Deep Blade Journal

Is covert manipulation America’s gift to democracy?


But Bush’s man in Iraq, Allawi, could not win despite US efforts

In the previous post about Haiti, I proposed a hypothesis that America packages elections so that its undemocratic policies can be ratified in a vote that makes possible only the narrowest choice. That process is in full swing in Haiti now, as the UN attacks the poor majority Lavalas party of democratically-elected and US-ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

In the case of Iraq, America’s purpose all along has been taking of the country followed by installation of stooges who could administer it for the benefit of long-term US military basing, US foreign policy goals, and US strategic energy interests. It only requires perusal of the former Coalition Provisional Authority’s Orders, and realization that the US seeks to preserve their effect in the writing and implementation of the country’s new constitution to see what the US plan is all about.

Though the outcome was nowhere near ideal from the US administration’s point of view, Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker for July 25, illuminates the little-understood back-room machinations that preceded Iraq’s January 30, 2005 parliamentary election. We all recall the purple fingers that saturated our televisions and newspapers the week of February 1, especially during the State of the Union message delivered by President Bush on February 2.

In that speech, the President told us,

We will succeed in Iraq because Iraqis are determined to fight for their own freedom, and to write their own history. As Prime Minister Allawi said in his speech to Congress last September, “Ordinary Iraqis are anxious to shoulder all the security burdens of our country as quickly as possible.” That is the natural desire of an independent nation, and it is also the stated mission of our coalition in Iraq.

Hersh puts Bush’s support for Allawi in a whole different light:

The [Administration’s] goal, according to several former intelligence and military officials, was not to achieve outright victory for Allawi — such an outcome would not be possible or credible, given the strength of the pro-Iranian Shiite religious parties—but to minimize the religious Shiites’ political influence. The Administration hoped to keep Allawi as a major figure in a coalition government, and to do so his party needed a respectable share of the vote.

The main advocate for channeling aid to preferred parties was Thomas Warrick, a senior adviser on Iraq for the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, who was backed, in this debate, by his superiors and by the National Security Council. Warrick’s plan involved using forty million dollars that had been appropriated for the election to covertly provide cell phones, vehicles, radios, security, administrative help, and cash to the parties the Administration favored. [emphasis added]

Hersh goes on to explain the even after some of the organinzations involved along with members of Congress balked at providing direct support for Allawi in order to influence the election, the Administration continued with, according to Hersh, “activities [that] were kept, in part, “off the books” — they were conducted by retired C.I.A. officers and other non-government personnel, and used funds that were not necessarily appropriated by Congress.”

Hersh’s piece tends to confirm the suspicions of former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who wrote in a March 23 piece,

What occurred in Iraq on Jan. 30, 2005 was an American-brokered event, not an expression of Iraqi national unity. The U.S. lowering of the Shi’a vote is case in point….

The Iraqi elections have been embraced almost universally as a great victory for the forces of democracy, not only in Iraq, but throughout the entire Middle East. The fact, however, is that the Iraqi elections weren’t about the free election of a government reflecting the will of the Iraqi people, but the carefully engineered selection of a government that would behave in a manner dictated by the United States. In Iraq, democracy was hijacked by the Americans.

Ritter discusses the irregularity of the vote counting, where final tallies were delayed for two weeks. As Deep Blade Journal reported on Sunday February 13, the initial tallies were: Unified Shiite list…48%; Kurdish list…26%; Allawi’s Iraqi list…14%. Ritter explains the depressed vote for the Unified list.

Well-placed sources in Iraq who were in a position to know have told me that the actual Shi’a vote was 56 percent. American intervention, in the form of a ’secret vote count’ conducted behind closed doors and away from public scrutiny, produced the Feb. 14 result.

The lowering of the Shi’a vote re-engineered the post-election political landscape in Iraq dramatically. The goal of the U.S., in doing this, is either to guarantee the adoption of the U.S.-drafted interim constitution, or make sure that there are not enough votes to adopt any Shi’a re-write. If the U.S.-drafted Iraqi constitution prevails, the Bush administration would be comfortable with the secular nature of any Iraqi government it produces. If it fails, then the Bush administration would much rather continue to occupy Iraq under the current U.S.-written laws, than allow for the creation of a pro-Iranian theocracy. In any event, the Shi’a stand to lose.

Deep Blade Journal carried several posts last winter that speculated about how the campaign was being run and how US goals were being served. Two examples…

Tuesday, January 18, 2005: “I will make a prediction. Somehow, Allawi will keep power after the January 30 election date. I’m not basing this on any specific knowledge, just a hunch. As Chomsky would say, democracy is fine as long as the correct choices are made and as long as the resulting government takes orders from its master. And recent reports of secret telephone conferences between the White House, Allawi, and Jordan’s King Abdullah portend that something is up…. [The US-funded campaign is] selling Allawi on TV as the tough hand against the violence. For Allawi, more violence is better. No one else can run a campaign, the candidates are too scared to be in public. Allawi dominates on television. It’s only the Shiite UIA left standing in the way of Bush/Allawi domination. Is it so hard to believe — with Bush in charge and all potential voters living in a climate of deep-seated fear — that some sort of chicanery, perhaps including suppressing votes (violence is perfect for that), stuffing the ballot boxes, and gathering votes from the diaspora would come into play?”

Sunday, February 13, 2005: “Iraq election results reinforce Bush win…. Failure to achieve absolute majority will dilute Shiite power… Yes, Allawi is beaten, but it’s not as huge a defeat for Bush, …. In fact, Allawi, from the third-place position, will hold significant influence in the formation of a new government because the Shiites are 20% short of the 2/3 coalition that is required….”

So, how has it all turned out? First off, I want to make crystal clear that I believe the Iraqis who voted on January 30 voted with great courage and voted with their hearts. Those hearts have made takeover of the country that much more difficult for the US military machine. Iraqi voters overwhelmingly were acting with a desire to see the end of the US occupation.

Iraqi government seems marginal
What has followed since January is a weak government, formed after months of internal struggle. It is not the government the US desired, so it is kept marginal. Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and other Shiite officials have been rebuffed by the US in their desire to remove Baathist operatives from the Interior and Defense Ministries, and also disband brutal militias composed of former Saddam loyalists that were developed during the puppet regime of Allawi. And both President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have not been too shy about issuing orders to the Iraqis and making clear that there will be no timetable for a pullout of US troops. Perhaps al-Jaafari’s recent visit to Iran is an attempt to strike some kind of independent posture, I don’t know….

Meanwhile, violence has reached an astonishing level, as can be followed in bitter detail every day through reading Juan Cole’s Informed Comment. That link goes to a piece indicating worry amongst the most important clerics in Iraq about what appears to be an out-of-control civil war.

Everybody is a loser after the administration’s election engineering effort. The US taxpayer is forced to foot the bill for what could be an endless quagmire. US troops have been betrayed by President Bush and eventually will be almost entirely alone as the effort to Iraqi-ize the occupation fails. But the biggest losers will be the Iraqi people, who are caught in the middle of the superpower’s desire to hold its spoils of war and the terrible violence in which the resistance to the occupation has decided to engage. The January 30 vote, I suspect, was not a call for this unfortunate outcome. Change of these conditions would require that the US president change course — something he has steadfastly refused to do.

UN doing wet work for US-supported dons


“On July 6 in Cite Soleil, a weeping Fredi Romelus, recounted how UN
troops lobbed a red smoke grenade into his house and then opened fire killing his wife and two children. `They surrounded our house this morning and I ran thinking my wife and the children were behind me. They couldn’t get out and the blan [UN] fired into the house.”’

There is only one media source I trust for daily news about Haiti since the US-sponsored coup and removal of democratically-elected President Jean Bertrand Aristide on February 29, 2004. That is Flashpoints radio from Pacifica’s KPFA in Berkeley. The reporting of Kevin Pina is essential. On the web, the best site is haitiaction.net.

I’m just going to go ahead and reproduce a transcript of an interview Pina broadcast on Flashpoints for July 15:

Kevin Pina: From Berkeley California this is Kevin Pina on Flashpoints radio here on Pacifica. With me now direct from Port au Prince is Georges Honorat, a Haitian journalist who works with Haiti-Progress. Georges we’re hearing today about a large demonstration in Cite Soleil. Of course we know Cite Soleil was the site of an alleged massacre by United Nations forces a few days ago, last week on July 6th. Georges what do you know now about what’s going on in Cite Soleil?

Georges Honorat: Ok, two days ago the Lavalas base in Cite Soleil announced a big demonstration…as you said, to protest the massacre of Wednesday, July 6th organized by the MINUSTAH and the [Haitian] National Police, where a minimum of fifty people died among them children and women. And since one or two o’clock this morning MINUSTAH, the soldiers of MINUSTAH from their tanks in Cite Soleil, mainly in Cite Boston, that is part of Cite Soleil. They fired upon peoples houses where - we don’t have the names yet - but three children died, nine years old, five years old and four years old.

Pina: You’re saying at one o’clock this morning the United Nations forces, who are also called MINUSTAH, opened fire on Cite Soleil again?

Honorat: Yes, since midnight I would say, midnight, one o’clock and they were firing on Cite Boston…and they killed three children…we can’t find their names yet but we will. They also fired upon the church, Notre Dame Immacules, and the front door made of steel blew up. And certainly they attacked the people to intimidate them in order [to get them] not to participate in the demonstrations. But the people threw bottles and rocks at the MINUSTAH so they had to drive back and the people cut [off] the roads so the tanks could not enter Cite Soleil. Finally, the demonstration started around 10:30 A.M. and they were like five thousand strong and protesting against, asking for the illegal government to leave the country so that President Aristide could return and finish his mandate and organize free fair and democratic elections. The demonstration finished in peace around 12:45 P.M.

Pina: People here are asking me and they’re having a hard time understanding it; after the horrible brutal killings that the United Nations performed on July 6th …and again as you said they killed children in the early hours today, how on earth can more than 5,000 people get out and demonstrate again? Obviously it’s terrible repression, what is motivating people to risk their lives and take to the streets in those numbers, to continue demonstrating?

Honorat: Yes, that’s a good question Kevin, and I think that the people in Haiti finally see that they don’t have any choice but to fight. I would say that the three elections that the people tried to vote their leaders in, in 1987 the Macoutes backed up by the CIA and the old army they killed thousands of people, mainly in Port au Prince and so that we didn’t have those elections. In 1990 the masses voted the President Jean Bertrand Aristide and after seven months, September 1991 and there was a coup d’etat. And again Aristide returned in 2000 where the people choose him again and in 2004, February 29th , the United States, France and Canada, they organized a kidnapping and they sent President Aristide away. The people say now, ‘what’s going on?’ They [the MINUSTAH] want to kill them, and the elite, mainly the group, they call themselves, 184, backed by the United States and now by MINUSTAH, the United Nations, probably want to finish with the Haitian masses, so that’s probably what motivates them so they will continue the fight until victory.

Pina: Thank you Georges, that was Georges Honorat who writes for Haiti-Progres, you can check his stuff out it comes out every Wednesday, published in New York in three languages, Creole French English. Georges thank you again for being on Flashpoints…

Honorat: Thank you Kevin.

Bush’s “democratic” keystone strategy is betrayed as a lie in Haiti like nowhere else (that says a lot). Apart from utter, appalling horror and revulsion over what my country has done to Haiti and the aspirations of its people, I have just this to add for now. It seems that the way the Bush regime is attempting to subvert self determination in Haiti and elsewhere is to develop an election package that offers narrowly drawn choices in order to legally ratify an episode of US domination. For this to work in Haiti, Aristide must be kept out of the country because he easily would win a fair election.

July 16, 1945 5:29am


From the book Day One: Before Hiroshima and After by Peter Wyden

The Bhagavad Gita
10: Pervading Power

The Blessed Lord said:
Now as a higher message yet
listen to this that I shall tell
both because you delight in it
and also that I wish you well

The mighty seers and hosts of gods
know nothing of my origin
I am the beginning of the gods
and mighty seers in everything

He who knows me, Great Lord of Worlds,
the Unborn and the Beginningless,
he of undeluded mortals
from every evil finds release.

From me alone all states of beings
derive in their diversities;
in mind and wisdom, non-delusion,
in patience, truth, control and peace,

In pleasure, pain, existing, dying,
in fear or safety, harmlessness,
in contentment, fame or infamy,
in austerity or bounteousness.

…

Whoever knows my Pervading Powers
and energies which work therein
is integrated certainly
in undivided discipline.

I am the Origin of all,
from me all creatures emanate
the wise know this and give me love
as thoroughly affectionate.

…

Come then, I will explain to you
at least the chief ones which transcend
of my divine Pervading Powers,
because unbounded I extend.

In the heart of every being
I am the Soul installed to dwell,
the Origin and Midst of beings
I also am their End as well.

I am Vishnu of the sky gods,
the radiant Sun among the lights,
I am Marichi of the storm gods,
I am the Moon of stars at nights.

I am Indra among the deities,
the Sama of the Vedas taught,
I am Mind among the senses
and among the beings I am Thought.

I am Shiva of destroyers,
the Lord of Wealth of sprites and freaks,
I am Fire among the brilliant
and Meru of the mountain-peaks.

I am the chief among the priests,
their god Brihaspati is me,
I am the God of War of captains,
among the waters I’m the Sea.

I am Bhrigu of great sages,
of words the single Syllable,
I am the murmured Prayer of worship,
Himalaya of things immovable.

The sacred Fig of all the trees
and Narada of seers divine,
Chitra-ratha of musicians,
wise Kapila of perfect line.

Indra’s steed among the horses
from Nectar of the sea I spring,
as Indra’s mount of elephants
of human beings I am King.

Of cows I am the Cow-of-wishes,
of weapons the Thunderbolt that shakes
I am the God of Love creating
and I am the Serpent King of snakes.

The Endless of the fabled serpents,
the Water—god of water—beings,
the Senior of the ancestors
and I am Death the all-decreeing.

I am Prahlada of the demons
and I am Time of reckoning,
I am Vishnu’s Mount among the birds
and of the animals I am King.

I am Ganges of the rivers,
I am the Wind of purifiers,
Leviathan of water-monsters,
I am Rama of the warriors.

The Beginning of creations
I am the End and Middle too,
of sciences the Science of the Soul,
in disputation I am True.

I am the letter A of letters
and of compounded words the Pair,
I truly am immortal Time,
the Ordainer facing everywhere.

I am Death that carries all away,
the Origin of things to be,
and female nouns: Fame, Wisdom, Speech,
Luck, Firmness, Patience, Memory.

I am the Gayatri of metres,
the Greatest Chant of those men sing,
I am the First amid the months
and of the seasons I am Spring.

I am Conquest, Resolution,
the Dice of those who speculate,
I am the Goodness in the good,
I am the Greatness in the great.

I am Vasudeva of Vrishnis,
you Arjuna of Pandu’s Sons,
I am Vyasa of the hermits,
wise Ushanas of thoughtful ones.

I am the Craft of would—be rulers,
I am the Rod when men chastise,
I am the Silence of the secret,
I am the Wisdom in the wise.

I am whatever is the Seed
in every other kind of being,
without me nothing could exist,
not one unmoved or moving being.

So my divine Pervading Powers
as I have said can never end,
in these examples I declared
how my Pervading Powers extend.

Whatever shows Pervading Powers
in either majesty or might
be sure it springs in every case
from just a part of my own light.

Yet what’s the use for you to know
so much of this extensive flow?
since all the cosmos I sustain
with part of me yet full remain.

So ends the TENTH CHAPTER and its name is The Yoga of Pervading Power

It is written in most histories of the creation of the first nuclear weapon in 1945 that physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project camp at Los Alamos, New Mexico, recited a verse from The Bhagavad Gita upon ignition of the explosion he named Trinity. The name represents the unified concept of creation, preservation, and destruction of the universe embodied in Indian philosophy.

Usually, the quote is written, “I am become death, the shatterer of worlds”. This is how the Lord Krishna in part answers Arjuna’s inquiries into the nature of the universe.

Above is the 1974 lyric translation of Chapter 10 of The Bhagavad Gita by Geoffrey Parrinder. I think it shows why Oppenheimer, or any physicist for that matter may have affinity for the ‘Gita. Here, the Oppenheimer line is translated, “I am Death that carries all away”.

No matter how we read The Bhagavad Gita, that fateful day sixty years ago was the day that the destroyer of worlds arrived in New Mexico, USA.

Update 7/19/2005 10:30am: I have to correct a couple of things I wrote here. First, I have the wrong citation for the Oppenheimer quote from The Bhagavad Gita. The citation should be Chapter 11:32. In the translation I cite by Parrinder, 11:32 reads “Lo, I am Time, the cause of world decay, matured, resolved the worlds to take away…”

This illustrates the danger in basing anything on a lyric translation where artistic license is taken. It is a beautiful text, but…. Here is a more literal translation of 11:32:

The Blessed Lord said: Time I am, destroyer of the worlds, and I have come to engage all people. With the exception of you [the Pandavas], all the soldiers here on both sides will be slain.

One more correction… The website I cited on the origin of the name “Trinity” for the test apparently was wrong. Accorning to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Oppenheimer:

Oppenheimer named “Trinity”, which he later said was after a John Donne verse. According to the historian Gregg Herken, this naming could have been an allusion to Jean Tatlock (who had introduced him to Donne when they had dated in the 1930s), who had committed suicide a few months previously. He later recalled that while witnessing the explosion he thought of a verse from the Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita:

If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one…

US declares itself arbiter of humanity


The military JAGs secretly had debated some of the allowable torture techniques, but told the Senate Armed Services Personnel Subcommittee on Thursday that “juvenile” pranks involving use of dogs and sexual humiliation constituted “humane” treatment of detainees.

Over the last several months, some former officials of the US military’s Judge Advocate General (JAG) services — the military lawyers — and other retired high-ranking soldiers have expressed concerns about Terror War information-gathering techniques employed on detainees. Deep Blade Journal carried some references to these concerns here and here.

On Thursday, current JAG leaders appeared before the Senate Armed Services Personnel Subcommittee. The Washington Post on Friday had a Page A01 story on this hearing headlined “Military Lawyers Fought Policy on Interrogations”. Okay, they fought some things — often on the clearly valid basis that it is not a good idea to allow tortures be committed against enemies that we would not want used on our own troops. Note however, that the memos containing these discussions remain secret, including from members of Congress.

But I watched a good chunk of this thing on C-SPAN 2. I was very troubled by what I heard. For the most part, the JAGs have accepted the notion that the President of the United States has the “Commander-in-Chief” authority to declare a whole new classification of persons detained in territory under US invasion called “enemy combatant”, to declare on this personal authority that international law does not apply to this class, to then deport these persons to a facility half-way around the world (this act itself a grave breach of the intent of international law), and to declare by unsubstantiated fiat — indeed what a reasonable person easily could find to be precisely the opposite — what constitutes “humane” treatment of such detainees. Terror War or not, it should be easy to see how a reasonable person could interpret such declarations as dictatorial, despotic policies.

The Post story alludes to this last point, but does not convey properly the consensus amongst the JAGs and the Senators that these are accepted as proper classifications of human beings, and in the case of detention at Guantánamo, proper suspension of international law. In fact, most in the room appeared to be quite anxious to get the military tribunals underway. These tribunals of course will be staffed and adjudicated by the US military’s own house puppies — in secret — under conditions where the enemy combatants will not have the normal rights to confront the evidence against them — rights afforded defendants in all decent societies.

I suppose Kennedy and McCain seemed a little grumpy about all this, McCain for obvious reasons. Carl Levin appeared to be offended that the memos discussing the “techniques” have been withheld from even the senators. But Lindsey Graham was mostly a disappointment, being apparently the most eager to get to the tribunals.

Meanwhile, on Friday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit was busy paving the road to legal approval of the “enemy combatant” process. They overturned a ruling from last November that stopped the military trial of Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen.

This capped an ominous flood of news this week on the Guantánamo torture front. Earlier, according to a posting on antiwar.com,

The U.S. Army general widely considered the architect of abusive prisoner interrogation techniques at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and detention centers in Afghanistan used “creative” and “aggressive” tactics, but did not practice torture or violate law or Pentagon policy, the head of the U.S. Southern Command has determined.Despite the recommendations of military investigators, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey C. Miller will not be reprimanded, thus bringing to a close what could be the last of 12 separate investigations into detainee abuse.

The Center for Constitutional Rights elucidated these “tactics”:

• Canadian O.K., a juvenile who was approximately 15 years old when he was taken into custody by U.S. forces in 2001, was threatened by interrogators who, on several occasions, told O.K. he would be sent to Egypt, Israel, Jordan, or Syria—to be tortured. Interrogators also told the 15-year old O.K. that Egyptians would send “Soldier No. 9” to rape him. On one occasion, O.K. was short shackled in various painful positions over an extended period of time; he urinated on himself. Military Police (MP) poured pine oil on the floor and dragged O.K.—still shackled—on his stomach through the mixture.

• Before he was taken to Guantánamo, German resident Murat Kurnaz was tortured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan who applied electric shocks to his feet, hung him by his hands for days at a time, and repeatedly subjected him to waterboarding. Mr. Kurnaz witnessed the brutal beating by soldiers of another prisoner who was left bleeding severely from his head wounds. Mr. Kurnaz believes the prisoner died as a result of the beating.

• When Bosnian Lakhdar Boumediene went on a hunger strike to protest his brutal treatment, a nurse administering intravenous (IV) fluid to him threatened to have a soldier administer the IV the next day if Mr. Boumediene did not eat. The following day, she made good on her threat, and a soldier was directed to administer the IV. Mr. Boumediene’s arm was in extreme pain and bleeding as the soldier attempted to administer the IV. On another occasion, interrogators threatened to shave Mr. Boumediene and apply lipstick to him to make him look like a woman.

• Abd Al Malik Al Wahab of Yemen was told by interrogators that he would be taken “underground” and never again allowed to see the sun; that if taken to the U.S. he would be “put . . . in a jail with all blacks” who “will do whatever they please to you” and “nobody will help you”; that he would be taken to “Egypt and Jordan, and they will torture you”; and that he would be raped by a male at Guantánamo. Interrogators also threatened Mr. Al Wahab’s family, telling him the military could “reach them if it wanted.”

• On approximately April 27 or 28, 2002, Juma Al Dossari was choked and beaten in his cell by MPs and lost consciousness. He was carried from his bloodied cell on a stretcher. The military videotaped the incident. When Mr. Al Dossari later asked the MP who had beaten him why he had done so, the MP replied, “because I’m a Christian.”

• During an interrogation of Abdullah Al Noaimi, Mr. Al Noaimi was injected with an unknown substance that caused him to lose the ability to control his thoughts. Interrogators then asked if he wanted to hurt himself, and if he wanted to be shot.

• Guantánamo prisoners routinely have been subject to beatings, extreme sleep deprivation, humiliation, short shackling, intimidation by dogs, extended periods of solitary confinement, withholding of medical care, and temperature extremes in connection with interrogation.

• As confirmed in findings released yesterday in the Schmidt Report, military officials impersonated FBI agents and State Department officials. Prisoners also have reported that interrogators impersonated lawyers, in an effort to gain information.

And why not throw in that the US military itself confirmed this week that at least one male detainee at Guantánamo was while dressed in women’s underwear “forced to dance with a male interrogator, was subject to strip searches for control measures, not for security, and he was forced to perform dog tricks — all this to lower his personal sense of worth”. All well and good, purposeful, they claimed.

And they better damn well make these claims that international law does not apply in these cases. The puzzle of the “humane” treatment language charged through the administration’s justification for its torture practices was unravelled in an excellent article by former US Representative Elizabeth Holtzman appearing in The Nation for July 18, 2005. Holtzman cites the 1996 War Crimes Act, a Clinton-era domestic statute:

This relatively obscure statute makes it a federal crime to violate certain provisions of the Geneva Conventions. The Act punishes any US national, military or civilian, who commits a “grave breach” of the Geneva Conventions. A grave breach, as defined by the Geneva Conventions, includes the deliberate “killing, torture or inhuman treatment” of detainees. Violations of the War Crimes Act that result in death carry the death penalty.In a memo to President Bush, dated January 25, 2002, Gonzales urged that the United States opt out of the Geneva Conventions for the Afghanistan war–despite Secretary of State Colin Powell’s objections. One of the two reasons he gave the President was that opting out “substantially reduces the likelihood of prosecution under the War Crimes Act”.

It seems likely that numerous high officials, up to and including the President, could be liable under this statute if their outlandish re-definition of the word “humane” and opt-out of international law does not stick. Unfortunately, the power relationships within the US government suggest that the Republican investigative apparatus will never allow such a formulation of charges to occur.

Jingoistic Americans may be impressed with the power the president appears to wield against perceived enemies. The humanity of persons finding themselves in US detention systematically has been attacked in both the personal and public spheres, breaking down 790 years of foundation of criminal law resting on the Magna Carta. This reflects the ultra-radical nature and drunkeness with power of the Bush regime. It is not a criminal regime only because it has usurped the power necessary for it to declare itself legal, but only through outrageous re-definition of the terms that define the crimes of which otherwise they would be guilty.

The baleful signs in this enterprise point to a future nobody would accept until the Bush regime’s noose is tight around our necks, at which point we have no choice. The regime’s purpose? Could it be domination of a sort a thousandfold more powerful than the threat posed by the terrorist enemy, 500 of whose members supposedly are incarcerated at Guantánamo?

I say supposedly because a high percentage of Guantánamo detainees are completely innocent of any wrongdoing, or if they are guilty, the deserve a fair, public trial. The verdict of a US tribunal, where the detainee has been tortured in any reasonable eyes, will hardly hold water or give anyone apart from emotionally immature Americans true satisfaction that justice for terror has been accomplished.

In these conditions, terror will breed like a wildfire. People around the world will begin to see themselves forced into desperate measures to avenge the injustice, settle the score, and protect their homelands from the invaders who deport their countrymen.

On the other hand, once the Bush regime establishes it’s ability to define terms and overturn law by its own fiat, every person on this planet with contrary political views is at risk for detention and mistreatment under any theory the regime will choose to apply. That would be a world gulag by any definition.

Gangbusters

After a slow start, conditions are ideal for the snap peas to come in

Weather conditions have become close to ideal the last few days. Yesterday’s good rainfall along with higher humidity and plenty of warmth and sun today are stimulating growth all around (including the weeds, unfortunately). All plants — especially the tomatoes in addition to the peas — are adding size and beginning to set fruit. This is exciting!

Did political use of terror alerts sacrifice London?

Back in August last year, I posted on a particularly comical episode in which then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in an interview with Tim Russert discussed how terror alerts in the weeks around the Democratic National Convention had been based on information over two years old. Funny they should bring it up just then, right?

A scandal then erupted concerning the public release by the Bush Administration of the name of a deep undercover terror informant, Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan. See Juan Cole’s contemporaneous postings for all the details: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Now after the terrible spectacle in London last week, it appears that the at best incompetent handling of the Kahn matter (at worst, it was done for a cheap Republican political boost) prematurely thwarted an important investigation that otherwise might have uncovered the entire terror cell responsible for the atrocities.

Complete details are posted at AMERICAblog.

It is just outrageous that there has ever been a perception that President Bush and his staff of thieving clowns have ever cared a whit about protecting the people of America or the world from the sadistic, skulking violence that they themselves create with the bombs and abuses of their Terror War.

UK anti-war MP must be read after the previous post

Galloway was heavily criticized by the war blogging crowd. But his remarks are right on the money, expanding in a way only Galloway can the ideas I was trying to express in my last post:

Does the House not believe that hatred and bitterness have been engendered by the invasion and occupation of Iraq, by the daily destruction of Palestinian homes, by the construction of the great apartheid wall in Palestine and by the occupation of Afghanistan? Does it understand that the bitterness and enmity generated by those great events feed the terrorism of bin Laden and the other Islamists? Is that such a controversial point? Is it not obvious? When I was on the Labour Benches and spoke in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I said that I despise Osama bin Laden. The difference is that I have always despised him. I did so when the Government, in this very House, gave him guns, money and encouragement, and set him to war in Afghanistan. I said that if they handled that event in the wrong way, they would create 10,000 bin Ladens. Does anyone doubt that 10,000 bin Ladens at least have been created by the events of the past two and a half years? If they do, they have their head in the sand.

There are more people in the world today who hate us more intently than they did before as a result of the actions that we have taken. Does this House understand that the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison have inflamed and deepened that sense of hatred around the world and made our position more dangerous? Do Members of this House not understand that Guantanamo Bay has contributed to the sense of bitterness and hatred against us around the world? Does nobody in this House understand that when Palestinians’ houses are knocked down, their olive trees cut down and their children shot by Israeli marksmen, an army of people who want to harm us is created? To say that is not to hope that they succeed—I started by making clear, I hope, my utter rejection and condemnation of the events in London this morning.

Chris Floyd has more excerpts…

False promises from the national security state

Could it be more clear that the post-9/11 Terror War being executed by US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair is an abject failure? These proponents of brutal violence, torture, and devastating war under the guise of national security should be naked in their mendacity at this point.

Certain creations-turned-to-opponents of the market elites who run both the US and the UK unfortunately have managed to gain new recruits for spectacular attacks directed back at the controlling societies. After the 7/7 attack last week on public transportation in London, we again face the question: Why do they hate us?

If it was not evident to many in the US in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, now after four years of US-sponsored bombing, war, detention without evidence or trial and torture, any honest answer to the question must examine the notion that a wide swath of the planet’s population feels it is in a fight for its property, culture, and very survival against these US-centered elites.

I examined these questions in my post-911 essay. It’s worth re-reading that today if only to note that President Bush and the war machine he commands is not at all interested in budging from the inimical course it has set since then.

The bellicose public justifications for resort to police-state mentality and military adventures merely have been enhanced after the 7/7 attack in London last week.

“We have carried the fight to the enemy. We are rolling back the terrorist threat to civilization, not on the fringes of its influence, but at the heart of its power,” says President Bush.

Sounds like something he put out since the London attack, right? Er, no… he had terrorism “rolled back” back on September 7, 2003. Since then, as he always steadfastly refuses to notice, his Iraq project has spiraled into a colossal quagmire with thousands US deaths and injuries and countless Iraqi casualties.

For now, I’ll defer to a former Blair adviser, David Clark, who wrote in a Saturday comment in The Guardian that, “This terror will continue until we take Arab grievances seriously”.

The hawkish Clark argued for reducing the threat of terrorism with what has always seemed obvious to me:

An effective strategy can be developed, but it means turning our attention away from the terrorists and on to the conditions that allow them to recruit and operate….

From this point of view, it must be said that everything that has followed the fall of Kabul has been ruinous to the task of winning over moderate Muslim opinion and isolating the terrorists within their own communities. In Iraq we allowed America to rip up the rule book of counter-insurgency with a military adventure that was dishonestly conceived and incompetently executed. Tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed by US troops uninterested in distinguishing between combatant and noncombatant, or even counting the dead. The hostility engendered has been so extreme that the CIA has been forced to conclude that Iraq may become a worse breeding ground for international terrorism that Afghanistan was. Bin Laden can hardly believe his luck.

In fact a wide range of hawks and former US administration or UK officials from the rationalist group, including former US terrorism czar Richard Clarke, Thomas Sanderson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and Robin Cook (who fell out with Blair prior to the Iraq invasion) have argued that “The struggle against terrorism cannot be won by military means”.

What the military adventures have done instead is create chaos in weak countries battered by years of often-US-supported dictatorship, sanctions, war, bombing, home invasion, extrajudicial arrest & detention in violation of the most basic precepts of international law, dominating violations of personal dignity and religious practice of detainees — certainly this means Iraq, but Afghanistan qualifies in essential respects too. Everyone throughout the Middle East and Arab/Muslim world can see what has happened, even if Americans and their jingo media can’t. What happened in London on 7/7, as terrible as it was, happens multiple times every day in America’s Iraq.

So it is not surprising that people who perceive themselves to be on the wrong end of US attacks would try to turn what President Bush says about how “We will stay on the offense, fighting the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them at home” right back in his face. We all lose when this happens.

Harbingers

Basil in good health

Glacier tomatoes have set early fruit

844-foot Navy warship visits Maine for the 4th

This list painted onto the ship’s superstructure gives the post-Cold-War organizing principle for the US military.

Aside from a childhood interest in military hardware, I’ve never been one to go ga-ga over a warship. Yet I joined thousands of people in Portland, Maine who on Monday toured the USS Iwo Jima. Please read this flag-waving story — “Navy ship inspires awe” — for the mainstream media details.

Okay, I was rather awestruck by the size and power of this floating platform for delivery of killing machines to far-flung regions of Earth. Killing machine… that’s what the ship is, along with all of the tools — helicopters, Harrier jets, and landing craft — that travel with it. And these are the tools of intervention, delivering death to opponents of the empire.

It has been a while since such a large warship has made a port call in Maine. I believe the purpose of sending the Iwo Jima so far north is twofold. First, there has been a massive political backlash against the Pentagon after the Base Closure and Realignment Commission (BRAC) proposed closing or cutting three key Maine facilities last month. The largest of these is the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, a nuclear submarine service base at the far southern tip of Maine along the New Hampshire border. A port call just makes for wonderful PR with which to assuage the masses and blunt the effectiveness of politicians ahead of important hearings on the issue. Second, an impressive ship filled with a diversity of bright, young, skilled wonderful sailors makes a good military recruitment poster. To what degree the myriad youth I saw on board were influenced, I do not know.

The whole picture is tied together by the mythological Terror War. I am not saying that terror does not exist in the world — it does, and some of it comes off of the Iwo Jima. Some people just do not want to accept the reality of that last point. US conduct of the Terror War has far too often meant that innocent civilians get US bombs dropped on their heads. The victims of these bombs are just as innocent and just as killed or hurt as US victims of 911. US propaganda claims that protection of civilians is undertaken through various means, like smart bombs. But time and time again, it is shown that the reality is quite different, as the actual conduct of the war means dumb bombs, flattened cities, home invasions, indiscriminate roundups, and torture in now-US-run dungeons.

I am saying that the the very real images of 911 have already evolved into a myth that supports jingoistic attitudes about war. This PR wedge is well understood by the Bush regime. Note the repeated references to 911, and to the nobility of the men and women in uniform serving the president as he is “taking the fight to the terrorists abroad” that infuse all of Bush’s recent stay-the-course speeches on Iraq.

Bush speaks war on the 4th of July in Morgantown, WV

See how in the 4th of July message the president’s speechwriter has expertly woven the 911 image with a subtle recruiting pitch:

At this hour, our men and women in uniform are defending America against the threats of the 21st century. The war we are fighting came to our shores on September the 11th, 2001. After that day, I made a pledge to the American people, we will not wait to be attacked again. (Applause.) We will bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies. (Applause.)

Our enemies in this new war are men who celebrate murder, incite suicide and thirst for absolute power. They seek to spread their ideology of tyranny and oppression across the world. They seek to turn the Middle East into a haven for terror. They seek to drive America out of the region. These terrorists will not be stopped by negotiations, or concessions, or appeals to reason. In this war, there is only one option, and that is victory.

The underpinning of US war policy is an NSC-68-like grand vision of post-911 terror threats. As I have written before, President Bush is tapped into very powerful stuff. Despite polls showing his support on Iraq has slipped in recent months, Bush still has great power to rally his loyalists and countless others in America who do not possess an analysis adequate to counteract the falsehoods and blatant manipulation that feeds their group fervor.

The American public remains vulnerable to God and country messages that reach hearts and engender feelings of limitless power. People like to feel powerful because of the fact that we can dominate and destroy Iraq while changing its government, occupying its lands, and rebuilding it in our image at our president’s will.