CRIMES AND CORRUPTIONS OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER NEWS

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2008-11-30T15:53:00.006-07:00

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Marc

WE'VE MOVED!!! NEW LOCATION!!! CRIMES AND CORRUPTIONS OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER NEWS Blog

2008-05-01T08:18:00.002-06:00

WE'VE MOVED!!! NEW LOCATION!!! CRIMES AND CORRUPTIONS OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER NEWS Blog: http://mparent7777-1.livejournal.com/

Previous Website For This Blog

2008-03-25T08:33:00.006-06:00

Previous Website For This Blog

Please click the following,

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UPDATE - May 10, 2007 - I am posting at the secondary blog until further notice

2007-05-10T16:11:00.000-06:00

The secondary blog.

Older articles are here below and at the overflow blog.

Editor's note: also see new articles at the other blogs

2007-05-08T14:07:00.000-06:00

UPDATE - May 10, 2007 - I am posting at the secondary blog until further notice.

Older articles are here below and at the overflow blog.

The Foggo-Wilkes Leaks

2007-05-08T13:35:00.000-06:00

Related
Dusty & 'the Boys' II: Secrets of the Black Budget Scandal
---
May 08, 2007

by emptywheel

Unlike Monday's earlier filing, there is no snark in the government's response to Brent Wilkes' motion to dismiss his indictment because of pre-indictment leaks. Instead, for the purposes of the case, there's just a simple logical argument:

Before Wilkes lawyer Geragos' complaint, DOJ had already started an investigation into the pre-indictment leaks.

Note: the timing on this is a bit fishy. The filing says only that the San Diego USA Office forwarded the Geragos' February 1 allegations to main DOJ "several weeks" before Geragos' formal complaint, which was April 23. So it's possible that SDUSAO didn't do it immediately upon receiving the letter.

On November 29, 2006, one of Wilkes' prior lawyers acknowledged that Wilkes was named in the Cunningham indictment.
Several of the press reports cited by Geragos are not incriminating (for example, the could be based on the earlier revelations about Wilkes mapped onto the Cunningham indictment).
For the key leaks (specifically, that government officials had shown draft indictments to reporters, that Lam had set a deadline for the indictments, and that Main DOJ was worried about the leaks), Geragos has provided no substantiation--and the substance of the leaks was not published.

That's the legal argument. But I'd like to go back and review the whole back and forth to see if we can get to what happened with the leaks (the ones from January, rather than the ones going back to 2005).

Geragos' February 1 Letter and Lam's Response

The issue started on February 1, when Wilkes lawyer Mark Geragos sent Carol Lam a letter memorializing a conversation he had with AUSA Sanjay Bhandari. Geragos quoted from two newspaper articles that, he said, showed "wholesale leaking of matters occurring before the grand jury."

The first cited two federal officials saying the SD USAO was close to seeking an indictment for Wilkes. The article described the first source this way.

The source, who has intimate knowledge of the case and spoke on condition of anonymity, said a preliminary draft indictment is under review by "many eyes on what is going to be proposed to the grand jury," the Times reported.

And it specified that the second source was from another agency.

Another official who is with a different agency but is also familiar with the case said an indictment is "imminent,"

The second article Geragos cited in his letter also relied on two government officials.

Federal prosecutors are preparing to seek indictments against a former top CIA official and a San Diego defense contractor linked to the bribery scandal that sent former U.S. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham to prison, two government officials familiar with the investigation said Wednesday.

But the article later suggested that these government officials were not prosecutors.

Prosecutors in San Diego would not comment about an ongoing investigation.

Allison Hoffman, the author of this second article, would write a detailed description of the alleged crimes just six days later that clearly relies at least partly on CIA sources. That second Hoffman article again cited the two government officials--and others--and broadened the list of those who refused to comment on the case:

Those officials and others spoke on condition that they not be identified because the charges have not been finalized and because CIA contracting is classified. Justice Department and law enforcement officials in San Diego and Washington declined to comment.

In addition to those two articles (the second Hoffman article post-dates Geragos' letter), Geragos describes another leak.

As I told Mr. Sanjay [note Geragos may be deliberately trying to rile Bhandari, because he misspells his name elsewhere in the letter in addition to referring to him here as Mr. Sanjay] during our phone call today, it has been brought to my attention that yet another reporter who today claims to have been shown two separate indictments of Mr. Wilkes. One in the Foggo matter and one related to Thomas Kontogiannis. In addition, this reporter was apparently told prosecutors wanted to arrest Mr. Wilkes possibly as early as today on one of those indictments.

But this journalist got the story wrong--not only was Wilkes not arrested on February 2, but Kontogiannis was not indicted with Michael and Wilkes. The latter mistake--predicting an indictment for Kontogiannis--is one Hoffman's sources made too.

This was a point Carol Lam made in her response to Geragos--she requested more details about the journalist spreading leaks with wrong information.

We invited you to provide any specific information you have, including contact information for the reporter who claimed that he had seen copies of indictments, but had his facts wrong.

The March 19 Hearing

The leaks to journalists become a central issue in the March 19 hearing, which was ostensibly about arranging the sharing of classified information. Against the background of the discussion of secrecy associated with classified information, Judge Larry Burns scolds the government team about leaks (the AUSA here is Halpern).

Halpern: What I can say is it has nothing from prosecution team. There have been no leaks [of classified information]. There certainly have been no suggestions that any information that we had that we're under control of has been leaked.

The Court: I disagree, Mr. Halpern. Look at their Exhibit B to the motion.

Burns goes on to read from the first Hoffman article (though he did not read the line noting that prosecutors would not comment). Burns labels that leak as a violation of grand jury secrecy rules.

You and I both know that's a violation of Rule 6. Whoever did that shouldn't have done it.

Mr. Halpern: Clearly your honor. But I don't think there's an indication that that's a member of the prosecution team.

The Court: It's somebody associated with the government that's forecasting this for the media and telling them what's going on in front of the grand jury.

Mr. Halpern: There are many people associated with the government. I'm not going to quarrel on the Court's point. I think you're making a valid point.

Burns returns to the issue again.

The Court: Somebody ignored the conventions of federal criminal practice and Rule 6 in the two disclosures that were made. Somebody did.

[snip]

Again, I'm not assuming that this has anything to do with you or Mr. Forge or Ms. Chu. I'm assuming it was somebody else who was anxious to get a headline or do something that led to this.

I take your point, Mr. Halpern, that whoever it was didn't disclose confidential secret national security information, but it was still--it's a pretty egregious violation to say, "here's what's going on in front of the grand jury, and expect an indictment in the next couple of weeks."

Mr. Halpern: Your honor, there's no way I will defend that action be whoever it was made, and I don't intend to.

All of this makes something crystal clear to the defense attorneys: Burns is pissed about the leaks, and they can use that to their advantage. Which Geragos then does.

Could I also address one other area, which is the leaks and the idea of the stand-alone order.

I had suggested in a letter prior to my client's indictment, because I was so irate at the time and I've mentioned before, that I wanted all of the people on the prosecution team, however we want to define that, to file declarations under penalty of perjury.

[snip]

As this court well knows, the source privilege is not met with a whole lot of success in the federal courts anymore. Unfortunately, in the state courts it's still there. And you can't get to the bottom of this. Here we can get to the bottom of this. Clearly, as they've conceded, it did not come from the defense. I think it potentially is Brady or Giglio information as to who it is who willingly will go out and violate 6(e).

And the way to find out is to get these people to put their declarations under penalty of perjury and bring in the reporters and put them under oath and let them say who it was who disclosed the information.

Note Geragos' move here. He says that, because this is a federal case, the reporters privilege does not hold up, so the Court can order the journalists to reveal their sources.

At this, one of Foggo's lawyers, Randolph Teslik pipes up to note that he, too, learned the details of the indictment from a reporter.

Just for the record, we learned the details of the indictment from a telephone call from a reporter before the indictment was returned as well. We didn't put that in our motion. But given the nature of the representations and the Court's concerns here about 6(e), I think it's important that the record reflect that we got the same telephone call as Mr. Geragos.

The hearing as a whole served to get Burns riled up about leaks to reporters and to get Halpern to cede the seriousness of the leaks. Which Geragos then uses to set up his May 23 motion to have the entire indictment dismissed because of the leaks.

Geragos' May 23 Motion to Dismiss the Indictments

Foggo's lawyers file a motion regarding the leaks on May 23, too. But they don't ask for a dismissal. They only ask for a thorough investigation. But Geragos, as is his wont, goes big, asking to have all the charges dismissed. I don't think he really hopes this will work. But he does use it to foreground the Lam dismissal, suggesting Lam leaked the information personally to pressure main DOJ to approve the charges.

Before indictments were returned against Mr. Wilkes, news articles cited government officials as the source of secret grand-jury material. Those government leaks to reporters disclosed secret matters before the grand jury violating of Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e), including the targets of the grand jury, the nature and focus of the investigation, and the likelihood that an indictment would be returned and when.

During the grand jury proceedings, counsel for Mr. Wilkes regularly received phone calls from reporters relaying specific information about the pending indictments. The reporters had even seen drafts of the indictments weeks before the indictments were returned. The government’s illegal disclosure of secret grand jury matter to the press was not accidental or haphazard. It was part of a deliberate campaign by the former United States Attorney, Carol Lam, to use Mr. Wilkes and the other defendants here in her political squabble with the Justice Department’s main office in Washington D.C. The United States Attorney used the leaks to create a public atmosphere that compelled the grand jury to return indictments and present Main Justice with a fait accompli, a gesture of defiance by Carol Lam as she was forced out of office.

There are important points that Geragos makes in his statement supporting the motion. First, he uses Halpern's concessions from the March 19 hearing to put the blame back on the prosecution team.

As the prosecutors have conceded in open court, these leaks can only have been from members of the prosecution team.

Second (though I'm presenting this out of order), he describes hearing from six different reporters, two of whom have printed all the information shared with Geragos, his colleagues, or Wilkes. He then explains he has attached the stories representing these leaks.

At least six reporters telephoned me, my co-counsel, or my client. At least two of those reporters published all or part of the information disclosed to them by government officials in violation of Rule 6(e). Attached hereto as Exhibit 2 are true and correct copies of newspaper articles from a few of those outlets as authored by some of those reporters disclosing secret grand jury matters illegally disclosed to them by government officials.

As the government points out in its response, some of these articles could be based entirely on Wilkes' previous lawyers' own revelations coupled with reading the Cunningham indictment. Further, two of these articles are those described above in connection with the February 1 letter, which report that the prosecution team would not comment. Also, it includes the article apparently relying on CIA sources. In other words, the visible evidence Geragos supplies doesn't really prove that the prosecution team was behind the leaks--one point the government made in its response.

I'm curious, though, about the reference to Wilkes. Because I'd be deeply curious about any so-called leaks going directly to Wilkes. Was Wilkes, for example, the one who received the erroneous leak referenced in Geragos' February 1 letter?

The leaks for which Geragos provides evidence don't really support his larger argument to dismiss the case. But Geragos uses another leak--one not apparently reported--to implicate Lam in the leak.

A few days before the indictments were unsealed, I received a telephone call from a local reporter who told me that the United States Attorney would ask the Grand Jury to issue the indictments against Mr. Wilkes the following day, and described, in detail, the contents of those indictments. When I asked the reporter about the timing of the indictments, the reporter told me that United States Attorney, Carol Lam, wanted the indictments issued and announced before her departure date the following Thursday, two days later.

This is the basis, presumably, for Geragos' claim that Lam was behind the leaks.

Finally, Geragos reports another leak that also has not been reported on--and this one comes from Main DOJ.

Around the same time the print reporters were disclosing to me detailed knowledge of the draft indictments, and stating that government officials were showing them copies of draft indictments, a television reporter told me that an attorney at the Justice Department main offices in Washington D.C. (“Main Justice”) had disclosed that Main Justice believed that it could no longer exercise its normal supervisory role because the leaks of the indictment “would now make any action taken by Main Justice appear to be political”.

This is the final necessary piece for Geragos' argument, because it suggests that the leaks prevented Main DOJ from fulfilling their normal supervisory role in the case. The implicit message here is that Main DOJ would have prevented the indictments, if only someone (and Geragos alleges that someone is Lam) leaked all the details in the case. Of course, simple logic would tell you that the burgeoning USA Purge--and not the leaks in San Diego--limited Main DOJ from intervening too obviously in the case. But the leaks provided a convenient excuse--presumably for a member of the clique back in DC--to taint the indictments.

Government's May 7 Response

Which is what brings us to the real anger evident in yesterday's government response to Geragos' motion. While the rest of the response simply shows that almost all of the evidence Geragos relies on is either irrelevant or wrong, the last passage of the response makes strong insinuations that the most important pieces of Geragos' argument--those touching on Lam's involvement and Main DOJ's response to the leaks--lack corroboration.

In the weeks and months since Wilkes’s counsel sent his February 1st letter, made his representations at the March 19th hearing, and filed his April 23rd declaration, not a single article or story has been published or broadcast that corroborates his representations regarding: (1) the disclosure to the media of actual draft indictments; (2) frustration at Main Justice over a perceived inability to exercise its normal supervisory role over these cases; or (3) a reporter’s pre-indictment awareness of the detailed contents of the indictments.

Under the circumstances, Wilkes’s counsel’s declaration simply raises more questions than it answers. For example, why, in the most publicized case in this district, and one that has generated national interest, did no reporter report any of the events described in paragraphs 5 and 6 of Wilkes’s counsel’s declaration?

The insinuation is clear. The leak that implicated Lam and the one that reflect hesitation at Main DOJ were never published. They were simply shared with Geragos, and then dropped. Why would a reporter with such an incendiary story just sit on it?

While I suspect the reporter alleging that Lam had ordered indictments before her departure may have been speculating (it was a common speculation at the time), I'm most curious about the Main DOJ leak. The clique at Main DOJ had been panicking about public coverage of Lam's resignation since mid-January. In early February, Rahm Emmanuel and others requested that Lam be made a special prosecutor on the Wilkes case. Geragos' TV reporter would have you believe that it was the leaks--and not the larger USA Purge scandal--that forced Main DOJ to back off of any intervention into the Wilkes indictment.

No wonder the prosecution team sounds so skeptical.

May 08, 2007 at 11:01 in Bush/Republican Scandals, Contributor--emptywheel | Permalink

Study suggests cancer risk from depleted uranium

2007-05-08T13:31:00.000-06:00

James Randerson

Tuesday May 8, 2007
The Guardian

Depleted uranium, which is used in armour-piercing ammunition, causes widespread damage to DNA which could lead to lung cancer, according to a study of the metal's effects on human lung cells. The study adds to growing evidence that DU causes health problems on battlefields long after hostilities have ceased.

DU is a byproduct of uranium refinement for nuclear power. It is much less radioactive than other uranium isotopes, and its high density - twice that of lead - makes it useful for armour and armour piercing shells. It has been used in conflicts including Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq and there have been increasing concerns about the health effects of DU dust left on the battlefield. In November, the Ministry of Defence was forced to counteract claims that apparent increases in cancers and birth defects among Iraqis in southern Iraq were due to DU in weapons.

Now researchers at the University of Southern Maine have shown that DU damages DNA in human lung cells. The team, led by John Pierce Wise, exposed cultures of the cells to uranium compounds at different concentrations.

The compounds caused breaks in the chromosomes within cells and stopped them from growing and dividing healthily. "These data suggest that exposure to particulate DU may pose a significant [DNA damage] risk and could possibly result in lung cancer," the team wrote in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology.

Previous studies have shown that uranium miners are at higher risk of lung cancer, but this has often been put down to the fact that miners are also exposed to radon, another cancer-causing chemical.

Prof Wise said it is too early to say whether DU causes lung cancer in people exposed on the battlefield because the disease takes several decades to develop.

"Our data suggest that it should be monitored as the potential risk is there," he said.

Prof Wise and his team believe that microscopic particles of dust created during the explosion of a DU weapon stay on the battlefield and can be breathed in by soldiers and people returning after the conflict.

Once they are lodged in the lung even low levels of radioactivity would damage DNA in cells close by. "The real question is whether the level of exposure is sufficient to cause health effects. The answer to that question is still unclear," he said, adding that there has as yet been little research on the effects of DU on civilians in combat zones. "Funding for DU studies is very sparse and so defining the disadvantages is hard," he added.

All Classified GTMO Records "May" Be Destroyed

2007-05-08T13:13:00.000-06:00

Monday, May 07, 2007

Disturbing news from the National Coalition for History. According to a protective order filed by the US District Court for DC, all classified information used at Guantanamo military tribunals by defense counsel-- namely, all papers, correspondence, memoranda, logs, photographs, and videos-- are to be physically "destroyed" after the trial ends. Further, the order states that prosecutors "may" choose to destroy all their classified materials as well.

The order essentially creates a legal memory hole into which the government can drop any information it deems embarrassing or illegal at the conclusion of a tribunal hearing. This includes any Combatant Status Review Tribunal transcripts, interrogation logs, or "Immediate Response Force" videos that depict the infliction of torture or cruel or inhumane treatment.

So far, only one tribunal hearing has concluded at Guantanamo-- that of Australia's David Hicks. In a 2004 affidavit filed from Guantanamo, Hicks alleged he was "deprived of sleep as a matter of policy", "beaten while blindfolded and handcuffed", and offered "the services of a prostitute for fifteen minutes if I would spy on other detainees."

One can only imagine what classified Hicks records the Pentagon has legally destroyed so far.

'War is peace'

2007-05-08T12:58:00.000-06:00

Orwellian theories are being acted out in Israel - as persecution against Palestinians begins to echo 1984.

May 8, 2007 5:00 PM

Nimer Sultany

It is one thing to read George Orwell and Franz Kafka, it is quite another to live their texts. For us - Palestinians - Orwell and Kafka are not works of fiction but concrete reality.

Israel's persecution of Azmi Bishara, the prominent Palestinian scholar, head of the National Democratic Assembly and - until recently - member of the Israeli Knesset, is only the recent articulation of this reality. After all, this is not the first Israeli attempt to criminalise Bishara or other Palestinian political leaders. The state hopes that by reframing his political agenda as treason, incitement to violence and support of terrorism, his ideas will lose legitimacy, his community will be intimidated and the establishment will not need to deal with the challenge that the Palestinian citizens of Israel present to the ideology of the state through their demands for equality.

Bishara rightly claims that he will not have a fair trial. Indeed, we know from the history of the General Security Service (GSS) of a culture of lies and fabricated files (even against their own men as in the Bus 300 affair, which was hijacked by Palestinian militants in 1984). We also know that even in cases unrelated to "security", the Arab citizen is twice as likely to be indicted, convicted and imprisoned compared to his fellow Jewish citizen. Professors Aryeh Rattner and Gideon Fishman of Haifa University write: "Being an Arab may lead to a presumption of guilt without facts and the rules of evidence."

We also know that security is the sacred cow to which Israeli judges bow. Security has always been an important tool for the maintenance of the Jewish and Zionist character of the Israeli state. It was a major pretext for the confiscation of Palestinian citizens' lands. Israel's persecution of Bishara is part and parcel of this security mindset of the Israeli state vis-á-vis its Palestinian citizens. Those citizens were denied their basic rights and were subjected to a military administration for 18 years (1948-1966). Since then, the GSS has been the main state organ in charge of viewing us as a "fifth column." Bishara has already had his trial(s) without knowing. The justices of the Israeli Supreme Court have authorised more than once the wiretapping of his private conversations. "parliamentary immunity", "freedom of expression" and "democracy" are all tricks through which Big Brother comes to haunt you in the end.

Not only does the GSS closely monitor and control the Arab education system inside Israel, but it has publicly declared that the Palestinian citizens of Israel are a "strategic and demographic threat" to the state. In fact, it can be said that Big Brother is not only patrolling "thoughtcrimes" but has "telescreens" in the bedrooms of the Palestinian citizens, penetrating our private realms and controlling some of the most intimate aspects of our family and love lives. The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law forbids family unification and effectively prohibits Arab citizens from marrying citizens of more than half of the countries in the Middle East. In this dehumanising context, the law declares that marriage and children are not humanitarian affairs.

Had Israel been a democratic state, one would have expected the legal apparatus to criminalise and outlaw anti-democratic movements. Israel, however, persecutes Bishara for his democratic agenda. "State of all its citizens" and "universal equality" would be considered a trivial and possibly conservative agenda in any normal democratic state. Strangely, in Israel, such an agenda has been labelled as dangerous, subversive and extremist. The Knesset rejected several times an "equal protection" clause that Bishara had proposed. Equality remains outside Israeli legislation.

After all, these are unorthodox ideas in Israel. The Zionist "Newspeak" is supposed to turn them into unthinkable ideas. The fact that three groups of Palestinian elites inside Israel - National Committee of the Heads of the Arab Local Municipalities, Adalah and Mada al-Carmel - have recently issued "vision documents" articulating our demands for equality, expressing our grievances and presenting an alternative historical narrative meant that Bishara had risen in prominence and influence.

On the other hand, anti-democrats and racists who openly propagate violence against as well as the expulsion of Palestinians (including those who are citizens) serve in the Knesset and the government, and cabinet ministers who routinely issue racist statements against the Palestinian citizens are not held accountable. In fact, they become more popular in the Jewish community after such statements.

It is thus hard to escape understanding the Israeli irony without the Orwellian backdrop. Bishara, vocal in his opposition to Israel's brutal assault on Lebanon last summer, is accused by the Thought Police (the GSS) of helping the enemy in times of war through contact with a foreign agent. The "enemy" here stands for the Arab world to which the Palestinian citizens belong and the "foreign agent" is defined retroactively as such by the Thought Police. These alleged crimes are punishable according to Israeli law by life imprisonment or death penalty. "Thoughtcrime is death."

On the contrary, cabinet ministers who urged the Israeli military - still ironically called the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) - to wipe out dozens of Lebanese villages and not feel morally restricted during the war were heralded as patriots. Those who perpetrate war crimes are considered "men of peace". The Big Brother is persecuting Bishara because "war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength."

What might be bewildering in recent developments is Israel's disregard for the impact that these policies might have on its future. Israel has always discriminated against the Palestinian minority, isolated it from its larger Arab milieu and employed a multi-layered control system. Since October 2000, however, Israel has been moving rapidly towards a collision by continuously pushing this minority further into the corner. Most of the minority's leaders were incessantly interrogated and at times physically assaulted by the police; Ra'ed Salah, a prominent religious and political leader, was imprisoned; several laws further restricted political speech and participation; Bishara faced two political trials; and more Arab houses have been demolished. More persecution of Bishara and his party will take Israel one step closer toward collision with its Palestinian citizens.

Israel is in effect presenting Azmi Bishara with two similar "options": to end up as either a Kafkaesque or an Orwellian protagonist. The former was executed, the latter was brainwashed and forced to betray his world waiting for an impending execution.

Meanwhile Bishara, as a genuine civil rights leader, is resisting the attempt to drag him into Kafka's Trial by Big Brother and his Thought Police. He courageously holds his ground: "We will not be intimidated. We will not bow to permanent servitude in the land of our ancestors or to being severed from our natural connections to the Arab world."

Nimer Sultany is a Palestinian citizen of Israel and currently a doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School.

He has worked as a human rights lawyer in the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and as the head of the political monitoring project
at Mada al-Carmel (the Arab centre for applied social research).

Cheney "X'd" off the DC Madam's list by ABC/Disney

2007-05-08T12:00:00.000-06:00

May 8, 2007 -- Cheney on DC Madam's list. Yesterday, WMR reported on the DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey's list: "WMR has been informed that the CEO of a major corporation is a former CEO but, nonetheless, the aforementioned extremely high-level official of the Bush administration. The individual, who is definitely "newsworthy," reportedly engaged the services of Palfrey's escort firm while he was the CEO and maintained a residence off Chain Bridge Road in the Ballantrae neighborhood in McLean, Virginia, a few blocks from the headquarters of the CIA."

Cheney "X'd" off the DC Madam's list by ABC/Disney.

WMR has confirmed with extremely knowledgeable CIA and Pentagon sources that the former CEO who is on Deborah Jeane Palfrey's list is Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney was CEO of Halliburton during the time of his liaisons with the Pamela Martin & Associates escort firm. Palfrey's phone invoices extend back to 1996 and include calls to and from Cheney. Ironically, in 2000 Cheney was appointed by Bush to head his Vice President selection committee, a task that enabled Cheney to gather detailed personal files on a number of potential candidates, including Bill Frist, George Pataki, John Danforth, Fred Thompson, Chuck Hagel, John Kasich, Chris Cox, Frank Keating, Tom Ridge, Colin Powell, and Jim Gilmore, before he selected himself as the vice presidential candidate.

The White House saw to it that ABC/Disney killed the DC Madam's story before yet another scandal swamped the Bush administration. Cheney is departing Washington today for a trip to the Middle East, where he will visit the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and the USS John C. Stennis in the Gulf.

Rationalising imperial conquest

2007-05-08T11:55:00.000-06:00

BOOKS

PRAFUL BIDWAI

The book is a devastating critique of the U.S. Empire-building project and its principal rationalisations.

FIVE and a half years after the United States launched its Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, by invading Afghanistan, the world has become considerably more insecure, and terrorism has become more menacing than ever before. A study for Mother Jones magazine in the U.S. by the Centre on Law and Security at the New York University (NYU) Foundation finds that there has been a 607 per cent increase in the incidence of terrorism between September 2001 and March 2003, and March 2003 and September 2006.

One of the biggest failures of GWOT strategy is none other than Iraq, where over 150,000 U.S. troops are deployed. A country free of religious extremism and terrorism until its invasion four years ago, Iraq now reports the world's largest number of terrorist and violent incidents, week after week. Over 650,000 civilians have perished in Iraq, besides 3,000-plus U.S. troops. The occupation forces there have no grip on the fast-deteriorating situation despite the "surge" in U.S. troops.

Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq has seen any of the promised "stabilisation" or "democratisation". In Afghanistan, there is a strong resurgence of the Taliban amidst rampant warlordism, and a serious danger that President Hamid Karzai's regime may come unhinged altogether. Opium production is booming as never before and now accounts for well over one half of the country's gross domestic product (GDP).

Worse, GWOT has alienated and antagonised large numbers of people in the Islamic world. The U.S. has lost all credibility in their eyes, as well as among growing numbers of people in the West. Discontent in the Islamic world, in particular West Asia, is growing along with the expanding cesspools of unaddressed grievances — further feeding violence, counter-violence and terrorism.

The U.S. is now increasingly perceived as a power in search of an Empire, to be built primarily by military means. It presents a new, ugly, aggressive and belligerent face in the post-Cold War era. New apologists have also emerged for the new imperialism of the post-Cold War era. During the Cold War, U.S. hegemonism was based on "saving the world from communism", and presenting a benevolent face to the "free world". Today's Empire needs different, if equally irrational, justifications or rationalisations.

Six of these rationalisations or banners and apologies for Empire are important: (i) the global war on terror; (ii) weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the `wrong hands'; (iii) failed states; (iv) the necessity and justice of external and forcible humanitarian intervention; (v) regime change in the name of democracy; and (vi) the war on narcotics.

The present book, an initiative of the Transnational Institute, an Amsterdam-based radical fellowship, and authored mainly by its Fellows, is a devastating critique of the U.S. Empire-building project and its principal rationalisations. Its greatest merit is that it centrally confronts the reality of post-Cold War U.S. imperialism and tries to analyse it comprehensively. It persuasively argues that each of the slogans and premises through which U.S. Empire-building is sought to be legitimised is fundamentally flawed.

The book's authors make their case on a broad canvas, which includes a discussion on the purposes of Empire (themselves related to specific regimes of economic power and to furthering inequality-enhancing neoliberal capitalism); the manufacture of intellectual opinion in favour of neoliberal ideas; and the special role played by American exceptionalism in legitimising Empire-building through its assertion that the U.S. is unique as the world's "natural" leader, in that "it is the one country whose pursuit of its national interest is, at one and the same time, the pursuit of a cosmopolitan universal interest".

These essays are followed by six chapter presentations on the six ideological banners. As important as these sections are the Introduction and Conclusion, both by Achin Vanaik, who weaves together the different themes and illuminates numerous connections between them.

To begin with, Walden Bello analyses the economics of Empire by postulating a massive crisis of over-accumulation: overproduction and building up of excess capacities, whose output the economics of the industrial North cannot absorb. He argues that recent attempts by international capital to develop new communications technologies; to colonise public spheres such as health, education, power, water supply and transport; to "financialise" itself; and to tap China's rapid growth to finance a debt-led consumption boom in the U.S. will not adequately remedy the causes of this crisis. Walden Bello presents U.S. post-Cold War belligerence as a consequence of economic weakness, not strength.

Susan George presents a critique of the neoliberal doctrine, rooted in a combination of conservative interpretation of neoclassical economic theory, and libertarian and ultra-individualist legal-political ideas. Susan George convincingly shows that the dominance of neoliberalism owes little to its intrinsic merit; nor was it a "natural" outcome of intellectual debate.

Rather, it followed a systematic and lavishly funded effort to "sell" the ideology through think tanks, select university departments, policy institutes and key individuals in the media. She explores and exposes the institutional framework through which this $1 billion enterprise was conducted.

Mike Marquesee's chapter is a searing critical analysis of American exceptionalism and its historical roots in settler colonialism. This notion sees the U.S. not just as a territorial entity, but as a "great social experiment", which must be propagated — if necessary, through colonial wars and the Monroe Doctrine. American exceptionalism sees the U.S. as the ultimate telos and goal of modernity itself.

Marquesee explains how this exceptionalism survives despite the blows delivered by the U.S.' ignominious defeat in the Vietnam war and the visible inferiority of the U.S. model of capitalism in relation to its Western European variants in respect of, say, public services.

The six chapter presentations that follow delve into the rationalising banners, by analysing their provenance and purpose, and their structural weaknesses and deceitful nature. They also suggest some alternative approaches.

Vanaik argues that the one-sided view of terrorism contained in the dominant discourse in the U.S. (which excludes state terrorism altogether), and the militarised solutions offered to it through GWOT, is an excellent "framing device" for the imperial project and "possesses the greatest capacity to mobilise domestic support for the U.S. pursuit of Empire abroad".

Vanaik, however, dissects GWOT's failure. He holds that demonisation of Islam and Muslims is "an inevitable corollary" of GWOT. Vanaik offers the International Criminal Court as an alternative framework within which to prosecute and punish terrorist acts.

Zia Mian takes apart the WMD argument as an excuse for waging war on Iraq. Washington deliberately concocted falsehoods about Saddam Hussein's pursuit of WMD and manipulated the media. The "in the wrong hands" proposition is a means of selectively rewarding friends, allies or client-states, while attacking enemies and "Axis of Evil" states.

Mian documents the U.S.' spectacular hypocrisy in developing new uses for and designs of nuclear weapons and ballistic missile defence systems, while preaching disarmament to others. He also shows how the mystique built around the bomb comes back repeatedly to haunt the U.S. through its spread to other countries. This is the inevitable consequence of the "Empire of Fear".

The U.S. claims that its wars in Central and West Asia were rationally calculated to promote regime change in the interests of "democracy"; or they were humanitarian interventions, necessitated by the failure/paralysis of the multilateral system (the United Nations, in particular). This argument has some resonance outside the U.S., especially given the context of the former Yugoslavia, Somalia and Rwanda — although the U.S. and its North Atlantic Treaty Organisaion (NATO) allies failed to act in these very cases.

But as Mariano Aguirre shows, unilateral, offensive, armed intervention mocks at international law and weakens multilateral institutions that ought logically to intervene and honour their obligation to protect threatened civilians.

Aguirre persuasively argues that the Left "should not abandon the moral imperative to protect victims, nor the principles of democracy and international law... We need to recognise that there are massive violations of human rights, that there are dysfunctional states that do not protect their people... Also, that the U.N. system lacks the administrative capacity and flexibility to respond and that power politics limit its capacities, and that, therefore, the international community has a role to play."

Phyllis Bennis writes a blisteringly critical account of how the U.S. first contemptuously bypassed the U.N. Security Council, and then cynically manipulated it to obtain a carte blanche in Afghanistan and Iraq. She criticises the U.S.' mollycoddling of regimes with dubious human rights records (for instance, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Russia), its setting up of puppet regimes in the occupied countries, and its policies of creating or widening sectarian divides and of promoting the outright loot of Iraq's wealth through corporatisation and privatisation.

Bennis presents a scathing analysis of the effects of U.S. policy in West Asia, including promoting authoritarian allies, legitimising Israel's brutal occupation of Palestine, and the negative examples all this has set for West Asia as a whole.

David Sogge exposes state weaknesses, fragility or "failure" as a dishonourable pretext for Empire-building.

Most characterisations of failing states totally ignore the causes of failure, typically rooted in the structure of the global economy, neoliberal policies imposed by international financial institutions or Western governments, and absence of democracy and accountability. Military interventions rarely offer a solution, nor does the "shell of elections".

Last but not least is a discussion by David Bewley-Taylor and Martin Jelsma of the "war on narcotics" as yet another excuse for Empire. The U.S.'s supply-side approach to the drugs problem emphasises physical interdiction, although this has proved a failure. In practice, as "Plan Colombia" shows, the "war on narcotics" provides a convenient excuse for attacking Left-wing insurgents and maintaining a heavy U.S. military presence in select Third World countries. The authors argue for an alternative "harm reduction" and "decriminalisation" approach to drugs.

Vanaik concludes with a final summing up, which takes a bird's-eye view of the six legitimising themes and their weaknesses, and argues for a comprehensive, critical, Left-wing approach to dissecting Empire.

The book is, then, a broad-horizon yet penetrating critique of the rationalisations for Empire in the post-Soviet era. One wishes it had explored some themes (for instance, the economics of Empire, the relations between the U.S. and its allies, the manufacture of domestic consent in different countries, and alternative international arrangements, and so on) in greater depth.

Above all, one wishes it had devoted some space to a discussion of the growing resistance to Empire through the anti-war and peace movements, themselves linked to the global justice agenda.

Despite these shortcomings, the book remains one of the sharpest critical analyses of contemporary imperialism published recently. It is highly recommended.

Praful Bidwai is a Fellow of the Transnational Institute. He co-authored with Achin Vanaik South Asia on a Short Fuse: Nuclear Politics and the Future of Global Disarmament, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1999.

Meyrav Wurmser: The Neocons’ Den Mother

2007-05-08T11:53:00.000-06:00

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 2007, pages 17-18

Neocon Corner

By Richard H. Curtiss


	MEMRI co-founder Meyrav Wurmser (The Hudson institute)

MEYRAV WURMSER, den mother of the neoconservatives, is now head of the Center for Middle East Policy at the far-right Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. A typical institute program included a Feb. 5 lecture by the former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, American-born Dore Gold, who introduced his new book, The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West and the Future. Gold’s previous Arab-bashing book, published in 2004, was Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism, published by Regnery Publishers.

When I last wrote about Dr. Wurmser (April 2003 Washington Report, p. 14), she and her colleague, Col. Yigal Carmon of Israel’s Mossad, had launched the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) organization. Founded in February 1998, MEMRI specializes in translating and distributing articles that present Arabs in a highly negative light, and providing these articles and free Internet advisories to the media in the U.S., Britain and, presumably, to other countries as well.

According to Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterintelligence official, MEMRI is selective and acts as propagandists for a political point of view which follows the extreme right of Likud. “MEMRI follows a familiar pattern,” noted journalist Brian Whitaker. “Either it reflects badly on the character of Arabs or it in some way furthers the political agenda of Israel.”(See November 2002 Washington Report, p. 22.)

In recent years prominent people have quoted MEMRI translations, including, astonishingly, Richard Cohen of The Washington Post. Others, predictably, include Prof. Bernard Lewis of Princeton University; Israel-firster Charles Krauthammer of The Washington Post; Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic; U.S. Rep. Thomas Lantos (D-CA); and former CIA Director James Woolsey.

According to the conservative National Review, 250 foundations and individuals fund MEMRI’S activities. Among these private donors is the right-wing Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which gave MEMRI $100,000 from 1999 to 2000. In 2001, the Randolph Foundation gave MEMRI $100,000, and in 2004 the John M. Olin Foundation gave $5,000, according to Media Transparency. All these donations were tax-deductible.

Prof. Halim Barakat of Georgetown University complained about MEMRI’s translations of his articles: “Every time I wrote Zionism, MEMRI replaced the word by Jew or Judaism,” he wrote. “They want to give the impression that I’m not criticizing Israeli policy, but that what I’m saying is anti-Semitic.”

Indeed, MEMRI seems bent on stigmatizing anyone who criticizes Israel and/or Zionism as being anti-Jewish.

With the exception of Meyrav Wurmser, who actually is an Israeli, neoconservatives are Americans extraordinarily sympathetic to Israel. Dr. Wurmser studied at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (SAIS). Her Ph.D. thesis was based on the Revisionist/Herut/Likud Party from Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky through Menachem Begin to Yitzhak Shamir.

Wurmser has taught political science at Johns Hopkins University and at the United States Naval Academy. She writes articles for such pro-Israel publications as William Kristol’s Weekly Standard and the extremist Middle East Quarterly.

Among the neoconservatives who have prospered—at least until recently—in the George W. Bush administration are Paul Wolfowitz, former Deputy Secretary of Defense, whose obsequiousness toward President Bush was exceeded only by his reputation for craftiness; former Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration Richard Perle, who resigned as chair, and later as a member, of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, and who has received large profits as a lobbyist; former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith; Elliott Abrams, a well-known figure from the Reagan era who was convicted and later pardoned on charges related to the Iran-Contra scandal and now is a central player as deputy national security adviser (see story p. 10); and ideologue Michael Ledeen, who basically believes that violence in the service of the spread of democracy is America’s manifest destiny.

Yet another neocon is Meyrav Wurmser’s husband, David Wurmser, an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney on Middle East affairs.

Many of the neocons’ dreams now have turned to ashes, leaving a ruined Iraq but not yet having destroyed either Iran or Syria as most of the neocons desire. Strangely, it is Meyrav Wurmser who can’t stop talking about what might have been. In unguarded moments she clearly has no regrets about the havoc she and her fellow travellers have wrought upon the United States and its allies.

Wurmser seemingly pays little attention to non-Jewish neocons such as former Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton (or their victims). Foremost among them, of course, is Vice President Richard Cheney, who became a willing accomplice of the neocons. Cheney might end up having to resign from the vice presidency, and his former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, may end up behind bars if President Bush doesn’t pardon him before the end of his second term. Ex-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld may get off scot-free only because he seemed to be more of a blowhard than a conspirator.

Then there is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who never became a neocon, but on the other hand never fought enough against them. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who refused to be taken in by the neocons, was unceremoniously dumped at the end of Bush’s first term.

Meyrav Wurmser almost seems to look back on the neocons’ glory days as a golden time. After all, the neocons kept the United States busy and distracted from solving the Israeli-Palestinian problem.

According to Israeli writer Yitzhak Benhorin of the Israeli Web site Ynetnews.com, “Despite the fact that many neocons are no longer part of the government, it turns out that they are still one big happy family who make sure to remain in touch.” He continues, “Many are Jews who share a passionate love for Israel. Some of the accusations against the government regarding the war in Iraq is that it was undertaken primarily for Israel’s sake and that the attack on Iraq was actually an Israeli objective.”

In an interview with Ynet, Dr. Wurmser refuted the accusations and criticism. “Since I’m an Israeli in the gang, you wouldn’t believe what’s been written about me,” she said. “That I’m proof of the covert neoconservative connection with Israel and the Mossad.”

Wurmser went on to explain: “The group is comprised of academics, most of them lacking operational experience, which became part of the Bush administration but failed to get their ideas through the bureaucracy. These are intellectuals who came with great ideas, in which I still believe, but did not find a way to promote their beliefs in the complexities of bureaucracies.

“The final decisions were not in their hands,” she insisted. “In the Pentagon, the decisions were in the hands of the military, and the political leadership had a lot of clashes with the military leadership.”

Wurmser continued: “Powell curbed our ideas and they did not pass. There was a lot of frustration over the years in the administration because we didn’t feel we were succeeding.

“Now Bolton has left [the U.N.] and there are others who are about to leave. This administration is in its twilight days. Everyone is now looking for work, looking to make money…We all feel beaten after the past five years.”

Later in the interview, Wurmser stated: “Hezbollah defeated Israel in the war. This is the first war Israel lost.”

She continued: “The neocons are responsible for the fact that Israel got a lot of time and space…They believed that Israel should be allowed to win. A great part of it was the thought that Israel should fight against the real enemy, the one backing Hezbollah. It was obvious that it is impossible to fight directly against Iran, but the thought was that its strategic and important ally should be hit.

“It is difficult for Iran to export its Shi’i revolution without joining Syria, which is the last nationalistic Arab country,” Wurmser explained. “If Israel hit Syria, it would have been a harsh blow for Iran. The hit would have weakened it and changed the strategic map of the Middle East. The final outcome is that Israel did not do it. It fought the wrong war and lost.”

In an interview with a May 18, 2003 episode of the BBC program “Panorama” entitled “The War Party,” Meyrav Wurmser talked about the war in Iraq. She also referred specifically to the neocons’ real fundamental love of power and their 1996 paper written for then-incoming Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.”

“It was no more than a mental exercise in a think tank by a group of people. Yes, many of us are Jewish, there is no need to apologize for that. Most of us, all of us, in fact are pro-Israel. Some of us more fiercely so than others. But we have no problem also criticizing Israel…

“There is no dual loyalty. The people in the group are Americans first and foremost, and view themselves as American thinkers, and as people who are most interested in American policy. We see a tremendous similarity between Israel and America, and Britain for that matter, simply because these are leading democracies. In the case of Israel, it’s the only democracy in the Middle East.”

Wurmser continued, “We don’t claim credit for the activities of the group [the neocons] at all…You could say our power is a figment of our enemies’ imagination. It might be absolutely true. We are not claiming to be running the world. Our job is just to think, and if ideas get adopted, and if ideas turn into policy—wonderful. That’s what we’re here for…

When the attack on Iraq began, Wurmser said, “We actually opened a bottle of champagne. This was a moment we waited for, for many, many years. I mean we’ve been working on freedom for Iraq for the past nine years maybe. My personal feeling was that we were doing an incredibly good deed by pushing this war because, you know…people got their freedom out of it…

“Contrary to popular belief there is no conspiracy,” she insisted “and the group would not have been so powerful were it not for an administration and a president who is susceptible and was willing to adopt many of those ideas. Nobody hijacked anything. Nobody has brainwashed the American president. He’s acting according to his own convictions and beliefs.”

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs magazine.

Life in Iraq has stopped

2007-05-08T11:35:00.000-06:00

A Conversation with Iraqi Member of Parliament Mohammed al-Dynee

Hypocrites-in-Chiefs

2007-05-08T11:34:00.000-06:00

Throughout the history almost every religion, every philosopher, every thinker, every historian, and nearly every Wiseman has feverishly abhorred hypocrisy and detested it more often and with more passion than any other behavior.

Almost 3,000 years ago, Homer said, "I detest that man, who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another." Jesus of Nazareth had such an abomination of hypocrisy that he said the hypocrites "have neglected the more important matters of the law-justice, mercy and faithfulness" (Matthew 23:23). Shakespeare also gave some insight into the underpinnings of hypocrisy, "With devotion's visage and pious action we do sugar o'er the devil himself."

Ironically, the true hypocrites never think of themselves to be hypocritical; therefore, they say one thing and do another with impunity and especially with pride. The same is also true with today’s global leadership, led by the likes of U.S President George Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and the Israeli government.

We carry such short memories, that it wasn’t even couple of months after the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which resulted in the massacre of over 1,200 Lebanese citizens, all was forgotten and forgiven. It was during this instance of, often seen, Israeli barbarism new standards of hypocrisy were set by the self-proclaimed saviors of humanity.

HYPOCRISY: With the complete blessings and support of the U.S and U.K, all hell was set loose on Lebanon and Palestine by the Israelis, because 3 Israeli soldiers were kidnapped. In reality, the so-called moral leaders have never uttered a word over the countless abductions and targeted assassinations of dozens of democratically elected Lebanese and Palestinian legislators and officials. On August 19, 2006, Israel seized Palestinian Deputy Prime Minister Naser al-Shaer, a top official of the Hamas militant group, at his home in the occupied West Bank. Not a word is wasted over the illegal and immoral incarceration of countless Lebanese and Palestinian civilians still rotting in Israeli dungeons. Not a single word is said over the collective punishment of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians.
HYPOCRITE: President Bush showed his real colors when he said, “this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom.” And with this racially-charged hypocritical outburst he belittled and generalized over 1.4 billion humans or 1/5 of humanity. But his racist comments beg even more questions. Whose ‘freedoms’ was he referring to? Did he mean Israel’s ‘freedom’ to violate international laws by freely embarking on Lebanese/Arab genocides, or it’s ‘freedom’ to legislate racist laws? Or did President Bush mean the ‘freedom’ of neo-con doctrine of pre-emptive attacks on sovereign nations like the one on Iraq, in which, since the U.S occupation 60,000-500,000 Iraqis and close to 3,500 Americans have been killed? The reality is, in 2006, President Bush openly and unapologetically supported the bloodbath of Lebanese and Palestinians, and still turns blind eye to the daily massacres of Iraqi civilians. If there is anyone who deserves to be known as a ‘fascist’, it’s him, his neo-con hawks, his lackeys like Tony Blair, and the Zionist groupies who blame everyone else but themselves for their indiscriminate and unabashed murders of thousands upon thousands of Muslims in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. Remarkably, it took them only less than 5 years to preside over all of these pogroms. The manner in which these saviors of the world are busy maligning Muslims can be directly collated to Adolph Hitler's deliberate vilification of Jews prior to World War II.
HYPOCRISY: Israel and Bush Administration arduously justified the destruction of Lebanon and the massacres of its people, under the pretext of, the Lebanese supposedly violated the UN Security Council’s (UNSC) resolution 1559. In reality, the resolution 1559 called upon “all remaining foreign forces [including Israeli] to withdraw from Lebanon.” In a direct violation of the resolution, Israel never vacated the Lebanese territory of Shebaa-Farms. Therefore, it had no legal or moral right to cry foul, especially when it had flagrantly violated 60 other UNSC resolutions relating to Israeli-Lebanese situation alone (see Appendix - A for the complete list). Hypocrites need to be cognizant of the fact that Israel violated UNSC resolution 425 (1978) for twenty two years. The resolution called upon the “Israel immediately to cease its military action against Lebanese territorial integrity and withdraw forthwith its forces from all Lebanese territory”. In an appearance on CNN’s ‘Paula Zahn Now’, the Lebanese consul general to the U.S Mohamad El-Harake shared his frustrations with the American hypocritical support of Israel at the UN Security Council. He said, “Let me tell you one thing before we finish. Israel took 22 years to implement Resolution 524, adopted in '78, to inviting Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanon. Israel couldn't wait for 1559 adopted on the 2nd of September, less than two years, giving us the possibility of implementing this among ourselves as Lebanese. This is the way Israel wants to see a strong Lebanon?” Hypocrites need to be cognizant of the fact that Israel violated UNSC resolution 425 (1978) for twenty two years. The resolution called upon the “Israel immediately to cease its military action against Lebanese territorial integrity and withdraw forthwith its forces from all Lebanese territory”. In an appearance on CNN’s ‘Paula Zahn Now’, the Lebanese consul general to the U.S Mohamad El-Harake shared his frustrations with the American hypocritical support of Israel at the UN Security Council. He said, “Let me tell you one thing before we finish. Israel took 22 years to implement Resolution 524, adopted in '78, to inviting Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanon. Israel couldn't wait for 1559 adopted on the 2nd of September, less than two years, giving us the possibility of implementing this among ourselves as Lebanese. This is the way Israel wants to see a strong Lebanon?”
HYPOCRITES: Some of Evangelical Christians shamelessly support Israel in its brutality because they believe, for the biblical prophecies (The Book of Ezekiel, Chapter 38) to come true and to prepare for the Second Coming of Jesus, Israel will have to annihilate its Arab neighbors. A 2003 Pew Research Centre poll found that 36 percent of Americans believe that the creation of the state of Israel was a step towards the Second Coming of Jesus and that Israel must be supported if this was to come true. In reality, what these religious zealots fail to mention is that the same prophetic literature prophesies a dim ending for the Jews, who will be either converted or killed off in Armageddon.
HYPOCRITES: American Zionists proudly send their children to Israel to get military training and to kill Arabs. American-media gives a flattering treatment to the American Zionists who join the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to fight the Arabs. They are revered as brave heroes. In reality, most of these heroes live in America, but they enlist only with the Israeli military. Not so surprisingly, the same media stereotypes the American Muslims as anti-American, even if they dare to participate in the humanitarian relief efforts for Lebanese and Palestinian civilians.
HYPOCRITES: During the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, on hourly bases, the vigilant American-media gave the latest count of Katyushas fired on Israel. In reality, Israel rained hundred times more weapons on Lebanon. The American-media never counted the Israeli cluster bombs, missiles, motors, rockets, and shells dropped by the Israelis on the hapless Lebanese civilians.
HYPOCRITES: The American and Jewish (Amerco-Jewish) news media eulogized and deciphered each shrapnel, every ball bearing, and every patch of grass of Israeli manicured lawns burned by the Hezbollah rockets. In reality, whenever a non-American or non-Israel media outlet showed pictorial proof of the Israeli brutality or Lebanese carnage, the Amerco-Jewish media hypocritically cried bloody-Marie and blamed the non-Amerco-Jewish media for inciting hatred against Israelis and instantly labeled them as anti-Semite.
HYPOCRITES: Amerco-Jewish news media claims to be fair and balanced. In reality, 90 percent of times, they ever so shamelessly, broadcasted a parade of ultra-Jewish diplomats who expectedly squarely blamed the Lebanese civilians for becoming victims of Israeli weapons. After the infamous 1982 massacres of Sabra and Shatila, the Jewish lobbies setup permanent institutional structures to sanitize its tarnished image and to win world opinion. Israel launched Hasbara project to win the U.S public opinion and trained its diplomats in public relations and communications. To cover-up its outed dirty secrets, Israel hired the largest U.S PR firms like NYPR to court favorable American public opinion. The Jewish propaganda machine put together groups and organizations with catchy names to marshal American support for the Israeli fascist policies. Americans for safe Israel, Christian coalition, Christian Broadcasting Network, American Jewish Congress, Christian Friends of Israel, Jews for Jesus, and AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful foreign lobby) are the most active organizations that remain busy with cloaking Israeli dirty deeds with an image of a pristine nation obsessed with humanitarian works. Then there are organizations like CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America). CAMERA, through its persistent harassment of journalists, ensures that media coverage remains pro-Israel.
HYPOCRISY: Israel and American government place themselves at the highest pedestal of morality and for the respect of law. In realty, the Human Rights Watch said the responsibility for the massacre in Qana rested "squarely with the Israeli military." Whenever Israelis killed the UN personnel, Red-Cross workers, or Lebanese civilians; the Israelis, Bush Administration, and the American-media nonchalantly dismissed the deliberate killings as accidents; even better, they blamed the Lebanese for bringing Israeli wrath upon themselves.
HYPOCRISY: Despite displacing 1 million and massacring over 1,200 Lebanese civilians during the first month of Israeli savage attack, it’s the Israelis that were portrayed as the victim by the Israelis, Bush Administration and the American-media. In reality, during the fighting 116 Israeli soldiers and only 43 Israeli civilians were killed. Israel massacred close to 28 Lebanese civilians for each Israeli civilian lost.
HYPOCRITE: In his comments, on July 31, 2006, President Bush said he wanted more than a ceasefire. "We want there to be a long-lasting peace, one that is sustainable." The reality is President Bush has blood of over 1,200 Palestinians and Lebanese on his hands. The Bush administration has ridiculed and stalled every peace effort, including Security Council ceasefire resolutions that could have saved innocent lives of hundreds of Lebanese civilians. If that wasn’t bad enough, his administration donated $210 million worth of aviation fuel to ensure that Israeli F-16s do not skip a beat in dropping bombs on Lebanese population, and expedited the supply of precision-guided bunker buster bombs for Israel to hasten the Lebanese holocaust. One such Made-in-America precision-guided bomb dropped from an Israeli F-16 massacred 54 Lebanese civilians in Qana, of which half were blossoming children.
HYPOCRISY: Israel claimed it warned the Lebanese civilians beforehand to leave. In reality, before sending out the warning, Israelis also ensured every route leading out of Southern Lebanon laid in ruins. They also made sure that every escaping vehicle, every civilian convoy flying white flags, every UN personnel carrier escorting the civilians, and every Red-Cross ambulance rescuing the civilians from the Israeli murderous campaign didn’t escape intact. Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch said, "Just because the Israeli military warned the civilians… to leave does not give it carte blanche to blindly attack." Israeli fire was also directly responsible for the cold-blooded murders of 257 UN personnel.
HYPOCRITES: American politicians and Media diligently harp on Israel being the most reliable ally and partner. In reality, the partnership had been largely one way, in favor of Israel. To date, Israel has received well over $110 billion FREE dollars in military and economic assistance from Washington.
HYPOCRITES: American politicians and Media proudly call Israel to be its closest ally. In reality, Israelis have never shied away from shedding American blood whenever it suited them. On June 8, 1967, while patrolling in international waters in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, without any warning or justification, for several hours, the USS Liberty (AGTR-5) was savagely attacked by Israeli air and naval forces. The Americans suffered 34 fatalities and 173 were wounded. To this day, not a single Israeli has been court marshaled or punished for deliberately slaughtering Americans.
HYPOCRITES: Israel and the U.S complain to no end that Hezbollah is armed by Iran and Syria. In reality, Israel has received 17 billion dollars of arms from the United States in last 10 years alone. In 2002, U.S gave $6 billion free aid to Israel. $2 billion were for Israel to buy American made weapons. $1.5 billion for military ventures to subsidize Israeli domestic armament industry. This amount doesn’t include other forms of military aid, such as free weapons and fuel for IDF.
HYPOCRITES: Pro-Israeli media repeatedly flashed Israeli propaganda videos showing infrared videos of firings of the so-called Hezbollah rockets as the Israeli spokespeople hammered their propaganda. In reality, the pro-Israeli media consistently failed to provide a neutral and reliable confirmation to support the Israeli propaganda. Experts familiar with Israeli tactics believed the alleged videos of Hezbollah rocket launches were the Oscar-Award winning self-engineered videos of the Israeli psych-ops (an Israeli military unit tasked to control and dominate the dissemination of information in favor of Israel, even through deceit and lies).
HYPOCRISY: The UN bullied by the U.S conveniently found time during the Israeli invasion to pass a Security Council resolution to threaten Iran with sanctions. In reality, the UN couldn’t muster enough courage to even request Israel to temporarily halt Lebanese genocide, so the Lebanese could have buried the rotting bodies of their loved ones.
HYPOCRITES: Israel and the U.S call Hezbollah a terrorist organization. In reality, survey after survey show that most of the world views Israel to be a terrorist state. With the exceptions of the U.S, Israel and their lackeys the Britain, no one else calls Hezbollah a terrorist organization, not even the UN or EU does.
HYPOCRITES: Israel argues, since Hezbollah emerged from and flourishes with the help Southern Lebanese population, therefore, everyone from that area should be considered and dealt as a combatant. In reality, almost every able Israeli adult either serves or has served, or is a reservist in the Israeli military. Therefore, by Israelis’ logic, every Israeli adult associated with the IDF should also be treated as legitimate combatant.
HYPOCRISY: Israeli government arms the Jewish settlers in occupied settlements with automatic guns and grenades for the supposed self-defense. In reality, the Jewish settlers mount vigilante attacks on the unarmed Palestinians. They destroy crops, uproot trees, and burn the homes of Palestinians who happened to be living there for last hundreds of years.
HYPOCRITE: The U.S presents itself as a fair and honest broker. In reality, between 1973 and 2001, the U.S used veto 33 times at the UN Security Council to sabotage Israel-specific resolutions. In addition, since the 1967 Six-Day Arab-Israeli war, the U.S has exercised its veto at the Security Council more than 90 times in support of Israel, rendering the UN totally impotent.
HYPOCRITES: Bush and his poodle Blair never get tired lecturing the whole world on the virtues of democracy. In reality, they demand the Lebanese and Palestinians to exercise their democratic rights by electing only the candidates desired by the Tel-Aviv and Washington. Since the democratically elected Lebanese and Palestinian governments are not run by the puppets of Tel-Aviv and Washington, monetary aid for public (including humanitarian) projects for the Palestinians was cut off, and Israel clamped a virtual blockade of Gaza and Lebanon. The consul general Mohamad El-Harake summarized the Israeli strategy very well to CNN’s Paula Zahn. He said, “It is with Israel always a catch-22 situation. Either you kill each other as Lebanese, or I [will] come to kill you all.”
HYPOCRITES: For several decades the British and Americans boycotted South Africa for its apartheid practices. In reality, neither the U.K, nor U.S ever utter a peep over illegal Israeli-occupation of Palestinian and Lebanese land, ethnic cleansing, and cold-blooded murders of Lebanese and Palestinians. Ironically, they declare the starvation of the Lebanese and Palestinians at the hands of Israelis as fair and legitimate.
HYPOCRISY: The U.S allows the private sector to take high-resolution satellite pictures of its own military and nuclear installations. In reality, American laws bar everyone from taking satellite pictures of Israeli military and nuclear installations.
HYPOCRITES: Upon the whims of Israel, Al-Minar, a Hezbollah T.V channel was banned in the U.S, Europe and India for allegedly spreading its propaganda. In reality, nobody says a word over the specially trained Israeli diplomats in public relations and communications -- like Alon Pinkas (a coordinator of PR efforts and the Israeli Counsel-General in New York) -- regularly winning and dinning with the America reporters and editors to disseminate the Israeli propaganda.
HYPOCRITES: If anyone, even justifiably, dares to question or oppose the Zionist mantra or their behavior he/she is instantly labeled as “anti-Semite”. In reality, Zionists call every non-Jew a “Gentile”. Those who maybe unaware of the meaning, Gentile means, Heathen, Pagan, or Uncivilized. Social stigmatism/assassination through labeling is the most commonly employed tactic by the Zionists to intimidate and harass their perceived foes.
HYPOCRITES: West never allows the whole world, especially the Germans, to forget the holocaust. In reality, for the last 60 years when it comes to Israel the West remains blind to making the 5 million Palestinians pay reparations for the holocaust.

It would be equally hypocritical to generalize every American and British and their whole media as biased in favor of Israel. U.S Congressman John Martha and the British Member of Parliament George Galloway are shinning examples of fair-minded politicians. Refreshingly, some of British news media, like ‘The Independent,’ provides unbiased coverage; occasionally, American media also exhibit glimpses of unbiased opinion. For example, August 1, 2006, in a ‘Los Angeles Times’’ Op-Ed, Adam Shatz pointed to the Israeli hypocritical humanitarian concerns, he wrote, “When Israel targets densely populated areas in hopes of killing one or a handful of militants, knowing that it may end up killing dozens of civilians, it can hardly claim to be showing concern for humanitarian law or civilian life. And by asking that we judge it by its professed intentions, rather than by its actions, Israel is asking too much of us and far too little of itself.”

Host of political satire John Stewart and the anchor of ABC World News Charles Gibson are also notable exceptions and pleasant examples of honorable and unbiased American journalists.

Maybe Andr Gide had Ehud Olmert and President Bush -- certainly not Tony Blair who merely loves to sit in Bush’s lap and wag his tail -- in mind when he observed, "The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity." Ehud Olmert flattened Lebanon under the pretext of self-defense, and President Bush flattened Afghanistan, Iraq and then helped Ehud Olmert flatten Lebanon under the pretext of self-defense and fighting terrorism. Who will fight the terror of these hypocrites?

APPENDIX - A

Following UN Security Council Resolutions directly name, condemn and/or deplore Israel for its violations. (Source: http://www.un.org/Docs/sc/unsc_resolutions.html)

Directly or indirectly asks Israel to respect Lebanese territorial integrity, sovereignty and political independence:

331, 337, 347, 425, 444, 467, 474, 490, 498, 501, 520, 549, 555, 561, 575, 583, 586, 587, 594, 599, 609, 617, 630, 639, 648, 659, 684, 701, 768, 803, 852, 1052

Deplores Israeli actions or lack of cooperation:

444, 467, 488, 517, 518

Condemns and calls upon Israel to cease military actions in Lebanese territories:

262, 270, 313, 316, 331, 347, 425, 450, 498, 501, 508

Condemns and deplores Israel for violating ceasefire and for military reprisals:

270, 280, 508, 509, 516, 517, 518, 520

Demands Israel to completely withdraw from the Lebanese territories:

242, 279, 313, 427, 501, 509, 517, 520, 587, 1559

Condemns and deplores Israel for violating Security Council resolutions:

248, 252, 256, 280, 337, 347, 444, 446, 467, 517, 520

Condemns and deplores Israel for violating Geneva Convention and Human rights Laws:

237, 248, 256, 280, 316, 347, 446, 450, 512, 513, 515, 518, 520

Deplores Israel for the interference and attacks on the UN Forces on the Israeli-Lebanese border:

427, 434, 467, 587, 1052

Demands Israel to release abducted/kidnapped Lebanese personnel:

316, 317, 347

The Winograd report's moral blindness

2007-05-08T11:24:00.000-06:00

05/08/07

Khalid Amayreh

While effectively indicting the Israeli government for "sever failure" in managing Israel's barbaric war on Lebanon last summer, the Winograd Commission report utterly and outrageously ignored the ghastly war crimes the Israeli army committed against Lebanese civilians in the course of the war.

The Winograd report castigated the Israeli government and army for the indecisive end of the war notwithstanding the widespread killings and destruction inflicted on Lebanese civilians and their civilian infrastructure, including schools, ports, power and fuel stations as well as bridges, roads and homes.

In other words, the Winograd report seemed to be blaming the Israeli army and government for not killing more Lebanese and for not destroying more Lebanese homes and probably for not dropping more cluster and uranium bombs throughout Lebanon.

For those who may have forgotten, the wehrmacht-like Israeli army and air-force killed and maimed thousands of Lebanese civilians, utterly destroyed thousands of homes and public buildings, and deliberately and knowingly massacred Lebanese civilians fleeing southern towns and villages during the war.

In the first days of that barbaric war, the Israeli air-force systematically targeted helpless civilians from the villages and hamlets of the South, such as Mirwaheen and Bayada, killing and maiming dozens of children and women. The images of the wanton slaughter were too gruesome to be described by words.

Entire families were exterminated by Israel's American supplied bombs when invading Israeli forces asked civilians to flee their villages. And when the civilians heeded the warnings, Israeli warplanes went into action, bombing the buses and vehicles carrying these hapless refugees northward toward Beirut, reducing dozens to incinerated pieces of human flesh.

The Nazi-like massacres were repeated several times throughout Lebanon, especially in the South and along the coast as Israeli warplanes targeted residential homes under the pretext that a person affiliated with Hizbullah was living there.

And the result was the extermination of entire families including toddlers, children, husbands, wives, grandmothers and grandfathers.

In addition, the Israeli air-force flattened Beirut's southern Dahiya, killing and maiming hundreds, and turning the largely residential area into a huge pile of rubble.

But the most outrageous war crime Israel committed during the war occurred in the closing days of the war when the Israeli chief of staff, Dan Halutz, ordered the air force to drop as many as 3000,000 cluster bomblets in and around residential areas throughout Lebanon.

This Nazi-like carpet bombing had a holocaustic proportions since three million bombs could, theoretically, kill at least three million children. Indeed, the killing and/or maiming of that many people would be at least half a holocaust by "Jewish standards."

The genocidal danger is, of course, far from being hypothetical. Nearly every day Lebanese civilians, including peasants, farmers, shepherds and school children are maimed and killed by these unexploded Jewish presents.

Needless to say, Israeli political and military leaders knew this fact well beforehand, which makes people like Olmert, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and Halutz bona fide war criminals very much like Nazis political and military leaders.

Shameless and criminal-minded Israeli leaders would never publicly admit that they committed horrible war crimes against innocent civilians.

A few moths ago, Likud leader Benyamin Netanyahu in an interview with al Jazeera English channel sought to justify the wanton bombing of Lebanon by citing the British RAF bombing of German cities in the closing months of WWII.

Unfortunately, the pornographically corrupt analogy went unanswered by al-Jazeera's David Frost who conducted the interview with Netanyahu.

The fact that the Winograd committee totally ignored this shameful aspect of the war is more than morally unconscionable. It is actually an unethical and immoral failure of criminal proportions since that committee gave the impression that the killing and maiming of thousands of innocent civilians, was a minor issue.

Which really indicts the Israeli society and mentality for its callous racism toward non-Jews.

It is true that Hizbullah fired dozens of Katyousha missiles on northern Israel, mainly to deter the Zionist state from committing a fully-fledged genocide against Lebanese civilians.

However, it was amply clear that Israel started the massive bombing and that whatever actions Hizbullah carried out were purely defensive.

In any case, the scandalously disproportionate and deliberate bombings of civilian targets, such as the Qana-2 massacre, can never be justified and may only be viewed as a war crime of Nazi-like proportions.

Thus, while the Winograd report may have the semblance of a credible and solemn probing committee, its willful failure to even allude to these grisly crimes committed knowingly and deliberately by the Israeli army should be viewed as a powerful indictment of the committee itself and its chairman, Judge Elyahu Winograd.

Which really shows that criminality and racism are not confined to the Israeli army and the Zionist political establishment, but are intrinsic traits defining and characterizing the entire Israeli society, including its so-called judicial system.

-###-

30 structures in unrecognized Bedouin village in Negev demolished

2007-05-08T11:20:00.000-06:00

Just another day of ethnic cleansing...
---
Last update - 20:00 08/05/2007

30 structures in unrecognized Bedouin village in Negev demolished

By Mijal Grinberg, Haaretz Correspondent

30 structures, among them shacks and tents, were demolished on Tuesday in the unrecognized Bedouin village of Al-Twayil in the Negev.

The Council of Unrecognized Villages said the demolitions left 100 people with no roof over their heads.

The village, north of Be'er Sheva, has been in a struggle with the authorities for many years.

After the establishment of the State of Israel, when Israel's Arabs were subject to martial law, the families of the village were moved to the nearby areas of Lahura and Lakiya, but they were unable to remain due to claims on the land by other families, leading many of them to return to their original land over the past 20 years.

Following the demolitions, the Israel Lands Authority said it evacuated 24 "invasions" in the area and that "these invasions have taken place for the seventh time this year, to the same place."

"The invaders have homes in Lakiya," the authority said, and added that they had "evacuated tents, livestock shelters, and sheds."

Canada partners with Soviet era torturers

2007-05-08T10:56:00.000-06:00

Afghani Blog (afghaniblog) wrote,
@ 2007-05-08 09:15:00

Eric Margolis

In 1979 the Soviet KGB created a mirror-image secret police for its Afghan puppet government – the KhAD.

KhAD was famous for: Prisoners being flayed alive, thrown into vats of sulphuric acid and psychological tortures (long isolation in darkness, mock executions and psychotropic drugs.) These psychological tortures are routinely used today by the CIA.

In 2001, once the Northern Alliance took Kabul, the KhAD, rechristened NDS, was quickly re-established. Today, an estimated 60% of NDS personnel are former KhAD agents

Ottawa's deal this week with Kabul for inspection of NDS prisoners is a sham. The KhAD had the same empty "agreement" with human rights groups in the 1980s.

Now Ottawa is hand in glove with the Communist Party's veteran torturers.

AfghaniBlog:

Canadian Gov: “Extraordinary Rendition” is legal

-----------------------------------------------------

Torture a Kabul speciality

Ottawa's deal to inspect prisoners shows it hasn't learned from war history in Afghanistan

By ERIC MARGOLIS

How did Canada, one of the world's most respected, law-abiding nations, become a party to the torture of prisoners in Afghanistan and a violator of the Geneva Conventions?

The story begins in 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

SOVIET KhAD

The Soviet KGB created a mirror-image secret police for its Afghan puppet government, KhAD.

KhAD sought to eradicate all opposition to the Communists. It also ran the education system and religious establishment. KhAD quickly became notorious, even in a famously brutal society, for its cruelties.

All political prisoners -- that is, anyone who opposed the Communists -- were subjected to systematic tortures. These ranged from garden variety beatings, pulling of fingernails, near-drowning and electric shocks to more refined cruelties.

Prisoners were flayed alive, thrown into vats of sulphuric acid, blinded, buried alive, burned with gasoline, or slowly frozen in refrigerated rooms.

Psychological tortures -- sleep deprivation, long isolation in darkness, sound assault, mock executions and psychotropic drugs -- were also used by KhAD under KGB supervision. The same tortures, known as "enhanced interrogation," are routinely used today by the CIA.

The Communists killed two million Afghans.

CANADIAN REACTION

Canada turned its back and refused to aid the mujahedeen battling Soviet occupation.

After the Soviets withdrew in 1989, the newborn Taliban movement drove the remaining Afghan Communists -- rebranded the Northern Alliance -- into the far northeast.

2001 REIGNITES KhAD

In 2001, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, allied itself to the Northern Alliance, and overthrew the Taliban. A figurehead, Hamid Karzai, was put in power.

Real power, however, was held by the Communist-dominated Northern Alliance.

Once the Northern Alliance took Kabul, the KhAD, rechristened NDS, was quickly re-established. The old Communist torturers and war criminals went back into business.

Today, an estimated 60% of NDS personnel are former KhAD agents. Canadian and U.S. forces fighting to pacify southern Afghanistan have been routinely handing captives and suspects over to the NDS secret police -- in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions.

EXPOSURE

This dirty secret was finally exposed to Canadians by a major Globe and Mail investigation.

It exposed Ottawa's childish claims of having assurances from the Afghan Communist secret police -- which had murdered or maimed tens of thousands of victims -- to treat prisoners humanely.

HOW CANADA GOT INTO THIS

How did Canada get into this mess?

Conservatives in Ottawa saw a chance to win new voters by whipping up jingoism in a jolly little war against "evil" Muslims that was supposed to be a slam dunk.

Chest-thumping generals leapt before they looked. The men in Ottawa responsible for getting Canadians stuck ever deeper in this ugly conflict had no knowledge whatsoever about Afghanistan, its tribal politics, or history.

Senior officers and politicians who claim not to have known they were handing over prisoners to the Afghan secret police for torture are either stunningly ignorant or lying.

I guess they never read Rudyard Kipling's famous admonition to British soldiers fallen wounded in Afghanistan, "save your last bullet for yourself."

This writer, who has covered many guerrilla wars in Asia, Africa and Central America, repeatedly warned in recent years that the longer Canadian troops stayed in Afghanistan, the more they would become brutalized and involved in war crimes. Such is the nature of all guerrilla wars. Has no one in Ottawa ever studied Algeria, Lebanon or Vietnam?

FAIRY TALE TORTURE

Canadians who still believe the fairy tale that their forces in Afghanistan are "nation building" or doing social work should reflect on the grim fate of prisoners their soldiers handed over to the mercies of the Afghan secret police.

Ottawa's deal this week with Kabul for inspection of NDS prisoners is a sham. The KhAD had the same empty "agreement" with human rights groups in the 1980s.

It's bad enough Canada's troops are defending Afghanistan's warlords who run its booming heroin industry.

Now Ottawa is hand in glove with the Communist Party's veteran torturers.

Well done, Ottawa.

Rate decisions poised to squeeze dollar

2007-05-08T10:49:00.000-06:00

By Richard Beales in New York Mon May 7, 12:56 PM ET

The dollar slipped against leading currencies yesterday as traders looked ahead to three central bank interest rate decisions due on Wednesday and Thursday.

The euro took a modest boost from the victory of market-friendly Nicolas Sarkozy in the French presidential elections, analysts said.

With a London holiday contributing to subdued activity, most traders were focused on this week's central bank meetings. US, UK and eurozone rate decisions are expected to deliver a combination of news that is negative for the dollar, already softer after a below-par US jobs report on Friday.

"The softness of US employment data has spurred some talk that the [Federal Open Market Committee] will acknowledge the economic slowdown in more concrete terms and again soften its risk assessment," said Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman.

The FOMC meets on Wednesday and is expected to keep the overnight Fed funds rate steady at 5.25 per cent.

Any hint that the Federal Reserve is becoming more worried about decelerating growth, or less concerned about persistent inflation, is likely to weigh on the dollar.

In Europe, the stronger economic growth picture and potentially rising interest rates could lift sterling and the euro against the dollar. The Bank of England is widely expected to lift UK rates by a quarter point to 5.5 per cent on Thursday.

On the same day, most analysts expect the European Central Bank to foreshadow a June rate rise while leaving rates unchanged at 3.75 per cent.

"Note that the ECB is comfortable with a strengthening euro to the extent that it helps combat inflation as long as it poses no challenges for exporters," said Ashraf Laidi, chief foreign exchange analyst at CMC Markets.

The euro rose 0.2 per cent against the dollar to $1.3618 by late morning in New York, still short of the all-time high of about $1.3680.

At $1.9952, the pound was less than 0.2 per cent higher compared with Friday's close. The yen strengthened more than 0.2 per cent to trade at Y119.90 to the dollar.

Commodity-based currencies were among Monday's biggest gainers, with the Australian dollar, South African rand and Canadian dollar all outperforming.

The loonie, the Canadian currency, was nearly 0.5 per cent up on the dollar at $1.1027. The currency has gained about 7 per cent in the past three months.

The strength stems from the commodity-driven economy and a shift in thinking on Canadian interest rates, according to Alan Ruskin, chief international strategist at RBS Greenwich Capital.

"The market was thinking about rate cuts, but now it has started to toy with the idea of rate hikes," he said.

Is this the end of American economic supremacy?

2007-05-08T10:48:00.001-06:00

04.05.2007

The Economist published a piece entitled “Come in number one, your time is up” about America’s declining global status. The scale of decline is already significant.

American economy: no longer number one

America used to be the world’s biggest exporter but The Economist points out that China’s merchandise exports exceeded America’s in the second half of last year and even more amazingly, China produced more cars than the United States. Very recently it has been reported that Toyota now produce more cars than General Motors, which gives a hollow ring to the old saying “What’s good for General Motors is good for America”.

More surprisingly, but understandable considering its perilous state, the dollar, although preferred by Central Banks as a reserve currency, is no longer the favourite cash for households and firms. There are now more euro notes and coins in circulation than there are dollars.

In the international bond market, the euro, according to the Economist, has displaced the dollar as the main currency.

The Financial Times have separately calculated that the Wall Street stock market capitalisation has now been eclipsed by Europe if you include Russia.

Tongue-in-cheek, the Economist points out that America hasn’t lost first place in everything. By a long way it’s the world’s biggest debtor nation, it uses the most energy and has the biggest prison population!

American economy: losing out to China

It’s fairly evident that the American empire is in inevitable decline, like all empires that have gone before it. As we said in the previous issue, the current rate of China’s economic growth, if maintained, will cause it to double in size about every eight years whereas the developed world is not likely to double in size quicker than every 25 years. Just draw the graph and see the exponential difference if over the next 25 years China doubles, redoubles and redoubles again whilst America doubles only once. Think about the Chindia middle class, growing in size and their standards of living equalising globally as the developed world’s standard of living probably declines to allow the unstoppable developing world’s to improve.

Interestingly, Woody Brock’s most recent published series of essays started with an essay entitled “YEAR 2006 – A GLOBAL TIPPING POINT” – annus horribilis for the USA – we would not wish to steal any of Woody’s thunder by reporting in the newsletter what he may well be addressing in his talk on 25th June, but we can repeat his executive summary on this chapter:

“This past year proved to be a significant tipping point in the global balance of power. More specifically, it is the year in which it became clear that politically, militarily and economically the relative power of the United States has begun significantly to decline. This reverses the 25-year trend towards US ascendancy that emerged from the nadir of post-war US power in 1980. In analyzing the “relative power” of the US, we avoid ambiguity by utilizing the formal definition of relative power based upon the work of Messrs. John Nash and John Harsanyi in game theory.

Among other findings, we note that 2006 was the year when, not only did the US show many signs of weakness – increased risk aversion most notably – but also Russia and China each evidenced far more signs of strength than most observers expected."

By John Robson & Andrew Selsby at RH Asset Management Limited, as published in the Onassis Newsletter, a fortnightly newsletter that gives insight into the investment markets.

For more from RHAM, visit http://www.rhasset.co.uk/

Rehabilitating US Imperialism

2007-05-08T10:42:00.000-06:00

Review of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower

by Ashley Smith / May 8th, 2007

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US stood triumphant as the lone superpower with no peer rivals and in a unique position to reshape the international system in its interests.

However, as Brzezinski notes in his new book, Second Chance, “barely fifteen years after the wall came down, the once proud and globally admired America was widely viewed around the world with intense hostility, its legitimacy and credibility in tatters, its military bogged down…, its formerly devoted allies distancing themselves, and world-wide public opinion polls documenting widespread hostility toward the United States.”

While Brzezinski excoriates the Bush Administration for what he calls its “catastrophic leadership,” he does not put the current imperial crisis merely at the feet of the toxic Texan. Instead, he argues that the last three Presidents have failed to craft a new grand strategy for the US and each in turn contributed to the current crisis.

As the former National Security Advisor to the Carter Administration, Brzezinski is no leftist. He is perhaps the most insightful imperialist thinker produced by Cold War liberalism and the most important one to confront America’s imperial crisis and propose a strategy to rehabilitate it.

Brzezinski reviews the records of the last three presidents attempt to shape the emerging new world system. To lead the world he argues a new grand strategy would have to take shape around are three priorities: (1) shaping the power relationships toward a more cooperative global system; (2) containing civil wars, preventing terrorism and halting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; and (3) ameliorating rising global inequality and spreading ecological crisis.

According to Brzezinski, the first Bush Administration did not develop a new grand strategy to address these priorities, relying on a vague slogan that the US was committed to a “New World Order.”

Amidst the dramatic transformations brought about the collapse of the Russian Empire, Bush I scrambled to keep up and essentially relied on conventional great power diplomacy to maintain the status quo among great and lesser powers, not lead their transformation.

Brzezinski singles out Bush’s failure to capitalize on its military victory in the Gulf War as his presidency’s “original sin.” He did not turn military success into a political victory to address the regions problems especially the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Instead Bush maintained the regional status quo.

Even worse he established military bases in Saudi Arabia and maintained sanctions against Iraq. All of these failures would provoke Arab anger and provide fertile grounds for the appeals of Al Qaeda against the US.

Brzezinski is no less scathing toward the Clinton Administration for failing to come up with a grand strategy. Clinton instead hoped that economic globalization would of its own accord erode conflicts between nations in the world system.

Brzezinksi argues that this naïve economic determinism led the Clinton administration to inadequately attend to statecraft among great and regional powers. Moreover, Clinton’s trumpeting of globalization left the US vulnerable to criticism and resistance from victims of multinationals, IMF/World Bank structural adjustment programs, and the Asian economic crisis.

Globalization’s inequalities both eroded US legitimacy and sparked what Brzezinski calls a populist movement dramatically expressed through the Seattle protest in 1999 that shut down the World Trade Organization meeting.

Brzezinski attacks the Clinton Administration for encouraging America’s elites to indulge in “social hedonism.” He argues that the ruling class’ unwilling to pay taxes or subordinate itself to international treaties and rules provoked denunciations of the US as a callous hyper-power. Its behavior risked fraying the strategic alliance with other global leaders, especially Europe.

George Bush’s foreign policy turned a problematic position into a catastrophe. Neoconservative advisers shaped his administration’s strategy in the wake of 9/11. In place of fostering alliances engaged in deterrence Bush announced his doctrine of preemptive war carried through by the US, whether other powers came along or not, telling other regimes “you’re either with us or against.”

Brzezinski argues that the neocons have foolishly narrowed US policy to the Middle East ignoring other strategic interests. Moreover, they demonized Moslems and Arabs and turned the US into an open partisan of Israel compromising any semblance of neutrality in negotiations over the Palestinian crisis.

As a result of Bush’s policies and wars, Brzezinski concludes that the regime has done “calamitous damage to America’s global standing,” caused a “geopolitical disaster” of broken alliances, destabilized Central Asia and the Middle East, increased the stimulus for terrorist counter-attacks, and encouraged rather than deterred the spread of weapons of mass destruction as all those under threat from the US race to build a bomb out of self-protection.

Most troubling for Brzezinski is how Bush has encouraged Russia, China and “rogue states” like Iran to begin forming a potential rival alliance that could threaten the primacy of American leadership of Europe in shaping the world system.

In a startling passage, he summarizes the consequences of Bush’s “suicidal statecraft”: “Europe is now increasingly alienated. Russia and China are both more assertive and more in step. Asia is turning away and organizing itself while Japan is quietly considering how to make itself more secure. Latin American democracy is becoming populist and anti-American. The Middle East is fragmenting and on the brink of explosion. The world of Islam is inflamed by rising religious passion and anti-imperialist nationalisms. Throughout the world, public opinion polls show that U.S. policy is widely feared and even despised.”

Brzezinski concludes that the US must conduct a regime change, replacing the Bush administration and its neocon policy advisers with foreign policy realists and chart a new grand strategy capable of repairing the damage done by the last three Presidents. The 2008 election is America’s second chance and, given the dire predicament of its current imperial crisis, he says there will not be a third.

Brzezinski proposes that the US take up Human Rights as the guiding principle of a new grand strategy. By focusing on human rights, the US can undue its lost legitimacy, win over its alienated allies, and rehabilitate itself in the eyes of those suffering in poverty and aspiring to fulfill the nationalist aspirations.

To carry this through, the US must rebuild its alliance with Europe and incorporate China, Japan, and Russia into formations like NATO and a rehabilitated WTO, thereby preventing the development of imperial rivals.

The US must conceive of its project as promoting national interests that are also in the interests of the global community. It must impose self-restraint on the social hedonism of the ruling class in order to spend money and build international formation that implement global policies to further the world’s common interests.

The price of failing to implement this strategy is two fold. First, the US will spur Russia and China among others to form a rival axis of power that could tip the world toward larger imperial wars. Second, it will antagonize the emerging populist rebellion against global inequality.

This widening inequality is producing “revolutionaries-in-waiting … the equivalent of the militant proletariat of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries …. [The] political awakening is now global in geographic scope, comprehensive in social scale …, strikingly youthful in demographic profile and thus receptive to rapid political mobilization, and transnational in sources of inspiration because of the cumulative impact of literacy and mass communications. As a result, modern populist passions can be aroused even against a distant target, despite the absence of a unifying doctrine such as Marxism …. Only by identifying itself with the idea of universal human dignity—with its basic requirement of respect for culturally diverse political, social, and religious emanations—can America overcome the risk that the global political awakening will turn against it.”

Brzezinski’s book is a liberal manifesto for rehabilitating imperialism. But it relies on a fundamental, faulty assumption that the world’s nations, both great powers and war torn nations, can be led by the US as a global commonweal.

While it is true that Bush’s incompetent and reckless strategy exacerbated conflicts between rival powers, it did not create them. As Lenin argued in Imperialism, capitalism compels great powers to compete with one another generating all sorts of conflicts and inevitably military conflagrations. Only this competitive dynamic can in the final instance explain the increasing antagonisms between China, Russia and the US in particular that have developed in the wake of the Cold War.

Moreover, while Brzezinski’s program of social reform to address global inequality and climate change might produce at best more aid, a revitalized peace core, and implementation of the Kyoto Protocols, it will not address the systemic causes of the world’s growing problems.

The period of our rulers providing guns and butter is long gone. The competitive pressures of the capitalist race to the bottom preclude fundamental social reforms because of the vicious competition built into the system and dramatically increased since the 1970s.

Brzezinski’s grand strategy of human rights may position the US better to win its way in the system than the previous three failed ones, but it will not overcome the imperialist and exploitative pressure built into capitalism.

The alternative to these lies in precisely what he most fears, what he calls rising populism or at other moments the tyranny of the majority. Only such a mass movement from below can win social reforms.

And for that new rebellion against social inequality to win and replace capitalist imperialism and class exploitation with genuine democratic control of society by the majority, it will need both Marxism and revolutionary parties. That which Brzezinski wants to preempt is the only solution—worker’s revolution.

Ashley Smith is a writer and activist in Burlington, Vermont.

Impeach Bush Vol. 3 - War Profiteers and Democrat Pussies

2007-05-08T10:29:00.000-06:00

Music by Eminem, Song: Business. WA... Music by Eminem, Song: Business. WARNING - This video contains graphic war photos, expletive language, and violent content which some may find gruesome and offensive.

Condoleeza Rice's transformational diplomacy doctrine is nothing more than an excuse for us to go to war with every country on the planet and pour billions of dollars into the pockets of the financiers that put Bush into office: specifically, the war profiteers such as Halliburton and Blackwater and the major oil companies who want to take the oil from the country once its invaded. The Bush administration personally has no financial incentive whatsoever to impose any diplomatic doctrines.

Sending our soldiers to fight an engineered war for oil company and defense contractors to make money is pure treason, abuse of power, crime against humanity and is rock solid ground for impeachment. It is the reason that the impeachment process was put into place.

Meanwhile, the Democrats in office refuse to impeach Bush and Cheney because Nancy Pelosi won't put it on the table.

April 09, 2007

Dick Durbin, Mike Gravel and Sibel Edmonds: When Silence is treason

2007-05-08T10:25:00.000-06:00

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Presidential candidate Mike Gravel gave Scott Horton a terrific interview today. I recommend you listen to the whole thing.

Gravel mentions Dick Durbin's recent statement that, because he was on the Senate Intelligence Committee, he knew that the egadministration was telling WMD lies prior to the Iraq invasion, but that Durbin couldn't say anything. Gravel says that's a lie - and that he, Gravel, is living proof. In 1971, Gravel read out the Pentagon Papers on the Senate floor, entering them into the Congressional Record, and later won a court case, proving that he was right, and within his rights, to do that.

I've been meaning to bring up the Durbin brouhaha in the context of Sibel Edmonds case (of course). Downstairs, I'll tell you why it's relevant (and also a heads up about some other Sibel-related stuff coming down the pike later in the week)

********

In case you missed it, late last month, Senator Dick Durbin dropped this 'bombshell' on the Senate floor (C&L has the video, courtesy of Olbermann):

""A few hundred feet away from here, in a closed room, carefully guarded, the Intelligence Committee was meeting on a daily basis for top secret breifings about the information we were receiving and the information we had in the Intelligence Committee was not the same information being given to the American people.

I couldn't believe it. Members of this administration were in active, heated debate over whether aluminum tubes really meant the Iraqis were developing nuclear weapons. Some within the administration saying of course not, it's not the same kind of aluminum tube, at the same time that members of the administration were telling the American people to be fearful of mushroom shaped clouds.

I was angry about it. Frankly, I couldn't do much about it. Because you see in the Intelligence Committee we were sworn to secrecy. We can't walk outside the door and say, "The statement made yesterday by the White House is in direct contradiction to classified information that's being given to this Congress." We can't do that. We couldn't make those statements.

And so, in my frustration, I sat here on the floor of the Senate and listened to this heated debate about invading Iraq, thinking the American people are being misled, they are not being told the truth. And that's why I joined 22 of my colleagues in voting no. I didn't feel at the time that the American people knew the real facts.

So what happened? We invaded, turned loose hundreds, if not thousands of people scouring Iraq for these weapons of mass destruction, never found one of them. Looked for nuclear weapons, no evidence whatsoever."

Of course, that means that everyone in the committee knew that the American public was being lied to - and nobody said anything, until now.

It turns out, apparently, that Durbin was either lying or mistaken when he said that he "couldn't do much about it."

In the interview that Presidential candidate Mike Gravel gave to Scott Horton yesterday, Gravel explained that "any member of Congress can release all kinds of stuff if they want to, in conscience, that they think the people should know." Gravel knows of which he speaks, in 1971, he put the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional record, and was vindicated in a Supreme Court ruling.

Here's a partial transcript (mine) from the interview:

"Mike Gravel: (22 mins)Are you familiar with what happened with (Senator Dick Durbin), making the statement that he was conflicted because he could observe the fact that the President was saying one statement to the people and that the members of Congress were briefed on something else?

Scott Horton: Right - in the run up to the war... Durbin was on the Intelligence Committee and he knew that what they were telling us was lies.

MG: Right - now let's analyze that for a minute, and we'll see something very interesting. First off, Dick Durbin, making that statement, right now, in my mind is very courageous. Here's a guy, who has now got his conscience, and he's reacting to it, and made it public. What he's doing is destroying the argument of Hillary, by God, and Edwards - all of the people who voted for the war, at the same time when he knew there was a shell-game going on, and when Hillary or any of the others, say 'Well, if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn't have voted for it' - well, they knew *then* That's what Durbin's statement says - they knew then! But what Durbin did unfortunately not know was that the Supreme Court ruled in my case, Gravel vs US Government, about the Pentagon Papers, that a member of Congress cannot be held responsible for the secrecy of the administration. And so, any member of Congress can release all kinds of stuff if they want to, in conscience, that they think the people should know!

SH: So Durbin's excuse that he would have gone to prison if he'd told us is null?

MG: Just the opposite! And of course, he said this statement, he said: "I thought that if I released this secret information, that people would die." Well, by not releasing it, people have died. And he was not at risk for anything that he might have revealed. And none of them would be, because the operative law is what the Supreme Court ruled in my case. The problem is there's nobody, nobody has dared to do anything about this since I was in office. And even after the courtcase, I released stuff - (inaudible) and other things.

It's just very sad, the level of timdity, and the lack of conscience. I say 'lack of conscience' because this is exactly what we had during the Vietnam era - people detached themselves from the loss of life. They don't appreciate the fact that... you know, when Murtha came out and was saying 'these people are dying, this is not right' - this was quite a change of heart for him, because he's been one of the major forces in Congress supporting the military-industrial-complex which brought about the Iraq war. So, it's the timidity, it's the lack of getting your moral sights up until you realize what you are doing with the power that you have, as a Senator. So, the game-playing is on, and that's what I'm trying to cut through. I'll be able to cut through it Scott, I'll tell you, if after my press conference, next Monday, the peace groups get organized, and make a showing at the press conference, and then turn around and make this the cause, I'll have the details all lined out, what the leadership is supposed to do. I'll tell you what, they'll respond!"

(As I say, go check out the rest of the interview, lots of great sensible-sounding stuff there, including his plan to end the war (by taking specific action steps in Congress), and details about his upcoming press conference (Monday) etc.)

Which brings me to Sibel Edmonds. Again.

Sibel has told her story (that Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Marc Grossman and Eric Edelman are involved in treasonous activity) to the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Some day - soon if we can get Henry Waxman to hold hearings - not only will we learn everything she knows, we'll also have to consider that many people knew all the details all along, and did... nothing! They stood by, knowing what they knew, while Richard Perle was Chairman of the Defense Policy Board. They stood by, knowing what they knew, while Doug Feith was running the Office of Special Plans, leading us into war.

It's enough to make me angry.

And to be clear, at the time, Sibel's claims weren't just 'allegations' - they'd already been investigated and proven. As Sibel said recently:

"This has been going on for five years, and it's not a case (that needs) to be investigated, that part has already been done by the Senate Judiciary Committee, by the DoJ's Inspector Generals office, so it just have to have a hearing and just put an end to it and see some oversight and accountability as a result. "

In other Sibel news, as you know, we've been demanding that Waxman hold hearings into her case - hearings that he promised would occur when Dems were in the majority. Details are available at Let Sibel Edmonds Speak. At some point later this week, we will have some new content being released, and when that gets published, we'll start with the phones again - calling Waxman's office demanding hearings. We'll need your help.

(let me know if you want to be added to an email list for announcements)

(DU, DKOS - please go kick, rec, if you think that's appropriate)

Israel's F-22 Raptor

2007-05-08T10:21:00.000-06:00

May 6, 2007

Xymphora in full:

Outsourcing
William S. Cohen, who as far as I can tell is just an private citizen who runs a lobby company with some iffy members, has assured Israel that the United States would be inclined to allow the sale of F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jets to the Israeli Air Force if Israel’s security were in jeopardy. Since Israel’s security, by definition, is always in jeopardy, Cohen is in effect announcing that the American government will turn over yet another part of its most important military secret technology to Israel (and thus, to China, as Israel immediately peddles all secret American military technology to China). Cohen’s trip was like a full state visit, with meetings with all the highest Israeli mucky-mucks, and discussions on Iran. Besides working for Israel, you have to assume Cohen is working for the manufacturers of the extremely expensive planes, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, who are anticipating the need to find new markets for them. Needless to say, the ‘sale’ of such planes to Israel would be funded by American taxpayer money. It is comforting to know that the concept of outsourcing has now been taken to its logical conclusion, with lobbyists now setting American military policy.

heh.

I suspect that Xymphora was just trying to get me to write the rest of his post for him... here goes:

Sibel Edmonds from her Hijacking of a Nation, Part 2:

The American Turkish Council (ATC)

Operating tax-free and under the radar is one of the most powerful “non-profit” associations in the U.S., the American Turkish Council (ATC). Some who are familiar with its operations and players describe it as ‘Mini AIPAC;’ this description aces it. ATC followed the AIPAC model; with the direct help of AIPAC & JINSA, it created a base out of which to stretch its tentacles, reaching the highest echelons of our government. While the ATC is an association in name and in charter, the reality is that it and other affiliated associations are the U.S. government, lobbyists, foreign agents, and MIC. Investigative journalist, John Stanton, correctly describes the ATC as an extraordinary group of elite and interconnected Republicans, Democrats and corporate and military heavyweights who are spearheading one of the most ambitious strategic gambits in U.S. history.

Included in ATC’s management, board of directors, and advisors; in addition to Turkish individuals of ‘interest;’ is a dizzying array of U.S. individuals. The ATC is led by Ret. General Brent Scowcroft, who serves as Chairman of the Board; George Perlman of Lockheed Martin, the Executive Vice President; other board members include: Former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, Ret. General Elmer Pendleton, Ret. General Joseph Ralston (Cohen Group), Ret. Col. Preston Hughes, Alan Colegrove of Northrop Grumman, Frank Carlucci of Carlyle Group, Christine Vick of Cohen Group, Representative Robert Wexler, Former Rep. Ed Whitfield…Basically many formers; statesmen, ‘dime a dozen generals,’ and representatives.

On the members - paying clients – side; their list includes all the MIC’s who’s who, such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman; the Washington Lobby scene’s who’s who; The Cohen Group, The Livingston Group, Washington Group International…
[]

One Stop Shop: The Cohen Group

Like many other former statesmen, William Cohen, former Secretary of Defense, dived into the business of lobbying and consulting, and created his own Washington firm, The Cohen Group, which works for some of the largest companies in the defense industry, such as Lockheed Martin, and serves numerous foreign players. The Cohen Group is one of the primary and most active members of the American Turkish Council (ATC). Cohen’s client, Lockheed Martin, happens to be on the board of ATC, in addition to being listed as ATC’s top paying client.

The group claims on its Website that its principals have "a century and a half of combined experience in the Congress, the Defense Department, the State Department, the White House, and state and local governments" and that they “have developed extensive expertise and relationships with key international political, economic, and business leaders and acquired invaluable experiences with the individuals and institutions that affect our clients' success abroad.” Abroad indeed. With a few ‘dime a dozen generals’ and former statesmen, the firm owes its phenomenal speedy success to interests ‘abroad’ and of course, the MIC! Let’s look, with great amazement, I hope, at how this ingenious lobby venture serves as foreign agent for several influences without having to register as such; with complete immunity against any scrutiny.
[]
The Cohen Group is an excellent case, illustrating the futility of FARA, since the firm does not have to be registered. They can claim that Turkey is not their ‘direct’ client; they can argue that they are not getting paid ‘directly’ by the government of Turkey or any other foreign entity or government. They certainly can; no matter that Grossman receives hundreds of thousands of dollars from a dubious Turkish company. Does Cohen discount Grossman’s Vice Chairmanship salary accordingly? No matter that half a million dollars per year from their client Lockheed Martin is mainly for services provided to Turkey, and having the group’s second chairman serve on Lockheed’s board is another way to get around all restrictions. The incestuous relationship twists and turns: The Cohen Group on the board of ATC, The Cohen Group a paying member client of ATC, The Cohen Group as Lockheed’s lobbyist, Cohen’s men on the board of Lockheed, Lockheed on the board of ATC, Lockheed also a paying client of ATC…How is your head; spinning yet?

well done, xymph. you got me.

De-Authorize the War Now, No Residual Troops

2007-05-08T10:15:00.000-06:00

Gov. Bill Richardson

05.04.2007

I first called for de-authorization of the war in Iraq in January, and I have repeated that call all around the country -- because I believe immediate de-authorization and removing all of our troops from Iraq this year is the only way to end Bush's war.

Congress should de-authorize the war today and demand that the President begin redeploying our troops.

There would be no need to negotiate the withdrawal with the President, and he could not veto the resolution.

The time has has come for Congress to stand up to this President who refuses to recognize that his war is bleeding our military and weakening our country. He believes mere stubbornness is a foreign policy and that he can just ignore the will of the American people. In the interest of our national security, he must be stopped.

Congress has the ability to end this war under the War Powers Act -- let's not wait or waver while more people die. And de-authorizing the war should mean removing all our troops. Every last one.

This is essential, because our presence in Iraq worsens the violence and enables our enemies to portray us as imperialist occupiers. If we announce that we are getting out completely, we undercut this propaganda. We need to get all our troops out of the crossfire of this civil war.

Anything less than immediate de-authorization, and beginning the process to remove all troops, is not a real plan to end this war. I know this region well, and understand how people there see the world.

I have served as US Ambassador to the UN, President Clinton's Special Envoy, and as Secretary of Energy. I have been there. I even met with Saddam Hussein and secured the release of hostages. I applaud Senators Clinton and Byrd's steps to begin the process of getting us out of this disastrous war. But I urge them and their colleagues in Washington to commit to the full task at hand:

Immediate de-authorization, and the removal of all U.S. troops.

The imperial overreach

2007-05-08T10:12:00.000-06:00

H.D.S. GREENWAY

By H.D.S. Greenway | May 8, 2007

LISTENING TO President Bush's petulant tones lambasting Congress for questioning his war, I had a feeling that what we are seeing in Washington has been going on for close to a thousand years in the political tradition in which America was formed. Rulers reach for more and more power until their parliaments and barons think things have gone far enough and begin clipping regal wings.

This has not been a good spring for the president. Democrats, and even some Republicans, are beginning to think about choking off the war in Iraq; the Supreme Court didn't like his closing down environmental regulations; his Justice Department is under scrutiny as never before for conducting politically motivated purges. The dark prince, Vice President Dick Cheney, mutters repeatedly that the president is all powerful, and that Congress should have little to say about war.

--MORE--

How much more of this lying can we take?

2007-05-08T10:00:00.000-06:00

May 7, 2007

In the Bible there is a passage found in Acts 5 verses 1 to 11 that tells of a man named Ananias and his wife, Sapphira, who lied about a land transaction in which they purposely kept money that was not theirs. Then they both died immediately after they had lied to Jesus' disciple Peter about the transaction.

That was in Bible times. Today the American people hear so many lies, especially from our government officials in the Bush administration, that it becomes just another day in which we hear more lies. If every member of the Bush administration died suddenly right after telling a lie to the American people there might possibly be only a few people left standing.

Vice President Dick Cheney has lost all his credibility regarding his comments on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. His statements almost always turn out to be untrue. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recently used the words "I do not recall" approximately 71 times when testifying before Congress. The truth has and does not come forward from these officials' mouths. It has been reported by the press that Gonzales rehearsed his "I do not recall" for over 10 days before going before Congress to testify.

Military personnel under the Bush administration have lied about the Pat Tillman case. The first report said that he was killed by the enemy. They tried unsuccessfully to push that lie into reality, but the truth came out that he was killed by "friendly fire," which turned out to be from Tillman's fellow soldiers.

A soldier testified before a Congressional committee he was ordered not to reveal the truth about Tillman's death to his family. At the hearing, Tillman's brother Kevin criticized the government for "intentional falsehoods" and "deliberate and careful misrepresentations."

Jessica Lynch also testified before that same Congressional committee and told them that the story that was told about her heroics was all false. The military was trying to sell it to the public as a story that would help bolster the American citizens' patriotism.

These lies go even deeper. The Bush administration attempted to hire journalists who would lie about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and tell nothing except how well everything was put in favor of the U.S.'s occupation.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) got caught up in a lie when he told Wolf Blitzer on CNN that Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, could walk the streets of Baghdad in Iraq without any protection such as a full "armored" Humvee, a bullet-proof vest or soldiers surrounding him for protection. Within 30 minutes of his statement, a well-known and respected reporter from CNN in Baghdad challenged McCain about his statement.

McCain, trying to save himself from the lie he told, went to Baghdad about a week later and tried to walk the streets of Baghdad himself. He found out that he needed a vest, about 100 soldiers, four full-armored Humvees surrounding him and two Apache helicopters flying overhead. This is the same protection that was afforded Gen. Petraeus when he walked the streets of Baghdad.

I am amazed the lengths that some politicians go through to continue their lies. McCain looked very uneasy as he was walking at an accelerated pace.

I do not believe that U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich's attempt to bring impeachment proceedings against Cheney is a very good idea. But I do understand the frustration he feels when Cheney continues to lie to the American people about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kucinich wants the lying to end. Frustration about this war not only affects the American public, but the senators and representatives also.

The lies that were told to U.S. citizens by Bush as to why we needed to go into Iraq have cost the lives of over 3,300 American troops, and over 25,000 military personnel have been wounded.

The war is in its fifth year since those first lies were told, and there is no progress to report. The Maliki-led government of Iraq has not reached any of the goals set by the U.S. government.

Only with God's helping hand and Congress' strong will and perseverance will this war come to an end. Bush and his administration are determined to continue this war in Iraq and Afghanistan and will not agree to bring our troops home. It is imperative that Congress has to come up with a solution to finally end these wars in two countries.

All the slogans and insults that most Republicans have used or are still using are getting tiresome and very stale -- "We will not cut and run," "We will stay the course" and the latest one, "We will not set a date for surrender."

Have you noticed, it is the Republicans using the word "surrender"? The Democrats have not used that word. They are calling for an orderly deployment of our U.S. troops and an end to this unjust war started with lies.

It will be a sad day when U.S. citizens realize that the Bush administration and most Republicans are timing the end of this war to coincide with Election Day 2008. Meanwhile, the death toll rises, and the U.S. soldiers killed are shipped back to the United States in the dark of night so that no one can photograph or see the caskets being unloaded.

One parent of a dead soldier recently complained that this unloading of a casket delivered to the soldier's hometown should not be done by a forklift truck, but by American soldiers. It will now be done by American soldiers, with thanks to that parent who helped make a change for the dignity of our fallen troops.

"Support Our Troops" should also include the humane treatment for our wounded troops to go to a respectable hospital for their care rather than the decrepit Walter Reed Hospital.

It appears that the American people will have to sustain two more years of an arrogant and stubborn President Bush before this war comes to an end.

I pray for every man and woman who are serving their country in military service, and I pray for their quick return home.

Dean Koldenhoven is a former mayor of Palos Heights and a 2002 recipient of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award. His column periodically appears in the Daily Southtown.

US allows Mahdi Army security role

2007-05-08T09:52:00.000-06:00

Associated Press

Tuesday, May 8, 2007 (Baghdad)

US troops are relying on the Mahdi Army to protect the mosque of Imam Kadhim, the most revered Shiite shrine in Baghdad, as it is a tempting target for Sunni insurgents.

The Mahdi Army is a Shiite militia that Washington considers a threat to Iraq's stability.

In Kazimiyah, a densely packed neighborhood of wooden shops and cheap hotels for Shiite pilgrims, the Americans and their Iraqi partners have opted for militia help to protect the shimmering, blue-domed shrine.

With tacit American approval, plainclothes militiamen loyal to anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr set up impromptu checkpoints and patrol alleys near the mosque day and night.

This development cuts to the heart of a dilemma for the US military three months into the campaign to pacify Baghdad: whether to risk fierce battles by confronting Shiite militiamen blamed for massacring Sunnis or to deal with ''moderates'' in the Mahdi Army - which the US believes receives weapons and training from Iran.

The Americans believe that tolerating a discreet role for the Mahdi Army, which US officers refer to by its Arabic acronym JAM, is better than either picking a fight with the militia or taking the blame if Sunni extremists manage a repeat of the February 2006 bombing of another Shiite shrine in Samarra.

That attack, which the US blames on al-Qaida, unleashed a wave of sectarian bloodletting and reprisal attacks on mosques, plunging the country into civil conflict.

Security forces streched

Without the militia, US and Iraqi officers acknowledge that the 2,000 Iraqi security forces and 500 American soldiers based in the area would be hard-pressed to protect the neighborhood's 120,000 residents and the shrine, which houses the tombs of two eight century Shiite imams.

US commanders have chosen to use the Mahdi security network already in place rather than divert resources from other parts of the city where security is worse.

''There are a lot of people affiliated with JAM, and if we made them all enemies, we'd be in trouble. So we try to sort out who's extremist JAM and can't be reasoned with because of their ideology, and who we can live with as long as they're not killing US and Iraqi soldiers or civilians,'' said Lt Col Steve Miska who commands US troops in northwest Baghdad.

Miska's efforts suffered a setback last week when Iraq's parliament passed legislation banning US troops from within two-thirds of a mile of the shrine.

The measure, proposed by al-Sadr's representatives in parliament, was seen as largely symbolic and was approved the day after a gunbattle between US troops and Mahdi fighters.

During the two-hour fight, some Iraqi soldiers fought alongside Mahdi Army gunmen, according to the Iraqi officer in charge of security in the area.

He spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear for his life. But his account was corroborated by US officials, who said some Iraqi soldiers took off their uniforms and tossed weapons to militiamen.

US and Iraqi commanders hope that once tempers ease, the law will be changed or ignored.

In the meantime, both American and Iraqi officials must deal with reality: the militia is so deeply entrenched in Kazimiyah and other Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad that it can be effective in maintaining security.

''Most people don't like JAM. But they enjoy the protection JAM gives them and the shrine,'' said Hassan, an Arab-American who serves as an interpreter and cultural adviser to Miska.

Al-Qaida threat

US officials fear an al-Qaida attack on the shrine is a real possibility.

In March 2004, three suicide bombers attacked the Kazimiyah shrine during a Shiite religious festival, killing 58 people and wounding 200.

After that, Shiite militiamen stepped up their presence around the shrine.

''If you look at al-Qaida and what they're capable of doing, I don't think it's paranoia here. They (the Mahdi Army) are trying to take prudent measures to protect an extremely sensitive religious site,'' said Miska.

Those measures involve inundating the streets around the shrine - a tightly woven web of mostly pedestrian thoroughfares - with mostly young men in their teens and early 20s who dress in civilian clothes and loiter on street corners.

Armed with cell phones, they become the eyes and ears of the Mahdi Army.

The militia ''dresses as civilians and they blend in,'' said Nabil Ali a Shiite who fled another Baghdad neighborhood after receiving a death threat from Sunni insurgents - a bullet in an envelope. ''It's a better way to protect the mosque.''

Political cover

Across Baghdad, the Mahdi Army has laid low in the past three months, as part of what is believed to be an informal deal with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki during the US-Iraqi security crackdown.

But in Kazimiyah, the number of fighters has spiked in recent months, US and Iraqi officials said.

With the approval of the Sunni-run Defense Ministry, the reinforcements include more than 300 men dispatched by Bahaa al-Araji, a member of al-Sadr's bloc in parliament.

The Iraqi government is still in the process of issuing them weapons, but the entire force is believed to have come from the Mahdi Army.

''You're looking at JAM with political cover all the way to the top here,'' Miska said.

In addition, militiamen are believed to have infiltrated most Iraqi army, National Police and local police units in Kazimiyah, US and Iraqi officials said.

The level of infiltration sometimes creates friction between US officers and the Iraqi security commanders with whom they work.

During a recent intelligence briefing at a US outpost in Kazimiyah, an Iraqi colonel shouted his objections to a US report that Iraqi soldiers were helping Shiites move into Sunni homes in one neighborhood.

Even so, Miska said, ''right now we just don't have a better alternative.''

That's just fine for many residents of Kazimiyah, who say they have little confidence in Iraqi soldiers and police, even though they are mostly fellow Shiites. Instead, residents believe the militia offers the best protection.

''I can go to and from my house late at night and I feel safe because JAM is in my neighbourhood. I might not like what some of them do to Sunnis or others who betray them. But for me, they protect my family. That is my concern,'' said Ziad Tariq al-Bendawi.

“Pro Surge” Mikulski Is Paving the Way for Hillary!

2007-05-08T09:49:00.000-06:00

William Hughes

08 May 2007 0

Want-to-be president, Sen. Hillary “War Lite” Clinton (D-NY), recently gushed over U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD). She said that “Pro-Surge” Mikulski had “paved” the way for her. Indeed, Mikulski has done a lot of paving, especially with respect to the manufacturing jobs lost on her watch. In addition, Mikulski persists in supporting funding for the Iraqi War. Now, it has been disclosed that she knew the Bush-Cheney Gang was lying about the war.

“The U.S. military announced the deaths of 11 more U.S. troops in Iraq.” - AP Report, May 7, 2007

“She has literally ‘paved’ the way for me and countless other women who now serve in the Congress,” gushed the want-to-be president, Sen. Hillary “War Lite” Clinton (D-NY). Bubba Bill’s other half was referring to Sen. Barbara “Pro Surge” Mikulski (D-MD), who had just proclaimed her support last month for Clinton’s candidacy. Mikulski has, indeed, done a lot of ‘paving,’ while pretending to serve the people of Maryland over the last three decades. For example, she has turned our once-vaunted manufacturing base, like the ex-General Motors’ plant in Baltimore, MD, into a “paved” parking lot! The Procter & Gamble facility and Bethlehem Steel’s huge steel-making and shipyard facilities, likewise, are history. The country has lost more than 3.7 million solid middle class jobs on her watch. (1) Sen. Mikulski, a globalist lapdog, has been a pallbearer for native industries that once gave working families a decent living wage, with real fringe benefits. (2)

Meanwhile, Sen. Mikulski is also regularly canonized by the Establishment media, “as a champion of women!” Yet, when the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), on March 16, 2003, ran over peace and justice activist, Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American from Olympia, WA, with a 9-ton bulldozer, she was silent. Not one word came out of her mouth! Corrie was run over, not once, but twice by the Israeli thugs. (3) This is the same Sen. Mikulski, who has made a career out of signing onto Congressional Resolutions in support of Israel’s Hard Right regimes, like that of Prime Minister’s Ehud Olmert. Even after the IOF slaughtered the Lebanese innocents, mostly women and children, at the village of Qana, on April 18, 1996, and again on July 30, 2006, Mikulski remained silent. (4) The more Mikulski fails her duty, the more faultless people die, and, ironically, the more popular she becomes. Go figure!

Part of Mikulski’s putative pit bull persona is built on a myth in my opinion. Supposedly, she took a significant part in stopping the building of a massive federal highway that would have devastated large areas of Baltimore City. One key player in that drama sharply disagrees about her role. “Mikulski didn’t write any letters, speak out, attend any [Baltimore] City Council meetings, or work on the project.” These are the words of the Hon. Thomas Ward, a retired jurist and former Baltimore City Councilman (1963-67), in referring to Mikulski’s supposed activism, during the critical ‘60s period, against the construction of a proposed federal highway system through the historic Fells Point and Federal Hill areas. Judge Ward was at the center of the effort to stop the highway. I reported his views on the U.S. Senator in an article for the Baltimore Press, entitled, “Did Sen. Mikulski Inflate her Political Resume?,” on May 22, 1999. Nevertheless, the Mikulski activist/highway myth persists. (5)

We know, too, from Sen. Mikulski’s press releases that she is against the terrible disease, Alzheimer’s, and that she wants to raise “awareness” about it. Brava for her! But, she also voted for the draconian USA Patriot Act, not once, but twice! (5)

What about the Iraqi War? Sen. Mikulski voted against it, but she has never, in any public arena--like at a Pro Peace Rally--spoken out against it! Instead, she has consistently voted to fund the war to the tune of $423.8 million. However, persistent pressure from her Pro Peace constituents, on March 14, 2007, forced her to take a stand. She said: “I will not vote to end funding.” In other words, Sen. Mikulski now wants to protect U.S. troops by placing them in the middle of a vicious, horrific Civil War in Iraq. (6) Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, USA, Retired, doesn’t buy that line at all. He said that the U.S. leaving Iraq “is neither cowardly nor imprudent. It is the ‘only way’ to recover from what is turning out to be the greatest strategic mistake in American history.” (7) As of today’s date, 3,378 brave U.S. troops have died in the Iraqi conflict, 181 were killed since Mikulski’s March 14th spiel. Of the total U.S. fatalities, 64 of those heroes called Maryland home. Over 1,300 Maryland National Guard troops are now headed for Iraq to fulfill the bizarre “Surge” strategy of the demented Bush-Cheney Gang, with Mikulski’s explicit approval. (8) As she goes along with the War Party, more Americans, and Iraqis, will continue to die. The Iraqi death toll is estimated by experts at over 655,000. (9)

Now, as a result of a recent shocking disclosure, we realize that Sen. Mikulski “knew” before the Iraqi War started on March 20, 2003, that the Bush-Cheney Gang was deliberately “lying” to the American people about some of its key reasons for wanting to go to war. (10) On April 28, 2007, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) admitted, on the floor of the Senate, that as a member of the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, that he knew, five years ago, that some of the relevant data that the Bush administration was feeding to the American people to hype a war with Iraq was in “direct contradiction to the information [intel] given to this Congress.” (11) Activist Kevin Zeese revealed there were sixteen members on that Committee, “who were given the same information as Durbin.” One of those members was none other than--Sen. Mikulski! (12) Isn’t it time that she comes clean about that fact and explains to the voters of Maryland her complicity in this life and death matter? How in God’s holy name could Sen. Mikulski vote to fund a war that she personally knew was launched by the Bush-Cheney Gang based on a pack of rotten lies?

At press time, there are rumors flying around Capitol Hill, that if Sen. Clinton does win the presidency in 2008, that Sen. “Pro Surge” Mikulski will be given a high-ranking Cabinet post. Well, bully for her and her lauded paving abilities! Question: How many more innocents, however, have to die because Sen. Mikulski has failed miserably her duties as a U.S. Senator, especially in putting the public’s interest first?

Notes:

1. www.economyincrisis.org/
2. “$11.30! Can People Live on that Hourly Rate?” by Jamie Smith Hopkins, Baltimore Sun, May 6, 2007.
3. www.rachelcorrie.org/
4. www.bintjbeil.com/E/occupation/robert_fisk_qana.html
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5228554.stm
5. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Mikulski and
dc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/133425/index.php
6. baltimore.indymedia.org/newswire/display/14770/index.php 7. www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp
8. baltimore.indymedia.org/newswire/display/14834/index.php
9. www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/10/11/iraq.deaths/
10. www.afterdowningstreet.org/
11. democracyrising.us/content/view/899/151/
12. intelligence.senate.gov/members107thcongress.html

© William Hughes 2007.

William Hughes is the author of “Saying ‘No’ to the War Party” (IUniverse, Inc.). He can be reached at liamhughes (at) comcast.net.

The Hard Bigotry of the New York Times

2007-05-08T09:38:00.000-06:00

Mon, 2007-05-07

By David Swanson

A New York Times editorial on May 7th is titled "The Soft Bigotry of Iraq," and begins:

"Whether out of blind loyalty or blind denial, most Congressional Republicans are prepared to back up President Bush's veto of the Iraq spending bill."

Whether out of blind loyalty or blind denial or corrupt corporate interests, the New York Times pretends to be writing only about Republicans, while building into its editorial the assumption that the Democrats, too, must retreat in the face of a veto. The Democrats, as we all need to be constantly reminded, are in the majority, yet the Times' editorial arrives at this as its penultimate sentence:

"The final version of the spending bill should include explicit benchmarks and timetables for the Iraqis, even if Mr. Bush won't let Congress back them up with a clear timetable for America's withdrawal."

"Mr. Bush" won't LET Congress pass a bill demanded by the vast majority of Americans? Why, because he might veto it again? If he vetoes enough of these war spending bills, Americans will get what they wanted anyway: he'll have to end the war.

The New York Times clearly believes that Americans' attention spans have been reduced to zero, and that we can now forget things even while they are still happening. Bush just vetoed a bill because it included a meaningless non-binding request to end the war while leaving a huge military presence behind and stealing most of the oil. The bill was miles behind the public's demand for peace, but Bush vetoed it, and demanded a bill free of even the nonbinding request to end the war. Immediately, the chant arose from the media: Stand Up to Bush! Don't back down! Send him a bill with no request to end the war!

The criteria for "standing up" were instantly redefined to include "benchmarks", such as oil theft, but no "timeline" to end the war, only "timelines" that might be imposed on those insufferable Iraqis who are handling the occupation of their own country so poorly.

That's right, the way to stand up to Bush, and not back down, and be tough, and stand strong, is to impose demands on Bush's victims. Only in America…

The New York Times' editorial continues: "It is now essential that the revised version not back away from demanding that Iraq's prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, finally deliver on the crucial national reconciliation measures he has spent the last year dodging. And it must make clear that American support for his failures - and Mr. Bush's - is fast waning."

So, now, over four years into a criminal war supported by fewer that a quarter of Americans, Congress should pass LEGISLATION in order to communicate that Americans may soon cease supporting the failures of Nuri Kamal al-Maliki? I'd like to see a poll on what percentage of Americans even know who Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is. Then I'd like to see a poll on whether Americans would prefer for Congress to

A.-pass a bill to make clear that their support for Maliki's and Bush's failures is waning;
or
B.-pass a bill to cut off the money and end the war.

The New York Times goes on to claim that some even unlikelier beliefs are commonly held: "What Mr. Maliki needs to do to slow Iraq's bloodletting is no mystery. Iraq's security forces must stop siding with the Shiite militias. Iraq's oil revenue must be apportioned fairly. Anti-Baathist laws now used to deny Sunni Arabs employment and political opportunities must be rewritten to target only those responsible for the crimes of the Saddam Hussein era."

The bloodletting is generated first and foremost by the occupation of Maliki's country by a foreign army. Therefore, the first thing he needs to do is to demand that the occupiers leave. Rewriting the laws of a puppet government at this point is not going to restore order. And "oil revenue apportioned fairly" is code for giving Exxon Mobil and other U.S. and British corporations control over most of the oil. This has been explained in an op-ed printed by the New York Times in March: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/19606

It's explained well here as well: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/22108

But this recent article by the New York Times buried the lead at the bottom of the story: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/22103

The May 7th editorial then takes a turn into irony:

"Without these steps, Mr. Maliki and his allies cannot even minimally claim to be a real national government. With them, there is at least a chance that Iraqis can muster the strength to contain the chaos when, as is inevitable, American forces begin to leave."

A puppet government in an occupied land can only be legitimate if it obeys its master. True enough. But why must the New York Times agree so wholeheartedly with Fox News that Americans should only reduce the occupation after Iraqis have shown they can contain the insurgency? The Americans can't contain it. It's going from bad to worse. And were the occupation to go away, so would most of the insurgency. There must be some grim humor intended and secret laughter resulting from this policy of telling the Iraqi people that we will occupy them until their government has shown that it can contain the resistance to our occupation after the occupation is gone.

Then the New York Times goes after Bush for not demanding more of his victims:

"Mr. Bush acknowledges that these benchmarks are important. Yet he refuses to insist, or let Congress insist, that Baghdad achieve them or face real consequences. Each time Baghdad fails a test, Mr. Bush lowers his requirements and postpones his target dates - the kind of destructive denial Mr. Bush called, in another context, the soft bigotry of low expectations. Consider the Baghdad security drive. Last week, The Washington Post reported that Mr. Maliki's office had helped instigate the firing of senior Iraqi security officers who moved aggressively against a powerful Shiite militia. After betting so many American lives, the combat readiness of the United States Army and his own remaining credibility on this bloody push to secure the capital, it is a mystery why Mr. Bush would allow the Iraqi leader to undermine it."

So, even while we pretend that the Iraqis have their own government, Bush is understood to be responsible for what that government does or does not do. Thus we can stand up to Bush by criticizing dark-skinned Arab-speaking Muslims, and avoid the whole unpleasantness of ending the war.

"Then," the New York Times continues, "there is the endless soap opera that is one day supposed to produce a fair share-out of Iraqi oil revenues. The Bush administration prematurely popped champagne corks in February when Mr. Maliki's cabinet agreed on a preliminary draft. Now, in May, there is no share-out, no legislation and even the preliminary agreement is starting to unravel. The leading Sunni Arab party in Mr. Maliki's cabinet is now threatening to withdraw its ministers, declaring that it has 'lost hope' that the Iraqi leader will deal seriously with Sunni concerns."

"Share-out" is a stock market term meaning "hand over the damn oil." The adjective "fair" in this instance is used to mean "handed over primarily to white English-speaking Christians."

There is nothing "soft" about the bigotry that allows the belief that Iraqis cannot best run their own country and manage their own resources.

The Times' editorial concludes: "Mr. Bush, by contrast, sees 'signs of hope' in the Baghdad security situation, urges Americans to give his failed policies more time and seems offended that Congress wants to impose accountability on Baghdad and the White House. The final version of the spending bill should include explicit benchmarks and timetables for the Iraqis, even if Mr. Bush won't let Congress back them up with a clear timetable for America's withdrawal. If Mr. Maliki and Mr. Bush still don't get it, Congress will have to enact new means of enforcement, and back that up with a veto-proof majority."

Again, this is not true. If Congress passes only bills to end the war, and no bills providing new money to extend it, the war will eventually end (following the illegal use of other funds, impeachment, and removal from office) whether the bill is signed or not.

From AP: Exactly WHO is the Enemy?

2007-05-08T09:32:00.000-06:00

by mldostert

May 06, 2007

Under the heading of things that make your head explode comes this story from the AP, posted 21 minutes ago.

US leaves militia limited security role

The story says that the US is deliberately leaving the Mahdi army in charge of some parts of Bahgdad. Yes, the same Madhdi army that is supposedly contolled by Iran, that we are supposed to be fighting. And Why?

Even so, Miska said, "right now we just don't have a better alternative."

You have to read this story - it's unbelievable:

Some of the choice bits:

"There are a lot of people affiliated with JAM, and if we made them all enemies, we'd be in trouble," said Lt. Col. Steve Miska, 39, of Greenport, N.Y., who commands U.S. troops in northwest Baghdad.

"So we try to sort out who's extremist JAM and can't be reasoned with because of their ideology, and who we can live with as long as they're not killing U.S. and Iraqi soldiers or civilians."

Miska's efforts suffered a setback last week when Iraq's parliament passed legislation banning U.S. troops from within two-thirds of a mile of the shrine.

The measure, proposed by al-Sadr's representatives in parliament, was seen as largely symbolic and was approved the day after a gunbattle between U.S. troops and Mahdi fighters. During the two-hour fight, some Iraqi soldiers fought alongside Mahdi Army gunmen, according to the Iraqi officer in charge of security in the area.

He spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear for his life. But his account was corroborated by U.S. officials, who said some Iraqi soldiers took off their uniforms and tossed weapons to militiamen.

That cuts to the heart of a dilemma for the U.S. military three months into the campaign to pacify Baghdad: whether to risk fierce battles by confronting Shiite militiamen blamed for massacring Sunnis or to deal with "moderates" in the Mahdi Army — which the U.S. believes receives weapons and training from Iran.

(snip)

Without the militia, U.S. and Iraqi officers acknowledge that the 2,000 Iraqi security forces and 500 American soldiers based in the area would be hard-pressed to protect the neighborhood's 120,000 residents and the shrine, which houses the tombs of two 8th century Shiite imams.

In fact, the article makes clear, all of the Iraqi army units that have appeared in Baghdad for the surge are, in fact, Mahdi army units.

But in Kazimiyah, the number of fighters has spiked in recent months, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.

With the approval of the Sunni-run Defense Ministry, the reinforcements include more than 300 men dispatched by Bahaa al-Araji, a member of al-Sadr's bloc in parliament. The Iraqi government is still in the process of issuing them weapons, but the entire force is believed to have come from the Mahdi Army.

"You're looking at JAM with political cover all the way to the top here," Miska said.

In addition, militiamen are believed to have infiltrated most Iraqi army, National Police and local police units in Kazimiyah, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.

So, let me get this straight. We had to have a "surge" to tamp down the violence and allow for political reconciliation, so that Sunnis would lay down their arms and join the political process.

But the US is partnering with the very Mahdi Army that is murdering Sunnis, forcing them from their homes, etc. Add this to recent news that a secretive office in Al Maliki's goverment is purging army officers who confront the Mahdi army.
Shadowy Iraq office accused of sectarian agenda

and the US strategy becomes clear: we've picked a side - the Iranian-backed side - in the Iraqi civil war.

And the Sunnis have evidently figured it out - as they are serious about bolting the government.

Sunni demand could unravel Iraqi government

Now, if I was Sunni - would I quite fighting?

what are we DOING?!?

Tags: Mahdi army, Iraq, shiite militias (all tags)

Iraq tribunal hears defense closing in Anfal genocide trial

2007-05-08T09:26:00.000-06:00

Sunday, May 06, 2007

[JURIST] The Iraqi High Tribunal [official website] heard closing arguments Sunday from defense lawyers in the genocide trial [JURIST news archive; BBC trial timeline] of Ali Hassan al-Majid [JURIST news archive] and other former officials in the Saddam Hussein [JURIST news archive] regime. Al-Majid - Hussein's cousin known in the Western media as "Chemical Ali" - and his co-defendants are being tried for their alleged involvement in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Kurds by using nerve agents and mustard gas during the so-called "Anfal campaign" [HRW backgrounder]. Earlier Sunday co-defendant Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai, a former Hussein defense minister who was an Iraqi Army corps commander at the time of Anfal, testified that he had had no access to chemical weapons and had received no orders to use them, echoing testimony from previous defense witnesses [JURIST report]. Prosecutors have sought the death penalty [JURIST report] for Al-Majid and three other defendants and have asked that charges be dropped against one of the six total defendants due to lack of evidence. Al-Majid became the leading defendant [JURIST report] in the trial following Hussein's execution [JURIST report] last year.

According to defense lawyer Giovanni Di Stefano [firm website], previously one of Hussein's lawyers, the defendants are waiting for the court to rule on several motions, including a motion challenging the legality of the indictments [DOC text] and a motion calling for exhumations [DOC text] of the deceased killed during Anfal to allow for forensic testing. In a statement to JURIST, Di Stefano said:

I have filed a submission in order that the Defence is able to obtain its own independent forensic pathologist and toxicologist. The indictments claim that the victims were murdered using chemical weapons. No post mortum or autopsy reports have been furnished to the defence (and Court) proving that anyone died from chemical attacks. It was and remains unconceded that any such deaths occurred without proper admissible evidence. I have requested the court to permit the Defence to exhume victims and to be examined by a forensic pathologist. No response has been forthcoming from the Court.

I have filed a submission to be permitted for the defence to examine documents held by the Iraqi Survey Group and the FBI in its storage facilities in Qatar. No response has been forthcoming from the Court.

I have provided the Court with two documents [DOC text] from many of an exculpatory basis for Saddam Hussein which clearly show that Saddam Hussein ordered no chemical attacks or weapons to be used. He further ordered that villages be 'relocated' not destroyed as the documents show. It was for this reason that there was a rush to execution of Saddam Hussein as I would have introduced these and more documents in my possession to the court.

Finally, we have filed submissions regarding the vagueness of the indictments. How can anyone defend what I term a 'carte blanche indictment'? Iraq was accused of cheating at football but in this case the Iraqi High tribunal with the current form of the indictments have created a 'perpetual moving goalpost' to ensure the Defence is always hindered. I am well aware that in the Anfal case three defendants will be sentenced to death, one to imprisonment and one set free. It has been made crystal clear. Yet despite such all involved regardless of the sever handicaps and unfairness will simply proceed to do our best. Both Dujail and Anfal are being held in grossly unfair and unsafe conditions. It is for these reasons that I am prosecuting Judge Rahman in the UK and will do the same to any Judge in any jurisdiction if unfair conditions are imposed on the defence.

AP has more.

Jeannie Shawl at 11:13 PM ET

URL

Perils of an unchecked executive

2007-05-08T09:24:00.000-06:00

Jonathan Hafetz

09:03 AM EDT on Tuesday, May 8, 2007
JONATHAN HAFETZ

NEW YORK -- REMARKABLY, President Bush has not learned any lessons from the excesses of his “war on terrorism,” now in its sixth year. Even though the president’s own secretaries of state and defense have warned that the prison at Guantánamo is undermining America’s credibility, the president continues to assert the powers of a king by detaining people without charge and without court review whenever he deems them “enemy combatants.” This strategy contradicts America’s core values and undermines the fight against terrorism.

In 2004, the Supreme Court sensibly defined the term “enemy combatant” as an enemy solider who engages in combat against American troops on an actual battlefield. The court also ruled that the United States must provide a legitimate process to make sure we are detaining the right people, not innocent tourists, embedded journalists, or local aid workers swept up amid the chaos of war where mistakes are easily made.

The administration, nevertheless, has ignored these limits in three important ways. First, it has defined “enemy combatant” in terms so sweeping that it would allow the president to lock up a little old lady in Switzerland who gives money to a charity which, unbeknown to her, is secretly funneling money to terrorist organizations.

Second, it has failed to follow the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. military’s own regulations which require a prompt hearing for detainees seized on the battlefield to separate innocent civilians from actual combatants. To make matters worse, only 5 percent of the detainees at Guantánamo were captured by U.S. forces; 86 percent were taken into custody by Pakistani or Afghan forces at a time when the U.S. was offering large financial bounties for the capture of any Arab terrorist.

And third, the administration has blocked review of its detention practices by denying habeas corpus, which requires a court to examine the factual and legal basis for a prisoner’s confinement. As a result, the administration has prevented any judge from determining whether the individuals it has jailed are actually terrorists — a position that speaks volumes about the government’s lack of confidence in its evidence.

Regrettably, last fall Congress increased, rather than curbed, the president’s power grab by passing the Military Commissions Act. This act not only weakens longstanding rules against illegal detention and torture, but also prevents the federal courts from enforcing those rules by eliminating habeas corpus.

Unchecked executive detention has created a prison beyond the law at Guantánamo, where nearly four hundred individuals remain detained without charge or due process. Though labeled as the “worst of the worst,” according to the government’s own data, only 18 percent of the detainees at Guantánamo have any definitive affiliation with al-Qaida or the Taliban. But since the government never has to present its evidence in a court of law, errors go uncorrected.

The president’s quest for ever greater power is not limited to Guantánamo, but extends to the United States. Mr. Bush maintains that he can jail without charge an individual living in this country, whether an American citizen or not. As a result, a college student whose former roommate later joins the Taliban, a chief executive who donates money to an organization he believes is helping to build hospitals in the Middle East or a person who teaches English to the child of an al-Qaida member, all may be permanently imprisoned as “enemy combatants” without any proof of guilt.

To be sure, it is difficult to imagine any judge tolerating this state of affairs. But the problem is that without habeas corpus no judge can ever review the government’s evidence, leaving detainees to languish in prison based solely on executive say-so.

The issue is not whether the president acts in good-faith when he deprives people of their liberty. The genius of our Constitution is that it does not entrust any president with that awesome power but instead sets up a system of checks and balances that prevents any person from placing himself above the law.

The president’s “trust-me” approach to civil liberties does not just defy America’s best traditions. It robs the fight against terrorism of the legitimacy and credibility it needs to succeed.

Over the last five years, Guantánamo has become a lightning rod for criticism and short-hand for the abuse of power. Our closest allies have denounced Guantánamo as a “shocking affront to the principles of democracy,” while Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently called for the prison’s closure.

Guantánamo makes it more difficult for America to demand that other countries obey the rules by showing we do not follow those rules ourselves. The same goes for the practice of “extraordinary rendition” in which the United States hands individuals over to countries like Syria and Egypt for torture. Like the detentions at Guantánamo, such practices put Americans at risk by encouraging other nations to treat our citizens as we have treated theirs.

The damage wrought by the administration’s wrong-headed policies cannot be remedied overnight but will require a concerted effort to develop a rights-respecting approach to counter-terrorism. The first step is an easy and obvious one: Restore habeas corpus, the greatest safeguard of individual liberty and check upon arbitrary executive power.

Restoring habeas will demonstrate that America gives all prisoners a meaningful chance to prove their innocence. Nothing less can suffice in a country committed to due process and the rule of law.

Jonathan Hafetz directs litigation for the Liberty and National Security Project of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, is counsel to several detainees and is writing a book on post-9/11 detentions to be published by NYU Press.

One in eight Iraqi children died of disease or violence before reaching their fifth birthday in 2005

2007-05-08T09:05:00.000-06:00

Report: Iraq Child Mortality Rate Soars
May 8, 2007 - 2:34am

By MARIA CHENG
AP Medical Writer

LONDON (AP) - The chance that an Iraqi child will live beyond age 5 has plummeted faster than anywhere else in the world since 1990, according to a report released Tuesday, which placed the country last in its child survival rankings.

One in eight Iraqi children died of disease or violence before reaching their fifth birthday in 2005, according to the report by Save the Children, which said Iraq ranked last because it had made the least progress toward improving child survival rates.

Iraq's mortality rate has soared by 150 percent since 1990. Even before the latest war, Iraq was plagued by electricity shortages, a lack of clean water and too few hospitals.

The publication, which used data from 1990-2005, also determined that gains in survival rates in some of the world's poorest countries _ including Botswana, Zimbabwe and Swaziland _ were declining.

The vast majority of child deaths _ more than nine in 10 _ occur in just 60 developing countries, the report said. Of the approximately 10 million children under age 5 who die every year, most could be saved with cheap solutions, like nets to protect against mosquito-borne malaria or antibiotics to treat pneumonia, according to the report.

"These aren't intractable problems," Dr. William Foege, of the Emory University School of Public Health, wrote in a foreword to the report. "It is simply wrong for only the few to have access to all of the tools for survival because of where they live."

About 4 million children die of complications in the first month after birth every year, according to Save the Children. Other causes of death for young children include diarrhea, pneumonia and measles, the group reported.

Among industrialized countries, Iceland had the best child survival rate, and Romania the worst. The U.S. placed 26th, tied with Croatia, Estonia and Poland. Nearly seven children die for every 1,000 live births in the United States. That was more than double the rate in Iceland, and 75 percent higher than rates in the Czech Republic, Finland, Japan and Slovenia.

Among developing countries, Egypt fared the best _ lowering its child mortality rate by 68 percent largely by improving care for pregnant women, ensuring the presence of a skilled attendant during childbirth, and providing better family planning help.

Since 1994, Egypt has also increased health spending by more than 200 percent.

___

On the Net:

http://www.savethechildren.org/

(Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

Moa'amal Mohammed, age seven, sits alone in a classroom in western Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, May 7, 2007. Due to security concerns, many children are not attending their classes. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed) By MARIA CHENG
AP Medical Writer

LONDON (AP) - The chance that an Iraqi child will live beyond age 5 has plummeted faster than anywhere else in the world since 1990, according to a report released Tuesday, which placed the country last in its child survival rankings.

One in eight Iraqi children died of disease or violence before reaching their fifth birthday in 2005, according to the report by Save the Children, which said Iraq ranked last because it had made the least progress toward improving child survival rates.

Iraq's mortality rate has soared by 150 percent since 1990. Even before the latest war, Iraq was plagued by electricity shortages, a lack of clean water and too few hospitals.

The publication, which used data from 1990-2005, also determined that gains in survival rates in some of the world's poorest countries _ including Botswana, Zimbabwe and Swaziland _ were declining.

The vast majority of child deaths _ more than nine in 10 _ occur in just 60 developing countries, the report said. Of the approximately 10 million children under age 5 who die every year, most could be saved with cheap solutions, like nets to protect against mosquito-borne malaria or antibiotics to treat pneumonia, according to the report.

"These aren't intractable problems," Dr. William Foege, of the Emory University School of Public Health, wrote in a foreword to the report. "It is simply wrong for only the few to have access to all of the tools for survival because of where they live."

About 4 million children die of complications in the first month after birth every year, according to Save the Children. Other causes of death for young children include diarrhea, pneumonia and measles, the group reported.

Among industrialized countries, Iceland had the best child survival rate, and Romania the worst. The U.S. placed 26th, tied with Croatia, Estonia and Poland. Nearly seven children die for every 1,000 live births in the United States. That was more than double the rate in Iceland, and 75 percent higher than rates in the Czech Republic, Finland, Japan and Slovenia.

Among developing countries, Egypt fared the best _ lowering its child mortality rate by 68 percent largely by improving care for pregnant women, ensuring the presence of a skilled attendant during childbirth, and providing better family planning help.

Since 1994, Egypt has also increased health spending by more than 200 percent.

___

On the Net:

http://www.savethechildren.org/

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

A Forgotten Holocaust: US Bombing Strategy, the Destruction of Japanese Cities and the American Way of War from the Pacific War to Iraq

2007-05-08T08:44:00.000-06:00

[*]

Mark Selden

World War II was a landmark in the development and deployment of technologies of mass destruction associated with air power, notably the B-29 bomber, napalm and the atomic bomb. An estimated 50 to 70 million people lay dead in its wake. In a sharp reversal of the pattern of World War I and of most earlier wars, a substantial majority of the dead were noncombatants. [1] The air war, which reached peak intensity with the area bombing, including atomic bombing, of major European and Japanese cities in its final year, had a devastating impact on noncombatant populations.

What is the logic and what have been the consequences—for its victims, for subsequent global patterns of warfare and for international law—of new technologies of mass destruction and their application associated with the rise of air power and bombing technology in World War II and after? Above all, how have these experiences shaped the American way of war over six decades in which the United States has been a major actor in important wars? The issues have particular salience in an epoch whose central international discourse centers on terror and the War on Terror, one in which the terror inflicted on noncombatants by the major powers is frequently neglected.

Strategic Bombing and International Law

Bombs had been dropped from the air as early as 1849 on Venice (from balloons) and 1911 in Libya (from planes).

Major European powers attempted to use them in newly founded air forces during World War I. If the impact on the outcomes was marginal, the advance of air power alerted all nations to the potential significance of airpower in future wars. [2] A series of international conferences at the Hague beginning in 1899 set out principles for limiting air war and securing the protection of noncombatants from bombing and other attacks. The 1923 Hague conference crafted a sixty-two article “Rules of Aerial Warfare,” which prohibited “Aerial bombardment for the purpose of terrorizing the civilian population, of destroying or damaging private property not of a military character, or of injuring non-combatants.” It specifically limited bombardment to military objectives, prohibited “indiscriminate bombardment of the civilian population,” and held violators liable to pay compensation. [3] Securing consensus and enforcing limits, however, proved extraordinarily elusive then and since.

Throughout the long twentieth century, and particularly during and in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the inexorable advance of weapons technology went hand in hand with international efforts to place limits on killing and barbarism associated with war, particularly the killing of noncombatants in strategic or indiscriminate bombing raids. [4] This article considers the interplay of the development of powerful weapons and delivery systems associated with bombing and attempts to create international standards to curb the uses of bombing against noncombatants, with particular reference to the United States.

The strategic and ethical implications of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have generated a vast contentious literature, as have German and Japanese war crimes and atrocities. By contrast, the US destruction of more than sixty Japanese cities prior to Hiroshima has been slighted both in the scholarly literatures in English and Japanese and in popular consciousness in both Japan and the US. It has been overshadowed by the atomic bombing and by heroic narratives of American conduct in the “Good War”, an outcome not unrelated to the emergence of the US as a superpower. [5] Arguably, however, the central technological, strategic and ethical breakthroughs that would leave their stamp on subsequent wars occurred in area bombing of noncombatants prior to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A.C. Grayling explains the different responses to firebombing and atomic bombing this way: “. . . the frisson of dread created by the thought of what atomic weaponry can do affects those who contemplate it more than those who actually suffer from it; for whether it is an atom bomb rather than tons of high explosives and incendiaries that does the damage, not a jot of suffering is added to its victims that the burned and buried, the dismembered and blinded, the dying and bereaved of Dresden or Hamburg did not feel.” [6]

If others, notably Germany, England and Japan led the way in area bombing, the targeting for destruction of entire cities with conventional weapons emerged in 1944-45 as the centerpiece of US warfare. It was an approach that combined technological predominance with minimization of US casualties in ways that would become the hallmark of the American way of war in campaigns from Korea and Indochina to the Gulf and Iraq Wars and, indeed define the trajectory of major wars since the 1940s. The result would be the decimation of noncombatant populations and extraordinary “kill ratios” favoring the US military. Yet for the US, victory would prove extraordinary elusive. This is one important reason why, six decades on, World War II retains its aura for Americans as the “Good War”, and why Americans have yet to effectively come to grips with questions of ethics and international law associated with their area bombing of Germany and Japan.

The twentieth century was notable for the contradiction between international attempts to place limits on the destructiveness of war and to hold nations and their military leaders responsible for violations of international laws of war (Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals and successive Geneva conventions, particularly the 1949 convention protecting civilians and POWs) and the systematic violation of those principles by the major powers. [7] For example, while the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals clearly articulated the principle of universality, the Tribunals, both held in cities that had been obliterated by Allied bombing, famously shielded the victorious powers, above all the US, from responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Telford Taylor, chief counsel for war crimes prosecution at Nuremberg, made the point with specific reference to the bombing of cities a quarter century later: [8]

Since both sides had played the terrible game of urban destruction—the Allies far more successfully—there was no basis for criminal charges against Germans or Japanese, and in fact no such charges were brought . . . . Aerial bombardment had been used so extensively and ruthlessly on the Allied side as well as the Axis side that neither at Nuremberg nor Tokyo was the issue made a part of the trials.

From 1932 to the early years of World War II the United States was an outspoken critic of city bombing, notably but not exclusively German and Japanese bombing. President Franklin Roosevelt appealed to the warring nations in 1939 on the first day of World War II “under no circumstances [to] undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities.” [9] Britain, France and Germany agreed to limit bombing to strictly military objectives, but in May 1940 German bombardment of Rotterdam exacted 40,000 civilian lives and forced the Dutch surrender. Up to this point, bombing of cities had been isolated, sporadic and for the most part confined to the axis powers. Then in August 1940, after German bombers bombed London, Churchill ordered an attack on Berlin. The steady escalation of bombing targeting cities and their noncombatant populations followed. [10]

Strategic Bombing of Europe

After entering the war following Pearl Harbor, the US continued to claim the moral high ground by abjuring civilian bombing. This stance was consistent with the prevailing view in the Air Force high command that the most efficient bombing strategies were those that pinpointed destruction of enemy forces and installations, factories, and railroads, not those designed to terrorize or kill noncombatants. Nevertheless, the US collaborated with indiscriminate bombing at Casablanca in 1943, when a US-British division of labor emerged in which the British conducted the indiscriminate bombing of cities and the US sought to destroy military and industrial targets. [11] In the final years of the war, Max Hastings observed that Churchill and his bomber commander Arthur Harris set out to concentrate “all available forces for the progressive, systematic destruction of the urban areas of the Reich, city block by city block, factory by factory, until the enemy became a nation of troglodytes, scratching in the ruins.” [12] British strategists were convinced that the destruction of cities by night area bombing attacks would break the morale of German civilians while crippling war production. From 1942 with the bombing of Lubeck followed by Cologne, Hamburg and others, Harris pursued this strategy. The perfection of onslaught from the air, or what should be understood as terror bombing, is better understood, however, as a British-American joint venture.

Throughout 1942-44, as the air war in Europe swung ineluctably toward area bombing, the US Air Force proclaimed its adherence to precision bombing. However, this approach failed not only to force surrender on either Germany or Japan, but even to inflict significant damage on their war-making capacity. With German artillery and interceptors taking a heavy toll on US planes, pressure mounted for a strategic shift at a time of growing sophistication, numbers and range of US aircraft, and the invention of napalm and the perfection of radar. Ironically, while radar could have paved the way for a reaffirmation of tactical bombing, now made feasible at night, in the context of the endgame of the war what transpired was the massive assault on cities and their urban populations.

On February 13-14, 1945 British bombers with US planes following up destroyed Dresden, a historic cultural center with no significant military industry or bases. By conservative estimate, 35,000 people were incinerated in a single raid led by. [13] The American writer Kurt Vonnegut, then a young POW in Dresden, penned the classic account: [14]

They burnt the whole damn town down . . . . Every day we walked into the city and dug into basements and shelters to get the corpses out, as a sanitary measure. When we went into them, a typical shelter, an ordinary basement usually, looked like a streetcar full of people who’d simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting there in their chairs, all dead. A fire storm is an amazing thing. It doesn’t occur in nature. It’s fed by the tornadoes that occur in the midst of it and there isn’t a damned thing to breathe.

“Along with the Nazi extermination camps, the killing of Soviet and American prisoners, and other enemy atrocities,” Ronald Schaffer observes, “Dresden became one of the moral causes célèbres of World War II.” [15] Although far worse was in the offing in Japan, Dresden provoked the last significant public discussion of the bombing of women and children to take place during World War II, and the city became synonymous with terror bombing by the US and Britain. Coming in the wake of both the Hamburg and Munich bombings, the British government faced sharp questioning in parliament. [16] In the United States, debate was largely provoked not by the destruction wrought by the raids, but by an Associated Press report widely published in the US and Britain stating explicitly that “the Allied air commanders have made the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of the great German population centers as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler’s doom.” American officials quickly acted to neutralize the report by pointing to the widely publicized great cathedral of Cologne, left standing after US bombing as a symbol of American humanity, and by reiterating US adherence to principles restricting attacks to military targets. Secretary of War Henry Stimson stated that “Our policy never has been to inflict terror bombing on civilian populations,” claiming that Dresden, as a major transportation hub, was of military significance. [17] In fact, US public discussion, not to speak of protest, was minimal; in Britain there was more impassioned discussion, but with the smell of victory in the air, the government easily quieted the storm. The bombing continued. Strategic bombing had passed its sternest test in the realm of public reaction in Britain and the United States.

Strategic Bombing of Japan

But it was in the Pacific theatre, and specifically in Japan, that the full brunt of air power would be felt. Between 1932 and 1945, Japan had bombed Shanghai, Nanjing, Chongqing and other cities, testing chemical weapons in Ningbo and throughout Zhejiang province. [18] In the early months of 1945, the United States shifted its attention to the Pacific as it gained the capacity to attack Japan from newly captured bases in Tinian and Guam. While the US continued to proclaim adherence to tactical bombing, tests of firebombing options against Japanese homes throughout 1943-44 demonstrated that M-69 bombs were highly effective against the densely packed wooden structures of Japanese cities. [19] In the final six months of the war, the US threw the full weight of its air power into campaigns to burn whole Japanese cities to the ground and terrorize, incapacitate and kill their largely defenseless residents in an effort to force surrender.

As Michael Sherry and Cary Karacas have pointed out for the US and Japan respectively, prophecy preceded practice in the destruction of Japanese cities, and well before US planners undertook strategic bombing. Thus Sherry observes that “Walt Disney imagined an orgiastic destruction of Japan by air in his 1943 animated feature Victory Through Air Power (based on Alexander P. De Seversky’s 1942 book),” while Karacas notes that the best-selling Japanese writer Unna Juzo, beginning in his early 1930s “air-defense novels”, anticipated the destruction of Tokyo by bombing. [20] Both reached mass audiences in the US and Japan, in important senses anticipating the events to follow.

Curtis LeMay was appointed commander of the 21^st Bomber Command in the Pacific on January 20, 1945. Capture of the Marianas, including Guam, Tinian and Saipan in summer 1944 had placed Japanese cities within effective range of the B-29 “Superfortress” bombers, while Japan’s depleted air and naval power left it virtually defenseless against sustained air attack.

LeMay was the primary architect, a strategic innovator, and most quotable spokesman for US policies of putting enemy cities, and later villages and forests, to the torch from Japan to Korea to Vietnam. In this, he was emblematic of the American way of war that emerged from World War II. Viewed from another angle, however, he was but a link in a chain of command that had begun to conduct area bombing in Europe. That chain of command extended upward through the Joint Chiefs to the president who authorized what would become the centerpiece of US warfare. [22]

The US resumed bombing of Japan after a two-year lull following the 1942 Doolittle raids in fall 1944. The goal of the bombing assault that destroyed Japan’s major cities in the period between May and August 1945, the US Strategic Bombing Survey explained, was “either to bring overwhelming pressure on her to surrender, or to reduce her capability of resisting invasion. . . . [by destroying] the basic economic and social fabric of the country.” [23] A proposal by the Chief of Staff of the Twentieth Air Force to target the imperial palace was rejected, but in the wake of successive failures to eliminate such key strategic targets as Japan’s Nakajima Aircraft Factory west of Tokyo, the area bombing of Japanese cities was approved. [24]

The full fury of firebombing and napalm was unleashed on the night of March 9-10, 1945 when LeMay sent 334 B-29s low over Tokyo from the Marianas. Their mission was to reduce the city to rubble, kill its citizens, and instill terror in the survivors, with jellied gasoline and napalm that would create a sea of flames. Stripped of their guns to make more room for bombs, and flying at altitudes averaging 7,000 feet to evade detection, the bombers, which had been designed for high-altitude precision attacks, carried two kinds of incendiaries: M47s, 100-pound oil gel bombs, 182 per aircraft, each capable of starting a major fire, followed by M69s, 6-pound gelled-gasoline bombs, 1,520 per aircraft in addition to a few high explosives to deter firefighters. [25] The attack on an area that the US Strategic Bombing Survey estimated to be 84.7 percent residential succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of air force planners. Whipped by fierce winds, flames detonated by the bombs leaped across a fifteen square mile area of Tokyo generating immense firestorms that engulfed and killed scores of thousands of residents.

In contrast with Vonnegut’s “wax museum” description of Dresden victims, accounts from inside the inferno that engulfed Tokyo chronicle scenes of utter carnage. We have come to measure the efficacy of bombing by throw weights and kill ratios, eliding the perspectives of their victims. But what of those who felt the wrath of the bombs?

Police cameraman Ishikawa Koyo described the streets of Tokyo as “rivers of fire . . . flaming pieces of furniture exploding in the heat, while the people themselves blazed like ‘matchsticks’ as their wood and paper homes exploded in flames. Under the wind and the gigantic breath of the fire, immense incandescent vortices rose in a number of places, swirling, flattening, sucking whole blocks of houses into their maelstrom of fire.”

Father Flaujac, a French cleric, compared the firebombing to the Tokyo earthquake twenty-two years earlier, an event whose massive destruction, another form of prophecy, had alerted both Japanese science fiction writers and some of the original planners of the Tokyo holocaust: [26]

In September 1923, during the great earthquake, I saw Tokyo burning for 5 days. I saw in Honjo a heap of 33,000 corpses of people who burned or suffocated at the beginning of the bombardment . . . After the first quake there were 20-odd centers of fire, enough to destroy the capital. How could the conflagration be stopped when incendiary bombs in the dozens of thousands now dropped over the four corners of the district and with Japanese houses which are only match boxes? . . . Where could one fly? The fire was everywhere.

Nature reinforced man's handiwork in the form of akakaze, the red wind that swept with hurricane force across the Tokyo plain and propelled firestorms across the city with terrifying speed and intensity. The wind drove temperatures up to eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, creating superheated vapors that advanced ahead of the flames, killing or incapacitating their victims. "The mechanisms of death were so multiple and simultaneous—oxygen deficiency and carbon monoxide poisoning, radiant heat and direct flames, debris and the trampling feet of stampeding crowds—that causes of death were later hard to ascertain . . .” [27]

The Strategic Bombing Survey, whose formation a few months earlier provided an important signal of Roosevelt’s support for strategic bombing, provided a technical description of the firestorm and its effects on Tokyo:

The chief characteristic of the conflagration . . . was the presence of a fire front, an extended wall of fire moving to leeward, preceded by a mass of pre-heated, turbid, burning vapors . . . . The 28-mile-per-hour wind, measured a mile from the fire, increased to an estimated 55 miles at the perimeter, and probably more within. An extended fire swept over 15 square miles in 6 hours . . . . The area of the fire was nearly 100 percent burned; no structure or its contents escaped damage.

The survey concluded—plausibly, but only for events prior to August 6, 1945—that

“probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any time in the history of man. People died from extreme heat, from oxygen deficiency, from carbon monoxide asphyxiation, from being trampled beneath the feet of stampeding crowds, and from drowning. The largest number of victims were the most vulnerable: women, children and the elderly.”

How many people died on the night of March 9-10 in what flight commander Gen. Thomas Power termed “the greatest single disaster incurred by any enemy in military history?” The Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that 87,793 people died in the raid, 40,918 were injured, and 1,008,005 people lost their homes. Robert Rhodes, estimating the dead at more than 100,000 men, women and children, suggested that probably a million more were injured and another million were left homeless. The Tokyo Fire Department estimated 97,000 killed and 125,000 wounded. The Tokyo Police offered a figure of 124,711 killed and wounded and 286,358 building and homes destroyed. The figure of roughly 100,000 deaths, provided by Japanese and American authorities, both of whom may have had reasons of their own for minimizing the death toll, seems to me arguably low in light of population density, wind conditions, and survivors’ accounts. [28] With an average of 103,000 inhabitants per square mile and peak levels as high as 135,000 per square mile, the highest density of any industrial city in the world, and with firefighting measures ludicrously inadequate to the task, 15.8 square miles of Tokyo were destroyed on a night when fierce winds whipped the flames and walls of fire blocked tens of thousands fleeing for their lives. An estimated 1.5 million people lived in the burned out areas. Given a near total inability to fight fires of the magnitude produced by the bombs, it is possible to imagine that casualties may have been several times higher than the figures presented on both sides of the conflict. The single effective Japanese government measure taken to reduce the slaughter of US bombing was the 1944 evacuation to the countryside of 400,000 children from major cities, 225, 000 of them from Tokyo. [29]

Following the attack, LeMay, never one to mince words, said that he wanted Tokyo “burned down—wiped right off the map” to “shorten the war.” Tokyo did burn. Subsequent raids brought the devastated area of Tokyo to more than 56 square miles, provoking the flight of millions of refugees.

No previous or subsequent conventional bombing raid ever came close to generating the toll in death and destruction of the great Tokyo raid of March 9-10. The airborne assault on Tokyo and other Japanese cities ground on relentlessly. According to Japanese police statistics, the 65 raids on Tokyo between December 6, 1944 and August 13, 1945 resulted in 137,582 casualties, 787,145 homes and buildings destroyed, and 2,625,279 people displaced. [30] Following the Tokyo raid of March 9-10, the firebombing was extended nationwide. In the ten-day period beginning on March 9, 9,373 tons of bombs destroyed 31 square miles of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe. Overall, bombing strikes destroyed 40 percent of the 66 Japanese cities targeted, with total tonnage dropped on Japan increasing from 13,800 tons in March to 42,700 tons in July. [31] If the bombing of Dresden produced a ripple of public debate in Europe, no discernible wave of revulsion, not to speak of protest, took place in the US or Europe in the wake of the far greater destruction of Japanese cities and the slaughter of civilian populations on a scale that had no parallel in the history of bombing.

In July, US planes blanketed the few remaining Japanese cities that had been spared firebombing with an “Appeal to the People.” “As you know,” it read, “America which stands for humanity, does not wish to injure the innocent people, so you had better evacuate these cities.” Half the leafleted cities were firebombed within days of the warning. US planes ruled the skies. Overall, by one calculation, the US firebombing campaign destroyed 180 square miles of 67 cities, killed more than 300,000 people and injured an additional 400,000, figures that exclude the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [32]

Between January and July 1945, the US firebombed and destroyed all but five Japanese cities, deliberately sparing Kyoto, the ancient imperial capital, and four others. The extent of the destruction was impressive ranging from 50 to 60% of the urban area destroyed in cities including Kobe, Yokohama and Tokyo, to 60 to 88% in seventeen cities, to 98.6% in the case of Toyama. [33] In the end, the Atomic Bomb Selection Committee chose Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki as the pristine targets to display the awesome power of the atomic bomb to Japan and the world in the event that would both bring to a spectacular end the costliest war in human history and send a powerful message to the Soviet Union.

Michael Sherry has compellingly described the triumph of technological fanaticism as the hallmark of the air war that quintessentially shaped the American way of fighting and heavily stamped remembrances of the War ever after:

The shared mentality of the fanatics of air war was their dedication to assembling and perfecting their methods of destruction, and . . . doing so overshadowed the original purposes justifying destruction . . . .The lack of a proclaimed intent to destroy, the sense of being driven by the twin demands of bureaucracy and technology, distinguished America’s technological fanaticism from its enemies’ ideological fanaticism.

Technological fanaticism served to conceal the larger purposes of power both from military planners and the public. This suggestive formulation, however, conceals core ideological patterns at the heart of American strategic thought. Wartime technological fanaticism in my view is best understood as a means of operationalizing national goals. Taken for granted were the legitimacy and benevolence of American global power and a perception of the Japanese as both uniquely brutal and inherently inferior. Technology was harnessed to the driving force of American nationalism, which repeatedly came to the fore in times of war, and was fashioned under wartime conditions, beginning with the conquest of the Philippines in 1898 and running through successive wars and police actions in Latin America and Asia that spanned the long twentieth century. In other words, technological fanaticism is inseparable from American nationalism and conceptions of a benevolent American-dominated global order. In contrast to British, Japanese and other nationalisms associated with expansive powers, the American approach to the postwar order lay not in a vision centered on the acquisition of colonies but in a global network of military bases and naval and air power that only in recent years has begun to be understood as the American way of empire. [34]

Throughout the spring and summer of 1945 the US air war in Japan reached an intensity that is still perhaps unrivaled in the magnitude of human slaughter. [35] That moment was a product of the combination of technological breakthroughs, American nationalism, and the erosion of moral and political scruples pertaining to the killing of civilians, perhaps intensified by the racism that crystallized in the Pacific theatre. [36]

The targeting for destruction of entire populations, whether indigenous peoples, religious infidels, or others deemed inferior or evil, may be as old as human history, but the forms it takes are as new as the latest technologies of destruction and strategic innovation, of which air power, firebombing and nuclear weapons are particularly notable. [37] The most important way in which World War II shaped the moral and technological tenor of mass destruction was the erosion in the course of war of the stigma associated with the systematic targeting of civilian populations from the air, and elimination of the constraints, which for some years had restrained certain air powers from area bombing. What was new was both the scale of killing made possible by the new technologies and the routinization of mass killing or state terrorism. If area bombing remained controversial throughout much of World War II, something to be concealed or denied by its practitioners, by the end of the conflagration it would become the acknowledged centerpiece of war making, emblematic above all of the American way of war even as the nature of the targets and the weapons were transformed by new technologies and confronted new forms of resistance. Indeed, for six decades the US (and those fighting under its umbrella) has been virtually alone in fighting wars and police actions notable for their reliance on airpower in general and the deliberate targeting for destruction of civilians, and the infrastructure that makes possible their survival, in particular. Certainly in this epoch no others have bombed on a scale approaching that of the US. The US would conceal the deliberate annihilation of noncombatants with the figleaf that Sahr Conway-Lanz describes as the myth of collateral damage, that is the claim, however systematic the bombing, that the intent was elimination of military targets, not the slaughter of noncombatants.

Concerted efforts to protect civilians from the ravages of war reached a peak in the aftermath of World War II in the founding of the United Nations, German and Japanese War Crimes Tribunals, and the 1949 Geneva Accords and its 1977 Protocol. The Nuremberg Indictment defined “crimes against humanity” as “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war,” language that resonated powerfully with the area bombing campaigns not only of Japan and Germany but of Britain and the US. [38] These efforts appear to have done little to stay the hand of power. Indeed, while the atomic bomb would leave a deep imprint on the collective consciousness of the twentieth century, memory of the area bombings and firebombing of major cities soon disappeared from the consciousness of all but the victims.

The ability to destroy an entire city and annihilate its population in a single bombing campaign was not only far more “efficient” and less costly for the attacker than previous methods of warfare, it also sanitized slaughter. Air power distanced executioners from victims, transforming the visual and tactile experience of killing. The bombardier never looks squarely into the eyes of the victim, nor does the act of destruction have the physical immediacy for the perpetrator of decapitation by sword or even shooting with a machine gun. This may be particularly important when the principal targets are women, children and the elderly.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the pinnacle of the process of annihilation of civilian populations in the pursuit of military victory. While President Truman claimed that the Hiroshima bomb targeted a naval base, the decision to detonate the bomb in the skies above Hiroshima and Nagasaki was taken to maximize the killing of their inhabitants and the destruction of the built environment. It was also calculated to demonstrate to the Japanese government and people, to the authorities in the Soviet Union and other potential challengers of American preeminence, and to the people of the world, the omnipotence of American power and the certain destruction that would be visited on any who defied the United States. The debate over the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has reverberated throughout the postwar era, centered on the killing of noncombatants and on its significance in ending World War II and shaping the subsequent US-Soviet conflict that defined postwar geopolitics. [39] In a sense, however, the very focus of that debate on the atomic bomb, and later on the development of the hydrogen bomb, may have contributed to the silencing of the no less pressing issues associated with the killing of noncombatants with ever more powerful ‘conventional’ weapons.

The US did not drop atomic bombs again in the six decades since the end of World War II, although it repeatedly threatened their use in Korea, in Vietnam and elsewhere. But it incorporated annihilation of noncombatants in the bombing programs that have been integral to the successive “conventional wars” that it has waged subsequently. With area bombing at the core of its strategic agenda, US attacks on cities and noncombatants would run the gamut from firebombing, napalming, cluster bombing, and atomic bombing to the use of chemical defoliants and depleted uranium weapons and bunker buster bombs in an ever expanding circle of destruction. [40] Indiscriminate bombing of noncombatants has been responsible for the most massive destruction and loss of life throughout this epoch, even while the US staunchly maintains that it does not deliberately kill civilians, thereby hewing to Conway-Lanz’s collateral damage principle to protect it not only from political criticism in the US, but also from international criticisms.

World War II remains unrivaled in the annals of war by important measures such as the number of people killed and the scale of mass destruction. In that war, it was not the bombing of cities but Nazi genocide against Jews, Catholics, Romany, homosexuals and other Germans as well as Poles, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and Japanese slaughter of Asian noncombatants that exacted the heaviest price in human lives. Each of these examples had its unique character and historical and ideological origins. All rested on dehumanizing assumptions concerning the “other” and produced large-scale slaughter of noncombatant populations. Japan’s China war produced notable cases of atrocities that, then and later, captured world attention. They included the Nanjing Massacre, the bombings of Shanghai, Nanjing, Hankou, Chongqing and other cities, the enslavement of the comfort women, and the vivisection experiments and biowarfare bombs of Unit 731. Less noted then and since were the systematic barbarities perpetrated against resistant villagers, though this produced the largest number of the estimated ten to thirty million Chinese who lost their lives in the war, a number that far surpasses the half million or more Japanese noncombatants who died at the hands of US bombing, and may have exceeded Soviet losses to Nazi invasion conventionally estimated at 20 million lives. [41] In that and subsequent wars it would be the signature barbarities such as the Nanjing Massacre, the Bataan Death March, and the massacres at Nogunri and My Lai rather than the quotidian events that defined the systematic daily and hourly killing, which have attracted sustained attention, sparked bitter controversy, and shaped historical memory.

The war dead in Europe alone in World War II, including the Soviet Union, have been estimated in the range of 30 to 40 million, fifty percent more than the toll in World War I. To this we must add 25 to 35 million Asian victims in the fifteen-year resistance war in China (1931-45), approximately three million Japanese, and millions more in Southeast Asia. Among the important instances of the killing of noncombatants in World War II, the US destruction of Japanese cities is perhaps least known and least controversial. In contrast to the fierce and continuing debate over the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Nazi extermination of Jews and others, and the far smaller-scale allied bombings of Dresden and Hamburg, and such Japanese atrocities as the Nanjing Massacre and the vivisection experiments of Unit 731, the US firebombing of Japanese cities has virtually disappeared from international and even American and Japanese historical memory of the war.

In World War I, ninety percent of the fatalities directly attributable to the war were military, nearly all of them Europeans and Americans. Most estimates place World War II casualties in Europe in the range of 50-60 percent noncombatants. In the case of Asia, when war-induced famine casualties are included, the noncombatant death toll was almost certainly substantially higher in both absolute and percentage terms. [42] The United States, its homeland untouched by war, suffered approximately 100,000 deaths in the entire Asian theater, a figure lower than that for the single Tokyo air raid of March 10, 1945, and well below the death toll at Hiroshima or in the Battle of Okinawa. Japan's three million war dead, while thirty times the number of US dead, was still only a small fraction of the toll suffered by the Chinese who resisted the Japanese military juggernaut. These are numbers of relative casualties that the US, by fighting no war on its own soil since the Civil War, and by adapting strategies that maximize its technological and economic strength and minimize its own casualties, would replicate to even greater numerical advantage in subsequent wars.

World War II remains indelibly engraved in American memory as the “Good War” and in important respects it was. In confronting the war machines of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the United States played a large role in defeating aggressors and opening the way for a wave of decolonization that swept the globe in subsequent decades. It was also a war that catapulted the United States to global supremacy and established the institutional foundations for the global projection of American power in a network of military bases and unrivaled technological supremacy.

For most Americans, in retrospect World War II seemed a “Good War” in another sense: the US entered and exited the war buoyed by absolute moral certainty borne of a mission to punish aggression in the form of a genocidal Nazi fascism and Japanese imperialism run amok. Moreover, Americans remember the generosity of US aid not only to war torn allies, but to rebuild the societies of former adversaries, Germany and Japan. Such an interpretation masks the extent to which Americans shared with their adversaries an abiding nationalism and expansionist urges. In contrast to earlier territorial empires, this took the form of new regional and global structures facilitating the exercise of American power. The victory, which propelled the US to a hegemonic position which carried authority to condemn and punish war crimes committed by defeated nations, remains a major obstacle to a thoroughgoing reassessment of the wartime conduct of the US in general, and issues of mass destruction carried out by its forces in particular.

World War II, building on and extending atavistic impulses deeply rooted in earlier civilizations and combining them with more destructive technologies, produced new forms of human depravity. German and Japanese crimes have long been subjected to international criticism from the war crimes tribunals of the 1940s to the present. [43] At Nuremberg and subsequent trials, more than 1,800 Germans were convicted of war crimes and 294 were executed. At the Tokyo Trials, 28 were indicted and seven were sentenced to death. At subsequent A and B class trials conducted by the allied powers between 1945 and 1951, 5,700 Japanese, Koreans and Taiwanese were indicted. 984 were initially sentenced to death (the sentences of 50 of these were commuted); 475 received life sentences, and 2,944 received limited prison terms. The result of military defeat, occupation, and war crimes tribunals has been protracted and profound reflection and self-criticism by significant groups within both countries. In the case of Germany—but not yet Japan—there has been meaningful official recognition of the criminal conduct of genocidal and other barbaric policies as well as appropriate restitution to victims in the form of public apology and substantial official reparations. For its part, the Japanese state continues to reject official reparations claims to such war victims as Korean and Chinese forced laborers and the military comfort women (sexual slaves), while the war remains a fiercely contested intellectual-political issue as demonstrated by the decades long conflicts over textbook treatments of colonialism and war, the Yasukuni shrine (the symbol of emperor-centered nationalism, empire and war), the military comfort women, and the Nanjing Massacre controversies. [44]

In contrast to these responses to the war in Germany and Japan, and even to the ongoing debate in the US about the uses of the atomic bomb, there has been virtually no awareness of, not to speak of critical reflection on, the US bombing of Japanese civilians in the months prior to Hiroshima. The systematic bombing of Japanese noncombatants in the course of the destruction of Japanese cities must be added to a list of the horrific legacies of the war that includes Nazi genocide and a host of Japanese war crimes against Asian peoples. Only by engaging the issues, and above all the impact of this approach to the massive killing of noncombatants that has been central to all subsequent US wars, can Americans begin to approach the Nuremberg ideal that holds victors as well as vanquished to the same standards with respect to crimes against humanity, or the standard of the 1949 Geneva Accord which requires the protection of civilians in time of war. This is the principle of universality enshrined at Nuremberg and violated in practice by the US and others beginning with the 1946 trials, which declared US immunity from prosecution for war crimes.

In his opening address to the tribunal, Chief Prosecutor for the United States, Justice Robert Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United States, spoke eloquently, and memorably, on the principle of universality. “If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes,” he said, “they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us....We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.” [45]

Every US president from Roosevelt to George W. Bush has endorsed in practice an approach to warfare that targets entire populations for annihilation, one that eliminates all vestiges of distinction between combatant and noncombatant, with deadly consequences. The awesome power of the atomic bomb has obscured the fact that this strategy came of age in the firebombing of Tokyo and became the centerpiece of US war making from that time forward.

That poisoned chalice was put to American lips in the 1945 trials and all the more so in subsequent wars. Sahr Conway-Lanz rightly points to the deep divisions among Americans seeking to strike an appropriate balance between combat and atrocity, and between war and genocide. [46] But with absolute American preponderance of technological power and the threat of enemies from Communists to terrorists magnified by government and the media, in practice, there were few restraints on the annihilation of noncombatants in the succession of US wars that have exacted such a heavy toll in lives. American self-conceptions of benevolence and justice have remained fixed not on the reality of the killing of noncombatants but on the combination of American intentions in combat and generosity in charting postwar recovery in all wars since 1945.

Epilogue: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and the Uses of Airpower to Target Noncombatants

The centrality of the wholesale killing of noncombatants through the myriad uses of air power runs like a red line from the bombings of 1944-45 through the Korean and Indochinese wars to the Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In the course of six decades since the firebombing and atomic bombing of Japan, while important continuities are observable, such as the firebombing and napalming of cities, new, more powerful and versatile aircraft and weapons would be deployed in the course of successive American wars fought predominantly in Asia.

General Curtis LeMay, the primary architect of the firebombing and atomic bombing strategy applied to Japan in 1945 played a comparable role in Korea and Vietnam. Never one to pull punches, or to minimize the claimed impact of bombing, LeMay recalled of Korea:

We slipped a note kind of under the door into the Pentagon and said, “Look, let us go up there…and burn down five of the biggest towns in North Korea – and they’re not very big – and that ought to stop it.” Well, the answer to that was four or five screams – “You’ll kill a lot of non-combatants,” and “It’s too horrible.” Yet over a period three years or so…we burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea, too… Now, over a period of three years this is palatable, but to kill a few people to stop this from happening – a lot of people can’t stomach it.” [47]

In the course of three years, US/UN forces in Korea flew 1,040,708 sorties and dropped 386,037 tons of bombs and 32,357 tons of napalm. Counting all types of air borne ordnance, including rockets and machine-gun ammunition, the total tonnage comes to 698,000 tons. Marilyn Young estimates the death toll in Korea, most of it noncombatants, at two to four million, and in the South alone, more than five million people had been displaced, according to UN estimates. [48]

One striking feature of these wars has been the extension of bombing from a predominantly urban phenomenon to the uses of airpower directed against rural areas of Korea and Vietnam, leading the United States to breach another of international principles that had sought to curtail indiscriminate attacks on noncombatants. Beginning in Korea, US bombing was extended from cities to the countryside with devastating effects. In what Bruce Cumings has called the “final act of this barbaric air war,” in spring 1953 North Korea’s main irrigation dams were destroyed shortly after the rice had been transplanted. [49]

Here we consider one particularly important element of American bombing of Vietnam. Franklin Roosevelt, in 1943 issued a statement that long stood as the clearest expression of US policy on the use of chemical and biological weapons. In response to reports of Axis plans to use poison gases, Roosevelt warned that “use of such weapons has been outlawed by the general opinion of civilized mankind. This country has not used them, and I hope that we never will be compelled to use them. I state categorically that we shall under no circumstances resort to the use of such weapons unless they are first used by our enemies.” [50] This principle, incorporated in US Army Field Manual 27-10, Law of Land Warfare, issued in 1954, affirmed the principle of no first use of gas warfare and bacteriological warfare. By 1956, that provision had disappeared, replaced by the assertion that the US was party to no treaty in force “that prohibits or restricts the use in warfare of toxic or nontoxic gases, or smoke or incendiary materials or of bacteriological warfare.” US CBW research and procurement efforts, that began in the early 1950s and culminated in the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s, resulted in the use of chemical and biological weapons both against Vietnamese forces and nature, specifically extending from the destruction of forest cover to the destruction of crops. As Seymour Hersh documents, the US CBW program in Vietnam “gradually escalated from the use of leaf-killing defoliants to rice-killing herbicides and nausea-producing gases.” [51] How widespread were US gas attacks in Vietnam? A 1967 Japanese study of US anticrop and defoliation attacks prepared by the head of the Agronomy Section of the Japan Science Council concluded that more than 3.8 million acres of arable land in South Vietnam was ruined and more than 1,000 peasants and 13,000 livestock were killed. [52] In the face of US military claims that the gases were benign, Dr. Pham Duc Nam told Japanese investigators that a three-day attack near Da Nang from February 25 to 27, 1966 had poisoned both livestock and people, some of whom died. “Pregnant women gave birth to still-born or premature children. Most of the affected cattle died from serious diarrhea, and river fish floated on the surface of the water belly up, soon after the chemicals were spread.” [53]

Before turning to Iraq, it is worth recalling President Nixon’s comments on the bombing of Cambodia as preserved in the Kissinger tapes released in May 2004. In a burst of anger on Dec. 9, 1970, when Nixon railed over what he saw as the Air Force’s lackluster bombing campaign in Cambodia. Kissinger responded: “The Air Force is designed to fight an air battle against the Soviet Union. They are not designed for this war.” Nixon then exploded: “I want them to hit everything. I want them to use the big planes, the small planes, everything they can that will help out there, and let’s start giving them a little shock.” Here was an early warning signal of the “Shock and Awe” strategy of a generation later. Kissinger relayed the order: “A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves.” [54] In the course of the Vietnam War the US embraced chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction as integral parts of its arsenal.

Another story of indiscriminate bombing in Cambodia came to light thirty six years after the events. The new evidence makes clear that Cambodia was bombed far more heavily than was previously known, and that, unbeknownst to the American public or the world, it began not with Nixon in 1970 but on October 4, 1965. During a fall 2000 visit to Vietnam, President Clinton made available detailed Air Force records to help the Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian governments to uncover the remains of two thousand missing American soldiers. The records provided specific data on place and scale of bombing. The incomplete data reveal that October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons’ worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. The consequences go far beyond the dead, the injured, and the continued dangers of unexploded ordinance. As Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan argue persuasively, “Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d’état in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide.” [55]

It is notable, by contrast to the preceding six decades of American warfare, that the centrality of the image of airpower and the bomb as the summa of destructive might, has shifted dramatically in the Iraq War: Americans remember World War II above all as the crowning achievement of air power, symbolized and mythologized by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; they remember the era of US-Soviet confrontation above all as one of nuclear standoff; and they remember both Korea and Vietnam in no small part through images of American predominance in the air, as in the bombing of Hanoi and North Vietnam as well as the defoliation using Agent Orange, air power. But, as Michael Sherry observes, air power has largely receded from consciousness in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the shift in target from the other superpower to faceless terrorists associated with Al-Quaida and Islamic militants. Sherry concludes that a sea change has occurred, a shift from prophecy to memory in which air power declines in American consciousness: “Bombers attacking Baghdad, B-52s over Belgrade, Russian planes hitting Grozny, rulers bombing their own peoples--the scale of those operations (however devastating for the locals) and the fact that they involved such unequal forces did not stir Americans’ apocalyptic fears and fantasies.” Where air power did appear in American consciousness, he finds, “American bombing came across on U.S. television screens more as a fascinating video game than as a devastating onslaught.” More importantly, he concludes, because of the attack on New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11, and because of the horrific images that it conjured, in contrast to the heroic images of air power in World War II, the prophecy associated with it “did not seem to last long or run deep.” [56]

In thinking about the Iraq War and contemporary American consciousness, I would like to suggest an alternative scenario. First, I believe that 9/11 and the Twin Towers in flames remains the iconic image of our times in American consciousness. It is the central mobilizing image for US war making and the primal impulse that drives American fears of the future. Second, as Seymour Hersh and others have observed, the US military, while continuing to pursue massive bombing of Iraqi neighborhoods, above all in the destruction of Falluja but even in Baghdad, has chosen to throw a cloak of silence over the air war. The major media have faithfully honored official dicta in this as in so many other ways. [57] Finally, among the George W. Bush administration’s major initiatives have been the efforts to seize control of space as the centerpiece of global domination in an era that is slated to replace the bomber as the primary delivery weapon of mass destruction. [58] Air power remains among the major causes of death, destruction, dislocation and division in contemporary Iraq in a war that had taken approximately 655,000 lives by the summer of 2006 in the most authoritative study to date, that of The Lancet) and created more than two million refugees abroad and an equal number displaced internally (one in seven Iraqis are displaced). Largely unreported in the US mainstream press, and invisible in US television news and reportage, this is the central reality that confronts the Iraq people. US strategy has produced the explosive social divisions that promise to lead to permanent warfare in Iraq and throughout the region. Despite the unchallenged air supremacy that the US has wielded in Iraq since 1991 and especially since 2003, there is no end in sight to US warfare and civil war in Iraq and throughout the region. [59]

We have shown the decisive impact of the final year of World War II in setting in place the preeminence of strategic bombing as quintessential to the US way of war, one that would characterize subsequent major wars that have wreaked yet greater devastation on noncombatant populations. Yet for all the power unleashed by US bombers, for all the millions of victims, in the six decades since 1945, victory against successive, predominantly Asian foes, has proved extraordinary elusive for the United States.

This article was written for Japan Focus. Posted on May 2, 2007.

Mark Selden is a research associate at the East Asia Program, Cornell University, and a coordinator of Japan Focus. His recent books include War and State Terrorism. The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century.

Notes

* The author thanks Noam Chomsky, Bruce Cumings, John Dower, Laura Hein, Gavan McCormack, and Michael Sherry for critical comments, sources and suggestions. The term holocaust used in the title draws on its original meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary provides this definition: “Complete consumption by fire; complete destruction, especially of a large number of persons; a great slaughter or massacre.”

[1] Estimates vary, especially in the Pacific theatre. See, for example, John Ellis, World War II - A statistical survey (New York: Facts on File, 1993); John W. Dower, War Without Mercy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), pp. 294-300; in Roger Chickering, Stig Forster and Bernd Greiner, eds., A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction 1937-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) p. 3, Chickering and Forster estimate military deaths at 15 million and civilian deaths at more than 45 million; Wikipedia offers a wide-ranging discussion of numbers and sources.

[2] Lee Kennett, A History of Strategic Bombing (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982), pp. 9-38; Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (New York: New Press, 2000), pp. 31-42.

[3] “General Report of the Commission of Jurists at the Hague,” American Journal of International Law, XVII (October 1923), Supplement, pp. 250-51.

[4] A valuable synthesis of the literature on war and the noncombatant is Sahr Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage: Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity After World War II (London: Routledge, 2006). A. C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities. The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan (New York: Walker & Company, 2006), subjects the British and American choice of area bombing in World War II in Germany and Japan to rigorous scrutiny from the perspectives of morality, international law, and effectiveness. The terms area bombing, strategic bombing and indiscriminate bombing refer to the wholesale destruction of large areas of cities, frequently with the annihilation of the civilian population. By contrast tactical bombing is directed to discrete military and/or military-industrial targets such as military bases and airfields, bridges, and munitions factories. In practice, given technical limitations, bombs directed at military targets frequently exacted heavy civilian tolls. I address the issues of state terrorism and the targeting of civilians by Japan and the United States in Mark Selden and Alvin So, eds., War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan and the Asia Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).

[5] A small number of works have drawn attention to US war atrocities, typically centering on the torture, killing and desecration of captured Japanese soldiers. These include Peter Schrijvers, The GI War Against Japan. American Soldiers in Asia and the Pacific During World War II (New York: NYU Press, 2002) and John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986). The Wartime Journals of Charles Lindbergh (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970) is seminal in disclosing atrocities committed against Japanese POWs. Two recent works closely assess the bombing of noncombatants and the ravaging of nature and society as a result of strategic bombing that has been ignored in much of the literature. A. C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities, provides a thoroughgoing assessment of US and British strategic bombing (including atomic bombing) through the lenses of ethics and international law. Grayling’s premise is that Allied bombing which “deliberately targeted German and Japanese civilian populations” and “claimed the lives of 800,000 civilian women, children and men,” “is nowhere near equivalent in scale of moral atrocity to the Holocaust of European Jewry, or the death and destruction all over the world for which Nazi and Japanese aggression was collectively responsible,” a figure that he places at 25 million dead. He nevertheless concludes that the US and British killing of noncombatants “did in fact involve the commission of wrongs” on a very large scale. Pp 5-6; 276-77. Michael Bess, in Choices Under Fire. Moral Dimensions of World War II (New York: Knopf, 2006), pp. 88-110, in a chapter on “Bombing Civilian Populations,” asks this question: “did this taint the victory with an indelible stain of innocent blood?” After reviewing both strategic and ethical issues, he concludes “There can be no excuse, in the end, for the practices of large-scale area bombing and firebombing of cities; these were atrocities, pure and simple. They were atrocities because the Anglo-Americans could definitely have won the war without resorting to them.” It is necessary, in my view, to go further to inquire whether these would have constituted atrocities in circumstances in which the bombing, presumably including atomic bombing, were necessary for securing US victory.

[6] Grayling, Among the Dead Cities, pp. 90-91. Grayling goes on to note the different experiences of survivors of the two types of bombing, particularly as a result of radiation symptoms from the atomic bomb.

[7] Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage, provides a useful overview of international efforts to protect noncombatants throughout history and particularly since World War II. See also Timothy L. H. McCormack and Helen Durham, “Aerial Bombardment of Civilians: The Current International Legal Framework,” forthcoming.

[8] The question of universality has been the centerpiece of Noam Chomsky’s critique of the conduct of the powers, above all the United States, from his earliest political writings to the present. See, for example, the introduction to American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966), pp. 4-5; Hegemony or Survival. America’s Quest for Global Dominance (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), pp, 2-13, 20-23; Failed States. The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), pp. 3-4 and passim. The Taylor quote is from his Nuremberg and Vietnam: an American Tragedy, cited in Chomsky, Failed States, p. 83. John Dower offers trenchant comments on the scales of justice in Embracing Defeat, pp. 451-74; Richard H. Minear, Victors’ Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).

[9] Quoted in Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, p. 81. The US debate over the bombing of cities is detailed in Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 23-28, pp. 57-59. Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 20-30, I08-9. Gen. Billy Mitchell's contradictory message, which became Air Force doctrine in 1926, was that air attack "was a method of imposing will by terrorizing the whole population . . . while conserving life and property to the greatest extent." Quoted in Sherry, p. 30. See also Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage, p. 10.

[10] Tami Davis Biddle, “Air Power,” in Michael Howard, George J. Andreopoulos, and Mark R. Shulman, The Laws of War. Constraints on Warfare in the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 151-52. Gordon Wright, The Ordeal of Total War 1939-1945 (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 26.

[11] On Casablanca bombing see Charles B. Macdonald, World War II: The War Against Germany and Italy, (Army Historical Series, Office of the Chief of Military History), chapter 22.

The first major British success came at Hamburg in 1943 when firebombing destroyed large parts of the city and took 44,000 lives. Grayling traces British and German shift from tactical to strategic bombing in the early years of the war, Among the Dead Cities, pp. 31-76.

[12] Max Hastings, Bomber Command: The Myth and Reality of the Strategic Bombing Offensive (New York: Dial Press, 1979), p. 139.

[13] Sherry, Air Power, p. 260. With much U.S. bombing already relying on radar, the distinction between tactical and strategic bombing had long been violated in practice. The top brass, from George Marshall to Air Force chief Henry Arnold to Dwight Eisenhower, had all earlier given tacit approval for area bombing, yet no orders from on high spelled out a new bombing strategy.

[14] Interview quoted in Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 593.

[15] Schaffer, Wings, p. 97; see also Sherry, Air Power, pp. 260-63. Grayling makes a compelling case for the failure of area bombing of Germany to achieve its objective of breaking morale and causing heavy destruction of cities and military-related industries, thereby forcing surrender, Among the Dead Cities, pp. 106-07. Robert Pape made a similar argument for Japan, stressing other factors including naval blockade, threat of invasion, and the Soviet entry into the war as having far greater significance than the fire bombing. Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). The extensive American debate over Japan’s surrender has paid little attention to the firebombing, concentrating on the three issues of the atomic bombs, the Russian entry into the war, and US terms with respect to Emperor Hirohito.

[16] The most eloquent criticism was the writing of Vera Brittain. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities, pp. 180-86. In the midst of the Dresden debate, On March 28, 1945, Churchill issued a minute questioning the area-bombing strategy and raising the question of whether tactical bombing of key objectives was not more effective. The minute was withdrawn following air force protests. Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany 1939-45 ( London: HMSO, 1961), p. 112.

[17] E. Bartlett Kerr, Flames Over Tokyo, (New York: Fine, 1991), p. 145.

[18] Tsuneishi Keiichi, “Unit 731 and the Japanese Imperial Army’s Biological Warware Program,” from Hata Ikuhiko and Sase Masanori, eds., Sekai Senso Hanzai Jiten (Encyclopedia of World War Crimes), (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 2002), tr. John Junkerman, Japan Focus, Nov 20, 2005 japanfocus.org/products/details/2194.

[19] Kerr, Flames Over Tokyo, pp. 31-32, 41-44, 52, 71-74. For the October 1944 recommendations of the Committee of Operations Analysts of the Air Force for area bombing, see pp. 83-88.

[20] Michael Sherry, “The United States and Strategic Bombing: From Prophecy to Memory,” forthcoming; Cary Karacas, “Imagining Air Raids on Tokyo, 1930-1945,” paper presented at the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting, Boston, March 23, 2007, pp. 2-5. Sherry traces other prophecies of nuclear bombing back to H.G. Wells 1913 novel The World Set Free. Sherry makes clear that prophecy has the capacity to speak forcefully not only to proponents but also to energize opponents of the envisaged future.

[21] Sherry, Air Power, pp. 272-73, 404-05.

[22] Cf. Stewart Udall’s discussion of responsibility for the US shift to area bombing, centering on President Roosevelt, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and Air Force Secretary Robert Lovett, and the difficulty of documenting responsibility for the policy shift. Sherry and Schaffer provide the most exhaustive study of the shift in U.S. bombing policy.

[23] United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Summary Report (Pacific War) (Washington: US GPO, 1946), Vol 1, p. 16.

[24] Kerr, Flames Over Tokyo, pp. 102-03, 108-14, 134-38 . The limited success of repeated efforts to destroy the Nakajima Factory and other aircraft factories paved the way for the area bombing strategy.

[25] Rhodes, Atomic Bomb, pp. 596-97; Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Gate, The Pacific: Matterhorn to Nagasaki June 1944 to August 1945. Vol. 5, The Army Air Forces in World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953; 1983 Office of Air Force History imprint) pp. 609-13; Kerr, Flames Over Tokyo, p. 146-50. The low-flying planes, which could save fuel, carry more bombs and better target their sites, were vulnerable to attack by fighter-interceptors. However, US attacks in mid-February destroyed most of the 530 interceptors protecting the Kanto region. Karacas, “Imagining Air Raids on Tokyo,” p. 27. In Japan in spring and summer 1945, as in virtually all subsequent bombing campaigns conducted over the next six decades, the US ruled the sky with virtually no enemy capacity to destroy its bombers.

[26] “Tokyo Under Bombardment, 1941-1945,” Bethanie Institute Bulletin No. 5, translation in General Headquarters Far East Command, Military Intelligence Section, War in Asia and the Pacific Vol. 12, Defense of the Homeland and End of the War, ed., Donald Detwiler and Charles Burdick (New York, 1980); see also Karacas on the imaginative link between the Tokyo earthquake and the bombing in the Unna Juzo novel.

[27] Sherry, Air Power, p. 276. A detailed photographic record, including images of scores of the dead, some burnt to a crisp and distorted beyond recognition, others apparently serene in death, and of acres of the city flattened as if by an immense tornado, is found in Ishikawa Koyo, Tokyo daikushu no zenkiroku (Complete Record of the Great Tokyo Air Attack) (Tokyo, 1992); Tokyo kushu o kiroku suru kai ed., Tokyo daikushu no kiroku (Record of the Great Tokyo Air Attack) (Tokyo: Sanseido, 1982), and Dokyumento: Tokyo daikushu (Document: The Great Tokyo Air Attack) (Tokyo: Yukeisha, 1968).

[28] The Survey’s killed-to-injured ratio of better than two to one was far higher than most estimates for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki where killed and wounded were approximately equal. If accurate, it is indicative of the immense difficulty in escaping for those near the center of the Tokyo firestorm on that windswept night. The Survey’s kill ratio has, however, been challenged by Japanese researchers who found much higher kill ratios at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, particularly when one includes those who died of bomb injuries months and years later. In my view, the SBS estimates both exaggerate the killed to injured ratio and understate the numbers killed in the Tokyo raid. The Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombing (New York: Basic Books, 1991), pp. 420-21; Cf. U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, Field Report Covering Air Raid Protection and Allied Subjects Tokyo (n.p. 1946), pp. 3, 79. In contrast to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which for fifty years have been the subject of intense research by Japanese, Americans and others, the most significant records of the Tokyo attack are those compiled at the time by Japanese police and fire departments. In the absence of the mystique of the atomic bomb and the ongoing national and global focus on that event, there was no compelling reason to continue to monitor the results of firebombing attacks on Japanese cities following surrender. And neither the US military nor the Japanese government produced significant records of the destruction during the occupation. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey study of Effects of Air Attack on Urban Complex Tokyo-Kawasaki-Yokohama (n.p. 1947), p. 8, observes that Japanese police estimates of 93,076 killed and 72,840 injured in Tokyo air raids make no mention of the numbers of people missing. Surely, too, many classified as injured died subsequently of their wounds. In contrast to the monitoring of atomic bomb deaths over the subsequent six decades, the Tokyo casualty figures at best record deaths and injuries within days of the bombing at a time when the capacity of the Tokyo military and police to compile records had been overwhelmed. Many more certainly died in the following weeks and months. The bombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities has attracted little scholarly attention either in Japan (with the exception of local museums and local studies of the bombing of particular cities) or internationally.

[29] Karacas, “Imagining Air Raids,” p. 22.

[30] Dokyumento. Tokyo daikushu, pp. 168-73.

[31] John W. Dower, “Sensational Rumors, Seditious Graffiti, and the Nightmares of the Thought Police,” in Japan in War and Peace (New York: The New Press, 1993), p. 117. United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Summary Report, Vol I, pp. 16-20.

[32] Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage, p. 1.

[33] Kerr, Flames Over Tokyo, pp. 337-38.

[34] Two excellent complementary accounts of important dimensions of the geopolitics and political economy of contemporary US empire are Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire. Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), and Michael T. Klare, Blood and Oil (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).

[35] The numbers killed, specifically the numbers of noncombatants killed, in the Korean, Vietnam and Iraq wars were greater, but each of those wars extended over many years.

[36] Mark Selden, “American Nationalism and Asian Wars,” (in progress).

[37] Cf. Dower’s nuanced historical perspective on war and racism in American thought and praxis in War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). In Year 501: The Conquest Continues (Boston: South End Press, 1993) and many other works, Noam Chomsky emphasizes the continuities in Western ideologies that undergird practices leading to the annihilation of entire populations in the course of colonial and expansionist wars over half a millennium and more.

[38] Geoffrey Best, War and Law Since 1945. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) pp. 180-81.

[39] See for example Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America. Fifty Years of Denial. (New York: Grossett/Putnam, 1945), Parts II-IV; Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage, pp. 13-16.

[40] Bombing would also be extended from cities to the countryside, as in the Agent Orange defoliation attacks that destroyed the forest cover and poisoned residents of sprayed areas of Vietnam.

[41] I have explored issues of Japan’s China war and the Chinese resistance in China in Revolution: The Yenan Way Revisited (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), and in Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz and Mark Selden, Chinese Village, Socialist State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). An insightful discussion of Japanese war crimes in the Pacific, locating the issues within a comparative context of atrocities committed by the US, Germany, and other powers, is Yuki Tanaka’s Hidden Horrors: Japanese Crimes in World War II. Takashi Yoshida, The Making of the “Rape of Nanking”: History and Memory in Japan, China and the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) examines the understanding of the Nanjing Massacre in each country. Daqing Yang surveys the contentious Chinese and Japanese literature on the rape of Nanjing in “A Sino-Japanese Controversy: The Nanjing Atrocity as History,” Sino-Japanese Studies, (November 1990), pp. 14-35. For additional studies of Japanese war atrocities and the search for justice for victims, see articles by Utsumi Aiko, William Underwood, Yoshiko Nozaki, Gavan McCormack, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Yuki Tanaka, Mark Selden and others at Japan Focus, http://japanfocus.org.

[42] R.J.R. Bosworth, Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima. History Writing and the Second World War 1945-1990 (London: Routledge, 1993). Wide discrepancies remain with respect to World War II casualties and deaths, notably in Asia. Cf. John Dower’s compilation and discussion of the basic data, War Without Mercy, pp. 295-300, and “Race, Language and War in Two Cultures,” in Japan in War and Peace, p. 257.

[43] Dower, Embracing Defeat, pp. 443-47; Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage, pp. 16-17.

[44] Mark Selden, “Nationalism, Historical Memory and Contemporary Conflicts in the Asia Pacific: the Yasukuni Phenomenon, Japan, and the United States”; Takahashi Tetsuya, "The National Politics of the Yasukuni Shrine" in Naoko Shimazu, ed., Nationalisms in Japan (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 155-80; Caroline Rose, “The Battle for Hearts and Minds. Patriotic education in Japan in the 1990s and beyond,” in Shimazu, pp. 131-54. The Japanese government has apologized to the military comfort women (jugun ianfu), most notably in the 1993 statement of Cabinet Secretary Kono Yohei. But in contrast to Germany’s extensive state-financed reparations to Nazi victims, the Japanese government dodged its responsibility by establishing a “private fund” to provide reparations of 200,000 yen to surviving comfort women. For this reason, strong opposition to the program, particularly in South Korea and Taiwan led the majority of survivors to reject the compensation.

[45] Quoted in Noam Chomsky, “War on Terror,” Amnesty International Lecture, Trinity College, January 18, 2006.

[46] Collateral Damage, pp. 18-19. Conway-Lanz traces major US debates since 1945 centered on noncombatant deaths to show that the question of intention, not the scale of noncombatant deaths caused by American actions, repeatedly trumped counter arguments in policy debates over atomic and hydrogen bombs and the targeting of cities and villages for destruction.

[47] General Curtis LeMay, Oral History, 1966, cited in Marilyn Young, “Total War”, conference paper, 2006.

[48] Young, “Total War.”

[49] Bruce Cumings, Origins of the Korean War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990) v.2, p. 755.

[50] Seymour M. Hersh, Chemical and Biological Warfare. America’s Hidden Arsenal, (New York: Anchor Books,1969), p. 18.

[51] Hersh, Chemical and Biological Warfare, pp. 28-32. See also Ronald B. Frankum Jr., Like Rolling Thunder. The Air War in Vietnam, 1964-1975 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), pp. 88-92.

[52] Hersh, Chemical and Biological Warfare, pp. 131-33. Hersh notes that the $60 million worth of defoliants and herbicides in the 1967 Pentagon budget would have been sufficient to defoliate 3.6 million acres if all were used optimally.

[53] Hersh, Chemical and Biological Warfare, pp. 134, 156-57. Canadian Dr. Alje Vennema described the symptoms of gas victims at Quang Ngai hospital where he worked in 1967, including two children and one adult who died.

[54] Elizabeth Becker, “Kissinger Tapes Describe Crises, War and Stark Photos of Abuse,” The New York Times, May 27, 2004.

[55] “Bombs Over Cambodia: New Light on US Indiscriminate Bombing,” Walrus, December 7, 2006.

[56] Michael Sherry, The United States and Strategic Bombing: From Prophecy to Memory,” forthcoming.

[57] Seymour Hersh, “Up in the Air Where is the Iraq war headed next?” The New Yorker, Dec 5, 2005; Dahr Jamail, “Living Under the Bombs,” TomDispatch, February 2, 2005; Michael Schwartz, “A Formula for Slaughter. The American Rules of Engagement from the Air,” TomDispatch, January 14, 2005.

[58] Tom Barry, “The Militarization of Space and U.S. Global Dominance: the China Connection” Japan Focus. December 6, 2006.

[59] Anthony Arnove, “Four Years Later... And Counting. Billboarding the Iraqi Disaster”, TomDispatch, March 18, 2007. Seymour Hersh, “The Redirection. Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” The New Yorker March 3, 2007. Michael Schwartz, “Baghdad Surges into Hell. First Results from the President’s Offensive”, Tom Dispatch, February 12, 2007.