Peace and Justice Post

Source: News.scotman.com

20 June 2007

IAN SWANSON SCOTTISH POLITICAL EDITOR

SCOTLAND’S Lord Advocate was today urged to prosecute Tony Blair as a war criminal for the invasion of Iraq.

Former MP Jim Sillars said he had written to Elish Angiolini with a 10,000-word document setting out a formal complaint against the Prime Minister.

And he said Scots law allowed Mr Blair to be put on trial despite such a move being ruled out south of the Border.

The move came as Westminster Tories called for an immediate inquiry into the war in Iraq in a move expected to cause a Labour backbench rebellion. Shadow foreign secretary William Hague was using a Commons debate to call for a hearing by senior politicians with powers to summon officials and military commanders.

Mr Sillars, who is married to independent Lothians MSP Margo MacDonald, claimed Mr Blair was guilty of conspiracy with others to wage aggressive war, and waging aggressive war against the state of Iraq in March 2003, contrary to international law and the law of Scotland.

In his letter to the Lord Advocate, he said: “I am requesting you to investigate this complaint and prosecute in a Scottish court.”

Mr Sillars emphasised that despite his political past – first as a Labour MP and then as SNP MP and deputy leader – the complaint against Mr Blair was based on legal principles and case law and was not a political initiative.

He told Ms Angiolini in the letter: “You will find that the research is sound, and that the case against Tony Blair is a strong one. You, of course, will be able to dig wider and deeper than I can as an ordinary citizen, and I am sure that when you do you will reach the same conclusion as contained in the complaint.”

Mr Sillars said it was generally believed that Mr Blair could not be indicted for war crimes over Iraq.

But Mr Sillars claimed Scotland’s High Court had “declaratory powers” which enabled it to embrace international crimes in Scots law.

He said: “I have spent since January of this year, with a break for the election, researching the case against Blair and whether he could be indicted through the Scottish criminal justice system. The complaint lodged with the Lord Advocate shows the conclusion to that effort. Blair can, in my opinion, be tried in a Scottish court; and the evidence of his conspiracy through deception, lies and misinformation, and his intention of committing the illegal act of regime change through aggressive war, is quite clear. ”

Mr Sillars said the Prime Minister had carried on because he felt immune from prosecution.

Mr Hague said today that the presence of UK soldiers in Iraq could not be used as an excuse to “indefinitely postpone” the inquiry. He wants an investigation along the lines of the wide-ranging inquiry into the Falklands War chaired by philosopher Oliver Franks.

Downing Street has said it will hold a probe into the war and the faulty intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, but not while UK troops are in the country.

And Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett is expected to dismiss the call, arguing there have already been four inquiries into various aspects of the war and that another one would distract from the efforts of troops on the ground.

The Independent, 19 June 2007

By David Usborne in New York

The two-star Army General who led the first military investigation into human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has bluntly questioned the integrity of former US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, suggesting he misled the US Congress by downplaying his own prior knowledge of what had happened.

Major General Antonio Taguba also claimed in an interview with The New Yorker magazine published yesterday that President George Bush also “had to be aware” of the atrocities despite saying at the time of the scandal that he had been out of the loop until he saw images in the US media.

The White House issued a response denying the claim, however. “The President said over three years ago that he first saw the pictures of the abuse on the television,” Scott Stanzel, a spokesman, said.

In the extensive interview, Maj-Gen Taguba insisted that at the very least Mr Rumsfeld “was in denial” at a congressional hearing in May 2004, when he said he had only become aware of the extent of the abuse – and seen some of the shocking photographic evidence – one day before. The Secretary told members of Congress that the images published in the media were “not yet in the Pentagon”.

Mr Rumsfeld had summoned Maj-Gen Taguba to the Pentagon on the eve of the hearing, which took place one week after first US media reports of the abuse surfaced in The New Yorker and on CBS News. Yet the General had begun his investigation several months earlier, in January 2004, and had circulated his finished report to Pentagon managers – with pictures and a video – several weeks before seeing Mr Rumsfeld. “The photographs were available to him – if he wanted to see them,” Maj-Gen Taguba said.

As for the Secretary’s congressional appearance, he claimed: “Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap. There’s no way he’s suffering from CRS – Can’t Remember Shit. He’s trying to acquit himself.”

Mr Bush has since conceded that the abuse at Abu Ghraib is the one thing he regrets about the war in Iraq. The photographs that became public at the time – and sparked worldwide condemnation – showed US jailers humiliating inmates who were naked, hooded, on leashes or piled into a human pyramid.

Maj-Gen Taguba said that other material not yet publicly disclosed or mentioned in subsequent trials included a video showing “a male American soldier in uniform sodomising a female detainee”. The first wave of images he received also included images of sexual humiliation between a father and his son.

The General said he was ordered to limit his inquiry into the conduct of military police at the jail even as he became convinced they had a green light from higher up. “Somebody was giving them guidance but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box.” He adds: “Even today … those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”

The General also tells the New Yorker that he became a victim of his own dedication to finding the truth when he was subsequently forced to retire early. In early 2006, he said, he received a phone call from a higher-ranking colleague telling him he was expected to retire by January this year, after more than 30 years of service. His conclusion: he was being punished for that first investigation.

“They always shoot the messenger,” Maj-Gen Taguba told Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker. “To be accused of being overzealous and disloyal – that cuts deep into me. I was being ostracised for doing what I was asked to do.”

The Gulf Times, June 17, 2007

UN declares Gandhi’s Birthday as Day of Non-Violence

by Gulf Times staff

NEW DELHI: The UN will observe Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday as the International Day of Non-Violence every year, it said in a statement yesterday.
The UN called upon all member nations and individuals to commemorate October 2 in “an appropriate manner and to disseminate the message of non-violence.”

The resolution was introduced by India.

Gandhi’s descendants hailed the move, but said the gesture should not only be symbolic.

“It’s welcome but not enough. If they have declared it as non-violence day, they should ensure that it is observed as one among member countries,” said the leader’s great grandson Tushar Gandhi.

“The conflicts should come to an end and it should be a step towards creating a world without violence.”

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also welcomed the move in a statement describing it as “a great tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and a proud moment for India.”

“I am extremely happy that the United Nations will henceforth observe Gandhi Jayanti, October 2 as International Day of Non-Violence each year, following a unanimous decision by the General Assembly of the United Nations yesterday,” Singh said.

“This is a tribute by the world community to the Father of our Nation,” the prime minister said.

“The universal relevance of Gandhiji’s message of non-violence is more important today than ever before since nations across the world continue to grapple with the threat of conflict, violence and terrorism,” he said.

Singh also exhorted the people of India “to re-dedicate ourselves to the ideals and values of Mahatma Gandhi, which shall continue to be our guiding light.”

Gandhi was a proponent of non-violent civil disobedience in India’s fight against the British colonial rule which ended in 1947.

He was shot dead by a Hindu nationalist in 1948.

Source: TruthDig.com

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Posted on June 18, 2007

AP Photo / Karim Kadim

Mohammed Saleem, 18 months old, and four family members were killed when U.S. forces opened fire on their vehicle in Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood in June 2004 during fighting between Americans and followers of a radical cleric.

By Chris Hedges

All troops, when they occupy and battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are swiftly placed in what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton terms “atrocity-producing situations.” In this environment, surrounded by a hostile population, simple acts such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke or driving down a street means you can be killed. This constant fear and stress leads troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find. The rage that soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed over time to innocent civilians who are seen as supporting the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral one. It is a leap from killing—the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm—to murder—the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing. American Marines and soldiers have become, after four years of war, acclimated to atrocity.

The American killing project is not described in these terms to the distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract of glory, honor and heroism, of the necessity of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. The press, as in most wars, is slavishly compliant. The reality of the war—the fact that the occupation forces have become, along with the rampaging militias, a source of terror to most Iraqis—is not transmitted to the American public. The press chronicles the physical and emotional wounds visited on those who kill in our name. The Iraqis, those we kill, are largely nameless, faceless dead. Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a regrettable but necessary virtue.

The reality and the mythic narrative of war collide when embittered combat veterans return home. They find themselves estranged from the world around them, a world that still believes in the myth of war and the virtues of the nation.

Tina Susman in a June 12 article in the Los Angeles Times gave readers a rare glimpse into this side of the war. She wrote about a 17-year-old Iraqi boy killed by the wild, random fire unleashed by American soldiers in a Baghdad neighborhood following a bomb blast. These killings, which Iraqis say occur daily, are seldom confirmed, but in this case the boy was the son of a local Los Angeles Times employee.

Iraqi physicians, overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, published a study last year in the British medical journal The Lancet. The study estimated that 655,000 more people than normal have died in Iraq since coalition forces invaded the country in March 2003. This is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech last December.

Of the total 655,000 estimated “excess deaths,” 601,000 resulted from violence. The remaining deaths occurred from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 additional violent deaths per day throughout the country.

Lt. Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran who is a professor of international relations at Boston University, estimated last year that U.S. troops had killed “tens of thousands” of innocent Iraqis through accidents or reckless fire.

Official figures have ceased to exist. The Iraqi government no longer releases the number of civilian casualties and the U.S. military does not usually give reports about civilians killed or wounded by U.S. forces.

“It’s a psychological thing. When one U.S. soldier gets killed or injured, they shoot in vengeance,” Alaa Safi told the Los Angeles Times. He said his brother, Ahmed, was killed April 4 when U.S. troops riddled the streets of their southwestern Baghdad neighborhood with bullets after a sniper attack.

War is the pornography of violence. It has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it “the lust of the eye” and warns believers against it. War allows us to engage in primal impulses we keep hidden in the deepest, most private interiors of our fantasy life. It allows us to destroy not only things but human beings. In that moment of wholesale destruction, we wield the power of the divine, the power to give or annihilate life. Armed units become crazed by the frenzy of destruction. All things, including human beings, become objects—objects to either gratify or destroy or both. Almost no one is immune. The contagion of the crowd sees to that.

Human beings are machine-gunned and bombed from the air, automatic grenade launchers pepper hovels and neighborhoods with high-powered explosives, and convoys tear through Iraq, speeding freight trains of death. These soldiers and Marines have at their fingertips the heady ability to call in firepower that obliterates landscapes and villages. The moral universe is turned upside down. No one walks away uninfected. War thrusts us into a vortex of barbarity, pain and fleeting ecstasy. It thrusts us into a world where law is of little consequence.

It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men and women into killers. Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy. All feel the peer pressure to conform. Few, once in battle, find the strength to resist gratuitous slaughter. Physical courage is common on a battlefield. Moral courage is not.

Military machines and state bureaucracies, which seek to make us obey, seek also to silence those who return from war and speak the truth. Besides, the public has little desire to puncture the mythic, heroic narrative. The essence of war, which is death, is carefully masked from view. The few lone journalists who attempt to speak the truth about war, to describe the experience of constantly being on the receiving end of American firepower, soon become pariahs, no longer able to embed with the military, dine out with officials in the Green Zone or get press credentials. And so the vast majority of the press lies to us, although not overtly; it is the lie of omission, but it is a lie nonetheless.

The veterans who return, even if they do not speak about the atrocities they have committed or witnessed in Iraq, will spend the rest of their lives coping with what they have done. They will suffer delayed reactions to stress. They will endure, as have those who returned from Vietnam, a crisis of faith. The God they knew, or thought they knew, failed them. The high priests of our civic religion, from politicians to preachers to television pundits, who promised them glory and honor through war betrayed them.

War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians. This bitter knowledge of betrayal is seeping into the ranks of the American military. It is bringing us a new wave of enraged and disenfranchised veterans who will never again trust the country that sent them to war.

We make our heroes out of clay. We laud their gallant deeds. We give them uniforms with colored ribbons for the acts of violence they committed or endured. They are our false repositories of glory and honor, of power, of self-righteousness, of patriotism and self-worship, all that we want to believe about ourselves. They are our plaster saints, the icons we cheer to defend us and make us and our nation great. They are the props of our demented civic religion, our love of power and force, our belief in our right as a chosen nation to wield this force against the weak. This is our nation’s idolatry of itself.

Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits—there are few people in pulpits worth listening to. The prophets are the battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and find the courage to speak the halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must hear and digest in order to know ourselves. These veterans, the ones who dare to tell the truth, have seen and tasted how war plunges us into barbarity, perversion, pain and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies, if we take the time to listen, which alone can save us.

History News Network,

Posted November 8, 2006

Mark A. Levine

Donald Rumsfeld is one of the half a dozen principal architects of the Iraq disaster. He should have been fired years ago, except that the disaster that unfolded before the eyes of the world was exactly what the Bush administration was hoping for–enough chaos to make sure no one in power in Iraq would ask us to leave.

Now that the American people have woken up to the ruse known as “Operation Iraqi Freedom” perpetrated by the Bush Administration for the last three and a half years it is imperative that progressive immediately push for a full investigation into the real reasons for the invasion of Iraq and the miserably and criminally managed occupation. And there is no greater symbol of everything that has gone wrong in Iraq than Donald Rumsfeld.

While in office, many of my friends and colleagues in the legal community believed that he was untouchable, although a legal brief sponsored by Code Pink that I helped research (see it at www.indictpresidentbush.org) argues compellingly that all the main planners of the war, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, could at least be indicted, if not prosecuted, while in office. Now, thankfully this question is moot. Rumsfeld is or will very soon be a private citizen. As such, there is no problem for a US court–and as important, a foreign court such as Germany’s which still claims universal jurisdiction to prosecute for war crimes–to indict him as the mass murdering torturer that he is.

Rumsfeld is clearly guilty of innumerable war crimes. I first reported on them after my trip to Iraq in 2004, where I saw first hand evidence of them. The violations he’s responsible for include the failure to assure humane treatment for the civilian population (under Article 27 of the 4th Geneva Convention) and permit life in Iraq to continue as unaffected by its presence as possible; to ensure the public order, safety and welfare of the Iraqi people, including using all the means at its disposal to meet the basic food (Article 50), health (Articles 20, 50, 55, 56 and 59, among others), and education needs (Article 50) of the population; providing medical car (Articles 68 and 69 of Protocol 1 of the Geneva Conventions).

Crucially, even if people aren’t purposefully killed by US forces, if the violations listed above lead to their death, the violations become war crimes. Moreover, the purposeful targeting of ambulances, or the prevention of or delay in the receiving of medical care, as happened during the fighting in Falluja and on numerous other occasions (violations of Articles 55 and 147 of the 4th Geneva Convention), the U.S. crosses the line between “merely” violating international humanitarian law (specifically articles 17 through 19 of the 4th Geneva Convention) and the commission of actual war crimes. These are defined as grave breaches of the 4th Geneva Convention as described in article 147, including “willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including… willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person… or willfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial …taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.”

And we know that US forces have engaged in these violations since the very first day of the war. A group of Belgian doctors who spent the last year in Baghdad explained that, whatever crimes might be committed by Iraqis, as the internationally recognized belligerent occupiers “the current humanitarian catastrophe is entirely and solely the responsibility of the US and British authorities.” Even that early into the occupation they documented violations of at least a dozen articles of the 4th Geneva Convention by coalition forces (including articles 10, 12, 15, 21, 35, 36, 41, 45, 47, 48, 51, and 55).

On top of all this, of course, there is also the issue of US torture, which is a violation of international and US Federal law, and military regulations as defined in the US Army Field Manual 27-10.

But there’s an even larger issue here. It could be argued that Rumsfeld is guilty of something far more serious than war crimes: crimes against humanity and even genocide.

Under international law, “crimes against humanity” includes many acts any of the following acts that the US military has committed systematically in Iraq against the civilian population: murder; imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law; torture; the enforced disappearance of persons; and other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.

The crime of “genocide” is found in Articles II and III of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. It includes a “mental element,” meaning “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”, and a physical element, which includes five acts, including killing or causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. One can be prosecuted for genocide not just for committing but also for merely conspiring, attempting or being complicit in an attempt or conspiracy to commit genocide. As important, the phrase “in whole or in part” is important because destruction of only part of a group (such as its educated members, or members living in one region), is also considered genocide.

Now, lets’ look at what Rumsfeld and Co. have accomplished in Iraq: upwards of 600,000 dead, much of the educated class has been forced into exile with no prospect of returning while many have been killed. Most important, the invasion and occupation of Iraq have led directly to a situation now in which many people are calling for a partition of the country. The partition of Iraq would mean the destruction of the Iraqi people as a nation, even if they survived as individuals in new countries. And the United States is the party directly responsible for this action by launching an illegal war and sewing chaos across the country, making some form of de facto if not de jure partition increasingly possible.

At the very least Rumsfeld and Co., and that includes President Bush, are guilty of politicide, defined by Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling in the context of Israel’s war against Palestinians, as a gradual but systematic attempt to cause their annihilation as an independent political and social entity.

For the sake of the integrity of the United States, and for all the harm we’ve done to Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld must be indicted and prosecuted as a war criminal as soon as possible.

UK Daily Mail | June 13, 2007
CHRIS ATKINS

Even George Orwell would be shocked. He described the sinister machinations of a totalitarian police state in his novel, 1984, and laid bare the danger of eroding our basic civil liberties, including the right to freedom of speech and the right to privacy.

Although he famously coined the phrase ‘Big Brother is watching you’, even Orwell cannot have foreseen just how prescient those words would prove to be.

Today, in Tony Blair’s Britain – which I naively voted into power ten years ago – we have witnessed a breath-taking erosion of civil liberties.

The truth is we are fast becoming an Orwellian state, our every movement watched, our behaviour monitored, and our freedoms curtailed.

Between May 1997 and August 2006, New Labour created 3,023 new criminal offences – taking in everything from a law against Polish potatoes (the Polish Potatoes Order 2004) to one which made the creation of a nuclear explosion in Britain officially illegal.

Then there has been the incredible number of CCTV cameras – a total of 4.2 million, more than in the rest of Europe put together.

And, yesterday, we learnt that the Government has agreed to let the EU have automatic access to databases of DNA (containing samples of people’s hair, sperm or fingernails) in order to help track down criminals, even though many thousands of those on record are totally innocent

How did all this happen? Who allowed it? To try to answer these questions, I have made a film, Talking Liberties, about the attack on our freedoms.

I uncovered a disturbing roll call of ancient basic rights which have been systematically destroyed in the self- serving climate of fear this government has perpetuated since the 9/11 attack.

First there was the Act which banned the age- old right of protest within half-a-mile of Parliament without special police authorisation.

And who can forget Walter Wolfgang, the pensioner who was dragged out of the Labour Party Conference for daring to heckle the Home Secretary? He was detained under the Terrorism Act 2000, which gives the police unprecedented stop and search powers.

In 2005 alone, this law was used to stop 35,000 people – none of whom was a terrorist.

But this is only the thin end of the wedge – our civil liberties, enshrined in British law since the Magna Carta, are being whittled away.

There has been an unprecedented shift of power away from the individual towards the state – but now this power is being used not to defeat terrorism, but to keep tabs on ordinary citizens. As well as a raft of repressive anti-terror legislation, there are the more insidious infringements of our freedom and privacy.

We will soon see the introduction of the vast National Identity Register, linking all databases such as the DNA database to which the EU will soon have access.

The tentacles of these networks will intertwine until they form a vast state surveillance mechanism, which can track every detail of your life: what books you borrowed from the library as a student, your sexual health, your DNA profile, your spending and your whereabouts at any given moment in time.

Ministers are even creating a children’s database, which will record truancy, diet, and medical history.

And, of course, ID cards will be issued in 2009 – to be used every time we carry out routine tasks such as visiting the dentist. Soon, biometric data – your iris scan, fingerprints and DNA, will help to identify you further.

And, all the time, there are those CCTV cameras – 20 per cent of the global total, even though Britain only has 0.2 per cent of the world’s population.

New Labour has an absolute obsession with these devices. Soon, more sophisticated cameras will be able to recognise your face and the information matched to one of the national databases.

All cars will eventually be fitted with a GPS chip, officially to simplify road tax payments but they will also allow government agencies to track every vehicle in the country.

There are, of course, more alarming implications to being constantly monitored – as Orwell understood. Soon, we will be living in an open-air prison.

Some may ask: why does all this matter? The answer is that to surrender our identity and privacy so comprehensively is to give up something we will never get back.

Although New Labour says its mania for data-gathering is all part of its plan to protect us, there’s no guarantee that future governments (who will be inheriting a nationwide surveillance machine and the National Identity Register) won’t use it to more malign ends.

Totalitarian regimes have, after all, always collected information on their citizens. Hitler pioneered the use of ID cards as a means of repression. The Belgians left Rwanda with a bloody legacy by implementing an ID card system which divided the population into Hutu and Tutsi.

When the 1994 genocide began, these cards proved a device for horrific ethnic cleansing, with one million people dying in 100 days. The Stasi secret police in Soviet East Germany kept millions of files in order to keep track of everyone in the country.

Of course these examples are the extremes – but basic liberties such as privacy and free speech have been hard-won over centuries and history shows that we should not allow them to be brushed aside.

This shift away from individual freedom towards state power has happened slowly, and almost without us noticing.

Like so many others, I was proud to put a cross against the box next to New Labour in 1997 as a first-time voter. But now I have become shocked at the vast swathe of new laws which had been introduced, most of them in response to terrorism.

We are told that this is all for the good – these laws, and the surveillance cameras and ID cards will stop terrorists. Is that the case? Sadly not.

The London bombers carried ID and were observed on CCTV – of course it did not stop them committing their terrible crime.

Intelligence experts say that most information leading to genuine breakthroughs come from informants, not through random tracking or surveillance of the general population.

In any case, liberty and security aren’t balanced on some delicate equilibrium, as John Reid, the Home Secretary, and Tony Blair would have us believe. History has shown us that it is precisely when you undermine people’s basic rights that they mobilise towards radical groups.

After all, one of the greatest recruiters for the IRA in Northern Ireland was the policy of internment, under which people were imprisoned without trial. Have we learnt nothing from our past?

Stop and search laws applied to Britain’s Muslim communities will simply polarise those groups. Instead, we need them to help us protect the country from terrorism.

It’s not all doom and gloom, of course – as I hope my film reflects. The sheer absurdity of the bewildering array of idiotic new laws has given us an abundance of bizarre and hilarious situations for our documentary.

But behind this dark comedy is something much more disturbing. Faced with the threat of terrorism, the Government has told us that we must lay down our freedoms for our lives.

Perhaps it has forgotten the millions of people from past generations who have laid down their lives for our freedom. I think we owe it to those people to turn this tide.

Source: Email: braina@nda.vsnl.net.in

By Badri Raina

After the shockingly questionable wiretap regime ordered, without Constitutional sanction it would seem, by President Bush, it is now the turn of young vigilantes. As reported by Guardian News Service, the Bruin Alumni Association has made the following offer to students at the University of California, Los Angeles: “Do you have a professor who just can’t stop talking about President Bush, about the war in Iraq, about the Republican party, or any other ideological issue that has nothing to do with the class subject matter? If you help. . . expose the professor, we’ll pay you for your work.”

For full notes, a tape recording and a copy of all teaching materials, students are being offered $100. Lecture notes without a tape recording net $50, and even non-attendance at class while providing copies of the teaching materials is worth $10.

The idea behind this 21st century version of McCarthyism is to discipline and punish teachers who express themselves negatively on the Bush Presidency and Republican recasting of American policy generally. Like their predecessors of the mid-twentieth century, these vigilantes must believe that the reds have landed, this time in the garb of the extenuators of ‘Islamic’ terrorism. How entirely voluntary their initiative is must remain a subject of suspicion.

Freedom-loving American citizens who have been either supportive or tolerant of the Bush regimes’ ostensible project of carrying the light of democracy to the dark corners of the world may need to consider whether America may not be paying a rather high price for the mission. Is it perhaps the case that in making democracy its chief export, stocks at home are depleting dangerously?

One legitimate inference from such a circumstance is that far from there being a clash of civilizations underway, the world may be witnessing a rather satanic convergence, as America inexorably takes on the colour and hue of what it assumes to be opposing. If yes, the proceedings might be seen to underscore the truth of the old adage “we become what we hate.”

It has been the argument of the Bush administration that the attack on the twin towers was a gratuitous act of barbarism (which it no doubt was), since nothing that America had done previously could have justified it. Thus, the “war on terror” came to be constructed as a righteous response to an evil act. The theoretical underpinning of that argument was supplied by the neocon think-tank who hold that the “Islamists” do not act out of any identifiable historical wrong but are impelled by the jihadi project to destroy the “western way of life.”
It seems about time that this informing political text is revisited — something that has repeatedly been suggested by adherents of the Enlightenment whose values are generally regarded to constitute the philosophical grounds of American republicanism. For example, the Bush administration is to this day unable to explain to its own citizens, let alone to the “international community” (meaning here the world that lies beyond the Anglo-Saxon persuasion), why it chose to attack an admittedly secular Iraq where no jihadis existed, and which had neither intended or done harm to America. Or, why within hours of the September 11 tragedy (whose perpetrators turned out to be American citizens of Saudi extraction) but one aircraft was allowed out of America, carrying the Bin Laden clan. To compound the ironies, it will need to be remembered that the Laden “Islamists” were at one time pressed into service as allies of freedom in Afghanistan, just as the Saddam regime was encouraged with full military support to launch an attack on Iran where a popular political change had taken place.

Such facts of history reinforce the suspicion that the administration lauds only such regimes in the rest of the world as are willing to buttress American interests, be they democratic, or autocratic, or “Islamist.” For example, here in India, it remains a question as to why democracy is not sought to be exported to Pakistan with quite the same vigor as to selective places in the Middle East. Or to Nepal, for that matter.

If these are indeed troubling posers, then freedom-loving Americans need to ponder without blinkers whether, after all, what is designated “Islamism” may not be a purely political phenomenon, unleashed to free West Asia chiefly from what is perceived as an imperialist axis between America and the Zionists. Exactly as the “crusade” that emanates from the Bush administration is not so much concerned with a defence of an evangelist Christendom, or the “western way of life” as it is with shoring up the ever-expanding greed of Corporate America.
Furthermore, it is obvious everyday that the doctrine of “full-spectrum dominance” spawns, world-wide, a contrary political yield. In Latin America, for example, country after country turns away from Classical Liberal democracy to one form or another of Socialism. Americans need to ponder whether the best principles of neighbourly accommodation, as enshrined in the Sermon on the Mount, may not, in the end, be better politics than the unchristian hubris of the Bush regime that seems guaranteed to land both America and the world into an Armageddon from which no victors may emerge.

9, Staff Residence
Kirori Mal College
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Ph: 766-6700

Because of their abuse and extreme overuse and over-extension of our military troops in Iraq, the Bush administration has been forced to rely more and more on private contractors to fill various roles in Iraq that were previously restricted to military personnel. These private contractors are being drawn into conflicts on a daily basis, essentially making them paid military mercenaries. They operate outside of US and Iraqi law, and they are being killed and wounded in a private war that has gone mostly unreported in the US press.

Today, the Washington Post reported that the number of contractors/mercenaries that have been killed and wounded has gone unreported.

They note that contractors have been “…taking hundreds of casualties that have been underreported and sometimes concealed, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials and company representatives.”

“The U.S. military has never released complete statistics on contractor casualties or the number of attacks on privately guarded convoys. The military deleted casualty figures from reports…”…the military wanted to hide information showing that private guards were fighting and dying in large numbers because it would be perceived as bad news.”

On one list alone that included only a small portion of the total contractor force, 132 security contractors and truck drivers had been killed, and 416 had been wounded since the Fall of 2004.

One particularly terrible incident was described in the Washington Post article this way: “On May 8, 2005, after dropping off a load that included T-shirts, plastic whistles and 250,000 rounds of ammunition for Iraqi police, one of Holly’s convoys was attacked. Of 20 security contractors and truck drivers, 13 were killed or listed as missing; five of the seven survivors were wounded. Insurgents booby-trapped four of the bodies. To eliminate the threat, a military recovery team fired a tank round into a pile of [US] corpses, according to an after-action report.”

These shifts in US policy mean that the United States is privatizing its military on a massive scale. Among the troubling aspects of this trend is that private contractors operate outside military law, and outside of Iraqi law, and are not accountable to anyone except for their employers. Further, deploying as many as 100,000 contractors in Iraq is costing US taxpayers up to 10 times more than it would cost to deploy the same number of military troops. Finally, there is the fact that both contractors and Iraqis are being killed in large numbers beyond the sight of the press and the American people.

This trend will only continue under Bush, because of the massive corporate profits being realized by “security” and “supply” companies, and in fact this may be the blueprint for the Bush/Cheney remaking of the entire US military into a substantially privatized “for profit” military force. The US is building dozens of permanent military bases in Iraq, and is planning up to two dozen more spread across Africa “to fight global terrorism”. Obviously, Bush and Cheney want a vastly expanded military presence throughout the world, and it will be a presence of a highly privatized nature.

Write your Senators and Representative, and tell them that you not only want the war in Iraq ended now, but that you want our military to return to a defensive military posture, one that does not include private contractors. Privatizing military functions can even put military troops in greater danger, because profit motives can outweigh safety procedures. If these companies were not making huge profits, they would never even consider sending their employees into harms way. But money talks… no, it screams bloody murder.

Dr. John Moffett is an active research neuroscientist in the Washington, DC area, who has published articles on the nervous and immune systems. Dr. Moffett is also the author and webmaster of the political opinion website http://www.Factinista.org.