youths more than non-Indian youths, and that constitutes racial profiling, he said. "I've been told that by my own children, and the court stats will prove that out," Thompson said. Statistics are not available to show the numbers of whites and Indians prosecuted for crimes in Roberts County or elsewhere in the state. Gov. Bill Janklow commissioned a study of race in the justice system following a series of complaints that culminated with a meeting of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in Rapid City in December 1999. He criticized the report developed from that session but asked a University of South Dakota political science professor to study the issue. That report is due out this summer. Thompson used a less-scientific method. Turning to the court page of the Feb. 26 edition of The Sisseton Courier newspaper, he pointed to the names of several people convicted in Roberts County courts. "Indian, Indian, Indian, Indian. They're almost all Indians," he said, his finger dancing from name to name. Robert's County State's Attorney Kay Nikolas said she does not file charges against people based on their race. "I charge people on the basis of the crimes that they committed," Nikolas said. Assault on police Shirley Duggan called the police for help with her daughter around 2 a.m. on Feb. 9. Adelia Godfrey had been drinking with friends and was suspected of breaking several windows out of her own home. Her mother later learned that one of the other youths had broken the windows. The teen-agers scattered when they saw the police car, but officers found them nearby and took them to the Roberts County Jail, said Doug Flannery, Sisseton's chief of police. "When she found out she was going to be detained, she went ape," Flannery said. Godfrey ran from the booking area into a nearby office, grabbed a fire extinguisher and leaped onto a desk, Flannery said. She threatened to discharge the extinguisher at the officer - and then did. "He had to go to the hospital," Flannery said. "He broke out in a rash." The unnamed officer and a Roberts County deputy sheriff pulled Godfrey from the desk, handcuffed her and placed her in a restraint chair, Flannery said. While subduing the 98-pound girl, the officers were kicked, Flannery said. "She tried to bite the deputy," he said. "And she spit." Flannery said the two resulting aggravated assault charges, each of which carries a maximum prison sentence of 15 years, were appropriate for the offense. "When you kick and spit at officers, that's what you get," he said. "My officer got assaulted, sprayed with the fire extinguisher." 'The dungeon' Since Roberts County has no facilities for holding juvenile offenders, Godfrey was taken to Milbank and lodged in the Grant County Jail. The Grant County Jail is a two-level, 16-bed facility. It has eight beds on the ground floor and eight beds in the basement. Grant County doesn't have a separate unit for minors but keeps juveniles in the basement unit if there are no adult inmates housed there. When Godfrey arrived Feb. 9, the only inmates in the jail were six adult males, housed on the ground floor. She was placed in the basement, a poorly lighted open bay, by herself. Grant County Sheriff Michael McKernan has a name for the basement unit. "We call it the dungeon," he said. Godfrey's new living quarters are damp and dark and smell of mold. There are no windows, and the two dim bulbs are never turned off. There's no natural light source and no way to know whether it's day or night. A camera tracks Godfrey's every move. When she showers, she crouches down behind a waist-high concrete wall to limit what can be seen of her body on the television monitor in the dispatch office. There are no recreation or exercise facilities. Sheriff McKernan said either he or his only deputy try to take prisoners outside, if time allows. But Godfrey said her only exercise has been a walk to the squad car while she was being taken to court in Sisseton last week. McKernan has been sheriff for 12 years. The jail, which he inherited, was built in 1972. He's tried to commence renovations, but there's no money in the budget, he said. "I get the heebie-jeebies when I'm down there," Godfrey said. "It's scary. The only time I get to talk to anybody is the lunch lady, when I get my meals, and just for a couple minutes." The conditions of Godfrey's confinement are worrisome to one juvenile corrections expert. Marc Schindler is an attorney for the Washington, D.C.-based Youth Law Center. His firm successfully sued the state and spawned major changes in its juvenile corrections program after the death of Gina Score at the girls boot camp in Plankinton. Given Godfrey's history of self-harm, Schindler had a warning for the state's attorney and law enforcement in Sisseton. "If the local officials are aware of these conditions and aware of her age and background, they're putting themselves in serious liability by allowing her to stay there," Schindler said. "They're facing major liability issues... "She needs to be moved immediately." The protest Godfrey's first court appearance last Thursday morning was accompanied by a small protest outside the courthouse and a Dakota drum group from Agency Village. Roberts County Sheriff Neil Long led Godfrey into the courtroom. She was wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and leg shackles. Thursday was juvenile court day, and the courtroom was full of children and their families. Circuit Judge Jon Flemmer was halfway through explaining their constitutional rights when the drum group started outside the courtroom. Godfrey's 13-year-old sister entered the courtroom carrying one of the protest signs and was quickly ushered out by Sheriff Long. The hearing was brief. Godfrey was appointed an attorney and told she would remain in the Grant County Jail until her next hearing Thursday. There is no bail. The state's attorney said Godfrey should remain in custody "for her own protection and the protection of society." Godfrey's mother told the court that her daughter was not a flight risk because she was unemployed, had no money and all of her relatives lived in the Sisseton area. "Milbank is cruel and unusual punishment," Duggan told the court. "It doesn't make any sense to me." Godfrey burst into tears when Flemmer ruled she would be returned to the Grant County Jail. In an interview after the hearing, Flemmer said he has seen no evidence of racial profiling during his time on the bench. "There isn't anything I've seen in Roberts County that leads me to believe that law enforcement is out there selecting who they prosecute or arrest," he said. "It's obvious there may be some societal problems." Magistrate Judge Tony Portra holds court in Sisseton every Tuesday. Portra's father is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Tribe in North Dakota. "I would say there's an inordinate amount of Native Americans in court compared to the percentage of Native Americans in the community," Portra said. "I don't know why. I don't see any evidence of (racial profiling) in court, but I'm not out following the officers around." Chief Flannery said his officers don't profile by race. "We have a policy against it," he said. But Godfrey said Native American youths get labeled by the town's police and, once labeled, are subjected to harassment. Flannery disagreed. "We understand the kids that we're having a lot of trouble with, and when they're around, we keep an eye on them," he said. "But we don't label anyone." 'Nothing else I can do' Shirley Duggan wonders why her daughter faces years in prison when another teen killed a youth and was charged with only driving while intoxicated. "It's a double standard," she said. In August 2000, Justin Redday, a tribal member, was struck and killed on a rural road by a white teen. A grand jury indicted the driver for vehicular homicide, but then-State's Attorney Kerry Cameron dismissed the count and charged the driver in juvenile court with drunken driving. Cameron lost his job as Robert's County state's attorney to Nikolas in the November 2000 election. He is now the court-appointed defense attorney for Roberts County, though he was not given Godfrey's case. Della Eastman, who founded the Eastern Dakota Chapter of the American Indian Movement in Sisseton, organized protests after Redday was killed. She sat through Godfrey's hearing with Darlene Pipeboy, Godfrey's great-aunt. "I see the court as being one-sided. There's a dual justice system here," Eastman said. "They try (tribal) members differently than non-Indians. I don't agree with the court's decision." Pipeboy, a respected elder, also is concerned about the result of the hearing. "The racial profiling offsets the feeling the youth should have that they're a member of the community," Pipeboy said. "They can't come and go as they please." Godfrey was fatalistic about what transpired. "I have to accept the court's decision," she said. "There's nothing else I can do." Rose Chase, 66, is one of several of Godfrey's surrogate grandmothers. "All of this is repetitive," she said. "When I was young, the Indian agents used to chase me around and bring me home. My mother, who didn't speak English, worried about me. Eventually, they put me in Plankinton, just like Adelia (Godfrey)." Said Pipeboy: "The Dakota word for children - wakaneja - means sacred people. That's how we as a people feel about our youth. But this perspective is not heard in a courtroom, where Indians are looked upon as troublemakers." ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> FREE COLLEGE MONEY CLICK HERE to search 600,000 scholarships! http://us.click.yahoo.com/iZp8OC/4m7CAA/ySSFAA/.zNplB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: Redbadbear-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ From mstainsby at tao.ca Mon Mar 11 14:15:36 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:07 2006 Subject: [R-G] self-explanatory Message-ID: <000d01c1c941$e44a0d00$76195218@vc.shawcable.net> "The Select Committee might wish to consider placing limits on the capitalisation of education and to explore GATS exemption for education with our EU partners. Both are necessary to avoid business interests corrupting educational goals, purposes and processes." This is the summary of the paper by Glenn Rikowski, author of "The Battle in Seattle: its implications for education", submitted to the House of Lords economic affairs select committee inquiry into the global economy. Please email me if you want the complete paper Chris Keene Globalisation and Education Glenn Rikowski A paper prepared for the HOUSE OF LORDS SELECT COMMITTEE ON ECONOMIC AFFAIRS INQUIRY INTO THE GLOBAL ECONOMY Summary There are four dimensions to globalisation. The first refers to the cultural effects of the breaking down of barriers through new communications technologies and the rise of standardised, global consumer goods on the one hand, and hybridity and fluidity in cultural forms on the other. The second dimension of globalisation focuses on economic, technological and social developments that undermine the nation-state. It also alerts us to supra-national organisations such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank that attempt to regulate relations between states and between corporations and states. The third dimension highlights the fact that it is capital that is globalising. This is occurring through processes of extension, differentiation and intensification. The fourth dimension uncovers the core of globalisation: the value-form of labour that is the basis of the capitalisation of all areas of social life, on a truly global scale. This fundamentally characterises what 'globalisation' is. This is its core. The WTO through one of its key Agreements - the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) - has a particular 'education agenda'. This is to open up education services to corporate capital and international trade. This involves the capitalisation of education: its commodification, its role as a profit-making enterprise and its reformation on the basis of the value-form of labour. This is what globalisation means in relation to education. The UK Government has reacted to the WTO/GATS education agenda by nurturing indigenous 'edubusinesses'. It is hoped that these will be able to compete with foreign edubusinesses when a strengthened GATS operates in 2003. Furthermore, the UK Government in interested in developing the export potential of these edubusinesses. These strategies, together with the tight GATS deadline, explain the rush to open up UK education institutions to corporate capital - schools in particular. The priorities and imperatives of the GATS have to be translated nationally. A number of organisations, initiatives and policies in our education system function as the national faces of the GATS. They function to open up education to business penetration. In effect, they are GATS enablers and facilitators. In relation to schools, these national faces include Ofsted, the Private Finance Initiative, competitive tendering and outsourcing, new types of schools, and a de-regulatory framework that nurtures edubusinesses (e.g. the Education Bill). On the basis of the above analysis, the commercialisation, privatisation (indirect) and capitalisation of education are our future. This is the logic of educational development when subjected to capitalist globalisation sponsored by supra-national bodies and actively encouraged by Governments in developed nations. The Select Committee might wish to consider placing limits on the capitalisation of education and to explore GATS exemption for education with our EU partners. Both are necessary to avoid business interests corrupting educational goals, purposes and processes. 28th January 2002 -- Chris Keene, Coordinator, Anti-Globalisation Network "Defending Democracy against Corporate Rule" 90 The Parkway, Canvey Island, Essex SS8 0AE, England Tel 01268 682820 Fax 01268 514164 ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international "They are all Enron, we are all Argentina" --WEF protesters. ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From pieinsky at igc.org Mon Mar 11 16:00:44 2002 From: pieinsky at igc.org (Jay Moore) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:07 2006 Subject: [R-G] Prisoners Swap in the Work? Message-ID: <00d701c1c951$2b94f1c0$9b7df2d0@bypass.com> http://www.azzam.com Daily news, articles and interviews on the Jihad in Afghanistan SECRET MESSAGE SENT TO MUJAHIDEEN FOR NEGOTIATIONS OF CAPTURED US SOLDIERS SPECIAL REPORT(Daily Ummat): Sources have disclosed that the US has now offered the Mujahideen to negotiate and make some deal in exchange for 18 captured US soldiers. Of the arrested US soldiers two are thought to be senior US military officials. The sources disclosed that as soon as news of the arrest of the soldiers reached the Commander in charge of operation Anaconda, Gardez, Major General Franks, he immediately gave the order to halt the operation and ground the US warplanes. He then sent a secret delegation of 2 senior military officials to meet the Governor of Paktika Wardaag and they sent a message to the Mujahideen commander, Mulla Saif ur Rehman Mansoor. The message said that if the Mujahideen were to free all 18 captured US soldiers, then the US troops will retreat from ShahiKot, Zarmaat, Gardez and retreat back to their Khost Cantonment. Following this offer, the US withdrew over 400 of its soldiers claiming that bad weather and fatigue had caused a break in the operation. But the truth is that the US, having confirmed the news of their soldiers' capture, halted the operation and attempted to make a deal with the Mujahideen. The sources also disclosed that the Mujahideen are keeping these arrested soldiers in underground bunkers, safe from US aerial bombardment. Some sources claim that the soldiers have already been moved to separate locations. The military minds of the US have been shocked by this news. The Mujahideen sources said that the Commander in Charge of Mujahideen in Gardez Mulla Saif ur Rehman Mansoor, has called a Shura meeting to discuss the American offer. Some Mujahideen sources said that they may demand freedom for all Afghan, Arab and Pakistani mujahideen currently being held at Camp X-Ray, Cuba. Sources have also disclosed that Maulana Jalaluddin Haqqani, who injured his shoulder in a bomb hit, is recovering and is well Alhamdolillaah, he will also be attending the Shura Meeting. In a separate incident a motorcycle troop of Mujahideen raided a US convoy in Tehsil Sarbi which is near to Tehsil Urgan of Paktika. In this operation the Mujahideen successfully killed 6 US soldiers, while all Mujahideen escaped without harm alhamdolillah. From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Mar 11 16:44:32 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:07 2006 Subject: [R-G] Operation Infinite Purity Message-ID: <200203112344.g2BNiWE11238@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> Operation Infinite Purity: AMERICA'S WAR ON MASTERBATION http://www.whitehouse.org/initiatives/purity/index.asp From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Mar 11 17:06:09 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:32:07 2006 Subject: [R-G] U.S. Works Up Plan for Using Nuclear Arms - LAT Message-ID: <200203120006.g2C06BE04432@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-030902bombs.story The Los Angeles Times 9 March 2002 U.S. Works Up Plan for Using Nuclear Arms Administration, in a secret report, calls for a strategy against at least seven nations: China, Russia, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya and Syria. By Paul Richter, Times Staff Writer Washington - The Bush administration has directed the military to prepare contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against at least seven countries and to build smaller nuclear weapons for use in certain battlefield situations, according to a classified Pentagon report obtained by the Los Angeles Times. The secret report, which was provided to Congress on Jan. 8, says the Pentagon needs to be prepared to use nuclear weapons against China, Russia, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria. It says the weapons could be used in three types of situations: against targets able to withstand nonnuclear attack; in retaliation for attack with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons; or "in the event of surprising military developments." A copy of the report was obtained by defense analyst and Times contributor William Arkin. His column on the contents appears in Sunday's editions. Officials have long acknowledged that they had detailed nuclear plans for an attack on Russia. However, this "Nuclear Posture Review" apparently marks the first time that an official list of potential target countries has come to light, analysts said. Some predicted the disclosure would set off strong reactions from governments of the target countries. "This is dynamite," said Joseph Cirincione, a nuclear arms expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "I can imagine what these countries are going to be saying at the U.N." Arms control advocates said the report's directives on development of smaller nuclear weapons could signal that the Bush administration is more willing to overlook a long-standing taboo against the use of nuclear weapons except as a last resort. They warned that such moves could dangerously destabilize the world by encouraging other countries to believe that they, too, should develop weapons. "They're trying desperately to find new uses for nuclear weapons, when their uses should be limited to deterrence," said John Isaacs, president of the Council for a Livable World. "This is very, very dangerous talk . . . Dr. Strangelove is clearly still alive in the Pentagon." But some conservative analysts insisted that the Pentagon must prepare for all possible contingencies, especially now, when dozens of countries, and some terrorist groups, are engaged in secret weapon development programs. They argued that smaller weapons have an important deterrent role because many aggressors might not believe that the U.S. forces would use multi-kiloton weapons that would wreak devastation on surrounding territory and friendly populations. "We need to have a credible deterrence against regimes involved in international terrorism and development of weapons of mass destruction," said Jack Spencer, a defense analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington. He said the contents of the report did not surprise him and represent "the right way to develop a nuclear posture for a post-Cold War world." A spokesman for the Pentagon, Richard McGraw, declined to comment because the document is classified. Congress requested the reassessment of the U.S. nuclear posture in September 2000. The last such review was conducted in 1994 by the Clinton administration. The new report, signed by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, is now being used by the U.S. Strategic Command to prepare a nuclear war plan. Bush administration officials have publicly provided only sketchy details of the nuclear review. They have publicly emphasized the parts of the policy suggesting that the administration wants to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons. Since the Clinton administration's review is also classified, no specific contrast can be drawn. However, analysts portrayed this report as representing a break with earlier policy. U.S. policymakers have generally indicated that the United States would not use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states unless they were allied with nuclear powers. They have left some ambiguity about whether the United States would use nuclear weapons in retaliation after strikes with chemical or nuclear weapons. The report says the Pentagon should be prepared to use nuclear weapons in an Arab-Israeli conflict, in a war between China and Taiwan, or in an attack from North Korea on the south. They might also become necessary in an attack by Iraq on Israel or another neighbor, it said. The report says Russia is no longer officially an "enemy." Yet it acknowledges that the huge Russian arsenal, which includes about 6,000 deployed warheads and perhaps 10,000 smaller "theater" nuclear weapons, remains of concern. Pentagon officials have said publicly that they were studying the need to develop theater nuclear weapons, designed for use against specific targets on a battlefield, but had not committed themselves to that course. Officials have often spoken of the advantages of using nuclear weapons to destroy the deep tunnel and cave complexes that many regimes have been building, especially since the Persian Gulf War of 1991. Nuclear weapons give off powerful shock waves that can crush structures deep in the Earth, they point out. Officials argue that large nuclear arms have so many destructive side effects, from blast to heat and radiation, that they become "self-deterring." They contend the Pentagon needs "full spectrum deterrence"--that is, a full range of weapons that potential enemies believe might be used against them. The Pentagon was actively involved in planning for use of tactical nuclear weapons as recently as the 1970s. But it has moved away from them in the last two decades. Analysts said the report's reference to "surprising military developments" referred to the Pentagon's fears that a rogue regime or terrorist group might suddenly unleash a wholly unknown weapon that was difficult to counter with the conventional U.S. arsenal. The administration has proposed cutting the offensive nuclear arsenal by about two-thirds, to between 1,700 and 2,200 missiles, within 10 years. Officials have also said they want to use precision guided conventional munitions in some missions that might have previously been accomplished with nuclear arms. But critics said the report contradicts suggestions the Bush administration wants to cut the nuclear role. "This clearly makes nuclear weapons a tool for fighting a war, rather than deterring them," said Cirincione. ======================= Los Angeles Times 10 March 2002 Commentary. Secret Plan Outlines the Unthinkable. A secret policy review of the nation's nuclear policy puts forth chilling new contingencies for nuclear war. By WILLIAM M. ARKIN WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration, in a secret policy review completed early this year, has ordered the Pentagon to draft contingency plans for the use of nuclear weapons against at least seven countries, naming not only Russia and the "axis of evil"--Iraq, Iran, and North Korea--but also China, Libya and Syria. In addition, the U.S. Defense Department has been told to prepare for the possibility that nuclear weapons may be required in some future Arab-Israeli crisis. And, it is to develop plans for using nuclear weapons to retaliate against chemical or biological attacks, as well as "surprising military developments" of an unspecified nature. These and a host of other directives, including calls for developing bunker-busting mini-nukes and nuclear weapons that reduce collateral damage, are contained in a still-classified document called the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which was delivered to Congress on Jan. 8. Like all such documents since the dawning of the Atomic Age more than a half-century ago, this NPR offers a chilling glimpse into the world of nuclear-war planners: With a Strangelovian genius, they cover every conceivable circumstance in which a president might wish to use nuclear weapons--planning in great detail for a war they hope never to wage. In this top-secret domain, there has always been an inconsistency between America's diplomatic objectives of reducing nuclear arsenals and preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, on the one hand, and the military imperative to prepare for the unthinkable, on the other. Nevertheless, the Bush administration plan reverses an almost two-decade-long trend of relegating nuclear weapons to the category of weapons of last resort. It also redefines nuclear requirements in hurried post-Sept. 11 terms. In these and other ways, the still-secret document offers insights into the evolving views of nuclear strategists in Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's Defense Department. While downgrading the threat from Russia and publicly emphasizing their commitment to reducing the number of long-range nuclear weapons, Defense Department strategists promote tactical and so-called "adaptive" nuclear capabilities to deal with contingencies where large nuclear arsenals are not demanded. They seek a host of new weapons and support systems, including conventional military and cyber warfare capabilities integrated with nuclear warfare. The end product is a now-familiar post-Afghanistan model--with nuclear capability added. It combines precision weapons, long-range strikes, and special and covert operations. But the NPR's call for development of new nuclear weapons that reduce "collateral damage" myopically ignores the political, moral and military implications--short-term and long--of crossing the nuclear threshold. Under what circumstances might nuclear weapons be used under the new posture? The NPR says they "could be employed against targets able to withstand nonnuclear attack," or in retaliation for the use of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, or "in the event of surprising military developments." Planning nuclear-strike capabilities, it says, involves the recognition of "immediate, potential or unexpected" contingencies. North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya are named as "countries that could be involved" in all three kinds of threat. "All have long-standing hostility towards the United States and its security partners. All sponsor or harbor terrorists, and have active WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and missile programs." China, because of its nuclear forces and "developing strategic objectives," is listed as "a country that could be involved in an immediate or potential contingency." Specifically, the NPR lists a military confrontation over the status of Taiwan as one of the scenarios that could lead Washington to use nuclear weapons. Other listed scenarios for nuclear conflict are a North Korean attack on South Korea and an Iraqi assault on Israel or its neighbors. The second important insight the NPR offers into Pentagon thinking about nuclear policy is the extent to which the Bush administration's strategic planners were shaken by last September's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Though Congress directed the new administration "to conduct a comprehensive review of U.S. nuclear forces" before the events of Sept. 11, the final study is striking for its single-minded reaction to those tragedies. Heretofore, nuclear strategy tended to exist as something apart from the ordinary challenges of foreign policy and military affairs. Nuclear weapons were not just the option of last resort, they were the option reserved for times when national survival hung in the balance--a doomsday confrontation with the Soviet Union, for instance. Now, nuclear strategy seems to be viewed through the prism of Sept. 11. For one thing, the Bush administration's faith in old-fashioned deterrence is gone. It no longer takes a superpower to pose a dire threat to Americans. "The terrorists who struck us on Sept. 11th were clearly not deterred by doing so from the massive U.S. nuclear arsenal," Rumsfeld told an audience at the National Defense University in late January. Similarly, U.S. Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton said in a recent interview, "We would do whatever is necessary to defend America's innocent civilian population .... The idea that fine theories of deterrence work against everybody ... has just been disproven by Sept. 11." Moreover, while insisting they would go nuclear only if other options seemed inadequate, officials are looking for nuclear weapons that could play a role in the kinds of challenges the United States faces with Al Qaeda. Accordingly, the NPR calls for new emphasis on developing such things as nuclear bunker-busters and surgical "warheads that reduce collateral damage," as well as weapons that could be used against smaller, more circumscribed targets--"possible modifications to existing weapons to provide additional yield flexibility," in the jargon-rich language of the review. It also proposes to train U.S. Special Forces operators to play the same intelligence gathering and targeting roles for nuclear weapons that they now play for conventional weapons strikes in Afghanistan. And cyber-warfare and other nonnuclear military capabilities would be integrated into nuclear-strike forces to make them more all-encompassing. As for Russia, once the primary reason for having a U.S. nuclear strategy, the review says that while Moscow's nuclear programs remain cause for concern, "ideological sources of conflict" have been eliminated, rendering a nuclear contingency involving Russia "plausible" but "not expected." "In the event that U.S. relations with Russia significantly worsen in the future," the review says, "the U.S. may need to revise its nuclear force levels and posture." When completion of the NPR was publicly announced in January, Pentagon briefers deflected questions about most of the specifics, saying the information was classified. Officials did stress that, consistent with a Bush campaign pledge, the plan called for reducing the current 6,000 long-range nuclear weapons to one-third that number over the next decade. Rumsfeld, who approved the review late last year, said the administration was seeking "a new approach to strategic deterrence," to include missile defenses and improvements in nonnuclear capabilities. Also, Russia would no longer be officially defined as "an enemy." Beyond that, almost no details were revealed. The classified text, however, is shot through with a worldview transformed by Sept. 11. The NPR coins the phrase "New Triad," which it describes as comprising the "offensive strike leg," (our nuclear and conventional forces) plus "active and passive defenses,"(our anti-missile systems and other defenses) and "a responsive defense infrastructure" (our ability to develop and produce nuclear weapons and resume nuclear testing). Previously, the nuclear "triad" was the bombers, long-range land-based missiles and submarine-launched missiles that formed the three legs of America's strategic arsenal. The review emphasizes the integration of "new nonnuclear strategic capabilities" into nuclear-war plans. "New capabilities must be developed to defeat emerging threats such as hard and deeply-buried targets (HDBT), to find and attack mobile and re-locatable targets, to defeat chemical and biological agents, and to improve accuracy and limit collateral damage," the review says. It calls for "a new strike system" using four converted Trident submarines, an unmanned combat air vehicle and a new a