Archive for May 23rd, 2008
FBI files indict Bush, Cheney and Co. as war criminals – Obama’s War Hawks and Ziocons
FBI files indict Bush, Cheney and Co. as war criminals
By Bill Van Auken
The most stunning revelation in a 370-page Justice US Department Inspector General’s report released this week was that agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had formally opened a “War Crimes” file, documenting torture they had witnessed at the Guantánamo Bay US prison camp, before being ordered by the administration to stop writing their reports.
The World Socialist Web Site, together with human rights groups and other opponents of US militarism and repression, has long insisted that the actions of the Bush administration—the launching of wars of aggression, assassinations, the abduction and detention of civilians without trial and, most repugnant of all, torture—constitute war crimes under any legitimate interpretation of longstanding international statutes and treaties.
To have this assessment confirmed, however, by the IG of the Justice Department, the only senior official there not answerable directly to the White House, and by agents of the FBI, an agency not known for its sensitivity to questions of democratic rights, is an indication of the rampant character of these crimes as well as the crisis they have engendered within the US government and America’s ruling elite as a whole.
The report makes it absolutely clear that torture was ordered and planned in detail at the highest levels of the government—including the White House, the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the Justice Department. Attempts to stop it on legal or pragmatic grounds by individuals within the government were systematically suppressed, and evidence of this criminal activity covered up.
There was no immediate reaction from the White House on these new revelations. Responses from other agencies directly implicated in the crimes at Guantánamo were indicative of the general atmosphere of impunity in which the torture detailed in the IG’s report continues to this day.
“There’s nothing new here,” said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman. A State Department spokesman, meanwhile, described the charges contained in the report as “pretty vague.”
Pretty vague? One can’t help but wonder what the spokesman would consider explicit. The report contains page after page of testimony by FBI agents on the sadistic and sickening practices carried out at Guantánamo.
In one section, the report states: “[An FBI Agent] recalled that, at some point during the interrogation, the military officer ‘put water down’ a seated detainee’s throat. He said he guessed that the purpose of the water was to give the detainee the sensation that he was drowning, so that he would provide the information that the interrogator wanted. [The agent] stated that the detainee was gagging and spitting out water. He said that the detainee appeared to be uncomfortable, and assumed that he had trouble breathing.”
Consider the account of the interrogation of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian national who was arrested by his own government, turned over to US forces and brought to Guantánamo in 2002:
“He was left alone in a cold room known as ‘the freezer,’ where guards would prevent him from sleeping by putting ice or cold water on him…
“He was subjected to sleep deprivation for a period of 70 days by means of prolonged interrogations, strobe lights, threatening music, forced intake of water, and forced standing.
“He was deprived of clothing by a female interrogator;
“Two female interrogators touched him sexually and made sexual statements to him;
“Prior to and during the boat ride incident, he was severely beaten.”
In addition, the document says, he was “led to believe he was going to be executed, and urinated on himself,” and was told that his mother and family would be detained and harmed.
Hundreds of FBI agents witnessed torture
Similar episodes were described, according to the IG report, by literally hundreds of FBI agents, who witnessed CIA, military and private contractor interrogators carry out illegal acts of torture and abuse against detainees.
In addition, the report cites: several agents who reported instances of beatings, 30 agents who reported witnessing prolonged shackling of detainees in stress positions, 70 agents who reported detainees being subjected to sleep deprivation, 29 agents who had information on the use of extreme temperatures in order to “break the detainees’ resolve to resist cooperating” and 50 agents reporting the use of extended isolation to “wear down a detainee’s resistance.”
In addition, four agents reported the kicking and beating to death of two detainees in Afghanistan who had been subjected to prolonged shackling in a standing position.
The episodes of torture detailed in this report are the tip of the iceberg.
They do not include the treatment of Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen born in Germany, who was arrested during a trip to Pakistan in the fall of 2001 and was handed over to US officials for a $3,000 bounty. First taken to the US base in Kandahar, Afghanistan, he was then transferred to Guantánamo. While by 2002 the US authorities concluded that Kurnaz had nothing to do with terrorism, he was imprisoned until the middle of 2006 and released only because of pressure from the German government.
Barred from entry to the US, he testified via video link to a sparsely attended hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee this week.
“I did nothing wrong and I was treated like a monster,” he said. He told how he was subjected to electric shocks, being suspended by his wrists for hours and subjected to the ‘water treatment,’ in which his head was stuck into a bucket of water and he was punched in the stomach, forcing him to inhale the liquid. (The Justice Department Inspector General’s report, it bears noting, affirmed that this last form of torture did not constitute “waterboarding,” but did represent “an effort to intimidate the detainees and increase their feelings of helplessness.”)
“I know others have died from this kind of treatment,” said Kurnaz. “I suffered from sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, religious and sexual humiliations. I was beaten multiple times.”
“There was no law in Guantánamo,” Kurnaz concluded. “I didn’t think this could happen in the 21st century…. I could never have imagined that this place was created by the United States.”
The inmates held at Guantánamo represent barely 1 percent of those detained at US prison camps and secret jails run by the military and the CIA in Iraq, Afghanistan and other points around the world. An estimated 27,000 people are being held without charges, much less trials, many of them simply having disappeared into Washington’s global gulag. Some are held on prison ships, others in secret dungeons run jointly by the CIA and regimes to which it “outsources” detainees, like Egypt, Jordan and Morocco, where other, cruder forms of torture—being buried alive, given electric shocks or slashed with scalpels—are employed.
The report also reconfirms that the revolting scenes captured in the photographs taken at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that came to light four years ago—naked and hooded men being subjected to torture and sexual humiliation by US guards—were no aberration. The methods described in the report—forced nudity, the use of attack dogs in interrogations, chaining detainees in “stress” positions, leading them around on dog leashes, draping them in women’s underwear—were identical to those officially blamed on a “few bad apples” at Abu Ghraib.
Sadistic torture “orchestrated” from the White House
The uniformity of abuse at these widely separated facilities is evidence that the psychopathic and criminal sadism inflicted upon those detained by US forces was planned and orchestrated from the top.
Indeed, as ABC News revealed last month, top administration officials on the so-called Principals’ Committee—Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft and National Security Council Adviser Condoleezza Rice—conducted detailed discussions on “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which, according to ABC, “were almost choreographed—down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.”
Bush subsequently told ABC that he was “aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.”
The report establishes that FBI and Justice Department officials advised the White House National Security Council of their concern that the practices witnessed by the agents were “gravely damaging … the rule of law” at Guantánamo.
In the end, however, they were told to back off, and they complied, thereby becoming accomplices in this criminality and its cover-up.
The revelations in the FBI report have provoked no significant protests or demands for action from the Democrats in Congress, or for that matter from the party’s presidential contenders, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, neither of whom have made torture an issue in their campaigns.
The New York Times Tuesday carried a lead editorial titled, “What the FBI agents saw,” which laid out the details of the report and stated that it “shows what happens when an American president, his secretary of defense, his Justice Department and other top officials corrupt American law to rationalize and authorize the abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners.”
The paper’s conclusion: “The Democrats must press for full disclosure” through hearings to uncover “the extent of President Bush’s disregard for the law and the Geneva Conventions.” This, they tell their readers, “is the only way to get this country back to being a defender, not a violator, of human rights.”
Such is the impotence of erstwhile American establishment liberalism. The extent of the Bush administration’s outright criminality has been thoroughly exposed over the course of several years.
The wholesale and deliberate violations of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture are, under international law, war crimes—just as the FBI recognized they were. What is demanded is not another toothless congressional hearing, but rather the constitution of a war crimes tribunal. Those responsible must be held accountable.
Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet and Ashcroft should be placed on trial. Those like former White House counsel and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington and Justice Department deputy assistant secretary John Yoo, who crafted the pseudo-legal arguments legitimizing torture, should be prosecuted as well, together with those military and intelligence officials who directed the criminal practices at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and other CIA and military camps and prisons.
The Democratic leadership has no desire or intention to fight for such a reckoning. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other party leaders have repeatedly insisted that impeachment of the president and vice president is “off the table.” They have no interest in pursuing the administration on the issue of torture because they themselves are complicit, with Pelosi and other senior congressional Democrats having been briefed extensively on the criminal methods employed at Guantánamo, which they approved and concealed from the American people.
On a more fundamental level, the Democrats have been complicit in a policy of global militarism and aggression—carried out under the mantle of a “global war on terrorism”—which is directed at using armed force to further the interests of America’s ruling oligarchy. It is this criminal strategy—resulting in the loss of over 1 million Iraqi lives—that has given rise to the crime of torture itself.
Nonetheless, the deepening crisis of American capitalism is creating the conditions for profound shocks and changes in political and social relations that may well result in Bush, Cheney and Co. standing in the dock as war criminals.
Such a trial is vitally necessary from the standpoint of halting these ongoing crimes, preventing the use of similar methods against political opposition within the US itself and politically educating the American people.
See Also:
FBI agents created “war crimes file” documenting US torture
[22 May 2008]
2003 Justice Department memo justifies torture, presidential dictatorship
[4 April 2008]
Bush defends torture
[16 February 2008]
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Obama’s War Hawks and Ziocons
Individuals at the center of Obama’s transition and emerging foreign policy teams were top players in creating and implementing foreign policies that would pave the way for projects eventually carried out under the Bush/Cheney administration. With their assistance, Obama has already charted out several hawkish stances. Among them:
– His plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan;
– An Iraq plan that could turn into a downsized and rebranded occupation that keeps U.S. forces in Iraq for the foreseeable future;
– His labeling of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a “terrorist organization;”
– His pledge to use unilateral force inside of Pakistan to defend U.S. interests;
– His position, presented before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), that Jerusalem “must remain undivided” — a remark that infuriated Palestinian officials and which he later attempted to reframe;
– His plan to continue the War on Drugs, a backdoor U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in Central and Latin America;
– His refusal to “rule out” using Blackwater and other armed private forces in U.S. war zones, despite previously introducing legislation to regulate these companies and bring them under U.S. law.
Obama did not arrive at these positions in a vacuum. They were carefully crafted in consultation with his foreign policy team:
Dennis Ross
Middle East envoy for both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Ross was one of the primary authors of Obama’s aforementioned speech before AIPAC this summer. He cut his teeth working under famed neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon in the 1970s and worked closely with the Project for the New American Century. Ross has been a staunch supporter of Israel and has fanned the flames for a more hostile stance toward Iran. As the lead U.S. negotiator between Israel and numerous Arab nations under Clinton, Ross’ team acted, in the words of one U.S. official who worked under him, as “Israel’s lawyer.”
“The ‘no surprises’ policy, under which we had to run everything by Israel first, stripped our policy of the independence and flexibility required for serious peacemaking,” wrote U.S. diplomat Aaron David Miller in 2005. “If we couldn’t put proposals on the table without checking with the Israelis first, and refused to push back when they said no, how effective could our mediation be? Far too often, particularly when it came to Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, our departure point was not what was needed to reach an agreement acceptable to both sides but what would pass with only one — Israel.” After the Clinton White House, Ross worked for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a hawkish pro-Israel think tank, and for FOX News, where he repeatedly pressed for war against Iraq.
Martin Indyk
Founder of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Indyk spent years working for AIPAC and served as Clinton’s ambassador to Israel and Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, while also playing a major role in developing U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran. In addition to his work for the U.S. government, he has worked for the Israeli government and with PNAC.
“Barack Obama has painted himself into a corner by appealing to the most hard-line, pro-Israel elements in this country,” Ali Abunimah, founder of ElectronicInifada.net, recently told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, describing Indyk and Dennis Ross as “two of the most pro-Israel officials from the Clinton era, who are totally distrusted by Palestinians and others across the Middle East, because they’re seen as lifelong advocates for Israeli positions.”
Susan Rice
Former Assistant Secretary of Sate Susan Rice, who served on Bill Clinton’s National Security Council, is a potential candidate for the post of ambassador to the U.N. or as a deputy national security advisor. She, too, promoted the myth that Saddam had WMDs. “It’s clear that Iraq poses a major threat,” she said in 2002. “It’s clear that its weapons of mass destruction need to be dealt with forcefully, and that’s the path we’re on.” (After the invasion, discussing Saddam’s alleged possession of WMDs, she said, “I don’t think many informed people doubted that.”)
Rice has also been a passionate advocate for a U.S. military attack against Sudan over the Darfur crisis. In an op-ed co-authored with Anthony Lake, she wrote, “The United States, preferably with NATO involvement and African political support, would strike Sudanese airfields, aircraft and other military assets. It could blockade Port Sudan, through which Sudan’s oil exports flow. Then U.N. troops would deploy — by force, if necessary, with U.S. and NATO backing.”
John Brennan
A longtime CIA official and former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Brennan is one of the coordinators of Obama’s intelligence transition team and a top contender for either CIA Director or Director of National Intelligence. He was also recently described by Glenn Greenwald as “an ardent supporter of torture and one of the most emphatic advocates of FISA expansions and telecom immunity.” While claiming to oppose waterboarding, labeling it “inconsistent with American values” and “something that should be prohibited,” Brennan has simultaneously praised the results achieved by “enhanced interrogation” techniques. “There has been a lot of information that has come out from these interrogation procedures that the agency has, in fact, used against the real hard-core terrorists,” Brennan said in a 2007 interview. “It has saved lives. And let’s not forget, these are hardened terrorists who have been responsible for 9/11, who have shown no remorse at all for the death of 3,000 innocents.”
Brennan has described the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program — the government-run kidnap-and-torture program enacted under Clinton — as an absolutely vital tool. “I have been intimately familiar now over the past decade with the cases of rendition that the U.S. Government has been involved in,” he said in a December 2005 interview. “And I can say without a doubt that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives.”
Brennan is currently the head of Analysis Corporation, a private intelligence company that was recently implicated in the breach of Obama and Sen. John McCain’s passport records. He is also the current chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), a trade association of private intelligence contractors who have dramatically increased their role in sensitive U.S. national security operations. (Current Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell is former chairman of the INSA.)
Jami Miscik
Miscik, who works alongside Brennan on Obama’s transitional team, was the CIA’s Deputy Director for Intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. She was one of the key officials responsible for sidelining intel that contradicted the official line on WMD, while promoting intel that backed it up.
“When the administration insisted on an intelligence assessment of Saddam Hussein’s relationship to al-Qaida, Miscik blocked the skeptics (who were later vindicated) within the CIA’s Mideast analytical directorate and instructed the less-skeptical counterterrorism analysts to ’stretch to the maximum the evidence you had,’ ” journalist Spencer Ackerman recently wrote in the Washington Independent. “It’s hard to think of a more egregious case of sacrificing sound intelligence analysis in order to accommodate the strategic fantasies of an administration. … The idea that Miscik is helping staff Obama’s top intelligence picks is most certainly not change we can believe in.” What’s more, she went on to a lucrative post as the Global Head of Sovereign Risk for the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers.
John Kerry and Bill Richardson
Both Sen. Kerry and Gov. Richardson have been identified as possible contenders for Secretary of State. While neither is likely to be as hawkish as Hillary Clinton, both have taken pro-war positions. Kerry promoted the WMD lie and voted to invade Iraq. “Why is Saddam Hussein attempting to develop nuclear weapons when most nations don’t even try?” Kerry asked on the Senate floor in October 2002. “According to intelligence, Iraq has chemical and biological weapons … Iraq is developing unmanned aerial vehicles capable of delivering chemical and biological warfare agents.”
Richardson, whose Iraq plan during his 2008 presidential campaign was more progressive and far-reaching than Obama’s, served as Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the UN. In this capacity, he supported Clinton’s December 1998 bombing of Baghdad and the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq. “We think this man is a threat to the international community, and he threatens a lot of the neighbors in his region and future generations there with anthrax and VX,” Richardson told an interviewer in February 1998.
While Clinton’s Secretary of Energy, Richardson publicly named Wen Ho Lee, a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, as a target in an espionage investigation. Lee was accused of passing nuclear secrets to the Chinese government. Lee was later cleared of those charges and won a settlement against the U.S. government.
Robert Gates
Washington consensus is that Obama will likely keep Robert Gates, George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary, as his own Secretary of Defense. While Gates has occasionally proved to be a stark contrast to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he would hardly represent a break from the policies of the Bush administration. Quite the opposite; according to the Washington Post, in the interest of a “smooth transition,” Gates “has ordered hundreds of political appointees at the Pentagon canvassed to see whether they wish to stay on in the new administration, has streamlined policy briefings and has set up suites for President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team just down the hall from his own E-ring office.” The Post reports that Gates could stay on for a brief period and then be replaced by Richard Danzig, who was Clinton’s Secretary of the Navy. Other names currently being tossed around are Democratic Sen. Jack Reed, Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel (a critic of the Iraq occupation) and Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, who served alongside Biden on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Ivo H. Daalder
Daalder was National Security Council Director for European Affairs under President Clinton. Like other Obama advisors, he has worked with the Project for the New American Century and signed a 2005 letter from PNAC to Congressional leaders, calling for an increase in U.S. ground troops in Iraq and beyond.
Michele Flournoy
Flournoy and former Clinton Deputy Defense Secretary John White are co-heading Obama’s defense transition team. Flournoy was a senior Clinton appointee at the Pentagon. She currently runs the Center for a New American Security, a center-right think-tank. There is speculation that Obama could eventually name her as the first woman to serve as defense secretary. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported: “While at CNAS, Flournoy helped to write a report that called for reducing the open-ended American military commitment in Iraq and replacing it with a policy of ‘conditional engagement’ there. Significantly, the paper rejected the idea of withdrawing troops according to the sort of a fixed timeline that Obama espoused during the presidential campaign. Obama has in recent weeks signaled that he was willing to shelve the idea, bringing him more in line with Flournoy’s thinking.” Flournoy has also worked with the neoconservative Project for the New American Century.
Wendy Sherman and Tom Donilon
Currently employed at Madeline Albright’s consulting firm, the Albright Group, Sherman worked under Albright at the State Department, coordinating U.S. policy on North Korea. She is now coordinating the State Department transition team for Obama. Tom Donilon, her co-coordinator, was Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Chief of Staff at the State Department under Clinton. Interestingly, Sherman and Donilon both have ties to Fannie Mae that didn’t make it onto their official bios on Obama’s change.gov website. “Donilon was Fannie’s general counsel and executive vice president for law and policy from 1999 until the spring of 2005, a period during which the company was rocked by accounting problems,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
“Twenty-three senators and 133 House members who voted against the war — and countless other notable individuals who spoke out against it and the dubious claims leading to war — are apparently not even being considered for these crucial positions,” observes Sam Husseini of the Institute for Public Accuracy. This includes dozens of former military and intelligence officials who spoke out forcefully against the war and continue to oppose militaristic policy, as well as credible national security experts who have articulated their visions for a foreign policy based on justice.
Obama does have a chance to change the mindset that got us into war. More significantly, he has a popular mandate to forcefully challenge the militaristic, hawkish tradition of modern U.S. foreign policy. But that work would begin by bringing on board people who would challenge this tradition, not those who have been complicit in creating it and are bound to continue advancing it.
http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/9224
In a Casino Mentality, The Economy Goes From Bubble to Bubble
[U.S.] “strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.”…[His removal is absolutely vital to] “the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century” and for “the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil.”
Neocons’ January 26, 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton
[About the Iraqis] “If they turn on their radars we’re going to blow up their goddamn missiles. They know we own their country. We own their airspace… We dictate the way they live and talk. And that’s what’s great about America right now. It’s a good thing, especially when there’s a lot of oil out there we need.”
U.S. Air Force Brig. General William Looney, head of the US-UK flying operation south of the 32nd parallel over Iraq (no-fly zones), interview reproduced in the Washington Post, August 30 1999, [quoted in William Blum's book, Rogue State, Common Courage Press, 2005, p. 159]
“Focus your operations on the oil, especially in Iraq and in the Gulf, as this would mean [the West's] death.”
Osama bin Laden, December 2004
“The high crude oil prices do not have any relation to production or consumption,”… [It is] “because of the decrease in the value of the dollar.”
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran President, April 2008
The American economy seems to be going from bubble to bubble: in 2000, it was the tech bubble; in 2005, it was the housing bubble; and now, it is the oil and commodities bubble. In fact, the entire world of investment is now a giant casino where speculators are in charge and where governments look the other way. For many basic marketable staples (rice, wheat, and corn) and commodities (oil, gas, metals), prices have no relation to the underlying values of what is being traded. Such prices are mostly driven by bad policies and by the pyramidal “greatest fool” technique by which large off-shore speculators navigate through unregulated derivatives to push prices up ever further, until the bubble burst. Meanwhile, a lot of disruptions may be created and people’s lives may have been endangered or lost. The current famine in many countries is the end result of such government approved manipulation of markets, by OPEC and a host of other cartels and so-called speculative hedge funds.
Is it possible for an economy to grow and prosper without always being on a roller coaster? Indeed, does the current explosion in oil and commodities prices reflect real supply and demand shifts, such as supply disruptions, or is it also or even mainly driven by geopolitical factors and financial speculation that fuel an ever larger insatiable artificial demand?
It is my feeling that the plummetting U.S. dollar is having serious unintended economic consequences worldwide. Indeed, such a panic devaluation of the most widely used key currency is fueling a major rush out of dollar holdings into hard assets, such as oil, gold and other commodities. Central banks, companies and individuals are losing faith in the dollar paper currency, which has been depreciating fast against other currencies, but whose intrinsic value is also expected to be eroded further by the coming inflation that will inevitably follow the Fed’s current liquidity creation. All these problems are interconnected.
Let us remember that the oil problem in the U.S. is largely a self-inflicted predicament since the U.S. government opted to move away from a self-sufficiency and a renewable-energy based economy. In 1982, for example, the U.S. daily consumption of oil had been brought down to about 9 million barrels a day, from 14 million barrels a day before the 1973 OPEC-initiated oil shock. Since the U.S. was producing about 9 million barrels of oil a day, it can be said the American economy was then self-sufficient in that form of energy needs. The Reagan administration changed all that: No more 55 an hour driving limits; reduced obligations for car manufacturers to raise gas mileage; no more restrictions, fiscal or otherwise, on the purchase of gas guzzlers, etc. The result is that the United States, with less than five percent of the world population, now consumes 25 percent of the daily world oil output, roughly 22 million barrels a day out of about 88 million barrels produced daily worldwide. And, here’s the gist, 60 percent of that oil has to be imported. What’s more, for the world as a whole, also 60 percent of oil imports come from the unstable Middle East. That’s what we can call playing with fire!
Therefore, since oil access under American control played an important part in the Bush-Cheney’s decision to launch an unprovoked war against Iraq in the spring of 2003, in order to turn that sovereign country into an American oil protectorate under management by a few major Anglo-American oil companies, it can said that the seeds for this illegal war were sown way back, during the Republican Reagan administration. That was when the philosophy of deregulation was rampant and was then hailed as a success. But, as a consequence, twenty-five precious years have been lost in preparing the U.S. economy for the time when oil would become a scarce energy source. Now, this time has arrived, but this is still the era of Hummer type vehicles that can only run on large quantities of costly and risky imported oil.
Indeed, in the U.S., there are now three cars for four adults and those cars are larger and have more powerful engines than anywhere else in the world. If only a few countries, such as China and India, were to emulate the United State in that regard, as their income levels rise, world oil consumption would more than double. But with no known oil reserves to meet such an expanded demand, oil prices would skyrocket, crushing the purchasing power of consumers and raising inflation. The result would be a major worldwide economic crisis before economically viable alternative energy sources could be developed. This could take ten to twenty years.
Are we there now? If not, we are moving fast toward that day of reckoning, while do-nothing or complicit governments hope for a miracle or some magic solution. The main consequences will be rising inflation, 19th century wars for securing resources, and a worldwide economic slowdown in production and trade. The next twenty years should prove to be interesting for a few, but taxing for the many.
Rodrigue Tremblay is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com
He is the author of the book ‘The New American Empire’
Visit his blog site at: www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog.
Author’s Website: www.thenewamericanempire.com/
Check Dr. Tremblay’s coming book “The Code for Global Ethics” at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/
Posted, Thursday, May 16, 2008, at 5:30 am
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”J’ai honte de l’indifférence occidentale face à la tragédie irakienne”
”J’ai honte de l’indifférence occidentale face à la tragédie irakienne”
Le député chrétien-démocrate Jürgen Todenhöfer a rencontré en Irak des gens simples, victimes de la guerre et de l’occupation. Il a rapporté de son voyage un livre de témoignage et d’analyse qui donne à réfléchir sur notre perception de ce conflit, de cette population et de sa culture.
Le député chrétien-démocrate Jürgen Todenhöfer a rencontré en Irak des gens simples, victimes de la guerre et de l’occupation. Il a rapporté de son voyage un livre de témoignage et d’analyse qui donne à réfléchir sur notre perception de ce conflit, de cette population et de sa culture.
Au cours des 25 dernières années, un certain nombre de pays ont particulièrement souffert de guerre et de privations. L’Irak en est un exemple.
D’abord une guerre contre l’Iran – fomentée par les États-Unis – pendant presque toute la décennie quatre-vingt, qui coûta 8 millions de victimes aux deux pays, menant ces derniers au bord d’une catastrophe économique.
Puis une guerre brève, menée avec une violence particulière ; une guerre qu’on aurait pu éviter par des négociations, comme on le sait aujourd’hui, mais que la coalition de guerre, menée par les États-Unis, voulait au début de 1991. _ Le résultat en fut non seulement des centaines de milliers de morts, la destruction d’une grande partie des infrastructures du pays, mais encore la contamination pour des années de cette région par des munitions à l’uranium.
Cela fut suivi de 12 années de sanctions particulièrement rudes qui coûtèrent la vie à 1,5 million d’Irakiens.
Enfin la résistance, qui dure depuis cinq ans, envers une agression et une occupation, menées par les États-Unis, au mépris du droit international, qui provoque, une fois de plus, des millions de victimes.
Comment perçoit-on ces événements en Europe ? Par exemple, en tant qu’Allemand qui mène une vie plus ou moins bien réglée, qui ne doit pas craindre que chaque jour soit le dernier pour lui, sa famille, ses voisins ou ses amis. Comment prend-on conscience que cette puissance, dont il est prétendu, depuis la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, qu’elle serait l’allié le plus sûr et le meilleur ami, commette les pires crimes de guerre ?
Et comment se fait-il que nous Européens, nous autres Allemands, laissions faire nos gouvernements, nos militaires, une partie de notre économie et de nos médias qui parti¬cipent de près ou de loin à ces crimes ?
La langue de bois en faveur de la propagande de guerre US n’est plus de mise
Jürgen Todenhöfer, ancien politicien de la CDU (chrétiens-démocrates) et député du Land de Tübingen au Bundestag, actuellement vice-président du conseil d’administration de la maison d’édition Burda, vient de publier, dans la cinquième année de guerre en Irak, un livre (Warum tötest du, Zaid ? 2008, ISBN 978-3-570-01022-8) qui se présente comme un contre-poids. Un livre rapportant des conversations avec la résistance irakienne dans la ville de Ramadi, à l’ouest de Bagdad, un livre relatant les rencontres sur le plan humain et révélant les motifs et les objectifs de la résistance.
Et il semble bien que ce soit là le premier livre, dans l’espace germanophone, qui ne manie pas la langue de bois dans le sens de la propagande de guerre, soit les questions de terrorisme et de guerres de religion, ou de la menace islamique qui justifieraient la présence de GI’S en Irak, mais qui donne la parole aux hommes et femmes qui résistent.
C’est ainsi qu’on obtient une vue différenciée
qui montre que la résistance est l’affaire de l’ensemble du peuple irakien ;
qui dément le préjugé selon lequel les Irakiens se combattraient mutuellement pour des raisons religieuses ;
qui démontre que les actes de terreurs dirigés contre la population ne sont que rarement le fait des Irakiens eux-mêmes, mais en majorité de combattants étrangers, de milices gouvernementales, d’escadrons de la mort menés par les États-uniens, voire des troupes d’occupations elles-mêmes ;
qui apporte la preuve qu’on ne peut envisager la paix tant que les troupes d’occupation séviront dans le pays et que ce ne serait possible qu’une fois celles-ci retirées ;
qui présente des hommes et des femmes qui n’ont plus d’autre solution que de résister à une troupe d’occupation barbare dans son comportement.
C’est pourquoi ce livre est davantage qu’un coup d’œil sur la résistance irakienne. C’est une fenêtre ouverte sur les agissements des troupes d’occupation. Enfin un auteur allemand de renom révèle ce que précédemment des auteurs états-uniens tels que Evan Wright (Generation Kill. Das neue Gesicht des amerikanischen Kriege » 2005, ISBN 3-86150-725-0) ou Joshua Key (Ich bin ein Deserteur 2007, ISBN 978-936096-80-4) avaient osé écrire.
Les victimes irakiennes ont enfin la parole
C’est un livre humain, laissant la parole aux victimes de ce pays
« Ne pouvez-vous pas faire comprendre à vos amis états-uniens qu’ils doivent cesser de placer nos enfants devant l’alternative soit d’assister sans sourciller au massacre de leurs familles ou de se mettre eux-mêmes à tuer ? Ne pouvez-vous leur inculquer qu’il est temps de cesser cette guerre, qui cause, de façon insensée, des victimes parmi leurs soldats et nos propres fils ? Nous n’en pouvons plus. Ce seront bientôt toutes les femmes irakiennes qui auront à pleurer l’un des leurs. Qu’avons-nous fait aux États-uniens ? » – C’est ce qu’entendit l’auteur de la part d’une mère.
A la fin de la première partie de son livre présentant ces entretiens, l’auteur exprime ses sentiments, tout comme s’il nous représentait nous tous, après avoir dialogué avec un jeune homme entré en résistance, alors qu’il avait perdu ses frères innocents par un commando de terreur des troupes d’occupation US : « Je n’oublierai jamais ce jeune homme quoiqu’il arrive ; jamais les larmes des gens que j’ai rencontrés à Ramadi. Une guerre maudite, reposant sur le mensonge et perdue – perdue pour tout le monde. Je suis écœuré de voir qu’en Occident on parle et rêve encore de ‹victoire› et j’ai honte de l’indifférence occidentale face à cette tragédie. Rarement j’ai eu un tel sentiment de honte comme à Ramadi » .
Quelques thèses concernant la relation entre le monde occidental et le monde de l’Islam
La deuxième partie du livre consiste en un « épilogue très personnel » qui dépasse toutefois largement une prise de position personnelle et rappelle à tout un chacun, en réflexion, combien il est erroné de considérer l’Islam comme agressif et menaçant pour le monde occidental. Bien au contraire : Jürgen Todenhöfer formule des thèses concernant la relation du monde occidental avec celui de l’Islam, qui jettent une autre lumière sur les conflits actuels. Par exemple :
« L’Occident est nettement plus violent que le monde de l’Islam. Depuis le début de la colonisation, plus de quatre millions de civils arabes ont été tués. »
Ou bien
« Du fait de la politique de guerre de l’Occident, il n’est pas étonnant d’observer que les extrémistes islamiques attirent toujours plus de monde. »
Ou bien
« Les terroristes camouflés en islamistes sont des assassins. Mais quant aux dirigeants de guerres d’agression en dépit du droit international camouflés en chrétiens, c’est pareil. »
Ou bien
« Les Musulmans furent et sont toujours, pour le moins, aussi tolérants que les Juifs et les chrétiens. Ils ont eu une grande influence sur la culture occidentale. »
Ou bien
« On trouve l’amour de Dieu et de son prochain non seulement dans la Bible, mais aussi dans le Coran, comme commandement central. »
Ou bien
« La politique de l’Occident par rapport au monde musulman se caractérise par une ignorance crasse des faits les plus ¬simples. »
Ou bien
« La nécessité du moment s’appelle l’art de diriger l’État et non pas celui de mener des guerres, qu’il s’agisse de celle d’Iran, d’Irak ou du conflit en Palestine. »
Toutes ces thèses méritent d’être étudiées à fond et de provoquer des discussions larges – ce qui irait vraiment dans le sens de l’auteur.
Une bonne partie du livre est consacrée à de larges extraits de la Bible et du Coran. C’est une façon pour Jürgen Todenhöfer de réfuter la conception d’un inévitable « choc des civilisations » et du caractère irréconciliable du christianisme, du judaïsme et de l’Islam. Il se place ainsi dans la tradition du « Projet d’éthique planétaire », du théologien de Tübingen, Hans Küng. Il rappelle aussi que le monde des intellectuels avait accompli de plus grands progrès que l’idéologie néoconservatrice d’aujourd’hui, et bien plus loin que toute idéologie actuelle orientée vers le pouvoir et la violence qui l’accompagne. Il confirme aussi ce que 138 théologiens musulmans avaient écrit en octobre 2007 au pape Benoît XVI : « Le christianisme et l’Islam sont les deux plus grandes religions du monde, cela tout au long de l’histoire. Les chrétiens représentent un tiers de l’humanité, les musulmans un cinquième, ce qui fait 55% du total. La relation entre ces deux communautés religieuses prend donc une dimension particulière pour imposer la paix dans le monde. Si les chrétiens et les musulmans ne peuvent vivre en paix entre eux, alors il ne peut y avoir de paix dans le monde. »
CIA death squads killing with “impunity” in Afghanistan
CIA death squads killing with “impunity” in Afghanistan
By Joe Kay
A United Nations investigator released a preliminary report last week citing widespread civilian deaths in Afghanistan, often at the hands of unaccountable units led by the CIA or other foreign intelligence agencies.
The investigator is Philip Alston, a New York University professor serving as the Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Human Rights Council on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary execution. His report provides a partial glimpse into the illegal actions of intelligence agencies, occupying forces, and Afghan police, as they seek to repress opposition to the US-led occupation and US-backed government.
A more detailed final report will be released later this year.
Alston focused on civilian killings by US and other international military forces, citing 200 reported deaths in the first four months of 2008. This figure, however, was based on tabulations by the United Nations and other international organizations, and is undoubtedly a serious underestimation.
In addition to civilians killed in air raids—often targeted indiscriminately at civilian dwellings—Alston reported on “a number of raids for which no state or military command appears ready to acknowledge responsibility.”
In a press conference on Thursday, Alston elaborated, saying, “I have spoken with a large number of people in relation to the operation of foreign intelligence units. I don’t want to name them but they are the most senior level of the relevant places. These forces operate with what appears to be impunity.” The location of the incidents cited in the report indicate that the intelligence agencies in question include the CIA or US Special Operations Forces.
The report cited a few incidents as examples of extra-judicial killings. In January 2008, two brothers were killed in Kandahar province in a raid led by “international personnel.” Alston found that the victims “are widely acknowledged, even by well-informed Government officials, to have had no connection to the Taliban, and the circumstances of their deaths are suspicious. However, not only was I unable to get any international military commander to provide their version of what took place, but I was unable to get any international military commander to even admit that their soldiers were involved.”
Other incidents involved raids by Afghans led by unnamed “international intelligence services” out of bases in both Kandahar and Nangarhar provinces.
“It is absolutely unacceptable for heavily-armed internationals accompanied by heavily-armed Afghan forces to be wandering around conducting dangerous raids that too often result in killings without anyone taking responsibility for them,” the report stated.
The British Independent newspaper provided some additional information. It noted, “A Western official close to the investigation said the secret units are still known as Campaign Forces, from the time when American Special Forces and CIA spies recruited Afghan troops to help overthrow the Taliban during the US-led invasion in 2001. ‘The brightest, smartest guys in these militias were kept on,’ the official said. ‘They were trained and rearmed and they are still being used.’”
The Independent went on to cite one incident involving British forces. “In Helmand, where most of Britain’s 7,800 troops are based, Special Forces were accused of slitting a man’s throat in a botched night raid last year. Security sources now claim the operation was mounted by a secret spy unit.”
Alston also reported on the actions of Afghan police. “They function not as enforcers of law and order, but as promoters of the interests of a specific tribe or commander,” he reported. He cited one incident in which Afghan police massacred a group from a rival tribe. There was no investigation by the government or the occupying forces. In another incident, police killed nine and wounded 42 unarmed protestors in Sheberghan in May 2007.
In general, he found little to no interest among US or Afghan officials in monitoring or following up on civilian deaths. “The level of complacency in response to these killings is staggeringly high,” he said.
At the press conference, he noted, “When I asked for the number of reported civilian casualties over the past year or so, I was told that those figures are either not available in Afghanistan—which I was told by several senior military people—or that they are secret and cannot be provided to me. When I asked for the results of certain cases, to ascertain whether those involved have been punished, I was told that no such information is available here in Afghanistan and that perhaps I should read the newspapers of the countries concerned.”
The fact that the CIA is involved in covert operations in Afghanistan is neither new nor surprising. Already by the 1970s, the CIA had developed ties to sections of the Afghan population, and in particular Islamic fundamentalist elements, in an effort to undermine the Soviet-backed government. Later, the CIA was heavily involved in developing ties to anti-Taliban warlords prior to the US invasion and occupation in 2001.
Following the invasion, Afghanistan—and in particular the Bagram Air Force Base near Kabul—became a transit point for prisoners captured by the United States and destined for Guantánamo Bay, secret CIA prisons, or US-allied countries that practice torture. US intelligence agencies were reportedly also involved in the interrogation of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
In 2005, US media reported on the operations of US-backed deaths squads in Iraq, deployed to kill suspected opponents of the US occupation. Yasser Salihee, a special correspondent for news agency Knight Ridder who was investigating the death squads, was killed with a bullet to the head in June of that year. Separate reports related how the US military had modeled Iraqi units on the death squads deployed in Central America during the 1980s to eliminate left-wing opposition to US policies.
While most of the CIA’s actions remain shrouded in secrecy, one CIA contractor was prosecuted for torturing an Afghan prisoner to death in 2003. The contractor, David Passaro, interrogated and beat the prisoner, Abdul Wali, for two days, injuring him so severely that he died two days later.
In a separate development, the New York Times reported on Saturday that the Pentagon is moving forward with the construction of a 40-acre prison complex at the Bagram military base. The current prison, as well as separate prisons run by the Afghans and by the US, are reportedly insufficient to hold the massive number of individuals swept up by the occupying forces.
The facility may also be used for prisoners currently detained in Guantánamo Bay. It will be designed to hold as many as 1,100 people.
See Also:
Fighting intensifies across Afghanistan
[7 May 2008]
Anti-Karzai attack in Kabul shakes US puppet government
[29 April 2008]
France considers sending more troops to Afghanistan
[12 March 2008]
Persons with dual Israeli and US citizenship in the US Government
Persons with dual Israeli and US citizenship in the US Government
Here’s a list of those who have taken over our government and who have pushed for war on Iraq, and are now pushing for war with Iran. And note too, that just about all these individuals are dual Israeli citizens. The US has been taken over by a foreign power, a fraction of its size.
Michael Chertoff: Head of Homeland Security
Richard Perle: Chairman Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board
Paul Wolfowitz: Former Deputy Defense Secretary
Douglas Feith: Under Secretary of Defense
Elliott Abrams: National Security Council Advisor
“Scooter” Libby: Former VP Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff
Joshua Bolten: White House Deputy Chief of Staff
Marc Grossman: Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs
Richard Haass: Director of Policy Planning at the State Department
Robert Zoellick: U.S. Trade Representative (Cabinet-level Position)
James Schlesinger: Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board
John Bolton: UN Representative (Former)
David Wurmser: Under Secretary for Arms Control
Eliot Cohen: Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board
Steve Goldsmith: Senior Advisor to the President
Christopher Gersten: Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary
Lincoln Bloomfield: Assistant Secretary of State
Jay Lefkowitz: Deputy Assistant to the President
Ken Melman: White House Political Director
Edward Luttwak: National Security Study Group
Kenneth Adelman: Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board
Lawrence (Larry) Franklin: Former Defense Intelligence Agency Analyst
Robert Satloff: National Security Council Advisor
Mel Sembler: President Export-Import Bank U.S.
Christopher Gersten: Deputy Assistant Secretary, Administration for Children and Families
Mark Weinberger: Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Public Affairs
David Frum: White House Speechwriter
Ari Fleischer: Former White House Spokesman
Henry Kissinger: Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board
Samuel Bodman: Deputy Secretary of Commerce
Bonnie Cohen: Under Secretary of State for Management
Ruth Davis: Director of Foreign Service Institute
