[Peace] News notes 2005-10-09

[Carl Estabrook]

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        Notes from last week's "global war on terrorism,"
        for the Sunday, 9 October 2005, meeting of AWARE,
        "Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort" of Champaign-Urbana.
        (Sources provided on request; some are indicated.)
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	"THE SECRET SERVICE recently entered a North Carolina high school
	to remove a student's project that was made for an assignment on
	the Bill of Rights.  Students in a senior civics and economics
	class at Currituck County High School were told to take
	photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights. One
	student photographed a picture of President Bush with a red thumb
	tack through his head. He then took the photo to Wal-Mart to be
	developed. An employee at Wal-Mart called the Kitty Hawk police
	and then the matter was passed onto the Secret Service. Late last
	month the Secret Service sent officers to the school to question
	the principal and teacher. They also entered the classroom to
	remove the photograph."


THE PRINCIPAL STORIES this week seem to group themselves under four
headings disasters, espionage, carnage, and criminal conspiracy.  They
will be followed by some good news and a brief book review.


I. DISASTERS

[1.] THE AP REPORTS that more than 30,000 are dead in an earthquake on the
Pakistan/Kashmir border raises the question as to why the massive military
force the US has in the affected area US-occupied Afghanistan and US
client state Pakistan can't be used for earthquake relief.  It doesn't
seem to be, leading Pakistan president Musharraf to plead for helicopters
from foreign states,

[2.] IN GUATEMALA, the death toll from torrential rains last week
associated with Hurricane Stan stood at 652; 384 were missing.  Mudslides
have led the Guatemalan government to say that The worst-hit communities
will be abandoned and declared graveyards ... after they stopped most
efforts to dig out increasingly decomposed bodies.  "Panabaj will no
longer exist," said Mayor Diego Esquina, referring to the Mayan hamlet on
the shores of Lake Atitlan covered by a half-mile wide mudflow as much as
15 to 20 feet thick. "We are asking that it be declared a cemetery. We are
tired, we no longer know where to dig." ... Sniffer dogs trained to detect
bodies didn't arrive in time ... Thousands of hungry and injured survivors
mobbed helicopters delivering the first food aid to communities that have
been cut off from the outside. Fleets of helicopters -- including U.S.
Blackhawks and Chinooks -- fanned out across the nation to evacuate the
wounded and bring supplies to over 100 communities still cut off by the
mudslides and flooding ... Meanwhile, scores of foreign tourists were
evacuated by foot and by helicopter from isolated communities ringing Lake
Atitlan, a popular destination for U.S. and European travelers.
Villagers in Panabaj, the worst-hit town, where hundreds are still
missing, refused to allow in the army because of memories of a 1990
massacre there during the country's 36-year civil war. In El Salvador
authorities reported 71 deaths from the rains. Others were killed in
Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras and Costa Rica.
	It's by no means entirely a natural disaster, as Paul Mueth, my
colleague from News from Neptune, points out:  the situation made worse by
deforestation and exploitative land use.

[3.] IN THE U.S., "Federal aid to victims of Hurricane Katrina is already
faltering on two crucial fronts: health care and housing. Incompetence is
part of the problem, but deeper political issues also play a crucial role.
Start with health care, where conservative senators, generally believed to
be acting on behalf of the White House, have blocked bipartisan
legislation that would provide all low-income victims of Katrina with
health coverage under Medicaid [because they're afraid] that it would
create "a new Medicaid entitlement." [Secondly] These days, both
conservatives and liberals agree that public housing projects are a bad
idea, and that housing vouchers - which help the poor pay rent - are much
better. But the administration has chosen, instead, to focus its efforts
on the creation of public housing in the form of trailer parks, which have
been slow to take shape, will almost surely be more expensive than a
voucher program and may create long-term refugee ghettoes ... if [the
administration] accepts the principle that all hurricane victims are
entitled to medical care, people might start asking why the same isn't
true of all American citizens... and what administration officials fear
isn't that housing vouchers would fail, but that they would succeed - and
that this success would undermine the administration's ongoing efforts to
cut back housing aid ... As the misery of the hurricane's survivors goes
on ... to a large extent, they are miserable by design." [Krugman, NYT]
	In other news from Capitol Hill, Senate Republicans are proposing
to slash food stamp programs by nearly $600 million. The Associated Press
estimates 300,000 people would become ineligible to receive food stamps.
	And the reports today that the panels that helped Louisiana's U.S.
senators hammer out a proposed $200 billion aid package were chock full of
energy and other industry lobbyists. "I was basically shocked," said one
scientist. "What do lobbyists know about a plan for the reconstruction and
restoration of Louisiana?"

[4.] THE PRINCIPAL EFFECT of the threat of a bird-flu epidemic (a similar
epidemic, which began in Kansas after the First World War killed more
people world-wide than all the civilians and soldiers who died in the
entire world war) has been to lift biotech stOcks -- not that they
particularly needed it: the profits of the big pharmaceutical companies
last year were greater than the profits of all the other Fortune 500
companies -- put together.


II.ESPIONAGE

[5.] FROM THE BRITISH PAPER The Independent:
	"President Bush's principal adviser Karl Rove is to be questioned
again over the improper naming of a CIA official. Mohamed ElBaradei,
accused by the American right of being insufficiently aggressive, wins the
Nobel Peace Prize for his stalwart work at the helm of the International
Atomic Energy Agency. Pentagon official Larry Franklin pleads guilty to
passing on classified information to Israel. Just a normal week in
politics. But there is a thread linking these events and it is Iraq.
	"Politicians tell us they acted in good faith on the road to war,
and maybe they did, but that leaves a prickly question: who was so keen to
prove that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat that they forged
documents purporting to show that he was trying to buy 500 tons of uranium
from Niger to develop nuclear weapons? The forgery was revealed to the
Security Council by ElBaradei. That was not an intelligence error. It was
a straightforward lie, an invention intended to mislead public opinion and
help start a war.
	"At the beginning of 2001, a few weeks before George Bush took
office, there was a break-in at the Niger embassy in Rome. Strangely,
nothing of value was taken. Months later came 9/11 and a month after that,
as George Bush wondered how to get back at the terrorists, a report from
the Italian security service (Sismi) reached the CIA: Iraq was seeking to
buy uranium.
	"Disappointingly for the neocons, the CIA sent Ambassador Joseph
Wilson to Niger to check the story: he reported that it was nonsense. When
the story was repeated by Bush, Wilson went public. His wife, CIA agent
Valerie Plame, was then outed by the White House. Hence Rove's
predicament.
	"An organisation called the Office of Special Plans (OSP) was set
up in the Pentagon by Douglas Feith, a former consultant to Israel's Likud
party, to prepare for the war. In the words of Robert Baer, a
distinguished former CIA man, it was a "competing intelligence shop at the
Pentagon ... if you didn't like the answer you're getting from the CIA".
In short, bogus stories would get a second chance at the OSP.
	"A clue to the ancestry of these black arts can be found in 1980,
when right-wing Republicans wanted Ronald Reagan elected. They publicised
a story that Billy Carter, the then President Jimmy Carter's colourful
brother, had received $50,000 from the Libyan government.
	"The story was always denied by the President and no evidence of
the payment was found, but the story helped to elect Reagan. Its source?
Sismi, and an associate of a man called Michael Ledeen.
	"Ledeen is an intriguing and enduring presence in the murkier
parts of US foreign policy. He is an American specialist on Italy with a
long-standing commitment to Israel. According to The New York Times, in
December 2001, a few months after the CIA first heard the Niger claims,
Ledeen flew to Rome with Manucher Ghorbanifar, a former Iranian arms
dealer, and two officials from OSP, one of whom was Larry Franklin. In
Rome they met the head of Sismi.
	"Some months later, the documents were published, having been sold
to an Italian journalist by a Roman businessman linked to Sismi. So far,
so circumstantial. One man who might well know the answer to all this is
Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of counter terrorism operations at
the CIA. His belief is that the documents were produced in the US but
'funnelled through the Italians'. When an interviewer asked Cannistraro
'if I said Michael Ledeen', he reportedly replied 'I don't think it's a
proven case ... You'd be very close'.
	"Ledeen, on hearing this, issued the following statement: 'I have
absolutely no connection to the Niger documents, have never even seen
them. I did not work on them, never handled them, know virtually nothing
about them, don't think I ever wrote or said anything about the subject.'
	"It seems it wasn't Ledeen but someone close to him. So who was it
who had been planning since before 9/11 to create a fraudulent casus belli
against Saddam?"  [The autheor, Norman Dombey, is Emeritus Professor of
Theoretical Physics at the University of Sussex and an expert on Iraq's
nuclear capability.]
	Ledeen, a long time Neocon with an interest in Italian Fascism, is
ensconced at the big business lobby, The American Enterprise Institute,
where in a speech a decade ago he offered one of the most succinct
statements of the Neocon philosophy: "Every ten years or so, the United
States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it
against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."

[6.] THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT is investigating whether a U.S. Marine working
in Dick Cheney's office gave classified documents about the Philippines to
opposition figures in Manila. The employee was caught last year and
arrested a month ago.
	In Washington, a federal grand jury has indicted the Bush
administration's former chief procurement official for making false
statements and obstructing investigations into Republican lobbyist Jack
Abramoff. The official -- David Safavian -- is facing five felony counts.

[7.] IT'S RUMORED that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald may indict a
number of administration figures and perhaps others on espionage charges
in the Valerie Plame case.  And he may have caught NYT reporter Judith
Miller perjuring herself: she's suddenly discovered notes about an earlier
and apparently unmentioned conversation with WH figures.


III. CARNAGE

[7.] THE LAT on Sunday described an increase in the insurgency in Iraq as
the vote on the US-designed constitution approaches (next Saturday).  In
other Iraq news, the NYT said Sunday that militias rule the city of Basra,
having infiltrated displaced the Coalition-backed police. British PM Tony
Blair said that Iran appeared to be linked to several recent attacks in
which eight British troops have died, although he added there was no
conclusive evidence of the country's involvement.  He also warned there
was "no justification" for Iran or any other country [sic] to interfere in
Iraq. " [A bit late in the day for him to come to that conclusion,
wouldn't you think?]

[8.] THE U.S. CONTINUED a major assault in western Iraq last week. ["The
military has said it will wrap up the operations in time for Sunni Arabs
in the region to vote in the referendum."] At least 3,500 U.S. troops took
part in two separate offensives. Operation River Gate was launched at the
start of the holy month of Ramadan. It marks the biggest U.S. offensive in
western Iraq this year. Blasts from U.S. warplanes and helicopters lit up
the sky during the fighting. Many Iraqi civialians were reported killed..
Meanwhile at least five U.S. troops have died. Col. Stephen Davis,
commander of Marine Regimental Combat Team 2, warned residents in western
Iraq that the U.S. will be there for a while. He told a crowd of Iraqis
"We're not going anywhere... Some of you are concerned about the attack
helicopters and mortar fire from the base. I will tell you this: those are
the sounds of peace." [You may recall a similar remark from the Vietnam
War, when a U.S. officer said, "We had to destroy the village in order to
save it."]
	US mortars are the sound of the peace of the grave, perhaps: AFP
reports 700 Iraqi civilians dead in September, up from 526 in August.
And why are we not hearing the stories?  Well, the group Reporters Without
Borders called upon the US to release five journalists they hold in prison
in Iraq.

[9.] CORPWATCH IS REPORTING that tens of thousands of low-wage Asian
laborers are traveling to Iraq to work for U.S. military contractors such
as Halliburton. Monthly salaries usually range from $200 to $1000 - far
less than the salaries paid to U.S. contractors. Many of the workers are
coming from the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal.
CorpWatch reports they frequently sleep in crowded trailers and wait
outside in line in 100 degree plus heat to eat "slop." Many are said to
lack adequate medical care and put in hard labor seven days a week, 10
hours or more a day, for little or no overtime pay. They are also often
unprotected from the ongoing fighting. When U.S. contractors slip on
helmets and bulletproof vests, the Asian laborers are frequently shielded
only by the shirts on their backs. The number of Asian laborers killed
since the war began is unknown.

[10.] AN EX-MARINE PUBLISHES a book in France he couldn't find an American
publisher that describes how US military training has created troops so
desensitized to violence that battleground brutality in Iraq is rampant.
Jimmy Massey's book is titled KILL! KILL! KILL!

IV.  CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY

[11.] THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES a week ago Friday passed by one vote a
bill ostensibly to increase the US oil refinery capacity but actually to
reduce environmental checks on big oil companies. Republicans had to keep
the vote open for approximately 45 minutes (while democrats shouted
"Shame! Shame!") to convince certain members of their party. Rep. Tom
DeLay, who is no longer in the House leadership, played an important role
in convincing representatives to vote for the bill. It does not face a
good chance of passing in the Senate. [Our own representative was one a of
a handful of Republicans who voted agaisnt it.]

[12.] LATE LAST WEDNESDAY the U.S. Senate approved (90-9) a bipartisan
amendment regarding the treatment of prisoners held in United States
custody. The amendment offered by Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey
Graham (R-SC), Dick Durbin (D-IL) and others, would affirm the United
States long-standing obligation not to engage in torture or cruel,
inhuman, or degrading treatment. It would also require that the treatment
of detainees comply with the Armys Field Manual on Intelligence
Interrogation. [Senator Corzine of New Jersey did not vote, and Senators
Allard (CO), Bond (MO), Coburn (OK), Cochran (MS), Cornyn (TX), Inhofe
(OK), Roberts (KS), Sessions (AL), and Stevens (AK) all voted Nay.] The
measure was offered as an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill.
Twice in the past eighteen months, Durbin has authored similar amendments
both of which were unanimously approved by the Senate. In both cases,
Durbins legislative language was later removed from the bill at the
insistence of the Bush administration.  This one too is sure to get
diluted, or cut, in conference with the House.
	Meanwhile, and perhaps more importantly, the Senate Intelligence
Committee quietly approved new legislation that would allow Pentagon
intelligence operatives to collect information from U.S. citizens without
revealing their status as government spies. According to the Los Angeles
Times, the bill would end a long-standing requirement that military
intelligence officers disclose their government ties when approaching any
U.S. citizen in the United States.

[13.] THE BBC REPORTS that the International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC) says it is worried about a hunger strike inside the US
concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay. The ICRC spokeswoman, Antonella
Notari, said the situation there was serious, and her organisation was
following it with concern. But she would not give details of what the ICRC
had found during its visits. The ICRC rarely takes its concerns to the
public, but it has done over these hunger strikers the hunger strikers are
apparently being force fed ... shackled to their beds so that nasal
feeding tubes can be inserted.  Some say as many as 200 of the 500 or so
detainees in the camps have refused food. Reports of hunger strikes at
Guantanamo Bay first surfaced back in July but were not mentioned in MSMN.

[14.] THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT said last Monday that it will investigate the
FBI killing of Puerto Rican independence leader Filiberto Ojeda Rios. The
killing has sparked widespread outrage in Puerto Rico. On Sept. 23, over
100 FBI agents surrounded the house of the 72-year-old Ojeda Rios. After
he was shot, the FBI let him lie wounded in his house for nearly a day
during which time he bled to death. The FBI claimed Ojeda Rios fired
first, but his wife said this is not true. Ojeda Rios had been on the
FBI's most wanted list for his role in a $7 million bank heist but he was
a legendary figure in Puerto Rico for his lifelong resistance to U.S.
colonialism. Tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans attended his funeral
services last week. [In Illinois, we remember the similar assassination of
the young Black Panther leader Fred Hampton by the FBI and Chicago police
in 1969.]

[15.] THE UNITED STATES is threatening political groups and politicians
that Nicaragua will lose millions of dollars in aid from Washington if any
moves are made to bring down the US-backed president, Enrique Bolaos. In a
move reminiscent of US intervention in Nicaragua in the 1980s, the US
deputy secretary of state, Robert Zoellick, was in the capital Managua
this past week, to head off the possibility of the Sandinista leader,
Daniel Ortega, returning to power. The Nicaraguan national assembly has
been debating a proposal to impeach Bolaos over campaign finance
violations. He was elected in 2001. Zoellick said that $4 billion in debt
forgiveness and a $175 million grant to Nicaragua would be withheld if
Bolanos is impeached.


V. BETTER NEWS

[16.] THE HINDUSTAN TIMES REPORTS that former South African President
Nelson Mandela is the international statesman that most people in the
world would prefer as their leader. This is according to a poll conducted
by the BBC through the internet. The results of the poll, in which 15,000
people from around the world participated, was released in Cape Town. The
BBC asked the people to choose their best 11 from 100 high-profile figures
for a fantasy world government. Most of the participants were from the
United States. Former South African anti-apartheid leader and Anglican
Archbishop, Desmond Tutu, was another South African who topped the first
11. He came in 8th. Mandela came in as number one, ahead of former United
States president Bill Clinton. Exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai
Lama, came third. The person who landed the fourth place was a choice that
surprised the BBC team - it was Noam Chomsky, the United States linguist
and leftwing political activist who is a professor at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates was number six
and Steve Jobs of Apple computers was number seven. After Archbishop Tutu
came flamboyant British tycoon Richard Branson in ninth place, followed by
stock market billionaire and philanthropist, George Soros.

[17.] BUSH'S NOMINEE for deputy attorney general, Timothy E. Flanigan,
withdrew. His confirmation has been delayed several times, particularly
after questions came up about his connections to lobbyist Jack Abramoff,
his lack of experience as a criminal prosecutor, and his role in the
creation of the administration's policies on the treatment of terrorist
suspects.

[18.] THE U.S. ARMY has suffered its worst year for recruiting since 1979.
The Army had set an annual goal of 80,000 new recruits by September 30 but
fell 7,000 recruits short. The Army National Guard and the Army Reserve
also fell short of their annual goal. Meanwhile the Armed Forces is trying
new ways to reach the nation's young. The Army National Guard is now
offering to give away three free music downloads from Itunes to
individuals who sign up online to be contacted by recruiters.

[19.] "VENEZUELA HAS MOVED its central bank foreign reserves out of U.S.
banks, liquidated its investments in U.S. Treasury securities and placed
the funds in Europe, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Friday."  The
move is a blow to the neoliberal economic regime that the U.S. has been
setting up for a generation around the world.

[20.] THE INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRY with the best national health is also the
largest per capita consumer of cigarettes Japan.  Why is the Japanese
national health so good? Relative equality in wealth and income. The more
unequal an industrialized country is, the worse its national health is and
the US is the most unequal.


VI.  BOOK REVIEW

I RECOMMEND David Harvey's new book A BRIEF HISTORY OF NEOLIBERALISM
(Oxford UP, 2005).  Brian Holmes writes in a review, "The book makes one
self-evident, yet strangely scandalous assertion: the rise of neoliberal
economics since the late 1970s ... is the centerpiece of a deliberate
project to restore upper-class power. True to its title, the book presents
a concise but extremely well-documented economic history of the last three
decades, encompassing ... the entire world, with a particular emphasis on
the US and capitalist China.  It identifies structural trends of
neoliberal governance that serve equally to explicate the present crisis,
both of the global economy and of interstate relations. And finally it
asks the political question of how resurgent upper-class power can
successfully be opposed."  See the rest of this long review at
<http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=05/09/29/0511228>.


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  C. G. Estabrook, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  109 Observatory, 901 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801
  ### <www.carlforcongress.org> <www.newsfromneptune.com> ###
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