Discontented Soul

Torture's Part of the Territory
by Naomi Klein
Published on Tuesday, June 7, 2005 by the Los Angeles Times

Brace yourself for a flood of gruesome new torture snapshots. Last week, a federal judge ordered the Defense Department to release dozens of additional photographs and videotapes depicting prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.
The photographs will elicit what has become a predictable response: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will claim to be shocked and will assure us that action is already being taken to prevent such abuses from happening again. But imagine, for a moment, if events followed a different script. Imagine if Rumsfeld responded like Col. Mathieu in "Battle of Algiers," Gillo Pontecorvo's famed 1965 film about the National Liberation Front's attempt to liberate Algeria from French colonial rule. In one of the film's key scenes, Mathieu finds himself in a situation familiar to top officials in the Bush administration: He is being grilled by a room filled with journalists about allegations that French paratroopers are torturing Algerian prisoners.
Based on real-life French commander Gen. Jacques Massus, Mathieu neither denies the abuse nor claims that those responsible will be punished. Instead, he flips the tables on the scandalized reporters, most of whom work for newspapers that overwhelmingly support France's continued occupation of Algeria. Torture "isn't the problem," he says calmly. "The problem is the FLN wants to throw us out of Algeria and we want to stay…. It's my turn to ask a question. Should France stay in Algeria? If your answer is still yes, then you must accept all the consequences."
His point, as relevant in Iraq today as it was in Algeria in 1957, is that there is no nice, humanitarian way to occupy a nation against the will of its people. Those who support such an occupation don't have the right to morally separate themselves from the brutality it requires.
Now, as then, there are only two ways to govern: with consent or with fear.
Most Iraqis do not consent to the open-ended military occupation they have been living under for more than two years...

Lacking consent, the current U.S.-Iraqi regime relies heavily on fear, including the most terrifying tactics of them all: disappearances, indefinite detention without charge and torture. And despite official reassurances, it's only getting worse...

In Algeria, the French used torture not because they were sadistic but because they were fighting a battle they could not win against the forces of decolonization and Third World nationalism. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein's use of torture surged immediately after the Shiite uprising in 1991: The weaker his hold on power, the more he terrorized his people. Unwanted regimes, whether domestic dictatorships or foreign occupations, rely on torture precisely because they are unwanted.
When the next batch of photographs from Abu Ghraib appear, many Americans will be morally outraged, and rightly so. But perhaps some brave official will take a lesson from Col. Mathieu and dare to turn the tables: Should the United States stay in Iraq? If your answer is still yes, then you must accept all the consequences.

© 2005 LA Times

I am ... part of the generation who were taught to fear Communists, who were trained to hide under school desks or sit on the floor in darkened basement corridors to protect ourselves from nuclear attack, who were told lurid tales about Russian gulags. And who, most of all, in my case, learned that when the godless Communists came, they would take down the crucifixes on our schoolroom walls and destroy our religion with them...
Laugh now, if you will. But those were very real and present horrors then. Especially the part about the suppression of religion.
We were prepared to do anything to avert such a fate, to destroy such an enemy. We built bombs big enough to destroy the globe. We sent thousands of young Americans into the jungles of Vietnam to block the advance of the Red Tide and brought thousands of them home in pine boxes. We had defeated the Germans. We would defeat the Russians, too. Whatever the cost.
We were a Messianic people. We did no wrong, and we destroyed the Darth Vaders who did. We were international heroes. If you were a citizen of the United States somewhere else in the world, you were, indeed, received with flowers and cheers. Drum roll, please.
Then we won the Cold War, became the world's only Super Power, set out to make the rest of the world just like us, and began immediately to lose -- our international image and our integrity. Our president told us that it was all because people were jealous of us. "Some people hate freedom," he said. And, apparently, some people believed it.
Then, in May, Amnesty International, the world's most reputable human rights organization, released its annual report on the state of human rights around the world. That's where the shock came in.
Amnesty International, founded by British lawyer Peter Benenson in 1961, functions as a kind of watchdog organization of volunteers whose purpose is to monitor and evaluate the practice of Human Rights around the globe as defined by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Human rights are in retreat worldwide, this year's report states, and -- most disturbing of all -- the United States bears most of the responsibility for it. Citing routine abuse of detainees, detention without trial, fishnet roundups of men labeled "enemy combatants" without cause, and U.S. attempts to circumvent both domestic and international bans against terror, the report is a scathing indictment of U.S. dishonor and international lawlessness.
What's more, the report says, U.S. actions, imposed by the military but sanctioned by the government, justify repression, dictatorship and abuse by oppressive regimes everywhere. So now people are marching in the streets from Indonesia to the Middle East, in every Islamic country on earth, not because they fear the Soviet Union or Russia. They are marching because they fear the United States...
They are as sure that we are coming to destroy them as we once were that the Communists were coming to do the same to us.
They fear the loss of a culture, a lifestyle, a value system. They fear the destruction of their religion, the loss of their way of life, the violation of their women, and the enslavement of their children to decadence and destruction.
They fear exactly what we feared. And, like us back then, they are willing to do anything --anything at all -- to preserve it.
Surely we can understand that. Why are we so surprised? We did the very same things 50 years ago, only worse. We armed the globe. We threatened the existence of the planet. We sent thousands of our best into the rice paddies of Vietnam, young and wrapped around with explosives, who never returned.

The Downing Street Memo is the gift that just keeps on giving. And well it should. It is the smoking gun which proves that the gravest possible crime was committed by the Bush administration, and among its victims were the American people.
I am more hopeful about American politics than I have been in a long time, though still cautious. For nearly five years now, the Bush administration has gotten away with murder - literally and figuratively - with seemingly immutable impunity, always defying the laws of political gravity, at least as they are known in this universe. So I've come to be tentative and rather pessimistic about the possibilities of ending this national nightmare of reaction, thievery and militarism, and bringing these criminals to justice.
But Downing Street seems to have legs, and I feel a critical mass building now. It is different this time, in part, because this is the first true insider smoking gun, set down in black and white. But it is also different, in part, because the context has changed. Unlike previous revelations, from the Clarke or O'Neill (Suskind) books, for example, the evidence this time comes against the background of growing discontent at home with the disaster of Iraq, and the diminished credibility of a president and the movement of regressive politics he leads...

The Bush Economy
The New York Times - Editorial
9 June 2005

With all of the debate about taxes, the economy and domestic spending, it is hard to imagine anyone supporting the notion of taking money from programs like Medicaid and college-tuition assistance, increasing the tax burden of the vast majority of working Americans, sending the country into crushing debt - and giving the proceeds to people who are so fantastically rich that they don't know what to do with the money they already have. Yet that is just what is happening under the Bush administration. Forget the middle class and the upper-middle class. Even the merely wealthy are being left behind in the dust by the small slice of super-rich Americans.
In last Sunday's Times, David Cay Johnston reported that from 1980 to 2002, the latest year of available data, the share of total income earned by the top 0.1 percent of earners more than doubled, while the share earned by everyone else in the top 10 percent rose far less. The share of the bottom 90 percent declined.
President Bush did not create the income gap. But the unheralded effect of his tax policy is its unequal impact on the modestly well to do. By 2015, those making between $80,000 and $400,000 will pay as much as 13.9 percentage points more of their income in federal taxes than those making more than $400,000, assuming the tax cuts are made permanent. Below $80,000, most taxpayers will see their share of taxes rise slightly or stay the same.
Mr. Johnston's article quotes a prominent economist who argues that people care more about the chance to move from one income class to another (upward, of course) than about income distribution. But during the Bush years, the two main sources of class mobility - a good job and money for higher education - have increasingly failed to materialize for those who most need them. Last week's jobs report from the Labor Department confirmed that a strong labor market recovery has not taken hold. Wages for most working people failed even to outpace inflation in the past year.
That might be more bearable if things were rough all over. But the share of economic growth that is going toward corporate profits, which flow to stockholders and bondholders who are concentrated at the top of the income scale, is at historic highs.
Which brings us back to the%

The War Against Islam
by James Carroll
Published on Tuesday, June 7, 2005 by the Boston Globe

Among the factors leading to the French and Dutch rejections of the European constitution last week, none looms more ominously than the nightmare of antagonism between ''the West" and Islam. Many Europeans fear a rising tide of green, both within the continent and from outside it. Where once communists threatened, now Muslims do. A new wall is being built.
Muslims, meanwhile, see a flood of contempt in pressures on immigrant communities in European cities, in restrictions on Islamic expression, and in openly expressed reservations about Turkey's admission to the EU precisely because of its Islamic character. Given escalations of the war in Iraq together with widely reported instances of Koran-denigration by US interrogators, such trends in Europe make the global war on terror seem expressly a war against Islam. The ''clash of civilizations" seems closer at hand than ever.
To make sense of this dangerous condition, it can help to recall some of the forgotten or misremembered history that prepared for it, from the remote origins of the conflict to its manifestations in the not so distant past...

Europe's initiating ''holy war" with Islam, that is, was based on flawed intelligence, propaganda, and threat exaggeration.
The poison flower of the Crusades, with their denigrations of distant cultures, was colonialism. The dark result of European imperial adventuring in the Muslim world was twofold: first, the usual exploitation of native peoples and resources, with attendant destruction of culture, and, second, the powerful reaction among Muslims and Arab populations against colonialism, a reaction that included an internal corrupting of Islamic traditions. The accidental wealth of oil in the Middle East made both external exploitation and internal corruption absolutely ruinous. The political fanaticism that has lately seized the Arab Islamic religious imagination (exemplified in Osama bin Laden) is rooted more in a defensive fending off of assault from ''the West" than in anything intrinsic to Islam. The American war on terror, striking the worst notes of the old imperial insult, only exacerbates this reactionary fanaticism (generating, for example, legions of suicide bombers).
Having forgotten the deeper history, nervous Europeans seem also to have forgotten how large numbers of Muslims settled in the continent's cities in the first place. In the 1960s and 1970s, Turks, Arabs, and North Africans were welcomed as ''guest workers," taking up menial labor with the implicit understanding that they could never hope to be received as citizens of the nations that exploited them. The rank injustice of a system depending on a permanent underclass was bound to issue in political resistance, and now it has, but with a religious edge...

The loony Gwalchgwyn has come up with another conspiracy theory. Ready? This time he’s saying that the Chinese diplomat was encouraged to defect by our Great and Powerful Friends in the USofA! The evidence? Well, firstly, our US mentors are not happy with our refusal to pledge warriors for the prospective “defence” of Taiwan, and, secondly, George W has repeatedly said, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” So, we have to be “tested” to see whether we stand with the angels and give the man political asylum, or with Satan and put our own economic interests before the divinely-inspired counsel of the US President. Pretty thin? Yes, but the Coalition of the Willing went into Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein on much thinner evidence.
In any case, it will be interesting to see John W twisting ‘n’ turning as he tries to serve both god — who, as we all know, speaks through George Bush — AND Mammon, in the shape of our trade agreements with China.

[The Coalition Government is poised to take control of the Australian Senate and ram through draconian new industrial laws which will change Australian society into a more "American" mould. The terrified petit-bourgeois of Howard's government have tried this before of course - in 1998, they attempted to break the Maritime Union of Australia, and in justification, blitzed the mainstream media with propaganda about "overpaid wharfies" (wharf labourers). Here is a good rebuttal, published at the time in The Canberra Times]

It's the pollies, not wharfies, who aren't worth a cracker
Penelope Layland

IF I HEAR one more Coalition politician exclaim in tones of incredulity that wharfies earn $75,000 to $80,000 a year I think I'll have to cover my ears and go "La, la la la la" until they stop.
It's not the words I hate so much (they may even be true) but the tone of incredulity.
"How dare wharfies earn so much," that tone says.
"How dare blue-collar workers have salaries as high as some of their betters?”
"Since when did the lower orders have the right to a decent wage?"
Why, those wharfies in their blue singlets and daggy shorts, manhandling a few heavy boxes around the docks, not only earn as much as some doctors and lawyers, they are getting frighteningly close to earning the same as a backbencher politician.
And the final insult? Wharfies can't be voted out of a job like politicians can. Their union is so powerful that they can't even be thrown out of a job!
No wonder the Government has made breaking the Maritime Union its No 1 priority, ahead of jobs, health and reconciliation with indigenous Australians. This insolence, this grievous breakdown in the social order simply cannot be allowed to continue.
Why, before you know it there won't be any point at all in sending one's children to good schools so they can get the marks for medicine or law.
One might as well advise them to leave school at 15 and get an apprenticeship. If apprenticeships still existed, which by and large they don't.
One might as well advise them to leave school at 16 and go on the dole. Oops, that doesn't exist any more either.
Now there's no denying that $75,000 or $80,000 is a decent wage by the standards of the vast majority of Australians.
The average wage is about $30,000 and the median wage (which is a better guide to what most people can hope to earn in a year) is about $23,000.
Not too many of us would sneeze at $80,000 a year. Most of us would probably try very hard to hang on to $80,000 if it ever came our way, even if it meant selling our Souls to the union.
But on the scale of truly gross over-the-top wages, $80,000 just doesn't rate at all.
The ACT Government is currently advertising for a head honcho for the territory public service. That job, carries a package (more a shipping container than a package really) worth about $200,000 a year.
And our illustrious federal politicians? We are routinely told how poorly paid they are. We are told how they would all have been better off financially if they had never entered politics (well some of them: John Howard would probably have been a suburban lawyer on a wharfie's wage).
We are told we should be grateful that our politicians have temporarily suspended their pursuit of .money in order to serve their nation. They are noble men and women. God bless them all.
Our backbenchers, as we have already discovered, earn about the same as a wharfie. Of course our blue-collar backbenchers also get $145, tax-free, for every night they spend in Canberra, rising to more than $200 if they are forced, by their gruelling, thankless jobs to stay in a motel in Sydney or Melbourne.
If they stay outside Canberra and choose to bunk with friends they still get $110 a night to help defray the costs of a loaf of bread, a carton of milk and wear and tear on the sofa bed.
If the politician rises beyond the back bench, to chair a committee, he or she gets a base salary of a tad over $94,000. Ministers get a fraction more than $124,000 and Cabinet ministers another $10,000 or so on top of that.
The Deputy PM just about reaches the breadline on $160,000 and the PM can breathe a sigh of relief to see the wolf slink away from his door as he pockets a little over $200,000 a year. Plus those nightly allowances, of course. Let's not forget the pin money. It is more than most people earn for a day's work, let alone a night's repose.
Backbenchers who manage to convince their constituents to keep sending them to Canberra for 20 years get a gold travel pass, allowing them,-to travel free by air, rail or bus within Australia for the rest of their lives or until they can no longer totter from the boarding lounge. A former PM gets the same bonanza after a mere year in the job, ministers after six.
Now my questions (asked in tones of incredulity) are as follows:
· • Who decided that politicians should be better remunerated than cafe waitresses?
· • What can be done to arrest this terrible slide in social standards, whereby the class of people who are generally regarded as the most grasping and untrustworthy of all the classes (apart from journalists and used-car sallesmen) should earn wages well in. excess of those earned by checkout operators?
· • And finally (cranking the incredulity into high register) how come a politician can be "sacked", a la Sharp, Jull and all those other ministers who have been "sacked" or who have "resigned" in the past 18 months, and still have a job pulling in $80,000 a year?
Talk about a closed shop.

Administration's Offenses Impeachable
by Robert Shetterly
Published on Friday, June 3, 2005 by the Bangor Daily News (Maine)

Let's consider an item from the news of about two weeks ago:
A British citizen leaked a memo to London's Sunday Times. The memo was of the written account of a meeting that a man named Richard Dearlove had with the Bush administration in July 2002. Dearlove was the head of the England's MI-6, the equivalent of the CIA. On July 23, 2002, Dearlove briefed Tony Blair about the meeting. He said that Bush was determined to attack Iraq. He said that Bush knew that U.S. intelligence had no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no links to foreign terrorists, that there was no imminent danger to the U.S. from Iraq. But, since Bush was determined to go to war, "Intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy." "Fixed" means faked, manufactured, conjured, hyped - the product of whole cloth fabrication.
So we got aluminum tubes, mushroom clouds imported from Niger, biological weapons labs in weather trucks, fear and trembling, the phony ultimatums to Saddam Hussein to turn over the weapons he didn't have and thus couldn't. We got the call to arms, the stifling of dissent, the parade of retired generals strategizing on the "news" shows, with us or against us, flags in the lapel, a craven media afraid to look for a truth that might disturb their corporate owners who would profit from the war. Shock and Awe. Fallujah. Abu Ghraib.
It was all a lie. Many of us have said for a long time it was a lie. But here it is in black and white: Lies from a president who has taken a sacred trust to uphold the Constitution of the United States.
So, what does it mean? It means that our president and all of his administration are war criminals. It's as simple as that. They lied to the American people, have killed and injured and traumatized thousands of American men and women doing their patriotic duty, killed at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians, destroyed Iraq's infrastructure and poisoned its environment, squandered billions and billions of our tax dollars, made a mockery of American integrity in the world, changed the course of history, tortured Iraqi prisoners, and bound us intractably to an insane situation that they have no idea how to fix because they had no plan, but greed and empire, in the first place.
What does it mean? It means that everyone in this administration should be impeached. It means that our Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins and our Congressmen Tom Allen and Mike Michaud should call for immediate impeachment. They were lied to by their president, voted for war, and are thus complicit in the multiply betrayals of the American people unless they stand up now for the truth...