The Salon Report on Kenneth Starr

The Salon Report on Kenneth Starr

Sept 18 1998

We now know more than we ever wanted to about the president's private life. Here's what the public should know about the prosecutor who may drive him from office.

BY DAVID TALBOT | There is much we now know about our 42nd president, William Jefferson Clinton. We know about his sexual proclivities and fantasies, his taste in women, his favorite erotic poetry, the size and topography of his reproductive organ and yes, his instinct to dissemble when his secret passions are revealed. Some of the endless stream of fact and rumor about the president's private life is of public relevance. Most, however, is not. And, as New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis observed on Tuesday, the urge to empty this president's -- or any president's -- inner life of all its contents is morbid and Orwellian. As Lewis noted, "Privacy is an essential ingredient of civilized human existence," a precious ingredient that has been steadily chipped away in modern American society.

Now Congress has been presented with an impeachment report on President Clinton that is apparently filled with a plethora of details about his once-private erotic life, and little else. (So much for the endless Whitewater probe, which started this entire national ordeal.) On the basis of this unprecedented inspection of the president's personal life, federal lawmakers will decide whether he may remain in office.

Ironically, while we are abundantly informed about the president's private life, we know very little about the man who may finally realize his long-sought goal of undoing the president's election -- independent counsel Kenneth Starr. His power to dominate the nation's attention and control its agenda seems untrammeled. And yet the media -- the voracious eyes and ears of the new era's Insatiable Curiosity -- shows scant interest in Starr. Perhaps this is because there is nothing sensational about the prosecutor's private life. But it is Starr's public life that should demand our attention. The front-page news about Starr is not his sexual fantasies -- we pray these remain forever locked away within the pious lawman -- but his political desires and intimacies. It's not his private lusts that should concern us, but the passionate fixations and excesses of his investigation.

The only criticism of Starr's performance that the elite media has been able to muster during the frenzy of the last several months is that the independent counsel is not PR-savvy, that he lacks the conniving political instincts of, say, President Clinton. (Even in this criticism there is buried the glow of approbation, a sense that there is something noble about Starr's naiveté.) And yet nothing could be further from the truth. Kenneth Starr is a consummately political being, and has been throughout his public life. And his goal from the moment he sought the independent counsel appointment was to hobble, if not destroy, a duly elected presidency that gave him and his conservative allies great offense.

The fact that Starr pursued this political goal during the first three years of his investigation with the key assistance of David Hale, a tainted witness who now stands accused of taking money and legal help from anti-Clinton activists with ties to Starr himself, is now the subject of another federal inquiry. But the media remains stubbornly indifferent to this startling story. Indeed, the New York Times appears to have issued Starr blanket immunity for any and all misdeeds committed in the course of his investigation. In a bland and unrevealing cover profile of Starr in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, staff writer Michael Winerip matter-of-factly asserted: "In the end Starr's motives no longer matter ... It no longer matters if malicious right-wingers consorted with [Starr's] office to lay a trap for the president ... Through Starr's doggedness, his relentless effort to amass every last fact, he has succeeded in making his investigation about Bill Clinton, not about Ken Starr." It may no longer matter (if it ever did) to the country's newspaper of record that a federal prosecutor with unlimited powers consorted "with malicious right-right-wingers" to overturn the results of the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections. But Salon takes a different view.

Ever since Clinton's Aug. 17 confession, the media have been thrashing around the White House like sharks smelling blood in the water. Now that Starr has "got" Clinton on Lewinsky, it's become an article of faith among the opinion elite that the prosecutor's unlimited probe has been completely vindicated and that any attempt to impugn him is folly. The only question allowed for debate in the national Clinton deathwatch is when the president will walk the plank. At the risk of putting a damper on this orgy of prurience and moral pomposity, we would like to remind the country of two salient points: First, Starr's endless investigation apparently found nothing improper about Clinton's role in Whitewater -- the sole reason a special prosecutor was appointed in the first place. This is why, after years of interrogations and hearings, there is apparently nothing about Whitewater in Starr's report to Congress. (But don't count on the New York Times editors' writing a front-page mea culpa about its irresponsible Whitewater coverage, as the less magisterial San Jose Mercury did when it retracted its "Dark Alliance" report on alleged CIA/contra drug trafficking.) Second, Clinton's personal misdeeds, while reprehensible, are simply nowhere near the stature of Richard Nixon's high crimes or the Reagan administration's efforts to fund a rogue war. Covering up a sexual affair is not an offense against the state. As Carl Bernstein commented recently, Zippergate is no Watergate -- the country will look back on this strange and feverish episode years from now and shake its head in wonder at how it convulsed Washington.

As Congress prepares to review Starr's report on President Clinton, Salon herein presents its own findings on the independent prosecutor. In considering Clinton's possible impeachment, lawmakers and those who elected them must also examine the motives, tactics and alliances of Starr himself. For despite Michael Winerip's puzzling assertion, the investigation that has entangled Washington throughout the year is very much about Ken Starr, not just Bill Clinton.

Over the past seven months, Salon has published a massive amount of information about Starr, his investigation and the conflicts of interest between his probe and the Arkansas Project, a secret $2.4 million project to undermine Clinton financed by Starr's former patron, Richard Mellon Scaife. Below is a summary of our special reports on Starr, which are primarily the work of Salon's own dogged investigator, Murray Waas. Other key reporting for Salon has been provided by our Washington bureau chief, Jonathan Broder, and contributors Joe Conason, Gene Lyons and Mollie Dickenson.

What these carefully documented investigative stories underline is essentially this: In his zealous pursuit of the president, Kenneth Starr defiled "the temple of justice," to use his own righteous rhetoric. Lacking a fundamental sense of fairness and judicial proportion, Starr sought first to build his Whitewater real estate case against Clinton using irredeemably corrupt testimony, and then, when this failed, he latched onto Paula Jones' ill-fated civil suit, and then when that failed, he wired Linda Tripp and finally snared Clinton on adultery -- a crime that if aggressively pursued in Washington would depopulate our capital as thoroughly as the Khmer Rouge emptied Phnom Penh.

Below is a fact sheet of what every American citizen should know about Kenneth Starr and his probe.

1. After successful lobbying by staunch conservatives such as North Carolina Sen. Lauch Faircloth, a three-judge panel dominated by Republicans replaced moderate Whitewater prosecutor Robert Fiske with Kenneth Starr in August 1994. Starr, former chief of staff to Reagan Attorney General William French Smith and a member of an ambitious circle of activist conservative attorneys, accepted the job despite the fact that he had opposed the independent counsel law when he was a Reagan official and helped prepare a brief arguing it was unconstitutional, vesting too much power in one unaccountable person.

2. At the time of his appointment as Whitewater independent counsel, Starr, a $1 million-a-year Washington attorney with the high-powered firm of Kirkland & Ellis, was advising the Paula Jones camp on her sexual harassment suit against Clinton and offered to write a friend-of-the-court brief on her behalf. He was also representing the tobacco industry, an ardent foe of the Clinton administration. Later, Iran-contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh would comment that, considering Starr's conflicts of interest, he should have felt obligated to turn down the job of investigating Clinton.

3. Starr proceeded to build his Whitewater case against Clinton largely around the testimony of confessed felon David Hale, a corrupt municipal judge and businessman who claimed then-Gov. Clinton had pressured him into making an illegal $300,000 loan to Jim and Susan McDougal, Clinton's partners in the failed Whitewater real estate deal. Starr's Whitewater investigators unearthed a formidable amount of evidence casting doubt on Hale's testimony against Clinton, including the fact that Hale had falsely invoked Clinton's name on a separate occasion to win a $50,000 kickback from an Alabama health company seeking an Arkansas state contract. But Starr chose to overlook this inconvenient episode in Hale's past, as well as the fact that his star witness had turned his courthouse into a personal ATM when he served as a municipal judge, taking kickbacks from a private collection agency he had installed to gather fines.

4. William Watt, another former municipal judge implicated in the Whitewater scheme, was used by Starr to corroborate Hale's testimony during the trial of the McDougals and Gov. Jim Guy Tucker. But Watt would later tell Salon that Starr's investigators ignored exculpatory information he provided them about Clinton and tried to pressure him into telling a more incriminating story about Clinton: "I was told they didn't like the truth the way that I told it. I had my truth and they had their truth and I was told that they liked their truth better." Watt also told Salon that he regarded Hale as someone who would "lie and manipulate people. He was a pathological liar."

5. David Hale, while cooperating with Starr as his chief Whitewater witness from 1994 to 1996, would sometimes stay rent-free at a fishing resort in Hot Springs, Ark., owned by anti-Clinton activist Parker Dozhier, who passed on secret cash payments to Hale. This charge was made to Salon by Dozhier's former live-in girlfriend, Caryn Mann, and her teenage son, both of whom have repeated their testimony before a federal grand jury. According to Mann, the money came from conservative attorney Stephen Boynton and David Henderson, vice president of the foundation that owns the conservative American Spectator magazine. Boynton and Henderson oversaw the Arkansas Project, an anti-Clinton muckraking campaign lavishly funded by right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, who funneled his contributions through the Spectator.

6. "We're convinced that none of our people had any knowledge of any such [Arkansas Project] payments [to Hale]," asserted Starr's chief Arkansas deputy, W. Hickman Ewing Jr. But the first meeting of the Arkansas Project took place in the Washington law offices of Theodore Olson, a friend, political ally and former colleague of Starr's, whose relationship dated back to their days as young activist conservatives in the Reagan Justice Department. Olson and Starr were also both beneficiaries of Richard Mellon Scaife's politically inspired generosity. Starr was scheduled to take a Scaife-funded deanship at Pepperdine University until controversy about his connections to Scaife forced him to resign the post. Olson has served on the board and as the attorney of the Scaife-funded American Spectator as well as on the advisory boards of four other right-wing institutions funded by Scaife. Referring to Olson's oversight role on the Arkansas Project, one source told Salon, "Olson is somebody who Scaife would trust to see that nothing went wrong and that his money would not be wasted." Like Starr, Olson worked on the Paula Jones case. Last year, when Jones challenged Clinton's claim of immunity from civil suits while in office, Olson, together with Robert Bork, held a moot court to prepare Jones' lawyers for their successful argument before the Supreme Court.

7. Olson -- who, along with his wife, Barbara, is often called upon by the press to defend their friend Starr -- also represented David Hale when he was called to testify before the Senate Whitewater Committee. Later, Hale lied under oath about how he came to retain Olson while testifying at the trial of Tucker and the McDougals. Two sources told Salon that by lying Hale was trying to conceal his connection to the Arkansas Project. It was the project's Stephen Boynton and David Henderson who put Hale in touch with Olson. (Olson's Arkansas Project connection is never mentioned when the New York Times and other media outlets call on him for comment about Starr's investigation of the president.)

8. While Hale was cooperating with Starr's Whitewater case, the independent counsel aggressively protected the man he called "a model witness," despite all evidence that Hale was anything but. Starr and his deputies tried to stop an insurance fraud case brought against Hale by Arkansas state prosecutors, who charged that Starr's office tried to intimidate them into dropping the case. The trial, which Starr succeeded in delaying but not stopping, will now begin in October. It will certainly cast a further cloud on Starr's "model witness," for Hale is charged with bilking poor black clients in rural Arkansas out of their funeral payments.

9. Some of Starr's deputies were alarmed by the independent counsel's unquestioning embrace of Hale. They shook their heads in dismay when Starr argued in court for a reduced sentence for "Judge Hale," as he called him, telling the court, "I have witnessed his contrition. I believe, your honor, that he is genuinely remorseful of his criminal past. I have been impressed with his humble spirit." Taking issue with Starr, one Whitewater investigator told Salon, "With someone like Hale, you can never let down your guard. You should never get to a point where you begin to trust him."

10. Starr deputy Hickman Ewing met quietly several times during the course of his Whitewater investigation with Rex Armistead, a private eye hired by the Arkansas Project to dig up dirt on Clinton. Armistead's investigation focused on allegations that then-Gov. Clinton had protected a cocaine-smuggling ring operating out of the Mena airport in rural Arkansas. The drug charges were examined and rejected by three separate federal investigations. One Whitewater investigator expressed concern about Ewing's meetings with the private eye, because of the controversial connection between Starr and Scaife and because not all the meetings were recorded in official files: "This was either the worst case of judgment or something worse."

11. At a critical juncture in Paula Jones' long-running legal battle with the president, the Arkansas Project's Stephen Boynton, David Henderson and Parker Dozhier intervened to find her experienced litigators, just before the statute of limitations on her lawsuit ran out. The suit was successfully revived -- and it in turn would later revive Kenneth Starr's flagging pursuit of the president. Another connection between the Jones case and the Arkansas Project surfaced when Salon reported that William Lehrfeld, a conservative attorney who has worked for Scaife and who served as legal counsel for the project, contributed $50,000 to Jones' legal fund from a little-known foundation he ran.

12. In early 1997, Starr's Whitewater case against Clinton had reached such a dead end that he made an effort to flee his job for Malibu's sunny Pepperdine campus. When his attempted escape provoked howls from his political and media supporters, Starr returned grimly to his Whitewater post. But his fortunes would dramatically reverse later in the year when the Jones lawsuit was green-lighted by the Supreme Court -- with help from Starr's friend Olson -- and Jones' lawyers subpoenaed Clinton and a then-obscure former White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.

And so the Clinton/Starr drama came full circle. By returning to the Paula Jones civil case that he had counselled before his appointment as Whitewater prosecutor, Kenneth Starr was finally able to get his man. Like Roger Chillingworth, the vengeful moralist who relentlessly pursued the adulterous Hester Prynne and her lover, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter," Starr branded Clinton with the scarlet "I" -- for impeachment.

Most Americans, even longtime supporters of Clinton, are feeling estranged from the president these days because of his reckless Oval Office antics and his seven months of legalistic stonewalling. The national media -- from the foaming Christopher Matthews to the Monica-fixated Maureen Dowd -- are reinforcing this estrangement with a 24-7 barrage of anti-Clinton commentary. This blaring uniformity of opinion (the American media in the '90s is less politically diverse than China's) might well further erode Clinton's support, as Wall Street Journal apparatchik John Fund eagerly predicted this week. But there is still a strong bedrock of American common sense that resists all the hysterical sermonizing, that understands that Starr's enterprise was a political inquisition from its very birth, and that his marriage of limitless prosecutorial force and political vengeance is a much more dangerous spectre than President Clinton's libido. It's this sense of decency and balance that will, we hope, save the country from being torn apart over a matter that should never have been dragged into the public arena.

SALON
Sept. 10, 1998

The Grand Chessboard

The Grand Chessboard

Part #1
America's Role as the First, Only, and Last Truly Global Superpower
Part #2
American Culture and the Demise of Empire Cultural Decay and Motivating Empire. The Grand Chessboard

Part #3
Supranational Unions As A Stepping Stone
Part #4
Interdependence and the Luxury of War

by Brent Jessop
Global Research,

May 1, 2008

In Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997), he outlines his case for how current American global supremacy should be used to further a long running elite plan for the unification of the world under the dictates of the United Nations.

For those who don’t know, among many other things, Brzezinski was an advisor to John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and Jimmy Carter. He was also the first director of the Trilateral Commission and board member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Currently he is a top foreign policy advisor to the Barack Obama campaign for presidency.

Controlling Eurasia With American Imperial Power

From The Grand Chessboard:

"In brief, for the United States, Eurasian geostrategy involves the purposeful management of geostrategically dynamic states and the careful handling of geopolitically catalytic states, in keeping with the twin interests of America in the short-term preservation of its unique global power and in the long-run transformation of it into increasingly institutionalized global cooperation. To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together." - 40

"...the issue of how a globally engaged America copes with the complex Eurasian power relationships - and particularly whether it prevents the emergence of a dominant and antagonistic Eurasian power -- remains central to America's capacity to exercise global primacy." - xiii

"A geostrategic issue of crucial importance is posed by China's emergence as a major power. The most appealing outcome would be to co-opt a democratizing and free-marketing China into a larger Asian regional framework of cooperation." - 54

"In effect, Japan should be America's global partner in tackling the new agenda of world affairs. A regionally preeminent China should become America's Far Eastern anchor in the more traditional domain of power politics, helping thereby to foster a Eurasian balance of power, with Greater China in Eurasia's East matching in that respect the role of an enlarging Europe in Eurasia's West." - 193

False Choice

Like a good con man, Brzezinski insists that there is only one alternative to American imperial domination of Eurasia and thus the world. Of course, there is little time to take advantage of this "narrow window of historical opportunity".

"In brief, America as the world's premier power does face a narrow window of historical opportunity. The present moment of relative global peace may be short lived. This prospect underlines the urgent need for an American engagement in the world that is deliberately focused on the enhancement of international geopolitical stability..." - 213

"The sudden emergence of the first and only global power has created a situation in which an equally quick end to its supremacy -- either because of America's withdrawal from the world or because of the sudden emergence of a successful rival -- would produce massive international instability. In effect, it would prompt global anarchy." [emphasis mine] - 30

"In that context, for some time to come -- for more than a generation -- America's status as the world's premier power is unlikely to be contested by any single challenger. No nation-state is likely to match America in the four key dimensions of power (military, economic, technological, and cultural) that cumulatively produce decisive global political clout. Short of a deliberate or unintentional American abdication, the only real alternative to American global leadership in the foreseeable future is international anarchy. In that respect, it is correct to assert that America has become, as President Clinton put it, the world's "indispensable nation." " [emphasis mine] - 195

The Legacy of American Imperialism is United Nations Control

"Accordingly, once American leadership begins to fade, America's current global predominance is unlikely to be replicated by any single state. Thus, the key question for the future is "What will America bequeath to the world as the enduring legacy of its primacy?" " - 210

"Meeting these challenges is America's burden as well as its unique responsibility. Given the reality of American democracy, an effective response will require generating a public understanding of the continuing importance of American power in shaping a widening framework of stable geopolitical cooperation, one that simultaneously averts global anarchy and successfully defers the emergence of a new power challenge. These two goals-- averting global anarchy and impeding the emergence of a power rival-- are inseparable from the longer-range definition of the purpose of America's global engagement, namely, that of forging an enduring framework of global geopolitical cooperation." [emphasis mine] - 214

"In brief, the U.S. policy goal must be unapologetically twofold: to perpetuate America's own dominant position for at least a generation and preferably longer still; and to create a geopolitical framework that can absorb the inevitable shocks and strains of social-political change while evolving into the geopolitical core of shared responsibility for peaceful global management. A prolonged phase of gradually expanding cooperation with key Eurasian partners, both stimulated and arbitrated by America, can also help to foster the preconditions for an eventual upgrading of the existing and increasingly antiquated UN [United Nations] structures. A new distribution of responsibilities and privileges can then take into account the changed realities of global power, so drastically different from those of 1945." [emphasis mine] - 215

The final paragraph from The Grand Chessboard:

"In the course of the next several decades, a functioning structure of global cooperation, based on geopolitical realities, could thus emerge and gradually assume the mantle of the world's current "regent," which has for the time being assumed the burden of responsibility for world stability and peace. Geostrategic success in that cause would represent a fitting legacy of America's role as the first, only, and last truly global superpower." - 215

PART #2

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s described in his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997), how the focus of American global primacy should be to unify the world under the dictates of the United Nations.

There are many problems associated with the emergence of the United Nations out of the ashes of the American empire. Brzezinski makes clear his distain for the limitations that "populist democracy" puts on his desired movements around the Eurasian chessboard and his revulsion at the potential for an "impotent global power".

"It is also a fact that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America's power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion" [emphasis mine] - 35

"A genuinely populist democracy has never before attained international supremacy. The pursuit of power and especially the economic costs and human sacrifice that the exercise of such power often requires are not generally congenial to democratic instincts. Democratization is inimical to imperial mobilization." [emphasis mine] - 210

"Indeed, the critical uncertainty regarding the future may well be whether America might become the first superpower unable or unwilling to wield its power. Might it become an impotent global power?" - 210

Four Key Dimensions of Power

"In that context, for some time to come-- for more than a generation-- America's status as the world's premier power is unlikely to be contested by any single challenger. No nation-state is likely to match America in the four key dimensions of power (military, economic, technological, and cultural) that cumulatively produce decisive global political clout." [emphasis mine] - 195

Little needs to be said about the first three dimensions of power; military, economic and technological. The fourth dimension, culture, is very important and rarely given appropriate attention. Brzezinski and the elite above and around him are well aware of the power of the creation and manipulation of culture. It is an essential component to convincing the American public to execute the elite designed imperial goals as well as the eventual and necessary removal of American primacy to make way for the emergence of the United Nations’ rise to dominance.

American Culture and the Demise of Empire

The current culture in America is aimed at the ruination of the American society and the empire few Americans realize they are a part of. This process requires many different things, but Brzezinski highlights the major themes; lack of association with empirical accomplishments and goals, lack of social cohesion, individual decadence, etc.

"Moreover, most Americans by and large do not derive any special gratification from their country's new status as the sole global superpower. Political "triumphalism" connected with America's victory in the Cold War has generally tended to receive a cold reception" - 36

"More generally, cultural change in America may also be uncongenial to the sustained exercise abroad of genuinely imperial power. That exercise requires a high degree of doctrinal motivation, intellectual commitment, and patriotic gratification. Yet the dominant culture of the country has become increasingly fixated on mass entertainment that has been heavily dominated by personally hedonistic and socially escapist themes. The cumulative effect has made it increasingly difficult to mobilize the needed political consensus on behalf of sustained, and also occasionally costly, American leadership abroad. Mass communications have been playing a particularly important role in that regard, generating a strong revulsion against any selective use of force that entails even low levels of casualties." [emphasis mine] - 211

"In addition, both America and Western Europe have been finding it difficult to cope with the cultural consequences of social hedonism and the dramatic decline in the centrality of religious-based values in society. (The parallels with the decline of the imperial systems summarized in chapter 1 [Rome for example] are striking in that respect.) The resulting cultural crisis has been compounded by the spread of drugs and, especially in America, by its linkage to the racial issue. Lastly, the rate of economic growth is no longer able to keep up with growing material expectations, with the latter stimulated by a culture that places a premium on consumption." - 212

Proper Motivation

Brzezinski’s geostrategic imperatives will require a final surge for the dying American empire. To accomplish this, he recognizes the need for the sudden emergence of a "direct external threat".

"Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat. Such a consensus generally existed throughout World War II and even during the Cold War." [emphasis mine] - 211

"It is also a fact that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America's power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization." [emphasis mine] - pg 35

This was provided four years later by the attacks of 9/11.

Terrorist threat

Brzezinski does however highlight nicely the inherent feebleness of today's direct external threat - Islamic fundamentalism.

"A possible challenge to American primacy from Islamic fundamentalism could be part of the problem in this unstable region. By exploiting religious hostility to the American way of life and taking advantage of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Islamic fundamentalism could undermine several pro-Western Middle Eastern governments and eventually jeopardize American regional interests, especially in the Persian Gulf. However, without political cohesion and in the absence of a single genuinely powerful Islamic state, a challenge from Islamic fundamentalism would lack a geopolitical core and would thus be more likely to express itself through diffuse violence." - 53

But, he does also underscore the usefulness of terrorism, or the threat of terrorism to push his ideas.

"It is also noteworthy that international conflicts and acts of terrorism have so far been remarkably devoid of any use of the weapons of mass destruction. How long that self-restraint may hold is inherently unpredictable, but the increasing availability, not only to states but also to organized groups, of the means to inflict massive casualties-- by the use of nuclear or bacteriological weapons-- also inevitably increases the probability of their employment." - 213

Creating the New Global System With Culture

The planned decay, or collapse, of the American empire must coincide with the emergence of the United Nations. Brzezinski mentions the tool to be used to generate a more international culture required for the acceptance of and obedience to global government.

"These efforts will have the added historical advantage of benefiting from the new web of global linkages that is growing exponentially outside the more traditional nation-state system. That web-- woven by multinational corporations, NGOs (nongovernmental organizations, with many of them transnational in character) and scientific communities and reinforced by the Internet-- already creates an informal global system that is inherently congenial to more institutionalized and inclusive global cooperation." [empahsis mine] - 215

The use of multinational corporations should need no explanation with the almost daily international corporate mergers, interdependence derived from the separation of production and consumption, and the uniformity of products across the entire globe. NGOs and the scientific communities are hard at work pushing for international institutions in their rabid campaign against global warming. The internet too, is a powerful tool in promoting a global digital culture.

My next article will draw attention to Brzezinski’s call for the expansion of the European Union and NATO, the establishment of an Asian Union, and his work with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission in forming an American Union.

PART #3

An important step in establishing a world government run by the United Nations is the development of smaller multinational trade and political unions. This step allows for a gradual weakening of nationalistic emotions in the respective countries as borders are slowly erased. It also develops a sense of normalcy with having multinational bureaucracies replacing the roles that national governments formerly played.

This process is strongly supported by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997). As discussed here, Brzezinski makes it plainly clear that the role of the American empire is to pave the way for the emergence of the United Nations as a world government. The tools used for this as well as the necessary fall of the American empire were previously discussed here.

European Union

From The Grand Chessboard:

"By pioneering in the integration of nation-states into a shared supranational economic and eventually political union, Europe is also pointing the way toward larger forms of postnational organization, beyond the narrow visions and the destructive passions of the age of nationalism." [emphasis mine] - 57

Brzezinski makes clear the need for the expansion of the European Union into central Europe and especially the absorption of a newly independent Ukraine. The expansion of the European Union eastward was to be preceded by the expansion of NATO. All of these objectives are slowly being implemented as can be seen by events like the “Orange Revolution” in the Ukraine.

"In the current circumstances, the expansion of NATO to include Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary -- probably by 1999 -- appears to be likely. After this initial but significant step, it is likely that any subsequent expansion of the alliance will either be coincidental with or will follow the expansion of the EU. The latter involves a much more complicated process, both in the number of qualifying stages and in the meeting of membership requirements (see chart on page 83). Thus, even the first admissions into the EU from Central Europe are not likely before the year 2002 or perhaps somewhat later. Nonetheless, after the first three new NATO members have also joined the EU, both the EU and NATO will have to address the question of extending membership to the Baltic republics, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovakia, and perhaps also, eventually, to Ukraine." - 81

"It follows, therefore, that states that are in a position to begin and are invited to undertake accession talks with the EU should automatically also be viewed henceforth as subject in effect to NATO's presumptive protection." - 83

"Given the growing consensus regarding the desirability of admitting the nations of Central Europe into both the EU and NATO, the practical meaning of this question focuses attention on the future status of the Baltic republics and perhaps also that of Ukraine." - 50

Asian Union

"A geostrategic issue of crucial importance is posed by China's emergence as a major power. The most appealing outcome would be to co-opt a democratizing and free-marketing China into a larger Asian regional framework of cooperation." [emphasis mine] - 54

American Union

Brzezinski's roles as the first director of the Trilateral Commission and a board member of the Council on Foreign Relations directly involves him in the current process of creating the North American Union. A nice video summary of the process and some of the important players can be watched here. This plan includes the creation of a single currency tentatively called the Amero, which was recently stated publicly as a 'possibility' by the governor of the Bank of Canada, David Dodge.

It should also be stressed that the formation of the North American Union is a stepping stone to a wider American Union encompassing the whole of South America. Much the same way the European Union initially began as a Western European Union.

Inter-Union Integration

The establishment of the three main economic and political blocks will gradually be united into a single global form. This process recommended by Brzezinski is the exact same process used to initiate the three separate unions; free trade agreements.

"...the United States would do well to consider the adoption of an American-Japanese free trade agreement, thereby creating a common American-Japanese economic space. Such a step, formalizing the growing linkage between the two economies, would provide the geopolitical underpinning both for America's continued presence in the Far East and for Japan's constructive global engagement." [emphasis mine] - 192

"Tokyo can carve out a globally influential role by cooperating closely with the United States regarding what might be called the new agenda of global concerns, while avoiding any futile and potentially counterproductive effort to become a regional power itself. The task of American statesmanship should hence be to steer Japan in that direction. An American-Japanese free trade agreement, creating a common economic space, would fortify the connection and promote the goal, and hence its utility should be jointly examined." [emphasis mine] - 208

"A Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement, already advocated by a number of prominent Atlantic leaders, could also mitigate the risk of growing economic rivalry between a more united EU and the United States. In any case, the EU's eventual success in burying the centuries-old European nationalist antagonisms, with their globally disruptive effects, would be well worth some gradual diminution in America's decisive role as Eurasia's current arbitrator." [emphasis mine] - 200

Once this process fully takes hold and American primacy fades the United Nations will emerge as a global government.

"In brief, the U.S. policy goal must be unapologetically twofold: to perpetuate America's own dominant position for at least a generation and preferably longer still; and to create a geopolitical framework that can absorb the inevitable shocks and strains of social-political change while evolving into the geopolitical core of shared responsibility for peaceful global management. A prolonged phase of gradually expanding cooperation with key Eurasian partners, both stimulated and arbitrated by America, can also help to foster the preconditions for an eventual upgrading of the existing and increasingly antiquated UN [United Nations] structures. A new distribution of responsibilities and privileges can then take into account the changed realities of global power, so drastically different from those of 1945." [emphasis mine] - 215

PART #4

The following is a series of loosely linked topics taken from Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997). These topics did not fit in to my previous articles about this book but are important topics in their own right and still should be addressed.

The first three articles in this series described the use of American imperial power to bring about world government, the techniques used to bring about the fall of the American empire and the rise of the United Nations, and the purpose of supranational unions within that agenda.

War, a Luxury of the Poor

War is an extraordinary tool for changing the culture of nations into the designs of the elite. The side being attacked and the side doing the attacking are both drastically altered by the process. With this in mind, the statement by Brzezinski, highlighted below, is referring to the usefulness of war to the elite of those countries and is coldly serious.

From The Grand Chessboard:

"That lack of confidence has been intensified by widespread disappointment with the consequences of the end of the Cold War. Instead of a "new world order" based on consensus and harmony, "things which seemed to belong to the past" have all of a sudden become the future. Although ethnic-national conflicts may no longer pose the risk of a central war, they do threaten the peace in significant parts of the globe. Thus, war is not likely to become obsolete for some time to come. With the more-endowed nations constrained by their own higher technological capacity for self-destruction as well as by self-interest, war may have become a luxury that only the poor peoples of this world can afford. In the foreseeable future, the impoverished two-thirds of humanity may not be motivated by the restraint of the privileged." [emphasis mine] - 213

Welfare State

"By the mid-nineties, however, these impulses had faded. Economic recovery by and large has been achieved; if anything, the problem Europe increasingly faces is that of an excessively burdensome welfare system that is sapping its economic vitality..." [emphasis mine] - 60

I highlighted the above quote by Brzezinski because he is currently a top foreign policy advisor to the Barack Obama’s campaign to be the Democratic party’s presidential candidate. Would those words not flow nicely out of an angry right-wing TV commentator? Just one more reason not to believe in the false left-right paradigm.

Global Interdependence

One of the favourite buzzwords, never too far from the lips of the globalists, is interdependence. Brzezinski demonstrates that the real purpose is to create dependence, and therefore servitude to the organizing body. He discusses this in the context of the break up of the Soviet Union.

"In its narrowest form, the "near abroad" priority involved the perfectly reasonable proposition that Russia must first concentrate on relations with the newly independent states, especially as all of them remained tied to Russia by the realities of the deliberately fostered Soviet policy of promoting economic interdependence among them. That made both economic and geopolitical sense. The "common economic space," of which the new Russian leaders spoke often, was a reality that could not be ignored by the leaders of the newly independent states. Cooperation, and even some integration, was an economic necessity. Thus, it was not only normal but desirable to promote joint CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] institutions in order to reverse the economic disruptions and fragmentation produced by the political breakup of the Soviet Union." [emphasis mine] - 106

The RAND Corporation: America's University of Imperialism

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ALTERNET

The RAND Corporation: America's University of Imperialism

For decades these self-professed saviors of the Western world helped precipitate U.S. foreign policy disasters like the Vietnam War.

Posted April 30, 2008

By Chalmers Johnson,
Tomdispatch.com.

The RAND Corporation of Santa Monica, California, was set up immediately after World War II by the U.S. Army Air Corps (soon to become the U.S. Air Force). The Air Force generals who had the idea were trying to perpetuate the wartime relationship that had developed between the scientific and intellectual communities and the American military, as exemplified by the Manhattan Project to develop and build the atomic bomb.

Soon enough, however, RAND became a key institutional building block of the Cold War American empire. As the premier think tank for the U.S.'s role as hegemon of the Western world, RAND was instrumental in giving that empire the militaristic cast it retains to this day and in hugely enlarging official demands for atomic bombs, nuclear submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers. Without RAND, our military-industrial complex, as well as our democracy, would look quite different.

Alex Abella, the author of Soldiers of Reason, is a Cuban-American living in Los Angeles who has written several well-received action and adventure novels set in Cuba and a less successful nonfiction account of attempted Nazi sabotage within the United States during World War II. The publisher of his latest book claims that it is "the first history of the shadowy think tank that reshaped the modern world." Such a history is long overdue. Unfortunately, this book does not exhaust the demand. We still need a less hagiographic, more critical, more penetrating analysis of RAND's peculiar contributions to the modern world.

Abella has nonetheless made a valiant, often revealing and original effort to uncover RAND's internal struggles -- not least of which involved the decision of analyst Daniel Ellsberg, in 1971, to leak the Department of Defence's top secret history of the Vietnam War, known as The Pentagon Papers to Congress and the press. But Abella's book is profoundly schizophrenic.

• On the one hand, the author is breathlessly captivated by RAND's fast-talking economists, mathematicians, and thinkers-about-the-unthinkable;
  
• on the other hand, he agrees with Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis's assessment in his book, The Cold War: A New History, that, in promoting the interests of the Air Force, RAND concocted an "unnecessary Cold War" that gave the dying Soviet empire an extra 30 years of life.

We need a study that really lives up to Abella's subtitle and takes a more jaundiced view of RAND's geniuses, Nobel prize winners, egghead gourmands and wine connoisseurs, Laurel Canyon swimming pool parties, and self-professed saviors of the Western world. It is likely that, after the American empire has gone the way of all previous empires, the RAND Corporation will be more accurately seen as a handmaiden of the government that was always super-cautious about speaking truth to power. Meanwhile, Soldiers of Reason is a serviceable, if often overwrought, guide to how strategy has been formulated in the post-World War II American empire.

The Air Force Creates a Think Tank

RAND was the brainchild of General H. H. "Hap" Arnold, chief of staff of the Army Air Corps from 1941 until it became the Air Force in 1947, and his chief wartime scientific adviser, the aeronautical engineer Theodore von Kármán. In the beginning, RAND was a free-standing division within the Douglas Aircraft Company which, after 1967, merged with McDonnell Aviation to form the McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft Corporation and, after 1997, was absorbed by Boeing. Its first head was Franklin R. Collbohm, a Douglas engineer and test pilot.

In May 1948, RAND was incorporated as a not-for-profit entity independent of Douglas, but it continued to receive the bulk of its funding from the Air Force. The think tank did, however, begin to accept extensive support from the Ford Foundation, marking it as a quintessential member of the American establishment.

Collbohm stayed on as chief executive officer until 1966, when he was forced out in the disputes then raging within the Pentagon between the Air Force and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. McNamara's "whiz kids" were Defense intellectuals, many of whom had worked at RAND and were determined to restructure the armed forces to cut costs and curb interservice rivalries. Always loyal to the Air Force and hostile to the whiz kids, Collbohm was replaced by Henry S. Rowan, an MIT-educated engineer turned economist and strategist who was himself forced to resign during the Ellsberg-Pentagon Papers scandal.

Collbohm and other pioneer managers at Douglas gave RAND its commitment to interdisciplinary work and limited its product to written reports, avoiding applied or laboratory research, or actual manufacturing. RAND's golden age of creativity lasted from approximately 1950 to 1970. During that period its theorists worked diligently on such new analytical techniques and inventions as systems analysis, game theory, reconnaissance satellites, the Internet, advanced computers, digital communications, missile defense, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. During the 1970s, RAND began to turn to projects in the civilian world, such as health financing systems, insurance, and urban governance.

Much of RAND's work was always ideological, designed to support the American values of individualism and personal gratification as well as to counter Marxism, but its ideological bent was disguised in statistics and equations, which allegedly made its analyses "rational" and "scientific." Abella writes:

"If a subject could not be measured, ranged, or classified, it was of little consequence in systems analysis, for it was not rational. Numbers were all -- the human factor was a mere adjunct to the empirical."

In my opinion, Abella here confuses numerical with empirical. Most RAND analyses were formal, deductive, and mathematical but rarely based on concrete research into actually functioning societies. RAND never devoted itself to the ethnographic and linguistic knowledge necessary to do truly empirical research on societies that its administrators and researchers, in any case, thought they already understood.

For example, RAND's research conclusions on the Third World, limited war, and counterinsurgency during the Vietnam War were notably wrong-headed. It argued that the United States should support "military modernization" in underdeveloped countries, that military takeovers and military rule were good things, that we could work with military officers in other countries, where democracy was best honored in the breach. The result was that virtually every government in East Asia during the 1960s and 1970s was a U.S.-backed military dictatorship, including South Vietnam, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Taiwan.

It is also important to note that RAND's analytical errors were not just those of commission -- excessive mathematical reductionism -- but also of omission. As Abella notes, "In spite of the collective brilliance of RAND there would be one area of science that would forever elude it, one whose absence would time and again expose the organization to peril: the knowledge of the human psyche."

Following the axioms of mathematical economics, RAND researchers tended to lump all human motives under what the Canadian political scientist C. B. Macpherson called "possessive individualism" and not to analyze them further. Therefore, they often misunderstood mass political movements, failing to appreciate the strength of organizations like the Vietcong and its resistance to the RAND-conceived Vietnam War strategy of "escalated" bombing of military and civilian targets.

Similarly, RAND researchers saw Soviet motives in the blackest, most unnuanced terms, leading them to oppose the détente that President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger sought and, in the 1980s, vastly to overestimate the Soviet threat. Abella observes, "For a place where thinking the unthinkable was supposed to be the common coin, strangely enough there was virtually no internal RAND debate on the nature of the Soviet Union or on the validity of existing American policies to contain it. RANDites took their cues from the military's top echelons." A typical RAND product of those years was Nathan Leites's The Operational Code of the Politburo (1951), a fairly mechanistic study of Soviet military strategy and doctrine and the organization and operation of the Soviet economy.

Collbohm and his colleagues recruited a truly glittering array of intellectuals for RAND, even if skewed toward mathematical economists rather than people with historical knowledge or extensive experience in other countries. Among the notables who worked for the think tank were the economists and mathematicians Kenneth Arrow, a pioneer of game theory; John Forbes Nash, Jr., later the subject of the Hollywood film A Beautiful Mind (2001); Herbert Simon, an authority on bureaucratic organization; Paul Samuelson, author of Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947); and Edmund Phelps, a specialist on economic growth. Each one became a Nobel Laureate in economics.

Other major figures were Bruno Augenstein who, according to Abella, made what is "arguably RAND's greatest known -- which is to say declassified -- contribution to American national security: ... the development of the ICBM as a weapon of war" (he invented the multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle, or MIRV); Paul Baran who, in studying communications systems that could survive a nuclear attack, made major contributions to the development of the Internet and digital circuits; and Charles Hitch, head of RAND's Economics Division from 1948 to 1961 and president of the University of California from 1967 to 1975.

Among more ordinary mortals, workers in the vineyard, and hangers-on at RAND were Donald Rumsfeld, a trustee of the Rand Corporation from 1977 to 2001; Condoleezza Rice, a trustee from 1991 to 1997; Francis Fukuyama, a RAND researcher from 1979 to 1980 and again from 1983 to 1989, as well as the author of the thesis that history ended when the United States outlasted the Soviet Union; Zalmay Khalilzad, the second President Bush's ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations; and Samuel Cohen, inventor of the neutron bomb (although the French military perfected its tactical use).

Thinking the Unthinkable

The most notorious of RAND's writers and theorists were the nuclear war strategists, all of whom were often quoted in newspapers and some of whom were caricatured in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. (One of them, Herman Kahn, demanded royalties from Kubrick, to which Kubrick responded, "That's not the way it works Herman.") RAND'S group of nuclear war strategists was dominated by Bernard Brodie, one of the earliest analysts of nuclear deterrence and author of Strategy in the Missile Age (1959); Thomas Schelling, a pioneer in the study of strategic bargaining, Nobel Laureate in economics, and author of The Strategy of Conflict (1960); James Schlesinger, Secretary of Defense from 1973 to 1975, who was fired by President Ford for insubordination; Kahn, author of On Thermonuclear War (1960); and last but not least, Albert Wohlstetter, easily the best known of all RAND researchers.

Abella calls Wohlstetter "the leading intellectual figure at RAND," and describes him as "self-assured to the point of arrogance." Wohlstetter, he adds, "personified the imperial ethos of the mandarins who made America the center of power and culture in the postwar Western world."

While Abella does an excellent job ferreting out details of Wohlstetter's background, his treatment comes across as a virtual paean to the man, including Wohlstetter's late-in-life turn to the political right and his support for the neoconservatives. Abella believes that Wohlstetter's "basing study," which made both RAND and him famous (and which I discuss below), "changed history."

Starting in 1967, I was, for a few years -- my records are imprecise on this point -- a consultant for RAND (although it did not consult me often) and became personally acquainted with Albert Wohlstetter. In 1967, he and I attended a meeting in New Delhi of the Institute of Strategic Studies to help promote the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which was being opened for signature in 1968, and would be in force from 1970. There, Wohlstetter gave a display of his well-known arrogance by announcing to the delegates that he did not believe India, as a civilization, "deserved an atom bomb." As I looked at the smoldering faces of Indian scientists and strategists around the room, I knew right then and there that India would join the nuclear club, which it did in 1974. (India remains one of four major nations that have not signed the NPT. The others are North Korea, which ratified the treaty but subsequently withdrew, Israel, and Pakistan. Some 189 nations have signed and ratified it.) My last contact with Wohlstetter was late in his life -- he died in 1997 at the age of 83 -- when he telephoned me to complain that I was too "soft" on the threats of communism and the former Soviet Union.

Albert Wohlstetter was born and raised in Manhattan and studied mathematics at the City College of New York and Columbia University. Like many others of that generation, he was very much on the left and, according to research by Abella, was briefly a member of a communist splinter group, the League for a Revolutionary Workers Party. He avoided being ruined in later years by Senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI because, as Daniel Ellsberg told Abella, the evidence had disappeared. In 1934, the leader of the group was moving the Party's records to new offices and had rented a horse-drawn cart to do so. At a Manhattan intersection, the horse died, and the leader promptly fled the scene, leaving all the records to be picked up and disposed of by the New York City sanitation department.

After World War II, Wohlstetter moved to Southern California, and his wife Roberta began work on her pathbreaking RAND study, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (1962), exploring why the U.S. had missed all the signs that a Japanese "surprise attack" was imminent. In 1951, he was recruited by Charles Hitch for RAND's Mathematics Division, where he worked on methodological studies in mathematical logic until Hitch posed a question to him: "How should you base the Strategic Air Command?"

Wohlstetter then became intrigued by the many issues involved in providing airbases for Strategic Air Command (SAC) bombers, the country's primary retaliatory force in case of nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. What he came up with was a comprehensive and theoretically sophisticated basing study. It ran directly counter to the ideas of General Curtis LeMay, then the head of SAC, who, in 1945, had encouraged the creation of RAND and was often spoken of as its "Godfather."

In 1951, there were a total of 32 SAC bases in Europe and Asia, all located close to the borders of the Soviet Union. Wohlstetter's team discovered that they were, for all intents and purposes, undefended -- the bombers parked out in the open, without fortified hangars -- and that SAC's radar defenses could easily be circumvented by low-flying Soviet bombers. RAND calculated that the USSR would need "only" 120 tactical nuclear bombs of 40 kilotons each to destroy up to 85% of SAC's European-based fleet. LeMay, who had long favored a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union, claimed he did not care. He reasoned that the loss of his bombers would only mean that -- even in the wake of a devastating nuclear attack -- they could be replaced with newer, more modern aircraft. He also believed that the appropriate retaliatory strategy for the United States involved what he called a "Sunday punch," massive retaliation using all available American nuclear weapons. According to Abella, SAC planners proposed annihilating three-quarters of the population in each of 188 Russian cities. Total casualties would be in excess of 77 million people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe alone.

Wohlstetter's answer to this holocaust was to start thinking about how a country might actually wage a nuclear war. He is credited with coming up with a number of concepts, all now accepted U.S. military doctrine. One is "second-strike capability," meaning a capacity to retaliate even after a nuclear attack, which is considered the ultimate deterrent against an enemy nation launching a first-strike. Another is "fail-safe procedures," or the ability to recall nuclear bombers after they have been dispatched on their missions, thereby providing some protection against accidental war. Wohlstetter also championed the idea that all retaliatory bombers should be based in the continental United States and able to carry out their missions via aerial refueling, although he did not advocate closing overseas military bases or shrinking the perimeters of the American empire. To do so, he contended, would be to abandon territory and countries to Soviet expansionism.

Wohlstetter's ideas put an end to the strategy of terror attacks on Soviet cities in favor of a "counter-force strategy" that targeted Soviet military installations. He also promoted the dispersal and "hardening" of SAC bases to make them less susceptible to preemptive attacks and strongly supported using high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft such as the U-2 and orbiting satellites to acquire accurate intelligence on Soviet bomber and missile strength.

In selling these ideas Wohlstetter had to do an end-run around SAC's LeMay and go directly to the Air Force chief of staff. In late 1952 and 1953, he and his team gave some 92 briefings to high-ranking Air Force officers in Washington DC. By October 1953, the Air Force had accepted most of Wohlstetter's recommendations.

Abella believes that most of us are alive today because of Wohlstetter's intellectually and politically difficult project to prevent a possible nuclear first strike by the Soviet Union. He writes:

"Wohlstetter's triumphs with the basing study and fail-safe not only earned him the respect and admiration of fellow analysts at RAND but also gained him entry to the top strata of government that very few military analysts enjoyed. His work had pointed out a fatal deficiency in the nation's war plans, and he had saved the Air Force several billion dollars in potential losses."

A few years later, Wohlstetter wrote an updated version of the basing study and personally briefed Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson on it, with General Thomas D. White, the Air Force chief of staff, and General Nathan Twining, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in attendance.

Despite these achievements in toning down the official Air Force doctrine of "mutually assured destruction" (MAD), few at RAND were pleased by Wohlstetter's eminence. Bernard Brodie had always resented his influence and was forever plotting to bring him down. Still, Wohlstetter was popular compared to Herman Kahn. All the nuclear strategists were irritated by Kahn who, ultimately, left RAND and created his own think tank, the Hudson Institute, with a million-dollar grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

RAND chief Frank Collbohm opposed Wohlstetter because his ideas ran counter to those of the Air Force, not to speak of the fact that he had backed John F. Kennedy instead of Richard Nixon for president in 1960 and then compounded his sin by backing Robert McNamara for secretary of defense over the objections of the high command. Worse yet, Wohlstetter had criticized the stultifying environment that had begun to envelop RAND.

In 1963, in a fit of pique and resentment fueled by Bernard Brodie, Collbohm called in Wohlstetter and asked for his resignation. When Wohlstetter refused, Collbohm fired him.

Wohlstetter went on to accept an appointment as a tenured professor of political science at the University of Chicago. From this secure position, he launched vitriolic campaigns against whatever administration was in office "for its obsession with Vietnam at the expense of the current Soviet threat." He, in turn, continued to vastly overstate the threat of Soviet power and enthusiastically backed every movement that came along calling for stepped up war preparations against the USSR -- from members of the Committee on the Present Danger between 1972 to 1981 to the neoconservatives in the 1990s and 2000s.

Naturally, he supported the creation of "Team B" when George H. W. Bush was head of the CIA in 1976. Team B consisted of a group of anti-Soviet professors and polemicists who were convinced that the CIA was "far too forgiving of the Soviet Union." With that in mind, they were authorized to review all the intelligence that lay behind the CIA's National Intelligence Estimates on Soviet military strength. Actually, Team B and similar right-wing ad hoc policy committees had their evidence exactly backwards: By the late 1970s and 1980s, the fatal sclerosis of the Soviet economy was well underway. But Team B set the stage for the Reagan administration to do what it most wanted to do, expend massive sums on arms; in return, Ronald Reagan bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Wohlstetter in November 1985.

Imperial U.

Wohlstetter's activism on behalf of American imperialism and militarism lasted well into the 1990s. According to Abella, the rise to prominence of Ahmed Chalabi -- the Iraqi exile and endless source of false intelligence to the Pentagon -- "in Washington circles came about at the instigation of Albert Wohlstetter, who met Chalabi in Paul Wolfowitz's office." (In the incestuous world of the neocons, Wolfowitz had been Wohlstetter's student at the University of Chicago.) In short, it is not accidental that the American Enterprise Institute, the current chief institutional manifestation of neoconservative thought in Washington, named its auditorium the "Wohlstetter Conference Center." Albert Wohlstetter's legacy is, to say the least, ambiguous.

Needless to say, there is much more to RAND's work than the strategic thought of Albert Wohlstetter, and Abella's book is an introduction to the broad range of ideas RAND has espoused -- from "rational choice theory" (explaining all human behavior in terms of self-interest) to the systematic execution of Vietnamese in the CIA's Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War. As an institution, the RAND Corporation remains one of the most potent and complex purveyors of American imperialism. A full assessment of its influence, both positive and sinister, must await the elimination of the secrecy surrounding its activities and further historical and biographical analysis of the many people who worked there.

The RAND Corporation is surely one of the world's most unusual, Cold War-bred private organizations in the field of international relations. While it has attracted and supported some of the most distinguished analysts of war and weaponry, it has not stood for the highest standards of intellectual inquiry and debate. While RAND has an unparalleled record of providing unbiased, unblinking analyses of technical and carefully limited problems involved in waging contemporary war, its record of advice on cardinal policies involving war and peace, the protection of civilians in wartime, arms races, and decisions to resort to armed force has been abysmal.

For example, Abella credits RAND with "creating the discipline of terrorist studies," but its analysts seem never to have noticed the phenomenon of state terrorism as it was practiced in the 1970s and 1980s in Latin America by American-backed military dictatorships. Similarly, admirers of Albert Wohlstetter's reformulations of nuclear war ignore the fact that that these led to a "constant escalation of the nuclear arms race." By 1967, the U.S. possessed a stockpile of 32,500 atomic and hydrogen bombs.

In Vietnam, RAND invented the theories that led two administrations to military escalation against North Vietnam -- and even after the think tank's strategy had obviously failed and the secretary of defense had disowned it, RAND never publicly acknowledged that it had been wrong. Abella comments, "RAND found itself bound by the power of the purse wielded by its patron, whether it be the Air Force or the Office of the Secretary of Defense." And it has always relied on classifying its research to protect itself, even when no military secrets were involved.

In my opinion, these issues come to a head over one of RAND's most unusual initiatives -- its creation of an in-house, fully accredited graduate school of public policy that offers Ph.D. degrees to American and foreign students. Founded in 1970 as the RAND Graduate Institute and today known as the Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School (PRGS), it had, by January 2006, awarded over 180 Ph.D.s in microeconomics, statistics, and econometrics, social and behavioral sciences, and operations research. Its faculty numbers 54 professors drawn principally from the staffs of RAND's research units, and it has an annual student body of approximately 900. In addition to coursework, qualifying examinations, and a dissertation, PRGS students are required to spend 400 days working on RAND projects. How RAND and the Air Force can classify the research projects of foreign and American interns is unclear; nor does it seem appropriate for an open university to allow dissertation research, which will ultimately be available to the general public, to be done in the hothouse atmosphere of a secret strategic institute.

Perhaps the greatest act of political and moral courage involving RAND was Daniel Ellsberg's release to the public of the secret record of lying by every president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Lyndon Johnson about the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. However, RAND itself was and remains adamantly hostile to what Ellsberg did.

Abella reports that Charles Wolf, Jr., the chairman of RAND's Economics Department from 1967 to 1982 and the first dean of the RAND Graduate School from 1970 to 1997, "dripped venom when interviewed about the [Ellsberg] incident more than thirty years after the fact." Such behavior suggests that secrecy and toeing the line are far more important at RAND than independent intellectual inquiry and that the products of its research should be viewed with great skepticism and care.

See more stories tagged with: soviet union, nuclear war, cold war, military, ellsberg, rand corporation

Chalmers Johnson's latest book is Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, now available in a Holt Paperback. It is the third volume of his Blowback Trilogy. To view a short video of Johnson discussing military Keynesianism and imperial bankruptcy, click here.

Right-wing revolt threatens Bolivia

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Right-wing revolt threatens Bolivia "The imperialist project is to carve up Bolivia and carve up South America" by Federico Fuentes

Global Research, April 28, 2008

Green Left Weekly

"Bolivia is on the verge of exploding", Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez warned on April 21.

Speaking on the eve of an extraordinary summit of the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas (ALBA — the alliance made of Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Dominica) that was partly called to discuss the situation in Bolivia, Chavez stated the landlocked Andean country was "once again under fire — for daring to dream of retaking the path of dignity, liberty and real independence".

"The empire wants to put a brake on the integration of South America", Chavez argued, and has chosen Bolivia as its immediate target. "Today the cause of Bolivia is the cause of the dignified people of Latin America who fight for unity and liberty." Chavez said that, "We are and will continue to be with Bolivia and we extend our hand and our heart" to the Bolivian people.

Illegal referendum

At the heart of the latest round of tensions in Bolivia are the plans by the elite in the eastern department of Santa Cruz (a stronghold of Bolivia's oligarchy) to push ahead with a referendum on "autonomy" scheduled for May 4.

Despite the referendum being declared illegal by the national electoral court, the Santa Cruz electoral court has stated it will press ahead with the vote, which many fear is aimed at fracturing the country.

The right-wing campaign of destabilisation against the indigenous-led government of President Evo Morales — which the referendum is one component of — has intensified in the last few weeks.

"Leaving clear the success of the bunkering-down by the business sectors in Santa Cruz", wrote Pablo Stefanoni on April 19 in the Argentine daily Clarin, "Morales yesterday had to pull out his vice minister for land, Alejandro Almaraz, from the Bolivian Chaco". "Days before, the functionary tried without luck to enter the hacienda of the US citizen Ronald Larsen in order to verify compliance of his land in regards to its economic and social function, but was received with stones and armed picket lines, and had to take refuge in military quarters."

Stefanoni also reported that the president of the Chamber of Exporters of the East, Ramiro Monje, threatened that "after May 4, another economic model will begin to function".

Sectors of large agribusiness have been on a war footing against the government following recent moves to restrict exports of certain food products — in order to tackle food shortages provoked by agribusiness.

While loosening some of the restrictions, Morales threatened to nationalise companies that "are provoking a bosses lockout" by enforcing a holiday on May 4.

Defending unity

An April 24 ABI news service article reported that the commander of the Bolivian Naval Force, Vice Admiral Jose Luis Cavas Villegas, said that "we are the people in arms, in order to defend the internal security of our population, the Armed Forces are with the people … behind the [national flag], we will defend unity all our lives".

Through the build-up of tensions, the position of the government, the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS — Morales's party) and the social movements aligned with the government has oscillated between threatening to stop the referendum going ahead to dismissing it as simply an opinion poll.

For now, it seems rallies will be held on May 4 in favour of "national unity" in all capital cities — except in Santa Cruz, in order to avoid confrontations. Nevertheless, the opposition have established "civil guards" to defend the polling booths in the department, just in case.

Since Morales inauguration in January 2006, the economic and political elites whose power has been threatened by the rise of Bolivia's first indigenous government — despite the impoverished indigenous people making up around two thirds of the population — have entrenched themselves in the east of Bolivia.

'Democratic and cultural revolution'

As the Morales government has continued to take steps forward in his self-proclaimed "democratic and cultural revolution" — through the nationalisation of gas, the convocation of a constituent assembly to "re-found" Bolivia and the implementation of important social programs aimed at tackling poverty and centuries of oppression — the elite have stepped up their campaign of destablisation.

In particular, the government's land reform, which has redistributed hundreds of thousands of hectares of land owned by the state or large landowners to poor campesinos (peasants), has aroused opposition. Key leaders of the push for "autonomy" in Santa Cruz are also large landowners.

Behind the calls for autonomy are economic interests hoping to give greater power to the opposition-controlled department governments on questions of control over natural resources and productive land, the majority of which is located in the east.

Bolivia sits on top of the second largest gas reserves in South America, after Venezuela.

By pushing for autonomy the elite hopes to weaken and bring down the popular Morales government. However, their campaign is also part of laying the groundwork for a plan B — the break up of Bolivia through the creation of an independent state in the east, taking with them the majority Bolivia's natural resources.

Under this banner, they have also sought, successfully, to unite large sections of the predominately white population of the east against the central government. Tapping into a long held sentiment for autonomy, and whipping up racism and fears of an "indigenous revenge", they have been able to mobilise large numbers in the east around the "autonomy" demand.

A recent poll by Equipos Mora showed that in Santa Cruz, 84% of the population say they will vote in the referendum, with 76% in favour of the autonomy statutes.

Solidarity

Pointing to the declaration of solidarity and support for the people of Bolivia, approved in the ALBA summit, Chavez stated that it expressed "the will … of millions of Bolivians, Nicaraguans, Cubans and Venezuelans."

During the summit, Chavez proposed the creation of a defence council and military force of the ALBA countries, "because our enemy is the same, the empire".

The declaration states that the nations in ALBA "reject the destabilisation plans that aim to attack the peace and unity of Bolivia". It stated ALBA nations would not recognise "any juridical figure that aims to break away from the Bolivian national state and violates the territorial integrity of Bolivia".

"The imperialist project", Morales said, "is to try and carve up Bolivia and with that carve up South America, because it has converted itself into the epicentre of the great changes that are advancing on the world scale". "I believe in the consciousness of the people and the wisdom of our social forces and of the indigenous movement, and above all of the patriots that are fighting for the dignity and sovereignty of our people."

To add your name to an international statement in solidarity with Bolivia, visit http://todosconbolivia.org. Federico Fuentes is editor of http://boliviarising.blogspot.com.

Federico Fuentes is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Federico Fuentes

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"Hero" John McCain as Phony and Collaborator: What Really Happened When He Was a POW?

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"Hero" John McCain as Phony and Collaborator: What Really Happened When He Was a POW?

ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Counterpunch

Monday, April 21, 2008

John McCain’s been getting kid-glove treatment from the press for years, ever since he wriggled free of the Keating scandal and his profitable association – another collaboration, you might say -- with the nation’s top bank swindler in the 1980s. But nothing equals the astounding tact with which his claque on the press bus avoids the topic of McCain’s collaborating with his Vietnamese captors after he’d been shot down.

How McCain behaved when he was a prisoner is key. McCain is probably the most unstable man ever to have got this close to the White House. He’s one election away from it. Republican senator Thad Cochrane has openly said he trembles at the thought of an unstable McCain in the Oval Office with his finger on the nuclear trigger.

What if a private memory of years of collaboration in his prison camp gnaws at McCain, and bursts out in his paroxysms of uncontrollable fury, his rantings about “gooks” and his terrifying commitment to a hundred years of war in Iraq. What if “the hero” knows he’s a phony?

Doug Valentine has written the definitive history of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. He knows about the POW experience. His dad, an Army man, was captured by the Japanese and sent to a POW camp in the Philippines for forced labour. Many of his mates died. Doug wrote a marvellous book about it, The Hotel Tacloban.

Now Valentine has picked up the unexploded bomb lying on McCain’s campaign trail this year. As he points out, he’s not the first. Rumours and charges have long swirled around McCain’s conduct as a prisoner. Fellow prisoners have given the lie to McCain’s claims. But Valentine has assembled the dossier. It’s devastating.

Some excerpts from Valentine’s indictment.

“War is one thing, collaborating with the enemy is another; it is a legitimate campaign issue that strikes at the heart of McCain’s character. . .or lack thereof. In occupied countries like Iraq, or France in World War II, collaboration to that extent spells an automatic death sentence.. . .The question is: What kind of collaborator was John McCain, the admitted war criminal who will hate the Vietnamese for the rest of his life?

“Put it another way: how psychologically twisted is McCain? And what actually happened to him in his POW camp that twisted him? Was it abuse, as he claims, or was it the fact that he collaborated and has to cover up? Covering-up can take a lot of energy. The truth is lurking there in his subconscious, waiting to explode. ”

“McCain had a unique POW experience. Initially, he was taken to the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison camp, where he was interrogated. By McCain’s own account, after three or four days he cracked. He promised his Vietnamese captors, “I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital ...

“His Vietnamese captors soon realized their POW, John Sidney McCain III, came from a well-bred line in the American military elite. . .The Vietnamese realized, this poor stooge has propaganda value. The admiral’s boy was used to special treatment, and his captors knew that. They were working him.”

“. . .two weeks into his stay at the Vietnamese hospital, the Hanoi press began quoting him. It was not ‘name rank and serial number, or kill me’. as specified by the military code of conduct. McCain divulged specific military information: he gave the name of the aircraft carrier on which he was based, the number of U.S. pilots that had been lost, the number of aircraft in his flight formation, as well as information about the location of rescue ships.”

“…McCain was held for five and half years. The first two weeks’ behaviour might have been pragmatism, but McCain soon became North Vietnam’s go-to collaborator…..McCain cooperated with the North Vietnamese for a period of three years. His situation isn’t as innocuous as that of the French barber who cuts the hair of the German occupier. McCain was repaying his captors for their kindness and mercy.

“This is the lesson of McCain’s experience as a POW: a true politician, a hollow man, his only allegiance is to power. The Vietnamese, like McCain’s campaign contributors today, protected and promoted him, and, in return, he danced to their tune. . .”

Alexander Cockburn is a well known social and political critic, and has established a reputation as one of the foremost reporters and commentators of the left by writing newspaper and magazine columns for the past decade. His essays have appeared in many publications in Britain, Europe and the Americas. Born in Scotland. Cockburn grew up in Ireland and graduated from Oxford in 1963 with a degree in English literature and language. He is co-editor of CounterPunch, whose web site, has a world audience in the millions. Cockburn has authored a number of books which include: 'The Politics of Anti-Semitism' and 'Imperial Crusades' His views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have often aroused controversy in some quarters

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An Exclusive Interview with Robert Fisk: Fisk Fighting

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An Exclusive Interview with Robert Fisk

Fisk Fighting

April 26 /27, 2008

By WAJAHAT ALI

"One thing I’m going to say to you now, please make sure – and I hope you’re tape recording this – but please make sure you’re quoting me accurately. Don’t even for the basis of shortening something make me say something I haven’t said,” orders celebrated journalist Robert Fisk.

I reply, “You won’t be misquoted, and if you want I’ll -”

“Because the biggest problem I have in journalism is being quoted or misquoted and then being asked to defend something I haven’t said.”

I assuage him, “I’ve taped every single word, and I’ve got what you’ve said down, and so far no interview has -”

“And when you’re putting it together, because you’re not going to use it all, try to make sure my counteracting points are there. So, if I call Ahmedinjad a “crackpot” keep it in, but make sure I’m also talking about Iran in general. Where I’m criticizing the Israelis, make sure I also criticize the Arabs.”

Throughout the interview I kept thinking the world’s most decorated foreign correspondent would have an equally brilliant career as a headmaster or drill sergeant.

It took nearly a week of phone tag to secure interview time with Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent for The Independent who has lived in the region for nearly three decades. Each time I called him, he seemed to give me multiple numbers, one land line in Ireland and another cell line in Lebanon, and ever changing appointments due to his frenetic travel schedule. He finally agreed to a fifteen-minute interview that quickly ballooned into a lengthy, hour plus conversation and an enlightening and entertaining Middle East history lesson by the celebrated reporter.

Allow me to state that rumors of Fisk’s passionate, opinionated garrulousness are indeed fact. Some detractors claim his personality infects his writing with a biased bombastic flair reflecting arrogance, while his supporters, who are many, highlight his impassioned voice as authentic and refreshing. The seasoned veteran couldn’t resist giving this ingénue unsolicited pointers and tips, both concerning journalism and Middle Eastern history.

This is an exclusive and candid conversation with one of the few journalistic authorities on the Middle East.

ALI: A recent British report said Gaza is in its worst condition since the last 30 years. Just last week, a seminary was targeted and several civilians were killed. Americans see this and think “Arabs vs. Jews, they’re just always killing each other.” What’s the ground scene reality regarding the current volatility? Is one side to be blamed more than the other for the recent conflagration?

FISK: Oh, God! Sounds like a CNN question! You know, this is about history, this is about the way our societies develop and what we’re told and what we’re not told. You’ve got the same situation in The West Bank, Gaza, Israel or “Palestine” as you had after the end of the First World War. Two groups of people want to live on the same piece of real estate and they have conflicting claims,

• one of which is based largely on deed which goes right back to the Ottoman period and the British period.
  
• And the case of settlements seems to be based on the idea of what God has promised.
  

And those two things don’t work out. You can’t say on the one hand, well, I have got the deeds to the land, but no God’s actually given it to me. That’s the end of conversation, isn’t it? From there on, you can spin out to all sorts of historical allegories, and ways of reporting, and ways of reporting history, and it doesn’t go anywhere. Each time we’re told we have to start again, we have to start the clock from now and we have to forget the past. You can’t forget the past anymore than you can in Iraq or you can in Europe or America.

The Second World War is and was constantly being drudged up by Blair and Bush to rationalize the invasion of Iraq. Well, you can’t constantly go back to WW2 and call Saddam the Hitler of Baghdad, and then on the other hand say we aren’t going to go back to history to other parts of the Middle East, because that’s inconvenient, so we’re just going to start from here. We always hear people say, “Let’s move forward.” (Laughs.) The psychobabble language of marriage guidance counsellors, you know, only look to the future let’s not look at the past even though so much sorrow has happened. I’m afraid you have to.

The Middle East is a land of great injustice. The Israelis can claim, or wish to at least, that Lord Balfour’s Declaration of 1917 promised Britain support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which didn’t just mean the left hand bit that became Israel. Many Israelis now and would be Israelis they could claim that Palestine meant everything up to the Jordan River. It was Chaim Weizmann’s hope that Jewish settlements would be allowed East of the Jordan River after the Cairo conference held in 1921. You have two groups of people who were made conflicting promises by the British. One for Arab independence and promises that Jewish immigration would not in any way make the indigenous Arabs dispossessed or suffer in any way. And the other which was a promise by Britain for support of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Those things are as impossible to integrate then as they are today.

We keep going around the Middle East and setting up our various dictators, whether they be the Kings of Arabia, or whether they be King Farooq in Egypt, or King Idris in Libya. Then, when people didn’t want the various kings, we brought in the various generals. General Sadat and Colonel Kaddafi. King Abdullah was a soldier, King Hussein was a solider. So, we get surprised when people say, “Enough is enough!” But, in the end of the day, when you say, “Who is right and who is wrong?” It’s history that is wrong. It’s the mistakes we’ve made and the injustices we’ve committed in that region. You can start it off with the Ottoman Empire, you can start it off in post WW1, and you can start it off with the Americans. And as you look back in history, the papers get more thin and fragile, don’t they?

ALI: You’ve been in the Middle East for decades. You’ve seen both Republican and Democratic foreign policy –

FISK: What’s the difference? There’s no difference. Where’s the difference between Clinton and Bush? It’s like people saying Labour government is going to come in Israel and be different than Likud, and it turns out not to be different at all.

ALI: Well, Obama as you know before his run as President, was more partial towards Palestinian rights. But, last month along with Clinton, he wrote a letter strongly condemning Palestinian violence. Many wonder, if he or even Clinton wins, is there going to be any change in policy?

FISK: Here’s the thing that’s going to be different in policy regarding the Middle East in the United States whoever wins the election: it’s utterly irrelevant.

ALI: Lebanon seems to be a forgotten story. In 2006, it had a struggle with Israel which devastated a large part of that society –

FISK: Hezbollah did. I don’t know if Lebanon did at all, but Hezbollah did.

ALI: Has the Lebanese society been able to recover in the past 2 years, or has it only strengthened Hezbollah?

FISK: Well, it certainly strengthened Hezbollah, but their political performance since then has been so ambiguous in that whatever it gained militarily in terms of prestige it has substantially lost politically inside Lebanon itself. Look, the only good news in Lebanon is that civil war hasn’t restarted. Lot of people thought it would, and I thought it would, but it hasn’t. This could mean that they have realized the folly of war: that you don’t win. It’s all about death; it’s not about victory. It also means that an awful lot Lebanese who were sent away as children to be educated during the civil war – you know to Paris, London, Geneva, and Boston wherever – have returned to Lebanon and said, “I don’t want this sectarian nonsense, and I want to live in an ordinary country without any more war.” To that extent, Lebanon – the fact it has not disintegrated like Gaza or Afghanistan or Iraq despite the wish of the Americans and Iranians to use it as battleground - which was what 2006 was about – is quite a tribute to Lebanon and the Lebanese. Whether they appreciate their good fortune is quite a different matter.

ALI: You have experience in Kosovo and Serbia, and you know Kosovo declared independence and sovereignty from Serbia on Feb 17. Do you believe there is complicity of Western agents in its prolonged suffering? Is this a new chapter signalling hope? And could it have come earlier?

FISK: I have a book coming out in two and a half years time which is going to involve quite a lot of things about Kosovo and Bosnia and particularly Islam. It’s going to be called “Night of Power” which you don’t need me to explain. They are very different places, of course. The Serb actions in Bosnia were not driven by the same political motives as the Serb actions in Kosovo, which Serbs believe is part of Serbia, and you can argue that until the cows home. I don’t know about “Agents” being complicit in anything. On one hand I never totally dismiss the “plot” unquote because we know, for example, the CIA and the British were involved in overthrowing Mossadegh [Democratically elected leader of Iran overthrown by the CIA] and bringing in the Shah in 50’s Iran. That’s all true. But the idea you can manipulate states into independence is probably pie in the sky.

The treatment of the Kosovars was such that Europe was bound to extend its support for independence in one form or the other. Now, we know in the Balkans, as always, regional European powers have their fingers in it. Just as the Germans supported the Croation independence, and we know why historically. We know historically many Albanians entered Kosovo during and before the Tito Period and changed its ethnic makeup. But, then again, how far do you go back in history when it was the other way around?

I think this is really an Ottoman story and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, which began the First World War. When the Ottoman Empire began to fray inside Europe, and I’m talking about Bulgaria as well as Serbia, it didn’t do so in a neat way. It did so with massacres and horrific killings, which if you read the contemporary accounts seems to be what we were writing about Bosnia in the 1990’s. There was a considerable historical heritage left over, unfortunately blood that most dealt with in an imperfect and unjust way. I think that Kosovo contains the seeds of further hostilities because of course I can’t imagine any Serbian leader denouncing Serbia’s right to regard Kosovo as part of the historic homeland of Serbia. And I don’t think Bosnia has been solved for that matter. It’s just an independent state in one federal illusion, isn’t it? Everyone is illusory in the Ottoman empire of what it was. You have to go back to the Ottomans to work all this out.

There’s this very interesting book that came out called Jerusalem 1912 and it argues quite persuasively that fundamental issues of land ownership and Jewish immigration became major issues before the First World War, before the British and Turks were at war, before the Ottoman Empire disintegrated. And I think you have to see the problems in the Balkans, although they don’t involve Arabs or Jews, in a similar light. We are constantly trying to cope with what our fathers or our grandfathers did. I wrote the book Great War of Civilization, and my father was a solider in the First World War which produced the current Middle East – not that he had much to do with that – but he fought in what he believed was the Great War for Civilization.

One of the problems that current leadership has is that in the past they had time to reflect and discuss what they were going to do and how best to deal with a particular situation. Their decisions might have been grotesquely unjust or wrong, but at least they took them based on considered reflections, whether they be in London clubs or Downing Street or while reading Shelley in bed, but at least they had an opportunity to reflect on what they were doing. Today, we live by Press conferences, TV prime time, News at 10, CBS news, ABC, CNN exclusives whatever it might be. We get pumped up by Presidential elections, Primary elections, so policies are made on the move – in the backs of cars, on mobile phones, over drinks before a hurried dinner when you have another press conference afterwards. This is why you have this cult of – and I don’t like this phrase – “spin doctors,” a man who comes up with an easy phrase. So, instead of having reflective decision making which takes into consideration what will happen tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the year after next, the decision making is taken on the basis on how to respond to some criticism one minute ago based on a Press conference. For this reason, you don’t have any long term planning.

That’s why we didn’t have any plan for post war Iraq, because we were too busy going on CNN announcing victory, so we hadn’t thought about that. There is an excellent academic pamphlet by Corelli Barnett, who is a prominent British historian, which goes step by step from archive documents in the British Public Record Office and National Archives from the Cabinet papers of 1941. And Churchill in 1941, when Britain still expected invasion by Nazi Germany, and before Hitler invaded Russia, before America was in the war after two long and profitable years of neutrality, Churchill appointed a Cabinet committee in London under Nazi bombardment to plan the post War government of Occupied Germany. Now, there’s forward thinking!

There’s a sign of how governments used to behave. Four years before the end of the War, when it looked as if the Germans were going to win, Churchill and the British, alone without any American involvement in the War, he was planning post War Germany. And as British troops moved under fire into the German city of Cologne in 1945, British Civil Servants in flak jackets went with them to take over the Town Hall, because they wanted civil administration to resume immediately. To get the fuel running, get rationing, get the people fed. It worked, and people didn’t die. I mean the Germans were poor and hungry, but they didn’t die. There’s a classic example of how before the age of instant television, news press conferences, spin doctors, etc., people planned for the future and generally it tended to work; by and large, it was successful. That was four years before the end of WW2. Four days before the Americans occupied the centre of Baghdad, they didn’t have a coherent plan. They had an odd committee set up in the State Department, but no one listened to it and it had 20 people. So, you’re carried along on this instant decision making: “So, whaddya’ gonna’ do, Mr. Bush? How do you respond to this?” And Bush has had 5 minutes before hand to bone up on what he is going to say.

We have a program in Britain called Desert Island Discs on the BBC, where basically you are allowed to choose 8 records that you play on a desert island if you were marooned. One of my records I chose was Winston Churchill’s speech to the British on June 18, 1940 when Dunkirk was finished, and the British were alone in the War against Nazi Europe. And I played it, because Bush and Blair keep claiming they are Churchill, but here was the real thing. And Churchill’s voice immensely tired and maybe he had a few glasses before he spoke, and you have this extraordinary feeling of power and a man who is using his knowledge of history and imbuing it into other people. What knowledge of history does Bush have? He confused Cambodia with Vietnam. He talks about Vietnam but he managed to avoid going there, as we know Cheney did.

You know another problem we have at the moment is that I don’t think there’s a single senior Western statesmen, which might change if McCain becomes President, who has ever been in a war. All of the Middle Eastern leaders have been in wars, I promise you. But none of the Western leaders have been in war. You see, their knowledge of wars, The Bushes and the Blairs, are from TV, Hollywood Movies. When Churchill committed people to war, he had been in the trenches in WW1. Theodore Roosevelt had direct experience. Eisenhower certainly did, I mean he was Supreme Allied Commander of WW2. So, you had in the post war years, you had Western leadership that knew what war was about: it was about death and screaming and loss and sorrow. Now, for people like Blair whose shadow lingers over the dull and boring Gordon Brown in London, war was a policy option: something you did if you couldn’t get in with the United Nations. “Do we need a second revolution or not?” That wasn’t the way people used to go to war. (Laughs.)

One of the things that is lacking today is common sense. Anybody with common sense, anybody who sat down would’ve said, “Don’t – Attack – Iraq.” Bush actually did start talking about democracy in Iraq before he invaded, despite what the lefty commentators say, he didmber I wrote a piece in November 2002 asking, “He wants a democracy in the Middle En’t say we want democracy but he said, “We want democracy in the Middle East.” I remeast, and he wants to start in Iraq?!?” which is not common sense. I think a lot of the problems we have in the moment is a failure to have a long-term view of anything.

Even if you take the Israeli government who says, “We are going to root out the evil weed of terror, terror, terror,” I mean they’ve been saying that since 1948. How many air raids have there been over Lebanon since 1948? Thousands and thousands and thousands. And they’ve achieved nothing, because still we’re told we have to root out the evil weed of terror. Because it gets repeated ad nauseam on television it has become normal. Nobody says, “Hang on a minute, there’s a problem here. If Israel’s still at war 60 years after it came in existence, there is a problem there.”

ALI: You have this quote, “There’s this misconception that journalists can be objective.” You also say, “What journalism is really about –

FISK: I think what I said is “impartial.” We should be partial on the side of justice. One of the problems we have in the Middle East in the moment, partly because of the pressure put on journalists particularly in the United States by lobby groups. I’m including the Israeli Lobby, and there is an Arab Lobby, as we know. Partly because of this awful trend of American journalism where you have to give 50% of your time to each side, you end up producing a sort of matrix, a mathematical formula which is bland, lacking in any kind of passion or realism, and is a bit like reading a mathematics problem. Much of the Middle East is reported like a football match: this side did this, they kicked a goal, they replied back, the ball went through the goal post, etc. Giving equal space in your report to two antagonists is ridiculous! I mean if you were reporting the slave trade in the 18th century you wouldn’t give equal time to the slave ship captain, you’d give time to the slaves. If you were present at the liberation of a Nazi extermination camp, you don’t give equal time to SS spokesman, you go and talk to the survivors and talk about the victims.

If you were present as I was in 2001 in West Jerusalem when an Israeli pizzeria was blown up and most of the victims were school children. I was just down the street. I reported about the Israeli woman who had a chair leg through her, and an Israeli child who had his eyes blown out. I said in my piece, “What did this child ever do to the Palestinians?” And do you think I gave equal time to the Islamic Jihad spokesman? No, I did not. Nor when I was in Sabra Shatilla [Massacre of Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon overseen by Ariel Sharon] did I give time to Israeli spokesman? If we walk as ordinary human beings out of our house and we see an atrocity, we are angry. Well, we journalists should be angry too if we feel that way about it. Not say, “Well, on the other hand, we just balance this by X,Y,Z.”

ALI: Can’t someone say that we readily dismiss FOX News as being biased and right wing, then can’t we just as readily dismiss you since you’re not an objective, unbiased voyeur?

FISK: The thing about FOX news is that they have a predetermined version. They aren’t interested in justice; they are interested in the “right,” aren’t they? They’re interested in the right wing of the Republican side, unless a Democrat happens to be right wing enough for them. They have a political slant. I’m not left wing. I’ve never voted in an election in my life. If I’m in the Israeli part of Jerusalem, I write with great passion and you can look up the story in my book The Great War for Civilization about the bombing of the Israeli pizzeria. I was in Bosnia and wrote passionately against the murderous Serbs, I mean those Serbs who were murdering. But if you report on Serbia during the NATO bombing I report with great feeling about the Serb civilians who were done to death by NATO and knowingly done so. NATO knew they were killing civilians in Serbia during the Kosovo war. And I also reported what was being done to Kosovo Albanians. That’s not what FOX News does. FOX News has a certain agenda.

ALI: Many of your critics, specifically some Zionist critics, say that you’ve lived in the Middle East for so long that you’ve become partial and succumbed to “their” narrative.

FISK: Same old, tiresome, boring old thing, you know. This always comes up. If you arrive at a place, and you don’t write satisfactory one week after arriving, they say you can’t see the woods for the trees. And if you do understand enough after two weeks, they say you’ve gone native. I haven’t risked my life in the most dangerous parts of the world to become a partial reporter politically. I’d be out of my mind if I did that. By the way, you keep talking about my critics and what the Zionists say. I don’t read blogs, because I don’t use the Internet because I think it’s crap. But I know there are two or three writers in the UK and I know there are three or four in America who regularly attack me, but that’s about it. I mean if you see my mailbag which comes in at 250 letters a week, maybe two or three are very critical, and the rest are either nice or helping or suggesting stories. What I’m saying is that one of the problems I have is the people will exaggerate the numbers and say, “Well, your critics say…” which makes it seem there is an army out there of 600 people constantly writing articles and commentary. And, it’s not true. There aren’t. I come to the States that averages every three and half weeks for lectures, and I don’t come across these people. The last one who was really obnoxious was in Texas for an interview, and the second cameraman came over to me after the program and said he wanted to hit me. (Laughs.) I said turn back the cameras, and we’ll do this live, but be careful when you do. Most people don’t care a damn about the Middle East, I’m sorry to say.

ALI: In America or the world?

FISK: Pretty much everywhere, particularly in America I’m sorry to say. And also in Europe, I mean how much of my daily paper is on the Middle East? And this idea that there is an army of critics or an army of supporters is simply untrue. By and large, people read you and they move on to read something else. What percentage of people read The Independent either online or on paper? I have no idea. I probably get more mail from America than I do from Britain, which is interesting. I’m read in the Arab world as well as in Israel. I think I’ve had two anonymous phone calls in my life in 32 years both from Turkey objecting to what I’ve written about the Armenian genocide. One of them was objecting to criticism of the Turkish Army, and one of them was objecting to my coverage of the Armenian Genocide, which obviously occurred a few years before I was born to put it mildly.

There are campaigns occasionally for accuracy, some outfit that operates somewhere in Boston, and you get city postcards from people writing to the editors, “I will never buy you magazine again” signed so and so from Houston, Texas. Firstly, we are not a magazine. Secondly, alas, we do not circulate in Houston, Texas, so this person hasn’t been buying it anywhere, but he’s just been encouraged to write this silly postcard which goes in the bin. But when you have a campaign organized by a lobby group, you tend to take it seriously in America, we don’t. We put it in the rubbish bin. We are interested in individual, serious letters by people. So am I. I encourage them in the paper. If the letters, especially if they are critical or have a certain mischief about them, I insist we run them, and I think it’s good. I think it makes people think and stirs up their idea of questioning about what’s going on in the Middle East.

The honest truth is I don’t use the internet, so I don’t see all the blogs or Googles or whatever they are. I can tell by, obviously, traveling and people coming up to me in airplanes, but I don’t pay any attention to it. I’m a journalist and a reporter and one of the great advantages I have on the paper is that my editor likes me to write opinion columns and also wants me to be a street reporter. So, when there’s a bombing explosion in Beirut or a war in Iraq, I’m there. Which is in a unique position to be in, because most reporters might be on a story but they don’t have an opinion column. And most of the people who write columns don’t go out on the beat.

ALI: You call them “hotel journalists,” correct?

FISK: No, that’s not true. What I said was that journalists, who worked in Baghdad and who, for perfectly good reasons, were unable to leave their hotels, i.e. security concerns, insurance companies hired by the papers to insure their lives, all their special security detail like the ex-military people who guard them. They find themselves effectively using their mobile phone from their hotel room, a guarded hotel, right? The problem is they don’t tell their readers, their listeners, their viewers that they’re reporting from the hotel. They give the impression when they give a “Baghdad Dateline” that they’re driving around the streets. You find articles written by someone who is sitting in an office with sandbags around the walls and aren’t let out. The much more serious side is that readers are entitled to believe, if they see it, “Dateline: Badghad” or Basra or whatever – that the reporter has movement. That he can go around and check out stories. But in fact if you read it, it’s just a police source that says, “American military says…American government says” and end of story. And it becomes echo chamber for what anyone in the Green Zone says. I mean I can live in the West of Ireland with a mobile phone and ring the Green Zone and produce the same report. (Laughs.)

ALI: They’re touted as experts in the American media.

FISK: I don’t know. Look, I have American colleagues, one of them in the New York Times, who goes out and gets good stories. So, I’m not pasting my criticism on all journalists. There’s lots of people trying to do what I’m trying to do. But, I do object to reporters who do not leave their hotels, but do not tell their readers that they do not leave their hotels. That’s what I call “hotel journalism.” I’m not talking about any reporter on the beat anywhere as being a hotel journalist.

What’s happening now as stories get more dangerous in the Middle East – and The Middle East is getting more lethal for reporting – as stories get more dangerous, more and more the Western correspondents are sending the local people out to do the story. In other words, Iraqis are on the streets in Baghdad reporting back to the New York Times reporter what they see. I noticed last year you will remember there was an Al Qaeda type organization that started an uprising in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli and took over apartment blocks. And I jumped in a car, and they had taken over an apartment block in Tripoli and were shooting at the Army, and I raced up to Tripoli. I know Lebanon very well, I mean I’ve been living there for almost 32 years. And I got into center Tripoli, which is very Sunni Muslim city, very pro Saddam I might add with [his] pictures outside the window. And there were bullets whizzing around the streets, and there were dead bodies, the armies were about to storm inside this building.

By pure good luck or bad luck, depending on your point of view, I knew the Lebanese Colonel who was going to take the army unit into this apartment block and storm into it and take it back. I’d been to his wedding, actually, which means I’m his friend. (Laughs.) “Robert, do you want to come with us?” I didn’t use a flak jacket because it is too bloody hot. So, I suddenly found the ridiculous Robert Fisk storming into this building with these soldiers, and I never carry a weapon or flak jacket or anything, and seeing the most incredible things.

Afterwards, I was out there in the street with all these dead bodies on the street. What astounded me was that I was the only Western reporter there. Most of the other reporters were either from Lebanese newspapers or Lebanese working for Western news organizations. I was the only blue eyed, Anglo Saxon guy there. My Western colleagues were there and they were in the hotel, and I’m not criticizing them. What was interesting is that on the very first, critical day of the Al Qaeda take over, I looked around the street and I didn’t see another Westerner. There were lots of Lebanese soldiers, policeman, people standing by, other journalists, camera crew, they were all Lebanese. Now, twenty years ago that wouldn’t be the case.

ALI: You just gave a really good microcosm example of how you’re on “the scene.” You’re one of the very few people who is “lucky” – well, I don’t think that is the proper word, I don’t even what the proper word is – to meet Osama Bin Laden and have an interview with him.

FISK: It’s definitely not lucky. (Laughs.) No, it’s not. I’ll tell you this guy will follow me for the rest of my life. It’s more and more unlucky I’ll let you know.

ALI: You interviewed him three times in total, and he made some very interesting comments about you. I don’t know how you feel about that, but he was quite reverential. In America, we see Osama as the horned devil himself, and in certain parts of the Muslim world –

FISK: He sees Mr. Bush pretty much the same way, of course.

ALI: Well, certain parts see him as a halo-wearing messiah. Steve Coll has a new book out on Bin Laden, and in my interview with him he told me one of the main reasons for his charismatic leadership is his ability to be multicultural, to understand the ability to look beyond ethnicity and race in his global jihad.

FISK: No, that’s not – that’s a very trendy explanation. It’s very simple why Bin Laden is popular in the Arab world; it’s because he says things that local presidents and kings won’t say.

ALI: What does he say?

FISK: He speaks about the injustice to Muslim people in a way that Mubarak or King Abdullah would never say. Because of course they’re basically run by us, aren’t they? He presents what millions of Arabs think. I’m not implying a million of Egyptians and Gulfies want to actually fly airplanes into tall buildings – they don’t. But when he describes the collapse of the Caliphate, which was the Ottoman Empire, when he talks about the immorality of the Gulf princes and kings, when he talks of the political or military or psychological occupation of the Muslim world by the West, he’s saying things which millions and millions of Muslims agree with. But they don’t hear their own leadership: the Khaddafis, the Mubaraks, or the King Abdullahs, or the Assads saying.

This doesn’t mean Bin Laden is particularly intuitively brilliant. I mean Ahmadinejad says a lot of things which are absolutely bullshit, but they probably catch somebody’s eye. I mean Ahmadinejad is outrageous, I mean he’s a crackpot. When he starts questioning the Jewish Holocaust, it’s similar to the Turks questioning the Armenian Holocaust, or the Israelis saying that they never drove the Palestinians out of Palestine, they left on their own accord because they were going to wait until the Jews were driven to the sea and they obeyed all the radio instructions. You know the story.

But, you know, Bin Laden has a voice, because the leadership of the Arab world doesn’t have a voice. Or if it does, it’s a weak one supporting the United States in general. I mean, the Mubaraks and the Abdullahs are allowed to say, “ If the war continues in Gaza, there will be an explosion in the Middle East.” That’s all right, that’s part of the course. They said it 70 times and it doesn’t even get reported very often. But the moment they start to talks seriously about the fact that people feel they are under the thumb of theWest, which they do, then they are in trouble. I mean the fact we only express our criticism of Mubarak is when the police lock up the wrong person who has a PhD from Boston or Harvard or whatever.

By and large, you see there is no Arab representative. Nor has there been for decades. It’s very interesting after the First World War, the Egyptians kept wanting democracy, and they kept saying they wanted the King out. So, the British locked them up. And the same thing happened in Iraq in the 1920’s, you the know the British arrived after they invaded in 1917 and the Iraqis said, “You encouraged us to want independence, and when we say we want independence, you put us in prison!” Which is true of course.

Naturally, if you go back to the 20’s and 30’s, where I think a lot of the history also beings, anyone who wanted a real freedom was imprisoned. So, the only way the Arabs learned you can have a change was through a revolution. Which meant no democracy of course. Meant you did everything in secret, whether you did it in office or clubs or a basement of a mosque is irrelevant. So, the failure of the Arab world to have a democracy is partially our fault.

You have to remember before the First World War, Egyptian academics and thinkers and philosophers were returning from France with the most extraordinary sort of Republican – which I’m using in the French Republic sense – views of liberation, freedom and equality. This is the decade where women didn’t want to wear the scarf in Cairo and other cities in Egypt. Where they had willingly embraced the West. You have to go back to the Ottoman Empire, and the biggest, industrial construction in the world was the Suez Canal. It was built by the French but under the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans imported state of the art steam locomotives from Switzerland to Lebanon. In Constantinople, the pashas were learning to paint and play the piano – they wanted to be like us. So we destroyed them. You see? We like it the way it is now. We don’t have to have too many occupation armies, but they all do what they’re told, and if they don’t, then we bomb them.

ALI: If Bin Laden’s grievances against the U.S. and the West are removed, and maybe you can tell us his major grievances since you’ve met him, then -

FISK: The world doesn’t work like this. Bin Laden justifies his actions on certain grounds. Whether it be the corruption of the Saudi Royal Family, the “Crusaders” to use his phrase, he says “Western forces” in the Muslim World. And remember, one of his achievements is that he’s brought Western forces into two more Muslim countries that they weren’t in before – Afghanistan and Iraq. And I used the word “achievement” ironically when I said that.

His raison d’etre will change, like we all do. To suggest that Bin Laden is out there as a negotiable figure is ridiculous. He doesn’t want to negotiate. One of the main problems with Al Qaeda is that there is no negotiation. We still haven’t learned that Bin Laden isn’t important anymore. He’s created Al Qaeda. That’s it. It’s over. It doesn’t matter if he dies of kidney failure, or whether he’s bombed or dies of old age or gets bored or gets assassinated or anything else, it’s over. Al Qaeda exists. And unless we deal with the injustice in the Middle East, there will always be an Al Qaeda. It might not be called Al Qaeda, it could be called “Al Qaeda Al Ummah,” “Al Qaeda Saudia,” “Al Qaeda in Iraq.” The very word is intrinsically rather boring, its foundation doesn’t set me off on a romantic thought. But, I always use the phrase “Al Qaeda-like”, which is inspirational but not card membership type connections.

Still we think, “If we capture Bin Laden and Mullah Omar, then we’ll be ok.” And it’s not true. There was a very fine French historian of the First World War, and he did a very good interview in Le Pointe some months ago, and he said you know we haven’t realized the world has changed militarily. But in the past, after the first and second World Wars, we thought we could have foreign adventures and be free. We could go to Vietnam. No North Vietnamese ever blew themselves up in front of the White House. We went and fought in Korea, but no North Korean soldier came and blew himself up in the London Underground. But today we can’t do this anymore, if we send our soldiers into Iraq, we are not saving Gloucester or Denver. That’s not going to change. We’re not going to back to nice, friendly left wing nationalists who wouldn’t dream of setting off bombs in our cities anymore. That’s gone.

Whether you regard this as increasing immorality of our opponents that is entirely up to you. But factually, we’re not safe at home anymore.

ALI: So, this is the future? We have to face the future and this is how it’s going to be?

FISK: Well, you’ve got to think of the years to come, not just about the next press conference. We’re going back to the same point I made to you earlier.

ALI: I had an interview with Seymour Hersh and asked him about Iran’s activity in the Middle East. He said Iran is doing what it’s always been doing in supporting the Shias. That’s what it’s doing in Lebanon and in Iraq. Now, you mention Ahmadinejad as being a “Crackpot” and –

FISK: I think he’s a crackpot, yeah.

ALI: People say Iran has its fingers in the cookie jar in helping Hezbollah and helping the Iraqi insurgents. Is Iran completely innocent? Should it be attacked? And what would –

FISK: You’re doing what CNN and FOX do. You’re producing a sustained government narrative and then asking a question about it. Yes, they do support Hezbollah financially, militarily, and in training, we know that. Do they support the Iraqi insurgency? Morally perhaps. I mean, mentally they might, but they don’t need to teach the insurgents how to blow up vehicles. I mean Iraqi insurgents, many of them in the Army, fought Iranians for 8 years. They know how to blow up vehicles and put bombs together. They don’t need help from the Iranians. So, from the start you have to disentangle this conventional wisdom on how Iran is this big, dark nation that is manipulating the Shias through out the Middle East. I don’t think the Shias of Iraq need military help from Iran. I don’t think they need money actually. And besides when you have a situation when most of the Iraqi government is beholden to Iran, what the hell are you worried about the insurgents for? When Ahmedinejad took the car from the airport like any normal human being, instead of being flown in armored helicopter, which was quite impressive, the American press didn’t make a lot of it, but it’s there.

You have to go back again. When the Shah was in power, the West wanted Iran to be nuclear power. He was our policeman in the Gulf, wasn’t he? The Shah went to New York and gave an interview saying he wanted Iran to have nuclear weapons, because after all Russia and America had them. And there wasn’t a complaint from the White House. In fact, shortly after he met Carter in the White House. And we in Europe, in particular, climbed over each other’s shoulders to supply the nuclear hardware to produce nuclear power stations.

When Khomeini came to power and the Islamic Revolution, before the Iran-Iraq War, and I actually was present as he said this in Tehran. He said nuclear weapons are gifts of the devil and we will close them down. And all nuclear instillations, and they weren’t nuclear weapon instillations, they were just nuclear instillations for power generation, were closed down under Khomeini’s orders. At the height of the Iran-Iraq War in 1986, when Saddam was supported by Britain and the United States, and was using gas, a weapons of mass destruction, against the Iranians, the Iranian High Command came to the conclusion that he was using these weapons, then Khomeini reluctantly reopened the nuclear establishment in Iran as a direct result of our friend Saddam using gas and chemicals. Which in some cases were supplied by companies on the East Coast of the United States. That’s what put the Iranians in the nuclear game.

Now, when you see it from this historical perspective, they’re getting a bit of the raw deal, aren’t they? All the mullahs want their hands on weapons (Laughs.) That wasn’t the case originally. I don’t see any particular reason why the Iranians want to make nuclear weapons at the moment. Because if they fire a weapon at Tel Aviv, they know Tehran will be destroyed. On the other hand, if you look at North Korea, quite clearly you will not be invaded if you have a nuclear weapon. Then again, you have to stand back and look at the long term and ask, are we, or our children or our grandchildren, our future generations always going to around saying, “Well, he can have nuclear weapons, because he is nice and is on our side on the War on Terror and his name is Musharaff. And they can’t have nuclear weapons because they have turbans on.”

I mean are we going to do this A-B-C joke every year deciding who may or may not have these things. If we deal with a world that deals about justice, and this can apply to Eastern Europe, the Far East, Latin America, or the Middle East, the whole institute of worrying about nuclear weapons begins to diminish. After the rising of 1798 in Ireland, where I am now, every Irishman who was found even to have a pitchfork that could be used as a weapon was hanged. But, in pubs you can see them on the walls. Because it’s become irrelevant. There’s this peace here. If you go to England, you can find swords from the English Civil War. Well, if in the aftermath of that war and we’re talking about the 17th century, if you had been found with that sword, you would’ve been executed. But now it’s in a pub on the wall of a bar.

You know, I’m not trying to be naïve when I say this, but with the whole issue of nuclear weapons, once the purpose of the weapon has disappeared, the weapon is pointless. If Iran didn’t feel itself surrounded by the Americans, which it is because the Americans are in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, I mean I don’t think they’d worry so much about defending Iran. Although, of course, you realize getting rid of the Taliban and Saddam, both enemies of Iran, means Iran basically won the American war in Iraq. You’ve got to start your questions not with a narrative: “Are they supporting the Iraqi insurgency?” Probably not. “Are they supporting Hezbollah?” Definitely. But, then again who is supporting the Israelis? The Americans.

There’s no doubt that the missile which the Hezbollah fired at that Israeli gunboat in the 2006 war, which almost sank it by the way, was from Iran. But don’t tell me that the bombs dropped on Hezbollah weren’t from the United States, they were of course. With all these questions you’re asking me, and I’m not trying to be critical of you, you need to go three steps back where you start asking the questions.

As the interview ends, Fisk complains, “And there’s nothing worse than the immortal phrase, ‘I never said that.’ Because people say, ‘Ah, that’s what he says now.’ And you’ll be surprised at the number of people, who might be quite sympathetic to what you’re saying, who manage to blunder into one single quote which they [an interviewer] slightly touch up or forget something quite innocently, and I am fighting off the problems that creates for the next 6 months long after you’ve forgotten ever talking to me. So, please, please be careful and make sure you’re very accurate in what I say, and it’s balanced out.”

“I’ll keep it very fair. I’ll quote you, and I won’t delete a word,” I promise.

“Fine. That’s all I need to hear.”

And with that, the class ends and the student finally exhales.

Wajahat Ali is Pakistani Muslim American who is neither a terrorist nor a saint. He is a playwright, essayist, humorist, and Attorney at Law, whose work, "The Domestic Crusaders," (www.domesticcrusaders.com) is the first major play about Muslim Americans living in a post 9-11 America. His blog is at http://goatmilk.wordpress.com/. He can be reached at wajahatmali@gmail.com

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Torture: Stress hooding noise nudity dogs

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Stress hooding noise nudity dogs

It was the young officials at Guantánamo who dreamed up a list of new aggressive interrogation techniques, inspired by Jack Bauer from the TV series, 24. But it was the politicians and lawyers in Washington who set the ball rolling. Philippe Sands follows the torture trail right to the top

Philippe Sands

The Guardian,

Saturday April 19 2008

On Tuesday, December 2 2002, Donald Rumsfeld signed a piece of paper that changed the course of history. That same day, President Bush signed a bill to put the Pentagon in funds for the next year. The US faced unprecedented challenges, Bush told a large and enthusiastic audience, and terror was one of them. The US would respond to these challenges, and it would do so in the "finest traditions of valour". And then he signed a large increase in the defence budget.

Elsewhere in the Pentagon, an event took place for which there was no comment, no fanfare. With a signature and a few scrawled words, Rumsfeld reneged on the tradition of valour to which Bush had referred. Principles for the conduct of interrogation, dating back more than a century to President Lincoln's famous instruction of 1863 that "military necessity does not admit of cruelty", were discarded. He approved new and aggressive interrogation techniques that would produce devastating consequences.

The document had been drafted a few days earlier by the general counsel at the Defence Department, William J Haynes II (known as Jim Haynes), Rumsfeld's most senior lawyer. The Haynes memo was addressed to Rumsfeld and copied to two colleagues: General Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and the most senior military official in the US, and Doug Feith, under-secretary of defence for policy and number three at the department.

Attached to the memorandum were four short documents.

• The first was a legal opinion written by Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, a staff judge advocate at Guantánamo.
  
• The second, a request for approval of new methods of interrogating detainees from Beaver's boss, Major General Mike Dunlavey, the army's head of interrogation at Guantánamo.
• The third was a memorandum on similar lines from General Tom Hill, commander of US Southern Command (Southcom, covering Central and South America).
  
• Last, and most important, was a list of 18 techniques of interrogation, set out in a three-page memorandum.

These techniques were new to the military.

• Category I comprised two techniques, yelling and deception.
  

• Category II included 12 techniques, aiming at humiliation and sensory deprivation, including
  
• stress positions, such as standing for a maximum of four hours;
  
• isolation;
  
• deprivation of light and sound;
  
• hooding;
  
• removal of religious and all other comfort items;
  
• removal of clothing;
  
• forced grooming, such as shaving of facial hair; and the use of
  
• individual phobias, such as fear of dogs, to induce stress. Finally came

• Category III. These methods were to be used for only a very small percentage of detainees - the most uncooperative (said to be fewer than 3%) and exceptionally resistant individuals - and required approval by the commanding general at Guantánamo. In this category were four techniques:
  
• the use of "mild, non-injurious physical contact", such as grabbing, poking and light pushing;
  
• the use of scenarios designed to convince the detainee that death or severely painful consequences were imminent for him or his family;
  
• exposure to cold weather or water; and, finally,
  
• the use of a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation. This last technique came to be known as water-boarding, described on a chat show by the vice-president, Dick Cheney, as a "dunk in the water" and a "no-brainer" if it could save lives.

The Haynes memo recommended "blanket approval" of 15 of the 18 techniques, including just one of the four techniques listed in Category III: mild, non-injurious physical contact. However, he did not reject the others, nor did he advise that they were contrary to the Geneva conventions. Rumsfeld signed his name next to the word "Approved", and added his comment at the bottom of the page: "I stand for eight to 10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?"

The techniques were devised with at least one specific detainee in mind. Detainee 063 had been refused entry to the US just before 9/11 and captured in Afghanistan in November 2001. In January 2002 he joined the first captives to be transported to Guantánamo, one of a group labelled by the administration as "the worst of the worst".

"The faster we can interrogate these people and identify them, and get what they have in them out of them, in as graceful a way as is possible," Rumsfeld said,"we have a better chance of saving some people's lives."

When the Haynes memo reached Guantánamo on December 2, Detainee 063 was in an isolated, plywood interrogation booth at Camp X-Ray.

• He was bolted to the floor and secured to a chair, his hands and legs cuffed.
  
• He had been held in isolation since August 8, nearly four months earlier.
  
• He was dehydrated and in need of regular hook-ups to an intravenous drip.
  
• His feet were swollen.
  
• He was urinating on himself.

During Detainee 063's first few months at Guantánamo, the interrogators had followed established practices for military and law enforcement interrogations. Building rapport is the overriding aim of the US Army Field Manual 34-52, the rule book for military interrogators, colloquially referred to as "FM 34-52". Legality was also essential, which meant operating in accordance with the rules set out in the US military's Uniform Code of Military Justice and international law, in particular the four Geneva conventions.

At the heart of them lies "Common Article 3", which expressly prohibits cruel treatment and torture, as well as "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment". Tactics that had conformed to these principles changed dramatically. The interrogation log describes what happened immediately after Rumsfeld signed the Haynes memo.

The pattern was always the same:

20-hour interrogation sessions, followed by four hours of sleep. Sleep deprivation appears as a central theme, along with stress positions and constant humiliation, including sexual humiliation. These techniques were supplemented by the use of water, regular bouts of dehydration, the use of IV tubes, loud noise (the music of Christina Aguilera was blasted out in the first days of the new regime), nudity, female contact, pin-ups. An interrogator even tied a leash to him, led him around the room and forced him to perform a series of dog tricks. He was forced to wear a woman's bra and a thong was placed on his head.

Rumsfeld led the charge for war in Iraq; in part he did so because of Saddam Hussein's contempt for human life. "Torture is systematic in Iraq, and the most senior officials in the regime are involved," Rumsfeld said, a few months before Saddam was overthrown. "Electric shock, eye gouging, acid baths, lengthy confinement in small metal boxes are only some of the crimes committed by this regime." He spoke those words one day after secretly signing the Haynes memo and approving his own techniques of aggressive interrogation at Guantánamo.

Ironically, it was the Iraq war - in particular, events at Abu Ghraib prison - that brought the Haynes memo into the open two years later. By the autumn of 2003, Abu Ghraib was being run by the US as a detention facility. On April 28 2004, a CBS television report revealed the nature and scale of abuse being inflicted upon Iraqi prisoners. Photographs taken by US military participants were published, including one, now notorious, showing a prisoner standing on a box with his head covered and wires attached to his fingers. Another showed Private Lynndie England holding a leash tied to the neck of a naked man on the floor.

Was there a connection between the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the Bush administration's secret interrogation policies at other places, including Guantánamo? In June 2004, President Bush, hosting the G8 summit in Savannah, Georgia, was asked by the media if he had authorised any kind of interrogation techniques necessary to pursue the "war on terror"? No, he said, his authorisation was that anything the US did would conform to US law and be consistent with international treaty obligations. "We're a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books."

Four days later, the administration unexpectedly declassified and released a number of documents relating to interrogation in the belief that this would reflect the thorough process of deliberation that, it was claimed, took place, and demonstrate a commitment to the rule of law. At the briefing, conducted by three lawyers from Bush's inner circle, Alberto Gonzales, the president's counsel, Jim Haynes from the Defence Department, and his deputy, Dan Dell'Orto, it was made clear that particular documents were crucial: the Haynes memo, and a decision taken a few months previously by the president, on February 7 2002, that none of the detainees at Guantánamo, whether Taliban or al-Qaida, could rely on any of the protections granted by the Geneva conventions, not even Common Article 3.

The second set of documents were legal opinions issued on August 1 2002. One of these, by two senior lawyers at the Justice Department, concluded that physical torture occurred only when the pain was "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily functions, or even death". Mental torture required "lasting psychological harm". The memo concluded that torture of suspected terrorists under interrogation would not be unlawful if it could be justified on grounds of necessity or self-defence.

On October 11 2002, Guantánamo had request that additional techniques beyond those in FM 34-52 be approved for use against high-value detainees, in particular a Saudi Arabian, Mohammed al-Qahtani - otherwise known as Detainee 063. The underlying message of the briefing was spelled out: Rumsfeld had merely responded to a request from Guantánamo, and in doing so had acted reasonably. By contrast, the abuses at Abu Ghraib were unauthorised and unconnected to actual policies.

Much later, in March 2006, Time magazine published on its website the interrogation log of Detainee 063. Some of the Abu Ghraib images bore a resemblance to what Detainee 063 had been through: humiliation, stress, hooding, nudity, female interrogators, shackles, dogs. Was this just a coincidence?

A few days after the president made his decision that the detainees were not covered by the Geneva conventions, Rumsfeld appointed the head of military interrogations at Guantánamo - Major General Michael E Dunlavey, a reservist, in civilian life a judge in Erie, Pennsylvania. Rumsfeld told Dunlavey to report directly to him on a weekly basis, bypassing the usual chain of command. When we met, I asked Dunlavey about the mission Rumsfeld gave him. He paused. "He wanted me to maximise the information. He wanted me to identify who was there and get the intelligence, to prevent the next 9/11."

When Dunlavey arrived at Guantánamo, "plane loads" of detainees were being delivered on a daily basis. Many posed no threat; some were very elderly; others posed a serious threat. The focus of attention soon shifted to Mohammed al-Qahtani. Dunlavey had no doubts about his identity or the threat he posed: al-Qahtani was the 20th hijacker on September 11. (How many "20th hijackers" are there, I asked, alluding to Zacarias Moussaoui, who'd recently been convicted. Dunlavey smiled.) "This guy may have been the key to the survival of the US," he told me. By August, Dunlavey was clear that the rule book FM 34-52 was too restricting for someone like al-Qahtani, who was trained to resist interrogation. In his memo of October 11 2002 he set out the key facts as he saw them. The usefulness of the existing techniques had been exhausted. Some detainees had more information. He requested that aggressive new techniques be approved.

Dunlavey told me that at the end of September a group of the most senior Washington lawyers visited Guantánamo, including David Addington, the vice president's lawyer, Gonzales and Haynes. "They brought ideas with them which had been given from sources in DC." When the new techniques were more or less finalised, Dunlavey needed them to be approved by Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, his staff judge advocate in Guantánamo. "We had talked and talked, brainstormed, then we drew up a list," he said. The list was passed on to Diane Beaver."

Apart from Beaver's legal input, no one else seemed to have provided any detailed legal advice on the new techniques. It seemed strange that on so important a decision the legal advice of a relatively junior lawyer, with limited experience of these issues, could be definitive. Several months passed before I met Beaver. By then, like Dunlavey, she was being sued in American courts, although the cases were later dropped.

Beaver told me she arrived in Guantánamo in June 2002. In September that year there was a series of brainstorming meetings, some of which were led by Beaver, to gather possible new interrogation techniques. Ideas came from all over the place, she said. Discussion was wide-ranging. Beaver mentioned one source that I didn't immediately follow up with her: "24 - Jack Bauer."

It was only when I got home that I realised she was referring to the main character in Fox's hugely popular TV series, 24. Bauer is a fictitious member of the Counter Terrorism Unit in LA who helped to prevent many terror attacks on the US; for him, torture and even killing are justifiable means to achieve the desired result. Just about every episode had a torture scene in which aggressive techniques of interrogations were used to obtain information.

Jack Bauer had many friends at Guantánamo Bay, Beaver said, "he gave people lots of ideas." She believed the series contributed to an environment in which those at Guantánamo were encouraged to see themselves as being on the frontline - and to go further than they otherwise might.

Under Beaver's guidance, a list of ideas slowly emerged. Potential techniques included

• taking the detainees out of their usual environment, so they didn't know where they were or where they were going;
  
• the use of hoods and goggles;
  
• the use of sexual tension, which was "culturally taboo, disrespectful, humiliating and potentially unexpected";
  
• creating psychological drama.

• Beaver recalled that smothering was thought to be particularly effective, and that Dunlavey, who'd been in Vietnam, was in favour because he knew it worked.
  

• The younger men would get particularly agitated, excited even: "You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas." A wan smile crossed Beaver's face. "And I said to myself, you know what, I don't have a dick to get hard. I can stay detached."

Beaver confirmed what Dunlavey had told me, that a delegation of senior lawyers came down to Guantánamo well before the list of techniques was sent up to Washington. They talked to the intelligence people, they even watched some interrogations. The message from the visitors was that they should do "whatever needed to be done", meaning a green light from the very top - from the lawyers for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the CIA.

By the first week of October, the list of 18 techniques was more or less completed and it fell to Beaver to provide the legal sign-off. She was conscious of her relatively lowly position - "the dirt on the ground", as she put it, too self-deprecatingly - but also acutely aware of the time constraints, the pressures. Relations with Dunlavey were now very tense. It was rumoured that Dunlavey was leaving, that he'd become paranoid, lost the plot. She tried getting help from more senior lawyers in Florida and Washington, but got nowhere. So she ploughed on alone, proceeding methodically through the 18 techniques. Each was tested against the standards set by US law, namely,

• the Eighth Amendment of the constitution (which prohibited "cruel and unusual punishments"),
  
• the federal Torture Statute, and
  
• the military law of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Her standard was elastic. The federal Torture Statute, she wrote, would not be violated so long as none of the proposed techniques was "specifically intended to cause severe physical pain or suffering or prolonged mental harm". Legality was thus boiled down to intent.

The techniques were justified because there was "a legitimate governmental objective in obtaining the information for the protection of the national security of the United States". The ends always justified the means. Rumsfeld had described the detainees as "the worst of the worst"; Beaver herself had unambiguous views about some of them. "Psychopaths," she told me. "Skinny, runty, dangerous, lying psychopaths."

Beaver explained what she had tried to do, and her sense of shock about the way in which her advice was made public. "They gave me an hour's notice, no warning, no preparation." They left her name on the advice when they released it; Haynes could have blacked it out but didn't. She took the flak and the lawsuits personally.

General James T Hill visited Guantánamo a week before he took over command of Southcom in August 2002. He had not closely followed all the comings and goings over new interrogation techniques, but he had become increasingly concerned about a "dysfunctional" command leadership. He worried that the full intelligence value of the detainees may not be fully exploited. He was also concerned that the interrogators hadn't been properly trained. "They were just kind of swimming by themselves," he said. However, he was not happy about the suggestion from the Pentagon that he should be the one to approve the new techniques. "I said no, no, no. This is way too important to leave at our level." He pushed the decision back to Washington.

Hill's memo reached General Dick Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the most senior person in the US armed forces, on October 25 2002. "There was a sense of urgency that in my 40 years of military experience hadn't existed in other contingencies," he explained when we met. There was the real fear that one of the detainees may know when the next attack would happen, and that they would miss vital information.

The first big decision was Geneva. For historic, cultural and training reasons, Myers insisted that the Geneva conventions should apply, even to a rogue, lawless actor such as al-Qaida. It became clear to me that Myers was a little confused about the decision that was actually taken. He claimed to be satisfied with the president's decision of February 7 2002. "After all the arguments were done, the decision was, we don't think it applies in a technical sense, but we're going to behave as if it does." That wasn't what the president decided.

The actual decision distinguished between the Taliban - to whom Geneva applied, although detainees could not invoke rights under it because they were not wearing uniforms or insignia - and al-Qaida, to whom it didn't apply at all because they were not a state. Had Myers understood what had been decided? Did he appreciate the consequences for interrogation techniques? If the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff was confused, then inevitably soldiers in the field would also be confused. As one seasoned observer of military affairs put it to me, Myers was "well and truly hoodwinked".

So what did Myers think about the new techniques? "We thought, OK, all the techniques came out of the book, there weren't any techniques invented." I stopped him.

"Out of which book?" I asked.

"Out of 34-52," he replied. "I think all of these are in the manual." They were not - not one of them. "They aren't?" he asked, surprised. Not only that, but most of them violated Geneva's Common Article 3. Such an answer from the chairman of the joint chiefs surprised me.

As we worked through the list of techniques, Myers became increasingly hesitant and troubled. At forced grooming and dogs he became defensive. "Dogs were only to be present, never to be..." his words tailed off. "When you see this, you say, holy mackerel," he exclaimed. "We never authorised torture, we just didn't. Not what we would do." Little by little, my understanding of Myers's role was becoming more focused. He hadn't pushed for these new techniques, but he didn't resist them, either. He didn't inquire too deeply.

With Rumsfeld's verbal approval and Haynes's support, the interrogation of al-Qahtani began. The interrogation log for November 23 2002 recorded the first moment. "The detainee arrives at the interrogation booth at Camp X-Ray. His hood is removed and he is bolted to the floor."

Meanwhile alarm bells were ringing with the FBI. One of the FBI's behavioural psychologists called headquarters in Washington. Concerns were raised by an FBI special agent who arrived to find al-Qahtani already "incarcerated in a darkened cell in the naval Brig". He was interrogated by the FBI, and the plan was for military personnel to continue for 24 hours straight. The FBI agent objected, but was told that this technique was approved by "the Secretary", meaning Rumsfeld.

The agent described how "the reservists yelled and screamed" at al-Qahtani, and "a German shepherd was positioned at the door of the interrogation hut and made to growl and bark at the detainee". At one point, a copy of the Qur'an was placed in front of al-Qahtani while he was handcuffed to a chair, and an interrogator "straddled the Qur'an". The detainee became very angry, but still refused to provide any information.

The FBI agent was not the only one with concerns. Mike Gelles, a clinical forensic psychologist, had worked since 1990 for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the primary law enforcement and intelligence arm of the US Navy. He first visited Guantánamo in February 2002, and had concerns from the outset.

By June, the numbers at Guantánamo had grown to more than 500 detainees and interrogations were underway. Were they getting any useful information? The expression on Gelles's face suggested not. Even assuming that they had the right people, nobody discovered what they knew. "I remember being down in Camp X-Ray and wandering around," Gelles recalled, "and seeing a couple of very psychotic folks, and thinking, 'What's going on here, why would you fly a guy who's flagrantly psychotic from Afghanistan to Guantánamo Bay?' It didn't make any sense." Gelles thought that Beaver had tried to rein in some of the greater excesses. "She tried to cool it, but basically she was so immersed and so lost..." Gelles' words trailed off. "She drank the Kool-Aid."

His chief doubts were that the new techniques would produce "unreliable information" - unusable in any court case against al-Qahtani - that they were immoral and they'd "set a pattern that was clearly going to impact our folks overseas when they were captured".

It was because of sustained pressure from dissenters at Guantánamo, such as Gelles and the FBI agent, and in particular Alberto Mora, the navy's top counsel at the Pentagon, that Rumsfeld rescinded the new interrogation techniques on January 15 2003. Subsequently a working group was set up; it approved a revised set of interrogation techniques, which were less harsh than those rescinded but which nevertheless contributed to a climate that was tolerant of abuse.

After 54 days of interrogation using the new aggressive techniques, what information did al-Qahtani give up? In June 2004, Gonzales, Haynes and Dell'Orto told the assembled media that the new techniques had worked and America was a safer place:

• al-Qahtani had admitted he had met Osama bin Laden,
  
• that he knew one of the 9/11 pilots, and
  
• had been sent to the US by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It was also claimed that
  
• he had provided detailed information about a number of key people, including José Padilla, the dirty bomber, and
• Richard Reid, the British shoe bomber. No details were given to support these assertions.

On the face of it, al-Qahtani's interrogation log provided little support for any of these claims. (Nonetheless, he faces trial on terrorism charges at a military commission - possibly later this year.)

At the time al-Qahtani's aggressive interrogation began, Cal Temple, a Defence Department intelligence expert, was in charge of an exploitation team created to support interrogations at Guantánamo. Had the pressure from the Pentagon produced anything useful? A measured and thoughtful man, Temple chose his words with care, indicating a negative response to my question. "There was a lot of data of interest," he said. "It was contextual in nature, confirming in nature. Did it help us catch Osama bin Laden? No."

In that same June 2004 press briefing, Gonzales and Haynes went to great lengths to crush any suggestion of a connection between Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. The facts, however, suggest that there was a link between the two places, and that the Haynes memo had a malign influence over time and distance.

One army investigator compared the treatment of al-Qahtani to that displayed so graphically in the Abu Ghraib photos. "Here's this guy manacled, chained down, dogs brought in, put [in] his face, told to growl, show teeth," he said of al-Qahtani, "If you had a camera and snapped that picture, you'd be back to Abu Ghraib."

In August 2003, General Miller made a trip from Guantánamo, where he had taken over as commander from Dunlavey, to Baghdad. He was accompanied by Diane Beaver. They visited Abu Ghraib and found shocking conditions of near-lawlessness. Miller made recommendations to General Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of Coalition Ground Forces in Iraq, to codify and develop proper interrogation techniques. Within two weeks, on September 14 2003, Sanchez signed a memorandum authorising new techniques that plainly violated the Geneva Conventions, and that were similar to those included in the Haynes memo, including environmental manipulation (temperature adjustment), the presence of military dogs, sleep management (four hours' sleep per 24-hour period) and stress positions. These would have been very familiar to al-Qahtani. The photographic evidence showed abuse beginning at Abu Ghraib on October 17 - one month later.

In August 2006, the Pentagon inspector general released his own damning report. This concluded unequivocally that interrogation techniques had migrated to Iraq because operations personnel believed traditional techniques were no longer effective for all detainees. The clear conclusions from the various reports - three in three years - reinforced what Gelles told me about "force drift", the situation where interrogators come to believe that if some force is good, then more will be even better. "If you let slip the dogs, they will run," was the way a former Defence Department official put it. And so they did, from Guantánamo, to Baghdad, to Basra.

A group of British soldiers were charged with allowing or participating in the abuse of Iraqi detainees in Basra in September 2003. The detainees there had been subjected to conditioning processes to prepare them for interrogation, involving "maintaining a stress position and deprivation of sleep whilst hooded and cuffed". One of the detainees died. At least one of the techniques (sleep deprivation) had been approved by Sanchez on September 14, just days after Miller's visit. Colonel Jorge Mendonca, the most senior officer charged, argued that he was advised that sleep deprivation, stress positions and other conditioning processes had been cleared by the chain of command. The Court Martial Board accepted this defence and dismissed the charges.

But the climate was changing. In June 2006, the Supreme Court overturned President Bush's decision on Geneva, ruling it to be unlawful. The court confirmed that Common Article 3 applied to all Guantánamo detainees. It was as simple as that. Whether they were Taliban or al-Qaida, every one of the detainees had rights under Common Article 3 - and that included Mohammed al-Qahtani.

The majority opinion, reaffirming the "minimal protection" offered by Common Article 3, was written by Justice John Paul Stevens. One of the Justices went even further: Common Article 3 was part of the law of war and of a treaty that the US had ratified. "By Act of Congress," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote pointedly, "violations of Common Article 3 are considered 'war crimes', punishable as federal offences, when committed by or against United States nationals and military personnel."

Justice Kennedy's remark put the issue of war crimes on the American political agenda. Individuals who had contributed to a violation of Common Article 3 would know that they were at risk of criminal investigation and prosecution. Even more ominously, it underscored the risk of being investigated outside the US.

Parties to the International Torture Convention are required to investigate any person who is alleged to have committed torture. If appropriate, they must then prosecute - or extradite the person to a place where he will be prosecuted. The Torture Convention is also more explicit than Geneva in that it criminalises any act that constitutes complicity or participation in torture. Complicity or participation could certainly be extended not only to the politicians and but also the lawyers involved in the condoning of the 18 techniques. After all, the scheme applied to al-Qahtani was devised by lawyers, reviewed by lawyers, overseen by lawyers.

Philipe Sands QC is a practising barrister in the Matrix Chambers and a professor of international law at University College London

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24: Questioning, the Jack Bauer way

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Questioning, the Jack Bauer way

The Guardian,

Saturday April 19 2008

The American TV drama, 24, featuring counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer, inspired lawyers at Guantánamo, who were instructed to come up with new interrogation techniques.

Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, a military lawyer at the detention centre, said Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, "gave people lots of ideas". She told Philippe Sands, author of Torture Team: "We saw [24] on cable ... It was hugely popular."

Sands writes: "She believed the series contributed to an environment in which those at Guantánamo were encouraged to see themselves as being on the frontline - and to go further than they otherwise might.

"The US military criticised the award-winning series last year, saying it encouraged soldiers to see torture as a justifiable weapon against terror suspects.

Bauer, who resorts to breaking a suspects fingers, suffocation and electrocution to extract information tells one bad guy: "You are going to tell me what I want to know - it's just a matter of how much you want it to hurt."

Refugees warn of Bhutan's new tide of ethnic expulsions

Refugees warn of Bhutan's new tide of ethnic expulsions

Himalayan kingdom's Shangri-la image is a myth, says tortured activist

Ed Douglas in Katmandu
The Observer,

Sunday April 20 2008

A Bhutanese refugee looks from a bamboo hut in the Ti Mai camp, Nepal.

The small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is hailed as the last Shangri-la in a region plagued by conflict and poverty. Attracted by its policy of Gross National Happiness, Western media have held up the country's apparently peaceful transition to democracy as a model of wise governance by a Buddhist regime protecting its culture from the ravages of consumerism.

But behind its façade of otherworldly charm, Bhutan holds a secret. Twenty years ago, its monarchy, threatened by an increase in Bhutan's ethnic Nepalese population, hit on a simple solution: ethnic cleansing. Families who had been living in Bhutan for generations were stripped of their citizenship. One hundred thousand Hindu Bhutanese - around one sixth of the country's entire population - were driven into exile and their land redistributed among the Drukpas, Bhutan's Buddhist elite.

Now a combination of divisions among the refugees, renewed tension inside Bhutan and the surprise election victory by Maoists in Nepal, is threatening a plan that finally gives hope to 107,000 refugees who have been languishing in camps in eastern Nepal for the last 17 years. Tens of thousands of unregistered refugees are living stateless and in abject poverty in Nepal and India.

There are also fears among exiled Bhutanese leaders that a new wave of expulsions from the remaining ethnic Nepalese population, called Lhotshampas, is imminent. 'The process is happening already,' said Ratan Gazmere, a leading human rights activist and a refugee himself. 'But I cannot convince the international community of that.'

Gazmere, who was tortured and jailed for two years in the capital Thimpu, said widespread discrimination continues inside the country.

Lhotshampas are denied education and in the last census, held in 2005, around 13 per cent of the whole population of Bhutan, most of them Nepalese, were classified as 'non-nationals'. As a result, 82,000 Bhutanese were denied a vote in last month's first-ever general election. Non-nationals, lacking an identity card, are not allowed freedom of movement or to start a business.

Paradoxically, it is a potential solution to the crisis that seems to have tipped the Lhotshampa community into fresh uncertainty. In 2006, with the international community facing an apparently endless bill for maintaining the refugee camps, an agreement was reached whereby some refugees would be resettled in the West while others would stay in Nepal and pressure would be brought on the Bhutanese government to allow others to return.

The US assistant secretary of state Ellen Sauerbrey said her country would offer citizenship to 60,000 of the refugees. Other countries, including Canada, have stepped in with similar offers.

With the prospect of around half of the refugees leaving the camps, leaders fear pressure on Bhutan to allow the rest home will evaporate. Put simply, they say, the government of Bhutan will be rewarded for its ethnic cleansing.

Extremists in the camps, including a new Maoist organisation, have allegedly threatened refugees not to apply to leave for the US. Gazmere echoes human rights groups who say refugees must be allowed to make up their own minds. 'My concern is that the refugees should not suffer more than they already have,' he said.

Disaffected young Lhotshampas who have grown up in the camps or suffered discrimination in southern Bhutan are turning to violence. Several bombs exploded in Bhutan in January, including one in Thimpu. Although no one was killed, the escalation resulted in Bhutanese security forces shooting dead five men they described as Maoists.

Now Bhutanese leaders in exile are adjusting to the prospect of a Maoist government in Katmandu that may not welcome what it regards as American interference in the region. The US still classifies the Maoists as a terrorist organisation.

'The Maoists will try to destabilise the resettlement process,' said Gazmere, 'because Americans are involved.' Other Bhutanese leaders disagreed, arguing that Maoist leaders in Nepal have warned them not to expect support.

The question remains how Bhutan got away with such a large-scale expulsion of its own citizens. A recent report by the Norwegian Refugee Council blames the world's media for helping 'perpetuate the myth of an exotic land of happiness. However, what we have before us is a silent tragedy occurring in a media-created Shangri-la.'

Ratan Gazmere said Bhutan's close relationship with India was critical. India had shielded Bhutan in return for access to hydro-power and timber.The Bhutanese had shut down camps in the south hat were used by the United Liberation Front of Assam to launch attacks across the border. 'India doesn't want to push Bhutan too hard,' Gazmere said.

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Osama, too good to be true. Part 1,2&3

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ISRAEL E NEWS

Osama, too good to be true. Pt 1. Osama, too good to be true. Pt 2 Osama, too good to be true. Pt 3

Filed under Opinion Editorials, Terrorism around the world, Conspiracies, USA foreign policy Monday, February 18, 2008 By: Shoher, Obadiah

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Why terrorism is not ubiquitous? It takes no brains or training to rent an apartment, turn gas on in the kitchen stove, and blow the building. It takes no brains and almost no training to rent a truck, buy three tons of nitrate ammonium fertilizer, mix it with you-know-what, park the truck at any building and blow it up.

It takes only minor brains and moderate training to derail a train transporting chlorine cisterns. Terrorists can legally purchase weapons and equally simply procure C-4 explosive by registering a demolition company.

Propane gas cylinders can be purchased in hundreds from multiple vendors without drawing anyone’s attention.

FBI works very well and intercepts many terrorist attempts. But the described grassroots terrorism is suitable for two- or three-men cells and usually cannot be detected beforehand.

One explanation for the lack of grassroots terrorism is the built-in moral prohibition.

The US Army, for example, can feasibly take over the country, like the many coups in other countries, but it doesn’t. Criminal gangs can kidnap local politicians to exchange them for jailed members, as German insurgents kidnapped Peter Lorenz in 1975, but such cases are few. Population of populist countries is widely conformist to the extent of sending their children to Vietnam and Iraq wars, and is not prone to confronting the government.

Social security destroyed the most important reason for people to care about their children: financial. People don’t rely on children for the old-age security. In the absence of financial bonds, moral issues are not strong enough to make the parents cut off their child’s finger instead of allowing him into the army for a senseless war.

People are afraid to go against the ruling system on their own but assemble in groups – that is where security services detect them. Many people support terrorists but few can go out and kill by themselves as lone wolves. Three-hundred million strong American nation produces a handful of psycho murderers, and its five millions Muslims are statistically unlikely to produce many suicide terrorists. But not even one?

It’s hard to comprehend why, despite the abundant Internet indoctrination, no man stood up against the system by terrorist means. Raskolnikoffs can be rare because they infringe on the universal moral tenets, but “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” and the high enough goals justify the means; there should be no shortage of lone terrorists.

People don’t detest terrorism the way they detest murder; terrorism is a tool only, and can bear good fruits of freedom as well as sour fruits. Osama’s efforts are doomed. The freedom fighters like Thomas Jefferson used violence to break the constraints on a fully-fledged new order.

Osama misuses terrorism to create a new order; such an approach cannot work in the West. Terrorism has some potential in Muslim states saturated with Islamic opposition; Osama can terrorize the despotic governments into allowing the Islamists to seize power in free elections. Even in the Muslim world, terrorism has no long-term potential: Iranians, for example, grew opposed to the ayatollahs in three decades.

Terrorists long for state sponsors not only for money and weapons, but predominantly for psychological reasons: the support reassures them. It’s not even about safety; many terrorists are ready to die.

Their problem is deep human discomfort of confronting a towering entity alone.

If the above insight is true – and no other concept explains the lack of ubiquitous terrorism – then Al Qaeda emerges as an exceedingly odd organization. Al Qaeda has never had a state sponsor. No meaningful terrorist group ever existed without support of a state or state-like entity.

From medieval Assassins with their own mountainous quasi-state to Red Army Faction supported by German Stasi, all terrorists relied on Big Brothers. Al Qaeda purchased safe havens in Sudan and Afghanistan, but never had a Big Brother to rely on.

Either Al Qaeda is a historically unique organization – an unlikely assumption – or it’s not a terrorist powerhouse.

Part2

The operation that would qualify Al Qaeda into the top tier of terrorists is 9/11. The official version contains many incongruent details, including puddles of molten steel which doesn’t yet melt at 1500F – the maximum temperature of kerosene burning, collapsing of the tower structures much after the kerosene burned away and in the absence of major afterfires, and the absurd story of Boeing plane’s wings liquefied before crushing into the Pentagon. It matters most that no terrorist group claimed the attack. That never happened before for any large general-purpose attack. On the contrary, often several groups claim one attack.

Terrorism is about publicity, and refraining from publicizing one’s involvement in the major terrorist act is senseless. Terrorist leaders do not fear retaliation, but long for propaganda effect. It is unbelievable that no group claimed 9/11. Even in the doubtful videotapes, Osama never claimed organizing the event. He only praised it, as he praised many other terrorist acts both before and after 9/11.

Osama's praise is unrelated to his participation or even to Muslim involvement: he congratulated the Chechen fighters for terrorist attack on Moscow Nord-Ost theatre, which is widely viewed as KGB/FSB ploy to implicate the Chechens. Osama’s praise for 9/11 came out only on October 7, almost a month after the attack – an inexplicable delay – and unusually for Osama stressed liberation of Palestine before Mecca’s.

The US government attributes to Osama only a few days’ advance knowledge of the attack; that’s not planning. Curiously, Osama's family in Saudi Arabia denounced him four days after the attack – three weeks before his first comment on 9/11; under the American pressure, they somehow knew the culprit before he stepped forward. Osama was quick to claim responsibility for attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and even claimed credit for the USS Cole attack which he didn't organize.

Islamic terrorist groups often claim credit for others' attacks – a practice facilitated by cross-membership; a whole bunch of terrorist organizations claimed three bombings in Taba in 2004. It is unbelievable that Osama refrained from claiming 9/11 attack fearing American retaliation. The very choice of date, the 9/11 for 911 emergency phone number, smacks of American black humour.

The Spain train bombings are also odd. Anyone living in Spain knows that local trains never arrive on time. The four trains just couldn't converge at the train station to blow the roof. The attack was planned by someone living in a country where timely arrival of trains is a norm; that disqualifies Israel. All the suspects killed themselves rather than be arrested by Spanish police.

That's odd, since the terrorists could use the court hearings as media tribune and hoped to be exchanged in prisoner swap. Police found a lot of unused explosives; why didn't the terrorists use them for train bombings but left that overwhelming evidence? Why did they stay in Spain after the bombings? No working relationship is proved between the dead terrorists and Al Qaeda.

Another Al Qaeda-related attack, that of the shoe bomber, is odd beyond measure. Jose Padilla might be an imbecile but someone sane had to assist him. Anyone who helped him to prepare the bomb understood that such bomb cannot cause a plane crash. The shoe bomber's case smacks of a trailer show for 9/11.

A string of assaults is atypical for terrorists who have to go deep underground after strikes, but is extremely typical of sabotage planned by secret services. For example, Israeli secret service apparently organized a string of double murders in the settlements to greatly terrorize the local Jews, too active politically. In a typical case, two family members would be murdered ostensibly by Arabs in unrelated incidents within a short time – the very improbability of such event causing terror.

Then of course there's Padilla's acquaintance McVeigh who surprisingly demolished a huge building with low-yield ammonium explosive, but that's another story.

Germans set Reichstag on fire to implicate fellow communists. Jews killed Rabin to implicate the right-wingers. Russians blew the apartment houses in Moscow to launch a retaliatory war in Chechnya.

Staging an attack is a historically standard way of forging a casus belli.

Part 3

Al Qaeda is not a terrorist organization in the sense of regularly committing terrorist acts with its own cadres. Rather, Al Qaeda is a venture firm engaged in seed financing, superfluous training, PR, and logistics. In return for those services, Al Qaeda shares in the terrorist acts committed by its client groups. Sometimes, Al Qaeda claims participation; that’s mostly happens when grassroots terrorists without an organization of their own perpetrate the attack. More often, Al Qaeda merely lauds the terrorist act, as happened with 9/11, without hijacking the laurels. Osama might be fearless, but he is a not a soldier - merely a rich Arab who brought the concepts of Western capitalism into the field of anti-Western terrorism. Let’s look at details.

Hollywood horror movies endow aggressors with bizarre features; media treat terrorists similarly. But they are not bizarre exceptions from human mentality. They are normal religious nationalists willing to die for their cause but not seeking death as members of some death cult; Osama evades American assassination attempts. In regular armies, soldiers undertake practically suicide missions defending their comrades and country; terrorists operate similarly. People who strongly identify with ideas might die physically but continue living in their ideas; shahedeen die, but live on as part of the ummah. Neither are terrorists monsters; thinking of 9/11 civilian death toll, recall fire-bombings of Dresden and Tokyo. The absence of mass following among Muslims doesn’t prove Osama wrong: John Brown failed to rally a significant number of slaves but nevertheless greatly advanced abolitionist cause.

Westerners despise Osama for barbaric intolerance. Civilized, affluent people are afraid to show intolerance because it endangers their lifestyle: the victims of their intolerance can strike back. The people preoccupied with pursuit of material wealth abandon the fight for moral values and rationalize their cowardice by abandoning moral absolutes. But the entire human system of values is calibrated with moral values. People who don’t pursue moral imperatives, pursue the other things even less. They want welfare rather than work, submission to government rather than responsibility.

Osama is highly responsible. Westerners seek to enjoy every moment of their lives, and grow impatient. They want all policies to bring immediate results. Osama, in the service of eternal God, is very patient – not because he is superhuman, but because he cannot change the political situation immediately. Neither are his means outdated. Westerners launched massive wars in Algiers, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq but believe the age of war is over. The inhabitants of pax Romana and Peace of Westphalia worlds thought similarly; Jews in 1939 thought that ethnic or religious wars are unthinkable anymore. Osama is way more realistic.

Taking the fight into America is not apocalyptic lunacy, but the only viable way to win the war. The Soviets lost the war in Afghanistan despite their cruelty because mujahedeen had safe havens in Pakistan; they could regroup, rearm, and relax. Israel similarly loses against the West Bank terrorists by allowing them safe havens in Jenin and elsewhere. Osama has to attack America if he is to deny his enemy a place to relax; continuous strain breaks the will to fight.

Osama is not a genius who rallied Muslim nations. The Muslim community is too huge, diverse, and dispersed to feel communal bonds. Other Muslims didn't help their Indonesian coreligionists hit by tsunami, and few Muslims came to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet invaders. The seventh-century jihad was waged for spoils rather than religion, and since then Arabs showed no religious zeal to fight. Arabs want the US visas rather than Palestinian statehood. Osama attracted into his ranks one thousandth of one percent of the world Muslims. Many more admire him as a symbol with no intention of joining him. Osama draws adventurers rather than Muslims.

That's not Osama's fault, but human. Rabbi Kahane similarly failed to gather a significant number of American Jews to confront Russia over the emigration restrictions on Soviet Jews. Osama was even less successful in garnering worldwide Muslim support for Palestinian insurgency. He repeatedly condemned Muslim governments and clergy for their failure to channel military support to Palestinians, and his early darling Hamas proved a disappointment unconcerned with global Islamic struggle.

Obadiah Shoher is the author of "Samson Blinded, a Machiavellian view of the Middle East conflict," and the accompanying blog.Samson Blinded, which advocates a ultra-hard-line Israeli approach to Arab nations. Shoher denies ethnic-blind democracy and argues for expulsion of Arabs from Israel. He rejects democratic process, and calls for violent opposition to police efforts at removing the illegal settlements, dismantling the Israeli army and fully relying on nuclear response to counter possible Arab aggression Shoher's real identity is unknown but he is believed to be an Israeli politician, writing under the pen name, "Obadiah Shoher".



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BBC: Imperial Tool

ATLANTIC FREE PRESS

BBC: Imperial Tool


Written by Stephen Lendman

Monday, 14 April 2008

• Misreporting on Iraq - Deception over Truth
• Supporting Aggression in Afghanistan
• BBC's Disturbing Balkan Wars Reporting
• Targeting Hugo Chavez and Assailing His Democratic Credentials
• BBC's War Against Mugabe
  

At a time of growing public disenchantment with the major media, millions now rely on alternate sources. Many online and print ones are credible. One of the world's most relied on is not - the BBC. It's an imperial tool, as corrupted as its dominant counterparts, been around longer than all of them, now in it for profit, and it's vital that people know who BBC represents and what it delivers.

It was close but not quite the world's first broadcaster. Other European nations claim the distinction along with KDKA Pittsburgh as the oldest US one. BBC's web site states: "The British Broadcasting Company Ltd (its original name) was formed in October 1922... and began broadcasting on November 14... By 1925 the BBC could be heard throughout most of the UK. (Its) biggest influence... was its general manager, John Reith (who) envisioned an independent British broadcaster able to educate, inform and entertain the whole nation, free from political interference and commercial pressure."

That's what BBC says. Here's a different view from Media Lens. It's an independent "UK-based media-watch project... offer(ing) authoritative criticism" reflecting "reality" that's free from the corrupting influence of media corporations and the governments they support.

Its creators and editors (Davids Cromwell and Edwards) ask: "Can the BBC tell the truth... when its senior managers are appointed by the government" and will be fired if they step out of line and become too critical. It notes that nothing "fundamentally changed since BBC founder Lord Reith wrote the establishment: 'They know they can trust us not to be really impartial.' " He didn't disappoint, nor have his successors like current Director-General and Chairman of the Executive Board Mark Thompson along with Michael Lyons, Chairman, BBC Trust that replaced the Board of Governors on January 1, 2007 and oversees BBC operations.

On January 1, 1927, BBC was granted a Royal Charter, made a state-owned and funded corporation, still pretends to be quasi-autonomous, and changed its name to its present one - The British Broadcasting Corporation. Its first Charter ran for 10 years, succeeding ones were renewed for equal fixed length periods, BBC is in its ninth Charter period, and is perhaps more dominant, pervasive and corrupted than ever in an age of marketplace everything and space-age technology with which to operate.

It's now the world's largest broadcaster, has about 28,000 UK employees and a vast number of worldwide correspondents and support staff nearly everywhere or close enough to get there for breaking news. It's government-funded from revenues UK residents pay monthly to operate their television receivers - currently around 22 US dollars, and it also has other growing income sources from its worldwide commercial operations supplementing its noncommercial ones at home.

Most important is how BBC functions, who it serves, and Media Lens' editors explain it best and keep at it with regular updates. They argue that the entire mass media, including BBC, function as a "propaganda system for elite interests." It's especially true for topics mattering most - war and peace, "vast corporate criminality," US-UK duplicity, and "threats to the very existence of human life." They're systematically "distorted, suppressed, marginalized or ignored" in a decades-long public trust betrayal by an organization claiming "honesty, integrity (is) what the BBC stands for (and it's) free from political influence and commercial pressure."

In fact, BBC abandoned those notions straight away, and a glaring example came during the 1926 General Strike. Its web site says it stood up against Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill who "urged the government to take over the BBC, but (general manager) Reith persuaded Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin that this would be against the national interest" it was sworn to serve.

Media Lens forthrightly corrects the record. Reith never embraced the public trust. He used BBC for propaganda, operated it as a strikebreaker, secretly wrote anti-union speeches for the Tories, and refused to give air time to worker representatives. It got BBC labelled the "British Falsehood Corporation," and proved from inception it was a reliable business and government partner. It still is, of course, more than ever.

Consider BBC's role during WW II when it became a de facto government agency, and throughout its existence job applicants have been vetted to be sure what side they're on. Noted UK journalist John Pilger explains that independent-minded ones "were refused BBC posts (and still are) because they were not considered safe."

Only "reliable" ones reported on the 1982 Falklands war, for example, that Margaret Thatcher staged to boost her low approval rating and improve her re-election chances. Leaked information later showed BBC executives ordered news coverage focused "primarily (on) government statements of policy" and to avoid impartiality considered "an unnecessary irritation."

This has been BBC practice since inception - steadfastly pro-government and pro-business with UK residents getting no public service back for their automatic monthly billings to turn on their TVs - sort of like force-fed cable TV, whether or not they want it.

Back on BBC's web site, it recounts its history by decades from the 1920s to the new millennium when post-9/11 controversies surfaced. BBC only cites one of them rather pathetically. This critique gives examples of its duplicity across the world.

Misreporting on Iraq - Deception over Truth

The controversy BBC mentioned was the so-called Hutton Inquiry into the death of Ministry of Defense weapons expert Dr. David Kelly. On July 18, 2003, reports were he committed suicide, but they were dubious at best. Here how BBC explained it: "a bitter row with Government" emerged after a "Today programme suggested that the Government 'sexed up' the case for war with Iraq in a dossier of evidence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (BBC governors) backed the report, rejecting (PM) Tony Blair's (demands) for a retraction."

"The row escalated over the following weeks when editorial flaws became evident." Then came Kelly's "suicide." It made daily headlines because he was the source of the BBC report. "The Hutton Inquiry followed, and on January 28, 2004 chairman Gavyn Davies resigned when Lord Hutton's findings were published. The following day the remaining governors accepted the resignation of Director-General Greg Dyke."

True to form, BBC suppressed the truth, so here's what we know. David Kelly, as an insider, accused authorities of faking a claim of Iraq WMDs that could be unleashed in 45 minutes with devastating effects. He then mysteriously turned up dead (three days after appearing before a televised government committee) to assure he'd tell no more tales with potentially smoking-gun evidence for proof. He apparently had plenty.

What BBC and the Blair government suppressed, a Kelly Investigation Group (KIG) examined and revealed. Consider these facts:

— Kelly's death was pronounced suicide without an autopsy;

— Lord Hutton was aging and never before chaired a public inquiry, let alone one this sensitive making daily headlines;

— no formal inquest was ordered and was subsumed into the Hutton Inquiry;

— evidence showed Kelly's body was moved twice;

— a supposed knife, bottle of water, glasses, and cap reported by later witnesses weren't seen by the first ones who found Kelly;

— haemorrhaging from a left wrist arterial wound was ruled the cause of death, but there was little blood to substantiate it; other suspicious findings also suggested a thorough independent investigation was warranted.

In fact, evidence became clear that the real agenda was cover-up. Key witnesses weren't called to testify. An anaesthesiologist specialist read two KIG accounts (of known facts) about Kelly's death and concluded that "the whole 'suicide' story (was) phony in the extreme... He was clearly murdered." Another surgeon confirmed that Kelly couldn't have died of hemorrhage as reported. It's impossible to bleed to death from that kind of arterial severing.


Three other doctors also examined evidence, commented, and concluded that Kelly didn't commit suicide. The doctors and KIG then wrote an 11 page letter to the Coroner, cited their concerns in detail, and got no response. In a follow-up phone call, the Coroner said that he saw the police report and felt everything was in order.

In the meantime, the Hutton report came out and was leaked a day early to defuse a possible murder angle. Concurrently, the Coroner refused to reopen the investigation, the Hutton Inquiry was bogus, it never proved suicide and, in fact, was commissioned to suppress Blair government lies, whitewash the whole affair, and end it with considerable BBC help.

In this instance, things didn't play out as BBC planned, thanks to correspondent Andrew Gilligan. On May 29, 2003, he delivered what became known as his "6:07 AM dispatch" and said his source (David Kelly) alleged that the government "sexed up" the September dossier with the 45 minute WMD claim knowing it was false. He was immediately reigned in on subsequent accounts, but the damage was done, and Gilligan upped the stakes in a June 1 Mail on Sunday article.

In it, he quoted Kelly blaming Alastair Campbell (Blair government's 1997 - 2003 Director of Communications and Strategy) for embellishing the dossier to provide cause for war against Iraq. The fat was now in the fire with Kelly through Gilligan accusing the Blair government of lying and BBC having to find an out and get back to business as usual.

It wouldn't be simple with an exposed Campbell diary entry revealing he intended to go after Gilligan and apparently Kelly and do whatever it took to nail them. It all played out for days with Campbell demanding an apology and retraction, BBC wanting it to go away, Kelly's July death, and other Blair allies defending the government with threats about reviewing BBC's Charter until it ended predictably and disgracefully.

BBC cut a deal. Saying they resigned in late January 2004, it fired Gilligan along with Chairman Gavyn Davies and Director-General Greg Dyke. Even they weren't immune to dismissal at a time of an "aberrant" report that later proved true. For BBC, it was back to business as usual under new management supporting two illegal wars showing no signs of ending or BBC reporting truthfully about them.

From the start, it championed Tony Blair's "moral case for war," was a complicit cheerleader for it with the rest of the media, and found no fault with Washington and London's blaming Iraq's regime for what it didn't cause or could do nothing to prevent. Instead, round the clock propaganda ignored the facts and barely hinted at western responsibility for the most appalling crimes of war and against humanity that continue every day.

It's the way BBC reports on everything. Fiction substitutes for fact, news is carefully filtered, wars of aggression are called liberating ones, yet consider what former BBC political editor Andrew Marr wrote in his 2004 book on British journalism: Those in the trade "are employed to be studiously neutral, expressing little emotion and certainly no opinion; millions of people would say that news is the conveying of fact, and nothing more."

Even worse (and most humiliating) was his on-air 2003 post-Iraq invasion comment that he'd like to erase: "I don't think anybody (can dispute) Tony Blair. He said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both these points he has been proved conclusively right. (Even) his critics (must) acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result."

So much for truth and accuracy and a free and impartial BBC. It continues to call a puppet prime minister legitimate; an occupied country liberated; a pillaged free market paradise "democracy;" with millions dead, displaced and immiserated unreported like it never happened.


Supporting Aggression in Afghanistan

BBC was no better on Afghanistan and considered the war largely over when Kabul fell on November 13, 2001. The bombing continues, but it was yesterday's news, and only Taliban "crimes" matter. Unmentioned was how John Pilger portrayed the country in his newest book "Freedom Next Time." He called it more like a "moonscape" than a functioning nation and likely more abused and long-suffering than any other.

Contrast that description with BBC's reporting that Afghanistan is now free from "fear, uncertainty and chaos" because the US and UK "act(ed) benignly; (their) humanitarian military assault is beneficial (but those) meddlesome (Taliban) are trying (to) undermin(e) our good work." Unreported is what really lay behind the 9/11 attack and the price Afghans and Iraqis keep paying for it.

BBC's Disturbing Balkan Wars Reporting

BBC's shame is endless, and consider how it reported on the 1990s Balkan wars that evoked popular support on the right and left. Slobadon Milosevic was unfairly vilified for the West's destruction of Yugoslavia. Things culminated disgracefully with a 1999 seventy-eight day NATO assault on Serbia. Its pretext was protecting Kosovo's Albanian population, but its real aim was quite different - removing a head of state obstacle to controlling Central Europe, then advancing east to confront a few others.

Milosevic was arrested in April 2001, abducted from his home, shipped off to The Hague, hung out to dry when he got there, then silenced to prevent what he knew from coming out that would explain the conflict's real aim and who the real criminals were.

The war's pretext was a ruse, Kosovo is a Serbian province but in 1999 was stripped away. Ever since, it's been a US-NATO occupied colony, denied its sovereignty, and run by three successive puppet prime ministers with known ties to organized crime and drugs trafficking. It's also home to one of America's largest military bases, Camp Bondsteel, and it's no exaggeration saying the territory is more military base than a functioning political entity.

Then on February 17, 2008, during a special parliamentary session, Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence. It violated international law but got something more important - complicit western backing (outweighing a one-third EU nation block opposition). It also got one-sided BBC support. Its reporting took great care to ignore an illegal act, leave unmentioned that Kosovo is part of Serbia, or explain the UN's (1999) Security Council Resolution 1244. It recognizes the "sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" and only permits Kosovo's self-government as a Serbian province. No longer with plenty of BBC help making it possible.


Targeting Hugo Chavez and Assailing His Democratic Credentials

BBC misreports everywhere at one time or other, depending on breaking world events and the way power elitists view them. Consider Venezuela and how BBC reported on Chavez's most dramatic two days in office and events preceding them. Its April 12, 2002 account disdained the truth and headlined "Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez (was) forced to resign by the country's military. (His) three years in power (ended) after a three-day general strike... in which 11 people died... more than 80 others (were) injured," and BBC suggested Chavez loyalists killed them. It reported "snipers opened fire on a crowd of more than 150,000 (and it) triggered a rebellion by the country's military."

During anti-Chavez demonstrations, "Mr. Chavez appeared on the state-run television denouncing the protest, (then BBC falsely reported corporate TV channels it called independent ones) were taken off the air by order of the government. (High-ranking) military officers rebell(ed) against Mr. Chavez. (He) finally quit after overnight talks with a delegation of generals at the Miraflores presidential palace."

"BBC's Adam Easton, in Caracas at the time, says there are noisy celebrations on the streets, (and former army general) Guaicaipuro Lameda said Mr. Chavez's administration had been condemned because it began arming citizens' committees (and) these armed groups... fired at opposition protesters."

In another report, BBC was jubilant in quoting Venezuela's corporate press. They welcomed Chavez's ouster and called him an "autocrat," "incompetent" and a "coward." They accused him of "order(ing) his sharpshooters to open fire on innocent people (and) betray(ing his) country."

BBC went along without a hint of dissent or a word of the truth, but where was BBC when a popular uprising and military support restored Chavez to office two days later? It quietly announced a "chastened... Chavez return(ed) to office after the collapse of the interim government... and pledged to make necessary changes." In spite of vilifying him in the coup's run-up, cheerleading it when it happened and calling it a resignation, BBC put on a brave face. It had to be painful saying: "The UK welcomed Mr. Chavez's return to power, saying that any change of government should be achieved by democratic means."

It's hard imagining Caracas correspondents Greg Morsbach and James Ingham see it that way. Morsbach called the country a "left-wing haven" on the occasion of 100,000 people taking part in the 2006 World Social Forum in the capital. He said the city is "used to staging big events (opposing) 'neo-liberal' economic policies," then couldn't resist taking aim at Chavez. "Five hundred metres away from the (downtown) Hilton," Morsbach noted, "homeless people scavenge in dustbins for what little food they can find." He then quoted a man named Carlos "who spent the last three years sleeping rough on the streets" and felt Bolivarianism did nothing for him.

It's done plenty for Venezuelans but Morsbach won't report it. Under Chavez, social advances have been remarkable and consider two among many. According to Venezuela's National Statistics Institute (INE), the country's poverty rate (before Chavez) in 1997 was 60.94%. It dropped sharply under Bolarvarianism to a low of 45.38% in 2001, rose to 62.09% after the crippling 2002-03 oil management lockout, and then plummeted to a low of around 27% at year end 2007. In addition, unemployment dropped from 15% in 1997 to INE's reported 6.2% in December 2007.

Morsbach also omitted how Chavez is tackling homelessness. He's reducing it with programs like communal housing, drug treatment and providing modest stipends for the needy. His goal - "for there (not) to be a single child in the streets... not a single beggar in the street." It's working through Mission Negra Hipolita that guides the homeless to shelters and rehab centers. They provide medical and psychological care and pay homeless in them a modest amount in return for community service. No mention either compares Venezuela under Chavez to America under George Bush (and likely Britain under anyone) where no homeless programs exist, the problem is increasing, nothing is being done about it, and the topic is taboo in the media.

Instead in a BBC profile, Chavez is called "increasingly autocratic, revolutionary (and) combative." He's a man who's "alienated and alarmed the country's traditional political elite, as well as several foreign governments," (and he) court(s) controversy (by) making high-profile visits to Cuba and Iraq" and more. He "allegedly flirt(s) with leftist rebels in Colombia and mak(es) a huge territorial claim on Guyana."

The account then implies Chavez is to blame for "relations with Washington reach(ing) a new low (because he) accused (the Bush administration) of fighting terror with terror" post-9/11, and in a September 2006 UN General Assembly speech called the president "the devil."

Chavez's December 2007 constitutional reform referendum was also covered. It was defeated, the profile suggested controversial elements in it, but omitted explaining its objective - to deepen and broaden Venezuelan democracy, more greatly empower the people, provide them more social services, and make government more accountable to its citizens. Instead, BBC highlighted White House spokeswoman Dana Perino saying: Venezuelans "spoke their minds, and they voted against the reforms that Hugo Chavez had recommended and I think that bodes well for the country's future and freedom and liberty."

In another piece, Inghram took aim at the country's "whirlwind of nationalisations, and threats to private companies (are) changing Venezuela's economic climate and threaten to widen a tense social divide." It's part of Chavez's "campaign to turn Venezuela into a socialist state" with suggestive innuendoes about what that implies, omitting its achievements, and reporting nothing about how business in the country is booming or that Chavez's approach is pragmatic.

Instead, Inghram cites his critics saying "his plan is all about power" (and) bring(ing) no benefit to the nation" in lieu of letting business run it as their private fiefdom. It's how they've always done it, Venezuelans were deeply impoverished as a result, and BBC loves taking aim at a leader who wants to change things for the better and is succeeding.

It refers to his "stepp(ing) up his radical revolution since being re-elected in December 2006." Venezuela is "very divided" and its president "far too powerful (and) can rule by decree" - with no explanation of Venezuela's Enabling Law, his limited authority under it, its expiration after 18 months, and that Venezuela's (pre-Bolivarian) 1961 constitution gave comparable powers to four of the country's past presidents.

BBC further assailed Chavez's refusal to review one of RCTV's operating licenses and accused him of limiting free expression. Unreported was the broadcaster's tainted record, its lack of ethics or professional standards, and its lawless behavior. Specifically omitted was its leading role in instigating and supporting the aborted April 2002 coup and its subsequent complicity in the 2002-03 oil-management lockout and multi-billion dollar sabotage against state oil company PDVSA.

Despite it, RCTV got a minor slap on the wrist, lost only its VHF license, and it still operates freely on Venezuelan cable and satellite. Yet, if an American broadcaster was as lawless, it would be banned from operating, and its management (under US law) could be prosecuted for sedition or treason for instigating and aiding a coup d'etat against a sitting president. BBC ignored RCTV's offense, assailed Hugo Chavez unjustifiably, and reported in its usual deferential to power way.

It falsely stated RCTV's license wasn't renewed because "it supported opposition candidates (and said) hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Caracas... some to celebrate, others to protest." Unexplained was that pro-government supporters way outnumbered opponents, it's the same every time, and they gather spontaneously for every public Chavez address. Also ignored is that opposition demonstrations are usually small and staged-for-media events so BBC and anti-Chavistas in the press can call them huge and a sign Chavez's support is waning. As BBC put it this time: The situation "highlight(s), once again, how deeply divided Venezuela is" under its "controversial" president - who's popular support is so considerable BBC won't report it.


BBC's War Against Mugabe

On April 4, The New York Times correspondent Michael Wines wrote what BBC often reports: "New Signs of Mugabe Crackdown in Zimbabwe." It highlighted "police raids... against the main opposition party, foreign journalists (and) rais(ed) the specter of a broad crackdown (to keep) the country's imperiled leaders in power."

Below is what BBC reported the same day in one of its continuing inflammatory accounts in the wake of Zimbabwe's March 29 presidential and parliamentary elections. It pitted the country's African National Union - Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) President Robert Mugage against two opponents - the misnamed Movement for Democratic Change's (MDC) Morgan Tsvangirai (a western recruited stooge) and independent candidate Simba Makoni.

In its role as an unabashed Tsvangirai cheerleader, BBC headlined: "Mugabe's ZANU-PF prepares for battle" after its parliamentary defeat - MDC winning 99 seats; ZANU-PF 97 (including an uncontested one); a breakaway MDC faction 10 seats and an independent, one, in Zimbabwe's 210 constituencies with only 206 seats being contested; ZANU didn't contest one seat, and three MDC candidates died in the run-up to the poll.

Results for the 60 (largely ceremonial) Senate seats were announced April 5 with ZANU-PF winning 30 and the combined opposition gaining the same number. In addition, ZANU-PF announced 16 parliamentary seats are being contested and ordered recounts for them that could change the electoral balance. Mugabe is also challenging the presidential tally, asked the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) to delay releasing it and wants it retabulated because of what he calls "errors and miscalculations."

MDC officials called the move illegal, BBC seems eager to agree, and then went on the attack the way it always does against independent black republics. It can't tolerate them, but it's especially hostile to Zimbabwe. It's the former Rhodesia that British-born South African businessman, politician and De Beers chief Cecil Rhodes founded shortly after Britain invaded in 1893 and conquered Matabeleland. UK soldiers and volunteers were given 6000 (stolen) acres of land and within a year controlled the area's 10,000 most fertile square miles through a white supremacist land grab. They went further as well, confiscated cattle, and coerced the native Ndebele people into forced labor. Brits also exploited the Shonas, they rebelled, and a year later were crushed at the cost of 8000 African lives.

Decades of exploitation followed, a 1961 constitution was drafted to keep whites in power, Rhodesia declared its independence in 1965, but Britain intervened to protect white privilege. UN sanctions and guerrilla war followed, Southern Rhodesia declared itself a republic in 1970, then became the independent nation of Zimbabwe (the former Southern Rhodesia, then just Rhodesia in 1964) in April 1980 after 1979 elections created independent Zimbabwe Rhodesia.

Robert Mugabe was elected president, won overwhelmingly, remained the country's leader for 28 years, and at age 84 ran again for another term on March 29. He's called outspoken, controversial, and polarizing but for millions in Zimbabwe (and in Africa) he's a hero of his nation's liberation struggle against white supremacist rule.

America, Britain and other colonial powers, however, don't view him that way, and therein lies today's conflict. A racist UK can't tolerate an independent black republic and uses its state-owned BBC to vilify Mugabe and target him for regime change in a pattern all too familiar.

In a close March 29 election, vote-rigging is suspected, results days later weren't announced, and BBC accused ZANU-PF of knowing and concealing them as well as governing dictatorially. With no official totals, it stated "Mugabe... failed to pass the 50% barrier needed to avoid a second-round run-off." It's now been announced, by law must be held within 21 days of March 29 (by or before April 19), but AP reports "diplomats in Harare (the capital) and at the UN said Mugabe (wants) a 90 day delay to give security forces time to clamp down."

BBC expects trouble, appears trying to incite it, and denounces Mugabe loyalists as hard-line, militant and known for their violence. In battle mode, correspondent Grant Ferret from Johannesburg (BBC's banned from Zimbabwe because of its anti-Mugabe reporting) states: "Intimidation is... likely to be part of the second round. Offices used by the opposition were ransacked on Thursday night (April 3) (and) two foreign nationals (were) detained (for) violating the country's media laws." An NGO worker "promoting democracy" was also detained.

Correspondent Ian Pannell joins the assault. He stresses a crumbling economy, out-of-control inflation, people unable to cope and talking everywhere about "a struggle to make ends meet." They "spend hours queuing at the bank or waiting in line at a bakery where lines stretch around the corners. Many shops have as many empty shelves as full ones," Zimbabweans are suffering, and "80% of the workforce" has no regular job. People survive anyway they can, there's "a thriving black market," overseas remittances help, but "fields (are) without crops, shops without goods, petrol stations... low or empty, women at the side of the road begging for food, traders desperate for customers and hard currency."

There's no denying Zimbabwe is under duress, but BBC won't explain why. It never reported that ever since Mugabe's ZANU-PF ended white supremacist rule, he's been vilified for being independent, redistributing white-owned farms, mostly (but not entirely) staying out of the IMF's clutches, and waging a valiant struggle to prevent a return to an exploited past.

Doing it hasn't been easy, however. It's meant getting little or no outside aid, bending the rules, restraining civil liberties, banning hostile journalism like BBC's, but up to now (most often) holding reasonably free and fair elections and winning every time. Despite Zimbabwe's problems, Mugabe's popular support has been strong, especially from the country's war veterans who didn't fight for freedom to hand it back to new colonial masters.

But it looks like that's where Zimbabwe is heading. The March 29 election showed weakness. The opposition made it close and forced a runoff (unless a retabulated count shows otherwise). It controls the parliament (barring a retallied change) and has strong western support that smells blood. Behind the scenes, regime change is planned and this time may succeed. An 84 year old Mugabe's time may be passing - if not now, soon.

Zimbabwe's economy has collapsed, drought problems have been severe, food and fuel shortages are acute, 83% of the population lives on less than $2 a day, half the people are malnourished, more than 10% of children die before age five, and the country's HIV/AIDS rate is the fourth highest in the world. In addition, average life expectancy plunged to 37.3 years, inflation is out of control, conditions are disastrous, and it was mostly engineered by 2002 western-imposed sanctions.

Fifteen EU member states and Australia support them plus America after passage of the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001 (ZIDERA). Its effect has been devastating on an already weakened economy. It cut off the country's access to foreign capital and credit, denied its efforts to reschedule debt, froze financial and other assets of ZANU-PF officials and companies linked to them, and effectively brought the economy to its knees.

ZIDERA states that economic and other sanctions will be enforced until the US president certifies that the "rule of law has been restored in Zimbabwe, including respect for ownership and title to property... and an end to lawlessness." Unmentioned is the Act's real purpose - restoring white supremacist rule, exploiting the black majority and doing to Zimbabwe what's happening throughout Africa and in nearly all other developing states.

If Mugabe goes, the IMF can swoop in with a promised $2 billion (renewable) aid package for a new MDC government with the usual strings attached - sweeping structural adjustments, privatizing everything, ending social services, mandating mass layoffs, crushing small local businesses, escalating poverty, and returning the country to its colonial past under new millennium management under a black stooge of a president to make it all look legitimate.

BBC has a role in this, and it's been at it for decades. It's waged a multi-year anti-Mugabe jihad and seems now to be going for broke. For days, broadcasts practically scream regime change. Reports are inflammatory, visibly one-sided, with correspondents saying (MDC's) Tsvangirai won, election results are being withheld, no runoff is necessary, and when it's held Mugabe will use violence to retain power.

On April 5, BBC quoted Tsvangirai accusing Mugabe of "preparing to go to war against the country's people (and) deploying troops and armed militias to intimidate voters ahead of a possible runoff... thousands of army recruits are being recruited, militants are being rehabilitated and some few claiming to be war veterans are already on the warpath."

Tsvangirai wants the courts to force officials to release the results, Zimbabwe's High Court is hearing MDC's petition, but earlier it was claimed "armed police prevented MDC lawyers" from petitioning the Court to get them. BBC quoted one of them saying "police had threatened to shoot them," then quoted Tsvangirai again saying Zimbabwe's central bank was printing money for bribes and government-financed violence and intimidation campaigns.

BBC also suggests that international intervention is needed "to prevent violence if a second round is held (because) violence and intimidation (have) been characteristic of past (Zimbabwe) elections." It quotes another MDC spokesman saying ZANU-PF will "use a runoff to exact revenge... it's a strategy for retribution."

Its correspondent Peter Biles reports "the ruling party remains divided... many (want) a change of leadership, and believe under Mr. Mugabe, Zimbabwe has no future." BBC hammers at this daily in a full-court press to force out Mugabe either willingly or with outside intervention, and now is the time.

A broadcaster is supposed to be neutral, fair and balanced and BBC states "Honesty and integrity (is) what (it) stands for." BBC is dedicated to "educate (and) inform, free from political interference and commercial pressure."

The US-based Society of Professional Journalists states in its Preamble that it's the "duty of the journalist (to seek) truth and provid(e) a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues. (They must) strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty. Professional integrity is the cornerstone of a journalist's credibility... Seek truth and report it... honestly, fairly, courageously."

In serving power against the public interest for 86 years, BBC fails on all counts.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Mondays from 11AM - 1PM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8566

The Return of the Swiftboaters

clipped from www.alternet.org The Return of the SwiftBoaters The shadowy group that smeared John Kerry in 2004 is ready to do its dirty work again. More than three years after John Kerry's bitter defeat, at the dawn of what looks like a far more promising campaign cycle for the Democrats, the party is still haunted by the specter of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Once upon a time, "Swift boat" denoted an obscure military vessel, but thanks to the activities of this group it has come to represent movement conservatism's penchant for ruthlessly (and effectively) smearing any and all political opponents, from a sitting senator and war hero to an 11-year-old boy with a cranial fracture. Research by The Nation into Federal Election Commission records of the group's top twenty donors reveals that they've been remarkably active in this cycle, contributing and bundling nearly $200,000 to presidential candidates. This does not bode well. During the last presidential campaign, the wealthy backers of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth--now rebranded as Swift Vets and POWs for Truth--didn't do their real dirty work until the general election, where as a tax-exempt 527 group they operated outside the restraints of direct campaign contributions. We may wish we were done with the Swift Boaters, but they aren't done with us. In 2004 the top twenty donors all gave (with one exception) at least $50,000 to the group. The top three--Houston home builder Bob Perry, Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens and billionaire drugstore impresario and investor Harold Simmons--gave a combined $9.5 million ($4.45 million, $3 million and $2 million, respectively). Calculating the influence of these and the slightly less wealthy Swift Boat donors during this cycle is a touch more complicated than simply adding up their contributions. Each one exerts far more influence as a bundler, given the federal restrictions on individual giving, which limit donors to a maximum of $4,600 per cycle. So The Nation looked not only at the contributions of the donors themselves but also at those of their family members and employees. It's an imperfect method, since some employees are clearly contributing of their own volition (such as one employee of a Simmons company who gave money to Hillary Clinton), but it gives a rough estimate of who's backing whom and to what extent. The most notable recipient of Swift Boat largesse is John McCain, erstwhile front-runner and Stand Up Guy. When the Swift Boat ads were first unleashed, McCain was alone among his Republican colleagues to condemn them. A fellow Vietnam veteran, a good friend of Kerry's and a former target of smears about his own service, McCain called the ads "dishonest and dishonorable," a "cheap stunt," and he urged Bush to condemn them. But in pursuit of the GOP nomination, McCain ditched the mantle of maverick for that of hack, and his once-floundering, possibly rejuvenated campaign has been aided along the way by $61,650 from Swift Boat donors and their associates. "There is such a thing as dirty money," said Senator Kerry in a statement, after The Nation informed him of McCain's FEC records. "I'm surprised that the John McCain I knew who was smeared in 2000 and thought so-called Swift Boating was wrong in 2004 would feel comfortable taking their money after seeing the way it was used to hurt the veterans I know he loves." (McCain's office did not return calls for comment.) McCain's Swift Boat bounty is exceeded only by that of Mitt Romney, who has raked in $70,550. Romney's success with Swift Boat donors is significant because he has surpassed even McCain in his demonstrated willingness to do or say anything in pursuit of the presidency and because he has emerged as the GOP establishment's favored candidate. Last year, when McCain held that position, the Arizona senator received significant backing from Swift Boat donors. But many have subsequently switched their allegiance. Pickens, who donated to McCain in June 2006, is now an enthusiastic Giuliani donor and fundraiser (Giuliani ranks third in Swift Boat funding, with $47,950). Perry, who also recorded several donations to McCain's PAC in 2005 and 2006, is now a major donor and fundraiser for Romney. If the list of top Swift Boat donors is expanded to fifty, Romney's fundraising edge is even more pronounced. (Neither Romney nor Giuliani's campaign returned calls for comment.) Also noticeable among the recipients of Swift Boat largesse is one who received only a single donation: Mike Huckabee. Despite meager fundraising and little national name recognition, the former Arkansas governor has experienced a bubble-like expansion of support and media attention, taking the lead in Iowa and approaching a steady lead in national polls. But the lack of Swift Boat contributions lends credence to the claim that Huckabee is viewed warily by the money men who call the shots in the modern GOP. Despite proposing a radically regressive tax change and taking Grover Norquist's antitax pledge, he's been attacked savagely by the Club for Growth and eviscerated by columnist George Will for "comprehensive apostasy against core Republican beliefs," among them "free trade, low taxes, the essential legitimacy of America's corporate entities and the market system allocating wealth and opportunity." This all supports the notion that the people behind the Swift Boat operation are chiefly concerned with the continued upward redistribution of wealth that is, more or less, the contemporary GOP's raison d'être. In 2006 Perry ponied up $5 million to start the Economic Freedom Fund, a 527 group devoted to attacking Democratic incumbents, and landed a large donation from prominent Swift Boat donor Carl Lindner. All of which is to say that the Swift Boaters aren't some kind of side show, a coterie of vicious mudslingers operating at the edges of respectability. They are the show. They are modern conservatism's core funders and beneficiaries. With conservatives staring straight into the abyss, their activities in this election cycle could very well make the Swift Boat smears look tame by comparison. This report was produced with support of The Nation Institute Investigative Fund. Additional research was provided by Nicholas Jahr.