Two Takes on Torture

As is characteristic of it, the Bush Administration, in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, has managed to persuade most Americans that the torture problem has been solved: the wrongdoers have been punished, torture is no longer tolerated, and Abu Ghraib is closed. The public’s gullibility notwithstanding, however, there remains the criminal truth. Not only are the perpetrators of the torture policies still at large and in power, a recent report indicates that, in fact, more Iraqis are now imprisoned than ever before: over 51,000 now languish in American and Iraqi prisons. Indeed, the “surge” has meant mainly a surge in prisoners: the number of Iraqis held by Americans rose 70% in 2007 from 14,500 to 24,700, while the Iraqi government now holds more than 26,000 of its own people prisoners. (“The Surge of Iraqi Prisoners,” by Clara Gilmartin, Foreign Policy in Focus, 5/7/08.)
Are we supposed to believe that none of these 50,000 now gets the “interrogation treatment” that made Abu Ghraib famous?
A look at two books—A Question of Torture, by Alfred McCoy, and The Lucifer Effect, by Philip Zimbardo--should quickly dispel any such notion, for each proves, in its own way, that torture by American agencies is not some recent innovation in response to the “war on terror,” but rather a longstanding government policy, and perhaps an unavoidable feature of imprisonment itself.
Begin with McCoy, in his book subtitled CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror. What McCoy demonstrates is that “Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Kabul are manifestations of a long history of distinctive U.S. covert-warfare doctrine developed since WWII, in which psychological torture has emerged as a central facet of American foreign policy” (p. 7). That is, in response to Cold War fears that both the Russians and the Chinese were engaging in “mind control” experiments that could force captives to reveal state secrets and, indeed, to commit criminal acts, the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s embarked on a massive program to develop mind-control tactics of its own. Its new paradigm focused on two elements: sensory disorientation, and self-inflicted pain. These methods were meant to substitute for more primitive, physical methods of torture, which not only have the negative characteristic of leaving visible marks on their victims, but also fail, in many cases, to break the will of captives to resist. With the psychological methods (often enhanced by physical methods where necessary), resistance almost always vanished.
To accomplish its task, the CIA elicited the help and funded the work of several university researchers in psychology. Donald Hebb, of McGill University in Canada, supplied the first element: sensory deprivation. Several Americans—Albert Biderman, Irving L. Janis, Harold Wolff and Lawrence Hinkle—provided data on the role of self-inflicted pain. And Stanley Milgram, whose obedience experiments at Yale became legendary, provided the third element—that almost anyone could be trained to inflict torture.
Hebb started in 1951, under a CIA-funded contract, to provide data on sensory deprivation. Paying college students to just lie in his “black box” 24 hours a day with all sensory stimuli blocked by translucent goggles, soundproofing, and thick gloves, he discovered that “even short-term deprivation produced a devastating impact on the human psyche.” After only a few days, the subject’s identity “began to disintegrate.” In other words, a varied environment was found to be so essential for humans that without it, subjects could be brought to a state of “acute psychosis,” with brain function seriously impaired.
The CIA also financed the research of another Canadian, D. Ewen Cameron, who was fond of a procedure he called “depatterning.” Working on his patients at the Allan Institute, Cameron used drug-induced comas, electroshock treatments, and repeated taped messages for long periods to induce breakdown. By 1964, Cameron was considered a crackpot, but by then he had so maimed several patients that he was sued, with the CIA paying an out-of-court settlement of $750,000 to nine patients, with the Canadian government adding another $180,000.
Still, the CIA was not discouraged and financed the research of Hinkle and Wolff into self-inflicted pain techniques. They reportedly found that the Russian KGB used a simple method—making victims stand still for 18 to 24 hours—that produced excruciating pain wherein ankle size doubled, blisters erupted, heart rates climbed, kidneys shut down and delusions emerged. The “best” part of all this was that, contrary to torture where the interrogator inflicted the pain—thus increasing the will of the victim to resist—self-inflicted pain had the opposite effect. The victims seemed to blame themselves for the pain, and hence could summon less will to resist.
The CIA was quite excited by this, as well as by the results from the experiments of Stanley Milgram at Yale (McCoy produces circumstantial evidence to suggest that Milgram was in the orbit of the CIA and the Office of Naval Research). There, ordinary citizens were induced and encouraged to shock “subjects” in order to make them learn. Though the subjects were not actually being shocked, but were acting, the shockers did not know this. They found themselves administering higher and higher voltages, encouraged always by the authority figures urging them on, up to and including the most excruciating pain available. The conclusion demonstrated that anyone—especially the police and military of foreign allies, such as those in Latin America, where the CIA was ‘fighting communism’—could be easily persuaded to torture those deemed in possession of useful information.
All these results were not simply academic exercises. The CIA put them into training manuals and implemented them worldwide for the next 40 years. In 1963, for example, the CIA produced its Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation handbook. It embraced the two-part form of torture—sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain—its paid research had uncovered. As McCoy puts it, the “fundamental hypothesis” of Kubark is that interrogation involves “methods of inducing regression of the personality to whatever earlier and weaker level is required for the dissolution of resistance and inculcation of dependence” (p. 51). All interrogation is a way of “speeding up the process of regression,” to the point where the assault on personal identity becomes “mentally intolerable.” The methods researched by Hebb and Cameron, among others, are laid out in full, with techniques such as “hooding” or “sleep denial” used to disorient the prisoner, and “personal or sexual humiliation” used to attack personal identity. It also pointed out that pain which the person “seems to inflict on himself” diminishes resistance much more rapidly than pain from without.
The CIA then proceeded to use Vietnam as its own personal laboratory for these and other techniques. Its main venue was the Phoenix program, meant to destroy the Vietcong underground. Information was crucial, and so all its new techniques, and many old ones such as the simple, old fashioned killing of captives, were employed. One of these ‘experiments’ deserves mention. In 1966, the CIA shipped to Vietnam an electroshock machine along with three psychiatrists, including Dr. Lloyd Cotter, to test the depatterning techniques of Ewen Cameron. Cotter applied electroconvulsive treatment to Vietnamese patients and was “impressed” with the results. The results with Vietcong prisoners were even more impressive: the CIA psychiatrists applied 12 electroshocks the first day, and as many as 60 during the next seven days, until one of the prisoners died. Undaunted, the electroshocks continued until the rest of the prisoners died several weeks later. At that point, the CIA operatives simply left; experiment over.
The result of all this was enemy “neutralization” estimated, in 1972, at 81,740 eliminated, with 26,369 detainees simply killed. As McCoy points out, this killing of suspects left over is necessary to avoid indefinite jailing of captives who can no longer offer information; hence his conclusion: “In effect, the logical corollary to state-sanctioned torture is state-sponsored murder” (p. 196). In Iran under the Shah (whom the U.S. installed after organizing the downfall of the democratically-elected Mossadegh government), the CIA, with help from Israeli intelligence, used its new torture doctrine to organize and train the Savak, the Shah’s secret police. According to Iranian poet Reza Baraheni, “at least half a million people” were beaten, whipped or tortured in Iran by Savak (p. 75).
Still, the United States did not want to appear to approve of torture, so it signed international agreements such as the 1984 UN Convention against Torture. However, the Reagan Administration posted reservations to the new treaty, which were effected when President Clinton finally signed it in 1994. These reservations, in the form of “clearer” definitions of what constituted psychological torture, limited it to such things as using mind-altering substances and the threat of imminent death. These narrow definitions, McCoy points out, made no mention of “sensory deprivation (hooding), self-inflicted pain (stress positions) and disorientation (isolation and sleep denial)—the very techniques the CIA had been refining for decades” (p. 100). Hence, even after the United States had signed the 1984 Convention, the CIA felt free to use its psychological techniques while U.S. officials could continue to say, “We do not torture.”
Thus we see that far from being an aberration, or a radical departure from previous interrogation practices, the Bush Administration’s announcement that the “gloves were coming off” after 9/11 meant mainly that, for America’s spy agencies, it would be business pretty much as usual. The departure from prior practice—for there was one—came with the extension of CIA torture techniques to the military: those interrogators at U.S. military installations who have since become so famous. In order to implement this “force drift,” however, the administration had to outflank its military officers, particularly those in the Advocate General’s office, who raised loud and persistent objections to what they saw going on at Guantanamo, Bagram Air Force Base, and later, Abu Ghraib. All, without exception, said such tactics violated military interrogation manuals and should be halted. In response, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, aided by the White House neocons like David Addington and lawyers in the Justice Department like John Yoo and Jay Bybee, organized a Defense Working Group to provide him and the military the cover and authority they needed.
As intended, Rumsfeld’s DWG produced a memo in March of 2003 approving of the extreme interrogation methods. They read like a reprint of the Kubark manual, especially when specified by General Geoffrey Miller for Guantanamo: a 72-point matrix for stress and duress, using “harsh heat or cold; withholding food; hooding for days at a time; naked isolation in cold, dark cells for more than 30 days; and stress positions designed to subject detainees to rising levels of pain” (p. 129). Miller also added forms of psychological torture specific to Arab culture which, since Abu Ghraib, have become disgustingly familiar—the conscious strategy of sexual humiliation and other forms of assault on Muslim cultural inhibitions. And though the International Red Cross, in 2004, declared such methods to be “tantamount to torture,” and hence violations of international law, the U.S. military simply dismissed these charges.
This open contempt marked another departure, according to McCoy: instead of using such psychological techniques covertly, as it had for half a century, the United States government under George W. Bush now “defied the international community by openly defending the techniques and denying that they constituted torture” (p. 157). Put another way, that which started out as a series of psychological methods to break any human being—but secretly, thus acknowledging their heinous nature—had now become something publicly and defiantly accepted, a kind of torture about which an American administration seemed almost proud.
*
What Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, adds to this discussion is the notion that, given the right situation, almost anyone can turn into a perpetrator of horror. In short, where most of us, particularly in the United States and the West, tend to attribute evil actions to “dispositional factors,” i.e. the alleged bad or evil inherent in a specific person whose evil disposition leads him to “sin”, Zimbardo’s famous Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) took the opposite tack: evil behavior stems mainly from the situation in which people find themselves. In the SPE, average college students were chosen at random to be either “guards” or “prisoners.” A pretend prison was set up in the basement of Stanford’s psychology building, and a situation created in which the guards were to control and discipline the prisoners for a set period. No physical force was to be used, but other means, such as humiliation, isolation, harassment, and so on were legitimate methods for the guards to use. Zimbardo summed up the design and purpose of the experiment as follows: “our research will attempt to differentiate between what people bring into a prison situation from what the situation brings out in the people who are there.” His assistant put it more succinctly: “You’re putting good people in an evil situation to see who or what wins.”
What stunned the experimenters, and stuns the reader, is how quickly the situation won, i.e. how rapidly the neutral students fell into their assigned roles. Within a matter of days, the prisoners become docile and obedient. The guards, many of them student radicals themselves, become authoritarian, brutal disciplinarians. As one “prisoner” put it afterward: “The guard role promotes sadism. The prisoner role promotes confusion and shame” (p. 189). Even more astonishing is the degree to which not just the students but the psychologists and graduate students running the experiment themselves seemed to forget the make-believe nature of the situation and became that which they were supposedly miming. The most dramatic example of this latter takes place when one of the prisoners, Doug-8612, becomes so overwrought that he must be released after his second day in “prison.” In response, the “warden” and Zimbardo himself as “superintendent” begin to worry that Doug-8612’s “breakdown” might have been just playacting designed so that he could gather other students outside the experiment to stage a ‘breakout’ of his fellow prisoners. Worse, they begin to analyze their screening methods to see if somehow they had allowed a “flawed” or “damaged” person to slip into their experiment. The irony is striking: in a “study designed to demonstrate the power of situational forces over dispositional tendencies, we were making a dispositional attribution” (i.e. Doug-8612 was a “bad apple” who had slipped into the group of “good” subjects. ed note)
Among many striking moments in this experiment, one of the most troubling, given our experience with Abu Ghraib, is the point near the end when one of the guards, Hellmann, on his own, adds sexual harassment of prisoners to his repertoire of control tactics: “’See that hole in the ground? Now do twenty-five push-ups, fucking that hole! You hear me!’ One after another, the prisoners obey, as Burdan shoves them down to do their duty.” Then the secondary guard, Burdan, makes the prisoners do the camel game—forcing three prisoners to play female camels, bending over, baring their behinds beneath their short prison smocks, while ordering the others to “Stand behind the female camels and hump them” (p. 172).
Fortunately for Philip Zimbardo and his subjects, an outside observer, his future wife Christina Maslach, intervened. Having seen what was happening, she objected heatedly, insisting that “What you are doing to those boys is a terrible thing!” This forced the researcher to admit his responsibility for having created this little “prison,” thereby leading his students into a tangled knot of dominance and submission that was deeply affecting their psyches, and to call off his experiment after only one week (it was originally scheduled to last two weeks.) It also led him to reflect, when writing his book 30 years later, on where the ultimate responsibility for evil behavior, especially in the real world, lies. In brief, though each individual should be held responsible for his actions, the situation in which those actions take place controls behavior far more than any of us realizes. Perhaps more important, it is the System that creates the action-inducing situation which is ultimately responsible. Zimbardo puts it thus:
“The negative power on which I had been running for the past week, as superintendent of this mock prison, had blinded me to the reality of the destructive impact of the System that I was sustaining….While I was focused on the abstract conceptual issue, the power of the behavioral situation vs the power of individual dispositions, I had missed seeing the all-encompassing power of the System that I had helped create and sustain.
The System includes the Situation, but it is more enduring, more widespread, involving extensive networks of people, their expectations, norms, policies, and, perhaps laws…Each System comes to develop a culture of its own, as many Systems collectively come to contribute to the culture of a society.” (p. 179)

Elsewhere, Zimbardo also includes a System’s ideology in the nexus of key factors that sustains it—ideology such as: America is a nation chosen by and protected by God, America is the model democracy, America is the home of liberty and justice for all, America is that singular nation which never attacks or exploits but always helps others, etc.

Now we need to contrast this Systemic-situational view with the one that has pertained in the Bush Administration (and throughout American culture to a greater or lesser degree) when faced with the consequences of Abu Ghraib and its war on terror. Zimbardo quotes Condoleeza Rice in an interview with Jim Lehrer in July of 2005 to illustrate the latter:
“When are we going to stop making excuses for the terrorists and saying that somebody is making them do it? No, these are simply evil people who want to kill…This isn’t about some kind of grievance. This is an effort to destroy rather than to build. And until everybody in the world calls it by name—the evil that it is---stops making excuses for them, then I think we’re going to have a problem.” (p. 311)

The administration attitude (these are simply evil people) pertained, of course, not just to the terrorists, but also to the guards who committed the photographically-documented outrages at Abu Ghraib. It was the “bad apples,” not the barrel, who were responsible. And the “bad apples” got punished—Sgt Chip Frederick, Lynnde England, Charles Graner—while the barrel itself, and those who had created the barrel, got off scot free. In the most immediate sense, this means Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who, according to Mark Danner (Torture & Truth: American, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror), issued directives about preparing detainees for interrogation that included the following recommended methods:
“Use of stress positions for 4 hours in isolation up to 30 days; Hooding during transportation and questioning; Deprivation of light and auditory stimuli; Removal of all comfort items (including religious ones); Forced grooming; Removal of clothing.; Using detainees’ individual phobias (fear of dogs) to induce stress.” (p. 408)

In the largest sense, it means all those, both appointed and elected, who helped to direct and justify and implement the system.
Thus, by examining American torture policies in light of his own Stanford Prison Experiment, Philip Zimbardo leads us to the conclusion that the situation trumps almost any individual disposition in leading the way to evil actions. And the System that creates the situation should bear the most responsibility of all. He liberally cites the memos noted above—memos that were designed to not only place the detainees in U.S. custody beyond the reach of any court or law, including the Geneva Conventions, but also to protect those implementing the policies from any liability for war crimes—to buttress his case. He also points out that a System is implemented by individual actors, to be sure, but it is not underlings like Sgt. Frederick and Pvt. England who bear most culpability; rather it is those actors who hold the power positions in that system—the Rumsfelds, the Cheneys, the Addingtons, the Yoos, the Bybees, the Rices, the entire Bush White House torture cabal including the President himself. As Zimbardo puts it:
I believe that a system consists of those agents and agencies whose power and values create or modify the rules of and expectations for “approved behavior” within its sphere of influence. In one sense, the system is more than the sum of its parts and of its leaders, who also fall under its powerful influences. In another sense, however, the individuals who play key roles in creating a system that engages in illegal, immoral and unethical conduct should be held accountable despite the situational pressures on them.” (p. 438)

It is such a system, Zimbardo suggests, that allowed Nazis like Adolph Eichmann to commit his crimes while feeling all along that he was just “doing his job.” To the extent that a similar type of system has been created in the United States of America under all of our noses and with our tax dollars is the extent to which all of us who support and sustain and allow that system to continue are guilty. Not as guilty, perhaps, as the Bush administration high officials, who should, who must be held to account for their crimes—but guilty nonetheless.

Lawrence DiStasi

Sami al-Hajj

On May 1, presumably not as a May day present, the Al-Jazeera journalist Sami al-Hajj was released from 6 years of imprisonment in Guantanamo. Al-Hajj had been on a hunger strike for more than a year, and was reported to be 40 pounds under his normal weight, and looking far older than his 38 years. Partly this was due to the treatment he received at Guantanamo, America’s infamous torture prison, where he said he was interrogated hundreds of times, and subjected to beatings, extremes of temperature, sexual assault, and threats with military dogs—all the standard methods used by Americans against “terror war” captives in recent years. In addition, al-Hajj was reportedly force fed to keep him alive, a procedure which involved forcing a feeding tube up his nose and into his stomach twice a day, and which exacerbated the throat cancer he has suffered from. As is customary, no charges were offered to justify al-Hajj’s captivity. He was a Sudanese national working as a cameraman for Al-Jazeera, the Arabic news outlet which the United States has constantly attacked, both verbally and physically, since the beginning of its “war on terror.” Upon trying to enter Afghanistan in December 2001 to cover the war there, he was seized by Pakistani authorities and turned over to American forces. Held and abusively interrogated at Bagram Air Force Base and then at another prison facility in Kandahar until June 2002, he was then delivered, bound and gagged, to the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. He remained there for 6 years.
In Sudan, where he was hospitalized following his release, Sami al-Hajj has made numerous statements about his imprisonment:“Our human condition, our human dignity was violated, and the American administration went beyond all human values, all moral values, all religious values. In Guantánamo...rats are treated with more humanity. But we have people from more than 50 countries that are completely deprived of all rights and privileges, and they will not give them the rights that they give to animals….For more than seven years, I did not get a chance to be brought before a civil court. To defend their just case and to get the freedom that we’re deprived of, they ignored every kind of law, every kind of religion….He concluded by saying: “My last message to the US administration is that torture will not stop terrorism—torture is terrorism.”
The U.S. response to al-Hajj’s claims of mistreatment follows a familiar pattern. ABC News featured three unnamed Pentagon “officials” who said that there was nothing to “substantiate his allegations that he was mistreated at Guantanamo.” These same officials tried to dismiss al-Hajj as “a manipulator and a propagandist.” (see Naomi Spencer, “Journalist released from Guantanamo details abuse,” May 5 2008, www.wsws.org ) But there are countless accounts corroborating the harsh conditions at Guantanamo, as NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reports in a May 4 piece called “A Prison of Shame, and It’s Ours.” Among them are memoirs, some already published, some due out soon, that confirm what Sami al-Hajj and others have described. Murat Kurnaz, a German citizen of Turkish descent, has a newly published memoir about his 5 years there, including long bouts of torture that “included interruptions by a doctor to ensure that he was well enough for torture to continue.” Other books are a memoir by an interpreter of Afghan descent, Mahvish Rukhsana Khan, and an account, Kafka Comes to America, by American attorney Steven Wax. According to Kristof, these and other accounts reveal two essential truths about Gitmo: 1) “most of the inmates were probably innocent all along” but were turned over because of the huge cash rewards America offered; and 2) “torture was routine, especially early on. That’s why more than 100 prisoners have died in American custody in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo.” Al-Hajj’s release thus leaves us with several disturbing conclusions. It is not just what we now know about the torture tactics at Guantanamo (as well as Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and other American “interrogation” sites), though that is injurious enough. It is the attitude of American (usually Bush administration) officials about it, which compounds the injury, for the official response is always the same: these are the “worst of the worst,” and so any tactic that produces the information we need is legitimate. Or, these allegations are simply “propaganda” produced by the “bad guys,” those Arab/Muslim fanatics who seek to harm us. What is left unsaid is the logical conclusion that too many Americans have accepted: we are fighting an inhuman, or sub-human enemy who does not deserve the common decency normally accorded to prisoners. These are not people, like our previous enemies; they are “things” to be manipulated in whatever way we wish.
The truth, however, is that this age-old justification for torture crumbles under even the slightest scrutiny. And that is not only because torture violates all the treaties and laws we have signed over the years, including our Constitution outlawing cruel and inhuman treatment. It is also because we now know that this type of torture did not begin with Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, and has not been limited to the Arabs or Muslims we have been at such pains to dehumanize. As Alfred McCoy makes very clear in his A Question of Torture, there is a long history of this new kind of torture that began shortly after World War II, one that has been constantly perfected since then by the CIA among others. These methods were ready and waiting when the so-called “war on terror” was announced after 9/11, and were quickly and eagerly updated and implemented. My next post will go into that aspect of the story in detail. Suffice it to say here that even a cursory look at the methods McCoy lays out proves—even if we doubt the words of Arab/Muslims like Sami al-Hajj—that these torture techniques have been part of the American interrogator’s playbook for nearly a half century now, and have been used not only by American “interrogators” themselves, but spread like a new gospel to our “allies” around the world.

The only question for us who have now become revoltingly aware of such things is how do we, a complacent public, justify standing idly by and letting this happen, letting the perpetrators of this little shop of horrors operating in our name ride off not just unaccountable and unpunished, but richly rewarded for their crimes?
Lawrence DiStasi

Library of Redactions

Now who would be attracted
If the text is redacted
And if the tortuous prose
Makes one hold his nose?
Surely not the Methodists
But how ’bout the rest of us
Is this all jest for us
That George knows best for us
The Emperor without any clothes
Who knows?


            This week, there was an important demonstration of courage by the Methodist Church when it refused to approve the plan for the George W. Bush Library to be located at Southern Methodist University. Of course, most betting people will put their money on the Methodists backing down to an offer that cannot be refused. There will be another meeting of the church in July. This is not the first controversy surrounding the presidential library in Dallas. Much earlier, the SMU faculty objected to locating the library and a partisan political center on the grounds of SMU. The library and partisan political center will cost in the neighborhood of a half billion dollars and will eliminate some student housing although SMU has purchased adjoining land in anticipation of the plan being approved.
            Reading the blogs and comments associated with the news is a hoot because of the names that citizens are offering to describe the content; much of it in creative spelling such as ”LIEbrary.” Despite all the negative feelings expressed for the unique concept of a partisan political center coupled with a library, I would like you to consider the possibilities:
            This could be the world’s largest collection of redacted text and therefore likely qualify for a Guinness record. Consider that scholars for centuries will debate the content of the visible text and, more likely, the content of the stuff under the Magic Marker obliterations. There may even be an entire branch of study, perhaps under linguistics, that will ponder the meanings of the text and why some words were chosen to remain while others were chosen to be blacked out. For decades, we had expert Kremlinologists who interpreted the meaning of bureaucrat A or B being included or excluded in text and photographs in order to predict the direction of the Soviet Union. This library could spawn an entire industry. We haven’t done that much in the last 8 years unless you consider war itself to be a growth industry. Add to that the word inventions of GW and we may advance learning for what drugs do to the formative brain…unless I “misunderestimate” the scholars of the future. Most of us guess that the redacted text of the documents from this administration is simply protection from embarrassment and not from disclosure of information that would be injurious to the national security of the nation, but who knows, maybe it was classified because we had enemies that we were unaware of?
            As I understand the plan for the library, there may be an entire wing devoted to shredded documents although the potential curator is understandably guarded about how these will be displayed, but given that Bush has expressed an interest in education with his famous “Is our children learning,” I understand that it will be an interactive children’s exhibit where they can piece shredded documents together. Given the zero impact on reading of the “No Child Left Behind Act,” there is no danger of the children even accidentally piecing these puzzles together and actually reading words like “waterboarding” or “torture” or Hurricane Katrina. There is another, although smaller, wing devoted to hanging chad just as you pass under the portrait of Katherine Harris and there are preliminary plans for an indoor maze on Astroturf from the Texas Rangers sale surplus and a replica of the Karl Rove desk is the center of that exhibit.
            Oh, I nearly forgot that the combination exhibit of shredded documents and the maze contains the shredded US Constitution. I don’t usually support mixing Church and State, but let us pray that the Methodists continue to demonstrate courage in the face of overwhelming odds and oddities.


Peace,
George Giacoppe
3 May 2008

Why Can’t He Close the Deal?

 
 
            Right after Hillary Clinton won the Pennsylvania primary, the pundits were busy dissecting the supposed “failure” of Senator Obama. The main question: “Why Can’t Obama Close the Deal?” Which means, given his big lead and his momentum coming out of the February and March primaries, why can’t he finish off Hillary?
The metaphor, of course, suggests that a presidential nomination is some sort of gunfight at the DC corral. But the metaphor notwithstanding, the reason Obama can’t eliminate his rival is simple: it’s called Racism. This nation always has, and arguably always will be the most racist nation on the planet. And by racism, I am talking specifically about racism against African Americans. The other forms of racism—against Asians and Hispanics and Pacific Islanders and East Indians and American Indians—can, and eventually will recede if not disappear. But the fundamental racism against those who were brought here from Africa as slaves, all the Emanicipation Proclamations and voters’ rights acts and affirmative action programs notwithstanding, persists to this day. It persists in patterns of living, it persists in patterns of education, it persists in the degree of punishment for crime, it persists in longstanding, deep-seated attitudes that are as American as apple pie.
            Barack Obama thought he could transcend all this. He thought that his half-white background, his distinguished record at America’s most prestigious university, his stunning ability to speak the language of white folks better than they can themselves speak it, would neutralize all this. He thought that by not exploiting his blackness to garner votes, he could rise above petty racial politics and disarm the racists he must have known still existed in droves. And in a certain sense, and with a younger, more educated electorate, he has succeeded in this. At least partly.
            Sadly, he ran into middle America. And middle America, not to mention southern and western America, have by no means risen above their instinctive  racism. Which is to say, their resentment that some uppity Harvard-educated black man—and the one percent doctrine still holds for most Americans, i.e. if you’ve got even one percent African in your genes, you’re black—could actually lay claim to the American throne heretofore reserved for not just whites, but whites of a certain northern European background and skin tone.  Preferably with names of only one syllable: Bush, Gore; or maybe two: Clinton, Johnson, Carter, Nixon. But Obama. Lord almighty, how could the Whitest of Houses contain a trisyllabic, fear-evoking name like that?
            The proof of this, if proof is needed, is in the numbers. Hillary Clinton has won every large state with a strong rural or powerful working-class population: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, New Jersey, and California (large parts of which derive, ultimately, from southern states.) They are also states that harbor immigrants and their children—those who have always been able to derive some comfort from the fact that, though they may be low on the class totem pole, at least they can always look down upon that population which remains permanently below them. To have a representative of that population now lay claim to the highest office in the land is simply too much to bear. He must be brought down. And if Hillary fails to knock him off his horse, we can bet that the Republicans—whose entire winning strategy, from at least the time of Nixon, has been predicated on winning these very same rural and working-class southern and Midwestern voters—will prove only too eager to play their favorite election game, race baiting. Think George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton ads. Think Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens.”
            All this gives the lie to the constant protestations by American conservatives of their patriotic veneration for our founding documents: the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, the Declaration’s ringing phrase that “all men are created equal.” For when it comes to the privacy of the presidential voting booth, the phrase that really counts is the add-on by Orwell in Animal Farm:
            “…but some are more equal than others.”
            Anything that challenges, in a fundamental way, that “more equal” status will be met with savagery. And, as we have seen with the Jeremiah Wright ads, it already has.
            To be sure, hope springs eternal. America could still right itself, redeem itself.  But at this point, it seems to me, ‘closing the deal’ is going to take a miracle.

Lawrence DiStasi
 

The Concentration of Evil

The more I read about torture by United States agents—CIA operatives,
military special forces, hired mercenaries, and military police—the
more unsettling the whole sordid situation becomes. The information
now at hand is simply unassailable: the United States government
consciously set out, after the attacks of 9/11, to “take off the
gloves” when dealing with prisoners who might possibly have
information about al Quaeda or the Taliban or anyone else in the Arab/
Muslim world. Using techniques that had been around for years, some
for centuries, some updated specifically for those likely to be
captured in the current “war” on terror, intelligence agents
determined that they could employ just about any method to extract
information. They were aided and abetted and indeed prodded to do so
by the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and through him, by
their commanders. The Secretary of Defense was in turn given the
protection of the best legal “minds” in the White House and the
Department of Justice, who issued a series of now-famous memos
justifying virtually all means of gathering intelligence from
captives, most of whom were placed in a category that voided the
protections normally due them as prisoners.

All this took place in an atmosphere in which the United
States President, George W. Bush, had promised, right after 9/11, to
rid the world of evil—by which he meant the evil promulgated by those
terrorists who had attacked the World Trade Center.

Instead, what took place was the greatest concentration
of evil in the history of the American presidency. Consider who was
in that White House. George W. Bush, from the moment he took office,
indeed, before he even took office, demonstrated that morals simply
did not apply to him. He could piously proclaim the virtues of
military service, and remain AWOL from even the minimal duty he was
obligated to perform in the Air National Guard. He could inveigh
against the so-called Axis of Evil, and at the same time authorize to
his staff virtually any measures in pursuing revenge: “any barriers
in your way, they are gone.” He could preach about the bestial
nature of the terrorists who had attacked our “civilized” values, and
at the same time rebuff anyone—this time the Secretary of Defense, no
nervous Nellie himself—who protested that retaliatory action could
encounter certain legal obstacles:

“I don’t care what the international lawyers say,”
brayed the President. “We are going to kick some ass.”

It was this climate, created by the President, that led directly to
the horrors at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib in Iraq and
Guantanamo in Cuba.

But the president was not alone. Smirking quietly but
malevolently behind him and beside him always was his president of
vice, Richard Cheney. Cheney is that lovely man who once gave the
finger in the Senate to a democrat who thwarted him, Senator Patrick
Leahy, mouthing presidentially: “Go fuck yourself.” He’s that
sporting duck hunter who famously shot his best friend in the face.
He’s that zealot who pushed the concept of the unitary presidency—the
notion that no law can constrain a president in time of war—to the
point that, with the war on terror scheduled to last indefinitely,
absolute presidential power becomes indefinite as well. Cheney is
also the man in whose office the lawyer David Addington reigns—the
one browbeating other white house lawyers to immunize the president
and all his men from their crimes.

Then, of course, there were the other ethically-
challenged legal eagles: Alberto Gonzalez, who had to resign from his
Attorney General post in shame; John Yoo, who coined the term
“quaint” to describe the Geneva Conventions, thus making their
protections moot; and a host of others dedicated to removing all
constraints on the torture of captives so long as the Decider in
Chief gave torture his imprimatur. And he did. And they did. And the
evil festered and suppurated and spread around the globe. And the
White House, and all it touched, became a black house of horrors.

How to explain this? How to explain such a concentration
of evil in one place at one time? No one really knows. Perhaps one
can only look at it poetically: those who preach the gospel of
absolute good and absolute evil, as George Bush has since taking
office, as the conservatives have since forever—it is their prime
article of faith—must ultimately practice what they preach. They
must finally be caught up in the dualism to which they subscribe. For
it is in the nature of dualism to be convertible: white easily shades
into black, hot inevitably becomes cold, good cannot help but be
infected by, and in the end defined by evil.

So it is in the Bush White House. Paint it and sanitize
it and bleach it as they will, they can never hide what they have
become and what it has become: a black house inhabited by demons.



Lawrence DiStasi

=

Here's to You, John Yoo

First, let’s get some facts straight. Attorney John Yoo was an
assistant to Attorney General John Ashcroft, working in the Office
of Legal Counsel under his boss, Jay Bybee, during George Bush's
first term. This office is supposed to advise all the departments of
government on the legality or illegality of their actions. The
attorneys work, in the final analysis, not for the President or any
of his subordinates, but for the American people. They are obliged to
render opinions that are, to put it mildly, legal, according to U.S.
and international law.

Second, let’s look at what John Yoo did and why he did it.

To begin with, he essentially argued, in a series of memos, that the
Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution has no bearing on
the President of the United States during wartime. Neither the 5th
Amendment’s due process clauses nor the 8th Amendment’s protections
against cruel and unusual punishment apply to aliens in foreign
countries, and even if they did, Yoo maintained, the President is not
bound by them. Essentially, this means that the President’s power
trumps both the Constitution and the federal statutes that constitute
U.S. Law—specifically, any that would constrain his power to find and/
or torture those he deems ‘enemies.’ This means that the President
can also thumb his nose at foreign laws and treaties, for if he
cannot be constrained by U.S. Law, he certainly cannot be constrained
by treaties with other nations, such as the Geneva Conventions, even
though normally and legally they have the force of the Constitution
itself. No matter; the President, wrote Yoo, is “free to override all
such laws and treaties at his discretion.” In sum: John Yoo argued
that the President has unlimited authority to order war crimes
against enemy combatants captured on foreign soil, so long as he
decides that such orders are necessary to the nation’s “defense.”

All this is breathtaking enough. What’s worse is that in defending
these memos, John Yoo has actually said that they confer on the
President the power, if he chooses to use it, to torture children. In
a January 2006 interview with Notre Dame professor and international
human rights scholar Doug Cassel, Yoo argued that there is no law
that could prevent the President from ordering the torture of even
the child of a suspect. Here is the conversation:

Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody,
including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is
no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the
August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do
that.
(see article by Philip Watts, www.informationclearinghouse.info/
article11488.htm.)

Of course, we can surmise, the President would always have a
“good” reason for crushing a child’s testicles.

So let’s get specific. Let’s take a look at one of the allegedly
toothless treaties that John Yoo was referring to—the 1984 Convention
Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment—which
the United States signed. Here is what it says:

“The term ‘torture’ means any act by which severe pain or suffering,
whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person
for such purposes as obtaining information or a confession…No
exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a
threat of war, internal political stability or any other public
emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” (cited by
Anthony Piel, “A Primer on the Law of Torture,” Truthout.org, 11/5/07)

Anyone convicted of such crimes can be punished by life imprisonment
or the death penalty. Piel goes on to say that not only is the United
States bound by this law, the President cannot grant immunity from
its provisions: “The US government crafted, promoted, adopted, signed
and ratified the 1984 Convention Against Torture, which therefore
automatically becomes the “supreme law of the land,” pursuant to the
US Constitution. No enabling legislation is required to give effect
to these basic principles of law.”

For a lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice
Department to argue otherwise is to essentially argue that the
President and all those under him can break the law with impunity.
But Yoo not only did this—in direct violation of his legal ethics. He
also argued for the immunity of those who followed his memos and
broke any such laws. Here is what Yoo writes in another Memo, (as
noted by Glenn Greenwald in “John Yoo’s War Crimes,” Salon, April 2,
2008):

"If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an
interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal
prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks
on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network. In that case,
we believe that he could argue that the executive branch's
constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified
his actions."

So there it is. Not only 'could we argue' that the President is
above all law prohibiting torture, both domestic and international,
so are those Americans (CIA agents, military police and/or
interrogators, civilian contractors) who follow his orders and
torture or abuse their captives. So are those who command them—the
generals, the admirals, the secretaries of defense and war and so on
up the chain.

This last part is really the point. We have been given the
impression, not least by Yoo himself, that he was trying to formulate
difficult policy in the critical and dangerous new conditions created
by 9/11, and that government officials were pressing him and his
office for guidance on how they should conduct interrogations, how
they should treat the dangerous “terrorists” they were capturing.
This turns out to be a smokescreen. In fact, as Scott Horton has
recently noted in “Yoo Two,” (Harper’s Magazine, April 3, 2008),
there were two series of memos, one in August 2002, and one in March
2003. The memos are similar in that they “were issued as part of an
actual plan to induce individuals to commit criminal acts by ensuring
that their crimes would never be investigated or prosecuted.” Horton
calls this effort a “criminal enterprise,” because “Under the
standards of U.S. v Altstoetter, it was reasonably foreseeable that
the issuance of these memoranda would result in serious harm,
including assault, torture, and death, to protected persons in the
custody of the United States. Accordingly, each of the actors,
including the memoranda writers, is criminally liable.”

This was the “need” to which John Yoo was responding. As a
lawyer and professor of United States law, he knew full well that
what he was advocating would make those who followed its dictates
liable to prosecution for war crimes. So did others in government,
and that was the real “crisis” at hand. Naval officers had seen what
was happening to “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo under the authority
of Yoo’s earlier memo, and had relayed it to Alberto Mora, the
general counsel for the Navy in the Pentagon. These practices, along
with other questionable techniques authorized by Donald Rumsfeld,
including waterboarding, led decent military lawyers to vehemently
protest what was going on. These were military lawyers who knew about
torture and knew about the consequences for U.S. military personnel
if it became known worldwide that the United States was engaging in
such practices. When the legal counsel at the Pentagon, William
Haynes, began wilting under enormous pressure from such lawyers, he
recommended to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld that the torture procedures
should stop. (see Horton, cited above, and Jane Mayer, “The Memo,”
New Yorker Magazine, 2/27/2006.)

Unfortunately for the military, the chicken hawks were in
charge. Rumsfeld took his case to the Office of Legal Counsel in the
Justice Department, among others. He needed legal justification for
torture, and military lawyers knew too much to give it to him. The
political hacks in the Office of Legal Counsel, John Yoo and his boss
Jay Bybee chief among them, had no such qualms. Yoo knew nothing
about the military, but he had “read lots of books.” And so he
crafted his torture-justifying memos. And those memos were relayed to
zealots like Secretary Rumsfeld and his commander at Guantanamo,
General Geoffrey Miller. Miller implemented the 'more creative'
techniques at Gitmo, was subsequently sent to Abu Ghraib to
“gitmoize” that sadly tragic place, and the rest is history
(including the death of the so-called “Ice Man” and god knows how
many more).

As Scott Horton puts it, Yoo created these memos “as a
roadmap to committing crimes and getting away with it.” The roadmap
worked. The only sad sacks punished for the scandals at Abu Ghraib
have been, as always, the underlings, the so-called “bad apples” in
an otherwise pristine barrel, Pvt. Lynndie England, Sgt. Chip
Frederick, Cpl. Charles Graner. The war criminals really responsible
for those crimes—Yoo and his boss Bybee, Donald Rumseld, Richard
Cheney and his lawyer, David Addington, Alberto Gonzalez, General
Geoffrey Miller, George Tenet and President George W. Bush, among
others—have so far gotten off scott-free.

Perhaps they are all laughing privately amongst themselves.
Then again, perhaps not. Though they may, like John Yoo (now safely,
and to my mind scandalously, welcomed back to his academic post at
Boalt School of Law, UC Berkeley) continue to defend their actions as
necessary in a time of war, perhaps they should also remember that
the conventions against torture specifically state that “no
exceptional circumstances may be invoked as a justification for
torture.” Perhaps they should also remember what Anthony Piel, cited
above, reminds us:

“…there is no statute of limitations on war crimes and crimes against
humanity.”

So here’s to you, John Yoo. You’ve served your masters well,
and duly collected your due. Although, it may be, you’ll yet see
another turn of the screw.

Lawrence DiStasi

Fragile and Reversible

Life is certainly hectic
When it comes to the war metric
What you measure and when
Over and over again
Tells us all so much
About philosophy and such
Recall the count of bodies
Was called so very shoddy
But now there is no hope
Without a microscope

I would not want to defend the Bush Administration’s position on staying the course. For this, General Petraeus deserves credit. He is loyal and articulate. Unfortunately, the performance measurements are essentially microscopic and movement toward success is surely not available to the naked eye. Hence, with some sensitivity, he called the gains “fragile and reversible.” While that description is not a common yardstick of progress, it does provide cover in the event of a tragic collapse. Each year now since the invasion in March 2003, we have been entertained by an Administration dog and pony show citing progress. In between, we have been provided a variety pack of “significant measures” that were “turning points.” We captured Baghdad. We toppled a statue. We de-Baathified. We disbanded the Iraqi Army. We killed Saddam’s two sons, Uday and Qusay. We established a provisional government. We tried Saddam. We executed Saddam. We killed the second or third most important insurgent (several times). We had a new president. We had a charter. We had a constitution. We had purple fingers. We had a power-sharing plan. We stood up the Iraqi Army (so we could stand down). We re-Baathified (at the cost of $10 per Sunni per day). We pacified Basra and secured Umm Qasr and the Brits went home. We got an agreement for a truce with Muqtada al Sadr. We fought Muqtada al Sadr in the streets of Basra and al Amarah and secured Umm Qasr. All this seems to verify that if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there…wherever “there” is.

Having quickly reviewed the Administration practice of using selected dramatic events as proof of progress, we are struck with the contrast of looking at other areas and practices of measurement. No Child Left Behind (NCLB), has been the centerpiece of domestic policy. The policy is dependent upon the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is a survey of student achievement that uses assessments in a variety of subject areas including reading, math, science, writing, history, geography and the arts. Without getting into the quagmire of unfunded federal mandates, the entire program is dependent upon measurement, measurement and more measurement. In fact, the major criticism has been that since Bush tied test scores to school performance, that teachers are teaching to tests and not teaching for learning. More important, schools have long been the nearly exclusive territory of local government and this top down measuring frenzy has reversed a couple hundred years of tradition. If you receive Title I funds, you must submit a plan to the US Department of Education that demonstrates that you have sufficient academic content and state wide standards that support the plan. Although the system is administered by a federal contractor, the numbers are salient yardsticks, even if compromised by fear of losing funds and teachers teaching to the test. Now, many of you may argue that NCLB has been a dismal failure perhaps because it focused too much on measurement of easily manipulated testing and I won’t defend the practice, but clearly, it provides a contrast to the evaluation of the war in Iraq. Or does it?

Do the real purposes of NCLB and the war in Iraq coincide? The answer that I submit to you is that both are intended to claim that Bush is a winner. He is a “winner” who took Baghdad, unlike his more tentative father and a “winner” who has upgraded American education with little or no money and with numbers to prove it. This evaluation of winners and losers is human nature and also a matter of perception. Bush is also sensitive to propaganda and has twice approved multi million dollar contracts for the Lincoln Group to promote the best side of the Iraqi war to Iraqis in Iraq. The whole purpose of the FOX-Bush connection appears to be promotion of Bush in exchange for Administration promotion of the network. Have you been to any military base and seen any public television set NOT tuned to FOX? Think of it as putting your best foot forward, not as either truth or prevarication.

As a military retiree who devoted over 30 years to supporting the government and the supremacy of the civilian to the military in policy decisions, I am troubled by current events where Petraeus has essentially provided a policy endorsed by the President instead of the other way around. The Secretary of Defense and Admiral Fallon (the nominal boss for Petraeus) have both been circumvented to promote the illusion that we are winning in Iraq. There is no metric that I know of that will prove him wrong, but we have heard that mantra of victory before and it has become hollow. Merely pretending that we could somehow “win” a civil war as an occupying force is bizarre, but pretending that there is no civil war is just as strange. Without metrics we can agree upon, we are left with the prospect of winning Iraq for the next hundred years, but remember that is fragile and reversible.


Peace,
George Giacoppe
11 April 2008

What’s a million or two among friends?

Looking back from the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War (OIF) and the 6 ½ year anniversary of the Afghan War (OEF), some numbers from immediate and past history help define our current position.
210 Days Gulf War – Shield & Storm
488 KIA OEF
584 Days WW I (US)
1,098 Days Korean War
1,364 Days WW II (US)
1,597 Days WW I (All)
1,832 Days in Iraq
1,898 WIA OEF
2,192 Days WW II (All)
2,361 Days in Afghanistan
3,927 Days in Vietnam
4,000 KIA OIF
5,070 Tons opium – Taliban 2000
9,040 Tons opium – US/NATO 2007
12,100 Afghanis Killed
29,320 WIA OIF
32,100 Afghanis wounded
89,760 Minimum Iraqis Killed
1,191,216 Worst Case Iraqis Killed
1,630,000 Bbl/day Iraqi oil output 2007
2,107,000 Afghan refugees
2,500,000 Bbl/day Iraqi oil output 2002
3,500,000 Iraqi refugees
$90.3B Cost Gulf War
$139.8B Cost OEF (to date)
$226.2B Cost WW I
$398.7B Cost Korean War
$505.3B Cost OIF (to date)
$557.3B Cost Vietnam War
$805.1B Estimated cost GWOT thru FY 2008
$1.49T Projected full cost OIF military ops only
$3.437T Cost WW II
NOTE: All costs US DOD only in 2008 dollars
Only the Vietnam War was longer than the current GWOT.
Only WW II cost more - we had 12 times as many under arms.
Physical casualties are down compared to other wars, but psychological casualties may be up.
Oil production in Iraq is down, and opium production in Afghanistan is up.
So why are these numbers important? Maybe just because we tend to forget the past when we concentrate on the present, and we then tend to ignore the present if we have no sound basis for comparison.
With the real numbers we can make some good comparisons. We can decide in the gross if things are going well in the fine; we can also decide if those who are managing this conflict are any good in comparison to those who handled the previous conflicts.
For example, we can ask why does it take longer to subdue a country of 27.5 million people in a land (Iraq) about twice the size of Idaho, with only about 40,000 part time, under-trained, and under-equipped soldiers opposing us? We can see that it took us only 75% of that time to subdue three major axis powers with millions of soldiers and the best and most modern equipment and training of its time, in a multi-theater conflict across the face of the globe.
Why will this war cost us at least a third of what WW II cost for military operations?
Why are more civilians killed in our Theaters of Operations than opposing fighters?
What have we done to the structure of these countries to make the bad stuff (opium) do better, and the good stuff (oil) do worse?
The figures don’t give the answers but at least they give us part of the framework for the questions – these and many more.
In the last issue I railed against the statistical approach to current wars and argued for the people approach. These numbers are facts not statistics. Let’s couch our answers in people terms. It is the only way to make even a little sense out of all of this.
“To save your world you asked this man to die; Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?”
W. H. Auden
"Epitaph for an Unknown Soldier”

Sandy Cook

Mannaggia l'America

With all the furor and rage being expended over the past comments of Barack Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright—especially his phrase that God Bless America really should be God Damn America—a person would think that such blasphemy had never before been heard in the history of the world. The truth is, I used to hear it almost every day. And it came from the mouth of my father, an Italian immigrant, and it came in his native language: Mannaggia l’America. And the truth is that it was rather a commonplace among Italian immigrants of that pre- and post-WWII era.
Now I can’t speak for others, but I do know what was behind my father’s use of the phrase, and it was something similar to what was behind Wright’s. That is, my father was railing at the fact that in his view as an Italian, America lacked respect for both quality and equality alike. As a hairdresser, he knew this firsthand. He invested his entire life in quality work. And what constantly drove him to distraction was the fact that peers of his were making fortunes by running strings of beauty shop devoted to quantity. “Get’ em in, get ‘em out, give ‘em dye jobs, frizzy hair, whatever they want.” My father refused to do this. Refused to ever touch hair dye because he knew, from his chemistry work, that it was poisonous. Just as he knew that the cold-wave solutions being initially marketed in those days, were even more toxic to human skin. He also considered his judgment as an‘artist of hair’ so inarguable that he refused to cater to his customers’ whims of the moment: “If they didn’t like what I wanted to do, I’d throw them out.” All this led to declining popularity and success. All of which, in his eyes, was due to a total lack of respect for quality work in Mannaggia l’America.
He ran up against the same problem in every business he ever tried. After a heart attack made it impossible for him to continue as a hairdresser, he tried building houses. He went broke on his commitment to building quality dwellings rather than hastily-raised shacks that he could sell on the cheap. And in the final movement of his life—wherein he tried desperately to market his formula for a permanent wave solution that curled hair without heat and without toxicity—he was unceremoniously rebuffed by the large corporations then making millions: they told him they didn’t care about burnt scalps and lawsuits because they had lawyers sufficient to minimize the few settlements they had to pay.
Mannaggia l’America.
It was his constant lament. For the America he encountered was even less interested in equality. As an Italian immigrant he was considered, when he arrived, one of the great unwashed, the detritus being vomited up by Europe to occupy the slums of American cities and pollute the American dream. And though he made Herculean strides in learning the language (in spite of being expelled from 6th grade), and the codes of the polite society he catered to in his beauty shop, he knew how white America assessed him—as a “dago,” as a “wop,” as a creature only nominally less degraded than the African Americans it had enslaved and dehumanized even in its founding document. The only equality that perhaps meant something was the equality of money. If one made enough money, then one might get to be equal. Otherwise, forget it. America—its creed, its commerce, its holidays, its fundamental attitude about life—was nothing, he insisted, but a “money-making proposition.” Those who made it in such a place were for the most part “thieves within the law.” Mannaggia l’America.
The interesting thing to me today is that though he clearly understood the fundamental larceny of American business, he probably didn’t know the whole truth of it. He didn’t know, as we now do, that the real truth behind Pastor Wright’s prediction that God will sooner or later “damn America” stems from an understanding of American history: its theft of the land from its original inhabitants starting with its ‘discovery’; its continuing theft of the West and Southwest from Mexico and any other people or entity that threatened its “manifest destiny”; the theft of those who run the government and the corporations for their profit and control; the theft that continues by corporations driving the economic conquest that now covers the entire globe, placing whole countries and their people in thrall; and of course the theft Pastor Wright was talking about—the continuing theft of the lives of the millions of Africans brought here in chains, and kept in the chains of poverty and injustice even into our own time. He didn’t know about that, my father, though he intuited it from what he knew—that those who control the money control the government and controlling the government means controlling the laws, which in turn means being free to be “thieves within the law.” This is the freedom that flag-waving Americans are really talking about: the freedom to plunder all those who have what we want. And, as John Perkins makes clear in his Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, the freedom to sanction or starve out or bring down or invade or eliminate any leader or country that refuses to accommodate that theft. As a partial list, just think Iran, Iraq, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, not to mention the places like Pakistan and Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Jordan where we prop up our dictators of choice.
So, as far as my father would have been concerned, the Reverend Wright was right. If there is any justice in this world—and that is not at all a foregone conclusion—the forces that operate the universe (call it God if you like; karma if you like; history if you like) will eventually damn America as they eventually damned Rome. For though the packing of the courts with Neanderthals guarantees that the law in its conventional sense cannot provide real justice, the higher law which says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction (some might call it “blowback”) perhaps can. We have already seen something like it working in Iraq, in Afghanistan, on 9/11, and in the money markets; and we will, I am afraid, continue to hear mannaggias upon l’america for some time to come.

Lawrence DiStasi
=

Ciao Geraldine

About a month ago, I wrote a blog called “The Necessity of Obama,” in which I warned of the imminent appeals to racism sure to emerge once Barack Obama had the Democratic nomination, and the Republicans launched their slime machine. It turns out I was optimistic. The appeal to racism, somewhat covert in the Clinton’s initial slanders, has already gone overt—this time in the person of former vice-presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro. Last week Ferraro opined in an interview with the Torrance Daily Breeze that “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position..”  She expanded on this a couple of times, and then in the subsequent storm, resigned from Hillary’s campaign. The damage, of course, had already been done. Whites, especially white males, especially white working class males reminded of their grievances over affirmative action, have been switching their allegiance in droves. Some have gone to Clinton. Some have already expressed a preference for Republican nominee John McCain. If there is a nightmare for Democrats in the 2008 presidential election, this is it.
            For me, the nightmare is doubly troubling. Geraldine Ferraro was a watershed candidate. Not only was she the first woman to have a run at the White House, she was the first Italian American to achieve that kind of prominence. A working class gal from Queens, a former teacher who rose to the halls of Congress, and then to the national ticket for President—this was the American dream made real, the antidote to the common stereotype of Italian Americans as bozos, criminals, prototypical working-class racists. Now, with one remark, she has reactivated all the stereotypes. Sadly, she has probably garnered a lot of sympathy as well. A woman unfairly targeted. A white woman only calling attention to the unfairness of affirmative action.
            Sadder still is the dispiriting spectacle of a once-admired woman sinking to gutter level in an effort to help her “sister.” And the conjoined spectacle of the Clintons, once also admirable for their brilliance, their apparent zeal for reform, consistently demonstrating that to win, they have no qualms about sinking to the very same level.
            And the saddest thing of all: America running true to form. A brilliant, charismatic black man is running for president, generating enormous energy and enthusiasm unseen in several generations. But the politicians, even those in his own party, cannot seem to bear it; cannot seem to bear losing, for one, but also cannot seem to bear forgoing the opportunity to appeal to racist fears. And so the fear machine has been rolled out, the race machine has been activated, and Obama and his campaign have been forced on the defensive. All the while the pundits, sensing blood in the water, have flocked to the controversy, and magnified it.
            No one knows how this will eventually play out. But given this nation’s history, given its enduring commitment to the suppression of every aspiration entertained by its former slaves, the signs are not good. We can say “Ciao” to Geraldine Ferraro. The question is, will we ever ever be able to say “Ciao” to racism? 
 
Lawrence DiStasi

Winter Soldier

I don’t know how many of you had the opportunity to listen to the Winter Soldier conference put on by Iraq Veterans Against the War this weekend, but it was a riveting, emotionally devastating primer on the cost of the Iraq War in lives, treasure, and the mental and physical health of the soldiers who have been induced to fight it.  Panel after panel, presenter after presenter revealed personal stories about the damage that has been done. Nearly every panelist referred to the “war” as what it really is: an OCCUPATION, an illegal occupation of a people who were already prostrate from a dozen years of our sanctions and bombing, and who, with the arrival of American soldiers, were treated like criminals in their own country, arrested without cause, curfewed in houses that, in Iraq’s summer heat, were literally ovens.
            And then there were the horror stories of what each soldier had done, the atrocities each was led to commit as part of that occupation. The brutalizing of women and children. The random arrests of every Iraqi male caught in the frequent sweeps of neighborhoods. The killing, without thought, of anyone who made or appeared to make a false move. All of it made possible by the training each had received, to wit, that Iraqis are subhuman, that they are “ragheads” or “haggis” responsible for 9/11 (it has been proven Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 or Al Quaeda) and thus undeserving of any human compassion whatever. One soldier described how the term “haggi” actually derives from the Islamic tradition of the Hagg, the pilgrimage to Mecca every Muslim is supposed to make at least once. Hence, he said sadly, the holiest tradition of an entire religious faith is trampled and reduced to a term of utter contempt.
Some of these soldiers and marines were interrogators at Abu Ghraib, and described the brutal tactics they used, and, when they were unwilling to perform as expected, those used by others. A soldier named Michael told of one detainee who was writhing strangely and acting crazily. Sensing insulin deprivation, Michael took a sugar reading and found it at 450, many times the normal range. Michael called the hospital, asking permission from the doctor to transfer the detainee, clearly in shock, to her facility. The captain refused, refused several times. The detainee was then taken to another area, and when his strange behavior continued, classified as a resister and put outside, manacled, in the hot sun as punishment. He died roasting and writhing in agony.
Another soldier related his experience with stop loss—the ploy by which the military, unable to attract new recruits, has been forcing troops who have finished their duty tours to be corralled into repeated deployments. This, and the brutality he was forced to employ in Iraq (at one point, he had his sights trained on a 6-year-old boy on a roof), eventually turned a gung-ho teenager eager, after 9/11, to kill all Middle Easterners, into a broken alcoholic who tried to commit suicide. But instead of giving him help, the United States Army discharged him with a general discharge for insubordinate behavior, leaving him with no benefits whatever, able to hold only a job as a pizza delivery boy. Among the military duties that led to his breakdown, he said, was his task of photographing dead Iraqis and sending the photos to superiors for use  in “building the morale” of American troops.
A Marine, Jason Wayne Lemue, served three duty tours in Iraq. On his first, he learned the rules of engagement. “My commander told me, ‘Kill those who need to be killed, and save those who need to be saved,’ that was our mission on our first tour,” he said of his first deployment during the invasion nearly five years ago. Lemue went on to relate that, “After that the ROE changed, and carrying a shovel, or standing on a rooftop talking on a cell phone, or being out after curfew” meant that people were to be killed. “I can’t tell you how many people died because of this. By my third tour, we were told to just shoot people, and the officers would take care of us.” (Quoted in “Rules of Engagement Thrown out the Window” by Dahr Jamail, Common Dreams, 3/15/08.)
Of course, Marine corporal Jason Washburn also explained the corollary—that American troops were instructed to carry shovels and “drop weapons” on their missions in case of an accidental shooting. A shovel or weapon found near a dead Iraqi was sufficient evidence to justify his death as a terrorist.
Such testimony, along with apologies by many of the panelists for the destruction they inflicted on innocent people, is enough to make anyone weep. Many in the audience did. And so, to the cost of this illegal and criminal war—now estimated at $300 billion a year by Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz in The Three Trillion Dollar War (that is nearly a billion dollars every day just for keeping the war machine going, nevermind the cost of replacing a broken military when it’s over and the broken human beings who will be needing veterans’ benefits for years to come)—there is the human cost. The cost of devastated lives and devastated psyches and devastated families, and, let us never forget, a country and an entire people that lies in ruins.
As one contemplates the horror of what the United States has done, and keeps doing, and the fact that we cannot, after Winter Soldier, claim ignorance, the words of T.S. Eliot come, almost unbidden, to mind:
            “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”
Lawrence DiStasi

"...Fear Itself." An Open Letter to Obama

I have watched with dismay as the Clinton campaign abandoned all restraint with their sleazy TV ad featuring sleeping children at risk. My dismay increased as it appeared to work: Clinton won both the Ohio and Texas primaries, reportedly on the strength of late-deciding voters who would have been most affected by her attack ad. Now I think it is time to respond—but not by defending the Obama machismo, or by pointing out that Clinton’s claim to be “experienced” has no validity. The response should come by invalidating the entire premise of the political discussion in this country, which, since 9/11, has based itself on the politics of fear.

To put it briefly, Senator Obama should now focus his campaign on the fundamental bankruptcy of this politics of fear and fear mongering. The opening salvo should simply recall Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous line when the nation was gripped by fear of the Great Depression:

"…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself…"

This line, and the policies that stemmed from it, succeeded in a way that few could have predicted. FDR was saying—and the rest of the line reinforces this with its description of fear as "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance"—that fear itself cripples any attempt on the part of people and governments to respond to a crisis. He did not maintain that there was no crisis. He simply said, nevermind the fear, nevermind the paralysis, let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.

This principle—perhaps updated to: "the only thing we have to fear is fear mongering itself"—fits the present situation almost perfectly. To undermine fear and the fear mongers would provide a perfect antidote and alternative not only to a) the Clinton TV commercial and her contention that Obama has no credentials to protect the nation from terrorism; but also to b) the similar attacks already being mounted by Senator McCain, when he says “the Democrats want to surrender in Iraq”; c) the entire 8-year reign of the Bush Administration, which has made fear mongering its central strategy and creed; d) the fear now mounting in the general populace of economic recession, the falling dollar, and the loss of American primacy as a respected world power.

Consider that since 9/11 every level of public discourse has been shaped and whittled down to one fear-mongering principle: terrorists are coming, we must fight them abroad before they get here, every cent invested (almost all militarily) in this fight is worth it, and, in this modern fight to the death, the American people SHOULD be afraid, should be so terrified and terrorized that they will make any sacrifice in blood, treasure, and their civil liberties in order to combat the demons planning to invade and kill us all.

It is a familiar, ancient cry that has worked almost unconditionally. Any opposition to military plans by Congress has been crippled before it could even be mounted. Congress itself has been gripped by fear—the fear of seeming to be “soft on terrorism.” And it has colluded in launching an illegal war against a country that was no threat to us; continued to fund an occupation of that same country for more than five years; spent a billion dollars a day to keep that war going; and allowed the United States to become known worldwide as an empire as aggressive, acquisitive and cruel as Rome or Great Britain. Worse, beginning with the Patriot Act and continuing with secret wiretapping of American citizens, a widespread policy of torture, and even the suspension of the ancient right of habeas corpus, the very liberties Americans are supposed to be defending have been steadily eroded. And through it all, fear has been the engine driving the whole enterprise.

For Barack Obama, all this has so far been portrayed as a weak spot in his resume. It need not be. The simple expedient of turning fear and fear-mongering to his advantage has the potential of reversing the entire campaign dynamic. For he can say, in effect, this is what we mean by CHANGE. We must change the politics of fear and fear-mongering. We must leave the fear mongers behind, and simply confront without fear the challenges and problems we have. Instead of the hyper-vigilance that has for the last eight years been the coin of the realm (and recall that hyper-vigilance is precisely what afflicts and cripples returning Iraq veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome), we need to be vigilant about the threats that are real. In fact, many of these threats have been ignored because of the huge drain in both money and national energies absorbed by the occupation of Iraq. Instead of pursuing Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, we abandoned the chase and invaded Iraq. Instead of shoring up the holes in our national defense against terrorist threats—our ports, our harbors, our infrastructure—we have been diverted by hyped-up orange and red alerts that turn out to be politically motivated. Instead of confronting the real threat posed to the entire world by global warming, we have been deluded into thinking that more spending and more wastage will somehow induce that threat go away. Instead of dealing with the huge losses to our national treasury due to stupendous military spending and equally stupendous borrowing, we have indulged in myopic tax cuts for the wealthy and privatization policies that have resulted in the enrichment of a favored few and the impoverishment of the many. And all this must change. The fear mongers must go.

In short, there is no need for Senator Obama to try to establish “commander-in-chief” or “government experience” credentials in the vain attempt to counter attacks. He need simply remind people what those so-called credentials (Cheney and Rumsfeld had years of experience while Bush has strutted like a wannabe Mussolini) have brought us: an unending war and a nation on the brink of financial ruin. He need simply remind the public of what fear does and what perhaps the greatest president of the last century said in his first inaugural address to a depressed nation in its grip:

"…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself..." 
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And the Meek Shall Inherit the Earth

When noses we tweak
It is not dominion we seek
But Justice and Truth
More gin than vermouth
And we don’t tell lies
For we’re all nice guys
But War’s for our youth
While for us it’s uncouth
I know that I have focused on hypocrisy from time to time, but this whole narrative of “We had to go to war,” is wearing thin. I commend each of you to read the speech presented by the Reverend Laurence M. Vance on 3 June 2007. The question that we must each ask is: “Is this a Just War, or just war?" Reverend Vance not only answers that question, but he examines the whole fabric of a nation that has chattered incessantly about peace, but has initiated wars now for over a century. Iraq merely puts any pretense to (eternal) rest. Essentially, as a fundamentalist preacher, Vance has challenged the ballyhooed concept of a Welfare State by discussing, in great depth, the Warfare State. He has the ammunition and is unembarrassed to fire away at the myths in our midst. Vance surely challenges us to act like a Christian country by following the tenets of Christianity, instead of merely spouting scripture.
A core issue for each of us should be the stark contrast between what we say we are and what we do. Donald Rumsfeld on 29 April 2003, while interviewed by al Jazeera stated unequivocally "We don't seek empires. We're not imperialistic. We never have been. I can't imagine why you'd even ask the question.” Well, let’s see. We had just invaded a sovereign country preemptively and without due cause and desperately tried to link the invasion to a criminal attack by 16 Saudi nationals and a few assorted Yemeni, etc. Hmmm. We were only tweaking noses? No harm no foul? Oh, the resulting chaos and continuing violence resulted in the death or displacement of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, loss of women’s rights, loss of human services such as health, education, water, electricity, and sanitation as well as public safety and religious freedom? Oh shucks! In truth, our core ideal is that we are a freedom loving people. We honestly believe that we are a force for great good in the world.
Unfortunately, Chapter 12 of the 9/11 Commission Report stated, “the American homeland is the planet.” How can we consider the planet our homeland and not bump into the reality of empire? Incidentally, the precedent of the Roman Empire is not encouraging. Caesar’s Pax Romana was not really peaceful for inhabitants of the empire and neither is Bush’s Pax Americana. Also, the Roman Empire collapsed when it expanded beyond it reach, became bloated and corrupt and depended on mercenaries to defend its core. Both eventually began spying on the people instead of the enemy and torture became a significant instrument of the state. Now we have a president who claims “We don’t torture,” but has today vetoed (Intelligence Authorization) legislation that prohibited torture. Now let me think… according to Vance, we now have a military budget that exceeds the budgets of the next 12 countries combined (including mercenaries and outsourced logistics and interrogation); we have over 700 bases over the globe; Iraq alone will cost us on the scale of $3.3 Trillion or more while we keep up the charade of eliminating taxes. KBR, formerly of Halliburton (until cut loose to face asbestos liabilities) takes in billions of scarce tax dollars while protecting its no bid contract profits from US taxes in the Cayman Islands. Our reality is upside down from our ideal. The irony of that world military stationing is that enemies will inevitably find us or we will create them due to over exposure. Isolationism brings on its own problems, but none of those problems result from over exposure. I support the notion of world travel, but shouldn’t we pick our spots and doesn’t high stationing create targets like the 241 Marines killed in Lebanon during Reagan’s regime? Maybe the planet should not be our homeland.
We praise our democracy and sometimes seem to confuse our ideal with reality. The ultimate denial of reality is that we should lose our 4th Amendment freedom in order to protect our freedom. The President has illegally authorized non-FISA spying on all our electronic communication and then asked the Congress to bless the crime retroactively and provide instant absolution for future crimes as well. We seem to be gathering more and more information that suggests that our great democratic experiment is being contaminated in the laboratory. Major General Boykin has asserted that God selected Bush to be President (not the Supreme Court). “He is in the White House because God put him there.” For those of you who become squeamish at the thought of mixing church and state, General Boykin did that while in uniform and preaching in conservative churches. He claims to have shared classified photographs of demons in those churches but was not prosecuted for either mixing religion in general officer regalia, or for compromising classified information. He was promoted to Lieutenant General.
We as a people have permitted this assault on democracy by our meek acceptance of the absurd. I guess that maybe the meek will inherit the earth as in scripture. The earth is our homeland, after all. Have a martini…and hold the vermouth.


Peace,
George Giacoppe
8 March 2008

Why oh Why oh Why oh!

As several news reports and commentaries have now pointed out, the
turning point in the Ohio primary, which Hillary Clinton won to
revive her campaign, was the sensational “news story” now being
called NAFTA-gate. An Obama aide supposedly told a Canadian official
at the Chicago embassy not to worry about Obama’s comments about re-
negotiating the NAFTA trade treaty, which many Ohioans blame for
their economic plight. Obama was just saying that to win an election.

Immediately, Hillary jumped all over this report, lacerating Obama
for hypocrisy and double dealing. John McCain jumped in as well,
noting that this was anything but “straight talk.” The attacks had
their intended effect: late-deciding voters seem to have taken this
(along with Clinton’s TV spot evoking the nightmare scenario of
little children sleeping while the White House phone rings an
emergency that she, but not Obama, would presumably answer) to heart
and moved to Clinton in large numbers.

Now we find out, in a way that reminds us more and more of Karl
Rove’s dirty tricks, that the whole story of Obama’s campaign aide
was not only a classic case of spinning, but an outright
fabrication. First, the leak came initially from Ian Brodie, the
chief of staff of Canada’s conservative prime minister Stephen
Harper, in what appears to be a blatant attempt by conservatives to
try to eliminate the contender they fear most. Worse, Brodie was
actually commenting about how Hillary Clinton’s campaign, not
Obama’s, had issued the statement: “someone from (Hillary) Clinton’s
campaign is telling the embassy to take it with a grain of salt. . .
That someone called us and told us not to worry.” (Paul Rogat Loeb,
3/6/08Common Dreams). This comment was then picked up by a Canadian
TV reporter in the U.S. and attributed to Obama’s economic advisor,
Austin Goolsby, who was supposed to have contacted someone in the
Canadian embassy in Chicago to make this reassuring remark. After
Obama denied it, the story was made worse by another leak, this time
from that same Chicago embassy, supposedly confirming the original
story, to wit, that Obama’s campaign statements were more like
“political positioning than the clear articulation of policy plans.”
Obama seemed to be caught lying.

The truth is that it was the Canadian government that contacted
Goolsby, not the reverse. And although Goolsby did meet with Canada’s
consul general in Chicago, George Rioux, it wasn’t to assure him
about “political posturing” but rather to say that Obama wasn’t
talking about eliminating NAFTA entirely, but only making clear that
labor and environmental safeguards mattered greatly to him. Which is
exactly what Obama claimed in defending himself. As for the memo,
even Prime Minister Harper now admits it was inaccurate, and
“blatantly unfair” to Senator Obama. Opposition members in the
Canadian parliament are expressing even more outrage, accusing the
Harper government of interfering in a U.S. election to “help their
Republican allies across the border,” and demanding that the Canadian
Mounties investigate the leaker of the memo.

Sadly, the damage is already done. Equally sadly, what we
have is an Ohio that continues to be the site of election
shenanigans. Only this time, the perpetrators are not Karl Rove and
his election Kommandos, but the mild-mannered Canadians in league
with the ever more crassly Machiavellian Clintons.

The song says, Why oh Why oh Why-oh, Why did I ever leave Ohio…?
The real question ought to be: When oh When oh When oh, When will
Ohio get it straight-oh?

Lawrence DiStasi

Wikileaks

There’s a great website that all people interested in government illegalities and inconsistencies should know about. It’s called “Wikileaks” and so explosive does it seem to U.S. Government authorities that a judge recently tried to close it down by issuing an injunction order to the service provider which issued the domain name. That means that you can no longer access Wikileaks by going to Wikileaks.org. BUT, you can go to www.wikileaks.de and find the same information. Hurray for unfettered access to the internet and all those who provide it.
            To give its flavor, here’s a little item that appeared in one of the documents at Wikileaks, the one containing U.S. Rules of Engagmenet (ROE) for Iraq. The document mentioned that U.S. forces can chase suspect enemies from Iraq into both Syria and Iran. Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammed-Ali Hosseini, immediately objected: "Any entrance to the Iranian soil by any U.S. military force to trail suspects would be against international laws and could be legally pursuable," the official IRNA news agency quoted Hosseini as saying.
            Of course, the United States does not bother to be restrained much by international law. But it is deeply concerned about its lawlessness being publicly bruited about. It immediately called the leak of its classified document on Wikileaks “irresponsible.”
“While we will not comment on whether this is, in fact, an official document, we do consider the deliberate release of what Wikileaks believes to be a classified document is irresponsible and, if valid, could put U.S. military personnel at risk," said Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, spokesman for the command. (all quotes from article by Bi Mingxin, Feb. 12 Xinhua, as seen on Wikileaks.)
So there you have it. War crimes or invading other countries in contravention of international law are perfectly ok to U.S. officials. But leaking the classified rules (or even documents which someone believes to be classified) which allow such crimes—that is somehow unfair and irresponsible. Brave New World anyone?
 
Lawrence DiStasi

On Patriotism

The conservative assault on Barack Obama has already begun. Recently, Michelle Obama, the candidate’s wife, spoke about this being “the first time she has been proud of America.” The Right jumped on this like a rabid dog. “She doesn’t love America!” “She’s another liberal who wants to only knock our country.” And John McCain’s blonde, botoxed wife passionately observed that she, unlike Michelle, has loved America all her life. We were to get the message: John McCain loves America too, in a white way, a respectful way that no black man ever could because like Michelle Obama, we are meant to infer, black Americans have a grudge against America. And every American knows they have a right to that grudge, given the disgusting way they’ve been treated since being enslaved here; which is why they can’t be allowed to say it.
            Nor is his wife’s comment the only patriotic deficiency being totted up against Obama. CNN reported on Feb. 24 that “the Ilinois senator does not wear an American flag lapel pin,” and has been observed “failing to put his hand over his heart while singing the national anthem.” Omygod! Not only is this upstart crow an African, he doesn’t conform to the standard of loudly proclaiming his patriotism with flag pins and the childish hand-over-the-heart gesture that has become de rigeur among politicians and other blowhards trying to prove their super-patriotism. And Americans gasp in disbelief. Doesn’t wear a lapel flag! Doesn’t put his hand over his heart! An apostate! A savage! No doubt an atheist who drinks latte as well!
            And we have to ask (especially after the latest, a photograph, possibly altered, showing Obama in Africa in white headdress looking like an Arab terrorist) is this country ever going to get over this orgy of jingoistic bullshit? Are Americans ever going to look beneath the puerile gestures and proclamations of undying love for USA! USA! to see that those who indulge in such pathetic gestures are the ones who should be investigated to see what it is, exactly, they are trying to disguise? Could it be, for example, that George W. Bush’s super-patriotic stance is designed to cover the war crimes he’s been committing in our names since he first took office? Could it be that he’s trying to cover the fact that he was AWOL from his reserve air force unit half the time; invaded another country without cause or provocation in violation of international law; approved torture techniques in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions; approved spying on his own countrymen in violation of the Constitution? Could it be that all the fools who wear lapel pins in Congress are covering up their crimes: taking bribes from lobbyists, adding pork to legislation to pay off their bribers; going along with the corporatocracy in funding the most bloated war machine in history not to protect “the American homeland” but to protect the foreign business interests of the oligarchs who control them?
            For my money, I applaud Obama for not wearing that stupid lapel pin, for not indulging in that schoolboy hand-over-heart gesture. Perhaps we finally have an adult running for president, a man who would prefer to focus on finally seeing to it that America, in Martin Luther King’s words, finally lives up to its creed: that all men, even those who don’t salute the flag of empire, are created equal. That all women, even those who are un-blonde, deserve a time when they can, at long last, proclaim their pride in an America that has, in recent years, more often made them ashamed. Perhaps that would initiate a patriotism worth the name.
 
Lawrence DiStasi

It’s Gun Control, Stupid!

Another week. Another senseless shooting at a college campus. Another
young man with a history of mental illness--the kid with the
unpronounceable name spent time in a mental institution after high
school because he'd become unmanageable--who is able to simply go
into a gun shop and buy the most lethal weapons available. No real
background check; they only check to see if the person has a criminal
record. Steven Kazmierczak didn't. So he was able to buy a glock
pistol and a shotgun to add to his previous handgun arsenal.

Then he showed up on campus and started to kill geology students at
random.

Now clearly the guy was mentally ill. But I am stunned by the most
common comment: we can't stop this type of thing. We're all
vulnerable. Some crazy wants to do this, it's impossible to stop.

Well yes. Always assuming that the crazy lives in the United States
of America, where morons in the National Rifle Association are able
to gut any meaningful gun control laws by appealing to the
Constitution's Second Amendment. We have a right to bear arms, they
shout. And Charleston Heston takes his stand menacing anyone who
tries to take his gun away--from his "cold, dead hand." They'll have
to kill me first.

No one wants to kill Moses. No legislator is brave enough to
challenge the gun control lobby. So Steven Kazmierczak is able to buy
his guns and blast away. After all, it's his second amendment right.
Is that so? Does the Constitution give Americans, even crazy ones,
the right to shoot randomly, lethally, with the best weaponry
available, at perfect strangers? Apparently so. After all, it's in
the Constitution (though in fact, the Constitution gives the right to
bear arms only to militias).

And Americans say, What can we do? Only a moronic nation would allow
this to go on. Only a nation controlled by idiots would defend the
right of such people to kill. Only a nation steeped in killing itself
would allow its crazies to slaughter innocents and call it freedom.
Will such a nation ever wake up? Learn to read its own founding
document? The signs are not good.

Lawrence DiStasi

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Why Does W Hate our Freedom?

In the Good Book it’s stated
That evil’s to be hated
But for those with no conscience
This is all nonsense
For Greed is Good
In their neighborhood
And the birth of Nations
Is through the Corporations
For the uninitiated, the last six years seem to be an aberration where we are being told that we need to give up our rights of habeas corpus, and our 4th Amendment rights. In other words, we must to give up our freedoms to stay free. There are several points to be made and surely I will miss a few, but let me try.
When corporations broke the law by spying on each of us that uses electronics like telephones, but including TV, cell phones, Internet, pagers and blackberries, the President insisted on providing retroactive immunity for the telephone companies, including Big Brother Bell. Now this is from a president that in April 2004 (at Buffalo) stated:
“…Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, Constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution….”
According to Mark Klein, the whistle-blower who reported this NSA operation, the facility at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco (Room 641A) was built in 2003, well before Bush spoke in Buffalo. Qwest refused to participate in this illegal spying on Americans and was soon prosecuted by the Federal Government for unrelated charges. Now is that ironic or what? Big Brother Bell can spy on us illegally and without the record of a FISA court order and be paid for it, but it is an offer you had better not refuse. Qwest refused. Collaborators can use the information and will be protected retroactively from prosecution and lawsuits. Clearly, the President was disingenuous at best in suggesting that he got court orders. Direct lie?…”Not exactly” as the Hertz ad goes. What is most revealing about this set of transactions is that the telephone companies unanimously agreed to obey the law and stop spying when the government fell behind in making payments. As long as they were being paid, they were OK with breaking the law. Not incidentally, this high-speed fiber-optic arrangement went far beyond spying on foreign nationals. It was/is called the Total Information Awareness Program headed up by Vice Admiral Poindexter (of Iran Contra fame). Poindexter is an experienced, recycled and ethics challenged operative. Are you shocked? If we pay, they spy on us.
This is one example of how Bush has embraced corporatism. Others abound, including outsourcing the Hurricane Katrina disaster aftermath (we cannot call it a recovery effort. Want to buy a toxic trailer?). He outsourced intelligence gathering at Abu Ghraib and myriad additional activities in Iraq to the tune of 180,000 non-military, including Blackwater, on our government corporate payroll for the Iraq adventure alone. He has outsourced much of our military health care to corporate contract labor and eliminated military positions. Our State Department mercenaries are also above the law. As I have reminded you before, Cheney is still on the corporate payroll for Halliburton, but this does not suggest a conflict of interest. Instead, it demonstrates a primary corporate interest. Similarly when creating an energy policy, Cheney met with energy companies who proceeded to run up the energy charges in California and laugh about it. If it were not for audiotapes showing their disdain for the law as well as Californians, we might have to guess that Cheney had a hand in the process. Bush enacted a drug policy that eliminated competition in pricing for government drug programs and established blocks and penalties for prescriptions coming in from Canada. This alone costs Americans billions of tax dollars each year, but it protects corporations from competition by a government that talks constantly about free trade and open markets. Bush has surrounded himself with cronies and incompetents who are protected from scrutiny and as long as the circle of contributions to Bush and favors to corporations remains unbroken, the curtain shall not rise. Daylight and transparency tend to discourage the growth of these viruses, but they flourish in darkness.
Even in the days following Katrina, Bush sought to eliminate union wage scales for the cleanup work and cheap imported labor was quick to the scene. Unions seem to be feared by the Bush administration. Who knows, they might limit the profit potential of corporations or shrink the circle of contributions to the Administration?
Another area of concern is the merging of Church and State. Not only have we endured the scandals at the Air Force Academy pushing evangelical Christianity, but we have had Major General Boykin caught preaching to congregations while in uniform and then “punished” by promotion to Lieutenant General. Blend these signs with the “Faith Based Initiative,” and you have the makings of a cozy relationship not seen with western governments since the twenties and thirties in Italy.
In fact, that brings us to other chilling parallels with the ultimate corporatist, Benito Mussolini. Military adventurism for Il Duce culminated in the botched invasion of sovereign Ethiopia. Does that parallel the invasion of sovereign Iraq? Too often, amateurs have equated Fascism with Totalitarianism. They are independent variables. Mussolini himself defined Fascism as corporatism. He also kissed up to the Pope and called Italy, “Catholic.” Benito Mussolini also hated freedom because he saw that as a threat to Italy and he claimed to give the people only enough “elbow room” for them not to revolt against the state. Dissent is discouraged. And is it not poetic, that we have the freedom to shop, but not to get involved in state policies? Another distraction is the use of a scapegoat or a boogeyman so that all the people have a common enemy. Elitism and corporatism go together for he ultimate good of the state. The corporate leaders become the elite and therefore the ordinary citizen does not have to concern himself with civic affairs except that we must all be very afraid of the boogeyman. Be very afraid of “Islamofascists” that represent an absurdity in terms since they are, by nature, the antithesis of corporatism. That gives us a boogeyman just as effective as the Socialists and Communists of Mussolini’s Italy.
Remember that dissent was the enemy of the Fascist state and that efforts were made to root out dissent. Benito was a uniter and not a divider. There are other characteristics of the fascist state that may not yet have materialized. Rigged elections, for example, were common in Mussolini’s Italy. Thank goodness that they have not happened here. Why does W hate our freedom? Freedom simply cramps his style. That is where dissent comes from, too. So if you lose your right to habeas corpus and privacy and security of your person and property, maybe the boogeyman won’t come…but then, maybe he is already here. Look up the definition of Fascism. It is fascinating.
“Don’t ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” Think “Ma Bell” becoming Big Brother Bell. We can still vote in frequently fair elections. Work to make elections fair and Vote, damn it, Vote.
Peace,
George Giacoppe

Whatever Happened to the War?

Last week, according to the Pew Research Center, national news media provided 2% of their coverage on the wars. They spent twice as much coverage on Heath Ledger, five times as much on the stimulus plan, and 20 times as much on the 2008 campaign.
When asked what they had heard about in the news lately, readers responded with Obama – 24%, Clinton – 23%, Ledger – 11%, Britney Spears – 6% and on down to Mitt Romney 3%. They did NOT MENTION THE IRAQ OR AFGHANISTAN WARS!
Even when asked what they might be interested in reading or hearing about, only 6% mentioned the war.
No one anywhere mentioned the corollaries of war – the effect on veterans and their families, the provision of benefits and services, the reconstitution of the vastly depleted forces, both federal and state.
I spend hours daily reviewing news stories from all over the nation. It is getting harder and harder to find substantive news stories on the war or veterans. There are more stories on naming parks and post offices for dead veterans than there are on failing hospitals and programs for live veterans.
In Congress there are more unfunded provisions for veterans than there are funded ones, and there is much more opened-and-died-in-committee legislation than there is legislation with any substantial benefit for today’s veterans commensurate with their sacrifice.
So whatever happened to the war?
Let’s start with the first war – Afghanistan.
THEY’RE BAAAACK!! The Taliban is back in force. They control many areas in the south and along the Pakistan border. They are increasingly infiltrating the cities with suicide bombers and paramilitary fighters. A suicide bomber killed the deputy governor of Helmand province last week.
They have engaged in set-piece battles with NATO forces, particularly in the south. NATO casualties are rising, as are Afghani casualties, military and civilian. The condition of women is returning rapidly to the situation under the old Taliban, and female school teachers and women running businesses are increasingly being targeted for terrorist assaults and assassinations.
The only progress seems to be that opium is once again a bumper crop, and Mullah Mohammed, bowing to international pressure, has told his forces to stop beheading the people they terrorize and shoot them or hang them instead. - That’s it after almost six years?
Then of course there is Iraq.
The surge has worked – in Baghdad at least. The killings are down – not done, but down. They may be coming back up.
We are arming the Iraqi forces with modern American weapons, although we know that those forces are infiltrated by the militias.
We are bribing the Sunni leadership to do what they already know they must do and would probably have done without our money, and that is get rid of the Al Qaida-in-Iraq thugs.
In the Shia area the state of women has reverted not just to pre-Saddam conditions, but to pre-20th century conditions.
The Maliki government is effectively forming our foreign policy in the region in that they refuse to do anything that we want them to do that might upset either the Shia mullahs or their Iranian neighbors. While we are paying the Sunni tribal leaders to supports us, and they are so far, Maliki is denying them even proportional parity in government.
There are disturbing reports that violence is increasing in the unattended countryside. The southern area around Basra is falling apart after the pull-back of the British forces. American casualties almost doubled in January over December.
Then there is the war as it is waged right here in the US of A
Given that half of America doesn’t even seem to care to participate, even to give the war a thought from day to day, the remaining half are waging a war here at home over what it means to be patriotic, what the Constitution says about war and the powers of government, what the United States’ obligations are under international treaties, how we should conduct ourselves in the world, and what we owe those who stand up and sign up.
“Patriotism is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.“
Adlai Stevenson
The divide seems to be between those who believe that the Constitution requires that in order to protect our freedoms we must not give them away willy-nilly, and those who believe that the Constitution is unclear, and who are afraid and are willing to sacrifice freedoms for a sense of security – real or not.
These are troublesome differences, because they speak to two completely different nations. One proudly free and democratic, and one willing to define something less than the historical concept of freedom and democracy as a new “freedom”.
"It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear."
—General Douglas MacArthur
The cliché, “Freedom is not Free” is batted about with obviously varying meaning. To some that means “Freedom is not Free so please send your kid to fight wherever the CINC says to go.”
We seem to forget that the original meaning was, “Freedom is not Free so all of you step up – all of you do your share – all of you sacrifice – all of you accept that you will always live under some insecurity.” Why? Because it is truly worth it.
And don’t forget that also means that “Freedom is not Free because we owe those who defend us daily everything that a grateful nation can offer.” This does not mean collecting an additional $1.2B from Tricare recipients, while giving away $150B, mostly to banks who gambled and lost, and to people who can’t control their spending.
We must pay a price for freedom, but we must not pay the price of real freedom to gain false freedom. Breaking down the protections and the checks and balances provisions of our Constitution are not worth it.
A unitary executive, not beholden to the peoples’ representatives, is what our fathers fought against two centuries ago. Representatives who represent themselves rather than us are likewise not the legislative construct for which our fathers risked their “lives, fortunes and sacred honor.” A judiciary that can set aside not only the clear precepts of the Constitution, but also can ignore two centuries of precedent would be anathema to those who gave us the precious gift called America.
We will prevail
We will come through this trying time, because we have proven again and again that we are strong enough to do so – that the structure of our nation as given us by our fathers is tough and resilient. To do that we will have to stop fighting each other and start writing the next chapter of our blessedly free world.
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."
Thomas Jefferson


Sandy Cook
10 Feb 2008