[Peace] News notes 2006-07-01: Success

[Carl Estabrook]

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        Notes from last week's "global war on terrorism,"
        for the July 1, 2006, meeting of AWARE, the
        "Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort" of Champaign-Urbana.
        (Sources provided on request; paragraphs followed
        by a bracketed source are substantially verbatim.)
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	"He that would make his own liberty secure
	must guard even his enemy from oppression;
	for if he violates this duty he establishes
	a precedent that will reach to himself." --Thomas Paine

[1] On our National Day in 2006, there are two and a half years left in
the constitutional term of the Bush administration, surely the most
successful administration since Reagan's, and probably since Roosevelt's
-- successful, that is, in delivering wealth and power to those who
already control them in the US.  Although the USG is reviled around the
world, and its policies generally rejected by the domestic population,
that doesn't matter -- there is no effective opposition to the US at home
or abroad.
	Policy elites within the US are reduced to wan wishes that perhaps
China will check the imperial arrogance of the USG (that's in a recent
issue of the establishment journal "Foreign Affairs"); the official
opposition party -- always part of the elite consensus -- consists of
toadies and trimmers (with isolated and partial exceptions like Reps.
Murtha and Kucinich).
	All of this wouldn't matter much -- after all, the USG was
designed from the beginning, in the words of Founding Father James
Madison, "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority" ---
except that the policy of today's unopposed administration is unchecked
murder, torture, imprisonment and immiseration.
	The country that imprisons a larger proportion of its citizens
than any other trumpets that it is spreading freedom and democracy to
other nations, but freedom must be understood to mean the freedom to do
what the US wants, and democracy, control by US business interests. Under
these definitions the USG impoverishes its own country to feed a
uncontrolled military and its attendant merchants of death.  (I'm just
back from New Orleans and a first hand look at that impoverishment.)
	The US and its principal client conduct, brutally and
inefficiently, two devastating occupations in the Middle East (a case of
apparently preplanned rape and murder, including child-murder, by
occupying US soldiers was revealed this week), and they threaten to attack
other countries, regardless of international law.  Seymour Hersh reports
in the current New Yorker on the ongoing discussion in the USG about an
air attack on Iran.
	In Africa the US supports authoritarian regimes and subverts
popular governments under the propagandistic umbrella of the Global War on
Terrorism; in Latin America it awaits a chance to deploy its military,
extricated from a devastated but subdued Iraq, against one or more
populist governments that are moving toward independence and integration;
and meanwhile it stymies its real economic rivals, Europe and Northeast
Asia, while extracting vast amounts of cash from them.

[2] Many cheered this week when the Supreme Court seemed to check
administration policies in its concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, which
the Bush administration originally established to be a place literally
outside of US law, where they could do whatever they liked.  The Court
held, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that the kangaroo courts the administration
had devised for the prisoners there were inadequate, and that the US was
legally required to observe the Geneva Convention.
	But will it make any difference?  All those held illegally and
indefinitely at Guantanamo are still there, the torture policies are still
in place, and the administration is moving to make the relatively minor
legal adjustments necessary to reinstate the tribunals.  And if they don't
succeed, they're perhaps even more pleased: they're back to the situation
they first established, holding the prisoners indefinitely without any
legal complications to deal with.  Our own Senator Obama (but not Durbin)
voted for the Graham amendment that severely limited these prisoners'
access to the US courts.

[3] Meanwhile, a new book gives glimpses of the US torture policy.  Ron
Suskind's "One Percent Doctrine" seems to be based on the uncredited
recollections of former CIA Director George Tenet .  It tells, e.g., of
the US imprisonment and torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, said to be the
planner of the 9/11 attacks, and still absolutely incommunicado in one of
the CIA's secret prisons around the world.
	In the course of his torture, USG officials whose salaries we pay
and who were operating in our name, threatened to kill his seven year old
daughter and nine year old son.  "Go ahead," he said. "They will go to a
better place, with God."  Whatever else is true, our US torturers -- from
Bush and Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld on down -- are clearly godless.
	The question of George Bush's own sadism -- raised by stories from
childhood friends, his enthusiasm for frequent Texas executions, and his
comments about Karla Faye Tucker -- was raised again by Suskind's story of
Bush's avidity to have the literal head of Osama bin Ladin's associate,
Zawahiri -- purported to have been discovered in a make-shift grave in
Afghanistan -- sent to him at the Oval Office.

[4] An article in the LAT points out that in the Hamdan case the SC held
"that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention applies to the conflict
with Al Qaeda -- a holding that makes high-ranking Bush administration
officials potentially subject to prosecution under the federal War Crimes
Act.
	"The provisions of the Geneva Convention were intended to protect
noncombatants including prisoners in times of armed conflict. But as the
administration has repeatedly noted, most of these protections apply only
to conflicts between states. Because Al Qaeda is not a state, the
administration argued that the Geneva Convention didn't apply to the war
on terror...
	"On the one hand, the administration argued that the struggle
against terrorism was a war, subject only to the law of war, not US.
criminal or constitutional law. On the other hand, the administration said
the [laws of war] didn't apply to the war with Al Qaeda."
	On this basis the USG said that it could disregard the
Constitution and "hold even US. citizens indefinitely without counsel,
charge or trial."  They argued that torture techniques were "not illegal
under US law because US law was trumped by the law of war, and they
weren't illegal under the law of war either, because Geneva Convention
prohibitions on torture and cruel treatment were not applicable to the
conflict with Al Qaeda."
	But Common Article 3 forbids "cruel treatment and torture [and]
outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading
treatment" ... Under federal criminal law, anyone who "commits a war crime
shall be fined or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and
if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of
death." And a war crime is defined as "any conduct which constitutes a
violation of Common Article 3 of the international conventions signed at
Geneva."
	The anti-war movement should be demanding war crimes trials.

[5] Our client state increased substantially its commission of war crimes
this week in attacks on Gaza and sweeping arrests of members of the
Palestinian government, occasioned by the kidnapping of an Israeli army
corporal by a guerrilla group.  The Israeli government is using the
capture of Galad Shalit as the USG used 9/11 -- an excuse for launching
long-planned military attacks and repression.  It becomes clear now what
the supposed withdrawal from Gaza was about: with the removal of Jewish
settlers from Gaza, the Israeli military treats it as a free-fire zone.
	The Israeli military operations were ostensibly to recover Cpl.
Shalit.  The Israelis delivered a letter to President Abbas saying that
they would assassinate the Palestinian Prime Minister unless the corporal
was returned.  They then attacked the PM's office with rockets from their
American helicopters.
	The US can hardly claim neutrality: in one incident, arguably also
a violation of the laws of war, US-supplied planes destroyed the plant
that provides electricity to much of Gaza -- and the plant is guaranteed
by the US government but will take months to rebuild.  Rejecting an
Egyptian brokered exchange, the Israelis made it obvious that they are
using Cpl. Shalit as a casus belli for continued ethnic-cleansing of
Palestinians.

[6] Of course, the very success of the Bush administration may be the
cause of vast, even catastrophic failure, as Noam Chomsky argues in
"Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy," perhaps
the most important political book of the year:
	"The selection of issues that should rank high on the agenda of
concern for human welfare and rights is, naturally, a subjective matter.
But there are a few choices that seem unavoidable, because they bear so
directly on the prospects for decent survival. Among them are at least
these three: nuclear war, environmental disaster and the fact that the
government of the world's leading power is acting in ways that increase
the likelihood of these catastrophes..."

[7] Alexander Cockburn describes what US domination of the world economy
has wrought:
	"It's clear, as we head into the summer of 2006, that the world
capitalist system is out of control. Literally so. In the older order of
things, international bodies such as the International Monetary Fund, the
central banks and kindred bodies could claim to have some purchase on the
overall situation. Not anymore. The major players these days are thousands
of managers of private equity funds-traders in shares, bonds, derivatives
and other instruments of a complexity that would require the genius of the
late Stanislaw Lem to evoke, as he did the planet of Solaris.
	"It's virtually impossible now to penetrate, let alone oversee,
this vast Solaris of speculative recycling of financial instruments such
as credit derivatives. As the historian Gabriel Kolko recently remarked in
an essay [on counterpunch.org] on the looming crisis, 'The credit
derivative market was almost nonexistent in 2001, grew fairly slowly until
2004 and then went into the stratosphere, reaching $17.3 trillion by the
end of 2005. Banks simply do not understand the chain of exposure and who
owns what. Senior financial regulators and bankers now admit as much. The
Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund meltdown in 1998, which involved
only about $5 billion in equity, revealed this. The financial structure is
now infinitely more complex and far larger. The top 10 hedge funds alone
in March 2006 had $157 billion in assets.'
	"The Bank for International Settlements is no circus-tent
Cassandra shrieking about the onrush of Doom. Bankers don't shriek. But
here's the BIS, trembling before its crystal ball and talking, in its most
recent annual report, about 'planning for the worst. Consider first a
discrete event which, if it occurred, would disrupt financial markets.
What might be done in advance to prepare for such an eventuality? One
important step would be to ensure the integrity of domestic lines of
communication among core financial firms, their supervisors, the central
bank and the operators of systemically critical parts of the financial
infrastructure. Another would be to ensure similar openness at the
international level. Stress testing is now almost universal in financial
firms, which is highly desirable. Yet stress tests are based on
simplifying assumptions that necessarily fail to match the complexity of
real world events.' That's a banker's way of saying, 'The show could blow
up tomorrow, and there may not be any way to stop it.'" [CP]

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	C. G. Estabrook, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
	109 Observatory, 901 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801
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