4 November 2006
Grenoble, France

Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
One thing that history teaches us is that political repression can always be refined and improved. The repressive techniques of Tsarist Russia, for example, were sophomoric compared to those of the Soviet period, when evasion and escape were made much more difficult. And a glance at Chechnya today makes repression under Stalin seem almost moderate.

The political "opponents" who have understood the loopholes in the system are more efficient when they come to power. They can shut down escape routes more effectively and regiment society more completely. Diversity means loss of control, and what person sitting in the driver's seat wants to loose control. The ends, as usual, are used to justify the means, and most drivers believe they are heading toward "utopia," or at least toward a good destination --Bismarck, like Hitler and Stalin; the Clintons, like Bush and Cheney, are not unlike every other leader with political ambitions and who necessarily finds him/herself working within the constraints of the modern capitalist system.


According to the tenets of split-brain theory, the two spheres of the human brain have evolved toward two separate states of specialization. The left sphere contains the seat of language and also logic. It is our source of digital rationality (skilled in making distinctions in the nature of either/or and all-or-none) : The ways of thinking which are concrete, analytical, propositional, mathematical, deductive, linear, literal, explicit, sequential, and goal-oriented mostly originate with the activities in our left brain. The right sphere, according to this theory, is largely responsible for our analog emotional states (with the capacity of registering differences like more-or-less and both/and) : It is visual, intuitive, non-verbal, associative, spontaneous, sensuous, playful, artistic, holistic and capable of seeing patterns. Furthermore, this research reveals that individuals have a tendency to prefer one side or the other, which affects their approach to life and to work. The right hemisphere of the brain is more worldly, more conceptual than computational; the left has been described as "a narrowly programmed linguistic computer". If the left is a system, the right is its environment. The right knows what words connote (or mean), what associations they have, and not simply what they denote (or signify). It can recognize the ridiculous and the inappropriate because it is aware that words and sentences are embedded in a wide matrix of relationships. (Anthony Wilden, 1987, pp.239 & 241-242)

Brain scientists have developed ways to actually measure specific thinking activities. The EEG (electroencephalogram) can identify which side of the brain is in primary use during specific thinking tasks. This biofeedback research shows how, when, and why shifts between the hemispheres occur. A recent example of the shift from right-brain to left-brain thinking occurred the other evening when I received a phone call from a colleague who wished to tell me that he was unable to meet the approaching deadline for the publication of a paper that was to be a chapter in a large anthology of essays I am now editing on the history of pacifist movements in the United States and France. He began by describing the pain he felt in his left shoulder as the result of a minor accident he had had. The pain in his shoulder became excruciating, he told me, each time he lifted his arm to type on the keyboard of his computer to finish the article he had promised to send me. After evoking strong feelings of empathy in me, he went on to suggest that it might be realistic to prolong the deadline for a week, so he would be able to work in comfort and meet our goal by producing a good 5-to-10-page essay on the influence of religion in American pacifist thought. My own thinking in this context had moved from feelings of empathy to goal-oriented logic which would efficiently satisfy the requirements of our collective strategy. (Another suggested way of noting this brain-shift is to hold a thermometer between the fingers of your left hand (controlled by the right brain) and visualize a hot day on the beach. Or during your next phone conversation, simply switch the phone's receiver from your right ear to the left; or close your left nostril and breath through the right for a few minutes. Feel any differences?)

Such parlor games would be of little interest if it were not for the fact that social control technologies today make use of a wide range of scientific discoveries which have been effectively organized in the service of PPM (the private profit motive). We would be well-advised to appropriate some of these scientific discoveries and use them in the service of OOL (our own liberation) from a system intent on war and exploitation.


The suicide of a ruling class, wrote Ralph Miliband, is without precedent, and so is true democracy. How do you protect people from tyranny if tyrants have convinced them there is no alternative to the repression they must endure. Empire builders, like demagogues, protect their power by practicing exchanges, both real and symbolic. What is always missing in these relationships, however, is a careful acknowledgment of the larger context in which these exchanges take place. The exchanges are usually puny, irrelevant in the larger scheme of things, but for purposes of perception management they are everything, even something to die for.....

Nevertheless, as Mumia Abu-Jamal has observed from his prison cell on death row, where he also is struggling for his life :

When a cause comes along and you know in your bones that it is just, yet refuse to defend it--at that

moment you begin to die. And I have never seen so many corpses walking around talking about justice.

Years ago mechanical engineers developed the convention of drawing "black boxes" on their blueprint designs in order to represent non-essential parts of their picture. They simply shaded objects of little interest rather than drawing their intricate functions, while the more important areas of their blueprint depicted functional aspects in great detail. Thus, for example, the drawing of a coffee machine in the design of the lobby of a train station might be shaded black instead of being represented in the drawing as an intricate mechanism with interrelated parts. More detailed attention would be paid to the main switches and clocks which governed the train tracks and to the security system that connects the switches to the mainframe computer above the lobby. According to this scientific convention, the non-essential is deliberately ignored and the "black box" simply represents a physical presence, without reference to functions.

Mechanical engineering strategies are okay for "closed systems," and they even have some predictive power. On a billiard table, for example, such reductionist techniques might be sufficient to develop the strategy to win a game. But in the complexity of real life, mechanical calculations with the use of "black boxes" can be very misleading, and sometimes have catastrophic consequences. By not knowing that we do not know, we cease asking relevant questions and we no longer can look for their answers. Instead we fall into what Jacquelyn Wonder and Priscilla Donovan have described as "a predominantly left-brain mode of thinking," i.e.not seeing the forest for the trees, which we continue relentlessly  to count and to measure in order to gather more digital information, all of which remains entirely divorced from any recognition of patterns. Thus, we find ourselves lost in the woods, so to speak, forgetting how we got there, and with no real understanding of where we are and where we are heading. It is "the enormous now," as e. e. cummings called it, which absorbs our critical attention to the maximum --no past, no future; only the present.

There once lived diverse communities of people who participated in a joyous (bilateral-brain) skepticism and were unwilling to be absorbed completely into the dominant mainstream of left-brain digital thinking. They were usually tolerated by the dominant (left-brain) culture; sometimes, in moments of crisis, they were used as scapegoats, but by-and-large they existed as "black boxes" on the social landscape. These nomads were mostly non-essential to the larger society in which they lived. Situated somewhere between the barbarians, who were in almost constant conflict, and the civilized, who were mostly obsessed with order and control, these universal skeptics --like Hebrews, Gypsies, and Revolutionary Socialists-- developed their own alternative cultures, parallel and sometimes contrary to the dominant cultures in their particular regions. Humor was often an efficient vehicle with which they transmitted their cultural values; laughter was a sign of recognition.

Today, we live in very sad times, and there is little genuine laughter. Diversity is drastically reduced as major as well as minor institutions submit to extreme forms of rationalization. The "black boxes" on the drawing board have been opened and attempts have been made to integrate their internal functions into the system of which we all are a part. Thus, liberals have become conservatives; radicals have transformed into neoconservatives; Hebrews into ultra-nationalists; Gypsies into urban welfare recipients; Revolutionary Socialists into the walking wounded. Social engineering, from a mechanical point of view, seems near perfection, and its "surplus population" is seen heading toward extinction....

However, there is one problem: mechanical knowledge is inadequate. Real people are neither billiard balls nor "black boxes." There are no entirely predictable trajectories when individuals are struck by "outside forces." In fact there are no "outside forces" that can act on the system in a pre-determined manner. In fact the entire mechanical paradigm of measuring weight, volume and velocity falls short of explaining why we behave the way we do. The "black boxes" that have been opened or crushed in an attempt to secure the system are in fact human beings mutating in a diversity of ways as a result of environmental changes, not all of which are for the worse. These individual and collective changes are often unpredictable, as the matrix of which we all are a part undergoes significant changes.

Real life is capricious, more like the croquet game in Lewis Carroll's Alice and Wonderland, where the hedge hog may simply get up and wander away from the game, instead of simply waiting to get hit by the Flamingo serving as a mallet, thereby risking the metaphoric loss of a battle, if not the war.

American fiction writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. recently wrote about political culture in the contemporary U.S. :

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because

power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get

crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking

the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies,

is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

This week we recommend the essays of U.S. investigative reporter, Robert Perry at : http://www.consortiumnews.com/,
and the audio essay by Howard Zinn: "We Live in an Occupied Country" at :  http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15479.htm,
and Bill Moyers' essay on the state of urban education in the United States at : http://www.tompaine.com/print/america_101.php.


And, as usual, we have selected 8 articles recently received from our research center associates at CEIMSA :

Item A., from Edward Herman, is a article by Carla Binion on the dangers looming over the political landscape of the United States (and therefore the rest of the world).
Item B., from Richard Du Boff, is a reference to some ugly realities after the U.S. military defeat in Vietnam.
Item C. is a podcast from Information Clearing House by award-winning film producer Aaron Russo on "the machinations behind the apparent rise of fascism in the United States".
Item D. is an article by Tony Judt at London Review of Books on the criminal collaboration with annihilation politics during the Bush administration and after.
Item E., from  the Council for the National Interest Foundation, is an article describing the religious ideology of Christian Zionism and the belief in one necessary means to establish a Christian paradise on earth.
Item F. is an article by Robert Fisk on the Israeli military arsenal and its crimes against humanity in Lebanon.
Item G., from Greg Palast, is an article on the psychology of war-nography in the United States.
And finally, item H. is an article by University of Texas professor Robert Jensen,  on "the consequences of the death of empathy" in affluent America.




Sincerely,
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies/
Director of Research
Université Stendhal
Grenoble, France
http://www.ceimsa.org/


P.S. We have attached with this bulletin an invitation to our series of local conferences on the theme of warfare and resistance movements : On Thursday, 16 November, CEIMSA-IN-EXILE will present the classic Gills Pontecorvo film "The Battle of Algiers"  which we have been told is unavailable for purchase in the United States today.
ff


____________________
A.
from Edward S. Herman :
Sent: Monday, October 23, 2006
Subject: Bush's Absolute Power Grab
http://www.truthout.org/

Francis,
A strong article on the totalitarian threat we face in the USA.
 Ed
 


 

[Many Americans are in denial about what is happening to the United States. They don't want to believe that a totalitarian structure could be put in place in their own country. They don't want to view the various pieces of George W. Bush's "anti-terror" system in that broad a context. They hope that someone or something - the Supreme Court maybe - will strike down the excesses of the Republican-controlled Congress and the Executive Branch.]

Though there are still obstacles that stand in Bush's way - the Nov. 7 elections, for instance - America's march down a road to a new-age totalitarianism has advanced farther than many understand, as freelance reporter Carla Binion argues in this disturbing guest essay:

On October 17, George W. Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006. This new law gives Bush power similar to that possessed by Stalin or Hitler, and grants agencies within the Executive Branch powers similar to those of the KGB or Gestapo.

Bush justifies this act by claiming he needs it to fight the "war on terror," but a number of critics, including former counterterrorism officials, have said the administration has greatly exaggerated the threat and used illogical methods to combat terrorism. (Examples are listed below.)

Except for MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, few television news reporters have bothered to mention that the Military Commissions Act has changed the U.S. justice system and our approach to human rights. As Olbermann said of the new law on his October 17 Countdown program, the new act "does away with habeas corpus, the right of suspected terrorists or anybody else to know why they have been imprisoned."

Jonathan Turley, George Washington University Constitutional Law Professor, was Olbermann's guest. Olbermann asked him, "Does this mean that under this law, ultimately the only thing keeping you, I, or the viewer out of Gitmo is the sanity and honesty of the president of the United States?"

Turley responded, "It does. And it's a huge sea change for our democracy. The framers created a system where we did not have to rely on the good graces or good mood of the president…People have no idea how significant this is. What, really a time of shame this is for the American system. What the Congress did and what the president signed today essentially revokes over 200 years of American principles and values."

Although we have a free press, rather than follow Olbermann's good example, most television news reporters have responded to this nullification of America's fundamental principles by avoiding the subject. News networks which voluntarily relinquish their right and duty to challenge government officials function more as the Soviet Union's Pravda or Hitler's Nazi press program than as a genuinely free press.

Just as the mainstream media failed to adequately question the Bush administration's many shifting rationales for invading Iraq in the lead-up to the war, they're now failing to challenge Bush's logic and motives as he justifies eviscerating the Constitution in the name of his ever-expanding "war on terror." How realistic is this so-called war, and is the Bush administration conducting it effectively?

Robert Dreyfuss covers national security for Rolling Stone. He interviewed nearly a dozen former high-ranking counterterrorism officials about Bush's approach to the war on terrorism. In his article, "The Phony War," (Rolling Stone, 9/21/06) Dreyfuss says these officials conclude:

• The war on terror is bogus. Terrorism shouldn't be treated as if it were a nation to be battled with the military, but should instead be fought with police work and intelligence agencies.
• Terrorism is not an enemy, but a method. Even if the United States were to wipe out every terrorist cell in the world today, terrorism would be back tomorrow.
• Bush lacks a clear understanding of the nature of the "enemy" and has no real strategy for dealing with them.
• The Bush administration confuses the issue by grouping "Al Qaeda" with everything from Iraq's resistance movement to states such as Syria and Iran.
• Today, there's virtually no real "Al Qaeda threat" to Americans.
• Bush's policies have spawned a new generation of "amateur terrorists," but there are few of them, and they're not likely to pose a major threat to the U.S.
• Though Bush has said he will fight his "war" until every last terrorist is eliminated, terrorism can never be defeated, merely "contained and reduced."

Dreyfuss says, "In the short term, the cops and spies can continue to do their best to watch for terrorist threats as they emerge, and occasionally, as in London, they will succeed. But they are the first to admit that stopping a plot before it can unfold involved, more than anything, plain dumb luck."

Not only has the Bush administration falsely characterized and exaggerated the threat of terrorism; they have gone out of their way to mislead the public by claiming credit for preventing attacks. Dreyfuss points out that although Bush has claimed we've fended off 10 terrorist plots since 9/11, "on closer examination all 10 are either bogus or were to take place overseas."

Dreyfuss also notes that, although in 2002 the Bush administration leaked to the press that Al Qaeda had 5,000 "sleepers" in the U.S., there were, in fact, none. (Or, as Dreyfuss says, not a single one has been found.) If the administration believes the facts bolster their case for a war on terrorism, why do they find it necessary to leak false information?

The administration has done little to secure U.S. borders, ports, airports and nuclear facilities. What could logically explain their inattention to these vulnerabilities if they believe a terrorist threat here is likely? Bush has said he'll do anything it takes in order to protect the American people. Why hasn't he secured our nuclear facilities?

Exaggerating the terrorist threat does give the Bush team an excuse to seize more power for the Executive and shred the Constitution. In an article for Foreign Affairs (September/October 2006), political science professor John Mueller supports Dreyfuss's view that the war on terrorism is bogus.

Mueller points out that not only have there been no terrorist incidents here in the past five years, but there were none in the five years before 9/11. Mueller asks: "If it is so easy to pull off an attack and if terrorists are so demonically competent, why have they not done it? Why have they not been sniping at people in shopping centers, collapsing tunnels, poisoning the food supply, cutting electrical lines, derailing trains, blowing up oil pipelines, causing massive traffic jams, or exploiting the countless other vulnerabilities that, according to security experts, could be so easily exploited?"

He also bolsters Dreyfuss's conclusion that the Bush administration can't take credit for the fact that we haven't been attacked again. He says, "the government's protective measures would have to be nearly perfect to thwart all such plans. Given the monumental imperfection of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, and the debacle of FBI and National Security Agency programs to upgrade their computers to better coordinate intelligence information, that explanation seems far-fetched."

Mueller addresses Bush's irrational argument that we're "fighting terrorists in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here." He points out that terrorists with Al Qaeda sympathies have managed to carry out attacks in a variety of countries (Egypt, Jordan Turkey, the United Kingdom), not merely in Iraq.

He adds that a reasonable explanation for the fact that no terrorists have attacked since 9/11 is that the terrorist threat "has been massively exaggerated." He notes that "it is worth remembering that the total number of people killed since 9/11 by Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda-like operatives outside of Afghanistan and Iraq is not much higher than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States in a single year, and that the lifetime chance of an American being killed by international terrorism is about one in 80,000 - about the same chance of being killed by a comet or a meteor."

Although Bush's justification for the war on terror has been illogical and deceptive, the administration has used it as an excuse to abuse the U.S. military in Iraq, tear down our system of government at home and seize power on his own behalf. As Jonathan Turley told Keith Olbermann on his October 17th program, with the signing of the Military Commissions Act, "Congress just gave the president despotic powers…I think people are fooling themselves if they believe that the courts will once again stop this president from taking - overtaking - almost absolute power."

Bush's many power grabs and refusal to submit to usual constitutional checks and balances indicates he prefers monarchy or dictatorship to the government set up by America's founders. The framers of our Constitution provided checks on tyranny by writing into law separation of powers, granting the legislative and judicial branches of government the ability to curb abuses by the executive. Today, the Congress has abdicated its constitutional obligation and serves only as a rubber stamp for the despotic president, and to date, the courts have done much the same.

Can George W. Bush be trusted with absolute power? Here are some things he has done with his unchecked power:

• Stolen two presidential elections.
• Exaggerated and falsely characterized the terrorist threat.
• Misled the country into war with Iraq.
• Urged the U.S. intelligence agencies to fix the intelligence around the Iraq war policy (as confirmed by the Downing Street Memo and other sources) in order to mislead the Congress and public into supporting war with Iraq.
• Abused human rights by promoting the use of torture and setting up virtual gulags.
• Suspended habeas corpus for some.
• Tried to silence political opposition by pronouncing them "weak on terrorism" or somehow "with the terrorists," and
• Placed himself above the law by issuing more legislation-challenging signing statements (around 800) than all of his predecessors put together.

Bush's unnecessary invasion of Iraq alone has cost nearly 3,000 American lives. An October 11, 2006 article by Greg Mitchell at Editor and Publisher says that a new study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, "suggests that more than 600,000 Iraqis have met a violent or otherwise war-related end since the U.S. arrived in March 2003."

The Bush administration's policies have not only resulted in high death counts, but also in widespread, out of control torture. A September 22, 2006 Christian Science Monitor report says:

"The United Nation's special investigator on torture said Thursday that torture may now be worse in Iraq than it was during the regime of deposed leader Saddam Hussein. The Associated Press reports that Manfred Nowak, who was making a brief to the United Nations Human Rights Council about the treatment of detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay Cuba, said the torture situation in Iraq was 'totally out of hand.'"

The CS Monitor mentions the fact that the recent compromise between the Bush White House and dissident Republicans (including Senator John McCain) allows torture to continue. The article quotes a Washington Post piece:

"The bad news is Mr. Bush, as he made clear yesterday, intends to continue using the CIA to secretly detain and abuse certain terrorist suspects…It's hard to credit the statement by [McCain] yesterday that 'there's no doubt that the integrity and letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions have been preserved.' In effect, the agreement means that U.S. violations of international human rights law can continue as long as Mr. Bush is president, with Congress's tacit assent."

 Congress has given Bush a blank check as he's bulldozed toward an imperial presidency. We have the outward forms of democratic institutions such as Congress and a so-called free press. However, the people currently managing those institutions behave as if they're being forced to serve a totalitarian dictator.

A perfect example of this surrender to Bush's virtual despotism is Congress's and the mainstream media's compliance regarding Bush's Military Commissions Act. While Keith Olbermann and Jonathan Turley see the extreme danger posed by Bush's authoritarian moves, Congress has done little to challenge Bush, and, overall, the press is eerily silent.

In The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich, William L. Shirer said the Reich Press Law of October 4, 1933, ordered editors not to publish (among other things) anything which "tends to weaken the strength of the German Reich or offends the honor and dignity of Germany." According to Shirer, Max Amman, Hitler's top sergeant during the war and head of the Nazi Party's publishing firm and financial head of its press said that after the Nazis seized power in 1933, it was "a true statement to say that the basic purpose of the Nazi press program was to eliminate all the press which was in opposition to the party."

The U.S. mainstream press doesn't have to be coerced by a government Press Law to avoid publicly opposing Bush's most egregious policies. Television news networks, in particular, have voluntarily held back serious scrutiny. They have not only failed to discuss the recent Military Commissions Act at length, but in the run-up to the Iraq war, liberal talk show host Phil Donahue and comedian Bill Maher were fired for challenging the White House spin about Iraq and the 9/11 attacks.

Shirer also describes the ease with which the German Reichstag gave Hitler the power to change the nature of Germany's parliamentary democracy. He writes:

"One by one, Germany's most powerful institutions now began to surrender to Hitler and to pass quietly, unprotestingly, out of existence…It cannot be said they went down fighting. On May 19, 1933, the Social Democrats - those who were not in jail or in exile - voted in the Reichstag without a dissenting voice to approve Hitler's foreign policy."

Shirer concludes: "The one-party totalitarian state had been achieved with scarcely a ripple of opposition or defiance, and within four months after the Reichstag had abdicated its democratic responsibilities."

The U.S. Congress, like the German Reichstag, has abdicated its democratic responsibilities by granting Bush an inordinate amount of power - "with scarcely a ripple of opposition or defiance." The U.S. press has abandoned its role as democracy's watchdog by failing to question this development. Both of these institutions have failed the American people.

Considering Bush is using the war on terror to justify seizing undue power, both Congress and the media should question his reasoning and offer opposition. Just as they didn't effectively challenge the administration's shifting excuses for attacking Iraq, these institutions haven't scrutinized Bush's claims about the need for the Military Commissions Act and the apparently endless war on terrorism.

Among things Congress and the media should challenge is George W. Bush's false claim that the United States does not torture. In an article published at the CommonDreams.org site, journalist Molly Ivins reports that in one case of death from torture by Americans, the military at first said the prisoner's death was caused by a heart attack. Ivins adds that the coroner later said the heart attack occurred after the prisoner "had been beaten so often on his legs that they had 'basically been pulpified.'"

She adds that the Bush administration's officially sanctioning torture "throws out legal and moral restraints as the president deems necessary - these are fundamental principles of basic decency, as well as law." Ivins isn't inclined to hyperbole, yet she says of Americans' passive acceptance of this new law: "Do not pretend to be shocked when the world begins comparing us to the Nazis."

As Jonathan Turley said on Olbermann's program, "I think you can feel the judgment of history. It won't be kind to President Bush. But frankly, I don't think that it will be kind to the rest of us. I think that history will ask, 'Where were you? What did you do when this thing was signed into law?' There were people that protested the Japanese concentration camps; there were people that protested these other acts. But we are strangely silent in this national yawn as our rights evaporate."

Future generations will wonder why the U.S. Congress and mainstream press helped Bush build up an imperial presidency and eliminate Constitutional protections. If they're able to sort through the administration's fallacies and lies and clearly see what went wrong with America during this time, they'll wonder why there were so few Molly Ivins's, Keith Olbermann's and Jonathan Turley's.

Coming generations will also ask why by comparison there were so many who failed to notice the obvious holes in Bush's logic and why so many turned a blind eye to his numerous false assertions and cruel policies. They'll wonder why so many supported, whether by direct action or by silence, the Bush administration's changing the fundamental nature of the democratic Republic we were given by America's founders, based on the flimsy excuse of fighting a war on terrorism - a "war" Bush defines falsely and fights ineffectively.

Generations to come might ask why this president who lied so often, about Iraq and other critical matters, was ever entrusted with enough power to damage this country's founding principles and wage endless, unprovoked war on other nations. If Congress and the media would ask these questions now, they might prevent Bush from doing further harm. This might save many lives, prevent much unnecessary suffering and possibly steer this country out of its present darkness.

_______________   
Carla Binion is a freelance researcher and writer whose essays have been published at various Web sites.

 
______________
B.
from Richard Du Boff :
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2006
Subject: USA doesn't cut and run!


Saigon, 30 April 1975...:
====================
Marines throwing Vietnamese back over the American Embassy wall

  
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fallofsaigon_on_gate.gif

 
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_____________
C.
from ICH :
26 October 2006
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/

Aaron Russo's "America Freedom to Fascism" presents startling facts about our laws, raising critical issues that Americans must consider if they are to be a free people.

"America Freedom to Fascism "
(Video - Runtime 109 Minutes)
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15399.htm

______________
D.
from Tony Judt :
25 October 2006
http://lrb.co.uk/v28/n18/judt01_.html
Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia of the United States in recent years kept its head safely below the parapet?

It wasn’t always so. On 26 October 1988, the New York Times carried a full-page advertisement for liberalism. Headed ‘A Reaffirmation of Principle’, it openly rebuked Ronald Reagan for deriding ‘the dreaded L-word’ and treating ‘liberals’ and ‘liberalism’ as terms of opprobrium. Liberal principles, the text affirmed, are ‘timeless. Extremists of the right and of the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency in our own country, intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out.’

The advertisement was signed by 63 prominent intellectuals, writers and businessmen: among them Daniel Bell, J.K. Galbraith, Felix Rohatyn, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Irving Howe and Eudora Welty. These and other signatories – the economist Kenneth Arrow, the poet Robert Penn Warren – were the critical intellectual core, the steady moral centre of American public life. But who, now, would sign such a protest? Liberalism in the United States today is the politics that dares not speak its name. And those who style themselves ‘liberal intellectuals’ are otherwise engaged. As befits the new Gilded Age, in which the pay ratio of an American CEO to that of a skilled worker is 412:1 and a corrupted Congress is awash in lobbies and favours, the place of the liberal intellectual has been largely taken over by an admirable cohort of ‘muck-raking’ investigative journalists – Seymour Hersh, Michael Massing and Mark Danner, writing in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.

The collapse of liberal self-confidence in the contemporary US can be variously explained. In part it is a backwash from the lost illusions of the 1960s generation, a retreat from the radical nostrums of youth into the all-consuming business of material accumulation and personal security. The signatories of the New York Times advertisement were born in most cases many years earlier, their political opinions shaped by the 1930s above all. Their commitments were the product of experience and adversity and made of sterner stuff. The disappearance of the liberal centre in American politics is also a direct outcome of the deliquescence of the Democratic Party. In domestic politics liberals once believed in the provision of welfare, good government and social justice. In foreign affairs they had a longstanding commitment to international law, negotiation, and the importance of moral example. Today, a spreading me-first consensus has replaced vigorous public debate in both arenas. And like their political counterparts, the critical intelligentsia once so prominent in American cultural life has fallen silent.

This process was well underway before 11 September 2001, and in domestic affairs at least, Bill Clinton and his calculated policy ‘triangulations’ must carry some responsibility for the evisceration of liberal politics. But since then the moral and intellectual arteries of the American body politic have hardened further. Magazines and newspapers of the traditional liberal centre – the New Yorker, the New Republic, the Washington Post and the New York Times itself – fell over themselves in the hurry to align their editorial stance with that of a Republican president bent on exemplary war. A fearful conformism gripped the mainstream media. And America’s liberal intellectuals found at last a new cause.

Or, rather, an old cause in a new guise. For what distinguishes the worldview of Bush’s liberal supporters from that of his neo-conservative allies is that they don’t look on the ‘War on Terror’, or the war in Iraq, or the war in Lebanon and eventually Iran, as mere serial exercises in the re-establishment of American martial dominance. They see them as skirmishes in a new global confrontation: a Good Fight, reassuringly comparable to their grandparents’ war against Fascism and their Cold War liberal parents’ stance against international Communism. Once again, they assert, things are clear. The world is ideologically divided; and – as before – we must take our stand on the issue of the age. Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose: they are at war with ‘Islamo-fascism’.

Thus Paul Berman, a frequent contributor to Dissent, the New Yorker and other liberal journals, and until now better known as a commentator on American cultural affairs, recycled himself as an expert on Islamic fascism (itself a new term of art), publishing Terror and Liberalism just in time for the Iraq war. Peter Beinart, a former editor of the New Republic, followed in his wake this year with The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, where he sketches at some length the resemblance between the War on Terror and the early Cold War.[1] Neither author had previously shown any familiarity with the Middle East, much less with the Wahhabi and Sufi traditions on which they pronounce with such confidence.

But like Christopher Hitchens and other former left-liberal pundits now expert in ‘Islamo-fascism’, Beinart and Berman and their kind really are conversant – and comfortable – with a binary division of the world along ideological lines. In some cases they can even look back to their own youthful Trotskyism when seeking a template and thesaurus for world-historical antagonisms. In order for today’s ‘fight’ (note the recycled Leninist lexicon of conflicts, clashes, struggles and wars) to make political sense, it too must have a single universal enemy whose ideas we can study, theorise and combat; and the new confrontation must be reducible, like its 20th-century predecessor, to a familiar juxtaposition that eliminates exotic complexity and confusion: Democracy v. Totalitarianism, Freedom v. Fascism, Them v. Us.

To be sure, Bush’s liberal supporters have been disappointed by his efforts. Every newspaper I have listed and many others besides have carried editorials criticising Bush’s policy on imprisonment, his use of torture and above all the sheer ineptitude of the president’s war. But here, too, the Cold War offers a revealing analogy. Like Stalin’s Western admirers who, in the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations, resented the Soviet dictator not so much for his crimes as for discrediting their Marxism, so intellectual supporters of the Iraq War – among them Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick and other prominent figures in the North American liberal establishment – have focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush for giving ‘preventive war’ a bad name.

In a similar vein, those centrist voices that bayed most insistently for blood in the prelude to the Iraq War – the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demanded that France be voted ‘Off the Island’ (i.e. out of the Security Council) for its presumption in opposing America’s drive to war – are today the most confident when asserting their monopoly of insight into world affairs. The same Friedman now sneers at ‘anti-war activists who haven’t thought a whit about the larger struggle we’re in’ (New York Times, 16 August). To be sure, Friedman’s Pulitzer-winning pieties are always road-tested for middlebrow political acceptability. But for just that reason they are a sure guide to the mood of the American intellectual mainstream.

Friedman is seconded by Beinart, who concedes that he ‘didn’t realise’(!) how detrimental American actions would be to ‘the struggle’ but insists even so that anyone who won’t stand up to ‘Global Jihad’ just isn’t a consistent defender of liberal values. Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate, writing in the Financial Times, accuses Democratic critics of the Iraq War of failing ‘to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously’. The only people qualified to speak on this matter, it would seem, are those who got it wrong initially. Such insouciance in spite of – indeed because of – your past misjudgments recalls a remark by the French ex-Stalinist Pierre Courtade to Edgar Morin, a dissenting Communist vindicated by events: ‘You and your kind were wrong to be right; we were right to be wrong.’

It is particularly ironic that the ‘Clinton generation’ of American liberal intellectuals take special pride in their ‘tough-mindedness’, in their success in casting aside the illusions and myths of the old left, for these same ‘tough’ new liberals reproduce some of that old left’s worst characteristics. They may see themselves as having migrated to the opposite shore; but they display precisely the same mixture of dogmatic faith and cultural provincialism, not to mention the exuberant enthusiasm for violent political transformation at other people’s expense, that marked their fellow-travelling predecessors across the Cold War ideological divide. The use value of such persons to ambitious, radical regimes is an old story. Indeed, intellectual camp followers of this kind were first identified by Lenin himself, who coined the term that still describes them best. Today, America’s liberal armchair warriors are the ‘useful idiots’ of the War on Terror.

In fairness, America’s bellicose intellectuals are not alone. In Europe, Adam Michnik, the hero of the Polish intellectual resistance to Communism, has become an outspoken admirer of the embarrassingly Islamophobic Oriana Fallaci; Václav Havel has joined the DC-based Committee on the Present Danger (a recycled Cold War-era organisation dedicated to rooting out Communists, now pledged to fighting ‘the threat posed by global radical Islamist and fascist terrorist movements’); André Glucksmann in Paris contributes agitated essays to Le Figaro (most recently on 8 August) lambasting ‘universal Jihad’, Iranian ‘lust for power’ and radical Islam’s strategy of ‘green subversion’. All three enthusiastically supported the invasion of Iraq.

In the European case this trend is an unfortunate by-product of the intellectual revolution of the 1980s, especially in the former Communist East, when ‘human rights’ displaced conventional political allegiances as the basis for collective action. The gains wrought by this transformation in the rhetoric of oppositional politics were considerable. But a price was paid all the same. A commitment to the abstract universalism of ‘rights’ – and uncompromising ethical stands taken against malign regimes in their name – can lead all too readily to the habit of casting every political choice in binary moral terms. In this light Bush’s War against Terror, Evil and Islamo-fascism appears seductive and even familiar: self-deluding foreigners readily mistake the US president’s myopic rigidity for their own moral rectitude.

But back home, America’s liberal intellectuals are fast becoming a service class, their opinions determined by their allegiance and calibrated to justify a political end. In itself this is hardly a new departure: we are all familiar with intellectuals who speak only on behalf of their country, class, religion, race, gender or sexual orientation, and who shape their opinions according to what they take to be the interest of their affinity of birth or predilection. But the distinctive feature of the liberal intellectual in past times was precisely the striving for universality; not the unworldly or disingenuous denial of sectional interest but the sustained effort to transcend that interest.

It is thus depressing to read some of the better known and more avowedly ‘liberal’ intellectuals in the contemporary USA exploiting their professional credibility to advance a partisan case. Jean Bethke Elshtain and Michael Walzer, two senior figures in the country’s philosophical establishment (she at the University of Chicago Divinity School, he at the Princeton Institute), both wrote portentous essays purporting to demonstrate the justness of necessary wars – she in Just War against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World, a pre-emptive defence of the Iraq War; he only a few weeks ago in a shameless justification of Israel’s bombardments of Lebanese civilians (‘War Fair’, New Republic, 31 July). In today’s America, neo-conservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig-leaf. There really is no other difference between them.

One of the particularly depressing ways in which liberal intellectuals have abdicated personal and ethical responsibility for the actions they now endorse can be seen in their failure to think independently about the Middle East. Not every liberal cheerleader for the Global War against Islamo-fascism, or against Terror, or against Global Jihad, is an unreconstructed supporter of Likud: Christopher Hitchens, for one, is critical of Israel. But the willingness of so many American pundits and commentators and essayists to roll over for Bush’s doctrine of preventive war; to abstain from criticising the disproportionate use of air power on civilian targets in both Iraq and Lebanon; and to stay coyly silent in the face of Condoleezza Rice’s enthusiasm for the bloody ‘birth pangs of a new Middle East’, makes more sense when one recalls their backing for Israel: a country which for fifty years has rested its entire national strategy on preventive wars, disproportionate retaliation, and efforts to redesign the map of the whole Middle East.

Since its inception the state of Israel has fought a number of wars of choice (the only exception was the Yom Kippur War of 1973). To be sure, these have been presented to the world as wars of necessity or self-defence; but Israel’s statesmen and generals have never been under any such illusion. Whether this approach has done Israel much good is debatable (for a clear-headed recent account that describes as a resounding failure his country’s strategy of using wars of choice to ‘redraw’ the map of its neighbourhood, see Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy by Shlomo Ben-Ami,[2] a historian and former Israeli foreign minister). But the idea of a super-power behaving in a similar way – responding to terrorist threats or guerrilla incursions by flattening another country just to preserve its own deterrent credibility – is odd in the extreme. It is one thing for the US unconditionally to underwrite Israel’s behaviour (though in neither country’s interest, as some Israeli commentators at least have remarked). But for the US to imitate Israel wholesale, to import that tiny country’s self-destructive, intemperate response to any hostility or opposition and to make it the leitmotif of American foreign policy: that is simply bizarre.

Bush’s Middle Eastern policy now tracks so closely to the Israeli precedent that it is very difficult to see daylight between the two. It is this surreal turn of events that helps explain the confusion and silence of American liberal thinking on the subject (as well, perhaps, as Tony Blair’s syntactically sympathetic me-tooism). Historically, liberals have been unsympathetic to ‘wars of choice’ when undertaken or proposed by their own government. War, in the liberal imagination (and not only the liberal one), is a last resort, not a first option. But the United States now has an Israeli-style foreign policy and America’s liberal intellectuals overwhelmingly support it.

The contradictions to which this can lead are striking. There is, for example, a blatant discrepancy between Bush’s proclaimed desire to bring democracy to the Muslim world and his refusal to intervene when the only working instances of fragile democracy in action in the whole Muslim world – in Palestine and Lebanon – were systematically ignored and then shattered by America’s Israeli ally. This discrepancy, and the bad faith and hypocrisy which it seems to suggest, have become a staple of editorial pages and internet blogs the world over, to America’s lasting discredit. But America’s leading liberal intellectuals have kept silent. To speak would be to choose between the tactical logic of America’s new ‘war of movement’ against Islamic fascism – democracy as the sweetener for American involvement – and the strategic tradition of Israeli statecraft, for which democratic neighbours are no better and most likely worse than authoritarian ones. This is not a choice that most American liberal commentators are even willing to acknowledge, much less make. And so they say nothing.

This blind spot obscures and risks polluting and obliterating every traditional liberal concern and inhibition. How else can one explain the appalling illustration on the cover of the New Republic of 7 August: a lurid depiction of Hizbullah’s Hassan Nasrallah in the style of Der Stürmer crossed with more than a touch of the ‘Dirty Jap’ cartoons of World War Two? How else is one to account for the convoluted, sophistic defence by Leon Wieseltier in the same journal of the killing of Arab children in Qana (‘These are not tender times’)? But the blind spot is not just ethical, it is also political: if American liberals ‘didn’t realise’ why their war in Iraq would have the predictable effect of promoting terrorism, benefiting the Iranian ayatollahs and turning Iraq into Lebanon, then we should not expect them to understand (or care) that Israel’s brutal over-reaction risks turning Lebanon into Iraq.

In Five Germanys I Have Known, Fritz Stern – a coauthor of the 1988 New York Times text defending liberalism – writes of his concern about the condition of the liberal spirit in America today.[3] It is with the extinction of that spirit, he notes, that the death of a republic begins. Stern, a historian and a refugee from Nazi Germany, speaks with authority on this matter. And he is surely correct. We don’t expect right-wingers to care very much about the health of a republic, particularly when they are assiduously engaged in the unilateral promotion of empire. And the ideological left, while occasionally adept at analysing the shortcomings of a liberal republic, is typically not much interested in defending it.

It is the liberals, then, who count. They are, as it might be, the canaries in the sulphurous mineshaft of modern democracy. The alacrity with which many of America’s most prominent liberals have censored themselves in the name of the War on Terror, the enthusiasm with which they have invented ideological and moral cover for war and war crimes and proffered that cover to their political enemies: all this is a bad sign. Liberal intellectuals used to be distinguished precisely by their efforts to think for themselves, rather than in the service of others. Intellectuals should not be smugly theorising endless war, much less confidently promoting and excusing it. They should be engaged in disturbing the peace – their own above all.

Footnotes

1 HarperCollins, 288 pp., $25.95, June, 0 06 084161 3.

2 Weidenfeld, 280 pp., £20, November, 0 297 84883 6.

3 To be reviewed in a future issue.

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Tony Judt directs the Remarque Institute at New York University. He is the author of The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron and the French 20th Century and, most recently, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945.


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E.
from Council for the National Interest Foundation :
1250 4th Street SW, Suite WG-1
Washington, District of Columbia 20024
202-863-2951
26 October 2006
Subject: Christian Zionism: An Egregious Threat to U.S.-Middle East
 Understanding
http://www.cnionline.org/
http://www.rescuemideastpolicy.com/

Christian Zionism: An Egregious Threat to U.S. - Middle East Understanding
Council for the National Interest Foundation

Christian Zionism, a belief that paradise for Christians can only be achieved once Jews are in control of the Holy Land, is gathering strength in the United States and forging alliances that are giving increasingly weird shape to American policy toward the Middle East.  The nature of the movement and its detrimental impact on policy was the subject of the 22^nd Capitol Hill public hearing presented by the Council for the National Interest yesterday.

A new Zogby International poll commissioned by the CNI Foundation shows that 31 percent of those surveyed in the national poll strongly believe or somewhat believe in the ideas behind Christian Zionism, defined as "the belief that Jews must have all of the promised land, including all of Jerusalem, to facilitate the second coming of the messiah."   Other polls bear similar messages, that 53% of Americans believe that Israel was given by God to the Jews (Pew), and that 59% of the American public believes the prophecies contained in the Book of Revelations will come true (CNN/Time.) 

The international implications of such beliefs are profound, as an increasing number of Americans believe that God sets foreign policy goals.  Rev. Robert O. Smith, Lutheran pastor at the University of Chicago, one of the speakers at the hearing, discussed the development of this belief that dates to the 19^th century and how it has received a powerful new impetus with the founding this year of a new group of the Christian right called Christians United for Israel (CUFI).  And yet while it works closely with Jewish Zionist organizations in the US, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to promote the continued occupation of Palestine by the Israel (land God has given the Jews), it works just as effectively in dehumanizing the original inhabitants of the Holy Land, both Muslims and Christians.

Another speaker, Rammy Haija, who teaches at Radford University, drew attention to the necessity in the Christian Zionist dogma for the Israelis to retain control not only of the whole of the occupied territory but also all of Jerusalem. Christian Zionists have pushed the militarist policies of both Israel and the U.S. in an effort to secure the Holy Land in preparation for the coming of the "promised land."  As part of this strategy, the U.S. occupation of Iraq is deemed absolutely necessary.

The irony of the alliance between Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists is that the one ideology promotes the ultimate destruction of the other. As Smith pointed out, the "Christians United for Israel" is all about Israel, not about the Israelis, and only a little surface digging into Christian Zionism shows how anti-Semitic it really is.  So much so that Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, one of the ceaseless champions of Zionism in this country, has called the Christian right one of the direst threats to American Jews.  This has not prevented top Israeli officials from paying homage to the Christian right, including Ariel Sharon (before he descended into a comatose state brought on by the withdrawal of the settlers from Gaza, Pat Robertson opined), the Israeli ambassador Daniel Ayalon, and Benjamin Netanyahu, and a host of others. The ability of CUFI and other far right Christian religious leaders like Jerry Farwell and Pat Robertson to raise money for Israel, including Israeli settlements, is well documented.

Christian Zionism, Smith concluded, has a fundamental lack of earthly concerns, is divorced from reality, and undermines the work of politics. Its practical impact is the killing of people in the Holy Land.  The recent statement by the Christian religious leaders of Jerusalem that warned against Christian Zionism's policies of racist intolerance and perpetual war was much needed, but it should have come from America's religious leaders.

__________
Council for the National Interest Foundation
<inform@cnionline.org>.
 

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F.
from Robert Fisk :
October 30, 2006
The Independent (UK)

Did Israel use a secret new uranium-based weapon in southern Lebanon this summer in the 34-day assault that cost more than 1,300 Lebanese lives, most of them civilians?
We know that the Israelis used American "bunker-buster" bombs on Hizbollah's Beirut headquarters. We know that they drenched southern Lebanon with cluster bombs in the last 72 hours of the war, leaving tens of thousands of bomblets which are still killing Lebanese civilians every week. And we now know -- after it first categorically denied using such munitions -- that the Israeli army also used phosphorous bombs, weapons which are supposed to be restricted under the third protocol of the Geneva Conventions, which neither Israel nor the United States have signed.

But scientific evidence gathered from at least two bomb craters in Khiam and At-Tiri, the scene of fierce fighting between Hizbollah guerrillas and Israeli troops last July and August, suggests that uranium- based munitions may now also be included in Israel's weapons inventory -- and were used against targets in Lebanon. According to Dr Chris Busby, the British Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, two soil samples thrown up by Israeli heavy or guided bombs showed "elevated radiation signatures". Both have been forwarded for further examination to the Harwell laboratory in Oxfordshire for mass spectrometry -- used by the Ministry of Defence -- which has confirmed the concentration of uranium isotopes in the samples.

Dr Busby's initial report states that there are two possible reasons for the contamination. "The first is that the weapon was some novel small experimental nuclear fission device or other experimental weapon (eg, a thermobaric weapon) based on the high temperature of a uranium oxidation flash ... The second is that the weapon was a bunker-busting conventional uranium penetrator weapon employing enriched uranium rather than depleted uranium." A photograph of the explosion of the first bomb shows large clouds of black smoke that might result from burning uranium.

Enriched uranium is produced from natural uranium ore and is used as fuel for nuclear reactors. A waste productof the enrichment process is depleted uranium, it is an extremely hard metal used in anti-tank missiles for penetrating armour. Depleted uranium is less radioactive than natural uranium, which is less radioactive than enriched uranium.

Israel has a poor reputation for telling the truth about its use of weapons in Lebanon. In 1982, it denied using phosphorous munitions on civilian areas -- until journalists discovered dying and dead civilians whose wounds caught fire when exposed to air.

I saw two dead babies who, when taken from a mortuary drawer in West Beirut during the Israeli siege of the city, suddenly burst back into flames. Israel officially denied using phosphorous again in Lebanon during the summer -- except for "marking" targets -- even after civilians were photographed in Lebanese hospitals with burn wounds consistent with phosphorous munitions.

Then on Sunday, Israel suddenly admitted that it had not been telling the truth. Jacob Edery, the Israeli minister in charge of government-parliament relations, confirmed that phosphorous shells were used in direct attacks against Hizbollah, adding that "according to international law, the use of phosphorous munitions is authorised and the (Israeli) army keeps to the rules of international norms".

Asked by The Independent if the Israeli army had been using uranium-based munitions in Lebanon this summer, Mark Regev, the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, said: "Israel does not use any weaponry which is not authorised by international law or international conventions." This, however, begs more questions than it answers. Much international law does not cover modern uranium weapons because they were not invented when humanitarian rules such as the Geneva Conventions were drawn up and because Western governments still refuse to believe that their use can cause long-term damage to the health of thousands of civilians living in the area of the explosions.

American and British forces used hundreds of tons of depleted uranium (DU) shells in Iraq in 1991 -- their hardened penetrator warheads manufactured from the waste products of the nuclear industry -- and five years later, a plague of cancers emerged across the south of Iraq.

Initial US military assessments warned of grave consequences for public health if such weapons were used against armoured vehicles. But the US administration and the British government later went out of their way to belittle these claims. Yet the cancers continued to spread amid reports that civilians in Bosnia -- where DU was also used by Nato aircraft -- were suffering new forms of cancer. DU shells were again used in the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq but it is too early to register any health effects.

"When a uranium penetrator hits a hard target, the particles of the explosion are very long-lived in the environment," Dr Busby said yesterday. "They spread over long distances. They can be inhaled into the lungs. The military really seem to believe that this stuff is not as dangerous as it is." Yet why would Israel use such a weapon when its targets -- in the case of Khiam, for example -- were only two miles from the Israeli border? The dust ignited by DU munitions can be blown across international borders, just as the chlorine gas used in attacks by both sides in the First World War often blew back on its perpetrators.

Chris Bellamy, the professor of military science and doctrine at Cranfield University, who has reviewed the Busby report, said: "At worst it's some sort of experimental weapon with an enriched uranium component the purpose of which we don't yet know. At best -- if you can say that -- it shows a remarkably cavalier attitude to the use of nuclear waste products."

The soil sample from Khiam -- site of a notorious torture prison when Israel occupied southern Lebanon between 1978 and 2000, and a frontline Hizbollah stronghold in the summer war -- was a piece of impacted red earth from an explosion; the isotope ratio was 108, indicative of the presence of enriched uranium. "The health effects on local civilian populations following the use of large uranium penetrators and the large amounts of respirable uranium oxide particles in the atmosphere," the Busby report says, "are likely to be significant ... we recommend that the area is examined for further traces of these weapons with a view to clean up."

This summer's Lebanon war began after Hizbollah guerrillas crossed the Lebanese frontier into Israel, captured two Israeli soldiers and killed three others, prompting Israel to unleash a massive bombardment of Lebanon's villages, cities, bridges and civilian infrastructure. Human rights groups have said that Israel committed war crimes when it attacked civilians, but that Hizbollah was also guilty of such crimes because it fired missiles into Israel which were also filled with ball-bearings, turning their rockets into primitive one-time-only cluster bombs.

Many Lebanese, however, long ago concluded that the latest Lebanon war was a weapons testing ground for the Americans and Iranians, who respectively supply Israel and Hizbollah with munitions. Just as Israel used hitherto-unproven US missiles in its attacks, so the Iranians were able to test-fire a rocket which hit an Israeli corvette off the Lebanese coast, killing four Israeli sailors and almost sinking the vessel after it suffered a 15-hour on-board fire.

What the weapons manufacturers make of the latest scientific findings of potential uranium weapons use in southern Lebanon is not yet known. Nor is their effect on civilians.


______________
G.
from Greg Palast :
26 October 2006
The Guardian (London)

It was pure war-nography. The front page of the New York Times today splashed a four-column-wide close-up of a blood-covered bullet in the blood-soaked hands of an army medic who'd retrieved it from the brain of Lance Cpl. Colin Smith.

There was a 40 column-inch profile of the medic. There were photos of the platoon, guns over shoulders, praying for the fallen buddy. The Times is careful not to ruin the heroic mood, so there is no photograph of pieces of corporal Smith's shattered head. Instead, there's an old, smiling photo of the wounded soldier.

The reporter, undoubtedly wearing the Kevlar armor of the troop in which he's "embedded," quotes at length the thoughts of the military medic: "I would like to say that I am a good man. But seeing this now, what happened to Smith, I want to hurt people. You know what I mean?"

The reporter does not bother -- or dare -- to record a single word from any Iraqi in the town of Karma where Smith's platoon was, "performing a hard hit on a house."

I don't know what a "hard hit" is. But I don't think I'd want one "performed" on my home. Maybe Iraqis feel the way I do.

We won't know. The only Iraqi noted by the reporter was, "a woman [who] walked calmly between the sniper and the marines."

The Times reporter informs us that Lance Cpl. Smith, "said a prayer today," before he charged into the village. We're told that Smith had, "the cutest little blond girlfriend" and "his dad was his hero." Did the calm woman also say her prayers today? Is her dad her hero, too? We don't know. No one asks.

The reporter and his photographer did visit a home in the neighborhood -- but only after the "hit" force kicked in the door. I suppose that's an improvement over the typical level of reporting we get. In dispatches home by the few US journalists who brave beyond the Green Zone, Iraqis are little more than dark shapes glimpsed through the slots of a speeding Humvee.

Last month there was a big hoo-ha over the statistical accuracy of a Johns Hopkins University study estimating that 655,000 Iraqis have died as a result of this war.

I doubt the Iraqi who fired that bullet into Lance Cpl. Smith read the Hopkins study. Iraqis don't need a professor of statistics to tell them what happens in a "hard hit" on a house. Of civilians killed by the US forces the Hopkins team found 46% are younger than fifteen years old.

I grieve for Lance Cpl. Smith and I can't know for certain what moved the sniper to pick up a gun and shoot him. However, I've no doubt that, like the Marines who said prayers before they invaded the homes of the terrified residents of Karma, the sniper also said a prayer before he loaded the 7.62mm shell into his carbine.

And if we asked, I'm sure the sniper would tell us, "I am a good man, but seeing what happened, I want to hurt people."

*******

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, "Armed Madhouse" Go to

www.gregpalast.com.


______________
H.
from Robert Jensen :
4 November 2006

One of the most devastating consequences of unearned privilege -- both for those of us on top
and, for very different reasons, those who suffer beneath -- is the death of empathy.