Al Qaeda, U.S. Oil Companies, and Central Asia
What is slowly emerging from Al Qaeda activities in Central Asia in the 1990s is the extent to which they involved both American oil companies and the U.S. government.[1] By now we know that the U.S.-protected movements of al Qaeda terrorists into regions like Afghanistan, Azerbaijan and Kosovo have served the interests of U.S. oil companies. In many cases they have also provided pretexts or opportunities for a U.S. military commitment and even troops to follow.
This has been most obvious in the years since the Afghan War with the Soviet Union ended in 1989. Deprived of Soviet troops to support it, the Soviet-backed Najibullah regime in Kabul finally fell in April 1992. What should have been a glorious victory for the mujahedin proved instead to be a time of troubles for them, as Tajiks behind Massoud and Pashtuns behind Hekmatyar began instead to fight each other.
The situation was particularly difficult for the Arab Afghans, who now found themselves no longer welcome. Under pressure from America, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, the new interim president of Afghanistan, Mojaddedi, announced that the Arab Afghans should leave. In January 1993 Pakistan followed suit, closed the offices of all mujahedin in its country, and ordered the deportation of all Arab Afghans.[2] Shortly afterwards Pakistan extradited a number of Egyptian jihadis to Egypt, some of whom had already been tried and convicted in absentia.[3]
Fleeing the hostilities in Afghanistan, some Uzbek and Tajik mujahedin and refugees started fleeing or returning north across the Amu Darya.[4] In this confusion, with or without continued U.S. backing, cross-border raids, of the kind originally encouraged by CIA Director Casey back in the mid-1980s, continued.[5] Both Hekmatyar and Massoud actively supported the Tajik rebels, including in the years up to 1992 when both continued to receive aid and assistance from the United States.[6] The Pakistani observer Ahmed Rashid documents further support for the Tajik rebels from both Saudi Arabia and the Pakistani intelligence directorate ISI.[7]
These raids into Tajikistan and later Uzbekistan contributed materially to the destabilization of the Muslim Republics in the Soviet Union (and after 1992 of its successor, the Conference of Independent States). This destabilization was an explicit goal of U.S. policy in the Reagan era, and did not change with the end of the Afghan War. On the contrary, the United States was concerned to hasten the break-up of the Soviet Union, and increasingly to gain access to the petroleum reserves of the Caspian Basin, which at that time were still estimated to be "the largest known reserves of unexploited fuel in the planet."[8]
The collapse of the Soviet Union had a disastrous impact on the economies of its Islamic Republics. Already in 1991 the leaders of Central Asia "began to hold talks with Western oil companies, on the back of ongoing negotiations between Kazakhstan and the US company Chevron."[9] The first Bush Administration actively supported the plans of U.S. oil companies to contract for exploiting the resources of the Caspian region, and also for a pipeline not controlled by Moscow that could bring the oil and gas production out to the west. The same goals were enunciated even more clearly as matters of national security by Clinton and his administration.[10]
Eventually the threat presented by Islamist rebels persuaded the governments of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan to allow U.S. as well as Russian bases on their soil. The result is to preserve artificially a situation throughout the region where small elites grow increasingly wealthy and corrupt, while most citizens suffer from a sharp drop in living standards.[11]
The tension between the Bush Administration's professed ideals and its real objectives is well illustrated by its ambivalent position towards the regime of Karimov in Uzbekistan. America quickly sent Donald Rumsfeld to deal with the new regime in Kyrgyzstan installed in March 2005 after the popular "Tulip Revolution" and overthrow there of Askar Akayev.[12] But Islam Karimov's violent repression of a similar uprising in Uzbekistan saw no wavering of U.S. support for a dictator who has allowed U.S. troops to be based in his oil- and gas-rich country.[13]
U.S. Operatives, Oil Companies and Al Qaeda in Azerbaijan
In one former Soviet Republic, Azerbaijan, Arab Afghan jihadis clearly assisted this effort of U.S. oil companies to penetrate the region. In 1991, Richard Secord, Heinie Aderholt, and Ed Dearborn, three veterans of U.S. operations in Laos, and later of Oliver North's operations with the Contras, turned up in Baku under the cover of an oil company, MEGA Oil.[14] This was at a time when the first Bush administration had expressed its support for an oil pipeline stretching from Azerbaijan across the Caucasus to Turkey.[15] MEGA never did find oil, but did contribute materially to the removal of Azerbaijan from the sphere of post-Soviet Russian influence.
Secord, Aderholt, and Dearborn were all career U.S. Air Force officers, not CIA. However Secord explains in his memoir how Aderholt and himself were occasionally seconded to the CIA as CIA detailees. Secord describes his own service as a CIA detailee with Air America in first Vietnam and then Laos, in cooperation with the CIA Station Chief Theodore Shackley.[16] Secord later worked with Oliver North to supply arms and materiel to the Contras in Honduras, and also developed a small air force for them, using many former Air America pilots.[17] Because of this experience in air operations, CIA Director Casey and Oliver North had selected Secord to trouble-shoot the deliveries of weapons to Iran in the Iran-Contra operation.[18] (Aderholt and Dearborn also served in the Laotian CIA operation, and later in supporting the Contras.)
As MEGA operatives in Azerbaijan, Secord, Aderholt, Dearborn, and their men engaged in military training, passed "brown bags filled with cash" to members of the government, and above all set up an airline on the model of Air America which soon was picking up hundreds of mujahedin mercenaries in Afghanistan.[19] (Secord and Aderholt claim to have left Azerbaijan before the mujahedin arrived.) Meanwhile, Hekmatyar, who at the time was still allied with bin Laden, was "observed recruiting Afghan mercenaries [i.e. Arab Afghans] to fight in Azerbaijan against Armenia and its Russian allies."[20] At this time, heroin flooded from Afghanistan through Baku into Chechnya, Russia, and even North America.[21] It is difficult to believe that MEGA's airline (so much like Air America) did not become involved.[22]
The operation was not a small one. "Over the course of the next two years, [MEGA Oil] procured thousands of dollars worth of weapons and recruited at least two thousand Afghan mercenaries for Azerbaijan - the first mujahedin to fight on the territory of the former Communist Bloc."[23]
In 1993 the mujahedin also contributed to the ouster of Azerbaijan's elected president, Abulfaz Elchibey, and his replacement by an ex-Communist Brezhnev-era leader, Heidar Aliyev.
At stake was an $8 billion oil contract with a consortium of western oil companies headed by BP. Part of the contract would be a pipeline which would, for the first time, not pass through Russian-controlled territory when exporting oil from the Caspian basin to Turkey. Thus the contract was bitterly opposed by Russia, and required an Azeri leader willing to stand up to the former Soviet Union.
The Arab Afghans helped supply that muscle. Their own eyes were set on fighting Russia in the disputed Armenian-Azeri region of Nagorno-Karabakh, and in liberating neighboring Muslim areas of Russia: Chechnya and Dagestan.[24] To this end, as the 9/11 Report notes (58), the bin Laden organization established an NGO in Baku, which became a base for terrorism elsewhere.[25] It also became a transshipment point for Afghan heroin to the Chechen mafia, whose branches "extended not only to the London arms market, but also throughout continental Europe and North America."[26]
The Arab Afghans' Azeri operations were financed in part with Afghan heroin.
According to police sources in the Russian capital, 184 heroin processing labs were discovered in Moscow alone last year. ''Every one of them was run by Azeris, who use the proceeds to buy arms for Azerbaijan's war against Armenia in Nagorno- Karabakh,'' [Russian economist Alexandre] Datskevitch said.[27]
This foreign Islamist presence in Baku was also supported by bin Laden's financial network.[28] With bin Laden's guidance and Saudi support, Baku soon became a base for jihadi operations against Dagestan and Chechnya in Russia.[29]And an informed article argued in 1999 that Pakistan's ISI, facing its own disposal problem with the militant Arab-Afghan veterans, trained and armed them in Afghanistan to fight in Chechnya. ISI also encouraged the flow of Afghan drugs westward to support the Chechen militants, thus diminishing the flow into Pakistan itself.[30]
As Michael Griffin has observed, the regional conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh and other disputed areas, Abkhazia, Turkish Kurdistan and Chechnya each represented a distinct, tactical move, crucial at the time, in discerning which power would ultimately become master of the pipelines which, some time in this century, will transport the oil and gas from the Caspian basin to an energy-avid world.[31]
The wealthy Saudi families of al-Alamoudi (as Delta Oil) and bin Mahfouz (as Nimir Oil) participated in the western oil consortium as partners with the American firm Unocal. In October 2001, the U. S. Treasury Department named among charities allegedly providing funds to al Qaeda the Saudi charity Muwafaq (Blessed Relief), to which the al-Alamoudis and bin Mahfouz families were named as major contributors.[32] One cannot discern whether religion or oil was their primary charitable motive.
It is unclear whether MEGA Oil was a front for the U.S. Government or for U.S. oil companies and their Saudi allies. U.S. oil companies have been accused of spending millions of dollars in Azerbaijan, not just to bribe the government but also to install it. According to a Turkish intelligence source who was an alleged eyewitness, major oil companies, including Exxon and Mobil, were "behind the coup d'itat" which in 1993 replaced the elected President, Abulfaz Elchibey, with his successor, Heydar Aliyev. The source claimed to have been at meetings in Baku with "senior members of BP, Exxon, Amoco, Mobil and the Turkish Petroleum Company. The topic was always oil rights and, on the insistence of the Azeris, supply and arms to Azerbaijan." Turkish secret service documents allege middlemen paid off key officials of the democratically elected government of the oil-rich nation just before its president was overthrown.[33]
The true facts and backers of the Aliyev coup may never be fully disclosed. But unquestionably, before the coup, the efforts of Richard Secord, Heinie Aderholt, Ed Dearborn and Hekmatyar's mujahedin helped contest Russian influence and prepare for Baku's shift away to the west.[34] Three years later, in August 1996, Amoco's president met with Clinton and arranged for Aliyev to be invited to Washington.[35] In 1997 Clinton said that
In a world of growing energy demand.our nation cannot afford to rely on a single region for our energy supplies. By working closely with Azerbaijan to tap the Caspian's resources, we not only help Azerbaijan to prosper, we also help diversify our energy supply and strengthen our energy's security.[36]
Unocal, the Taliban, and bin Laden in Afghanistan
The accusations against Amoco, Exxon, and Mobil in Azerbaijan parallel those from European sources against Unocal in Afghanistan, which has been accused of helping, along with Delta Oil, to finance the Taliban's seizure of Kabul in 1996. (This was at a time when the Taliban was also receiving funds from Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden.)
The respected French observer Olivier Roy has charged that "When the Taleban took power in Afghanistan (1996), it was largely orchestrated by the Pakistani secret service [ISI] and the oil company Unocal, with its Saudi ally Delta."[37] Unocal executive John Maresca then testified in 1998 to the House Committee on International Relations on the benefits of a proposed oil pipeline through Afghanistan to the coat of Pakistan.[38] A second natural gas pipeline (Centgas) was also contemplated by Unocal.
For Unocal to advance its own funds for the Taliban conquest would have been in violation of U.S. law, which is why such companies customarily resort to middlemen. No such restraints would have inhibited Unocal's Saudi partner in its Centgas consortium, Delta Oil. Delta Oil certainly had the assets; it was "owned by a Jeddah-based group of 50 prominent investors close to the [Saudi] royal family."[39] Delta was already an investor with Unocal in the oilfields of Azerbaijan, and may have been a factor in the October 1995 decision of Turkmenistan to sign a new pipeline contract with Unocal.[40]
As I wrote a decade ago, citing the case of a U.S. oil company in Tunisia, "it is normal, not unusual, for the entry of major U.S. firms into Third World countries to be facilitated and sustained, indeed made possible, by corruption."[41] This has long been the case, but in the Reagan 1980s it was escalated by a new generation of aggressively risk-taking, law-bending, "cowboy" entrepreneurs. The pace was set by new corporations like Enron, a high-debt merger that was in part guided by the junk-bond impresario Michael Milken.
Some have speculated that Enron also had a potential interest in the Unocal gas pipeline project through Afghanistan. By 1997 Enron was negotiating a $2 billion joint venture with Neftegas of Uzbekistan, to develop Uzbekistan's natural gas. This was a huge project backed by a $400 million commitment from the U.S. Government through OPIC. Uzbekistan also signed a Memo of Agreement to participate in the Centgas gas pipeline. But the Enron Uzbek negotiations collapsed in 1998.[42]
Enron's short-term plans had been to export Uzbek gas west to Kazakhstan, Turkey, and Europe. However it has been claimed that Enron hoped eventually to supply, via the Centgas pipeline, its failing energy plant in Dabhol, India. (Without a cheap gas supply, the cost of electricity from Dabhol was so great that Indians refused to buy it.)[43]
In my book Drugs, Oil, and War, I quote again from Olivier Roy: "It is the Americans who have made inroads in Central Asia, primarily because of the oil and gas interests. Chevron and Unocal are political actors who talk as equals with the States (that is, with the presidents)."[44]
It is clear they talk as equals in the current Bush Administration. Both the President and Vice-President are former oilmen, as were some of their oldest friends and political backers, like Kenneth Lay of Enron.[45] Twice in his early years George W. Bush's oil investment Arbusto (later merged into Harkin Energy) was advanced by Saudi investors (Salim bin Laden, Osama's father, and Khalid bin Mahfouz of Delta-Nimir), some of whom have been allied with the U.S. oil giants in Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan.[46]
Al Qaeda, the KLA in Kosovo, and the Trans-Balkan Pipeline
The U.S., Al Qaeda and oil company interests converged again in Kosovo. Though the origins of the Kosovo tragedy were rooted in local enmities, oil became a prominent aspect of the outcome. There the al Qaeda-backed UCK or "Kosovo Liberation Army" (KLA) was directly supported and politically empowered by NATO, beginning in 1998.[47] But according to a source of Tim Judah, KLA representatives had already met with American, British, and Swiss intelligence agencies in 1996, and possibly "several years earlier."[48] This would presumably have been back when Arab Afghan members of the KLA, like Abdul-Wahid al-Qahtani, were fighting in Bosnia.[49]
Mainstream accounts of the Kosovo War are silent about the role of al Qaeda in training and financing the UCK/KLA, yet this fact has been recognized by experts and to my knowledge never contested by them. For example, James Bissett, former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, said "Many members of the Kosovo Liberation Army were sent for training in terrorist camps in Afghanistan.. Milosevic is right. There is no question of their [al Qaeda's] participation in conflicts in the Balkans. It is very well documented."[50] In March 2002, Michael Steiner, the United Nations administrator in Kosovo, warned of "importing the Afghan danger to Europe" because several cells trained and financed by al-Qaeda remained in the region.[51]
As late as 1997 the UCK/KLA had been recognized by the U.S. as a terrorist group supported in part by the heroin traffic.[52] The Washington Times reported in 1999 that
The Kosovo Liberation Army, which the Clinton administration has embraced and some members of Congress want to arm as part of the NATO bombing campaign, is a terrorist organization that has financed much of its war effort with profits from the sale of heroin.[53]
Yet once again, as in Azerbaijan, these drug-financed Islamist jihadis received American assistance, this time from the U.S. Government.[54] At the time critics charged that US oil interests were interested in building a trans-Balkan pipeline with US Army protection; although initially ridiculed, these critics were eventually proven correct.[55] BBC News announced in December 2004 that a $1.2 billion pipeline, south of a huge new U.S. army base in Kosovo, has been given a go-ahead by the governments of Albania, Bulgaria, and Macedonia.[56] Meanwhile by 2000, according to DEA statistics, Afghan heroin accounted for almost 20 percent of the heroin seized in the United States -- nearly double the percentage taken four years earlier. Much of it is now distributed by Kosovar Albanians.[57]
The closeness of the UCK/KLA to al-Qaeda was acknowledged again in the western press, after Afghan-connected KLA guerrillas proceeded in 2001 to conduct guerrilla warfare in Macedonia. Press accounts included an Interpol report containing the allegation that one of bin Laden4s senior lieutenants was the commander of an elite UCK/KLA unit operating in Kosovo in 1999.[58] This was probably Mohammed al-Zawahiri. The American right wing, which opposed Clinton's actions in Kosovo, has transmitted reports "that the KLA's head of elite forces, Muhammed al-Zawahiri, was the brother of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the military commander for bin Laden's Al Qaeda."[59] Meanwhile Marcia Kurop in the Wall Street Journal has written that "The Egyptian surgeon turned terrorist leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri has operated terrorist training camps, weapons of mass destruction factories and money-laundering and drug-trading networks throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Bosnia."[60]
According to Yossef Bodansky, director of the U.S. Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare,
Bin Laden's Arab `Afghans' also have assumed a dominant role in training the Kosovo Liberation Army.[by mid-March 1999 the UCK included] many elements controlled and/or sponsored by the U.S., German, British, and Croatian intelligence services.[61]
The most flagrant and revealing evidence that as late as 2004 some U.S. bureaucratic sectors were still working with veterans of al Qaeda networks came in respect to Haiti:
In 2004 a USAID Report confirmed that "Training and management specialists of the Kosovo Protection Corps, a civilian response unit consisting primarily of former Kosovo Liberation Army members, have been brought to Haiti"[62]
Why would AID bring veterans of the Kosovo Liberation Army, "a major force in international organized crime, moving staggering amounts of narcotics,"[63] to train and manage the Haitian Army, an organization traditionally "corrupted by Colombian cocaine kingpins"?[64] Whatever the answer, it is hard to imagine that AID did not have drugs somehow in mind.
Al Qaeda and the Petroleum-Military Complex
It is important to understand that the conspicuous influence of petroleum money in the administration of two Bush presidents was also prominent under Clinton. A former CIA officer complained about the oil lobby's influence with Sheila Heslin of Clinton's National Security Council staff:
Heslin's sole job, it seemed, was to carry water for an exclusive club known as the Foreign Oil Companies Group, a cover for a cartel of major petroleum companies doing business in the Caspian. . . . Another thing I learned was that Heslin wasn't soloing. Her boss, Deputy National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, headed the inter-agency committee on Caspian oil policy, which made him in effect the government's ambassador to the cartel, and Berger wasn't a disinterested player. He held $90,000 worth of stock in Amoco, probably the most influential member of the cartel. . . . The deeper I got, the more Caspian oil money I found sloshing around Washington.[65]
The oil companies' meeting with Sheila Heslin in the summer of 1995 was followed shortly by the creation of an interagency governmental committee to formulate U.S. policy toward the Caspian.
The Clinton Administration listened to the oil companies, and in 1998 began committing U.S. troops to joint training exercises in Uzbekistan.[66] This made neighboring countries like Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, wary of Russia, more eager to grant exploration and pipeline rights to American companies.[67]
But Clinton did not yield to Unocal's strenuous lobbying in 1996 for U.S. recognition of the Taliban, as a condition for building the pipeline from Turkmenistan. Clinton declined in the end to do so, responding instead to the strongly voiced political opposition, especially from women's groups over the Taliban's treatment of women.[68]
The three way symbiosis of Al Qaeda, oil companies, and the Pentagon is still visible in the case of Azerbaijan, for example. Now the Pentagon is protecting the Aliyev regime (where a younger Aliyev, in a dubious election, succeeded his father).
The Department of Defense at first proposed that Azerbaijan also receive an IMET [International Military Education and Training] grant of $750,000 and an FMF [Foreign Military Financing] grant of $3 million in 2003 as part of the war on terrorism but later admitted that the funds were actually intended to protect U.S. access to oil in and around the Caspian Sea.[69]
We have seen that, thanks to al Qaeda, U.S. bases have sprung up close to oilfields and pipelines in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Georgia, and Kosovo. And as Michael Klare has noted,
Already [U.S.] troops from the Southern Command (Southcom) are helping to defend Colombia's Cano Limsn pipeline..Likewise, soldiers from the European Command (Eurcom) are training local forces to protect the newly constructed Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline in Georgia..Finally, the ships and planes of the U.S. Pacific Command (Pacom) are patrolling vital tanker routes in the Indian Ocean, South China Sea, and the western Pacific..Slowly but surely, the U.S. military is being converted into a global oil-protection service.[70]
A survey of U.S. history since World War Two suggests that the United States power state has consistently used the resources of the global drug traffic to further its own ends, particularly with respect to oil, at the expense of the public order and well-being of the American public state.[71] For at least two decades, from Brzezinski's backing of Hekmatyar in 1979 to Bush's backing of the Afghan Northern Alliance in 2001, the United States has continued to draw on the resources of drug-trafficking Islamic jihadists who are or were associated at some point with Al Qaeda.
In the next chapter I shall argue that this alliance with al Qaeda terrorists against the United States public order underlies the conspiracy that made 9/11 possible. But we must also look at how the military-petroleum complex came to project long-term military budgets, in the order of a trillion dollars, that its advocates acknowledged that the American public state could not be persuaded easily to support...
In the absence, that is, of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor."[72]
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[1] Western governments and media apply the term "al Qaeda" to the whole "network of co-opted groups" who have at some point accepted leadership, training and financing from bin Laden (Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam [London: I.B. Tauris, 2004], 7-8). From a Muslim perceptive, the term "Al Qaeda" is clumsy, and has led to the targeting of a number of Islamist groups opposed to bin Laden's tactics. See Montasser al-Zayyat, The Road to Al-Qaeda: The Story of Bin Laden's Right-Hand Man [London: Pluto Press, 2004], 100, etc.).
[2] Guardian, 1/7/93; Evan F. Kohlmann, Al-Qaida's Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network (Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2004), 16. Despite this public stance, ISI elements "privately" continued to support Arab Afghans who were willing to join Pakistan's new covert operations in Kashmir.
[3] Montasser al-Zayyat, The Road to Al-Qaeda: The Story of Bin Laden's Right-Hand Man (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 55.
[4] Barnett Rubin, New York Times, 12/28/92.
[5] Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil (New York: Crown, 2003), 143-44. Former CIA officer Robert Baer, who in 1993 was posted to Tajikistan, describes a raid at that time in which "a Tajik Islamic rebel group.from Afghanistan.managed to overrun a Russian border post and cut off all the guards' heads." According to Baer, the local Russian intelligence chief was convinced that "the rebels were under the command of Rasool Sayyaf's Ittehad-e-Islami, bin Laden's Afghani protector," who in turn was backed by Saudi Arabia and the IIRO. More commonly it is claimed that Hekmatyar's terrorist drug network was supporting the Tajik resistance (Independent, 2/17/93, San Francisco Chronicle, 10/4/01). For Casey's encouragement of these ISI-backed raids in 1985, see Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 104.
[6] Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan (London: Pluto Press, 2001), 150 (Tajik rebels); Coll, Ghost Wars, 225 (U.S. aid).
[7] Ahmed Rashid, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale UP, 2002), 140-44.
[8] Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind, 115. Exploration in the 1990s has considerably downgraded these estimates.
[9] Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001), 145.
[10] Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 30-31.
[11] Martha Brill Olcott, "The Caspian's False Promise," Foreign Policy, Summer 1998, 96; quoted in Michael T. Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum (New York: Metropolitan/ Henry Holt, 2004), 129. Cf. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 8, 64-66.
[12] Reuters, 4/24/05.
[13] Martha Brill Olcott, Washington Post, 5/22/05
[14] Thomas Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporter's Adventures in an Oil-Rich, War-Torn, Post-Soviet Republic (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 272-75. Cf. Mark Irkali, Tengiz Kodrarian and Cali Ruchala, "God Save the Shah," Sobaka Magazine, 5/22/03, http://www.diacritica.com/sobaka/2003/shah2.html . A fourth operative in MEGA Oil, Gary Best, was also a veteran of North's Contra support effort. For more on General Secord's and Major Aderholt's role as part of Ted Shackley's team of off-loaded CIA assets and capabilities, see Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 26-30, 36-42, 197-98.
[15] It was also a time when Congress, under pressure from Armenian voters, had banned all military aid to Azerbaijan (under Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act). This ban, reminiscent of the Congressional ban on aid to the Contras in the 1980s, ended after 9/11. "In the interest of national security, and to help in `enhancing global energy security' during this War on Terror, Congress granted President Bush the right to waive Section 907 in the aftermath of September 11th. It was necessary, Secretary of State Colin Powell told Congress, to `enable Azerbaijan to counter terrorist organizations'" (Irkali, Kodrarian and Ruchala, "God Save the Shah," Sobaka Magazine, 5/22/03).
[16] Richard Secord, with Jay Wurts, Honored and Betrayed: Irangate, Covert Affairs, and the Secret War in Laos (New York: John Wiley, 1992), 53-57.
[17] Secord, Honored and Betrayed, 211-16.
[18] Secord, Honored and Betrayed, 233-35.
[19] Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary, 272-75; Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 7. As part of the airline operation, Azeri pilots were trained in Texas. Dearborn had previously helped Secord advise and train the fledgling Contra air force (Marshall, Scott, and Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection, 197). These important developments were barely noticed in the U.S. press, but a Washington Post article did belatedly note that a group of American men who wore "big cowboy hats and big cowboy boots" had arrived in Azerbaijan as military trainers for its army, followed in 1993 by "more than 1,000 guerrilla fighters from Afghanistan's radical prime minister, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar." (Washington Post, 4/21/94) Richard Secord was allegedly attempting also to sell Israeli arms, with the assistance of Israeli agent David Kimche, another associate of Oliver North. See Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 7, 8, 20. Whether the Americans were aware of it or not, the al Qaeda presence in Baku soon expanded to include assistance for moving jihadis onwards into Dagestan and Chechnya.
[20] Cooley, Unholy Wars, 180; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 7.
[21] Cooley, Unholy Wars, 176.
[22] As the 9/11Commission Report notes (58), the bin Laden organization established an NGO in Baku, which became a base for terrorism elsewhere. It also became a transshipment point for Afghan heroin to the Chechen mafia, whose branches "extended not only to the London arms market, but also throughout continental Europe and North America (Cooley, Unholy Wars, 176).
[23] Mark Irkali, Tengiz Kodrarian and Cali Ruchala , "God Save the Shah: American Guns, Spies and Oil in Azerbaijan," 5/22/03, http://www.diacritica.com/sobaka/2003/shah.html. As we have just seen, they were not the first.
[24] One of Bin Laden's associates claimed that Bin Laden himself led the Arab Afghans in at least two battles in Nagorno Karabakh. (Associated Press 11/14/99).
[25] Ibrahim Eidarous, later arrested in Europe by the FBI for his role in the 1998 embassy bombings, headed the Baku base of Al Qaeda between 1995 and 1997 (Strategic Policy 10/99). An Islamist in Baku claimed that they did not attack the U.S. Embassy there so as "not to spoil their good relations in Azerbaijan" (Bill of Indictment in U.S.A. vs. Bin Laden et. al. 4/01; Washington Post 5/3/01).
[26] Cooley, Unholy Wars, 176.
[27] Frank Viviano, San Francisco Chronicle, 12/18/92.
[28] 9/11 Report, 58.
[29] USA vs. Osama bin Laden, Transcript, Testimony of Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, February 6, 2001, http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/reports/pdfs/binladen/060201.pdf, 300-03.
[30] Levon Sevunts, Montreal Gazette, 10/26/99; cf. Michel Chossudovsky, "Who Is Osama bin Laden?" Centre for Research on Globalisation, 9/12/01,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html. Those trained by ISI included the main rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Al Khattab. Cf. Rajeev Sharma, Pak Proxy War: A Story of ISI, bin Laden and Kargil (New Delhi: Kaveri Books, 2002), 84, 86, 89, 91.
[31] Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind, 115.
[32] Boston Herald , 12/11/01; New York Times, 10/13/01; http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/q4c.html .
[33] London Sunday Times, 3/26/00. The U.S. private research firm Stratfor agrees that "Western energy companies splashed cash about in an attempt to squeeze the country for its oil and natural gas" (Stratfor, 10/16/03).
[34] European sources have also alleged that CIA meetings with the Algerian fundamentalist leader Anwar Haddam in the period 1993-95 were responsible for the surprising lack of Islamist attacks on U.S. oil and agribusiness installations in Algeria. See Richard Labivihre, Dollars for Terror: The United States and Islam (New York: Algora Publishing, 2000), 182-89. For partial corroboration, cf. Cooley, Unholy Wars, 207; Bradford Dillon, Middle East Policy Council Journal, September 2001, http://www.mepc.org/public_asp/journal_vol8/0109_dillman.asp.
[35] Washington Post, 10/4/98: "Before the meeting ended, Amoco - the largest U.S. investor in Azerbaijan's oil boom - had what it wanted: a promise from Clinton to invite the Azerbaijani president to Washington. Six months later the company, which traditionally donated heavily to the Republicans, contributed $50,000 to the Democratic Party. In August 1997, Clinton received President Heydar Aliyev with full honors, witnessed the signing of a new Amoco oil exploration deal and promised to lobby Congress to lift U.S. economic sanctions on Azerbaijan."
[36] White House Press Statement, 8/1/97; quoted in Michael Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (New York: Metropolitan/ Henry Holt, 2001), 4; Scott, Drugs. Oil. and War, 30.
[37] Olivier Roy, quoted in Richard Labeviere, Dollars for Terror: The United States and Islam (New York: Algora, 2000), 280.
[38] Senator Hank Brownwas a supporter of the Unocal project, and welcomed the fall of Kabul as a chance for stable government (Rashid, Taliban, 166).
[39] Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind, 124.
[40] Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan (London: Pluto, 2001), 124.
[41] Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 203.
[42] Alexander's Gas & Oil Connections, 10/12/98, http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/news/ntc85031.htm.
[43] Enron's losses on its Dabhol project approached $900 million, and were a major factor in Enron's bankruptcy. "Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and a series of other top Bush administration officials and diplomats reportedly lobbied Indian leaders to save Dabhol. OPIC documents released in January 2002 revealed that the National Security Council had intervened on behalf of Enron on the Dabhol issue" (M. Asif Ismail, "A Most Favored Corporation," Center for Public Integrity, 7/29/05, http://www.publici.org/report.aspx?aid=104&sid=200.)
[44] Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 55n.
[45] According to David Corn, Bush "claimed he had not gotten to know disgraced Enron chief Ken Lay until after the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election. But Lay had been one of Bush's larger contributors during that election and had--according to Lay himself--been friends with Bush for years before it" ( "The Other Lies of George Bush," Nation Online, 9/25/03).
[46] Khalid bin Mahfouz was indicted by the U.S. in connection with the failed Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).
[47] KLA representatives had met with American, British, and Swiss intelligence agencies in 1996, and possibly several years earlier (Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge [New Haven: Yale UP, 2002], 120).
[48] Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge (New Haven: Yale UP, 2002), 120.
[49] Evan F. Kohlmann, Al-Qaida's Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network (Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2004), 79. Al-Qahtani, who was killed by U.S. ordinance in Afghanistan in 2001, had previously fought in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Israel, Chechnya, and Kosovo.
[50] and an expert on the Balkans. `Milosevic is right. There is no question of their participation in conflicts in the Balkans. It is very well documented," (National Post, 3/15/02). Contrast e.g. Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War : Kosovo and Beyond (New York: Metropolitan/ Henry Holt, 2000), 13: "the KLA, at first a small band of poorly trained and amateurish gunmen." For the al Qaeda background to the UCK and its involvement in heroin-trafficking, see also Marcia Christoff Kurop, "Al Qaeda4s Balkan Links," Wall Street Journal Europe, 11/1/01; Montreal Gazette, 12/15/99.
[51] National Post, 3/15/02
[52] Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 29. "According to Michel Koutouzis, the DEA's website once contained a section detailing Kosovar trafficking, but a week before the U.S.-led bombings began, the section disappeared" (Peter Klebnikov, "Heroin Heroes," Mother Jones, January/February 2000, http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2000/01/heroin.html). Speaking in Kosovo in February 1998, Robert Gelbard, the U.S. special envoy to the region, said publicly that the KLA "is, without any questions, a terrorist group" (Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge, 138).
[53] Washington Times, 5/3/99. Cf. San Francisco Chronicle, 5/5/99: "Officers of the Kosovo Liberation Army and their backers, according to law enforcement authorities in Western Europe and the United States, are a major force in international organized crime, moving staggering amounts of narcotics through an underworld network that reaches into the heart of Europe."
[54] See Lewis Mackenzie (former UN commander in Bosnia), "We Bombed the Wrong Side?" National Post, 4/6/04: "Those of us who warned that the West was being sucked in on the side of an extremist, militant, Kosovo-Albanian independence movement were dismissed as appeasers. The fact that the lead organization spearheading the fight for independence, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), was universally designated a terrorist organization and known to be receiving support from Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda was conveniently ignored..The Kosovar Albanians played us like a Stradivarius violin. We have subsidized and indirectly supported their violent campaign for an ethnically pure Kosovo. We have never blamed them for being the perpetrators of the violence in the early 1990s, and we continue to portray them as the designated victim today, in spite of evidence to the contrary. When they achieve independence with the help of our tax dollars combined with those of bin Laden and al-Qaeda, just consider the message of encouragement this sends to other terrorist-supported independence movements around the world." Cf. John Pilger, New Statesman, 12/13/04.
[55] George Monbiot, Guardian, 2/15/01.
[56] BBC News, 12/28/04. Those who charged that such a pipeline was projected were initially mocked but gradually vindicated (Guardian, 1/15/01; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 34). See also Marjorie Cohn, "Nato Bombing of Kosovo: Humanitarian Intervention or Crime against Humanity?" International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, March 2002, 79-106.
[57] Klebnikov, "Heroin Heroes," Mother Jones, January/February 2000.
[58] Halifax Herald, 10/29/01, < http://www.herald.ns.ca/stories/2001/10/29/f126.raw.html >. Cf. Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America [Roseville: Prima, 2001], 298: "In late 1998, despite the growing pressure from U.S. intelligence and its local allies.a new network made up of bin Laden's supporters was being established in Albania under the cover of various Muslim charity organizations..Bin Laden's Arab `Afghans' also have assumed a dominant role in training the Kosovo Liberation Army." Bodansky adds that by mid-March 1999 the UCK included "many elements controlled and/or sponsored by the U.S., German, British, and Croatian intelligence services.. In early April [1999] the UCK began actively cooperating with the NATO bombing--selecting and designating targets for NATO aircraft as well as escorting U.S. and British special forces detachments into Yugoslavia" (397-98). Cf. also Scott Taylor, "Bin Laden's Balkan Connections," http://www.realitymacedonia.org.mk/web/news_page.asp?nid=1186 ; San Francisco Chronicle, 10/4/01.
[59] Cliff Kincaid, "Remember Kosovo?" Accuracy in Media, Media Monitor, 12/28/04, http://www.aim.org/media_monitor/2393_0_2_0_C/ .|
[60] Wall Street Journal Europe, 11/1/01.
[61] Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America [Roseville: Prima, 2001], 298, 397-98ZZck.
[62] Anthony Fenton, "Kosovo Liberation Army helps establish `Protectorate' in Haiti," citing Flashpoints interview, 11/19/04, www.flashpoints.net ). Cf. Anthony Fenton, "Canada in Haiti: Humanitarian Extermination," CMAQ.net, 12/8/04; http://www.cmaq.net/fr/node.php?id=19240 .
[63] San Francisco Chronicle, 5/5/99.
[64] New York Times, 6/2/04.
[65] Robert Baer, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (New York: Crown, 2002), 243-44. Cf. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 31.
[66] Ahmed Rashid, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale UP, 2002), 83.
[67] Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 65; Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, 172-73.
[68] Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001), 173-75, 182.
[69] Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, 137. Cf. 169: "During the 1990s and especially after Bush's declaration of a `war on terrorism,' the oil companies again needed some muscle and the Pentagon was happy to oblige."
[70] Michael T. Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum (New York: Metropolitan/ Henry Holt, 2004). 6-7.
[71] Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 1-105, 185-207.
[72] Project for the New American Century, "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century," September 2000, p. 51 (63), http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf . See Chapter 10.
-------------
http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/q.html
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
TCS: Tech Central Station - My Stalker
TCS: Tech Central Station - My Stalker
A stalker is after me.
His name is Paul Krugman, formerly a respected economist, with whom I frequently agreed, but now a polemicist on the op-ed page of the New York Times, assiduously and boringly toeing the Party line.
A stalker is after me.
His name is Paul Krugman, formerly a respected economist, with whom I frequently agreed, but now a polemicist on the op-ed page of the New York Times, assiduously and boringly toeing the Party line.
BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | Judge-only terror courts mooted
BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | Judge-only terror courts mooted: "Judge-only courts are being considered for pre-trial hearings in terror cases, the Home Office has confirmed."
The Malaysian connection to 9/11 and USS Cole bombing
The Malaysian connection to 9/11 and USS Cole bombing
KUALA LUMPUR, August 6, 2005—As many of you know, the meeting that led to the 9/11 and USS Cole attacks was conducted in a Kuala Lumpur condominium. The local Special Branch snoops who are adept at unearthing dirt on political dissenters—meaning those with a mind of their own—could not tape the conversation. This was patently ridiculous, though they did videotape footage of the terror plots.
There is one major problem with this story.
No one thought of lip reading to decipher what was said. There are people, many of them commoners, who can discern a person's accent—and not just the spoken words alone—right down to a Kansas locale, and yet this issue was not brought up by "terrorism experts." However, now there is an emerging spin about photos instead of videos. But the original reports and links that broach on the video footage are still extant on the worldwide web. Notice, that there are now many references to photos, though when I read them in 2001, they were referred to as "video footages."
Wonder whether there will be a counter spin about the angle of the lens, and other optical parallaxes, which spin illusionists are adept at conjuring. Let it be, as these spin machines spend millions to consign each cogent question alone into the media black hole. It's a costly affair; more for them than for millions of people who are beginning to ask millions of questions.
I have been doing a lot of rethinking lately on the "War on Terror," a.k.a. the Jihad Jamboree, and I do find many craven liars cum leaders in many parts of the world. George W. Bush may be the poster boy of global hegemony, but he is certainly abetted by a global enterprise of terror. These are the very people who are taking Americans, Britons and Australians (the largest victims of terror among Westerners) for a ride with their own homegrown "terrorists" outfits.
Consider this example: Which Islamic "terrorist" organization would call itself the Kumpulan Militan Malaysia (Malaysian Militant Group)? There is no Islamic or Jihadist aura in that name; it's more like a crazy gathering without an ideology. It would be really, really stupid for a Jihadist group to chose such an un-Islamic name. Its name was originally designated as the Malaysian Mujaheedin Group but Mujahideen was glibly change to Militan. Someone must have thought that Malaysians were stupid enough to be taken in. (We really do have stupid leaders who make stupid remarks, but they can resort to brute force without much warning.)
Even counter-terrorism experts, a group of international high profile charlatans who hop from one country to the other spreading fear and al Qaida strategies, went along with this charade till they found the game was up. Now, there is a concerted attempt to revert it to Kumpulan Mujahideen Malaysia. Yet, a Royal Malaysian Police news release, dated 27 Sept 2002, still carries that "Militan" tag. (Save this nugget before it gets removed).
But then hardly any Malaysian daily—whether government-controlled or those poster boys of the opposition—raise these questions, and many more. Various US journals raise issues for common humanity than any local daily or "opposition" journals in Malaysia. Heck, you'd find more hard-hitting articles in the oft-maligned New York Times and Washington Post.
Protection for Journalists?
Almost all the NGOs in Malaysia are inevitably government-propped or neutered and the local reps of international human rights organizations are not doing their jobs, being part of the same party scene. I'll recount the nature of the party later.
Even the International Federation of Journalists has admitted that they cannot admit or help independent journalists as memberships are reserved exclusively for national unions. This means a Robert Mugabe-controlled national union of journalists have membership prerogatives and along the way, the ability to slant any story. Independent accounts don't count with the IFJ. Attempts to clarify issues were met with silence after the questions were getting too sharp. I thought these guardians of journalism would be able to supply tough questions in no time.
One IFJ affiliate happens to be Malaysia's National Union of Journalists, the very one which could do nuts, but offer lip service, when the Far Eastern Economic Review's Murray Hiebert was jailed in 1999 for exposing the attempted arsenic poisoning against former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, while he was in jail. The judiciary made a fool of itself in the process, and the high arsenic content in Anwar's blood was attributed to high fish intake during one fateful dinner. Or was it lunch?
Anyway, by that scientific rationale, the Japanese would be extinct by now.
If you find this funny, then consider the conundrum of where a reporter from one IFJ affiliate tacitly supports the brutal actions against another IFJ-related journalist.
Why should I stay here then? I hope to leave for good before I end up in prison or before I get blown up by the KMM. I am not sure whether it will be the Mujahideen or the Militan side of the terrorism coin. It doesn't matter. Photos of the London bombings send a chill down my spine.
Political asylum is not a option with the EU. They hate to admit that while people like me try to reason against injustice through writings/or activism, we do not strap bombs to our bodies to vent our frustrations. I don't intend to blow myself up in crowded subways or buses even after I had faced severe discrimination for all 35 years of my life, except for a year I spent in Leeds, UK. Somehow the Western Imperialists that my former daily liked to depict weren't imperious with me. Or is the EU selective in welcoming the discriminated, the oppressed, and the persecuted who might eventually turn against them? There are possibilities here for conspiracy theorists and they might be right . . .
Of course, the powers that be wouldn't want a story like this out. Communications problems are expected. And it has begun. Here is an alert I received from InternetSeer (It's a first):
Recovery Alert Your Web Site is no longer on error
URL: http://maavak.net
Time: Wed Aug 03 03:12:16 EDT 2005
Total Time on Error: 10 minutes, 9 seconds
Error Alert
Your Web site is not responding
URL: http://maavak.net
Time: Wed Aug 03 03:05:54 EDT 2005
Error Type: Connection Refused
Wish me luck. I will prevail, but for those who think that only American citizens and Iraqi civilians are worthy victims, not to mention UK Muslims who face taunts, your turn will come. All human beings are worthy, but selectivity will be met by selectivity, tenfold.
KUALA LUMPUR, August 6, 2005—As many of you know, the meeting that led to the 9/11 and USS Cole attacks was conducted in a Kuala Lumpur condominium. The local Special Branch snoops who are adept at unearthing dirt on political dissenters—meaning those with a mind of their own—could not tape the conversation. This was patently ridiculous, though they did videotape footage of the terror plots.
There is one major problem with this story.
No one thought of lip reading to decipher what was said. There are people, many of them commoners, who can discern a person's accent—and not just the spoken words alone—right down to a Kansas locale, and yet this issue was not brought up by "terrorism experts." However, now there is an emerging spin about photos instead of videos. But the original reports and links that broach on the video footage are still extant on the worldwide web. Notice, that there are now many references to photos, though when I read them in 2001, they were referred to as "video footages."
Wonder whether there will be a counter spin about the angle of the lens, and other optical parallaxes, which spin illusionists are adept at conjuring. Let it be, as these spin machines spend millions to consign each cogent question alone into the media black hole. It's a costly affair; more for them than for millions of people who are beginning to ask millions of questions.
I have been doing a lot of rethinking lately on the "War on Terror," a.k.a. the Jihad Jamboree, and I do find many craven liars cum leaders in many parts of the world. George W. Bush may be the poster boy of global hegemony, but he is certainly abetted by a global enterprise of terror. These are the very people who are taking Americans, Britons and Australians (the largest victims of terror among Westerners) for a ride with their own homegrown "terrorists" outfits.
Consider this example: Which Islamic "terrorist" organization would call itself the Kumpulan Militan Malaysia (Malaysian Militant Group)? There is no Islamic or Jihadist aura in that name; it's more like a crazy gathering without an ideology. It would be really, really stupid for a Jihadist group to chose such an un-Islamic name. Its name was originally designated as the Malaysian Mujaheedin Group but Mujahideen was glibly change to Militan. Someone must have thought that Malaysians were stupid enough to be taken in. (We really do have stupid leaders who make stupid remarks, but they can resort to brute force without much warning.)
Even counter-terrorism experts, a group of international high profile charlatans who hop from one country to the other spreading fear and al Qaida strategies, went along with this charade till they found the game was up. Now, there is a concerted attempt to revert it to Kumpulan Mujahideen Malaysia. Yet, a Royal Malaysian Police news release, dated 27 Sept 2002, still carries that "Militan" tag. (Save this nugget before it gets removed).
But then hardly any Malaysian daily—whether government-controlled or those poster boys of the opposition—raise these questions, and many more. Various US journals raise issues for common humanity than any local daily or "opposition" journals in Malaysia. Heck, you'd find more hard-hitting articles in the oft-maligned New York Times and Washington Post.
Protection for Journalists?
Almost all the NGOs in Malaysia are inevitably government-propped or neutered and the local reps of international human rights organizations are not doing their jobs, being part of the same party scene. I'll recount the nature of the party later.
Even the International Federation of Journalists has admitted that they cannot admit or help independent journalists as memberships are reserved exclusively for national unions. This means a Robert Mugabe-controlled national union of journalists have membership prerogatives and along the way, the ability to slant any story. Independent accounts don't count with the IFJ. Attempts to clarify issues were met with silence after the questions were getting too sharp. I thought these guardians of journalism would be able to supply tough questions in no time.
One IFJ affiliate happens to be Malaysia's National Union of Journalists, the very one which could do nuts, but offer lip service, when the Far Eastern Economic Review's Murray Hiebert was jailed in 1999 for exposing the attempted arsenic poisoning against former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, while he was in jail. The judiciary made a fool of itself in the process, and the high arsenic content in Anwar's blood was attributed to high fish intake during one fateful dinner. Or was it lunch?
Anyway, by that scientific rationale, the Japanese would be extinct by now.
If you find this funny, then consider the conundrum of where a reporter from one IFJ affiliate tacitly supports the brutal actions against another IFJ-related journalist.
Why should I stay here then? I hope to leave for good before I end up in prison or before I get blown up by the KMM. I am not sure whether it will be the Mujahideen or the Militan side of the terrorism coin. It doesn't matter. Photos of the London bombings send a chill down my spine.
Political asylum is not a option with the EU. They hate to admit that while people like me try to reason against injustice through writings/or activism, we do not strap bombs to our bodies to vent our frustrations. I don't intend to blow myself up in crowded subways or buses even after I had faced severe discrimination for all 35 years of my life, except for a year I spent in Leeds, UK. Somehow the Western Imperialists that my former daily liked to depict weren't imperious with me. Or is the EU selective in welcoming the discriminated, the oppressed, and the persecuted who might eventually turn against them? There are possibilities here for conspiracy theorists and they might be right . . .
Of course, the powers that be wouldn't want a story like this out. Communications problems are expected. And it has begun. Here is an alert I received from InternetSeer (It's a first):
Recovery Alert Your Web Site is no longer on error
URL: http://maavak.net
Time: Wed Aug 03 03:12:16 EDT 2005
Total Time on Error: 10 minutes, 9 seconds
Error Alert
Your Web site is not responding
URL: http://maavak.net
Time: Wed Aug 03 03:05:54 EDT 2005
Error Type: Connection Refused
Wish me luck. I will prevail, but for those who think that only American citizens and Iraqi civilians are worthy victims, not to mention UK Muslims who face taunts, your turn will come. All human beings are worthy, but selectivity will be met by selectivity, tenfold.
IS "THE FAKE" TRULY A FAKE? :: from www.uruknet.info :: news from occupied Iraq - it
IS "THE FAKE" TRULY A FAKE? :: from www.uruknet.info :: news from occupied Iraq - it
BG: London "suicide bombers". More point / counterpoint. The onus would seem to be on Fintan, and I think his argument is underwhelming.
BG: London "suicide bombers". More point / counterpoint. The onus would seem to be on Fintan, and I think his argument is underwhelming.
Many a strange bedfellow
Many a strange bedfellow
The purpose of this essay is not to try and prove a definitive link between the July 7 (or July 21) attacks and the state but that an historical (and on-going) relationship exists between state-sponsored terror via covert operations of all kinds and the vehicles they use as cover – drug smuggling, money laundering, extremist groups, neo-nazis, in fact whatever is convenient. Therefore, it should come as no surprise to anyone that such things happen and given what is at stake here – the future of the British state – of state involvement in the tragic events of July 7. And before you scoff, consider that the first victim of open state terror, the young Brazilian, Menezes, has already paid with his life as a direct result of Blair’s policies.
The purpose of this essay is not to try and prove a definitive link between the July 7 (or July 21) attacks and the state but that an historical (and on-going) relationship exists between state-sponsored terror via covert operations of all kinds and the vehicles they use as cover – drug smuggling, money laundering, extremist groups, neo-nazis, in fact whatever is convenient. Therefore, it should come as no surprise to anyone that such things happen and given what is at stake here – the future of the British state – of state involvement in the tragic events of July 7. And before you scoff, consider that the first victim of open state terror, the young Brazilian, Menezes, has already paid with his life as a direct result of Blair’s policies.
Boing Boing: FCC's schizoid rulings on DSL, wiretapping
Boing Boing: FCC's schizoid rulings on DSL, wiretapping
BG: For Xeni not to point out fallicies in Declan's article is wholly sad. For Declan to write the article the way he did is unforgivable.
BG: For Xeni not to point out fallicies in Declan's article is wholly sad. For Declan to write the article the way he did is unforgivable.
Civil Commotion � Michael Reagan: No chip off the old block
Civil Commotion � Michael Reagan: No chip off the old block
It turns out that Michael Reagan, radio talk-show host and son of former President Ronald Reagan, is just as dumb as critics thought his dad was.
If you are wondering where the American Civil Liberties Union is standing in the war on terror, contemplate the following: The ACLU wants U.S. courts to allow the Quran to be used instead of the Bible when administering the oath to Muslims in court.
According to The Associated Press, denying the use of other religious texts would violate the Constitution by favoring Christianity over other religions, the ACLU of North Carolina said in a lawsuit. State law currently allows witnesses preparing to testify in court to take their oath either by laying a hand over a “Holy Scripture,” by saying “so help me God” without the use of a religious book, or by using no religious symbols.
[ … ]
I can’t reach any other conclusion but that the ACLU feels the only way for this war in Iraq to end is to have more Americans die so that the backbones of the American people will weaken, as happened in Vietnam, and will finally demand that Washington stop fighting the terrorists there and pull out. I’m convinced that the ACLU has reached the conclusion that the only way they can accomplish this is to pour more fuel on the fire and allow the enemy to recruit more terrorists to kill more Americans.
I firmly believe that the ACLU wants more Americans to die so that the war will end.
[ … ]
I don’t know how much longer the American people are going to put up with this sorry ACLU bunch. They are the ones who caused prayer to be banned in our schools …
Ahhh … nuts.
As it happens, I share the view that the ACLU’s argument that “Holy Scriptures” comprehends texts other the the Bible is pretty feeble, but — unlike Reagan — it seems entirely reasonable to me that a Muslim should wish to affirm the oath using the Quran, and I can’t think of a reason in the world why I, or Reagan, should suppose that extending such an ordinary courtesy evidences a desire to see Americans die. Nor can I think of any reason why that courtesy should not be extended as a matter of course.
Reagan is half-baked on the school prayer matter, too. The Supreme Court combined two cases, Abington Township v. Schempp and Murray v. Curlett, issuing a single decision. The ACLU assisted Schempp, but refused to assist Murray. More importantly, the resulting decision did not outlaw school prayer. School prayer has never been outlawed, and no American court has ever held otherwise.
Compulsory school prayer was outlawed, and if Reagan knew anything more about the subject than the demagoguic applause-line he’d know that. What is more, he’d be grateful. If compulsory school prayer was legal, the children who attend Dearborn, Michigan’s public schools would be prostrating themselves and reciting prayers from the Quran 5-times daily.
Reagan is just another example of the trivial, cliche-howling belligerants (see here, and here) on the Right who exploit the Ignorami for personal gain.
It turns out that Michael Reagan, radio talk-show host and son of former President Ronald Reagan, is just as dumb as critics thought his dad was.
If you are wondering where the American Civil Liberties Union is standing in the war on terror, contemplate the following: The ACLU wants U.S. courts to allow the Quran to be used instead of the Bible when administering the oath to Muslims in court.
According to The Associated Press, denying the use of other religious texts would violate the Constitution by favoring Christianity over other religions, the ACLU of North Carolina said in a lawsuit. State law currently allows witnesses preparing to testify in court to take their oath either by laying a hand over a “Holy Scripture,” by saying “so help me God” without the use of a religious book, or by using no religious symbols.
[ … ]
I can’t reach any other conclusion but that the ACLU feels the only way for this war in Iraq to end is to have more Americans die so that the backbones of the American people will weaken, as happened in Vietnam, and will finally demand that Washington stop fighting the terrorists there and pull out. I’m convinced that the ACLU has reached the conclusion that the only way they can accomplish this is to pour more fuel on the fire and allow the enemy to recruit more terrorists to kill more Americans.
I firmly believe that the ACLU wants more Americans to die so that the war will end.
[ … ]
I don’t know how much longer the American people are going to put up with this sorry ACLU bunch. They are the ones who caused prayer to be banned in our schools …
Ahhh … nuts.
As it happens, I share the view that the ACLU’s argument that “Holy Scriptures” comprehends texts other the the Bible is pretty feeble, but — unlike Reagan — it seems entirely reasonable to me that a Muslim should wish to affirm the oath using the Quran, and I can’t think of a reason in the world why I, or Reagan, should suppose that extending such an ordinary courtesy evidences a desire to see Americans die. Nor can I think of any reason why that courtesy should not be extended as a matter of course.
Reagan is half-baked on the school prayer matter, too. The Supreme Court combined two cases, Abington Township v. Schempp and Murray v. Curlett, issuing a single decision. The ACLU assisted Schempp, but refused to assist Murray. More importantly, the resulting decision did not outlaw school prayer. School prayer has never been outlawed, and no American court has ever held otherwise.
Compulsory school prayer was outlawed, and if Reagan knew anything more about the subject than the demagoguic applause-line he’d know that. What is more, he’d be grateful. If compulsory school prayer was legal, the children who attend Dearborn, Michigan’s public schools would be prostrating themselves and reciting prayers from the Quran 5-times daily.
Reagan is just another example of the trivial, cliche-howling belligerants (see here, and here) on the Right who exploit the Ignorami for personal gain.
Accounting 101 for Donald Luskin
Angry Bear
Accounting 101 for Donald Luskin
Brad DeLong catches Donald Luskin failing to understand that “deficit” means the annual increase in “debt”:
When an American (1) labors or invests to earn money, (2) chooses to spend that money on foreign goods, and (3) the foreign maker of those goods doesn't spend that money on American goods, somehow debt is created. I don't see it. Where's the debt? Or at least, where is the debt that arises uniquely in virtue of the trade deficit?
Brad seems to be wondering if Luskin really is the stupidest person alive given all the competition from his National Review colleagues, but I’d rather help this clearly confused person out as well as to see if he has any point in his confused rant. In a way, one has to start at the beginning with the simple notion that to intelligently opine on any issue first requires one understands the concepts including the appropriately terminology and then one has to know how to apply these concepts to real world data. Brad is noting that Luskin has skipped the freshman college lecture on the concepts before jumping into application. So forgive me for some rather obvious balance sheet and income statement ideas that apply to nations as well as to individuals.
One’s wealth can be thought of as the sum of one’s real assets and one’s net financial wealth. Savings (S) represents the flow increase in wealth with investment (I) representing the flow increase in real assets. The difference, often defined as a surplus, represents the flow increase in financial wealth. If a person - or a nation - investments more than it saves, then its financial wealth declines over time. In one way, a nation is a collection of individuals with one caveat (which will be important later) being that the nation’s population likely is growing over time. For a nation, the current account is defined as S – I, that is, national savings minus investment.
Luskin may be trying to argue what some conservatives claimed over 20 years ago – that the large current account deficits of the early 1980’s were not bad as they represented strong investment relative to moderate savings. If one goes back to 1980, the U.S. was described as the world’s largest creditor as our net financial wealth was quite high. Five years later, however, our net financial wealth was virtually zero. And we have continued to experience current account deficits, which implies that our net financial position is one of substantial debt. But haven’t we accumulated substantial real assets in the process according to Luskin’s “logic”.
To see why his logic does not apply well to the American economy, let’s consider a couple of hypothetical examples as we also remember what James Hamilton noted. In both of our examples, assume net national product is $10 trillion and consider the implications of a current account deficit equal to $0.5 trillion. In the first example, assume national savings is $3 trillion so investment is $3.5 trillion. In the second example, assume national savings is $0.3 trillion so investment is $0.8 trillion. Luskin seems to be talking about the first example where real assets are growing rapidly even relative to a growing population. While a net investment to NNP ratio may be a good description of the Chinese economy, the U.S. economy is more akin to the second example where real asset growth barely matches population growth. On a per capita basis, our real asset to worker ratio is not rising but our indebtedness to the rest of the world is.
Hamilton does a very nice job of explaining what the issues are. If an economy is investing a lot with most of its investment being from savings, then what Luskin has tried to express – albeit poorly – might make sense. But Luskin really does need to understand the real world point that U.S. savings is quite low.
Accounting 101 for Donald Luskin
Brad DeLong catches Donald Luskin failing to understand that “deficit” means the annual increase in “debt”:
When an American (1) labors or invests to earn money, (2) chooses to spend that money on foreign goods, and (3) the foreign maker of those goods doesn't spend that money on American goods, somehow debt is created. I don't see it. Where's the debt? Or at least, where is the debt that arises uniquely in virtue of the trade deficit?
Brad seems to be wondering if Luskin really is the stupidest person alive given all the competition from his National Review colleagues, but I’d rather help this clearly confused person out as well as to see if he has any point in his confused rant. In a way, one has to start at the beginning with the simple notion that to intelligently opine on any issue first requires one understands the concepts including the appropriately terminology and then one has to know how to apply these concepts to real world data. Brad is noting that Luskin has skipped the freshman college lecture on the concepts before jumping into application. So forgive me for some rather obvious balance sheet and income statement ideas that apply to nations as well as to individuals.
One’s wealth can be thought of as the sum of one’s real assets and one’s net financial wealth. Savings (S) represents the flow increase in wealth with investment (I) representing the flow increase in real assets. The difference, often defined as a surplus, represents the flow increase in financial wealth. If a person - or a nation - investments more than it saves, then its financial wealth declines over time. In one way, a nation is a collection of individuals with one caveat (which will be important later) being that the nation’s population likely is growing over time. For a nation, the current account is defined as S – I, that is, national savings minus investment.
Luskin may be trying to argue what some conservatives claimed over 20 years ago – that the large current account deficits of the early 1980’s were not bad as they represented strong investment relative to moderate savings. If one goes back to 1980, the U.S. was described as the world’s largest creditor as our net financial wealth was quite high. Five years later, however, our net financial wealth was virtually zero. And we have continued to experience current account deficits, which implies that our net financial position is one of substantial debt. But haven’t we accumulated substantial real assets in the process according to Luskin’s “logic”.
To see why his logic does not apply well to the American economy, let’s consider a couple of hypothetical examples as we also remember what James Hamilton noted. In both of our examples, assume net national product is $10 trillion and consider the implications of a current account deficit equal to $0.5 trillion. In the first example, assume national savings is $3 trillion so investment is $3.5 trillion. In the second example, assume national savings is $0.3 trillion so investment is $0.8 trillion. Luskin seems to be talking about the first example where real assets are growing rapidly even relative to a growing population. While a net investment to NNP ratio may be a good description of the Chinese economy, the U.S. economy is more akin to the second example where real asset growth barely matches population growth. On a per capita basis, our real asset to worker ratio is not rising but our indebtedness to the rest of the world is.
Hamilton does a very nice job of explaining what the issues are. If an economy is investing a lot with most of its investment being from savings, then what Luskin has tried to express – albeit poorly – might make sense. But Luskin really does need to understand the real world point that U.S. savings is quite low.
:::Mo(nu)ments::: ©Ine Dehandschutter: Censored
:::Mo(nu)ments::: ©Ine Dehandschutter: Censored
When Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter George Weller's 25,000-word story on the horror that he encountered in Nagasaki was submitted to military censors, Gen. MacArthur personally ordered the story killed, and the manuscript was never returned. As Weller later summarized his experience with MacArthur's censors, "They won."
When Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter George Weller's 25,000-word story on the horror that he encountered in Nagasaki was submitted to military censors, Gen. MacArthur personally ordered the story killed, and the manuscript was never returned. As Weller later summarized his experience with MacArthur's censors, "They won."
Monday, August 08, 2005
Discovery landing - just another NASA psychodrama
TOTAL INFORMATION ANALYSIS
Sounds like NASA's playing more games. Chatter on the Richard Hoagland blog reports circular radar anomalies indicative of weather control for creating cloud cover; which has put off the first scheduled landing..
Hopefully these poor space bastards will land safely like in the Apollo 13 movie; and not crash all over the ancient cities buried in the Gulf of Mexico for the blackop searchsubs to pick over. At least this mission's patch looks more like a yin & yang symbol than a shuttle falling into pieces like the Colombia's last patch did.
Sounds like NASA's playing more games. Chatter on the Richard Hoagland blog reports circular radar anomalies indicative of weather control for creating cloud cover; which has put off the first scheduled landing..
Hopefully these poor space bastards will land safely like in the Apollo 13 movie; and not crash all over the ancient cities buried in the Gulf of Mexico for the blackop searchsubs to pick over. At least this mission's patch looks more like a yin & yang symbol than a shuttle falling into pieces like the Colombia's last patch did.
Suburban Guerrilla » Blog Archive » Caught in the Gears
Suburban Guerrilla » Blog Archive » Caught in the Gears
The rotten apples are still at the top of the tree:
In the first interview granted by any of the accused soldiers, a former guard charged with maiming and assault said that he and other reservist military policemen were specifically instructed at Bagram how to deliver the type of blows that killed the two detainees, and that the strikes were commonly used when prisoners resisted being hooded or shackled.
“I just don’t understand how, if we were given training to do this, you can say that we were wrong and should have known better,” said the soldier, Pvt. Willie V. Brand, 26, of Cincinnati, a father of four who volunteered for tours in Afghanistan and Kosovo.
The rotten apples are still at the top of the tree:
In the first interview granted by any of the accused soldiers, a former guard charged with maiming and assault said that he and other reservist military policemen were specifically instructed at Bagram how to deliver the type of blows that killed the two detainees, and that the strikes were commonly used when prisoners resisted being hooded or shackled.
“I just don’t understand how, if we were given training to do this, you can say that we were wrong and should have known better,” said the soldier, Pvt. Willie V. Brand, 26, of Cincinnati, a father of four who volunteered for tours in Afghanistan and Kosovo.
Public Domain Progress: The Sheehanator: She absolutely will not stop, ever, until Bush is politically dead!
Public Domain Progress: The Sheehanator: She absolutely will not stop, ever, until Bush is politically dead!
The Sheehanator: She absolutely will not stop, ever, until Bush is politically dead!
"Beating a political stake in your black heart will be the fulfillment of my life ..." -- Cindy Sheehan
"Listen! And understand! That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with! It can't be reasoned with! It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!" -- Kyle Reese, The Terminator
Of the Many Deaths in Iraq, One Mother's Loss Becomes a Problem for the President
Larry Downing/Reuters
Cindy Sheehan paces on a road Sunday near President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Tex. She vows to wait until he talks to her or leaves the ranch.
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON, NY Times, August 8, 2005
President Bush draws antiwar protesters just about wherever he goes, but few generate the kind of attention that Cindy Sheehan has since she drove down the winding road toward his ranch here this weekend and sought to tell him face to face that he must pull all Americans troops out of Iraq now.
Ms. Sheehan's son, Casey, was killed last year in Iraq, after which she became an antiwar activist. She says she and her family met with the president two months later at Fort Lewis in Washington State.
But when she was blocked by the police a few miles from Mr. Bush's 1,600-acre spread on Saturday, the 48-year-old Ms. Sheehan of Vacaville, Calif., was transformed into a news media phenomenon, the new face of opposition to the Iraq conflict at a moment when public opinion is in flux and the politics of the war have grown more complicated for the president and the Republican Party.
Ms. Sheehan has vowed to camp out on the spot until Mr. Bush agrees to meet with her, even if it means spending all of August under a broiling sun by the dusty road. Early on Sunday afternoon, 25 hours after she was turned back as she approached Mr. Bush's ranch, Prairie Chapel, Ms. Sheehan stood red-faced from the heat at the makeshift campsite that she says will be her home until the president relents or leaves to go back to Washington. A reporter from The Associated Press had just finished interviewing her. CBS was taping a segment on her. She had already appeared on CNN, and was scheduled to appear live on ABC on Monday morning. Reporters from across the country were calling her cellphone.
"It's just snowballed," Ms. Sheehan said beside a small stand of trees and a patch of shade that contained a sleeping bag, some candles, a jar of nuts and a few other supplies. "We have opened up a debate in the country."
Seeking to head off exactly the situation that now seems to be unfolding, the administration sent two senior officials out from the ranch on Saturday afternoon to meet with her. But Ms. Sheehan said after talking to the officials - Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, and Joe Hagin, a deputy White House chief of staff - that she would not back down in her demand to see the president.
Her success in drawing so much attention to her message - and leaving the White House in a face-off with an opponent who had to be treated very gently even as she aggressively attacked the president and his policies - seemed to stem from the confluence of several forces.
The deaths last week of 20 Marines from a single battalion has focused public attention on the unremitting pace of casualties in Iraq, providing her an opening to deliver her message that no more lives should be given to the war. At the same time, polls that show falling approval for Mr. Bush's handling of the war have left him open to challenge in a way that he was not when the nation appeared to be more strongly behind him.
It did not hurt her cause that she staged her protest, which she said was more or less spontaneous, at the doorstep of the White House press corps, which spends each August in Crawford with little to do, minimal access to Mr. Bush and his aides, and an eagerness for any new story.
As the mother of an Army specialist who was killed at age 24 in the Sadr City section of Baghdad on April 4, 2004, Ms. Sheehan's story is certainly compelling. She is also articulate, aggressive in delivering her message and has information that most White House reporters have not heard before: how Mr. Bush handles himself when he meets behind closed doors with the families of soldiers killed in Iraq.
The White House has released few details of such sessions, which Mr. Bush holds regularly as he travels the country, but generally portrays them as emotional and an opportunity for the president to share the grief of the families. In Ms. Sheehan's telling, though, Mr. Bush did not know her son's name when she and her family met with him in June 2004 at Fort Lewis. Mr. Bush, she said, acted as if he were at a party and behaved disrespectfully toward her by referring to her as "Mom" throughout the meeting.
By Ms. Sheehan's account, Mr. Bush said to her that he could not imagine losing a loved one like an aunt or uncle or cousin. Ms. Sheehan said she broke in and told Mr. Bush that Casey was her son, and that she thought he could imagine what it would be like since he has two daughters and that he should think about what it would be like sending them off to war.
"I said, 'Trust me, you don't want to go there'," Ms. Sheehan said, recounting her exchange with the president. "He said, 'You're right, I don't.' I said, 'Well, thanks for putting me there.' "
Asked about Ms. Sheehan's statements, Trent D. Duffy, a spokesman for the White House, said Sunday: "The president knows one of his most important responsibilities is to comfort the families of the fallen. That is why he has personally met with and grieved with hundreds of families who have lost a loved one who made the ultimate sacrifice. We can only imagine how painful and difficult it must be for a mother to lose her son. Our hearts and prayers are always be with the moms and dads and spouses and children of those who have fallen."
It is not clear how the White House will handle Ms. Sheehan. Mr. Bush usually comes and goes from the ranch by helicopter, but he might have to drive by her on Friday, when he is scheduled to attend a Republican fund-raiser at a ranch just down the road from where Ms. Sheehan is camped out. She will no doubt get another wave of publicity on Thursday, when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice join Mr. Bush at the ranch to discuss the war.
The Sheehanator: She absolutely will not stop, ever, until Bush is politically dead!
"Beating a political stake in your black heart will be the fulfillment of my life ..." -- Cindy Sheehan
"Listen! And understand! That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with! It can't be reasoned with! It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!" -- Kyle Reese, The Terminator
Of the Many Deaths in Iraq, One Mother's Loss Becomes a Problem for the President
Larry Downing/Reuters
Cindy Sheehan paces on a road Sunday near President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Tex. She vows to wait until he talks to her or leaves the ranch.
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON, NY Times, August 8, 2005
President Bush draws antiwar protesters just about wherever he goes, but few generate the kind of attention that Cindy Sheehan has since she drove down the winding road toward his ranch here this weekend and sought to tell him face to face that he must pull all Americans troops out of Iraq now.
Ms. Sheehan's son, Casey, was killed last year in Iraq, after which she became an antiwar activist. She says she and her family met with the president two months later at Fort Lewis in Washington State.
But when she was blocked by the police a few miles from Mr. Bush's 1,600-acre spread on Saturday, the 48-year-old Ms. Sheehan of Vacaville, Calif., was transformed into a news media phenomenon, the new face of opposition to the Iraq conflict at a moment when public opinion is in flux and the politics of the war have grown more complicated for the president and the Republican Party.
Ms. Sheehan has vowed to camp out on the spot until Mr. Bush agrees to meet with her, even if it means spending all of August under a broiling sun by the dusty road. Early on Sunday afternoon, 25 hours after she was turned back as she approached Mr. Bush's ranch, Prairie Chapel, Ms. Sheehan stood red-faced from the heat at the makeshift campsite that she says will be her home until the president relents or leaves to go back to Washington. A reporter from The Associated Press had just finished interviewing her. CBS was taping a segment on her. She had already appeared on CNN, and was scheduled to appear live on ABC on Monday morning. Reporters from across the country were calling her cellphone.
"It's just snowballed," Ms. Sheehan said beside a small stand of trees and a patch of shade that contained a sleeping bag, some candles, a jar of nuts and a few other supplies. "We have opened up a debate in the country."
Seeking to head off exactly the situation that now seems to be unfolding, the administration sent two senior officials out from the ranch on Saturday afternoon to meet with her. But Ms. Sheehan said after talking to the officials - Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, and Joe Hagin, a deputy White House chief of staff - that she would not back down in her demand to see the president.
Her success in drawing so much attention to her message - and leaving the White House in a face-off with an opponent who had to be treated very gently even as she aggressively attacked the president and his policies - seemed to stem from the confluence of several forces.
The deaths last week of 20 Marines from a single battalion has focused public attention on the unremitting pace of casualties in Iraq, providing her an opening to deliver her message that no more lives should be given to the war. At the same time, polls that show falling approval for Mr. Bush's handling of the war have left him open to challenge in a way that he was not when the nation appeared to be more strongly behind him.
It did not hurt her cause that she staged her protest, which she said was more or less spontaneous, at the doorstep of the White House press corps, which spends each August in Crawford with little to do, minimal access to Mr. Bush and his aides, and an eagerness for any new story.
As the mother of an Army specialist who was killed at age 24 in the Sadr City section of Baghdad on April 4, 2004, Ms. Sheehan's story is certainly compelling. She is also articulate, aggressive in delivering her message and has information that most White House reporters have not heard before: how Mr. Bush handles himself when he meets behind closed doors with the families of soldiers killed in Iraq.
The White House has released few details of such sessions, which Mr. Bush holds regularly as he travels the country, but generally portrays them as emotional and an opportunity for the president to share the grief of the families. In Ms. Sheehan's telling, though, Mr. Bush did not know her son's name when she and her family met with him in June 2004 at Fort Lewis. Mr. Bush, she said, acted as if he were at a party and behaved disrespectfully toward her by referring to her as "Mom" throughout the meeting.
By Ms. Sheehan's account, Mr. Bush said to her that he could not imagine losing a loved one like an aunt or uncle or cousin. Ms. Sheehan said she broke in and told Mr. Bush that Casey was her son, and that she thought he could imagine what it would be like since he has two daughters and that he should think about what it would be like sending them off to war.
"I said, 'Trust me, you don't want to go there'," Ms. Sheehan said, recounting her exchange with the president. "He said, 'You're right, I don't.' I said, 'Well, thanks for putting me there.' "
Asked about Ms. Sheehan's statements, Trent D. Duffy, a spokesman for the White House, said Sunday: "The president knows one of his most important responsibilities is to comfort the families of the fallen. That is why he has personally met with and grieved with hundreds of families who have lost a loved one who made the ultimate sacrifice. We can only imagine how painful and difficult it must be for a mother to lose her son. Our hearts and prayers are always be with the moms and dads and spouses and children of those who have fallen."
It is not clear how the White House will handle Ms. Sheehan. Mr. Bush usually comes and goes from the ranch by helicopter, but he might have to drive by her on Friday, when he is scheduled to attend a Republican fund-raiser at a ranch just down the road from where Ms. Sheehan is camped out. She will no doubt get another wave of publicity on Thursday, when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice join Mr. Bush at the ranch to discuss the war.
FPI 2005: War Plans Drafted To Counter Terror Attacks in U.S.
FPI 2005: War Plans Drafted To Counter Terror Attacks in U.S.
War Plans Drafted To Counter Terror Attacks in U.S.
Washington Post
8/8/2005
COLORADO SPRINGS -- The U.S. military has devised its first-ever war plans for guarding against and responding to terrorist attacks in the United States, envisioning 15 potential crisis scenarios and anticipating several simultaneous strikes around the country, according to officers who drafted the plans.
The classified plans, developed here at Northern Command headquarters, outline a variety of possible roles for quick-reaction forces estimated at as many as 3,000 ground troops per attack, a number that could easily grow depending on the extent of the damage and the abilities of civilian response teams.
The possible scenarios range from "low end," relatively modest crowd-control missions to "high-end," full-scale disaster management after catastrophic attacks such as the release of a deadly biological agent or the explosion of a radiological device, several officers said.
Some of the worst-case scenarios involve three attacks at the same time, in keeping with a Pentagon directive earlier this year ordering Northcom, as the command is called, to plan for multiple simultaneous attacks.
The war plans represent a historic shift for the Pentagon, which has been reluctant to become involved in domestic operations and is legally constrained from engaging in law enforcement. Indeed, defense officials continue to stress that they intend for the troops to play largely a supporting role in homeland emergencies, bolstering police, firefighters and other civilian response groups.
But the new plans provide for what several senior officers acknowledged is the likelihood that the military will have to take charge in some situations, especially when dealing with mass-casualty attacks that could quickly overwhelm civilian resources.
"In my estimation, [in the event of] a biological, a chemical or nuclear attack in any of the 50 states, the Department of Defense is best positioned -- of the various eight federal agencies that would be involved -- to take the lead," said Adm. Timothy J. Keating, the head of Northcom, which coordinates military involvement in homeland security operations.
The plans present the Pentagon with a clearer idea of the kinds and numbers of troops and the training that may be required to build a more credible homeland defense force. They come at a time when senior Pentagon officials are engaged in an internal, year-long review of force levels and weapons systems, attempting to balance the heightened requirements of homeland defense against the heavy demands of overseas deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Keating expressed confidence that existing military assets are sufficient to meet homeland security needs. Maj. Gen. Richard J. Rowe, Northcom's chief operations officer, agreed, but he added that "stress points" in some military capabilities probably would result if troops were called on to deal with multiple homeland attacks.
Debate and Analysis
Several people on the staff here and at the Pentagon said in interviews that the debate and analysis within the U.S. government regarding the extent of the homeland threat and the resources necessary to guard against it remain far from resolved.
The command's plans consist of two main documents. One, designated CONPLAN 2002 and consisting of more than 1,000 pages, is said to be a sort of umbrella document that draws together previously issued orders for homeland missions and covers air, sea and land operations. It addresses not only post-attack responses but also prevention and deterrence actions aimed at intercepting threats before they reach the United States.
The other, identified as CONPLAN 0500, deals specifically with managing the consequences of attacks represented by the 15 scenarios.
CONPLAN 2002 has passed a review by the Pentagon's Joint Staff and is due to go soon to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and top aides for further study and approval, the officers said. CONPLAN 0500 is still undergoing final drafting here. (CONPLAN stands for "concept plan" and tends to be an abbreviated version of an OPLAN, or "operations plan," which specifies forces and timelines for movement into a combat zone.)
The plans, like much else about Northcom, mark a new venture by a U.S. military establishment still trying to find its comfort level with the idea of a greater homeland defense role after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Military officers and civilian Pentagon policymakers say they recognize, on one hand, that the armed forces have much to offer not only in numbers of troops but also in experience managing crises and responding to emergencies. On the other hand, they worry that too much involvement in homeland missions would diminish the military's ability to deal with threats abroad.
The Pentagon's new homeland defense strategy, issued in June, emphasized in boldface type that "domestic security is primarily a civilian law enforcement function." Still, it noted the possibility that ground troops might be sent into action on U.S. soil to counter security threats and deal with major emergencies.
"For the Pentagon to acknowledge that it would have to respond to catastrophic attack and needs a plan was a big step," said James Carafano, who follows homeland security issues for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank.
William M. Arkin, a defense specialist who has reported on Northcom's war planning, said the evolution of the Pentagon's thinking reflects the recognition of an obvious gap in civilian resources.
Since Northcom's inception in October 2002, its headquarters staff has grown to about 640 members, making it larger than the Southern Command, which oversees operations in Latin America, but smaller than the regional commands for Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific. A brief tour late last month of Northcom's operations center at Peterson Air Force Base found officers monitoring not only aircraft and ship traffic around the United States but also the Discovery space shuttle mission, the National Scout Jamboree in Virginia, several border surveillance operations and a few forest firefighting efforts.
'Dual-Use' Approach
Pentagon authorities have rejected the idea of creating large standing units dedicated to homeland missions. Instead, they favor a "dual-use" approach, drawing on a common pool of troops trained both for homeland and overseas assignments.
Particular reliance is being placed on the National Guard, which is expanding a network of 22-member civil support teams to all states and forming about a dozen 120-member regional response units. Congress last year also gave the Guard expanded authority under Title 32 of the U.S. Code to perform such homeland missions as securing power plants and other critical facilities.
But the Northcom commander can quickly call on active-duty forces as well. On top of previous powers to send fighter jets into the air, Keating earlier this year gained the authority to dispatch Navy and Coast Guard ships to deal with suspected threats off U.S. coasts. He also has immediate access to four active-duty Army battalions based around the country, officers here said.
Nonetheless, when it comes to ground forces possibly taking a lead role in homeland operations, senior Northcom officers remain reluctant to discuss specifics. Keating said such situations, if they arise, probably would be temporary, with lead responsibility passing back to civilian authorities.
Military exercises code-named Vital Archer, which involve troops in lead roles, are shrouded in secrecy. By contrast, other homeland exercises featuring troops in supporting roles are widely publicized.
Legal Questions
Civil liberties groups have warned that the military's expanded involvement in homeland defense could bump up against the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which restricts the use of troops in domestic law enforcement. But Pentagon authorities have told Congress they see no need to change the law.
According to military lawyers here, the dispatch of ground troops would most likely be justified on the basis of the president's authority under Article 2 of the Constitution to serve as commander in chief and protect the nation. The Posse Comitatus Act exempts actions authorized by the Constitution.
"That would be the place we would start from" in making the legal case, said Col. John Gereski, a senior Northcom lawyer.
But Gereski also said he knew of no court test of this legal argument, and Keating left the door open to seeking an amendment of the Posse Comitatus Act.
One potentially tricky area, the admiral said, involves National Guard officers who are put in command of task forces that include active-duty as well as Guard units -- an approach first used last year at the Group of Eight summit in Georgia. Guard troops, acting under state control, are exempt from Posse Comitatus prohibitions.
"It could be a challenge for the commander who's a Guardsman, if we end up in a fairly complex, dynamic scenario," Keating said. He cited a potential situation in which Guard units might begin rounding up people while regular forces could not.
The command's sensitivity to legal issues, Gereski said, is reflected in the unusually large number of lawyers on staff here -- 14 compared with 10 or fewer at other commands. One lawyer serves full time at the command's Combined Intelligence and Fusion Center, which joins military analysts with law enforcement and counterintelligence specialists from such civilian agencies as the FBI, the CIA and the Secret Service.
A senior supervisor at the facility said the staff there does no intelligence collection, only analysis.
He also said the military operates under long-standing rules intended to protect civilian liberties. The rules, for instance, block military access to intelligence information on political dissent or purely criminal activity.
Even so, the center's lawyer is called on periodically to rule on the appropriateness of some kinds of information-sharing. Asked how frequently such cases arise, the supervisor recalled two in the previous 10 days, but he declined to provide specifics.
War Plans Drafted To Counter Terror Attacks in U.S.
Washington Post
8/8/2005
COLORADO SPRINGS -- The U.S. military has devised its first-ever war plans for guarding against and responding to terrorist attacks in the United States, envisioning 15 potential crisis scenarios and anticipating several simultaneous strikes around the country, according to officers who drafted the plans.
The classified plans, developed here at Northern Command headquarters, outline a variety of possible roles for quick-reaction forces estimated at as many as 3,000 ground troops per attack, a number that could easily grow depending on the extent of the damage and the abilities of civilian response teams.
The possible scenarios range from "low end," relatively modest crowd-control missions to "high-end," full-scale disaster management after catastrophic attacks such as the release of a deadly biological agent or the explosion of a radiological device, several officers said.
Some of the worst-case scenarios involve three attacks at the same time, in keeping with a Pentagon directive earlier this year ordering Northcom, as the command is called, to plan for multiple simultaneous attacks.
The war plans represent a historic shift for the Pentagon, which has been reluctant to become involved in domestic operations and is legally constrained from engaging in law enforcement. Indeed, defense officials continue to stress that they intend for the troops to play largely a supporting role in homeland emergencies, bolstering police, firefighters and other civilian response groups.
But the new plans provide for what several senior officers acknowledged is the likelihood that the military will have to take charge in some situations, especially when dealing with mass-casualty attacks that could quickly overwhelm civilian resources.
"In my estimation, [in the event of] a biological, a chemical or nuclear attack in any of the 50 states, the Department of Defense is best positioned -- of the various eight federal agencies that would be involved -- to take the lead," said Adm. Timothy J. Keating, the head of Northcom, which coordinates military involvement in homeland security operations.
The plans present the Pentagon with a clearer idea of the kinds and numbers of troops and the training that may be required to build a more credible homeland defense force. They come at a time when senior Pentagon officials are engaged in an internal, year-long review of force levels and weapons systems, attempting to balance the heightened requirements of homeland defense against the heavy demands of overseas deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Keating expressed confidence that existing military assets are sufficient to meet homeland security needs. Maj. Gen. Richard J. Rowe, Northcom's chief operations officer, agreed, but he added that "stress points" in some military capabilities probably would result if troops were called on to deal with multiple homeland attacks.
Debate and Analysis
Several people on the staff here and at the Pentagon said in interviews that the debate and analysis within the U.S. government regarding the extent of the homeland threat and the resources necessary to guard against it remain far from resolved.
The command's plans consist of two main documents. One, designated CONPLAN 2002 and consisting of more than 1,000 pages, is said to be a sort of umbrella document that draws together previously issued orders for homeland missions and covers air, sea and land operations. It addresses not only post-attack responses but also prevention and deterrence actions aimed at intercepting threats before they reach the United States.
The other, identified as CONPLAN 0500, deals specifically with managing the consequences of attacks represented by the 15 scenarios.
CONPLAN 2002 has passed a review by the Pentagon's Joint Staff and is due to go soon to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and top aides for further study and approval, the officers said. CONPLAN 0500 is still undergoing final drafting here. (CONPLAN stands for "concept plan" and tends to be an abbreviated version of an OPLAN, or "operations plan," which specifies forces and timelines for movement into a combat zone.)
The plans, like much else about Northcom, mark a new venture by a U.S. military establishment still trying to find its comfort level with the idea of a greater homeland defense role after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Military officers and civilian Pentagon policymakers say they recognize, on one hand, that the armed forces have much to offer not only in numbers of troops but also in experience managing crises and responding to emergencies. On the other hand, they worry that too much involvement in homeland missions would diminish the military's ability to deal with threats abroad.
The Pentagon's new homeland defense strategy, issued in June, emphasized in boldface type that "domestic security is primarily a civilian law enforcement function." Still, it noted the possibility that ground troops might be sent into action on U.S. soil to counter security threats and deal with major emergencies.
"For the Pentagon to acknowledge that it would have to respond to catastrophic attack and needs a plan was a big step," said James Carafano, who follows homeland security issues for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank.
William M. Arkin, a defense specialist who has reported on Northcom's war planning, said the evolution of the Pentagon's thinking reflects the recognition of an obvious gap in civilian resources.
Since Northcom's inception in October 2002, its headquarters staff has grown to about 640 members, making it larger than the Southern Command, which oversees operations in Latin America, but smaller than the regional commands for Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific. A brief tour late last month of Northcom's operations center at Peterson Air Force Base found officers monitoring not only aircraft and ship traffic around the United States but also the Discovery space shuttle mission, the National Scout Jamboree in Virginia, several border surveillance operations and a few forest firefighting efforts.
'Dual-Use' Approach
Pentagon authorities have rejected the idea of creating large standing units dedicated to homeland missions. Instead, they favor a "dual-use" approach, drawing on a common pool of troops trained both for homeland and overseas assignments.
Particular reliance is being placed on the National Guard, which is expanding a network of 22-member civil support teams to all states and forming about a dozen 120-member regional response units. Congress last year also gave the Guard expanded authority under Title 32 of the U.S. Code to perform such homeland missions as securing power plants and other critical facilities.
But the Northcom commander can quickly call on active-duty forces as well. On top of previous powers to send fighter jets into the air, Keating earlier this year gained the authority to dispatch Navy and Coast Guard ships to deal with suspected threats off U.S. coasts. He also has immediate access to four active-duty Army battalions based around the country, officers here said.
Nonetheless, when it comes to ground forces possibly taking a lead role in homeland operations, senior Northcom officers remain reluctant to discuss specifics. Keating said such situations, if they arise, probably would be temporary, with lead responsibility passing back to civilian authorities.
Military exercises code-named Vital Archer, which involve troops in lead roles, are shrouded in secrecy. By contrast, other homeland exercises featuring troops in supporting roles are widely publicized.
Legal Questions
Civil liberties groups have warned that the military's expanded involvement in homeland defense could bump up against the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which restricts the use of troops in domestic law enforcement. But Pentagon authorities have told Congress they see no need to change the law.
According to military lawyers here, the dispatch of ground troops would most likely be justified on the basis of the president's authority under Article 2 of the Constitution to serve as commander in chief and protect the nation. The Posse Comitatus Act exempts actions authorized by the Constitution.
"That would be the place we would start from" in making the legal case, said Col. John Gereski, a senior Northcom lawyer.
But Gereski also said he knew of no court test of this legal argument, and Keating left the door open to seeking an amendment of the Posse Comitatus Act.
One potentially tricky area, the admiral said, involves National Guard officers who are put in command of task forces that include active-duty as well as Guard units -- an approach first used last year at the Group of Eight summit in Georgia. Guard troops, acting under state control, are exempt from Posse Comitatus prohibitions.
"It could be a challenge for the commander who's a Guardsman, if we end up in a fairly complex, dynamic scenario," Keating said. He cited a potential situation in which Guard units might begin rounding up people while regular forces could not.
The command's sensitivity to legal issues, Gereski said, is reflected in the unusually large number of lawyers on staff here -- 14 compared with 10 or fewer at other commands. One lawyer serves full time at the command's Combined Intelligence and Fusion Center, which joins military analysts with law enforcement and counterintelligence specialists from such civilian agencies as the FBI, the CIA and the Secret Service.
A senior supervisor at the facility said the staff there does no intelligence collection, only analysis.
He also said the military operates under long-standing rules intended to protect civilian liberties. The rules, for instance, block military access to intelligence information on political dissent or purely criminal activity.
Even so, the center's lawyer is called on periodically to rule on the appropriateness of some kinds of information-sharing. Asked how frequently such cases arise, the supervisor recalled two in the previous 10 days, but he declined to provide specifics.
Dissent Magazine - Summer 2005
Dissent Magazine - Summer 2005
The Passion of Christopher Hitchens
by Michael Kazin
Love, Poverty, and War:
Journeys and Essays
by Christopher Hitchens
Nation Books, 2004 475 pp $16.95
Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, an unsettling matter has roiled certain precincts of the left: Christopher Hitchens’s zealous support of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, in particular its war in Iraq. How could the once fearless radical polemicist have become a cheerleader for the neoconservative project to remake the world? Why must he revile former comrades as either traitors or slackers in the struggle against terrorists? Why, this June, did he join David Horowitz to conduct a ten-day tour of London, featuring private visits to the House of Lords and the estate of Winston Churchill?
Some believe Hitchens’s apostasy began in 1989 when an Iranian fatwa—which still stands—demanded the murder of his close friend the novelist Salman Rushdie. A few connect his militant patriotism to his applying for American citizenship or even the discovery that he had Jewish ancestors. Others prefer to fault his personality instead of his politics. Hasn’t Hitchens always been an arrogant individualist, eager to bash the illusions of the left? Perhaps all that good whiskey and champagne finally curdled his synapses?
Turncoats can fascinate, particularly when they are such brilliant and prolific writers. For decades after the 1947 hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, left-wing commentators tried to psychoanalyze Whittaker Chambers; they alleged that spurned affection, perhaps even lust for Alger Hiss drove the squat, anxious journalist to target the suave, handsome diplomat. Hitchens is certainly Chambers’s intellectual equal, although the sum of his opinions will never match the historical significance of the former spy’s testimony to Richard Nixon and his fellow red-hunters.
What tempers the furor over Hitchens is the recognition that he has not really become a soldier for the right. Browsing through his ample writings during the first quarter of 2005, one finds, alongside support for the war in Iraq, a variety of opinions that many American leftists would applaud: a slap at the late Pope John Paul II for “saying that condoms are worse than AIDS,” praise for John Brown as a prophet “who anticipated the Emancipation Proclamation and all that has ensued from it,” and a tribute to Tom Paine as “our unacknowledged founding father . . . the moral and intellectual author of the Declaration of Independence.”1 Hitchens also continues to oppose the death penalty and to advocate putting Henry Kissinger on trial as a war criminal.
He does seem perverse at times; why indeed would any non-disciple of David Horowitz choose to do business with that screeching bully? But Hitchens, who put in many years as an editor of New Left Review and a columnist for the Nation, has clearly stuck by many of the convictions that made him a radical back in the 1960s. And nearly everything he writes is full of sly observations and delicious prose—even when one finds something to disagree with on every page.
There is one constant in his torrent of publications since the end of the cold war—whether the topic is literature, politics, or history. Strange as it may sound, Hitchens is a romantic—and a particularly ardent one at that. His romanticism harks back to the beginnings of the Anglo-American left and of modern literature—to Paine’s and Mary Wollstonecraft’s passionate engagement with the French Revolution but revulsion at the orgy of the guillotine, to the early socialists who imagined they could build a cooperative order that would do away with class distinctions, and to the writers and artists inspired by Wordsworth’s maxim “that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings . . . ”
For Hitchens, too, it is unforgivable to compromise one’s principles, to flirt with lies, to heed the sirens of realpolitik over the call of the heart. His anger at such corruptions shouts, elegantly, from the brief introduction to this collection of his pieces written from the early 1990s to 2004: religion is “the most base and contemptible of the forms assumed by human egotism and stupidity”; Kissinger, Bill Clinton, and Mother Teresa are all “despicable” figures; American schools are “designed to bore” students “to death with second-rate and pseudo-uplifting tripe.” “I wake up every day,” Hitchens confesses with a certain glee, “to a sensation of pervading disgust and annoyance.”
This style of moral outrage at wicked, mendacious authorities was stoked by the Enlightenment and burned on through countless manifestos, anthems, and the oratory of socialists and anarchists over the next two hundred years. Formidably well-read, perpetually self-confident men like Bakunin, Trotsky, and Max Shachtman were masters of the idiom. The counterpoint of such invective is a strong sympathy for those whom priests, presidents, and principals are fooling and pushing around. It is not surprising that, in his title, Hitchens chose to give “love” top billing. Although celebrated for his sardonic hauteur, he has always championed intellectuals he believes fought the good fight for ordinary people.
Elsewhere, Hitchens has revealed, in a doleful tone, that he no longer calls himself a socialist. But here, in a review published in 2004, he fairly gushes about Trotsky, from whom “a faint, saintly penumbra still emanates.” Hitchens salutes the “Old Man” for predicting that Stalin would sign a pact with Hitler and for sternly admonishing leftists in the 1930s who saw little distinction between the Nazis and the older, aristocratic right they toppled from power. Trotsky, he writes, set down “a moral warning against the crass mentality of moral equivalence.”
Alas, a taste for romantic heroes often leads one to neglect their flaws. Hitchens says not a word about Trotsky’s infamous crushing of the 1921 revolt at the Kronstadt naval base, which alienated many independent radicals from the Soviet cause. Nor does he mention that the Old Man remained, until the end, an Old Bolshevik, insisting he could pick up where Lenin left off, if only Stalin, the Oriental despot with a poor education, could somehow be whisked into the dustbin of history. But when Hitchens loves you, it’s no good unless he loves you all the way.
That spirit also animates his essays on literary giants. Byron’s poem “The Isles of Greece” “can still start a patriotic tear on a manly cheek” even though it “was originally composed and offered as a self-parody.” Hitchens lauds Kingsley Amis for demonstrating in Lucky Jim, his satire of British academia, the “crucial human difference between the little guy and the small man.” The novel’s protagonist, “like his creator, was no clown but a man of feeling after all.” Bellow, Borges, and Proust all get the same smart, adoring treatment. Hitchens makes no apology for writing solely about “the gold standard” in modern literature, with “the sort of words that hold their value.” Romantic critics from Thomas Carlyle to Harold Bloom would warmly agree.
The longest essay in the collection describes a different sort of love, that between a tourist and the great, mostly late American West. One recent summer, Hitchens—outfitted, presumably, with a large expense account from Vanity Fair—cruised the length of Route 66 in a bright red Corvette convertible, the same model driven by two buddies in a not-quite-forgotten television show named after the highway. “It winds from Chicago to LA, more than two thousand miles,” and Hitchens got as many kicks as he could on the journey. He praises the hamburgers and “terrific jukebox” at a St. Louis bar; marvels at the skills of the auto mechanics in Elk City, Oklahoma, who patch his tires; gapes at a huge meteor crater in the Arizona desert; and orders too much food from “a hauntingly beautiful Spanish waitress” before he heads into California.
But Hitchens is appalled to see how the crude and greedy are trashing what remains of this quaint and seductive cultural landscape. Drug dealers and prostitutes hassle him outside his motel, and Indians peddle “bogus beads and belts and boots” by the side of a mountain. “Surely,” he laments, “a decent silence could be observed somewhere, instead of this incessant, raucous, but sentimental battering of the cash register.” One can share his opinion yet be amused by his naiveté. Learned folks have been deploring the commerce in culture since the Renaissance, if not before. Hitchens is nostalgic for an America he never knew and that never existed.
That passion for an idealized homeland may help explain his unqualified fury at the antiwar left. Hitchens has no patience with a politics of difficult choices. In the waning years of the 1990s, he and I held two debates about the merits of Bill Clinton and the Democrats—one at a Dissent meeting, the other in print. Hitchens, in high moral dudgeon, thought it “contemptible” to defend the president on strategic grounds, as a figure who had blocked the advance of the Gingrichite right, even if he hadn’t done enough to advance a progressive agenda. To him, Clinton was the vilest member of the political species, a man whose “mock-compassionate and pseudohumanitarian bilge” concealed the raw ugliness of his egomania. Realists like me were cowards who did not want the knave to be humbled and driven from office.
The attacks of 9/11 roused Hitchens to a greater, and more justifiable, fury. True to character, it was mingled with righteous joy. “I felt a kind of exhilaration,” he wrote a few days after the Twin Towers came down, “. . . at last, a war of everything I loved against everything I hated.”2 Hitchens had not supported the first Gulf War. During one appearance on CNN, he dared Charlton Heston to name all the nations that bordered Iraq. When the aging conservative fumbled the attempt, his antagonist remarked that such ignorance was typical of Americans who believed their might gave them the ability to forge a new world order. Yet a year later, Hitchens was reporting on the valiant Kurds who, protected by U.S. warplanes, had carved out a liberated enclave for themselves in northern Iraq. “They have powerful, impatient enemies,” he wrote, “and a few rather easily bored friends.” In Hitchens, the Kurds now had an ally as steadfast and articulate as they could desire.
The shock of 9/11 finally persuaded him to abandon his troubled romance with the left and begin another. In war, he embraced the cause of a country he had always held at arm’s length when it was at peace. Enraged by the coldly reflexive anti-imperialism of such figures as Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore, he abandoned his previous ambivalence about the perils of deploying the American military in the Islamic world. He hailed the United States for “bombing” Afghanistan “back out of the Stone Age” and reported happily that children in post-Saddam Iraq chanted “Boosh, Boosh!,” while weeping men declared, “You’re late. What took you so long?” To a right-wing interviewer, Hitchens complained, “Most of the leftists I know are hoping openly or secretly to leverage difficulty in Iraq in order to defeat George Bush . . . this is a tactic and a mentality utterly damned by any standard of history or morality. What I mainly do is try to rub that in.”3
It’s the stance of a man whose passion outruns his reason. Hitchens knows there are many liberals and some radicals who cheered the fall of Saddam Hussein yet also cursed Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair for lying their way into Iraq and then doing more to cover their tracks than to rebuild that devastated nation. Such ambivalence is the main reason no mass antiwar movement exists today, despite widespread aversion to the administration’s conduct before and after the invasion. But the arrogance and brutality of empire are not repealed when they temporarily get deployed in a just cause.
What defines Hitchens’s great talent also limits his political understanding. It is thrilling to read and argue with a gifted writer who evinces no doubt about which side is right and which wrong and who can bring a wealth of learning and experience to the fray. We judge public intellectuals partly on their performance, and few can hold an audience as well as he.
Still, the most romantic position is not often the most intelligent one. It is unheroic but necessary to explain how the Bush administration threw Americans into a bloody morass and might now get them out. A lover of absolutes would label this task an act of bad faith; I would call it common sense. In a luminous recent essay about successive translations of Swann’s Way, Hitchens observed, “To be so perceptive and yet so innocent—that, in a phrase, is the achievement of Proust.”
The author might also have been speaking about himself, a self-made patriot who has added to his love of fearless rebels a fierce apology for the neoconservative crusade.
Since Bush’s reelection, some of Hitchens’s old left-wing friends have urged him to come back home, to confine himself to the elegant slashing of powerful hypocrites on which he built his writerly reputation. But their wish is unlikely to be granted. Christopher Hitchens, you see, is already home.
Michael Kazin is the author of William Jennings Bryan: A Godly Hero, forthcoming in January. He is a member of the Dissent editorial board and teaches history at Georgetown University.
The Passion of Christopher Hitchens
by Michael Kazin
Love, Poverty, and War:
Journeys and Essays
by Christopher Hitchens
Nation Books, 2004 475 pp $16.95
Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, an unsettling matter has roiled certain precincts of the left: Christopher Hitchens’s zealous support of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, in particular its war in Iraq. How could the once fearless radical polemicist have become a cheerleader for the neoconservative project to remake the world? Why must he revile former comrades as either traitors or slackers in the struggle against terrorists? Why, this June, did he join David Horowitz to conduct a ten-day tour of London, featuring private visits to the House of Lords and the estate of Winston Churchill?
Some believe Hitchens’s apostasy began in 1989 when an Iranian fatwa—which still stands—demanded the murder of his close friend the novelist Salman Rushdie. A few connect his militant patriotism to his applying for American citizenship or even the discovery that he had Jewish ancestors. Others prefer to fault his personality instead of his politics. Hasn’t Hitchens always been an arrogant individualist, eager to bash the illusions of the left? Perhaps all that good whiskey and champagne finally curdled his synapses?
Turncoats can fascinate, particularly when they are such brilliant and prolific writers. For decades after the 1947 hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, left-wing commentators tried to psychoanalyze Whittaker Chambers; they alleged that spurned affection, perhaps even lust for Alger Hiss drove the squat, anxious journalist to target the suave, handsome diplomat. Hitchens is certainly Chambers’s intellectual equal, although the sum of his opinions will never match the historical significance of the former spy’s testimony to Richard Nixon and his fellow red-hunters.
What tempers the furor over Hitchens is the recognition that he has not really become a soldier for the right. Browsing through his ample writings during the first quarter of 2005, one finds, alongside support for the war in Iraq, a variety of opinions that many American leftists would applaud: a slap at the late Pope John Paul II for “saying that condoms are worse than AIDS,” praise for John Brown as a prophet “who anticipated the Emancipation Proclamation and all that has ensued from it,” and a tribute to Tom Paine as “our unacknowledged founding father . . . the moral and intellectual author of the Declaration of Independence.”1 Hitchens also continues to oppose the death penalty and to advocate putting Henry Kissinger on trial as a war criminal.
He does seem perverse at times; why indeed would any non-disciple of David Horowitz choose to do business with that screeching bully? But Hitchens, who put in many years as an editor of New Left Review and a columnist for the Nation, has clearly stuck by many of the convictions that made him a radical back in the 1960s. And nearly everything he writes is full of sly observations and delicious prose—even when one finds something to disagree with on every page.
There is one constant in his torrent of publications since the end of the cold war—whether the topic is literature, politics, or history. Strange as it may sound, Hitchens is a romantic—and a particularly ardent one at that. His romanticism harks back to the beginnings of the Anglo-American left and of modern literature—to Paine’s and Mary Wollstonecraft’s passionate engagement with the French Revolution but revulsion at the orgy of the guillotine, to the early socialists who imagined they could build a cooperative order that would do away with class distinctions, and to the writers and artists inspired by Wordsworth’s maxim “that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings . . . ”
For Hitchens, too, it is unforgivable to compromise one’s principles, to flirt with lies, to heed the sirens of realpolitik over the call of the heart. His anger at such corruptions shouts, elegantly, from the brief introduction to this collection of his pieces written from the early 1990s to 2004: religion is “the most base and contemptible of the forms assumed by human egotism and stupidity”; Kissinger, Bill Clinton, and Mother Teresa are all “despicable” figures; American schools are “designed to bore” students “to death with second-rate and pseudo-uplifting tripe.” “I wake up every day,” Hitchens confesses with a certain glee, “to a sensation of pervading disgust and annoyance.”
This style of moral outrage at wicked, mendacious authorities was stoked by the Enlightenment and burned on through countless manifestos, anthems, and the oratory of socialists and anarchists over the next two hundred years. Formidably well-read, perpetually self-confident men like Bakunin, Trotsky, and Max Shachtman were masters of the idiom. The counterpoint of such invective is a strong sympathy for those whom priests, presidents, and principals are fooling and pushing around. It is not surprising that, in his title, Hitchens chose to give “love” top billing. Although celebrated for his sardonic hauteur, he has always championed intellectuals he believes fought the good fight for ordinary people.
Elsewhere, Hitchens has revealed, in a doleful tone, that he no longer calls himself a socialist. But here, in a review published in 2004, he fairly gushes about Trotsky, from whom “a faint, saintly penumbra still emanates.” Hitchens salutes the “Old Man” for predicting that Stalin would sign a pact with Hitler and for sternly admonishing leftists in the 1930s who saw little distinction between the Nazis and the older, aristocratic right they toppled from power. Trotsky, he writes, set down “a moral warning against the crass mentality of moral equivalence.”
Alas, a taste for romantic heroes often leads one to neglect their flaws. Hitchens says not a word about Trotsky’s infamous crushing of the 1921 revolt at the Kronstadt naval base, which alienated many independent radicals from the Soviet cause. Nor does he mention that the Old Man remained, until the end, an Old Bolshevik, insisting he could pick up where Lenin left off, if only Stalin, the Oriental despot with a poor education, could somehow be whisked into the dustbin of history. But when Hitchens loves you, it’s no good unless he loves you all the way.
That spirit also animates his essays on literary giants. Byron’s poem “The Isles of Greece” “can still start a patriotic tear on a manly cheek” even though it “was originally composed and offered as a self-parody.” Hitchens lauds Kingsley Amis for demonstrating in Lucky Jim, his satire of British academia, the “crucial human difference between the little guy and the small man.” The novel’s protagonist, “like his creator, was no clown but a man of feeling after all.” Bellow, Borges, and Proust all get the same smart, adoring treatment. Hitchens makes no apology for writing solely about “the gold standard” in modern literature, with “the sort of words that hold their value.” Romantic critics from Thomas Carlyle to Harold Bloom would warmly agree.
The longest essay in the collection describes a different sort of love, that between a tourist and the great, mostly late American West. One recent summer, Hitchens—outfitted, presumably, with a large expense account from Vanity Fair—cruised the length of Route 66 in a bright red Corvette convertible, the same model driven by two buddies in a not-quite-forgotten television show named after the highway. “It winds from Chicago to LA, more than two thousand miles,” and Hitchens got as many kicks as he could on the journey. He praises the hamburgers and “terrific jukebox” at a St. Louis bar; marvels at the skills of the auto mechanics in Elk City, Oklahoma, who patch his tires; gapes at a huge meteor crater in the Arizona desert; and orders too much food from “a hauntingly beautiful Spanish waitress” before he heads into California.
But Hitchens is appalled to see how the crude and greedy are trashing what remains of this quaint and seductive cultural landscape. Drug dealers and prostitutes hassle him outside his motel, and Indians peddle “bogus beads and belts and boots” by the side of a mountain. “Surely,” he laments, “a decent silence could be observed somewhere, instead of this incessant, raucous, but sentimental battering of the cash register.” One can share his opinion yet be amused by his naiveté. Learned folks have been deploring the commerce in culture since the Renaissance, if not before. Hitchens is nostalgic for an America he never knew and that never existed.
That passion for an idealized homeland may help explain his unqualified fury at the antiwar left. Hitchens has no patience with a politics of difficult choices. In the waning years of the 1990s, he and I held two debates about the merits of Bill Clinton and the Democrats—one at a Dissent meeting, the other in print. Hitchens, in high moral dudgeon, thought it “contemptible” to defend the president on strategic grounds, as a figure who had blocked the advance of the Gingrichite right, even if he hadn’t done enough to advance a progressive agenda. To him, Clinton was the vilest member of the political species, a man whose “mock-compassionate and pseudohumanitarian bilge” concealed the raw ugliness of his egomania. Realists like me were cowards who did not want the knave to be humbled and driven from office.
The attacks of 9/11 roused Hitchens to a greater, and more justifiable, fury. True to character, it was mingled with righteous joy. “I felt a kind of exhilaration,” he wrote a few days after the Twin Towers came down, “. . . at last, a war of everything I loved against everything I hated.”2 Hitchens had not supported the first Gulf War. During one appearance on CNN, he dared Charlton Heston to name all the nations that bordered Iraq. When the aging conservative fumbled the attempt, his antagonist remarked that such ignorance was typical of Americans who believed their might gave them the ability to forge a new world order. Yet a year later, Hitchens was reporting on the valiant Kurds who, protected by U.S. warplanes, had carved out a liberated enclave for themselves in northern Iraq. “They have powerful, impatient enemies,” he wrote, “and a few rather easily bored friends.” In Hitchens, the Kurds now had an ally as steadfast and articulate as they could desire.
The shock of 9/11 finally persuaded him to abandon his troubled romance with the left and begin another. In war, he embraced the cause of a country he had always held at arm’s length when it was at peace. Enraged by the coldly reflexive anti-imperialism of such figures as Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore, he abandoned his previous ambivalence about the perils of deploying the American military in the Islamic world. He hailed the United States for “bombing” Afghanistan “back out of the Stone Age” and reported happily that children in post-Saddam Iraq chanted “Boosh, Boosh!,” while weeping men declared, “You’re late. What took you so long?” To a right-wing interviewer, Hitchens complained, “Most of the leftists I know are hoping openly or secretly to leverage difficulty in Iraq in order to defeat George Bush . . . this is a tactic and a mentality utterly damned by any standard of history or morality. What I mainly do is try to rub that in.”3
It’s the stance of a man whose passion outruns his reason. Hitchens knows there are many liberals and some radicals who cheered the fall of Saddam Hussein yet also cursed Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair for lying their way into Iraq and then doing more to cover their tracks than to rebuild that devastated nation. Such ambivalence is the main reason no mass antiwar movement exists today, despite widespread aversion to the administration’s conduct before and after the invasion. But the arrogance and brutality of empire are not repealed when they temporarily get deployed in a just cause.
What defines Hitchens’s great talent also limits his political understanding. It is thrilling to read and argue with a gifted writer who evinces no doubt about which side is right and which wrong and who can bring a wealth of learning and experience to the fray. We judge public intellectuals partly on their performance, and few can hold an audience as well as he.
Still, the most romantic position is not often the most intelligent one. It is unheroic but necessary to explain how the Bush administration threw Americans into a bloody morass and might now get them out. A lover of absolutes would label this task an act of bad faith; I would call it common sense. In a luminous recent essay about successive translations of Swann’s Way, Hitchens observed, “To be so perceptive and yet so innocent—that, in a phrase, is the achievement of Proust.”
The author might also have been speaking about himself, a self-made patriot who has added to his love of fearless rebels a fierce apology for the neoconservative crusade.
Since Bush’s reelection, some of Hitchens’s old left-wing friends have urged him to come back home, to confine himself to the elegant slashing of powerful hypocrites on which he built his writerly reputation. But their wish is unlikely to be granted. Christopher Hitchens, you see, is already home.
Michael Kazin is the author of William Jennings Bryan: A Godly Hero, forthcoming in January. He is a member of the Dissent editorial board and teaches history at Georgetown University.
BBC NEWS | Middle East | Ex-UN oil-for-food chief resigns
BBC NEWS | Middle East | Ex-UN oil-for-food chief resigns
Ex-UN oil-for-food chief resigns
The former head of the United Nations' oil-for-food programme has quit the UN, lashing out at Secretary General Kofi Annan for "sacrificing" him.
Benon Sevan's decision comes a day before a third report on the scandal-plagued programme is published.
It is expected to accuse Mr Sevan of receiving cash in return for allocating Iraqi oil contracts in the mid-1990s.
The oil-for-food programme allowed Saddam Hussein to sell limited amounts of oil to buy humanitarian goods.
Mr Sevan's lawyers have already said the report will falsely accuse him of receiving cash kick-backs for helping a company obtain lucrative oil contracts under the scheme.
Mr Sevan, a Cypriot who had worked with the organisation for four decades, tendered his resignation in a letter addressed personally to Kofi Annan.
'False charges'
"I fully understand the pressure you are under [...] but sacrificing me for political expediency will never appease our critics or help you or the Organization," he wrote.
The charges are false and you, who have known me all these years, should know they are false
Benon Sevan
Mr Sevan was suspended in February but was retained an honorary post so that he could help the investigation, receiving a nominal annual salary of $1.
The report is the third in a series produced by an independent inquiry committee established by the UN.
In his letter he insisted he was innocent of any charges that would be made against him.
"The charges are false and you, who have known me all these years, should know they are false," he wrote.
In February, the independent panel investigating the allegations of corruption in the oil-for-food scandal had said that Mr Sevan had received payments of cash as well as oil allocations.
Mr Sevan said the real oil-for-food scandal was the way the programme was misrepresented by those who were against the UN.
He said he was disappointed by Mr Annan's "failure to defend the historic achievements of the oil-for-food programme."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/4130390.stm
Published: 2005/08/08 00:02:17 GMT
© BBC MMV
Ex-UN oil-for-food chief resigns
The former head of the United Nations' oil-for-food programme has quit the UN, lashing out at Secretary General Kofi Annan for "sacrificing" him.
Benon Sevan's decision comes a day before a third report on the scandal-plagued programme is published.
It is expected to accuse Mr Sevan of receiving cash in return for allocating Iraqi oil contracts in the mid-1990s.
The oil-for-food programme allowed Saddam Hussein to sell limited amounts of oil to buy humanitarian goods.
Mr Sevan's lawyers have already said the report will falsely accuse him of receiving cash kick-backs for helping a company obtain lucrative oil contracts under the scheme.
Mr Sevan, a Cypriot who had worked with the organisation for four decades, tendered his resignation in a letter addressed personally to Kofi Annan.
'False charges'
"I fully understand the pressure you are under [...] but sacrificing me for political expediency will never appease our critics or help you or the Organization," he wrote.
The charges are false and you, who have known me all these years, should know they are false
Benon Sevan
Mr Sevan was suspended in February but was retained an honorary post so that he could help the investigation, receiving a nominal annual salary of $1.
The report is the third in a series produced by an independent inquiry committee established by the UN.
In his letter he insisted he was innocent of any charges that would be made against him.
"The charges are false and you, who have known me all these years, should know they are false," he wrote.
In February, the independent panel investigating the allegations of corruption in the oil-for-food scandal had said that Mr Sevan had received payments of cash as well as oil allocations.
Mr Sevan said the real oil-for-food scandal was the way the programme was misrepresented by those who were against the UN.
He said he was disappointed by Mr Annan's "failure to defend the historic achievements of the oil-for-food programme."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/4130390.stm
Published: 2005/08/08 00:02:17 GMT
© BBC MMV
Savoir Vivre... hmmmmmm
Then he start to check the air...
This lonely King series remembers me:
" Hakuna matata, pole, pole. Hakuna matata"
-There is not problem, calm, calm. There is not problem-
He was really enjoying the last warm sunrays of a cold winter’s day.
This lonely King series remembers me:
" Hakuna matata, pole, pole. Hakuna matata"
-There is not problem, calm, calm. There is not problem-
He was really enjoying the last warm sunrays of a cold winter’s day.
Jellyfish
Jellyfish from the Aqua Museum at Sea Paradise glow pink as they pulsate under the light in the their tank
Hakkeijima Sea Paradise, Yokohama, 2005
Hakkeijima Sea Paradise, Yokohama, 2005
Pentagon harasses, demotes and otherwise punishes black female whistleblower for taking on the white boys at Bush & Cheney Inc., Halliburton, etc.
AMERICAblog: Because a great nation deserves the truth
Army whistleblower draws fire
By Deborah Hastings, AP National Writer | August 7, 2005
WASHINGTON --In the world as Bunnatine Greenhouse sees it, people do the right thing. They stand up for the greater good and they speak up when things go wrong. She believes God has a purpose for each life and she prays every day for that purpose to be made evident. These days she is praying her heart out, because she is in a great deal of trouble.
Bunnatine "Bunny" Greenhouse is the Principal Assistant Responsible for Contracting ("PARC" in the alphabet soup of military acronyms) in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Lest the title fool, she is responsible for awarding billions upon billions in taxpayers' money to private companies hired to resurrect war-torn Iraq and to feed, clothe, shelter and do the laundry of American troops stationed there.
She has rained a mighty storm upon herself for standing up, before members of Congress and live on C-SPAN to proclaim things are just not right in this staggeringly profitable business.
She has asked many questions: Why is Halliburton -- a giant Texas firm that holds more than 50 percent of all rebuilding efforts in Iraq -- getting billions in contracts without competitive bidding? Do the durations of those contracts make sense? Have there been violations of federal laws regulating how the government can spend its money?
Halliburton denies any wrongdoing. "These false allegations have been recycled in the media ad nauseam," the company said in response to a list of e-mailed questions from The Associated Press.
Now Bunny Greenhouse may lose her job -- and her reputation, which she spent a lifetime building.
She is a black woman in a world of mostly white men; a 60-year-old workaholic who abides neither fools nor frauds. But she is out of her element in this fight, her former boss said.
"What Bunny is caught up in is politics of the highest damn order," said retired Gen. Joe Ballard, who hired Greenhouse and headed the Corps until 2000. "This is real hardball they're playing here. Bunny is a procurement officer, she's not a politician. She's not trained to do this."
------
Greenhouse has known for a long time that her days may be numbered. Her needling of contracts awarded to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) predated the war in Iraq, beginning with costs she said were spiraling "out of control" from a 2000 Bosnia contract to service U.S. troops. From 1995 to 2000, Halliburton's CEO was Dick Cheney, who left to run for vice president. He maintains his former company has not received preferential treatment from the government.
Since then, she had questioned both the amounts and the reasons for giving KBR tremendous contracts in the buildup to invading Iraq. At first she was ignored, she said. Then she was cut out of the decision-making process.
Last October 6, she was summoned to the office of her boss. Major Gen. Robert Griffin, the Corps' deputy commander, was demoting her, he told her, taking away her Senior Executive Service status and sending her to midlevel management. Not unlike being cast out of the office of bank president into the cubicle of branch manager. Griffin declined to be interviewed by the AP.
Her performance was poor, said a letter he presented. This was a surprise. Her previous job evaluations had been exemplary, she said. The basic theme was that she was "difficult," and "nobody likes you," she said.
If she didn't want the new position, she could always retire with full benefits, the letter noted.
Over my dead body, said Greenhouse.
"I took an oath of office. I took those words that I was going to protect the interests of my government and my country. So help me God," she says. "And nobody. Has the right. To take away my privilege. To serve my government. Nobody."
She has hired lawyer Michael Kohn, who successfully represented Linda Tripp in her claim that the Pentagon leaked personal information after she secretly taped Monica Lewinsky's confessions of a sexual affair with President Bill Clinton.
Two weeks after Greenhouse's trip to the woodshed, Kohn wrote an 11-page letter to the acting Secretary of the Army, requesting an independent investigation of "improper action that favored KBR's interests."
He also asked that his client be protected against retaliation under whistleblower statutes.
Then he reminded the Army secretary of Federal Acquisition Requirement 3.101: "Government business shall be conducted in a manner above reproach ... with complete impartiality and with preferential treatment for none."
The status of an independent investigation by the Defense Department is unclear. "As a matter of policy, we do not comment on open and ongoing investigations," said Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Col. Rose-Ann Lynch.
Halliburton is also under federal investigation for alleged favoritism by the Bush administration. FBI agents questioned Greenhouse for nine hours last November about that probe. In March, a former employee was indicted for taking bribes while working for KBR in Iraq.
Company spokeswoman Melissa Norcross said KBR has "delivered vital services for U.S. troops and the Iraqi people at a fair and reasonable cost, given the circumstances."
Meanwhile, Greenhouse has been placed under a 3-month performance review ending in September.
------
When Gen. Ballard hired her in 1997 she was overqualified -- three master's degrees and more than 20 years of contracting experience in private industry, the Army and the Pentagon.
"She is probably the most professional person I've ever met, " Ballard said. "And she plays it straight. That created problems for her after I left."
Ballard used her, he said, to help him revolutionize the Corps -- by ending the old-boys practice of awarding contracts to a favored few, and by imposing private industry standards on a mammoth, 230-year-old government agency with 35,000 workers. He felt the Corps, which had overseen everything from building hydroelectric dams to the Soo Locks to the Manhattan Project, needed a hard boot into the new age of contracting.
"The Corps is a tough organization. And I'll tell you, it's not easy to be a woman in this organization, and a black one at that," said Ballard, who was the first black leader of the Corps.
He is not optimistic about her future.
"I think you can put a fork in it," he said. "Her career is done."
At Corps headquarters, few speak to her, she said, and her bosses write down what she says at departmental meetings.
Sometimes, as she walks down a hall, someone will mutter, "Go for it, Bunny," or "Give 'em hell," she said. "They pass by saying this while they're looking straight ahead," she recounted, and chuckled.
In a city where politics is everything, including blood sport, she refuses to play. Right down to her clothes.
Bunny Greenhouse does not subscribe to the Capitol chic of a dowdy Janet Reno jacket and skirt or a boxy Hillary Clinton suit with buttons the size of quarters. On a sweltering summer day, seated in her lawyer's Georgetown office, Greenhouse wears a vibrant pink-and-black shirt, tight-fitting trousers with creases that could cut butter, and a blazer with a shredded-fabric flower.
Her bag -- overflowing with files, papers, pens, wallet, cell phone -- rivals the weight of a bound copy of the federal budget. Underestimate her at your peril.
"I have never gone along to get along. And I'm willing to suffer the consequences," she said.
Her contracting staff was sharply reduced, she said, and her superiors have gone behind her back, most notably in issuing an emergency waiver -- on a day she was out of the office -- that allowed KBR to ignore requests from Department of Defense auditors who issued a draft report in 2003 concluding KBR overcharged the government $61 million for fuel in Iraq.
"They knew I would never have signed it," she said.
The Army Corps of Engineers declined to comment on Greenhouse's complaints. "It's a personnel matter," said Corps spokeswoman Carol Sanders. "We're not going to go point-by-point with Ms. Greenhouse's accusations.
"They want me out," Greenhouse said.
------
In her job, Greenhouse is mandated by Congress to get the best quality at the cheapest price from the most qualified supplier. Over her objections, KBR was awarded three multibillion-dollar war-related contracts, two of them without competitive bidding.
Together, they are worth as much as $20 billion -- the entire cost of the Manhattan Project, adjusted to today's dollars.
Greenhouse's most strenuous complaints were over the Restore Iraqi Oil contract, estimated at $7 billion, originally planned to handle oil field fires that might be started by Saddam Hussein's troops. When that failed to happen, it morphed into an agreement to repair oil fields and import fuel for civilians and soldiers.
The contract was given to KBR in March 2003. In Greenhouse's view, that process violated federal regulations concerning fair and open bidding. Halliburton denies that.
A month before KBR got the contract -- and three weeks before the U.S. invaded Iraq -- she had demanded KBR officials be ejected from a Pentagon meeting attended by high-ranking officials from the Corps and the Defense Department. "They should not have been there," she said. "We were discussing the terms of the contract."
Later, she would tell Democratic members of Congress: "The abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR represents the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have ever witnessed during the course of my professional career."
At the Corps, Greenhouse said she was told KBR was the only qualified firm.
With the country on the brink of war, she reluctantly signed the RIO contract. But next to her signature, she boldly wrote an objection to the only thing she felt she could challenge -- the contract's length, five years. One year would have been more than fair, she said. After that, it should have been put out for bid among contractors with top security clearances.
"I caution that extending this sole source contract beyond a one-year period could convey an invalid perception that there is not strong intent for a limited competition," she penned in neat cursive.
In June, she was asked to testify before the Democratic Policy Committee -- formed by Democrats who said their efforts to get the Republican-controlled Congress to investigate alleged war profiteering had been repeatedly denied.
She was joined by a former Halliburton employee who said KBR fed spoiled food to American troops and charged the government for thousands of meals it never served.
Halliburton would not specifically address the former employee's claims. Norcross said taking care of troops is "our priority."
"I thought she was very courageous to come forward and blow the whistle," Rep. Henry Waxman of California said of Greenhouse. "The administration ran around her and ignored her. We owe her a debt of gratitude."
And if she is forced out?
"I would find that outrageous," Waxman replied. "They should be promoting her."
Greenhouse is a registered independent. Her husband, Aloyisus Greenhouse, is retired after a long Army career as a senior procurement officer. They have three grown children.
Bunny grew up in the segregated South, where her parents taught her and her siblings to be proud and hardworking. Her brother is Elvin Hayes, the Hall of Fame basketball player. She followed her husband's military postings, moving and moving and then moving again. In each place she found her own way, and her own job.
Her husband watches what is happening to her and tries to bite his lip.
"Bunny has a lot of faith. She really believes that someone will stand up and say, 'This is wrong.' But I don't think a person exists like that in the Department of Defense."
But in her world, Bunny Greenhouse's faith still beams.
"I simply believe that we have callings and purposes in this life. I walk through this life for a purpose. I wake up every day for a purpose. And every day I say, 'Here I am. Send me.' "
Army whistleblower draws fire
By Deborah Hastings, AP National Writer | August 7, 2005
WASHINGTON --In the world as Bunnatine Greenhouse sees it, people do the right thing. They stand up for the greater good and they speak up when things go wrong. She believes God has a purpose for each life and she prays every day for that purpose to be made evident. These days she is praying her heart out, because she is in a great deal of trouble.
Bunnatine "Bunny" Greenhouse is the Principal Assistant Responsible for Contracting ("PARC" in the alphabet soup of military acronyms) in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Lest the title fool, she is responsible for awarding billions upon billions in taxpayers' money to private companies hired to resurrect war-torn Iraq and to feed, clothe, shelter and do the laundry of American troops stationed there.
She has rained a mighty storm upon herself for standing up, before members of Congress and live on C-SPAN to proclaim things are just not right in this staggeringly profitable business.
She has asked many questions: Why is Halliburton -- a giant Texas firm that holds more than 50 percent of all rebuilding efforts in Iraq -- getting billions in contracts without competitive bidding? Do the durations of those contracts make sense? Have there been violations of federal laws regulating how the government can spend its money?
Halliburton denies any wrongdoing. "These false allegations have been recycled in the media ad nauseam," the company said in response to a list of e-mailed questions from The Associated Press.
Now Bunny Greenhouse may lose her job -- and her reputation, which she spent a lifetime building.
She is a black woman in a world of mostly white men; a 60-year-old workaholic who abides neither fools nor frauds. But she is out of her element in this fight, her former boss said.
"What Bunny is caught up in is politics of the highest damn order," said retired Gen. Joe Ballard, who hired Greenhouse and headed the Corps until 2000. "This is real hardball they're playing here. Bunny is a procurement officer, she's not a politician. She's not trained to do this."
------
Greenhouse has known for a long time that her days may be numbered. Her needling of contracts awarded to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) predated the war in Iraq, beginning with costs she said were spiraling "out of control" from a 2000 Bosnia contract to service U.S. troops. From 1995 to 2000, Halliburton's CEO was Dick Cheney, who left to run for vice president. He maintains his former company has not received preferential treatment from the government.
Since then, she had questioned both the amounts and the reasons for giving KBR tremendous contracts in the buildup to invading Iraq. At first she was ignored, she said. Then she was cut out of the decision-making process.
Last October 6, she was summoned to the office of her boss. Major Gen. Robert Griffin, the Corps' deputy commander, was demoting her, he told her, taking away her Senior Executive Service status and sending her to midlevel management. Not unlike being cast out of the office of bank president into the cubicle of branch manager. Griffin declined to be interviewed by the AP.
Her performance was poor, said a letter he presented. This was a surprise. Her previous job evaluations had been exemplary, she said. The basic theme was that she was "difficult," and "nobody likes you," she said.
If she didn't want the new position, she could always retire with full benefits, the letter noted.
Over my dead body, said Greenhouse.
"I took an oath of office. I took those words that I was going to protect the interests of my government and my country. So help me God," she says. "And nobody. Has the right. To take away my privilege. To serve my government. Nobody."
She has hired lawyer Michael Kohn, who successfully represented Linda Tripp in her claim that the Pentagon leaked personal information after she secretly taped Monica Lewinsky's confessions of a sexual affair with President Bill Clinton.
Two weeks after Greenhouse's trip to the woodshed, Kohn wrote an 11-page letter to the acting Secretary of the Army, requesting an independent investigation of "improper action that favored KBR's interests."
He also asked that his client be protected against retaliation under whistleblower statutes.
Then he reminded the Army secretary of Federal Acquisition Requirement 3.101: "Government business shall be conducted in a manner above reproach ... with complete impartiality and with preferential treatment for none."
The status of an independent investigation by the Defense Department is unclear. "As a matter of policy, we do not comment on open and ongoing investigations," said Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Col. Rose-Ann Lynch.
Halliburton is also under federal investigation for alleged favoritism by the Bush administration. FBI agents questioned Greenhouse for nine hours last November about that probe. In March, a former employee was indicted for taking bribes while working for KBR in Iraq.
Company spokeswoman Melissa Norcross said KBR has "delivered vital services for U.S. troops and the Iraqi people at a fair and reasonable cost, given the circumstances."
Meanwhile, Greenhouse has been placed under a 3-month performance review ending in September.
------
When Gen. Ballard hired her in 1997 she was overqualified -- three master's degrees and more than 20 years of contracting experience in private industry, the Army and the Pentagon.
"She is probably the most professional person I've ever met, " Ballard said. "And she plays it straight. That created problems for her after I left."
Ballard used her, he said, to help him revolutionize the Corps -- by ending the old-boys practice of awarding contracts to a favored few, and by imposing private industry standards on a mammoth, 230-year-old government agency with 35,000 workers. He felt the Corps, which had overseen everything from building hydroelectric dams to the Soo Locks to the Manhattan Project, needed a hard boot into the new age of contracting.
"The Corps is a tough organization. And I'll tell you, it's not easy to be a woman in this organization, and a black one at that," said Ballard, who was the first black leader of the Corps.
He is not optimistic about her future.
"I think you can put a fork in it," he said. "Her career is done."
At Corps headquarters, few speak to her, she said, and her bosses write down what she says at departmental meetings.
Sometimes, as she walks down a hall, someone will mutter, "Go for it, Bunny," or "Give 'em hell," she said. "They pass by saying this while they're looking straight ahead," she recounted, and chuckled.
In a city where politics is everything, including blood sport, she refuses to play. Right down to her clothes.
Bunny Greenhouse does not subscribe to the Capitol chic of a dowdy Janet Reno jacket and skirt or a boxy Hillary Clinton suit with buttons the size of quarters. On a sweltering summer day, seated in her lawyer's Georgetown office, Greenhouse wears a vibrant pink-and-black shirt, tight-fitting trousers with creases that could cut butter, and a blazer with a shredded-fabric flower.
Her bag -- overflowing with files, papers, pens, wallet, cell phone -- rivals the weight of a bound copy of the federal budget. Underestimate her at your peril.
"I have never gone along to get along. And I'm willing to suffer the consequences," she said.
Her contracting staff was sharply reduced, she said, and her superiors have gone behind her back, most notably in issuing an emergency waiver -- on a day she was out of the office -- that allowed KBR to ignore requests from Department of Defense auditors who issued a draft report in 2003 concluding KBR overcharged the government $61 million for fuel in Iraq.
"They knew I would never have signed it," she said.
The Army Corps of Engineers declined to comment on Greenhouse's complaints. "It's a personnel matter," said Corps spokeswoman Carol Sanders. "We're not going to go point-by-point with Ms. Greenhouse's accusations.
"They want me out," Greenhouse said.
------
In her job, Greenhouse is mandated by Congress to get the best quality at the cheapest price from the most qualified supplier. Over her objections, KBR was awarded three multibillion-dollar war-related contracts, two of them without competitive bidding.
Together, they are worth as much as $20 billion -- the entire cost of the Manhattan Project, adjusted to today's dollars.
Greenhouse's most strenuous complaints were over the Restore Iraqi Oil contract, estimated at $7 billion, originally planned to handle oil field fires that might be started by Saddam Hussein's troops. When that failed to happen, it morphed into an agreement to repair oil fields and import fuel for civilians and soldiers.
The contract was given to KBR in March 2003. In Greenhouse's view, that process violated federal regulations concerning fair and open bidding. Halliburton denies that.
A month before KBR got the contract -- and three weeks before the U.S. invaded Iraq -- she had demanded KBR officials be ejected from a Pentagon meeting attended by high-ranking officials from the Corps and the Defense Department. "They should not have been there," she said. "We were discussing the terms of the contract."
Later, she would tell Democratic members of Congress: "The abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR represents the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have ever witnessed during the course of my professional career."
At the Corps, Greenhouse said she was told KBR was the only qualified firm.
With the country on the brink of war, she reluctantly signed the RIO contract. But next to her signature, she boldly wrote an objection to the only thing she felt she could challenge -- the contract's length, five years. One year would have been more than fair, she said. After that, it should have been put out for bid among contractors with top security clearances.
"I caution that extending this sole source contract beyond a one-year period could convey an invalid perception that there is not strong intent for a limited competition," she penned in neat cursive.
In June, she was asked to testify before the Democratic Policy Committee -- formed by Democrats who said their efforts to get the Republican-controlled Congress to investigate alleged war profiteering had been repeatedly denied.
She was joined by a former Halliburton employee who said KBR fed spoiled food to American troops and charged the government for thousands of meals it never served.
Halliburton would not specifically address the former employee's claims. Norcross said taking care of troops is "our priority."
"I thought she was very courageous to come forward and blow the whistle," Rep. Henry Waxman of California said of Greenhouse. "The administration ran around her and ignored her. We owe her a debt of gratitude."
And if she is forced out?
"I would find that outrageous," Waxman replied. "They should be promoting her."
Greenhouse is a registered independent. Her husband, Aloyisus Greenhouse, is retired after a long Army career as a senior procurement officer. They have three grown children.
Bunny grew up in the segregated South, where her parents taught her and her siblings to be proud and hardworking. Her brother is Elvin Hayes, the Hall of Fame basketball player. She followed her husband's military postings, moving and moving and then moving again. In each place she found her own way, and her own job.
Her husband watches what is happening to her and tries to bite his lip.
"Bunny has a lot of faith. She really believes that someone will stand up and say, 'This is wrong.' But I don't think a person exists like that in the Department of Defense."
But in her world, Bunny Greenhouse's faith still beams.
"I simply believe that we have callings and purposes in this life. I walk through this life for a purpose. I wake up every day for a purpose. And every day I say, 'Here I am. Send me.' "
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